Half-Measures?

 

Some on the Left say that politicians like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and "progressives" among the new crop of Democrats elected in the anti-Trump/anti-inflation "Blue Wave" are just sheepdogs for the Democrats.  Keeping left-leaning voters from straying from the flock.  Voting for such people means guaranteed betrayals, as both the political party and the wider capitalist system either bring such people to heel or they were always mercenaries to begin with.

Some of those on the Left saying such things are delusional crackpots with decades of failure and non-accomplishment to show for their activism.  (Obviously, I'm a different sort of delusional, failed crackpot.)  Even so, they might still have a point.

Is it possible that voting for anyone electorally viable is not only a waste of time, but, worse, losing time and energy that could have gone into more genuinely revolutionary endeavours?  Voting for people who will betray us siphons energy and creates despair when those betrayals are made manifest.

Or is it possible to vote for such people and mitigate the damage done to ordinary people by the capitalist system, thereby creating breathing space and time to develop and advance a farther reaching agenda?

I suppose it's helpful to figure out if these moderate progressives actually mean what they say.  I'd say that most of them do.  They don't see revolution as realistic, and they feel that what they're offering is the best that can be expected, given the circumstances (which includes an electorate that is far from possessing a revolutionary consciousness).  Fraudulent, self-serving "progressives" should be relatively easy to figure out.

Arguments against voting for genuine moderates will have to be more thorough to really make their case. 

CBC News: An Avalanche of Slop

 

I'm trying to focus my thinking about current events.  I only read a few (mostly US-American) websites and I try not to pay attention to the news outside of whatever those sites are talking about.  I've decided to try writing more here to get me to look at the news more comprehensively.  In that spirit, I decided to look at the CBC News website.  I want to know what the CBC is talking about given all the real information about AI, West Asia, Ukraine, etc., that I get from the sites I regularly read.

So, today, November 9th, 2026, CBC News has a bunch of stories about IVF and other reproductive issues, such as egg-freezing.  I suppose that's interesting on some levels, but it isn't exactly crucial information for understanding today's world.  Russell Brand got sentenced to 10 years in prison.  People are using illegal drugs in public.  Somebody in Toronto is removing trees "suspiciously."  They're shooting bears at dumps in Inuvik.  A 19-year old won the PGA.  Some hockey player isn't going to play for Winnipeg's next game.  And 39 people died in a boat accident in Senegal.  There were a few other stories.

Mostly trivial stuff.  Mostly stuff that can't really be connected to the main events and trends going on in the world today.  The rise of oligarchic feudalism and the continued hollowing out of the economy and the majority's living standards.  Nothing about major wars and genocides.  All just unimportant slop.  Stuff to distract us from understanding the world that the CBC (a propaganda outlet) serves. 

Where Is The Left-Wing Opposition To Carney?

 

Mark Carney has taken advantage of Donald Trump's imbecilic attacks on Canada to push a radical, far-right agenda, all while paying lip-service to the idea of "resisting" Trump and pursuing "Canadian sovereignty."  The racist grifter Pierre Poilievre cannot play that role because he spent too many years telling Canadians about his masturbatory fantasies of himself and Trump playing with each other's bodily fluids.  The fact that Carney remains Trump's lickspittle ally doesn't register because Canadians are, essentially, complacent, ignorant people with short attention spans and a corporate media system that works to keep them that way.

Carney is attacking the right to collective bargaining.  He's unilaterally attacking First Nations rights to consultation about Canadian assaults on their lands.  He's going gung-ho on NATO's delusional imperialist agenda.  He's publicly supporting Trump's illegal, murderous assaults on Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Palestine.  He's subsidizing the fossil fuels industry and its commitment to global heating for short-term profits.  He's all-in on the shit-for-brains/anti-human "Artificial Intelligence" boondoggle.

Carney wouldn't be able to do all of this if the Canadian Left hadn't shown itself to be an irrelevancy decade after decade.  Our electoral system is partly to blame for this.  First-Past-The-Post means that (as is even more the case in the USA) legislative authority is traded between two pro-business parties.  (That was the real reason that the idiot Justin Trudeau reneged on his promise to change our electoral system.  The massive majority the Liberals received when stephen harper made the Conservative brand toxic was the elixer, but it was the way that FPTP limited Canadians' democratic options that was at the base of it.

But elections are one thing.  A Left that has neither strategy nor tactics cannot be expected to be an effective extra-parliamentary resistance.  I have said for years and years at this blog, and I continue to say, that peaceful, one-day marches will not sway politicians who are controlled by corporate capitalists, domestic and foreign.  All the money and power is on the other side.  The people of Canada are fodder for them.  The political class's material self-interest comes out of servitude to the profit-above-all capitalist agenda.  They aren't going to deviate from that course just because we took an afternoon to register our displeasure.

For pointing out this obvious reality I was derided as a negative nelly and I eventually gave up on arguing my case, both online and face-to-face with other leftists.  I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that my exiting myself from the fight is what has doomed the Left to failure.  I'm irrelevant.  The Left has failed all by itself.  With its merely performative protests, its unwillingness to inflict/suffer consequences, its stupid, sanctimonious adherence to non-violence, ... the Left has made itself irrelevant as well. 

War on Sunday?

 

I'm no expert in such things at all.  But if the weirdo who blogs at "Moon of Alabama" is right, then the new moon of November 8-9 is going to be the time when Trump will try one last bombing campaign against Iran. 

Working against this is Trump's realization that both the USA and Israel are running out of long-range offensive weapons (meaning that their fighter-jets will eventually have to fly into Iranian airspace to hit their targets, with all the risks that entails) and defensive interceptors.

Trump also knows that the Gulf states are highly vulnerable to Iranian retaliation.  All of the assets there, from the central fossil fuels and infrastructure, to the undersea internet cables, to desalinization plants, could be obliterated, throwing the region's and the world's economies into a black hole.

Furthermore, Israel is a small country.  A densely packed country.   And Iranian patience with the zionist entity is approaching a breaking point.

One of the video channels that I watch (can't remember if it was Danny Haiphon, or Jackson Hinkel, or The Grayzone) said that Trump is insisting that if there is an attack on Iran, then Netanyahu's airforce is going to be taking a leading role in it.  For much of this conflict it has been the USA doing the work of attempting to re-open the Strait of Hormuz and attacking Iranian targets.  I don't know how a US President, who is being blackmailed by an Israeli politician, who forces him to start a war that everyone knew had a good chance of turning out badly, negotiates in such a situation.

Leaking the videos of Trump raping adolescent girls would be a huge thing.  It would undermine the influence of the USA grievously.  It would be massively destablilizing.  There would be rage and there would be calls for all the rest of Epstein's fellow degenerate murderers to be exposed.  Because the Epstein case shows the total moral depravity of the West's ruling classes.  As well, Israel revealing this evidence of Trump's monstrous behaviour would rebound against them.  That they knew about this.  They had this evidence and they chose to conceal it until Trump stopped obeying them.  It wouldn't exactly make the Israelis look less disgusting than they already do.

 

It's also not clear that Israel's military leaders are prepared to sacrifice their country to protect Naziyahoo from going to prison. So there's that.

But what is the alternative to a reckless, likely doomed-from-the-start assault on Iran?  The continued throttling of the world economy as oil is prevented from exiting the Strait of Hormuz.  Tankers are being destroyed.  Strategic reserves are dwindling.  Prices will continue to inexorably rise.

Iran is demanding the removal of US military bases in the region.  (This has already happened.  But Iran will not allow the USA to return and rebuild those bases.)  It is demanding the removal of the Israel Child-Killing Force from Lebanon.  It has the USA's puppet monarchies on the ropes.

Trump could hold off on attacking Iran only to eventually be forced to concede to the end of the US-American Empire sometime in 2027.  Meanwhile, Iran is building its relationships with Russia and China.  Ukraine is crumbling.  The delusional European leadership trying to build the capacity to challenge Russia militarily but the people of Europe don't seem to have any interest in such insanity.  If Russia manages to end the war on its western flank it will have more resources to share with Iran.  China is also increasing its aid to Iran.  China has zero interest in preserving the USA's ability to bully and threaten and subvert.

Personally, having written all this, I think that Trump will take the second option.  He will avoid instantaneous destruction from attacking Iran and will opt to drag things out until the inevitable becomes unavoidable.  

Early-morning reflections ...

 

I was reading something just now that had been written on January 30th, 2026, about how the protests in Iran had been co-opted by Mossad/CIA agents.

It just occurred to me how disgusting that was.  I've long been an opponent of dogmatic non-violence advocates.  But sometimes, mass-rallies do represent the views of what might possibly be an important demographic.

Whatever the case, some people think that publicly demonstrating your opinion to your government via a mass-rally is a valid way to influence your government.

And, so, at a time when the besieged Iranian government was suffering from an attack on its currency or whatever it was using to import needed necessities, and it privileged some of the more protected demographics, perhaps for venal reasons, perhaps for rational reasons of national survival, this would inevitably have meant that some people who were already suffering under the USA-imposed/Illegal/47Years of illegal sanctions, would find themselves in very dire straits indeed.

And, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that the government of Iran is NOT run by hopeless, delusional, fanatically-narcissistic psychopaths, and that they are, instead, sane, empathetic men, who (whatever their delusions and the justifications for those delusions) responded to the currency attack with desperate measures, which they knew would harm people outside of protected circles.  AND they would only grant whatever concessions they could when they were forced to by public opinion.

And, in authoritarian states, as Iran is, ... it takes considerable guts to organize a public demonstration. (Which, I suppose, is a big reason why, say, Canadians, of the "activist" persuasion, are so addicted to them!  They haven't figured out that governments at the centre of imperialist systems know that they aren't threatened by the stern looks of disapproval of the tiny minority who have enough resources to have the time and the energy to be concerned about issues outside their immediate self-interest.)

 

....

Anyway, the point that I don't want to lose is that public demonstrations can sometimes be dangerous to organize and/or participate in. In some countries anyway.  And Iran is such a country.  [And saying that doesn't make me have to concede that the "Mad Mullahs" need to be wiped out with a nuclear bomb and the 4-million innocent civilians who die with them are necessary "collateral damage."]  

But these public demonstrations were no more than what Canada's are: an expression of disagreement.  or an expression of discontent.

These were people under forty-seven years of crippling sanctions, being subjected to further deprivations because of a recent attack on their country's currency, to which their government was responding as best as their preconceived ideas could muster, ... being FORCED to speak out, to say to their own besieged government: "WE have our limits! WE are AT our limits!" because desperate times call for desperate measures.

And to have those demonstrations within the crisis to be infiltrated and expropriated by agents of the people who caused the crisis, ... which is to say CIA and Mossad ... the cynicism of that.

 

Too angry for words ... 

Fascist Propaganda

 

I like Owen Bean as an actor.  He's quite good.  And for a guy with such "presence" he's been a pretty good sport about being relegated to being the villain who dies, or the hero's right-had man who dies.

All that having been said, it took obviously more than just that to make YOOtOOBE put the British TV series "Sharpe" into my feed.

And, as a result of that meta-subsiduary I tried to watch "Sharpe."

It reminded me more and more of "Master and Commander."

Go to Ian Welsh's blog for a more eloquent critique.  But the 18th-19th Century British aristocracy were a pretty capable bunch of scumbags.  Like, some accident of history made the British temporarily better at incorporating new ways to kill people and they ran with it.

But watching the first episode of "Sharpe," ... first of all, there's an Irish soldier who risks his life to defend the treasure of the army that was going to execute him.

Then there's the conversation between Sharpe and the Spanish count who sides with the French.  In my view, Napoleon could have saved himself a lot of grief (and deprived us of Goya's masterpieces about the war that actually got fought) by just forcing his will through the existing monarchy.

Apparently the opera "Carmen" was related to a lot of bleeding-heart, "woke", pinko-commie-faggots, leaving post-Napoleonic Spain for France.

The brother of the contested title of "Count" says that he's backing Spain against the old-order of Catholic superstition and royal dictatorship.

Sharpe says something stupid about not caring about anything outside of his mission and then the battle was going to resume but I couldn't bring myself to watch anymore of that dreck.

This oligarchic nightmare we are living under is the direct result of the success of the ancient British aristocracy to maintain their hold on power over the world and to also delude working class people into thinking that they're free.

Napolean did fuck up though.  And Goya's prints ARE worthwhile for showing us what we should avoid. 

Former European Imperialist Powers Wanting to Colonize Russia and former Soviet Republics?

 

Why do the European vassals in NATO want to continue to drag out Ukraine's agony?  They are desperately trying to militarize themselves (after severely damaging their industrial base by cutting themselves off from Russian energy) and they are launching a brazen campaign of propaganda trying to instill fear in their populations that Russia is attacking them.  It doesn't appear to be working because what neo-liberal shit-heads don't (and can't) understand, is that when you constantly fuck people over they see no reason to die for you.