2014: Will the Left Pull Their Heads Out of Their Asses?

Will leftists finally figure out that an afternoon's protest isn't worth the energy that goes into organizing it?

Will leftists finally figure out that if they believe that the government is comprised of psychopathic, inhuman murderers, then peaceful protest is useless?

Will leftists finally figure out that if the state is a conglomeration of power-mad psychotic, inhuman, selfish murderers, armed to the teeth with the latest weaponry and forewarned by a massive surveillance network, ... that smashing a few windows isn't going to do shit against it?

Will leftists finally clue in to the fact that their removing their marginal, insignificant contributions from the system isn't going to impact anything other than (probably) negatively impact their own quality of life?

I advocate something between gullible belief in the system and radical rejection of the system (in favour of nothing at all or some idiotic "anarchist" lifestyle). At the moment my ire is directed to the navel-gazing "radicals" who pompously pronounce how the whole system is rotten, but whose rejection of the entire system is really nothing more than petulance. The vast majority of the population, the society in which they live, believes in the system in some form or other. These "radicals" seem incapable of raising their heads above their tiny social circles to notice how marginal and insignificant they are. They have  brains though. They have good analysis. But it needs to be tempered by reality. It needs to be tempered by the goddamned inescapable fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them. It needs to be informed by some sort of testing against fucking reality. WORK WITH REALITY, don't ignore it because it's inconvenient.

But my anger can as easily be directed to those dullards, plodders and sell-outs within the NDP and the Liberal Party of Canada (especially the latter), who deny the horror of the system and propagate more of the same filth. Canadian Liberals are not quite as bad as the deluded, blood-soaked, corrupted, lazy, arrogant US Democrats, but they're awful fucking close. Just as there are about 5 semi-decent Democrats amongst the 200 or so Democratic legislators, so too are there a few decent Liberals, elected by generally decent people. That the NDP under the conniving Mulcair wants to transform itself into the Second-Coming of the Liberal Party is even more craven and disgusting and depressing.

I no longer have much bile against apolitical types. They've done more to build lives for themselves than I did with my "activism" and ideals. And who can blame them for not dumping harper when it was OUR RESPONSIBILITY to lead the way in that regard? WE FAILED, not them.

harper Tweets About the Ice Storm

Montreal Simon has another great indictment of the usurper. Far be it from that garbage-head harper to interrupt his Christmas in hiding to make a personal appearance during this crisis.

The Usurper's Christmas Message

I'm sort of an all-or-nothing kinda guy. You know, if I don't believe in a religion, then I stop going to church. Canada, and Canadians, are either historical entities trying to build a just, humane society for themselves and others, or they're not. Leftists should either dedicate themselves to achieving change or they should just STFU.

Christmas is supposedly a season when Christians celebrate the birth of their saviour, but in our more secular times it's really supposed to be about reaching out to others and gifting each other in the spirit of self-sacrifice that this Jesus character supposedly did when he had himself born amongst us. Or, it's supposed to be family and friends getting together, blah, blah,blah. It's also a bunch of pagan winter festivals dressed up in Christian garb.

Thank god for the three wise men though! They brought bona-fide presents and thus serve as the real reason for the season; consumerism. Kids love Christmas, partly because of the lights and the decorations, but really, it's about the material goods.

I stopped liking this holiday a while ago. Stress. Family get-togethers always meant stress. There were a couple of years when I had a house and could afford to entertain friends, but those days are gone. But Christmas keeps coming every year. The shmaltzy, bullshit Christmas carols by musical acts seeking to cash-in keep playing in all the malls and other such spaces. Canadians continue to abuse the First Nations. We continue to belch carbon gases into the atmosphere. More and more, Canadians appear to me to be a selfish, childish, deluded people. The "spirit of the holidays" is nothing more than people getting together with people they already associate with and to hell with everyone else.

Bullshit.

And speaking of bullshit; nothing epitomizes the emptiness and hypocrisy of the holidays better than the idea of a cruel psychopath like stephen harper bothering us with a "Christmas Message" based on the fact that since he stole the office of prime minister he's entitled to spew some sort of seasonal nonsense at us.

I read his stupid statement and I was going to go through with it, but it would be redundant. I already have no time for the seasonal bullshit and I've already said what I think of this bullshit artists. Who cares what he had to say? It was all meaningless lies anyway.

Revolution - the ONLY Solution

There's just no other way. We cannot "reform" capitalism. At least not in the way that US Democrats, Canadian Liberals and "social democrat" NDPr's want to do it. They want painless reform, ... as in reform that doesn't anger the powerful. It can't happen. It's their mewling "vision" of compassion and social justice that's produced this sorry state.

The root of all the terrorism and war and most of the problems in the world is human greed. The movement of liberal democracy produced substantial benefits to many people since the 16th Century. But liberal capitalism grew along with it, and while it too produced many benefits, it also produced a lot of misery and its time has passed. It has now metastasized and is devouring its host, liberal capitalism. That and it's put humanity on a suicidal trajectory.

We need an eco-rational economy. We need to destroy social inequality. We need rational, fact-based politics, not the capitalist-sponsored abominations of Barack Obama, george w. bush, stephen harper and Rob Ford. To achieve this, we must have a revolution. A democratic, mass-based revolution. One that builds on the quasi-democracy and set of rights that we now have. We must fight to rollback government incursions against this democracy and these rights. What we should not do is pursue the shit-head strategy of certain anarchist radicals, or Marxist radicals, or any sort of radical who believes that the hard-won agency and autonomy ordinary people enjoy is utter bullshit and that we should reject everything entirely and retreat into individual insignificance. (This pointless and petty refusal was called "Going Galt" [as in John Galt, as in Ayn Rand's tedious novel] when right-wing idiots responded to Democratic Party victories in the United States, and it's called "human strike" by marginal, unimportant anarchist thinkers on the left.

We need to think and act big and in accordance with forces as they actually exist.

There is no other way.

Wut We's Got's To Do

My point about the lack of a response to the TTC fare increase was that I, who have been told several times that my plans are too grandiose, am pointing out the sheer invisibility of the standard leftist response to problems. If I had my druthers, I'd be organizing a transit-users' strike, or an occupation of City Hall and Queen's Park, until said powers-that-be find the goddamned revenues from out of their tax-cuts for the rich or their general corruption funds, to pay for the existing service levels and to invest the billions more that are needed to restore the system to a state of decency.

Overall, to defeat capitalism, we need to democratically expand the rights of workers within their workplaces. We do this through the present constitutional-liberal rights system. Because that is the hegemonic system, and the most peaceful way of doing this massive switcherroo of power.

It needs to be something big. The brain-dead status-quo has failed and will continue to fail.

And What Is Everyone Doing About Toronto's TTC Fare Increase?

Just to bring non-Torontonians up to speed: Toronto has gone from having what was widely regarded to be a good public transit system to having what is widely regarded as being a bad transit system. Bus service in the outer city is deplorable. Long waits to get on over-crowded buses, or to watch over-crowded buses pass your stop. Streetcar service that can mean it's faster to walk from Yonge to Bathurst than it is to wait for a streetcar. An over-crowded subway system prone to signals breakdowns and other interruptions.

This has happened because for the past few decades, neo-liberals have convinced people that taxes are an unmitigated evil, that the public sector is a complete waste of money, and that nothing can be achieved via democratic collective action. It's gotten to the point where you'll hear from a surprising number of ignoranmuses saying that the TTC should be privatized; thereby revealing their total cluelessness.

So, due to inflation, increased ridership, and what-not, the TTC is raising its fares by a nickel next year and again in the summer, just to maintain its existing poor service level.

What are the various groups dedicated to improving public transit, or transit users' rights, going to do about this? From where I'm sitting, the answer appears to be nothing. I've not heard of any protests. I've not seen any literature being distributed. I've not seen anyone.

Why don't I do something?

I tried to get Canadians to do something about a stolen election, to no effect. The progressive movement's big players likewise did nothing, although they could have done something with their amount of resources. This fare increase is an outrage, but we can't escape from the trap of kabuki protest, and so we do nothing.

Whose Side Are You On?

Do you stand with the victims or with the aggressors?

Do you stand with the tortured or the torturers?

Do you stand with the oppressed or with the oppressors?

Do you stand with the raped or the rapists?

Do you stand with the weak or with the strong?

Do you stand with the poor or with the rich?

It's amazing how many "conservative" bloggers stand on the wrong side of things, isn't it?

NORTH KOREA!!!!!

Last summer, North Korea's mad ambitions to attack the United States [actually desperate blustering in the face of USA/South Korean provocations] were all over the news until a bomb exploded at the Boston Marathon. "Poof!" North Korea's inscrutable threat vanished into the thin air from whence it came.

But now North Korea is back in the news. Supposedly the boy-dictator is killing family members and stuff.

It's either the tonic for a slow news day or North Korea is being targeted. (Not that I have any respect for that regime.)

Soldiers's Suicides: Too Little, Too Late

So retired general Rick  Hillier is calling for action, a public inquiry, a Royal Commission, something, into the recent spate of soldier suicides, and, as well, he offers qualified criticism of the harpercons' Veterans Charter:

The other area Hillier pointed to for improvement was the new Veterans Charter, in particular the part of the charter that replaced a pension for life or payment system with lump-sum awards and allowances.
"Many of us, certainly, almost all of us, agree that the charter is now lacking," he said.
He said the system now does not provide ill and injured veterans with the support they will need throughout their lives. And it does not go far enough to make sure they are properly taken care of for their entire life.

Too little, too late Mr. Hillier. You, more than anyone else, are responsible for our troops being sent to the hotly-contested Kandahar Province. And the time to have spoken out against the harpercons' symbol of their obvious cynicism and hypocrisy was before their bullshit Veterans' Charter became law.

[Just to point out: As progressives have called for social-economic policies to give young men a greater range of choices than unemployment, poverty wages or crime, whereas "conservatives" say they have "zero tolerance" for crime and advocate locking them up, only to end up smoking crack with them on a regular basis, ... so too do progressives despise war while still calling for decent conditions for ordinary soldiers as long as they exist, whereas "conservatives" make all kinds of ceremonial bows to the greatness of the military, only to repeatedly cast them aside like trash should they become wounded or otherwise useless.]

Canada Post

Basically we've got tens of billions to waste on fighter-jets and 3 billion to simply lose on public safety, but Canada Post has to cancel home delivery to save us money. So says Canada Post management and the think-tank that CP's prez is connected to.

It's also a good idea to eliminate 8,000 decent jobs and raise user fees during a recession.

These people are fucking morons.

Rob Ford and the Murder of Anthony Smith

For the record: The alcoholic, hypocrite, incompetent, infamous shameless buffoon has insinuated that a Toronto Star reporter is a pedophile. The Star is talking with its lawyers. Because unlike Rob Ford, who knew there was a video of him smoking crack, the Star might actually sue when someone defames one of their own.

Just wanted to point out that, as far as a Rosie DiManno (Rosie DiMoron around here usually!) column says, the assertion that police transcripts attribute his murder to non-related gang violence is unaccompanied by the actual transcripts that would establish the truth of the matter.

Which means that it could be just as Ford staffers told police; Smith's murder was related to the crack video.

The Shamelessness & Stupidity of Rob Ford

A while back, somewhere, I mentioned a book about stephen harper's grievous damage to Canada's parliamentary institutions. The political-scientist authors wrote that our institutions were designed with an implicit trust in the good faith of those who would be working within them, and that harper has no good faith and abused that trust and thereby weakened those institutions.

The same thing applies with Rob Ford. Our political tools weren't designed to deal with an obnoxious cretin who, after months of lying, has finally admitted to having smoked crack with gangsters in a drunken stupor, but who then refuses to resign. Our institutions were designed for better people than this imbecile and his die-hard, shameless, hypocritical fan-base.

And, really, it couldn't be helped. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to tell yourself: "I'm 45 years old and the mayor of Canada's largest city. I think it's cool, it's "gangsta" of me to party with these criminals. I'm not even concerned that I've stated publicly that I have 'zero tolerance' for gangs and drugs. I can barely register having made these two contradictory sentences."

How stupid must you be to, at heart, KNOW that you've smoked crack, used heroin, and been filmed while doing so by these same gangsters, and to still somehow imagine that if you lie long and hard enough the police evidence of all of this isn't going to come out?

How shameless do you have to be to believe that despite the infamy you've brought upon yourself and your city, the complete and total hypocrisy that you've displayed, the sheer amount of blatant lying that you're now exposed of, that you somehow have the right to carry on?

The decline of capitalist democracy started with Reagan and Thatcher. These two mediocrities were allowed to say any stupid, deluded thing that came into their heads, because, no matter what else, it attacked and pissed-off the "progressives." It pissed-off the people who the patriarchal, mindless authoritarian, fascist-headed dimwits hated. So it's all good.

We need a politics that IGNORES the KKKate MakkkMillan's of the world. Not one that panders to it.

Canadian Failure Makes You Sick?

Are you sickened by your fellow Canadians' failure to do anything about stephen harper? What did you do to bring him down? What did you do to try to get others to do something about him?

There needs to be something big, something huge, to change the present arrangement of power between corporate capitalism and the earth. That's what we should be focused on. But we're incapable.

A Little Observation About This Rob Ford Nonsense

So, the radio's going at work. Talk radio. Some guy, John Oakley, who, it seems, has his tongue so far up Rob Ford's ass-crack that he can almost reach the hole, is conducting yet another attempt at a defense of his hero. He has Ford's lawyer on, letting the guy talk about how his client is being tried in the media.

Time for the callers. And this one right-wing, whining baby, starts going on about how Ford's predicament is the intended product of a deliberate campaign of left-wing intimidation and smears. You just better believe that all those leftist politicians are just as dirty as his hero, Rob Ford, and the right-wing has got to learn how to play rough, the way the left does, and start looking for the dirt on all those Laytons and Vaughns and whoever.

Sure. Not surprising. Not remarkable. But let the significance of this guy's insanity sink in.

Supposedly, David Miller was likewise getting wasted with criminals back in the day, but the right-wing was too decent, too gentlemanly, to go after him for it. You see, the right-wing is all about the policies; the cut and thrust of competing ideas. Character assassination, or the airing of dirty laundry, are not their sort of politics.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Yes. All about the policy. Except for the fact that Ford is an ignoramus and an incompetent, and that "Ford Nation" has less than zero knowledge of the city's financial situation, the costs of government services, zero grasp of logic, and zero grasp of what Rob Ford actually does (Etobicoke supporters of Rob and Doug were shown to be completely ignorant of the brothers' attempts to close a much-utilized community centre). They also have zero in the way of intellectual or moral consistency.

You will notice that there are numerous right-wing and centre-right councillors at Toronto City Hall. None of them were despised to the extent Rob Ford was both before and after becoming mayor. That's because none of them were as obnoxious and ignorant as Ford was and is. It's that simple folks.

But seriously, ... this is a left-wing conspiracy? What part? Where did it begin? When Ford (for whatever drunken-stupor reason) first decided to consort with the gangsters he said he had zero tolerance for? Were the gangsters who documented his buffoonery part of this left-wing conspiracy? Is Chief Blair and the Toronto Police Service a part of this left-wing conspiracy? Was the US-based gossip website Gawker brought in as a ringer; part of an international conspiracy to bring Ford down? Was the Toronto Star's decision NOT to publish the stories about the crack videos their reporters saw part of the conspiracy?

Do you grasp how utterly insane one must be to see this as a left-wing plot?

But this is the thing about these people: They're so stupid, that their thought patterns come out looking like insanity.

They don't even notice their own hypocrisy. Leaving aside Ford's miserable failure as a financial manager, let's look at his management of his office. Ford loyalists receive plum positions and salaries higher than the prevailing rate. It seems they don't have to do much in the way of work for the city to get these salaries. Lower-level staffers are paid on the city's dime to run personal errands for Ford. But Ford Nation, who were so up in arms about a councilor buying a bunny suit with her office budget so that she could walk in a parade, or who complained about Kyle Ray's publicly subsidized retirement party, care not a whit about Ford's personal extravagances. They don't even care that their hero is out getting wasted most days and nights. They justify this indifference by pointing to his fiscal prudence, so I guess we do have to talk about it. It doesn't exist. Ford is an incompetent and a liar. His fiscal management skills exist only in the imaginations of his deluded fan-base. So there's really no excuse they can have for their indifference to his laziness and wastrel ways.

 "They all do it!" shout the right-wingers when they can no longer deny their politicians' failure and corruption. These are the people who rail about government waste and corruption louder than anyone else. When their team (of incompetent scum-bags) invariably end up being the dirtiest, smelliest, scuzziest politicians around, their response is to degrade our political culture even further by hypocritically, and falsely, insisting that all politicians are the same.

No my friends; Rob Ford is the only mayor of Toronto to have ever hung out at crack houses doing drugs with gangsters. I'm depressed that that even needs to be said. But that's where these cretins have taken us, isn't it?

Oakley thanked the caller, but I suspect he wasn't convinced. Either that or he had his own insanity to blurt out and couldn't wait to get to it. No, Oakley's focus was about the rule of law, and how Ford, who has lied throughout this whole sorry affair, and who has been photographed with the gangsters, video'd doing drugs with the gangsters, and who lied for months about his knowledge about the video, isn't getting a fair shake in the media and is being tried in the court of public opinion with all this errant speculation that his desperate attempts to get the video might have something to do with the murder of one of the gangsters in the photograph and the shooting of one of the others. Such speculation is irresponsible, and more importantly, very chilling. If you condemn people without a trial, well, that's just like the Soviet gulag.

That's right. Public speculation about Ford's criminality is akin to Stalinism.

As I said; so stupid they're insane.

Dear stephen harper: Shove your Hockey Book Up Your Ass

Gawd. His pathetic warbling and now his asshole attempt to appear like a regular guy, some stupid ghost-written piece-of-shit about hockey. He's like some cheesy Hollywood movie slime-ball. His attempts at being nice are so transparently fraudulent, as he stabs everyone in the back.

Mr. Myxpikellix