The Last "First-Past-the-Post" Election

 

I shant be linking to it, but Liberal hack blogger "Montreal Shithead" has a post wherein he has conniptions about the NDP daring to be critical of his airhead dreamboat Justin Trudeau. At one point in his ridiculous ravings "Montreal Shithead" accuses the NDP of "splitting the progressive vote."

I took particular umbrage with that continued stupidity on Montreal Shithead's part and pushed-back against it in the comments. (I also said a few words about MS's laughable and nauseating self-righteousness and hypocrisy, listing a few of the disgusting Liberal Party of Canada's policies that MS can't seem to find the time to ever criticize.)

Let's look at the response so far:

Someone anonymous writes:

Nice work MS. You've hit the bulls-eye. How do I know? The amount of bile spewed is commensurate with the accuracy of your words. Thwap for example never addressed any of your points. He offered no rebuttal. All he could do was personally attack you.

Um, actually fuck-face, I addressed MS's champing at the bit for an election while COVID is still a danger AND I addressed MS's drivel about vote-splitting. And it isn't a "personal attack" to list the evil Liberal policies that MS refuses to address as he's a partisan hack.

Next, Montreal Shithead's supervisor from Liberal Party headquarters, the certifiably insane and sickeningly racist "Jackie Blue" pipes up:

@thwap -- It's not Trudeau's fault if NDP diehard cultists don't accept mathematical reality or their own role in hijacking the electoral reform committee for their own gain. Let it go already and stop holding a bitter grudge that you didn't get your Holy Grail prize from the Christmas wish list. The Liberals have accomplished a lot more -- heck, Trudeau has on his own -- than the NDP have in 70 years. Why don't you just pack up the circus tent already and give up the ghost. The NDP are useless for anything other than grandstanding with No Damn Plan and helping Cons get elected by attacking the wrong enemy. You're jealous because Trudeau has made the NDP irrelevant.

I knew the rose bros and their handful of handmaids would come after Chrystia Freeland with the same line of vile attacks leveled at Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. Brocialist swine, no wonder you lot ride Horgan's coattails while throwing Notley and Horwath under the bus and downplaying O'Toole's courting of so-con fetus fetishists. You torpedoed childcare in 2006, and you don't care if you do it again as long as the Liberals don't get to claim credit.

As for "Israeli barbarism" you guys are massive hypocrites. You talk a good game about the apartheid state, yet you want Canada to adopt the same system that kept Bibi in office for 12 years, and currently has a joke of a parliament where Bennett and Lapid are playing tag team musical chairs. Like I said I'm sure Singh would love such an arrangement, as it's the only way he'd get to play pretend prime minister in a position he's too immature to deserve.

Let's see if we can attach that word vomit to anything in the real world shall we? 

@thwap -- It's not Trudeau's fault if NDP diehard cultists don't accept mathematical reality or their own role in hijacking the electoral reform committee for their own gain. 

This is tricky. The imbecile appears to be saying something about "mathematical reality." What is she trying to refer to? The way FPTP doesn't give smaller parties the representation they (and their supporters) deserve based on their percentage of the vote? Or is she cheering this under-representation? Which would be stupid, because that would remind everyone that airhead Justin Trudeau had a FUCKING MAJORITY. Absolutely NOTHING the opposition did prevented airhead Justin Trudeau from keeping his promise and providing Canadians with a more democratic electoral system.

I don't know what Jackie Blue is referring to at all when she talks about the NDP "hijacking the electoral reform committee for their own gain." To "hijack" something is to take control of it. That didn't happen. It's probably unknowable what Jackie Blue meant because she's a raving lunatic asshole who spews out random assertions like a crazed COVID-denying conspiracy theorist when she's challenged.

Moving on, the shameless moron continued:

I knew the rose bros and their handful of handmaids would come after Chrystia Freeland with the same line of vile attacks leveled at Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. Brocialist swine

Crystia Freeland's maternal grandfather was a fascist who ran an anti-Semitic newspaper for Adolph Hitler. When this TRUE FACT is mentioned, the shameless corporate stooge shrieks about "Russian disinformation" like the scumbag she is. It would be unfair to bring up the revolting behaviour of Freeland's grandfather were it not for the fact that the lady herself is at present playing footsie with Brazilan fascist Jair Bolsonaro. She's rooting for the fascists in the government of her ancestral Ukraine. She's a disgusting, hypocritical groupie for corrupt, murderous authoritarians throughout Latin America. 

Kamala Harris is a psychopathic servant of the USA's corrupt ruling classes. She's a shameless hypocrite. She'll keep poor people in prison past their release dates, harrass parents of poor children who go truant, while she declines to prosecute wealthy criminals. She cried crocodile tears for asylum seekers (people fleeing brutal governments and destroyed economies created by bipartisan USA foreign policy) when she's campaigning against Donald Trump, but once in power she changes her tune and tells desperate people to stay in their US-created hell-holes.

And Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, insane war-monger, anti-democratic piece of filth who needs no introduction.

Jackie Blue, being a vomit-brained human failure tries to do her best to discredit feminism by claiming that any criticism of these individuals is misogny because all three of them have vaginas. That's it. That's the sum of Jackie Blue's feminism. A person can take money from the private health insurance industry, condemn tens of thousands to death and hundreds of thousands more to bankruptcy, call for war and more war, and get herself rich in the process, but if they have a vagina, you can't criticize them.

Thank Christ that Jackie Blue is an unremarkable piece of garbage with zero influence outside of the comments section of fading star Montreal Shithead and her influence as to how society will think of feminism is practically non-existent.

Lastly, Jackie Blue bizarrely equates proportional representation with Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians. Because she's stupid and incapable of sustained mental effort. She's also brutally anti-empathetic, with no grasp whatsoever of the bases of human morality. This worm-brained loser doesn't even know why Israel's apartheid system and murderous racism is a bad thing. That's why she spewed the ridiculous drivel that she did. What a stinking turd!

Lastly, some other anonymous nothing returns to the subject of the NDP's role in Airhead Trudeau's decision to betray the electorate on electoral reform:

For the edification of Thwap. It was the NDP who scuttled electoral reform. They teamed up with the Cons in demanding a referendum. 

No. Again (you stupid, shameless Liberal hacks): Airhead Trudeau had a HUGE MAJORITY. There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Justin Trudeau from passing electoral reform. NOTHING.

No matter how many times you assholes shamelessly lie, it will never change the fact that Justin Trudeau's majority nullified the power of the opposition parties to do anything to stop him from implementing electoral reform. You can repeat this stupid lie over and over about the NDP wanting a referendum somehow tied Airhead Trudeau's hands, but it will never be true.

Deep down, I'm sure that Montreal Shithead realizes he's become a disgusting travesty. There's probably a little thing in the pit of his stomach that gives him trouble sometimes as he tries to keep it down in his service to a corrupt political party. Jackie Blue on the other hand is (as I said) certifiably insane. She has no grasp of right or wrong and even less capability at constructing a coherent worldview. She's like a machine, a wind-up machine, who yammers whatever catchphrases have been installed into her, and she thinks she's having what normal people call a debate. 

Un-fuck the two of those fucking losers now and forever.

How Brainwashed are You?

 

I didn't really know what to call this post. I've got a bunch of things bothering me recently. Here goes:

So, the Roman Catholic Church in Canada grudgingly, sorta admits to having abused the First Nations children stolen from their families and placed under Catholic Residential Schools by the Canadian state. They abused them. They starved them. They beat them. They used them as unpaid labour. They forbid them from speaking their own languages. They raped them. They made them live in squalor which encouraged diseases like tuberculosis. This led to the deaths of thousands of children and permanent trauma for thousands more.

As I said, the Catholic Church essentially admitted to this sickening barbarism, and "promised" to "try" to pay $27 million in compensation. Then, revoltingly, the Catholic Church pretends it could only come up with $3 million. 

Here's the thing: Catholics in Canada supposedly number 12.8 million. Two dollars from each of them would have almost raised that $27 million. The Catholic Church in Canada wants to pretend that it couldn't raise $27 million?!?!?!?!!? And what are we hearing from Catholic laypeople? The "flocks" who attend weekly at their churches to receive moral instruction and uplift from this institution with that wee little problem of child rape and cover-up that it has to overcome? Aren't they ashamed of their religious institution's outrageously cynical and sleazy and cruel and selfish and greedy and disgusting behaviour? 

Is there a movement of outraged Catholics demanding that the Church pay what it said it would?!?!? If not, why not????

This is the level of apathy and self-centredness that blights so many of us and will be the doom of our species.

Next up: Canada being one of the countries at the World Trade Organization blocking the lifting of patent restrictions on the production of COVID-19 vaccines:

Despite having the support of more than 140 nations, the head of the World Health Organization, and hundreds of civil society organizations spanning the globe, the proposed waiver has been mired in fruitless negotiations for months as wealthy WTO members—most prominently Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada—refuse to drop their opposition in the face of growing grassroots pressure.

The People's Vaccine Alliance, an international coalition of public health organizations campaigning for equitable vaccine distribution, warned following the WTO's meeting Tuesday that "countries' inaction isn't just frustrating bureaucracy."

"It's a death sentence for so many people," the coalition tweeted. "Support the TRIPS waiver. End the pandemic."

I don't suppose any "progressive" blogging, partisan Liberal Party hack, laughable Justin Trudeau groupies will ever have anything to say on this monstrous behaviour, in between their interminable posts about how awesome and studly and saintly and beautiful and perfect Justin Trudeau is and how maybe he should call a snap election before COVID-19 is defeated because polls show that the Liberals would win a majority and THAT is all that really matters after all?

When it comes to COVID-19, ... this is just a mini-version of the deadly stupidity that has also been at work on the Global Warming file, as Ian Welsh hammers home:

I am tired of living in societies where we know how to do the right thing and simply refuse to do so because our elites are psychopathic, selfish and greedy and our population refuses to discipline or control the elites.

We KNOW what to do to stop Covid. We KNOW how to do it. We just fucking refuse.

This is goddamn pathetic. It’s just like climate change, but on a faster timeline so you can see it in weeks to months rather than decades. We may go extinct, we are certainly going to kill and impoverish billions and probably wipe out half the world’s species (which will hurt us terribly, not just them) all because while we KNOW how to do the good, non psychopathic, non criminally insane things, we REFUSE.

You discipline your elites, or most of  you and your children will die or be impoverished by their actions and lack of actions.

With COVID-19, the people on my team, .... which is to say, ... anyone who opposes austerity imposed on the majority and taxpayer bail-outs for banksters, ... anyone who opposes unilateral abrogation of our Treaties with the First Nations and who deplores the racism of Canadian society, ... anyone who knew there were no WMD's, ... everyone who opposes murderous racism from the police, ... etc., etc., ... you all know who you are: It's so damned frustrating to know that if we ever did organize something to at least force the stupid Canadian government of stupid Justin Trudeau to join the majority of the world in allowing the free manufacture of vaccines, ... that we'd also have to fight a rearguard action against the shit-heads who say that COVID-19 is a hoax and the vaccines contain microchips and all that other stupid nonsense. The same idiots who deny global warming even when towns in British Columbia are bursting into flames from unprecedented heatwaves. Fuck those idiots.

Finally (for today) MILLIONS of people continue to starve to death in Yemen as a direct policy on the part of the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and with the direct support of the USA. (For its part, Justin Trudeau's Canada continues the policy of stupid stephen harper in accepting the blood money of the Saudi regime for purchases of made-in-Canada military vehicles.) This atrocity, this abomination, has been going on for YEARS now. And what is the peace movement doing about it?

What am I doing about it? Nothing. And I'll tell you why: I believed that stephen harper and Doug Ford needed to be forced to resign but that getting them to do so would require more than a few afternoon protests where some empty speeches were made and placards (some with clever slogans, some not so clever) are carried. I believed that taking on an entrenched neo-liberal regime required lots of work. Lots of preparation. Lots of planning. Lots of outreach to ordinary Canadians. But Canadian progressives prefer to stick with what they know. Which is milling about in public with a few like-minded individuals (a few? a few dozen? a few hundred? a few thousand? whatever.) making empty "demands" and then going home. Proposals that we try something else because Plan A isn't working are to be met with embarrassed silence until the complainer goes away.

What does it say about the state of the international peace movement that a massive crime such as the mass murder in Yemen is met with practical silence? Fine. I'm a delusional idiot. What are the sane, intelligent, smarter, superior tacticians of the Left doing?

It could be argued (and I have argued it) that we might be overwhelmed by the number of fires (both literal and figurative) that we have to put out: Global warming, Yemen, racist police violence, austerity, increasing economic inequality, Venezuela sanctions, Israeli apartheid, Canadian apartheid and racism against the First Nations, cuts to public healthcare and other services, etc., etc., etc., .... But that just goes to show why we need to think seriously about TAKING POWER rather than making infinite "demands" on the amoral psychopaths who rule us.

But so many progressives shove their heads up their asses and fanatically support neo-liberal con-artists like the Democratic Party USA or the Liberal Party of Canada (whooz kidding whom? the NDP sux!) and spending three years obsessing over crimes that Donald Trump didn't commit while ignoring the crimes he did.

I'm blogging because I need to vent. I've left proposing solutions to the world's problems to the more obviously intelligent, wise and capable people. And you just have to open your eyes to see their uselessness.  I'm going back to bed. We're all going to die. 

Three Books

 

Lately I've been reading George Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. As he has done in previous books (such as Heat or The Age of Consent), Monbiot shows he's not the sort of leftist author who spends 80% of his book describing problems with the remaining 20% dedicated to vague, generalized prescriptions for alternatives. 

Starting off, I was struck by how similar Monbiot's centring of the importance of narrative for human affairs was to Caitlin Johnstone's writings on the subject. The Left has avoided "metanarratives" (such as Marxism) in response to the ways that the white, male dominated Old Left excluded feminists, racialized minorities, environmentalists and the eco-system, etc., from power and constructed institutions reflecting this exclusion and narrow-mindedness.  (In so doing, the Left seems to have succumbed to the intellectual morass of post-structuralist confusion. Don't get me wrong. Reality IS chaos. But reality is also REAL. Whether you earn enough to not have to worry about homelessness is a condition that can be created by a focused, class-based politics. A Leftism that deliberately alienates ordinary people through the confused elevation of "identity politics" and conniptions about "micro-aggressions" is a Leftism that is quite compatible with gargantuan levels of social inequality and state violence.)

Monbiot's great narrative in Out of the Wreckage is that most human beings are altruistic and that we value things like community and cooperation. But a minority of people are motivated by selfishness. And these are the people who are driven to rise to the top of any social pecking order. Capitalism doesn't just reward hard workers and innovators. (Oftentimes it doesn't even reward these!) Capitalism (especially late-capitalism) rewards the ruthless, the cheaters, the already-powerful, anyone willing to betray colleagues, poison the environment, exploit the sick, kiss ass, steal ideas, etc., etc., ... assholes basically.

And it is neo-liberalism, propagated by economists like Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, that provides the grand narrative for these selfish attitudes to be rewarded. Instead of fellow human beings to be worked with, neo-liberalism instructs us to think of other people as individual rivals to compete against. This system inevitably creates atomization, precarity, alienation and loneliness and despair. (As well as a threatened eco-system.)

Monbiot does a great job describing how adherence to neo-liberal hegemony has been devastating to left-wing parties and to representative democracy generally. He talks about utilizing participatory budgeting and the Donut Economics of Kate Raworth.

I've got two other books to mention so I'll stop there ....

Next up is Eric Toussaint's The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation. I've read other books before about "Third World" debt, but Toussaint's book is the first one that so clearly emphasizes the massive fraud involved in 19th-Century international financing. So far I've read about the loans from (mainly) London bankers to South America and Mexico; London and Paris bankers to Greece; Paris bankers to Tunisia. The peoples of these countries would find themselves on the hook for bond payments that were sold at a discount (but which needed to be repaid at 100% of their value) by bankers who took commissions and fees that routinely amounted to 10% of the total loan. Oftentimes, domestic oligarchs got in on the action too, directing money raised by these loans to their own bank accounts or to the purchasing of substandard goods produced in their own factories. It's a story that really exposes the seflishness, inhumanity and hypocrisy of European capitalism and European imperialists.

Finally, I'm reading Edward Ashpole's Signatures of Life: Science Searches the Universe. I'm writing a Sci-Fi comedy (mostly for my own amusement) and I wanted some backgrounding in the realities (or, make that, "science-backed speculation") of alien evolution and the evolution of alien technology. Ashpole is a science writer, not (I do not think) a PhD-possessing, practicising scientist. Still, he does write about hard-science topics about the physical dangers of space travel; the enormous challenges of the distances in space-time involved; and the likely total incompatibility of space-travelling lifeforms with the alien eco-systems they're likely to encounter. Sometimes the book feels padded by repetition. But it says enough interesting things to keep me reading.

Burning Buildings

 

When last summer's gigantic Black Lives Matter protest wave erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd some buildings caught fire. For racist, right-wing troglodytes (who support the murder of innocent, unarmed civilians by the police ... especially if the victims are Black) these burning buildings "discredited" the protests against murderous police brutality and racism.

The fires could have been the work of provocateurs. They could have been the actions of looters and vandals who were only taking advantage of the confusion created by the protests. Or, they could have been acts of passion committed by individuals enraged by a culture of racism, cruelty, injustice and violence. Whatever their origins, these fires nullified the merits of anything the protesters had to say.

The Roman Catholic Church is a mobbed-up cabal of pedophile weirdos. It has been suffering a public relations problem in recent decades over it habit of allowing their pedophile weirdo priests to continue to lead "flocks" of parishoners after their sexual assaults on children were exposed. These priests were simply relocated to other parishes, without warning the parishoners that their new spiritual leader had to get outta Dodge because he got caught molesting children. 

Of course, there's also centuries of obscurantism, imperialism, hypocrisy, torture and murder. Oh, and the collaboration with Nazis during the Holocaust mentioned in the link above.

In Canada, in the early-20th Century, if Catholic priests were diddling kids who went home to their parents at night, we can only imagine what foul deeds they perpetrated at places like the Residential Schools, where kidnapped Indigenous children were forced to reside for years, far from home. What they did was to starve, beat, torture, rape, and kill. Their surviving victims know this. Often times, the families of these survivors know about this. The Canadian government acknowledged this. The Catholic Church acknowledged this. But somehow or other, instead of being forced to pay $25 million in compensation to its vicitms, the Church got away with only having to "promise" to "try" to raise that money. In the end, this multi-billion dollar entity tossed a paltry $3.7 million to the First Nations victims' compensation. Because what else could have been expected from such scumbag vermin? 

Jesus Christ! Just think of the level of cynical, disgusting, inhuman monstrosity it took to acknowledge having tortured, raped, and killed an entire people, and then to falsely plead poverty to avoid paying even token restitution!

And that wretched, sleazy, revolting behaviour took place before First Nations activists (at their own expense) produced evidence of hundreds of unmarked graves of First Nations' children beneath the grounds of what had been Catholic-run Residential Schools! Canada's anti-indigenous racism was so brutal and callous, that when kidnapped Indigenous children died in their custody, the school authorities often didn't even bother to inform the parents. They just dug a hole on the school property and tossed the bodies in it!

Soon after these revelations were made, unknown arsonists have been setting on-reserve Catholic church buildings on fire in recent weeks, most likely in response to this confirmation of a century's worth of abusive cruelty.

And for some people (like the racists and grifters at Ezra Levant's "The Rebel") the burning buildings are what Canadians should be fixating on!

"Yes! I know that the Canadian state kidnapped you. And then the Catholic Church enslaved you, starved you, neglected your living conditions to the point where you contracted tuberculosis, beat you when you spoke your Native language, sexually molested you, and dumped your tiny bodies in unmarked graves if you subsequently died from their abuse of you AND THEN reneged on its promise to pay you token compensation for their crimes against you. But NONE OF THAT gives you the right to get angry and set empty church buildings on fire! And these burning structures of bricks, wood, glass, steel, etc., ARE THE REAL VICTIMS HERE!!! I'm just shocked and appalled that you're taking this evidence of mass murder as an EXCUSE to commit ARSON!!!!"

What moral degenerates these right-wingers are!  

And the point of this post is that besides being degenerates, right-wing fucks are also inconsistent. Because some buildings are burning down because of something, but these burning buildings apparently don't matter as much as the buildings that burned during protests againgst murderous racism. Entire forests are burning (but that is ONLY ever the concern of leftard tree-huggers), and 90% of the town of Lytton British Columbia (among other places affected by the wild fires) burned down.

This time the culprit was Global Warming. Global Warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Anthropogenic Global Warming is something we've known about for several decades now. Those buildings in Lytton were as much deliberately set as any buildings set afire during a BLM protest or those churches belonging to the cult that committed the atrocities at the Residential Schools.

But yet, we don't hear much criticism of the arsonists of Lytton from these right-wing blowhards, do we? That's because (obviously) blowhards like Ezra Levant and Tucker Carlson and all the other fuck-faces at theirs' and other right-wing media outlets are hypocrites. They're racist. They're corrupt. The fossil fuels sector is one of the primary funders of right-wing propaganda. These pundits aren't going to criticize their sugar daddies just to be morally and intellectually consistent! Moral and intellectual consistency are alien concepts to them.

My 2021 Canada Day

 

I don't celebrate Canada Day anymore. Not for the past several years. My explanation for that is here. I tend not to do anything on Canada Day, one way or the other. But this year, well, there are these weekly "De-Fund the Police" rallies in front of the Toronto Police Headquarters on College Street and this week the rally happened to fall on Canada Day. The organizers announced that they would be demonstrating on College Street and then marching down Yonge Street to Dundas Square to join the Anti-Canada Day rally that had been organized by Idle No More.

I thought that the recent attack on the homeless encampment at Trinity-Bellwoods Park and the discovery revelations of the mass graves of First Nations children on the grounds of former residential schools made me want to join these rallies just to stand and be counted. 

I mean, the money that went into the Trinity-Bellwoods action, and the sheer barbarism of the policy! Rents are sky-high. Incomes are stagnant. The pandemic has thrown thousands of people in Toronto out of work. People have no homes. They get a tent and they live in parks, or under bridges or under the Gardiner Expressway. And what do the authorities do? They destroy the encampments, throw the homeless people's few belongings into garbage trucks, and tell them to go to the overcrowded, COVID-infested shelters. 

[To be fair, the city did make new temporary housing available during the pandemic, in hotels that would otherwise be closed and in other places, but the crisis is so enormous that these efforts are clearly insufficient.]

And then there's the mass graves. As I said in a recent post, someone on the rabble/babble discussion board informed me about how often times, when First Nations children died of tuberculosis or abuse at a residential school, the school authorities wouldn't even bother informing the parents. They'd just dump the childrens' bodies in pits and ignore the eventual pleas from the families asking after their loved ones. (I did see a case where a school did inform the parents that their child had died. But they rejected the request that the child's body be returned home. In a typed letter, the authorities write that it wasn't "policy" to pay the freight costs to send the body home by train. Of course the Canadian government did pay to transport the stolen children TO the residential school!)

And, despite what partisan lunatics and scumbags will tell you, these crimes took place under BOTH of Canada's major parties. (And I've no doubt, seeing them in action at the provincial level, that the NDP would have been no different.) 

And the Canadian state and Canadian governments have known about these mass graves the entire time. Imagine this: After years of denial and lies, the wealthiest man in town admits that he was wrong to kidnap poor people's children and force them to join his cult, while all the while starving and abusing them. By some mysterious process, the town had come to sympathize with the poor people and the courts had ruled that he'd done them wrong and forced him to admit it and pay them some compensation. He did apologize and he did pay some of the money. But the poor people wanted to know where the bodies of the children who never came back were buried. He ignored them. At their own expense, they found the bodies. And then he uttered yet more empty apologies and platitudes.

So I dragged myself down to College Street. I got there a few minutes late and it was already in full swing. Maybe fifty people, ... maybe one hundred at the most. A speech about colonization and imperialism from some Arab guy was winding up. Then they started chanting: "From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a crime!" Over and over. Then a First Nations woman took the megaphone. She said that she had been sexually trafficked and that the police knew and did nothing about it. They only do things TO her people, nothing FOR them. Then the Arab guy started up again with his rhymes and getting the crowd to chant: "If they won't offer a solution; We will start a revolution!" "Revolution! Revolution!" Over and over again. 

I thought: "Are you really planning on revolution? With these numbers? Are you being serious?"

Then he returned to "From Turtle Island to Palestine; Occupation is a crime!"

I've heard enough empty chanting at rallies to last me a lifetime. I couldn't take anymore so I headed down to Dundas Square early. I got there and saw lots of orange shirts. Many worn by white people. There were nowhere near enough demonstrators to fill the Square but the rally wasn't due to start before another 45 minutes. Eventually almost twenty more people showed up and they started the rally. A line of activists (including children) held up letters that spelled out "No Pride in Genocide." Little else happened and then the crowd from the De-Fund the Police arrived. 

The young man with the megaphone started up with the rhyming and the chanting again. The "Turtle Island to Palestine" one. The "No Solution/We Will Start a Revolution." Then they threw in "The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!" Finally, the old standby: "No Justice? No Peace!"

That last one: How do non-violence advocates imagine their shouting "No Justice, No Peace!" sounds? If you're dedicated to peaceful protest, that chant is merely empty verbiage. 

I've heard all these stupid chants before. They only left out: "Hey-hey! Ho-ho! [Insert Name Here] has got to go!"

Listen: If you threaten "revolution" while making no serious plans for a revolution, you're just being childish. If you shout "The people united will never be defeated" when you're just a tiny band of activists, you look silly. If you threaten "No peace!" while professing non-violence and while also not having any plans for any serious non-violent disruption, you're just blowing smoke. 

I'm a dispirited, pessimistic, cosmic nihilist. I couldn't take it anymore and so I went home.