Some things of note…

A general update here, in lieu of posting the next piece of my Terrorist Assemblages review, of things I've found interesting, or that I've been involved with, in recent weeks…

Sticky Notes: so immediate!

First of all, I've been reading a lot of The Worker's Spatula.  I don't know who is behind this website, but whoever they are they're fucking hilarious: it's kind of like an Onion for the communist left, and thus requires an understanding of communism and the anti-capitalist left in general, to really get––perfect, then, for most of my readers.  I don't find all of their articles super funny, but most of them are.  And to be clear, when I say that "I don't find all of their articles super funny" I don't mean that I find the articles that poke fun at things connected to my set politics unfunny (i.e. like when they parodied Sison), because I actually find those things the most funny: I truly like laughing at myself. More that, not being from Europe, I don't really get all of the Stefan Engel jokes… I think ICOR is kind of a joke, yeah, but I figure that I still need to know more about Stefan Engel to really appreciate the references (they seem funny, though!) that are littered throughout numerous articles.  And the most recent post to date, about Cizre, wasn't very funny at all because it couldn't really be that funny, and the authors knew this, and was more an angry post about violent government repression––as it should have been.  All-in-all, though, hilarious shit.  Back when I started this blog (you know, when I thought nobody would ever read it and so I called it a stupid name and made the URL by gosh-darned last name, you know, to just alert CSIS to my existence and damn my academic career forever) I tried to post a lot of humorous stuff, some of which was designed to satirize the anti-capitalist left (i.e. my Tao of Mao comics), but that fell by the wayside pretty quickly.

Secondly, the elections boycott campaign is gathering steam and the mass organizations I work with in Toronto are working to organize and plan for the national day of action.  The recent Red Flag / Le Drapeau Rouge [#4] has a bunch of good articles about the campaign (among other things) and worth the read––the dead tree copy looks pretty lovely.  Despite at least one of the internet leftist trolls who bothers me on an occasional basis (along with supporters of Maoist Rebel News, that Free Criticism eclectic dude who thinks he understands theory he can barely read, and now Rosa Lichtenstein) writing a dumb-ass post about the boycott campaign, it's pretty clear that the reasons for the initiation of such a campaign two federal elections ago, back when the PCR-RCP was still just in Quebec, have now been proven to be correct.  The NDP is such a joke now that the entire possibility of "critical support" for a party whose figurehead name-drops Thatcher is laughable.

Next, there's the whole cafuffle over the fact that some misogynist on blogTO demanded that students show up at the University of Toronto and shoot women professors because, you know, feminism is evil.  Which means that some people are openly celebrating the Montreal Massacre and hoping that it is repeated.  There was a march at the University of Toronto to demonstrate anger at this misogynist demand, but part of me feels that the march kind of missed the point of what should be done.  Really, this kind of attitude is the result of MRAs organizing on university campuses in the past few years, pushing their virulent woman-hating discourse (which they claim is not woman-hating, but a "justifiable" response to "misandry") in these spaces, and so we should have expected these kinds of "kill the feminist women" demands.  So why have some kind of march for tolerance, or at best a march to show to the streets of Toronto that we hate sexism, when this won't confront these fuckers?  And where were all these people who joined the march back in the days when the Revolutionary Student Movement and the Proletarian Feminist Front were actively shutting down these MRA campus events?  And no mention of this militant resistance was made at the march, though they did publicly mention where the next on-campus MRA event was going to be held.  Here's hoping that everyone who came to the march will mobilize to shut down this meeting.

Thirdly, there's an upcoming PEGIDA event in Toronto against which some obscured anti-fascist and/or anarchist folks have demanded a counter-rally.  PEGIDA is a crypto-fascist "international" organization, started in Germany: Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, translated as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident.  I'm not going to make a joke about Germany and fascism here… oh wait, I just did!  And I wonder if the anti-deutsch "marxists" are involved in this fascist endeavour––probably are.  In any case, PEGIDA is a modern fascism: instead of Jews destroying the fabric of Western Civilization (the Occident!) now it's the Muslims.  They are also canny enough to have token people of colour to legitimate their fascism and claim, all multi-culty, that they're not racist. Apparently one of the reps of the Toronto PEGIDA event defines themselves as aboriginal––which is kind of funny that an Indigenous person is aligning themselves with "the Occident" and not seeing, you know, this Occident as being a far greater threat to Indigenous self-determination (because colonialism) than Islam.  Since the PCR-RCP in Montreal led a successful rally against PEGIDA there, effectively shutting it down, my Maoist comrades in Toronto, along with some commuting from Hamilton, are going to form a red contingent in the counter-rally.  Unfortunately, it's my daughter's birthday party on Saturday and so I would be a terrible dad if I abandoned her DIY Moomin party in favour of said rally.

Finally, I wrote a post on my other arts/literature/culture blog about the Strugatsky Brothers and the way in which apprehension of Soviet science-fiction is distorted through cold-war ideology. This post was the result of three things: i) downloading German's adaptation of the Strugatsky Brothers' Hard To Be A God; ii) reading a pretty terrible review of the book's rerelease, that spent more time talking about "Stalinism" than the book itself; iv) and again reading about how George Orwell, beloved by some people on the left, was an anti-communist snitch. So when I was faced with a review of the Strugatsky Brothers' amazing Hard To Be A God that bizarrely tried to explain it according do Stalinism and summoned the memory of Orwell, I was greatly annoyed.

And that's about that.  Next post: hopefully a reflection on the third chapter of Puar's book, but now that I've just been captured by the onslaught of my teaching semester this might have to wait!