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Seasons greetings folks. Tim Minchin snuck a new recording of this atheist hymn out last year. It’s good.
A personal message as well this year. Take stock of what is around you and enjoy the relationships that you have, nothing is forever as much as we’d like it to be. Be kind to others and demonstrate what that looks like so people can follow a good example.
Thank you to everyone who follows and comments here on DWR – we’re a small put plucky bunch. Take care and be well.
“Rachel’s behaviour to Martina is exactly a demonstration of the way in which the moral logic of queer ‘inclusivity’ has now become a hegemonic, punitive, and profoundly disciplinary discourse. As we have all been noting over the last months, trans and radical queer activism is animated by a deeply authoritarian and coercive political impulse which leads it to behave like the bastard child of Stalinism and the Medieval Catholic Church.”
Two main things turned up in my timeline this morning. One was the fall-out of Rachel McKinnon’s egregious and unconcealed bullying of Martina Navratilova, and the other was a Call For Papers from Brighton University that Kathleen tweeted here.
I was already planning on doing this post on Martina when the CFP popped up – because Rachel’s behaviour last night was a pretty copper-bottomed rendition of what trans activist coercion looks like, and I thought it was worth taking a look at it blow by blow. The academic CFP might, at first glance, seem a little tangential to the issue of trans inclusion in sports, but it refracted with Rachel’s behaviour in an interesting way, so, happy or unhappy accident, this is what you get guys…
The CFP sketches out the familiar claim that ‘queerness’ is ‘inclusive’ and ‘fluid’ while ‘gayness’ or ‘homosexuality’ is ‘exclusive’ and ‘oppressive,’ a dichotomy…
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Meghan Murphy is living proof of the cost of going against patriarchal ideals. Her road is challenging and we can make it a bit easier by subscribing to her youtube channel, or better yet supporting her on Patreon.
Paul Street writing at Counterpunch:
“Yellow vest-wearers demand real democracy – popular self-rule. They have called for a popular referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French Parliament to debate and vote on a law within one year. There have been calls (evoking memories of the great French Revolution of 1789) for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution meant to create a new French government – a Sixth Republic based on popular sovereignty and majority rule, not the plutocratic commands of a de factocorporate-financial dictatorship. Imagine!
Calls for Macron’s resignation have been prominent in Gilets Jaunes rhetoric and graffiti. Many, probably most French people want a new and genuinely democratic governmentnow, not on the ridiculously time-staggered scheduled imposed by an outdated Constitution.
Despite predictable attempts by the right to hijack the movement and notwithstanding an absence of coordination by Left parties or unions, France is experiencing a left-leaning popular and working-class uprising consistent with the French revolutionary tradition of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” It is not a neo-fascist or anti-immigrant or anti-environmental petit-bourgeois rebellion. As Mercier writes:
…. What the yellow vests of the Gilets Jaunes symbolizes is blue-collar workers, struggling retirees and students who revolt against the suits of the political class and CEOs. …The Gilets Jaunes movement is strictly horizontal, without a hierarchy or recognized leaders. It has, so far, refused to be hijacked by political parties: either the Rassemblement Nationale of Marine Le Pen on the far-Right, or La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Melenchon on the Left. It has also rejected association with French labor unions. Without spelling it out, the Gilets Jaunes movement is anti-capitalist:a guttural revolt of the have-nots against the elite.It is a popular, not a populist, movement.Europeans and even American populist-nationalists are already distorting the Gilets Jaunes’ significance to serve their political agenda. As opposed to the rise of nationalism-populism elsewhere, such as in Italy, Austria, Hungary, the UK as expressed by BREXIT, the US, and Brazil with the election of Bolsonaro, the Gilets Jaunes do not have an anti-immigration or even an anti-EU agenda that reeks of racism and neofascism.…The Gilets Jaunes are in revolt against capitalism or neoliberalism, which is a worldwide system of concentration of wealth and power into a few hands. With our pending ecological collapse and vanishing biodiversity, capitalism has failed and is reaching its end game. Unlike the neofascist science deniers, the Gilets Jaunes perceive climate change as a crisis, but they say that it is hard to focus on a global ecological collapse when you live from paycheck to paycheck. They feel that they deal with the anxiety of putting food on the table at the end of the month while the rich talk about the end of the world. Thinking about humanity’s survival is hard to do on an empty stomach.”
The Gilets Jaunes have resisted the nativism of the nationalist right. They have called not for closed borders but rather for improved integration policies to help foreigners settle in France (language and civic education), for all foreign citizens working in France to have the same labor rights as French citizens, and for policies that address the causes of forced migrations.
The yellow vest uprising was/is no small development in a nation that is a leading nuclear power and one of just five permanent member of the United Nations Security Council!
You wouldn’t have known it from U.S. cable news last week or weekend, however. The chatterboxes on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News could barely break from their week-long commemoration of the imperialist war criminal George H.W. Bush and their breathless reporting of the latest developments in Bob Mueller RussiaGate investigation to give any serious attention to the momentous events in France.”
There may be hope for us yet.
It’s a near cyclical event. Disaffected folks in the West periodically need to grumble about how shitty it is living in a safe secure nation state. Nothing more than flashes in the pan when Westerners are feeling like they need someone to blame instead of themselves – because the ethic of bootstrapping yourself up into prosperity only applies to people who happen to be more poor that you…
In the coffee shops and meeting rooms throughout Saskatchewan these days, there’s more and more talk about the breakup of Canada. But it’s not Quebec at issue, it’s western separatism.
After years of falling incomes and an apparent lack of action from Ottawa, many Prairie people are now debating the pros and cons of splitting the West from the rest of Canada.”
A Okanagan political group is spearheading a campaign to have B.C. and Alberta separate from the rest of Canada.
The group, calling itself 110 West, plans to organize public consultations in the two provinces. It’s running advertisements in local newspapers, and has set up a Web page.”
On a sunny Sunday in Calgary, Alberta’s separatists are on the move, pounding the pavement at the city’s popular Lilac Festival on the hunt for signatures.
Larry Smith is working the crowd, looking for support for his fledgling political movement, the Western Independence Party of Alberta (WIPA).
Truth is, WIPA isn’t quite a political party just yet. Before that can happen in Alberta, it needs signatures — and lots of them.
To be registered as a political party in the province, you need 7,868 electors — or about one-third of one per cent of eligible voters — to sign on the dotted line.”
So really, when the latest “Western Alienation” story happens to crop up – remind yourself it has the all the significance of this:
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