Could someone please change Ezra's diaper?

Honestly, he's starting to smell. Dear Lord, who told this little pisher that kacking into cyberspace is the same thing as a contribution to intellectual discourse?  ("Hey, look at me, I'm a Stockaholic!  Look at me! Look at me!")

Another smear job, another steaming pile of crap, lies and hysterical accusations. And for kicks, he ties Margaret Atwood to Al-Jazeera with a lurid story about some dirty Muslim terrorist who smashed a 4-year-old kid's head with a rock. Just in case it isn't clear that this is a Clash of Civilizations^TM, and the brown folks with the funny names are eeeeeevul.

But that's just setting the table. The main point, it seems, is to carry on with the lies, the anguished posturing as aggrieved victim, and whine about censorship and suppression. Margaret Atwood is demanding that Sun TV be banned, he says.

Of course, there's no evidence for that, and of course, that's not what she said. And again, he's displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of both freedom of expression and censorship. But then that's par for the course, isn't it. The rest of the piece is just more of the same: left-wing mainstream media consensus, the only opinions allowed on TV are anti-American, anti-Christian big-government mush, yargle bargle blegh, drool.

Yawn.

He's like a kid who never mastered toilet training, craps his pants regularly and then demands that someone change him. I suppose we can't hold him responsible for someone else's bad parenting, but he can't have it both ways by demanding to be treated like an adult either.

Update: Tip of the yarmulka to Sabina and thwap.

About that free speech thing

Deep sigh.

Again with the cultivated ignorance from the flying monkeys of the Right. One of the things you constantly hear them whining about, when they're complaining about the leftwing socialist libtard media, is about how the liberal media suppress freedom of speech because they won't publish "politically incorrect" viewpoints.

Should I make the type larger here? Would that be the written equivalent of speaking slowly and using short words? 

How often do we have to go back to first principles with this crowd? I'll go through it once more:

Freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want, no matter how repulsive. Nothing complicated about that.

It does not mean anyone else has a duty to listen to you.

It does not impose a corresponding obligation on anyone else to provide you with an audience.

It does not mean anyone else has to provide you with a forum.

It does not mean that you have the right to be taken seriously.

It does not mean that, having spoken your piece, you are somehow immune from criticism.

It means that you can say whatever you want, but if you:

• lie
• take things out of context
• carry out political dirty tricks in the guise of "journalism"
• make grotesque, over-the-top ad hominem attacks
• engage in repulsive smear jobs
• twist facts
• pull crazy shit out of your ass and present it as fact
• or say stupid hateful things ...

then other people are going to call you out.

OK? Knock yourself out, Ezra. And you, my brave Fighting Keyboarders, back to your posts.

This way to Authoritarian Avenue

(Photo by Jonas Naimark)

I've written at some length about the need to assert control over the way the story of the G20 summit is told. It's not going to be easy, given the institutional and political imperatives interested in spinning last weekend's events as a bunch of black-clad anarchist thugs trashing our peaceful city, yada yada yada. That doesn't make it any less important, however.

Just so we're clear: this isn't a story about a bunch of world leaders / political hacks / meat puppets for the corporate string-pullers getting together and agreeing on a whole bunch of things that'll make our lives a lot more painful. And it's not a story about a few morons breaking windows. And it's not a story about how thousands of riot cops couldn't protect a handful of cars, much as I'd like it to be about that.

No. This week's story has been about the corporate / state security apparatus using our fundamental freedoms for toilet paper. It's about people being locked up for hours without water, without being allowed to go to the bathroom, packed into cages like animals. It's about homophobic slurs and threats of sexual violence. It's about thuggish behaviour by people who know they can get away with it, because the mechanisms designed to ensure accountability are laughably weak.

View Larger Map

Last Sunday evening, my partner and I rode our bikes eastward on Queen toward Spadina. We were held up at Queen and Cameron, about a block west of Spadina, by a wall of bike cops, backed up by a phalanx of more heavily armed officers from various police forces. We could see by looking eastward that the intersection of Queen and Spadina was completely cordoned off, so we pulled up and just watched. As we waited, we watched the facial expressions change on the cops confronting us; shoulders straightened, muscles tensed, batons brandished openly. The front line of bike cops started herding us westward, ordering us to move back, buzzing their bike buzzers and pushing us. We all complied, but you can only move as fast as the guy behind you, and that wasn't quick enough for the officers pushing us westward, and they began shoving us. I couldn't help but wonder whether they were doing it because they figured they could, that their uniforms amounted to a licence to push people around?

Theodor Adorno's description of the authoritarian personality may provide some insight, but ultimately it pales in comparison to some of the stories emerging from the weekend. As it happened, while we were being shoved westward along Queen, several heavy-duty unmarked vans pulled past us to discharge the heavily armed tactical squads, and that was our cue to get the hell out of there.

Lisan Jutras' account of being caught in the kettle is required reading for anyone who wants a first-hand account of what was going on at Queen and Spadina Sunday night, and despite being caught in the rain and not allowed to leave for hours, she was one of the lucky ones.

Tommy Taylor's account of his arrest and detention is mind-blowing. Hours without water or a chance to pee. Homophobic slurs. Abuse of disabled prisoners. At the conclusion he, like hundreds of other people, is released without being charged. It seems apparent that the police knew they'd have a hard time making charges stick, but in the meantime, hundreds of people were abused, threatened and deprived of the basic rights we normally associate with living in an open society. Got a problem with that? Go complain. There are avenues for that, Dalton McGuinty assures us.

And then there are the accounts of people who were actively beaten, threatened and abused. Lacy MacAuley was arrested outside the makeshift gulag on Eastern Avenue. Her story sounds like something from behind the Iron Curtain. Amy Miller talks about cops threatening to gang-rape her.

In a few weeks, or perhaps months even, there may be an inquiry. Findings will be announced. Wrists will be slapped. Tuts will be tutted. And eventually, if we're lucky, someone will decide that the police - Toronto, OPP, ISU, RCMP, York, Halton, Montreal, Sudbury, Barrie, and anyone else who was invited to the party - had absolutely no justification for treating people the way they did. Feel better now? If you want to complain, there are established channels. Uh huh. Good luck with that.

This needs to be hammered on, repeatedly, all the more so because the MSM are getting tired of it. There's an implicit assumption that our attention spans are, well, limited. Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of smashed windows and burning cars, and maybe the cops overreacted, but there were a lot of smashed windows, and - oh, look! Something shiny!

And that's the dynamic that the corporate / state security apparatus is counting on. The more distracted / cowed we are, the easier it is for them to keep doing this to us. Yes, it's inexcusable how people were treated, and it shouldn't have happened, but by the time these processes wind their way to the end, people will have forgotten. In the meantime, the association of protest and activism with all the negative connotations continues, and the mere act of stepping outside your door becomes risky, unless you're planning on doing anything more than being a good little consumer / producer.

So, part of the narrative that needs to emerge from this weekend is: let's just keep in mind how fragile our fundamental freedoms really are. It's become pretty clear that those charged with serving and protecting us, and those who control them, don't think they count for much.

Truth to power, and other battle lines

Not surprisingly, the battle to define the history of the last few days is in full swing. The whole point of the story we're being fed, by the institutions of state/corporate coercion and their PR transmitters in the corporate media, is to marginalize and demonize the very idea of activism and dissent.

Moreover, this shouldn't be reduced to a one-dimensional debate over where we land on the left / right spectrum. Fundamental freedoms and their assertion in the face of things like free trade, summits and continentalism are not intrinsically left or right, and part of our task in fighting for control of the narrative is resisting that kind of oversimplification.

The G20 and the criminalization of dissent

Public protest, activism and dissent are long-established and honourable traditions. From Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, no society, no matter how egalitarian and how well-resourced, can make progress without people -- inside or outside the loci of power -- who are willing to stand up and risk censure or worse for pointing out that the emperor is naked. The Industrial Revolution prompted class consciousness. Women's activists brought universal suffrage. Labour activism and organization brought us the 40-hour work week, the weekend, and benefits. All of those are under attack now; nothing new there.

What is new, and especially worrisome, is the obvious state / corporate goal of tarring the very idea of activism itself. Thanks to the narrative propagated 24/7 this weekend in connection with the G20 -- the seeds of which were clearly sown weeks, if not years, in advance -- it'll be impossible even to use the words "protest," "demonstration," and "activism" without thinking of burning police cruisers, smashed store windows, and violent confrontation. In the days and weeks to come, we'll be hearing tropes like "violent black-clad anarchist thugs" so frequently that they'll become part of the subconscious noise. They'll become the norms. They'll become so ingrained that any suggestion that activism or opposition to the G20 / corporate agenda might be justified will come as a shock, a departure from established and acceptable ways of thinking.

Separating words from their meanings has always been part of the apparatus of repression, of distraction, of domination. In the United States, right-wing operatives have successfully turned the term “liberal” into an epithet. That strategy is clearly at work here, now, with the endless display of violent images and the feverish efforts to entrench a manufactured storyline – one we can all write in our sleep. Violent protestors are used to justify a massive investment in security and coercive state actions, which then have a chilling effect on further public participation. No one will want to be tarred with labels like “activist.” How convenient for the powerbrokers orchestrating events. God knows, democracy can be messy and unpredictable and even interfere with profit-seeking.



We cannot meet the operators / foot-soldiers of the corporate / state security apparatus on their own turf. They'll always have more guns, gas, tasers, truncheons and testosterone. Our best strategy is to undermine the narrative. We can't let them associate protest, demonstration and activism with negative connotations (as is clearly their strategy). We must challenge the storyline at every possible opportunity. Undercover cops as agents provocateurs? Unprovoked violence against peaceful demonstrators? Wholesale suspension of our fundamental rights? Rousting people from their beds in midnight raids? Privileged access to G20 leaders for business leaders and other ruling-class functionaries?

This is a challenge that goes beyond this weekend's G20 events in Toronto. What's at stake is the very idea of public participation, the very notion that we have rights that go beyond the channels so carefully delineated for us.