Win win come again, brethren come again
On the plus side, 2022 is going to be a great primer for how climate change response will shake out.
What do you say about 2022? It was a horrible year, filled with backslides for labour, for rationality, and for fuck sakes it’s only February oh God, oh my Christ. Wow. Okay. Damn.
As much as I want to mock the Hognado that descended on downtown Ottawa, disrupting the local culture of driving to the suburbs at 4 P.M. and believing federal Liberals will help people, I have to hand it to them. It is the most effective protest I’ve seen in my lifetime. Governments around the world were already itching to drop COVID rules so we can get back to making the GDP line go up. Having a group of riled up dorks in Carhartt and six-figure trucks erect tent cities in a G8 capital probably drove home their sense of popular support. Do I think New York dropped COVID mask rules because some Canadians got all goofed-up on hockey and cans of Black Ice? Of course not, but they have televisions and knowing you have friends at your back makes people do stupid shit every day. Ask a bartender.
So you have a bunch of people with bad information with great funding and huge trucks and enough savings to leave their jobs for awhile. You can block international commerce with a Jake brake and your friends are in government, police, and the fucking tow truck companies. The temptation is there to glean lessons for the left from the truckers but the strategy for riding a bike changes when you have no training wheels. Their society armour keeps them safe, their precarity was, for a moment, paused because of a $10 million strike fund on GoFundMe. It’s comparing apples to charcoal. Barring a sympathetic billionaire or foreign intelligence service funding land back activists, I don’t think we can find the scratch.
So now going places becomes more dangerous! Going to a bar with a mask on will put you in a slim minority soon as peer pressure and fatigue erodes the will of the fearful. People who try to stem local spread by mandating vaccines and masks in their establishments will get screamed at by buffoons, but that was already happening. The bigger danger from inadequate distribution of vaccines allowing new and stylish mutations was always the bigger issue. The half-measures are gone and bringing them back when Omicron 3 sweeps in from Hungary or Malaysia or who knows where is going to be next to impossible. If you so much as ask people to cough into their elbow, what will the response be? If they head back to Ottawa armed, will the police bother to risk their lives?
Our ~structures~ have been incapable of accomplishing large projects for a long time, and this week showed that the reactionary power base can’t and won’t be coerced to do anything, even if that thing saves lives and is relatively benign. If their only desire is for the state to do nothing, and the state doesn’t move the levers at its disposal, then why bother having a state in the first place? It becomes a well-funded observer. How many bodies will move them to action, and when the stack is that high will there be any levers left to pull?
🏹Thank you to the CEO of REI. Humiliating yourself fighting unionization helps unions form everywhere in your stupid, hilarious shadow.
🕹The UCP would rather drug users just die, thanks very much.
⏰FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN OUR POLITICS!
🏮A Starbucks I frequent has a board where you can add twee thoughts on Post-It notes while you wait for your coffee. I keep putting up union agitation slogans and they keep taking them down.
☢️NFTs are being pushed hard by mega-agency CAA and a group of 2000s-era celebrities because they have interest in a central NFT marketplace.
🎴Silicon Valley start-up schemes always end up messing up a ton of lives, in this case about 2800 in one go.
💯If a cop trespasses on your property without identifying himself he is allowed to kill you. Sorry.
🔔Dave Chapelle fucking sucks.
✂️I remember when people were tracking Elon Musk’s plane racing down the Mexican coast against a private plane suspected to belong to drug cartel bosses.
🍩NATO is trying to end carpets on walls.
🥧Turns out police violence correlates with higher voter turnout. If only there was someone to vote for!
🎨How climate change is changing oceans. Maybe we could have a little state planning as a treat?
📉Alberta Advantage is swollen and throbbing with inflationary concerns this week.
🎧Aaron at Sweater Weather is talkin’ bout that Leo. Not not that one, the other one.
🔇Harbinger already solved the problems Ottawa is having with Freedom this week.
🏍University of Lethbridge has some doings a transpirin’. Keep an eye on them for opportunities to help them on the picket line.
🛸You can build a good union. Yes you!