What’s really funny is he tried hard to pander to the Alliance fascists and convoy guys (of which there are a lot in NB), but they weren’t interested in turning out for him. Sure they hate trans people, but they also hate masking, social distancing and vaccines, which are all things they consider him a traitor for pushing in 2020. The amount of extreme right people who are simultaneously whining about Holt and the Liberals but also I-told-you-so-ing about Higgs and his “mandatory vaccine” agenda is a great sign of their current inability to organize.

In a weird way, Oct 7 was also a critical moment in collapsing the anti-trans movement in NB. In September 2023 there were anti-trans rallies in every city that were massive by the standards of New Brunswick organizing, but then October came, and there was a schism between the fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, with the Christians immediately turning on the Muslims. Muslim groups switched focus to protesting Canada’s participation in genocide, Christian groups didn’t want anything to do with them, and queer people turned out to the Palestine rally and started forming crucial connections with the Muslim communities. Really powerful example of the importance of solidarity in breaking down barriers and building coalitions.

I’m sure they were, but I haven’t read it and so it didn’t inform my position when writing this essay.

Anyway, the Lenin quote is actually from Clara Zetkin’s Lenin on the Woman Question, I rarely read men.

Yeah that’s what Canada wants people to think, but unfortunately: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-magazine-for-november-22-2020-1.5807350/the-rise-of-the-ku-klux-klan-in-canada-and-why-its-lasting-impact-still-matters-1.5807353

“In just a year, the group became the largest and the fastest growing social organization in the country”

““You had rallies where you had five, 10, 15, 20,000 people who would show up at these Klan meetings in places like Kingston and Belleville, London, Hamilton,” said Bartley.”

I appreciate the suggestion, but this is a “further reading” like a bibliography, this is a list of texts that informed the essay, and I haven’t read Engels

It’s because the actual institutional language used the term, so marginalized groups often continue to bring to the forefront the language the government employed (or still employs, in the case of Indian) as a way to combat the post-90s “liberal mosaic/colourblind” narrative that permeates Canadian society. Canada exists in this ahistorical cultural vortex where slavery was an American problem (they stress that the Underground Railroad led to here, but ignore that at the exact same time Canadians had their own slaves and it was border laws that “freed” slaves coming North, not an anti-slavery sentiment, and rarely teach about Canadian slavery at all) and work camps were a British problem (don’t look at what Canada did to Asian immigrants please) and residential schools are only recently even talked about at all.

It’s about rejecting this false ideal Canada has that it “solved racism” or whatever because it was always “more progressive” than America (please ignore that the country was founded by Orange Order racists, that the RCMP exists to wage war on the Indigenous population, and that the KKK chapters here flourished without scrutiny).

Anyway, that particular word is used a lot when addressing Canadian foundational myths, which are built on the idea of the railway (and especially the Canadian Pacific Railway) as this great nation-building project that allowed Confederation. What that myth most often ignores is the work camps of sino-immigrants, the violent occupation of the West and the consolidation of the industrial bourgeoisie as the ruling class as they ousted the old feudal order.

It’s a term used less in a reclamatory way by Asian academics and activists, and more in a way that forces acknowledgement of the racist legislative bodies of the country. There’s a lot to be said about the way pejoratives can be used in different contexts, but, especially online where you can’t know anything about the person on the other end, it’s usually best to avoid them altogether so as not to cause unintentional hurt, for which I apologize.

Ah, sorry in certain activism circles it’s pretty standard to continue to use that term (as well as Indian, rather than Indigenous) when trying to highlight Canada’s history of institutionalized racism, I didn’t consider how people in other contexts may just be unhappy/hurt to see the word. I’ve edited it.

Yeah Faytene is horrible, her church does these weird anti-trans and anti-abortion marches and they have her face printed off on a huge banner labelling her as a prophet. Marci MacDonald’s The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada has some good stuff about Faytene’s early entrance onto the evangelical scene, and the ties between all the Christian Nationalist players and their American benefactors.

She has built a weird creepy “compound” that is ostensibly a television studio for her preaching (which is specifically aimed at Canada and Israel, no surprise), and she also has an anti-abortion snitch line (for a province that already has like zero abortion access). Anyway, what’s very funny about her loss is that she picked an overwhelmingly conservative area, like Trump flag (in Canada for some reason), Fuck Trudeau, anti-vax conservative. And she still lost, because she missed the most important part of New Brunswick voting: her opponent is from there and everyone knows him.

What’s especially interesting is putting aside the liberal wins in Fredericton and Saint John, it was almost entirely an English-French split. 70% of the province is blue (the English south), and 30% is red (the French north), and all the anti-French assholes are pissed about it. The French are really who ousted Higgs, which is not surprising for anyone who knows that he hates the French so much he used to be in an anti-French hate group.

“Getting?” Canada’s racism is foundational. A bunch of trading corporations “given” supreme legislative authority over half of a continent that only became a country in order to cement the capital accumulation of railway investors who decided the best way to build their railways uninterrupted was slavery, primarily sino-immigrant labour, and torture schools with backyard mass graves. Literally had a “whites-only” immigration policy for like a hundred years, and now it’s a points system that is held up internationally as a gold standard despite being nearly indistinguishable from the Kafala system in the Gulf.

It seems like what they want is to have AI-generated “tasks” that students have to complete to gauge their level of knowledge so that the AI can then generate tests that are more specifically tailored to what that student’s trouble spots are. I already hate this, and this is the promise they’re leading with, meaning it’s the most benign possible application that is the face of the actual terrible ways they will algorithmically decide students’ academic potential.

Boy do I have some news for you: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/ai-may-be-coming-for-standardized-testing/2024/03

“This could be a step towards figuring out how AI can help educators achieve a long-elusive goal: Creating a new breed of assessments that actually helps inform teaching and learning in real time, he said.”

That’s fair, but an important thing to remember in regards to China: Patnaik (2020) notes that 64% of the number of persons lifted above the international poverty line since 1990 was entirely on account of China. Whatever economic complaints that people on the Internet have, China has made moves to alleviate the immiseration of a billion people in the face of an over-reaching hyperviolent global hegemony.

As far as hope, I always take to heart Mariame Kaba’s assertion that “hope is a discipline.”

" I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad . . . hope is a discipline and. . . we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. . . I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that. And I don’t also take a short-time view, I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that, that I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of. So, that also puts me in the right frame of mind, that my little friggin’ thing I’m doing, is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but [if] it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that."

Cuba suspended the deal back in 2022 because they couldn’t produce enough sugar and became a sugar importer instead, their sugar industry is in collapse. But yes, please tell me in more snarky and doomerist ways why China is a big bad bully for not continuing to buy sugar that doesn’t exist

Just an FYI for people getting angry about this: this deal to export 400,000 tonnes of sugar to China annually was suspended back in 2022, by Cuba, because Cuba ran into production issues, didn’t have enough sugar, and became a sugar importer. The deal remained suspended in 2023, again, because Cuba could not produce enough sugar. This year the deal was finally cancelled because, shockingly, Cuba still can’t produce enough sugar since their sugar industry has been in collapse for years.

And now the Financial Times of all places has made up some story about how China is punishing Cuba, and people are repeating it (literally no other sources exist for this, every article in English and in Spanish that I can find link back to the FT article).

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cuban-sugar-industry-restructures-another-bleak-harvest-looms-2021-11-24/ (Start of the collapse and the last year people were still talking about Cuba maybe fulfilling its export but probably not because harvest was bad)

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cuba-cuts-plans-export-sugar-with-output-expected-stagnate-2022-11-03/ (article from the following year about how Cuba can’t export sugar anymore because they can’t fulfill their contracts)

Edit: China is still Cuba’s number two trade partner. Could they do more for Cuba? Yeah, they could do more for literally everywhere, but complaints about how China needs to deliver more aid are way different than uncritically accepting that China is cutting trade ties with Cuba to punish them. (By the way, China is also one of the largest investors in Cuban infrastructure, so the real energy should be at wanting China to double down on helping Cuba fix their currently faltering energy infrastructure)

I think we’re talking past each other here because the article that spawned this thread is saying the cause is specifically to punish Cuba for walking back privatization, which is spin on the situation published by Atlantic Council goons. The thing I have asserted is that if you were to look at the parent comment and the linked article, and take it at face value, you are uncritically accepting US narratives.

At no point have I denied that this deal was cancelled, nor that trade deals are implemented, maintained, or cancelled, all entirely on the basis of profitability. That isn’t what this thread is about though. It’s about whether or not China is “punishing” Cuba.

It’s just a contract being cancelled, that could have any number of reasons behind it (and the most likely reason is profitability, which is problematic in its own right but not at all what this thread is complaining about). But to accept that it is being cancelled as a punishment to fail to privatize is pure conjecture unless you have inside information you’d care to share.

I never said the deal wasn’t being cancelled, but the outrage being generated here is that it is being cancelled as a punishment, which there is no evidence of that isn’t from a US-backed source.

Please do, actually, and find a source that corroborates what you are criticizing: that this trade deal is being cancelled in order to punish Cuba for not privatizing. Otherwise all you have substantiated is that the deal is cancelled, and not the why of it, which is what people are getting mad about. A deal being cancelled isn’t really anything: that happens all the time.

When you read an Atlantic Council article and then say “fuck Xi” I think the US has worked its propaganda well.

Sure and maybe the news that China is cancelling a trade deal is true, but the point of these types of NGOs is to frame it with a lot of unsubstantiated spin. This article you linked writes specifically that the trade deal comes as a punishment for failing to privatize, but I can’t find a single non-US funded source that links those as cause-and-effect. There is no evidence that this deal is being cancelled as a lever for privatization, which is the thing that you are criticizing China for doing.

That’s why when you use sources like this you can’t take their reasoning at face value, that’s just spreading Atlantic Council narratives.