tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70429612024-03-17T23:03:57.205-04:00A Canadian Lefty in Occupied LandPersonal/political musings from a Canadian activist and writer. From May 2004 to July 2005, when the author lived in the U.S., the site was known as <em>A Canadian Lefty in the Land of King George</em>. Here are a few words about the <a href="http://scottneigh.blogspot.com/2009/10/this-blogs-name.html">current name</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1286125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-51130125368388213342023-09-25T11:49:00.000-04:002023-09-25T11:49:39.230-04:00The far right and its enablers are lying to you It's pretty clear that a lot of people don't understand the way that more extreme elements on the right try to build support for their agenda of harm and violence and a base to pursue it by organizing things like the anti-queer/anti-trans actions across the country last week and the convoy occupation last year. Not understanding how this works makes people more vulnerable to being taken in by Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-75869541007190203012022-09-03T14:17:00.001-04:002022-09-03T14:17:50.285-04:00Social Media is Making Me a Worse ReaderI have realized in the last few days that social media – especially but not only Twitter – has made me a worse reader.I mean this in a specific way. For me at least, this is not about, say, social media use monopolizing time that I would otherwise use to read books, or about social media-induced fragmentation of my practices of attention making it harder for me in general to read longform Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-84283212326718617812022-07-06T17:21:00.006-04:002022-07-06T17:21:31.444-04:00Review: The Twittering Machine [Richard Seymour. The Twittering Machine. London: The Indigo Press, 2019.]There is practically an entire industry devoted to churning out
think-pieces, studies, books, and articles expressing concern about the
impacts of social media and the broader spectrum of information
technology of which it is a part on our lives and our world. It comes in
lots of flavours, many neither convincing Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-67445586079447881122021-12-31T15:45:00.004-05:002021-12-31T15:47:59.220-05:00Review: Four Thousand Weeks [Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2021.]An anti-productivity book, of sorts. In most books that are either directly or indirectly about how we individually make use of our time, the goal is to enable the reader to do more. Now, I don't actually often read that sort of book, at least in its most blatant neoliberal-cult-of-productivity Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-40130813833489862782021-10-29T13:40:00.005-04:002021-10-29T13:40:47.987-04:00Review: The Dawning of the Apocalypse [Gerald Horne. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.]Historical scholarship. A sweeping history of the long sixteenth century, from the first voyage of Columbus in 1492 to the establishment of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in North Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-69491573041226795842021-09-06T14:35:00.004-04:002021-09-06T14:35:35.042-04:00Review: The Ministry for the Future [Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry for the Future: A Novel. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020.]Science fiction. Starts fifteen minutes into the future and extends for several decades, focusing on the climate crisis at a global scale. Begins with a powerful chapter describing in an embodied way one character's experience of a devastating heat wave that ultimately kills 20 million people –Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-84132087259019853142021-08-30T14:38:00.000-04:002021-08-30T14:38:01.058-04:00Review: Personal Politics [Sara Evans. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.] Movement history. An interview-based and archival history of the emergence of the women's liberation movement in the United States in the late 1960s. It particularly focuses on the ways in which women's liberation came out of the experiences of women Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-76684726469781047982021-08-19T10:19:00.003-04:002021-08-19T10:19:40.635-04:00State violence against homeless encampments and the refusal to know
Many years ago, I was walking in downtown Hamilton with a friend. As
often happens in downtown Hamilton, a woman we walked by asked us for
spare change.
I no longer remember
exactly how the interaction played out – then as now, I often give
change if I have it, but not always (particularly after the n'th time
of being asked on a given day), and anyway I don't always have Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-88529282112820454412021-01-09T16:14:00.001-05:002021-01-09T18:00:37.802-05:00Review: The All New Don't Think of an Elephant! [George Lakoff. The All New Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014.]Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-15856642956929942502020-12-27T14:23:00.003-05:002020-12-27T14:39:21.750-05:00Review: Reading Across Borders [Shari Stone-Mediatore. Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowedges of Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.]
A lot of Serious People who do Serious Things when it comes to knowledge tend to treat stories and other kinds of experience-based narratives as inherently suspect and not terribly useful. Some do this from a sort of empiricist place, an unreconstructed Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-8958052388733623942020-11-07T11:24:00.003-05:002020-11-07T11:25:18.505-05:00Review: Life as Politics[Asef Bayat. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Second Edition. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.]
A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn't Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-79460197463291193012020-09-19T15:58:00.007-04:002020-09-19T15:58:42.227-04:00Review: Red Round Globe Hot Burning[Peter Linebaugh. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2019.]
A sprawling, intricate history set in the Atlantic world, particularly Ireland and England but also connecting events there to America and Haiti and France and beyond, during the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-92070349995612634532020-07-05T12:35:00.000-04:002020-07-05T12:35:08.613-04:00Review: Sonic Agency[Brandon LaBelle. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018.]
A book concerned with "positioning sound and its discourses in dialogue with contemporary struggles," that attempts to seek out "ethical and agentive positions or tactics" grounded in "experiences we have of listening and being heard" (1). It does this by drawing on the scholarly area of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-64543627019034644972020-01-26T15:07:00.000-05:002020-01-26T15:07:52.846-05:00Review: Life Isn't Binary[Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi. Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019.]
A look at the ways in which, in Western societies, binaries organize our thinking and our lives, and at ways we can navigate and perhaps at moments move beyond them. Clever and very accessible, though not without its limitations.
I've read two books by Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-19741192549987804882020-01-02T16:18:00.001-05:002020-01-02T16:18:43.160-05:00Review: How to Do Nothing[Jenny Odell. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn NY: Melville House Publishing, 2019.]
A very thoughtful, very well-written book by an artist who lives in California's Bay Area. A self-proclaimed "field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy" (xi) that is "not anti-technology" but that is "obviously anti-capiatlist" (xii). A Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-30601931084600100602019-12-16T15:03:00.003-05:002019-12-16T15:04:08.465-05:00Review: Weapons of the Weak
[James C. Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.]
A classic from a political scientist of anarchist proclivities doing what amounts to anthropology and studying the fine-grained class relations in a peasant village in Malaysia in the late '70s and early '80s, in the context of the capitalist re-organization of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-69870832149618892382019-11-27T12:16:00.002-05:002019-11-27T12:16:20.056-05:00Review: Black Feminist Thought
[Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2009.]
A Black feminist classic, and deservedly so. An effort by one of the most prominent Black feminist sociologists in the US to create a sort of overview and synthesis of the rich and varied Black feminist tradition in that country. As you might expect, it Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-60905591952299987882019-10-24T14:36:00.002-04:002019-10-24T14:36:59.617-04:00Review: Guerrillas of Desire
[Kevin Van Meter. Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible. Chico CA: AK Press, 2017.]
A book with some useful and important ideas, but one I was not as able to like as I'd hoped. It sets out to demonstrate that everyday resistance has been historically pervasive and crucial to successful struggle, and to argue that movements in North Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-62755525697784050822019-09-02T13:59:00.001-04:002019-09-02T16:12:59.100-04:00Review: Pleasure Activism
[adrienne maree brown. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico CA: AK Press, 2019.]
This is an eclectic collection "written and gathered" (as the author credit puts it) by organizer, facilitator, and writer adrienne maree brown. It contains many, many different kinds of pieces – both newly written and older re-published work by brown herself; pieces by other people, and pieces Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-44125740687238664052019-08-11T13:35:00.000-04:002019-08-11T13:44:17.938-04:00On online reading
More and more, these days, I dislike what I read online.
Probably like a lot of you who have found your way to these words, my online reading is mostly about the state of the world and efforts to change it, broadly understood. The form, politics, and tone vary a great deal – staid journalism to overblown punditry, careful theorizing to back-of-the-envelope strategizing, pop cultural dissection Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-38100574656986263772019-08-09T11:37:00.003-04:002019-08-09T11:39:37.227-04:00Review: Turn This World Inside Out[Nora Samaran. Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture. Chico CA: AK Press, 2019.]
This book has its origins in an online essay by Nora Samaran called "The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture" that went viral when it was first published, and also I think in a direct follow-up that circulated quite widely called "On Gaslighting." These two essays are included Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-85921877761644716262019-08-01T10:58:00.004-04:002019-08-01T10:59:21.037-04:00Review -- BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom
[Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdhillahi. BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom. Winnipeg MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2019.]
A short, sharp book exploring what is necessary in Canada, in this era of Black Lives Matter, to transform dominant conceptions of Black personhood – which is to say, dominant denials of Black humanity – and all of the knowledge, imagination, liberal and left Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-69491707781449444912019-07-10T10:48:00.004-04:002019-07-10T10:48:49.561-04:00Review: Unhappy Silences
[Berenice Malka Fisher. Unhappy Silences: Activist Feelings, Feminist Thinking, Resisting Injustice. Toronto: Political Animal Press, 2019.]
A book by a life-long activist and retired scholar thinking through the many varieties of a kind of moment familiar to anyone invested in questions of justice and liberation: When we know we could speak, we should speak, perhaps at least part of us wants Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-88267508262388207152019-04-10T11:26:00.003-04:002019-04-10T11:33:04.356-04:00Review: We Can Do Better
[David Camfield. We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017.]
A short, accessible, measured, and methodical book that lays out what the author describes as a "reconstructed historical materialism" – that is, a way of understanding the world and of orienting our struggles to change it that fuses a critical marxist approach to class relations with Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7042961.post-60992340913335425982019-02-14T10:29:00.000-05:002019-02-14T10:33:06.999-05:00Review: The Lost History of Liberalism
[Helena Rosenblatt. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.]
This is an academic history of liberalism, in the form of what it calls a "conceptual history" – that is, it explores what its proponents (and to a certain extent opponents) have said over the years about the positions, ideas, and politics Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2