31% of the world’s population are Christian, 25% are Muslim, 15% are Hindu, that right there is 71% of the world’s population that believe not only in souls, but in immortal souls that continue after death. Plus all the other religions that have souls, or people who aren’t particularly religious or spiritual but believe in souls. We as a society have collectively always accepted the existence of souls, and soulless atheist heathens (no value judgment) have always been a minority.
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
The Divine Right of Kings is totalitarian, which implicitly makes Henry VIII Islamic, not Christian, therefor the British Empire was actually the first Gammon Caliphate.
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.
If we want languages other than English to flourish we must start with having pronoun options that don’t lock you into English-language gender signifiers by default.
Jules Joanne Gleeson (who writes on trans liberation and Marxism) and Ali Kadri (who writes on the structure of contemporary imperialism and the ascendancy of waste as accumulation)
Silvia Federici, Sara Ahmed, Sumaya Awad, Angela Y. Davis, Vijay Prashad, Jasbir Puar, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Harsha Walia, Noah Zazanis, Rosa Lee, Nat Raha, Farah Thompson, Kate Doyle Griffiths, Zoe Belinsky, Nathaniel Dickson, Anja Heisler Weiser Flower, Elle O’Rourke
Lot of really great queer and feminist Marxist writers especially.
IntelligenCIA - it’s accurate.
Totally possible, enjoy <3
Here ya go <3
I wrote this for real life educational purposes, it’s not anywhere public, but I could throw a PDF up on like catbox or something if you wanted
Glad you liked it, I’m always up for throwing down some research and book recs.
Thank you for reading, appreciate your desire to learn more <3
Death is the subject in the phrase. It’s from a 16th century Anglican prayer book, The Book of Common Prayer, in which it was “till death us depart,” with death being that which would depart (separate) the people making the vow (“us”). However, something that was more common in the 16th century (and is rather more rare in English now though many common phrases still use it), is the subjunctive mood, in which conjugation of verbs has a different form (usually the bare form).