MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2024

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  • "Any increases greater than three per cent that take effect before Feb. 1 will not change" so what's already happening is landlords right now are trying to throw up massive rent increases before they aren't allowed to anymore, notices have started going out this afternoon.

    I'm not so optimistic about Holt. She's better than Higgs (really doesn't take much), but she's also a person who agreed with the People's Alliance fascist Kris Austin that Trudeau is "too far left"

    Edit: I know that you mentioned the six months notice to increase rent (which was a relatively recent addition to tenant laws that actually managed to happen under Higgs) but basically what the landlords are doing is ignoring this and hoping to get enough tenants paying the increase without taking them to arbitration. It's worked for them with the last round of limits (the one where massive increases had to be spread out) with many tenants not knowing the actual rules around rent increases. Because NB went so long with like...no rules whatsoever, most people are still unaware of the rules, and so a bunch of people ended up just taking illegal increases on the chin. It's bleak.


  • 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).



  • 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.







  • 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.



  • 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.



  • "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."



  • 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)