The CIRB ruling is putting Canada Post back to work tomorrow. Canada's legalized strike-breaking record is unbroken.

This isn't like previous back-to-work legislation though. Rather than just making striking illegal, they had the relations board kick the can down the road until May.

Learning the language is an act of love! If you're not able to find a múinteoir, then there are some great resources online.

Mollie Guidera offers online language lessons (www.irishwithmollie.com) and often offers free courses/workshops, and if I remember correctly she has social media with cute little videos on language learning and speculation on etymology.

Molly Nic Céile just released a lovely little book, Gaeilge i mo chroí (Irish in my heart), and also does some online lessons.

Manchán Magan is an Irish folklorist who explores very localized language to preserve words, phrases, and expressions that are particular to specific communities/areas. He also has a fantastic series of explorations on the connections between Irish and Indigenous struggle, and has a new book coming out about the common root of Irish and Vedic folklore/cultural traditional.

Ciara Ní É is a queer poet that I recommend, as she is part of a generation of queer Irish speakers that are at the forefront of building new language that expresses queer Irish identity without reliance on Anglo queer terminology.

Also, this is a really old classic, but Myles Dillon's Teach Yourself Irish, coupled with some online resources, maybe Rosetta Stone, will do much more for you than Duo Lingo.

Above all: music. Music is the living soul of language, if you want to understand Irish then immerse yourself in Irish music.

Oh for sure, though y'know, I actually want to go back to Venus and Butler for a second here:

In Gender Trouble, which is one of the early pieces of academic literature that informed Anglo/American queer studies, Butler spends an awful lot of time talking about how drag is this subversive and powerful statement about the performativity of gender as a whole.

But then they go on to lambast Venus for reifying the gender binary, a critique that erases Venus as a living subject in favour of arguing for drag as symbolic. It's actually pretty close to what hooks was saying but that Butler obviously came around on by the time of Bodies That Matter.

It's interesting, because the importance of Gender Trouble as a foundational queer studies text meant that a lot of early queer studies was in tension with trans experiences, and led to queer theorists and academics to make arguments that androgyny/gender transgression were inherently subversive, but that "binary transition" was a regressive and anti-feminist/anti-radical "position" (rather than a lived reality, because such theorists often posited identity as a whole as more of a socio-political position than an intrinsic selfhood). This is the kind of anti-trans rhetoric that was quite pervasive in queer theory at the time.

Edit: I can't recall the exact details of the film (been a while for me as well), however I do want to say that the NY ballroom scene had a very diverse array of femininity, with categories spanning everything from high femme to tomboy, butch, androgynous, leather. Maybe the film doesn't cover that as much, but I don't particularly think it'd be fair to say that the ballrooms were centred around upholding a white femininity.

This critique is fairly dismissive of trans (transgender, transvestite, transsexual) identities, arguing that the girls in the film are emasculated gay men who are harming womanhood by mimicking white femininity. This particular essay is one that is critiqued quite a lot in later trans literature, because it completely avoids even contemplating the possibility that the people in the film are being their authentic selves, and not just men play-acting at womanhood while reproducing harmful patriarchal/colonial stereotypes.

She goes so far as to quote lesbian separatist Marilyn Frye: "It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom femininity is the trapping of oppression, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo., .What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports...But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine..."

This idea that transfeminine people are actually dominating women and making mockery of womanhood while invading women's spaces is a classic of gender critical feminism, and one that Janice Raymond really ran with at the time as well. In Bodies That Matter, Butler even mentions the way that hooks' use of Frye here echoes Raymond' anti-trans thought: "In her provocative review of Paris Is Burning, bell hooks criticized some productions of gay male drag as misogynist, and here she allied herself in part with feminist theorists such as Marilyn Frye and Janice Raymond."

This isn't to argue that there may not be some merit in investigating the potential for misogyny in drag, however Paris Is Burning has an eclectic group of transfeminine people who live many types of gendered lives, including those living as women full time, and in that review hooks lumps them right in as misogynists mocking femininity by their existence, and even calls Venus him/her despite her living full time as a woman. It's a very cissexist view on the subject matter from someone trying to make the lived experiences of transfeminine people be about how cis women are harmed.

This part especially stands out: " the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit"

This is the ultimate dismissal of the lived realities of transfeminine people. She reduces them all to "black gay brothers," even the ones living full time as women (and ignoring that a large portion of the people involved are Latinx, not Black), and considers that their alienation from society, their poverty, and their dysphoria are all products of the choice to mock womanhood as a result of white supremacism. When we see the transfeminine people in the film discuss the hardship they've faced, the abuse, the discrimination, the poverty, the loss of home lives, where they form houses with each other in queer communities for survival, to dismiss that as purely "worship at the throne of whiteness" and not a desperate attempt to carve out an authentic life is absolutely out of touch.

Edit: not to say that there isn't some interesting investigation to be had into the nature of an educated white lesbian coming into these spaces as interlocutor, but the general trend of hooks' review is completely off the mark

This is one of my favourite albums, but did you know that the baby in this photo actually sued Nirvana in 2021 because he hadn't consented to having his image used?

If you like art, the Winnipeg Art Gallery is pretty cool, their permanent collection has over 21000 pieces. In 2021 they opened Qaumajuq (the Inuit art centre), which is the largest collection of Inuit art in the world.

If some reason you were a coin nerd, the Royal Mint in Winnipeg produces all of the coins in circulation as well as coins for 80 countries worldwide. The one in Ottawa now mostly focuses on collector coins.

FACTOR (arts organization in Canada that dispenses grants to musicians) had almost $10 million stolen from its account at Scotiabank, which was then converted to crypto and used to buy crypto-mining equipment.

Only 1 person in the country was meant to have access to the bank account, but Scotiabank just let a random outlook email address take all the money without flagging that or like...following up in any way. FACTOR is taking them to court to get them to pay the money back, obviously.

In a similar vein: in NB, a charity for homeless people had $3000 stolen from its Scotiabank account because Scotiabank didn't do anything when the account's info got changed to some other email.

Ford is threatening to end energy exports to the US if Trump goes ahead with the tariffs. Electricity from Ontario powers about 1.5 million houses in the US.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/doug-ford-tariff-threat-energy-exports-1.7408644

""That's okay if he does that. That's fine," Trump told a CNBC reporter."

Ah yes, nothing more conscionable than continuing to sell the country out to American tech corporations and their lackeys. At least Andrews has generally stood up for Palestine, rather than profiting off apartheid.

"Neely was unarmed, with nothing but a muffin in his pocket, and didn't touch any passengers on the train. Multiple riders testified that he didn't even approach anybody, and that they didn't consider their lives threatened."

"Penny continued to choke Neely on the floor of the subway car for nearly six minutes after the train pulled into the station and other passengers left"

Eric Adams thinks he was "doing what we should have done as a city." So I guess the lesson is that you should choke healthcare CEOs to death and not shoot them if you want the mayor onside.

When I met her she was a very interesting person to talk to. She's a human rights lawyer who has focused on border militarization and migration (including the patterns of occupation and displacement that lead to migration). Through her work she has a very solid understanding of the forces at play in war and oppression.

However, I would hesitate to call her a communist. It's important to remember that people can come to understandings of the systems of oppression in our world but arrive at different conclusions for how to address them: for instance, as a lawyer she has built her career on understanding the framework of international laws. Her assertions, normally, are based on that; it is around the upholding of international law that she seeks to ameliorate the lives of others. Does that mean she believes that if the laws were actually upheld that would be enough? Who knows, as far as I know she doesn't speak of that. For instance, when she refers to Turtle Island it isn't because she's championing landback: it's because she's championing equality for Indigenous people within the current nation-states that are built on their land and respect for the treaties that are in place (and are constantly being violated).

Gramsci isn't that much of a hint: he's actually a very popular read even for complete ghouls. For example, in Florida, DeSantis appointed Christopher Rufo to the governing board at New College where he has led a campaign against Critical Race Theory. Rufo also frequently mentions Gramsci (https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/03/gramsci-florida-republican-party). Even the right is aware of his writings and seeks to use them to push cultural hegemony in their favour. Never forget that many of our opponents know Marx (and other Marxists writers) and they agree with the validity of the writings, but use them to uphold their own class interests. So any Italian academic with even a vaguely left view would absolutely have read Gramsci.

Finally, as informative as she is to talk to, and as determined as she is to leverage the framework of international law to hold violators accountable for the pain they cause, this doesn't equate to communism. And if I recall correctly, her husband works at the World Bank, which doesn't preclude her from being a communist, but does point to material class interests that are an indicator that she would be less likely to be a communist.

Either way, whether or not she's a communist I like her, and I appreciate anyone who has such a clear and informed view of the history of settler-colonialism and apartheid (and pisses off Trudeau so much).

This attitude you have here (and below when you say they Kurds are gonna get what they deserve for being anti-Assad) is such an American attitude. You get to righteously watch from the sidelines while others suffer, secure that you (safe online and unaffected) were on the right side of things and they were not so they deserve their suffering. It's nearly indistinguishable from Democrats talking to racialized minorities after they lost the election.

"According to Sarah Fraser 'Photography’s role in shaping China’s image from 1860 to 1900 is evident in the visual transformation of the Chinese subject of over a half-century of colonial intervention. In these shifts related to China’s visual culture, the camera was an instrument of the contemporary practice to create types, classify peoples, and impose hierarchies upon the world as it was being observed . . . By the turn of the century, the photographic lens was focused on larger statements about “the Chinese” and national character.'

In her study of the translational politics of visualizing the Chinese, Larissa Heinrich has similarly pointed out that “in early medical photography in China we see the convergence of those colonial, commercial, ethnographic, and scientific ideologies that marked the indisputable entrance of the ‘Chinese specimen’ into global discourses of race and health.” Through its heterogeneous modes of circulation (e.g., archives, museums, private collections, and publications) and deployment of stylistics (e.g., the “before and after” clinical contrasting trope, portraiture, battlefield documentary, and erotic thematization), photographic images of the ill decontextualized and recontextualized Chinese identity by “representing supposedly specifically Chinese pathologies to a global medical community.” In the formative years of China’s nation formation, the increasing popularity of clinical photography gave representational claims of Chinese pathology a new set of cultural valence and ideological relevance. The diseased ontology of the photographic specimen came to be absorbed by the very medium of its cultural production and naturalized as representative of the inherently pathological quality of Chinese empire and identity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, China was granted entrance into the global system of nationstates on the condition of being racially stereotyped as “the Sick Man of Asia” with growing intensity.

The evolving relationship of the camera to its object of representation relied on, among other things, the circulation of certain medical beliefs about Chinese identity, which substantiated the “Sick Man” stereotype: in the nineteenth century, China was blamed for being the original home of the Bubonic plague, cholera, small pox, and, eventually, leprosy."

-How China Became a "Castrated Civilization" and Eunuchs a "Third Sex", Howard Chiang

Canada is banning a bunch of firearms, and they're shipping them to Ukraine.

Defence Minister Bill Blair said some of the guns the government plans to collect will be sent to Ukraine as part of Canada's ongoing donations of military aid to that country.

"The Department of National Defence will begin working with the Canadian companies that have weapons that Ukraine needs … in order to get these weapons out of Canada and into the hands of the Ukrainians," he said.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-gun-control-announcement-1.7402187

Man is it really appropriate to be making jokes like this in response to someone worried about their fucking family? Are you that irony-poisoned that you lack empathy? Truly such an American response to people dying in West Asia.

Ali Kadri - Imperialism with Reference to Syria ; Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment ; The Unmaking of Arab Socialism ; The Cordon Sanitaire: A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World ; Development Challenges and Solutions After the Arab Spring

Abdullah Hamidaddin - The Huthi Movement in Yemen: Ideology, Ambition, and Security in the Arab Gulf (this one is pretty pro-West/anti-Ansarallah, but if you can read past the bias there's a lot of really good context for the situation in Yemen)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb - Hiz'bullah: Politics and Religion

Harriet Allsopp, Wladimir van Wilgenburg - The Kurds of Northern Syria: Governance, Diversity, and Conflicts

Ilan Pappé - The Modern Middle East

Karim Makdisi, Vijay Prashad - The Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations and the Arab World

Linda Matar, Ali Kadri - Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War

Mahmood Mamdani - Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (a little more historical, but that always depends on how far back in context you're hoping to look)

Matthieu Cimino - Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State

Naomí Ramírez Díaz - The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria: The Democratic Option of Islamism

Rashid Khalidi - Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East ; Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East ; The Origins of Arab Nationalism

Andre Vitchek - Socialist Iran: Powerful and Determined!

Thomas Schmidinger - Rojava: Revolution, War, and the Future of Syria's Kurds

Sorry I don't really have more, most of my library in the area focuses on Palestine.

Grand Lake (New Brunswick) residents celebrate Liberal decision to go ahead with jail [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/grand-lake-jail-liberals-1.7395898]

"We needed this. This is the best Christmas present ever. And we thank the premier so much," said resident Carol Smith

Nothing says Christmas like building a $66 million people cage :)

For context, current facilities are "overcrowded" because they keep pushing everyone into poverty and then criminalizing existing, so the Tories decided to build a big ol' jail. It was supposed to go in Fredericton (the capital), but people protested and it ended up going to Grand Lake. The Liberals were opposed to the project until they won the election, of course. Tory prisons are bad, Liberal prisons are good for the economy.

However in the meantime, they've been releasing "low risk" inmates, which has shown very directly that you can, in fact, just not have people be in the jails. Ah well, nevertheless.

I mentioned yesterday that Susan Holt (New Brunswick premier) was arguing for retaliatory tariffs against the US. This worked the last time, when Trump put tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium.

Now there are think-pieces about retaliatory tariffs in CBC, and Freeland (finance minister/deputy PM) has said that Canada's response last time was "smart."

"Hufbauer suggested, target electric vehicle company Tesla, owned by billionaire Elon Musk who has become a significant Trump ally." [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/tariff-canada-retaliate-trump-1.7394432]

Please target Tesla. That would be fantastic. Last time they targeted like, Heinz, lol.

On the other hand: "the federal government owns the Trans Mountain Pipeline, and although the supply contracts for those shippers on the pipeline are destined for Asia, that's not to say that Canada couldn't look at striking deals with U.S. refineries, Meredith said."

This feels like a likely route. Not to mention that the threat of tariffs is largely predicated on Canada not "securing" the border, so I expect we'll start to see a more militarized border between the US and Canada. Canada has already committed to increasing their border policing in cooperation with the US, including more militarization of the Arctic to combat Chinese and Russian "threats." The Beyond the Border Accord has long established joint policing forces, and pre-clearance agreements have put American police on Canadian soil. Earlier this year Trudeau also promised Biden to ignore Canada's responsibility to the UN Refugee Convention more than ever before and just shunt asylum claimants down to US detention centres for deportation.

Edit: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/susan-holt-premiers-prime-minsiter-meeting-trump-tariffs-1.7395329

Yup, stricter borders

CUPW (postal workers union) has stopped negotiating with Canada Post [https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-negotiations-talks-break-down-1.7394535].

As we get into the Christmas crunch, this puts massive pressure on Canada Post. No mail for Christmas? The government can't have that. CUPW knows this is really good leverage. The thing is, the last four times CUPW went on strike it was ended with back-to-work legislation; back in 2018 the legislation was tabled after a month of rotating strikes.

So we should expect to see back-to-work legislation soon, Canada absolutely loves making strikes illegal as soon as one actually has leverage.

One thing to consider with this: private couriers are absolutely using this opportunity to secure as many of the few remaining Canada Post contracts that exist as possible, which makes privatization a major leverage to be used against the union.

Another thing to consider: certain critical documents have been exempted from the strike (pension cheques for instance), however disability income and social assistance has not been exempted, which is some really scummy punching down. If you're going to do exemptions, deciding to placate the elderly who have pensions but not caring about the disabled or the very fucking poor is a cruddy choice.

Yeah for sure, but in this case it was a way to prop up national massive grocery chain Sobeys, which didn't even appeal to the pro- "shop local" liberals or the petite bourgeoisie