happy new year from wmtc

Wishing you all love and good health. 

Wishing the world justice, solidarity, and peace. 

 

why i'm not letter-writing this year, part 2: the sad tale of the lost comments

In my previous post, I mentioned that I'm not participating in Write for Rights this year, for the first time in more than 15 years. This decision propelled me to introduce Write for Rights as a library program, which spreads the word, generates lots of letters, and helps me justify (to myself) not writing.

The real reason behind this decision: I have three consecutive days off from work, and I had slated them for restoring The Lost Comments. And once again, my plans for The Lost Comments have come to naught.

* * * *

The lost comments

In 2020, a series of unfortunate events led to the disappearance of thousands of comments from this blog. 

Allan believes (insists) that this is his fault. He is definitely not responsible, as the trouble began with a very stupid, careless error on my part. But really, despite whatever errors we both made, the whole mess exists because Blogger's backup and restore system is a piece of crap. In fact, it is not really a backup system at all.

I won't recount the steps that led to this disaster. Suffice to say that in February 2020, all the comments on wmtc from July 2006 to February 2020 disappeared. These dates include peak wmtc, when -- in the golden age of the blogosphere -- a community of up to 50 or more commenters regularly posted their thoughts on this blog. Lively, fun, and interesting discussions often took place in comment threads. 

The May 2019 file

I have a Blogger export (.xml) file from May 2019, that, if properly restored, would reduce the comment gap from more than 13 years to nine months -- nine months when comments weren't even that active.

However, the May 2019 Blogger .xml file is corrupted and will not upload. I've created various test blogs, and can import other .xml files, but not that one. And -- an important note -- none of the .xml files have ever imported comments. None. Ever.

An additional issue

After the February 2020 disaster, Allan was able to restore all the deleted posts, but their URLs had changed. This means internal links no longer work, except for posts on the "greatest hits" page, which I manually fixed. It also means that The Lost Comments now had no associated post to be attached to. The text of those posts still exists -- but the posts themselves, with their unique URLs, no longer exist. So the comments couldn't be restored to their original posts, regardless of Blogger's backup capabilities.

No help

Blogger's Help Community has been useless. Several people made some semblance of trying to help, but their answers made it clear that they hadn't read my post and weren't willing to engage on any but the most superficial level. I realize that the problem may not be fixable -- but no one came anywhere close to even trying.

My obsession

Since the comments disappeared in February 2020, I've been periodically obsessed with trying to restore them. I have a post in drafts titled "the lost comments of wmtc: making peace with blogger". There is only that title. I never wrote the post because I never made peace with it.

I now export/backup wmtc more regularly than I used to, and I periodically try to import the May 2019 .xml. I know that's supposed to be the definition of insanity, but it is also the definition of hope.

The plan

Earlier this year, I decided I would copy/paste the comments from the May 2019 file into the appropriate posts. I created a gmail account for this purpose, and I identified December 25-27 as The Comment Project. I don't celebrate Christmas, and three consecutive days off seemed like the perfect opportunity -- perfect enough that I gave up this year's W4R.

My plan was to copy all the comments on a post, open a new comment, paste in the original comments as one long comment, and submit. This seemed totally doable.

Until I opened the .xml file.

I had assumed that comments would appear after each post -- post, comments, post, comments, and so on. Bzzzt. The .xml file contains, in this order: the blog template, all the posts, all the comments.

Comments are not identified according to the post they were associated with, nor with the date of that post, but by the dates of the comments themselves. So if people were coming back to a thread and posting over several days, which is very typical, those comments would be spread out over several dates, and have no identifier to show which post they belonged with.

This may seem obvious to people who regularly work with .xml files, but it was news to me. Very, very unwelcome news.

I tried anyway

Call it tenacity, or stubbornness, or compulsion, it doesn't much matter. I have trouble giving up. 

Allan and I copied the entire .xml file into a Word file: 17,490 pages.

Allan then deleted the template and the posts, shrinking the file to just over 7,500 pages. (Allan had to do this, as my computer would have frozen and crashed.)

He then did some fancy find-and-replacing to make the blocks of comments easier to see.

But here's the thing. 

When this was a simple copy/paste job, I was willing to slog through it. But now there is decision-making involved. Reading, thinking, and decision-making. I simply do not have the bandwidth. The spoons. The energy.

Like most people who work full-time, my time outside work is limited, and I always feel that I don't have enough time to do the things I want to do. In addition, I have chronic illness that demands I manage my rest and energy levels. Do I want to use hours, days, weeks of my precious free time trying to determine what comments go where and pasting them in? No. I do not.

Still, I can't let go

Despite the realization that I don't want to devote the necessary time to it, I still mourn the loss of those comments, and I'm still considering chipping away at this project.

things i heard at the library, an occasional series # 42: why i'm not letter-writing this year, part 1 #w4r2024

This is the first time in 16 years that I am not spending Christmas and Boxing Day writing letters. This time of year, I normally participate in Write for Rights, Amnesty International's global human rights letter-writing event. I decided to give myself the year off, for two reasons -- one positive, one not so much.

I've tried many times to organize a group for Write for Rights, but never found enough interest to get it off the ground. This changed with the amazing team now working at the Port Hardy Library. We are offering our customers the opportunity to participate in Write for Rights for an entire month, beginning on December 10, International Human Rights Day.

I reached out to Amnesty Canada, and they sent a great package of swag -- t-shirts, buttons, bandanas, pens, water bottles. Our team created a beautiful display, featuring petitions for each case, and a box for letters.

For every letter they write, customers receive one entry to a draw for a prize package. We do the mailing, and I'm paying the postage as my donation.

The prize package includes a copy of Letters to a Prisoner, a beautiful, wordless picture book about what Write for Rights is all about, which Amnesty sent us. 

This program has shown me something about Write for Rights that I had forgotten: many people don't know these issues exist. Many people do, of course. Some folks, after seeing our Facebook posts, have come in specifically to write letters. But for many people, the cases are beyond eye-opening -- they are staggering. They didn't know that peaceful activists are targetted, jailed, tortured, and even killed, or their families threatened or killed, for standing up for their communities. 

As people scan through this year's cases, I hear quiet gasps, or expressions of shock and horror. I see people brush away tears.

This program is very labour-intensive for library staff. Multiple times each day, we explain what Write for Rights is, what the cases are, what we are inviting them to do. I've been so impressed with our staff's willingness and energy for doing this. It's a powerful reminder of the role public libraries play in education. 

As always, I am grateful to the good people at Amnesty whose Hefrculean efforts make Write for Rights happen.

Stay tuned for the second and unhappy reason I am not letter-writing this year.

yellowstone has always been political: thoughts on season 5 (contains mild spoilers)

When the final season of "Yellowstone" first dropped, there was a lot of chatter online that the show had "become political", even that it had become a mouthpiece for Trumpism. Having watched -- and loved -- the first four seasons of the series, I was baffled. For one thing, I couldn't image the Duttons, the ranching family at the centre of the neo-western / family saga / action / romance series, throwing their lot in with anyone as garish, crude, and dishonourable as Trump. Of course the Duttons would vote Republican, I didn't imagine they'd be supporting Bernie Sanders anytime soon, but I couldn't see the show veering off into MAGA territory. 

More importantly, though, I wondered if a fair portion of the audience might not be getting it. Because the Yellowstone series has always been political. 

Yellowstone has always been political

At its most basic, thematic level, Yellowstone is about land. 

Who owns the land, who uses the land, and for what purpose. Land as identity, land as a vehicle for profit, land as a sacred trust. 

This is as political as it gets. Native Americans, settlers, the environment, capitalism. Differing views of humankind's relationship to nature, of land stewardship, of purpose. These are often the most political issues of our world. In The Yellowstone -- not the show, the place -- Native reservation and casino, National Park, cattle ranch, vacation boomtown -- this is inherently and profoundly political.

In case you missed it, they threw up some billboards

In Season 5, the political messaging becomes heavy-handed. Perhaps, with the show's end in sight, Taylor Sheridan wanted to make sure we all "got it". Perhaps the earlier seasons were crafted by better writers, who had less at stake than Sheridan. And perhaps viewers who found Yellowstone suddenly political were reacting to some of the awkward and more obvious billboards. 

In the first episode of S5, there's a particularly clunky scene at the Montana-Canada border. Some RCMP officers on horseback (their jackets say POLICE, I suppose to not confuse an American audience?) confront a group of American ranchers in a skirmish about stolen horses. 

The Canadian police declare: "It might be the Wild West on that side, but on this side rules are the foundation of order, and order holds the flanks of a civilized society." Kayce Dutton, both rancher and Wildlife officer, dismisses the Canadians as "sheep", and asserts his property rights, daring the order-keepers to challenge him.

Some progressive commentators were horrified, because don't all right-thinking Americans see the rule of law as sacrosanct? Well, do they? Do progressive people agree that the rule of law supersedes all? I don't think so. If we did, how would Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks be heroes? Ranching and chattel slavery: the laws defied in these examples are very different. But both situations assert that there are values more important than what a government declares to be the law.

Yet even with these awkward, heavy-handed moments, I can't see the politics being telegraphed here as Trumpism.

The Duttons and their culture are staunch libertarians. The show conveniently omits some of the gross contradictions of the libertarian right. We don't see health care, or schools, or even how electricity is produced and delivered -- any of the shared resources that even libertarians might use. We only see the "freedoms" that Taylor Sheridan wants us to see. But there's nothing sinister about that. A grand, stirring series about, say, organizing factory workers probably won't show you the dark side of labour unions, either. 

But here's the thing. If Yellowstone's politics were Trumpism, would the show consistently acknowledge that the land was stolen, taken by force, from the original inhabitants? If it were MAGA, would the show be chock-full of incredibly fierce, smart women -- women who are the unquestioned head of their families -- and strong men who consistently and honourably defer to them?

If the show followed Trump values, would it be anti-fracking? Would it portray environmental vandalism as heroic civil disobedience? And would it emphatically insist that the best use of land is no use at all -- that the highest purpose land can have is wilderness? This is a far cry from Drill Baby Drill. 

An elegy for a way of life

In addition to the family drama, romance, murder, intrigue, and tragedy, Season 5 is an elegy.

Yellowstone S5 lifts up the cowboys' and ranchers' cultures, bathed in a warm glow of love and deep respect, and asks us to admire and mourn it. It shows us a way of life that is flawed, dangerous, often cruel and ugly, and at the same time, profoundly beautiful. A philosophy that worships individual freedom, yet is consciously steeped in community. A culture that is dying, but remains alive, because people are choosing to create it and live it. 

As with other worlds we have seen onscreen, such as the "Godfather" saga, the cowboy and ranching culture is rife with contradictions: violence, cruelty, love, honour; respect for nature and dominance over it; machismo and equality; the bonds of chosen family above all. As a cultural ethnography, it compares to books of previous eras such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Call It Sleep that elegized the urban immigrant experience: something both ugly and beautiful. Something to be endured and celebrated.

The billboarding can get tiresome. One character -- a vegan environmentalist whose presence is sometimes used as a foil -- actually says, "People think you're all a bunch of misogynist bigots who ruin the environment, but that's not what I found here." Right. We got it. Yellowstone asks us to see cattle ranchers as environmental stewards. That may be a tough sell, but compared to the multinational corporations that want to build condos, malls, and luxury resorts on the same land, they are.

I wonder if those who see right-wing politics in Yellowstone are reacting to a work that humanizes a culture that they reflexively oppose.

I also cross-reference some books I recently read -- or tried to, but couldn't, because they were too heartbreaking: Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul and How to Kill a City. The same forces that are destroying New York, San Francsico, and other great cities around the globe are the same forces ruining Montana: unchecked greed, arrogant entitlement, the blind quest for profit, and total disregard for the environment -- whether that environment is natural or human-created.

In Yellowstone, references to New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are often used as a shorthand for these forces, not unlike the way progressives use "Texas" as a stand-in for many things we despise. When you're tempted to yell at the screen that New York is more than entitled elites looking for unspoiled wilderness to use as vacation playgrounds, you might remember that Texas is more than xenophobic, homophobic book-banners, and fetus-fetishers.

I suppose you could watch Yellowstone yelling at your screen about the virtues of veganism and the joys of urban life. Or you could maybe learn something about how some other people live.

* I watched S1-4 on Prime, then S5 got paywalled behind Paramount Plus. But only the first half of Season 5 was available. I don't read entertainment news, so I didn't know why the second half of the show was delayed. (I do now.) I waited -- and waited and waited -- for the remaining episodes of S5 to drop before ponying up for Paramount. My plan is to complete Yellowstone, watch both prequels -- "1883" and "1923" -- and possibly "Landman," then cancel Paramount. There's nothing on it that I care about that I don't have access to elsewhere. I'm particularly curious how the prequels approach Indigenous/settler issues.

what i'm reading: prequel by rachel maddow

As I wrote in my last post, there were two relatively new nonfictions that I wanted to make sure I read this year. I wrote about Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, a complex, multilayered book that is worth the trip. 

The other book is Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. This is a more straightforward history, and huge cheers and thanks to Rachel Maddow for writing it.  

Few of us know just how close the United States came to an attempted Nazi takeover. And I mean the Nazis, not neo-Nazis, not a generic term for right-wingers. We're talking United States senators on Hitler's payroll. Seriously. Maddow tells the story, and resurrects the unknown, uncelebrated heroes whose prodigious courage and persistence changed the course of history. 

While the FBI was focused on the supposed threat of Communism, and any anti-fascist movement was thwarted by virulent antisemites and Nazi sympathizers in the US Congress, Hitler's organization made strategic inroads into the American political system. Much of this was funded (unknowingly and illegally) by US taxpayers. 

Some of the radical right-wingers in this account are familiar names: antisemitic preacher "Father" Charles Coughlin, blueblood Republican Hamilton Fish III*, and renowned Nazi and famous architect Philip Johnson all played substantial roles. But most of the names in this account have been lost to history, especially the antifascist heroes who fought against this very real threat. Readers meet Leon Lewis, a Jewish lawyer who ran a private spy ring that infiltrated the radical fascist White Guard, at tremendous personal risk; Henry Hoke, a direct-mail advertising specialist whose painstaking research collected the hard evidence needed to prove the conspiracy; and activist lawyer O. John Rogge. Legendary journalist Drew Pearson also played an important part. 

Drawing on the work of many historians who have documented this, Maddow reveals that there was Nazi interference in US elections in 1936, 1940, and 1944. Accounts by Hermann Göering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and other high-ranking Nazi officials corroborate this. In fact, the Nazis devoted copious resources to a trio of American-focused aims: to try to keep the US out of the war, to sell the idea that Nazism was preferable to democracy, and to foment antisemitism.

The action took place simultaneously on several fronts. There were United States Senators and Congressmembers on Hitler's payroll. Klansmen controlled armed cells in more than 30 states. Senators and Congress members distributed Nazi propaganda using government mailing privileges, bypassing rules that foreign sources declare themselves. Plots to orchestrate pogroms -- including hanging prominent Jewish Americans from lampposts -- were in the works. Indeed, the isolationist plank of the 1940 Republican platform was lifted verbatim from Nazi propaganda.

Evidence of this was purposely suppressed, as it might undermine Americans' faith in their government. (Ya think?) O. John Rogge's book detailing the evidence was blacklisted from publication for 15 years, then published, buried, and forgotten.

Please think of this next time you hear someone dismissed as a "conspiracy nut".

From Prequel:

This much was certain: Germany had agents at work inside the United States; armed American fascists were being actively supported by the Hitler government; members of Congress were colluding with a German propaganda agent to facilitate an industrial-scale Nazi information operation targeting the American people; critical U.S. munitions plants were blowing up in multiple states.

From Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld, by John Roy Carlson, pen name of Arthur Derounian, quoted in Prequel:

Most of the saboteurs of democracy looked and acted like ordinary men and women, went quietly about their work of destruction, lived on Park Avenue as well as Yorkville [a New York City neighbourhood that was the heart of the German immigrant community], came from our best families, and the most efficient of them were American-born and boasted of their [American] ancestry. . . . These fascist saboteurs could lurk in the pulpit and cocktail lounge, as well as the factory.

Maddow writes in an easy, breezy voice, and she's not averse to inserting her own opinions and sarcastic comments. Along with her impeccable research, that makes for an important yet accessible read.

* A right-wing veteran group says Fish's "detestation of Communism made him slightly less anti-Nazi than might otherwise have been the case". Very amusing.

what i'm reading: doppelganger by naomi klein

There were two nonfiction books in my 2024 reading plan that I wanted to get in by the end of the year. I usually read great nonfiction long after the curve; with my reading habits, anything published in the past decade is current. Both these books were published in late 2023. For me, that's practically hot off the press.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into Mirror World by Naomi Klein, and Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow are both excellent, powerful, essential reads. I'm glad I made them a priority.

Doppelganger is an ambitious work, and very complex. It is also the best work Naomi Klein has done. That's a big statement, considering that at least two of her books defined their eras. No Logo became an anti-corporate-globalization manifesto, and The Shock Doctrine brought into focus a concept now widely recognized: disaster capitalism.

Like many people, I didn't understand why Klein wrote a book about being confused with someone else -- one-time feminist and progressive turned full-blown wingnut, Naomi Wolf, the doppelganger of the title. 

It seemed an odd topic, especially during this time of climate crisis, desperate income inequality, and the rise of fascism all over the planet. Of course I assumed there was more to the book than mistaken identity -- and what an understatement that turned out to be.

The ongoing misidentification of Klein with "other Naomi," as she sometimes calls Wolf, was at first cause for amusement, then irritation and exasperation. But then Klein started probing the confusion. What did it mean to be, not just confused, but often conflated, with someone similar to her in some ways -- two Jewish writers named Naomi -- and yet 180-degrees different. Klein comes to see Wolf as a mirror image of herself -- and the world she inhabits as a mirror image of our own. She uses the concept of the double as a lens through which to see our socially and politically polarized world.

The Mirror World

I've often joked that the right-wing lives in Bizarro World. Only in a place where down is up and black is white could Barack Obama be considered a radical leftist, and an attempt to slow the spread of an infectious disease be called slavery. From The Guardian: 

As well as being Klein's doppelganger, [Wolf] is also a doppelganger of herself. Once a prominent feminist and Democratic party adviser, Wolf is now aligned with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and has become part of what Klein calls the mirror world. This is where conspiracies are spread, where left critiques of corporate power are absorbed and twisted so "deregulated capitalism" is framed as "communism in disguise" and "where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far-right propagandists all in the name of saving and protecting 'the children'".

As we are bombarded with the impacts of multiple crises, there is nearly universal anxiety, fear, and often despair. And:

The problem is that for some people, the mirror world speaks to these anxieties better than anything else. Not by seriously addressing the climate crisis but by playing on these feelings for its own ends – an authoritarian political project which is highly nationalist and has elements that are "explicitly fascist" (although not everyone is in the mirror world for this reason).

Take Bannon. "While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren't having, the people we are insulting and discarding." And this focus on popular issues could be his ticket to the next wave of electoral victories, Klein warns.

From an interview with Klein in The Breach:

[Klein:] I think what's more relevant and more interesting for us to pay attention to is the way in which ideas get co-opted and twisted. Everything from "I can't breathe," the slogan of the Black Lives Matter racial justice uprisings, becomes: "I can't breathe, because of a mask." The vaccines are cast as "Canada's second genocide," a direct reference to the genocide of First Nations. "My body, my choice," is about not getting a vaccine. 

Wolf, in particular, her star turn on the right was all about riling up fears about vaccine verification apps. She put out a video saying "Vaccine passports equals slavery forever," and that was what got her on Bannon in the first place, and Tucker Carlson. What she was describing about these vaccine verification apps was surveillance capitalism, and she was projecting it all onto this app, which wasn't true. The apps weren't listening to our conversations and things like that. The only reason why I think it got the traction that it did is because surveillance has been so normalized in our culture, so they're filling a vacuum.

If we think about what [Bannon] did as Trump's campaign manager and chief strategist in the run-up to Trump's victory in 2016, I think Bannon played an absolutely critical role in turning Trump into a certain kind of working-class hero. Certainly not for everyone, but for particularly guys in the Rust Belt, who were really disaffected. They'd voted Democrat many times, back to Bill Clinton promising to renegotiate the trade deals, and just gotten more trade deals. Trump was not somebody who used to talk about free trade very much, but suddenly this became a centrepiece of his platform, that he was going to bring the jobs back, that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA, that he was going to get us a great deal, right? 

This is an important dynamic to understand, because this is only available to Trump, because the Democrats have betrayed voters, ceded this territory. This used to be an issue for the left. [emphasis added] I came up in the alter-globalization movement. It didn't used to be reactionary to talk about these trade deals, but it does point to the fact that this has not been an issue on the left for a long time and it's dangerous to create that kind of political vacuum. 

And from an interview in The.Ink:

[Klein:] I think there is always this kind of dialectic between the rise of a fascist right and the failures of a center-left, a far left, a failure to make alliances but also this opening up of vacuums.

Politics hates a vacuum. Somebody is going to fill it. If there are powerful emotions out there that are being unaddressed, if you're a smart strategist, you will study your opponents and you will speak to those feelings even if you don't actually have serious policy responses to them.

Is it our fault?

I normally hate when people blame the current state of politics on "the failure of the left". I've been hearing that all my life, and it's nothing short of victim blaming. Feminists don't cause rape, war resisters don't cause invasions, and the left has not caused the global shift to the right.

However... under Klein's incisive analysis, this "failure of the left" trope gains a lot of credibility – not as a sole cause, surely, but as one reason baseless and dangerous ideas spread. In fact, she articulates what I'm often thinking and attempting to express. In Doppleganger, Klein writes:

When someone is pushed out of progressive conversations or communities because they said or did something hurtful or ignorant, or questioned an identity orthodoxy, or got too successful too fast and was deemed due for a takedown, their absence is frequently celebrated, as Wolf's exile from Twitter was. But those people don't disappear just because we no longer see them.

If this doesn't ring a bell for you, perhaps you have never openly disagreed with – or merely questioned – a current progressive doctrine. I have, and I found myself quickly on the receiving end of over-the-top vitriol and abuse, complete with baseless assumptions about me, personal insults, and, most importantly, an absolute unwillingness to engage in meaningful discussion. The reaction said: if we don't agree 100% on everything, we are enemies. It said: anyone with even slightly different views must be exiled.

In this way, progressive communities grow increasingly insular and isolated, an in-crowd – with an out-crowd (everyone else!) increasingly alienated from important ideas. Gatekeepers jump down people's throat for perceived language slights or for consuming entertainment that has been left-blacklisted – focusing on that, rather than attempting to unify over the larger and more important picture. So increasingly, it seems, the left talks only to itself.

As Katie Roiphe writes in a review of Doppelganger in The New York Times:

In Klein's view, "When entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender and labeled 'privileged,' there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances." She points out that such reductive labeling is "highly unstrategic," since the Mirror World is waiting for people alienated or exiled by the left, offering them forums and sympathy.

People are justifiably distrustful of and angry at governments and institutions. Powerful, unseen forces are manipulating economic, social, and political systems to their advantage. People know this with instinct and with feeling.

And instead of embracing people of diverse backgrounds and worldviews, and helping them find answers from a progressive point of view, the left finds their language incorrect, or their sources trivial, or parts of their lives objectionable. And dismisses them. Then their questions, and their alienation, go unanswered – and are picked up in the Mirror World.

This condescension is not only elitist, disrespectful, and lacking in empathy, it is the opposite of organizing. It is the opposite of movement-building. It is, as noted above, highly anti-strategic. We must meet people where they are. Instead, we demand they find their way to us, in order to become one of us.

In this way the left alienates rather than organizes. And in steps the right wing, responding to the anger, distrust, and confusion with slogans, scapegoats, and outright fantasy.

A word about conspiracy theories

I deeply appreciated Klein's treatment of the concept of conspiracy theories. Conspiracies exist. Everyone reading this should know that. The CIA really did conduct secret LSD experiments on people without their knowledge or consent. The US government really did import and patriate high-ranking Nazi scientists to the United States to capture their knowledge of biological and nuclear weapons (and to prevent the Soviets from doing the same). The FBI really did infiltrate, spy on, smear, and faslely discredit peaceful activists in the civil rights, peace, and women's movements. These things all happened, and so much more. And they were all conspiracies.

Yet so many of us join the mainstream in labelling anyone who questions official stories a conspiracy theorist, lumping legitimate questions and concerns with wacky, unproveable, and outright ridiculous ideas, using that label as a tool to short-circuit complex and important trains of thoughts – and again, leaving the field open to the Mirror World, where conspiracy theories flourish.

* * * * * 

In Doppelganger, Klein takes the reader on far-ranging excursions that weave together a panoply of disparate ideas. Roisin Kiberd writes in The Stinging Fly:

Throughout Doppelganger, Klein blends the personal and the political so seamlessly that it's hard to imagine they could ever be apart. She writes about her autistic son, the historical underpinnings of Nazism, and the state of Israel, all through the lens of the duality at the heart of her book. She tells how some of the same Canadian truckers who took part in a 2021 convoy to express solidarity with that country's Indigenous peoples following revelations about the mass graves of Native children also took part, eight months later, in a trucker blockade to protest an intolerable vaccination mandate. 

This complexity doesn't make the book a difficult read. Klein is astonishingly good at bringing the reader into her analysis step by step, as she peels back layer after layer. This is a fascinating read, well worth your time.

the reaction to a murder: this is why we must protect and expand public health care

Discussion and debate about health care is a staple in Canadian politics and the culture at large. The adjective most often applied to the system is used so frequently, it might as well be an official name: Our Broken Health Care System. 

Once upon a time, this word broken was a propaganda coup on the order of "pro-life".  And like all propaganda, this ubquitous word masks the real state of Canadian health care. It's not broken. It is starved. 

Successive Liberal and Conservative governments slashed health care budgets; slashed, slashed, and slashed some more. As in all things, budget cuts were never restored. The starving system becomes the new normal. Then the next Liberal or Conservative government blames the other party, and cuts some more. 

Governments continued on this course -- and Canadians continued to vote for those governments -- even though the increasingly elder population would only need more care -- and even though this has been projected for decades. We can see disaster coming, and the collision course continues on. 

And Canadians complain. 

And they continue to vote for governments that don't respect the public sector, who are beholden to corporations rather than people, who focus on window dressing like legalizing cannibis or beer sales, or who win election by spewing blatant lies about their political opponents.

And decades of under-funding have given rise to a system that may in fact truly be broken -- at least parts of it are. 

And now that they've softened the ground, Liberal and Conservative governments can talk about the real end game, the only thing worse than a starving public health care system: a private health care system, or a two-tier system. 

Canadians who want to see the system privatized, who want to continue the stealth march to privatization already taking place under our very noses, would do well to look at a spectacle currently unfolding on social media: the reaction to the recent murder of the CEO of a huge American health insurer. The reaction -- on all platforms, from almost every sector of society (other than the ruling class) -- reflects the insanity of the entrenched for-profit health care non-system, and the continued march of extreme income inequality. 

For this, I share a column by Zeynep Tufekci, who writes about the sociology of technology. The link is unlocked from The New York Times.

The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.'s Killing Should Ring All Alarms

By Zeynep Tufekci

It started barely minutes after the horrifying news broke that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was fatally shot in midtown Manhattan. Even before any details were available, the internet was awash in speculation that the company had refused to cover the alleged killer's medical bills — and in debates about whether murder would be a reasonable response.

Soon there was a video of a man in a hoodie, face not visible, walking up behind Thompson and shooting him multiple times, ignoring a woman standing nearby before walking away. Could he be a hit man?

Then came the reports that bullet casings bearing the words "delay," "deny" and "depose" were found at the scene. "Delay" and "deny" clearly echo tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims. "Depose"? Well, that's the sudden, forceful removal from a high position. Ah.

After that, it was an avalanche.

The shooter was compared to John Q, the desperate fictional father who takes an entire emergency room hostage after a health insurance company refuses to cover his son's lifesaving transplant in a 2002 film of the same name. Some posted "prior authorization needed before thoughts and prayers." Others wryly pointed out that the reward for information connected to the murder, $10,000, was less than their annual deductibles. One observer recommended that Thompson should be scheduled to see a specialist in a few months, maybe.

Many others went further. They urged people with information about the killing not to share it with the authorities. Names and photos of other health insurance executives floated around. Some of the posts that went most viral, racking up millions of views by celebrating the killing, I can't repeat here.

It's true that any news with shock value would get some of this response online — after all, trolling, engagement bait and performative provocation are part of everyday life on digital platforms.

But this was something different. The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters.

Even on Facebook, a platform where people do not commonly hide behind pseudonyms, the somber announcement by UnitedHealth Group that it was "deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague" was met with, as of this writing, 80,000 reactions; 75,000 of them were the "haha" emoji.

Politicians offering boilerplate condolences were eviscerated. Some responses came in the form of personal testimony. I don't condone murder, many started, before describing harrowing ordeals that health insurance companies had put them through.

On a prominent Reddit forum for medical professionals, one of the most upvoted comments was a parody rejection letter: After "a careful review of the claim submitted for emergency services on December 4, 2024," it read, a claim was denied because "you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest." Just a few days earlier, the forum had been a place where people debated the side effects of Flomax and the best medical conferences.

I've been studying social media for a long time, and I can't think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today's business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication platforms allow millions of strangers around the world to converse in real time.

But on a deeper level, the currents we are seeing are expressions of something more fundamental. We've been here before. And it wasn't pretty.

The Gilded Age, the tumultuous period between roughly 1870 and 1900, was also a time of rapid technological change, of mass immigration, of spectacular wealth and enormous inequality. The era got its name from a Mark Twain novel: gilded, rather than golden, to signify a thin, shiny surface layer. Below it lay the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War.

The era survives in the public imagination through still resonant names, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their mansions, which now greet awe-struck tourists; and through TV shows with extravagant interiors and lavish gowns. Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth — the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions.

Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on.

As the historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, "the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections 'won' by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations." And neither political party, he added, seemed "capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans' lives." No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.

It's not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers. And it's not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle.

A recent Reuters investigation identified at least 300 cases of political violence since the 2021 assault on the Capitol, which it described as "the biggest and most sustained increase in U.S. political violence since the 1970s." A 2023 poll showed that the number of Americans who agree with the statement "American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country" was ticking up alarmingly.

And the fraying of the social contract is getting worse. Americans express less and less trust in many institutions. Substantial majorities of people say that government, business leaders and the media are purposefully misleading them. In striking contrast to older generations, majorities of younger people say they do not believe that "the American dream" is achievable anymore. The health insurance industry likes to cite polls that show overall satisfaction, but those numbers go down when people get sick and learn what their insurer is and is not willing to do for them.

Things are much better now than in the 19th century. But there is a similarity to the trajectory and the mood, to the expression of deep powerlessness and alienation.

Now, however, the country is awash in powerful guns. And some of the new technologies that will be deployed to help preserve order can cut both ways. Thompson's killer apparently knew exactly where to find his target and at exactly what time. No evidence has emerged that he had access to digital tracking data, but that information is out there on the market. How long before easily built artificial-intelligence-powered drones equipped with facial recognition cameras, rather than hooded men with backpacks, seek targets in cities and towns?

The turbulence and violence of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to comprehensive social reform. The nation built a social safety net, expanded public education and erected regulations and infrastructure that greatly improved the health and well-being of all Americans.

Those reforms weren't perfect, and they weren't the only reason the violence eventually receded (though never entirely disappeared), but they moved us forward.

The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence, and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view, will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns. Calls for a higher degree of public surveillance, or for integrating facial recognition algorithms into policing, may well follow. Almost certainly, armed security entourages and private jets will become an even more common element of executive compensation packages, further removing routine contact between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, except when employed to serve them.

We still don't know who killed Brian Thompson or what his motive was. Whatever facts eventually emerge, the anger it has laid bare will still be real, and what we glimpsed should ring all the alarm bells.