The Social Drift That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Research Time, 15/06/2018

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of convergence between research for my philosophical writing and the political activism work I’ve been doing. Here’s an example.

As you can tell from my Twitter feed, I spent the last month working a contract for the New Democratic Party in Ontario on a district campaign in the provincial election. We lost that race by a respectably small margin, but there were some promising and troubling signs of future directions in how people engaged with state politics in this part of Canada.

On a province-wide level, the New Democrats had a remarkable success, nearly doubling their seats in the legislature, showing a strong performance province-wide, and breaking into victories in areas that hadn’t supported them in some time or ever.

When I was searching for artistic images of Ontario Premier Doug
Ford, I ended up discovering that there's a whimsical visual artist
in Auckland, New Zealand who is also named Doug Ford. One
of his ongoing projects is painting amusing or pastoral scenes on
traffic light control boxes.

The New Democrats swept most of urban Toronto, and even into the metro suburbs like Scarborough and Brampton. They gained seats in Kingston and central Ottawa, as well as growing and consolidating support in and around Windsor, Hamilton, Niagara, Thunder Bay, the lesser London, Peterborough, Sudbury, and Kitchener. But the rural-urban divide in support was stark and disturbing.

The only rural seats that went New Democrat were Indigenous-dominated populations in the far north of the province and the area around Sudbury. Two smaller cities with very working-class backgrounds went to the Conservatives: Sarnia and Sault Ste Marie. A major Sault Ste Marie Steelworkers union endorsed the Conservative candidate after its members demanded it. It was probably a major factor in his slim victory.

Sault Ste Marie offered the most troubling story for an organizer in progressive politics. The New Democrats have historically been a very pro-union party, traditionally linked to the concerns of working-class citizens.* This is especially true in Ontario, with its powerful government, higher education, and manufacturing unions.

* I mean, the New Democratic Party was literally created from the merger of Canada’s federal socialist party and the country’s largest association of trade unions.

But many union members are turning away from the New Democrats, even though that party’s policies are generally the best for people in that sector and class. I want to do some investigations about this, but my hypothesis is that the socially conservative, pro-white sentiment among many working class people are driving them to support a party that dog-whistles sufficiently to let folks know their stance.

He's a symbol and a voice. A voice that does speak for far too many
people out there.

Yes, Doug. That’s what “I’m taking care of our own first” means.

One of the most insightful popular analyses of this problem I found last year, written by Erik Loomis, a historian at University of Rhode Island. American union leadership and membership has taken the side of heavily-polluting oil companies against environmentalists and Indigenous people. Throughout the country’s history, American trade unions have supported openly racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and supported Donald Trump’s economic isolationism.

During the campaign, a Meet-and-Greet I was organizing fell apart. It was with a group of strong NDP supporters, all of whom had spent their entire lives in Toronto’s manufacturing and construction sectors, all of whom were dedicated union activists. My contact in the group even told me why.

Late in the campaign, the Liberal and Conservative parties began blanket messaging of opposition research on different New Democrat candidates around the province. I didn’t consider any of these issues a dealbreaker. In fact, I considered these additional reasons to endorse those candidates. But I can understand why many Ontarians who aren’t me found these people’s activism disgusting.

Gurratan Singh, running in the same Brampton riding his brother left to become federal NDP leader, once held a sign at an anti-violence protest reading “Fuck the Police.” Jessica Bell, running in central Toronto, once got herded into a police wagon and arrested at the protests against Stephen Harper’s G20 summit that saw Toronto’s entire financial district occupied by the Canadian military.

Erica Kelly, running in central Etobicoke, once said on social media that gun owners disgusted her after a blitz of post-Stoneman Douglas NRA ads made her blood boil. Laura Kaminker, a candidate in central Mississauga, refuses to wear a poppy leading up to our Remembrance Day because of how the symbol has been turned from a sign of mourning to one of patriotic jingoism.

Because the government of Tony Blair brought nothing but justice
and prosperity to Britain and the wider world. People got a little
disappointed about this, and more than a little angry.

We also ran a young trans woman in the Vanier suburb of Ottawa. She lost. So did Kelly and Kaminker. Singh and Bell won, though.

What reason did my contact give for his community turning down our campaign event? They were all disgusted by Kaminker, Singh, Bell, Kelly, and the other candidates slammed as ‘radical activists.’ They all threw their support to the Conservatives.

Jeremy Gilbert describes a parallel problem happening in Britain in the late 1990s. After Tony Blair led Labour to an electoral victory in 1997, the British labour movement of union activists and organizers largely shut down for several years. They presumed that, with the unionists’ party having taken government, there was no need for them to advocate. They had won.

You never win. The Labour Party won the 1997 election, so the popular movement for social justice in Britain was complete. I couldn’t finish writing that sentence without laughing. I’m not sure how much I should trust Gilbert on this assessment. It sounds a lot like hyperbole.

But I can’t deny that when one sector associates themselves with a political party so much, you can identify the party’s electoral victory with your own.

If the NDP ever wins government in Ontario again, I’ll be among the first to criticize its policies if they fall short of what we want to do and what we can do. Even if they’re giving me another job. My principles will never take a back seat to any party loyalty.

It seems the union folks abandoning the New Democrats think the same.

Whither Capital V: An Alliance Is No Friendship, Research Time, 05/06/2018

Being a revolutionary academic already puts you in a strange and possibly hypocritical position. You depend on an important institution in the social-economic system you want to change, for your publication platform.

Worse – because most of your theoretical publications are in heavily paywalled research journals, they aren't even physically accessible to people outside university institutions.*

* Which is why you should just steal these publications. I encourage theft of intellectual property in purposely inaccessible venues. Steal every journal article you can – it’s not like anyone who writes them ever gets paid.

No matter how much politicians like Bill Clinton may have genuinely
wanted to improve the lives of people through the actions of their
governments, they fell to the corruption of their offices. Institutions
that foster authoritative power encourage elitism and indulgence.
The inability to perceive the real consequences of your actions.

Nonetheless, thanks to their university positions, those intellectuals are regarded as leaders of the social movement against the rapaciousness of industrial capitalism. We can’t have a social movement without its leaders, after all. Any revolution needs a vanguard.

Please be aware of how sarcastic I was being in that last paragraph. Social movements don’t need leaders. In fact, it’s better that social movements don’t have leaders at all.

I’m going to follow up on this point farther down the road, when I go through Negri and Hardt’s Assembly on the blog. But the basic idea that movements don’t really need centralized leaders – and tend to work better without them – has been gathering steam since the start of this century. Because they do work better.

Here's how Jeremy Gilbert set things up in his history of Cultural Studies. The breakup of the USSR pretty much solidified the triumph of new liberal politics and economics. The authoritarian, centrally-controlled, ideally autarkic state economy failed miserably. That meant marketizing liberal individualism was the only kind of economy worth having.

Please be aware that the sentence ending that last paragraph was extremely sarcastic. I’m trying to explain what the mainstream liberal economic position was – the globalization of trade networks and the reliance of the planet’s economy on the financial sector. In the West, this stream of politics dominated the American state through an uneasy alliance with grassroots Christian nationalists.

The progressive side of politics over the turn of the century was a similarly uncomfortable alliance. The leaderless ‘movement of movements’ was kicking into gear in critical hubs around the world. The other head of the hydra was the Third Way of politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

In 1999, you could make a fairly reasonable argument that the
theatrical protest and occupation actions of anti-capitalist social
movements couldn't be productive. You could argue that they needed
leaders to guide their protest activity, translate their desires into state
policy, negotiate on their behalf with the powerful for concessions. But
nearly 20 years later, it's turned out that what the organizers of
alternative community spaces – protests, occupations, art events –
needed wasn't leadership to calm their energy. They needed to intensify
and grow their followings until there were actions nearly every day.

The Third Way was basically a program of governance of concession to the economics of new liberalism, which refused to bow to the Christian nationalists. In the more positive light, you can call it concessional. In the more critical light, you can call it a capitulation.

These days, I think most people would call it capitulation. Throughout the West at the turn of the century, all the major political parties agreed with some version of the new liberal idea.

Let all sectors of the economy organize themselves by market networks, subsidize everyday purchases with debt and credit, raise all dimensions of the cost of living by futures and derivative speculation. Call the bulging of stock portfolios an accurate measure of GDP.

We know now that these policies laid the conditions of the global economic depression of 2008. But the major political parties cleaved apart along social and religious moralities – economic policies were indistinguishable where it counted. The secular parties just wanted slightly higher capital gains taxes.

These Third Way concession leaders share one thing in common with orthodox marxists – they still believe that political movements need leaders to guide them. Executives to guide their political programs and force them into coherence.

Was there ever any coherence among the political programs of Christian nationalists and financial oligarchs? Political alliances are marriages of convenience. Let’s be honest with ourselves.

How to Be a Progressive Activist Without Having a Daily Nervous Breakdown, Jamming, 11/03/2017

That’s actually a pretty tough achievement these days. Right now, it’s easier to push for more progressive politics as a Canadian than, really, pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Charlie Angus, the MP for the eastern half of Northern Ontario, is
running. He's long been a strong advocate of a new national 
consensus and institution to restore – at long last – justice for
indigenous people in Canada.

For example, our social democratic party, the NDP, is having its first leadership debate this Sunday for our contest later this year. I’m the Vice-President of my electoral district’s riding association, so I’m helping promote the event on social media, and through personal posts like this.

But I’m in a very privileged position here in Canada. At least relatively speaking. This seems to be one of the few Western countries where the white nationalist alt-right isn’t taking hold of our politics.

Of course, I haven’t adopted some born-again complacency in the three weeks since I posted about my generation’s confrontation with reborn Nazism. Nothing about that has changed.

White nationalism is still a major political problem facing Canada – people wouldn’t be holding demonstrations against the existence of Muslim people in front of our largest city’s house of government if it wasn’t.

Our major conservative party has had its youth wing pretty much entirely compromised by white nationalists. One leading Conservative leadership candidate is openly courting them, declaring that people who don’t share white Christian values shouldn’t be welcome in Canada. Even the more traditional conservatives leading the race throw bones to the alt-right or channel Trumpism in their rhetoric.

Manitoba MP Niki Ashton has made one of her core initiatives the fight
for a more fair economy, often working with groups of young white
collar workers around Canada who are advocating for better working
conditions and more security in their often precarious jobs and careers.

I’m confident that Canadians and the Canadian government can resist and prevent a takeover by white nationalist leaders and activists. They’ll fight hard, and we’ll have to work considerably harder to fight them. But we have better material defences against them.

For one thing, significant portions of Canada already have majority-minority populations, or close enough to it that far fewer people in our cities have stereotypical or racist misconceptions of Asian and Latin American immigrant groups.

Too many white people in Canada’s cities already know Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to be turned against them with racist fearmongering. These people are our friends.

As well, our political parties have never had to marginalize social democratic multiculturalism to succeed. Here’s what I mean.

Right now in the USA, the Democratic Party and its activists are in a serious rebuilding mode. They’re leaders in the anti-Trump resistance, but the party itself is still figuring out how best to overcome Republicans electorally.

Guy Caron is the MP for Rimouski, so far the only leadership
contender representing the strong Quebecois base of the New Democrats.
He made universal basic income as a central point of his policy platform,
restoring to the front of Canadian politics an important idea that's been
blown away to the wind by the hurricane of Trumpist nationalism.

They have a tough road ahead, especially because they seem to be shooting themselves with infighting – typical of the American left over the years. You could see it in the way progressive activists continued to argue over Tom Perez or Keith Ellison taking over the DNC chair.

The Sanders wing saw Perez as continuing Clinton-style neoliberalism that ignored the real economic suffering of millions. The Clinton wing saw Ellison as continuing the blind populism that made what should have been Democratic votes peeling off for Trump in the name of some amorphous ‘change.’

That division among the American left is a hangover from the three biggest mistakes Sanders and his campaign made.

1) Vilifying Clinton so much that he provided Republicans almost as much ammunition as FOX and no take-backs could ever sound sincere. 2) Pushing a protectionist economic populism whose core principles hewed too close to Trump’s. 3) Completely failing to even bother considering black outreach seriously.

Meanwhile, many conservative Americans think Perez is a radical left-wing loon. And the spectre of Perez’s (or Ellison’s) advancement being purely a matter of identity politics continues to haunt American discourse.

Peter Julian is probably the most senior parliamentarian among the
leadership contenders, and a strong voice for social democratic policy
from the west of the country, thanks to his strong constituency in
Vancouver.

The truth is that American politics have been radicalized already along white anglophone ethnic lines. That was the substance of “Make America Great Again,” taking the country back from minorities, and painting the advancement of non-whites as theft from the rightful lot of white Americans.

The Democratic Party in the United States today has, as its core constituency, women of colour. It’s the party of multiculturalism and the fight against inequality along all vectors. Arguing over which inequality to emphasize – whether to, as Sanders did, divorce racializing inequities from inequities emerging from economic processes – ignores the real integration of all these inequities and oppressions.

Canada, in contrast to the United States, has had a mainstream social democratic party for decades. So these ideas have never truly had to fight against institutional opposition to the same intensity as in America, when the Democrats spent decades embracing Reaganism with hugs.

There again is the ultimately flaw with Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic standard-bearer – the formative decades of her modern political identity was in that era of conservative liberalism.

In Canada, we never had to make that compromise. Those who refused it could always find an institutional home in the New Democratic Party. The core reason why we lost the last federal election to Trudeau was because he doubled down on that language while our strategists got scared and pursued a triangulation campaign straight out of 1994.

That institutional home of the NDP unites all the intersectional politics of liberation – economics, gender, racialization, class – in one coalition. One box on a ballot.

The best defence against Canadian white nationalism is strengthening the voice and growing the platforms of the New Democratic Party. Our next leader has to stand for that total liberation – no one is free if a single person still wears their chains.

Will the Liberal Finally Die or Regenerate? Research Time, 29/11/2016

Life has gotten a bit busy, so my Class review will be late by a day or two. Judging by Phil Sandifer’s review of the episode, I’m not missing on much artistically, but it will probably be a fascinating shit show of crazy ideas flying all over the place.

Such things have their place in science-fiction, and in the world of Doctor Who as well.

But today, I want to follow on from yesterday’s post about the CBC controversy brewing. Right now, Canada is experiencing a white nationalist movement, just as in Trump’s triumph in America and the growing movements in Europe.

You might not think so because of Justin Trudeau’s leadership. How can there be a resurgence of political racism in Canada when we re-elected the party with contemporary multiculturalism at its core, led by a fresh-faced social progressive?

Canadian Liberal Party rhetoric challenges the destructive, conservative
tendencies of our society, while falling in line with those tendencies in
their governance and actions. With every generation, the party has to
work hard to find a new way to pull the same old slight of hand. Justin
is the regeneration that continues the traditional theme.

My answer reveals a lot about the decadence and the promise of liberalism as an ethic and a political philosophy. It’ll just take a few paragraphs to work through.

Justin Trudeau himself is a frightfully normal Liberal Party politician. He campaigned as a standard-bearer for social progressivism and institutional change to the Canadian state after the paranoid doldrums of the Harper decade. He’s ended up a new mix on traditional Liberal Party hypocrisy, walking back all his promises that would actually change Canadian institutions and economic relationships.

Trudeau will dominate Canadian state politics for the next three years at least, probably longer. But the white nationalist movement has its own voice in federal politics in Kellie Leitch.

Canadian white nationalism is specific to the Canadian situation. But a white nationalist reactionary movement tends to emerge in response to a wave of activism for formerly excluded people to be included as full members of a society.

America’s largely revolves around the growing social clout of black and Hispanic minorities, and activists from those communities who seek material equality as people and as cultures.

The different European white nationalist movements respond to the demands of immigrant groups for inclusion. They first emerged when the groups were from the former colonies, but picked up popular speed when the mass influx of Muslim refugees from the three/four wars* of the Middle East began.

* The Libyan Civil War, the Saudi-Iran proxy war for control of Yemen, and depending on how you divide the conflict, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad, and the Syrian-Iraqi war on ISIS.

But we don't live in an era when traditional ways of thinking and acting
can maintain and defend our democracy and our freedoms. Modern
nationalism isn't the hoary old terror of Stormfront and greasy Hitler
hair. White nationalism's voices today are young, dynamic politicians
whose charisma could challenge Trudeau's own. Like Germany's
Franke Petry, leader of the Alternative for Deutschland Party, on
track to unseat the tired centrist-liberal Christian Democrat Party of
Angela Merkel.

All these white nationalist movements emerged and strengthened in reaction to social movements that challenged old and ancient racializing hierarchies in their societies.

In America, it was a renewed desire of the former slave class for social inclusion – the demand that black lives matter. In Europe, it was the demand of Muslim people to become Europeans, when Europe has been defined since the early second millennium in opposition to Islamic civilization.

Canada? I still have some work to do tracing the ideas, but my initial hypothesis is that Canada’s conservative culture started to embrace white nationalism in response to the Indigenous cultural renaissance. The Canadian state was founded – in part, but in essential part – as institutions to remove Indigenous people from political life.

Lock them away in reserves, in rural areas where no one goes. The first major crime of the Canadian state was the suppression of francophone Indigenous people in the first mass settling of the territories of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. State-sponsored genocide continued through the residential schools.

The last five years have seen the recognition of these crimes, and the growing visibility of continuing racism. When an elected official in Saskatchewan reacts to the murder of a young Indigenous man by declaring that the shooter should have killed all Colten Boushie's friends so there’d be no witnesses? He got in trouble, but he was speaking for his constituents.

Chantal Mouffe writes in praise of liberalism because of one important aspect of its philosophy – the possibility that everyone can be included in a society, no matter how different they are. That community can arise from difference, not from conformity to some common moral, religious, or ethnic being.

I may sound alarmist when I say this, but now is a time when alarmism
is entirely reasonable. As Canadians, we have to accept that a not
insignificant number of our fellow Canadians think it's not only
morally acceptable to kill Indigenous people, but that it's a national
imperative to suppress, marginalize, and drive Indigenous people to
their cultural and literal death.

In the wake of Trump’s election, there’s been a lot of chatter among self-identified liberals that maybe it’s time to move on from “identity politics.” To move away from provoking the white people who are threatened by the racially marginalized seeking inclusion.

Because mainstream liberalism sees racism as a matter of individual’s or group’s shared beliefs about people, it’s often blind to more structural material oppression. Yet liberalism’s drive to include difference requires confronting and changing those systematic institutional structures that perpetuate racializing inequities.

If liberalism and liberals accept and reconcile their politics with nationalism, liberal politics will die. If liberal thinkers and leaders find ways to fight nationalism – to welcome the different and find strength in that diversity and bravery in confronting fundamental structures in society? It will regenerate into a more powerful philosophy and a more peaceful world.

Who Is the Public You Broadcast? Advocate, 28/11/2016

Or: How the CBC Fights White Nationalism by Existing

Just a few paragraphs of riffing on the politics of Canada. In part, it’s to escape to a world of news not dominated by Trump and Trumpism. But I can also see the embrace of extremity that he’s inspired. Which is depressing to me as a person.

Late last week, the complete dismantling of Canada’s public broadcaster the CBC has become an ordinary mainstream discussion. Because two leading candidates for our Conservative Party leadership, Kellie Leitch and Maxime Bernier, announced that a part of their platform is radically changing that institution.

CBC on Front Street in Toronto. For Canada's Conservatives, it's the heart
of the country's liberalism, despite its institutional corruption and the
politically conservative bias in much of its coverage.

Right now, the CBC is a public broadcaster – it’s wholly owned by the government, which provides about a billion dollars each year to run it. And the CBC sells advertising too, to supplement that funding.

It has a regional network providing local programming – for news and entertainment – from all over the country. A bureau for every province and every major population centre in that province. It runs television, radio, and internet services for each of those regions.

CBC’s television service gets less than 5% audience share for the entire country. We aren’t exactly dealing with a powerhouse of television production like the BBC. But it essentially provides a media production house and budget to every significant region of Canada.

It’s especially important for more isolated regions of the country, throughout the north and rural regions. These are lands so vast that it’s difficult to get any viable local media production happening there. Places where a private network, with its incentives to focus only on the largest, richest markets, would never have an incentive to send anyone.

Leitch and Bernier both say that the CBC is a government intrusion into the media market. A monopoly whose removal from the commercial television game would spur competition that’s now stagnant.

Kellie Leitch has become Canada's leading standard-bearer for the global
white nationalist political movement.

How the disappearance of a television network that barely gets 5% audience share would spur competition is anyone’s guess.

Bernier would prefer that the CBC become an equivalent to PBS in the United States. There’d be a little government funding, but most of its production would come through private donations. It could probably only afford one or two studios and produce only a few, very low-budget, productions.

Leitch wants to dismantle and sell the entire network. The CBC would provide some rural radio coverage for local concerns at most.

Under all this talk of the CBC as a government “monopoly” on a media market, is a voice in mainstream discussion of long-simmering right-wing populist hatred of the CBC. A government-built network that constantly opposes conservatism, a mouthpiece for liberal and Liberal Canada.

The radical conservatives of my country have a long and colourful history of hating the CBC for its supposed liberal bias. And quite a few on the left found the network hopelessly corrupt and kowtowing to the Conservative Party line during the Harper years.

The drive to dismantle the CBC is to destroy what radical conservatives consider an ideological opponent.

Local production houses like CBC Iqaluit, for example.

And there’s an even deeper, more disgusting idea at the heart of radical conservative hatred for the CBC. Remember that regional network of local studios I mentioned? Those low-budget production houses scattered all over the country provide a channel for voices in the very rural north and wild areas of the country to speak.

The ongoing Indigenous Cultural Renaissance of Canada exploded in artistic and political vectors across the country through those channels. Indigenous voices today demand material reparations for acts of genocide. They demand control over their lands – constitutionally speaking, sovereignty within the Canadian state.

They demand recognition as equal participants in Canadian culture – not just as individuals, but as individuals whose singular character was shaped by their Indigenous culture. The Indigenous want in.

Indigenous voices reach the hearts of Canada’s biggest cities and smallest, whitest towns through the communication networks of all those CBC studios. They’re being carried by private channels now, having built these relationships with their newfound cultural power. But the CBC was the first conduit, and it remains one of the most important.

The radical conservative line on the CBC is that it’s a home for urbane, alienated, socially progressive (and Liberal sellout) elites. And there are a lot of hipster journalists working for the CBC today. Dismantling CBC will likely shut many left-wing voices out of mainstream media.

Aesthetically, my favourite expression of Canada's Indigenous Cultural
Renaissance is the music of Tanya Tagaq. Not only is it beautiful,
remarkable music unlike anything else most Westerners (and probably
most other cultures on Earth) have ever heard. It expresses the same
social and political ideas that threaten all the traditional relations of
cultural dominance of the Canadian state over Indigenous life.

But if the CBC is dismantled, it will also significantly diminish the Indigenous voices reaching the rest of Canada. It will be easier for Indigenous people to be kept silent, confined in the wilderness where proper Canadians never go. To the silent, dark, and cold.

One of the advantages Trump’s moving the Overton Window is that the enemies of racism can return to calling what we fight what it really is. Racists aren’t the only ones who dog-whistle. If you were speak in code to disguise white nationalism, we have to speak in code to call you out on it. Otherwise, we’d look extreme and lose credibility.

So thank you Donald Trump, for letting me say what seems to be the real motivations of Kellie Leitch, Maxime Bernier, and quite a few (though not all) of the folks who support exactly the sorts of proposals they now say openly.

If you dismantle the CBC, you’ll know that the Indigenous voices of Canada will lose a lot of their local media production outlets, and media communication between your world and the mainstream of Canada. It will be easier to remind Canada’s Indigenous of their proper place in Canadian society.

Absent from it.

Too Much Democracy, Research Time, 11/11/2016

It’s been difficult for me to keep my thoughts in one place yesterday. There’s been quite a lot of terrible news coming out of the United States today, as the Trump transition team begins its descent into autocracy. His administration will be dominated by white nationalists, prolific architects of voter suppression, and religious fanatics.

But the most emotionally destabilizing news I’ve been reading today are accounts of the hate crimes.

The face of American autocracy. Violence is already sweeping the
country on its own power and we're still months away from the
inauguration. He doesn't even have the keys to the security state yet.

Muslim women beaten and robbed in the streets. Black and Hispanic schoolchildren are taunted, insulted, and beaten in openly racist violence. A man screams and threatens a woman in a coffeeshop for having a Skype conversation in sign language.

We were only on the second day after Trump’s election and the worst is already happening. Everyone in America’s orbit has a lot of work to do to overcome the oppression and violence that’s coming. And it is coming.

I’m going to try to do my part from Canada. One part of that will be opposing the growth of white nationalism in my own country, which many elements of Canada’s conservative party are embracing. The most visible proponent is Kellie Leitch, frontrunner for leadership of the federal Conservatives.

I’m also floating some activist ideas with my colleagues in the local New Democratic Party – fundraising for women’s rights groups who’ll come under attack from the Trump government, coming up with some videography and social media projects about Toronto’s multicultural communities.

And call me naïve, but theory is important too. Even something at the small (but growing, little by little) scale of this blog can keep democratic ideas in the culture. Getting unashamedly strange, ambitious, idealistic. The book will be called Utopias, after all. And I plan on touring it.

The last couple of weeks of posts have been riffs on different ideas in Jacques Rancière’s short, dense book Hatred of Democracy. One core idea that he turns over and over in that book is the conception of freedom as essentially limitless.

Theorist of radical democracy Jacques Rancière. If there's ever a time
when we need radical democracy, it's now.

He considers two ways to think about this limitlessness. One is the way that a lot of establishment liberals in Rancière’s country France have spoken about democracy’s limitlessness since the turn of our century.

The limitless desires of the ignorant masses to consume. The gauche gluttony of capitalist consumption plus the unrestrained lechery and extremism of total cultural freedom. It’s a foundational concept for the hatred of democracy in the West today, the idea that all people want from freedom is more stuff.

Remember how Mitt Romney, in those innocent days of 2012, used to talk about free stuff? That people let the government take control over their welfare because they were lazy and wanted Barack Obama to give them free stuff?

The vocabulary is definitely different when you leave erudite, pretentious France for in-your-face America. But the idea is the same.

It's all a red herring, though. The real limitlessness of democracy is the limitlessness of freedom itself. You create new ways of living, new identities, affiliations. Freedom is the proliferation of difference. What I called the asymptotic approach along multiplying vectors of liberation.

To reduce this expansion of the multiplicity of human life to a desire for more and better consumer goods is to make the most profound dimension of human desire into an image of lazy gluttony. Contempt for the desire that is freedom itself.

That contempt is also a way to drum up support for social homogeneity. Bringing people back in line with old-fashioned socially conservative values carves away the differences that constitute freedom itself.

In America today, it’s the popular call for the domination of white, male, straight identity, and the silence of all other ways of existence. The imagination of an ideal of perfect uniformity and conformity.

It’s going to be a rough four years.

Hating Democracy IV: End Your Traditions, Research Time, 24/10/2016

I haven’t gotten my hands on the first episode of Class by Sunday night, so the first post in that series will come on Tuesday. That’ll be my discussion of the first episode “For Tonight We Might Die.” The post on the second episode, “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo,” will likely go up Friday – But Patreon backers will get to see it a day earlier.

Posts on Class will probably appear each Tuesday after that. This will probably be how the Doctor Who posts end up going as well.

• • •

Continued from last post . . . You can say democracy is a lot of things. It’s not exactly a simple concept. But here’s what democracy is on today’s post. 

Democracy leaves ever aspect of a community’s social order up for grabs in every moment. It’s the fundamental opposition to social conservatism at all times. 

The unity of a culture is built from the ground up, from such ordinary
things as brief television commercials about noteworthy moments in
your country's history. Like when Drake took those baskets back to save
the Raptors from the Halifax Explosion at the conference to choose the
design of the new Canadian flag. At least that's how I remember it.

This is another part of Jacques Rancière’s account of the democratic attitude, democratic life. If I can name it a little more poetically, it’s the fundamental human yearning for freedom.

I sometimes feel as though a lot of popular political discourse in the West has lost this more profound conception of freedom. Too many of us think freedom is a matter of “money talks.” The kind of freedom that means we shouldn’t care how much a company pollutes if people still love their products because the market will guide our reason. 

The kind of freedom that means I can say whatever I want, even if it’s horrible and racist, because my fundamental freedom is freedom to be a jackass. That freedom is nothing more than the absence of coercion. Or sometimes even the absence of resistance.

In many ways, that kind of very individualist libertarianism doesn’t go far enough. It sticks with the perspective of an individual’s freedom as an isolated unit. But it doesn’t consider how deeply integrated each of us as individuals are with so many others. 

This doesn’t make individuality disappear into some amorphous blob of a society. For one thing, actual societies are way more complicated than that. Nations and communities aren’t homogeneous unities, no matter how many ancient* sociological theories treated them that way. 

* And undeniably fucked up . . . 

Societies don't really have any essence – no identity like an individual. They’re collections of many different individuals. These individuals all affect each other in complex networks. Think of how many different people you interact with half-frequently in a week. Or a month.

Co-workers, neighbours, friends, family members, casual acquaintances, occasional clients, people you see often enough at the grocery store that you remember their faces, that street musician with the steel drums and the cool hat. Now think about all the networks each of those people have. And all the networks that flow out from each person in those networks.

These networks aren't evenly distributed all over the world. They don’t have boundaries, per se, but there are hubs, as well as general tendencies to link in some ways and not in others. 

Though I'd like to meet some people from Kyrgyzstan. It seems like a
really cool place.

I don’t know personally anyone in Kyrgyzstan, for example. Because it’s far away, I’ve never been there, I don’t know any Kyrgyz myself in the city where I live, and I don’t even speak Kyrgyz, Russian, or Uzbek, the country’s most common languages. Physical, social, and institutional obstacles prevent me from direct connections to the networks of people in Kyrgyzstan.

But you could find a path through the networks of my networks (and all their networks) that would eventually lead to Kyrgyzstan. Because I live in immigrant-heavy Toronto, it probably wouldn’t take as long either. 

This is the reality of society. We’re not cells in some kind of big, giant person called Canada. We’re networks of individuals. But all these people affect each other – some a little, some a lot, and some in very subtle ways. Ideas, beliefs, and ways of acting all drift through these networks. 

So the individual people in those networks might share some tendencies, across the population when you survey it. Many of them may share tastes in food, or a peculiar rudeness in the behaviour of a city’s bad drivers. That’s where cultures come from: the integration of networks of individuals.

We’re not made by some omnipowerful essence called our nation. We’re individuals who all affect each other – and have some mild power over each other, in tension with each other. Most of the time, the people who are networked together benefit each other. 

We all do our jobs, keep our city’s infrastructure and businesses running, are generally nice to each other in the streets. But each of us, living our lives in pleasant, productive, peaceful ways, exercises their little bit of power to build and rebuild society every day.

Societies are not giant people who behave according to sarcastic
national stereotypes. But it would be funny if they were.

And that’s why you have no obligations to uphold your traditions if they stop working for you. If the world has changed so that something that you’ve always done before starts causing destructive effects, you can stop it. 

There’s no moral obligation to do something when it starts to hurt you instead of help you as it had for years or decades. Humans work best when we all strive to live so that we make each other’s lives better, or at least keep each other on the right track. The world is largely beyond our individual control, but we can adapt to a changing world.

Democracy is a politics that recognizes that fundamental human power over each other and over the world. It says to everyone who’s networked together and holds that little bit of power over everyone they’re fairly densely connected with: You have that power over each other, and an obligation to use it wisely for all our sakes. 

Democracy says: Each of us has a duty to help each other figure out the best way to survive and prosper. If that means overthrowing an old social habit or institution? If it looks like that’s the best route, heave ho.

Social conservatism in the face of destruction isn’t just foolhardy. It’s rude.

Desire Creates Us, A History Boy, 16/10/2016

I'm one of those people who always reads a bunch of books at the same time. A little while ago, I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I came to the book in a very simple way, but came to the author in a bit of a roundabout path.

Not the cover of my edition, but I think it's my
favourite. The smoke is the sign of the productive
energy that unites the steamship that united the
narrator's grandparents, the city where she
lived, and the relationship that helped her
fully understand his identity and nature.

Turning From Small Worlds

Eugenides is typically lumped in with David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen – sensitive white male chroniclers of the angst and narratives of the suburban American culture heading for an existential crisis through the 1990s and early 2000s. 

They were the most prominent writers in a clique of American authors that were called a coherent cohort in New York Magazine in 2011, their society and wider meaning unified by in how their culture made sense of Wallace’s suicide a few years earlier. 

Eugenides never had much meaning to me when I first discovered these writers. I bought Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest practically by impulse in a mall bookstore when I was 16. 

When I first read it, I was overwhelmed, bowled over by the massive scope of his literary creation, which was wedded to a narrow focus on his characters’ deep, personal, singular pain. I’d later think of Wallace as prefiguring the drive to sincerity. That cultural drive jacked up seriously after Sept 11, as the ironic reflexes of late 20th century popular culture* weren’t adequate to process America’s intense societal trauma.

* Key example: the cool, smirking, distance of authors like Thomas Pynchon from the interiors of his characters, the postmodern focus on technical and formal experimentation, characters as plays of tropes and pure ideas instead of personalities.

I grew tired over the last decade of both postmodern experimentation and the insular interiority of the Wallace-influenced approach. The deal on Wallace was sealed when I read D. T. Max’s biography of him last year – Wallace spent his life tortured by mental illness, frequently unable to escape his own head and most often a mess. 

His characters fell into such deep and detailed pits of interiority in their depression because that was the arc that kept repeating in Wallace’s own life. His research on settings would be comprehensive. I was especially impressed by how much he learned about tax accountancy for The Pale King, but the story was always the same. A subject's fall into their own sadness. Usually never to emerge.

Eugenides has become my favourite of that cohort of
white novelists of the midwestern suburban
American subjective interior. He breaks their
crushing sameness.

I felt the same about Franzen's work, except on a social level. Wallace and Franzen had convinced me that this crew of writers couldn’t escape their heads and their own, socially isolated worlds. The precious interiority of the middle and upper class white American male of the mid-sized town.

Writing Difference – Imagination at Last!

That article I linked earlier, describing Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as an adaptation of the sick relationship Wallace developed with Mary Karr, made me think he was little different than the others. But with a little reflection, I thought differently.

I remembered The Virgin Suicides. Not the book itself, which I still haven’t read, but the film. I often thought of it primarily as a Sofia Coppola film – her personality was all over the film. But so much of Eugenides’ narrative voice survived her adaptation. Literally, in the film's narration.

That voice expressed a mind that sought to understand difference. The Virgin Suicides could sound like a journey that never leaves a skull at first sight, because it remains the voice of the boys who followed the Lisbon girls. Boys who follow girls. Say it, and you can hear how easily it can fall into the unseemly.

Yet the voice in that film preserved the love that always disappeared from the true solipsists. Wallace’s writing never escaped the black pits, though he depicted the abyss brilliantly. Whenever I try to read Franzen, I have to stop for the choking odour of mothballs. Eugenides seemed different.

The Virgin Suicides was an attempt to narrate the radically different from the outside. That little boys’ choir narrator wanted to explore this world that was so close to their own, but diverged so radically. 

The steel oppression of social conservatism, even for such a basic, insular neighbourhood society as theirs – and the silent howls of pain as they clawed into a familial coffin – the desperation of the realization that an actual coffin is the only escape. 

A story of the relentless drive of love to uncover an alien neighbour.
The film is a masterpiece you can never watch twice, its violent
sadness overcomes your guts.

The entire narrative was an exercise in the refusal to understand what’s different from you on your own terms. The beginning of the ethical imagination that I know now is the purpose of art. If that was Eugenides’ first novel, then how far would he go afterward?

Thousands of Stories in Each of Us

So one day, I saw Middlesex on sale for $1 at a United Way fundraiser table at my local liquor store. The story and its narrator intrigued me – a young girl grows up in 1960s and becomes a man after realizing that she’s intersex with interior testes. And it also flowed through the story of hir grandparents fleeing war in Greek Turkey to settle in Detroit.

After I bought the book, I looked through reviews. Some of the negative reviews thought that a novel was too unwieldy to contain a Greek immigrant story and an intersex awakening story at the same time. 

But that overstuffed excess of narrative was a selling point for me – real life is always intersectional. Every actual person has multiple heritages and stories within them. I look among my own old and new friends in Toronto for examples. 

A young artist leaves the “new world” for the country of his parents’ birth and sees it undergoing a renaissance, while he also works through the complex heritage of a deceased parent and another whose work sometimes exposes him to the poorest of the poor.

In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
write that they wrote the book together and each of them were several
people themselves already. It made their room very crowded. Each of
us is just as crowded as they were.

A woman climbs out of poverty while also growing distant from her earlier religious awakening thanks to hypocrisies in the community, grows alienated from family, and lives through the tension of her own trauma and the mental health issues of her partner.

A man finds financial success and builds a new multicultural family while living the precarious neighbourhoods of a gentrifying city.

A man leaves a dictatorship for a democracy, where he finds love. Only a few years later, he finds himself at the forefront of activism to democratize his old country and bring victims of war to safe shores.

All these overflow the simple narratives that a straightforward literary treatment would make of them. That’s life. It’s what art should depict – the beautiful excess and diversity of human life on its own terms. 

Desire Creates Us From Sludge and Rock

The Greek-American immigrant story of Middlesex blends with the intersex-awakening story of Middlesex even better than simply through an embrace of life’s excessive meaning. I’d actually call it a very Deleuzian book (some relative spoilers coming, though, maybe, depending on your definition).

At many times in the book, Eugenides’ narrator describes himself and his family as assemblages. Particularly, assemblages of genes, phenotypes, hormones, and proteins. We’re chemical as well as psychological and narrative. That doesn’t detract from our humanity – it's part of what constitutes humanity.

Life is physical, an assemblage of forces, imperatives, and tendencies. They all run actively under our intentions and personalities, shaping who we are. We aren’t passive before them, because we’re the actors of our own desire. But those drives and forces, channelled through the personalities they constitute, become desire.

Eugenides depicts a Detroit that becomes a vibrant centre of industry
and a hollowed-out husk within a generation. The Detroit that really
exists. This is Central Michigan Railway Station, abandoned to rot
by 1988.

That's the desire that the narrator’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty have for each other. Their desire is the vehicle for the proliferation of intersex people, in the deep physicality of their metabolisms and cell nuclei. Their intense sexual desire and deep love for each other drives them to their incestuous marriage. 

It’s kept secret from everyone around them because they’re the only survivors of their home village, destroyed by the nationalist Turkish army. That same desire appears in their son Milton, who seduces his cousin by playing clarinet against her skin. Jazz has rarely been so properly erotic. 

The narrator, faced with the prospect of genital surgery that would destroy her capacity for pleasure, flees and begins living as a man. He’s already been awakened to sexuality through falling in love with a female classmate, and understands that his nature can’t fit in the strict definitions of life in mid 20th century middle America.

That’s another beautiful line of Eugenides’ story – the tension of real human difference with the conservative determination for simplicity and conformity. That’s another way that the immigrant and intersex stories blend together. 

The grandparents flee massacre by a nationalist army – their city Smyrna is burned to the ground and rebuilt as Turkish Izmir. Lefty faces constant company propaganda to abandon his Greek culture and assimilate to WASP Americanism while working at Ford Motors. Desdemona runs an indoor silk farm for a clothing business of the early Nation of Islam.

They give birth to a son who joins the army, takes over his dad’s restaurant, becomes an Eisenhower Republican, and moves his family out to the suburbs when too many blacks settle his neighbourhood. Then that son has a precocious little daughter who grows into a young man by age 15. Every drive to conformity and conservatism is ultimately shot to hell by life itself.

Humans are constructs of desire – made from forces that are prior to our individualities, and always roil beneath our identities and everyday thoughts. That desire pushes us in singular directions, uniquenesses that can’t be tied down to a single code or conform to a unified nature. No matter how much you might believe in the morality that says you must.

That's the story of Eugenides’ Middlesex. Depicting such singular existence is the point of art.

Tainted Left I: Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Research Time, 19/07/2016

My two-year online friendship with a pair of radical right-wing libertarians was one of the most philosophically enlightening relationships I think I’ve ever had. 

I don’t mean this in the sense that it made me an equally doctrinaire right-wing libertarian, even though that was their goal. Our relationship was a micro-level anthropology of North America’s radical right – I saw Trumpism in its embryonic form, a new fascism waiting for its catalyst to blossom.

What Sandifer explored through his critical analysis of neoreaction’s central writers (Mencius Moldbug, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick Land), I saw unfold before me in two real people. 

There's one particular memory I want to share with you, as an introduction to what will probably be a whole week talking about a problem inherent in any kind of left-leaning politics in the West. An image Libertarian G shared with me on the anniversary of Jack Layton’s death.

He wasn't even really all that radical in what he fought for.

It was a picture of Vladimir Lenin, with a short, respectful caption lamenting Jack’s passing.

At the time, I thought his equivalence of Jack Layton with Vladimir Lenin was just a joke, a ridiculous exaggeration for me to laugh at. But after several months more of almost daily interaction, it struck me that G really believed that. And as I learned more about right-wing libertarian society, I discovered that virtually all of them did too.

They believed that all left-wing people – no matter their real diversity of mind – wanted government to act as a fully collectivized communist totalitarian state. 

It seemed ridiculous, like a complete delusion. Finally reading Freidrich Hayek made it clear where this idea came from. From him, naturally. Because he says it – explicitly and repeatedly – in The Road to Serfdom. 

I sincerely believe – given what’s become an immensely powerful political movement in our time – that every academic philosophy department should include The Road to Serfdom in its political curriculum. And they should require students to attack its arguments with all the critical vigour and aggression they can.

Even though The Road to Serfdom can read like a work of philosophy, and be philosophically interpreted, you can make a strong argument that it isn’t philosophy. Following a concept Louis Althusser develops in For Marx, it’s ideology. Specifically, ‘mere ideology.’

We should all study the book critically because it is probably the most influential single book of political thought of the last 100 years. From the ideas of this one book, and the network of think tanks he built with Milton Friedman and other academics to spread their ideas to the wider public, came the foundational orthodoxy of modern conservatism.

The face of a bestseller, the most
influential political thinker of the last
hundred years. He can't be ignored.

A cut-down version of Road to Serfdom was published in Reader’s Digest of all things in 1945, and reached a huge popular audience across America. Hayek wrote the book as an explicit warning about the danger of totalitarian ideas, as the sustained confrontation of the Cold War was looming. 

That popular idea about left-wing people spread to all of society through conservative partisan political messaging for the rest of the 20th century. It spread through everyday conversation with people who came to accept it. It’s an opposition every progressive has to defend against, and can appear at any time.

“How are you not a communist!?” he shouts. 

For the next few posts – however many it’ll take me to work through the idea – I’m going to work through my impressions of how Althusser handles this in For Marx. He asks it specifically about marxists, of course, because he was himself a lifelong communist party activist in France. 

But today, we know the same question applies to everyone on the broadly left side of the political spectrum. How are our ideas not of the same path as the crimes of Stalin? . . . To be continued

How to Think How to Write and How to Teach, Composing, 15/06/2016

I’ve had a lot of ideas lately for posts here, which is a shame that I’ve been so busy since coming back from Calgary, I’ve only been able to update sporadically. 

I’ve finished reading Commonwealth and wanted to add some thoughts wrapping up my long engagement with Antonio Negri’s trilogy. I also started reading Louis Althusser’s For Marx, and have a few ideas about how we understand history that I want to work out here. And I’ve been thinking about the medium of messaging apps, mulling over the mechanics and meanings of how we interact with chatbots. 

But I discovered something very disconcerting a couple of days ago. My old employer, McMaster University’s Philosophy department, was accused of racist practice by a former Master’s student in a pretty bold forum.

The home building of my old department was also one
of the oldest and best looking buildings in the otherwise
drab and brutalist McMaster campus. Plenty of green at
that university, though.

Udoka Okafor wrote a piece on Huffington Post alleging mistreatment and a lack of respect from the professors in McMaster’s department. A PhD student at the department, Jorge Humberto Sanchez Perez, wrote a response that was posted at the less mainstream* venue of Brian Leiter’s blog.

* A blogging space exclusively for university-based philosophers, and quite a controversial one in that community, thanks to Leiter’s creation and stewardship of the “Gourmet Report” rankings and his indefensible defence of formerly-Northwestern University’s Peter Ludlow after his sex scandal. I’ve already written about all this mess.

You can read Okafor’s piece online and download the .rtf file** of Sanchez’s hit job – I mean rebuttal! – to read yourselves. You’ll be about as well-informed of their characters as I am. Both joined the department well after I left my position at McMaster, and I think after I left the city of Hamilton as well.

** Seriously?!

But you can tell where my sympathies lie. If you take Okafor at her word – and you have no reason not to – you see an ambitious young thinker. And I’ve never been one to cut away at ambition. 

Having worked in McMaster’s department for five years, I certainly see why they’d discourage Okafor pursuing such a massive project as a striving-for-completeness comparative study of Western and African legal theory. It’s impossible to do in a single year. 

But if I were in their position, I wouldn’t have outright discouraged her from moving in that direction at all. What would have provoked the best work in the long run is for her to have figured out some kind of preliminary project to the big one. 

Maybe contrasting a Western and African legal theorist whose work, juxtaposed together, reveals an interesting or illuminating idea. Now, I’m just riffing here, but there’s no reason why some similar riff couldn’t have appeared in the few minutes of a grad student’s committee meeting. 

Thanks to Barry Allen, McMaster
has a firm base for new approaches
to comparative philosophy. That
should have made a project like
Okafor's quite at home.

My own supervisor, Barry Allen, has been working on comparative philosophy for about a decade now. He’s written two books on ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy, the general survey Vanishing Into Things and the exploration of philosophy of the martial arts, Striking Beauty. He would have been an excellent supervisor for such a project.

But Okafor was part of the Justice, Political Philosophy, and Law program, over which Allen never really had much influence. That program focussed very much on North American and British legal and political theory, and was largely conceived as a philosophical prelude to law school. That’s how its founders discussed its role when I was there and they were designing it.

That's the local-level set of issues. It expresses the institutional conservatism of the department, a fairly common attitude there, which I think held the faculty back from achieving more progress in teaching, research, and creativity than the good work they did do.

Because at a larger scale – as an expression of trends throughout the academic institution – Okafor describes a group of people operating in blindness to the crisis unfolding throughout the university system and the philosophical discipline in particular.

I’ve written my own perspective on this institutional crisis at the Reply Collective, twice actually. And if you take what Okafor says seriously, you can see another perspective on academic philosophy’s crisis of institutional conservatism. 

One of the most common and most effective ways to hide your head in the sand about serious problems among your discipline’s leaders is to divorce what they say from the context of their lives. Here are some concrete examples to illustrate what I mean.

In November 2013, McMaster’s Philosophy Department hosted Peter Ludlow in a prestigious week-long series of talks – mere months before his career-ending exposé, but well after his condemnation by Northwestern’s Title IX board. One McMaster Philosophy professor who’s been a good colleague and friend to me is a devotee of the disgraced Thomas Pogge's philosophy of mass charity from wealthy to poor countries. 

Now, my own problem with Pogge’s argument was that it smacked of the same imperialist condescensions that were embedded with the creation of mass poverty in the Global South in the first place. It's built on the insulting reduction of the entire formerly-colonized world to a charity case, and puts all agency on the former colonizers, treating the entire non-Western world as a passive receptor of our goodwill. 

I always found the political imperatives of his philosophy
as horribly smug, as if he never questioned if there was
more to the moral problems of a post-imperialist world
than simple differences in material wealth.

More specifically, Okafor describes, in the most problematic of her problems, being taught Pogge’s philosophy without any permission to make an issue of his years of using his Yale position for sexual predation. She wanted to introduce the hypocrisy of his position to problematize his ideas. But she was told that his vile character had nothing to do with the value of his ideas when considered in the abstract.

It makes for a curious parallel of my own problems with Pogge. His abstract ideal of justice as an imperative to restore egalitarian fairness would work out in real application to a repetition of empire as infantilizing charity on a civilizational scale. 

Following Okafor, the appeal of his abstract argument for egalitarian justice suffers when spoken from the keyboards of a man who exploited gender, economic, and post-colonial hierarchies for his selfish sexual pleasure. Real hypocrisy deflates the power of an abstract argument.

In summary, Okafor’s critiques and problems with our former colleagues at McMaster Philosophy have much in common – we both appear able to see the hypocrisies and self-undercutting of abstract arguments for justice and fairness made from a material situation of institutional conservatism.

Having such an eye for that conflict of the abstract and the material makes me think she’d have a good home as a contributor to the Reply Collective. 

As for Sanchez’s rebuttal? Just read the bloody thing. It looks like a condescending, dismissive screed at a young woman as an irrational fool not worth listening to. Appeals to empty buzzwords like ‘political correctness’ that are used to delegitimize movements against racism all over the West. Insulting the genuine need for Western philosophy to embrace a global scope as the mere fetishization of 'diversity.'

The sadly typical huffing and puffing of a grumpy old man.
• • •
Editor's note. A few hours after the post went up, a friend of mine who was a classmate of Okafor told me that the course on Pogge's philosophy took place before his recent exposé, so I can understand why what were – at the time – only rumours were bracketed from its discussion.

But the neo-colonial critique of Pogge still stands (he reminds me of John Stuart Mill's justifications for British sovereignty over India as a "civilizing mission") and Sanchez still sounds like a pig.