Shares of the Week: The Police Are Executing Black People Again Edition
Note: I have no stories to share about the spate of recent police shootings and mass shootings in America but I wanted to acknowledge them in some way, hence the post title and some of the comics further below.
The City That Rhymes With Fun
Who Are The Prisoners Buried in Wascana Park? - Here is another interesting tidbit of Regina history from Kenton DeJong that appears to have been lost in time.
Warping and Unwarping Our Minds
Child safety groups ask Facebook to scrap plans for Instagram for kids - Social media is bad enough for adults, the notion of a platform specifically targeting young children, in what is clearly an effort to prepare them for a life of keeping up with the Joneses in order to fulfill their fundamental human needs, shows how utterly messed up our priorities are in our unnaturally-hyperactive and image-obsessed society.
New study bolsters support for ‘magic mushroom’ treatment for depression - The war on drugs was really a war on mental health and on one’s ability to forge their own path to a peaceful and meaningful life outside of capitalism. Magic mushrooms won’t be a cure-all solution to the depression our unfulfilling capitalist society is giving many of us, but once their use becomes legal and normalized, I have a feeling there will be a sudden boost of positive interest in art, in the environment, and in each other, while offering a gigantic blow to the profits and power of big pharma, the self-help industry, and the justice system.
Challenging the Status Quo
No, Education Still Won’t Solve Poverty - Education has typically been seen as a meal ticket to success. But what if it wasn’t? Looking at the last couple hundred years of education in America shows that achieving successful individual economic outcomes also involves having an economy that is equitable and driven by the needs of people and not just the profits of the few.
The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting - The goal of my own job as a software developer is typically to automate or make more efficient the processes that would otherwise be done by a human. At the same time, my interest in politics and the economy has me noticing more and more well-paying jobs disappear. These reasons are precisely why technology often scares me and why I continue to sound the alarm to others who continue to operate under the false assumption that more technology will free us up to create new well-paying jobs. Spoiler alert: it won't.
The Cult of Ignorance
Paid sick leave top issue for workers, labour leader says, but Sask. government won't mandate it - I hate to be impolite but how incompetent is Saskatchewan Minister of Labour, Don Morgan? He says worker's compensation should be enough for workers having to choose between getting paid and preventing the spread of Covid-19, while completely missing the point of guaranteed sick days in their prevention of worse health and economic outcomes compared to taking the lazy, reactive approach, as conservatives so often do. The Sask Party sure aren't sending their best.
Erin O'Toole faces backlash from 'surprised and frustrated' Conservatives over carbon pricing plan - So, the Conservative Party’s alternative to what they call the 'Trudeau carbon tax' is a 'totally not a tax' pricing mechanism that would see private companies track spending and manage savings accounts for individual Canadians, with the government deciding how consumers can spend that money. Tell me again how this plan is less government and less red-tape than just giving people a rebate and letting them decide how to spend it? Once again, the Conservatives take a swing and miss with this burn and earn plan, in what will surely fail to convince anyone to come to their side while likely pushing out those on the far-right who refuse to accept that climate change is real. It’s just sad at this point.
That’s How the Conservative ‘Resistance’ Crumbles - The losses keep piling up for conservative politicians across Canada. It’ll be interesting to see how they pivot as they can no longer simply rely on fear and a split left to win, as voters wake up to their gaslighting, hypocrisy, and lack of any kind of plan to tackle the things Canadians care most about.
Republicans Are Basically Starting a White Supremacist Caucus - Leaders on the right are getting desperate and instead of adapting to what voters want, they continue to spread fear by drumming up the culture war, while making it harder for their enemies to vote. Trump may be out of the spotlight at the moment but fascism is ramping up and once the movement has a competent leader, we all better be prepared to defend and fight for this precious democracy that can disappear as quickly as you can say 'never again.'
Canada needs to brace itself for the next chapter of far-right extremism - Fascism isn’t just rising in the United States, or in white men for the matter. Like our neighbours, Canada was built on white supremacy and the colonization of indigenous lands, and the power that traditional institutions hold on to won’t just go gently into the night. They will bring along anyone desperate enough to join them including women and minorities as they take advantage of the divisions and suffering created by decades of neoliberal policies and fomented by establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle.
