Blackmail from Dirty Politics.

"What should the Prime Minister do? The choice is easy. If Teck Frontier is approved, the extortion tactics will be used again and again with every new oil and gas project. You don’t “pay” blackmailers. Reject Teck Frontier." National Observer. Jason Kenney Blackmailing Canada Won't Solve Climate Crisis.

The main drive of dirty politics is to demean a portion of the populace and hold up the opposite. Praise the loyalty of unquestioning, silent groups. Whether it's keeping children in cages or caning them when they fail to choose the right answer.

The conditioning of white men demands a silent muscularity, a competing for top dog, an anti-intellectual hardness, and indifference to the suffering of those who don't win. The winner takes all and the loser is tortured to death.

This sounds extreme but the goal of those who seek power use extremes to stay in power. It doesn't matter whether the system is capitalist, communist, authoritarian or democratic -- it is how information is conveyed that reveals what you are voting for.

Fascism now threatens the whole world and those who are operating it do not care about you or any living creature other than themselves.

George Monbiot has a thorough understanding in the roots of Fascism. “These guys are going to die in the streets like cockroaches – and that’s how it should be.” Bolsonaro is quoted fomenting hate towards the indigenous people trying to protect the forest.

Fascism puts people at the bottom of the pecking order. People who have nothing to gain but who support it are weary and overwhelmed at all the opinions and arguments dominating the waves in sound and sight.

National Observer lists Ontario Budget Cuts for 2019

Ontario budget cuts for 2019 - this list found in the National Observer:

Legal aid for climate emergency
Money for First Nations Wildlife Protection
Paramedic services
Support for Refugees and Immigrants
Legal aid and crime victims

"The 2019 budget forecasts that Ontario’s public account will not reach balance until 2023–24, one year earlier than the prior Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne had proposed but beyond the current term of the government’s mandate, breaking one of Ford’s key election promises." (National Observer.). But it looks like people who really need help to survive and the environment will suffer.

This morning as I waited for the ferry I struck up a conversation with a woman who lived in a luxury high-rise condo who was upset that homeless people made her and her visitors uncomfortable as they sat on a bench near the shopping mall asking for change.

I confessed I felt uncomfortable that people are homeless. It seems to me their plight is way more damaging to their well-being than having to say no to people who ask for a handout.

But then that is a sensibility that predates the concern for balancing the various budgets. The flurry of panic headlines that worry about government debt don't include the costs of homelessness on a societal level -- a kind of blindness we maintain as if life itself is a nuisance, undoing our vague sense of security in the abundance of things, entertainment and nice homes. When people suffer they seem to get in the way of being organized.

How Can I Fight Anti-semitism?

 "I never thought that in 2018 I would still have to speak about antisemitism", says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

What happened to these decades where there was so much conversation about inclusion and social justice for everyone? What happened to the laws against hate crimes? I thought we had progressed beyond anti-semitism.

In March of this year an 85 year old Holocaust survivor in Paris was murdered because she was a Jew.

In May of 2017, the Globe and Mail reported "B'nai Brith Canada, which has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents for 35 years, said 1,728 anti-Semitic incidents were reported across the country last year — a 26 per cent increase from 2015 and the highest number the group has ever recorded." 

I had believed that Muslims were more at risk, however, in 2014, the FBI reported 609 incidents of hate crimes against Jews and 154 against Muslims.   Even Snopes reports more attacks against Jews than Muslims. 

Like bullying everywhere, a division is created and the majority beats up the minority by words or by silence. The after dinner conversation in what I think of as a civilized home is not about how to fix any given social problem. It's about who can be blamed without making anyone in the room feel uncomfortable. It was only much later in my life that I could see this as an acquiescence to prejudice. As one of my relatives said when I expressed concern about racism - well that's life I'm afraid.

Now we talk about injustice on social media which also allows anonymous commenters to harass, abuse and threaten minorities, and women who tackle these issues.

Writing about the recent attack in Toronto where a young man ran down pedestrians in a rented white van - Nora Loreto warns we must not overlook misogyny and social conditions as part of the cause. "We live in a society where our collectivity has been undermined in every way possible, and the Greater Toronto Area is ground zero for how we have been ravaged by forces that seek to drive average people into the ground."

The connection between the different groups who are targeted is the young white man. The previously privileged majority whose future has bottomed out.

But the question remains how can I (a white woman) fight anti-semitism without diminishing the dignity of the Jews who are vastly more educated and engaged in civil society than I am? Can I help or should I let the experts deal with this?   

 Self interrogation is a start but doesn't keep thugs from defacing synagogues and cemeteries.  I can listen  to the souls who are homeless and jobless, who can't find a place to belong but that won't help the unarmed women and men who are murdered as they walk home. 

I can examine the use and abuse of power to link antisemitism with our systemic habits of expressing contempt for life by glorifying hegemony and war. I can argue respectfully with white supremacists on facebook. I can look strangers in the eye and know they have a right be here just like me. I can support environmental and socially progressive groups with funds. I can eschew those who promote privilege by association and creating class divides. 

There is a border that I must defend and it's not against people from different countries but against beliefs that make life a resource to be exploited.

People who cannot earn a living wage, who can't access health services, who have nowhere to live, who are treated like objects, who cannot get justice when they have been harmed, who are marginalized by their sexual orientation, who are judged by their religion or skin colour, are victims of a system which diminishes humanity and although no-one can fix this within one lifetime it is the vigilance we are obliged to keep. It is the duty of all within the human race to fight antisemitism and all the other bigotries.

Human Rights and Authoritarian Governments

"Human rights activists are very inconvenient to authoritarian governments. Discrediting them as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers is right out of the tyrant's playbook." 
Sandy Garossino, National Observer.

This article written by Sandy Garossino and published in the National Observer is a well articulated opinion on how "terrorists" and "terrorism" is as useful to authoritarian leaders as war.

It's another trope to divide the world into us and them, good guys and bad guys, without the conversation about what makes a nation safe. So it removes the pressure for ruling elites to make their country a better place.

Of course we need to arrest those who plan to bomb, to kill, to torture for their "cause". But there are always opportunists in government who blow up the conversation to find their opposing parties to blame. It's so easy to stir up big sensational claims in corporate sponsored media and political jades.

When citizens fall into blaming whole groups such as immigrants, Sikhs, Moslems for the violence of a minority we fail on the tasks that move us toward social justice, and lose sight of the ways we can protect the innocent.

Every nation that we talk about or know of has been guilty of destroying civil society through fear and hate.

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