Category: Racism

Tragedy in London

As far as I can tell I’m not reacting nearly as hard to the shot as I did the last time. There’s a hot raised spot on my arm but nothing like the last time.

I’m just so happy to be fully vaccinated. I CAN’T HURT SOMEONE UNINTENTIONALLY now. I can be disgusting and homicidal some other way I guess.

I have a new favourite dessert: cold home made rice pudding, done Jeff style (he prefers it more gooey than I do), with mascarpone layered on top and then home made chocolate sauce dribbled on top. I invented it last night and then promptly got up and ate another dish of it. LOL.  Possibly I should run the dishwasher now before everything gets too crusty.

The Muslim family killed by a 20 year old driver in London ONT …. I have few words.

– Salman Afzaal, 46 physiotherapist – Madiha Salman, 44 PhD student in Civil engineering – Yumna Salman, 15, grade 9 student – Fayez Salman, 9 – Grandmother, 74, family ‘pillar’

Struck down FOR WHAT REASON? Other than bigotry and hatred and ignorance.

 

one massive ball

Part of genocide is thinking that one Indigenous person from x point in Canada is like an Indigenous person from y point.

After all these years CBC still thinks that ‘the Indigenous community’ is a convenient monolithic block. It speaks with one voice, sees with one eye, dances with one foot, etc etc. Please don’t roll up Indigenous communities in one mass for your own convenience.

This is me in response to the CBC talking about ‘the Indigenous community’ response to finding 215 murdered children in Kamloops.

Sad tidings

Finding hundreds of children’s bodies at the Kamloops residential school ground was a ghastly piece of news to get yesterday.

There are many burial places like it. More horror.

I’m just sad about it. Indigenous people on twitter have asked white people to just be still for a while and not make it about them.

Get the babies home. That’s all I can say.

I am glad

 

I am glad that I am older
because when I was younger
I thought fireworks were friendly fun
But carrying a baby while John shot that roman candle at me *
made me think
maybe I’m wrong
It’s one idea, among them all
but if I have to call it right or good
this is not the one

*it was not deliberate and I had agency over my distance.

I am glad that I am older
thanks to some crucial luck
at birth ‘n every year come since
I lived long enough to come to understand that all this luck
is held up
by a thing
called white supremacy
and now I have to come up with some proof
that I give a fuck

I am glad that I am older
and my loved ones help pay for my time
to think about how to heal this hurt
I lived long enough to look at it as a lot of work
a lot of
fucking work
Like more than I could do in one small lifetime
but I know
what is owed
Don’t want to be a jerk

 

So I started writing this after eleven and it just banged the noon gong. There is a very powerful melody for this and apart from additional voices, one trombone and two french horns I can’t hear any orchestration and I’m basically okay with it being solo voice. I should record a scratch track. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS THING RIGHT NOW.

I will however continue to sing it through until the tune quits wriggling around quite so hard.

#FreePalestine #Naqba73

Well, another Naqba – the anniversary of the day the newly hatched Israelis started booting the Palestinians off their land – has arrived. Keith and I went to the demo but we’re both pretty easy to overwhelm thanks to the pandemic so we didn’t hang around longer than it took to watch the parade go by, but there were at least 2500 people there and there were literally hundreds of flags and signs, it was super colourful and people put a lot of effort into the signs. Everyone was masked, it was kind of a condition of showing up.

We parked at Edmonds and Skytrained in, and then sprinted home again – we left when the cops started flashing lights at the end of the column, although everything I’ve read in the news indicates it stayed peaceful. You can understand how the local cops would be a bit sensitive at the moment with bodies dropping left and down the street from here.

Anyway, what the Israelis are doing is war crimes and Hamas is trying to mount a defence that is not really working. I don’t want Canada to be supporting Israel in committing genocidal acts over several generations as outlined in David Ben-Gurion’s fucking diary and I understand the nutgrinder Trudeau’s got himself in on the subject and candidly I don’t care. Not in my name.

delish

Keith made lunch yesterday, a Hello Fresh roasted veggie bowl over spring mix. Damn it was good! Before that Paul and I went to Oakalla. Still forgot to mail Dave’s letter.

I am hoping today to go to a demo with Keith, we’ll see what the Grand Joculator of Fortune brings us….

 

AND here’s where having ADD is so much fun. I sent cookies to Jim and Jan and THEY SHOWED UP ON JIM’S BIRTHDAY. I had no idea, because my ADD makes it hard to manage other people’s birthdays so I just followed the previous family practice of not making a big deal about birthdays (which is good, because they are often disappointing) and just giving people stuff as and when you can remember and afford it. Of course Jan knew it was a coincidence but life is good. Anyway mOm you should have your bikkies soon if you haven’t received them already.

It was so lovely to get Jan’s email. You want to think what you do has an effect on people and yip yip yip!! (dancing dog image goes in your brain *here*)

 

Oh, and just you think I’ve gone soft, fuck the police, the VPD in particks. (Article about the false arrest of Selwyn Romilly)

Reasonably productive day

Shopping; didn’t get to Al P.’s New Years Walk in Trout Lake, le sigh, made pizza, wrote and mailed a letter to my mOm, made biscotti dough, three loads of laundry washed and dried and sort of staged for being put away, recorded Bob Dylan’s New Years Day.

This morning I shall bake biscotti and then deliver it to the deserving and the undeserving alike. Then I’ll probably make another batch because otherwise it’s too much room in the fridge as it chills.

Continue reading Reasonably productive day

No Alex

Jeff and Allegra circa 1963

Not so much as a peep out of Planet Bachelor. This paragraph deleted, and there was much rejoicing. I’ve written him a letter, now I have to figure out what I did with the last stamps. Can you believe it? I bought 48 stamps a month ago and they are all gone.

I practiced for an hour this morning, including working up a mandolin accompaniment for “I Guess I Never Felt This Way,” which the kids helped me write while we were living in Montreal. Jesus, such a long time ago now. I wouldn’t trade my troubles then for now, that’s for damned sure.

Visibility outside has crashed from 3 k to less than 200 metres. A FOGGY MORN IN BURNABY.

Time to figure out what the MIT is for today… the Most Important Thing. I’m thinking letters… I have so MANY to ANSWER. Yup.

I’m not happy with my major project for next year, but honestly, if I just record one tiny little thing per day, that will still technically work, and it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s assembling my entire life’s work in one year, so yeah, it’s work. Not everyone gets the chance to do something like that, and most women throughout history couldn’t even read.

The other daily post, that is really really going to be a grind, but 2021 is going to be the year of ‘real content or die tryin’. I’ve posted all the Throwback Thursday pictures for all of November and December 2021 so progress, yay.

Just as an aside, a suicide bomber blew up a substantial chunk of Nashville on Christmas day, but the fucking media is spavining itself coming up with ANY CONSTRUCTION BUT ‘ SUICIDE BOMBER ‘ because that’s reserved for BROWN PEOPLE.

The racism of this society is heinous bullshit.

 

News from Nova Scotia and elsewhere

I can easily believe the RCMP did nothing about a mob of whites almost killing a bunch of Indigenous fishers. But the people who are PROUD of that are  SCUM.

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THIS WILL BE THE LAST HALLOWEEN YOU’LL BE ALLOWED TO BUY FIREWORKS IN VANCOUVER

I am thrilled past words.

Now I know why Buster did a running&leaping paw clap this morning! He was celebrating. (He LOATHES fireworks.)

Phil Shailer of Hollywood wrote this as part of a letter to the editor in 2016

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white disabled people from soapbox: thing
Black disabled people noticing: thing has context, Black people don’t experience it that way
white disabled people to Black disabled people: if you were less whiny you’d experience ableism correctly
Black disabled people: flames dot gif
the above is in response to a simply VILE twitter exchange between a relatively wealthy blind white woman and a relatively brokeass Black disabled woman
Palate cleanser:
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from @theyankeeartist on twitter, Gomez tossing Morticia in the air
4614

right okay fine let me kick this in the goolies

How to Stop Being Offended by Everyone (in just 13 steps)

JFC. This woman need a course correction, but I’m not giving her one in the comments. Here’s the skinnified version of what she said:

My being offended is a choice; take a few breaths before responding; consider the source; discern if it was intentional; interrogate the sense of being offended, is it you or the circumstances; locate the part of you that feels victimized; send yourself loving energy rather than going off; listen to the opposing perspective; release yourself of the duty to police other people’s views; wait 24 hours to respond; and I’m quoting #11 in full because it’s SUCH BULLSHIT I WANT YOU TO SAVOUR er EXPERIENCE ITS EXCESSIVELY SHITTY QUALITY: “11. Remind yourself that we are a collective, and that the person that “wronged” you is from the same Source as you. We all have the same “cosmic DNA”. So hating them is hating you”; see the lesson from the offence as a gift; don’t stay offended.

I’ll be simple, I’ll be brief. Imagine giving this advice to a Black person who’s reading about how Black people are terrible workers; to a trans woman who’s experiencing harassment from cis-magats on the internet; to a woman reading something about feminism and allyship from the man who raped her; to an Indigenous person being mocked for eating country food when they could be vegan and ‘save the planet’; or a Jew sent the long-nosed Pepe meme; or a disabled queer person encouraged to just die already and quit ‘draining the public purse’.

THE ADVICE LOOKS DIFFERENT NOW DOESN’T IT. Don’t tell me who I can’t hate, you peccary-approximate clickbaiter. Listen to the opposing perspective when THEY WANT TO KILL ME and or MY FRIENDS. GET FUCKED! NO, SERIOUSLY! AFTER YOU!

Kelly Albano wrote the above noted clickbait. I’d like to annoy her until she drops the pretence that she’s calm, but I have other shit to do today than tell another white woman that she’s totally fucking clueless about how this feel-good advice appears during climate crisis, fascism on the march, destroyed norms of media balance and public behaviour, kids incarcerated and separated from their parents for being brown and poor, and the future of our young people destroyed by crony capitalism. Fuck you, Kelly Albano. Stay in your bubble and quit posting crap.

Yes yes, Kelly, this is advice for something that ‘offends you’ — not for something that’s an existential threat. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT, you oft-scratched scab, white women have this tremendous tendency to send shit like this to marginalized people. Yup, I see it ALL THE FUCKING TIME on twitter; they will repurpose this feelgoodery to douchewaddery in four seconds flat and some poor schlub who’s legit angry is going to get told to wind it in by a thirty-five year old white woman who’s never been stopped by the cops for anything and who thinks this shit’s a blessing on a troubled world, when it’s just going to get used to hurt people who aren’t ‘evolved enough’ – Jesus wept – not to get angry when someone’s trying to KILL THEM.

And I’m not talking on twitter about this. The idea that someone I know might forward this shite to a marginalized person who’s suffering is fuckin’ more than I can handle.

 

 

another appointment

Next week. Waiting is.

Here’s a list of gender neutral words, quite thought provoking and useful.

Here’s a list of words to clarify language around slavery.

Speaking of language, even Wikipedia has troubles with shitposts:

Image

cleanser:

An image of Jupiter taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light on Aug. 25, 2020, is giving researchers an entirely new view of the giant planet and offers insights into the altitude and distribution of the planet's haze and particles.

credit NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), and the OPAL team

Further cleanser, which is a stoat on a trampoline

and speaking of shitposts, which we weren’t, right? right? Here’s a lovely hit to the face of christian witness:

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peaceful demonstration after a woman was shot in her bed

Shown from the back, in front of high rise apartments, taken Wednesday, September 23, 2020, in the evening, a demonstrator visibly wearing a mask holds up a sign which reads

A COP SHOT A

BLACK WOMAN

AND WAS ONLY

CHARGED

FOR THE SHOTS MISSED

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The demonstrator is wearing a sign saying say her name.

HER NAME WAS BREONNA TAYLOR