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Fleeing the House of Horrors is a work of feminist sociology... It is based on detailed interviews with 39 women in Ontario who had successfully left a relationship with an abusive male partner.

The book spends the first few chapters setting the stage in terms of past research and academic writing in the general field of male violence against women, including...

(See the full review at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

Thinking Through is a short volume of essays, most or all published originally in other venues over a number of years. Himani Bannerji is a Canadian academic whose politics are, as the subtitle would indicate, feminist, anti-racist, and Marxist. It is, however, a particular kind of Marxism, as much of her work develops themes from the work (and the particular reading of Marx) of Dorothy Smith...There are a number of important issues that Bannerji tackles in the book. The first major essay looks at the relationship between identity politics and class politics, and presents...

(See the full review here at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

Recent polls show support for Dick Cheney at eighteen percent. Of course it is amusing to see support for this tyrant at such rock-bottom levels. Obviously it's laughable that Cheney has even a single supporter. That's not the point. The point is who are these people? There is a lesson to be learned here and it's an important one.
Who are these people? Who continues to support Dick Cheney (and by association, the President)? What should be done? Should these people be engaged in debate? If you do you will be wasting your time, time better spent stopping them. Should we teach them the error of their ways? "If they haven't learned by now," the saying goes. These dead-enders, to borrow a phrase, are people who would, for example, support the use of torture. Torture! Think about it!

Does anyone know if there is there any truth to some GIs signaling that if they die in Iraq that they desire to have their remains (ashes) dropped or spread on President Bush's Texas ranch or personally delivered to him by a surviving family member? I've heard that the thinking is, the president had them killed therefore he owns them. Similar to you broke it you own it.

So,

I was visiting a blog I found while seeking and found more words about the CBS, radio personality, nappy haired ho fiasco.

The blogger was saying something to the effect of "Who would have known this man would have actually been fired. Usually, someone in the public eye would get a slap on the wrist along with some community hours or some cultural sensitivity training."

I commented saying something to the effect of

"I don't think what happened to that radio announcer has anything to do with public outcry. This is the media we're talking about, remember? Their motives are often obscure and convoluted, yet always related to money and power...."

Despite the similarities between the conflicts in Iraq and Darfur, "the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?"

Perhaps if White westerners are perpetrators, we must name it "insurgency/counterinsurgency", but if the "bad guys" are Arabs, we name it "genocide" - this makes it a morality play, a simple story of good v evil.

One fairly common response to documents such as this book is the quite sensible observation that it is not reports, books, studies, and research, research, research that is going to change the world -- only organizing will do that. At the same time, this cynicism about the role of documents can easily be taken too far. Carefully crafted written words can have a tremendous impact. Saying this is not buying into...

(See the full review here at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

I've been encountering a lot of liberal lefty racism and religious fundamentalism disguised as political analysis online over the time I've spent blogging among a majority amerikkkan bloggers who claim to detest their government's foreign policy as related to the middle east. People spend a lot of time discussing and debating how best to oust the village idiot from his high paying job. They debate which upper class smiling figurehead should replace him. Should the figurehead of choice be an affluent light skinned heterosexual black man? Or should they go with an affluent and stoic heterosexual white woman who has seen the inside of the big house before and liked it so much she wanted to return but this time openly at the helm?

While back in Utah over the holidays I heard a remark about the Mormon church that I used to hear a lot when I was younger: “The Church is true (or good, perfect—there are several variations), but the people in it aren’t.” I remember a friend of mine reciting that same phrase and I answered by saying that I felt the exact opposite—“the Church isn’t good, but some of the people in it are”. He took offense. In other words, he found it okay for non-Mormons to dislike individual Mormons or even the entire Mormon community, but intolerable to critique the church itself—the institution. At the time, my friend’s reaction surprised me, but it shouldn't have.

I had read about racial profiling before, but the first time I was really made aware of it in a personal way was while on a whitewater rafting trip at a fairly cushy, decidedly not-wild portion of the Ottawa River. We were a large group of mostly young people who were either part of the same workplace or had friends in that workplace, so some people knew each other well and others not at all. One evening, in amongst various sorts of partying-related activities, about ten from this larger group were sitting around a camp fire, talking -- eight young white women and men, and two young Black men. The conversation turned to past interactions with the police...

See the full review at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.

Observe our current executive regime--
Take it at face value and observe the face it shows the public. The face shown before the cameras, the star of the show, the president himself, the man and his words. Is he an idiot? Is he an idiot or he is able to mask reality in a veil of incompetence and buffoonery? How can we possibly know? [more at Mule Z]

Persuasive political writing (of a kind I am able to stomach these days) appears toward the end of Rory Stewart's, The Places in Between.  Bookended by his personal testimony of walking through Afghanistan only two weeks after the new (US puppet) "government" had been established, this passing indictment of the window-dressing/McEnlightenment model of international intervention casts a far longer, darker shadow than it would have otherwise.  Readers are invited to read my quasi-review (of the phenomenon of "maverick" journalists) at pas au-delà.

Happy New Year to all, but especially to Nick.

Take this quiz . . .

Is Preznut Doubleduh:

___ Crazy?

___ Drinking?

___ Receiving messages from God?

___ Dumb as a truckload of cinder blocks?

___ Smoking crack?

___ Just following orders?

___ All of the above?

The answer is at P!. Well, maybe.

(P! has moved. Please change your link URL to this address. Thank you.)

I'm not really used to reviewing books that are not straight-up nonfiction. These days it's mostly history and/or theory. And it's not because I don't like anything else, just because of circumstance. Brand, one of Canada's foremost authors, writes novels (I've read and very much enjoyed At the Full and Change of the Moon), political essays (I would recommend Bread Out of Stone, especially the essay on cultural appropriation), history (an important work of oral history of Black women who worked in Ontario between 1920 and 1950), and poetry (haven't read any myself but it is also widely acclaimed), and she has a long history of grassroots involvement in...

(Continued here at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

Often the most important question that we can ask ourselves about texts that we encounter is, why should I care? Sometimes this reveals more about the book; other times, it tells us more about our own paths and politics.

Reading Capital Politically is a short, simple book with a deceptively narrow focus. The main body of the text is concerned with providing a close reading of the first three chapters of Volume 1 of Karl Marx's Capital that is politically useful in struggles. I have never read any Marx directly, except for...

(Continued here at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

A central question in all politics, albeit one that is seldom even recognized let alone effectively addressed in more privileged progressive (broadly defined) spaces, is who exactly are "we"? Who composes the collective subject pushing for change in a given instance, and how in practical terms is that collectivity constituted? What are the political implications of our answers to those questions? What might we wish to try and do differently?

Often in our semi-conscious dealings with the questions of "we", we forcibly...

(Continued here at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

Holloway begins his book not with the word but with the scream.

He writes:

In the beginning is the scream. We scream. When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO.

This is an important beginning. I like many...

(Continued here at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

Dorothy Smith is perhaps Canada's foremost feminist sociologist. Her greatest contribution to the discipline is the elaboration of a sociology -- not a methodology, but an actual alternative sociology -- called institutional ethnography (IE). This book is her most recent, most complete theoretical discussion (albeit with plenty of concrete examples from actual IE studies over the years) of the bases and major features of IE.

I first became aware of Smith's work about four years ago when I...

(Continued here on A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.)

What do Danish cartoonists and the Pope have in common? They're both apt to spew vile Islamophobic material, and act shocked that nearly 21% of the world's population are not only offended, but quite angry with them (from The Guardian):

"The Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio: 'It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to undertake a comprehensive study of the jihad and of Muslim ideas on the subject, still less to offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful.'"

Perhaps if the 'Holy Father' had undertaken a comprehensive study of jihad, he would have been less prone to 'offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful'. But then again, anyone who would completely overlook a backlash to statements such as the following, lives in a box so dark and cavernous that he espouses views held by a 600-year-old Byzantine emporer:

Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am a figment of my own imagination.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am here at this point in time and space. Who are you?
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am the water running under the bridge on which you are standing.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am looking back at you through this three dimensional mirror.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am the other you are looking through to see me.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I was here a moment ago, but now I am still here.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I will be gone, and you will still be here.
Ask me where I am, and I will tell you,
You can see me. You can hear me.
You can even touch me,
but you cannot come with me.