Pretty Heady Stuff

Imre Szeman is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His recent book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life, examines corporate and state control of the transition to renewables.We talk here about how Futures of the Sun explores the competing eco-stories being offered by people intent on shaping the transition to fit their vision and version of a renewable society. Imre discusses how key players are working hard to make sure a greener, cleaner future will look much like the world we live in today and examines the rhetoric, ideology, and politics of liberal nationalists intent on fighting a war against climate change, billionaire solar entrepreneurs who believe only in themselves, and the populist far right who want no change at all.Offering possible new critical and political avenues, Szeman reveals how those on the environmental left can ensure their vision of egalitarianism beyond the status quo can become the reality of our renewable future.Celebrate Earth Day by thinking with us about what's going on in the ersatz push for renewables and join the struggle for a future that is more radically democratic than the present.#earthday #climatepolitics #energytransition #fossilfuels #endingfossilfuels #oilandgas #anticapitalism #internationalism

Max Haiven is the author of many books on finance capitalism, social movement organizing, anti-fascist revolt and the politics of revenge. His latest project focuses on games as a major feature of everyday life under advanced capitalism. His writing on games has really grown my understanding of what’s going on when people take on the sort of abstract agency they can experience in an imagined environment when they play.Beyond writing about games, Max has designed a wicked new board game called Billionaires and Guillotines, published by Pluto Press in their first foray into game production. The Kickstarter campaign to support the game is running until the end of April. Get behind it! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plutopress/billionaires-and-guillotinesIn Billionaires & Guillotines, players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets. Help us make a wicked, easy-to-learn board game for the coming class war.Will you play the aristocrat or the war profiteer? The tech overlord or the property speculator? In any case, you’ll try and build a private space program, marry (and divorce) a celebrity spouse and start your own scam charity in this raucous game for aspiring billionaires and their enemies. As the revolution approaches, the billionaires have one chance to cooperate to delay their downfall… but otherwise, may the best (or worst) tycoon win. Billionaires & Guillotines is so easy that 2-5 envious losers can learn and play in under an hour. It is heartily approved by many satisfied players who hate games and the uber-rich. Start by selecting your billionaire: the media baron, the aristocrat, the war profiteer, the property speculator or the tech overlord. Each has to collect five prizes to win, which might include a private golf club, a mercenary army, a cryogenic tank, a luxury bunker or a celebrity spouse. Each turn, players draw cards they can use to bid on prizes or make it more difficult for their opponents. And, yes, like all self-made billionaires, you should definitely bribe the government to favor your investments and sabotage your rivals.As the game proceeds the billionaire’s frantic competition unleashes social, ecological and economic crises. Every financial meltdown, political scandal and climate agony presents more opportunities for profit, but also makes the game more and more unstable… and it also unleashes rebels who threaten to end the game for everyone.On the brink of revolution, the billionaires are given one opportunity to sacrifice a small bit of their wealth and continue the game… otherwise, out comes the guillotine with a free (if inaccurate) haircut for everyone!In the advanced version game, each billionaire also has a special “job” with secret powers: a crooked politician, an insider trader, an unscrupulous gangster, even a celebrity influencer (who survives the revolution), making the game delightfully replay-able and deliciously irreverent.In Billionaires & Guillotines’ first expansion pack, Reform or Revolution one player takes on the role of a rebel sympathizer! But are they a well-intentioned reformist, working with the billionaires to resolve crises? Or are they secretly a nefarious revolutionary, working to bring the system down from the inside? Reform or Revolution allows for six people to play Billionaires & Guillotines.Billionaires & Guillotines has already been playtested by thousands of jealous losers who have nothing better to do than hate on the hard working ultra rich. Nonetheless our small team of nihilistic gremlins remains at their posts, ironing out the last kinks in the design and making adjustments that will make the game irresistible to the vengeful masses.

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, and the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia.

His newest book, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, talks about how the far right Conservative leader has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. Ripper charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. 

Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.

Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.

Judy Haiven is the co-founder of Equity Watch and part of the national steering committee for Independent Jewish Voices Canada. She worked for nearly 20 years as a professor of industrial relations at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Now, her main focus is left wing activism and political writing. As a Jewish person who supports Palestinian human rights, her voice is a powerful source of moral courage at a time when the ongoing genocide in Gaza is still cloaked in claims that opposing Zionism is tantamount to anti-semitism. We talk about that conflation in this interview, and why it's become a means of explaining and excusing the inexcusable: a reign of terror and a commitment to killing children, erasing families and committing genocide in Gaza. Haiven bluntly explains that the way anti-semitism has evolved is that it is now profoundly attached to criticism of Israel. What do we do in that situation? How do we find clarity? What will it take to gain enough political traction for the liberation of Palestine from Western imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism to become possible?I recommend reading her blog, which is called Another Ruined Dinner Party. It's autobiographical, searingly critical and wonderfully funny. I want to say, before we get to the interview, that I'm at a point where I can't help but feel that continuing to talk and write about Palestine is falling short. Harsha Walia mentioned on social media recently that she is humbled by the many calls for her to weigh in, to publicly speak to this unrelenting nightmare. What she said was that she is "ambivalent about writing" because it is so "jarring to have spent years connecting & organizing against violences in multiple places, registers, and geographies, and for it to be exploding all around us." I continue to give a platform to anticolonial communicators because the common sense assumption still seems to be that Palestinians are not our equals, their lives do not matter to the same extent that the lives of other human beings matter. But the overwhelming destruction, the Zionist wrath, that has been inflicted upon Palestine is impossible to ignore now. We are living in the aftermath of a foreseeable slaughter, which no one seems capable of stopping. How do we reckon with this reality?

#freepalestine #anticolonialism #indepedentjewishvoices #leftpolitics #anticapitalism #settlercolonialism #canadanews #canadianpolitics

Deborah Britzman is a practicing psychoanalyst and philosopher of education. Her research connects psychoanalysis with pedagogy, teacher education, and the idea of vulnerability as a "constitutive inequality."

We discuss her recent book When History Returns, which brings together theories of learning with the paradoxes of social strife. It argues that history "returns" through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict.

We also discuss Anticipating Education, a collection of some of the most influential pieces of her writing. Some of these pieces examine the dilemmas created by anticipating education, provoked when teachers, students, and professors encounter the unknown while trying to know emotional situations affecting their waiting, wanting, and wishing for teaching and learning.

The challenge, for Britzman, is to imagine a way that education can work “in the service of humane public life” and “ethical reparation when humans have never lived in a world without violence and when dwelling in the failure of peace and in histories of war may invoke cynicism and hopelessness.”

To this end, she reflects on her experiences growing up in Ohio and hearing “many teachers and parents” say that they “felt the students [shot by the National Guard at Kent State University] deserved to be killed.” Consensus around who deserves killing can spur and be spurred by what Britzman calls a “failure of imagination… and an attraction to quick solutions.”In this moment where there are too many crises to count, Britzman's "light touch" gives those fearful of political complexity a way in, and that means something right now.

#education #domination #rumination #university #psychoanalysis #writing #biography #memoir #feminism #resistance #inequality

Abdaljawad Omar is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. He has written some indispensable articles on the assumptions people have about Palestine and Palestinian resistance, on the internal tensions in the Palestinian diaspora, the complicity of the United States with Israel’s genocide, and the ongoing exterminationist attitudes that Western elites have toward Palestinian society.Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism.In this conversation, we talk about how the October 7, 2023 attack by a Hamas-led coalition of Palestinian resistance fighters sought to “decompose” or “deform” the reality of oppression that people in Gaza have been living under for a very long time, and especially the state of siege that Palestinians there had been suffering since 2006. This conversation will likely sound one-sided to anyone who believes the self-justifying fictions of the Israeli state, not only because the three of us believe that Israel’s brutal domination of Palestine is unjustifiable, but because the question of Palestine has been strategically simplified into a winner-take-all binary, where we are forced to pick a side—while knowing that Western elites have created a situation in which siding with Israel is the only acceptable position. Instead of capitulating to the unthinking, racist reductionism of this position, we aim to take a step back and see the settler colonization of indigenous Palestinians in historical perspective and grasp the current state of political subjectivity and discourse within Gaza and the West Bank from a place of empathy and solidarity.The only questions, for the three of us, are how do we name and frame the obviously genocidal acts of the Zionist state, how is Palestine grappling with the decision to rupture the relegation of Gaza to slow death, and the West Bank to subjugation, what did that decision to release a flood of resistance expose about the law and sovereignty and the capitulation of certain parts of the left to censorship and quietism, and what will come after the flood, after the rebirth of the movement to liberate Palestine and restore human rights to Palestinians?#gaza #westbank #zionistregime #israelpalestine #gazagenocide #anticolonialism