Stuart Parker

Deep Green Resistance keynote by Derrick Jensen.

The first draft of chapter nineteen of my memoirs, "Wrong Again, Ira!" is now available on my Patreon. It chronicles an absurd debate involving Geoff Berner, Jeff Ranger, Ira Zbarsky and the Hand of Iraq.

Teaser text:

"Imtiaz, who had the perfect Identitarian profile, was a flaky, unemployable gay Ismaili Muslim who was a member of the Indian diaspora whose people had been pushed out of East Africa during decolonization. He also had irritable bowel syndrome. He had become a spokesperson for a group opposing US sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Hands off Iraq Coalition. But, because Imtiaz never checked his writing for typos or spelling errors, his e-mail signature for the second half of the 1990s was 'Imtiaz Popat, Hand of Iraq.'

While the Hand at least found novel things to say about the dozens of motions he insisted on speaking to on that holiday Monday afternoon, Ira, every time he was recognized by the chairman would say, “now, correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this resolution really about the international coordination of NGOs in the context of…”

Except that literally no resolutions were about the international coordination of any NGOs in any way in any context whatsoever.

So, after a few iterations, when Ira asked this question before going back into the incomprehensible monologue he was giving us in stages, Geoff and Jeff would yell out “you’re wrong Ira!” And as the afternoon wore on the intervention came closer and closer to the start of the sentence. To the point where, after an hour and a half, it was going like this,

Ira: 'Now, correct me if I’m wrong b…'
Geoff and Jeff: 'Wrong AGAIN, Ira!'"

Chapter Nineteen: Wrong again, Ira! | Stuart Parker Get more from Stuart Parker on Patreon

This might just be my most controversial piece yet.

"Similarly, many conservatives acquitted themselves atrociously during the gay liberation movement and AIDS crisis. Lifesaving medication was denied to innocent people; their same s*x partners were spitefully barred from visiting them in hospital; their partners’ pension spousal benefits were confiscated; and marriage was placed out of reach. In the 1980s, Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up performances ended far too frequently with the men who had laughed at the homophobic jokes performed going out and beating up innocent gay men.

Just as I attended anti-Reform Party rallies, I fought for gay rights and organized with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first openly gay MP.

But, as I warned at the time, we were taking shortcuts for which we would pay later. Instead of arguing that people have a right to marry whomever they want, we should have argued that, extending marriage rights to gay couples was a pro-social move of intrinsic that would make our societies better, not the creation of a new kind of right. Similarly, when we argued that we should never judge people for the weird s*x they like, I thought: 'this is heading for trouble.'

But, the Bizarro Churchill effect is, of course, present on questions of human s*xuality now. If men need to wear diapers and s**t themselves in the street in front of us, dance provocatively in s*xualized getups in front of grade schoolers and wave their junk teenage girls in locker rooms, who are we to judge them? After all, if objecting to one form of male s*xuality showing up in public was wrong in the 80s, objecting to any form of male s*xuality asserting itself in any context is inherently wrong at all times and places."

The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id – StuartParker.ca The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id Beginning in the 1890s during the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill had a consistent response to whatever ailed the British people: “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!” That plan did ...

Look! It's an old school socialist essay informed by Marxism:

"You see, whereas the two-tier medical systems of the other Global North countries make access to prompt and quality care increasingly contingent upon wealth, Canada’s system makes these things contingent upon class. Whom one knows, with whom one socializes and who is inside one’s larger social world determines access to health care in Canada.

Like old school class systems, the Canadian system looks down on those who might be termed nouveau riche and shunts them into poor person healthcare or out of the country. Healthcare access in Canada is about class and culture in the traditional sense, measuring one’s social refinement, family history, educational background, literally what parties you attend and how much sophistication and decorum one can show there. One’s socio-cultural proximity, of which wealth is merely one very important facet, determines your access to Canadian healthcare.

For the members of Canada’s commissar class and liberal bourgeoisie, there is no healthcare shortage, no access problem."

Canada’s Emerging Two-Tier Society – StuartParker.ca Canada’s Emerging Two-Tier Society Until it was gradually overtaken by “the Tories will ban abortion” beginning in the 2000 Canadian federal election, the favourite, and not wholly inaccurate or illegitimate scare tactic used by Canada’s Liberals and New Democrats was to claim that conservat...

When is the last time you said, "My team made a mistake"? Because big teams make mistakes all the time.

It really disturbs me to watch these cultural shifts, first on the right, then on the left, where people feel that their duty to their team is unqualified and unquestioning support of every single boneheaded move it makes.

It's like everybody is now an unpaid intern PR flak who is trying to impress their boss at the DNC or RNC.

If we think of orthodoxy as malaria, Dunning-Kruger is sickle cell. It's still a debilitating condition but it offers peculiar immunities that have population-level utility.

Darkness is falling everywhere it seems. Looks like I picked the right day to skip town.

If someone keeps saying crazier and crazier things out of fear, you need to talk them down.

But if pointing out that what they are saying doesn't make sense is ineffective in doing so after a few tries then you have to move on and address the underlying fear.

Because until they become less fearful, more courageous or even more frightened of sounding crazy to you, they will keep saying nutty s**t.

"In the next four months, two and a half million Sudanese could die of hunger-related causes. That’s twice as many as Pol Pot’s regime starved in Cambodia over four years...

Since civil war erupted in April 2023, ten million Sudanese have fled their homes. One out of every eight internally displaced persons in the world is Sudanese, and more children have been displaced from their homes in Sudan than anywhere else.

And yet the world seems to hardly notice the agony of Sudan and its people. Donors have contributed only 31 percent of the $2.7 billion the UN has requested for Sudan—a shortfall that is worsening the hunger crisis."

The UAE’s Secret War in Sudan How international pressure can stop the genocidal violence.

Back in the 2000s and 2010s, the Left spoke a lot about how increasing Islamic extremist militancy and bellicosity were best explained by a phenomenon called "blowback," whereby people who had no intrinsic sympathy for Islamist politics would become radicalized and mobilized because they or their community had been irreparably harmed by the US and its allies.

I believe that and still do. It's a big reason that, as someone who hates pretty much every decision Israel has made in the twenty-first century but nevertheless supports the continued existence of the state, I opposed the punitive expedition to Gaza from the beginning. Killing Hamas militants attacking Israel does not necessarily result in a reduction in the number of Hamas militants attacking Israel, due to the blowback phenomenon.

The funny thing is that, in their home societies, the contemporary Left who preached the doctrine of blowback during the Iraq War, give not one iota of thought to domestic blowback. Dissidents are defamed, canceled, fired, blacklisted, tormented, harassed, incarcerated, psychologically destroyed.

But the thing is that they are not islands, entire of themselves. They are part of families, friend circles, churches, workplaces; and their suffering does not stop with them as individuals. What I have noticed over the past five years, moving among the canceled as I have, is that people's ideas about what should happen to those who did this to us have, to say the least, hardened.

And our sense of what an emergency stopping further advances by the authoritarians has only grown more urgent, desperate.

And yet I don't think the proponents and stooges of neo-McCarthyism have given a minute of thought to blowback in their own societies.

I can't resist just one more on the Olympics. I mean my family have been involved since 1912 so it's hard to walk away.

Progressives, has it ever occurred to you that the conservative Muslims running Algeria are trolling you by mocking your stupid gender ideology?

That they're just letting out film of this guy giving Andrew Tate-style motivational speeches about masculinity, having him adjust his balls in front of all of you on live TV, showing off photos of him living as a man, photos of him greeting female boxers who are all wearing hijabs while he is not.

They're doing it just to watch you make the next lame excuse, offer the next outrageous justification. I bet the social conservatives in the Algerian government are pi***ng themselves laughing at your stupid memes about how this guy they sent to mock you is your special magic unicorn rainbow victim.

I'm breaking my rule against posting two gender critical essays in a row because this piece is timely and seeks to answer a timely question: why did seeing women being punched in the face by men in the boxing ring make people more likely to support Genderwang?

Breast Gropes, Rabbit Punches and the Politics of Fear at Versailles: How Machiavelli’s the Prince Helps Us Understand the Paris Olympics – StuartParker.ca Breast Gropes, Rabbit Punches and the Politics of Fear at Versailles: How Machiavelli’s the Prince Helps Us Understand the Paris Olympics Every single time I write a gender critical blog post, a feel a very familiar feeling: fear deep in the pit of my stomach, rising through my abdomen and reachin...

Adding this to the list of "things you feared the Christian Right were going to do but instead was done by liberal progressives," I present:

Banning Richard Dawkins from Facebook for accurately describing evolutionary biology:

Despite the example of Eammon de Valera's Ireland and other Cold War Catholic theocracies, I think a lot of people do not understand how you can't have a free society in which abortion is prohibited.

Freedom is about the law only being able to govern the outside of your body. The moment you let the law enter your body through an or***ce, freedom is gone.

An important question for people living through the social crisis of the contemporary West:

How many unorthodox opinions do you still hold at this point? How many opinions do you hold that are not part of the pre-packaged orthodoxy of either MSNBC or FoxNews?

How frequently are you reacting to information that does not fit with an orthodox worldview by claiming that it is "fake news," "disinformation" or a "false flag"?

George Gibault believed that politics in the West reached its zenith when many key activists on the right were people who escaped the Warsaw Pact and many on the left had survived the Great Depression.

That's because politics was strongly inflected by ordinary decent people trying to protect their neighbours from real evils they had escaped or survived.

Those folks kept the busybodies and the profiteers in better check.

Cowardice has a thousand masks.

Donald Trump is basically Godzilla. People cheer for Godzilla when they believe Tokyo has become so corrupt that the only thing for it is being destroyed by a giant radioactive monster.

Well, all that kvetching and upset over the Olympics has proven intellectually fruitful even if not emotionally so. Here is the first of my two essays that attempt to connect the big cultural dust-ups over the Versailles Games over the past week.

Spicy excerpt:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass chills us with its prescience here. Humpty Dumpty’s promiscuous, arbitrary and dictatorial control of language is power, nothing more, nothing less.

Woke apologists like Judith Butler vulgarize and redefine the linguistic constructionism of Jacques Derrida and the postmodernists and basically argue that reality, our shared world is made out of words and that if we change the words, we change the world.

They also vulgarize and debase Michel Foucault and the poststructuralists’ idea of the “episteme,” arguing not that how knowledge is “made” and power is distributed are intimately related in a complex dance but instead simply that knowledge and power are either the same thing or completely interchangeable things.

True Names of the Paris Olympiad: Humpty Dumpty and the Adam-God Heresy at the Versailles Olympics – StuartParker.ca True Names of the Paris Olympiad: Humpty Dumpty and the Adam-God Heresy at the Versailles Olympics I don’t think anyone doubted that the Paris Olympics or, as I prefer to think of them, the Versailles Olympics, were going to showcase the current state of the madness or morbidities of the world. Bu...

Gonna leave this here and not respond to your comments.

We, on the Old Growth Left, have a problem: we cannot rid ourselves of the habit of seeing the political morbidities of our age as correctable with analysis, information, education and persuasion.

But this would mean that what we are up against is slow wittedness and ignorance. We are not up against those things. We are up against authoritarianism.

People in thrall to the authoritarians are not going to change their positions because of arguments we make or information we give them. Because that's not what got them to adopt the positions they hold now.

They hold the positions they hold out of the desire for approval, out of fear, out of the desire to conform, out of a need for community in a world that is flying apart. Nobody actually convinced them that NAFTA and Maastricht were great deals, that men can become women, that we should have an uncontrolled border and a rightless, stateless labouring class pouring across it, that if we just throw enough free drugs at addicts they will stop taking too many drugs, etc.

You can't win an argument with them because they don't believe their own arguments. The public positions they stake-out are self-protective and/or status-seeking. And the more ridiculous they sound in defense of orthodoxy, the more approval they attain.

The way forward is to build community, to build an alternative social and economic spaces. It may be fun to skewer bulls**t on social media but the reality is that we are actually helping the authoritarians when we do because we are providing weak people an opportunity to sound stupid and dogmatic in public and prove their loyalty and worth, thereby allaying the fear that serves as their primary motivator.

There is an exciting new conspiracy theory about Nelson Mandela. It has inspired an essay. For the second time, my blog features a weird dream a friend of mine had in the 80s. Read the essay to find out how I connect this nonsense to the problems of the global left since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the results of the most recent South African election.

"Steve was fifteen years old and still in high school when the new, shorter, white-haired, peaceful-seeming, almost beatific Mandela began making appearances on the world stage in 1989. And in his dream, he learned that Mandela would be getting out of prison to celebrate his seventy-first birthday and that Steve had been chosen to host the affair in the small apartment in a three-storey walk-up, on Vine Street in Southwest Vancouver, that he shared with his mother.

Steve is one of the world’s great raconteurs and has a talent for offering up only the details most necessary to understand the shape of a story, like those economical paintings in which the artist renders an image using the fewest brush strokes possible. So, the narrative of the dream is awfully short:

'Once people showed up, everything was going just fine, until Nelson started doing his card tricks. And then, for an encore, he started passing little red plastic combs through his head. Then the police showed up and tear-gassed the sofa.'"

True Dreams of Robben Island: Dreams, Conspiracy Theories and the Public Memory of Nelson Mandela – StuartParker.ca True Dreams of Robben Island: Dreams, Conspiracy Theories and the Public Memory of Nelson Mandela Truth, Reconciliation and the Creation of Saint NelsonFollowing the last South African election, in which the African National Congress finally completed its multi-decade project of squandering its parl...

Sometimes a "conspiracy theory" is a way of articulating a deep and true feeling in one's soul with a non-literal narrative. I was told such a theory last night by David Marwa. It made me tear-up:

"Our Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 80s."

Finally wrapping up my series on our cities' turn against cosmopolitanism. A few punchy highlights:

"We need look no further than the Gospels to see what an important tool urbanization is in the self-fashioner’s toolbox. When Jesus visits his home town of Nazareth, no one there will believe he is the Son of God or the Messiah; they won’t even believe he is a competent exorcist or interpreter of scripture. “And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.’” Luke 4:24. In other words, no one who watched you grow up is going to be convinced of your new special identity.

In healthy societies, prophets and other sorts of self-fashioners are few and far between. But, as Monty Python so brilliantly observed in The Life of Brian half a century ago, the culture of the New Left shares with Judea and Samaria in the era of Jesus, John the Baptist, Dositheus and Simon Magus a culture generative of self-fashioning projects.

In most healthy societies, who people think you are is not something people believe they have much of a choice about. Especially in village-based societies, your identity just naturally accretes to you. People form an idea of who you are based on their shared experiences with you, the associates you surround yourself with, the work you do to make a living. You discover who you are as people develop expectations about you, tell stories about you, confer nicknames on you. Your identity is not something you make but something you co-discover with the people around you."

The Anti-Cosmopolitian City – Part 3: The Problem of the Self-Made – StuartParker.ca The Anti-Cosmopolitian City – Part 3: The Problem of the Self-Made When we think about the term “self-made” we usually associate it with a semi-apocryphal Horatio Alger story of how a rich man made himself rich. But the reality is that bootstrap narratives are just one kind of self-making prac...

Chapter Eighteen of the memoirs is now out!

Here is some teaser text introducing one of the most entertaining minor villains of the text, a man who will come to be known as Mister Avocado, the legendary Korky Day.

"But there was a bit of a problem with the team. It comprised, Margot, David, Bob Everton and Korky Day. While Bob, David and Margot were pretty quirky people, Korky was an absolute loon, but a hard-working and surprisingly effective one.

By this point, Korky had been thrown out of the Wreck Beach Preservation Society, the local n**e beach advocacy group, because he was too extreme and disruptive in his advocacy of nudism, insisting that the group conduct all its meetings in the n**e. He had also been thrown out of La Leche League, the local breastfeeding advocacy organization for being too extremist in his advocacy of private and public lactation. He was also, like my dad, one of those fanatical anti-smoking activists who liked confronting individual smokers and trying to make them put their ci******es out.

Korky had a distinctive look. He mostly wore threadbare t-shirts with swim trunks with the liner cut out in the summer and ancient corduroy trousers in the winter. He had not cut any of his hair, irrespective of its location, in more than a decade. It was upon seeing him in his summer attire that Steve Lyons, my high school chum, had coined the term 'full body beard.'"

Chapter Eighteen: Being a Giant Is a Vocation | Stuart Parker Get more from Stuart Parker on Patreon

I'm not going the way he went. So don't worry about me hurting myself. I would never kill myself. Too many bad people who be smug and joyful if I did, at this point.

But I would note that Abbie Hoffman was my age, fifty-two, when he committed su***de, largely because he could not handle discovering how little Jerry Rubin and the other Yippie activists had ever believed in it all.

Thinking that he could dig himself out of debt by doing a debating tour with Rubin, "The Yippie vs. the Yuppie" he sank into an increasingly deep depression as he discovered that it was the old Jerry, not the new one who had been the illusion.

Whether you loved or hated Hugo Chavez, you should be glad to see the end of Nicolas Maduro. Every bad thing about Chavismo was amplified under his rule and everything decent about, thrown down, danced-upon and destroyed.

The best thing that could have happened to the actual far right is the decision by progressives to define everything and everyone they don't like as "far right."

By beating all meaning out of the term, they have actually de-stigmatized the actual far right. Once you decide that anyone who doesn't think men should compete in women's professional cycling, believes that no mass graves were discovered in Canada in 2021, supports a negotiate peace in Ukraine, thinks Covid might have spread from a lab leak, has been interviewed by Fox, given a talk to a conservative group, or opposes the ideological censorship of social media is part of a far-right hate movement leavened by Russian disinformation, people stop caring about the label "far right." They stop being afraid of it because it probably just refers to someone progressives disagree with but don't know how to debate.

And by applying the logic of contagion i.e. anyone who "associates" with a member of the putative "far right" professionally, politically or socially, what progressives have done is define "far right" as follows: any person who is not actively compliant with neo-McCarthyism.

And that's a shame. Because there are more actual members of the racist, authoritarian right out there every day. But no one is going to heed those warnings when people like me are trotted out as examples of right-wing extremism.

The Great Society was hard to kill. We know that because it took from 1979-2016 to put it down.