Critical Perspectives and Reflections

A s a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867) According to CNN (Isadore, 2022) the oil corporate giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron both reported massive second quarter, three-month profit gains “thanks to record gasoline prices during the quarter”. Exxon's profit, came in at an obscene $17.6 billion, almost double what it made in its very profitable first quarter as oil and gas prices started to surge in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to the CNN wording. Its 2nd quarter profit was up a stunning (to me) 273% from the same period last year. Chevron raked in a $1...

  I grew up as a Cayuga Language Immersion student, right from kindergarten to high school…and then I dropped out in grade 10… I have definitely come a long way on the journey of learning how to read and write in English, later in life, and doing my best to push myself to get a westernized education, and when I say push, I really mean PUSH… I’ve had to force myself to step out of my comfort zone in ways that were so cringing, scary and difficult…fearing nothing but judgment or whether you’re good enough to succeed… But it still absolutely surprises me some days just how much I need a dictionary (online or off) to know the meaning of what I think are everyday words. I do my best at being articulate when I’m writing or speaking, but it definitely requires some extra work and effort, as a result of being in immersion and dropping out of school early… But there is nothing more of a blessing to me, than growing up with our language and culture, regardless of how much I use it now or pa...

I thought I would share my response to a Con Cockwobble who thought that a statement, that the right in Canada will be pushing hard to reopen the abortion issue, was the raving of a madman. After putting out the standard Con talking points, i.e., falsehoods, he called me a few names. He, of course, blamed Trudeau for everything. Standard procedure. My response: The issue of Roe vs Wade is not going away and will remain in the headlines for a long time. The timing of this frankly couldn’t be better for Maxime Bernier and the PPC, and couldn’t be worse for PP and the Tories. The hue and cry from their troglodyte base will be deafening as it demands that Canada revoke a woman’s right to choose. Timing is everything in life, this is particularly true in politics with the chaotic, insane comings and goings in America on so many issues. Canadians feel like we live above a meth lab and many will no longer visit the omnishambles, be it due to gun violence, racism etc. Now that the knuckle drag...

Recently I came across what I initially assumed to be a satirical take on the Rapture. That, for the uninitiated, is the belief, by some Christians, that one day in the foreseeable future a bunch of people will, at some point, be whooshed up bodily into heaven. I assume that these would be believers, who had lived lives of purity, go to church every Sunday, send in donations to various televangelists and believe that the bible is the ultimate in scientific truth. They doubtless don’t drink, smoke, swear, fornicate, believe in abortion and avoid non-believers unless in attempts to convert them. They would be the crème de la crème of the fundamentalist Christian set. This particular post, on Facebook, was aimed at believers, who were being offered a pet care service should they be among the elect to be “raptured up” as the phrase is. It seems, at least in the illustration in the ad, that the elect would all be naked. I guess there is not much call for clothing in heaven but maybe it mean...

By any standards we’d have to say that last couple of weeks constitute a “sabbattis horribilis”, a hell of a nightmare for democracy and decency in the USA. In week one the myopic “originalist” right-wing “elders” of the Supreme Court struck down the right of women, to access abortion, by a six to three margin1. This, though a reported 72% of US voters support the 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade (Saunders, 2022). Interestingly and distressingly, there is evidence that one of the robed “wise persons” (one of them is a woman), the dreadful Clarence Thomas, has in his gun-sights the right to same sex marriage as well as the right to freely use contraception. It is as yet unclear to what degree the other five ideologically blind denizens of the right-wing majority are of the same opinion. Then on Friday of the same week, the court made another six to three decision that will make it more difficult for the states to regulate which individuals may possess lethal ordinance, i.e., guns...

A person is a person through other people . - Michael Schur I don’t know if up till the last little while I’ve been inattentive to the developments in the zeitgeist, but recently I seem to be coming upon more and more chatter, radio interviews, articles in the culture section of the various magazines and newspapers I read, extolling the importance for the nurturing of our individual selves. You know the topics, “self” sufficiency, regard for “oneself”, love of “self”, depending on “oneself”, paying no attention to anyone who is not four-square 100% on “our” side, “self” care etc., etc. Of course, anyone who engages with Face Book knows what I’m taking about, the messages are everywhere. The individual or the ego, in these messages is seen as supreme. There is nary a word regarding notions of social wellbeing, the public good or the necessity of forging and maintaining social relationships. Perhaps this is not so surprising given the number of YouTube videos available on social media an...

Our very new family member, Kleio, a rescue dog (ft note, a Jindo from Korea) got loose this evening (a worker had left our gate open. But it was essentially my fault for not telling them all to make sure they closed it on leaving.) Kleio has had a very rough life (though seemingly a pure bread she was probably abandoned on the streets of a Korean city, nabbed by someone who planned to sell her for dog meat, and finally rescued by an agency with headquarters in Toronto, ending up here in Canada). She had been with us only about six or seven weeks, too short a period to bond with my wife and I. I’m sure when she found herself alone, she probably became disorganized and then freaked out and just started running. A neighbour across from us heard me calling for her and offered to help. Wendy (the neighbour) just jumped in her car and started driving around and asking anyone she saw about Kleio. Other neighbours also went looking on foot as did our son-in-law Darryl JG Newbury who biked all...

Let’s be crystal clear on this matter: I support Ukraine, and Ukrainians, in this war 100% and unapologetically. Yes, Ukraine has an Alt right political element of extremism, just as does Canada, the USA, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Poland… The list is endless. So let’s stop treating it like we’re “shocked and appalled”. At the same time, let’s not deny it. Folks, we can call fake, BS etc. all we wish and it may very well be. However, Russia, will exploit this to their own benefit, to deflect attention from their vile war crimes. I think some of you are missing the point here. This war is very much an info ops campaign with both sides vying to influence the hearts, minds, support, be it financially or with arms, what have you. In the event Ukraine fails to address this video, by way of an independent body investigating its validity, Ukraine would be handing Putin ammunition in his campaign of deception and deceit, both domestically and internationally. Cooler heads are r...

Well, the delegations have gone to Rome and have now left. In the various meetings with Pope Francis the Indigenous “delegates”, who travelled to the Vatican, have spoken to the Pope and by all reports he has listened to them. Behind the scenes there have been meetings between Indigenous spokespersons and Vatican officials. Hopefully those Vatican diplomats also listened carefully to what the Indigenous people had to say, what their experiences with colonialism, historical and contemporary, have been and what they desired to come out of the whole process. As Friday ended, some of the Indigenous people present were interviewed. All, of course, suffered due to their own experiences, or those of their parents or grandparents or uncles or aunties, in one of those residential hell holes. Many of these people were heard to state that it was a good apology and was helping them to heal. They said that hearing the Pope actually use the words sorrow and apology reached their hearts in a way tha...

Starting with Discontents Ideology is one of the more misunderstood terms we have commonly heard enunciated and/or thrown around in common daily discourse. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. It has been, and is, described by many as a “straight jacket’ on our thinking, or some set of beliefs that work so that people misunderstand the world, as in, “Well, that’s just his/her ideology talking”, or “s/he is so ideological”. This is a charge that I hear particularly about those of us who use a left wing, socially progressive framework in attempting to make sense of the world.1 We also see the same charge levelled at those who consider themselves conservatives or liberals. The assumption is that the person has been tricked or browbeaten into believing some irrational or harmful notion, by elites or charismatic leaders or by reading some unfortunate literature that was found lying around. Of course, this can be true. It happens. A Definition My colleague Mirna Carranza and I h...