July-September 2021 Archive

14 September 2021

Yes, I have been to Winnipeg.

New locations for the annals of Supermartifacts:

• 1981 Portage Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 479 St. Mary's Rd., Winnipeg, MB
• 891 St. Mary's Rd., Winnipeg, MB

• Confusion Corner, Winnipeg, MB
• 43 Marion St., Winnipeg, MB
• 727 Portage Ave., Winnipeg, MB

• 161 Goulet St., Winnipeg, MB
• 625 Osborne St., Winnipeg, MB
• 1295 Pembina Hwy., Winnipeg, MB
• 345 Main St. N., Brampton, ON

• 240 and 318 Manitoba Ave., Selkirk, MB
• 2 Alpine Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 1031 Autumnwood Dr., Winnipeg, MB
• 595 and 619 Broadway, Winnipeg, MB
• 971, 1700, and 2025 Corydon Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 850 Dakota St., Winnipeg, MB
• 3900 Grant Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 731 and 1441 Henderson Hwy., Winnipeg, MB
• 45 and 87 Isabel St., Winnipeg, MB
• 920 Jefferson Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 850 Keewatin St., Winnipeg, MB
• 1625 Kenaston Blvd., Winnipeg, MB
• 654 Kildare Ave. E., Winnipeg, MB
• 247 Lilac St., Winnipeg, MB
• 1787 Logan Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 1409 and 1441 (new pictures) Main St., Winnipeg, MB
• 285 Marion St., Winnipeg, MB
• 115 Maryland St., Winnipeg, MB
• 594 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 535 and 655 Osborne St., Winnipeg, MB
• 1319 (new pictures) and 2155 Pembina Hwy., Winnipeg, MB
• 893, 905, 1333, 1849, 1881, and 3393 Portage Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 107, 701, and 1615 Regent Ave. W., Winnipeg, MB
• 499 River Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 376 Salter St., Winnipeg, MB
• 577 and 600 Sargent Ave., Winnipeg, MB
• 110 Sherbrook St., Winnipeg, MB
• 1 St. Anne's Rd., Winnipeg, MB
• 222 and 1099 St. Mary's Rd., Winnipeg, MB
• 77 Vermillion Rd., Winnipeg, MB
• 396 Scott St., Fort Frances, ON

1 August 2021

Threads of summer

• Remember Hanson? The musical threesome who endeared themselves with catchy tunes in the late 1990s, challenged audiences with their androgynous appearances and lyrics of non-conformism and self-empowerment, and cultivated a strong (and possibly even pre-eminent) queer fanbase that supported the band through thick and thin after their major-label days were through?

  The Hanson brothers were straight, white cis men (red flag) from Oklahoma (another red flag). They were also child stars, which at the very least raises serious questions of exploitation. Yet in spite of all that, they managed to avoid publicly embarrassing themselves...until 2020, when all hell broke loose against the background of George Floyd's murder, white supremacy awareness, COVID, and Tr*mp. The members' far-right allegiances were laid bare in a flurry of tone-deaf statements and racist and homophobic Pinterest posts, much to the chagrin of queer and PoC fans who had spent years cultivating close-knit relationships with Hanson through exclusive performances and fan social events under the presumption that their support and respect for the band was mutual.

  There's a subreddit for fans trying to decompress, as well as an excellent if heartbreaking video that delves deep into Zac Hanson's childhood exploitation, sexualization, and dive into extremism as an adult.

  Considering the Hanson brothers spent their entire lives on stolen portions of nineteeth-century Indian Territory, have they ever addressed indigenous issues in their music? The Tragically Hip they ain't...

• Speaking of reprehensible musicians from Oklahoma, some schadenfreude to enjoy: Anita Bryant's granddaughter is marrying another woman.

• 18 of the 20 states with the highest COVID infection rates voted to elect Tr*mp. 'Nuff said.

• August 2021 marks the centenary of West Virginia's Battle of Blair Mountain, where miners of all skin colours and persuasions marching to support workers in Mingo County were fought with lethal force by militarized cops and representatives of the coal companies, then as now, running the state into the ground. Telling comment: "And now most voting WVians betray their memory and sacrifice."

• California bans inessential state-funded travel to West Virginia, on account of its wave of reactionary anti-trans legislation. West Virginia's Christian-bigot attorney general throws a hissy fit in response, charging that he and his cronies are under "economic coercion" to drop their Christian-bigot policies. Um...yes. That's the point, Patrick. Glad you agree!

• Audacity is a practical, useful wave editor that always seemed to be a key example of OSS "done right." So what do techbros do? They make a pull request to add completely unnecessary, invasive "phone home" features to a software title that existed for over 20 years without them, just because they can.

  Though the decision was reversed, it succeeded in poisoning Audacity's well of reputation, and forks duly appeared. What's most interesting is what happened next. One of the developers of such a fork became targeted for physical violence by the Internet's G*m*rg*te-spawning hive of villany over a perceived naming slight. Can we stop pretending that the Internet isn't "real" and that online harassment doesn't have real-world consequences?

• For the first time in the better part of 30 years, I no longer have a computer running Windows 95 in my possession. I...feel quite a bit sorrowful about this, to tell the truth.

17 July 2021

Summer is upon us in Canada...but there's little sentiment for happiness or celebration to spare. Back in May, First Nation surveyors using ground-penetrating radar discovered the remains of 215 children buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia.

This nightmare, horrifying in itself, was soon bolstered by additional discoveries:

• 104 children buried at the Brandon Residential School in Brandon, Manitoba.
• 751(!) children buried at the Cowesses Residential School in Marieval, Saskatchewan.
• 182 children buried at the Kootenay Residential School in Cranbrook, B.C.
• 160 children buried at the Kuper Island Residential School in Penelakut Island, B.C.

Even worse, this is shaping up to be just the tip of an iceberg. 140 residential schools existed in Canada's pre-1949 borders, with another 5 in Newfoundland. What if every one of them is home to one to eight hundred unmarked graves? This is a genocide of tens of thousands, waiting to be discovered.

Heartbreaking memorial on the St. Joseph Residential School grounds, Thunder Bay, Ontario.

I discussed residential schools in passing back in 2015: They were a program of assimilation induced by the British and Canadian governments against indigenous people and run from the 1820s to the 1990s. (Yes, in my lifetime and probably yours.) To say that the residential schools were "horrible" is an understatement: Children were mandatorily seized from their homes and families at gunpoint by Indian Agents and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Students were subjected to rote, prison-like conditions where they were banned from speaking their indigenous languages or engaging in indigenous traditions. Oftentimes they were starved and subjected to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, with mortality rates as high as 60%. (And don't feel smug, Americanos: You did the same thing.)

Residential school plans, Fort Frances, Ontario.

There was also a theocratic aspect to the schools. Indigenous participants were forced to pray and practice Christianity as part of a regimen for instilling the "superior" white Western colonalist culture and "killing the Indian in the child." Nearly every one of Canada's residential schools was run by a church, as a church, according to church standards. The Catholic Church, Anglican Church, Methodist Church, and Presbyterian Church (as well as the latter two's 1925 offshoot, the United Church) were all complicit, along with a scattering of smaller denominations.

Nowhere does the stench and blood of residential schools run deeper or stink more than in the Roman Catholic Church. Fully half of the schools nationwide were founded by Catholic dioceses outright, and additional schools spent periods of operation under Roman Catholic control. Kamloops, Cowesses, Kootenay, Kuper Island? All Catholic, through and through. Even the Brandon School, founded by Methodists in 1895, was administered by the Catholic Church in its later years of operation.

Graffiti, Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Alone among large denominations, the Catholic Church has refused to make an institutional apology. And the church continues to be uniquely obstinate and complicit, stalling on releasing school records that could identify victims and scattering records among 51 subdivisional entities to frustrate researchers and delay justice as much as possible.

Catholicism.

No one should be surprised. This is the same amoral cult of forced-birthers and gay-bashers who ran the Magdalene Laundries, funded Prop 8 to the tune of millions of dollars, obsessively fetishize fetal cells to the complete exclusion of human life and human rights, shelter child rapists throughout the world, and who have the blood of millions of Africans on its hands.

If any other type of organization...a hockey club, a public school district, a nonprofit...were guilty of a fraction of the things the Catholic Church has been and continues to be guilty of, it would surely be run out of existence on a rail. It would be sued to oblivion, its supporters turned into pariahs, its property seized and redistributed to the victims it hurt. Why the fuck hasn't this happened to the Catholic Church?!

(And while we're at it, remind me again why the fuck the Province of Ontario funds and runs schools on the Catholic Church's behalf?)