Two Things Anti-War Activists in Canada Need To Do Better
There are at least two things that the anti-war movement in Canada needs to do a much better job of as we speak out against war and empire: We need…
Scott Neigh
Review: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
There’s a flavour of journalist whose names I know well because they are popular on the left, who write about things that I think are important and often (though not…
Who We Think We Are in Hunger Games: Catching Fire
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name…
Review: Unmastered
This book is a meditation by an English academic on gender, power, and desire that I find intriguing in certain respects and troubling in others. First, the good stuff. I…
Review: The Liberal Defence of Murder
As I think was true of a fair number of young middle-class white men politicized as university students in the mid 1990s, one genre of radical material that I read…
Review: The Uses and Abuses of History
Margaret MacMillan is a respected academic historian who is firmly embedded in the liberal tradition. I haven’t read any of her original historical scholarship but there is one of her…
Review: Sexual Decoys
I’m more than old enough to be familiar with the odd sense of dislocation that comes from being pulled back into the mood of a past historical moment that you…
Review: The Poorer Nations
When the global justice movement erupted into mainstream North American consciousness in 1999, much that was written not only in the mainstream but even by many of the participants in…
Review: Yellow Ribbons
The social shifts that this book describes enrage me. But the fact that this book describes them makes me very happy. There are a few key elements in what it…
Review: Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change
There have been a number of occasions over the years, both in conversation and in writing, where I have identified as being someone who exists in a state of perpetual…
Review: The Darker Nations
A conventional overview of world history from the early 20th century to the 1970s would likely talk of World Wars, Cold Wars, and proxy wars. It would, to be blunt,…
Review: What We Talk About When We Talk About War
I have some major disagreements with some of this book’s political premises, as well as significant reservations about its framework. But somehow, despite all of that, I think it does…
Old Family Photos and 1930s Gender Play
One interesting aspect of how most of us regard history is a tendency to take the stereotypes we have of the 1950s as representative of the unchanging essence of our…
Review: Towards Collective Liberation
I tend to resist generational explanations for things, but there does seem to be at least a partial correlation between the moment in which we are first politicized and the…
Two Tasks of Grassroots Media
There are two distinct though very much interrelated tasks that those of us involved in grassroots media should be aiming to accomplish. It’s a bit simplistic, but you can think…
Canadian Social Movement Podcast — Six Months and Counting
For six months now, the single biggest project on my plate has been Talking Radical Radio, a radio show and podcast that brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. The…
Privilege Protects: On Facing Little Nastiness in 15 Years of Lefty Media Production
Over the years, I have cast much written and audio material out into the world. Over that time, I have always been thankful, and even a little surprised, at how…
Review: Dirty Wars
Though the word “Canada” appears only a handful of times in the book and is not even in the index, this is a book about Canada’s wars in the last…
Review: Catastrophism
A surprising assortment of political approaches in a broad range of traditions depend in one way or another on narratives of catastrophe.
Self-cultivation, Secularization, and Neoliberalism
Part of how we are produced as who we are is through the ways we are shaped by socially-enforced patterns of practice and attention. We are, as Michel Foucault showed…