Oh right, this.

Go listen to Wizards & Spaceships' "WITCHES!" Which witch is the best witch? Which witch tropes are wired and which are inspired. Plus a blatant ripoff of Margaret Killjoy's excellent podcasts about the witch trials.

Witches, bitches!

 There are a lot of very important things to listen to this week about, specifically, your legal rights if you are American or step past the regime's artificial borders. But look, my job here is partially to entertain you in dark times, so that's what I'm doing this week. Check out No Gods No Mayors' episode on Mel Lastman because it's hilarious. 

Mel Lastman was in his last years as mayor when I moved to Toronto, but a lot of what he did continues to influence the city today. He was a forerunner to the Big Fun Strongman archetype that we saw in Rob Ford and to a lesser extent, Doug Ford and Trump, the kind of guy who will answer his phone personally but propose jailing children and implement policies that lead to a lot of dead homeless people and the kind of long-term infrastructure problems that won't affect him, because he's dead, but definitely affect me, a TTC commuter. Lastman was definitely towards the more comedic and less sociopathic end of that archetype and the episode is fucking hilarious, especially the long-running feud with Howard Moscoe. (Side note: I'm sure he had his issues but I had no idea how funny Moscoe is. He comes off as an absolute chad in this episode.)

My two quibbles with this episode: 1) In hindsight, and after knowing some army guys, I think Lastman was right to call the tanks into Toronto during the 1999 snowstorm. 2) It doesn't go into detail about the funniest thing about Lastman's illegitimate sons, which was that he denied he'd fathered them and the paper immediately published a picture of them, leaving zero doubt about their paternity.

Also there's some fun trans humour at the beginning, some of which I don't understand because I'm not an anime person, but it's pretty cute.

Just finished: Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern. I don't really have much to add—I'd highly recommend this one, whether you just learned about Palestine two years ago or you've been in the movement for decades. It's well-written, empathetic, and clear-eyed. My only critique is the bit at the end, which is an anarchist vision of a future liberated Palestine and Israel. It's not that I disagree politically, but I'm not sure it needs to be as long as it is, and they have the same issue as Starhawk when it comes to gardening on highways (why would you do this). I think it might turn off people who are not already anarchists, and beyond that, it feels like the kind of vision that everyday Palestinians and Israelis wouldn't necessarily share or relate to. But the core of the book is so good that I'm not terribly bothered by it.

Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel. You know how most alternate histories are about things like "what if the Nazis won WWII?" or "what if the Confederates won the American Civil War?" (how would you be able to tell in the Year Of Our Lord 2025???). What if someone wrote an alternate history that was actually...creative? This is about an alternate India where British colonialism continued into the 60s and 70s. All of the leaders of the independence movement are dead, most of the young men are off at war with China, and Kalki, the daughter of a disappeared revolutionary, dreams of standing up to the British. Together with her college friends, Fauzia, who's Muslim, and Yashu, who's Dalit, she reforms a cell of the Indian Liberation Movement in Mumbai (known as Kingston).

One of my issues with alternate histories is I often wonder what the point of them is. They'll tend to posit our dystopian reality, one in which fascism is ascendant, the climate crisis is raging, and surveillance capitalism owns the most intimate parts of our lives, as the best possible outcome, because isn't that better than the Nazis winning? This book has a point. It uses the failure of the original independence movement to show how resistance movements can grow after a crushing defeat.

Anyway, I loved it. ( spoilers )

Currently reading: Girls Against God, Jenny Hval. At least one of you read this awhile back and I was like, ooh, I must read that, and I finally started. I haven't gotten far in yet—so far it's a teenage girl ranting about how Norway sucks and black metal rules. Which I can get behind, but given the blurb, I hope it's going somewhere. It does very much have an authentic teenage voice but I deal with authentic teenage voices for a living.