It's Time to Unite the Left

I am a socialist.

This puts me to the left of approx. 99.9% of the people in the USA and even to the left of the mainstream left wing in Canada.

With that being said I am disgusted with the left in Canada and the USA and not because they are too far to the right.

My disgust with the left in this country is because the leftists in this continent are letting an ultra-conservative minority dictate the agenda.

We have been trapped in the morass of single-issue advocacy for far too long. People on the right identify themselves as "conservatives". People on the left instead have created a dozen names, a hundred advocacy groups, often acting at odds with each other.

Partly the political parties are to blame. The Democrats are a centre right party. In Canada our most left wing political party is the Bloc Quebecois which only fields candidates in a single province because it, like most of the popular leftist movements is a single-issue movement! The next most left wing party, the NDP, has moved so far to the right that they have lost any semblance of support from the modern left.

It's time for the left to get it's act together. American leftists: organize! I know many of you have anarchist leanings and distrust anything resembling authority but, get this, central organization lets you act more effectively at a mass level. I'm not knocking grass-root activism, it's necessary, but it's also necessary to have organization, leadership, people making sure all the activists are pointing in the same direction, working toward the same goal.

Canadian leftists: we need to organize too. We also need a new political party. We need a leftist party that will work openly with the Bloc and that will remain true to leftist ideals rather than becoming the union face of the Liberal party.

An election is coming. After this election we will either be stuck with a Liberal government (conservative) or a Conservative government (neo-fascist). Our best hope is that the bloc sweeps quebec and the liberals take a minority government with a bloc balance of power.

But now is the time to start organizing, not for the election that is upon us but for the one after that. Canada has a vibrant left wing. It's time they got off their collective asses and started marching together for a common cause - taking back the reins of this country from the tyrants.

Novel Editing Continues (interminably)

I have got my last pages back from my mother and am now in the process of copy-editing them (and doing draft revisions occasionally too when the mood hits me). Did about 2.5 chapters yesterday but the .5 was a mistake. I was still feeling good to go and then hit the first major tangle-up in the third and was like: I don't have the mojo for this right now.

So it's today's project.

Pam picked up a bunch of shifts. On one hand I'm happy because she needed the hours but on the other hand it's a bit of a pain because her shifts are night shifts. This means I don't get to see her much, she's exhausted when she gets home and goes pretty much straight to bed, and our dinner plans for the week are kind of toast.

The Liberals backed the Conservatives on the Colombia free trade agreement. Just goes to show that if you claim to be anti-drug and pro-business it doesn't matter what a tinpot little warlord you really are. I swear, if they ran candidates in Ontario, I'd be voting Bloc who hit the nail on the head when they said "Deux Partis, Un Regard" about the Liberals and the Conservatives.