No Cherry Bombs

Anonymous asked: What do you think is in the future for ModPAC and Mob Squad?

What’s in the future for our friends at MobSquad and ModPAC? It’s hard to tell. I’m neither involved in these groups nor am I precognizant, so I don’t have any insight that the average McGill student wouldn’t have. I can give my general impressions of what direction I think these groups are going in, however. Obviously my political leanings slant a certain way so everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt and a shot of vodka.

Coming out of Winter 2012 we see a tired, defensive and slightly confused MobSquad that has taken a beating and doesn’t quite know why or what to do about it. Eight months of more or less nonstop activism has fatigued the group and while their members are politically and philosophically cocksure as ever, MobSquad is realizing that they are not nearly as appreciated as they assumed they were, or at least not enough so that they can do whatever they want and expect the student body to support them unconditionally. Lately questions in regards to MobSquad’s tactics have arisen both outside and inside the group, and it appears that some are coming around to the idea that it’s very difficult to stage a popular revolution when one is staggeringly unpopular. This is especially important now that the old-school MobSquad method of influencing student politics by using numbers to dominate sparsely attended GAs is becoming irrelevant with the advent of online voting.

If MobSquad is to avoid being relegated to the political fringe, or to the fringe of the political fringe as it were, the prodigious intellects behind things such as the Milton Avenue Revolutionary Press are going to have to step aside. MobSquad’s tendency to refer to their opponents as “fascists” or “shitty authoritarians” does little more than isolate MobSquad from the student body, stifle critical debate, and perpetuate a toxic environment of ideological conformity within the group. If such habits don’t change MobSquad is only going to continue to encounter the same resistance they’ve been dealing with all year and it’s eventually going to wear them down. There is some evidence that cooler heads will prevail; for example, while I vehemently disagree with Robin Reid-Fraser politically she seems much more grounded and open to discussion than Joel Pedneault ever was.

The only thing I can say about ModPAC for sure is that their future is certainly uncertain. While ModPAC is working from a position of relative stability for now, the group has its own existential challenges to deal with. As a new group, ModPAC needs to survive the dry season; students are notorious for losing interest during the summer and if ModPAC can’t maintain some activity they’ll be essentially dead on arrival come next fall. In addition, ModPAC may sooner or later find itself without things to do or a cause to rally around. As defenders of the so-called “moderate position”, ModPAC needs others to take a radical position so that it may oppose them; if MobSquad didn’t exist, ModPAC would make no sense. Because of this strange dependency, it is unclear how long ModPAC is going to remain relevant. In addition, ModPAC is now, as ever, continuously struggling to avoid being co-opted by conservative students claiming that the “moderate” stance and the “conservative” stance are in fact the same. We saw some of this early on in particular from campus demagogue wannabe and jelly doughnut Brendan Steven, and even more of it during the second World War QPIRG referendum.

What can we expect to see next year? Well, I assume the four months away from school are going to have cooled some tempers, but I don’t think the antagonism between the campus left and more centrist and conservative students (regardless of “Mod/Mob” affiliation) is over, not by a long shot. Here are my predictions; if the student strike and provincial government come to a compromise, this issue will soon fade from McGill’s mainstream political discourse. If not, you can expect more of what we’ve seen recently, although perhaps with a few less occupations. We’ll see more of the Israel-Palestine debate, or rather we’ll see the exact same debate all over again. The usual opt-out QPIRG nonsense is going to occur again, as it has been with alarming regularity. I’m also predicting that 100% of all GAs next year are going to be colossal failures; there’s really no reason to think they won’t be given that pretty much all student GAs at McGill have failed except for the “departmental general assemblies” arranged as an ad hoc justification to go on strike. Heather Munroe-Blum will leave at the end of next year’s fall semester and be replaced by someone who, I’m sure, MobSquad will despise just as much or more.

As always, bring your rain gear and your McGill Memes, because we’re all going to be showered with ugly propaganda from all sides and the only real way to deal with it is to laugh it off.

I love reading articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals which refer to studies done by other people and basically say “Your methods and results are total crap. You’re wrong, we’re right, and here’s why”.

Anonymous asked: I love you.

Thank you for the kind words, but… who are you?

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Ignore QPIRG McGill

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while, and now seems about the right time to do it. So let’s see. QPIRG. What do I have to say about QPIRG?

QPIRG, specifically the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill University, is… well, it’s a public interest research group, a student-run organization committed to “environmental and social justice issues at McGill University and in the Montreal community”. It collects an opt-outable $3.75 from every student each semester to fund its staff, working groups, bureaucracy, expenses and so on. The organization also has the uncanny ability to bring out the absolute worst in McGill students as far as shit-slinging goes. My opinions of QPIRG are complex, in that they don’t make sense and I assume that anything that doesn’t make sense is too complicated to be understood.

On the one hand, QPIRG has its vaguely defined appendages inserted into so many McGill student initiatives that it would be hard to imagine the university without it. QPIRG’s existence is almost entirely justified by their providing an alternative to SSMU’s clusterfuck of a frosh alone. Most everything QPIRG does is either received relatively well or ignored because it’s so boring to the average McGill student that they can’t be assed to care about it, with one glaring exception that I’ll discuss shortly. As an organization, there’s not much doubt that QPIRG is never anything besides mind-numbingly mundane or benign, even if the group does have a tendency for clumsily tripping over their own finances.

On the other hand, something about the attitudes of QPIRG supporters in particular is off-putting, like the smell of a salmon fillet that’s been left out on the table just a bit too long. The amount of smug circle-jerking that occurs amongst QPIRG supporters is enough to fill the SSMU ballroom halfway to the ceiling with spunk and the high-horse attitude of the average QPIRGer is so stuck up that you’d need a space elevator to get anyone down from there. My personal problem with QPIRG is that it bills itself as progressive and anti-oppressive and therefore morally and intellectually superior, and while being against oppression is by all accounts desirable, one should not judge oneself exceptional if one wants to be taken seriously because doing so perpetuates the illusion, or rather exposes the reality, of swollen head syndrome. The truth is that once a group has deemed itself immaculate it tends to let its membership and supporters get away with a lot of bullshit they wouldn’t otherwise get away with, ie. #6party. QPIRG is an organization whose most severe fault is that it enables a minority of students with delusions of grandeur to construct flimsy moral high grounds for themselves in the name of social justice and then use these high grounds as platforms from which they may act like pillocks without fear of criticism. You can’t blame that on QPIRG because those fucks were probably going to do it anyway, but you can blame QPIRG for accommodating their friends’ metaphorical hoity-toity self-righteousness habit and not staging a well-needed intervention/smack upside the head combo when they had the chance.

QPIRG itself displays no evidence of being a bastion for extreme far-leftist programs but some of it’s members have left their muddy MobSquad-y footprints running  up one side of QPIRG and down the other. These are the people who have a reputation of behaving more suspiciously than children standing next to a step-ladder trying to pretend they haven’t just eaten all the biscuits, although upon inspection you find that all the biscuits are in fact uneaten and still in the jar thus making the situation all the more bizarre. I don’t know why QPIRG’s supporters are slinking around and laughing nasally to themselves like QPIRG is the secret front for igniting the revolution when most of what QPIRG does isn’t remotely shady, remotely subversive or even remotely interesting. Yet they celebrate every won referendum as a victory against an oppressive status quo, the bourgeoisie, imaginary fascists, a violent police state nightmare dystopia, baby-eating conservatives, blind capitalist sheeple, and Stephen Harper. It’s enough to make one suspect that QPIRG is up to something untoward, but anyone who endeavours to find out what said “something” is is bound to be disappointed. Not that this fact keeps those most irrationally opposed to QPIRG from trying to dig up dirt and, upon failing to discover anything of note, fabricating nonsense out of whole cloth.

QPIRG’s missteps seem to be mostly due to sheer incompetence rather than any sort of conspiracy as its detractors allege there is or some of its supporters secretly wish there was. QPIRG’s most recent debacle over changing the fee-levying system back in February appears to have occurred less because the board of directors were trying to pull a fast one on McGill students and more because they don’t realize that McGill students, while “bright”, are neither omniscient nor telepathic and as such don’t have knowledge of the intricacies of the financial fever dream kraken that happens to be the QPIRG budget. Most of QPIRG’s follies are due to idiocy, mismanagement, an inability to dislodge its head from its own ass and a very unfortunately obstinate commitment to being involved in the Israel-Palestine debate as opposed to any genuine malice.

And so we come to the crux of the issue, that being the Israel-Palestine debate, as if this were surprising to anyone. Yes my friends, we’re back here again. Most of the students at McGill are hoping and praying that Israel and Palestine come to some sort of peace agreement soon, because it would bring quite a lot of relief to both the middle east and all of the upper-middle-class teenage twits in eastern Canada who are so puzzlingly invested in that controversy and ONLY that controversy. QPIRG has gotten itself inextricably tangled with Israel Apartheid Week much to the organization’s own detriment, in the same way that carrying around a dead cat in a knapsack might injure one’s reputation for cleanliness and mental stability. See, Israel Apartheid Week is run by the sort of people who tend to trot out “I’m not an anti-Semite but” before plastering posters comparing the Israel Defense Force to the Nazi war machine all over brick walls, and QPIRG finds itself uncomfortably guilty by association.

QPIRG’s idiosyncratic two-thousand dollar infatuation with Tadamon! isn’t doing it any favors either, and attempts by apologists to defend QPIRG by citing groups such as Greening McGill and Campus Crops come across as fantastically insincere. If my dog blows vittles all over your lawn, I could point to all the nice flowers I helped you plant in your rose garden the other day but that doesn’t change the fact that there is still half-digested dog breakfast on your lawn.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned pillock-ery spreads like a malignant neoplasm around here, and the McGill student body is nothing if not cancerous in its ability to completely ruin any political debate. Bringing this to its illogical conclusion yields the formation of diametrically opposed YES and NO campaigns, absolutely identical in their inability to understand opinions different from their own, trolling each other and throwing feces into a canyon like feces throwing was going out of style and they only have a week to get their kicks in before the canyon gets closed, which, thanks to the bewilderingly strict campaigning rules of Elections McGill, is technically the case. So QPIRG, as an organization that does stuff, gets smacked around from both sides by idiots with a leftist agenda misinterpreting what the group is supposed to do and idiots who oppose the former idiots but can’t tell the difference between the group, its constituent members and MobSquad.

That being said, it’s probable that QPIRG will win this referendum, and probably for the better. Does that mean that there there is nothing about QPIRG that needs to change? Of course not; no organization has ever suffered from a deficiency of improvement opportunities, and QPIRG is not any sort of exception. Tweaking the structure might help, but I would personally close the program for two years or so, wait until most of the people involved now have graduated, and then restart it from the ground up with an entirely new staff, a new mission, and that lovely “new car” smell that is so much more appealing than the odour of partially spoiled fish.

On Joel Pedneault’s Censure Hearing - A McGill MadLib

Hey kids! Welcome to this week’s edition of “McGill MadLib!”, where we examine campus politics for the festering gangrenous bedsore that it really is! Follow along with us and fill in the blanks as dictated by your own myopic political opinion. Make sure to keep your mind closed so that your brain doesn’t fall out of your head. Remember kids, learning is fun AND educational!

“The motion to censure Joel Pedneault at the latest SSMU Legislative Council meeting was a total farce! How dare that small group of students in ____________ (MobSquad/ModPAC) abuse their power to enact their own selfish agenda! It is absurd that these people can ____________ (misappropriate SSMU funds to distribute divisive propaganda/bully a student politician for his political beliefs) and get away with it. This is all part of a larger ____________ (radical leftist/conservative) conspiracy to manipulate the rules and undermine student ____________ (democracy/democracy). And how sad that this small vocal minority in ____________ (MobSquad/ModPAC) uses it’s violent voice to coerce SSMU councilors into voting a particular way! They are bad people for being ____________ (radical/conservative) and they are making McGill a worse place by ignoring ____________ (the silent majority/the disenfranchised minorities) on campus. McGill has been overrun by ____________ (greedy/over-entitled) fools who act like ____________ (tools of the patriarchy/disruptive clowns). People who don’t think exactly like I do should be ____________ (ashamed of themselves/ashamed of themselves).”

Well kids, how did it go? Did you have fun? Join us next week for another super-awesome McGill MadLib!

Upon becoming more politically active (or at least more politically aware), I’ve witnessed first hand all the rampant vitriol, outright condescension, undue hatred, and total disrespect students at McGill display towards one another. I’ve even been guilty of participating in this myself, which makes me something of a hypocrite right now for denouncing that sort of behaviour. It’s easy to get caught up, as it were.

To be honest, it’s a very discouraging sight to behold. Sometimes I feel like we have reached a point in the discourse where things have gotten so ridiculously out of control that, despite there being so many issues to talk about and lessons to learn from each other, it makes no sense to continue the dialogue. We can always talk, sure, it’s possible… but what’s the point when no one is listening?

This division has split McGill down the center, and it will be a long time before the students at McGill can come together as a community again. Supposing such a thing is even possible. Until then, anything the McGill student body accomplishes is only going to be done through the filter of an ugly civil war.

On the bright side, the drama at McGill is absolutely delicious. I wonder what a no-holds-barred tag-team cage match between Joel Pedneault and Matt Crawford vs. Brenden Steven and Peter Guo would look like.

…is there any way we can get this set up?

When examined closely enough, there is something intrinsically unsatisfying about the idea of democracy.

Any intelligent person who thinks deeply enough about what democracy means will always leave the polling station with a bit of weight in their hearts.

Then again, when examined closely enough there is something intrinsically unsatisfying about the idea of humanity as well. So I suppose it’s not surprising.