Peter Kuper illustrated a scenario for the documentary Containment:

Containment treated, in part, the U.S. government’s attempts to invent a linguistic or paralinguistic means of warning future generations of the dangers of a nuclear-waste dump. Those efforts have been a fertile ground for the imagination ever since. (I’ve thought about it for 20 years.) Indeed, “imagination” was explicitly tapped, like a well untainted by nucleotides, in a related government project that ginned up future scenarios, including this one:

A feminist world, 2091

Women dominate society, partially through selection of girl babies. Twentieth-century science is discredited as male arrogance. Warnings about repository are dismissed as another example of muddled masculine thinking.

Aren’t we there already‽

“Not a serious country” vs. TV‑Robotics.co.za (q.v.).

Discuss.

• Jan Wong, Lunch With John Hurt (1999):

  Hurt is unhappy talking about his life. At lunch in Toronto at Sassafraz, the temperature drops one degree with every question…. “Is this going to be about smoking?” he asks, slightly irritated.

  He’s told the point is to figure out what makes him tick. “I don’t think you’ll manage to do that over lunch,” he says dismissively….

  “Nobody told me I was doing an in-depth interview.” Glowering, he cites his right to privacy and denounces “glib” articles published “for the sake of selling newspapers. Not that I’m being churlish.”

  The maître d’ interrupts. “How is everything?”

  “It was delicious, thank you,” says Hurt pleasantly, demonstrating his fine acting ability. Once the maître d’ disappears, he continues. “I’m slightly annoyed now,” he says icily. “As far as I knew, I came here to help Fox get their wretched film off the ground. Don’t put that down, for chrissake.” […]

  ---

  Hurt would have stomped out, except he didn’t know the way back to his hotel. After his publicist fled, I walked him back the two blocks to the Four Seasons. (We both pretended everything was fine.)

• Tyler Brûlé:

  But does he feel guilty that, somewhere along the chain, he’s feeding others’ sense of entitlement?

  “No,” he says briskly. “Our friends on the plane were beastly South Africans.” In the following week’s column, he’d corrected the “many” readers who’d assumed the couple were American. He says he’s had “big fights” with the FT when he’s mentioned nationalities and they’ve pulled the reference: “I’ve rung up and said, ‘That’s the whole point, that they’re Chinese or Russian, and now it’s neutered.’ It’s entertainment.”

It’s considered gauche to write down exactly what happens. Like when a fat social-justice-warrior girl lied about me in a “right-wing” newspaper. Or how a fat teleplay writer spent half of the last decade of his life on a harassment crusade, now carefully covered up by “friends” and colleagues who pretend it never happened (or that I deserved it).

Or when I attended Jian Ghomeshi’s final hearing, not quite sitting in Crusty Blatchford’s de rigueur second-row-aisle seat, and observed Ghomeshi blinking in sequence, then a pause, then a sequence, and with visibly dry mouth; that the Crown prosecutor, Michael Callaghan, is a fair-skinned bald eldergay who no longer quite fits his suit; what Marie Henein’s shoes were like, and how she needs her thick eyeglasses on while sitting but takes them off before standing, if only because that’s the performance segment of her job; and how almost every word uttered in the courtroom, even by the judge, was read from a script.

You didn’t read any of that anywhere.

Nobody likes a journalist who writes down exactly what happens, and calls people (for) what they are. But reporting that a man in a dress isn’t a woman, or that antifa throws the first punch at demonstrations, or that Mohammedans are waging war on the West all merely require the ability to see – and the willingness to report what was seen. I manage it.

Proud Boys (sic; emphasis added)

We captured the flag! We win! Uhuru!

Anti-Fascist News (sic; emphasis added)

Labeling all opposition as Antifa, which is a more militant organizational praxis used to confront neo-Nazis and white supremacists directly, they have created unity in their own ranks in opposition to the organized resistance they are seeing in cities around the country. From open Alt Right white nationalist organizations to patriot militias, their direct repression is not coming from state actors [continues for 1,100 words – Ed.]

1. Are you covering an issue while studiously refusing to use the one term that accurately describes it (autogynephile, jihad, rape gang [rape jihad], taqiyyah, Muslim terrorist, no-go zone, antifa)?

2. Are there topics you refuse to cover because doing so would make you a pariah among your journalist friends?

3. Do you maintain years-long Roy Cohn–like dossiers on real or perceived enemies? Does it just eat you up, are you just dying inside if you can’t find an excuse to pull the trigger and publish?

4. If you’re writing at a print newspaper:

   • How thoroughly and accurately will you quote online-only sources, especially if a topic arose online in the first place? Or did you write a whole story based on a single “tweet”?

   • Would you prefer to write a lazy “hot take” about a single “tweet” instead of writing even one brief story about a longstanding, systemic, even intractable issue (e.g., poverty)?

   • If an issue is new and has been well discussed online, do you feel it is your duty to wait a decorous time, then swoop in and adopt an attitude of “Let’s let the grown-ups handle this, sweetie” that puts the online discussion in what you view is its due place?

   Aren’t all these impulses in direct opposition?

5. If there are videos (especially somewhere other than YouTube [viz Twitter, Periscope]) categorically disproving an assertion you make in writing, will you act as though written words are always true and supreme while moving images are neither?

   • Corollary: When a Muslim terrorist is caught on video shouting “Allahu akhbar!” or anything remotely Islamic, will you not only pretend that evidence does not exist but report that the attacker’s “motives” are “unknown” (by implication, unknowable)?

   • If you work for a TV station or network, will you carefully edit out such shouting of “Allahu akhbar!” or anything remotely Islamic? Or, irrespective of where you work, will you change “Allah” to “God”?

6. If a source uses the word “nigger,” will you in turn quote that source without bowdlerization? If a source calls someone a faggot or a cocksucker, will you instead write that the source “used homophobic slurs”?

7. Is it your job to redress racism against blacks and reconcile yourself with Indians? Is that just the tip of the iceberg of societal ills that it is your job to personally redress?

   • Is it racist not to write “Blacks” (caps in original) and to use any term other than “Indigenous Canadians” (ditto)?

8. Looking honestly at yourself, whom do you hate or resent or are jealous of, and is that whom you’re writing about?

9. When covering a subject you hate or resent or are jealous of, will you use fact-checking methods that you know will be insufficient to give the source a fulsome chance to respond? In other words, when you know what you’re writing is a hit piece, will you dash off a single E‑mail right before publication and tell yourself that amounts to responsible fact-checking and true right of reply?

10. How many restrictions should be placed on your enemies’ free speech, and, deep down, do you wish you had the authority to place them?

11. If the subject of your coverage died, were ruined, were destroyed, or were wiped off the face of the earth, would your coverage have done its job?

12. Which groups’ complaints would always prompt an apology? Which other groups’ complaints would always prompt an angry personal pledge to enact revenge?

13. Are you afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted?

14. Should your audience trust you? (Are you narrowly defining what “your audience” means to manufacture a response of yes?)

15. Should your job exist?

16. Are you in the right line of work?

(UPDATED THRICE) The political movement that positively will not renounce violence even when repeatedly challenged to do so now somehow wants you to go to the gym.

Exercise is always a good idea, even for incomplete quadriplegics and the very old. I take a Richard Simmons approach here: No amount of added activity is too small. It is easy to adopt the secular religion of working out, especially in my case – after a crippling back spasm that occurred when I leaned a few degrees forward to take a picture. Besides, as I am never shy to explain, you can at least teach an athlete to read, and if you have a choice between going to the gym and reading a few pages of yet another book, well, the book lasts longer than your body does. (If the choice is between going to the gym and rechecking your Twitter, it isn’t a “choice.”)

I advised antifa to stop wearing blue hair and start working out. But I take issue with motivation.

I made a case to radical lesbians that amateur boxing should be at least begrudgingly accepted. Yet if one believes the following minitrend is even real, a ginger-bearded ostensibly Hispanic socialist is encouraging his comrades to lift weights, while antifa are trying to raise the money to start their own gym. (Is it par for the course, or is it perverse, that they can’t come up with 50 grand by themselves?)

The outfit’s name – Haymaker – is the first of many clues that, irrespective of claims to the contrary, this is a facility that will train antifa in how to throw the first punch. All this is about inciting violence, not engaging in limited self-defence, which, in the U.S. context, is bewilderingly complex in legal terms. Ginger-bearded socialist Poncho Martinez (no relation) specifically articulated the scenario of interposing himself in, say, a subway car when some kind of minority (this means a Muslima in hijab) is being verbally abused. Knowing as little as they do about the male psyche, these antifa don’t understand how quickly matters will escalate. (Or they do, and that’s what they’re hoping for.) In neither case do they understand how much better at fighting their opponents will always be.

This Martinez later stated on Twitter: “I think it’s pretty clear I’m not a pacifist.” (Martinez didn’t answer a respectful E‑mail. Neither did Haymaker.)

Remember: In the current political context and in my own direct observation, it is antifa that instigates violence. They could stop doing that if they chose. They choose the opposite.

Notably, Black Lives Matter Toronto majordoma Janaya Khan is a trained boxer, which fact joins the constellation of reasons why her insurrectionist faction was the first to bring violence to Gay Pride.

Updates

1. Haymaker belatedly responded to my mail:

   Our position on self-defen[c]e goes beyond that of simple antifascism and we articulate our position vis-[à]-vis antifascism in our campaign. If you’d like to know more about our politics, I recommend reading this interview we did with antifascist news [sic]

   …linking to the same article I did here, which intentionally makes nothing clear and does so in thousands of words of academic jargon.

   My follow-up was of course ignored:

   You didn’t answer the question. Are you planning on training members to initiate violence, to make the first strike, or not?

   Note: Any answer other than no is indistinguishable from yes.

2. The curiously named UnicornRiot.NINJA deleted an article about Haymaker (2016.06.27; copy-edited):

   Learning To Make A Fist With The Haymaker Collective [caps in original]

   Chicago, Illinois – On June 11th, 2017, Unicorn Riot met members of the Haymaker collective, a new public facing anti-fascist and anti-racist project, on a beach in Chicago. The collective’s goal is to further community self-defence.

   They referred to their upcoming gym as a “popular fitness and self-defence” gym that will be donation-based. While they told us their collective couldn’t address all the self-defence needs of the city, they said they were already in conversations with queer and Muslim trainers who wanted to use the space to provide self-defence lessons to their communities.

   “Queers” should not really be banding together with “Muslims.” Muslims throw queers off roofs and shoot us up at our bars.

   Kevin, one the members of the collective, told us that the collective had raised $6,000 on Indiegogo, but they weren’t getting a space until this fall. The beachside training was just to get the ball rolling.

   At the beach, the group went through a series of warm-ups and stretches. After the stretches, they learned how to properly form a fist, practised jabs and crosses [and] a takedown, and how to fall and get back up while defending themselves. The workout ended with some strength training.

   Meyer, a Haymaker collective member, said that they had received international support and explained that anti-fascist self-defence gyms existed across Europe, and that they had already heard interest from other people in the United States who wanted to open up gyms. When we asked another Haymaker collective member why they were involved with the gym, they [Kevin] said, “We need to start thinking about in radical communities, and community organizing and whatnot, we need to have a physical component to it. Marching, all these things we do have a physical component and it’s often overlooked.”

   The Haymaker collective said they were preparing to defend their communities against the rise of the right under Trump and pointed at the previous day’s anti-Muslim rally as an example of escalating right-wing violence.

   Haymaker trains to defend against fascists and racists.

   After the workout, the participants looked tired but were excited to have begun to learn self-defence. Kevin, who has only one leg, told us they [again, they keep calling this male “they”] were disabled and never thought they’d ever be able to join a gym, and that they looked forward to learning self-defence and then teaching other disabled people how to defend themselves.

   UnicornRiot.NINJA also deleted an adorable video showing these antifa learning to make a fist. (Later reuploaded.)

3. To no one’s surprise, Steven Crowder, who actually can make a fist, mocked this project. (Actually, Kacie Burnett wrote that figurative takedown.)

4. Now: What’s up with ginger-bearded ostensible “Latinx” Poncho Martinez (no relation) and his three cats?

   Well, he managed to look like a regular guy at the gym at one point –

   

   – but that was after he got his nails did.

   

   Your “radical liftist” leader, ladies and gentlemen of various genders.

And now: A feature article in Men’s Health

(2017.09.03 · 2018.04.22) Rather unhelpfully for Poncho Martinez, that’s Men’s Health UK. Nonetheless, the article (PDF) by Tom Ward (with Nils Ericson photos) reveals:

1. names of a couple of the tiny number of members of this Swole Left

2. that one of them wants to run away from cops faster (deadlifts et al. will not help with that)

3. that Poncho understands he has to be at the right place at the right time to intervene in right-wing violence (“The problem with any superhero fantasy is 90% of the time you won’t be there when anything bad happens”)

4. that Poncho somehow believes right-wing violence really exists in America

5. that Poncho rules out preëmptive violence (“I believe you shouldn’t go out of your way to fight anyone”)

(UPDATED) I joined thousands who wandered through the OCA(D) graduates’ expo this year. The fatwa having apparently been lifted, tall Dutch-origin gay ginger designers did not look to the side while serving platitudes, and crone-like faculty did not pull bemused students straight out of the room after I began talking to them.

Something else that has been lifted is my self-imposed ban on critiquing these students, who had just graduated from an accredited course yet had clearly never been subjected to a crit in their lives. This year – at a certain age, one begins sentences with “this year” – I’ll focus on a theme I brought up with several students: Minimum Viable Product. I saw four, and here’s the best of them: Bronson Rabishaw’s Avalanche jacket.

Bronson doesn’t include this, his most important work, on any of his profile pages. I’m sure he’ll fix that (update, 2017.07.26: he hasn’t), plus shoot a few videos and just license the damn thing. (I borrowed the photo above from his Instagram.) But to start at the beginning: Yes, a designer named Bronson. This 22-year-old was inspired by an Arc’teryx inflating backpack, which, oddly enough, I had actually held in my hand recently. (Just this past weekend, I found another hole in my 20-year-old Arc’teryx backpack. I’m a fan of the marque. “Arc’teryx,” a diminution of archæopteryx, has stress on the first syllable, as I have to remind everyone, especially Millennial store clerks.)

Bronson’s jacket (GradEx project page) contains what amount to airbags that inflate if you tumble into something, including walking straight into a tree, an outcome an inflatable backpack does nothing to protect against. (But the jacket does protect your back, with an airbag even over the lumbar spine.) The Avalanche has sewn-in standards-compliant beacons that can be activated by distant transceivers (a word I had to teach Bronson).

There were umpteen months of planning, but Bronson told me he spent 3½ months sewing the prototype jacket from scratch. He further told me he’d never sewn anything in his life. I’ve worn Gore-Tex® or equivalent jackets for a quarter-century, and I can tell you this prototype is three steps removed from any level of quality you would find even in Chinese knockoffs, one of which I wear. Here I’m talking about slightly off-kilter seams and threads, and an asymmetrical central zipper that doesn’t work for the right-handed majority.

But it’s functional. It’s a wearable garment. He made it from zero with no experience. It’s even got a lining (tricky to attach), and some nice material choices where such things shouldn’t matter and could be overlooked, like the ripcord and its “handle,” for want of a better term.

I recall the episode of the reality show The Great British Sewing Bee in which contestants had to construct, again from scratch, what in British English is incongruously called an anorak. (It’s a good word, encompassing “raincoat,” “waterproof jacket,” and “foul-weather jacket” all at once.) Contestants – in the uncomfortable homograph used on the show, sewers – had to figure out how to cut and pin nylon without leaving holes, and further had to figure out how to tape-fuse nylon variants that required different iron temperatures and timings on either side. Sewers with 40 years’ experience made all sorts of mistakes.

But they made no more mistakes than Bronson did on his first go.

I told this fella two things: Get on the blower to Arc’teryx right away, and start your next project that same day, otherwise you’re gonna crash. “What – nobody told you about that?” “No,” Bronson said, revealing just how little useful training a graphic-design education will leave you with. (You always crash after your show closes or you ship a project.)

Bronson is a graphic-design student. To his credit, he decided to ignore that and invent his own marketable object. (He did design an accompanying product monograph, which I didn’t even look at. And his type is pretty bad.) Bronson – I say again – is a designer named Bronson and already walks, talks, stands, and dresses like a male designer, save for one detail. Unless he tumbles down a hillside in an avalanche while not wearing his own creation, he’s got a good future ahead of him.

David or Dave Topping, known to habitués by the ancien userID dstopping, is an actually competent young Toronto journalist. (Yes, he’s the one.) dstopping got Peter Principled into some management position at the content farm known as St. Joseph Media – publisher, variously, of the journal of the dumb rich, a nonviable transgender blog, and 12:36.

dstopping released a so-called survey about journalism in Canada. It stacks the deck so egregiously I think I may have to stop considering him competent anymore. He can’t really believe his own lies. [continue with: Feral hacks: Canadian journalism’s bloodlust →]