Archives for category: Social Criticism
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Christmas Conservatism

Dec 25, 2025 //
5

Christmas, as it is popularly understood, is a deeply conservative holiday. It is literally about the birth of the Christian saviour, and there is a declared war against it by woke liberals who wish nothing more than to acknowledge a world outside of baby Jesus and His manger. It is a holiday deeply embedded with tradition, symbolism, and in-group community – big conservative values! For those who know me or have read this blog for any length of time, you’ll know me as an anarchistic atheist who disdains power and hierarchy, whether religious or secular. You would assume that someone with such radical beliefs would be antagonistic toward Christmas and all its consumerist, nativist ideology.

You would be wrong.

It was a revelatory moment when I realized that I was a Christmas conservative. Obviously not in the mainstream sense with either of those two phenomena, given the birth of Christ holds no meaning in my life nor do I believe churches ought to be exempt from taxation. I just like to celebrate the way that I’ve always celebrated. Big family affair, some gifts, a real tree, Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, and an immutable canon of movies and songs.

Elf on a Shelf became a thing much later in my life, so I think it’s tacky and creates additional lies that must be maintained on top of an already dubious holiday tradition of Santa Claus and the north pole. They keep making Christmas movies, some of them even fairly well-done, but as much as they might involve the saving of Christmas from a variety of yuletide threats, they will never be truly Christmas to me. People literally mark the beginning of the holiday season with the emergence of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, rising from the rotting leaves of fall to usher in the season of unending retail insanity. I do not consider it a Christmas classic since it did not come out early enough in my life for me to have had it embedded in the core of my Christmas spirit. I’m not so much a Grinch about Christmas as I am a stodgy, old curmudgeon, set in my ways, whinging about the kids these days who know nothing about what Christmas is truly about – how I personally have celebrated it since I was a kid!

The greatest consequence of global warming is she keeps escaping every single time!

I see value in the way that I celebrate Christmas. It’s important to me, and I wouldn’t want to have to change my ways because I see this holiday as sacred, in my own secular way. My community is small and familial, but meaningful. I have my traditions, my important symbols, and my cherished values deeply entwined with this holiday. I’m hopeful to be able to pass down my traditions to my currently hypothetical children. As much as anyone can be a conservative, I am with Christmas.

When I realized that I was a Christmas conservative, it formed within me a hitherto unknown empathy for the right-wing. It’s nice to have nice things. Change isn’t an inherent good. Progress is nuanced, and blasphemy can truly sting in the yearly attacks of a 90s pop-diva. Maybe the values of typical conservatives don’t come from what they abhor; maybe the values of typical conservatives, perhaps, mean a little bit more…

Some say his bipartisanship grew three sizes that day!

I think the biggest difference in a Christmas conservative like myself and a traditional conservative is that modern Christmas is very clearly diluted in its practice and has been embraced by secularism rather broadly. People get upset when stores have “Happy Holidays” in the window, but they’re not putting it up during Ramadan, are they? Much in the same way that everyone acknowledges that this is the year 2025, we celebrate a Christian holiday without too much fretting over the minute details of its religiosity. It is patently obvious to me that my puritanical Christmas beliefs come from my individual upbringing, but less so to regular conservatives that their own values come from the same place. There are as many Christianities as there are Christians; it’s just that no one acknowledges that, so it’s easier to want to impose a false doctrinal unity on everyone else.

I don’t care if you listen to Mariah Carey, during Christmastime or otherwise. You can sneakily move your elf from shelf to shelf, and I’ll keep my opinions about it to myself. We can still be friends if you don’t like Home Alone, though I won’t necessarily trust the movie recommendations you might make in the future. The need to impose is where I break from the broader conservative movement. Other people don’t need to adhere to my lifestyle; that would be silly. Much in the same way a man kissing another man doesn’t infringe on my ability to kiss a woman, nor does someone born a man identifying as a woman impinge on my own lifelong masculinity, I don’t carry the fear and insecurity inherent in typical political conservatism that needs a mono-culture in order to feel safe in their practices. I can only empathize to a point.

How badly does one need to pee in order to be embrace inclusivity?

So this holiday season, celebrate however you like – or don’t at all! I am neither your real nor your hypothetical father!

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals!

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Categories Fun, Social Criticism

In Defense of Identity Politics

Jun 21, 2025 //
4

I tend to dislike identity politics. I find it shallow and regressive, and as a straight, white man, it is none too fond of me either. I had heard rumblings about liberal backlash against identity politics after the election of Donald Trump, as if women of colour existing had suddenly brought about the rise of fascism, but I disregarded this because it’s stupid. Then, like too many stupid things, it became my problem when I had to listen to someone defend this position in a podcast that I follow. They asserted along similar lines that because the Democrats had too closely linked themselves to identity politics, that Trump was able to seize the economic narrative and soar to authoritarian heights on promises of increased prices through tariffs and trade wars with traditional allies. Clearly a persuasive argument.

This was promised and intentional, and was the bar Democrats needed to surpass in order to win the economic argument. I’m not saying that the stock market is representative of the financial situation of most people, but it’s a simple enough symbol for our purposes here.

At this point I think it’s important to define our terms because what was described in the podcast was any reference to white supremacy or gender issues as “identity politics.” This is never how I’ve ever understood the term. Identity politics in the pejorative sense is the inclusion of a traditional minority into the established mainstream and calling it progressive without changing anything real or substantial. So Disney remaking all of its classics with women of colour in the lead role is identity politics because it’s a shallow cash grab pretending to be something new and edgy because Ariel is black now. Or Hilary Clinton platforming her gender as the primary reason to vote for her in the “I’m With Her” campaign slogan. Or corporations coming out with rainbow-tinged logos for Pride month while raising prices to accommodate such woke largesse. All this capitalistic tokenism is then interpreted as leftism because homosexuality and vaginas are seen as intrinsically leftist concepts! It’s all stupid and fake, but because the people behind this empty astroturf ideology often have all of the money, it becomes the focus of political discourse because it’s so polarizing and in your face (Am I saying that women of colour shouldn’t be movie leads or run for president!?! How dare I!? Get at me in the YouTube comments!).

I’ve always felt there weren’t enough gays toppling leftists governments, but I guess that’s because of my woke mind virus!

I didn’t see a ton of that in the last election from the Harris and Walz campaign, and though I didn’t obviously see every single campaign ad, I certainly heard contemporary coverage approving of that campaign for not fixating on Harris’s identity as a Homeric blasian heroine. Somewhat ironically, the worst I saw were ads focusing on Tim Walz as the folksy white football coach, trying to pander to the superficial identity of the traditional right. Frankly, I saw more identity politics from the Republican side with Trump literally questioning Harris’s blackness, and their ad saying that, ”Harris is for they/them, and Donald Trump is for you!” using the identity of non-binary people in purely shallow framing to fearmonger an Us versus Them dynamic. Per this metric, identity politics were actually quite successful in this last election, and maybe the Democrats should have done more to categorize people into these simplistic labels for the sake of petty politics!

But… but… how can this be identity politics if Tim Walz doesn’t have a vagina of colour!?

The important thing to keep in mind during this tiresome deliberation is that class is a marker of identity! To suggest that the Democrats ought to focus solely on the economy and not “identity politics” is to miss the truism that all politics is inherently based on identity! The suffragette movement was identity-based. The civil rights movement was identity-based. The New Deal’s G.I. bill was identity-based – it was dedicated to veterans! Drug laws are for drug users; prostitution laws are for sex workers; healthcare is related to the spectrum of ability. All of us exist across intersections of identity, and all laws and policies bleed across them in varying ways. The G.I. Bill brought so many Americans into the middle class after World War II, but only if we define those Americans as white. So too the Nazis brought Germany out of the Great Depression, but their own infamous identity politics left much to be desired beyond the economic recovery. Class and more populist economic policy is something the Democrats certainly need to absorb into their political philosophy (as per their stunning defeat to Donald Trump on this issue), but this literally cannot be detached from identity, nor should it. We cannot talk about Trump barring refugees from everywhere in the world save for those “fleeing” from a manufactured genocide in South Africa without discussing white supremacy. We cannot talk about the impacts of overturning Roe without acknowledging that the people affected by that the most are those with a uterus. These are atrocities, and ignoring them is tantamount to ignoring the “identity politics” of the Nazis as they resurrected Germany’s economy. We cannot and should not. Identity is a web; class is connected to everything else which is in turn connected to class.

So what the fuck are people even talking about? The podcast guest later in the show gets in a heated argument with the host over how Palestinian deaths aren’t being fairly reported in American mainstream media, in blatant hypocrisy to his earlier dismissal of identity politics as worth mentioning. Per his meltdown, you would think he had forgotten that being Muslim or Palestinian is just as much an identity as being white or a woman. Should we ignore the genocide in Gaza? He would disagree, strenuously, but that is “identity politics” per his definition! I guess identity only matters when it’s one of your own. While this was not explicit in the show, and I think I’m just extrapolating this from the broader political discourse and think it’s irrelevant to what they actually think on that podcast, but this disregard toward identity is entirely about trans-people. When people say that Democrats should focus on the economy and not on “identity politics” without giving a definition of what that means, they mean that they’re fine with throwing trans-people under the bus if it means that everyone else can get the Medicare for all. This is the only thing that makes sense given the arguments and hypocrisies they are making.

Unless you need it for hormone replacement therapy, in which case, tough shit

Harris was criticized because she believed prisoners should be able to access gender-affirming care if they needed it. This is not identity politics in the actual definition of the term, this is a genuine, honest-to-goodness policy. It’s policy for a particular identity, in the way that voting rights have historically been for particular identities, but it’s healthcare policy. People on the left and the right spoke about it as if it were superficial and unnecessary identity politics because acknowledging the healthcare needs of the transgender community is seen as superficial and unnecessary, akin to a rainbow Nike swoosh. If we don’t see transgenderism as a real thing, if it’s a disguise for attention or sexual predation, then it’s easy to dismiss their legitimate needs as shallow and fake. This isn’t something unique to the right. Much of the so-called left struggles with the needs of transgender people too, which, to be clear, is mostly social acceptance and healthcare and is not to participate in elite-level sports.

Democrats, and liberal governments across the globe, are failing in how they address the economic needs of their citizens, and it is fair and necessary to criticize them on that failure. More than criticize, disrupt and dismantle them for something better. Do not, however, try to suggest that “identity politics” is the barrier to that kind of economic and social change when you really mean acknowledging the existence of trans-people. Corporate gimmicks and Disney remakes should also be criticized too, but they are not leftist; the capitulation to fascism among the ownership class shows the hollowness of their “progressivism” quite clearly. You can continue to trash identity politics, as I am sure I will too, but be honest in your bigotry and stop pretending that you’re advocating for a social restructuring for all.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality, Politics, Social Criticism

Social Work: The Noble Profession

Aug 18, 2024 //
0

I am a social worker in Canada, and with some frequency I am told that I work in a noble profession. And it’s always that word, too: noble. Social workers are paragons of virtue simply by dint of how we make a paycheck. We don’t toil monotonous labour; we don’t exploit those same labourers for surplus value – we transcend the capitalist dichotomy. Doctors, firefighters, and the like may be heroes, but social workers are noble. We’re not glamourously saving lives; we’re in the trenches helping the less fortunate. We sit among both the lepers and the crooks. It’s unclear what we actually do, as I find when talking to even those who work intimately with social workers, but our virtue is assumed – whatever it is we’re doing with those lepers and crooks is irrelevant. Our proximity to pain is enough.

So what do social workers do? Are we really so noble? Am I secretly a monster??

Pictured: a social worker

The Sixties Scoop refers to direct policies of colonial Canada to remove indigenous children from their homes and place them into white foster families or fully adopt them into other, equally white families. It ran from about the 1950s until the 1990s. It represented a shift in approach from the residential school policy which was established to follow the maxim, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” This approach aimed to “save” the indigenous person by “killing” everything that was indigenous about them, and the residential school program aimed to do exactly that by removing children from their families and culture, abusing them if they spoke their native tongue, and presenting them as superficially white with shorn hair and new clothes.

As abducting children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive facilities became more and more gauche, the Canadian government needed a new methodology to “save” them. In comes the social worker to investigate indigenous homes, and when the indigenous parents are found lacking by white colonial standards, abducting the children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive white families. This practice continues to this day in what’s called the Millennium Scoop, as the majority of youth in care across the country remain indigenous despite being a small fraction of the Canadian population. Social workers as a profession are responsible for this.

Pictured: another social worker

But surely social workers must do more than whisk babies away in the dead of the night to feed the endlessly hungry maw of settler colonialism! And we do! Socials workers are in schools, healthcare, all over the place. We even do more than just report new moms to child welfare when they’ve given birth while poor! We also connect those without an income to regular, adult person welfare which in British Columbia adds up to… $560 a month.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that seems like less than table scraps. But there’s more! Social workers can also support low-income people in getting housing that is arguably worse than homelessness: insufficient temperature controls that have residents freezing during the winter and cooking in the summer; illegal practices by landlords including unlawful evictions; restrictions on guests preventing loved ones from ever visiting; health issues arising from mold, bed bugs, vermin, and general lack of upkeep; the list goes on. Those helped by social workers can enjoy their fraction of a scrap living in deplorable squalor.

The resources that social workers can actually provide to the people they’re “helping” are so insufficient it seems somewhat surreal to refer to it as helping at all. This is the parsimonious bounty the system provides, and social workers are the smiling face of the miser doling it out. People don’t typically know what social workers do because even in the best case scenario, the real answer is so close to “nothing” that we would all collectively die of embarrassment if anyone actually looked into it.

Pictured: still another social worker

If our jobs are so trivial, how did we become noble? In this instance, it’s useful to look at the etymology of the term. Noble comes from the Latin nobilis, referring to the high-born families of the time: the nobility, duh! It is a moral framework steeped in hierarchy. Noble people are those who embody the ethic of the aristocracy, and social workers do exactly that.

The idea of the welfare state is to help the less fortunate, but capitalism can’t actually address any of the root causes of poverty and inequality because that would upend capitalism itself. Welfare is the compassion of capitalism whose sole purpose is to never solve anything. Monetary policy requires a percentage of the population to be unemployed; when there is inflation, the central bank raises interest rates in order to produce more poor people. Our system requires poverty, and if any of the methods utilized by that system ever did anything to address it, society would collapse into itself in a Dadaist paradox. Social workers are the systemic representation of that compassionate farce. We are noble because we are the morality of the capitalist elite. When approaching indigenous population, we are the ethic of the white settlers, taking up the white man’s burden to serve our captives’ need. We ease the worries of an otherwise apathetic middle-class, comforted knowing that social workers are there as a bulwark against the cognitive dissonance from class and racial guilt.

Pictured: a final disparaging caricature of social workers

We are not, however, a moral profession. As compassionate and as genuine as social workers tend to be, our “help” is often harm. Indigenous families do not look upon social workers as saviours but as destroyers, tearing up their families in the name of an oppressive fantasy of “doing good.” The impoverished do not see social workers as angels coming down from on high, but merely as a means of drowning less quickly. We try to be good, but good on whose terms? We try to help, but we’re in denial, cogs maintaining the facade of a benevolent state. True solutions would not involve social workers at all, but a restructuring of the world so that the horrifying outcomes of colonial capitalism would not be produced in the first place.

If the ethic of nobility is the delusion social workers use to sleep at night, it is useful to look at the Latin once more to try to break free from that corrupted reverie. We traditionally think of the vulgar as the offensive, the crass, the unclean. In its origin, however, it referred to the low-born, everyone else outside of the nobility. These are the people social workers are supposed to support, yet we remain detached and aloof. How can we bridge that gap? What would an ethic of the vulgar look like? What would social work practice look like if it embraced the vulgar instead of the noble?

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Categories Social Criticism
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