| | | Good morning, Passengers, and happy Friday.
Today, we have a blog about the premier of Alberta’s bad start to her time in office, one of my favourite articles from the archives and a movie recommendation.
Enjoy! | | | David J. Climenhaga | Rabble | October 13 | Earlier this week, I shared a few articles about Alberta’s new premier, Danielle Smith, and the many reasons people are rightfully worried about what she’ll do to the province. Her first few days in office haven’t done anything to dispel these concerns, with just the opposite actually happening. At the end of her first press conference, she said that those who chose not to receive vaccines “have been the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime,” which is a ridiculous and ignorant comment for anyone to make, particularly someone in power, though. The next day, Smith released a statement, but it certainly wasn’t an apology. Rabble has published an article with some analysis of Smith’s response, and what it means for the province going forward. (6 minute read) | | | Jon Greenaway | Passage | October 2021 | This is one of my favourite articles that we’ve published at Passage, and it’s also one of the few pieces of film/TV/cultural analysis. It’s written by a co-host of the great Horror Vanguard podcast (the other co-host wrote that article for us about watching an 857-hour movie), and he makes a case for why horror is essential to understanding our lives under capitalism. Debt is one of the central focuses in this article, and given all the articles about inflation and recession lately, I figured this would be a good one to reshare.
Jon Greenaway writes, “There’s a recurring debate that emerges in the wider cultural discourse around this time every year. It centres on a simple, but seemingly inexhaustible, question: What is Halloween for? Unlike the majority of other holidays, it doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose. Increasingly, voices on the right have used it as a way of indulging their tiresome histrionic culture war. Want to teach your kids about the dangers of socialism? Simply take their candy away from them when they go trick or treating and voila, lesson learned! It’s a cheap rhetorical move, but an easy one to pull off. However, as the writer China Miéville points out in Jacobin, Halloween isn’t for the right, but functions as a cultural space essential to the socialist political imagination. In fact, it’s important to go further than Miéville does, and argue that not just Halloween, but horror more widely, should be of profound importance for a leftist understanding of culture and our place in the world. To put it simply, capitalism is a horror story. This is something well documented in the history of leftist thought.” (8 minute read) | | | John Carpenter | Letterboxd | 1987 | John Carpenter is one of my favourite horror directors, and of all his films, Prince Of Darkness is probably the movie I’ve most enjoyed. Great score, great premise; genuinely spooky at times but fun at others, it serves as an entertaining film and a compelling commentary on the relation between science and faith, and our understanding of the universe. The film is currently available on the Criterion Channel, the streaming service associated with the Criterion Collection, which offers a 14-day free trial.
Here’s a description of the film from SYFY: “Inspired by Carpenter’s own reading about quantum physics, Prince of Darkness is a merging of science and faith, of the tangible and the inexplicable. The meat of the story follows a quantum physicist (Victor Wong) and a group of his students as they head to an old church to research an object unearthed by a Priest (Donald Pleasence). The priest claims that the object — a cylinder full of swirling green liquid — is the physical embodiment of Satan, kept under guard by a secretive Catholic order for centuries. But the order’s power over the cylinder is waning, and the liquid is threatening to break loose into the world. To save humanity, the priest warns, the physicists must study the liquid and the artifacts associated with it and decode them scientifically, creating tangible proof for the general public that ‘pure evil’ is real, and must be defended against.” (101 minute watch) | | | | Previous Digest Editions - October 13 | Canada’s hockey obsession, the end of Greyhound, suppression of speech on Palestine in Canada - Read here
- October 12 | The wage-price spiral, an NDP mess, mapping Islamophobia - Read here
- October 11 | Danielle Smith, engineering recessions, lessons from revolutionary women - Read here
- October 7 | Doug Ford and the debt, recruiting for the Israeli army, His House - Read here
- October 6 | Ignoring murder, Mahsa Amini and Muslim women, the Quebec election - Read here
- October 5 | MPs and the housing crisis, Legault’s unearned majority, cancelled for criticizing Israel - Read here
- October 4 | Losing money to the ultra rich, nuclear war, the CAQ - Read here
- October 3 | Interspecies solidarity, undermining daycare, social solidarity for exclusion, a coup in Brazil? - Read here
- September 29 | Deleting Palestine, taking Canada to court, xenophobia and horror - Read here
- September 28 | The curse of renters, city councils and police budgets, the Labour files - Read here
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