I wanted to post this YouTube video before the debates.

Over the last two decades, debates on religious conservativisms have supplanted debates on feminisms in the public discourse. That is no coincidence; the old forms of social organisation represented in religio-conservative ideologies recognized themselves as under attack from the international movements of women for social and political freedom and have tried to reestablish themselves as the loci where women’s rights get negotiated in any given society. Why one may ask do matters of ‘faith’ have so much to do with the control of women? Why is the control of women so important to a belief in a god?

In recent days I am struck by how many pictures of distraught stockbrokers, stock analysts, bankers, traders, buyers, sellers, I’ve seen in the news. They’ve occupied the focus of web pages, and newspaper front-pages with their dramatic poses. We are alerted to their plight at the start of every newscast, and in extended treatments on cable networks and magasines. Their problem, we are exhorted, is our problem.

Conservatives and their satraps religiously haul out the ‘law and order’ stick each election. Fear not remedy is at the base of their deploying this trope. No one is against law and order, it would be like being against water, or against air or something; so the fake attacks about who is soft, and who hard, on crime are really just so much fear mongering and macho posturing. The Conservatives’ especial Judas this time is ‘youth’ and the Young Offenders Act.  In urban and suburban Toronto and Vancouver, gun violence has plagued communities, killing young people and wrecking people’s lives.