RIGHT WING MOB
Thousands in Ottawa protest COVID mandates, many rebuked

THANKS TO GUN CONTROL 

NONE ARE ARMED

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Protestors mingle around vehicles parked on Wellington St. in front of West Block and the Parliament buildings as they participate in a cross-country truck convoy protesting measures taken by authorities to curb the spread of COVID-19 and vaccine mandates in Ottawa on Saturday, Jan. 29, 2022. 

(Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP)

OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) — Thousands of protesters gathered in Canada’s capital on Saturday to protest vaccine mandates, masks and lockdowns.

Some parked on the grounds of the National War Memorial and danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, others carried signs and flags with swastikas and some used the statue of Canadian hero Terry Fox to display an anti-vaccine statement, sparking widespread condemnation.

“I am sickened to see protesters dance on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and desecrate the National War Memorial. Generations of Canadians have fought and died for our rights, including free speech, but not this. Those involved should hang their heads in shame,” tweeted Gen. Wayne Eyre, Canada’s Defense Staff chief.

Protestors compared vaccine mandates to fascism, one truck carried a Confederate flag and many carried expletive-laden signs targeting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The statue of Fox, a national hero who lost a leg to bone cancer as a youngster, then set off in 1980 on a fundraising trek across Canada, was draped with a upside down Canadian flag with a sign that said “mandate freedom.”

Trudeau retweeted a statement from The Terry Fox Foundation that said “Terry believed in science and gave his life to help others.”

Eric Simmons, from Oshawa, Ontario, said all vaccine mandates should be ended.

“They’re not effective, they’re not working. It’s not changing anything. We can’t keep living like this. People are losing their jobs because they don’t want to get the vaccine,” Simmons said.

The convoy of truckers and others prompted police to prepare for the possibility of violence and warn residents to avoid downtown. A top Parliament security official advised lawmakers to lock their doors amid reports their private homes may be targeted.

Trudeau has said Canadians are not represented by this “very troubling, small but very vocal minority of Canadians who are lashing out at science, at government, at society, at mandates and public health advice.″

The prime minister’s itinerary for the day usually says he is in Ottawa if he’s at home, but on Saturday it said “National Capital Region” amid a report he’s been moved to an undisclosed location. One of Trudeau’s kids has COVID-19 and the prime minister has been isolating and working remotely.

Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and the premier of the province of Quebec who is proposing to tax the unvaccinated is popular.

Some are, in part, protesting a new rule that took effect Jan. 15 requiring truckers entering Canada be fully immunized against the coronavirus. The United States has imposed the same requirement on truckers entering that country.

The Canadian Trucking Alliance said a great number of the protesters have no connection to the trucking industry, adding they have a separate agenda to push. The alliance notes the vast majority of drivers are vaccinated.

The organizers of the protest have called for the forceful elimination of all COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates and some called for the removal of Trudeau.

The Shepherds of Good Hope, which has a soup kitchen for the homeless in Ottawa, reported staff and volunteers “experienced harassment from convoy protestors seeking meals from our soup kitchen. The individuals were given means to defuse the conflict.”

Some opposition Canadian Conservative lawmakers served coffee to the protesters. Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole met with some truckers. The protest has also attracted support from former U.S. President Donald Trump and some Fox News personalities.

“We want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way,” Trump said at a rally in Conroe, Texas. “They are doing more to defend American freedom than our leaders by far.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman said the threat against democracy isn’t only happening in America.

“Both the use of the swastika and the confederate flag are symbols of hate. So very sad to see these symbols anywhere and especially in Canada,” said Heyman, who was the U.S. envoy under former President Barack Obama.

The Parliamentary Protective Service expects as many as 10,000 protesters as part of a weekend-long rally.

“I’m locked into my own country right now,” said Tom Pappin, an unvaccinated man who came from just outside Ottawa. “I can’t go on a holiday. I can’t go to a restaurant, I can’t go bowling. I can’t go to a movie. You know, these are things that it’s just gotten out of control.”

The 52-year-old said attendees are likely to stay parked by Parliament until vaccine mandates are lifted.

Canada's 'Freedom Convoy': 

Is this Jan. 6 for the Great White North?

Kathryn Joyce, Salon
January 29, 2022

Canada's 'Freedom Convoy' (Screen Grab)

If you choose to believe Fox News and right-wing social media, this weekend a 40-mile long "Freedom Convoy" of 50,000 Canadian truckers, plus millions of their supporters, will converge in Ottawa — our northern neighbor's capital — for a mass protest that will gridlock the city until all of the country's vaccine mandates are repealed

The anti-vaccination convoy movement has raised some $7 million, and earned the support of Canadian conservative Parliament leader Erin O'Toole, who says he plans to meet with the truckers, as well as prominent American conservatives or libertarians from Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson to Elon Musk. Videos of the convoy have proliferated online, most depicting lines of tractor-trailers driving across Canada, variously set to dramatic film scores or Twisted Sister, and cheered on by throngs of spectators waving the Maple Leaf flag on highway shoulders and overpasses. Other images and videos have popped up too, showcasing the efforts of convoy supporters, including a sort of women's auxiliary unit singing "O Canada" while assembling sandwiches for the truckers.

But in the last couple of days, research and reporting has emerged that suggests the convoy, ripe as it is for gags about the polite or earnest nature of Canadians, could spell trouble. On Friday, Ottawa police asked residents of the city to avoid traveling downtown on Saturday. Security officials at Canada's House of Commons warned that demonstrators have been searching for the home addresses of members of Parliament. Groups that track the far right have warned that the convoy movement is sparking violent rhetoric online, including calls for the demonstration to replicate the U.S. Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, and for drivers to use their trucks to ram into the barricades around the Parliament building.

Reporters and researchers have also pointed out that the convoy movement is inextricably tied to Canadian far-right groups, including members of radical, neo-Nazi-linked "accelerationist" networks, Holocaust deniers and supporters of the white nationalist Great Replacement theory, "sovereign citizen" types with quixotic plans to dissolve the Canadian government and, of course, QAnon adherents.

As one leading Canadian research group, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), noted in an article published Thursday, "Since the start of the pandemic, COVID conspiracies have been bringing various fringe and far-right elements together. The close connections between the People's Party of Canada, the young white supremacists of Canada First, and the Diagolon network is one example. This convoy is another."

On the eve of the convoy's arrival in Ottawa, CAHN's executive director Evan Balgord spoke with Salon.


So what's going on with this convoy?

I'll dispel one myth right away. A lot of folks are saying that this was some sort of trucker convoy that was hijacked by the far right. That's not actually true. Canada was going to have a requirement that cross-border truck drivers get vaccinated. We already have a mandate that some public servants have to be vaccinated, like nurses and doctors, and that's fairly uncontroversial. But a small number of truckers and some trucking organizations pointed out that, because the average Canadian trucker is alone in their trucks all day, why do they have to get vaccinated when they're largely self-isolating because of their work? Agree with it or not, that seems like a reasonable thing to have a conversation about. So the trucking organizations were asking the government to talk about this mandate. And the far right spotted this and just stole it — stole the idea and decided to have a convoy about it.

About two years ago, [the organizers] had another convoy called United We Roll. It was a far-right convoy. It was all the same kind of people that we monitor at CAHN. So they stole this grievance and put together this convoy. We have these organizers on record making Islamophobic statements. One of the loudest, Pat King, has made many racist and antisemitic statements and called for violence in the past. One of the main organizers of the group that's sort of behind the convoy, Canada Unity, is run in part by a guy named James Bauder, who was involved in our Yellow Vest Canada movement. He's previously expressed support for a bunch of different hate groups. He said that [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau needs to be arrested and charged with treason. He and some other people got together to do this convoy, so it's been a far-right project from day one.

Now their GoFundMe has raised around $7 million, and the actual convoy is about to descend on Ottawa. Of course it's not 50,000 trucks or whatever ridiculous thing Fox News was saying. It's probably 100 to 200 actual trucks and then a bunch of other vehicles. But it's significant. Some people are saying they want it to be Canada's Jan. 6. So it's concerning.

What should people expect to see in Ottawa this weekend?

I'll make one hard prediction. The irony to me in all this is the truckers actually had a kind of issue. But because the far right stole the issue, and the convoy has come to represent far-right extremism, there's no way those truckers or the trucking organizations can have an adult conversation with our government now. They've been totally fucked by this convoy.

If you look at the list of demands that Canada Unity put out in this memorandum of understanding, they're asking that the vaccine passport system and mandates just be done away with across Canada. That's everything from getting on a plane to eating at a restaurant. There's just no way that our government is going to do that. Then they've added on all these other grievances. Some people want to see a Jan. 6. Some people want Trudeau tried for treason. Some people showing up are "sovereign citizens," who believe that using some magic combination of words and pseudo-legal paperwork is going to dissolve the government. And of course, there's the others who are just saying no vaccine mandates whatsoever. None of this is going to happen. So one prediction I'm damn sure of is that they're not going to achieve anything, public policy-wise.

But in terms of what actually happens — it's not like we don't have people who want to do a Jan. 6 here. We do, and they're always around. I don't think something like that is going to happen. Jan. 6 was fairly well planned. Not everybody there was part of that plan, and different groups had different plans, but there was significant planning behind it. I don't know that that planning is taking place here. Then there's the fact that all of our lawmakers and our prime minister aren't actually there right now. And in Ottawa, on Parliament Hill, we have concrete barriers to prevent ramming attacks and a gigantic lawn in front of our Parliament building. All of which, I believe, means it's a lot harder to storm.

But we are telling people who live in Ottawa to stay away this weekend and try not to go outside if they can avoid it. I feel really awful giving that advice. But, you know, there are people among this big convoy who are racists. There are people in this convoy who want to do violence to others. I'm not saying everybody's like that. But they'll be finally reaching their target, the thing they're maddest at, Ottawa, and there's a crowd, there's a mob. So you don't know how things can go.

Maybe there's some violence. Hopefully not. Best-case scenario is just they honk their horns, annoy the hell out of everybody, achieve nothing and then have to go home. A lot of businesses are actually closing up for the day. And there's no public washrooms in Ottawa. They're not going to have anywhere to poop. Sorry to be crass about it. But they're not going to find a warm reception there.

There are a lot of videos online that claim to show hundreds or thousands of trucks on their way to Ottawa. And there are videos claiming to show sympathy protests in different countries around the world. How accurate are the depictions of this movement on social or right-wing media?

I have no idea of anything else happening in other countries. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of that. In terms of people supporting them, for all intents and purposes, this is an anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown crowd. And we've got a lot of them, just like the States has a lot of them, just like many countries have a lot of them. They've thrown all their support behind this, and it's not just a few bad apples, either. Every single hate group, far-right group we monitor is involved in this in some way, shape or form, pretty vocally.

There's very much two Canadas right now. There's the Canada that is for health and public science and all of that. And then there's the far right, which is not. But if anyone's talking about massive levels of support, I'd point out that 90% of our truckers are vaccinated. A lot of our truckers here are South Asian, and I don't see them participating in this convoy in numbers that would be representative. So this isn't about truckers, or the specific issue that truckers had. It's just a far-right thing.

Is this America's fault? Did we do this to you guys?

Not entirely. Canada has had its own unique hate ecosystem forever. What you do in the States does definitely strongly impact us. Of course it does. But it works both ways. I mean, stop me if you've heard the names Gavin McInnes, Lauren Southern, Faith Goldy or Stefan Molyneux before. And you know, AltRight.com, the website, was created in a Toronto apartment; Richard Spencer was living in Toronto at the time. Canada has a disproportionate impact on the States and the rest of the world when it comes to putting out thought leaders in these fascist movements as well. So it's not just the States' fault. We have to own up to our own racist, genocidal history and the systems of white supremacy that we have here as well.

But for American readers, describing the people on the overpasses — they're somewhere between, or an amalgamation of, MAGA and Jan. 6. Meaning, with Jan. 6, there were some people that got really organized and wanted to do what happened, or even worse. And then there were plenty of people who were just there and got swept up and started to participate because somebody lit that match. With the convoy, it's similar: Not everybody that's there is a racist who wants to do violence. But there's elements of that in there. Every single hate group and insurrectionary element that we have in our country is there, or is supporting it from the sidelines. So it does create a volatile situation. I don't think we're quite at critical mass. We don't have all the right ingredients, I think, to make this a Jan. 6. But the point is, there's people here who want it to be.

Texas Gov. Abbott under fire from GOP and Dems for botched National Guard deployment: WSJ

Tom Boggioni
January 29, 2022

Greg Abbott announced the reopening of Texas by lifting state capacity limits on businesses and the masking requirement. - Lynda M. Gonzalez/The Dallas Morning News/TNS

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is taking heat from Democrats and members of his own party after deploying National Guard members to the border with Mexico with no clear mission and little support while they sit there.

As WSJ's Elizabeth Findell reports, some members of the Guard are sitting around doing nothing and not getting paid after being pulled off of their civilian jobs for "Operation Lonestar."

As Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Jason Featherston, who served as senior adviser to the Texas Army National Guard put it, "I’ve never seen the magnitude of problems of Operation Lone Star."

According to Findell, "Last spring, Mr. Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, which involves sending troops and state police to the border and arresting immigrants on state trespassing charges, saying he was looking for ways to take federal immigration enforcement into state hands. Now, complaints within the ranks and concerns about the troops’ treatment could cast a pall over an operation that has been central to Mr. Abbott’s public messaging. Republican pollsters and consultants said there is no issue of greater importance to the party’s voters in Texas than border security and immigration."

RELATED: Greg Abbott says critics are "playing politics" over Texas National Guard suicides

That has led to sniping from some of Abbott's rivals for his job, with the Journal reporting, "Two Republican primary challengers of Mr. Abbott, Allen West, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and former state Sen. Don Huffines, have called for more troops on the border. They say the mission to the border lacks focus and have said in speeches and interviews that Mr. Abbott is using the troops for political theater."

Democrats have also piled on with the Journal reporting, "...on Wednesday, 50 Democrats in the Texas Legislature sent a letter to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, requesting an investigation into the operation. The letter cited concerns about treatment of Guardsmen, as well as treatment of immigrants, stress on local justice systems and the role of private militia groups in the operation."

In a statement from Abbott's office last week, the embattled governor claimed, "The mission for the National Guard and Texas DPS has been clear: deter and prevent immigrants from entering Texas illegally, including building barriers to achieve those goals, and to detain and arrest those who are violating Texas law,” however there has been pushback from the guardsmen.

"A large part of the problem with the troops stems from boredom, say Texas National Guard members deployed at the border," the report states. "Many members of the National Guard, who don’t have authority to enforce immigration laws, say they do very little during the day, and frustration has risen amid difficult living conditions, financial stress and months away from their families. Some have been on the mission longer than overseas deployments, without the same support resources, they said."

According to one member of the National Guard who is a nurse, they're needed back home to help deal with the Covid pandemic after being called to duty last summer.

He didn’t receive a paycheck for months and mortgage payments back home drained his savings account to the point that when he had a week off from the mission, he spent it working long hospital shifts trying to put some money in the bank," the report states with the soldier adding, "Truthfully, I’m not doing anything here. We’re in the middle of a pandemic and we have a critical nursing shortage.”

The report continues, "Some members reported getting paid late or not at all for months, causing them to dip into savings and miss mortgage payments. The Texas Military Department said Tuesday that all soldiers had received at least one paycheck and some 80% of pay issues had been resolved," before adding, "Between mid-October and mid-December, four Guardsmen killed themselves. Two of them were actively serving on a border deployment, the department confirmed. The other two had been ordered to deploy and sought exemptions, according to copies of their hardship requests."

As spiritualism’s popularity grows, photographer Shannon Taggart takes viewers inside the world of séances, mediums and orbs

The Conversation
January 29, 2022

Ouija Board (Shutterstock)

The word séance conjures images of darkened rooms, entranced mediums, strange occurrences and spirit voices. For many contemporary audiences, these visions might seem like something out of the past, or perhaps a movie, rather than a living belief system.

For the past 20 years, American photographer Shannon Taggart has explored modern spiritualism, a religion whose adherents believe in communication with the dead.

Her photographic series “Séance,” which was recently on view at the Albin O. Kuhn Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, provides a window into this often misunderstood religion.

As a curator and art historian who has researched apparition photographs and the art of conspiracy theory, I was drawn to Taggart’s images because they offer a lens through which to examine the role of spirituality in modern life.

In an era defined by a global pandemic, heightened political division and the planetary threat of climate change, I wonder: Is spiritualism due for a major resurgence?

Spiritualism comes knocking

Spiritualism emerged near Rochester, New York, in 1848 when two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, claimed to hear a mysterious rapping at their bedroom wall. The adolescents claimed to communicate through a system of knocks with the spirit of a man who had died in the house years earlier. News of the phenomenon traveled quickly, and the girls appeared before crowds demonstrating their purported abilities.

Soon, reports of similar phenomena occurring across the United States appeared in the press, and the possibility of speaking with the deceased fueled the popular imagination.

Spiritualism first grew in private. People who channeled communication with the dead, called mediums, operated out of their homes, where they would organize séance circles, gatherings in which a small group attempted to make contact with the spirit world.

Over time, spiritualists started appearing publicly at conventions and outdoor summer camp meetings. By the 1870s, they began to put down roots, founding like-minded communities and centers of study, such as the spiritualist colony of Lily Dale, New York, established in 1879.

In addition to holding séances, spiritualists practice healings and believe in the gift of prophecy. Mediums say they convey messages from the dead to the living, including reports about the future.

Many spiritualists hoped to make utopian visions of the future a reality in the present by supporting progressive political causes such as abolitionism, women’s rights and Indigenous rights.

Notably, spiritualism gave women an unprecedented role in religion, providing an audience and a platform to deliver messages both personal and political. Suffragists Marion H. Skidmore, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony all spoke at Lily Dale. The views of spiritualists thus represented a radical break from traditional religious and political authority.

Ghosts in the machine

The Fox sisters’ purported ability to communicate with the dead became known as “the spiritual telegraph,” referencing the then-recent invention by Samuel B. Morse. As spiritualism developed, adherents embraced technology as tools for spirit communication and to prove the existence of spirits.

Photography became “the perfect medium” with which to create an iconography of spiritualism. Whether it was through astronomical, microscopic or X-ray photography, cameras could render the unseen visible. Despite the proliferation of altered photographs in the 19th century, the photograph’s status as a truthful representation of reality remained – and, one might argue, continues to remain – largely intact.

Photography also played a leading role in the 19th century’s memorial culture, since the camera could freeze time and render absent loved ones present, if only as a visual trace.

The American Civil War brought death at an unprecedented scale into people’s living rooms through the pages of the illustrated press. Black attire, mourning jewelry and the genre of post-mortem photography were commonplace in a culture of grieving.


Sandy Candy Eppinger’s family spirit photographs, which show her brother Eugene Candy with the spirits of their grandmother Ethel Philips and great aunt Helen Thompson, at Lily Dale, New York, in 2015.
© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist, Author provided

In the 1860s, New York portrait photographer William Mumler and his wife, Hannah Mumler, a medium, offered portrait sessions in which spirits of the sitters’ loved ones appeared to manifest in the resulting photographs.

Mumler’s spectacular portraits also raised the specter of hucksterism. The photographer was charged with fraud by claimants who argued he faked the photographs, and none other than showman P.T. Barnum gave evidence for the prosecution.

In the early 20th century, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously rallied to defend British medium Ada Emma Deane, who was also accused of faking spirit photographs.

The double-sided coin of belief and skepticism haunts these historical examples; nonetheless, the psychological impact of these images among the grieving remained powerful.

Spiritualist revivals

History seems to suggest that catastrophic loss of life can spur renewed interest in spiritualist beliefs.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Mumlers’ portraits became all the rage amid the devastation of the U.S. Civil War, while Deane’s popularity peaked in the wake of World War I and the flu pandemic.

Has the pervading sense of uncertainty induced by the COVID-19 pandemic triggered another spiritualist revival?

Alternative belief structures, including astrology and tarot, seem to have experienced a resurgence, reaching new audiences through the internet and social media.


Séance trumpets featuring celebrity spirit guides, including Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury, hand-painted by medium Sylvia Howarth, in England in 2013.
© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist., Author provided

Recently, a number of mediums have become famous thanks to their endorsements by celebrity clientele. Some mediums claim to be able to channel stars from the grave, from Louis Armstrong to Elvis Presley.

While modern mediums have their detractors, their eager adoption of television and the internet is a logical step for a religion that has always embraced new technologies.

What was once seen as a niche subculture or the domain of late-night 1-900 call-in shows has gone mainstream: Psychic businesses were a US$2 billion industry in 2018.
Shannon Taggart’s ‘Séance’

This new spirituality has influenced pop culture as well as high art; the Guggenheim’s 2019 retrospective of Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint was the most-visited exhibition in the museum’s history, drawing over 600,000 viewers.

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith argued that the exhibition’s impact amounted to a “psychic and historical shift” in the art world. Smith’s use of the word “psychic” is apt; the exhibition was a watershed not only for restoring to primacy women’s role in the development of abstract painting, but also for re-centering the spiritual within art.

Taggart’s photographs, meanwhile, explore present-day practices, sites and objects of spiritualism.

Allowing chance and automation to guide camera experiments, she reveals processes of transformation and altered states through blurred effects, halos of light and doubling in images that reference historical spirit photographs.

In one image, for example, a grieving mother raises her arms into a darkened sky dotted with circles of light known as orbs. Orb photography is a recent innovation within spirit photography in which practitioners call upon spirits to manifest orbs, which are then captured by digital cameras. Orb photography is another example of the ambiguity of spirit photographs: Does it channel the supernatural, or simply capture reflections of dust on the camera lens?


Kim Kitchen calls to her deceased daughter Casey and asks her for orbs in Lily Dale, New York, in 2014.
© Shannon Taggart. Courtesy of the Artist, Author provided

For Taggart, that question is largely beside the point. Her aim is to remain truthful to the psychological experience of spiritualism, to make visible what is ineffable.

Taggart’s photographs recover the marginalized history of spiritualism at a moment when the religion feels once again on the verge of a resurgence.

As Taggart is fond of saying, “You don’t have to take spiritualism literally to take it seriously.”

Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections and Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How to be a god: we might one day create virtual worlds with characters as intelligent as ourselves

The Conversation
January 29, 2022

Woman playing video games (Shutterstock)

Most research into the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerns its use for weaponry, transport or profiling. Although the dangers presented by an autonomous, racist tank cannot be understated, there is another aspect to all this. What about our responsibilities to the AIs we create?

Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (such as World of Warcraft) are pocket realities populated chiefly by non-player characters. At the moment, these characters are not particularly smart, but give it 50 years and they will be.

Sorry? 50 years won’t be enough? Take 500. Take 5,000,000. We have the rest of eternity to achieve this.

You want planet-sized computers? You can have them. You want computers made from human brain tissue? You can have them. Eventually, I believe we will have virtual worlds containing characters as smart as we are – if not smarter – and in full possession of free will. What will our responsibilities towards these beings be? We will after all be the literal gods of the realities in which they dwell, controlling the physics of their worlds. We can do anything we like to them.

So knowing all that…should we?

Ethical difficulties of free will

As I’ve explored in my recent book, whenever “should” is involved, ethics steps in and takes over – even for video games. The first question to ask is whether our game characters of the future are worthy of being considered as moral entities or are simply bits in a database. If the latter, we needn’t trouble our consciences with them any more than we would characters in a word processor.

The question is actually moot, though. If we create our characters to be free-thinking beings, then we must treat them as if they are such – regardless of how they might appear to an external observer.


That being the case, then, can we switch our virtual worlds off? Doing so could be condemning billions of intelligent creatures to non-existence. Would it nevertheless be OK if we saved a copy of their world at the moment we ended it? Does the theoretical possibility that we may switch their world back on exactly as it was mean we’re not actually murdering them? What if we don’t have the original game software?

Can we legitimately cause these characters suffering? We ourselves implement the very concept, so this isn’t so much a question about whether it’s OK to torment them as it is about whether tormenting them is even a thing. In modern societies, the default position is that it’s immoral to make free-thinking individuals suffer unless either they agree to it or it’s to save them (or someone else) from something worse. We can’t ask our characters to consent to be born into a world of suffering – they won’t exist when we create the game.

So, what about the “something worse” alternative? If you possess free will, you must be sapient, so must therefore be a moral being yourself. That means you must have developed morals, so it must be possible for bad things to happen to you. Otherwise, you couldn’t have reflected on what’s right or wrong to develop your morals. Put another way, unless bad things happen, there’s no free will. Removing free will from a being is tantamount to destroying the being it was previously, therefore yes, we do have to allow suffering or the concept of sapient character is an oxymoron.

Afterlife?

Accepting that our characters of the future are free-thinking beings, where would they fit in a hierarchy of importance? In general, given a straight choice between saving a sapient being (such as a toddler) or a merely sentient one (such as a dog), people would choose the former over the latter. Given a similar choice between saving a real dog or a virtual saint, which would prevail?

Bear in mind that if your characters perceive themselves to be moral beings but you don’t perceive them as such, they’re going to think you’re a jerk. As Alphinaud Leveilleur, a character in Final Fantasy XIV, neatly puts it (spoiler: having just discovered that his world was created by the actions of beings who as a consequence don’t regard him as properly alive): “We define our worth, not the circumstances of our creation!”.


World of Warcraft is massively-multiplayer online role-playing game.
Daniel Krason/Shutterstock


Are we going to allow our characters to die? It’s extra work to implement the concept. If they do live forever, do we make them invulnerable or merely stop them from dying? Life wouldn’t be much fun after falling into a blender, after all. If they do die, do we move them to gaming heaven (or hell) or simply erase them?

These aren’t the only questions we can ask. Can we insert ideas into their heads? Can we change their world to mess with them? Do we impose our morals on them or let them develop their own (with which we may disagree)? There are many more.

Ultimately, the biggest question is: should we create sapient characters in the first place?

Now you’ll have noticed that I’ve asked a lot of questions here. You may well be wondering what the answers are.

Well, so am I! That’s the point of this exercise. Humanity doesn’t yet have an ethical framework for the creation of realities of which we are gods. No system of meta-ethics yet exists to help us. We need to work this out before we build worlds populated by beings with free will, whether 50, 500, 5,000,000 years from now or tomorrow. These are questions for you to answer.

Be careful how you do so, though. You may set a precedent.

We ourselves are the non-player characters of Reality.

Richard A. Bartle, Professor of Computer Game Design, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists warn of 'a slew of ethical concerns' with Elon Musk’s brain implant technology

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
January 28, 2022

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reached a deal with US stock market regulators over his use of social media AFP/File / Frederic J. BROWN


Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology, which sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, recently hired a director for clinical trials. The idea behind Neuralink is to implant coin-shaped devices that would allow people to operate computers and mobile devices with their brains. And in the scientific world, journalist Noah Kirsch reports in an article published by the Daily Beast on January 25, Neuralink is inspiring a lot of debate.

“In spite of the never-ending momentum for the world’s richest man,” Kirsch explains, “scientists are worried about the company’s oversight, the potential impact on trial participants, and whether society has meaningfully grappled with the stakes of fusing big tech with human brains.”

Neuralink has already been tested on animals, but testing it on people takes the technology to a whole new level. One of the scientists who has strong reservations about Neuralink is the University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Karola Kreitmair, an assistant professor of medical history and bioethics.

Kreitmair told the Beast, “I don’t think there is sufficient public discourse on what the big picture implications of this kind of technology becoming available are. I worry that there’s this uncomfortable marriage between a company that is for-profit.”

But Kreitmair also said that “this technology has the potential to be life-changing for people who are paralyzed” even though it “raises such a slew of ethical concerns.”

Another scientist who has strong reservations about Neuralink’s technology is Dr. Laura Cabrera, who specializes in neuroethics research at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania.

Cabrera told the Beast, “With these companies and owners of companies, they’re kind of showmen. They’ll make these hyperbolic claims, and I think that’s dangerous, because I think people sometimes believe it blindly…. I’m always cautious about what (Musk) says.”

The 50-year-old Musk, a Gen-Xer and native of South Africa, is now, as Kirsch notes, the wealthiest man in the world — a position once held by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and later, investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016, is estimated to have a net worth of $243 billion, according to Forbes.

Thai pig farmers angered by havoc from suspected African swine fever

2022/1/30 
© Reuters


By Patpicha Tanakasempipat

NAKHON PATHOM, Thailand (Reuters) -Business began unravelling for Thai pig farmer Jintana Jamjumrus two years ago, after dozens of her animals got feverish and died within days of a mysterious illness she suspected of being a viral disease with no known vaccine, African swine fever (ASF).

This month, officials identified the first case of ASF in Jintana's province of Nakhon Pathom, after years of saying it was not in Thailand, unleashing a political firestorm as pork prices hit an all-time high near which they may stay for months.

"There's no way they didn't know. Pigs died all over the country ... Why the cover-up?" Jintana, 75, asked about the deaths in previous years. "What can they do now? There's nothing left."

In parliament, an opposition lawmaker accused the government of a years-long cover-up, though a deputy agriculture minister denied this, saying authorities had successfully kept out the disease in previous years.

But small farmers, whose losses have driven 54% of them out of business in the past year, are sceptical, particularly as the viral disease, for which there is no vaccine, has killed hundreds of millions of pigs in Europe and Asia since 2018.

"I had to let the sick ones die and sell off the healthy ones," said Jintana. "My business was all gone."

Earlier warning would have saved their livelihoods, say the small farmers, and perhaps averted the pork shortage that drove retail prices in Bangkok to 215 baht ($6.47) per kg on Jan. 11, the highest daily average in a database stretching back to 2001.

The high prices led to a ban on exports of live animals until April, and consumer prices could stay high as production could take months to recover, putting further strain on rural communities already reeling from the hog losses.

Since the confirmation, Thailand has uncovered African swine fever in 22 areas of 13 provinces and culled more than 400 pigs, all on small farms, said Bunyagith Pinprasong, the director of the Bureau of Disease Control and Veterinary Services.

Between 2019 and 2021, livestock authorities culled nearly 300,000 pigs deemed at high risk of African swine fever, though it was never detected in any samples from dead pigs, Bunyagith told Reuters.

Most pig deaths earlier were because of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), he said.

"We implemented strict and effective measures to prevent ASF, which is why it wasn't found before," he said. "We will control and curb its spread until a vaccine is developed."

LOWER PRODUCTION

By the time Thailand confirmed the first ASF outbreak this month, nearly 100,000 smallholders, or those rearing up to 50 pigs, had disappeared, leaving just 79,000, government figures on the livestock industry show.

Small farmers' herds were halved to 1 million pigs, accounting for the bulk of the loss in the national herd, which stands at 10.85 million, down 17% from last year's 13.1 million, the data shows.

Smallholders and small farms, or those with herds of between 51 and 500 animals, normally contibute about 30% of Thailand's pork production of about 19 million to 20 million pigs, about 18 million of which are consumed domestically and the rest exported.

"The current decrease in pigs is due to previous disease outbreaks, not because of African swine fever," said Bunyagith, adding that PRRS and classical swine fever were the most common diseases in Thai pigs, with vaccines available for both.

"But whether PRRS or ASF, there will be losses for smallholders without a good farm management system."

While small farms struggle, shares of Thailand's biggest food producer, Charoen Pokphand Foods Pcl, jumped in January to their highest in nearly seven months, and shares of peer Thaifoods Group Pcl hit their highest since April.

Further shrinking of small farms' market share threatens longer-term implications for food prices, said Kevalin Wangpichayasuk of Kasikorn Research Center.

"Smallholders' gradual disappearance means fewer players and lower competition, which will have an impact on price," Kevalin told Reuters.

Bunyagith said rearing new animals to bridge the gap would take up to 10 months, so the government plans to offer smallholders loans and new piglets to help rebuild.

But farmers said they had lost faith in the government and doubted pig farming could still yield a livelihood, at least until a vaccine is found.

Jamnian Iangjiam, 62, said she gave up pig farming after two attempts to restart with new piglets saw them get sick too.

"I'm in debt because I spent my last savings on raising new pigs, and now I have nothing," said Jamnian, her pig pens empty since May. "I'm done."

($1=33.22 baht)

(Reporting by Patpicha Tanakasempipat; Editing by Kay Johnson, Gavin Maguire and Clarence Fernandez)

A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their amputated legs – taking science one step closer to helping people regrow their body parts, too

The Conversation
January 28, 2022

Frog AFP/File / LUIS ROBAYO

Our bodies connect us to the world. When people lose parts of their bodies to disease or traumatic injury, they often feel that they’ve lost a part of who they are, even experiencing a grief akin to losing a loved one. Their sense of personal loss is justified because unlike salamanders or snarky comic book characters like Deadpool, adult human tissues generally do not regenerate – limb loss is permanent and irreversible.

Or is it?

While there have been significant advances in prosthetic and bionic technologies to replace lost limbs, they cannot yet restore a sense of touch, minimize the sensation of phantom pains or match the capabilities of natural limbs. Without reconstructing the limb itself, a person won’t be able to feel the touch of a loved one or the warmth of the sun.

We are researchers in regenerative and developmental biology and biomedical engineering. Our recent study in the journal Science Advances showed that just 24 hours of a treatment we designed is enough to regenerate fully functional and touch-sensitive limbs in frogs.

Kickstarting regeneration

During very early development, cells that will eventually become limbs and organs arrange themselves into precise anatomical structures using a set of chemical, biomechanical and electrical signals. In considering ways to regenerate limbs, we reasoned that it would be much easier to ask cells to repeat what they already did during early development. So we looked for ways to trigger the “build whatever normally was here” signal for cells at the site of a wound.

One of the major challenges in doing this, however, is figuring out how to create an environment that encourages the body to regenerate instead of forming scars. While scars help protect injured tissue from further damage, they also change the cellular environment in ways that prevent regeneration.

Axolotls are known for their powerful regenerative abilities.

Some aquatic animals such as the axolotl have mastered regeneration without scar formation. And even in early human development, the amniotic sac provides an environment that can facilitate regenerative mechanisms. We hypothesized that developing a similar environment could override scar formation at the time of injury and allow the body to reactivate dormant regenerative signals.

To implement this idea, we developed a wearable device made of a silk hydrogel as a way to create an isolated chamber for regeneration by blocking other signals that would direct the body to develop scars or undergo other processes. We then loaded the device with a cocktail of five drugs involved in normal animal development and tissue growth.

We chose to test the device using African clawed frogs, a species commonly used in animal research which, like humans, does not regenerate limbs in adulthood. We attached the device onto one leg stump for 24 hours. We then removed the device and observed how the site of the lost limb changed over time. Over the course of 18 months, we were amazed to find that the frogs were able to regenerate their legs, including fingerlike projections with significant nerve, bone and blood vessel regrowth. The limbs also responded to light pressure, meaning that they had a restored sense of touch, and allowed the frog to return to normal swimming behavior.

Frogs that were given the device but without the drug cocktail had limited limb regrowth without much functional restoration. And frogs that weren’t treated with the device or the drug cocktail did not regrow their limbs, leaving stumps that were insensitive to touch and functionally impaired.

Interestingly, the limbs of the frogs treated with the device and the drug cocktail weren’t perfectly reconstructed. For example, bones were sometimes fragmented. However, the incompleteness of the new limb tells us that other key molecular signals may be missing, and many aspects of the treatment can still be optimized. Once we identify these signals, adding them to the drug treatment could potentially fully reverse limb loss in the future.

While prosthetic and bionic limbs can help amputees regain their independence, they do not fully restore function.
Nadia Ramahi/500px Prime via Getty Images

The future of regenerative medicine

Traumatic injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability in Americans. And limb loss from severe injury is the most frequent source of lifelong disability. These traumatic injuries are often caused by automobile accidents, athletic injury, side effects of metabolic diseases such as diabetes and even battlefield injuries.

The possibility of decoding and awakening dormant signals that enable the body to regenerate parts of itself is a transformative frontier in medical science. Beyond regrowing lost limbs, regenerating heart tissue after a heart attack or brain tissue after a stroke could extend life and dramatically increase its quality. Our treatment is far from being ready to use in humans, and we only know that it works when applied immediately after injury. But uncovering and understanding the signals that allow cells to regenerate means that patients may not have to wait for scientists to really understand all the intricacies of how complex organs are constructed before they can get treated.

Making a person whole again means more than just replacing their limb. It also means restoring their sense of touch and ability to function. New approaches in regenerative medicine are now beginning to identify how that may be possible.

Michael Levin, Professor of Biology, Tufts University; David Kaplan, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University, and Nirosha Murugan, Assistant Professor of Biology, Algoma University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ancient DNA suggests woolly mammoths roamed the Earth more recently than previously thought

The Conversation
January 28, 2022

Photo by Christopher Alvarenga on Unsplash


In 2010, small cores of permafrost sediments were collected by a team at the University of Alberta from gold mines in the Klondike region of central Yukon. They had remained in cold storage until paleogeneticists at the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre applied new genomics techniques to better understand the global extinction of megafauna that had culminated in North America some 12,700 years ago.

These tiny sediment samples contain an immense wealth of ancient environmental DNA from innumerable plants and animals that lived in those environments over millennia. These genetic microfossils originate from all components of an ecosystem — including bacteria, fungi, plants and animals — and serve as a time capsule of long-lost ecosystems, such as the mammoth-steppe, which disappeared around 13,000 years ago.

How exactly these ecosystems restructured so significantly, and why large animals seem to have been the most impacted by this shift has been an active area of scientific debate since the 18th century.

We can now use environmental DNA to help fill the gaps that have driven this debate.

Ancient DNA, cutting-edge technologies

Bacterial, fungal and unidentifiable DNA make up over 99.99 per cent of an environmental sample. In our case, we wanted a way to selectively recover the much smaller fraction of ancient plant and animal DNA that would help us better understand the collapse of the mammoth-steppe ecosystem.

For my doctoral research, I was part of a team that developed a a new technique to extract, isolate, sequence and identify tiny fragments of ancient DNA from sediment.


We analyzed these DNA fragments to track the shifting cast of plants and animals that lived in central Yukon over the past 30,000 years. We found evidence for the late survival of woolly mammoths and horses in the Klondike region, some 3,000 years later than expected.

We then expanded our analysis to include 21 previously collected permafrost cores from four sites in the Klondike region that date between 4,000 to 30,000 years ago.

With current technologies, we not only could identify which organisms a set of genetic microfossils came from. But we were also able to reassemble those fragments into genomes to study their evolutionary histories — solely from sediment.



Synthesis of dated bones, ancient environmental DNA and archaeological sites in Yukon and Alaska.
(Tyler J. Murchie)

Tremendous environmental change

The Pleistocene-Holocene transition, which occurred about 11,700 years ago, was a period of tremendous change across the globe. In eastern Beringia (the former Eurasian land bridge and unglaciated regions of Yukon and Alaska), this period saw the collapse of the mammoth-steppe biome and its gradual replacement with the boreal forest as we know it today.

This brought about the loss of iconic ice age megaherbivores like the woolly mammoth, Yukon horse, and steppe bison, along with predators such as the American scimitar cat and Beringian lion, among many others.


We found ancient environmental DNA from a diverse spectrum of ancient fauna, including woolly mammoths, horses, steppe bison, caribou, rodents, birds and many other animals.

We were also able to observe how ecosystems shifted with the rise of woody shrubs around 13,500 years ago, and how that correlated with a decline of DNA from woolly mammoths, horses and steppe bison. With this remarkably rich dataset, we observed four main findings.

There was a surprising consistency in the signal between sites, suggesting our data was representative of ecological trends in the region.
Woolly mammoth DNA declines prior to the Bølling–Allerød warming, a warm period at the end of the last ice age, suggesting that megafaunal losses may have been staggered.
Forbs (herbaceous flowering plants) make up a substantial component of the mammoth-steppe ecosystem alongside grasses.
There is a consistent signal of woolly mammoth and Yukon horse persistence into the Holocene, as much as 7,000 years after their disappearance from fossil records.


An evolutionary tree showing the location and relationship of horses and their relatives with genomes reconstructed from bones and sediment.
(Tyler J.Murchie), Author provided

When paired with other records, our genetic reconstructions suggest that the transition out of the last glacial period may have been more drawn out than dated bones alone would suggest.

Mammoths, for example, may have declined in local population abundance thousands of years earlier than other megafauna, which is potentially correlated with the first controversial evidence of humans in the area. Further, grassland grazing animals may have persisted for thousands of years in refugia (habitats that support the existence of an isolated population), despite the environmental shift.

Woolly mammoths alongside humans

Our data suggest that horses and woolly mammoths may have persisted in the Klondike until approximately 9,000 years ago and perhaps as recently as 5,700 years ago, outliving their supposed disappearance from local fossil records by 7,000 years. However, it is possible for ancient environmental DNA to survive erosion and re-deposition, which could mix the genetic signals of different time periods, necessitating a degree of caution in our interpretations.

Until recently, there was no evidence of mammoth survival into the mid-Holocene. But studies have now shown that mammoths survived until 5,500 and 4,000 years ago on Arctic islands.

Researchers at the Centre for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen found evidence for the late survival of horses and mammoths in Alaska until as recently as as 7,900 years ago. They also found evidence of mammoths surviving as recently as 3,900 years ago in Siberia, alongside woolly rhinoceros to at least 9,800 years ago.

Steppe bison, which were thought to have disappeared and been replaced by the American bison during the Pleistocene, have likewise been found to have survived even as recently as perhaps just 400 years ago. We were able to observe the presence of distinct genetic lineages of both woolly mammoths and steppe bison in the same sediment samples, which suggests that there were likely distinct populations of these animals living in the same area.

There is a growing body of evidence that many ice age megafauna probably survived well into recorded human history, roaming the north during the Bronze Age and while builders worked on the pyramids of Egypt.


Researchers in Denmark found evidence of woolly rhinoceroses surviving in Siberia at least 9,800 years ago.
(Shutterstock)

Genetic archives of our ecological past

The growing sophistication of environmental DNA methods to study ancient genetic microfossils highlights just how much information is buried in sediments.

Permafrost is ideal for preserving ancient DNA, but as this perennially frozen ground thaws and degrades with a warming Arctic, so too will the genetic material preserved within, and the evolutionary mysteries they once held.

Advances in paleogenetics continues to push the boundaries of what was once relegated to science fiction. Who knows what undiscovered evolutionary information remains frozen in ordinary sediments, hidden in microfossils of ancient DNA?

Tyler J. Murchie, Postdoctoral fellow, Anthropology, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Canada’s Military Aid Hypocrisy
No weapons for vulnerable Ukraine. Plenty for the villainous Saudi regime.

Mitchell Anderson Today | TheTyee.ca
Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Tyee.

Canada has sold the Saudis 928 of these LAV 6 armoured troop carriers whose firepower includes 105 millimetre cannons and 30 millimetre chain guns. Photo via General Dynamic Land Systems Canada.

Besieged on three sides by a Russian military buildup, the Ukrainian government has pleaded with western countries for military aid to help confront what might be the largest land invasion in Europe since the Second World War. Following a three-day cabinet retreat, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declined to provide even pistols to Kiev apparently for fear of escalating a volatile situation.

If only the Ukraine were Saudi Arabia, such moralistic hesitation on arms exports might not be so problematic. In 2020, sales of Canadian military equipment exported to the Ukraine totalled $351,964 — about half the value of a cheap condo in the Lower Mainland. That same year Saudi Arabia — a country with one of the worst human rights records on the planet and a primary player in the wretched civil war in Yemen — enjoyed over $1.3 billion in Canadian arm exports. In 2019, Canadian arms sales to the same Saudi regime that butchered Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate reached almost $3 billion.

A scathing report in 2021 by Amnesty International Canada and Project Ploughshares documented how Canada may be violating international law by providing lethal weapons almost certainly being used in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Photographs of Canadian-made light armoured vehicles and sniper rifles in the Yemen were blandly dismissed by the Department of National Defence as “battlefield losses,” rather than obvious evidence that Canadian arms are being deployed in one of the world’s worst war zones in explicit violation of written assurances to the contrary provided by the Saudis.

Canada’s indulgent support of the Saudi regime ramped up in 2014 with a $14.8 billion deal to provide 928 armoured vehicles configured for carrying troops, for “heavy assault” armed with a 105 millimetre cannon, or for “direct fire support” with a 30 millimetre chain gun.

The Saudis also ensured that details of the sales be sealed under a confidentiality agreement, which also benefited Canadian politicians seeking to duck moral responsibility for a deal so at odds with professed Canadian values. Former prime minister Stephen Harper described these lethal weapons as “trucks.” Trudeau characterized them as “jeeps” — a ruse eventually revealed when the media obtained documents showing how grotesquely inaccurate this description was.
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Other Saudi arms exports from Canada included 58,506 rifles, including large caliber sniper rifles lethally effective to two kilometres. Canadian aerospace companies have been providing maintenance and training support to the air forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates whose bombing campaigns in Yemen have left 24 million people at risk of starvation.

Canada was one of only four countries flagged by the UN Human Rights Council’s panel on Yemen as “helping to perpetuate the conflict” through ongoing arms sales. Global Affairs Canada responded to such criticism with the absurd position that “Canadian exports of military goods and technology to [the kingdom] contribute to regional peace and security.”

Such moral origami aside, lucrative sales by Canadian arms manufacturers located in several federal swing ridings are unlikely to end anytime soon. The Saudis have a secretive 14-year arms deal benefiting over 500 Canadian companies extending to 2028. The four million Yemeni refugees — mostly women and children — do not vote in Canadian elections, nor are they represented by well-heeled industry lobbyists. The continued cynical political calculus seems inevitable.

In light of our wretched record regarding Yemen, for Canada to maintain that is does not wish to enflame the volatile situation in the Ukraine is hypocrisy taken to the level of performance art. In lieu of actual military aid, the prime ministers office’s communications department apparently instructed cabinet ministers to pose with pieces of paper professing their steadfast support for the Ukrainian people. Such vacuous virtue signalling has sadly become emblematic of the Trudeau government on everything from the climate crisis to Indigenous reconciliation.

In a written statement, the Ukrainian embassy in Ottawa expressed their understated disgust regarding Canada’s lack of concrete measures to help meet this crisis. “We have hundreds of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles deployed along the Ukrainian border and in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s territory. Facing the risk of a further Russian invasion, we need to defend our land. The U.K. and the U.S. have already shipped the military equipment and we would appreciate if Canada follows suit.”


How to Destroy the Conservative Brand

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War is of course the worst of all possible outcomes. However, those professing this laudable view should also not presume that Russian President Vladimir Putin shares their sentiment. Domestic critics of the Putin regime often find themselves thrown out of windows, poisoned by nerve agents, or shot in broad daylight outside of the Kremlin. Thirty-one journalists — and counting — have been murdered in Russia since he came to power in 1999.

Like it or not, Canada is a major arms producer. Many Canadians — myself included — might not enjoy that reality but it is the truth. At this pivotal moment, it is worth asking why such an outsized portion of these lethal exports are somehow bound for the benefit of one of the most murderous regimes in the world, rather than a besieged strategic ally standing up to geopolitical forces fundamentally opposed to the principles of democracy. Canada can and should do better. As always, history will judge us accordingly.

We can't ignore the rise of the far right.



Katie Perfitt - 350.org 

350@350.org



As of this morning the “Truckers for Freedom” occupation has entered its third day in Ottawa, choking off access to the downtown core and putting hate symbols on open display.1 Whether they were watching on the news from the other side of the country or from their front doors in downtown Ottawa, people across the country were disgusted by the harassment, vandalism and hate.

You probably know by now that members of Canada’s far-right movement organized the convoy, and the protest has attracted the sympathy of thousands more who are angry and disaffected by a system they know is rigged.2

In fact, the current convoy camped out on Parliament Hill looks remarkably similar to the Yellow Vest convoy that descended on Ottawa three years ago. Claiming to be in opposition to Trudeau’s carbon tax, it similarly became swept up by anti-immigrant and far-right sentiment.

Right wing politicians and their operators have been pouring fuel on working class frustration ever since. Instead of addressing the problems we face, they’ve successfully tapped into working people’s rage in order to further their visions of everything from fossil fuel expansion to privatization to white nationalist ideologies.

We can’t combat the rise of the far-right by ridiculing or ignoring it away. We have to out-organize it. We have to build a movement big enough to stop them — one that holds space for people’s anger against a broken system, and channels it into a positive vision for the future.

That means organizing our communities around the vision of a bold, inclusive just transition that responds to this moment of crisis without leaving anybody behind. On March 12, people across the country will do just that, standing up to demand action on Trudeau’s long-promised Just Transition Act.

So far, 20 communities have registered to hold actions and events, but that’s well short of the 60+ we reached for our last big Day of Action in September. Eugene, will you take a moment and register to host an event in your community on the Day of Action for a Just Transition?

The convoy has generated a lot of media coverage and that’s been frustrating to see too, especially when I think about how often Canada’s news outlets ignore and marginalize our own, much bigger movements. These so-called “Truckers for Freedom” are sidelining the majority of transportation workers – particularly immigrant and South Asian truckers who are currently struggling against poor working conditions and wage theft.3

The Day of Action for a Just Transition is a chance to come together across movements and build power in our communities to win the future we deserve. Get involved now by signing up to host an action on March 12.

I’ve connected with everyone who signed up to host an action so far and I can tell this Day of Action is going to be powerful. Along with our partners at the Council of Canadians, we’ve asked organizers to come up with ways to bring the Just Transition to life in their communities and they’ve come back with creative ideas we never even imagined. Together, we can push this Parliament to meet the moment and pass sweeping just transition legislation that acts at the speed of the climate crisis, creates good, green jobs, and leaves no one behind.