After nearly a decade of mediocre videos displaying a clear identity crisis, beloved YouTube brand Smosh has once again found its creative footing. 

When the Smosh YouTube channel was created in 2005, it was a recipe for instant success. Its founders, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, were longtime best friends. The boys’ infectious personalities, strong friendship and joint sense of humour – along with the freshness of a new digital medium that had not yet developed a clear identity – allowed the duo to skyrocket to Internet fame, becoming some of the first online influencers of the modern age. 

Hecox and Padilla became known for their sketch comedy, which often depicted a fictionalized, over-the-top recreation of the duo’s lives as best friends. The brand’s success could be credited not only to the individual personalities of Hecox and Padilla, but also to the strong friendship the pair shared. 

As with all good things, this would eventually come to an end. 

In 2011, Smosh was acquired by Alloy Digital which would later become Defy Media. Their parent company’s budget and resources helped the sketches at first, but the acquisition would eventually prove detrimental to Smosh’s core identity. As Hecox and Padilla became overloaded with other projects spearheaded by Defy, their friendship began to deteriorate off-camera. Eventually, their frustration and lack of creative control would cause Padilla to leave the brand entirely. 

This left Smosh in a difficult position. If a brand’s identity is built on the foundation of a duo’s strong friendship, it will inevitably struggle if one member of the pair leaves. While the channel maintained a healthy (yet decreasing) view count for quite a while, I would argue that many of the remaining views were a result of Smosh’s earlier success. This is evidenced in the comments section of these videos, with many commenters requesting a return to the “old Smosh” and hoping for Padilla to return. 

Smosh quickly became experimental, trying out new sketches with an increasingly diverse cast – an understandable decision, yet the simplicity of Hecox and Padilla’s original videos was lost in the process. Furthermore, the company’s increasingly corporate and “family-friendly” image made the humour feel watered-down. One could argue that Smosh was broadening its horizons, but in many ways, the brand was becoming a hollow shell of its former self. 

While many of Smosh’s original sketches were filmed in a suburban house, the videos shifted to an office setting after Padilla’s departure. The house in which Hecox and Padilla had filmed added charm, personality and relatability to their sketches, all of which was lost through the shift to a corporate setting. 

After Defy Media’s shutdown in 2018 and subsequent acquisition by Mythical Entertainment, the Smosh team found more creative freedom, but the company’s original magic was nowhere to be found. Improvised videos were added to the channel’s lineup, but occasional sketch comedy and music videos left the channel without a clear vision. Hecox would eventually admit that the primary Smosh channel “[hadn’t] quite found its footing over the past few years,” and that they “[kept] trying to find a voice for it, and [nothing was] clicking.” 

Interestingly, the Smosh cast and crew seemed to enjoy their time creating content on the company’s secondary channel, Smosh Pit. These videos, which include “Try Not to Laugh” challenges, are more entertaining than many of the main channel’s modern outings because they better display the true friendships between company members.  

It was evident that there are genuine friendships within the company and that its new members have a lot to offer. These videos had become a new niche, drawing in a new crowd, albeit much smaller than the tens of millions of viewers that skyrocketed Hecox and Padilla to fame. It felt as though the secondary channel had become the main place for company members to create content they enjoyed, while the main Smosh page was nothing but a series of largely soulless attempts to maintain any sort of relevancy on the original channel. 

This would completely change on June 20^th when out of nowhere, the primary channel would upload a video revealing that Hecox and Padilla had purchased Smosh and intended to create more content in the style of their old videos. 

And they did. Smosh’s first new sketch was released soon after the announcement, and the enormous shift from the channel’s recent content was undeniable. While Hecox and Padilla have plenty of people working behind the scenes (just as they did throughout their prime), the team took care to return to the nostalgic feelings brought by the channel’s most popular era. While many references were made to the channel’s history, the most important element is that Hecox and Padilla resumed their roles as the videos’ writers, directors and stars. 

Hecox and Padilla have not only rekindled their friendship, but they have also rediscovered their passion for making silly, light-hearted content with one another. Their excitement can be felt throughout their latest sketches, especially when compared to the videos they created directly prior to Padilla’s departure as their friendship was falling apart. 

For those who found the channel during Padilla’s absence, the larger Smosh cast and crew continue to appear in challenges and games on the Smosh Pit channel. This way, the hardworking team at Smosh can continue their work and enjoy creating more on-screen content, but their efforts no longer conflict with the identity of the main Smosh channel. 

Padilla’s return is certainly a defining factor in this shift, but it isn’t the only one. Through reclaiming ownership of their shared business and reviving their friendship in a genuine way, Hecox and Padilla haven’t just made a half-hearted attempt to regain views on their channel; they’ve recaptured the magic that allowed Smosh to succeed in the first place. 

There are plenty of reasons to prefer Android smartphones, but Apple’s long-term success lies in several factors that competitors have failed to replicate. 

The “iPhone vs. Android” debate has plagued the tech industry for over a decade. While Android products make a compelling case through certain hardware benefits, their open source nature and affordability, Apple’s iPhone easily remains a cultural powerhouse thanks to a few features that many consumers deem even more valuable. 

The iPhone’s commitment to security and privacy set a benchmark for the entire tech industry. When using an iPhone, consumers face less risk of an information breach thanks to Apple’s focus on security, a philosophy ingrained across their hardware and software. 

With efficient storage encryption and the Secure Enclave built directly into their chips, Apple works to maintain their users’ sensitive information on every level of hardware. Coupled with security measures such as Touch ID and Face ID, the latter of which has less than 1 in 1,000,000 chance of erroneously allowing a stranger entry into a user’s smartphone; iPhone users can rest assured that their personal data is protected by a company that takes privacy extremely seriously. 

This dedication is matched in iPhone’s software, which includes an optimized update system and unrivalled transparency and customization to suit a user’s preferred privacy settings. 

Apple cemented their commitment to security when they opposed a 2016 court order to help the FBI unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, citing a “breach of privacy” and the concern that the government may eventually demand access to public users’ information should their requests be granted. Whether this was ethical is another debate entirely, but the company’s commitment to their users’ privacy is undeniable. 

While Android products typically provide more software-oriented customizations, the iPhone prides itself on its ease of use. iPhone’s user interface is simple and easy to understand, as well as carefully crafted to ensure a wide audience is able to quickly adapt to iPhone’s operating system, iOS. 

The iPhone’s software design language is consistent and makes for a pleasant experience using a variety of native apps, while still providing options for those who do wish to add a personal touch without interrupting the design philosophy in the process. iOS 16 added a plethora of ways for users to customize their lock screens while remaining in-line with iPhone’s design language. The iPhone’s software also prioritizes accessibility options, easing the product’s use for a wider range of users. 

Another draw is the iPhone’s seamless connection with other Apple products. Through a single iCloud account, users can easily link their other devices within the Apple ecosystem, including iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods and Mac. For example, with a linked account, photos taken on an iPhone are instantly uploaded to Apple’s online server and become viewable on the user’s other Apple products quickly and effortlessly. While the iPhone can certainly be used on its own, Apple’s fluent ecosystem allows its users to have an easy, interconnected experience across their entire digital portfolio. 

This philosophy extends to connecting with others’ products. With features such as AirDrop and a dedicated FaceTime app, iPhone users can share information or create a video call without the need for codes, wires or manual setup. Systems like these encourage users to switch to iPhone so they may enjoy easier connections with iPhone-using peers. 

The iPhone’s sleek and consistent hardware is another draw for potential customers. Across each new piece of hardware, Apple places an emphasis on physical beauty, and the iPhone is no exception. It’s worth noting that this beauty-first philosophy has actually proven anti-consumer in the past, such as Apple’s removal of commonly-used ports on the 2016 MacBook Pro to make the device thinner — but for many, the clean look of a brand-new iPhone remains a selling point regardless. 

As many defenders of Android will tell you, the iPhone maintains its popularity due to brand recognition, and this certainly has truth to it. While many of these features are positive for Apple’s customers, the iPhone’s cultural popularity plays an undeniably major role in its continued success. But don’t be fooled into thinking that this influence is the only reason iPhone users remain so loyal to their choice of smartphone — there are a variety of factors keeping this apple from going rotten. 

Disliking popular things just because they’re popular doesn’t mean you’re morally or intellectually superior, it just earns you the reputation of being a frustrating contrarian

Whenever something becomes popular, there are a few naysayers prepared to criticize it. From larger complaints to minor nitpicks, certain individuals always seem to be ready to bash the latest trend.  

This is nothing new. Take Entertainment Weekly’s list describing 10 reasons why “you” hate Twilight, including such critiques as “vampires shouldn’t sparkle” and “Robert Pattinson’s just not that cute.” 

If it seems like these writers are grasping at straws, that’s because they are. The truth is, there’s something intrinsically enjoyable about opposing the majority. It might provide the satisfaction of freedom or release, while in some cases, it allows the contrarian a feeling of ideological superiority. If the majority seems to be enjoying something yet one individual stands against it, that person may feel that they are more knowledgeable on the subject than those who they believe are too easily influenced. This mentality meant the birth of the word “sheeple,” a term meant to describe those who engage in herd mentality rather than thinking for themselves. 

In reality, consistent defiance doesn’t make the contrarian appear more intelligent, it just displays their arrogance and inherent unwillingness to partake in social norms. 

This isn’t to say that it’s always wrong to oppose popular opinion. Sharing different thoughts is important, and every voice is ultimately valuable. Unique perspectives can help foster conversation and share new thoughts worth consideration. The difference lies in people who feel an air of superiority through their refusal to enjoy anything popular. 

There is science behind this mentality. The Guardian lists several reasons that might cause someone to stand against a majority, such as group polarization or a desire for rebellion.  

Part of the issue lies in those who desire to take enjoyment away from others. Feeling superior in an opinion might bring about the will to inform others why they are wrong to enjoy a certain subject, or how they are too easily influenced by what’s societally popular at a given time. 

The phrase “let people enjoy things” may have started as a meme derived from a webcomic, but there is truth within the sentiment. Some have twisted the phrase in an attempt to negate legitimate criticism; but when applied in the appropriate context, it becomes a message that contrarians could stand to learn from. 

Enjoying popular things doesn’t make you basic, boring or unintelligent. Thinking for yourself is certainly important, but if your own thinking leads you to enjoyment of a societal trend, there is nothing to be ashamed of. 

Unsurprisingly, the internet is a fantastic place to find those who enjoy complaining since there are plenty of contrarians able to fuel their collective fire. Observe this Quora thread originally posted by a web-surfer wanting to know why TikTok is “so cringy”. Chances are that this person already knows why they dislike TikTok, but they hope to see opinions from others who share their annoyance – and they’d become quite satisfied in this regard. 

“It’s full of dumb dances, stupid trends [and] dangerous challenges,” responds one user. “The people on there have nothing to do besides post good for nothing content.” Take note of this comment’s insulting tone. This is not a genuine critique on TikTok, it is an attack on the platform’s creators simply because they are fun to hate. 

What the contrarian doesn’t realize is that they are only harming their own experience. Attacking something just because it’s popular doesn’t mean that public perception will be successfully swayed, but it does mean that the complainer will not experience the joy and togetherness of sharing a common interest with a group. Rather, through their insistent self-isolation, the contrarian puts themselves at the ironic risk of garnering a negative reputation for themselves. 

Standing against a public opinion is certainly valid when a personal conclusion is drawn from critical thinking. When a person complains about a popular trend due to an insistence on defiance, however, they only open themselves up to criticism in the process. 

The staples of securing a middle-class life in Canada are becoming less realistic for millions of Canadians every year. Treating the disease and not the symptoms is important: rising inequality is not a Canada-specific problem, it’s a global market problem and market planning is the way out. 

Leader of the Official Opposition Pierre Poilievre put out a political advertisement in early August where he suggested that cities should be pressured to build high-density, affordable housing near or on public transit hubs. 

Poilievre’s reasoning is straightforward; those who consume public transit the most tend to be a physically- or financially-limited demographic. He names senior citizens and students in his proposal as examples. Having close access to transit alleviates the expenses of a personal car or the time commitment of walking to get out of suburban sprawl. 

The proposal unsurprisingly caught the political commentariat by surprise. Poilievre is a politician who spends most of his airtime toeing the party line with empty rhetoric around the mummies of red tape produced by the government that can only be unraveled through a laissez-faire market approach. Yet here he is proposing a concrete solution to alleviating the housing crisis administered through F.D.R-era centralized government planning. 

To be clear, a cynic has good reason to believe that this is Poilievre’s attempt to capture the votes of young, single-issue voters who are feeling the despair of never owning a home on top of increased gas prices in the last couple years. 

But to be clear, the idea itself is excellent. Putting zoning laws in place for dense, rent-controlled public housing near major transit hubs would disproportionately bolster the working class. Without such zoning and government control, it’s often more in the direct interests of developers and investors to build luxury condominiums as they have a higher rate of return on investment. 

An example of misallocation from the private housing market in my hometown city of Burlington, Ontario is extremely apropos to Poilievre’s cause. 

A set of eight luxury condominiums called the Paradigm Grand started construction in the last decade in Burlington on a plot of land that’s contiguous with the regional train’s Burlington Station as well as one of the same regional transit provider’s bus stations. The condos are set to finish completion in 2025 and the available unit prices range from $649,000 to $995,000, making them hardly affordable for the majority of Canadians looking to own a home. 

The result is a situation where working-class people are often coming to and from the bus terminal walking from the crowded local bus stops surrounding the station. Meanwhile, the mostly professional-class inhabitants of the condominium units – a minority of the total traffic coming through this bus and train terminal in a given day – are going from their condos onto the train. 

It was Friedrich Engels who, in a footnote to the fourth German edition of Karl Marx’s Capital, noted that the words “work” and “labour” seem to denote different things. The former seems to fit an anthropological category of that which is productive in human society, while the latter was a term employed in a capitalist context where surplus value is the non ducor, duco of human productivity. 

An analogous linguistic implication exists in the difference between the words “house” and “home.” The former is, at best, a market term for the commodity of shelter; at worst, it’s a “safe” speculative instrument. There’s of course the proverb, “a house is not a home” that has found use in the titles of many Western films since the mid-20^th century many of which express loneliness and alienation. So “home,” like Engels insight into “work,” has an anthropological determination: a home is that with which people build close bonds with family and friends while sheltering from the elements. It’s also a place where basic needs are met in terms of food, rest and recreation. 

The neoliberal logic of the last five decades has eroded these anthropologically sacrosanct areas of human life that one could call The Commons – public spaces and essential goods and services like homes, healthcare, education, emergency services and communication networks. However, many of these resources are subject to supply and demand and allocated based on pricing in countless OECD countries. 

With that being said, despite the valorization of competition rather than planned cooperation, being the best bet of reaching “market equilibrium” and thus prosperity in the eyes of neoclassical economists, it appears more and more that the largest corporations today plan a great deal of their operation in order to be big retail players that reliably provide what people want at low costs. 

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s book, People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Largest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism, stresses the importance of planning in the world’s largest retail firms. Phillips and Rozworski compare major distributors like Amazon and retailers like Walmart and they find that these corporations with internal economies larger than the economies of some countries have made use of internal planning and supply chain transparency. This approach is counter to the orthodox use of internal markets where predicting price fluctuations happens asynchronously, even among tightly bound supply chains. 

Early in the book, the authors explain the “bullwhip effect,” which arises when there’s a marginal change in demand for a good on the consumer end that causes disproportionate adjustment to inventory stock for that good moving backwards through the supply chain.  

The authors note that this fluctuation at each node (extractors, manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, etc.) can be up to eight times the actual change in market demand. In fact, a study from the ‘90s, which is cited in this passage from the book, found that it was roughly a one-to-eight ratio of the real change in consumer demand verses the reactive inventory changes along an affected supply chain. Therefore, if there’s a fluctuation of consumer demand of 10 per cent, affected supply chain organizations will prepare for a demand shift of around 80 per cent. 

Essentially, the more transparent and less competitive a supply chain, the more likely that supply will match market demand leading to better efficiency. Phillips and Rozworski explain that this is what Walmart realized with an initiative called Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) wherein all levels of their supply chains collaborate in a free flow of information around firm activity and forecasting. 

The book also makes a case study of what happens in the opposite case of organization with Sears. Sears is a multi-departmental mega-retailer which implemented an internal market between not only suppliers but departments, which the authors argue lead to its downfall as competition, mistrust and misallocation caused the retailer to close down a large number of stores across the continent. Only a double-digit number of Sears stores remain in 2023. 

Phillips and Rozworski draw the conclusion that a great deal of economic planning in the age of big data and advanced algorithms is the best way to allocate scarce resources. However, the authors note that with the incentives of capital being the accumulation of profit, which often doesn’t see a substantial trickle-down to the employees, then more planning isn’t enough on its own to make the production and share of resources more egalitarian across society. 

When things like stock buybacks – which use the accumulated value created by labour – are far more serving to the interests of the owners and investors of a corporation than investing in labour or production technology, you have a system problem that even planning can’t fix. Hence the need for more direct government intervention into the market, especially for those goods considered essential, like housing. 

Thomas Piketty’s 2014 bestseller, Capital in the 21^st Century, is an exhaustive study on global inequality since roughly the 19^th century as this is roughly when tax information started to be collected by governments in a standardized fashion. Piketty’s conclusions lead him to predicting that the 21^st century is likely to reach wealth and income inequality levels unseen since Belle Époque Europe. 

Piketty notes in his study that, as a rule, r, the rate of return on capital, tends to be greater than g, the growth rate of the economy (r>g), throughout fiscally recorded history. When this happens, concentration of wealth and massive disparities of income relative to one’s relation to the means of production ensue. The only time this formula was reversed to r<g was briefly within the period spanning from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 to the neoliberal turn in the 1970s. 

Massive government intervention into the market; the wide-scale spread of progressive income taxes; the destruction of wealth in the aftermath of two world wars and massive population growth with the end of war; not to mention the systematic introduction of women into the global market – all created an anomalous situation where inheritance and the ownership of capital were less predictive of a decent life. 

The trend of robust redistribution was reversed according to the data presented by Piketty with the reforms of the 1970s. Although, inequality looks different today compared to before World War I, with income disparities and “supermanagers” being the main harbingers of 21^st century inequality whereas wealth inequality resulting from the nobility and the now non-existent rentier class was understandably the larger inequality relative to income inequality in the Belle Époque era. 

When r>g is the status quo, a condominium has a higher likelihood of being inefficiently built next to vital transit services for poor and working-class people rather than to serve the interests of a few high earners and investors looking to make a profit. 

As global inequality is on the rise, direct government intervention and democratic workplaces that make use of transparent planning and cooperation may be the only way to steer us out of a protracted period of neo-feudalism ruled by a global rentier-investment class.  

To be clear, the imperative for more democratic planning of the economy extends past just the misallocation of housing and other scare resources. It is more apparent than ever that non-nationalized control of sectors like energy are fueling the ecological crisis as structural competition has petroleum giants playing a lucrative game of chicken with the stability of the planet’s biosphere as the knock-out. 

In Norway, one of the two sovereign wealth funds that comprise The Government Pension Fund of Norway invest the profit of the state-owned petroleum sector into funding pensions. Not to mention, Norway being located between the North Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean makes its inhabitants more susceptible to dramatic changes in global temperature. Nationalization of the petroleum sector means the ability to scale back and switch to renewables more easily for the Norwegians because control is more in the hands of those affected by rising temperatures through their votes instead of in the hands of investors who are responsible mainly to their own personal self-interests and who can flee once they’ve made their fortunes. 

Again, Poilievre’s pop-economic idea of planning based on demographic needs is obviously a single-issue layup and which isn’t anywhere to be found on his still proposal-empty campaigning website. Just for comparison, Bernie Sanders, who isn’t running for United States president anymore, still has an “issues” page on his website with detailed proposals to expand Social Security, but I digress. 

Regardless, the kernel of democratic control and transparent planning over the allocation of resources in Poilievre’s proposal needs to be radicalized so that that same thinking is directed at the commanding heights of the economy and the authoritarian structure of traditional firms. 

Paid verification badges on social media sites aren’t just representative of corporate greed, but they also defeat the purpose of verification in the first place.

Prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion late last year, users of the platform experienced a divide in opinion. While some held out hope that Twitter would finally allow supposedly previously-restricted “free speech” under Musk’s leadership, others were concerned with the prospective consequences that loosened restrictions for the platform might hold.

When the acquisition went through, Twitter became a subject of controversy. As prominent public figures abandoned the app and Twitter employees quit in huge droves, the platform’s future quickly became uncertain.

But there is no better indication of the dark path that Musk is leading Twitter down than his new paid verification service.

Those on social media accounts like Instagram or Twitter might have wondered what that little checkmark next to certain accounts’ online handles means. On Instagram and Twitter, for example, it’s usually a little blue icon.

This symbol is typically referred to as a verification badge, and until recently, it has served as a sign that a notable account is legitimate and not an impersonation of the entity it claims to represent. Think of your favourite celebrity — anyone could make an account with their name in the handle, even if they need to add extra characters to make it unique. There needed to be some form of differentiation between impersonators and accounts of legitimate notoriety, thus the verification badge was born.

The badge isn’t limited to celebrities, however. Business accounts and political figures are other examples of accounts that might require a verification badge. This way, users know they are getting information directly from the real source, and do not have to fear that they might be following a “lookalike” that is set on spewing misinformation. With this system, all was well. It existed to clear confusion and maintain reliability.

Apparently, Elon Musk disagreed.

Musk believed the previous verification system created a “lords and peasants” dynamic on the platform, meaning that those who have a verification badge are held in a higher regard than accounts without.

But this simply isn’t true. Verification badges weren’t simply for bragging rights or to feel more important than accounts without the badge; their primary purpose was to ensure misinformation on Twitter was minimized as much as possible. With the verification system in place, fraudsters could not create impersonation accounts in the hopes of tricking users, because their lack of verification would denote their illegitimate status. Musk’s idea that the system created a barrier between accounts that left them as “lords” and “peasants” ignores the purpose of verification entirely, and pretends there was a “problem” that never actually existed.

Musk’s solution was that anyone should be eligible for verification consideration, regardless of who they were. The only catch: those who wish to be considered for a verification badge must pay a subscription fee of $10 CAD per month.

Twitter already had a subscription service that added features for users called Twitter Blue. The original version of the service from 2021 already added several features for users, such as the ability to edit recently-published Tweets, access to ad-free news on certain sites and unique app icons. The service was also considerably cheaper, standing at $3.49 CAD per month.

In December, Musk revealed his plan to solve the nonexistent “lords and peasants” issue: adding verification badges to accounts with Twitter Blue (and upping the price in the process). In other words, any account paying for the subscription service had the potential for verification, whether they had 10,000,000 followers or zero.

This begs the question: what is being verified? Now, verification no longer exists as a legitimating mechanism for notable accounts, so what is the point of the blue checkmark? Why have a verification symbol if it doesn’t exist to actually verify anything at all?

The system quickly backfired when users began paying for verification badges on impersonation accounts, meaning that accounts based in parody or misinformation could no longer be easily differentiated from their legitimate counterparts. This is hardly surprising — this is the logical consequence of opening verification to anyone with $8 a month to burn, and shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.

The system was quickly paused as Twitter engineers worked to solve this problem, but one has to wonder: did Musk seriously not see this coming? How is it possible that he could demand such a system be quickly implemented and not foresee this obvious, glaring flaw?

After all, this is the Internet: people love to make jokes and have fun, even at the expense of impersonation and the spreading of misinformation. Ensuring that users couldn’t verify parody accounts should have been one of Musk’s first orders of business. This goes well beyond being a simple oversight — this was straight-up foolish.

The system has since returned with new measures in place to ensure only eligible accounts paying for Twitter Blue can get a verification badge, but the fact that the original purpose of “verification” being destroyed still remains.

Twitter is now full of verified accounts owned by random people, with little to differentiate them from accounts of note. The app has changed the badge for businesses into a gold checkmark rather than blue, and government and multilateral accounts now hold a grey checkmark. But this means the system has only gotten more complicated, with users having to learn the difference between three colours of verification badge — many of which belong to random individuals who pay for Twitter Blue.

The situation only worsened when leaked information revealed Twitter’s alleged plan to charge businesses $1,000 per month to keep their gold checkmark, a claim corroborated by other sources.

If this is true, it means businesses would need to pay $1,000 every month just to prove that they are who they claim to be. If a business chooses not to pay, then their account will not have any evidence proving its legitimacy. This might not be a problem for major corporations, but smaller businesses are likely going to suffer as a result.

Hypocritically, in his quest to end the supposed “lords and peasants” issue on the platform, Musk created the very system he intended to destroy. Recently, Musk announced that Tweets from verified accounts would take priority over those from unverified accounts, meaning that posts from individuals who don’t pay the monthly fee will be harder to find.

Formerly, verification on Twitter existed as a system to avoid impersonation, but Musk has turned it into a service that makes it more difficult for non-paying users to reach a wide audience. He has actually created a systemic divide more analogous to the division of lords and peasants than ever before on the platform, by quieting the voices of those who refuse to pay.

The paid verification problem isn’t just sticking to Twitter, either. Meta has unveiled its plan to follow in Twitter’s footsteps, meaning that users will soon be able to pay for their own “verification badge” on their Instagram accounts. In fact, the service has already begun rolling out in different regions.

Again, this is solving a problem that never existed in the first place, and creates new problems of its own. If anyone can be verified, then the ability to easily differentiate notable accounts from anyone else has effectively been eliminated. “Verification” is literally an inaccurate description now.

Verification may nominally exist on the platform now, but the concept of legitimate verification on Twitter is dead — because Elon Musk killed it.

Many may wonder how they can do their part in solving climate change.

Realizing that individual accountability is essential to curb the effects of climate changeand actually taking matters into one’s hands is often rocky, especially considering the general public has been made to believe that sustainability is inherently luxurious and out of reach.

With the rise of companies who offset sustainable practices with increased pricing, as in the case of clothing retailer Reformation, consumers who cannot afford to consume ethically and sustainably-made items feel disenfranchised from taking part in becoming more eco-conscious, leading to disengagement in the movement as a whole.

Regardless of the messaging produced by this new wave of “eco-friendly capitalism,” what cannot be disregarded is that eco-friendliness should be inherently accommodating to all budgets. The best way to ensure people individually take concern of climate change is by ensuring they do what they can with what they have– nothing more and nothing less. Truly, the notion that exclusively acquiring ethically-produced goods entails more sustainable living is an oxymoron; consuming less (when feasible) is the key to inclusive sustainability.

Furthermore, the conversation regarding the cost of sustainable living often involves food security and affordability. Many advocates for solving the climate crisis point to the fact that the production of meat accounts for up to 60 per cent of the global greenhouse gasses polluting the Earth’s atmosphere, or twice as much as the global production of plant-based food. With that in mind, many feel a fully plant-based diet, such as veganism, must be the only path to fulfilling one’s responsibility to the planet, but it is naive to believe that everyone will be able to sustain a plant-based life.

In Canada, the price of lettuce has risen over 35 per cent in the last year, along with a 17 per cent price increase for vegetables as a whole. It is clear that those wishing to nourish their bodies with vegetables and grains alone may only be those that can afford to do so. Many also often disregard the cost of nutritional supplements and vitamins needed to sustain a vegan lifestyle, further pushing the idea that sustainable living equals affluent buying power.

If exclusively purchasing high-quality, sustainable goods and strict veganism are not the main pillars of eco-friendly living, then what is? Arguably, anything actively beneficial to the planet that is in tandem with your budget, health goals and abilities.

For instance, instead of indulging in shopping sprees for sustainably-made clothes marketed to you as a more sustainable alternative than your current wardrobe, you may as well invest your time into repairing old clothes, trading with friends and family or thrifting. Not only are these options more affordable, but they are likely more eco-friendly, as you won’t create demand for sustainable brands to make more inventory, and thus will save resources and possibly help avoid clothes from ending in landfills after they are no longer desirable.

Likewise, if veganism or any other “sustainable” lifestyle change does not fully suit your health or budget, the most eco-friendly things you could do are to reduce the consumption of food categories known for being major pollutants, to reduce the number of leftovers thrown away in your household or composting.

As long as climate change advocacy is gate kept behind notions of “right” and “wrong” and behind costly expectations for the average person, it will remain in the theoretical rather than the functional– thus further pushing society away from tangible change to prevent the catastrophic consequences of climate change by 2030.

The New Democratic Party of Canada has been the voice of social democracy in Canada for nearly a century, but they often lack teeth which is, in part, a result of a lacking sense of tradition.

A look at the radical roots of socialism in Canada is needed by the NDP if they want to win more political terrain in the future.

To be clear, I criticize the NDP because I want them to win. With the threats of climate change and increasing wealth inequality mounting with every day that change isn’t implemented, the New Democrats seem to be the only party in Canada treating these facts with the seriousness they deserve.

Canada’s history of radical socialist parties, namely the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) from the early 20th century, are worth considering when it comes to thinking about mounting a radical shift in the political terrain towards workers control of the economy in the 21st century.

The SCP, for example, existed from 1904 to 1925 and called for the collective ownership of the means of production and had a variety of left-wing identities within the party including trade unionists, social democrats, and full-blown Marxists.

Likewise, when the SCP disbanded after splits within the party due to the rise of Bolshevism and the risky opposition to World War I, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) came about and contributed a great amount to trade union movements and labour in general in the country. The CPC even managed to get members elected to the House of Commons and provincial legislatures. However, the neoliberal turn decimated a large part of the radical left-wing movements in Canada.

The NDP have persisted as a party of social democrats, and have won some of the best socialist policies that Canadians still enjoy to this day such as our universal single-payer healthcare system.

However, the federal-level coalition that the NDP formed with the Liberals in 2022 showed that the NDP are willing to make strategic concessions to maintain power. There are some benefits to this, such as the Canadian Dental Care Plan that will help families earning under $90,000 a year with dental payments. However, the NDP needs to tap into the radical roots of socialist thought that were more present in the early 20th century if they hope to take the majority of power in Canadian politics and implement the changes needed to overcome labour’s abject subordination to capital and the excesses of fossil fuel consumption.

The vanguardism of these early socialist movements are important for organization building and the NDP doesn’t show the same initiative in recent years to engage in that kind of arm-in-arm linking with labour-adjacent organizations.

If the left wants to win in Canada, then the NDP needs to tap into the radical roots of socialism that underscored the early 20th century of Canadian left-wing movements.

Karl Marx’s central observation about capitalism was correct and the acknowledgement of that is desperately needed in a 21st century fraught with inequality and undemocratic institutions.

This whole writing year at The Brock Press I’ve been something of a broken record on the need to take socialism seriously as a political alternative to the dominant neoliberal consensus in the Western world. I’m not the only one, though. The Fraser Institute put out a poll that found socialism saw a favourability amongst Canadians aged 18-24 in the 50 per cent range. Needless to say, socialism is becoming favourable to younger generations—Gen Z and Millenials.

While the fear rightfully associated with names like Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot still plague and blossom into irrational reactionism in the generations that were most acutely subject to McCarthyism, younger people are realizing that socialism is just as diverse a tradition as any other ideology. Socialists of today are fairly sober minded when it comes to the failings of big 20th century projects. Many on the left today rightfully acknowledge that what the Stalinist USSR and Maoist China did was a kind of state capitalism that industrialized too fast and imploded from within. Demand always outpaced supply. That’s why the resurgent push for both top-down and bottom-up reform to capitalism from socialists like founding editor of Jacobin magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara, as seen in his book The Socialist Manifesto are so important.

Likewise, the Marxist economist Richard Wolff in his seminal work Democracy at Work argues that the worker cooperative is the way forward for the socialist movement in the 21st century and beyond. What a cooperative entails is the democratization of the workplace, where every worker has a share in the company and can vote on how the organization is run. The workers of an enterprise, then, are effectively their own directors instead of the division of owners and workers seen in traditional work organizations where the board of directors and CEOs, CFOs, etc. are the sole owners and pocket the profit created by the workers.

This would be the bottom-up aspect. The top-down aspect would no longer be the Central Committee as seen in the Soviet Union but institutional reforms in the state that would incentivize the democratization of the private workplace through preferential loans to worker co-ops or even through nationalizing banks, as well as rebuilding a progressive welfare state not unlike what one sees in the highly successful socialized models in the Scandinavian bloc. There’s also merit to the need for state control of the energy sector as it will be easier to facilitate a switch to renewable energy for the basic reason that the market mechanisms in place currently simply don’t address the climate crisis (which is criminally called an externality according to neoclassical economics).

The common thread running through all of these arguments and proposals emerge from what was essential to Karl Marx’s study of capitalism as outlined in his masterwork Capital, released in Germany in 1867.

In the first volume of Capital Marx spends the first few chapters laying out his labour-theory-of-value (LTV). The LTV has been rejected by many economists and commentators since. However, the main idea articulated in it is still correct: workers produce commodities and capitalists sell them and pay back only part of the value created by the workers in the form of wages and hold onto the rest of the value — called surplus-value by Marx — in the form of profit. This is what Marx calls the exploitation of labour-power. And while Marx spends a great deal of time in Capital arithmetically tying the LTV into prices and other aspects of economic theory that appear to be a dubious gymnastics of universalization by today’s standards, the central idea of exploitation still stands regardless of if prices can or can’t be pinned down to a science that results from the socially necessary congealed labour-time of society.

What Marx made clear is that there is an antagonism at the heart of capitalism. The neoclassical approach has been to disavow this antagonism at every step of theorization. Key objections from the neoclassical side of the aisle include (I) that the capitalist takes a risk in starting an enterprise and that (II) the capitalist assembles the means of production (factories, tools, the workers, machines) in order to begin the production process in the first place. The first statement, however, is true of workers too. Workers have to sell their labour otherwise they risk homelessness and starvation; they too take a risk accepting to work for a company they have little to no control in because they have to to survive. To the second point, Marx already outlines how those means of production assembled by the capitalist are already congealed forms of labour from the past, a kind of frozen labour that Marx calls dead labour.

What labour-power in an economy does is it uses living labour from the living workers to create value with, on and through dead labour in the form of tools, buildings, machines, and even intellectual dead labour such as concepts. The capitalist is simply a mediator between the interaction between these two forms of labour that manages it but under capitalism he also takes the value created, claims it as his own, and apportions a bit of it through wages to workers so they can meet their subsistence requirements and continue to work for him. Capitalists ensure that they are not just mediators but owners and exploiters through the employee-employer contract which states in law that the employee agrees to sell their labour-power and, therefore, their muscles and brain to the employer for a wage.

The contractual aspect is why criticism of the state from the left shouldn’t focus on abolition first, as per anarchist thought, but on using state power to reconfigure this contract to a more just arrangement, again through preferential loans or by making wage and salary work illegal in the same way that paying under the minimum wage and sexually harassing employees is illegal. That would involve having a scaled form of penalization, starting at fines and ending with imprisonment. So no, the implementation of state sanctioned abolition of wage/salary labour doesn’t mean throwing capitalists in jail per se, just that there will be a sliding scale of punishments like when there’s other laws violated in the workplace.

It’s time to acknowledge that Marx was right and then work towards sublating the antagonism at the heart of the global capitalist system.

Throughout the 2022/23 production year at The Brock Press there were serious societal wins alongside alarming large-scale failures such as the tripping back of civil rights, rising global tensions and the threat of AI. 

There’s a lot of work to do in the political space and this writing year made that more clear than years past.

As fundamentalism is on the rise globally — with the basic rights of women being removed in a country as advanced as the United States with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade — labour and progressive movements have been on the rise as well.

For example, in the U.S. the assumption that the existence of billionaires and the state’s subordination to capital interests are net positives for society as a whole were disrupted when the Staten Island Amazon warehouse successfully formed a union for the first time in the corporation’s history. Leader of Amazon Labour Union, Christian Smalls, became the face for North American labour’s rebuke to corporate profiteering off the backs of the inflation brought on by global supply issues, not to mention decades of stagnant wages despite growing productivity.

For reasons like the symbolic support for Smalls, Joe Biden is continued to be lauded as the most progressive president since F.D.R. by some liberals. However, this seems a laughable caricature considering the crackdown on the rail strike he undertook four months ago. The railway workers on strike simply didn’t have paid sick days or weekends off, yet Biden had no hesitancy in breaking the strike.

…

Globally, the close presidential election in Brazil in late October ultimately ousted the far-right Bolsonaro government for the incumbent Lula da Silva of the Workers Party, proving the continued strength of the Pink Tide movement in Latin America.

In France, as of writing, the largest protests since the ‘68 uprisings are underway against Emmanuel Macron’s use of special constitutional powers to hemorrhage his proposal past the legislature raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel attempted a similar power move by giving the majority government in the Knesset the ability to disregard the country’s judicial system. Riots have been breaking out that haven’t been seen since 1948, and they even managed to push Netanyahu to retract the bill.

Still, the soft Cold War that has begun to arise between the “autocratic East and the democratic liberal West” has produced alarming examples of an attempt to assert both western and eastern hegemony.

When Canada’s Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, replied to a member of the African Bank of Development about his concerns that the West’s funding of the Ukraine war was depleting resources going to impoverished parts of Africa, she suggested that Africa ought to take a lesson from the Ukrainian president about the willingness to die for one’s country in order to establish democracy.

European powers and their settler-colonial offspring have destabilized African democracy for centuries, and when leaders like Patrice Lumumba of the Congo fought for Pan-Africanism and national freedom in his country, it was the West who helped assassinate him. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an unlawful violation of international law and human rights but the rhetoric of Western imperialism that has emerged in the West as a result of the nation is often nothing short of hypocritical — especially considering we don’t see the same attitude of protecting and funding sovereignty from Western democracies when it’s the territorial integrity of the Yemeni or Palestinian peoples that are being violated.

Needless to say, tensions between the two major economies occupying the east and westare concerning and this last year has only seen the raising of those tensions.

…

Social media in the West increasingly exhibits a kind of dystopian breakdown of meaning, with a reflexive exchange of often vitriolic discourses. Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2023. Why did he buy the popular social media app? Simply because he can. He even has a ton of renegade “independent” journalists willing to dish out information — likely for clout — that Musk easily could have selected for, which they published on his platform, the content of which serves Musk’s interests. This was once called PR, but no longer in this era of algorithmically supported social bubbles and its corollaries of identity tribalism, misinformation and a kind of Nietzschean perspectivism that unites the expanded multiplicity of niche groups on the Internet.

Meanwhile AI intelligence is continuing to threaten the notion of what being human even means anymore, as historian Yuval Noah Harari explores in his book Homoh Deus. With ChatGPT and other MLs and form of machine intelligence starting to question whether the Turing test has been passed, the question now is how can we regulate these technologies before it’s too late and multinational corporations give them full reign to invade our lives as they bolster consumer capitalism in the most efficient and all-encompassing manner. Not to mention the world of quantum computing which every major nation is in a race to develop as it’s a computer that completely changes notions of what a computer is and has the potential to work out problems at the subatomic level.

We are entering an era where it won’t be clear that we’re in a machinic dystopia. Instead, rather ironically, the future looks like it will be characterized by a general disorientation around what the human is. With no clear paths out of global capitalism at the moment, either a serious societal upheaval is needed or the next stage of global economy will be something where there is no antagonism between human beings but rather through the divisions that AI powers create; a class of those well-versed and able to serve the various AI apparatuses that control basic decisions about our day-to-day lives at the commanding heights of the economy.

For example, what stops an AI-model that is coded to maximize for employment efficiency from recommending men over women because women have a higher likelihood of needing leave for maternity reasons. From the purely deductive standpoint of the AI, men would likely rank higher on an index of this kind that’s produced for employers.

The only solution to a problem like the one above is the same one needed to curb the detrimental effects of neoliberalism today: regulate, socialize, then regulate some more.

Left-wing populism has its limits.

Some of the best content on the left comes from populist media platforms. On YouTube, channels like Secular Talk with host Kyle Kulinski prove to be excellent pipelines for impressionable right-wingers to hear from the other side of the aisle in a rhetorical manner that appeals to them.

The Majority Report, another left-wing YouTube channel, splits their show into a main show and a “fun half” following it. The fun half often generates clips that are posted as independent videos on the channel due to their having a much higher likelihood of being viewed. Like Secular Talk, this show’s setup is effective in bringing in ordinary viewers through fun half clips and getting them interested in the main show where there’s detailed policy and news analyses, interviews with experts, and historical deepdives.

However, viral populist-oriented videos don’t equate to noticeable spikes in viewers for the more analytic politico-historical videos for these channels. There’s a few reasons for this phenomenon, and they’re all entirely structural.

First, most people don’t have much time because they’re working or in school or both, so a snappy clip that has more entertainment value is frankly easier to consume on a lunch break, between classes, etc. Second, these channels need to make money and that is often a direct function of AdSense from viewership. Oftentimes these content creators use a third party service to build a donation base as well but viewership is still where the majority of the money is to be made to continue producing content.

The ecology of social media is increasingly one of attention-grabbing where building a critical worldview involves time to absorb dense information through reading, not to mention the challenge of synthesizing that information into a coherent political identity. College students are guaranteed at least three years to hone these skills — which is never a guarantee considering the climate of precarious employment alongside relatively stagnant wages and high prices for housing and food — but those of the working class who can’t afford to go into debt at college often don’t have the same amount of dedicated time to build those skills. Still, Ivy League-adjacent students tend to use those skills to enrich the ruling class, usually making nearly twice as much as regular college graduates mid-career, and often ending up in high places in government or the private sector.

To be clear, appealing to what’s common to people is important if the left wants to radically shift the balance of power in society.

However, that’s just the beginning of the fight; populism doesn’t work as an end in itself, especially in the era of mass social media. As Jodi Dean presciently puts it in her groundbreaking theoretical work from 2016, Crowds and Party, which focuses on the interplay between the crowd and the political party, “breaking with the suffocating reflexivity of contribution and critique in the mediated networks of communicative capitalism, insistent crowds impress themselves where they don’t belong.”

This brings out an important flaw that hardcore populists tend to ignore, “the people” is always an abstraction.

Dean doesn’t do away with essential aspects of populism due to this, though, but reconfigures them into a necessary relationship of transference between the demands of the crowd as a subject and the party form:

“The gaps substitutionism flags are the space of the subject. Neither the crowd nor the party is the people. The people is the gap between them. Political capacity always involves delegation, transfer, and division of labor. Not everyone can do everything. The very idea of a politics of everyone is a debilitating fantasy that denies the constitutive feature of the political: division goes all the way down.”

This is why, with all due respect, anarchist thought is often not realistic about the necessary hierarchical aspects needed to supplant the capitalist state. With all of its emphasis on direct action and justified hierarchy, anarchism is too recalcitrant to the necessary gap that forms the abstraction of the people between the disruptive crowd and the organized party.

Anarchism today allows a kind of enjoyment in one’s radicalness at the expense of the pragmatics of political division and the particular standing in as the universal in representing the demos. This is also why anarchist feelings of social horizontality are so easily subsumed into the horizontal individuating networks of social media.

In her book, Dean works with the psychoanalytic edifice of Jacques Lacan, a popular psychodynamic theorist of the left today from the 20th century, to make her argument for the party at the level of the psychology of inter-subjectivity.

Lacan formulates three registers essential to human experience: Imaginary—the register of fantasy and illusions of wholeness; Symbolic—the register of language which is characterized by division, difference and incompleteness; and Real—the inner limit of symbolization, that which cannot be symbolized or represented, the register of trauma and, therefrom, subjective disintegration; not to mention pain as well as the intrusive enjoyment seen in compulsive disorders, for example, which Lacan calls jouissance.

Many 20th century postmodern theorists of the left understood the registers of the real and the imaginary to become predominant in late-capitalism and in some ways interchangeable; the definition of a simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard’s fatalist theories of society as a simulation as postulated in the ‘80s, for example, certainly were ahead of their time when it came to describing societal phenomena today as content (and misinformation) is refracted through multiple networks of digital representation as commentary, critique, mimicry and germination.

But surrendering and appealing to the simulation-like dynamics of horizontal social networks won’t work, especially as the much more top down models of state-capitalism seen in China or Singapore means that the West and the ostensibly democratic simulation economy therein are no longer the site of the global geist. Baudrillard certainly thought they were in the ‘80s, positing Los Angeles, California as the paradigm of simulation in the world, putting forward extended analyses of places like Disneyland. However, this analysis seems dated in 2023 where social media doesn’t necessarily call for a certain identity drawn across lines of nationality.

Altogether, the West ought to consider the organized party as something that will necessarily universalize certain particular struggles from below at the departure from others, and present them as the thought of the people.

Populism is a starting point, but ultimately not a strategy for the long run when it comes to a just democratic politics.

*CONTENT WARNING: Sensitive topics such as infanticide are discussed in detail in this article*

With the U.S. Supreme Court having overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, which guaranteed abortions to women in the first trimester, a reminder that a fetus isn’t a person seems vitally necessary.

Living in Canada comes with the benefit that abortion is not only legal at all stages of pregnancy, but that it’s funded by our universal healthcare system. In the states, not only is abortion not available to roughly half of those able to get pregnant in the country, but insurance coverage for the operation varies widely based on how states allocate insurance services. Whether through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicaid or private insurance, the coverage for abortion is often spotty in the U.S., especially for low-income women of colour.

It’s not just in the U.S. While abortion rights were expanded to quite a few Latin American countries as of last year, Latin America and Africa have the most abortion restrictions globally.

The most belligerent accusation made against pro-choicers is that abortion is murder. Some argue that it’s murder even if undertaken just at the moment of conception, regardless of the zygote consisting of microscopic cells. This extreme position can be debunked rather effortlessly. Our moral faculties usually kick in when we see animals, especially the ones we keep as pets, get harmed or killed. Our reaction to microbiological death doesn’t produce nearly the same reaction, much like the way killing a born baby is clearly worse than a clump of cells that has the potential to be a baby. But even when the fetus has taken shape, murder involves the intentional killing of another person; which begs a better question that is ultimately a philosophical one: Is a fetus a person?

A fetus is not a person.

Unless you’re Plato and you think that the human being is an imperfect imitation of some eternal essential idea of the human, it’s patently obvious that a fetus hardly resembles an exogenous human being.

The absurdity of the position was revealed in a rather comedic way when the comedian Ben Glieb faced off against republican talk-show host Charlie Kurk on the topic of abortion and presented an image of a fetus to Kurk asking if he truly believed it was a human being; “without a doubt” replies Kurk, to which Glieb reveals that the image is in fact a dolphin fetus.

Ontologically a fetus is nothing like a human being, either. A fetus is entirely dependent on existing within a human being, requiring their bodily resources, and, even though it can respond with irritation to stimulus, this is usually the result of a preconditioned state for motor responses by the still developing cerebellum.

Notably, these types of motor responses are not a function of consciousness. Therefore, when a fetus displays behaviour that suggests consciousness, such as responses to harm, touching or even kicking, it’s often still endogenously sedated which is a form of being unconscious.

Furthermore, the thalamus is the part of the brain that transfers nerve fibre connection to the cerebral cortex essentially allowing sensory information to be processed in the part of the brain that mediates any input as feelings that belong to oneself. The development of thalamocortical radiation — the axons between these two parts of the brain which act like electrical wires that connect their neurons — required to perceive pain aren’t hooked up and functional until the third-trimester of a pregnancy (29-30 wk gestation).

It’s important to remember that third-trimester abortions makeup less than one per cent of abortions and that when they are undertaken it’s primarily because there’s a threat to the life of the person carrying the child, novel information about the fetus that suggests fatal outcomes in birthing the fetus, or because policy restrictions made it difficult to abort before the final three months of the pregnancy.

With that being said, the more modest pro-life stance of conceding that abortion is not murder but that it is unethical because it causes pain to a nearly conscious being also doesn’t hold water considering the neurogenesis of an in utero fetus.

Now that it’s established that at no point in the early to mid parts of the pregnancy can what becomes a fetus be considered experiencing themselves and the world as a full-on person, including pain, it’s crucial to focus on the actual people affected by unwanted pregnancy.

As Sophie Lewis points out in The Nation, many species can cancel a pregnancy at will, whereas humans can’t, and when a person undertakes a clandestine abortion the placental apparatus in humans makes the process far more dangerous. Before the development of robust abortion procedures, unsafe abortions were, and still are, a leading cause of maternal deaths. Clandestine abortions are still widely pursued in places where it’s illegal to get an abortion or where the medical system is antiquated.

Considering all these arguments means it only makes sense to fully legalize abortion, because the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, and fetus are simply not human beings; those carrying them are, however—and they deserve full rights over their body.

Stock buybacks should be illegal.

In fact, they were for a long time before former U.S. president Ronald Reagan rescinded the laws in place to combat the practice. Since then, differences in CEO-to-worker pay ratios in the U.S. have grown exponentially, showing that buybacks are not a democratic practice in the slightest.

After the Great Depression of the ‘30s, U.S. corporations invented a way to safeguard their company losses by buying their shares back from investors. This had the double effect of raising the stock price due to reducing the amount of stock in the market, a basic rule of supply, as well as using profit to spend on buying back the stocks instead of reinvesting in new products or employees in terms of upping wages or hiring more workers. This made the company look like it was doing well given that stock prices were rising, meanwhile the very act of using profit for buybacks was the opposite of altering or improving the company’s output and organization.

After word got out in the public that this practice was becoming widespread, it was banned by the Roosevelt administration in the mid-’30s under the The Securities and Exchange Act. In 1982, the Reagan administration allowed stock buybacks again as part of the sweeping deregulatory regime that was part and parcel of the neoliberal turn.

Stock buybacks have another pernicious dimension to them beyond the lack of reinvestment they incentivize and the inflationary effect on the price stock. Many CEOs and directors of large public corporations make their salary on bonuses that are contingent on the price of the stock of the company. There’s a perverse incentive, then, to engage in stock buybacks because it means higher salaries for those at the top of the corporation, while workers are struggling with wages; wages, mind you, that have stagnated relative to the steady increase in productivity in the United States and Canada, a phenomenon that appeared with the neoliberal reforms of the ‘80s. Before Reagan and Thatcher, productivity and real wages kept pace with one another for decades.

The buyback is a kind of business maneuver that stores up wealth in the investor and corporate classes and directly weakens labour.

Take the railway strikes that Joe Biden broke up four months ago; rail workers didn’t have paid sick days or weekends off, yet the railway companies collectively made $10 billion in stock buybacks in the first six months of 2022. The paradoxes of the practice are apparent, yet it’s considered a reasonable economic practice. This has to change.

Here in Canada, too, stock buybacks are allowed and prevalent. Canadian companies spend on average around $20 billion to $70 billion buying back their own stock. Minor taxes on the practice, like the ones Ottawa proposed last year, are not enough.

Buybacks should be illegal purely from a market standpoint; they aren’t necessarily furthering reinvestment or productivity for the company, which cuts through the American Dream rhetoric of the tides of private enterprise lifting all boats. In reality, what buybacks accomplish is the entrenchment of power in the hands of the investor and management classes at the cost of workers.

It is reasonable to assume that the Nintendo Switch’s successor will launch in 2024.

There’s a lot to love about the Nintendo Switch. The innovative hardware allows players to enjoy it on the big screen at home and then take it on the go wherever they please. Compared to the Wii U, its failed predecessor, its third-party support is excellent — there is no shortage of games to enjoy from companies outside Nintendo on the Switch.

But if one thing has kept me drawn to Nintendo over the years, it’s their lineup of console exclusives. Nintendo has pioneered several of the most recognizable franchises within the world of gaming including Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing.

Their cooperation with other companies has led to equally impressive second-party support, such as HAL Laboratory’s work on Kirby titles, Retro Studios’ work on Metroid titles, and of course, Game Freak’s development of main series Pokémon games. These are examples of franchises only available on Nintendo platforms (not including the occasional mobile game release), and have certainly been a significant draw for many owners of Nintendo consoles.

But with so many games to choose from, it might be intimidating for someone hoping to pick up a Nintendo Switch — it can be hard to know where to start. That’s why I’ve created a list of my top ten Nintendo Switch exclusives, meaning that games available on other platforms such as PlayStation or Xbox are automatically disqualified from appearing on this list.

Without further ado, here is my ranking of my 10 favourite Nintendo Switch exclusives.

10) Splatoon 3

The Splatoon series takes the wildly popular third-person shooter genre and adds that familiar Nintendo feeling. Rather than focusing on historical wars or gritty bloodshed, the series sees creatures known as Inklings battle it out on the “splattlefield” in paintball-style matches. The series’ most popular mode, Turf War, sees teams of four players matching online to see who can cover the most ground in their colour of paint, creating an interesting twist on a well-established formula.

Add in that classic Nintendo creativity, and you’ve got a game where you can take the form of a squid rapidly darting across the arena through streams of paint, ready to launch a surprise attack on an opponent with one of the game’s many weapons.

Splatoon 3 continues the tried-and-true formula of previous entries in the series, but adds new weapons, battlefields, gameplay features and story. Recently, Nintendo announced paid downloadable content (DLC) for the game, meaning its playability will continue for a while to come, which is of great importance in a game with a large focus on multiplayer.

While it would have been nice to see more additions, improvements and changes from the previous title in the series, Splatoon 2, there is no denying that the most recent entry holds the most content and ways to play within the wildly popular franchise. I’ve never been one for the shooter genre, but even I get excited when a friend gives me a call and asks if I want to duke it out on Splatoon 3.

9) Fire Emblem Engage

Here’s one that caught me by surprise. I’ve never gotten into a Fire Emblem game. But when I spontaneously downloaded Fire Emblem Engage, the most recent entry in the 30+ year old series, I found there was much more enjoyment to be found than I could have ever expected.

Engage is a turn-based strategy game that sees players commanding a team of units around a grid-based battlefield to defeat an opposing team of units, or the enemy leader. Think of it like chess — well, if chess had a story, memorable characters, beautiful locations and surprising gameplay additions the further you go.

The 2023 release adds the ability to engage with an “Emblem,” each Emblem being a protagonist or major character from a previous title in the long-running series. As someone who’s never gotten very far in a Fire Emblem game, these characters hold no nostalgia for me, but I enjoy how they affect the strategic gameplay all the same.

By engaging one of the game’s original characters to an Emblem, they partner up to combine their strengths and abilities into a singular unit. The game allows any Emblem to attach to any character, meaning that there are tons of possibilities for which combinations a player will choose to send onto the field. I might choose to engage Emblems with a totally different set of combinations than you, but that simply allows us both to play with our own unique strategic style.

There’s a lot to understand with the game’s mechanics, so be prepared to do some serious thinking. This might not be for everyone. In fact, my intimidation towards the game mechanics’ learning-curve largely held me off the series up until this point. But for those who are ready to sit down, learn a lot of mechanics and devote some time to strategic thought, they’ll find their victories on the battlefield to be as satisfying as it gets.

8) Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Until the release of Arceus, I’d been quite dissatisfied with the Pokémon games released for the Switch. 2018’s Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! left a bad taste in my mouth, relying on an overabundance of systems from the mobile app Pokémon GO rather than sticking to what made the series’ mainline games so special. To be fair, this was the purpose of that game; it tried to get new people into the series, which is great. It just didn’t mesh well with me as a longtime fan of the franchise.

That’s why I was so excited and disappointed by 2019’s release of Pokémon Sword and Shield. The game, which was intended to be a return to form for core Pokémon RPGs, felt stagnant in its approach, and a series of controversies (both graphically and gameplay-wise) left the game feeling not only unfinished, but unsatisfying.

But just when I was ready to accept that Pokémon had lost its once-vibrant flair, Pokémon Legends: Arceus released in early 2022 for the Switch. The game mixes up the long-standing Pokémon formula, something the series has failed to do for quite some time. This led to the first Pokémon game in ages that had me feeling like I really was in an expansive world catching Pokémon creatures as part of an equally big adventure.

The game innovates on everything that made previous releases feel stagnant while maintaining that familiar Pokémon feel. Pokémon now visibly wander around five large explorable areas and can be caught in real-time, meaning a potentially tedious battle might not even be required.

Each species acts with its own characteristics: some might flee or remain neutral upon seeing you, while others immediately get ready to attack. This shakes up the franchise in a way I had not been expecting, but that I see it really needed.

The game isn’t perfect. If you’re looking for a visually impressive world to explore filled with different activities and side quests beyond simple “gather requests,” you’d be wise to look elsewhere. But if you’ve been waiting for a Pokémon game that tries something new, and does it in a fun way — you have to pick this one up.

7) Animal Crossing: New Horizons

In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic where people were trapped indoors, Animal Crossing: New Horizons came to save the day. It’s difficult to explain what makes the game so special. On the surface, it’s a game where you walk around an island, catching bugs and fish. Maybe you’ll start building a shop, but you’ll need to be prepared to wait one day in real-time for its construction to finish. Chatting with your animal villagers can be fun but even they get annoyed if you talk to them too much in one day.

Yet, there’s something about that Animal Crossing magic that has lasted since the game’s earliest releases. Even as you walk around hunting for materials to give to a talking raccoon, there’s this cozy feeling that no other game has really ever captured.

The game is timed to line up with daytime and seasonal cycles in the real world, which only adds to the experience. Wandering your island as it snows during winter or going for a swim as the sun beats down on you is just such a special feeling. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch your island grow into your own personal design as you decorate it and alter its landscapes.

The only problem with this game is its lack of fresh content in recent times. While the game was receiving regular content updates for its first couple years, culminating in a final major update in late 2021 that added paid DLC, it has become stagnant in terms of waiting for new updates. It’s now stuck in a year-long loop with repeating events and not much more to collect.

If that’s something you can get over, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still an amazingly joyous and relaxing experience that can be prolonged for many hours. For new players, there’s plenty to do and many friends to make. It’s just worth noting that the game’s current output leaves something to be desired.

6) Paper Mario: The Origami King

I have something to admit: I am incredibly biased when it comes to the Paper Mario series. I grew up with it as a child and have never let go of it. Despite this, I still think that The Origami King is a must-try for anyone looking for a unique, charming and inspired Mario experience on the Switch.

Paper Mario is having a bit of an identity crisis. It started out as an RPG series before moving to platforming, having since turned into a controversial action-adventure series that continually tries throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Despite the idea that the latest game will never hold up to the first few games in the series, The Origami King is the best that modern Paper Mario’s ever been, and I believe it’s definitely worth a try for that reason.

The game sees a paperized version of Mario living in a world made entirely out of paper. The game’s devotion to the paper aesthetic is commendable, and makes for gorgeous views that consistently appear hand-crafted. In the game, Paper Mario must defeat the titular Origami King to stop him from folding the world’s citizens into an army of creepy origami soldiers.

The game shines in its development of characters and locations, and contains many memorable moments that players won’t see coming. You might find yourself on a game show, riding around an open desert expanse in a shoe or engaging in aerial combat using sentient bombs as projectiles. The game keeps you guessing as to what might be next, and does so in a beautiful papercraft world.

However, one warning I must issue is in regards to the battle system. Its structure is unlike that of any other video game, and sees players rotating and sliding a series of panels on four rings to open up attack opportunities in a puzzle-centric fashion. The battle gameplay is very “love it or hate it,” and has turned some players against the game even if they love everything else it has to offer. If this is a game you choose to pick up, be advised that its turn-based battles will leave you thinking in ways you might not have expected.

5) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Even if you don’t own any Nintendo systems, you’ve likely heard of the wildly popular Mario Kart franchise. The Switch’s entry is a port of the Wii U’s 2014 release Mario Kart 8, but adds several enhancements to further the experience.

There are tons of racetracks to explore, each with their own unique charm and style. Don’t expect your typical Need for Speed raceway; instead, get ready to race through a haunted mansion, a land made of cheese or a rainbow in space. Different character and kart combinations allow each player to have their own style, and the game’s many creative items have been known to end friendships since the series’ inception.

Last year, Nintendo announced that the game’s racetrack count would be doubled through paid DLC, which is being released in waves. These tracks, many of which are remakes from previous titles, have kept the game’s community more active than it’s been in years and has created hype for players hoping to see the return of their personal favourite courses.

The game’s multiplayer mode is always full of lobbies to join, so don’t worry that you won’t find people to match with. That being said, single-player mode can be just as enthralling, especially when you ramp up the speed.

There’s not much else to say about this one. It’s Mario Kart. Its legacy speaks for itself.

4) Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Kirby is known as the sidescrolling platforming series where an adorable pink puffball inhales enemies to absorb their unique powers. Take that already-successful formula and throw it into a three-dimensional space, and you’ve got a recipe for perfection.

Forgotten Land sees the lovable Kirby exploring 3D environments filled to the brim with things to do and hidden corners to search behind. The game is always throwing something new at the player to experiment with, which is further encapsulated by the title’s addition of “Mouthful Mode” — Kirby’s new ability to take the shape, size and properties of certain objects he consumes. If you’ve ever wanted to drive Kirby around as a full-size car, here’s your chance.

The world within the game has clearly been abandoned for a long time, with grass and moss growing over the large city buildings that are clearly no longer in use. This style allows for a distinct visual look and unique storytelling, leaving the player constantly finding new areas that were once highly populated.

It’s remarkable that HAL Laboratory, the longtime Kirby developers, managed to find such strong success in their debut 3D title. For 30 years, mainline Kirby games could only be experienced in a 2D space, but that changed with the release of Forgotten Land. While the adventure may be a bit easier than other titles on this list, it’s still an exciting leap forward for the Kirby series we all know and love.

3) Luigi’s Mansion 3

It’s no secret that the Luigi’s Mansion franchise has its fair share of fans, but the latest entry cranks the series to a higher level than it’s ever been at before. In the game, players control a very nervous Luigi as he navigates a haunted hotel filled with ghosts ready to attack. As you ascend the hotel’s 17 floors in an effort to reach the top, collecting elevator buttons along the way, you’re sure to find countless surprises.

“Exploring a hotel” might sound like a concept that gets boring after a while, but each floor’s unique concept and complementary theme leaves players on their toes. One floor consists of a massive garden, another will find Luigi participating in a film production and one will see the player exploring a pyramid within the hotel’s desert-themed floor.

Each floor concludes with a unique boss fight, leaving Luigi to battle against the ghost that guards the floor’s elevator button. These bosses are consistently creative and inspired, leaving the player thinking about what kind of character that ghost might be. The game is full of puzzles, many of which require the use of Gooigi — essentially a clone of Luigi made of green goo — to solve. Each floor is incredibly satisfying to finish, and rising to the next floor to see what awaits you is always a fun feeling.

Add in memorable characters such as Professor E. Gadd and some of the best cinematic cutscenes ever to appear in a game within the Mario universe, and there’s no denying that Luigi’s Mansion 3 is one of the Switch’s greatest offerings.

2) Super Mario Odyssey

Odyssey is the return to form that fans of mainline 3D Mario games have been waiting for. The game throws large environments called “kingdoms” at the player, ready to be searched top-to-bottom for the collectible Power Moons needed to power Mario’s ship, the Odyssey. The exploration aspect of the game is phenomenal, and the game’s wide selection of possible movements for Mario mean that players can reach areas never intended by the developers.

This started crazes such as the “Impossible Jump” series back when the game released in 2017, in which players challenged themselves to reach incredibly far distances using the game’s movement mechanics. The addition of Mario’s talking hat, Cappy, means that movement possibilities are ramped up even further, leaving the player to experiment to see which area they’ll be able to reach next.

Like many other games on this list, the game contains tons of unique locations — but unlike more linear titles such as Paper Mario: The Origami King or Kirby and the Forgotten Land, this game encourages exploration in wide-open environments in which players can run off in any direction, unbound by walls meant to keep the character set on a certain path. Because of their collectible nature, the Power Moons of each kingdom can be grabbed in almost any order, and intricate movement strategies mean that a player can explore in ways beyond even the developers’ expectations.

There’s a reason why 3D Super Mario games are so beloved, and Super Mario Odyssey is just a further step in this direction.

1) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Here it is, the number one spot.

Breath of the Wild is not just my favourite game on the Switch, but it is one of my favourite games of all time. While Super Mario Odyssey throws players into a series of wide expanses, Breath of the Wild contains one interconnected open world begging to be explored.

There’s far too much to cover here, but the game’s physics engine and non-linear story encourage players to use their imaginations and have an experience throughout the kingdom of Hyrule that is entirely their own. As soon as the tutorial lifts, the player is given a paraglider: their ticket to free-roaming exploration anywhere on the game’s map.

Players can run in the opposite direction of the suggested path and still find ways to move the story forward. Especially courageous players can head off to the game’s final boss immediately after completing the tutorial, skipping all the story points and missions up until that point — according to speedrun.com, the game’s fastest recorded speedrun clocked in at just under 24 minutes.

Don’t let that fool you into thinking there’s not much to do — the game has hundreds of hours worth of content, accompanied by gorgeous vistas to discover, tall mountains to climb, lakes to swim through and established towns to visit. If you can see it, you can travel there — though you’d be well-advised to prepare for any unexpected trouble you might find along the way.

To many who have played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s probably no surprise to find the game at the top ranking of this list — now, the only game that has a chance to dethrone it is its rapidly approaching sequel.

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As a longtime Nintendo fan and early adopter of the Switch, I hope that my recommendations can help those struggling to know where to start. Remember that gaming tastes are entirely subjective; you might not be drawn to the same games as I am, and that’s okay. Even if you disagree with some of the choices on this list, I hope it gives you a few ideas of games to check out.

Content warning: includes links to news sources about robbery and gun violence

Video gaming can be an expensive hobby.

Antonio Romero Monteiro is recognized by Guinness World Records as having the world’s largest video game collection, containing over 24,000 games. This is just one such achievement under Monteiro’s belt — he also holds the individual records for collecting the most Xbox, Sega, Nintendo and PlayStation items.

Oh, and another thing about his collection: it’s worth around $2.1 million.

When a collection becomes big enough, its monetary value can become quite substantial. In some cases, a collection isn’t even required. In 2021, a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sold for over $1.5 million at an auction, which made headlines for the amount of money certain people are willing to dish out for video games or related products.

Over the years, this concept has led to some individuals wondering how they can use highly-desired video games and consoles simply to turn a profit.

Old but important items being sold for astronomical prices is nothing new. For example, a sealed first-generation iPhone just sold for over $75,000 CAD despite being valued at around $27,000 but video game culture has led to even new items being sold above retail price.

In November 2020, Sony released their highly-anticipated PlayStation 5 (PS5) console — but what should have been a fun time for millions of excited gamers ended up in mass frustration.

A semiconductor chip shortage and supply chain issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that production of the console was already lower than it should have been, making room for those hoping to abuse the situation for a quick buck: scalpers.

Scalping refers to purchasing items that are in high demand but low quantities, and immediately reselling them on secondhand sources such as eBay for an inflated price. This means that those who struggle to buy one of these products from retail locations will need to cough up some extra cash if they wish to get their hands on the item, leading to a profit for the resellers.

Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, the PS5’s situation was arguably even worse.

The vast majority of physical retail locations were not selling the console in-store because it would create a major influx of would-be buyers, which would not have been doable given COVID-19 restrictions at the time. This meant that major chains turned to their online shopping alternatives so that the consoles could be purchased virtually — opening the door for tech-savvy scalpers to create automated bots that would immediately purchase PS5 consoles in bulk as soon as an online store opened orders.

Soon, the everyday buyer who wanted to purchase a console to play on would find that they were not available anywhere — well, unless they were willing to pay anywhere up to or beyond double the console’s retail price to a scalper on eBay.

Once the scalping situation became well-known, those who engaged in the scummy procedure began receiving much-deserved anger online. They were snatching the long-awaited opportunities of those who wished to enjoy a new gaming experience for their own greed in a display of selfish behaviour.

But even the hate against scalpers has gone much too far. As despicable as their greed might be, there’s simply no justification for death threats on those attempting to scalp, such as the resellers who were held at gunpoint early last year so that the supposed “buyer” could make a getaway with all four consoles.

Scalping not only showcases the greed of those who wish to engage in the reselling process, but it fuels a fiery rage within those who become upset by the act. I believe negativity towards scalpers is entirely deserved; they should certainly not be applauded for their selfishness — but things have clearly escalated too far on both sides when real lives are on the line.

Video gaming should be a hobby that, if anything, brings people together. There’s a reason why online multiplayer is a paid subscription service on every major console: playing games with others is a huge part of gaming that can unite people, cooperatively or competitively, even when they’re not in the same room.

There’s no shame in single-player gaming, either. That’s actually how I spend most of my time with my gaming hobby. Video game collecting is more along these lines: one person compiling a series of personal treasures as part of their unique collection isn’t usually an experience that brings lobbies of people together, but it’s fun all the same. These collections are formed out of passion for the products and can be an excellent hobby for those who can afford to collect.

But there’s no excuse for using video games, or really any type of entertainment media, to tear people apart. Those who scalp should know that their actions not only speak volumes about their character, but that they are standing against one of the core pillars of the gaming community.

Mythological diets, like many incarnations of the carnivore diet, are silly yet popular and they’re worth debunking.

First of all, a mythological diet is not the same thing as being a vegetarian. Most vegetarians commit to not eating meat for ethical, religious or health reasons. What I mean by a mythological diet is any diet that has both the quality of being an ahistorical fad and of having a kind of naturalist component that its propagators leverage. A naturalist cosmology is usually used to say that this kind of diet is the “correct” diet that humans are meant to eat based on our ancestry, physiological corks or other pseudoscientific premises.

To set the record straight, there are no strict diets that are the natural human diet. There are certainly things we ought not to eat and things it’s best not to eat a lot of, however that doesn’t mean there’s a food group that is best for our species. Scholars of early hominids suggest that our primitive diet likely consisted of the diet of chimpanzees; an omnivorous mix of berries, meats, flowers, bark and more as Andrews & Martins suggest in their heavily cited 1991 study on the matter.

Diets like the carnivore diet have become the sine qua non of otherwise carnival-tier influencers like Brian Johnson, A.K.A. the Liver King, a fitness influencer who preaches a carnivore diet that involves eating raw organs and especially, well, livers.

It sounds absurd, but the pull of Liver King is the idea that it is in line with our real nature. If it sounds like this logic only applies to ‘roided up figures like Johnston, one of the leading public intellectual figures of our time, Jordan Peterson, also swears by the all-carnivore diet. Those of Peteron’s elk tend to cite studies such as the Tel Aviv University metastudy published in 2021 to the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that found that for 2 million years our ancestors were extremely carnivorous.

Though the study is largely opposed to being prescriptive about this fact, stating in the conclusion of the study that with the agricultural revolution, patterns of human diet become fuzzy.

On the other hand, the topic of what human diets are most beneficial, not natural, is hotly contested. For that reason, I don’t plan to put down my own ardently held hypothesis here. However, I would point out that the meat and dairy industry accounts for a large portion of global greenhouse gas emissions, therefore human beings moving to more plant-heavy diets in the future might be a good idea based on that alone. This seems especially feasible now as we can take supplements to get the essential nutrients found primarily in meat products.

On this note, it is also worth mentioning that the trophic studies of our ancestry don’t hinge greatly on our behaviour today. Since the agricultural revolution, human beings have evolved into evermore complex societal arrangements to the point where it’s not hyperbole with things like the Internet to say that we are a global consciousness. We even went to the moon not that long ago. The changes in humanity in the last 10,000 or so years have seen an incredibly rapid advance in our technological capabilities, so much so that we’re even able to make lab-grown meat by culturing animal cells in vitro.

The issue is ultimately that the mythological diet influencers create cults around themselves because they argue their diets are ancestrally “correct” diets. Whether in a more disguised political form as in Peterson’s case, or as a means to amass views as in Liver King’s case, this whole premise is absurd. It can’t be discounted that there’s an aspect of enjoyment taken in dietary superiority too. The unassuming viewer of one of these influencers might feel they are doing the wrong diet. Conversely, the devout follower of a mythological diet now has reason to feel as though they are more in-line with our “true” nature, hence, the superior human specimen.

This insecurity seems to be something that has the potential to affect young men especially. When a phenomenon like mewing, where one positions their tongue in a strenuously concerted way so as to expand their jawline throughout a long period of time, garners a community of 44 thousand — mainly male based on the posts — followers on Reddit, that’s concerning. Likewise, with mythological diets, especially of the carnivore brand, young men can be duped into thinking that they are tapping into the “apex” aspect of themselves, enabling a sort of masculine primality.

It’s pseudoscience through and through but it preys on very real insecurities.

From a philosophical perspective, if anything characterizes the human being, it’s that we are able to be extremely variable in our lifestyles and choices. So long as someone accounts for needed nutrients, they can never eat a piece of meat in their life again and be okay. This applies just as much to the idea that we are primordially meant to eat, say, plants and berries.

From a political view, it’s as if the void left in liberal postmodern societies has pushed people to deify their diets in the absence of any other cause of political sense of duty. To have your epistemological niche is tantamount to having a tribe. In the scattered multiplicity of identity and enclaves that proliferate in a late-capitalist postmodern context, it’s not surprising that diet choices are taking on an air of cult-like fervor.

Canada doesn’t have an outstanding record when it comes to the Middle East.

The 20-year anniversary of the disastrous Iraq War only cemented the criminality of the United States’ action. The U.S.’s baseless argument about the existence of WMDs as a pretext to invade Iraq, resulting in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians is still disavowed as being an unequivocal wrong decision by major media outlets.

While Canada’s role in the invasion of Iraq was limited, and Canada even played an important role in de-escalating the 1956 Suez Crisis, Canada’s 13-year involvement in the war in Afghanistan starting in 2001 saw the Canadian government united with the Americans in attacking the Taliban.

Importantly, the Taliban was propped by the U.S. throughout the final decades of the Cold War as seen in Operation Cyclone. U.S. officials even stated that they didn’t regret funding the Taliban because the USSR was a greater existential threat to Europe than some Middle Eastern militias.

Despite this, Canada went alongside the U.S. in invading after 9/11. Much of the proof that Afghanistan was behind the 2001 attacks was revealed through the 9/11 Commision Report which secured information through torturous methods, mostly waterboarding.

The war in Afghanistan still shows little proof that it did anything in helping the region from Taliban rule as the Trump administration reduced the number of American troops to the lowest level in over a decade.

There was certainly an economico-energy aspect to the invasion as well, just as there was with Iraq as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine famously argued in 2006.

In Michael Keefer’s essay on the topic of Canada in Afghanistan he points out the following:

“US and Canadian government officials have scoffed at the notion that energy geopolitics had anything to do with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. But in June 2008 the distinguished petroleum economist John Foster, who has worked for British Petroleum, the World Bank, Petro-Canada, and the Inter-American Development Bank, published a monograph on the subject of plans for a $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline that was going to be built, at American insistence, in 2010—and the Canadian government acknowledged that Canadian forces would indeed be assigned to protect the pipeline, whose route lies through Kandahar province, where most of our casualties have been suffered.”

Extending beyond Afghanistan and ties to the U.S., Canada still refuses to condemn the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and its harsh apartheid policies. In fact, Canada was one of the first countries to legitimize the state of Israel after the 1948 war in which Israel’s mandate on the region was given ascent by the United Nations despite the Jewish population being a third of the total population in the country at the time. Canada remains a trade partner and a symbolic ally to Israel to this day.

Canada also continues to be among the top exporters of arms to the monarchical, human-rights abusing Saudi Arabian government. The Saudis have also waged an illegal war against the people of Yemen, which Canada refuses to use as justification to stop trade.

The Canadian role in the destabilization of the Middle East over the past several decades is unacceptable.