The Hungover Pundit

Pride 2019 Part 3 — Cops and Nazis

It’s been a long, ugly week for LGBTQ people in Hamilton and the Niagara. The fallout from the fascist attack on the Hamilton Pride Festival has dominated the community since the 15th. Last Thursday Hamilton Police Chief Eric Girt doubled down on blaming the LGBTQ community for the slow and completely inadequate police response to the hate groups’ violence, infamously stating “We were not invited to the event. We were asked not to be at the event and we remained on the perimeter.”

A quick recap for clarity, if you’re just joining us: The Hamilton Police Service, like Hamilton city officials, were asked not to have an official presence at Pride ceremonies, and the HPS were specifically asked not to run a police recruiting booth at the Pride festival. This request was made because Hamilton Police have a very poor record of interacting with the LGBTQ community, including the perception of selective policing and especially with racial profiling, to the degree that many LGBTQ people in Hamilton feel uncomfortable around, if not outright threatened by, uniformed police.

Core Concepts 4 — Our Home On Native Land

Today is National Indigenous People’s Day in Canada.

As a settler who is trying to understand Native issues and work in solidarity with Native peoples it has been my habit on this day, ever since a friend passed on a challenge a few years ago, to “Share on social media the names of the First Peoples whose territory I live on, the Treaty or Treaties which govern where I live, and the place where my ancestors came from.” Usually I just make a short post on Facebook, but since I’ve got this new blog, I’m going to expand my usual post.

Blog Changes

Just a quick note to acknowledge some changes around here — I’ve updated the blog’s look and fiddled with the colours to make it a little less stock-Wordpress. I’ve added some new content, including subscribe and support options to the right of the page, Facebook and Twitter share links at the bottom of posts and a few other cosmetic changes, including a page setting that will allow me to hide long posts behind a “continue reading” link.

Pride 2019 Part 2 – Under Attack

Last week I wrote a blog post about titled Pride 2019 about the pressures on LGBTQ Pride celebrations this year and the context in which they occur. Near the end of that post I stated “So here we are, partway though Pride 2019. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re commodified and divided and we’re under attack by religious bigots, the alt-right and literal fucking Nazis… and we’re supposed to rely on the same police who have repeatedly broken the trust of our community to protect us.”

Yeah, I really hate being right. Four days after I wrote that, Hamilton Ontario’s Pride celebration was attacked. On the morning of Saturday June 15th 2019 a group of extreme-right wing religious protesters met up with a group of the neo-fascist Yellow Vests and the neo-Nazi Canadian Nationalist Party members who have been congregating at Hamilton Ontario’s City Hall every Saturday and then marched on the Pride celebration at Gage Park with the clear intent of violently disrupting the proceedings.

Core Concepts 3 — Intersectionality

I was doing a bit of research into intersectionality theory for today’s blog post, thinking I know kind of how I want to explain it, but if someone has done it better then I can quote and link to them — you know, standard blogger stuff — and Google throws out a link to a YouTube video titled “What is Intersectionality?” So I click it, thinking maybe I can link to it if it’s well done… and it’s Ben Shapiro.

Unexpected Ben Shapiro spouting bad alt-right logic about “leftist fads” and how “white identities are valued less” is a nasty fucking thing to stumble into while hungover and before I’ve had any coffee. No warning at all. Plus he’s got the world’s smuggest, most annoying voice and about forty seconds in it set up this sort of post-bourbon reverb inside my skull that I could taste in my teeth. Brutal.