Pride – The Hungover Pundit

What I Wish I’d Said

I have a lot of weird interactions when I’m out and about. I’m very well known among my friends for running into complete strangers who will give me advice, or confront me, or offer to sell me stuff or just generally tell me things. Once, I had a random stranger in a parking lot aggressively demand to know why I had a canoe lashed to the top of my car; he seemed quite put out when I told him that obviously, I was a bobsledder. I’ve had people complement me on my various pins, t-shirts, and jewellery, and then I turn around and had someone insult me for the very same thing. After the Pulse nightclub shooting I’d been making a point of wearing my Pride rings and an elderly lady in a grocery store asked me what they meant, then wept and called me a “brave boy” when I explained. I recently had an anti-masker charge at me screaming for wearing an N-95 in public.

And don’t get me started on all the weird shit that’s happened to me at various LCBOs across this province. The trick to dealing with the weirdness is to keep calm and, when necessary, deploy a caustic wit.

Doxxed Again & A Reportback

Writing has always helped me process stuff, so taking advantage of the unexpected bump in popularity on my Twitter feed that I’ve recently gotten, let’s try and reboot this blog.

First off, we’ve been doxxed. After my spouse and I joined in the community defence of an all-ages Drag Brunch in our hometown, far-right bad actors identified us (not actually hard, since I was live-tweeting from an account which links to this blog and I’ve never hidden my real name) the chuds quickly posted our home address, our workplaces, our phone numbers and so forth. Our personal information is out there, we’ve both been receiving death threats both at home and at work, various far-right scum are gleefully spreading hate and outright lies about us online, the whole works.

In short, this does not a very merry Christmas make.

Pride 2019 Part 8 – Conclusions

This afternoon lawyer Scott Bergman is presenting his independent review into the events surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019 to Hamilton’s city council.

As I posted earlier this week, I’ve been working through Mr. Bergman’s report, and I’ve been generally quite impressed by it. When I wrote my earlier post, I was still slogging through Part 7 – The HPS Culture, Training and Initiatives, and it was difficult going, especially as it clearly demonstrated an inherent bias against “anarchists from The Tower.”

The Tower’s organizing collective issued a response to the independent report yesterday, and it’s pretty blunt about both the shortcomings of the report – particularly the recommended responses – and pessimistic about the report’s impact on policing in Hamilton.

(Full disclosure: I am not a part of the seven-member organizing collective, although I am very much in support of and stand in solidarity with both this specific statement and with the actions and efforts of both The Tower and Hamilton’s anarchist community generally.)

And, having been so glowing in my praise for Mr. Bergman’s efforts in the early part of the report, I also have to say that I was also rather disappointed upon reading Part 8 – Recommendations.

Pride 2019 Part 7 – The Reports

For the first time in quite a while I’m getting back to the blog. I’m going to do my usual caveats: between health problems, the COVID-19 lockdown (we’re currently on day 101 of a very strict self-isolation) other projects, major dental surgery and a family crisis, I’ve let my writing fall by the wayside. I need to stop doing that, I know. Inertia is difficult to overcome when you’re in pain, and that’s an explanation, not an excuse.

Ironically, the other problem I’ve faced is that there’s so much going on in the world that it’s difficult to get started. With the coronavirus pandemic, the anti-lockdown/paranoid racist protests, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing massive reaction across the US and the world, the ongoing police violence towards protesters… it’s overwhelming. As a writer, having too much to address is often as bad as too little.

Like, where do you start?

Well in my case, I’m going to start with yesterday’s release of Scott Bergman’s Independent Review Into The Events Surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019. (The full 125-page report can be downloaded in PDF format from the criminal-lawyers.ca website, and the executive summary has been published at in its entirety at Raise The Hammer.) Mr. Bergman’s report was commissioned by the City of Hamilton to understand what happened before, during and after last year’s attack by hate groups against Hamilton Pride, particularly regarding the behaviour and reactions of the Hamilton Police Service.

Don’t Feed the Trolls

This past Saturday, July 27th, was Chris “Helmet Guy” Vanderweide’s so-called “Rally Against Bullying” in Kitchener Ontario. It did not go as well as he’d hoped, and has been described in local media as a “fizzle.” This is because, despite the usual grandiose alt-right claims only about a dozen hate-group members attended the “rally.” Their numbers might possibly have been depressed because Helmet Guy had spent the previous week in an internet bitch-slap fight with the Nouns of Odin. In any case Vanderweide himself skipped his own rally for fear of breaking his bail conditions — which suggests to me that someone finally explained to him how bail conditions work.