What Are You Grateful For in 2022? - Dinner Table Digest № 33
White Lies / Truth Before Reconciliation / 40 Most Important Guitar Solos of the 20th Century / Final Report from the January 6th Committee
Before I get to the pieces, I wanted to draw attention to one of the most life-changing personal practices that my wife and I do together, every night, before we turn out the light: we ask each other what we are grateful for that day. This helps us to refocus from our stresses and worries towards the things that make life meaningful for both of us. So, in the spirit of gratefulness and the end of the year, I turn it over to you - let me know in the comments below!
What are you grateful for in 2022?
Sections: White Lies / Truth Before Reconciliation / 40 Most Important Guitar Solos of the 20th Century / Final Report from the January 6th Committee
White Lies - Lauren Manning - Toronto Life
While I’m familiar with NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal), I am a metalhead after all, for obvious reasons I have never really listened to much of the music. However, for other people, it can be the introduction to a whole new world. Lauren Manning was introduced to Toronto’s White Power movement after interacting on the Facebook page of Nokturnal Mortum, a Ukrainian NSBM band. In this Toronto Life feature, she shares her story, from her entrance and indoctrination in the movement, and her many attempts to prove she belonged. After meeting a few kind people who were not white, she began to question the things she’d been taught, before finally taking the leap and leaving the movement altogether.
Members came and went, but Donny and I were in it for the long haul. Though we weren’t in a romantic relationship, we spent all our time together. He taught me how to armbar, hip throw and hit with force, then made me the group’s enforcer. We’d get into street fights with anyone who gave us trouble. All it took was for someone to yell “Nazi scum” and we’d start brawling. We spent a lot of time partying in the forested areas around High Park and Old Mill, pretending to be Vikings, setting up bonfires and drinking. I spoke at crew meetings, using aggressive, over-the-top language to keep the guys’ interest. They listened to me and seemed to respect me. I felt validated, powerful and smart. After years of feeling invisible, I felt seen.
I wanted to prove that I was committed to the movement, so I shaved the left side of my head and got “1488” tattooed on my neck: “14” for a notorious white-supremacist phrase called the 14 Words (“We must secure the existence of our race and a future for white children”) and “88” for Heil Hitler, or HH, H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. I thought that, if I wore this angry mask, adopted this badass persona, everyone would be afraid of me and no one could harm me.
Truth before reconciliation: 8 ways to identify and confront Residential School denialism - Daniel Heath Justice, Sean Carlton - The Conversation
There have been a spate of articles over the past year in major Canadian publications that have tried to call into question the facts about the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada, engaging in polemics that attempt to frame the Residential School System as if it were a normal Canadian education with a few rare instances of unfortunate abuse. Notably, many of these genocide denialists will attempt to make hay of definitional technicalities around the burial of murdered Indigenous children, suggesting that no mass graves have actually been found. These claims are false. In this piece, we are introduced to 8 ways that genocide denialists try to peddle their revisionist history.
Residential school denialism is not the outright denial of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system’s existence, but rather the rejection or misrepresentation of basic facts about residential schooling to undermine truth and reconciliation efforts.
Residential school denialists employ an array of rhetorical arguments. The end game of denialism is to obscure truth about Canada’s IRS system in ways that ultimately protect the status quo as well as guilty parties.
Residential school denialists begin and end with a firm belief in innate Indigenous deficiency and settler innocence, often rooted in Christian triumphalism. Their ranks include missionary apologists, writers and academics, right-wing and anti-Indigenous editorialists and relatives of residential school staff who uncritically refer to personal memory and work to defend their family reputations. These are neither informed nor objective commentators.
The 40 Most Important Guitar Solos of the 20th Century - Guitar Player
For the music lovers among us, here are 40 of the most important guitar solos in the musical constellation that is rock music. Some of my favourites on the list include Mark Knopfler’s “Sultans of Swing”
David Gilmour in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”
and Kirk Hammett in Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”
Final Report From the Jan. 6 Committee - New York Times
The New York Times has published for download the full version of the January 6th Insurrection Committee Report. While it is an imposing read, it contains all of the evidence needed to see that the former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is personally responsible for the armed insurrection that took place in Washington on January 6, 2021. From chapter 1, The Big Lie, from pages 220-222:
During a meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr that day, President Trump claimed the ASOG report was “absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged” and meant he was “going to have a second term.” … In the ensuing days, as Barr predicted, the ASOG report was swiftly and soundly criticized by experts within and outside the Trump Administration, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. The initial analysis of election security experts at the Department of Homeland Security was that the ASOG report was “false and misleading” and “demonstrates a callous misunderstanding of the actual current voting certification process.” Subsequent analyses of the ASOG report and the underlying data from Antrim County were even more critical. These thorough assessments of the Antrim County data and the ASOG report demonstrate that virtually every one of the claims that President Trump and his surrogates made about the report was false. ASOG’s inspection did not reveal any malicious software or algorithms or any other evidence that the voting machines had been compromised. Most importantly, as Attorney General Barr had promised President Trump, within days of the release of the ASOG report, a full hand recount of every ballot cast in Antrim County confirmed the results reported by the Dominion machines and refuted ASOG’s assertion that an algorithm has manipulated the vote count. Giuliani’s chief investigator, Bernie Kerik, acknowledged that his team was not able to find any proof that a Dominion voting machine improperly switched, deleted, or injected votes during the 2020 election.
President Trump was not swayed by these basic facts.
And from Chapter 2, “I Just Want To Find 11,780 Votes,”
For [Vince] Haley [Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy, Strategy and Speechwriting], however, purported election fraud was a way to justify President Trump-friendly legislatures changing the outcome of the election, but there were other reasons for doing so, too. Election fraud was “only one rationale for slating Trump electors,” Haley told [Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel Johnny] McEntee, and “[w]e should baldly assert” that State legislators “have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” if that prevents socialism. Haley added, “[i]ndependent of the fraud—or really along with that argument—Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], Madison [Wisconsin], and Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris,” proposing that radio hosts “rally the grassroots to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states . . .”
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