Bookish version of pdotb@todon.eu
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Success! pdotb has read 52 of 52 books.
Out of the closet and into the fire!
The last night of Claire Ryland's old life was pretty normal, aside …
The birthright of every Ástfríður is to know each metal in the earth, command it, and bend it to their …
Out of the closet and into the fire!
The last night of Claire Ryland's old life was pretty normal, aside …
How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of …
The resurgence of the far right across Europe and the emergence of the “alt-right” in the US have put the …
The resurgence of the far right across Europe and the emergence of the “alt-right” in …
Why would a Greek Communist (Poulantzas had joined the KKE as a student in Paris) write a long and difficult book about inter-war fascism in the heady days of the late sixties?
— Fascism and Dictatorship by Nicos Poulantzas (Page 1)
Probably time to admit that I don't really have the brainpower at the moment to read a book when the first line of the foreword describes it as 'long' and 'difficult'. :)
After losing her job with the US Forestry Service, Celeste Foster makes a desperate gamble by answering an ad for …
'...in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or …
As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his rise and exposes his radical …
As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his …
Content warning canpol
I wasn't exactly expecting to warm to Poilievre over the course of this book, but this really does lay out just how dangerous he is. I think it did a great job of balancing the span of his career to pack as much as possible into a relatively short book -- just enough of his early life to see where his ideology comes from (perhaps unsurprisingly, it's Milton Friedman all the way) but then greater detail as we approach the present. The book is particularly good on his faux populism -- how he pretends to be on the side of working people, when his policies will absolutely screw us all over. Highly recommended, especially as I'm afraid the threat he poses isn't going away anytime soon.
As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his …
Content warning canpol
Even by his standards, it was a flashy, fear-mongering cavalcade of economic nonsense. For one thing, Poilievre based his claims on the research of academics Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who had published a best-selling book making the case that large debts inevitably lead to economic catastrophe. Their work, widely cited in the post-2008 recession era, had been used to justify bruising austerity measures in Britain and the United States. For Poilievre, who was fond of statistical manipulation, this was perhaps a fitting choice: Ten years earlier, the research had been notoriously exposed for containing such egregious and elementary errors that it invalidated their entire thesis, and austerity economics with it.
— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (57%)
As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his …
Content warning canpol
The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg.
“You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.”
“Yeah,” Evans said.
“That’s going to be the playbook.”
It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved fast. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” he said.
— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (55%)
As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his …
Content warning canpol
Campaigning in Sault Ste. Marie in the summer of 2023, he had opened a speech at a rally with an anecdote about a local waitress who ordered him to fix the country and reduce her taxes. “I don’t know her personal story, but let’s say that she has three kids,” he had said. “And let’s say that she earns $60,000—25 bucks an hour.” At this point, Proudfoot wrote, “several people even in that extremely friendly audience made little strangled noises of surprise and confusion, the human equivalent of a record-scratch sound effect. A waitress in a blue-collar Northern Ontario city pulling down a cool $60,000 a year?” As Poilievre “wages his chosen game of class warfare,” she wrote, he was exploiting working class anger. “Without an evident shred of real empathy, perspective or authenticity, Mr. Poilievre seems to see them as smouldering embers of resentment to be fanned for his own purposes.”
— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (42%)
As Pierre Poilievre closes in on power, journalist Martin Lukacs reveals the playbook behind his …
Content warning canpol
It was the first months of O’Toole’s leadership of the Conservative Party in the fall of 2020, and his team had launched initial advertisements to signal a shift to supposedly pro-worker politics. In another video ad, he wished a happy Labour Day to workers and spoke wistfully about being raised in a “General Motors family.” (As labour scholar Rawan Abdelbaki pointed out in The Breach, he slid by the fact that his father hadn’t been a worker but a manager, and later, a Conservative MPP who supported Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s major cuts to public services.)
— The Poilievre Project by Martin Lukacs (35%)
I love that one of the section headings in this chapter is "How Do You Do, Fellow Workers?"
