Monday, December 26, 2016

Black Lives Matter, Right Sector, Canadian Labour & more -- 2016 on The Left Chapter in review

2016 saw 236 posts of various kinds on The Left Chapter. Expanding on a great first year in 2015, 2016 saw record numbers of hits and readers month-after-month as the year progressed.

I want to thank all of our readers and contributors very much for their feedback, support, criticisms and engagement. I look forward to what 2017 has in store.

The year had many posts that came very, very close to making this list including posts about the Canadian Labour Congress and the Liberals, McMaster and neo-Nazis, Pam Anderson and pornography, the Left and road tollsColin Kaepernick and a very popular post about "Strongest", an vintage Soviet children's story.

We also had contributions from other writers that were widely read and shared, such as Simon Dougherty's trenchant look at Trudeau and "Elbowgate", Jesse Zimmerman's take on how "The Blairites and NDP leadership share the same contempt for their party members", Natalie Lochwin's powerful exploration of her past as an anti-abortion activist, or 11 year old Julia Laxer's poem on why we should remember the fallen on Remembrance Day.

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed this year and I look forward to seeing what interesting viewpoints and arguments we see next year!

(Remember that if you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share or if you want to share a petition/appeal or upcoming event you can send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!)

Here, without further ado, are the top ten posts (in terms of hits) on The Left Chapter in 2016:


You know, it is always appalling to see some oblivious white idiot walking around with the horrifically racist Cleveland Indians logo on their chest or on some sign of some kind.

I did not see this specific idiot in the picture, but saw another entitled white idiot, strolling down the platform of the Go Station after a Jays-Indians game this year with this disgraceful caricature on the front of her jersey.



Toronto's Ukrainian Festival is an annual celebration of Ukrainian culture and food that takes place on Bloor St. W. and that draws large crowds looking to enjoy some traditional song and dance, perogies and all the other things that get people out to festivals. The organizers say it is the world's largest such festival.



The last few weeks have seen a series of what are seemingly truly perplexing moves and actions by some of the country's most important labour leaders.



The "problems" facing Canada Post are entirely ideological.

Canada's politicians and media have bought into a long-term project driven by right-wing notions of society and the economy that seeks to re-frame public services as "businesses" that should be run "efficiently" along the lines allegedly followed by the private sector. 



A photo is going viral on Facebook that purports to show the Standing Rock Pipeline protest in North Dakota.



Excited about the possibilities that the upcoming NDP leadership race might allow?

Wondering if an insurgent campaign might arise and if an outsider or unexpected candidate might lead to something akin to what happened with Corbyn in the Labour Party?



Have you seen this Facebook post circulating around?

Sadly and depressingly it has been shared more than 44,000 times as of this posting.

Old myths along these lines have been around for a long time and have been repeatedly disproved and shown to be false or totally misleading.



After a generation of retreat that saw its abandoning of the welfare state and of any meaningful advocacy for working people and much of the middle class in the United States, it can now truly be said that the wages of liberalism is Trump.



Yesterday, the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination released a campaign ad unlike any you have ever seen.



Do you remember this moment?

That time when newly minted President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for absolutely nothing other than having won an election in the wake of the George Bush apparent catastrophe and for having given nice speeches about "hope", closing down Guantanamo and supposedly taking the US in a new direction that would be a departure from the death dealing of the past.

So how did that all work out?



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