#qpirg

[imagierdelarue]

[imagierdelarue]

[rebodiescollective-blog]

[not-yr-fucking-mother]

things i will be doing today, and you should too

Wednesday February 13th 5pm - 3480 McTavish - SSMU Building room B-30  Workshop:Struggles Against Capitalist Colonialism: How Indigenous Feminisms Will Save the Earth and Destroy the State An introduction to some of the thoughts and work of indigenous feminisms and feminists on occupied Turtle Island (“North America”), and how the anti-colonialist struggles of indigenous women, queers, and two-spirited people are fundamentally and radically anarchic and anti-capitalist in their construction and organization. Colonialism, misogyny, and capitalism are deeply interconnected, and activists cannot engage in feminist or anti-capitalist struggle without also working to decolonize ourselves, our relations with one another, and the spaces & land we inhabit. These ideas and thoughts will be connected to the current happenings in Quebec, with discussion on how to create a truly revolutionary social movement. Presented by  Molly is a Métis anarcha-feminist hailing from the seam that separates mountain from prairie in the deep West of colonized Assiniboia. She’s out East to cause trouble and do a Joint Honours Women’s Studies and Religious Studies degree at McGill.

https://www.facebook.com/events/528277803873631/542027029165375/?notif_t=plan_mall_activity

[nocherrybombs]

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Ignore QPIRG McGill

I've been meaning to talk about this for a while, and now seems about the right time to do it. So let's see. QPIRG. What do I have to say about QPIRG?

QPIRG, specifically the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill University, is... well, it's a public interest research group, a student-run organization committed to "environmental and social justice issues at McGill University and in the Montreal community". It collects an opt-outable $3.75 from every student each semester to fund its staff, working groups, bureaucracy, expenses and so on. The organization also has the uncanny ability to bring out the absolute worst in McGill students as far as shit-slinging goes. My opinions of QPIRG are complex, in that they don't make sense and I assume that anything that doesn't make sense is too complicated to be understood.

On the one hand, QPIRG has its vaguely defined appendages inserted into so many McGill student initiatives that it would be hard to imagine the university without it. QPIRG's existence is almost entirely justified by their providing an alternative to SSMU's clusterfuck of a frosh alone. Most everything QPIRG does is either received relatively well or ignored because it's so boring to the average McGill student that they can't be assed to care about it, with one glaring exception that I'll discuss shortly. As an organization, there's not much doubt that QPIRG is never anything besides mind-numbingly mundane or benign, even if the group does have a tendency for clumsily tripping over their own finances.

On the other hand, something about the attitudes of QPIRG supporters in particular is off-putting, like the smell of a salmon fillet that's been left out on the table just a bit too long. The amount of smug circle-jerking that occurs amongst QPIRG supporters is enough to fill the SSMU ballroom halfway to the ceiling with spunk and the high-horse attitude of the average QPIRGer is so stuck up that you'd need a space elevator to get anyone down from there. My personal problem with QPIRG is that it bills itself as progressive and anti-oppressive and therefore morally and intellectually superior, and while being against oppression is by all accounts desirable, one should not judge oneself exceptional if one wants to be taken seriously because doing so perpetuates the illusion, or rather exposes the reality, of swollen head syndrome. The truth is that once a group has deemed itself immaculate it tends to let its membership and supporters get away with a lot of bullshit they wouldn't otherwise get away with, ie. #6party. QPIRG is an organization whose most severe fault is that it enables a minority of students with delusions of grandeur to construct flimsy moral high grounds for themselves in the name of social justice and then use these high grounds as platforms from which they may act like pillocks without fear of criticism. You can't blame that on QPIRG because those fucks were probably going to do it anyway, but you can blame QPIRG for accommodating their friends' metaphorical hoity-toity self-righteousness habit and not staging a well-needed intervention/smack upside the head combo when they had the chance.

QPIRG itself displays no evidence of being a bastion for extreme far-leftist programs but some of it's members have left their muddy MobSquad-y footprints running  up one side of QPIRG and down the other. These are the people who have a reputation of behaving more suspiciously than children standing next to a step-ladder trying to pretend they haven't just eaten all the biscuits, although upon inspection you find that all the biscuits are in fact uneaten and still in the jar thus making the situation all the more bizarre. I don't know why QPIRG's supporters are slinking around and laughing nasally to themselves like QPIRG is the secret front for igniting the revolution when most of what QPIRG does isn't remotely shady, remotely subversive or even remotely interesting. Yet they celebrate every won referendum as a victory against an oppressive status quo, the bourgeoisie, imaginary fascists, a violent police state nightmare dystopia, baby-eating conservatives, blind capitalist sheeple, and Stephen Harper. It's enough to make one suspect that QPIRG is up to something untoward, but anyone who endeavours to find out what said "something" is is bound to be disappointed. Not that this fact keeps those most irrationally opposed to QPIRG from trying to dig up dirt and, upon failing to discover anything of note, fabricating nonsense out of whole cloth.

QPIRG's missteps seem to be mostly due to sheer incompetence rather than any sort of conspiracy as its detractors allege there is or some of its supporters secretly wish there was. QPIRG's most recent debacle over changing the fee-levying system back in February appears to have occurred less because the board of directors were trying to pull a fast one on McGill students and more because they don't realize that McGill students, while "bright", are neither omniscient nor telepathic and as such don't have knowledge of the intricacies of the financial fever dream kraken that happens to be the QPIRG budget. Most of QPIRG's follies are due to idiocy, mismanagement, an inability to dislodge its head from its own ass and a very unfortunately obstinate commitment to being involved in the Israel-Palestine debate as opposed to any genuine malice.

And so we come to the crux of the issue, that being the Israel-Palestine debate, as if this were surprising to anyone. Yes my friends, we're back here again. Most of the students at McGill are hoping and praying that Israel and Palestine come to some sort of peace agreement soon, because it would bring quite a lot of relief to both the middle east and all of the upper-middle-class teenage twits in eastern Canada who are so puzzlingly invested in that controversy and ONLY that controversy. QPIRG has gotten itself inextricably tangled with Israel Apartheid Week much to the organization's own detriment, in the same way that carrying around a dead cat in a knapsack might injure one's reputation for cleanliness and mental stability. See, Israel Apartheid Week is run by the sort of people who tend to trot out "I'm not an anti-Semite but" before plastering posters comparing the Israel Defense Force to the Nazi war machine all over brick walls, and QPIRG finds itself uncomfortably guilty by association.

QPIRG's idiosyncratic two-thousand dollar infatuation with Tadamon! isn't doing it any favors either, and attempts by apologists to defend QPIRG by citing groups such as Greening McGill and Campus Crops come across as fantastically insincere. If my dog blows vittles all over your lawn, I could point to all the nice flowers I helped you plant in your rose garden the other day but that doesn't change the fact that there is still half-digested dog breakfast on your lawn.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned pillock-ery spreads like a malignant neoplasm around here, and the McGill student body is nothing if not cancerous in its ability to completely ruin any political debate. Bringing this to its illogical conclusion yields the formation of diametrically opposed YES and NO campaigns, absolutely identical in their inability to understand opinions different from their own, trolling each other and throwing feces into a canyon like feces throwing was going out of style and they only have a week to get their kicks in before the canyon gets closed, which, thanks to the bewilderingly strict campaigning rules of Elections McGill, is technically the case. So QPIRG, as an organization that does stuff, gets smacked around from both sides by idiots with a leftist agenda misinterpreting what the group is supposed to do and idiots who oppose the former idiots but can't tell the difference between the group, its constituent members and MobSquad.

That being said, it's probable that QPIRG will win this referendum, and probably for the better. Does that mean that there there is nothing about QPIRG that needs to change? Of course not; no organization has ever suffered from a deficiency of improvement opportunities, and QPIRG is not any sort of exception. Tweaking the structure might help, but I would personally close the program for two years or so, wait until most of the people involved now have graduated, and then restart it from the ground up with an entirely new staff, a new mission, and that lovely "new car" smell that is so much more appealing than the odour of partially spoiled fish.

[cutvmontreal-blog]

QPIRG Concordia's Jaggi and Ashley support CUTV's fee levy campaign! Vote Yes!