Red_Canadian posted:Hey getfiscal, I just moved to montreal, can you recommend any good orgs? or bars or restaurants or whatever.
what are you up to? what neighbourhood do you live in?
some general suggestions though:
- learn french as quickly as you can (if you don't speak it already). there are lots of courses and clubs made available to do this. for example, there are courses available to you as a migrant from another part of canada and it costs like $100 - $150 for the whole year of courses. they are very flexible. i can give you more details on this if you care.
- the various art museums are cool. check them out. the fine arts one is PWYC for the permanent exhibits.
- cinema du parc plays cool independent/foreign movies and such. the cinema at atwater (cineplex forum) plays a lot of cool films too in addition to big ones because it's got a lot of screens.
- i really like double double pizza, and mont-royal hot dog for quebecois junk food. i like soupes et nouilles at st-marc and ste-catherine (where i used to live). there's also a funny little korean street food place on st-marc just near soupes et nouilles that i liked. my favourite poutine in the city is probably at angelas on maisonneuve near st-mathieu or whatever, the chicken one. i haven't been back to the city in the past year though so i dunno what's up.
- the plateau is a very nice neighbourhood to just walk around. i like cotes-des-neiges and rosemont as well. a nice weekend thing to do is just go for long walks.
for orgs i can answer questions about them but they mostly parallel other organizations in canada, with the exception of the national question and such. if you want a generic left organization and electoral party then just talk to quebec solidaire members. if you have a specific radical angle then there is probably a corresponding org in montreal. PCR-RCP is considered a criminal organization but i don't think police care about non-cadre members.
Red_Canadian posted:Verdun, though I work on the other side of the airport. Just part time though, need more schooling. I could use some details on french language classes, i was looking into a few things but most required you to be an out-of country immigrant that were offered by gov orgs for cheap.
here's a school i went to for a few months http://centre-st-louis.csdm.ca/english/
it's funded through the school board. if you live southwest though you can probably find something closer to you if you ask them about it. don't email though just call or go in person and be persistent if they don't understand (their clerks speak english but not great). there's one in little burgundy i think. centre saint-louis has a mix of backgrounds, including a lot of young canadians, while i've heard the others are more just immigrants. the courses are in two month blocks.
the national library at Berri-UQAM has a french conversation club i think too which might be an interim fix.
getfiscal posted:i'm reading a french book about maoism and i understand everything and i feel proud lol
i have a french book of castro's writings w. commentary and if you like i could send it to you cos fucked if im ever gonna read it
littlegreenpills posted:getfiscal posted:i'm reading a french book about maoism and i understand everything and i feel proud lol
i have a french book of castro's writings w. commentary and if you like i could send it to you cos fucked if im ever gonna read it
i want it
babyfinland posted:the gay part of town in chicago is called boystown and apparently thats coincidental
how are you enjoying boystown so far, where you live, because you are a homosexual
getfiscal posted:reading old mim theory blew my pea brain back in 2008. i remember printing a stack of old introductory issues and going to Burgers N' Benedicts in montreal, getting breakfast in the afternoon, and reading about maoism for a few hours. one time i ordered six eggs because i was really hungry. then i went a few weeks later and the same waitress was there and she came over and said "do you want six eggs?"
lmfao
there were a lot of discussions that were strange. at one point I gave a presentation on 9/11 to my miltiary science 101 "learn how to speak and comport yourself with dignity" class, and discussed the collapse from an engineering perspective and debunked loose change point by point, and some people in the class disagreed with me and gave evidence that indicated they had agreed with loose change. think about that. at another time all of the marine people were discussing smedley butler and this upperclassman was like "you know thats pretty much right when you think about it." and then we all laughed and played basketball or climbed up a rope or something. oorah.
annnnd then at a reserve base in connecticut, the army rotc people were doing training and marines were supposed to be opfor. I literally purchased a shemagh and learned how to wrap it around my head. to play opfor. did that. later in the day I was tasked with being a prisoner and told to struggle and mouth off and I came up with some shit about 'why are you in my country' in an accent that everyone was trying not to laugh at. also my roommate, who was in a different part of the training that was supposed to mimic interacting with local civilians, walked up to one group of army people and started speaking german, which none of the army guys knew. the response of the army people was to set up a dummy claymore laboriously in front of him and then set it off hahahaha
Edited by stegosaurus ()
getfiscal posted:the new PCR-RCP in canada has a line very close to MIM's actually. i don't think a lot of that is direct crossover, though, just recurrent themes in the same milieu. i agree with FRSO(FB)'s line more i think, though (to which there is no equivalent in canada).
what are the differences you like about frso's line
stegosaurus posted:getfiscal posted:the new PCR-RCP in canada has a line very close to MIM's actually. i don't think a lot of that is direct crossover, though, just recurrent themes in the same milieu. i agree with FRSO(FB)'s line more i think, though (to which there is no equivalent in canada).
what are the differences you like about frso's line
well i disagree that maoism is an advance over marxism-leninism, for starters. i don't think people's war is universal and i don't think the cultural revolution has any profound meaning. i also think mao's importance is overrated by maoists and his mistakes underestimated. i think you can accept parts of the argument against revisionism (persistence of the DOTP under socialism and repudiation of the 'state of the whole people') without adopting the chinese position wholesale. FRSO rejects most of these maoist argumetns as well i think.
also, to be honest, i feel conflicted about contemporary china. i'm not sure how to develop criteria for judging china. i think there are massive problems with the state of their economy and their policies but i'm not sure what character opposition to these policies should take. i'm also not sure that simply dismissing china because it does not have a centrally planned economy is especially marxist to do, since it was consensus under late stalin that china would need a long 'democratic' period, and it was mao who veered left of that a number of times. i'll have to read more about it though.
getfiscal posted:stegosaurus posted:getfiscal posted:the new PCR-RCP in canada has a line very close to MIM's actually. i don't think a lot of that is direct crossover, though, just recurrent themes in the same milieu. i agree with FRSO(FB)'s line more i think, though (to which there is no equivalent in canada).
what are the differences you like about frso's line
well i disagree that maoism is an advance over marxism-leninism, for starters. i don't think people's war is universal and i don't think the cultural revolution has any profound meaning. i also think mao's importance is overrated by maoists and his mistakes underestimated. i think you can accept parts of the argument against revisionism (persistence of the DOTP under socialism and repudiation of the 'state of the whole people') without adopting the chinese position wholesale. FRSO rejects most of these maoist argumetns as well i think.
weaksauce
blinkandwheeze posted:why don't you think people's war is universal getfiscal
i think it is too schematic to say that the eastern bloc countries went communist just because the red army occupied them. in most of these countries there was still a process that involved electoral politics and such. no marxist-leninist denies that the smashing of the bourgeois state involves violence. the question is if the specific claimed path of military conquest is universally applicable, which i don't think it is. beyond that, every time you bring this up to a maoist they tend to be like "of course we don't mean guerillaism" or whatever but then it's confusing what they actually mean. because i point out that venezuela has a revolutionary process probably worth broadly supporting and i've heard maoists say that they support it too and just want to reinforce the armed wing to prepare for the future and it's like... that's not really people's war then is it.
