[NSFW] The Applicability of BDSM Risk Profiles

Content Notice:  NSFW photos below the fold, rope bondage, women bound in rope.

“Risk” is probably a conversation that ranks #2 in the BDSM community, second only to “consent.” Like consent, there are a contingent of folks in the kink community who will talk a lot of talk, fuck up in practice, and then go back to talking the talk. Someone will come forward with a conduct violation and no matter how obviously egregious the behaviour is, there’ll be a lot of hand-wringing and deflection and victim-blaming and humming and hawing that proceeds for weeks until someone invents a snappy new initialism or acronym which everybody totally agrees to adhere to, bygones be bygones, we totally don’t have to do something about the predator in our midst.

Yeah, I’m not cynical. /s

Setting aside the fucksticks who turn these conversations into smokescreens into abusers, the rest of the kink community does have a lot of valuable insights on risk in general, just as it does for consent. Most of what I’ve learned in kink can be taken outside of kink. I would even say my lessons learned from BDSM, and from the Leather community in particular, have formed the bedrock of my personal ethics.

[Read more…]

Running at 0.5 Marvins

Content Notice: Depression and discussion of suicidal ideation.

I’d like Chris Hall’s unit of measurement for depression to be A Thing, a scale from -1 to 1 measured in Marvins, referencing the comically depressed robot from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Marvins are bad to have, meaning 1 would be suicidal.

I think the best I’ve ever been was 0.1 Marvins. Well into my transition, with a loving and supportive partner with a good sense of humour and just the right amount of mean streak to satisfy my kink, a job I enjoyed that paid the bills and then some. Even then, a distant dread, a little devil whispering in my ear that I would lose it all. (Which turned out to be right). It doesn’t help that my metaphorical devil gets help from outside my brain. No shortage of people penning lengthy diatribes about how monstrous I am because I’m queer or trans or poly or kinky. Might as well hand my devil a megaphone and name it after a fake goth.

My childhood was 0.25 Marvins at best. Even during times of happiness, there would be a cloud, a fog that surrounded me at all times. The sun wouldn’t be quite as bright, the colours would not radiate quite as vibrantly, laughter was always short lived. It was pervasive, as if the entirety of my wardrobe had been freshly rained on, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

[Read more…]

Trudeau talks Left; Governs Right

Although the Liberals campaigned on a platform of government accountability, particularly after years of reaming Harper out for his shady dealings, Trudeau has decided to shut down any inquiry into Canada’s role of torturing Afghan detainees:

Many celebrated ​Justin ​Trudeau’s election, thinking the charismatic leader would turn a new page for Canada, especially for Canadian Muslims who overwhelmingly voted for the Liberals in 2015.

Yet the Liberals who presented themselves as open and transparent while in opposition have proven to be anything but in government.

While in opposition, the Liberals advocated for three innocent Canadian Muslims tortured in the Middle East with CSIS complicity.

One of them, Ahmad El Maati, spent more than two years languishing in Syrian and Egyptian prisons.

The 2008 Iacobucci report found that CSIS agents travelled secretly to Egypt, shared unfounded allegations that the men were al-Qaeda terrorists and provided questions to interrogators.

The “confession” obtained through torture was used in Canadian courts to justify search warrants.

The three men demanded an apology and filed a $100-million civil lawsuit, which the Liberals supported while in opposition.

But now that he’s prime minister, Trudeau and his federal Liberals are continuing Stephen Harper’s legal battle against compensation, filing an appeal against the lawsuit and requesting retroactive blanket anonymity for spies in order to protect government officials complicit in torture.

Trudeau is also blocking an inquiry into Canada’s role in the torture of hundreds of Afghans despite the fact that he called for an inquiry himself while in opposition.

Forty-thousand pages of Afghan detainee records detailing Canada’s role in torture from 2010-11 still haven’t been released.

In 2011, 4,000 pages were released but were heavily blacked out, making the records unreadable. The inquiry was such a big deal that it was one of the reasons why Harper prorogued Parliament in December 2009.

In June, the Montreal daily La Presse produced new evidence, publishing a letter written by dissident Canadian military officers who accused high-ranking Canadian officers of ordering the abuse of Afghan detainees, many of whom weren’t Taliban fighters, but simply poor people illegally arrested during military sweeps.

“Nearly 50 per cent of those detained by the military police were people like you and me, husbands, fathers, farmers, who had done nothing wrong,” the letter read.

The letter explained that most detainees were released due to lack of evidence after spending about two months in prison. A secret agreement was made with Afghan forces for the detainees to appear as if they were under their guard, while they were all held in Canadian cells, the letter said. Under orders from high-ranking officers, they conducted “exercises” to terrorize the detainees.

Despite all this, Canada’s “badass” Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said an inquiry isn’t necessary.

Canada ranks Number 2 in arms exports to Middle East for the first time in history, second only to the United States. The ranking came days after Canada addressed the UN Security Council, stressing the importance of protecting civilians in conflict zones.

I think it is important to note that for all of the Conservative’s most repugnant moves on the international stage, the Liberals don’t seem to be particularly interested in stopping, reversing or examining those trends.

Trudeau, as ever, has better PR. But he seems to be continuing the foreign policy of Harper, despite criticizing that same policy as the Opposition. Maybe we should sign at the bottom of our new child benefit cheques “paid for in blood”?

-Shiv

When festering pustules pop up on campus

Content Notice: White Supremacy

It’s no secret to woke Edmontonians that we have our own dregs from the bottom of the alt right barrel. Between PUAs scheduling meet ups to MRAs following women around who have the audacity to ignore them, with redneck hillbillies shouting racial epithets on a daily basis, it’s no surprise that we would eventually find signs of White Supremacy, especially since Trump’s bold campaign has been emboldening them.

white-supremacy

Photo credit: Brett L.

They chose my university, the University of Alberta. Posted on the corkboard of Student’s Union announcements, a fellow local activist took a pic before the poster was taken down.

It probably tells you everything you need to know when a racist jumps to the conclusion that anti-racism efforts are inherently anti-white, as if PoCs are just waiting for the chance to leap into power and reignite the engine of discrimination. What exactly are they afraid of? Being treated as poorly as they treat black people?

So hey, I guess I just wanted a crystal clear example of how Edmonton’s got its own cancerous alt right growths.

The poster is anonymous, of course. Probably doesn’t want to be labelled a social pariah for being a shitstain of a human being.

-Shiv

My best buddies, Parents for Choice in Education, are “non-partisan”

My best friends and favourite “non-partisan” group of all time ever, Parents for Choice in Education, has some… rather partisan connections.

Parents for Choice in Education also devotes a page on its website to material from Alberta Can’t Wait, the Political Action Committee set up to raise funds for the campaign of social conservative federal MP Jason Kenney to lead the Progressive Conservative Party and merge it with the Opposition Wildrose Party.

The Kenney campaign material distributed by Parents for Choice in Education accuses the NDP Government of “social engineering” – a coded reference to a supposed conspiracy to proselytize young people to take up alternative lifestyles – and attacks Education Minister David Eggen, who has stated repeatedly that the law on GSAs must be obeyed.

While claiming to be non-partisan, Parents for Choice “had a board director recently meet with Jason Kenney and she sensed that his camp has taken the time to educate themselves on the issues and is in support of parent choice,” a commentary accompanying the Alberta Can’t Wait statement approvingly noted.

Oops!

[Read more…]

Insults so common they become meaningless

It’s quite easy to take the piss out of a supposed insult like Social Justice Warrior because it is so loosely used that, by now, it pretty much means “a woman I don’t like.” It has been used on men, but those men are typically minorities in other ways. Cishet white men are typically called “White Knights” or some variant thereof by the neo-Nazi alt right or by people who are just antagonistic in general to the idea of social equity. But SJW and its associated spinoffs are essentially shorthand ways of signalling dismissal to anyone from “moderates who want the opportunity to avoid discomfort in conversations about discrimination” to “fascist apologists who can’t wait to dox and harass someone into oblivion.” It’s a literal ad hominem–no engaging with the substance of the argument provided, just shout SJW and any conversation about structural, institutional, or individual discrimination can be safely ignored or dismissed as frivolous.

Enter Philip DeFranco. :/

[Read more…]