You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!

I hope nobody can confuse me with someone who approves of religion, my recent posts supporting the idea of humanist ‘churches’ notwithstanding. I don’t. Religion is built on a foundation of unwarranted belief in claims that are nonsensical at best, and horribly destructive at worst. It concentrates unchecked and unimpeachable power in the hands of people who have done nothing to warrant it, and propagates abusive practices through threats and bribery:

Britain’s madrassas have faced more than 400 allegations of physical abuse in the past three years, a BBC investigation has discovered. But only a tiny number have led to successful prosecutions. The revelation has led to calls for formal regulation of the schools, attended by more than 250,000 Muslim children every day for Koran lessons.

The chairman of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board said he would treat the issue as a matter of urgency. Leading Muslim figures said families often faced pressure not to go to court or even to make a formal complaint. A senior prosecutor told the BBC its figures were likely to represent the tip of an iceberg.

But hey, so does the Boy Scouts, apparently:

CBC News has learned that Scouts Canada has signed out-of-court confidentiality agreements with more than a dozen child sex-abuse victims in recent years, shielding the incidents from further media attention. In many of the agreements, a confidentiality clause prevents victims from revealing the amount paid or even the fact that there was a settlement. At least one bars a former boy scout from publicly divulging that the abuse took place. Scouts Canada has refused to disclose details about any of the settlements. Sources tell CBC News that some settlements were around $200,000. [Read more…]

Fuck you, Oakland

I don’t usually shoot from the hip like this, but what happened in Oakland last night is disgusting:

Police in riot gear have used non-lethal weapons on a crowd of more than 1,000 people attempting to march on to Oakland’s city hall to condemn arrests made at an “Occupy Wall Street” camp. Police dispersed the crowd with what appeared to be stun grenades and set off tear gas to drive the demonstrators away from a plaza in Oakland’s business district that had been at the centre of Tuesday’s conflict. Ali Winston, a journalist at the scene, described to Al Jazeera the police’s tactics. “There have been two incidents of tear gas, flash-bang grenades and less-than-lethal projectiles beanbags being fired at the crowd,” he said. “In one instance, they used CS gas – which is a stronger version of tear gas that affects your respiratory system as well as your eyes, as well as burning your skin. So that’s happened twice since then.”

Thus adding to the list of cities that I will never visit unless circumstances force me to. Mayor Jean Quan – you’re scum and the world would be a better place if you had never been born. Police have sworn a duty to protect and serve the people, and attacking a peaceful protest, no matter how otherwise unruly, does neither of those things. Arresting people for “assembling without a permit” directly contravenes the First Amendment, and I hope that a lot of the officers involved serve prison terms. I hear they’re not too nice to pigs in the joint – maybe they’ll like you better if you tell them the story of the totally badass time you opened fire on a group of unarmed civilians.

Even if it wasn’t evil, responding to peaceful protest with violence is stupid. All it does is galvanize people against the police and grant the movement legitimacy. I’m amazed that we keep allowing stupid people who have learned nothing from history make our political decisions. So Jean Quan:

Fuck you.

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How do you know when you’re wrong?

Well there’s no definitive answer to this, but it’s a pretty safe bet you are if you’re considered too conservative for Texas:

Conservatives in the United States’ toughest crime-fighting jurisdiction — Texas — say the Harper government’s crime strategy won’t work. “You will spend billions and billions and billions on locking people up,” says Judge John Creuzot of the Dallas County Court. “And there will come a point in time where the public says, ‘Enough!’ And you’ll wind up letting them out.” Adds Representative Jerry Madden, a conservative Republican who heads the Texas House Committee on Corrections, “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ’em, I guarantee you they will come. They’ll be filled, OK? Because people will send them there. “But, if you don’t build ’em, they will come up with very creative things to do that keep the community safe and yet still do the incarceration necessary.”

I’ve spoken before about the terrible clusterfuck of ideas that is the incoming omnibus crime bill. It’s a mishmash of ideas, some of which are good, most of which are bad. Legal authorities, criminal law enforcement, opposition MPs, pretty much everyone who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to crime, they’ve all said that it’s a bad idea. Then again, our mighty ruling party has demonstrated repeatedly that it is relatively indifferent to outside criticism.

Until, apparently, they went to Texas. It’s not a trivial issue – arguments that work in Texas work for the Republican North party’s base. If there was anywhere that this type of bill should receive a warm welcome, it’s in “common sense” Texas. The only criticism one would be likely to expect is that Canada’s crime bill, coming from the great socialist north, would be seen as a bit “soft on crime”.

The problem is that Texas has about a 10-year crystal ball look into the future to know that this kind of approach just doesn’t work: [Read more…]

Greta says it so I don’t have to

One of the frustrating things about this blog is that I have a lot of stuff I like to talk about, but limited time/energy/motivation to cover it all. I also worry about losing focus and having this Manifesto turn into a diffuse leftist whine-zine. The thing that is particularly frustrating is when I get e-mails from readers suggesting I talk about this article or that issue, and I have to tell them that I will try but can’t guarantee anything. For one reader, I had to give a definite ‘no’. The reader in question is someone who has worked with sex workers before and thought that since I was pro-fem and anti-racist, that the topic would be well-suited to my attention.

I had to confess to this person that while ze made a very valid point, I am not informed enough about the topic to do it justice, and it was a bit outside my wheelhouse. This exchange happened a few months ago and I have been quietly working behind the scenes to see if I can’t get some traction to open this issue up to the skeptic community here in Vancouver, since the city has many of its own demons to deal with when it comes to the sex trade.

The awesome thing about this blog is, now that I am an FTBling, I am surrounded by people who can do a much better job than I can of discussing these important issues:

The myth: Prostitutes and other sex workers can’t choose their customers. They have to have sex with anyone who offers to pay.

When you think about this for ten seconds, you should realize that it makes no sense. People in any other service profession can, and do, turn down customers they don’t want to work with. Therapists, car mechanics, gardeners, hair stylists, nannies… you name it. There are a few exceptions — emergency room doctors leap to mind — but for the most part, it’s understood that, as long as they’re obeying non-discrimination laws, service professionals reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. (My hair stylist has told me long, entertaining stories about clients she’s fired.) So it’s kind of weird to assume that sex workers would be the exception.

Greta Christina, one of my favourite writers (the first version of this post contained a 2-paragraph gushing elaboration of this fact – I decided to turn down the squee a bit) and fellow FTBorg hits 9/10 of my high points of the issue – sex workers as workers, sex workers as autonomous people, female sex workers as the victims of a cruel sexual double-standard – with her usual flair and sharp, critical eye. The one thing that didn’t make it into the piece was the way in which violence against sex-workers is disproportionately weighed against people of colour (PoCs) working as prostitutes, which tesselates nicely into her overall argument.

Anyway, I feel slightly less guilty about not spending more time on this topic, since I have a much more capable colleague to do it for me. Go read her stuff.

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Absolute speech freedom? Absolutely!

Blogging requires a bit of a thick skin, or at least a certain amount of self-assuredness. The more people scrutinizing your ideas, the more likely you are to have people openly disagree with you. I recognize that I am breathing fairly rarefied air, here at Freethought Blogs – most of the people reading my posts already agree with most of my basic premises. There are perhaps a handful of topics that I introduce in a given month of blogging that are foreign to 90% of the readership here. I recognize that. I also recognize that by the virtue of not owning a uterus, I will escape a lot of the uglier side of attacks (since everyone knows racism is bad, but misogyny still seems to be okay).

This is why I’m always somewhat buoyed whenever I come across someone who can express my opinion for me: [Read more…]

Canada’s hate speech laws collide with reality

For those of you who are noticing an alarming trend in my writing, I will come clean: I really like Canada. So much so, that I can’t seem to shut up about it. I’d apologize, but a) I’m not sorry, and b) I know that this glut of Canadiana is a passing phase, and I’ll have a new pet topic in a few weeks for you to get sick of. Anyway, as I was saying, I really like my country. There is, however, one aspect of Canadian life that I wish was more, dare I say, American – our stupid approach to hate speech:

The country’s highest court heard arguments pitting freedom of expression against laws banning hate speech Wednesday, setting the stage for an eventual ruling on what is more in need of protection: groups targeted with hatred, or a citizen’s right to speak freely. It could take the Supreme Court months to decide on which side they fall in the case of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission versus William Whatcott. The commission is appealing a decision that overturned its original ruling against Whatcott, who published and distributed four anti-gay flyers in towns and cities in Saskatchewan in 2001 and 2002. They led four people to file complaints with the commission.

As someone who feels most at home talking about things that make polite society squirm – religion, racism, poverty, the idea that people can actually be wrong about things – I place a premium on free speech. Penn Jillette likes to talk about the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (the right of every citizen to own bear’s arms), saying that it’s the one that protects all the others. This, quite frankly, is militaristic nonsense. A gun doesn’t protect your right against unreasonable search and seizure – you pull a gun on a cop and that search all of a sudden becomes pretty fucking reasonable, amirite? [Read more…]

Reading between the lines – execution and de facto racism

We’ve been trained by oversimplification of a complex issue to view racism, indeed any bigotry, as intentional malice springing from some kind of personal defect. If only those darn racists could just be better people (like us), then they’d stop hating and everyone could go hold hands under a rainbow. If the sarcasm dripping off that last sentence wasn’t evident enough, allow me to state plainly that I don’t buy that school of thought for a second. It’s a very handy position to hold, because it excuses the holder from any responsibility to examine her/his own actions for racial bias, and excuses her/him from having to do anything to repair the gulf left by systemic racism. Every time someone approaches me in one of my race discussions, either in person or online, with the tired excuse of “I don’t think I’m racist – race has never been a big deal to me”, I want to shake them violently.

Racism doesn’t show up at your doorstep and announce that it’s there. It is rarely so direct as someone going on a diatribe about lazy Mexicans and how this country was better when you were allowed to lynch an uppity negro for looking at your daughter funny. That kind of racism is, mercifully, fading from popular expression as it becomes increasingly socially unacceptable. That being said, that is only the most egregious aspect of racism – akin perhaps to fundamentalist Christianity. Just because we lock up everyone who tries to bomb an abortion clinic doesn’t mean that the underlying principle of divine permission for all kinds of other, lesser evils is somehow made neuter. We can look at a macro level and see that in the absence of overt (what I call “classical”) expression, racism still operates in a major way in our society.

Today, I thought I’d walk through an example of doing just that: [Read more…]

Religious: free, dumb

There are two conflicting definitions of the phrase “religious freedom”. The correct definition is that a person should have complete liberty to believe as they wish – perhaps “freedom of belief” is a better phrase. The stupid definition is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, so long as it’s licensed by their religion, and that the law cannot interfere with that practice. Of course it’s trivially easy to pick apart exactly why that second definition is so stupid – sincere religious belief can justify all kinds of illegal and immoral acts. Interpreting “religious freedom” in this way is dangerous.

Here’s a little factoid for all you Yanks about my great country: we’re really not all that different from Americans. I will probably lose my maple syrup license for saying so, but aside from some historical differences that continue to inform our national identity, Canadian society contains all the same elements that American society does. At the moment, this means that our version of the theocrats are in power. Now, to be sure, our theocrats aren’t nearly as terrifying as theirs are, but they’re into the same wacky stuff.

Oddly enough, whereas the USA has its vaunted (and currently besieged) Constitutional separation of church and state, Canada has a Charter that explicitly enshrines the involvement of religious institutions in federal law. I call this ‘odd’ not simply because I think it’s a bad idea, and I do, but because it’s rarely been an issue. Canadians have, for the most part, unconcerned with arguments over religious involvement in public life. This, however, is changing under our current Parliament, and has been steadily ramping up over the past decade or so. More and more, we begin to see nonsense like this: [Read more…]

¿Ustedes tambien, Mexico?

In 18 months of blogging, I’ve only brought up abortion a handful of times (usually in service of a larger point). Today, for some reason, I’ve got two posts about it. Let’s hope there’s nothing Freudian about that…

I agree with Kavita Ramdas that empowering women is the key to making progress in society. I am sure this will garner me my fair share of dirty looks from a crowd of people who will see this as sexist against men – I am as immune to your looks as you are to rational argument. I join Christopher Hitchens in recognizing the cure for poverty as being “the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” A key component of such emancipation is the presence and defense of rights to abortion. However uncomfortable one might be with the idea, terminating unwanted pregnancy is part and parcel with recognizing a woman’s right to be reproductively autonomous. When women have the power to do with their bodies as they choose, the world becomes a better place for all of us.

Mexico doesn’t seem to recognize this: [Read more…]

Another victory of evidence over ‘common sense’ in Canada

There are few terms so intellectually offensive to me as ‘common sense‘. Every time someone invokes ‘common sense’ in an argument, I immediately stop listening to them. What they invariably mean is “I have no evidence to support my position, so I will substitute what I think is obvious”. The problem is that there is very little that is ‘common’ between people with different perspectives, and it very rarely makes any kind of ‘sense’. If you have an argument built from logical first principles, I will be happy to hear it; however, if it’s just based on your own particular handful of prejudices, please don’t waste my time.

It’s incredibly gratifying to see that even in this day and age where ‘common sense’ has become a mantra in our political and social life, we still see examples where evidence and reason win out:

Vancouver’s controversial Insite clinic can stay open, the Supreme Court said Friday in a landmark ruling. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that not allowing the clinic to operate under an exemption from drug laws would be a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court ordered the federal minister of health to grant an immediate exemption to allow Insite to operate. “Insite saves lives. Its benefits have been proven. There has been no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada during its eight years of operation,” the ruling said, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.

American liberals – our chief justice is a lady. U jelly?

A brief backgrounder – Vancouver is home to an unreal level of addiction and drug use. [Read more…]