The worst thing in the world (Thursday edition)

Trigger warning: sexual assault and other violence. Also, police.

When they tore down the Occupy Vancouver tent city, I was there. I was all geared up to get arrested for peacefully resisting the destruction of what was ultimately an important and helpful resource, not only for Canadian democracy, but for the city of Vancouver. I called my parents to tell them I might be thrown in jail; I called my close friends to put them on notice that if they didn’t hear from me in the next few hours, I would need them to start making phone calls. Then I headed downtown, fully expecting to see the scowling face of a judge before I saw my own bed again. What I saw instead was a massive cleanup crew with police helping to facilitate the voluntary removal of a bunch of supplies. The square was cleared without any confrontation whatsoever.

My Occupy experience was entirely bloodless, with the Vancouver Police Department behaving as though they truly understood the concept of peaceful protest and civil liberty. Their professionalism and restraint stands in sharp contrast with what we’re seeing out of their comrades in New York City: [Read more…]

Movie Friday: Jay Smooth on Trayvon

Because I will never NOT share something by radio host and vlogger Jay Smooth, here’s his take on an aspect of the Trayvon Martin case that hasn’t been fully explored:

It’s weird for me to hear my beliefs coming out of someone else’s mouth, but there you go.

Jay is making the same point that I tried to make with my posts about Occupy – that we have to be active participants in our system, whether that be political or judicial. No, we may not be the ones running for office or sitting on the bench, but we have to be actively engaged. Should we fail to remain vigilant, the system is allowed to run on its laurels, which inevitably serves only those at the top. In the case of Trayvon Martin, no justice was even pursued until people stood up and started paying attention. A man murdered a 17 year-old kid, and the police let him walk free, right up to the point where the cries of a small number of people who were acquainted with the case were heard by other people who believed that a just solution must be, and could be pursued.

This week I’ve been throwing examples at you in support of the basic tenet that we have to keep our brains switched on and our eyes open, because the system we live in is seriously flawed and unjust. We can and should expect more, and in order to achieve it we have to be asking the tough questions and demanding more than pat answers.

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Woodworth? ABORT! ABORT!

This morning I recounted the somewhat bizarre tale of a Republican North Party member of Parliament who tabled a private member’s bill to, in a semi-oblique way, spark debate over access to abortion in Canada. To my sincere surprise, the bill’s author (Stephen Woodworth of Kitchener) was rebuked by all parties in Parliament, including by a high-ranking member of his own party. Considering the fact that a sizeable proportion of the RNP voting base is anti-choice, it seemed odd for the government to come down so heavily on its own MPs motion, especially to have a high-ranking member dish out the tongue-lashing.

As I said in this morning’s post, all that really matters is that women’s reproductive autonomy is preserved and appears to be well-safeguarded from Parliamentary interference, even under this government. However, what I am profoundly unclear on is why this motion – doomed to fail as it was – even saw the light of day. There are a number of potential explanations I can think of, and I will spend a little time on each one.

1. The obvious one: everything is exactly as it seems [Read more…]

Something… weird happened last week

Anyone who is at least passingly familiar with the political landscape of the United States right now knows that the Republican Party has declared open season on women’s reproductive rights. From the much-derided all-male hearing on women’s contraception (and the resulting Limbaugh clusterfuck) to the very serious breaches of both personal autonomy and medical ethics happening in various states, there seems to be a concerted effort to roll back women’s access to health care. Add to that the fact that the government was nearly shut down because Republicans refused to allow any federal funding to go to Planned Parenthood, their reluctance to recertify the Violence Against Women Act, and the picture becomes pretty clear: Republicans have decided that American women are on their own.

Of course we have our own version of the Republicans forming the government here in Canada. As I noted shortly after the election, the Republican North Party is actually a stiched-together and very uneasy coalition of actual legitimate fiscal conservatives and the backwoods knee-jerk reactionaries that exist in every country to some degree, and said this: [Read more…]

A Wildrose by any other name…

DISCLAIMER: I am going to do my absolute best not to make fun of Alberta in this post.

Those of you who do not follow Canadian politics news closely may be unaware that the province of Alberta recently had a provincial election. Alberta has often been (somewhat unfairly, but not entirely) characterized as the Texas of Canada. It is rich in oil wealth, and has long held itself out as the victim of a campaign of neglect by central Canada. At least partially as a result of this, and the entrenched conservatism that seems to accompany life on a frontier, Alberta has long been to the political ‘right’ of most Canadian issues. Of course, now that we have a Prime Minister from Alberta who is to the political ‘right’ of most Canadian issues, it’s a confusing time to be Albertan. What does it mean to your long-standing identity as the middle child of the Canadian family when one of your own is calling the shots?

In the wake of this confusion sprung the Wildrose Party, a provincial party that is even further to the right than the Progressive Conservative Party that has run Alberta for the past 40 years. Yes, you read that right – Alberta has been represented by a single party for 40 years, and it is called the “Progressive Conservative” party – Americans, sorry for blowing your minds with our weirdo Canuck ways. The Wildrose Party, branding itself as the populist conservative alternative to the staid, Tory leanings of the PC party, made a strong bid to unseat the reigning PCs in this latest election. Up until recently, political observers (plus everyone with a sense of civic duty) were gnawing their fingernails at the prospect of the right flank of the right wing seizing control – it was a real possibility.

Then… the wheels kind of came off: [Read more…]

Canada: this is your government

This is one of those stories that, if it weren’t so goddamn sad, would be fucking hilarious:

With Conservatives targeting a Liberal staffer who posted the sordid details of Vic Toews’s divorce to Twitter, the Speaker of the House has ruled that threatening videos by the hacker group Anonymous violated the Public Safety Minister’s parliamentary privilege. Andrew Scheer told the Commons Tuesday the Anonymous videos “constitute a direct threat to the minister in particular, as well as all other members” of Parliament.

Okay, so this part’s not that funny. A group of Anonymous supposedly ‘threatened’ Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (who you’ll remember has appeared on this blog a few times before) after he announced his intention to pass a bill that would allow police to access information on the IPs of Canadians without a warrant. Mr. Toews then said that anyone who thought it was a bad idea to let police snoop people’s personal data without any kind of judicial oversight was simply standing with child pornographers. Anonymous, being who and what they are, did not like that, and released this “threat”:

Again, that’s not the punchline. While the threats were comparatively mild, Toews and his Republican North colleagues threw a shit fit and demanded answers. This Inquisition was spurred on by the revelations that a Liberal Party staffer was responsible for a novelty Twitter account that revealed the (publicly-available) details of the depths of Vic Toews’ depravity in the form of affidavits signed during his divorce proceedings*. All of a sudden the “liberal conspiracy” klaxons were sounding from the hallowed halls of the House of Commons, and the government was out for blood. [Read more…]

Movie Friday: Invisible Children becomes visible

The more I learn about the organization Invisible Children, the less I like them. I’ve known good NGOs who are on the ground and involved with communities in underserved areas – they are able to listen and react to the needs of the population rather than simply helicoptering in and ‘fixing’ whatever problem they (the NGO) thinks is worthy of their attention. There’s no quicker way to breed resentment than to walk into someone’s house and tell them how to fix their problems.

Unless of course you go into their house and just use them for a photo op:

Yeah… we probably could have called that.

The problem with the Invisible Children group is that they don’t seem to be all that interested in Uganda – they seem to be interested in Joseph Kony and in being responsible for killing him. The people who are actual victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army don’t seem to share IC’s zeal for single-minded justice at the expense of recognizing the plight of the victims.

Furthermore, it seems as though Invisible Children is in bed with some truly nasty people themselves: [Read more…]

Ethics, wealth, privilege – pulling it all together

Looking back at this morning’s post, it may have seemed a bit atypical for me to highlight a study that has nothing to do with politics, religion, racism, or any of the other usual suspects for this blog. In the early days of the Manifesto I realized that it was important to have a focus – in order to build a ‘brand’ one must be associated with an idea (or even a handful). Over the past couple of years this ‘focus’ has been rather malleable – shifting as my own personal interests do. However, insofar as this blog is an attempt to unify my own thoughts and ideas and provide myself (and you) with some insight into how my thought process works when synthesizing new information.

When I first read the fact that there was a study that demonstrates that rich people are jerks, I was prepared to laugh it off as just one of those interesting, quirky psychological discoveries. But as the days passed, I realized that there was quite a bit more depth to it. Many of you (hopefully) remember my series on System Justification Theory where we explored the theoretical underpinnings of why people who are relatively lower status may embrace behaviours and attitudes that work to the advantage of the outgroup rather than selfishly. Since we are talking about power and status, there is an opportunity to explore the extent to which greed increases someone’s system justifying behaviour. Are low-status people who have positive attitudes about greed approve when high-status people subvert the rules? Are they more motivated to excuse unethical behaviour by those in power? If such a correlation exists, could it possibly explain why someone like Newt Gingrich still has political support among evangelicals despite his rampant infidelity?

Does this overlap between greed and SJT explain perhaps the backlash against the #Occupy movement – why Romney’s characterization of the justifiable anger against the excesses of the financial elite as ‘jealousy’ resonates with voters who are getting screwed by the same elites? How does this potential psychological phenomenon affect the way people interpret news like this:

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.

(snip)

One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents’ educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.

What implications would understanding a climate of greed and the ethical lassitude that accompanies it have when we add system justifying into the mix? If we can find ways to convince people that greed isn’t good (contra Gordon Gekko), will we see an adjustment in the amount of support for social programs that level the playing field? Will politicians who adopt an ‘investment’ model rather than a ‘free market’ model gain more traction?

Many of you may have read this resignation letter from a (former) Goldman Sachs executive:

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

(snip)

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

How does this reaction to corporate greed connect to Goldman’s unethical practices (as detailed in the letter)? Is it always the case that the extremely wealthy will become avariciously unethical, or is it greed that separates a Lloyd Blankfein from a Warren Buffett? Many praised Greg Smith (the letter’s author) for showing a level of morality that one does not commonly see among the very rich. Is that ‘morality’ borne of an organically superior sense of right and wrong, or simply a less favourable view of greed?

System justification produces unfavourable attitudes that fall along racial and gender lines, and operates implicitly (subconsciously). If greed is mixed in to the system justifying process, does that contribute to the atmosphere that results in fewer women and minorities being promoted to executive positions? Do the double standards that make identical actions look ‘assertive’ in men and ‘bitchy’ in women come from a subconscious approval of a culture of greed? Would encouraging people to think of greed unfavourably create a more demographically balanced environment? Can this help to explain why economically ‘left’ groups tend to be more inclusive of minorities than economically ‘right’ ones?

Finally, how do we moderate approval of greed? Does merely exposing greed make people think unfavourably of it, or do we have to focus our attention on the downsides? How can we separate (unhealthy) greed from (healthy) competitiveness? Are they two sides of the same coin, or is there a way to encourage innovation and discovery without having to accept the phenomenon of people pulling each other down rather than pulling themselves up? Do we as skeptics have a role to play in unpacking the subconscious baggage of greed, or is that a job for educators and public figures? Is greed biological or sociological – do we see parallel behaviours in animal species?

These are big questions, and I certainly don’t have answers for them. However, the more I look around, the more I see that things are connected.

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The ‘decent interval’ is over!

Whenever someone dies, there is something called a ‘decent interval’ where it is considered in extremely poor taste to disparage the deceased. It’s perfectly reasonable – even the worst of people have families who are mourning the loss, and it does no good to rub salt in their fresh wounds. The length of that decent interval is very much an ambiguous question. There is no rule as to when it’s done, but it’s usually proportional to the amount of good (or evil) the person did in hir life. I myself was appalled when the vultures began circling almost immediately after Christopher Hitchens died.

Andrew Breitbart died last week. When it happened, I stated it as a fact and left it alone because, despite the revulsion I felt toward him, it wasn’t right to begin crowing victory at the death of an enemy. Mobutu & Gen. Ze’evi have apparently kicked the fucking door off the ‘decent interval’, and thank fuck for that:

Provocateur, website founder and collector of America’s largest wads of spittle Andrew Breitbart died last Thursday morning, when some sentient shred of his cardiac organ kamikazed out of an exhausted sense of justice.

The invertebrate response from journalists was exactly to be expected. Breitbart said, like, bad stuff in his lifetime, but he also married someone and fathered people; once he even objected to anti-gay GOP rhetoric. A malicious career and two milquetoast mitigating facts: It all balanced out, really, at least for the purposes of forced, quailing objectivity. To borrow a grossanalogylustilyemployed on Breitbart’s own websites, if today’s mainstream media was penning obits on May 1, 1945, they would have summed up with, “Despite initiating the Second World War, the German leader was fond of public architecture and is survived by his beloved dachshunds.”

But nothing so generic could be the money quote of this squeamish grudging esteem-a-thon. For that, we have to go to Slate‘s Dave Weigel, who quoted Breitbart thus: “‘Feeding the media is like training a dog,’ he wrote. ‘You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.'” This is just the carrot part of the metaphor. Nobody mentioned the stick.

The piece is long, but holy fuck is it amazing. I love good polemic, and this is great polemic. You’ll notice that the focus is (rightly) placed on Mr. Breitbart’s actions and behaviour, and is a criticism of things he actually did. This isn’t crowing over someone’s death – this is an unapologetic statement that the man who people are tiptoeing around revealed himself to be an awful person deserving of an honest and thorough verbal keel-hauling, which this piece gives him in spades.

Go read it right now. Some choice nuggets below the fold.

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A few words about “Kony 2012”

I have some small experience with skepticism on the internet and in social media. It’s usually a pretty hard slog, because people don’t like being corrected, especially when they’re passionate about something. So you’ll see people posting stuff that you find on Snopes, and you have to painstakingly explain to your friends and more gullible family members that it’s generally not a good idea to forward along things that are unsourced, particularly when they don’t pass the skeptical ‘sniff test’. And then someone gets into a fight over it, and it’s 2 or 3 days before it stops spreading like wildfire.

Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a video called “Kony 2012” with the question “thoughts?” Now, as hipster as this makes me sound, I’ve actually known who and what Joseph Kony was for a few years now. I’ve even talked about him (obliquely) on this blog before. There is no question in my mind that Joseph Kony represents everything that is evil about humanity. I try to avoid describing people as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, in an attempt to recognize that the environment is a much better predictor of behaviour than anything that exists within us organically. Even still, the methods and actions of Mr. Kony are so beyond comprehension and empathy that I struggle to even see him as a human being. His only saving grace, politically speaking, is that he’s been allowed to commit his atrocities in a place where the rich and powerful nations have more or less ignored him.

This video, created by an advocacy and humanitarian aid group called Invisible Children, is designed to strip away the anonymity that allows Joseph Kony to engage in his grisly campaign. Their reasoning is that if people are paying attention, there will be sufficient political pressure to “do something” (which, in the case of Invisible Children, means hunting him down and either arresting him or killing him). The powerful imagery of the video, coupled with the shocking reality of the situation, immediately provoked huge reactions from people who had no idea that any of this had been going on. [Read more…]