Yesterday, tomorrow, today

The central thesis of my series on black history this year was focussed on the importance of understanding the whole truth of our history as a nation. This is not only relevant to Canada, mind you – it is universally true that understanding where we came from tells us how we got where we are. Furthermore, it gives us an indication of how we can move into the future intelligently, avoiding the same pitfalls that had waylaid us before. The reason why I thought black history was particularly useful for this task is that a) it has not been well-explored and is not well-understood, and b) it is a particularly egregiously bad slice of our history that we must learn to confront honestly if we are to glean anything from it.

That being said, Canada’s abysmal treatment of black people is far from the worst story we have to tell. For that, we have to turn to First Nations Canadians. The original settlers and inhabitants of the land were repeatedly exploited and conned into agreements that worked to their continual disadvantage. It is only recently that we have been willing to confront our national shame in anything other than an entirely token way, and many (myself included) would argue that we are still not doing enough to not simply make up for historical injustices, but to understand how we non-Aboriginal Canadians fit into their historical narrative.

Just as in the case of black history, learning the history of the Nation of Canada and the First Nations of Canada teaches us about ourselves, in ways that we may find uncomfortable but which are critical to moving forward: [Read more…]

Domo Arigato, Mr. Robocallboto

Some of you may be following the “Fauxbocalls” scandal that is the latest offering in the Republican North Party’s campaign to demonstrate that they are no different from their southern ideological cousins. Essentially, voters in a number of ridings around the country (including mine, apparently) received calls from people claiming to be from the Liberal Party of Canada. These voters were then advised that their polling place had changed, which was an outright lie.

While it is usually my habit to comment on a political story of this magnitude, I am intentionally avoiding doing so. My primary reason for doing this is that we don’t have any answers yet about how widespread this practice is, or how much of it is simply anecdotal. What we do know is that more than 31,000 complaints were made to Elections Canada in this past election, which is more than 4 times the margin of victory for the Republicans in the last election. We also know that complaints in the previous election was in the area of hundreds, not tens of thousands. What we don’t know is whether or not anyone in the political wing of the Republican party knows anything whatsoever about this practice.

My official take: I believe them when they say they don’t know what happened. I think they’re a bunch of scumbags for basically out-and-out stating that they do know what happened, and that it was a tricky ploy by the Liberals to manufacture a controversy. I think that anyone who says this “isn’t a big deal” is talking complete nonsense (yes, I am looking directly at you, Rex Murphy). I think that any response other than “we need to determine who did this, and what their intent was” is unnecessarily bet-hedging or worse, an attempt to promulgate a fraud far worse than the one that toppled the previous Liberal government.

That being said, until I have more information (or a particularly slow news week), I am not going to comment beyond that. Below the fold are some articles that I have found interesting and/or useful in parsing this whole issue.

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What kind of week has it been? Round 2

Once again, our esteemed federal government has handed us a veritable flood of exciting politics news. This isn’t the kind of excitement that I usually get happy about – it’s the type that makes the adage “may you live in interesting times” a curse rather than a blessing. We’ll skip my usual preamble and just get right to the good stuff.

Mom without medicare gives birth in hotel

A Scottish woman married to a Canadian wound up having their baby in a hotel room — across the street from a Vancouver hospital — after she couldn’t get provincial health-care coverage. “Luckily it all went OK and I was able to cope with the pain,” said Lynne Aitchison, who delivered baby Ziggy in the hotel bathtub, without medication or complications.

(snip)

However, the province told her she couldn’t have any medical coverage because she couldn’t get a letter from the federal Immigration Department verifying her application. She said Citizenship and Immigration refused to give her anything in writing because her application was sitting in a pile with thousands of others, unopened.

So first of all, I need to state unequivocally that I am opposed to naming your child ‘Ziggy’. No child, no matter how untimely, deserves to be stuck with that name. That being said, obviously the greater crime is that someone who, for the want of a letter from the government, was refused medical coverage and had to deliver Ziggy in the bathtub of a hotel overlooking the hospital. Perhaps all of the relevant information is contained within this graph: [Read more…]

So high, so low

So I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: mandatory minimums are racist. When we finally strip away the facile understanding of ‘racism’ as an intentional discriminatory act by a bad person against someone else, we are able to recognize that people, institutions, and traditions can be racist. The lack of intentionality is immaterial with respect to whether or not an action is racist – a better yardstick to use is whether or not it has the same effect that an intentionally racist (or “really” racist) action would. Put another way – I can be racist without even trying, and so can a non-conscious entity such as an institution (or even a non-entity like a policy).

Judged by this metric (which is arguably far more useful and accurate than the one used to detect ‘classic racism’), mandatory minimums serve to exacerbate existing racial disparities by removing the capacity of the system to take societal factors into account. In other words, they’re racist:

The legislation, a medley of 10 bills on the Harper government’s tough-on-crime agenda, includes mandatory-minimum-sentencing rules that will curtail judges’ abilities to deal out alternative sentences. That could undo a decade-long effort to find culturally specific ways of diverting inmates such as Mr. Findlay away from serial engagements with the justice system. Native Canadians make up less than 4 per cent of the general population, but they account for 22 per cent of prison inmates. Many of those are young men who have grown up in poverty and high unemployment, and who have lower-than-average education levels.

Shawn Atleo, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said recently that aboriginal children are more likely to go to jail than to graduate from high school. More will go to jail after C-10, and many will end up in the gangs that flourish in western and northern jails, where more than 70 per cent of inmates are aboriginal. “What we’re doing with C-10,” says Jonathan Rudin, program director of the ALST, “is to increase our reliance on things that don’t work.” [Read more…]

Courting disaster

I don’t do a lot of computer coding at work, but I do occasionally find myself forced to make a computer do something that exists only in my head and on paper. I don’t really have much of a background in computer science, aside from a couple of courses in statistical analysis methods in undergrad. The problem is, there’s certainly no shortage of project in which at least some coding is required, forcing me to have to learn as I go. Luckily, I am surrounded by competent professionals who can give me examples of their own work that I can copy. Of course, the problem with this approach is that I do occasionally have to do some original work and solve new problems.

My incompetence (in this matter – I am well competent in most things, just not computer programming so much) forces me to try and tackle the problem with the little experience and few tools that I have at my disposal. This involves using the few tools I have at my disposal in a series of “work-arounds”. What inevitably emerges is a program that functions, but is really clumsy and unwieldy. If I have to go back and change something, it takes a lot of unraveling, which is a time-consuming process. When I show it to colleagues, they always say “oh, well why didn’t you just do this?” and then they show me some nifty trick or macro or something that I hadn’t even considered, and it cleans up my analysis really quickly and elegantly.

Now, if I were less aware of my relatively junior standing in my field, or if I were just a whiny and petulant dick, I would view the contributions of my colleagues as attacks on my intelligence. I’d refuse to show them the flaws in my work, in an attempt to cultivate an illusion of infallibility – an illusion that would quickly crumble under the intense scrutiny of peer review. That’s how science works – it’s actually to my benefit to show my work to my colleagues, even if it means exposing my own ignorance. I will learn something, and my results will be much stronger when it comes time to have them reviewed by others who may not be as friendly. It turns out that there may be an element to this in politics as well: [Read more…]

It’s a good day for the ladies

One of the most frustrating arguments I encounter when talking about feminism is the various double standards. Women are portrayed as the passive recipients of actions, and yet are the ones who must take responsibility for their marginalization (either by “grow(ing) a pair”, “get(ting) a sense of humour”, or not “dress(ing) like a total whore”). There is rarely the corrolary pressure put on men to moderate their (our) behaviour, at least not by non-feminists. Of course when feminists do say “hey guys, don’t do that”, they (we) get piled on for being a castration-hungry horde of groupthinkers who are just trying to get laid (if you’re a straight man) or who just need to get laid (if you’re not).

Not too long ago, I talked about an experience I had when I was doing undergrad orientation, where the women in my residence were taught a number of ways to safeguard themselves against date rape. Oddly (or, rather, not oddly at all), there were no accompanying instructions for the guys. Safeguarding people from date rape was a ‘victim-only’ responsibility. In that same post, I lauded a program that is seeking to shift the conversation away from that kind of blame-based advice and toward a “personal responsibility” *twitch* model. The idea seems to be picking up steam in some unlikely places. [Read more…]

Calgary chalks one up in the ‘win’ column

The cup of conservatism overfloweth with bromides about the virtues of small government. “That government is best which governs least” is a pithy quote from Thoreau. People today are probably more familiar with Ronald Reagan’s most dangerous nine words: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. There’s the oh-so-cute line about shrinking government to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub (which, I’ve got to tell you, is a fucking creepy image). Of course, time and again we see that when “conservatives” are given power, they use it to rapidly expand government’s role in the social sphere while cutting the amount of actual good they do in terms of policy.

Hypocrisy aside, the maxims of ‘small government’ are still mostly nonsense. It is not the size of government that is meaningful, it’s the behaviour of government. Institutions that are transparent and made accountable to the people in its constituency can provide excellent services and aid in a variety of sectors. Insofar as a small government is easier for the electorate to monitor than a big one, there is some virtue in reducing size per se. Of course there is a trade-off to be paid in reducing government size – it becomes much less able to do things. A government small enough to drown in a bathtub is too small to react meaningfully to a national emergency or create a sufficient safety net – things it does much better than the private-sector alternative.

There is a balance that must be struck, to be sure. Big government isn’t always the problem, and shrinking it isn’t always the solution. Sometimes large social problems require government-assisted solutions. Case in point: [Read more…]

Religious no-longer-free-dom

If they weren’t such a bunch of self-righteous, predatory, literally holier-than-thou, shockingly dangerous and immoral scumbags, I’d have some sympathy for the Catholic Church. After all, after centuries of iron-fisted rule over the minds of powerful nations around the world, the level of power afforded the Holy See has diminished substantially. As people have learned to pull back the curtain and find out who’s working the levers and dials of the Great And Powerful Pope, the church has had to start chasing believers and whining like a bully whose victims are finally fighting back.

One of the things that truly baffles me about public policy and religion is the fact that churches are tax exempt. I suppose it is defensible insofar as some churches provide charitable services; however, that is not even close to all they do. Their main activity is doctrinal instruction, not charitable organization. That kind of ‘service’ does not, in my mind, warrant getting the special privilege of having all income declared tax-exempt.

The Vatican has a weird relationship with Italy. It’s like when a spoiled child announces that ze is now going by a new name, and then the parents just kind of go with it until ze grows up and stops demanding to be called “Tangerine”. Except in this case, the parents are all the countries in the world, and the bizarre name is “Vatican”. True to its form, because the Vatican is technically a church, it demands tax exemptions for all of its properties, even those which are obviously not places of worship (as though that made a relevant difference).

I think the parents are getting fed up: [Read more…]

“Birth control? Just keep your legs closed, you sluts!”

Yeah… I am pretty much FULL of rage right now:

Appearing of MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell today, Foster Friess, the main donor to the Super PAC backing Rick Santorum’s presidential bid, dismissed the controversy surrounding President Obama’s new birth control rule by suggesting that women should just keep their legs shut. Asked if he worried that Santorum’s Puritanical views on sex and social issues could hurt the candidate in the general election, Friess offered a more home-spun family planning scheme:

FRIESS: On this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.

I need people to say soothing things to me today. Video below the fold.

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Classic Crommunist: Judeo-Christian Heritage? Hardly!

A number of factors conspired to rob me of my blogging time this weekend, and my life didn’t get any less busy during the week. Many of you have been with this blog for a while, but most of you will still not have read this re-post. I will try to be back to normal as soon as I find time.

I’m really tired of hearing people say “we are founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs” or “we have to remember that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.” It is a phrase that often comes out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, that ridiculous walking ball of Silly Putty (who is so loved because she has no personality of her own and simply imprints the image of whatever is around her). Knowing at least a smattering of history, philosophy and theology, I know this not to be the case. While the country was originally founded by people who were Christian (that fact is not in dispute here, although many argue that many of the founding fathers of the United States were deist or agnostic), the principles that make Canada the country it is have at best coincidental resemblance to Judeo-Christian principles. At worst, they are in direct violation of biblical commandments. [Read more…]