The inherent racism of “Tough on Crime”

I’ve talked about the need for diversity before, as a way of making policy more effective. When you have a plurality of voices articulating their position, you stand a better chance of hearing new ideas. Diverse groups may be more unwieldy, but they are far less limited in scope than homogenous groups because a variety of perspectives are providing input. There is another reason why diversity is important though: it makes us less stupid. Because any in-group is going to subject to its own biases and privilege, the inclusion of diverse voices helps safeguard a movement from being self-serving, or worse, inadvertently harming another group.

It is fairly clear, based on this response, that the Prime Minister’s Office did not have a particularly diverse group building their absolutely moronic crime bill:

A University of Toronto law professor says a new federal crime bill chips away at sentencing provisions that require judges to consider all reasonable alternatives to jail. This, said Kent Roach, will only increase the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system.

“We’re going to have a future where one in every four people in prison are aboriginal,” he said. “And we’re going to have a future where perhaps more aboriginal people are going to go to jail than to university.”

Nearly half of the inmates in some Canadian prisons are Aboriginal people. That’s despite the fact they make up less than three per cent of the general population.

So, funny story. It turns out that when you take away the ability of judges to… well… judge, they also lose the ability to factor in the causes of crime and the best interest of not only the criminal defendant, but society at large. Poverty and crime are inherently linked. Not all crimes, to be sure, are caused by poverty. One would have to stretch the definition of ‘poverty’ pretty thin to claim that Bernie Madoff was impoverished, but the types of violent and property crime that the omnibus crime bill are supposedly targeting is linked to poverty. [Read more…]

Warning: this story is full of win

Sometimes the stuff I blog about gets me pretty down. There’s a lot of ugliness in humanity, and a lot of things to despair about. The ever-persistent stain of racism, rampant and unabashed misogyny, the easy lies of conservatism… it’s enough to wring a tear from even my stony gaze, and I have to reach for my supply of otter pictures.

Then again, sometimes a story comes along and completely cheers me up:

Poland’s first transsexual member of parliament has been sworn in, in what has traditionally been a socially conservative country. Fifty-seven-year-old Anna Grodzka was previously a man, known as Krzysztof, before having surgery in Thailand.

Okay, that’s pretty cool. Poland has made a progressive milestone by electing someone who, no matter how qualified, would not have been able to serve in office a generation ago. That’s pretty cheering. But wait, there’s more… [Read more…]

Sunlight: the best disinfectant

When I started this blog, I wasn’t anti-police. I saw police as a necessary part of society, with individual officers being basically decent people who react badly when the chips are down, due to over-work and high-stress jobs. My view of individual officers hasn’t changed much, but as I learn more I have begun to see that there is much more to the picture.

The beautiful thing about science is the peer review process. I am not simply referring to the formal process that happens when you submit a manuscript for publication, but the climate of collegial over-shoulder-reading that is de rigeur for the discipline. Scientists do not research in a vacuum – we present our findings at conferences, we discuss them at professional meetings, and of course there are publications. In so doing, not only do we ensure that we learn from each other, but we stand a much better chance of catching each other’s mistakes.

Not so for police – the attitude from various police departments is one of insularity, croneyism and unflagging loyalty, regardless offense. This attitude is perhaps on no better display than in the following tragic story: [Read more…]

It’s a banner day!

There is a famous biblical passage that reads: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Whether or not that’s true in general (spoilers: it isn’t), it is certainly true in the case of my request for a new banner for the blog. I have been overwhelmed with the level of creativity and generosity demonstrated by the readers here, and you have the most sincere thanks that I can muster from my godless, soulless core. I have boiled down the multitude of submissions to 5 of my favourites: [Read more…]

Crommunist joins a cult (part II)

In which our hero continues his narration of attending a workshop for a self-help program. Read Part 1.

What if everything you ever wanted… came in a ROCKET CAN? Okay, so this presentation wasn’t quite as entertaining as Powerthirst, but it amused me for the span of an evening. When we left off, the audience had just broken off into smaller groups to chat with the coaches.

What would you give?

The group discussion came back to the same central question that Mr. Vicente had kept posing, broken down into three (extremely leading) subquestions: 1) what would you like to achieve, 2) what would that accomplish for you, and 3) how much would you give up to achieve it? I call these leading questions because they prime you to accept that there is something on offer than can accomplish the transition from 1 to 2, in exchange for 3. [Read more…]

Skepticism in action: Crommunist joins a cult

Some times I have fun adventures. This is a story of one of them.

I have a friend (who I will call Valerie for the sake of clarity) who, although we get along quite well, I find to be a bit credulous. I’m sure if you asked her, she’d tell you that, although we get along well, she finds me simplistic and reductive and closed off to possibilities beyond what can be seen and heard. This is an unfair characterization, but rooted in a larger ignorance of skepticism that we are slowly resolving through good-natured chats whenever we get together.

Because I’m, well… me, Valerie calls from time to time to ask my opinion on various matters. Not because she thinks I’m particularly brilliant, but because I am in real life more or less how I am online – full of opinions. She also knows that, as a skeptic, I am quite adept at poking holes in things. It was in this spirit that she invited me to attend an open house at the life-coaching workshop she had been attending for a while. She thought that maybe I would learn something new, or that (more likely), I would sit like a curmudgeon and get into a fight with the speaker. I promised her that I would be open minded (which was a bit of a cheat, because she and I have very different definitions for that term).

And so it was that I found myself attending a workshop for the Executive Success Program, led by none other than director and film-maker Mark Vicente. Yes… that Mark Vicente.

Now I very rarely walk into a meeting like that without knowing anything about the speaker or the product being flogged, because part of my definition of being open minded is understanding what critics have said. Let’s just say that I almost changed my mind about going: [Read more…]

Oh, and there’s also this

I’m so forgetful. Sometimes I get so enamored of my own writing that important things slip my mind. The pragmatic argument is not the only reason I’m a feminist. There’s also the empirical one:

The SAT I is designed solely to predict students’ first year college grades. Yet, despite the fact that females earn higher grades throughout both high school and college, they consistently receive lower scores on the exam than do their male counterparts. In 2001, females averaged 35 points lower than males on the Math section of the test, and 3 points lower on the Verbal section. A gender gap favoring males persists across all other demographic characteristics, including family income, parental education, grade point average, course work, rank in class, size of high school, size of city, etc.

There are a number of pieces of evidence that suggest a systemic bias against women. I am familiar with dissecting these biases because they show up in the same kinds of places we find biases against black people. The pernicious thing about these kinds of non-obvious forms of sexism is that they have immense staying power. As the test causes women to underachieve, it means that fewer women are accepted into elite mathematics programs, which means fewer elite-level female mathematicians are produced, which means that math remains a “man’s field” for the next generation of students.

But it doesn’t simply stop at the SAT: [Read more…]

Why I am a feminist

I took an intro to philosophy course back in high school. It was roughly the equivalent of a first-year philosophy survey course (only better, because the class size was smaller and everyone in the class actually wanted to be there), taught by a really cool guy named Mr. Peglar. It is to him, and his class, that I can attribute credit for not only a lot of the content on this blog, but the way in which much of it is presented – he’s the one who taught me the strength of the ‘argument-counterargument-refutation’ approach to persuasive writing.

One of the central dichotomies we focussed on at the beginning of the class was realism vs. antirealism – the question of whether or not reality exists independently of an observer. We agonized over this for a week before he introduced us to an absolutely magical solution – pragmatism. Whether or not reality exists objectively, since the question is unanswerable (the scientific method – the best way to determine truth – is dependent on the assumption of reality existing), we are best served by assuming things exist. It is the only way to get by in the world.

There are a lot of assumptions about what motivates feminism. If you’re a woman, you may be accused of hating men and wishing to castrate them, or of being bitter and not having the strength to assert yourself, so you have to tear men down. If you’re a man, these assumptions are harder to make stick – there’s no reason to suspect that I hate men, being a man myself and having mostly male friends, and anyone who thinks I’m not strong enough to assert myself is invited to come say that to my face. Other insulting suggestions, that I am whipped or I’m just sucking up to chicks to get laid, are similarly poorly applied to me particularly – I’ve been single for many years and it’s theoretically much easier to score with randoms that don’t respect themselves than it is with feminists (which is a sad fact), who are, in my experience, the only kind of women that think a guy who calls himself a ‘feminist’ is sexy. [Read more…]

Wives, be subject(ed) to your husbands

I’m not married. I have no idea if I ever will get married. But if I do, it won’t be to anyone who’s read this book:

Malaysian officials have banned a controversial book that offers sex tips to Muslim women, reports say. The book, entitled Islamic Sex, is believed to have been read by a few hundred people. It was published by a group known as the Obedient Wives’ Club, which has been widely criticised for promoting polygamy and denigrating women.

The Obedient Wives’ Club told journalists last month that the book was intended as a spiritual guide to be read only by club members to help them comprehend sex. The club has previously said women should act like “first-class prostitutes” to prevent their husbands from having affairs or resorting to violence.

Yikes.

Funnily enough, there’s no advice to the husbands on how to make sex a life- and relationship-affirming experience for their wives. It’s almost as if the publishers of this book think that sex is a woman’s duty, and that the husband’s role is to simply enjoy it. Almost as if, despite constant propaganda from Muslim apologists (and other theists, to be sure), following the Qur’an doesn’t establish women and men as equals, but rather as a dominant and submissive relationship (but not the good kind). [Read more…]