Posts By Crommunist

0 Special Feature: I participate in SlutWalk Vancouver

May 17, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · feminism · First Nations · gender · privilege · race · sex · skeptivism

This past Sunday, I participated in the local (to Vancouver) SlutWalk event. I have spoken previously about the issues that preceded this event, so if you haven’t heard of it you should probably read that post. I will attempt to summarize: a police officer in Toronto suggested that women who don’t want to get raped probably shouldn’t “dress like a slut”. Giving Constable Sanguinetti the benefit of the doubt for a moment, I’m sure what he was trying to say is that rapists are more likely to target women who are wearing clothes that expose skin than someone dressed in, say, business casual (more on this later). What followed was a backlash against the idea that rape victims are “asking for it” through their dress, as though a woman’s job is to not provoke the ravenous male hordes through improper dress.

Obviously, when put into context, this idea is not only wrong but very dangerous. Women are often blamed for being raped, disbelieved by even their own families and the judicial system. This kind of slut-shaming double standard inherently disadvantages women – “slut” is always a gendered term even when used (subversively) to describe men. Inherent in the word slut is the idea that a woman enjoying her sexuality is dirty and immoral. It is leveled against women irrespective of their level of sexual activity – a girl who sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time (or indeed, who has never done anything sexual) is just as likely to be called a slut by those around her as is a professional sex worker. Neither of them deserves the appellation – the word should never be used.

In this post, I will give some of my reactions to the event.

The Good

1. Attendance

I wasn’t sure how many people would bother to come to an event like this. Keep in mind that it was pouring rain at various points that day (this is Vancouver, after all), but there was a crowd of around 1,000 people (my estimate would have been higher, but that’s what the paper said) there. Some were dressed in a variety of costumes: three men in operatic drag, a woman in a Saran Wrap dress, a young woman in a really uncomfortable-looking corset, a guy wearing a tiny t-shirt and silver bicycle shorts (not a flattering look… they kept slipping down), and my personal favourite: bandana man – so named because that’s all that covered his junk. My response to my friend (who I will call “Julie” just for simplicity’s sake) was “wow, who knew people actually cared about women’s rights?”

2. Who Attended

One would expect that an event like this would be almost entirely women. I was pleasantly surprised at the gender mix: still majority women but with a lot of friends, spouses, boyfriends, and people like me who simply care about the issue there. It is a sad fact of the sexual double-standard that these kinds of issues only seem to gain real traction when men start speaking about them, but at least the Y chromosome camp was well-represented. It certainly surprised a couple of knuckle-draggers who showed up expecting a parade of sluts, and were instead confronted by a group of passionate feminist allies.

3. Support

This was not a fringe event where only a few whackos showed up (although there were a few of those, to be sure). In addition to various legal and social support organizations, the deputy mayor of Vancouver Ellen Woodworth showed up and spoke at the kickoff to the march (“As a lesbian, a queer, a dyke… I know the power that words have”). Media were present, and sponsors had donated materials and time to the event. The Vancouver Police were also on hand to block traffic, which was important because there were a lot of people on the streets.

4. The Reaction

Nothing was more rewarding than seeing people’s faces as the parade moved past. People were shocked to see not only the attire, but the word “SLUT” paraded defiantly and openly through the streets. I said to Julie “that is the face of consciousnesses being raised.”

The Bad

1. Messaging

One of the stated purposes of SlutWalk was to reclaim the word ‘slut’, in order to rob it of its power. Ultimately, I disagreed with this part of the campaign. Like with the word “nigger”, I don’t think that re-appropriating words is a useful endeavour. I am of the opinion that people should be forced to deal with the full history and implication of a word like ‘slut’, and to understand that it is a word that cannot be separated from inherent hatred of women. Once people understand not only where it comes from, but how it is used to silence, shame and victimize women, they won’t want to use it. I have never been the target of the word ‘slut’, and so it is not my place to say that women shouldn’t re-appropriate it; my criticism is of the idea of re-appropriating words in general.

2. Failing to understand the point

I spotted a number of signs saying things like “real men don’t rape” and “don’t tell me how to dress; tell men how not to rape” and “rapists cause rape, not women”. Even one of the organizers went up and said “women don’t need to be reminded not to dress slutty; men need to be reminded that they will go to jail!” While I understand the spirit behind the statement, I think it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of rape and slut-shaming. Men that rape women do not do so because they want to get laid*. They certainly don’t do it because they “are rapists” any more than people commit crimes because they “are criminals”. Failing to understand this is committing a fundamental attribution error.

Rape is an issue of control and respect. Rape is the result of someone believing that their own wishes supercede the rights of another person, and that the victim deserves her/his treatment for whatever reason. Rape, like all violence against women, is the product of the idea that women do not have the right to sexual self-determination. The word ‘slut’ is a manifestation of that idea. It is the idea that needs to be fought, rather than focussing on “rapists” – as though that was a group in and of itself that must be identified and punished. A man who doesn’t rape because it’s illegal will rape as soon as he thinks he can get away with it. Better to make fewer men that think rape is acceptable.

3. Failing to address the fallacy

There was a particularly powerful moment during the introductory speeches, where one of the organizers said “I am a woman, a colleague, a friend, a girlfriend, and a person deserving of respect.” She then removed her pants, revealing a short sequined skirt, followed by the words “I am still a woman, a colleague, a friend, a girlfriend, and I am still a person deserving of respect.” It was a perfect demonstration of the fact that regardless of a person’s apparel, she/he should be treated as a self-determining individual whose body is her/his own. However, as great as the demonstration was, it skipped over an important point.

While it is difficult to get exact numbers on this (since many sexual assaults go unreported, particularly in places where they are not taken seriously), I hope those of you who are skeptically-minded will allow me to get away with the following assertion: places that have strict dress codes for women do not have lower rates of sexual assault. While it is my suspicion that these places have higher rates of assault, at least we can conclusively state that covering women head to toe does not eliminate the risk of sexual victimization. The fallacy committed by Constable Sanguinetti was not that he was impolitic in his wording, it’s that the original statement is nonsense. The way that women dress is not related to their risk of being raped, at least at a population level.

I am reminded of the old joke about the two hikers that run afoul of a bear. While the first hiker starts running, the second quickly starts putting on his running shoes. “You fool!” calls the first hiker “Those shoes aren’t enough to outrun a bear!” The second hiker says “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.” There is no standard definition or quantitative parameters for what “dressing like a slut” means. It is entirely subjective – the things that are worn by the women I work with would be considered pornographic in many Middle-Eastern countries. The problem is not the clothes; it’s our attitudes towards women and sexuality.

This point was not adequately addressed by the speakers, and I think it was a real missed opportunity.

The Ugly

1. The Racial Double-Standard

Vancouver is a city with a large East- and South-Asian population. Black women and aboriginal women are disproportionately more likely to be victims of sexual assault (including rape) than are white women. Neither of these facts would have been apparent while looking at the crowd. Like most feminist and social activist causes in North America, SlutWalk Vancouver was attended by white people, organized by white people, and focused on issues that do not include race. One of the speakers was Angela, a woman who works front-line for a victim support service in Vancouver’s downtown East Side (DTES). She began talking about the work that she and her colleagues did while dealing with assault victims, and whenever she talked about defending women from rapists, her every sentence was greeted with enthusiastic applause and cheering.

When Angela pivoted to point out that there is a racial component of the word “slut” that is largely ignored, that women of colour don’t particularly want to take back the word “slut”, that this wasn’t an issue of wearing a little black dress but of not being beaten and subsequently ignored by the legal system, the reaction was far more muted. I think I might have been the only person who cheered.

There is a common theme in the intersection between race and feminism. Feminism is well-tended by white women, and many women of colour recognize that there is a need for shared mutual struggle. However, when issues of race and racism – particularly the fact that PoC are disproportionately affected by sexism – come up, there is significant hesitation to face those head-on. Aura Blogando calls this ‘white supremacy’ – I think that characterization is perhaps a bit strong. I think of it more in terms of “white blindness”, or more familiarily, privilege. White women are very enthusiastic to address those issues that are germane to themselves, but more reluctant (it seems) to bring issues affecting PoCs to the fore except in very tokenistic ways (for example, the organizers of SWV noted correctly that Vancouver is built on unceded Saalish territory, but didn’t say word one about the fact that Aboriginal women are more often the victims of assault).

By completely dismissing, or at least not making a point of raising, the issues associated with race, SlutWalk Vancouver allowed white people to feel good about themselves for standing up to one injustice, without having to deal with the related injustice in which their own (unexplored) attitudes play a role. This criticism should not be interpreted as an indemnification of white people, merely an observation that these issues tend not to become publicly-relevant until they affect the majority (in much the same way as sexism issues don’t get treated seriously until men complain about it too).

So in all of it, the good bad and ugly, I think SlutWalk Vancouver was a success. People from many different walks of life were present to raise consciousness about an issue that I think is very important, and hopefully a conversation will be sparked about not only the word “slut”, but how we think of women in our society in general. I was proud to participate, and look forward to more opportunities to do the same.

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* I will no doubt be criticized for making the generalization that it is only men that rape women, or that only women are raped. I fully recognize that men rape men, and less frequently women rape men or other women. Rapists are not exclusively male, and victims are not exclusively female. I also recognize that transpersons are caught in a tricky gender classification limbo, and are disproportionately more likely to be victims of sexual assault and rape than are cispersons. It is not my intention to diminish these cases, and I hope I do not come across as dismissive of this very real issue.

2 Yeah THIS guy needed to be fired…

May 17, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · crapitalism · religion

Pretend for a moment that you’re the head of a major international organization worth billions of dollars (hey, congratulations!). Unhappily, however, your organization is facing overwhelming international criticism for a series of egregious ethics violations. Some of these violations implicate you personally, but the majority of them refer to the general standards of practice and the organization’s history of secrecy and evading prosecution. As the leader, you have complete and total authority to change the rules and standards of practice of the organization to respond to this criticism – criticism which, incidentally, is severely impacting your bottom line.

Have you got that in your head? Good. Moving on.

Now imagine that you hear that someone in middle management somewhere in the organization has advocated changing a company policy on the grounds that it is both unpopular and unfair. This manager has bypassed the usual chain of command, which is most certainly a violation of the rules. However, in the larger scheme of things he has articulated a position that many of your shareholders advocate and that would certainly go a long way in rehabilitating your international image. What do you do with this manager? Do you call him in for discipline? Do you say that while you respect his right to speak, you disagree with his position and here’s why? Do you use the criticism as an opportunity to change direction and show the public that your antiquated policies can be changed for the better when the times call for them? You’ve got lots of options; which one do you pursue?

If you picked anything other than ‘shitcan his ass’, the congratulations: you are smarter than the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI has sacked an outspoken Australian bishop who had called on the church to consider ordaining women and married men. The Vatican said in a statement Monday that the pope had “removed from pastoral care” Bishop William Morris of the Toowoomba diocese. That language was unexpectedly strong by Vatican standards. However, no explanation for the move was given.

There are many people that need to be fired in the church (the Pope being chief among them), for doing things that make a person with any sense of humanist morals shudder. It is one thing to know someone who rapes children and not do anything to stop it. That’s pretty bad (even writing that sentence seems ludicrously evil). It is another thing entirely to aid the rapist in covering up his crime, allowing him to repeat it again and again. It is another thing to threaten the victims of your friend’s crime with eternal punishment if they speak out about it. It is another thing to allow all of this (and actively participate in it), whilst simultaneously holding yourself up as an example of morality and ruin the lives of millions of people, sacrificed in the name of your moral posturing.

But yeah… fire the guy who says that women should be allowed to be priests.

The level of evil is almost cartoonish with this organization, and the rabbit hole goes deeper:

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has arrived in Rome for the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II. An EU travel ban forbids him from visiting member states but the Vatican, where the ceremony will take place, is a sovereign state and not in the EU. Mr Mugabe, a Roman Catholic, has been allowed to transit through Italy. Italy’s foreign ministry said it had requested an exemption from the EU travel ban for Mr Mugabe.

Yep. The gross pig-fucker himself is welcome in the Vatican’s hallowed chambers. A man whose exploits have earned him the just condemnation of the international community for bankrupting his country, attacking political appointments with violence, and repeatedly violating the human rights of his own people… but he’s got a friend in Rome! To the point where government officials have to ask the EU to suspend its own laws so that he can come watch a fraud passed off as miraculous. You’ve got to imagine how uncomfortable that conversation must have been.

EU: Sorry… we must have a bad connection. It sounded like you said you wanted an exemption to allow Robert Mugabe into Europe. Heh heh, but that’s just ridiculous.

Italy: Um… yeah. You got it right. We want Mugabe.

EU: WHY?

Italy: The pope wants him at the beatification of John Paul II

EU: WHY?

Italy: Well the Vatican has diplomatic relations with Zimbabwe, and he’s the leader, so he’s invited

EU: WHY?

Italy: Is there someone else I can talk to?

Some people wonder if the Pope and other religious leaders do not actually believe the things they say, but perpetuate the lie to gain power. It’s certainly a reasonable suspicion, given that the claims religious leaders regularly make are so bizarre and contrary to the basic rules of logic. However, when you look at the actions of these people, it becomes abundantly clear that they really do believe that their deity is speaking directly to them. It’s the only way one could justify such unrelenting and convoluted evil – license from the supernatural.

This is why enshrining ‘faith’ as a virtue is dangerous. People can trick themselves into believe just about anything, especially when they are told by the culture surrounding them that it’s good enough to just believe something, facts be damned. Once you’re willing to completely blind yourself to the effects of your actions by telling yourself that justification for your evil comes from on high, anything is possible. There is some truth to the old adage that ‘faith can move mountains’ – it can move mountains of inconvenient evidence and logic out of the way, so that the believer can commit any crime she/he wants without utterly devastating her/his own self-concept.

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8 Mixed up

May 16, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · race · skepticism

Those of you who have read this blog for a while, or who know me personally, know that I am what is technically known as “mixed race”. Generically, this means that my parents identify as two different ethnic groups. More specifically, my father is black and my mother is white, which according to the racist nomenclature of Jim Crow era America makes me a “mulatto” (a word meaning ‘mule’). At various points in my life, my ‘mixed’ status meant different things to me.

When I was very young, it used to irk me that people in my mostly white home town, who knew I had one white parent, didn’t see me as half-white. After all, technically speaking it was just as true that I was half-white as much as I was half-black. However, nobody else seemed to think along those lines. When I mentioned it to my dad, he imparted to me one of the first lessons I ever had to learn about race: it doesn’t matter what you are, it’s what other people think you are that matters. It affects the way they treat you, the way they think of you, and the way they see you.

I had the opposite experience living in Mississauga, where there were white kids, “really black” kids, and then me. As if I wasn’t enough of an outcast, being a recent transplant to Ontario, not knowing most of the kids I went to school with, and not really having been exposed to other black kids before, I was viewed with deepening suspicion and ultimately kept on the outside. As much as the kids I hung out with (mostly white, as that was who I was used to being around) accepted me, I knew I didn’t fit in. Most of them were Italian, Maltese, or of another Mediterranean extraction.

As a result of my mixed heritage, I never really connected with the black community where I grew up, only able to view it from the outside. Being in a special-ed program that didn’t exactly overflow with black kids didn’t help much either. To this day I wonder whether the system passively discriminated against the black kids – failing to identify them as “gifted” (in the language of the time – who knows what it’s called now?) because of pre-conceived notions of how black kids are supposed to be. I wonder if that’s the case, or if kids that were intelligent enough to qualify weren’t encouraged at home. As for me personally, I had tons of support. That’s neither here nor there, vis a vis this story, I just thought I would big up my home environment.

People of mixed race have been around for as long as there have been distinct racial groups, but as a sociological phenomenon, there has been a marked shift in how kids of my ilk are viewed. First, people no longer call us “half breeds” a term I hated when I was younger – my parents aren’t horses or dogs; they didn’t breed. Furthermore, the idea of someone being “pure” anything is mostly nonsense – everyone is a mutt no matter where they come from. We are called “part _____”, which is a much more flexible descriptor that allows for people who are a mixture of many different things. We’ve gotten over our obsession with fractions.

Secondly, people of mixed heritage are no longer seen as an exotic oddity (at least not to the extent that we were before). Perhaps with the rising prevalence of interethnic marriages, some of the shine is off the penny when it comes to the novelty of identifying with more than one group. Even the census and most other questionnaires that ask about ethnicity use a “check all that apply” rather than forcing people to choose one that applies best.

Last week a white supremacist showed up in the comments section. While I’ve dealt with that type before, there’s always a part of me that gets apprehensive because it raises an old spectre that I don’t like thinking about. That is, if genetics (along racial lines) do influence things like intellect and “personal responsibility”, what does that mean for me? They don’t, of course, but what if they did? Is my interest in science and academic topics the result of my “white” half? Is my love of music and dancing the result of my “black” half? Do traits break down like that? Am I a lucky composite of two complementary characteristics?

I am always able to beat those kinds of introspections back with a little bit of skepticism. Are there not many prominent intelligent black scientists out there? White musicians? Haven’t we learned through history and experience that the reasons that one group does something better than another is simply a product of culture rather than genetics? The stereotypes we paint each other with are just the result of sloppy thinking. Still, it’s always a struggle to have to deal with those fears every day.

Through this blog, I am trying to encourage readers to engage in skeptic thinking when it comes to race. Above and beyond my love of skewering religious topics, if there’s one thing I’d like you to do it’s learn to recognize and challenge the nearly-inaudible voice of cultural indoctrination when it comes to race. We all have embedded assumptions about groups not like our own (or even of those within our own group), and learning how to catch ourselves when we start unconsciously following those assumptions is a useful tool for dealing with each other fairly.

I learned this trick by reflex, living my entire life trying to figure out how I fit in. I don’t have the option to turn it off, nor would I want to if I could. We can find a way to make our unique set of interactions work well if we are just a combination of open-minded, careful and honest. If we can all be “mixed” in this way, we can learn important things about each other, and about ourselves.

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2 Movie Friday: Black White Supremacist

May 13, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · hate · movie · race · racism

I had an honest-to-Spaghetti-Monster white supremacist show up on the blog this week. In honour of this auspicious occasion, I couldn’t resist posting this classic bit:

Those of you who read through the comments will probably notice that I didn’t strike back with my usual level of vituperation. Chief among my reasons for not engaging is the fact that the supremacist in question has clearly invested a lot of time in his “scientific racism” – nothing I do will disabuse him of his position. I’ve gone up against people whose positions I didn’t think I would change before, but those times were fun. This time I’m dealing with a person who thinks that I am inferior simply because of the genetic group I belong to… I don’t think I could possibly go down that rabbit hole without losing my shit completely. That’s not fun for me.

Anyway, whether they’re as slick and sciency-sounding as Unamused there, or as cartoonish as Mr. Biggsby, white supremacists are worth nothing but scorn and dismissal.

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0 Arming the rebels

May 12, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech · good news

The recent war/conflict/military police action in Libya has kind of overshadowed the fact that something really important is still happening in the middle east. Shit has seriously got out of control in Syria and Bahrain, and that’s disturbing enough. What is far more disturbing to me is what’s being discussed in Libya. Yes, the rebels are still fighting and NATO forces are becoming progressively more entrenched in what has become a full-blown civil war.

Many commentators in the United States (who you would think should know better than I do) are talking about providing weapons and training to the rebels. While they sorely need it, the USA doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to arming groups of insurgents. For reasons that ~~surpass understanding~~ are completely understandable, those rebel groups tend to use those weapons and that training to kill people that the US wishes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’re Americans.

But there may be other ways that the United States can arm the rebel groups – ways that are far less likely to get someone killed.

US Government invests in activist technology

The United States government is spending millions of dollars developing technology to help pro-democracy activists in the Middle East and China. Washington has begun to open-up about the projects which include a “panic button” that lets protesters wipe their mobile phones if they are arrested. State department official Michael Posner said that the US was investing money “like venture capitalists”. He also revealed that it was providing campaigners with technology training.

It’s hard to understand to those of us that wake up to technologies our grandparents couldn’t have possibly imagined, but there is a significant portion of the world that doesn’t have the kinds of access that we take for granted. That being said, cell phone technology has become pretty much ubiquitous, and with it has come new opportunities. As I’ve outlined as one of the central theses of this blog, the antidote to tyranny is free speech. By providing the ability for anti-government groups to communicate undetected, the United States hopes to keep any future governments from becoming tyrannical.

Who is this good for? As far as I can tell, only the people who live in the countries using the technology. There is no guarantee that this will work in the US’s favour, except insofar as democratic governments tend to be more motivated by trade and the opinions of the international community – both things that the United States can exert quite a bit of influence over. However, it is entirely possible that the technology will be used to overthrow pro-American tyrannical governments (like the one that just ~~left~~ got booted out of Egypt ~~on its own terms~~ after a huge popular revolt).

Sesame Street goes Pashtun

The United States is funding a Pakistani remake of the popular TV children’s show Sesame Street. In a new effort to win hearts and minds in Pakistan, USAID – the development arm of the US government – is donating $20m (£12m) to the country to create a local Urdu version of the show. The project aims to boost education in Pakistan, where many children have no access to regular schooling.

Just as free speech is a poison pill to tyranny, education is a poison pill to religion. The more educated the populace, the more likely they are to question the religious authority that controls them. Encouraging reading means encouraging critical thinking skills, which in turn encourages criticism. The irony is not lost on me that we have the religious establishment in Europe to thank for public education today. Once again, arming the rebels works for the rebels themselves (which would be us), but not so well for those that provide the arms. In the case of providing education to Pakistanis, the United States does indeed stand to benefit. The status quo there… isn’t exactly working out well for them these days.

There can be a benefit to arming those who are enemies of your enemies. However, despite what the cliche would have us believe, the enemy of my enemy may not remain my friend for long. It’s imperative that we take the long view when we provide powerful tools to those who share a common opponent, lest we someday find those same tools arrayed against us. By providing help in the form of non-lethal technology, we can ensure that at least we don’t have those tools fired at our heads. By providing help in the form of education, we can ensure that we find ourselves in a world filled with people who we can at least have a conversation with.

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4 Tidying up a landfill

May 11, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · politics · race · racism

Imagine for a moment that your house is built on a garbage dump. Your home constantly reeks of not only the discarded foodstuffs and general refuse of our disposable society, but of the general human neglect that accompanies those places we prefer not to think about. All around you is the funk of abandonment, to the point that it permeates your pores.

In other words, you stink.

Now, imagine someone from outside your home notices your living conditions and clucks disapprovingly. You are not invited to social engagements, and are generally ostracized from polite company. Everywhere you go people turn up their noses and avoid you. Noticing this, you say “I know what the problem is! This garbage dump I live in is untidy!” So you pile all of the rotting compost into an organized heap, rake the dirty diapers into a mound, and arrange the biohazardous waste in an aesthetically-pleasing way that really showcases your savvy as a decorator and landscaper. “There,” you say “that should take care of the problem!”

National Front of France bans skinheads

The new leader of France’s National Front, Marine Le Pen, has barred skinheads from the far right’s annual May Day march in Paris. She confirmed for French radio she was banning “trouble-makers” from the first march to be held since she took over from her father Jean-Marie in January. “They draw cameras like flies and naturally we would protect ourselves from such provocations,” she said.

Marine Le Pen has decided that the real problem with her ultra-right wing racial supremacist party is that there’s just too many skinheads around! They’re making all of the bigots in suits look bad! The depressing part of this story is, of course, that her plan appears to be working. As though people don’t really mind racism so much as they don’t like being associated with the ugly parts of it. Your heart almost goes out to those poor bastards – too racist for the ultra right-wing of the political spectrum, and now too ugly to even be seen.

But then I remember that given the chance they’d kick my teeth in and leave me on the side of the road for dead, so my sympathy doesn’t really extend that far.

Orange Country Republicans censures member

A California Republican group censured one of its own Thursday, saying her words and actions since sending an e-mail last month depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee have been potentially offensive, damaging and insincere. Capping a meeting Thursday, the Orange County Republican Party’s executive committee voted 12-2 Thursday to issue an ethics censure against Marilyn Davenport.

Do you want to know how you can tell that you’ve gone way over the line? Like, not just said something questionable or that could be potentially misconstrued, but have left tact and appropriateness deep in the distant past as you bravely rocket forward strapped to a jetpack fueled by pure racism? When you get disowned by The Republican Party for being too racist. That’s like having Mel Gibson take you aside and warn you that you might have a bit of a drinking problem. It’s like Glenn Beck calling you a conspiracy theorist. It’s like Michael Vick leaving you a note of concern about the way you treat your pets.

The Republican party is not necessarily racist, and I think I’ve pointed out this distinction before. There’s nothing egregious in the Republican platform that says “black people are inferior”, but their constant harping on “personal responsibility” as the primary explanatory factor for differences between the haves and the have-nots certainly dovetails nicely with racism. It’s not an accident that every time someone in the news says something ridiculously racist, it’s always a Republican. Republican political philosophy isn’t overtly racist, but it does ‘provide aid and comfort’ to racists. Conservatives hate hearing this – nobody likes being called racist. Most conservatives wouldn’t consider themselves to be racist, and under particular definitions of the concept they aren’t. However, there seems to be a great reluctance among conservatives to try and parse out why the racists always seem to come from their camp, and so much more rarely from ours.

It is a rhetorically unfortunate fact that both of the people mentioned in this post are female, because the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig” takes on a sexist connotation. My intent is merely to point out that no matter how much you try and ‘beautify’ something, it is still as fundamentally ugly as it was before you started (although I don’t personally find pigs that ugly). Trying to gloss over – I intentionally avoid the word ‘whitewash’ – the problem by tidying up the landfill that is your political position isn’t going to fix the underlying issues. If you think racism is a problem, if you think that your spotlight is too often taken up having to apologize for and distance yourself from those who are your allies but who say bigoted things, then you have to really look hard at why they feel at home in your house.

People aren’t shunning you because your dump is unkempt; it’s because you stink.

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28 I’ll just leave these here…

May 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · forces of stupid · privilege · race · racism · science

Sometimes things get said so well that there’s no point in my digesting and putting my own spin on them. Today we have a few of those, which I’m just going to leave here and suggest you read.

1. 90% of prominent Climate Change deniers are linked to Exxon Mobil

A recent analysis conducted by Carbon Brief which investigated the authors of more than 900 published papers that cast doubt on the science underlying climate change, found that nine of the ten most prolific had some kind of relationship with ExxonMobil.

Links to these papers were proudly displayed on the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation website, where they are still fanning the dying embers ofClimategate hoping something will catch, under the heading, “900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism Of ‘Man-Made’ Global Warming (AGW) Alarm.”

The top ten contributors to this list were responsible for 186 of the 938 papers cited.

Hey denialists (coughcoughcoughgrassrutecough) – want to talk some more about how climate change is just a scam? Just be aware that your position was bought and paid for by oil companies. Why don’t we look at the evidence rather than accusing each other of having some secret financial motive?

2. The appeal of the “New Racism”

The New Racism manifests itself in many ways–school choice, the obsession with property values, including the rise of Neighborhood Watch in the 1980s; the differences in prison sentences for those convicted of possessing crack as opposed to cocaine, etc.

We’ve lost an understanding of what racism means in this country. We’ve forgotten that it’s race hate combined with power. A white person being harassed in a black neighborhood is not experiencing racism–that person can call the police and get a response. My students refer to anything other than whatever they think of as Martin Luther King’s dream as racism. Like with so many other words, conservatives have won the rhetorical war. We need to define racism as what it actually is and reclaim the rhetorical ground on moving toward real equality.

To the list of code words that don’t sound racist but are, I would add ‘personal responsibility’. While personal responsibility is a good thing, its usage in discussions of race inevitably cast black and brown people as being personally irresponsible, as though some genetic flaw makes us incapable of achievement (which, in turn, explains why we deserve to be poor and why any attempt to balance the scales is ‘reverse racism’).

3. Seriously, Fuck Ayn Rand

We all know that liberalism is for the (naive, inexperienced, foolish) young while conservatism is a natural byproduct of aging, maturing, and gaining experience with the world, right? Conventional wisdom gets it wrong yet again. The surge in popularity of objectivism and libertarianism on campus underscores how right wing ideology, not pie-in-sky liberalism, is the real fantasyland for kids who have absolutely no experience in the real world.

Yes, Ayn Rand is making a comeback among the college-aged. Objectivism is even getting some mainstream press in light of Commissar Obama frog-marching the nation toward hardcore Communism. Heroic individualists are threatening to “go galt” now that Obama has completely eliminated all incentive for anyone to work ever again, re-enacting their own version of the “producers’ strike” in Atlas Shrugged.

I’ve gotten a little more mellow in recent years, believe it or not, less keen to argue and more able to see middle ground. But there is no middle ground here, no way for us to meet halfway in intellectual compromise: If you are an Objectivist, you are retarded. This is a judgment call, and I just made it. Grow up or fuck off. Those are your two options.

So I decided to give you 1000 words on objectivism last week. Gin and Tacos gives us an… alternative take on the same position. While I’m not a fan of the use of the word ‘retarded’, the rest of the piece is worth reading. Edit: I should note that there is at least one person who is a Rand devotee and whose intelligence and opinion I respect, even if I do not agree.

4. 10 Ways the Birthers are an Object Lesson in White Privilege

Ultimately, the election of Barack Obama has provided a series of object lessons in the durability of the colorline in American life. Most pointedly, Obama’s tenure has provided an opportunity for the worst aspects of White privilege to rear their ugly head. In doing so, the continuing significance of Whiteness is made ever more clear in a moment when the old bugaboo of White racism was thought to have been slain on November 4, 2008.

To point: Imagine if Sarah Palin, a person who wallows in mediocrity and wears failure as a virtue, were any race other than White. Would a black (or Latino or Asian or Hispanic) woman with Palin’s credentials have gotten a tenth as far? Let’s entertain another counter-factual: If the Tea Party and their supporters were a group of black or brown folk, who showed up with guns at events attended by the President, threatening nullification and secession, and engaging in treasonous talk, how many seconds would pass before they were locked up and taken out by the F.B.I. as threats to the security of the State? If the Tea Party were black they would have been disappeared to Gitmo or some other secret site faster than you can say Fox News.

Earlier this week President Obama tried to be the adult in the room by surrendering his birth certificate in an effort to satisfy the Birthers and their cabal leaders Donald Trump and Pat Buchanan. Of course, his generous act does nothing to satisfy the Birther beast for it is insatiable in its madness. Nevertheless, a lesson can still be salvaged by exploring the rank bigotry which drives the Birther movement. In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege.

Still confused about how white privilege works? Here’s a few concrete examples.

I guess I should get a tumblr or something for this stuff…

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0 I get skeptical with your money

May 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog

Phil Ferguson over at Skeptic Money has invited me to occasionally guest post over at his blog, to increase some of the diversity of opinion represented there. Anyway, you can go check out a reprint of my post ‘Is Atheism a White People Thing?‘ (original is here). I’ll be contributing about once a month, and I’ll let you know when those go up.

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0 Believers are still out there

May 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · news · religion · skepticism

Being a skeptic is incredibly hard work. I’m not referring to the fact that many people have a completely vacuous and dizzyingly inaccurate idea of what ‘skepticism’ means – that it’s simply the refusal to entertain or accept new ideas – that’s tough enough. No, even if everyone had the definition right (skepticism being the practice of questioning all assertions about reality and apportioning the strength of one’s belief to the strength of the available evidence), it would still be a slog. Not only does a skeptic have to question the opinions of others, she/he must repeatedly check her/his own assumptions and thoughts constantly.

Skepticism, like the concept of ‘enlightenment’ found in Zen teaching, is an abstract; a goal that can never be fully attained but which should be constantly pursued. Nobody can ever be a ‘true’ skeptic, as we constantly find ourselves falling back into our human failings. One of the things I keep finding myself blindsided by is the occasional realization that while, as far as I’m concerned, the supernatural aspects of religious belief are the stuff of juvenile fantasy, there are still lots of people out there that really do believe that shit:

Belief in a god, or a supreme being, and some sort of afterlife is strong in many countries around the globe, according to a new Ipsos/Reuters poll. Fifty one per cent of the 18,829 people across 23 countries who took part in the survey said they were convinced there is an afterlife and a divine entity, while 18 per cent said they don’t believe in a god and 17 per cent weren’t sure.

But only 28 per cent believe in creationism, the belief that a god created humans, compared to 41 per cent who believe in human evolution and 31 per cent who simply don’t know what to believe.

From my personal experience, even those religious people I regularly spend time with say that most of their beliefs are more allegorical than literal. They believe in ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ in abstract terms representing a belief in some sort of ultimate justice. They believe in ‘god’ as a vague description of some kind of greater organizing force that permeates the universe. As such, they describe themselves as ‘religious’ in the sense that they do not accept that the universe can be entirely explained through cause/effect chains. If you really drill down to the core of modern theology, it eventually becomes various forms of this kind of ecumenical refusal to be certain about anything.

While infuriating from a rationalist point of view, this kind of belief system is not the kind of thing that inspires people to go out and murder their fellow man or oppress her rights, and often these people are able to pivot that kind of fuzzy ‘religion’ into something constructive (which, I think, points even more strongly to the fact that belief is entirely ancillary to human virtue). And while I think this kind of belief is an intellectually lazy way of having your cake and eating it too, I can at least appreciate the impulse to retain some kind of belief in the supernatural.

That’s why I am gob-smacked when I am confronted with the fact that more than half of my fellow creatures believe in the literal truth of life after death and an ultimate supernatural entity. Not as a vague abstract notion, but as a real being with conscious decision-making abilities and a penchant for judgment. I can handle the abstract concept of people who believe this kind of stuff, but from time to time my brain grabs onto it semantically, shakes my conscious mind and says “can you believe this shit?”

And of course, they do:

Mexicans were the most likely to accept the idea of an afterlife, but not heaven or hell, followed by Russians, Brazilians, Indians, Canadians and Argentines. Believers in creationism were strongest in South Africa, followed by the United States, Indonesia, South Korea and Brazil.

Of course there are two different ways of looking at these findings. Yes, depressingly 3 or 4 billion people in the world think that their entire lives are nothing more than the staging area for some post-mortem talent contest judged by the ultimate Simon Cowell. However, it’s almost perfectly balanced by people who either recognize that there’s no evidence for such an assertion or simply reserve judgment on that particular issue. Nearly half of my fellow creatures live their lives under the operating assumption that this life actually matters, not as a screening process for some kind of real life that happens after you die, but to the planet they live on and the beings that share it. Even if it turns out that there is an afterlife (although the very idea seems preposterous – what part of you goes to the afterlife? And no, ‘soul’ isn’t a meaningful answer to that question), the world we do know exists is made better through the actions of people that live as though their existence matters now.

Opinion polls are largely unimportant when it comes to determining truth about reality (saving those exceptions where we are trying to describe the reality of human belief), but they do give us a pretty significant nod in the direction that our policies and decisions will take us. It’s crucial to never underestimate the fact that while I (and many of you, I’d imagine) have abandoned the false promises given by those who claim knowledge of the afterlife, we share our space with literally billions of other who every day trade the cow of their life for the magic beans of faith.

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1 Mining a silver lining

May 9, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · critical thinking · crommunism · good news · news · politics

First off, I want to apologize for shirking my duties this past week. I squandered my weekend, when I should have been writing the posts for last week, doing other stuff. When Monday came around, I had decided to write a post-mortem on the election after the results were in. However, by the time I got home from working at the polls I was so tired and disgusted with the outcome that I couldn’t really marshal my thoughts enough to write anything that I could feel good about. This is the reason why I usually set up a buffer of posts, so as to avoid this exact type of thing.

Secondly, I find it troubling that the week that I decide not to post, my hit count explodes 😛

Finally, this post is going to be a sort of amalgamation of some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for the past week since the election. I’ve titled this post ‘mining a silver lining’, because while it pretty much goes without saying that I am disappointed and fearful about what it means that the Republican North party has a legislative fiat (both in the Parliament and ostensibly in the Senate), I think there are some real good news stories to come out of the election. The political content of the archives of this blog should be sufficient to explain why a Republican North majority is a bad thing for Canada; I will instead focus on some good news speculation.

ALL THE PROGNOSTICATION MEANS ABSOLUTELY DICK

There will be a lot of political commentators (myself among them) who will make predictions about what will or won’t happen under a Republican North majority. The sheer variety of opinions and predictions ensures, mathematically, that most of them will be wrong. Political decisions are influenced by ideology and promises, but occur on a day-to-day basis and are affected by human events. Nobody can predict exactly what human beings will do, as this world is a chaotic place. Nobody would have expected U.S. foreign policy to make a dramatic series of shifts based on events in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Fewer still would have predicted that Japan’s economy would take a tumble after an earthquake and resultant nuclear accident.

My point here is that no matter who makes the predictions, policy will adapt to the the immediate circumstances around it. Changes in technology, in climate, in foreign politics, in any number of things will have a strong influence on how Stephen Harper’s policy decisions will be made. Trying to predict specific actions over a four-year period is a complete waste of time, and can be enjoyed only as an intellectual masturbatory exercise.

Now I will commence to fapping.

STEPHEN HARPER IS THE LEADER OF A DIVIDED PARTY

The Republic North party is made up of two core constituencies: social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. The perhaps unspoken (or certainly under-spoken) reality that accompanies such a grouping is that while they may claim to be related ideologies, the two are in fact orthogonal. There is nothing in the doctrine of social conservatism that lends itself to fiscal conservatism – in fact the two are often at cross purposes. Libertarians and Classical Liberals believe that the government has no business whatsoever legislating either social issues or economic issues – only in safeguarding individual liberties. The reason the Republican North party was able to pick up so much support is because they catered to the economic centre/right, which is also a part of the Liberal party’s core constituency.

The only way (as far as I can see) that the RNP was able to stitch these two groups together was to simultaneously forge a false equivalence between these two perpendicular political perspectives, and to publicly proclaim disinterest in social policy while quietly whispering assurances to their social base that those issues would come to the fore once a majority was achieved. Now that this is a political reality, Prime Minister Harper will have to ‘pay the piper’, so to speak, by advocating positions that are wildly unpopular among the Canadian majority. If he fails to do this, social conservatives who have long felt ignored by the federal government will abandon the RPN and revive the Reform party. Should he capitulate to their whims, he will alienate the Libertarian/Classical Liberal wing of his party.

This must be a deft balancing act that will take an extraordinary statesman and leader to accomplish. Stephen Harper is neither of these.

JACK LAYTON MAY EXERCISE A GREAT DEAL OF CONTROL

Part of the success of the RPN during their successive minority governments was Stephen Harper’s ability to keep the reins of his party tightly held. Information did occasionally leak, but for the most part the government spoke from one perspective only. Considering the number of wingnuts in the party, keeping that communication clamped down was an extraordinary achievement that served the party’s interests well. Jack Layton may be able to exercise the same kind of party discipline, albeit in a dramatically different way.

Nobody really predicted that the NDP would make the strides they did in this past election (owing largely to Quebec, but also partially due to the implosion of the Liberal party). Jack Layton now finds himself the leader of a party with 102 seats, many held by rookie politicians. The NDP brand has been, since the early 2000s, consistently centred on Jack Layton himself, rather than a particular policy position. The rookie MPs will be looking to Mr. Layton for guidance and instruction, more so than would a team of seasoned veterans. While Jack will have to pull in some of his own wingnuts and handle more than the ordinary number of blunders born of inexperience, he will also have a party that gets virtually all of its cues from him. In this way, the NDP can appear more organized and credible than they legitimately are. This means that progressive decisions and policies can be articulated without seeming like they’re coming from the hippie fringe.

ELIZABETH MAY WAS ELECTED

I am not a Green voter. I did vote Green in 2006, because my riding was a safe bet and I supported electoral reform. I think the Green party can articulate a non-corporate perspective that is sorely and noticeably absent from the other three major parties. Elizabeth May is a gifted speaker and is able to articulate environmental policy issues well. She’s also shown herself to be indomitable and highly resistant to intimidation in the face of overwhelming opposition. While I don’t necessarily agree with her party’s platform on many issues (medicine and health care being chief among those), I am glad to see a more pluralistic Parliament.

Her election also serves the purpose of giving the Green party legitimate political status. Voting Green is now a legitimate alternative, and while the party is still in its infancy in terms of credibility, having elected an MP (over a RPN cabinet minister, no less) certainly vaults it into the standings. After all, they only have 3 fewer seats than the Bloc, who used to be the official opposition 😛

POLARIZATION IS BAD, BUT NOT ALL BAD

One doesn’t have to look much further than the United States (a name that is becoming progressively more ironic) to see how dangerous political polarization can be. Polarization forces people to make choices to support positions they don’t agree with in the name of party affiliation. Having a plurality of perspectives means that government will be more stable, rather than erratically jerking back and forth from right to left. Canada has elected a far-right government with a far-left opposition (although I don’t think either of those descriptions are really fair in the general scheme of things), meaning that for the first time in a long time we see a stark separation between the usually moderate people of this country.

However, there is one upside to polarization that has to do with a necessary consequence of good government. When the government is largely running things behind the scenes and caters to the will of the majority, people become complacent. Why bother getting up in arms about a government whose actions are largely invisible and that I agree with for the most part? Having the debate happen more to the extremes, with policies to match, means that government activity will become increasingly salient to the average Canadian. People will see that their actions (or inactions, as the case may be) can allow dangerous legislation that is contrary to their personal interests to be passed largely without comment. Perhaps having a RPN majority government is what Canada needs as a kick in the pants to spur increased political involvement by its populace.

SUMMARIZING THOUGHTS

As I’ve made clear, I’m not happy about this election. My best-case scenario would have seen a diminishing Harper minority with a strong NDP opposition – allowing the further fragmentation of the right and bringing progressive issues to the fore. What I got instead was a bizarro world in which a 2% increase in political support for the RPN means 30 more seats and the Bloc has all but evaporated. It is an interesting time for Canadian politics, and while there will undoubtedly be some serious damage done in the interim (I’m thinking specifically of crime, climate change and the strength/direction of the Canada Health Act), there may yet be some positive stories to come out of this.

I am back to my regular self, and am recommitting myself to articulating my position. I promise – no more weeks of rage (well… hopefully).

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