Posts By Crommunist

30 Movie Friday: Jamie Kilstein

August 26, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · hate · LGBT · movie · sex

Those of you who are regular readers may have noticed that my use of language fluctuates from post to post. Sometimes I am crude and direct, other times I am flowery and expressive. Some of this is organic – I am actively trying to improve my writing and I think that repeated daily practice is accomplishing that. Other times it is intentional – trying to match the tone of my words to the topic at hand to elicit emotional impact. Sometimes, I will confess, it is simple laziness on my part.

I love words. I can’t really draw or paint, and while I am a musician my creativity in that department is not exactly exceptional. Where I think my real strength lies in in my use of language. Words on a page, properly arranged, can change the world. While my own personal aspirations are somewhat more modest than global metamorphosis, I do put more than a little bit of conscious effort into these sentences you read here.

Sometimes I run into someone who can knock me on my ass with their use of language. Jamie Kilstein is one such person:

Audio is definitely NSFW, but you shouldn’t watch Youtube videos at work anyway.

Yes, I recognize it’s crude, but I challenge you to find fault in the phrase “fist you into a meth coma”.

I’ve run into these kinds of arguments against gay marriage and gay parenting before. They are, quite frankly, ridiculous. There are heterosexual parents who do a far worse job of raising kids than a gay couple could ever hope to. There are single parents who do do an outstanding job without another person around (I’d offer my own upbringing as evidence of that possibility). Suggesting that a mix-gendered environment is a necessary component of a healthy childhood is easily put to the lie by even the most casual of scrutiny. Suggesting further that every gay couple will do a worse job than every straight couple is an even greater height of absurdity.

Jamie Kilstein does a great job of skewering these arguments with a fast-paced, profanity-strewn and impeccably-delivered 3 minute monologue. Of course, being in front of a sympathetic audience certainly helps the delivery, but even without the accompanying laughter it’s quite something to see.

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0 The god of the glass

August 25, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · psychology · religion · science

Back when I was in my younger teen years I used to love playing a game for Nintendo called Secret of Mana. Toward the end of the game, you have to battle against clones of your own character in order to complete a particular dungeon. This battle was always necessarily the most difficult in the game, because the clone of you had all of your abilities. It meant that unlike other enemies in the game, you couldn’t gain experience or items that would tip the scales in your favour if the fight was too difficult on first pass. The opponent was always your equal, meaning you had to rely on your superior abilities to carry the day. I wasn’t (and am still not) a very good gamer, so this part was always tough for me.

I was reminded of my frustration with this battle against one’s self when I saw this article:

People often reason egocentrically about others’ beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent’s beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people’s own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God’s beliefs than with estimates of other people’s beliefs (Studies 1–4).

…

In particular, reasoning about God’s beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person’s beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God’s beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one’s own existing beliefs.

(I find HTML journal articles very difficult to read. A .pdf version is available here)

I hinted at this during last week’s Movie Friday, suggesting that when someone talks about their ‘personal relationship’ with whatever deity they happen to worship, there are always discrepant accounts of what that deity values. This is quite inconsistent with the idea that there is an actual entity out there, but fits exactly with the hypothesis that people have a ‘personal relationship’ with something within their own heads. I’ve made this more explicit in the phrase “Ask 100 people for a definition of god, get 200 answers” – referencing the fact that the gods people claim to believe in almost always turn into something much more mushy and deistic under direct scrutiny. The authors of this study have done the scientifically responsible thing and ~~made fun of religious people on a blog~~ actually conducted some research.

In the first study, the researchers asked people to report their own beliefs, those of a person they do not know personally, and those of their god. Keep in mind that if there were some external standard (god), the level of correlation between people’s own evaluations and that external standard would vary. After all, not everyone agrees with homosexuality or capital punishment or abortion, or any number of topics. What they found instead was that there was a consistently strong correlation between whatever the respondent happened to believe, and what they thought their god believed. Once again, surprising if you believe in a supernatural source of absolute morality that communicates with humans, completely expected if you recognize what it looks like when people talk to themselves.

The facile rejoinder to this would sound something like this:

True followers of YahwAlladdha spoke the truth about those topics, whereas those who are not real _______ only spoke what was in their own heads. What this study demonstrated is nothing more than the fact that some people are not sincere believers.

Luckily, there is a way to test this hypothesis too. If this was indeed the case, then the sincere believers would not change their minds, whereas the convictions of those who are just faking it (or worse, believing in the wrong version of YahwAlladdha) would shift to fit the circumstances. After all, the sincere believers have direct communication with the divine, who is unchanging and absolute. The scientists had participants read arguments for and against a policy (in this case, affirmative action) and rate how strong they felt the arguments were. Then they were asked to rate their opinion of the topic, as well as the fictitious people’s opinion, and then God’s.

As we can see from the graph, those that opposed the policy (the anti-policy group) felt that their god disapproved just as much. Those who had been manipulated to support the policy (keep in mind these were randomized groups, so their position before reading the arguments would have been the same) felt that their god did too. Interestingly, this effect was not seen in how participants thought the average person felt – suggesting that evaluations of the average person are not quite as egocentric as evaluations of YahwAlladdha. This effect was further explored by having people read speeches that either supported or opposed the position they held on the death penalty, which has the effect of polarizing agreement and moderating disagreement. Again, after being manipulated into a position, the participants’ expectation of what their god supports changed right alongside.

Finally, if that wasn’t enough evidence that the ‘personal relationship’ is about as personal as it could be (i.e., just a reflection of your own beliefs), the investigators hauled out a functional MRI (fMRI) scan. Brain activity when considering one’s own beliefs was different than when participants considered the beliefs of other people. However, as you might have expected from the above experiments, when people thought about what their god wanted the pattern of activity was the same as when thinking about themselves. Not only are the content of the beliefs identical, but so too is the method by which believers arrive at them.

None of this is proof that a god doesn’t exist – such a thing is logically impossible and wildly uninteresting (I will explain this on Monday). What it does prove, however, is that people do not get their morality from direct communication with the Holy Spirit or any other kind of supernatural entity. Moral attitudes come from a variety of sources, none of which point to non-material origin. While people may get their moral instruction from religion (in a “do this, don’t do that” kind of way), it is not because of an entity which embodies absolute morality and communicates said morality through prayer.

I am still curious how believers deal with things they disagree with, but which they are told are commanded by their god. Do anti-gay activists legitimately hate gay people, or are they just following the instructions from the pulpit? Are the religious teachings to blame for the evils committed by religious adherents, or are they just a smokescreen used to justify underlying organic hatred and spitefulness? Whatever the answer, those of us hoping to deal with those who believe their cause is divinely justified have to confront the truth that we are not just fighting against the concept a god – we are fighting against the concept of a god that takes shape in the mirror.

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8 The company you keep

August 24, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · news · politics · racism

I think that a lot can be said for a person by the company that she or he keeps. Part of my attempt at consistent self-criticism involves me trying to size up how I am doing generally as a person. I take great comfort in the fact that I can count people I admire, respect, and wish to emulate among my close friends. It means, at least in my eyes, that there is something about me that they also admire and respect. Maybe they’re all just really nice and take pity on me 😛

In the same vein, when your friends and supporters are people with whom you fundamentally disagree, you’ve got to take a long hard look at yourself:

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, whose long-shot campaign has been gaining media attention in recent days, apparently has the support of an unusual constituency — the white supremacist movement. Stormfront.org, a white supremacy web site, as well as others, such as WhiteWorldNews.com, have actively supported Paul’s bid for the presidency, including directing donors to his campaign. Stormfront has also endorsed Paul for president.

“Once in a great while a presidential candidate is presented to us. A candidate who not only speaks to us, but for us…I am supporting Ron Paul in his run for the presidency,” the Stormfront endorsement says. The endorsement praises Paul’s plans to reduce taxes, close the borders and eliminate trade deals, such as NAFTA. “Whatever organization you belong to, remember first and foremost that you are a white nationalist,” the endorsement continues. “Put your differences with one and other aside and work together. Work together to strive to get someone in the Oval Office who agrees with much of what we want for our future. Look at the man. Look at the issues. Look at our future. Vote for Ron Paul 2008.”

Ron Paul’s supporters have a deserved reputation for being the most vehement scourers of the internet, and for being nearly indistinguishable in their defense of their champion. I therefore want to take great pains here to say that this is not evidence that Ron Paul is a white supremacist. I am not trying to imply a sort of guilt by association – the endorsement from Stormfront seems to be largely based on Ron Paul’s isolationist beliefs rather than any racist statements he’s made in the past. Which isn’t to say that Ron Paul’s positions on race aren’t suspect:

What bothers me the most about Ron Paul’s defense of liberty regarding the Civil Rights Act is that he glazes over the significance of the social and political culture at the time. However, I don’t think he’s a stupid man by any means. He is well educated and fully aware of the history of racial discrimination and the Civil Rights Movement. He is fully aware that allowing business owners to do whatever they wanted in their businesses during this period in history meant some business owners would deny service to individuals because of the color of their skin. He is fully aware that some business owners would take significant measures to remove black people from their businesses.

When pictures pass around the press of children having acid poured in their pool water, it is not just those black children who are being harmed. All black Americans were at the helm of potentially injurious acts of discrimination. This photo illustrates that real, violent threat.

This is my problem with Ron Paul specifically and libertarianism in general – while many of the ideas proposed have some merit, the absolute application of the principles they’re based on are wildly impractical. The Civil Rights Act absolutely infringed upon the liberty of some people. Anyone who denies this fact is either woefully ignorant or bizarrely entrenched in their own ideology. However, the Civil Rights Act, for all its infringement, was a step forward in recognizing the equality of all people. The free market approach to civil rights was not working – black people were on the receiving end of massive discrimination with no recourse or relief from a state that is ostensibly invested in defending the rights of its citizens. Libertarian policies of government non-intervention were failing, and a more direct approach was needed.

Which is not to say that Ron Paul is a Libertarian:

There are a lot of libertarians who still buy into the Ron Paul myth, I’m sad to say. Ron is no libertarian. He’s a paleoconservative and his voting record backs that up. In addition he has all the crazy shit he gets from the Birch Society and continues to spew out. But what I find surprising is how gullible some libertarians are regarding Ron’s excuses for all this. Take the newsletter that Ron edited and sold, during his stint out of office, between his LP presidential bid and his next Congressional race. Ron was listed as co-editor of the newsletter. There was a staff of four people, including his wife and daughter. So it was hardly a huge enterprise. It published some pretty bigoted remarks about blacks and gays and had the usual crazy Ron Paul shit about conspiracies.

I have talked about this kind of thing before, but when your support comes from people who hold positions you abhor, then you really need to take a hard look at why. I was quite taken with Ron Paul when I first learned of him. Ramping down foreign wars, eliminating the monstrously-wasteful war on drugs, support for individual rights – lots of great ideas. However, it’s mixed in with a lot of crazy stuff, including more than a little racism. It’s not at all a surprise to me that Stormfront sees him as their best hope of political legitimacy. That fact alone should give Paul supporters pause.

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2 Post Racial: Montana style

August 24, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · hate · race · racism

One of the more odious lies we tell ourselves when discussing race happens when we ascribe ourselves the label of “post-racial”. While we don’t tend to use it as part of our collective lexicon here in Canada, it gets a lot more traction in “Obama era” America. The general thrust of the phrase is that people these days don’t really ‘see’ race, and that the labels are thereby not useful. We can stop talking about race (or, more accurately, we don’t have to start) because it has no power as a sociological phenomenon anymore. Of course, the evidence is stacked miles high to suggest otherwise, but it is a comforting lie.

My contention has always been, and continues to be, that we have learned how to talk about race in code, and to obscure our own racist tendencies from nearly everyone – particularly ourselves. I occasionally speak of small groups of people who are not interested in even pretending to hide their racism, rather reveling in it. Another example has crossed my desk:

A new flag with an old message is flying in Montana. Montana Creativity Movement members bear as their standard a banner marked with a W for the white race. The W is topped by a crown symbolizing elite status and with a halo representing the sacredness of the race they worship. They count chapters in Billings, Laurel, Lockwood, Miles City, Bozeman, Butte, Helena, Missoula, Park City and Shepherd. “We are your neighbors, your best friend, your co-workers, etc.,” organizer Westin Adams said. “The only difference is we are loyal to our racial family.”

There is a canard that comes from the more intellectual wing of the white supremacist movement (the phrase “world’s tallest midget” comes to mind…) is that if self-identification along racial lines is valid for people of colour (PoCs), then so too should it be for white people. There is nothing inherently wrong, they say, with celebrating ‘white pride’ or ‘white power’ – it is merely a celebration of the achievements of ones ethnic forbears. In a facile and pedantic sense, this argument does have some merit. There is nothing wrong with being proud of being white; conversely, there is no virtue in being ashamed of being white. Any statement of ‘white pride’ that is a reaction to being made to feel ashamed of one’s white ethnicity is entirely reasonable and defensible.

However, the terms ‘white power’ and more recently ‘white pride’ have connotative associations that are anything but reasonable and defensible. The ideals embraced by the Montana Creativity Movement (MCM, hereafter) are not a simple matter of being “loyal to (their) racial family”, as they would like to represent themselves. Their beliefs are inextricably wrapped up in doctrines of racial supremacy:

The group’s name stems from the idea that the white person is the “most creative, productive and intelligent creature Mother Nature has produced in … 2.3 billion years,” Klassen wrote in his autobiography. Creators shun marriage between those of different races, embrace anti-Semitism, reject Christianity and other religions (save worship of the race) and take as their motto “RaHoWa” (racial holy war).

At this point I have to walk back a bit from some of my more leading anti-theist statements and admit that people are capable of adopting monstrous beliefs that are entirely ancillary to theistic religion. Any idea that is inured from criticism and granted truth axiomatically can lead to this kind of abdication of humanistic principles. Faith – that willing suspension of rational thought – is not necessarily only centred on a deity. MCM’s belief system is clearly an exercise in a priori “backfilling” to justify an already-held conviction that white people are somehow more creative, productive and intelligent than their dusky brethren. This belief is non-religious, despite their invocation of the idea of a holy war. They should and must be thought of as distinct from, for example, the KKK – an explicitly Christian organization (although one that operates well outside of what would be considered the mainstream of Christian thought, to be sure).

That digression aside, it is important to note that while many of us are busy patting ourselves on the back for how ‘post-racial’ we are, there is quite another segment of society that is deeply invested in the concept of race. There are those in my camp, who think that a productive and open discussion of race is essential to making any progress on tackling the glaring inequalities that fall along racial lines. There are also those who wish to bring race into focus in order to use it as a weapon against those who are different. To carve into society a new version of the Great Chain of Being, with their own group at the top.

While I am usually quick to dismiss this kind of overtly-racist self-aggrandizing as the juvenile chest thumping of a pitiful group of backward people, such dismissal is perhaps doing my own argument a disservice. These are not ‘bad people’ in the colloquial sense – I am sure they are kind, caring and generous people who are otherwise upstanding citizens. However, their adoption of this collection of noxious and bizarre beliefs has led them to compartmentalize their otherwise moral instincts when it comes to issues of race and adopt a Hitlerian view of human subspeciation:

Klassen in “The White Man’s Bible” spelled out a scale of whiteness, with black people at the bottom as “barely human, but more correctly subhuman or humanoid,” white people as the “very top pinnacle” and “mud races” categorized between the two. “One of the beliefs Creators have is RaHoWa, racial holy war where creators believe there will be a worldwide ethnic cleansing that will leave only white people with everything on the planet,” McAdam said.

Add to that their agitation for political recognition and the fact that their expansion is speeding up and we are left to conclude that our conceit and posturing to this supposed ideal condition of “colour blindness” is anything but ‘post-racial’. The existence of these groups should be seen as a sign that we have not yet freed ourselves from our historical fascination with racial supremacy, and that more work, not less, is needed if we are to give ourselves a chance at a future that is more safe and more just.

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9 Woes of the Pharisees

August 23, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · hate · law · news · religion

Regular readers will know that I am not above my practice of occasionally quoting Christian scripture in the service of a point. While I’m sure I’ve mentioned this here and there, I don’t have any problem with using the Bible as a literary resource. I view the Old and New testaments in the same way I view Chaucer or Nabokov or Neruda – as a work of fiction from which interesting points can be gleaned. The only difference is that, unlike Chaucer, Nabokov and Neruda, I’ve actually read the Bible.

The title of this post is a reference to a sermon by the Jesus character in the Bible, in which he decries hypocrisy in a variety of forms. I enjoy this particular passage a great deal because of how unremittingly hypocritical religious adherents are when it comes to issues regarding their own beliefs. I explored that topic a bit this morning, but I failed to make an important point. While I am disgusted with the actions and arrogance of the Roman Catholic Church, and while I find their particular brand of hypocrisy to be the most blatant and offensive, I do not ascribe to them exclusive ownership of religious hypocrisy:

Rights groups have expressed outrage after an Indonesian court jailed a Muslim sect member for defending himself from a brutal mob attack. The court jailed Ahmadiyah member Deden Sudjana for six months, a heavier term than many of the attackers received. Three Ahmadiyah members were bludgeoned to death in an attack by a 1,000-strong mob of hardliners in February. No-one was charged with murder.

Sudjana was hit with a machete and almost had his hand severed during the attack, which pitted about 20 Ahmadiyah followers against more than 1,000 fanatics in the village of Cikeusik, west Java. But the court ruled that he had disobeyed a police order to leave the scene, and had been filmed punching another man.

Video footage of the attack shows crowds of hardliners beating a small group of Ahmadis as police watch. So far 12 of the attackers have been found guilty of minor offences and sentenced to between three and six months.

I first talked about the Ahmadiyah back in March, using their situation to make a point about what actual religious persecution looks like. It’s something quite distinct from merely not having exceptions made for your bigotry because your religious beliefs make you an asshole. It is when the force of law is not only brought to bear to bar you from engaging in what would otherwise be legal activity, but also prevents you from realizing your legal rights. I also talked about this attack over at Canadian Atheist to illustrate why a secular state is to the benefit even of believers.

I honestly don’t know what makes the Venn diagram of ‘religion’ and ‘hypocrisy’ so tight, but it seems as though this tendency is not relegated to simply the Pope. The courts in Indonesia have given a big ol’ middle finger to the very concepts of fairness and equality under the law and have begun punishing people for being the victims of brutalization at the hands of a mob, simply because that mob believes in the ‘correct’ version of YahwAlladdha. The personal beliefs of the attackers, or how justified those who would assault non-combatant people may feel in perpetrating violence, is entirely immaterial when it comes to judging their actions. I would have the same contempt and outrage at a crowd of pro-science feminist atheists who physically attacked a white supremacist group as I would for the reverse. Violence is never an option in defense of ideology.

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8 I’ve got your amnesia right here

August 23, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · crapitalism · critical thinking · news · religion · secularism

I try, at all times, to be an introspective person. Because of the kind of person I am – physically imposing and unabashedly forthright in expressing my opinion – I have a tendency to overwhelm other people in conversation. I don’t do this intentionally, it’s simply a byproduct of who I am. However, because of this fact I am particularly susceptible to a particularly pernicious type of confirmation bias, wherein people who disagree with me either don’t speak up because they’re intimidated, or are shouted into silence by the force of my response. My appeals to friends and colleagues to challenge me when I do this are often unheeded, and as a result I can get a false impression that people agree with me more often than they actually do. I constantly struggle to monitor my own behaviour and demeanour, particularly when I am defending a topic I am passionate about.

This kind of introspective self-criticism is, I think, a critical component of being an intellectually honest advocate of a position. The zeal with which I practice this behaviour on myself has, unfortunately, left me with little patience for hypocrisy. There is perhaps no greater font of hypocrisy in the world today than that which finds its home in St. Peter’s Basilica:

Pope Benedict XVI encouraged thousands of young people gathered for World Youth Day in Spain to avoid temptation and non-believers who think they are ‘god.’

“There are many that, believing they are god, gods, think they have no need for any roots or foundations other than themselves, they would like to decide for themselves what is true or isn’t, what is right and wrong, what’s just and unjust, decide who deserves to live and who can be sacrificed for other preferences, taking a step in the direction of chance, without a fixed path, allowing themselves to be taken by the pulse of each moment, these temptations are always there, it’s important not to succumb to them,” the Pope said during his first speech to the pilgrims.

“Taking a step in the direction of chance, without a fixed path, allowing themselves to be taken by the pulse of each moment, these temptations are always there, it’s important not to succumb to them.”

The kind of unbelievable hubris and lack of self-awareness it takes for a man who claims to speak directly for YahwAlladdha and issues edicts that are, by his own claim, infallible – for this kind of person to go around telling others not to succumb to the temptation to think that they are god is the most shocking and frankly ridiculous type of hypocrisy possible. Beyond simply being rank dishonesty and a complete failure to recognize one’s own faults, it is ethically disgusting for someone with as much power as the Pope has to use that pulpit to encourage people not to think for themselves.

But it doesn’t stop there:

[The Pope] said that the continent must take into account ethical considerations that look out for the common good and added that he understood the desperation felt because of today’s economic uncertainties. “The economy doesn’t function with market self-regulation, but needs an ethical rationale to work for mankind,” he told reporters traveling aboard the papal plane. “Man must be at the centre of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximisation of profit but rather according to the common good.”

Now it so happens that I agree with the Pope in this particular case – our financial system’s pursuit of profit at all costs must be tempered by a strong regulatory climate to ensure that the human beings that make up the economy are protected from exploitation. However, for someone who is the head of an organization that is guilty of some of the most egregious ethical violations in the history of civilization to advocate the importance of morality and care for human beings makes one’s head spin in a most unpleasant fashion. It would be like hearing Robert Mugabe (that greasy pig-fucker) opine on the importance of transparency in government – yeah he’s right, but completely unqualified to offer an opinion.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the massive protests over the amount that the Spanish government, already reeling from financial hardships of its own, has spent on bringing the Pope to Spain to say things that he could have simply put on his Twitter feed.

Perhaps most gallingly of all, to me personally at least, was this statement:

Benedict told them their decisions to dedicate their lives to their faith was a potent message in today’s increasingly secular world. “This is all the more important today when we see a certain eclipse of God taking place, a kind of amnesia which albeit not an outright rejection of Christianity is nonetheless a denial of the treasure of our faith, a denial that could lead to the loss of our deepest identity,” he said. Benedict’s main priority as Pope has been to try to reawaken Christianity in places like Spain, a once staunchly Catholic country that has drifted far from its pious roots.

Humankind is, for the first time in our history, on the verge of throwing off the chains of superstition and fear that has been a millstone around our collective necks since we climbed down from the trees. Part of this burgeoning emancipation is the rejection of the boogie man of religious faith – the willing suspension of our critical faculties when some decrepit ‘holy man’ mutters some syllables about some bit of supernatural nonsense or other. Every time we have had the courage to pull the veil from our eyes and look at the world with vision unclouded by faith, we have been able to discover something new about phenomena that were previously consigned to the label of ‘mystery’. To be sure, not every such advancement has been positive, and we have made many mistakes. However, the solution to those mistakes is emphatically not to simply refuse to examine the world. To exhort mankind to value faith is to point out how comfortable and reassuring those chains were when we were manacled to the yoke of religion.

I am overjoyed that we are denying such ‘treasures’, and I hope you are too.

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10 Poverty: fallen and can’t get up

August 22, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · liberalism · poverty · race

I’m stepping outside my area of expertise far more than usual for this one, so I hope you’ll forgive me for my even more amateurish look at this topic. The reason I’m even bothering is because it’s been cropping up more and more in my own explorations of race, racial disparity and social program development. For those coming here for atheism stuff, I promise that I’ll have a dynamite anti-theist screed ready for action next week. Cross my heart.

On Thursday I tipped my hand a bit on this topic when I spoke about the way that prison can (and often does) lead to an increase in the very same poverty that, in many cases, was the impetus for the same crime that lands someone in jail. If our goal as a society is to reduce and prevent crime, then we should be looking at ways to reduce and prevent poverty. It is not simply a bleeding heart “think of the children” kind of approach – reducing poverty can be an act of self preservation. If we don’t pay to reduce crime, we pay to clean it up far later. I was first turned on to this topic when I read an article on Cracked.com:

I’m not blaming anybody but myself for getting into this situation (I was drunk for two straight decades) and I’m not asking for anybody’s sympathy. What I am saying is that people are quick to tell you to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and just stop being poor. What they don’t understand is the series of intricate financial traps that makes that incredibly difficult.

It details the author’s struggle to regain solvency after going broke, and the number of hurdles he had to overcome. The piece goes far beyond the simple problems of making enough money to live on, pointing out the number of things that keep you poor once you’re already down in the hole. Little things that only affect those who live below the poverty line. Things that prevented him from regaining financial independence, even when his household was pulling in a dual income.

As the author takes pains to point out, he is not asking for sympathy or trying to blame anyone else for his situation. It is immaterial both to his point and mine. It is not really necessary to understand why someone lives below the poverty line, except insofar as we need to understand what the best way to get that person out of poverty is. The point is that once you are there, it’s incredibly difficult to get out on your own, and the problems are often things that we who live above that line don’t see or think about.

The link between poverty and crime is a strong enough one that it should be sufficient motivation for us to want to eradicate poverty. After all, crime has the potential to harm any of us, even we innocents who haven’t done anything so stupid as to put us in that bad financial shape. All the jails in the world won’t be enough to save us. And of course jails don’t protect us from future crimes – they just temporarily lock up those who have already committed crimes. I’m not sure what the state of the evidence is supporting the old chestnut that people go into jail as minor criminals and come out as major criminals, but once again it’s immaterial to my argument.

But let’s say that take a particularly hard-line view of crime and decide that more jails will be sufficient. There are still reasons beyond crime prevention to want to reduce poverty. People who have low incomes and low economic security also consume far more health care resources than those in the middle (or upper) classes. Even outside the confines of our socialized health care system, poverty creates a greater burden on the health care system. Scarce resources go to treat conditions that would not exist save for the poverty of the afflicted. Even in a for-profit health care delivery system, these are the same resources that non-impoverished people use, and drains on them hurt us.

But let’s say that you exist in even more of a vacuum than most, and you have a private doctor that tends to your every ache and pain. Let’s also say that you don’t mind your tax dollars going to the health care system (because they do, even in the USA before the dreaded Health Care Reform Act). Even then, eliminating poverty is still in your selfish best interest. Impoverished people are a drain on the economy (it is important that this not be interpreted as a judgment on people living below the poverty line – it is simply a fact). Even those that work are often mired deeply in debt, which is only good news for the lending agencies that make money off of interest – until, that is, the poor default on their loans and declare bankruptcy. This is to say nothing of social assistance programs that get a disproportionately high level of criticism and a disproportionately low level of funding and autonomy.

Poverty also has a racial component, since people of colour (PoCs) are far more likely to be impoverished for reasons that I have hinted at before. While it is easy (and fun) to blame PoCs for their condition, the fact is that poverty isn’t a product of laziness. It is, as the Cracked article so aptly puts it, “like trying to climb out of a dick pit but the ladder is also made of dicks.” There are any number of forces that pull you down deeper into poverty and make it unbelievably difficult to leave. It is a trap into which people and families can sink forever.

Poverty should require work to get out of – to be sure. I am not advocating the opening of government coffers to give a slush fund to every street person with a hand out. What I am advocating is much more simple than that – create opportunities for people to learn to do for self. Put training, education, housing, and opportunity within the grasp of every street person looking for a hand up. Give people the wherewithal to improve their own situations through hard work and innovation. Yes, this will require sacrifice on the part of those of us not living in poverty, and this may seem unfair. What I am hoping is that they (we) are smart enough to realize that, for the reasons I point to above, reducing poverty and inequality is in the best interest of everyone, not just the poor.

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2 Movie Friday: A personal relationship

August 19, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · funny · movie · religion

One of the things that Christians (particularly Protestants) like to brag about is how they have a ‘personal relationship’ with the divine. Of course, ask 100 Christians about what God wants, and you’ll get 200 different answers.

NonStampCollector points this out in his usual hilarious way:

The problem with everyone claiming to have a personal relationship is that there’s no consistency to the claims made. If Jesus was a real entity (which is a central Christian claim), and is accessible through prayer (another Christian claim), and responds to the faithful through the intercession of the Holy Spirit (another Christian claim), then we’d see a convergence of ideas. What we see instead is that the several religions of the world can’t split off of each other fast enough.

What I posit is that the only person you’re in contact with when you pray is the inside of your own head. It’s certainly easy to confuse your own conscience with the machinations of a disembodied force, especially if you’ve been brought up to accept revelation as a kind of evidence. I used to think that the voice inside my head that told me all this God stuff is bullshit was the devil – true story. I used to actively tamp down the voice of “the devil” while I was in church. It took me years to realize that what I was actually hearing was the rational part of my brain. It’s served me quite well since then.

The tragedy is that there are billions of people out there with whom one could conceivably have a personal relationship with, but who are of a different religious background. I’ve heard dozens of stories of people who are shunned from a friendship or romantic involvement because of religious differences. Entire countries have been split apart because of religious differences. Wars have been fought over religious differences.

All because we can’t get a straight answer out of our personal imaginary friend.

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3 Out of the frying pan…

August 18, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · law · politics · poverty

I’ve been hinting for a while that I want to take on the topic of poverty, but have been chasing down more urgent/contemporary topics. It just so happens that at the end of this week I have a brief window to begin laying some of the ground work for what will eventually become my ultimate point. I’ve already tipped my hand a couple of times in topics I wrote back in July, but I haven’t made the point completely explicit yet. It’s not that it will be monumental or groundbreaking – I’m not trying to plant teasers as much as I am trying to apologize for not getting to it yet.

I did my graduate degree in Kingston, Ontario which is a city about 300 km east of Toronto. Kingston was once the capital of Canada and home to its first Prime Minister. More recently, Kingston has become the home of 3 things: Queen’s University, the Royal Military College, and a metric fuck-ton of prisons. There are 7 prisons within the municipal borders of the city, with two more in the outlying area. When a family member is imprisoned, particularly if that family member is the main income-earner, the whole family suffers as a result. I am not interested in trying to determine who is to blame – many criminals go to jail because they made poor decisions and deserve their punishment. The point is that there is ‘collateral damage’ to the family.

It was common enough to see families move to Kingston to live close to where the bread-winner (usually the father) was in jail. These were more often than not single-parent families, meaning that the remaining adult at home worked a part-time job to ensure sufficient time for child care. These were not people who were rich before their spouse was locked up, so it’s not a stretch to picture the kind of economic shape most of these families were in. The TL/DR version of this situation is that imprisonment can be economically catastrophic to young families. There is an additional issue that I have to confess I was totally ignorant of:

The fees levied on prisoners are put there by state legislatures who have found a group few people will stick up for. But this is short-term thinking at its finest. For example, a report on the issue by the Brennan Center for Justice studied Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, which in 2009 arrested 564 people for failing to pay their debts and jailed just under half of them for several days before their hearings. The cost of jailing them — even for a short time — far outweighed the money eventually collected.

“Look at the cost of year in jail for just one person,” said Rebekah Diller, an author of the report. ($30,000 per year is the low end.) “If this only drives a few people back into the system you’re already undermining any revenue you might raise.”

These debts would seem to drive more than a few back into the system. Probation officers are the front line people pushing probationers to pay, and one of their most effective weapons is the threat of arrest. But this drives probationers into hiding if they don’t have the money. “They end up going underground, not fulfilling their probation requirements because they can’t fulfill the court fees,” said Abrigal Forrester, a program coordinator for StreetSafe Boston, which does gang intervention and other work to help reduce crime in tough neighborhoods. If you skip your meetings with probation, you are probably going back to prison.

So imagine this, if you will. Let us suppose that for any of a wide variety of reasons you were so deep in debt that you couldn’t pay your way out. Family connections cannot help you, and bankruptcy isn’t an option. You are then charged with failure to pay your debt and go to jail (apparently this is not possible in Canada, but please bear with me for the sake of argument). While in jail, your debt accumulates interest. Due to a well-intentioned but ultimately myopic “tough on crime” policy, you are charged a fee for your prison stay. When you are released from jail, you are deeper in debt than you were before you went in, but you cannot secure gainful employment because you have a criminal record.

Now of course you wouldn’t turn to a life of crime at this point, dear reader. No, you’d get extra-long bootstraps (on sale, because you’re thrifty) and tug yourself to economic freedom. But perhaps a neighbour of yours who is not quite so virtuous as you would succumb to the lure of breaking the law in order to make enough cash to feed your family and pay down her debt. Perhaps she’s not quite the criminal mastermind she thinks she is, and gets charged, this time with an actual crime. It’s back to prison for her, with the weight of a conviction on top of the still-mounting debt.

This is the experience of a number of people. Even without the initial charge of ‘being in debt’ sending you to jail, putting someone in prison can trap them in a spiral of criminality and recidivism that goes beyond simplistic explanations of the criminal mind and “gangsterism”. I am not trying to suggest that every convict is an innocent victim of circumstance; only that some are, and we can make changes to our social system to ensure that these folks have an easier chance of it. As it stands now, our prisons might be creating more new prisoners, rather than accomplishing their ostensible goal of reducing crime and protecting communities from criminals.

I bring this story up as an example of why I think we need broader, more forward-thinking approaches to crime and justice. I think it would be better to recognize that convicts do not disappear when they leave prison, and that many would, if given the opportunity, prefer to make an honest living than scramble the streets trying to avoid getting caught and sent back. Any program that increases poverty or fails to provide a clear pathway out is ultimately doing our entire society a disservice.

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4 Race, remixed

August 17, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · culture · race

I’ve explained before that it would be technically accurate to refer to me as being “mixed” – I am the product of an interracial marriage. While I self-identify most often simply as black, there are times when I make mention of my status as a ‘multi’. Against the social backdrop I find myself in most often, ‘black’ conveys sufficient information for my purposes, and I let it go there. However, there are many people who, for their own personal reasons, prefer to refer to themselves as ‘mixed’.

What makes this phenomenon more interesting is the fact that “mixed” has quite a variety of meanings:

Today we see both increased immigration and rising rates of intermarriage. In 1960, less than 1% of U.S. marriages were interracial, but by 2008, this figure rose to 7.6%, meaning that 1 out of every 13 U.S. marriages was interracial. If we look at only new marriages that took place in 2008, the figure rises to 14.6%, translating to 1 out of every 7 American marriages. The rising trend in intermarriage has resulted in a growing multiracial population. In 2010, 2.9% of Americans identified as multiracial. Demographers project that the multiracial population will continue to grow so that by 2050, 1 in 5 Americans could claim a multiracial background, and by 2100, the ratio could soar to 1 in three.

Very long ago, I made specific reference to this phenomenon, noting that this may be a product more of familiarity and the re-drawing of in- and out-group definitions than it is the result of people becoming more enlightened about topics racial. Whatever the explanation, it seems as though the lines drawn around race groups is not quite as tight as it might have been once upon a time. We may be seeing the beginning of a collapse of the definitions of race – themselves largely the products of blind tradition and xenophobia rather than anything to do with human biology.

Then again, perhaps a closer inspection is warranted:

For instance, Asians and Latinos intermarry at much higher rates than blacks. About 30% of Asian and Latino marriages are interracial, but the corresponding figure for blacks is only 17%. However, if we include only U.S.-born Asians and Latinos, we find that intermarriage rates are much higher. Nearly, three-quarters (72%) of married, U.S.-born Asians, and over half (52%) of U.S.-born Latinos are interracially married, and most often, the intermarriage is with a white partner. While the intermarriage rate for blacks has risen steadily in the past five decades, it is still far below that of Asians and Latinos, especially those born in the United States.

It is fascinating to me to see how prejudice is not shared equally among all people of colour (PoCs). I may be fairly and accurately accused of focussing on issues of white and black people predominantly. As I’ve said before, this is mostly because this particular divide is one that I am familiar with on a variety of levels. That being said, it also seems as though the deck remains stacked against black people, even among other minority groups. There seems to be a hierarchy of which groups are ‘acceptable’ and which ones aren’t, although I might be reading too much into that one finding. It would also be interesting to see these statistics for Arab and Persian Americans, especially in light of the pervasive anti-Muslim attitude currently in vogue in America.

The article notes that only 7% of black people in the study identify as multiracial, which stands in stark contrast to the 75-90% estimated prevalence of mixed heritage among the black community in the USA. The authors express some mock bafflement at why this would be the case. I can give at least my own perspective on why I don’t really connect with the white side of my identity. Part of the problem is that ‘white’ doesn’t really have much presence as an identifying feature. One of the drawbacks of being the majority group is that identification as such doesn’t give people much information about you. It is far easier for me to identify those aspects of my background that are different from those around me than to focus on those things that are true for everyone.

Next, there aren’t too many people out there who see me as ‘half-white’. To the casual observer on the street, I am a brown-skinned guy with a bit of an afro. Sometimes people think I’m Indian when my hair is cut short or I am wearing a hat. Nobody says “he’s got white background for sure… but what’s the other part?” This isn’t a knock on them, or even all that unusual. It just serves to illustrate that calling myself ‘mixed’, while accurate, is not a term that resonates particularly well with my personal experience of my race. This appears to be a common experience:

By contrast, none of the black-white couples identified their children as just white or American, nor did they claim that their children identify as such. While these couples recognize and celebrate the racial mixture of their children’s backgrounds, they unequivocally identify their children as black. When we asked why, they pointed out that nobody would take them seriously if they tried to identify their children as white, reflecting the constraints that black interracial couples feel when identifying their children. Moreover, black interracial couples do not identify their children as simply “American” because as native-born Americans, they feel that American is an implicit part of their identity.

White skin, light skin and black skin also have a long and storied history with attached stigma and associations in the black community. These cultural memes manage to transcend generational lines and persist within the community for decades. While change has been happening over time, it may take many more generations before we see marriage offering widespread cultural remedy to our race problems. Until then, we can continue our work pushing the boundaries, making sure that the intellectual ground is laid for the next generations of multi-racial kids to help us grapple with the consequences of our historical segregation.

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