Category: critical thinking

18 Doctor Crommunist’s health prescription

June 20, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · health · health care

Okay, so I am not a doctor (yet), but I do spend my 9-5 hours working as part of Canada’s health care system, and I do have a couple of degrees in which health policy played a pretty significant role, so I’m going to take this opportunity to make one of my (thankfully) rare digressions away from the typical subject matter of this blog and talk about health care.

My master’s thesis (which was a rather shabby affair) was partially focussed on the issue of wait times for critical services. Those of you who live in civilized developed countries will be familiar with this concept already. Those of you who live in the United States will probably need a refresher. Because there exists a finite pool of resources in the world, when a large group of people want to access something that is a one-at-a-time thing, there is a good chance that some people will have to wait. In Canada, because we have a publicly-funded medical care system, we run into wait times as the inevitable consequence of more people wanting a thing than the system has the capacity to provide.

I have, incidentally, discussed why Canada’s system is not only more fair but more economically sound than the American system in a previous post that I encourage you to read. … Continue Reading

8 We’ve got a job to do

June 14, 2012
by Crommunist
· anti-racism · blog · economics · race · racism · science · skepticism

I remember my first job interview. I had applied for a position as a stock boy at a bulk food store, and the owner called me on the phone the day after I dropped off my resume. My interview was one question, three words: “are you big?” I replied that I was, indeed, big. “Come in and start tomorrow,” was the reply. I was there for nearly 3 years. Since that time I’ve taught violin, I’ve packed boxes onto trucks, I’ve managed an amusement park cleaning crew (easily the worst job I’ve ever had), I’ve been a doorman, a karaoke host (easily the best job I’ve ever had), and spent two mortifying shifts serving tables in a tapas restaurant. None of those jobs were particularly hard to get – in fact, when I was offered my current job I could scarcely believe it and spent the first year dreading the day when my boss would realized they hired the wrong guy.

At no point in my various job searches did I really actively stress over race. Like most people I’ve been rejected from more jobs than I’ve been given – even then, it never occurred to me to wonder whether or not race played a role. Why would it? After all, I live in the 21st century, and certainly nobody ever said to me “we don’t hire your kind” or anything so overt as that. I will likely never know the role, positive or negative, that race played in me getting my various jobs. However, I know too much to think that racism isn’t still very much a part of the hiring process: … Continue Reading

10 Less relevant by the minute

June 12, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · crapitalism · news · religion · science · sex

Since I was a little kid, I’ve loved stories. Even as an adult, I am drawn to the narrative arc – the pacing, the twists and turns of a good plot, the art of a well-crafted climax – these have always been like magic to me. In my younger days though, I was drawn to Greek mythology in a big way. It wasn’t just the fanciful tales, although I liked that aspect a lot – it was the fact that each story was attached to some kind of lesson. They weren’t just stories told for amusement – they were expositions of human foibles and an accounting of how ancient peoples saw the world.

While Aesop’s Fables are not, strictly speaking, Greek mythology, they are perhaps the best exemplar of that type of morality and psychology as taught through story that we have. While Jesus of Nazareth (supposedly) taught in parables, it can often be an arduous exercise to pick out the nuggets of useful knowledge from the heaps of nonsense (what kind of shepherd abandons an entire flock to search for a single lost sheep? A bad one, I’d imagine). The fables attributed to Aesop are far clearer and more real-to-life.

One of the most famous, at least among the secular community, is the Emperor’s New Clothes. The reason it’s famous in our clique is because it so perfectly mirrors the public perception of religion – everyone is told how important and meaningful and significant it is, but as soon as someone takes a critical look at it the whole edifice quickly unravels to reveal one naked fallacy after another. However, turned on its head, there’s another valuable lesson contained in that story. One about the vanity and blindness that accompanies unchecked power and how it can lead people into situations where they completely fucking embarrass themselves: … Continue Reading

2 Skeptivism: Jamie’s story

June 11, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · gender · good news · skeptivism

My Blogathon efforts left me far more drained than I thought it would. By the time 6 hours of recording was up, I didn’t have much left in the tank for blogging. All is not lost, however, because a friend of mine from Vancouver has been engaged in some truly impressive local activism, so I asked Jamie to sum up the events for you all to take a look at:

I’ve been writing a lot about demonstrations, protests, nearly frothing at the mouth while yelling profanity, and taking my top off, all in the name of exercising bodily autonomy as a person who has two X-chromosomes. I mean a lot. This entry concerns a summary version of what is contained in all those posts, with links to the original writing.

The inciting incident concerned a woman in a sun dress, who felt particularly brave one afternoon while approaching a pro-life group that appears at the same intersection every weekend, to the Great Annoyance of the entire neighbourhood and virtually all passersby. She said “If a woman is raped and conceives from it, should she be forced to carry the child?” and was answered with “If she’s dressed like you, she should.” When I found out she wanted to organize the community to hold them accountable, I flipped all my shits. Read about it here.

Read Jamie’s epic saga; it’s really impressive.

I will be back to normal tomorrow, I bet. Plus I still owe a bunch of people cover tunes, so that’ll happen.

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9 Manufacturing the ‘other’

June 7, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · crime · forces of stupid · hate · law · police · race · racism

One of the frequent memes that emerges from racial discourse is that people of colour are expected to try extra hard to justify their existence and inclusion in American society. Nowhere was this more evident than when Congressman Peter King basically revived Joe McCarthy to investigate whether or not Muslims were ‘patriotic’ enough. It is not enough, according to Mr. King, to simply live in the United States – to be a real American, Muslims have to go above and beyond to prove that they’re not ‘too Muslimy’.

Of course, those kinds of obsessive intrusions often only serve to contribute to the general climate of xenophobia that leads to radicalization in the first place. Why on Earth would you be patriotic toward a country that uses the force of its government to peer into your personal life simply because you worship the wrong god? I alluded to this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of exclusion earlier this week:

It’s not hard, therefore, to imagine why black Americans do not see themselves reflected in the priorities of their country. It is certainly not hard to imagine that they may be less patriotic than one might expect. They see a country that seeks to lie about what it cannot hide. They see a country that seeks to erase what it cannot destroy. They see this country, and they say “god damn America”.

I would be interested to see a study investigating the causal association I believe exists between feelings of exclusion and likelihood of antisocial behaviour. We know, for example, that racial profiling by police makes members of minority communities less likely to co-operate. It’s not exactly rocket science – if you don’t believe the police are on your side, why would you work with them? What I’m curious about is whether or not that refusal to comply with social norms (i.e., recognizing authority figures) translates into a generalized contempt for other types of normative behaviours, like compliance with the law.

Or put another way, are New York’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ policies making their problems worse: … Continue Reading

22 Lazy, spoiled, entitled whiners

June 5, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · critical thinking · education · politics

I think if I was ever really hard up for cash, I could make a pretty decent living as a conservative columnist. It would actually be pretty easy – all I’d have to do is learn to stop thinking things through and rely on ‘common sense’ to justify all of my boneheaded, reductive, stereotypical leaps to whatever conclusion was sure to resonate with those who hadn’t bothered to learn anything about an issue. I could have made a killing opining on the Montreal protests – it was the first time most Canadians (myself included) were paying any attention to Quebec’s provincial political scene. All I’d have to do is denigrate this group or that group (maybe blame it on immigrants to boot), and collect my cheque.

Unfortunately, I am a liberal, and a skeptic liberal at that. I just don’t have it in me to pass off simplistic pseudo-explanations as statements of fact – not for money, anyway. Since announcing my intention to travel to Montreal (and a number of times since returning – and once while I was still there), I’ve had many conversations about the protests, and managed to get my counterpoints down to pretty concise talking points. … Continue Reading

39 The darkness before dawn

June 4, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · forces of stupid · Occupy · skepticism

It is more or less inevitable that, in any discussion of turmoil within a social movement, there will be those who archly perch atop some combination of a high horse and a fence, raining down tongue-clucking pronouncements about how the mere existence of dissent is the reason why they will never get involved. I suppose if one was being charitable, one could interpret this as an impulse to avoid conflict. After all, not everyone wants to jump into the midst of a fight, and I can certainly sympathize with that impulse. Some people simply want to exist and be at peace without having to ‘pick a side’ between factions that should be united in purpose.

Of course, the question becomes why those who wish to avoid conflict so ostentatiously announce themselves to be above it rather than just butting out the way they claim to want to do. Standing up on a soapbox and doing the whole ‘plague on both your houses’ lecture is not a statement of non-involvement; it’s a statement of philosophical purity and superiority. “I would never lower myself to so crass a level as to care about something and fight for it. How vulgar!” It is the same spirit of false equivalence we are so often ‘treated’ to from faitheists who would hush Gnu atheists for being ‘too strident’ and ‘attacking’ religious folks instead of engaging in a sort of faux-ecumenical hand-holding exercise where we hold our noses and pretend each other’s shit doesn’t stink. … Continue Reading

175 “It’s my movement too”; the white whine of atheism

June 1, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · forces of stupid · gender · hate

*Trigger warning for misogyny.

Sometimes the world does your job for you.

So one of the most fun aspects of male privilege is that I can look at stupid bullshit like this and laugh. First of all, Ian Adelstein isn’t a member of CFI Amherst, he’s just a douchebro with a big mouth. But hey, that’s one of the hallmarks of douchebroism – a ludicrously inflated sense of self-importance. Because I’m a guy, I get to look at words like ‘cunt’ in purely anthropological terms and pick apart the various types of ignorance and privilege that would lead someone to make that word choice. Of course, Mr. Adelstein immediately disavowed any sexism in his tweet: see, there are a lot of things he could have meant by ‘cunt’. He might have been calling her an old old wooden ship from the civil war era! Words can mean anything! I guess he’s relying on the assumption that we’re all as stupid as he is. … Continue Reading

6 Special feature: Crommunist goes to Montreal

May 31, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crommunism · personal · politics

Last Monday, work took me to Toronto for the annual meeting of one of my projects. The following Monday was a conference held by the team I work for in Montreal, which meant that I was facing a week-long gap between events. Given how friggin’ expensive it is to fly across Canada, I figured it would be easier for me to take a few vacation days and spend the time on some rest & relaxation than try to cross the distance twice. And so it was that I found myself at Toronto’s Union station on the 11:30 train bound for Montreal with my good friend Nate.

A picture of my friend Nathan and I … Continue Reading

23 Flirting, fucking, and tossing the pigskin

May 31, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · sex

So immediately after my first-ever atheist conference, the atheist community was all a-Twitter about people trying to fuck other people at conferences. It’s kind of difficult (I avoid using the word ‘hard’ intentionally) to suppress my ego, but I’m going to go ahead and conclude that this was simply coincidence, and not a sign that everyone was secretly trying to bang me. At any rate, people are talking about it, and there’s the usual crowd of folks managing to miss the point, so I thought it might be fun to throw in my two cents.

I have had a few interactions with people who write, or play music, or do their jobs, solely to achieve some other goal. They write because they want to be influential. They play music because they want to be famous. They’re in their respective fields because they want to get rich. I suppose the term for people like that is ‘goal-oriented’. The various things they take part in are a means to a more enjoyable end – they’re the necessary legwork required to attain the true object of desire.

For my purposes, I tend to align myself more to being ‘process-oriented’: I do stuff because it’s fun and I like it. I write because I like to organize my thoughts and to play with words. I play music because I enjoy the intimate collaborations that are made possible by mixing it up with other musicians. I do my job because it’s challenging and interesting. Any notoriety or attention or wealth I gain from doing these things are all of secondary importance. … Continue Reading

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