Category: critical thinking

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.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 Shades of racism

August 16, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · news · race · racism

One of the things that I hope to instill in readers of this blog is the eventual abolition of the idea of the dichotomy of racist/not racist. It’s a split that enjoys a great deal of popularity in our culture despite the fact that, with only a few outliers, essentially everyone puts themselves on the ‘not racist’ side of the line, regardless of their attitudes or behaviours. As a result, the term loses any really discriminant ability and becomes merely an unhelpful pejorative.

When I talk about racism, I am talking about a set of cognitions that reduce the evaluation of a person or persons to their ethnic/cultural group at the exclusion of any other salient details. Often, when we have negative ideations about a group, we are likely to have correspondingly poor impressions of any given member of that group, regardless of that individual’s behaviour or actual characteristics. We are pretty good, as a society, at calling out egregiously negative examples of this thought process, but not so good at the more subtle ones. This is, I think, because of the fact that we are still expecting to find ‘the line’ between racist and not racist. So for you, dear reader, I offer these examples of racism on a gradient from merely bad to… well, you’ll see.

Muslim man fired from SeaTac for not shaving his beard

A Muslim man from SeaTac, Wash., who claims he was fired from his job as a security guard after refusing to shave his beard has filed a federal lawsuit against his former employer. Abdulkadir Omar, 22, began working in Kent, Wash., for California-based American Patriot Security in May 2009. He said no one told him when he was hired that he would have to shave his beard, which he keeps closely trimmed and said is part of his Islamic faith.

So this one is borderline, right? First off, Muslims aren’t a race – they are a cultural group that spans a number of ethnicities. Second, this is an issue of an employer setting a dress code and one employee refusing to comply. Even under a really generous view of where ‘the line’ is, surely this doesn’t qualify as racist, right? Well yeah… but then you read this:

Omar told the supervisor he was religiously obligated to keep his beard and continued to work at the company until April 2010, when he met with a regional project manager to discuss wages he hadn’t received, according to the suit. When she saw his beard, that manager warned Omar that to continue working there he’d have to shave it and comply with company policy, and Omar repeated that he was following his religious beliefs, according to the lawsuit. Omar said other security guards at the company had beards and continued to work.

All of a sudden it’s not so clear, is it? He had been given prior permission to wear his beard, it wasn’t until he came to lodge a complaint about not being paid that it became an issue, and other people working there had beards. All of a sudden it stops being a story about a disgruntled employee and starts being about someone who was singled out for discrimination based on his ethnicity and religion.

Moving on…

NBC employee sues for racial harassment (warning: New York Post article)

A Native American NBC studio technician was tormented about his ethnicity by cruel colleagues, who strung up an Indian doll on a noose and called it his “long-lost daughter,” he claims in a lawsuit. Faruq “Peter” Wells — who worked on the “Today” show, “Dr. Oz” and “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” — endured the abuse after returning from a vacation and eventually quit his job when NBC’s Human Resources Department told him to ignore the problem, the court papers charge. The worst indignity came when one co-worker pelted him with the doll and barked, “Here’s your long-lost daughter!” the papers say.

So I’m sure most of us (especially those reading this blog) can point to this as ‘over the line’. This, we would say, is clearly racist. However, I’ll bet you if you asked those that thought it was a good idea to hang up a doll on a noose to torment a Native American colleague, they’d tell you that it was ‘just a joke’ and that Mr. Wells needs to ‘lighten up’. They don’t see it as racism – just a bit of office pranks that he’s just being too sensitive about.

Except that it’s not funny for Mr. Wells to learn that this is the way his colleagues see him – as a caricature based on his ethnic heritage. He’s probably proud of his heritage. Having it used as a weapon to ridicule and exclude him is probably incredibly hurtful in ways that his colleagues will likely never understand. That’s of course entirely outside the fact that he can’t be comfortable at work anymore, and not due to any action of his own doing, but because of the insensitive racism of his co-workers.

Moving on…

Black man murdered in targeted attack by white teens

On a recent Sunday morning just before dawn, two carloads of white teenagers drove to Jackson, Mississippi, on what the county district attorney says was a mission of hate: to find and hurt a black person. In a parking lot on the western side of town they found their victim. James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker, was standing in a parking lot, near his car. The teens allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including “White Power!” according to witnesses.

This is about as chilling as a news story can get. For no reason, and completely without provocation, a man was murdered for the crime of having black skin. This is, I’m sure, the kind of racism that even the most staunch opponents of the anti-racist cause would decry as clearly racist. There is no equivocation possible here – this was a targeted murder motivated solely by race. Not only is it an unforgivable crime against Mr. Anderson, but against the whole black community of Jackson. Who knows when the next gang of white kids is going to decide to roll into town and murder them? What possible preventative action could there be, short of completely walling the white community off and not allowing them to enter the city?

So we have here a clear example of racism that pretty much everyone can agree is definitely ‘over the line’. My point in all of this is that the differences between the situations facing Mr. Omar, Mr. Wells and the late Mr. Anderson are not of type, but only of magnitude. Mr. Omar is singled out for discrimination because of his religion and his skin colour (given that other employees are allowed to have beards); Mr. Wells is singled out for ridicule because of his ethnicity; Mr. Anderson is singled out for murder because he is black – the underlying cognitive framework is identical in each situation.

Anyone who disagrees with this characterization must then provide a definition of racism that finds a way to differentiate the third story from the first two. Or, far easier, recognize that while the severity may change, racism is the same in all its various forms.

TL/DR: I present three examples of racism with increasing severity in an attempt to demonstrate that it is a unified concept, despite the many faces it may have.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

4 Movie Friday: An Epiphany

August 12, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · ethics · movie · psychology · religion

This blog is getting more and more race-y and less and less religion-y. Don’t think it hasn’t escaped my notice. I approach blogging in a sort of Taoist way, letting the items that crop up in the news and in my random online pokings around direct the content and focus of my posts. I know some of you came here when I was on a particular anti-theist binge, and I hope I haven’t bored you too much.

But there’s always movie Friday, right?

I like this video a lot for a few reasons. First, it does a pretty good job of debunking the frustratingly-common question I hear from theists when I criticize the concept of a god: “why are you so anti-God?” or “why do you reject God” I don’t reject the gods, I reject the idea of them because they are some combination of incoherent and evidenceless. For example, I don’t believe in Yahweh/Allah because He is described as merciful, kind and all-powerful, a portrayal which is not reflected in reality at all. I don’t believe in the Hindu gods because natural phenomena explain all the things that are supposedly the domain of the gods. Ditto for the Greek and Egyptian and Norse pantheons. I don’t see any evidence for the Buddhist cycle of rebirth, and the deist non-interventional god I used to believe in is entirely superfluous, and so might as well not exist. To call that rejection of your personal understanding of whatever god you believe in is taking things too personally – I “reject” all gods for the same reason – I don’t believe they exist.

Second, it posits a possible explanation for why believers see non-belief as ‘rejection’ rather than nonbelief. People’s god concepts are very real to them, and DarkMatter suggests a mechanism to explain why this is true: because people’s god concepts are simply reflections of themselves. I’ve long suspected that people twist the concept of a god to reflect what’s in themselves, but there’s a bit of a chicken-egg thing wherein people are taught what their god wants, which helps inform what they believe later. This video provides some support to the idea that God is personal. As Heinlein put it: “thou art god”.

Finally, there’s a really cool question that comes up from this video that I’d like to try asking a theist. Is there anything that God commands you to believe that you personally disagree with? Are there any instructions that you find immoral but follow anyway? Are there any things you believe that you recognize are absurd but adhere to because you think your god requires it? I know this was a major source of dissonance for me when I was a teenager – so many teachings of the Catholic church were completely abhorrent to me, but I was told I had to believe them. My solution was to reject the abhorrent teachings as simply a product of human stupidity, which was the first major step I took toward leaving theism altogether.

I am fairly certain that hardly any theists read this blog (I am only aware of 2 theistic commenters), but if you get a chance to have a conversation with someone – particularly someone who is a mushy ‘liberal’ theist, see what their reactions are to the question. I’d really like to hear the responses.

Anyway, next week will be no exception to the flood of race-specific stuff. I plan to opine on the riots in England, talk about some hate crimes, and hopefully finally get to tackle the issue of poverty that I’ve been wanting to talk about for months now. Don’t fret though – I haven’t run out of anti-theist rage and will return to my old form soon.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 The barbarians have switched gates

August 11, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · crapitalism · forces of stupid · free speech · news · religion

A few months back I wrote a post about Andres Serrano’s artistic installation “Piss Christ”. In it, I made an allusion, likening Philistine knee-jerk religious reactionaries to a horde of barbarians swarming around the gates of civilized society:

The fact is that rationality has surpassed our need for imagined explanations and intuitions to govern our society. We can govern ourselves based on secular reason – furthermore, those regions that do this more are doing much better than their less-reasoned brethren. Those who would react to an idea by trying to destroy it, and those that think it, must not be the ones to rule us. They should be thought of, in our walled palace of reasoned thought, as barbarians banging at the gates.

Not a flattering image, to be sure, but it was not intended to be. I have nothing but the deepest contempt for those who believe the way to settle philosophical disagreements is through violence or the threat thereof.

I was disheartened, therefore, to see this story in the news:

A Manila art exhibit blasted as offensive to Catholic Filipinos has been shuttered, following complaints from President Benigno Aquino III and death threats to artists and cultural officials. The Kulo group exhibit at the state-funded Cultural Center of the Philippines opened in Manila in June. However, the show began receiving complaints after recent coverage by media outlets in the predominantly Catholic nation. Originally slated to close Aug. 21, Kulo was shut down Tuesday. Specifically, complaints focus on work by contemporary artist Mideo Cruz that mixes Catholic icons with pop culture and sexual imagery and paraphernalia.

We’ve heard about the presence of the Catholic church in the Philippines before, as they have been the chief force retarding that country making any progress toward comprehensive sex education. It’s nice to know that when they’re not dooming a generation to unwanted pregnancies and STIs, they’re still finding the time to act as art critics. Once again, though, I think they’ve completely missed the point of the exhibit:

The exhibition, entitled Poleteismo or Polytheism, includes a statue of Jesus with the ears of Mickey Mouse, and a wall collage featuring images from Christ and the Virgin Mary to the Statue of Liberty and US President Barack Obama. Mr Cruz says it is intended to be about the worship of icons. “This speaks about objects that we worship, how we create these gods and idols, and how we in turn are created by our gods and idols,” said the Filipino artist, referring to the 300 years of Spanish rule that brought Catholicism to the Philippines and the current influences from the US.

Or maybe they aren’t. I remember one of the first problems I had with the RCC as an organization was its insistence on idolatry (yes – I used to be a bit of a zealot). You can’t walk into a church or basilica anywhere in the world without being overwhelmed with religious iconography, which is in direct contravention of the second commandment. Of course accusing the Catholic church of being hypocritical is like accusing a windstorm of being destructive: you’re absolutely right but it’s not going to listen to you. This exhibition calling Roman Catholicism a foreign idolatrous ideology might have just rubbed the Church the wrong way, and so they fixed on (what else?) sex to get everyone up in arms.

You know what they should have been up in arms about?

A day earlier former first lady Imelda Marcos joined the growing protest over the exhibition. She said Mideo Cruz’s exhibition at Manila’s cultural centre had “desecrated” something sacred. Mrs Marcos is one of the country’s main patrons of the art and founded the cultural centre in the 1970s when her husband Ferdinand was president. She saw the exhibition for herself and said she was “shocked” by it. “There were so many symbols of the male organ there – something sacred to be desecrated. It is sad, and it should not happen here in the cultural centre,” said the 82-year-old.

The BBC uses the word “president” a bit too liberally. Ferdinand Marcos was a brutal dictator whose bloody reign was marked with corruption, violation of human rights, and assassination of political rivals. It was only 25 years ago that a huge populist uprising eventually forced him into exile, taking with him large sums of money that he and his wife embezzled from the country they had ruled mercilessly. It is thanks to his corrupt and cartoonishly-evil rule that the Philippines is in the kind of shitty shape it’s in now. And his wife has taken it upon herself to express her “shock” at how something beautiful has been desecrated. The irony of hearing this from the lips of someone who so thoroughly desecrated the principles of democratic government made my eyes swim a little.

I am not offended by this exhibit. I was slightly offended, for example, by some of the more lurid exhibits at the slavery museum in Amsterdam. I am very offended by the depiction of black men as sexual subhuman animals in pornography. Every fibre of my being – everything I have ever believed in, the very bedrock upon which I build my life, is offended by the bullshit that is the closing of an art exhibit because you don’t like the art. However, it doesn’t matter at all what offends me – I don’t have a right not to be offended. But then again, I am a rational human being, not a goddamn barbarian.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

3 Can you hear me now?

August 11, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · privilege · race · secularism

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big fan of Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog. While I may not necessarily agree with everything he says (although I do most of the time), I find him to be a great writer who somehow finds time to post regular high-quality content (this past couple of months have been testament to how difficult it is to post regularly). It was therefore a great pleasure to see him take some time for himself and have a vacation. During that time, he invited a number of members of the Secular Student Alliance to post on his blog, which I thought was a nice touch. Some of them were funny, some of them were very serious, and some of them weren’t that great.

Only one of them actually made me angry:

These are daunting numbers, particularly after taking into account statistically lower high school graduation and college enrollment rates among African-Americans. It is likely that the main reason college non-theist groups are having trouble recruiting black atheists is that there simply aren’t very many – and probably even fewer willing to admit it. That being said, we still have to face the original issue: after recognizing the immense social pressure black atheists face, what can we do to attract the ones that are on our campuses? I argue that the method for attracting black students is no different than the method for attracting members in general.

Before I delve into this too deeply, I want to make a couple of things clear. First, nothing I write here should be interpreted as an attack on Derek Miller (the post’s author). I’m sure he’s a well-meaning and passionate advocate who has, in all probability, done far more for the skeptic cause than I have. Second, I do not believe that Mr. Miller’s post was written out of malice or any kind of ill will towards people of colour (PoCs). There’s nothing at all in his piece to suggest anything like that, and I don’t want my response to be interpreted as me being spikey about someone else’s racism. I will call out racism when I see it – I don’t see it here.

Now that I’ve said that, can I begin tearing him a new asshole?

First of all, if your position is that there’s no point in putting any extra effort into inviting PoCs to the secular movement, why on EARTH would you title your blog post “Inviting Black Americans to the Secular Table”? This is exactly the opposite of your conclusion. It would be like me titling this post “Derek Miller has a really good point”. Mr. Miller refers to a session he attended at a secular student conference wherein the presenter discusses the fact that there are a large number of challenges that are unique to the black community, and that there may not be a surefire way of targeting recruitment to black students. There may be some truth to that (I don’t agree, but what do I know?), but the conclusion to that argument in either case is not ‘so we should stop trying’. It means not only that our recruitment efforts can stand to be refined, but also that the issues that we focus on need to change.

Speaking to that last issue for a second – the secular community’s focus has been largely focussed on issues of church/state separation, scientific education, and general skepticism. These are fantastic and crucially important topics. They are topics that I care deeply and passionately about. However, they are also rather esoteric and highfalutin topics of interest that don’t really track with the general public. As I try to do every day on the pages of this blog, I think we can apply the same principles of skepticism and secular humanism to topics like poverty, justice, employment, politics… things that are far more relevant to the average person, particularly the average black American. Throw in discussing racism as a priority for the secular movement and you’re probably far more likely to appeal to members of minority groups, for whom those are constantly relevant topics in a palpable sense. Make the mountain come to Mohammed, so to speak.

Third, Mr. Miller’s position completely neglects the success that the atheist/secular/skeptic/freethinker movement(s) has had in making inroads with women and LGBT folks. Now more than ever, embracing feminism and pro-gay humanism is part of the central identity of this movement. This didn’t happen by accident, or because we made secularism super-nice for all people equally, it’s because we buckled down and actively changed the way we talk about those issues. We stopped ignoring them, and instead grabbed them as banner issues to attract women and gays/lesbians/transpeople to the movement. It is due to purposeful and targeted effort on behalf of people within the secular movement that we see a very different demographic makeup today than we did 10 years ago. Mr. Miller would prefer, it seems, to throw his hands helplessly in the air and completely ignore that success.

Finally, and most importantly (hence the title of this post), it is clear from his response that Mr. Miller has not been listening at all to people who are talking about the challenges of attracting minority members to secularism. While we have not yet reached the prominence that feminists have (and even they are fighting and scrambling to establish their legitimacy, making huge successes as they do), we are out there and constantly advocating real, concrete methods of increasing diversity. Mr. Miller’s post completely fails to even pay lip service to any of those, including the person who runs the blog his post went up at. Nothing says “I’m not listening” quite like saying “there’s nothing we can do to solve this problem.”

It would have been an entirely different situation if Mr. Miller had said, for example, “there are issues within the black community that the secular community cannot fix”, or “I’m not sure how to attract minority members, so I’m going to focus my efforts on making it more attractive to everyone”. That is not at all what he said. What he said is “no effort is needed to attract members of minority groups, so that’s that”. He’s ignorant, he’s wrong, and he’s clearly not listening.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

5 Exploring the alternative

August 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · critical thinking · forces of stupid · health · medicine · skepticism

I live in Vancouver. Vancouver is home to quite a bit of what is wildly-inaccurately called “alternative medicine”. What people think they mean by this term is medical treatments that fall outside of the conventional combination of surgery, pharmaceuticals, and other forms of medicine that one expects to find in a hospital. Some even fancy these treatments as operating in a different medical paradigm – an entirely new way of looking at the human body and human health.

The truth is that “alternative” medicine has been around forever – it’s how we treated illness before we understood anything about immunology, biology, biochemistry, physics… basically it’s what we did while we were all idiots. Apparently some of us are still wedded to our historical idiocy, and are promoting this prescientific bafflegab under the label of “alternative”. However, there’s nothing alternative about it – it’s just the stuff that doesn’t qualify as real medicine.

People here in North America don’t seem to appreciate this line of reasoning. They accuse people who recognize the importance of basing our health care decisions on scientific evidence of being “closed-minded” and “reductionist”. This is an inaccurate characterization, since the whole principle of the scientific method requires open-mindedness and evaluation of truth based solely on observed phenomena. However, cloaked in a certainty borne of smug arrogance (“science doesn’t know everything – there are other ways to know things”), people readily flock to nonsense ‘treatments’ like reiki, homeopathy, acupuncture, reflexology, and a whole host of others.

However, there are millions of people who turn to these ‘alternative’ therapies because they can’t get actual medicine:

Ignoring the red-and-white danger sign, Sri Mulyati walks slowly to the train tracks outside Indonesia’s bustling capital, lies down and stretches her body across the rails to seek electric therapy. Like the nearly dozen others lined up along the track, the 50-year-old diabetes patient has all but given up on doctors and can’t afford the expensive medicines they prescribe. In her mind, it is only option left. “I’ll keep doing this until I’m completely cured,” said Mulyati, twitching visibly as an oncoming passenger train sends an extra rush of current racing through her body.

Side effects may include headaches, nausea, cramps, and being crushed by a motherfucking train. It is sad to see that a complete lack of a social safety net has resulted in conditions being this bad (are you paying attention Americans? Republican North Party?). It’s stuff like this that lights the fire under me to keep defending a well-run and publicly-funded health care system.

Back to my original point though. I challenge anyone who promotes ‘alternative medicines’ to explain why this particular therapy is stupid, but your treatment of choice isn’t. For those promoting science-based medicine, this task is easy: rigorous examination of patients reveals that those that lie on train tracks to cure their diabetes experience the same rate of cure as those that pursue homeopathy, reiki, crystals, ‘distance healing’, and whatever other nonsense term you’d like to throw out there.

If you’re not of a mind to call this therapy stupid and think that there’s something to it, then I really have to question your sanity. These are people risking their lives for a cure that not only doesn’t work, but can’t possibly work. Diabetes is not a condition of the nervous system. Electrical shocks would have no effect on the ability of the pancreas to produce its own insulin. The only thing that repeated and prolonged shocks might do is the same kind of effect you see in electroconvulsive therapy – massive release of endorphins and neurotransmitters, causing temporary feelings of euphoria. It would certainly explain the types of testimonials available in the article:

But Mulyati insists it provides more relief for her symptoms — high-blood pressure, sleeplessness and high cholesterol — than any doctor has since she was first diagnosed with diabetes 13 years ago.

Illness is a complex and multifaceted concept. I am entirely willing (and so is the medical community) to grant that there is a psychological role to all disease. This doesn’t mean anything quite so Chopra-riffic as being able to think yourself well from cancer, but it does suggest that management of any kind of illness requires an understanding of patient psychology. Anyone who can tap into a patient psychologically can provide “relief” of a certain kind, but that doesn’t do anything to treat the underlying biophysical problem.

Then again, some problems are not exactly biophysical:

The Philippine government has warned against using geckos to treat various diseases, including Aids and cancer, saying the traditional and common practice across southeast Asia could put the ill at greater risk. A Philippine health department statement said on Friday that the use of geckos as treatments had no scientific basis and could be dangerous because patients might not seek proper treatment for their diseases. “This is likely to aggravate their overall health and put them at greater risk,” it said. Treatments for asthma are easily available and affordable, while there are antiviral drugs to control the progress of HIV, the statement added.

Sometimes the problems are more deeply entrenched than even an adequately-funded health care system can address. Proponents of ‘alternative medicine’ often point to the age and popularity of their nonsense as evidence that it must work. After all, the reasoning goes, why would people stick with something that doesn’t make you better? Surely people are inherently rational and will abandon bogus medical intervention once they have been shown not to work. As difficult a time as alt-med types have with evidence, it seems to point in the opposite direction of this hypothesis.

And sure enough, just like in the Phillippines, there are always those who are hovering around the crowd of desperate sick people, circling like vultures and waiting for an opportunity to make a quick buck. The problem is that there will always be hucksters and charlatans who are more interested in making money than making people feel better. Worse, there are those that honestly believe they are helping, but who don’t bother to follow up or investigate their ‘patients’ longer than it takes to pocket their fee and hear a testimonial.

This is a problem that can be addressed only in part by legislation – we can’t really legislate people into rationality. It is for this reason that I am a partisan skeptic: we need to be actively promoting the ideals of basing our decision-making on scientific evidence, rather than simply saying “well people are going to do what they want.” This kind of arch-liberal hands-off cowardice is laying out the path for more abuse, fraud, and ultimately preventable deaths.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

4 Race transforming: more than meets the eye

August 9, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · culture · First Nations · privilege · race · racism

This post was intended to go up on Monday. My apologies for the past month of shakiness. I am hoping to see things settle down in the next couple of weeks.

I left a somewhat cryptic message for you on Monday:

I want to remind people that it’s not okay to dress up as a First Nations person. While it might be a totally cute costume, it’s incredibly disrespectful to wear a feathered headdress and “war paint” to a bar, particularly if you’re going to forgo a shirt for simply a bra, get up on stage and sing a song about fucking guys in exchange for alcohol.

Some of you inquired as to what exactly I was talking about. It seemed like an oddly-specific caution to give – who would actually do something like this? Well, I can report with more than a little sighing and eye-rolling that this is something that I witnessed on Sunday night. A duo of women who called what they were doing “parody” got up on stage at the open mic I host with my band and did some rapping that was offensive not only because of how bad it was, but because of how they were dressed while performing. I mentioned to their friends that they might want to let these ladies know that what they’re doing is incredibly racist – the response was “well she was given that headdress as a gift from a First Nations person.”

A reader contacted me by e-mail to ask a follow-up question about my ‘positive stereotypes’ post last week:

…do you think the desirability of full lips and ample bottoms should be discouraged in the white community? (Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, etc.) I understand how it could be problematic- that these women made a feature that typically “belongs” to a minority group suddenly desirous when the minority group has had it for many years without it being remarked or noticed. Yet, are physical features different than culture theft?

I sent a reply along the lines that features on their own aren’t necessarily the problem – it’s when those features are racialized (like having “a black girl ass”) that I start to get uncomfortable. Reducing members of minority groups to sexual characteristics is incredibly dehumanizing. While that’s enough of a reason to be suspicious of that kind of fetishization, there was a larger issue that I felt deserved some discussion.

Another reader sent me an e-mail asking for my response to a blog post he had written:

On August 3rd, I came across a news report on MSNBC about Quera Pruitt, a Black student suing her old high school over a homecoming celebration known as “Wigger Wednesday” by students while she attended.

The story in question concerns a school in Minnesota where the student body held a day when the student body was supposed to dress up as “wiggers” – a contraction of the words “white” and “nigger”. I pointed out that above and beyond my objections to using the inherently-racist word “wigger”, it was an event that by definition excludes any student that isn’t white, since there is already a word for a black person that “dresses like a nigger”. Even beyond that, though, there’s another problem that his discussion missed that I think is salient.

All three of these examples speak to an issue that I have alluded to before but never made explicit: race transforming. That is, dressing up or in another way appropriating the hallmarks of another ethnocultural group. I want to first be clear about what I’m not talking about. I am not talking about making an effort to participate in the practices of another group, or trying to incorporate the traditions of another group into your daily life. I think it’s great when people break out of their cultural silos, particularly when it comes to innovating new types of music or food (yum!). Provided that your participation is respectful and you engage in due diligence about the context of whatever tradition you’re involved in, then go nuts.

When I talk about ‘race transforming’, I am talking about taking an image or feature that is specifically associated with one group, and divorcing it of its context. There are a variety of reasons why people do this. In the case of the ladies at the open mic, I guess they thought it was sexy – completely ignoring the fact that those headdresses aren’t just a fashion accessory and have deep cultural significance (to say nothing of the sexualization of the “squaw” image that flies insultingly in the face of the disproportionately high rates of sexual abuse faced by First Nations women). In the case of “black girl asses” or “Puerto Rican eyes” it’s usually intended as some kind of compliment, but is inappropriate for reasons I discussed in my post last week. In the case of “wigger Wednesday” it’s intentional mockery of an already-marginalized group – playing up their poverty for laughs.

The other side of this issue is the fact that while the rappers can slip back into their Lululemon and American Apparel, Scarlett Johansson is a blonde bombshell, and the Minnesota students will go back to being just regular students once they doff their basketball jerseys and chains, the groups they are lampooning have no such recourse. First Nations women have to deal with the double whammy of being sexualized as women and as First Nations people, regardless of what they say, do or wear. Black women might have great asses, but those ‘positive’ features also come alongside a whole host of decidedly-negative stereotypes about black women that are intrinsically-tied to skin colour. “Wiggers” might be comical, but when dressing that way in earnest makes you a target for police profiling and not dressing like that makes you a social outcast, you’re stuck in a bit of a Catch-22.

Of course, this entire line of reasoning assumes that people actually bother to take the time to sit, reflect, and listen to the points of view of other groups. By and large, anyone who thinks that these behaviours/attitudes are acceptable aren’t the kind to really give it a whole lot of thought. They have the ability to ignore the racial marginalization of other groups (gosh, if only there was a word for that), and when confronted about their behaviour they usually pivot to blaming their critics of being “too sensitive”. Perhaps the problem is not an excess of sensitivity, but exactly the opposite.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

2 Movie Friday: Not-so-good books

August 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · ethics · movie · religion

One of my favourite commenters showed up again this week to rehash an old battle – where do atheists get their morality from? The general argument is that while theists can point to a source of absolute morality, those that don’t believe in a god/gods must exist in a morass where all acts are permitted. Of course I’ve skewered this argument as fallacy before – atheist morality comes from a variety of overlapping sources. The important take-home message of that post was that saying something is ethical because a big book says so is not sufficient moral instruction because it doesn’t tell you what to do when it comes to stuff not in the book, but there’s an important piece that I missed: the book itself is ethically incoherent.

Qualiasoup helps me illustrate this point:

I find it unbelievably wearisome to hear people try and wave away the atrocities of their religious traditions by saying “we can’t understand YahwAlladdha’s plan” or “YahwAlladdha isn’t bound by human morality”. All you’ve done when you say that is announce that you have no idea what you’re talking about, and that I can start ignoring you. If you wish to claim perfect morality for your deity, and then say that humans are incapable of understanding that deity, then you’ve just admitted that you don’t have any idea what ‘moral’ means and that it’s fundamentally unknowable.

We can make intelligent statements about morality and justice without resorting to religious sources. We can clearly identify suffering and work to minimize it. We can see inequities and work to balance them. We can stop abuses of power at the expense of the powerless. None of these things require us to have any supernatural beliefs whatsoever.

But even beyond that, the source from which the religious claim to assert their morals is more of a confused quagmire of permissibility than anything they could claim of atheists. The book itself is nonsensical and self-contradictory, often permitting things that even those that profess to believe in it would shrink away from. If those believers wish to claim only the things that work in a secular moral sense (as I do on occasion, but of course without the appeal to authority) then they are free to do so; what they are not free to do, however, is to claim that they follow the book absolutely.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

3 The negative side of ‘positive’ stereotypes

August 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · race · racism

Note: Even though this post is going up on Wednesday, this was originally intended as Monday’s ‘think piece’. My apologies for the fractured way I’ve been running this blog for the past month or so – it is summer and my priorities are temporarily shifted away from blogging and toward having fun outside. Once the weather cools off in September and my stream of couch-crashing pals abates, I will be back to normal.

There are a wide variety of stereotypes about different racial groups (a controversial statement, I know). Stereotypes represent our brain’s tendency to try and classify things as simply as possible, since individual processing of every individual object in the universe would be incredibly tiresome, and we’ve got shit to do. Racial groupings are no less (and probably more) prone to that kind of process, and as a result we have a plethora of stereotypical ideas that fall along racial lines. Many of these are obviously negative: Mexicans are lazy, Jews are cheap, black people are violent and prone to crime, white people can’t dance. We tend to abhor those stereotypes in polite company, even if we might happen to believe them in private (except maybe the one about white people not being able to dance – that one still seems okay to laugh about).

However, there are some stereotypes that we often think of as ‘positive’ in racial groups too. Black guys have big cocks and are naturally athletic; East-Asians are good at math; First Nations people have wisdom stemming from being ‘in tune with nature’. These are surely not intended as insults, but rather as complimentary facets of being a member of a given racial group. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having a large penis, right? Or being good at math? Or being well-attuned to the natural world? If anything, these are positive traits that we envy and wish we could have for ourselves.

My problem with these ‘positive’ stereotypes comes from two different sources. First, when one takes the time to examine the implications and history behind some of these stereotypes, it becomes abundantly clear that they are not a net positive for the stereotyped group. Second, they are still products of the same racism as the negative stereotypes, and as it says in the book of Matthew, “…a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” (I draw a brief distinction here for humour derived from racism that is specifically intended to mock the absurdity of racist beliefs – jokes do not necessarily have to be completely clean.)

So let’s take a look at on of the myths I highlighted above: well-endowed black men. My position is that, despite the fact that this aspect is not obviously negative (I am sure you’ve all heard far more negative things said about black men), it is not complimentary and does damage.

Black men and sexual reduction

During the era of American slavery, black men were inspected like livestock before purchase. Soon-to-be slaves were evaluated not only by their physical statue and health – a proxy for how valuable they were for labour – but also for reproductive characteristics. Unlike purchasing other farm equipment (and once again like livestock), African slaves could do something incredibly lucrative for their owners: create more slaves. In theory, with only a handful of male and female specimens, a single slave-owner could breed generation after generation of new slaves, each saleable at a profit much larger than the cost of feeding. Africans with obvious sexual advantages were highly prized, since they would produce offspring more prodigiously.

After emancipation (well, actually well before emancipation, but let’s not quibble) there was a great hysteria within the white community about black men raping white women. In fact, every time a white woman was caught having sex with a black man, she claimed it was rape – a most unusual coincidence I’m sure you’ll agree. The image of the savage black rapist – his over-sized member swinging in the breeze and becoming engorged at even the thought of sexual violence against tender, innocent, white flesh – became ingrained in the cultural psyche as the essence of black masculinity.

In our modern, post-racial era, we see the same fetishizing of black sexuality in media. Because of the metamorphosis of this myth into a positive aspect (somehow), we are bombarded with jokes about black sexual prowess, particularly the impressive size of the penis. Rap music has added more than its fair share to this meme. I’m not sure how many of you watch porn, but if you do, I challenge you to find a black actor in porn that doesn’t have a comically large penis. Black men are still reduced to a caricature – mindless animalistic creatures whose sole purpose is sex. While it’s never stated so explicitly as that, it nevertheless crops up repeatedly when the meme is examined with a broader view.

I should, and in fact must take a moment to point out that the sexualization of Africans is not relegated solely to men. Black women are slandered and derogated in equal measure (perhaps more, due to the intersection of being black and female), and much of it happens at the hands of black men. The recent obsession we have had with big butts and lips is not an accident – it’s an outcropping of this same reduction of African women to sexual objects, as well as a reaction to the ultra-Aryan standards of beauty seen in the 80s and early 90s. While black men can accept much of the blame for the propogation of this attitude, its genesis can be found in the same cultural conception of Africans as sexual creatures rather than people.

It’s also important to recognize the harmful effects that our historically-based North American perspective on those of African descent has on our modern-day perspective on Africans. While severe poverty, lack of opportunity, poor education, lack of domestic social infrastructure, and international apathy are causing a major AIDS epidemic across many parts of the continent, the narrative from popular culture is that Africans are fucking themselves to death. If only those rutting animals could keep it in their pants for 5 minutes, their problems would be solved, right?

I recognize that I am asking a lot of you, dear reader. I’m seemingly extrapolating a lot of historical context from something as innocuous as ‘black guys have big dicks’, and am asking you to see something that seems fairly neutral as being actively negative and harmful. Maybe you’re not ready to come along with me on that point just yet (you will, just give it some time and thought). For those holdouts, I will take this opportunity to point out that whether neutral or actively negative, racism is not something to be encouraged. When we propagate racial stereotypes, however ‘positive’ we may find them, we are engaging in the same kind of nonsensical heuristic use of the same time as those who commit racist acts that we oppose. Individuals should not be judged based on their ethnic background – not because it isn’t nice, but because it’s very rarely the case that any useful predictions can be made from those classifications. Reducing someone to a societally-defined label is a recipe for disaster, even if you associate that label with positive things.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 Evidently ecstatic

August 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · crime · critical thinking · law · police · politics

There was once a time when I could have been accurately described as ‘pro-police’. I recognized that in order for a society to progress, we needed to have some way of enforcing law. A society without laws quickly degenerates into violence, and it was thanks to the tireless efforts of police officers and other members of the justice system that we were such a peaceful place to live. I would openly and unashamedly take the police’s side when debates came up in our high school (we had a pair of police officers on constant patrol on our campus). However, as I’ve become a bit more aware of the world and the nuances of the argument, my knee-jerk support for the police has diminished quite dramatically. While I have not yet gone quite to the extent of labeling police indiscriminately as a gang of threatening thugs, events like the travesty that was the G20 summit are moving me in that direction.

I still believe in the principle of rule of law, and I doubt that will ever change. However, I no longer see police as being reliable arbitrators of law. Again and again, we see examples not only of police abusing their power to circumvent justice for themselves, but of such abuse actually undermining justice for others:

The Richmond trial of five men accused of running a multi-million dollar ecstasy lab has been thrown out of court because of what a provincial court judge says were repeated Charter of Rights violations. In January 2007, Mounties uncovered nearly 100 kilograms of ecstasy and nine pill presses in two Richmond homes following a year-long investigation. Tin Lik Ho, Qing Hou, Shao Wei Huang, Yi Feng Kevin Li and Kai Lai Kyle Zhou were all charged with producing ecstasy and possessing ecstasy for the purpose of trafficking. But in a 30-page provincial court judgment, Judge Paul Meyers issued a scathing indictment of the RCMP’s handling of the case. “The police officers who were in charge of this investigation, from start to finish, violated so many Charter rights of the accused persons, that one might have thought that the investigation took place before the Charter of Rights had been enacted,” Meyers wrote.

Asking a conservative what this story represents will yield a very different response than if you ask someone who actually understands what she/he is talking about. A conservative commentator will point out that this is a prime example of the “hug a thug” mentality that liberals have – prioritizing the rights of criminals over the rights of decent, hard-working Canadians. This judge is clearly a liberal activist that doesn’t care about seeing criminals punished for their crimes, or of drugs spreading through communities where they destroy the lives of the young and innocent.

Someone with a slightly more realistic understanding of the legal process will recognize that this is the sign of a healthy legal system (the abuses of the police notwithstanding). Undoubtedly, these men are dead to rights – the drugs were found in their homes along with the method of manufacture. This was not the case of a handful of pills trying to make a quick score, or some guys who just really really like to get high – these guys were mid-level traffickers of a restricted substance. They absolutely belong in jail. However, in their handling of the case, the RCMP decided that their apparent guilt justified shredding the charter. While judges regularly look the other way for slight abrogations of legal rights in clear cases of guilt, Judge Meyers’s report details the extent to which these particular officers decided that they were above the law.

I am the law! — BC's RCMP reveal their new recruitment mascot

The reason why this ruling is good is because there are countries in the world in which those accused of crimes are treated as already-guilty. We don’t like those countries – they tend to use that justice system to lock up political dissidents. Neither the presumption of innocence nor the presumption of guilt will result in a perfect system; however, one will ensure that fewer innocent people are imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. We can always produce evidence of guilt – evidence of innocence is almost impossible by definition.

More interestingly, it seems as though the slipshod method of being “tough on crime” actually creates more crime than it prevents:

What’s more interesting than the finding that drug prohibition causes gang-on-gang violence is our inability – or is it unwillingness? – to learn from repeated demonstrations of this connection. For some reason, we seem to think that what’s happening in northern Mexico – where drug-trafficking gangs are at war with each other and with the Mexican army – is somehow different from what’s happening in Winnipeg, where drug-trafficking gangs are at war with each other and with the Winnipeg Police Service. There is a difference in scale, to be sure, but not in kind. Drug prohibition enriches organized crime, and police crackdowns on drug suppliers provoke gang-on-gang violence over market share.

We know from abundant evidence in other counties that the kind of drug enforcement strategy we use in Canada is not particularly effective at actually reducing crime. This analysis from The Mark suggests that, to the contrary, it actually increases the rate of violent crime as market forces inexorably drive up demand whenever supply is interrupted. If we were trying to reduce crime, we’d change our strategy – we’d do what it took to actually protect the populace against its dangerous elements. However, it is clear that we are not interested in reducing crime, which raises the question of what it is we are trying to do.

It is when we betray the liberal principles of crime prevention and harm reduction that we begin to see the corporatization of law enforcement. For-profit law enforcement strategies only serve those who make profit from crime. If our interest is in doing whatever it takes to ‘punish’ criminals by locking them up, we’ll see more examples like the Richmond case where the rights of the people become a secondary interest to serving and upholding law enforcement’s sworn duty to protect and serve the people.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Page 43 of 67