Category: news

6 Movie Friday: 14th and Webster

November 4, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · movie · news · police · politics

Last week I weighed in on police brutality committed during the Occupy Oakland protest movement. In the comments section, a bit of a dust-up occurred between a reader from Oakland who thought there was blame to be placed on both sides, and another who objected saying that police brutality of this kind is never justified. Other things were said as well.

The boyfriend of the Oakland reader helpfully provided me with this excellent video that he shot the night after the clash.

In it, he explores the city and gives a (fairly) neutral account of what’s happening on the ground. Anyone looking for sex or violence will be sadly disappointed, but if you appreciate good tunes and documentary looks at ongoing social movements, then this is definitely worth 20 minutes of your time.

As for me, my stance hasn’t changed. I support the Occupy Movement unequivocally, and while I recognize that violence was committed on both sides of the protest, I am suspicious enough of police and the political system in the Bay Area that I am inclined to side with the protesters. Especially since the actions taken by police seem to have been illegal.

I can understand the frustration felt by people who want no part of the Occupy Movement. That frustration, however, does not translate into lack of legitimate purpose for the protest. We’re all going to have to be patient and wait for the process to work its way through. Better yet, we could get involved and help instead of tut-tutting from the sidelines.

Thanks go out to Clifford Brown III:
Brown Audio Solutions & Services
San Ramon, CA
http://www.brownaudio.com
http://www.thebrewingco.net
http://www.cbjazzfoundation.org

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8 This is what happens when you put a woman in charge

November 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · feminism · gender · good news · news · politics

One of the things that drives me absolutely squirrel-burying nuts about how we choose political leadership is the fact that those decisions get made based on our personal evaluations of the candidates. For some reason, we can’t separate the qualities necessary for effective policy-making from the qualities necessary for bowling. Our news cycles get clogged with personal flotsam about whether or not this candidate or that one is affable, is nice, wears the right clothes… whatever. I’m not saying that there aren’t some personal qualities that are also required for effective leadership – I’m sure consensus-building and interpersonal skills are a necessary component of getting policy made – but they are certainly not the whole bag.

The part that especially grinds my gears is that our interminable evaluations based on the same handful of largely meaningless characteristics gives us, predictably, the same kinds of candidates all the time: people who are great at campaigning and lousy and governing. Because of deeply-entrenched attitudes about women, it also tends to give us a abundance of male candidates. Incidentally, because of similar attitudes about visible minorities, they tend to be white, but that’s a conversation for another time. This is, to be blunt about it, our society voluntarily shackling itself. While I am sure there are many white men who are incredibly competent politicians, I do not believe that political leadership is their exclusive province. Having more women in leadership positions probably makes us pass better policy.

Maybe you disagree with me. But you know who’s probably on my side? Germany and the rest of Europe: … Continue Reading

5 How do you know when you’re wrong?

October 25, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · conservativism · crime · forces of stupid · law · news · politics

Well there’s no definitive answer to this, but it’s a pretty safe bet you are if you’re considered too conservative for Texas:

Conservatives in the United States’ toughest crime-fighting jurisdiction — Texas — say the Harper government’s crime strategy won’t work. “You will spend billions and billions and billions on locking people up,” says Judge John Creuzot of the Dallas County Court. “And there will come a point in time where the public says, ‘Enough!’ And you’ll wind up letting them out.” Adds Representative Jerry Madden, a conservative Republican who heads the Texas House Committee on Corrections, “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ’em, I guarantee you they will come. They’ll be filled, OK? Because people will send them there. “But, if you don’t build ’em, they will come up with very creative things to do that keep the community safe and yet still do the incarceration necessary.”

I’ve spoken before about the terrible clusterfuck of ideas that is the incoming omnibus crime bill. It’s a mishmash of ideas, some of which are good, most of which are bad. Legal authorities, criminal law enforcement, opposition MPs, pretty much everyone who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to crime, they’ve all said that it’s a bad idea. Then again, our mighty ruling party has demonstrated repeatedly that it is relatively indifferent to outside criticism.

Until, apparently, they went to Texas. It’s not a trivial issue – arguments that work in Texas work for the Republican North party’s base. If there was anywhere that this type of bill should receive a warm welcome, it’s in “common sense” Texas. The only criticism one would be likely to expect is that Canada’s crime bill, coming from the great socialist north, would be seen as a bit “soft on crime”.

The problem is that Texas has about a 10-year crystal ball look into the future to know that this kind of approach just doesn’t work: … Continue Reading

3 Learning from South Africa’s new rich

October 18, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · culture · good news · history · politics · poverty · race · racism

So this morning I announced that I was going to go into greater depth into the story of the rising wealthy class in South Africa.

There was a lot of fertile ground in that story, and some important other issues that I think deserve a more generous portion of the spotlight than I could devote in an anti-poverty piece. … Continue Reading

2 Occupy Vancouver – a second perspective

October 17, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · First Nations · history · news · politics · privilege

This morning I alluded to a fact about the “Occupy Vancouver” movement, indeed the Occupy movement as a whole, that has not yet pierced the popular narrative – the fact that we are choosing to ‘occupy’ land that is already occupied in a very real way. Vancouver, the city I love, is basically existing in a perpetual and overblown state of “squatter’s rights”, wherein the land is governed by people who have no legal claim to it. The irony, therefore, is that the act of standing up for the little guy is happening on land that is owned by the littlest guys in society, by the same people who have a hand in that group’s oppression.

I consider myself a First Nations ally, in the same way that I consider myself a LGBT ally or a women’s rights ally – I am aware that there are serious problems about which I have a superficial understanding. I come to this particular position by recognizing the vast and numerous similarities between Canada’s First Nations and the struggle for mainstream acceptance of black people. My support for the recognition of their rights is, in my mind, no different than my fight for equality for myself. My role as an ally is simple: to advocate when I can, and listen when I am being spoken to. In that vein, I would like to offer this signal boost to what I think is a phenomenal article about some of the ‘forgotten’ issues underlying Occupy Vancouver:

… Continue Reading

14 Religious: free, dumb

October 12, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · forces of stupid · law · news · politics · religion

There are two conflicting definitions of the phrase “religious freedom”. The correct definition is that a person should have complete liberty to believe as they wish – perhaps “freedom of belief” is a better phrase. The stupid definition is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, so long as it’s licensed by their religion, and that the law cannot interfere with that practice. Of course it’s trivially easy to pick apart exactly why that second definition is so stupid – sincere religious belief can justify all kinds of illegal and immoral acts. Interpreting “religious freedom” in this way is dangerous.

Here’s a little factoid for all you Yanks about my great country: we’re really not all that different from Americans. I will probably lose my maple syrup license for saying so, but aside from some historical differences that continue to inform our national identity, Canadian society contains all the same elements that American society does. At the moment, this means that our version of the theocrats are in power. Now, to be sure, our theocrats aren’t nearly as terrifying as theirs are, but they’re into the same wacky stuff.

Oddly enough, whereas the USA has its vaunted (and currently besieged) Constitutional separation of church and state, Canada has a Charter that explicitly enshrines the involvement of religious institutions in federal law. I call this ‘odd’ not simply because I think it’s a bad idea, and I do, but because it’s rarely been an issue. Canadians have, for the most part, unconcerned with arguments over religious involvement in public life. This, however, is changing under our current Parliament, and has been steadily ramping up over the past decade or so. More and more, we begin to see nonsense like this: … Continue Reading

8 Big fight, little impact

October 11, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · hate · news · politics · race · racism

My father, who is a retired social worker (and a phenomenal photographer) used to have this book on his bookshelf called “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (and it’s All Small Stuff)“. I never read it, but you can pretty much infer the contents from the title. There are real, honest-to-spaghetti-monster problems in our lives, and it’s really easy to get bogged down by minutia. Spending our mental and emotional energy clearing the little things off our mental desktops saps our will to fight the big stuff.

Racism is a serious problem. It is a huge and seemingly-intractable problem, because of how pervasive and historically-rooted it is. In the past century, we’ve taken monumental steps to reduce the harms that it has done. While we can all take some pride in that work, what we cannot afford to be is complacent. We’ve won several battles, but the war is not over.

And sadly, we keep letting ourselves get distracted by stupid stuff like this: … Continue Reading

10 ¿Ustedes tambien, Mexico?

October 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · law · news · sex

In 18 months of blogging, I’ve only brought up abortion a handful of times (usually in service of a larger point). Today, for some reason, I’ve got two posts about it. Let’s hope there’s nothing Freudian about that…

I agree with Kavita Ramdas that empowering women is the key to making progress in society. I am sure this will garner me my fair share of dirty looks from a crowd of people who will see this as sexist against men – I am as immune to your looks as you are to rational argument. I join Christopher Hitchens in recognizing the cure for poverty as being “the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” A key component of such emancipation is the presence and defense of rights to abortion. However uncomfortable one might be with the idea, terminating unwanted pregnancy is part and parcel with recognizing a woman’s right to be reproductively autonomous. When women have the power to do with their bodies as they choose, the world becomes a better place for all of us.

Mexico doesn’t seem to recognize this: … Continue Reading

32 Anti-abortion or anti-contraception: pick one

October 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · forces of stupid · health · health care · news · politics · sex

One of my favourite bits of trivia about Christianity specifically is that the teachings attributed to Jesus say far more against hypocrisy than they do about sex. This, of course, does not seem to faze his ‘followers’ whose anti-sex crusade seems to be taking notes directly from Orwell (who are we kidding? They’ve never read Orwell). While the weird pre-occupation of the religious with sex is well-understood, this does not seem to dissuade the throngs of pious outrage from trying to interfere every time someone drops trou.

While we here in the north agonize with our southern cousins over the disgraceful erosion of that most sacred American ideal – the separation of church from state – a little known fact is that Canada has its own religious right that is intentionally mimicking the tactics of the “Moral Majority”. A bit of background before I launch into this news tidbit. More than a decade following the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade that found anti-abortion laws unconstitutional in the USA, Canada’s Supreme Court made its own finding that ~~no laws could be passed against abortion in Canada~~ the current abortion laws were similarly illegal (thanks to ibis3 for the correction). While Roe v. Wade was couched in the right of privacy enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, Canada’s court was a bit more explicit. It was ruled that anti-abortion laws violated the security of the person, as laid out in our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Most of this legalese is unimportant, particularly to those that don’t live in the USA or Canada, but bear with me.

Abortion has been, since then, a relative non-issue in Canada. Nobody has really brought a substantive case against abortion rights, and we don’t have nutjobs running doctors out of town (at least not any that make the news – if I’m wrong someone please tell me). However, the religious right – emboldened by a recently-elected majority government – have decided that if it’s fixed, break it: … Continue Reading

25 Another victory of evidence over ‘common sense’ in Canada

October 4, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · good news · health care · law · politics

There are few terms so intellectually offensive to me as ‘common sense‘. Every time someone invokes ‘common sense’ in an argument, I immediately stop listening to them. What they invariably mean is “I have no evidence to support my position, so I will substitute what I think is obvious”. The problem is that there is very little that is ‘common’ between people with different perspectives, and it very rarely makes any kind of ‘sense’. If you have an argument built from logical first principles, I will be happy to hear it; however, if it’s just based on your own particular handful of prejudices, please don’t waste my time.

It’s incredibly gratifying to see that even in this day and age where ‘common sense’ has become a mantra in our political and social life, we still see examples where evidence and reason win out:

Vancouver’s controversial Insite clinic can stay open, the Supreme Court said Friday in a landmark ruling. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that not allowing the clinic to operate under an exemption from drug laws would be a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court ordered the federal minister of health to grant an immediate exemption to allow Insite to operate. “Insite saves lives. Its benefits have been proven. There has been no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada during its eight years of operation,” the ruling said, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.

American liberals – our chief justice is a lady. U jelly?

A brief backgrounder – Vancouver is home to an unreal level of addiction and drug use. … Continue Reading

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