Category: news

0 We no longer have the Conservative Party of Canada

April 27, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · conservativism · crapitalism · news · politics

Once upon a time, Canada had two major political parties – Liberal and Conservative. In the mid-20th century the Conservative party re-branded itself as the Progressive Conservative Party. With its economic stance set somewhat toward the right and its social stance being somewhere in the middle of the road, it catered well to those Canadians who identified as ‘centrists’, and tended its garden on the political right fairly well. However, as the NDP rose to federal prominence, the Liberal party was forced to make a rightward drift. Enjoying national popularity and avoiding divisive issues, the federal Liberal party was able to lay claim to the political center.

Facing obsolescence, the Progressive Conservative dropped the “progressive” label and united with the newly-formed Reform party – a party catering exclusively to those in the right wing – forming the Conservative Party of Canada. Because the far right had been all but ignored by the major political parties, the CPC was able to capitalize on a stumble from the Liberals and form government. Their popular appeal rested firmly on walking a tightrope between “Progressive Conservatives” – those with a conservative economic viewpoint but a centrist social viewpoint, and “Reform Conservatives” – what would be called ‘values voters’ in the United States (as though liberals don’t have values).

The problem with the Conservative party is that their base is fractionated – those who are turned off by hardcore social policy, and those that are growing increasingly tired of being slept on while they try and impose hardcore social policy. Until now, the CPC maintained their solidarity by publicly claiming to be socially centrist, whilst simultaneously whispering promises to the more extreme fringes of their base. Now, it appears that this facade is slipping:

Saskatchewan Conservative candidate says the federal government has decided to cut funding to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, a decision he says was influenced by anti-abortion supporters. The decision on whether to fund the organization has not yet been announced. But Brad Trost, the incumbent candidate for Saskatoon-Humboldt, told the Saskatchewan ProLife Association’s annual convention last Saturday that anti-abortion supporters who signed petitions played a big role. In a recording of his speech, obtained by CBC News, Trost can be heard thanking those who had signed the petitions, saying his office was involved in spearheading the petition campaign along with other members of Parliament.

This is not an economic policy. Cutting funding to an international agency is a tiny drop in a much larger bucket. Canada’s foreign aid spending represents about 0.33% of GDP – falling far short of its pledge of 0.7%. Removing funding for one agency does not meaningfully reduce Canada’s budgetary deficit or national debt. Given the involvement of the anti-abortion lobby in this particular move, there is no conclusion one can reach other than the fact that this is an ideological move against abortion rather than anything that could be called economically conservative.

I won’t bother re-hashing all the arguments against defunding Planned Parenthood, except to say that the only thing this move accomplishes is to make it more difficult for people, particularly women, to get much-needed health care services. Abortions do not decrease when they are made illegal, and Planned Parenthood does not exclusively provide abortions – those kinds of services represent a tiny portion of a wide variety of health care procedures. But of course we are dealing with Conservatives here – facts and reality represent a similarly tiny portion of what informs their policy.

I’m not necessarily opposed to conservativism, although I do think it is a short-sighted and ultimately simplistic world view. Overdone conservatism, like overdone liberalism, can be incredibly destructive. However, a well-struck balance between the two opposite ideologies can move society forward in a sustainable and equitable manner. It is, therefore, with no small measure of sadness, that I am forced to announce the death of the Conservative Party of Canada. While Conservative in name, this party has revealed itself to be nothing other than the northern branch of the Republican Party of the United States.

The ugliest, most small-minded and hateful aspects of humanity are on full and proud display in the Republican party, and the Republican Party North (formerly the CPC) is pinning its future on the idea that Canadians are as stupid and short-sighted as our southern neighbours. Given that the CPC is polling around 40% (which, in Canada’s political system, is a majority – it’s because of the metric system), it appears to be a safe bet.

So if you’re Canadian and you’re not planning on voting in the upcoming election, or if you’re planning on voting Conservative in the upcoming election, please don’t tell me. With things like this happening in my country, I’m not sure I can maintain my trademark personal evaluation from ideological. If you’re so lazy that you can’t be bothered to stand up against the forces of stupid long enough to write an ‘X’ on a piece of paper, or so blinded by sound bytes and easy answers that you think that the Conservatives have anything resembling policies that will have a positive effect on the lives of Canadians, then I’m not sure I can know that about you without taking it personally.

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2 Well I’ll be…

April 26, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · good news · LGBT · religion

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – something will happen that catches me completely by surprise:

A [city] church has voted to stop signing marriage licenses in protest of the state of [state]’s denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples. Douglass Boulevard Christian Church made the unanimous vote Sunday. The Rev. Derek Penwell, senior minister of the church, said it’s unjust that heterosexual but not homosexual couples can benefit from marital rights involving inheritance, adoption, hospital visits and filing joint tax returns, saving thousands in annual taxes.

A Christian church defies not only public opinion but state law to support gay rights. In what bastion of freedom-hating, Democratic liberalism did this happen? Oregon? Massachusetts? Connecticut?

Kentucky.

In 2004, Kentucky voters passed an amendment to the state constitution by a three-to-one margin, banning same-sex marriage and unions and reinforcing what had already been state law. Large religious groups were among the drivers of that amendment, with endorsements from leaders in Kentucky’s two largest denominations — the Kentucky Baptist Convention and the Catholic Conference of Kentucky. The state’s largest congregation, Southeast Christian Church, ran an advertising campaign before the referendum, promoting traditional marriage. Some congregations, however, support the right of same-sex couples to marry and will perform same-sex ceremonies in their services, even though they have no legal standing in Kentucky.

While the gesture is symbolic, it certainly injects some measure of dissonance into the narrative that you can’t be a good Christian and support gay rights. Especially in the American South, with its deeply-entrenched conservative Christian tradition – and the mountains of bigotry that go along with that – someone taking a stand against the tide of anti-gay hatred is a rare and welcome sight indeed.

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4 Good Idea; Bad Idea – the gay edition

April 26, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · forces of stupid · gender · hate · LGBT · news · religion

And now it’s time for another Good Idea; Bad Idea

Good Idea: Providing counselling and other support to gay kids to reduce their risk of killing themselves

Several international studies have found higher attempted suicide rates among lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) youth compared with heterosexuals. Overall, suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth aged 15 to 24, researchers say. The study in Monday’s issue of the journal Pediatrics found LBG youth living in a social environment more supportive of gays and lesbians were 20 per cent less likely to attempt suicide than LGB youth living in environments that were less supportive.

I am not gay, nor have I ever had any serious questions about my sexuality or gender. Due to what I hope is just a weird set of coincidences (rather than a subconscious bigotry), I’ve never had any close gay friends. As a result, it’s difficult for me to truly empathize with gay youth. Insofar as being a young person sucks in general, I can connect to my own struggles to establish my identity and my feelings of alienation, but to add to that being a gay kid in a society that still treats being gay as an “alternative lifestyle” rather than simply the way some people are (although, to be sure, this is changing rapidly) – it’s got to be extra tough to be a gay kid.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that living in an environment where you constantly have to question and hide a part of who you are – from friends, from family, to even have to deny it to yourself – makes gay kids more likely to turn to self-harm and suicide. Conversely, being in a place where being gay is seen as just another facet of a person’s identity – like their race, height, sense of humour, whatever – must take an enormous amount of pressure off of gay kids. It would, at the very least, remove some of the alienation and feeling of “otherness” that can come from a non-supportive environment. At its best, it helps balance out the hateful speech coming from various corners of society – equating homosexuality with unforgivable sin or some sort of deep character flaw.

Bad Idea: Sending gay kids to correctional camps to ‘fix’ them

Sixty-six Muslim schoolboys in Malaysia identified by teachers as effeminate have been sent to a special camp for counselling on masculine behaviour. They are undergoing four days of religious and physical education. An education official said the camp was meant to guide the boys back “to a proper path in life”.

Ah yes, we can always count on Malaysia to drag humanity kicking and screaming back into the dark ages – when men were men, women were women, and fags were persecuted and killed for having the temerity to try and live like everyone else does. It is stuff like this that makes me cringe any time someone raises the idea of promoting “traditional gender roles”. For many people, there is no conflict between how they behave naturally and what tradition would dictate. However, there are many others that strain against the expectations of historically-established behaviours. This isn’t simply a matter of education or conditioning; forcing yourself to rebel against instinct – especially in something as fundamental as sexuality, a characteristic that underpins the entire human experience – can be incredibly disruptive.

Picking young kids out of school and sending them to gender re-education camps as a way of stamping out ‘teh ghey’ is about as egregious a breach of trust and duty of care as you can get. The news report suggests that the children are attending voluntarily, but you’ve got to question how ‘voluntary’ it could possibly be when you’re being singled out by your teachers and coerced by your parents for being a little too queer. Of course we know at this point that religious education is almost useless in changing gay kids straight, and gay people can also be in typically “manly” professions – education has nothing to do with it. This is simply psychological abuse perpetrated against those who are the most vulnerable.

I do pick on Christianity for a variety of reasons – chief among them being that I am most familiar with it, and it is constantly all around me. However, for all its flaws as a movement, there are at least some moderate/liberal elements within Christianity that help balance out the more destructive factions. Islam, at least outside of North America, doesn’t have anything that approaches a moderating force capable of balancing out such blatant hatred and stupidity. However, to be fair to the good people of Malaysia, there does appear to be some backlash within the country:

But the women’s minister, Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, said singling out these children based on perceived feminine mannerisms was traumatising and harmful to their mental health. The camp violates the Child Act, which protects children without prejudice, she said.

Once again, it is the women to the rescue. This should help clear up any potential confusion over why I, a straight, cissexual (identifying with the gender into which I was born), man would spend so much time talking about women’s issues and gay issues – because I am not completely insulated from what happens to other people in the world. Despite the various flavours of privilege I might enjoy, I’m still acutely aware that not everyone sees the world through the same lens I do.

When we fail to protect those that don’t count themselves among the majority, we invite those same to fall through the cracks of our neglect.

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4 Axioms, beliefs, and ideas

April 21, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · news · skepticism

I recently had dinner with a good friend, in which we discussed (among other things) conversations that I’ve had with people whose world views differ sharply from my own. We were not referring to people with different opinions on things – that is an unavoidable consequence of being around other people. What we were talking about were people whose entire view of how the world works is different. Imagine for a moment someone starting with the mindset of a creationist asked to explain some geological finding – while to the rest of us the existence of a 5 million year-old fossil would be sufficient proof that the world isn’t just a few thousand years of age, the creationist would be looking for the flaw in the dating technique – not out of an effort to overtly distort the truth that they simply wish to deny, but because their fundamental understanding of the world does not permit fossils that old.

My friend questioned the value of bothering to discuss issues with people like this. After all, he suggested, there can be no meeting of the minds or resolution of differences in opinion in this kind of conversation. Inevitably the dispute will drill down to the fundamental differences, which cannot be resolved in most cases. Someone who believes, a priori, that the universe has to be 6-10,000 years old simply cannot accept contradictory evidence. Someone who thinks that a zygote is the same as a grown human person is never going to see abortion as anything other than murder. Someone who thinks that government is the source of social problems (as opposed to a potential solution to those problems) will never agree that affirmative action policies can benefit society.

My response to my friend was that a) I enjoy the challenge of a spirited debate, and b) I used the arguments as a whetstone to sharpen my rhetorical skills, and as a probe to find flaws and holes in my own ideas and beliefs that ought to be addressed. However, in our discussion, he raised a word that I have been chewing on ever since – axioms. I have spoken before (in years past) about the need to separate one’s evaluation of a person with the evaluation of their ideas – in a nutshell while I may disagree with your ideas, that doesn’t mean anything about how I feel about you as a person. It is of crucial importance to separate these two types of evaluation, because failure to do so is the first step towards demonizing and dehumanizing those who have different beliefs – a frightening path that can lead to serious abuses.

However, when your beliefs are axiomatic – self-evidently true with no need for evidence – such separation becomes impossible. Not only that, but no amount of contradictory evidence or reasoned argument will penetrate the force field of your confidence. And then you start to make the same mistakes over again:

Ontario is one step closer to the legalization of marijuana after the Ontario Superior Court struck down two key parts of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit the possession and production of pot. The court declared the rules that govern medical marijuana access and the prohibitions laid out in Sections 4 and 7 of the act “constitutionally invalid and of no force and effect” on Monday, effectively paving the way for legalization…

Anti-drug action groups and others against the legalization of marijuana have said legalizing marijuana could lead to widespread use and increase crime rates.

If you’re axiomatically wedded to the mantra “drugs are bad”, then this might make sense. After all, if the force of law is the only thing keeping ordinary citizens from becoming drug addicts, then relaxing the legislation around drug prohibition would result in higher rates of drug use. However, since the only real barrier to accessing drugs is how much money you have and how badly you want the drugs, making them legal doesn’t really put a dent in use. The fact is that most people who want to use drugs are already using them – marijuana particularly.

However, this jives with the axiom, so it cannot be true. Despite the evidence we have from places like Portugal and Amsterdam (and my own city of Vancouver), we are still spending billions every year punishing drug users rather than finding ways to reduce the harms of drugs.

And we find other ways to spend billions on our axioms:

With the future of federal corporate tax cuts playing a role in the election campaign, a new study says the planned reductions will not stimulate the economy. A new report from the labour-oriented Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a non-profit research organization, suggests historic trends show businesses’ fixed capital spending has declined as a share of GDP and as a share of corporate cash flow since the early 1980s, despite a series of federal and provincial corporate tax cuts.

If you want to have any credibility among the conservative set as an economist, learn the following set of axioms: a) businesses create jobs, b) taxes reduce business revenues, and c) reduced revenue means reduced job creation. With those axioms firmly in hand, how could anyone conclude anything other than “tax cuts create jobs”? If you give businesses more money and space to innovate, they will find ways to be competitive, resulting in more jobs, right?

The problem is what happens when our axioms come up against evidence. Can we learn to abandon our world view when it is refuted by observation, or will we always insist on finding ways to square our circle? Nobody likes to admit that their beliefs are incorrect, let alone the entire way you see the world. How can we be sure that our studied skepticism isn’t just us clinging to another set of axioms? This is the true challenge of the skeptic – constantly searching ourselves to make sure that we are not just as rigid as those whose opinions we oppose.

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1 Canada DOESN’T have a race problem… grading on a curve

April 20, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · cultural tolerance · good news

I make a lot of hay on this blog by pointing out negative things in Canada, the country I love. As a blog about race and racism (with some gay shit sprinkled in there for flavour), I go out of my way to find, illustrate and criticize things that happen here that are to the detriment of minority groups. Reading my writings here, some may walk away with the impression that I think that Canada is a particularly bad place to be a person of colour (PoC), a gay person, a woman, or member of another disadvantaged group. This is simply not true.

Part of the reason I am so passionate about Canada and the issues facing Canadians is because I recognize that our country has the overwhelming potential to model positive values to the entire world. Perhaps uniquely, Canada is making the experiment of multiculturalism work and has found a way to maintain a level of civility and understanding that transcends any kind of formal legal protection, but that has simply become a feature of our national identity. How could I approach such an important issue with anything less than my full attention and fervor?

However, all the doom and gloom that I cast around may serve to distract from the fact that Canada is a really amazing country:

Canadians are hard-working, great readers, the most tolerant people in the developed world, and enjoy more “positive experiences” than everyone but Icelanders, according to a new analysis of social trends released here Tuesday. “At 84 per cent on average, Canadians report the highest community tolerance of minority groups — ethnic minorities, migrants, and gays and lesbians — in the OECD, where the average is 61 per cent,” the report said. Residents of the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the Nordic countries were among the most tolerant, while those in southern and eastern Europe, as well as Japan and Korea, were less tolerant.

This is something to celebrate – among countries in the developed world, Canada still stands out as a place where minority groups are, by and large, respected and tolerated. The kinds of racial strife and discord that seem to run rampant in many developing countries (particularly those in the Middle East and Africa) are completely foreign to us, and aren’t likely to degenerate to Rwanda or Bosnia levels ever. We should be happy about this.

However, and I cannot stress this enough, we should not be satisfied. It’s wonderful that we’re at the top of the OECD, but racial and cultural tolerance are not a competition. We are not trying to win the “world’s nicest people” award, at least we shouldn’t be. And while accolades are nice, it is dangerous to judge our successes by the failures of others – downward comparisons are a bitch.

While we are doing very well, we can still do better. By highlighting and discussing the issues that I do, I am trying my best to keep these conversations from getting swept under the rug of complacency. There are many areas to improve, and by doing so we can show the rest of the world how they can make the same improvements.

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2 Conservative Party shows its “true colours”

April 20, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · critical thinking · news · politics · race

Nobody likes being called racist. The word carries with it so much baggage and negative connotation that even to be painted with the appellation does some serious psychological damage. Nobody reacts more strongly to the label than do those who identify as conservative. The two words, conservative and racist, have been paired so often as to become synonymous. While conservatives, bristling under the accusation, tend to blame this conflation on liberal bias against the long-suffering conservative minority, those of us that actually pay attention to these kinds of things tend to notice stuff like this:

An email sent out by a Conservative campaign staffer in a Toronto riding seeking people in “national folklore costumes” to appear at a photo-op is an insulting use of so-called ethnic voters as props, critics say. Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouamar received an email late Tuesday from a Conservative campaign staffer for the Etobicoke Centre riding asking “representation from the Arab community” for a Thursday visit from Stephen Harper. “Do you have any cultural groups that would like to participate by having someone at the event in an ethnic costume? We are seeking one or two people from your community,” the email signed by Zeljko ‘Zed’ Zidaric said.

This is simply run-of-the-mill political pandering, to be sure. Every party targets minority voters, as they are a growing demographic with increasing political power. There is nothing wrong with looking for ways to increase one’s visibility in minority communities, and the above quotation speaks to the Conservative Party’s strategy to do just that. However, there is a great deal to be learned here about how members of the party view members of these communities. As far as Mr. Zidaric is concerned, members of minority communities are props to be posed in front of cameras, and then promptly forgotten about:

The Conservative government cut off more than $1 million in funding to the Canadian Arab Federation after the president expressed “hateful sentiments” toward Israel and Jews, according to then immigration minister Jason Kenney. “So suddenly now we exist as props for a photo op?” said Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouamar. “This is hypocrisy.”

The way that political representation is supposed to work is that members of special interest groups are courted for their support during campaigns. The price that politicians pay for the support is to move political influence to the benefit of those groups. For better or for worse, this is how groups of people get action from their political representatives beyond the list of campaign promises. However, if you don’t value the people whose endorsement you’re courting beyond what they can do for you in terms of votes, then you’re going to use them like props.

And so, to those of us that have watched the pattern of disrespect toward minority groups from conservative politicians over the years, statements like the above yield a total lack of surprise. Or, statements like this:

Donald Trump once again made headlines Friday over comments he made about President Barack Obama. This time, Trump steered away from the president’s citizenship, suggesting that votes Obama received in the 2008 election were race-based. “I have a great relationship with the blacks,” Donald Trump said on an Albany, N.Y. radio station Thursday morning. “I’ve always had a very great relationship with the blacks. But unfortunately, it seems the numbers that you cite are very, very frightening numbers.”

To a guy like Trump, they aren’t black people, they’re “the blacks”. They’re (we’re) a monolithic group that can be meaningfully defined by the colour of their skin. He doesn’t have to have a relationship with black people, as long as he has a good relationship with “the blacks”. The Conservative Party, at least the ones running the campaign in Etobicoke Centre, are not concerned with forming political partnerships with minority groups – they want photo ops with “the ethnics”. Having Jason Kenney spearhead outreach to communities with large immigrant populations is kind of like having Fred Phelps lead the Pride parade.

So it was a poor choice of words, but it reveals the underlying attitude, and something far worse. Political theatre aside, statements like Mr. Zidaric’s show that despite growing political clout, members of minority communities are considered second-class citizens. Many of the groups that spoke to the media articulated this position:

Shalini Konanur, a member of the Colour of Poverty campaign that released the video, said while the Tories have overtly pursued the ethnic vote, all major campaigns have been guilty of it. “That term, the ethnic vote, is quite a divisive term,” said Shalini Konanur. “We’ve always had the view that we’re all Canadians. We have Canadian issues. And those issues are larger than the “ethnic communities” or the racialized communities that we come from.”

It’s an all-too-real and disappointing fact that many people of colour (PoCs) in Canada are constantly made to feel as though they are guests in someone else’s home rather than members of the family. Having dark skin in Canada invariably means fielding an incessant stream of unsolicited questions about “where are you from?”, as though being white in Canada is the default and any deviations must be investigated. Most of us (if I may speak in such generalities) are capable of treating such interrogation as harmless and well-intentioned despite being tiresome, but to have our major political parties treat us this way is disheartening to say the least.

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3 “Liberation Therapy” saga continues

April 19, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · health · medicine · news · science

A while back, near the beginning of this blog, I brought to your attention a new potential treatment for Multiple Sclerosis – a severe degenerative disease. The treatment, pioneered by an Italian doctor by the name of Zamboni (I couldn’t make this stuff up – I’m not that creative), is referred to as ‘liberation therapy’, and involves using venous angioplasty (balloons) to clear blockages.

I expressed my skepticism about this procedure at the time, saying that I generally doubted the claim, simply because there’s little connection between the circulatory and nervous systems. It seemed improbable to me, but I was happy (and encouraged others) to wait and see what the evidence says – what happens when we observe patients under controlled circumstances with adequate followup?

Well, it seems that this happens:

People with multiple sclerosis may show blocked neck veins as a result of the disease rather than as a cause, a large study published Wednesday suggests. The findings cast doubt on the theory that blocked or narrowed veins are a main cause of MS, study author Dr. Robert Zivadinov of the University of Buffalo said. The findings published in the journal Neurology were consistent with thinking that the condition — also known as chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency, or CCSVI — is more common in patients with multiple sclerosis but not to the degree first reported by Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni.

Please don’t mistake me – I get little pleasure from being right in this case. People close to my family have lived with MS, and I would much rather be wrong if it meant that people could undergo a simple medical procedure and achieve relief from their symptoms. However, the facts are the facts. In this case, the facts do not support the claim that blocked veins contribute to MS, and there is consequently no reason to suspect that alleviating the blockages will have any effect on MS patients.

This study is, perhaps, not the definitive ‘smoking gun’ that liberation therapy is not effective, but it certainly does cast doubt on the original hypothesis of its efficacy. One of the chief components of the scientific method’s accuracy is the ability to reproduce results in a variety of locations. If some event only occurred once, and cannot be observed by others performing the same procedures as elicited the original event, then serious doubt is cast on the original observation. It is far more likely, in a case like this, that there was some flaw in the original observation. This is a good thing – it prevents us from making decisions based on bad information.

However, sometimes we are hell-bent on making those decisions no matter what the evidence says:

The New Brunswick government says it will still help multiple sclerosis patients gain access to therapy to open narrowed neck veins, even though a new report on the procedure is raising concerns. New Brunswick Health Minister Madeleine Dube said that could be debated in the medical community for some time. “But while this is being researched and debated, those people still need support and we are committed to that,” she said Thursday.

There is nothing strictly incorrect about Minister Dube’s statement; however, she and I do seem to have a disagreement over what the word ‘support’ means. Under my definition, it means giving sick people the best care possible, guided by scientific evidence and good practice. Under her definition, it means giving patients whatever they ask for to make them feel better. While I am all for making people feel better, I do not subscribe to the philosophy that cutting people open to elicit the placebo effect constitutes responsible medical care.

For all intents and purposes, there is no reason to suspect that liberation therapy elicits anything stronger than a placebo effect. For every anecdote that states an improvement in symptoms, there is one that talks about how the symptom relief has faded over time. And among those anecdotes, there’s more from people who keep chasing the bad medicine like an addict fiending for a fix:

The monitoring is for Canadians such as Caroline McNeill of Langley, B.C., who travelled to California to have her neck veins reopened using balloon angioplasty. She has had the procedure twice before, and noted lingering benefits such as feeling less tired. “The numbness on my fingers has started to come back again, and I have really bad dizziness and vertigo,” McNeill told her doctor. She plans to return to Newport Beach in Southern California for a stent later this month.

It doesn’t surprise or confound me in the slightest that people who experience a temporary benefit would go back to the well, so to speak, and give the therapy another try. When the current regimen of therapies are only partially effective and carry a whole host of adverse effects, it’s completely reasonable to leap at any alternative. This is why these ‘alternative therapies’ (which is a really stupid name) are so dangerous – they make wild promises that offer benefits that have no scientific backing whatsoever. The people to whom these promises are made are often desperate for any relief, and will try just about anything no matter how dangerous it is.

This is why people who advocate “health freedom” make me so angry – there is no way you can expect people to be dispassionate and conscientious consumers, weighing the plusses and minuses of different options, when the stakes are so high. People’s lives and day-to-day well-being hang in the balance, and they’ll jump at any chance to feel better. This is why our policy should be based on scientific evidence, not the whims of politicians and the desperation of sick people.

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4 Well India is apparently stupid too

April 7, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · forces of stupid · free speech · history · news · politics

In case you were wondering, it turns out that India is also stupid:

A controversial book on Mahatma Gandhi has been banned by the government in his native state of Gujarat. Chief Minister Narendra Modi said that its contents were “perverse and defamed the icon of non-violence”. The book by Pulitzer Prize winning author Joseph Lelyveld contains evidence that India’s independence hero had a homosexual relationship.

I’m not a fan of religion. I am irritated by conservatism. I detest racism, sexism and homophobia. I hate book bans. They have got to be the least useful, most reactionary response to an idea in existence. The entire span of human history is testament to the fact that book bans are a horrible idea. Especially for such petty and transparently ridiculous reasons.

Those of you who know me well know that I am a huge fan of a show called Clone High. It was a one-season Canadian show that caricatured teen shows, through the lens of a high school populated by clones of famous historical characters. The humour of the show came from its completely irreverent humour and fast-paced weirdness:

One of the main characters was a clone of Mohindas Gandhi, re-imagining him as an extremely hyperactive, self-aggrandizing misfit whose entire driving force was to be accepted despite his zany behaviour. Anyone with even faint knowledge of the life of Gandhi knows that this characterization is completely opposite from the actual living person, wherein lies the funny. However, when the show left Canadian television and was rebroadcast around the world, Indians were up in arms over the desecration of their national hero.

And now someone said he was GAY! OMG U GUYZ!

Here’s the thing: as much as India likes to behave as though it is a secular country, many parts of India cling strongly to “traditional values”, meaning hatred of gays and other strog out-group hostility. While we think of India as a single country, it is perhaps better understood as analogous to ancient Greece – a collection of nation-states that are affiliated but by no means homogeneous. Understanding this fact perhaps gives some insight as to why suggesting that Gandhi was anything less than a macho macho man is likely to raise some eyebrows. The fact that they’re talking about Gandhi, someone whose hero worship goes beyond the man himself and takes on a religious fervor just compounds this.

So fine, I can understand people being upset. I can understand people being so upset that they don’t buy the book, or they protest the book, or they produce scathing critiques that show the poor workmanship and revisionist history that went into writing the book. Instead, they chose to try and ban it.

Now I’ve said that banning is a stupid idea, but I haven’t bothered explaining why. Quick show of hands: who would have heard about this if the government hadn’t banned it? Okay, you can put your hands down now – I can’t actually see you. The point is that elevating this book to the level of controversy that it begins to make international headlines only serves to accomplish the exact opposite of what you’re hoping to do with the ban. If the goal of banning the book is to keep people from hearing about the idea, it is an epic level of fail – one of hundreds of biographies of Gandhi has now jumped to the top of several reading lists.

The worst part of this story, incidentally, is the fact that the author actually didn’t say any such thing:

The author of a book on Mahatma Gandhi has said it is “shameful” that it has been banned in India’s western state of Gujarat. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld said the book was banned on the basis of newspaper reviews. He said the reviews had sensationalised his account of Gandhi’s friendship with a German man, who may have been homosexual.

And it seems like the family doesn’t care, even if he did:

Indian writers and relatives of Mahatma Gandhi have protested against the ban. Gandhi’s great grandson Tushar Gandhi said he was against banning of books, and that it did not matter “if the Mahatma was straight, gay or bisexual”. “Every time he would still be the man who led India to freedom”.

Writer Namita Gokhale said she was saddened by the ban. “Every time a book is banned, it saddens me because you simply cannot ban ideas, you cannot ban thoughts.” she said. “In India a democratic space for ideas is a gift and I think banning a book is the most pointless exercise.”

Book bans not only violate the principle of freedom of expression, they also don’t fucking work. It is basically just setting up a giant flag that says “warning: moron approaching”.

And it seems that Canadians are just as stupid:

A Saskatchewan First Nation has banned performances of an acting troupe’s adaptation of an ancient Greek tragedy because one of the characters in the play is a corrupt chief. She said she believes her adaptation of the 2,500-year-old Greek tragedy Antigone offended the leadership of the Poundmaker First Nation.

Psst… Chief Antoine… want to know how to make people suspect that you are corrupt? Take global criticisms of corrupt chiefs personally! I’ve performed an adaptation of Antigone (many many years ago), and done some literary analysis of it. It’s a great story that well encapsulates many of the issues of governance and how personal conflict enters into discussions of principle. It’s a literary classic that has lots of parallels to band governance, regardless of whether or not a given chief is corrupt. However, standing up and banning it is a glaring sign that the criticism hits too close to home, and elevates that criticism to the national level.

Book bans – they do the exact opposite of what you want. Learn it, remember it.

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0 Freedom of religion… inherently contradictory?

April 5, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · law · news · religion

Okay, not usually, but maybe in this case?

A polygamous society “consumes” its young. It hurts people. It hurts society. Because of that, polygamists ought to be criminally prosecuted, not shielded by constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion, expression or association. That’s the position laid out by the B.C. attorney general’s lead lawyer Monday as the reference case to determine whether Canada’s 120-year-old criminal law against polygamy ought to be struck down entered its final phase in B.C. Supreme Court.

I’ve tried to avoid commenting on the polygamy case thus far, because I wasn’t sure what there was to say about it other than the obvious, but I’ll try to wade in a bit here. For those of you that haven’t been following the case, a group of religious fundamentalists in Bountiful, British Columbia are before the Provincial Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of Canada’s ban on polygamy. They are claiming that they should be exempt from the law on grounds of freedom of religious expression, a claim which obviously irritates me to no end. If your religion commands you to break the law, it’s not the law that must change, it’s your religious practice. Canada is a secular country that allows people to believe however they want – that courtesy is not extended to behaviour.

The contradiction doesn’t come from their central claim:

What [Canadian historian Sarah] Carter wrote was that protection of women was “a central rationale” for outlawing polygamy and that “Anti-polygamists claimed that polygamy meant unmitigated lives of slavery, bondage and horror for the wives.” “The child brides smuggled across borders to serve as compliant wives to middle-aged men they have never met, the boys expelled or sent to work camps without an education, the harsh mechanisms of control, the grotesque subjugation of women and girls, these are not discrete harms [of polygamy] that are simply coincidental,” [attorney general’s lawyer Craig] Jones said.

It comes from the idea that telling someone they aren’t allowed to enslave children is a violation of that person’s freedoms. Now they may not see it as slavery, but the disgusting way in which they treat these supposed ‘brides’ is medieval and undoubtedly falls under the umbrella definition of slavery.

If I can read the judicial minds of the Supreme Court, I’d imagine that this case will not be granted as argued – there is no Charter protection of compulsory servitude for life, nor does punishing the violation of both the law and common decency amount to religious persecution. However, the attorney general is attempting to demonstrate that the abuse and depravity that is systemic in the Bountiful group is a necessary product of polygamous relationships. In this attempt, I think he will fail. While there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the particular kind of polygamy practiced in Bountiful and other fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints churches (as well as some branches of Islam) is inherently exploitative, that fact is insufficient to justify a wholesale ban on polygamy.

The claim that polygamous marriage would disrupt society is certainly a true one. The definition and practice of marriage would become unbelievably complicated if groups of people were allowed to marry. Marriage has specific legal implications, and making changes to that would have broad societal ramifications. However, I remain unpersuaded by this argument, simply because a different formulation of it was used to prop up racial segregation and to bar women from getting the vote. Constitutional freedoms should not hinge on whether or not their are convenient – the whole point of having guaranteed human rights is that sometimes they are wildly inconvenient. We have to find a way to work around them.

However, there is one argument now being made that I find particularly interesting:

“We’ve seen the extent to which religion is used as the control mechanism, as the enforcement mechanism that magnifies the harms of polygamy,” Jones said during his third day of final submissions at the constitutional reference case being heard by the B.C. Supreme Court. “The evidence that has emerged from expert and lay witnesses alike is that the greater the religious fervour with which polygamy is intertwined, the more harmful it can be expected to be. There is something significantly harmful about the religious manifestation of polygamy.”

It is entirely possible, and seems to be supported by the testimony, that when religion is used as the justification for polygamy, that’s when the whole host of other abuses begin to manifest. As an anti-theist, this certainly gels with my view of what religion does – takes a perfectly decent thing like community or charity and distorts it into something sinister. That being said, banning things because they are religious sets a dangerous (and, frankly, ridiculous) precedent. If we say that polygamy is allowed for secular reasons but not religious ones, we are simply tipping the “freedom of religion” argument to the opposite extreme. We cannot begin outlawing things because they are religious, just as we cannot permit things on the same grounds. We should be making our legal decisions on grounds that entirely ignore their religious justification.

The abuses that occur in these polygamous groups are criminal. Child neglect, emotional abuse and imprisonment are all horrible acts that we should fight vociferously. However, they are not necessary outcomes of a man married to several women, even if such marriages are done for religious reasons. While the men of Bountiful should not be allowed to abuse their child brides because their imaginary friend said it was okay, it is illiberal and anti-democratic to punish them for such delusion. The harm of polygamy manifests itself as abuse – when that happens the abusers should be punished. In absence of abuse, there are no grounds to ban polygamy that are not just as arbitrary as the arguments against gay marriage, interracial marriage, or allowing women to vote.

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0 Unopposed hypocrisy

March 31, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · liberalism · news · politics

I am what libertarians would describe as a ‘statist’. I believe that the government can and should play an active role in maintaining the stability of the society, as well as being actively involved in the economy. Of course, the word ‘statist’ has a bunch of other baggage that doesn’t apply to me at all, and I certainly have some libertarian leanings that my more liberal brethren disagree with, but suffice it to say I am not in favour of a completely hands-off approach to governing, nor do I necessarily think that the private sector will do a better job than the public sector in controlling costs or delivering high-quality services.

The only way that the democratic process can work well for the people is if there is a strong and effective opposition. The government’s interests should be to best represent the people, but as history shows us, it tends to become self-serving. Regular elections help balance that out, but an effective opposition can bring light and voter attention to issues that might otherwise escape notice. In the absence of a powerful opposition, or when the opposition has power but cannot wield it effectively, the government has a free hand to indulge in its favourite pastime: soul-crushing corruption and hypocrisy.

US state department spokesman PJ Crowley has resigned from his post following controversial comments involving the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The news on Sunday came three days after Crowley was reported to have criticised the Pentagon’s treatment of detained US soldier Bradley Manning. Crowley said the defence department’s handling of Manning, who is accused of leaking thousands of confidential US documents to WikiLeaks, was “stupid” and “counterproductive”.

So… let’s get this straight. A non-violent, non-enemy military person leaks non-mission-critical information to a journalistic outlet that makes the info available to the world. That person is locked in a maximum-security prison, deprived of his civil rights, humiliated and held without trial. This, according to the Obama administration, is in no way cause for anyone to be fired. Despite repeated violations of the constitution and basic decency, there are no deleterious consequences for the way in which Manning is being treated.

Someone within the administration voices a perfectly reasonable criticism of this atrocity, and he’s pushed out. Someone, incidentally, with years of experience in a time when experienced state officials are sorely needed. And the rabbit hole of hypocrisy and self-immolation doesn’t stop there:

Of course, it’s also the case in Barack Obama’s world that those who instituted a worldwide torture and illegal eavesdropping regime are entitled to full-scale presidential immunity, while powerless individuals who blow the whistle on high-level wrongdoing and illegality are subjected to the most aggressive campaign of prosecution and persecution the country has ever seen. So protecting those who are abusing Manning, while firing Crowley for condemning the abuse, is perfectly consistent with the President’s sense of justice.

Also, remember how one frequent Democratic critique made of the Right generally and the Bush administration specifically was that they can’t and won’t tolerate dissent: everyone is required to march in lockstep? I wonder how that will be reconciled with this.

This, from a Republican president, would be a not-so-shocking example of executive overreach. From a Democratic president who campaigned on changing the way politics is done in America, this is a disgusting betrayal not only of the trust of those who voted for him, but of liberal democratic principals and basic human decency.

So where, pray tell, is the outrage over this issue? Where are the Republicans to stand up for the constitution, for civil rights, for open and transparent government? Oh right, the Republicans are more concerned over stripping the rights of workers to stand up to their employers and the rights of women to sexual self-determination to bother with something as trivial as the rule of law.

An effective, well-coordinated and disciplined political opposition is crucial to the health of a democratic state. No matter who is in power, she/he will invariably become corrupt and begin abusing her/his power. A political opposition provides a check on that power, to ensure that corruption is exposed. When your opposition is completely incompetent, then the interests of absolutely nobody are represented, and everyone loses.

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