Category: politics

4 Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap

March 14, 2016
by Crommunist
· hate · politics

TL/DR: Donald Trump has no sincere beliefs, and says whatever he wants to serve his own ego. His rhetoric is a partially-accidental exploitation of a dangerous strain of nativism, and a mob has formed around that. Trump doesn’t control the mob, if anything they control him. That mob will still exist when Trump loses the presidential race, and people with overt hate-based agendas are likely to capitalize on the power vacuum his loss will create.

Jamelle Bouie in Slate does an excellent job of putting some more solid research behind this same argument, and puts the Trump phenomenon squarely in a racial/white supremacist lens.

It seems that it takes quite a bit to get me back into the blogging game, but the issues surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination (and ultimately the Presidency) have kicked up a lot of thoughts that I need to get down. The whole campaign has been a giant disaster for human decency, but the tipping point for me was watching this video analysis by Rachel Maddow. Her thesis is that the reports of violence at Trump campaign events (and seemingly only at Trump campaign events) is not an accident; not merely people’s emotions boiling over, or a reaction to the existence of protest, but something that is actively cultivated and exploited by the Trump campaign. I don’t dispute the facts as she presents them, but I arrive at a conclusion that differs slightly from hers.

In order to explain why, I need to give you a brief summary of one of the best sci-fi franchises ever produced in Canadian cinema. … Continue Reading

6 Violence isn’t the answer, unless I’m asking the question

November 26, 2014
by Crommunist
· black history · blog · civil rights · critical thinking · crommunism · history · law · police · politics · race · racism

On Monday, a Missouri Grand Jury decided that when a police officer kills an unarmed young person, no crime has been committed as long as the officer can spin a fanciful tale of The Incredible Nigger Hulk. That officer not only need not be locked up, decided the Grand Jury, but he doesn’t even need to see the inside of a courtroom. He doesn’t need to be cross-examined, his story doesn’t have to be questioned, there need be nothing more than the pathetic ghost of a due process that the people of Ferguson have been told to shut up and wait for.

Predictably, the residents of Ferguson weren’t pleased with the result. Peaceful protest and non-peaceful protest filled the streets, shut down traffic, and in the latter case, destroyed many local businesses and other property. In response to the protests (which have, by the way, been called “riots” in the media from day 1, regardless of the predominantly peaceful nature. Until the cops showed up, at least), a chorus of voices has gone up condemning violence and looting. This would be a defensible position from people on the ground in Ferguson, or people who are leading specific civil rights projects relevant to police brutality – in that case, it’s brand management and promotion. Nothing wrong with that.

The problem, in my eyes, is that the “violence solves nothing” crowd has a broad swath of representation from people with absolutely no connection to the issue. It is the ever-present spectre of respectability politics manifesting itself as a treatise about the merits of violent vs. non-violent protest. It is an excuse to remove one’s self from any sense of responsibility or complicity in the situation that has triggered the violence – “well, I agree that things are bad, but that’s no excuse to be violent!”

In response to this sneer disguised as a moral stand, I sent out a couple of tweets: … Continue Reading

6 “Just Unicorns” – a dissection of The Friend Zone

September 16, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · sex

A friend on Facebook recently asked about whether or not I think “The Friend Zone” exists. I gave a short (for me) response, but I wanted to flesh out where I am in this debate more fully. For some personal history on where I once was on this topic, I encourage you to read my post: I Was a Nice Guy™.

Also, the subject matter of this post requires me to be far more cisnormative and heteronormative than I usually try to be – I hope the reason for this writing choice is clear from the context of the post (but I will gratefully receive any offered criticisms if I overstep that justification).

What is “The Friend Zone”

The highest-rated entry on Urban Dictionary is somewhat revelatory of a central dichotomy within the very concept of the Friend Zone:

What you attain after you fail to impress a woman you’re attracted to. Usually initiated by the woman saying, “You’re such a good friend”. Usually associated with long days of suffering and watching your love interest hop from one bad relationship to another. Verb tense is “Friend-ed”.

One should not fail to note, by the way, the gendered language in the definition. We will return to this later in the discussion.

The more generous definition of the Friend Zone describes a situation in which one person (‘the friender’) maintains a non-romantic relationship with a person who would prefer to have a romantic one (‘the friended’). Reasons for this situation vary. In some cases, the friender is simply unaware of the friended’s interest, perhaps wilfully so. In other, more nefarious cases, the friender is aware of the non-reciprocated interest but keeps the friended person around for reasons of psychological self-gratification or because the friended provides some sort of benefit (companionship, emotional support, sometimes even material support). In the latter case, the friender is exploiting the romantic feelings of the friended in order to maintain a relationship that, in the absence of the romantic interest (and tantalizingly possible romantic involvement), would not persist. The key is that the friended does not derive the desired benefit from the relationship, and has either decided to ‘settle’ or is hoping that some day romantic reciprocation will occur.

The least generous definition of the Friend Zone is one in which the friended party is a predator, waiting for a lapse in judgement or self-restraint in order to foist a romantic relationship on the friender. Friended people are misrepresenting themselves as genuine friends as part of a ploy to gain the confidence of the friender. The friender believes that the relationship is organic and free of sexual potential, and that both parties spend time together simply because they enjoy each other’s company – as friends do. Under this definition, it is the friended who is misrepresenting the relationship, and the friender who is the wronged party.

It is my position that, at some point in time, both of these definitions have accurately described a situation between two people. There are a broad variety of possible relationships between human beings, and some of those are not constructive or healthy. There are, almost certainly, people who have exploited someone’s romantic interest for their own selfish purposes. There are, almost certainly, people who have dissembled platonic interest solely as part of a gambit to propagate a sexual encounter. … Continue Reading

3 A myth-taken identity

July 29, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · crapitalism · critical thinking · history · religion

Longtime readers may remember that religion used to be a primary, rather than incidental focus of this blog. It may be the case that writing for Canadian Atheist and then moving to Freethought Blogs took some of the fun out of being a combative atheist. It could just be that I had more pressing questions rattling around in my brain. At any rate, I haven’t done a pure religious critique in a while, so pardon me if the rust shows through.

I read the Old Testament when I was in high school. Being a longtime fan (and voracious reader) of Greek mythology, I immediately recognized the stamp of myth on the stories of Jonah and the Giant Fish, Noah’s Ark, the Walls of Jericho, you name it. Stories are important cultural signifiers that transcend generations and give us some common ground. It didn’t strike me as particularly peculiar that a group of nomadic people whose written language arrived many generations after many serious events in their history would have kept their history alive in story form. It seems equally non-controversial to imagine that, as stories tend to do, the histories and the fables and legends became blended over multiple tellings. For someone who, even at the time, wasn’t a literalist believer, the idea that a literal super-strong Samson probably didn’t actually exist in the way he’s depicted didn’t matter much to me. What was important were the lessons of the Bible. It would take me a few more years to realize how monstrous many of those lessons actually are.

Similarly and non-coincidentally, I began to view the New Testament as a work of fictionalized history. At the time I thought Jesus was probably literally real, and that the writing in the Gospels needed to be viewed in context of the politics of the time. Understanding the tension that would have existed between, for example, the Pharisees and the Roman Empire at the time, helped put things like the Sermon on the Mount into a reasonable context – Jesus wasn’t speaking for eternal attribution, he was talking about the issues of the time. Judas wasn’t some evil conniver, he was a run-of-the-mill political zealot who sought to install new leadership by betraying the old one. And so on, in a most run-of-the-mill sort of way. … Continue Reading

6 The salience of hatred

July 8, 2014
by Crommunist
· feminism · hate · race · racism

Feminista Jones has the post to read about the events that spawned this post. Please read hers first.

And from the woodwork, another emerges:

Apparently, Anthony Cumia, the shock jock better known as half of the duo “Opie and Anthony,” had a bad Tuesday night in New York. He claims that he was taking pictures when a woman just happened to wander into the frame and then assaulted him. If his account is true, it is highly unfortunate.

…

But whether or not Cumia was assaulted is not actually the point. Cumia himself made sure of that when he took to Twitter in the small hours on Wednesday morning to pontificate on the state of New York and African Americans in a rant amply documented by Gawker. (Both the Gawker post and links to Cumia’s tweets that appear later in this piece contain wildly obscene and offensive language.)

I first caught wind of Anthony Cumia’s tweets when one of my favourite rappers started retweeting them. At first I thought it was parody – some sort of tasteless piece of performance art that would be explained away as “satire”. My next reaction was to remember that the internet is full of people with opinions, and if you want to find hateful stuff out there, you can. But this wasn’t some anonymous nobody tweeting from some basement den for lulz, this was the host of a fairly popular radio show.

Unfortunately, the rest of this piece won’t make much sense if you don’t read the tweets, but for those of you who (wisely, I assure you) avoided clicking on the Gawker link in the pull-quote, I will attempt to summarize. Mr. Cumia claimed to have been taking photos when a black woman happened to enter the frame. She confronted Cumia angrily (allegedly physically assaulting him), and he responded by calling her a name*. A number of black men came to the aid of the young woman, who (again allegedly**) struck him repeatedly. In response to the confrontation, the assault, and the men taking the side of the assaulter rather than the assaultee, Cumia wrote a long and sweeping condemnation of the woman specifically, black people more generally, and (for some reason that eludes ready explanation) “illegals”. … Continue Reading

16 Single? It’s probably because you’re an asshole

May 27, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · gender · personal · privilege

This post is going to be more navel-gazey than is normal for this blog. That’s not a disclaimer of apology, just a ‘heads up’. This piece is also very much rooted in gender binary language, and that is a disclaimer of apology. I am speaking most often from my own experience. As a mono cis hetero guy, my romantic experience falls along a gender binary with a single partner. This is not to elevate or normalize mono cishet relationships above others, but I don’t want to speak too far out of my own depth. I am sure that relationships between queer and poly people have dimensions that I simply cannot address, and I don’t want to do it hamfistedly. I am very interested to hear what parts of this post do and don’t resonate with your own experiences, particularly if they are different from my own.

I am sure that I’ve made oblique reference to this before, perhaps even on this blog, but my sexual and dating history are perhaps a bit atypical. I say ‘perhaps’ because a pretty decent argument can be made that everyone’s dating history is atypical. However, from the standpoint that the average age at which people in Canada have their first sexual encounter is some time in their teens, my history is slightly to noticably atypical. This has a lot of explanations, some of which I am capable of explaining in some detail; others that I am still puzzled over. I’ve talked a bit about this process in a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

After a year spent in a different doomed-to-fail relationship in my first year of undergraduate (this time I ended things, and for what at the time seemed like noble reasons), I embarked on a long journey into my own bruised psyche to try and figure out what it was about me that made me so undesirable while everyone else had girlfriends (author’s note: most of my friends at the time were single). It was an endless pattern: I’d meet someone, we’d hit it off, I’d eventually work up the courage to ask her out, and then I’d get rejected. In my feelings of dejected misery and frustration and need for self-affirmation, and because there was a whole intellectual institution created around it, I embraced the “nice guys don’t get laid” myth wholeheartedly.

So, I didn’t get laid a lot. That “endless pattern” lasted, for the most part, for around 8 years. After I broke up with Jane (not her real name) in fall of 2004, I didn’t enter into another committed relationship until spring of 2012. During that intervening period, I had a small handful of flings with women, but nothing that lasted longer than 6 weeks or so. None of this did anything to disabuse me of the notion that I was, at some deep, fundamental level, incapable of being loved or having a lasting, meaningful relationship. It wasn’t all bad, as I’ll discuss further down the page, but there were a lot of pretty despondent nights. … Continue Reading

4 The benevolence of white men

April 30, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · news · race · racism

By now the vast majority of you will have heard of the racist comments made by Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, an NBA team. Sterling was taped during a phone conversation with his girlfriend V. Stiviano, asking her not to bring black people to games with her. This is, apparently, part of a long history of racist comments made by Sterling over the course of this conversation and over a number of incidents stretching back many years. The response has been quick and severe, with players, owners, sports fans, and team sponsors all moving to condemn the comments and the man who made them.

Is Donald Sterling a racist?

Whether or not Donald Sterling is “a racist” is a question that I find profoundly boring. As I have said many times before, I do not recognize the validity of the category “a racist”. There seems to be no behaviour or set of behaviours that we can agree on to define what “a racist” is. All we know about “racists” are that nobody who is ever accused of being one, nor anyone who supports or is otherwise allied with the accused, will accept the label. Then there is something about how many bones in that person’s body are racist. And then some jiu-jitsu about who is really “a racist”. The pattern is as predictable as it is tiresome.

I am similarly not interested in writing a personal condemnation of Donald Sterling. I doubt he (or anyone else) would care if I did, and that ground is pretty well trod already. If you heard what Sterling said, and you don’t already think he’s a total scumbag, then I doubt that any combination of consonants and vowels could possibly convince you.

What I do want to do, however, is unpack what I think is a really revelatory statement made by Sterling in his recorded conversation. When Stivilano presses Sterling on the blatant racist content of the comments he’s made, and how it stands at odds with the fact that the players of the team he owns are predominantly black, Sterling is recorded as angrily responding: … Continue Reading

8 White people on offence

April 8, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · critical thinking · First Nations · politics · privilege · race · racism

It is an interesting thing to observe that whenever I hear the term “real racist”, as in “maybe you’re the real racist here!”, it’s coming from the mouth of a white person. I have never heard a person of colour use this phrase either to a white person, let alone another PoC. I say “let alone” because maybe, just maybe, PoC trust each other to have a pretty accurate working definition of what racism is. Or maybe I’m reading too much into too little.

At either rate, the reason I find this little observation so fascinating is as follows: white people are far less likely (some would say it is definitionally impossible || EDIT: I have been asked to clarify this point, which I have done in a companion post) to experience racism than are PoC. It seems preposterous to assume that you, a person with no experience in the topic under discussion, would be in a position to lecture someone about that topic. It’s textbook ‘splaining. You’d have to have less than a spoonful of self-awareness to fail to see that.

It’s the “oh yeah, well if evolution is true why are there still monkeys?” of racial entitlement and ignorance. … Continue Reading

16 On “toxic feminism” – The Nation and the people

January 30, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism

Michelle Goldberg’s article in The Nation got me pretty steamed yesterday, but I want to use that debacle as a ‘jumping off point’ to make a larger point about what is actually happening in these ‘spaces’ and ‘debates’. I’ve made a similar argument in a previous article:

Walking hand-in-hand with privilege is a grossly-misplaced sense of entitlement. All spaces are assumed to be welcome and open, and your opinion is always appreciated and listened to. The fact that you lack relevant knowledge and experience is immaterial – you still deserve a place in the conversation. This is why you see creationists sneer their way through “why are there still monkeys” questions on evolution forums. It also explains why they react with butthurt whines and a cloud of scripture whenever their ignorance is revealed, and especially when it is pilloried. They have never experienced a circumstance where faith was not accepted as evidence; where sincere belief is not a substitute for fact.

The Real Issues

Part of this issue, I think, is that people disconnect the message from the intended audience, and assume that all people having a discussion are having that discussion for the sake of everyone who could possibly be watching. When a person, new to a topic, decides that their perspective on, say “reverse racism” or “misandry” is clearly being neglected and needs to be added to the discussion, they jump in with both feet. This is, in a way that I hope is obvious to readers of this blog, extremely problematic. The term “derailing” describes a circumstance in which someone enters a conversation and tries to change the topic to something ze wants to talk about instead. It’s rude at best, and erodes the possibility of conversation at worst. … Continue Reading

9 Feminism: for all your 2000 parts

November 18, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · feminism · politics

I was having a discussion with a (cis-female) friend of mine about the challenges she was having meeting date-able guys. She’s quite tall, and has a difficult time dating guys who are much shorter than she is because of a long list of complicated reasons, some mechanical some psychological, which restricts the pool quite precipitously. But she said beyond the simple fact of physical compatibility (we’ll ignore for now the proportion of tall guys who she’s nonetheless not attracted to physically), the biggest obstacle she was having is findings guys who didn’t piss her off during their first date by saying or doing something that betrays a shitty, gender-essentialist, retrograde attitude toward women. This is a sentiment I have heard from many other friends – even ‘nice’ guys who might otherwise be fine to date take themselves out of the running by holding on to (and voicing) anti-feminist and/or misogynist attitudes.

If you (like me) are an openly feminist cis gendered heterosexual (‘cishet’, hereafter) guy, you’ve probably encountered the meme that guys are just pretending to be feminists to get laid (or worse, I suppose, actually adopting the tenets of feminism and self-brainwashing in order to get some consensual hotslappy going). ‘Real men aren’t feminists’, is the implication (if only there were a longer discussion of this topic somewhere). ‘Real men’ are deeply invested in perpetuating a rigid definition of masculinity, and any deviation from such perpetuation is a revocation of their ‘man card’; either that or they are actually adhering to the idea that men will do pretty much anything to get sex, including either mass deception or self-delusion. … Continue Reading

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