Category: politics

0 U.S. shows its hypocrisy over free speech

March 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · crapitalism · free speech · hate · law · news · politics

Sadly, with this whole free speech thing, sometimes this is what it looks like when your side wins:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a grieving father’s pain over mocking protests at his Marine son’s funeral must yield to First Amendment protections for free speech. All but one justice sided with a fundamentalist church that has stirred outrage with raucous demonstrations contending God is punishing the military for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality. The 8-1 decision in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., was the latest in a line of court rulings that, as Chief Justice John Roberts said in his opinion for the court, protects “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

Yeah… fuck. Possibly the worst scum of the earth, Fred Phelps, has been granted a landslide license from the Supreme Court of the United States to picket military and private funerals, spreading his ludicrous doctrine. In the name of free speech, he’s allowed to cause widespread suffering to grieving families who have done nothing to deserve such hateful condemnation from a group of people they’ve never met.

I’ve never been less happy to win.

Nate Phelps, estranged son of Fred Phelps and director of Centre For Inquiry’s Calgary branch is, understandably, opposed to this ruling:

It has been my contention all along that protesting at a funeral is unconscionable. For the Court to give greater consideration to Free Speech, at the expense of a citizen’s right to bury a loved one in peace, is a dangerous travesty of justice… If ever there was a just reason to limit the time and place that a person can exercise their First Amendment right to free speech, this would be it.

I admire Nate a great deal, and his journey away from his family cannot have been an easy one. Forever being known as the son of that crazy hate preacher must be incredibly tiresome. It is therefore with some trepidation that I must disagree with him in principle. First of all, there is no law in the national constitution or any state constitution that grants an explicit right to bury a loved one in peace. To be sure, privacy isn’t a guaranteed or delineated right in the US Constitution either, so there is an argument that can be made over explicit and implicit rights. However, an implicit right cannot trump an explicit one, and the right of free speech is an explicit one. While it is certainly not a good thing to picket funerals, the rule of law dictates that we must prioritize rights that are codified over those that we wish were codified.

Secondly, there are far better reasons to curtail the right of free expression. From the government’s perspective, vibrant and wholesale protestation of the actions of government officials is dangerous. It could in fact be dangerous to the safety of citizens to have certain ideas made public or encouraged openly. Curtailing that kind of free speech would be far more justified than telling a tiny group of zealots that they’re not allowed to wave ugly signs at a funeral. However, the government is specifically enjoined from banning such demonstrations of lawful speech, and so by the literal interpretation of the law, the WBC slides in.

That being said, since the United States government is more than happy to curtail even legitimate free speech, it seems incredibly hypocritical of them to give the WBC a pass. Apparently it doesn’t violate the constitution to lock political protesters into fenced-off areas, but when those protesters are only harassing innocent civilians, it’s an 8-1 matter for the SCOTUS? Not to mention that since the content of the protests are personal in nature, a legitimate argument could be made that these protests are tantamount to criminal harassment, which is against the law. Not to mention the fact that even if they are not harassment, they are certainly disturbing the peace (another crime). It seems as though these protests can be moved on other legal grounds.

But of course, it is definitely too much to expect consistency from the United States. Free speech is a fundamental right! Well, unless it’s speech we don’t like:

The US army has filed 22 new charges against the soldier accused of leaking thousands of classified documents published by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning is facing life in prison if found guilty to the charges which include aiding the enemy. Manning, 23, had previously faced a host of charges including downloading and transmitting to an unauthorised person a classified video of a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters employees.

I am well aware that Private Manning has broken military law and is subject to prosecution as a result. However, his ongoing imprisonment and his treatment as a hostile combatant is both cruel and unusual (there’s that pesky constitution again!). Considering that “the enemy” hasn’t been defined, and that Private Manning didn’t release the information to any specific foreign government or terrorist group, the charge of “aiding the enemy” is as ridiculous as it is transparently a ploy to torture someone who caught the US government with its pants down.

While politics, particularly (it seems) in the United States, is a breeding ground for hypocrisy, this kind of double-speak is particularly egregious. Free speech is important to uphold for hate groups who persecute grieving families, but speak against the government and your rights under the constitution are shredded. Land of the free and home of the brave indeed…

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0 Flirting with free speech

March 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · critical thinking · free speech · news · politics

There’s an interesting wrinkle in the debate over free speech, which has to do with the issue of truth. If I say that Stephen Harper is the worst Prime Minister we’ve ever had, that falls under the category of political criticism and opinion, which is protected speech. However, if I say that Stephen Harper raped a 12 year-old girl in 1997, that falls under the auspices of defamation and is punishable under law (where I would have to produce some evidence or face a legal repercussion). Both of these things are reasonable statutes – while we should be allowed to criticize our political leaders (and each other), it would certainly be harmful to society as a whole if people were allowed to level damaging accusations at each other without restraint.

There is, however, a large middle ground where the line between these two things blurs. If I say, for example, that Stephen Harper seems to me like a guy who would rape a 12 year-old child, that’s still my opinion, but it’s definitely defamatory. What if someone tells me that they heard that Stephen Harper did something like that, and I repeat their lie based on faulty information? Is that my fault? What if I am a prominent public figure? Does my position as an opinion leader impart on me some responsibility to check into the factuality of claims that I make before I repeat them?

What about if instead of being a singular opinion leader, I am a news organization? Do I have a duty, both to the public and to the rule of law, to ensure that the things that I report are based in fact? The CRTC seems to think so:

The CRTC has withdrawn a controversial proposal that would have given TV and radio stations more leeway to broadcast false or misleading news. Indeed, the broadcast regulator now says it never wanted the regulatory change in the first place and was only responding to orders from a parliamentary committee. The committee last week quietly withdrew its request for regulatory amendments in the face of a public backlash.

The CRTC has been in the news quite a bit recently for its approach to telecommunications, the Fox News North issue, and now once again for its withdrawal of its own proposal over false news.

There are two issues to consider with this move. First, it is notoriously difficult to establish a standard for “truth” outside the realm of science. If we look at what is happening in Libya right now, it is both a populist uprising against a brutal dictator, and a band of anti-government rebels using unlawful force against the legitimate ruler of the country. Both of those completely contradictory claims are completely true, depending on the editorial position one takes. How could one determine which of these claims, if made from a media outlet, would be considered “false or misleading”? Are the Democrats in Wisconsin bravely refusing to capitulate to an over-reaching and clearly corrupt governor, or are they fleeing the legitimate government and abdicating the legislative role they vowed to uphold? Again, these are both completely true claims, and if station A adheres to the first, while station B trumpets the second, which one is lying? Both? Neither?

The second issue to keep in mind is that, thus far, this has never been an issue in Canada. The CRTC has never had to prosecute or fine a television or radio station for broadcasting false or misleading news. There’s a great diversity of opinion among the various outlets, save for the fact that we don’t have an outlet that specifically caters to the bizarro-nut right wing (we also don’t have one that caters specifically to the bizarro-nut left wing, if that helps). It’s a sort of non-issue that, if the CRTC is to be believed, was raised about 10 years ago (before the days of the Harper government) and was quietly shelved for most of that time. Given that there’s never been a challenge to the ruling, it’s hard to claim that this is an unreasonable restriction of free speech.

These two issues aside, there is still an underlying conflict at the centre of free speech when it comes to truth. Since truth is always a shifting target outside of science, banning false or misleading news is a tricky issue. By any objective standard of truth that we could agree on as a society, religious statements are all false and misleading, as are ghost stories and UFO sightings. Clearly we are not comfortable banning those statements. What do we do when someone does make a blatantly false claim in a news outlet, given that we have no precedent? While we can trumpet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” until the cows come home, can we turn that into a general rule for the state to follow? Or must we let the liars continue to lie, with our only recourse being to counter their false speech with true speech?

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0 You finished cleaning that glass ceiling yet, sweetheart?

March 8, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · culture · feminism · gender · good news · news

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which should be some cause for celebration. After all, 100 years of progress is an incredibly long time in human history. In the past 100 years we moved from horse-drawn carriages and plows to an international space station orbiting the planet. In 100 years we went from a largely-illiterate population with extremely limited access to information to a planet-wide network that puts virtually the sum total of all human knowledge at ready access from something that we can slip into our pockets. Our understanding of the universe has gone from the deterministic passage of small particles to a nuanced, varied and complex probabilistic model, allowing us to probe concepts previously written off as unsolvable “mysteries”.

Surely in all that time, with all that progress, we’ve made similar strides in the way we treat each other. The answer, as always, seems to be “yes and no”.

Why Feminism Still Matters:

Across the globe by almost every measure, women lag well behind men. Even though women do 66 per cent of the work and produce half of the food, UNICEF reports that they earn only 10 per cent of the global income and own just one per cent of the property. Nowhere in the world do women account for even a third of the national parliamentarians and, in most regions, including Canada, it is considerably less.

Still, this represents progress.

This article, published in the Vancouver Sun, is a pretty decent overview of the various stalls and starts of the movement for women’s equality, but it doesn’t do an explicit job of answering the question implied by its own title – why does feminism still matter? Why should we be focusing on issues that affect women? Anti-feminists, in their attempts to resemble reasonable and decent human beings (rather than reactionary dicks) often refute the feminist position by arguing that we should focus on having equal rights for everyone, and that focusing on women is the same as ignoring men. And while feminists sometimes just want to scream “men are doing just fine, shut your face hole!”, that’s a quick way to lose an argument for a stupid reason.

Canadian companies lack strategies for promoting women:

In the U.S., 70 per cent of companies surveyed lacked strategies for promoting women, compared to 71 per cent internationally. Despatie noted that the Canadian survey also showed that 43 per cent of companies didn’t feel they had a problem with promoting women to top jobs. To women, however, the lack of support strategies was clear. More than half (53 per cent) of all Canadian women and about 38 per cent of American women thought their organization provided “no or minimal support” for their promotion.

It’s right here that the importance of feminism is revealed: companies think they’re doing an excellent job promoting women, but the reality is that they are even worse here than they are in the United States, a place that we’re all happy to look down on socially (to my great chagrin). When there is such a huge gap between perception and reality, the status quo becomes deeply entrenched and progress becomes next to impossible. I am somewhat reminded of the bromide from Alcoholics Anonymous – the first step is admitting you have a problem.

When confronted with this kind of information, the usual reaction of the anti-feminists is to go with the old standby excuse of “maybe there aren’t enough qualified women for the positions”. To me that seems to invite the question: why the hell aren’t there? Women are statistically better educated, are supposedly guaranteed by law to be free from official discrimination based on sex, and equally intelligent as their male counterparts – wherefore the disparity?

Women are underutilized in executive workforce – study:

In both years, a full 30 per cent of the largest companies in Canada did not have a single woman in their executive ranks. “Time is up for ‘give it time’,” Gillis said, though she added that the solution is not simple tokenism. Research indicates that on average, companies with more women senior officers outperform those with fewer (emphasis mine).

That agrees very much with what one of Canada’s largest companies has found in its efforts to reduce the homogeneity of its executive ranks. “If you start to see it as one versus the other, you miss the point,” TD Bank CEO Ed Clark said of the bank’s efforts to promote more women in a recent CBC interview. “By framing it as a people development issue, you don’t get this zero-sum game; everybody wins.”

More and more we are finding that the stereotypical underperformance of women in “men’s fields” like sciences and mathematics are a product of the stereotypes, and not due to any actual difference in cognitive ability. Tearing down stereotypes is a process that requires the intentional encouragement of cognitive dissonance – creating highly visible and immediately recognizable violations of the stereotype. Faced with observed reality and “what I’ve always heard”, reality wins out in the end. Add to that the fact that encouraging women appears to have beneficial outcomes above and beyond being the right thing to do, and you’ve got the recipe for a winner.

(There is an important fact raised in that article that doesn’t fit the overall theme of the argument, but I thought it should be raised anyway. While Crown corporations had the largest proportion of women in executive positions, the private sector came in second place, a number that has increased slightly in the past 2 years. It appears that the private sector is doing a better job of promoting women than the public sector. Just food for thought.)

The premier-designate is a woman:

It may not be kosher to discuss the premier-designate (Christy Clark) in terms of her sex, given we are conditioned to believe that a person’s capability has nothing to do with gender, but it’s clearly a factor, because when it comes to positions of power, whether it’s Parliament Hill or a corporate boardroom, a skirt is still an anomaly in Canada.

And it is relevant. The majority of the population is female, and yet women remain woefully under-represented at the top -be it by historical choice or entrenched sexism. Women, despite making up the bulk of the workforce, are still traditionally considered custodians of the home and hearth and, as such, are often viewed as weaker than men, slower to decision and less likely to be strong political leaders who will go the distance.

My home province of British Columbia (or at least those who are registered members of the provincial Liberal party) recently appointed a new leader… and it’s a lady! If you scratch the surface of the image of the B.C. granola hippie yoga hipster, you’ll find that B.C. is still a western province with deep entrenched Conservative (note the capitalization) values. It is indeed, therefore, a big deal that the person with her finger on the button is a “her”. Despite the fact that the provincial Liberals would pass for Conservatives just about anywhere else in the country, a female premier (designate) is just the kind of high-profile stereotype-busting position I was talking about, and I wish premier-designate Clark success.

Ivory Coast women protesters shot:

Soldiers backing Ivory Coast’s defiant leader mowed down women protesting his refusal to leave power in a hail of gunfire Thursday, killing at least six and shocking a nation where women’s marches have historically been used as a last resort against an unrestrained army. Because the president’s security force has shown almost no reserve in opening fire on unarmed civilians, the women decided this week to organize the march in the nation’s commercial capital Abidjan, assuming soldiers would be too ashamed to open fire. But at least six of the thousands of women demonstrating Thursday were killed on the spot, said Mohamed Dosso, an assistant to the mayor of Abobo, a suburb of the city.

Women bring another set of sensibilities to the table when discussing issues, and a diversity of viewpoints is a strength. Whatever the final decision, having a plurality of insight allows decision-making authorities to consider a variety of potential outcomes. In the Ivory Coast, women have traditionally exercised a different kind of power to their male counterparts, and have been able to blunt the more outrageous actions of a male-dominated culture. Their execution by the army signals a disturbing new development in an already-disturbing conflict.

Closing thoughts

Which brings me back to the question I tried to address earlier: why does feminism still matter?

Well, do women experience disproportionately little political and economic power? Is the improvement of the standing of women irrevocably linked to the improvement of society in general? Have gains been made? Is there still work to do?

The answer to all of the above questions is “yes”. We are not yet, as a society, in a position to let feminism slide into history as obsolete. While I am primarily a commentator on race and associated issues, I am not so blind as to fail to recognize that the same societal forces that are stacked against black people are stacked against women. A victory for women is a victory for all of us, and there can be no equality until we see the advancement of women as being part of our own self-interest. In order to achieve that, people need to be talking about it.

Happy International Women’s Day.

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0 I so very much want to believe!

March 8, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · news · politics · secularism

The title alone probably caused a few heart attacks from the atheists who visit the site from Twitter or Facebook – please rest assured I am not talking about a deity. No, I am referring once again to the important thing that is happening. The Middle East and northern Africa are still up in arms over the protests and changes in power, and we are starting to see some of the political fallout of these actions.

Libya is still on fire

At least 30 civilians have been killed after security forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, Libyan leader, attempted to retake the rebel-held town of Az Zawiyah, near the capital Tripoli, that has for days been defying his rule, witnesses have said. The rebellion in Az Zawiyah – the closest rebel-held territory to the capital and also the site of an oil refinery – has been an embarassment to the Libyan authorities who are trying to show they control at least the west of the country. Eastern regions of the country, around the city of Benghazi, have already fallen out of Gaddafi’s control after a popular revolt against his four decades of rule.

Widespread fighting is happening all across Libya. What makes the situation in Libya much different from Egypt or Tunisia is the fact that the pro-government forces (including part of the military) are unashamedly attacking Libyan civilians, and the anti-government forces are responding in kind. This has the potential to turn into a civil war (although MSNBC’s Richard Engel points out that a civil war is really defined by civilian forces attacking other civilian forces, which is not really the case here… yet), with the “People’s Army” arming itself and rising violently against the government. Attempts by the government to retake eastern cities has been largely unsucessful, and the anti-government protests appear to have hit Gaddafi’s stronghold in Tripoli.

While I would very much like to believe that once the army has overthrown Gaddafi they will divest themselves of their arms and stand for peaceful elections. There is not a lot of precedent for “people’s armies” doing anything other than installing themselves as a new regime, and perpetrating the same evils of the old regime on a different group of people. One can only hope that the international community shows some uncharacteristic restraint and doesn’t listen to idiots like Joseph Liebermann and John McCain, who want to arm and train the rebels. Yeah, because that strategy’s never failed before…

Egypt’s new Prime Minister is pledging democratic reform

Egypt’s new Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf, has pledged to meet the demands for democratic change sought by protesters, and to resign if he fails. He made the comments in an address before thousands gathered at Cairo’s Tahrir Square before Friday prayers. The former transport minister told the crowds that he drew his “will and determination” from the people. Mr Sharaf replaced Ahmed Shafiq, who was appointed in the dying days of the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

Essam Sharaf is an interesting guy, who I have some hope for. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, Sharaf didn’t just suddenly discover his taste for democratic reform once the people began calling for politicians’ heads on pikes. He’s been a critic of the Mubarak government for a few years, which lends him a great deal of credibility in my eyes. The trick to democratic reform is that you cannot guarantee that the outcome will be what you like. Sharaf seems to understand this, and is pressing for democratic reform anyway. However, a lot can happen in between now and August, when the current provisional government has been ordered to step down.

I would very much like to believe that Egypt, a state with a strong secular history and many Western ties, can implement a real democratic state following constitutional reforms. The forbearance of the army during the popular uprising strongly suggests to me that they are not interested in grabbing power from the people, but instead are invested in returning Egypt to a state of relative peace and stability. Only time will tell though.

Tunisia is talking about elections

Tunisia’s interim president Fouad Mebazaa has announced details of new elections promised after the overthrow of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Mr Mebazaa said voting for a council of representatives to rewrite the constitution would be held by 24 July. He said a new interim government would run the country until then.

This is even more encouraging, because an actual date has been set. I react viscerally and negatively to any “plans” that are made without concrete details. When someone says “we should hang out sometime” or “someone should do this” or “yeah, Ian, best sex ever, I’ll call you sometime”, I immediately write off that statement (and, sometimes, the person making it). President Mebazaa has made a definitive date for new governmental elections. Good thing, right? Well…

The political confusion has been compounded by the constitutional provision limiting a caretaker president to 60 days in office, he adds. Mr Mebazaa has argued that, since the current constitution no longer has any credibility, he will stay in office beyond the limit. In his speech, he said the constitution “no longer reflects the aspirations of the people after the revolution”.

This, this, this, THIS is how it starts. First, a politician says that he is taking “temporary” power. Second, he claims to represent the will of “the people”. Third, he says that the rules of the constitution (or whatever document) do not apply in this unique situation. Fourth, he declares himself to have emergency powers until the state of _________ has been resolved, after which he will call for free elections. Fifth, the state of emergency is constantly renewed, meaning that no elections ever take place. Sixth, free speech criticizing the seizing of power is branded as seditious and treasonous, and political opposition is therefore outlawed. Seventh, meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

I want very much to believe that democratic states can foster in the Middle East and northern Africa. I’d love to see the same spirit of peaceful and organized protest carry forward into a secular state that respects free speech and individual human rights. But, as with all things, I am extremely skeptical.

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20 In defense of the “weaker sex”

March 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · civil rights · crapitalism · culture · feminism · gender · law · sex

Note: This article first appeared on Monday, February 28th on Canadian Atheist. While it is CA policy not to cross-post, I felt that this case needed to be made on as many outlets as I could.

A good friend of mine posted a story on my Facebook wall last week about a police officer who fell victim to the arch-stupidity of the “she was asking for it” argument:

A police officer who suggested women can avoid sexual assault by not dressing like “sluts” has apologized, saying he is “embarrassed” by the remark and that assaulted women are “not victims by choice.”

“I made a comment which was poorly thought out and did not reflect the commitment of the Toronto Police Service to the victims of sexual assaults,” Const. Michael Sanguinetti wrote on Thursday to Osgoode Hall Law School where he made the comment. “Violent crimes such as sexual assaults can have a traumatizing effect on their victims. . . . My comment was hurtful in this respect.”

It’s a tired trope that is almost guaranteed to come up in any discussion of women and sexuality – if women didn’t make themselves so open to sexual predators then they’d be safer. It is due to the privilege of being male that this argument offends me only intellectually, since I will never be the target of a sexual assault. I will never appreciate the visceral part of the feminist response to this argument, try as I might. The reason this particular friend posted the link on my wall is that she and I have gone 9 rounds on it in the past, with me articulating the “personal responsibility” position. Don’t worry – I got better.

However, a second friend of mine saw this and posted what he thought was an entirely reasonable response. His response (I’ll call him “Billy” just so we can avoid pronoun confusion) was that the story failed to take the police officer’s side into account. It is a fact, said Billy, that women will be less inviting targets for assault if they are dressed more conservatively and hide their sexuality. Billy didn’t understand why this was such a controversial statement, and was taken aback with Sheila’s (again, for the same of pronoun confusion) full-throated and confrontational response. Billy messaged me afterward to apologize for starting a fight on my wall, and confessing that he couldn’t really understand what he had said that was so inflammatory.

The problem with this “she was asking for it” argument, aside from the fact that it isn’t true (sexual assault is just as common in Muslim countries where women have to stay covered and none of them dress sexy for fear of being arrested, beaten, or scalded with acid), is that it completely misses the point, and tries to derive an “ought” from an “is”. The mere fact that a woman is more likely to be assaulted if she wears certain types of clothing does not make it right. The solution to the problem is not for women to “dress less slutty” (a phrase which is provocative enough on its own), but for men to realize that a woman’s choice of dress is not an open invitation to sexual assault.

It seems as though this seemingly-obvious (once explained) argument still has yet to suffuse through common consciousness:

A University of Manitoba law professor has concerns about a judge’s comments at a sexual assault sentencing. Karen Busby said the remarks by Justice Robert Dewar are a legal throwback to the time when how a woman dressed or acted could be treated as implied consent to sex. Dewar said “sex was in the air” when he spared a man jail time by handing him a two-year conditional sentence instead and allowing him to remain free in the community.

During the sentencing, Dewar also commented on the way the woman was dressed and her actions the night she was forced to have sex in the woods along a dark highway outside Thompson in 2006. The man and a friend met the 26-year-old woman and her girlfriend earlier that night outside a bar under what the judge called “inviting circumstances.” He pointed out the victim and her friend were dressed in tube tops, no bras, and high heels and noted they were wearing plenty of makeup. Dewar called the man a “clumsy Don Juan” who may have misunderstood what the victim wanted.

On a Facebook wall, the kind of statement that Billy made (although, to be sure, he didn’t intend to suggest that it is a rape victim’s fault for being assaulted and he went out of his way to say so) is merely annoying. When it comes from a judge’s mouth, it carries behind it the force of law. I do not wish to derogate Justice Dewar’s abilities as a jurist – perhaps he would have handed down an identical sentence if the victim’s clothing had not been a factor. One cannot guarantee that this would have been the case for all judges, although it certainly should be.

And certainly, this kind of cavalier attitude toward sexual assault does appear in other places:

Reports that women are being sexually assaulted at a Downtown Eastside shelter are being ignored, a coalition of women and women’s groups is charging. But the agency that oversees the First United Church co-ed shelter at Gore and Hastings says it has had meetings with both police and women’s groups on the matter and is actively working to address it. “The safety and security of people using provincially funded shelters are our top priority,” said a statement from BC Housing, which funds and has an operation agreement with the shelter. “We will continue working together to make sure the shelter is a safe place to stay.” But Harsha Walia, a coordinator at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Shelter, said women have reported sexual abuse to front-line workers, police and staff at the shelter, and nothing has been done about it.

When it is a woman’s fault for being assaulted, when her mere presence is provocation enough to justify some kind of violence against her, we know something has gone terribly wrong. When we turn a blind eye to women being assaulted, we cannot call ourselves a society where women enjoy equal or sufficient rights under the law. And because language like “she was asking for it” or “don’t dress like a slut” only serves to reinforce the casual tolerance of violence against women that leads to assault, it is the job of every feminist to speak out against it whenever it comes up. It will forever be a source of chagrin for me that I didn’t always speak this way, but I bloody well will from now on.

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0 Religion’s double-edged sword cuts through Libya

March 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · news · politics · religion

One of my (several) major problems with religious faith, particularly that faith which is based on scripture, is that it can be used to justify or condemn just about any action. Like a fortune cookie, a Tarot card reading or an astrological prediction, scripture is vague and contradictory enough that a wide variety of interpretations can be said to have equal validity. It is for this reason that people as day-and-night different as Shelby Spong and Fred Phelps can both call themselves “Christian” and claim to be “followers of Christ”. They have both read the same document diligently and came out with wildly different interpretations, both of which they can defend with equal fervor.

It is for this reason that a government that is based on religion is pretty much guaranteed to get caught in its own hypocrisy – not because religious people are inherently hypocritical but because the scriptures do nothing more than give the illusion of divine justification for one’s a priori decisions. Moammar Gaddafi is learning this lesson:

Violence flared up even before the Friday sermons were over, according to a source in Tripoli. “People are rushing out of mosques even before Friday prayers are finished because the state-written sermons were not acceptable, and made them even more angry,” the source said.

Libyan state television aired one such sermon on Friday, in an apparent warning to protesters. “As the Prophet said, if you dislike your ruler or his behaviour, you should not raise your sword against him, but be patient, for those who disobey the rulers will die as infidels,” the speaker told his congregation in Tripoli

Contrast this state-sponsored co-opting of religion, not to mention Gaddafi’s full-throated endorsement of an Islamic Europe, with what he said in a long, rambling, and mostly incoherent speech last week:

Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has said in a speech on Libyan state television that al-Qaeda is responsible for the uprising in Libya. “It is obvious now that this issue is run by al-Qaeda,” he said, speaking by phone from an unspecified location on Thursday. He said that the protesters were young people who were being manipulated by al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, and that many were doing so under the influence of drugs.

So when Islam is used as justification for his continued reign, it is a good and useful thing. However, when it is used as justification for violence (as is al-Qaeda’s whole reason for being), it is a bad thing. Mosques are to spread pro-government propaganda as decreed by Allah, but are to be bombed when used against the government, supposedly under the same authority. It should be stated unequivocally that there is no truth to Gaddafi’s assertion, or at least no evidence to support it. Given that he is becoming crazier and more disconnected from reality, it is probably wise to just assume that everything he says is a self-serving lie.

The tragic thing in all of this, aside from the thousands of people dead and the thousands more injured by pro-government forces and foreign mercenaries, is that both sides are claiming that Allah favours their cause rather than the other. It means that no matter what the outcome, it is because of Allah, rather than placing the credit (and blame) where it firmly belongs – on the people of Libya.

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0 The more things change…

March 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · news · politics

For someone with a more than passing interest in politics, religion and human rights, my cup doth overflow this week with stuff to talk about. I am hoping to group this week’s posts thematically so as not to completely drown you in my random thoughts, but if my threads aren’t clear please forgive me – I am doing my best.

I am not an expert in international law or foreign relations (“and the ‘Understatement of the Year’ award goes to…“), but I knew that the protests in Egypt were going to be a big deal. What I didn’t for a moment suspect is that they would explode in the way they have, turning much of the Arab world on its heels in a way that, to my knowledge, has no precedent. Of course my attention, along with the rest of the world’s, has moved from Egypt to Libya where things have taken a much more frantic and vitriolic turn. However, when I got a chance to step back from the rah-rah pro-democracy feeling I had about what’s happening, I realized that there’s a much more interesting picture happening.

The more things change…

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention (and you really should be), Libya has been completely turned upside down:

Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s long-standing ruler, has reportedly lost control of more cities as anti-government protests continue to sweep the African nation despite his threat of a brutal crackdown. Protesters in Misurata said on Wednesday they had wrested the western city from government control. In a statement on the internet, army officers stationed in the city pledged “total support for the protesters”. Much of the country’s east also seemed to be in control of the protesters, and an Al Jazeera correspondent, reporting from the city of Tobruk, 140km from the Egyptian border, said there was no presence of security forces

Libya has an interesting political layout. In the stereotypical style of a warlord, Gaddafi was able to unite a number of tribes under one banner that was formerly ruled by a monarch. Libya has no constitution per se, instead purportedly relying on the general will of the people to govern itself. However, in reality it has been a dictatorship that is only egalitarian on paper. There is a significant east/west divide, based on historical tribal affiliations, now punctuated by the dictator’s strongholds in the western city of Tripoli standing in opposition to the bastion of the anti-government movement based in the eastern city of Benghazi.

The take-home message of all of this is that eastern Libya (which, perhaps coincidentally, shares a border with Egypt) is out of government control. Not only has Gaddafi lost control of the eastern cities, but his power base is rapidly crumbling:

Libyan diplomats across the world have either resigned in protest at the use of violence against citizens, or renounced Gaddafi’s leadership, saying that they stand with the protesters. Late on Tuesday night, General Abdul-Fatah Younis, the country’s interior minister, became the latest government official to stand down, saying that he was resigning to support what he termed as the “February 17 revolution”

While I have to express a little bit of skepticism at the true motivation behind these resignations and sudden allegiance to the protesters, the short-term result is that Gaddafi is finding himself more and more without allies.

Libya isn’t the only place facing major changes as result of protest:

Algeria’s cabinet has adopted an order to lift a 19-year-old state of emergency in a concession designed to avoid the tide of uprisings sweeping the Arab world, but protesters said the measure did not go far enough. A draft law approved by the cabinet would repeal the emergency law as soon as it is published in the government’s official journal, the official Algerie Presse Service reported on Wednesday. Ending the emergency powers was one of the demands voiced by opposition groups which have been staging weekly protests in the Algerian capital that sought to emulate uprisings in Egypt and neighbouring Tunisia.

These “emergency powers” are nearly always problematic, especially in countries with a weak opposition party. To exist in a state of emergency for 19 years is essentially the government’s way of cracking down on all opposition and adopting a sort of “l’état, c’est moi” approach to governance wherein the political rulers conflate themselves with the entire country – political dissent thereby becomes treason. Seemingly inspired by what’s been happening in neighbouring countries, Algerians have pushed the government to release their grip in an effort to save their state control. They’ve also passed a number of economic measures designed to stimulate the private sector (which makes my inner capitalist very happy). We’ll see if it goes far enough to placate the people, who may not stop until they have achieved the same kind of wholesale change being demanded in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and their other African neighbours.

…the more they stay the same

It is incredibly tempting to see these protests as the dawning of a new era of Western-style democracy in the Middle East, but such a conclusion would be incredibly naive. The region doesn’t have a history of democratic rule, and has far too much foreign entanglement to simply start afresh. One of the most sensitive entanglements is that of the United States:

In finally supporting the Tahrir experiment, President Obama was, in effect, pledging to end decades of American hypocrisy in its policies towards the Middle East and larger Muslim world. But in order to live up to this promise he will have to develop one set of policies for all the peoples and countries of the region. And doing that will demand an even more costly break with the past, putting old allies at arm’s length until they respect the rights of their peoples while embracing, however tentatively, groups that once seemed more easily characterised as, if not quite foes, then at least untrustworthy partners in securing American interests.

Unless the United States (and the West in general) suddenly becomes uncharacteristically non-interventionalist and allows these protests to reach their equilibrium on their own, there is a real risk that after a brief and bloody insurrection, the status quo will simply re-emerge and the region will simply exchange one set of dictatorial rulers for another. This, sadly, seems to be the case in Egypt:

Egypt’s key portfolios of defence, interior, foreign, finance and justice were unchanged in a cabinet reshuffle, state television confirmed. The list of new ministers that was presented on Tuesday included changing the veteran oil minister, as well as introducing politicians who had been opposed to the rule of Hosni Mubarak, who stepped down from office after widespread protests. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who leads the ruling military council and has been defence minister for about 20 years, took the new ministers’ oaths of office.

But the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s biggest opposition group, said the new cabinet showed that Mubarak’s “cronies” still controlled the country’s politics. “This new cabinet is an illusion,” Essam el-Erian, a senior Brotherhood member, said. “It pretends it includes real opposition but in reality this new government puts Egypt under the tutelage of the West.”

One must be aware of the fact that these criticisms come from the Muslim Brotherhood, which does not support democratic rule, and any pro-democracy politicians could be considered “under the tutelage of the West”. Given that the entire direction of this movement is balancing on a knife edge, the only way to ensure there is no backlash against Europe and America is to stay the hell away from the whole situation, and encourage the protesters to decide their own path.

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2 Libya has upped the ante

February 22, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · news · politics

I have a niggling suspicion that I glossed over the issue of the struggle for freedom in this morning’s post. There is some real shit going down right now:

Pan-Arab news outlets report that Gaddafi’s troops have used live ammunition and heavy military equipment such as anti-tank missiles in Benghazi. Late on Sunday fierce clashes were being reported in Tripoli. Libya Al Youm reported on its website on Sunday that the regime was using “heavy weapons” and shooting at random.

I cannot put too fine a point on this – Muammar Gaddafi has authorized the use of deadly force against civilians for exercising their right to free speech and free assembly. He has called in foreign mercenaries and snipers to shoot Libyan citizens, and has directed weapons strikes from aircraft against crowds of unarmed civilians. The United States declared war against Iraq at least partially on the justification that he had done stuff like this to his people. The drama is rapidly unfolding:

Meanwhile, two Libyan fighter jets have landed in Malta, where officials say the pilots defected after they were ordered to bomb civilians. Two Libyan helicopters apparently carrying French oil workers have also landed in Malta.

These reports are unsubstantiated eye-witness accounts so it’s entirely possible that we’re not getting the unvarnished truth here, but these reports are coming from Al Jazeera and the BBC – not exactly World Net Daily.

By the time you’ve read this, this “news” will be more than 24 hours old, but I’ve been told by a handful of people who don’t read the news regularly that they wouldn’t have known about this stuff if I hadn’t been harping on it. I hope this will motivate you to read up a little about what’s going on – this will have major repercussions for all of us for many years to come. It’s a good idea to be paying attention. This morning, Gaddafi appeared on state television and gave an hour-long histrionic rant, blaming America and demanding that his fictitious supporters go out onto the streets and arrest those protesting the government, promising death to all who oppose the government. Chilling stuff.

Of course in all the tumult it’s easy to forget that The Ivory Coast has been in a state of violent revolution, with citizens being murdered and raped, since November.

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3 Something important is still happening

February 22, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech · news · politics

Back in the beginning of January, the people of Tunisia decided they’d had enough of systemic government corruption and a leadership that had repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for its people. They staged a large-scale protest, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets and calling for the resignation of then-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. When Ben Ali fled the country and his government toppled, people in oppressed countries all over Africa and the Middle East took immediate notice.

That spirit of revolution and the power of ordinary people to affect widespread change was picked up almost immediately by the people of Egypt, who fought an even tougher battle against a firmly-entrenched and powerful leader. The people’s desire for wholesale change was barely dented by vicious violence directed by a corrupt government, its baton-wielding thugs and its unashamedly dishonest state media. It took weeks of mounting protest and the attention of the entire world, but the protests (largely peaceful although there was occasional retaliation by anti-government protesters) eventually achieved their stated goal: the removal of Hosini Mubarak after 30 years of corrupt rule.

As I stated previously, there’s really only one important thing happening in the world right now, and it’s spreading:

Hundreds of Libyans calling for the government’s ouster clashed with security forces early Wednesday in the country’s second-largest city as Egypt-inspired unrest spread to the country long ruled by Moammar Gadhafi. Ashur Shamis, a Libyan opposition activist in London, and witnesses said the protest began Tuesday and lasted until the early hours Wednesday in the port city of Benghazi.

What’s perhaps most interesting about these protests is that the governments don’t seem to learn much from each other’s missteps:

Protests have been banned in Bahrain and the military has been ordered to tighten its grip after the violent removal of anti-government demonstrators, state TV reports. The army would take every measure necessary to preserve security, the interior ministry said. Three people died and 231 were injured when police broke up the main protest camp, said Bahrain’s health minister.

The immediate reaction of these regimes seems to be the use of force to quell dissent. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t seem to work all that well, and often only serves to bolster the resolve of the people who are in the streets. It seems as though people living in autocratic regimes where police and government officials are all corrupt and organize crime syndicates are often inextricably intertwined with the normal day-to-day business of living aren’t all that afraid of getting beat up if the chance of freedom exists. Sometimes, the consequences are more dire than that:

Bahraini security forces have opened fire on anti-government protesters, witnesses and opposition activists say. The protesters were fired on after they had streamed into the centre of the capital Manama from the funerals of protesters killed in a security crackdown earlier this week. Witnesses said the army fired live rounds and tear gas, and officials said at least 120 people had been hurt.

Two people have been killed and 40 wounded after police shot at a crowd of protesters in Kurdistan, northern Iraq. Hundreds of young men, chanting slogans against corruption and high unemployment, tried to storm the local government offices in Sulaimaniya. There have been a string of protests in cities across Iraq. On Wednesday, three people were killed in clashes with police in the southern city of Kut.

At least three people have been killed during widespread anti-government demonstrations in Yemen. Two people were killed in the southern port city of Aden from gunfire as police moved to disperse protesters, medical officials and witnesses said. In the city of Taiz, one person was killed when a grenade was thrown from a car into a crowd of protesters. And in the capital Sanaa, supporters and opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh clashed on the streets.

Iran’s opposition leaders should face trial and be put to death, the country’s hardline lawmakers said Tuesday, a day after clashes between opposition protesters and security forces left one person dead and dozens injured. At an open session of parliament Tuesday, pro-government legislators demanded that opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi and former reformist President Mohammad Khatami face be held responsible for the protests.

It’s tempting to cheer unabashedly for the forces of popular reform. After all, these are countries that are ruled by despotic leaders that regularly violate the human rights of their own people, hold corrupt “elections” where the outcome is decided a priori and fail to display anything that looks even slightly like common decency. However, just because those people are being thrown out, that doesn’t mean that the new batch is necessarily going to be any better. Imagine what it would look like, for instance, if the Tea Party in the United States successfully overthrew the government and installed Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann as the new leader – sometimes the people are idiots, and find even bigger idiots to lead them.

Most interesting (to me personally) in all of this is the role that the media and especially the internet are playing. The uniform knee-jerk reaction from those in power has been to spread lies over state media about how violence is being started by the protesters, that they are sponsored by foreign interests, that police are being called in to protect the people… the list of falsehoods goes on. Despite attempts to silence reporters (and the particularly disgusting and shocking case of Lara Logan’s assault in Egypt), reports have been flowing out on a regular basis. In an age when anyone with a cell phone and an internet connection can become an instant amateur journalist, controlling the flow of information has become next to impossible. The United States is making noises like it understands that:

China has warned the US not to use calls for internet freedom as an excuse to meddle in other countries’ affairs. The foreign ministry comments came after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced an initiative to help dissidents around the world get past government internet controls. Since Mrs Clinton’s speech, comments about it have been removed from China’s popular Twitter-like microblog sites.

It seems like some autocrats never learn. Whatever the outcome of all of these uprisings, the inability of these despotic states to control the free speech of their citizens will ultimately ensure their downfall. No society that can communicate with the rest of the world can truly be controlled by its rulers.

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2 Black history in Canada moment: Ontario

February 21, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · conservativism · history · race · racism · religion

This year for Black History Month, I have decided to do a bit of research into black history in my home and native land, Canada. Since there are 4 Mondays in February, I am going to focus on 4 different regions of the country. Last week I looked at black history in the prairies. This week, I am focusing on the Ontario, Canada’s oldest and most populous province. This summary will intentionally exclude Toronto – black history in Toronto is so long and complex that any attempt to summarize it in ~1000 words would be doing it a grave disservice.

I was born in British Columbia, living in the interior until I was ten years old. My family moved to the Toronto area in 1994 so that my father could complete his graduate degree in social work at the University of Toronto. I lived in various parts of southern and eastern Ontario over 15 years, including two years in Kingston, Ontario (which was Canada’s first capital and where first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald resided) while I completed my own graduate degree. While I call British Columbia home, I am just as entitled to consider myself a native son of Ontario, having spent my formative years there.

Black history also has long and deep roots in the province of Ontario. After the United States passed the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 which, among other things, compelled people to return runaway slaves to their owners, the northern United States were no longer a safe haven where a slave could find her/his own life. As a result, emigration (flight, really) of black Slaves into Canada began in earnest. Because of where the borders were located, their proximity to major American urban centres, and the difficulty of moving people across the prairies in the United States, Ontario became a prime location to smuggle in freed slaves. As with most displaced peoples, blacks settled and tried to build lives for themselves as soon as they had the opportunity, which means that black settlement in Ontario dates back hundreds of years – prior, in fact, to much of any group settling in the prairies.

One of the earliest such settlements was the farming community of Buxton. Buxton is famous among buffs of the history of slavery, as it was considered the “last stop” on the Underground Railroad that brought escaped slaves from the United States to Canada. The land was purchased and made available to the fugitives by Reverend William King – a fact that should not be overlooked when considering the role of Christians and white abolitionists in the movement to aid slaves. Despite the availability of land and a means of cultivating it, things were obviously not all roses and smiles for freed men in the new “promised land”, as this quote from A NorthSide View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by themselves, with an account of the history and condition of the colored population of Upper Canada will attest:

Among some people here, there is as much prejudice as in the States, but they cannot carry it out as they do in the States: the law makes the difference. I am acquainted with many of the colored families here, and they are doing well. We have good schools here.

Once again, this fact cannot be overlooked by those who would claim that Canada was a racism-free land of milk and honey, or those who would claim that passing laws against discrimination or other prejudice are ineffectual.

I’ve been to Buxton, Ontario. There are in fact several Buxtons with similar histories – one in Nova Scotia, and another in Grenada in the West Indies. The Buxton I went to has a graveyard, which is perhaps the oldest and best-kept black historical site in Canada. There are Cromwells buried in the cemetery at Buxton, Ontario, but these are likely no relation to me – our name is a bastardization of a Dutch surname. Near Buxton is the small town of Chatham, which has its own distinct historical significance. Perhaps chief among its contributions is the fact that it was used as the staging ground for the famous raid on Harper’s Ferry by the American abolitionist John Brown.

In my pokings around doing research for this article, I was struck with a bit of history I had never even heard hinted at before. Reading books by Lawrence Hill (a great Canadian author who you should definitely look into if you get a chance), I learned that Oakville, Ontario has a long black history. This is a particularly outrageous suggestion, given the nearly monochromatic makeup of Oakville currently. I was looking for some information to corroborate this, when I discovered that the Niagara Movement has a Canadian origin.

The Niagara Movement was a political group devoted to antisegregation and the improvement of the plight of black people in the United States, founded by black intellectuals under the supervisory auspices of W.E.B. Du Bois – himself a prominent and influential black intellectual whose life history is an amazing story that is chronicled in the book Up From Slavery (n.b. – Up From Slavery was written by Booker T. Washington, not Du Bois. Du Bois has written several autobiographies, the most recent of which was published in 1968, and which I apparently need to read post-haste). The Niagara Movement laid down the foundation of what would become the prevailing attitude towards the improvement of black people’s lives, and eventually lead to the foundation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which is, of course, still in existence. The inaugural meeting took place in Fort Erie, Ontario near Niagara Falls. Interestingly, the advancement of women was part of the foundation of this movement, working in concert with and anticipating the suffrage movement that was to define the next few decades.

It was at their meeting in Fort Erie that they (mostly Du Bois) built the basis of their foundational document that called for, among many other things, equal and desegregated schools, the protection of trade unions, anti-discrimination statues, and a number of other things that would make any decent conservative wake up in a cold sweat. They also criticized the institution of the Christian churches, particularly their complicity in racial prejudice. Once again, these facts speak against the attempt to re-brand the abolition movement as being in line with conservativism or Christianity, as is often attempted.

As I stated in the header, there is far more to black history in Ontario than I can comfortably address here, and more conscientious scholars than your humble narrator have done much more thorough jobs of chronicling it. The “take home message” of this piece (indeed, all of these pieces) is that black history is closely tied to Canadian history. The prosperity and stability of the territory of Upper Canada (the early name for Ontario) owes a good portion of its existence to the contributions made by black people – freed slaves and their descendants alike. To fail to recognize this is to rewrite history and neglect an important and interesting narrative.

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