The Crommunist Manifesto

13 Home-grown religious huxter

August 12, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crapitalism · news · religion

When I was at that “debate” between Hugh Ross and Brian Lynchehaun, Brian made what I thought was an interesting point toward the end. He asked the audience to picture a circumstance in which a loved one was dying a painful death, with no hope of a medical cure. Someone offers you a chance to visit a faith healer, who promises a miraculous result, and all it will cost you is your life savings. Left with your back against the wall and no other options, would you take that chance?

A skeptic atheist wouldn’t, and Brian’s argument was that this is a illustration of how skeptics are less likely to fall for scams than a religious person. It popped into my head when I read this article about a pastor in Montreal:

Several members of the Bethel Christian Community have gone public with troubling allegations about money they say they lent to their spiritual leader — Rev. Mwinda Lezoka, a Congolese native who has ministered to Montreal’s growing African community for two decades.

These are not rich people – these are ordinary working people, some of whom went so far as to remortgage their own homes. They gave their money to a man they trusted, and were not repaid. It turned out that pastor Lezoka was using the money he appropriated for… slightly less divine ends:

During the years Lezoka ministered to his parish at the Bethel Christian Community Church in Ahuntsic, he also studied gemology, and appeared to head a Kinshasa-based export agency specialized in diamond trading.

Lezoka was apparently an administrator of a diamond exporting firm in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – the firm has since gone bankrupt. It does not take a great deal of imagination to envisage a scenario in which Lezoka used funds that were loaned to him for the purpose of developing the church in order to prop up his failing investment.

Jewish and Christian scripture exhort the faithful to be honest and fair-dealing. Bearing false witness is in the commandments (God is not cool with it), and that has been extrapolated to include all types of lying. Surely a pastor, one whose life is devoted to the teaching of scripture, once caught in a lie, would come clean and be honest, right?

“I did not take anyone’s money,” said Mwinda Lezoka, speaking in French, in an exclusive interview with CBC News. “So I, Mr. Lezoka, am not responsible for deceiving anyone.” … The pastor was unable to produce any financial records, when asked by CBC News. Nor could he explain why charitable tax receipts he issued have false numbers, according to Revenue Canada.

It’s sad, but unsurprising, when people with religious authority show themselves to be as callow, evasive, and corrupt as people with just regular ol’ Earthly authority. Unsurprising to me, at least, because even while I was a believer I didn’t buy the fiction that priests are somehow more righteous or upstanding than anyone else. To borrow from (and paraphrase) Napoleon, religion is an agreed-upon fiction. It is built firmly on the basis that everyone believes the story – if you do not believe, you cannot be shown evidence to engender belief (the fundamental difference between science and religion). If the morals and righteousness are based upon fiction, there is no end to the number of cognitive dissonances and goalpost shifts possible to justify any act of evil.

I am well aware of the fact that these people might have been duped by anyone. Many people fall for scams that are not religious in any way. However, credulous belief in falsehoods and the associated elevation of people into positions of power and authority (and assumed rectitude) based on those falsehoods makes a person more likely to believe in nonsense. To put it plainly: those who are willing to believe anything are willing to believe anything.

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0 Vancouver doesn’t have a race problem

August 12, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · race · racism

You had to know I’d bring this all back home, right? I’ve talked before about Canada’s issues with race, and more specifically Vancouver’s, and as I’ve pointed out these aren’t isolated incidents – the issues continue:

Two men were caught on camera writing racially inflammatory graffiti aimed at people of Chinese origin, as well as derogatory comments toward police, on the wall of the Empire Centre parkade in Richmond.

Those of you not from the area may not know that Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, has a large Chinese population that has exploded in recent years. It is perhaps more famous for housing the Olympic speed skating oval. There has been historical tension in the region between white Canadians and Canadians of Chinese descent. It comes certainly as no surprise to me that incidents like this are happening.

Police were able to identify and arrest one of the vandals, and will likely have found the other by the time this makes its way up online. It’s good that the police are able to catch the perpetrators, but that’s not a solution to the underlying problem of racial tension. By no means am I suggesting that arresting criminals is futile, but it is not a method that approaches crime prevention.

Nor is beefing up security:

Two Jewish religious institutions in Vancouver that have been targets of hate crimes have been given federal money to increase security around their buildings. On Thursday Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the Schara Tzedeck synagogue and the Ohel Ya’akov Community Kollel would receive $20,000 from the Communities at Risk: Security Infrastructure Pilot Program.

Again, far be it from me to suggest that it’s a waste of time or money to try and secure the safety and property of people who are being actively persecuted by hate groups. It’s every person’s right to be able to protect him/herself from violence. Hate-based violence affects the entire community, both those who are the targets of hate and those who are merely empathetic and humanistic people. We should do what we can to secure our safety, and punish those who break the law…

…but we shouldn’t for a second think that approach is sufficient.

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0 More on Net Neutrality

August 11, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech

If you found this afternoon’s post interesting, you should check out episode 75 of Radio Freethinker, which is hosted by Ethan Clow here in Vancouver. Regular readers might remember that I made a guest appearance on the show back in June.

7 Net Neutrality – definitely a free speech issue

August 11, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech

The following clip was brought to my attention:

I don’t know much about Al Franken, except that people whose opinions I respect think he’s a good guy. Based on this speech here, he seems like someone I should be paying more attention to. Imagine for a moment what the world would be like if the Catholic Church had been in complete control of the printing press (although we don’t have to strain our imaginations too much – just read a history book). Science, philosophy, literacy, all of the hallmarks that took us out of the dark ages would have been completely lost. Medicines wouldn’t have been discovered (since prayer would be all you need), representative democracy would not have become the standard of government, ethicists like Hume, Kant, Rawls, and Nietzsche (especially him); authors like Dostoevsky, Twain, Hugo and Orwell would have published exactly nothing (but on the bright side, no Twilight novels either); Picasso, Dali, Hendrix, and Ginsberg would have been forbidden the political climate that spawned their works.

I’d really rather live in this world where public expression was the secular right of all people.

Senator Franken imagines a world in which large corporations, who have no responsibility aside from delivering money to their shareholders, are in control of the means of knowledge dissemination. We can look to China to see what happens when the government controls the means – they have a socialist fascist political system. Imagine then what a corporate fascist political system would look like. Or, sit back and do nothing, and we’ll find out.

Those of you in the United States should please feel free to sign this petition.

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0 Arizona doesn’t have a race problem

August 11, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · news · race · racism

While I have mentioned it tangentially, I haven’t devoted an entire post to what is probably the biggest racial civil rights struggle since the 1960s: Arizona’s new immigration law. In brief, the law requires police officers to detain anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. If a suspected person cannot prove they aren’t an illegal immigrant, they can be arrested and put in jail. When I say that the law requires police to do this, I mean just that – a component of the bill is that if an officer fails to interrogate someone, and a citizen notices it, the officer can be found in dereliction of his/her duty. Basically, the reins of law are turned over to the most paranoid and least informed members of the populace of Arizona.

The reflexive question that everyone immediately asks is “how do you tell if someone looks like an illegal immigrant?” Good question: let’s ask the governor who signed the bill

Huh… even she doesn’t know. Not to worry though, she says. People will have their civil rights protected, as it says in the bill:

“This act shall be implemented in a manner consistent with federal laws regulating immigration, protecting the civil rights of all persons and respecting the privileges and immunities of United States citizens.”

Handy! What about this right?

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

If the law respects the right to be innocent until proven guilty, and the constitution outlaws unreasonable seizure, then the immigration bill is pretty clearly meaningless. After all, if you cannot prove that someone is illegal (which is the standard of innocent until proven guilty), you cannot compel them to prove they are illegal (that pesky 5th Amendment) and you’re not allowed to arrest them arbitrarily, then the bill is moot.

Well, the federal government didn’t argue that case, but still managed to block the bill’s enforcement, arguing instead that immigration policy is the purview of the federal government and that the law went outside the state’s jurisdiction. Of course, Arizona plans to appeal:

Lawyers for Republican governor Jan Brewer and the Arizona government filed their appeal at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Thursday. “I have also asked the 9th Court to expedite the briefing schedule and its ruling, since Congress and the president have once again failed to act,” Ms Brewer said in a statement.

I want to take a moment to talk about the people of Arizona. While I think they’ve made a frighteningly poor decision and are wearing their entrenched racism out on their sleeves, I am loath to condemn them outright. Arizona has major economic problems (which this bill will only make worse, but we’re not dealing with rational people here), and as I’ve said before, racism will bubble up from beneath the surface whenever there is economic hardship. Illegal immigrants are a convenient scapegoat in times of crisis, especially if they are brown-skinned. While people affirm up and down that this isn’t a race issue, it strains credulity to think that the cops are going to be on the hunt for illegal French and German immigrants.

Especially with this guy in charge…

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0 First, kill all the lawyers

August 10, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · news

All:
God save your majesty!

Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

Dick:
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Cade:
Nay, that I mean to do.

Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78

The common temptation is to read the above quote out of context, and to imagine that killing the lawyers will somehow usher in a Utopian society. Certainly we can all think of our favourite lawyer sterotype – the slick corporate lawyer who gets the megacorporation out of having to pay damages, the wily defence lawyer who helps the rich defendant escape punishment, the aggressive divorce lawyer who strips a man of all of his possessions through litigation.

I’d like to add another stereotype to your arsenal: the lawyer who is kidnapped for have the temerity to assert that his client has the right not to be executed for having a boyfriend:

Mohammad Mostafaei, who is defending the woman (Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtani), was called in on Saturday for questioning at Tehran’s Evin prison. Amnesty (International) says he appears to have gone missing after his release. The authorities have since detained his wife and brother-in-law, it says.

I attended a rally here in Vancouver in support of this woman. It was sparsely attended, and largely failed to capture the attention of the crowds going by – highly disappointing. There was one highlight, however. During a speech, the speaker decried the practice of stoning and the oppression of women in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. A man in the crowd began shouting his dissent, saying that women were well-treated in Saudi Arabia. The speaker on stage pointed out that women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive. The heckler shot back, and I am not making this up, that they didn’t want to drive. I am gratified that the audience immediately broke out laughing. It is utterly ridiculous to pass a law banning someone from doing something that they don’t want to do in the first place. If the women of Saudi Arabia don’t want to drive, they should be able to choose not to – no need for a law.

At any rate, the execution of this woman appears to be a foregone conclusion. The government of Iran has decided that she is guilty and worthy of death, and no amount of legal argument or international protest seems sufficient to sway them from their course. Considering what’s happening in Iran, and in Gaza, and the ongoing idiocy of Pakistan, it seems like the Middle East is leading the bold charge forward into the 15th century.

UPDATE: Mr. Mostafaei has turned up in Turkey and is seeking asylum there.

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0 South Africa doesn’t have a race problem

August 10, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · news · racism

I was watching The Daily Show a few weeks ago, during the coverage of the World Cup. John Oliver was talking about race relations in South Africa – to people on the street, to a hard-line racist activist, and to a government minister in charge of racial relations. The most poignant part of the interview for me was when the minister looked John in the eye and told him flat out that South Africa doesn’t have a race problem. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking milk at the time, because it most assuredly would have flown out of my nose as I laughed derisively.

I feel compelled at this point to re-state a maxim that I’ve danced around many times at this blog. It is a central tenet of my approach to race and improving the climate of racial discourse in Canada (and other countries, of course). It is not… It is not… IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to simply wish racism away. It is not possible to declare that there is no race problem simply by asserting it and hoping to high heaven that it comes true. Racial issues are deeply entrenched in our society, in our history, and there is some evidence to suggest that elements of it are present in our very human nature. The first step toward progress is recognizing the subtle effect that non-obvious racism has on our day-to-day lives.

Hence my scoffing and incredulity when presented with the statement that “South Africa doesn’t have a race problem”. As though hundreds of years of colonialization, coupled with an absolutist and brutal apartheid regime that existed within my own living memory could somehow be erased by good will and warm, fuzzy feelings. It was times like that I wished I had a roommate, and that the roommate was a bit slow – I would have made a bet. “Within a month of this statement,” I would have said “we’re going to hear about some major race issue out of South Africa.”

I would have won some money.

Four white South Africans have been convicted of humiliating five black university domestic staff after a video of the incident was posted online. The video showed the five staff being made to kneel and forced to eat food which had apparently been urinated on by one of the students.

I don’t speak Africaans (and neither do you, likely) so I can’t translate the video for you, but the actions are pretty clear. The ‘urinating’ in the food is simulated by a water bottle, but wow does that ever not matter. The former students (those rapscallions) claim that they didn’t intend for the video to be humiliating, and that they never would have done it if they had known what the outcome would be. That’s cold comfort for the millions of black South Africans who see the barely-retreated spectre of apartheid – where being black meant that you were legally at the bottom rung of society and had no legal protections – rearing its head in the form of these students forcing hostel workers to eat contaminated food for their entertainment.

But hey, at least justice was done:

The four – RC Malherbe, Johnny Roberts, Schalk van der Merwe and Danie Grobler – were also given six-month prison terms, suspended for five years on condition they are not found guilty of discrimination during that period. The fines of 20,000 rand (~$2,700) were higher than that requested by the prosecution.

“It sends a strong message to potential offenders of similar crimes,” said magistrate Mziwonke Hinxa in the mainly white town of Bloemfontein.

It does send a strong message – if you’re white and have enough money, you can get away with pissing on the rights and dignity (and food) of black people in South Africa.

In a statement read out by their lawyer, the men said the video had been made to demonstrate the traditions of their hall of residence and to protest at plans to make the university more racially mixed.

Well you’ve essentially taken care of that, boys. Why any black person would want to attend the University of the Free State (someone’s been reading George Orwell) is incomprehensible to me.

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0 Michael Bloomberg gets it EXACTLY right

August 9, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · cultural tolerance · secularism

Holy crap, can I vote in the next New York City election? That is, can I vote for Bloomberg to move to Canada and run for office?

“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here — in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance — was hard-won over many years.”

This is in reference to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque“. Bloomberg had expressed his opposition to the attempts to block the building previously, but this was a great speech in support of civil rights and personal freedoms. While I’m not thrilled about the “God’s love and mercy” part, I recognize a political pander when I see one. Secular society requires us to respect the rights of people to think and believe as they like, even if we don’t agree with them.

For the text of the speech, you can click here.

1 “Polite” Racism

August 9, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · race · racism

Feeling like I’ve been picking on religion too much in my Monday morning think pieces, I’ve decided to re-publish some essays I wrote during Black History Month in February, 2010. This post, which originally appeared on Facebook on Monday, February 15th, 2010, is part 5 of a 6-part series on race and racial issues.

This will probably be everyone’s least favourite post in this series, but it’s a topic that I find the most fascinating and most dangerous – Canadian racism, or racism in the “post-racial” utopia we supposedly have. I say least favourite because it makes everyone uncomfortable, particularly white people in my generation (my own friends included). Nobody likes to be accused of being racist, and I would imagine that most people honestly believe they aren’t, and harbor no active anti-racial sentiments or prejudices. You won’t have to look very hard to find someone who will say that racism isn’t a serious problem in Canada, or find someone who makes the statement “we don’t have racism in Canada” – a patently absurd claim.

The nature of racism has changed a great deal in the past handful of decades. The face of racism, as we’re used to seeing it, comes in the form of hooded Klansmen, burning crosses, police with dogs and hoses turning on angry crowds, lynch mobs, the whole nine yards. We’re used to seeing a system where people actively and overtly discriminate against other people based on their skin colour or ethnic heritage. After a prolonged fight (much less rancorous here in Canada than in the States), we have overthrown that kind of racism. Even within my lifetime, I’ve seen a difference in the tenor of public discourse.

So does that mean that racism is over? Have we finally reached that level playing field? Can we please stop talking about racism and racial issues?

Not on your life.

We may not have police dogs, we may not have lynchings, we might not call people racial slurs (at least to their faces) anymore, but we have not solved the racism problem. We’ve just cleaned it up. We gave people language to avoid offending people, we passed laws to make it harder to discriminate based on race, we went out of our way to put non-white people in prominent, visible positions. All of these have been seen as important, positive steps toward a bias-free society. I see things a little differently.

Imagine if medical science progressed to a point where we could develop such effective anti-sneeze, anti-cough, decongestant, muscle stimulant medications so that the common cold would be completely invisible. A person with a cold would simply pop a handful of pills and be completely symptom free. In fact, taking them prophylactically would ensure that symptoms would never develop. He’d be able to go about his life as though he wasn’t sick. As long as he kept taking the pills, he’d never have to see the effects of illness. However, the reality would be that there’s a serious problem happening inside his body; a problem that doesn’t go away just because it can’t be seen. This person wouldn’t even be aware that he was sick, would take no corrective actions in his life to deal with the susceptibility to illness that made him sick in the first place, and might even go so far as to deny the existence of illness in his body.

By successfully attacking the symptoms of racism – the hate groups, the discriminatory hiring laws, the violence – we have lulled ourselves into thinking that we have solved the underlying problems of racial discrimination and injustice. A friend on comments in another post (on Facebook) actually pulled the “but there’s a black president now” card. As though one black man getting elected to one high office is evidence that justice has been done and everyone should just get over their racial issues and hold hands under a rainbow.

Racism is still alive and well. We still don’t have proportional representation in political life. The poorest people living in the worst conditions are, even in Canada, predominantly dark-skinned. Our history of treatment of Native peoples and our continued discrimination against them is still happening every day. If ability is evenly distributed among the human population, then opportunity should be as well. What we should see if this is the case is a meritocracy in which power is held by those who are the most able. Such a system would look far more multi-cultural (and gender balanced) than the one we have today. One doesn’t have to look too far beyond our own senate and parliament to see that we just ain’t there yet.

Furthermore, by denying the existence of the problem, we grow up unable to see the evidence in front of our own eyes. We become unable to distinguish racial prejudice from bad luck, or circumstance, or a real lack of ability. I was stunned recently to hear someone say “well maybe there just aren’t enough qualified people from minority groups to run for high office.” This little gem is one of the oldest in the book, cited frequently when discussing Affirmative Action laws in the United States. If innate ability is evenly distributed throughout the population, but achievement is not, then we have a racist system. On an even playing field, success will be based on innate ability and hard work, and the best and brightest will move to the front of the line. Again, we’d see a much different distribution of power/race. The fact that we don’t means that either a) the playing field isn’t as even as we’d like to think it is, or b) ability is not distributed evenly throughout the population. Looking at the world, I’m more inclined to believe A over B, but if you honestly think it’s B I’d really like to see some evidence of that.

If we move back for a moment to the analogy of the man with the medicated cold, one would expect occasional flare-ups of sickness when compliance with the drug regimen slips. Our sick man forgets to take his pills one day, and the next day he’s got a runny nose, sneezing, etc. He quickly bombards his system with more pharmaceuticals and the illness subsides until the next time he forgets.

Enter Michael Richards’ tirade; enter Don Imus’ nappy headed ‘hos; enter Mitt Romney’s invocation of Baja Men; enter George Bush’s reaction to Katrina. These are high-profile (and recent) examples of what happens when symptoms are suppressed but the underlying problems aren’t dealt with. It doesn’t take a lot of scratching of the surface to unearth the racial problem. As I said, the problem is far worse in the United States than in Canada, but it’s still happening here.

Reading this, one might get the impression that I think the problem is as bad as it’s ever been. That is not my feeling. We are far better now than we were in my father’s time. I can work where I want, get access to the same government services as anyone else, marry whom I choose, vote, protest, and exploit my human rights. 50 years ago this was inconceivable for many people (both black and white). We’ve absolutely come a long way. However, we haven’t fixed the problem, and our denial and refusal to discuss it has only forced it underground to a place where it’s so subtle, we don’t even know it’s influencing our decisions. As far as we’ve come, we still have miles more to go.

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0 Movie Friday – What up, Ninja?

August 6, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · movie · race

Seeing as the topic came up on Monday, I thought it would be fun to play this video

I really liked this video. While I’m not sure if the authors “get it”, they do expose some of the risible and arbitrary rules around the use of a word, and explore it using humour. Even if it was offensive, it’s funny enough to be excused.

My favourite part is the last scene, where they seem to have a quick debate to see if the non-eastern Asian guy can use the term without offence. “He counts,” apparently. Hilarious.

Enjoy!

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