If I were a stand-up comedian, I would be quickly out of a job because everyone would say “you’re just a less-funny version of W. Kamau Bell”:
There’s really not much more to say than that.
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8 Movie Friday: W. Kamau Bell (again)
11 Presented without comment
It’s going to be okay, I promise.
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12 A truly remarkable election, a truly remarkable story
So there was an election last night. Maybe you heard about it. I decided to take on a bottle of scotch and let the election results decide whether I was drinking in triumph or in bitter defeat. At it turned out, the lesser of two evils prevailed, which is good news for America and the rest of the world.
There was sincerely, non-cynically good news last night too, as Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, and Tammy Baldwin all won elections against opponents who represented the ugliest aspects of the body politic. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin and Richard “god’s will” Mourdock lost their races as well, as did Allen West and Joe Walsh. This is all suggestive of an America that is happy taking a step back from the precipice of insanity that is the once-fringe-now-mainstream of the Republican party. There are a lot of ugly things that happened around this election as well, but we can talk about those next week. Events have once again conspired to rob me of blogging time, but I do want to highlight an important thought.
Elections are viewed through a lens of Hollywood-style horse race struggles between two opposing ideas, where one side “wins” and the other side “loses”. The fact is that this election is, at least at an aggregate level, a preservation of the status quo of Washington politics. It is no exaggeration to point out how deeply corporatized both parties are, and we don’t have to look too far to see a laundry list of things that went almost entirely undiscussed in this election: secret and illegal wars, climate change, domestic spying, curtailment of civil liberties, housing, affirmative action programs, increasing economic inequality, deepening poverty, and the disproportionate effect the economic crisis has had and continues to have on Americans of colour are just a few examples that jump off the top of my head. … Continue Reading
BDSM, Erotica, & Pseudo-Snuff: Astounding Observations of Groupthink
In July of this year, a former friend of mine who is an RCMP officer was exposed on national news as a practitioner of BDSM who had starred in his very own erotica. Unfortunately, he was also erroneously identified as the male component of a series of photos I can only reasonably describe as pseudo-snuff, which bear a chilling resemblance to the last moments on Earth faced by 49 women at the hands of serial murderer Robert Pickton — this was stated as an objective observation by journalists from two separate national media outlets, which both accused the RCMP officer of having some unspecified part in the serial murder spree (which was extended for nearly three years due to apathy and incompetence on the part of investigators in two separate jurisdictions, including his, because a marked majority of the victims were Aboriginal females engaging in sex work and illicit drug use). One of the journalists actually seems to have fabricated an even more sensational description of the photos as well. Turns out they were all duped by a single man whose hobbies include cyber-stalking, compulsive lying, and creative fiction writing in the form of letters to the media, RCMP, blog writers, and the lawyer who represented many of the grieving families of the serial murderer’s victims.
When the story first appeared in national news, I wrote a blog entry about what it was actually like to be this RCMP officer’s friend (spoiler: it’ll give any rational person at least one case of goosebumps). I criticized the photographer and models in the pseudo-snuff photos that were aired on national news, for attempting to eroticize violence against women. I also criticized the rest of the community for pretending this was not exactly what was intended when the male model took a fistful of the female model’s hair, bringing her to her knees in front of him, and held a large knife against her throat as she gazed up at him in terror. I didn’t know that my former friend was not the male model until I received a phone call that triggered a whole other past trauma (which I’ve since reported to RCMP), from the man in the photos. RCMP had found my first blog post within days, written an internal memo about it, and started monitoring my blog. They came to my home and I gave a two-and-a-half-hour statement about every detail I could summon from the depths of my memory. I took a look at the online space I used to share with this RCMP officer, which was named in the news stories, and was shocked to see hundreds of people convincing each other that there was no crime, therefore no criminal investigation. … Continue Reading
47 Ayn Rand, and Obscurantism
People often wonder at the success of Ayn Rand’s writings, at how otherwise intelligent people get sucked in to the Randian circle-jerk. I want to take some time to deconstruct one of her essays, on “Man’s Rights”, with two purposes in mind: 1) to demonstrate that her writing is not 100% vacuous crap, and 2) to help people combat these ideas when presented ‘in the wild’, as it were.
Have a read of her essay. Come back when you’re done. Hopefully you can get through the whole thing (yes, yes, choking down that first sentence is pretty rough, and it doesn’t get any better later).
So where to begin? First, I think it’s important to remember that pure lies don’t often take hold in the way that Rand’s writing has. A lie alloyed with truth can get a lot farther than either the lie or just the truth by themselves. So… For time constraints, I’m going to gloss over the pure bullshit (defining a ‘free society’ as capitalism, for example), and focus more on the truths that are used to sweeten the lie.
11 Kiva project update: November 2012
Hey all,
So we got paid this week. In light of the fact that there’s an urgent need for donations in the American Eastern Seaboard and the Caribbean (particularly Haiti), I was thinking of foregoing our usual Kiva donation this round and splitting the funds between those two Red Cross projects. Keep in mind that Kiva is a microloan project, so that money is still circulating around various projects and we can re-loan once things start getting repaid. Essentially we would just be skipping a month.
If I don’t hear any stringent objections in the next 24 hours, I’ll just go ahead. … Continue Reading
3 Writing from Privilege
I haven’t submitted any posts lately and for that I’m sorry; school has been kicking me around and my health hasn’t been stellar lately. At any rate, here’s a new submission. Enjoy!
PS: I’d like to also say how happy I am that Jamie is now a contributor the blog. Looking forward to reading more of Jamie’s posts!
Writing from a position of privilege is easy. All I have to do is put my fingers to a keyboard; after all, by almost any axis you wish to examine me by, I’m about as privileged as you can get. I’m white, able-bodied with an invisible impairment that is generally manageable (I have clinical depression and a mild anxiety disorder) cis-gendered, heterosexual, and in an age cohort that is often the most valorised in society (late-twenties to mid-thirties). Granted my income isn’t high at the moment, but my expected earnings – thanks to a top-tier education – sit comfortably in the higher-end of the income tax bracket.
Writing from a position of privilege while trying to critique and challenge that privilege is quite a bit more difficult. The most powerful force that keeps privilege in place is its ubiquity; it’s everywhere – in all aspects of my life – and when something that totalizing has been experienced for a lifetime, it makes recognizing it all the more challenging.
In writing for this blog, I have to engage in a near-constant form of self-criticism in order to identify and counter any examples of privileged language or thought processes that might inadvertently cause offense or harm. This is a good thing. It is a very good thing. It is the sort of self-analysis that ought to be the number one tool in any skeptic’s or critical thinker’s tool-kit. Pointing out logical fallacies or contradictions in the beliefs of others is a fairly simple thing to do, and many of us do it all the time. But to turn that critical eye inward is monumentally challenging – especially when doing so turns up things that you might wish were left hidden. Uncovering a false or unjustified belief carries with it the demand that it be abandoned or modified such that the resultant, edited belief can be justified. This rejection or modification has the result of affecting any number of other, related or contingent beliefs. This problem becomes magnified the more foundational the belief you are challenging actually is. Modifying one’s belief that yellow starburst are not only a great flavour of starburst, but the best flavour of starburst is nowhere near as difficult as changing, say, from believing in God to not believing in God. Most people who believe in God do so at a foundational level – that belief is the font from which a myriad moral, epistemological, and even scientific or sociological beliefs spring from, and to remove that font is to collapse any other beliefs that rely on it for support. That’s a weighty proposition.
And that’s how privilege works; those of us who have it often seek to maintain it because by doing so, we are effectively maintaining a web of beliefs that are reliant upon it. Our beliefs in large part define us, and help us to build a society that we want to live in – a society that reflects back to us our beliefs writ-large. When activists, supporters, and members of marginalized and vulnerable communities attempt to change society they (we ) are in effect attempting to distort the social mirror that reflects the beliefs of the privileged. And just like the mirrors in funhouses in crappy fairs the world over, the distorted mirrors reflect back images of ourselves we might not like to see; in the place of a ‘perfect’ and sanitized image of ourselves (or at least an idealized notion of ourselves), we might instead see in the reflections all the ways that we are assisting in the marginalization and oppression of others.
For my part, I see my efforts to confront and check my own privilege to be a work in progress; I try to scrutinize what I say (and the beliefs behind the words that spurred me to speak in the first place) and how my actions – or lack thereof – might serve to either help or hinder people who weren’t dealt the hand I was at birth. And I screw up. All the time. I sometimes lapse into speaking for others, when I should be trying to provide the space to let them speak for themselves; I sometimes slip and use ableist slurs without thinking. I don’t always get it right, but I do try.
And therein lies the greatest challenge to making people aware of their privilege; it has to be voluntary and many, many people simply don’t want to try. For those that do, the process is one that may take a lifetime. Progress on the social justice front seems to me to be an effort that is measured in generations, rather than years; it may have been almost 50 years since Martin Luther King’s impassioned “I have a dream” speech, but it has been a mere two or three (or three or four, depending on how you measure) generations. We will not know the extent of our successes or failures until the generation of children we have raised begin to raise their own and the society they build reflects the substance of their beliefs. The passing of laws that support and protect vulnerable populations are important, but they are not the end of a struggle; the fact that gay marriage is legal in Canada hasn’t ended homophobia, nor has the election of Barack Obama ended racism in America. But they are both steps in the right direction. An even more challenging step might be influencing society’s privileged to take a closer look at their social status and maybe start to question it a little.
3 Movie Friday: Back for Good
As part apology, part self-aggrandizing vanity, here is a bonus movie on this Friday, to reassure you that my Friday movie posts are back for good.
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25 Movie Friday: Anthony Griffith
My apologies to those who have missed this series. As much as I’d like to blame it on the fact that I’ve been spending my Thursday evenings with my ladyfriend, she is not to blame for the disruption to my usual writing schedule. I started writing this post literally a month ago, and it sat at 90% completion – I just couldn’t work up the motivation to finish it off. I hope to resume Movie Fridays henceforth and forevermore.
I’d like to think that my suspicion about gender roles started from a very young age. Growing up as I did, spending most of my middle childhood and into adolescence as the child of a single father, I had a good chance to observe up close the abundant reality that men are caring and nurturing. My father was a social worker, meaning that conversations about emotion and the language we use to express it was never hidden from me – I was never exhorted to “be a man” when experiencing sorrow or frustration, I was merely encouraged to talk about it. As a result, the pop culture narratives about men as needing to tough things out or bottle things up never really resonated with me.
Also peculiar to my upbringing was the fact that, for most of my life, I grew up almost entirely surrounded by white people. White folks made up most of my peer groups, my schoolteachers, and the main characters of most of the shows I watched. It has almost always been true that I was more likely to interact with non-black PoCs than I was with fellow black folks, except obviously for family and Caribbean cultural gatherings (and even in the latter case, not always). Similarly, I never really had to grapple with what it meant to “be black”, except insofar as my racial identity was thrust upon me by circumstance. I’ve had few occasions where I felt pressure to “act black” – I just acted like me, and that was my version of black.
However long I have been skeptical of male-typical and afro-typical behaviour memes, I am definitely incredulous when presented with them today. This has made me somewhat insufferable in casual conversation, but I make up for it by having a ready supply of dick jokes. What it also does is make the following story particularly fascinating: … Continue Reading
25 How is a black man like a parking space?
Because all the good ones are taken or gay!
Wait… I think I screwed that joke up. Speaking of things that are screwed up, here’s a thing:
Extremist Christian and Bishop Earl Walker Jackson may believe gays are ‘sick’, but he has admitted he thinks they have stolen ‘all the nice looking black men.’ He made these comments while in an interview with Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, Right Wing Watch reports.
Jackson said: ‘Their minds are perverted, they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex. So they can’t see clearly.’
Once again… a whole lot to unpack in even just this snippet of a statement. … Continue Reading
Crommunist 