#SOPA/#PIPA blackout post no. 4

In solidarity with the sites (including FTB) that are down for the day, I will not be providing original content today. I encourage you to poke around the archives. There’s nearly 2 years of quality posts to rummage through. Instead of writing myself, I have compiled a few interesting articles that I think you should read. Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

Racism ‘happens’: Inexplicable events haunt GOP primary

Trigger warning for Santorum

It’s the darnedest thing. Republicans have zero tolerance for anything racist. They’ll tell you so at the drop of a hat. It’s liberals and Democrats who are the real racists. Just ask Herman Cain, he’ll set you straight. After all, if a pizza CEO isn’t an expert on racism, then who is?

And yet, in recent weeks, all manner of seemingly racist things keeping popping up all around the GOP presidential primary campaign, which can only be explained in terms of mysterious and malevolent forces, out of movies such as The Exorcist, or Men in Black, or more recent low-rent fare, like the SyFy channel’s Ghost Hunters “reality show”.

First there was the matter of Ron Paul’s racist, homophobic and otherwise bigoted newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s. Of course he never read them. (“I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written,” he told Gloria Borger on CNN the week before Christmas.)

Read the rest of the article, leave your comments here.

Like this article? Call your senator, call your congressperson, tell them that you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and that ze should too. Not American? Neither am I.

 

A rare, happy moment

I spend a lot of time bashing our political system. It’s a formula that has yielded a fairly consistent source of not only blog fodder, but commenter agreement as well. After all, who doesn’t love complaining about politics? It gives us an opportunity to appear erudite and superior to those who would try to represent themselves as the “ruling class”. Plus we get to spread indiscriminate blame on all politicians as being morally deficient hucksters.

It brings me no personal satisfaction, however, to live in a country with crappy politics. As a liberal, I believe that government can be a force for good in the world. That as a representation of the collective will of the populace, we can do more as a group than we can as individuals pulling for our own selfish ends. That there is room for giving up a bit of personal liberty to gain a greater measure of mutual success.

It is not the failures of the body politic that make me happy. It is stories like this: [Read more…]

The inherent racism of “Tough on Crime”

I’ve talked about the need for diversity before, as a way of making policy more effective. When you have a plurality of voices articulating their position, you stand a better chance of hearing new ideas. Diverse groups may be more unwieldy, but they are far less limited in scope than homogenous groups because a variety of perspectives are providing input. There is another reason why diversity is important though: it makes us less stupid. Because any in-group is going to subject to its own biases and privilege, the inclusion of diverse voices helps safeguard a movement from being self-serving, or worse, inadvertently harming another group.

It is fairly clear, based on this response, that the Prime Minister’s Office did not have a particularly diverse group building their absolutely moronic crime bill:

A University of Toronto law professor says a new federal crime bill chips away at sentencing provisions that require judges to consider all reasonable alternatives to jail. This, said Kent Roach, will only increase the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system.

“We’re going to have a future where one in every four people in prison are aboriginal,” he said. “And we’re going to have a future where perhaps more aboriginal people are going to go to jail than to university.”

Nearly half of the inmates in some Canadian prisons are Aboriginal people. That’s despite the fact they make up less than three per cent of the general population.

So, funny story. It turns out that when you take away the ability of judges to… well… judge, they also lose the ability to factor in the causes of crime and the best interest of not only the criminal defendant, but society at large. Poverty and crime are inherently linked. Not all crimes, to be sure, are caused by poverty. One would have to stretch the definition of ‘poverty’ pretty thin to claim that Bernie Madoff was impoverished, but the types of violent and property crime that the omnibus crime bill are supposedly targeting is linked to poverty. [Read more…]

Why are you hitting yourself? Part 7: Summary

This is part 7 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6.

So on Thursday I finished up with the last sections of the paper, but I didn’t get to do the wrap-up post that I wanted to (time crunch – abstract submission deadline followed by dinner immediately after work, with friend who then asked for a full explanation of the entire OWS movement… it was a long day for my brain). So I’m going to take this opportunity to bring this series to a conclusion.

Why System Justification Theory?

Older psychological models to explain human behaviour focussed on the relationship between individual ego motivation, and group allegiance. The central understanding was that people would tend to demonstrate in-group favouritism and out-group hostility. In the same way we tend not to see ourselves as bad people but vilify the actions of others, we would do the same for groups with whom we did and did not feel allegiance.

The problem with this theory is that it fails to explain a common and seemingly-inexplicable finding: that people often tend to demonstrate an asymmetric bias toward people in high-status groups, even to the point of abhorring their own group. If it was a rare occurrence, we could just chalk it up to “well some folks is crazy”, but when it’s consistently observed in many different populations under experimental conditions, it becomes something that needs looking at. [Read more…]

Why are you hitting yourself? Part 4: the self-hating 99%

This is part 4 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3.

In this morning’s installment, we explored the phenomenon of implicit valuation of members of high-status groups. Despite what we may say, or what we may consciously believe about ourselves, our actions reveal subconscious attitudes that we may have. Our wish to approve of, or make excuses for, the status quo of our social lives leads those who are on the top of power gaps to exhibit bias towards themselves. At the same time, that same desire puts those at the bottom of those divides in the somewhat bizarre role of showing the same bias – toward those at the top. This effect is not seen when measuring explicit attitudes – what people are willing to admit to – but shows up when we can find ways to ‘bypass’ conscious processing.

In this installment, I’m going to look explicitly at one aspect of how system justification theory manifests itself: political ideology. [Read more…]

How do you know when you’re wrong?

Well there’s no definitive answer to this, but it’s a pretty safe bet you are if you’re considered too conservative for Texas:

Conservatives in the United States’ toughest crime-fighting jurisdiction — Texas — say the Harper government’s crime strategy won’t work. “You will spend billions and billions and billions on locking people up,” says Judge John Creuzot of the Dallas County Court. “And there will come a point in time where the public says, ‘Enough!’ And you’ll wind up letting them out.” Adds Representative Jerry Madden, a conservative Republican who heads the Texas House Committee on Corrections, “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ’em, I guarantee you they will come. They’ll be filled, OK? Because people will send them there. “But, if you don’t build ’em, they will come up with very creative things to do that keep the community safe and yet still do the incarceration necessary.”

I’ve spoken before about the terrible clusterfuck of ideas that is the incoming omnibus crime bill. It’s a mishmash of ideas, some of which are good, most of which are bad. Legal authorities, criminal law enforcement, opposition MPs, pretty much everyone who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to crime, they’ve all said that it’s a bad idea. Then again, our mighty ruling party has demonstrated repeatedly that it is relatively indifferent to outside criticism.

Until, apparently, they went to Texas. It’s not a trivial issue – arguments that work in Texas work for the Republican North party’s base. If there was anywhere that this type of bill should receive a warm welcome, it’s in “common sense” Texas. The only criticism one would be likely to expect is that Canada’s crime bill, coming from the great socialist north, would be seen as a bit “soft on crime”.

The problem is that Texas has about a 10-year crystal ball look into the future to know that this kind of approach just doesn’t work: [Read more…]

Bacon, porn, and rainbows: poverty edition

I am a liberal. I am not a hyphenated liberal, or a centre-left or a “social liberal, fiscal conservative” or any such nonsense. Probably the least liberal thing about me is that I refuse to dither over whether or not I am a liberal. I believe, proudly in fact, that people can get together and solve social problems. I further believe that government, properly scrutinized by the public, can be a place where those solutions can be implemented. I am aware that there are arguments for and against public sector involvement – I am far more comfortable with democracy than I am with unregulated free markets.

When we apply our shoulders to the wheels of social policy, we can make monumental changes that make life better for the people who need it most. When we fail to make the commitment to act, it makes life worse: [Read more…]

How DARE you?! Conversations about liberal racism

Being a liberal is often associated, rightly or wrongly, with smugness or an air of superiority. For example, oftentimes this ‘superiority’ is the product of a comprehensive education in the humanities and sciences (dare I say a ‘liberal arts’ education)? When someone makes a reductive claim – attributing outcome A solely to input B – liberals often point out that there are causes C-Z to consider as well. What the reductive claim-maker hears is “you’re stupid and I’m better than you because you didn’t know that”. It is no accident that the forces of anti-intellectualism line up almost exclusively on the right.

But beyond the explanations for why there are reasons why liberals might be seen as arrogant when in fact we aren’t, there certainly does exist some legitimate arrogance that comes from the same source as conservative arrogance, or the sense of superiority manifesting itself in any group. When one associates with only those (or primarily those) that share your group monicker, one begins to believe one’s own propaganda. Tea Party groups really do believe, for example, that they are true patriots who only want government off their backs – that’s because they don’t read the polls that reveal them to simply be the new face of the religious right. Religious groups really do believe, as another example, that theirs is the ‘true’ interpretation of the holy books – that’s because they don’t recognize that their ‘proofs’ of their deity are the same as those of a competing group.

With liberals, the most vexing of these myths is the one about racism being ‘their’ problem. Namely, that being liberal makes you vouchsafed from racist thoughts or ideas. I can understand where this myth comes from. Conservatism, particularly when it comes to immigration and civil rights, is always on the side of the status quo – hence the name. Because an argument against allowing immigrants (which is often an argument against allowing certain immigrants) access to citizenship always carries with it the stench of anti-brown bigotry, those on the conservative side end up holding the bag for racism and xenophobia. The same goes for civil rights and access – it was conservatives opposing the Civil Rights Act, it was (and is) conservatives opposing lesbian/gay marriage rights, which leaves them tagged with repeated instances of bigotry.

Because liberals have been on the other side of these fights (by and large), liberals have become comfortable with the assumption that adopting this political stance is impervious armour against accusations of thoughtcrime. Indeed, when having drinks with a colleague and discussing politics, he made some offhand remark about how as liberals, we had to overcome racism from the right. He was visibly first confused, then alarmed when I suggested to him that, in fact, liberals are racist too. It might not look the same as conservative racism, but it still has the same effect.

It was with these thoughts in the back of my mind that I read this piece in The Nation:

Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate’s qualifications, ideology or party. This form of racism was a standard feature of American politics for much of the twentieth century. So far, Barack Obama has been involved in two elections that suggest that such racism is no longer operative. His re-election bid, however, may indicate that a more insidious form of racism has come to replace it.

In it, Dr. Harris-Perry (who I follow on Twitter) lays out an argument for why white voters, who supported Barack Obama in the first election, may be abandoning him now at a greater rate than they did President Clinton in the 90’s – despite the many political and situational similarities between the two. Given that so many of the ostensible reasons for withdrawing support are balanced between the two administrations, racism may explain, at least in part, any differences in voter support and approval. It’s hard to argue that race and racism have not played a role in this particular presidency far more than in others.

Because I liked both this article and a related one that more closely explored the racial attitudes of Bill Clinton more specifically and liberals more generally, I fired a quick message to Dr. Harris-Perry in support, because I knew that she was taking quite a bit of flack for her audacious temerity to suggest that liberals weren’t the immaculate paragons of fairness that we make ourselves out to be. Basically, just a “hey, I liked your piece in the Nation.” Didn’t even get a reply. No biggie.

It was a few short hours before a friend of mine sent me a seemingly-indignant message, asking me to defend my support for Harris-Perry’s article. She/he had procured statistics suggesting that all presidents lose favourability in their first terms (which the article doesn’t dispute), and that she/he saw more differences between the two presidencies than the article had pointed out. When I replied, briefly, that the article was more about the attitude I have described above, she/he challenged me to provide data demonstrating the racism at play. It was at this point that I simply gave up, as I wasn’t really interested in defending someone else’s work while trying to eat my dinner, and the article in question talked about the next election, not the current polling.

This exchange wouldn’t be unusual, except that I happen to know that this person is a regular reader. I say all kinds of unsubstantiated shit on these pages pretty much every day. While I do my best, I don’t always provide full citations for my conclusions or speculations, leaving it up to the reader to dispute them. Most of the time, this particular friend chooses not to dispute, even when I am talking about racial topics. However, this particular statement – a throwaway line of congratulations in a Tweet – stuck in her/his craw long enough that she/he went stats hunting.

So in the same way that Harris-Perry has done, I am openly speculating here that this kind of “prove it” attitude from liberals who spontaneously become skeptical whenever they have a dog in the fight (which, by the way, Harris-Perry wrote another piece about), comes at least in part from the cognitive dissonance at play when they are accused of racism. “I couldn’t possibly be racist,” they say, as though being liberal means you were raised on a different planet. We are all products of the same system. If someone points out that a behaviour has racial connotations, instead of reflexively reaching for counterexamples, perhaps take the time to consider the possibility, and engage in the argument that person is making, rather than the one you hear through your rage.

I will close with Dr. Harris-Perry’s words:

Racism is not the the sole domain of Republicans, Conservatives or Southerners. Not all racists pepper their conversation with the N-word or secretly desire the extermination of black and brown people. Racism is complex, multi-layered, and deeply rooted in the American story. Name calling is not helpful in uprooting racism, but neither is a false sense of moral superiority.

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Germany: We can’t be

Then again, sometimes there are stories that completely shatter my faith in humanity:

A row with uncomfortable echoes of the past is gripping the world of Germany’s student duelling societies after a club admitted a non-European member. Duellers in Munich objected to the fact a Mannheim club had allowed a member with an Asian background to join, despite his service in the German army.

Yep… that’s happening. Apparently the member in question is German enough to serve Germany in the armed forces, but not German enough to dress up in a silly costume and wave a sword around. The reaction of the club? Well I think we could all have predicted this one:

The clubs’ national association insisted they were not racist.

“We’re not racist, honest! We just don’t like darkies being in our clubs!” The story reads like the plot of a bad Disney movie (Erinner Das Titan maybe?), and just gets more ridiculous the further in you go:

Such societies are usually male and involve dressing up in traditional 19th Century outfits, as well as drinking and fighting with swords. Real swords are used and the men who join often sport a scar on their cheeks to show they have fought a real duel.

There was a feeling from the more conservative elements in Bavaria that, according to internal documents, members with “non-European facial and bodily characteristics” did not qualify as Germans and so could not join what the objectors see as a bastion of true German identity, our correspondent says.

It’s funny, many of the rampant anti-immigrant sentiment currently running through Europe hinges around the idea that immigrants won’t “assimilate”. That people whose ancestry hails from another part of the world (by the way, Germany – your ancestry is from Africa, so maybe you should put down the swords and pick up a drum) will refuse to adopt the customs and mores of the majority group. Since immigrants won’t take on native ideas, we should keep them out! Except here’s a guy who is trying to do just that – take part in a custom that is about as German as it gets, and he’s being forced out by the same majority group.

These kinds of attitudes come from a mindset in which culture is a static thing that cannot and should not change. This is a faulty view of the world – all currently-existing cultures are departures from ones that came before. Those elements of cultures that are valuable are retained (co-operation, family cohesion, respect for individual rights), and those that are not necessary for survival can be sloughed off (exclusion of outsiders, absolute power of the patriarch, tyranny of the majority). There can be debate over the merit of the individual component values, but it is ludicrous to suggest that any change to traditions is a destruction of those values.

The fact that this kind of story merits any discussion at all, let alone the tide of public opinion against the egregious racism on display by these clubs (or at least their conservative elements), is evidence of the fact of this cultural evolution. Time was, not long ago, it was considered entirely reasonable to exclude members of certain racial groups from “private clubs”. This practice still occurs, mind you, but only in those places where the light of modernity hasn’t quite penetrated the curtain of stupidity.

As with the story this morning, these kinds of attitudes will be consigned to the dustbin of history, and be seen as simply an odd curiosity of our ancestry.

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Tough on crime

One does not have to plumb the depths of political rhetoric very far to expose the unbelievable hypocrisy and outright falsehood lying just beneath the varnished surface of its truisms. The right to publicly-administered health care is not slavery. Republicans are not better on the economy. The Harper Government™ is not tough on crime:

The Supreme Court of the Canada will hear arguments this week that will likely determine the future of Vancouver’s supervised injection site, known as Insite. The court will have to decide whether Insite is a health-care facility under the jurisdiction of the B.C. government, and whether closing it violates the rights of impoverished drug addicts.

Supporters, including the province, say a body of peer-reviewed studies has proven Insite prevents overdose deaths, reduces the spread of HIV and hepatitis, and curbs crime and open drug use. But the federal government rejects that evidence, arguing the facility fosters addiction and runs counter to its tough-on-crime agenda.

Those of you not familiar with Vancouver’s safe injection site should read Ethan Clow’s excellent analysis of the issue. I will do my best to summarize. As we learned from the United States in the 1920s (and from our own failed national experiment), prohibition is a really stupid way of trying to stop people from doing something. There are generally two ways of preventing an unwanted behaviour – enforcement and outreach. Prohibition puts the emphasis firmly into the first camp by creating stiff penalties for engaging in the unwanted behaviour. With respect to drugs, this means punishing those that use and sell drugs.

One of the biggest looming issues facing Canadians with the Republican North majority is the introduction of the omnibus crime bill. Basically, this bill calls for money to be funneled into the prison system, including the construction of new incarceration facilities. Of course, this comes at a time when crime rates are in fact dropping, but the RNP has a solution for that too – make more things crimes! Mandatory minimum sentencing is one tool in the arsenal of a prohibitive government – take legal leeway out of the hands of judges and force standard jail terms regardless of the severity of the crime.

The problem, as anyone with even the slightest insight into human behaviour and psychology will be able to tell you, is that people are generally going to do whatever they want if they don’t think they’ll get caught. When it comes to drugs (especially drugs like marijuana with negligible personal risk due to use), people will always want to get high, and unless you have cops on every street corner and outside every window, people will find a way to do just that. While drug use may be a bad thing (I think the issue is more nuanced than that, but let’s just grant the assertion for a moment), if your goal is to reduce drug use, your policies should be targeted at doing just that.

If you don’t think that drug use per se is bad, but rather the consequences of drug use (addiction, self-harm, overdose, loss of control) are bad, then you would likely favour an approach known as “harm reduction”. Basically, the idea is to find a way to allow people to do what they want but to minimize the negative repercussions. For example, alcohol is regulated in such a way as to minimize the damage – only licensed facilities may dispense it and staff must be trained to recognize intoxication; only people of a certain age may purchase it; purity of ingredients is inspected by the government – people still drink, but in a way that is much safer than it used to be before those regulations were in place.

In the case of Insite, the negative health consequences of intravenous drug use are mitigated by providing clean needles (that are not infected with HIV) and a safe place to get high. Needles are disposed of safely (rather than in the streets, where any number of things can and do happen to them), and overdoses are managed by professionals. It is certainly not ideal – ideal would be to have zero drug users – but it does save lives, reduce infection rates, and actually saves the city a lot of money. It is the kind of local control for a local problem that small-government conservatives and libertarians should applaud.

Not so the Republicans though. They claim to be “tough on crime”, but what they actually are is litigious on crime. They endorse laws that expand the role of the federal government to interfere in municipal matters and take discretion out of the hands of judges and place it in the (completely incapable) hands of elected officials. This is the kind of behaviour, of course, that Conservatives (note the capitalization) constantly accuse Liberals of; however, it’s only wrong when it’s something Conservatives don’t like. When it’s for their own cause, there is always some bullshit rationalization.

I have a friend who is a prison guard (actually I have a few, but I am talking about this one in particular) who was overjoyed over the RPN majority election. His rationale was that there would finally be attention paid to the state of the prison system, and no more coddling of criminals. Far be it from me to question his expertise in terms of what the inside of a prison looks like – he’s in one every day and I haven’t even visited. However, I think his assessment is short-sighted. The omnibus crime bill creates more criminals, it does not reduce crime. If anything, it statistically increases crime (convenient, when you have all these new prisons to fill) by creating new criminals. It does not reduce the harms caused by criminal behaviour, nor does it do anything to reduce the true underlying causes of criminal behaviour (income disparity, lack of opportunity/education, living conditions).

Both the political left and right undoubtedly want to reduce the incidence of crime. It is in nobody’s best interest for there to be more crime. However, one side of the political debate has chosen a method that is proven not to work, and does so in the name of being “tough on crime”. Nothing could be further from the truth, and we are all about to learn this first-hand.

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