When the goggles come off

I have size 16 feet. They’re quite ridiculously large. I have to order my shoes from the internet, because if I try to buy them in a story I get laughed at (and then apologized to when they realize I’m not joking). I am not particularly eager to confirm or disconfirm the rumours about guys with big feet, but let it suffice to say that my feet are a rather hefty inconvenience. They pretty much preclude me from any activity that requires specialty footwear – rollerblading, skating, bowling – all of these have been off limits to me for about 12 years now.

One of the biggest losses, as far as I’m concerned, has been my ability to ski. When I was a kid, I was enrolled in a junior ski racing program at my local hill. I wasn’t great, but I had some serious promise. Then we moved to Ontario, my feet grew out of control, and the rest is history. It’s a true shame though, since I live within a pretty short drive of some of the best skiing and snowboarding in the world. And until I have a couple thousand dollars to blow on custom equipment, I’m going to have to forego the thrill of winter sports.

One of the things I remember most clearly about skiing is what would happen when, either at the end of a day or just one a break, I removed my ski goggles. In order to protect from glare, ski goggles are tinted orange. After an hour or so on the slopes, my eyes would adjust to the way the lens would filter colours. When the goggles came off, however, the full spectrum flooded in. In the relief, the world looked eerily blue and fluorescent. It would often take a few minutes for my eyes to return to normal. [Read more…]

Movie Monday: The Camelunist Hammerfesto

Last week I sat down with Daniel Fincke from the FTBlog Camels with Hammers to chat about race and race-related subject matters. We were trying out the Google+ hangout environment that we used for last week’s FTB + Skepchick group conversation. I imagine that I’ll be finding more ways to use this tool and be releasing more videos.

 

We got cut off by a dropped connection, so there’s two parts:

We talked about a number of fun topics, including

  • Affirmative Action
  • Diversity
  • Colour blindness
  • Implicit racial processing
  • Feeling safe about having ‘the race conversation’
  • Liberal racism
  • Humour
  • “The black community”

It was a fun and productive conversation, and I enjoyed myself a great deal! Hope you enjoy it too.

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*I feel it necessary to apologize for the inconsistent posting recently. Up until now I have prided myself on keeping a regular schedule; however, some recent (positive) changes in my day-to-day schedule have made blogging consistently a bit more difficult. I am trying to make adjustments, but those will take some time.

Doctor Crommunist’s health prescription

Okay, so I am not a doctor (yet), but I do spend my 9-5 hours working as part of Canada’s health care system, and I do have a couple of degrees in which health policy played a pretty significant role, so I’m going to take this opportunity to make one of my (thankfully) rare digressions away from the typical subject matter of this blog and talk about health care.

My master’s thesis (which was a rather shabby affair) was partially focussed on the issue of wait times for critical services. Those of you who live in civilized developed countries will be familiar with this concept already. Those of you who live in the United States will probably need a refresher. Because there exists a finite pool of resources in the world, when a large group of people want to access something that is a one-at-a-time thing, there is a good chance that some people will have to wait. In Canada, because we have a publicly-funded medical care system, we run into wait times as the inevitable consequence of more people wanting a thing than the system has the capacity to provide.

I have, incidentally, discussed why Canada’s system is not only more fair but more economically sound than the American system in a previous post that I encourage you to read. [Read more…]

Special feature: Crommunist goes to Montreal

Last Monday, work took me to Toronto for the annual meeting of one of my projects. The following Monday was a conference held by the team I work for in Montreal, which meant that I was facing a week-long gap between events. Given how friggin’ expensive it is to fly across Canada, I figured it would be easier for me to take a few vacation days and spend the time on some rest & relaxation than try to cross the distance twice. And so it was that I found myself at Toronto’s Union station on the 11:30 train bound for Montreal with my good friend Nate.

A picture of my friend Nathan and I [Read more…]

Flirting, fucking, and tossing the pigskin

So immediately after my first-ever atheist conference, the atheist community was all a-Twitter about people trying to fuck other people at conferences. It’s kind of difficult (I avoid using the word ‘hard’ intentionally) to suppress my ego, but I’m going to go ahead and conclude that this was simply coincidence, and not a sign that everyone was secretly trying to bang me. At any rate, people are talking about it, and there’s the usual crowd of folks managing to miss the point, so I thought it might be fun to throw in my two cents.

I have had a few interactions with people who write, or play music, or do their jobs, solely to achieve some other goal. They write because they want to be influential. They play music because they want to be famous. They’re in their respective fields because they want to get rich. I suppose the term for people like that is ‘goal-oriented’. The various things they take part in are a means to a more enjoyable end – they’re the necessary legwork required to attain the true object of desire.

For my purposes, I tend to align myself more to being ‘process-oriented’: I do stuff because it’s fun and I like it. I write because I like to organize my thoughts and to play with words. I play music because I enjoy the intimate collaborations that are made possible by mixing it up with other musicians. I do my job because it’s challenging and interesting. Any notoriety or attention or wealth I gain from doing these things are all of secondary importance. [Read more…]

Imagine No Religion 2: parte the seconde

Aside from the piss-poor performance by the theists during the debate, there were a couple of low points for me during the conference.

Some of y’all are intense

At the risk of sounding completely bigoted and neuronormative, I gained a lot of appreciation for the stereotyped image of atheist conference-goers as a bunch of oddballs. I’m sure any group of people who have a passionate interest in a specific topic will produce its share of wackies, but I don’t go to conferences (except things that are work-related, which is a whole different thing to tackle) – I don’t think this is an ‘atheist problem’ per se, I think it is a problem inherent to human interaction. That being said, there were some things that were kind of offputting for me.

First of all, as pugnacious as I am about a wide variety of topics, I know better than to turn every verbal misstep into an opportunity to mount a soapbox. Part of human interaction involves putting others at ease, in order to allow trust and emotional intimacy to build. If your objective is to cultivate that kind of interaction, then jumping up and down any time anyone says something incorrect or insensitive is counter-productive. There were a number of times when I found myself sitting and chatting pleasantly enough with folks I didn’t know, only to have the conversation jerk wildly into a combat situation with no real warning. I didn’t want to be around those people. [Read more…]

Imagine No Religion 2: parte the firste

As many of you are aware, this year I attended the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops, BC. What you may not have been aware of is the fact that this was my first ever atheist conference. I’ve only been ‘out’ for a couple of years, and because nearly all of the atheist meetups I’ve ever seen are in the eastern United States, I haven’t really had much motivation to go. While it would be cool to meet some new athie folk, the fact is that I can think of quite a number of things I’d rather spend $1200 on.

This year, however, I was asked by members of CFI Vancouver and Okanogan to attend the function in Kamloops. At the time they asked, they were concerned about not being able to recoup their expenses. Seeing as I owe a great deal of my public profile to the hard work done by my fellow CFIers, and that I genuinely like them and am happy to help out when I can, I decided to pop my conference cherry and attend INR2. Overall, I am incredibly glad that I did. Not only was it a wonderful chance for me to hang out with a group of (largely) like-minded people and have fun for a weekend, but I also got a chance to meet some folks that I’ve been looking forward to crossing paths with for some time. [Read more…]

The paradox of science and conservatism

I expend a great deal of time and effort in the disparagement of conservative ideologies. They oversimplify complex issues to the point where the ‘solutions’ that arise from such ideologies are often more harmful than the problems they purport to ‘fix’. Reality is a multifaceted state of affairs with a lot of moving parts that defy the panacaea of upper-class tax cuts and ‘common sense’, and yet those who hold conservative ideologies are often openly contemptuous of the nuanced view of the world that is required to make any headway or improvement.

Despite my irritation, I must confess a certain sympathy for conservatism. Not a sympathy borne of pity (considering the way in which conservative policies are decimating not only my own country but others around the world, there is no room left for pity), but one borne of understanding. The conservative impulse, in its essence, is the human tendency to grind to a halt when new challenges face us. To put that another way, it is to address new problems with the solutions that have worked before – tradition and ‘common sense’ (which, in light of this view of conservatism, is simply what we call those things which used to confound us but we have answers for now). [Read more…]

Because I am an atheist…

Those who wish to demonize or denigrate atheists are rather fond of telling us what we believe as a consequence of our atheism. You’ve undoubtedly heard the shrieking refrain of “you’re an atheist? That means you believe in nothing!” Who can argue with that kind of airtight logic? Or the similarly bulletproof “atheists just say they don’t believe so they can be sinful!” Thanks, Mr. Comfort – any other gems you want to lay on us? “Atheists have no moral centre – if there are no gods, any depraved act is permitted!”

The accusations are as tedious as they are false. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that people who lack a god belief are less moral than those who have one. Indeed, one could make the argument that the association between the most vile behaviours humankind struggles with – anti-gay hatred, suicide bombing, tribalist racism – and fervent religious expression suggests the exact opposite: that god-belief provides a convenient excuse for those who wish to do evil. Whatever the truth is, theist apologists are perhaps the least qualified to tell the world what atheists do as a consequence of their atheism.

Many of you have undoubtedly seen PZ Myers’ “why I am an atheist” series on Pharyngula. His purpose is to provide a variety of answers to the question “why are you an atheist” that go beyond the simplistic tautology of “because I lack a god belief”. In a similar vein, I thought I would share some of the specific ways that acknowledging my atheism has changed my life: [Read more…]

Rock me sexy Jesus

So maybe I’m disclosing more about myself than anyone really wants to know, but I’ve never understood our society’s pre-occupation with sex. I think of sex in much the same terms as I think of a game of pickup beach volleyball – a lot of fun if you have the opportunity, but if it doesn’t happen I’ll find something else to do with my time. My casual attitude about the whole venture stands, at least to my eye, in sharp contrast with piously intoned truisms that come from all corners of society – that sex is a deep and profound part of the human experience, that expressing your sexuality is a fundamental human right, that a person’s sexual identity is an intrinsic part of who they are. Maybe it’s a facet of hetero/cis privilege, but I just can’t get that fired up about the subject.

That being said, there are fewer people who obsess over sex more than religious folks. To be sure, most religious people are just as laissez fucke about other people’s sex lives as I am, but if you want to find people with a level of obsession that borders on the psychotic, you need look no further than religious hardliners. The scriptures are replete with proscriptions about where, when, how, how often, with whom, and exactly how terrible you should feel about yourself afterward. Some folks think that this is an issue of population control – that by controlling this oh-so-crucial component of human life, religious authority can tighten their grip on every aspect of human life. As you might conclude from my first paragraph, I am less than convinced. [Read more…]