Regarding the Arizona terrorist

Most of you are aware of what happened in Arizona on Saturday:

Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot Saturday in Tucson during an attack that left six people dead and 13 others injured. The Arizona man accused in the weekend shooting that left a congresswoman injured and six people dead is due to make his first court appearance on Monday. Jared Lee Loughner, 22, is to appear at 2 p.m. MT before a judge in Phoenix. The dead include a federal judge, a congressional aide and a nine-year-old girl. The shooting also wounded 13 people.

The media has (rightly, in my opinion) pointed out that the kind of language that is consistently exploited on the right, about the need for revolution, “second amendment remedies”, “ballot or bullet” arguments, and so forth, have poisoned the political environment to the point where political disagreement has become tantamount to a struggle between good and evil. Perhaps most damning (or at least getting the lion’s share of the attention) is the “targets” used in a Sarah Palin ad to describe how Tea Party voters should target vulnerable districts in the midterm election. My nemesis has (predictably) chosen to lobby on behalf of the forces of stupid. Depressingly, so has CLS. I suppose I shouldn’t expect much more from dyed-in-the-wool libertarians – the entire premise is based on overlooking complexity and trying to reduce issues into single-concept nuggets, so you can go back to lighting your cigar with your hundred dollar bill or something.

Tim Wise has, true to form, articulated my argument far better than I ever could:

In a media environment where highly paid commentators can keep their jobs even as they insist that those who call for the shooting of government agents so as to stop a world government takeover are“beginning to have a case,” or that a national service initiative is just a run-up to the implementation of a literal stormtrooper corps like the Nazi SS, or that “multicultural people” are “destroying the culture of this country,” or that Latino migrants are an “invasive species,” that seeks to undermine the nation, or that the President is intentionally “destroying the economy” so as to pay white people back for slavery, or that, worse, he and other Democrats are vampires, the only solution for which is a “stake through the heart,” to feign shock at the acts of a Jared Loughner is a precious and naive conceit that we can no longer afford.

It’s like looking at erosion and saying “there’s no way water could do this. Look, I just poured a cup of water on a rock and nothing happened. Therefore erosion isn’t real.” The continued failure of people to look at forces from a broader perspective than what is happening in the here and now is sad to me. There are consequences to using violent themes in your rhetoric – they are precisely the consequences that you are intending to elicit when you use it. To pretend otherwise is either wholly disingenuous, or the mark of a mind that fails to grasp even the basics of the human psyche.

Incidentally, my use of the word ‘terrorist’ in the title is intentional. This man is not an isolated crazy person, or an outlying kook, or some kind of unique case of youth gone mad. He’s a terrorist – he executed people as part of a political strategy to strike fear into the heart of the populace and destabilize the government. Can we stop pretending it’s only those Ayrab jihadis that are doing this? Please?

I also feel compelled to point out that if this guy is an atheist, then he’s an asshole atheist. He isn’t “not a real atheist” or any such ridiculous dodge. He very well might be atheist, and if that’s the case then he’s a murderous fuckhead of an atheist. Do I think that his atheism lead him to commit those acts? Doubtful. Even if it did, that has nothing to do with whether or not there is a God (spoiler alert: there isn’t).

Edit: Looks like he wasn’t an atheist after all, he was… well you decide

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Canadian Native communities face a new kind of challenge

There was once a time when I called myself a libertarian. After all, I believe that people should be allowed to do what they like, as long as it hurts nobody besides themselves (Scary Fundamentalist is going to poke me for this statement, too). I think that innovation happens when people are allowed to address challenges in whatever creative ways, rather than when they are forced to abide by a strict set of rules. I think that the more free a society is, the better off its citizens are. However, these are principles that have caveats: external regulation is necessary to prevent exploitation and fraud; liberty is not absolute, particularly when one person’s liberty infringes on another’s; it is sometimes justifiable to curtail the actions of a few to benefit the many in the long term. As such, I am not well-described by the term libertarian, and unlike CLS, I am not attached enough to the term to try and reclaim it.

However, the ghosts of my long-dead love affair with Ayn Rand were momentarily stirred when I read this story:

[Brian] Smith had made headlines for leading a grassroots uprising against the elected leaders of the Glooscap First Nation, after learning that his chief and councillors were each collecting more than $200,000 in salary and other payments — for running a community of 87 people.  He organized a petition demanding a community meeting, where Glooscap leaders were made to account for their extraordinary pay and promise more transparency in the future.

“You’re changing the way things are done,” said one email to Smith from an Ojibway supporter in Central Canada, whose sentiments were typical of the messages Smith received after the Glooscap details broke.  “I’m really, really, really happy you are standing firm on this and giving voice to us First Nations people who want better governance. I’m (also) proud that change is going to come from the community level, and from a First Nation person.”

It is a well-understood fact in sociology circles that if you want to engender lasting and meaningful change in a community, the solutions must come from the community itself. As well-intentioned as outside help might be, it stands the risk of being resented or worse, mischaracterizing the problem and failing to take salient details into account. Friends of mine went on a humanitarian aid trip to Attawapiskat First Nation in Northern Ontario a few years ago, to conduct what is known as a Needs Assessment – determining what problems face a community and what resources are needed to address them through dialogue with members of the community. The community expressed a strong desire to have public health education and resources made available. When the team pointed out that there was a federal building staffed with 2 public health nurses and the resources they had asked for, the community pointed out that it was “the government’s building”. Branded as it was with the federal logo and built without consultation from the community leaders, members of the public distrusted the service and assumed it was for the government’s use.

It has been a common practice to see a problem and swoop in to try and solve it. However, as anyone who has been on the receiving end of such an effort knows, this approach is rarely helpful. What is needed is direction from within the community, which fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility for solving the issues. To make it fully effective, such an effort should be supported by resource allocation (from the government or the NGO or whatever external parter is present), but their use must be determined by those stakeholders who use the service, not by those providing it. It seems perverse and exclusionary, but it is the only way to sufficiently address the problem.

With issues of good governance, it seems that members of First Nations communities are realizing this for themselves:

“I don’t have any desire for the federal government to come in and solve our problems,” says Cherie Francis, another Glooscap member angered by what her chief and councillors were being paid. “We elected these people. At some point, we have to step up in our own community and be responsible for our own actions, and our own leaders.”

…

“I’m glad Indian Affairs is staying out of this,” says Smith, who works as director of operations for the Vancouver-based National Centre for First Nations Governance, an independent group that promotes good leadership in native communities. “In the past, Indian Affairs would have jumped right in. That has changed in recent years. I think the message First Nations people are giving to the federal government is, at the end of the day we want to be more responsible for ourselves. And sometimes you’ve got to learn the hard way what is the right and wrong way of doing things.”

Ronald Reagan lampooned this (perhaps) well-intentioned bungling and over-reaching with his immortal line about the nine scariest words you’ll ever hear: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Of course, as with most conservative calling cards, this drastically over-simplifies the issue. There is absolutely a way for government to help, and sometimes it is necessary for it to do so. However, when it overasserts its role and tries to solve the problem rather than making available the resources required for an organic solution, problems inevitably arise. The opposite approach, a sort of laissez-faire approach where government sits back, does nothing, and waits for problems to solve themselves, does nothing other than allowing the current conditions to continue unabated. A deft touch is required – one that is sensitive to the contemporary and historical forces at work in the situation and navigates the waters accordingly. This deft touch involves active engagement, and exists somewhere between the authoritarian “we fix it” and the libertarian “you fix it”.

This is fertile ground for a much longer discussion, but suffice it to say that the racial barriers, stigma, and long cultural history of betrayal and oppression facing First Nations people in Canada can be addressed, and self-government goes a long way toward starting that process. There is a role for all Canadians to play in this fight, and a role for government as well; provided it stays its hand and acts according to the will of the people rather than its own ideas of how to “fix” the Native “problem”.

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Something cool happens in Poland

As you’re reading this, my vacation time is officially over. I’m back in Vancouver, and depending on what time it is right now I’m either having breakfast, sitting at my desk working, or at band practice getting ready for CROWN’s New Year’s Eve gig in Kits.

At the time of writing this, however, I am sitting at the kitchen table in my parents’ condo in Toronto, happily digesting a turkey sandwich and frantically typing out this week’s posts. I am a bad blogger, in that I write in fits and starts rather than putting up fresh stuff every day. I’m a good blogger, I think, in that I haven’t yet missed a post. It’s a trade-off for me between consistency and timeliness – I am satisfied to err on the side of consistency.

The reason for this personal disclaimer is that I’m basically just posting this stuff without what I feel is my usual level of comment. This story probably deserves a fuller discussion than it’s going to get today:

John Abraham Godson, a Polish citizen born and raised in Nigeria, has been sworn in as the first black member of Poland’s parliament…

It is still quite rare to see black people even in the Polish capital Warsaw, Poland’s most cosmopolitan city, the BBC’s Adam Easton reports. Racism is still a problem in Poland, where it is not uncommon for well-educated people to make racist jokes, our correspondent says.

I roll my eyes whenever someone invokes the “we have a black president now, therefore racism is over” argument. It’s almost completely without merit – one high-level appointment does not negate the entire history of a struggle. However, there is some good that can come as a consequence of electing a black public figure, particularly to such a visible position.

Black office-holders help erode stereotypes about black people, by providing a conflicting narrative about the black experience. All of a sudden everyone in Poland, even those who have never met a black person before, has a ready example in their mind of a black person who doesn’t conform to the misconception about what it means to be black – he’s a well-respected member of parliament rather than a gang-banger or an illiterate hood rat, or whatever the stereotype is there.

However, this is a double-edged sword for many black people. If Mr. Godson succeeds, he will be described by some as being “not really black”, or as succeeding despite of his blackness. However, if he fails, he will be described by those same people as failing because of his blackness. His failures will be seen as emblematic of all black people, whereas his success will divorce him from that same group. It’s a common problem facing high-profile black people, one that certainly moves many to try and hide their ethnicity by taking on the characteristics and mannerisms of the majority group.

Of course the real answer is to do the exact opposite – wear your race on the same sleeve as your successes, wedding those two things together to such an extent that they are impossible to separate. Of course, you’d better succeed, otherwise you risk doing much more harm than good.

All that being said, I’m glad to see when things like this happen, even when they’re not in my own country.

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Why separation of church and state is important

Canada does not have an explicit legal separation between religion and government, which is obviously cause for concern for me as an atheist. However, whatever your beliefs, this kind of thing should concern you too:

A senior Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, has suggested that opposing the country’s supreme leader amounts to a denial of God. Correspondents say the unusually strong comments appear to be aimed at silencing internal dissent over the leadership of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Sometimes in our more contentious debates, we are tempted to accuse political opponents of being heartless, or say that a position we hold is what God wants. I’m not sure how much anyone actually believes that God cares about politics, but the rhetoric definitely gets amped up at times. However, that’s (mostly) harmless talk; we don’t hear that kind of stuff from our political leaders. This is a good thing, because both of those arguments (liberal and conservative respectively) are thought-stoppers – no reasonable conversation can proceed once we start building our house on the sand of emotion or in the cognitive quagmire of faith.

However, Iran has no such restraint:

The latest comments were made by conservative cleric, Ayatollah Jannati, who heads Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, which oversees the country’s elections and the constitution.

Analysts say the unusually strong demand for public loyalty to Iran’s supreme leader is an attempt by the influential cleric to liken political dissent to religious apostasy – a crime which carries heavy punishment under Iran’s strict Islamic code.

The danger of such statements, especially when backed by state power, is fairly obvious. When the religious establishment controls the state power, and opposition to a political leader is tantamount to a religious crime, then any political opposition is, as a result, a crime. If the leader is corrupt, if the leader abuses his power, if the leader violates the rights of the people, the people have no recourse. Political speech is blasphemy, subject to severe punishment. Forget the idea of an opposition party, forget the idea of free speech, forget the idea of fairness or justice under the law.

Obviously nothing about this particular story will be surprising to anyone who’s been paying any attention at all to the situation in Iran. I only began paying attention in the wake of the election madness a couple years ago, but since then I’ve seen nothing but repeated arrogance, stupidity and evil come from this religious republic. However, abstracting a general rule from this specific case may be possible – it is to everyone’s benefit to have religious power separated by law from state power. The only people who would benefit from an erosion of state sovereignty by the religious establishment is those who agree completely with the leading class’ views. History shows us again and again that fractions will appear within religious communities as they grow larger and more powerful. There is no long-term benefit to the rule of religion – there will always be a group that is seen as heretical until there is only one absolute ruler. Religion knows no satiety in its appetite for power.

So regardless of your religious beliefs, a separation of state power from religious influence is to your benefit. Eventually your beliefs will come into conflict with the ruling party’s, at which point you will find the religious/state power directed at you. The solution, of course, is to wall off religion – allow people their individual rights to believe as they want, but to ensure that state power flows from the people, not from the whims of a capricious God.

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Oklahoma does right thing for wrong reason

I can’t tell you how depressed I was after the last US mid-term elections. I likened it at the time to watching a good friend go back to her alcoholic, abusive ex-boyfriend because the new guy wasn’t enough of a “bad boy”. The Republican party in the United States has completely shed any air of credibility as a party interested in the long-term good of the United States. They’ve completely devolved into politicking, abrogating any responsibility they have to act as leaders, grabbing after power instead by ramping up the fear and hatred of an uneducated populace.

Rome is falling, my friends, and it is doing so to the clamoring approval of the mindless horde.

Luckily (or perhaps tragically, since it prolongs the fall) there is a system of checks and balances present in the United States that places limits on the ability of the people to be the authors of their own destruction:

A US federal judge has stopped Oklahoma putting into effect a constitutional amendment to bar courts from considering Islamic law in judgements. Judge Vicky Miles-Lagrange granted an injunction against the certification of the results of State Question 755.

To provide a bit of background, there was a ballot amendment during the midterm election that was passed, banning the recognition of Sharia law or any international law in Oklahoma courts. Of course there was nobody actually proposing that Sharia law be recognized, and the courts already ignore international law (on jurisdictional grounds), but if you whip people into a xenophobic frenzy, they’ll pass whatever law they want as long as it makes them feel safer.

But then… then the stupid sets in:

“Plaintiff has sufficiently set forth a personal stake in this action by alleging that he lives in Oklahoma, is a Muslim, that the amendment conveys an official government message of disapproval and hostility toward his religious beliefs, that sends a clear message he is an outsider, not a full member of the political community, thereby chilling his access to the government and forcing him to curtail his political and religious activities,” she explained.

That’s the shakiest possible grounds for a legal decision I’ve ever heard. Basically because the law would hurt people’s feelings, it’s therefore invalid? I’m not a soothsayer, but I can certainly see this ruling (if it isn’t kicked on appeal) being used as precedent to protect some crybaby Christian group saying that failing to teach Creationism in schools “conveys an official government message of disapproval and hostility” towards their belief in a 10,000 year-old planet.

The real reason this law should be off the books? Because it’s stupid. It’s an entirely redundant law that solves exactly zero problems. The inclusion of any religious law would violate the US Constitution (and likely the Oklahoma state constitution), and would not survive a court challenge. There is absolutely no need to pass a law specifically against Sharia law.

Seriously, America… dump the Republicans. They only end up hurting you in the end.

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God Damn It (wording intentional)

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

U.S. Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would have repealed the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allowed gay troops to be open about their sexual orientation. Democrats failed Thursday to cinch a procedural deal with Republicans in the waning days of the lame-duck session. The 57-40 test vote fell three votes short of the 60 needed to advance. The vote ends months of political wrangling about the bill and makes congressional action on the repeal provision unlikely any time soon. The 1993 law bans gay troops from publicly acknowledging their sexual orientation. A repeal provision was included in a broader defence policy bill and passed last spring in the House.

In what kind of fucking mathematical fucking system is forty larger than fifty-fucking-seven?

Fuck you, United States. Fuck you Senate. Fuck you Republican party. You deserve the shithole your country is becoming.

I will return to my usual level of language tomorrow.

Whoops, spoke too soon

Sometimes I overextend myself and make statements preemptively before I have all the facts. It can happen to any of us, and from time to time I have to walk back something I’ve said in a post here.

This is one of those times.

Yesterday, I made a statement in a post that could be interpreted as me saying that the Pope wasn’t evil:

Apparently the world is quite willing to hand an abundance of cookies over to the Pope for finally saying something that pretty much everyone else had figured out already.

But hey, at least he figured it out, right?

I’m sad to say that I have to walk back even this grudging attempt to paint the Pope in anything other than a completely negative light:

Pope Benedict XVI praised efforts of the Filipino bishops in blocking any attempts to promote contraception in the Philippines. The pontiff said the Philippine Catholic leadership has reaffirmed its commitment to confronting any attack on the sanctity of life.

“I commend the Church in the Philippines for seeking to play its part in support of human life from conception until natural death, and in defense of the integrity of marriage and the family,” said Benedict XVI.

Hmm, perhaps I should translate:

Pope Benedict XVI praised the corrupting influence in the Filipino bishops in ensuring that poor people are doomed to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy in the Philippines. The ancient decrepit virgin said that the religiotic busybodies in the Philippines have reaffirmed their commitment to preventing any attempt to improve the quality of life.

“I commend the assholes in the Philippines for seeking to dictate its beliefs to other people in defiance of human rights from conception until natural death, and in defense of bigoted and outdated definitions of marriage and the family,” said Benedict XVI.

So it is to my great chagrin that I must apologize for misleading you fine readers. The Pope is completely evil and has no redeeming qualities. He is happy to whine and cry about the “oppression” of religion in rich countries, and then cackle with Palpatine-like glee as his Church dooms entire countries to a cycle of abuse and unwanted pregnancy in the poor countries.

Tim Minchin, play us out…

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My Wikileaks response

A friend messaged me yesterday to ask if I was planning on saying something about this unfolding Wikileaks saga. I was planning on steering clear of it, but since this is a blog that is in part about free speech, it might seem particularly conspicuous if I don’t say anything at all.

For the most part so far, it seems that most of the things that were leaked were diplomatic cables wherein people bitch about other world leaders. It’s the equivalent of someone printing out copies of a high school girl’s diary so that everyone finds out what she really thinks of them. I think Wikileaks is a good idea, since people in this hemisphere seem to be happy to ignore the hellscape that is our middle eastern foreign policy, but this particular document dump doesn’t seem to tell us much we don’t already know, and has instead raised people’s backs.

So much of diplomacy seems to be about appearance rather than substance, and it’s rather depressing to think that some of these leaked cables (which have little to no substance) will give recalcitrant states some puerile justification for throwing a tantrum on an international scale. Then again, it’s not like there’s a way for things to get much worse short of dropping actual bombs, and I saw very little evidence that things were getting any better.

But, as I am not a person with a background in international relations, or in possession of a great deal of knowledge about peace & conflict, I am happy to side-step this particular story. There are enough better commentators out there to give you an informed opinion on the subject, rather than my superficial from-the-hip analysis.

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George W. Bush misses the point, says something stupid

So George W. Bush is in the news again for saying something stupid. *Ho hum*

“‘I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.'”

So, to be clear. This is the president that presided over the September 11th terrorist attacks, two mismanaged wars in which thousands died, the largest expansion of government intrusion in history, directed smear campaigns and dirty tricks against political opponents, and watched as hundreds of thousands of people suffered in the wake of a hurricane. He was almost universally reviled by the international community, irretrievably tarnished the reputation of the United States, destroyed public schooling, and created a gag rule that denied health care to women all over the world. This is a man whose name is now synonymous with failure, ineptitude, stupidity, and hubris.

But being called racist was the low point of his presidency.

Hooooo boy!

This is part of the reason why I think the word racism needs to be redefined for accuracy. We use it to describe some kind of active hatred and violence against a group of people, when its contemporary face is far more insidious than that. I don’t doubt for a moment that George W. Bush doesn’t affirm white supremacy openly – I’m sure he thinks he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. However, his lack of response to the tragedy in Louisiana, and the lopsided, mismanaged, haphazard way in which his administration responded is a clear sign that he, and the rest of the people responsible, don’t give a flying fuck about black people. It’s the same lack of giving a fuck that makes 3,000 New Yorkers worth starting a war (two wars, really), but the hundreds of thousands of genocide victims in Sudan barely worth a ‘meh’.

I don’t think Mr. Bush is any more evil or racist than anyone else on the whole, he just believes in his own non-racism more deeply than someone like me does. He refuses to be self-critical about his motives when it comes to racial disparities, so convinced is he that he could not possibly be racist. And when his clearly-racist actions are identified as such, he retreats into the role of the victim – how dare he call me racist! The mature response to an accusation like that is to defend your position, but at the same time try and understand where the accusation is coming from. Kanye was spot on in his description, and if Mr. Bush had spent 2 seconds thinking about it, he’d see that too.

But of course, the word racism immediately shuts down rational thought (insert ‘George W. Bush is stupid’ joke here), and all parties try to climb the highest tree to avoid getting splashed by the racism floodwater (perhaps a tasteless allusion). Once we can discuss racism as a phenomenon and not a damming character trait, we can start to address it, and in that way improve the climate.

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Tanzania elects albino to parliament

Last week I talked about the dangers of believing superstitions, and confusing superstition with culture. I also illustrated the specific plight of albino people, who are particularly targeted with violence for the supposed magical properties of their limbs. Of course, albinos have no magical properties – albinism is a single-gene mutation affecting pigmentation. But that doesn’t stop people from kidnapping and maiming albinos.

Tanzania has taken one small step toward correcting this practice:

An albino has been elected as an MP in Tanzania for the first time. “This win is a victory not only for me but also for all the albinos in this country,” Salum Khalfani Bar’wani, from the opposition Cuf party, told the BBC. “My joy has no end,” he told the BBC Swahili Service. “The people of Lindi have used their wisdom and have appreciated clearly that albinos are capable. I am so touched that this is the first time in the electoral history of this country for an albino to be elected by the people in a popular contest to be their representative in parliament – and not through sympathy votes or decisions.”

This is a great feed-forward mechanism that could have real positive effects. An albino MP is a recognizable, prominent public figure that challenges the commonly-held narrative around albinos. A greater level of awareness about albinism can start to take hold in the public consciousness. Of course such a shift will take a long time, so strong is the staying power of superstitious beliefs. However, the fact that Mr. Bar’wani was popularly elected suggests to me that such a shift has already began.

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