Bloggity blog blogs

I have many blogs linked to this one.

They’re on the side bar of your screen —–>

Maybe I should tell you about them!

BelleIQ – This is written by a former colleague of mine who is a fashion model as well as a scientist. I’m happy to say that at my urging, and the urging of others, she has started adding new content. FRSRS, visit this one. She’s a great writer.

Classically Liberal – I came across this one shortly after I started blogging. Yes, he’s a Libertarian (one of those), but he writes some very thought-provoking content and espouses many liberal principles from the perspective of the Libertarian movement. Even when I disagree, I read.

Pharyngula – PZ Myers’ blog about religion, science, and squid. I’m assuming that at least half of the people reading this have been to Pharyngula already, but if you haven’t you should go.

Racialicious – A handy resource for commentary about pop culture and racial issues. As often as not I find myself disagreeing with their take, but I read it every day.

Respectful Insolence – The one that first bit me with the blogging bug. Medical science, quackery, and a whole host of medical woo. Interesting stuff!

Scary Fundamentalist – On days when I feel particularly full of myself, I call this guy my nemesis. Another Vancouver blogger who writes and thinks as well as I do, but whose opinions make me want to punch my way through the internet and kung-fu him in the face (figuratively speaking, of course).

Stuff White People Do – Almost as soon as I found this blog, the author went on hiatus. The archives are fun to poke around in, though.

The New 20 – Appears to be on hiatus (hasn’t been updated since April). May take this one down soon.

If there are any blogs that you read about free speech, racial issues, religion, or other types of skepticism, or that you think I’d particularly enjoy, and that update content regularly, please let me know about them. I will be adding more soon (Canadian Atheist immediately springs to mind).

Movie Friday – postitive thinking

Psst… do you want to hear something amazing? There’s an unbelievably simple trick you can use to get everything you’ve ever wanted, without having to work for it, put any effort at all into bettering yourself or your life, or kill off your rich uncle.

It’s called THE SECRET

Anyone’s who’s taken any type of eastern philosophy course knows about the law of attraction. Basically, the theory is that if you put positive energy out into the world, you will reap the benefits of that energy. Hindus call it karma, Taoists call it the Tao, and skeptics call it a heaping pile of steamy bullshit.

Like prayer, or ‘remote viewing’, or psychics, mediums, Tarot and horoscopes, the law of attraction (karma) relies on some fundamental cognitive heuristics our brains use. The first and most important is called confirmation bias – our brains selectively attend to those events that fit assumptions we’ve already made. The second is a logical fallacy called ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc‘ or, ‘after it, therefore because of it’ – we see two events and infer that the first causes the second.

For an example of this, think of what happens when you’re waiting for a bus. How many times have you waited for a bus, got fed up and decided to walk, only to have the bus show up a minute after you leave? Have you ever said “of course, as soon as I leave, the bus arrives.” Your leaving has nothing to do with the bus arriving – the two events are independent, but after it happens 2 or 3 times, your mammal brain puts them together.

So when you send out positive vibes and something good happens, the two aren’t necessarily causally related – indeed, there’s no mechanism by which they could be related. The “Secret” is just an appeal to your mammalian brain and the cognitive shortcuts we all use to get by.

“So what?” you might be saying. “It doesn’t hurt anyone to think positively.” Despite evidence that it absolutely CAN hurt people to have unrealistically positive outlooks, it also leads to victim blaming. People assume that if you can think your way to happiness and wealth, then anyone who is poor just has a bad attitude.

Let’s let Dave Chappelle have the last word here…

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Home-grown religious huxter

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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Vancouver doesn’t have a race problem

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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Net Neutrality – definitely a free speech issue

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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Arizona doesn’t have a race problem

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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First, kill all the lawyers

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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South Africa doesn’t have a race problem

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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Michael Bloomberg gets it EXACTLY right

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.