Interrobang's Internationale: The Real Interroblog

Do NOT Donate to the Salvation Army

2010-12-09T14:30:00.001-05:00

If their being a right-wing evangelical Christian organisation isn't enough for you right off the top (and it damn well should be), they are

pro-forced birth, even in cases of genetic abnormality
pro-execution, if in a somewhat wishy-washy way
anti-assisted suicide, which they frame as a "dignity" issue, as if dying slowly from a horrible disease is ever dignified
anti-same-sex-marriage, as well as pro-patriarchal family structure
anti-gambling!
of the opinion that LGB people should remain chaste unless they are willing to marry someone of the opposite sex, and seem to advocate that it's possible to "pray away the gay". They claim in Canada not to discriminate against LGB people in the provision of services (although I'm skeptical), but they openly do in the US.
anti-divorce, and pro-patriarchal marriage
anti-porn, and consider using porn to be an "injurious lifestyle" (This position statement also seems to take a fairly hardline stance against doing anything specifically for the purpose of obtaining sexual pleasure, yeesh.)
anti-stem-cell research, as well as for circumscribing scientific research based on their interpretation of Biblical morality; they also seem to be for the idea of forcing people to raise handicapped children they don't want (which, as a handicapped person, I am totally against)
in favour of even non-believers observing a/the sabbath
anti-drinking, and really seem to be taking the line that "use is abuse" for pretty well any drugs (don't look to the Slave Nation Army to help with decriminalisation, legalisation, or harm reduction programmes!)

Not only that, but their Calgary branch is throwing away Harry Potter and Twilight toys on the grounds that they're unsuitable because they promote "witchcraft and vampire themes"...but they think toy guns are perfectly okay to give away.

They've also had to make public apologies for child abuse, including rape, in Australia and New Zealand.

Rustin also worked at a SA relief depot in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and his major complaints about them were that they were far more interested in doing things that would look good to the media and outside observers than actually providing concrete help. He relayed an anecdote about an incident where, after he had essentially taken over the station and gotten it running efficiently, the burning question of the hour among the SA members was which uniform they should be wearing the next day...

The Unbearable Bigness of Streetcars

2010-09-15T04:30:00.004-04:00

Rustin and I were just talking about corporate malfeasance and how damn bloody difficult it is to get the average person to grok just exactly how huge the problem really is. The problem is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think political corruption, war, and poverty are big problems, but that's just peanuts to corporate malfeasance.

I mean, take Rustin and I. We're a couple of pretty smart folks. He's managed to drop out of both Carnegie Mellon and Reed College, has a patent, and is generally a know-some-of-it about a hell of a lot. I got an undergraduate degree from Canada's answer to Yale and a Master's from Canada's answer to MIT. Both of us have been scaring teachers (and other ordinary unfortunates) for most of our lives. (I once handed in an assignment which was returned with the note “100% This was the first one of these I've ever given – and it hurt.”)

In other words, what I'm saying is that we're a couple of badass brainiacs, and this shit has us constantly sanity-checking each other because of the scope of it. Honestly. Every couple of months, Rustin and I find ourselves on the phone kind of making Scooby-Doo noises at each other and asking ourselves, “Are we nuts? Are we seeing things?”

But this really isn't about us. We're not even the baddest of badasses this problem has devoured. Let me introduce you to the man who started it all, Bradford J. Snell. At the time, he had everything. He was young, good-looking, charismatic, at the top of his game, from a wealthy family (I get the distinct impression that he might have introduced himself as “Brad Snell of the [Somewhere] Snells,” you know?), and working in government antitrust actions in the swinging 1970s.

In 1974, Brad Snell was a 26 year old hotshot Congressional antitrust lawyer tasked with investigating corporate corruption in the American ground transportation industry. His explosive testimony before a United States Senate inquiry, and the landmark report American Ground Transportation, unearthed disturbing facts about how a handful of powerful corporations, including General Motors, Standard Oil, and Greyhound, had more or less literally remade the world in their own images. The facts in the case had been lying dormant since the late 1940s when the antitrust cases had occurred, except for a minor publication in a policy journal in 1970. It was a scoop and a coup. If there is such a thing as a rock star lawyer, Brad Snell used to be it.

But.

Brad Snell has been going to publish a book on the subject – for about 25 years now. Rustin and I understand why he has never gone to press; the sheer crushing weight of the huge web of information is enough to paralyse even a hotshot lawyer who can crank out a 200 page report with 50 pages of footnotes in a year. Since 1974 – that's before I was born – he's been enmeshed in streetcars. Granted, it has given him a fairly lucrative sideline in helping Holocaust survivors track down and reclaim assets and property from Nazi-allied corporate profiteering. But that in itself is an indication of how staggeringly big this is: You start out writing about streetcars and robber barons and wind up as Simon Wiesenthal's forensic accountant.

Which also means you have a hell of a time writing a book on the subject. How do you keep your information straight? I mean, you know you have a citation somewhere for a particular fact, but if you have to dig through a couple of rooms' worth of documentation (the related papers for one antitrust case, US v. National City Lines, literally take up an entire room) to find something, you're, well, fucked. Even if you're an elite prep school-educated rock star lawyer. And where do you start? The tangled mess of facts is huge, and most of them are interrelated, and picking a specific thread apart to start on it might just cause the whole thing to unravel in front of your eyes. So you wind up doing more research, and more research, hoping to find the one thing, that smokingest of smoking guns, that you can hold up in front of people and say “This is it,” rather than having to subject them to a backtrail of facts that would put ole Brad's Con Law prof down for his afternoon nap.

So that's what he's been doing for the last almost four decades. And oh god, do I ever feel his pain. (I keep saying to Rustin, "The poor guy.") You start out writing about streetcars and robber barons and wind up as Simon Wiesenthal's forensic accountant...and then, somewhere in there...

The project eats your life. And keep in mind, that's only one tiny piece of the problem of corporate crime, which is only one tiny piece of the problems with corporations in general.

It's too big to see well without getting a bad case of vertigo of the mind. If you're not nauseated by the thought of trillion-dollar ad campaigns and worldwide social engineering experiments, you're not understanding it yet. I'm not saying that everyone has to let it consume them to the same extent it has happened to Brad Snell, but if you don't get that this problem is so big that just trying to understand even part of it can sweep you away like a woodchip in a spring flood, you cannot possibly do much about it. Yes, it looks impossibly big, but it's not (merely improbably big, and it didn't start that way).

Want to do something about corporate crime? Think big. Really big. And hang on to your barf bag.

Score One for the Good Folk

2010-07-08T15:58:00.002-04:00

Seed Media is not going to allow PepsiCo to have a blog on ScienceBlogs after all. This is a minor victory in the war against complete corporate dominance, but an important one at least for that little corner of the internet.

This SCIENCE® Brought To You By PepsiCo, Purveyors of Fine Foods Everywhere!

2010-07-08T03:44:00.004-04:00

So apparently PepsiCo, in an apparent attempt to leech reputation and gain blog traffic by proxy, has bought its way into ScienceBlogs, where I spend a fair amount of time hanging out. I think this stinks for several reasons:

a) It seems like an attempt at greenwashing, like by blogging about food science and nutrition, PepsiCo is trying to make out that they're a "good corporate citizen"¹ in that they care about nutrition and stopping the so-called obesity epidemic and so on and so forth. This strikes me as akin to Wal-Mart's CF lightbulb initiative and their subsequent trumpeting of their environmental friendliness, 100 000 s.f. mega-box rainflow-distorting, hectares-of-land-buried-under-concrete, air-conditioned big box grotesqueries notwithstanding.

b) It seems as though PepsiCo is trying to grab reputation and traffic by proxy. ScienceBlogs itself is the biggest, most well-trafficked science blogging site on the whole Internet. It's the place to be to read interesting writing on science, as well as a variety of other topics including religion or the lack of it, medicine, current events, and politics. It's a great place to be, and I can understand PepsiCo's PR department wanting to grab a piece of that shine for themselves. On the other hand, in terms of getting traffic for themselves, what, do they really think that the Pharynguloid Hordes or the Respectfully Insolent are going to storm their blog en masse to do anything other than give them the Sadly, No! snark and awe treatment? Either corporate drones are really stupid, or they just don't really get this internet thingy, despite its being in its second decade of wide popular currency...

c) That said, what the fuck is PepsiCo doing trying to buy its way into ScienceBlogs, anyway?! PepsiCo is a giant transnational corporation with more money than Croesus, King Midas, and Scrooge McDuck put together, so to speak. It can afford to put a blog on its own corporate site (or one of them), and apparently has already done so, but wants to "syndicate" the blog onto ScienceBlogs. Or it could create its very own "experiential marketing" site, at trivial expense to a corporation of that size, to put the blog and whatever other suit-approved content it wants to put there, without making the ScienceBloggers look like a bunch of shills for swill.

d) It's a huge conflict of interest. I don't want to read a blog on nutrition put out by PepsiCo (or Coca-Cola, or Archer-Daniels-Midland, or Monsanto, or McDonalds, or or or) any more than I want to read a blog on mass transit put out by General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, or a blog on sustainable energy put out by BP or Shell or even Petro-Canada. They have no credibility on the subject at all because they're a corporation, which exists strictly to make money, and these particular corporations make their money by selling people products and/or services that are antithetical to those topics. If you don't get why this could be a problem, picture a blog about steak written by PETA.

e) There's no delicate way to say this: Corporations lie. They lie and they lie and they lie and they lie some more. Whether it's tobacco industry denialism and stonewalling, Wal-Mart lying about the origins of its products and projecting a wholesome folksy image while squeezing its suppliers to death and mistreating its workers in a variety of ways, or the industry-funded bullshit and propaganda that has been put out regarding biofuels, or the assisted demise of the rail transit system in North America, or the various propaganda-fests documented in Fast Food Nation, or the egregious abuses documented by J. Patrick Wright from John De Lorean's notes in On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, or the outright denials of any wrongdoing or liability by Curragh Resources² in the Westray mine disaster, or even the existence of birthstones, which seems to have been made up out of the whole cloth so that Tiffany's could sell more jewellery to credulous dupes; it's wise to assume that since corporations exist for no other purpose than to make money, if a corporation can make money by lying, it will. Therefore it's really only justified to assume, prima facie that a corporation is lying. Or, as your mother used to say, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Also, given a) through e), yeah, let's just give a billion-dollar corporation another platform on which to put its corporate message. It's not as though there aren't practically already billboards on the backs of people's eyelids, for fuck's sake.³

So I think this is a dumb move by Seed Media, and will ultimately either corrode ScienceBlogs' credibility, or it will backfire on them when the blog sinks like a stone and the revenue goes away.

________________
¹ I refer you to Murray Dobbin's book The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen.

² Note the line "the explosion was a terrible tragedy which could not have been foreseen"; this about an explosion in a notoriously gassy and deadly coal seam, in a mine where stonedusting was done intermittently if at all (the extent to which this is true is documented in the Westray Inquiry transcripts), but hoocuddanode?! Gassy, coal-dusty mines tend to blow up! I dunno about you, but I'm damn tired of flacks using "Nobody could have foreseen..." as their all-purpose Get-Out-Of-Jail/Stupid/Trouble-Free Card, especially when the thing they're feigning ignorance of is so transparently obvious the chorus of "WE DID, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!" should be deafening.

³ But, thanks to NAFTA et al, corporations now have more rights than natural persons, so we're not actually allowed to have ad-free public or personal space anymore, in our brave new world of dutifully, humbly, and gratefully serving our corporate overlords.

Who is Zaki Bucharest?

2010-03-04T22:43:00.002-05:00

People in the Portland area have been rightly concerned about an interesting case that happened at Portland State University:

A professor claims that Associated Students of Portland State University Chief of Staff Zachry (Zaki) Bucharest is an "FBI informant and agent provocateur," who is trying to incite students to violence.

A commenter on the Willamette Week Online site claims that Bucharest is "member on [sic] nearly all the Muslim student groups at PSU."

Another commenter in the same thread provides this link to a YouTube profile she claims is his. There's no way of linking the two, other than circumstantially, however. (A little discourse analytics suggests it may in fact be the same person.) I note that the name on the YouTube profile transliterates roughly to "Itzhak Perez."

The same commenter provides a link to his MySpace page, where he uses the handle "Born Zacharias...Ramon." The picture makes it pretty clear that "Zacharias...Ramon" is almost certainly the same person as in the pictures on the Daily Vanguard article and the ASPSU profile page. (I'm personally not convinced that "Bucharest" is anybody's actual family name.)

Things get a little murky from here. You see, whoever Zachry Bucharest/Zacharias Ramon is, he has no digital backtrail whatsoever. In the linked articles, there are a few people who vouch for having known him for a couple of years, but a little investigation turns up almost precisely nothing, except for a bunch of rabid right-wing and/or anti-semitic websites ranting about Zionist scum or whatever.

If you Google "Zachry/Zachary/Zaki Bucharest," you find pretty much nothing other than his ASPSU page, the linked articles, and the aforementioned foaming websites.

If you Google the e-mail given on Bucharest's ASPSU page, you find basically the same thing. Same with the phone number.

If you look at his MySpace page, you'll find he has no blog posts, one friend (and seven deleted friends), and basically no activity. (I can't cop to having the world's most active MySpace, either, since I've basically forgotten about it for over a year now, I think, but my profile doesn't exactly look quite so phoned-in.)

Even Googling under all the variations of any of his names/aliases I could think of (and all the spellings I could think of) in Hebrew -- which would possibly turn up any Israel-based online presence -- turns up precisely nothing.

He has no blog comments, no YouTube comments (that I can see, anyway), no visible e-mails, no web page, no nothing. Even looking for him strictly under PSU-sanctioned stuff doesn't find you much.

My thoughts on this are that either he's the most successful case of internet anonymity ever, or the guy doesn't actually exist. In either case, I think that raises more questions than it answers...

Malaria, Revisited

2010-02-26T10:49:00.002-05:00

Today on Science-Based Medicine, there is an article talking about the effects of climate change on infectious disease. Mark Crislip writes,

Diseases that may increase in the US or become endemic again include malaria, dengue, and Leishmaniasis. A 4 degree rise in temperature could allow dengue to exist as far north as Winnipeg and malaria to be in all of Europe. Seems to be a good trade off to me: more dengue and malaria, less RSV [respiratory syncytial virus].

Good times for an infectious disease doctor.

Not so good times for the rest of us.

Just for the record, I was saying this three years ago. On Tuesday, 16 January 2007, I wrote:

I've been watching what has been happening with insect-borne and emerging diseases in this area. Due to climate change, the ranges of various insects are moving northward. Species that once couldn't survive the cold winters here are now thriving. Combine that with ubiquitous and fast overseas travel from around the world, and is it really so farfetched to think that we could begin to see malaria in this area somewhere soon? Already there has been a localised outbreak in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Yes, it could happen here, probably in much the same manner as SARS. I am not a doctor (nor do I play one on tv), and I'm not an epidemiologist (even a barefoot one), but I think it's probably safe to assume that the native strain of malaria is eradicated, and I wouldn't want to speculate on the chances of reintroducing or re-evolving a plasmodium parasite that can live in our native mosquitoes ... but I also don't think it's completely unrealistic to think we might see a reappearance of malaria in North American temperate zones in our lifetimes, either.

Sometimes I hate being right...

The Great Canadian Flyer-In

2009-12-13T01:18:00.002-05:00

Or: Interrobang Writes Letters

I got so fed up today with the CRAP MP from one riding over spamming my house with his junk mail perpetual-campaign propaganda flyers (and a very explicit Christmas card, just in case anyone forgets that all real Canadians are supposed to be celebrating Christmas -- bet that plays well in ~~Peoria~~ the big Muslim neighbourhood just down the way in that riding...), I wrote him an angry e-mail demanding that he stop sending us his crap since we don't even live in his riding and can't, therefore, vote for him.

Then I found out that the Harperoids do this a lot, and they've been spending outrageous amounts of taxpayer dollars doing it, too.

If you're tired of these twerps mailing you stuff when you don't even live in their riding (or even if you do; they sure do seem to send a lot of it), save up a few weeks' worth of your (non-identifiable) junk mail -- all those grocery flyers, solicitation letters, bulk circulars, and all that other crap -- and maybe a few weeks' worth of your friends' and neighbours', and then truck it all down to the offending MP's office and drop it there.

You could stick it through the mail slot with a note to the effect of "You've been spamming us with your junk mail; now it's our turn...", or just walk into the office, say you're protesting the CRAP policy of doing this, and dump the shit on the floor, and then turn around and walk out. I'd suggest packing it all up and mailing it to them postage-free, except that'd just be spending more tax money exacerbating the problem.

A minor favour?

2009-12-02T21:07:00.003-05:00

Would it be too much to ask bloggers, when posting on their own sites, to not use URL-shortening services like TinyURL or Bit.ly? (That's what that anchor tag stuff is about; to make the link nice and short like so, you see?)

I absolutely guarantee you'll also increase your click-through rate, because a lot of people won't click on an obscured URL. Who knows whether that link goes to some Russian virus farm or to (the late and unlamented) goatse.cx?

"Stop Resisting!"

2009-10-15T17:50:00.003-04:00

(Doesn't that just say it all, folks?)

The Toronto Star has an article about campus and London, Ontario city police officers at the University of Western Ontario beating a student they were trying to arrest. At least two people got video of the arrest:

Video 1
Video 2 (different angle)

Note in the article, the apologists for police brutality are saying that people could get the "wrong impression" about the officers' behaviour because the video is out of context. Normally, I'm all about context, but is there anything more we honestly need to know other than, in the video, five guys are beating the crap out of a guy who's on the ground the whole time? Other than that he might have been struggling, frankly, he doesn't even look like he is resisting. (And be honest with me, folks, if five guys were landing on you and kicking and punching you while they were holding you down, wouldn't you be struggling, too? I would, if only to try to make sure they didn't always get to land blows in the most painful places.)

But remember, especially when dealing with the police in this brave new USA-lite version of Canada (same shit taste, less populated), be sure always to believe the authority figures, and not your lyin' eyes.

This is honestly disgraceful; I'm a UWO alumna, and I frankly don't care what the so-called extenuating circumstances are, or even what the ostensible training manuals say (as in the article) -- if the campus and city police were beating a guy who was on the ground, someone who should have been in charge was doing their job wrong, to a degree significant enough that someone should lose their job over this.

Shame on the university administration for condoning this and for their lame apologetics, as well.

Dear Mr. Klein

2009-09-01T19:24:00.003-04:00

I am a blogger. I'm also a professional writer. I do, in fact, do research (my last commissioned piece clocked in at 3500 words and included 42 citations in 35 endnotes -- yours?), and I do, in fact, have an editor. (I actually have three or four I work with on a regular basis -- you?)

Incidentally, I have a few not-inconsiderable editing chops myself, too, given that I'm going to be starting a position as a senior editor with a firm in Eastern Canada in about a month and a half.

Maybe before you go slagging bloggers as being know-nothing amateurs, you should take a moment and realise that some of us aren't amateurs. Maybe we don't write for the New York Times, but you can still be in the biz and not in the Times.

Yours anonymously,

Interrobang

Dear Ed Holder

2009-08-31T10:10:00.003-04:00

Please stop sending your propaganda flyers to my house. I am, after all, across Wharncliffe Road and thus not in your fucking riding.

It's bad enough that you're using taxpayer dollars to send this drivel out in the first place. Could you at least maybe not send it to people who can't even vote for you even if they want to? (I don't.)

No love,

Interrobang

Dear Balanced Day Bags, and the CBC

2009-08-19T12:29:00.002-04:00

Please remove the odious neologism "mompreneur" from your respective vocabularies. There is nothing mutually exclusive about being a mother and an entrepreneur, and generations of feminists fought and sometimes died to give you the right and the ability to own and run your own business. If not out of respect for yourselves, at least out of respect for them, do yourselves the favour of not ghettoising yourself with a demeaning, trivialising, and sexist term.

Truths, Real and Otherwise

2009-08-10T21:46:00.002-04:00

At Salty Current, run by Pharyngula regular and Order of the Molly recipient "SC," I was reading some quotes from Alan Sokal, most notable for hoaxing one of the preeminent journals of literary-critical bullshit out there. (I say this with a substantial background in lit-crit -- most of it is bullshit, and about the only literary theorists you should actually even think about trusting about anything are Mark Turner and Stephen King.)

Some of Sokal's meditations on the notions of factualness and truthfulness, as well as Alan Ryan's assertion (quoted in the same essay) " Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it." I'm personally with Sokal in thinking this is a mischaracterisation of what Foucault actually said, but the notion that truth is an effect of power is an interesting one, and I think factual in some cases, for some definitions of "truth."

I'm going to say that in this case, I'm drawing a distinction between factual and true, in that there are a multitude of "truths" in this culture that have absolutely nothing to do with their factual status. In fact, most of them don't even have the saving grace of a kernel of truth lurking in their cores. These "truths" are things that "everyone knows," as the stock phrase goes, received wisdom in the service of power:

Corn ethanol is synonymous with biofuels, and is starving the planet.

Most disabled workers require expensive, inconvenient accommodations on the job.

The WTO protestors in Seattle and Montreal were all trust-fund babies and anarchists.

An unmarried woman over the age of 40 has a greater chance of being killed in a terrorist attack than of getting married.

Greenroofing is expensive and requires extra technology.

There are many more, of course. (I could do an entire book on "Things the Culture Says are True About Women, But Aren't," for example.) A lot of people have been doing good work in trying to combat these "truths," but a lot of them have entrenched themselves firmly in the mainstream discourse, to the point where a lot of the time it goes without saying that these things are just true. My advice is maybe to pay a little bit of attention to things people say are true, and rely instead on things that people know are factual...

You Can't Win, You Can't Break Even, and You Can't Even Leave

2009-06-08T12:19:00.003-04:00

I was just reading a very frustrating article at Clusterfuck Nation. (With my friend Rustin, I'd be more inclined to classify the culture as the product of a Hundred-Year Fever Dream rather than a prosaic old Clusterfuck, but chacun a son gout, non?)

In his essay "Lagging Recognition," he makes the very important case that one of the major consequenses of the economic downturn (following hard on the heels of 30 years of Reaganite anti-statism) is infrastructure decay and collapse. One of the major componenents of the infrastructure decay and collapse is, therefore, a decline in road quality, which, if left unchecked (and it is currently unsustainable, most likely) will result in the eventual decline of car culture.

This is not without sociopolitical consequenses. As Kunstler writes,

The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it. Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too.

One can already observe the reaction of the car-owning majority to the carless classes (a prime example would be the "Why didn't they just leave?" types whining about Katrina victims who were left without transportation out, as options for those without either car access or money were severely limited); a look at the suburban landscape as it has existed from the late 1940s onward should be an indicator, as should any number of extremely car-centric developments, such as strip malls, shopping malls, and big box complexes. It's woven into the culture in ways that most people don't even see. (How many "boy meets car" songs do you know?) As Kunstler says, "Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity crisis."

The decline, probably inevitable, of car culture is going to change all that. Kunstler writes, "It will be very painful for us to walk away from the car-centered life. Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of being hopelessly over-invested in a suburban house and all the life-ways associated with it."

Now for the frustrating part.

As you know if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, the most viable alternative to a car-centred lifestyle is one that revolves heavily around the use of rail-based transit. As I've documented at length, the original "suburban" development was the streetcar suburb, which permitted a car-free or low-car-usage lifestyle while maintaining many of the benefits of modern suburban life (detached houses, residential streets, relative quiet), plus some other benefits that modern suburbs don't often have (a sense of community, outward-looking houses that encourage street-level interactions, a diminished lack of attachment to the community at the family level). These communities were planned from the outset to be built on a human (not car) scale, so they're walkable (even in bad weather) and at one time provided access to rail-based public transit seamlessly as a part of the design of the neighbourhood. Modern suburbs will need to be retrofitted to include rail-based transit (and most of them are not even designed to be bus-friendly).

Likewise, most modern urban areas will need to undergo the same retrofitting, and absent a complete demolition and rebuilding (probably not politically feasible) will not function as well as communities designed with integral rail transit in mind.

The frustrating part of this is that we had all of this at one time; the time to have (as they're now saying again) "electrified the railroads" was before they ever converted the existing electric railroad network to diesel. The time to start building streetcar suburbs was in the late 1800s, and streetcar suburbs (and the streetcar lines that serviced them) should never have been taken out of operation in the period between 1920 and 1960. The time to stop getting swindled was while the swindle was going on, not 60 years after the fact.

Let me reiterate: We once had what we now need.

Further, I really do think (having looked at it for strictly unhealthy amounts of time) that all this was preventable, if there'd been the political and social will to do so. But our parents and grandparents got sold a bill of goods by a bunch of long-dead conmen and their heirs, and we and our children will have to take the brunt of it.

Good luck!

Dear Toronto Star

2009-05-29T10:27:00.003-04:00

I might be more inclined to subscribe to your newspaper -- which I love, by the way -- if you would stop calling me to try to get me to subscribe.

I. Will. Not. Patronize. Businesses. That. Telemarket.

That includes you, so knock it off.

A Brief And Cranky Reminder

2009-04-25T02:03:00.002-04:00

Teleology is bullshit.

Disabled people are not about you. Disabled people don't exist to "teach you" things. We're not your instructional objects, so shut the fuck up until you grow out of your absurd religious fetish.

Simply because having the experience of being around a disabled person has caused you to expand your mind doesn't mean that that person exists to expand your mind. To quote from the excellent essayist A.C. Grayling, "In case you need reminding, the point can be illustrated as follows: I would not be writing this on a laptop if computers had not been invented, but this does not prove that computers were invented so that I could write this." Framing the issue the other way is grossly offensive to every disabled person on the planet and mighty arrogant of you.

____________________

Just to show that I'm not a completely nasty person all the time, here's a lovely Hadiqa Kiyani video for you to enjoy: Dholan Aawein Ha, Jhook Wasaven Ha.

Evil Biofuel Powered Reptile-Shaped Kitten-Eating Machines from Another Planet!

2009-04-19T01:18:00.003-04:00

(Joke reference, because I'm too disgusted for anything but snark.)

Now the Associated Press is lying about biofuels, along with (possibly, unless this is grossly misreported) the US Congressional Budget Office, claiming simultaneously that "Food stamps and child nutrition programs are expected to cost up to $900 million more this year because of increased ethanol use," whereas further down in the same story, they say, "The CBO said other factors, such as skyrocketing energy costs, have had an even greater effect than ethanol on food prices."

So, uh, if these otherwise-unnamed "other factors, such as skyrocketing energy costs, have had an even greater effect than ethanol on food prices," why are those things not news? Why are we not hearing how energy costs and purple mitten futures or whatever and all those other factors with such a significant impact (although you can't be bothered to name them) are driving up the price of food? Why are we only hearing that the sky is falling because of corn-derived ethanol?

Look, folks, I'll make this perfectly clear: Writing a news story so that the most significant contributing causes of a phenomenon are buried and mostly not described two grafs below the lede so that a minor, relatively insignificant contributing cause can be highlighted in the headline, the slugline, and the lede, is dishonest. It's a lie. It's also bad journalism, and it needs to stop. I'm looking at you, Mary Clare Jalonick of the Associated Press, and all the other reporters who are doing this.

As I've said before, I'll be the first person to tell you that corn ethanol-derived biofuels suck diseased donkey ass, okay? They're really a bad execution of an otherwise good concept, especially since if we're doing biofuels, we should be doing them from waste materials, used french-fry grease, switchgrass and other low-till, no-maintenance, no-irrigation, low-energy-expenditure crops, and not something as disgustingly high-maintenance as corn.

Besides which, as I've mentioned before, no, corn ethanol is not starving the planet, or taking high-fructose corn syrup out of the mouths of impoverished babies to power hippie yuppiemobiles, so sit down and take a chill pill or several already.

Economic Terrorism

2009-03-24T10:56:00.004-04:00

Unless I'm seriously misreading this article, didn't Wall Street basically just take the vast majority of US taxpayers hostage, then threaten to crash the economy into the ~~World Trade Center~~ ground unless they got their bonuses?

Since I'm too inarticulate to deal with this at length for the moment, and I'm really working on a post about Greg Gutfeld and his gang of gutless groupies, go read Melissa McEwan and Hilzoy.

Is It Okay to Say the "C-Word" Here?

2009-03-14T22:11:00.002-04:00

I'm talking about the word "cult." That C-word. Let's talk about that for a moment, since the word seems to have fallen out of fashion in the current vernacular. The finger I've got on the pulse of pop says that most people associate the word "cult" with Hare Krishnas and various other hippie-dippie weirdnesses and probably figure that the fashion died out around the same time as disco fell off the charts.

Not so. As the very perceptive Southern Beale says:

Removing individuals from their support structure -- family and friends -- and replacing that support with a new one; separating the world into those who have privileged access to an exclusive truth and those who do not; placing a group’s doctrine over and above an individual’s experience; use of overly-simplified, cliche-ridden language and slogans; use of “sacred science” -- the idea that if something works for so many in the group it has the authority of “science”; and a cult of confession where one’s testimony is told so often it becomes a well-rehearsed script outlining how lost and sinful the individual was before finding salvation in the group: these are all classic hallmarks of a cult.

There are lots of cults operating these days; they've just mostly gone under the radar to a certain degree, in that modern cults don't usually sell flowers in airports or beg for converts on city streets. These days, they shut their followers up in remote locations, and/or operate as single autonomous units, communicating over the internet.

Southern Beale documents the ways in which the Quiverfull movement operates as a cult, bolstered by quotations from an article by a former movement leader. We can find similar experiences within movements like the FLDS, which famously locate their settlements far from mainstream society (so they can operate their multigenerational women- and child-abuse schemes undisturbed by uncoopted law enforcement), the Satmar Hasidim as they exist in places like Kiryas Joel, an all-Satmar intentional community in New York (where 2/3 of the town's population is below the poverty line and 40% on food assistance due to the Satmars'...interesting ideas on work), or the proposed Ave Maria, Florida, whose founder, a hard-line Catholic, said that he wished to ban abortions, pornography, and contraceptives inside city limits. We've seen this before, with everything from the Heaven's Gate suicides to the events at Waco.

Other cults still exerting a disproportionate influence on the popular culture include the everpresent Unification Church (Sun Myung Moon), which publishes the Washington Times, famously owns much Washington DC real estate, and sponsors various political events, including one at which a Democratic politician crowned Sun Myung Moon, and Scientology, which owns and controls a substantial portion of Clearwater, Florida. (I was there in the early '80s, before Scientology took it over. Too bad; it used to be a nice town.)

With incidents like the ones chronicled here, the UU Church shootings (where the shooter left a manifesto proclaiming his hatred of all things liberal), Glenn Beck's latest assertion that liberalism is driving people to commit mass shootings, and all the various other eliminationist, tribalist, and authoritarian rhetoric we've been hearing of late, the cultic mentality is in full swing, and looking like it's going to ratchet up even further. As Southern Beale says, "It's time we got comfortable with the words "cult" and "thought control" again. We live in a mass-media age, and the tools of exploitation have expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams." We can't address this problem without effective ways of talking about it. Let's call a cult a cult and not cut off our vocabulary's nose to spite its face.

I See What You Do There

2009-03-13T12:26:00.002-04:00

Let's talk about Ari Fleischer on Chris Matthews' show the other day. Lots of people have been commending (inasmuch as Chris Matthews deserves any kind of cookie) Matthews for taking Fleischer to task. You can watch the video here, courtesy of MSNBC, which seems to have, for once, picked out the salient point from the copious distractor material.

Most of the people in the blogosphere I've read so far are (still) focusing on the oft-debunked claim that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attacks of 11 September 2001. That's an old lie. They've been lying about that one since 2001. Not that I'm willing to just let it go or anything, but I think the focus on this particular revenant lie is distracting from the larger point.

Did nobody else but me notice how Fleischer said, "How dare you say 9/11 happened on our watch?"

That right there is possibly the biggest rewriting of history we've seen yet from the people who sincerely believe they can just create "their own reality," regardless of what the actual facts, documentation, and videotape say.

I can't quite tell what Fleischer was meaning in saying that. It seems to me that either he's been swallowing the Clinton-did-it Koolaid for so long that he really does somehow believe that 11 September 2001 (the 6 August PDB notwithstanding) happened on Clinton's watch, or he really is trying to unhappen Bush from that day's events.

Side note: He seems to be making the rounds on the talking-head shows, lying all the way, so I suspect this is a prong in a systematised campaign of disinformation. More later.

I can understand why most of the left blogosphere is still hung up on the Saddam Hussein-9/11 thing; the Bush people have been banging that drum so hard for eight years they've long since ruptured the head and broken the sticks, and for a while (search down for "Hussein") a majority of people believed it. Frankly, I can see why. If you're an ignorant racist scuttlefish who knows nothing about Islam or Middle Eastern politics, and who's been primed for years to hate Muslims (and to hate Saddam Hussein in particular, since I can remember talking about how the North American media was demonising him as the Hitler Nouveau du Jour back in the 1990s when I was in high school, ferchrissakes), it's pretty easy to believe that a Middle Eastern dictator might have something to do with Islamic terrorism.

On the other hand, the Bush people have spent the last eight years trying to convince everyone how preznitial Bush looked giving speeches on the rubble in NYC, how the response was appropriate and justified (and for the first little while until the idea of going after Osama bin Laden got boring or impractical, working), and how Bush's policies kept everyone safe because there'd been no terrorist attacks on US soil since then*, and how everything they did and were doing was justified because 9/11 shut up, and so on. And here's Bush's former press secretary insisting on national television that the former president wasn't the president on 11 September 2001, despite all evidence to the contrary, and My Pet Goat footage notwithstanding.

That is, frankly, an enormous, mind-blowing lie, to the point where everything Matthews said was utterly inadequate, and to the point where only a Joseph Welch-style rhetorical pile-driver would have been necessary and sufficient. That isn't just conveniently omitting some salient facts to attempt to shore up a lie of convenience by omission, that is blatantly 1984-style historical Memory (ass)Holism.

Frankly, I suspect they're going to continue to lie and lie and lie until they've tinfoiled the radar enough that sufficient numbers of people don't know what to believe anymore. They do this all the time, basically daring people, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Authoritarian followers can be duped into believing the authority figures over their own eyes, and I suspect that's Phase II of this operation. First confuse, then consolidate...their planned step three, of course, is a return to power, buoyed by a glib line of patter that convinces the confused rubes that there really is such a thing as (Received) Truth, and they are It.

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* Excepting the anthrax attacks and all those various copycat crimes (like Chad Castagena and friends) and the garden variety abortion clinic bombings and shootings and assorted Minute (pronounced "my newt") Man milita-nut-nitwit things perpetrated almost solely by white goodoleboys, of course...

A Special Offer for Railfans! Don't throw out those old magazines!

2009-02-28T22:10:00.002-05:00

Dear railfans,

Do you collect rail union magazines (and other old rail magazines), either for the covers or the pictures inside them? Don't throw them out! Streetcar Press wants your old rail magazines regardless of condition or missing material. No cover? No problem. We will pay cash for all of your old rail magazines after you've finished with them.

WE ONLY READ THEM FOR THE ARTICLES!

Don't throw those magazines out! They're important historical documentation of rail history, and Streetcar Press wants them. For more information, contact publisher-filter@streetcarpress.com, minus the "-filter."

Safe, Legal, and Why Do You Care

2009-02-20T10:25:00.003-05:00

Dear antiabortion concern trolls,

Even if you did everything in the world to encourage women not to have abortions, up to and including making contraception free, providing no-cost, easy-to-access daycare, state-subsidised in-home childcare, laws forcing employers to give flextime to anyone who requests it, "baby bonus" money, free prenatal care (where it doesn't already exist), and anything and everything else you can think of...

...there would still be women who, for whatever of the plethora of reasons that exist, simply would not elect to have a baby. I realise this is hard for some of you to understand, but there are more reasons why a woman wouldn't want a(nother) baby than simply the economic or social reasons.

In any case, whether the reason is "I've already got two kids and I can't possibly take care of a third," or "I'm disgusted and repulsed by the very idea of undergoing gestation," why do you give a shit? It isn't your body on the line, and you're not the one who's going to have to raise the baby after it's born. And that's the crux of the matter there.

If someone would really rather not do the job, why do you want to force them? Would you trust your books to an accountant who had only become one because the state had told them they had to? That's just your finances; why would you trust a child to someone who only became a parent because the state told them they had to?

(In presuming to speak for the committed nullipara demographic, let me say that Your Humble Narrator really does despise babies, and would rather be shot than impregnated, so there is also that possibly-incomprehensible aspect, too.)

Brilliant.

2009-01-23T00:14:00.004-05:00

I'm not really back, but I spotted this at Sociological Images and thought it was entirely too good not to share.

This is a poster for a Berlitz language school from Israel. For those of you who don't read Hebrew, the bottom word כן means "yes" and is pronounced "ken."

Hiatus

2009-01-18T16:36:00.002-05:00

I'm currently dealing with really intense family trauma, so it's likely going to be a while longer before I really feel like blogging anything, unfortunately. I am okay, and the family will get through this problem, but I'm going to need to prioritise the non-essentials (like blogging) downward a bit.

An Immodest Proposal

2009-01-03T19:18:00.003-05:00

Imagine, if you will, Constant Reader, a world in which men randomly, or not so randomly, go around cutting the balls off other men, usually as a demonstration of social dominance. Abusive boyfriends and parents do it, random strangers do it, even acquaintances do it.

Members of the scientific establishment, usually dominant males, publish scholarly papers in high-impact journals chronicling involuntary castration in animal species, and popular media reports translate those findings into saying that castration is a fundamental part of men's essential natures, which serves to shore up centuries of popular belief. Evolutionary psychologists of the less reputable type come up with the usual just-so stories.

A victim gets taken to a Catholic hospital after being castrated and finds out that the medical staff won't treat the wound aside from basic first aid, because any infection or complications that the victim winds up with (including, say, osteoporosis and arthritis) are God's will and it would be immoral to interfere with God's plan for the eunuch. Besides which, eunuchs are Scriptural. When an incident of this type comes to light, a prominent legislator asks what the problem is with an alteration of the standard of care on religious grounds, being as "it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital."

The victim is told to "just deal with it. It isn't so bad... It could be worse...you could be dead." Male friends and relatives of the victim, on finding out, promise to "revenge castrate" the perpetrator, usually as a distancing mechanism. Very few of the threats are ever carried out, mostly due to endemic societal disinterest in identifying and punishing the perpetrators.

Men who try to get cosmetic or functional repairs done surgically often have difficulty in finding a provider who will do the procedures, and most people are quite judgemental about it. A concerted political movement to ban reparative surgery exists, and has gained a lot of political traction in recent years. Laws are passed in a number of jurisdictions allowing store personnel to refuse to sell castrated men testosterone or the needles to administer it, even when the men in question have a valid prescription, on religious-objection grounds. These so-called "conscience laws" also allow store personnel to refuse to sell prosthetic testicles. Many stores do not carry any of these items, but also do not notify their clientele.

The victim goes to the police, and hears things like:

"Oh, honey, you know you shouldn't wear briefs in public. Men really like how those show off your package, after all..."
"Eh, I don't believe anybody really cut your balls off. You're just taped up down there to try to get sympathy."
"You're being hysterical."
"You're overreacting."
"You know there's no point in pressing charges; none of these guys ever get caught anyway."
"What are you, some kind of a whore that you're flashing your balls in public? Get out of here, before I have you investigated for sexual deviance."

In court, the victim rarely fares much better. Conviction rates hover around 10% of reported castrations. Needless to say, only a fraction of castrations are ever reported.

Laws banning cross-examiners from mentioning the victims' sexual and sartorial history only apply in certain jurisdictions and most of the laws have been passed within the last 20 years or so. In at least two high-profile cases, the prosecution presents videotaped evidence of the castrations, and the jury declines to convict.

Most media accounts refer to castration as "cosmetic surgery," and the actual castration as "the alleged incident." Perpetrators are almost always referred to as "the accused" or "the perpetrator," and never as "the castrator." If no conviction is obtained, a lot of people assume the victim is lying in an effort to get sympathy or social benefits.

Castration by a spouse or partner didn't become a felony until 10 or 15 years ago in most jurisdictions, and that only after a long and intense campaign by activists.

Well-meaning NGOs, municipalities, and other groups frequently run PSA campaigns directed at men, informing them how they can avoid becoming victims of castration. The advice almost always includes admonitions against drinking to excess, wearing certain clothes, going to certain places, and being out alone at night. When anti-castration activists point out that these activities amount to a comprehensive schedule of social control, they're often told "What are you complaining about? All of those things are common sense anyway. Everyone should be doing them. What have you got against good advice?" Very few of these campaigns ever focus on reducing the rate of castrations by preventing the perpetrators from committing the crime in the first place, or on ensuring swift, certain punishment for offenders.

Castrations of imprisoned men are disturbingly common, and people often make derrogatory jokes about so-and-so "getting cut" in prison. A Million Eunuch March on Washington, DC, to demand equal treatment for castration victims under the law was treated mostly as a media spectacle and joke fodder. CNN's main male newsanchor spent a lot of time chortling. Castration apologists abound on blog threads devoted to discussing the political, social, and physical implications of castration. People who make castration jokes rarely listen to victims' pleas to stop, saying they're "overreacting," and "being politically correct," and "humourless," and "don't appreciate edgy comedy," and often go out of their way to annoy victims with tasteless jokes...

Anybody out there sitting there reading with their hand over their crotch? Anybody flinch while reading this?

And that is why rape jokes really aren't funny.

An Elegant Proof of Concept

2009-01-01T00:43:00.006-05:00

According to this article in the New York Times, test pilots with Air New Zealand have successfully tested a biofuel-blend fuel in an aircraft engine. The biofuel in question is made from jatropha curcas, the oil of which can be readily converted to biofuel. (Incidentally, tests in Japan and the US are apparently in the planning stages.) This flight, as limited as it is, is noteworthy because it demonstrates very publicly that biofuels can be used other places than simply cars, trucks, and tractors; and it demonstrates an in-practice, real-world use (by a major commercial airline) of a fuel whose biofuel component is not derived from corn or soybeans, but is instead derived from a much more biofuel-suitable plant. This is particularly important, since the mainstream North American media seems intent on trying to make biofuels synonymous with (and only with) corn ethanol.

As I said before: Corn ethanol is not equal to "biofuels." Corn ethanol represents one type of biofuel, and only one type. Please stop referring to corn ethanol as "biofuels" as though the terms are synonymous. They are not. Doing so is unethical, flat-out dishonest, and bad journalism to boot.

The best part of the article is that even the usually biofuel-negative NYT can't avoid mentioning "jatropha needs little water or fertilizer and can be grown almost anywhere — even in sandy, saline or otherwise infertile soil. Each seed produces 30 to 40 percent of its mass in oil, giving it a high per-acre yield." (This extremely negative Reuters article seems to disagree on its being high-yield, but it also seems to contradict most of the information available on jatropha curcas as well. On the other hand, this wouldn't be the first time Reuters has lied about biofuels.)

Of course, the NYT does have to get in the usual food scarcity smear, claiming that "some observers¹ [fear] that farmers could be tempted to grow jatropha rather than edible crops in the hope of getting better prices." Some other observers, namely this blogger, who isn't too chickenshit to put her pseudonym of eleven or so years on the claim, figure that since J. curcas grows just about damn anywhere including places other crops won't grow, farmers would be stupid to replace whatever their main cash crop is with jatropha, when they can grow it on their verges, on marginal land where other things won't grow, and so on. In fact, farming jatropha could make farmers out of people who own land that otherwise couldn't be farmed.

Also, while we're on the subject of making one's living from farming, I love this insinuation that nobody farms anything except for food. I guess cotton, tobacco, textile flax, seed grain, tree, mink and other fur livestock, commercial flower and decorative plant, textile bamboo, and industrial hemp farmers (among others) don't exist in NYT World. Also, seemingly, according to the author of this piece, nobody ever farms more than one thing at a time. (A friend's neighbour, whose main cash crops are tomatoes and trees in that order, might disagree.)

__________________
¹ Obligatory journalistic integrity moment: "Some observers"? Like whom? Name two. Name names, or I'm going to figure that you pulled this out of your ass.

Inaugural Enthusiast

2008-12-18T16:11:00.002-05:00

So, I understand that Rick Warren, Dominionism with a smiley non-threatening Dr. Phil face, is giving the "invocation" at Obama's inauguration. (Why there is need for the shamans and witch-doctors of the local cargo cult to give an "invocation" at the elevation of an American president is beyond me, but I'm a dum furriner and a heathen atheist to boot.)

The next time an American says something to me about the separation of church and state and/or the Establishment clause, I reserve the right to first puke on their shoes and then kick them in the shins.

Fair warning.

Shameless Plug Time

2008-12-14T23:11:00.001-05:00

Rustin's new book, Listen Up! A Native's Guide to New York City is now available for $6.50 at CafePress. Get yours before they vanish like a Midtown independent newsstand...

Stupid Liberal Talking Points

2008-12-12T22:58:00.004-05:00

...or Why The Big Three Bailout Is Actually a Bad Idea Too

The latest conventional wisdom in Left Blogistan is that the Big Three bailout must be a good thing, since Republicans are opposing it, most probably to bust the UAW. Pardon me while I *headdesk*. Does anyone around here but me remember what unions are for?!

Saving the Big Three to save the unions is like subsidising mobsters to make sure that the police have something to do.

The Big Three have made these threats before: I can't be the only one who remembers the '80s: Back then, it seemed like every month or so, representatives of the Big Three would be back at the government's door, palm out, flanked by a couple of sweating gorillas in suits, saying, "Chee, nice economy youse got here. Be a shame if somethin' wuz ta happen to it... Youse wouldn't happen ta have a few extra bucks lyin' around, kinda ta make sure nuttin' happens ta it, wouldja?" (And keep in mind, unions exist to protect workers against the exploitation of capital. Where's the union to protect the world against exploitation by the Big Three?)

If the Big Three were natural persons, instead of those fictive legal persons we refer to as corporations, they'd be looking at life imprisonment without possibility of parole, based on the number¹ and frequency of their crimes; they're unrepentant, unreformable serial criminals. They've been on the brink of failure now (and being kept alive by massive government subsidies -- either in the form of actual subsidies, outright bailouts, tax credits and other "incentives," and public investment in infrastructure that directly benefits them, such as the Interstate highway program) for about three decades or longer. They have had countless opportunities to reform, restructure, and reinvent themselves. Their response has always been to buy a few more legislators, throw around some (empty?) promises about building another plant (to replace the ones that went elsewhere because of NAFTA) and crank up the consent-manufacturing machine (to the tune of trillions of advertising dollars) to make sure they don't have to sell what consumers really want, they can keep making consumers want what the Big Three have to sell, at least well enough to keep them limping along on their various forms of subsidy money for a while more. Suggest the kind of massive restructuring that would take away their near-monopoly/monopsony status, and their executives start slandering your character, which is a sure tell that they know that's the real solution, but they like the status quo just fine.

I'm against an auto industry bailout for exactly the same reasons I was against a financial industry bailout -- allowing a corrupt, exploitive, failing industry to remain on taxpayer-funded life support is basically giving the criminals at the top a free license to continue robbing us. So bailing them out is stupid. Considering that the Big Three are in large part responsible for many of the ills of the modern world, we don't owe them, they owe us.

By the way, now would be the time for some enterprising politician to be the hero by kick-starting that "green Apollo program" we've all been hearing so much about. Someone who could create millions of jobs by creating alternatives to dysfunctional, destructive car culture would solve the entire problem in one fell swoop.

___________________________
¹ A view in my folder of articles on the subject from Lexis-Nexis also shows antitrust probes in 1976, 1979, 1980, 1993 and 1994, plus breakup proposals for GM in 1980 and 2000.

Hey MaximumPC...You are cordially invited to bite me!

2008-12-11T21:05:00.003-05:00

In their article 50 Skills Every Real Geek Should Have the guys (I'm going to go with guys here) at MaximumPC once again perpetrate the usual:

I quote:

Run All Your Essential Apps on a USB Stick: Any real nerd is almost sure to have a USB thumbdrive in his pocket at all times.

Hide Porn From Your Significant Other: These features make it so that your browser temporarily stops storing any information about your activities on the web, meaning that your wife won’t get any nasty surprises the next day when Google autocompletes her search to something obscene.

So, uh, there are no female nerds in MaximumPC's world? Granted, there aren't a lot of us, but there are more of us than some people apparently think. I'll let Randall Munroe explain.

I applaud the effort to at least be sort of gender-neutral, in that you guys did say "spouse" instead of "wife" originally. (There are also apparently no gay male geeks in MaximumPC's world, which would come as quite a surprise to some of my friends.) Let's go all the way with that one next time, okay?

Also, I really have to object to Explain What E=MC^2* Means to a Liberal Arts Major. There apparently are no liberal arts major geeks in MaximumPC's world, either, which definitely excludes me.

I'm a female geek with not one, but two liberal arts degrees. I can build a computer from parts. I test software for a living. I don't program very well (yet -- I'm kind of a UI/UX design kind of person), but I can read source code in at least four programming languages, not all of which are old and related to COBOL. I hand-coded all the HTML in this blog entry. I'm such a big fucking nerd, I like writing documentation and I get off on over-commenting my code.

In other words, fuck you and your stupid assumptions very much. Think before you write next time, hmmm?

_____________________
* Amazing. I apparently know the ^superscript tag, and the people with the Geekier-Than-Thou complex didn't use it. Must be all those footnotes I have to use because I was a liberal arts major and I'm hardcore about citing sources... Oops.

Americanization in Progress, Please Wait...

2008-12-05T11:40:00.003-05:00

The situation here is getting pretty dismal, although the jokes are great, and this is the most fun thing to happen in Canadian politics since either Confederation or maybe this.

LOLitics aside, though, I'm getting worried by the rhetoric coming out of Harper and his supporters. Harper has consistently tried to paint the proposed coalition government as "undemocratic," even though he's the one who promised to (try to) govern as though 37 or so percent of the vote gave him a "mandate."* Also, this morning, on Radio-Canada** (where yesterday, one of the announcers referred to the proposed coalition as "un coup d'etat"), I heard a really rather remarkable exchange, recorded live (and in English) at what might have been a pro-coalition rally. Someone said, ""We need a change," and another, very angry-sounding man started screaming, "We voted Harper in! You can't change that! You're a traitor to our country!"

The number of ways in which a Harper supporter challenging the patriotism of a political opponent is remarkable in the Canadian context is mind-blowing. First of all, I have never heard such a thing said about anybody's political opponent, ever. It's simply not a place where it is normal to go in terms of the Canadian political discourse. People here simply do not tend to frame arguments in the context of appeals to patriotism.

Secondly, since when is the Canadian right about patriotism anyway? Calling a political opponent a traitor is absolutely absurd from a member of a contingent whose leadership has spent the last 20 or 30 years telling us all how great the Americans are (and that we should do everything they say without question), telling us how our quality of life sucks compared to the US (which it does assuming you're rich, and which it most assuredly doesn't if you aren't rich), telling us all how much better off we'd be if we simply allowed them to turn Canada into USA North (and how stupid and deluded we are for not seeing that they're right), working for Republicans (I'm looking at you, Dianne Haskett), cutting shady backroom deals with US leaders (like some of the NAFTA shennanigans), getting cozy with right-wing US think tanks (like Harper's numerous connections to the National Citizens' Coalition), and on, and on, and on.

My reaction is basically thus: Your entire schtick since the emergence of the Reform/neocon bloc in Canadian politics has been that the United States of America does everything better than Canada does and the US should therefore be emulated and obeyed in every respect, and now you're impugning the patriotism of the 60+ percent of the electorate who disagrees with you?! What are you, too stupid to live, completely mind-colonised by the Americanoid thought-virus, just generally contemptuous of Canadians as a whole, or all of the above?!

It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.

I for one do most emphatically not welcome our new Americanoid overlords, and you're going to have to drag me out in chains if you expect me to like it. I didn't vote for any Republicans or Republicanoids, and if they want or expect me to want to be an American, they're going to have to let me vote in actual US elections. And then deal with the results.

Author's Note: I'm sorry if the tone of this post comes off as completely anti-American. While I don't object to Americans, I do object to creeping Americanism in Canadian politics, especially as it concerns the blind, fact-free embrace of the premise that everything the US does is better than what Canada does -- even for the Canadian context and in defiance of the will of the electorate -- and that Canada should do whatever the US wants it to do. That is a profoundly anti-sovereignity stance, and I cannot tolerate it. Canada must be allowed to go its own way and develop its own course, not be transformed into a clone of the United States because of the actions of a well-financed ideological minority.

Update: (6 December) A friend of mine has been banned from Facebook because of Harper supporters flagging his comments as spam when he was mocking them on a pro-Coalition forum they were inundating (dare I say "spamming") with their talking points. He says,

I made comments making fun of Harper on an Anti-Harper webpage and Pro-Harper spammers of that webpage decided that instead of addressing me, they would simply report me as 'spam' to the Facebook team. Naturally Facebook being the soulless, faceless, white-washed corporate tool that it is, sided with Harper's fans who were attacking the people on the page and not me, who was defending it.

So let me just take this opportunity to warn each and every free-thinking person online that Stephen Harper and his supporters are actively attempting to ban, censor, out-shout and overwhelm every major discussion forum regarding the subject of Harper or Canadian politics.

Go to CTV.ca and CBC.ca and look at the discussions if you don't believe me. They are not trying to debate, they are not trying to form useful discussions, they are not trying to discuss points or share in ideas, they are simply attempting to overwhelm the sites with their message, trained to repeat the talking points that they have been given by their Right Wing mailing lists.

Which leads to the inevitable question: Who is Canada's Richard Viguerie? There's a name I would dearly like to know. Whoever it is needs a little midwinter sunshine, I think...

____________________
* Are there any right-wingers who don't project faster than a Cineplex Odeon on a Saturday night during a school break?

** Radio-Canada has been paradoxically pro-Harper, especially considering that it's a) a public broadcasting station, and therefore will be first against the wall when the neocon privatisation revolution comes, and b) a French-language station, which means it'll get an express ticket to be first against the wall when the Harperoid Alberta-Uber-Alles-English-Only (Bilingualism-is-a-Failure) revolution comes.

A Completely Frivolous Post on a Most Exciting Subject

2008-12-03T18:17:00.004-05:00

Submitted for your approval...Canadian history in the making...

(Mostly making us laugh our fucking asses off, that is...)

h/t handsvermillion.

Domestic Terrorism Comes to Toronto

2008-10-05T23:03:00.002-04:00

(H/T James Nicoll)

Just days before a contentious federal election in the "bellwether riding" of St. Paul's in Toronto, a person or persons unknown has vandalised cars and homes with Liberal campaign signs on the lawns. The worst things the vandal(s) did were cut brake lines on cars and phone lines to houses, but they also damaged cars and cut cable lines. Apparently there have been fourteen reported cases of this domestic terrorism, but no one was hurt (although the article details a near-miss).

This is new, different, and very very scary; I don't like it at all, and I like the significance even less. (Also, I'm flashing back to my mother's stories about being in Ottawa during the FLQ Crisis.) It looks as though someone is deliberately trying to intimidate Liberal voters in a strategically-important riding by using possibly life-threatening violence. (Even cutting phone lines counts in my estimation, because someone theoretically could have needed to call 911 and found that their phone was dead...)

I'm personally afraid that this is because it is simultaneously looking as though the CPC might get a majority government and that the polls are tightening closer to the election. Nothing amps up an authoritarian like thinking they're thisclose to getting their way and then feeling like they might lose it after all. Even if it smells like desperation, the impetus to action is pretty strong.

I note that the media response has been swift and negative. As David Neiwert mentions, this is the best possible tactic, since many of these types feel that silence gives assent -- "ignore them and they'll go away" gets read as "They're not protesting me, so they secretly approve!" NO.

Lessons From a Financial Crisis

2008-09-29T22:36:00.002-04:00

By now, with the stock exchange herd mentality in full swing, it's painfully obvious that the financial world is in for some changes, regardless of what happens. Being a student of history and current events, it's equally obvious that there are some important takeaway lessons from this financial situation. Whether anyone learns from their mistakes and uses the dislocation as an opportunity to effect major changes (as opposed to retrenching and doubling down on the conventional wisdom) is anybody's guess; I suspect that getting anyone much in North America to learn from history at this late date is a fool's errand, but I may be a fool, so I'll just keep talking.

The points lessons that are apparent from where I'm sitting are as follows:

Deregulation is evil. This lesson isn't news to anyone who's been paying attention, but I should point out that tighter and more rigourous regulation would have prevented many of these problems from existing. Predatory lending and entirely speculative leveraging methods can only flourish in an unregulated, non-transparent environment.

Speculation is equally evil, and needs to be replaced with saner, sounder investment. We as a culture need to return to market fundamentals, like actually investing in companies over a long period of time, rather than just trying to flip stocks and forex to make a quick profit.

It's time for a Tobin tax, and a small surcharge on all stock trades. Even something as miniscule as a quarter of a percent would wipe out much "stock churning" (because it would effectively eliminate its exceedingly narrow profit margin), thereby reducing market volatility and removing the temptation for professionally high-strung traders to stampede in one direction or the other.

The credit-dependent economy needs to shrink, and badly. There is no earthly reason why the world in general needs to be that dependent on credit.

Businesses need to learn how to buy in cash again, like Granddad did, and citizens need to stop feeling like their personhood is defined by their credit cards, and/or debt level, and the culture at large needs to stop encouraging people to be in debt.¹ (As this article demonstrates, there are a substantial number of credit card companies whose revenue stream depends on people not paying off their card balances. Do I actually need to mention how fundamentally broken that system is?)

For that matter, corporations in general need to stop acting like consumers' cash money is no good -- ever tried to get an ISP account (for example) without a credit card?! Marginalisation and penalisation should not be the default response to someone who wants to deal in cash (read: prefers to use their money unmediated by a giant transnational corporation); that response is symptomatic of a big big problem and needs to go away.

The business culture in general needs to start making longer term plans than "close of trading today," and "next quarter." I don't mean to harp on the "back to basics" idea too much, but Granddad and Grandma really did have the right idea there as well.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SMALL, INDEPENDENT RETAILERS. Unless I completely miss my guess, large corporations are going to get hit far more by this than the mom-and-pop shop at the corner, unless Mom and Pop's statistics pan out very badly (they had all their money wrapped up in investments, for instance).

For those of you inclined to go the extra 1.609344km, I would add a seventh point: If you haven't started already, now is the time to begin decoupling from the mainstream economy. Stop shopping at chain stores, or transnationals; cut down your discretionary spending; if you're in debt, make getting out of it a priority; find out who speaks barter in your local area; join a Freecycle group or swap meet; join or support a co-op or farm basket programme in your area; look for alternate employment, that kind of thing.

Maybe it's too late for some people to learn from their mistakes, and I'm not expecting a business culture revolution, but if small and micro businesspeople implemented changes like these, North America might be a very different -- and better -- place in ten or fifteen years. We can hope, right?

________________________________
¹ Companies that depend on their clients maintaining a debt balance in order to derive revenue refer to frustrating people like me (who pay off their balance on time or ahead of time) as "deadbeats." Spot the dysfunction, boys and girls!

Okay. Folks? Folks, please? Listen up...

2008-09-28T16:00:00.002-04:00

This is an example of a real live, living, breathing example of a genuine Canadian hard right-winger. Right now, he's got an erection the size of Alberta contemplating the thought of a Harper majority, because people on the voting left (which is plus or minus 60% of us, and probably would be more if people like my folks really paid attention to what the right-CPC was about, rather than just thinking it'll allow them to pay less taxes) can't get their shit together and are about to split the vote.

Again.

We've been here before, at least those of us in Ontario. I'm speaking, of course, of Mike Harris' eking out narrow-margin victories in two elections. Speaking as someone who spent most of the Harris years broke and unemployed, it sucked. (Oddly, my work prospects improved dramatically once McGuinty got in office and got settled. Funny, that.)

You will remember that a lot of Harper's advisors and brain trust are ex-Harrisites.

Harper has also already gone on record saying (to a group of American right-wing think-tankers) that he wants to make Canada over in their image, and that if he gets elected even with a minority, he's going to govern as if he had a "mandate." (Shades of Bush the Younger.)

Let's play that back again, with a slightly less charitable perspective, shall we: The man is saying that he's going to actively go against at least 60% of the electorate with the aim of turning this country into USA North.

Do you people who are throwing your support behind the laughable Greens and the NDP really want that? Is it fucking worth not sucking it up and voting for Stephane Dion this once just so that you can act all smug about how righteous you are? Meanwhile Harper will be burning down civil rights (as he's already shown a willingness to do, since he apparently doesn't have a mother or doesn't think his mother is human), Medicare, a humane criminal-justice system with a low recidivism rate (to replace it with the high-recidivism rate, state-sanctioned torture, US-style Prison-Industrial Complex), and so on...

Yeah, thank you ever so much for being so ideologically pure, you've lost all sense of perspective. And since I'm not optimistic about the leftward-leaning politicians' ability to get their shit together and form a coalition government in the event of another minority government, I'll righteously punch you in the head every time the second Harper administration takes down another institution on the advice of their Scaife-funded ideological mentors in the US. I hope you don't mind. Country over party this time, please?

Resources for Interesting Times: An Annotated Linkography

2008-09-25T19:36:00.004-04:00

This entry is an annotated list of some resources you might need to help you survive times of political and social upheaval, posted purely for informational purposes.

1: Documentation

This section will give links to and information about obtaining identification and other documents.

Passport Canada: Information on applying for and renewing a Canadian passport. Includes a link to downloadable forms (left sidebar) and service locations.

CDC NCHS site with state information on obtaining birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates.

United States Passport Office: Information on obtaining and renewing a United States passport. Includes downloadable forms, an application status check, and information on office closures.

UK Identity and Passport Service: Gives instructions on applying for and renewing passports, has links to the site for obtaining UK identity cards, travel advice, and services for people with disabilities.

Birth Certificate information page from Service Canada, with links to provincial pages with the relevant birth certificate information.

Order Certificates site from the General Register Office, UK, for obtaining copies of birth, death, adoption, marriage, and civil partnership certificates.

Service Canada site with information on obtaining or updating a Social Insurance card.

Social Security site with information on how to request a Social Security card. Includes a location finder.

2: How-Tos

This section gives information on how to do specific tasks, as noted below. I've included regional information for how-tos that are specific to one country or jurisdiction.

How To Put Together a Bugout Bag -- A "bugout bag" is a kit (or a list of easily-grabbable items) you can have on hand that you can take with you in the event of having to leave your home on extremely short notice in case of an emergency.

How to Get Legal Aid (Canada). Also see Canlaw's guide to Legal Aid Offices in Canada.

How To Find Cheap Legal Services (US-based). Feministe's "Help Us Help Ourselves" guide to finding a lawyer when you don't have a lot of money.

How to Deal With Being Arrested; the ACLU's guide on what to do if you get arrested. (US) Here is a similar how-to for Canada.

How To Make a Refugee Claim in Canada from Settlement.org.

How to Assemble a Document Emergency Kit: Good advice on making sure your critical documents (or at least copies of them with all the information required to obtain replacement copies) survive an emergency.

How To Blog Anonymously And Safely: Tips on preserving your anonymity in the blogosphere.

How to Deal with Identity Theft: Information from the Federal Trade Commission (US).

Privacy Commissioner's site on identity theft and how to deal with it.

Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee page on what to do if your identity is stolen (UK).

How to Pay Your Bills Late and Avoid Disconnection: This guide is primarily aimed at readers in the US, but some of the information applies as well in Canada.

How to Eat Well While Poor guide from Brownfemipower.

3: Other

This section contains miscellaneous useful links.

UK Legal Services Commission, legal aid in the UK.

What Mark Chu-Carroll Said

2008-09-24T20:27:00.002-04:00

Curious about the background I was talking about in my last post. Don't be. Just go read this.

Money quote: "Of course, it gets even stupider."

The Invisible Hand Needs a Medina Mugger's Manicure

2008-09-24T10:55:00.004-04:00

Or, Who Put the Children In Charge, Again?

The conventional wisdom put forth by the instrumentalities and instruments of the current US/UK financial crisis is this, and it's tiring: There is a huge crisis going on, and the middle and lower class taxpayers should be on the hook for cleaning it up -- rather than allowing that responsibility to fall to the perpetrators -- simply because it's important. The market deserves it.¹

Well, you'd have to be historically illiterate, stupid, or a blind ideological glibertarian at this point not to realise that laissez-faire capitalism is a failed ideology. We've been here before. Laissez-faire capitalism is what produced such a terrifying cycle of vast booms and busts between the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression, and a class of gilded plutocrats living on the sweat of a vast mass of slum-dwelling labourers. There was a reason the New Deal included historically-unprecedented levels of regulation (and why the gilded plutocrats fought it so hard, and have been working ever since to undo it); and why the Great Society which followed it (with its historically-unprecedented sky-high tax rates on the wealthy) created a flourishing, strong, stable society, and why eroding those protections and foundations ever since has steadily eaten away at the foundations of a peaceful, orderly civil society -- a good publicly-funded education system, public investment in research and development and infrastructure, and a functioning social safety net. (Canada's amazing entrepreneurial culture at the microbusiness level is ample evidence of the incentive toward business risk-taking that minimising personal risk to the lower and middle classes encourages, likewise the counterexample would be the millions of Americans stuck at jobs they hate for the health insurance.)

The current cohort of gilded plutocrats, plump as gorged mosquitoes on what they've been sucking out of the deregulated US economy for the past several years, are taking this pretty hard. Despite playing for tears in the right-leaning and financial press, as evidenced brilliantly by the excerpt at Hullabaloo about the poor dear who was facing the most difficult crisis of his entire life -- giving up his private jet, they're not doing a very good job at winning sympathy from left-leaning hardasses like me. My heart, which, like the rest of me, has never earned more than thirty grand a year in my entire adult life, bleeds...

...from the pain of having to listen to these entitled shitstains whine about how hard-done-by they are.

And that's why nobody should be asking for a fucking bailout of seven hundred thousand million dollars, for chrissakes.

Call me a Communist if you want (I'm not), but I don't think people really need to own private jets in the first place. Once you've accumulated an obscene enough amount of money that you can afford a private jet (as opposed to the kind of private plane that you're, you know, flying yourself because it's a hobby), you're basically doing nothing but masturbating your greed anyway, and that kind of thing needs to fucking stop. Greed wankers are eating the culture of not just the United States, but the entire world alive in their rapacious quest to own more and more of the world's wealth (and drive people like us to produce more and more wealth so they can harvest it from us).

Some of us aren't exactly too happy about explicitly being the endlessly sacrificing impoverished parent-figures of the ruling class, to the point where the ruling class is saying at an economic level, that a good many of us deserve to be metaphorically or literally taken to the poorhouse so that we can enable them to maintain (most of) their grossly inflated standard of living. I'm a small business owner, for chrissakes, and if I'd been so incompetent as to not only lose my business but also to have destabilised the world's financial markets in losing that business, I think I could pretty much expect to be eating lentils and rice in my one-room dive for the next, oh, several decades, don't you think, and not just snivelling about how poor me, I might have to sell my third vacation home and two of my twelve cars...

Fuck them and their obscene case of the poor-mouth. No seven hundred thousand million dollar quicker-picker-upper. If they want the world's economy -- as opposed to simply themselves -- to maintain financial integrity, they can start by doing what that that AIG CEO did, and refusing their severances. They got the world into this mess, first by agitating for the deregulation that would allow economic jiggery-pokery on a transnational scale, and then by running around like small children on a Halloween candy binge, virtually shrieking "Whee, everything's deregulated, let's just make shit up!"; they can at least help pay for the broken glass and plaster.

Keep in mind, this economic crisis is mostly not about subprime mortgages; the bulk of the bailout would be going to reward fraudsters and people who thought that an unregulated derivative market (which, worldwide may be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars or more) was not only a good idea, but ideologically the right thing to do.

Also, last I'd heard, part of the $700B swindle was going to go to pay $2.5B in bonuses to Lehman Brothers employees. They helped destabilise the world economy and they think they deserve two and a half billion dollars in bonuses?! For fucking what?! (Is anyone else reminded of kids insisting that they do so deserve their allowances despite being holy terrors all week and not doing any of their chores?)

Before Mommy and Daddy Taxpayer shells out dime one (and does anybody seriously believe the $700B would be the end of it?), the holy terrors of Wall Street (and Bay Street, and the Square Mile) can give back their bonuses, their fucking golden parachutes, their years' worth of ill-gotten gains, and maybe even their salaries to not more than twice what their highest-paid non-upper-management workers make. If they did all that, maybe nobody in the middle and lower classes would even be on the hook for a bailout, because they'd no doubt have more than enough cash to go around.

Also maybe if their actions actually had real consequenses, they'd be a damn sight more careful in the future.

I'm personally awfully weary of the attitude that just because something is ostensibly "a crisis," that somehow absolves the people who were instrumental in creating the crisis (or allowing it to happen) from any responsibility to fix it, or from experiencing any the real-world consequenses of their actions. That kind of attitude is disturbingly Christian to me -- cry, "Oh, I'm sorry, I repent!" loudly enough, and someone will either pat you on the head and tell you you're forgiven, so it doesn't matter anymore, or sell you an indulgence. Me, I'm a philosophical Jew when it comes to that sort of thing -- if you fuck it up, you're responsible for it, and you not only had better ask forgiveness to the party or parties you've wronged, but you'd also better get your tuchis in gear and at least attempt to fix it.²

I don't see much of an attempt to fix it forthcoming from the perpetrators, just a plea to Mama or Mammon to make it awwww bettoww...

___________________
¹ I'm with Bernie Sanders here: Any company that is "too big to fail" is perforce too big to exist.

² For those of you who in the upper-class crowd who are actually Jewish, Rosh Hashana is in six days. You've got some heavy-duty atoning and repaying of debts to do before the end of the year; I'd hop to it if I were you.

Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/AFP/Getty Images: A protestor visually heckling US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (left), and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke (right).

Liked Mike Harris? You'll Love a Harper Majority

2008-09-16T23:45:00.004-04:00

Here's what you are voting for, if you mark that ballot for your local CPC candidate:

fewer and less stringent food and water inspections -- Walkerton: The Sequel, coming soon to your town!

the further demotion of women to a "special interest group" (Does The Smirking Corpse not have a mother?)

allowing the continued abrogation of the Treaty of 1814 by the US government without so much of a murmur of protest (Hey, Corpsey, you're all about northern sovereignty; what about southern sovereignty? What about that "longest undefended border" thing? Are we not into doing that anymore? If so, I demand you arm the rest of the border, to keep the Americans out.)

an economic plan guaranteed to cause further rising income inequality

a Prime Minister who promises to "govern as though he has a majority" even if he doesn't (shades of his alter ego Bush in 2004)

cuts to social spending (Look for the part in the Star article where Harper says "...spending ourselves into oblivion either through deficits or through raising one tax or another. It's all the wrong direction." If that isn't neocon code-speak for cutting social programmes, I need to turn in my rhetorician license.)

a continued presence in Afghanistan, where, I should remind you, we are doing "counterinsurgency" (aka "picking sides in a civil war"), not peacekeeping.

a continuation of the Great Canadian Sell-Off (h/t for the title to Sophie Kneisel, Centre Magazine)

further encroachments of "public-private partnership" healthcare (that is, healthcare administered by for-profit entities, driving costs up and service levels down*)

American-style mandatory minimum sentencing that ties the hands of judges and prevents them from exercising discretion in extenuating circumstances

further legislative encroachments along the lines of Bill C-484

further deregulation and the creation of an even larger speculation-driven economy in Canada

pulling Canada out of the Commonwealth Scholarship programme such that foreign students can no longer use the programme to study in Canada

the embrace of wannabe-Republicans like the execrable carpetbagging Dianne Haskett, who disappeared from her riding's area for four years to go work for the Republicans in Washington, DC, only to magically reappear when her former riding was having a by-election, saying she wanted to represent it in Ottawa.

Anybody who still hasn't come to the conclusion that NEOCONSERVATISM IS A FAILED IDEOLOGY FOR GOVERNANCE (although it is great for vacuuming money out of the pockets of the lower 99% and into the pockets of the top 1%) does not deserve to be in office. We suffered through years of neocon misrule here under Mike Harris' government (aka Harper's Brain Trust, or The Stupidest Guys In The Room); failing them upward to the federal level a second time would be a disaster.

______________________
* The most disgusting hospital I was ever in was picking up my broken-backed ex from a PPP hospital in Brampton. The place was filthy, the people working there were surly, and it was so understaffed, he'd been lying on a gurney in the hallway all night. The foyer was lavishly appointed, though...

We're Not Potted Plants

2008-09-04T18:53:00.002-04:00

I'm getting damn sick of this meme that Sarah Palin is some kind of saint for choosing to have a baby with Down Syndrome even though apparently most people choose not to. Some people are even going so far as to label this phenomenon a new form of eugenics, and assuming that it's entirely predicated on how much the prospective parents think the potential baby would be "worth," whatever the hell that means.

Did it ever occur to you folks that maybe, just maybe, prospective parents of disabled children (who will most probably grow up to be disabled adults) look around themselves and see what a horribly ableist society this is, and how hard it is for parents -- even Canadian parents with single-payer healthcare -- especially rural, low-income, minority, or otherwise disadvantaged parents to access the kinds of services and support they need to do the job of raising a disabled child properly?

Shark-Fu's recent post at Shakesville contains a really telling anecdote about her highly autistic brother:

My mother dedicated her life to helping my brother find a way to cope in a world that isn’t tolerant of understanding of difference. I watched as she sank deeply into a depression that, sadly, she has never fully recovered from…all because she couldn’t find that cure or treatment that would fix my brother. ... And I know this one true thing…my brother is now in residential treatment and it takes a rotating staff of eight people to do what my mother did for the first 13 years of my brother’s life.

Not every parent is going to be in that situation. I never needed residential care, and it certainly doesn't take a staff of eight to maintain me (although I'd really like a staff of eight just so that I could get some stuff done for once, but who doesn't?), but. Even with a kid who's about as non-handicapped as it's possible for someone with a disability to be (thanks, doctors!), my mother put in a lot of work of the sort that parents of able-bodied children never have to do. One story that sticks in my mind is her account of when I first got my diagnosis, in the mid-1970s. Apparently a doctor came into the room where she was waiting, made some kind of pronouncement in medical jargon which Mom didn't understand at all, and then turned and went to walk out. Mom, showing the first traces of the deep steel spine she's had to grow (largely because of me!), grabbed the doctor by the collar and demanded that he sit down and talk to her in plain English until she understood what was going on. (Go Mom!)

I'd also like to, if I may, drive a 1979 Impala over the idea that handicapped people are special and better and maybe even morally superior because we exist to teach able-bodied people about tolerance and suffering and patience and keeping a good demeanour under adverse circumstances. How self-centred can able-bodied people be?! We're not angels or saints (and neither are our parents, goodness knows); we're human beings.

Although I know I'm irrevocably putting myself in the "One of Those Ones" category by saying this, because I'm angry about it, disabled people are not about you. We don't exist for your edification. We don't exist to give you moral lessons. We don't exist to make you feel morally superior, either, so knock it the fuck off right now. Please stop appropriating our bodies for your misguided cultural narrative already. (We're also not potted plants, and if you want to be involved with disabled people, children in particular, strictly because you feel an urge to fix something, please, for the love of squid, take up gardening. Or go volunteer for Habitat For Humanity or something.)

While I am firmly behind the idea that the disabled experience is a valid, and above all, human experience like any other, I'm getting the distinct impression from some people that they see it as a more valuable human experience than some. What is with that? It is not all sunshine and roses out here, folks. As you can see from some of the links here, it's often more like thunderstorms and thorns.

That said, I'll also add that I'm firmly in favour of anyone making the reproductive choices they feel are best for them and their families, including having abortions for any reasons.

You may have doubts about your ability to properly raise a child with a disability. Okay, that's honest. Good for you. It's a lot of work and shouldn't be taken lightly.

As I've pointed out, even the best possible life for a visibly disabled person may not be the life you envisioned for your kid once they've grown up (and kudos to parents who think that far ahead!).

That's fine with me. Every child a wanted child, even the disabled ones. Also, speaking purely from my point of view, I don't want anyone to carry a pregnancy to term when they don't want to for the same reasons you don't want me doing your accounting -- I'd suck at it and hate every minute of it.

Not being an adherent to cultural Calvinism, I'm not into the idea that the conservation of misery is a good thing.

Conflict of Interests

2008-09-04T04:14:00.003-04:00

I'm very interested in the Small Space Living idea. I do think there's something to be said for a design aesthetic that can produce livable spaces that don't contribute to urban sprawl, for instance, or a workspace that can be more worn than used, if you get my drift.

However, I find I really can't endorse a lot of small-space projects for one simple fact: Almost none of them are accessible, let alone handicap-friendly.

Yes, if you want to reduce the amount of square footage a structure's footprint uses, up is a great direction in which to build. But even I, who am pretty able-bodied by the standards of non-able-bodied people, am really really not enthused about the prospect of having to climb a ladder to go to bed at night, because the designer of my tiny space has thoughtfully created a "sleeping loft." Assuming that the entire bedroom space is supposed to be in such a loft, I can't even fathom trying to, oh, say, haul a laundry bag up there. (Has any loft-happy designer ever thought to include a dumbwaiter?) Let alone trying to get up and down between bed and bathroom when I'm sick, for instance.

Also, I don't think I've ever seen a tiny space that's wheelchair-accessible, let alone crutches-friendly, owing to narrowness. I realise that smallness is a goal here, but my counterargument is, I guess, that there are lots of things about the small-space living design aesthetic and movement that could be used to enhance handicap-friendliness and wheelchair accessibility in spaces (such as making sure everything was within easy reach, providing easier-to-manipulate and well-designed furniture and fixtures, making housework easier for disabled people, and maximising space and design and function considerations to provide useful, safe, and accessible spaces for handicapped people).

I mean, really, can you imagine how well the small-space living movement's same care and attention to detail and willingness to privilege function over tradition would work for desgning handicap-friendly bathrooms?

My suggestions for creating better small spaces for disabled people would be:

Pay attention to the different ergonomic needs of people with disabilities. Things like grab rails, bath seats, level access, wider doorways and hallways, placement of fixtures and outlets, heights of countertops and shelves become really important.

Think outside the "up." An able-bodied person might be just fine using a library ladder or a ladder to a sleeping loft or using a stepladder to access a high shelf. A walking disabled person, maybe not, and for a wheelchair user, it's impossible.

Use different dimensions. Change your perspective to include different approaches for different levels of mobility. For example, instead of designing in a tall, steep staircase, try to find a way to design in a short, wide staircase. Instead of designing a tall counter with drawers underneath, try designing a counter with nesting pull-out countertop-type tables (for use by seated or wheelchair-using cooks), as shown here.

Get friendly with the floor. Use the spaces along the baseboards, rather than around the crown mouldings.

Sacrifice. Yeah, an accessible building isn't going to be as perfectly small as something designed to be used by able-bodied people. For one thing, you're probably going to have to trade off height for width. But on the other hand, that sacrifice will probably pay off, especially when the current crop of temporarily able-bodied tiny space fans start getting older.

A Small Accessible Spaces Linkography

Cool House Plans with handicap-friendly house plans.
The Accessible Kitchen: A site with design information for creating barrier-free kitchens.

Accessible Housing By Design (scroll down to "Accessible Housing") -- From the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, this section covers home automation, lifts and residential elevators, kitchens, bathrooms, appliances, residential hoists and ceiling lifts, and ramps. (This is a really excellent set of guidelines, with pictures and diagrams.)
HowTo Library -- Accessibility from Bob Vila.

Good Gravy, Geeshie Wiley

2008-07-28T22:36:00.003-04:00

I guess it credits an artist when you only record half a dozen songs in your life and seventy years later you're still gaining new fans.
-- Danny McCoy, Ari Eisinger’s Acoustic Blues Message Board, on Geeshie Wiley

I hate to post so soon after my last post (what's it been, two hours or so?) but I absolutely must. I move to the background to no one, absolutely no one, in my admiration for the legendary lost early-1930s acoustic-blues cypher Geeshie Wiley, and I just discovered that now, four of her songs are available on YouTube. That's an astonishing 2/3 of her entire recorded catalogue.

She has a reputation for having been a superb guitarist, but jesus could she sing. Check it out.

Skinny Legs Blues
Last Kind Words
Pick Poor Robin Clean
Eagles on a Half

I still have not heard "Motherless Child Blues" or "Over To My House," which makes me sad. (If I have a feminist musical icon, it's Geeshie Wiley, who beat Robert Johnson at his own game, and did it in six sides.)

You can download the first three tracks off the pages linked here, which I would strongly NO KIDDING GO DO IT NOW encourage you to do.

The Fathers of Atoms

2008-07-28T20:10:00.002-04:00

In his essay Starship Stormtroopers (available here), Michael Moorcock deftly points out the essential tension between mythic-narrative depictions of the American mental landscape: "To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit." The counterpoint to that, of course, is that the true rugged individualist, as depicted in forms ranging from the media action-hero (Jack Bauer, say), or in extreme form, as one of Ayn Rand's cardboard protagonist, is that the rugged individualist must always be prepared to act, to enforce compliance with Truth, Justice, the American Way, and whichever kind, paternal authority is the exemplar this time.

Against this mythic-narrative backdrop a century and more old, the American political landscape has seen the rise and domination (for the last 30 years or so) of political actors (some of them really are actors) who not only believe the myth, but have taken it upon themselves to enact it in whichever ways they can. The political landscape also contains a cadre of distant authorities, urging these John-Wayne-in-their-own-minds to do something:

"We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." (Phil Gramm)

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (Ann Coulter)

Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. (Rush Limbaugh)

We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee. (Ann Coulter)

A great deal of good could be done by arresting Bill Keller having him lined up against the wall and shot. (Melanie Morgan)

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building. (Ann Coulter)

Sometimes, people who have been listening too hard to people attempting to push the bounds of acceptable discourse to include violence and death threats do in fact act on it. Apparently, in the story of Jim David Adkisson, we're seeing it again. Adkisson had written a four-page "manifesto" detailing how much he hated liberals (among others), was an avowed neo-Confederate, and an all-round ~~charming example of humanity~~ bigot.

I can't help but think these things are of a piece, that the mythic reality written about and enacted so dramatically by another right-wing icon, John Birch, informs these people's unconscious idea that they are the instrumentality of the paternal authority, the hero out to save the day by enforcing the correct social order as they perceive it, the Rugged Individualist writ real.

Frank Fencepost Meets the Hell's Angels

2008-07-20T18:56:00.002-04:00

Some of you may know of W.P. Kinsella's Fencepost Chronicles, a series of charming, comedic stories that take place on the Indian reserve in Hobbema, Alberta.

Meet the real Hobbema:

Police first noted the Hobbema gang problem in 2001. Today, 13 street gangs, including Indian Posse, Redd Alert and Alberta Warriors, deal drugs and wage turf wars. Most observers, including Hobbema's RCMP officers, largely blame the prison system for seeding the reserve's gang troubles. ... Drive by shootings quickly became a nightly threat to Hobbema's 12,000 residents. In 2001, RCMP officers arrested 3,500 people, a thousand more than last year. Hobbema has Canada's highest ratio of gang members per 1,000 residents: 18.75 compared to Toronto's 1.15, says Toronto-based gang expert, Michael Chettleburgh.

If Kinsella were writing these stories now (as far as I know, he no longer writes, having sustained cognitive damage from a car accident in 1997), they'd no doubt look much different.

Reuters Lies About Biofuels This Time

2008-07-04T20:07:00.004-04:00

...with help from World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who contradicts himself quite neatly in his own quoted statement here.

According to Zoellick, corn-based ethanol (not "biofuels") is a significant contributor to rising world food prices.

Reuters makes a particularly egregious mistake here in the seventh paragraph of their story

Recently, [Zoellick] wrote in the Financial Times that the use of corn for ethanol by the United States had consumed more than 75 percent of global corn production over the past three years, and called on the United States and Europe to ease subsidies and tariffs on biofuels derived from corn and oilseeds.

"The use of corn for ethanol has consumed more than 75 percent of the increase in global corn production over the past three years," he wrote.

Let's break that down a little, shall we? On the one hand, we have Reuters saying that corn ethanol is using up seventy-five percent of the total world corn crop, which is garbage by any estimation, and then Zoellick himself saying that corn production has increased some unspecified (in the Reuters article) amount in the last three years, of which increase, 75% has been diverted to corn ethanol. That means real corn production is still up 25% in three years even discounting corn production for corn ethanol.

Here's Zoellick's contradiction: I am frankly not seeing how you get from "real worldwide corn production is up by one quarter" to "corn ethanol is a significant contributor to the world food shortage." Particularly when you consider all the other factors I've mentioned before.

Update: Commenter Ficus corrects my math, in that real corn production is not up by one quarter; one quarter of the total increase is going to food and other non-ethanol uses. We do not, as far as I know, have any statistics in the recent Reuters article to quantify the amount of the increase. I thought something looked hinky there, but due to my dyscalculia, there are some days when I can practically crunch standard deviations in my head, and some days when I can't count to five using my fingers. Guess which happened to me the day I wrote this post? Nevertheless, I still think the point stands: I don't see how you get from "real corn production is up a significant amount" to "corn ethanol is a significant contributor to the world food shortage," especially given the other factors in play. My calculation error also doesn't invalidate the rank dishonesty I've exposed here, as I think ought to go without saying...

It's also extremely mendacious to refer to "biofuels" when you mean "corn ethanol." I'm getting tired of pointing this out, but apparently I need to keep doing it, since otherwise the propaganda machine gets to make its barbaric yawp unopposed (even by lowly umpteenth-tier bloggers like Your Humble Narrator).

Corn ethanol is not equal to "biofuels." Corn ethanol represents one type of biofuel, and only one type. Please stop referring to corn ethanol as "biofuels" as though the terms are synonymous. They are not. Doing so is unethical, flat-out dishonest, and bad journalism to boot.

It's all about the framing, folks. Pay attention, and don't believe the hype.

Postscript: My better half, the brilliant Tomble of Neologue, also points out the red herring in the first paragraph, in his typically pungent British way: "Corn has fuck-all to do with oilseed fuels as far as I can see, apart from the fact they're both used in some biofuels."

_____________________

Author's Note: I had some things to say about Henry Morgenthaler's being awarded the Order of Canada, but I'm kind of all out for now. I swear, this blog won't be all biofuels all the time in the future, though...

Addendum

2008-07-03T21:50:00.002-04:00

While I don't absolutely agree with everything Rustin says here, the take-home message is worth listening to: There is no energy shortage, dammit! and Don't believe the hype.

The Propaganda Hits Just Keep Coming

2008-06-29T21:26:00.003-04:00

(Author's note: For more information about this, see this entry.)

They're at it again, folks, this time in the person of David Olive, writing in the Toronto Star.

The article has a particularly damning quote from Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestle, saying that "Biofuels are economical nonsense, ecologically useless and ethically indefensible." Brabeck-Lemathe is certainly extreme in his right-wing views, espousing the common corporatist notion that water should not be a human right, for example. (If it is classed under trade agreements as a "human need," instead of a "human right," it can be bought and sold for profit regardless of local demand. Coming from the chairman of Nestle, there's no conflict of interest there, nope nope.) Interestingly, Brabeck-Lemathe also sits on the European Round Table of Industrialists, along with representatives from companies like MOL Hungarian Oil and Gas Company, Volvo, Volkswagen, the General Motors subsidiary Renault, tire manufacturer Pirelli, and oil companies Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

In the article, we also get some statistics (unsourced) about the amount of corn being diverted to corn-based ethanol: "America's vastly expanded network of ethanol plants now consumes between one-quarter and 30 per cent of U.S. corn production, up from 10 per cent in 2002." While 25-30% sounds like an awful lot, that represents only a 20-25% increase in six years.

There also seems to be this unstated assumption that because an increasing percentage of American corn crops are being diverted to biofuels, this is somehow causing the entire rest of the world to go hungry. Again, there is no mention of the Ug99 grain rust, increasing problems with insect pests in Asia and the Middle East, and drought in Africa, and climate-change induced drought (in Africa) and flooding (in the United States). Note to Americans: You are not the centre of the universe, let alone the world, and most areas manage to feed themselves relatively well without your help.

Besides that, the piece is entirely devoted to conflating biofuels with corn ethanol. As I've mentioned before, their entire strawman argument seems to be "Corn ethanol sucks. All biofuels are corn ethanol. Therefore all biofuels suck."

Let's look at that for a moment. Well, yes, I agree that corn ethanol sucks. (At this point, after years of malfeasance by the Bush Administration, and knowing how oil-connected they are, I'd be instinctively skeptical of any biofuel proposals they backed, because they'd pretty much have to be a Potemkin tactic to discredit everything else.)

You'll get absolutely no argument from me about how badly corn ethanol sucks. In fact, if I were going to write a How Not To... article on biofuels, I'd talk about making it from high-maintenance monoculture crops that require lots of energy investment, chemicals, fertiliser, and special machinery; that take up land that could be used productively for other purposes, and divert resources into a biofuels boondoggle. In other words, I'd be writing about why you shouldn't make biofuels out of corn.

The article never mentions that there are lots of other sources of biofuels, such as:

switchgrass (see here for information on using switchgrass for space and home heating applications as well)
corn husks
corn and maize stalks
hemp
sawdust
human or animal waste (as biogas), and of course the vaunted
used vegetable fat from commercial deep-fat fryers.

While we're on the subject, do you remember when anyone who was anyone who was talking about biofuels was talking about running their car off of throwaway McDonald's grease? "It'll make car exhaust smell like french fries!", everyone said. Funny how now that the disinformation has pupated and emerged from its scrofulous corporate chrysalis as the death's head moth it is, everyone's sort of forgotten about running your car out of the contents of Mickey D's dumpsters... I guess it's more fun to believe the Dirty Fuckin' Hippies of the world are causing your bread prices to triple.

Also, scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have genetically engineered a microbe that excretes sugars and cellulosic ethanol for biofuels.

There are also ways of making biofuels from a bunch of really weird stuff like old credit card statements and pizza boxes. (Now, if I could make biofuels out of bills, I'd be all set.)

In other words, this whole essay has been a very, very long-winded way of saying that the article is a total smear job from headline to dingbat. Apparently the corporate shills have got their marching orders, and that's to prevent us from even exploring any alternatives to oil until it's vastly too late. By that point, one suspects, the oil companies and their executives will have either discovered that money's irrelevant if the earth has turned into Venus 2.0, or else, more probably, they'll have their companies all lined up with all the technology in place to arm-twist us into using whatever they deem necessary at whatever price they dictate. That would make the modern robber barons pretty happy. The rest of us, not so much.

I Take Back Everything I Ever Said About Antonia Zerbisias

2008-06-14T00:37:00.003-04:00

(At least until the next time.)

Go read. She's on fire today. A sample:

Can somebody please explain why so many well-intentioned people want to stick their noses between women's legs?

Whether we're talking those who would limit women's access to contraception or abortion, or those who believe that chastity is a "gift'' one gives to one's keeper – i.e. husband – or even those hordes of French feminists now protesting the legal annulment of a marriage because the bride lied about being a virgin, the medieval obsession with our vaginas continues unabated.

Myself, I'd claim that the obsession goes back much further than the Middle Ages, and at least, and calling it "medieval" is kind of a slur on the actual Middle Ages. After all, as evidenced by the scene in Gawain and the Green Knight, somebody had it figured out that women were, you know, people...

Plan B Available OTC in All of Canada

2008-05-16T22:58:00.002-04:00

According to the Toronto Star, "behind the counter" restrictions on the sale of Plan B, the "morning-after pill" are ending in all of Canada, meaning that the pill will be on general sale in pharmacies along with other over-the-counter medications.

I suppose the major difficulty now will be making sure that pharmacies stock it, although this does seem like good news to me.

I Can, In Fact, Has Cheezburger

2008-05-04T00:17:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine recently turned me on to the existence of Sheese, a 100% dairy-free soy cheese substitute. It's pareve and vegan and comes in a variety of flavours and textures. Most other soy cheeses contain casein, which is a milk protein, which means they're not Interrobang-safe. In my quest to bring you the best obscure information on subjects that interest me (and may interest you too), I'm turning you on to it too. Enjoy.

Note for those of you who aren't vegan, which includes me (I'm the opposite of an ovo-lacto vegetarian; I eat meat but not eggs or milk products), the Bute Island site contains a lot of vegan-perspective marketing copy. If you're more of the opinion that PETA should stand for People Eating Tasty Animals, check the product page and the recipes, and leave the rest alone. :)

Tax Day, or Dismantling Right-Wing Frames, One Person At a Time

2008-04-29T20:04:00.003-04:00

I paid the government the $3200 or so I owed it today, with a whole day or so to spare. I had a rather interesting conversation with the clerk at the bank, who said something about my not wanting to pay "the government," and I said, "Eh, it's not so bad. I like the stuff I get for paying taxes. I've probably used that much in doctor's appointments last year alone. So fair's fair." He got this wonderful "I didn't think of that before" sort of look on his face, said, "Yeah, that's fair," and handed me my slip back.

____________
Side Note: Hello friends here to read the "How to Argue..." series. My spoons took a wrong toin at Albuquoique and there's just no way I'm going to be able to write anything else today. Fear not, I shall return with more argument analysis anon. In the meantime, go read Streetcars -- a simple thought experiment."

Shout-Out

2008-04-26T14:28:00.002-04:00

My friend Rustin has (finally!) started a blog of his own. It's called From Streetcars to Spaceships. A few choice samples:

A Smoking Gun In The Hands of the Transit Monopolists:
I found a stack of old newspapers at an estate sale last weekend. One from right about the end of World War II caught my eye. I think that what I found is pretty damn important since it documents a transit monopoly that isn't in the much-discussed Snell Report. ... I'm hoping that by posting this sort of thing I can shed a bit more light on what really created our current appalling situation. (This relates directly to my Streetcar Series, linked in the sidebar, for what it's worth.)

I walk. That shouldn't be a problem.
Move transit stops closer to destinations. As with cabs, most pedestrians also use buses and having the bus or the MAX stop allllll the way at the far edge of a mall or, say, the Portland Expo Center just adds one more impediment to leaving the car at home. Why should access for transit only be put out past the furthest possible space beyond the worst possible parking spots?

Jet packs -- some history to think about
Allegedly one day during the Nixon administration a couple of folks from the White House just showed up at the project and said, "as of now you're all reassigned. Your work is all classified; you're now funded. ... Welcome to the cruise missile program." And so the jetpack project morphed into cruise missile engine work and the original project got uncreated.

He's also been a mad posting maniac lately, so watch for lots of activity there (unlike the kind of output you get out of Your Humble But Poky Narrator).

How To Argue Like a Right-Winger, Part 2

2008-04-21T18:54:00.002-04:00

Author's Note: This is the second part of a multi-part series. Part 1 appears here.

In the first part of this series, I looked at six common tactics used in fallacious arguments, primarily drawn from right-wing sources. (For what it's worth, various factions on the less reality-based segments of the political left tend to use these too, but they're neither germane to the target audience for this series, nor a particular problem at the moment.)

For those of you playing along at home, there may very well wind up being enough of these to fill a Bingo card. If anyone with better graphics skills than I would do one, I'd appreciate a link!

The Windows Fallacy, or Keyword Triggering.

What is it? This is one of the key cognitive and argumentative strategies employed by hard-core right-wingers. I've taken the name of the phenomenon from something that the Microsoft Windows operating system used to do (it may very well still, but I've beaten XP into submission years ago, and have no plans to downgrade to Vista), where you would perform an action, and Windows would interpret it differently to how you had meant it, in effect saying, "You just tried to do X! You must mean 'Do Y!' instead!" (Picture Clippy the Psychopathic Paperclip speaking that line, and you'll have it perfectly.) Likewise, this phenomenon refers to the unusual tendency for right-wingers to think they know what you're talking about based on hearing (and only hearing) keywords and not parsing what you're actually saying. From there, they feel perfectly free to assume they know what you're talking about, and generally feel free to dismiss, discard, and refuse to respond to the rest of your argument. In essence, you could say this behaviour is a synthesis between the Strawman (the caricature has primacy over your actual speech acts), Conflation (two things confused), a lack of understanding of figurative speech, and overall intellectual laziness. It also ties in nicely with denialism, which seems to have a lot in common with radical right-wingery.

For example, my friend Rustin just had a conversation regarding sewer storm peak with an apparently very right-wing member of the Portland, OR city government. He was trying to pitch a solution he'd come up with to help ease water overflow problems by slowing off-roof outflow, essentially by attaching a gizmo to a downspout that would function not unlike a large plastic bottle with small holes punched in the bottom. Try as he might, he couldn't get the guy to understand what he was talking about. "Think about it like a rainbarrel with holes in the bottom," Rustin said. "That won't work," answered the municipal mook, "Rainbarrels only solve the problem for the first surge of the first storm of the season," and shut his ears off again. Apparently there were several iterations of this, with Rustin trying ever more exotic ways of framing the concept, and the RW shooting down what he was thinking he was hearing every time.

Where Do People Use It? This one is nearly universal. You'll see this in discussions about public policy, politics, evolution, and just about everywhere else.

What Does It Do? It allows the RW to maintain his or her protective bubble of stereotypes, preconceptions, prejudice, and ideology, because nothing you're saying will actually penetrate. Because the preconceptions and ideology are so ingrained, it also reinforces political divides where people might be able to find common ground.

How to Combat It. Point out that the RW is using the tactic. Ask the RW to define the terms they think they're hearing. Define your terms. Try to reframe the issue in completely unfamiliar and unexpected ways so that the RW in question doesn't have any easy cubbyholes to stick your arguments based on their existing set of keywords. This is probably not easy, and may not even be possible, however.

Argument By Assertion

What is it? This name refers to RW's tendency to argue by asserting that certain things are true or valid without actually having to provide any evidence that they actually are. A clever RW debater will actually say something like, "I hope you'll grant me the point that..." or "Of course, we can all agree that..." (Don't do it! Never let them get away with this! Give your opponent the first premise, and you've just lost the argument.) Another tactic a clever RW debater will use in conjunction with this one is to assert (or assume) that it's up to the other side to prove them wrong. Bzzzt! Sorry, no. Claims require evidence, and the person making the claim is obligated to provide the evidence for that claim.

Where Do People Use It? Everywhere.

What Does It Do? Ideally for the RW, it either gives them a leg up on the whole argument by granting them the first premise, or else it diverts and derails the discussion into having the helpful liberals do the RW's homework for them, which they will then ignore or use to nitpick (see "Changing the Subject" from Part 1).

How to Combat It. There are several things you can do to combat this one, including the old high school debate-team tactic of repeating "State your sources" over and over. Try to get the RW to pony up their sources. Point out to other readers that they won't if they don't. If they do, point out any biases or known deficiencies in the source. Secondly, don't fall for either of the two traps outlined in the first section here. Don't give the RW the first premise. (I'd recommend not giving them the time of day, but I'm not one of these "nice liberals.") Don't do the RW's homework for them, and don't let the claim that they have to be "proven wrong" stand unchallenged, either.

False Comparison

What is it? This is a comparison supposedly made for statistical or analogical purposes (but note that right-wingers are really notoriously bad at analogy; they tend to be disturbingly literal-minded for people who have seriously broken user-to-world interfaces) that for some reason or other simply does not work. Examples include the scarily innumerate "Iraq is less dangerous than Washington, DC" canard, and, as I mentioned earlier, the "male circumcision is exactly like female genital mutilation!" problem that occurs every single time a feminist blog attempts to discuss FGM.

Where Do People Use It? Generally this one gets used anywhere the RW wants to either exaggerate or deprecate a particular point (as in the examples above, one of each). By making a false comparison, they're drawing an equivalence between the two things that doesn't belong.

Aside: Formally, in metaphorics, we'd call a false comparison a "mismatch between the source and target domains," meaning that the trait selected for the comparison doesn't actually have what we'd call "congruence" (similarity) between the thing we're comparing and the thing to which we're comparing it. You can see how this works in the examples above. For more information, you can get a small taste in section II:1 of this paper, or you can go look up George Lakoff's original work on metaphorics and conceptual metaphor theory.

What Does It Do? As I stated above, this one either heightens or lowers the importance of a point unduly. It's used to minimise important issues and make mountains out of molehill issues. (No word on the whereabouts of the mountain's Mohammed, however.) It also can act as fodder for a derail, as various people will be tempted to leap in and correct the false comparison, bad statistics, or other falsehoods.

How to Combat It. Correct the falsehoods if necessary, then return to topic. Point out that the exaggerated or minimised topic is as (un)important as it actually is.

Argument from Tone Problem or the Plea for Civility

What is it? Pretty much everyone in the liberal blogosphere is familiar with this one. Some RW will enter an argument spewing the same damn tired stupid canards that have already been debunked seven hundred thousand times as though they're new, exciting, and original. (I was saying about a lack of imagination? Guys -- you need a better farm system, because your fresh talent is looking like it turned into sludge in the icebox a couple years ago.) Various commenters will leap on them, perhaps intemperately, and the RW will immediately put on a big show about being offended by the very nasty words s/he hoped to provoke in the first place. You also see this a lot in right-left blog wars, where the right side of the blogosphere basically writes off the entire left side on the grounds that we DFHs fucking swear too fucking much. You also saw a variant of this when faux-moderate right-wing blogger Ann Althouse tore into feminist blogger Jessica Valenti for daring to wear her breasts while in the same room as Bill Clinton. How incivil!

This one is a key component of the phenomenon known as concern trolling.

Where Do People Use It? This one comes out pretty much anywhere tempers get hot and someone uses invective. Which, in liberal circles where we tend to both not be so uptight about looking proper in public and the power of malediction in general, this one gets used a lot.

What Does It Do? It's a distraction, a way of changing the subject, a way of derailing, and a "make the bastard deny it" tactic.

How to Combat It. Ignore it if possible. Point out to the other commenters that the RW is attempting to change the subject by using this tactic. Stay on topic.

This essay is getting very long, so I'm going to wrap it up here, but I will apparently be writing another part, since there's still so much more to cover. Stay tuned...

Propaganda Alert: Biofuels and Food Shortages

2008-04-20T19:47:00.002-04:00

I notice that every article is blaming rising food prices worldwide on rising production of biofuels based on corn and wheat. Interestingly, I can't actually find any statistics on how much diversion of the total staple crop the rise in biofuels production supposedly accounts for. The closest I can come is this blurb from this article, which seems speculative at best: "Most look at a scenario in the year 2015 where the American farmer will produce 15 billion bushels of corn, said Renewable Fuels Association spokesperson Matt Hartwig. If the ethanol industry can produce three gallons of ethanol per bushel, that will mean using about one third of that crop to make 15 billion gallons of ethanol as mandated by the Renewable Fuel Standard in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA)."

Also, not one of the myriad articles, blog comments, and suchlike I've seen mentioning biofuels as one of the causes of the problem (if not the primary cause, which I find extremely hard to believe) mentions the Ug99 wheat blight, a new, emerging strain of wheat rust to which every major wheat strain in commercial production is vulnerable, and which has been devastating wheat crops in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The most populous regions in the world are losing most of their wheat crop to Ug99 (the "breadbasket" area of Africa has been especially hard-hit), and demand is spilling over -- people have to eat, whether they're eating wheat, corn, rice, or other staples. Given that, I'm calling bullshit on the biofuels scare tactics.

That absolutely reeks of propaganda, for three reasons. First of all, it's easy to enforce the petroleum status quo if you can say to people, "Oh, the hippies with their biodiesel are the reason you're now paying two and a half bucks for bread, and why half of the world is starving." Secondly, since corn ethanol in particular is being heavily subsidised by the US government, you can pretty much tell that EISA is a straight-up Bush Administration gift-with-a-bow-on-top to Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, and other big agribusiness players. Thirdly, it's easy to discredit biofuels if you make them synonymous in most people's minds with inefficient, wasteful, high-maintenance products like corn ethanol -- in many people's minds, reinforcing ideas like that leaves no conceptual space for other alternatives. So if corn ethanol = biofuels, and corn ethanol sucks, then biofuels suck, right? After all, it wouldn't do for the energy plutocrats in the Bush Administration to have people know that the most efficient way of doing biofuels is using no-till, low-maintenance, fast-growing crops like switchgrass... (Good thing the Manitoba government is a bit smarter and less evil than the Bushies.)

What an impressive hat trick.

h/t Bark Bark Woof Woof for the idea.

At Least If I Put My Foot In Your Ass, the Heel Won't Split Your Cute Little Skirt

2008-04-17T23:37:00.002-04:00

Dear Claire Coleman,

People like you make it harder for people like me to be people like me. You see, there's no way I could be "on trend" when the trend is five, six, seven-inch stilletto heels. I can't walk in heels. I mean, can't. (This is one of the downsides of having cerebral palsy; look it up.)

On top of that, people like you being so enthusiastic to embrace sartorial trends that sacrifice functionality for some warped bizarre version of "looks" (have you ever really sat down to think about why, for women, "vulnerable" is synonymous with "sexy" in many people's minds?) raises the bar for the rest of us, increasing the cultural demands on all of us to perform more and more extreme iterations of conventional femininity.

While I actually am a man-hating, hairy-legged radical feminist, I'm not telling you to give up your fashion-forward ways, or even throw your conspicuous-consumption limo shoes in the wheelie-bin (although I might strongly urge you to do so for reasons having more to do with your health than anything else). But for the love of all that's non-patriarchal, think a little bit. You don't have to be a stereotype, even if you do write for the Mail. Embrace your inner Birkenstock-wearing flannel-shirted lesbian, and let it go a little bit. Shoes are not power, contrary to what you might believe. (Then again, what do I know? I'm probably taller than you are when you're in heels and I'm in flats.)

Earning your own money, having your own place, being able to kick the asshole to the curb when you need to -- that's power, and it's an awful lot easier to accomplish in sensible shoes than when you feel like you're trying to "climb Everest on stilts."

Just a thought.

Love,

Interrobang

I Win the Internets

2008-04-12T00:54:00.002-04:00

This blog is currently the only hit for "scrofulous bastard." Congratulations, Stephen F. Harper, you scrofulous bastard you, for giving me a fleeting moment as someone's Googlewhack.

Resentment

2008-04-04T12:20:00.002-04:00

Author's Note: A much shorter version of this essay appeared in comments at Orcinus.

Normally, I agree completely with David Neiwert, who is wise and intelligent and one hell of a writer. His commenters, on the other hand, often get up my nose, sometimes in surprisingly amusing ways. However, today he wrote something I just can't let rest. He said, "Indeed, it is not just hard, it's practically impossible for a white person to understand the resentment that young African Americans feel after a lifetime of having doors slammed in their faces and being treated as second-class citizens."

I don't know that it's "practically impossible." I'm white, and it happens to me every day. Let me tell you about it.

Try being a white person with a visible disability for a while. If you don't notice someone visibly recoiling at your dysfunctional carcass, you'll notice the questions. (I seem to get "How did you hurt your leg?" and "Are you blind in that eye?" most often; it's not unlike how pregnant women find their bodies are suddenly public property. If I were going to be really full of hubris about it, I'd imagine it's similar to the questions people of colour get about their hair, getting sunburns, and that sort of thing.)

That's assuming of course people don't just skip straight to talking to you like you're five years old even long after you've been buying alcohol regularly without getting carded.

Hell, even the landscape discriminates against you -- how many restaurants/public facilities have you been in lately where the bathrooms are in the basement, and/or where the front doors aren't level-access? (Aren't "grandfathered" building code exemptions great?) Try waiting hours for a paratransit bus booked days in advance, only to have it not show up, which makes people think you're unreliable and irresponsible for not making your appointments.

Try hearing statistics like that anti-disabled hate crimes are rising.

Or that where you live, almost one in three disabled people who want to work and are capable are unemployed anyway (compared with an overall rate of six in a hundred). If you actually do manage to find and keep a job, try looking at the dismal state of your finances and then hearing that other, able-bodied people with your level of skill and education are making tens of thousands of dollars a year more than you, and have been for their entire careers. Think about what that means for your retirement, which, for health reasons, will probably come earlier than most people's. (Not being American, I don't even have to worry about being trapped in a crappy job I hate because I desperately need the health insurance -- just being trapped in a crappy job I hate because if I quit I can't be sure I'll get another one before I go broke and wind up "at no fixed address." Again.)

Try hearing things like that the actual medical name of your condition is considered a rather severe pejorative. Try hearing that it's considered to be the worst thing you can call someone. I don't live in the country where it is, but the fact that there is a country where that word is considered to be the worst possible insult should give you some pause.

(I am a spastic, and can people please not use the term as an insult anymore? "Spastic" is the actual medical terminology. It means "muscular rigidity." Have a nice rigidly muscular day.)

Try hearing, "When I first met you, I thought that thing with your eye was really creepy/freaky/weird"...

...from your boyfriend of two years. And your best friend. And various other friends and acquaintances who all sound suitably shame-faced about it, but still.

Bonus points: Watch how it freaks certain people out that you even have a boyfriend, because, ew, disabled people want to have sex?! The upside to the residual cultural freakiness about gimp sexuality is that at least if you're female, the normal rigid looks-based patriarchal gender enforcement doesn't apply to you quite as much. On the other hand, since you're obviously not a sex object, you're going to be trained from the age of awareness to be helpful and obsequious to anyone and everyone, that is, trained as a service object.*

Then try having the humbling realisation that compared to what you would have gone through if you'd been born thirty, fifty, a hundred years earlier, you've got it good. I mean, systemic, looks-based prejudice beats being dead, caged in a crate, locked in an attic, or institutionalised just on general principles.

Then, if and when you admit how angry you are about how bad things still are, people say "I think you're overreacting," "You're reading too much into it," "If you were nicer to people, they'd be nicer to you," "Why are you so bitter?" "There's nothing you can do about it."

While you're watching how few depictions of people like you there are in the media, and how most of them are either tragic characters or victims of violence, watch people blame you for prejudice-related problems. Watch it happen over and over again. Watch them tell you: If you can't get a job, you must be doing something wrong. If you can't catch a break, you just can't get out of your own way.

Count the number of times someone tells you that "you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself." Count the number of times someone tells you that you'd do better if only you would stop feeling sorry for yourself. Count the number of times the same people confuse (conflate) being angry with "feeling sorry for yourself." Count the number of times you suspect they're doing it on purpose because it makes them feel better.

Count the number of times you manage to say something polite back. Count the number of times you don't call someone out on being rude.

Count the number of times you feel ashamed of yourself for wanting to punch that person in the face.

On the other hand, watch able-bodied people insinuate and argue behind your back that you're getting something you don't deserve if you happen to be a beneficiary of government largesse/an assistance programme/affirmative action.

So yeah, I think at least some white people can kind of get an inkling of why black people are pissed off due to the white overclass treating them like shit.

I can only imagine what handicapped people of colour go through...

(Keep in mind, I have had every conceivable advantage of skin colour and inherited class privilege**, this stuff still happens to even me.)

________________
* I can't count the number of times my own mother called me "inconsiderate," and I don't actually think I was really any more "inconsiderate" than any other white suburban kid, especially since the offenses for which I was being called out for were things like grabbing a drink from the fridge without first asking if everyone else wanted one too (and then serving everyone who did before myself, of course).

** Despite having wealthy parents and an excellent education, I'm downwardly mobile; my parents were the first generation in their families to leave the working class, and, despite being a "professional" in that I sit at a desk all day and am not doing manual labour, I'm not in a managerial or supervisory job at all (which makes me "working class" by some definitions). I make less money (in inflation-adjusted dollars) now as a mid-career professional than my mother did in her first job...in 1965. Fuck your "screen inches index," this is reality.

I Didn't Like You Much Before; I Like You Even Less Now

2008-04-03T20:53:00.002-04:00

So...

If I were a politician and a tape came out where I said, ""The A's are guys like me, the B's are homosexual faggots with dirt on their fingernails that transmit disease," do you think I'd be ripe for my political party kicking me out of my seat?

Apparently, according to Stephen Harper and the CRAP Crew, it's ok to make mean-spirited homophobic remarks as long as you really and sincerely apologise...

...after you get caught, of course.

And naturally, "House Leader Peter Van Loan says Regina Lumsden Lake Centre MP Tom Lukiwski has apologized for his remarks and the Conservatives are convinced he does not hold those same views today."

You got any, uh, evidence for that? This is after all, a guy who gained his seat because his predecessor got kicked out of the party (probably strictly on an optics deal) for suggesting that homosexuality be recriminalised. Note to Saskatchehoovian LGBT people: Avoid Regina like the plague; they grow the bigots thick up there.

Apparently someone else on the same tape said "Roy Romanow's got his head up his ass I don't even know how he walks upright with his head so far up his ass," and a third person on the tape said that "Grant Devine will ... kick the balls right off of that hard-headed slut [former Saskatchewan Liberal party leader Lynda Haverstock]." (Obligatory radical feminist moment: Note that in the mind of whoever said that, Lynda Haverstock is a "slut" because she's "hard-headed" but she apparently has "balls" to boot. So which is it, boys, balls, or sluttiness? Seems the way you patriarchal rubes construct this stuff, you can't really have both in one feminine package... Unfortunately, the rank misogynistic comment is also the only one quoted where the speaker isn't named. Whoever you are, you have problems. Lots of problems.)

Nice going, guys. Throw in some gratuitous comments about "drunken Indians," "Pakkies," or whatever the hell the current cool ethnic slur is, and you'll have hit the bigotry trifecta.

Jesus. If I were Stephen Harper (which I'm not, thank goodness) I'd throw all of these guys out of the party just for the optics. It's disgusting how many people actually vote for people who think this way. (It's more disgusting how many people actually think that way, but they're also not usually enacting public policy.)

How to Argue Like a Right-Winger

2008-04-02T20:29:00.006-04:00

As a student of rhetoric, I like to read a lot of blogs where people of opposing political philosophies crash together. Very few things make me happier than a huge thread on, say, Pharyngula where one of the usual cre(a)ti(o)nist trolls shows up, ditto the anti-vaccinationists or HIV-AIDS denialists at denialism blog, the usual gang of Deepak Chopra fans, woo-believers, and miscellaneous freaks and flakes who show up at Respectful Insolence. You see about the same things when the Ron Paul brigades were descending en masse onto David Neiwert's Orcinus, and see it there still in the form of anti-immigration types, the usual neo-Nazi nutcases (sorry, David, I'm still chuckling over "fat, ethnically Israeli forehead"), and assorted other off-their-meds hangers-on. The trolls spew things out, and people respond, and the trolls counter-spew, and people respond to those, and you get these marvellous multithreaded arguments happening. It's extremely useful to watch these arguments, because you can see the same tactics coming up over and over again.

So, that said, allow me to present a few of the rhetorical tactics you're likely to see in these sorts of arguments. Watch for them. (You could even make a Bingo card, if you felt so inclined.)

Moving the Goalposts.

What Is It?   In this tactic, the person using it demands a "burden of proof" (so to speak) progressively farther beyond the original scope of the argument. For example, the RW will say, "You haven't demonstrated X, show me some proof of X," and when people provide that, they say, "But that didn't actually prove anything. Now you need to demonstrate Y," and so on, until people either stop responding or the discussion gets bogged down in tiny irrelevant minutiae.

Where Do People Use It?    You see this one all the time, especially when talking about "controversial" areas of science. It's commonly found in discussions about evolution. People are going along having a lovely conversation about the vagaries by which living things change over time (because no individual is identical to their parents), e.g. evolution, and some creationist troll pops up and starts demanding that people on the thread account for the origins of life itself (abiogenesis). Pretty soon everyone on the thread is talking about abiogenesis and the various hypotheses surrounding that.

What Does It Do?    It's basically a technique for muddying the rhetorical waters and derailing comment threads away from the original point of discussion.

How to Combat It    Use the "I see what you did there" method -- mention that the RW poster is moving the goalposts (for the benefit of the other commenters and readers if nothing else), then stay on topic. If the RW in question is using the tactic to avoid answering an uncomfortable question or addressing a point, repeat the item the RW is avoiding. Above all, encourage other commenters to stay on topic.

The Gish Gallop.

What Is It?   This tactic, named after notorious professional creationist debater Duane Gish, is also known as the "fling shit at the wall and see what sticks" technique. People using it spew out as many premises in their argument as they can, combining fact, lies, bullshit, and opinion in a non-stop avalanche. A really good example of this tactic is here, where you see a right-winger construct a strawman (we'll get to that) composed of no fewer than six beliefs and then refer to it as one belief.

Where Do People Use It?    This one occurs most frequently in evolution/creationism debates, but it does occasionally come up in political debates. Denialists of all stripes also seem to be fond of using it.

What Does It Do?    Essentially, it's a form of "tinfoiling the radar," making it impossible for your opponent to refute your argument because it takes ten times as long to unpack and refute (every single point) than it does to argue in the first place. It's also a great favourite of RW debaters in public fora, because it allows the RW in question to dazzle the audience with bullshit.

How to Combat It    This is one where you can't really combat it effectively once the RW doing it has the bit between their teeth and has started to run away with the discourse. You can really only combat a Gish Gallop effectively by forcing the RW to stop after each point and refuting the points one at a time. Countering it in a written medium is a little easier, because you can pick apart each claim, but be prepared to write things like the judge's commentary here.

The Strawman

What Is It?    The essence of this tactic is to set up a caricature of your opponent (most amenable to demolishing by your preferred line of argumentation, of course), then proceed to knock it down. You can see an excellent discussion of this tactic (carried on at book length in the Left Behind series!) at Slacktivist's post "The Imaginary Liberal." Jonah Goldberg's exercise in historical revisionism Liberal Fascism is essentially one long exercise in building strawmen.

Where Do People Use It?    Everywhere. This one is so ubiquitous, it turns up in discussions of politics, feminism, denialism, crankery, science, economics and everywhere the reality-based mindset conflicts with right-wing ideology.

What Does It Do?    It gives the RW arguer an "easy score" (against a completely imaginary opponent). It also forces the RW's opponents to have to deny the specific accusations against them.

How to Combat It    Point out that the RW is using the tactic, for the benefit of the other commenters and the readers. Reframe the argument using positive terms, if possible.

Changing the Subject

What Is It?    This is probably the most transparent rhetorical trick in the RW arsenal. Basically, when confronted with an argument they don't like, they proceed to talk about something else. More sophisticated RW arguers will make sure that the attempted subject-change is related (but tangential) to the subject. Really clever RW arguers will attempt to cement the relationship between the original subject and the subject of the derailment by drawing an equivalence (usually false) between the two things. (In feminist circles, this argumentation tactic is generally referred to as the "But What About The Menz" gambit.) An example of an arguer using this tactic would be that any time a feminist blog attempts to discuss female genital mutilation, anti-feminist trolls invariably descend and try to change the subject to talking about male circumcision, and almost always attempt to draw a direct equivalence between the two.

Where Do People Use It?   Everywhere. Changing the subject is often the first tactic RW arguers use.

What Does It Do?   It essentially derails the discussion, luring commenters into talking about a subject controlled by the RW, and not the original arguer or other commenters.

How to Combat It    Don't give the subject-changer the control. Stay on topic. Point out the attempt to derail the discussion by changing the subject for the benefit of other commenters and readers.

Conflation

What Is It?    This tactic is used to generate a long-lasting pollution of terms by confusing two dissimilar things. An example of conflation would be the Bush Administration's relentless linking of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in speeches leading up to the invasion of Iraq and afterward. You can see a similar thing happening in John McCain's recent speeches, where he's (deliberately or not) confusing Sunni Iraq and Shia Iran. The tactic works similarly to the sleeper effect, in that over time, the two items can become indistinct in people's minds (similar to how, in the sleeper effect, a viewer's skepticism of a biased source may disappear over time in relation to how persuasive the message is).

Where Do People Use It?    Conflation occurs when there are two demonised elements in the discussion, so it happens a lot in political discussions (Iraq/Al Qaeda, Iraq/Iran) and anti-vaccination denialism (where the element shifts between "mercury" in vaccines -- until it's pointed out that there isn't really any mercury left in vaccines -- to the more general "toxins"). Oftentimes, both of the demonised elements are treated as equivalent, if not identical.

What Does It Do?    Conflation is designed to muddy the waters in an argument, to pollute the semantic environment. It's also designed to degrade the meaning of certain terms into meaninglessness, thereby decreasing their rebuttal value. RW arguers often use conflation in conjunction with Moving the Goalposts, for extra rhetorical effect, in essence creating a mass of shifting argumentative objectives overlaid with a layer of ill-defined terms. If the terms of the argument are unclear, the argument is nearly impossible to refute.

How to Combat It    Point out that the two elements are not, in fact, the same, for the benefit of the other commenters and the readers. Define the terms. Ask the RW arguer to define their terms. Do not allow the RW to set any of the terms of the argument (that is, don't buy into any of their frames).

Projection

What Is It?    This is another classic of RW argumentation -- basically, accuse your opponent of everything you're doing. As mentioned above, the book Liberal Fascism is also a classic example of projection, as David Neiwert has demonstrated in his series "If conservatives really, really hate being called fascists..." (See the sidebar for links to parts 1-6.)

Where Do People Use It?    Arguers who are projecting usually use it in ad hominem attacks, or to attempt to cement a conflation. You're pretty much going to see RW arguers using psychological projection in every area of dispute.

What Does It Do?    It does three things. First of all, it muddies the waters in the argument, by attempting to force the RW's opponents to answer the allegations. Secondly, it turns control of the argument over to the RW. Thirdly, it can be used in conjunction with a number of other rhetorical techniques (such as the Strawman, Changing the Subject, or Conflation) to make them more potent.

How to Combat It    Point out that the arguer is projecting. Provide evidence that the arguer is projecting, then, where applicable, move back to the original topic. Refusing to allow a projection to become a derailment is particularly important in certain fora, and not so much in others. (In a comment thread, it's important. When dissecting articles by RW arguers that use the tactic, discussing the projection is the topic.) Above all, don't give the RW arguer control over the debate.

There are several others I could have gone into here, but these seem to be the most universal and widely-used. The object to using these tactics is, of course, to prevent people from having productive discussions of topics of their own choosing; it is vitally important to the RW arguer to have control over even fora they don't own, and can be seen as central to the overarching RW rhetorical mission to dominate the discourse to the exclusion of all other viewpoints. (As Jello Biafra says, "You can have right wing or extreme right wing.")

A Short Note On Purpose: The object of this essay is to teach liberals and people in the "reality-based community" how to win arguments. The object is not to persuade the opponent; I'm pretty much convinced that in most cases, that's impossible anyway. The point is to make sure you can answer and deflect the arguments when they appear in various media, whether online, on television, or in print, and rebut them effectively. The RW's opponent, in this case, is not practicing the art of suasion towards the RW, but rather pointing out to the other participants in the discussion why the RW is making a bad/fallacious/untrue argument, and how.

Update: Hello readers from TPM Cafe! If you liked this essay, please bookmark it and come back later, because there will be a Part II. In Part II, I'll be talking about the Ad Hominem logical fallacy, quote-mining, and other hits from the same album. --?!

Update Two: My buddy Spocko reminded me of a post he did quite a while ago called "How to Talk to Wingnuts," which contains many of the same points as in this first pass by the topic, although from a slightly different frame of reference. So, credit where credit is due, as I'm sure I read the post originally. By the way, if you're not reading Spocko, what the hell are you waiting for?

My Friends Went to EschaCon and All I Got Was This Lousy Attitude

2008-03-30T03:10:00.003-04:00

I have a cat who needs a trip to the vet's, a friend who spent last night in jail, and some sort of respiratory infection that just won't quit. Lots of my online friends are at EschaCon in Philadelphia right now, and despite having been practically ordered to show up, I couldn't because of transportation logistics...and it seems as though it would have been better to have stayed home, had I even tried to go. (How does one cross an international border by rail, anyway?)

Not that I'm, you know, bitter or anything...

Update: Hello to friends from FDL! And thank you Spocko for mentioning me. As always, you're way too good to me. Maybe I can make it to EschaCon or whatever's passing for YKos next year. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, birushalayim ba'shana haba'a...)

Cab Calloway and Klezmer: A Maven Speaks

2008-03-22T03:23:00.002-04:00

According to the associated page information, on July 2, 2007, noted klezmer musician and theorist Hankus Netsky, weighed in on the subject of Cab Calloway and klezmer music at Jbooks.com: Cab Calloway: On the Yiddish Side of the Street. Great minds think alike. Fools seldom differ. Mr. Netsky can pick, if he likes.

My essay on the subject is from January 8, 2007, and is called "Just Tell Her Klezmer Joe Was Here and Had to Go." (Naturally, I had the better title; Netsky is the real musician here, and I'm just a writer with pretensions of know-some-of-it-ism about music...)

Speaking of know-some-of-it-ism about music, I am thinking about writing an essay on rail references in acoustic blues of the 1930s. In the meantime, please go to Archive.org and enjoy the vocal and guitar stylings of the enigmatic lost legend Geeshie Wiley, probably one of the best blues guitarists of the period, and an absolute genius of an arranger, who recorded a grand total of six sides in two sessions in 1930 and 1931 and then disappeared again. And did I mention that Geeshie Wiley was a woman?

A Tourist's Guide to the Foreign Country Called the Past

2008-03-15T21:48:00.002-04:00

Part of the way my perspective on history has been shaped by my background in English literature is that I've developed a real love for primary sources. My anti-authoritarian streak also compels me to go straight to the sources instead of relying on the judgements of historians more professional than I. The internet is actually a wealth of primary-source historical information, all digitised for easy access. (It's like a giant library that just appears at your house! How cool is that?)

Here, presented for your at-home history study pleasure, is a small annotated linkography of primary-source information on the web.

The Internet Archive, which is probably the biggest single collection of primary-source information. (It's not just the "Wayback Machine.") Particularly noteworthy and useful in my estimation are:

The Prelinger Archives, a collection of digitised films that spans roughly the period between 1920 and 1960, and features a lot of ephemera, such as commercials and public-service films

The 78 RPM Collection, a library of over 2000 digitised 78 RPM disc and cylinder recordings (I spotted both recordings from both wax and celluloid cylinders). Highlights include some classic Delta blues sides dating from between 1920 and 1940, and a recording of the last living (and only recorded) castrato singer, Alessandro Moreschi.

The Conet Project, a compilation of recordings of numbers stations.

The World War I Primary Document Archive (thanks to J. Plotke for making me aware of its existence). This resource contains HTML-transcribed versions of documents from the First World War.

The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record recreated online. These are photographs from pre-Revolution Russia, most of them dating to around 1900, that were produced using a unique glass plate negative process that allowed colour images.

The Yad Vashem Museum (you can access their central database of names from the main page) and the Nizkor Project, two of the best Holocaust research sites online.

The Mudcat Cafe, an online collection of information about, lyrics, and music for folk, traditional, and blues, with an emphasis on North American music forms.

Early Recorded Sounds and Wax Cylinders, an archive of early recordings, usually in cylinder format.

The World's Earliest Television Recordings -- Don McLean's site on early British 30-line analogue television disc recordings made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The site includes Real format video for viewing.

Of course, there are lots more historical resources out there, but being someone who specialises in ephemera and media in a small way, I enjoy these ones the best.

Dipshit Bush Lackey says McCain Best for Canada

2008-02-21T20:51:00.002-05:00

According to former US ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci, John McCain should be Canadians' US Presidential candidate of choice because

Democrats like Clinton and Obama are dependent on financial and organizational support from unions, Cellucci said. Those unions are often hostile to liberalized trade.

"Any Democratic candidate would be pulled away from free trade because of the unions, and McCain understands how important free trade and the ease of travel is," Cellucci said in an interview.

The stupid, it burns. (Note also the grammatical error in the last quoted sentence -- "understands how important free trade and ease of travel [two items] is [singular verb]." Did this guy take anti-remedial English in the same class as The Shrub?) Apparently neither our corporate media (Canadian Press), nor Cellucci actually understand that nobody here except our corporate overlords really likes NAFTA and pretty much thinks we collectively got screwed by the original Free Trade Agreement. (Gee, years of softwood lumber disputes and various other trade wars, bad rulings by the WTO, jobs draining south like someone pulled out the plug due to so-called "right to work" states, and people are still trying to sell the "free trade is good" line? The Auto Pact worked better, and it wasn't anybody's idea of a panacea.)

Note also the not-very-subliminal anti-union slam. It's not as though a Democrat would do anything because they believe it's the right thing to do, no, it's those nasty, evil unions (like we're all entitled to by federal law up here) pulling them this way. Does Cellucci actually know anything about Canada aside from that he had to spend some time here once upon a time? (Actually, considering what most Americans, especially right-wing Americans think they need to know about the world outside the US's borders -- and inside it, too, at times -- I think I just answered my own question.)

Still, the idea that any Republican would actually give a damn about doing anything that was actually good for Canada, unless it was somehow even better for the US in general and themselves in specific is rather laughable. Of course, the usual Republican (and right-wing) modus operandi is to arrange things such that everything possible is a zero-sum game. They win, and everyone else loses, the more spectacularly the better.

Not, of course, that I think the Democrats are substantially better on doing things that are good for Canada and Canadians per se, since they have what you might call the ultimate "privilege of privilege": They don't care about how their policies affect the rest of the world, because, by and large, they don't have to. (A line from Rudyard Kipling occurs to me: Always her heavy hooves fall/And Rome never hears when we call.) Still, I think the Democrats are, overall, better for Canada, since Democrats aren't in the business of governing to prove, as Ronald Reagan famously said, "that government is the problem." (And, as Grover Norquist famously said, that it needs to be "drowned in the bathtub.") Anything that forestalls the decline such that we don't come down with a serious terminal case of the A6 superflu because of (what Atrios calls) "the Big Shitpile" and/or the slow osmotic diffusion of toxic ideology past the blood-brain barrier of the 49th Parallel, is a good thing, in my mind.

Virtual Casseroles

2008-02-19T13:54:00.005-05:00

As some of you may have heard, my good friend Spocko has had two family emergencies in the past month, for which he has had to make short-notice trips back home (the kind of distance that requires flying on short notice). If you would like, you can help by hitting the donation link in the sidebar, to defray some of his travel and other expenses. If you can't donate, but would like to help anyway, please spread the word.

Those of us who grew up in cultures where people bring food to the bereaved will understand the significance of the title.

Thank you all.

Update: El Gato Negro through Whiskey Fire wants to let everyone know that Spocko's PayPal link has been down between the time I posted that and now (it was working for me last night). EGN says that if the PayPal link isn't working, you can still donate:

- Go to paypal.com

- click on "Send Money"

- Type Spocko's email in the first field, fill in jour email, and the amount, and joo are good to go.

Spocko's email is:

spockosemail "at" gmail "dot" com

Gracias to BlueGal for the tip.

Aerial Conspiracy Theory: Breaking the Numbers Down

2007-09-20T16:03:00.000-04:00

The other day at Hullabaloo, a commenter mentioned something along the lines of "Ever notice how only Democrats die in plane crashes?" Being as I'm a lifelong fan of aviation and a longtime fan of both statistical analysis and conspiracy theories, I thought I'd do a little research and see what I could find.

Notes on Methodology: I'm attempting to use the best sources I can find online, and taking out all the data from 1920-1960, because most of the earlier entries involve either aviation pioneers, wartime pilots, or similar confounding factors. I'm also not going to be making any speculations about the cause of any trends I might find.

US Politicians Killed in Aviation Incidents
Broken down by year and party affiliation

Donald Grant Nutter	Republican	1962
Clement Woodnutt Miller	Democrat	1962 (small plane)
de Lesseps Story Morrison	Democrat (Mayor of New Orleans)	1962
Thomas Hale Boggs, Sr. (Hale Boggs)	Democrat	1972
Nicholas Joseph Begich	Democrat	1972 (Disappeared, presumed killed)
George Washington Collins	Democrat	1972
Jerry Lyle Pettis	Republican	1975
Jerry Lon Litton	Democrat	1976 (private plane)
Ralph Frederick Beermann	Republican	1977
Lawrence Patton McDonald	Democrat	1983 (Aboard the Korean Airlines jet shot down by the Soviet military)
Jim Waltermire	Republican	1988
George Thomas Leland	Democrat	1989
Larkin I. Smith	Republican	1989 (private plane)
Henry John Heinz III	Republican	1991 (small plane)
John Tower	Republican	1991
George Speaker Mickelson	Republican	1993
Ronald Harmon Brown	Democrat	1996
Charles B. Yates	Democrat	2000
Melvin Eugene Carnahan	Democrat	2000
Paul David Wellstone	Democrat	2002

Totals and Statistics

Number of Republicans: 8 (40%)
Number of Democrats: 12 (60%)

Risk Factors: Rural, small/private planes

Lifetime odds of being killed in an aircraft incident (US population average, deduct for frequent flyers): approximately 1 in 5,000

Sources:

"Politicians killed in plane crashes," CNN.com, Friday, October 25, 2002.

"List of people who died in aviation-related incidents, Politicians," Wikipedia.

" Politicians Killed in Aircraft Accidents and Disasters," The Political Graveyard.

"What are the odds of dying?," National Safety Council.

Missing the Point -- There Aren't Good Guys Here

2007-09-03T16:18:00.000-04:00

Spotted at Rick Perlstein's place, under the unlikely title "E. coli conservatism hits the nursury" [sic]*, link in original to source is broken:

In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign...

I've seen other writing on the subject, most of which seems to dwell on the pressure against the ads having come from the formula makers' wanting to secure their profits.

Okay, but everyone's kind of missing the point here: Isn't using in-your-face pictorial ads to imply, nay, outright state "breastfeed or else [dire thing here]," rank emotional blackmail?! Further, isn't the point here that the Bush administration, while claiming first and foremost to represent the vaunted "culture of life,"** has done nothing to make it easier for mothers of newborns to nurse? No tax incentives for employers offering flex-time and parental leave, no publicly-funded parental/maternity leave, no living-wage laws, no increases in social benefits for nursing mothers, nothing.

And yet, they feel perfectly justified in producing ads that outright blame mothers for not nursing, even though they're utterly in favour of making it as impossible as possible for everyone outside of the upper class to reasonably do so. It's actually rather like their attitude towards pregnancy, only continuing after birth. As Mosh Pit Mom said in an entry titled "u cannot has cheezburger":

[E]nough with the mother-shaming, you jerks. Seriously, enough is enough. I have absolutely lost all track of what all isn’t safe to do, eat, have, wear, think, own, drink, or smoke while you’re knocked up. It seems that as long as they can keep on adding to that list, every single time a woman has a baby with some sickness or disorder, they can turn around and point their fingers at the mother, who had that one piece of salmon nigiri at 4 months gestation or that half glass of wine on her birthday at 7 months or went to listen to her favorite band and breathed a little secondhand smoke at 8 months and they can blame her.

This initiative is just more of the same -- it makes women's bodies public property by inviting everyone from the state on down to pass judgement on what the womb-carrier in question must've been or must be doing to produce a child with [insert condition here].

I'm really stunned that nobody much is picking up on this, preferring instead to go after the "evil corporation" angle. Evil corporations do undoubtedly exist, and I don't really have much sympathy for manufacturers of baby formula, especially after their disastrous "PR initiatives" in the developing world, but on the other hand, it is kind of good that they managed to blunt the force of these ads somewhat.

Of course, it would be better overall if there were actually pro-breastfeeding ads, instead of fearmongering, scare-tactic ads. However, given that the Bush Administration's means of relating to women is malign paternalism cloaked in blandly pro-women rhetoric, I guess that would be too much to hope for.

_____________
* Is that supposed to be some weird pun on "usury"?

** Which means, of course, pre-birth but nothing afterward, and don't mind us if your kid has a bullet with his/her name on it eighteen or twenty-one years in the future.

The Ultimate Confined-Space Entry

2007-08-17T22:50:00.000-04:00

The Toronto Star has an article today on the most recent development in the case of the mine disaster in Utah. According to the article, "a cave-in Thursday killed three rescue workers and injured at least six others who were trying to tunnel through rubble to reach" the trapped miners; the search has been "suspended indefinitely." (Aside: I hope there's no one still alive down there, because they'd have to know by now that nobody's coming.)

In occupational health and safety terms, a "confined-space entry" means going into a space where there is only one available avenue of entrance and egress. In hazard situations, a confined-space entry is the most dangerous form of rescue to attempt, because (particularly with confined spaces like silos, rail cars, and mines) the air is often unbreathable, undetectably so. According to The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, 60% of fatalities in confined-space entry incidents kill the would-be rescuers. Protocols for handling confined-space entries usually stress testing the air quality before attempting a rescue (or, if time is absolutely critical, wearing a full breathing apparatus with self-contained air supply), taking steps to ensure a minimal risk of fire or explosion, and ensuring that the space is as structurally sound as possible before attempting an entry.

In other words, attempting a rescue in a seismically-unstable, 1500-foot-deep mine is an intrinsically extremely unsafe situation to begin with.

That's also assuming that the mine was in good, safe operating condition to begin with. (A "bump," which seems to be what happened here, is a cave-in or collapse caused by stresses on the rock, or even rock layers collapsing, and isn't necessarily the sign of an egregious operator safety violation, although it is almost certainly proof of a high-hazard mining environment, which is problematic in and of itself -- more later.) According to CBS News,

Government mine inspectors have issued 325 citations against the Utah mine since January 2004, according to federal Mine Safety and Health Administration online records. Of those, 116 were what the government considered "significant and substantial," meaning they are likely to cause injury.

The number of safety violations is not unusual, said J. Davitt McAteer, former head of the MSHA and now vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.

Comparatively, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review notes that Murray Energy, the owner of the Utah mine and other mines, had "'almost 500 safety violations a year,'" between 1996 and 2000 in two now-closed mines in western Pennsylvania, according to "Tim Baker, deputy administrator for occupation, health and safety with the United Mine Workers union."

It actually isn't unusual to see a large number of safety violations in a coal mine, unfortunately, especially where the enforcement mechanisms are compromised by politics, as looks to be the case here. According to the excellent (former) blog Confined Space (there's that term again), the head of the US Mine Safety and Health Administration, Richard Stickler, is a Bush appointee, and according to the CBS article, the chairman of Murray energy is "is a strong Republican backer." (For example, according to Open Secrets, in the 2000 US election, Murray Energy contributed $93,625, all of it to Republicans. $37, 075 of that was from individual donors, but I wasn't able to find any information on Stickler's personal donations.)

This has happened before. The most dramatic example in recent history happened in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. In the late 1980s, a constellation of Conservative Party politicians (the Canadian equivalent to the Republicans), political handshakes, coal mining, and unstable ground aligned. On September 11, 1991, the Westray mine opened, extracting coal from the highly-unstable and extremely gassy Foord seam (there had been two major mining disasters in the area in 1956 and 1958, and a history of cave-ins and explosions dating back to the 19th Century) opened, with much public fanfare and anticipation. Safety conditions in the mine were appalling from the get-go, the mine inspectors seemed blithely unconcerned about massive coal dust and gas problems (see the Westray Inquiry transcripts for details).

On May 9, 1992, in the early hours of the morning, the Westray mine exploded, killing 21 miners.

We can take some lessons here -- the intermingling of regulatory bodies, partisan politics, and money with dangerous occupations almost always have severe consequenses for the workers.

Also, a great deal has been written about media relations in the wake of the disaster. In the case of the Westray mine disaster, the mining company's communications strategy "did not satisfy legitimate media needs and that the company's lack of open, prompt, and accessible communication fed a media suspicion that officials had something to hide. On the other hand, journalists relied on human interest, made mistakes, and decontextualized their coverage of the story."¹ A particularly illuminating look at the media coverage, which is especially relevant in the case of the Utah disaster, is John McMullan and Sherman Hinze's paper, "Westray: The Press, Ideology, and Corporate Crime," which appears as Chapter Nine of The Westray Chronicles: A Case Study In Corporate Crime.².

In their paper, McMullan and Hinze state that "corporate lawbreaking is rarely described as criminality. It is usually underplayed by the media and reported as 'accidents,' 'tragedies,' or 'unforseen incidents.' With corporate malfeasance, there is a different condensation of organizational images at play." (183) This postulate is sharply apparent in the media coverage of the Utah incident, where the media is presenting allegations of flagrant safety violations as a "he-said/he-said" conflict, with the only quoted voices presenting the corporate malfeasance angle being pro-labour, and both the mining company spokespeople and the head of the MSHA talking about "accidents" and "tragedies" and dwelling on the emotional, human-interest story angle. Strikingly, Robert E. Murray, the chairman of Murray Energy Corp, maintains that the disaster occurred because of an earthquake (according to CBS), rather than the bump it appears to be, which abdicates responsibility a level further.

(The argument there being that one can avoid having one's workers trapped by bumps by not mining in unsafe, unstable ground, but earthquakes are basically unpredictable. An earthquake, ferchrissakes. Perhaps it's germane to mention here that, according to CBS, Murray is also a global-warming denialist, so he's used to blithely disregarding the scientific consensus.)

The pattern repeats itself yet again.

You could also say there's another confined-space entry going on here -- we're entering into a confined rhetorical space, bounded by money, politics, and the media. Are we going to see an honest examination of the proximate and root causes of this disaster, another terrible accident in an industry nobody seems to have much interest in even trying to make safe, or are we collectively going to perish in a polluted semantic environment?

________
¹ Richards, Trudie. "The Westray Mine Explosion: An Examination of the Interaction Between the Mine Owner and the Media." Canadian Journal of Communication, v21 n3 1996
http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewarticle.php?id=377&layout=html

² McCormick, Christopher. The Westray Chronicles: A Case Study in Corporate Crime. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1999.

McMullan, John and Hinze, Sherman. "Westray: The Press, Ideology, and Corporate Crime." The Westray Chronicles: A Case Study in Corporate Crime. Ed. Christopher McCormick. Halifax: Fernwood Publications, 1999.

But They Perceive Not

2007-08-06T14:53:00.000-04:00

And of mankind, there are some who say: We believe in [God] and the Last Day, when they believe not.
They think to beguile [God] and those who believe, and they beguile none save themselves; but they perceive not.
In their hearts is a disease, and [God] increaseth their disease. A painful doom is theirs because they lie.
And when it is said unto them: Make not mischief in the earth, they say: We are peacemakers only.
Are not they indeed the mischief-makers? But they perceive not.
-- Glorious Quran, S.2:8-12, translated by M.M. Pickthall

Today is August 6th, 2007. Six years ago today, as Sinfonian tells us, George W. Bush, President of the United States,

received, as he does every day, the President's Daily Briefing, or PDB. The 8/6/01 PDB was a little different, though. It contained the words, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." Intelligence gathered over a period of months, if not years, had revealed that Osama bin Laden was readying his al-Qaeda network for an unprecedented terrorist attack on American soil. The PDB was the intelligence community's method for warning the White House and ensuring that all available resources could be brought to bear against al-Qaeda, preventing an historic catastrophe.

Of course, as we all know, that's not what happened. [Bush] read the PDB, set it aside, and turned his attention to other, apparently more pressing matters. And just five weeks later, it was September 11.

Without being conscious of the symbology of the date at all, I just listened again to the first two tapes made of the Manhattan Emergency Response Dispatch (available here, although I got them from the New York Times site shortly after they became publicly available). They're really quite remarkable artifacts, if you know what you're listening to. ("Knowing what you're listening to" in this case requires some familiarity with ERD procedures, codes, and calls.)

For one thing, starting at 2:46 on the first tape, you hear this exchange:

18: Squad 1-8 to Manhattan, kay?
MH: Squad 1-8, kay.
18: [unintelligible] ...battallion that transmitted, it looked like it was intentional. Inform all units going in that it could be a terrorist attack.
MH: 10-4. All units be advised.

2:46 on the tape would have been just before 8:50AM, as the tape starts at 8:46AM.

The second thing that stands out for me is how good at his job the dispatcher was that day. The guy never loses his cool for an instant, unless you count telling some panicky unit on the radio "Units are on their way. Please stand by," after the guy called in three times in as many minutes to demand backup that, by then, wasn't going to come. (You can hear the, "Get off the channel, you panicky SOB," though.) "Manhattan," if you're out there reading somewhere, brilliantly done, sir. I hope you're very proud of yourself. You did better than could have been expected of almost anyone, I think.

Unfortunately, even "Manhattan's" icewater-blooded handling of communications that morning wasn't enough to make everything run smoothly, which is the third remarkable thing about the tapes. By the middle of Tape 2, Side 2 (about 150 minutes into the event, or by 10:30AM or so), there are longer and longer gaps in the tape where there are no incoming and outgoing communications, and where there are, you hear "Manhattan" say, over and over again, "[Unit], you're breaking up..." You can hear the NYC emergency communications system failing, in realtime-on-tape. It's simultaneously sad and scary...

...much like knowing that so many of the voices on the tape (possibly even "Manhattan's") are now the voices of the dead.

And being the possible optimist that I am, I think it could have been, if not prevented, then a lot less bad than it was. And there's an awful lot of blame and opprobrium to go around, spread amongst the mischief-makers of the world who perceive not.

Brief Hiatus

2007-04-28T17:32:00.000-04:00

Hi, everyone. Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. I'm down with a terrible sinus infection (and you don't even want to know about the awful gunk coming out of my face, but the phrase "bean-sized blood clots" can probably give you a good start on it). I've been to the doctor's and I'm on an interesting combination of antibiotic, antihistamine, and steroid drugs, and a saline spray to irrigate my nose et cetera. Nothing fun, though.

I also almost lost my laptop last Monday, which would have eaten all my notes on the abstinence-only report. (Say, any of you intrepid people out there following what's going on with US global AIDS coordinator Tobias, that sterling abstinence-only crusader, and the "sexless" massages provided by the employees of a well-known DC madam?)

I'll be posting more in a few days when I can muster the energy. Thanks for your patience.

Mathematica Report, Part 3: Sleazy Sources and Self-Sufficiency

2007-04-15T20:37:00.000-04:00

In Part 1 of this series, I advanced the radical hypothesis that one of the aims of abstinence-only education is to inculcate the belief, crudely put, "No fucking until you can afford it." In Part 2, I looked at some of the language used in the beginning sections of the report.

While I was taking down my notes, I happened to notice a passing reference that one of the "tenth grade program[s referenced in the study] also featured slide show materials from the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH), which provided information on STDs and instructed students that abstinence is the only sure way to avoid contracting them." (34, as noted previously, all page numbers reflect the pages in the PDF, not the report pagination, for easier reference).

That institute name caught my eye, and got mental alarm bells ringing way in the back of my head. For some reason or other, the juxtaposition of "Medical" and "Institute" (hm, I tried to type "Mental" there; Freudian slip?) makes it seem as though they're desperately pushing for credibility in nomenclature. So who are these crazy MISHed up folks?

Well, according to their own website, MISH "founded to confront the global epidemics of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs)." Interestingly enough, though, the Google search result page says:

In case you can't read that, it says "A nonprofit scientific, educational organization to confront the global epidemics of nonmarital pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease..." I decided to include a screenshot, because I'm assuming they track statistics and do vanity searches every so often, and I suspect that once they figure out that their Google search result text drops the dime on them, it won't remain as it appears now for very long. (And check out their Executive and Board of Directors while you're there.)

So let's break that down a bit. According to MISH, there is a "global epidemic of nonmarital pregnancy." Do you smell something a bit patriarchal there? I do, I see a couple of male doctors trying to dictate that if women have children, they should do so only within legal marriage...

A little further poking turns up even more evidence of the same:

The healthiest sexual activity is intentional, mutually agreeable, and mutually pleasurable in the context of a respectful, lifelong, mutually monogamous relationship. The healthiest sexual activity occurs between adults who are mature physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. They are financially self-sufficient and...

And hold on a minute. We just hit paydirt. Financially self-sufficient.

They claim to be interested in promoting optimal sexual health, but their definition of optimally sexually healthy does not include anyone on an economically unsound footing, among other things.

It continues:

...prepared to handle the results of sexual activity. ... For adolescents: delay of sexual debut, ideally until committing to a life-long mutually monogamous relationship such as marriage

For adults: abstinence outside of a life-long mutually monogamous relationship such as marriage

(Personally, for myself, I don't quite understand how you're supposed to have a pleasurable and mutually-satisfactory sexual relationship if you're also expected to have only one sexual partner in your lifetime and commit to that partner before beginning sexual experimentation. To use the same analogy as some other bloggers, that's a little bit like getting your driver's license without ever having been behind the wheel of a car, and then having your first real driving experience be on a ten-lane superhighway.)

According to SIECUS, MISH's study on abstinence-only education

cites mostly unpublished, non-peer reviewed studies to argue that abstinence-only education has a positive impact on teens’ sexual behavior. This contradicts overwhelming evidence from peer-reviewed evaluations of sexuality education programs that show that age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education programs that include information about contraception as well as promote abstinence are the most effective form of sexuality education for young people.

A report by the Guttmacher Institute says that the President of MISH wrote a

monograph on condoms and STDs, billed as "the most comprehensive scientific review of the science on condom effectiveness to date," MISH provides an analysis of the workshop report that, while factually correct, nonetheless asserts that condoms do not make sex "safe enough" to warrant their promotion for STD prevention [shouldn't that be up to the interested sexually-active parties to decide? -- ?!]. According to MISH, because condoms are "not foolproof" and marriage is "generally safe" from STD infection [except for all those people who get STDs from their spouses, but we won't mention them -- ?!], the government should be only promoting marriage and abstinence outside of marriage for STD prevention.

In other words, these are the same people who persistently keep their heads in the sand about the realities of human sexual behaviour, and insist that other people should submit to their control based on their unenforceable and impractical codes of conduct. They're also the same people who are looking to remove the "C" from the "ABC" HIV-prevention model, thereby condemning untold numbers of people to death.

Have I mentioned yet that this stuff falls neatly within the literal definition of evil?

Not only that, but let's look at some of the people this model excludes:

gays and lesbians, who cannot legally marry in many jurisdictions, unless they marry someone of the opposite sex;

many disabled people, who cannot find or retain work, and are therefore not "financially self-sufficient";

poor people in general;

and anybody else who can't, for one reason or another, get legally married within the jurisdictions they consider their purview.

I suspect too that part of the heavy emphasis on the "no fucking until you can afford it" message is because of the subtle (or not so subtle) anticontraception mentality of the writers and promoters of abstinence-only curricula. What they mean by "wait until you are financially self-sufficient before having sex" is "wait until you are financially self-sufficient before having children," which is not at all the same thing.* However, they would like you to believe, and to act, as though it is.

__________
* Incidentally, there is some evidence that in some cases, early childbirth has little impact on later educational and financial attainment, although I'm having trouble locating the source at the moment. I'm not at all against the idea that one should have enough money to raise kids before having them, but it isn't up to me to enforce that idea on everyone, nor to attempt to deny people the opportunity to have children if they wish based on the contents of their literal or metaphorical bank accounts...

Mathematica Report Part 2: Preliminary Notes

2007-04-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

I'm slowly slogging my way through this abstinence-only education report linked in the last post. It's interesting reading, and not only because of the excerpt from the Title V legislation language I quoted.

Here are my initial impressions, with the original quotations in numbered form, and then an exegesis (NB: all page numbers are given as the pages in the PDF, not the actual report pagination):

high-risk girls only

programs did not simply raise the likelihood that youth believed any disease was transmitted sexually; rather, they had a beneficial long-term impact on STD identification (pg 19)

reality of premarital sex

ideational

In addition, a sizeable fraction in both [the program and control] groups, about one-in-seven, reported being unsure about condoms' effectiveness for preventing HIV. (20)

Program group youth were less likely than control group youth to report that condoms are usually effective at preventing STDs; and they were more likely to report that condoms are never effective at preventing STDs. For example, 21 percent of program group youth reported that condoms never prevent HIV, compared to 17 percent of control group youth. For herpes and HPV, 23 percent of program group youth reported that condoms are never effective, compared to 15 percent of control group youth. (20)

Waxman report

please

One-quarter of sexually active adolescents nationwide have an STD, and many STDs are lifelong viral infections with no cure. (23)

STDs have been linked to infertility, miscarriages, cervical cancer, increased HIV risk, and numerous other health problems. Their cost is estimated at several billion dollars annually. (26)

saliency

kill you

A fifth program Heritage Keepers in South Carolina (31)

that

I think I'm going to stop there for now, as it occurs to me that the next item in my list of quotations discusses a curriculum called "Vessels of Honor" [sic], and there's probably an entire blog post just in that eight lines or so alone.

_________
* A yeast/jock itch infection, which, if you're in a sexual relationship with someone and one of you gets it, you both should treat yourselves.

** After all, we know a lot of people like to "link" breast cancer to abortion, and Plan B to abortion, when there's no actual connection between either of those pairs of things.

There it is, in black and white...

2007-04-14T17:14:00.000-04:00

I've just started reading the Mathematica report on abstinence-only education in the US, and goodness, is it ever an interesting document (and I'm only on page 14/164 so far). Hat tip to Vanessa at Feministing for the link.

There has been a considerable amount of speculation in the feminist blogosphere about whether these professional abstinence promoters basically want to promote the idea that poor people shouldn't be having sex. The answer is unequivocally yes, according to this report. From their summary of Title V, Section 510 (b)(2)(A-H) of the Social Security Act (P.L. 104-193), one of the goals of abstinence-only education is to "[t]each the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity." It may depend on how they're defining "self-sufficiency" in this case, but considering the other rhetoric we've seen around welfare recipients, it's pretty obvious that they do, in fact, mean economic self-sufficiency.

In other words, no fucking until you can afford it. If you can never afford it, well, then, you don't deserve sexual pleasure, you lazy piece of worthless trash.

I think I'll be blogging more about this as time goes on, and I think I want to be taking notes as I'm reading, as well.

Suddenly, holding masturbation seminars for low-income people seems very subversive...

Take It Back, Markos

2007-04-12T16:20:00.000-04:00

Take it back now. Your piddly little "all liberals need to die" eliminationist rhetoric is nowhere near comparable to having your photograph, name and address, and Social Security number posted on the internet in conjunction with violent sexualised threats and bizarre pornographic images. Call me back when someone writes about you, "fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob," but of course, they won't, will they? When was the last time anyone threatened a male blogger with grotesque sexual violence? I can't think of an instance, because the kinds of men who hurl these offensive grudge-fuck rape-fantasies into the ether don't do that kind of thing to other men, unless they feminise them somehow first. In other words, I'm not going to sit here and wait for the phone to ring.

This isn't the first time you've been called on the carpet for rank misogyny, such as when you suggested that "women's issues" (which are actually people's issues, and affect 51% of the electorate directly, and most of the rest of them indirectly* -- so much for your vaunted designation of being politically smart) needed to take a back seat in Democratic politics to "real issues." Yeah, that's great. There are "women's issues," and then there are "real issues." Nice.

Funny how that works, isn't it? As commenter kali at Feministe points out:

There’s a formula here, isn’t there?
Woman: I got multiple, specific, sexualised death threats that were sufficiently credible to concern the police.
Man: Someone wrote to me and wished that all liberals would die, and you didn’t catch me whining about it! Why don’t you shut up and stop whining? Be thick-skinned like me!

See also:
Woman: Women earn 77 cents on the male dollar.
Man: Men have to pay for dinner and dating, but we don’t complain! Except just now, of course. Life isn’t fair. Deal with it.

Woman: Women have to live with the threat of rape.
Man: Men have to deal with the threat of being suspected rapists! THAT’S WORSE! So stop whining about rape, it really hurts my feelings.

Patriarchy’s brave little soldiers! Awww!

That about says it all, as far as I'm concerned.

As I've mentioned before, people in the fucking fifteenth century (a few people, at any rate) had figured out the radical notion that women are actually people, and, in modern society, anyway, are entitled to all the rights and perquisites pertaining thereto. This seems to be a difficult concept for you to grasp. I'd suggest grasping it right smart, or graciously bowing the fuck out and keeping your trap shut about gender politics.

If Kathy Sierra wants to quit blogging because she can't take a year or more of specific, targeted, credible (to the point where she notified the FBI) death and rape threats, that's her business. Speaking as someone who has done a fair bit of techblogging myself**, I know that the IT world is persistently misogynistic and can be a rough-and-tumble place at times. Simply because that is so doesn't mean that Kathy Sierra's presence in that world should automatically generate death and rape threats.

This isn't about her; this is about a bunch of ornery little class-bully boys who are pissed off because not only has a woman horned in on their mystery religion, she has the temerity to be good at it, too. I'm sorry if you don't like that, but fuck you very much for blaming the victim. Grow up. Get your consciousness raised. For the sake of your new baby, at least, start treating women like human beings, if for no other reason than that your child needs a good role model.

As for me, there's only one rational response to all this, and that's to start studying programming again.

__________
* For a really rank example of how a so-called "women's issue" affects men too, think of any of these self-styled "men's rights activists" and how they complain about getting "trapped" by women who get pregnant. If more and better birth control and/or abortion services were available -- which is usually considered to be the canonical "women's issue," there'd be an awful lot fewer unwilling fathers, MRA idiots or not, out there. Since this tangential discussion is on, once again how a feminist issue affects men -- this is bloody damn tiring, yawl -- I'm going to leave out the question of unwilling mothers, although I have written about that before.

** Incidentally, I hand-coded all the HTML you'll see in these blog postings myself, and I do it inline, as I'm composing in the Blogger web client window, so I'm not exactly a complete ignoramus myself.

The View from Next Door

2007-04-08T21:17:00.000-04:00

Hullaballoo is running a good series right now on the homegrown American theocrats, the types who believe that their God really does have a political position on everything from taxation to Communism. It's definitely worth checking out, although if you've been more or less keeping up with the literature, you don't so much have to read the text as the editorial commentary (much of the text is approaching word salad anyway).

It's important to realise that these people are influential in their own way in the US political spectrum, and they're genuinely masters of using the Overton Window to inch their ideas surreptitiously into the public discourse. They don't actually need as much help with this as you might think, because they share deep ideological roots with much of the dominant US hard right (regardless of their intrinsic motivations), so their in-practice political positions are not too far off the "mainstream" of hard-right pseudofascist thought anyhow, even if their rationale for supporting these positions is completely different. They also represent another faction in the concerted action that has been pulling the US rightward for about 35 years now.

I have to take a slightly different tack on this than most bloggers who are writing on the subject, because I'm not a US citizen, so the concept of my defending US Constitutional rights just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I do believe that there are valid rationales for opposing US theocracy, even without doing it from a US-Constitutionalist perspective. First of all, from the point of view of a minoritarian civil libertarian (small-l, since I'm politically most closely aligned with the libertarian socialists, it's the right thing to do. Secondly, and this falls on the shoulders of the people actually living within the US' borders who can, say, vote in elections and petition elected representatives (and expect a response), a theocratic US would be very bad news politically and economically for the rest of the world.

I collect variations on an aphorism, heard in roughly the same form in various satellite countries of the US. In Canada, we say, "If the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold." In Australia, they say, "If the US sneezes, Australia gets covered in mucus." In Israel, they say, "If the US sneezes, Israel gets pneumonia."

What then if your country comes down with dancing mania, or, dare I say, Jerusalem syndrome?

If the theocrats take over, a US economic crash is almost inevitable (after a quarter-century of neoconservative rule, and yes, I'm counting Bill Clinton in there, since, despite accruing a surplus, he basically let the Republicans set his fiscal and domestic policy -- it's looking less and less avoidable anyhow). And if you go down, you take down practically the rest of the world with you. Canada, your second-largest (for years, the largest, but has now been superceded by China) trading partner, goes. The UK, the third-largest foreign holder of your Treasury securities, goes. Australia goes, albeit to a lesser extent. Israel, which is already on the brink of financial ruin, having first destabilised its functioning collective-based economy in an orgy of privatisation, and is now pumping vast amounts of treasure and blood into maintaining its war machine, goes. You'll probably hurt Japan, India, and China, too, although you won't destroy their economies quite as thoroughly. Remember how the Asian Currency Crisis basically caused a worldwide nuclear winter in the financial and employment sectors? If your economy crashes, multiply that by about ten.

Not only that, but you'll also destabilise world political relations. Who would want to deal with you? On the other hand, who would want to risk antagonising you, either?

Unfortunately, you, as US citizens, own this problem. There's very little the rest of us can do about it, since (surprise, surprise) we can't vote in your elections or petition your government effectively. What we can do is try to make you aware that the big world out here does actually give a damn about the problem (from where I'm sitting, being conversant in US politics isn't a hobby, it's a survival skill), and can point you to the bigger, non-US-centric issues.

Good luck.

A Brief Tangential Note: That reminds me... A friend of mine put a lovely quotation up on his LiveJournal today about how the true practice of Christianity is love, and how anyone who doesn't practice this isn't really practicing Christianity and so on. Peachy sentiment, but unfortunately, it really chaps my ass. My first reaction, speaking as an atheist and religious conscientious objector, is to say, "I'm sorry, what? And all true Scotsmen wear kilts."

You moderate liberal Christians, I love you all individually, but I'm sorry, you really don't get to cop out like that. Those guys, the Rushdoonys and the Peter Paces and Jerry Falwells of the world, they all self-identify as Christians. You can have all your private little doctrinal struggles, but from where I'm sitting you own those guys. You need to deal with them too, since they're interpreting your religion as their prime motivation for doing the crazy evil shit they're up to.

There isn't a damn single atheist you can say that about, and I don't want to hear any bullshit about either Stalin or Pol Pot, since neither of them did what they did because of atheism; they happened to be brutal, genocidal dictators who followed a political philosophy that had atheism as one of its minor tenets. Re-write the historical context of The Communist Manifesto so that organised religion wasn't an active collaborator in the oppression and suppression of labour (funny how that works, isn't it?), substitute a collective state religion, and it would have come off precisely the same way.

You own these folks, and you'd better damn well start standing up to them with Scripture in hand, because from where I'm sitting, the evangelical funnymentalist megachurch mindset is taking over, and that's not too far removed from Sinclair Lewis' formulation, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."

You've all got some work to do. We'll keep up our end if you keep up yours. Good luck, again.

The Great Trillion-Dollar Swindle

2007-04-06T02:57:00.000-04:00

By the later years of the 1910s, demand for automobiles was basically flat. Ford's Model T, first produced in 1908, had basically saturated the market (it would continue to be produced unitl 1927, by which time advances in technology made it obsolete). ¹ There had been nothing in the automotive market to really fire the imagination since the introduction of the Ford-Edison partnership that promised an affordable battery-powered electric car, and public "recharge stations" to run them with. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison even went so far as to purchase Detroit Electric, a maker of battery-powered automobiles. This remarkable development captured the imagination of the popular press at the time, and with it, the attention of the public, and the executives of General Motors.

In December of 1914, a disastrous and mysterious fire destroyed Thomas Edison's "fireproof" laboratory complex in West Orange, New Jersey, taking with it much of the prototype work that might have made such a scheme possible. The lab, thought to be impervious to fire because of its construction and the private fire brigade that was always on duty, was not insured, and Edison personally sustained a $5M loss. ²

Meanwhile, by the early 1920s, General Motors had put in place a strategy for increasing the general demand for automobiles, rapidly expanding its business, and achieving dominance in the automobile, truck, bus, and rail hardware markets. ³ GM's plan was manifold and breathtaking in scope,and included acquiring other companies in targeted sectors, building new plants all over the world, and a massive marketing, PR, and lobbying campaign that was one of the single-biggest promotional ventures in history. This systematic programme for shaping public demand and consensus must have run into the billions of dollars between 1930 and 1960 alone.

For example, an internal sales film from 1935, Pontiac Advertising ⁴, outlines a staggeringly large marketing campaign – and the film details only marketing activities for the Pontiac product line. There were campaigns for Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, and Chevrolet as well. According to Pontiac Advertising, Pontiac purchased an estimated “three billion, four hundred million reader impressions going into the home ... just through newspapers alone,” with ads appearing in 2500 US daily and weekly newspapers. They also ran “thirty-four pages” of ads in the Saturday Evening Post, with a circulation of 3 million, for a calculated 12 million ad views; twenty-one pages of advertising in Collier’s, with a readership of 10 million; twenty pages of ads in Time, aimed at half a million readers; thirteen pages to pitch Pontiacs as the “ideal second car” in the New Yorker, circulation 130 000 (“second car market” ads also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and Fortune); and print ads also appeared in The American Weekly, the largest-circulation weekly in the US at the time, at 5.5 million. Unusually (and expensively), American Weekly ads were also in “full colour – big, beautiful [and] arresting.” A “women’s appeal advertising” blitz placed ads in Good Housekeeping, “with its 2 million readers.” The “selling impressions” numbers are no doubt inflated, but even adding up the circulation totals yields impressive statistics. The film claims that the magazine campaign alone would reach 13 850 000 people for “365 million reader impressions.”

Based on a combination of the print ads plus Pontiac ads on 5000 billboards around the US, and radio commercials on NBC’s Red Network, the film boasts a total of “7 560 000 000 selling impressions” for the 1935 campaign alone. A similar film called Helping You Sell ⁵, produced in 1937 by the Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet, details similar extremely aggressive salesmanship and marketing. Although this particular film primarily shows the details of Chevrolet’s film-based ad campaign, it does mention print ads, paper catalogues showing all available Chevrolet models, dealership sales, flyers to be inserted into newspapers, and what appears to be a brief depiction of door-to-door car-selling procedure. Chevrolet’s 1937 filmed-materials strategy involved campaigns in schools, community organisations, inside industry (for commercial, industrial, and fleet sales), and in movie theatres.

Keep in mind that while they were mounting this enormous ad campaign to sell cars, these same players, General Motors, Greyhound, Hertz, Firestone Tire, and serial antitrust violator Standard Oil ⁶ among them, were also involved in actively removing alternatives -- buying up and systematically shutting down street and interurban rail systems all across North America. ⁷ Everyone profited from these transactions -- the automakers, the bus-builders, the road lobbyists, the tire companies, the owners and shareholders of municipal transit companies (who were, as the photo shows, compensated heavily in cash -- and sometimes other perquisites) -- everyone but the riding public and the large industry that made and serviced the electric rail coaches that were rapidly being replaced by automobiles, buses, and diesel locomotives. (General Motors had a very large freight business, and was a major supplier of diesel rail equipment and parts, and so was not afraid in the least to throw its weight around to ensure that railroads purchased its equipment. ⁸)

At one time, there had been a thriving market in resale streetcars and parts. As "Good Used Cars" notes, "In the 1950's, [Philadephia] bought forty ex-Kansas City Missouri [streetcars], and another fleet from St. Louis ... Eleven more ex-Kansas City cars came to Philadelphia, by way of Toronto, in 1976." ⁹ Toronto had been a major buyer of decommissioned streetcars, when decommissioned streetcars were available, since Toronto has managed to keep its streetcar culture intact since the inauguration of (horse-drawn) streetcar service in 1873. ¹⁰

University of Pennsylvania professor Vukan Vuchic, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation Engineering, puts some more numbers to the ever-mounting dollar figures involved: "The U.S. had 72,911 streetcars in service in 1917; by 1948, there were 17,911." ¹¹ What happened to those other fifty-five thousand streetcars?

You can see from the picture accompanying this essay what happened to some of them. These streetcars were soaked in kerosene and set alight ¹², some were hauled away, shredded, and sold for scrap, and others were sold and sent to cities with still-operating streetcar service. Still other transit companies merely towed the streetcars to out-of-the-way places and left them to rust. ¹³

Which leads, of course, to the obvious next question: How much exactly was all that streetcar/interurban rail rolling stock worth? Many of those streetcars and interurban rail cars were electrically powered (few moving parts and cheap to operate), in the first decade or so of their thirty- to forty-year operational lifespan, and a significant capital expenditure on the part of their former owners. Rebuilding existing streetcars and interurban cars was a common occurrence. In his article in Trains Classic, "What was it about the interurban?", transit historian William D. Middleton provides an excellent example accompanying a photograph taken in 1951:

Originally a Jewett Car Co. open trailer of 1916, [Bamberger Railroad] interurban 365 had been rebuilt more than once over its 30-plus years, emerging from a final 1946 rebuilding as a modernized, high-speed car good for a top speed of close to 75 mph. ¹⁴

Even assuming all else being equal (and they were a long way from, in fact) that represents a significant destruction of wealth, in classical economics terms.

How much money got burnt, shredded, melted, scrapped, dismantled, ditched, and dumped? Add it up. Between the ad campaigns, the secret backroom deals, and the destruction of tens of thousands of pieces of rolling stock, just in terms of gross wealth destruction, this was the great trillion-dollar swindle.

_______

¹ "Showroom of Automotive History: The Model T." The Henry Ford: America's Greatest History Attraction. 11 May 2005. The Henry Ford Museum. 5 Apr 2007 http://www.thehenryford.com/exhibits/showroom/1908/model.t.html.

² Black, Edwin. Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. First. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006 (pp. 1-2).

³ See: “GM - Corporate Info - History - 1920.” GM Cars - General Motors Corporate Website. General Motors Corporation. Accessed April 4, 2007 http://www.gm.com/company/corp_info/history/gmhis1920.html, and

Doyle, Jack. Taken For a Ride: Detroit's big three and the politics of pollution. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000, and

Mintz, Morton. “GM Still Faces Monopoly Suit.” Washington Post 24 May 1974. Cited in Doyle, 2000, and

Snell, Bradford C. “American Ground Transport” Part 4A of Hearings in S. 1167, The Industrial Reorganization Act, before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, 1974.

Snell, Bradford C. “The StreetCar Conspiracy: How General Motors Deliberately Destroyed Public Transit.” TomPaine.com 10 Sep 2001. Accessed 1 July 2006 http://www.lovearth.net/gmdeliberatelydestroyed.htm. (Originally at
http://www.tompaine.com/history/2001/09/10/index.html.)

Snell, Bradford C. Telephone/e-mail interview (with Rustin Wright). 16 Mar 2006.

⁴ Helping You Sell. Film. Jam Handy Organization, 1937. Accessed 6 April 2007, Archive.org. http://www.archive.org/details/HelpingY1937.

⁵ Pontiac Advertising. Film. 1935. General Motors Corporation (?) Accessed 6 April, 2007, Archive.org http://www.archive.org/details/1935PontiacA.

⁶ Bowen, John, editor. “STANDARD OIL CO. v. U. S. 221 US 1.” Supreme Court Antitrust Debates. 12 Nov 1997. Ripon College. Accessed 27 May 2006 (now at archive.org) http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/bowenj/antitrust/STDOILNJ.htm, and

“Standard ogre.” The Economist Millennium issue 23 Dec 1999. Accessed 4 April 2007 href="http://www.economist.com/diversions/millennium/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=347251.

⁷ idem Snell, "American Ground Transport"

⁸ idem Snell, "American Ground Transport," and

"Is EMD a Monopoly?." Trains (magazine) June 1961: 6, 11.

“U.S. Supreme Court, UNITED STATES V. NATIONAL CITY LINES , 334 U.S. 573 (1948), 334 U.S. 573, UNITED STATES v. NATIONAL CITY LINES, Inc., et al. No. 544.” FindLaw for Legal Professionals. FindLaw. 26 May 2006 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=334&invol=573 (link dead).

⁹ Szylagi, Mike. "Philadelphia Trolley Tracks: Good Used PCC Cars." Philadelphia Trolley Tracks. 30 Nov 2003. Accessed 5 Apr 2007. http://www.phillytrolley.org/tracks4.html.

¹⁰ Wyatt, David. "History of Regional Transit in Toronto, Ontario." David Anthony Wyatt, BSc.. 2 Feb 2007. University of Manitoba. Accessed 6 Apr 2007 http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wyatt/alltime/toronto-suburbs-on.html.

¹¹ "Streetcars Derailed Canada Escaped Plot That Scuttled US Transit." Toronto Star 27 June 1999, Sunday 1: Context.

¹² Taken For A Ride. Dir. Jim Klein and Martha Olson. Videocassette. New Day Films, 1996.

(This film actually shows footage of streetcars being burnt in Philadelphia.)

and idem, Black, Edwin. Internal Combustion (photographic plates showing burning of streetcars in Newark and Minneapolis).

¹³ "How a Fleet of Vintage Streetcars Became Stranded in the Snows of Lake Tahoe." [Weblog Telstar Logistics] 22 Mar 2007. Telstar Logistics. 6 Apr 2007 http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/2007/03/the_lost_street.html.

¹⁴ Middleton, William D.. "What was it about the interurban?." Trains Classic 1999: 82-92.

Ephemera

2007-04-01T22:13:00.000-04:00

Historians, as a general rule, are crazy. People, on the other hand, have a disturbing tendency to make historians crazier, simply by being...well, people.

Let me tell you about it.

One of the reasons I feel so fortunate in my practice as a historian, such as it is, is that I have a significant background in literature. Believe it or not, literature really helps to fill in the gaps in the historical record, particularly things like realistic novels, comedies of manners, and social satires. More often than not, works of fiction like these have accurate (confirmably from the evidence) descriptions of the popular culture at the time they were written.

As much as young fogies like me (if I weren't a democratic socialist, I'd definitely be the kind of person who gripes about the "good old days," and how bad the good old days really were) would like to ignore it (*coughBritneySpearsMarkWahlbergandTimeMagazinecough*), the sad fact of the matter is, popular culture goes a long way towards explaining history.

And there's the flaw. We know a fair bit about what a lot of ancient cultures thought was important, but we know very little about the day-to-day lives of ordinary people in those cultures. It's pretty easy to figure out what the kings and emperors, princes and princesses and potentates were doing, but it's harder to figure out what the common person was doing (and about tenfold if the common person in question was a female common person).

This is what's so interesting about historical archives like The Crypt of Civilization, which contains among its relatively useless items some actually interesting things, like "1 package Butterick dress patterns," various toys and household items, and numerous samples of synthetic products that aren't, as far as I can tell, even made anymore (a mere 67 years later). Because it's accessible, the Prelinger Archive at Archive.org is even more interesting.

Both of these collections house significant amounts of ephemera -- stuff that appears and vanishes quickly, and isn't generally kept, things like dress patterns and printed advertisements and television commercials.

With that in mind, I'd like to make a few suggestions. If anyone reading this is ever planning on building a time capsule, here are some things you should be thinking about putting in:

maps (yes, they go out of date quickly; that's the point!)
transit and train schedules
menus
recipes
general-interest magazines and similar media (a copy of TV Guide!!)
television commercials
an ATM receipt
posters, flyers, and other promotional items, particularly political ones
articles of clothing
faddish products of the time

With any luck, future archaeologists and historians will have a fairly easy time documenting this era, but it never hurts to want to give them some help.

The First (Inter)National Bank of...Wal-Mart?!

2007-03-26T12:25:00.000-04:00

Hat tip to Michael McLarney and John Caulfield at HARDLINES, the Canadian trade newsletter for the lumber and building industry, for alerting me to this story.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Associated Press,

After years of facing resolute resistance, Wal-Mart Stores on Friday gave up on trying to open its own bank.

Community bankers and union activists cheered Wal-Mart's decision, and took credit for making the world's largest retailer withdraw its application to operate an industrial loan company, a type of bank that dozens of other commercial companies already own.

An industrial loan company (ILC) is a limited-service private bank run by a corporation, usually for the purpose of extending credit services and processing credit transactions for clients. Probably the earliest and most well-known (notorious) example of an ILC is GMAC, General Motors' financial services division, that provides financing and credit services to General Motors car-buyers. Other large companies that operate ILCs are General Electric, Target, American Express, and Harley-Davidson.

Partially in response to the actions of a broad coalition of grassroots activists, and partially in response to a very strongly-worded letter from Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH-11), Wal-Mart withdrew its application. (The recent Bush-appointee head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair, called the withdrawl a "wise choice.") Republican Representative Paul Gillmor (R-OH-5) released an e-mail in support of the bid to make Wal-Mart withdraw, saying that Wal-Mart evinced "a pattern of deception and dishonesty" in its business practices.

Wal-Mart was apparently looking to save money, by eliminating the fraction-of-a-cent transaction fees it pays to third-party financial services institutions for processing financial and credit transactions.

This raises the question of why exactly it would be bad for Wal-Mart to have its own ILC, even though many other large corporations (including corporate behemoths like GE and GM) operate them already. The answer may lie in why, on January 31, the FDIC extended its moratorium on granting ILC charters to nonfinancial institutions (such as giant retail companies), and why Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA-5) and Paul Gillmor have tabled a bill* to "[block] commercial acquisitions or formations of ILCs after June 1, 2006, [bar] new activities by commercially-owned ILCs chartered between October 2003 and June 2006, and [make] the FDIC the consolidated supervisor for all ILC holding companies."

According to Terry Jorde, spokesperson for the Independent Community Bankers of America (quoted in the Illinois Business Journal),

"Banks currently play a central role in the payment system," she said. "While companies other than banks may help stores and banks process check and card transactions, only banks can actually transfer funds from one party to another, which is known as settlement. Federal supervisors make sure that banks follow stringent policies and procedures to manage the risks involved in this process. The Wal-Mart Bank would process more than $170 billion per year, and this does not include the transfer of funds to Wal-Mart suppliers."

Jorde adds that Wal-Mart would have to balance its responsibilities as a federally insured bank with the liquidity and profit-motivated business demands of its owner.

"If the Wal-Mart Bank fails to timely settle payment transactions, it could harm thousands of other financial institutions and their customers," Jorde said. "Since the owners of industrial loan companies are exempt from Federal Reserve oversight, there is weakened regulatory protection to effectively guard against this abuse."

Wal-Mart, of course, says that it intends its ILC solely for processing credit/debit card and cheque transactions in its US stores...

...but that assumes that one can trust Wal-Mart, especially after its ruthless history as a vigourous practitioner of the strategy Microsoft calls "embrace and extend." I submit to you the following data point as evidence of an ulterior motive:

As reported in the super-conservative National Post:

Wal-Mart Canada Corp. is looking to expand into the financial services business, a potentially lucrative growth area ... The big-box giant recently hired Trudy Fahie as vice-president of financial services at Wal-Mart Canada, a role created for assessing the retailer's options in the sector. Ms. Fahie is the former vice-president of financial services for American Express Canada.

"We will be looking at a range of possible financial services to enhance our offering to our customers," Andrew Pelletier, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Canada, confirmed yesterday, calling the next six months to a year an "exploratory" period. "It's too early to speculate on what those services will be at this point."

(Note to Canadians: Now's the time to petition *sigh* the Harper government for something like the Gillmor-Frank bill.)

Reading these articles, it becomes clear that Wal-Mart is far, far from being the only offender in this area. Nonetheless, they have more clout than most of the rest of their cohort combined (GE and GM are exceptions). Giant corporations not only want you to spend your money with them, they're also looking for an 'in' to manage your money for you. Much as I distrust the motivations of banks in general, I must admit they have a point: Too much centralisation in the hands of any industry, especially the financial industry, is bad. It represents a complete horizontal and vertical integration of the corporation with its suppliers and its consumers. And that is anticompetitive and downright anticapitalist.

____

* I am given to understand that Americans use "table" in the bill sense slightly differently from Canadians; in this sense, I mean submit it for discussion and consideration.

Interrobang's Quick Guide to Not Making an Ass of Yourself on the Internet

2007-03-24T17:52:00.000-04:00

One of the great strengths of the internet, and also one of its great weaknesses, is that it's an interactive, largely text-based medium. That said, there are a lot of people out there on Teh Intarwebs who don't seem to understand one of the most basic principles of text-based, interactive communication, which we may sum up briefly in Grade III aphorism fashion, and then expand upon anon:

Neatness Counts

What constitutes "neatness" in this case? Well, being "neat" would mean paying attention to how your words represent you. When you're working in a text medium, your words are all anyone has on which to evaluate you, so the way you present yourself really does matter.

So here are a few basic tips on how not to make yourself look like an ass on the internet. Most of my readers probably already know this stuff, but maybe they can pass it on to other people and make all of our lives just a bit easier.

Please observe standard typographical and formatting conventions, as much as is possible. It's very hard to take you seriously as a commenter if your posts do not contain any punctuation, capitals, or paragraph breaks, or contrastively, if your posts consist of ALL CAPS broken up by multiple strings of several exclamation points apiece.

Special bonus aggravation: People who use apostrophes in plurals. Please don't do this. It's wrong. "Apple's" does not mean "more than one apple," it means "belonging to the apple," as in "the apple's stem is brown."

Learn some basic HTML formatting tags. Seriously, these things aren't hard, no harder, at any rate, than learning how to write basic mathematical symbols (like + and =), and they can make a real difference in the readability of a comment. All HTML tags are enclosed in angle brackets: < and >*. Most of them come in pairs, which is why it's important to "close" your "tags," as you might have seen people say on the web. The way you indicate a closed tag is with a / inside the second tag.

To make a hyperlink, you type:

<a href="http://www.yourlinkhere.com">Your link text here</a>

refers

bold

italics

bold text

italic text

If you don't know how to spell something, look it up before commenting. Google is very good at this; just Google the term you're not sure how to spell, and it'll likely tell you the correct spelling ("Did you mean...?"). You can also use something like schoolr, which lets you do a Google, Wikipedia, dictionary, thesaurus, acronym, Urban Dictionary, encyclopedia, and book summary search, as well as providing handy links to a citation builder, a text translator, and a unit converter. You can also use Google to find the definition of the term by typing

define:term

in the Google search window, where "term" is whatever word you're looking to have defined.
If you don't know what a word means, don't use it. This one really gets my goat, since I see these ones all the time. They're usually in the ranks of commonly confused words, but with some of these words, people ought to know better. For instance:

These Pairs Are Not The Same Word,
So Stop Using Them That Way

tenet Noun. A belief, dogma, or doctrine. Commonly used in reference to religion.
tenant Noun. A renter or occupant.

If you start telling me about the "tenants" of a religion, I'm going to tune you out, unless of course someone actually did put their religion up for rent...

conscience Noun. An ethical or moral sense of direction, particularly in discerning right from wrong, and inflicting guilt or satisfaction from within.
conscious Adjective. Aware or awake; intentional (as in "a conscious effort").

populous Adjective. Having a large population. ("Before the two US invasions, Baghdad was a populous city.")
populace Noun. Inhabitants, dwellers, or citizens. ("The town's populace was up in arms over the city council decision to subsidise a new Wal-Mart Supercentre.")

accept Verb. To receive.
except Verb. Exclude, demur, or Preposition. But, other than. ("Everyone accepted the award except John, who excepted himself on religious grounds.")

lose Verb. To be defeated, to misplace (something).
loose Adjective. Not tight. Also a verb meaning to set something free ("Loose the hounds!")

Special Bonus Vocabulary Nitpicks: The idiom "rein in" should never be spelt "reign," as it refers to the practice of an equestrian using the reins to put a check on the horse's behaviour.

Likewise, the idiom "toe the line" should never be spelt "tow," since the metaphor in question refers to walking along a "line" or some kind of boundary (metaphorical or otherwise), on the other side of which is impermissible behaviour. It does not refer to hauling things around by means of a rope or a trailer hitch, and is probably related to the concept of "being on the straight and narrow."

Context is important. Just as it's kind of rude to come onto a blog known for its scholarly tone and thoughtful comments and post something along the lines of "ORLY? U SUCK LOLOLOL!!!1," it's also kind of impolite to come onto a vernacular blog and post a long, pedantic comment. (This being my blog, I can do whatever the hell I want.) Make sure you accurately judge the community in any online forum before you begin posting, and it's actually a good idea to lurk for a while first.

Preview is your friend. I don't really have to say more than that, do I?

Following these tips will help you at least not look like an ass on the internet, since otherwise we have little to go on. The personality part of not being an ass is entirely up to you.

_____________
* In order to type those in an HTML-based form, I had to type & lt ; and & gt ; (without the spaces), where the "&--;" sequence is a standard HTML "escape" character, that tells your web browser to read what's between them as a command and not just as text, and where "lt" and "gt" stand for "less than" and "greater than." Other interesting ones are & trade ;, which makes the ™ symbol, and & copy ;, which makes the © symbol.

Interview Memed

2007-03-18T16:03:00.000-04:00

Eli from MultiMedium posted an opt-in interview meme. How it works is, you leave a comment and ask me to interview you, and I ask you five questions. You then post them and your answers on your blog, and away we go. So here are the five questions Eli asked me, in blue:

Interrobang (In)FAQ

1) Why Interrobang for a handle?

Ages ago, and by "ages," I mean about ten years ago now (woah), I got my own Slashdot account. Knowing Slashdot, I had to have a sufficiently geeky, gender-neutral handle. Since I'm not a coder (I'm a coder's symbiont), a lot of the usual Slashdotiana didn't apply to me. So I chose the name of an obscurely funky newfangled punctuation mark. The rest is history -- about ten years' worth.

2) Describe your dream vacation.

I'm currently avaricious to go to England and meet up (again) with someone special, but I'm also set on the idea of going to Eilat in Israel and staying at the Dan Eilat Hotel (I dig that swimming pool), hanging out with whichever of my friends wants to show up, and speaking some French, since I'm given to understand that many French-speaking people go to Eilat. Maybe I can pass myself off as a French Jew... (*snerk* With my Quebecoise accent?! Not bloody likely.) And yes, I'm precisely perverse enough to want to to go Israel and speak French. I'll probably speak some Hebrew too, but if I have to operate in a language other than English, French is a good safe fallback for me, especially for stuff like dealing with my massive, catastrophic food allergies.

3) Describe your dream job.

I'm pretty much doing it. I'm a consulting technical writer, and I currently work for a small software company, writing help files and doing a smidge of QA/User Acceptance Testing.

4) What is the biggest or best difference between Canada and the U.S. (aside from not having a homicidal maniac in charge)?

Don't be too sure Harper isn't a homicidal maniac; he probably just hides it better than Bush does. Anyway, I'd have to say the biggest single difference is our attitude towards government. Americans seem to have a sort of willful blindness against the actual nuts-and-bolts functioning of government, insisting that the government doesn't actually do anything for anyone (many of them seem to have arrived at this belief because they think the government passes bad laws, despite legislation and administration being two almost completely separate functions of government, often handled by completely different types of government, that is, municipal or state versus federal, for instance). Canadians, on the other hand, not only believe that the government does things (and beneficial things at that), but expects the government to fix things that go wrong at a societal level.

One can see the reflections of this differing set of beliefs in every aspect of society, from the presence or absence of sidewalks, land allocation at the municipal level, public transit, and so on, to healthcare and social assistance programmes, to the differing levels of public participation (voter turnout).

5) What is your favorite material possession?

Definitely my Toshiba Tecra 9100 laptop, Isaac, on which I am writing this. (All my computers have names; we're heavily networked here Chez Geek.)

Thanks very much to Eli for interviewing me.

_____
Note: Edited to delink the photograph of the Eilat Dan hotel, on the grounds that I was generating traffic static.

Transit City: Someone Was Listening to Me

2007-03-17T22:43:00.000-04:00

It's official. I am a transit prophet. As I wrote in "Built for Riders: Operations, Efficiency, and Streetcars,"

Dedicated trackage functions in streetcar systems two ways – either it runs in the street in its own separate lane, or else it runs separately from the roadway, typically over long distances, as in interurban streetcar lines. In particular, Toronto (where streetcars have remained continually in service for over a century), has several routes operating partially on private rights-of-way, usually in the median of a street and separated by raised curbs. Most of these private rights-of-way are newly established (and a political battle continues as of this writing over private right-of-way for streetcars on St. Clair Ave.), but one street, the Queensway, has featured private streetcar right-of-way since 1957. This feature keeps the streetcars (and streetcar riders) out of the way of automobiles, and automobiles out of the way of streetcars.

Giving streetcars their own private rights-of-way also allows for higher-speed service. In some areas, historically, electric interurban rail would run at speeds of 60-80 mph, or 100-130 kph, or approximately the speed of normal Canadian 400-series highway traffic (the speed limit is 100 kph, but most people drive ~120 kph). That is significantly faster than the average morning/evening commute down the "Don Valley Parking Lot".

So imagine my joy, delight, and moistness of undergarments when Spacing Wire ran this overview of the new Transit City plan in Toronto, which includes an entire new streetcar (they call it "light rail" these days, shhh...) system mostly running on private rights-of-way. (Attention TTC planners: Right of way at rail-road crossings is very, very, like tres important, too, and if you can finagle right of way in street traffic, I believe I will move to Toronto to start the First Church of Saint Planner of Toronto Transit Commission. Jus' sayin'.)

Other particularly scrummy elements of the plan include:

a proposed 122.4 km of new lines (this blows my rather modest "200 by 2010" proposal out of the water);

a number of phases of the plan already approved or in the environmental assessment stage;

good statistics on the actual ridership of the current TTC lines these new routes would supplant (in the tens of millions of trips per year on average -- and everyone says nobody likes public transit), and

a comprehensive web of service running from the extreme west end of the city to the east, and the same north to south.

This plan reads like a dream, and should be imitated in any city of any size across North America. Whitebreadville would be no exception. The only difficulty will be getting the funding. Maybe a comprehensive "Transit Cities" plan for every burg in Soviet Canuckistan over 150 000 people would be something they could do with those huge governmental surpluses; it's certainly more productive (in terms of real wealth generation) than pouring it into debt reduction, or, ghu help us, Afghanistan...

________________

Special Non-Streetcar Multimedia Bonus: From time to time I've been posting links on here to music I like, and I've got a new drug -- Mata Hari by Ofra Haza. (A statement on how depressing the world is: Ofra Haza is dead and Britney Spears is famous. And yes, she sounded like that live; I've heard raw recordings. You can contrast with Dupatta by Hadiqa Kiani, if you like... ("Hadiqa Kiani is the Islamic Ofra Haza," she says, and everyone gets offended... *snerk* )

Canadian Heroes You've Never Heard Of, Part 1

2007-03-12T22:12:00.000-04:00

Vince Coleman was a telegraph operator and train dispatcher in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the early years of the 20th Century. On the morning of December 6, 1917, he witnessed a ship on fire, drifting towards Pier 6 in downtown Halifax. A sailor ashore from the ship warned that the ship, the Mont Blanc, was full of explosives. Coleman realised that some hundreds of people (some accounts say 300, others 700) aboard inbound trains were en route to Halifax and went back into the dispatch office to send a Morse code message down the line. The message he sent was "Stop trains. Munition ship on fire. Making for Pier 6. Goodbye."

It was the last thing he ever did.

Just before 9:05AM, the Mont Blanc exploded, the largest man-made explosion ever, prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth (across the harbour) were flattened. Approximately 2000 people were killed and another 9000 seriously injured. The blast was felt 126km away.

Wikipedia article on the Halifax Explosion
Wikipedia article on Vince Coleman
Heritage Minute on Vince Coleman
CBC site on the Halifax Explosion

______

In 1958, Maurice Ruddick was a miner in the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia. Springhill was notorious for its dangerous coal mines; the entire area is the ideal location for mine disasters, since the unstable, friable rock contains vast quantities of high-quality, yet extremely gassy and dusty, coal. (The infamous Westray mine disaster that claimed 26 miners' lives in 1992 happened not far away in Pictou County.) There had already been two mining disasters in Springhill by 1958, a terrible fire on February 21, 1891 that killed 125 miners, and a coal dust explosion on November 1, 1956.

On October 23, 1958, there would be a third and final mine disaster in Springhill. The mines would be closed for good afterward.

At 8:06PM, an enormous "bump"* collapsed the three working faces and the ends of the four mine levels nearest the working faces. One hundred and seventy four men were in the mine at the time, including Maurice Ruddick. Seventy four of those men died in the incident, while a hundred made it out alive.

On November 1, 1958, a draegerman walking past a ventilation pipe heard singing drifting out of the mine. The community mounted yet another rescue attempt, and finally, six more miners, including Maurice Ruddick, were brought out of the mine. Ruddick, who had a reputation around town for singing, had helped keep the men alive and in good spirits by getting them to sing hymns.

The last group of men rescued from the mine were instant celebrities across Canada and into the United States. However, the crest of good wishes soon turned to a political turmoil when the Governor of Georgia invited the miners on a luxury holiday to Jeckyll Island. According to histori.ca, "The most telling tale of tribute came from the Governor of the state of Georgia. He generously invited the nineteen survivors to vacation at one of his state's luxurious resorts, usually reserved for millionaires. When the Governor discovered that one of the miners was black, he explained that while Ruddick was still invited, he would have to be segregated from the others. 'It is the law here that Negroes must be separate,' said the Governor.

When the miners heard this, they were reluctant to accept the offer. 'There was no segregation down that hole, and there's none in this group,' said one miner. But Ruddick agreed to go on the Governor's terms, knowing how much the others really wanted the vacation."

Maurice Ruddick always modestly downplayed his role in saving his and his colleagues' lives, and died in near-obscurity in 1988.

Eyewitness account of the 1958 Bump from Dr. Arnold Burden
History Minute on Maurice Ruddick
Wikipedia article on the Springhill Mine Disasters

______

* According to Illustrated Mining Terms, a bump is "a violent dislocation of the mine workings which is attributed to severe stresses in the rock surrounding the workings."

Tap That Talent Pool, Already: Disability, Entrepreneurship, and Social Obstacles

2007-02-27T17:55:00.000-05:00

"This is what the ramen was for!" exclaimed my friend Rustin, as he pondered the very successful re-launch of his business. His company, Reed&Wright, had been left a metaphorical smoking ruin much in the same way as Rustin's life, health, dwelling, and property had been left a literal smoking ruin after a devastating apartment fire back in 2004. Besides losing his business and the majority of his possessions (what didn't get ruined by the fire or the smoke got ruined by sitting around in an inch of water for months afterward), Rustin sustained structural second-degree burns over a large portion of his body, a serious, life-threatening intestinal infection (you don't want to know the details, trust me), and lost most of the use of his left arm. His arm is recovering, slowly, but the medical professionals estimate that the damaged nerves repair themselves at a rate of about a half-millimetre a month, so he has a long, long recovery ahead of him still.

Nevertheless, because he is a self-described "driven motherfucker," he has managed to produce this, and this, and has an entire line of products in the works.* (Disclosure: A work which encompasses the information from Streetcar Suburbs and Trolleytrack Towns and Built For Riders is among them.) He is well on his way to having a successful small specialty publishing company.

Me, I'm also a disabled entrepreneur. (And I'm looking for more of you!) I went a slightly different route and got a government grant from the Canadian federal government for entrepreneurs with disabilities, and now I have a moderately successful microbusiness. It's keeping me alive and in groceries and roof, at least. I also know another disabled entrepreneur; I'll call him Theo, although that isn't his name. Theo is a consultant like me, albeit in a different field. He's missing a leg and uses a wheelchair.

While I realise that the plural of anecdote is not "data," one common experience the three of us have had is coming to entrepreneurship out of a desire to walk away from a system (the traditional employment system) that was not, we felt, giving us a fair break and recognising our talents and skills. In my experience, there are very many disabled entrepreneurs who go into business for themselves because they've felt shut out of traditional employment opportunities and undervalued in the workplace. For us, starting our own businesses and relating to potential employers as service-providing contractors rather than as job seekers changes the power dynamic dramatically and in our favour, especially if we already have a proven track record of successful job performance. (I built up a lot of my resume doing telecommuting jobs, the ultimate blind audition, because most of my previous clients had no idea what I looked like or that I was handicapped. I was the perfect author function; for all my clients knew, I could have been a cat with opposeable thumbs. But I could do the job, and that was what was important.)

The Power Dynamic: For us, the important part was to be able to shift the discourse away from being a petitioner (so to speak) to being an offerer. In terms of optics, it makes all the difference. As a job seeker, you are already in a subordinate position to the people who have the job on offer. If you therefore seem in any way weak or desperate, you are at a severe disadvantage. If you seem weak or desperate because of your very nature, as I've written about before, you are even worse off. Being unable to perform the appropriate look and feel on demand for corporations who are currently obsessed with "fit" (which, in my experience, is a sort of shorthand for "conformity to the corporate norm") because of your nature is a real drawback on the job-seeking market. However, if you can become an offerer of services, you are suddenly on a much more equal footing with potential employers, and the level of professionalism with which you are likely to be treated rises accordingly.

All is not lost for those who would rather not eat ramen while waiting (interminably!) for their embryonic startups to start having positive cashflow. A lot of corporations are coming to realise that there actually is a significant business case for hiring individuals with disabilities, which is a step in the right direction. A group in British Columbia, WorkAble Solutions, has published a research report and an employer handbook on the subject.** WorkAble Solutions' summary of the business case is as follows:

Employers need skilled workers

Persons with disabilities are a largely untapped human resource available to meet today’s growing labour and skill shortages

Persons with disabilities are a large, growing consumer market.

I am personally skeptical of the claim that there are "growing labour and skill shortages," particularly in light of the recent local demise of mandatory retirement laws, although I am hearing this claim repeated over and over again by HR professionals of my acquaintance (many). Cynical me, I suspect that their idea of a "labour shortage" means that the unemployment rate and the cost of labour is such that most employers no longer receive hundreds of resumes for one position and may have to -- horrors! -- select from a pool of merely some tens of candidates. Which is how it should be, really. I think a lot of the current crop of HR people have gotten so used to an "employers' market" that it makes them nervous when the tables are turned such that job-seekers actually have a little power.

I would also add to that list that people are more likely to patronise a firm they feel looks like them and their community, which is where my next point comes up. Unlike me, both my friends Rustin and Theo came to their disabilities late in life. As the population in general gets older, and as medical science turns what once might have been fatal or severely debilitating medical problems into manageable conditions, the proportion of disabled people to the overall workforce is only going to increase. A bias against disabled people in the workplace is only getting more irrational by the moment. There may in fact be significant improvements (finally!) in prospects for disabled people to have stable, meaningful work in the fields in which they were trained, particularly in future. (I'm also cynical enough to suggest that now that disability issues are becoming important to those penultimate power brokers, the Baby Boomers, they're starting to get some attention and remediation.)

Of course, rosy future prospects don't translate into paid bills now, which is something I think a lot of rights activists in general forget (especially when criticising others for choices they've made). Entrepreneurship is one of the ways to bridge that gap. Of course, it's not for everyone. (Not everyone likes ramen.) The hours are long, it requires a lot of work, patience, persistence, tenacity, and, as Rustin puts it, "complete shamelessness helps." The life of a small-business owner or a consultant may not be ideal, but it beats yet another "We received many applications from extremely qualified candidates...we wish you great success with your future career" letter in the mail.

_______

* Obligatory Bleg: Feel free to buy posters. I don't make any money from the sale, but Rustin does, and they're $4US, cheap at twice the price. They look damn good in those pictures, and nicer in real life, too.

** Because of insider information, I know that more material like this is forthcoming from other groups.

John Stuart Mill Was Right

2007-02-24T01:21:00.000-05:00

He said, "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative" (click for larger view, which is really important in this case).

"Unexplained silliness" my rosy pink behind...

The Bravest Women in Iraq

2007-02-22T15:40:00.000-05:00

Here's an enraging story that I haven't yet heard the mainstream North American media pick up on:

Amid the Iraqi Government's attempts to stop the spiral of violence, comes the story of 20-year-old Sabrine Janabi - a story that threatens those very efforts to improve the security situation.

The woman, whose identity has not been confirmed, told Al Jazeera Arabic television that Iraqi police raided her house in western Baghdad on Sunday, while her husband was away.

She said the officers accused her of providing food to Sunni fighters, before taking her to a police facility. She then alleges she was raped by three officers.

I first heard of this from Riverbend, who gives a detailed account of the original Al Jazeera broadcast, including screenshots.

A website I was on yesterday had a quotation, "If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities," and I think that's about the most accurate summation of the problem here. The US government believed some patent absurdities enough to start the whole conflagration. Enter atrocities.

I find it doubly heartbreaking to see Riverbend write

I look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.

I'm pretty enraged. I'm perhaps more enraged about this case than I am about the tiresomely usual case in which a woman in North America comes forward claiming to have been raped, and is roundly disbelieved, mocked, shamed, and degraded. It's worse in this case because this isn't just another simple case of the Patriarchy At Work; it's also complicated by the (admittedly patriarchal) exercise of American supremacy in the world. The conditions for atrocities like this one (and the ones at Abu Ghraib, and so on) would not exist had the US not irrationally decided they needed (for whatever twisted reasons) to take out Saddam Hussein. I'm more angry about this case than the business-as-usual story in North America because it's obvious here that Iraqi women are losing their agency, autonomy, and humanity in great leaps and bounds every day.

I'm even more angry about this case than the business-as-usual story in North America because, as a Canadian citizen whose government isn't even involved, and who cannot vote in US elections nor petition US politicians seeking redress on behalf of others (and expect to be listened to), there's next to nothing I can do about it.

A Short Tangential Aside: This, and the case of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, for whose rape and murder a US soldier has been sentenced to 90 years in prison, and two others may face execution, are ample refutations of the tedious argument that feminists should support the "humanitarian intervention" in Iraq on the grounds that it's beneficial to women. Short course: Wars are never good for women and other human beings; invasions even less so. It's really that simple. (Why am I reminded so much of the beginning of the War of 1812-14, where the US rhetoric was all about how they should invade Canada to free us from the wicked tyrant-king? Then some part or other of their fighting force decided that the best way to liberate the citizens of Chatham, Ontario, from the wicked tyrant-king would be to slaughter the entire population of the village, loot what they could carry, and burn the rest. Why am I reminded so much? Because the stories themselves just never change.)

"Enraged" is a good word. Also "disgusted" and "appalled."

Eight Hundred Sixty Seven Million Dollars

2007-02-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

...is 17% of the current $51 billion Employment Insurance surplus in Canada.

17% of Canadians who pay into Employment Insurance are never able to collect it, because they work too few hours per year to qualify. According to Service Canada,

Most people will need between 420 and 700 insurable hours of work in their qualifying period to qualify, depending on the unemployment rate in their region at the time of filing their claim for benefits. ... [I]f you are living in one of the 23 participating economic regions, you could qualify for regular benefits with a minimum of 840 hours instead of 910 hours.

When you show that you have at least 490 hours related to employment in the labour force during the labour force attachment period you will need between 420 and 700 insurable hours to qualify for regular benefits. Otherwise, you will need a minimum of 910 hours to qualify regular benefits. In some instances, a minimum of 910 hours in the qualifying period may be needed to qualify.

Most of the workers who do not meet the cutoff are low-income women, who often have short-term, temporary jobs, and are exactly the kinds of people a rationally-designed (un)employment insurance system would benefit most.

Under Brian Mulroney in 1990, and then again in 1994 and 1997 under Jean Chretien, it became progressively harder and harder to collect EI. Now, the federal government has a $51B surplus in the fund reserved for Employment Insurance payouts, and has been posting billion-plus dollar general funds surpluses since 1997/8.

That's even despite dispiriting news such as this reported (in an oddly right-wingily celebratory sort of way) by Statscan:

Federal government revenue fell to $190 billion in 2002/03, down from $192 billion in 2001/02. This second straight decline was due in part to a drop in personal income taxes, explained largely by weakness in the stock market. As well, corporate income taxes dropped, reflecting a weak profit performance in the previous year.

At the same time, federal government expenditures decreased, albeit marginally, from $185 billion in 2001/02 to $184 billion in 2002/03.

So, personal income taxes are down, the politicians are handing out tax cuts left and right (mostly right), corporate income taxes are down (and if anyone thinks that's because of "weak profit performance" instead of the Liberals' "business friendly" attitudes, I have a tower in Toronto I'd like to sell you, cheap), and so have government revenues.

Meanwhile, so has the national debt as a percentage of government spending, " from a high of 33 cents of every dollar of revenue collected by the federal government in 1995/96 down to 19 cents in 2001/02."

Yet we're still directing vast amounts of money into "debt reduction" (as if, at this time, with one of the healthiest economies in the world, we need to do any more debt reduction) and tax cuts, while starving beneficial social services because the benevolent bureaucrats in Ottawa would rather sit on a $51B surplus than do something useful with it, like make sure it gets paid out to its supposed beneficiaries.

That's approximately $160.00 of money from every Canadian, not just the percentage of the population currently paying into EI (which excludes children, retirees, the self-employed, people who don't work for other reasons, et cetera). Not that I'm saying every Canadian should get cut a cheque for $160. For one thing, a lot more people would get $160 out of it than ever paid into it. But that's not the point. $51B is an awe-inspiring amount of money.

For once in your stupid, useless, right-wing, University of Manitoba School of Economics lives, policy wonks in Ottawa, do the economic right thing and invest that $51B where it will do some good: a revamped EI programme that gives a fair break to women and minorities; infrastructure; healthcare and social services, and maybe some roses to go with the bread, too.

On the Outside, Looking In

2007-02-17T17:59:00.000-05:00

"God damn you to hell," writes Arthur Silber in a post that outlines precisely what the difference is between being a white, heterosexual man and a white, homosexual man. Small things can make all the difference in the world. I've written before about how I've noticed the intersection of class and race issues in my life, or maybe I should be more broad, yet more specific, and say "the intersection of class and prejudice," since (being so white I'm practically blue in a city where pale is the overwhelmingly dominant skin colour) I don't really get hit with the racism stick, but I certainly have had to deal with ablism, size discrimination, and other forms of looks-based discrimination.

In my experience, dealing with discrimination of that sort can be an overwhelming, self-reinforcing negative cycle. The more shut out of things you feel, the less inclined you are to even try to abide by nominal social norms, and the more severe the social penalties are that accrue against you. One of the most catastrophic social penalties (as opposed to financial penalties) that one encounters here in Whitebreadville is invisibility. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? I recommend you go off and read Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man to start with, and/or, if you're pressed for time, track down a copy of Robert Silverberg's story "To See the Invisible Man." (It's available in the "New Stories from The Twilight Zone" anthology, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, and it was also made into an episode of the New Twilight Zone in 1985).

Of course, since Canadians are relatively polite, while they're working hard to unsee you to keep from staring (because staring at someone would be rude), being effectively invisible may not keep you from getting served in a restaurant (as in Silverberg's story). It certainly won't keep you from getting arrested, but it may keep you from being able to ride public transit (as I learned to my dismay during my most outrageous punk-rocker phase when bus drivers would just not see me at bus stops, repeatedly), and it may cause people to try to walk through you on the street, which has happened a couple of times while I was wearing my scarf around my head*. It can also effectively prevent you from buying anything in certain stores, since the sales staff will actively ignore you. This latter can happen here in Whitebreadville even if you're merely insufficiently dressed-up enough for their taste. If you happen to be female, that's a fairly high standard, these days. Forget about going to the malls in the nice parts of town if you're wearing a pair of jeans with the bottom hems going raggy, unless of course you're also highly groomed and made-up and wearing a $200 pair of high-heeled boots and an expensive coat and outfit.

The choice is fairly simple: Conform to the narrow norm, or have other people's prejudices limit your options for you. This directive is particularly limiting when it's aimed at you in ways that you simply cannot conform to. Case in point, I was once given an extremely rude talking-to by a (white, male) recruiter on the grounds that the outfit in which I had shown up to a job interview was not "conservative" and "dressed up" enough for his liking. (I had turned up in a black business suit with a pink blouse on underneath, black and pink being a very hot colour combo at the time.) Most job interview dressing guides emphasise (even now) that female job-seekers should wear skirts, nylons, and high-heeled, closed-toe shoes.

Now how am I going to conform to that narrow norm? I cannot walk in high-heeled shoes (and most pumps won't stay on my feet because my feet are oddly shaped and two different sizes, and I have no heels to speak of**); I'm allergic to nylons (they turn my skin red and itchy), and, because of the way my disability makes my legs look, I'd draw more negative attention from wearing a skirt than wearing pants. (It is tangential but useful to point out that job-interview dressing advice aimed at women has not changed substantially since the mid-1960s.) However, dressing to accommodate my disability -- which is nothing I can control -- and, incidentally, to minimise other people's discomfort with the sight of my non-standard carcass still carries a social penalty.

As Silber says in another essay in the same series,

[P]ower flows from the primary cultural structures which embody and disperse that power.

This simple and inescapable fact has consequences that reverberate in countless ways through the lives we all lead. It affects the jobs we have, the jobs we believe we can hope to get, where we live, how well we are paid, how we socialize, the people whom we befriend, those whom we marry, and almost everything else. Let me be very clear: I am not endorsing some form of cultural determinism, nor am I saying that we all must inevitably be constrained by these choices. But our choices are not infinite, either; they are limited to a very significant degree by the particular culture in which we live at this particular time. When we seek to transcend the limitations imposed by our culture, such efforts require daunting work over a prolonged period of time -- and the costs, in numerous ways, can be enormous. For many people, those costs are prohibitively high.

In my case, here in Whitebreadville, the "primary cultural structures" are overwhelmingly white, affluent, professional, and socially conservative in certain ways, especially pertaining to gender differences.

Perform the gender of the affluent, white, professional, conservative woman, bitch, or else. (Performing affluence^ and conservatism are equally as hard as performing the prescribed notions of femininity, if you are not affluent or socially conservative, let alone cisgender.)

In this case, the "or else" is, among other things, "...you won't get that job," "...you'll get passed over for promotion," "...you'll wind up making tens of thousands of dollars less per year than people your age with your qualifications," "...people will talk about you to other people that you know" (in a city as disturbingly interconnected as Whitebreadville, where there often literally are only 2.5 degrees of separation between anyone and anyone else, that's no idle threat), "...you'll be invisible." And so on.

Social costs. Indeed. Daunting work, yep. It's a fucking daunting amount of work just trying to deal with people whose default gender settings for people with female bodies are either "conforms to narrow heteronormative standard" or "lesbian, and can be treated with contempt." It's a fucking daunting amount of work just dealing with people whose default settings for physical existence are "normal" (read: don't notice) and "plucky cripple," or "obvious physical disability = hidden mental disability." It's a fucking daunting amount of work dealing with people whose default socio-economic settings are "normal" (read: rich like me) and "white trash" or "social-services abusing minority" (the contrary to that is, of course, "one of the good ones," "a hard worker," "articulate," et cetera).

A Tangential Obama Aside: It really stung me when I read the commentary on "articulate"^^ being used as a racist codeword in the case of Barack Obama, since "articulate" is something that people frequently use to describe me. Now, I probably am more articulate than the average bear, but now I'm also wondering if I'm being contrastively described against those (ideational) other handicapped people, who presumably aren't articulate. (Which is funny as hell, since there are an awful lot of non-articulate able-bodied people out there, many of whom are in positions of nominal power, and who speak the godawful local rural dialect.)

Do I sound a bit angry? Bitter, perhaps? Maybe. Here's Silber again, from his essay We Are Not Freaks, after having described a case where school officials wanted to use a little boy with a slight deformity as a "case study" in teaching genetics and heredity (they couldn't use eye colour like everyone else in the world?): "If he allowed himself to experience fully the humiliation and the shame, and the immense rage to which he was fully entitled, and if he felt it for more than a couple of minutes, it would kill him. That's how the repression begins in the case of the innocent victim: it is the only way he can survive."

Damn right. Buy in, sell out? I own a collection of designer blouses, some very expensive, conservative suits, and a pair of flat, loafer-like "Republican shoes." Deal with it.

_______
*I feel bad for anyone who wears a hijab out of a sense of religious obligation or for any other reason here in Whitebreadville if idiot frat boys from the local university try to walk through them, too.

** The backs of my feet are essentially straight up and down.

^ The existence of Whitebreadvillian thrift stores where $200 designer blouses et al can be gotten for a pittance by the intrepid and lucky is a blessing, especially when one is a consultant and socially obligated to try to look rich when hustling for business, especially against the myriad female types here whose husbands have cushy, well-paying jobs and who consult, part-time, and then don't understand why you can't pony up $1200 to come to their "really beneficial" seminars, et cetera.

^^ I have nothing to say about this.

Objectively Pro-Robot

2007-02-11T16:53:00.000-05:00

Note: Understanding this entry requires having seen the video for Heck No! (I'll Never Listen to Techno) by Maldroid. You can come back; I'll wait.

I found this video quite randomly the other day while surfing around on YouTube, which is definitely my visual drug of choice (television is not the drug of the Nation of Interrobangs; I kicked my television habit over ten years ago now). I was intrigued by the title, since I actually like some techno, and I was wondering if it was going to be a TISM-style one-sided pissing match or not. Besides which, the video said it was stop-motion animation done on a Lite Brite, and anyone who's crazy enough to have a music video using stop-motion Lite Brite animation is obviously my kind of maniac. Shades of Lasse Gjertsen.

And here I'd thought subtle Juvenalian satire was dead.

I'm not sure if it was an accidental political statement or not, but the message of the song -- and the video even more so -- basically effectively takes the wind out of those "If the [foo]s win, then we'll have to [bar]" arguments. I'm generalising here, although the most common form of those these days is "If the terrorists win, then [some horrible thing]," although the right wing has been using this basic formulation for years. I remember quite vividly people like Phyllis "Ladies Against Women" Schlafly using this one in the form of "If the ERA passes, then everyone will have to share bathrooms!" (Oh, the howwow! Widdow Intewwobang gonna fwow up now...)

The rhetorical strategies haven't changed in 30 years, just the targets, or, as Mrs. Underwood the algebra teacher (from Stephen King's "Rage") put it, "So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change."

Naturally, half the commenters on YouTube, of the comments I read, missed it entirely. Nevertheless, you, dear intelligent readers, can answer the next wingnut fulmination about beheadings and Shari'a law and whatever else and the "terrorists winning" (whatever the hell "win" means in this context -- as though life is some kind of zero-sum sporting event) by saying, "Yeah, yeah, and if the robots win, we'll have to listen to techno." Be sure to have your digital camera ready to capture the reaction for posterity (and posting to YouTube).

Not Muslim, Just Cold

2007-02-09T22:31:00.000-05:00

It's been liquid nitrogen weather here in the microclimate. Wind chills have been down to -30C at times, which is an important number to note if you, like I, are an unperson and don't drive a car, and thereby are spending quite a bit of time out perambulating around in the Big Blue Deep-Freeze.

I must confess, I hate wearing winter hats. I have long, wavy-ish, fine, thin, flyaway hair (I'd cut it off but I've spent years growing it, and about four years ago I got tired of people mistaking me for a lesbian graduate student), and winter hats don't make it happy...especially when I'm going to work or something where I can't walk around wearing the damned thing, like at work.

Fortunately, I have the perfect solution. It doesn't squish my hair, or if it does, it doesn't squish it in that annoying "hat head" way, and it also doesn't seem to aggravate the flyaway tendencies, either.

I own several of what are vernacularly called "pashmina scarves" (only two of mine are actually pashmina/silk, one of which is actually from Nepal and I've had it since long before the things were cool), or "fringed shaylas" in other parts of the world. Instead of wearing them Ghurka-fashion, folded in thirds and wound around my neck, instead of a hat, I wear them shayla-fashion, around my head.

Since I don't actually own any hijab pins (note to self: hijab pins), I kind of have to make do with an artistic arrangement of folding and tucking. The collar of my winter coat helps a lot, especially since I can tuck the loose ends of the scarf in the collar of my coat. (This of course doesn't dispel the illusion any.)

And it's quite an interesting illusion. I've gotten quite a few looks, but nothing I can really categorise as hostile or anything, more curious. I actually must be kind of a spectacle, since "everyone knows" what "Muslims look like," and although we have a few Serbian or Croatian Muslims in town, there aren't that many (I'd wager the two largest Muslim groups are Iranians [who call themselves Persians] and Somalis), and I don't look like them, either, with my so-pale-it's-blue skin and my dusty-blue eyes. (I suffer at times from a terrible colour saturation level problem, and also sunburn.)

I actually learnt how to wind cloth around my head in interesting ways while I was active in the SCA and going to Pennsic regularly. When I had my hair dyed black (boosts my colour saturation), I found it was cooler to go around with my head wrapped in light-coloured cloth. Not only that, but a veil worn with a broad-brimmed straw hat would keep my face and neck from turning the colour of a freshly-boiled lobster, while avoiding massive slatherings with skin-stinging sunscreen. At winter SCA events, some of them held in sprawling halls so draughty you might well have been outside, I found that having my head veiled was actually quite warm, bonus points if I could, say, tuck the hem of my veil in the neck of my houppelande.

Earlier this summer, as well, I was doing research for a manuscript I wrote tentatively titled How to Dress Like a Muslim, and the idea of fringed shawls and veils (in the medieval, not niqab, sense) and stuff sort of fused in my head, and I wound up inventing my own way of draping a fringed shayla that has the look and feel of a hijab-style shayla but requires no pinning.

It's actually very similar to the technique shown here (scroll down to the bottom of the page, showing the mannequin in the brown shayla). Instead of just draping the shayla over my head at the front and then creasing it at the sides, though, I tuck it behind my ears, then bring the folds up from behind and over my ears. I also start with the shayla placed very asymmetrically on my head -- on the left side, it just barely touches my shoulder, and on the right side, it hangs down quite far. Then I bring the short side under my chin and tuck it in on the right side, in my collar. I wrap it just like pictures 3 and 4 in that series, and wind up with a look very similar to picture 5, except without the pin (I tuck the loose end up and around in my coat collar under my chin). Remarkably enough, it usually stays quite adequately, although if I were going out for what I knew would be a long walk in the cold, I'd probably pin it rather like in picture 5.

It's relatively easy to do (easier using a mirror, though), especially once you practice a bit, very warm (especially if I use one of the actual pashmina/silk shaylas), and comfortable.

In truth, I didn't start doing it because I was trying to make a statement; I did it because I could, and because I happened to be wearing a fringed scarf and no hat and my ears were falling off in an unexpectedly stiff breeze-cum-windchill. However, I must say walking around in a long black winter trenchcoat while wearing what looks to be a black hijab is an interesting sociological experiment. I feel rather like a female version of John Howard Griffin. I suspect I'm unlikely to be hanged in effigy here in Whitebreadville, though.

My First Blogoversary!

2007-02-08T03:03:00.000-05:00

Interrobang's Internationale is one year old today! It got off to a great start with By The Numbers, a numerical analysis of the Bush death toll (a year ago) compared to various US population centres, and then almost immediately went on hiatus for about three weeks, because a friend came to visit me from England and stayed for three weeks.

I manage to post here irregularly -- I'm going to try to aim for more regular posts, now that I have a job that demands regular, if part-time, hours, although it's often difficult to come up with the kinds of things that I like to write in this forum just like that. A lot of my pieces, believe it or not, involve substantial amounts of research and, dare I say, even some number-crunching. Even Tell Her Klezmer Joe Was Here and Had to Go and the streetcar series, while more in my arts-and-social-science type background area, weren't exactly trivial to write. (The streetcar manuscript and all its pieces fought me every electron of the way.)

Thanks to all of my regular readers (I know who you are, or at least what your IP addresses are!) for being here. Thanks to those of you who leave comments, especially my regular commenters -- #1 Interrobangish Fan Sanjay, Eli Who Pinches, Green Goddess Anne Johnson, and particularly my buddy Spocko! (Also, big thanks to YodQaf for calling me today! You rock, dude! Call me sometime when I'm actually home, though.) I could have done it without you, but it wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun...

Irony

2007-02-01T02:07:00.000-05:00

She would appreciate the irony -- an entire blogosphere full of gifted writers being struck incoherent at the news of her passing.

Goodbye, Molly Ivins.

Damn.

Here's How the Other Half Lives, Mr. Arar

2007-01-28T06:48:00.000-05:00

I don't normally get too personal with this blog, but today the Maher Arar story hit me in a way that was very close to home. There's something about this story that just seems to bring out the worst -- and the best -- in people. Glenn Greenwald, the blogosphere's best legal writer, did an absolutely bang-up job talking about the issue. I did some banging while talking about the issue with my family today, too, but the banging in question was more like my head exploding...repeatedly.

It went a little something like this:

I made the mistake of going over to a family gathering today and got in a huge argument with almost the entire rest of my family. Before the argument started, they were all talking about how, while it was good that Maher Arar had gotten some compensation, he'd gotten way too much compensation, and maybe a million dollars would have been fair, but ten and a half was way too much, and it's all just a bullshit political stunt of Harper's (agreed*, but it was one he managed to finesse quite well -- he got off easy). Someone raised the point that he'd gotten as much compensation as he had, they thought, precisely because he's a Syrian-born Muslim Canadian, and thereby requiring "special treatment."

I made the mistake of saying that I thought Maher Arar didn't get nearly as much compensation as he should have, on the grounds that the Canadian government lied to the US government -- the RCMP head in charge of the case perjured himself, either accidentally or on purpose while testifying against Arar and resigned in disgrace), whereupon Arar was kidnapped by US authorities (against his wishes and without the knowledge of the Canadian government, who thought he was going to be returned to Canada), and you know the rest.

The reason I think Arar got very little in the way of compensation is because as near as I can tell, "terrorist" is the new "pedophile." Go down for a rap like that, and your life might as well be over. (Incidentally, I happen to know someone who was actually framed on a pedophile rap by a parent with mental problems, and the list of things he just can't do is unreal.) So I don't think the comparison is really all that out of line. As far as I can tell, the RCMP, CSIS, DFAIT, and DHS basically ended Arar's career for him. I figure very few people would want to hire him for the job for which he's been trained now. The corporate rationale would probably be that he's "too controversial" to "fit" with the organisation. The down-deep rationale, in our profoundly closetedly bigoted society, is that half of everyone either won't remember that he was completely cleared (so he's, as my mom said, "that terrorist guy"), or else they won't care. My mom even said that he basically deserves what he got because "he must have done something to justify being on a watch list in the first place," and "he was in the US, and acting suspicious."

Aside: Money Talks, Bullshit (and Stephen Harper) Walks: I think that another economic rationale for paying him a hefty compensation is that they not only owe him for lost wages as a result of their screw-up, but they owe him for lost wages at the end of his career. Also, if they have, as I suspect, managed to end his career as a computer programmer, they owe him a reasonable sum based on a rational projection of his future income. This data is reasonably easy to derive; I could probably do a creditable job of it using Monster.com and Google, in about a half-hour. (I'd need some time to crunch numbers since I'm dyscalculic.) Further, that's not even taking into account punitive damages (which ought, in this case, to be genuinely punitive, I think) or the dollar value (whatever that might be) of pain and suffering inflicted. The family's economic argument was that a person can (according to them) live entirely comfortably for the rest of their lives (even with three children) on a million dollars, so giving him a million dollars, so that he would live comfortably for the rest of his life, would have been fair. Or right, or something. (I would dispute the million dollar figure, since Arar is 34, and he has an awful lot of expected lifespan in front of him. Good god, Maher Arar is more or less my age. Jesus Murphy.) Nevertheless, that was their idea, and they were sticking to it.

(Mom: "Oh, he's laughing all the way to the bank." Me: "They threw him in a hole in the ground and tortured him for a year! Tell you what... If someone offered you a deal where they said, hey, we'll give you ten-point-five million dollars, but you have to let us fly you halfway around the world, throw you in a hole in the ground, and beat you bloody with electrical cables every day for a year, would you take it? I don't think so!")

The family's feelings were that because he is a Muslim and not Canadian-born, therefore he must obviously be a "suspicious person." Because he's obviously a "suspicious person," then it's basically okay that he was kidnapped to Syria and tortured, or if not basically okay, then not a major issue, and besides which, it was the Liberals' (as in the Liberal Party, for my American readers -- they're not, themselves, especially liberal) fault anyway.

My mom's major beef was also that because his case made it through the courts fairly quickly, it must be because he's getting "special treatment" because he's a minority. My mom was particularly adamant that he should have had to "wait his turn in the court system" and that it was a "crime" that other cases have been pending for a long time while his was resolved fairly quickly. The level of (wilful?) ignorance this reveals about the workings of the court system, and about legal cases in general, is mind-boggling.

She mentioned one particular case where a woman was accidentally killed in a drive-by shooting, and said it had been going on for 13 years now, and why did Maher Arar get "special treatment" to have his case resolved so fast? Interestingly enough, when I asked her about specific details of the case, she couldn't really tell me, but obviously it was really, really important. I asked if the RCMP had shot the woman and if it was an international incident, but she didn't see the difference between an official mistake and a garden-variety homicide.

Not only that, but in hindsight, I realise that there are all sorts of reasons why cases get held up. Maybe the discovery process was taking a long time. Maybe someone's been studiously avoiding the process server. Maybe a key witness has refused to testify. Maybe the police bungled the initial investigation. Maybe forensic re-evaluations have needed to be done. Maybe one or other of the parties filed a motion to postpone, for one reason or other. MMaybe there's a huge backlog of cases in that court jurisdiction for the particular court that has authority in those particular cases. Who knows?

Eventually, and through a long and complex process known as Conservative Argumentation Tactic #2 (when the liberal refutes your points, change the subject and/or move the goalposts), the conversation disintegrated into my entire family telling me that white people are the only group left that are discriminated against, and my dad saying that as a "White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male**, I would have a harder time getting a job than a black man," and my sister saying that only black people are really racist anymore, and the existence of the Million Man March proves it. But of course, she's not racist, right, and none of my family is racist, right? (Mom: "Some of my best friends are black. I work in a black woman's pocket for three months every year!")

I mentioned a couple of studies that were done, first the one where an identical resume was shopped around (5000 times!!), with a "black" name and a "white" name, and the resume with the "white" name got more call-backs, and the second one where white ex-convicts got more job offers than black men with no criminal records, and my sister said, "Yeah, well, I'd have to see that study." (As if my sister, who is a vocational/technical-college dropout with no social sciences background could really evaluate the validity and rigour of a study, phft!)

Then she called me an asshole for having an argument with people at my grandfather's birthday party, which probably wasn't smart, but I hate to see my family basically making racial slurs at people, and the whole rest of it. I can't help it. I was raised in a racist, conservative place, and blatant, in-your-face white supremacism (albeit couched in the nicest possible terms; it's not like my family would ever join a militia or a neo-Nazi group) drives me nuts.

Assholery: Who brought up the goddam subject in the first place, and started saying bonehead stupid thing piled on bonehead stupid thing? Yeah, if I were an easier-going sort of a person, and/or I hadn't had a couple drinks, I probably would have kept my mouth firmly shut and gone for a walk or something. Judgement error, and yes, assholery offenses on my part against domestic tranquility, but ferchrissakes, don't try to tell me white privilege doesn't exist. Especially when you're outright claiming that there's something special about being white in the first place. Why be a white supremacist (even a gentle suburban white supremacist) if there's nothing in it for you?

Aside: I Get Something Out of It, But I Try Not To Put Anything Into It: Even I realise that white privilege more than likely benefits me. I actually spend quite a bit of time thinking (and maybe even being grateful) for both white and having inherited class privilege. (I keep trying to figure out whether being white trumps being disabled, or whether being behaviourally middle-class trumps being white, in terms of where someone might sit in the power hierarchy, but the only answer I can come up with is "it depends on the situation, I guess.") I'm already dealing with enough problems, being a somewhat unusually intelligent female with a disability; I don't really want to know what it would be like to have to add racism to that, as well. If that makes me a bigot, I guess I'm a bigot. My apologies. I also say "inherited class privilege" because I grew up in an upper-middle-class type environment (albeit first-generation middle class, which is a different experience than coming from a family that has been middle-class longer), and so, despite having an actual income level that puts me economically into the proletariat (and there's an argument to be made that even though I work in "the professions," I have no managerial authority and thus am "working class" that way, too; I tend to support that hypothesis, for various reasons including the odious "work-for-hire"), I can adequately pass for a middle-class professional such that people frequently confuse me with one. (I even used to refer to myself as "a potsmoking punk posing as professional.") So there is that. I'm not unaware that this dynamic isn't fraught, but I'm working on it.

So there it is. Mr. Arar, when they ruined your life, they started a chain of events that basically will cause my entire family not to speak to me for weeks. Isn't collateral damage a beautiful thing? All of us who've been in the situation, great or small, can get together some September 11th one of these years (and I'll buy you a Coke), and we can all bitch about how nineteen guys -- that we never even met! -- driving airplanes in a foreign country still managed to fuck us over anyhow.

________

* Do read the link under there. Mike in Ottawa writes a memory-refreshing post about how, before the Commission of Inquiry released its findings, and before Harper was forced to behave like civilised folks because of his minority government (back when he was still the Canadian Reform AAlliance Party [yes!] Official Opposition), he and his people were convinced that Maher Arar was a terrorist, and were pissing themselves that the US would think they were "weak on national security" and so on. (You realise, Mr. Harper, that digital archives indisputably exist, and it is possible for you to be called on your words years later even if they didn't get captured on videotape, and not just by people who have pricey Lexis-Nexis subscriptions, right?)

** You could hear the capital letters. I'm not making this up.

That's a Hell of a Deal!

2007-01-27T03:21:00.000-05:00

So...

If you got a deal whereby someone said to you, "How'd you like to make $10.5 million dollars? All you have to do is let us kidnap you out of an airport, fly you halfway around the world, turn you over to some sadistic despotic prison guards, and have you thrown in a hole the size of a grave and then hauled out on a regular basis so you can be beaten bloody. We'll give you one million and fifty thousand dollars a month for ten months if you let us. Sounds good, huh? Piece of cake, right?"

That's pretty much what Stephen Harper just did to Maher Arar. I hate to even say this, because it shouldn't be necessary to stroke someone's ego for doing the goddam right thing, but at least Stephen Harper had the minimal levels of decency (and shoe soles getting toasted from the judicious application of flame) to issue a public apology and offer compensation. (Rumour has that Arar's settlement package will also include a sum to cover his not-inconsiderable legal expenses.)

This is all well and good, since the RCMP (as well as CSIS and DFAIT) definitely fucked up by providing the US authorities with erroneous information, and so it's good that the RCMP Commissioner resigned in disgrace over the issue, especially as it seems he either deliberately or accidentally lied during his testimony.

Arar was originally asking for $400M in compensation, which doesn't actually seem so unreasonable to me. After all, when your home country's state security apparatus lies about you to another country, which means you get "kidnapped by persons in the employ of U.S. agencies acting under color of authority," flown to the Middle East and thrown in a hole in the ground and beaten bloody with electrical cables, and nobody even knows where you are for the longest time, I'd say you deserve a pretty big apology and enough compensation so you never have to worry about a damned thing ever again.

Even still, as he says in an interview (Andrew Sullivan has it, but I don't have a link), "They ruined my life." No shit. Ten and a half million dollars: Syrian-born Canadian-citizen computer programmers from Ottawa are a glut on the market these days, I guess.

Credo: It's Not About "Choice," It's About Rights

2007-01-22T19:37:00.000-05:00

Today is "Blogging for Choice" day. Abortion has been legal in Canada formally since 1988(and covered by publicly-funded healthcare in all provinces except PEI), although it was originally decriminalised in 1976. The debate here, thank goodness, isn't really ongoing. Nevertheless, there are enough people out there who would like to see the 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision (the suit brought by what, in modern parlance, would be a "MRA") overturned, that I think it's worth posting about. This should have been a nonissue right from the get-go. That the "debate" dragged on here for over a decade is kind of disgraceful.

I Believe Because it is Not Absurd:

I believe in life after birth and before death.

I believe no one should be made to feel any way other than how they want to feel because they deliberately got rid of a tiny clump of cells, no more or no less than their own body may have (perhaps as much as 50% of the time).

I believe that no one has the right to determine what I, as a conscious, thinking adult, do with my own body against my will.

I believe that people who don't want abortions shouldn't have them.

I believe that people who don't want abortions should keep their ideology off my biology.

I believe that sex serves lots of important functions outside of procreation. If it didn't, nobody would have bothered before they figured out where babies came from.

I believe that natalism is like gender roles: bullshit.

I believe in abortion on demand, without apology.

I believe that "safe, legal, and rare" and similar sentiments pander to the mushy middle, who are easily swayed and don't pay attention to facts.

I believe I'd rather have science than religion swaying public policymakers; observations are easier to deal with than fuzzy-wuzzy "feelings" and "gut instincts."

I believe I may be the only actual baby-hating feminist harridan in the world, but I also believe I am profoundly grateful to all those people who came before me, who fought for women's rights, and what Amanda Marcotte calls "sexual justice," which means I have the freedom to be the only actual baby-hating feminist harridan in the world, instead of yet another desperately unhappy trapped housewife with too many unwanted kids and too few options.

I believe I'll have another Coke.