when the status quo frustrates.

Guns in schools

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Whatever side one falls on in the gun control debate, most people agree that handguns should not be in schools. It’s just a bad mix—volatile, trapped kids and deadly firearms. Any sane person ought to feel a bit uncomfortable at the thought of guns in a high school.

Unfortunately, sane people aren’t in charge in my city.

Sticking police in schools is a bad idea on principle, but sticking armed police in schools is pure, unadulterated lunacy. We have enough problems with police shooting at teenagers of colour—why put them in a situation where they have even more opportunity to do that?

But of course, it all comes down to police chief Bill Blair’s inferiority complex:

“Quite frankly, as you can probably guess by my constant appearance, I believe in police officers in uniform,” he told a press conference this morning.

“I want the people of Toronto to see their police. I want them to have a relationship with the entire police service that is based on trust and respect. And my police officers are armed.”

That’s very nice for you, sir, that you believe in being formal. But we’re talking about arming crazed thugs who will be around children all day. Children—not criminals. How is anyone supposed to get an education with an armed cop just outside the door? Especially, say someone who is a refugee from a war-torn country or a police state, or from an impoverished region here, someone with every reason to fear large armed men carrying guns.

There’s a lot of talk about making schools safe and welcoming in Ontario. That’s all you hear about when you’re becoming a teacher. Apparently, though, that’s been amended to “safe and welcoming…or else.”

opPRESSion oLYMpics, Baby!

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I hold Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton personally responsible for having seriously overloaded the collective “oppression” brain circuitry of America. Bad, bad candidates for the supreme leadership of what is still the richest and most powerful country in the world. Naughty! You’re both grounded! Now go to your rooms and think about what you’ve done!

To date, I personally have based my own worldview of oppression upon (a) the fact that every human society on Earth is a patriarchy and (b) the timeless wisdom of Twisty Faster, quoted below:

[Twisty's] views revolve around evidence that patriarchy is a violently tyrannical but nearly invisible social order based on an oppressive paradigm of class and status fetishizing dominance and submission. Patriarchy’s benefits are accrued according to a rigid hierarchy at the top of which are rich honky adult males and at the bottom of which are poor female children of color.

Now, it hasn’t bothered me–the above definition is sufficient unto my needs–but not everybody seems to feel that level of zen about the precise degree of shafting being inflicted upon the folks who are in-between rich white men and poor nonwhite girls–those who possess some traits of the privileged group (say, being male) but not others (say, being poor). ‘Smatter of fact, some people are really, really obsessed with it. Really obsessed. I thought about linking to some examples of said obsession but quickly realized that the supply so far exceeded my demand that I’d run out of text space before I even got to say anything more on the subject. But I kid you not; it is everywhere; you have but to Google it or even just read the front page of any newspaper.

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Pro-life, unless it’s the lives of poor people

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Just completely gross.

Short version: Sarasota Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity team up with a plan that will help Planned Parenthood with some zoning issues and help Habitat get some almost-free land. For their altruism, they’re repaid with the nastiest of the nasty anti-choice contingent:

“We could have put up any building we wanted,” said Barbara Zdravecky, president of Planned Parenthood. “We wanted to donate the land so Habitat could build more attainable housing.”

But after Habitat donors learned about it and complained, Habitat International told the local board to drop it. The local Habitat board dropped the deal Tuesday night, less than a month before it was set for a final vote by the city.

The barrage of e-mails started with James Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, a Virginia-based group that has led protests at Planned Parenthood offices in Sarasota. They said it showed a cozy relationship between Habitat and Planned Parenthood, which the league has accused of pushing pornography to children, among other things.

The American Life League must be so pleased. They’ve managed to screw over woman and poor people in one fell swoop.

Donate to Habitat, but let them know how you feel about them caving to pressure from anti-woman nutjobs.

Hat tip: nom_de_grr.

It can happen here

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

I wonder at what point a country accumulates enough of the markers—surveillance, botched elections, out-of-control law enforcement, and so on—that citizens and government alike can just shrug their shoulders and say, “Yep, we’re living in a police state. Can someone please liberate us now?”

The U.S. is pretty well there, I think. Check out this story from DCist. Hey D.C., guess what? You’re getting checkpoints!

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

As most of the people randomly detained and abused at these checkpoints will no doubt be some combination of poor and black, the modest proposal to turn D.C .into a militarized zone is unlikely to raise much ire, though reasonable people, including the chairman of the D.C. police union, the ACLU, and the dean of the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, have all called this plan what it is: “breathtaking” and “cockamamie.”

Alas, I fail to be surprised, particularly in a country currently holding 26,000 people in secret prisons without trial. But, you know, freest country in the world, right?

Here’s the other thing. These people have not read their Jane Jacobs. I mean, it’s obvious because the sorts of people who want to put checkpoints and surveillance cameras everywhere are not the sort of people who read Jane Jacobs. But one of the things she argued, and she was absolutely correct, was that more pedestrian traffic = safer streets. That’s obvious when you think about it. Where would you rather walk around at night: a lively, active, well-lit city street, or a suburban park? Neighbourhood checkpoints will reduce foot traffic to people who can demonstrate that they have a “reason” to be there, making the streets emptier and therefore a better location to commit crimes. Of course, this isn’t so much about making a poor area of town “safer” as it is about policing the freedom of movement of U.S. uncitizens, but you won’t catch any of the plan’s advocates saying that in public.

Hat tip: symbioid.

Power = fucking and fighting, pretty much no matter what

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Jessica linked an article from Robert Jensen about masculinity. The jist: in mixed company, people of both genders describe what it means to be a man with words like “strong, responsible, and loving.” When it’s just the boys, though, the definition of masculinity changes:

To be a man is to be a player, a guy who can attract women and get sex; someone who doesn’t take shit from people, who can stand down another guy if challenged, who doesn’t let anyone else get in his face. Some of the men say they have other ideas about masculinity but acknowledge that in most all-male spaces it’s difficult to discuss them.

So in male-only (or male-dominated) circumstances, the concept of masculinity takes on an ugly face that even guys who participate in it don’t always enjoy. He also points out (correctly!) that the positive ideas of men-dom offered in mixed company actually apply to *people* and not just men. Then Jensen asks:

If the positive definitions of masculinity are not really about being a man but simply about being a person, and if the definitions of masculinity within which men routinely operate are negative, why are we holding onto the concept so tightly?

Uh, because sometimes it feels good to be bad.

Rambo!
There’s a reason these movies make so much money, people.
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Peak Banana

Monday, May 26th, 2008

I don’t like bananas, but even if I did, I wouldn’t eat them. United Fruit, the reason that we have the bananas that we have today, is basically the template for ruthless, evil corporations, pursuing unimaginable profits as the cost of human rights and the environment.

Within the next few decades, short of a scientific miracle, the bananas that we’re used to will cease to exist. That’s also United Fruit’s fault, incidentally. Check out Johann Hari’s fascinating article on the subject.

Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea – and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself.

Anyway, it turns out that the banana-as-we-know-it is not so much the atheist’s nightmare:

…as it is a freakish creation of mankind’s greed and cruelty. Sorry, Kirk Cameron!

Videos for you

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Here’s one, from the Canadian Union of Public Employees, that should put a smile on your face:

Of course, we here in Canada recognize this as satire. I’m not sure that it reads that way to Americans. What do you think?

Hat tip: Audra Williams

And here’s one that really won’t put a smile on your face: American soldiers in Iraq: Protecting you from terrorist puppies.

(Warning: animal cruelty.)

Hat tip: mercenarytoast

Why I support black-focused schools

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

A few people have asked for my thoughts on the TDSB’s decision in favour of black-focused schools. Sonjaa and Troubleinchina both wrote good posts on the subject, and I recommend reading those too.

I’ll preface this by saying that this is a divisive issue in Toronto, particularly within the black community and the activist community. It’s also a rare example of my opinion reversing on a controversial issue within a very short period of time. In August 2007, I thought that black-focused schools were a terrible idea. Five months later, I support the plan, albeit critically. This about-face happened because of a) my experiences at OISE, b) my experiences in an actual Toronto high school, and c) heated debates with people that I respect.
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One step closer to a corporatist dystopian future

Monday, January 28th, 2008

…where you can get a high school diploma by working in McDonald’s

Do I need to point out everything that’s wrong with this? Corporate sponsorship of public education is a vicious cycle. First, the government cuts funding to schools. Next, a corporation approaches the desperately underfunded school to bail it out—Nike will build you a new basketball court, in exchange for some brand-name recognition. How could any inner city school refuse? Then, the government is free to shirk its responsibility for funding, because hey, someone’s already paying.

I doubt there will be much of an outcry as the education of the underclass is slowly handed over to corporations eager for a docile, under-educated workforce. In my province, this has been going on for awhile—Ontario high school students must complete 40 hours of community involvement to graduate. The lofty rationale behind the policy (“to encourage students to develop awareness and understanding of civic responsibility and of the role they can play and the contributions they can make in supporting and strengthening their communities”) sounds nice until you read the rest of it; students, most of whom already have part- or full-time jobs, can complete these hours “in a variety of settings, including businesses, not-for-profit organizations, public sector institutions (including hospitals), and informal settings.” While I’ve been in community activist groups that have taken on student volunteers, most kids end up doing free labour for businesses.

Welcome to the future: Liberal educations for the rich, indentured corporate servitude for everyone else.

Suffering from being a patronizing, paternalistic ass? That’s just what organized religion was designed to combat!

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

Over at Boundless Webzine, Focus on the Family’s source of hip, Candice Watters is reminded by the New York Times to warn science to beware, bee–waaarrreeeeeee!!!!!!!! That is, beware to continue to be aware that scientific ethics are a good thing.

Also, did you know that in the past, scientists were sometimes wrong? And other times, science-sounding words were used by people in authoritative positions to maintain the status quo, even when the status quo conflicted with the interests of the people these learned men were trying to serve? Really, it’s true.

In a culture where everything is relative, it’s hard to defend anything as true. Few trust anything that isn’t supportable by science. But science without truth is barbarism. The standard evidence of this point is Auschwitz, the concentration camp now decried for it’s “scientific” experiments.

Let’s go through this paragraph slowly:

1. Candice, LOTS of people trust plenty that ain’t supported by science. And LOTS MORE trust things that they think are supported scientifically, but in fact they are being scammed by people who are taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are very hazy about what exactly counts as science. A few examples pulled just from blogs I’ve read recently:

  • It would be very convenient for some to believe that black people are naturally less intelligent than white people.
  • A select group of hypochondriacs believe that ingesting substances that make shitting somehow even more disgusting is an important health regimen.
  • Your very own blogmate is saying that he read that CFL will give you skin cancer, when in fact science is merely claiming that people who already have chronic skin conditions that could be exacerbated by CFLs, and that could lead to an increased risk of cancer for those individuals. However, being vague about the qualifiers fits in better with his anti-CFL legislation schtick, as it did for the Daily Mail.
  • Increased levels of estrogen mimicking chemicals in our water supply is bad news for aquatic life and probably us; some would argue that this is cause to ban birth-control pills when the real source of the problem is actually the plastics industry.

    2. So now we’ve established that ‘science’ is frequently used as a wishy-washy word at best. Are we talking pure research here, or application, or the way data is used to justify things that may or may not be accurate, or are we including instances where data is deliberately misconstrued to support an unfair or irrational policy, or sell something? In your case, you seem to be claiming it’s ‘science’ whenever a guy with an advanced degree does something. Ok, we’ll work with that. But now you say “But science without truth is barbarism” so what is truth? Truth is beauty, beauty truth, I suppose but that’s not actually helpful. By the end of your article it is clear you mean “biblical truth” and ohhh, baby, there’s a can of worms.

    3. I’m not going to declare a Godwin violation here, I’m just going to chastise you for your improper use of scare quotes. The Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners were vile beyond all possible imagining, but they were actually pretty scientific; as in, they resulted in usable data. And many of their scientists were top-notch, which is why we took them and their data at the end of the war. And we used them to beat the Russians to the moon.

    It’s important to note the the Nazis also had a sizable pseudo-scientific crazy person science department, that, for example, funded rocket experiments designed to prove we lived in a hollow earth.

    However, you can’t blame a lack of religion for Nazi atrocities, although you can certainly argue with their version of the ‘truth’ until you are blue in the face. So to wrap up everything that’s wrong with the final sentence of your opening paragraph: a) the Nazis are not the best example of science going amok because there was no religious philosophy to restrain their greed for knowledge, if anything, they managed to make a religious philosophy that was entirely consistent with their justifications for torturing concentration camp prisoners with ghastly experiments; b) if America’s Protestant religious underpinnings are a superior ethical guide to science policy than Nazi Making-Hateful-Shit-Up Christianity, then our leaders would have had a lot more qualms letting the captured scientists use and build upon the data obtained by experimenting on prisoners; c) I can’t believe you just invoked the freaking Nazis, the motherfucking Nazis, for the love of all that is holy, to set up an article about how doctors in the past were wrong to be so restrictive about parental visiting hours in pediatric wards.

    Could we please show a least an inkling of a sense of perspective? Ok, then, let’s blow through the rest of this trainwreck a bit faster.
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  • Racism is like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal: if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Right?

    Thursday, November 15th, 2007

    Breaking news: white boy does something racially insensitive and is knocked right on his ass.

    Gabriel Keith, an assistant editor at the City College Times at Minneapolis Community & Technical College, used a drawstring from a hooded sweatshirt to make a noose, from which he hung a message about making deadlines in late October.

    The tactic did not go over well in a newsroom that included several black students. Keith took the noose down five minutes later, but the ensuing hubbub led to his firing from the paper and a dispute between the editor-in-chief and the adviser.

    Long story short: everyone involved knows that this college newspaper editor was not trying to make a racist statement; however, his offensive and poorly executed attempt to be funny and the apparently poor handling of the event afterwards meant that at the very least, he needed to be replaced by someone with a clue. Anyone who has ever spent five minutes in a campus newspaper office can probably imagine how this whole thing went down. And really, how can you not have sympathy for the guy? Expecting a journalism upperclassman to be aware of all the major symbols in modern American history is like expecting him to remember the names of all 50 freaking states. That’s like, a lot, and he’ll never even use half of it, so whats the big deal?

    I was in the middle of learning to fix a heat stage when my friend came in to talk about this terribly critical event; mostly he wanted to complain that the thought police were on their way when a man can’t use a noose to convince his subordinates to do their work on time. I was just surprised that every guy in the room needed to have why a noose could be interpreted as a racist symbol explained to them. I made several compelling arguments about why this newspaper editor was in the wrong, including: “well, duh” (this one didn’t work as well as I think it should have) and “a newspaper editor, off all fucking people, should know better than to use such a heavily laden symbol for something so stupid, especially since the noose has no special relationship to making people work more effectively so he could have just as easily picked something else” which I think they found a little harder to argue with. I mean, really, pretend you’re a person who has no negative noose-related associations, then pretend you’ve just seen one hanging over your boss’ desk. My first thought? WTF? My second? Maybe I need a new boss, if this one is threatening to kill me in an elaborate and antiquated manner for missing a deadline. Perhaps I’d like to work with someone with better management skills. See? Even if you remove the racist imagery all together, Gabriel Keith is still a dumbass.

    Then I actually read the article. Now, the version I linked to is similar to the version I read this morning, but it replaces a few paragraphs with more recent information. In the version I read, two assistant editors (or they may have been section editors, I forget which) said that they’d been there when Keith and his friend had made the noose, and they told them it was a bad idea to hang it up. In fact, other suggestions were made and dismissed in favor of the noose.

    The two assistant editors were black women, by the way.

    So now those of us who have spent some time in the campus journalism school really know how this all went down, don’t we? There’s always that One Guy. They’re everywhere, and most of them never get beaten with the clue-by-four they so richly deserve, so you can imagine how surprised these guys are when someone finally calls them on their bullshit. How much do you want to bet that the two guys making the noose were too busy giggling over how funny it was to heed their prudish colleagues warnings? And now they’re paying for it, cause no one can just take a joke. It’s a harsh world, I know, and let’s pause and feel sorry for poor Gabe. OK, that should be enough of that. I’m sure he’ll do OK once all the furor dies down; you don’t reach 2623 that clueless without some kind of safety net.

    So I went back to my friend and said, hey, I read the article and while it is overkill that this campus incident has made national news, the editor in question was pretty fucking stupid, doubly so because he’d been warned by his two coworkers that hanging the noose was a terrible idea. Now, I know what I’ve been thinking when I’ve told guys “I don’t think this is a good idea.” And I have been told by others, “I don’t think this is a good idea.” We all know what “I don’t think this is a good idea” means; it means: dude, fucking stop it, this is an awful idea. No, seriously, fucking stop it right now because you’re going to get in trouble. The person saying this is nearly always right.

    My friend, however, considered this a terribly cryptic, almost useless warning. What, he said, are we supposed to read women’s minds?

    White male privilege in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

    Wait till they discover that the hordes of children were camouflaging how much their mall sucks on its own merits

    Monday, November 5th, 2007

    When I was a child, downtown Cleveland had something around three major department stores, the kind you actually had to visit an urban area to see. We went every winter to see Mr. Jing-a-ling, a Santa look-alike who hosted brunch; people had their bridal registries there and we traveled to these departments stores for special occasion clothes – suits, first communion dresses, formal dresses – that you just couldn’t find outside the glamorous big city. Even as late as 1986, going Downtown was kind of an experience.

    Of course, now the pale imitation of a shopping center that replaced the now-defunct department stores of yore is falling on hard times, and it’s clearly not because it’s got the same Victoria’s Secret and Waldenbooks my local mall has; it must be those damn black kids!

    A downtown Cleveland mall is implementing one of the nation’s toughest curfews on teenagers, joining a growing national trend among shopping centers that say loud, unruly youngsters drive away paying customers.

    The mall, Tower City Center, said it would ban anyone under 18 after 2:30 p.m. unless he or she was accompanied by an adult.

    What time does school get out again? Just askin’.

    I’ve walked through this mall a couple of times. Yes, the kids are obnoxious douchebags, and the begging problem outside is quite annoying. But the kids are concentrated mainly in the movie theatre and the food court and you know what else is obnoxious? That horrible screeching thing installed in the alleys to keep the homeless from sleeping in them. So Cleveland’s mall has fallen on tough times, and like most Cleveland institutions, they’ve hit on a solution that is about as bad as the problem it was meant to solve.

    Tower City is the 51st of the nation’s 1,104 large retail shopping centers to impose a curfew on minors, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. But it is one of the few whose policy will be in effect seven days a week; most mall curfews restrict teenagers only on weekends or after 6 p.m., the council said.

    The curfew is part of Tower City’s new Parental Involvement Program, which Krieger said was in keeping with “a national trend as retail centers seek to create a family-friendly atmosphere.”

    Getting rid of the scary hordes of black child-thugs with their ‘hip-hop’ and their- I dunno, dark skin?- may help the “family-friendly” (euphemism for whatnow?) atmosphere, but why would Mr. & Mrs. WhiteFlight lug their kids all the way to the center of downtown to shop at Tower City when every damn mall around the ‘burbs offers the same basic stores and nearby Beachwood and Legacy Village offer way better pretentious luxury goods shopping Midwest-style (seriously, they have a Pottery Barn Kids, WTF?) and free parking?

    “I know the kids can be kind of intimidating, especially for people that are from out of town or from outside of the city,” said Tishara Clement of Cleveland.

    Who? Who is coming from out of town or outside of the city? Who? People don’t even come here to see the damn Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who the hell is traveling from anywhere more distant than Parma to shop in our exclusive Lady Foot Locker?

    Ah, yes, those imaginary people who are just dying to come to Cleveland if only we’d build a convention center or ban smoking or clap our hands, yes everybody, clap your hands!

    On balance, said Krieger, of Tower City, many mall managers are concluding that it’s worth the loss of vitality and sales from younger visitors to lure back adults and out-of-towners who may be intimidated by loud groups of teenagers.

    “The centers that have done this are really seeing their centers go up, and they’re seeing more families wanting to come back,” she said.