Darcy Allan Sheppard, 1975-2009

 Fifteen years ago, on August 31 2009, Darcy Allan Sheppard encountered Michael Bryant on the most fashionable stretch of Bloor Street, between University Avenue to the west and Yonge Street to the east. What happened then depends on who you ask; according to at least one witness, Michael Bryant struck Darcy Sheppard with the front bumper of his car either deliberately or negligently, and then without trying to see if the person he had hit was all right as the law requires, had attempted to make off. At this point, Darcy Sheppard had latched onto the car, possibly to demand Mr Bryant live up to his responsibilities. Michael Bryant apparently responded by driving rapidly along the wrong side of Bloor Street attempting to shake him off. In the course of this action, Bryant drove so close to the street furniture he struck Darcy Sheppard against the street furniture, fatally injuring him.

Antisemitism: evaluating events in context

To go back to the beginning: antisemitism, animus against Jewish people for the religion they profess and the community they belong to, is absolutely wrong, as wrong as any other bigotry. Trying to excuse antisemitic actions or expression by claiming to oppose the policies of the current policies of Israel offends twice. Using Israeli policies as an excuse to target Jewish people make them scapegoats for policies they did not choose and often do not support. Antisemitic acts and expressions by those claiming to advocate a just peace in Israel/Palestine cast doubt on the sincerity of peace efforts while obscuring the hard reality: more Christians than Jews support the bad political and theological ideas behind efforts to subjugate, expel, or destroy the Palestinian people. 

None of this makes it any less important to report incidents fully and honestly.

A verdict and a question

The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York jury actually raises a number of questions, some trivial and some decidedly not.

From the beginning, Donald Trump's behaviour has appalled me. His casual cruelty disgusts me, and his contempt for the very idea of service angers me at a deep level that frankly surprised me. His profound divisiveness and heedlessness incompetence frightens me, particularly when I consider the power of the office he has held and wants to reclaim. I and others appalled and enraged by Donald Trump should probably ask ourselves how much we really want to celebrate the conviction and possible incarceration of an elderly and by all accounts rather pathetic individual on a relatively minor, if squalid crime. 

On the trivial side, I wonder how the US Treasury Department, which provides security for American presidents and former presidents, will decide which agents have to accompany Donald Trump to prison. Musical chairs, perhaps? Offering danger money or hardship pay?

The jury verdict on Donald Trump does not, in fact, mean he will go to prison or even jail: not soon, and quite possibly not at all. Courts have routinely sentenced people guilty of worse things than any of the charges against Mr. Trump to fines, community service, or probation. As well. Mr. Trump still has avenues of appeal.

Pierre Poilevre Can't Handle the Truth

 Recently, Pierre Poilievre, the conservative party leader and Bitcoin promoter, added his voice to the chorus of voices calling for political oversight over the decisions of Corrections Canada officials. This proposal, of course, almost certainly stems from the flurry of media interest in the transfer of Paul Teale (Bernardo) from a high security institution to a lower security one. 

It makes sense to start here by pointing out the correctional service falls under the justice system, which as in most democracies operates under political oversight but not political micromanagement. Parliament passes laws and Attorneys General set policy, but ministers and members of parliament do not tell the police who to investigate, and for them to try to tell judges how to rule constitutes a serious breach of ethics.

The American gun organization the National Rifle Association has a new advertisement out on the web, full of standard right wing complaints about mean things the Left has to say about their president and their policies. This list of complaints noticeably avoids making any kind of case for gun rights. Indeed, it doesn't mention gun rights at all.

While this might seem surprising at any time,the choice by the NRA to talk about something other than gun rights at this specific time appears downright perverse, since a jury just acquitted a police officer for the most brutal possible violation of a citizen's right to legally carry a gun.

Stop quoting Havel and behaving like Brezhnev

East German Trabant

About a year and a half ago, Yale University sent out an email in advance of the Halloween season, asking students to choose their costumes with some cultural sensitivity. One of the senior residents charged with supervising residence life, Erika Christakis, took exception to this email and distributed her own rejoinder. Student activists in turn protested the email and accused both Dr Christakis and her husband failing to properly supervise residence life. In the end, both Dr. Christakis and her husband left the residence program, an outcome regretted by the libertarian conservative writer Conor Friedersdorf, and even more strongly deplored by Rod Dreher.

In his argument, Rod Dreher quotes, as he frequently does, Valclav Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless. In common with many conservatives who quote Havel, he seems to think power means the ability to say distressing things on "woke twitter", and consider professors who give into "political correctness" the modern equivalent of the Havel's metaphorical green grocer, who puts a "workers of the world unite" sign in the window. I disagree. I think Dreher's argument fundamentally distorts the question of where the real power lies in his society, and where the implied analogy to the Soviet block of Leonid Brezhnev applies.

Anger is a sin...

C. Le Brun.  from Wellcome Images
via Wikimedia commons

As Margaret Lawrence's lyrics about the oppression of Metis people ironically put it: "those [people] must learn that anger is a sin".

Our society, and the pundits, academics, publicists and others who speak, or claim to speak for it, frequently display a profound unease with the anger of the oppressed. That unease frequently manifests itself not in cogent criticism but in unthinking rejection, or worse, violence: the violence of a direct attack or the violence of a judicial blind eye.

The corruption of freebies in politics

By Kiwiev via Wikimedia Commons

By freebies, I don't mean swag ; I don't mean rides in jets and helicopters provided to politicians by prominent business leaders. In fact, I don't mean corruption of politicians at all, although crooks in office do cause major problems. I mean a much more serious problem: the corruption of the voters and, by extension, the political process.


Commentators have long derided political promises as bribing voters with heir own money, but the purposes of legitimate political debate include the best use of resources. The process gets corrupted when politicians promise someone else will pay. One example of this we all know: the slogan "make the rich pay", an aspiration often stated but seldom realized. Calls to tax the rich frequently give rise not to better services but rather to increasingly convoluted tax avoidance schemes. Governments have had much greater luck extracting money from people accused of crimes. Conservative governments in the eighties, motivated to reward their friends with deep tax cuts and to punish those they disdained, invented a series of creative and mischievous government financing tools, from the outright forfeiture of assets to fine surcharges.

Donald Trump's promise to force the Mexican government to pay for a massive public works project on the southern border of the US has a precedent: Ronald Reagan's government sent Oliver North on an unconstitutional fund-raising tour through the palaces of depots to obtain funding for the "contra" mercenary terrorists the US Congress had explicitly refused to support. Mr. Trump has extended this idea in two ways: proposing a major infrastructure program employing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and planning to take the money by some form of coercion rather than beg for it.

Letter to Brezhnev

Soviet freighter: by Грищук ЮН
via Wikimedia Commons

Letter to Brezhnev is a light romantic comedy made in 1985, about an encounter between Sergei, a Russian sailor and Elaine, a young working class woman from Kirby, South of Liverpool. The film follows the intense night they spend together, their falling in love, and her decision to go to Russia and marry him. The film has a barbed wit, with the running theme of Margaret Thatcher's supposedly dynamic Britain not really offering more to the average worker than the supposedly sclerotic Soviet Union. In the end, the film shows British authorities applying quiet but strong and not very scrupulous pressure to keep Elaine from going to Russia.

American conservatives who emphatically insist their country has dealt with its historic racial injustices owe Leonid Brezhnev a letter of their own: a posthumous apology.

Indignation and punishment

By Takkk
 via Wikimedia Commons

Audre Lorde's well known quote, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," derives much of its power and appeal from its flexibility. Interpreted one way, it rebukes those with too great a focus on practical politics, since the dominant parties of the existing order have by definition mastered its practice. Looked at another way, it calls us to leave behind the specific tools of domination, the tools shaped by the needs of a house of bondage and designed to create and maintain it. Genuine liberation, opposed to changing the hand that holds the whip, requires us to reject the habits of thought and action developed to wield power.

When I attempt to identify the "master's tools" in my own habits and in ways of thinking I take for granted, experience tells me to look for contradictions. I look out for contradictions between the ways I think, the way I imagine the world, and the way I live in it. If a way of thinking doesn't serve its intended purpose, that doesn't mean it has no purpose. It makes sense to ask what purpose such a way of thinking does serve. Sometimes, the ways of thinking that serve no useful function turn out to serve the desire for power, the wish to dominate. Once I see them clearly, I can eliminate them, because I know them as the master's tools: the tool of the ones who hold the whip, and the part of me that wants not justice but power.

Another comment on Black Lives Matter

By Fibonacci Blue (Wikimedia Commons)

Six months ago, Chris Lollie settled a lawsuit against the City of St. Paul Minnesota and the police department of that city. In response to a complaint by a private security guard that Mr. Lollie had sat in the wrong chair in an area open to the public, the police shocked him using an electric discharge device and arrested him.The courts first dismissed all the charges the police laid against Mr. Lollie, and subsequently cleared the way for his suit to go forward. At that point, to avoid the possibility of a larger damage award the city settled, although to the credit of the councilors who made the decision, they also considered the police had done wrong. As a member of council said: "I want to see our city make national news for many things. And this is not one of them."

Mr. Lollie took a cell phone video of his arrest, and the release of the video, as well as the subsequent discussion, took place just as the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO came to international attention. Seeing the way the police treated Mr. Lollie, and discussing his arrest, led me to see the phrase Black Lives Matter as not simply the self-evident truth that the police should not shoot people with black skin, but that Black people have a right to live a full and whole life, lived in dignity, freedom, with a sense of possibility. I do not see Black Lives matter simply as a not shooting, but as upholding the dignity of the person.

Fashionable political absurdities...

David Frum recently published an article in Atlantic Monthly, with the following interesting statement:

The Obama people, not being idiots, understand very well that international terrorism possesses an overwhelmingly Muslim character. In Europe, where attention is so focused now, the great majority of the most lethal terrorist incidents of the past 15 years have been carried out by people professing to act from Islamist motives. 

Peter McKay, Canada's Justice Minister, recently illustrated the problem with this thinking, although he did so unintentionally. In his recent statement on the conspiracy to commit random mayhem in Halifax, Mr. McKay denied the conspiracy had any links to "terrorism". Since then, evidence has surfaced of a motive: the social media presence of at least some of the accused conspirators reveals a far-right wing orientation. Denying that a plot to commit random violence with no possible motive except for politics only makes sense in the context of a trope that effectively defines political violence as terrorism only if committed by Muslims.

Consider another example, the largest mass casualty act of political violence in the last twelve calendar months to take place in the geographic confines of Europe: the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Eastern Ukraine. To the extent this attack involved any Muslims at all, it involved them as victims. It caused 298 deaths, by a long way the greatest number of deaths from an act of political violence last year, and for some time before. So why does neither David Frum nor the sources he quotes at least acknowledge this as a terrorist act? Because, by the definition in effective use by his contemporaries, it doesn't qualify. Muslims didn't do it.

Given the winds of political fashion, shorthand expressions that conceal absurd assumptions come and go all the time. These tropes only really matter when someone attempts to use them to establish a point of fact, and ends up seduced into stating something seriously out of line with the facts.

Halfway around the world...

I recently stumbled on an example of the way an untruth can make it halfway around the world while the truth is getting its boots on.

On a comment section in Atlantic recently, I ran into the following claim about the creeping Islamic influence in "Western" societies:

...Islamists have brought about women-only classes and swimming times at taxpayer-funded universities and public pools; that Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been banned from serving on juries where Muslim defendants are being judged, Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist sensibilities. Ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger King locations because the picture on the wrapper looks similar to the Arabic script for Allah, public schools are pulling pork from their menus, on and on...

When I asked for sources for these claims, another person posting on the same thread pointed out that virtually exact copies of this same statement have appeared as cut and paste jobs in many site comments. After a Google search I tracked down the source of this boilerplate: a thriller by Brad Thor called The Last Patriot. Amazon describes it as the story of a US Navy Seal turned Homeland Security operative, searching for a secret way to halt militant Islam. That may or may not provide a diverting read. But when a sentence or two, lifted from a work of fiction, appears in dozens of comments as fact, it has the potential to distort discussions of public policy that matter.

This encounter with Internet fiction repackaged as fact has reminded me not to assume the assumptions that produce legislation such as the Conservatives' recent security bill have any basis in fact. 

I remember...

as a child watching the first runs of Mel Brooks's Get Smart with my parents. In one of the episodes a character mentioned torture, and my mother said the American forces would never use torture.

My mother did not indulge in illusions about Americans. She never saw the United States with awe or reverence or as the exceptional and unique nation many Americans profess to see. She saw a nation among all others, home of Janas Salk and Bull Connor, Martin Luther King and George Wallace, John F. Kennedy and H. L. Hunt. She saw a country with manifold, even brutal flaws, a country capable of great good and great evil, a country where, in that moment, the good outweighed the evil. Above all, she saw a country which stood for something, something that included a code of conduct. And that code of conduct simply excluded torture.

I refuse to believe that country no longer exists. I believe many, many Americans still hold to and live the basic American propositions about the fundamental dignity of human beings, and would never engage in. or condone, torture. The American Empire may have grown over the American Republic, but it has not devoured the American Republic. Yet when I read long discussions in comments on the recently released US Senate report of CIA torture, discussions focussed entirely on the question of utility, of whether torture works, I cannot shake the conclusion that my mother would find many contemporary Americans deeply dsappointing.

Two court cases for cyclists to watch

Two cases will come up in Toronto area courts over the next while, both worth watching.

1. Lawrence Koch has a traffic case that could potentially set a bad precedent for cyclists' right to the road.
2. Immanuel Sinnadurai was killed in a car/bicycle crash on August 1. Police now believe the driver who killed him was racing, and they have charged both of the people they believe participated in the race with dangerous driving causing death.

And now for something completely different...

intersectionality and the carceral state. A post about what's wrong with the current furor over Woody Allen.

In the Nation, Jessica Valenti wrote:

I also believe that deep down people know that once we start to believe victims en masse—once we take their pain and experience seriously—that everything will have to change.

Jessica Luther writes:

When people buy tickets for the next Woody Allen film or they purchase his latest on DVD, when another Hollywood group decides to honor his decades of work, when an actor chooses to work with him and says how nice he is in the interviews as they promote their movie.... those actions, all of that acceptance of Allen silence his victim.

A lot of silencing has taken place in this situation. The defence of Woody Allen by Robert B. Weide in the Daily Beast suggests we shouldn't believe what Dylan Farrow has to say. He doesn't accuse her of lying, not exactly, but he does claim people he does not name have somehow engaged in "swiftboating" Woody Allen. He writes:

I know Dylan/Malone believes these events took place, and I know Ronan believes so too. I am not in a position to say they didn’t, any more than all the people on the internet calling for Woody’s head can say they did. 

Nobody should have to say this, but: if Dylan Farrow and Ronan Farrow believe Woody Allen committed a heinous crime against her, why should they keep silent? Neither his talent, nor his body of work, should excuse Woody Allen from somehow reckoning with some serious accusations he has evidently not come to terms with.

Defining justice as punishment and exclusion, on the other hand, silences many other people. Jessica Valenti, Jessica Luther, and others write as though some even-handed judge of impeccable integrity will arbitrate their call to exclude and punish Woody Allen and those like him, but in fact calls for harsh retribution lead to laws interpreted and enforced by the American state, with all its historical faults. Millions of Americans, mostly impoverished and racialized, face literal silencing by cell walls, and once released, when laws turn them away from the polls.

By a coincidence, on the day I looked up Jessica Valenti's comment, the Nation also published the following story in the "this just in" box on the same page:

The US government hid an egregious clerical error that placed a Malaysian Stanford University student on the TSA’s no-fly list and prompted a nine-year effort to clear her name, according to a federal ruling released to the public Thursday.

In other words, on the same page that Jessica Valenti inveighs against any acceptance, not for convicted malefactors but for the accused as well, a link appears to another incident in the ongoing story of the American national security and carceral state. Pace Ms. Valenti, that United States has long believed victims "en masse". The results include laws, many named for individual victims, which specify harsher and harsher penalties, ceding more and more unchecked discretion to police and prosecutors, and narrowing the legal rights of suspects, offenders, and the general public alike. Americans have already decided to reject the argument that the life of a person, any person, amounts to more than the worst thing they ever did, or the worst thing anyone accused them of doing. They have instead embraced laws that have led to mass incarceration, mass punishment, at a rate that not only eclipses Russia, China, and Iran, but also has serious effects on American democracy, from the racial imbalance in the denial of voting rights to outright public corruption.

Our society engages in extravagant celebrations of talent and achievement in the performing arts and sports. We do a poor job of separating the celebration of achievement from an affirmation of the ethical qualities of the people we celebrate, so that we make performers, people who excel at sports and other performances, into heroes. We have no vocabulary for saying that Woody Allen has great talent but also great flaws. Indisputably, he has family members in deep pain that he has never succeeded in reconciling with. Clearly, we cannot dismiss the memories of Dylan Farrow. Equally clearly, after three decades of American public policy has excluded and demonized offenders, we can see that road does not lead to a good place. As difficult as it seems, I see no realistic choice but to treat the good in people, in everyone, with celebration, and the bad as something to heal.

Hard words

According to news reports, the New York Jewish community to which Nachman and Raizy Glauber belonged want the state to prosecute their deaths in a car crash, along with the death of their newborn, as "homicide" or "murder". Bereaved parents in Grande Prairie Alberta give the justice system's performance a failing grade after a judge gives a driver three years for four counts of dangerous driving causing death; nine months for each of the four teenagers who died in the crash.

Perhaps, centimeter by painful centimeter, the public has begun to understand that the law has no business treating death by car differently from death by bullet, death by lead pipe, death by poison. While tragic accidents happen, we appear to excuse motorists from responsibility for traffic deaths in a way we would never excuse accidental shootings. Our definition of murder does not require a specific intent to make one person dead. If an offender chooses to gratify an appetite, for the contents of convenience store till, for "respect" on the street, for revenge, and if to gratify that appetite they behave in a way that endangers someone else's life, and by doing so cause a death, then that offender will suffer the penalty for murder. Canada's Parliament has seen fit to treat deaths caused by motorists indulging an appetite for excessive speed differently. The courts have responded with an even more lenient standard. Recent news suggests the public has grown increasingly impatient with this disparity.

To make this clear: I do not ask to have homicide perpetrators treated without mercy. I ask to have them treated without favour. I ask to have the law deal with death by car bumper the way it deals with death by bullet.

Privilege (I): Transcending politics

Many of us wish out politicians and commentators could transcend petty disputes about their ideas. Recently, several columnists did transcend their politics, and I learned to think carefully about what I wished for.

After the prosecutor assigned to Michael Bryant's case concluded he had no hope of convicting Mr. Bryant (a reasonable legal conclusion), a number of commentators, including a fair share of conservatives, hailed the decision as not only a legal victory for Mr. Bryant but a moral vindication.

I will have more to say about the question of whether the dismissal of the charges against Michael Bryant adds up to vindication in any but a legal sense; for now, I propose to focus on what the conservatives who expressed relief and satisfaction at the dismissal of charges against Mr. Bryant did not mention: his politics. Before his encounter with Mr. Sheppard, Mr. Bryant had served in the provincial legislature, first in opposition and then as attorney general, where he regularly promoted government as an wise caretaker of public health and safety. He did not just want to control guns, he wanted to control realistic toy guns. He banned pit bulls and dogs that looked like pit bulls. Ironically, he called for draconian enforcement against hazardous drivers, extending police powers to suspend licenses and impound cars without the bother of a trial. In short, he promoted and extended the nanny state in the service of a liberal government. His measures catered to the supposed anxieties of the "soccer mom" voting demographic.

Yet after his fatal encounter with a private sector contract worker, I read no conservative comments about the irony of Mr. Bryant's past stances in light of his predicament. Bryant's middle class status, his polish and accomplishments made him someone they could identify with, even if he had used those advantages in the service of causes most conservatives oppose on principle. They gave Mr. Sheppard no credit for keeping going and refusing to give up on his life after suffering insults and assaults starting from his childhood, and indeed from before his birth.

Our society carries on and awards unjust privilege in this quiet way, often as much by what we ignore as by what we proclaim, by what we do not say as much as by what we do.

End the impunity. See what happens.

Jim Kenzie, among others, has claimed that, for no reason he cares to make explicit, Canadians will not stop driving cars and drivers will not change. I think he and people who think like him underestimate the intelligence and decency of the driving public. I think drivers would do the behave much better if the law and the culture around us sent a clear message about the right way to drive. Specifically, I think insisting drivers will never treat other road users respectfully makes it much less likely they will. Whatever the reason, this country suffers from a road death rate that makes it very likely that over a normal lifetime you will lose a family member or friend to a traffic crash. I have a modest proposal to change things.

End the impunity.

Recently, the courts convicted a driver for having a car illegally modified for street racing in a way that defeats important safety features, driving that car at a reckless speed, and causing a death. Having reached all those conclusions, the court sentenced the driver to one year in jail. This would not bother me as much as it does, if similarly reckless behaviour with firearms attracted a similar sentence. Someone who deliberately disconnected the smoke alarms in a house, or permitted someone else to, then behaved recklessly with matches and inflammables would face a charge of manslaughter, if not murder, should their behaviour kill someone.

With the series of judicial and police decisions over the past year, it seems hard to deny that dangerous drivers in this culture can expect a presumption of good faith and a leniency that few others can. If you pull the trigger, the courts assume you meant to shoot. If you strike the match, the courts assume you meant to burn. If you defeat the safety measures in your car, drive recklessly, and kill someone, the courts appear to assume that you meant to arive at your destination will everyone aboard well and hearty. This has reached a point where it amounts to impunity for drivers.

Let's end the impunity. Let's do whatever it takes to ensure the courts cannot presume good faith in the face of evidence of reckless conduct on the roads and tampering with safety features. If judges in this province regularly treat homicidal recklessness with motor vehicles as much less culpable than recklessness with guns or fire, then maybe the law should require minimum sentences. Maybe, then, drivers would treat the responsibility inherent in operating a vehicle capable of causing serious harm with more respect. If not, then at least offenders will receive proportionate punishment, whether they use a bumper or a bullet to kill.