What the women's Olympic boxing controversy tells us

 

 

To use a sports metaphor the controversies over two women boxers at the Olympics, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have a world of "tells" attached to them.

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.

Conspiracy minded

Iran isn't actually powering missiles with money

George Orwell characterized the English "Rule of the Saints" under Oliver Cromwell as "a military dictatorship enlivened by witchcraft trials". Those words appear to describe Iran pretty well today. A dictatorship, and particularly a military dictatorship, needs an enemy, and the current regime in Iran had identified Israel as an enemy well before the Ayatollahs came to power. Iran's declarations of solidarity with the Palestinian people and support for Hamas in the current conflict continues a policy they have pursued for over forty years. It seems obvious the leadership in Iran strongly approves of  the current opposition to Israeli policy in the West, and it makes sense expect them to support organizing in opposition to Israel in any way they can.

Oppression and atrocity

This post deals with the accounts of sexual violence in the Hamas-led assault on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It thus necessarily includes references to rape, homicide, and crimes of extreme violence.

A United Nations investigative team has now submitted a report, finding credible evidence the Hamas fighters committed acts of sexual violence, both during the initial assault on southern Israel on October 7, and also against those they held hostage.

In all the things people can say, and have an obligation to say about this report, a number of things stand out. Start with the obvious: "credible evidence" does not mean certainty. If subsequent investigation should disprove these allegations unfounded, we should all celebrate: any woman  not suffering rape, not violated in life or death, is good news. But that is also to say there is no excuse, whatever, for this kind of violence. Nor, now, do we have any excuse for ignoring or dismissing the possibility Hamas fighters, or people associated with them, did commit these atrocities. 

We can't justify the violation of Israeli women by Hamas by pointing to claims, also under investigation, that Israeli soldiers have assaulted and violated Palestinians. Nor do we have to justify, or ignore, claims about brutality by Hamas to uphold Palestinian rights. The children of Gaza are innocent, and their suffering is unjust. No actions of Hamas cancel or reduce the rights of Palestinians who had no hand and no say in them.

William of Occam

William of Occam

 The intellectual asceticism of William of Occam is not popular in American conservative circles. The American commentator Rod Dreher has extended his dislike for Occam's antinomianism into a distaste for the rule against multiplying causes known as Occam's Razor. Plenty of conservatives who do not often refer to William of Occam by name refuse, in practice, to apply his insight. 

Occam's Razor provides a central insight in all forms of intellectual endeavour, but nowhere does it matter more than in the formation of policy, because in politics the facts and the logical conclusions from these facts matter most when they come with bad, or at least unwelcome, news. Facts always matter, but when they happen to align with our desires, they have only a marginal influence on policy. After all, we seldom turn from doing something we want to do because the facts and logic affirm our choices. Living by the truth only really counts as a virtue when it includes a willingness to live by truths we find unpleasant.

Occam's Razor plays a vital role in this process, by cutting down the number of conclusions possible from any given set of facts. If I write a computer program and the test runs keep providing the wrong output, I can conclude I have made an error somewhere in my logic, or I can decide the operating system has an arcane defect my program has somehow stumbled into, a system error capable of evading detection for decades, and one invoked by only the tiniest set of circumstances. While such things happen, Occam's Razor tells me to start looking for errors in my own work. 

Virtue

In his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell wrote the following passage: 

Civic Virtue  in Green-Wood Cemetery
by Rhododendrites

Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the 'change of heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. (emphasis added)

Orwell's concession of the "partial truth" of the talk of the need for a "change of heart" proceeds naturally from a comment he made in his essay about the work of Charles Dickens:

The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens... had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.

Orwell identifies a classic paradox  here: how do you make a good society out of human beings with impulses, and in some case a real disposition, to behave badly. The context of these quotes also hints at a solution. In art and literature in religion, in all areas where human beings choose to participate and where we accept our participation may change us, even if we do not necessarily choose to change, we consent to address our inner lives and thoughts, the source from which our behaviour springs. Thus, a writer such as Charles Dickens, or a religious teacher, or a poet, painter or playwright can exhort us to see ourselves and the world in a different way. Religious teachers and artists have the authority to ask us to change the way we think, and in that sense the person we are. Politics, on the other hand, exists to define standards of behaviour we will, if necessary, enforce. Enforcement, in the final analysis, means some form of violence. 

To begin with the principle: the body politic does not have the right to shape its members. Politics stops at my skin. To go on to the practical: as Orwell notes, focus on the individual serves to distract from the real business of politics: putting in place the rules, expectations, and structures we require in order to live together as the people we are, not the people some utopian vision hopes for.

Living not by lies but ignoring the truth

Reverend Dwight Longenecker has reviewed Rod Dreher's new book "Live Not by Lies", and his review essay is interesting. In fact, I would go so far as to call it fascinating: it brings to my mind an essay by Connor Cruise O'Brien called "What can become of South Africa?", in which he speaks of the potential of ideological rhetoric to "boggle the mind" and completely drive out ordinary, humble respect for everyday reality. Reading Fr. Longenecker's essay, I can't tell whether he actually does not see the contradictions in his writing, or whether he simply wants to know if his readers have paid attention, because he wrote the following paragraph in his glowing review of Mr. Dreher's book:

 No matter what you believe about the legality of Joe Biden’s election, the fact remains that half the country believe Donald Trump and his Trump army were planning a coup. The other half of the country believe Joe Biden accomplished a coup through a rigged election. Again, no matter what the facts are–the result is that the Joe Biden presidency appears to be propped up by military might. Calling up 25,000 troops to Washington this week was not just for “security”. It was clearly a show of strength by the winning side. It was a display of military might to remind the other half of America who won and who is in charge. 

 In case anyone has forgotten, one of the books praised in this review essay bears the title "Live Not by Lies". That context makes the above quote from the article quite remarkable. 

Dr. Biden, I presume...

Ralph Alswang, White House 
photographer

Now eighty million American voters, well over fifty United States judges, and the electoral college have awarded the title of president elect to Joe Biden, mainstream conservative publications have a problem. Refusing to call Mr. Biden the president elect looks increasingly desperate, increasingly unrealistic, and with increasing clarity, it reveals a lack of respect for American democracy. At the same time, it seems evident a great many people with influence among conservatives don't believe in conceding with any grace. Perhaps they have internalized Winston Churchill's quote:

Nations which go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.

 Most of us can discern the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Democratic Party, but American politics has grown more extreme lately. Some conservative opinion journalists in search of a hill to defend have found one: they may have to call Mr. Biden the president, but to call the incoming first lady by her academic title of Dr. Biden: never.

It started with an essay in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal decrying Dr. Biden's use of her title, then spread to National Review, where one article gives the laxity of American libel standards a serious workout by suggesting, with no apparent basis save the writer's own opinion, the University of Delaware had chucked its standards to award a degree to the spouse of a senator.

Voting, voters, and entropy

Tucker Carlson
by Gage Skidmore

A popular metaphor for entropy, attributed to Schopenhauer, goes like this: if you take a barrel of sewage and pour in a glass of fine French wine, you have a barrel of sewage. If you take a barrel of fine French wine and (shudder) pour in a glass of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage.

In one of his nightly opinion pieces, Tucker Carlson sarcastically lauded the triumph of voters who cast ballots from the grave. He later had to retract one of his examples after learning one of the ballots he cited had come from a very much alive widow, who had identified herself as Mrs. (husband's name). Carlson's sarcasm had an interesting effect: it produced an emotional reaction sufficient to briefly cloud my analysis, and I had to take a (virtual) step back to analyze what he had to say. Once I broke his arguments down and considered them, I found a couple of interesting layers, ones hinting at American Conservative strategy going forward. 

On collective humility...

At the end of an eventful day, to say the least, I offer a brief anecdote, just to quell the worst of our impulses to indulge in self-righteous indignation. Just over a year after I returned to Toronto after a forty year absence, John Barber, one of the journalists who spoke for Toronto's downtown urbanists, wrote a column gushing with praise for the lawless thuggery of Richard Daley's destruction of Meigs Field. The former mayor of Chicago destroyed that city's waterfront airport in what Barber described as a "midnight raid", a romantic description leaving out the multiple laws this "raid" broke, or that it endangered everyone in the air over the American midwest that night. If "Ford Nation" has produced a leader determined to get his own way, law be damned, well, they have had some good teachers over the years, and those teachers have sometimes included ourselves and our friends.

Humility alone, though, won't save us. Yes, we, collectively, have contributed our share to the sorry record leading to Doug Ford's determination to cut down every court in the province, if he must, to get at Toronto's City Council. We still have to deal with the situation.

Don't quote Genesis 19 on Same-sex Marriage

Jem Bloomfield, in the blog quiteirregular, writes about the collision between the stance on same sex marriage held by some churches, and the culture prevalent in university settings:

One of the major points of view that I hear is that Christianity is immoral.  They don’t use exactly that word: they’re more likely to describe things as “discriminatory”, “oppressive” or “unjust”, but that’s the general gist.  There are moral principles of inclusion and justice which are central to their lives, which they see the Church as transgressing.  They are used to looking at the media, or at politics, and criticising the misogyny or homophobia they see, and institutional Christianity is no exception.  The same disdain for minority groups, the same discrimination.

 This strikes me as a pretty accurate set of observations, but I would go further. To interpret one of the biblical passages commonly cited against Gay men as a condemnation of same-sex behaviour requires accepting a claim nearly everyone today views as outrageous, and many contemporary governments have made outright criminal.

Luke Skywalker and the United States Constitution

Conor Friedersdorf thinks the Left has made a huge mistake in abandoning the pure libertarian position on the freedom of political speech. At least, he thought so as of last week, before the pardoning of Joe Arpaio.

Donald Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio, as Mr. Friedersdorf himself has pointed out, along with many other able commentators, has a real potential to unravel the rule of law. The presidential power of pardon has few specific limits, but the United States Constitution certainly never intended it to permit the President to undermine a prosecution, much less a law, the president simply disapproved of. The specific pardon of Mr. Arpaio, whom President Trump pardoned for offences related to civil rights violations, makes the situation more troubling. Issuing a pardon for someone who has never expressed regret or admitted wrongdoing means one of two things: either the President believes the court made a serious error of fact, or he condones the offence. If officials with the power to pardon violators actively condone civil rights violations, they effectively strip some, and in the end all, members of the community of their civil rights.

This illustrates what I call the Skywalker rule of constitutions: like the death star, every written constitution has to have a relief port.

"White fragility" is ableist

I often read and hear people with disabilities, describe the moment the light bulb lights; lights with incandescent rage in the moment we understand the standards defining "normal" rest on choices as fundamentally arbitrary as the dictates of fashion. Norms shift from culture to culture, but this culture, our culture, polices its norms by any brutality necessary. Since policing construed as therapeutic supposedly serves the interests of those policed, no consideration of rights or fairness restrain it. If the policing takes a form impossible to construe as therapy, its promoters justify it as necessary for the prosperity and happiness of future generations.

Some people, a tiny minority, have the credentials or the power to set standards, define "normal"; others enforce these standards, checklist by checklist on the bodies of the vulnerable, often starting before school age. This entitlement of the doer over the done to forms the essence of the oppression we call ableism. Those who have received this treatment, the done to, feel this entitlement in our bodies: deathly sick and uncontrollably shaking from drugs given to us because the impulse to erase our differences outweighed the (known) side effects. We know it in our spirits and our memories, of being held up as examples of failure, targets for bullying, or just old fashioned beatings by authority figures or by our peers.

Using the term "white fragility" accepts and affirms this system of entitlement. It affirms the checklists acted out on the bodies of children who can't speak, the toxic drugs given to neuro-divergent children and teens, and acts yet more extreme. It affirms the whole system, with one proviso: racial animus, or more precisely any deviation from the response to animus the enlightened decree, also counts as a deviation, a symptom in need of correction, of checking off the list.

Logophobia redux

Rod Dreher links approvingly to an article by Elizabeth Corey in First Things that tackles the concept of intersectionality. Corey dismisses the concept as "a wholly academic invention", then promptly refutes that characterization by citing a real life example of discrimination and the ensuing legal case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. Corey writes:

...five black women sued General Motors for discrimination. GM had not hired black women prior to 1964, and had dismissed all but one of its black female ­employees hired after 1970 on the basis of seniority. The plaintiffs claimed that the harm they suffered could not be addressed by suing as women only, because GM could point out that it had indeed hired women (white women) prior to 1964 and had retained those that were hired after 1970. 

Nor were they willing to sue on the basis of race alone. The discrimination they suffered was not merely racial, they argued, but a result of their combined racial and gender identity. The district court dismissed this claim, observing that the prospect of “the ­creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.”

Encryption, security, the internet, and King Canute

Legend has it that King Canute, a canny and highly successful ruler of England,

Huts and seashore in Wales

Denmark, and parts of Scandinavia, had courtiers who like to flatter him; when some at court suggested that even the sea would have to obey Canute's wisdom and power, the king decided he had enough of this nonsense, and resolved to end it with a demonstration. He and his court accordingly went to the sea shore, and there Canute gave order to the incoming tide to cease, desist, and turn around. The tide, naturally, did no such thing. Having demonstrated his limits, he finished with an admonition to keep the flattery within the bounds of reality, and the court returned to the capital, doubtless to the relief of the chastened courtiers.

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.

The right to be wrong is not necessarily the right to be sloppy

photo by Duke University Divinity School Library

We all ignore truths, demands, arguments we would prefer not to face. At my best, I only hold arguments I find offensive to a higher, perhaps impossible standard of proof. At my worst, I ignore truths I would prefer not to deal with and avoid pressing arguments for fear of giving offense to other people.

There is a difference between avoiding uncomfortable ideas and challenges, and making a public virtue of it.

Making room for change

Thirty years ago, at the height of second wave feminism, writers such as Mary Daly firmly defined patriarchy as the root of all oppressions. Popular writing described even the wealthiest and most privileged of woman as victims.

Facts are stubborn things

John Adams pointed this out in his defence of British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre:

 Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence...

Facts are also oppositional, in this sense: they restrain everyone in the same way, and in doing so they bring people together.  We have an infinite number of ways of coming at he truth: the soaring beauty of music, the inspiration of religious ritual, the stories we tell, the lives we lead. But when my life and my passions differ profoundly from someone else's, what then? If I find truth in the music of Mozart's concert masses, I might not succeed at finding a common musical language with someone who finds their truth in the work of Tupac Shakur. Facts, even the hard facts made notorious by Gradgrind, may offer the only way profoundly different people can find enough common truth to live together.

Which brings us to Yusra Khogali.

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.