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.

Again with the modest proposals

A major impediment to systems to make traffic safer is resistance on the part of motorists. Like many other people, motorists tend to resist measures that could restrict what they see as their freedoms, even if they improve safety for everyone. The motoring public, which of course makes up a large proportion of the general public, will accept safety measures more willingly if these measures provide advantages for the drivers and owners of motor vehicles.

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.

A welcome departure...

Jeff Sessions testifying
by Office of Robert Aderholt

 I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. 

At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, Jefferson Sessions, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. 

Laying down a marker

Trump Rally
by Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA

Imagine a miracle. Someone with the power to do so takes every Trump supporter through the voting systems of American democracy. They examine every contested state, every urban precinct, every ballot, voting machine, line of code, signature and mailer envelope. All the millions who came to his rallies, sent in their money, or voted for the man and his enablers, get to see in detail how the voters recorded their choices, how the poll workers counted them, and how the tallies and the counts and recounts worked. 

Let us assume this examination would reveal exactly what the  Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council has said of the election as a whole. Let us assume it confirms what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has told the world about the Georgia election and its associated recounts, and what the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona government officials had to say. Assume our imaginary audit shows each Trump supporter why American state and federal courts have rejected thirty-eight lawsuits by the Trump campaign and layers aligned with him.

How many of the Trump supporters who have refused to accept the election results would change their minds? How many of the protestors chanting "stop the steal" would, if presented with irrefutable proof no corruption or tampering sufficient to tip the election results had taken place, change their minds, still their protests, and accept Joe Biden as their president?

A trophy of ashes

At a pivotal moment in the film "The Bounty",  when the mutineers under Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) are about to put Captain William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) and the crew loyal to him into the ship's boat and set them adrift in the Pacific, Bligh asks his former second in command if he thinks he can command the mutineers, "this rabble". Bligh reminds Christian he failed, and Bligh had the law behind him. 

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.

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.

On punching racists and genocide advocates

by Vas Panagiotopoulos

Someone punched Richard Spencer, the self-proclaimed "white nationalist" during a street interview. Since then, a lively debate has blossomed on the Internet, driven, inevitably, by a series of memes and videos relating the punch to Indiana Jones's punching a Nazi in The Last Crusade.

Among the cheerfully irreverent memes, some people have asked the serious question: is it right to punch Nazis? And if we regard punching a Nazi as ethically acceptable, does it accomplish anything positive? 

To start with the moral question, which should always come first: anyone can condemn violence on moral grounds, but condemning this punch specifically and consistently requires much stronger condemnation of practices of the American government. Richard Spencer published a website that notoriously published an article advocating genocide of African peoples. A South Asian member of a Salafist organization publishing a similar article advocating genocide of "infidels" would find themselves in danger of a sucker punch in the form of a hellfire missile fired by a drone. If you deplore, and work against, the drone campaign, you may consistently deplore the punch on moral grounds.

Arno Arr Michaelis has a post on facebook in which he argues against punching Richard Spenser on rational grounds: violent people thrive on violence, and punching a "white nationalist" simply feeds the us versus them reaction racists need to promote themselves and their views. 

The value of a tell

I have seen a number of comments about the movement calling themselves the "alt-right"; these comments argue we should not accept these peoples' name for their movement, but rather call them fascists, racists, national socialists, misogynists, and plain haters. An Internet activist has written a Google Chrome plug-in that renames "alt-right" to White Supremacy or neo-Nazi. The Associated Press has also updated their style guide to require quotes and a full definition whenever writers use the term "alt-right".

I sympathize with the impulse, but if we reject the name "alt right" we stand to lose potentially useful information. The name a person or a group gives themselves is always a "tell"; it gives away more about the people who take the name than they intend.

Giving us back the horrors...

In the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon", the crew of the Enterprise approach  Eminiar VII, planet that has grown comfortable living in an extended state of  inter-planetary war with a former colony, Vendikar. The inhabitants of Eminiar VII and Vedikar have made their war bearable by waging it with computers, launching their attacks mathematically. The war resembles a video game in all but one aspect: the casualties really die. As part of the agreement between the warring world, those declared dead in an attack must report to disintegration chambers that neatly annihilate them.

With Captain Kirk and the enterprise caught up in this conflict, They perceive only one choice: force the governments of Vendikar and Eminiar VIII to make peace (this episode predates the Prime Directive). He makes his way to the center of government in the capital of Eminiar VII, and  after a cat and mouse dialog with the planet's ruler, Anan 7, Kirk manages to destroy the connected computers that manage the lethal video game. As usually happens in science fiction of the 1960s, the computers explode spectacularly, and Anan 7 stumbles out of the smoke and storms at Captain Kirk: "Do you realize what you've done?"

"Yes," replies Kirk, "I've given you back the horrors of war."

The small band of neo-Nazis who tainted Donald Trump's campaign have given us back the horrors of racism and "white" supremacy.

An inadvertent Faustian bargain for cyclists?

The Ontario Highway Traffic Act says that cyclists have to ride in the right hand lane, but does not specify a position. It also requires motorists to pass cyclists with at least a meter of clearance. At the same time, it says that when passed, cyclists must move over and allow the overtaking vehicle to proceed. The law makes it unclear whether the cyclists must, as another part of the section on passing states, leave no more than half the road free, or whether the cyclist must move over regardless.

In the United States, the Uniform Vehicle Code, published by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances in 2000, says the following:

(a) Any person operating a bicycle... at less than the normal speed of traffic... shall ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway except.... When overtaking and passing another bicycle or vehicle.... When preparing for a left turn.... When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions' including but not limited to: fixed or moving objects; parked or moving vehicles; bicycles; pedestrians; animals; surface hazards; or.... a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a motor vehicle to travel safely side by side..... When riding in the right-turn-only lane.

In both cases, the law manages to say the bicycles should ride in the right hand lane and ride, or give way, to the right side of the road, except when they shouldn't. Conversely, cyclists can take the lane, when allowed to, under certain conditions.

For the past three decades, laws, practices and attitudes have evolved under pressure from environmentalists and cyclists. For much of that time, various people with an emotional or an economic stake in the current heavily motorized transportation system have attempted to resist this process. Laws in the process of change inevitably contain contradictory and unclear segments, as the legislature changes laws piecemeal.

As different legislatures change laws differently, it makes sense to expect the laws will evolve differently. In this case, the laws in very different jurisdictions have changed to the same effect: they all acknowledge the right of cyclists to take the lane where safety requires it, but they do so ambiguously. In all cases the application of the law depends on a judgement; in the case of the Ontario law, it requires a judgement about what the law means.In the case of the Uniform Vehicle code, a cyclists's right to take the lane depends on whether conditions require it; again, a matter of assessment.

The laws in Ontario and elsewhere have taken a particular shape: articulate cyclists with considerable personal resources, of the sort who tend to lead legislative campaigns, can take the lane with some confidence the courts will uphold, or at least permit, their actions. Meanwhile, the laws retain enough ambiguity to permit the police to push cyclists without the resources or time to study the law or prevail in court to the side of the road. I do not consider this a compromise cyclists should or can accept. As long as cyclists' right to ride in safety remains subject to ambiguities in the law, then some of us do not have the right to take the lane, which means none of us really do.

At a minimum, this means we haven't won the battle for the right to cycle, safely, and to choose the best road position. We need to say so. We need to keep pushing governments to remove all the qualifications in the law regarding our right to the road.

How not to argue for the rights of cyclists

When cycling on streets and roads where motorists may have permission to operate their vehicles, cyclists have the right to decide our lane positions for ourselves. Human vision has a narrow acute range: the optimum resolution of our eyes covers just a few degrees. To cope with this limit, aviators train to scan the sky in small sections; without this training, surface motor vehicle operators focus on the road in front of the vehicle. Cyclists occupying the center of the lane have the best chance motorists will see and avoid us. Visibility plays a particularly critical role at intersections, and there cyclists riding to the side have the greatest chance of coming into conflict with motor vehicles.

There you have the safety case for cyclists riding in the center of the lane. It exists in tension with another safety imperative: separating traffic operating at different speeds, to avoid the need for sudden changes in speed and to minimize the consequences of an impact. Those two hazards: getting sideswiped by a driver passing too close and getting hit by a driver who sees us too late define the choices for cyclists. Taking all the risks and the known limits of drivers into account, it makes a lot of sense for cyclists to ride in the center of the lane when we don't have, at minimum, an adequate bicycle lane, and, preferably, a protected bike lane. Most of us who ride in North America can't count on bike lanes every where we go, or even most of the places we go. Most of us need to take the lane, and taking the lane serves us best when we do it without fear and without apology. At an absolute minimum, cyclists have, and ought to vigorously defend, a right to make our own choices about where in the lane to ride.


I ride in the center of the lane because I consider it safer. That covers it in three words: I consider it safer. John Forester and some of his supporters clutter the issue with irrelevant and frankly offensive detours from the single objective that matters: getting everyone from point 'A' to point 'B' alive and uninjured, notwithstanding the presence of two-tonne steel bombs.

#blacklivesmatter vs. #alllivesmatter: a different perspective

By Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA
[CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

To judge by my facebook feed, just about everyone I know who forwards thoughts about the original #blacklivesmatter and the rejoinder #alllivesmatter see the difference as one of urgency. The vast majority of comments I read use an analogy of a building on fire or a child who got left out at dinner. By this analogy, black lives don't matter more, but black people, at least in the American context, have a more urgent need for justice right now.

I agree with this analogy, but I can see other ways of looking at the issue as well. A hashtag, after all, has some flexibility; we can see it in many different ways. And by seeing the hashtag #blacklivesmatter in a slightly different way, I have also come to see the problem with the attempted retort #alllivesmatter in a different way as well.

Imagine the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, not as a plea or as a proposition. Imagine it as a simple statement that we all long ago signed onto. In this light, the hashtag contains an accusation: the lives of Black people matter; you know it, I know it, we all know it, but our society, and particularly our justice system do not act according to our understanding. The power of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag stems from our recognition that our actions and the behaviour of our institutions do not reflect our stated ethics: therefore, #alllivesmatter will always embody a weak response, a feeble denial. Simply acknowledging the phrase "black lives matter" as a statement that calls for a response shows that at some level those who respond understand the problem exists. If black lives matter did not call our attention to a real problem, we would respond with "of course", rather than with "all lives matter".

Pulse nightclub Orlando. Rest in peace, rise in glory

Stanley Almodovar III, Amanda Alvear, Oscar A Aracena-Montero, Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, Antonio Davon Brown, Darryl Roman Burt II, Angel L. Candelario-Padro, Juan Chevez-Martinez, Luis Daniel Conde, Cory James Connell, Tevin Eugene Crosby, Deonka Deidra Drayton, Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, Leroy Valentin Fernandez, Mercedez Marisol Flores, Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, Juan Ramon Guerrero, Paul Terrell Henry, Frank Hernandez, Miguel Angel Honorato, Javier Jorge-Reyes, Jason Benjamin Josaphat, Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, Christopher Andrew Leinonen, Alejandro Barrios Martinez, Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, Kimberly Morris, Akyra Monet Murray, Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, Joel Rayon Paniagua, Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, Enrique L. Rios, Jr., Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, Edward Sotomayor Jr., Shane Evan Tomlinson, Martin Benitez Torres, Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, Luis S. Vielma, Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, Jerald Arthur Wright

Editing the list of names of people killed at Pulse nightclub in Orlando last Saturday brought home to me how long a list of names forty-nine victims makes.

A betrayal wrapped in an oxymoron

By Gage Skidmore (Flickr.com) CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By running for president of the United States, Donald Trump has exposed a good many open wounds. The phrase used to describe one of these sums it up succinctly, but not neatly. Like origami, the concept opens into multiple dimensions; the more you pull on it, the more it reveals. White working class: suddenly, the phrase appears in everyone's articles, an all purpose location for the appeal of one Donald Trump, and much more beside.

The phrase explains without explaining; it explains not in the sense that the words themselves carry meaning, but in the sense that the words "white working class" serve to trace the lines of deep scars or unhealed fractures in our society. Start with the word order: the white working class. The syntax suggests a single mass, like a vast white shag carpet covering several American states. The opposite phrase, working class African Americans, suggests a single description applicable to multiple individuals. Specifically, the phrase speaks of African Americans who belong to the working class, people who work for wages and who need to work for wages to support themselves. Working class African Americans also belong to a larger set: the working class generally, made up of people of all ethnic varieties, all nationalities. The phrase white working class, on the other hand, completes a definition not of multiple persons but, somehow, a single phenomenon.

These aren't the droids you're looking for -- and by the way, this is the best movie ever

It's probably just me, but somehow the rave reviews for "The Force Awakens" have a whiff of jedi mind tricks about them. It's not that it's a truly bad movie. Certainly, if you compare it with "Phantom Menace", it's a real accomplishment. But it's been called the best movie of the year, which seems just a little excessive in a year that saw the release of "Room" and "Spotlight".

For those who go to movies looking for spectacle, "The Force Awakens" delivers. For those who want to see plot twists, this movie will more than satisfy. If you want to see moments of convincing acting between the explosions, it comes across as well. For those who want to see truly coherent, truly excellent writing: see "Spotlight", or see "Room".

In his book "The Empty Space", the great English theatre director Peter Brook wrote about the disconnection between plays that described inner lives and plays that addressed the great sweep of world events. Brook points to the Elizabethan theatre as proof that writers could address both interior thoughts and feelings and world events, exposing the conflicts and interactions between the fears and hopes of individuals and the great events of the world. Perhaps Star Wars aims to do the same thing on a mythic scale, but it misfires badly.Star Wars has a red shirt problem. The first movie of the series, in 1977, began with the destruction of the planet Alderan.

All story-telling risks a kind of narcissism: telling a story inevitably means telling it from a particular point of view, and the listeners come to understand, and to that extent sympathise with, that view. Some story-tellers resist, making a conscious effort to remind their hearers that people outside the circle of the story also matter. Other storytellers happily capitulate to the limits of the form, even turning effect into ideology. Star Wars explicitly defines some of its characters as "chosen", some as auxiliaries placed by fate in the orbit of the chosen, and the vast majority as grist for the cosmic grinder. But this juxtaposition of the few who matter with the many who do not creates jarring inconsistencies in the heart of the story. At the end of Return of the Jedi, the film clearly presents Annakin Skywalker as fulfilled and redeemed, together with Obi-wan and Yoda which leaves the audience to wonder where in that afterlife the inhabitants of Alderan have got to.  "The Force Awakens" does not change this; it doubles down on the anonymous slaughter.

The problems with "The Force Awakens" start with, well, the force. An invisible, quasi-religious and very loosely defined principle associated with a set of abilities, mostly telepathy, the ability to manipulate others, and telekinesis, the Start Wars movies describe it as a grace somehow passed on by heredity. The force, in fact, provides a continual deus ex machina for the series, and particularly for the current film. The film depicts one of the principal characters as a scavenger, scratching out a subsistence living selling parts scavenged from the debris of space battles of a generation ago to an exploitative and oppressive junk dealer. Yet this character goes on to display excellent piloting and combat skills, skills that take decades to master and in fact act as the hallmarks of military aristocracy. Who taught this character these skills? Why would they? It should not surprise any viewer that the film makes it abundantly clear that the force is strong in this one. The films express a vision of profound inequality, and "The Force Awakens" does not change this.

Some of the best works of literature and drama to describe great historical events and movements have done so from the point of view of a random participant, as "Casablanca" tells the story of the Second World War, or from the point of view of the victims, as "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or "Johnny Got His Gun" do. The protagonists of these stories represent the millions of people who went through the same experiences. Other accounts tell the story of major events from the point of view of people who happened to make specific decisions that had a profound impact. The choice of protagonist matters, and in Star Wars, the choice of protagonists, by an impersonal blessing from the universe passed on in the family line, contradicts the ostensible theme of the series, the struggle to preserve, then the struggle to restore, then the struggle to maintain a democratic state. The writers of Star Wars do not manage this tension well. "The Force Awakens" is spectacular; it has good acting between the blasts, but it does not tell a compelling story.

Ride Line 9

UPDATED BELOW

A high pressure petroleum pipeline known as "line 9" runs through Toronto, roughly parallel to Finch Avenue for most of its length. Historically, the pipeline has carried crude oil from terminals on the East coast to the refineries in Sarnia. Enbridge, the owner of the pipeline, proposes to reverse the flow and have the pipeline carry diluted bitumen, tar sand, from Alberta to refine on the East Coast.

We know that the Earth's mineral resources will not sustain the kind of high energy, high consumption culture and lifestyle symbolized and enabled by the private automobile for much longer. Trying to keep on with business as usual, squeezing the last oil out of our planet, will come at a high cost to the world, to the living things on it, and to us and our cities. Line 9 goes right through some of the most ecologically sensitive and the most heavily settled part of Ontario. As the energy industry wrings the last drops of fossil energy from this planet, pipes such as line 9 carry more and more dangerous and corrosive substances.

Cycling culture offers an alternative to this ugly escalation of extraction, consumption, and waste. To demonstrate this alternative visually, I propose a bike not bitumen ride along the line 9 route, through some of the beautiful and diverse parts of Toronto. I tentatively propose it for the first Saturday of October: early enough to be warm for the ride. A Saturday one week after critical mass, should provide an opportunity for the greatest participation. An afternoon ride, starting at 3:00 pm, should take place in the light; the ride should take about two and a half hours at an easy pace.

The route I propose for this ride follows the route of line 9 closely, from Islington Avenue near the Humber to Leslie Street in the East.



For reasons of safety I am changing the ride start point to Jane and Finch, specifically Jane at the recreational trail crossing, just north of York Gate Mall (about a block North of Finch on Jane). Also, the ride will stop at Dufferin until 4:30pm, to give anyone who wants to join us after the Ice Ride a chance to do so there and then. 

The public eye: Nina Davuluri and Amanda Marcotte

It started with a flower.


Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2014, visited Central High School in York Pennsylvania, and Patrick Farves gave her the flower and asked her to come to the prom with him.

Anyone who has had any involvement with planning a high school prom, or even just observed the process from a distance, knows that while not all high school formal dances aim for this, or achieve it, a cultural expectation exists that those who participate in a prom will find it a magical experience, an excursion into a fairy tale world, a Cinderella dance where all the coaches turn back into pumpkins (or, more accurately, rental stretch hummers) in the morning. Likewise, anyone who shops for food and reads the magazines and tabloids in the checkout lane knows that a whole industry dedicates itself to convincing us that some people, collectively known as celebrities, live in this enchanted world all the time.

An invitation to the prom, therefore, does not necessarily entail a sexual invitation, still less an invitation to any sort of relationship. An invitation to the prom may well mean nothing more than an invitation to share a fantasy. When someone to extend it to a person supposedly living the life of a celebrity, what does that mean? If you treat the proposition as an equation, and cancel out the absurdities on both sides, it comes out to a simple acknowledgement of the other person's humanity. I don't know how Mr. Farves saw his actions; more than anything else, it looks as though he saw the event as a cheerful prank.

But it caught the attention of Amanda Marcotte the feminist blogger, who saw the whole thing in a much darker light.  She has of course the right to see these matters anyway she chooses, but I find her arguments interesting. She wrote:

Every year around prom, there’s a “cute” story wherein a teenage boy gets himself some attention by putting a famous and beautiful celebrity he’s never met on the spot by asking her to prom, knowing full well that she would rather be at home pulling out her toenails than go on a date with some random teenage boy she’s never met.

The passage expresses an interesting repugnance: people don't generally pull out their toenails voluntarily. Marcotte here appears to equate any date with any random teenage boy with torture. She provides an important clue to her thinking later in the piece, when she writes:

I don’t think it’s cute when girls pester Justin Bieber for dates, either.

As someone who wishes Bieber well and hopes he gets his life together, I still have to say: on the record now, and when Ms. Marcotte wrote the piece in question, the problem with pestering Justin Bieber for dates has much less to do with the "pestering", but with the recent behaviour of Justin Bieber. If I had to advise any random young woman about asking Mr. Biever out on a date, I would have something to say about getting into a car with someone who has a charge of drunk driving on his record, I see no reason any young woman who wants to date Justin Bieber should not consider herself attractive enough to set her sights on him.

Emotional safety and Privilege

Sometime over the past three decades, an increasing number of people began to demand emotional comfort as a right equivalent of physical safety. Expressions such as "I'm uncomfortable" went from an explanation to an imperative. Alerts appeared on writing dealing with any subject liable to upset people.

Some of this was simply respect for a diversity of belief; some of it, decency to people with harrowing pasts. But it doesn't do to allow the claims for emotional comfort to pass without asking three critical questions: who has made the claim to have their comfort protected; what measures does this require? Above all: who will these measures affect, and at what cost to them?

After all, the demand for emotional comfort current on the Left has a lot, indeed too much, in common with the conservative preoccupation with "quality of life". Quality of life, in these cases, always seems to mean a sense of comfort and safety for the privileged at the expense of people the privileged would prefer not to deal with. That has led, over time, to a great many oppressive actions by police, both official and unofficial.  The video in this post was taken by Chris Lollie as police arrested him after security officials complained he refused to cooperate with their demand he vacate a chair in a public area in Minneapolis. Whatever the merits of this specific situation, the police focus of "quality of life" clearly falls disproportionately on people of colour. While treating people with traumas in their past with sensitivity and respect doesn't mean pushing people like Chris Lollie from pillar to post, making sure we do not use phrases like "quality of life" or "emotional safety" as excuses for oppressive behaviour will take a certain amount of careful, and critical thinking.