Alex Trebek and the Donald

RIP to a giant who made knowing stuff cool. https://t.co/GQybsCTDLo

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 8, 2020

 If the clue reads: "In 1984 George Orwell wrote this thing was statistical, though the book says, clearly, it isn't", the correct response is: "what is sanity?"

On the day after most media outlets called the election for Mr. Biden, Alex Trebek died at his home, with his family, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer. In his public fight over a year and a half with the cancer, he showed grace, humility, and a defining gentle, self-deprecating humour. 

He provided a useful, even healing, counterpart to the career of that other TV show host, the one who disastrously took his act into the White House. Alex Trebek did more than making "knowing stuff cool"; he made reaching for the truth cool. He made acknowledging and correcting his mistakes cool. The TV show "Jeopardy" taught us many things, some trivial, some not, but perhaps the most important lesson the show taught came not from the clues or the questions, but from the occasional adjustments to scores as the judges accepted a response Mr. Trebek had rejected, or rejected a response he had allowed. Alex Trebek always conveyed these changes courteously, always with a tinge of regret for taking away points, and never, not ever, with any hint of wounded vanity at having his calls overruled. In doing so, he taught us nothing matters more than the truth, not the flow of the play and certainly not the ego of the host. Without display, without fanfare, without even speaking to the matter directly, he taught everyone who watched the show the importance of getting things right. 

401-k and fantasy

 In the American election just past, a voter gave the state of her 401-k retirement savings plan as a reason for voting for Donald Trump. I don't begrudge anyone feeling happy about the state of their preparations for retirement. I don't even feel moved to condemn anyone for overlooking Mr. Trump's egregious offences, from the hundred thousand excess American pandemic deaths to the separation of families on the Southern border of the United States. We live in a merciless, every person for themselves society, and  some of us come to terms with that by taking steps to secure their future.

I have something else to say to this Trump voter: the numbers in this person's 401-k statement and in the stock market section of the news she reads may make her feel happy, but they have a good chance of meaning as much to her actual life in retirement, or even her ability to stop working, as Darth Vader's revelation to Luke, or Aragorn's marriage to Arwen. Three related reasons explain why.

Police and Violence

 Justin King (Beau of the Fifth Column on Twitter and YouTube) recently noted, in a tweet, the lack of sympathy for police in an online forum for military and security contractors. After a gunman shot and seriously injured two Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies, he noticed a series of comments ranging from ironic to hostile, and it puzzled him.

I don't pretend to know the reason this particular community appears to have turned against the police, but I do know about some trends in police training. When I consider the notions of honour I observe among people in high risk occupations, and compare that with what I see in police training and police behaviour, I can see one explanation for the hostility in the series of tweets Justin King quotes. I may not have the right explanation, but I think my hypothesis fits the available information.

Watch any television show from forty years ago and compare it with just about any similar show today, and the change in police tactics and equipment will appear instantly. Where twenty or thirty years ago a pair of detectives might knock on a door, today's shows portray squads of officers in full body armour taking down doors with battering rams. Television may exaggerate, but it tends to track social change, and police behaviour has indeed changed. Radley Balko has written about this, calling the phenomenon The Rise of the Warrior Cop. In the most important sense, however, the dominant attitudes in police training and department policies make the police of today less truly warriors than the police of forty or fifty years ago. Driving a Bearcat or an MRAP and wearing a plate carrier and a tin hat does not make anyone a warrior. Trading a revolver for a Heckler & Koch rifle doesn't make anyone a warrior. One thing only defines a warrior: a willingness to die for something outside yourself. Warriors die for a principle, or for their friends, or their country. A generation of training and policy have combined to impress on police the idea they have a single duty: to go home at the end of their shift with a whole skin. In one particularly egregious case, in the United States, a municipality fired an officer for failing to kill a citizen, claiming he took an unacceptable risk by attempting to deescalate a confrontation instead of shooting. 

It is a commonplace to say the police have a problem with "bad apples", but I consider "the fish rots from the head" a more appropriate metaphor. Many of the issues with police behaviour arise from official policies and training, often with provincial or state and national support, and driven by promoters and influencers with an international reach. The result seems clear: much of official and unofficial police culture inclines officers to kill people in their charge rather than take the risk of making non-violent choices. It does not surprise me to see respect and support for the police have declined as well. 

Steps Toward Abolishing Police and Prisons

I’d like to present some steps toward police and prison abolition. These proposals assume three overriding principles: first, do no harm; second, make progress sustainable; third, follow the golden rule.

Start by understanding we can make things worse. If we eliminate a large part of the police force and end up with a greater role for private security, we will certainly have made things worse; private security doesn’t answer to anyone but the people who write their salary and expense cheques. However bad the police and justice system today, at least in theory they answer to the whole public and not only to the wealthy.

Nobody, no party or coalition and no political program can guarantee uninterrupted progress toward liberation. Ground one government gives their opponents will try to reclaim. To make reforms sustainable, we have to make them work, we have to make sure they take root in our communities, and we have to make certain we make, and keep, the public aware of their benefits. That means, always, making sure each change we make responds effectively to the actual needs of people and communities. It means making each step sustainable on its own, so if our progress suffers a check we have the least risk of going backward.

Finally, follow the golden rule. We still have no more effective guide to moral decision making than reciprocity, asking ourselves what we would think, feel, or do in the other person’s position. That means taking the obligation to listen to the concerns of other people seriously. It means both respecting other people’s pain and anger, and not working in such a way as to inflict more pain.

Unto us a child is born.

The birth of a child, any child, represents renewal, the next generation to whom we will pass our wisdom, the offspring we hope will make better mistakes than we did.

Crying out for a great conservative

As an acolyte in the Anglican tradition during my youth, I often had occasion to read the last edition of Archbishop Cramner's great work, the Book of Common Prayer. In it, quite separately from the main burial service, was a specific service for the burial of a child. In my naivety, I regarded that as an acute and kind response to the trauma the death of a child must be to any family. Only much later did I come to realize the truth: for most of the nearly half millennium Anglicans have used Cramner's work, the death of a child was not an infrequent horror but a routine grief. Through the four centuries preceding antibiotics and other effective disease control methods, the burial of children was something relatively few families escaped. Family histories routinely chronicle births and then provide the number of children who lived.

All of the history of the human species as we know it has taken place in the shadow of routine child and infant mortality. Family traditions, religious rituals, and state policies revolved around that single fact. Then, in a historical blink, everything changed. Vaccinations, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, antiseptic surgery and food safety all sprang from the discoveries of the late nineteenth century, and in barely more than one generation, they transformed a routine misfortune into a rare catastrophe.If we no longer lose half our children, more or  less, before they reach adulthood, what does that mean? If the number of humans doubles in one generation, our population will grow over thirty-fold in a century. Unless someone has a large supply of Minshara-class planets available, we will have to change our approach to bringing the next generation into the world.

That's not a small change. It means changing who we are as men and women; because most of us experience our humanity as members of one sex or the other, that eventually affects everything about us. It's a wrenching change, one we have to negotiate at the same time as we thread the narrow path between technological progress and mutual annihilation, and find a way to cope with the promise of automation that offers us wonders as it leaves more and more members of society with no place in the productive economy. But it isn't optional.

The phenomenon many of us call the "sexual revolution" did not begin with hormonal contraception. If I had to pick one representative pharmaceutical product to award the role of herald of the sexual revolution, I would pick diphtheria vaccine. 

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.

Next steps

This morning, we celebrated a victory. We hoped, briefly, Doug Ford would respect this city, respect the law and constitution, and let the election, already seriously, disrupted, go ahead. By this afternoon, we learned to our distress he was willing to try to break a long and honourable Ontario tradition of respecting the constitution and the principle of judicial review, in order to enforce his will.

An open letter to MPPs

Doug Ford by Bruce Reeve

In a few days, possibly even less, you will receive a summons to Queen's Park to vote. Doug Ford wants you to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause in order to override a judicial decision preventing him from changing the size of Toronto's wards in the middle an the election already underway. You can do it, but you don't have to. You shouldn't.

The notwithstanding clause has always marked out a line, a line between the collective will and the rights of the individual. Until now, Ontario has always stayed on the side of individual rights. We have always had governments, and representatives, in this province who undertook to reconcile the desires of the majority with the rights of minorities. It made governing harder, but it should be hard. Members of the Provincial Parliament get offices and good pay and respect because you have taken on a difficult job. Make it easier by curtailing our rights and you lose that respect.

An open letter to progressive councilors

As a follow-up to my previous post on resistance to the provincial conservatives' agenda for our city, and the most effective way to resist it, I am posting an open letter to progressive councilor in the City of Toronto. This letter goes out to both those serving and those community members who aspire to serve.

Maybe my most unpopular post yet

I have taken made a number of unpopular statements in the city since my arrival at the beginning of 2002. This may be the least popular, partly because I do not much like what I have to say. Unfortunately, I think I have to say it, or someone does, because if I and other people do not say this, we may end up with a much worse situation than the one we now face.

Doug Ford has probably won this round.

We can still hope the courts decide the conservatives' reckless move to slash council violates the charter rights guaranteed to every Canadian citizen, but given the place of cities in Canada's constitutional order, it would take a bold court to make that decision.

The Old Mill Questions -- Introduction

In the middle of the year of grace 2017, a collection of prominent conservative theologians released the Nashville Statement, intended to express their position on the purpose of human sexuality as divinely revealed in the Bible. This triggered the release of a number of statements, one called the Denver Statement and another called the Nazareth Statement, which diverged strongly from the views expressed in the Nashville Statement.

Why Cyclists Take the Lane, Why Motorists Shouldn't Object

Toronto's Metro News generally has fair and positive coverage of cyclists, but they have the odd lapse, as this article demonstrates:

As a driver, I’ve also seen the kind of bike behaviour that gives all of us cyclists a bad name — weaving in and out of traffic, riding on the sidewalk, hogging an entire lane when there’s no need, failing to signal before turning or coming to a sudden stop, cutting off other cyclists or startling them by passing on the inside. One of the worst offences is riding a bike at night without a light, then having the gall to become indignant when cars almost run them over.

In the immortal words of Sesame  Street, one of these things is not like the others. Cutting other road users off, failing to signal, riding on the sidewalk: all these endanger other road users. Taking the lane, which the writer describes, wrongly, as "hogging an entire lane when there’s no need" doesn't endanger anyone. At worst, it annoys other drivers who would like to press their accelerators a bit harder. Drivers who resent cyclists for holding them up should ask if they ever fume about other drivers taking unnecessary trips alone in their cars, which cause far more traffic jams and waste far more time.

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.

What the People Who Sent Murderers to Barcelona Want

Sagrada Família

A terror cell affiliated with the deash has murdered fifteen people and injured one hundred and thirty more.

Pray for the dead and for the recovery of the injured. And don't give the hard men of the daesh, who sent the killers, what they want.

Reflections on Conservatism in the Wake of Charlottesville

The American people have elected a man who has no idea of shame as their president, and I surprised myself by feeling particularly incensed to see the way he confidently assumed he could disrespect a gold star family and then count, not only on the obedience and professionalism but the political support of the American service chiefs. Last week, his service chiefs served a quiet but determined notice: they would obey him but never willingly acquiesce to the corruption and dishonour of the military they served. After witnessing white supremacists parading with the symbols of slavery and genocide, and their president refusing to condemn either the ugly ideology or its uglier, murderous display, the chiefs of the American services: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps issued a series of statements condemning white supremacy and warning potential recruits their services had no place for bias or racism.

"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.

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.

One hundred and fifty years ago today...

the parliament of Great Britain passed an act uniting New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Canada (then Ontario and Quebec), under a single federal parliament and four provincial legislatures. The new country, called a dominion in deference to the phrase from the Book of Psalms: "dominion from sea to sea" would continue to have the British monarch as a head of state, and British diplomats would speak for it in international relations, but Canada's own legislatures would govern in all internal matters. Canadians greeted the passage of the British North America Act with modest celebration.

Pirsig, Bell, LaPadula, a different kind of braid...

Fredrik deBoer asks why so many people have so much trouble evaluating propositions to do with social justice on a continuum. He cites examples from cultural appropriation to campus hookups, asking in every case why so much of the conversation about these issues ends in extreme, opposing, and angry positions.

I don't have the answer, I don't think a single answer exists. With multiple cultures rubbing up against each other, ideas and expressions may seem perfectly innocent to some people, and egregiously offensive from a different perspective. Some commentators have suggested the growth of social media has reduced dialog between people who disagree while concentrating and amplifying the dialog among like-minded people, thus encouraging the unchecked adoption of more and more extreme positions.

I don't know why this has happened, but I have a theory.

Logophobia

Rod Dreher, in common with most of the rest of the world, struggles to make sense of the senseless: the bomb exploded in a crowd of women and girls at an Ariana Grande concert and the resulting slaughter of innocent people.

In the process, he makes a very interesting set of comments, and displays what I call "logophobia", meaning fear of and revulsion toward a specific word, rather than a repudiation of the concept behind it.

Size the office to fit the man

photo by Gage Skidmore

 Donald Trump’s recent behaviour has provoked dark thoughts among American opinion writers. Ross Douthait, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has raised the possibility of declaring Mr. Trump medically unfit for his job and invoking the 25 amendment to the US constitution to remove him.

That is a spectacularly bad idea. It is, to paraphrase Orwell, a bad idea even though National Review says it’s a bad idea. For one thing, the authors of the 25th amendment intended it to deal with a medical crisis, not a policy disagreement or even justified reservations about the character of a president. For another, it doesn’t deal with the structural or even the psychological problems the Trump presidency raises.

What, me worry?

by Gage Skidmore

If American news reports accurately describe the events of last week's meeting between President Trump and Russian representatives, somewhere in the Western Asia at least one person probably has a lot less confidence in their future than they did a few days ago. We may never know the name or names of the people who apparently took huge risks to obtain important details of the latest efforts by the Daesh to loose chaos on international air travel. We can only hope the president of the United States did not sentence them to an unpleasant death by recklessly boasting about his intelligence sources.

We have less room for doubt about what happened next. After both his national security advisor and his secretary of state denied the story in carefully worded statements, Mr. Trump took to late night Twitter and cast doubt on their claims by stating he had, in any case, the right to tell the Russians anything he wanted them to know.

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.

Rendemptive anger

Louis Riel

Last week, in one of the vicious but not exactly random assaults underlining the inequalities of life in a "western" urban society, an unknown person beat up the principal dancer in the "Buffalo Hunt" scene from the Canadian Opera Company's production of Harry Somers's opera Louis Riel. He and his partner, hurt badly enough to need hospital treatment, they suffered further indignities at the hands of the medical system; some of the people I spoke to clearly considered their treatment negligent.

This racist attack on a talented First Nations dancer, and the callous treatment in its aftermath, could have easily led to worse divisions and deeper mistrust in its wake. Violence of this kind divides and silences people, as the perpetrators and enablers often intend. In a production negotiating the tricky politics of staging a classic Canadian work telling a story involving First Nations, this attack could easily have poisoned the atmosphere.

Terrorist are using cars as weapons. How can we protect ourselves?

Westminster Bridge by Katie Chan,
via Wikimedia Commons

In an alarming number of recent terror attacks, the assailants have made use of vehicles to ram or crush their victims. Recently, an attacker killed three people on Westminster Bridge in London by hitting them with a hired vehicle before getting out of the car and fatally stabbing a police officer. Last year on Bastille Day, an attacker drove a truck through celebrating crowds in Nice and killed eighty-four people. These attacks and others would indicate a disturbing trend even without reports the Daesh has recommended the use of vehicles to sympathizers aiming to commit lethal terror attacks.

Nice Bay by Fecchi, via Wikimedia Commons

Shortly after the derisively named "undies bomber" failed to blow up a plane bound for the United States with underwear soaked with explosives, American and international aviation authorities severely restricted the liquids they permitted passengers to carry on board. They had, of course, long forbidden passengers from bringing knives into the cabin of an airliner. Every time a terrorist organization attempts an assault against the civil aviation system, even if they fail, even if they fail in a risible manner, regulators take action. With several terror attacks committed using road vehicles, reports the Daesh has specifically committed to  this method of inflicting casualties, the call for road safety authorities to take some action would seem obvious.

A source of information

A couple of days ago, a car following me in the right lane tried to get between me and the streetcar in the center lane. Frustrated (they didn't remotely have enough room) they followed me to the stop line (the light was red) and honked.

The simple controls of a car can express a surprising amount of information. In this case, a honk told me I had an entitled driver behind me. and that if I moved to the side they would try to fit their 2.5-3 metre wide car, my bike which takes up at least a metre, the metre they have to leave between my bike and their passing car, and the half metre clearance required between the streetcar and their car into the four metres between the streetcar and the curb. In other words, I knew if I didn't ride in the center of the lane I could expect a dangerous close pass.

The time has long come and gone for motor vehicle operators to realize ordinary drivers of non-emergency motorized vehicles don't have priority over other road users, and increasing numbers of cyclists will not compromise our safety for your impatience. You impatience won't kill you or us; getting sideswiped by a poorly-judged pass from an impatient and entitles motor vehicle operator very well might.

Cyclists are here and we will not go away, so if you plan to drive, get used to us.

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.

The white battalion

by Gage Skidmore , via Wikimedia Commons

A friend and colleague of mine, an officer in the Canadian Infantry, taught me "Old King Cole" ("beer beer beer said the privates, merry men are we"), and he taught me about the White Battalion. The White Battalion is a tradition in the Canadian Forces, or at least in some regiments. It is a term for the regimental dead. As my friend explained to me, regiments disband, their colours hung on the walls of churches for time and nature to return them to the Earth, but white battalion never disbands; its members are transferred to an active regiment. Soldiers remember, honour, and grieve.


The act of remembering war dead has many expressions in many places, but it works out to the same basic contract: a society will ask its young men, and in some cases its young women, to put themselves in harm's way for the sake of the nation. In return, the nation will carry the names of everyone who gives their life in its service down through history in honour. It is a covenant painted on the walls of thousands of churches. It is carved in the stone of war memorials in villages and cities across the world. It forms the basis for a signature piece of American political rhetoric: Lincoln's Gettyburg Address. It is a part of the hearts of millions of families.

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.

What's wrong with David Frum's excellent article

by HiMY SYeD via Wikimedia Commons

David Frum recently wrote an excellent article in the Atlantic Monthly on the possible development of an authoritarian populist state under Donald Trump. Read it if you haven't already.

David Frum comes from Toronto, but he left many years ago for the United States. He did not live through Toronto's experience with insurgent populist conservatism. That may or may not have led to what I regard as the most interesting omission in a very good article.

Tied up with a bow

We often package ideas the way shippers package freight
photo by Albert E. Theberge, NOAA via Wikimedia Commons

As an activist in the 1980s, I routinely encountered exhortations to "make connections" or to act, and think, "consistently". Much of the time, these exhortations came out of a genuine effort to understand and live out the ramifications of "left-wing" beliefs. Some of the time, efforts to make "connections" covered for pragmatic coalition building. In not a few cases, people appealed for "connections" and "consistency" dishonestly, in order to get support for weak arguments that depended on "connections" with ideas people already accepted.

Well meaning or otherwise, honest or shady, the emphasis on "connections" and "consistency" led to an acceptance of package politics by the Left. By commission or by acquiescence, we created a political environment in which participants could wrap up their opinions, beliefs and positions in a single imagined whole.

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.

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. 

White is a privilege, not a people

Ballycastle Church, Ireland, photo by John Spragge

People from many cultures and origins, including  Picts, Celts, Franks, Angles, Saxons, and Slavs, have somewhat lower melanin levels than the average for the human species. That physiological peculiarity does not define a common culture or identity. People with low melanin levels speak different languages, derived from different language groups, follow very different religious and cultural practices. Where cultures meet, as in the "melting pot" or "mosaic" of mainstream North American culture, African cultures have as much influence as their European counterparts.

The word "white" defines a cloud of privilege, not a people. Like most clouds, it is white with unclear and contested borders, opaque but insubstantial, and often roiled by unseen but real violence, both within and without.

Political sclerosis: the pursuit of perfection

I write this during the final preparations for the inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. By the time I post this, he will probably have taken the oath of office.

By Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota,
via Wikimedia Commons

Today, the day he takes office, marks the end of eight years of President Obama, a man with unusual grace and dignity for anyone who has risen to the top job in the American political system. It also marks the end of eight years of obstruction, always shameless and sometimes blatantly unconstitutional, by the gerrymandered Republican Congress. The redistricting that allowed the minority of voters in the Republican party to command a majority in Congress, and the low turnout in every midterm election, came about at least partly because of failures by the Left to organize throughout the United States, Put simply, the United States, Canada, and indeed the world, has suffered from a sclerosis of the Left for some time now. Conservatives today scarcely need to stand in front of our progress yelling "stop"; at a time the world needs change more critically than ever before, we have slowed ourselves to a crawl.

I propose to offer a look at some of the problems over the next little while. I can propose solutions for some of our problems; for others, I have no real or comprehensive solution to offer.

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.

Three modest proposals for the Toronto budget

Toronto has the lowest property tax rate in the Golden Horseshoe: the prosperous region stretching from Oshawa around the end of Lake Ontario to the Niagara River. We also have some of the best city services in Canada: services under increasing financial strain. Too many of our citizens have no homes. Some, and any is too many, die on the street every year. This is unacceptable; the city must fulfill its responsibilities, and that almost certainly means taxes have to go up.

Members of city council have suggested other revenue tools (read: new forms, more equitable forms, of taxation), but for now we have the old stand-by, property, or real estate, taxes. Since real estate taxes can and sometimes do have perverse and unfair effects, I present three modest proposals to make real estate taxes more fair, and to ensure the impact of the needed tax increase falls where it should: on those best able to pay.

Crime and some inappropriate spin

By Beatrice Murch
via Wikimedia Commons

Consider three propositions:

1. People with black skin are people. 
2. People, by nature, have moral freedom, which means we can choose to behave well or badly, and it follows that given the choice, some people will choose badly.
3. Since people with black skin are people, the second proposition applies.

I don't like to think anyone finds these propositions difficult or controversial, but it seems some writers choke over the implications.

1380 CE please... with antibiotics and vaccines, and hold the smallpox

By Geaugagrrl,
via Wikimedia Commons

The world's human population is fast closing in of seven and a half billion people. It's a world Mark Boyle wants to get off. He has bought, and he wants to sell you, a comforting notion about the cause of our problems: bad choices don't cause them. He blames technology, as a kind of disembodied external force. He has a simple cure, as well: get rid of technology.

Mark Boyle says:

My culture made a Faustian pact, on my behalf, with those devilish tyrants Speed, Numbers, Homogeneity, Efficiency and Schedules, and now I’m telling the devil I want my soul back.

Julia set by Solkoll

Now a good part of this amounts to mere rhetorical flourish, but where he includes numbers among the so-called "devilish tyrants", my disagreement with him goes beyond practicalities, beyond even technology, and right to the core question of purpose. My First Nations teachers taught me every form of life has instructions from the Creator. My own religion, Christianity, teaches me the same thing: life has a purpose or purposes. I have the ability to learn and consciously understand the world, to apprehend ways the natural order works, and I believe my purposes include doing so. To aid in this holy work, our remote ancestors worked out a spiritual discipline they called mathematics. As Ursula K. LeGuin pointed out, numbers provide a bridge between psyche and matter. To reject the sacred language of numbers as "devilish tyranny" means rejecting hard clarity and truth in favour of comfortable vagueness, imprecise language with little meaning. What Mr. Boyle appears to hail as liberation, I see as sloth.

Nazi victory porn

It is a paradox: high intensity military combat is one of the most extreme of human experiences, which means nobody who has not experienced it can will have the emotional or physical memories to make sense of it. Relatively few people today have experienced high intensity combat. Only a minority of people ever enlist in the armed services, and the majority of members of the armed services work at the vital, and sometimes dangerous, job of supplying the front line soldiers. Today, the majority of people have not experienced high intensity combat.

Yet it appears war remains the one of the most common single subjects for historical presentations and documentaries, as well as historical fiction. Accounts of war, historical and otherwise, often tend to lay stress on the experience of intense combat, rather than the boredom that defines much of military life.

JunkersEF128 jet model
By Juergen Klueser via Wikimedia Commons

Partly, this stems from the curiosity people who have never experienced intense conflict feel about it; partly from assumptions about the importance of military conflict in shaping history. But books and documentaries do not make present the experience of battle, as Guy Sajer's book The Forgotten Soldier makes clear: "One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired..." War documentaries come closest to the experience of a civilian reading about events taking place a long way away; yet even the experience of a civilian in wartime involves uncertainty the viewer of a documentary or reader of history does not share.

The combination of unreality and the ability to evoke emotional intensity makes military history subject to various forms of manipulation. I call one particular form of this manipulation "Nazi victory porn". It consists of various descriptions, frequently highly unrealistic, of ways Hitler could supposedly have won World War II.

The ferocity of hope

By Pete Souza
via Wikimedia Commons

Eight years ago Americans and Canadians celebrated the audacity of hope in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. This year, a film called Arrival introduced me to the ferocity of hope: its tenaciousness, its endurance. If optimism is defined as the hope of getting dealt a good hand, hope is the willingness to play the hand, however lousy it seems to be, or is.

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.

The sales force for war is out

...and experience suggests we can expect another round of trashing for Neville Chamberlain. That guy. Every hawk with a war to sell, or a conflict to stoke, or a peace initiative to shut down, drags out the same carpet beater and flogs the very dead horse of Neville Chamberlain's unavailing concessions at Munich. Even ones who can't say exactly what Chamberlain did at Munich.

Neville Chamberlain died in November of 1940: Winston Churchill gave the eulogy at his funeral, and even with bombs raining on London, could say of Chamberlain's policy:

But it is also a help to our country and to our whole Empire... [that] we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands and peoples, and yet seek new victims still. Herr Hitler protests with frantic words and gestures that he has only desired peace. What do these ravings and outpourings count before the silence of Neville Chamberlain's tomb? Long, hard, and hazardous years lie before us, but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts.

Many people in the present day who know far less than Churchill take a far less charitable view. Why does this matter? Do I really intend to waste time defending an old, white man whose maintenance of the imperial system undoubtedly fed the great conflicts of the 20th century?