After the Crash

2009-11-02T04:51:00.002-06:00

On Saturday, October 31st 2009 my beautiful bride and I were married, first in a civil ceremony for the benefit of the government, then in a Pagan/Satanic blood bonding to make it real for us. It was the most amazing experience of my life and I'm looking forward to many years of wedded bliss.

2009-10-18T15:23:00.001-06:00

Apologies for the lack of updates. Lately I've been severely a) ill, b) depressed, and c) busy planning my wedding. More to follow.

This is what's known in the world of Capital as 'Arbitrage'

2009-09-19T16:20:00.001-06:00

Let's look at an example. In 1979 – the year I was born – the dictator of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, took out a loan for $15m from the dictator of Romania to buy some tractors. Most didn't work. But after 20 years of non-repayment, the new democratically elected government of Zambia said it had no way to pay the loan, and negotiations began to cancel it. But a multi-millionaire called Michael Francis Sheehan, whose company Donegal International is based in a British tax haven, had spotted a chance. He bought the debt from Romania for $3m, and took Zambia to court in Britain for the full amount – which had now piled up to $55m.
The Zambian government explained that they don't have the money. A fifth of their people are HIV positive, and there are only 600 doctors covering more than 12m people. Most people are dead before their 38th birthday. The Zambian President's adviser, Martin Kalunga-Banda, explained – and aid groups verified – that if the government had to pay out for the dead dictator's bills, "medicines that would have been available to in excess of 100,000 people in the country will not be available.... [and] in excess of 300,000 children will be prevented from going to school." The people who will go sick or uneducated were not alive when the loan was taken out.
The British judge who heard the case was clearly appalled, but he said the law gave him no choice but to require Zambia to pay $15m, a third of what had been demanded. Virtually all the debt relief the country had received that year – as a result of Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History – was wiped out.
What happens to the money once it is redirected? Sheehan – who likes to be known as "Goldfinger" – is fond of vintage Cadillacs, and lives in a mansion in Virginia. Singer used the cash he took to become the biggest donor in New York to George W Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, and then went on to bankroll Rudy Giuliani's bid in 2008.

Vulture Funds: the apotheosis of capitalism

Just why is Ayn Rand so popular anyway?

2009-09-16T10:31:00.003-06:00

Wow - I always saw the Randroids as cult-like in their bizarre, absolutist ideological inflexibility; but I never quite realized before that Objectivism is, quite literally, a cult:

She allowed him to run the Nathaniel Branden Institute, a small society dedicated to promoting Objectivism through lectures, therapy sessions, and social activities. The courses, he later wrote, began with the premises that "Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived" and "Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world." Rand also presided over a more select circle of followers in meetings every Saturday night, invitations to which were highly coveted among the Objectivist faithful. These meetings themselves were frequently ruthless cult-like exercises, with Rand singling out members one at a time for various personality failings, subjecting them to therapy by herself or Branden, or expelling them from the charmed circle altogether.
So strong was the organization’s hold on its members that even those completely excommunicated often maintained their faith. In 1967, for example, the journalist Edith Efron was, in Heller’s account, "tried in absentia and purged, for gossiping, or lying, or refusing to lie, or flirting; surviving witnesses couldn’t agree on exactly what she did." Upon her expulsion, Efron wrote to Rand that "I fully and profoundly agree with the moral judgment you have made of me, and with the action you have taken to end social relations." One of the Institute’s therapists counseled Efron’s eighteen-year-old son, also an Objectivist, to cut all ties with his mother, and made him feel unwelcome in the group when he refused to do so. (Efron’s brother, another Objectivist, did temporarily disown her.)
Sex and romance loomed unusually large in Rand’s worldview. Objectivism taught that intellectual parity is the sole legitimate basis for romantic or sexual attraction. Coincidentally enough, this doctrine cleared the way for Rand--a woman possessed of looks that could be charitably described as unusual, along with abysmal personal hygiene and grooming habits--to seduce young men in her orbit. Rand not only persuaded Branden, who was twenty-five years her junior, to undertake a long-term sexual relationship with her, she also persuaded both her husband and Branden’s wife to consent to this arrangement. (They had no rational basis on which to object, she argued.) But she prudently instructed them to keep the affair secret from the other members of the Objectivist inner circle.

Yep, it's all there: fanatical veneration of a single person and the principles they espouse; loss of any sort of critical engagement; humiliation and ostracism used as tools of social control; isolation of members from family and others with conflicting beliefs; sexual coercion and manipulation by the leader of her disciples.... all the NBI really needed was some good ol' rhythmic chanting, and "Objectivism" could have been as big today as the Moonies or Scientology.

Absent the driving force of Rand herself and her cult of personality, however, I've been trying to understand just what it is that continually attracts successive generations of adherents to the Rand cult. After all, as the above cited article easily demonstrates, Rand's cartoonish econo-moral framework doesn't survive contact with reality for even a second:

Now, it is certainly true that working hard can increase one’s chances of growing rich. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the rich work harder than the poor. Indeed, there are many ways in which the poor work harder than the rich. As the economist Daniel Hamermesh discovered, low-income workers are more likely to work the night shift and more prone to suffering workplace injuries than high-income workers. White-collar workers put in those longer hours because their jobs are not physically exhausting. Few titans of finance would care to trade their fifteen-hour day sitting in a mesh chair working out complex problems behind a computer for an eight-hour day on their feet behind a sales counter.

[...]

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

[...]

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.
Now assume that this principle were to apply not only within a profession--that a dentist earning $200,000 a year must be contributing exactly twice as much to society as a dentist earning $100,000 a year--but also between professions. Then you are left with the assertion that Donald Trump contributes more to society than a thousand teachers, nurses, or police officers. It is Wall Street, of course, that offers the ultimate rebuttal of the assumption that the market determines social value. An enormous proportion of upper-income growth over the last twenty-five years accrued to an industry that created massive negative social value--enriching itself through the creation of a massive bubble, the deflation of which has brought about worldwide suffering.

The attraction of Randism for the rich and powerful is obvious, as it gives them an excuse not only to justify but to actually act morally superior about their dedication to base greed and powerlust. And it certainly holds similar attraction for intelligent outcasts like myself, telling us that we deserve to be rich important people with equally smart, rich, important lovers; that it's only the thoughtless parasites of the world who keep us from our rightful place in society. But I'd like to think that folks as smart and purportedly rational as us could more easily see past such vanity long enough to at least take notice of how ridiculous even Rand's factual claims, let alone her moral claims are. So I think there's more to it than that.

As regular readers may know, I'm not afraid to say that I'm ethically and morally a Satanic Egoist; I strongly believe that my own needs must come before the needs of others, that my own wants must come before the wants of others, and that society ought to be arranged in such a way that my needs and wants can be fulfilled with a minimum of pain and sacrifice. I've worked my positions out in detail from first principles. I've examined competing moral theories - Relativism, Utilitarianism, Deontology, Contractarianism, Virtue Theory - and though each of them has contributed important points to my nuanced thought on morality, all of them seem in the end to be inadequate. Egoism seems to me the only self-consistent overarching principle that can satisfy the need for a clear, concise, universally applicable moral framework.

And yet I'm not a Randite. Like a lot of people, I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and in fact I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has an undeniably charming exuberance as a story of heroic magical super-capitalists fighting off a zombie horde of parasitic Commie leeches, despite the inadequacies of its cardboard-cutout characters and lumpen, polemical prose. It's like a philosophical comic book, emotionalism and low drama acted out by reified ideas in business suits instead of capes and spandex. But it wasn't a revelation for me like it seems to have been for so many people. It was a good read that I then put aside and went on to some other trashy sci-fantasy. I never saw what the big deal was.

When I think about it now, though, I come to the realization that Rand is probably a lot of people's first exposure to Egoism, as an attempt at a coherent moral philosophy beyond simplistic 'I got mine'-ism. It's a terrible presentation composed of muddled assumptions, counterfactual reasoning and ridiculous conclusions, but it's presented with panache and drama. Someone who has been raised in the white-lighter's world of sacrificial obligation, but is already beginning to perceive the intellectual void at its centre, probably would see Rand's super-capitalists and bureaucratic parasites as a revelation. I suppose the difference with me, the reason I wasn't infected by the virus of Rand, is that I'd already been inoculated with sterner stuff. I'd read some Nietzsche, whom she was influenced by, and some LaVey, who was strongly influenced by her. I'd also read Marx and other socialist writers, so I had the opposite perspective as well. By the time I actually got around to reading Rand, her schtick was old hat to me. I'd already started working out my own ideas on how Egoism and Utilitarianism could potentially be reconciled. I'd already started to recognize that elementary game theory shows how unmitigated pursuit of immediate gratification is ultimately stupid and irrational.

Randism forms the core of today's political 'Libertarian' movement and 'Neoliberal' economics; ironic, considering that it's hard to find a more illiberal philosophy outside Fascist corpocracy and Stalinist economic centralization. Randism, Christian Identity, and the patriotic cults of petty nationalism and regionalism have become the tripod that holds up the decaying colossus that is nowadays laughably known as 'Conservatism'. The economic crisis of our time is driving a renewed interest in Ayn Rand and her works; the corpocratic media has already begun spreading the narrative that we're seeing Atlas Shrugged coming to life before our eyes. The Left had better start kicking the education and agit-prop into high gear, before the next generation of intellectual outcasts sprouts a fresh crop of Randroids to spend the another few decades extolling the virtue of selfishness and telling us that freedom is slavery.

The Absolute Basics

2009-09-15T19:23:00.006-06:00

If you want to understand how I see the world:

1. The universe is very large, and you are very small.

2. The universe does not care about you. It does not love you. It is not going to give you a present.

3. Everyone and everything dies. Nothing and nobody comes back.

4. The only 'meaning' in the universe is that which is attached to it by conscious minds.

5. Your perceptions are the only reality that will ever exist for you, and they will never be more than an approximation at best.

6. Morality is an entirely human creation, not an intrinsic property of the universe, and it changes depending on what the majority of people in the world decide is in their own best interest.

7. Free will is an illusion created by our capability to imagine counterfactual realities. Every effect has a cause. Everything you think, everything you do, and everything you are is entirely determined by the circumstances of your birth.

8. Concepts such as Justice, Personhood, Rights, Dignity, and Freedom are so vague and ill-defined as to be practically meaningless.

9. None of this allows you to evade responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Some form of justice must be seen to be done, lest society crumble into the most absolute of barbarity.

10. Every aspect of reality is defined by the constant death and destruction of the inadequate. Destruction is the vital force which causes evolution. Life feeds on life.

11. This does not mean that the successful deserve what they have. The cream may rise to the top; so does the scum. Inequity begets inequity. If people become too unequal, the powerless will resent and eventually destroy their rulers, and if people become too equal, the evolution of society will stagnate and decay.

12. Yes, life is unfair. Suck it up, buttercup.

Surrey police go chickenshit on the homeless

2009-08-23T03:56:00.002-06:00

This shit is just too good to pass up:

The City of Surrey and RCMP lined a Whalley social service building with chicken dung to keep homeless and vagrants away, The Leader has learned.
On Aug. 14, witnesses saw City of Surrey staff pull up to the Front Room Drop In Centre in the 10600-block of 135A Street and line the building with putrid poultry manure. The desired effect was to create a smell so repugnant that it would repel vagrants who were hanging out around the building.
[...]
Mayor Dianne Watts said she was "flabbergasted" to hear of the chicken dung directive.
"I'm certainly going to get to the bottom of this," said Watts, adding it's disgusting and a health hazard.
Bottrill's e-mail to Watts says the area businesses and local business improvement association were in favour of the plan.
That doesn't make it right, said Watts.

Ever hear something that simultaneously makes you want to laugh like a screaming hyaena, and punch someone in the face until little chunks of bloody flesh start flying off?

I mean, it's just fucking surreal. You read something like this and your first reaction is, 'how can this possibly be true?' Seriously, what kind of person thinks that the best solution to any kind of problem is to cover it in pestilent feces? I mean, a move like this takes a certain amount of planning and execution. Did nobody involved in the process of ordering truckloads of chicken shit on the grounds of a government building think for even one fucking second? AIEEEE (sound of brain exploding)

This really shows the kind of respect the Surrey RCs have for the human rights of those who don't happen to have a place to sleep at night.

Nice Guys Finish Their Fucking Breakfast

2009-08-12T23:09:00.002-06:00

via Pandagon, I was directed to a conversation between Tycho and Gabe, the creators of the webcomic Penny Arcade, in which Gabe feeds the myth that women are mysterious forest creatures which control men through the awesome magic power of the vagina. He expresses great sympathy for lonely, sex-deprived dudes with Self-Diagnosed Aspergers who buy into the misogyny-baiting snake oil that is the 'seduction community', where self-described pickup 'artists' sell systems absolutely guaranteed to get you laid (because what poor, unfortunate dateless ubernerd wouldn't want the password that unlocks the cunt of whatever hot lady you happen to be crushin' on at the moment? Forget mutual interests and compatible personalities, mutual desire and attraction, or even mutual recognition of each other's basic humanity and right to make choices in life - UP DOWN UP DOWN LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT B A NEG, and like magic her panties come off, amiright?) Such 'systems' essentially consist of being a huge douchebag of stalker-like proportions, because the ladies love total jerks and not 'nice guys' like you dontchaknow; a routine of put-downs and not taking no for an answer which continues until some woman with low enough self esteem to not toss her drink in your face caves in and throws you a pity fuck. And then you get to impress all your internet and gamer buddies with tales of what a smooth criminal you are IRL. To Gabe's credit he eventually starts to recognize what a shit he's starting to sound like and backs off the whole 'if someone wants to pay good money for trash like this, what's the harm if it honestly boosts his confidence?' line of thought. But he still doesn't seem to have picked up on the disconnect between the 'poor poor pitiful me' narrative and the utterly scummy behavioural realities he's playing into.

Because, let's face it, the primary reason straight male geeks have trouble interacting with the opposite sex is largely because of the patriarchal myths that get stuck in their one track minds: that women are otherworldly reptile people with such different brains from yours that trying to actually understand and communicate with them is a fool's errand; that the ultimate object of any and all social interactions with women is to place your dick into their pussy; that dating is a 'game' that you 'win' by fucking her and 'lose' by ending up masturbating in front of your computer again. Here's a free tip: the reason so many women blow you off is not because you're insufficiently callous or lacking in confidence. It's because your every word and gesture breathes emotional immaturity. It's because they've had to deal with enough fumbled passes, shitty pickup lines, and poor 'nice guys' drooling into their cleavage at the slightest prospect of seeing them get naked that they already know what's coming the moment you sidle up and start panting up the courage to ask for a little sugar. The reason women think you're creepy is that you're acting like a fucking creep.

Honestly it's a little heartbreaking hearing Gabe go on about how terrified he was of his first encounter with the opposite sex, and how many guys have written to him defending these systems because they 'gave them the confidence to even approach a girl'. I sympathize; honestly I do. I've been there. My adolescence and young adulthood was the perfect storm of social anxiety, Gothic wyrdness, and serious gender and sexuality issues; I know whereof I speak. 'Normal' girls wouldn't give me the time of day, and with those who were accessible (by which I mean 'didn't think I was an animal-mutilating psychopath just because I liked long black coats and clown makeup'), I had difficulty catching on when was the right time to try a little flirtation. The thought was paralyzing, and I still curse some of the blatant opportunities I missed to get into this or that super-sexy Goth girl's pleather panties. You know what? Never once did I think 'I wonder what exactly the right sequence of actions is to make this person sleep with me'. What I did was make friends with whatever women I met that seemed friendly and in tune with my interests, and by make friends I mean 'make friends', not 'fake an interest in their lives as a pretext to manipulate them into bed', which is what a lot of these passive-agressive 'nice guys' seem to mean when they say they 'make friends' with women.

And yes, there were a lot of times when I ended up as 'just friends' with a woman I might have enjoyed a more intimate relationship with. And exactly what the fuck is wrong with just being someone's friend? People act like this is the kiss of death, having to be all friendly and not horny around a lady friend when you're just throbbing with hormonal urges. You know what? Tough titty, kitty. Go home and rub one out. Show some fucking self discipline for goth's sake. Hollywood has implanted this notion in our heads that if we're friends with a woman, and are also sexually attracted to her, and perhaps disapprove of her current boyfriend, the only logically acceptible conclusion is that we end up bedding and wedding her. In reality, such situations rarely work out that way, and so you're faced with two choices: try to move the relationship to the next level and take that risk of rejection and possibly losing a friend, or just be content with friendship and keep it in your fucking pants.

More to the point, however, I didn't end up spending the next ten years in a constant stew of sexual frustration, surrounded constantly by unattainable fey creatures who were inexplicably unaffected by my incredible niceness and charm. Neither did I enjoy constant access to pussy. I was able to participate in romantic and sexual encounters on a regular basis, for a given value of 'regular', ranging from one-night stands to relationships lasting several months at a go. Eventually I met the one I'm currently planning to marry, a strong, smart, extremely Gothic, and strongly feminist lady who loves video games and larping. And yes, alot of the time I was lonely and depressed and frustrated over my lack of companionship, but I fucking dealt with it, because that's the way it works. Sometimes someone is interested enough in you to engage in mutually pleasurable physical recreation. The rest of the time you fucking deal. What you do not do is wallow in resentment of how those lovely ladies give it up to jerks and not nice guys like you. And you certainly don't give good money to some douchebag to teach you how to be a degrading asshole so those stuck-up whores will open their legs to you.

The way you get over 'nice guy' syndrome is to actually be a nice guy instead of a stuttering, titty-staring survived abortion who treats women like achievements instead of people. There you go, great dating advice for confidence-riven dorks, and you didn't have to pay a red fucking cent for it. You're fucking welcome.

Real Justice

2009-08-12T03:11:00.002-06:00

This is the kind of story that warms the cockles of my heart:

It was bikers versus a machete-wielding robber in Regina on Monday night — and the bikers won.
According to Regina police, a group of 10 "motorcycle enthusiasts" were having coffee at a Tim Hortons restaurant on North Albert Street when, at around 9 p.m., they spotted some suspicious activity nearby.
Two men were observed walking up to a Domo Gas station, with one of them carrying a machete. When the two pulled on masks, Rob Hove and a motorcycling friend jumped into action.
"The gas station attendant come out and started yelling that he was being robbed," Hove said. "The guy with the machete was swinging it at the gas station attendant, so we went and stopped them."
The bikers grabbed the man with the machete, seized the weapon and held him for the police.

Now imagine a similar situation: A group of 10 average people with no discernable enthusiasm for motorcycles, while coffeeing at THo's, sees a pair of masked men with a machete walk into a gas station. They call the police. The owner runs out, screaming that he's being robbed. They call the police. The owner is cut down by the man with the machete and the robbers walk off with the cash. The onlookers drink their fucking coffee. The police arrive and question the onlookers, who regret that they couldn't do anything to help that poor man, the 10 of them; someone might have got hurt, though, and after all it is the responsibility of the police to deal with this sort of thing. That's what we pay taxes for, innit?

It makes me so happy to see that, once in a while, there's real justice in this world.

Object Lessons: Living with family, capitalist vs. communal

2009-08-11T00:32:00.002-06:00

A few months ago, my partner and I were illegally evicted from our home. This has been an intensely traumatic experience for us, but ultimately I see it as a good learning experience, because it pointed up in an intensely personal way the manner in which life under capitalism poisons and degrades even the most intimate of relationships.

See, until this point we had been living with a cousin-in-law who owns a house and was renting a room in it to my partner for a not especially extortionate rate of 300$ a month. She also rented the basement suite to a succession of people including her own brother and his SO, and later to a couple of teenagers who made a real mess of the place (breaking furniture, kicking holes in walls, pissing in the back yard, etc.) My partner asked me to move in, and I agreed to also pay 300$, making the total rent 600$ for one room and use of the common areas. A bit high, but not, in today's rental market, unprecedented. Cousin/landlord then moved out to live in another property with her boyfriend, thus implicitly altering the rental terms to 600$ for the entire top floor of the house and back alley parking, less one room where she was storing a bunch of junk (which she repeatedly promised us would be removed) - a bit of a better deal. This was an entirely informal arrangement without written contracts or lease agreements. Usually I cover my bases a bit more thoroughly, but hey, family is family, right?

We made a number of plans based on our understanding that this was going to be our home for some time. I had recently lost my job due to constant joint pains, and was recieving EI which would run out in several months; in the meantime I played hausfrau, cooking, cleaning, and maintaining the property while remaining on the lookout for writing gigs or a job that wouldn't make me want to kill myself and/or my boss, co-workers, and clients. My partner was recieving an education grant that barely covered her rent and our combined living expenses. We were aware that we would have some troubles with our rent, as eventually we did, but cousin/landlord assured us that she understood and that it would not be a major problem as long as the rent was, at some point, paid. So we spent the winter in more or less happy domesticity, dreaming of the victory garden I had repeatedly talked about planting and about turning the lawn under like the owner had stated was her desire and intention.

Then things went completely to shit.

Over the course of the next month, cousin/landlord started sending us messages on facebook (and BTW what the fuck is it with people saying things on facebook that they're too much of a coward to say to your face?) demanding our late rent immediately, berating me for not getting a job and 'laying on the couch playing video games all day' (the hours I spent every day keeping her property clean and in good repair, building a brick fire pit, etc. apparently didn't even register), trying to break me and my partner up (this literally right after we made the commitment to get married), and whining about how we 'forced' her to kick out paying tenants (these would be the ones who kicked a hole in her wall among other things - we were just the messengers) and how we were taking food out of her children's mouths (the children she does not, as of yet, have). When she finally got around to actually stating that we were being evicted, I politely inquired as to when we would be getting our one calendar month's notice to vacate as required by law. After quoting a law to me that does not exist supposedly allowing her to kick us out with one day's notice, she eventually (ie. a week before she had told us we were supposed to leave so that she and her family could move back into the house) gave us a letter stating that our poor hygiene was destroying her property, bribing us to leave by 'letting' us keep the back rent she had repeatedly refused to take from us (including when we literally waved a wad of cash in front of her face) if we left by the end of the month, referring to her legal obligations under the rental tenancies act as 'a bunch of legal BS', and telling us to 'get out of my house and out of my life'.

Now this would be disturbing enough behaviour from a professional landlord, and it's pretty damn disturbing behaviour from a family member whom my partner had to this point believed she had a good relationship with. But from someone who is both at the same time, well, it's honestly not that shocking; Because capitalist relations poison everything they touch. I had never liked her but neither did I think of her as an exploiter to that point. After all, she has her own financial obligations to fulfill; and the law of land is such that she is not just allowed, but in fact encouraged, to extract surplus value from her property by renting it. I could always see where she was coming from, and believed/hoped that it wouldn't get in the way of our having a healthy family relationship and making a nice little urban homestead of the place over time. I should have known better. When the obligations of family ties (and basic human decency) conflict with the obligations of a capitalist to maintain profits, which is going to win out? The irony, of course, is that literally a week later my partner got a job that easily could have supported us there over the summer, but by then it was too late; relations had been irreperably damaged. She had the legal right to evict us, though it still would have been pretty callous; but the way she did it was illegal and absolutely unconscionable. I think she was trying desperately to paper over her white-lighter guilt at doing something she knew was completely dispicable by creating some sort of fantasy world where our financial problems were actually a sinister plot by a couple of scam artists to bilk her out of her rightfully deserved rental fees. And we considered taking legal action - my personal preference would have been to fight with every weapon at our disposal; but cousin/landlord was at this point having her family members send us distinctly threatening and abusive communications, and my partner just wanted out of the whole situation. With less than a week to find new lodgings or face the prospect of having to live under the same roof as this insane bitch, our only real option was to take advantage of my parents' kind offer of the basement in our family home of 25 years.

When we first moved in, we offered them rent - in fact, nearly insisted that they take some; they repeatedly refused, saying that they were just happy to have us there. And our being here has actually been a distinct benefit for them. They're getting older, slowing down a bit, living on a pension and a couple of part time jobs; they really seem to appreciate some help with the housework and the grocery bill. They're a couple of old hippies and quiet UC Christians who tolerate our paganistic and countercultural ways; their values really support sharing, investing in the community, and being content with what you have. In fact, we live in a very communal way, each of us contributing money when we can and labour as appropriate. I cook almost every night - for a family that appreciates my effort, not a stuck-up adolescent who turns up her nose at the product of my labour, then makes pasta with crap canned tomato sauce at midnight and leaves the leftover rotting in the fridge for weeks at a time. My garden is doing lovely, with the spinach just playing out and the wax beans very nearly ready to go; my potato tire tree is ready for its fourth level, and I harvest fresh raspberries from my mother's massive cane patch every day. I've been earning a bit more money helping my father with his job as a janitor, and still have time to write, cook, clean, plan a wedding, and yes, play video games. My partner is going to start her courses this fall for her mortician's certificate, and doesn't have to worry about whether her student loan is going to provide enough money to put both a roof over her head and food in the fridge. My aunt also just moved in after seperating from her abusive husband, and she brings her own talents, income, and labour to the household; meaning that, instead of our wealth being divided up for the pyramid of exploiters that rests on the shoulders of landlords and the workers they milk their living out of, more of it stays in the household to improve our own material conditions. The difference between the way we live now and our relationship with that parasite who happened to own our previous home is absolutely amazing. We're not renters and landlords, not capitalist bloodsuckers and impoverished people struggling to survive; we're a real family. My partner still feels depressed, like 'teenagers playing house', and I certainly share a lot of that - I never wanted to move back in with my parents, and I'll be happy when we can manage to get out of this forsaken city and be independant again. But I can't help but think that this is the closest I've ever gotten to a life that makes me truly happy, and I wonder if we'll ever be able to achieve this kind of life again once we're back out in the world of capital.

Another one for the 'misogyny and misandry are essentially the same thing' files

2009-08-10T18:57:00.003-06:00

The ugly truth about The Ugly Truth:

The fact is that nothing in The Ugly Truth is new. Most of its messages are taken directly from relationship advice guides for women. The Ugly Truth is He's Just Not That Into You in spirit, if not in title. The message of these guides, paradoxically, is not that women should subordinate themselves to men because men are stronger and smarter. It's that women should subordinate themselves to men because men are very, very stupid and deeply, unbelievably weak.
The average straight man, if dating guides for women are to be believed, is a fragile, delicate flower, ravaged by primitive desires beyond his control, needy to the extent that he requires constant, fawning admiration (but not too much – the idea that a woman is actively pursuing sex or a relationship will scare him, as he is a skittish creature) and absolutely incapable of dealing with any sort of criticism or challenge from the women in his life. This is conveyed in the movie in a scene where Mike reveals that his macho front is a put-on, caused by dating women who "didn't like him". (The question of why on Earth he deserves to be liked is neither asked nor answered.)
A woman's natural desires – to talk about her life, to laugh at jokes that are funny, to disagree with people when they're wrong, to have real orgasms – will drive a man away, if not scar him for life. However, the advice goes, you can actually control men (to the extent that you can get them to date you) by pretending to be someone other than who you are – someone who simply delights in doing every single little thing a man wants at all times. Because men are also, fortunately, so stupid that they won't realise you're lying.

No comment.

Somebody Got Stabbed! Call In the National Guard!

2009-08-03T02:23:00.003-06:00

I had a rather scary incident a couple of days ago. I was walking down the street about midnight to mail a letter (yes, I go out at midnight or later just to mail letters, shut up). As I was walking down a familiar street near the home I grew up in and have lived in all, my life, I began to see police cruisers parked across the street. Part of it was blocked off, a nearby house and several store fronts were cordoned off with crime scene tape. Apparently, there was a huge brawl at somebody's house party and some lady got stabbed (not to death, happily).

This made me a little nervous, first that the cops would want to speak with me, and then later as I walked about my familiar neighbourhood in the middle of the night, not quite knowing what was going on jumping at shadows and gripping my security weapons tight at any voice or figure. But that's not what scared me that night. I've been randomly stopped by the cops before, and I've been randomly assaulted before, and neither is, when you get down to it, such a big deal. Shit happens.

No, what scared me is this: I was sufficiently shaken to walk down to the 7-11 and buy some comfort food, which I've been trying to avoid. I got into a conversation with the cashier about what had happened, and quickly regretted it; the fellow was obviously a bit of a racist and anti-socialist, saying that 'natives on welfare' are responsible for 80% of crime. I feel now that maybe I shoulod have engaged a bit more, but all I really wanted at that point was to get my fucking cheezies and twinkies and get home. Then this little gem dropped out of his mouth:

"Y'know what they should do? They should call the guys from [Canadian Forces base] Dundurn down here and get them to patrol. Full gear, with guns and everything. That would quiet things down in a hurry."

No shit! I literally felt like I was going to throw up. Here standing before me was a man who was actually advocation that martial law be declared in response to a few paltry stabbings and beatings. Things a larger centre swallows without pity or remorse, as if they never existed. This man wanted people trained to kill patrolling our streets with assault rifles. His personal perception that there is seemingly a bit more violent crime now than in the past is all it takes for him to want to sign away his freedom, not to mention mine and everyone else's, and call for the formation of a police state.

Now, I don't much like the cops or what they represent, but I must admit that there are times when I'm happy to know that there's a bunch of thugs with guns out there whose primary responsibility it is to swoop down on people who are disturbing the shit and get them the hell out of my existence. I don't think it really helps that much, and would strongly prefer that 'civilians' take a more active role in defending themselves and creating justice, but I appreciate the role of the police in allowing me to go about my business without having to look sideways at everyone who passes me in the street.

This is a whole new level of fucked up. I absolutely do not want soldiers to be responsible for preserving order unless I am living in the middle of a fucking war zone. The cops, at least, are trained not to use lethal force unless absolutely necessary. The cops, at least, see the people around them as potential 'suspects' or 'witnesses' rather than as potential 'targets'. The purpose of soldiers is not to enforce the law.

And the scariest, most sickening part is that I just mumbled some excuse and walked away.

All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

Targeting the Vulnerable

2009-07-28T21:09:00.002-06:00

Here's another thing that's starting to really piss me off: religious literature in doctors' waiting rooms. I was at the mediclinic the other day while my partner was having her stomach pains checked out, and while searching desperately for a readable magazine I came across a little stand filled to the brim with Xian tracts. Not even the amusing kind of tracts either; shitty boring-ass ones that nobody who's not already up the fruity lulu river can't possibly get anything out of, they're so full of language code and weird twists of logic that make sense only within the hermetically sealed ideological bubble. For instance the one I managed to glance at started out something like this:

"It's fashionable these days to think that it doesn't matter what someone believes, just as long as they believe it sincerely..."

BAAMF! Wrong, fucktard! Nobody actually believes that! Not even the loopiest hippy-dippy new ager or the most nihilistic, apathetic Goth you'll ever meet believes that every possible belief is equally true. Nobody thinks, because Hitler or Stalin or W or Bin Laden sincerely believed, that it makes them any less of a fucking survived abortion. Out general social ettiquette has evolved to a point where many people feel that in most situations it's improper or impolite to vigorously question the beliefs of others, because they don't want to get into a screaming public fight. And people have largely come to feel that, as long as they're not hurting anyone, it's not their business to try and change someone's beliefs. And we have a number of forums - the academy, the free press, and the political arena - where people are permitted or even encouraged to air their beliefs, no matter how insane or asinine, provided they are also willing to submit those beliefs to vigorous critique. But I sincerely doubt that you will find anyone, anywhere, who would tell you that it doesn't matter what someone believes as long as they believe it sincerely. The only reason you think people think that is because you literally can't concieve that someone would actually think they had a good reason for believing something other than what you believe, so you have to make up this bizarro fantasy world of social relativism and moral subjectivism in which the only possible alternative to the One Holy Truth of Christ Arisen is to completely abandon any possibility of objective truth from the get-go. You've managed with exactly one fucking sentence to convince me that you're so memetically crippled that nothing you have to say can be of any relevance to me whatsoever! Congratulations, you lose!

Then, just today, I was at my GP's office for a routine consult and a physio referral, and I saw a couple of child indoctrination devices - friendly little picture books with titles like 'The Story of Jesus' and 'The First Christmas'. Now, when I see shit like DARE propaganda or pharmacorp advertising materials or Reader's Digest at my doctor's office, I find it fucking offensive, but I see this as being right over the line. Xian propagandists have no business distributing their trash in facilities that my taxes pay for, be it a school, a library, a military base, a jail, or, yes, in this socialist paradise we call home, a Medicare-sponsored doctor's office. And trying to scare people who are sick and nervous and vulnerable and probably have nothing else to read but 7-month-old Popular Mechanics or Babies and Motherhood? That's just fucking low. I don't want to see that shit when I'm worrying that I may be permanently disabled or that my partner may be developing a heart condition, any more than you would want to see a pamphlet titled 'God Doesn't Exist and When You Die You'll Be Worm Food'.

Problematic

2009-07-24T08:16:00.002-06:00

I recently was directed to this article by Jodi Kasten on Salon Open titled 'Equal Rights for Men'. Now, I'm certainly in favour of equal rights for men, being that I am a man and like the idea of having equal rights. And I can hardly dismiss this as yet another paranoid, anti-feminist MRA screed, since the writer is a self declared feminist. But although it might be considered more along the line of 'friendly fire' than an attack, I have some problems with this piece, and my biggest problem is a perfect intersection with the problems I have with the MRAs I see repeatedly 'pointing out' these same problems over and over again. It does a decent job of spotlighting some (a very select sub-set) of the problems men face under the patriarchal standards of masculinity, but it does little if anything to try and deconstruct *why* these issues remain so endemic or what is to be done; and there's more than a little implication here that feminists are to blame, or at the least are standing at the roadside without doing anything about it. Perhaps I can be forgiven for finding such an approach problematic, for imagining that Kasten may have inadvertantly taken a sip of MRA kool aid.

To start with, there's the classic litany of male oppression (by women?) that I've come to expect every time I read an article like this. Men practically never get custody of children in divorce cases. Women are perfectly free to treat men like pieces of meat - even at work! - and to make fun of men using the crudest and most vicious of misandrist steroetypes, while women get a free pass. All men are treated as potential child molesters. Men who are domestically or sexually abused by women are laughed at. And, yes, these are all real problems that have to be dealt with on the road to equality.

Now, I'm a strong advocate of the position that socially constructed gender roles hurt men as much as they do women, that men are constrained to a narrow and artificial range of self expression and behaviour that does on balance tend to place them in a position of power greater than that of their femal counterparts (things such as race, class, abilities, &c. being otherwise equal) but not in a position of greater overall freedom. And during the progress of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, a great many more men, having lost a great deal of the power over their wives and girlfriends, daughters and mothers, female parishioners, employees and co-workers, random women they meet on the street, and the lives of women in general through political and economic subordination that they might otherwise have enjoyed (deep breath) have started looking at their lives and realized, 'Hey! This whole socially constructed standard of masculinity thing is a bit of a raw deal!' And it is so fucking easy to just go the extra mile and start thinking about where our artificial gender roles come from in the first place and why they have to be so restrictive and discriminatory, but I see so many people who could have been allies in the cause of equality turn into bald-faced reactionaries instead because they just refuse to make the bloody effort to fucking think about things for two goddamn seconds. And it really hurts to see a self-proclaimed comrade in arms repeating the same tired line in defense of my equality, however well intentioned. You don't chase a dog away by feeding it steak.

So I'd like to lay it on the line here. This is the first level of analysis you really ought to be going through when examining the issue of misandry and anti-male discrimination from a feminist perspective (just noticing that it exists really doesn't constitute an analysis). Here are a few reasons why child custody cases are slanted against men: women, regardless of their personal qulaities, are seen as inherently better suited to the process of child rearing; men who divorce, or are divorced, are seen as having failed in their duties as 'head of the household' and thus no longer deserving of a household to head; and patriarchy sees fit to place the burdens of single child rearing primarily on women as a check to their economic and political power. The social definition of men (especially single men, or at least those unaccompanied by a proper spouse) as potential pedophiles serves a similar purpose, to build the social case for the constant care and attention required by young children to be delivered primarily by women, as well as shepherding men into their 'proper role' as husband and father; once a man is proudly and openly married, this blanket suspicion tends to evaporate and he is free to demonstrate love for his children (though never of course too physically lest they become effeminate and weak) as well as coach little league or lead the local scout troop. The maintenance of valuable property, of the land and the house, is the man's work since he's the one that really 'owns' the property; the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, and the decorating is all the woman's job since she just 'lives' there.

Now let's talk about those 'sweeping generalizations about ALL men being stupid, sex driven, lazy assholes', which doubtless allow women who rely on them feel warm inside at getting a leg up on those sexist sons of bitches. It's pretty telling that the stereotypes getting reinforced about men are the ones that give them greater social liscense to act like their dicks control them instead of the other way around; to be abrasive, competitive, and callous, to follow strategies which can gain them power at the expense of others; to leave to the women all of those little routine chores they're so 'incompetent' at (but not, of course, any of the important stuff); and generally to be impervious to new information and ideas, free to concentrate on sports and power politics without getting bogged down in messy 'women's issues'. Not to mention the stereotyping of men who don't fit the ideal of the buff, hard charging Alpha Wolf as lesser beings, weak and dependant, letting women walk all over them, psychically castrated by those vicious feminazis talking in the break room about the hot guy in recieving.

The last several decades may have seen men lose a bit and women gain strongly in terms of relative power positions, but I think it's clear to most that both have gained in terms of overall liberty and power over their own lives. For instance, the fact that divorced men rarely get to keep the kids (saying never is a provable falsehood since I personally know at least one male divorcee who has custody of his own child) looks like a bit less of a problem when you think about how much easier it's become to get out of that joyless or abusive marriage. The kinds of oppression we see against males in our society (a lot of which are hardly new - men who are beaten by their wives have always been considered a laughing stock) are not some sort of institutionalized matriarchal privilege inculcated by an equalitarian feminism drunk on its own power. They're part of the pushback, part of the ways that patriarchal authoritarianism is attempting to re-entrench its own powers and privileges. Women are being sold their own brand of socially constructed masculinity, 'strong enough for a man but made for women', as a means of achieving male power and privilege instead of fighting the hard fight for equality - beating men on their own turf, instead of changing the playing field. You (and your daughters) can have power over men by treating them like meat, by wearing a t-shirt with a sexist slogan, by being an emotionless ice queen who crushes anyone who stands in their way. And for every smirking marketer out there wrapping subjection in false empowerment and selling it in easily consumable units, there's a Men's Rights Advocate ready to hiss and howl about how the feminazis are out to break your balls, steal your children, and spend your hard-earned money on jewelry and shoes.

All of this, in of course a slightly less coherent and more fragmented form, was almost choking to jump out my mouth as I read what is overall a fairly measured, honest, and fair blog post about the problem of equal rights for men. But then I got to the parts of the article that really made me want to scream.

I must say, I don’t know a single man, NOT ONE, who thinks I am a lesser person because I have a vagina. The men I know see women as mysterious, alluring and even holy.

Oh please no, don't even start down that road. Yes, I'm sure that the particular circle of educated, middle class, liberal guys you associate with see women in these terms. Not only is it nowhere near a universal sentiment, it is an intensely problematic attitude to be fostering. Women are not 'mysterious'. They are not magical forest creatures. They are neither saints nor angels. They are not here to be put on a pedestal so we men can adore them (and kick mud all over them when they fall from our artificial expectations of grace into the dirt of reality). Women are people, to be properly interacted with as people. For fuck's sake! This is practically the madonna/whore complex distilled into a single sentence.

What would you think of a man who told a woman he would give her diamond jewelry if she had sex with him? How is that different than “holding out” on a man because he doesn’t give you jewelry? Or take out the garbage? Or mow the lawn? There should be no "price" on intimacy.

Once again, the fact that a lot of women haven't gotten over the patriarchal expectation that men get to buy access to their vagina, and that their job is thenceforth to exchange sex for household upkeep, is a long-standing problem that feminism has been seeking to correct for generations. Yes, it is discrimination against men! It's also discrimination against women! All discrimination against women is discrimination against men, and vice versa, because our socially constructed gender roles are about keeping men in their place, and keeping women just a step below them!

(/rant)

OK, seriously. I understand that Jodi Kasten has good intentions here and I'm sorry if this came off a bit harsh. But this is kind of my personal hobby horse, so I hope whoever reads it can take it in the spirit of honest critique, profanity notwithstanding. I just think we get exactly these arguments coming at us as a genuine attack so often, that the basic rebuttal needs to be made explicit. If men are victims of female privilege, it is because it is in the interest of the system to play men and women against each other, and I've seen way too many hotlinks today in the vein of 'see, even a lady with lady parts gets the fact that feminism has gone too far!' to let it slide.

Life Feeds on Life

2009-07-21T01:15:00.002-06:00

Satanists are often accused of participating in 'animal sacrifice' (we're unfairly accused of human sacrifice as well, but that's a topic that can wait for another day). And I won't deny it. In fact, I'll willingly affirm it: I sacrifice animals more or less every day. I'm not talking about the meaningless torture and murder of an inoffensive house pet or forest critter to slake the blood lust of some imaginary demon, but the common and everyday act of eating the flesh of dead cows, pigs, chickens, and fish. Every one of us (except the lunatic fringe of vegetarians/vegans) participate in animal sacrifice every day. In fact, this is the whole point of the classic, 'religious' animal sacrifice - the immaterial soul is offered to the Deity, while the more material parts are distributed to friends and family to enhance the sacrificier's prestige. In fact, this may have been the reason that certain animals were domesticated in the first place.

Life feeds on life. It's one of those inescapable facts of reality that we try so hard to ignore. Working in my garden, pragmatist that I am, I can't help but acknowledge the fact that every time I pull a weed I am destroying a life; that these tiny shoots and leafy vines and glorious flowers I work so hard to nurture are destined to be mutilated, slaughtered, and consumed in sacrifice to my ravening hunger. Now, at this point it is customary for the proponents of giving animals rights on par with those of humans to make compassionate noises about alleviating suffering, and point out that plants do not suffer as cows and chickens do. Now, whatever the merit of this line of argument on its face, I feel like it's somewhat missing the point. I'm all for alleviating the suffering of animals, in part because keeping animals in conditions which cause them to suffer makes for poor quality meat and a distinctly heightened risk of contagion, and partly because I am not a sociopathic monster bereft of empathy for my fellow creatures. But just as there is a clear dividing line between plants and animals which allows the animal rights activist to remain callous to the suffering of their clorophyll-enhanced brothers, there is also a clear line between animals and humans. Just because they feel, does not mean they feel as we feel. Just because they suffer, does not make it inherently wrong for us to kill them and eat them.

Now, as a follower of an essentially egoistic moral philosophy, I feel an instinctive pushback whenever I hear arguments for certain programmes of moral improvement to be undertaken purely for the sake of the 'rights' of those affected. In most cases involving human beings, I can get behind progressive ideals because I see them as being intrinsically beneficial to me and those I love; in part to alleviate the empathetic pains and intensify the empathetic pleasures which evolution has engraved on my psyche, and partly for the material reasons that people who are opressed and impoverished tend to be dangerous to those around them (not to mention the continual presence of opression and threat of poverty in my own life). In these cases I recognize the logic that an injury to one is an injury to all, and thus, an injury to me. I'm even prepared to recognize the rights of nature for the same reason. Nature is pretty damn necessary to a happy, healthy human life; even a committed urban tribalist like myself can recognize this fact, and those who despoil nature are likewise worthy of my wrath for their contribution to the degrading conditions of my own livelihood. But when it comes to the ideal that no animal should ever be used for any human end whatsoever, well, I'm not quite prepared to cross that line. Theoretically, exploited sweatshop labourers, women trafficked for the purpose of sex slavery, and black men wrongly imprisoned on false charges could all become a direct threat to me or those I love. Cows will never be a threat to me. So long as I am satisfied that they have been treated as humanely as is practicable, I feel no compunction whatsoever about biting into a nice juicy steak.

Satanism is a philosophy that sees life and nature as sacred, as an intrinsic part of that which makes possible my existence and thus my godhood unto myself. But the sanctity of life includes as part and parcel the sanctity of death, necrophagy, and natural selection. Were it not for millions of generations of life killing and consuming life, the human race could never have evolved to the level at which we are capable of such systematic cultivation, exploitation and slaughter of plants and meat animals. That I want to eat meat is ultimately all the justification I feel is necessary for me to do so. If you choose otherwise, it is your business and I will neither stand in your way, nor do you the insult of offering you meat or animal products when you have made it clear that you do not wish to partake of them. But if your goal is to force me to stop eating any meat whatsoever, know that the only way you are going to accomplish it is to make it irrational for me to do so, by making it arduous or even dangerous for me to procure the flesh of dead animals; and that I will resist any such efforts to the best of my ability, until it becomes clear to me that such resistance is futile. In some ways, the ALF and other animals-rights terrorists are the only animal activists I can respect, because they at least have the backbone to take their beliefs to the logical conclusion. Hunt the hunters; kill the killers. There will always be that irreducible hard core for which no amount of self-righteous leaflets and grotesque videos will ever be enough.

Random Thoughts

2009-07-16T21:16:00.002-06:00

Today my partner and I were at a family dinner at a nice restaurant. The mirror in the men's room is, for some difficult-to-imagine reason, placed perpendicular to the urinals. (There are also TVs in little glass cases above the urinals, but that's not germane to my story.)

While relieving myself of excess fluids, I happened to notice via my mirror reflection how undesirably far my gut has begun to stick out in front of my historically slender body and thought to myself, 'Goth, I'm getting fucking fat.'

I then thought, 'Well, at least I'll have a decent store of calories to live off when the big crash comes and we can't just get food at the supermarket anymore.'

Is it frightening that I'm starting to think this way in random moments of my everyday life?

Anarchy Rising: De-Franchisification

2009-07-16T01:39:00.002-06:00

A chain of grocery stores in Ontario has severed their relationship with Sobeys and formed an independant co-op, because the major chain's corporate policy stopped them from purchasing locally produced food. Now granted, this is a fair ways from genuine worker-owned cooperatives and CSAs, but hey, it's a start.

I'm at the Nexus of the Universe!

2009-07-14T01:59:00.003-06:00

In an act all but guaranteed to cause the total implosion of reality, Wells Fargo Bank sues itself.

In this particular case, Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium, according to Sarasota, Fla., attorney Dan McKillop, who represents the condo owner.
As holder of the first, Wells Fargo is suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is itself.
"The primary reason is to clear title and ownership interest in a property to prepare it for sale," Waetke said in an email exchange. "So it really is not Wells Fargo vs. Wells Fargo."
Yet court documents clearly label "Wells Fargo Bank NA" as the plaintiff and "Wells Fargo Bank NA" as a defendant.
Wells Fargo hired Florida Default Law Group., P.L., of Tampa, Fla., to file the lawsuit against itself.
And then Wells Fargo hired another Tampa law firm -- Kass, Shuler, Solomon, Spector, Foyle & Singer P.A. -- to defend itself against its own lawsuit, according to court documents.
Wells Fargo's defense lawyers even filed an answer to their client's own complaint.
"Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property," the answer reads. "All other allegations of the complaint are denied."

So, since corporations are persons under the law, does this make Wells Fargo schizopherenic? Ya know, in addition to sociopathic and megalomaniacal, which pretty much all manjor corporations would be considered if they were actual persons as opposed to convenient legal fictions designed to protect greedy people from the consequences of their actions?

Kicking people out of Canada for their own good

2009-07-10T01:11:00.004-06:00

A new bill before parliament would give Immigration officers a more or less unlimited power to ban foreign workers from entering Canada if they felt they were 'in danger of being exploited':

Under Bill C-45, tabled by Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney on June 17, a visa officer “shall refuse to authorize the foreign national to work in Canada if, in the officer’s opinion, public policy considerations that are specified in the instructions given by the Minister justify such a refusal”.
The instructions, according to the bill, “shall prescribe public policy considerations that aim to protect foreign nationals who are at risk of being subjected to humiliating or degrading treatment, including sexual exploitation”.
Kenney’s ministry issued a media release stating that the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will “protect vulnerable foreign workers such as exotic dancers and live-in caregivers who could be victims of exploitation”.
However, Kurland said that bill is a “blank cheque to refuse people”.
“The path that I see is.…‘Let’s attack exotic dancers because we want to but we’re not allowed to,’ ” he said, adding that exotic dancing in strip clubs is a legal activity. “They can’t use the criminal law so they’re going to use the immigration law on a morality issue.”
Alice Wong, Conservative MP for Richmond and parliamentary secretary for multiculturalism, explained that the bill is intended more for exotic dancers, agricultural labourers, and those who may end up in “sweat shops” than it is for live-in caregivers.
According to Wong, one measure to evaluate the vulnerability of a person is insufficiency of funds. “If we allow them in, we are actually putting them in great risk,” Wong told the Straight.
Wong confirmed that the bill is driven by Conservatives’ aversion to foreign strippers in Canada. “That is one of the major concerns because, legally, according to admissible criteria, these workers can come in but experience has told us that once they come in, they will be exploited,” she said.
[...]
Strip club owners already find it almost impossible to bring women to Canada. In a letter to Parliament’s citizenship and immigration committee in 2008, Tim Lambrinos, executive director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada, pointed out that from about 1,000 visas for strippers issued in an unspecified previous year, the government issued only 17 in 2007 and half of 2006 combined.
In a phone interview from Toronto, Lambrinos said that in 2008, only about 10 visas for foreign strippers were granted.
“I want to know the name of one Canadian employer, of an exotic club owner who has been charged or convicted of any crime of any form of exploitation against foreign women working as an exotic dancer in Canada in the last five years,” Lambrinos told the Straight. “There’s not one.

This is so fucking typical. First, let's stir up a moral panic about something prurient and sexual that is actually not a real problem but just a figment of the fevered, sexually repressed autocratic imagination. Then, let's propose to 'help' the people this terrifying non-issue doesn't threaten by subjecting them to increased scrutiny and restricting their movement. Let's kick them out of our 'exploitative' country and back to whatever situation it is they're trying to escape by coming here in the first place. Then we'll oh-so-subtly alter the language of this 'anti-exploitation' measure until it covers pretty much anyone who doesn't already have an advanced degree and a wad of cash. Slapping down uppity brown folks and women who transgress the sexual boundary code - at the same time! It's two, two, two disgusting displays of privilege-entrenchment in one! They'll thank us for it, really they will.

Thanks to Border Thinking for the tip.

2009-07-08T20:37:00.002-06:00

Stories like this renew my continual shock that people are still, for some fucking reason, willing to actiually defend the American 'health' 'care' 'system'. I mean, at least some of said people must logically not be directly on the health isurance industry payroll, so what gives!?

Look, everybody!

2009-07-04T17:13:00.001-06:00

It's P.Z. Myers in a big rainbow balloon hat!

Torture Porn

2009-06-30T23:01:00.003-06:00

...is another thing I'm getting really sick of, specifically, the use of the term to describe movies involving highly explicit scenes of torture and mutilation. It's not 'porn'; it's art, or at the least, entertainment. By tossing into the cum bucket of the pornographic, you're trying to revoke its status as legitemate art or entertainment and implying it has no value, or even affect, beyond that of sheer prurience; that the only possible reason to watch such films is that you get off on watching people being tortured and mutilated. Just the same as people have always said about Slashers, Zombie flicks, the whole cornucopia of horror and gorelesque. Yet there is a long tradition of critique defending the artistic value of horror films, horror novels, and the grotesque in art generally; why should none of this suddenly apply to 'Torture Porn'? It's the reductive critique of 'yuck' at its finest, a reflexive act of normative disgust, an attempt to label as 'valueless' what should merely be labelled 'do not want'.

I could go on about Captivity as a feminist staement of empowerment, Hostel as anti-capitalist and anti-western discourse, and Saw as an exploration of the principles of virtue ethics; but why bother? It's nothing but Torture Porn, after all.

I would submit that we re-label this genre as 'Torture Box' or 'Torture Trap' or 'Torture Game' horror. Anything but 'Torture Porn'. When I want to see torture porn, I go to askjolene.com, not to the movie theatre.

The value of virtual items

2009-06-30T22:31:00.003-06:00

...specifically, as digital heirlooms. What might the value be, in the year 2100, of a genuine World of Warcraft sword? Of 100 carefully hoarded and preserved Linden Dollars? Or 10$ in E-Gold or PayPal money? Remember that old comic book or baseball card collection that would be worth thousands of dollars now if your mom hadn't thrown it in the trash? Think twice before clicking the 'delete' key.

2009-06-30T22:30:00.001-06:00

POST 100!!!!!!!!!!! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-EE!

Stonewall all over again?

2009-06-29T05:03:00.002-06:00

Police in Fort Worth, TX raid a gay bar and arrest the people there for 'public intoxication'. They are handcuffed and shoved face-down on to the floor. One man has sustained a serious brain injury. This is Stonewall Day, 2009.

Sounds to me like it's time for a fucking RIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The War Against Gender: Pop

2009-06-28T01:29:00.004-06:00

A Swedish family is refusing to reveal the sex of their 2-year-old child:

Pop’s parents [see footnote], both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

And damn rights they shouldn't have to; it's nobody else's bloody business whether a 2 year old child has a penis or a vagina. But some people don't quite see it the same way:

“Ignoring children's natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

[...]

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

Yes, because that's what we teach them to do. And since children learn to tell apart different languages when they're still in the womb, I don't think they have too much trouble learning what type of behaviour is rewarded and encouraged for kids bearing the male vs. female gender markers like clothes and hair. I mean, humans taught a horse to do math (or rather, to act like it was) using involuntary, subconscious body language alone. Kids are smart little shits, way smarter than most of us grown ups care to admit. They pick up on that stuff.

Now, I'm afraid I don't feel comfortable hailing this as a great victory in the war against gender. A successful first strike, maybe. But my personal intuition is that little Pop is going to end up as a martyr to the gender revolution. If the authorities don't end up swooping in and taking zer off to a foster household to be dutifully stuffed into the appropriately gendered box, zie's going to get the ever loving shit beat out of zer by kids already well versed in the unspoken rules of binary gender. By the time zie is growing into adulthood zie will most likely hate zer parents for letting zer grow up without the emotional bedrock of a socially-mandated gender identity that everyone else just takes for granted. And I can't help but feel sorry for the poor kid.

I understand and even to an extent applaud what the parents are doing. To grow up never being told what you can and can't look like, dress like, say and do; not getting an automatic succession of trucks/dolls to reinforce some arbitrary view of what you're supposed to do with your life; free of all the conditioning and bullshit. It honestly makes me choke up just a little bit, to imagine what my life might have been like if I'd been free to create my own gender identity instead of cobbling one together out of left-over offcut bits and pieces of masculinity, femininity, and fey gothic otherness.

But I do have a bit of a problem with the concept of a child being used as a weapon in this war. If there were a community out there where such children could be raised in a supportive manner, with more people than just their parents and immediate family refusing to gender-program them, it would be different. Unfortunately, there is not; we as a society have yet to create one. And the really sad thing is that sacrificing kids like Pop on the altar of gender conformity is just about the only way to go about creating such a community. It really is a catch 22; deliberately subjecting a child to judgement and ridicule from their peers, the media, society-at-large, even their own family - in an attempt to create a world where children are no longer subjected to judgement and ridicule, should they dare to transgress the artificial boundary of the gender barriers. I don't have the solution. All I can do then, is wish Pop and zir family all the best, and hope to goth zie doesn't end up dead or insane.