Politblogo

Bad ideas in the world of Canadian criminal law

It is universally entertaining to discuss abstract and hypothetical situations, the life-and-deathier the better.  For instance, many people apparently find it extremely entertaining to discuss the possibility of a terrorist parachuting into, oh, Round Top, Texas and detonating a neutron bomb or something, and whether we should prevent it by anaestheticlessly removing the fingernails of every Swedish grandmother or Palestinian-sympathizing penguin or whatever figures in their imagination.

One of my favorites is the one about "when does life begin?"  After all, all sorts of things come into the picture there.  Ensoulment, individuation, the meaning of life, 42, all those wonderful issues we get to debate.  It's an awesome thing to do when you're high on Mountain Dew. 

But when it comes to any actual law related to the concept, the simple question becomes this: even if you do have an opinion on the deep philosophical question of when life "begins": at what point  are you willing to tie up and intubate a woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy in order to prevent her from doing so?  Because, you see, that's what it takes.  If you're like me, you'll recoil from the concept.  That recoil keeps the debate safely in the hypothetical realm, the world of fun and innocent lunchroom philosophical debates that everyone ought to have.  If you don't recoil from the idea, then you'll be very happy to base laws on the severe restriction of women's freedom on your lunchtime hypothetical musings about the origin of human existence.  There are, in fact, people like that.  For what it's worth.

I am willing, however, to take a crazed chainsaw murderer from a horror movie and, in fact, restrain him or her until I can figure out what to do with this person.  That is why I support the existence of laws on the prosecution or prevention of murder in some form or another.

Why are these two situations different for me?  First and foremost, there is an emotive one.  I am unashamed to say that I do judge some moral situations on an instinctive inner evaluation of relative suffering.  I know that I have to inflict months of torture on some women in order to prevent them from having abortions.  Unless we play silly semantic games with the concept of "suffering," I don't have to do this in the case of the crazed chainsaw murderer.  Even if I did, I would be saving large numbers of people---beyond the mere victims---from a potentially great deal of suffering.  My inner emotive evaluation of suffering forces me to see these things differently.

Even the debate-club ethical discussion forces me to take a position distinguishing these two situations.  In the case of the pregnant woman, she is facing a situation in which her very being and personal existence may be altered by carrying the pregnancy through.  To put it metaphorically, the very weight of her existence and consciousness is an order of magnitude greater than that of any fetus.  We cannot easily say this for the chainsaw murderer or his/her victims. 

Of course, I realize that this is the argument that abortion criminalizers are least moved by.  But the correct and honest response is to persuade us that their debate-club notions of life, the universe, and everything should be used as a basis for law.  Unfortunately, they have recently embarked on a strategy in Canada to circumvent that.   This strategy may very familiar to my American readers.  It is to consider the harming of a fetus during a violent act as a crime separate from that of harming the woman during that act.  I am not saying that this is a stealthy end-run around the distinction between the abortion-seeking woman and the chainsaw murderer.  I'm saying that it is a direct and open end-run around that, and extremely transparent to boot, which exploits the suffering of a small number of victims to enshrine in law a certain kind of debate-club ethics.

I don't normally write about this issue, as I have no personal direct or indirect experience of the matter.  But I thought I would do so this once, as it vaguely appears that it might have a chance to pass in Canada, which would be a bad idea for the same reason that it is a bad idea to enshrine in law anything that has so obviously not made it out of the high-school debating club level of thought* and for the same idea that it's a bad idea to allow any party to get around an up-front discussion of their political motivations.  It also connects a lot of other issues together.  Like why it's wrong to torture Swedish grandmothers or suspected members of the man-penguin armies, or anyone else for that matter.

*No offense to high-school debaters.  I was one too, and I enjoy that sort of thing.  Well, actually, some offense intended.  I think the formats are highly artificial and weird and possibly adversely affect the public discourse when debate-club graduates actually start careers without getting it out of their systems.

Iraq: contaminated by girl cooties

A brief note: Brad R. at Sadly, No! finds this fascinating quote from Michael Ledeen in an article in Vanity Fair about how the neocon hawks feel about the problems in the prosecution of the war in Iraq.

Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.

Ledeen is the neocon known for using cartoonish concepts like "Terror Masters" (right from bad superhero comic, no?) in book titles.  Apparently, he's quite prominent.  The other quotes in the S,N! post are pretty good too.

I do note that I occasionally find people blame the flaws of empires on the associated seraglios.  I think that I am right to be skeptical.  But Ledeen is just funny.

The surprising moral and epistemological relativism of SWC opponents

I shouldn't keep poking, but I guess I will.

In the post immediately preceding this one, I remarked on the political and logical incoherence of those in favour of dismantling Status of Women Canada and similar programmes.  In a nutshell, the primary argument that is used against SWC is that it doesn't fund entities that work to counteract its influence and mandate.  This argument is made by people who apparently believe that the government shouldn't fund things that counteract its influence and mandate.  And who worry about wasting money.

I netted a couple of commenters from the other side of the aisle.  Rather than defend the contradiction, they instead revealed the motive behind the transparently propagandistic incoherence.

The first one, SUZANNE, is a longtime anti-abortion campaigner on the Canadian interwebs.  Her moral position is one held as absolute moral truth delivered from the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.  And yet she writes:

This agency, which operates supposedly operates to better my welfare, operates without any input from me

It used to be "father knows best". Now it's "feminists know best".

It is simply undemocratic for an agency or for a movement to claim to speak in my name or work on behalf of my welfare, without consulting what I want.

From this we can deduce that she holds that government policy on the matter of women should not only be relative, but relative to her moral desire.  This she holds to be the pinnacle of democracy.

Behind door number 2, we have frequent libertarian troll, lrC.  lrC belongs to the wing of libertarianism that holds that the ability of the rich to dispose of their wealth/power is the highest form of liberty.  This form of libertarian prides itself as being grounded in the ultimate in materialism.  It is frequently associated with invocations to the economic axis of the Vienna Circle and their associates and descendents.  Ironically, lrC tells us,

In writing this post, you've laid bare the fallacy underpinning most of what you stand for: the assumption that you and your fellow travellers are equipped to measure utility and good on behalf of others.

Whatever lrC believes---and he could be the very few admitted relativist naive-libertarians---one has to admit that one finds the moral and epistemological relativism in this statement to be quite striking.

This "relativism for me and not for thee" is, alas, a common phenomenon on the other side of the aisle.  No doubt there is some logical contortion that they have to help weasel themselves out of it.

Spending money on conservative groups would have been wasting it

I'm told that the folks at the Progressive Bloggers aggregator are holding a special event today in erstwhile protest of the recent cuts to Status of Women Canada, which were part of an immensely predictable round of cuts to right-wing bugbears intended by Stephen Harper and co. to pay off the usual suspects.  The size of the cut was about five megadollars, and thus the ProgBlog event involves as many bloggers as they can find writing a list of five things feminism did for each of them, one, presumably, for every million.  Or so it would be if I had conceived of the idea.

I'm still conflicted about whether I should post a list of my own.  Some people, including women, are eager for men to post such a list.  Most of what I could put on such a list are either things that derived first from women gaining the material benefits of feminism, such as my ability to converse with interesting women in my professional area.  Or they're "Being a better person" type things, and I'm too much of a cynic for that.  The primary material benefit has gone, as it probably should, to women.

So for the time being, and in lieu of this, I'll instead leave you with my astonishment at one of the more odd arguments against the SWC and its related women's group funding programmes, arguments raised, in particular, by the sheep-led-to-slaughter type of conservative women's organizations like "REAL Women."  Now, of course, these groups make applications to the SWC in order to make a point: that they'll be turned down for funding.  And, yes, they tend to be turned down for funding---because they aren't equality-seeking organizations that comply with the mandate of the SWC, which is part of Canada's stated international commitments to women's equality.  The decision to turn them down is thus an eminently logical decision.

But let us examine what the experiment is intended to prove.  It is intended to show that taxpayers money is not being equitably distributed according to the political interest of Canadian taxpayers themselves, some of whom, presumably, are wingnuts.  All of a sudden, this wingnut concern for proportionality---of course some government spending will be disagreeable to certain portions of the population.

Even more contradictory, however, is that any such false funding equity would have been a waste of money.  And we all know how much the radical right hates wasting government money, right?  And the reason for this is not only the obvious one---the nature of REAL Women itself---but the act of funding REAL Women and feminist groups in this parody of proportionality that SWC's opponents espouse. 

Why?  Because ever dollar spent on a group like REAL Women, in the ideal case (for them), trivially negates a dollar spent on a bona fide equality-seeking organization.  In terms of effect, it's like throwing money down the drain.  A dollar spent on moving women's equality one step forward spent simultaneously with a dollar for REAL Women's destructive desire to put their sisters in their places.

To get the same favorable effect for women, the government would have to spend even more money on equality-seeking organizations.  That is the astonishing absurdity of the wingnut shallow argument.

You might think that I am feeling irony-impaired today

I am not entirely certain of the meaning of this post:

The London Fog: Men should wear burkahs too: The United Nations, in collaboration with the World Mental Health Organization and the Women's Universal Suffrage organization, in collaboration with the Homeless Coalition and the Diversity and Anti-Discrimination co-operative, in collaboration with local White Male support groups overlooked by the environmental friendly are advocating mandatory burkahs for all.

I am sure this "Lisa" person is being sarcastic about something, but I'm not sure what.  Is she mocking advocates for women's equality or is she mocking conservative Muslim cultures?   I mean, if she's in favour of women's liberty, then I can easily surmise that she is mocking the mandatory imposition of the burqa under Taliban rule.  But then she uses a trope like "White Male support group" (usually a sarcastic reference to equality-seeking politics) and then refers to "equal opportunity" in a sarcastic way (and not the sarcastic way I would use).  The two propositions contained in Lisa's post are simply too difficult for me to reconcile.

And that is only the beginning of my confusion.  Can someone explain to me what this woman means to tell us?

Brief quasi-vacation; hello Pandagonians!

Hello, Pandagonians!  For those who don't know, this post has been added as a guest post on Pandagon right here.  So welcome to any new readers!

I have been on a reduced posting schedule due to travel and the preparations for it.  I'll try to get back in business when I get home again.

North, Women, South, Media

Twisty Faster writes:

I Blame the Patriarchy - European Honky Dudes Whacking Wives At Alarming Rate: I say this because our racist conceits are more thoroughgoing than we care to admit. As I have oft opined, Americans display a notably high tolerance for the suffering of others, especially when those others are brown. Like white dudes and their birthright of male privilege, Westerners are indoctrinated from birth with a sort of first-world entitlement. This allows us to keep “exotic” cultures at arm’s length, to luxuriate in a cavalier unfamiliarity with their strange, primitive ways, and ultimately, to think of them as ideas rather than people, as less real than we are, and therefore less important. My own unscientific, blog-centric survey, based on the much-lower-than-average number of comments generated by posts that focus on violent misogyny in “third-world” countries, is that even seasoned patriarchy-blamers are rather less outraged by ritual stonings in Pakistan or mass rapes in Rwanda than they are by Dove soap’s attempt to pass off skinny white models as fat girls.

A lot of very good comments ensue about how women are represented in developing countries and the relation to women's rights in the West and matters of imperialism, colonialism, and violence.  Most of the commenters understand why Western feminists commenting on developing countries can be a bit of a minefield.  I'd like to point one very important thing out, though, at least regarding the usual subject of Western handwringing.

Someone pointed out earlier that women's rights are a point of conflict between the West and the Muslim world.  I'd like to emphasize that this is very much a two-way street.  Hypocritical Western powers/media/etc use women's rights as a bludgeon against extraneous interests of the Muslim world.  This has caused a lot of the Muslim world to regard women's rights as an instrument of Western domination---a totally predictable effect.  A lot of progress that might have been made has been retarded by this perception. 

In the media, women's lives in the Muslim world are treated like some form of prurient horror show---in relation to the lives of Western women.  I mean, we see an unrelenting parade of misery.  All of my family comes from that part of the world, and, truth be told, there isn't much more misery there as far as I can tell as there is here.  Not THAT much more misery, that's for sure, and in some cases perhaps less (options for women vary a lot by class and geography).  And, unfortunately, even Western women who consider themselves feminists contribute to this, such as, for instance, people like Irshad Manji. 

What it does is provoke resentment about the West, even for women.   Women in my family can do nothing but shout at the TV in frustration when the plight of women in their countries is used essentially for propaganda.  I remember in a CBC TV report about Pakistan (perhaps more than one), some of the women were speaking Urdu, but the translation captions were deliberately skewed to make things sound much closer to Western stereotypes than what was actually said, and some important sentences were simply glossed over.  It's hard to see this as anything but propaganda, and a lot of the Muslim world resents the hypocrisy and associates feminism with it.  And, in any case, it necessarily obscures the search for solutions.

Of course, I am not denying that there aren't problems.  Big problems.  But I can presently count few successes brought about by foreigners, even women, in addressing these concerns.  The best successes are typically brought about by the women who live there, on the ground.  That doesn't mean necessarily that successes can't come from outside, or at least support and honest advice can't come from outside.  But we haven't really seen it that often.

Women's love of symmetry is to blame for Canada's predicament: Quebec man

This is so out of left field, I had to share it with you.  Some guy wrote a letter to Cyberpresse with a very interesting theory:

Cyberpresse | Opinions - Révélations inédite dans La Presse:  Sans s'en rendre compte, La Presse se trouve à révéler aujourd'hui à quoi tient le Canada : au vouloir symétrique de ses protagonistes les plus influents. En effet, on apprend que les femmes préfèrent les hommes qui dansent bien. Or, ces derniers sont ceux ayant les corps les plus symétriques.

Le «corps canadien» s'étant imposé au cours des dernières décennies en est un symétrique. À la Trudeau. Toutes tentatives d'«asymétrisation» globale formelle (e.g. statut particulier, société distincte) ont échoué. Pourquoi ? Parce que les femmes préfèrent la symétrie. Laquelle aura été le mieux incarnée politiquement par Pierre Trudeau. Symétrique et bon danseur.

Essentially, we are in this situation because Pierre Trudeau was physically symmetrical and a good dancer, and women prefer symmetrical solutions so we got constitutional symmetry between provinces and regular defeats for asymmetrical solutions.  His evidence: women in Quebec are generally more federalist (and perhaps more centralist?) than men.

He even blames the Ignatieff phenomenon on women later on.

He refers to some articles in La Presse, but he doesn't provide any links.  I assume he's not serious but satirizing what someone else said.  Nevertheless I recall some "men's rights" angst recently getting published in Cyberpresse (something like, "The decline of the Québécois male") so we can't know for sure.

Nonchalance about disappearance

Twisty Faster applauds the disappearance of indigenous cultures, or at least she doesn't shed any tears for them.

I Blame The Patriarchy: Fuck Culture: It's tough toenails, but the day is almost upon us when culture will no longer be practiced by isolated pockets of diverse and colorful indigenous natives. I'd say good riddance, too, since culture is just another word for patriarchy. Sadly, what we're getting instead is no great improvement over the quaint crap it replaces. Today's culture is an homogenous, pulsating gray fungus oozing out of TVs and internet porn sites and McDonaldses and Wal-Marts. It reeks of polyester and grease. And male honky domination. If it's eaten away all the naive and picturesque social constructs that everyone loves to imagine are alive and well in other, less complicated parts of the world like Fiji, well, that's too bad, but odds are those dear old traditions were oppressin' somebody. So fuck'em.

To emphasize, she's not happy either with what is replacing local cultures, but she's not willing to go to any length to defend them, since for her that would likely be abetting women's oppression.  I have other opinions on this but no time, so I'll just throw this out to the reader.

Feministe - In Remembrance: The Montreal Massacre

Pursuant to my post pointing to Craig's links on the Montreal massacre, Jill at Feministe provides a perspective on it as a US feminist:

Feministe - In Remembrance: The Montreal Massacre: Sixteen years ago, this tragedy mobilized Canadians to address the issue of violence against women. Gender-based violence is certainly not a problem that we’ve solved yet, and it remains a far-reaching one. It’s just usually quieter and more private than this.

This man’s act was intended to terrorize women everywhere, and his aim was to scare them back into traditional roles. He thoroughly failed: From 1989 to to 1999, the number of women in Canadian engineering schools more than doubled, to more than 9,000.

Like I said, this was big news in Canada and is every year, but it's a nonissue in the US.  Which is par for the course: it's two different countries.  But despite Canadians' occasional smugness (and occasionally deserved smugness), it's a problem that affects both countries, and it has similar solutions.