Charity, Morality, and Welfare

Shown: Not Goofing Off on the Clock
Working for a Living

 I live in one of the richer American republics (actually, it's a constitutional monarchy, but it functions as a republic would in everything but name). As it happens I'm actually not pro-republic, I'm pro-democracy, but my rantings and ravings about electoral math are both, by now, well-known, and overdone.

However, living in one of the richer American states, I live in a country with a disproportionate amount of pseudo-socialistic thought, and at some point way before I was born, Welfare became a thing.

Now, I should begin by saying that up here Canada we have a variety of different welfare programs, not all of which are welfare, and all of which need to be considered on their own merits and not the merits of their esteemed confreres. For the purposes of this discussion, it's enough to know that there's basically Welfare, Disability, and Employment Insurance. I'm going to try to talk briefly about all of them, but I also have to get some obligatory disclosure out of the way first, so that you can spot my confirmation bias and point it out to me. Remember, dissenting opinions feed developing intelligence.

I'm a Christian. What particular denomination you attached to that statement is ultimately meaningless because I don't recognize denominational boundaries as legitimate for any purpose other than sociology. My developing understanding of Christian morality comes from direct reading of the bible and also pursuit of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.I consider mine a faith of charity in all senses of the word. Looking out for the less fortunate is probably the most noble thing a person can do, whatever the context.

Shown: How I cook when I'm working-poor.

Let's talk, though, about our welfare programs. We'll start with the one actually called Welfare. This is a program that anyone who is not presently employed may collect from, if they meet certain, rather low criteria, and can produce paperwork reliably to prove they are actively looking for work. Welfare is funded from the general taxation revenue in my country, which means that anyone who pays any tax of any kind pays for welfare, though obviously not proportionally.

Welfare is not available to anyone who's working over a certain wage, either, and the line for the welfare cutoff is well below the poverty line. What's more, provisions are made in the welfare system for certain conditions, like being a single parent, or having children. Additional children mean additional money is paid out by the system to help keep you afloat. It's a way for the state to enforce charitable ideals upon even the most bitter-hearted of us.

I used to like welfare. Now I know I live in an area with a lot of claimants. I know enough about how the business world works to recognize that many claimants, who come to my area looking to get their "I applied here" paperwork signed, have no interest in getting an interview. They're failing first impressions deliberately, and doing it in a way that is painfully honest. The system is gamed, with parents who live together but are unmarried listing separate addresses and one or the other collecting single parent benefits while the other collects an ordinary welfare cheque.

The people who abuse this program spoil it for everyone else. It gets to the point where refusing to be on welfare becomes a matter of pride for people who have a genuine need of it, and where people who are otherwise charitable want the program abolished on principle.

Shown: How I eat when unemployed.

Employment Insurance is even better on principle. This is a system everyone who works pays into. It's deducted from your pay on top of your taxes, and then it's matched-and-then-some by your employer. It's intended as an insurance policy against loss of work due to layoffs. If you quit, or were fired for cause, you're not entitled. If you don't have a certain number of hours logged, you're not entitled. And the payouts only last for so long, no matter how hard you're looking for work. But hey, it's something, and I have no problem paying for it.

I often complain about it, of course. I've been unable to draw upon it when I really needed it in the past, wuch as two months, recently, where I was unable to find work. This was before I decided to go back to college for my second bite at the post-secondary-education apple, so there was no savings to draw on, and precious little work to find. I hadn't been fired for cause. The business I worked for was doing poorly, and the owner basically decided to drop all staff that wasn't family. I was laid off.

I still couldn't claim it, because too long of a period had elapsed between that job and the previous, which had been a summer practicum I was released from at the end of the summer work term. Such things don't count for EI claims so I was no better than the person who gets fired for throwing a knife down the line during a heated argument with a holier-than-thou server during a breakfast service where everything that can go wrong did.

Well, let's be honest, I really am no better than that, but you would think a program you pay for - directly - would actually pay out. Particularly where other seasonal workers can, or at least, could (there's reform in the tubes) draw on EI benefits during their off season.

So I'm against Welfare and on the Fence about Ei. This is the part where I look like a crypto-fascist and argue against disability, right? Wrong. Disability payments serve a legitimate purpose. People have a right to the necessities of life in this country. Those who are unable to work to earn those necessities should have an expectation for the government to provide for them within reason, because there is simply no other alternative.

These positions aren't going to be very popular. If I ever ran for office with any of the parties that I actually liked, or indeed ever ran for any office of any kind in the area I live in now, all it would take to sink my career would be for someone to dig up this post or another like it. But it needs to be said, becauser enforced charity is no charity at all.  Instead of encouraging people to work less, we should be helping them find ways to work more. I've known plenty of people on any of these programs who made more money than I did while working, being paid, in essense, to sit around all day and be online, railing against the unfairness of a political system that forces people to work, fails to raise the assistance payments to the level they think is necessary, or else-wise simply play their favourite facebook, pogo, or miniclip games.

The legitimate users of these programs deserve every penny they get, and the illegitimate ones deserve to work off every penny they stole.

Prejudging, Judging, and Divine Directives

Earl Grey White Tea

As I sat alone this morning in the basement of my boss's house, drinking what's probably the last of the Phoenix Mountain Dan Cong, I came to the sudden, sharp realization of a few things all at once.

Firstly, that earthenware retains flavours, and all my teas are now likely to taste salty for several days after having only just once made OXO-brand fake chicken stock in it to serve as a between-meals savoury-thing to keep my tongue happy.

Secondly, and no more relevantly, that I should stop thinking of a 10:30 wakeup as being lazy when it gets me up four hours before I have to leave for work.

Thirdly, and more to the point, that we, as a society, judge personal worth based on some properly stupid metrics.

We've all had that friend, I think, with the heavy eyelids and the full-arm tattoos that gets most passers-by assuming he's a drug user without having ever met or interacted with them. Once that assumption is made, even subconsciously, other traits begin to get applied: shiftless, under-achieving, possibly unemployed, probably unemployable, and so forth.

As an experiment, an aquaintance of mine from high-school who actually does fit that description shaved his head to eliminate the somewhat skinhead-esque haircut he'd had, bought himself a nice Denver Heyes dress shirt thick enough to hide the tattoos, had me update his resume for him, and tried to get back into the workforce. What people saw instead was someone industrious, a go-getter who was a great catch in a labour market currently swollen with terrible applicants for even the most menial positions. He was offered all three jobs he was interviewed for. God willing, he might even live up to these expectations.

Now, take it from me - I'm the straightest-edged guy you'd think you ever saw, and I've got as many twists and turns in me as any other piece of poor white trash you happen to come across, in spite of being neither. Physical appearance is nigh-onto-worthless in evaluating a person's job performance.

Let's consider the example of another friend I have. He has a single tattoo on his forearm - an ambigram of his sign in the western zodiac with his birth date beneath it. This guy is one of the harder-working, more level-headed and agreeable people I know, and anyone who actually takes the time to interview him comes to pretty much the same conclusion.

When his recent employers learned of the tattoo, they altered the uniform for him, and him alone, to hide it. I suppose that's better than firing him - I've heard of people fired for such things - but at the same time, in the role he performs in the industry in which he's working, a forearm tattoo is about as off-putting and relevant as green eyes.

On the tattoo thing, we're a society that's pretty much embraced the technology and its application for a good two, maybe even three, generations now, but we're pretty much pandering to those above us.

Moving on to the broader topic at hand (I, being uninked, couldn't possibly care less about Tattoos) we really do judge personal worth on pretty stupid metrics. More importantly, it's pretty surprising we bother to judge personal worth at all.

This is how a boring person looks

Now, as it happens, I don't like reaching for the bible to support my arguments if I'm not expressly discussing theology - I find even morality can usually be arrived at directly without divine intervention thanks to having been raised in a society that values, by and large, the Golden Rule.

There is however, Matthew 7:1-6:

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.

2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Mk. 4.24 

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

6 ¶ Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

To me, a strict interpretation of this passage seems to indicate we have no business judging people at all, and my secular values agree with me. The only relevant judgments are judgement on the matter at hand. Tattoos at a job interview are not relevant, even in the service industry, unless they are somehow indemnifying on their own merit (racist, ideological, and so forth). They are no more material to the dispensation of your duties than the colour of your hair or eyes. The real metric of relevance is past and present job performance, personal charisma in the interview process, and, frankly, demonstrable creative energy and drive. Anyone who can spin the Hilton into work afterward the way I did probably deserves the job they got - a shame that job fell through.

Americanization of Canadian Politics II: Our Increasingly Violent Culture

I have been said to personify one of these from time
to time.

If people knew me by my frustrations alone, they'd probably think of me as a violent person. A teenage decade of losing pretty much every physical fight I've been in, however, has taught me that psychological warfare has much more of a place than any sort of physical conflict.

When it comes to political issues that surround violence, I'm hopelessly liberal - in favour of restricting civilian access to firearms, broadly in favour of legalizing even some of the harder drugs I would personally never touch, anti-death...

Frankly, I never really thought I was sitting all that far outside the margin until I read this thread on the NationStates Forum. While I wasn't surprised by some of the comments considering the vast majority of the players on this site are American, I became surprised pretty quickly once certain players I know to be Canadian got involved.

With "debate" (or what passes for it on the internet) raging on the issue of abolishing the death penalty, a surprising number of otherwise very representative Canadians came out in favour of keeping the practice (or, I suppose, in our case, bringing it back - we abolished it in 1976 and the last executions were actually in 1962), often rather vocally.

What was telling, however, was that these particular Canadians kept citing various prison statistics - from the United States - and calling it "our broken prisons".

Either five or six of the people I know on the internet to be Canadian all spontaneously moved to the States, or, once again, a lack of competitive flare on the part of Canadian broadcasters means we're getting drowned out in favour of CNN and FOX. For the record, and as an aside, on four occasions of the last fifty that I've gone to a restaurant that happened to have a tv tuned to a news channel - commonly McDonalds - it's been tuned to CNN. D'oh.

This is actually one of many things I'm always surprised to hear people get up in arms. I honest to god had one older woman (who frankly should have known better!) complaining about the recent abolition of the penny and invoke President Obama in the proceedings, who is not my president and had nothing to do with setting fiscal or monetary policy in Canada. No discussion of the traditional hot-button issues from America is complete without at least one person in the group somehow invoking the American state of affairs, with such hits as:

Yeah, but when the Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade they pretty much made it impossible to get an abortion in this country.

(Honestly, I can't even begin to tell you what's wrong with that sentence.)

We're all supposed to have health insurance through provincial medicare - why is this clown making us buy health insurance?

That's the other guys!

There's no need to ban guns - just made safety training comprehensive and compulsory and restrict the more ridiculous weapons.

Get this: We already do. Civilians can pretty much only own long arms (and certain, very restricted classes of handgun), and only after earning certification in firearms safety through accredited, government-run instructors.

I can't believe (such and such a state) legalized (pot or gay marriage, player's choice) - What are they doing to this country?

This is another one of those statements I hear way to often. First of all, if it happened in another state, it didn't happen in Canada (I'll teach you the meaning of the word state in countries other than America presently), and what's more, neither of those things is bad. Say what you want about the morality of the issue, but neither Catholic Doctrine nor a strict solo-scriptura reading of the bible makes the use of recreational drugs a sin per-se. Abuse is Gluttony, sure, and I'm pretty sure I saw a passage that makes violating "just laws" (of course, the definition of "just" is open to fairly wide interpretation, because this is the kind of thing where you'd want as much ambiguity as possible) a sin, but in areas where it's legal to smoke and you keep your smoking within the "healthy" limits of most people's drinking and tobacco habits, it's pretty much fair game from a moral standpoint. I'm pretty sure I've said before that you can't really justify a prohibition on Marijuana and the creation of a criminal class if you're going to let people drink alcohol and smoke tobacco. Say what you want about the morality of Gay Marriage - a properly secular government cannot legislate morality, and Gay Marriage is not a public safety issue.

Disapproving Pink-Tailed Chalceus, anyone?

The underlying problem with all this, particularly changing attitudes with younger Canadians toward executions and guns, stems, I believe, from an influx of American media. While I've never been on the ball with the whole "videogames/movies/music cause violence" argument, I certainly get how people make the connection, and I can certainly see such things predisposing a frustrated culture toward the acts often depicted. After all, even non-gamers usually play way more Call of Duty (at least, the recent ones) than is probably necessary or completely healthy. This is coming from a guy who plays some pretty violent games himself, from time to time, though for the most part, lately, killing blocky zombies in Minecraft is about as violent as it gets for me.

If we idolize vengence, of course we come to want the death penalty. We need to learn the distinction between Justice and Vengeance (as a species, on the whole).

Christmas, Rest, and Due Diligence

There's a halfway decent chance
this Alexandrine will
outlive you.

It's the day before Christmas, and I'm up at half past six getting ready to go to work.

Partly due to the fact that I'm pretty much inoculated against it these days, I'm used to having to work on and around Christmas Day, and I don't really have a problem with it. Whether I'm selling or cooking, this is simply the best time of year to ply my trades, and it would be silly to rail against that.

I am, however, growing tired, and I think all of us are. I know many people out there are thinking of getting pets for people for Christmas, and I wish you all would stop and think about the situation a little more clearly.

A pet is a serious responsibility. You're adopting a life, often a longer-lived one than you think, and giving it to someone else to care for. I don't really have a problem with pets as a family gift so long as the giver is willing to assume responsibility in the event the recipient cannot or will not. There's nothing wrong with a whole family adopting something like an Alexandrine, a Lorikeet, or a dog.

Where I get temperamental is when people give pets as gifts to, say, small children, and expect the children to take perfect care of them. They won't. They might try, sure, and an unusually responsible 12 year old might even do the research on how to care for a pet. But on average, I just can't trust any of your children to do that when you yourselves won't.

There are plenty of pets that this is especially pronounced for: every breed/strain of goldfish I know of exceeds six inches (often dramatically) in length and has a lifespan potentially measured in decades rather than single years - that's right, even those two-and-three-dollar feeder goldfish you've never seen live longer than six months. Goldfish need exorbitant care. If you are looking for a simple fish needing a minimum of care, look no further than a betta, but still expect to do frequent water changes - a well-cared-for betta can live for years.

Ditto for rodents. Hamsters are about the worst pet you can give a child and quickly go feral if not regularly handled - a task difficult at the outset as they start feral to begin with and have to be hand-tamed. A rat would be better, but expect it to live for a couple of years.

There's no pet I can think of (except perhaps a Mantis) who should not be expected to live at least three years, and most pets I can think of (and have kept) have had lifespans potentially reaching ten years or more. Birds and reptiles are among the clearest examples of this.

These turtles are called red-eared sliders. They're a common enough species in the pet trade that I've never actually seen another kind of pet turtle. They're cute and tiny now, but Red Eared Sliders live for thirty years or more and have an adult size approaching on a foot. Turtles, particularly aquatic ones, are some of the most care-intensive pets I can think of, and require that care, unfalteringly, for the better part of the rest of the recipient's life. If you give this to your child, they can reasonably expect to be caring for it while they're studying for the bar exam, or even, potentially, administering it.

"Affordable Dental"

Parrots are worse. The Alexandrine, above, has a lifespan exceeding 70 years, when properly cared for, and is about 18-20 months old. They're good little birds, and easy to maintain, but he's a lifelong companion for most who could afford him, and one you will in all likelihood be bestowing upon your friends or family when you pass on. That's a pretty big responsibility - many humans don't live as long as Alex will.

Conures, like this sun conure helping Mandy fix her loose crown (no, not really), have an average lifespan of 25 years. At their price, I doubt anyone would give them as an impulse gift, but it's still helpful to know what you're getting into.

As a family matter, pets are actually fantastic gifts. But the giver must always be willing to ensure that pet's standard of care, just as the adopter of a child must be willing to care for that child. That's why we try not to say you have "bought" this or that animal. You're adopting them. It's a life, and once you've let it out of the box it came in, you can't put it back in.

Pre-Tea Pontification: Foreign Trade

So, while I'm sitting at my desk waiting for my Earl Grey White to steep, I've been reading stories through the CBC, La Monde, and BBC websites detailing a deadly fire in Bangladesh that killed 112 workers over the weekend - believe it or not, this is the first mention of it on the CBC since the weekend. The coverage, by and large, is more concerned with the protests surrounding the deaths than the deaths themselves - probably because 112 faceless Southeast-Asian workers don't pull much weight in a predominantly white readership.

Still, the protests highlight important points - Bangladesh clothing factories such as the one that burned down have claimed 300 lives this year, largely due to poor safety regulation, and, in this one particular case, managerial snafus. The Bangladeshi clothing industry is second only to that of China, with major retailers like Disney, Sears, and WalMart sourcing from this one particular factory. La Monde reports that these workers are paid between 40 and 80 euros a month, which is my take home pay in a week at minimum wage, and they work far longer hours than I do.

Sears and Disney did not comment, but Wal-Mart claims that the factory was subcontracted by a supplier (which they refuse to name) which no longer does business with the company. The BBC has also reported that three middle-management officials from the factory have been arrested in relation to the fire.

The western economy has become dependent on South-East Asian manufacturing - at this point, nobody can dispute that. Even products designed in Canada are manufactured in China and by and large we don't pay nearly enough to the people who make them. Because we can all live comfortably on the minimum wage (or so they would like us to believe), people like me have the time to passively consider the issue and pontificate on it without due thought for the consequence.

The problem, as I see it, is not the salaries of the workers per-se - we do not live in a post-scarcity society and until we did I think that the pay rate a person can eke out for themselves will have to suffice - but the safety standards we are willing to effectively underwrite by purchasing products produced in these factories.

Having said that, there is one important consideration to make. If someone such as myself purchased clothing exclusively from western manufacturing, or even locally, I'd own perhaps two of each article of clothing, or need to be making a lot more money than I am now. The fact of the matter remains that the reason there are so many middle-class families in the west is that we exported our lower-class to the nations that make the things we luxuriate in.

It's time to bust out your keyboards and printers and send a letter to the retailers you frequent, protesting use  of manufacturers located in countries without adequate safety standards for their products. I know I for one have even less motivation to go back to Sears or Walmart in the near future. In fact, let's throw down a blanket boycott of all department stores and support local business at the same time.

Auditing Assisted Suicide

Even though this originally came up a few weeks ago when the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that  the status-quo prohibition of Physician-Assisted Suicide was in violation of the Constitution Act (in not one but two sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). Unfortunately for you, perhaps, I chose to stay out of the matter. The date that the ruling was handed down was surprisingly close to my recent birthday, the stress of work was mounting, and wading into a topic as controversial here as abortion is in the United States wasn't high on my priority list. Fortunately, now that I'm back up to my fighting weight, I've been given a second shot because the Vancouver Sun is now reporting that Ottawa will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Better part of half a decade ago, now, I took my first formal course in Canadian Law, through my high school. The teacher was lively, and often deliberately induced class debate, particularly on issues related to the Charter specifically or to the Constitution in general. One of those issues was assisted suicide, specifically the case of Sue Rodriquez, pictured left, who won a battle in her lifetime to earn the right (it would seem temporarily) to end her life with the help of her doctor.

Now, the exact specifics of her case elude me at the moment, but I remember arguing rather vociferously that she should be allowed to do so. I used s. 7 as the cornerstone of my argument, which reads:

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

As I recall, my argument chiefly revolved around the idea of life and liberty. I argued that the only way you can have a right to do something was also to have the right to refuse it, otherwise your "right" was more of a mandate and in that case the Charter wasn't as useful a document as one would hope.

Times have changed a bit since then, however. For one thing, I no longer feel the need to come down on the liberal side of every issue on-spec. I've also learned to separate my issues and prioritize them.  In much the same way as governments in a federal system divide powers along federal, provincial, and municipal lines, I divide my opinions on law and morality. They aren't the same, but for wishing making it so. As I've written before, what is just is not always legal, what is legal is not always moral, and morality, no matter how objective we insist on it being, is subjective, and you need look no further than any argument on any moral point ever to see that.

The Catholic Church teaches that assisted suicide (what it refers to erroneously as Euthenasia in the Catechism) is morally unacceptable on the basis of  an equation to murder that is not-well cited, and before you try to point out that it DOES have some form of scriptural support, that citation simply isn't made available in the supposedly "complete and updated" version of the catechism I was given by my sponsor when I was baptised late last year.

Now, I could wrap myself up in my usual arguments: as a Heisenburg Christian (that is to say, uncategorised), I don't necessarily consider the Catechism to be binding to everyone. I could also give the "assisted suicide =/= murder" speech, on the basis of consent. I'm getting quite good at those arguments. The problem is, I can't put real conviction behind either argument. Believe it or not, at the age of 22, I don't have a solid opinion on every subject in every field any more. I miss and regret the teenage years of absolute certitude because I miss the feeling that I know everything, a feeling which went out the window at the moment I realized I didn't.

Now, am I saying assisted suicide is therefore moral? No - I just finished saying I don't have a coherent position on that particular subject. The deeper question is whether or not a ban on purely moral grounds is constitutional. As I've mentioned in previous posts on abortion, I don't believe that my morality should be allowed to set public policy guidelines. Some morality requires going above-and-beyond the call of the law - ask anyone who keeps kosher or halal, chooses to be a vegan, or chooses to dress or act in a certain way on the basis of their religious beliefs. If this was a question of politics, there would be some merit to putting my shoulder behind a party that would respect my moral views on the matter.

This isn't a question of politics, either, but the constitution. There's nothing to do now but pray, I suppose, for the mental clarity and wisdom of the Justices of the SCC. Whether you're for or against assisted suicide, I'm sure you agree that these are attributes the ultimate legal authority in this country would need in spades.

We Might As Well Play The Sims

I suppose I should not be surprised and there's probably a reason why I never really spend any time on NationState's "General" subforum, and stick largely to the roleplaying sections of the board. The website is, at any given time, consumed with debate over socialism, abortion, or a children's show called My Little Pony... in any and all possible combinations of any or all of the above, up to and including aborting socialist ponies, though I suspect that was quite a bit of satire.

It probably goes to show that we do tend to get a little more mature as we age that I've manageed nt to get myself sucked into any of these arguments. If I respond at all, I include a line to say I won't be actively following the topic, and that anyone who wishes to debate details should send me a message to my inbox (what we call a TG or Telegram) to let me know that they've responded. I don't have the time or the inclination to spend days upon days, quite literally, following a single topic waiting for people to tell me why I am wrong, so that I can simply tell them how they didn't understand my argument. My style of discussion has matured, along with my need for it, I guess.

However there's always been something that bothered me about the abortion debates, and that's the language used by the pro-choice crowd, using words like tumor and parasite to describe the foetus, and words like disease and disability to describe the pregnancy. Topics spring up all the time (in an attempt, I suppose, to get the not-inconsiderable right-wing portion of the forum to start admitting conditions where abortion would be "Okay, I guess", such as one topic that sprung up late last night asking if, and I quote the original post in full:

 If a doctor found a way to with 100% accuracy pinpoint the sexual orientation of fetuses, would an abortion be OK if the parants found out that their baby would be born gay?

Let's ignore the natural asshole-factor of taking two issues like homosexuality and abortion and stapling them together (expecting to get logical responses), and take as read that a great many members of the forum gave one-word answers and posted pictures of the famous jet-pack "nothing to do here" image. Essentially, this is an argument from eugenics.

Eugenics is, of course, the idea that we can basically breed better people by eliminating genotypes we consider to be "subversive" or "undesirable". In the past it's been used to justify genocide and at present it's a justification for aborting children with birth defects and mental disabilities, such as those who show signs of developing Down Syndrome. Admittedly, some of these diseases, acquired during foetal development,  are entirely unsurvivable. Many others aren't, and questions like this one and the current practice of aborting children with the genetic markers for mental illness are an indication of what people have been telling me for years and I've been refusing to listen to:

We, as a society, are sick.

Now, I'm not going to get up on too high of a moralistic horse, being, generally speaking, who I am. It's hard to take a firm moral stance when you're as close to a live-and-let-live mentality as one can ever actually be without giving up one's own identity. But the fact that we've got it into our minds that, unless the baby is precisely the one you want, carrying it is a disease  which needs to be "cured". One female poster called any limitation on abortion an "attack on bodily sovereignty" and "forcing women to essentially be blood donors for 9 months".

Now, I've always been in the "I'd never abort" crowd, but being male that's easy for me to say as the closest I ever get to being pregnant comes from eating too much red meat. Even then, respecting the right to abort when the child is actually in-viable or the mother's life would be put at risk is an easy step to take. I've argued long and loud when I was younger for total legality and freedom of this particular choice. It's funny that it's the language of what was, for a long time, my own side, is what's convinced me to be about as anti-abortion as I'll likely ever become.

Consequential Inconsequentiality

We have a tendency to declare things to be inconsequential,, as a society. In Canada in particular, we often look at certain laws, declare them to be inconsequential, and summarily ignore them. They're usually little laws: digital piracy, using a mobile phone while driving, under-age drinking, smoking marijuana, et cetera. Sometimes we're right, and sometimes, over a few years or decades, we're able to get those laws revoked in the interest of general freedom (though this happens only rarely). The problem is, we're just as often wrong: see my first three examples. Still, the citizenry considers themselves the end-all-be-all authority, and circumvent the laws they see no need for at their leisure... most people I know have, from time to time.

The problem is that we really don't know what we're doing, most of the time. What seems of no consequence at one moment can be of grave consequence in another, and very often, one evasion begets others. For example, what starts as lighting up with the fellas on the post-finals weekend might turn into nightly use, which might turn into keeping a potted plant in your closet under lights, which could potentially turn into filling the attic over your garage with several such plants.

The general scene around here seems to be that smoking pot isn't a crime. I mean, it is, on the books, but in general, you get your stuff confiscated, maybe spend a couple hours in a cell waiting for your parents or guardians to come pick you up, and are told very sternly not to do it again. By contrast, growing marijuana is serious business, netting real jail time and first-hand-experience of RCMP home invasion techniques.

This is just one example in a room and country full of them. I'm looking chiefly at those of you who pirated enough Eidos games that they went under. Thanks fellas. Now I have to put up with the lame SquareEnix reboot series.

The Penalty for Slave Trading in Canada?

Toronto Star Image

We've come a long way from The Underground Railroad.

This is Ferenc Domotor, a Hungarian-Canadian man who today was sentenced for having lead what was called by the CBC "The leader of what has been called the largest proven human smuggling ring in Canadian history", along with his wife and son, who helped him orchestrate the slavery of 19 Hungarian men. They were held against their will and forced for years to work for table scraps, under threat of violence to their families back home in Hungary. The family and twelve fellow gang members essentially helped ruin the lives of these men and their families for years at a time.

Domotor was given a nine-year sentence for his part in the crimes, which, less time served (and sundry other deductions) means he'll be spending another four and a half years in federal prison, which is where I come in.

Palm Sunday Bombing of Planned Parenthood

NBC's Brian Miller reports a firebombing at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin. Other sources report that the device used was of an incendiary nature. Nobody was hurt, and only minor damage was done to the building. An FBI investigation is ongoing.

The bigger story here is that this sort of thing hasn't just happened before, but that it can almost be called commonplace. Abortion clinics and abortion doctors  are threatened with violence, attacked, and killed more frequently in the United States than anyone is comfortable admitting. Whether you agree with abortion's legality or not, you must recognize that this is a serious problem.

This sort of attack weakens the pro-life argument. While nobody was inside at the time of the bombing, this was not assured, and even if it were, violating a law without hurting anyone is still violation of the law. If I want to defend a moral cause, say, the abolition of the use of condoms (this being only an example), and I do that by stealing a shopping cart full of condoms and setting fire to them on the sidewalk, not only am I personally going to look pretty crazy, but now the entire anti-birth-control crowd is going to be associated with that level of crazy. How much worse is it, then, when people get hurt?

The main argument for the pro-life side is that all life is sacred, and that life begins at conception. If we defend that life by taking away other lives, how is that internally consistent logic? There is talk all the time of moral relativism being a slippery slope, but it seems to be a slope with a cutting edge in both directions. Is abortion being the logical precursor to assisted suicide worse than abortion being the precursor to terrorism? I'll leave that for the individual conscience to decide.

Am I about to get an abortion? No. Does this sort of thing make me nervous? Not really, I live in a much different social climate. But does terrorism from the "Christian" Right make me, a Christian myself, absolutely furious? You better believe.