Defensor Fide

Shown: Genuine Enthusiasm

This past week has been a particularly crazy one for any of a number of reasons, but the one I wish to discuss revolves around politics. Canadian politics, as a matter of fact - not that world politics hasn't been just as crazy, and I'll try to get a few words in edgewise about that. The difficult part is deciding where I should begin.

Do I want to start with the current resignation of the Prime Minister's chief of staff over allegations that the same inappropriately funded a senator's repayment of expense claims - claims that senator was ordered to repay after an external audit revealed the claims were made wrongly, or, should I start with the rather unfortunate lack of a resignation of a key national mayor, who was already ousted once in this term for ethics violations, only to be re-installed at the order of a higher court, who is now being accused of having been caught on film  smoking crack cocaine?

It grows increasingly easy to understand why my generation undeniably, consistently, and and growing-implacably shows up as the least-registered, least-participating demographic in our national body politic. There are no young MPs or MLAs, and few enough young voters. This is treated as an endemic problem of the system, and frankly, the frustration is getting a little understandable.

We have a multi-party system. There's really only one major party with a right-of-centre policy, and that's the Conservative Party of Canada, whereas there's two major left-of-centre parties, no centre parties, and a wide-array of what are, frankly, spoiler parties.

So the social-right, the target audience for the CPC, feels no conflicts over whom to vote for, whereas anyone leaning toward the centre or the left has to choose between the lesser of "who cares?". And for my generation, it really is a matter of "Who Cares?"

Young voters in this country are impossibly outnumbered by the old - that's not necessarily a problem, for me, except that the old is also disproportionately right-wing, while my generation is, by and large, disproportionately left. So the few of us who do bother to get up and vote on election day get drowned out by social-conservative, frankly reactionary, voices, wind up with the CPC's hand-picked yes-men for our representatives, and genuinely feel disenfranchised.

When those yes-men become the senators embroiled in fiscal misappropriation scandals, the senators suspended on charges of sexual assault - senators we can't vote for or replace, except on the hope that they retire and a more favourable parliament is created.....

You start to understand why it becomes hard to bother picking between the lesser of who cares.

I don't expect my demographic to start showing a commanding presence on the political battlefield any time soon. Even if the election were called tomorrow, it would still be hard to get people motivated to vote, because, frankly, we've all stopped caring. After all, there's going to be corrupt politicians for as long as politics and money remain linked.

Without comprehensive changes to who we elect and how they are elected, this country is doomed to see less and less participation in our democratic processes.

The Fascinating State of the Minimum Wage

A Full Military Funeral, with Honours

At 26 hours weekly, I am tied with one other employee for the most-often-present non-supervisory employee at my job. I work hard in those 26 hours to try and find a 27th or a 28th.

Last year, between two similar jobs and a capital gain I made about $25,000, which is actually quite a bit more than what is considered to be impoverished  However, the circumstances of that capital gain won't repeat themselves and next year, with all other things being current and no provincial increase in the minimum wage, I can reasonably expect to make, give or take, $11,000, which is all of about 500 dollars above the line at which the federal government can tax my income.

Hahahahaha!

Either way, the government /does/ tax your income whether you receive a return at the end of the year or not, so I operate under the assumption I am taxed. In practice, that pulls in at around 18% of the paycheque off the top, leaving me with 82% of what I earned to work with. If it's easier to wrap your head around, I get .82 on the dollar for all living expenses.

However, with very small exceptions, pretty much everything that I buy is taxed at 13%, partly provincially and partly federally. That means I functionally get .71 on the dollar. If I make $11,000 this current year, as I can reasonably expect to do working a single job, I actually only have just a little under $8,000 to work with.

In practice, this number is actually even lower, because the income tax deduction is not the only deduction taken off the paycheque. We also pay into two federal programs - the Canada Pension Plan, and Employment Insurance. The former I don't have much of an opinion on, but the latter...

$1500 of interconnected spare parts

Well, that's a digression and I'll have to get into at a later time, but we'll suffice it to say that it's easier to make a home owner's insurance claim in which the police say you robbed your own house than it is to make an EI claim.

At any rate, taking those two programs out turns my annual net to something closer to $7300 dollars.

I don't have many responsibilities. I have rent, some groceries, and my phone. My rent includes internet service and power, the other groceries, and water. My pets, such as they are, represent very little expense to me now that I have the equipment. So far this year, not including the equipment itself, I've spent about $40 and, barring a crisis, I can reasonably expect not to spend any more.

My rent is $500 a month paid bi-weekly to make the money-management easier - taken out over the course of a year that's $6000, and about what I was paying for rent and utilities last year. My phone's another $75/month so we can call that $900. I have some small credit card debt that if I could magically clear overnight would cost me, say $800, but with the compounding interest, that's going to look more like $900.

Woops, now we're over budget at $7800 and I haven't even fed myself yet...

Now, bare in mind that I get away with such nonsense because I live extraordinarily cheaply. I don't have car payments and pay perhaps less than $40 a month in transportation fees, when I pay them at all - in the summer I can travel pretty much anywhere I need to except in special circumstances without paying a cent. I don't have a child. I barely drink, barely smoke, and my annual expenses on both accounts are probably a couple hundred dollars. I eat out when I can but I don't when I can't. I give good gifts when I can recall an occasion (or rather, that's a habit I'm trying to form).

I can build a hearty lunch for $1.80.

My expenses are minimal. And I cannot live on a minimum-wage job.

Granted, I could, if such a thing as a full-time, minimum wage job existed. But Canada's quiet recession is shrinking working hours since wages can't be shrunk. Employees are expensive, let me tell you, and the response of businesses with shrinking margins are to minimize costs - in practice, the only expenses you ever really control are your labour costs, and so..

26 hours is actually quite a long work week for someone on the minimum wage around here.

I can get a second job, but they don't exist either - not the kind needed. I need either something that will let me only work on the two days a week I have off, or work daytime hours doing just about anything else. Having my old teavana job back would actuall be ideal if I thought that company had a future in the local market, but it'sjust a little two Hollywood for our Santa Monica tastes.

Day jobs, full time or not, usually go to favoured, older workers who have been with the company for a good long time.

What's more, there is a plentiful supply of above-minimum-wage full time jobs that, while tolerable, are much less fun than what I'm doing now, and don't pay enough extra to make it worth my while. Part time, maybe, but that job doesn't exist.

Of course, raising the minimum wage would just shrink hours again. What we need is some sort of comprehensive, right-to-work sort of a thing. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I'm working on it.

Logical Consistency (Marriage and the State)

Prom night. Feels like an age ago.

Something many people seem to forget is that the Catholic viewpoint is that state marriages don't count - at least the way state marriages are conducted here in canuckistan, where the language is as theologically clean as humanly possible. I've been to enough weddings involving justices of the peace to know that there's an identifiable difference between these and just about any other, Christian-conducted ceremony. As it happens, I personally don't have a problem with state marriages - it's a pretty good way to do interfaith weddings when you stop to think about it, or to marry people with no actual religious views.

If you already consider something invalid, do you really get to put energy into deciding how that invalid thing should be administered? I mean, you've pretty much already declared it to be make-believe.

That's exactly what Catholic Answers, one of the largest catholicism-related websites on the English-speaking internet (mostly due to having captured the Catholic.com domain name) is doing. Recently, they sent around a mass email to all their members (by the way, you can't unsubscribe from their mailing lists or delete old forum accounts) doing precisely that. Entitled "Stop Same-Sex Marriage!", the email goes opens with a bombshell.

This Is OurLast Chance to StopSame-Sex Marriage

Formatting and emphasis is theirs, of course. Not two lines further down is a hyperlink for "mak[ing] a gift... that will help you defend marriage!"

I recognize that the Church teaches a very narrow view of the parameters of marriage for straight couples, never mind unorthodox ones. I also recognize that the general population over at CAF works mostly in conservative or ultra-conservative circles and that rather liberal views about secularization such as my own are alien and, to be fair, completely heterodox.

The fundamental problem seems to be that CAF and its operators can't understand the difference between Church and State, or else don't seem to understand why the separation is important or why it exists. I'll go on to demolishing the email itself in short order, but I've got to address that point first, otherwise there's no point in going forward, because my arguments aren't grounded in theology and a basic understanding of civics is necessary.

In the USA, which is where this email is primarily targeted just by tone and subject, there exists a right to the free exercise of religion. That is true in Canada too and my point stands for both countries. In a country where all religions are to be freely exercised, there cannot be a state faith. There just can't. Strictly speaking, Canada has a state faith - a function of our head of state being the head of the Anglican faith - but that faith does not inform state procedures, laws, regulations, codes, or (except loosely) ceremonies.  It's a cute little window dressing. There's a very good reason for that. As soon as the state acknowledges primacy of one religion over the others, and lets that inform their legal system, freedom of religion slowly begins to erode for other religions. Remember: what is morally just is not always legally just and what is legally forbidden can often be a moral act.

Now, out of the general and into the specifics...

First and foremost, if you basically lead by asking me for money, I'm more inclined to be an antagonist. You could be the Canadian Alzheimer's Society or something and I'd still be inclined to laugh in your face and dispute your statistics... at least until I forgot what I was doing and remembered that you're working on my single most-feared disease. It's rude, it looks greedy, and it's just plain gauche.

"Despite the fact [California Proposition 8] was a constitutional amendment, they got key judges—using tortured legal reasoning—to strike it down as unconstitutional."

This species exhibits
homosexual behaviour

 This is an apples-and-oranges fallacy. Prop 8 was a constitutional amendment to the constitution of the State of California, which was overthrown in US courts (not California Courts) and is undergoing appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States because it's unconstitutional under the federal Constitution, which has primacy in the US. "State's Rights" is really more perfunctory than anything else to my understanding of American law.

"It would be just like in 1973, when Roe v. Wade swept away all state laws protecting unborn children from abortion."

It really wouldn't. I can accept abortion as a moral ill sweeping aside tens of millions of lives as something being easy to oppose but I... just don't see that here. Millions of gay couples suddenly being able to be married gay couples is only going to bolster certain industries, like my own, by providing a new market to tap. It's not like gay couples will break up if they're told they can't get married. That's not really how it works here.

Given the mostly-conservative composition of the court, I can't really see an open field being declared. I just see more of the same "state's rights" declarations.

We’re on Our Own . . . So It’s All Up to Us!

Except for just about every other conservative faith group operating in the USA at the moment.

[Our Amicus brief] focuses on the disastrous effects that imposing same-sex marriage would have on religious liberty in America. Here’s what would happen. . . .

A Nightmare Future

As the brief to the Supreme Court bluntly puts it, anyone who upholds true marriage will be treated like a bigot, regardless of his faith:

“To be a devout Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Muslim, or Orthodox Jew will become the moral equivalent of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Furthermore, our brief points out:

“The Court would correspondingly consign traditional religious beliefs regarding marriage and the family to the same circle of constitutional hell as racism and sexism.

“Thus, simply by accepting the principles that their religious groups have publicly supported for thousands of years, tens of millions of religious believers in the United States would be branded as the legal equivalent of racists, a result that will subject believers to such burdens and acrimony that many will be forced to hide their faith.”

Those burdens will be felt in all parts of society.  

 I realize Amicus curiae briefs are rhetorical by their very nature but... really? The moral equivalent of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan? You feel that that is your strongest possible argument?

The argument you took out of your brief as your best fundraiser has no merit. None, whatsoever. I'm not saying that it won't happen - I'm merely saying that it's probably the weakest argument you could make. What if the KKK had made that argument when intermarriage was legalized? "You can't make [moral issue] legal - It'll make us look like idiots!"

The fear-mongering actually gets worse from here. The following section, entitled "How You, Your Children, and Your Granchildren Will Be Punished", basically threatens that gay marriage will be the downfall of Christendom. I'm to get into specifics in a second but... I thought the gates of Hell could never prevail against the Church?

Employers will fire people—or not hire them in the first place—if they speak out in favor of true marriage. (Some are already doing this.)

Fish species, like A Heckelii, don't derive pleasure from
sex. Like true Catholics, they do not exhibit homosexual
behaviour.

 Of course, this would be illegal under employment nondiscrimination laws protecting the exercise of religion, where such laws exist. And you can't have it both ways - if I had a nickel for every time I personally was turned down for a job because I was going to the wrong church according to the management, I could probably buy a single french-fry from MacDonalds.

Lawsuits will be brought against small business owners to compel them to provide services to homosexuals as married couples. (That’s already happening, too.)

 From what little research I could manage to pull reliable results regarding this is mostly happening in states where gay marriage is legal - it's basically forcing small business owners to acknowledge state functions rather than live in an imagined Theocracy.

Public schools will indoctrinate children against the beliefs of their parents—and against the Catholic Faith itself—in a way that dwarfs what’s happening in the school system today.

This is only true if you consider the entire Catholic Faith to be consumed in this sentence "Homosexuality is wrong." I suppose the Apostles Creed doesn't count for much these days.

From there, the email pretty much devolves back into asking for money, and I'd be happy to send it along to anyone else who wants to see it.

Fundamentally, the argument is the same as the argument I used on this post at A Woman's Place to explain why, if you're going to have a draft, you have to draft anyone.

IF the state is going to be conducting marriages, they have to marry everyone.

Could that be Private (or Lieutenant) Auditor?

These days, I tend to look less like this...

So, I make no secret about a time when I used to be a Royal Canadian Army Cadet (rank of Master Bombadier - we were an artillery corps), and I make less of a secret about the way in which I semi-frequently consider joining the actual military as a Cadet Instructor Cadre member.

The thing that holds me back is actually that I never "aged out" as a cadet, but rather quit. Ostensibly, I did it to free up time - I usually say for schoolwork but anyone who knows my history and has seen my transcript would realize pretty quickly that I did it for the girl.

Because that quitting was preceded with shuffling from service branch to service branch trying to find something that was more freshly appealing, and because I've never managed to hold a job or go without an outburst of some kind for as long as our tours of duty last up here, I've hesitated.

If it was the CIC I joined, I'd only need to do a few weeks of training, and then I'd be moving on into a life of even less military activity than a reservist. And that has appeal. The cadet movement is a valuable social program and I wish I'd had greater participation in it as a kid, now that I've got no real social hangups and could have used the discipline and, let's be fair, prestige that comes with having served as an army cadet for the better part of a decade (cadets are allowed to be between the ages of 12 and 18).

And more like this scrub.

Just as often, I think about joining the actual military. The branch of service varies from time to time - I'm disqualified as a military pilot, but a life as ground crew in the Air Force interest me, as does the occasional stint in the Navy, which anyone who has seen me near water, read or written psychiatric reports, or had to spend a weekend with me will all pretty much agree is a terrible idea.

Having said all that, I used to set aside my ridiculousness to go to Summer Training Centres like Argonaut ACSTC. There was usually money involved when it came to that, though.

In the end, it's a wash, and I should really be packing instead of thinking.

If anyone's wondering what brought this on -  this article by Cam over at A Woman's Place seems relevant, if only tangentially. That's just how my brain works.

History Lessons

"You're involving yourself in centuries-old conflicts without sufficient regard for history."
-Lord John Marbury of Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing

Canada has a rich and varied history that it shares quite well with its renegade older brother to the south. It takes only a cursory examination of our politics to realize there are really only five factions in the country, in terms of people.

• "Old Clan" whites with history in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc;
• "Ancien Famille" whites with history in France;
• "Wang ming guo wai zhe" Chinese-Canadians whose family lines came over during the expansion of the railways;
• "De Novo" immigrants in their third, fourth, or fifth generations;
• "First Nations" aboriginals who have been on this continent for longer than anyone else.

A look at current-running tensions felt in the first and second groups to everyone else (including each other, and often in mutual ways) can usually be summed up as simple xenophobia or racism, with only a cursory examination, but in truth, the matter runs far deeper. Things were not always at peace between the British and French colonies, and in fact the only reason why Quebec is a part of Canada at all was that it was under British rule basically from the end of the 18th century onwards - by the time of confederation in 1867, Britain had ruled over the Province of Quebec for nearly a century and defended it against revolutionary forces in the American Revolutionary War. The resentment is still felt in the Quebecois desire to have as much freedom and independence as possible in both real and cultural terms, and the insistence in many English communities that the Quebecois should embrace the same bilingualism that they must.

To be fair, I live in the only formally bilingual province in Canada (historical note: most of the province used to be the French colony of Acadia), and speak very little functional French - something I'm hoping to rectify.

The animosity felt between the Quebecois and the Anglophone community is largely of a deep-rooted, resignation-type feeling, with no good reason for it other than "that's what we've always done". It is still nothing, however, compared to the relationship between Old Clan and Ancien Famille whites and the First Nations.

Our history with the First Nations is no better than the history to the south - the current situation was preceded by centuries of war, ranging from skirmishes over land, to outright conquering and through on to full-on genocide. The image we have in our minds of the First Nations being far-flung, primitive, and sparsely-populated tribes is somewhat belied by modern archaeological understanding of the situation. While they might not have build such wonders as Tiahuanaco or Machu Pichu, the First Nations of North America are generally thought to be on a par, technologically speaking, with the Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, and other aboriginal peoples of the South American continent.

To be fair, much of the early slaughter was unavoidable - in spite of relatively peaceable and open first-contact, the First Nations simply could not resist our European pathogens. Whoops.

But it's the memory of that conquering and pillaging that moves on. We displaced huge populations onto reserves, and backed the people into treaties while we imposed upon them our culture and belief systems. Even to this day, many First Nations don't have formalized treaties with Canada, meaning we're either there as a de facto occupying force, or our maps are wrong. Reservations appear not unlike third-world countries, lacking proper infrastructure, and as I reported a year or so ago, even proper housing.

There's a genuine class- and race-war not terribly far in the offing if the current trends in rising tensions continue. We cannot ignore so rich a piece of history for long. History is like a time-bomb - if you don't study it and diffuse it, it's going to blow up in your face.

Prison Inmate's Life Threatened with Unassisted Birth

Well, what I really wanted to write was actually a fish profile, but real stuff happens from time to time, and since writing about events seems to work in my style, I thought I'd keep doing what I was accustomed to doing.

The CBC reported recently that a woman being held awaiting trial at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre gave birth under some "less than ideal" circumstances. It seems that the woman went into labour in detention, and guards removed her to what's called a segregation cell, believing her labour to be counterfeit, or else false. As it happens, her son was breech-born, and he was born without assistance.

Now, holding aside that the woman was yet to be convicted and the rather obvious issue of the fitness of felons to be parents, we have a rather serious problem here.  I know for a fact that there will be people out there who disagree with this assertion, but we have a moral duty to properly care for prison inmates. Canada's legal system does not legitimize a death penalty, nor cruel or unusual punishment. We're not Finland, but we do have fairly forward-thinking ideas about prisoner rights.

I'm shocked to learn that "prison hospitals for female detention centers should be used in the event of labour" isn't one of those ideas. A breech birth is not a little thing -  it has real risks for the health of both the mother and the child.

How can this happen?

Relatively Stupid

If you're going to deny one of physics most fundamental principals and the theory that explains it, you'd better be packing some serious heat. I won't pretend to be a physicist, but since it's my second favourite of the hard sciences, I felt like this particular page was a big, fat, slow ball over home plate.

I am going to do a point-by-point refutation of Conservapedia's "Counterexamples to Relativity" page, ignoring the political screed at the top, which is nonsense on the face and requires none of my art to be discredited. I think a refutation of their "45 counterexamples; any one [of which] shows that the theory is incorrect" will suffice.

The Americanization of Canadian Politics II: RCMP, Border Services to Allow Torture

I don't have a small child to frown at you, so you're going to have to settle for me looking unimpressed (to put it tacitly).

I've been working in the kitchen all morning, trying to get it ready for a long week of what I suspect will be low-cycle mentality, and I've finally taken a break scant hours before I have to go to work. I don't like the day-to-day feeling of banality that comes from only having the news of the mall to talk about, so today I flicked open the CBC page and had a little look.

Banner Headline: RCMP, border agents can use torture-tainted information.

Now, being a social liberal and having always leaned just slightly to the left of Christ Himself when it comes to how people should and shouldn't be treated by the governments they empower, a standing displeasure with the direction my country has been heading in has more or less been the norm for about... a decade or so. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not.

Still, it's a common practice to sensationalize your headlines to raise eyebrows and get people to read the article, and being the perfect little sheep I am, I have. I'll even admit to having done the same to my headline.

Directives issued about a year ago to the RCMP and the Border Service have recently been released to the press under various information requests. These directives make it clear that in exceptional circumstances (which are never properly defined), either agency may make use of information from all available sources - including foreign agencies, even if they suspect said information is derived from torture. This is some fuzzy logic away from being the same as the American practice of Extraordinary Rendition, a practice that I'll not seems not to have decelerated under the sitting President. 

In either event, it is simply an allowance of torture. While I'm not suggesting that we start fighting wars to end torture (I think that would be a job for some kind of UN standing army, not Canadian peacekeepers), it's absurd to believe that these foreign agencies would simply be feeding us their torture-gathered information for no reason. Somewhere, hidden in the accounting, to be sure, there's going to be economic or political consideration to these people. And that's why we're the enablers, which is why I get to use the phrase "Allow Torture".

I was disappointed when I started taking law and world issues courses in high school, and when I started paying attention to the news, because that was precisely when I started to learn that America, our dear neighbour to the south, has been denying her dream for years. That's when I started learning about Guantanamo and Abu Graib. I learned the real reasons behind Canadian involvement in the NATO invasion of Afghanistan - how we were holding the most dangerous neighbourhoods with some of the weakest equipment. I was extremely proud - as proud as a 14 year old could have been - when I found out we wouldn't be going to Iraq. It wasn't our fight.

To find out we're adopting this policy... this Jack Bauer, "where's the bomb!", enhanced interrogation policy... whether on our own soil or through well-paid foreign hands, is actually the last straw. I am a Canadian. I stand for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and I think that it should apply globally rather than nationally. I served two training tours as a Royal Canadian Army Cadet and I've considered, on and off again, making a career of military service. My true patriot land may still be free, but it is no longer glorious. This cannot, shall not stand.

Tell everyone you know about this. Tell everyone you know that his honour, the Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, is killing Canada.

Drama For Her Own Sake

I've mentioned Doctor Philip Mason before, when I did a post a little while back about the ludicrous Draw Mohammed Day public event. As always, I have to point out that I enjoy watching his videos on the Thunderf00t and BeautyInTheUniverse channels. As should probably be expected for a biochemist, the scientific content is bang-on stuff and explained so simply that a bag of hammers could comprehend it.

As always, though, I have a few criticisms of everyone's styles, if only because there are actually right and wrong ways to make an argument. Social Graces have been the hallmark of the gentleman for ages and the greatest heroes of the intelligentsia have always been those who could dissent with grace, poise, and an absence of invective.

Now, don't get me wrong, Dr. Mason's videos are good. He's a marvellous scientist, and I've had a lot of fun with his experiment in using water, a rechargeable battery, and a blast shield to create a plasma the temperature of the surface of the sun inside a coke bottle; watching his aerial photography using nothing more than a camera mounted to an inexpensive styrofoam plain, and particularly his astronomical sightings. When he talks about science he is bang on the mark.

Now, I should preface the rest of this rant by paraphrasing the usual Voltaire: Dr. Mason has the right to say anything he wants on any subject. Absent approval or disapproval of his statements I will still fight with my life for his right to do so. Likewise, anyone else has the right to express dissent or assent to his statements. I'll even go so far as to say I actively encourage him to respond to the following criticisms.

The next sharpest tool in Dr. Mason's chest after his scientific literacy has always been his invective, and that is not for a lack of use. It's generated him quite a fan base, myself included, and as always, invective is fun to watch. I've got a bit of ichor in my pen as well and I know how easy, tempting, and satisfying it is to add the odd insult into an argument.

Thing is though, it only works if it's an add-on to your argument, and even then, you're going to be taken more seriously without it. In a few cases, invective is used by Dr. Mason as a substitute for an argument, as in his recent obsession with... well, it takes some explaining.

The atheist community rarely thinks with one mind, but one of the central ganglia has always been the Freethought Blogs operated by PZ Myers. Recently, Dr. Mason was given an authorship position by Dr. Myers on the blogs. As I understand it, Dr. Mason commented on issues facing just about every society that has large conventions - the perception of sexual discrimination, radical feminism, and chauvinism. Whatever the comments made in this First and Only post on FTB, Dr. Myers removed Dr. Mason's authorship privileges. This has sparked a rather graceless drag-out, knock 'em down brawl between the two and has resulted in countless blog posts and videos tackling the subject on each side - in doctor masons' case, largely continuing to hammer on the original point, as here.

Now, I appreciate that Dr. Myers essentially promised Dr. Mason absolute freedom of speech and then promptly removed him over a disagreement of how far that freedom actually extended. I even agree with Dr. Mason that he should be reinstated and FTB, though it's hard to see why anyone would want to be now that it's clear content is being controlled over there. Where my irritation comes in is that this whole argument has turned something that is a reasonably valid concern (the potential mistreatment of women at skeptic conferences) into something more ridiculous (though admittedly, there was a lot of help coming in from the "skepchicks" themselves).

Dr. Mason, I have a reasonable assumption you will at least click on the link to this post I am leaving in your comment feed. I feel you are fighting a losing battle on this one issue. The more often you write about it, to the exclusion of your ordinary, science-based content, the less and less people are going to care about it.  Unfortunately, and this should not be taken as an insult, your content dealing with social issues and political issues has never been as effectively rendered or as exciting to view as your scientific content. In the same way that I do not write about sports, dating, or issues of race, it behoves your style and your intellect to remain in the scientific arena, where, quite frankly, you are a king among men. Choosing a hot-button issue like Rebecca is a marvellous way to generate page-views. Drama, for her own sake, sells, but they are empty calories, Doctor Mason. Unfulfilling, and, when all is said and done, you will still be hungry in five minutes.

To borrow your own signoff: Best Wishes,
-ZJA

All Opinions are Sacred, Except Those That Aren't

I sometimes have difficulty talking to people who haven't worked in a kitchen. Being a professional cook is a lot like cooking for a 70 person dinner party, and everyone is arriving at different times and wants different things. You have to juggle multiple trains of thought at once, and if you can't do that, you simply won't keep up.

Chik-Fil-A, which I understand to be a fried chicken chain (I really haven't spent all that much time south of the border), is the subject of a recent boycott by some on the left after their president made a statement, while stalking to a religious reporter, no less, that they supported the biblical order of marriage. Film at eleven.

In seriousness, such a statement, made inside a church, isn't exceptionally rare. Neither is the position, within churches, that marriage should be of the biblical variety. The only reason this became an issue is that the speaker has what passes for notoriety in the States, and that, for the most part, the entertainment media leans left (in contrast to every other business, which inherently leans right). Cue an uproar. Chik-fil-A is anti-gay! Film at eleven.

Thing is, Chik-fil-A hasn't actually done anything wrong. They do not discriminate (on protected grounds) in hiring or in service. President Dan Cathy wasn't necessarily speaking for the entire company, and even if he was, there's nothing wrong, legally, with what he said. The problem with this particular boycott is that it is the result of a difference of opinion, which I suppose is ultimately true in all cases, but this particular difference of opinion is predicated upon an unwillingness or inability to understand the opposing point of view.

To the boycott-supporters, I can only say that you're fighting this one stupidly. Taking the things that people honestly believe on religious grounds and bigotry is fine. You're allowed to do that, both here and in the US. The problem is that it doesn't work. You aren't going to change minds. You aren't going to pursuade anyone. You're just going to piss them off and set their heels more firmly into the muck. This has to be made clear: you must frame the issue properly.

There is a fear, a palpable fear, whenever any ground is lost, that the Churches will somehow have to change their teaching in order to coincide with the new laws. It must be made clear that this fear is unfounded. "Congress shall establish no law establishing a state religion or abridging the freedom of religion", I believe is the line. Religious Marriage and Civil Marriage are two different but often entangled things. The church marries you spiritually, and the marriage licence marries you legally. That's all gay marriage is. Civil marriage.

To the others, as is said, I disagree with what you are saying but will fight with my death to defend your right to say it. I hold that the old covenant has been fulfilled (as we are taught) and that includes the abolition of homosexuality. For those who insist that homosexuality is still a sin, I have a few questions, and must nod generously to Aaron Sorkin.

My mother-in-law is thinking of auctioning off her daughter as permitted in Exodus 21:7. She's special to me and if anyone's going to own her I'd rather it was me. What price should I offer? My team lead insists on doing work on the Sabbath; Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death - do I have to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? There are 90,000 people in this city: do they all have to gather to watch me be put to death for planting different crops side-by-side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing clothes made from two different threads? And one more thing: you like shrimp, right?

While we all have generally forgotten that morality comes from within and justice comes from without, I want to make it clear that we can't pick-and-choose which proscriptions in the bible we get to follow. If you're a Christian who thinks they have supreme moral authority, then speaking as a Christian - Go to bed, would you please?

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.

On Misogyny

Content advisory. Hostile language below the jump not suitable for minors. Parents - you know what to do! (Extremely mild, mind you.)

So, I know I promised a second tea-related post in the twitter feed, but something more important has come up. Those of you who know me well know that schedule changes tend to irritate me more than just about any other non-insult, so I want us to think for a minute about just how annoyed I've let myself become over this particular thing.

I'm not sure how or when it happened, but somewhere between "girls have cooties" and suddenly boys like girls again as normal, we've gone back to misogyny. Now, the original post for the night was going to dovetail tea and the art of gentleman-ship in the 21st century, so I suppose taking the night to yell at the males of my particular species of the Homo genus sort of fits.

The oft-mentioned Greymane supplied the straw that broke the camel's back tonight with his dissemination of a post on Cookies for Breakfast regarding Daniel Tosh, a comedian whose repitoire leans rather heavily on (among other things) rape jokes. It's not my story to tell, and enough people are ripping Tosh a new one that I don't even have to - click the link if you want to know exactly what happened.

World Wednesday: Luka Magnotta

So, a few of you abroad might have heard by now about government offices in Canada receiving human body parts by mail a short while ago. Before long, the victim was identified, and shortly after that, a suspect was pretty clearly identified. His name was Luka Magnotta, a model and gay porn actor who filmed his murder of Jun Lin, a Chinese national studying at a university in montreal, and the subsequent dismemberment.

Now, I'm not going to tell you where to find the video, but I'm sure you could if you looked hard enough. I haven't watched it, and I don't intend to. What I find interesting, however, is that a number of high school teachers are on suspensions from their positions at the moment because they DID view it... along with their classes. The general narrative on these stories is that the teacher puts it to a vote, the class votes unanimously (or dissenters, if the minority, are allowed to abstain), and then they watch the video before discussing it as a class.

My question is, if you were an instructor, of any subject, do you feel there is anything to be gained by your students watching the video? And if so, do you feel that the same objective you couldn't be met by simply discussing the circumstances of the video?

A Rare Frown at a Cardinal

There is a bill before the Ontario Legislature today called the "Accepting Schools Act". While it isn't a national issue and I try to stay within my own province, the bill came to my attention today when a buddy of mine sent me a link about protests of the bill on the Legislature grounds. Among the leaders of the protests are Thomas Cardinal Collins, Cardinal Archbishop for Toronto. His grievance? The bill would allow students at all schools receiving funds from the Province of Ontario to form clubs similar to what is known as the Gay Straight Alliance - a group built on finding common ground between heterosexuals and their homosexual friends.

The main problem is that public schools are governmental entities. Not allowing groups such as the GSA to form chapters in their schools would be a violation of their Section Two rights. There's a concern that this would also affect catholic private schools, since many do in fact receive provincial funding.

Here's my take: your religious freedoms (under Section Two) as an institution don't trump the rights of your students. If you want to take provincial funding, you must be willing to accept that there is an extent to which the government has to cover their liability. Charter Rights only apply to protecting you from government action. If His Eminence would prefer not to allow his students to form these groups, he is more than welcome to refuse the provincial funding.

What's more, the Gay Straight Alliance is being misrepresented as an organization that promotes homosexuality. While there's a way to make that argument, it's intellectually dishonest. The state goals of the GSA is to promote tolerance of all sexualities. That is to say, as an anti-bullying group, their aim is to prevent harassment. It is an exercise in politeness, a value I rarely get to harp about given how rough-around-the-edges I usually am. We can ask the students to change the name if you like, but there's nothing any thinking catholic (or any other Christian, for that matter) should find objectionable in their aims.

I admit that I stand well to the left of the Church on just about everything. Let's take as read that homosexuality is immoral... so is bullying. We can't pick and choose our favourite evils. If a group wants to cut down bullying, let them cut down ALL of it.

Politics vs. Issues

As a general rule, I try not to let politics affect my voting decisions. As anyone in my class is now probably painfully aware, there's a massive difference between the right choice to make and the popular choice. So I try not to let individual politicians sway my thinking too far, and focus on individual issues.

Sometimes, though, there comes a moment when a politician is too willing to lie to you or too stupid to know he is, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently learned the hard way. During debates in Parliment over extending the Afghan mission, he accused NDP leadership of being "pacifistic" (as if that were somehow a bad thing) and said that the NDP leadership was against acting against Hilter's Nazi Germany in 1939.

The New Democratic Party was founded in 1961. You missed the mark by more than two decades. Congratulations, sir. You just made it impossible for me to vote for the Conservative party with you at the head. Which was a shame, because when it comes to Arctic Sovereignty, I was actually starting to favour your party.

A Discipline to be Retained

Occupy Toronto is calling for everyone to call in sick on May 1 as a protest. While I certainly support the right of the people to protest, and the general call for higher taxation on the top income brackets (actually, I advocate a flat tax for everyone over the poverty line, as opposed to the current graduated system), I think this is about the dumbest idea I've ever heard.

Granted, I just got my job. But I've lost jobs in the past for exactly this kind of a stunt. Moreover, I've had to pick up the slack on people who pull this kind of thing. If you want to protest, fine. Declare it. You have legal protections in this country if you wish to protest. If you wish to defraud your employer you get no protection. And if you really want to protest taxation structure and a culture of entitlement, don't do it by allying yourself with Occupy. It always struck me as funny that such materialistic people would espouse socialist ideology, until I realized it was largely malfocused envy and their own sense of material entitlement.

You know what? Feeling entitled to having nice things is fine. Having a hissyfit, taking the day off and making the rest of us work harder is not. It's puerile. And God forbid now, that anyone actually happens to be sick on May 1. The odds are pretty good, given the time of year, that you might be, and now you're going to get lumped in with the protesters whether your illness was genuine or not.

The rest of us, though, are thankful we're working in an economy with 7.2% (StatsCan) unemployment (and that only counts the people who haven't given up on trying to find work). Pick eleven friends at random and one of them is probably unemployed. Some of us even have jobs where we need to work hard to hold onto them. Some of us would rather advance our positions as opposed to wallowing in self-pity. If we collectively work hard, earn money, and spend it, we create new jobs. We help that friend of ours find work.

Hard work and forbearance are virtuous. Protest is only valid if it's open. And if you don't have a potential solution, you're just complaining.

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.

An Answer for MegaSage007

I have an answer to a challenge raised about three weeks ago, albeit indirectly, by a youtube user named MegaSage007 (Personal Website Redirect), which was directed largely to atheists. As a former agnostic atheist myself, and seeing as the question wandered into one of my favourite disciplines (astrophysics), I thought I'd take some time while I eat my ham sandwich to speak to his statement.

It's Finally Here!

After much fussing around with file-converting, middle-man applications, and narrating with both a bad speaking voice and a bad microphone, I've finally caved. The Introduction to Rationality presentation is not being shown on YouTube, but on a power-point sharing website called SlideShare. I'm a little disappointed because it did not preserve my sound or animation, but it serves the purpose nicely.

IR I - Introduction to Rationality

View more presentations from AuditorGentleman.

If you have any comments, questions, or catch a mistake I made, please let me know in the blog comments.

Scientology? Scifientology, maybe.

So, the people who hang out around me and try to prod me into a rant have been asking about Scientology, and I wasn't going to come out and say a word, until new hit the wire today that Narcanon Trois-Rivieres rejected a withdrawal patient outright, charging his mother $10,000 for 1 week's stay before throwing him on a bus bound for Toronto.

I don't actually have a problem with Scientology's theology, excepting of course that it's hard to take anything written by a writer of speculative fiction as divine revelation, especially when it's of the same genre as his previous titles. My main problem is with the behaviour of Scientologists and the way that the "Church" treats its own. When you start copyrighting and classifying religious material, it's your own fault if you get called cult-like... just ask Freemasons everywhere.

No, my main problem with Scientology is the way individual Scientologists behave on the whole. The ones who respond to being asked to answer questions about their faith on camera with a string of serious but fruitless accusations, the futility of which cheapens the severity of the crimes purported, and does nothing but convince the rest of us that you're indoctrinated beyond the point of holding sensible discourse.

 

On the whole, it's no way to behave... and precisely the problem I have with Westboro Baptist Church. Never mind their oppressive practices, never mind their wealth-based "enlightenment" portfolio... it's being rude.

By the way, the woman in Toronto is getting her money back. Son's homeless and still hasn't received treatment.