Vancouver Police Department’s use of carding disproportionately targets Indigenous people

2018/06/06 Leave a comment

Not particularly surprising, nor is the denial that any systemic racism may be involved:

Street checks conducted by the Vancouver Police Department disproportionately involved people who were Indigenous, according to data released by the force, a disclosure that drew swift condemnation from civil-liberties advocates.

The data, recently posted to the department website, said 16 per cent of those who were subjected to street checks last year were Indigenous people, who make up about 2 per cent of Vancouver’s population.

The data said people who were black, about 1 per cent of Vancouver’s population, were also disproportionately stopped. About 5 per cent of street checks last year were of black people.

In a written statement, t he department denied its street checks were driven by race and said its focus is on crime.

Street checks, or carding, involve stopping people to gather information without a reasonable suspicion of an offence. The issue drew attention in Ontario after complaints about privacy violations, and police were accused of disproportionately targeting minorities. Justice Michael Tulloch of the Court of Appeal for Ontario is reviewing the province’s laws on street checks, with recommendations expected next year.

Douglas King, former police accountability lawyer with Vancouver-based Pivot Legal Society, said the numbers confirmed what he had suspected.

“The way that the police conduct their work, the way that they’ve created their boundaries with the street-check system, is inherently going to lead to bias, it’s going to lead to people who are aboriginal and black more often checked than others,” he said in an interview.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, called the data “alarming.”

“We know First Nations are overpoliced, and this is just another shocking indication of the degree,” he said in an interview.

Sergeant Jason Robillard, a Vancouver police spokesperson, said in a statement on Monday that street checks are a valuable public-safety tool and occur when an officer “encounters someone believed to be involved in criminal activity or a suspicious circumstance, and documents the interaction.”

“Our street checks are not based on ethnicity. They are based on a crime or an action – not the person,” he wrote.

He said individuals who were Caucasian were also overrepresented in the stops last year. He said they made up about half the population, but 57 per cent of those checked.

The street-check data were posted to the Vancouver police website on May 24 in response to a Freedom of Information request. The website does not say who filed the request.

Mr. King, now executive director at the Victoria-based Together Against Poverty Society, said he made an FOI request for ethnic data and Vancouver street checks more than four years ago, but received nothing.

He said he was told the department did not track such information.

“I was told so many times that they did not keep that data and that they saw it as a breach of privacy to be keeping that data. So I do not understand where this is coming from, it’s honestly quite shocking,” he said.

The data provide yearly street-check totals from 2008 to 2017. In 2008, 9,358 individuals were checked – about 15 per cent were Indigenous and about 5 per cent black. Fifty-four per cent were Caucasian.

The number checked has dropped over the past several years, from 11,011 in 2014 to 6,322 last year.

The ethnicity of about 6 per cent of the people checked last year was marked as other or unknown, or the field was left blank.

The data said 1,826 of the individuals checked last year were for “problem-oriented policing.” The reason given for 1,280 checks was “suspected criminal” while another 1,231 people were stopped for “suspicious activity.”

Sgt. Robillard said problem-oriented policing is “a pro-active, targeted approach to reduce crime or disorder after an underlying problem has been identified.”

via Vancouver Police Department’s use of carding disproportionately targets Indigenous people – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism

Changes to UK law may provide more dual citizenship drama – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

2018/06/06 Leave a comment

The never-ending saga of dual citizenship and the Australian Constitution:

As the apocryphal Chinese idiom goes, we live in interesting times. We can give qualified agreement to Prime Minister Turnbull’s assertion that there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian constitutional law expert.

So far, 15 members and senators have resigned or been ruled ineligible by reason of section 44(i) of the Australian constitution. That section provides:

Any person who: “is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power; shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.”

All the disqualifications under s44(i) so far have related to the first part of the clause. These involved MPs who were “citizens” of a foreign power at the time they nominated for Parliament.

However, s44 does not only disqualify “citizens”. It also disqualifies anyone: “entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power.”

The High Court has not yet ruled definitively on how this provision works. However, in light of the decision in the Katy Gallagher case, it appears the dual citizenship saga may not yet have run its course.

Entitled to the rights or privileges

Citizenship is a little like herpes: you might not even know you have it. One can contract the “rights and privileges” of citizenship without showing any outward symptoms.

What are the symptoms of being “entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen”? In Nick Xenophon’s case, the High Court had to consider whether being a British overseas citizen disqualified a person under s44(i). It held it did not.

The then senator remained eligible to sit in Parliament because British overseas citizens were, essentially, only “second-class” citizens. The High Court found: “… a BOC [British Overseas Citizen] does not have the right of abode in the United Kingdom. The right of abode includes the right to enter and to reside in the country of nationality.”

As Mr Fransman observes, the right of abode is one of the main characteristics of a national under international law.

Someone without a right of abode will not be considered a citizen for the purposes of s44(i). Of course, this implies its opposite. Anyone who has a “right of abode” might fall foul of the second part of s44(i). Despite technically not being a citizen, they may be found to be “entitled to the rights and privileges of a subject or citizen”.

What is a right of abode?

Since 1983, the only way to obtain a right of abode in the UK has been to become a British citizen. People with a right of abode in the UK are exempt from customs control. They may work, live, own property and register to vote in the UK. In a deeply ironic twist, they may also stand for office.

One does not need to do anything to obtain the right of abode. The UK Home Office explains: “The right of abode is a statutory right which a person either has or does not have…”

And as we learned in the Canavan decision, when it comes to s44, ignorance is no excuse.

Contracting a right of abode

Prior to 1983, British citizenship was patrilineal; a fancy way of saying deeply sexist. Only your father could pass it on. It took a change to the law in the British Nationality Act, which came into force in 1983, for women to be able pass British citizenship to their children.

Section 44 casualties

This is where it gets complicated — and interesting. The operation of section 37 of the British Nationality Act and section 2 of the Immigration Act together mean that anyone born in a Commonwealth country before 1983 to a parent who is a UK citizen is granted a “right of abode” in the UK. Australia, of course, is a Commonwealth country.

If your father was a British citizen, or you were born after 1983, nothing changes. You would have been a British citizen by descent anyway, which means you already had a right of abode in the UK.

However, if your mother was a British citizen, and you were born prior to 1983, the British Nationality Act operates retrospectively to grant you a right of abode in the UK.

For many people, this newly discovered right will come as a welcome surprise. MPs born before 1983, who believed that they were not caught by s44(i) because only their mother was a British citizen, may find the surprise far less welcome.

Another round of section 44 cases?

One of the few things Mr Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will agree on is that predicting how the High Court will rule is a mug’s game.

We will not know whether those who possess a “right of abode” in the UK will be excluded by operation of s44(i) until the High Court explicitly considers the matter. Even then, each case turns on its own facts.

However, in light of the High Court’s fairly blunt ruling in Katy Gallagher’s case, some MPs who may have inherited more than just an inexplicable love of Coronation Street from their mother might have good reason to be nervous.

via Changes to UK law may provide more dual citizenship drama – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

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Canadian military falling well short of its target for recruiting women

2018/06/06 Leave a comment

Endemic problem but recruitment and culture change takes time and premature to evaluate success or failure with the new plan. Need to wait 3-5 years before assessing properly:

The Canadian military has barely moved the needle on its ambitious plan to recruit more women, just over a year after the Liberal government introduced its gender-focused defence policy, new figures reveal.

The stated intention of Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance was to have women make up 25 per cent of the Armed Forces by 2025-26.

Statistics released by the Office of the Chief of Military Personnel show that while the number of female recruits coming through the door has increased slightly, it has not been enough to boost overall representation.

As of the end of April, women made up only 15.4 per cent of both the combined regular and reserve forces.

The story is the same for Indigenous Canadians and visible minorities — those recruitment numbers remain just as anemic as they have been for several years.

Indigenous Canadians make up about 2.8 per cent of the Armed Forces; DND has set a goal of getting that share up to 3.5 per cent. Visible minorities make up 8.2 per cent; the target percentage is 11.8.

But the military and the Liberal government have more political capital invested in the effort to get more women into uniform. It’s central to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mantra of gender equality. and to Canada’s desire to put women at the heart of a reformed international peacekeeping system.

The drive to recruit more women comes as the military attempts to overhaul its culture in the wake of a damning report in 2015 by retired supreme court justice Marie Deschamps, who said a “sexualized culture” within the military was behind an endemic problem with sexual harassment and misconduct.

Female recruitment picking up — but slowly

There were 860 women enrolled in the military in the last fiscal year, which ended on March 31 — an increase of eight per cent over the previous year.

It’s not enough, said the chief of military personnel.

“Those are still not meeting the number we need to have in order to meet the 25 per cent target and we’re conscious of that,” Lt.-Gen. Chuck Lamarre told CBC News in an interview.

The slow pace of female recruitment has forced senior brass to take more direct control, he added.

“We recognize it’s going to take a much more disciplined approach, a much more targeted approach to go get more women, more visible minority and more Aboriginal folks to come join the Canadian Armed Forces,” said Lamarre, who insisted the Armed Forces can still hit the target, which was first established in early 2016.

Military looks at foreign recruits to boost ranks

The direction from Vance back then had been to increase the representation of women in the forces by one per cent per year over a decade. The new statistics show the military has seen healthy increases in the number of women applying to be officers, or to join the navy or air force.

But National Defence is having a harder time convincing women to join the army, and to become non-commissioned members of the rank and file.

Lamarre said he believes the military is fighting against perceptions about the kind of career being offered.

“People have a tendency to self-select out before they give it a shot, and I think that’s a mistake,” he said, pointing to the military’s struggle to get women to consider signing up for trades such as aircraft, vehicle and maritime mechanics.

“We are attracting more women into the officer corps, but I think we need to broaden that even more. Part of it is demystifying some of those occupations. Some of them look to be hard and exclusively centred towards men. That’s not the case at all. We have some great examples of women who are operating in every occupation.”

Military’s image problem persists

Others — DesChamps among them — argue that the perception of the military as a tough place to be a woman hasn’t gone away.

Despite the military’s high-profile campaign to stamp out misconduct — known as Operation Honour — and the increasing number of sexual assault cases being tried in the military justice system, many say that little has changed when it comes to the macho nature of military culture.

“In the last three years, in my opinion, more could have been done” to stop harassment and make the military a more welcoming career choice for women, Deschamps told the Senate defence committee last week.

“What I have seen is, not a lot of progress has been made.”

The federal government has faced two class-action lawsuits launched by survivors of sexual assault and misconduct in the military.

The cases entered settlement discussions last winter after it was revealed government lawyers filed a statement of defence that said National Defence “does not owe members of the Canadian Armed Forces any duty to protect them from sexual harassment and assault.”

via Canadian military falling well short of its target for recruiting women | CBC News

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USA: Richardson (Texas) minister stands by church flier that warns Judaism, Islamism ‘dangerous’ | Dallas News

2018/06/05 Leave a comment

One is sorely tempted to add “Christianism” to the list given the minister’s lack of awareness:

A minister of a Richardson church that included Judaism and Islamism among “dangerous isms” on a flier distributed in area neighborhoods is standing behind the message and the events it advertised.

Pulpit minister Shelton Gibbs III said Greenville Avenue Church of Christ could have better handled the wording of the advertisement, which included the faiths with pessimism, materialism and alcoholism.

He said the church’s leadership was meeting Sunday night to discuss the social media backlash that followed the church’s distribution of the fliers on the doors of homes in the area.

Gibbs said the church will go ahead with the series, despite objections to categorizing the other religions, along with atheism and liberalism, as dangerous.

“We’re not here to criticize or be antagonistic toward people and to beat them down,” he said. “There’s no threat. The people in the community should not feel a threat.”

The church plans to conduct the summer series on 10 Wednesdays, starting June 13. Islamism will be covered June 27.

Judaism is scheduled for discussion Aug. 22, according to the flier, which included a Star of David alongside icons that appear to symbolize pessimism, materialism and alcoholism.

Gibbs said that though “dangerous” probably wasn’t the best word to use, the other faiths run counter to his church’s belief that God wants all people to follow Jesus Christ.

He said the series will aim to explain God’s message for each of the “isms.”

“What is his message to those who espouse Islam? What is his message to those who are caught up in materialism? Those who are pessimistic?” Gibbs said.

When asked why the list didn’t include other “isms,” such as racism or sexism, Gibbs said there are only so many Wednesdays in a summer.

In the future, he said, the church will work on its phrasing.

“We’re living in an age where every word means something, and you have to be very careful about the words that you use,” Gibbs said.

“And I think going forward, I’m sure we’ll be able to phrase it where people are drawn in, and not that we have somehow marginalized them and caused them to fear. That’s not Jesus.”

The predominantly African-American church was formed as Hamilton Park Church of Christ in 1959 and occupied several different sites before it moved in 1990 to its home on Greenville Avenue, near Centennial Boulevard, and changed its name to reflect the new location.

The church, formed with 20 members, has grown under Gibbs’ decades of leadership and provides three Sunday services. The church has made community outreach one of its main focuses.

via Richardson minister stands by church flier that warns Judaism, Islamism ‘dangerous’ | Richardson | Dallas News

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Holocaust education ‘not enough’ to tackle antisemitism, Unesco warns – The Jewish Chronicle

2018/06/05 Leave a comment

Valid points and a reminder that UN organizations are not blind to antisemitism:

Openly antisemitic attitudes are no longer limited to extremist circles and are increasingly voiced in the mainstream, the United Nations’ cultural agency has warned.

Unesco said that Jews in Europe were feeling under “renewed danger” and that while teaching people about the Holocaust is important, it is not an adequate substitute for education that aims to prevent antisemitism.

“If anti-Semitism is exclusively addressed through Holocaust education, students might conclude that anti-Semitism is not an issue today or misconceive its contemporary forms,” the agency said in a report, which was published on Monday.

“It is appropriate and necessary to incorporate lessons about anti-Semitism into teaching about the Holocaust because it is fundamental to understanding the context in which discrimination, exclusion and, ultimately, the destruction of Jews in Europe took place.”

The study – jointly produced with the OSCE, a security and democracy watchdog – calls on European governments to uses education to make young people more resilient to antisemitic ideas and ideologies.

Unesco director-general Audrey Azoulay (Photo: Getty Images)
“It is alarming that, as survivors of the Holocaust pass on, Jewish communities in Europe feel in renewed danger from the threat of anti-Semitic attacks,” Unesco’s director-general Audrey Azoulay said.

“Anti-Semitism is not the problem of Jewish communities alone, nor does it require the presence of a Jewish community to proliferate. It exists in religious, social and political forms and guises, on all sides of the political spectrum.”

She added: “This is both an immediate security imperative and a long-term educational obligation.”

The document contains a list of tropes that students should be taught to identify as antisemitic.

They include blood libel claims, the perception that Jewish people are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries, and conspiracies that Jews are plotting to take over the world for their own gain.

“It is appropriate and necessary to incorporate lessons about anti-Semitism into teaching about the Holocaust because it is fundamental to understanding the context in which discrimination, exclusion and, ultimately, the destruction of Jews in Europe took place,” the report says.

“Similarly, the study of anti-Semitism should include some attention to the Holocaust, as a nadir of anti-Semitism in history, through the state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and their collaborators.”

via Holocaust education ‘not enough’ to tackle antisemitism, Unesco warns – The Jewish Chronicle

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Halifax legion bars group that questions immigration, multiculturalism | The Chronicle Herald

2018/06/05 Leave a comment

Quite a change from the Legion opposition to Sikh Canadians wearing turbans a generation ago:

A Calgary-based group with controversial views on immigration and multiculturalism is no longer allowed to host a town hall at a Royal Canadian Legion in Halifax.

The National Citizens Alliance was set to host its meeting at a legion branch in Halifax’s north end Friday evening, but the event was cancelled by the legion Thursday.

“The original booking was made by an individual for a private function. When RCL Branch 27 learned that the booking was intended as a town hall meeting for the National Citizens Alliance, the booking was cancelled,” Valerie Mitchell-Veinotte, executive director of the Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command, told Global News.

The alliance promotes the idea of “integration” of new arrivals into what it calls the “basic cultural norms of Canada” and a belief that political correctness threatens Canada’s identity and culture.

The group said Friday it had further been banned from meeting at a church hall and a Halifax hotel, and now plans to hold a rally at a downtown park.

It had also recently been banned from participating in the Annapolis Valley Apple Blossom Festival, whose organizers apologized on Sunday after the NCA walked in its parade.

“We apologize to anyone who may have felt unsafe at the Grand Street Parade because of this political party’s attendance and derogatory messaging,” organizers of the week-long festival in Kentville, N.S., said in a statement.

Stephen Garvey, leader of the NCA, said on Thursday that he rejects the characterization of the party, adding that no one in his party made hateful comments or uttered any hate speech.

Garvey added his party doesn’t tolerate racism, and argued that his organization was taking part in the parade just like other political parties were. The NCA is not an officially registered party but has committed to running candidates in the 2019 federal election.

“They’re the ones dividing people,” he said. “If we offended people, that’s their problem, not ours. As far as we’re concerned, we probably added some nice spice to the festival.”

Garvey said the group wanted to host a town hall at the Halifax legion to clear up the confusion that has plagued the group since it made headlines with its role in the apple blossom festival.

Garvey told Global News that organizers had called the legion on Thursday morning to confirm the booking.

“They had actually confirmed it with us,” Garvey said. “Then someone higher up said no.”

Among the group’s core tenets is the goal of implementing a “strong no nonsense immigration policy that puts the well-being and safety of the Canadian people first and implementing a temporary pause and substantial reduction in immigration.”

via Halifax legion bars group that questions immigration, multiculturalism | The Chronicle Herald

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Roseanne Barr’s fall was as righteous as it was inevitable – Southey

2018/06/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Tabitha Southey, calling out some of the right-wing “snowflakes:”

On May 29, following the latest in a long line of outbursts from comedian—and racist—Roseanne Barr, ABC cancelled the reboot of her self-titled sitcom. Roseanne would not, as had previously been announced, be renewed for a second season. Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, described her tweets as “abhorrent” and “repugnant.”

In her series-tanking tweet, the TV star—and avid spreader of bizarre, often anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about international pedophile rings conspiring with American civil servants to thwart Donald Trump—described Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman and senior advisor in the Obama White House, as the child of the “Muslim brotherhood & Planet Of The Apes.” That would seem to have been the straw that broke the network camel’s back, a camel that had shown remarkable, even super-camelean, fortitude up until that point.

Clearly, the weight of Roseanne having tweeted about another Black woman back in 2013—”Susan Rice is a man with big swinging ape balls,” she wrote—obviously didn’t make the camel break its stride; ABC signed her to do the show all the same. Roseanne’s penchant for spreading the theory that Hillary Clinton was at the centre of a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles operating out of a Washington D.C. pizza joint should possibly have been taken as another indication that some kind of career-ending tweet was inevitable—but then, maybe her tweets were part of her appeal to a network said to have been worried it wasn’t locking down the “lock her up” demographic.

Roseanne’s long history of abject transphobia should also have been a clue that her triumphant return might end like this, much the way a taped confession of “I totally did it in the library with the candlestick, ask the professor, he saw everything” is a clue.

All of which is to say: while I applaud ABC’s decision to cancel the series without subjecting everyone to a week of “Will they or won’t they dump the racist now,” my sympathy for the network is limited. On top of everything else, they’re the ones who landed us with so many dangerously hot takes in the wake of Roseanne’s cancellation.

When physicists focused the world’s most powerful X-ray laser on a piece of aluminum, they heated matter to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius), making it for a moment the hottest thing on Earth. I bet those physicists are now feeling kinda silly. How does lasered aluminum even begin to compete with the takes generated by a number of Supreme Arbiters of What Is And Is Not Racism, or as they are more commonly known, “aging, conservative white men”? A number of these gentlemen took a break from explaining how racism is over—I mean, there was a Black president and everything—to sagely declare that this thing Roseanne had done was the official “Thing We Will Acknowledge As Racist To Prove We Are Not Racist Ourselves Before We Go Back To Complaining About the Scourge of Identity Politics of 2018.”

Writing on his personal website, former Fox News personality and professional sexual-harassment suit settler Bill O’Reilly saw it this way: Statements like Roseanne’s aren’t victimless, and attacking Valerie Jarrett in such a “gross personal way” caused genuine harm. To whom? Why, to “everyday Caucasian folks […] described as having ‘white privilege’ by ideological loons.” Now, O’Reilly complained, “the false generalizations are harder to refute.” Worst of all, by sending “a signal to the nation’s 46 million African-Americans that white racism is indeed alive and well,” Roseanne made “football players protesting the American flag … more confident in their dissent.”

Be careful, this scalding hot take warns, lest managing to star in a network sitcom despite—or arguably because of—being an open and unashamed racist until your racism becomes just a bit too blatant gives people the impression that white privilege played a part in your success. Roseanne Barr deserves to lose her show, O’Reilly seems to believe, because she failed to maintain plausible racism deniability, and in so doing risked hurting O’Reilly’s case that Black athletes peacefully protesting the repeated killings of unarmed Black people by police officers should just shut up, stop “dissenting” and play games for his amusement.

An essay by Todd Starnes of Fox listed all the people he feels ought to have lost their shows before Roseanne, and noted that Barr’s tweet was “detestable and racist.” But, he asks: “Did ABC Entertainment go too far when it canceled her television show?” Roseanne, after all, “attracted a huge audience of gun-toting, flag-waving, blue collar Trump supporters” because Roseanne’s “rhetoric… appealed to Middle America.”

Again, he’s not saying Roseanne Barr shouldn’t have been fired. He’s just certain that the reason ABC executives chose to cancel the show called Roseanne, starring the woman named Roseanne, instead of just firing the eponymous star and executive producer and selling the world on The Show Formerly Known as Roseanne, But She’s Gone Now, Whoops, Sorry About the Racism, was because “Network executives could not stomach the show’s ‘deplorable’ viewers.” And that’s the real bigotry in this story.

Tucker Carlson apparently missed the memo that you’re supposed to condemn Roseanne’s racism before comparing her critics to genocidal fascists. He explained how Viacom and Hulu’s decision that now is a bad time to air old Roseanne reruns is a lot like Nazi book burning. The series, Carlson complained, was being “disappeared forever” possibly being “burned somewhere in a public bonfire so the rest of us can gather in our uniforms and chant slogans while that happens.”

Normally I’d frown upon comparing Hulu not serving up old sitcom episodes to Nazism, but credit to Carlson for working a literal fire into his hot take.

The actual no-kidding President of the United States threw in a hot take of his own, recognizing the true victim in this whole affair: Himself. The most powerful man in the world tweeted “Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ‘ABC does not tolerate comments like those’ made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”

Fox contributors and world leaders who spend their mornings live-tweeting Fox and Friends weren’t the only ones to throw a flaming take into the ring. Jimmy Kimmel took to Twitter to agree that Roseanne’s words were “indefensible,” but he cautioned that “angrily attacking a woman who is obviously not well does no good for anyone.” “Please,” he implored, “take a breath and remember that mental health issues are real. The Roseanne I know could probably use some compassion and help right now.”

Kimmel neglected, as people very concerned about mental illness in the aftermath of a friend of theirs getting in trouble for saying or doing something awful all too often do, to show that same compassion for the targets of Roseanne’s “unwellness” or many people who live with mental illness without joining in the centuries-long effort to compare Black people to animals in an attempt to justify slavery and more.

Roseanne herself apologized and explained that it was Memorial Day weekend, and she’d taken an Ambien. It’s easy to mock this, but I just took an antihistamine and now I have some things I want to say about the Dutch.

Predictably, Roseanne was held up as just another example of someone cruelly brought down by a “Twitter mob.” This is a bit like arguing against the use of torches and pitchforks before a crowd of people who have just tracked Dracula to his lair and put an end to his centuries of predation upon their gloomy Transylvanian village.

“The Twitter mob is getting more muscular,” warned Scott Gilmore, a Maclean’s editor-at-large who, like many pundits, seems alarmed that public opinion is increasingly formed and articulated by the public, which quite honestly seems to get it right at least as often as the professionals. It “usually takes a full day or even two” to generate enough outrage for people to “call for the offender to be boycotted, or fired, or otherwise punished,” Gilmore wrote. Indeed, in this case, the outrage against Roseanne came in less than 24 hours—outrage that was so brutal that it stopped her from being the star of a major network sitcom and subjected her to horrific “dismay” from TV anchors, “Roseanne sinned,” but in a world of “civil war” and “children being separated from their parents, or politicians being corrupt,” is contributing to the systematic dehumanization of black people really such a crime? Is it “important enough to sacrifice the livelihoods of the hundred-odd people who worked on the Roseanneshow,” Gilmore fusses, as though network shows don’t get cancelled for far worse reasons all the time and the people in the industry don’t understand that?

It’s a lot, says Gilmore, like this one time he was seriously tempted to join a “machete-wielding mob” stoning a man to death, this pissed-at-a-racist-TV-star thing. Luckily, a Blackhawk helicopter swooped down and flew the man to safety, leaving him still clutching the stone. “I don’t think I would have ever thrown it,” Gilmore assures us before leaving us with this dire warning: “But, then again, I never thought I would get so agitated about a comedian and her tweets.”

Be careful, we are told. Today you think maybe Roseanne Barr should go from being a wealthy actress with a network sitcom to being a wealthy actress without a network sitcom all on account of her being a racist. Tomorrow you’ll find yourself beating up cops and burning shops. Driven as we are by “dopamine-dealing retweets and likes,” as Gilmore insists is the case, who knows what horror we might unleash next if we don’t pull ourselves together and stop talking about racism on the internet?

I like to think the conversation has just begun.

via Roseanne Barr’s fall was as righteous as it was inevitable – Macleans.ca

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If you vote for a reckless politician, you can’t claim to be a good person: Domise

2018/06/02 Leave a comment

While  it is unhelpful to label people as good or bad, it is valid to highlight that people are accountable for their political affiliations and positions and are somewhat complicit in the overall nature of political decisions:

Earlier this year, while talking to a relative about Donald Trump’s comments regarding “s–thole countries,” I mentioned that Trump’s voters are every bit as responsible as Trump himself for converting the executive office into Coachella for white supremacists. My relative responded that free choices are part and parcel of democracy, and that we should respect people’s voting choices, even if we don’t agree with them. After all, she said, these are mostly good people who generally feel put off by politics.

At the time, I let the matter drop, but I think about that conversation when the Know-Nothing school of the authoritarian right defends its leaders against scandal and ignominy. And with the recent stream of news over the last couple of weeks, it should be safe to say that not only are voters of the populist right driven by their own politics—rather than an alienation from it—they cannot hide behind the assumption they are good people.

Many who throw in their lot with the populist right have serious hang-ups about immigration and multiculturalism, as shown in a study by Jackie Hogan of Bradley University, and Kristin Haltinner of the University of Idaho. Dehumanizing words such as “barbarians” and “parasites” are often used by political and nationalist organizations to describe out-groups, and to circle the wagons in defence of whiteness. These groups have, in recent years, co-opted the right wing and replaced principled conservatism with nationalist and religious theatrics.

Additionally, a recent study conducted by Steven V. Miller of Clemson University and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M University found that white people who would not want immigrant or non-white neighbours were more likely to oppose democracy. Moreover, they were “more open to rule of government by the army,” or by a “strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” (The study, by the way, was conducted from 2011 to 2016, before Donald Trump was elected President.) In a follow-up article for NBC News, writer Noah Berlatsky summarized this effect as a tendency of white voters to pull away from democratic institutions, when marginalized people are perceived as benefiting from democracy. “When faced with a choice between bigotry and democracy,” wrote Berlatsky, “too many Americans are embracing the first while abandoning the second.”

The study dovetails with previous evidence to show that white people with racial hang-ups are more supportive of harsh punishments in the criminal justice system, and less supportive of social service programs, when they perceive racialized minorities as the targets of those programs. Prejudice isn’t simply a matter of personal preference, and it doesn’t park itself at the ballot box. Voters who elect populist right-wing politicians—and who know they’ve proposed or support policies that are likely to harm broad swaths of the population—aren’t good people forced into a bad decision by a disdain for politics. Harm against those groups are their politics.

In April, the New York Times reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have separated more than 700 migrant children from their asylum-seeking parents since October, and taken to shelters run by non-government agencies. Many of them wind up in the facilities indefinitely, and many of them are younger than four years old. And earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for the crime of crossing the border illegally, which pledged to separate children from their parents if they are apprehended.

While the alleged abuses by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection date back to the Obama administration, the response from the Trump administration has been an encouragement for these agencies to escalate punishments in order to deter future migrants. In a recent interview with NPR, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly commented that the migrants in question are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society,” and that children separated from their parents “will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.”

In short, it’s easy to let right-wing populism slide by a simple rejection of élitism—performing a civic duty that occasionally has unforeseen consequences. This is a complete cop-out, and assumes voters have no responsibility to engage with their own humanity. To mark the ballot with that motivation, under the belief that one is fundamentally a “good” person, is to fool oneself. Especially when candidates tout policies during the campaign that will punish and marginalize, and then receive an electoral mandate to act on them. Voters knew who Donald Trump was, before they elected him President. They knew this could happen to innocent migrant children.

Keep that in mind as Ontario’s election day nears. Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford has taken to the campaign trail with his everyman attitude and a bullish approach to sensitive issues. This brand of empty populism—rooted more deeply in his feelings than any demonstrable evidence or priced-out policy—has not deeply hurt his election chances among working-class and high-income voters.

In a community meeting in northern Etobicoke, Ford has pledged to bring back the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy. TAVIS was a police detachment whose tendencies towards racial profiling (or, if you will, “carding”) and strong-armed tactics were so destructive to community policing that even the Toronto Police Service itself recommended the organization be disbanded. And Ford has plainly stated that he is dead set against safe injection sites for opioid addicts, stating that society can’t “just keep feeding them and feeding them” drugs. This, despite repeated rafts of evidence that safe injections sites help save lives, and no evidence that shutting them down will accomplish the same.

Ford’s disregard for the well-being of some Ontario communities doesn’t end there. He has also thrown in with the Campaign Life Coalition’s opposition to Bill 163, which establishes protest-free zones outside abortion clinics. He has floated the idea of requiring parental consent for teenagers to seek abortions. And in his capacity as Toronto city councillor, he attacked a home for autistic youth as having “ruined the community.”

But according to polls, even with his musings on his record, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives remain a strong contender to form Ontario’s next government. Without a coherent and fully costed platform for voters to examine so they can arrive at an educated decision, the PC campaign has mostly surrendered itself to Ford’s own political and social revanchism. Even the Campaign Life Coalition says that his actions and words should speak for themselves: “There is much on the public record about Ford’s views on Toronto’s controversial gay pride parade…This public record can also be considered an indicator of where Doug stands with respect to the pro-family values that are important to many socially conservative members of the PC party.”

And now, voters appear poised to hand him a blank cheque.

Though I may disagree with many on the right, there are principled ways to practise conservative politics. At the very least, if a politician intends to cut back on social services, spur business by cutting red tape, and address the sticky matters of crime and drug policy, those proposals should have plenty of evidence and a fully costed budget attached. But what has passed for “evidence” lately are the gut feelings of people with low stakes. People whose lives and safety are not placed at risk by reckless policies that result in young men of colour being racially profiled, young women screamed at as they enter abortion clinics, and children ripped out of their mothers arms at the border. People who would generally refer to themselves as “good.”

It hardly matters what a voter’s intentions might have been when they cast a ballot for bullies and panderers who have no moral objections to making life more difficult for the marginalized. Regardless of the intent, if the pain of marginalized communities is less important than jamming a finger in the eye of the so-called elites, that voter has signalled to politicians that inflicting pain is a sound campaign strategy. Our pain, in other words, are their politics.

If this is how they choose to exercise their civic duty, then God save the rest of us from good people.

Source: If you vote for a reckless politician, you can’t claim to be a good person

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Jehovah’s Witnesses can shun members as they see fit, just like any old bridge club: Supreme Court

2018/06/02 1 Comment

Reasonable decision, although I expect some interesting commentary arguing against it:

A new Supreme Court ruling that Jehovah’s Witnesses are free to banish and shun any member they wish, regardless of how they decide to do it, offers a powerful precedent for religious independence in Canada.

It follows years of uncertainty of just how deeply into the waters of faith and doctrine Canada’s judges are willing or able to wade.

Now the limits are clear, thanks to the case of Randy Wall, a Calgary real estate agent and longtime Jehovah’s Witness whose “disfellowship” destroyed his client base and led him to seek redress in the courts. He did not dispute the right of the Highwood Congregation to banish him, but claimed they did so unfairly, without telling him detailed allegations, or whether he could have counsel or a record of proceedings.

The top court’s decision rejects that view, bluntly refers to his “sinful” behaviour, and says it has no business making legal decisions about it.

At issue were two episodes of drunkenness, one in which Wall “verbally abused” his wife, for which he was not “sufficiently repentant,” according to court records. The family was under great stress, stemming from the emotional troubles of their teenage daughter, who had similarly been disfellowshipped, leaving the parents in the strange position of being required by their religion to shun their own daughter. Wall said he was even pressured to evict her from their home.

He convinced a lower court it had the jurisdiction to hear his complaint, because it engaged his civil and property rights. The Alberta Court of Appeal agreed. But the Supreme Court has now said once and for all that the courts ought not to interfere in religious discipline.

To borrow an analogy used by a lower court judge in his case, a church is less like a public company that has to act fairly and more like a “bridge club” that can pick and choose its members — or boot them out — at its own discretion.

Supreme Court Justice Malcolm Rowe borrowed this analogy in his reasons on behalf of the unanimous nine-judge court, one of the last cases under former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin: “By way of example, the courts may not have the legitimacy to assist in resolving a dispute about the greatest hockey player of all time, about a bridge player who is left out of his regular weekly game night, or about a cousin who thinks she should have been invited to a wedding.”

The discipline panels of voluntary religious groups do not exercise state authority like, for example, a professional regulatory tribunal for doctors or dentists. They are not “public decision makers” whose actions must be subject to judicial review, the court decided.

In this case, Wall has no fundamental right to be a member of the Highwood Congregation, so he does not have a right to procedural fairness in the decision whether to shun him. The group has no constitution or bylaws it must obey. The “disfellowship” may have spoiled his real estate business when other Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to do business with him, but that is likewise not a matter for the courts.

Lastly, and most crucially, this was a dispute over ecclesiastical issues, the court ruled. These cannot be decided by judges. How, for example, could a court of law evaluate the Highwood Congregation’s finding that Wall was not repentant enough for his sins? There is no common law on this, and rightly so, the court found.

“Even the procedural rules of a particular religious group may involve the interpretation of religious doctrine, such as in this case. The courts have neither legitimacy nor institutional capacity to deal with contentious matters of religious doctrine,” Rowe’s decision reads.

The limits of court intervention in religious affairs have not always been so clear.

In 1992, the Supreme Court said churches must show procedural fairness, like any tribunal, and not just issue edicts from on high. That precedent, in which the top court sided with a man expelled from a Hutterite colony, is part of the reason, for example, why the United Church of Canada last year gave up its push to defrock the popular atheist minister Greta Vosper.

Courts are always reluctant to tread on religious freedoms, and have typically intervened in church disputes only after the complainant has exhausted all internal processes.

But once they have, the courts have often heard the appeals, sometimes finding that the internal processes are unfair. Courts have intervened, for example, over the unfair discipline of United Church ministers.

But now the bar is very much higher.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling provides clarity to Canadians that neither courts nor governments can legally compel citizens to associate together unwillingly,” said John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.

Wall could not be reached for comment. The case attracted many intervenors, representing Muslims, Sikhs, various Christian groups, and civil liberties advocates.

Source: Jehovah’s Witnesses can shun members as they see fit, just like any old bridge club: Supreme Court

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Can Catholic crosses keep the far right at bay in multicultural Bavaria? | The Guardian

2018/06/02 Leave a comment

Given the demographics of Bavaria (25 percent with a migration background) and greater independence of Church leadership, unclear whether this apparently political gambit will work apart from being objectionable:

Today the German state of Bavaria will formally renounce the ideal of multiculturalism. All public buildings will be required to display a “clearly visible” crucifix near the entrance. Crosses already hang in Bavarian class- and courtrooms and many town halls. Now ministries, jobcentres, municipal hospitals and police stations must follow suit. Fearing civil disobedience, universities and theatres have been granted an exemption from the executive order of Bavaria’s new first minister, Markus Söder, to underline “Bavaria’s cultural and historical heritage”.

At first blush, this seems to put Söder in the same camp as Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbàn, who promotes “Christian democracy”, a term he uses interchangeably with “illiberal democracy”: a nationalist, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, Eurosceptic and authoritarian brand of populism. Or with Jaroslav Kaczyński’s governing Law and Justice party in Poland, and similar populist outfits in eastern Europe.

But Bavaria is different. Different from the rest of Germany, and from the ex-Communist countries to its east and south-east. It is the only German state to have been ruled by one party – the Christian Social Union (CSU) – since the Federal Republic was founded in 1949. The CSU has an agreement with the Christian Democrats (CDU) not to poach on one another’s turf. This has allowed the CSU to pander to Bavaria’s rural and conservative population in a way that the more inclusive CDU could never dare. At the same time, the business-friendly CSU has transformed Bavaria from an agricultural poorhouse into an industrial powerhouse – think BMW and Audi, Siemens and Bosch, biotech, AI and financial services. “Laptop and lederhosen” is how the Bavarians – who enjoy Germany’s lowest unemployment rate and highest incomes – describe the CSU’s mix of folksy populism and determined modernisation.

It’s a difficult balancing act, and the rise of the rightwing AfD – Alternative für Deutschland, the true German exponents of the Orbàn-Kaczyński brand of populism – combined with Angela Merkel’s swerve to the left on immigration and energy policies has made it harder. To take one example: when Horst Seehofer, Merkel’s minister of the interior, was Söder’s predecessor as Bavaria’s leader, he constantly goaded the chancellor by calling for a reduction in the number of refugees entering Germany to 200,000 per year. A few years ago, that seemed bold. Now the government has adopted Seehofer’s “upper limit”, but the AfD is demanding closed borders and massive repatriation. There’s no way the CSU can go down that path, not least because industry wants more immigration, not less.

The Nazis were unsuccessful in Catholic areas until Pope Pius XII made a deal with Hitler in 1933

In this situation, Söder has taken a leaf from the Zentrum: a pre-1933 party of political Catholicism. Although National Socialism originated in Bavaria, the Nazis were unsuccessful in Catholic areas until the future Pope Pius XII made a deal with Hitler in 1933 and agreed to disband the Zentrum in return for the protection of Catholic institutions. Söder, who is facing elections to the Bavarian parliament in October, seems to hope that religious feeling will prove an antidote to political radicalism, and that conservative Catholics will rally to the CSU as they once did to the Zentrum.

He could be wrong. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican is no longer the conservative bastion it was under John Paul II and the Bavarian Benedict XVI. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich, who heads the Conference of German Bishops, has criticised Söder for trying to instrumentalise a religious symbol for political aims. More to the point, Bavaria’s modernisation has meant that the once backward and priest-ridden society is now better educated, and that Catholics, though still the majority, are more independent of the church. Few Catholic voters will be swayed by church leaders who condemn the AfD, still less politicians who hang up crosses in job centres.

Meanwhile, Bavaria is becoming ever more multicultural. Almost a quarter of the population have what Germans call “a migration background”. And for the first time since the war, more people are leaving Bavaria for other parts of Germany than the other way around. The most popular destination for Bavarians is Berlin – the epitome of decadence and religious indifference, not to mention multiculturalism and everything Bavaria is not supposed to be. Trying to bridge the chasm between a globalist, liberal elite and the rising number of the disaffected and disenchanted, Söder is more to be pitied than censured for his crucifix gambit.

via Can Catholic crosses keep the far right at bay in multicultural Bavaria? | Alan Posener | Opinion | The Guardian

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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