Don’t Overreact, Canada – Patriquin

2014/11/10 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin on the risks of over-reaction:

Canadians need only look to the south to see how attacks on individuals and establishments can’t usually be prevented by increased surveillance of a country’s civilians. The United States arguably is home to the world’s largest and most sophisticated intelligence-gathering network, the excesses of which have been documented by leaks from the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Yet none of this prevented the breach of the White House in September, in which an Iraq war veteran scaled the White House fence and made it to within feet of where the president and his family live before being apprehended. Nor has surveillance hindered the ability of various gunmen to inflict mass murder on innocents throughout the years. As the former Vice President Al Gore noted last year, in a speech decrying the folly of such mass intelligence gathering, “When you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s not always wise to pile more hay on the haystack.”

Theoretically, it would be possible for the Canadian government to legislate itself the powers to prevent all such attacks. Yet the trade-off — constant surveillance, criminalization of dissent, restriction of free movement and the economy — would make the country unlivable. It would be a travesty if the actions of two troubled individuals moved the country closer to that possibility.

Don’t Overreact, Canada – NYTimes.com.

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Anti-Semitism Rises in Europe Amid Israel-Gaza Conflict – NYTimes.com

2014/08/05 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of nastier aspects of antisemitism emerging in Europe from the NY Times:

Carola Melchert-Arlt, an elementary school principal in Berlin and mother of three, said she felt afraid for the first time in her decades of living in Germany. She said her mother had asked her to stop wearing a Star of David, a family heirloom from her grandmother’s bat mitzvah, around her neck.

Friends have taken down their mezuzas, Ms. Melchert-Arlt said, and she no longer stifles a smile when a fellow Jew wonders if they are really welcome in Germany.

“We have all always felt the latent anti-Semitism here,” Ms. Melchert-Arlt said. “But what we have experienced in recent weeks and days, not only in Germany but across Europe, is a prevailing mood of outward anti-Jewish sentiment in the streets.”

Anti-Semitism Rises in Europe Amid Israel-Gaza Conflict – NYTimes.com.

And the Globe’s similar take by Eric Reguly:

The intense media coverage of the war, much of it sympathetic to the Palestinians, has added fuel to the anti-Semitic fire, Jewish and Muslim group say. And what the mainstream European media shows is positively sanitized compared to what can be found on social media such as Twitter, where pictures of dead, dying and mutilated Palestinian children are common.

“The thing about social media is that it cannot be reined in,” says Salman Farsi, communications officer for the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre. “Everyone pushes out their propaganda and it’s quite scary. Left unchecked, it will generate more hatred and possibly violence.”

Mark Gardner, director of communications for Britain’s Community Service Trust, has a similar view. “I think of a lot of the anti-Semitic reaction comes from the media,” he said. “It causes enraged people to become more enraged. It can come from the mainstream media or, increasingly, from self-selected media like the social media sites.

”For years, CST has carefully monitored anti-Semitic “incidents” in Britain and claims it is ultra careful to distinguish between ant-Semitic and anti-Israel behaviour. Mr. Gardner says the number of anti-Semitic incidents always spike up when the Israel-Gaza conflict, ongoing since 2006 erupts into extreme violence Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007.

The peak monthly number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in Britain by the CST was 289, in January, 2009, during Operation Cast Lead. That’s when the Israelis, determined to stop the rocket launches from Gaza and the delivery of arms into Gaza through what Israel described as “terror tunnels”, launched a bombardment and ground invasion of the strip. Between 1,200 and 1,400 Palestinians were killed, and 13 Israelis.

The second highest figure came this month as the Israel-Gaza war grew bloodier by the day. Between July 1 and July 29, 130 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded.

Is the Gaza conflict stoking anti-Semitism in Europe? – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking – NYTimes.com

2014/06/24 1 Comment

Interesting psychological experiment on language. Believe there have been similar experiments with managers working in a second-language which both slows down their thinking (Kahneman’s System 2) and removes some of the emotion:

But we’ve got some surprising news. In a study recently published in the journal PloS One, our two research teams, working independently, discovered that when people are presented with the trolley problem in a foreign language, they are more willing to sacrifice one person to save five than when they are presented with the dilemma in their native tongue.

One research team, working in Barcelona, recruited native Spanish speakers studying English and vice versa and randomly assigned them to read this dilemma in either English or Spanish. In their native tongue, only 18 percent said they would push the man, but in a foreign language, almost half 44 percent would do so. The other research team, working in Chicago, found similar results with languages as diverse as Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English and Spanish. For more than 1,000 participants, moral choice was influenced by whether the language was native or foreign. In practice, our moral code might be much more pliable than we think.

Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? The answer, we believe, is reminiscent of Nelson Mandela’s advice about negotiation: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” As psychology researchers such as Catherine Caldwell-Harris have shown, in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language.

An aversion to pushing the large man onto the tracks seems to engage a deeply emotional part of us, whereas privileging five lives over one appears to result from a less emotional, more utilitarian calculus. Accordingly, when our participants faced this dilemma in their native tongue, they reacted more emotionally and spared the man. Whereas a foreign language seemed to provide participants with an emotional distance that resulted in the less visceral choice to save the five people.

If this explanation is correct, then you would expect that a less emotionally vivid version of the same dilemma would minimize the difference between being presented with it in a foreign versus a native language. And this indeed is what we found. We conducted the same experiment using a dilemma almost identical to the footbridge — but with one crucial difference. In this version, you can save the five people by diverting the trolley to a track where the large man is, rather than by actively shoving him off the bridge.

Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking – NYTimes.com.

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Quebec’s Tea Party Moment – NYTimes.com

2013/11/13 Leave a comment

While their is ongoing debate within Quebec and Canada about the degree to which criticism of the Charter within Canada is helpful or not to Quebec debates (conventional wisdom is that it falls into the PQ strategy of increasing the contrast and polarization between Quebec and Canada), an article in the New York Times, by Maclean’s analyst Martin Patriquin, (Patriquin has been consistent in his views for a long time), raises the stakes somewhat:

In catering to this white, populist rural vote, the left-of-center Parti Québécois has seemingly ventured into Tea Party territory. Janette Bertrand, the 88-year-old leader of a pro-charter group, recently told a newspaper that she would be “scared” to be served by a veiled doctor, because Muslims let women “die faster.” She wasn’t joking.

Anti-immigrant sentiment exists across Canada. Yet Quebec is the only province with a political party willing to exploit that sentiment for political gain. Will it work? Probably not, if only because winning any future referendum on Quebec’s separation from Canada would mean putting the question to each and every Quebecer — including the very people the Parti Québécois is scaring and scapegoating today.

Quebec’s Tea Party Moment – NYTimes.com.

Sure enough, the Quebec Minister responsible for the Bill felt compelled to respond to the critique , reverting to the time-honoured technique of attacking the messenger:

«Or ce n’est pas du journalisme, a commenté Bernard Drainville. C’est de l’opinion. D’ailleurs, M. Patriquin n’en est pas à ses premières frasques. Il a déjà dit que la corruption faisait partie de l’ADN des Québécois», a-t-il rappelé au sujet de ce qu’avait publié le magazine anglophone Maclean’s, en 2010. (an ironic reference, given the current hearings on corruption in Quebec’s construction industry)

La Charte des valeurs, digne du Tea Party? Bof! répond Drainville | Michel Corbeil | Politique

And in minor Charter news, François Legault, the leader of the CAQ distances itself from the comments mentioned yesterday by the former leader of its predecessor, the ADQ, cited yesterday («L’islam, une religion de violence», selon le fondateur de l’ADQ), reflecting how Quebec discussions on multiculturalism and interculturalism have evolved over the years:

Charte: François Legault se distancie de Jean Allaire | Denis Lessard | Politique québécoise

And the Liberal Party of Quebec, while considering legislation limiting the wearing of the niqab or burqa (Le PLQ prépare un projet de loi contre l’intégrisme religious), nevertheless is open – at least in theory – to potential LPQ candidates wearing the chador (in practice, hard to see how any candidate wearing a chador would be nominated a candidate, let alone win, but the party is being consistent that the dividing line is being able to see the face):

PLQ: les candidates portant le tchador seront bienvenues | Jocelyne Richer | Politique québécoise

And lastly, Lysiane Gagnon on the PQ political strategy:

If it wins a majority, Premier Pauline Marois’s government will unfold the second part of the strategy, hoping that its identity legislation will inflame the political climate, provoke an angry backlash in the rest of Canada and eventually push a majority of francophones to react by voting Yes to another sovereignty referendum. The sovereigntists will argue that “English Canada” and the federal government are imposing values alien to Quebec (multiculturalism, for instance) and depriving Quebec of the right to adopt the policies it needs for its cultural survival.

 PQ’s charter madness has a method 

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Deeper Than God: Ronald Dworkin’s Religious Atheism

2013/09/26 Leave a comment

A good review and overview by Stanley Fish in the NYTimes of Ronald Dworkin’s last book, Religion without God. Some of the argumentation is complex, but treating belief and non-belief as equal rights (freedom of and freedom from religion), and how liberals recreate an ethnical framework, is of interest. Quote:

By “ethical independence” Dworkin means the individual’s independence to decide for himself or herself how to acknowledge the “felt conviction that the universe really does embody a sublime beauty.” One form of acknowledgment might be the practice of theism — traditional religion with its rituals, sacred texts, formal prayers, proscribed and prescribed activities; but the conviction of the universe’s beauty does not, says Dworkin, “suppose any god” as its ground. Once we see this, we are on the way to “decoupling religion from a god” and admitting into the ranks of the religious those who are possessed by that conviction but do not trace it back to any deity. They will be, Dworkin declares, “religious atheists.”

Deeper Than God: Ronald Dworkin’s Religious Atheism

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