Running it twice

Child rearing is a rollercoaster of emotion.  Sometimes, like in my last blog post, you have to watch your kid go through wretched stuff that you wish you could defend them from.  Pinkie Pie had an adult man approach her and try to rope her into a 'relationship' on the street.  Many people messaged me or commented hoping that the police would get involved and do something, but the reality is that when I called them I got redirected to a nuisance line and left on hold.  After a long time listening to 'hit X for graffiti, hit Y for parking issues' I finally gave up.  The police do not have the time or inclination to do anything about this, in large part because no actual laws were broken.

It is tough to tell your kid that an evil predator is out there and that the people charged with protecting us from such predators will do nothing.  I don't blame the police in this case though - I wouldn't want to try to give the police enough money to be able to put tons of hours into every case of some asshole being awful to someone else, and I don't want them to have the power to smash into people's lives when they don't have any reason to think a law was broken. 

Sometimes you just have to tell your kids that bad stuff happens, and that you will do what you can to protect them... and sometimes what you can do is little to nothing.

But there are good times.  For example, today I realized that Pinkie Pie had never heard the Boot To The Head skit by the Frantics.  If I said Boot To The Head, she wouldn't understand what I was talking about!  This cannot stand, obviously, so I found it on youtube and got her to listen to the clip.

Apparently the original Boot To The Head contains an anti-gay slur by Ed Gruberman, the jackass in the sketch. Thankfully the version I found does not have that phrase, as it has been changed. I don't know if the version I first heard many years ago was the original or the new version, but I hope it was the new one. I certainly wouldn't share it with her in the same way without that alteration.

There are many hilarious things that have a wonderful first time experience.  You can't get that again, but sometimes the process of watching somebody else have that first time experience can be almost as good.  Watching Pinkie Pie giggle and twitch with joy at Boot To The Head was so good for me, and now we have another shared bit of culture we can enjoy.

I have her trained to say "Party on Garth" after I say "Party on Wayne".  She has never seen the movie in question, and indeed I can barely remember it.  Still, those little bits of shared memory are a source of happy feelings, and I like that she is happy to be a part of nostalgia she doesn't quite understand.

Parenting a teenager is not the easiest thing, but I gotta say, it is *so* much better than parenting a toddler for me.  There are still struggles, but the good parent moments are superior when the little person can actually grasp what I am talking about.

Evil in the world

This weekend I went through one of those unpleasant parental firsts.  Pinkie Pie got her first experience with sexual harassment at the hands of an older man, and I had to figure out what to do about it.

He met her on the street, managed to convince her to give him her phone number, and then proceeded to text her over the course of the next hour or so.  He told her he was in love with her, that he desperately needed her, and asked for pictures.  He ignored the fact that she isn't attracted to men in any way, smashed right through her 'but I have a girlfriend' objections, and wasn't fazed at all when she told him she is only 14.

He continued to message her with desperate and bizarre statements, making it clear that he required her in his life and could not cope without her.  He even claimed to run some sort of 'love and connection' business, for which he even had business cards.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie trusts us, and brought his messages to us to ask for help.  I talked with her about all the obvious manipulation and gaslighting, and explained what he was trying to do.  She had been feeling worried and bad about the whole thing, and was happy to block him.  As far as lessons go, I am glad she got past this one without much damage.  I think she is over it, and is moving on.  

I, on the other hand, keep having thoughts of tracking this bastard down and smashing him into hard objects until he breaks into little pieces.  I doubt that the police can or will do anything, since while it is obvious to anyone who glances at the messages what is going on, he hasn't actually done anything illegal, as far as I can tell.  In this, we are on our own.  I don't know if there is any point in messaging him myself, threatening outrageous bodily harm should he ever be near her again - it certainly isn't an idle threat, but I have no idea if that would make things safer for Pinkie Pie or not.

Making it safer for her is my only concern.  Making things safer for all the other 14 year old girls out there is important, but I can't do a lot about that.

I am not one to overreact in terms of what I will let Pinkie Pie do.  She is going to continue to have the same freedom to wander about as before.  The world isn't perfectly safe, but I won't build a cage for her.  The best I can do is teach her how to handle this sort of thing and hope that I never actually need to beat the hell out of some asshole who tries to hurt her.

Her friends, to their credit, were entirely supportive and were talking about going out to beat this dude up or try to scare him.  I made it clear that they were not to do such a thing under any circumstances.  They noted that it would be a pretty bad look for a bunch of white kids to be out beating the hell out of a black guy in a bout of vigilante justice - not an observation I would have expected from my friend group when I was a teenager.  They are way more woke than I ever was.

I don't want this to escalate to violence or intimidation of any sort, and I particularly don't want kids involved in any way.  If that sort of thing was ever called for though, it is definitely not on them - it is on me.  Here's hoping it never comes to that.

A failed attempt at argument

We need to cut way back on the use of force by state agents in our society.  We do need armed people at some point for the extreme cases, but it should be restricted to extreme cases.  I saw a thing online attempting to argue back against this, but it only ended up proving my point.

Obviously this is meant to suggest that you need a cop with a gun to handle this.  A naked guy with his fists raised is such a dangerous thing, after all.

But this is *exactly* what we want social workers to be doing.  We don't need a person with a gun ready to murder this naked dude.  We need someone to say "Hey, what is up?  You seem pretty agitated.  Want to tell me why you are on this roof?" without the implied threat of death or imprisonment if the answer isn't what the emergency worker wants.

Nurses and doctors and social workers and lots of other people have to deal with difficult, delusional, drunk, or otherwise problematic people all the time.  They do it without weapons, because the presence of weapons escalates otherwise safe interactions into violence.

A social worker who can talk naked dude down, figure out what his problem is, and try to help him solve it is exactly how we should respond to naked people on a roof.  (That is, assuming we think that naked people on a roof are a problem in the first place, which they are emphatically not, unless they are doing something else that is an issue.)  We definitely don't need a cop with a gun.

If that naked guy grabs an iron pipe and starts threatening to murder nearby people, *then* we need a cop with a gun.  Let's reduce the number of armed state agents by 90%, hire a ton of social workers and EMTs to replace them, and see how much less violence we can have.  I am confident it will be a lot, and we will make life much easier for the people the cops so consistently make problems for - people of colour, queer people, trans people, and others that are already oppressed.  The police amplify the effect of existing prejudices, so we need to reduce their numbers to the absolute minimum we can get away with, given the occasional necessity for violence by the state.

Black lives matter

What with all the conflict in the world surrounding BLM I figured I should link to a black person writing about his struggles with police.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote a piece on this topic, and one of the key things it nails is how racist policing can't be explained away by 'but the police need to question suspicious people' and similar attempts to ignore the problem.  Tyson's story includes an example of him being questioned for carrying books into a building on campus.  This isn't a thing you would imagine any police officer randomly getting involved with, except that Tyson is black, and the police felt sure that black people don't belong near a physics department.  That is for white people!

Here it is.

One thing I have found interesting in all this is looking at the way people talk about their proposed solutions.  'Defund the police' has become a refrain from the protesters, and I am totally behind that.

Sometimes I have seen people saying "Well, obviously we want to redirect most police funding to social workers, health workers, etc. and shrink the police force, but we don't want to *eliminate* police." but others truly want to get rid of police entirely.  No armed law enforcement at all.

You see similar arguments with regards to prisons.  Prison abolition strictly means no prisons, and some people advocate for exactly that, while others want significant reductions in prison populations.

I am certainly in the 'significant reductions' camp.  There are deeply evil people in the world that cannot be dealt with via fines, classes, apologies, or other similar techniques.  The Jeffrey Dahmers and Robert Picktons of the world can't just be left alone.  We need prisons for such people.

We also need armed law enforcement.  When somebody has a gun and is ready to shoot other people, we need people who are trained to fight them.

But we need so few of those people, and such a small amount of prison space.  The desperately evil and incorrigibly violent are rare.

Traffic control does not need to be overseen by armed law enforcement.  Responding to people who are drunk or high or otherwise causing a fuss does not require guns and clubs, it requires someone trained in social work.  There are so many police functions that simply should be overseen by somebody else, probably somebody with actual training that applies to the situation at hand.

We could reduce prisons populations and police personnel by 90% and it would make me happy.  We do need those both of those things for the extreme cases, but there are way too many cops and they are way too involved in everyone's everyday life.

Changing how the police operate is certainly a good goal.  There are so many things we could do to try to reduce the damage police do in each interaction.  However, the simple fact is that we can do a tremendous amount of good by drastically slashing the number of interactions the police are involved in, and we do that by stripping away the vast majority of their budget and putting it towards programs that bring far greater benefits and far fewer problems.

Smashing limits

What would happen if people had limit breaks?

By limit breaks I mean the ability to suddenly be extremely powerful, far beyond their normal abilities, but to be seriously restricted in terms of how often this could occur.  I have been considering what it would do to society, and how it would directly impact warfare and crime in particular.

The exact rules are critical of course, so here is the structure I have been considering:  Each person can limit break once and only once in their life.  When they do this they become incredibly strong, fast, and tough.  Not strictly invulnerable, certainly, but powerful enough to laugh off bullets, car crashes, and other minor irritations.  Obviously while doing this they can easily kill anyone else who isn't also limit breaking.  The transformation would last for 1 minute and would make them look really cool - wreathed in flames, surrounded by shining armour, or giant claws - something impressive.

I think you would have to prevent children from limit breaking because otherwise everyone's limit breaks would end up being used at age 2 because they *really* wanted a cookie.  I don't know what age would make sense to allow them to be used though.  I assume that you can't actually test someone to see if their limit break is still available - only they can tell for sure, unless you see them using it.

Clearly this makes a lot of warfare really weird.  You couldn't, for example, attack a village of 300 people with 100 soldiers.  The villagers just limit break and wreck the soldiers, especially since the soldiers have likely used their limit breaks before!  In fact it might become standard to rotate civilians into combat roles temporarily just to use their limit breaks, presuming they are willing to be used in such a fashion.

This would upend a lot of situations where violent crime is involved.  You can rob a convenience store with a gun, sure, but maybe the clerk draws a sword made of rainbows and chops you in half... that is not how you want that robbery to go.  Policing would also be a lot scarier, since the police can't count on having overwhelming force at their disposal.  A couple of really angry people can stomp a SWAT team if that team doesn't have limit breaks available.

It would also lead to some bizarre situations where people might try to get others to use their limit breaks foolishly, bluffing dangerous situations or trying to trick people.  Once you get them to burn their one chance at nigh invulnerability, they know you can beat them at any time.

I wonder if this would actually end up in some kind of Orwellian dystopia.  The government recording every use of limit breaks and keeping track of which citizens have it available and which do not, monitoring every person so their level of power can be used, if necessary.

Maybe I am just overthinking this though.  Having a limit break available, for most situations, is no different than having a gun.  I can kill whoever I want if they aren't prepared, and they can't do much to stop me.

My limit break, in case you are curious, is a general glow combined with a gigantic 2 handed translucent orange battle axe.  Because I have some people I want to axe a question or two.

Seven Fallen Feathers

On my trip last week I read the book Seven Fallen Feathers.  It uses the stories of seven young Indigenous people who died in Thunder Bay over only a handful of years to explain something much bigger - the way that Indigenous people in Canada have been terribly mistreated over many generations.

The book does not paint a good picture of Thunder Bay, my hometown.  Thunder Bay is the hate crime and murder capital of Canada.  Those hate crimes are overwhelmingly targeted at Indigenous people, and racism, when you are in Thunder Bay, generally means anti-Indigenous hatred and bigotry.

I knew that was true, to an extent, when I was younger.  I just didn't realize quite how bad it was.  Reading about how the kids who had to travel from far away reserves to Thunder Bay for high school were pelted with garbage from passing cars on a regular basis just sickened me.  Worse than that, a Indigenous woman died when people threw a trailer hitch out of a car at her just a few years ago.  It isn't just cruelty - this bigotry spills over into murder.

The way the police and other officials treated these cases was tragic.  When they found a Indigenous kid dead in the river, the police instantly declared it an accident and moved on.  Maybe it was an accident.  Hard to say, sometimes, and information was sketchy.  But they police made it clear that they weren't declaring it an accident because they did everything possible to determine the cause and that was the logical conclusion.  They declared it an accident because investigating the death of a Indigenous kid just wasn't worth their time or attention.  Those deaths didn't count.

When people call for Indigenous people to just work harder, get better, fix their own circumstances, they completely ignore things like this.  How do you get a job when people refuse to hire you?  How do you build a network of professional contacts in a big city when you have never seen things like a streetlight?  How do you trust in the police and other authorities when you know that if you were murdered they would just shrug, call it an accident, and forget about it?

All of that is compounded by the long term destruction wrought by residential schools.  Whole generations of kids were taken, literally at gunpoint, to schools where they were regularly starved, beaten, raped, denied their names, culture, and family support, and then dumped back in reservations at the end.  Even if they escaped the medical starvation experiments (conducted on Indigenous kids without knowledge or consent of them or their parents, naturally) and didn't die at school (many thousands did), how do you then build a life after that?

How the HELL do you excuse thousands of children dying at school?  I can't comprehend it.

Seven Fallen Feathers gives both an understanding of the history that led to the challenges Indigenous people face now, and current examples of how that situation plays out.  It is a hard book to read, but an important one, especially for white people in Canada.  Atrocities are not something that only happens in other countries.  They have happened here, and they continue.  We need to do more to repair the mistakes of the past, and prevent more tragedy in the future, and understanding the problem, both past and present, is key to that.

Serious Medicine

I was at a marijuana dispensary earlier this week, and what I saw there amused me to no end.  I wasn't actually buying MJ myself, just accompanying someone else to get her own supply.  I was under the impression, prior to going, that dispensaries were regulated and serious, supplying medicine to people who needed it.  Also they were clearly just selling to anyone who wanted to pay.  However, I expected some sort of cursory screening process and at least a pretense of officialness.

I didn't even get a pretense.

The dispensary had a board of daily specials.  Now I may not be any kind of medical expert, but I feel like daily special such as "Hash Wednesdays!" aren't quite selling the 'serious medicine' thing.  Nor was the plate of cookies, the trance music, or the checkout clerk vaping in the corner.

I don't mind any of that of course.  MJ shouldn't be illegal and there is no compelling reason why people should have to jump through crazy hoops to get it.  It should be sold with just as much hucksterism as anything else.

But that contrast between the fact that MJ is clearly being sold as a recreational drug and the official line that it is still illegal here is staggering.  The government is maintaining the line that MJ is dangerous and that it is under control so that all the pearl clutchers can stop worrying about reefer madness while at the same time officials basically ignore MJ being sold openly.  We have this foolish, destructive, hypocritical system that can't decide if MJ should just be lightly regulated and otherwise ignored (it should be) or if it is a dangerous drug that has to be kept away from people no matter the cost.

A week from now MJ will become legal here.  We will finally be able to use it without worrying that we will be tossed in jail, our lives torched in order to prevent us from feeling sleepy and snacky.  Naturally the government is rolling this out in a completely idiotic way, using a single government supplier that won't even have any brick and mortar locations in the beginning.  The lack of competition in supply and the lack of freedom of purchasing means that people will continue to buy from illegal sources, funnelling money into organized crime.

Legalization is a good first step, but the Ontario government is still proceeding as if they can prevent MJ usage by simply making production by the private sector illegal.  A cursory examination of any part of human history can teach us that this is foolish in the extreme.

There are a lot of things that the free market is bad at, but providing MJ is one of the things it would actually be good at.  Tight fisted government control just makes things worse.

At least there is some measure of progress, and in a week I can wander down to my local dispensary and fill out an official looking form to buy my weed without worrying about being imprisoned for my troubles.  That much, at least, is looking up.

This is not your day

At the cottage this weekend I ended up in a contentious discussion about the police and queer people.  We got onto the subject of the Pride parade in Toronto and how the police are currently banned from marching in the parade.  Individual officers can march if they like, but the police aren't getting a float and they aren't allowed to be in uniform.

This is a good thing.

In an ideal world it would be great for the police to show their support for Pride and queer people in general.  But in an ideal world we wouldn't need a Pride parade in the first place, and in this non ideal world we inhabit the point of Pride isn't to give the cops a voice - it is for the queer people.

The tricky part about this conversation was that the people I was talking with are very pro police.  They have never had any trouble with the cops and they think of cops as defenders of the innocent.

It is easy to not have trouble with the cops when you are straight, white, cis, able bodied, neurotypical, and wealthy.  Not so much for people who aren't all those things.

These conversations don't seem likely to go anywhere useful, but I won't back down from them.  This is especially true because Pinkie Pie and friend were there listening and I will not allow them to think that the police are correct in demanding a place - at least not without hearing a proper counterpoint.

I talked about how the infamous Toronto gay bathhouse raids were only a few decades ago, and many people marching in that Pride parade were treated abominably (and illegally) by the police in those raids.  How can you ask that someone make space for their abuser like this?

Then they brought up that homosexuality was still illegal back then.  I wasn't at all sure it was the case, but I hate to argue with false information or guesses.  So I looked it up, and as I had thought the bathhouse raids took place in 1981 and decriminalization happened in 1969.

Armed with my new certainty I brought it up again at the next meal and made it clear that the bathhouse raids back then were not law enforcement - they were state sanctioned violence, enacted because of hatred and bigotry.

I am never quite sure how hard to push this stuff.  I made my point, there was a long, sustained silence, then the topic got changed.  No one argued with me further, which is a good thing, but nobody apologized or said that they had been mistaken either.  I know that these conversation are unlikely to convince someone with boatloads of privilege and decades of submersion in pro police culture.  It will probably be written off as a few bad cops, nothing to worry about now.  I also don't know if Pinkie Pie was even paying attention.  Does she get the message I am sending?  Is she just thinking about Minecraft and wondering why all the adults are being tense?

No way to know.  I know I won't sweep it under the rug, and I know there is no point yelling for hours.  Where I should land between those two points though, I can't quite suss out.

The end of a career

With the sexual misconduct stories surrounding people like Louis CK, Kevin Spacey, and Harvey Weinstein in high gear I am seeing all kinds of takes on what to do about it.  Most people seem in agreement that this is horrible but some of them think we should destroy these men's ability to work in their chosen field forevermore and some think that is too much and that they should be let off with a scolding.

I don't know if it comes from simply admiring the work of these moguls of entertainment or if it is more about misogyny (at least in the cases of Weinstein and Lous CK) but there is something that causes people to speak out about how we ought not to ruin the careers of people revealed to be serial abusers.  There are so many people out there saying that oh yes, the things that Weinstein and Louis CK and Kevin Spacey did were bad, but should we really ruin a person's career over them sexually abusing people?

Yes.  Burn it to the fucking ground.

Make no mistake.  This isn't me saying "It is acceptable to ruin their career to send a message."  It isn't me saying "I can live with their careers being ruined in order to protect people."  It is much more than that.  It is me saying "We MUST destroy their careers completely and utterly."

Imagine a person who over the course of decades repeatedly hit people with their car.  Over and over and over they ran people over inflicting horrible pain and suffering.  We would naturally insist that this criminal lose their licence forever because they clearly cannot be trusted in a car.

The same applies here.  All three of these men used their career success as a weapon to hurt others.  They used their influence and fame and connections to assault people on a regular basis.  They leveraged their fortunes and friends to cover up their misconduct.  Their careers were not separable from the evil they inflicted; they were the vehicle by which these men caused harm.

All three of these men, and many others, used their careers as weapons to injure people.  They clearly cannot be trusted with power, influence, or recognition.  We know that when they are put in positions of authority and respect they immediately and repeatedly leverage those things to harm others.

So yes, we should ruin the careers of people who are guilty of repeated and continuous sexual misconduct.  Not by accident, and not because we can't find any other way, but because this is exactly what these people deserve and because they have proved themselves unworthy of respect, influence, and adoration.

None of these men are going to starve.  They have lots of money as it is, and they will be able to find more.  They absolutely deserve ignominy, and they deserve to find out what it is like to have people refuse to let them be part of show business, just the way they threatened to do to others who might have outed them for their reprehensible behaviour.

That strikes me as the thing that is as close to justice as we are likely to get, barring prosecution, and while if they are prosecuted that would be a fine thing as far as I am concerned I am not holding my breath.

You don't have to hate The Usual Suspects or throw out your DVDs of Louis CK comedy specials.  But you should do your damndest to make sure they can't get work making anything more.  They are plenty of other people in the world who will step up to fill those roles, and perhaps these consequences will prevent others from trying the same thing.  We can only hope it is so.

The big man

Over the past couple of years I have watched Narcos and El Chapo on Netflix.  Both are dramatized stories of true events focusing on drug dealers of a few decades past - Pablo Escobar in Colombia and El Chapo in Mexico.

It turns out I really like stories about drug dealers, at least in part because I get to watch stories about people who live in worlds I have never touched.  The thing that really blows my mind is the henchmen.  I watch stories where the military attacks a place where a drug lord is hiding and the drug lord's bodyguards stand there and fight the military to the death.  The henchmen are facing an enemy that has more people, bigger guns, armour, communication, and even helicopters and tanks for backup.  The henchmen are just dudes with guns. 

And yet they stand there and fight, dying like flies.

It isn't just the dying.  There is an attitude there that I find totally baffling - like somehow it is an honour to fight and die for the boss.  The bosses clearly expect people to place themselves and their families on a pedestal and be eager to die to protect them.  It is a class thing, I think, like the bosses are one class, their henchmen are the next one down, and below them is everybody else.  Like royalty before them these bosses think that they somehow deserve people's undying loyalty and gratitude.

That loyalty boggles my mind.  I mean, they can see that the boss doesn't have loyalty to them.  They know that the boss regularly murders anyone he wants to, including any of his henchmen who annoys him.  I guess I can understand loyalty a little bit when it goes both ways, but when one person clearly thinks of the other as disposable, expendable, interchangeable, it is hard for me to understand that willingness on the part of the henchman to die.

Certainly some among the henchmen are just evil, violent people who thrive on being part of a power structure that lets them hurt other people with impunity.  But some of them spend their days just standing around protecting the boss, doing nothing, knowing that the only thing they are there to do is to die to protect someone who will be running away. 

It doesn't make any sense to me.

I know that there are tremendous differences between these men and me.  They are mostly drawn from desperately poor group of people and had little in the way of options.  The choices available to them were likely manual labour, unemployment, or crime and in that situation crime starts to look pretty good.

So there is an element of economic sense for many of the henchmen because they had so few options.  They just hope that they are one of the ones who makes a good living working for the boss and doesn't end up catching a bullet. 

But there is something in them that isn't just necessity or desperation.  There is some love for the boss that transcends mere employment.  Stockholm syndrome, almost, where once you work for a violent, selfish, evil man for long enough you eventually come to love him despite the fact that he would kill you for any reason at all and not think twice about it.

My parents always told me that while I might make a good general I would never make it through the military because I don't have it in me to obey.  I think being the henchman of a drug lord is pretty much the same thing.

Though clearly it works for an awful lot of people, following orders just isn't my thing.

Youtoo, 2

In reading posts on social media with the #metoo tag I saw some sad and disturbing things.  Some of those things were in the primary posts themselves of course, but some of the sadness was men charging into threads that were started so women could relate stories of abuse and saying awful things.  Some of these men decided to start a debate about the exact difference between sexual assault and sexual harassment.  One decided to talk about how he was groped a couple times and he liked it.

It doesn't fucking matter if you liked it when you got groped.  It matters if the women in question liked it, and if people should stop groping people without being sure that they want it.  (Hint:  Yes, you really should make sure people want to be groped before groping them.)

This past Saturday I was dancing in a club downtown.  A bunch of friends were with me and one of them, a man of similar size to me, danced all sexy with me and at groped at my crotch a couple of times.  I was dancing sexy right back at him, so the groping wasn't out of the blue but it was unexpected.

I didn't mind.  In fact, I was amused.

But even though a person randomly groping me (who I am not sexually interested in) didn't bother me that doesn't mean it shouldn't bother other people!  I am a large man.  I am stronger than him, and could make him get off me if it came to that.  I don't think there is any chance it would come to that because the guy in question is a reasonable sort of person but just knowing that I *could*, if I had to, completely changes how the interaction feels.

It is also different when I don't think the person in question actually has any intention of pursuing more sexual interaction.  Knowing what he wanted and the limits of what he was interested in changes the situation drastically.  It also matters that we were in a public space around lots of other people, as that can add a layer of safety.

Afterwards The Flautist asked me if I had ever had a sexual interaction that was scary or felt like assault.  I honestly answered no - I have only ever turned down sex a couple times and it was never of the type where I was shoving someone off of me.  I just used my words and they were respected.  (Being big generally means your words get respected, so this isn't such a surprise.)  Then she asked if anything I had experienced would probably be taken as sexual assault if I were a different person.  That is an important question because there are plenty of things that could happen to me that I would just brush off where other people might be traumatized for any number of reasons.

I guess the groping in the bar would qualify.  There are a lot of people who would be quite upset or at least unimpressed with such a thing.  I suspect that the guy that groped me wouldn't have done so to a woman or to many other people but he figured I would be fine with it, and he figured rightly in this case.

So yeah, I bet there are a lot of men out there who have been groped but it didn't really do much to them.  That doesn't matter.  Their privilege, size, strength, and other factors can easily change something they don't mind into someone else's horror story.  They should not assume that their feelings are universal because who they are and how they fit into society drastically changes the situation, even if it seems superficially similar.

I got groped.  It made me laugh and I was not bothered.  But that doesn't mean that other people aren't justified in being upset by being groped, and I sure as hell shouldn't use my experience as a weapon to try to trivialize the hurt they feel.

When someone talks about how they have cancer, for example, everyone knows that you shouldn't step in and say "hah, cancer, what a joke.  I lived through cancer!"  Even if you did, and even if it wasn't that bad, shut the hell up.  You also shouldn't say "Well, *your* kind of cancer isn't that bad.  Other people have it much worse, you know."  Even if that is true, shut the hell up.

The same goes for sexual assault.  Don't minimize other people's suffering, and don't try to shut down their conversation because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Youtoo

I have seen a lot of women posting on social media with the #metoo tag.  They are talking about their experiences with sexual harassment and sexual assault, and the sheer number of them that I know who are sharing their stories is hard to deal with.  It is made far worse by the fact that so many have terrible stories to tell who aren't telling them for one reason or another - the stories I have seen are just the beginning.  Of course there are men (and people who are neither men nor women) posting these stories too, but the ones that I know whose #metoo posts have affected me are women, so that is the thing I will focus on.

Awareness is great and useful but the real key is a commitment to change and that has to happen from men or little will change since men are the great majority of the offenders.  We have to step up and make it clear that we believe these stories, that we want the world to be different and better, and that we will take the steps we can to change it.

So I will join my voice to the chorus and say that I want a world where women are not sexually harassed and assaulted, and that I believe them when they say they are.  It is not their fault, it is the fault of those harassing and assaulting them.

I will refuse to make excuses for predatory behaviour because the predator has other traits I admire.  Just because I like what you make does not mean you are not doing something evil.

I will call out catcalling and other harassment.  I will not let it slip by.  I will not ignore misogyny when I see it, and I will examine my actions and thoughts for internalized misogyny to do my best to catch myself.

I will work hard to educate people, particularly young boys, to try to show them a better way to be so that they may do less harm than the generation before them.

When I screw up I will own it, apologize for it, and not do it again.  I will not ask women do the emotional labour of coping with my apology or atonement.

I wish the world was a better place and these stories were not true.  But they are true, and we must work to make there be less of them.  I will work to recognize the mistakes of my past and do what I can do nudge the world toward a better future where people don't need to take to social media by the millions to post their stories of trauma and heartache just to get people to believe that there is a problem at all.

Getting the guns out

Recently there was a mass shooting in Las Vegas.  58 people died and hundreds were injured by a single person with a huge collection of guns.  Gun control has been a huge topic on the internet as a result, and stocks in gun companies have shot up on the assumption that people will buy guns trying to get ahead of possible gun control laws.

The debate is a mess.  Talking about it is tough because we get bogged down in details, when what most people want is for action to be taken that will change the status quo.  For example, people will call for bans on assault rifles, not realizing that 'assault rifle' is not a well defined thing.  What differentiates a semi automatic rifle from another one that is classed as an assault rifle but which is pretty much equally dangerous?  Random details in the gun laws, that is the only practical difference.  Ban assault rifles and gun manufacturers will just make new guns that are outside the definition of assault rifle and you are back to where you started.

It is true that 'ban all assault rifles' is nearly worthless as policy, but the trick is that gun regulations in general aren't particularly effective as policy.  25% of Canadian households have guns, and 38% of American ones do, and yet the mass shooting rate in the US is somewhere between 4 and 6 times higher, depending on how you count it.  Most shootings don't include really powerful, large, military grade weapons either.  The difference is less in the number of guns or who owns them, and more in the culture.

You can't legislate away the toxic masculinity that goes along with gun fetishization.  You can't write a law that tells people that going out in a hail of bullets is pathetic rather than brave.  You can try to write laws to get the most dangerous of the guns out of people's hands, but those are only going to be modestly effective, especially in a country like the US where there are already more guns than people.

What is actually necessary is a change in thinking.

The US needs it especially, but the rest of the world could use a dose of venerating nonviolence.  The culture of honour that demands that you be able to defend yourself violently from attackers is incredibly destructive and it leads to all kinds of deaths, both deliberate and accidental.

We will get modest results at best from legislating away guns.  We should still do it, but that isn't actually the thing that needs changing most urgently.  The real culprit is the belief that having guns and using them makes you a big shot, powerful, worthy of respect.

"Ban assault rifles" is not useful policy.  This is true.  But the appropriate response to such a statement isn't "Bah, we can't define this correctly, so we shouldn't bother."

The appropriate response is "Guns are a problem, so I am going to get rid of my guns, and so should everyone else."

When people minds have changed, and guns are seen as the problem rather than the solution, then the laws will change with them pretty nearly effortlessly.

As to how to convince the gun enthusiasts to come around en masse and advocate for a gun free society... I don't have a lot of good answers for that.  I wish I did.

Home Alone

I ran into an article today on the topic of letting children ride public transit alone.  It talks about a man in Vancouver who let his four children of ages 7, 8, 9, 11 ride the bus to school without adult supervision.  A seven year old on the bus alone seems possible depending on the seven year old, but in the company of an 11 year old I feel it is perfectly reasonable considering he spent considerable time training them to do this.

The government did not like this however and forbade it.  Once his eldest child reaches 12 they can then supervise the younger ones, and while that seems older than the limit I would choose it doesn't seem absurd.

But the article also talked about the rules here in Ontario and those made me choke a little.  Apparently here children cannot legally be left alone until age 16.

16!  The same age at which they can legally hop behind the wheel of a car and start driving.  Apparently sitting at home alone for a short period is equivalent in terms of responsibility to being the operator of a powerful and potentially dangerous piece of machinery.  It boggles my mind.

It is especially galling because nobody obeys that law.  Children are expected to arrive at Pinkie Pie's school by themselves - while parents are certainly welcome to drop them off, it is obvious to anyone at the school that nearly all of them arrive on their own.  So even though by law the great majority of the parents of the children in the school are in violation, and even though the people in the school are undoubtedly aware of it, nothing happens.

I *hate* laws like that.

Having laws on the books that are stupid and which are not enforced just leaves people in a terrible state where they risk something horrible happening to their family if they do what basically everyone does, and when everyone is doing the right thing it is especially crappy.  Obey the law, do a disservice to your children.  Disobey the law, be worried that they will take your children away.

Even if nobody actually obeys the law and it never gets enforced its mere existence is a problem.  I think people will generally have a lot more respect for laws and those who enforce them if laws themselves are consistently enforced.  When people know that the rules are fair, reasonable, and consistently enforced they have more reason to think that they themselves should play by the rules.

When it is clear that laws are arbitrary, destructive, and ignored, then it fosters the idea that the legal system should be ignored.

And if that law should happen to be enforced, as in my case, or the case of nearly all parents, it would be a disaster.  Should this happen, it won't occur to people with money, and influence, and access to lawyers.  It will happen to someone who is poor and powerless.

That is what gets me.  Not that anyone is going to take my kid away, that won't happen.  But that somebody might decide to do this to someone who doesn't know how to fight back or cannot do so.

A disreputable sort

Today I ran to Pinkie Pie's school.  It is about a twenty minute walk but I sprinted most of the way in order to make a delivery - a lunch that was discovered in the kitchen five minutes after Pinkie Pie had already gone to school.  It was my fault as I had failed to put it in her backpack so off I ran to deliver it.  Children looked at me askance as I ran down the street, everyone's gaze flickering to my bare feet and then back to my face again.

Because of course I was running in bare feet.  Putting on socks would have taken time, and sandals are crap for running.

However, unbeknownst to me Pinkie Pie had taken an alternate route to school to meet a friend on the way and I got there far before she did.  I wasn't terribly surprised to find that I got there first so I sat on a bench in front of the school and waited.

And waited.

During my wait the traffic on the street in front of me came to a stop and a man on a motorcycle began questioning me.  He demanded to know why I was barefoot, and I answered that I am often barefoot.  Then he demanded to know why I was at the school.  He was clearly agitated, and at first I couldn't figure out what he was about, at least partly because our conversation was impeded by traffic noise and him wearing a helmet.

Soon though it became clear what his problem was - he was convinced I was some sort of pedophile.  Because a male, near children?  It couldn't be that I was delivering a lunch, or meeting a teacher, or making inquiries about my children.  No, it must be that I am a violent criminal deviant.

Now, of course he would have given a pass to a well dressed man.  Those types of people aren't to be suspected of things.  But to break the cultural norm against wearing shoes, that means you must be twisted and evil.  Perhaps even worse, you might be poor!

Before I had to make the choice between politely telling him the truth, giving him the finger, or telling him to bring the fucking noise, traffic began moving again and he decided that stopping the street completely to yell at a stranger on the sidewalk was not the thing to do and he sped off.  He hesitated though, clearly angry that he didn't have the time to interrogate me properly for the suspicious activity of sitting on a public bench while dressed in a way he wasn't used to.

Finally Pinkie Pie showed up about fifteen minutes later.  She was surprised to see me, but glad that the lunch had been delivered.

This kind of crap really grinds my gears.  I hate that people feel entitled to a position of authority on the basis of another person's presumed poverty, and the sexist bullshit of thinking that a male couldn't possibly have anything legitimate to do with a school twists it into something even worse.  I have encountered this before, particularly when I took Pinkie Pie to the park when she was small.  When she was playing away from me and our relationship wasn't clear I would often get death stares from people who clearly concluded that a male near children must have nefarious purposes.

I can't help but wonder how these interactions would have gone if I wasn't large and strong.  How bad might it be to add physical intimidation into the mix?  I at least have the advantage that even if people feel entitled to be assholes to me, they don't try to push me around with brute force.

Much ado

Being a juror wasn't as interesting as I had hoped.  In the back of my mind there were fantasies of courtroom drama, shouts of "OBJECTION!", witnesses reduced to tearful confessions on the stand by brilliant questioning, and my own role in bringing justice and truth to the world.  I knew those things weren't likely, but one can dream...

Instead I sat in a room.  After thirty minutes of sitting in a room a video was played to convince us that serving on a jury was an honour and a joy rather than a chore.  It made me cringe.  A couple hours later a man walked to the front of the room and gave a long speech about the details of being on a jury, the time frame involved, how it all works, etc.  When his speech was winding down he finished it up with "Oh, and we won't need you at all this week, your service is done.  Thanks!"

I was glad that I didn't get caught up in a big trial.  I have no interest in having my holiday plans destroyed.  I am disappointed that I didn't even get to see a courtroom though, much less any Matlock-style courtroom antics.

It turns out that my experience of jury duty is exactly the same as most people I have talked to.  You sit in a room reading for awhile, then someone tells you to go home because you weren't needed after all.

It is like going to an amusement park only to be turned away at the gate because one of the rides broke and it is a disaster inside the park.  Sure, it is better than being the one on the ride who finds out that it is broken the hard way, but you sure didn't get what you wanted!

If only I could just clear a couple weeks of my schedule and offer to be on all the juries during that time.  I would totally sign up for that.  The waiting in a room for no reason thing... not so much.

Doing my duty

Tomorrow I go in for jury duty.  I haven't done this before, and it is exciting.

I know, I know, it is most likely to be days of boredom sitting in a room with nothing to do, eventually to be told to go home.  Rarely does a prospective juror actually get to trial, and ever rarer yet is a trial that is exciting the ways the ones on TV are.

And yet, I am excited.

I want to understand the system.  I am deeply curious about how jurors are selected, what sorts of questions the lawyers and judge will ask, and what they will tell us.  The things they choose to tell us can be used to figure out what people generally think about the process and how the people running it cope with common misconceptions.

Clearly the people running the jury selection system realize that most people's exposure to this is TV courtroom dramas so they must have to constantly cope with odd ideas about what will occur.

One thing a discussion with a friend brought up was how much I will respect the law when and if I am asked to convict someone of a crime that is not actually immoral.

For example, if I was on a jury where a person was being tried for marijuana possession, could I possibly condemn them to prison for a victimless crime?  It is even harder when we consider that marijuana is soon to be legalized, and I know a *ton* of people that use it.  I can't justify destroying their lives to punish such a 'crime', so how could I justify doing that to a stranger?

I don't think I could.  I want the legal system to be consistent, but if I was asked to convict a sex worker or marijuana user or some other person who should never have been charged in the first place I don't think I could return a guilty verdict.  It simply isn't right.

That attitude might disqualify me from being a juror in the first place.  They don't want people who take writing laws into their own hands - they want people to interpret facts and return a verdict.

(Or they want people who will return a guilty verdict as fast as possible because that is convenient for the system, depending on how cynical you feel.)

Anyway, tomorrow I will go sit in a room for hours on end for no reason.  Maybe it will get more exciting than that, and I hope it does, but the odds are against me.  Still, I go to do my duty, and it is one I take seriously, so I don't mind.

This again

An argument has been spewing its way across my social media feed about pronouns.  It started with a University of Toronto professor called Jordan Peterson who made some videos about how he thinks that pronouns other than he and she are wrong and bad and no one should use them.  You can read what he says here.

Naked Man linked me to this mess and asked what I thought of it.  I think that Peterson is a bigoted idiot and he is totally wrong about the new wave of pronouns.

Perhaps I should break down a bit why I think that name calling is justified.

Peterson trots out the usual crap to justify his dislike of pronouns other than he/she, which can be broken down as follows:

-It is an assault on language.

-Hate crime laws will put normal people who misgender others by accident in prison.

-Everyone has an obligation to present themselves in a way that makes it easy for others to interact with them.

Now I will give Peterson credit in one way; he avoids the usual claim that biology backs him up, which is also completely bogus.  However there is still plenty wrong.

Using alternate pronouns is not an assault on language.  Language is not fixed.  The perfect form of language does not happen to be the one you were taught when you were four.  Language evolves based on the people that use it, otherwise we wouldn't *have* any recognizable language.  We all adapted to the word computer as a noun, black hole as an astronomical object, and ISIS as a political entity rather than a mythological figure.  Language changing with the times and with culture is just the way things are, and saying that we shouldn't do a thing because it is a change to language is asinine.

Thoughtful criticisms of how hate crime laws work are something I would actually like to see.  I think we should talk carefully about how those laws work.  If Peterson had actual examples or legal critiques of these laws I would listen because that is a thing I am interested in.  Instead he seems keen to use his opposition to the laws as an excuse for acting like an asshole to marginalized people.  Object to the laws?  Sure, fine.  Maybe even good!  I don't know how the laws work that well, so they might well be overbroad.  But using that as an excuse to refuse to give an important consideration for someone who needs it, and which takes almost no effort on your part?  For shame.  The risk of imprisoning people for trivial offences like calling someone 'she' when they self identify as 'xe' is nonexistent.  The laws are aimed at consistent, deliberate misgendering, not accidents or pronoun usage for a person with a perference the speaker is unaware of.

The bit about people having an obligation to present themselves in ways that make it easy for others really boils my blood though.  Peterson basically has decided that everyone has a moral obligation to cater to his biases in all things.  They have to dress, speak, and identify in a way that is easy for him.  That way he never has to consider that there are people different from him in the world and he is saved from the tragedy of accepting other ways of living.

Peterson is a privileged upper class man who is angry that he might have to think about his preconceived notions and challenge some of his deeply held beliefs.  He is desperate to preserve the sanctity of the world he was taught to believe in and he is happy to cause whatever harm is necessary to do that.

Do his arguments about the laws surrounding hate speech have merit?  Maybe.  I don't know.  I am hesitant to have the state regulate speech, so I am naturally sympathetic to that worry.  But what I do know is that the rest of what he has to say is crap, and that leads me to believe that he is blowing his legal arguments out of proportion to justify his indignance at having his worldview challenged.

Disrupting the disruptors

At the Pride parade this past weekend there was quite a hiccup - Black Lives Matter protesters staged a sit in, blocking the parade from moving for 30 mins.  The standoff ended when a Pride representative signed an agreement that BLM insisted on, and eventually things went back to the plan.  The BLM demands looked like this:

Some of those demands seem like they would meet little resistance.  6, for example, is particularly hard to argue with.  Pride is dominated by white men, and increasing diversity would be a good thing.  I think you would find that this demand has pretty broad base support.  Removing all police floats though, number 8, seems much more controversial.  Even though Pride signed the petition at the time, they are now claiming that they won't necessarily do everything on it, which comes as no surprise whatsoever to me.  BLM got attention with their protest, which is obviously a big part of their agenda, but signing this document was just a stunt.  It isn't binding, especially because you can't expect a document signed under pressure from a group breaking the law to be upheld by a court, just as you wouldn't be expected to honour an agreement signed at gunpoint.

Decades ago I would have just figured that the police should just wait a few minutes then arrest the people blocking the street.  Go through the proper channels, I would have said.  Talking to other people and reading articles about this I found a lot of people who agreed with teenage me.  These days my responses are quite different.  The proper channels are put in place and enforced by the very people BLM are protesting against.  The police and the courts incarcerate and assault them at much higher rates, so no wonder they aren't interested in bowing to law enforcement authority or rules.  Those rules don't serve them, so why should they serve the rules?

I am not a big fan of disrupting Pride, but queer people of colour are more oppressed than white queer people, and pushing that problem to the front of people's consciousness is a good thing.  I hope BLM wasn't actually thinking that the signing of this list of demands was going to be binding, but I suspect they never thought that.  They wanted publicity, attention, and for their demands to be known and spread far and wide.  Their actions this weekend certainly achieved that.

In particular I was thinking a lot about the removal of police floats from the parade.  I think there is value in police symbolically extending an olive branch to people they have oppressed in a huge way historically, (and in a much smaller way today).  Police publicly supporting queer people is good.

But you cannot deny that people in that parade are unfairly attacked, harassed, and pressured by police.  They don't want police around in their parades, and you can't fault them for that.  Police make people like me a bit wary, and I am a straight white guy, not someone the police traditionally inflict grief upon.  I can't even imagine how it would feel to know that a group that consistently attacks and occasionally kills people like you are marching in a parade with you.

I wonder how police could still offer their olive branch, still try to show their commitment to changing their old ways, while not torpedoing Pride for the very people who need that place the most.  I don't have answers, but I do hope that Pride finds a way.

Precise demands

The shooting in Orlando is a tragedy for so many reasons.  First off, there is the direct disaster of losing 49 people.  Then there are all the secondary problems, like the Latino and queer communities feeling terrified, unsafe, and hated after they were targeted by this attack.  It is a sad thing, but if you want to read about emotional responses to it you shouldn't be listening to me - there are a lot of people directly or indirectly affected who have lots of things to say.

I do have things to say about some of the fallout of these sorts of events.  There are always long discussions about guns, and specifically banning guns.  I get that people are angry about gun laws (on both sides) but when we talk about these things we need to separate feelings and policy.

Being angry at people who own big guns like the one used in the Orlando massacre is expected.  Wanting to get rid of those guns is normal, and useful in my opinion.  However, when we talk about how to do that we should be careful and precise about what we say so that our outrage has a real chance of accomplishing something.

Saying that we should ban 'assault weapons' is not useful.  As the linked article says, there isn't a definition of assault weapons.  Banning the specific model of gun used in the attack is equally ridiculous.  One problem with these debates is that people get fired up advocating for things that are vague enough to be totally impossible to implement, and that is an impediment to getting it done.

Banning all firearms?  Not likely, but at least specific.  Banning all weapons capable of firing more than 8 rounds before reloading?  Again, decently specific, though unlikely.  The trick is that we need to figure out what we actually want before we have debates about implementation.

The main thing in my mind is to separate emotional reactions from action items.  Hating big, rapid firing guns in the hands of civilians?  Yup, totally on board with that.  But that is a feeling, not a policy.  Totally worth having, worth sharing, but let's not have arguments about the specifics until we actually have specifics.  Far too often I see these debates get bogged down in people yelling about banning assault weapons and then other people yelling about how assault weapons aren't defined and them getting called gun nuts and things go absolutely nowhere useful.

You can see this problem in other situations too.  When the Liberal government was elected here last year they promised marijuana legalization.  Which is good, but there are all kinds of ways that could be done.  They could have a government monopoly on pot, sell it only at a few locations, raise the price to ludicrous levels, and still prosecute people getting pot other ways.  This would be a really crappy solution because most people would get their pot cheaply and illegally and we would have nearly as many problems as now.  On the other end of the spectrum they could just remove all restrictions whatsoever on pot, which is a really different situation entirely.  Personally I am hoping that they restrict pot sales to people 19 and over and require informative packaging but otherwise don't worry about it - much like tobacco is now.

Just as the two extreme cases of pot legalization are completely different, there are many gun restrictions that are completely different, and they have vastly different outcomes.

If we want changes to our system, it pays to be precise, to know what our terms mean, and to advocate for policies that might actually get passed and which will do the thing we want.  Our discussions will be more productive and those that might pass laws will be a lot more willing to take our positions seriously if we have put time and thought into them, whichever side they are on.