Slut, and Slut-Shaming: Important Distinctions

This video deals head-on with the word slut, and how we use it to think about women and make them wrong--and not that they did wrong, but that they are wrong--which is the definition of shame. This video, by John Fugelsang, is very well presented and well worth the 3.75 minutes it takes to watch. This goes right to the heart of how we marginalize women, and it seems particularly timely in light of recent events on Twitter, and the shocking treatment of Caroline Criado-Perez, and many others. Tell me you don't see, on some level, a contribution you make to the status quo on this issue. Yeah. Let's stop that.

On What's Happening in Egypt: A 12 year old's perspective

Holy shit. Is this translation for real? I'd vote for this kid.

Edward Snowden Interview

The now famous interview excerpts of Edward Snowden with Glenn Greenwald. I remember when the US mocked the Russian cold war police state, but now Mr. Snowden describes that same creature and this time it's not them, it's us. Very interesting developments indeed . . .

Capital Punishment

The prosecution is seeking the death penalty for James Holmes, the protagonist in the Aurora movie theater shootings last summer.  This raises in my mind the issue of capital punishment, and since I have a blog and a few minutes to kill...

If murder is wrong, then murdering a murderer is wrong.  If murder is illegal for citizens, murder should be illegal for the state.  The state has a right to defend itself, but incarceration is a sufficient self-defense, and I don't believe there should be state sanctioned vengeance for families and loved ones of victims. 

We don't assault those found guilty of assault.  We don't steal from those caught stealing.  We don't sexually offend sex offenders.  There is no sense to me in employing a punitive act which is itself the crime we are punishing.

To me, these things are self evident.

Dean Del Mastro Didn't Do It

On How a Good Law Prevents a Harm

I read an interesting article at Popehat today which opposes North Carolina's Amendment One, in which voters there have been asked whether they want to add this text to the state's constitution.

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

The content of Patrick's argument against the law is encapsulated as follows.

All laws restrict freedom in some fashion.  All laws harm some subset of people within the body public, by punishing them for exercising their freedom, but sometimes that's justifiable.  A good law is one that protects the public, or individuals who make up the public, from a discreet, identifiable harm, while doing as little damage as possible in the process.

A heterosexual marriage is not harmed when a gay couple marries, so forbidding gay marriage does not prevent a harm.  Nothing is harmed by gay marriage.  So Forbidding it is a harm.

Unfortunately, this amendment has now passed, and North Carolina joins 28 other states that explicitly forbid same sex marriage in their constitutions.

US Deploys and Recalls 'Pain Ray'

As reported in this article by Al Jazeera, check out this $120 million 'pain ray' deployed to Afghanistan, and then immediately recalled as, not surprisingly, a PR disaster.  I'm not arguing that pain rays are evil while water cannons, flash-bangs and tear gas are good, but people are very easily frightened by things they don't understand.  I can see how a pain ray, packaged in an camouflaged truck with a big satellite-dishy thing on top, would be super juicy low-hanging fruit for Taliban propagandists to make America look like an even greater Satan.

Tories Honour Charter, Fail to Mention Trudeau.

In a fanatically petty move today, the conservative government released this statement honouring the 30th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms...

Today marks the 30th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Constitution Act of 1982, which was formally signed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on April 17, 1982, in the presence of tens of thousands of Canadians on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

This anniversary marks an important step in the development of Canada’s human rights policy. Building on Diefenbaker’s Canadian Bill of Rights of 1960, the Constitution Act of 1982 enshrined certain rights and freedoms that had historically been at the heart of Canadian society into a constitutional document known as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Constitution Act of 1982 empowered our government to amend every part of Canada’s constitution, for the very first time.

As we look ahead to Canada’s 150th Anniversary in 2017, we encourage all Canadians to commemorate the milestones that have built our nation and made us the great country we are today.

... and utterly failed to use the word Trudeau anywhere, which is ridiculous.  I don't mind Tories per se, and even though I didn't vote for one, I didn't think they did a bad job in their various minority incarnations over the past few years.  Yeah, there were some issues, but in my view it's a form of extremism to salute this Charter and mention Diefenbaker and not Trudeau.  So today I honour Heritage Minister James Moore and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson with FanMod's first Fanatically Petty Jerk Of The Day Award.  Congratulations guys!

Canada Post in Postal Code Copyright Fail

A company in Ottawa has crowdsourced a database of postal codes and now it appears that Canada Post is suing them for violation of copyright.  If you can't believe it, read it for yourself at CBC.   

Postal code data is a set of facts, and facts are not protected by copyright.  Yes, the format of those facts, so the A9A 9A9 character/digit sequence or format might be protected, so if you set up your own postal code system and you used L0L 0L0 somewhere, then they might have a case, and you might be a pirate, rrr, but even then it's not clear to me how you'd have damaged Canada Post's interests in any way.  Like, what is the harm?

In the current case Canada Post is trying to protect it's right to price gouge by making it illegal for other companies to compile and sell public facts.  In a free market this is called competition, and I can see how Canada Post might not like that because access to their own database of postal codes is extraordinarily expensive.

This is exactly the same situation as in other copyright cases, where rather than innovate to provide an awesome product at an awesome price, fat-cats in business lobby the fat-cats in government to protect lousy old business models with overreaching copyright law, protecting the interests of business over the interests of the consumer and of the society at large. 

Happy Constitution Day

Hey, it's Constitution Day! Who knew? If you need help understanding what a constitution is, check out this video from constitutionday.ca, which uses simple to understand hockey analogies, but watch out, there is a bit of blood during the description of what might happen if hockey had no rules.

Trayvon Martin III: Mother Seeks to Trademark "I Am Trayvon"

Like the murder and the subsequent failure to prosecute the perpetrator, our system supports much that defies common sense, and so it should perhaps come as no surprise that Trayvon Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, is seeking to trademark the phrases, "Justice for Trayvon," and, "I am Trayvon.

I have mixed feelings about her choice.  On the one hand it seems dirty to capitalize on this misfortune this way, like racism is evil but greed is totally cool. On the other hand, if I was in her situation and saw that others were capitalizing, what would I do?  She'll probably make millions with T-shirts and book deals and movie rights.  Can I begrudge her that?  And if not, and if it still feels wrong, where is the problem?  I don't know.

If the focus of past civilizations was religion, as evidenced by archeologists finding objects of ritual and cathedrals having been the most significant architectural efforts put forth, our society, by contrast, worships wealth.  Our cathedrals are shopping malls, and our sacred objects are plastic cards, but there's something that feels wrong about that in a case like this.

I've heard that some ancient societies had no concept of ownership or personal property, and as a thought exercise it seems interesting to contrast that with what we do.  In our society it seems that everything, if not already owned, is at least subject to ownership, and so Trayvon Martin's death can become a commodity, and if I want to sell T-shirts that say, "I Am Trayvon," I should owe money to his mom. 

Weird.

GOP Misogyny: Out There for the World to See

From MoveOn.org, this video powerfully repeats comments made by prominent US Republicans.

On Fads, a Free Internet, and Paying Attention

The Kony 2012 craze is a fad like a hula-hoop.  In the first half of March 2012 the Kony video was watched 80 million times, and in the late 1950's the hula-hoop sold 100 million units.  Both of them were heavily promoted with the best of modern technology, and both are pretty inconsequential in terms of content.  Kony, since his peak in the late 1990s, is mostly a spent force, and 'hula-hooping,' well, who cares?

The thing exists because it can.  If it wasn't Kony, and if it wasn't the hula-hoop, it would have been some other asshole and some other toy.  Darwin showed that given constant variation and a nourishing medium, natural selection happens.  Kony 2012 has celebrity endorsement, YouTube, and a shit-load of users demanding entertainment.  The hula-hoop had celebrity endorsement, TV, and a shit-load of viewers demanding entertainment.  If the medium is the message, then Kony and the hula-hoop are strictly message.

What's interesting is the medium, and if hindsight is 20/20 then let's start with the hula-hoop, which flourished in a semi-euphoric, post-war, televised, affluent, civil society.  In a similar fashion, what's interesting about Kony is not Kony, but rather the fact that a complex idea expressed by a small organization can 'go viral' in the medium of our internet connected society, and millions of people across nations can participate in the conversation in a matter of days.

Kony, the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Copyright, SOPA, ACTA, all these messages point to the incredibly interconnected medium in which our society exists, and how messages within that medium increasingly bypass governments and corporations.  They are now the old authorities--the old keyholders and the old gatekeepers--and they are not pleased, but neither are the people.

Now is an important time.  I'm going to be paying close attention.

Rush Limbaugh: Say No More.

Wow, incredibly sad commentary.  I'm not even going to link to anything he said about anything, but I'm glad to find out that as of now he has lost 45 sponsors.

TheComedyNetwork.ca Fail

This is what I see when I go to a boingboing.net article where they've posted a John Stewart video: a note indicating that the video is not available at my location.

In Canada those shows are the property of The Comedy Network, who would rather damage their own product than let me enjoy it at some other site.  If this issue was judged by King Solomon, The Comedy Network would obviously be happy to cut the baby in half.  And they provide no link, and no assistance finding this video if I go to their site.

The outcome is that I don't get to see the video, and I lose respect for The Comedy Network, and for their parent company Bell Media, who put financial gain in front of integrity and lose both in the process.  Idiots.

How Internet Censorship Is Surveillance

Check out this article at The Guardian on how you must do surveillance in order to implement censorship on the internet. In brief, the issue is that a network is an object that routes traffic, and it routes traffic without judgement or prejudice, so in respect to a network there is no good traffic or bad traffic.  The result is that if you want to censor traffic to or from a particular address you need to interrogate all traffic and compare that traffic's origin and destination to a list of forbidden locations.  Surveillance is the part where you interrogate all traffic.  This is like listening to all the phone calls or opening all the packages.  And that is the same as guilty until proven innocent.

But what really makes it silly is this: spoofing the origin or destination of internet traffic is only moderately hard, so people highly motivated to not get caught--criminals--will still not get caught.  And for the rest of us, our every move online gets recorded in a big database.

Iceland Considers Switching To Canadian Dollar

It could be that the days of the Krona are numbered in Iceland.  Check out this article at The Globe And Mail.

For 150 years, no country has expressed interest in adopting the Canadian dollar -- the poor cousin to the coveted greenback.
But now tiny Iceland, still reeling from the aftershocks of the devastating collapse of its banks in 2008, is looking longingly to the loonie as the salvation from wild economic gyrations and suffocating capital controls.  And for the first time, the Canadian government says it’s open to discussing idea.

Fanaticism Fail Or Authentic Anger?

I posted this article earlier today, but I'm having second thoughts...

Afghanistan Fanaticism Fail
Given that this blog is called The Fanatical Moderate, I have a nagging sense of responsibility that won't allow me to let the outrage in Afghanistan pass by without comment.  In case you don't follow news, local garbage collectors at Bagram Airbase found evidence that someone had burned a Koran.  That was five days ago, and since then about 30 people have died in the rioting and unrest.
Burning a holy book is a harm, I get it, and I can see how people might be insulted and hurt, and that that might cause anger that legitimately needs a public expression.  Maybe there would be madness and marches, bullhorns and banners.  Maybe a few thugs would go too far and flip a police car and set it on fire, but omfg, 30 human beings have to die?
How about I print you another Koran, and you return those husbands to their wives and you return those sons to their fathers!

The problem is that the harm, the burning of a Koran, was perpetrated by an occupying foreign army, and maybe that changes everything.  Has this event triggered an authentic and legitimate objection to a foreign occupation?  I know I would resent occupation by a foreign army, particularly if they showed a lack of sensitivity to my culture and my values.

The Government Heard Me

I wrote a couple of letters to my MP, Mark Strahl over the past few of weeks, one of which went like this...

I believe it's very important to not hobble the internet to protect copyright. Like the streets of a city, the internet is simply a thing that conducts traffic without prejudice.
Though some parts of a city might be rife with crime or social harms and some individuals or groups eminently worthy of arrest, nonetheless we do not--in a free society--curtail freedom of movement.
Please protect the rights of the individual in respect to the internet. Please protect freedom of movement, presumption of innocence, common carriage, and due process.
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.

In a second letter I expressed my concern about the plan to make the circumvention of digital locks illegal.  

I received this today from Vic Toews' office...

Thank you for contacting my office regarding Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.

Canada's laws currently do not adequately protect Canadians from online exploitation and we think there is widespread agreement that this is a problem. 

We want to update our laws while striking the right balance between combating crime and protecting privacy. 

Rick Mercer vs Vic Toews