At least those who destroy the environment are polite.

michael thibault photos/the ubyssey

On Friday, Greenpeace activists held a protest at Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff's UBC talk:

What started as an opportunity for Ignatieff to reach a politically apathetic generation turned into a heated demonstration held by Greenpeace activists.

During the question period, one activist asked Ignatieff about his stance on the Alberta tar sands. He was interrupted by Greenpeace protestors before he could answer.

The crowd grew restless and confused as Greenpeace continued to make its voice heard. Some students started to boo the protesters, some clapped, and others squirmed in their seats from the awkwardness of the atmosphere.

The student response has been decidedly against Greenpeace and the way they handled themselves. Much like the Blake Frederick kerfuffle over tuition policy, UBC students were too preoccupied with the crude breach of protocol to address the very real issue being raised. Most of the discussion has centered around the way Ignatieff held himself in the face of these foolish, rude and bombastic philistines. A student comments:

What was so remarkable about the situation is that Ignatieff didn’t seem phased at all, rather he gave an answer and did a remarkable job explaining his position

And a few more representative samples:

fuck greenpeace, that was just embarrassing and rude on their part, misrepresented UBC, kind of pissed me off

these tree hugging hippies definitely embarrassed UBC!

Notice the very clear evasion of the issue in favor of this meaningless discussion of image, poise, and respect. One might not agree with Greenpeace's methods, but to rally around Michael Ignatieff for the purposes of demonstrating your pompous sense of civility is simply cowardly. This nonsense about how well Ignatieff did or did not handle the situation is borderline idol worship, a poisonous trend in our political discourse. These are not personalities to psychoanalyze and revere for their gravitas, they are embodiments of actual policies (in this case, very destructive policies). Unhealthy reverence for the political elite and their etiquette is, on the whole, trivial and ruinous because it focus' political energy on the superficial and marginalizes the dissent (which is necessarily rude) needed for political change. The passion we saw on the part of these activists suggests the matter of the tar sands warrants further investigation, the protest should be used as an opportunity to speak substantively on the issue of climate change and our role in the matter.

Among the chaos, the very polite room of University students seemed not so concerned with something that I felt was much more worrisome, Ignatieff's rationale for continuing the tar sands:

“If you’re asking me to shut down the tar sands, I’ll tell you frankly, it is not in the national interest of our country to do [so].”

In the opening of the talk, Ignatieff continuously alluded to a “race against other nations” for matters of Canada's national interest. When one astute student asked Ignatieff to clarify the interesting choice of words, Ignatieff said he was referring to acquiring market share in emerging markets. This rationale is hardly out of the ordinary, it's pervasive in our political discourse. But self-serving attitudes are incredibly detrimental when addressing climate change and other matters that require international co-operation and compromise (Canada is public enemy number one here, thanks to the tar sands). The "national interest" justification--met with such thunderous applause--is nothing more than thinly veiled tribalism, hardly a just or liberal motivation. Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed exposed this insanity at the Copenhagen summit:

Every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first. This is the logic of a mad house, a recipe for collective suicide.

The IPCC AR4 "Summary for Policy Makers" has recognized this problem:

Fossil fuel exporting nations (including annex one countries) may expect lower demand and lower GDP growth due to mitigation policies.

but...

Those in weakest economic position are often the most vulnerable to climate change.

We may be satisfied that we play the role of climate criminal number one with the appropriate level of civility, but I think those most adversely affected by climate change will hardly be impressed by our good manners.

A repositioning of torture

President Obama has ceased to employ the torture policy of the last administration. This rather important policy shift in ending torture policies (much like closing Guantanamo) is only symbolic when one understands the abundance of abuse that continues just a short step removed from the areas of unambiguous American responsibility. Those more ambiguous areas where torture is implicitly endorsed by the United States--undertrained Afghan jailers, extraordinary rendition, monetary support for ignoble regimes, ect--are where torture will continue. Noam Chomsky maintains that this has long been the standard:

Ordinarily, torture is farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their government-established torture chambers. Alain Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out that "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so." Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. Since Vietnam, "the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy -- paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed." Obama's ban "doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of 'armed conflict,' which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict ... his is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."7

Sometimes engagement in torture is more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter years. Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, and this is commonly improved by murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists, and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.8

These studies precede the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear. And the tendencies continue to the present.

Obama's decision is most certainly an important step in the right direction. Howevever, the history of surreptitious and indirect American torture strategies would suggest that we cannot be assuaged by this shift. The danger of another war justified by coerced intellegence will persist if there is no concerted effort to ensure all American allies cease their practice of torturing detainees.

Subconscious Racism

http://www.reallygoodfriend.com/index.php?category=45

I come from a country that lauds itself for being a veritable cornucopia of cultures and ethnicities. Toronto and Vancouver, large urban centers, boast immigrant populations soaring to over 40% of total population. Business is said to prosper as a result of how quickly these diverse immigrant populations become accustomed to (and thrive in) the workforce. Moreover, Canadians trumpet their multiculturalism--embracing unique perspectives rather than homogenizing them with the 'melting-pot' philosophy--and garner world-wide respect for their tolerance. All these soaring principles are pervasive in the rhetoric of the typical Canadian and customarily employed by political figures--Which is why I was somewhat surprised when I saw this in today's Globe and Mail:

You are more likely to land a job interview if your name is John Martin or Emily Brown rather than Lei Li or Tara Singh – even if you have the same Canadian education and work experience.

These are the findings of a new study analyzing how employers in the Greater Toronto Area responded to 6,000 mock résumés for jobs ranging from administrative assistant to accountant.

Across the board, those with English names such as Greg Johnson and Michael Smith were 40 per cent more likely to receive callbacks than people with the same education and job experience with Indian, Chinese or Pakistani names such as Maya Kumar, Dong Liu and Fatima Sheikh.

These findings should give any sensible Canadian pause. We must stop perpetually asserting the superficial slogans of Canadian pluralism that render genuine concerns to the periphery. There is no doubt that Canada is a particularly tolerant place, but past successes cannot allow us to become complacent in the face of humiliating statistics.

Employer discrimination likely lives in a subconscious level and presents itself through instinctive decisions within the immediate pressures of sifting through a plethora of potential candidates. To address this issue would be complicated. The statistics suggest something systemic and pervasive. The challenges of discrimination are too immense to be remedied by the typical calls for sensitivity or chants of pluralistic platitudes.

Torture and Dualism

Matthew Schmitz sees the torture debate as an opportunity to attack dualism:

The body is not property that can be disposed of however one wants. This Lockean view, that we are citizens who “have” bodies (instead of being citizens who are bodies) leads to a state that, just as it can seize property when it wants to build a highway, can torture a body when it wants to win a war. Maybe this means that we all deserve blame for torture to the extent that we buy into a shared cultural idea that undergirds many of the not-so-bad things we do, but is ultimately capable of buttressing brutality.

The philosophical ideals that legitimize dubious practices must be reevaluated in the wake of several crippling critiques. Any claim that the mind and body are separate entities is deeply flawed in light of the discoveries of modern neuroscience. Although Schmitz's torture-dualism link is somewhat tenuous, belief in the immaterial as a means to assuaging the guilt and responsibility of questionable practices is a deeply entrenched American practice. There is no doubt that men and woman in stripes seek vindication from something immaterial--a God or a flag. Furthermore, there is no doubt that men in power continue to exploit this belief of the immaterial to serve their own ends. I am troubled by those who feel vindicated -- even compelled -- by God or country to employ insidious means to reach questionable and uncertain ends. What makes this enterprise inevitably disastrous is that there is no way to gauge the legitimacy of claims with respect to the non-existent immaterial world. Any atrocity is possible when people can be manipulated by a concept where one can never, by definition, look to facts for answers.

Percentage of Afghanistan officials that recognize the right to not be tortured: 12%

About a year ago I wrote a rather grave critique for the Leaderpost regarding Canada's complicit approval of torture and abuse in Afghan prisons. Much to my surprise, the article was spotlighted by the Canadian Forces. The article featured a dark look into some of the most wretched conditions documented by human rights groups and Canadian diplomats:

Trapped in a futile struggle, our country would continue to complicitly surrender its prisoners and its ideals to a perverted labyrinth shrouded in a veil of secrecy and misinformation. Canadian officials would document cases of abuse in mysterious Afghan prisons, while our ministers would vehemently deny any such occurrence. Heavily censored documents would detail a corrections officer's plea for footwear suitable for traversing the "blood and fecal matter" that plagues the floors of Afghan prisons. Thirty men claimed to have been "beaten, starved, frozen and choked" after they were handed over to the NDD. Additional detainees would simply disappear, no multimillion-dollar lawsuit to appease them.

A year has passed and by all accounts (but the Canadian government's) Afghan jails continue the widespread use of torture. A new Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reports that fewer than 20% of Afghan officials even know of the legal rights of detainees:

The rights body's report, which surveyed 92 Afghan law-enforcement officials and 398 alleged victims of torture in detention, found that only 17.4 per cent of officials were aware of legal rights in Afghanistan affording the accused protection from torture. Only 12 per cent of those surveyed, who included prosecutors, police and court officials, recognized the rights of the accused as outlined in the Afghan constitution. Article 29 of the constitution prohibits torture and declares information obtained through it unusable.

Moreover, the pattern of gruesome instances seem to stem from a sharp philosophical divergence rather than a 'few bad apples':

Afghan officials have defended their practices, suggesting that foreigners fail to understand the grim reality of fighting the insurgency - an enemy that regularly tortures captives and uses hanging and beheading for executions.

The Afghan National Police, financially supported by Canadian, sees little problems with the use of torture. With only 12% of officials recognizing the rights of the accused, how could anyone imagine that Afghan detainees are being fairly treated? These jailers' explicate support for torture practices cripples any notion of plausible deniability for this government. The Canadian government must take full responsibility for knowingly sending their detainees to places where torture is widespread.

Sleeves are the new hands!

Swines are the harbinger of the end of civilization. We can only avoid the coming a-pork-alypse if we take the necessary measures to protect ourselves. This old Mercer Report video has some prudent suggestions on how to defend yourself from those murderous germs, and even an ominous forewarning of the coming swine flu:

Theatre in the Red Chamber

Margaret Wente quips about Harper's spurious Senate appointments:

So can't you find a Senate seat for me, too? If Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin can be senators, then surely there is room for me. Like them, I am a lifelong hack.

Seriously, you can't deny that I have what it takes to be a first-class senator. I am accustomed to being underworked and overpaid, and I am able to emit hot air on any subject on demand. Ask Duff. I've been on his show lots of times. He'll tell you I have glib and superficial opinions about everything, especially things I know nothing about.

This is very much the political reality in Canada. During a time when inventive political leadership could be most beneficial (the sky is indeed falling), theatrics and gamesmanship is the number one priority of our leaders. As long as Harper remains leader, the threat of his insidious attacks on the plurality of Canadian politics will continue to breed hostility, umbrage and vindictiveness on both sides of the aisle.

He started it! No Mr. Speaker, he started it. . .

Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister whose pathological need to destroy the opposition set in motion an unprecedented parliamentary crisis which resulted in prorogation (dissolving of parliament,) has continued to play his brand of incendiary power-politics. In an about-face, Harper has abandoned his promise of not stacking the Senate and pushing for Senate reform (subjecting Senators to elections) in favor of appointing 18 conservative senators. The new appointments, all party-friendly hacks (fundraisers, old members, even a talk-show host) are said to be a sign of compromise and party-building aimed at assuaging Harper's rather irritated but impotent party of yes-men.

Coral Goar on Harper's Cabinet pre-parliamentary fiasco:

The members of the Conservative caucus know better than to express an independent thought or opinion. Their job is to be compliant cheerleaders.

Bob Plamondon, a Conservative party expert, on Harper's approach after the fiasco that threatened to make the Harper Conservatives Canada's shortest minority government:

Mr. Harper has concluded that rallying the troops is important to his future as party leader. . . There is place for loyalty in politics and with this Prime Minister it's been in short supply.

Brian Lagh, from the same article:

Mr. Harper seems to have realized the need to make friends and appease critics at a
time when his reputation as a parliamentary strategist is in doubt.

As to whether Mr. Harper has offended the Western base of the party - many of whose members support Senate reform - at least one party worker said the disappointment will be balanced by the fact that the PM has finally recognized the party needs nurturing.

This political crisis and the unrepentant aftermath--Harper's lack of mea culpa for derailing our Government during the worst financial times since the great depression (making the economists who beg for swift action cringe)-- is emblematic of how political brinkmanship destroys the possibility of having worthwhile leadership. By initiating a crisis that threatens to destroy the opposition, the opposition was left to fight for their political lives with their pathetic coalition (a rather unholy alliance with separatists and socialists, although Conservative derision was a truly artificially inflated panic). One political pot-shot after another (the reality of contemporary scandal-ridden Canadian politics) consumes leaders into these petty political games rather than imaginative policy making--something we truly need during a time where our traditional definition of how an economy should be governed (or not governed) is very much in question.

Although on second thought, with the apparent tendency for Canadian policy to be rather similar to their Southern counterparts, I can't help but wonder if Canadians aren't just xeroxing Bush bills into Parliament--a task which would leave them much time for their wretched squabbling.