One More With Feeling: Yeah for the Supreme Court of Canada

Supreme Court: Omar Khadr should be treated as if he were sentenced as a juvenile

'Nuff said!

Update to blog post on May 11th, 2015: Boggles the mind

Omar Khadr should be declared adult offender, Ottawa to tell Supreme Court

Boggles the mind.

The Harper government just won't let it go. 

Boggles the mind, just boggles the mind!

Could we say that the Harper government has a hard-on for Khadr - way too much Viagra in their drinking water?

The Supreme Court of Canada has better things to do with its time. They have already given the government their response on cases against Khadr twice before. Do they really believe that it will be "third time lucky"?

Hope (or desperation) over experience. [So I really should get married a 3rd time? Not that that's relevant to the post, but ...]

I do not usually bring up the issue of wasting taxpayer money (too much of a rightwing rant about entitlements with which I, for the most part, don't agree), but the Harper government has spent $4.7 million on 15 court cases and lost every one.

See Conservatives spent more than $4.7 million fighting 15 losing court cases. They have already spent over a quarter of a million dollars on the previous 2 cases against Khadr and lost. How much are they going to waste this time?

This is bothering more than it would if I were not teaching the end of WW1, the Weimar Republic and the rise of the NSDAP this week and next week. The parallels bother me no end. 

Cumulative radicalization, I say, cumulative radicalization!

And people wonder why historians and classicists cry themselves to sleep at night!

Classical Mythology Too Triggering for Columbia Students

MY RANT: To echo the sentiments in the article.

Enough already. 

The world is full of triggers.

Learn to deal with them. 

Maybe students just shouldn't go to class until they have had the requisite years of therapy! 

If I had let "triggers" stop me from learning, I wouldn't have a PhD. 

One cannot deal with rape until one understands how embedded (and therefore, accepted) this symbolism is in our culture. 

Avoidance will never get you anywhere.

Most students haven't got a clue where anything comes from and are constantly re-inventing the wheel. 

I have to keep correcting basic mistakes about history, again and again and again.

They seem to think that the documentaries about history and the wikipedia pages that they read and the "history light" that they get tells them everything that they absolutely need to know. They will argue with me in class - until they go and actually get the facts from those boring tomes.

And they don't understand that there is more than one answer or solution to an historical question - and that doesn't make different answers right or wrong - only different interpretations (WELL, THAT IS WHAT WE HISTORIANS DO, ISN'T IT - ARGUE, ARGUE, ARGUE in a civilized manner, of course :-))

The more information, that is, primary source material, that we get, the more we understand about a period of time in history. That doesn't mean that past explanations were stupid or "wrong", they were the best past that people could come up with given the information (& worldview) that they had.

Goes for real life too.

On the other hand, I don't really have to worry about any of my students knowing more than I do - frankly, about anything!

Anybody for Doctor Who's time machine? If only .....................sigh................

This is an abomination in a western democracy

Ottawa considering hate charges against those who boycott Israel

"The government's intention was made clear in a response to inquiries from CBC News about statements by federal ministers of a "zero tolerance" approach to groups participating in a loose coalition called Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS), which was begun in 2006 at the request of Palestinian non-governmental organizations."

I could not believe this when I heard it on the news this morning. I was horrified. I am teaching a course on 20th century German history, and this sends chills down my spine. In my course, I am trying to get my students to understand how good people slowly walked into participating in one of the more horrific events in the history of the world.

First, my positions & I do realize that I live with a certain level of discombobulation on the issue:

1. I would never take part in BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction), the boycott of Israel. However, it worked with South Africa and apartheid - but only after supported by western governments. In the final analysis, my position would be "a pox on both their houses".  When I think of what is going on there right now, I weep for all those that are displaced by war and for all the dead. On the other hand, the historian in me selfishly thinks about all the artifacts, and past worlds that are being destroyed. For better and worse, the ancient middle east contains the founding blocks of western and Muslim civilizations.

2. I am in total disagreement with the church that I grew up in (the United Church of Canada) and its one-sided position on this issue. I wish that they could focus more on forcing a solution rather than blaming one side more than the other. There is plenty of blame to go around, believe me. 

3. I do not support the building of Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

4. The situation is so f!@#$ing complicated. All parties need to be held to account, and that includes the west who set up this appalling situation in the first place. I cannot even begin to write about the historical mess that brought us here. I am only teaching one small part of that mess. 

5. Anti-semitism is a construct of Christianity. This is an unpopular position to take, but nevertheless, it is true, and, as such, those societies that are based on the Christian mythologies need to take ownership of the part that they have played in creating this mess. Christian anti-semitism has now morphed into a bizarre form of secular anti-semitism. The Jews are to blame for everything (for god's sake, even the American Indian Movement and some Canadian First Nations peoples jumped on the anti-semitic bandwagon - for example, somewhere on the AIM website is a lecture that smacks of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - if it has not been pulled down, go look for it. As one of  my students said, "The poor Jews, they can't cut a break!")

6. I support the right of Israel to exist. My personal history does not allow me to do otherwise. I do not support the Fundamentalist/evangelical support of Israel - it is, in its own way, blatantly antisemitic. One day I will write about my trip to Israel with a bunch of fundamentalists (don't ask - just to say, that my mother really didn't know what she was getting us into), and (to keep it simple) its up front - "so sad that the Jews don't really belong on this land because they aren't saved, etc., and won't be there at the rapture" crap.

Books to read (with links to Amazon site):
Robert R. Wistrich's A Lethal Obsession
John G. Gager's The Origins of Anti-Semitism
William Nicholls' Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate 
William F. Buckley, Jr.'s In Search of Anti-Semitism

HOWEVER:

1. Boycotting the state of Israel is an acceptable method of protest. We live in a democracy and we can choose to boycott who/what/where we will. I joined a general boycott of Thailand over its lack of child sexual abuse legislation. At a personal level, I no longer watch Woody Allen films - I can't stomach them. The  same goes for Michael Jackson's music - no matter how good it is, I just can't stomach it. I don't expect anyone else to think the way that I do; I don't believe that those who think differently are "evil".

2. The state of Israel just voted in Netanyahu with enough seats to create a government with the extreme right. So much for a peace settlement. "Dead to me, they are dead to me" was my immediate response. (As I said, discombobulation)

And the point that takes us right back to the beginning of this post:

3. The Harper government is beginning to do to the Muslims, what the Germans did to the Jews. This government is turning the Muslims in Canada into scapegoats, creating a fear scenario that could easily morph into something far more sinister. Just look at their position on Omar Khadr. It is a slippery slope as history tells us. There is, in all humans it seems, an unease about the "other", that is, those who don't look like us, don't think like us, don't believe like us. The NSDAP tapped into that in Germany; and Harper is certainly trying to tap into that in the Canada. Is it "needless to say", that Europe and the United States is falling into that trap as well. It is a thin line that they are all walking.

4. In part, this is a political move on the part of the Harper government to appeal to its fundamentalist Christian right base. (Although I do believe that there are other personal motivations by members at play) The religious justification for this one-sided extreme support of Israel is based in a particular millennial interpretation of  "the end". Some of them believe that all the Jews will convert - thus heralding the end; some of them believe that the final battle between good and evil will be fought on the fields of Megiddo (as my mother said on that trip to Israel - "you don't really believe that" - out loud, on the bus - I had to shush her with the "yes, Mom, they really do").


As Bonhoeffer told us: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”  There is also the unattributed adage: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Those who are boycotting Israel are doing something in the face of what they see as evil. That I find their position at times extremely simplistic and problematic is true. But people like to take simple black and white positions - demonizing the other is so easy. Something has to give in the Middle East - the backlash against modernity will not go on forever - the violence and cruelty of the medieval period of western European Christian society can be considered somewhat analogous to what is going on in the "middle east". Of course, that is for next semester's history course. 

Adam O'Hehir wrote it: now I don't have to

But then again I will have lots of other stuff to say

The Ghomeshi Syndrome; Delusional Creeps from Clarence Thomas to Gamergate.

One paragraph near the beginning of the article:

"There’s something sad and troubling to be found just below the surface of this case, which has implications far beyond the career meltdown of a public-radio talking head. Ghomeshi appears to be one of those men — a distressingly large number of men, it seems – who are unable or unwilling to pick up basic social cues from women about sexual and dating behavior (among other things). They seem to view women as a mysterious alien species who do not say what they mean or mean what they say, and they stumble far too easily into paranoid stereotypes about bitch-covens of “jilted exes” and ball-slicing feminists. Encountering this pattern of behavior in a much-admired and good-looking media celebrity, who honestly should have had no trouble finding consenting partners for whatever level of kinky sex he wanted, offers us a chance to come to grips with how widespread it is. (As Dan Savage has reported, at least one of Ghomeshi’s former lovers says the BDSM activities were fully consensual in her case – but that seems to have been pure luck.)"

And they say that there is no misogyny - tell us about it Mother Jones

Today is about Gamergate or How Science Explains #Gamergate

Tells us about it, Mother Jones

My son is part of gamecritics.com (http://gamecritics.com/about-us) whose members have all been doxxed. The slacker in my son meant that his information is out of date. The horrendous and vicious e-mails and comments are at the least unsettling, at the worst, criminal. If someone cares to find these people and put them behind bars the sooner, the better. The subtext for putting all this information out there is "we know where you live". As anyone who has been stalked knows, it can be terrifying.

This goes to the point - the viciousness has nothing to do with "ethics in video journalism" if gamecritics.com is part of the attack, and is unacceptable in any event, for any other site. The GameCritics reviewers are all volunteer. They use an ad service and have some ads from software companies on their site (ancestry.com, american express are most recent ones that I have seen). For example, they do not take the luscious Microsoft packages to review games (in fact they were boycotted by Microsoft for years because of bad reviews). They are probably the MOST ethical video review site on the web. Full disclosure on games is on every review (in the instance at hand, whether they were sent the games free, whether they bought them themselves, etc.). Go visit the site & see for yourselves.

Some reviewers have taken games to task for their misogyny. That is probably the real reason for the attack. It has nothing to do with "ethics in journalism". That is just an excuse for a bunch of angry, disturbed people to cyber-stalk.

Well, at least it's not Jian again . However, the issue of vicious attacks on women is the same. Whether we like it or not, there is something deeply wrong in a society that fosters and protects (mostly) men who think that they have a right to abuse and attack women (real or avatars), and those who would defend women and their right to be fairly treated.

So...... Is the CBC actually trying to lose its case?

Or is it trying to gauge the opinion of its listeners or increase its listeners' outrage so that the CBC can say that people wouldn't stand for this behaviour and thus, it was reasonable to fire Gomeshi and it will win the case?

It's hard to tell.

This morning I wrote a post called "Shame on As It Happens". I have just finished streaming the interview with Lucy DeCoutere on The Current (http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2014/10/30/from-smooching-to-smacking-there-was-no-build-up---actor-lucy-decoutere-speaks-out/). It was not as bad as the As It Happens interview but ....

I must say that I am puzzled. This woman sounds as if she is just learning that she should have been more upset 11 years ago than she was. No wonder Jian thinks that he always had consent. Clearly, he didn't in this case. However, she didn't call him on the violence; she didn't bring it up; and she dated him more than once after it occurred. The cynic in me wonders if she thought that this might be a good career move now, because she clearly states that it wouldn't have been a good career move to have said anything previously (& she is probably right about that).

Women need to take some responsibility in all of this. For over ten years, this man has thought that what he was doing was just "hunky-dory" and it doesn't appear that either the women involved, or the men who were his friends said anything to dissuade him of that fact. That doesn't make his behaviour morally defensible, but if we as women don't want to stand up and be willing to be counted, why are we surprised when there are so many more victims. These are not children, all of them are grown women and were when the assaults occurred. Is it ridiculous of me to think that, at some point, at least some of these women should have done something more than just walking away & metaphorically shrugging their shoulders? They can't all have been so traumatized that they couldn't act. But then, they belong to the "post-feminist" generation - the ones that don't need its insights.

They also all seem to believe the propaganda that the police wouldn't have done anything. This is not the seventies or the eighties. There are female police officers and the male police officers who are in domestic violence and sexual assault units who are well trained and sympathetic. Social media (and that includes TV and radio) only tells its audience about the bad ones. The police and the justice system can do nothing at all if no one comes forward. From my experience, in cases of harassment and potential violence, for example, even when they can't arrest someone, they can scare the hell out of them. Real life is not a TV show.

"Women done got themselves some education". They don't seem to have gotten any smarter.

Shame on "As It Happens"

I am writing this because 1) there is nowhere to comment on the As It Happens website or their Facebook page; 2) I am teaching a Canadian Women's History course & need to get this off my chest before this afternoon; 3) I am so disappointed in this news program & the CBC; 4) I don't even want to listen to The Current this morning; and 5) this whole thing is bothering me more than I would like to admit.

This is where the women's movement and the sexual revolution and social media world has taken us?

"As It Happens" is a CBC news show that is on in Canada 5 nights a week varying from 1 hour to 1 & 1/2 hours every weekday  night. I was one of those faithful listeners ever since it began in the 70s - even when we were overseas. It is a news and current affairs show. Over the last few years, I have listened to it less and less - not consciously, but because it just didn't seem worth listening to anymore (unlike The Current, which I will often stream if I miss it). We currently have a sex scandal going on across the country involving the man who hosted & has been fired from the show that he created called Q, which was (is?) an extremely popular morning radio Cultural Show. It has created a social media storm in Canada and the United States - even Salon & Jezebel have weighed in.

It is an unpleasant, murky case involving BDSM and issues of consent. Needless to say, perhaps, but social media has revolved around who is telling the truth. The women say he hit & beat them without consent, he says that he never hit a woman without consent.

So many people on my Facebook page were horribly disappointed & one was even "heartbroken" that this man could do such a thing. Others were outraged. The dangers of putting anyone on a pedestal.

Before I go on, a couple of points:

I have listened to the show on & off, depending on who was on and what I was doing. Can't say that I was a fan. And like with Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and others, all previously listened to shows will have the YUK factor - which is too bad because, ironically, there was a very interesting "Q debate" on the issue of rape culture back in March 24, 2014 (http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2014/03/24/rape-culture-debate/).

I have weighed in on Facebook (on my own status, which is public) & as a commenter on other pages, saying that we need to wait - "it will all come out in the wash". If Gomeshi is guilty of assault & battery & rape, then this needs to be in the courts, not social media, & he needs to be sent to jail. However, not one of the accusers has filed a complaint with the police. The reasons "why not" are part of the social media storm.

Shame on "As It Happens" and the CBC for letting it air: 

Listen to the interview in question at: http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/features/2014/10/29/jian/  

This interview brings up all the murky issues around our attitudes towards women, the patriarchy, misogyny, sexuality, women's sense of self worth & most disturbingly, the issue of consent. The woman came forward on the condition of anonymity, which I understand. However, that will not make her immune to the fallout.

The quick story is that she went out with Gomeshi the first time and he yanked her head back & pulled her hair in the car at the end of the "date". Then she went out with him again - to his apartment this time - where he hit her and started to choke her. She began to cry, he stopped and said that it was late and she should leave. She was distraught and spent the rest of the night with a girlfriend crying her heart out.

What "As It Happens" and Carol Off don't seem to get, is that this interview gives Gomeshi - however distasteful the scenario - 1. the right to claim that he thought that he had consent (whether or not he did is up to the courts - see the addendum) & 2. when he realized that he had misread the situation, he stopped immediately. A case of the law of unintended consequences?????

Carol Off did ask her why she went out with him after the first time. The answer indicates that this has haunted her even though it all happened over 10 years ago. Part of her answer is that he was charming and "wow, my father would really like you", and she didn't really know how to think about it. She said that "we didn't discuss it" - "why didn't he ask me" & actually gave a scenario about how the conversation should have gone (what she would have considered consent), "it came out of nowhere".

The problem is that this is what we hear women say again and again. The warning sign was in the first violent act. She should never have gone out with him again. However, this is what women do. We excuse and excuse violent behaviour from men.

Did second wave feminism accomplish nothing????

My part of the story or why was I so upset?

This probably gets me to the point that has been bothering me ever since I heard the interview - took me a long time to get to sleep last night. No man ever hit me except my father, and I would have walked and never given any man who did (we could say "without consent") a second chance. However, it was violence that sent me on the road to leaving both my husbands. There were lots of other reasons in the mix, but these incidents were catalysts. One kicked our son for no reason; the other was so angry he almost killed his father and took a door off of its hinges in our house. In the one case, I broke up the marriage within 6 weeks; the other took longer for various reasons. Both men were extremely frustrated and unhappy at the time when they exhibited their violence.

While I have always understood that those incidents played a role in the breakup of the marriages, I don't think that I realized until this morning and as I am writing this post, just how important these were in my decision making. Both husbands scared the hell out of me - something that has, for years, been difficult to acknowledge. In both cases, I had to get the children away from these men. I have often voiced the fact that I could not change my husbands, but I could not let my sons grow up thinking that this violence and the way that they treated me was acceptable behaviour. If I stayed, I would have been implicitly, if not explicitly, condoning behaviour that I had years ago deemed completely unacceptable. My father never hit my mother, only his children.

We learn about relationships from our parents and those around us. What we learn is different in every case. My sisters and I all learned different complicated things from our childhoods, but  none of us ever allowed physical abuse to happen to our children (as far as we know, of course - but on this issue we were vigilant).

We still have a long, long way to go if we expect to end violence (whatever kind) in our society. Some days, I feel like we have gone nowhere on this issue. I can only go back to Alice Miller's For Your Own Good: The Hidden Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing Practices. If only the world would take it seriously.

An Addendum

Canadian law is very difficult in the area of the law and rough sex. See the following article, from which I have excerpted the relevant paragraph here (Ms. Leiper is a lawyer):

Nor is express consent at the outset of any sexual activity a complete answer for an alleged criminal assault. Ms. Leiper said certain provisions in the Criminal Code, such as sections 273.1 and 265, describe situations in which consent cannot be properly given. For example, consent is not obtained if the person engages in activity because the other person has taken advantage of a position of authority or trust. Consent is not obtained in law where it is given as a result of threats, fear of force, fraud or actual application of force. Also, consent in sexual cases must be ongoing. A person must be able to revoke consent, by words or conduct, even if initially he or she did consent to sexual activity at the outset. And if a complainant is incapable of expressing consent, the consent is gone.

Reflections on Ottawa's 22/10/14 "Terrorist Attack"

We have been here before.

I lived in Montreal in 69-70. A bomb went off down the block from my apartment building. The military roamed the streets of Montreal when the police went on strike. The bank where I worked closed. Sir George Williams (now Concordia) shut down, so my class was cancelled,

I was in Ottawa when the War Measures Act went into effect and the hysteria was ridiculous. I remember sitting with a girlfriend in a bar talking about how "stupid" the Act was (& unnecessary). She was freaking out because we could be "arrested" or something because of my non-supportive position. We all should have some idea about the re-evalution of the "War Measures Act" that has taken place over the last 5 decades. Hysteria helps no one & potentially damages many.

Has no one seen the similarities with the Montreal Massacre? Seems we can go crazy when it's soldiers & Parliament; a targeted attack on women - we still debate whether it says anything about our society (think: "powerful mothers"; "patriarchal fathers"). I just want the implications to be on the record. I was teaching when the Montreal Massacre occurred & found out about it after I got home. I made an extensive prediction about what we would find out about the gunman (family background, state of mind, etc.) - I was dead on (I didn't have the nickname "Sibyl" as in the Roman Sibyls for no reason). The roots of violence begin in the home. If someone wants to understand this, just read Alice Miller's "For Your Own Good: The Hidden Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing Practices". This book is as "a propos" today as it was when written.

It is easy to blame "radicalization" or fundamentalist Islam for this man's behaviour - whatever the flavour of the day. This is not the problem. Someone who is angry, who believes that they have no where to turn will find something "to believe in". What this man did is no different from Columbine, the Texas Observatory, the Oklahoma City bombing, and unlike the Air India attack, which was a planned organized terror attack. Do I need to even say that making guns harder to get  might help? However, even that is not the solution.

You cannot stop someone from doing something like this if they are motivated enough, particularly if they are individuals. There is no conspiracy to uncover - no leaks. I may be wrong, but I wouldn't bet against myself. We don't have the resources to follow people 24/7 & it is extremely hard to target which ones will actually move from speech to action.

 I wish the world was different. I wish that we didn't have to go through this again and again. The line is "So it was, so it is & apparently, so it ever shall be." Seems societies, the people who run them, and the people who live in them never really learn.

Triggers: Ray Donovan: Season 2.7

I wrote that I was going to review Ray Donovan episodes after season 1 was finished. Well I didn't get around to it. After watching the second season to episode 7 (binge watching), I am beginning to wonder whether that was a deliberate avoidance.

Season 2:7 was full of triggers for me. The impact wasn't all immediate but the biggest "gotcha" was near the end when Ray stands in the middle of the room staring at his wife and says "Conor wanted the family; Conor got a family", snort-smiles, shrugs and walks away (at 46:45). Interestingly enough, I remembered it as "I wanted the family, I got the family." What is really boils down is that we keep looking for some kind of stability in the structures around us - even when we watch it crumbling. Ray tries to run, tries so hard to  make it right in all the wrong ways. The fights, the screaming, the drinking, the disintegration, the obliviousness - all because we can't change the past. The old truism "you can run, but you can't hide", it will come and bite you in the ass is borne out again and again.

My mother ran, my father took care of her. I ran, nobody took care of me, I just ended up in so many ways like Ray, trying to create stability, trying to take care of everyone and everything, and frankly, at times, not doing a very good job of it. This is not a pity comment, but a reflection comment. I think that I did better in many ways than my mother did (and certainly better than Ray - LOL). But watching this episode, brought back so many of the fights (with my original family, my marriages, my children). There were so many of the moments when one was incapable of doing anything but fight because there was no other release. Then the "I'm sorries" but nothing ever really changed. Then eventually, the complete sense of utter defeat. Things only seemed to change with the complete destruction of a world, sometimes forces from the outside, sometimes from within. Then one started all over again.

If one wonders whether or not this show is getting it right, I would say that, at least the personal aspect is certainly true to the reality of the intergenerational impact of childhood sexual abuse. The family dynamics of generations of sexual abuse, whether acknowledged or not, are being played out in this series. It is gut-wrenching and soul-destroying; it leaves no one undamaged.

I will get to the entire series, episode by episode, In the meantime, I boogie to "Walk this Way" and go find Aerosmith's Pump.

Sam Harris said it so that I don't have to.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-dont-i-criticize-israel

There are  further issues for some other time!