Category: Best

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The Unjust and Jian Ghomeshi (I)

The first lie is that anyone who dares to question the almost hysterical rush to pile on Jian Ghomeshi, is therefore defending Jian Ghomeshi, even when what is being criticized is the distasteful spectacle of the media hyping a particular issue beyond all reason and rationality. But hey, Ebola might be over soon: we need to whip up something to keep the public reading.

On Ghomeshi’s Actual Trial

I have now read and heard three specific commentators who insist that what this means for our justice system is that women are always telling the truth in these matters and must always be believed. This very morning on the CBC, one of their panelists in a discussion of why women are so reluctant to bring charges against a man who assaults her, asserted that the justice system must be changed so that the victim does not have any burden of proof.

The accused is guilty until proven innocent.

This is a repulsive, stupid, deeply offensive idea.

Joel Rubinoff in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record raised the issue of why, to his credulous incredulity, would anyone make up something so humiliating? So they must be telling the truth. I can’t believe that anyone, in 2014, still believes this. In first place, why would the woman be humiliated? Some guy was a jerk and you don’t want to say anything because it makes you feel humiliated? Is it awful to humiliate someone? It is awful to engage in the public shaming of someone? Is it different?

He couldn’t have invested the slightest effort in checking into his theory: has any woman ever lied about being sexually assaulted?

How wickedly casual this upending of the foundations of our justice system slips into the conversation. It should not be countenanced. It is outrageously, fundamentally, horribly wrong.

Oh, they say, but it makes it so difficult to punish people. It should be difficult. History is loaded to the brim with governments and authorities and mobs who made it easier to arrest and imprison people. It has taken hundreds of years and millions of lives to establish the principle that no one may be imprisoned unless it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he or she has committed a crime.  Be it noted that the U.S., in the case of black suspects and white juries, regularly dispenses with this rule.

The last reason anyone should contemplate sacrificing that principle is this media frenzy piling on one particularly distasteful individual. The second last reason might be because of one shooting in Ottawa.

It’s also something of amusing paradox that, while insisting that women are never believed, virtually everyone in the media believes them. They all go on and on about how Jian Ghomeshi is a monster who needs to be locked up because, as Elizabeth May says, you should “always believe the women” (unless you’re a 15-year-old pimp from Ottawa). Is there even a single pundit out there who does not believe the women? (Haven’t you even read “To Kill a Mockingbird”?) Yet, the blather from the CBC and Toronto Star and even the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, goes on and on about how our society constantly excuses male aggression and abuse and ridicules the victim. Who? Who is excusing it? I’m sure there are some marginal tabloids and perhaps Fox News, but nobody serious is defending Ghomeshi.

A national radio program is raising the allegations against Ghomeshi and treating all of them as fact and simultaneously complaining bitterly that nobody ever believes the women and that that should be fixed by simply ordaining that the women who charge men with bad behaviour should always automatically be believed, as if there is not the slightest evidence that any woman ever lied about what a man did to her.

It even made it’s way to the Ontario Legislature where, long, long before any trial or investigation, the NDP asserts that this proves that the government needs to do more to prevent workplace sexual harassment.

Like what? Make it “more illegal”?

The Unjust and Jian Ghomeshi Part II

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Rohypnol

I am a bit surprised the poll did not ask students if they had ever had a drink spiked with the date-rape drug, Rohypnol (also known as flunitrazepam). If you are interested in facts, a study in the UK examined 120 claimed cases of use of “date-rape” drugs: not a single instance survived scrutiny.

I repeat: not one survived scrutiny.

The San Diego Medical Examiner’s office also looked into the issue– again, using real science– and found some evidence of possible flunitrazepam in about 1% of the alleged incidents. (Keep in mind that Rohypnol is sometimes– often– used intentionally, recreationally by people.)

Obviously, the investigators never watched Oprah or 20/20, or any of the other numerous programs on their mission of frightening the uninformed.

The University of Illinois, incidentally, casually asserts that date rape drugs are being used “at an increasing rate”. Really? And how do they know this? What previous studies are they comparing current studies to? What was the rate ten years ago, or fifteen years ago? They further assert that it is “often” brought back from Europe (where it can be prescribed as a sleep aid) by students.

I think I know where they got these conclusions from. They asked people their impressions. Do you think the use of date-rape drugs is going up or down? What do you think? Give us your honest opinion.

Do a search on the question of “does Rohypnol leave any traces” and you will find that a lot of websites use exactly the same text to say it does not. Look for the phrase:  “is colorless, odorless, and tasteless and dissolves without leaving any traces”.  They are all republishing information from same misinformed source.

It is not truthful. First of all, since about 10 years ago, the manufacturer, Roche, has made the tablets “less dispersible”. It doesn’t dissolve cleanly quickly, and colors the liquid in which it is mixed.

More importantly, Rohypnol can be detected in the urine of a person who ingested it for up to 60 hours afterwards. In the situation in which a woman suspects she has been secretly drugged and raped, she has at least two days to report it and have her urine tested for the unlikely possibility she really has been drugged.

But then, Rohypnol is supposed to cause amnesia: the victim is supposed to lose her memory of the assault, and even time before the assault. Then how would she know? That’s problematic, especially since alcohol has a similar effect. And that’s why when you do see cases of suspicion of the date-rape drug, victims report that they were bruised or sore in the groin area, and that’s what made them suspicious. They understand the problem: how did they know?

Even more problematic: many of the alleged symptoms of the drug are very, very similar to symptoms of excessive alcohol consumption. Would there be a temptation for a woman in this situation to under-state the amount of alcohol she has consumed?

Have you ever understated the amount of alcohol you have consumed?

The disturbing part of this– something which should be very disturbing to women who are genuinely concerned about sexual assault– is the number of women who have claimed to have been drugged and then raped. A charge of rape can often boil down to he said/she said arguments, and feminists urge us to always believe the woman, but if a woman is tested within 60 hours, it is possible to prove, scientifically, whether or not she was drugged. But if it can be proven that most of the claims of having been drugged and raped are false– at least, insofar as the drug part goes– a rational person might consider whether there’s something going on here that needs to be acknowledged by the legal system, by society, and by feminists.

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Campus Duplicity

Dr. Foubert said he considered many of those responses a form of “excusing the perpetrator and blaming the victim,” and was very concerned about it. NY Times, 2014-10-28

MIT’s Study of Sexual Assault

The Real Rohypnol

I could not imagine a more emblematic example of how duplicitous this issue has become than the quote above: Dr. Foubert, responding to details in the MIT study that show that “large numbers” of undergraduates agreed with statements suggesting that the blame for sexual assault “did not always rest exclusively with the aggressor”, says, oh, we can ignore that data. Just pay attention to the results I like.

The results seem to imply that this university campus is just rife with monstrous men committing sexual assault everywhere with near impunity (only 5% of the victims ever report it).

Let’s start with the fact that only 35% of the student body completed the questionnaire. We don’t need to assume that a higher majority of victims than non-victims might be willing to take the time to complete the questionnaire, skewering the results, because it is obvious that that possibility exists. Dr. Foubert trusts this minority when they assert that they have been victims of unwanted sexual conduct, and then heaps contempt on the same minority when “two-thirds agreed that ‘rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved'”.

This is called “cherry-picking” your data. You take the results that support your ideological commitment, attribute fabulous reliability to this data, and then ignore the same “reliable” results that don’t.

Foubert is “concerned” about the fact that many of the supposed victims feel they might be co-responsible for the sexual activity that took place. As, perhaps, in “I guess I shouldn’t have gone to the bedroom with him while I was drunk and my friends were urging me not to”. No no– women must not even be permitted to think that that would be unwise.

In other words, we need to train these women to see things the way we want them to see them, instead of how they actually see them, without having been programmed.

Foubert wants everyone to report every unwanted sexual advance to the campus police and the authorities. He asks the students who did not report these assaults, why they didn’t: “more than half” didn’t think it was serious enough. Perhaps some did not think it worth the trouble (heresy!). Some, possibly, didn’t want to ruin somebody’s life over an incident they feel they can handle.

A few years ago, two children were killed in a car accident on the 401 highway. The driver of a transport truck was clearly at fault. Yet the parents of the children refused to demand “justice”, or severe punishment. They felt that the driver would benefit more from their compassion and forgiveness than from a stern prison sentence. Dr. Foubert would undoubtedly feel a need to insist that these parents demand a pound of flesh. He would be “concerned” that they don’t understand what needs to be done in that situation. He would argue that other parents of children killed in at-fault accidents have been undermined.

Perhaps some of the girls filling out his survey just don’t believe there is a lot to be gained by getting back at someone. Is it really all that satisfying? Yes, yes, we will conduct the charade of “trying to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else”, and we know the necessity of that cover, because otherwise, you know, it looks like revenge.

Oh my, no, — that cannot be permitted. Dr. Foubert will undoubtedly embark on a vigorous program of re-education to correct this deficiency. Everything is serious. Everything is assault, if you don’t have an explicit “affirmative consent” (which is “consent consent”, and will shortly be replaced with something like “affirmative positive consent”, or “consent consent consent”, until the authorities realize that even more gravity is required.

 

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Indentured Students

Did you know that the Government of Germany pays the full cost of post-secondary education for all of its students? Even for American students who speak German?

The student loans program  needs to be seen in a completely different light. Here we are now recruiting even younger people with even less knowledge or understanding of credit and pushing them to lock themselves into major debts so that immediately upon leaving college or university they begin making their perpetual payments to the banks.

The banks don’t care about he principal. They don’t need the principal. What they need and want is your perpetual payments to them, and you must not be allowed to escape until you are very old.

That’s when the medical bills kick in…

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Shill Shun

“I was regularly called a shill for the food industry”. Elizabeth Whelan, in NY Times Sep 18, 2014.

Why is this so inevitable? From the inside, it must look like something no one will really notice or pay attention to. Or maybe you just don’t care. Or maybe you are right: no one thinks that just because you take money from the industry that benefits from your “science” you would alter your findings.

And Elizabeth Whelan set out to establish a national organization that would battle what she called “junk science” and excessive government regulation protecting us from chemicals and substances which, she believed, were of marginal risk.

Why oh why oh why did she not resist the temptation? I thought there might be something to her point of view. I thought, it is likely that government bureaucrats would over-react to preliminary test results. It is possible that banning one substance will only increase different risks from the alternatives. I thought, let me read more.

And then, inevitably, it is discovered that the industry, delighted with her point of view, began to fund her organization.

And she accepted the money.

Among other things, American Council on Science and Health has endorsed saccharine, smokeless tobacco, pcbs, and fracking. She ridiculed Michael Bloomberg’s drive to ban sales of huge soft drinks in New York City.

Now, if I had been one of the corporations, I would have kept as far away from her organization as possible. I might even have attacked her for being too cautious, too reticent. I would have urged my fellow corporate buccaneers to lay off, stay back, restrain yourselves– because the minute a person like me finds out that Elizabeth Whelan is paid by the industry that benefits from her activism, her research loses all of it’s value and credibility.

Now, I shouldn’t have to respond to this hypothetical argument from the conservatives: activists from the other side also benefit from their cause– they have nice, paying jobs, junkets, expenses, and so on. But that is like saying that any married woman is the same as a whore because she offers sex to the man who feeds her and keeps her. It is not even remotely the same thing. The “benefit” corporations receive from Elizabeth Whelan’s advocacy is increased material profit for a small number of shareholders and owners. The benefit received by those who support Greenpeace is a healthier, more beautiful world for everyone– not just themselves.

***

And I guess Dalton McGinty just couldn’t resist either, signing up with a company that makes software for schools– which it sells to the provincial government. I agree with the NDP on this one: MP’s should have to wait five years after retirement before they can take jobs like this. But I think it should be 10.

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The Orwellian School

High schooler Blake Robbins filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against his school, alleging that the Lower Merion School District had taken hundreds of secret photos of him over a two-week period. His family discovered this when a teacher accused Robbins of dealing drugs based on one of the photos.  Forbes (see link).

My first question is, does this school district teach George Orwell’s “1984”?  What do they teach about it?  What do they tell students about sick, totalitarian, repressive, intrusive, voyeuristic minds that have nothing but contempt for the privacy rights of any individual?

How the hell does this not result in criminal action?  Because the school district’s asserted intent was “good”?   How the hell does this not result in a police investigation in which it is determined which individual employee or group of employees at the school board decided to secretly spy on their own students, in their bedrooms, and retain the obtained images.  How the hell did these people not get arrested?

A student named Blake Robbins was photographed “dealing drugs”.  He says he was sharing candies, not pills, and the police never charged him, but Mr. Robbins wondered why the police ever thought he was dealing drugs.  Well, they had a photo, which the school district had given them, showing Mr. Robbins “dealing”.

The school denied any active spying, saying that security software activated for laptops suspected of being stolen kicked in automatically, and took photos every 15 minutes. That defense, while reasonable, was made shaky by the school’s possession of over 56,000 Webcam shots.   Forbes (see link below).

Forbes points out that the school district’s biggest mistake was not telling the students that the school district would be spying on them and taking photos of them in their bedrooms.    Forbes says, “if they had, they likely would not have gotten into so much legal trouble of the civil variety”, while pointing out, again, that there was no criminal charges filed.  The prosecutors “declined” to press charges.

You would think the school district had shot some people with a licensed gun: recklessly, with negligence, or in sheer stupidity– it doesn’t matter: they would be immune because Americans believe that of all the things in the world you could be liable for in terms of causing death, destruction, or mayhem, one of them is not ever going to be a gun.

Robbins successfully sued the school board.  He won $600,000.  Then his lawyer took $425,000 of that– the cost of seeing justice done.

How the hell, was this lawyer not also arrested?

The Forbes Article

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The Discovery of Consciousness

A BREAKTHROUGH by a talented University of Huddersfield student has shown for the first time that people with psychopathic tendencies who have high IQs can mask their symptoms by manipulating tests designed to reveal their personalities. It raises the possibility that large numbers of ruthless risk-takers are able to conceal their level of psychopathy as they rise to key managerial posts.   University of Huddersfield Academic Journal

Wow. Shocking. So this “talented” student has discovered consciousness. This is a “breakthrough”.

I assume these tests were normally conducted by employers to evaluate employees and judge how suitable they might be for senior level positions. Managers. Leaders. Supervisors.

What Carolyn Bate did was apply these tests to a number of students. First she measured their IQs. Then she had them answer a number of questions the answers to which will help assess whether the person is capable of empathy or other normal feelings of compassion or kindness. After collecting this information, Carolyn had the subjects go through a different test utilizing Galvanic Skin Response– a lie-detector, really– to measure responses to a series of pictures which are intended to evoke feelings of empathy and compassion.

Carolyn found that the GSR responses among her participants were much as she would have predicted – except for the fact that it was only those with lower levels of intelligence who displayed the expected levels of excitement.

In other words, smart people were able to fool the lie-detector. I mean, the Galvanic Skin Response machine. They were able to fake the right emotional responses.

Like Generals and politicians and hedge-fund managers and brokers and bankers and investors and General Motors executives and arms manufacturers and football players and so on and on and on.

This kind of muddies the issue. Do organizations use the Galvanic Skin Response machine to test their employees?

Can it be that most psychology students, until now, have assumed that people filling out their questionnaires simply responded to their queries with uninhibited instinctive honesty?

Oh woeful day! Now they will have to go back over all of their studies and begin to account for the fact that people might have understood what those questions were about and how their responses might be interpreted and whether or not they like those interpretations and whether or not they really like the feeling of revealing their true thoughts to a stranger, even if it’s all supposed to be anonymous and private.

But Carolyn misses the biggest point of all: how many corporations would not, in fact, leap at the chance to hire a true psycho who was capable of concealing his complete lack of empathy for customers, investors, civilians, and reporters?

Is “Huddersfield” a real name?

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Robin Williams

Robin Williams was a brilliant standup comedian, a master of improvisation, and an exceptional mimic. He became very famous for his brilliant improvisations– precisely the reason why it became impossible for him to make a truly great film. His talent was not the talent that is useful to a director or writer when creating a film. He made films because Hollywood makes films with celebrities, not actors.

As an actor, I always thought he was less than average, confusing restraint and modulation for character. Hollywood knew what to do with him– in the perverse way Hollywood deals with all original talents: take out all the guts, add some heart-warming dreck, and make the audience feel sophisticated. Make him a saintly, wise, lovable psychiatrist, only barely more believable than Liv Tyler in “Reign Over Me”, who devotes all of his waking hours to a single disturbed math whiz and provides miraculous cures that no one in the real world has ever experienced. Dress him as a woman and set his fake breasts on fire in the preposterous and schmaltzy “Mrs. Doubtfire”: a sure Hollywood winner because our hero is funny and wicked and naughty AND– he loves his family! This was a conceit so fantastical that it took hours and hours of the best make-up crew in Hollywood to make it even remotely not ridiculous. Set him up against cardboard cutout stereo-typed villains — in most of his films, but most egregiously in “Patch Adams”– so the audience feels wonderful about being on the side of people they can’t stand in real life. His roles were emasculated, neutered, homogenized, cleaned up and packaged for mass audiences.

But I would have liked to see him live as Estragon in “Waiting for Godot” (with Steve Martin as Vladimir). But even there, at least one reviewer was ambivalent about Williams’ “stage antics”. (Steve Martin, in the same production, was also dissed by the reviewer, for blending too far into the background, a phenomenon I have noted, in which great comic talents believe that by not being antic they are actually “acting” and creating a character.

Amid all the drivel that always rises to the top upon the death of a popular entertainer, the most ridiculous is that, besides being a great comic, he was also a great actor: he was not. I think people were so impressed by the contrast between his drawn-in, restrained, sedated performances an actor, especially in “One Hour Photo”, that they confused the absence of character expression with the presence of talent.

Williams’ talents were far more suited to secondary characters, dissolute friends, unfaithful husbands, writers and artists, drunks, and bums. So “The Fisher King” was an ideal platform for him– except, they couldn’t stand to have him play a real homeless psycho, so they eliminated all the real-life characteristics of homeless people– the things that make them a real problem to deal with– and sweetened him up and cleaned him up so he was adorable and safe, and thereby obviated the entire point of the movie. The only example of Hollywood doing this worse is “Reign Over Me”– which, it must be admitted, was way more repulsive.

Of all of them– and some were very, very awful– “The Dead Poets Society” pissed me off the most because it was a calculated pitch to audiences who think they have better taste than most people because they will go to a movie with the word “poet” in the title and features scattered readings of one or two lines from poets who are famous for being poets (but nobody too obscure, please, or my friends won’t be as impressed), but who could never actually stand listening to any poem more complex than a limerick.

“Dead Poets Society” was never really about poetry or life at all. It was about admiring yourself for seeing a movie in which a charismatic actor does everything except poetry. He has the pipe and the patches on the sweater and the high brow manners, but if “Dead Poets Society” showed you, for even an instant, the real stuff of poetry, mass audiences would be offended and frightened and would hurry back to their TV sets. The boys themselves don’t live poetry: they admire it like dilettantes, adopting the symbols and manners but none of the substance of a poetic conscious: they completely forget that great poetry is always about something and only the worst, dullest, least interesting poetry is about poetry.

The sad, sad truth is that Robin Williams did not factor in a single movie that mattered.

Robin Williams Least Worst Films (no, you haven’t seen them):

Have you seen “World’s Greatest Dad”?  Now go see “Dear Evan Hansen”.

Un huh.  Familiar, isn’t it?

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The Necessity of Secrets

To those who continue to insist that no law-abiding citizen has anything to fear from government surveillance or ubiquitous security cameras or cell phones that constantly report your location to your service provider: please go live in your own country with like-minded people and you can all watch each other all the time.

Better yet, someone needs to organize a group of volunteers to contact one of these congressmen or NSA administrators or FBI or CIA officials and ask for their address and their license number and make and model, and photos, and announce that this person is now going to be followed, 24/7, by these volunteer citizens, because this person doesn’t think the average American citizen has anything to fear from being spied on.

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The Circuitous Life of Johnson’s Folly

If President Johnson had decided in January 1964 that the U.S. would not win the war in Viet Nam and should withdraw it’s troops and let the chips fall where they may, what would have been different?

About 45,000 American men would be alive today instead of buried in graveyards all over America. Most of them would have married. They would have had children– another 100,000 citizens– who would, by now, be having children of their own.

Johnson would have run again in 1968 and he probably would have won, being the incumbent, and credited with the Civil Rights Act, and his anti-poverty programs and the general prosperity of the expanding consumer society. The war protests, of course, would have ended. The younger generation would have lost their identity. No Chicago riots, no Kent State. One great song “Ohio” by Neil Young, would not have been written or sung. We would have never learned who Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin were, or cared. Nixon would probably never have been elected and U.S. relations with China might today be a lot worse.

Who knows– maybe Reagan would have won in 1972. Maybe Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. Bobby Kennedy would not have been assassinated, because he would not have run in 1968, because Eugene McCarthy would not have run (proving that an antiwar candidate could win), because there would have been no war.

There are threads that can never be traced because everything else would have been different.

The inflation of the 1970’s would have been stopped dead in it’s tracks because, don’t you know, the Viet Nam war ate up a HUGE chunk of American government spending and purchasing. Maybe there would not have been a budget deficit. Or– even better– perhaps that deficit would have been run up by spending on social programs and infrastructure instead, which would actually have improved the economy even more.

U.S. credibility abroad would have been immeasurably higher. Except for the fact that they had engineered coups in other Third World countries like The Congo and Iran and El Salvador. Well, imagine, if you will, that they hadn’t. Imagine the U.S. as an emblem of freedom and democracy and justice, in the 1970’s, instead of a cynical, manipulative, oil-mad behemoth?

Viet Nam would still have gone communist, of course, just as the Republicans feared, and just as they did anyway, but with a less extreme leadership. (The moderates were all driven out by the war.)  Significantly, Cambodia would not have been destabilized by U.S. bombing likely sparing the world one of the great atrocities of the 20th Century committed by the Khmer Rouge, which came to power as a result of the illegal U.S. bombing in the border regions with Viet Nam.

I’m saying all this because, in 40 years, we may be asking ourselves what would have happened if the U.S. had just walked away from Iraq in 2014.