America: You're starting to scare me.

My old friend twitter brought to my attention the How To Take Back America Conference held this past weekend in the old U.S. of A.

One of the speakers at this conference was Kitty Werthmann, author of Freedom to Dictatorship in 5 Years. Kitty, an Austrian-born survivor of the Third Reich, has believed that Democrats are some sort of communo-fascist hybrid for some time. This time, however, she gave a talk to a packed house on "How To Recognize Living Under Nazis & Communists."

Now, it's no secret that I'm not particularly sympathetic to the tenets of early 21st century American Republicanism, especially the really, really right-wing stuff.

Even so... whoa guys (& girls trying to cope with those pesky feminist attacks on marriage and motherhood). Seriously?

The vitriol being spewed by some of the more... enthusiastic elements of what used to be the right wing fringe are starting to frighten. They're rabid, illogical, and open about their professed right to violence as a possible tool in the fight to take America back from... the communists? the fascists? the feminists? the atheists? (I'm genuinely not sure here - I usually lose the thread of the argument somewhere around the references to the middle part of the second amendment).

I've decided that the best way for me to help America dial back the scary rhetoric and go back to good old fashioned partisan mudslinging is to lend some clarity to some of the terms that most readily apply to the ideas that Mrs. Werthmann and the other folks at the Eagle Forum are so keen to toss out into the body politic. I'm thinking that if we get some clarity around what all these dirty words mean, perhaps we can go back to insulting each other the way nature intended: like we're all 5 years old.


Without further ado then...
Marxism: They hate capitalism, the state, laissez-faire economics, corporations, alienation, exploitation, the bourgeosie and stating their philosophy in a way that would be easy for proletariats (or Joe Plumbers or whatever) to understand. It has also been rumoured that they hate industrialization, but this is difficult to prove because, as previously noted they hate making their philosophy easy to understand. Dudes with crazy beards are good as are labour unions, solidarity, and political plurality. So is class warfare, as long as the proletariat wins.

Calling someone a Marxist is kind of like calling someone an anarcho-syndicalist. It's not naughty if you're correct, because they likely ascribe to intellectually complex ideologies that are probably dangerous to the standard of life that you love and either currently enjoy or aspire to, and they're probably pretty proud of that (pysche! insult turns into a compliment!). If you're wrong though, it's more stupid than naughty. People who aren't Marxists aren't Marxists, and the ones who are get mad when you try and give bourgeosie jerks the distinction of having attained such socio-political enlightenment without them having earned it. Besides, no one really understands what you mean.

Also, Marxist ≠ Communist (or communist!)

Communism: Communists hate private property, people who say they're socialist but really aren't, Marxists who disagree with them, corporations and the bourgeosie. Soviet communists (which are a bit different than just regular communists) also hate Americans and thinking for themselves. Communists (in theory, at least - tbe Soviet communists are again a bit different) like egalitarianism, stateless societies, common ownership of everything, revolutions and big government.

It is widely held that Soviet communists proved that communism is an inoperable ideology - this hypothesis has not been tested widely though.

In America, calling someone a communist! is a fantastic insult. Americans have a proud history of labelling all kinds of dissenters as communists!, regardless of whether or not they have anything to do with Stalinism, Soviets, or even communes. Even school children know that communists! are bad. As a matter of fact, being called a communist! in America has almost nothing to do with communism. So keep at 'er, folks. As long as you mean 'communist!' in the uniquely American homage-to-McCarthyism kind of way and not in the 'someone who subscribes to a communist ideology' way that much of the rest of the world understands it. Because if you mean that second thing, you're being silly again.

Fascism: They hate communists, capitalists, class warfare, political systems with more than one party, and agreeing on universal ideological tenets. Money's good though. So are dictators, differentiated socio-cultural identities based on a common mythology, and successful corporate enterprises that get along with the dictator and makes lots of money.

While lots of people think it's very naughty to call someone a fascist, it isn't, really, because no one actually knows what fascism is. Least of all actual fascists.

Nazism: They hate communists, capitalists, class warfare, political systems without armbands, peace, Europe, America, and lots of religious minorities, stateless peoples, sexual minorities and persons with disabilities. They like secret police, armbands, war machines, and big government public affairs bureaus.They also generally enjoy building large mechanized systems with which to put an end to that which they dislike.

It's very naughty to call someone a Nazi. Seriously. I wouldn't do it if I were you.


And, our two bonus definitions

Godwin's Law: (updated to the parlance of our times) "As a threaded online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." In other words, the more you talk about something that is increasingly tangential to the actual issue, the more likely you are to call your opponent a Nazi. You may or may not be right in this assertion, but the magnetic draw of probability will certainly impair your judgment on this front.

If you fulfill Godwin's law during the course of a discussion, it is extremely likely that you have made yourself and your argument look silly.

Reductio ad Hiterlum: Wikipedia isn't super-helpful here as the article seems to have been written by some sort of pedantic debator who thinks that logical fallacies are self-explanatory.
The basic gist is that this is an extension of Godwin's law: while some Nazi/Hitler comparisons are valid, most follow the principle of reductio ad Hitlerum, which holds that most references to Hitler abandon both logic and reality in order to make an emotionally-charged and argument-ending point that offers a conclusion totally devoid of context, usually via drawing a ridiculous parallel between their opponent and Nazis.
It goes something like this: Hitler wore pants. Because Hitler is bad, pants are also bad. Anyone who wears pants is a Nazi (and Nazis are, of course, bad).

If you utilize the reductio ad Hiterlum model of reasoning, you have definitely made yourself and your argument look silly to everyone except the people who agreed with you before you started talking. Also, you should probably stop wearing pants.

According to The Economist, Godwin's law and the principle of reductio ad Hiterlerum can be taken together to give us the following rule:
"in most discussions... the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument"

You lose, Kitty Werthmann.


Poopyhead.

Compliments

I've been very lucky in my life and lucky for a lot of reasons.

I was reminded today of one of those reasons: in private, in person, and sometimes in very public places, a surprising number of really tremendous people have paid me the honour of a compliment.

And not just any compliment. No, no - I'm talking about the kind of compliment that leaves you awestruck and humbled; the kind that was thoughtful and measured and eloquent; the kind where you're pretty sure that you aren't really worthy of such praise, but glad nonetheless that someone out there thought so highly of you, if even just for a moment, and found a moment to tell you so.

Don't get me wrong - all kind words, if sincere, are worth saying. But sometimes people say things (or write things) that profoundly affect the person that they're saying things about.

I count myself as truly lucky to have been on the receiving end of words like these. I'd like to say more about the gratitude I feel and how I have tried to grow into a better person as a way of demonstrating that gratitude for this luck of mine. But I never have been very good at that kind of thing.

Instead, I think I might try returning the favour or at least paying it forward.

AIDS Awareness - In Several Guises

((if you came to this blog by searching for something about how you catch AIDS, please skip to the bottom of this post))

Some of you savvier internet-international development types might think it strange that there has been such a furor over MSF's "Boy" ad and things have (so far at least) remained relatively quiet on the "there is such a bad thing as bad press" front for the AIDS is a Mass Murderer Campaign.

While I can't speak to other denizens of the blogosphere, my answer is that I simply won't be deigning to give it the benefit of a commentary. While the 'Boy' ad may have been an emotive and disturbing composite of real (or real enough) events, the new AIDS awareness ads, while provocative, aren't really even an apt metaphor.

That being said, Google Analytics has pointed out to me that a large percentage of the tiny number of one-time readers my blog has come here searching for something related to "how you can catch AIDS." This is probably because of my You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks post penned after a visit to a Malawian primary school. Not that it matters - the point is, people come to this blog looking for information about AIDS transmission and I want them - even if it's only handful of them - to get access to accurate and helpful information about it.


AIDS: Some Facts & Resources

(It should be noted that I am not a doctor. If you are concerned that you or a loved one has a medical condition, you should seek medical advice. And even if you aren't you should be careful to trust the accuracy of online information, especially on blogs. I have tried my best to provide accurate information here, but I make no guarantees and will not be held liable for any consequences that may arise as a result of misinformation provided here.)

AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome. It is an incurable and life-threatening sexually transmitted infection most commonly spread through having unprotected sex. It is also spread through sharing needles and from mother to child during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Historically, it has also been spread through tainted blood transfusions (though this is rare and NOT a reason to avoid donating blood or receiving transfusions in most places - please, please, please talk to a physician or a blood donation clinic if you have concerns about this possibility).

AIDS is actually caused by HIV (human immunodeficiency disorder). HIV/AIDS is currently classified as a global pandemic.
Both HIV & AIDS are incurable illnesses. Both are also treatable.

Many people who are HIV positive do not know that they have an incurable and life-threatening condition, as symptoms are not apparent in the early stages.

HIV/AIDS itself does not kill people. What it does it destroy the immune systems of people with the virus, making them more susceptible to opportunistic infections and tumours. Just because HIV/AIDS itself does not kill people does not mean that the virus is not deadly: infections caused by the virus have killed more than 25 million people since 1981.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has an easy-to-read and authoritative Question & Answer section on their website that is available in multiple languages. You can find it in English by clicking here.

Care also has an excellent list of resources.

AVERT also offers comprehensive resources.

And I'm sure there are many other good sites out there.

If you are concerned that you may have contracted HIV/AIDS, speak to a physician immediately or get tested for it.

The State of Alberta

I would like to write a concise, well-researched post about the state of Alberta.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to comb through the hundreds of pages of documentation I would need to look through in order to do that (researching the state of funding for graduate students in Alberta post-secondary education is quite enough, thank-you) nor do I have the energy to put up with the weeks-long bout of increasingly perplexed depression that researching would no doubt cause.

Onto baseless anecdotal blog-drivel then.

This province is in trouble.

And it's not in trouble because I'm an Alberta-hating hippie who is just pouting because the PCs have been in power my whole life or because I'm some kind of socialist nut-job who hates oil, Stephen Duckett, and the private sector.

Some part of why it's in trouble is that writing down the sentence "this province is in trouble" anywhere and daring to allege that even some small sliver of the blame may rest at the feet of the current government will get me called all these things and worse. But that's not really the point - there's partisan political fundamentalism at work in systems other than ours, and I'll save my thoughts on the damage that does for another day.

The vision for a future Alberta is in trouble. No political party is offering an inspirational or even coherent vision for Albertans to get behind. The PCs don't have to and the Liberals and NDP both seem thoroughly convinced that, despite all evidence to the contrary (including their respective performances in the last elections), the most effective way to get their message out to Albertans is to harp loudly and often about how they're not the Conservatives. I don't care what the Opposition parties are not: I want to hear about the Alberta they want to build. The Green Party is folding in on itself (for shame). That leaves the Wildrose Alliance Party - and in the midst of a leadership race, time will tell if they can come up with something that isn't pandering smoke and mirrors. Here's hoping they can.

The quality of representation and respect that (most of us) get from the members of our Legislative Assembly is in trouble. I have been insulted twice in the past four months by public offhand comments made by elected officials - once by Minister Iris Evans, who thought it would be appropriate to say that I wasn't raised properly and once by Doug Elnisky, who thought it would be funny to make a blog joke that I along every other woman in Alberta should get our 'Equal treatment' in little packets at Starbucks. There have been other denigrating outbursts, like Dave Taylor's garbled 'Scopes monkeys' reference... and I have no doubt many that I've missed. The point is, showing such callous disregard for the basic dignity of constituents through comments that have little if anything to do with the actual jobs of elected officials is saddening and absurd behavior.

Our democratic integrity is in trouble. Voter turnout in this province is embarrassing - we sit in roughly the same boat as places like Colombia, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. And people who vote in those places are risking their LIVES to cast their ballots. Since the last election, both the Chief Electoral Officer and the Auditor General have called it quits, and both did it amidst an embarrassingly small furor over government attitudes towards their department that, for me at least, leave serious questions about the ability of our system to behave in a transparent and impartial way when called upon to do so.

Our system is making bad decisions for us. There was a 16 billion dollar forecasting error in the current budget. Let that sink in a bit: the government was wrong about their budget forecast by about 16 billion dollars. That is a lot of money to screw up with, and the consequences are severe. Cuts to education and health both seem to be on the radar - sectors that can ill afford the loss, given that they're both absolutely essential to the success of our province in caring for its citizens and in assuring economic prosperity in the future and given that neither sector has ever really been given the resources needed to recover from the last round of devastating deficit-inspired cuts. All this on the heels of record-breaking surpluses and certain knowledge that the royalty-revenue boom was not going to last forever. What happened? Seriously, guys (and girls - sorry Minister Evans) - we trusted you with this and you should have known better.

The decision has been made to close Alberta Hospital and the government has said (though I don't know if they still stand by this position) that they're working on a strategy for dealing with the patients that would subsequently be bedless - not that they already have one, but that they're working on it after the decision has already been announced. This all in spite of the fact that Alberta has been through the debacle of closing a psychiatric hospital without adequate planning once before (in Red Deer in 1977) and knows what the consequences of that kind of action are (they're bad).

That's not to mention the rest of the health care system. Unless you believe that 'it has to get worse before it gets better,' recent decisions regarding health provision are doing serious damage to the province's health care system that it will take years and an extremely unlikely policy reversal/regime change to fix. At the top of my list is the amalgamation of the health boards into one mega-board which can't possibly be as familiar with local conditions province-wide as their regionally based predecessors were, and it's already starting to show.

And Bill 44 is a nightmare. Regardless of whether or not you think parents should be able to shield their children from controversial curricular content, this piece of legislation is shoddily worded, largely redundant, and causing more trouble than it's worth on all sides.

Even without the research, this sucks. So much so that, other than sending pointless little rants out to sail on the over-saturated waters of the worldwide web, I don't even know where to start with fixing it.

Messages of Hope

I'm a bit starved for inspiration today... but it's Friday, and I think that blogs should go into the weekend with a most recent post that is either amusing, important, or uplifting. My last post is none of these things, and so I'm wracking my brain for things to say.

Unfortunately, my brain isn't a very good place to go looking for things that are important or uplifting today (I won't comment on amusing - I'm a comedic legend in my own mind, 24/7). That fact is that I've spent a lot of my online time this week feeling pretty frustrated, pretty disgusted, and maybe even a bit forlorn about what humanity is up to.

From the former Auditor General vs. Toronto cyclist incident (which has been reported as far away as India and Malaysia) to the Alberta government's poorly handled and seemingly short-sighted decision to allow the closure of the Alberta Hospital to riots in Gabon to the continuing bad behavior of some Americans, and Canadians and their politicians (never mind all the horrible news in between), I can't help but look back on this week's snapshot of us and see that it looks a bit grim.

'Grim,' however, is a prognosis that I refuse to accept. Here are three little bits of my life that remind me that things can be a little bit better than that if we let them.

"Hold on. Hope hard. It gets better."
-anonymous chalk graffitist, as written on a street in Edmonton on a day when I really needed it

"Quand on se souvenait que tout était sorti des mains et de l’âme de cet homme, sans moyens techniques, on comprenait que les hommes pourraient être aussi efficaces que Dieu dans d’autres domaines que la destruction."
(roughly tranlated: "When I considered that this had all sprung from the hands and from the soul of this one man - without technical aids - , it struck me that men could be as effective as God in domains other than destruction. ")
-Jean Giono, from L'homme qui plantait des arbres/The Man Who Planted Trees

And...
The Change (video)


Happy weekend everyone.

Oh, He Just Forgot. Well, That's Okay Then.

I'd love to be important enough to forget where all my paycheques come from. that sounds like grand fun.

Peter MacKay drops the conflict-of-interest ball

---

MSF Ad-roversy

I've been following the discussions raging online about Doctors Without Borders/MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES/MSF's latest ad.

While there are lots of places to link to, I'll give you The Road to the Horizon for an excellent collection of related links and an interesting position on the ad (more on my take on that after you've had a chance to see the thing for yourself).

And here's the ad...


My first introduction to this ad was via a tweet by @geroter, co-CEO of Engineers Without Borders Canada. I was intrigued by George's concern that the ad "further entrenches the typical story of "Africa" in the media." After watching the ad, I tweeted something snippy to the effect of "Are you sure that's Africa? MSF didn't specify the country, so is the entrenchment of "Africa's" story here yours or theirs?" (Sorry George - the dangers of unedited instant internet communiques).

I left it at that. At first. But George's concerns buried themselves in the back of my mind along with some of my own that I had totally ignored, waiting for a chance to strike.

That chance came today, when a friend sent me a story in The Ottawa Citizen about the experiences of two longtime MSF volunteers.

I watched the ad again.

It's powerful - there's no denying that. Who wouldn't be moved to do something (anything, really) to spare that child from the suffering you can hear in his voice?

And someone is soliciting feedback in a big way about this ad (I say "someone" because I'm not sure if it's MSF or if it's Pete their web guy not operating in an 100% official capacity), so my hat is tipped to them for trying to engage with their 'audience' in the world of web 2.0.

But...well, where do I start with the 'buts?'

I don't like it when ads reinforce the collective superficiality of the West by giving us 10 seconds of emotional connection and a sleek, simple solution at the end. This ad is that. Our heartstrings are pulled, and we are told that this little boy needs us to donate to MSF. It doesn't matter where he is, or whether or not MSF would have stopped the militias from orphaning him (which they could not have - that's not the kind of work that MSF does), or the fact that 'fixing' the problems of wherever that poor child is are far more complex than a monthly donation will solve. 'What you can do' is made easy.

There are more 'buts,' like how the desperation of this ad leaves me feeling empty and hopeless, or how I am uncomfortable with how the anonymity of the ad makes me feel like MSF is complicit in this child's powerlessness instead of working to change it, or that, some part of me feels like the tone of this ad is a betrayal of the optimism that attracts at least some of MSF's volunteers to the work that they do.

Basically, I don't like the ad, and it would take me an essay to explain why. So instead of an essay, I turn to poetry.

Many years ago, a poet named T.S. Eliot wrote a long poem called The Wasteland. Eliot's not for everyone. He is for me though. I find myself drawn to his poetry often, wrestling to unlock what he was saying that speaks to me so and seems so much to offer a wrenching and chilling insight into this world of mine. With regards to this ad a quote from part 2 (the game of chess)...

‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

'Africa' never speaks to us because we seem to only want to listen when they are screaming.
We never know what we are thinking because really, we aren't.

I think that we need to do better at both if we really want to help - ads like this aren't really helping.