Many men are falling....

Where you promised to stand guard. But precisely what is anyone guarding these days? I know this is happening south of me, but Senator Joe Lieberman's recent comments regarding the suspected Times Square bomber are downright frightening. Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen, has been arrested in conjunction with last week's attempted bombing of the famous New York intersection. As any other American citizen, he was read his Miranda rights. His case has thus far been handled according to constitutional legal channels. Lieberman has suggested that Shahzad, and any other terror suspect, ought to be denied these rights, because, well, they're terror suspects.
His logic is that, if people do something that can be perceived as 'against the United States' they should no longer belong to the United States, nor be entitled to the protections thereof.
It takes approximately three seconds of thinking to start seeing problems with this logic. First, and most alarmingly, is the fact that the word 'suspect' is included in this. Lieberman is proposing that constitutional protections not apply to those who are 'suspected' of certain crimes.  The Arar case, and the continual official denial of wrongdoing, has proven that the system by which an individual is declared a terror suspect is inherently flawed.

The American legal system was developed as a mechanism for allowing a person's innocence or guilt to be proven according to a set of standards that contain checks and balances in order to ensure the rights of all involved, both victims and perpetrators. Yet Lieberman wants to deny rights to those whose guilt has not even been proven. This boils down to open season for any law officer, prosecutor, or homeland security official to grab literally anyone off the street, accuse, and torture them, all within the bounds of the law. Perhaps Lieberman’s been reading an old KGB manual.
Lieberman’s comment, and the GOP officials who are enthusiastically hailing his wisdom, speak to a growing trend that’s causing a great deal of alarm. Those very civil liberties against which the terrorists are supposedly fighting are being eroded in the attempts to stop them. Precisely how, then, is the war on terror being won, if that which the terrorists hate is disappearing anyhow?

Give me Absolute Control...

... Over every living soul, asks the Utah government.  Every single living soul.  The planned bill would allow for homicide prosecution against women whose actions may have led to the death of their unborn children.  This came out of the story of a young girl who paid a man to beat her, in hopes that it would trigger a miscarriage. 

What exactly is wrong with this picture?

Let's start with the obvious.  Women miscarry.  Sometimes spontaneously, often for no apparent reason at all.  To my knowledge, the last time punishing a woman for that was legally permissable in a Western country was during the Spanish Inquisition.  There is a difference between a miscarriage, and working actively to bring one on.  However, the way this law is written, it puts the onus on the woman to prove that she did indeed have a natural miscarriage, and did not actively seek to make it happen.  If a woman has acted in some way that could be deemed reckless and she miscarries, she's considered atfault for homicide.  The law does not define reckless behavior.  Considering the notoriety of Utah prosecutors to try for demented convictions, it's really only a matter of time before some woman is thrown in prison because she ran a stoplight that led to an accident, or she ate a vegan diet and miscarred (no I'm not suggesting there's a medical correlation between the two, as much as the beef lobby would like to suggest that there is).

This whole thing speaks to some much larger issues.  Utah is not exactly the easiest state in which to access birth control.  It's expensive, as the government is unwilling to help pay for it, and minors cannot even access the products without parental permission.  Unless the government starts locking women in chastity belts, this set of circumstances is going to lead to unplanned pregnancies, particularly in low-income demographics.  Terminations are also difficult to access, as public funding cannot be used for them except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the mother is in danger.  Many private insurers also refuse to fund the procedure.  How is anyone shocked that women are turning to illegal, and dangerous, methods to end their pregnancies?  I will not weigh in on the morals of abortion, here.  I'm more concerned with the circumstances that are leading to this sort of desperation.  No birth control, no way to end a pregnancy, and, unless you are wealthy, no way to provide the health care and other amenities necessary to raise a child.  So the state insists that you give birth to this child, but won't do a thing to help you care for it, apparently not even allowing a full education.

Exactly what are proponents of this system trying to accomplish?  The argument against accessible contraceptives is that people ought not to have sex unless they want to get pregnant.  So really, withholding information about contraceptives, or access to them, is a way of attempting to control whether or not someone is having sex.  Is it really up to a legislative body, or even fellow citizens, to control such an intimate and personal aspect of another person's life?  Yes, sex carries certain risks.  However, almost every activity human beings engage in carries risks.  Part of being a person is being responsible about each activity you do, from driving to eating to sexual activity, doing the best you can to avoid unwanted consequences... ie, obey traffic laws so you don't get into an accident, eat healthy food so you don't become diabetic.  Sex, however, is a different story.

This system may speak to that militant mentality that all bodies are needed to raise up an army against those who would 'threaten freedom', as Dubya so eloquently put it.  So women become convenient brood mares for the state, producing bodies that can eventually become cannon fodder.  I think this law goes even deeper than that.  It speaks to a widespread, rarely-declared belief that a woman's sole value lies within her procreative abilities.  If she does not want to use those abilities, she is given the choice of two punitive options... not use her own body as she sees fit, or pay a large amount of money into the system for the privilege of engaging in sex without risking pregnancy.  How is that freedom?

Review - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson

Comparative Literature afficionados will be absolutely drooling over deceased Swedish journalist and social activist Steig Larsson's English debut novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first in his Milennium series.

Larsson, who died in 2004 of a massive heart attack after delivering three of the Milennium books, leaving a fourth unfinished, writes one absolute head-fuck of a story. Beginning with a disgraced financial journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who has just been successfully sued for libel, the novel quickly gathers a host of other characters, including Dragan Armanksy, the head of a security company, and the proverbial girl with the inked Leviathan with whom he is a little bit in love. Mikael Blomkvist is hired by ageing, wealthy industrialist Henrick Vanger to investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet, who vanished nearly forty years previously. Blomkvist digs into the tumultuous history of the entire, scattered Vanger clan, whose underground lives reveal chilling secrets, long-simmering hatreds, links to Nazi extremist groups, and horrifying violence. Though he's reluctant to take the assignment, Vanger bribes him with the opportunity to redeem himself to the world of journalism - he will recieve the concrete evidence he needs to prove himself innocent of the libel case.
As Blomkvist becomes more deeply entrenched in the Vanger family, the case grows more complicated and he needs help. He seeks out Lisbeth Salander, pierced, tattooed, deeply emotionally disturbed and utterly ingenius as a computer hacker and a researcher. Together, the two of them uncover the truth, which is even more disgusting and horrifying than either could imagine.


It's an engrossing mystery. I stayed up all night reading it. It's obvious Larsson's a journalist... the info dump gets a little much at times, and he 'tells' rather than 'shows' much of the story, but he gets into the character's heads so well it feels fairly natural. If I have a major complaint, it's that the element that drew me to the book to begin with - the Nazi connection, is the weakest part of the plot. I see that Larsson was trying to draw a line between Naziism and sadism, but it doesn't quite get there. The Nazi character, one of the Män som hatar kvinnor (Men who Hate Women) of the original Swedish title, really could be anything, a Communist, an anarchist, even just your run-of-the-mill sadist and the plot would not have changed in the least. I was disappointed, especially considering Larsson's journalistic expertise was in Fascist extremist groups.
This is a mind-fuck story. You leave frustrated. The perpetrator of the lesser crime - that of the financial misdealings, recieves a vast amount of his just desserts, while the greater crime goes unspoken to the larger world. It leaves a person wondering exactly what Larsson himself saw as the greater wrong.

Though Lisbeth Salander is supposedly a genius, Larsson pushes it too far at times, throwing her into a plan of vengeance that makes very little sense and seems unlikely considering her inability to function socially.  That part is written well. Lisbeth Salander is trapped in the mental-health system, under the care of court-appointed guardians because she's considered mentally incompetent, and she's utterly unable to understand why. Larsson does an incredible job of explaining her damaged mind and charting her growth.
I'm hoping that, since this novel is the first in a trilogy, possibly a quartet, the questions and issues I have with this text will be resolved. However, this is one incredible mystery, and I sincerely hope that Larsson's next text hangs on to the momentum of the first, because flaws and all, this is a good read.

Recommended for a long afternoon when you have time to sit down and focus. Takes some mental energy, but well worth it.

"You Must Not Ask for So Much"...

Says the Canadian Red Cross to hundreds of Indonesian workers hired to rebuild after the 2004 tsunami, who have yet to be paid for their work.  The Canadian Red Cross funded work in the Aceh province of Indonesia, sometimes directly, sometimes through other contractors.  Workers were brought in from hundreds of miles away, and allegations have even risen that these workers were not given adequate food, water, or shelter.  Many of them are still there, and still waiting to be paid for work they were hired to do with Canadian public funds six years ago.

The Red Cross has conducted an audit of the situation, but still appears to be in denial of the scope of the problem.  This makes me seriously wonder about the effacacy of donating money to the Red Cross.  The Canadian government has loudly denounced both slavery and human trafficking, yet if the Red Cross is using money from said government to finance operations where slavery is being utilised, how can that be anything other than a tacit acceptance of these practices?   Though the news is only coming out about this now, the organization has been aware of this issue for years.  The public outcry, too, has been slow in coming and is embarrassingly softer than it should be.  I'm trying to understand why.


Aceh is half a world away, and it's not exactly a place where homelessness and human trafficking are unknown.  I'm wondering if the powers that be have found it easier to ignore the situation because the workers there are not in any worse straights than many other people in the region.  It harkens back to the days of Abolition in Great Britain, the United States, and yes, even Canada, where slavery advocates were insisting that there was nothing wrong with slavery because slaves were used to living in poor conditions and working hard for the benefit of others, and knew no other life.  Does that make it right?  Of course not.  Is it possible to end all human trafficking and slavery in the world?  I'd like to think so, but I have my doubts.

However, the reason I believe that the government should be screaming down the Red Cross's throats on this issue is because Canadian public funds and the donations of Canadians were blatantly used in perpetuating this injustice.  The Red Cross is assigning blame to the contractors they hired within Aceh, but this does not absolve them of responsibility to ensure that the money we have given them is used in the way they had assured us it would be used... and I'm certain that slavery was not part of the bargain.

More links:
Video of Press Conference.
CBC National Story Part 1   Part 2

Everybody Knows that the Naked Man or Woman....

... Are just a shining artifact of the past.  Not so much in Quebec anymore.  The introduction of Quebec's Bill 94, a bill banning Muslim women from receiving any sort of public service if they are wearing the face-covering veil called the niqab, is, in essence, imposing nakedness upon certain women.  Extreme?  Yes, by some mode of thought, it is, but if you look at it through the eyes of the women this bill affects, it is not so extreme at all.

This ban is about security issues and equality.  I'm not interested in discussing the security side, as it's painfully obvious that a few adjustments to the existing system would easily render this point moot.  I am, however, interested in the idea of banning the niqab as a way to promote equality.

The veils, though they can be seen as subjugation, and are indeed subjugation if the woman who wears them is being forced to do so by someone else, whether it be a religious leader or a member of the family.  But this is certainly not always the case.  I, a Christian woman, have some Muslim female friends whom I love and respect a great deal.  They wear varying versions of scarves and veils, ranging from a loose, bandana-like drape over the crown of the head to a full niqab.  As we discuss the differences in our faiths (and there are a lot fewer than I'd first thought) we often return to the concept of modesty.  Modesty, though it first, to me, invokes images of Victorian gowns and forbidden ankles, is an idea, and an ideal, that is becoming a social movement in this era of thong bikinis and Tweeted sexual histories.  Sociologist and author Wendy Shalit is one of several female leaders of varying religious faiths who are advocating modest dress and behavior as an expression of self-confidence and self-respect.  Modesty is basically the choice to keep private those aspects of your body and self that are related, in one way or another, to your sexuality.  Religious beliefs provide some pathway in determining what those aspects are.  The standard in North America for women has long been that breasts and the pelvic area are sexual.  Varying from person to person, region to region, you might add shoulders, parts of the leg, and waist into this equation.  Depending upon the degree of orthodoxy, Jewish women cover legs past the knee, arms past the elbow, sometimes hands, and often hair.  From there, it doesn't seem so extreme that a woman would consider her face part of her sexuality, and want to keep that private.  In parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, a woman's breasts are not considered sexual, and are therefore exposed.  I, personally, would be horrified at being forced to walk around like that.  It should be my choice, based on my personal belief system, which parts of my body I cover and which I don't.  My niquab-wearing Muslim friends would be as uncomfortable walking around with their faces exposed as I would be with my breasts.  So why should the law deny them that?

Is this ban honestly about security concerns, or is it just another form of cultural imperialism?  While Jean Charest claims security as the reason, Christine St-Pierre, minister of women's issues, is declaring this a victory for equality.  She makes no secret of her disdain for the garment, going so far as to call them 'ambulatory prisons' for the women who reside inside.   She's proudly declaring Quebec as a world leader in gender equality, but equality does not exist if you're forcing women to change themselves in order to fit into a certain cultural ideal.  It's just a different form of subjugation.  Nowhere else in Canada are people banned from receiving public services based upon what they are wearing, or their religious beliefs.  It goes against everything this nation stands for.

It was Pierre Trudeau who declared Canada as multicultural, who helped implement much-needed protection measures to preserve the unique culture in Quebec.  It's shamefully hypocritical for that province to then turn around and deny those same rights to others.

Looks Like Freedom but it Feels Like...?

Leonard Cohen might have said death, but the furor over Ann Coulter's cancelled Ottawa appearance feels, to me, like something else entirely.  Coulter, that right-wing political agitator whose words too many less-than-intelligent individuals take as gospel, is screaming human-rights-abuse because the provost of the University of Ottawa took it upon himself to inform her about details of Canadian law that could be relevant to her planned speech.

Coulter is well-known for her extreme social Conservatism, and for her derogatory comments towards Muslims, Canadians, Democrats, and, really, anybody who does not fit into the Conservative American WASP Republican ideal.  The KKK likely wants to set up a national holiday in her name.  She justifies her views by citing that illusive concept of 'free speech' that, in the rhetoric of herself and many others of her ilk, seems to demand that right only for those who espouse a similar ideology.

Again, Coulter has proven herself a hypocrite in her reaction to the situations in London and Ottawa.  It was her public recommendation that freedom be restricted for those of certain ethnic and religious backgrounds, regardless of their political leanings, that set off the firestorm in the first place.  The protestors in Ottawa were exercising their own rights to freedom of expression by protesting.  Seems as though Coulter's belief in the rights to free speech extend only to those of her worldview, for it was Coulter's people, not U of O, who then chose to cancel the appearance.  Apparently she can dish it out, but is unwilling to take it in a forum where she is not assured of coming out on top.

Coulter has publically blamed Francois Houle, the University of Ottawa Provost, for promoting hatred against her by sending her a private email that informed her of the details of Canadian law that forbids hate speech.  Ezra Levant, the tour's organizer, cited this email as the reason for the Ottawa protest against Coulter.  Interesting, how Coulter has claimed that this missive, sent directly from Houle to herself, 'promotes' hatred against conservatives.  She was the sole intended audience of the note, which simply informed her of Canadian law and the possible ramifications of breaking it.  It was Coulter herself who made the discussion public.  Personally, I'd be grateful to somebody who quietly let me know something that might keep me out of prison, rather than publically screaming for the execution of the messenger.

Canada has laws against hate speech.  If these laws are somehow inappropriate, then it is up to Canadians themselves to lead the way in having them altered, rather than an American whose public statements have never gone beyond discussing Canada beyond its usefulness to furthering the Conservative American agenda.

Seems to me that Coulter's real problem is the fact that she was inconveniently reminded of a law she does not respect, made by legislators she does not respect, in a country she does not respect.  So now, of course, the result will be a human rights complaint, based on the delusion that it is because she is female, supposedly Christian, and conservative, that led to a university official informing her about certain laws, and other individuals protesting because she chose to break those laws.  If this actually does go through the tribunal, it may indeed be death, after all.