Today’s reading, which may contain traces of peanuts, comes from Hebrews 8, Exodus 5.1-6.27 and Proverbs 1. It has been a couple of weeks, but if my memory holds, Hebrews was just a weird book full of “OMG OBVIOUSLEH JEZUZ WUZ KING, Exodus was the story of God being a complete dick to Egypt, and we were DONE THE PSALMS! At least for now. Proverbs shouldn’t be that much better, but a boy can dream.

Hmm. Hebrews is maintaining itself as boring as ever, but I like this line: “Not one of them will have to teach another to know me, their Lord.” You hear that, fundamentalists? Stop trying to teach me. I do not know the lord, and I will never be taught to suspend reality that much. The fact that you cannot teach me this means you should leave well enough alone, stay home, and leave me to my heresy. Thank you very much.

Ah, Exodus. Is there a book that truly shows the Lord working in mysterious ways better than you? I can’t imagine. So the Lord tells Moses to piss of the Egyptians. He knows that the Egyptians aren’t going to budge, but he basically tells Moses that it’ll give him an excuse to be mean to the Egyptians. So in today’s reading, we see exactly that, and the Egyptians respond by being dicks to the Israelites, beating them regularly and setting unrealistic goals that they know the Israelites can’t meet. Naturally, the Israelites think that Moses and Aaron, Moses’s brother and the other guy who joins Moses in his conversations with the Pharaoh, are just a pain in the ass. Good plan, God. Not only do you piss off everyone and make your servants look like jerks, but you’re getting nowhere fast.

Now, I’m foreshadowing a bit here, but God tells Moses that the Pharaoh won’t just let them leave, but he’ll actually chase them out. Only that doesn’t jive with my memory of events. I’m pretty sure the Pharaoh’s people were actually going to slaughter them, and thus the parting of the seas which would ultimately drown the menacing Egyptian horde. I’m honestly not sure just how the faithful reconcile God saying something that was actually wrong and proved wrong in his own book.

Oh, and now we get some more of the lineage of the Israelites and another example of traditional marriage in the form of Amram, who “married his father’s sister Jochebed, and they had two sons, Aaron and Moses”. I find this strange. The right wing always says that if you let gay people marry, the next logical step is incest and bestiality, but clearly there is plenty of incest sanctioned by God in his Big Book…

And now we come to my first reading from Proverbs. It can’t be worse than Psalms, right? Well, we’re starting well, with the explanation that these are sayings from King Solomon (David’s son) and they will teach you self control, understanding, and morality. What’s more, they will actually make you smarter. I’m a smart fella, but I’m sure I could use some more smarts.

Man, do I ever love this translation. “Don’t be tempted by sinners or listen when they say, ‘Come on! Let’s gang up and kill somebody, just for the fun of it!’” Can you imagine a bunch of your friends saying to you, “Come on! Let’s gang up and kill somebody, just for the fun of it!” Probably not. I have some pretty sketchy friends, some of whom wouldn’t surprise me if they were to murder someone if the right situation presented itself. But none of them would do that just for the fun of it. That’s not being a sinner, that’s being a psychopath.

But all fun-poking aside, the first proverb is definitely a sound one for a lesson to children. Don’t join gangs. Gangs are a guarantee to trouble you don’t want. Stick to the path, son. Fair enough.

But our second proverb is actually just the mean-spirited and snide remarkings of a smart person who can’t wait to say “I TOLD U SEW” to everyone around them. In the voice of “wisdom”, the proverb tells of laughing at those who don’t follow knowledge and fall on their faces as a result. Why must the Bible always be so smug and petulant? I mean, how often do we find God or another agent (in this case, wisdom) reduced to being a serious jerk because people aren’t listening? It’s really quite distasteful.

Jim

So there sits a rich, privileged, Christian white guy talking to a room of the future rich and privileged, Christian white folks. They have a lot of things in common, and what they lack in common, he holds and they long for. It’s an easy room for Mitt to play, and all he needs to do is tell them what they want to hear from the guy who wants them to vote for him to run the free world.

Well, one of the quotes in his speech is as follows:

As fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debate. So it is today with the enduring institution of marriage. Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman. The protection of religious freedom has also become a matter of debate. It strikes me as odd that the free exercise of religious faith is sometimes treated as a problem, something America is stuck with instead of blessed with. Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government.

Now, I’m sure that room of white, privileged, Christian honkies received this message with glee. Traditional family values and religious freedom all in a single paragraph? It’s like Manna from heaven to these people. I’d be stunned if any of them considered for a minute not voting Mittens come election day.

But me, I don’t like this message. The man running for the head of government has said that the highest wisdom and authority do not come from it, and to that I agree, but the implication on his end is that this highest wisdom and authority come from the one true God. That’s where ole’ Mittens loses me.

The Bible has a very loose definition of marriage, the focal point of this conversation of Mitt’s. Many of the characters in the Bible either had no wives (such as Jesus) or had multiple wives. And the Bible is pretty clear on what it thinks about homosexuality. The Bible, as with any supposedly revealed word of God, lacks consistency and morality. We accept this. Christians by and large do not think it moral for a man to behave in accordance with many of the moral teachings of the Bible. As Dan Savage recently stated, we ignore much of the other bullshit in the Bible, but pick and choose the parts that we feel should be acceptable.

The other question I would ask is which God is Romney siding with? The God from the Old Testament is clearly not the same dude as the New Testament, and even less so the God of Joseph Smith. Remember, that last God also encouraged (and in the case of Emma Smith, outright demanded) marriages that were made of one man and at least a few women. Sure, the majority of the Mormon churches have backed down on the topic of multiple marriages, but there are plenty who consider that a legal issue and not a moral one, and there are plenty of fundamentalist Mormons who continue the tradition.

Mittens is a poster boy for the right. That’s his job. As weirdly creepy as it may seem, these sorts of speeches where he preaches to the choir and pretends that the independent choices of consenting adults are more important topics of conversation than the economy or world relations. In fact, he probably shouldn’t be out there saying things he believes in about the economy or world relations because those are more divisive standpoints. He must be their cult of personality, appealing to everyone by watering down the message into convenient soundbites and rallying the troops around generalities. Our leaders don’t lead anymore, they appeal or, as a worst case scenario, they present the lesser of two evils.

Jim

{This all comes because of the recent stir Sam Harris has raised with his article, In Defense of Profiling. I didn’t originally expect to end with the conclusion I did, so this was an interesting project for me.}

Once upon a time, I was a young and skinny kid with a shaved head, a laptop, and a pocket full of dreams catching a plane for sunny Denver, Colorado to attend Web Design ’99. On my way back, I was pulled aside by security and asked to open my laptop. They started poking it clumsily, and I asked what they were looking for. The answer was naked pictures of minors. Needless to say, I was more than a bit offended, but I fit the profile. We then had a humorous conversation wherein they found out what I did for a living and asked how I would go about smuggling such images across the border:

Me: I would email them.

Security: But say you couldn’t.

Me: You mean like if the entire internet suddenly went dead, and not even a modicum of communications infrastructure existed to allow me to send files digitally across the border?

Security: Yeah!

Me: In that highly unlikely event, I would use an uncommon ZIP tool to make a single file out of whatever it was that they were to contain. I would then rename the file “WIN32SYS.BAK” or something equally innocuous, and I would put it in the Windows system directory.

Security: Hmm. How do you s’pose we would stop that?

Me: You wouldn’t.

I’m kind of surprised they didn’t immediately go looking for that file on my laptop. The whole thing was ridiculous because I would assume anyone sleazy enough to peddle such disgusting garbage would be smart enough to recognize that carting it across the border was totally unnecessary. But these guys had a job to do, and I wasn’t about to get in the way of their doing it. The only thing on the laptop was a couple of work projects I needed to make adjustments to remotely. We had rebuilt the box shortly before I took it to Denver, and it was work’s laptop, so it’s not like I was putting anything personal on it. They could look at it all they liked.

Anyway, long story short, the reason they pulled me aside and not the old woman or the Christian missionary in front of me was because I fit the bill. There’s obviously no “look” for a villain, but short of going through every single person’s every single thing looking for every single possibility, you have to put your resources where they can do the most good. And people who looked like me were a better return on their time investment than people who looked like pensioners.

I don’t like profiling. I think profiling is horrible. And I’m profiled all the bloody time, being a big, strong guy who looks a lot like a biker, has a shaved head, atypical facial hair, tattoos, and evil, Germanic features. People make a wide range of assumptions about me based solely on my appearance, my favorite being that I am a racist. This makes me giggle, because I am not a racist, and because of the — is it irony? — to be found in their judging me by appearances and deciding that I am someone who judges others by their appearance, which is bad.

Even before 9-11, profiling was happening all the time. Since 9-11, profiling has taken on a life of its own. Flying while brown is the new driving while black. Despite the Timothy McVeighs of the world, airports and other mass transportation areas are much more aware of anything that even sounds remotely Muslim, like when Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf Islam) wasn’t allowed entry to the US. They hide behind the War On Terror and chip away at our freedoms and rights.

But are they wrong? I think this is one of those situations where maybe right and wrong depend on perspective and trying to pick the lesser of two evils.

If you want people to be safe, the most thorough way would be to ensure that every single passenger were naked and strip searched, strapped into their seat, refused bathroom access for the duration of the flight, and had all possessions stored in the baggage compartment. All flight and ground crew would similarly be naked and searched, and no food or drink would be served. If you create a perfect locked room, then the people within that room are perfectly safe. Personally, I would have no problem with naked flights, provided they increased the size of the seats. Nothing is more revolting than the idea of being squashed in like sardines with naked men returning from their Des Moines sales junket, and that’s the sort I always get stuck flying next to.

Likewise, if we flip the scales in the other direction (to the absurd), the most thorough way to ensure everyone’s freedom is to do nothing. Anyone can board any plane with anything they like. No baggage checks, no metal detectors, no wands, and no need for security staff. We could even put some absolute barrier between the cabin and the passengers to ensure that not only are the pilots shielded from any possible debris or explosions, even perhaps going so far as to give the nose an ejection functionality and deployable parachute in the case of an explosion, but also shielded from any contact with the passengers. If a passenger jumps up with a bomb and says he’ll kill everyone, the pilot and copilot would be kept utterly unaware of the danger and safe within the nose of the plane. They would have no way of knowing that there were terrorists on board and be insulated from any attacks, thus ensuring that no flight plans would be changed and no buildings careened into.

Neither one sounds like a suitable option. So we need to make a choice on where in the middle we meet. Security is always a matter of giving up convenience and putting up with nuisance, and no system is utterly perfect.

So is profiling an acceptable compromise? I don’t know. It’s easy for me to say that it’s no big thing as a white male, but for those who are actually targeted by profiling, the answer might be strikingly different. And as much as the decision is ours, it isn’t. Largely, the decision rests with a combination of our various governing documents like constitutions and the people who run the airline companies. How much or how little danger will they tolerate their staff and resources to be exposed to?

I think, given the realities at play here, that profiling is an unfortunate but necessary thing. You won’t catch all the villains and you’ll annoy a lot of innocent people, but the risks of allowing someone on a plane with a weapon are far greater than the risks associated with letting an unknown black man drive a Mercedes through your neighborhood. Nobody likes to be the victim of profiling and prejudgement and all that crap, but my guess is that less people want to be the victims of a terrorist attack.

So what do you think? Please answer in the comments here.

Jim

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/in-defense-of-profiling

The first one I will approach is the Gambler’s Fallacy, because I think it’s one of the most common fallacies we use in our daily lives. It ultimately preys on our general misunderstanding of mathematics, particularly the use of numbers to confound and our lack of understanding probabilities.

If you flip a coin 9 times, and you have 5 heads and 4 tails, what are the odds that the next flip is tails? The answer is 50/50. Every flip of the coin has the same chance of heads or tails. The preceding 9 flips are totally and completely irrelevant to the outcome of the tenth.

The fallacy isn’t limited to gambling, though. Let me give you an example. Suppose that Janet has 13 children, and they are all girls. She becomes pregnant again. Is she having a girl? The gambler’s fallacy would imply that somehow she has to have a boy because the odds on all of those girls leading to another girl are impossibly long. The reverse is also true, however, that someone could commit the reverse gambler’s fallacy by saying that it would have to be a girl because the universe has been obviously giving Janet girl after girl after girl.

The reality is that there a an immense number of factors that could play into the outcome. One of the most notable that I am aware of is the timing of the sex that leads to conception. Male sperm move quicker, women sperm live longer. Is it possible that our friend Janet has a natural pattern for when she is most intrigued by sex, either consciously or not, and tends to have it earlier, allowing the male sperm to die off before ovulation? Of course it is. But if she has sex outside of that rhythm, a boy may be more likely.

But that’s hardly the point. From the parents’ perspective, the outcome is binary – male or female. That’s why the fallacy gets applied. Now, you’ll notice that the fallacy applies both ways. This is because the odds based on previous pregnancies are what we are talking about here, and those odds have no bearing whatsoever on the current pregnancy.

Another example of this fallacy, but again relating to babies, is the idea that your lump is likely to be a boy because boys run in the family. Boys don’t run in your family. Sperm run in your family. I have personally never heard of a hereditary condition that resulted in only sperm of one gender being created, so your family having all those boys would be a matter of random chance and nothing more.

The way to spot this fallacy is the phrase, “Well, the odds are…” Unless two events are causally related, then the odds are nothing special.

That doesn’t mean that odds can’t come into the conversation, but people like to see relationships between events that are not directly related to one another. There are actually many logical fallacies that cater to this desire, but we’ll get to more of those. The gambler’s fallacy is an easy one to spot because it relies on the assumption either that a result has to be a value simply because that hasn’t value is past due, or that a result has to be a certain value simply because it’s always that value.

Jim

Abortion debates are not important legal matters at present. That is absolutely true. Admittedly, we have, at present, no abortion legislation in place. This is because our existing legislation, the Criminal Law Amendment Act from the late 60s was found via R. v. Morgentaler to be unconstitutional, and the only attempt to introduce new law on the matter failed. At present, abortions are legal because there is nothing to say they are illegal.

When the Supreme Court ruled on R. v. Morgentaler, they said, “The decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount to that of the state.” I wholly agree. This is a private decision that the mother must make and live with, and any legislation that prevents her from having the ability to make that decision violates the idea of a free and democratic society.

Where that gets tricky is the argument that an unborn baby has the same rights as a person. Woodworth’s argument is summed up nicely when he says, “How can we honestly discuss all of the complicated issues around abortion if we cannot decide whether or not a child is a human being before the moment of the complete birth?” This is the right to life argument that says that a baby is a living thing at the moment of conception, and as such should have the same rights and privileges as any other human being.

Make no mistake, life exists at conception. In fact, life exists long before conception. Sperm are alive. Eggs are alive. When they meet, they are definitely very much alive. All decisions around how many weeks old a baby can be before we consider it a living thing are moot. However, why does the state of being alive change anything? Nobody pretends that a fertilized egg is not a living thing that possesses the potential to grow into a fully functioning human being. But granting the right to life for it ultimately means that the life of that fertilized egg is more important than that of the mother carrying it.

Let me now clarify the statement I made in the opening paragraph. I am not against legislation on the topic, provided that legislation were in keeping with the Supreme Court decision. If they want to shore up the details with legislation that coincides with the present practice of abortion clinics, I have no problem with that. However, that is likely not the intention of Woodworth. The Conservatives, despite all their talk of small government and wanting to have government stay out of the private lives of the people, want government to make the practice of abortion illegal.

That said, I do not consider the current legality of abortions to be more worthy of debate and evaluation than so many other topics which will not get the attention they need. As a result, I believe that further discussion on the topic should be tabled until such time as there is nothing better to weigh in on.

In the election campaign, Stephen Harper said, “As long as I’m prime minister we are not reopening the abortion debate”. Harper is still Prime Minister, but here we are. He is claiming that he cannot control what private members bills are brought up in Parliament, but I believe that is a weak statement at best. This is a means to show their biggest support base, the right wing Christians, that they are standing up for them.

Neither Harper nor Woodworth will ever need to make the decision to have or not have an abortion. Speculation on what they would choose is pointless. What matters is that women have abortions. Criminalisation of abortions does not mean that women will not abort, it just means that they will abort less safely and with greater potential health problems, not to mention the legal ramifications of doing so. And all of this is merely to placate the Christian Right?

Not cool, Harper-bot. Not cool at all.

Jim

I know it’s not every Christian who would behave like this, so please don’t bother trying to explain to me that fact. I’m not calling out every Christian, but I am pointing out a particular group of sick jackasses who use their faith in the Lord in disgusting fashion. That’s right, they are praying for breast cancer to swiftly and brutally kill the women involved in the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

The MRFF is a group whose intention is to battle the presence of religion in the US military. Remember that separation of church and state thing? Well, the military is rife with violations of that principal, and often a very difficult place for those who don’t aspire to the Christian faith. Read their mission statement, and you’ll see that this is an altruistic group who merely seek to ensure that the rules around religious freedom granted in the US Constitution are maintained.

So, taking a page from the Psalms, these goodly Christian folk are praying that their God ravage and murder his enemies. As PZ Myers points out in the post, this is anything but a genuine threat. I don’t imagine that the women identified are quaking in their godless boots at the thought that the Almighty is going to smite them with cancer. But this is what these particular people think constitutes a reasonable reaction to religious freedom.

To my Christian readers, I would strongly suggest that when you see this sort of garbage associated with your faith, you make some noise about it.

Jim

Today’s reading, which is just what the doctor ordered, comes from Hebrews 7, Exodus 3-4 and Psalm 41. Hebrews continues to leave me mildly entertained, especially after yesterday’s irrefutable logics. Exodus has thus far been an intriguing read as I try to remember my mis-remembered memories of the story of Moses, and the Psalms always suck. Let’s begin.

Woah! Now, I’d never heard of Melchizedek, but it turns out he’s another immortal. I’d like to meet this guy. Not only was he alive in Christ’s time (or, more accurately, since 63 or 64 CE), but he was alive in Abraham’s time, around 2018 BCE. And he’s still alive today, because the Bible says so! But what’s really cool about this section is that THIS is the part of the Bible where it explains the importance of giving a tenth of your earnings to the church!

One thing I found that was inconsistent, but not a deal breaker… Hebrews 7:24 says, “But Jesus will never die, and so he will be a priest forever!” This should more accurately read “But Jesus will never die again, and so he will be a priest forever!”

The rest of Hebrews, unsurprisingly, continues the “Dude, Jesus is so neat!” style of the book.

I have to distrust the word of the Bible at the start of today’s Exodus Adventure. When the burning bush calls Moses by name, I cannot believe his response would be “Here I am”. No, maybe I’m wrong here, but I know my response to a burning bush calling me by name would be “WHAT THE HELL THAT BUSH JUST CALLED ME BY NAME”, followed quickly by checking the dosage of whatever it was I had been taking. But it tells better their way, so we’ll go with it.

And here we reach another of those points in the Bible that don’t make sense. God is all-seeing and all-knowing and all-powerful. Later, when he wants to make the Egyptians worthy of his righteous wrath, God actively turns the heart of Pharaoh, but here he seems all ZOMG THERE HURTIN MY PPLZ WHO NU about the Hebrews being enslaved. That just doesn’t add up. He made the Hebrews get enslaved to punish them (or something), so why act all surprised by it?

And I mean, to that end, all the stuff he’s about to do to the Egyptians is pretty sick when he’s the one who controls whether or not Pharaoh lets his people go.

Seriously, here’s the words from God’s lips to Moses’s ear:

When you get to Egypt, go to the king and work the miracles I have shown you. But I will make him so stubborn that he will refuse to let my people go. Then tell him that I have said, “Israel is my first-born son, and I commanded you to release him, so he could worship me. But you refused, and now I will kill your first-born son.”

What a dick!

Woah! And then there’s a story I never heard before about foreskin and reprieve. See, Moses was sleeping, and God was all set to murder him in his sleep (like a kind and loving God would) when someone cut the foreskin off their baby and touched Moses’s leg with it. What the hell is God’s problem? Dude, go stand up for my people, IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH MWAHAHAHAHA.

What a dick!

And now I have to read another Psalm by King Dave. Ugh. Oh man, this is rich: “You always heal them and restore their strength when they are sick.” No he doesn’t, Dave! Lots of people die from sickness, and I imagine that even a lot of real lame sickness back in the bronze age were utterly lethal. But you say that prayer will stop them? Sigh.

Dave then claims that his enemies are jerks waiting for him to die of sickness, but if he prays just hard enough, God will save him so he can get even with them. Yeah, that’s a good message to send. I heal you, Dave, now go murder people.

I can’t believe I still have more than 250 days of this to read. Ick.

Jim

Today’s reading, whose taste is taste is taste is gonna move ya, comes from Hebrews 6:13-20, Exodus 1-2 and Psalm 40. Hebrews has been confusing as all sin to me, and the Psalms are just irritating. We’re into Exodus now, which means the great tale of Moses and Pharaoh. Interestingly, archaeology has punched massive holes in the story to the point of making it almost laughable, but still people try to take it seriously.

Hebrews will not go down as the be all and end all of well considered arguments, that’s for sure. This section essentially makes two points. The first, that you can tell he’s God because he promised Abe that Abe would have a lot of kids and then (after many years) BAM! Abe’s knee deep in diapers. The second is that people swear by something greater than themselves, so when God promises, he’s promising on his promise, which is greater than himself, so you know it’s for sure! That’s some interesting logic…

The beginning of our trip through Exodus is the story of the struggle of the Jews in Egypt. As mentioned earlier, it conflicts with what we have learned about the treatment of the Jews, but who am I to split hairs. I’ll take the book of Exodus as writ. Within a very short time from the days of Jacob and Joseph, the Jews in Egypt are laid low and forced to work as slaves. I’m not really sure how, from reading the description of their tasks, they were working harder than anyone else, but we’ll just assume that is something lost in the translation.

It’s funny, I’ve confused the stories of the murdering of children during Christ’s time (did that happen? I don’t recall it from the first Gospel I read in this series…) and the murdering of children during Moses’s time. I guess the King in Moses’s time just wanted to cripple the Jews so they only had girl-children rather than having a direct plan to kill off a potential enemy from prophecy.

I’m confused on another point here, and always have been. The King says, “Kill me all them Jew babies!” and then his daughter finds a baby, recognizes that it must be Hebrew, and adopts it. Did the King not notice? Me, I think I’d probably hear about it if my daughter was about to have a baby. At least I bloody well hope I would… And it’s not like they tried to hide the fact, they named the kid “I pulled your ass out of the water”, which couldn’t possibly have been a common name at the time. At least I assume Moses means that. The actual words are “She named him Moses because she said, “I pulled him out of the water”, so I’m running on that assumption.

Exodus is neat, though! Remember, this is the story of Moses, the Charlton Heston guy who gave the Jews God’s law. So far we’ve seen liars rewarded with children and Moses killing a guy. Were they really not subject to any divine law before God thought to jot down his Top Ten Ways To Go To Hell? Why does Moses get a pass?

The rest of Exodus is uneventful. Moses runs away from Angry King, meets some ladies, marries them, and if I remember correctly, hears a song about a tapestry that tells him God has a plan for him. Or maybe that was the movie version. Either way, Moses hooks up.

Our Psalm is another of King Dave’s Awesome Psalms. I am literally cringing at the thought of reading another of these things.

Well, it’s better than usual. In this one, Dave is in a surprisingly jovial mood, and is not screaming about how much suffering God has laid on him (but he’s really  merciful). Nope, today we have a Psalm about how God has taken away much of his suffering, and how if you live a good life and don’t sin, God will do the same to you. But then he says, “My sins are all around me, and I can’t find my way. My sins outnumber the hairs on my head, and I feel weak”. So he’s a terrible sinner, and you helped him, and the lesson we are to learn is that not sinning means God will help you? Sorry, but that just doesn’t add up. Silly Yaweh.

Anyway, that’s it for today.

Jim

So what did we learn in this election? I think the most significant thing was that the province is scared of jumping whole hog into the more extreme right wing. While the pollsters were suggesting a majority leadership by the Wildrose Tea Party, what we got was a majority government held by the PC party. While I cannot say that I was expecting things to go exactly as they did, I was only really surprised by the majority part of the equation. I had thought we would see a much closer balance of power between the PC and Wildrose, which would have put more power in the hands of the other opposition parties.

This election was framed from the very start in both media and conversation as, “Which Conservative party do you want to run the show?” and I understand that those were probably the two most significant parties in the election, but I felt that it predisposed the results. In the end, a huge majority of people voted for the PC party, and I cannot help but wonder how much of that was legitimate support and how much was fear of the Wildrose.

A majority government does not bode well for the province, and such a heavily right-leaning government (only 7 seats to non-right wing parties) is not, in my opinion at least, representative of the philosophical breakdown of Albertans. I am curious to see how the total number of seats reflects the percentage of voter support for each party, and whether that will trigger the opposition bringing up the subject of changing the riding system. It will not work, though. I would be stunned if we ever see significant changes to the electoral system.

And now, the future. Obviously, I am no prophet, but there are some things that I see great potential in.

For starters, the words “business as usual” are going to become far too common. The PC party will no doubt read into the distribution of votes that the Albertan population support them greatly, rather than seeing that many people voted based on the evil they knew and a fuelled fear of the evil they didn’t. The PC party campaigned on the twin statements “No new taxes, no service cuts”. There was no promise of anything getting better, just that they wouldn’t increase our tax burden or cut our services. Now, the PC (as with every party) must either live up to their word or show themselves as lying scoundrels. But we are talking about politicians, so I figure the former is highly unlikely.

I would be staggered if we saw improvements in any of our public services. There were the campaign promises made of more monies allotted to a variety of areas, but time will tell just how true they spoke. The harsh reality is that our public services are in horrible shape because of the PC party, particularly in the Klein years when they devastated budgets. Many of those service cuts were a direct intention to undermine the public system and open the conversation for privatization, and that isn’t about to change.

We are certain to not see a balanced budget any time soon. Alberta is the Starbucks of provinces. We have the most money, yet somehow have lousy public services that cost enough to drive us into debt. Clearly, our Conservative friends know how to run the show. If they follow their plan and ask for no additional revenues while expecting to maintain the admittedly pathetic level of service we currently receive, I see no reason to assume that we will see anything other than deficit budget after deficit budget.

Now, I’m not one of those who thinks that a deficit budget is the worst thing on earth. I think that there are times when one has to run into the red, but those times should not be when we are prospering so. Ultimately, what I believe we truly need is to evaluate all of our public services and find ways to do them better. That, in my opinion, is the only way to ensure that no new revenues and no cuts to service are possible, but to assume that the PC have any intention of this is probably foolish.

What worked in this election, sad as it is, was scrapping. The PC won the most support because their screwups happened at the beginning of the election season, with Gary Mar’s suspension and the revelation of the committees that were paying MLAs to do nothing. But as the election drew on, the right wing nature of the Wildrose became the talking point. Slips on topics like abortion and “conscience rights” as well as public mistakes like the “honkey knows best” and “gays are gonna burn” gaffes began what would ultimately be a tarnish to the Wildrose armour that would ultimately cost them the election.

But all is not bleak. The Alberta Party managed over 16,000 votes which, when you consider that they are a new party, the near-total media blackout on them, and the fearmongering nature of this election, is pretty impressive. I still believe that Albertans want a change, they just don’t know what direction to change in. My hope is that in the next election, we are able to shine the light on the Alberta Party.

Either way, I’m beyond proud of the work I did for this election, and I hope to remain as involved in things as I have been. Many of my friends have teased me about running myself, but I do not believe that is a possibility. The reality of things is that I do not look or feel like a politician, and I cannot imagine standing a chance of doing any good representing the Alberta Party in that capacity. Like it or not, image is everything.

Jim

For my two cents, though, this seems like we’re not getting the whole story. There is no rule in France or anywhere else that I know of that says that you can’t wear masks in public. Here in frosty Canada (which, at least in my little section, is gloriously un-frosty today), we have no problem with people wearing masks. In the winter, a balaclava is perfectly acceptable to wear, and seeing people at a protest wearing masks or in other ways obscuring their features is perfectly acceptable. Having a muslim woman wear a veil to me is not a question of rights that we do not possess.

I can wear a ski mask and walk the streets of My Home Town. If I was to go to a bank, they would ask me to remove it for security reasons, and they would be right to do so. If I were posing for my driver’s license, they would ask me to remove it, and they would be right to do so. This is where the problem lies. We expect that things like driver’s licenses show an accurate picture of the person in question. If I were bouncing at a club and someone came in with a veil, I would ask to see their license and ask them to remove their veil that I could verify whom I was talking to. This is not an unreasonable request.

Does someone’s religion supercede my ability to ask them to do this? Does someone’s religion supercede a bank’s ability to ask them to unveil? I don’t believe so. As a bouncer, how am I to know if the person handing me the ID is the same as the person on the ID without some sort of visual confirmation? Because all manner of masks are used in robberies and the like, and banks (and other businesses) rely on video recording in their private establishment to identify potential culprits, it is not unreasonable that they require their customers, when appearing in person, to not obscure their identities.

In both those settings, this is not religious discrimination. If the policy were “people with ski masks are fine, but people with veils are not” then that would be unacceptable. There are banking options available to those who do not wish to unveil, and there are other bars that may have different policies than the ones I work at.

Now, as to the picture in question, what is missing is context. There are clearly a large number of cameras and people standing in the area. It is highly unlikely that all of this media and attention (and, indeed, police) came about because of this incident. We don’t know the context, so we can only speculate (and should not). To take the picture at face value, we have a group of big mean brutes hassling a tiny woman in a veil. But there are plenty of tiny women in veils every day in France, and presumably they are not all targets of arrest.

I have to assume that there is more to this picture than meets the eye. As much as it’s possible that all of this erupted around a poor, oppressed woman going about her business, it is equally possible that she has just attempted to kill the President of France, or took a swing at a police officer. The picture is powerfully compelling because she appears scared and so much smaller, but that’s all we have to go on with this. A reasonable evaluation of the image begins to break that down.

But as to the greater issue of whether or not we should allow muslim women to wear veils, I have no problem with this. I do not like the veil and see it as a shaming mechanism, but that is my perspective. If someone chooses to wear a veil, whatever their reasons, I see no reason to disallow it provided they are prepared to remove it when circumstances require it. I am certain that adherants will not like my caveat. The way I see it, you are free to express your religion, but required to abide by laws and reasonable policies that would require you, from time to time, to remove the veil.

Jim