Cue the whining about the left-wing media

Not a good week for the Harper Machine, so, in keeping with the Rove playbook, watch for the complaints about media bias. I can practically hear the clutch grinding as they switch gears from swaggering bullies to whining victims.

This hot-oil massage from The Star should figure prominently.

Class warfare and the corporate media

In a comment on the preceding post, JJ (is she returning to the blogosphere? Be still, my beating heart!) observes the near-total blackout on coverage of the situation in Michigan.

Police budgets, and how a phony narrative gets manufactured

Earlier this week, the Star ran an essay in which the best mayor Toronto's had in the last half-century argues that there's plenty of wasteful spending in the police budget, and that if the Ford regime is serious about trimming fat and stopping the gravy train, there's lots of room to cut there.

Saturday night Leaf-fan blues

Off the grid most of the day ... real-life tasks, dinner-party preps, whatever.

So I haven't checked TSN or CBC or the Star or the Globe or anything else (not even the best hockey blog in the known universe) for the results of this evening's tilt between the Leafs and the Canucks.

Rationality, critical thinking and Phil Plait: the limits of civil discourse

As you can tell by looking over to the right a little, I follow quite a few blogs. Dozens, in fact. Lots of friends on Facebook and hundreds of tweeters as well. And sometimes I just go surfing, clicking on links without any preconceived objective, just to keep reading. So I can't really remember how I found this, but thank you to whoever pointed me to it.

Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

Rather timely, I think, because it's hard to be a skeptic, especially given the institutional energy devoted to pushing packaged narratives and manufactured storylines. It's never been easy to swim against the current, let alone persuade others to do likewise.

What's particularly worthwhile about Plait's presentation, though, is the passage from which the title is taken (at about the 24:30 mark). As he argues, no matter how wrong people's beliefs are, you're not likely to convince them they're mistaken if you're insulting them. Mea culpa, therefore, given the tone of yesterday's post about Rob Ford's supporters and "suburban fury."

But it raises a number of issues, for me at least, about civility and civil discourse. I've written previously about the obligations of civic engagement, and how the tone of public conversation has been poisoned and corrupted, deliberately, by the likes of Fox Noise and the Rove / Murdoch cult. You don't have to dig too deep to see Stephen Harper, Kory Teneycke and the folks at Sun Media using the same playbook. 

One of the comments on Plait's presentation argues that debate isn't so much about changing your opponent's mind as it is about convincing as many members of the audience as possible. Plait himself alludes to that, I think, in his remarks about the "big tent." Whether you agree with that or not, though, it implies another question: when you're making an argument, whom are you trying to convince? And does it indeed suggest that a commitment to civil discourse implies an obligation to listen respectfully and hear out any and all opposing viewpoints, no matter how outlandish?

I haven't worked this out in full, but this, I think, is where I run up against the limits of Phil Plait's argument. One of the worst aspects of the Karl Rove playbook, and one we see the Harper government embracing with relish, is the calculated devaluing of science, evidence-based decisionmaking, and acquired expertise. The script is familiar: dismiss experts as elitists out of touch with real people, and insist on "balance,"and demand that people should hear "both sides of the issue." It's how the denialists manage to derail any serious attempts to address climate change, for example.  

The effect is to set up a whole array of false equivalencies based on two faulty assumptions: firstly, that complex issues can be reduced to a simple "he said / she said" storyline, and secondly, that both sides of this artificially framed issue are valid and deserving of equal time. Which is why we see entire social movements devoted to pushing creationism, and school textbooks forced to include disclaimers that evolution is just a theory.  

And this is where I get off the bus. Yes, civil discourse is preferable to inflammatory rhetoric, and yes, reasoned debate is better than screaming and namecalling. But there's no obligation to treat creationism, cultish superstition or other forms of manufactured stupidity with the same weight or serious consideration as the body of scientific, rationally tested and demonstrated knowledge we've developed since the Enlightenment. And if people continue to cling to it in the face of fact and evidence, out of laziness, dogmatism or sheer spite, they don't deserve to be treated with respect.

If that makes me a snobby condescending elitist, fine. Sue me.

Read this post from Alex Himelfarb

Not going to try and summarize it here. Can't possibly do it justice. Here's a taste:

The new anti-elitism is, I believe, profoundly misplaced, strangely focused on politicians, public servants, experts, and knowledge workers rather than on those who have all the money and power. That’s certainly good news for those who have all the money and power.

Read it here.

I know I've gone on about the cultivation of stupidity and the celebration of ignorance, but this takes the analysis that much deeper. It's long, but it's worth it. Go. Read.

Sun Media leaves another mess on the sidewalk

I've never been fond of the news business's predilection for describing the late summer as the “silly season” It implies that there isn't any real news happening, which is patently not true. And it provides a justification for manufactured bullshit stories.

That's what we're seeing in the “controversy” surrounding Homegrown, one of the plays on the bill for the current SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto. Apparently we're supposed to consider it objectionable because it portrays Shareef Abdelhaleem, one of the so-called Toronto 18, in a sympathetic light. And we're supposed to be even more pissed off because the festival got some money from Ottawa. Cue the braying from the Fox wannabes at Sun Media, the Levantines, the Corians, and the rest of the perpetually angry flying monkeys of the right.

As J. Kelly Nestruck points out, the festival got perhaps $35,000 from the federal government. When you do the math and consider how that was divided up among various productions, promotional costs, etc., he suggests that this particular play might have gotten around $850 or so. (Well, I can certainly understand the outrage. How many tasers and cans of pepper spray could have been had for that kind of money?)

Sun Media hack Brian Lilley has been the point man on this. He's taken issue with Nestruck's accusations of censorship in a blog post today, in which he takes the predictable tack of posing as a hard-working dogged reporter, crusading for the rights of the hard-working little guy, bristling at the sneering condescension of media elites, yada yada yada. We've heard the cliches so many times we can probably recite them in our sleep. As he puts it:

There is no right to arts funding, a point that many supporters of the performing arts just don’t understand. Just because a play is written doesn’t mean it should be funded. Just because a theatre company wishes to put it on does not mean it should receive a grant.

Nestruck, Toronto city councilor Adam Vaughan and other defenders of Homegrown would prefer it if the hoi poloi, the great unwashed would just pay the bills and shut up.

Apparently the issue is about public money being spent on things Brian Lilley and his bosses don't like. Well, boo fucking hoo. Can we talk about how tiresome and fundamentally anti-social that line of argument is? “Yargle bargle bleghh, I don't want my tax dollars spent on things I don't agree with.” Straight out of the teabaggers manual.

To anyone who still wants to dance to that music, I say tough shit. You're a citizen of a democratic society. It's not your money, it is society's money – to be allocated in accordance with publicly determined priorities. You get your say in how those determinations are made through your inherent right to participate in the political process. And if you don't get what you want through participating, you don't get to simply take your marbles and go home. I don't think the Canadian military should be in Afghanistan. I don't think public money should be spent on billion-dollar summits or paying cops to beat the shit out of peaceful citizens, but I don't get to withhold my tax dollars on that basis.

As for Brian Lilley, his argument is disingenuous bullshit. What he and his Sun Media paymasters have done is taken one play – one play, from a festival staging more than 40 plays – which may have gotten a tiny little percentage of the money allocated to this theatre festival and built a cynical and contrived narrative of “glorifying Islamic terrorism” around it for the sole purpose of working their knuckle-dragging, drooling readership into a frenzy. Another textbook demonstration of how right-wing operatives manufacture controversies.

What's worse, though, is the insult to our intelligence, with the wide-eyed, innocent “we're not advocating censorship, we're just asking questions about the funding” script. (Yeah, right. I'm not saying your sister's a whore, I'm just asking why she has sex with strangers for money.) They're not just asking. They've poisoned the debate before it's even started by framing this as a story about our hard-earned tax dollars coddling terror-symp artists who don't work for a living because they're milking our socialist government for grant money. It's faux-populist crap.

One last question: did Lilley actually talk to Nestruck, or Vaughan, before penning this load of shite? How can he presume to tell us what they would prefer?

But that's standard procedure for Fox / Sun operatives. Their object isn't to inform, it's to inflame. Just because it's late summer doesn't mean we can afford to relax our guard. The stupidity virus is a nasty one. If we're not vigilant, we could end up here.

Ok, this census thing is getting out of hand

Two of my favourite progressive observers have noted the speed and suddenness with which the flying monkeys of the right have swung into line behind the Harpokons' inexplicable attack on the long-form census. As Chet Scoville notes at The Vanity Press, a couple of weeks ago nobody was even talking about it, but now it's tapping into long-held beliefs and long-suppressed rage and resentment of Condescending Urban Elitist Big Government Socialism. The fact that even Tom Flanagan's baffled by it is beside the point.

And note as well the all-or-nothing nature of some of the anti-census commentary. As Cathie from Canada notes, there's no nuance, no grey, nothing – it's all wrapped up in one big ball of string. If we let them collect census data, the next thing we know they'll be coming for our guns and forcing us to marry gay Muslims.

Another manifestation of the toxic right-wing tropes the Harpokons seem determined to import from their teabagging friends to the south. As we've seen in the case of the birthers, facts don't matter to these people. And when the facts get in the way of the narrative or the ideology, guess what gets thrown out the window?

That's the thing about manufactured controversies. For decades, nobody's gotten their knickers in a twist about the census, but out of nowhere, there's this huge groundswell of organized opposition to it? A grassroots movement of resentment that's been building for years? Can anyone say astroturf?

How do we hold them accountable?

I've been thinking for a few days about police officers and the obvious, glaring inadequacy of mechanisms supposedly designed to hold them accountable. We may or may not get a public inquiry in the wake of the way citizens were abused during the G20 weekend, but it's pretty clear that nothing's going to change and no one's going to be charged, suspended or otherwise disciplined.

The police board isn't going to do anything. The municipal, provincial and / or federal governments? The courts? Not gonna happen. At best, we might get some sententious declaration, a few months from now, that mistakes were made.

Even a well-resourced public inquiry with the power to compel testimony and make findings of fact - the Braidwood inquiry in British Columbia, for example - can't do much more than decide that subject officers don't have any credibility. At least in that case, the four RCMP officers who tasered Robert Dziekanski to death were held up for the public scorn they deserve.

What we saw during the G20, however, goes much deeper. We've all seen the videos, of aggressive and violent police attacking, abusing and shoving peaceful citizens. We've all heard the stories about outrageous and appalling violations of civil and human rights. What I'm forced to wonder is: where do they get the idea that it's OK to abuse the people they're sworn to serve and protect like this?

There's no shortage of examples, of course, but I'm struck by the particular egregiousness of this one. This York Region cop - a fairly senior one, if the three shoulder bars mean anything - starts pushing around a guy at least a head shorter than himself (1:40) and says "this ain't Canada" (3:57). Take away the badge and the uniform and he's pretty much indistinguishable from your everyday asshole on steroids - note the aggression, the bullying, the clear contempt for the people he's dealing with - but what's particularly noteworthy for me is his obvious knowledge that no one's going to call him to account for this. He knows he's untouchable.

Since we can't count on an institutional response, however, it falls to the broader activist community (that's right, activists - there's nothing wrong with activism, and the idea isn't going to be demonized or marginalized by the manufactured corporate narrative) to find our own ways of holding guys like this accountable. And in this case, I think that's accomplished by the video: it holds him up to the light so that we can see him for what he is.

Also, you've got to admire the cojones on this guy: