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Antonia Zerbisias has a thought-provoking article today in the Star regarding the easing of prostitution laws in Canada. She points out the disparity of views among feminists. Not surprisingly, many feminists are appalled at the decision. And it’s not just because historically some feminists are actually more puritans than feminists. Montrealer Diane Matte of the Coalition Against Sexual Exploitation is furious. She claims that feminists who support the ruling “want to prostitute other women”.

“I’m sorry, but why should I, as a feminist, support that a woman wants to sell another woman? And that doesn’t even look at the question of why men should have the right to buy women — and children — whenever and wherever they want. That’s why it’s impossible to reconcile these two visions.”

What abolitionists such as Matte want is to follow the so-called Nordic Model, one in operation in Iceland and Sweden, which has decriminalized sex workers while criminalizing their clients.

Others don’t buy that solution.

“As a criminologist I can guarantee you that that doesn’t work because it doesn’t remove the criminal element from prostitution,” says O’Doherty, who teaches at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Making demand illegal, she says, onlivly serves to drive sex workers underground.

It’s not just Matte. Other feminists are against the freeing of women to choose for themselves what they want to do with their own bodies. Zerbisias quotes other opponents. But it’s Matte who takes the cake.

“Fighting the sex industry is complicated,” she concedes. “But if you don’t start somewhere, it’s sure that you won’t end prostitution. For me, as a long-time feminist, if we had once decided that we couldn’t win against patriarchy or against violence, we wouldn’t be very far today.

The modern woman engaged in prostitution knows that claims of patriarchy are largely no longer applicable. In Canada – or in BC at least – the industry is largely run by independent women who use relatively safe outlets such as Craigslist to run their businesses. The Internet has turned the industry from a history of ‘patriarchy’ into one that actually empowers many women. The lax view of Canadians, as opposed to the United States for example, empowers women to engage in prostitution relatively safely without the cultural stigma that so endangers American prostitutes.

That the industry is changing is best indicated by a friend of mine. In her fifties, she is late to the game but an enthusiastic participant. Using Craigslist, she does a brisk business with the approval and protection of her neighbours. She is bright, politically astute and very independent. Nobody is making money off her but her. Punishing her clients would only punish her.

I’m not saying she is doing it because it is her first choice. I don’t know that. She is divorced with two children now married. And I’m not saying she is indicative of the situation of every prostitute. But she is part of a loose coalition of sex workers with which she communicates and has formed a kind of union. That’s the reality of the new Internet age sex worker in Canada. Diane Matte should pay attention and do a little catching up.

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain

Look, I appreciate Keith Olbermann. As an MSNBC celebrity, I don’t love him. He goes overboard and sometimes serves more as fodder for right wing mockery than for any appreciation of his humour, eloquence and withering critiques. In other words, I recognize him but don’t watch him any longer because of  his excesses.

Saying that, as a sports guy he is unequaled. His replay commentaries on Sunday Night Football were unparalleled. He took his MSNBC persona, softened it, kept the humour and slid in some zingers. He was perfection. He gave it up (or more likely was forced to give it up) to devote his energies to his news commentary show.

So, in tribute to Keith Olbermann the sportsman, this is a photo today from a playoff game with two luminaries, Ken Burns of the precise and historical docs and the much maligned Jon Klein, ex-head of CNN fired for not being right wing enough. Most of all, I love that Burns is wearing a baseball glove. Rock on Keith, Ken and Jon!

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain

Via an excellent article from Frank Rich on politics and social media:

“With Facebook and Twitter and the like,” Gladwell wrote, “the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will” was supposed to be upended, so it would be “easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Instead, he concluded, we ended up with the reverse: social media increase the efficiency of the existing order rather than empowering dissidents. In his view, social networking is far less likely to recreate the civil rights movement of the 1960s than to track down missing cellphones for Wall Streeters.

Gladwell’s provocative Internet critique is complemented by a much-buzzed-about independent movie — in this case, an actual documentary — that was released shortly before “The Social Network.” No one will confuse this ham-fisted film, titled “Catfish,” with a Fincher-Sorkin production, but it’s highly unsettling nonetheless. It tells of a 25-year-old Manhattan photographer who strikes up a devoted Facebook friendship with a small-town Michigan family whose 8-year-old daughter is a painting prodigy. When the photographer seeks out his virtual friends in the real Michigan, it’s inevitable that he and the audience will learn the hard way, as the Times film critic A.O. Scott put it, that cyberspace is a “wild social ether where nobody knows who anybody is.”

Even if Gladwell and “Catfish” are overstating the case, they certainly have one if you look at the political environment in our election year of 2010. The Internet in general and social networking in particular have done little, if anything, to hobble those pursuing power with such traditional means as big lies and big money. Perhaps what’s most remarkable this year is the number of candidates who have tried to create fictitious avatars like the Facebook impostors in “Catfish.” These candidates and others often fashion their campaigns to avoid real reporters (and sometimes real voters). Some benefit from YouTube commercials paid for by impossible-to-trace anonymous donors. In this wild political ether where nobody knows who anybody is, the Internet provides cover, not transparency.

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain

The Star’s James Travers scared Mattbastard back to bed this morning with a column on the frightening possibility of a Conservative majority. Travers goes through the likely scenarios and maps out the new reality of Canadian politics. That reality has been wedged single-handedly by Harper. He has split the nation, manifested the most unsavory of the nation’s fears and prejudices, laid waste any civil debate and made ‘Canada’ a dirty word around the world.

Most chilling of all, despite the boundless scandals and negative direction in which Canada is heading, is that Harper maintains a minority and unbelievably could win a majority, despite a mere third of the country supporting him. How can this be? Has our system of government become so outdated that it can be played by Harper like a cat with a mouse? Is it the general malaise of the populace or the ‘rampant disillusionment with the political process’?

These are points that Ignatieff and Layton need to consider. With any coalition now seemingly kaput, it is up to the opposition leaders to remove their white gloves and play by the anything-goes rules. Travers put it succinctly:

Two lessons this Prime Minister learned from former prime minister Jean Chrétien are never take your foot off an opponent’s throat and never miss an opportunity to win an election. Both are relevant now.

There you have it. Travers states the obvious. To counter these two lessons, it takes a tough and ruthless student who can outplay his teacher. If Harper wants to be the authoritarian monster who has no respect for his also-ran opponents, it is up to the opposition to look to Chretien for clues on how to fight Harper with unsparing tenacity. Chretien was nowhere nearly as devious and devoted to foisting a foreign agenda onto Canadians as is Harper. But Chretien knew how to fight and how to win.

While Ignatieff and Layton play the erudite nice guys, Harper keeps ripping them a new one. The media doesn’t care who is right or wrong, they just report the show. It’s up to the opposition parties to come to our rescue with a combination of fight, effective campaigning and sheer audacity. And, as Ken Kesey once put it, “never give a inch”.

Neither Ignatieff nor Layton seem to have the goods. This is not good news. Where do we go from here? Not even James Travers knows.

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain

Israel is embarrassed but not that much.

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Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain

In a 5-4 decision, our Supreme Court has ruled to deny suspects the right of advice from a lawyer during police interrogations. Does this mean that authorities now have permission to browbeat and coerce confessions out of innocent citizens too emotionally exhausted from questioning and accusations to fight back?

Justice Ian Binnie wrote a dissent saying the court was going too far.

What now appears to be licenced, he said, is that a presumed innocent individual may be detained and isolated by the police for at least five or six hours without reasonable recourse to a lawyer, during which time the officers can brush aside assertions of the right to silence or demands to be returned to his or her cell, in an endurance contest in which the police interrogators, taking turns with one another, hold all the important legal cards.

Justices Louis LeBel, Morris Fish and Rosalie Abella also raised concerns in their own dissent.

In their joint opposition, delivered by LeBel and Fish, they emphasized this right was not been granted to suspects on the condition that it not be exercised when they are most in need of its protection — notably in an interrogation when they are particularly vulnerable and in an acute state of jeopardy.

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain

Conservatives don’t much care for intelligence, especially Nobel Prize winners. Or civil rights. They’d like them not to exist. So, I imagine there are smiles around Cons’ breakfast tables this morning while reading this news about the wife of a Nobel prize winner in China being forced out of her home for talking to the media about the prize. Even more pleasing for the toast and coffee sippin’ Conservatives is that television has been blacked out from covering the news. The ideal Conservative world exposed.

SHANGHAI — Police forced the wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo to leave her Beijing home Friday night, in a bid to stop her talking to foreign media crowded outside her apartment block.

It was part of China’s “damage control” efforts that began with blacking out television coverage Friday when the announcement came that the jailed Chinese rights activist is this year’s Nobel Peace laureate.

Only satellite television, of course. No Chinese stations were even covering the news that China had won its first ever Nobel Prize.

When George Bush began waving his compassionate conservative flag, the laughter could be heard not just from the left but many on the right had a chuckle, too. The term goes beyond ‘oxymoron’. Any dictionary should have ‘conservative’ as the first entry for antonyms of ‘compassion’.

With the explosion of tea party candidates for the US midterms, compassionate conservatism can now be shown for the canard that it is. The frothing and churning of hate from these candidates, the threatening of doing away with EI, social security and other safety net programs, the overt racism and the violence always just under the surface are all indicative of a nasty, selfish and ruthless world view.

No one represents this view more than Glenn Beck. And nothing represents that view more than Beck’s take yesterday on a  family who lost their home to fire while firemen stood by and watched. The owner, Gene Cranick, had neglected to pay a $75 fee to pay for firefighters. The result is that not only did the house burn down but three dogs and a cat died in the fire. A sad story.

But not to Beck. He railed against Mr. Cranick while his co-host took the part of the home owner using a fake southern accent, mocking the man. Granted Cranick should have paid his dues. But surely the fire department could have put out the fire and then fined him or found some other punishment.

The burning down of one’s house and the loss of family pets is a tragic enough fate. But to mock and laugh at Cranick and then complain that people may show sympathy towards him is not only cold-hearted but the hallmark of the conservative’s lack of common decency and compassion.

GRAY: (mocking Cranick’s accent) Even tho’ I hadn’t paid mah seventy five dollahs I thought dey’d put it out. [...] I wanted ‘em to put it out, but dey didn’t put it out.

BECK: Here’s the thing. Those that are just on raw feeling are not going to understand. [...]

GRAY: But I thought they was gonna put the fire out anyway, but it burned down. Dat ain’t right! [...] What’s the Fire Department for if you don’t put out the fire?! [...] I thought they’d put out mah fire even if I didn’t pay seventy five dollars.

BECK: This is the sort of argument that Americans are going to have.

GRAY: It is.

BECK: And it goes nowhere if you go onto “compassion, compassion, compassion, compassion” or well, “they should’ve put it out, what is the fire department for?” [...] If you don’t pay the 75 dollars then that hurts the fire department. They can’t use those resources, and you’d be spongeing off your neighbor’s resources. [...] It’s important for America to have this debate. This is the kind of stuff that’s going to have to happen, we are going to have to have these kinds of things.

The United States, with its history of racism and intolerance of any religion outside its own, will be ripe for the picking if Geert Wilders makes good his plan to spread Islamophobia Stateside. He’s already made inroads in the Netherlands and in Europe. If the USA succumbs, how far behind can Canada be, with its legions of anti-Islam Sun Media, Postmedia, rightblogger goons salivating over the chance to denounce a brown-skinned religion?

H/T: Matt Bastard and abuaardvark

This is a post borne almost certainly out of political naivete, but I’ve always thought in rather simple terms of the Conservatives representing the right of the spectrum with the Liberals as the left, and the NDP a little further to the left. But with Ignatieff as the Liberal leader, I find myself thinking of the Liberals now as a party representing the middle and not so much progressive values.

I suppose my coldness towards Ignatieff is mostly because of the Liberal leader’s own centrist views; he has not been shy about characterizing his party as such. His views on Israel and marijuana are just two of those views that seem to be on the wrong side of progressive politics.

Like with Obama, my instincts tell me that Ignatieff is less liberal than his more recent predecessors and much more interested in staking out a position between liberal central and conservative lite. While Ignatieff’s embrace of the US is harmless and well documented, his history doesn’t help to separate him from the far worse Conservative lust for a US style culture and government in Canada. To the progressive community, that is sacrilege.

Perhaps my suspicions about Ignatieff’s tenuous grasp on progressive politics goes back to his stance on Iraq. While I understand his empathetic point about the tragedy of the Kurds at the hand of Saddam, I will never figure out how that could cloud his judgment to support the American/British invasion of that country, considering the overwhelming evidence contrary to such a foolish and fearful act. Ignatieff’s later explanations have proven to be lacking and engender little solace to those who were on the enlightened side of history.

Hans Blix and other international weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq had been yelling loudly that there were no WMD’s. Wars of the recent past conducted by US forces proved to be wasteful, bloody and costly. There was nothing in George Bush’s history that indicated he had the basic competence to wage such a war in compassionate conservative manner. Any school kid knew this was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions in the making. But Ignatieff failed to see this. It’s not so much his failure of judgment that concerned me and concerns me now, it was his approval of the conservative mindset of belligerence and unaccountable recklessness that stunned me then and stuns me now.

When Ignatieff was pronounced leader of the leaders, I was immediately disheartened. With time, many of my fears have been allayed somewhat by Ignatieff’s education as leader. He has come a long way. But I still lack any trust that he will come through for us progressives. He is fighting against a monstrous Bush-like regime in the Conservatives, which requires a strong counter from the left. I don’t always feel Ignatieff is with us when push comes to shove. Perhaps it is my long ago fears that cause me to distrust the Liberal leader. Perhaps it is his centrist message. Or maybe, like Obama, it is his seeming dismissal of the left that is worrisome.

Perhaps I am wrong. Like I wrote earlier, hopefully I’m just naive. Ignatieff is proving to be more of a force than the Conservatives expected. Maybe he will learn that the way to beat the Cons is not just by fighting for the middle but by embracing progressive values of freedom, equal rights and fighting for the little guy. He won’t be the first Liberal leader to occupy the middle. We now have a relatively stable economic basis, thanks to Liberals. He has the luxury of bringing a fight to the party. I don’t think Ignatieff wants to do that. And that’s a shame and I hope I’m wrong.

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain