Terahertz

Well this is a change from last year’s embarrassment of a caucus retreat for the Liberals (when Ignatieff said he would defeat Harper ASAP then got whipped by his party and retreated back to the vote or abstain with Harper at every opportunity bit).

Today we have Ignatieff blasting Harper for reckless spending (exactly what needs to be said), and also adding a little bit about “playing nice with others.” This is a great contrast to Harper’s scaremongering with coalition talk again.

In the red and orange corner we have talk of cooperation and nation-building. Defence of health care and the environment are priorities, along with sound economic management.

In the blue corner we have talk of boogeymen and the continued denigration of our welfare state.

My new theory is that Libertarians like Harper just never learned to share as children.

I’ll probably be posting a lot less on religion/atheism here (unless I want to get really defamatory), since over the past week I have joined the new Canadian Atheist group blog.

I can’t promise how much more I’ll post here, since I like the communal, grassroots nature of this new project, and it’ pays off with more page hits than my own site. I also have my personal blog, which covers more mundane aspects of my life which leaves little space for this site, although I may still do the occasional overtly partisan rant here.

So check out the new site, it has a lot of great writers, and I have a series of posts coming up on the intersection of politics and atheism in anticipation of the VanSecular Party meeting on Tuesday.

I won’t be posting much here (or at my other site) till next week since I’m off to Victoria this weekend with some of the Vancouver Skeptics in the Pub people. We’ll hopefully be meeting up with some fine island-folk while we’re out there.

The other reason for a bit of calm is that I’ve been recruited into a group blog that I’m hoping to have a bit of content filled in for Monday when we publicly announce it. It should be good, so stay tuned for the announcement.

This is the latest YouTube video that’s making news in Canada:

A few thoughts cross my mind:

• Does this shaky spy-cam action and rock music show anything other than the film-makers bias?
• Why does this paranoid bigot feel the need to film a check-in gate?
• And does this not worry airport security more than a family of travellers who have already passed the main security gates?
• On a related note, what’s the real, scientific explanation of why we feel this need to see faces? We know people are very easily deceived, so what does seeing someone’s face actually accomplish?
• If they are not who they say they are, won’t getting through customs in England be quite a bit more difficult?
• Why question the gender of one of the passengers other than to suspect that most Muslims are terrorists?
• If this “error” was so egregious, then I guess we must just be lucky that these veiled “women” didn’t use this opportunity to strike with plastic knives and bring down the plane. Or of course, there is no real need to be any more secure at the gate other than to ensure that people paid for their seats.

And while I deplore Islam and its brutal subjugation of women, ignorant accusations like this do nothing to help bring peace and freedom to the victims.

Yesterday was the 2010 Vancouver Pride Parade.

There was a total of 146 entrants, of which the 135th scheduled entry was the BC Humanist Association. With the BCHA marched the SFU Skeptics and CFI Vancouver.

I had previously marched in the 2008 and 2009 Edmonton Pride Parades with the Society of Edmonton Atheists and they marched again this year with a great FSM sculpture (write up and photos). Our first year there was a bit tame, but we had a table and showed some spirit. It looks like they’ve gotten really good at parades since then.

I’m proud to say that yesterday’s turnout was fantastic. We had almost 20 people out, facepaint, banners and lots of dancing. We unfortunately weren’t quite organized early enough to get a table (I brought this idea to the BCHA in early June and the entry deadline was June 30).

(video and photos below fold)

Read the rest of this entry »

It turns out that Mark Twain wrote an autobiography of his life but decided that it shouldn’t be published until 100 years after his death (which occurred in 1910). Newsweek has posted an excerpt, and it seems like it’s a well timed release.

About once a year some pious public library banishes Huck Finn from its children’s department, and on the same plea always—that Huck, the neglected and untaught son of a town drunkard, is given to lying, when in difficulty and hard pressed, and is therefore a bad example for young people, and a damager of their morals.

Two or three years ago I was near by when one of these banishments was decreed and advertised, and I went over and asked the librarian about it, and he said yes, Huck was banished for lying. I asked,

“Is there nothing else against him?”

“No, I think not.”

“Do you banish all books that are likely to defile young morals, or do you stop with Huck?”

“We do not discriminate; we banish all that are hurtful to young morals.”

I picked up a book, and said—

“I see several copies of this book lying around. Are the young forbidden to read it?”

“The Bible? Of course not.”

…

I can’t wait to do this with the book club (although in the end it will be 3 volumes and half-a-million words).

[This post is part of a week-long series from July 24-30 about issues within the secular community. Also see parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.]

After I’ve hopefully identified my chief concern, hypothesis about the issue and presented the first steps to rectifying the issue by building positive-action centred communities (in addition to and not in replacement of the existing organizations), I want to turn my attention to one more concern that should be addressed. This final concern is about diversity.

Hemant Mehta posted a very illuminating picture a few days ago from a Skeptics Conference in 2006.

He asked if we could notice anything “manly or white” about it…

Of course the diversity question is slowly being addressed and people are more willing to talk about it now, but that doesn’t mean our work is done.

Doing the same things and expecting different results is Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity, so it’s well worth recognizing that to appeal to a greater demographic, our events are going to have to be more appealing than to just our current members – predominantly 18-35 year old white males, which, coincidentally, appeals primarily to other 18-35 year old white males.

While finding positive activities to focus on should help, I think we can be even more successful if we work on finding niches that need to be filled.

I’m not claiming my ideals are novel or that none of this is being undertaken. CFI Vancouver is launching a book club under my fiancée and my coordination next month, and the Saskatoon Freethinkers have been pioneering secular parenting in Canada with a Secular Parenting meetup and a Freethinker Family summer camp.

Not every event needs to be about debunking woo or bashing religion or drinking in the pub. We need events for mothers, fathers, singles, women, and children.

Heck, even just having a secular equivalent to Sunday School would allow many parents to come to events who wouldn’t otherwise make it.

These things aren’t hard to do (first-aid training and child care licensing are not difficult to obtain) but are just not always in the minds of people who mainly plan events to fit what they would want to do (something I’ve been guilty of too). On the basis of the increased membership alone, it’s worth at least trying to diversify our appeal.

[This post is part of a week-long series from July 24-30 about issues within the secular community. Also see parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.]

So far I’ve discussed the issue of non-active atheists and how the cynical skeptics and their tone may keep them from joining and being active in our organizations. Today, I hope to outline some constructive ideas for starting to build these communities.

The benefits of community building that result from collectively bashing religion are not limited to negative activities. It is very possible, and in fact relatively easy to build a community on positive and constructive discussions. There’s a few ways to build such a community, and I think each of them can help a group break out of a funk of deconstructive cynicism.

A great example is that of the Students for Freethought (notice their relatively kick-ass website) at Ohio State University. For two years in a row, their group has paired with a campus Christian group and travelled to New Orleans to help with the ongoing reconstruction efforts since Hurricane Katrina. While not every group needs to pair with Christians, the positive emphasis on charity work and (literal) community building is something I think every secular group out there should emulate.

I also appreciate non-religious groups that participate and support local Pride Parades (Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, etc.). It’s great to defend our own community, but the true nobility comes from the solidarity we can show to other minorities who’ve been victim to relentless religious discrimination.

One final thing that I think is of vital importance to establish in BC is a humanist officiant program, mirroring the successful programs in Ontario and several states. These officiants provide guidance and oversee major life events which don’t cease to happen when one leaves their faith. Marriages, deaths and even birth (or naming) ceremonies are already in a large demand for people who don’t want a church service but don’t find a civil / government ceremony to be meaningful enough for them. These ceremonies are a great chance to show how we can use humanism to build communities of like-minded individuals.

Of course there are many, many more ideas and opportunities out there, which all take money and volunteers. The lucky thing is the more services we start to offer and the more people who start to attend and take ownership over the community, the more resources that we will have available.

I’ve finally written an article for The Peak again. This time I address the long-form census controversy and ask if Harper’s really a great strategist or just a lucky ideologue.

Harper’s success: strategy or luck?

By Ian Bushfield

Many pundits and voters view Stephen Harper as a strategic political mastermind. Since winning the Conservative party leadership he has impressively managed to take a right-wing fringe party to consecutive minority governments. However, after repeatedly failing to win that elusive majority, the evidence is growing that blind ideology often impedes his better judgment.

His latest blunder comes with the growing and near unanimous backlash in his attempt to kill the long form portion of the census. Every five years the federal government conducts a survey of the country in two parts — a short form that is sent to everyone and a longer form that is only sent to one-in-five people. The long form probes deeper than the short form and provides a wealth of information for social welfare groups and policy-makers. Until Harper’s recent decision, both forms were mandatory, but now the long form has been made voluntary.

The rumours out of Ottawa suggest that this decision came directly from Harper himself, likely assuming that a change like this would go widely unnoticed as the political season winds down into the summer. However, statisticians, local governments, social groups, and even religious groups like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada have denounced the action.

In a stunning display of statistical ignorance, to compensate for this break in continuous data, Harper decided that they would send out more voluntary long-form surveys at an estimated cost of $30 million. Perhaps a first-year stats student here can explain to Harper how collecting more shit won’t make it smell any better.

The government’s post-hoc reasoning for such an unpopular course of action is that the mandatory long form is overly intrusive and violates the fundamentals of the freedom to privacy. Neglecting that the freedom to privacy is neither stated nor implied by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it is worth remembering that actions such as filling out the census are important of civic responsibilities, just like jury duty, voting, and paying taxes are. Similarly, Harper has no intention of making the long-form farm census voluntary which provides invaluable information about agricultural techniques. Apparently suburban libertarians are more important than rural ones.

Scrapping the long-form census is more about weakening the information available to progressive social justice agencies across the country than appealing to a very fringe libertarian base. By weakening the continuity of census data, organizations and local governments will be less able to target their services to where they are needed the most. If only those who can afford the time respond, it will be much more difficult for Stats Canada to ensure the robustness of its data from low income and remote communities; the groups most served by such aid organizations.

The census wasn’t Harper’s first mistake as leader. In his blood-lust to kill the weakened Liberal party after the 2008 election, he assumed it would be easy to remove the per-vote party subsidy system, only to find that the opposition parties could agree on enough to form a coalition and threaten to topple his government.

Then, last year he assumed Canadians were too apathetic to care if he prorogued Parliament to avoid answering questions about the torture of Afghan detainees. It must have been quite the surprise when hundreds of thousands of protesters turned up to criticize his three-month Christmas vacation.

So, it seems that perhaps Harper’s only real strategy thus far has been to appear less incompetent than the various Liberal leaders. But with lame ducks like Paul Martin, Stephane Dion, and Michael Ignatieff, should we really be calling Stephen Harper an expert strategist?

[This post is part of a week-long series from July 24-30 about issues within the secular community. Also see parts 1, 2, and 3.]

I’ve hopefully introduced my main concern in the discussion of the non-active atheists and cynical skeptics and how I think we as a community need to find ways to make them feel more welcome in our groups. Today I want to try to discuss one of the major roadblocks for the non-active atheists for them getting involved in existing groups.

I think the issue is not our overall message. There is a documented, large support base for secular groups in Canada, and especially in BC. The idea of limiting religious influence on government and society is generally popular here, and science still commands a reasonable amount of respect.

The issue that I think is keeping many from joining communities is a matter of communication and appearance.

To put it bluntly, the atheist community (science departments as well) suffers from a bloat of members with varying social deficiencies. We have a number of charismatic speakers (James Randi, Phil Plait) but at the local level, a number of people either forget or do not realize that many people are not won over by a mere resuscitation of facts and logical arguments.

What separates Phil Plait from an IRL internet troll is not an ability to create and use logical arguments, but the skill at which they are applied to discussions with other human beings. Being a douche bag may be very self-satisfying, but when a group is fighting for a broader social change, lacking the ability to actually interact with people is something that just needs to be accepted.

Hell, it’s even scientifically wrong to think that throwing facts at someone will change their mind. People get entrenched in their position and will defend it, no matter how irrational.

Tone matters

Don’t get my message wrong. I support the New Atheist approach to demonstrating that it’s okay to challenge the taboo of belief, but there is definitely a time and place for everything.

An organization that wants to be taken seriously as a community beyond belief needs to conduct itself differently than the members within it. If I want to make fun of religion and be a dick, that’s just fine, but I think larger groups need to be aware of what their audience is.

If we only want to appeal to hardcore, angry, stereotypical atheists, then attacking religion is just fine. But I think if our goal is to attract a larger audience, we need to tread lightly.

Perhaps it means that angry atheist groups and compassionate humanists groups would be more successful apart, but I think until our (active) numbers are much larger, fragmentation represents a reduction in the resources available to any one group.