Tag Archives: human-rights

The Very Real Threat of Islamophobia

Today, I’d like to do something I’ve been wanting to for a while. We’re going to go through a list of recent quotes on Arabs and Islam and replace them with the words “Jew,” “Jews,” and “Jewish.”

Most quickly springing to mind is the latest line of tripe from Anne Coulter. While you are (unfortunately) probably already familiar with some of Coulter’s statements (see: “It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact.” or “[Canada] better hope the United States doesn’t roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent.”), you may not have heard Coulter’s recent assertion that the wife of one of the Boston Bombers should ““Be jailed for wearing a hijab” (right after saying “I don’t care if she knew about this [bombing]”- just so you know it’s about religion, not justice).

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Fame Day: Rand Paul

Only got four hours of sleep last night, so bear with me if this isn’t the epitome of proper grammar or decent, coherent writing. It took me almost half a minute to remember the word “coherent.”

The topic for today was brought to me by my good friend Stew, and forced me to look up the definition to the word “filibuster.” Since I’m going to assume that at least a few people have, like me, lived their lives without ever having to read, hear, or use it themselves, it is as follows:

fil·i·bus·ter (noun):

the use of irregular or obstructive tactics by a member of a legislative assembly to prevent the adoption of a measure generally favored or to force a decision against the will of the majority.

b. an exceptionally long speech, as one lasting for a day or days, or a series of such speeches to accomplish this purpose.

c. a member of a legislature who makes such a speech.

Basically, in layman’s terms, a filibuster is a whole lot of talking to make sure that some sort of law or policy doesn’t pass [or the person who does this]. Enter filibuster, and subject of today’s Fame Day, Rand Paul.

randpaul

Senator Rand Paul conducted a filibuster [I’m going to be using that word a lot] on the Senate floor to prolong or prevent the CIA nomination of John Brennan. He did this to protest the president’s drone policy, i.e. Obama not eliminating the possibility of military drones being used in the US.

This man began his filibuster yesterday at roughly 12 pm EST, and he kept on going for almost 13 hours. Not only that, but in spite of coming prepared with binders of notes he barely looked at them. He ended his interminable talk with a touch of humour, saying “I would go for another 12 hours to try to break Strom Thurmond’s record, but I’ve discovered that there are some limits to filibustering and I’m going to have to go take care of one of those in a few minutes here.”

Let that sink in for a bit. Rand Paul stood and talked for almost 13 hours. As quoted from the article I linked to above, “As the person leading the filibuster, Paul was forbidden from ever leaving the floor, lest he lose control of the debate.

Rand Paul went without food, water, or the means to relieve himself for over half a day. He did this to protest a very frightening reality, that of the American military using drones on American soil. During the speech he voiced his concern with that, saying “When I asked the president, can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It’s an easy question. It should have been a resounding, an unequivocal, ‘No.’ The president’s response? He hasn’t killed anyone yet. We’re supposed to be comforted by that.”

I end this post with another quote from the speech highlighting the fervour that this man has for human rights in America, and his unwavering dedication to uphold them:

“I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

Shame Day: Video Game Companies

eaeaI am a dude who loves video games. I’ve played so much Team Fortress 2 in the past few weeks that it’s essentially become a ritual for me, something to do while and after I eat dinner. What I don’t always love are the business practices these  companies  engage in.

The image I Photoshop’d together depicts the EA [Electronic Arts] logo because they’re a company that I’m positive some of the blame lies with when it comes to generally being horrible to its employees.

I was turned onto this flagrant abuse of humanity through a webcomic Scott Kurtz [of PvP] and Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins [of Penny Arcade] put together. The comic, titled The Trenches, follows the life of a QA [quality assurance] guy whose name escapes me at the moment. The important part is that below the comic is a feature called Tales From The Trenches, which catalogues nightmare stories from those who toil within in the industry.

Below is one of my favourites, entitled “Weekend Funtimes.” My favourite not in that I enjoy reading it, but in that it encapsulates some of the horror of working  for large corporations:

We were about two months into “crunch” when they decided to up our hours AGAIN, taking us to over 80/week. The only available day to squeeze these extra hours in? Sunday!

I arrive at the building Sunday morning, only to find it locked—no other businesses had Sunday hours. I call my supervisor, who proceeds to fuss at me about interrupting his “family” time. My team had all arrived for work by that point, which just seemed to make him angrier. He tells me he is on his way and hangs up.

Flash forward ten minutes. We’re all still freezing (it was winter and -10 windchill) when we see his car come around the corner at the end of the block. He drives up the road, rolls his window down, and THROWS the office key at me—all without ever slowing down.

He calls me twenty minutes later to make sure we had gotten in, then informed me we would have to make up the time we had “wasted” waiting on him. He ended the call telling me to never interrupt his family time again.

That’s fairly despicable, and definitely up there among the worst of them. It was posted last month, and while it’s unknown when the event actually happened there is a date we can pinpoint: November 10th, 2004. The date that “EA: The Human Story” was posted to LiveJournal by user “EA Spouse.”

The post is a thorough examination of EA’s policies, especially regarding the infamous “crunch time” that its employees have to go through as the game nears its impending launch. She writes with a genuine, heartfelt voice that stems from being the wife of an EA employee. This is definitely present in the penultimate paragraph of her piece:

If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. “What’s your salary?” would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you’re doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it’s not just them you’re hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?

Better known by her blogging handle, little did Erin Hoffman know what sort of action her post would lead to. In part it resulted in the filing of three class action lawsuits against EA and the beginning of many changes within the industry. Her post inspired another entitled “Why Crunch Modes Doesn’t Work: Six Lessons” which garnered a fair amount of attention within the online community.

That being said, Tales From The Trenches continues on into 2013, and it’s undeniable that many are slaving away in gaming companies because they love the final product. Their devotion to video games means that they’re stuck in jobs where they’re treated poorly by anyone and everyone a rung above them on the corporate ladder. Yes, this can be said of many work environments, but few have the same number of young, eager individuals so passionate to take part in what they’ve enjoyed their entire lives.

So shame on EA, and shame on any and all video game companies that treat their employees like dirt. No one said starting a career was easy, but no one should have to toil away thanklessly for an abusive system, either.

Shame Day: Masculinists

Let’s be clear right here and now- I’m not talking about “masculinism” in the original “let’s recognize gender discrimination against men too” philosophy. No, I’m talking masculinism in its modern day sense: the general idea that women have somehow hijacked everything it means to be a man, and have either watered down everything manly, or made it socially unacceptable. This is the gripes of countless dads and uncles around the country at every kid on the team getting a medal given an intellectual motor.

That’s not to say that there are certain points which these guys aren’t correct on. In custody battles, the courts are almost certainly going to side with the mother on the basis that her gender somehow makes here a superior parent. That’s stupid. If a man were to make a pass at a female co-worker, the consequences would in all likelihood be more severe than if the positions were reversed. That’s unfair. A man striking a woman gets a visceral reaction out of us, a woman striking generally does not. That’s sexist.

Now promoting gender equality is perfectly fine. After all, when a person hits a person, that’s all that really matters. Gender (or race, creed, religion, etc.) don’t make the act any better or worse. But tragically, that positive element of the movement is mired down by all the psychotic and apologetically misogynistic madness that makes up the other 50%. Stuff like:

  • Equating circumcision with genital mutilation (or even wrongly declaring that women are exempt from any such practice)
  • Declaring the existence of a “war on men”
  • Complaining of the lack of existence of any day celebrating men
  • Complaining the women are somehow exempt from heavy, dangerous, and strenuous labor (again, what planet are these people living on?)
  • And countless other bat**** crazy claims of male victimization and persecution

Again, as stated above, there is a double standard, and while any inequality in the rules is obviously unfair there’s no way on earth we can possibly imagine that these offenses against men in any way stack up to the offenses against women. Is there female domestic abuse of males? There is. Is it as much as male domestic abuse against females? Not even remotely. Does that mean that one side is more right or wrong than the other? Of course not. The same basic logic applies to pretty much each and every one of the nutty gripes the masculinist movement brings against the supposedly woman-dominated world we’re trapped in. Other claims are quite simply false. The idea that women somehow have a “glass floor” protecting them from working physical labor or living in rough, dismal conditions is simply an utter lie. Women are disproportionately the majority in sweatshops around the world. Not two hours ago, I drove past a homeless woman on the street, and I saw another one the day before (although it could’ve been a hipster, I’m not entirely sure). Again, it’s true that men are sometimes treated unfairly on the basis of their gender, or subjected to a double standard. However, the degree to which men are persecuted and the degree to which women are persecuted are leagues apart.

That’s not to say that injustice to a man is any less unjust, but rather, when you’ve got a paper cut and the person in the emergency room with you is missing an arm, you should still apply a band-aid, just maybe without griping about it.

Shame Day: Concerned Women for America

“Concerned Women for America.”

It sounds almost like a cartoonish satire of the kind of people who storm into PTA meetings demanding to know why their children have been
“exposed to filth” after discovering a copy of Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, or Harry Potter in their kids’ assigned reading list. The kind of people who warn about the corrosive and unwholesome messages hidden in rock songs, or who sit horrified in front of the TV as some sensationalist dead-inside “journalist” warns about the latest secret teenager trend that’s sure to kill them/get them pregnant.

And as much as it sounds like something that’s ripped out of Footloose, Concerned Women for America is very real.

And that is an absolute shame.

Let’s take a look at some of the bilge that these guys are producing.

What caught my eye was a recent article of theirs on Malala Yousafzai, a heroic Pakistani girl and women’s rights and peace activist. In this post, the authors launch a vicious attack on Islam as being an inherently barbarous and misogynistic religion with a murderous agenda for any who dare oppose it. As the article states

“Malala questioned the station of women under Islam’s oppressive thumb, and the Taliban tried to put her six feet under the ground.”

This, quite simply, is a lie.

Yes the Taliban tried to kill Malala, and yes, Malala questioned the station of women-but what the authors of the article neglect to mention is that Malala Yousafzai is a Muslim herself.

Apparently it’s not enough that this fifteen year old girl (and she is fifteen, not fourteen, as the CWA article wrongly states) has to deal with the threat of violence and murder- she now has to endure her activism being hijacked by the “Concerned Women for America” bent on turning her sacrifice into a smear campaign against her own religion, which they claim is both “false” and “hate-filled.”

But why stop there?

The “Concerned Women for America” are also turning their ignorant ire against the “Slut Walks,” which for those of you who may be unaware, are parades of women wearing clothes of different degrees of modesty or exposure to make the point that it doesn’t matter how you’re dressed- one’s wardrobe is never an “invitation to rape” as some sex-offenders have tried claiming.

Being the moral, upstanding people that they are, CWA has sent up a howl of protest against these walks, declaring:

“The latest desperate bid for attention by the publicity-starved feminists is to sponsor SlutWalks — events where scantily clad women take to the streets en masse to claim their “right” to dress and behave however they want or to go anywhere at any time without the risk of being sexually assaulted or deemed streetwalkers.”

“They propose somehow to make the point that even if what they wear, their drunken state, or their presence alone in a very vulnerable place might indicate their willingness to participate in a sexual free-for-all, women should not be subject to lewd propositions or be at risk of being raped.”

Now I could leave it right there- those two statements alone are enough to demonstrate without a shred of doubt just what vile, reprehensible misogynistic scum the CWA is made of, but just to hammer in a few more nails for safe measure, here are some of there other quotes.

Here’s a lovely little comment regarding the Russian punk-rock protest group “Pussy Riot,” recently sentenced to two years in prison for singing an anti-government song in a cathedral.

Their formal statements about the incident reveal their utter lack of morality, embrace of a “blame-everyone-but-us” ideology, and disdain for capitalism and individual responsibility. Like their U.S. counterparts, they want “human rights, civil and political freedoms” for themselves but not for Christian believers or anyone else with different beliefs… Christians around the world are facing intolerance of their beliefs and sometimes violence as well. In spite of the Constitution, religious liberty is under attack in the United States, with the federal government telling religious institutions that they must violate their beliefs and support homosexual “marriage,” homosexual adoptions, contraception, and abortion or face penalties.

Really? A handful of women sing a song in a church decrying the increasingly totalitarian state, get the ridiculous sentence of two years prison for doing so (the same action in the US would merit a fine, if that) and it’s you who are the persecuted ones.

Here’s another good one- outrage that a Macy’s employee was fired for confronting a transgender person for using the women’s dressing room.

Transgender?  Give me a break!  First of all, there is no such thing; it is a choice of behavior.  And hope as we might, our desire to behave in a certain way does not legitimize a chosen behavior.  It certainly does not entitle them to circumvent the rights of society and our moral tenets in order for them to “have their way.”  Natalie Johnson, the employee in question, was quoted in an ABC interview, “I refuse to comply with this policy,” and “There are no transgenders in the world.  A guy can dress up as a woman all he wants.  That’s still not going to make you a woman.”

An easy call? Certainly not, but this self-righteous outrage is just plain stupid. What if the person in question had been born a hermaphrodite? How would he or she be treated then? Would that kind of ambiguity have justified the guy/gal being denied service? If that’s our logic, why not deny service to people in wheelchairs for not conforming to the societal norm? That logic just doesn’t hold up.

End of the day, “Concerned Women for America” is what cancer would look like if it were an social movement. Shame on this vile organization.

October 15: What’s Not Being Talked About In The News

For the most part, I try to keep my politics toned down here at CWR, but every once in a while, something comes along that straddles the line between ideology and culture that’d be wrong not to talk about.

I’m guessing you may have heard of Malala Yousafazi.

Young Pakastani girl known for being a women’s education and peace activist, shot by a reported Taliban assassin just short of a week ago and just today being flown to England to continue her recovery.

You may have seen this picture of her:

But the picture you may not have seen is this one here:

That’s young Malala wearing a hijab, a head-covering worn by many Muslim women as part of their understanding of modesty. Yep, Malala’s a Muslim– but that’s something you’re not gonna hear on the news or read in your paper.If Islam is mentioned at all, chances are, it’s in reference to Malala’s would be assassin- not her (or her friends who were with her). Why is that? How come the same frenzied media attention that is devoted to listing off every attack or offense on the part of “Radical Islam” utterly fails to note the Islamic element when it’s related to something positive. I can understand- maybe even overlook- the fact that the news doesn’t offer any attention to the millions of Muslims (the ones I grew up with) who just go about their day without doing anything to anyone. But the moment  a Muslim man or woman stands up for what he or she believes, even going so far as be nearly murdered for those beliefs and actions, religion disappears from the picture.

And while we’re at it, there’s another thing that’s been bothering me.

You remember Pussy Riot? Feminist Punk Band who got into trouble for playing anti-Putin songs in a historic Russian cathedral?

Why is it that when they got convicted of “hooliganism” and were sentenced to two years in prison (a term waaay disproportionate to the crime) the world united in outrage, and when Leah-Lynne Plante was arrested-

Oh.

Who’s “Leah-Lynne Plante”?

She’s an activist up in Washington State whose apartment was raided by FBI and SWAT Teams. See, back on May 1st, there was some vandalism that occurred in Seattle and Leah-Lynne was a suspect.

How many people who have vandalized walls or billboards actually have the police investigate them, let alone the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force? Of those people, how many have black clothes and books confiscated as “evidence”?

Obviously this has about as much to do with vandalism as Pussy Riot’s sentencing had to do with disturbing the peace. See, Leah-Lynne Plante is a self-proclaimed anarchist, and after refusing for a third time to answer questions before a grand jury. Considering the Grand Jury that’s investigating these and other alleged anarchist criminals was first created in March (two months prior to when she allegedly committed these crimes) doesn’t exactly reflect well on the whole “liberty and justice for all” element of the legal system.

But that’s all beside the point.

The point is, you probably don’t know about it. Your news has almost certainly never reported it, and considering the similarities between the two cases, doesn’t Leah-Lynne Plante’s case deserve your attention just as much as anti-government rockers off in Moscow?

Your media doesn’t think so.

And I think we’re being asked too much. I think we’ve had enough.

See, you can’t pick and choose- if the media want to take the violent or oppressive actions of Muslims as being representative of their faith, they have to apply the same logic to Muslim heroism as well. The same goes for equal air-time. The news can’t report on a bunch of women in brightly colored balaclavas for being broadsided by the state and then whistle Dixie while one in a black shirt has her home raided by men in kevlar.

Consistency- I’m not expecting that the news be factual (and considering it’s the news, that’s a pretty big thing to let slide) but they have got to be fair
or stop calling themselves reporters. If they wanted to pick and choose their battles, they should’ve become bloggers instead.