Dawg’s Blawg

(Beijing, March 11) DawgNews has learned of unsettling developments in a country that once seemed to be leading the way in democratic governance.

Canada has no term limits—so strongman Justin Trudeau, whose official title is “Prime Minister,” may rule the troubled nation for life. Already, under the Canadian Constitution, he holds the power to appoint legislators to an “Upper House,” members of his Cabinet, and judges. He also has the unquestioned authority to hand-pick members of powerful “boards and commissions,” sign treaties, and declare war.

Prime Ministers will continue to be chosen, not through a universal franchise, but by a party convention. Canada’s largely ceremonial Parliament is restricted to asking questions on specified days—which Trudeau is not required to answer.

Promised electoral reform has been squelched, according to pro-democracy sources. This further entrenches the ruling Liberal Party, called the “Natural Governing Party” by supporters and dissidents alike.

President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China has reiterated his willingness to seek a free trade deal with Canada, but only if political rights there can be guaranteed.

When I was asked at my clinic a few days ago what my “preferred pronoun” was, the hornet’s nest that I have been avoiding became just a little too inviting. So big, so grey, so buzzing with hellish life. And so I put on my boots, while looking around for handy escape routes.

Once upon a time—well, three or four years ago, and for some time before that—“gender” came to be seen as an oppressive social construct, which of course it is. Gender discourse is inscribed upon bodies. It is a kind of brand, and I mean that literally, in both the cattle-owning and commercial senses of the word. It defines a primordial (for we are encouraged to think that way) difference, a binary, and in practical terms a set of unequal power relations: “We knew who we were then. Girls were girls and men were men.”

Obviously this had to go. But a funny thing happened on the way to liberation.

Suddenly—and I may have been asleep while it began—gender was getting reinforced, with rivets and steel, by the very people sent to smash it.

This all seems to have begun innocently enough. The gay and lesbian “communities,” which had fought their own bitter battles and changed society in the historical blink of an eye, had always embraced the tricky bisexual category as well, and then the trans community, in the acronym “LGBT” (once GLBT, but, you know, intersectionality). The trans phenomenon, however, is not like the others: it isn’t a sexual orientation—partner choice—but a claimed identity.

(I’m going to avoid the TERF wars here, but just suggest that those who claim transwomen were “socialized as men” should unpack the notion of socialization a little. Later for that.)

Meanwhile, in the natural course of events, LGBT expanded to LGBTQQIP2SAA. And from sexual preferences, all of these categories slid effortlessly into identities themselves. In other words, we went from “whom do I want to sleep with?” to “who am I?”.

That way madness lies. It’s a question without an answer. The identity swamp breeds reptiles of the mind: essentialism, fragmentation and exclusion, “call-out culture” and an endless proliferation of categories.

What was once a matter of loving who the hell you want has become an existential question, complete with its bottomless pit of Angst. As for that gender binary…

Well, perhaps one way of getting rid of gender is to make it explode. But that suggests more strategy and collusion than I think we are witnessing. Instead, two genders have been replaced with dozens, all points on a “gender spectrum.”

The battle now is only between two versus many. Binaries are before the firing squad. But gender itself, like rock and roll, is here to stay.

How do we accommodate this taxonomic eruption? Why, by coming up with pronouns to fit, of course. Once we bemoaned the absence of a personal third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun (other than “one,” which means “a person,” not a specific person). At least, some of us did. I wincingly learned to use “they” as a singular, and as a handy replacement for “he or she,” although my spirit recoils at “They is.” But I was, in any case, heading in the wrong direction.

Here’s a list of current pronouns, and they are anything but gender-neutral. I am advised that people venturing into the gender spectrum can try various sets on for size until they get a good fit. Failing memory? Not to worry—practice makes perfect.

Let me address the metaphorical elephant in the room at this point. That would be Professor Jordan Peterson, the fake polymath from Toronto who is the latest darling of the alt-right. Peterson, some will recall, vaulted into public prominence by stating his refusal to use preferred pronouns in class (although he himself used the singular “they” to cover off “he or she” in one article, as I recall).

If only he had stopped there! Keeping in mind the lists I referred to above, one could easily sympathize with a person, part of whose job is to teach large classes, throwing up their hands in despair. Just keeping track of names is hard enough. That Peterson turned out to have an agenda, and used the pronoun issue to force a political public entrance, is neither here nor there.

Were this extraordinary catalogue of genders to be seriously taken up by mainstream society (whatever that might be these days), social interaction would become just a tad awkward. Deliberate misgendering—calling a transwoman “he,” for example—is offensively rude and discriminatory. But using “cir” when the person you’re talking to wants “zan” could be just an honest mistake. Many of those would inevitably be made, spoiling a lot of parties and wrecking learned society conferences.

The “call-out” possibilities, on the other hand, would be endless. So perhaps all is not lost.

UPDATE: I leave this here without further comment:

Hi John,

I’m writing to let you know that we’ve reviewed your latest blog post and have decided to pass on publishing it: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/dr-dawgs-blawg/…/03/pronouns

The discussion of gender identity and pronoun use in this post is dismissive of LGBTQ communities and the struggle to assert their rights — seen for example in references to “the trans phenomenon” and the suggestion that the way gender identity and sexual orientation are framed in 2018 veers towards “madness.” In our view, it has overtones of transphobia, which violates our journalistic policy, and reads more like a provocation rather than an effort to advance progressive debate on this topic. Because of this, we’ll be passing on it. You can see our full journalistic policy here: http://rabble.ca/about/journalistic-policy If you have any questions, please let me know.

Whoops, wrong photo. Could derail the narrative that way.

Better?

This is an open thread. Why? Because, maybe for once, I am not sure whom or what to believe.

I can’t believe this, for starters. On the other hand, Terry Glavin’s Maclean’s piece opposes a conspiracy theory with other conspiracy theories. It’s a stunningly incoherent article. Before he returns us to his Yellow Peril v.2.0 hobbyhorse, he leaves us with the unchallenged suggestion that the Liberals have been deliberately derailing peace talks between Khalistan separatists and the Indian government. Cui bloody bono?

Needless to say, I don’t mind Trudeau’s parade à la mode, and the pack journalism on this occasion will be something for future J-schools to ponder. But the presence of Jaspal Atwal on the tour, granted a visa to India while the peaceful Jagmeet Singh remains barred, may be of more consequence.

Yet, of how much consequence? We’ll be reaching peak tinfoil at this rate. Couldn’t it have been a simple misjudgement? Such things are not unknown.

Comments welcome.

Not a politics: a diagnosis.

Exhibit 1: Dinesh D’Sousa.

Exhibit 2.

Exhibit 3.

As a Canadian, an immigrant, and just as a human being, I don’t merely feel sadness and outrage at the acquittal of Colten Boushie’s killer by an all-white jury in Saskatchewan. I feel soiled.

The bullet that put an end to Boushie’s young life, if the defence is to be believed, sat in Gerald Stanley’s gun “hanging fire” until the weapon was properly positioned behind his head. At that point, the bullet left the gun, untriggered.

Only in a profoundly racist society could such a ludicrous defence succeed. Only in a profoundly racist society would the police (RCMP) put out a news release right after the killing indirectly accusing Boushie of attempted robbery—then go to his mother’s house, surround it, search it without a warrant, and in the course of this violation, tell her that her son was dead. When she collapsed at this news, she says (and there is no reason in this world not to believe her), one of the cops asked if she’d been drinking. Needless to say, the RCMP soon cleared themselves, while admitting they might have been a little insensitive, so that’s all right, then.

They bungled the investigation too. Unfunny Keystone Kops, deepening and widening the tragedy.

Meanwhile the local yokels were cheering. Premier Brad Wall found himself having to condemn the gushing sewer of hatred that so quickly erupted, fouling the Saskatchewan air.

My sympathy and my feelings of grief, anger and helplessness are with Boushie’s bereaved family and his friends today. But, like “thoughts and prayers,” those aren’t worth a damn. The only thing that matters now is change, real change, delivered at speed. Genuine nation-to-nation and person-to-person reconciliation in this tortured, racist land in which we co-exist, but not as equals.

Last night, that hope was set back by decades. It was Mississippi North, except that you can’t deliberately pick all-white juries in Mississippi any more. The verdict was a body blow to decency and right, and to any remaining self-delusions about the sort of Canada we live in.

Once again, justice for the indigenous population is not only blind, but deaf. It’s 2018. What the hell do we do now?

It was a travesty of justice from the very start. A mild-mannered university lecturer in Ottawa was falsely accused of a heinous crime, the bombing of a Paris synagogue in 1980. There was little credible evidence and no charges, but a Canadian citizen was made to suffer nearly a decade of judicial abuse before, finally, being cleared and freed.

Hassan Diab spent years of his life in the grip of two justice systems. In Canada, he was arrested by the RCMP, forced to pay for his own electronic monitoring, then put through an extradition hearing that relied upon a French Record of Case from which exculpatory evidence had been deliberately excluded. He was finally bundled off to a French prison in 2014 without even being allowed to say goodbye to his family. There he was confined in a maximum security prison for more than three years.

Diab was never charged with anything. Eight French lower-court orders to have him released on bail were overturned by a highly-political French court of appeal.

As an Other with a funny name, Diab became a target after his initial arrest. The mob quickly gathered: B’nai Brith had him fired in mid-class by then Carleton University President Roseann Runte, and its CEO at the time said: “It’s appalling university professors would lobby for the reinstatement of a professor who is alleged to have bombed a synagogue. And one asks this question: is it because a synagogue was bombed?”

“The stalled extradition of Hassan Diab continues to afflict his victims,” shrieked a spokesperson for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

The then Managing Editor of the Ottawa Citizen belched out a spittle-flecked rant, denouncing Carleton’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology for having hired him in the first place. “[I]t is hard to interpret the slur against Jews as anything but entirely deliberate….[P]erhaps [Peter] Gose [Chair of the Department] believes that Muslim students might actually find it congenial to be taught by an accused terrorist and mass murder [sic].”

The Ottawa Citizen editorially opined: “Students shouldn’t have to wonder whether they’ll be safe when they walk through the classroom door.”

Triple-distilled Islamophobia. Guilty before proven innocent.

The evidence that led to Diab’s decade-long ordeal?

Witness testimony: He had long blond hair. He had medium length black hair. He was 45. No, 26. He had a stocky build. A slim build.

Documentary evidence: He entered France by train and plane simultaneously. The report of a handwriting “expert” with 21 hours of training since 1993, whose conclusions were demolished by three professional handwriting analysts with international reputations. (Earlier handwriting “evidence” had been removed by the French authorities when challenged. The extradition judge, Robert Maranger, gave them time to root around for more.)

The exculpatory evidence—fingerprints and a palm print—was left out of the Record of Case The extradition judge refused to permit the defence to produce it.

Diab was the classic pharmakos, an outsider by virtue of his name and ethnicity whose sacrifice was necessary to purge society. He was, in more familiar terms, a scapegoat: “[T]he goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.” A great evil had been committed, and a sacrificial victim had to be found and expelled. The Canadian justice system did just that through extradition; the French system did so by removing him from society: confining him to prison without charge, despite flimsy evidence and repeated judicial demands that he be released on bail.

His guilt or innocence simply stopped mattering.

To his credit, one of the French examining magistrates who succeeded the crusading Marc Trévidic—who had engineered the original case—did his job, although it took long enough. He traveled to Lebanon, where he discovered “consistent evidence” that Diab was writing university exams when the Paris bombing took place.

Now, at long last, the case has been tossed out. An innocent man, a fellow-citizen, lost nearly ten years of freedom, for no defensible reason. We’ve been watching a textbook study unfold, one demonstrating the crushing effects of prejudice and fear. Collectively, we should all be ashamed.

One of the depressing rituals associated with this time of year is the ceremonial tallying up the tragic losses we’ve experienced. While that usually involves a tedious roster of luminaries we all pretend to care about more than we actually did (although I’m sure Gord Downie was a very nice person), one shocking loss has so far passed unremarked (as far as I’ve seen). In 2017, Canada said farewell to one of it oldest, dearest, and best-known celebrities. The North Magnetic Pole, which is moving toward Russia at a rate of roughly 57 km/yr, drifted this year beyond Canadian territory, and is now estimated to reside at 86.5N, 172.6W. Goodbye, li’l buddy: I never actually met you, but I did once spend a terrible week stuck in Resolute Bay, just a couple of hundred kilometers away. Bon Voyage, and Счастливого пути.

The sine qua non of real existing Zionism is that the Jewish people have a right to a properly sovereign state, that is, one with borders, military power, and a primary purpose of being the expression in state form of the concept of Jewishness, howsoever its Jewish inhabitants may construe it. That right is instead construed from a particularly bad history upon whose tragedy most reasonable people agree. That bad history and the manner in which it can be taken to make the creation and maintenance of a Jewish state a moral imperative is the reason why many supporters of Israel deeply resent the comparison of Israel to South Africa under apartheid, in that there is no comparison in historic suffering between the descendants of white settlers in Africa and the Jewish people, no well-aged, widespread extant ideology loose in the world demanding the violent extermination of whites as such, etc.

I have largely supported the two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine dispute—-even if many supporters of Palestine may view it as a moral capitulation on the rights of Palestinians in the face of their dispossession through the colonial machinations that eventually afforded Jewish refugees a state and Zionism its physical-world conjugate. A negotiated solution must take into account how each party sees its raison d’être, even if the bulk of the hypothetical losses from a solution may fall upon the very much weaker party that are the Palestinians. Even the most well-intentioned of Israel’s supporters see Israel’s raison d’être in the terms I put above: the non-negotiable point is that there ultimately be a state with a Jewish majority that is a normal sovereign state with military and economic power identified, first and foremost, as Jewish.

The only viable way to accomplish this is via a two-state solution. And as many pro-Palestinian critics of the two-state solution point out, it is precisely the prospect of a two-state solution that has allowed Israel in particular to keep the Palestinians in an ambiguous condition, despite effective total Israeli state control over anything that matters. Without the prospect of a two-state solution, the Palestinians become in effect third-class Israeli citizens, subject to discriminatory control in a state that will governs them indefinitely but has no intention of giving them a vote or access to its benefits. The accusations of apartheid become even harder to deflect.

Naturally, I wrote this post in relation to the official Presidential recognition by the USA of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It was motivated by domestic considerations. I don’t think it changes much in material terms. In practice, most Israeli governmental activity was already happening in Jerusalem.

However, I find it hard to understand how it is that very many pro-Israeli commentators think that the decision is good for Israel. The constantly receding horizon of an actual two-state solution required that the USA, despite its enormously pro-Israeli politics, visibly partake in the appearance of ambiguity on most issues that touched on final status. With the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the USA loses this appearance on a key final status issue, likely driving a final nail in the two-state solution’s quantum coffin.

The result ultimately brings the day closer that Israel will have to choose the outcome that only it will now have the primary power to influence. This is of course exactly that Israel’s supporters celebrate. Except, there does not appear to be any outcome in which the Palestinian populations do not formally enter Israeli custody. This is not a process that in the long term can maintain the goal of a Jewish-majority state for the Jewish people. The feeling I get from reading the openly anti-Palestinian part of the pro-Israeli press is that they think that the day is coming where the Palestinians will “capitulate” to Israel’s existence in some sense. What that capitulation is supposed to lead to is not stated and apparently not thought through.

As I predicted, the subject of a recent Wilfrid Laurier University inquisition, a 22-year-old teaching assistant named Lindsay Shepherd, had been quickly adopted as a mascot by the Right, and has been—as we “cultural Marxists” might put it—interpellated into their discourses. In plain English, she’s had her head turned. She might have gone into her interview with no particular ideological fix on things, certainly not as a dogmatic ideologue, but she emerged ripe for the plucking by Postmedia columnists and the usual “free speech” suspects.

I recall being 22, and the memories are cringeworthy. I strongly doubt that I’m alone in this. My brain was mush. I was giddy with ideas. I had neither the wisdom nor the analytical ability to make them cohere. I knew a lot more then than I do now.

I have also been a TA, in 1970 and then again in 2008-9. My job was to get the students thinking about the course material. It was not to impose a point of view, although I was clear what my own was. I gave deserved top marks in my more recent Anthropology sections to a) a niqabi, and b) a young woman who was fiercely opposed to feminism. So far as I know, I never “triggered” anyone. We had class discussions, and nobody was looking over their shoulders.

None of us know to this day what went on in Lindsay Shepherd’s classroom. We know only that on one occasion she showed a short video clip of alt-right cult hero Jordan Peterson being quizzed by host Steve Paikin on the issue of new pronouns for “non-binary” people. This resulted in her being called on the carpet.

Shepherd’s recorded audio of her inquisition-by-committee became, as we know, public property: she slipped it to Postmedia’s Christie Blatchford, first off, knowing an opportunity for maximum publicity when she saw one. She had been badly treated, and like most folks who have been wronged and arguably bullied by people in authority, she wanted to hit back.

Some fellow progressives proceeded to take her far too seriously, representing her as a fully-fledged, cunning right-wing spokeskook who possessed a developed agenda from the very start. She was held to have “denied the humanity” of transpeople, of having tossed the Peterson cat amongst naive student pigeons with malign intent, of poor and/or tendentious pedagogy, of “weaponizing tears,” even of wilfully inciting hatred and violence. To repeat, none of us has a clue what her classes were like, what the post-clip discussions were, or what role she played in them. But to go on like this about an unfledged graduate student was outrageous.

Her superiors didn’t argue against whatever discussion took place, in any case: they objected to the very mention of the person whose video-presence sparked one or more complaints. Another unknown: we have no idea whether the complaint(s) came from transpeople, or (as is statistically far more likely) from politically outraged white knights. Whatever, the ad hoc committee’s comments were embarrassing and painful to listen to.

Things went haywire very quickly after that. The released audio chummed the waters for legions of trolls eager to push the narrative of universities as left-wing indoctrination camps. The Right extended a pseudopod, in the person of Postmedia’s Jonathan Kay (who messaged her as soon as she got herself a Twitter account), and she was quickly engulfed. He was one of the first two people she followed: the second was Jordan Peterson.

Shepherd found herself a celebrity, and she began to revel in it, as any 22-year-old would be likely to do. She Tweeted, addressed rallies, appeared on TV, and generally assumed the mantle of a “free speech rockstar,” a latter-day libertarian Pasionaria, champion of the politically-incorrect. She became an increasingly polarized and polarizing figure. There are, for instance, obvious parallels between her case and that of Masuma Khan, a Dalhousie University student who made social media comments about “white tears” and soon faced, not a mere meeting, but the full weight of a university disciplinary process. But Shepherd casually dismissed Khan as “insolent,” an airily offensive choice of word. She gratuitously attacked her university’s Rainbow Centre. She claimed that she was being “racially harassed.”

Over-the-top responses to over-the-top attacks; exaggeration; borrowed ideas used as weapons; those of us with a few miles on us should really try to think back. The best thing for Shepherd right now might be a year in a Zen monastery, to catch her breath and reflect. Right now, without denying her own agency, it is obvious that she has become a prisoner. To take Oswald Spengler completely out of context, “All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, [and] young feelings stiffen in senile works.”

It’s going on before our eyes. And perhaps I’m the only one left who presently feels a bit sorry for her.


NB: If you try to get to the comments by using the sidebar, you’ll get a “404” (thanks, Disqus). Change “11” to “12” in the URL.

This is excruciating to hear: the ill-treatment of Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, by a panel of commissars. But, if it weren’t for the seriousness of bullying a young woman to tears in a so-called “safe” institution, this nasty episode would be the stuff of dark comedy.

When Christie Blatchford of Postmedia first broke this story, I thought it was too fantastic to be believed, and I said so on social media. I was wrong, and mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Even if we were provided only excerpts of a longer conversation, this absurd, miserable performance deserves contempt, right across the political spectrum.

Three not-so-grand inquisitors confronted Shepherd over her use of a short clip of the infamous Professor Jordan Peterson at one of her tutorials, one which, as it happens, was taken from TV Ontario’s The Agenda. Her sin—and I use the word advisedly—was not that she took his side, which, given his expressed desire to suppress academic freedom himself, and his penchant for doxxing those who dare to protest against him, would have been questionable in a university setting. It was to take no side. It was to engender debate, which no doubt it did.

It certainly did after the fact. Shepherd’s class generated a complaint, or several. The young woman was not permitted to face her accuser(s), nor to be given the actual substance of the complaint(s), nor was she even allowed to know how many complaint(s) there were. In this, the process departs from Maoism, at least, where facing accusers, usually a mob of them, was part of a ritual social cleansing. The inquisition at SWU was like an alt-right sketch of what the benighted imagine a university to be. A joint performance by Josef K. and the Three Stooges. Sounds like a grunge band, and so, in essence, it was.

And boy oh boy, did this ever play into the fashionable right-wing narrative about our universities which, judging from public commentary, is the dominant one. Havens of leftist cultism, motivated by that bizarre conflation of “cultural Marxism/postmodernism” that the unread go on about incessantly, not excluding Dr. Peterson. Indoctrination camps. The triumph of the Long March through the institutions.

Never mind that universities have, all over North America, been actively suppressing progressive thought—just ask anyone interested in Palestinian human rights. At Carleton University not so long ago, during Israeli Apartheid Week, students were sent warning emails from then-President Roseann Runte, and a poster advertising the week was banned. Scattered incidents like this have happened across Canada, but they fall outside the narrative and are usually all but ignored. Academic freedom at Canadian universities is, in fact, a bit of a myth, particularly when corporate interests are involved.

The maddening thing about this story so far is the amount of speculation that it has called forth—perforce including my own. We now have the full content of the interview with Shepherd, but we know very little about the classroom context in which the offending video—that excerpt from the TVO panel discussion—was shown. On the Right, there is the usual gnashing of teeth, but this time, unfortunately, with something to chew on. (They’ll see this eventual apology for what it’s worth, like everybody else.) On the Left, there has been some intelligent commentary, not defending the university’s incredibly heavy-handedness, but critiquing the TA’s pedagogy, as well as pointing out the gigantic deficiencies in Jordan Peterson’s knowledge. But none of us except Ms. Shepherd was in the classroom. We have little idea of the context that was set, or the ensuing discussion.

Progressive critiques have suggested that the TA was insensitive to trans students, considering their lived lives to be mere trifles to be made the object of a debate. But we don’t know that the debate was framed that way. We don’t know if trans people would object, in fact, to participating in a suitably framed discussion. We don’t even know if there were any trans students attending the class, nor should we assume that one or more of them, if present, made the complaint against Shepherd. Statistically it seems far more likely that it was someone politically, not personally, motivated, who thought they had witnessed yet another instance of transphobia and wanted to call the TA out.

(A discussion of pronouns, just incidentally, should not necessarily be taken to be transphobic on its face, despite Peterson’s general unpleasantness. There has been a certain pronominal proliferation that could prove challenging, not only to a teacher, but in common social interaction. My own ageing memory simply cannot cope.)

Peterson’s raw, angry right-wing energy is now plainly present for all to see. His fame has led him to believe that he’s some kind of polymath. But he’s really a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, speaking on a wide variety of subjects that he knows next to nothing about. One hopes that Shepherd, who stated that she was not a supporter of Peterson, will not succumb to similar political adulation and follow his route, but it may already be too late.

The witch-hunt against academe, in any case, will now be pursued with redoubled fury. And the Inquisition, while presented in only one anecdote, will once again be presented as the norm. Post-modernism? My eye. We’re living in mediaeval times.