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We Need to Fight the (Police) Unions For Justice in Law Enforcement

By Chris Hall
December 22, 2015

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police brutality 2015 photo

Photo by Elvert Barnes

Very rarely — in fact, almost never — would I say that a union has “too much power.” The last time I can remember thinking that was sometime back in the late 90s, when there started being public discussion of terms of the San Francisco MUNI drivers’ contract, which allowed them a certain number of days per month when they could just decide not to come in to work, without even notifying their supervisor.

That may have been silly, but the effects of police unions on the ability of the people to have a voice in their local law enforcement is terrifying. The fact that white people have been conned into a mindless worship of the police is a huge problem, but so also are the contracts that give police officers rights that go far beyond anything that regular citizens have. Check out the facts in this piece from Mother Jones for some of the dirty facts:

The police reform advocates who have long argued that cops shouldn’t be allowed to investigate themselves for wrongdoing now have some new data to back them up. Earlier this month, four activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement launched Check the Police, a database of police union contracts from departments in 50 cities. After scrutinizing the documents, the project’s creators identified four key provisions by which the contracts shield officers from accountability, or receive rights and courtesies not available to most civilian suspects. These common provisions stipulate:
1. That an accused officer cannot be interrogated within 24 hours of an incident.

2. That complaints be expunged from an officer’s personnel file and destroyed after five years

3. That complaints against an officer submitted more than 180 days after the contested incident be disqualified, along with complaints that require more than a year to investigate.

4. That civilian oversight boards are severely limited in their ability to penalize officers.Police union contracts in Austin, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; and Seattle include all four of these provisions. Many of the municipal contracts also mandate that officers involved in shootings receive paid leave.

Photo by Elvert Barnes

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Filed Under: Featured, Politics Tagged With: black lives matter, civil rights, police brutality, Sandra Bland, unions

Hooray for Femme Superheroes: Supergirl’s Skirt is Badass

By Chris Hall
December 14, 2015
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I’ve been enjoying the new Supergirl series much more than I expected. There are a few places where it’s overdone, but that’s to be expected in any show while it’s still finding its legs. One of the things that I love is the costume: It actually looks like it can stand up to intense battles with robots or aliens and the stresses of high-speed flight. The fact that the costumes no longer look incredibly silly on screen is a big part of why the modern crop of superhero media can actually be taken seriously.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Comics (and Comix), Featured, Feminism, Gender, Pop Culture Tagged With: comic books, supergirl, the mary sue, tv

Infographic: Police are Threats to Sex Workers, Not Protection

By Chris Hall
December 14, 2015
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(CC) Eliya Selihub

(CC) Eliya Selihub

Whenever you see the mainstream media talk about “helping” sex workers, it almost invariably involves the police in some way. If you didn’t realize that was bullshit before, the last couple of years of news stories should have given you some kind of inkling. Just this week, Oklahoma Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted for raping at least 13 black women while on duty. It should be painfully obvious to all but the most obtuse that going to the police is helpful for only a small fragment of United States citizens, and to many, it’s highly risky. The answer to the question “Who guards the guardians?” is a plaintive “No one.”

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Featured, Politics, Sex and Gender, Sex Work Tagged With: sex workers' rights, sex-workers, SWOP

A Song Stripped Naked: The Be Good Tanyas Version of “Waiting Around to Die”

By Chris Hall
August 28, 2015
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The "Be Good Tanyas" (originally from Vancouver, BC) performing at Knox United Church in Calgary, Alberta on December 7th, 2006. They have previously played in Calgary at the Folk Fest and are much loved all over Canada, especially in Guelph. ; )

For some reason, I’ve had this song in my head for the entire week: The Be Good Tanyas version of Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around to Die.” I first heard it months ago, when I started watching Breaking Bad on Netflix. The song is used to excellent effect in the third episode of the second season, “Bit By a Dead Bee.”

But for some reason, it started haunting me, coming into my skull over the last week or so. I’ve always loved Van Zandt’s version, and I always will. The beauty of this version is that like most good covers, they don’t try to imitate Van Zandt. They just drill down and find the emotional core of it. It feels naked, like there’s nothing standing between you and the narrator’s fatalism.

“Waiting Around to Die” is about abuse: first in relationships, then through drugs. Van Zandt was legendary for his self-destruction through drug and alcohol abuse. I don’t know enough about his family life to speak on how much experience he had with events like the one portrayed in the second verse.

But this is about the Be Good Tanyas, not Townes Van Zandt. I can’t quite describe why it’s dug so deep into my head recently; sometime songs just do that to me. This isn’t a depression thing, although the matter-of-fact fatalism depicted in the lyrics and the music is a very real, very familiar thing to me. I’ve been mildly depressed lately, but living generally seems like something that’s both good and doable. I play music compulsively as a soundtrack to my life, and sometimes a song just grabs hold and won’t let go.

If I were forced to say why this one now, I would say it’s that naked quality that’s so compelling. There’s something really beautiful about the plainness and unobscured emotion. Unlike a lot of songs that only mimic fatalism or depression, it doesn’t wallow. It simply lays that sense of resignation out on the table like a hand of cards that aren’t even worth a bluff any more.

This may not be Townes Van Zandt’s definitive version of “Waiting Around to Die,” but it’s the first one I ever heard, and still the one that shows up in my playlists most often. Take a listen for comparison.

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Filed Under: Depression, Featured, Music Tagged With: Be Good Tanyas, Breaking Bad, country music, depression, folk music, Townes Van Zandt

Feminist Batwoman Explains It All: Quit Calling Things “First World Problems”

By Chris Hall
November 16, 2014
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Cell phones and makeup aren't exclusive to the US and Europe. Starvation and police brutality aren't just "third-world problems" either.

Cell phones and makeup aren’t just things here in the US. Starvation and police brutality aren’t just “third-world problems” either.

I have always loathed the term “First-World problems” for more reasons than can be expressed properly here. This post by Feminist Batwoman on Tumblr is a thing of beauty that really articulates how it enshrines some really bad misconceptions about what life is like in the so-called “third world.”:

If you’re ever tempted to say “first world problems,” do me a favor, and pull down a map. Tell me EXACTLY where the “third world” is. Make sure you correctly identify Switzerland as part of the third world, and Turkey as part of the First World. Don’t forget that Djibouti is a part of the first world.

Literally sit down and learn what “third world” means and why people from nonwestern nations  think it’s a total bullshit term.

Second: you think people in the so-called third world don’t care about shit like makeup, and love, and technology? You think they don’t care about internet harassment? You think women over there don’t care about street harassment? You think they don’t care about fashion and clothes? You think they don’t care about music and video games?

Because THEY DO.

Right now, there is a woman in burundi teaching herself how to do a cut-crease eyeshadow look. Guaranteed.

“Third world” nations have fashion shows and fashion magazines. They care about street harassment. They care about the internet. They play video games. They know more about anime than your sorry ass every will. And the idea of “first world problems,” which makes it sound like all women in “third world” nations are dealing with starvation, rape, war, acid attacks etc.

Is bullshit.

Rank.

Bullshit.

Women in Iran spend shitloads of money on makeup. Women in the DRC don’t just care about rape. Rape – the ONE THING westerners can be expected to know about women in Congo-Kinshasa – ranks NUMBER FOUR on the list of issues women in Congo want addressed. Political participation is number 1. Economic empowerment is number 2. Women in India are passionate about information technology, and you know what they hate? Coming to the United States, where Indian women in STEM are suddenly considered LESS GOOD than their male colleagues.  My friends in Senegal taught ME how to download movies off the internet. Zimbabwe has a fashion week.  [More. Read the whole fucking thing.]

The terms “first world” and “third world” are confusing, especially since they’ve been functionally obsolete in their original meaning since the end of the Cold War. They evolved as a way to describe the divisions between capitalist and communist countries and their respective allies: The “First World” was the United States and its allied countries; the “Second World” was the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the countries aligned with them; the “Third World” was the countries that were aligned with neither. Just as elections are fought over the moderate middle, the Cold War was fought mostly in the Third World, especially when it turned into actual war, instead of the metaphorical kind.

Now, its meaning is rather ambiguous at best, and functionally means little more than “countries that are brown and poor.”

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Filed Under: Featured, Politics, Quotables Tagged With: colonialism, First World Problems, language, social justice, Tumblr

GamerGate’s Pathology in Less Than 140 Characters

By Chris Hall
November 5, 2014
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This is essentially what you’re saying if you’re a GamerGate supporter:

Tweet by @Hello_Tailor: "Should women be allowed to create and play video games without fear of being murdered in real life? Let's hear both sides of the story."Hello Tailor nails it beautifully. Even if we steelman1  Gamergate up the wazoo and accept that it’s really about ethics in journalism, the reality is that in the end, they’ve accomplished nothing more than inflict terrorism and fear.

There’s also a meta-statement to this tweet: A lot of people took it for the real thing. That’s not an indication that people are stupid, but it is a perfect demonstration of how severely out of control Gamergate has gotten. If you’ve been keeping track, it’s not that hard to believe that the ‘gaters would say something like this.

Sometime, there just aren’t two sides. We’re taught to believe otherwise, but sometimes staying neutral and acting like both sides are worthy of equal consideration is the same as teaming up with the bad guys.


  1. Steelmanning is the opposite of strawmanning an argument; instead of addressing the weakest form of your opponent’s argument, you argue against the best possible form of their argument. To my knowledge, the term was coined by Chana Messinger. In Gamergate’s case, of course, in order to steelman you have to dive straight into the realm of fantasy. ↩

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Filed Under: Featured, Feminism, Gaming Tagged With: feminism, gamergate, gender

Sam Harris Doesn’t Get Better In Context

By Chris Hall
October 13, 2014
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I think that Friendly Atheist would benefit vastly if they just dropped Terry Firma.
 Every time I see something that really makes me cringe on that blog, it’s got his byline on it. Today, Terry’s trying to defend Sam Harris using the “out of context” argument. That can certainly be a valid argument, but it’s also something that a lot of people use as a weasel excuse when someone calls them on saying something particularly stupid and appalling. In Harris’s case, he got called on saying something appalling when this image started getting passed around Twitter:

Head shot of Sam Harris with quote: "Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them."Terry thinks that the use of that one line to represent Harris’s views is a dishonest smear. But frankly, it doesn’t sound any better when you place it in context. Here’s what Harris himself considers to the be the proper context. From pages 52-53 of his book The End of Faith:

The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:

Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.

What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

(Emphasis added)

It’s crap like this that made me instantly dislike Sam Harris. Of all the Four Horsemen, he was the only one that I instantly, irrevocably loathed. Dennett I found to be an amiable but well-meaning sort, Hitchens was problematic but could have witty and devastating insights when he wasn’t determined to be a total prick, and Dawkins seemed to be an intelligent and compassionate person with a sense of moral integrity. I could see certain problems with him even then, but thought that he had the moral integrity to challenge himself and find his way past them. That’s turned out not to be true.

But Harris, even in the early chapters of his first book, flaunted authoritarian and racist tendencies that just made me want to distance myself from him as quickly as possible. This is an excellent example of why.

Terry and Harris may think that context somehow changes the meaning of the line, but all it does is expound further on the original theme. Harris really does think that it’s perfectly ethical to kill people for what they think, not what they’ve done or are about to do.

Harris repeatedly finds himself using the “out of context” excuse, trying to explain that the words on the page don’t actually mean what they say. It’s been a theme in his career ever since he started to make a splash in the media. In this case, the only thing I can figure is that he expects that the original context means people that we see as “other.” By conjuring up the specter of ISIL/ISIS, he wants his readers to understand that he’s only in favor of killing people that we’ve already decided are okay to kill:

The flag of ISIL/ISIS

The larger context of this passage is a philosophical and psychological analysis of belief as an engine of behavior—and the link to behavior is the whole point of the discussion. Why would it be ethical to drop a bomb on the leaders of ISIS at this moment? Because of all the harm they’ve caused? No. Killing them will do nothing to alleviate that harm. It would be ethical to kill these men—once again, only if we couldn’t capture them—because of all the death and suffering they intend to cause in the future. Why do they intend this? Because of what they believe about infidels, apostates, women, paradise, prophecy, America, and so forth.

Notice how he’s changing the rules here: This doesn’t say the same thing as the original line. Here, the action that he’s advocating is only about ideas at the most abstract level. In practice, it’s about defending yourself or someone else against an imminent, physical threat, not an idea.

Sam Harris can rest assured that although I think he’s an asshole with dangerous ideas, I’m not going to advocate killing him for them. It’s too bad that he can’t write clearly enough to reassure other people of the same thing.

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Filed Under: Atheism, Featured, Politics Tagged With: authoritarian, racism, Sam-Harris, Terry Firma

Can We Actually Ban Small, Yappy Dogs?

By Chris Hall
October 3, 2014
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Being as I write for a dog blog and actually get paid for it, I hope it doesn’t make me a bad person that part of me wishes that this headline were actually real. More to the point, I hope that I don’t wind up unemployed. Or more unemployed than I already am. I love dogs, really, but the small, yappy ones sometimes make me want to use them for practice on a trebuchet.

When you make your trebuchet out of Lego bricks, it’s even better. [media-credit]By: Paul Albertella[/media-credit]

SASKATOON – While bans on pitbulls are increasingly common, Saskatoon has become the first city in the world to ban dogs under 5 pounds (2.27 kg) because they are “noisy, annoying and not really dogs.”

In a split-vote decision, City Council passed the by-law to shut the city gates to a long list of dogs that are commonly referred to as “Purse Dogs” because they fit in a handbag, or “Dinky Doo Doo Doggies” because their pooies are the size of Raisinettes.

— The Alpine, Saskatoon Bans “Shitty Little Yappy” Dogs

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Filed Under: Featured, Humor Tagged With: dogs, Humor, quickiies

The Cell Phone: Savior of Democracy?

By Chris Hall
October 2, 2014
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Demonstrators in the streets of Hong Kong, September 28, 2014  I’m starting to love cell phones more and more. They have their share of frustrations, and sometimes corporate policies piss me right the fuck off, but I think that they\’re turning out to be a great tool for democracy. A lot of the discussions that we’re currently having about police abuse would not be happening if it weren’t for the fact that everyone is carrying around a miniature television studio and photo lab in their pocket. We’re not just seeing that these things happen; we’re seeing proof that they happen regularly. Of course, there were always people who knew this — people of color, queers — but by definition, the people who get the shit beaten out of them by cops are the ones without power, and they’re asked to prove what they say over and over again. The pictures coming out of cell phones have been that proof for all but those who are determined to defend the police at all costs. The demonstrations in Hong Kong give another great example of smartphones as tools of democracy. There’s been a lot of furious debate over allowing governments to have a “kill switch” to shut down the Internet in case of crisis. It turns out that might not be as easy as some people might like to think. The demonstrators in Hong Kong are using modern tech to talk to each other and organize whether the networks are up or not:

As throngs of pro-democracy protesters continue to organize in Hong Kong’s central business district, many of them are messaging one another through a network that doesn’t require cell towers or Wi-Fi nodes. They’re using an app called FireChat that launched in March and is underpinned by mesh networking, which lets phones unite to form a temporary Internet.

So far, mesh networks have proven themselves quite effective and quickly adopted during times of disaster or political unrest, as they don’t rely on existing cable and wireless networks. In Iraq, tens of thousands of people have downloaded FireChat as the government limits connectivity in an effort to curb ISIS communications. Protesters in Taiwan this spring turned to FireChat when cell signals were too weak and at times nonexistent.

via How Hong Kong Protesters Are Connecting, Without Cell Or Wi-Fi Networks : All Tech Considered : NPR.

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Filed Under: Activism, Featured, Politics

A Very Old and Very Fake Sex Work Statistic at The Advocate

By Chris Hall
September 15, 2014
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Ten dollar bill sticking out of crotch of blue jeans.I know that The Advocate isn’t the radical firebrand it once was; after all, the entire LG (sometimes BT) movement isn’t the radical hotbed it once was. Still, it kind of hurts to see them making the same mistakes about sex work that the straight media does. Today on Facebook, Melinda Chateauvert pointed out to me that they’d published this infographic, titled “Numbers Crunch: Prostitution.” Most of the info looks right, or at least plausible, but there in the second half, they reproduce one of the biggest pieces of junk social science about sex work out there. Specifically, item number 9 says:

BETWEEN 11 and 13: Average age when boys and transgender youth become victims of prostitution.

I just published a nearly 4,000-word article in The Atlantic chronicling why this is complete bullshit, so I take the fact that The Advocate can’t be arsed to do their fact-checking a little personally. It’s really easy to find out why this statistic is so bad that it’s “not even wrong” as they say in science.

"Disinfographic" from The  Advocate, with annotations about why it's bullshit.

This statistic has been debunked so many times, it’s not even funny.

Usually, the “age-of-entry” nonsense is used to refer to girls, and implies heterosexual prostitution. But nevertheless, there’s no research backing up the claim that massive numbers of children go into prostitution at such young ages that they could statistically outweigh those who go into sex work in their late teens, twenties, or older. Those studies that have made such claims have focused entirely on samples of people under the age of 18, which automatically skews your results. They’ve also tended to focus exclusively on young people who have been arrested or “rescued,” which also skews the results towards people who are in trouble. For a really good, detailed examination of what’s wrong with these numbers, I recommend reading Emi Koyama’s blog post, “The Average Age of Entry Into Prostitution is NOT 13.” It’s one of the first pieces that I looked at as a reference for my Atlantic article.

There’s also problems with the claim that go beyond the merely statistical. For instance, look at the phrase, “become victims of prostitution,” which immediately erases the line between prostitution and child-rape. In hindsight, I will acknowledge this as also being a problem with my piece in The Atlantic; I should have been more careful about making a distinction between sex work, which is done as an economic choice, and abuse. It’s a very important distinction, and to ignore it also erases the agency of those who do sex work by their own initiative.

Besides failing to check their facts, The Advocate doesn’t even cite their source for the “age-of-entry” stat, probably because they got it through the journalistic equivalent of chatting at the water cooler. I would be very surprised if the person or persons who created this particular dis-infographic knows where they heard it. However, I can make an educated guess at the ultimate source: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U. S., Canada and Mexico, by Richard J. Estes and Neil A. Weiner. The Estes and Weiner report came out in 2001, and included this snippet, based on interviews with 210 underage subjects:

Average age of first intercourse for the children we interviewed was 12 years for the boys (N=63) and 13 years for the girls (N=107). The age range of entry into prostitution for the boys, including gay and transgender boys, was somewhat younger than that of the girls, i.e., 11-13 years vs. 12-14 years, respectively. The average age of first intercourse among minority boys and girls was younger than that of the non-minority youth we interviewed, i.e., 10-11 years of age for minority boys and 11-12 years of age for minority girls.

Emphasis added, to show it specifically matches the claim in The Advocate’s graphic.

As I say in my own article, I don’t have any particular gripe with the Estes and Weiner study, but I do have major issues with how it’s used. The quote above is referring only to the proportions in their sample; it is not making a universal claim, about prostitution in America as a whole. It is certainly not making such a claim about prostitution in 2014. In a mainstream publication, I would roll my eyes in frustration. When I see this stuff in The Advocate, I feel disgusted at how easily they play respectability politics.

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Filed Under: Featured, Media, Sex Work Tagged With: age of entry statistic, Journalism, lgbt, media, Melinda, Sex Work

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  • Hooray for Femme Superheroes: Supergirl’s Skirt is Badass
  • Infographic: Police are Threats to Sex Workers, Not Protection
  • A Song Stripped Naked: The Be Good Tanyas Version of “Waiting Around to Die”
  • Steven Pressfield and Impostor’s Syndrome

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