{ texts for nothing }

An announcement overheard at an American airport over the holidays:

The current threat assessment level, as established by the Department of Homeland Security, is orange. We ask for your assistance in reporting any suspicious behavior, or unattended baggage, to law enforcement or TSA personnel immediately.

A new sign posted at BC Ferries terminals:

SECURITY NOTICE
This facility is currently operating at MARSEC LEVEL 1. Entering this facility is deemed valid consent to security screening or inspection. Failure to consent to security measures will result in denial or revocation of authorization to travel.

Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, p. 47:

Is this not the state we are approaching in developed countries around the globe, where this or that form of the emergency state (deployed against the terrorist threat, against immigrants, and so on) is simply accepted as a measure necessary to guarantee the normal run of things?

In 2007, Benjamin “Monty” Robinson killed a man named Robert Dziekanski. Because he was an on-duty RCMP officer at the time, he was not charged with any crime.

In 2008, Monty went for a drive after having a few drinks. He smashed his Jeep into a motorcycle and killed a man named Orion Hutchinson. He fled the scene but returned a short time later; his fellow cops didn’t administer a breathalyzer test until 90 minutes after the crash. Monty’s driver’s license was suspended for all of 90 days, and he had the gall to challenge even that slap on the wrist. It has taken the authorities more than a year to press charges. Now, instead of facing a charge of drunk driving causing death — which carries a life sentence — Monty has been charged merely with obstruction of justice, for lying to his fellow cops after he fled the scene of his second crime.

Here we have a man who has killed innocent people twice through his own irresponsible actions — a man who ran away instead of taking responsibility for what he’d done. Has he been held to account for either death? No. He’s only facing the obstruction charge because he lied about what happened. If you or I did what Monty had done, we would be behind bars for the rest of our lives. But Monty has a badge and a uniform, so even if he’s convicted, he’ll be walking the streets again in a few years’ time.

One set of laws for you and me, another set of laws for the cops. That’s how it is.

The BC government has passed the Assistance to Shelter Act, which gives the cops the power to kidnap people off the street — by force, if necessary — and put them in shelters against their will during “extreme weather conditions.” The law is targeted at homeless people, although there’s nothing in the text of the act that says so.

Naturally it’s just a coincidence that the law has been passed three months before the Winter Olympics come to British Columbia. The law has nothing at all to do with the consistent pattern of Olympic host cities clearing their streets of undesirables in the lead-up to the Games:

South Korea’s military dictatorship cleared out 720,000 people for the 1988 Seoul Games. Private security forces roamed the streets at night, using rape, beatings and arson to break community resistance.

But it doesn’t take a one-party state to bring out the jackboots when the Olympics come to town. Atlanta gained notoriety among Olympic watchers when it declared the central business district a “sanitized corridor” and had police pre-print arrest citations, with the words “African-American,” “Male,” and “Homeless” already filled in. In the lead-up to the games the city arrested about 9,000 people, a “crime” that has significant implications because people with criminal records are not eligible for public housing. Some of the homeless were given one-way bus tickets out of town.

(Hmm. One-way bus tickets out of town? Now where have I heard that before?)

The people who rule us claim they have the best interests of the homeless at heart. After all, they say, last winter a homeless woman in Vancouver’s West End accidentally killed herself while trying to stay warm. You have to wonder if these people have ever actually talked to a homeless person before. Most of the ones I’ve talked to avoid shelters because they feel unsafe there. For some strange reason, they don’t like sleeping in overcrowded rooms where a majority of the other people in the room have addiction or mental health problems and might hurt them or steal what few possessions they have. (Incidentally, the new law makes no provisions for ensuring that the people kidnapped by the cops will be allowed to take those possessions with them when they’re forced into shelters against their will.) I know it’s hard for some people to believe that homeless people might have good reasons for the choices they make, but there it is.

Ah, but by being concerned about their own safety, homeless people are putting their own safety at risk, and we can’t allow that! Back in September, a columnist for the Globe and Mail argued that the state has a duty to protect these people from themselves, even if it means violating their rights. Indeed, the secondary headline on that article reads, “Sometimes ensuring citizens are safe means leaving aside their constitutional freedoms.” This is the reasoning behind laws like the Assistance to Shelter Act. But didn’t we just spend the past eight years proving how terribly misguided and dangerous the false dichotomy between safety and security really is? It’s incredible how easy it is these days for Serious People to justify Doing Whatever’s Necessary to Keep People Safe — without the least concern for the rights they violate in the process.

Seriously, do we really need to have the cops pull people off the street and incarcerate them for the crime of being homeless in the middle of winter? Why don’t we just provide decent permanent housing instead?

There’s nothing unattainable about that solution, by the way. BC deals with homelessness through a combination of emergency rooms, cops and judges, and temporary emergency shelters — an unplanned patchwork of half-assed tactics that leaves many homeless people without the support they need (the province’s homeless population has shot up in the past few years). Not only is this approach both ineffective and immoral, it’s also more expensive than the alternative. Last year, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that it would actually be cheaper to provide our homeless population with both housing and support services, in the form of treatment for addiction and mental illness, than it is to continue doing what we’re doing now.

So why does BC’s government want to spend even more money on an approach (I hesitate to call it a “strategy”) that doesn’t work, when an approach that does work would actually be cheaper? And why do they want to compound their sins by giving the cops a mandate to force our most vulnerable citizens into unsafe spaces against their will?

In Spain, every citizen will have a legal right to affordable high-speed Internet service by 2011. That makes Spain the second country in the world to declare broadband access a right; Finland was the first. Several other countries — for example, France and Estonia — have already declared Internet access (but not necessarily high-speed access) to be a human right.

And yet the people who claim to govern us are conspiring to implement a three-strikes regime that would cut off your Internet access if anyone accuses you three times of online copyright infringement. It’s part of an international copyright treaty called ACTA — a treaty that’s being negotiated in strict secrecy, with participants apparently required to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from telling ordinary folks like you and me what’s going on. (Big business, of course, already has access to all the information that’s being kept from the general public.)

Meanwhile, here on BC’s Pender Island, smack in the middle of the ferry corridor from Vancouver to Victoria, many people still don’t have access to high-speed Internet connections. According to this month’s Pender Post (not online, sorry), Shaw had planned to apply for funding from the federal government to extend its existing broadband infrastructure to cover the whole island, but they pulled out three days before the funding deadline, leaving many residents in the lurch. In fact, in many parts of BC, your Internet options are still limited to unreliable satellite connections — that is, if you can get a connection at all. You could argue that BC is a special case because of its geography, but the same problem hasn’t prevented Finland from guaranteeing its citizens’ right to accessible high-speed Internet.

Oh, and that funding that Shaw was going to apply for? That’s part of a federal initiative called Broadband Canada, which has $225 million to allocate over three years to extending high-speed Internet coverage in Canada. Which is great, as far as it goes — only it doesn’t go nearly far enough: Broadband Canada received a total of $972 million in funding requests, and as we can infer from the situation on Pender Island, even that doesn’t cover the existing demand.

(Hat tip to Slashdot for the first two links.)

From a review of a book called Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform by Charles Upchurch:

Previous historical accounts have made the unwarranted assumption that there was little public discussion or public awareness of same-sex activities in Victorian England until late in the century, when a series of notorious cases involving queers culminated in the prosecution and conviction of Oscar Wilde.

But Upchurch, after a decade of meticulous research, demonstrates that this assumption is palpably false. Earlier examinations of the press in early-and-mid Victorian England relied on indexes and databases built on key words that missed many published reports on same-sex conduct and legal action. But by minutely examining the files of three newspapers with different class audiences between 1827 and 1870, and cross-checking them with court records, official documents, and correspondence, Upchurch has shown that not only was there broad public awareness in these years of sex between men, but that male homosexual conduct was a matter of considerable public discussion.

I haven’t read Upchurch’s book, so I can’t verify the claims made in the review. But if the claims are true, then this story is an excellent illustration of the importance of proper indexing. The indexes and databases that previous researchers used ought to have covered the news stories and other documents that Upchurch discovered in the course of his research, regardless of the language used in those documents to describe homosexuality. That’s the whole point of creating subject indexes. In this case, inadequate indexing may have helped to obfuscate the already obscure history of homosexuality in the West.