Another taser horror story
Mounties use tasers to sexually assault an aboriginal child. And get away with it. Predictably, the article doesn’t call it sexual assault. But what does this sound like to you? The girl, who was 16 at...
View ArticleSomehow, I’m sure the patriarchy is to blame.
My computer stopped turning on over the weekend. (* cue sound of sobbing children *) I push the power button. Nothing! I unplug her, wait a minute, plug her back in and push the power button. Nothing!...
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The anti-gun gun-nut
Not bad for a gun-hater. So. A homophobic terrorist shoots up a Unitarian Universalist church, which is pretty much the mass murdering equivalent of kicking puppies. The usual suspects on both sides...
View ArticleIt would be nice to think that we actually had respect for the dead.
It’s not exactly like we gave her much in life, is it? I haven’t written about Angie Zapata, which is particularly unforgivable since she was killed in my city. I find myself having trouble...
View ArticleAn eye for an eye.
An Iranian woman who was blinded in an acid attack is choosing to exercise her right to demand her assailant suffer the same way she has, and the courts agree. In what is called an “eye for an eye”...
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Paid Killers
Hugo has a post up about pacifism, which apparently is not a concept I’ve understood very well all these years. I thought pacifism was defined as the philosophical opposition to war or perhaps to the...
View ArticleThis does not really bother me.
Saudi Arabia’s judicial practices are often abhorrent to me–sentencing a gang rape victim to hundreds of lashes, for instance, or refusing to allow an eight-year-old to divorce the 47-year-old man her...
View ArticleCommon Ground with the Violent
As Amanda reminds us here and here, the notion of a reasoned debate, of consensus morality, of civilized human interaction vanishes and is impossible to recover when the “conversation” takes place with...
View ArticleNon-Violence vs. Political Solutions
A position of non-violence is incompatible with the idea of political solutions to social problems. The state, as we know it, ultimately has only one tool for controlling behavior, it can legitimately...
View ArticlePolitical Power, the Barrel of the Gun and All That
I believe that the only human future, that is, a future with humans in it, is one in which violence as an acceptable mode of human interaction is renounced. This renunciation will make the state, as we...
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