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Jeff Halperin

Jeff Halperin

Category Archives: Politics

TTC “Fare Enforcers” Are Absurd and Backwards

01 Wednesday Mar 2023

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

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Tags

fare enforcement is racist, john tory, TTC fare enforcement, ttc fare evasion

Toronto faces multiple crises at the same time. In the immediate term, gridlock-traffic is agonizing and drivers pose lethal risks. It’s infuriating day to day, the city loses billions in productivity, and people get injured or killed. Housing is also obscenely overpriced and hard to find. In the middle distance, the pandemic continues and climate change looms.

The reasonable response to this is vastly improving public transit to reduce congestion, the parking burden, and air pollution. For every $1 the government spends on transit, it spends $9 on the infrastructure private cars require. That means that even if a TTC passenger doesn’t pay a fare, they cost the city less than private cars do.

Yet the city is poised to send “fare enforcers” back throughout its transit system in late March 2023 to give tickets as high as $425 to people sidestepping $3.25 fares, fares which are set to increase yet again, even as service is cut. The TTC is eliminating some bus routes and there will be longer waits for existing buses, and even subways.

These TTC cuts come at the worst time possible: violence has increased, ridership is significantly down. TTC Board Chair Jon Burnside’s views are so upside down, he may as well be an executive for Uber or a car company rather than work for the TTC.

So how does the TTC have money to circulate over 100 fare enforcers to inspect its own riders when facing a $336 million-dollar shortfall? The TTC boasts that fare enforcers will wear body cameras, as if equipping these less-than-useless patrols with expensive gear is good! If fare enforcers require body cameras because they pose that level of risk, they shouldn’t exist.

The point is to end racist enforcement in public space, not videotape it. We already have 2018 footage of three TTC fare enforcers physically assaulting a Black teenager on a streetcar at St. Clair and Bathurst, just outside my old apartment while I lived there. It’s a well-established pattern that doesn’t need to be confirmed yet again. The inspectors were suspended, with pay.

The way this conversation is framed, even people sympathetic to TTC passengers think “fare evaders” deprive the public transit system of money. People on both sides see it that way, wrongly.

And OK, in an obvious and basic sense, people who don’t pay a TTC fare clearly don’t contribute that money to the TTC. But almost nobody accuses drivers of personal cars of getting a free ride, even though they also don’t pay to access public roads that cost vastly more tax dollars to maintain than public transit does.

Let me repeat this because car-brain has hopelessly warped this public conversation. Every private car on Toronto streets is a considerably larger burden on the city than TTC “fare evaders.” Private cars create financial problems, the space they take up cause bottlenecks, we breathe poisoned air that creates trickle-down health problems, which we pay for too.

A modern, sensible city would encourage people to take public transit, and nothing is less welcoming or pleasant than “fare enforcers”! They have a tendency to grill marginalized people and their entire job description is absurd. They shouldn’t exist on the TTC even if their very generous salaries cost us nothing. That we pay for this “service” is fiscal nonsense.

One reason I think the motivation behind “fare enforcement” is motivated purely by cruel and punitive punishment and not any actual philosophical or economic principle is the difference in how people perceive safety enforcement for drivers.

Enough people think speed cameras are just a “cash-grab,” even if they really do catch people breaking the law and posing danger to the public. Let’s be real, cars injure, maim, and kill people every day despite “Vision Zero,” and measures to enforce safety are widely publicly rejected, rather than embraced the way “fare enforcers” are.

Unlike speeding cars, TTC “fare evaders” pose no physical danger to anybody! Toronto drivers transcend stupid or even dangerous; drivers here regularly crash into houses, condominiums, telephone poles, fences, laundromats, bus shelters, and, of course, other cars and people on the road. This is a much bigger problem than people moving efficiently, affordably, and cleanly through the city. In fact, far from a problem, the latter is the goal! It’s what we hope to achieve and we are investing money in punishing it!

The alternative to the person not paying a TTC fare (among North America’s most expensive transit fare) is them not riding, which also doesn’t add money to TTC coffers. If someone doesn’t have the money to pay, then they can’t go to appointments, see people, get groceries.

Anyone saving money by riding the TTC isn’t the type of person this city should depend on to keep the system afloat. Anyone saving money by not paying a TTC fare is even less suitable. If someone who doesn’t pay transit fares chooses to drive their car to get somewhere instead, how is that a better result for the city?

Let’s be clear again: the TTC isn’t short of funds because riders aren’t paying enough–it’s the exact opposite. TTC riders put vastly more money into our transit system than riders from other cities, which enjoy more public subsidies. Toronto riders fund roughly 2/3rds of our transit system. No other North American city this size depends on fares to fund its system, but Toronto does. That is the wellspring of our financial difficulties, not riders cheating the city. If anything, the city is cheating TTC riders, then giving itself a moral pat on the back for harassing the people they do wrong by.

That’s the reason it’s broke, which obviously predates the pandemic. 10 years ago, a TTC token cost I believe $2.25. Now, tapping Presto costs $3.25. Prices have risen roughly 50%. Overreliance on TTC passengers, using their wallets as a crutch while austerity politicians like John Tory defied experts to pour billions he didn’t have into the crumbling Gardiner Expressway is, frankly, stupid.

To hear these officious and ignorant arguments portraying the backwards and barbaric “fare enforcement” of poor people as if it’s moral, rational, and fiscally sensible is maddening and sad.

John Tory spent millions of dollars on police to violently push homeless people out of public parks. Those people have nowhere to go, so some may try to survive the Canadian winter by riding TTC vehicles overnight. Now we’re paying another tier of patrol to harass them there, too.

Letting drivers access public streets for free while subjecting TTC passengers to rising fares, reduced service, and increased enforcement is ignorant and hypocritical, and is a flagrantly irrational response to the multiple crises we face. More than that: the crises we face exist mostly because this city asks people with less to spend more and vice versa.

It’s unsustainable, which is why things feel like they’re breaking more fundamentally, not just worsening at their usual rate. We need to look at this conversation holistically and ask what the goal of the TTC really is, and how we accomplish that goal by actively investing sorely-needed money into creating new barriers that make the riding experience a lot worse for many people.

“Fare enforcers” are a puritanical vestige of Toronto the Good who have absolutely no place in a safe, functional, modern and fiscally responsible public transit system everyone can ride.

Solve the problem by addressing root causes: redirect a lot of the billions we’re wasting on private car infrastructure (widening old highways, building new ones, paving farmland) and invest it in public transit at the rate normal North American cities do, and the problem the city created will gradually vanish. Blaming and stigmatizing innocent poor people, and investing in their increased harassment, is self-defeating, intellectually indefensible, and morally unconscionable.

What Exactly Do You Mean By “Woke” ?

23 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

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Tags

ford, mtg, toni morrison, trump, woke

I’m probably making a huge mistake weighing on a fraught term people use and understand differently. Well, let’s make a huge mistake then!

“Woke” was originally a term some Black people used to describe the need to be vigilant about the dangers of racism they face in our deeply racist society. It still means this, but it also means so many other things that whoever once used its original definition must know it’s been obscured. Often deliberately so.

Today, depending on the person, “woke” means quite different things. Some well-meaning centrists say it to disparage those on their left they feel lay on the anti-racism a little too thick. In their minds, Western society isn’t particularly racist, it’s just as racist as any other place because (as they’ll say begrudgingly, but with a shrug) nowhere is perfect, so anybody speaking to the need to transform society instead of reform or tinker with it is by definition going too far. The self-satisfaction this person advocating for transformative change seems to feel, the pat you can feel them giving themselves on the back, is summed up in the word “woke.” This is a confused position but a relatively innocent one that makes space for one more vile and willfully-deranged.

Basically, today’s most slobbering racists use “woke” as a euphemism for the n-word. When Marjorie Taylor Greene and that ilk say “woke,” the sentence would read the same if you replaced that word with the slur. When MTG praises Chris Stapleton’s rendition of the national anthem before the Super Bowl but says, “we could have done without the rest of the wokeness,” you can feel the word she really wants to say. She all but said it.

While some confusion around the word “woke” arises naturally, organically, and innocently, the word itself is also under attack by racists using it to obscure things and advance racism. Once they start using it in many different ways, by the time you add the new context to the old one, the old one feels outdated. It’s impossible to say “woke” now without associating the term with the far-right who co-opted it.

That’s what’s tough when talking about this word: the casual political people will roll their eyes at being lumped in with the slobbering racists, while the slobbering racists are violently irrational and act in terrible faith no matter what you say or how you act. The rabid right appeals to centrists and anybody who isn’t steadfastly opposed to them by insinuating “we might be crazy fucks, I mean look at us, but the alt-left and Antifa are crazy too, and you and I have fundamental things in common.”

The liberal who means well but doesn’t grasp how intertwined racism and our social institutions are may find common cause with the rabid racist, even if it’s to their private dismay and embarrassment. The centrist will often be rightly disgusted by MAGA’s violent demented freaks, but they can’t totally disagree with them altogether, either. The far-right doesn’t threaten the centrist’s national mythology, whereas the so-called alt-left does. Centrists enjoy being reassured this country isn’t on stolen land and doesn’t owe its foundational wealth to crimes, and the far-right are more than happy to give them this reassurance, one the left is adamantly opposed to giving them.

One pernicious trick the right does is spread these comforting illusions in the name of being critical, hard-eyed realists! They get to believe the most self-serving explanations for their comforts possible for supposedly impartial intellectual reasons. It’s kind of like children claiming they read Will to Power and Nietzsche clearly states they can have all the cookies and juice they want before bed time.

Did you really do the reading? Is this just what you want to believe, or what the text actually says?

The far-right’s “Free Market” beliefs also have more in common with liberalism/centrism than with any leftist view.

So on one hand, liberals and centrists are hugely embarrassed by the far-right, but not by their underlying beliefs. It’s mostly the illiterate clown show antics of the Ford brothers and Donald Trump. John Tory was a fiscal conservative austerity mayor whose economic and cultural views line up with the Ford and Trumps of this world, but he was polished enough to conceal this similarity, or even housebroken enough. On a basic level, Tory, unlike Trump and sometimes the Fords, could talk to the media without causing apolitical people around the world to simultaneously laugh and shudder.

The far-right can’t be denounced enough.

MAGA freaks in Florida are banning Toni Morrison novels, which is akin to a modern book burning. What could be a more hostile act of war against Western Culture than banning the best Western literature? I won’t defend Toni Morrison, the author of Sula, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and other masterpieces, because that would suggest her status as a writer could be in doubt.

But that’s what so confusing about the “Culture War”…it’s a war against culture led by people using culture as a mask for racism. The word “woke” is wrapped up in this.

Years after police murdered George Floyd, “defund the police” might be a mainstream position with lots of support across society, but the mayor of New York is currently a cop. John Tory defunded everything in Toronto except police, and now that he has resigned, the new race for mayor has not one but two cops.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because the backlash to racism is louder than usual that it means racism is over. If this wasn’t such a deeply racist society, I’d be making fun of the do-gooders too! I think that’s why people are so eager to use the term “woke” as a casual, jocular insult: it comforts them, because they don’t want to confront the fact that racism is real and rampant. They get to be in denial while enjoying the satisfaction of feeling like they are boldly, critically looking truth eyeball to eyeball.

There’s a circular, self-perpetuating kind of logic: they don’t identify as racists (they genuinely do oppose flagrant racism!), so how can society be racist if they are joking about the racism? If racism was a real problem, they wouldn’t be joking about it, so their jokes are in a way held as proof that everything is fine.

In my experience, this conversation is way more likely to examine the intentions of the person saying “woke” than any academic or critical work about racism or society. The white person saying “woke” is more likely to focus on their innocence rather than society’s guilt. Because again, in a way, if they are innocent, so is society.

“Woke” is a very reasonable thing to be in a racist society, so it’s only used pejoratively under the assumption racism doesn’t exist or barely exists, and do-gooders say it to appear superhumanly good, by overcompensating and demanding excessive justice.

This is not what’s happening! I promise you, the harder and more carefully you look at society, the more racism you’ll find. That racism exists in Canada but not that much is the dreamy and naïve position, not the cynical and critical one!

At this point it’s much easier to just avoid saying the word altogether because either you’re preaching to the choir or people’s understandings of it are likely caught somewhere in the middle of all this. The point isn’t to go out and use “woke” correctly. I just think it’s worth reflecting on what other people really mean by it.

I don’t want to tell anyone how to live, but if you only used the word “woke” innocently enough to give liberal do-gooders a hard time, you should probably stop using it too. I’m sure the alt-right will repeat the cycle by co-opting more Black lingo. If you aren’t using the term to race-bait (and why would you be?), there are lots of other words you can use. Write around it.

One ironic, sorry thing about modern life is that it’s sometimes necessary to give this much time and thought to a single word in the context of the alt-right, people who don’t exactly have a literary love of language.

Bye Tory! Actually, Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

17 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

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Tags

john tory, john tory resigns, Toronto urban decay

For years, Tory was known as a total political loser. Why recount all his losses? There were many. Today he is a loser again despite eking out a W against the crack mayor’s bro in 2014 and sleep walking to two more victories in quiet elections against low-profile candidates, the last of which in 2022 had the lowest voter turnout in any election since the 1996 Megacity amalgamation.

His out-of-nowhere resignation mere months after being handed “strong mayor” powers seems unthinkable. Usually, Kouvalis-led Conservatives operate an elaborate digital ratfuckery machine to brainwash and play dirty tricks, then cling to power afterwards at all costs, and even change the laws while in office to increase the likelihood of keeping it later. The idea that someone in 2023 would resign once having this power over an issue so small as “integrity” is astonishing.

Sure enough, Tory didn’t resign right away. No wonder some in his circle advised against resigning after he made the initial announcement. Ford, who privately arranged for Tory’s “strong mayor” power during the mayoral election but said nothing about it until his candidate won, took this occasion to support Tory and insult “leftists,” typical of that corrupt, illiterate and belligerent ape.

Apparently some closest to Tory insisted he step down, which is so incredible to consider that it makes me wonder if there’s more to this they didn’t want known. How can sex, even with a subordinate, be resign-worthy in 2023? People are dying in every direction, ecological collapse is gradually taking hold or worsening, and this ends a political career of a guy who had been pretty squeaky clean?

I knew Tory was a prude and repressed wasp, but is he really more prude than he is hungry for political power? Can anyone be that prude? I guess it’s possible!

The former city staffer he slept with went on to work for Rogers-owned MLSE to help get the city to host five games of the 2026 World Cup tournament, which Toronto will pay $300 million to host. MLSE insists she was hired on a merit basis, that Tory didn’t get her the job. Either way, the optics are not great, and Tory must have worried it’d look unkosher even if it wasn’t.

Tory refused to step down as a Rogers special adviser on the family trust, a position paying $100k annually. Rogers’ tentacles are so long, their involvement in the city so wide and entrenched, it was impossible for Tory to be mayor and work for Rogers without the appearance of many conflicts of interest. When questioned how he could be mayor and still collect a giant cheque for advising a telecom giant, he told a story about honouring the promise he made to old-time family friend Ted Rogers–essentially, he said loyalty to ruling class connections trumped his public obligations, in so many words.

To his supporters, he was the adult in the room who upheld the status quo in a palatable way for media and apolitical people who only follow politics distantly, if at all. Wealthy people loved him because he artificially engineered keeping their property taxes extra low, while making it seem like this sleight of hand was just the natural order of things, like the sun rising and setting every day and night. Plus, if they called 311 to complain about a pothole or anything, someone was dispatched right away to clean it up. The city did work for them, so no wonder they mostly loved him. I suspect they vastly underestimate how dysfunctional the rest of the city is.

Ford and Tory are both the elite of the elite, but Ford is comparably a coarse uncouth street brawler while Tory has always been posh and polished and groomed all along for this work. Ford is the bad cop, Tory the good cop. They may position themselves differently in their own PR, but both ultimately work for the same force and advance mutual interests, even if they have also seriously butted heads over the years. (The Ford family has serious rifts among themselves and with Tory that go beyond the scope of this article.)

Ford took federal money meant for public healthcare and used it to pay down the deficit for political purposes during a pandemic. It’s hard to say how many people in the city Tory presided over died needlessly so the provincial conservatives could torque the numbers and show economic indicators their base loves. Maybe the increased power he gave Tory helped smooth things over between them. I’m genuinely not sure. Just speculating.

Whereas Doug Ford was the Ford brother who lacked the people skills of his racist and misogynistic brother Rob, Tory seemed to be at least a normal person. He seems to embody the modern struggle between the personal and political in that one-on-one, maybe he was a nice guy. That there’s a gap, a chasm, between the goodness of his heart and the misery of his policy is not impossible to believe.

Galen Weston is reportedly a kind and chatty fellow when he encounters employees in the elevators. Maybe Tory is “nice” in this vein. Personally, I ran into John Tory of all places in New Delhi. I was supposed to interview him for TV but, like much at WION, things got botched. I wrote the questions my friend and colleague Daniele asked, and when I met Tory after and he realized he was unprepared to meet a journalist from Toronto that might ask him something, he looked instantly petrified and fled like Homer floating backwards through the bushes GIF. He could fake being normal better on camera and in person, and I think he had more capacity than Ford to be a normal human being. But what is that saying?

Tory adamantly supported police throughout their violent and super expensive crackdowns on homeless people in public parks. Tory spent millions forcing people with nowhere else to go to go elsewhere. The city falsely claimed most “evicted” people got safe shelter indoors elsewhere, but of course they didn’t. Most went to other parks or under bridges, others simply, tragically, and needlessly died. Tory was OK suing Khaleel Seivwright in 2021, a local carpenter who heroically took it upon himself to build tiny shelters for people trying to survive the Canadian winter during a global pandemic.

Tory spent money to ensure homeless people didn’t have somewhere to stay. If Tory was so concerned the “Tiny Shelters” were dangerous, as the city claimed, why was he so supportive of the city’s dangerous and over-crowded shelters?

Tory wasted millions to worsen desperate people’s crises at a time he was also crying poor. He arbitrarily set the property tax rate too low first, then worked backwards to set the budget, an old Rob Ford trick that makes defunding society seem fiscally inevitable, or at least prudent and wise, rather than what it really is, opting to be cruel and withholding.

Ultimately, John Tory governed badly by 1960s standards, but in 2023. If anything good happened in Toronto during his tenure, he resisted it, and it happened largely against his will. CafeTO and ActiveTO would never have been approved without the pandemic occurring, and even with it, the patio application is expensive and lengthy while many “bike lanes” are either car lanes with a bike painted in them, or they have plastic “bollards” designed to prevent cars from getting damaged by the bollards rather than cyclists from getting killed by the cars and their drivers.

Was he really the milquetoast, middle-of-the-road, sensible man he presented himself as? Only if we accept what he said about himself at face value. I don’t. Tory was more ferociously right-wing than people here claimed, but he was more media polished and better able to hide it.

Torontonians watching him resign wondered about his legacy. In 2014, “Smart Track” was the central plank of Tory’s mayoral campaign. Today, it doesn’t exist. No mega, or even minor, projects bear his signature. He paid for artificially low property taxes for homeowners by actively neglecting basic services non-wealthy parts of Toronto rely on, from Scarborough to Etobicoke to throughout the downtown core.

Last election, Tory critics made the incumbent mayor synonymous with uncollected garbage spilling out of city garbage cans. I took a picture of a TTC bus stop duct taped to a pole and countless people found similar forms of urban decay. The crumbling under Tory was that palpable. It’d be funny if it wasn’t depressing and sad. Sure enough, after years of austerity, the TTC is overcrowded and people understandably fear violence. Fares are rising, service is worsening. The city is broke and there’s no plan for improvement apart from asking higher levels of government for money and concealing the extent of the decay with gimmicky but elaborate and expensive PR.

Tory’s final act, to defy his own promise to resign to push through one more austerity budget, is the symbol and substance of everything wrong with him and his politics.

I’m thrilled he’s gone! It happens that after months of not writing here, I happened to write an anti-Tory post only the night before he resigned. The night he initially shocked everyone by announcing his intention to resign, the Leafs had a 3-0 shutout and the vibes in Toronto were, as they say, immaculate. Nights later when he listed the date of his formal resignation, Auston Matthews had an extremely sexy goal and assist in his first game back after three weeks of injury.

There are questions about the circumstances of Tory’s departure, but there’s no doubt he torched his reputation on the way out and I’m glad about that too. He never deserved a good reputation. We could have avoided all this by electing Soknacki in 2014! I love Toronto and hope the city turns around, but I hope Tory is associated with its current demise, and hope that Tory’s few late-era victories don’t obscure the reputation he developed over years as a total loser.

Homelessness: John Tory’s Humanitarian Crisis

09 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Homelessness crisis, john tory, Nicholas Hune-Brown, OPAC

Toronto’s City Council voted yesterday, February 8, against funding 24-hour warming centres to help people experiencing homelessness survive the winter. Buildings like the Scarborough Civic Centre or Metro Hall only open when the weather drops to -15.

They voted to “study” the issue, which is what they say to avoid sounding cheap when they don’t want to fund something straightforward. In voting against funding the warming centres, council rejected recommendations from the city’s own Board of Health.

What should homeless people do if it’s -14? Wait to see if temperatures drop another degree? There are no spots in shelters. City officials dispute that, but of course they do. The reality is people get denied entry at shelters every single night because there’s no space.

People slip through the cracks in lots of ways, but here is one. Let’s say a nearby shelter has a space for you, but you have a partner, and it’s not co-ed, or a pet they refuse to allow in. What do you? Even if there is a spot at a shelter across town that would fit all your needs, what good is it if you don’t know it’s there? And say you do know there might be such a spot, would you pay the rising TTC fare to trek across the city to check?

That many people feel safer not in a shelter, in their own tent, is a scathing indictment of our shelter system, which after all isn’t supposed to exist! It’s only meant as a last resort. Ideally, shelters should be phased out as people move from the streets into homes. Instead, we’re phasing shelters and even warming centres out while homelessness is rapidly increasing.

I covered Toronto City Hall for a pretty bleh/low-quality online outlet in 2013, Toronto Standard. I didn’t really know fuck-all about politics, but I’ll never forget attending my first city council meeting, when OPAC protesters unfurled a banner accusing city council of having blood on its hands for failing to provide ample shelters. They weren’t just being hyperbolic; they had recently returned from funerals of friends who died.

When people make charged claims like “this council has blood on its hands” or “people are dying,” it’s liable to sound like exaggeration, or like a heavy-handed rhetorical device designed to illicit response in an argument or debate. But it’s a neutral, accurate description of what’s going on. This was in 2013, well before John Tory or the pandemic.

When this city would like money to fund, for example, hosting five World Cup soccer games in 2026, $300 million suddenly appears out of thin air from local, provincial, and federal governments. Magic! Modern, sensible cities everywhere are freeing up real estate, beautifying prominent spaces, improving street safety, reducing pollution, and improving public health and joy by removing obsolete urban highways; instead, John Tory has chosen to pour over $1 billion to repair the crumbling Gardiner Highway. The city had money, but he wasted it.

We’ve seen huge increases in the costs of housing and food, while austerity budgets phase out or severely reduce public services. TTC fares are rising yet again, while bus routes are axed and passengers wait longer for subways. Yes, the pandemic hasn’t improved anybody’s mental health, but the conditions John Tory opted for are not exactly boosting public morale. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a rise in violence. How did Tory respond? By finding $8 million dollars so 80 cops can circulate the TTC system. This comes after giving Toronto cops an additional $50 million.

The self-proclaimed fiscally-responsible Strong Mayor looked astonished when asked point blank by a representative from the organization TTC Riders to justify the increased spending, given the $50 million price tag and the disconnect between the crisis Torontonians face and the police’s total inability to address the problems’ root causes. The squirming, terrified, what-do-I-do-now? look on his face is that of a person unaccustomed to actual questions, who often speaks in public but never without a script, a script they know is total horseshit.

In what felt like mere minutes after the 2022 mayoral election, Doug Ford, the belligerent ex-city councilor, who in vengeance in 2018 cut council in half mid-election, suddenly gave John Tory “strong mayor” powers. In 2018, Toronto city council had 45 members. Now it has 25. A few months ago, a two-thirds majority was required to pass bylaws. Now, it’s 1/3rd. In other words, instead of needing the support of 30 councillors, now it’s merely eight. (Fewer people for Vaughan condo developers to bribe?)

The argument that this would help Tory bypass “red tape” or other hurdles interfering with Getting Things Done doesn’t really make sense, since nobody could point to a major vote he lost in his two prior tenures as mayor. He was never held back, he just wanted more power. The current conservative party leader gave the former conservative party leader more power. Favours. (These two politicians also hate each other considerably, as Ford lost the 2018 mayoral race to Tory, before winning the provincial election Tory lost when he led the party.)

Homelessness predates Tory. In 2019, Nicholas Hune-Brown’s devastating account of Toronto homelessness serves as a reminder that the crisis we’re facing isn’t caused by the pandemic, even if things have worsened enormously since. In 2018, I received a visitor from India stunned by the homelessness she saw in downtown Toronto. As gut-wrenching as homelessness is, when your country has the complicated colonial history of India, and a host of problems we don’t have in Toronto, perhaps people living on the street feels tragic but inevitably. But in a wealthy city like Toronto? What’s the excuse? There was no excuse then and there still isn’t one.

John Tory himself said his “strong mayor” powers would make him more accountable to voters. Let that be the case, then. City council is gradually shrinking to do his bidding, so this is John Tory’s humanitarian crisis.

Tax Evasion vs TTC Fare Evasion: Selective Enforcement

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

doug ford, john tory, justin trudeau, tax evasion, ttc fare evasion

Society ignores tax haven criminals dealing in many millions of dollars but hounds poor people over pennies. This is one example of an infinitely-recurring pattern, where the ultra wealthy essentially rig society in their favour at the expense of society’s poorest people.

Let’s see one manifestation of this dynamic in action.

Canada loses $4 billion a year to tax evasion, because Canada’s wealthiest have more than $200 billion in offshore accounts, and these funds don’t get taxed. $4 billion.

The general public is not demanding blood. In fact, nothing is happening!

In Canada, over the past few years, the CRA has been financially hobbled in just such a way that it can’t really pursue the tax returns of society’s wealthiest people, who necessarily have the most complex, unwieldy paperwork. As a result, apparently it is more efficient for the agency to invest in assessing small- and medium-level tax returns…

How convenient!

Effectively, tax evasion is legal for the very wealthiest people in society.

Compare this lax treatment against how everyday TTC riders are grilled.

TTC riders face TTC Fare Enforcers, a subsection of police there specifically to ensure “the integrity” of $3.25 fares. All this, though more than 97% of TTC riders pay a fare, and the 2.7% who don’t includes people who can’t because a Presto machine was broken.

So, “fare evasion” is a rarity, what evasion there is is tiny, and “fare evasion” isn’t one person greedily draining the broader society of wealth, it’s just them traveling around their city, which is what the TTC exists to do. If the TTC received 5 times the amount or revenue supposedly lost to “fare evasion” annually, it’d still be critically underfunded! “Fare Evasion” is not the root cause of the TTC’s problem.

Still, we send patrols out because the idea of a poor person getting away with anything is cannot be tolerated.

The TTC is basically broke because unlike any other North American city this size, about 80% of its funding comes from the till box–ie, riders pay for it mostly, not government. Yet the TTC found the money to take out ads to shame and humiliate their own riders and plastered them on TTC vehicles!

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 1.46.33 AM

Similar ads were on the insides of buses and subways, and the outsides of streetcars.

The outrageous fine for “evading” an outrageously high $3.25 TTC fee is $425 or criminal charges. The smaller the crime, the more it is enforced and the higher the penalty.

When considering this backwards enforcement, is it really coincidence that John Tory, Doug Ford, and Justin Trudeau are more likely to have personal and professional connections with tax evaders than TTC fare evaders?

Look how they chase poor people.

Toronto’s mayor proudly sent fare enforcers on public transit into a global pandemic in March! Imagine paying $3+ to take a shitty public transportation system to a minimum-wage job during a deadly pandemic, hoping nobody is on your bus so you don’t get COVID, and still seeing Fare Enforcers circulate through the system. Public schools are crumbling, hopefully we have enough PPE for frontline healthcare workers, but this we have money for? This is our society?

Our indifference to poor people is evident from the TTC’s “plan” at the time for social distancing, which was this: Fare Enforcers exit the vehicle once 50 people are on board. Can you imagine society risking the lives of wealthy people to ensure financial accountability over any sum of money, never mind $3.25?

Unsurprisingly, a system built on a foundation of violence against poor people is also racist.

Statistically, Fare Enforcers issue tickets disproportionately to Black people. Fare Enforcers assaulted an unarmed Black teenager on a streetcar just down the street from my apartment. The enforcers were found to have committed no wrongdoing, which is not an exoneration of their conduct but a total indictment of the entire system.

Can you even imagine one scenario where an authority would ever physically tackle a tax-evading investment banker, and upon formal review it’d be deemed acceptable?

This charade of enforcement-theatre which lets mega criminality operate freely in broad daylight while violently hounding poor people out of a fake concern for Law and Order is grotesque, yet very typical. Indeed, if you look carefully, you’ll see this underlying dynamic repeated ad infinitum with only minor variations.

If TTC riders face humiliating ad campaigns suggesting they’re criminals and a dedicated team of armed enforcers over $3 fares, what would it look like to see proportionate enforcement against people stealing many, many millions of dollars?

The tax haven class would be cavity searched upon leaving their home in the morning. Growling bloodhounds would bark after them in the street. Billboards targeting the super rich would proclaim, “You unpatriotic dogs think you can swindle Canada? Think again!” and the super rich would be billed for these undermining billboards.

The TTC is a public good that only exists to affordably get people around the city. People have jobs and appointments to get to: The TTC is not there to generate profit, nor should it be!

Comparing the relative treatment of Class Haven Criminals versus TTC riders illustrates clearly that poor people are the ones paying for collective society, that “trickle-down-economics” is BS because in reality the money trickles down to Switzerland or Panama to be privately hoarded.

If our politicians were actually concerned with enforcing the laws on the books evenly and sensibly, rather than waging a war on the poor to benefit their friends and donors, they’d immediately send TTC Fare Enforcers away from public transit and into the Board Rooms, where all the real criminals and “evaders” are.

 

 

 

 

Thoughts About Narendra Modi’s 2020 Pogrom in New Delhi

07 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

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Tags

Alt-right political violence, CAA protests, Delhi pogrom, Delhi Violence, Narendra Modi

Screen Shot 2020-02-28 at 11.57.14 PM

In late February a pogrom broke out in New Delhi, where I lived between February 2016 and August 2017. I was overwhelmed when I started reading about the violence, and still am while writing this. Still, I have thoughts.

 

Some basic facts about the violence
A mosque was burned. Footage circulated of a man from the Militant Hindu mob standing on a vandalized minaret, planting a saffron-coloured flag (BJP colours, Modi’s far-right party) and a flag of Hanuman, a popular Hindu god. Men chanted “hail Lord Ram” (a Hindu Nationalist slogan). In places, Muslim men were asked to sing the national anthem, or were beaten up right there.

To confirm their religion, Hindu mobs asked Muslims to show if they were circumcised. Elsewhere, in places Hindus put up the saffron flag so the mob would know not to torch their homes or businesses. A Hindu mob burned an 85-year-old Muslim woman to death, she was too frail to leave her home in time.

Footage of Delhi police shows them damaging CCTV cameras, so they won’t record what’s happening on Delhi streets. Yet I’ve seen a video of a police member instructing a mob to throw a brick (my friend translated the cop’s instructions).

The death toll was 4 in the initial reports from February 25. At the time of writing, it’s 53 and could still rise.

An editor in Delhi sent me pictures of victims way too graphic to post or even describe. Friends there advise me not to visit–“the country has changed.” One buddy told me, his friends aren’t talking about the pogrom–“let’s not discuss politics,” they say…as if a massacre is simply “politics.”

An Indian judge hearing the “Delhi violence” case came down on Delhi police, and was transferred away from Delhi days later. There’s other evidence this violence had explicit support from politicians and police, thought Hindus were also killed, and so was a policeman. How organized and predictable should the violence in a pogrom be?

Pogroms From all the reports I’ve read, and from everything I’ve heard from my friends there, this was a long-coming anti-Muslim pogrom organized by a fascist Hindu government.

 

India’s reputation
Modi’s India is dark, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’re there. In North America, we hear reports about the supposed eradication of poverty in India–Western Big Business is looking to corner the Indian market, and they’re eager to demonstrate their presence in India benefits India.

The pogrom in Delhi threatens to pierce this painstakingly cultivated image. To maximize profits from India Big Business can’t have India associate with political instability. Actually I think they don’t have much to worry about: media coverage about Delhi’s pogrom has been predictably shameful.

Right wing outlets that still reference Trudeau’s clothing during his India trip are not reporting about Modi’s second pogrom. Priorities.

The image North Americans have been fed about India (deliberately) ignores the all-too-real real undercurrent of violence and growing militarism circulating through the country.

India is not usually associated with Militant Hindu Extremism, but with softer, nicer things: yoga, vegetarianism or butter chicken/naan, non-violent protest, infectiously joyous Bollywood movies, etc. Indians should be proud of these things! But Modi uses this them strategically.

I saw and felt militarism-creep with my own eyes: the increased public Army worship, in the form of bigger parades and more statues; a new law requiring movie theatres to play India’s national anthem, compelling everyone by law to stand up; Hindus (gau rakshaks) lynching Muslims, and the shrugs which follow.

Still, I was totally stunned when the pogrom in Delhi actually happened, even if I wasn’t surprised. That’s the paradox. No matter how much you expect and even prepare for violence, you’re never ready when it happens.

Violence has been ratcheting up since December, when Modi introduced a law (CAA) that itemized which minorities entering India would receive certain citizenship rights on their path to becoming a naturalized citizen, and Muslims were glaringly not included. You can read about the rising violence, Modi’s “detention camps” in Assam (they seem like concentration camps), the different timeline of violence in Delhi and more elsewhere.

I’m not recapping such complex events, just want to write about my perspective on the aftermath of a massacre.

 

How to feel, after your adopted home saw a pogrom?
There are different ways to be at a loss for words, and they are not all equal. “Be safe” feels like a trite and impersonal thing to say, equivalent to “have a nice day” between strangers.

How can you tell a friend, “please, don’t die”? But what do you say?

I wanted to know that my friends were in fact safe. I assumed they would be, since they mostly live in posh South Delhi, but I didn’t want to take anything for granted.

Actually, a friend of mine’s wife is Muslim, and her family’s business was burned down by a mob. She is safe. They don’t live in Delhi anymore. No wonder.

My Facebook feed has been Indian friends non-stop reflecting, sharing reports, grieving…my Muslim friends are still worried. Their fear is palpable. My Hindu friends also lament what the country has become and are worried too. But it’s different.

I feel impossibly close and far away from the violence. My Canadian friends don’t have the first-hand sense of things to really understand what’s happening. They could intellectualize it and sympathize it, but they won’t get it.

But here’s the thing: neither do I. I’m close enough to feel my heart breaking, but I’m thousands of miles away. It was my home city for a period, but I can’t speak Hindi. My experience living in India was like an ultra immersive movie–I really did experience that country, but always through a bubble.

I wonder what my local gurdwara in Lajpat Nagar II is doing to help desperate people get their lives back together in languages I don’t understand. This is the closeness and the distance I mean. Guilt for being unable to help, close enough to feel a visceral sense of dread. 

I didn’t live in North Delhi where the riots largely took place, but I see the streetscapes from images and become nostalgic for what feels like my home.

One observation I’ve made is that maybe corny things are important to hear the closer you are to the violence. Yet I also believe the precise opposite at the same time:

“Don’t give up on the dream of a safe, secular India”…is this just twee crap that grates on the ears of people gripped by the realness of spilled blood, or is it a heartening and literal description of what peace-seeking Indians need to do moving forward?

In closing
All I know is I send my LOVE to everyone in Delhi trying to live among their neighbours in peace, who want nothing to do with Modi’s Hindu extremism. They have a proud democratic tradition amid regional challenges more complex than Canadians can imagine.

Canada has seen a mosque massacre. A Nazi unfurled a swastika at a Bernie Sanders rally just days ago, yet some North Americans simply think fascism can’t come here because our country is good, but that violence in countries like India (non-white, poorer) is expected.

At heart, Modi’s politics are identical to donald trump and doug ford’s–like McDonald’s operating in different countries, alt-right nationalist politics also makes adjustments and accommodations based on the region.

Consider, Canadian Conservatives lambasted Trudeau, not for having ties with Narendra Modi, a man so connected with mass-murder, the US wouldn’t let him enter the country for a decade–but for not having stronger ties with him. Scheer has still not denounced modi’s massacre. Neither has Trudeau.

I suppose Canadians naively think that after full-fledged mass-murder in the streets, the adults in the room will automatically stand up united to denounce all violence. In my brief experience what happens is this:

a) People who denounce modi for the Delhi pogrom are flooded by modi supporters on twitter accusing you of Fake News and being funded by an “Islamist Network” etc. (His elaborate Digital Army has been written about in detail.)

b) Modi’s radical RSS supporters claim to be the victims of a Muslim Mob, and anyone who even sympathizes with Muslim victims or blames Modi for the pogrom will face their fierce criticism and distortions of events–those who murder have no trouble merely lying.

c) outlets here that promote their own business interests as “news” will ignore a genuine massacre when their partner does it, but will fiercely denounce the wardrobe choices of non-clients for years.

d) the pattern to beware is this: alt-right parties portray critics as being outlandish and hysterical for calling them violent fascists; when the warned-about violence really does happen, they’ll say it didn’t happen, or it happened to them.

I want to send ALL MY LOVE to Delhi now! I didn’t know what to say to you through text messages in the immediate aftermath, and I still don’t know what to write even now, and I’m sorry about this. I send my love. Also, a caution: the pogrom did happen in New Delhi, and it can happen anywhere.

 

Cars and Bikes in Toronto: Applying Chess Logic to Urban Planning

12 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics, Statements

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Tags

cyclists, drivers, john tory, toronto traffic, urban planning, war on the car

Gracious reader, do me a kindness and perform a mental backflip and please read about this loaded topic with a fresh mind. I want to use chess logic to look at the problem of how to move people around a city effectively.

Preferring one chess piece to another is a terrible weakness in a chess player–the only goal is to get checkmate first, and every move serves only this prime directive. Moving people around a city is to transporation what checkmate is in chess.

The goal is not to only serve one kind of commuter, it’s to accommodate the needs of everyone in the city, and get them moving in a way that fits their lifestyle. The point isn’t to move cars around, it’s to move people.

I’d like to describe the benefits and the drawbacks of cars and bikes with these criteria in mind.

Benefits of Cars

Cars are excellent for long-distance trips that take you exactly from point A to point B. Nothing beats a car for this.

Cars easily transport heavy and oddly shaped things. And people!

They are great for those with mobility issues.

Once you buy winter tires and adjust how you drive on icy roads, it’s definitely good to be in a car on a cold winter day. Though accidents do increase, too.

Cars can transport people without them expending any physical energy.

Cars have good or sometimes great stereo speakers.

When the roads are open, and the gas tank is full, and you’re with a good buddy on a nice drive, it’s fun! These conditions are rare, though.

Drawbacks of Cars

To fuel a car, you need to find, extract and process oil. Fuel is expensive, and relying on it signifcantly damages the planet. Continually adding new cars to regions that didn’t have many cars before, or to ones that always did, is unsustainable.

Physically, cars take up a lot of space! You can park about 10 bikes in the space it takes to park one car. There is only a finite amount of space on the road and in the city, all of it at a premium, and much of it is taken up by cars and roads. Toronto must have millions of cars in it…how many square metres of road do we have? How many square metres of car? In a crude, basic sense, the physical space cars take up is a big problem.

The public infrastructure to support privately-owned cars is expensive: road signs, parking policemen’s salary, road upkeep/maintenance, new roads…(john tory is spending billions of dollars to fix a 1.6 km stretch of the Gardiner, all to shorten commuters’ drive by 2 minutes.)

Highways act like great psychological barriers–You can be on Front Street and feel very far away from Lake Ontario because a highway separates you from the water. Highways bissect neighbourhoods and have major real estate implications: look what a house costs on the east versus the west side of the Allen Road.

Cars also kill lots of people. I have a good buddy who died in a car crash (actually, Yale died 17 years ago today. RIP, love you forever!). 30,000+ Americans die every years in car crashes. What other thing this fatal do we actively embrace like this?

People pave their front lawn to make space for their car to just sit there. A car is the only form of transportation you need to pay for even when you’re not using it–insurance, parking fees, buying a driveway/parking pad.

Driving makes us angry! There is even a specific term for it, “road rage.”

The very presence of cars scares people, especially kids and seniors. Nobody ever had a more relaxed time because cars were nearby whizzing by them.

The Benefits of Bikes

Bikes are wildly inexpensive. There is no fuel charge, no parking fees, no insurance. They cost a few hundred dollars, and you can either repair/maintain them inexpensively or even learn to do it yourself for free, or for the cost of parts.

Biking is healthy. You get jacked from it! Stay fit.

Biking is safe (half truth–biking is safe, only not near cars! It’s the cars that aren’t safe for bikes). The only reason helmets are necessary is because cars are everywhere.

It’s easy to sidestep obstacles on a bike that a car cannot, usually other cars. What is to the driver an infuriating bottleneck barely slows a cyclist down. I don’t mean cyclists should rapidly weave in and out of cars–you can cycle around and between them very slowly, and when cars are stuck in gridlock, it feels very fast!

Bikes are actually a very fast way to get around town. Many people tend to think of distances in terms of how long it takes to drive there, which may or may not factor in traffic. Cycling is usually slower, sometimes way slower, but sometimes faster. Especially if you factor in the search for parking.

Cycling is continuous. Driving is usually agonizingly stop-start, stop-start, but biking you mostly keep going forward. I’m not talking about barrelling through reds: if there’s a red far away, just slow down a bit and it’ll be green when you get there.

Cycling introduces you to nooks and crannies of your city you have never seen. When people drive, they take the major roads with good flow they’re familiar with. Cycling is the opposite: you just head in a general direction and go where it’s quiet and safer…you’ll find cool new places!

Drawbacks of Bikes

Unless you have an attachment or a hitch, you can’t transport people or very much weight on a bike. I bring a napsack to the grocery store, but I’m not buying food for a family.

Distance: Unless you’re Josh Kaminsky’s father, you can’t ride a bike to Muskoka.

Adverse weather: Montreal does have harsher winters than Toronto, but they plow their bike lanes and people ride 12 months a year. If you have rugged wheels and a rugged soul, you can ride in winter. Most people don’t, for understandable reasons.

Theft: Bikes get stolen. I mean, cars do too. But bike theft is a bitch.

Sweat: If you’re biking to work, or to an interview, a date, etc., you don’t want to get there sweaty.

Cyclists annoy drivers: bikes don’t inherently piss off drivers, it’s only because Toronto doesn’t have one physically separated bike lane (ie, we don’t have one real bike lane), and drivers want to get to where they’re going without feeling like they might kill someone.

Upshot:

Every method of transportation has a role to play in a city’s transporation network. In just the way you can’t talk about the virtues of a bishop without talking about how it teams up with the other pieces, it’s difficult to talk about these modes in isolation. There are also busses, subways, streetcars, LRTs, etc.

If anything is to be emphasized here, it’s the underlying perspective of this conversation needs to change from ‘WAR ON THE CAR’ hysteria to what is actually good and bad about each method. What I’ve written here is off the top of my head, and obviously it’s basic.

Transportation decisions should be made by cool detached reason and evidence; our decisions shouldn’t be hijacked by the road lobby or the car lobby, or their seductive mythology and propaganda that has already taken root in people’s minds. Post-WWII North American cities were designed for a world that (wrongly!!) assumed cars weren’t bad for the enviroment, and that everyone could drive one on perpetually unclogged streets.

There will always be cars. It’s impossible to have everyone on a bike, and not even the most militant cyclist is asking for that! There will always be way more drivers than cyclists. That isn’t the point.

We need a mayor that pushes for attractive alternatives to driving: if the only way to get around a city is to own a car, it’s not affordable, accessible, or healthy. The impasse is this: “I have to drive because Toronto has no good public transit option,” a decision which then incentivizes more subsidies for drivers and less for public transit, and thus perpetuates the problem.

Give people good options–clean, inexpensive, and rapid public transit; safe bike lanes–and some drivers will decide through cost-benefit analysis that driving is no longer worth it for them anymore. When this happens, drivers will see reduced traffic and no bikes to contend with, and everyone will be happy!

More urgently, cyclists and pedestrians are dying, more of them die each year. It’d be nice to have a mayor who prioritized keeping everybody alive over saving drivers’ two minutes of their day.

Laughter: No Joking Matter

21 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Comedy, Politics, Statements

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Tags

Comedy, laughter, maga, Modi, racist jokes, Sopranos, trump

Laughter is rarely thought of in all its dimensions. When considered in a positive light, laughing is associated with happiness but also childish innocence and immaturity, and this narrow focus makes laughter widely misunderstood and undervalued. Laughter is complex and works differently in everything people do, and tells us important things along the way.

Laughter is a joy and a killer. Let’s see a few ways laughter can work.

Dictators

It’s said that fascist dictators can withstand criticism, but not laughter. The existence of critics in the media benefits a dictator because: 1) it gives them an entity to demonize, and rally their base around 2) critics create the illusion that the ordinary pre-dictatorship world still prevails, a world where institutions haven’t yet been subverted and can still check the dictator’s power.  This illusion is essential, because its existence keeps naive centrists from accepting the truth—that the left is correct, and there’s a dictator in power.

So fledgling dictators do tolerate media criticism, even if they lash out against it violently, but what they cannot abide is being laughed at. Laughter undermines strongman leadership. How can you be dominating people, if they’re laughing at you? trump absolutely freaked out about being mocked in SNL. He took to social media to go on pathetic tirades, trying to appear impervious and undermine them right back. You saw his face when Obama made jokes at his expense at the correspondent’s dinner, and drew wide laughter from the audience.

Dictators need the appearance of control and domination, and laughter shatters this illusion.

Laughter in All Social Groups

This dynamic I’m talking about doesn’t only apply to dictators—laughter means something different to every group, depending on the nature of the group and where you are located on the hierarchy. You don’t laugh at power. You don’t laugh at the boss at work, or at a mob boss. Think of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: “How am I funny?”

In the mob, where status, reputation, and hierarchy mean everything, somebody could legitimately be murdered over having their leadership undermined by a joke. It wasn’t obvious Pesci was joking. Immediately after it’s clear he was in fact only joking, everyone laughs. Then, someone from the restaurant asks Pesci to pay his tab–he’s actually undermined in front of his mafia friends, so he cracks a glass over his skull–and everyone laughs.

In the Sopranos the reverse happens. In one episode, Tony gets upset because his mafia buddies laugh too hard at his jokes, even very mediocre jokes, trying to curry favour with the boss. You must not ever laugh at the boss, but you must always laugh with him. This is how laughter works in the presence of power.

Bullies

Bullies pick on people by mocking them, and bystanders signal their approval of what the bully is doing by laughing. For the victim, the more laughter there is, the more gut-wrenching it feels. The bully isn’t the only adversary. The bully plunges the knife into the victim, and laughter is what twists it.

Why is laughter such a powerful signal? Because it’s a pre-thought, reflexive thing, making it hard to fake. If I tell somebody “that joke is funny,” it doesn’t mean as much as simply laughing. People sometimes laugh uncontrollably, a guffaw. There is no equivalent for this in speech. Laughter is immediate and visceral, so as a signal, it’s reliable.

Comedy

Humour is badly undervalued in mainstream art because people are hard-wired to be moved by suffering, not pure joy. Woody Allen said that humorists are always seated at the kid’s table, which, aside from explaining why he became a humorist, is a good phrase that gets at how drama and politics are seen as mature and intellectual and comedy is not, even if the dramatists or political pundits in question are illiterate swine and the comedians are brilliant and serious. Making people laugh is thought to be low because it’s fun, whereas politics is taken seriously because it’s miserable and hopeless.

This dynamic helps to explain why John Kennedy Toole’s comedic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by publishers, which apparently drove Toole to suicide. Only after his mother dutifully circulated the manuscript with this tragic story in hand did the comedy get published, and eventually win the Pulitzer Prize. Comedy needs tragedy to be valued, because people are hard-wired for suffering.

A lot of the vivid humour in Certified Serious writers like Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Gogol, Bulgakov, and others is missed, because readers tend to think literature is serious, solemn, grave, and read in that headspace. These writers fuck with you all the time, and if you take them too seriously you may miss the jokes. Comedy is not in conflict with seriousness, and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong and liable to miss out on comical profundity, which sucks for them.

Commercial Implications

Humour is deeply idiosyncratic. It’s impossible to pin down. While there are formulas in comedy like the 80s cop-buddy movie, those formulas revolve around the plot—the actual humour in the movie can’t be broken down into a formula and reproduced, like as some kind of Hero’s Journey formula. (The Lion King is based on Hamlet, etc.)

Comedies are one offs. They fail or succeed if they’re sufficiently inspired. Robert McKee’s famous book on script writing does something beautiful on this topic: it devotes hundreds of pages about how to write every kind of movie, but comedy is deliberately excluded.

The only rule of a comedy, McKee says, is that by definition the hero is never in danger. If a house falls on the main character, he will stand up after, dust his shoulders off and walk away. This is what distinguishes a comedy from merely an action movie or drama that contains comedy. I like McKee’s rule, because it points to the primary rule in comedy: something is either funny or it’s not. 

Comedy is impossible to scale up. They make 10 million superhero movies now because they’re all variations of the same thing…meanwhile, the brilliance of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (the best film of the 20th century) couldn’t even be carried forward into the sequel, which had its moments but is a very pale shadow of the first.

Comedies are one-of-a-kind—they are the hardest genre to replicate.

Self-Deprecating Humour

If bosses, mob bosses and dictators can’t be laughed at, maybe people like self-deprecating humour so much because on some level it signals, “I’m no threat.” Note, the self-deprecating joke is funnier the more power the teller has—if some pathetic little shit makes fun of themselves, it’s probably just sad. If a powerful person laughs at themselves in public, it signals that they won’t wield their power against you.

Dictators are never self-deprecating. A boss might make a self-deprecating joke, but not when you’ve been fucking up. The self-deprecating joke is a reward, that signals everything at work is currently fine.

Jokes among Friends

Laughter is actually the sign and the substance of friendship. Laughing is the best thing friends can do among friends. Laughing at the same jokes as somebody shows not only that you’re on the same mental wavelength, but that you belong in the same social group.

When good buddies talk shit to each other, it’s a way of signalling, I only fuck with you because we’re buds. Ribbing requires a friendship that rest on a foundation of real trust and love.

You signal that you’re on good enough terms with somebody to taunt them by actually taunting them, and they signal that your estimation is correct by laughing at it and making fun of you back. In a sense, this form of laughter is one way to measure and test just how good friends you are with somebody. This style of humour isn’t for everybody, no one style is. We all have our own temperament when it comes to what we find funny, but this explains one common form of humour. There are infinite forms of laughter.

Us Versus Them–Jokes and Social Power

It’s called an “inside joke” because the people laughing are the “in” group. That’s literally the word used—“you’re in on the joke,” they’ll say. There is an us-versus-them dynamic in humour, and what side you’re on is signalled by laughter. It’s not just chuckles, it’s about signalling group membership.

That must be why in offices or work contexts, women report having feelings spanning from eye-rolls to real discomfort or worse when guys make lewd sexual jokes. It’s clear who the in group is, and who is out. It’s not just a joke, it’s claiming territory—this is a male space. Now, of course there are women who like that kind of joke, but they’re called “one of the guys.” When men denounce that kind of joke, they’re called “a bitch” or whatever. Toxic masculinity is equating the unwillingness to abuse power for a laugh with weakness, which is expressed as femininity.

I joke around with people all the time, and when I lived in India I noticed a pattern: people laughed a lot. Too much, sometimes. Now I love to fuck with my boys like Kandarp and that miserable degenerate Parakram, and I got them laughing because we’re buds. But when I joked and bantered with the security guards in my sector or the “office boys,” they were smiling ear to ear, even though…they didn’t speak English. What was exactly happening?

I think they saw that a white guy was taking the time to talk and fuck around with them, and they were happy because they felt included. People with power often exert it in less friendly ways. So when a person with power cracks jokes with a person with less power, they might just laugh out of relief, or maybe they partake in that power because for a moment it’s shared with them.

Racist Jokes

When jokes punch down, they stop being funny. Or, should. Privileged people sometimes express disdain for marginalized people with jocular contempt—hate expressed as a joke, for chuckles.

Frankly, I used to do this. I don’t anymore because only hateful or oblivious people enjoy this kind of humour. I was oblivious. I come from a very privileged background (white, straight, male, from Forest Hill—the works!), and while I never wanted to physically or emotionally hurt anybody, I found squeaky-clean fun to be boring.

Punching down was everywhere in 90s culture, and I did it too. We all did. Gay jokes (SNL, my beloved Ace Ventura is wildly transphobic at the end), black jokes (CB4, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, and too many movies starring white people to name), homeless jokes (Dirty Work and Happy Gilmore are full of them) or whatever seemed to me like innocent transgressions. It was a form of bullshitting, and because I was surrounded by people unaffected by these jokes, it felt innocent. I never saw what harm there was, and was allowed to believe there was none—I was oblivious.

If chirping a friend is actually a way to reinforce that we can only talk shit to each other because there’s love there, then perhaps on some level what offensive shock humour really says to the recipient is, “I only make this joke with you because you know I don’t believe that shit.” You don’t say this out loud, you just tell the joke. They answer that sentence by laughing.

Is there a distinction worth making between the racist racist-joke teller and the person who just likes shock-humour? These people are obviously not the same, but, in practice it’s a distinction without a difference: in either case, stop making these jokes! To even explore this distinction is to prioritize the comfort of the joke teller over the target, or the bystander who hears these jokes and is understandably uncomfortable.

Racist jokes aren’t necessarily concrete proof that a person harbours ill will towards people of that race, but even writing this makes me feel very uncomfortable, because people say “it’s a joke” to mean that it’s only a joke, when many people aren’t only joking. I don’t want to give cover to people who use humour to shield their racism.

Ask yourself, when you hear someone make a racist joke, do you identify with the teller, or the target? Whose defence do you naturally gravitate to? People who identify with power (privileged people normally do) make explanations for why the teller of racist jokes is not necessatily a bigot, and if they consider how it makes someone else feel, it’s considered second.

I’m not comfortable with punching-down humour now, and I’m not defending myself or anyone who make these jokes. I’m just explaining myself, then and now.

Humour as Means to Feel Power

I suppose privileged people make fun of marginalized people because subconsciously it makes them feel their power. They subconsciously revel in the fact that they aren’t the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy.

This would also explain why people from marginalized communities mock those who are even more marginalized. It makes them feel powerful. You can’t laugh at people with power over you, but when you have more power than someone, kicking down is easy—they have less power, they can’t respond.

This explains, for example, why there was homophobia and misogyny in hip hop even as so much of it also rightfully denounced anti-black racism. Many of these rappers matured, and rightly apologized. Actually, America’s white Christian Family-Values fundamentalists who went on a moral crusade against Rap in the 90s turned out to be—surprise surprise—scumbag racists. Today they’re MAGA, and Nas is writing a kids’s book.

Again, some people enjoy punching down not just for this subconscious reassurance that they have power, which is still a very bad reason to do it, but because they do hate the people below them! Racists enjoy laughter too, and when they express racism as a joke, it is still a) a joke b) definitely racist. The alt-right’s irony-drenched trolling is tired and trite as fuck, and they’re definitely not only joking.

How do you know if the person making the racist joke is a genuine racist or just oblivious in their privilege? After you tell someone to stop making racist jokes, watch how they respond. Do they genuinely get introspective and apologize, not because they were caught committing a faux pas in public but because in their bones they feel horror at having upset someone? Or do they get defensive, stick up for their rights to Free Speech, insist you are humourless, that they didn’t intend on harm and therefore harm is impossible and if you’re feeling it it’s your fault?

A wave of fascism has already descended on places close to me. Muslims are being lynched under Modi, MAGA people have murdered leftists and journalists in broad daylight and trump seems happy about the deaths. Conservative politicians in Canada are demonizing minorities, and this will escalate in the lead up to the federal election in October. Canada has produced faith goldy, gavin mciness, ezra levant, and other alt right shitlords.

Let’s make jokes to share love with friends and strangers, and to deflate fascists and the corporate gutter trash running Ontario. Let’s not revel blindly in privilege by making jokes that reinforce our power over people and undermine their sense of self, but just to lift people up and brighten their days and for no other reason.

Thoughts on Racism and “Intent”

15 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

black lives matter, blue lives matter, police brutality, racism

I’ve heard friends say something I really disagree with, that a person can’t be racist so long as they don’t have racist intent.

What I suppose they mean is, there’s a distinction between proud racists and well-meaning white people who may say/do something on Tuesday that was only deemed officially racist by the Internet Monday. Putting these two people in the same category feels wrong, right?

I think they mean: social mores are changing fast, people are busy with work and family, and if a nice white person commits a racial faux pas because they can’t keep up with ever-evolving PC nomenclature, they shouldn’t have their lives ruined by the rabid SJW Social Media Mob.

Anecdotally, enough people have told me more or less this. Here is why I don’t think it’s logically relevant to consider a person’s intent when determining whether or not they’re racist.

First, agreed: there is a moral distinction between the white person who, for example, supported slavery because of the Economy and the white person who supported slavery because they thought black people were subhuman. The second person is morally worse! But who cares??

This kind of moral distinction only matters to the white people worried about self-image (theirs or someone else’s), or to people who make abstract philosophy out of brutal physical/psychological violence, but it doesn’t matter at all to the people actually suffering and in desperate need of relief.

If you vote for trump, your reasons for doing so don’t matter to anybody but you, when it comes time to defend your choice, so you can find a way to sleep at night. I heard someone express this point differently. “The German language has a word for people who voted for the Nazis only because they were economically anxious: the word is, Nazi.”

If you support something racist, you are racist to the precise extent that you support that racist thing. There’s just no other way to look at it. And we know this. Does someone need to self-identity as an asshole, or can you safely call them an asshole if they keep behaving like a fucking asshole?

How can people who mean well become very racist? An analogy and thought experiment:

Imagine a Christian fundamentalist knocking at your door, trying to convert you because, being of a different religion, you’re a heretic, and heretics burn in hell for all eternity. We’ll call this guy Peter. Peter is trying to save you from hell.

If hell was a real place, Peter would be doing a real kindness! Peter’s intent is very good, but in reality he’s an annoying idiot unwelcome at my doorstep. The problem with Peter isn’t his intent, it’s that his intent is not aligned with reality. He’s not morally wrong, he’s factually wrong.

But imagine if Peter had a different but still wrong world outlook, and thought black people were naturally inclined towards criminal behaviour, and rather than a bible Peter carried a gun because he’s a cop, which gives him legal permission to shoot and kill somebody if he feels threatened.

Now imagine Peter feels particularly threatened around black people, not because he was born evil but because he grew up inundated with images on TV of black violence, which nothing in his adolescence counteracted. Now, Peter didn’t create the racist imagery in the first place, or ask to be exposed to it. There are countless ways to imbibe racism because it’s everywhere, so even if he isn’t responsible for becoming a racist, he is one now. But he’s a cop, and in his mind he only wants to protect his community and return home alive to his family when the shift is over.

But one day on the job, feeling threatened, he shoots and kills an unarmed black man. What is a white jury/public likely to see?

They watched the same TV promoting racist ideas about black violence Peter saw growing up. The white public sees a person daily risking their life to save the (their) community from threats (invented, in this theoretical case, but very real in their mind, which matters a lot). They put themselves in the cops’ shoes, and imagine how scared they’d be too. Wealthy white people often side with the police in an unspoken understanding, that they, the wealthy white people, are the ones in need of protection. Cops only exist to protect them and their property.

So the white cop kills a black person, the white citizen sides with the police, the white reporter frames the story/headline in a pro-police stance because they also identify with the police, and all of these white people may earnestly believe they’ve done nothing racist!

Even though a black person is dead. You see, throwing the term “racism” around is what’s divisive, not state agents killing innocent people.

So, if you read that a cop killed an unarmed black person, don’t respond saying that the cop probably didn’t wake up that morning looking to kill somebody.

The ghastly and concrete reality of police brutality and other horrific outcomes that stem from racism need to be concretely addressed. Racism is real and it kills. 

Sitting around guessing whether the perpetrator had full or only part mens rea is decadent crap for people who, thankfully, will never be on the wrong end of a police officer’s bullet.

(Random, semi-related thoughts: the Blue Lives Matter movement is absurd: nobody denies police lives matter! rob ford gutted every public service and even he gave police a raise, despite the fact that they were investigating him for crimes!

If police became cops from birth rather than choice, and innocent officers were semi-regularly murdered by the state, and the justice system basically looked at this murder with approval, then Blue Lives Matter would be legitimate, except it would be indistinguishable from Black Lives Matter.

That Blue Lives Matter formed in opposition to Black Lives Matter, rather than sitting down to discuss with that community how it could improve, is just more proof that Black Lives Matter has the truth on its side.

Thoughts On Toronto’s Homelessness Crisis

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics, Statements

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

doug ford, Homelessness in Toronto, India slums, Jeff Halperin, Nicholas Hune-Brown, poverty, Toronto Life

My first time reporting on Toronto City Hall in early 2013, Rob Ford’s council debated on whether to fund more emergency beds for people experiencing homelessness. Unsurprisingly, council put it off, saying more studies needed to be done, etc. Politicians invoke the word “studies” when they don’t want to fund things for poor people, but don’t want to appear heartless.

Immediately after the vote activists rose in the chamber, unfurled a banner and denounced the council for having “blood on [their] hands.” If that sounds dramatic, know the previous day they had attended the funeral of a friend who died on the streets of Toronto. They shouted lucid and undeniable arguments, a silence really did hang in the room, then security escorted them out.

That was six years ago, and Toronto’s problem has grown.

Since this time I lived for over a year in India. For most of it, I lived in a posh sector just outside Delhi, in Uttar Pradesh, near my office in a company guest house, among retired judges and lawyers and military people. In January 2017 I moved to Lajpat Nagar II, where my neighbours included Afghan refugees.

Honestly, I didn’t see many expats in Lajpat II, (when immigrants are white they’re called “expats”), but I had an Italian friend in Lajpat IV. My real estate agent (finding an apartment requires one) lived in an apartment down the street from me with his family, but I regularly saw merchants sleeping on the streets next to their stalls, on charpoys, cots of woven rope. They slept among the homesless dogs.

There was a Gurdwara near me, a Sikh temple of worship that helps feed people. Honestly, I didn’t learn enough Hindi to talk with the poor people around me, and even if I did, I couldn’t have come even close to understanding their world. I grew up in Forest Hill: I can’t understand the life of a homeless person in Toronto, never mind there. One time I gave a legless beggar, wheeling himself on a wooden platform, 100 rupees ($2) and he cried and said nobody has ever given him so much. (My friend translated).

But here? In Toronto? I’ve seen people arrive to downtown Toronto straight from India, and they are appalled by the homelessness. Amid such wealth, in such a clean city? It’s unconscionable. The sight of people dying in slow motion on the street amid such robust prosperity shakes them.

India is notorious for its poverty, for its slums. India used to be the richest country on Earth, and it was plundered, and now amid a booming middle class, as Western Businesses compete for their share of this new money, Indians don’t believe they’re a poor country anymore. This may stun people in Canada, for whom India is synonymous with poverty, but many there don’t.

I was in an editorial meeting the day Snapchat’s CEO reportedly said he didn’t want to invest in poor countries, such as Spain and India. This remark didn’t go over well in India. But wasn’t it…true? Sudhir Chaudhary wondered how the man could say such a thing! And the room agreed. There like here, journalists come from wealthier backgrounds—nobody else could afford to rise in an industry that often pays in “exposure.” (Believe that this affects coverage of money, homelessness, power…)

Anyway, so how exactly does a country measure its wealth?

Forget India for now. Here, things are not OK. According to the 2016 census (the most recent available), the average 2015 income for a Toronto male over 15 was $33,456. If a one-bedroom is $1,500 a month (no roommate, but that’s a good price), subtract $19,200 from that. Toronto has a higher share of high-income earners than the rest of Canada and Ontario, and a higher share of low-income earners in both. People here are generally very rich or very poor.

Anecdotally, the oldish but spacious two-bedroom, two-storey apartment I rented in late 2010 by Trinity Bellwoods cost $1600, plus hydro. Today, the landlord wanted to charge $3,000. We all know this story.

How best to crunch the numbers, which stats are most useful in representing Toronto’s wealth, is interesting to consider and it’s important for framing policy, but the fact is Toronto has slums and people are dying and nobody is talking about it.

Consider all the media attention gun violence is currently getting. In 2018, an especially violent year, we had 95 homicides. This is a crisis too! But over 100 homeless people die each year in Toronto. Contrast the silence in the media regarding the deaths of people experiencing homelessness with that of gun violence. Again, obviously gun violence is a major issue, but more people die in Toronto from…from what? From being poor. Or depressed, or having no support.

As Toronto-born Robbie Robertson wrote: “I’ve just spent 60 days in the jail house, for the crime of having no dough, now here I am back out on the street, for the crime of having nowhere to go.”

This is a time of supposedly divisive politics, but doesn’t everybody care about this? Can anybody hear these stories neglect, of needless human suffering on a shocking scale amid such wealth, of death, and shrug? Does anybody think that Free Markets determine the cost of things, so people should just…die? Do people think this?

Nicholas Hune-Brown wrote an absolutely must-read article in Toronto Life about homelessness in this city. He spoke to people living under the Gardiner Expressway and in Rosedale, he drew up the most relevant stats, and really, the article was as fantastic at capturing the different dimensions of this crisis as the crisis is depressing.

Citing stats, he says the line up to receive subsidized housing in Toronto is 98,000 people long, roughly two full Sky Domes. Toronto builds 500 units of affordable housing each year. There are about 8,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, currently. This number is growing steadily. The article points out that housing a person with mental health needs in Toronto’s housing system costs $59,000, whereas subsidized housing costs $21,089—roughly a third of the cost.

I’m sure there’s a policy solution to this, but whatever it is it’ll takes years and lots more people will die. I don’t know what should be done.

The activists I saw in 2013 were 100% correct. Rob Ford’s council had blood on its hands. So does Tory’s. Rob’s brother Doug is gutting social programs left right and centre and transferring this money, rebranded as “efficiencies,” to Toronto’s wealthiest people. I think our political class are essentially slum landlords.

But again, nobody enjoys the fact that people are homeless, starving, freezing, and dying. Right? I talk with Conservative voters, and right-leaning people who feel politically abandoned because Ford is an obvious illiterate maniac but they don’t like Trudeau, and (through media conditioning, I think) in their bones cannot stomach the thought of voting NDP. Everyone agrees homelessness matters though.

But nobody wants to pay for it. Not really. They say they would, but it never happens.  This is about power, but it’s also about the psychological gulf between wealthy people who just never, never actually have meaningful interactions with these people. It’s out of sight out of mind. “Ohhhhh, you don’t know the shape I’m in.”

Devote tax dollars to this. Please!

During a flash-freeze last year I walked around giving people I saw on the street some gloves and toques and some money. In India, this is a type of jugaad—the Hindi word for a MaGyver, basically—an improvised solution with whatever is at hand. I have an Indian buddy who recently visited Russia, and he made some videos wherein he described to someone that in India, for many people, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is upside, where spiritual needs are addressed first and foremost, then they move towards food and shelter.

Frankly, in Toronto I see a lot of overpriced yuppie ice cream and tacos, Uber Eats charging $35 for a small dinner that arrives cold (delivered by a “driver partner” not an employee, so the US company is conveniently exempt from the Employee Standards Act), people either in despair over the cost of renting and buying a house and ready to seriously leave Toronto, or they’re excited about the cute back splash in their new kitchen…

There’s either a lot of money in this city, or none. But I don’t expect homelessness to get addressed in a meaningful way when this same city is full of people livid at the thought of workers, workers, earning literally only $1 more an hour.

Again, I hope I’m wrong! I do think everyone cares on a basic level about this. But this isn’t quite about morals…everyone feels bad, it’s about money. Hopefully Hune-Brown’s article will galvanize public opinion and politicians will believe there’s actually a will to fuel change. It was just published and is getting air time.

But if the life and death of 100 people a year truly depends on good Samaritans, Toronto is a sad place to live.

Only a couple weeks ago, a woman at Bloor and Dovercourt was trying to get clothes from a donation box. She got stuck inside and died. Days later, a man sleeping on the streets in the Financial District was run over by a garbage truck. He died too. The driver didn’t see him. Stop for a minute: consider the symbolism and visualize the reality of the Financial District’s stupendous wealth, as a human being lies on the street one morning in an alley, and suddenly his life over, run over by a garbage truck.

Please, I hope we can all agree we need comprehensive and well-funded policy right away so people don’t die on our streets. Be mad. Whatever our political differences I refuse to believe people in my city are OK with this.

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