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Jeff Halperin

Jeff Halperin

Category Archives: Statements

Some Scattered Thoughts About Racism

26 Saturday Sep 2020

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

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Anti-racism

The point of eradicating racism is to allow everybody to exist in the same blessed and joyful state of obliviousness and innocence towards racism white people get.

Fellow white people: remember growing up, when race basically never entered our consciousness, and all we did and talked/thought about was fun stuff we liked? That! That’s what non-white people want, and to be safe, and to feel safe.  

If you are tired of hearing about racism, I assure you, so are non-white people!

Let’s put away raging political discourse about The Left or The Right or “anti-racism”: people have one life to live on this planet and it should be as full and as free as they’d like it to be. This isn’t partisan or particularly left or right wing, it’s just basic normal goodness. It’s the Star Trek view of things.

I suspect if you ask most people “Should everyone be free?” they’d say, “of course!” On the surface, everyone claims to value universal freedom. Right? Yet, racism persists. So where exactly do people’s views differ? Where is the fork in the road?

If you believe in standard Canadian mythology—that people here are unusually “nice,” that we live in an advanced country, and that racism is a blight indeed but mostly a historical one—you may be skeptical of reports of systemic racism.

The thinking is pretty straightforward: How can people say Canada is so bad when Canada is so good?

Where we mostly differ, then, is what we think is going on at a street-level, and what constitutes racism. It’s a difference in perception, not necessarily values.

Years ago, with Obama in office and anti-racism becoming mainstream in pockets of culture, it was easier for White Canada to deny racism ever existed, let alone persisted. trump and Black Lives Matter has made that impossible for even the most sheltered person imaginable.

You’d have to be living under a very remote rock to still believe there is no racism. But how much racism is there? How bad is it? Where is it? What effect does racism have on people’s lives?

What sources are you going to rely on to find out? Whose voice do you trust and why? When/if you read about racism/anti-racism, are you consciously/subconsciously invested in exonerating White Canada? Are you reading Black writers only out of due diligence because all formally educated people know to read both sides, but in practice, you’re reading with a closed-mind because secretly you don’t want to believe White Canada is in the wrong?

Nobody born wealthy and white is born Woke, and it’s very easy to understand how white people cling to old and untrue explanations of the world that, let’s be honest, reflect better on us.

If you are a white person making money in a country that everyone surrounding you, movies/TV, and textbooks all tell you is a model to the world, you are likely to be very eager to fully believe them! Not only do you get to live a life of wealth, you get to be respected by society and feel like the respect is merited! You get to have it all! You get to believe, essentially, “Canada is prosperous because it is just and good, and I am prosperous because I am just and good.” What does this person have to gain from considering what Canada is getting wrong, or who it is leaving behind? Even acknowledging the question may undermine not just their sense of accomplishment, but their world-view and sense of self.

If you aren’t making money here but subscribe to the Canadian myth, you get to have an entire political party dedicated to putting “Canada First,” claiming you’re getting left behind because decadent vacuous feel-good politicians are putting sissy internationalist values ahead of good ol’ Canadian boys!

Either way, you are at the unquestioned centre of the mythology. White Canadians are embraced by society from birth, which is great! But it should be done for everybody. It is precisely the thing that must be done for everybody.

You can come at this topic from different angles, and personally, mine is this: there is no god and race is a made-up concept we have horrifically imagined into existence to justify slavery/economic exploitation. Humans are free to make this world a civilized place by ending organized barbarism of paying police billions to jail and surveil historically persecuted people instead of genuinely supporting them with education and housing. This is possible, but the biggest obstacle is: we don’t want to. No communities/nationalities/religions are genetically or socially predisposed towards crime! White supremacy robs people of their childhood innocence—the worst heist imaginable.

Sometimes it may understandably seem like white anti-racists are scolding fellow white people on Wednesday for not knowing/accepting what we just learned about on Tuesday. Or maybe it seems like white anti-racists are saying: look at my lofty and understanding soul!

I’ll just say this: I don’t want to be talking about race, and I’m sure Black people don’t want to either! I’d LOVE to just talk about Dr John and Jerry and Alice Coltrane and the rest of my loves! I’m sure Black people also have a huge amount of much better things to do! Nobody would be in the streets every night directly facing off against a militarized army of violent racists who kill Black people and viciously attack innocent protesters unless things were really fucked up and needed to change.

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Many conservatives and even so-called liberal/centrists believe gender pronouns on campus constitute government tyranny or a threat to Free Speech, but they shrug or even applaud when public servants (ie police) kill innocent unarmed civilians/citizens–this flagrant double standard is a good example of how what is framed as an intellectual argument about society, and what embarrassingly passes for Political Discourse, is really just powerful people believing “if I am irritated, it is a threat to all civilization; if you are attacked or killed by the state, meh/lol, I’m sure they had reason.”

Racism often boils down to which skin colour is reflexively trusted, and which is doubted. Power maintains power through violence, then uses the power to tell nice stories about how it got the power. Privileged people seldom have their illusions punctured because society has historically run on those illusions.

In a world where Black people may tragically have their innocence robbed early on, being able to carry childhood innocence into late adulthood is a real blessing and a privilege, even if it encourages attitudes like the above which are untrue and repugnant!

Years from now, you’ll be humiliated you ever paid attention to people paid to be so embarrassingly out of touch.

Racists sometimes make the following defence: “a person can’t be racist unless they intended on being racist.” While there is a distinction between a proud racist and a person who unwittingly holds one or several racist views, the statement is not remotely true! Try substituting the word “stupid” for “racist” in the sentence above, and see how dumb it sounds! Really, do it: “A person can’t be stupid unless they intend on being stupid.” Makes no sense, right?

According to this defence’s underlying logic, if a person doesn’t intend on driving badly, but they keep crashing their car into trees, they cannot be called a bad driver!

A racist society is inhuman and frankly barbaric for everyone. It won’t get fixed until a critical mass of people with a lot of power decide they’re genuinely willing to trust and listen to people with less power. This isn’t about capitulating to Leftist internet activists or the SJWs or anything like that–everyone should be interested in understanding what is actually happening in the world, and ensuring we live up to the stated values we claim to believe in. What better way to rehabilitate our lofty but largely BS nationalist myths than by infusing them with truth by actually applying them to everyone in the country?

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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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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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 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.

Am I in the echo chamber, or are you?

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

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Tags

doug ford, echo chamber, trump

This will sound sarcastic, but honestly I never got accused of being influenced by an “echo chamber” until after I moved to India to work as a journalist, and after making a deliberate effort to read non-white and non-male writers.

To review, an “echo chamber” is the phenomenon where a person only exposes themselves to views they already have, and the more online they are the more they deeply entrench their own beliefs/biases.

Whatever people think of my views, objectively speaking, I’m not a product of an echo chamber. The accusation is laughable.

I read Conservative media. I used to be conservative. For years I kept tabs on the heart of Conservative Canada by reading the FB updates of my cousin’s husband, a former speech writer for Harper who is currently strategic director of communications for Doug Ford.

This guy has defended Trump, Breitbart, rejoiced when NFL planned to shut out Colin Kaepernick, Betsy Devos, and more. He once accused me of being in a social media echo chamber, and has since defriended me from FB. I cannot help listen to Ford without being deeply aware that he hired a man with these views to communicate for him.

I read the National Post for years–I know the work of Rex Murphy, Blatchford, the Kays, Conrad Black, Robyn Urback, Lorne Gunter, and the rest. I used to see the Sun’s Sue Ann Levy at city hall when I wrote about that circus, and ran into Tarek Fatah in an elevator in Film City. I read (hate-read) Wente at the Globe.

I can’t read Ezra Levant on Twitter because he blocked me, but I’ve seen this former National Post editor’s Rebel segments and read enough of his writing, from his early days at Maclean’s. I read Barbara Amiel, Conrad Black’s wife and the former wife of George Jonas, a small-C conservative voice I read fondly in the National Post for years.

I worked for Zee Media, basically India’s Fox News. Sudhir Chaudhary was my editor in chief (I was on Web and he was TV, and mostly does Hindi news, but still, I sat in story meetings and am acquainted with his thought). I have read/watched enough Jordan Petersen and have talked with him before.

I had to read US Conservative media in the summer of 2016 when researching for a TV show I was writing about Trump. I don’t read it all the time now because it’s exhausting and time-consuming, but I know the work of Ben Shapiro, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Bari Weiss at the NYT, Sam Harris. I used to read Krauthammer, and still read former Bush speech writer David Frum.

I was in the belly of the beast of India’s Conservative news machine. When demonetization was announced, we got an order not to write anything critical about it.

The BJP announced Demonetization on literally on the night of the US election, and like everyone I was consumed by Trump news. While I had reservations about demonetization right away I thought my fellow Indians on the desk were better suited to pronounce on it than me. Maybe this is me rationalizing a moment where I should have quit on principle, out of disgust for the flagrant conflict of interest–the owner of my station is an independent member from Haryana of the BJP, the ruling national party.

But the point is, I’ve seen first-hand how money influences/determines coverage of economic policies. Even without telling this story, my station ran a disgraceful commercial that promoted not WION, but the government policy! Imagine CBC running a commercial promoting Trudeau–that’s what my station did.

When people claim that Postmedia is affiliated with the conservative party here in Canada, it means they informally do what in India is done formally. It’s not an accident that Tarek Fatah writes for the Sun here and appears on Zee TV.

What become undeniably clear to me during my time in journalism is the extent to which economic reports are deliberately and shockingly cooked, both by ostensibly neutral economic institutions like the IMF and by journalists covering the industry.

I had a good talk with John Perkins, the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who for 10 years negotiated in backrooms with the leaders of Central American countries, unofficially but decidedly on behalf of American business interests. Perkins was recruited by the NSA, and his book outlines the basic process:

  1. Corruption: Offer leaders money and perks if they give major contracts to American businesses
  2. Propaganda: Tell the leaders, we will cook the books/stats so that your citizens believe (wrongly) you will benefit the country.
  3. Threaten: Cooperate, otherwise, see examples where national leaders were removed by coup, to be replaced by cooperative leaders.
  4. Threaten more: Cooperate, because if you don’t play ball and a coup doesn’t work, the US will simply assassinate you or take power by force

People in Toronto seem to have no awareness that Free Market ideology is an ideology. It’s assumed that the current stage of consumerism/capitalism arises here naturally, like lakes do, that the Free Market’s global success is do to its innately superior properties, and not to external pressure applied by wealthy people.

They think the Market is a non-human entity, an omniscient force that somehow distributes the right money and jobs to the right people based on a complex but merit-based algorithm. That it somehow weighs people’s personality, skills, responsibilities, and other criteria and allots to them the salary they deserve.

I believed something like this. But it’s total horseshit. Of course the control of money has human fingerprints all over it. It’s incredibly naive to believe that ultra rich people simply entrust their fortunes to fate.

Really, they acquire and guard it ferociously–there are entire industries that exist so that people with immense wealth can use either legal, quasi-legal or illegal means to shelter their fortunes from tax authorities in offshore accounts. Money buys politicians or media influence. People know this–every pseudo-sophisticated political observation is based on the wonderful quip “An honest politician is one who when he’s bought, stays bought.” But I suspect most people downplay how much this of a role this plays in politics.

I had a fascinating conversation with a longtime Canadian journalist who mentored me, who said that the Globe and Mail is basically a money-losing entity that only exists so the owners can frame the national discussion. Obviously they’d rather make money than lose it, but even if it bleeds money, it’s a very worthwhile investment, and anyway it’s only a small part of the owner’s portfolio. The Globe’s target audience, according to internal documents from the Globe, is people who make over $100,000 annually.

The Sun and National Post–2 of 4 of Canada’s major daily newspapers–are the Conservative Party’s low brow and high brow blogs, respectively. But even the Globe is not there to expose white collar crime or anything that seriously undermines how the Free Market.

These newspapers work on the assumption that the grotesque and ever-growing income inequality is by definition justified because the market dictates it, and to interfere with the market is akin to sticking a wrench in Nature.

While social conservatism is often berated in public and in media, when it comes to money journalism in Canada and really everywhere has a right wing bias. Look at a newspaper: there are entire sections devoted to Cars/Driving, Travel, Movies, Sports, and now Cannabis–these papers will neglect some life-and-death issues (jailing, housing crises, police brutality) while reporting on subjects that might be interesting but are only only important because money is concentrated there.

These are complicated topics, oversimplified here for my purposes. It’s impossible to talk fully about the Market and how money works without talking about race and gender, and that’s also beyond the scope of this little article.

I have an acute sense that my FB friends despise my political posts (I do too! I swear, politics is miserable and depressing). But my views are in the minority in the broader community, too: Toronto elected Tory and Ontario elected Doug Fucking Ford.

So, if my views are unpopular, doesn’t that suggest my views were arrived at despite the echo chamber?

Isn’t it possible that the people and media institutions with long histories of promoting the status quo are the creators of the echo chamber?

There’s a concept called “Vertical Integration” coined by an old sociology professor of mine. The idea is this: If a theory is incompatible with other types of accepted explanations of the world, it is likely bogus–it’s not enough that the Bible says that the Bible is true, because it’s contradicted by so many interdependent branches of science. This is begging the question 101. The more a theory tallies with different kinds of thought, the more buttressed it is and the more likely it is to be true.

The Bible is a self-contained echo chamber. I put it that conservative politics is drifting further and further into the same kind of realm.

Trump calls any credible media report that doesn’t flatter him “Fake News”, and a hostile country flooded social media with fake accounts (“bots”) that pathologically promote Trump, who has created an entirely alternate reality for his followers to believe in because his views are so incompatible with the actual world: Isn’t it possible that *this* is the echo chamber?

The left is frequently entreated to watch 4 hours of Jordan Petersen videos to see that his latest misogynist quote was deliberately misquoted to smear him. I’d like to ask those on the right to do a type of mental back flip, a very hard thing to do and no small ask, but really, ask yourself: “am I the one in the echo chamber?”

PS: I am happy to discuss any of these broad topics with more nuanced with anybody, privately or in the comments or whatever. I do think it’s important to be approachable: Sometimes my writing comes off snarky because the truth is I can be a little shit, but I do get bored talking to basic liberals and find these and other conversations very fascinating.

Male sexuality post-Weinstein

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

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Tags

cuck, male sexuality, MRA, rape, sexual assault, sexuality, weinstein

I usually keep my personal life out of my writing, but it’s impossible to write about the flood of men accused of sexual assault without some reference to my own experience as a male in the 90s and 2000s.

It’s weird—ask any guy and they’ll agree that of course (of course!) sexually assaulting women is wrong, but there’s a feeling in the air that this surge of men being accused of doing just that is dangerous or somehow bad.

I’d like to try explaining this.  Men have taken a hit lately, and for good reason, but I don’t want my explanation to read as an attack on men, or an apology / justification for assault or bad treatment. Just perceptions in a difficult time.

—————————————————————————————————————————-

Some men are (understandably, but regrettably) confused now because we grew up in a hyper-sexual world predicated on male sexual desire, and we are being bombarded with incontrovertible evidence that this world was anything but innocent. We, men, are and feel implicated in it.

Let’s be clear, women have been describing what‘s currently in headlines for years, and we didn’t listen. We didn’t want to. That world was very fun for us, and we didn’t want the party to stop.

Imagine existing in a world that accepts and caters to the deepest impulse raging through your body. That’s what it was to be male growing up in North America in the 90s and 2000s.

Imagine, the jokes, movies, the socially acceptable professional / unprofessional dynamics in so many ways all reflected and encouraged precisely what you most badly wanted to do. Both nature and nurture said the same thing: go for it.

Would anybody turn this off voluntarily?

This is about power—the reason good men (not Nice Guys, actual good men) may be uncomfortable today or even worried about women publicly describing how men have assaulted them is, for the first time, the world is making a demand on men, and we’re actually being expected to obey it.

That the demand is an ultra small demand—don’t be greasy let alone actually rape women—doesn’t change the fact that it’s a demand. It’s not the substance of the demand causing discomfort really, it’s that there’s any demand at all. (This is an explanation, not a justification for the discomfort.)

Male impunity is gone in the present and the past, and there’s a backlog of behavior being held accountable that was never supposed to be held to account.

In short, for the first time, men are not in total control. Ceding power is perceived by some men, MRA types or alt-right fuckers, as weakness. The connection they make between social power and sexual prowess is explicit in their use of the term “cuck” (from cuckold, as in a male whose wife has sex with another man) as a general pejorative. Males who don’t dominate are weak, to this type. Trite, brain dead alpha macho shit flourishes here. Of course progressive types can be misogynists who assault women too, which only shows that this transcends politics: it’s a male problem.

But every normal person across the political spectrum agrees that sex crimes against women (or men) are wrong, so I want to look at the culture of my youth, which at the time I (like everyone) enjoyed but now seems incredibly unhealthy and toxic.

In one of countless examples I can name, my friends and I lamented what we perceived as a crackdown on fun, when the summer camp I went to ended a staff rec tradition of the “Sex Olympics”, where among other things, female staff (16+) competed to see who could best deep throat popsicles. That this ever existed seems as ridiculous now as cancelling it did then.

But of course the Sex Olympics seemed like a reasonable thing to do in 2001. That was for staff. As campers we were brought up in this culture, and if 13-year-olds could inhabit a milieu that was near in spirit to hardcore porn, why shouldn’t people 16 and up? I called this the pussification of society. Casual misogyny abounded here. At the time, it was life and life as a young man then was fun.

I wonder about people who read my facebook posts supporting the female accusers, who saw me drunk as hell on a dance floor grinding with a random or telling or laughing at obscene ribald jokes, and think me a hypocrite. Well, I doubt anybody has an unblemished record, and this isn’t really about me. Every guy should be frantically searching their memory for bad shit they might have done, otherwise they’re inexperienced or part of the problem.  I leave it to them.

Women have described what’s in the headlines for years, but it’s reached the point where it’s simply impossible to deny. Thankfully, women are finally being believed and the public is getting a feel for the scale of the problem.

So, how to move forward?

Civilization is, in essence, order imposed on the lizard brain. Civilization is the collective act of using human intelligence to lift us above the conditions of feral animals, and choosing how life should be then enforcing it. At its root, art is ordering chaos. Laws do the same. Art and laws are civilization.

But, that we have the capacity for rational thought obscures the fact that rationale is not what primarily motivates us. The lizard brain has a much larger say than we want to believe. That’s why progressives can prove to be just as sick fucks as anybody else. Not having principles and setting them aside amount to the same.

The facts are as follows: human beings survived because of evolution, and evolution implanted in us the innate desire to want to fuck. It’s why we think of sex every seven seconds. Among other things, this sex drive led to the survival of our species (good!) and terrible consequences for women (terrible!).

I’ll say something my leftist friends have given me shit for: males and women are hard-wired differently. To be crystal clear, I believe nothing is more important than an individual’s right to be / do whatever they want, and I hate narrow or even broad gender stereotypes. The idea of telling anyone how to live, or of being told, repulses me. But can it be coincidental that over the course of history, the physically dominant gender has dominated?

I took a course in evolutionary psychology (EP) where the class text was written by a female feminist named Anne Campbell. This was by design, as leftists are suspicious of EP because they fear (sometimes correctly) hard-wiring is invoked in an attempt to justify male superiority, or the naturalistic fallacy, that something is desirable and maybe even inevitable for being natural. No. 

EP just posits that something can be said to fit into “human nature” if it is found to exist across time and across the planet. In other words, to qualify, an underlying behavior must occur basically always and everywhere. Can anyone name an era and place where women held real power? Sure, Google may turn up an isolated indigenous matriarchal society, but what does it say that you need to Google it? In the enlightened West women couldn’t originally vote. Same with celebrated Ancient Greece. The leading military figures and robber barons, the people with real power, have all been men.

The notion that women are people does not come naturally to men, who categorize them in two groups, women to be and not to be fucked. Hot or not. People need to unlearn a lot of messed up ideas they inherited, and ones pre-programmed in their brain.

It’s not for me to condemn male behavior—every person only knows what they’ve done in their life and that’s their responsibility. Of course women are the victims of patriarchy, but there isn’t one social institution that fosters any real sense of philosophy for its own sake. How to be friends with people, how to feel and be, how to love. Men suffer from this too, even the ones who behave badly and impose suffering on others.

Chivalry is essentially rituals around men ceding power to women—holding the door open, pulling out their chair, taking off a coat to warm them when it’s cold. Subconsciously, the idea boils down to: I’m physically more powerful than you, but I will use my power for you, rather than against you. Men must continue doing this, but writ large rather than in small isolated and ceremonial acts, and in ways that don’t directly benefit men. If chivalry is just a way to fuck a girl, it’s not really chivalrous.

The point is to give up power because it’s the right thing to do. I doubt this will happen. Even as more guilty men fall, I doubt things will fundamentally change. I hope I’m wrong.

The beast is in so many social institutions and reflected back at us because it’s in us in the first place. Men. The cycle moves in both directions. It’s in our lizard brain, so it’s in our movies and conversation, the office, the streets, the home. Everywhere. Men haven’t been asked to reckon with this, to amend our behavior.

Well of course we were asked, but we denied there was a problem. We denied we were the problem. Denying it was wrong then, but it’s impossible now. No guy can claim innocence ever again.

Every guy is hopefully having a private reckoning, assessing how they behaved in the old world by the new standards. Assuming your conduct was just gross or shameful and not illegal, there were excuses, even if bad ones.

But what you do now moving forward in the post-innocence era is up to you.

Keep weddings chilled

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

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Planning a wedding is a bitch. I assume people love the idea of marriage way more than the cost and aggravation of planning the wedding. If you’re wealthy and you love planning parties, have fun and please invite me. But for many, the money, time and anxiety spent on planning a wedding would only make sense if the success of the party determined the success of the actual marriage.

I suspect many would elope but for their disappointed mother. No matter how much the bride or mother (or some modern, heroic man) claim they want to plan a wedding, doing so is a huge burden. I imagine people feel pressure not to have the most basic party of their circle of friends, and to hover at average or higher. Elaborate flower arrangements are not the heart of the party—money is best spent on food, booze, music and plus ones.

The Wedding Business knows how much people value their wedding day, and they extort accordingly. In the way governments unshackled from the gold standard print their own money and determine the value of this currency, so the wedding industry says that actually a room, a band, a photographer no longer costs Y, but Y x 3. Love causes inflation and attracts vultures.

To be fair, the bride and groom can be the source of wedding mania as much as its victims. People getting married are liable to get swept up in their own self-importance and ask friends to spend hundreds, if not thousands, on things like a dress or the bachelor/ette party before the wedding even starts. If your people have Vegas money, cool, but often some in the group don’t, and feel pressured not to miss a friend’s celebration. This pressure breeds. People become inwardly resentful, if not outwardly, and suddenly there’s a beef where there should be love.

In my experience, bachelor parties are best inexpensive and core-focused: go up north, drink whiskey, smoke hash and play guitar. Indeed, this would make a flawless wedding. The lucky people attending such a party are grateful they weren’t asked to shell out, and can just chill meeting the good friends of whoever’s getting married. Then they know each other at the actual wedding, which is the point.

Also, spending several hundred so a circle of guys can watch their friend awkwardly deal with one or more strippers is just weird for every single person involved, and can be safely done away with. The formulaic bawdiness is trite and played out, and that everyone needs to be very drunk to endure the thing says it all.

I have no first-hand experience with bridesmaid politics but understand it can be a world of pain. After we help Syrian refugees, Canada needs a national strategy to save the victims of bridezillas.

Co-ordinating all the moving pieces surrounding a wedding and all the accompanying parties is hell, so remember this and be generous if an aspect of somebody’s irks you. Getting invited to a friend’s is an honour: I’ll do my part by cracking jokes with strangers at my table and getting drunk enough to actually dance. But if I get left off the invite list, it’s one less present to buy and I will continue to be your friend. We’re grownups. In return, don’t ask your people to do stuff for your wedding they really don’t want to do.

Some associated costs need to be graciously sucked up, even if you don’t love them. Maybe the people with expensive bachelor/ette parties are exacting revenge on friends who gouged them, or if their wedding comes first maybe they want to ensure they squeeze people before they get squeezed themselves. This perpetuates cycles.

I wish people in love nothing but continued love, however they celebrate it, and hope everyone, those who are single or who are in dubious relationships, finds the happiness that people appear to have at their wedding. But just because two people are in love doesn’t mean everyone needs to lose their mind.

Charleston Church Massacre and White Racism

26 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

charleston church, Jeff Halperin, racism

Nine totally innocent black people in a South Carolina church were murdered by a 21-year-old white man intent on starting a race war. For normal people there can only be one reaction–grief. Publishing this response when there can be no second might seem trite, as in why make a point of saying something when only that one thing can be said. But the only other option is not airing any response and I find that unacceptable.

When white people write about race they literally don’t have skin in the game. It often feels like philosophy play. No matter what conclusion they reach, the white writer’s safety is never in jeopardy. The implications of the article only affect them insofar as they care about the lives of the people who the article is about, ie non-white people. Black people are being killed in the street by citizens, and those ostensibly there to protect them, police.

I have a dual sense of race. In a cosmic or existential sense, there is no god and all people’s lives matter equally because we’re all bumbling about on this planet trying to have a good time living decently. Race is a social construct, skin pigment should be irrelevant. Except of course it isn’t.

I think racism stems from the unfortunate flipside of the drive that makes a mother instinctively love her baby. In evolutionary terms, 10,000 years ago in the Pleistocene, it’s easy to see the advantages of being close with one’s own tribe. Danger was everywhere, trust was necessary, and at a time when we spent life mere kilometres from where we were born we didn’t encounter even a fraction of the diversity we do today.

All humans have an ineluctable, diabolical genius for automatically sussing out people like them. We sort them into various categories based on blood, ethnicity, geographic ties, gender, religion, race, nationality, class. But ultimately these are subdivisions of two largest categories: alike and not alike. How similar is this person to me, and how are they different?

That’s why most people are disproportionately friends with people like themselves, and why the quaint liberal notion that people be judged solely according to the content of their character instead of these factors doesn’t really play out much in reality. It is a lovely notion, but it’s not usually how things go. We surround ourselves with people like us. (Cosmopolitanism has increased due to internet and cheaper flights–we see different people as less different or even as the same as us, but it didn’t start out this way, we had to climb out of our natural state.)

Loving your family because they’re family (or have some other of the above commonalities) can often be a lovely thing, or at least benign. But on a large-scale, a world of people preferring those like themselves inadvertently makes them opposed to those who are different as a byproduct. If you add this dynamic to crowd-think, racism is easier to understand.

It’s a fact that people are people irrespective of their skin colour, but saying this to a victim of racism is like telling someone with dead lost to a Holy War that there is no god. The underlying fact of it is irrelevant when in practice it can mean life and death.

I’ve heard Jews here scared to publicly criticize a provincial or federal policy lest they get audited say they’d feel safer hearing Muslims, perhaps living in arms-range of Hamas or ISIS, publicly denounce these two barbaric groups, even if the consequences for doing so has been death or worse (death of family members to send a message). Many Muslims do publicly denounce these groups, but there are understandable, practical reasons why they may remain silent. Many people who hate ISIS don’t bother to claim so publicly because they never say anything publicly. Silence doesn’t equal consent. On the flip side I imagine there are racist CEOs of companies only begrudgingly removing Confederate flags from stores now out of profit motive, sensing shoppers (thankfully) want this. It’s Pride now, and I imagine homophobic CEOs realise rainbow flags are good for business. Knowing a person’s private heart is complicated.

White people often think everyone is in a race but us, so when a white person does something they’re just a person doing it, not a person of a race. Many white people don’t feel compelled to publicly denounce white crimes because it doesn’t occur to us that we should. This white guy killed people in my name, and that’s unacceptable. Many other white people also hate this shit but don’t have a public platform to denounce it, but I do so I will.

I get that white people bemoaning the conditions non-white people live in can sound like giving themselves a sanctimonious pat on the back–look what a humanitarian I am! Gushy white liberal guilt makes for poor reading. But seeing it exclusively in these terms makes it about the author when what matters is the article’s subject, in this case those murdered for not being white. Anyway, it doesn’t take an especially enlightened humanitarian to denounce race wars or the death of innocent people. It’s the right position and it’s important, but it’s mundane and basic.  

It’s hard to talk about this stuff without it devolving into platitudes. Both social justice advocates and those who lament PC censorship both speak them. But consider, there isn’t a single worthwhile principle or philosophy that can’t be reduced to a corny platitude. When dealing with these issues it’s easy to scoff at this or that often repeated slogan or pre-packaged phrase, but align yourself with the substance behind it.

Dizzy Gillespie used to say that “everyone’s my brother until they prove otherwise.” If I had the power I’d “extend the chill” to non-white people, a phrase I like because it has a light touch on a heavy subject and carries the idea of allowing everyone to do what white people take for granted, innocently wander about enjoying life without fear, oblivious to even the thought, that for no reason it might suddenly end.

For now and from afar, it seems this ghastly crime is doing anything but starting a race war. I hope I’m right and I hope that continues.

Misery: the city after canoe tripping

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

canoe trips, city = shit, Jerry Garcia, Nature, the city

I love Toronto, but since returning from a ten-day canoe trip all urban environments sicken me. The forests and rivers have placed the scourges of the city into sharp relief. I’m conflicted: I feel like I cannot readjust to city life without losing the serenity I built up in the woods. That nature recalibrates the soul is a cliché, which doesn’t make it untrue just simply vague, so let’s inspect this.

First, five buddies and I spent ten days in Northern Quebec, shooting the north part of the Coulonge and the Noir. Algonquin doesn’t have rapids as large as the ones we shot, and though there are sections of Algonquin where solitude is complete, we didn’t see a single solitary person from about day two to six. Now for what’s superficial about the city.

Author gets doused

Author gets doused, Noire River

The city offers many places for spiritual escape or release, some free, like parks, others not, like museums and other cultural institutions, gyms, or yoga centres where unilingual instructors speak ancient languages they don’t know, and more. That businesses in the city supply life-balance is not proof that the city cares about you, rather they exist to take your money while you recover from the city itself. This compacted parasitical dynamic, this secondary gouging as you seek solace from the primary gouging, presuppose that life in the city is so hostile it requires escaping. In a larger sense these releases from work serve a crucial systematic function, to prevent citizens and workers from going insane. It’s akin to the hip company with the office ping pong table—the company doesn’t want you to enjoy working, they just want you stress-free to increase your productivity for their sake, and really nobody wants to be seen playing ping pong because it reflects poorly. These institutions just seek profit, which is their prerogative and perfectly understandable. But self-interest disguised as selflessness is the commonplace, everyday lie of the city. City life is founded on guile.

In nature, there is no purpose or motive. Nature is neutral, and always will be. It demands and offers you nothing. The actual world is just…there. No ads offer happiness or spiritual respite for a price. It is the primordial world before systems of government or business made direct or indirect demands on people. In this physical and psychological space, free of bosses, solicitations and professional or social obligations, there isn’t total freedom, but the limits, restrictions and hardships imposed on you arise naturally. And not only are they reasonable but they are not subject to questioning; you can only bring the personal effects you are willing to carry, and you cannot blame your problems here on ignorant voters or The Man. Obstacles, whatever they are, simply arise and must be surmounted. There is no alternative. No excuse or complaint will change the fact that you must make it to your campsite or you’ll have nowhere to sleep, and must make a fire if you want heat to cook food, etc.

But let’s not romanticize things too much—camping is not merely you and the elements. If it was, a couple lovely days of reflection would be followed promptly by hunger and death. You bring equipment and food from the city and you do not enter the woods without an exit plan. The outside world is never hermetically sealed off. But life feels different because the nature of work is fundamentally different, and after all work is what occupies most of our time, both in the city and on canoe trip.

Strictly speaking, very few people do work in the city that needs to get done. Even teachers, doctors, social workers and other noble professions must be at least occasionally struck by the feeling that their work doesn’t have the impact that initially attracted them to the profession. Hats off to people who find purpose despite making money! These lucky bastards are the minority. Bureaucrats, pencil pushers, PR people and advertisers, financiers, the producers and hawkers of senseless tacky garbage sold cheaply or outrageous sums—all these should have the good sense to know their work is absolutely useless. The world simply has more people than useful functions; everybody needs a job, but there’s nothing to do. Having a job is useful, even if the job is useless.

I speak here in an existential sense. Of course workers receive money for food and crap to buy in exchange for their labour (unless they’re writers or are otherwise exploitable), but the cycle is roughly this: the economy, the largest determiner of “quality of life,” depends on employment, thus employment per se is a cause in and of itself. Thus, a low (or even high) paying job that actively harms humanity, destroys the worker’s soul, and consumes all their waking hours is thought to increase their quality of life. The economy is merely a measurement of the country’s collective financial affairs, and has nothing to do with the spiritual well-being of people. But politicians and polls see “quality of life” in these terms, and these forces and this mode of thinking hold serious sway in the city.

This faulty system would equally praise all wealthy people with access to healthy food and elite schools but can’t distinguish between someone happy and suicidal. It’s a blunt view that regards quality of life only in measurable economic terms. There is something to be said for having money, let’s not be dopey artists, but soul and spirit can’t be ignored when determining quality of life, even if they defy quantification. The Earth turned for millennia before jobs in finance or PR existed. Nobody would be the worse if these and several other industries collapsed. Indeed, their total demise would probably lead to mass-bliss.

Every single work task on a canoe trip has definite purpose. You don’t do anything on trip unless it’s necessary or fun. And rather than rely on the city’s abstract, arbitrary or vague work evaluation, on canoe trips your body is the arbiter of how hard you worked. You feel it. Employed people in the city might get a promotion if they’re related to the boss, or have worked for __ number of years, or they might get fired because it’s cheaper to outsource their job to China, or getting rid of their role entirely benefits the bottom line. It’s beyond naïve to expect a fair correlation between your fate and how hard you work. The vicissitudes of the city’s relationship between worth ethic and payoff can be opaque and corrupt, nor does it have the capability to factor in unquantifiable things like soul and spirit even if it wanted to, which it doesn’t.

Nature is different. Reward and work in the woods are always governed by a simple, incorruptible dynamic: hard work gets physically easier the more you do it, and do it you must. This is the natural law. Muscles respond to paddling and portaging, and gradually these become simpler and more enjoyable. More, these tasks are never pointless or arbitrarily assigned along a top down hierarchy—boss, manager, useless employee, more useless intern. Trip life has an unselfconscious equality because you’re all in the same position. You need to portage because you’ve reached the shore, and carrying your gear across land is the only way to get to water again. The necessity of the work gives it meaning, and the rewards and pains are always in perfect proportion to the work put in. But nature is refreshingly indifferent to your productivity or how your muscles hurt. There’s no ping pong table, but if you need to chill, then chill. Pontoon, stop paddling eat something, roll a hasher, jump in the river. Nobody offers you a break, secretly judging you for being unproductive. But the rivers gives.

IMG_7264

Delicious. When we gutted him a crayfish he ate popped out, so I put that on the line and caught another next cast. Oh, generous river.

Let me absolutely clear about one thing: nature can be milk and honey but also a motherfucker. The woods offers lots of ways to be killed, and while I’ve stated that the work on canoe trips is necessary for survival that’s only true once you’ve embarked on the trip itself, which strictly speaking isn’t necessary. But canoe trips are the best vacation there is.

A vacation has two functions for the urban worker: first, it alleviates pent up work-related misery, and second, the prospect of vacation during work is a carrot that makes time stuck at work bearable. In other words, city work basically cannot be endured unless there is promise of release from it. Pretty much everyone agrees work is shit, and somehow if the world flipped upside down, we’d rather not do it if given the option.

On paper, it makes sense that vacationers aggressively seek to do as little work as possible. Sloths gorge their faces off at all-inclusives. On beach vacations, bliss is attained by remaining dormant for extended periods of time. Vegas-type gambling excursions promise glamourous thrills via ill-advised bets, outsized stage shows, cocaine and hookers. I find these fundamentally unappealing and possibly immoral. What’s so attractive about spending vacation time on a canoe trip, working?

I can invoke Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, that work per se is rewarding, but this emphasis on work might distract from a better reason: canoe trips are a vacation from so-called civilization, and work is just what you do on them. (Though there are flog trips…) Nature washes away the city’s spiritual pollution. The city’s disgusting advertising everywhere, the lies we’re numbed to through sheer bombardment, the disconnected people, the enormous stacks of windows that pass here for architecture, the crippling car traffic stuck on broken concrete, our caveman mayor, media reports of the latest international atrocities—these and more are escaped with wonderful effect. This might sound like a cop out, like naturalists flee their world because they’re weak, but in fact they’re returning to the actual world that the ghastly city supplanted. It was here first.

Computers, screens, and office buildings are so pervasive that it’s easy to forget how foreign they are to our species. The industrial revolution was very, very recent compared to our evolutionary history. Human bodies and minds are designed and wired to move about in nature. Doing so feels like an ancient memory stirred up. You sweat at first, because it’s hard and unfamiliar, but you adjust soon.

The handsome eagle with its shockingly expansive wings is a worthy representative of its majestic habitat. The city’s emblem is the pigeon, probably disease-ridden and definitely disgusting to behold, accurately described as a rat with wings. Even the city’s parks and green space we loudly applaud ourselves for maintaining are only a taunting simulacrum of what was. However well-intended to impart in us a restorative, Wordsworthian appreciation of nature, they are only a token, a paltry fraction, a castrated version of what used to be. For me right now parks are no help coping with the city’s heinous aspects (roads, buildings, smog, work). Imagine about what Toronto looked like 1000 years ago, then celebrate our abundant parks.

Nature might be so comforting because it is basically people-free. Go somewhere remote to increase your odds of being somewhere that hasn’t yet been ruined by the human race. The few people you do encounter camping are there to do the same thing as you. They know the guide book and the ways of the forest and water, in the same way it’s unnecessary to explain who Jerry Garcia is at a Phish show. But a Phish show has thousands of people, some primarily there for drugs. The woods only a handful, and it’s unforgiving to amateurs. It rewards experience and purer intentions, though of course nature lovers can die in the woods.

Many differences between city and nature are more obvious, and no less important. City lights kill the stars, which illustrates perfectly how nonchalantly, how easily, even if indirectly, the city ruins the wonders nature gives us freely. In the bush, water is fast on rivers, vast on lakes. We are separated from Toronto’s waterfront by a highway. The sun, the only source of light in the woods but not the city, wakes you up and announces bed. Electric lights cause irregular sleeping patterns. Animal chatter and gushing water is nature’s background noise, replacing car horns and pop up ads. You involuntarily digest these contrasts in thoughts and feeling and they accumulate somewhere deep inside you. It’s this interconnectivity between you and all these elements which causes that precious, impossible to articulate thing—spiritual bliss. Hopefully you’ve filled up a reserve of it large and intense enough to last a considerable time while you’re stuck in that godforsaken shithole, the city.

Dating in your 30s

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

30s, chilling hard, dante's inferno, dating, Facebook, leo tolstoy, online dating

A friend suggested I write on this topic. While I’m usually averse to divulging views about more personal stuff, I’ll take her up. I’ve been 30 for five days now, so I’m qualified.

Dating used to be carefree. Two people were or attracted and interested in each other, and that was that. But aging brings complications, as we feel we must at least give a look down the road. Do I like this person enough to bother, or am I taking away from her/my prime years? It’s unfair, but women have serious complications in pregnancy after 35. Meanwhile, men can look hot with salt and pepper hair. Nature is a motherfucker.

Also, people all around us are acting decisively. As you’ve seen on Facebook, people are married. Nothing makes people freak out like a celebration of love. I suspect some people get married mostly for the Facebook status and the accompanying flood of pictures. These pics are the ultimate “humble brag,” proof the couple are socially well adjusted, evidence they will not die alone. I’m all for connubial bliss, and nobody roots for love like I do. Joyce: real love loves to love love. But single people can be comforted by considering how many marriages are filled with despair.

It’s well known that 50% of marriages end in divorce, meaning half of marriages are outright failures. But what of this other half? They fall somewhere between love at one happy end and I’ve-made-a-huge-tiny-mistake.

Starting everyday beside someone terrible can be avoided by prudence and patience while single. Many think looking for a “serious relationship” is the sensible, mature course of action, but finding a life mate is not just another thing to cross off the to-do list. It must be done right. Life is long. Judges consider “life” 25 years but it’s actually longer, meaning marrying the wrong person can lead to a lengthier imprisonment than murder.

The thing is not to look for a serious relationship, but to find a serious love. It’s hard to talk about love without sounding sentimental and corny, which is why in art it’s so often depicted horribly. It’s also wildly personal, so there’s no general way to talk about it, but maybe some things to keep in mind.

Compatibility is often thought of in positive terms—someone who accentuates your strengths. But don’t pick someone too high above you! It’s about balance. Don’t spend life paranoid and insecure about your better looking, richer, more charming partner. Compatibility might mean selecting someone as ugly, broke and dull as you. It’s not like you reach a verdict on a potential mate by consciously entering each variable into some kind of formal ledger, but you’ll probably be mutually attracted to someone who, if such a ledger were created, would come out about equal.

There are two related forces working against people finding real love: the unconscious evolutionary drive beckoning to just mate already, and social pressure. This latter world has different looks: your relatives asking if you’ve scheduled the start of a family, movies and TV about these problems, and of course advertising, which is itself a maelstrom of lies valuing love only because married people have predictable purchasing patterns (diamond ring, a home, stuff for the home, baby products, etc.)

Genuine concern for, or even acknowledgement of, an individual’s heart and soul is by definition banished from both these worlds, but these forces motivate many people all the same. So find someone who either does or doesn’t transcend this stuff to the same degree you do. Don’t be more or less self-actualized than the person you’re seeing.

There’s no formula for happiness. The famous dating blogger Sun Tzu says “know yourself and know your enemy and you need not fear the result of a thousand battles,” meaning you need to really know yourself and the other person.

Leo’s famous intro “All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion” [Maude translation] sounds wonderful, until you think about it. Happiness has unlimited variations. 40-year-old Tolstoy was actually a proponent of the traditional nuclear family, and he thought passionate follow-your-heart Anna was just an alleyway skank, sympathizing instead with her steadfast, dull ex-husband. Later radical Tolstoy opposed pre and post-marital sex, joining him with other great thinkers like Dr. Tobias Funke.

In closing, in dating, chill. Not just because relaxing is less stressful than not relaxing. Chilling is crucial. When you focus hard inwardly, not only do you take care of your own life but you give off that I-don’t-give-a-shit vibe that’s powerful so long as you really don’t give a shit. Authenticity is key. It can’t be faked. Women call guys immature sometimes for not pro-actively seeking a serious relationship, but it might just be that they don’t give a shit in the way described above, and thus aren’t necessarily frivolous about matters of the heart.

And if you dodge trashy idiots, dating is basically just drinking, eating and talking with people who might be tolerable, even if you don’t instantly fall in love. Single people generally sleep alone and have to endure the stigma of being the single ones at parties filled with couples. This is nothing compared to how bad a bad marriage one can be.

At the base of Florence’s Duomo is a shockingly graphic depiction of hell inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Various ghastly devils cackle with laughter while engaging in heinous acts of violence: bashing human skulls in with clubs, impaling people with tridents, flaying naked people alive. Hellfire sizzles in back. This is the great Florentine poet’s allegory for daily life in a bad marriage. You don’t see this side of marriage a lot because, for some reason, people don’t post these pictures on Facebook.

Image

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