Author: Dave

I was born late in 1963. In 1969 contraception stopped being illegal in Canada. In 1983 spousal rape became illegal in Canada.

So in the spring of 1963 when my father raped my mother the assault was perfectly legal. She had no access to contraceptives. She had little or no access to reproductive health services and certainly not an abortion. This despite the fact that she was living in astonishing poverty with a drunken abusive rapist and already had two nearly grown daughters.

In fact, gynecological neglect contributed to decades of health problems for my mother which significantly worsened the misery of her later years.

That being said, OHIP started in 1966 so she was more fortunate than her mother who, without birth control had a life of annual miscarriages that took a heavy toll on her health. And even so they both had it easier than my father’s mother who had an unknowable number of miscarriages as well as someteen surviving children by a physically abusive man who once hung his heavily pregnant wife out a second story window and would try to, in my aunt Virginia’s words, “beat the French out of her.”

Antiabortionists like to frame their cause in terms of protecting babies. I will not bother here, again, to explain that blastocysts and embryos and fetuses are not babies, and cannot be persons, but this is so. And such as it is, “pro-life” campaigners cannot be acting as they are to protect the unborn, because the unborn, in the sense that they are proposing, are imaginary.

No, what is actually the case is that these people, or more explicitly the leaders who agitate them for their own purposes, are trying to undermine women’s access to reproductive health services.

Most of the services that Planned Parenthood provide are the contraceptive and gynaecological services my mum and her mum and my dad’s bruised and beaten mother suffered without. Organizations making and distributing disinformation about Planned Parenthood are using abortion as an inflammatory issue as part of a systematic attack on women’s health and their rights in general.

And in some parts of the US this has been very successful and progressed quite far. Either of my grandmothers might have gone to prison multiple times under new legislation in Alabama because of their miscarriages. Please think about that.

Attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on women’s reproductive health, on women’s access to health services, on women’s rights. Abortion bans are on the same road as contraception bans and disenfranchisement of women. As the decriminalization of spousal rape. As a return to an appalling age of suffering and abuse of which we should all be profoundly ashamed.

Screening a film intended as part of a defamatory campaign against Planned Parenthood and by extension, women in general, is no grey area of free speech. It is obscene. And in its potential to spread disinformation that is likely to bring severe harm to many women, it is inexcusable.

We need to decarbonize. But it is delusional to think that will be today, or this month, or this year. We really do not have a technology for that.
Electricity would be easy if people were not what they are. We could build nuclear reactors and decarbonize electrical generation within 10–20 years. It would take that long to build them. But that is not going to happen because first you would have to convince misinformed people that we should build nuclear reactors. Best of luck with that. So while possible with existing tech, decarbonizing electricity is by no means going to happen soon. And all the carbon cost of the delay lies at the feet of the antinuclear (energy) lobby.

And yet this is not the most significant problem. In a recent interview a climate scientist was finally asked what the prognosis was for decarbonizing. She made the above point about electricity, but went on to say that both heating and transportation were less tractable problems. And they are. It is not easy to see how heating can be refitted to eliminate fossil fuels. A bigger problem however is that for this, or more problematically to electrify transportation would require a vast increase in core electrical generating capacity that absolutely cannot be achieved with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.

For the UK alone, electrifying all the vehicles would require an additional 10 full-sized nuclear plants on top of those that would be built to replace existing fossil fuel production.

Particularly in light of the Canadian government’s announcement on the Trans-Mountain expansion it is important to understand that while we must move toward carbon free energy, primarily by educating people about nuclear power, we are still in a fossil fuel age and we still need to manage the production and infrastructure associated with that fact until we can get off this carbon producing ride.

Where I grew up, our next door neighbours were Louise and Paul Buss. Paul was an immigrant and an engineer. He and his brother invented the process for making spun rock wool.

The Busses built Spun Rock Wools Ltd. in Thorold, manufacturing the insulation and selling it all around the world. Later the whole shebang was sold to Rockwool International. Spun rock wool is Roxul, which you may well have purchased if you were doing any renovations involving insulation.

And yet the Busses lived next door to the relatively impoverished McKays, in if anything a smaller house, although situated on the corner. This wealthy successful man who owned a factory and an international business, who had made valuable contributions to both technology and the economy, was just a neighbour to me. And there it is. Rich and poor, workers and factory owners, we all lived similar lives in the same neighbourhood in much the same housing.

Just a couple of doors down from me was built a conspicuously consumptive mini-McMansion covered in “security” lights and with a crowded driveway. In that house lives someone prosperous enough to be a model of consumerism. And what has that person done, for the world, for the economy? He owns a clothing line… That’s it. He has a brand, marketing and subcontractors.

And somewhere in that difference at either end of fifty years, I think I see what is wrong with our economy.

I am happy to see Senator Lynn Beyak “kicked out” of the CPC Senate caucus. I would not however go so far as to say that it represents any moral rectitude on the part of Andrew Scheer or the CPC. They did not rebuke her, indeed they were vocally supportive of Beyak, when she humiliated herself and all Canadians by suggesting, in the House, that residential schools were a net positive if some of the children who survived were Christianized. These racist letters that she posted to her parliamentary website were letters of support for exactly that stance.

So, what has changed? Well, Ontario is having an election this year, and there is an upcoming federal election in 2019. Conservatives will want something to point at to show they are not the racists they have been for years, even if they actively court that base.

But there is another factor to consider. Lynn Beyak is a stupid white woman. The stupid and white are important, not only because her privilege has befuddled her critical thinking, but because her being white is the only reason someone so stupid could have achieved such high office. In the last CPC leadership race candidates were running on xenophobic ignorance and hate, so don’t tell me that these ideas are unique to Senator Beyak, they are common tropes both within the party and its racist base. Nope, Lynn is not especially racist for her party, but she is also a woman. And at this point in time a party that is also misogynistic has looked around for a public relations scapegoat and thrown HER under the bus.

People who want blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses to have ‘rights’ create an unreasonable dilemma.

Either women have rights, or you can require them to carry a child.
Either women can choose to terminate a pregnancy or they do not have a right to security of their person. There is no way around this.

No matter how deeply you feel about the life of an unborn child there is no practical way for it to have rights that supersede or restrict those of the mother.

No matter how distressing you find this reality there is no moral choice that assigns rights to a pregnancy where that would deprive the host of her rights as an independent human being, which blastocysts, embryos and fetuses are not.

No matter how impractical a method of birth control abortion is, disenfranchising pregnant women, and therefore by extension, sooner or later most women, is a repugnant option.

This is why it is intolerable for a political party to advance members who take an anti-abortion stance or who advocate any measure that would tend to limit women’s access to reproductive health services. It is simply not acceptable that any person in a position of authority could stand behind a policy that inevitably diminishes women’s hard-won legal personhood and still moderate gains in equality.

But the distress and hand-wringing is entirely unnecessary. Ask, “Do women have rights.” It’s a simple question, with a simple answer that must be, “yes.”

Every so often, someone buys a shitty backpack, catches a ride to the end of some logging road, heads off into the “wilderness” with high hopes, and ends up leaving their broken corpse somewhere inaccessible for future generations to find.

No one can survive alone outside the community of people. Our species has been specializing in interdependence for hundreds of thousands of years. To survive and prosper each one of us needs the fellowship and cooperation of our community.

This allows individuals to specialize in, for instance, plumbing. You can become an excellent plumber because you can rely on bakers to bake, firefighters to extinguish fire, dentists to cause you periodic discomfort and etc. That way they can also become excellent specialists because they can rely on you to be great at plumbing for them.

And everyone cooperates. They may superficially resent or disparage this, but everyone needs help in order to move house, to hold a ladder, to let them do a lane change.

This is what society is made of. Everything about everyone’s survival and prosperity is based in social cooperation and mutual support.

Survivalist libertarian nut-job vloggers do not ride a bicycle strapped to a generator for 10 hours to make the electricity to charge their cellphone to record their latest every-one-for-themselves podcast. Not any more than they maintain a unique personal GPS satellite system so they can find their car after.

Almost every aspect of everyone’s life is intricately entwined with the efforts and good will of the members of their society. Where this breaks down, death follows.

Which is why it makes me so angry to listen to ranters deride socialism, for socialism in its fundamentals is just this cooperation and specialization of everyone, for everyone, that no one is apart from unless they are face down in a ravine waiting to die.

No matter what humans do within society we are all socialists. Humans are social animals. It is our one true strength and the source of all our adaptation. If you cannot understand this you are either eligible for the gold medal in self delusion or are alone, cold, wet and unlikely to make it til morning.