Adam Radwanski’s (non-firewalled) column in today’s Post takes an interesting look at the numerous significant, er, compromises Tony Blair’s Britain has made between freedom and security, and between freedom and government-enforced behaviour modification therapy. Suffice to say the term “Orwellian” makes an appearance, which seems like a pretty good segué into this new Home Office ad campaign.

Somewhat spine-tingling, innit? I especially like the subtle but devastatingly inappropriate invocation of prison rape as a deterrent.

Today’s Guardian leader the laments the following:

Three decades ago one out of three rape attacks reported to the police ended in conviction; today it is just one in 20.

Shortly thereafter, we discover one major reason why:

There has been a large increase in reported rapes — from 4,900 in 1995 to 14,100 in 2004.

Hold on — no point picking your jaw off the floor just yet:

But even with this number, the British Crime Survey suggests another 85% go unreported.

So that would make some 94,000 rapes in the United Kingdom in 2004 — almost exactly the same number of reported rapes as in the United States, which is five times the UK’s size, and roughly one for every 265 adult women. I’m not sure if that’s believable or not, but I’m sure of this: a nearly 200% increase in reported rapes over 30 years is going to be accompanied by a reasonably commensurate increase in inappropriately reported rapes, which are perhaps the most hurtful and damaging abuses of the justice system going — for both men and women.

It’s tough to see this Home Office ad campaign helping. I know they’re just posters, but taken to its logical conclusion the policy they espouse essentially frees women from any responsibility whatsoever to avoid unwanted sexual contact. They no longer need to say “no” if they don’t want to have sex; they just need to not say “yes”. Which is ridiculous, of course — normal people don’t behave that way — but that’s the problem. There are a tiny number of crazies out there who falsely accuse people of rape, and advertisements like this do nothing except encourage them.

I invite feedback on the following statement: “Rape” should not be said to have occurred unless the aggrieved party has:
(a) verbally indicated, to the extent she is able, her unwillingness to participate; and
(b) attempted, to the extent she is able, to physically repel the attack.

To me that’s common sense. I don’t think people need an ad campaign to tell them what rape is, especially one that seems to encourage people to interpret drunken indiscretions, which frequently occur without explicit consent given by either party, as a matter for the courts. But I’d be fascinated to hear other viewpoints.

Is it just me, or doth the two Thunder Bay women fingered by Mexican authorities in the murder of Dominic and Annunziata Ianiero protest too much? I don’t mean that it casts doubt on their innocence or anything — I just mean, well, that they protest too goddamn much. I sure wouldn’t want to be in their position, but it’s not as if they’re going to be extradited to Mexico on the say-so of some tin pot Attorney General and a tabloid newspaper. They act as if they’re fighting a PR battle, which they’ve already won if it ever existed, and I’d say they have more to lose by constantly appearing in the media than they have to gain. Case in point, this dumbfounding statement from Kimberly Kim:

We’re hoping Stephen Harper will step up to the plate. There are innocents suffering here. Not only us, but the Ianiero family and other people who have been unjustly accused.

Indeed. As we lie awake at night pondering Cheryl and Kimberly’s awful plight, let’s all spare a moment’s thought for the couple that bled to death from their throats on the eve of their daughter’s wedding. It’s called perspective, people.

Look at Rosie DiManno go:

Directly overhead, in the night sky, are the brilliant stars of constellation Orion, the great hunter drawing his bowstring taut.

Down on the ground, the inhospitable desert ground, Task Force Orion — which takes its name from that predatory celestial image — is battle-bloodied from the crack and flare of enemy gunfire.

It’s like I’m actually there…

In yesterday’s Guardian, Cristina Odone presented an intriguing premise, namely, that the rise in infertility is causing a surge of pro-life sentiment in the UK:

For the 45,000 British couples who seek fertility treatment annually, the 200,000 terminations that take place each year are a personal insult: how dare anyone discard something that you yearn for so greatly?

Her argument is no great shakes — it repeats itself, insults infertile Brits on a couple of fronts, and ends right back up where it started in Nowheresville. I quite agree that it’s tremendously wasteful to abort a fetus in the face of interminable adoption wait lists, but Odone somehow manages not even to bring adoption into it. The emotion she’s ascribing to these infertile people isn’t sorrow, or even outrage, but nonsensical bitterness:

Feminism, as has often been the case, becomes a casualty of fertility. It is horrible to think of the poor, ignorant or oppressed woman having to visit a backstreet abortionist because of new, stricter limits on termination. But if you’ve spent four years obsessed with having a baby, the horror of a seedy illegal abortionist seems bearable in comparison to the tragedy of not conceiving.

But the one thing has nothing to do with the other unless you consider adoption. Let’s say I want to have a eucalyptus tree in my front garden, but I cannot on account of my not living in Australia. If I read about a man in Australia who’s going to chop down his eucalyptus tree I might feel some kind of jealousy pang, but mostly I’m just going to have to call it none of my business. If I lived right down the street, mind you, and was willing to pay for the eucalyptus tree to be moved to my property, then the tree’s owner would have to be some kind of bloody-minded to refuse. (Before you ask — yes, I am comparing a woman carrying and delivering a baby to tree ownership.)

So I think Odone has oversimplified in the interests of her own pro-life beliefs, but the agonizing difficulty of adopting a child is certainly a legitimate driver for pro-life sentiment, and increasing infertility is going to put more and more people on those wait lists. Whether or not it can legitimately be linked to infertility, Odone claims that

…the climate of opinion has changed so much that 42% of Britons today would like the abortion law to be tightened from 24 to 22 weeks. You can’t ignore them: they’re probably your neighbours.

So then, we just need Odone to explain how insisting that fetuses be terminated more expeditiously will help out infertile couples — say, by putting an adopted baby in their arms. Indeed, I’m still unconvinced that term limits make any sense at all, and it’s arguments like Odone’s that lead to my grudging admiration of Canada’s abortion status quo, in spite of the legal wrangling that precipitated it and the fear of honest debate that keeps us there.

As far as I understand it, Abdul Rahman was not on trial for being a Christian, but for renouncing Islam. That’s what apostasy is — he’d have fared no better as a newly minted Jew or atheist. Now, from most perspectives that’s just splitting hairs — it’s equally barbaric to put someone on trial for what he believes as for what he doesn’t. But the distinction is significant for the west’s mission in Afghanistan, and even more so for future missions we undertake to remove regimes like the Taliban.

I believe in the idea that there is a minimum standard of civilization below which regimes should not expect to operate while enjoying all the benefits of sovereignty from the leading nations of planet Earth. The Taliban was one of those regimes (though it was for far more specific and universally appreciated reasons that they were removed), as was Iraq under Saddam (though Bush and Blair unfortunately declined to hitch their wagon to that justification for their invasion).

The fifty-thousand-dollar question is whether the sort of democracy we want to meld onto these countries should be form-based or content-based. Is it acceptable, in other words, for a country like Afghanistan to outlaw the rejection of Islam, and/or the practice of other faiths, as long that reflects the will of the people? Both are distinctly unpleasant, of course, but I think the former is less so than the latter and I’m afraid the answer has to be “yes”.

One can believe in Christ and pretend not to — one shouldn’t have to, but one can. One cannot pretend not to be a woman, however, and there are a damn sight more women in Afghanistan (about fourteen-and-a-half million) than there are Christians (two or three thousand, by the most biased estimates). The removal of the Taliban has had enormously positive consequences, but the population is fiercely religious and may not be ready to accept pluralism for a millennium or two. That shouldn’t impugn the mission, except for those who were hopelessly naïve about the prospects for post-Taliban Afghanistan. It should merely underscore how much further there is to go.

We mustn’t “accept” laws against religious freedom, of course. We should and do oppose such laws (well, except in Saudi Arabia), but we must also recognize that in a country whose constitution and laws are based on the Koran, rejecting Islam is naturally going to be problematic. An apostate is to a religious democracy what an anarchist is to a secular one.

Ultimately I am glad Abdul Rahman isn’t going to be executed, but I do have to wonder if it bodes well for the future of an independent Afghani judiciary — another of those fun western concepts we are presumably trying to export in the general direction of Mesopotamia — that President Karzai was apparently able to influence the course of Rahman’s trial so profoundly at the behest of western leaders like Stephen Harper. Karzai strikes me as a reasonable person, an incalculably valuable ally. I think the best gift Christians can give him in return for Rahman’s life is to count their blessings and stay the hell out of Afghanistan.

Why didn’t anyone tell me about Art Brut? I generally avoid anything described as “art punk” like cats avoid rocking chairs, but this album is the furthest thing from pretentious. Any band that claims “We’re gonna be the band that writes the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along” can safely be assumed to get the joke.

A 12-year-old girl is stabbed at 2:20am on Saturday night outside a nightclub in downtown Toronto that was holding some kind of all-ages event. According to at least one Toronto city councillor, it was illegal for her to have been there:

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti… told CTV yesterday the parents of the stabbing victim should be charged under the provincial Child and Family Services Act, which requires children under 16 to be supervised by a parent when out between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.

And yet Mammoliti and other councillors nevertheless want to address this massive city-wide problem, as represented by this one isolated incident, by instituting a curfew. In other words, they want to turn back time and make it super-duper illegal for the 12-year-old victim to have been at the club. If I know them, they’ll probably arrive at a final proposal that all children under 13 be off the streets by 2:19am.

"I’m from the old school," said councillor Frances Nunziata. "A 12- and 13-year-old should be home in bed sleeping at that hour." Blech — go ahead and try to argue with that! I take some comfort in the idea that municipal politics is sort of a coarse filter that stops people of limited to non-existent intellect from gaining control of more important elected positions. But accepting that City Hall wishes to reach back into the mists of time and pluck one person from the unfortunate Saturday night situation, why on Earth are these councillors zeroing in on the 12-year-old girl who was stabbed? The 12-year-old girl who stabbed her seems like a much more logical target, and no one has to invent some jackass new law to deal with her.

(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)

I’m on vacation, dudes. Back Monday-ish.

Thanks to the National Post’s editorial today, there isn’t too much more to say about the Toronto Star’s baffling campaign to paint the deportation of illegal Portuguese immigrants as some sort of cruel and unusual punishment. “Tories begin deporting illegal workers” is the most ridiculous headline yet, but not by all that much. If they were going to reduce this to a matter of partisan politics, I’d have thought something like “Liberals ignored Canadian immigration law for years” might have fit the bill better.

As for the argument that the construction industry depends on illegal Portuguese labour… well, it’s against the law to employ illegal Portuguese labourers, is it not? I’m a little surprised the industry types are so forthcoming with this information. The whole argument is a non-starter — these people need to go home. I have some compassion for them, of course, as I would for anyone forced to uproot their entire family on a week’s notice. But they’re being sent back to the European Union, for heaven’s sake. Their children will have healthcare there, just for instance, that they never could have had here.

And you know, I read today, also in the Star, that access to jobs is one of the keys to solving the crime problem among Toronto’s black youth. Bricklaying is a job — pays pretty well, too, as I understand it. That’s not a short-term solution, but we can’t maintain the totally unacceptable status quo just because an industry was content to rely so heavily on a group of people that logic dictated might disappear, en masse, at a moment’s notice.

Bit of a noodle-scratcher in this morning’s Toronto Star:

In an effort to reach out to parents who oppose vaccination, a program should be established to compensate children harmed by inoculation, a doctor says.

People who refuse get their children immunized are by and large leery of a possible link between immunizations and autism. This link is highly dubious, at best. Even if it wasn’t, society would have to balance the risk of a rise in autism against the risk of a loss of herd immunity against things like rubella and the measles. And herd immunity weighs a ton.

More to the point, I think compensation would do precisely the opposite of what Dr Kumanan Wilson thinks it will:

The Wilson paper also calls for children harmed by a vaccine to be compensated. Given that vaccines are a public good, it is “reasonable and appropriate” to compensate those who are harmed, the paper said.

Vaccines aren’t just a public good, though. I imagine most parents quite understandably care more that their little angels don’t get some horrible disease than they do whether the rest of the herd does. By announcing a compensation scheme for those who have adverse reactions to immunizations (we’re talking about seizures and anaphylaxis, obviously, not autism) you’re going to reinforce the idea that there’s something to this autism theory.

Any change in the current vaccination system, which seems shockingly laissez-faire to me, should be designed to drive home the point that immunizations are more or less your duty as a citizen. Live-and-let-live ends where your life starts messing up other people’s. If anyone should be compensated it’s children who get rubella or the measles because of a loss of herd immunity, and the money should come out of the pockets of the selfish, gullible fools who refuse to get their kids immunized.

(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)