Dec 01 2017

Why don’t we have professional jurors?

A while ago I received a summons to appear for jury selection.  So I dutifully drove to the courthouse on the day in question ready to establish my fitness to serve.  No, that’s not true.  I drove to the courthouse on the day in question ready to answer their questions – and curious as to whether one or both of the lawyers would decide they’d rather not have me on the jury.

The judge welcomed us — all hundred of us, it was standing room only — and  briefly described the upcoming trial and the jury selection process.  He then said, “If there is anyone with hearing problems who has trouble hearing what’s being said in the court room, please raise your hand.”  The process was off to an impressive start, I thought.

We were a motley crew of housewives, electricians, social workers, administrative assistants, metal fabricators, and restaurant owners.  I know, because as we were called one by one to stand before the lawyers, that information was provided to them.  We weren’t asked if we had any prejudices, if we had any issues with the law that had been broken, or if we would be able to render a fair decision.  (‘Yes, but the relevant issue is whether my prejudices would get in the way’; ‘Yes, I don’t think possessing marijuana should be illegal, nor do I think selling it should be illegal – especially as long as selling alcohol is lega’l; and ‘That depends on what evidence is presented and how it’s presented – and your definition of ‘fair’.’)  Which means that the lawyers’ decisions to accept or reject us were based solely on what we looked like and what we did for a living.  So much for prejudices and rendering a fair decision.

Oh, and we were asked to look the accused in the eye.  (“AAGH!”)

And then, if we were accepted, we were asked this question: “Do you swear that you shall well and truly try and true deliverance make between our sovereign the Queen and the accused at the bar, whom I have in charge, and a true verdict give, according to the evidence, so help you God.”  Well, ya should’ve asked that before.  Because first, I don’t know what the hell “true deliverance make” means.  Second, as for being able to give a true verdict, if we knew what the truth of the matter was, we wouldn’t have to have a trial now, would we? And third, I’m atheist, so I’m not putting my hand on that.  ‘Reject’ both attorneys say at once.

Well, no they didn’t, actually, because I never got a chance to say any of that.  The required thirteen jurors were selected before my name was called.  And I have no idea why the chosen thirteen were chosen.  Why was the college instructor rejected?  Because she might ask too many questions and get too few answers and, therefore, hang the jury?  Because it would be too inconvenient for her to be away from her job for two weeks?  And why was the steelworker accepted?  Because he smiled at the judge and seemed like an awshucks kinda guy?  Or because his employer would reimburse him so the five dollars an hour we’d be getting paid wouldn’t be quite so appalling.  (Mind you, that’s just if the trial goes on for more than ten days; for the first ten days, we aren’t paid at all — which means it may well cost us to be a juror, given the ten days’ lost income.)

What’s even more appalling, of course, is that someone’s future is at stake.  Whether or not the accused spends time, possibly years, in prison is up to people who aren’t even getting paid.

‘Course why should they be?  It’s not like they’re qualified.  Their names were drawn out of a hat and they were chosen largely on the basis of their appearance.

All of which BEGS the question, Why don’t we have professional jurors?  People who are trained not only to recognize and resist personal prejudice, but to recognize and resist loaded language.  People who understand the difference between fact and opinion, and who know what an argument is, and the difference between an inductive argument and a deductive one.  People who can identify and evaluate unstated assumptions, and who understand relevance, the difference between correlation and causation, and the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions.  People who understand the many ways to reason incorrectly and who know how to evaluate personal testimony, sources, and studies.  People who are paid according to their qualifications and contribution.

Seriously, why don’t we have professional jurors?  Is it because we want a jury of our peers to decide our fate?  Why in the world would most people want that?  Most people’s peers couldn’t tell the difference between good evidence and bad evidence if their – your – life depended on it!  Is it because we think that in a democracy such decisions are best made by the common people?  Right, well, maybe that’s the problem with democracy.  We have professional judges; our judges are trained to be clear and critical thinkers (notwithstanding the one mentioned above).  And since jurors often bear more responsibility for the judgements to be made in our courts, they too should be trained, qualified to do the job.

Share

Nov 11 2017

The Soaps vs. The Game

While both ‘the soaps’ and ‘the game’ have been criticized as poor viewing choices, only the soaps have been dismissed as fluff.  However, a close examination reveals that, in fact, the soaps have more heft than the game.

In both cases, the central theme, and that which drives the action, is winning.  In the soaps, what the players are trying to win is money, power, love, and/or happiness.  These are pretty substantial goals.  In the game, however, the players are trying to win – the game.  Frankly, it verges on circularity (you play the game in order to win the game), which comes close to utter triviality.

And while both sets of players use strategy, often involving manipulation, the strategy of the soaps is considerably more complicated than ‘Go left, fake, then go right.’  In fact, I would venture to say that the soaps is to the game what chess is to checkers.

With regard to setting, the soaps have a bit of an edge: while a well-furnished room is the norm, at least the set does change.  (One has the well-furnished office, the well-furnished den, the well-furnished living room…)

With respect to dialogue, again the soaps have the edge: there is some.  (Actually, I expect the game players speak to each other too, but for some reason we never get to hear their dialogue; instead, we are privy only to a voice-over commentary, explaining the action, rather like a Greek chorus – as patronizing now as it no doubt was then.)

While the characters of the soaps are more gender-inclusive, the characters of the game are more race-inclusive.  (And in both cases, they’re rich.)  I’d call it a tie here.

As for plot, again I’d call it a tie: in both cases, the events are terribly predictable.  I’d venture to say one is hard put to distinguish one game from another or one soap from another – only the characters give it away.

In the cinematography category, the game is superior for its long shots, but the soaps are superior for their close-ups.  Again, a tie.  However, in the soundtrack category, the soaps walk away with the prize.

As for sex and violence, I’m afraid the soaps lead the game on both counts.  There is simply no sex in the game – unless you count the occasional ass-pat (but that is so very elementary, it hardly even counts as foreplay).  And while there is a lot more physical contact in the game, of a violent-seeming nature, and while injury must therefore be frequent, it is seldom permanent; in the soaps, however, people get hurt all the time, in rather long-lasting ways.  Death is even rarer in the game; not so in the soaps.

One might point out that the game is real, whereas the soaps are not, and on that basis alone claim victory for the game.  Unfortunately this very ‘advantage’ backfires: given the level of injury and death in the soaps, it’s to its credit that it’s not for real; in the game, however, real people get hurt.

Tally up the points and I rest my case: the soaps are pretty substantial stuff compared to the schoolyard play of the game.

 

Share

Nov 11 2017

I can do whatever I want on my own property!

I am so very sick and tired of hearing ‘I can do whatever I want on my own property!’  The latest instance concerns a neighbour who has stuck some of those new solar lights in front of her cottage, lakeside of course.

Thing is, they don’t have an on/off switch.  So what she’s done on her own property means the rest of us will have to see her lights every night, all night, for the rest of our lives.

If we lived in the city, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad; they’d get ‘lost’ in their surroundings.  But we live on a lake in the forest.  Where the stars are amazing and the moon glimmers across the water. And now there are a dozen lights at eye level a little to my left whenever I look out at night. They stand out like a middle finger.

I can understand the desire for outdoor lights in order to see where you’re going, but then turn them off when you go to bed.  Or in this case, cover them.  And I can understand the possibility of all-night lights deterring wildlife, but motion-sensor lights would be a better choice, if only for the startle effect.

Please, people, are you really that stupid?  Do you really not see that what you do, even on your own property, affects others?  On that basis, those others most certainly do have a right to ask you not to do something.

In the same way, your pre-1980 use of spray cans is justifiably subject to my complaint.  It’s why I’m at risk for skin cancer now.  Your excessive use of fossil fuels was partly responsible for the flood or drought that destroyed my house.  (Let’s say.)  Your actions often have consequences for me.  Not immediately and not directly and maybe you’re too stupid to see any other kind of consequence, but nevertheless, most certainly, what you do affects me.

The really sad thing is that my neighbour doesn’t even notice the lights.  She doesn’t believe me when I say I do.  She’s that desensitized to her environment.  Or that inattentive.  She thinks I’m exaggerating the intrusion.  I received the same response when I complained about the bright red Home Hardware sign that suddenly appeared nailed to a tree at the end of the lane.  And when I’ve complained about any one of a hundred noises – dirt bikes, atvs, leaf blowers, weed trimmers, generators, chain saws.  Those of us who see things, who hear things, those of us who pay attention to what’s around us, we’re the ones to suffer.  The dullards who go through life with a ‘What?’ expression permanently on their face, who wouldn’t notice, well, anything, they’re the ones living happily.  So in order not to go crazy, I wear earplugs most of the time now.  And my reading glasses, so everything more than six feet past the tip of my nose is out of focus.  The alternative is to become as oblivious as the rest of ‘em.

Share

Nov 08 2017

Kids Behind the Wheel

The other day, I was walking on the gravel/dirt road I live on.  It’s a back road that might see a dozen cars in a day.  As one such car passed us, I noticed that a kid was at the wheel in dad’s lap.  Proud dad, happy kid.

What is it with that?  Why, of all the adult things, do parents push their kids into that one?  Mis-asked the question.  It’s not the parents, it’s the dads.  And usually, it’s their sons, not their daughters.

Given that men are worse drivers than women (ask the insurance companies – why do you think young males pay such a high premium?), perhaps it makes sense: boys need all the practice they can get.  But surely it would be better to take them to a go-cart track.

Proud dad, happy kid.  I get the impression it’s not practice.  Is it a rite of passage to manhood?  But women can, do, and should drive as well.  There’s nothing gender-specific about driving a car.  So why would it be a rite of passage to manhood?

Maybe it’s the vroom vroom that confuses men.  It’s a surrogate roar.  They think they’re intimidating when they make a lot of noise.  (Actually they’re just annoying.  As hell.)  And they want to be intimidating because – ?

Or, also, attendant with a roar, maybe their primitive brain triggers the production of adrenaline, and the adrenaline makes them feel good.  Perhaps that explains the appeal of the Indy.  And the adolescent males who take the mufflers off their trail bikes.

Or maybe it’s the speed that confuses them, makes them feel like they’re chasing prey (or fleeing predators) and again, their primitive brain produces feel-good adrenaline.

So why doesn’t their modern brain recognize this and veto the primitive response?  Noise and speed matter little to homo sapiens living in the 21st century.

Proud dad.  Happy kid.  Oh aren’t you the grown-up.  No, you’re not.  You shouldn’t be behind the wheel until you’re sixteen and then you should approach the task with fear and trembling.  Driving is not fun.  A car is not a toy.  One wrong move and you could kill someone.

 

Share

Nov 08 2017

The Weather Report

Does anyone else find the weather report really, really irritating?  All that drama!  It’s going to rain!  Oh how exciting!  A low pressure weather front is moving in!  Oh my, grab the kids!!

And the pseudo-scientific detail!  The rain is going to be caused by water droplets, that’s droplets of H2O, in the air that will succumb to gravity, under normal conditions, and eventually reach us, possibly at 6:20 or maybe 6:21.

Thing is, all that drama and detail distracts us from what’s really going on with the weather.  Notice the obsession with proximate causes?  Is it because if they addressed the real causes, those remote causes like CFCs and fossil fuel consumption/emission, they’d have to address blame?

 

 

Share

Oct 25 2017

The “M” word on Prime Time TV!!!! (Misogyny; Scandal)

I’m delightfully surprised by the current season of Scandal.  I had trouble getting into the show, and actually, I’m surprised I’m still with it; catching a glimpse of a political debate between two women and  Melly’s bid for the presidency kept me involved, even though I don’t really like her, or Olivia …

And this season, Olivia’s arrogance is really off-putting, but my god, her monument or asterisk speech to Melly  – she actually used the word ‘misogyny’.  The word!  Spoken by a character on prime time tv!!  Been waiting for that for almost fifty years.

And then in a subsequent episode, Marcus takes Fitz to task for his white privilege.

And  for turning Olivia into a ‘black ho’?  Bring it on.

And that was after he lands that “Welcome to the plight of almost every successful woman in the history of mankind” remark.

 Who are these writers?  And why weren’t they on the show since the beginning?  (If I’m reading the IMDB site correctly, the writer has always been Shonda Rhimes.  Hm.)  (Perhaps no surprise.  If she’d said the ‘m’ word in the first episode, perhaps she wouldn’t’ve gotten any further.)

(Though I have to say…I worry that Olivia will set feminism back fifty years if she continues with, well, murder and blackmail.  People will say shit like ‘see what happens when we let women in power?’ conveniently forgetting every man in power that has done the same…)

Share

Oct 19 2017

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED – Traister’s All the Single Ladies

Just at chapter 3, but I can highly recommend Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies.

A few bits…

“…as the legal scholar Rachel Moran argues, while the feminist movement of the 1970s was in part a ‘direct response to these conditions of early and pervasive marriage,’ the ironic side effect was that single women had almost no place in the underpinnings of the movement” (20).  Yes!

“Le Bon conceded that ‘Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely'” (53).  Had not heard that one.

Oh, and this lovely tidbit: “Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, ‘a painful  menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathe din male semen'” (54).

 

Share

Sep 25 2017

A Postscript to Why Feminist Manuscripts Don’t Get Published

So here’s a query letter my friend Chris Wind sent to a publisher recently:

Editor, [XYZ Publishers]:

Feminist theorist Dale Spender wrote, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, “We need to know how patriarchy works.  We need to know how women disappear….”   Indeed we do.  Where are all the straight-A girls from high school?  Why, how, have they ‘disappeared’?  Marriage and kids is an inadequate answer because married-with-kids straight-A boys are visible.  Everywhere.  Even the straight-B boys are out there.

September (fiction; 114,698w) responds to Spender’s urgent comment with a microscopic examination of the life of a single woman that is, I fear, all too typical, answering the question ‘What happened?’

Although there have been many non-fiction books since Spender that have exposed the sexism in our culture …  fiction seems not to have kept pace, seems not to be informed by the insights of those authors.  September thus helps fill an important gap (especially for those who don’t read non-fiction) …

There are three voices juxtaposed throughout the novel: the fresh, impassioned protagonist speaking in the present through her journal entries from the age of fifteen to fifty; the wise, and fighting-off-bitter, now-fifty protagonist commenting about the events of her life, talking to her younger self; and the dispassionate narrator.  Insights are underscored by alternate realities, extended ‘should’ve happeneds’ and ‘could’ve happeneds’…

And so September is part fiction, part memoir; part personal essay, part critical essay; part psychology, part philosophy, part sociology.  It is a maze of analysis in which, despite the appearance of rambling randomness, one thing leads inexorably to another.

I append below a bio, synopsis, and sample; I am submitting this query to a few other publishers.

Thank you for your consideration, and I do hope to hear you’d like to read more!

Bio:  Chris Wind (M.A., Philosophy; B.A., Literature) has published four collections of poetry (Paintings and Sculptures, UnMythed, Soliloquies: the lady doth indeed protest and dreaming of kaleidoscopes).  Her prose and poetry has appeared in several journals and magazines (including Prism International, Ariel, Bogg, Canadian Woman Studies, The University of Toronto Review, Hysteria, The Wascana Review, The Antigonish Review, event, The New Quarterly, The Humanist, f.(L)ip, Waves, grain, Canadian Author & Bookman, cv2, Atlantis, and Herizons) as well as anthologies (including Contemporary Monologues for Young Women).  Several of her short theatrical works have been performed, and her stories have been read on CBC Radio (the Canadian equivalent to the BBC).  She has been awarded sixteen Ontario (Canada) Arts Council grants.

And this is the rejection letter she received:

Thank you for submitting your fiction proposal to [XYZ Publishers].

Unfortunately, we don’t think Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them is a good fit for our list at this time. …

Sincerely,

Gregg [Somebody, XYZ Publishers]

I don’t know what’s worse, that he didn’t read the letter (or even the first line) very carefully (let alone, one has to assume, the enclosed sample) or that he didn’t recognize Spender’s work.

 

 

Share

Sep 25 2017

Toller Cranston on Janet Lynn

[Obviously written a while ago, and yet … this shit keeps being said.]

 

Toller Cranston, as Janet Lynn takes the ice: “You wouldn’t know by looking at her that she’s a housewife and mother of three.”

What?

Would he have said of Kurt Browning, “You wouldn’t know by looking at him that he does stuff around the house and is a father of three”??

I think not.

Clearly Cranston thinks that – well, I don’t know what the hell he thinks.  That doing stuff around the house is somehow incompatible with – skating?  I’ll grant that being a parent could deplete one’s energy to the point that maintaining an elite level of athletic performance is unlikely, but that would apply only if the kids were a certain age and only if one didn’t have any assistance – and it would apply to men as well as women.

I suspect he has some stereotype of housewife and mother in his mind that Lynn didn’t fit.  Perhaps that of a ditsy simpleton or an unkempt troll.

Share

Aug 15 2017

Why Feminist Manuscripts Aren’t Getting Published Today – McSweeney’s List

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/why-feminist-manuscripts-arent-getting-published-today

 

Share