Sexual Orientation and Violent Victimization

Anyone who believes that Canada is a generally more open society with less prejudice towards sexual orientation should read this recent Statistics Canada report. After controlling for other factors (such as age, living in an urban/rural area, income, student status, and frequency of going out at night), a recent analysis found that gay men and lesbians were nearly twice as likely as straights to be violently victimized; even worse, people who are bisexual had a 4.5 times greater risk of being victimized by violence.

Now admittedly, this analysis doesn’t speak to whether these victimizations were related directly to their sexual orientation (i.e. gay-bashing), but it stands to reason that at least some of them are. They do not seem, however, to feel victimized, however:

Despite experiencing higher rates of violence, gays, lesbians and bisexuals did not express higher levels of fear than their heterosexual counterparts.

Overall, more than 9 out of 10 gay, lesbian and bisexual Canadians indicated that they were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their personal safety, a proportion which was similar to heterosexuals.

It would be interesting to see the same study done with regards to transsexual/transgendered folks: I have a bad feeling that the victimization rates would be even higher for that population.

The full study is available here.

Stéphane Dion says it like it is

I had to laugh when I read the headline on this CBC.ca story on Dion’s decision to not oppose the Tories’ budget: “We’ll find a way to not defeat the government’: Dion”.

Thank goodness for the Liberals: if it wasn’t for them, who would be propping up this Tory government, anyways?

Manley nominated for Afghan potentate?

According to the Globe, John Manley is apparently in line to be nominated by the Conservative government as a so-called ’super envoy’ for the Afghanistan “aid and reconstruction” efforts. Manley, as you may recall, was the Chair of the recent ‘Manley Commission’ (otherwise known as the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan) that decided Canada’s imperialist ambitions in Afghanistan were just super and that (as long as we get 1,000 troops committed from other NATO countries) we should stick around for the time being.

Freedom under Capitalism

The realm of freedom actually only begins where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. - Marx

Our society, as it is commonly defined, that is to say Canadian society, Western society, or liberal-democratic society, is by the same common definition free and democratic. This definition, however, has significant limits: while correct in terms of being more ‘free’ than some other possibilities, it is certainly not ‘free’ in a total or even thorough sense.

Does capitalism offer freedom? What is freedom? How can alternatives, such as socialism, provide genuine freedom? These are all major questions at the heart of what we, as a society (and here I’m using society in the broadest sense: human society) choose to have as an economic system.

Class & city planning

CBC.ca published an interesting article today on a report done by the Montreal Public Health Department:

Pedestrians are more likely to get hit by a car walking in poor neighbourhoods than affluent ones… The discrepancy can be explained by a relative scarcity of traffic calming measures in low-income areas, researchers at the department concluded.

This is, of course, a perfect example of how class interests shape how cities are built. City councils, which typically represent the interests of the suburban middle-class above the urban working-class, turn the inner-city into a giant highway for getting suburban commuters to their jobs and back; the people who live there are forced to live beside high-speed roads with high vehicle traffic.

Linkity-link: Feb 8th, 2008

A few more interesting links for perusal: today we have Pilger doing a deliciously snarky lambasting of the U.S. Presidential Elections, Prince Charles being the royal buffoon he is, and Lenin’s Tomb taking a gander at Canada’s involvement at Afghanistan. Enjoy!

“Every home a fortress, every street a trench, every neighbourhood a wall of iron and combatants…”

Regular readers (hi, Mom!) may recall my post late last year about my overambitious plans for reading during my winter holidays, which amounted to me taking a pile of books about the Spanish Civil War out of the university library and foolishly assuming I would actually make a dent in them. I didn’t do that well, but I have managed to nearly finish one book, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War by Ronald Fraser. I thought I would write about my thoughts so far.

This book, really, is just fantastic. It’s stuff like this that makes me want to do a Masters degree in History. Fraser has managed to speak to a ridiculously-broad sample of Spaniards active in the Civil War, be they anarchists, communists, socialists, left republicans, monarchists, Basque nationalists or falangists – this achievement is doubly impressive considering that while the book was published in 1979, the vast majority of the interviews were conducted between 1973 and 1975, during the twilight years of Franco’s Spain; Franco actually died six months after the last interview was conducted.