Six Weeks into the First Semester

It had been my intention to write a post about once a week, after all I’m not going to improve my writing unless I actually practice. That plan, however, fell by the wayside when I was presented with the amount of work that is involved in law school.

The first week of classes were interesting, it was a week of discussing ethics, the law, and legal practice. While the work load in this week wasn’t particularly high — compared to what was coming — I was still settling into my new apartment. After that the real work began, by which I mean I settled into my 1L (first year) schedule and the readings came fast and heavy.

The most difficult thing that I have come across so far has been figuring out how to do things, by which I mean figuring out how to organize notes, readings, juggle my schedule, and so on. Every class has a significant amount of reading associated with it, and since most of the readings are cases, they also need to be briefed (a fairly standardized way of summarizing each case). In the case of some classes, the cases can date back to the 17th Century, so they also need to be translated and deciphered. It was only this past weekend, almost all the way through October, that I finally feel like I’m on top of the work. Not ahead, not behind, just finally caught up to where I should be.

There is definitely a lot of work involved, more even than I was expecting, but I am also finding it a lot of fun. The work is challenging and interesting, and I feel like I’m starting to come to terms with it. Time will tell.

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The First Week

The past week has been pretty hectic, it has been the beginning of orientation week, and the week that I did the most substantial part of my move to Toronto to law school. It has been hectic, but it has also been an amazing experience, both in terms of what I learned through orientation, and things that I’ve forgotten about moving.

In terms of what I was expecting in law school, the biggest thing that I found unexpected was the diversity of the student body at Osgoode. I was expecting to meet a lot of students who were very academically inclined, instead I was surprised by the amazing accomplishments that most of the students had already achieved. The number of students I met who are coming directly from university is low, though I did meet some of those. But what I found astounding was the incredible diversity of experiences, and backgrounds. These are some very interesting people in my cohort. There is no one that I met who hasn’t already lived an interesting life. More than once I wondered what I was doing here.

When I first received my acceptance letter from Osgoode, I was surprised. I figured that they had made a mistake, especially since I received it so soon after submitting my application. That feeling still hasn’t gone away, the feeling that someone had made a mistake and that I didn’t belong there. It’s a feeling that’s driven me to read about the law before this week, so that I could feel like I was coming into the whole thing with something to offer. From talking with the other students, and from listening to some of the impressive professors and guest speakers that I’ve heard from, this feeling is far from common. Still, it hasn’t gone away, and I still worry that at some point I’ll be found out as a fraud. So I’d better work pretty hard to avoid that.

The apartment that I choose was semi furnished — a room in the upper floor of a house owned by friends of mine, friends that don’t use it very often. I made this decision for a number of reasons, but the main ones were the semi-furnished state and the location. Even then, though, I’ve forgotten just how much it costs to set up a place to live. The costs of incidentals can run fairly high, and the amount of time it takes to prepare everything is always greater than I think. Most things are now in place now, though, and I think that things are in a state that I can pick away at them as the semester unfolds. There are only one or two small things that I need before I can start living and working here.

It has been a busy week, and school hasn’t really begun yet. I am about to head home for the weekend, and begin my readings for next week when classes actually begin. Now the real work of school begins, and I am both excited and terrified.

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The Law of Internet Bias (The Blogger’s Rule or The Fox’s Law)

When the Queen told Hamlet that “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” Shakespeare hit upon a truism that we best keep in mind in these days of internet and “citizen reporting.” That truism being that if someone goes out of their way to say something, the veracity of that thing is called into question. Consider Fox News, notorious for their “fair and balanced” motto, yet known for their significant bias. This isn’t to say that all news sources other than Fox are without bias, on the contrary, but other news sources don’t claim to be unbiased, they accept the implication that it is impossible to do away with bias, and in that awareness become a little less biased, while Fox denies the obviousness of bias and then revels in it.

My attention was brought to this in a post a friend of mine put on Facebook today, that linked to this article on Facebook. If you followed that link on your PC or laptop, you probably noticed that it’s a website called “whydontyoutrythis.com,” and one of the categories available on the menu is “Truth,” a category of posts whose primary unifying property is not veracity, but the contradiction of “mainstream” views. If you followed it from your mobile, though, you might have noticed that it looks like this:

screen shot

Screen cap of the article with headline “FDA Finally Admits Chicken Meat Contains Cancer-Causing Arsenic”, Website title “Why Don’t You Try This?” and subtitle “Try being informed instead of just opinionated.”

What follows is then a rather opinionated article. This can be verified by reading the article, and following each source to read the article that is sourced. The opinions in the WDYTT article are each more hyperbolic than the authorities cited. In the usual way, these references are then built into accusations against big pharma, implying collusion with the FDA, and then claims that show a lack of understanding. For example by claiming the FDA considers Elderberry juice more dangerous than Arsenic. The author, like many lay people, seems to be unaware that “the dose makes the poison.”

I could go on with pointing out the bias in the article, but that’s not really the point. It is a blog post on the internet, and as such it is chock full of bias and opinion. That’s the whole point of a blog, after all. What I am pointing out, though, is that this is a site that goes out of its way to talk about “Truth” and “Opinion” and how it tells the truth and not opinion, while being rather opinionated and seriously biased. There may be some truth to the issues that are raised in the article, big pharma may indeed be bad, but the authority of the opinion is severely damaged by the rhetoric used, and by the claims made in general by the site and it’s framing rhetoric, claims that are demonstrably false.

I am using this site as an example. It is in fact the example that inspired this post, but it is far from the first that I’ve come across. The internet is full of them. In Mark Twain’s time (or possibly Churchill’s, depending on which site you believe), a lie may have gotten halfway around the world while the truth was putting on its shoes, but in the days of the internet the truth may never get out the door because the lie has flooded the world 3 feet deep. Take for example vaccination. Despite the number of studies that have debunked the vaccination/autism link (including the charging of the original study author with fraud), it is still widely believed by many, referenced by many, and easy to find with a quick google.

ASIDE: Coincidentally, the last two sites I linked in the previous sentence show the same sorts of signs of bias that I am talking about in this article: “Independent News for Independent Minds,” at intellihub.com, and “Real News Powered by the People, Naturally,” for naturalnews.com. In both cases, making the implied case that other news is biased (dependent) or false (not real).

Fact is about authority, not Truth, this is a concept that is hinted at in Plato’s Cave, and serves as the moral in Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum.” It is the postulate of science, that a premises have to be checked and tested, conclusions need to be challenged. It is because of this refusal to trust blindly that we enjoy the standard of living that we do today, as opposed to that of the dark ages. Once we admit that humans are imperfect, we find a way to work around the problem to alleviate the damage the imperfection can do. By being aware of our shortcomings as a species, we create a process by which we can check ourselves and fix our mistakes. If we refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a mistake, the problems will still happen, but they will never be corrected. This is the main problem with a dogmatic approach to anything, if something is the capital-T-Truth, then no matter how wrong it is, it can’t be wrong, and the facts must be adjusted to match the conclusion. This is what gave humanity the dark ages to begin with.

What most bloggers mean when they talk about their own true, unbiased facts, are their opinions. They see the opinions of others as wrong, and their own as correct. Rather than construct their opinions in a compelling way, they rely on a rhetoric that compels any disagreement to be heretical, and thus harm their own authority for all who don’t agree. Authority is all about credibility, and authority is what gives opinion weight. A reasonable person wants a reasonable argument that relies on reasonable and accepted premises, and further, the humility to admit when you make a mistake gives you credibility, because it garners trust. If the goal is to change minds, then trust is important, if the goal, however, is just to preach to the choir, then relying on cognitive bias is more than enough.

Through my experience with blogs, fox news, and true believes, I therefore put forth the following hypothesis, called either “The Blogger’s Rule” or “The Fox Law,” either is acceptable:

A person or organization’s bias is inversely proportional to the amount they insist they are unbiased.

Of course, all this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.

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Reflections on Privacy Post Edward Snowden

Recent revelations that the NSA spies on all internet traffic have caused quite a bit of concern for folks who don’t usually consider these things. Information that we have historically considered private on the internet has really never been, we just haven’t thought about it. Personally, I have given it very little thought since my early days on the web when I played around with PGP.

E-mail has always been a very public way of communicating, and now that I, like many others, rely on cloud services like gmail, all of those messages are stored and maintained outside of my control. It is a great deal of trust to place in a company, to hold all my private correspondence, not just for what the company may do with that information, but for how well they protect it from access by others.

There is good reason to be concerned about the government watching who you associate with, what books you read, and what your political opinions are. These are tools used by tyrants to limit freedoms of expression, belief, and political opinion. This is why our society has traditionally placed limits and oversight on these tools, requiring warrants for wire-taps, for example, but as our methods of communicating have moved from traditional land lines towards e-mail and Facebook, neither the laws nor our own expectations have kept pace with technology. Far too often, we leave a public trail of information that we would never do had we properly thought about it.

Consider the information that a company like Google or Apple or Microsoft may have about you if you have a GMail account, or a Smartphone, or a Mac, or have used Skype. If you use a cloud-based service for your personal mail, all your personal correspondence is stored in one, easily searchable place. There may not be anything in there to incriminate you, but surely there is something you would find publicly embarrassing, whether it’s flirting, sexting, or bad mouthing a friend. All of that is out there someplace. The same goes for chat-logs, browsing history, shopping data, sexual preference(s), and more.

There’s a very good chance that you haven’t done anything illegal, but there’s also a chance that you may have, say, downloaded a song or a movie. If a company dragged through your chat logs, browser history, sniffed your IP Packets, or read your e-mail and sent you a letter to pay them $5,000 or try your luck in court, would that be the worst thing that could happen, or would someone publishing all your best or worst messages to or about your spouse/significant other?

And that’s the personal information that is out there and “secure.” As hacks of Microsoft and Sony have shown, companies aren’t always secure when it comes to how they store things like passwords and credit card information, but even less secure is the information that we transmit when we talk to these sites where our things are stored. It does no good to have a completely locked down and secured e-mail account when we access that account in the clear.

Protocols like http transmit our information across the web in the same way that you are reading this text: available to everyone. This makes it possible for folks on a public wifi to listen in to (almost) everything that you do with tools widely available and easy to use.

There is fortunately some low-hanging fruit that can offer a small amount of protection: use a more secure browser, lock down your laptop with a password, don’t use the same passwords for multiple websites, be careful about what you install on your computer, use https wherever possible. You can even use a program like Tor for more secure browsing, turn off your wifi and bluetooth when you aren’t using it, and put a lock code on your phone.

After the easy stuff, though, it starts to get more complicated, because it comes to making compromises. Facebook is great for keeping in touch with friends, but do I want to give that much information to one company, or expose that much to people who may just be acquaintances or future employers? Am I willing to pay the price of privacy for the sake of convenient communication? Which websites should I trust with my credit card information, and does not trusting them mean that I can’t purchase a product or service I may be interested in? What about e-mail? Should I continue to use the free and well featured GMail, or pay for a more secure account, like Hushmail (which still has a back door to allow government access).

These are questions which were never particularly important to me in the past, after all I am a relative no-one. On this website I practice a modicum of anonymity, but I have no expectations that a reasonably motivated individual couldn’t easily “dox” me. But if I am to become a lawyer, the direction that I am about to go in school, these are questions that I need to consider, particularly when it comes to attorney-client privilege. The trust between a client and a lawyer is as sacred as that between a doctor and a patient, and deserving of maximum protection.

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Reverse Racism is still Racism

 

If you are like me, you probably have a wide range of friends on Facebook. This is a good thing, because you, like I, are exposed to a variety of view points. This saves us by the grace of god from the trap of the echo chamber. But from time to time I see something that irks me for simple reasons like “is it true?” and “what is it saying?” Something like this:

anafricantribe

Image of Massai Warriors Jumping with the following text:

An African tribe does the most beautiful thing.

When someone does something hurtful and wrong, they take the person to the center of town, and the entire tribe comes and surrounds him.

For two days they’ll tell the man every good thing he has ever done.

The tribe believes that every human being comes into the world as Good, each of us desiring safety, love, peace, happiness.

But sometimes in the pursuit of those things people make mistakes. The community sees misdeeds as a cry for help.

They band together for the sake of their fellow man to hold him up, to reconnect him with his true Nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth from which he’d temporarily been disconnected:

“I AM GOOD.”

This was posted by someone who is very liberally, feministly, and compassionately minded, as one would probably guess from the content. But when I see a post like this, I feel an overwhelming urge to respond, because there is something wrong here. Often I don’t, but sometimes, like this, I do, and I always regret it. This was my response:

“If it is the Massai, as the photo implies — the text is frustratingly non-specific, and not some other tribe, then the use of the male pronoun throughout the article is appropriate, since in that culture women are property and they still practice genital mitigation. So, I guess it’s beautiful for the men?”

And this was the rebuttal:

“The beautiful part is the cultural practice of reminding the individual who did something hurtful that they are indeed a good person and that life is about giving and receiving the good in the world. As far as I can tell there isn’t a culture on earth that doesn’t have both beauty and terror in it. If you find one, let me know!”

Now this was kind of the point, that all cultures that have both beauty and terror in them, but there are different levels of beauty and different levels of terror. How offensive would it be to talk about a culture that had managed to embrace equality for all and brotherhood for everyone under a photo of Stalin? Here, the photo and the talk of “an african tribe” use code-words to set up a frame of reference that infers existing prejudices that fill in the blanks.

So let’s say you picture the pastoral tribe, and the intent and beauty that’s intended from the rhetoric of the framer. It’s a nice story, but is it true? There’s no way to know. The tribe isn’t specified, the narrative itself is vague, it doesn’t even mention what crimes would fall under this sort of restorative sentencing. Property crime? Violent crime? A rape? A murder? Copying DVDs for sale in a downtown Dar Es Salaam market? In smaller groups violent crime can be rare, but not unheard of. The bottom line is that there’s no way to easily tell if it’s real or just a nice folk tale.

As a mental experiment, let’s assume for a moment that it is true, and we can infer that the tribe is the Massai, the tribe in the photo. If this were the case, then the use of the male pronoun throughout the description is apt. After all, the Massai are a patriarchal society of warriors: women marry young into polygamous relationships with older men. The Massai practice genital mutilation on women. A warrior tribe of this sort would need to ensure group cohesion in order for the warriors to be able to rely on one another, and so easily forgive one another for transgressions. If it were a rape, would that matter if a woman were just property? Now re-read the story and tell me how beautiful it is.

When code words like “tribe” and “nature” are sprinkled under a photo of tribal warriors, we trigger racism: the reduction of people to a narrow set of prejudicial ideals, and racism is racism regardless of it’s political utility. When you are no longer seeing an individual as a human, but as the projection of one’s own ideals of what that individual should be based on his or her race, then that is racism.

There are those who, for whatever reason, believe that tribal people, be they aboriginals, africans, or whichever group, are some how more “wise” and “in touch with nature” than others. They see the exceptionalism of the noble savage, and rather than see a complex people with needs, wants, flaws, and loves, they see a non-person, a group painted with an unfair brush, a hypothetical perfection that drags with it other unfair stereotypes. This group has achieved something beyond the compromises of civilization, they practiced neither war, nor slavery, were excellent stewards of the land, and were healthier than we are today. All historically incorrect, and a simplification of a very complex people with a long history, and multiple cultures with different practices and values. They were people, with needs, wants, flaws, and loves. They were as imperfect as anyone else, and shouldn’t be delegated to non-personhood because of a prejudicial idealism.

Aboriginals, of the Americas, or Australia, or Africa, are people, and both the racism that tells you they are all drunks and the racism that tells you that they are all wise stewards of the land, are both racism. They are people, equals to you or I in the law of our society, in the law of basic human rights, and in the law of nature that makes us human.

Of course there is wisdom in the practices of tribes, but there is also wisdom in the practices of modern society, too. There is wisdom in every people and in every person. The wisdom is found in the practices of the culture improve the values of the society, for good or ill. In my society, Canada, our values have been spelled out in the Charter, and in the history of the English Common Law tradition. Those who see the wisdom of the tribal elders should like common law: it’s a system whereby appointed elders sit in rational judgement based on values and tradition, and can overturn even laws passed by elected officials that violate our core principles. In fact, the Canadian system has even adopted something very much like the restorative justice spelled out in the article above.

Even with all it’s flaws and it’s racist undertones, it’s a beautiful idea. But I think the system we have is even more beautiful, it gave us women’s suffrage and gay marriage even when public opinion was having none of it, against the mob-rule of the tribe. Protecting people’s basic rights even when it’s unpopular? That’s kind of beautiful. Is it perfect? No, but what is?

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