[PHOTO] The sheds and shacks of Covehead

[PHOTO] Men's rights on the Toronto subway

This Lifemates dating ad on a subway car on the Bloor-Danforth line was first defaced by--I presume--an advocate of the men's rights movement. "WOMEN EXPLOIT MEN - BEFORE, DURING & AFTER MARRIAGE" the author wrote in red block letters. "lol men's rights" below appeared at a later date.

(What this dialogue means, I do not know. Ridiculosity at least got publically contested.)

[LINK] Two Tin Man posts on same-sex marriage in the United States

In a welcome return to blogging, the Tin Man has made a couple of posts on same-sex marriage in the United States. The first, "The Next Marriage Debate", touches on second-order consequences of same-sex marriage.

Having lost the debate over public discrimination, opponents of equality have moved on — or retreated — to arguing for the right to private discrimination, couched as “religious liberty”: the right of bakers, photographers, florists, and so on, to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings. First the opponents feared that churches would be forced to marry gay couples, but most of them soon realized this was ridiculous, since the First Amendment prevents the government from forcing churches to perform particular religious services. So they moved on from defending religious institutions to defending businesses owned by religious individuals.

That’s a murkier issue. Whether private businesses have the right to discriminate is something on which I haven’t completely made up my mind. My gut and my heart firmly oppose such discrimination; I don’t see why a private business has any more right to discriminate against gay couples than it has the right to discriminate against a particular race. If you choose to enter the public marketplace, you must play by public rules. Adults should know that they can’t always do what they want. It’s the price for being a member of society.

But part of me can see the other side. Photography and baking and flower arranging are not just business practices; they are also forms of artistic, personal expression, expressions of one’s selfhood. And if someone really, truly opposes gay weddings, should we make that person take part in such a wedding?

The second, "On Rod Dreher and the Futility of Arguing", reacts to a Rod Dreher column prophesizing doom.

Logic doesn’t work, because a person’s beliefs are a product of one’s own psychology, one’s own biochemistry, one’s own history, and those are deep-rooted and powerful things. It’s like thinking all you need to do is repair a patch in the ceiling, and realizing you actually need to tear the whole house down to fix the problem.

Anyway, to counter Dreher: he really thinks that letting five percent of the population get married is what will “topple the cultural authority of Christianity”? Does he not realize that centuries of epochal change in our understanding of the universe and ourselves have already toppled it? Galileo, Newton, evolution, the germ theory of disease, Freud, brain science, the whole scientific revolution — no, apparently gay marriage is the Rubicon, the final straw.

[LINK] "Windsor-Detroit border project needs $250M from U.S."

I've been following the ongoing issues surrounding the ideologically-driven reluctance of the responsible parties in the United States to build a second bridge to serve the needs of the Detroit-Windsor conurbation straddling the Ontario-Michigan border. This CBC report doesn't reassure me.

(Does the United States want Canada to take over Detroit?)

Canadian poiticians and border critics want U.S. President Barack Obama’s to include $250 million US in his next budget for a new customs plaza in Detroit.

It's one of the biggest and most critical pieces of infrastructure needed in a new international crossing between Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, Mich.

Canada has pledged to pay for the entire $1-billion span and property acquisition in Detroit, but wants the U.S. to pay for and build a new $250-million customs plaza in Detroit.

Last month, Ottawa dedicated $630 million for property acquisitions in Detroit and preparatory construction work.

Roy Norton, Canada's consul general in Detroit, said “all of the other hurdles have been overcome” in moving forward with a new bridge.

Last year, Obama issued a presidential permit for the bridge. Only America's commitment to a new customs plaza is lacking.

“There’s no formal commitment on the part of the U.S. government to fund that customs plaza,” Norton said.

Earlier this month, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had failed to commit to funding for the plaza on the U.S. side. He called it a major hurdle in the construction of the crossing.

In an effort to force the funding, U.S. Representative Gary Peters introduced the Customs Plaza Construction Act of 2014. It calls on Washington to commit $250 million to the new plaza.

"This budget could be a logical opportunity to do that,” Norton said.

[LINK] "From Syria to São Paulo

Monique Sochaczewski's recent article published at The Cairo Review of Global Affairs takes a look at the presence of Syrians of whatever religious background (and Arabs more generally) in Brazil. Brazil's large populations of Arab and Jewish background dates back to the 1880s, and have seen interesting fluxes in identity, political behaviour, and relationships with other groups.

Middle Eastern immigrants began trickling into Brazil as early as the 1850s, and Arab descendants mark 1885 as the official beginning of their immigration from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. The 1890s witnessed the first large-scale arrival. The Rio newspaper Gazeta de Notícias reported that crowds of “strange tanned and bearded men” attracted much “admiration and distrust” on the part of Brazilians. Those first immigrants largely became peddlers, initially selling objects brought from the Holy Land, such as amulets, rosaries, and small religious images. They later began to sell matches, clothes, and haberdashery in remote places that did not have established trade, such as in the suburbs and regions far from urban centers. Arab peddlers spread throughout the country.

About 4.5 million immigrants entered Brazil between 1872 and 1949. Approximately 400,000 of these were Asians, Arabs, and Jews. Europeans, who made up the majority of the immigrants, were welcomed and could rely on large private or public programs to help them settle. The Brazilian government and the elites believed that Europeans were the “ideal immigrants,” able to work as farmers, settlers, and craftsmen; and they also assisted in “whitening” society after centuries of African slavery. Asians, Arabs, and Jews on the other hand, were considered by the government and elites as non-white or “imperfect white” and, with the exception of the Japanese arrivals in 1908, could not rely on official immigration programs at all.

The Arabs were Ottoman subjects leaving an empire that did not officially allow their departure, as they were needed for cultivating the land and serving in the army. The Sublime Porte also feared the poor image that some immigrants projected of the Ottoman Empire—as they begged on the streets of European cities such as Marseille and Genoa to afford passage to the Americas. The Brazilian government showed little interest in encouraging immigrants who had no intention of working in agriculture and were not seen as white and Western.

[. . .]

Over time, these immigrants and their descendants began to project varying identities. Some 85 percent of the Arabs in all the waves of immigration to Brazil were predominantly Christian; they included Roman Catholics, Maronites, Antiochene Orthodox, Melkites, and Protestants. As the anthropologist Paulo Pinto points out, some immigrants focused on ethnic issues, using the generic term “Arab” or the term “Syrian-Lebanese” common in Brazil. Others gave more importance to their places of origin, such as Beirut, Zahle, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Homs, Aleppo, or Damascus. There was still an emphasis on “national” origin, including by Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians. Among the Muslim immigrants, membership in one of the various sects, such as Sunni, Shiite, Druze, and Alawite, also shaped their self-designation. Jews immigrating from the Middle East could have an Arab or Sephardic identity, as well as a deep connection to their hometowns, such as Sidon, Safed, Beirut, Istanbul, or Smyrna.

Until the 1940s, a relatively close relationship existed among Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, and Arab Jews in Brazil. In a series of popular essays on the religions of Rio de Janeiro published in 1904, the Brazilian writer João do Rio noted that the Arab Jews of the city center were more integrated with the rest of the Arab immigrants than with the Ashkenazi Jews of European background, who also had begun to settle in what was then capital of the country. The historian Rachel Mizrahi, in her 2003 book Jewish Immigrants of the Middle East: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, highlights that the area of Rio where Arab Muslim, Christian and Jewish families lived was called Little Turkey—a reference to the Ottoman Arab territories—and that it was a space of “respect and cordiality.” There are some published memoirs and photographs that evoke the rounds of hookah and backgammon games that united the Arabs of different religions in downtown Rio in the first decades of the twentieth century. Something quite similar happened in São Paulo’s Mooca district.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the CRTC, Cancon porn, and cultural identity in Canada

The CRTC, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, has appeared on A Bit More Detail a few times before, in 2009 regarding Al-Jazeera and last year in relation to the demand of little-watched Sun TV for promotion on cable packages (1, 2). The news--as noted at Global News--that the CRTC is looking into channels which don't show enough porn from Canada

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) claims the company behind AOV Adult Movie Channel, XXX Action Clips Channel and Maleflixxx isn’t broadcasting enough homegrown pornography.

Toronto-based Channel Zero, which owns the speciality channels, is required by its license to air at least 35 per cent Canadian programming “over the broadcast year and during the evening broadcast period.”

The CRTC is holding a hearing on April 28 to review the license renewal application for the channels.

The regulator is also concerned the broadcaster failed to provide the minimum 90 per cent closed captioning for English-language programming.

The CRTC could choose not to renew Channel Zero’s license, to renew it for a shorter period, or suspend it with an order to comply with the license conditions.

Channel Zero is not commenting on the CRTC’s concerns but has previously described the lack of Canadian programming as an error.

Canada is a major player in the production of porn, with thriving companies based in Toronto and Montreal.

I'm inclined to wonder if this might not be a bad way of getting more high-profile Canadian porn produced. Cancon seems to have helped produce stronger music and other cultural industries, after all. I'm also inclined to consider seriously the argument of The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor that this raises issues of the relevance of Canadian content regulation to some media.

[I]n a land awash in American programming, Canadian content regulations have a larger purpose, to reserve some portion of cultural space for domestic product so that Canadians occasionally see Canada and Canadians on TV. Adult movies may be culture in the broadest definition of the term, but they don’t have much redeeming social value. Unlike sitcoms or dramas, which are potentially filled with meaning that contributes to a social conversation, porn is a generic product whose national origins are as unimportant as those of a light bulb or a vibrator.

Beyond that, however, lies a nastier question about all Canadian broadcasting: How effectively can you ever compel commercial interests to advance public policy objectives? Lots of anodyne specialty channels featuring comedy, cooking and cartoons as well as the main commercial networks themselves have to meet more onerous programming requirements than the AOV trio and it is often not in their best business interests to do so. Depending on their niche, they can usually buy American content more cheaply than they can produce Canadian, and they rarely show much enthusiasm for their obligations, squirming around the regulations in one inventive way or another. Commercial Canadian broadcaster is something of an oxymoron; one of the reasons Canada needs a powerful public broadcaster is so that at least one institution can operate free of that contradiction and dedicate itself to Canadian programming.

Thoughts?