More non-English phobias

The Telegraph (in the UK) published a piece about how immigrants should be required to learn English before they settle in England.

I love the ironic ignorance of history, linguistics, and anthropology that leads to articles like this. And I love the totally ironic error in the sub-headline:

The inability to speak a host country’s language ... is a very reasonable requirement of any immigrant.

I guess the Normans don't belong in England. The Saxons came after the Angles, and THEY replaced the Celts, who were themselves cultural and linguistic invaders. None of them spoke the "native" languages.

But what is more ironic is that the author claims that we need to all speak one language so that we don't have "dangerous divisions". This is a totally unsubstantiated claim; lots of countries do just fine with minority populations that speak different languages; but then the author goes and cites CANADA as an example of a country that requires a language test to get in. Um... maybe someone should tell him that we don't all speak the same language in Canada? Yeesh. I guess we're dangerously unstable? Oh wait... nope, it's just a few crackpots that occasionally cause the odd ruckus about Quebec, while meanwhile separatist sentiment waxes and wanes. Oh wait, didn't England have a problem of this sort? Like, hm, Ireland? I'm pretty sure they speak English there.

I addressed some of the points about immigrants learning new languages in my previous post on this topic. To sum it up, I don't think it makes sense to force immigrants to learn the language when we don't force natives to learn the language. Research has shown (and your own intuition should also show this) that the children of immigrants assimilate quite quickly and within a couple generations they are indistinguishable from the natives. This is most true when it comes to language, as children learn languages really really easily.

What this all amounts to is that language is used as a proxy for racism and xenophobia. You can't shut the door on immigrants, you can't single out all the Muslims or Indians who want to move to England, but maybe you can raise the bar high enough that it's impractical for those people to move there.

As an aside, Joshua Gans wrote about his taking of the English test for moving to Canada. Frankly it's quite absurd that an economics professor from Australia, who has published books in English, is made to take a test to prove that he speaks the language. Surely this is something that would be immediately apparent from a simple 15-minute interview? Testing native speakers is a waste of time and money, and testing other immigrants is xenophobia and racism.

Virginity tests

In Egypt, the military administered virginity tests on female prisoners.

W. T. F.

The general who admitted to this crime rationalizes his behaviour:

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs). ... We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

My irony meter exploded when I read that last part.  So, to prevent them claiming that they had been sexually assaulted, you ... sexually assaulted them? And since they supposedly weren't virgins at the time of their capture, that means you have no way to prove that they haven't been raped in your captivity. Boy, you must be disappointed that you went to all that trouble for nothing!

Sadly, this sort of behaviour is too commonplace in other parts of the world. Here in Canada, we generally don't tolerate sexual abuse or rape. It must suck to be female and to live elsewhere. Dear women of Egypt, and other places where the men can't be trusted: you are welcome to come to Canada. Leave the jerks behind though.

France's anti-veil law

Recently two women were arrested in France for wearing a veil in public. The article in The Star says that one of the women was arrested because she was part of an illegal protest, and because she "refused to disperse" when asked to. (The French law tries to be very PC and avoids mentioning Islam, women, or veils, but let's not be naive. This is clearly about Muslim women wearing veils.)

In the middle ages it was fashionable to hate the Jews, because they had the temerity to keep to themselves and refuse to integrate into Christendom. Now that we're more enlightened, it's fashionable to hate the Muslims, because they dress differently and refuse to integrate into Christendom.

Wait, how exactly can one woman "disperse"? Was she supposed to de-materialize?

Personally, I don't like the Muslim veils. I see it primarily as a tool for male oppression of females. But you know what? If a woman wants to wear a veil in public, she should be allowed to. What's next? Laws banning mini-skirts? Laws banning socks with sandals?

In Canada, we believe in Freedom. Personal liberty is an extremely important concept. Privacy is as well. So why should we tell someone that their dress code is wrong? If they choose to wear it, that's their choice.

Some women don't have a choice. Their husbands or fathers or other relatives will force them, one way or another, to comply with their medieval religious ideals. But guess what? We already have laws against this behaviour. Why would we need another law specifically singling out one kind of abuse? Honour Killings are against the law no matter whether the reason was because she had sex out of wedlock or because she didn't want to wear a frickin' scarf. If some jerk tries to force her to wear the scarf, HE should be punished. If SHE chooses to wear the scarf, by all means, let her.

Inevitably someone will mention some ridiculous edge case that supposedly makes my argument moot. Such as the commentor on the Star who says "I saw a woman driving while wearing a niqab." But we already have laws that stipulate what constitutes safe driving. You could be charged for dangerous driving if you were, say, driving while blind, or driving while wearing contact lenses that block your vision. Even if everyone can see your face.

I can hear the other whiners now. "But what if I'm working at a bank, and this person comes in and says she's my customer, but I can't recognize her? What if we need her driver's license photo? What if, what if?!" Clearly, if a person must be identified, then they must be identified. But how often do YOU need to be identified on a daily basis? I certainly almost never need to be. I can pay for things with a credit-card and enter my PIN and nobody needs to know who I am. I can walk around the city and it doesn't matter who I am. I can get on the TTC with my Metropass and it makes no difference if the driver can see my face or not. So why should it be against the law for me to cover my face? Or for a Muslim woman to do so?

The comments posted on the Star's article are FULL of racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia. Canadians (at least, the ones who posted on that article) seem to be very insecure about their country and the demands that Multiculturalism (tm) places on it.  You know what? Canada has ALWAYS been multicultural. From the very first colonists who landed here and started integrating with the existing population... oh wait, that's not how it happened. Two dominant European cultures came here and fought everyone else into submission for centuries, until they reached an uneasy peace. Then we opened our doors to other cultures... as long as they weren't too shocking. No Asians or Africans or other "visible minorities" please.  It wasn't until the late 20th century that we finally reached something like true Freedom and openness. I mean, until Trudeau, we were a model of tolerance and freedom. Forget about the Japanese internment camps. Or the Residential schools for the natives. Or better yet, DON'T FORGET about those things.  Canada's history (and the world's history) is full of misdeeds and shameful things we'd sooner forget, but we must always remember our mistakes. Let's not add systemic, legalized Islamophobia to that list.

Canada has some important values. Freedom and equality are the most important. Our women must be free from the religious tyranny commonly associated with Islam. But not all Muslim women are oppressed. And not all oppressed women are Muslim. Don't be afraid of the veil. Be afraid of tyranny, and stand up against it. Let ALL our women be free, including being free to choose the veil. France's law, and its oppression of its own citizens, should be condemned.

No, it was the *first* thing that was disgusting

The following story is true.

I was sitting on a crowded subway when I noticed that a couple doors away there was a stroller parked, essentially blocking the door. It didn't much matter that the door was blocked because the stroller was moved in as far as it could be and the train was full. The father was all the way in the train and the mother was at the outside edge by the door, having barely squeezed in. So far, nothing amiss.


Then, at the next stop, I overheard the father telling the mother not to let someone on the train. She was telling the person on the platform not to push her because there was no room for them to get on.  The father started shouting at someone on the platform, and then he said "Come on! I'll kick your ass!"

By now, everyone nearby was watching the spectacle, because the potential for violence on a train always merits vigilance. But I don't think anyone expected the father to do what he did.

As the doors were closing, he spit this huge spray of spit, right out the door.  Right over his kid's stroller, right past his wife, and (because it was a pretty wide spray) he probably got everyone else who was crammed into that doorway.

Someone standing nearby said "That's disgusting!"

His reply? "No. You know what's disgusting? That guy was calling me on, right in front of my kid!"

I nearly burst into flames from the irony.

Build-a-Bear part 3

I've posted before about my build-a-bear cake pan. I've used it a couple of times now and I think I can finally claim to have the hang of it. I've made the bear cake maybe half-a-dozen times and each time it has turned out more or less ok.  However, the last two times I upped the ante a bit by using fondant for decorating it. This gives the bear "clothes" and is a really good finishing touch to make the bear look special.

I googled around for other people's advice on using this cake pan and I was surprised at how many people couldn't get the bear to assemble properly. People claimed there wasn't enough batter in the recipe, or the cake fell apart, or other problems. I have to say that not once has the back-of-the-box recipe failed me in any way. It makes a cake that is strong enough to stand up, good-tasting, and the proper quantity for the bear pan.

That being said, I have a new challenge when making this cake. My son is allergic to milk and eggs, and thus we've had to vegan-ize some of our recipes. In some cases that's easy to do but in this recipe we have to replace 4 eggs. However with a bit of experimentation I came upon a winning formula. I replaced the milk with soy milk (plain, sweetened, unflavoured). I replaced the butter with half shortening, half margarine (this mixture worked well for me when making cookies). For the eggs, I replaced the eggs with 1/4 cup per egg of pureed pumpkin, and I tripled the baking powder. Since I was making a pumpkin cake I also added some spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice.

The resulting cake was better than any of the previous bear cakes I've ever made, and if I do say so myself, was better than almost any cake I've ever made. It was moist and rich, yet strong enough to stand in bear-shape.  I had a bit of minor tearing when the cake came out of the pan, but the head didn't fall off and I was able to fix up any glitches with a patch of icing.  Once iced there was no way to tell that it wasn't the same old dry cake underneath.

Since I also couldn't make buttercream icing I used my half shortening, half margarine substitution for the butter and added a touch of pumpkin and some spices. Then I iced the entire cake, even the parts which would end up covered in fondant.  Finally, I rolled,  cut and trimmed the fondant and dressed the bear up in its outfit.  Since I was making a white dress I used white fondant and didn't bother with any dyes (I did dye the buttercream icing brown).  Dyeing fondant is a major hassle (I spent more time dyeing the fondant when I made a Santa bear last Christmas than I did doing any other part of the decoration).  I used white icing to trim the edges of the dress.

The last touches of decor on the bear are the eyes, nose, and feet-pads. For these I simply melted some chocolate chips in margarine, stirred, put it into a plastic sandwich bag, cut the corner, and squeezed it out. This makeshift cake-decorating bag was enough to make these flat-ish elements. The resulting bear was cute enough that when I brought it to my friend's baby shower, people on the subway and street stopped to talk to me about it, and nobody at the shower wanted to actually cut the cake. So I call this one a success.

They don't build them like they used to

So my notebook computer died.  It was only 2.5 years old and it had almost never been used as a portable computer; it spent most of its time tethered to the A/C adapter and the mouse.

It was a not bad computer, feature-wise, but I did have to buy a notebook cooler because it would overheat when I played games.  The battery stopped working one day, but that wasn't a big deal because I never moved the notebook.  I only bought a notebook because I needed to be able to put it away back when I lived in a condo.

Anyway, when your computer dies it's hard to write infrequent blog posts and do all those other important things I like to do with my computer.  So I had to buy a new one.  Problem was, I didn't know what to buy since I normally research my computer purchases on my computer before I buy them.  I was in a situation I've never been in before: needing to buy a new computer and being without a current one.  Ever since my parents first bought the XT back in '87 there's been a PC in the house.  I started feeling twitchy after about 6 hours.  I had to do something, and fast.

The problem with replacing a notebook is that your choices are A) another notebook (yech) or B) a whole new PC.  I opted for a desktop PC because I like desktops better.  But that meant I had to buy EVERYTHING, since I didn't have an old Desktop that would contribute a few parts here and there.  Actually I had to make a second trip to the store, because I planned to re-use my old DVD burner from my barely-working HTPC, but it turns out that burner is IDE and "modern" motherboards don't have IDE anymore, not even one port.  I don't really miss it but it is annoying.

I ended up getting

• Asus P6X58D-E motherboard
• Intel i7 950
• 6GB DDR3 RAM
• 1TB SATA3 HDD
• ATI Radeon HD 5850
• CoolerMaster case
• Samsung BX2335 23" HD LED display
• Windows 7 64-bit

 The display is nice and the increased speed of this PC is nice too.  Widows 7 is an improvement over Vista and XP.  So overall I'm pleased.  One thing that struck me is how long it took to put all this together.  Some things have not changed since 1995 when I used to assemble PCs for a living, but one notable change is that almost everything is integrated on the motherboard now.  That saves some time.  Installing CPUs (the first time, anyway) is as easy as it's ever been; put it in the socket, close the lever, snap the fan down, done.  The video cards are huge these days, and there's lots of power connectors everywhere, but what seemed to take the longest for me was getting all the extra crap plugged into the motherboard.  Every fan, button, external SATA connecter, etc, needs to be plugged into the right spot.  My case has a bunch of external features on it (hard drive dock, USB, eSATA, audio, etc) and those all need to be hooked up.  Once it's done, though, it's a nice case with easy-to-access features.  If only the SATA dock was hot-pluggable (maybe it can be, but it didn't work for me).

The annoying thing is that I didn't want to buy a computer right now, I was hoping to keep the notebook a bit longer.  Maybe I erred when I named it "Ephemeron".  I won't repeat that mistake again.  The new PC's name is "Eternia".

Mandatory Language Tests for Immigrants

It seems that all skilled immigrants to Canada will need to pass a language proficiency test.  Even those whose native language is English and whose careers are based on daily use of the English language.

At first glance this seems like a reasonable idea.  The truth is it is a dangerous tool which can be used to enforce racist and xenophobic policies under the guise of "integration".  However, it seems like enough of the commentors on the Star's website disagree with me. When I read the comments I was disappointed to find that most of those writing were supportive of the new policy and hostile to foreigners.  My own comment achieved a stunning 16 "disagrees", a new record for me.

The article talks about a woman who was born in New York, graduated from Harvard and has been practising law for 13 years.  Clearly there is no need to test this person on her language ability.  To suggest that anyone in the government Canada is even qualified to pass judgment on her language skills is ridiculous.  Yet she must prepare for the language test while simultaneously managing her home life and career.

Wait, what?

She has to prepare?  Many of the comments on the Star were questioning this.  Why should she need to prepare if she is so confident of her language skills?

Well, the sad truth is that language tests are notorious for being debatable about their content.  Thankfully, the test in question doesn't have any grammar questions (despite newspaper reports to the contrary), and seems to be completely about reading and writing comprehension.  But the truth is that any test which measures "language" is going to be strongly influenced by how well the test-taker understands the desired answer to a question.  A person's grasp of language is not necessarily related to their grasp of test-taking.  And since she must pay to take the test, it behoves her to prepare, so that her money isn't wasted by an over-zealous and pedantic test-grader.

Besides the dubious nature of testing a native English speaker's grasp of English, and the obvious waste of resources this entails, is the question of whether or not this exercise has any merit whatsoever.

The comments on the Star were full of sad, sad stories about going into a shop and not being able to find an employee who spoke English.  My heart nearly broke into a million pieces as these poor, poor people recounted their tales.  The ordeals of a lady who couldn't find an English speaker in a shop in Chinatown.  The escapades of a gentleman who was unable to locate the kolbasa in the grocery store and couldn't find an employee who understood his question.

All of these stories have something in common.  The speaker suffers from an absurdly inflated sense of entitlement.  They act as if they are being personally injured or insulted when they go somewhere and someone doesn't speak their language.  It never occurs to them that THEY are somehow flawed for not knowing more than one language.  They just bitch and whine that multiculturalism is a failure.  They ignore the fact that all of them are descended from people who didn't speak the local language when they arrived: none of their ancestors spoke the languages of the Natives.  The hypocrisy goes further, however, because these same people are the type that go into Quebec and complain that the people don't speak English.

Ignoring the petty 'foreign employee in a shop' syndrome, the bigger question is whether or not non-local-speakers are even useful to the society at large.  It should be pretty clear that they are.  There is no reason that a doctor can't practice medicine in Chinese or in Italian if they have Chinese or Italian patients.  This doctor may have difficulty reading the laws on what drugs are legal, or other various tasks, but isn't it the job of the medical college to regulate such things? If the college decided to offer its services in Chinese (because the Chinese population will soon be the biggest minority group in Canada) would that somehow harm the English-speaking doctors and patients?  For regulated professions we have licensing and examination boards to keep out people who can't function in those roles.  For any other task, why does it matter if the person is illiterate in English?  The electrician who comes to your house to install a new light fixture doesn't need to speak English.  He needs to know how to install wiring, and he needs to know how to communicate with YOU.  If you (hypothetically) only speak German, then that's what he needs to speak.

Furthermore, it's also pretty obvious that monolingualism is an artifact of (some) adult immigrants only.  Their children will always (always!) learn the local language.  They will be bilingual, speaking their home language at home and their local language at school and work.  And their children are (sadly) almost always monolingual in the local language.  This always happens, as long as the family stays in the country.  So any worries about Canada turning into some country where nobody can speak to anybody are just ridiculous.

Finally, Canada is supposed to be a free country.  If I decide that I want to speak nothing but Esperanto, and I teach my children only this language, and I home-school them, and throw away my TV, is this not my choice?  Sure, nobody will be able to communicate with me.  But don't I have the right? Don't I have the right to try to find work at an Esperanto-friendly business, dealing with Esperanto-speaking customers?  Don't I have the right to fail at that task?  Of course I do.  But I was BORN in Canada.  Newcomers aren't allowed to fail and aren't allowed to even try.