La Noirceur nouvelle, cru 2015

Last night several feminists I follow on Twitter (québecoises and from the rest of Canada) tweeted the link to a breaking news story in Le Devoir regarding some hidden provisions in Bill 20, currently moving thru the Assemblée nationale.

This bill, framed as a necessary - AUSTERITY! - reform to the programs which regulate how healthcare is provided by physicians in Québec, was bulldozed through Québec's legislative assembly by the Minister for Health Dr Barrette.  The crumbs of information disclosed reveal that family physicians as well as specialists working for community-based public healthcare service providers will be penalized if they don't obey Barrette's complicated system of quotas.

Interestingly enough, specialists employed by private sector clinics that are owned by physicians who are incorporated as business entities are not restricted by these new regulations.  For example radiologists - unless employed by a hospital, individual practitioners - are still allowed to be as greedy as they want.  Dr Barrette and his spouse are radiologists.

Prochoice providers of women's reproductive healthcare crunched the numbers and revealed another repressive aspect of the Québec Liberal regime's proposed system (loosely translated from story here):

The Minister of Health Gaétan Barrette will limit the number of abortions done by Quebec physicians. In a departmental working document, it was said that abortions will no longer be considered as priority medical activities, which will result in the closing of clinics and thus limit access to first-trimester pregnancy termination.

The devil is in the details. For months now, health care stakeholders demanded to see the famous regulations that Bill 20 will impose. A draft regulation, obtained by the Women's Health Centre in Montreal and consulted by Le Devoir, set off reactions. "Bill 20 was passed without consulting patients, which is extremely dangerous! Women's reproductive health and ensuring prompt access to abortion is fundamental to women's rights. This is a basic criterion of equality between men and women."

The director of the Women's Health Center, Anne-Marie Messier, is angry.  Thirty doctors and directors of family planning clinics sent a letter to the Minister to denounce this attack upon the rights of Québecoises. "By trivializing the important work of doctors (mostly women) working in providing abortions and related services in reproductive health, the Liberal government seriously undermines the right of women to comprehensive reproductive health care in Quebec," they wrote.

Jabba the Hutt doppelgänger Dr Barrette is infamous for throwing his political weight around, bullying his opponents into silence.  On radio, he hectored women for their hysterical stupidity.

But women have reacted rationally and calmly to Bill 20's proposed reforms.

Toula Drimonis published this.

As it stands, the proposed legislation would impose a maximum quota of 504 abortions per doctor per year, even though the number of physicians performing abortions is already limited in this province. This morning, Barrette said that physicians regularly performing abortions would be given “exemptions” to the restrictions. I still don’t quite understand why you would create a law limiting the number of abortions a physician can perform and then hand out “exemptions” to that very same law. What’s the point? Are these measures aimed at reducing costs or are they simply meant to open the door to privatizing these services? One has to wonder. 

If a woman doesn’t have access to one of the very few abortion clinics that exist, then a woman would have to go through her family doctor or another specialist, and eventually that doctor is going to hit a quota. And then what? What does that woman do? As it currently stands, too many Quebecers don’t even have access to a family doctor. A woman without access to one wishing to terminate her pregnancy would have to resort to her CLSC or another clinic, significantly increasing the chances of coming across that quota once again. Particularly in rural areas. 

Let’s not forget that Barrette and his band of merry cost-cutting men (women too, sadly) are also behind governmental efforts to significantly limit access to in-vitro fertilization treatment (IVF), going as far as making it illegal for women over 42 to get IVF. With this bill, only women aged 18 to 42 would have access to IVF treatment — after passing a psychological evaluation. A psychological evaluation…

During that period of Québec history known as "La grande noirceur", Premier Duplessis colluded with the Catholic Church to suppress women's rights. Married women were ostracized by their parish priests if they used birth control. Union organizers like Madeleine Parent and Léa Roback were harassed.

A regressive, patriarchy-tinged backlash is burbling in Québec, much like an over-full septic tank that's been overlooked.  In spite of secularity being the dominant discourse, recent events such as violence incited by the proposed Charter, the emergence of many antiChoice Pregnancy Crisis Centres - which my co-blogger investigated here - a judge refusing to hear the testimony of a woman clad in hijab, suggest that Dr Gaétan 'Duplessis' Barrette is a carbuncle, a symptom of toxic misogyny seething in the body politic. 

"Participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic"

I can't take my eyes off Greece, because it continues to be Ground Zero for the next phase of the economic Great Game we're all forced to play. I was originally going to call this post, "Long Live Death"---this is a title that Dr. Dawg likes to use when referring to fascist-exterminationist tendencies---but then I read this deliciously horrifying Crooked Timber post on security changes at Greek universities.

To put a long story short, as I understand it, after Greece's dictatorship years, police were banned from university campuses for obvious reasons. Greece recently abolished university asylum after the recommendations from a recent report on campus security which ends, after translation, like this:

The politicizing of universities – and in particular, of students – represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic.

Now for the horrifying but satisfyingly predictable punchline: one of the coauthors of this report is *drumroll* UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi (who is of Greek origin and Was There during the overthrow of the dictatorship). Y'all have probably already heard of her role in the Kampus Kaptain Kapsicum outrage at UC Davis.

Um. But the quote from the report is delicious indeed. I would like to give it an "amen".

Now the original point I was going to write about is on a very related note, Greece again. This is the "Long Live Death" bit. Mark Ames at Naked Capitalism informs us of just who is participating in the austerity satrapy in Greece. Take a look at this:

That is Greece's new Minister of Industry, as a law student in the 80s, carrying a club intended, presumably, to brain leftist students. Think this was a youthful indiscretion? Sadly, no. He is a member of the neo-fascist LAOS party. Which is, in fact, also an old-fashioned anti-Semitic party: as in, real anti-Semitism, not mere human sympathy for the Palestinians. But real, right-wing anti-Semitism is not really an factor in consideration, when it comes to the empire of austerity so desired by the 1%.

Finance to Greece: elect a new people, or else

I note with some happiness and satisfaction for the future of the human race that the Greek government has decided to put the latest "bailout", handed down from on high by non-Greek politicians in the thrall of big finance, to a referendum. I note with further satisfaction the howls of outrage represented in the "market reaction", and the absolute naked hatred for democracy demonstrated thereby. Exposed and ugly as ever.

Prepare for massive application of shock doctrine tactics to the Greek people. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks were eventually to vote yes, even though I am firmly hoping for a no. Make no mistake: the brutal confidence fairy's insatiable thirst for the well-being of the old and the future of the young will not be slaked by another austerity package.

This is the lesson: you cannot have free trade without political union. One is the other. All supranational free trade (protected investment) zones are political unions. Most of them are hidden corporate dictatorships. Now the Greek government---as part of a gamble for the political capital that they would get on a yes, notwithstanding the fact that the situation had become untenable in Athens---has done the unforgivable and exposed this reality. Europe will have to decide whether it is going to implement democracy or abandon the project (or resort to corporatist military coups in noncompliant states...).

I for one am with you, Hellas. Here's hoping that they'll retain the strength to say no, and to force the rest of Europe to stop trying to pass the buck. The truth is, a referendum is far preferable to what would follow if the world is forced to feed the vampire squid another decade.

I don't believe in fairies. Unicorns, maybe. Fairies, no. Especially not confidence fairies.

Sometimes there just isn't a scientific theory

One of the hopes of creationists battling the nefarious forces of evolution is this: that once evolution is "debunked" or "disproved", there will be only its obvious counterpart left standing. Creationism, in some form. But, alas, no---their hope is in vain. If someone manages to "disprove" evolution (how?), what we will be left with is nothing. Not Young Earth Creationism, not Intelligent Design, just...nothing. Yep, the Empty Theory. That's because creationism is not a second-best scientific alternative to evolution. It's not a scientific theory. We don't have a second-best alternative to the overall theoretical framework of evolution.

Get it? There are some things for which we have no theory. Perhaps (though I dislike assuming this), there are possibly even things for which we can't have a theory for purely analytic reasons. Free Will, for example. Sometimes there just isn't a scientific theory.

So it is with some frustration-tinged amusement that I watch the econo-folks at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative attempt to, um, rationalize away the criticism of rational actor/homo economicus thinking in mainstream economics. Recall that the criticism of the rational actor type of modeling is that it uses a rather constricted robots-in-a-maze autonomous agent modeling to substitute for a robust understanding of why people do what they do. Mike Moffatt defends it by proposing...a rather constricted robots-in-a-maze autonomous agent sort of modeling based in abstract preferences whose inter-relationships are hopelessly trivial and cannot possibly bear any resemblance to how people arrange preferences in the real world. (Entirely leaving aside how value-laden these models are constructed in practice...)

But this is just par for the course.

What tickled me the most, though, was when my old babble econ sparring partner Stephen Gordon wrote plaintively in comments: "...And thrown away in favour of what, precisely?"

As I answered, nothing. Thrown away in favour of nothing. Sometimes there just isn't a scientific theory. Sometimes when a theory is shown to be, if not analytically incoherent, totally inadequate to the task, there is not an alternative waiting in the wings. It's merely that the entire line of thinking must come to a standstill to be dusted off until better days, or, as in the case of astrology, never, outside of newspaper back pages.

The relevance of all of this is amply and repeatedly illustrated during this endless worldwide financial crisis. Take a look at this horrific Financial Times op-ed piece by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (say it fast ten times; to read it past the pay wall use the title in your favorite search engine; h/t Yves Smith). Now look at this rebuttal.

Will austerity bring back the confidence fairy? Who knows? Is the flu caused by unfavourable astrological influences? Who kno---oh. Mighty Science does know the answer to that one, and no, it ain't the stars. Seriously. That's how premature the field of economics seems to be in anything that relates to the policies that govern our daily lives.

And, to be sure, this is all about expectations and rational actors. Are our social programs scaring off the skittish little investors? Whose back needs to feel the lash next to assuage the delicate fee-fees of bond ninjas?

Or could it be that the economists themselves are, in a Gödelishly self-referential manner, muddying the waters by opining at all? Perhaps the intractability of this problem stems from the problem itself? Perhaps there really is, for logical reasons alone, no reliable answer to these sorts of questions.

But, dictu mirabile, it turns out that decades of policies that were explicitly and openly designed to put and keep relative wealth in the hands of the relatively wealthy, actually happen to do that. Whoda thunk it?

What's that? *tilts head to listen to austerity pixie* Mainstream economic policy-opining is actually an exercise in rationalizing the rationalizations that handwave away further rationalizations against ascribing moral-political agency? How can this be...?