I refuse to hand over a penny of my money to the Quebec Public Interest Research Group.

The McGill chapter of QPIRG collects a student fee of $3.75 per semester from all McGill undergraduate students. They use those funds to support working groups who advocate for “social and environmental justice.”

Thankfully, however, students can choose to opt-out of the QPIRG fee and receive a refund through Minerva, and a coalition of McGill groups is advocating that we do just that. This coalition includes Free the Children McGill, PLQ McGill (an arm of the Liberal Party), and Conservative McGill (full disclosure: I am a member of Conservative McGill), among others. It’s a testament to QPIRG’s radical politics that two of McGill’s major political societies are so strongly opposed to it.

I decided to lend my voice to the opt-out movement after taking a glance at some of the working groups approved by QPIRG’s Board of Directors. Some questionable organizations receive student funding.

The organization Tadamon! is a “Montreal-based collective which works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality, and justice in the ‘Middle East'” and is a working group of QPIRG. They explicitly ally themselves with organizations that are “anti-capitalist” and oppose the use of the term “terrorism,” which they say marginalizes “targeted communities in Canada and engenders a climate of fear.” They oppose the “Apartheid” policies of Israel, comparing the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel to South African Apartheid, a parallel that is inappropriate at best. QPIRG itself is one of the sponsors of Israeli Apartheid Week, featuring events “educating” the public on Israel’s “apartheid system” and advocating for the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” strategy of direct action against the Israeli nation.

Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble is an anarchist drumming group. They organize on anarchist principles, they support an anarchist philosophy, and QPIRG gives them your money to do it. I have no fondness for the politics of anarchy, or its supporters; I am proud to say I support a limited political authority, and I don’t want to fund a group that says such authority shouldn’t exist.

QPIRG also sponsors the Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui. The aspect of this organization that disturbs me most is the first of their goals: they demand the “immediate release” of all five Canadian security certificate detainees, a group that includes an alleged agent for the Vanguards of Conquest (a radical wing of Islamic Jihad), an alleged senior Al Qaeda operative, and two suspected members of the Bin Laden Network.

QPIRG claims to use student money to work towards “environmental and social justice,” but in practice they support a number of angry fringe organizations. They themselves were the publishers of “School Schmool” – the activist handbook that detailed easy ways to vandalize advertisements and happily celebrated the invention of the pipe bomb.

Controversial groups like Tadamon! should go directly to McGill students to raise funds. They could hold a bakesale, ask for donations, or submit a referendum question asking for student funds. As it is now, I have a problem with letting QPIRG use student fees to fund groups whose radical politics would make many students cringe.

Let me be clear: I have absolutely no opposition to people expressing their opinions and goals. Many of QPIRG’s working groups have admirable goals. Groups like Greening McGill and the Global AIDS Coalition are extremely worthy of student funding. But unfortunately, QPIRG also lets a small number of misguided lobby organizations dip into our pockets indirectly.

I don’t want my money to go to organizations that I disagree with. That’s why I opted out.

If an Anarchist drumming group approached you on the street and asked for your money, would you give it to them? If not, then you should opt-out of QPIRG until they stop supporting such unworthy groups. If the only way a group can get funding is through the backdoor of QPIRG, then they don’t deserve it in the first place.

I love Jersey Shore as much as the next well-educated Midwesterner – and with as much guilt. I also get a thrill seeing people get thinner on The Biggest Loser, and cackle with delight at every shot of Mary Murphy’s super-Botoxed facehole on So You Think You Can Dance. I can’t help myself. Despite the obvious reasons why reality TV is cheapening our lives and corrupting our youth, I really like it. Chances are you do too, so don’t get all self-righteous on me.

In fact there are a few benefits to liking reality TV. It helps me bond with people I otherwise have nothing in common with; it makes me aware of the humanity of the idiotic; and it helps me consider ideas of morality. What episode of House can do all that?

First and foremost, reality TV helps with the complicated business of making new friends. Most people first changed social groups after elementary school when we were first becoming aware of the strangeness of our family lives or reading the What’s Happening to My Body? book with a flashlight in our closets. We were insecure, and so, naturally, we talked about the flaws of others to make up for it. Gossip was the glue that masked our insecurities and held our new friendships together, and although we’ve figured out divorce and body hair, there is still an element of grade-eight gossip in university life. Shared stories are shared experiences, and if you’re just meeting someone, the lives of reality TV stars are go-to gossip topics without the risk of betraying those close to you. Scripted shows aren’t as easy to bond over because the uniformly beautiful cast members with extensive medical knowledge are too obviously fake. At a fundamental level, reality TV features real people making real decisions (no matter how artificial it may seem after post-production). A discussion about reality TV can ignore the issues of education and class. It’s readily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, and no post-secondary education is needed to rag on Heidi Montag’s new face. If the conversation builds into a discussion of the patriarchy’s control over women’s bodies, then that’s great. If not, there’s still a sense of community fostered by mutual knowledge.

Reality TV also helps me be slightly more understanding of some of the idiots I come into contact with. I have a habit of being incredibly uncharitable in my character assessments. When describing people – even those who I like – I often tend toward the brutally accurate details, instead of toward the sympathetic version of the truth. However, I’ve found that I’m much more likely to recant my indictment of personality for a TV star than for a real person, simply because I know more about the things that made them who they are. I don’t want to sit through a four-hour monologue about an enemy’s childhood, sexual history, and genealogy to understand why they irritate me. MTV knows this. So they give me small slices of Snooki’s life to help me understand why she has such a vapid, grating personality. It doesn’t mean I grow to like her, but it helps me stop dehumanizing her, and sometimes the other people in my life as well.

Watching reality TV “stars,” especially those whose lives are diametrically opposed to mine (My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?) also helps me form my own set of social norms. Because I don’t practice any religion, aside from the vague Christianity of “secular” North America, I’ve cobbled together my views on personal decorum from the media, my mother, and Ayn Rand. Given its genesis, there are obviously holes in my guidelines and reality TV helps me find them. By putting “normal” people in real life situations, reality TV helps me figure out who I would ally with to stay alive on a desert island, whether an apprenticeship in New York City seems fun, and whether T-back binikis are acceptable beach wear (no, unless you’re on Elimidate). Deciding that I never want to be eligible to appear on Half-Ton Mom nor Toddlers & Tiaras is a big help in terms of life planning.

Obviously, reality TV is stupid, manipulative, and probably a sign of the Apocalypse, but at the same time, it’s doing me some good, so I’d rather rally behind it than burn Jeff Probst at the stake.

The American health care “debate” has been doomed from the beginning.

Rooting their campaign in blatant lies, the American Right came out swinging the moment the massive profits of certain special interests – namely the Medical Insurance/Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex – were put into question. These profiteers have for years been spending more on lobbying and bribing in Washington than even the oil and war industries. These select few who profit at the expense of millions have poured millions of dollars into spreading their lies and have successfully duped a large portion of the American public into believing that their best interests lie with those who have been profiting off of illness and poor healthcare for decades. Otherwise rational people have come to believe that providing healthcare for the millions of working Americans who cannot afford to buy in to the for-profit system will bankrupt the country, lead to government bureaucrats choosing life or death for every last patient, and be the harbinger of modern-day Bolshevism. These arguments come from on high (members of government), from below (right-wing protest groups), and even from those designated to moderate debate in our society (the media).

Of course, there is a debate to be had. The choice to provide health care or allow people to die and suffer en masse is a political one – although it seems like a rather obvious choice to most people. Nonetheless, if one is truly convinced that unnecessary death and suffering is preferable to empowering the state to restrict the profits of private insurance companies, let them say so. But please, let’s be upfront – such a position is not about stopping Islamo-Kenyan-Canadian-Communist-conspiracies, it is about prioritizing greed over human need.

On our campus a similar “debate” filled with half-truths and blatant falsehoods has been raging thanks to the “Opt-out of QPIRG” campaign. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the QPIRG Board of Directors.)

Based on the principles of democracy and consensus, the founders of the McGill chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group wanted to make sure that no student who disagreed with QPIRG’s mandate of social and environmental justice should be forced to pay for its activities. To facilitate this mode of conscientious objection they created the opt-out mechanism – a procedure that allows students to obtain a refund of the $3.75 per semester student fee that they pay to QPIRG – that has subsequently been copied by many other student groups at McGill.

Today that good-faith decision by QPIRG has come back to bite it – and all of us students who care even minimally about the world around us – in the ass thanks to a campaign of misinformation and lies. Students are currently bombarded – on Facebook, via flyers in the library and in residence rooms, and on the email lists of otherwise respectable organizations – with blatant lies: QPIRG-McGill is all about radicalism, pursues an extremist agenda, and does not represent the majority of students on campus. This campaign began on high, with the administration’s questionably legal decision to take the opt-out system out of the hands of those who designed it – QPIRG – and place it under their control on Minerva. It has been pushed from below by a small group of students on the far right of campus opinion masquerading as “moderates.” And it has been reinforced by sensationalist commentary that is rooted in blatant falsehoods.

Of course, as with America health care, there is a debate to be had about the values of QPIRG. If you think that the McGill Global AIDS Coalition, Campus Crops, Greening McGill and KANATA (the Journal of Indigenous Studies at McGill) are truly representative of a fringe, radical agenda that disturbs you to the core, you should not be paying for them. However, most classmates that I’ve spoken to who have opted-out did not know that these and similar groups are the recipients of the majority of QPIRG’s resources and time. Instead, these classmates were duped by McGill’s far right into believing that the majority of QPIRG’s time is devoted to smashing bank windows, making Jewish students (like myself) feel unsafe on campus, and generally bringing about a new Russian Revolution. Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly would be proud.