A Sea of Flowers

From AL Daily, top of the page on June 26/07, the Commencement Address by Dana Gioia to the graduates of Stanford University on June 17, 2007. Worthwhile and quotable. Speaking of the media and culture in the 1950's:

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Of course, I'm not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics "show business for ugly people."

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

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The Free Press has published a couple more stories about crystal meth addiction and the governments' strategies to restrict supply of meth.

Last Tuesday, January 4, 2006, there was a Bruce Owen, "Mom blames crystal meth for daughter's death", published electronically at McIntyre's site. On Friday, January 6, 200, there was a story that pharmacists had agreed to move products that contain ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine behind the counter, and to limit the amount sold.

Continue reading "Another Meth Story" »

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The Winnipeg Free Press discovered crystal meth this year. There were a few stories, usually tied to the meetings of the Western Canadian provincial premiers, over the last year or 18 months. A few weeks ago, the Free Press discovered the real source of the problem and the government instantly solved it. I am of course being sarcastic, and not completely fair to the Free Press. Some of the information in the recent stories was more useful than the usual daily wad of infomercials and propaganda between the Superstore section, the Canadian Tire section, the Wal-mart section and the Future Shop section.

Continue reading "The Discovery of Meth" »

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The story of the fatal shooting on Sargent Avenue on October 10, 2005 was presented in the media intensely over a short time, and then persistently for several weeks. I summarized the coverage in my entry Unlucky.

There are a few things to be said about perspective. The media are trying to meet the needs of readers, as journalists and editors read those needs. This affects the the questions they address, facts they leave out, and the way they tell the story, The media seldom tell the whole story, and often doesn't try to get differing perspectives. The media often tries to make a story colourful or accessible by writing about people, instead of facts and issues, which can also make a story intrusive.

Continue reading "Newsworthy" »

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If you live in Winnipeg, you will know this story, which was in the headlines for several consecutive days, and in the headlines repeatedly over the following weeks as civic authorities announced new initiatives in the war on crime. I was distressed by the story, because it involves the death of a young man - only 17 years old.

On Monday October 10, 2005, a young man was walking on Sargent Avenue crossing Maryland Street, with another man, a casual acquaintance. Around 11:00 PM, about a block away, other young men, identified by the police as associates or members of a new gang of teenaged criminals called the African Mafia, fired a .22 calibre firearm, from a house, identified by the police and local residents as a crack house. Members of a rival gang, the Mad Cowz, had been at the house and had fled in the direction of Sargent and Maryland. The police suggested that both gangs were comprised of recent immigrants from Africa. One or more of the occupants of the house had discharged firearms. As the story unfolded, they may have been attacked or believed they were under attack, or just trying to shoot their rivals who had come near the house, and the fled. One young man, named Philippe, was wounded in the abdomen, and he died. A .22 calibre bullet has enough force to penetrate clothing, skin and muscle, and to damage vital structures, although it does not have the momentum to cause massive shock. He was unlucky to have been in the line of fire, unlucky to have been hit, unlucky to have died within blocks of Winnipeg's major trauma hospital, the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. Phillipe's companion was wounded in the arm.

Continue reading "Unlucky" »

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Deborah Hope riffs on the many meanings of Respect in the Australian. She's right. It has become a flexible word, prominent in the vocabulary of relativism. All beliefs are entitled to respect (but especially mine ...) She might also have said that the discourse of respect is usually self-centred and blaming. Feeling disrespected is a more common sentiment than feeling ashamed for disrespecting others.

The Guardian reports in a story headlined 'We're not germs or louts. Sarkozy should've said sorry' that some French rioters are complaining that the French government doesn't respect them. It sounds like gangster-talk, and it might be dismissed as posturing. However, there is merit to the complaint that French society disrespects its underclass. French immigration policy and French social policy have tended to marginalize East European, African, and North African immigrants and their children. Some French politicians have used inflammatory language toward everyone who lives in La Zone, which has helped keep the anger and crime going. Some political and media figures are explaining the riots as a mass protest against social conditions. The rioters have the government's attention, which is a kind of respect.

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Wikipedia's start page has a daily featured article, an entry selected as the article of the day. For football fans, on November 7, 2005 the featured article is about the Arsenal Football Club which plays in the FA Premier League in England.

The French urban riots made the front page of the Free Press today - a picture of firefighters trying to put out the fire in a burning car. The news coverage is still neglibible. Wikipedia had a problem with the story over the weekend - competing rewrites and disputes over whether the article overstated the role of Islam in the rioting. They had an objectivity flag on the story on Sunday, but they have worked that out. Their article is now called 2005 French Urban Violence.

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The Winnipeg Free Press has been running news stories about the riots in French cities, on the inside pages. I don't think the National Post or the Globe and Mail have treated these stories more prominently, although their stories have had more depth.

The Wikipedia entry has been regularly updated since the riots started, and it links to a number of media sources. The most recent BBC Online story on November 5 links to earlier stories and to stories that try to analyze the background and the political situation. Wikipedia links to Theodore Dalrymple's essayin City Journal, in August 2002, The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, which took a hard-headed view of the cités of La Zone. (For a note on Dalrymple, see this book review of Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left of It: the mandarins and the masses in the New Statesman).

Continue reading "La Zone" »

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The Guardian reports, in a story called Lords defeat for religious hatred bill, that the House of Lords voted against the British government's Religious and Racial Hatred Bill. The opposition to the Bill crossed party lines with many Labour peers joining Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in opposing the Bill. The government can still override the Lords and pass the Bill into law in the Commons, which is a special process to break deadlock between the two House of the British Parliament. For background, here are the British government's explanatory notes on the Bill as passed in the House of Commons, and here is the Bill after the amendments. These links to debate and more debate on the amendments in the House of Lords bring up the Hansard text. The quality of speeches is excellent. This level of debate makes Canadian MP's sound like trolls.

I like a passage from Lord Onslow's speech:

I also suggest that, in the well-established case of a Shia cleric who ensured the conviction of a young girl, aged 18, for pre-marital sexual intercourse, he not only advocated her conviction but he also went and put the noose around her neck. I do not know about noble Lords, but I personally find that detestable. It is meet to be detested, and should be by every single person in this Chamber. What this Bill could do—although I am obviously open to correction—is to say that I could be prosecuted for saying that it was a detestable habit and that the man who did it was an odious human being. I would say that with intent, and mean every single word. I give that as one example.

At Second Reading, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said that religion had actually been defined. Now there is, as we know through evidence of it, a religion involving witchcraft and the mutilation of small boys. Their torsos were thrown into the Thames. I know that these things are illegal, but it seems odd to me that I cannot hate them. I may have misinterpreted the Bill; I may have it all wrong. But I am advised that I have not. Can the Minister clear my mind, and either accept the amendment or something like it in whatever form the Bill takes? Or can she explain to me that there is no such provision in the Bill and that I am quite entitled to go on hating Shia clerics who pull the legs of young girls dangling in a noose outside Tehran?

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(This updates my entry on Behzti and Mr. Bean from last December, and other entries about religious freedom, freedom of conscience and free speech).

Stories about a Bill before the British Parliament for a Racial and Religious Hatred Act were prominent in the feed from Butterflies and Wheels in my aggregator yesterday. A government Bill, having made it through the Commons, is being debated in the House of Lords where it is facing opposition. Comedian Rowan Atkinson's speech to a House Committee was reported in the Times on October 21, 2005 - "Hatred Bill Panders to Minorities". The Times interviewed Atkinson for another story October 23, 2005. One of Atkinson's points was that the Bill would give fringe groups like Wiccans and Satanists new standing to promote themselves as religions, and give fundamentalists (Sikh, Christian, Muslim) a new tool to oppress their critics. As to the Wiccans et al, they are looking forward to the enactment of the Bill, excited, as the story in the Times puts it. Will it be a crime to say that modern Wicca and Satanism are, like Scientolology, fraudulent inventions promoted by writers, performers and entrepreneurs?

The various stories say that the Bill is opposed by a non-partisan coalition in the House of Lords, including a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey. It has been criticized by many religious leaders. The old New Leftist writer Bernard Crick, writing in the Guardian online reports on a public lecture by Atkinson and the activities of the Citizen Organising Foundation, a community education group in East London - This age of fanaticism is no time for non-believers to make enemies - without discussing the Bill. The Bill was the subject of a comment in the Times October 23, an essay by Christopher Hart called God Save the Heretic.

I wonder if the religious groups that favour this legislation have thought about what should happen to religious leaders who use their churches and mosques to denounce feminism, homosexuality and secular values?

Today, the Wikipedia feature entry is about the French law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools.

The ironies of politics - a conservative French government protects secular values. A self-styled progressive Labour government in England promotes cultural diversity by giving fundamentalists (and the fuzzy fringes of religion) a stick to beat their critics.

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On Thursday (October 13) the Wpg Free Press published an article called "Intellectuals, The Empty Drums of Scholarship" on the editorial page, in a section called View from the West. The author was Barry Cooper, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, and managing director of Calgary office of the Fraser Institute. He writes a regular column for the Calgary Herald. This article was probably a reprint his column in the Herald on October 5, published as "Ignatieff's Vanity". It is an attack on Michael Ignatieff

Cooper's criticism of Ignatieff is that he is a liberal, and his concern is that Ignatieff is rumoured to be considering entering Canadian politics as a Liberal. Ignatieff has had tremendous media experience and he has a background and presence that would put him on a par with Pierre Trudeau as a formidable candidate. Cooper tries to dismiss Ignatieff as a mere intellectual dilettante. He also criticizes Ignatieff's willingness as a liberal, to use power to implement an agenda that Cooper, as a conservative, finds to be utopian, inherently oppressive and potentially totalitarian.

Continue reading "Red-neck Eschatology" »

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The Nation published an essay by Nicholas von Hoffman called A Devil's Dictionary of Business which seems to be based on his book by the same name.

The original Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a classic of political satire. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg. Bierce was cynical and skeptical, and he made few friends when he stripped away pretensions and popped the ballooned egos of the comfortable and the powerful.

I mentioned John Ralston Saul's Doubter's Companion in an entry in July. It fits into the tradition of satirical dictionaries.

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This essay - The Anti-Semitic Disease - by historian Paul Johnson, published in Commentary is certainly interesting. It has some good information about the history of anti-semitism in the West and in the Arab World, but it takes an odd spin.

Continue reading "Essay on Anti-Semitism" »

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An essay - Gone Fishing - by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.

The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish's ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish's relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.

Some of Fish's ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader's response to the story depends on the reader's way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.

Fish's suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons - rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.

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Theodore Dalrymple's essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession's ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.

His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient's capacity, and not on whether the patient's decisions correspond to a psychiatrist's assessment of what is a patient's best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.

His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault's argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments - bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn't help to identify or answer Foucault's critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.

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An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style.

The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is going to be charged with terrorist conspiracy offences.

There are difficult aspects to this story. Bouyeri was a disaffected immigrant youth, apparently involved with drug use and street crime. He found new values in fundamentalist Islam, which made helped him live within a strict moral code, connected him to his cultural roots, and gave him a supportive community. It also indoctrinated him in an ideology of moral and cultural superiority and empowered him to become a terrorist and a murderer.

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The Doubter's Companion (1994, ISBN 0-670-85536-7) followed Voltaire's Bastards in Canadian writer John Ralston Saul's books on modern economics, politics and culture. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a philosopher. I see him as a public intellectual and a social critic. His academic background appears to have been in economics. His arguments blend careful analysis with colourful and forceful presentation.

This book is subtitled "a dictionary of aggressive common sense", which plays out as an alphabetically organized collection of essays running from a few lines to a few pages. His essays explore concerns that are discussed in more detail in several of his other books.

Continue reading "The Doubter's Companion" »

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Last Sunday (June 26) I was listening to CBC One's Sunday morning (radio) show, and I heard the lovely sound of Dutch accents, the accents of my stubborn parents, who shaped my contrarian tendencies. The Dutch accents belonged to interviewees in a documentary about the social conflicts that propelled the murderers of politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. There was more about Van Gogh, less about Fortuyn. Both had been critical of the way that immigrant communities - specifically immigrants from Morocco and Turkey - were relating to Dutch society. Neither was a conventional white European racist. Both were modernists, opposed to immigrants on secular questions. While Fortuyn is often described as a right-wing populist, he was a libertarian and his conflicts with Muslim immigrants were initially personal. He was gay, and he criticized the homophobia of the Moroccan imam Khalil el-Moumni. Van Gogh was a friend and supporter of Fortuyn, as well as the immigrant feminist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both questioned the cultural values of Muslim fundamentalists, and Dutch immigration and social policy. Their central argument was that fundamentalists were exploiting Dutch tolerance to create a hostile and intolerant subculture.

Continue reading "Pluralism, Dutch-Style" »

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There is a review of Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, Partha Dasgupta, is an economist. The review is titled "Bottlenecks". It's a long review, with an overview of the book. The book has been praised in reviews and on the web by deep ecologists, Greens, Gaians, and the other usual suspects. Professor Dasgupta isn't singing in that chorus. He is impressed with Diamond's research and the analysis, up to a point.

Continue reading "Nature-Worship or Science?" »

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Here's an article in Christianity Today on living wages and Wal-Mart called "Deliver us from Wal-Mart". This article takes a liberal Christian look at a social and ethical issue.

Continue reading "Retail Wages" »

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On Saturday May 14, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church - about 400 people were expected - led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn't clear on it, but it was a "Love Won Out" seminar. The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against "homophobia" and in favour of same-sex marriage.

Continue reading "Gay Orthodoxy" »

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The headline of the article read "Crystal Meth Crackdown Urged". The story, from the Canadian Press, was that the Premiers of the four Western Provinces (and three northern Territories), meeting in Lloydminster, had issued a communique announcing a plan to deal with the growing popularity of the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetimine. There was a picture of the four premiers walking down the street, semi-casually attired. The plan: insist that Crown prosecutors demand higher sentences for trafficking. This announcement is entirely typical of Canadian politics. It pretends that the Premiers are taking action, but it does nothing to help addicted teens and young adults and their families, and nothing to help people to avoid fooling around with toxic and addictive mood-altering drugs.

Continue reading "Useless" »

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This is a book review of "One Nation, Two Cultures" by Gertrude Himmelfarb. She published this book in 1995, her next book after "The De-Moralization of Society" which was mainly a study in the history of ideas. "One Nation, Two Cultures" is more a work of social criticism than history. She looks at why and how the Victorian virtues, which were the foundation of a successful civic culture, became discredited. She looks directly at America, and frames her discussion in the context of what many call the culture wars. She isn't the first writer to identify the American cultural revolution and the continuing culture war, but her book is one of the most penetrating examinations of the origins and consequences of those events.

Continue reading "Culture Wars" »

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This is a book review of "The De-moralization of Society, From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values" (1994), by Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian and writer. I have read a couple of her books after reading this review of her latest book "The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments".

Continue reading "Victorian Virtues" »

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There is an essay by Jennifer Roback Morse called "Marriage and the Limits of Contract" at the Policy Review Online. The author and the journal have a libertarian perspective, a minimum-government perspective that is usually called conservative in the Canadian, American and British political traditions. I think her ideas are more based in natural law than in libertarian principles, which is why I like her analysis. I agree with her general perspective:

There is enormous room for debate, but there ultimately is no room for compromise. The legal institutions, social expectations and cultural norms will all reflect some view or other about the meaning of human sexuality. We will be happier if we try to discover the truth and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than try to recreate the world according to our wishes.

Continue reading "Marriage as Contract" »

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[Updated entry]. There was a documentary on The Fifth Estate on CBC TV about crystal meth, Dave's addiction. It was on the regular network on March 23, 2005 and was played on the Newsworld cable channel several times later in the week. After the show premiered, CBC set up a Dark Crystal microsite which has streaming video links (Windows Media and Quicktime) to the 42 minute documentary. I thought it was a competent and comprehensive show, which communicated basic information about the effects and availability of the drug, and some information about treatment of the addiction. It might have said a few more things on some issues.

Continue reading "Dark Crystal" »

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Two BBC news stories from Europe on the Girbaud poster and billboard campaign. A French Court has banned the poster - apparently throughout France. The municipal authorities in Milan banned the picture on billboards. The picture, which is in the linked stories, has Hot female models posed as Christ and the Apostles as in Leonardo da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper.

Continue reading "da Vinci Poster" »

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The Canadian Catholic Bishops have been trying to get Catholics involved in motivating Members of Parliament to oppose Bill C-38, which deals with same-sex marriage. Last Sunday at the 8:00 AM Sunday Mass St. Ignatius, instead of delivering a homily, Father Monty presented the Archbishop of Winnipeg's Pastoral letter (available here in pdf format). Yesterday, I read in a newspaper that Fred Henry, the Bishop of Calgary, suggested on a Toronto Radio show that the Prime Minister of Canada, who is a Catholic, should be excommunicated for supporting Bill C-38.

Continue reading "Clumsy Bishops" »

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The Canadian Parliament has been debating a Bill relating to same-sex marriage. Bill C-38 says: "Marriage, for civil purposes, is the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others." This would replace or alter the legal definition of marriage, which had been established by judicial precedent in 1866 as "the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others." People of the same sex will be considered to have the legal capacity to make a marriage contract, and if married, to divorce and divide their property in accordance with provincial marital property laws, and to claim other legal benefits and rights accruing to the married state.

Continue reading "Same-sex Marriage" »

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An interesting story, courtesy of the BBC World News Web service about a survey of American teens. One of the findings is that American teens tend to be authoritarian in defence of patriotic values. They tend to think the First Amendment is too liberal and promotes anti-American values. The group responsible for the survey has its own web site with a page devoted to the survey.

Continue reading "Freedom in the American Dream" »

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Some European countries (England) have laws that curtail freedom of speech to protect religious groups from criticism. There is a BBC an article that a Polish Court convicted a prominent journalist of insulting a foreign head of state. He compared the Pope to Brezhnev. I haven't been able to get the offensive text. He may have meant that the Pope is isolated and dependent on the Vatican bureaucacy and a few personal assistants, and losing touch. That argument has some merit.

The head of State was the Pope who is the head of state of the Vatican City, which is a separate state under International Law. Poland doesn't seem to have laws that specifically protect the Catholic Church and other religious groups from hate speech or other lesser forms of criticism. However I am not sure how those laws might apply to criticism of the Pope or his performance in the Vatican.

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My previous post, devoted to the Westboro Baptist Church's bizarre interpretation of the Indian ocean disaster, refers to a case in Sweden in which a Pentecostal Minister was charged with the criminal offence of hate speech against gays and lesbians for a sermon preached in his own church. I had trouble getting a clear factual story on the Web, because most of the Web sites that mention it are either devoted to the interests of religious groups, or devoted to gay pride issues. Each side has its own stories and both contain mistakes and legal inaccuracies. The coverage in the online edition of Christianity Today was clear and informative. It also played a minor part in a story about the cultural war between religion and liberalism in Europe in Time Magazine.

Continue reading "Swedish Preacher" »

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The Behzti story has been in the news from England for the last few weeks. It evokes one of the themes of the movie Bend it Like Beckham, as second generation Sikhs come into conflict with their families as they make their own way in British society, but there are no happy endings here. Behzti is a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a younger Sikh woman, which was being staged at the Birmingham Repertory Theater. The play is set in a gurdwara (temple) and has a scene of sexual abuse by a Sikh priest - a rape scene. Conservative religious Sikhs protested. At first the protests were small but they escalated to protests by hundreds, with protesters storming the theater on December 18. By December 21, the play had closed and the playwright had gone into hiding after receiving death threats. Some Sikh leaders condemned the death threats.

Continue reading "Behzti and Mr. Bean" »

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With orange having been his campaign colour in the Ukranian presidential election, and the emblem of resistance to the fraudulent election results, creative voices in the world media have tried to find an ironic symmetry in the news that medical tests confirm that Victor Yushchensko ingested dioxin. The Daily Express claimed that he had been poisoned with Agent Orange. The news that high levels of dioxin were found in tissue samples tends to cut through some of the confusion and speculation in the media and the scientific community.

Continue reading "Ukranian Orange" »

Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rick Mercer is a supercilious prick, but he can be very funny. (Or should I say he is funny and can be a prick?) I wonder if he writes his own lines.

Tonight in the opening segment of his self-named CBC show he commented on George W. Bush's visit to Ottawa, which includes a visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, "it must be irony week in Ottawa."

Indeed, with the looting of the museums of the cradle of civilization during the American invasion of Iraq ... Perhaps not the point Mercer was making but heh...

Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 9:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I began to see bloggers identifying themselves as part of the Reality-Based Community in the last couple of days. It's an ironic response to a remark by a White House staff member who dismissed the the Reality-based community when he was talking to a journalist in 2002. Most of the proud members of the Reality-Based community are using it as evidence that the Bush team is wrapped up in its own rhetoric - its own separate reality, if you please. Some are using it as evidence that the Bush team is being run by religious zealots who reject science and reason.

I think this remark tells us that the people in the White House like being positive and pro-active and optimistic and supportive and team players, and that they have their own private code for talking about people on the outside.

Continue reading "Reality-Based Community" »

Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few days after 2004 American elections, I am tired of the commentary coming from the propaganists and leaders of both of the dominant factions. Republicans, barely restraining their glee at winning, talk insincerely about reaching out to liberals and healing. Liberals talk about how illiterate and stupid fundamentalists were tricked by propaganda, funded by corporate interests, into electing a hollow and stupid person to the most powerful position in the world. Some liberal leaders and propagandists are trying to distance themselves and the Democrats from the Sorry Everybody (Sorry, slow link) project and other distasteful expressions of the disappointment of Senator Kerry's supporters, although they share the sentiment.

Continue reading "Moralizing Liberals" »

Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Winnipeg has built itself at the junctions of the Assiniboine, the Seine, the LaSalle Rivers and other tributary streams and creeks with the Red River of the North. It sits at the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, at the low point of a flood plain. This contributes to the fertility of the soil, and to the presence of hundreds of thousands of sloughs, dips, melt ponds and other bodies of standing water which nurture the reproductive capability of the mosquito.

When the warm breezes of summer warm the breeding ponds of insect world, Winnipeg resorts to spraying the insecticide Malathion. When the spray trucks roll, the Greens start to write letters to the editor, to caucus, and ultimately to blockade. Last year it was a few streets. This year, it was the City yards where the trucks are loaded. Last year it was impromtu drama. This year it was civil disobedience and organized protest, resolved by arrests and criminal charges.

Continue reading "Save the Mosquito" »

Posted by Tony Dalmyn at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)