Cornell University Researchers Mutilating Girls
June 30, 2010 | 6 Comments
Some blog posts are difficult to write. They’re difficult because you don’ t know just where or how to start, and they’re difficult because of the topic at hand. This is one of those posts. I’ve written before about circumcision and female genital mutilation. What we, as a species, do to our children on a [...]
It’s been a Grey Tuesday in the financial world….
June 29, 2010 | 6 Comments
Today (Tuesday June 29th, 2010), or Grey Tuesday as I’m going to call it, we saw some of the sharpest declines in world markets we’ve seen since April 2009, and granted these declines came right on the heels of the G20 austerity agreement. The fact that some media outlets are viewing this as investor cooling [...]
Jonathan Kay, Police, Pin-pricks and Missing the Point
June 29, 2010 | 4 Comments
Writing in National Post, columnist Jonathan Kay laments the inherent wussiness of Toronto and dreams for… well, I’m not sure, maybe more tear gas? As a Torontonian myself, I am naturally not happy about what happened over the weekend. But neighbours, get a grip please: Thanks to a strong police presence, not a single person [...]
Shooting the Messenger?
June 29, 2010 | No Comments
Last week, the course of the war in Afghanistan shifted unexpectedly after General Stanley McChrystal uttered comments deemed disrespectful to both this combat effort and McChrystal’s superiors in a Rolling Stone magazine article. McChrystal’s comments (see the story here), apparently made in a drunken fog, are unarguably rude and an undermining force in the war [...]
A Quick G20 Note
June 28, 2010 | 2 Comments
Apologies to all of our readers for my silence the past few days; I’m in the midst of a move, and life has been a little too hectic for blogging. Naturally, this has happened on a weekend of huge issues regarding politics, diplomacy and civil liberties. Anyway, I thought I’d share this experience from the weekend by [...]
Anarchists: “Black bloc”, “criminals”, “looters”, “the mob”, “rioters” or “thugs”?
June 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
Yesterday at home I switched between live FIFA World Cup games and one of the Canadian 24-hour news channels and watched what happened in several streets of Toronto close to where I used to live. The images and reports stunned me. Beside the person detained during the week for possession of a crossbow in [...]
BP and the Oil Spill Fallacy
June 25, 2010 | 5 Comments
In case you thought British Petroleum couldn’t sink any lower, don’t worry, they can. From The Wall Street Journal: But in Planet BP — a BP online, in-house magazine — a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. “There is no reason to hate BP,” one local [...]
Feminism, Stalinism and Orthodoxy
June 25, 2010 | No Comments
As a follow up to my posts on feminism, here’s a bit from Michael C. Moynihan responding to Kathleen Parker, Jessica Valenti, Gloria Steinem, and some other stuff. It encapsulates much of what I was saying in the previous posts: Jessica Valenti, founder of the website Feministing, is baffled, having recently “seen articles desperate to [...]
The Gentrification of Political Discourse
June 24, 2010 | 3 Comments
“The first time around, it didn’t pass and it didn’t change much[.] The second time it did pass, and it didn’t change much either. Add them together, we talked a lot and not much changed. Ah, Jean Chrétien. That’s the former Prime Minister talking about the Meech Lake accord and the later recognition of Quebec [...]
The Troubles with the Saville Report
June 24, 2010 | 1 Comment
I’ve been sitting on this issue for the past week, hoping to have time to really give it the attention it deserves. Unfortunately, that’s probably not going to happen, so I’ll just give y’all a link instead. The Saville Commission issued a report on the 1972 Bloody Sunday incident, in which fourteen people in Londonderry [...]