BLOG THIS | blog.thismagazine.ca: March 2007 Archives

Try to check out Fido while you still can. The fun zombie flick was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival. A lot of money has been poured into promoting it -- let's help it break even!

Radiant City (see above photo) opens across Canada in early April. Billed as "an entertaining and startling new film on 21st century suburbanites," the doc has already received a lot of positive reviews.

More entries on: Film

March 29, 2007

Stand up, Scarborough!

Posted by shawnsyms at 09:30 AM ET | Comments (2)

It was with incredible joy that I learned that Scarborough Southwest Liberal MP Tom Wappel is not seeking re-election after his current term. From a progressive perspective, you can't get much worse than Wappel. When he threw his hat in the ring for a Liberal leadership convention in 1990, he pledged to make abortion a crime punishable by life imprisonment. According to the Toronto Star, he described same-sex marriage as a sham and a hoax. He argued that anyone with HIV should be denied refugee status in Canada. On the positive side, he did advocate for improved nutritional labeling on Canadian foods.

The lead story in the current issue of Spacing magazine (penned by Eye Weekly city editor Ed Keenan) discusses the great potential of Scarborough, arguing that it is a far stronger example of successful integration of very diverse communities than downtown Toronto. I'm looking to the people of Scarborough to surprise and delight us with a new elected official who reflects this promise. The former borough got off to a great start in the recent municipal contest when they elected progressive school-board trustee Nadia Bello, who has been involved in Scarborough queer Pride organizing and TEACH (Teens Educating and Confronting Homophobia).

Stand up, Scarborough! Yes, you gave us the Barenaked Ladies and numerous other notables. It's time to shine again. We're counting on you!

More entries on: On the Hill

March 27, 2007

Mayor Miller vs Movies?

Posted by annette at 11:17 AM ET | Comments (2)

Toronto Mayor David Miller's proposed "City of Toronto Act" may include sin taxes on items like booze, cigarettes and...movies? While I'm not a fan of paying more for my booze, that's a sin tax I can wrap my head around. But movies? Going to the cinema is already so expensive, I'm sure people really don't want to pay another 5%. But if this initiative really must go through, some suggestions:

- Waive the 5% tax for Canadian films
- Instead of tacking the 5% onto ticket prices, why not tax the truly sinful part of the cinematic experience -- the gargantuan, fat-laden snacks

Thoughts? Does anyone else find this a tad outrageous?

More entries on:

March 24, 2007

Thoughts while stuck in traffic

Posted by aaron at 03:27 PM ET | Comments (3)

I've been spending some time in Seattle lately visiting an ailing grandfather which means I've been stuck, bumper to bumper, on the I-5 for literally hours a day. I'm talking about the commute between my grandfather's house in north Seattle, the hospital and downtown, three places quite close to each other. Just the sheer number of cars that role through Seattle each day, all day, is quite astounding. Rush hour is especially brutal.

The on-ramps have stop lights to space the cars getting on, this can mean waits of up to twenty minutes when busy. Once you're on, it's six/eight/ten lanes of bumper to bumper in both directions. When you finally get off, whether in north Seattle or downtown, you're stuck in even more congestion.

This brings me to the Gateway Project; the BC government's plan to "improve" regional transportation, specifically the plan to twin the Port Mann bridge and widen Highway 1 into East Van (aka my back yard). I think it's a horrible idea. Vancouver currently has minor (by North American standards) rush hours, which some think can be solved simply by adding more highway.

It was Jane Jacobs' book Dark Age Ahead that introduced me (I'm young) to the idea of "induced demand" that more freeways mean more cars, hence more congestion especially around major off ramps. My place in East Vancouver already gets plenty of commuter traffic to begin with and would become unbearable.

But don't worry about me, Jacobs' main argument against highways is that urban neighbourhoods, the economic and creative heart of the city, are often destroyed or significantly altered by megaprojects like these. Imagine the harm it could do to the cultural life of Commercial Drive and Strathcona to have thousands more cars per-day inching through the Downtown Eastside. More traffic would then necessitate extending the freeway even further into the city. The last time we allowed something like this to happen, Vancouver's only black neighbourhood was destroyed to create the Georgia Viaduct. I like to think that in this "post car, post racist" age, there are better ways to organize a city.

A vocal movement of people opposed to the project already exists, check out gatewaysucks.org for more info. Similarly, the David Suzuki Foundation's briefing document (highly recommended reading) suggests that highway construction is only a (very) temporary solution to traffic congestion and ends up doing far more harm than good.

The answer to the traffic problem, according to almost everyone who studies the issue, is light rail and more busses. The B-Line experiment--articulated express busses to the university and the airport--has been such an overwhelming success in terms of ridership and affordability, why not replicate it everywhere else?

More entries on: Activism | Vancouver

March 23, 2007

Information Wants to be Free UPDATE

Posted by john_d at 10:42 AM ET | Comments (0)

(image courtesy nyc.uncivilservants.org)

Maybe this will be the first in a series of postings about our marvelous Internet, and the complicated issues it inspires.

The NYTimes reports on a New York City website encouraging regular citizens to rat on municipal employees potentially abusing their parking privileges in the city. Personal information such a license plates are displayed on the website nyc.uncivilservants.org, which has at least one NYC police officer understandably upset.

Here is a case of "public interest" advocacy bumping right up against the public interest. Here's a less than complimentary comment from the site:

Way to go. Next time I do surveillance in the hood I have to worry about whether or not my car is listed as a cop car online!

How free do we want our free Internet info? Free enough to endanger the families of those who park where they shouldn't?

You know, in Deadwood, where there are no laws and everyone is blissfully free, you can get shot in the eye for parking your horse in the wrong place.

More entries on: Interweb

March 21, 2007

Holy Bottled Water

Posted by Ariel Troster at 11:28 AM ET | Comments (3)

Holy Water!.jpg

Does the insanity ever end? This seems like the perfect combination of corporate greed and religious whacknuttery (wow, I just invented that word).

Here's my favourite quote from their website: "WATER IS TWICE AS VALUABLE AS OIL. Now you can import this valuable commodity to your country, already bottled with your own private label or Holy Bottled Water will create an appealing label to meet any of your needs."

Or maybe: "From the River of Living Water flows 'Holy Bottled Water' Produced by man under the inspiration of God."

More entries on: Planet Earth

It's spring! ... and I love Europe

Posted by john_d at 10:44 AM ET | Comments (2)

Is Europe just about the most progressive society in the world today?

The Independent thinks so:

So, what has Europe ever done for us? Apart from...

Hmmmm, it might fall under #40: Human rights legislation has protected the rights of the individual, but I am madly impressed by Europe's longstanding refusal to accept any country with discriminatory laws against homosexuality. Strangely, the right to marry does not make it into the EU package of rights.

Oh, Romania -- you are so close.

(flag image courtesy of the Europa.eu web portal)

More entries on: Human rights

March 20, 2007

Bottling profit, not altruism

Posted by Ariel Troster at 10:04 AM ET | Comments (6)

This Thursday is World Water Day, and you may have read the gushing announcement from Starbucks about how the company is planning to donate 5 cents from every bottle of their new Ethos bottled water to "benefit India and Kenya." Starbucks says its goal is to donate $10 million by 2010 to organizations that "are helping to alleviate the world's water crisis."

Now, the irony of selling bottled water in an effort to "save the world's water" is so ridiculous I don't even know what to do with this ... Okay, for starters, the bottling of water has contributed directly to the crisis that the Starbucks CEOs seem so concerned about.

In India, underground aquifiers have been sucked dry, and locals are forced to buy water back in bottles for their drinking and cooking needs. In the southern state of Kerala, Coke and Pepsi use satellite imagery to locate reservoirs of groundwater and in Plachimada, bottling companies extract up to 1.5 million litres of water every day. All 260-bore wells installed by public authorities have gone dry. As well, the soil, water and air around the plant have become contaminated from a sludge by-product, made up of cadmium and other trace metals.

This same story is being told in community after community, all over the world. For more information on the devastation caused by water bottling companies, check out the Polaris Institute's Inside the Bottle project.

Now, this is not to mention Starbucks' less-than-rosy record when it comes to interactions with communities in the Global South. Oxfam recently launched a campaign targeting Starbucks for denying the rights of Ethiopian farmers by attempting to patent the names of indigenous coffee beans: Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe. According to Oxfam, "Starbucks has continually rejected Ethiopia's requests to resolve the issue, and has refused to sign a royalty-free licensing agreement that would recognize Ethiopia's right to control how its own coffee names are used."

There are lots of World Water Day events going on in Canada and around the world on March 22nd, so no need to attend the ones being promoted by Starbucks (where no doubt they will encourage you to buy their branded water to help save the world's water. Ack.) Here's where you can find a list of community events all over Canada. And check out the Canadian Union of Public Employees' World Water Day online action centre here.

More entries on: Planet Earth

March 19, 2007

Web 3.14159 -- somewhat rambly thoughts

Posted by john_d at 05:04 PM ET | Comments (0)

(photo of Dorothy Day at a draft card burning, courtesy of the Culture of Peace website

Here is a poem by THIS mag contributor, Brian Joseph Davis, from his very funny book Portable Altamont (Coach House 2005):

Philip Roth

I never should have trusted you
When you told me that you were
David Lee Roth's brother.

Davis has an essay in the latest THIS Magazine about Socialism, Internet Style -- you know, Web 2.0, social networking, participatory content-making, peer to peer, etc. Go, read it now. It's interesting.

I might have just read it and filed it with all the many, many other thoughts I'm having about the Internet these days, except after reading Davis I took a big book with me to lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant. It's called The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and is about four radical American Catholics and how literature shaped their lives. I try to read as much as I can about people way back in the 20th Century -- those backward folk who lived without the benefit of e-mail and file-sharing and MySpace -- and how they managed to get things done with ancient technologies like telephones and newspapers. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, at lunch a woman one table away was describing her job to her meal-mate. She runs a social networking site for TorStar, and her talk mirrored Davis' article almost perfectly-- the radical democratizing of content, the opportunity to connect and share and meet and message and make and change and create. What Davis calls "analyzing and editing the raw feed of life." Except the bottom line for TorStar is about aiming advertising. The information users share with them, the personalities they display online, the preferences they exhibit -- these are all used to push commercialism back at them in increasingly subtle ways.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Davis writes in his piece:

Using online applications and being a stakeholder in websites positions a user as part of something else -- something like society -- in a way that the alienation of everyday life usually keeps that person from attaining.

I'd like to talk a bit about this idea. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it. One immediate response is that I question if Web 2.0 really does manage an end-run around alienation. Does it? Society has always provided tools for engagement, both commercial and radical. Dorothy Day, one of the subjects of the book I'm reading, started the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City, and marched on Washington to demand the vote for women, spending weeks in jail for her radicalism, and winning in the end. I'm pretty sure e-mail and a myspace page could have helped her gather support for her hunger strike, but all the information and communications tech in the world is meaningless without that brave woman putting her body on the line.

Thoughts?

More entries on: Interweb

March 18, 2007

Hijib Hijabbery

Posted by calvin at 03:30 PM ET | Comments (0)

Should I be shocked by this? That a recent incident at Montreal's Bordeaux correctional prison barred a recently hired prison guard from wearing her Hijab (a tradiitonal Muslim headscarf) on the job? There are a number interesting political angles here: Muslim religious attire, Quebec multicultural tolerance, employee safety interests. Is this really a Quebec specific issue? Probably not as there seems to be a similar policy across the board on a Federal level, including the RCMP. So the media sensationalizing the fact this occured in Quebec and the recent Hijab ban in France is both a coincidence and blatant red herring. So, where do we end up between personel safety and religious entitlement? Personally, I'm tire of the knee jerk reactions, blanket policies and outcries of anti-Islamism. If the issue is safety then deal with the issue of safety, and not squeal bloody persecution. We live in Canada for goodness sakes, possibly the most diverse and tolerant of countries in the world. I guess the big question is does diversity, tolerance and common sense also go hand-in-hand-in-hand.

More entries on: Religion

March-April issue of This now online

Posted by mason at 01:31 PM ET | Comments (0)

March-April cover

Canada's place on the world stage has never been more scrutinized than right now. A military campaign in Afghanistan and a federal government that is changing our traditional foreign policy positions are just two of the issues at hand.

The March-April issue of THIS examines Canada on the world stage from several angles: What should be our approach to Afghanistan? What is our mining sector's role in developing countries? How is Vancouver preparing to welcome the world in 2010, and who is being affected?

Check out the issue's table of contents and dive in!

More entries on: THIS matters

March 16, 2007

Budget This!

Posted by shawnsyms at 12:34 PM ET | Comments (1)

Despite a comparatively small population, Canada has one of the world's largest Gross Domestic Products (a key indicator of overall economic health). Yet over 1.2 million of our children across the country live in poverty.

The problem is the federal budget, says the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Rather than reflecting the needs of most Canadians, the CCPA suggests, government budgets often favour elite business interests and emerge from brazen electoral strategies. Since 1994, the centre has produced its own alternative budgets after a lengthy consulation with a range of civil society organizations. And they just released the results of a poll indicating that a majority of Canadians would support a government committed to reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Is that what the impending Tory budget will do? The CCPA is not holding its breath. Instead, it just released its own kick at the can, showing what could be done differently to promote social justice while maintaining a balanced budget. A few of the highlights: an increased minimum wage, honouring agreements with First Nations and increasing funding for women's programs instead of cutting them. The difference could be made up in part by additional taxes on the rich and eliminating tax loopholes that unfairly benefit large corporations.

The CCPA notes the Tories are currently promoting a spending spree of their own, with a panoply of promises seemingly designed to curry favour before an expected election: "The Harper government is on the brink of exhausting its fiscal surplus on a pre-election spending plan that is at odds with what Canadians want. According to their senior economist Ellen Russell, the Tories' numbers just don't add up. "Prime Minister Harper's tax cuts plan is so expensive, he may soon find himself having to choose between putting the nation back into deficit or slashing programs," she argues.

Dreaming of a just Canada is one thing. Devising a tactical plan to help us get there is another altogether. To have a detailed look at the CCPA's vision for a different tomorrow, view their report here.

More entries on: Economics

March 15, 2007

The Next Prime Minister

Posted by aaron at 06:06 PM ET | Comments (5)

Stephane Dion is much taller in person. He still looks like a mouse but only in the cute sense. In fact, he's so unintimidating up close, it's hard to imagine him being anything more than maybe your second favourite uncle. Not the one who gets drunk at Thanksgiving and offends your mom (he'd be the favourite) but the quiet intelligent one who always gets just the right birthday gift.

Even at seven in the morning Dion turns down coffee, opting instead for a second glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. He should have taken the caffeine. His speech, Tuesday, in front of the Vancouver Board of Trade was just too low key for someone with his agenda.

The "Three Pillars," as he calls his plan, is "the economy, social justice and the environment." Instead of the usual pro-business rhetoric, he managed to explain why a national healthcare program is really important to a healthy modern economy and other novel ways of looking at social programs. The tired neo-liberal trap of warning about our competitiveness with United States never came up, instead he mentioned success stories within western European countries and asked how we could better emulate them. This is in front of a big-business audience too.

He also did part of his speech in French which elicited snarky comments from some stock broker looking types in the back row: "What the hell is he doing speaking French, this is BC!" What struck me most about the speech was how formal and bland it was. Maybe it was the language barrier but he seemed incapable of being off-the-cuff. Chretien had trouble with English pronounciation too, but all I remember of him are wiseass remarks and innapropriate cracks; pepper spray anyone?

More entries on: On the Hill

Drugs into bodies, money into pockets

Posted by shawnsyms at 03:06 PM ET | Comments (0)

When Big Pharma doesn't get its way, it takes its toys and goes home. When the "toys" in question are life-saving medications, the results can be grim. People with HIV in Thailand are finding this out first hand.

Most medications are protected by 20-year patents that allow a drugmaker the exclusive right to produce them and profit from them— but exceptions can be made for urgent medical situations in poor countries. A country can issue a "compulsory license" to allow for the generic manufacture of drugs its people urgently need but cannot afford.

That's what Thailand has done in the case of Kaletra, one of the new generation of HIV meds. Prior to that, the government in the developing nation had been trying without success to get Abbott Laboratories to lower its hefty annual $2,200-per-patient pricetag.

The Thai government's move was assailed by the Wall Street Journal, who called it a "seizure of foreign drug patents." Abbott responded by pulling its wares off Thai shelves. They have rescinded a request to register a new heat-resistant version of Kaletra in Thailand, along with several other Abbott products. This effectively prevents the government from allowing anyone to make a generic copy of the drug, because they will have no legal access to the original in order to test and assure they are equivalent.

Activists argue that this demonstrates putting profits over people's lives. The heat-resistant drug formulation was desperately needed in Thailand because there is no guarantee of refrigeration at all points in the drug's supply chain.

American law professor Brook K Baker, member of the advocacy group Health GAP, was particularly scathing. In a release, he described the withholding the registration for life-saving medicines "a new variant of pharmaceutical apartheid."

Baker assailed the notion the drug companies need to protect their patents because of R&D costs. He described Abbott as "a company which has been subsidized through NIH and university research for most of its discoveries, which gets huge taxes breaks for its research and development expenditures, and which earns monopoly profits on all its sales in rich country markets that collectively comprise 90% of global pharmaceutical sales."

The battling over profits in poor countries certainly appears greedy. Médecins sans Frontières also criticized the drug company, noting that in Thailand, newer "second-line" HIV drugs like Kaletra (which many patients need to turn to when older medicines no longer work for them), can cost up to 22 times more than first-line drugs, specifically because of patent protection.

In Thailand, where AIDS has become a leading cause of death, that's money most people just don't have.

More entries on: HIV/AIDS | Pharma | Poverty

What does it mean to be a leftist?

Posted by mason at 01:51 AM ET | Comments (23)

To paraphrase a certain right-wing rag: disagree or agree?

More entries on: Activism

March 13, 2007

NY Times columnist takes you to Africa

Posted by ron at 01:03 PM ET | Comments (3)

NY Times columnist Nick Kristof wants to take you to Africa. No this won't be some cushy first-class vacation. Kristof wants to show you, first-hand, the devastation that international ignorance, war, disease and famine has wracked on parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

This is apparently the second time in a row that he's done this. This year he's even partnered up with Myspace to try to reach out to that apathetic college demographic. I want to commend Kristof for doing this, a lot of journalists lament on how those of us in the West ignore what's going on in the rest of the world. Kristof goes the extra mile in trying to do something about that apathy. Good for him.

Sadly the contest is only open to Americans. But if one of our large national newspapers want to run a contest like this I'll promote it to the rooftops.

You can also read the blog of last year's winner Casey Parks.

UPDATE: SPELLING ERROR FIXED

More entries on: Generally Interesting

the culture of catastrophe

Posted by john_d at 11:31 AM ET | Comments (0)

(image courtesy Rocks on Fire)

Heading for a bar on Queen Street two nights ago, my friend and I caught sight of a streaking ball of flame flashing across the southwest sky. Lots of shouting and pointing later, we settled on the idea that we had just seen a meteorite of some kind. Very cool. I'd seen one before in the early nineties... strangely, heading in the same direction across the same section of sky. That one had a bluish edge, while this one was yellowy orange.

Yesterday I checked the news for any reports, but found nothing. Today there is this in the Toronto Star.

Glad to have it explained. But this article raises another question. Read this bit:

"Oh my God, I think I just saw a plane crash," she declared to her husband, running inside.

A ball of light, seething white, had careened overhead, spitting out dazzling debris. She called police, the government, airport authorities. Seeing his wife so frantic, Russell Crowther imagined worse.

"I thought it was a nuclear warhead," he recalls. "I was just squinting, waiting for us to evaporate."

Great age we live in, when a beautiful natural display is immediately interpreted as the the end of the world. And I'm not saying these folks were wrong to think what they thought. After all, it was their over-reaction that made a story about pretty basic science something far sexier. But have we really advanced so little in our comfort with existence that we are still waiting for the hand of god to reach down and smite us?

More entries on: Signs of the Apocalypse

March 12, 2007

Take your community standards and ...

Posted by Ariel Troster at 02:02 PM ET | Comments (4)

God, this feel like so-20-years ago. Censorship is rearing its ugly head in Ottawa once again, after a father complained to the Hunt-Club Riverside Community Centre, after his son picked up a copy of Capital Xtra, Ottawa's gay and lesbian newspaper. He is, of course, objecting to an ad for a gay chat line, which appears in the back section of the newspaper.

In an article in Saturday's Ottawa Citizen (not online unfortunately), Greg Evans is quoted as saying, "I sat there looking back and forth at the pictures and words and the kids' basketball practice, and I thought, 'this is wrong.'"

Now a city councillor has taken up the case, and is apparently going to encourage city council to discuss an across-the-board ban on "explicit material" in community centres.

I don't know whether to stifle a yawn or hit the streets, because this issue just refuses to go away for the queer community.

First of all, I find it hard to believe that the city is actually taking one complaint seriously. I mean, do people read the Ottawa Sun? Because I'd like someone to explain to me why the Sunshine Girl doesn't elicit the same condemnation as a photo of two men embracing.

Are we to believe that the objectification of women is socially acceptable, while the queer community's depiction of our own sexuality should be condemned as obscene? That sounds like a double-standard to me.

Besides, children young enough to be "vulnerable" to sexually explicit content should not be left alone and unsupervised in public places where they could read free periodicals. Frankly, I find anti-choice religious rhetoric more damaging than any depictions of nudity and sexuality. The Christian Right offends my "community standards." Should we also ban advertisements for church socials and anti-abortion rallies?

Also, to quote Gareth Kirkby, editor of CapX:

Queers want access to our community newspaper of choice, just like everyone else. We live throughout the city and we want our paper treated exactly on par with other papers and widely available.

Capital Xtra is not an adult publication. It is a community newspaper. Like other local papers, it has a small amount of advertising devoted to dating services, escorts and so on. But the overwhelming majority of space goes to local, provincial and national news and views, along with listings and arts and culture coverage.

The municipal government has no business restricting the content of community newspapers.

Gays and lesbians are sick of having our lives and our media put under a microscope. It's deeply offensive to keep asking us to justify ourselves. It's time Ottawa dealt with our existence and our way of life and moved on.

More entries on: LGBT

March 11, 2007

Back in the USSR

Posted by aaron at 07:13 PM ET | Comments (0)

The latest dead Russian journalist, Ivan Safronov, fell from the fifth floor of his apartment building on March second. Authorities claimed it was a suicide but nobody believes this. He was, at the time, working on an article about Russian arms sales to the Middle East, making him the twenty second working journalist to die since Putin gained power in 2000 according to Reporters Without Borders, an organization that monitors press freedom worldwide.

Maybe you caught Michael Specter's article in the New Yorker on January 29th about the new Russian totalitarianism. Most articles don't shock me anymore, I've become very desensitized, but this one did. Surprisingly, I'd fallen for the liberal line that, "post-Soviet Russians now enjoy the benefits of western capitalism and pluralism, finally being free to pursue a sort of Russian version of the American dream."

The reality, as Specter points out, is far darker:

"Sick of the lines, the empty shops, and the false promises of Soviet life, Russians looked first to the West--and particularly to the United States--to provide an economic model. What followed was an epic disaster: the sell-off of the state's most valuable assets made a few dozen people obscenely rich, but the lives of millions of others became far worse. The health-care system fell apart, and so did many of the social-service networks.

Russia became the first industrial country ever to experience a sustained fall in life expectancy. Russian males born today can, on average, expect to live to the age of fifty-nine, dying younger than if they were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is not surprising, then, that by the time Putin became President most Russians were only too happy to exchange the metaphysical ideas of free speech and intellectual freedom for the concrete desires of owning a home and a car and possessing a bank account. They also wanted to feel that somebody was in control of their country."

Consequently, press freedom in Russia has completely disappeared. Statistically it's safer to be a journalist in Afghanistan, which, however you read it, is pretty terrifying.

More entries on: Media navel-gazing

March 09, 2007

The God Discussion

Posted by shawnsyms at 12:31 PM ET | Comments (16)

Over the past month, I got into the habit of reading Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion on the bus and streetcar most mornings. I try to walk to work as much as I can but it's been just too cold!

It's proven to be a very controversial book, and with its shiny cover with the title in big letters, I'll confess I've been a bit afraid someone pious might come up and accost me as my Ossington Street bus roars through some of the more church-lined parts of the trip to the office. And there's a section called "Stalin and Hitler were atheists, weren't they?" that reproduces and later dissects some of the arguments of Hitler and Stalin. I'd hate to have a person sitting next to me read some Nazi propaganda over my shoulder and become hurt or offended.

Ironically enough, getting over the fear of hurt or offense is one of the key thrusts of Dawkins' book. He believes that religion on the whole does more harm than good, and that people shouldn't shy away from making that case. He also makes provocative arguments against the religious indoctrination of children.

After reading both the book and much of the hype surrounding it, the hype—including the argument that Dawkins is a "fundamentalist atheist"—doesn't hold up. The God Delusion doesn't mince words, is bound to offend many, and may in fact be "preaching to the (atheist) choir"—but it offers some fascinating challenges to progressives.

On the one hand, many people involved in movements for social change, and doing greatly valuable and important work, get their philosophical inspiration from a deep spiritual commitment. On the other hand, it is in fact problematic that religion is seen widely as the one area that is untouchable in terms of rational inquiry. Across history and cultures, different religions have been in various positions in terms of social power and in relation to one another. The bottom line is that all of them should be equally up for discussion.

More entries on: Atheism | Religion

Franked

Posted by john_d at 10:32 AM ET | Comments (10)

(image courtesy Frank Magazine, apparently)

The pro-Conrad Black website www.supportlordblack.com is a truly brilliant Frank Magazine hoax, proving once again that if it seems too funny to be true...

D.B. Scott's magazine blog reveals the saddest detail, which is that it appears Lord Black himself sent the site a note of thanks and a t-shirt offer. Now I actually do feel sorry for him. He's becoming that Jon Lovitz character who took Marge Simpson to the prom.

You know, looking at it now, that ribbon up there really should have tipped me off. Brilliant.

More entries on: Media navel-gazing

March 08, 2007

International Women's Day Special Report: Women's Health in Haiti

Posted by shawnsyms at 04:09 PM ET | Comments (0)

Getting the word out about a free hospital for pregnant Haitian women
(photo by Isabelle Jeanson for Médecins sans Frontières)

The poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has suffered as a result of international intervention for over five hundred years. The damage continues to this day, in the form of desperate poverty and extreme brutality. Some of those at greatest risk are women.

Last year, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that in the year following 2004's armed insurrection against the Haitian government, 8,000 murders and 35,000 acts of sexual assault occurred in the area surrounding the capital Port au Prince alone. More recently, the BBC reported that some UN troops deployed in the distraught nation have been accused of sexual violence against children.

And with Haiti's for-profit healthcare model, the most vulnerable suffer. In the dozens of slums surrounding Port au Prince, women were forced to give birth at home in unsanitary conditions, without the benefit of electricity, latrines or even running water. Until Médecins sans Frontières got involved, that is. MSF opened Jude Anne Hospital one year ago, strategically locating it so the poorest women in the capital city could easily travel there. The hospital offers emergency obstetric care to poor pregnant women, for free. It also offers support for those who have been sexually assaulted, and provides anti-retroviral treatment to deter mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

In the Post Marchan slum, thousands live surrounded by garbage and open sewage
(photo by Isabelle Jeanson for Médecins sans Frontières)

The hospital has just over 50 beds—but hundreds of women seek help there every day. So a fast turnaround is essential. About 4 hours can be devoted per standard birth; women who undergo Caesarean sections can recuperate there for two days. Still, the efforts of the hospital staff greatly increase the odds for women and children in a country where, the MSF points out, there are 523 maternal deaths for every 100,000 childbirths (compared with 20 deaths on average in Western nations).

Jude Anne Hospital saves lives. Many of its patients experience high-risk medical complications where an attempt at home birth would likely kill the mother, or child, or both. Still, even managing to get to the hospital can be a fateful risk. In the slums of Port au Prince, random violence such as shootings and kidnapping are daily occurrences. A lot of the births take place in the hallways or even in the parking lot. As Sarah Senbeto, one midwife working at Jude Anne, told MSF: "Sadly enough, we can only help a small portion of the women in Port au Prince. We can only save those who make it this far."

MSF is on a mission to let the world know the struggles facing the poor women of Haiti. Find out more here.

More entries on: Feminism | Healthcare | Poverty | Sexual Health

March 07, 2007

Vaginas unite!

Posted by Ariel Troster at 01:11 PM ET | Comments (2)

In honour of International Women's Day tomorrow, I would like to designate today as "The Day in Honour of Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson." These gutsy gals have just been suspended from a Cross, River, N.Y. high school for defying their principal's orders, and reading out the following passage (in unison!) during a performance of the Vagina Monologues:

My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country.

Apparently, the school deemed the word vagina to be inappropriate for children to hear. You can read the full story here.

Can you imagine if other body parts were deemed arbitrarily inappropriate for young audiences? Like "elbow." I think elbows are kinda lewd.

Anyway, this isn't the only place where the proper name for pussy was deemed too racy. A Florida theatre tried to re-name Eve Ensler's famous play "The Hoo-Ha Monologues" last month, but Ensler told them she'd pull the plug on the production, unless they dropped the moniker and used the play's real name.

Still, there are hip feminists out there that take issue with the Vagina Monologues' use of the wrong v-word. According to this writer, we should be teaching girls about both the vagina and the vulva, saying,

The widespread denial of female external genitalia (and thus of female sexuality, if not female reality) is a subject worthy of serious discourse. It is true that Americans do not excise the clitoris and ablate the labia, as is practiced in other cultures on countless girls and women. Instead, we do the job linguistically-- psychic genital mutilation, if you will. Language can be as powerful and swift as the surgeon's knife. What is not named does not exist.

Here's to girls who get it! Your smarts and your bravery are the real liberation flags in the women's army.

More entries on: Feminism

Many faces of AIDS in Africa

Posted by shawnsyms at 11:40 AM ET | Comments (1)

Researcher Cory Alan Johnson

The history of AIDS in Africa is a story intertwined with the ongoing legacy of colonialism, poverty, racial discrimination and other systemic ills. Including homophobia, according to the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).

People often point to the African situation as "proof" that "AIDS isn't a gay disease," because on that continent—home to 25-million HIV-positive people and the disproportionate location of 60 percent of the world's HIV infections—the bulk of the impact is upon heterosexuals, and children.

But the reality is more complex. According to IGLHRC's just-released report "Off the Map":

Studies in Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya indicate HIV seroprevalence rates significantly higher among men who have sex with men than in the general population. While African lesbians may have lower HIV seroprevalence rates than heterosexual women, same-sex practicing African women have self-reported HIV seroprevalence rates substantially higher than one might expect. The vulnerability of same-sex practicing men and women is not due to any biological predisposition, but is the result of an interlocking set of human rights violations and social inequalities that heighten HIV risk. Anti-gay discrimination is fueling the African HIV/AIDS epidemic.

IGLHRC's Cory Alan Johnson wrote the report. He says that while part of the problem is homophobia within some African cultures and governments, another big issue is the agenda of international and local "faith-based" organizations, whose religious beliefs mandate ignoring same-sex practising African people. "Our inclusive efforts are oppressed and stigmatized by the majority of faith-based organizations," he notes.

The needs and experiences of same-sex people in Africa may be drastically different from the agenda for queer rights in the West—but they need our support urgently. Education is the first step.

More entries on: HIV/AIDS | LGBT

Submit!

Posted by jessica at 10:48 AM ET | Comments (33)

This Magazine — Call for Submissions

Calling all writers: critics, commentators, essayists, troublemakers and political pundits — This Magazine wants you! We are looking for smart, quirky or fun pitches on political topics of national relevance. This Magazine articles are well researched, have a strong analysis at their core, and a Canadian angle. We welcome ideas for investigative features, literary non-fiction, politically oriented service journalism, essays, photo essays and arts and cultural analyses. Or, pitch a shorter piece for one of our departments.

Info on upcoming themes, department descriptions and instructions for submitting a query after the jump.

Editorial Calendar 2007 / 2008

July/August 07 — Rebellion

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First draft deadline: April 15

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THIS & THAT

Editor: Wendy Glauser, news[at]thismagazine.ca

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Editor: Jessica Johnston, editor[at]thismagazine.ca

A good This Magazine article offers background and context to ongoing Canadian issues, a challenge to the mainstream media perspective or an important story that hasn't been told elsewhere. Subject matter includes the arts, culture, Canadian party politics/legislation, legal issues, labour, the environment, native affairs, social services, public policy, education, health care, foreign policy, race/racism, media, science, queer issues, feminism, with a focus on high-quality writing and in-depth research.

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More entries on: THIS matters

March 05, 2007

On Think Tanks and Market Fundamentalists

Posted by aaron at 03:26 PM ET | Comments (7)

The CounterCulture lecture series is organized by the Simon Fraser University School of Communication. Last thursday the speakers were Donald Gutstein and Jamie Peck, two leading researchers of neo-liberal think tanks. While I already knew how evil the Fraser Institute was before, it's never been put to me in such an urgent way.

These think tanks are the reinforced concrete of the right wing propaganda structure. Not only do they play an essential role in setting the ideological agenda within the movement but by masquerading as genuine scholarly institutions they influence politicians, media, and regular people.

But it's not regular people they're after. According to Gutstein, the think tanks work on the treetops model, opposite of the grassroots model. They very conciously single out the small group of influential people whom they want to target and spare no expense reaching them. And they're certainly well funded.

Thirty years ago, the Fraser Institute was one of two neo-liberal think tanks worldwide, but now with the help of money from big business neo-liberal think tanks exist in almost every country, American state and Canadian province. While most left leaning organizations focus on one issue, are staffed by volunteers and struggle to get media exposure, the Fraser Institute is multi-issue, flush with cash and has a direct line to the Canwest plutocrats. David Asper is a former Fraser Institute trustee.

Jamie Peck, a visiting professor from the University of Wisconsin, Madison spends his time interviewing think tank "intellectuals." Like old school Maoists, these guys are "stark utopians" with a really pure idea of the future. He joked that these "market fundamentalists" will look you in the eye when they say the free market will solve the healthcare crises but will always look at their toes when discussing global warming. Which is probably why sometime last week the issue pretty much got dropped by the right.

You can read Gutstein's article on Steven Harper and the Fraser Institute in the Georgia Straight and if you're around the wet coast this month, i encourage you to check out the next CounterCulture talk:

Thursday March 15

SFU School of Communication CounterCulture Series presents,

Nandita Sharma
On
How to Stop Thinking Like a State:
No Border Movements and the Struggle Against National Forms of Discrimination

SFU Vancouver Campus
(515 West Hastings St. Vancouver)

7 pm
Room 1700 (7th Floor)

Nandita Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i. Her recent book, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006), examines the importance of nationalist renditions of home, community and society to the indenturing of hundreds of thousands of people classified as non-immigrant workers. She is currently examining temporary "guest workers" in the U.S. Nandita has long been active in feminist, anti-racist and migrants' rights movements. She helped to co-found a transnational campaign, Open the Borders!, in 1999.

More entries on: Fundi Watch

irony passes away at Chicago newsdesk -- no-one notices

Posted by john_d at 11:09 AM ET | Comments (1)

As we all await Lord Black's day in court (March 14th, or as I like to think of it , 3 days before Guinness Day), we sadly mourn the death of ironic comment and hope that Rick Mercer can do something to bring it back to life.

A while back, I posted here about a website set up to gather and express support for Conrad Black in his ongoing legal difficulties in the United States. I encouraged readers to go to the site and register their true feelings for Lord Black. I ended the call to arms by suggesting that all of us supporters of Lord Black would enjoy a bit of fox hunting at the trial's end.

This past weekend, the Chicago Tribune quoted from my posting to make the point that "the fact that Black is out and about, holding his head up, is winning him some grudging respect." Tribune staffer Susan Chandler writes:

Black also has garnered supporters in cyberspace. A recent post by "john_d" on a Canadian magazine blog asks if readers are "sick of how the United States is persecuting one of our best and brightest with a frivolous legal action inspired by little more than the inferiority complex of the common masses?" Then it urges them to "Stand up for Conrad Black."

A public relations blogger in the U.S. declares "Conrad Black is my new anti-hero and favorite writer."

I can't believe the fox-hunting didn't make it into the quote.

Edward Greenspan is a brilliant lawyer, and Lord Black's campaign of innocence has been a marvel to watch. This should be almost as good as the March Madness college basketball tournament.

Thanks to D.B. Scott for pointing out the Tribune article. D.B.reads an awful lot.

More entries on: Media navel-gazing

Remembering a "Dyke Dynamo"

Posted by shawnsyms at 09:55 AM ET | Comments (7)

My heart sank a few days ago when I learned of the death of longtime lesbian activist Chris Bearchell.

I remember seeing Bearchell on the streets at a demo back in the late eighties and being too timid to approach her. I was shy, and she was already a legend in political circles by then. One of the publishers of the seminal queer publication The Body Politic (TBP), she was writing there about dyke politics as far back as 1975. Along with the rest of the TBP collective, she was active in the massive protests about Toronto's bathhouse raids in 1981, infamouly coining the chant that defined that moment of resistance: "No More Shit!"

Bearchell came up in the radical left and had a particular commitment to lesbians and gay men working together, at a time when many of her sisters were focused on separatist forms of community development. She hosted a collective queer household on Walnut Avenue in Toronto that incubated many new activists and served as a hotbed of local progressive politics. She was particularly committed to supporting queer youth, and sex-trade workers.

I walk down Walnut most days (it's near my office) and my thoughts often turn to the many fruits of her labour. Rest in peace, Ms Bearchell.

More entries on: LGBT

Open Source Medicine

Posted by shawnsyms at 09:10 AM ET | Comments (0)

I did a double-take when I came across a headline on the Medecins Sans Frontieres website the other day: "Medecins Sans Frontieres welcomes the introduction of a new open-source user-friendly drug combination against malaria." The notion of "open source" is very familiar to me in my day-to-day work as a web-server administrator, conjuring up thoughts of the Linux operating system and free programs such as techie faves PHP and MySQL. Little did I know the concept had resonance in the worlds of healthcare and activism.

Open-source software is that whose actual code is freely available for anyone to use, modify or share, rather than guarded by proprietary methods to preserve a corporation's profits. Its advocates argue that it can be developed and improved more rapidly—and the price tag is nice as well, especially for individuals and non-profits. Now physicians, scientists and activists are taking this model and applying it to the world of pharmaceutical development.

Big Pharma is driven by profit, which means they don't devote adequate resources to combatting the specific diseases that affect the global poor. So a movement is emerging to foster international scientific collaboration on medical development, resulting in the release of drugs that are patent-free, making them dramatically more accessible to those in need. In the case of MSF's announcement, a new anti-malaria formulation has been released that is cheaper and easier to use than the standard treatment—a critical advance against a disease that kills over a million people a year.

Come to think of it, this open-source model reminds me a lot of my earliest involvement in direct-action politics, where many people got together and freely shared ideas in order to accomplish social change. Despite my initial surprise, I guess the idea isn't so unexpected after all.

More entries on: Healthcare

March 04, 2007

All together now

Posted by Ariel Troster at 08:06 PM ET | Comments (2)

In the queer community, we have a lot of discussions about the intersection between sexuality and gender. I've been party to many dinner parties where we natter on about what really defines "us" -- is it our sexual orientation or our gender identity? We talk a lot about how as "the movement" is broadening its reach to include trans people, it's encouraging gay and lesbian folks to think about how homophobia intersects with transphobia, and how to make space and share "lessons learned" with up-and-coming activists who are struggling with issues that are so pressing ... like finding a safe place to pee -- as Ivan Coyote wrote about in a recent issue of This Mag.

Anyway, all of these discussions are really inconsequential to the fundamentalists who are so terrified of "the gay." According to WorldNet Daily's resident fundie Jim Rutz, "homosexuality is always deviant." And the latest threat to our children's moral purity? No, it's not Madonna or home decoration shows. It's soy, which according to Rutz has the ability to turn boys into girls and girls into women ...

Which brings me back to my original point. If you read Rutz's rant, what he really seems to be scared of is men becoming more like women. I find that this is the real source of homophobia -- hatred and fear of women ...

That's why Jack Malebranche is only fueling hatred against women by suggesting that gay men should redefine themselves in an effort to "remain men." (You'll note the portrait of him holding a baseball bat in a menacing manner -- lovely).

That's why I've always believed that the past battles between feminists and gay men (over censorship/pornography) and between lesbians and trans people (over access to women-only spaces) seemed so futile.

Because according to our opponents, the only thing worse than being gay is being a woman.

More entries on: Fundi Watch

Previous month: February 2007
Next month: April 2007

THIS MAGAZINE. BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL

Please note that all writers hold the copyright for their pieces and it is illegal for any portion of them to be copied or distributed without their expressed permission. So please don't steal.

THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

March 31, 2007

Pet zombies and suburban sprawl

March 29, 2007

Stand up, Scarborough!

March 27, 2007

Mayor Miller vs Movies?

March 24, 2007

Thoughts while stuck in traffic

March 23, 2007

Information Wants to be Free UPDATE

March 21, 2007

Holy Bottled Water

It's spring! ... and I love Europe

March 20, 2007

Bottling profit, not altruism

March 19, 2007

Web 3.14159 -- somewhat rambly thoughts

March 18, 2007

Hijib Hijabbery

March-April issue of This now online

March 16, 2007

Budget This!

March 15, 2007

The Next Prime Minister

Drugs into bodies, money into pockets

What does it mean to be a leftist?

March 13, 2007

NY Times columnist takes you to Africa

the culture of catastrophe

March 12, 2007

Take your community standards and ...

March 11, 2007

Back in the USSR

March 09, 2007

The God Discussion

Franked

March 08, 2007

International Women's Day Special Report: Women's Health in Haiti

March 07, 2007

Vaginas unite!

Many faces of AIDS in Africa

Submit!

March 05, 2007

On Think Tanks and Market Fundamentalists

irony passes away at Chicago newsdesk -- no-one notices

Remembering a "Dyke Dynamo"

Open Source Medicine

March 04, 2007

All together now