Author Archives: Senning

Another World

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High school was a heady time for me. For the first time, I was out of a Catholic environment, I had friends of a variety of backgrounds, I was kissing girl and studying science. And I was reading Common Dreams every chance I got.

Having grown up on The Toronto Star (centre-left and a bit wanting in international news), reading Common Dreams was just as much a part of becoming an adult as calculus and hormones.  Though I read about the cloistered meetings of the World Economic Forum in the Star, it was Common Dreams that introduced me to its more open alternative, the World Social Forum.

It was, and is, an exciting idea: activists and thinkers dedicated to a world of justice and democracy meeting in a city in Brazil that was trying to live the idea.  I’ve tried to live that idea too (my only real credit, beyond eating local/fair trade when I can, is my total use of Free/Open Source Software for my work.  Please give Ubuntu a try!) because I believed in that WSF slogan – Another World is Possible!.

TORONTO STAR/STEVE RUSSELL - The first of two cruisers burns on Queen Street West near Spadina, two damaged police cars were left on the street.

I think that’s why I’ve been haunted by that burning police cruiser.  The fire doesn’t bother me as much as the writing scrawled in green, because it makes me ask: just what is this other world?  Is it acceptable to destroy community property there?  Are our possible worlds limited to those in which violence is an excusable response to those who are disagreeable?

What violence, what excuses?  Well, let’s start with that one – it’s not that serious because it was just property.  Ignore for the moment that there were people in some of those properties.  If smashing store windows doesn’t sound like violence, imagine they were windows to abortion clinics, gay bars, newspaper offices, or constituency offices.  The violence is not just in breaking windows, but in making the city feel unsafe.

The evil of dento-fascism exposed

Independent pharmacies can afford speedy glaziers.

Then the excuse that makes the thought exercise necessary – the attacks were targeted at mega-corporations that do harm, and can afford to make repairs. I doubt the Bay/College medical offices and the TTC are part of a vast global-corporatist conspiracy to enslave the people, but if they are they’ve certainly learnt their lesson.  But how does that hold up as an excuse?  Can a better world only rise up after Tim’s, Bell, and Swiss Chalet have been annihilated?

Finally, it’s important to say that these are the acts of a tiny, violent minority, which is true.  But I’ve read on Facebook more times than I care to remember that the media should be writing on the issues raised instead, or that this isn’t really reprehensible because it’s targeted at evil corporations, and the police ‘planted’ their cars to be burnt.

FUCK THE FARE because in a communal society, we'll engineer power plants, drive streetcars and lay track without the violent coercion of the capitalist regime!

On Saturday, I tried to stop a couple of guys who were doodling on parked streetcars with their markers.  They had already been spray painted and scratched so it was really a moot point, but I love my city and my transit system, and I wasn’t about to stand by while a streetcar was defaced.  I ask them to stop, with a reminder that the clean up cost would be borne by the riders.  One said, “I ride the streetcar too.  I just don’t pay for it,” and they left.

I don’t know if these people had broken any windows or destroyed any police cars, but it feels to me that they come from the same place.  Apathy, incivility, self-righteousness, the kinds of attitudes that eat society away.  That’s always going to be a story, and that can’t be the foundation for a world built on community.  There were thousands of people this weekend trying to make legitimate points, or at least earnestly trying to make the world a better place to live.  Talk about them, but spare a sentence to condemn the violence.  Another world is possible.

Postscript

I should have written this on Saturday night, after I got home.  I’d spent the entire day walking the streets, and I was unreservedly impressed with the professionalism of the police who didn’t lose their cool.  I think some of those present found that frustrating because they took to chanting “We are peaceful; how ’bout you?” to the lines of cops bracketing smashed police cruisers, in which there was apparently still an officer.  Even while I was eating dinner, it was reported that the police hadn’t used tear-gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, or the water and sound cannons.

I was on the phone when I heard that pepper spray had been used against a protest at Queen’s Park, and mounted police had charged in.  Later that night, I read Steve Paikin’s report that the police had arrested every person at a protest, and had beaten a reporter.  The next morning, I read of more mass arrests at a protest outside the detention centre on Eastern Ave.  Then heavy police presence at a Critical Mass ride far from the summit, and at a pray-in much further in the core.  And then the four hour non-arrest at Queen and Spadina.  Then, as people were released from detention, word of the poor conditions there.

Had I written this on Saturday, it would be an uncomplicated story.  But maybe it still is.  The actions of the police cannot be excused because few people were seriously hurt – the indiscriminate and unnecessary use of force makes the city feel unsafe and unjust.  Nor can they be excused because they were targeted at radicals – they clearly were not, and even if they were, it is not criminal to be radical.  Nor can they be excused because they were the actions of a minority of officers (hopefully acting off their own anxieties, and not orders from above).  Violence is wrong no matter who perpetrates it.  This weekend, it seems, nobody’s reasons were as good as they’d like to think.

Spirit Vigil

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Yesterday, NASA announced that Spirit had missed a planned transmission.  To date, Spirit (and its twin, Opportunity) have lasted more than 2150 martian days longer than the expected 90.  Not just lasted, but thrived – originally planned to travel a single kilometre, Spirit logged 10 before becoming stuck in soft soil.  After trying and failing to escape for half a year (earth years), NASA decided to give up on mobility and allowed Spirit to perform science.  That was two months ago.  Today, it seems to have shut down to charge its batteries.

These two little rovers have lasted longer, seen more, done more than anybody ever expected, and have survived draining conditions.  Their tenacity has earned them empathy and celebration.  In tribute to Spirit, and in the hope it will revive and continue to contribute to our understanding of Mars, I wanted to offer up my best wishes to the rovers, and to all the people at NASA who keep them going.  Rock on, Spirit!

The Vegetarian’s Dilemma

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I was trying to finish Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma last night and, while reading the chapter on vegetarianism, I was stopped by a moral question.  The set up is based on Pollan’s summary of an ethical argument against eating meat:

  1. People vary wildly; some are cuter, funnier, smarter, etc.
  2. Smarter people don’t (as a matter of course) have the right to exploit those not as smart
  3. Any moral argument for meat-eating that relies on human ‘superiority’ runs in to #2.  Any argument that relies on a ‘difference in kind’ is speciesist (which might sound fine now, but might be as hard to justify as racism to your grandkids and their pet space-capybara).
Island Fox

Lunch. (wikipedia)

“Okay, great,” say the vegetarians between spoonfuls of granola, “what’s the problem?”  Pollan goes on to talk about a population of feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island, whose delectable piglets attracted a now-booming population of golden eagles who waltzed in to the vacuum left by the DDT-extinction of their cousins, the bald eagle.  Bald eagles (apparently, I’m going by Pollan here) mostly dine on seafood; golden eagles are huge and scary and dine on land animals like piglets… and the slower, smaller, critically endangered island fox.

Well, the foxes and bald eagles were there first, and the foxes are critically endangered which means, to those not familiar with the IUCN classification,  someone will shoot you in the face for sneezing in its direction because it is more important than you.  Well they are: there are only 125 Santa Cruz foxes.  And that’s why there are snipers hunting down the pigs and trapping the golden eagles – we have lots of pigs.

More important than fluffy kittens. (CC-SA, flickr:whereisbrent)

Sounds reasonable, right?  Well, let’s do the same thing with cats.  In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams’ and Mark Carwardine’s travelogue of endangered species, is the story of a program to protect the kakapo.   Isolated, New Zealand had lots of bizarre birds happily living on the ground (this being New Zealand, I use the term in a way unfamiliar to Southern Ontarians; there are lots of fjords and sundry cliffs) because there weren’t many other animals there – even the Maori were fairly recent.  More recent still were the European sailors, and the animals they brought with them: rats, possums, and, yes, cats, all of whom would quite enjoy a meal of slow, fat bird or its eggs and were quite able to get them.  Thus the government of New Zealand, killed off all the rats and possums and cats over a few islands, and brought every kakapo (and other endangered island birds) they could find to live on them.

So that’s Fluffy – is that fine too?  If it’s not, is it fine to leave these species to extinction?  There aren’t that many of them, and a single pregnant cat and her offspring could probably get to them quite easily.  If it is fine, then where do we draw that line?  The komodo dragon lives on inhabited islands, and they are not good neighbours.

So here’s the point: if we believe in “animal rights,” do those rights belong to the individual (as do human rights) or the species?  The ethical argument for veganism is that the individual animal has a right to live, and live freely.  But then the morally consistent stand would be to support the pigs and the cats – Pollan recounts a Save the Pigs campaign which flew plane-trailed banners.  On the other hand, domesticated animals only exist because we’ve bred them for captivity over millenia (or have we, as Pollan argues, grown together to a form of mutualism?) and wouldn’t exist otherwise.  In fact, as long as they’re treated well, the life of a farm-raised chicken or cow is generally much more pleasant than a life in the wild spent scrounging for food and fearful of… foxes.

Half of Omnivore’s Dilemma is actually devoted to telling the story of just such a farm.   On Polyface, it reads at length, cattle, chickens, pigs and grass formed an ecosystem that produced better beef, chicken, eggs, pork, and (via manure) vegetables.  Let’s imagine a future where this is the norm – living on abundantly fertile and wide-open Ontario soil, this shouldn’t be hard.  If the individual animal has a right to live, and live free, then this is still slavery, albeit a form of slavery some might choose over a cubicle farm, even if it ends in baconizing, as long as it includes a period of stud-ing.  The alternative for us though, given the number of human mouths to feed, is a plant-only agriculture that relies on fossil-fuel fertilizers (still much reduced, given everything that goes in to corn and soy for animal feed).  Other cities, in hillier climes, would have to continue to rely on intensive planting (and energy-intensive transportation) elsewhere.  At our current technology and infrastructure, that’s a recipe for continued (maybe worsening) climate change, condemning huge numbers of species to stress and extinction.

I actually don’t have a dilemma – I’m happy to live in moral inconsistency if it lets me fawn over individual puppies and piglets, express disgust over Chinese supermarket fishtanks, and still choose to eat local fish in the Yukon (there were no local fish, due to overfishing in Alaska, so I enjoyed non-local asparagus parmesan on fettuccine instead).   But there’s certainly an inconsistency there, and thus a question: Do animal rights belong to the individual or the species?  If the individual, what do we do about re-nativization and sustainable food?  If the group, is vegetarianism justifiable?  Is liberalism?

(link)Street View, Toronto 1876 edition.

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Header
Seriously beautiful, especially the border sketches which to me a lot like historical Hong Kong (or probably any British colony of the era).
CAMH-trin U of T is basically part field, part park, save for Spadina Crescent (then Knox) and UC (then Provincial College, apparently).  North-east of the big CAMH complex on the left is Trinity in its original site (now Trinity-Bellwoods).  Vic was still in Coburg at the time; not sure where St. Mike’s was (yes, technically I’m an alumnus).

You can spot St. Stephen’s-in-the-Fields near the Spadina-College intersection; that’s the only part of Kensington I recognize.  This was a couple of decades after the area was subdivided from an estate, but before it became home to waves of immigrants.  And the Grange is further south, before it was split by Dundas I guess.

Osgoode South-east of that, is the palatial Osgoode Hall, at the foot of College Ave.   The surrounding area is pretty much unrecognizable, and I think this was before it became Chinatown.

StLawrenceSouthSouth east of St. James (that biggest church on Church), you can see the North Market in its original form, and the (relatively) tiny thing across from it was the City Hall and jail.

This map is really worth checking out, but it is a 76mb JPG, so you may want to use a lab.
You can also see it in The Historical Atlas of Toronto, though it’s a bit harder to pick out details in a physical copy (this thing is serious huge).  Also, the amazon link is for reference only – buy it at Book City or any other local bookstore if you can, because it’s kind of weird to celebrate this historical bookish dedication to the city then failing to support its contemporary form.

Not Amused

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We are not amused

We are not amused

The President, while listening to a ‘question’ from Sen. Lincoln.  Were he ever to look at me like that, I’d really just stop talking.

Also true were he ever to look at me (sigh).

Hey Liberals

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Hey Liberals,
I know this should make me happy, but it doesn’t really.  You’ve finally caught up with the cons, but it’s not like you’ve made any real effort or taken any real risks of your own.  Hell, I’m subscribed to your email list and I don’t know what you’d bring us.  And you’ve never mentioned the anti-prorogation rallies, let alone helped organize them.

Look, you’re going to get my vote. I just wish I could vote for you.

(link) Papyrus

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With the proliferation of Macs, millions of people now have access to beautiful typefaces like Helvetica and Futura, Gill Sans and Optima.  But even though they have these fantastic tools, they do not choose them, no.  What do they choose?

Papyrus.

Is this what you're doing? THEN DON'T USE PAPYRUS.

Is this what you're doing? No? THEN DON'T USE PAPYRUS.

If you are not Joss Whedon merging East Asian influences in to Western culture, you have no place using papyrus.  No, not even you James Cameron (especially not you, James Cameron.  Weren’t your bluefolk vaguely First Nations?)!  This is not a beautiful font signifying tranquility and transcendence.  IT IS LATE 90′s CALIFORNIAN YOGA FROU FROU MASQUERADING AS AGE AND EXOTICISM.  At least Chalkboard isn’t vague cultural appropriation!
Remember, friends don’t let friends use papyrus – friends mummify friends who use papyrus.

(link) The effects of objectification

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This study uses a darn clever way of quantifying the effects of objectification, something that seemed strictly qualitative.  The blog post (and, I assume, the paper too) implies that reactions were gender innate, I think that might be an over-reach. I’d be curious whether (in a different experiment) the camera positions might actually embolden some participants and whether the effects remain over time.

Under the Covers

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“Would you please welcome to the stage… Sloan!”

That line is not on the latest album of Sloan songs, but then neither is Sloan.  It can be strange listening to Take It In – like any cover of old favourites, there’s a Being Erica level of time-travel, becoming a past self.  I absolutely loved One Chord to Another as a kid (somehow I had the U.S. version with the ‘party’ CD), and To The Power of Three’s version of Anyone Who’s Anyone made instantly awkward and happy.

The best tracks took well-known songs and made them feel current again (“breathe life into a song that’s long lost its lustre,” as Torontoist said of Winter Gloves’ cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit).  Creepy Finger’s drone Take It In, Lonnie James’ Nick Drake style proto-emo* The Good In Everyone, Fuck Montreal’s lo-fi People of the Sky and To The Power of Three’s Anyone Who’s Anyone are great, and that’s just from half of the first album (Chenemies G Turns to D also stands out on the second album for turning a rockout in to a beautiful acoustic strumfest).

Even the straight-up covers though, the tracks that weren’t much re-interpreted, were fun (for a while).  Except there was one pretty common change: on most tracks appears the ubiquitous female backup vocal (and that includes Fuck Montreal and To the Power of Three, and The Guthries’ damn good cover of Coax Me).  And its weird – is this real progress because women at least have a role in these bands?  There’s no doubt that in the Canadian indie scene, singing in heavily male bands has made a woman’s career (see: BSS alums, Neko Case), but its strange that women are almost a necessary component to make a song sound contemporary, but are generally in the background.

And then there are the songs where women come to the fore: listen to The Light Brights’ The Rest of My Life or Laura Borealis’ Bells On and see if slowing it down and adding a woman’s voice doesn’t make that whiny heartbreak seem more sincere and defiant (protip: yes, it does).  Mary Stewart’s People of the Sky turns the whole thing on its head – it’s actually damn similar to the original, but song by a woman with male backup.

Most of us have memories (and opinions!) of Sloan, this band that’s been around for almost as long as most of us, made music to which we grew up, and now hits on/makes out with our friends (anybody who can’t tell this story to the third degree needs to make more friends in Toronto).  You won’t necessarily love Take It In if you love Sloan, and you might love it even if you hate Sloan, but this is absolutely about them, and us, after almost two decades.  “What could you both possibly share other than the colour of your hair?”  I guess we both learned to stop fearing women?