On John Stuart Mill, Free Speech, and Climate Change

I got caught up in a few arguments about climate change recently that just reinforced to me, that there’s still such a strong bashlash against the entire idea that we’re unlikely to move forward quickly enough to be effective.

Paper is trees!

My school board is fundraising for the Philippines, and I’m totally on board with it. But I commented publicly on the irony of sending each kid home with a piece of paper on the issue. That’s over 60,000 full pieces of paper or about 8 trees for something that will be crumpled at the bottom of a knapsack or tossed before it even makes it home.  We’re cutting down trees to make paper to ask people to help those affected by conditions exacerbated by the cutting down of trees. And there are other ways to get the word out like our websites and automatic phone callers. If we really want to use paper, the notices could at least be sent on half pages or on re-use-it paper (‘goos’ paper in some places).

Pretty straightforward and reasonable, right??

Not so fast. A colleague ridiculed me for quibbling about paper when people are struggling to cope with a “NATURAL” disaster. I responded with a quote from the IPCC linking extreme weather to climate change and a suggestion that we're negligent if we don't take responsibility for our small daily actions having an accumulative and disastrous effect elsewhere.  But I'm pretty sure it's all for nought.  Sigh.

But, as is often the case, a much more interesting conversation happened with my students.

On Celebrating History

I've got a funny story.

A while ago - like months - a colleague asked if I'd do some website or advertising work of some sort for a sesquicentennial event in 2017 crossing Canada and involving high-school history teachers.  I'd have to find a way to get high-schools everywhere involved.  I said, "Sure!"

Then yesterday, as I was drinking my morning tea and scanning facebook as I'm wont to do while I wake up, I heard about this innane project proposing to make sculptures of all 22 of the Prime Ministers of Canada and litter them about our park.  I jumped on it and said to my facebook peeps, "Harper's statue will be toppled too often to fix."

Lenin fell for different reasons.

I got five likes in no time.  In my tiny, tiny world, that's a big win.  Five!!

A Little Hope is Effective...

A lot of hope is dangerous. - President Snow

This may be a little hokey, but I think Catching Fire is an important film to see right now.

And it's awesome!

I read the books ages ago, but even though I know how they each end, it didn't stop me from being on the edge of my seat.  And I was surprised by how inspirational I found the film to be.

Grist relates how the books chronicle what happens after climate change destroys the world and makes for scarce resources for the survivors to fight over.  We have a really interesting crisis to overcome for our time.  It's not us against the state - not just us against the state - but against our own conveniences.  Not enough of us have the foresight to vote out politicians who are supporting the pipelines.  That's one problem.  But a bigger one is that too many of us are sliding into complacency.

On Alain de Botton on Art Galleries

de Botton

Alain de Botton wrote one of my favourite under-praised books, Status Anxiety.  I also quite like using his Consolations of Philosophy in my class as an additional resource because it simplifies and grounds some theories for the kids.  And I show his TEDTalk on atheism 2.0 every semester when I talk about secular rites in anthropology.

However, he also wrote several books I found difficult to finish - not because they're complex, but because they're unfocused and trite.  They just don't seem to say anything.  I'm a bit wary to write that right out loud because he flipped out after a bad book review, telling the reviewer, "I will hate you until the day I die."  Yikes!  I think I'm relatively safe under my cloak of obscurity though.

Suffice it to say that he's hit and miss.

On Designer Vaginas and Media Influence

Labiaplasty is on the rise.  Who knew?

There's an article in the Guardian in which Daisy Buchanan argues that we can't blame porn for this rush towards plastic surgery to pretty-up our lady bits because it's everywhere; in mainstream music videos we can see about as much as porn shows.

I'm not sure what bands Buchanan follows, but I haven't see much in the way of actual labias in my regular, mainstream video-watching, nor in any of the movies I watch - and I watch a lot of movies.  Even Miley Cyrus doesn't actually show her junk.  So, if men are complaining enough for women to save up cash and courage to go through with this, then clearly porn is to blame for this significant cultural shift.  But I do agree with Buchanan that we're seeing a whole lot more skin these days, and I wonder if labias are next.

Moving Beyond the Rational

Unlike everything else in the news, this isn't about Rob Ford.

I'm going to merge some Fraser Institute news with recent discussions in class, an old Munk Debate on religion, and some ideas from David Hume.   Here we go!

Kate McInturff writes at the CCPA that the Fraser Institute,

"would like to remove compassion from the policy debate about poverty in Canada....because....compassion is causing us to confuse those who have lower income with those who do not have enough income to sustain life."

The interesting bit to me is just these few words:  "compassion is causing us to confuse...."

Munk Debates: Are Men Obsolete?

While I was waiting for the newest Munk Debate to show up on the site, I watched an old one: an excellent debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on, of course, religion.  There's little I enjoy more than watching really intelligent thinkers go at each other with carefully and thoughtfully chosen words.  The debate was run with opening statements, a series of 3-minute rebuttals, then closing statements.   They understood and followed the rules, and they remained focused on the topic without a single barb directly at anything said outside of that arena.

So it was interesting to watch four women on next.  Now, I don't know if it's because they're women, or because there were four instead of two of them, or because they're from very mixed backgrounds where on-your-feet oral debating isn't key to their livelihood like it might be, say, in parliament, for instance, but, for the most part, they didn't debate so much as they had a little conversation.  Most of what they said was previously scripted rather than a direct reaction to anything that was said in front of them.

It was still fun to watch.

On Russell Brand's Politics

I want to look at a few things Russell Brand has to say - in print and on video (quotations below are from both).  As Elizabeth Renzetti said in yesterday's Globe & Mail, he's resonating with people.  But, as she also suggests, he's not going far enough clearly enough for others to follow.  It reminds me of the Canadian film The Trotsky in which a young rebel tries to encourage a student protest.  (*spoiler alert*)  In the end, they all decide that he hasn't really thought it through all the way, but who cares?  It's clear we so desperately need a revolution.  We might not know exactly how our world should look, but we know it's not like this.

We need guys like this.  

Renzetti refers to Brand's rant as a generational conflict, but she seems to forget that Brand is almost 40, and he's lived a long life.  Sure Paxman is older, but many people implicit in the system Brand condemns are not.  He's not a rebellious youth; Brand is practically middle aged!  And it's dangerous to frame the argument as about age because that alienates the older supporters and dismisses some important ideas as part and parcel of a childish naivete spewed by the adolescents of the day.

Brand's not a rebel without a cause.  He is saying something important, more than just a stance on voting, and people are starting to listen:

Unexpected Side Effects

It's about teaching again.

We used to deduct 5% each day an assignment was late, and after one week, it gets a big fat zero.  Typically I'd get almost all the assignments on the due date, and a few stragglers by the end of the week.

Now we can't deduct late marks, and we can't give a zero if it's not handed in.  If they don't do the major essay, they can't get the credit, so we don't want to give a final day that we won't accept it, because we know full well that if they end up handing it in on the last day of term, we'll have to take it anyway.  We can call home, but most parents don't have much sway over their near-adult children.

The effect?  Fewer than half my grade 12s handed in their essay on the due date.  Why would they?  I gave, as incentive, that I'd be marking it harder if it's late, and that I'll be explaining the next assignment the day after this one is due.  We'll be moving on without you, and you won't have the comments on the first paper to help you do the second.  Better get it done....

On Regulating Smoking for Youth

Letter to the Editor in the Record today.  It's hard for me to stick to 200 words!

Make it illegal for teenagers to smoke
RE: Ontario bans youth from tanning beds — Oct. 10

I was ecstatic to see that a bill banning youth from tanning beds passed unanimously in the Ontario legislature. Malignant melanoma causes more than 1,000 deaths per year in Canada.

But it's baffling that 20 times as many people die each year from lung cancer, and smoking is still a legal hobby for youth and children to pursue. It's illegal to give or sell a cigarette to anyone under 19, but they can smoke 'em if they got 'em. And, somehow, they always manage to get them.

Tanning beds can be habit-forming for some, but smoking is physically addictive. If tobacco producers can get them when they're young, they can own them for life. If we can pass legislation to prevent youth from starting until their brains are mature enough to make good decisions, then we can make a huge dent in the leading cause of preventable deaths.

We've tried stopping the flow through various regulations at stores, and it's proved minimally effective. If we really care about our youth, we will make it illegal for anyone under 19 to smoke. Teenagers smoking in public should be fined the way they would if they were caught drinking in public.

And then we'd really be saving their skins.

 Marie Snyder Waterloo


If you agree, take a minute to tell your MPP (Catherine Fife's link is here)!


ETA - My 17-year-old son took offence at the suggestion that teenagers have immature brains, but I'm using this study as my backing.  There it is.  

On Strong Women

the infamous album

I want to start with the admission that the first CD I ever got was Sinead O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got.  It's attached to some fond personal memories.  I was wakened in bed by my partner with the CD in hand as an "anytime present," then went downstairs to find an actual CD player all set up!  And I'm still overly fond of the album because of the association.

I loved that she was political yet beautiful, and that she used the SNL forum to make a political statement.  Her aim, well above the fluff of pop music, made her admirable.  I wished I had been brave enough to shave my head.

BUT...

It Doesn't Matter

It doesn't matter why they're dressed as a tiger, have they got my leg?



About educational reform. This relates to the video above because we've spent years talking about why we need to make these changes, why these new ideas make up the best way ever (with truly weak evidence), and we're only just getting into the thicket now.  But there's more...

As we were sitting in our staff meeting on Friday, we watched a video about what kind of jobs will be available twenty years from now. Most top jobs today didn't exist twenty years ago, so we really have to prepare kids for jobs that....  That what?  That we don't know about??  That we can't even imagine?? The video focused on technology, and, I wonder if it's a wise assumption that the next twenty years will bring even more tech jobs to the fore. We might be in for a sharp corner ahead.

Because as I was sitting there, I was thinking, and I actually said so at my table, that it doesn't matter what kind of jobs they'll have in 20 years time because our future could very well hit a serious turn in about 30 years from now. I'm a riot at a party! But here we are, we're still stuck worrying about the nitty gritty of day-to-day life, while the entire system is collapsing around us.

About those 30 years: it's been reported in the Globe & Mail, and CBC, but you can read the whole study in the Journal of Nature (always go to the primary source, kids!), and what it actually says is,

Using 1860 to 2005 as the historical period, this index has a global mean of 2069 (±18 years s.d.) for near-surface air temperature under an emissions stabilization scenario and 2047 (±14 years s.d.) under a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario.

So if we ignore it all, business as usual, we have somewhere between 20 and 61 years before the climate will change permanently to the effect that the coldest year in 2047 will be warmer than the warmest years pre-2005. AND, they're talking global means, and I'll put my money on this part of the world to be one of the last to die off. That means, best case scenario, my youngest could make it to 70 without struggling. That's a relief.  Really. I'm not entirely sure it's a good thing to go last as a region, though. If and when things get too hot to for animal life to survive, it'll be up to us to make a whole lot of tough decisions and/or prevent mass invasions and genocides. Too bad for the tropics, eh? We mainly talk about people - like the world will be fine, it's just people that will die off - but that huge diversity of animal life will be gone too, and most of the plants.  And the ocean's already a mess. The report suggests coral reefs could be gone in 20 years.

When 9/11 happened, the entire day stopped at school, and everybody talked about the events and potential implications. I dropped my lessons for the afternoon, and we just talked.  It took over a few days, really. But when the papers and radio announced the IPCC findings, and some dudes extrapolated and distilled the concrete reality from that report, there's nary a mention in my building or neighbourhood.  It isn't in the curriculum objectives for my courses.

About to be brave in a flood.

It's too big to be real to us, but it has to be.  We have to be very very brave and face this reality, at least enough to get off our butts and raise some hell to ensure our livelihood scrapes by comfortably a few more decades at least!  If we stay in denial, we'll enjoy the next decade or so, but then it'll all be inevitable. If we can be realistic, and then break through the miasma of despair, we might actually be able to slow the process down. But to change things we'll have to give up flights, cars, eating meat, shopping, getting rich by exploiting resources, free markets, fossil fuels....  Lots of different bad things will happen, but they'll be less fatal if we can all work together.

If I were Minister of Ed, I'd make sure every student knows how to grow their own vegetables and how to preserve them: canning, pickling, making jams, horticulture, seed-collection and storage (Monsanto be damned!). Those are the important jobs of the future. We'd have kids looking at ways to make home-made water filters, and how to get water from other sources. And as for learning skills, responsibility and organization are great, but the key to the future?  Adaptability.  It's actually always been key, really. Yet it's not part of our learning skills chart anywhere.

How well can we change our lives to accommodate a dramatic change in our climate?  I'm all for being pro-active, but I can't grow vegetables. I'm hoping just to attach myself to someone with food skills!

And another learning skill we need to add to the list is unwavering compassion. Collaboration comes close, but it doesn't quite capture the flavour of what's needed.  This could all go very wrong.  We desperately need to keep our heads and help one another through it all.

And we need more theatre-of-the-absurd while we're at it. We need more weird-ass plays about our lives to remind us how mad it all really is.

Just a thought.

Piglet having fun without burning GHGs!

As for the jobs of the future, I'll put my money on philosophers. There will be scam artists galore and religious zealots -  they come out of the woodwork in times of trouble - but the real thinkers might be given a closer listen as we struggle with death. I mean, we all knew we were going to die anyway, but we often comfort ourselves with a leave behind - something that will outlast our corporal form - like a painting, or a book, or a bunch of blog posts, or some kids. That's because we've really just been pretending to be okay with death. Now we're facing a total obliteration of ourselves.  No more leave behinds to keep us going.  Even Picasso and Plato will be completely gone. Nothing.

So seize the day, my possums. Just please try doing it without using any fossil fuels.

And, wow, it's a gorgeous day out there! Enjoy! And Happy Thanksgiving!

Margaret Trudeau on Mental Health

There's a crack in everything.  That's how the light gets in.  - Leonard Cohen  

From CBC Books

I had the fortune of seeing Margaret Trudeau speak on mental health a few days ago.  She told her life story in exactly an hour with great intensity and humour.  She peppered her speech on mental illness with snippets of the stuff I remembered as a child - the hippie skirts then later dancing at Studio 54.  I'm of the age to have wanted to emulated her audacity.  She was the Prime Minister's wife, yet she didn't let that box her into being a stereotype - at all.

She wrote a book a couple years ago, Changing My Mind, which made her plight with mental illness public.  

She talked about the many things that might have triggered her bi-polar condition.  She always had a greater range of emotions, but it was kept in check by her mom who made her life regular: eating, sleeping, and playing all regularly.  But things happened to her that made things worse: a concussion as a child, no regularity at university, pot smoking, loneliness as the PM's wife, post-partum depression, and then profound grief when her son died.  She was "mad with grief."  

AER and Educational Reform: Makin' It Work

From Free Info Society

Whenever people start talking about A.E.R., I hear the letters being "sung" by Johnny Rotten.  Somehow it seems to help.

So we're getting to a point that it might all be feasible.  Change is always hard, but I feel like I'm over the hump.  There are still thing I disagree with, but I'm finding ways to work within the new system.

Do I feel like a sell-out?  Strangely, yes I do.  There's a stubborn part of me that says that what I was doing for the past 22 years was gold, dammit, so how dare people ask me to change it all because of questionable theories with limited evidence of success.  And there are a few things that I'm still trying to repackage with the new jargon and within the new boundaries rather than relinquish them entirely  That feeling was addressed a bit in this 15-minute video which was played for us during our last staff meeting.  I'd like to complain further about the repackaging process that happens repeatedly over the years - and how sometimes it just seems like the ministry is looking for something to validate its existence - but that's fruitless at this point.  I'll grade how things are going right now as far as I've been implementing the changes (and as far as I understand them).  This will be long, so I'll use headings (and letter grades because I'm really old school):

If You Build It, They Will Come - Really!

Photo Cred: Harrogate Cycling Group

In today's Record, Jeff Outhit comes very close to suggesting that if we bike in K-W, we should expect to get hit by a car.  It's not safe out there:  "...riding a bicycle to work is dangerous and counter to common sense."

Counter to common sense.  Later on he uses the term, "unwise."

I'm with him sort of... K-W feels like it's not a cycling-friendly city.  But to suggest that people who cycle in the city lack common sense is to shame the cyclists and add to the prevailing sentiment that cyclists shouldn't be on the road where weary drivers are likely to smash into them and crush them all to bits.

But if we look at it another way - by the number of collisions involving cyclists and those just involving cars - cyclists in Waterloo Region make up only 1% of total collisions, and, in Canada, less than 1% of fatalities.  That number is on par with the number of cyclists commuting to work compared to vehicles, so really, statistically, it's no more dangerous to bike than to get behind the wheel.  It's actually most dangerous to be a passenger in a car (especially on Fridays between 4 and 5 pm).

On Celebrating Talent

Convalescing from a wicked cold that's beating the crap out of me, I watched a trio of movies about amazing musicians: Joe Strummer, Ginger Baker, and Sixto Rodriguez.  In the films, other musical geniuses were highlighted along the way.  What a delight!  But as Ginger, Jack and Eric talked about people with the gift of perfect time, my first reflexive response was, "How many kids are told they can be a great musician if they just put their mind to it?".

In class this week, yet another student insisted that intelligence has minimal genetic basis compared to effort.  Anybody can do anything if they try hard enough.  I suggested there are people her age still struggling with the alphabet and lamented the ivory tower effect of streamed academic courses.  I don't think it was very convincing.  I'm battling a life-time of programming.  In high-school, I struggled with grade 13 physics.  Both my parents were math and physics profs at U of W, yet with their unwavering help, and the help of my teacher, I still couldn't get my head around that whole inclined plane issue.*  It's just not how my brain works.

And that's okay.

On the On-Going, Never-Ending Regional Bike/Car Conflict

On Friday, I had a conversation in class about cyclists being hit so much in the region because of our culture around cycling here relative to other cities, and then I saw Luisa D'Amato's article in The Record suggesting cyclists should be licensed to be on the road.  This continues to be an issue in the region.  Seriously, I've been writing about it periodically for 25 years!

First, on the article, I don't have any problem with getting a license to ride my bicycle, but I do wonder how this can possibly be enforced.  And at what age do we enforce it?  Should 6-year-olds be licensed?  What if they can't read yet?  Should there be a graduated licensing scheme like there is for driving - maybe one at 6, then 12, then 18?

Actually, the average 6-year-old doesn't have to ride on the road, like big people do, because they typically have bike tires less than 20" in diameter (or 50 cm), which is the cut-off for sidewalk cycling - something that IS legal in Waterloo if the tires are that small.  (By-law 08-077, which also says it's illegal for anyone to use a skateboard on a sidewalk.  Who knew?)  So maybe once kids graduate to a 20" tire they should have to get a license to drive it legally.

Law-Abiding Politicians

"I think politicians are entitled to private lives," - John Baird

Yet another article in today's G&M - page 3 no less - about pot smoking politicians.  Recently Trudeau admitting to having a puff since becoming an MP.

I totally support legalization of marijuana, and I don't care if you were a junkie as a teenager, but I think all politicians should be law-abiding while in office, and, ideally, maybe even a few years prior.  Is that so much to ask?

I remember once, in my early 20s, sitting with friends when a joint was being passed around.  One friend got up and left because she was thinking about becoming a cop and didn't feel right being in the same room with people breaking the law.  She was just thinking about it.

That's the kind of politicians I want.  Once you start thinking about getting into politics, you've got to clean up your act.

Which is why I prefer to just blog about politics and write them letters!

On Canada: A Fair Country

I used to be so proud to be Canadian and that's wavered over this difficult period in our history.  I was searching for this book to loan out, and once found, I got totally engrossed in re-reading it.  It made me feel so much better.  It's an important book about who we really are:  A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada by John Ralston Saul (2009).  What a delight!

Like Hedges' Empire of Illusion, this book focuses on our cultural stories or myths.  How we understand ourselves affects how we live and act, our beliefs and allegiances.  And we Canadians have lost our way swimming through the miasma of American influence.  As a civics teacher, when I do a pre-test at the beginning of the year, a good half the grade ten class give American answers to questions about Canadian politics.  Once in a while, someone admits that they thought Obama was our president too.  And they're not far off.  We have a long journey ahead of us to correct this indoctrination.  We can't be true to ourselves if we don't know who we are.  

Here are my notes and thoughts along the way, but do read the book - I've just captured the ideas, but the stories are what make it. 

Paternity Rights in Rape Cases

It's an interesting moral dilemma to have a judge decide a child has access to a father when the only contact the mother and father had was a sexual assault producing this child.  This isn't entirely the story here.  In this article, it could be a case of statutory rape.  It's possible there was a relationship for a while, that led to vocally consensual, yet not actually legal, sex.  It's not clear from the article if it was a guy jumping out of the bushes or a romantic tryst gone wrong or something in between.

The young mother, H.T."says she lived with her mother, who had to quit her job to care for the baby."

Well...the grandmother didn't have to quit her job to support the baby.  That was a choice she made - a difficult choice, but not the only possibility.  It makes me nuts when someone says they "had to" make some sacrifice for someone.  Apparently abortion wasn't on the table even though she was 14 when she gave birth, but that could have been an alternative to suffering caused by one fewer paycheque in the family.  It was her choice to leave her job.  But that's just a minor point.