I read this book last summer, but people are suddenly talking about it (and his earlier book) all over the place for some reason – maybe because we’re just seeing that things are really messed up. Even my youngest asked to borrow it, so it’s time to revisit. I give
Continue readingAuthor: Marie Snyder
A Puff of Absurdity: On Pandemics and the Climate
Everyone staying at home might buy us a bit more time to finalize policies that will actually mitigate climate change, if we actually care to do save even more lives. Juan Cole explains the connection between pandemics and climate change in this Truthdig article: There is an exact analogy between Trump’s treatment
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Can Public School Teachers Teach from Home?
Last Thursday, after getting a series of emails from the school board and OSSTF about concerns with many students travelling over the March Break and returning with an incubating virus that could infect each school, we suddenly found out from the CBC that we’re shutting down for the two weeks
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: COVID 19 and Pascal
Kevin Patterson at The Walrus has a great piece on the coronavirus. It’s different than the flu, faster, and our high-density living spaces aren’t helping contain it: “Famine and war routinely bring civilizations low, but though he trots closely beside those two, the horseman who carries off the most has
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Bit about Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom
I’ve written before about how I support free speech but don’t support giving platforms to “White Nationalists” or neo-Nazis or any other racist group who could use the venue to garner more followers. My concern is with audience members who might be easily led or looking for a place to
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Slowing Climate Change Doesn’t Have to be so Confusing!!
Some people insist that we can’t put it on individuals to make the changes necessary to affect climate; we have to change industry and vote differently and all that jazz. But it’s only with individual efforts to change our behaviours AND to effect industry and petition politicians, as individuals, that
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Getting My Head Around Privilege and Protest
This is a bit of a round up on this issue, just of opposing positions floating around social media. First let’s look at Andrew Scheer’s comments: On “ideologically motivated protestors”: I hate how the existence of ‘ideologies’ has been spun to be a problem in the world. I get the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Resisting Decadence
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” – Oscar Wilde Ross Douthat explores our trajectory that has led us to decadence, which he defines as, “cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. Under decadence, Barzun
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Let’s Talk about Population! (ducking projectiles)
Back in November, 11,000 scientists declared that we need to stabilize or gradually reduce the global population. Since then, I’ve bumped into a few people, online and in real life, who become absolutely irate at the suggestion that climate change is in any way affected by the growing population on
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: But Thinking is So Much Work!
Misinformation and misunderstanding and misreporting are going to be the death of us. From news sources reporting who was in the plane with Kobe Bryant before details were released to the families to an old article about Ebola resurfacing as if it’s about Coronovirus, it’s now up to Joe Public
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Martin Luther King Jr.
Chomsky praises him, saying he was vilified, but he was crucial to making change. Two years ago, the New York Times published an excellent transcript of his final sermon, annotated by Nikita Stewart to clarify the events that provoked some of his words. It’s his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Chomsky’s Optimism: On Climate Change, Nuclear War, and Activism
Truthdig‘s Scheer Intelligence series, hosted by Robert Scheer, recently posted a 3 hour podcast in two parts. I’ve summarized the gist of what Chomsky says below, in about a 15 minute read, with a few of my own thoughts and links added to the mix. You can listen to the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: How to Be a Good Citizen
This is a Twitter thread, but I want to save it, so I’m putting it here. It’s by Elle Maruska. (Here’s her Patreon and Ko-Fi, whatever that is.) “Here are some things you can do that, while maybe won’t change the world will help you become more effective as a progressive
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Age of Oblivion, Part 2
Chomsky has said, over and over, that the two things we should be worried about are climate change and nuclear war. We’re doing well at exacerbating both! Our obliviousness to these catalyses of catastrophe will propel us into total oblivion. Defense stock is up, though. Hedges on Iran: “The strike
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Age of Oblivion: Another End of Decade Rant
Of course calendars are a construct and don’t mean anything, but the end of the year and, even more so, the end of the decade are useful times to take stock. In pop culture, we have the Ecco Homo moment as a cultural foreboding – the chutzpah to insist on a fix that pretends
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Game Changers: A Bit about Persuasion and Reason and Eating Your Vegetables
I’ve come to believe that determining the very best diet is as individual as figuring out the best course of action to treat anxiety or depression. We are each our own guinea pig. Individually, we each have to try a few things, gradually, while monitoring our energy levels, abilities, and
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Pre-COP25 Panel of Speakers
A headache kept me home from work today, so I got some fresh air and checked out the climate strike. It was great timing for the strike, on Black Friday, with COP 25 starting in Chile three days from now. It’s a really hard sell to get a protest going
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Greatest Propaganda Machine in History
Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G. and Borat, among others) won an award from the Anti-Defamation League. Here’s his 25 minute acceptance speech. It’s in writing, abridged a bit, below the video if you’d rather skim than watch. (Emphasis is mine.) “Today, around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Gen Z for Zero, Net Zero
Mia Rabson reports, “A baby born in Canada today will never know a time in which his or her health isn’t at risk from a warming planet . . . Without accelerated intervention, this new era will come to define the health of people at every stage of their lives.
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Developing a Consistent Self
In a New York Times article, “What do teens learn online today?“, Elizabeth Weil suggests that kids are on the right track when they stream every inch of their anguish and joys in countless video tutorials aimed at, perhaps a necessary clarification, other teens. Weil says, “It’s nice if our fellow
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