On February 17th the Monarchist League of Canada finally received confirmation by the government that no medal would be produced to mark Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee. Now, given the number of people who have went above and beyond during the pandemic (and ought to be honoured in some way) this is not a great decision.
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Canadian Dimension: Oppressed by social justice
University of Toronto. Photo by Jon Bilous/Shutterstock. Right-leaning academics and many who have never set foot on a post-secondary campus will try to convince you that universities are bastions of leftist ideology and activism. They will lament their loss of academic freedom in an increasingly “woke” environment. They will complain
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Gregg Gonsalves writes about the continued dangers of responding to COVID with wishful thinking rather than realistic public health measures, while Meredith Wadman reports on how the spread of the Omicron BA.2 strain has caught the scientific community off guard. The National Institute
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jim Stanford discusses how Canada’s COVID response has been slanted toward handouts to corporations and demands of workers – and increasingly so as the pandemic has continued. Alison Pennington calls out the cruelty by design in Australia’s similar move toward eliminating pandemic leave
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Plague Update: Moevid
Plague Premier Moe has COVID-19. He spent the last few days improperly using a substandard mask in public crowds, wiping his bare nose, and coughing. Maskless 3 days ago at a school. https://t.co/U7RuRTm21T — Kelly Miller (@sqirlgirly) January 13, 2022 The release has lies.He coughed into his hand, and rubbed
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Gloria Novovic writes about the desperate need to start planning ahead to control the damage done by the COVID pandemic, rather than reacting only to calamities already in progress. Ed Yong highlights why there’s no reason to minimize the effect of the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Charlie Smith highlights how attempts to minimize the ongoing pandemic have reduced the public credibility of both government and public health officials alike in British Columbia (even as they’ve provided a messaging boost to anti-vaxxers). Nam Kiwanuka laments how parents have been
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: The Kids Go Back to School (it’s a matter of “balance”)
“We’re on the cusp of a generational catastrophe. We need to prioritise children. And yet, for some reason, children are never prioritised. They’re the afterthought of a pandemic.” – Dr Tracey Vaillancourt, Chair, COVID-19 Task Force, Royal Society of Canada On Jan 5, 2022, after a one-week delay, Education Minister,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Trevor Herriot and Cathy Holtslander write about the Saskatchewan Party’s climate position which can’t be treated as anything but implicit denialism. John Woodside points out that the Libs’ fuel regulations seem designed to lock us into decades of avoidable fossil fuel use,
Continue readingAlberta Politics: N.W.T. drops Alberta school curriculum, adopts B.C.’s – a powerful symbol of what’s gone awry under Jason Kenney
The news release from the Northwest Territories Government doesn’t even mention Alberta, but just the same it’s a powerful symbol of what’s gone awry in the province to the south under the United Conservative Party Government of Premier Jason Kenney. The release published yesterday in Yellowknife said that the N.W.T.’s
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Inside Laurentian University’s demise
In April 2021, Laurentian University announced plans to cut 58 undergraduate and 11 graduate programs and lay off more than 120 faculty. As Ron Srigley writes, this move signaled the craven capitulation of the institution to market demands. Photo from Twitter. What happened to Laurentian University? How did a publicly
Continue readingThe Maple Monarchists - Blog: How historical happenstance resulted in the Québécois being ruled by the same monarch they would have had anyways if they had never left France
The Québécois are, as a rule, not fond of the monarchy. Poll after poll bear this out. Its not so much that Québécois dislike the Queen or, arguably, even the institution of monarchy. Instead, the monarchy is a convenient symbol of the conquest of the colony of New France by the British and the subsequent second class
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: And The Answer Is …
Education. Well, it’s part of the answer anyway. And the question? How does society mount a serious effort to combat racism in its many forms, be it directed against Muslims, Asians, Jews, Blacks, Indigenous or anyone else who falls within the sights of the benighted and the evil? The stakes
Continue readingAlberta Politics: In Flanders Fields? It’s time to encourage another generation of school kids to read some better poems from the Great War
A civilization that forgets its poetry is barely worthy of the name. Like fiction and unlike non-fiction, poetry is how a culture’s most profound truths are told. Unlike fiction, poetry does this vital work with great economy of words. Dr. John McCrae, surgeon in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Chesterson’s Fence – Why Second Order Thinking is Important
Sometimes a concept is so good one must ruthlessly crib from another source – So here ya be, the notion of Chesterson’s Fence and how important it is to understand the reasons why something was done in the first place. “Second-order thinking will get you extraordinary results, and so will
Continue readingKersplebedeb: Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-Imperialist Education, Vol.6 No. 1 (September 2021) – Now available on LeftWingBooks.net!
This journal will be available to ship in early November pingkian noun \pi?-k?-?n\ * flint * nom de plume of revolutionary Emilio Jacinto * metaphor for struggle From the Philippines, PINGKIAN (pi?-k?-?n), Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-imperialist Education, is published by the Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy (CONTEND)
Continue readingThe Maple Monarchists - Blog: Queen & Governor General’s Statements on the First National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
“I join with all Canadians on this first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to reflect on the painful history that Indigenous peoples endured in residential schools in Canada, and on the work that remains to heal and to continue to build an inclusive society” ~Her Majesty the Queen “As we mark the first National Day
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Dialectic of Sex – Firestone
Shulasmith Firestone is one of the important thinkers of the Second Wave of feminism. In her book the Dialectic of Sex she tackles some of the big problems facing women, and more importantly, lays out a path to understand not only how history has played out, but the why. She
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: #Elxn44 Roundup
The latest from Canada’s federal election campaign. – Sam Hammond argues that we should expect our federal parties to strengthen public education in the wake of a pandemic which has exposed the iniquities faced by disadvantaged students. And Ricardo Tranjan highlights why we can’t afford to let parties treat rental
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