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Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan
The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend. The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag. On their side, the museum indicated that
Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan
The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend. The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag. On their side, the museum indicated that they did not want blog posts that are “used as, or be perceived as, a platform for political positions or partisan statements”. Strong-Boag replies that she considers this approach to be both “naive and pedagogically unsound for a museum supposedly dedicated to (the promotion of) Human Rights”. It’s worth reading both statements in their entirety.
In the public response to the CMHR’s statement, the museum has been called out by a wide array of historians for what they perceive as its desire to try to produce a museum which is not political at all. As Franca Iacovetta and many others point out, “human rights are, by definition, political.” I fully agree, and at least on the face of that letter, it seems that I might have given the museum too much credit if I thought they might have accepted a balanced political post that was not overtly partisan. A museum of human rights cannot hope to be taken seriously if it pretends that the issues it discusses are not political. There must be political content in their exhibits if they are to be able to educate their audiences. On that issue, I’m fully onside with the critics of the museum – assuming that they are correct in taking the CMHR’s statement that they do not want the blogs to be “a platform for political positions or partisan statements” as a complete disavowal of all things political.
And now for my qualifier. “Political” can mean a number of different things. It can mean discussing issues that are politicized, and it can mean presenting a variety of political stances on a given issue. It can mean taking one specific political stance or viewpoint. Or it could mean taking one political stance or viewpoint and explicitly tying that to why a person should support or oppose a given political party. “Political” is not the exact same thing as “partisan”, although there is overlap. One can take a political stand on an issue – favouring government-funded childcare, for example – without explicitly endorsing or attacking a particular political party. So while I fully endorse my colleagues in calling for a Canadian Human Rights Museum which engages with political and politicized issues, I do ask the genuine question of whether they also think or expect that the Museum should also be partisan in its communications. Do they expect the Museum to engage in direct criticism of the current governing Conservative Party of Canada, calling the party out by name? Would they expect the same if the governing party were Liberal or NDP? Would they have considered it acceptable if the Canadian War Museum had explicitly criticized the Trudeau or Chrétien Liberal governments for cutbacks to the military? Would it be acceptable for Quebec’s Musée de la civilisation to take an explicitly separatist approach to Quebec’s history and overtly celebrate the accomplishments of the PQ and criticize the PLQ for being federalist? How will they feel if the Canadian Museum of History, in its new incarnation, explicitly celebrates past Conservative governments for their contributions to Canada’s development, and is critical of Liberal governments for supposed missteps or failures? The parallels are not exact, but hopefully they illustrate my point.
My worry is that the debate over the issue of partisanship has got a bit lost in our haste to insist on the need for political content at this museum, and I think it would be useful to have a sense of where the line can or should be drawn. Because if we call for a free-for-all on explicitly partisan material, then it becomes that much easier for a museum to be manipulated to serve the government of the day and to use them as a mouthpiece to trumpet the policies of the current administration. In other words, how far do we expect museums to go, when we ask them to be “political”?
Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan
The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend. The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag. On their side, the museum indicated that
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Continue readingCanadian Progressive World: Thatcher to Trudeau: No desire to deal with “queues of Indians”
This year marks the 30th anniversary of patriation of the Canadian Constitution. And guess what? It took us 30 years to learn that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wasn’t exactly welcoming to Canada’s Aboriginal chiefs and elders seeking participation in the sensitive constitutional talks that resulted in our legal independence
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: Latest Pro-Keystone XL Website Backed by GOP Special Interest Group
kerpin.jpeg This morning, the latest in pro-tar sands spin went live. KeystoneXLNow.com takes aim at President Obama for failing to approve the Keystone XL project (even though the White House just announced approval of the southern leg today), calling it "an affront to millions of Americans out of work and an
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: If Conservatives Were Really “Conservative,” They Would Want to Do Something About Global Warming
kerry-emanuel.jpg Originally, when I asked MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel to be a guest on the Point of Inquiry podcast, my goal was simple. I wanted someone who could give an expert take on the relationship between climate change and all the freakish weather we’ve been seeing. As for having
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: It’s the Weather, Stupid: Slowly Re-Awakening the Public About Climate Change
drought monitor.gif The Yale and George Mason Centers on Climate Change Communication, collaborators on the well-known “Six Americas” studies of how the public views global warming, are out with their latest report, the fifth in the series. And it hints at an underlying theme discernible in many of these surveys:
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: After All That, The Himalayan Glaciers are Indeed Shrinking
800px-Everest_North_Face_toward_Base_Camp_Tibet_Luca_Galuzzi_2006_edit_1.jpg Remember the Himalayan glaciers? They were at the root of the most deserved black-eye to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the intensely politicized period of 2009-2010. In so-called “GlacierGate,” it was revealed that the IPCC had published, in one of its reports, a truly bogus assertion that
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Canadians Should Envy Greeks
Canadians aren’t too envious of Greeks, Italians, and Egyptians right now, but maybe they should be. Though Canada has a relatively better economy and a stable political system, the other countries in the world facing crises have something Canada seems to be lacking, a resolve to make things better. Facing
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: More Evidence That Republicans Are More Factually Challenged Than Democrats
pinocchio.jpg In writing The Republican Brain, I had a problem to solve. You see, it was one thing to cite all the psychological research suggesting that liberals and conservatives just think differently, because they have different personalities and cognitive styles. Sure, one could infer on this basis that certain conservatives,
Continue readingDeSmogBlog: The Politics of Ice and Fire
High_Park_Wildfire_Arapaho_and_Roosevelt_National_Forests_June_10,_2012.jpg In late June of 1988, just under 24 years ago, NASA’s James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress about global warming. He noted that the Earth had been remarkably warm in the months leading up to that moment, and said he was 99 percent certain that the overall warming
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