So a creditor has put their hand directly into my bank account without permission or authorization of any kind. True I owe them money, but resorting to illegal acts like that isn’t exactly fair, either. I’m almost surprised they didn’t send thugs to beat me up, break my legs and burn down my apartment building with me and all my neighbours trapped inside or something like that, as they do in the movies. The fact that they stole the money I was saving to pay rent was both bad timing and genuinely evil. At least the telephonic campaign of daily harassment over the payments I’m too strapped to make seems to have stopped for a while…
Year: 2011
Right Wing Nuts & Bolts
It’s hard to believe that a country as tolerant as Norway can produce such a rotten apple, but even in peaceful, progressive countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark hate and fear can still exist. Emotional and political acts of terrorism aren’t all that surprising in countries like the U.S., where much of their culture and history comes from the intolerance of others, but it just goes to show that even in the most tolerant of societies like Norway there can live a misguided, hateful and racist man…
Let’s play the CPCCA game, you only have to give up your freedom of speech
Well, the freedom to speak out, protest and criticize injustice just got a whole lot more complicated in Canada. The Canadian Parliamentary Commission to Combat Antisemitism released its report and to the surprise of almost no one, it opted to pretty much redefine criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, instead of proposing ways to deal with real instances of antisemitism…
The Enemy Within: How our media and politicians fed the Norwegian spree shooter…
Did you know there’s a war going on? One you haven’t heard of? It’s not a terribly well organized war. Not too many people are dying though this is changing, fast. It’s not very well reported the established media has been slow at coming to terms with what’s actually transpiring here. They are blinded by their own complacency, and this war is partly their responsibility. Yet they, much like the rest of society, continue to look elsewhere…
Internet on the radio, FTB on CKUT’s Friday Morning After
This morning I woke up a little earlier than usual, had my coffee and took a walk through the already sweltering heat, arriving at the CKUT studios in the heart of the McGill Ghetto around 8am. I was there to talk about FTB on the Friday Morning After. Not to be confused with our very own sex column of the same name, CKUT’s Morning After is a local arts, news and culture radio show running Monday to Friday from 7-9am. The hosts change depending on the day as does the language they speak on air. The Friday edition…
Toronto the Green
Before moving to Toronto for the rest of the summer I was warned about the dangers of biking on its streets. I’d need a helmet and some luck, I was told. And I’d heard plenty about newly elected Mayor Rob Ford’s lack of appetite for cyclists and their paths. In fact, the week I arrived, bike paths were making headlines as city council decided to remove bike lanes on Jarvis street they had set up one year earlier. The irony of the decision is that it will cost much more to remove the lanes than it did to install them…
Rupert Murdoch: The Tabloid & the Damage Done
News of the Screws, Screws of the World, you can call Rupert Murdoch’s former weekly tabloid newspaper whatever you like. News of the World was the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world up until it printed its final paper last week, amid a high profile phone hacking and corruption scandal. While the world seems shocked at the depths of the allegations, I for one am not surprised. The 168 year old News of the World was bought by Mr. Murdoch and News International in 1969. At the time it was a regular weekly newspaper that covered actual news…
Fighting propaganda with critical discussion: Canadians are awakening to the tragedy of Palestine
Reading Ha’aretz, one of the largest Israeli daily newspapers, is a fascinating experience. Here in Canada those who criticize Israel are dismissed as anti-semites, terrorists even. Rather than defend international law and UN resolutions, our Conservative government calls the participation of Canadians in the Freedom Flotilla 2, such as the five activists we profiled earlier this month, an unnecessary “provocation”. Meanwhile, over in Ha’aretz, Netenyahu is called out for his “bullshit”…
Putting the few before the many: why Harper hates the arts…
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Spock, Star Trek II. But when the few control everyone’s cash, their needs seem to predominate. Unfortunately that’s what’s happening in Canada these days, at least when it comes to arts funding. Two recent stories, the Sun News interview with Margie Gillis and what happened to SummerWorks, paint a pretty bleak picture of what might be on the horizon in the next four years of a Harper majority…
Using Socialism to Finance a Transportation Revolution in Canada
The People have a right to move. So too, does the State it’s vital that the State have the ability to move large numbers of people and quantities of materiel to support the population whenever they call for it. And the People and the State are one given that the State would not exist without the People. I find it odd that I would have to go through this diatribe, but given the state of political discourse in this country, this world, it is vital too that the people recognize the State in a democracy must work in the service of the collective. Yes, our society is based on Socialist principles…