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By susanonthesoapbox, on May 19, 2013, at 8:00 pm Sigh…where to start? The barrage of bad news spewing out of the Premier’s office has been so intense that the government’s Machiavellian takeover of post secondary institutions and research and development slipped by with relatively little public outcry.
Sure, some students and academics staged protests on the steps of the Legislature but the general public doesn’t know what the fuss is about. Is it higher tuition fees? No. Do the professors want higher salaries? No. Well what then?
Government-driven R&D
The PC government has recognized (yet again) that Alberta’s economic survival depends (Read more…)
By Adam, on May 14, 2013, at 9:24 am Universities and colleges do a lot of research and sometimes their findings can make a large difference on the world around us. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get the media to represent what the research actually means and how the media can best work with academics to ensure that the coverage is accurate. At the same time, individuals who perform the research need help explaining quite complex ideas in rather simple ways.
The Worldviews Conference is focused on this very topic and their second conference is happening next month in Toronto. If you’re interested in media and academics than (Read more…)
By The Arbourist, on May 13, 2013, at 8:08 am Just in case you were not clear on what the friend zone is. Many thanks to Angels and Angles for the definition.
——
As defined by urban dictionary, the friendzone is…
“When you are expected to support a girl you really like while she searches for a smarter, richer, and more handsome boyfriend. There is little you can do without feeling like a dick. All in all, one of the meanest things a girl can do, whether they mean it or not.”
and ”The perennial location of nice guys everywhere.”
Although this hypothetical situation could work (Read more…)
By The Arbourist, on May 11, 2013, at 10:36 am The first step to understanding privilege is recognizing the various forms and flavours it comes in. If you happen to be Asian and female, well, the fun(?) doubles as you get to deal with not only the misogyny, but the racism as well. Woo-haa! (Go to the tumblr Creepy White Guys for more examples.)
Just a few snippets of what women have to deal with:
And then of course, just to establish what a fine upstanding dude he really is…
Filed under: Education, Feminism Tagged: Creepy White Guys, Misogyny, Patriarchy
By Greg Fingas, on May 8, 2013, at 9:41 am Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Linda McQuaig discusses Stephen Harper’s class war: Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.
Apart from this clumsy fiasco, the Harperites have been adroit at keeping their anti-worker bias under the radar. Instead, they’ve directed their attacks against unions, portraying them as undemocratic (Read more…)
By trashee, on May 6, 2013, at 7:00 am … is confirming her support for the Ontario’s wasteful and discriminatory duplicate school board system. If there is an election over the Budget, my vote for the Ontario Greens – the only party to say that the system needs a second look – is a lock! (2) Trashy, Ottawa, Ontario
By Greg Fingas, on May 2, 2013, at 9:22 am Here, on how increasing inequality at the top of the income spectrum is creating a real disparity in opportunity affecting both middle-class and lower-income children.
For further reading, see Sean Reardon’s column (or better yet, his study) discussing the U.S.’ experience in detail.
By The Arbourist, on May 2, 2013, at 8:07 am Browsing my news feed I found this piece and decided it was scary enough to share with everyone. I think I’d like to read Papantonio’s book and see what she has to say. Here is a radio dealing with her premise and some related information from Raw Story.
“In her book, Papantonio explained, Jacobs found that more than 40 percent of Americans under the age of 44 did not read a single book over the course of the previous year. And their concentration had deteriorated to the point that politicians needed to condense their messages into (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 30, 2013, at 9:49 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- We shouldn’t be surprised that the corporate sector is reacting with contrived outrage to the Cons’ tinkering with a severely flawed temporary foreign worker program. But Jim Stanford points out what it would take to actually move labour standards upward rather than including Canadian workers in a race to the bottom: (T)he Harper government is now moving to avert a political disaster in the making. Advance coverage in the Globe and Mail indicates its proposed changes will include a new fee for temporary foreign worker permits, and requirements that employers promise to (Read more…)
By Christine, on April 30, 2013, at 6:04 am It’s TED Talk Tuesday on 350orbust, and today’s presenter is Zoe Weil who spoke to the young people who gathered at the TEDx Youth symposium held at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, last December. Ms. Weil is the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education. Ms. Weil’s inspiring talk is entitled “How To Be A [...]
By Greg Fingas, on April 28, 2013, at 5:11 pm Erin is right to question Doug Elliott’s attempt to split hairs between a “slowdown” and a “deceleration”. But Elliott’s parsing ranks a distant second behind Russ Marchuk in the field of evasive dissembling.
Shorter Marchuk: It’s outrageous that anybody would suggest we’re imposing a disastrous policy like universal standardized testing on students. Instead, our policy is one of (flips through thesaurus) unified province-wide (flipflipflip) regular (flipflip) assessments for individual pupils. Which I’m sure you can see is something totally different.
By The Arbourist, on April 24, 2013, at 8:16 am Popularity? Posting “too much” on the feminism tag? Do I give two shits? Things don’t change if people don’t know about it, so off we go – a few things that feminism is actually fighting for. Oh and go read the whole post on “If I Admit That “Hating Men” is a Thing, Will You Stop Turing It Into A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”.
(ed. Italics mine for highlighting the theme of what feminism is actually fighting.)
”Feminists do not want you to lose custody of your children. The assumption that women are naturally better caregivers (Read more…) part of patriarchy.
Feminists do not like commercials in which bumbling dads mess up the laundry and competent wives have to bustle in and fix it. The assumption that women are naturally better housekeepers is part of patriarchy.
Feminists do not want you to have to make alimony payments. Alimony is set up to . . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Setting the Straw Arguments Against Feminism Ablaze
By The Arbourist, on April 24, 2013, at 8:16 am Popularity? Posting “too much” on the feminism tag? Do I give two shits? Things don’t change if people don’t know about it, so off we go – a few things that feminism is actually fighting for. Oh and go read the whole post on “If I Admit That “Hating Men” is a Thing, Will You Stop Turing It Into A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”.
(ed. Italics mine for highlighting the theme of what feminism is actually fighting.)
”Feminists do not want you to lose custody of your children. The assumption that women are naturally better caregivers (Read more…) part of patriarchy.
Feminists do not like commercials in which bumbling dads mess up the laundry and competent wives have to bustle in and fix it. The assumption that women are naturally better housekeepers is part of patriarchy.
Feminists do not want you to have to make alimony payments. Alimony is set up to . . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Setting the Straw Arguments Against Feminism Ablaze
By The Arbourist, on April 22, 2013, at 8:23 am What is the best way to learn?
Usually by screwing up in a spectacular fashion. Search your memories (Luke) and I bet you can find a lesson painfully learned, but painfully learned well in your past.
Fast forward to school and the increasing focus on tests and testing. Everyone wants to do well on the tests, but how does photocopying facts improve your critical thinking? It doesn’t. Lawrence Davidson in Scientific American comments on the lack of critical thinking skills being taught in school:
“Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 18, 2013, at 9:49 am This and that for your Thursday reading.
- Ellie Mae O’Hagan and Nicholas Shaxson annihilate the claim that perpetually lowering corporate and upper-income tax rates offers any competitive advantage: Tax “competition”, it turns out, is always harmful. First, while people rarely move in response to tax changes – flighty financial capital does move. Governments “compete” for it by cutting tax rates on mobile capital (which means, in effect, cutting taxes on the rich.) And if you’re not taxing the rich, you’ve got to make that up elsewhere. How do you do that? You tax people who can’t afford to
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
By The Arbourist, on April 15, 2013, at 3:41 pm On the experience of women in society:
“Like most women, I currently live in a society where violence, harassment and scary shit can break out at any moment, just because I told some random asshole “no” without bothering to be nice about it. Doing that is so dangerous that most women don’t dare; after a few scary incidents, they learn to make up excuses, to smile, to be sweet and welcoming, to act as if every single random asshole on the street is a precious new friend that they would just LOVE to stand outside of the Chipotle and
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Quotes of the Day – Clues for Liberal White Dudes – On Experiences
By The Arbourist, on April 15, 2013, at 12:12 pm Reblogged from man boobz:
And so the MRAs have found yet another woman to hate.
Earlier this month, as many of you no doubt know, a Men’s Rights group sponsored a lecture at the University of Toronto. The event drew protesters, and the protesters drew MRAs with video cameras. One of the MRAs filmed a confrontation between a red-haired feminist activist and a number of MRAs who continually interrupted her as she tried to read a brief statement.
Read more… 875 more words
Evidence of the ugly side (is there a good side?) of the MRA movement. This . . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Canadian feminist activist receives death threats and other abuse after being targeted by Men’s Rights Activists
By Greg Fingas, on April 15, 2013, at 11:28 am Sure, we know that an undue obsession with standardized testing leads to incentives for administrators and teachers to cheat in order to give the impression of improvement. But that’s nothing compared to the impact on other parts of a child’s eduction which get shoved aside in the name of test scores: At Public School 10 on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parents begged the principal to postpone the lower school science fair, insisting it was going to add too much pressure while they were preparing their children for the coming state tests.
On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Someday, this could all be ours
By The Arbourist, on April 13, 2013, at 8:02 am No objectification going on here Ms.Facetitsass. None at all.
Embedding in wordpress sucks.
Thus, I am only able to provide the link to the video I would like you to watch. Jimquisition, featured on the pop culture gaming site The Escapist, puts crass behaviour and bombast squarely in the centre ring. Jim’s style is crude, but in the case of female protagonists in the gaming industry, serves to succinctly make the point about the blatant sexism in the gaming industry (and yet another reflection on the inherent misogyny in the culture).
So go watch the video
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: The Creepy Cull of Female Protagonists – Jimquisition
By John Klein, on April 10, 2013, at 11:42 pm Kent looks the same… but his mind has left him.
Amazing CBC coverage of climate change from the early 1980s. Bob McDonald, Peter Kent, and others make appearances: Attention Washington: Peter Kent explains Climate Change (the briefing you won’t see).
“The natural preoccupation with the weather tomorrow, the next day, or even Thursday, has distracted public attention from the longer term implications of the Greenhouse Effect.” – Peter Kent, 1984 on CBC
“The Greenhouse Effect must be considered as the world’s most serious environmental concern.” Now he’s the nation’s Environment Minister, and he acts like a POS. What
. . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: Peter Kent Didn’t Age Well
By The Arbourist, on April 9, 2013, at 8:07 am If you missed out of what Rape Culture is, I suggest you go back and look at yesterdays post. Today, lets enumerate a small sample of what is going on in our society. Specifically, lets look at some of posts from the tumblr “I Once Had A Guy Tell Me…” Liberal White Dudes I thought I would provide some evidence that your experiences are NOT some sort of platonic baseline that everyone shares. It is a touch different for others: (be aware these posts contain triggering material about rape, violence against women and sexual
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Rape Culture – We Live it – Part II
By The Arbourist, on April 8, 2013, at 8:06 am Oh pish-posh! What is Arb going on about now? You see bro’s it kinda goes like this. You dudes, especially the liberal progressive privileged ones, often don’t have a fucking clue about what feminism is or why it has come about or some of the neat things that LWD never get to experience. Yes, believe it or not, your experience is not the same experience as everyone else in society(pro-tip: Think in terms of your experience being ‘easy mode‘). Let’s start with a nifty one, and that is the culture of violence rape
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Rape Culture – We live it.
By Greg Fingas, on April 7, 2013, at 1:07 pm Assorted content for your Sunday reading.
- Stephen Maher points out why we shouldn’t believe the Cons for a second when they claim to care about cracking down on offshore tax evasion: The top level of Canadian society is a small club, and it includes politicians. The people who run the country are on excellent terms with the business people who squirrel away money in offshore tax havens.
Shea’s meaningless tough talk was prompted by a CBC report that said Saskatchewan lawyer Tony Merchant has $1.7 million in a Cook Islands bank. Merchant’s wife, Pana, was appointed to the . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By Mystro, on April 4, 2013, at 8:02 am Ideology can be a horrible thing. It sinks the brain in a rut, spitting out automatic responses with no regard to critical thought or empirical evidence. This results in a huge resistance to progress. “Change? No! We were right before, so your new option must be wrong! Actually consider the facts and implications? Nope, not interested.”
This sad fact is now rearing its ugly head in the arena of children’s sports, specifically, soccer. The Alberta Soccer Association is proposing to stop keeping score and tracking wins for children under 12. They tried to push this through earlier, but met
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Don’t Score Kid’s Soccer Games, Commercial Media Be Damned
By The Arbourist, on April 3, 2013, at 8:06 am The RPOJ comes for thee DC.
A previous encounter with this fine individual has inspired me to go to his blog and deconstruct all the vile shite that he churns out on semi-regular basis. Douche-Canoe (DC) is a dyed in the wool homophobe, misogynist and whinger makes for some fantastic laughs as this prime MRA supplicant seeks to reaffirm his place in the manosphere.
This post, “Take hold of the Wheel” is the genesis of this particularly foul weed that seems to build, self-referentially (image someone pooping in the same spot over and over) on itself and as
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Misogyny on Tap – The Fetid Beginnings
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