tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27294383664662378342024-03-19T07:45:32.683-04:00Measure of Doubt"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine." Bertrand RussellGraham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.comBlogger131125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-38750322399449103202015-08-29T19:53:00.003-04:002015-11-09T06:39:18.275-05:00Superheroes<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Longtime readers of this, the second best blog called <i>Measure of Doubt </i>will have picked up on the fact that your noble is author is slightly OCD. Titles are always one word and I only ever have one picture, which appears in the top left corner.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I have a variety of OCD habits that I am at a loss to explain, many of them stemming from childhood. My solution is to be really very messy – I am currently aiming to achieve maximum entropy in my office. When things are moderately clean my OCD kicks in, and I have to make sure the books are perfectly square with the lip of the bookshelf and whatnot. When it's complete chaos, I don't bother.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, all that brings me around to superheroes. There's something I want to discuss, briefly, and it will require me to do something unprecedented on MOD: namely, post more than one picture. So maximum entropy to overcome the OCD.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here's a bunch of movie and TV posters about Superheroes. These are all real. I noticed something.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here are Batman and Superman. Looking down. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here's Spiderman, looking down. Maybe something fell out of his pocket while he was climbing walls or hanging upside down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0_If22qr76NG8sG5eveGr1r6DB5MusRlrZFvnW9TYUsT_L-klNKn20jQPQ3Plm-1x2mf-De4HozpEFJm9COjmvnSkHnCpeIrhEeRo4ry_69J04WfcgqEJiWUIM-3sugOUxwmC__YIWoWq/s1600/IMG_0229.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0_If22qr76NG8sG5eveGr1r6DB5MusRlrZFvnW9TYUsT_L-klNKn20jQPQ3Plm-1x2mf-De4HozpEFJm9COjmvnSkHnCpeIrhEeRo4ry_69J04WfcgqEJiWUIM-3sugOUxwmC__YIWoWq/s400/IMG_0229.jpg" width="271" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Flash, looking way down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Captain America, looking so far down he may actually have nodded off. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> And again. Bear in mind he's a WWII vet and getting up there. </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSlIsUjVtV1898hF3kZJjbpYR08Ilvn7_RVhYNuDMszIXwPOXBQlJQlBHjevoZsXCYbXjCH6jFmzLIlv9ljdii0v-vsODQk58n7QQjoxLZV4ze1eSGv5HMoVmBqcvZ-f3xPoDIHoEuHSYp/s1600/captain-america-the-winter-soldier-poster-chris-evans-helmet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSlIsUjVtV1898hF3kZJjbpYR08Ilvn7_RVhYNuDMszIXwPOXBQlJQlBHjevoZsXCYbXjCH6jFmzLIlv9ljdii0v-vsODQk58n7QQjoxLZV4ze1eSGv5HMoVmBqcvZ-f3xPoDIHoEuHSYp/s400/captain-america-the-winter-soldier-poster-chris-evans-helmet.jpg" width="273" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In case you thought maybe it was the helmet, weighing his head down. Nope. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here are Bruce Banner and the Hulk, both looking down. Banner is wondering how the Hulk fits into his pants, why a Hulk sized dingle doesn't flop out every time he gets angry.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A completely different Superman, looking down. Lois Lane, however, is looking up. She's thinking, "What is wrong with him? He's got issues."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Speaking of issues. Mr. Issues himself, looking down. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Dark Knight Rises, but he's looking down. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Wolverine, looking down. In fairness, it is raining.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Daredevil, looking down, which is odd. Because he's blind. What's he looking at?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here we have Iron Man, looking down-ish. Or, in his case, Downey-ish. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />But his sidekick and corporate CEO Pepper Pots is most definitely looking down. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Green Arrow is too cool to look way down so he just inclines his chin slightly. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Thor, down. But as far as I'm concerned that Chris Hemsworth can look at me anyway he wants. Also Black Widow, doing the slight chin incline thing because too cool.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bad guys look down sometimes, too. Here's Loki, looking down but at you at the same time, to stress his unpredictable nature.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Whereas Ultron looks down AND turns his back on you just to be rude.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I don't even know what this villain's name is but he is <i>looking down</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Okay, this is not just looking down. This is a cry for help. Which, you would also make if you had been in Spider Man 3. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">...or if you were going to prison for tax evasion. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Some </i>of the Watchmen are looking down. But they need to <i>watch </i>you. So they have to be careful about that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some people in this poster are looking down. But Ant Man is more-or-less looking on the level. He is very tiny, after all, and might get stepped on if he looked down.</span></div>
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Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-82699534726721559412015-06-24T09:02:00.001-04:002015-06-24T13:17:01.970-04:00Flags<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimU2I96NPMJhPYB0Uamwth3AP4LKjzF4VXtePIdrc2jCqAbaHxTBC9HJAIqNAA54LaC3rhxSYDfmnIlkCBRRFmBh9M7FuvQz1bUjuGb_AWTMgshGGHzp427iT7HT5EX3zoDLEu6t6vQbs8/s1600/032709-modelUN.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimU2I96NPMJhPYB0Uamwth3AP4LKjzF4VXtePIdrc2jCqAbaHxTBC9HJAIqNAA54LaC3rhxSYDfmnIlkCBRRFmBh9M7FuvQz1bUjuGb_AWTMgshGGHzp427iT7HT5EX3zoDLEu6t6vQbs8/s320/032709-modelUN.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Much brouhaha in the United States right now over the Confederate flag — more properly the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia — and whether it should be flying over the statehouse in South Carolina, or anywhere for that matter. Walmart and Sears stopped selling them last week. In typically stale and unthinking reporting, successive journalists have described the debate as one that pits those who see the flag as a symbol of racism and oppression against those who see it as a symbol of history and heritage, as if it can’t be both. <br /><br />Back when I taught American history I would sometimes get confronted by enormously self-assured students who told me that I had it wrong. The American Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights. They learned this in high school. In a sense, they were correct. The Civil War was indeed about states' rights, of which the only one worth going to war over was the right to own slaves. The Union did not go to war in 1861 to free slaves, but the South most assured <i>did</i> go to war in order to keep them. If the Confederacy had won the war the institution would not have died in 1865. Having lost the war, however, the former Confederate states mobilized politically to replace slavery with legal forms of racial discrimination that endured for over a century, and whose social and political legacy remains deeply entrenched. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />The “Confederate flag” is a symbol of all that, and its opponents are right to insist that it belongs in a museum, not over a statehouse, or in Walmart, or on a bumper sticker.<br /><br />But how selective our righteous indignation can be. I wonder how many flags aren't symbols of cruelty and oppression for some group of people, or even very large groups of people? Certainly not Old Glory. Or the Union Jack. Or Japan's flag. Or the Republic of China’s. Shall we count bodies of the innocent? In reverse order from the list above, we would start with about 40 million. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />Amazon is no longer selling the Confederate Flag, either. Whew. Wouldn’t want that symbol of oppression to fall into the wrong hands. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dsporting&field-keywords=soviet+flag" target="_blank">Buy one of these instead. </a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Addendum: shortly after I posted this column, South Carolina took down its Confederate flags from the state legislature. I approve but, remember: when they de-Stalinized the Soviet Union, the point wasn't to confront the past. It was to bury it. </i></span></span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-168032185879850352015-05-29T12:04:00.000-04:002015-05-29T12:04:15.278-04:00Dogfights<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgROVTX6lOl-oS3_rmyYFqkWkfClVO2EFvzGt1KPXosXlPDUjSJQFCQsex_s1tyT7fh6pis-GyUlupTdpNJvEwq0fT8hyphenhyphenhhj0YfokLcPROIlg-LmXkHw0M_yj1C_o5GlnXpZVeyAKEC6mWx/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-29+at+11.44.51+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgROVTX6lOl-oS3_rmyYFqkWkfClVO2EFvzGt1KPXosXlPDUjSJQFCQsex_s1tyT7fh6pis-GyUlupTdpNJvEwq0fT8hyphenhyphenhhj0YfokLcPROIlg-LmXkHw0M_yj1C_o5GlnXpZVeyAKEC6mWx/s320/Screen+Shot+2015-05-29+at+11.44.51+AM.png" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Saturday, October 28th was the second consecutive day of high winds, rain, and heavy cloud, dreadful weather that grounded much of the RFC on the Somme. Undaunted, 24 attempted two patrols that day. Returning from a solo OP that morning, Saundby, whose engine was giving him trouble, fought a west wind so strong he could barely make headway against it. Low on fuel, he landed at Morlancourt, home to No. 9 Squadron. After refueling and some repairs, he clawed his way the remaining twenty miles west to Bertangles, arriving late but intact, no doubt much to relief of his squadron mates. The weather had hardly improved by 3 PM, when McKay and Knight alighted in the rain on a defensive patrol. High winds, dense cloud cover and what Knight described as intermittent “gales and storms” led another pilot to think them “impertinent” for flying at all. Worse still, McKay’s engine was acting up, and he had already returned to the aerodrome once with a dud engine to switch machines. Buffeted by wind, rain, and sleet, he had a horrid flight through frigid grey skies over a devastated grey landscape, nursing his engine, sputtering along at 7000 feet, 1500 below and behind Knight, unable to climb higher. Beneath them, the armies hunkered down in their waterlogged trenches, wearily and grimly bracing themselves for the denouement of the Somme battle. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">By 3:40 PM, McKay and Knight reached the town of Pozieres. In July and August twenty-three thousand Australians had been killed or wounded wresting the town and its adjacent ridge from the Germans in a series of violently contest assaults. Now it lay in shell-pocked ruins. On the two Canadians pressed, flying through cloud and rain. Then, peering into the distance, McKay spotted a single German machine, well below them to the north. It was a tempting target, but experienced pilots knew that this sort of thing was often a trap, designed to lure reckless newcomers into formations of scouts lurking at high altitudes. Scanning the sky above, McKay saw them between the clouds: nearly an entire squadron at 10,000 feet. “Halberstadter and brown scouts,” he called them in the squadron record book, but they were in fact the new Albatros fighters, faster than the DH.2 and mounting twice its firepower. Knight had seen them, too. Probably both men had guessed their identity. This was 24’s arch-nemesis, <i>Jagdstaffel Zwei</i>, and after five minutes of pursuit, half a dozen of them, led by Oswald Boelcke himself, slipped to the side and came screaming down upon them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">From <i>Eddie: The Life and Times of A.E. McKay, Royal Flying Corps </i>(in process) </span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-13184789890993642372015-04-10T14:15:00.001-04:002015-04-12T13:40:07.562-04:00Excerpts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh70l_N5GoEh5WY-90kjyVeBRGIf_En7zlawEKeJr-6_weV-ncCpXLFbPzStoePDB2iZ6BD2lqYhkeOYMNNDlXzoFfhQVaajK-o2f3mdJODYTKTzxov8dtHHU7VMCdLweVtFX3l2B2D7n7V/s1600/Eddie+McKay+ca.+1916.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh70l_N5GoEh5WY-90kjyVeBRGIf_En7zlawEKeJr-6_weV-ncCpXLFbPzStoePDB2iZ6BD2lqYhkeOYMNNDlXzoFfhQVaajK-o2f3mdJODYTKTzxov8dtHHU7VMCdLweVtFX3l2B2D7n7V/s1600/Eddie+McKay+ca.+1916.jpg" height="320" width="225" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">On the 14th of March 1917, Eddie McKay departed 24 Squadron for the last time. The squadron’s aerodromes had been his home and its pilots his family for nine months. Now he was the last — the very last — of that ‘fellowship of famous knights’ who had stormed the skies above the Somme when the great battle began in July. He still languished as 2nd lieutenant, undecorated, with a solid but undistinguished four victories to his name, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Boelcke" target="_blank">Boelcke</a> story probably starting to become a bit threadbare in the mess. But he was alive. ‘Lithe’ Eddie McKay, ‘cool headed’ Eddie McKay, ‘quick and scrappy’ Eddie McKay, never happier than on the rugby pitch, boring in with heart alone against bigger men and bringing them down. He was alive. Gray, Wigglesworth, Evans, Mansfield, Gooderich, Langan Byrne, Crawford, Begg, Glew, Wilson, Holtom, Knight, and Lewis were not. And <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanoe_Hawker" target="_blank">Hawker</a> was not. McKay left. England and the Home Establishment beckoned. <br /> The next day, his replacement, nineteen year old 2nd lieutenant James Kenneth Ross of Crouch End, a comfortable middle class suburb in the north of London, arrived fresh from No. 6 Reserve Training Squadron to take his place in the roster of “A” Flight. He was dead in twenty days. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">from<i> </i></span></span><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Life and Times of Eddie McKay, Royal Flying Corps </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(in process)</span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-3227309017991931442015-03-17T13:09:00.000-04:002015-03-17T13:16:41.085-04:00Tennis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMYz2DvTCQr-Wvw1k6n65q9Q7pWOxfsRCSNwfOeaUJoRa1NViUVL7niZ6nLKDrl1-GuvyeCl-63SfIz2sTJVssjNyHhEqPJf6Z84sjmjvTZeJhB_4h-yDDJd-BQ2uZ-fT106d2d5toutW6/s1600/index.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMYz2DvTCQr-Wvw1k6n65q9Q7pWOxfsRCSNwfOeaUJoRa1NViUVL7niZ6nLKDrl1-GuvyeCl-63SfIz2sTJVssjNyHhEqPJf6Z84sjmjvTZeJhB_4h-yDDJd-BQ2uZ-fT106d2d5toutW6/s1600/index.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hi,<br /><br />I’m offering tennis lessons, at a big tennis facility. They cost $7271.93. I know that sounds like a lot, but, consider the following. The average incoming tennis student, based on prior demonstrated skills in tennis, is awarded a $1,000 admission bursary. This brings the cost of a package down to $6300, on average. For that, you get fifteen hours of tennis lessons per week with at least five established professionals in the field, and it’s a twenty-six week package! That’s 390 hours of tennis lessons for $6300, which works out to <i>$16/hour for instruction! </i><br /><br />Still not convinced? Well – <i>and you’re not going to believe this </i>– the cost of your lessons is tax deductible! This reduces the functional cost of your tuition, I mean, <i>tennis lessons</i>, by an average of 15%, or to about $5350, or about about $13.70 hour. I'll say that again – $13.70 an hour! That's about what Laser Tag costs! (You can even take out low-interest loans to cover the cost of your lessons, and the interest you pay on them is<i> tax deductible,</i> reducing the interest rate with inflation to about 1%). <br /><br />In addition, I forgot to mention the other services we offer. You have <i>free weekly </i>opportunities for <i>one-on-one consultation</i> with your tennis instructors – some of whom are <i>world class tennis champions</i> – in addition to a wide array of free skill-set and personal related counselling by professionals that you can consult without limit. And your tennis instructors almost always can offer tips by e-mail. <br /><br />Did I mention the tennis library, which has tens of thousands of works about tennis you can check out, staff you can consult with, and where you can work to study up on your game for no additional charge? Or the tennis libraries’ thousands of digital databases you have 24/7 access to in order to improve your playing?<br /><br />Did I mention our recreational facilities? The gym? The pool? The fitness classes? The dozens of non-tennis related clubs? The vast number of social activities you can go to in order to meet other tennis students? That we even hold concerts and plays and have an art gallery and lovely grounds to walk? Nearly all of these services are available at no extra charge, and they’re available to you when tennis lessons aren’t in session. We even throw in a free year-round bus pass! Finally, we can demonstrate statistically that people who have taken tennis lessons have higher lifetime earnings than people who haven’t.<br /><br />What’s that? No, I’m afraid we can’t offer tennis lesson for free. All those services cost money. I know it's a difficult concept. But the fact is, we’re literally going bankrupt offering the lessons at their current rates. The way it’s looking right now, we probably won’t be able to offer them for much longer, so I’d grab the lessons now if you could. <br /><br />One thing, though…some people still complain that their tennis lessons are far too expensive. And yet our records show that they only show up for half their lessons! Maybe they shouldn’t have taken tennis lessons in the first place.</span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-13998659294048242052015-02-05T07:55:00.001-05:002015-02-05T08:00:34.032-05:00Walking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjWlPeBvfKPpIj8iyh3ncriL529IwMzacD-upepARUAmSMGVhqzEWjdjOQQ2YpPvhKTys5oc3n9c0jE6cwXKIyUNwYklzTfBJ38zq_hzMD9sExN62PGnYioMwfpWFvMR3u8kPkQcOrifGy/s1600/feet-walking1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjWlPeBvfKPpIj8iyh3ncriL529IwMzacD-upepARUAmSMGVhqzEWjdjOQQ2YpPvhKTys5oc3n9c0jE6cwXKIyUNwYklzTfBJ38zq_hzMD9sExN62PGnYioMwfpWFvMR3u8kPkQcOrifGy/s1600/feet-walking1.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">High-fives
all around, humanity. You’re familiar, of course, with the terrible
story of <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/james-robertson-who-walks-33-km-a-day-to-work-to-get-help-with-new-wealth-1.2944788?cmp=rss&utm_content=bufferbbfd0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer" target="_blank">James Robertson</a>, the Detroit man who walks over twenty miles a
day to work at a job that pays $10.55 an hour. A crowdfunding effort has
raised nearly $300,000 – that’s Robertson’s take-home pay for a decade,
by the way – to help him get to work. And now he has a “team of
financial advisors" to help him out. Problem solved! And here you crazy lefties thought that the
problem was the economy we've chosen to have, and the cities we've chosen to design. Ha! Ha! </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In
other news, a crowd-sourcing effort is underway to save a drowning
polar bear whose ice flow has melted due to climate change. We'll alert you when the polar bear is saved and that problem is solved, too. </span></span><br />
<br />Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-75304612871867544252015-01-20T19:37:00.000-05:002015-01-20T19:37:10.994-05:00Addresses<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOFHpYUWmTGNmyWtEc3EuNbz3OUApzhGc4-vHJN0jiZuNMRn0SxA0W4ylxpIYoNXJWWrpks9at9TFdLsb3ANlKvrs4rzTnrDoh275YG1Gz9hdnj_AuFYYH9WOsvIcWOn91k7Cj2xIKeBOk/s1600/state_of_the_union.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOFHpYUWmTGNmyWtEc3EuNbz3OUApzhGc4-vHJN0jiZuNMRn0SxA0W4ylxpIYoNXJWWrpks9at9TFdLsb3ANlKvrs4rzTnrDoh275YG1Gz9hdnj_AuFYYH9WOsvIcWOn91k7Cj2xIKeBOk/s1600/state_of_the_union.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My fellow Americans. I did not write these words. They were written for
me by a team of professional speech-writers. They were tested before small focus groups
ahead of time in order to determine their likely impact on the polls.
The speech you are about to hear will be devoid of substantive content.
Nothing that I will say will be surprising. Ninety percent of what I say
could have been said by any of my predecessors in the past forty
years. The speech will contain at least two dozen tiresome political
cliches. I will pause for just a moment after delivering each of these
so that members of Congress and others in attendance will
know when to rise and applaud. You will notice that the Justices of the
Supreme Court and the Joints Chiefs of Staff seldom
will clap. This is their way of maintaining the ridiculous pretense that
they are somehow apolitical, when in fact they are some of the most
ideologically zealous people you will ever meet, and have been chosen in
part precisely because of their ideological zealotry. <br /><br />I will
now insert a word of thanks to the brave men and women of our armed
forces. Members of Congress, you will wish to be first on your feet to
applaud for them. If you believe that it is not merely absurd but
actually insidious and indeed even fascistic to valorize martial virtues
over civilian ones, or if you think that it impedes badly needed argument about the conduct
of America’s foreign and military policy, you should rise and applaud anyway. To do otherwise would be to commit an
immediate act of political suicide, with implications not only for your
own career but for your party. <br /><br />In addition to offering a
succession of banal statements written at approximately an eighth-grade
reading level, I will also deploy a number of rhetorical cliches. These
ring familiar to the ear, like a repetitious hit song, or the formula
that drives your favourite Hollywood movies. They have been shown by the
marketing and public relations firms that drive so much of our
political culture to produce the most statistically favourable poll
results. To that end, I will not and <i>shall not </i>just say “will not.” I
can not and <i>will not</i> just say “can not.” I will also be referring to
Americans as “folks” and will never say “taxpayers” without inserting
“harding working” in front of it. I promise to make no literary
references except to the Bible. My only historical references will be to
the Founding Fathers, though I have been advised to downplay Thomas
Jefferson.<br /><br />I have invited guests today to hear the State of the
Union Address. They are good people who have done good things for their
communities. Some of them have saved peoples’ lives. You will be
comforted to know that they have been carefully vetted to ensure that
they haven’t done anything in the past that might embarrass me; they
have also been selected in a precisely calculated manner so as ensure
that their selection plays out favourably in terms of likely and
probable voter support.<br /><br />I wish to stress again that this speech
will include no substantive content. For instance, I will not and shall
not mention that we borrow money China in order to pay for ridiculously
bloated armed forces that irrationally regard China as their greatest
foe. And I can not and <i>will not</i> mention that a powerful lobby has
somehow convinced millions of Americans that gun crime is unrelated to
guns. Or that we alone do not use the metric system. Or that forty percent of you think the world is less than 10,000 years old and that this in turn explains why we are falling behind in scientific achievement relative to the rest of the world. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Nonetheless, this content-free speech
will be analyzed down to the last word by journalists, a very special
breed of people paid to write and speak at great length on matters about
which they have no professional expertise. They will judge the value of speech – and note once again, that it has none in particular – based on their pre-existing ideological predispositions. They will pay
particular attention to the one or two times in this speech when I make a
gracious remark about a member of Congress from another political
party, like the guy sitting behind me. I can not – and <i>shall not</i>
– reveal just how much I hate that guy’s guts. Instead, I will make a
point about how great America is by observing that he came from
humble origins. You may now applaud. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Once again I’d like to
thank the brave men and women of our armed forces for protecting our
freedoms, even if it demonstrably true that our government in the
conduct of its foreign and military policy has provided vital political,
economic, and military aid to a litany of dictatorships while
progressively encroaching on individual liberties at home. I’d also like
to thank the hardworking taxpayers who make it possible for us to spend
$1.5 trillion on a jet that we don't need and that doesn’t work while our urban infrastructure crumbles. <br /><br />I do not believe in God but am required by poll
evidence to conclude this speech by asking God to bless America, because
despite the widely held view amongst the religious that their faith is
under attack and in retreat, they constitute an overwhelming majority of
the population. So, God Bless the United States of America. He didn’t
stop the Holocaust but maybe he’ll intervene on our behalf in this
particular instance, and straighten out a health care system that costs two or three times as much per capita as ones that we deride as being "socialist." Thank you and goodnight. Especially if you're one of the brave men and women of our armed forces. </span></span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-82512513553915392212015-01-11T10:59:00.000-05:002015-01-11T11:14:42.199-05:00#JeSuisCharlie<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-RPzmKVH0b7uuKmIGyNXZEevAlxXPRQ1yteVAfgOrWzGo3ipa75k1GcF4SR5LgdfvBRem0sZte324xH9X6r3R-wda-SNvt2wedB2grAjtTBgfoR1uFjpBKKtrYF0m1gD4nHVF6duv2Mmk/s1600/1504303_511525572323779_6855595518382802050_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-RPzmKVH0b7uuKmIGyNXZEevAlxXPRQ1yteVAfgOrWzGo3ipa75k1GcF4SR5LgdfvBRem0sZte324xH9X6r3R-wda-SNvt2wedB2grAjtTBgfoR1uFjpBKKtrYF0m1gD4nHVF6duv2Mmk/s1600/1504303_511525572323779_6855595518382802050_o.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Feeling more aggrieved than usual, your unbending author interrupts regularly scheduled programing to clear his throat in defense of civilization. </i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes, I tweeted #JeSuisCharlie. Yes, I put the hashtag on Facebook. Yes, I even put it on the wipe board on my office door, which isn’t really <i>my </i>office door, hence the “even.” #JeSuisCharlie is a small thing, but not meaningless, a gesture of solidarity with victims of religious fascism. As someone who makes his living in the world of thought and ideas and written expression, I found the murders at Charlie Hebdo particularly poignant even though far worse acts of violence against innocents were committed elsewhere in the world that week. Boko Haram murdered several hundred people in the town of Baga around the same time as the Paris shootings, and despite what some people seem to think, I am not ignorant of the one if I care about the other. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The very minute I saw the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, I knew that the backlash against it would begin with a couple of days or so. </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Sniping of the kind I just described was inevitable.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Even before the Ice Bucket Challenge (remember that?) reached its zenith last summer people started saying, “Why all the attention about ALS? Don’t people know that heart disease kills more people?” And so on. If you’re ever giving a eulogy, try that line of reasoning out. “Well, sure, </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">this</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> guy is dead. But, come on. A lot more people than him died this week. Don’t you people care about them? What kind of monsters are you?” See how that goes over. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So the backlash against #JeSuisCharlie has taken on a perfectly predictable form and has come from perfectly predictable people, including a number of journalists who <i>make a living </i>writing Op-Eds that wouldn’t make the cut for emergency backup columns on <i>Measure of Doubt</i>. To those people, I say: just how stupid do you think I am? Did I anywhere claim that posting #JeSuisCharlie is an act of bravery? That it constitutes a serious blow against religious fascism? That it mitigates the need for vigilance about freedom of expression in my own country? Does it mean that I am unaware or uncaring about other acts of violence, including some committed by the government of France in the past? Does it mean I am not aware of the complexities and nuances of the political, economic, and cultural conflicts that underpin the attacks? Does it mean any of those things about anyone who posted it? To listen to and read many cranks you’d think so.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There’s another distressing side to this, too, even though it was equally predictable. You wouldn’t think you’d have to defend the idea that people ought not to be murdered for hurting the feelings of the kinds of people who murder people for hurting their feelings, but you do. There are hordes of people saying right now, “Well you poke the bear…” or “I’m against murder, but…” and so forth. We've been listening to that noise since <i>The Satanic Verses </i>pissed off people who never read it. So, here’s the thing. Am I committed to freedom of expression? Yes. Do I understand the nuances and complexities of the statement I just made? Yup, some of them. You can explain the rest to me if you feel the need. But will I post any of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons here? No. Why not? I already told you, and it’s not because I’m afraid of terrorists. </span><br />
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Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-49303814586891353912015-01-01T13:48:00.002-05:002015-01-02T03:29:20.148-05:00Tourism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_nEJDnBtG_dqXrwSCR7awnf1fr4a5Sddx02Awv28fAAjr24plB8FzbbPAtee_61RCLGZ_-3ZO6ML_P1DY3Ffzk_OcfR9WxIN6a8uGPzKYjHxbNOkgk3FaLtiLSjoTUHo9DajRUYIUK-D-/s1600/Tourism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_nEJDnBtG_dqXrwSCR7awnf1fr4a5Sddx02Awv28fAAjr24plB8FzbbPAtee_61RCLGZ_-3ZO6ML_P1DY3Ffzk_OcfR9WxIN6a8uGPzKYjHxbNOkgk3FaLtiLSjoTUHo9DajRUYIUK-D-/s1600/Tourism.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">OK. I want to see places where I don’t already live. See the problem? To listen to some people, you’d thing that being a tourist was some sort of inherent crime against humanity. How </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">dare </i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">I not be a native Parisian? Where do I get off not having been born in Thailand? What was I thinking, choosing parents who didn’t live nearer to Venice? </span></div>
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There’s a large body of literature that interrogates what it means to be a tourist and sometimes very cleverly distinguishes between the tourist (who comes as some sort of cultural imperialist, if I understand things correctly) and the <i>traveller</i>, who is respectful and discerning about what he encounters. Oh, please. If I’m in Paris I’m going to tie on my bright white running shoes, grab my day pack, see the Mona Lisa, go up the Eiffel Tower, buy a fridge magnet of Notre Dame, and photograph the hell out of the place. Then I’m going to damn well put those photographs on Facebook, that weird world where people ask to be your friends and then complain when you use it for what it’s intended for. By all means get snooty about that while you wallow in whatever hellhole you’re from.</div>
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I'm writing this from Portugal, where there are important archeological sites, medieval towns, cathedrals, museums, and galleries that would slide into total ruin and decrepitude if not for the massive stream of tourists whose spending supports these places or the local economies that support them. And around the world whole countries depend on tourism as the backbone of their economy. This comes at a price, of course, because the tourists change the places they’re visiting. In some cases, such as Paris’s famous Latin Quarter, there is very little left of what drew tourists in the first place, just shops selling junk gifts and restaurants selling junk food to tourists who can’t imagine anything worse than eating something they’ve never eaten before (the kind of people who will <i>line up </i>on a Friday to eat at East Side Mario’s.) </div>
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And there really are tourists who are culturally ignorant and insensitive. They use their camera flashes in places where they’re asked not to and don’t even bother to learn to say “hello” “please” or “thank you” in the local language. Last year a perfectly nice evening we were having in a very good restaurant in Paris was very nearly ruined by four people at a nearby table. Why was the service so slow? Why didn’t the waiters speak English, after all <i>we </i>had done for <i>them</i> in <i>the war</i>? And they demanded to know of a lovely couple from New Zealand, sitting (thankfully, for they absorbed the brunt of this) between us and them, how New Zealanders could possibly get by without <i>gun rights</i>? How did they <i>defend themselves</i>? (At this point you can probably guess which country the four were from, and probably who they voted for in its last several elections.) With good humour, one of the New Zealanders opined that he’d never considered the need to defend himself at all in New Zealand, there having been five homicides, three of them committed by sheep, the previous year. Game, set, and match, I thought, but it was more of a moral victory than an actual one. The big hairs carried on. They really need to fix the roads – they’re so narrow! And the locals are so rude! I ordered a second bottle of wine to dull the pain.</div>
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It’s also true that there are weird forms of tourism: “dark tourism” (visiting sites of murders, massacres, genocides, and the like), and “poverty tourism”, where people who are rich pay money to see “authentic” people who are not. But I’m not sure that what I’ve done is much different: I’ve led battlefield tours, and spent the day today photographing character-filled medieval neighbourhoods in Lisbon, behind whose walls and doors are people who are by Canadian standards really quite poor. </div>
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So I’m not sure what it all means. But I do know this: in about three days our plane will land in Toronto and one of the first things I will see will be that most ubiquitous of Canadian restaurant chains, and weary travellers who will immediately queue for a coffee that’s so bad they have to double the sugar and milk just to drink it, and a little part of me will die. But it won't be the unapologetically elitist part.</div>
Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-35273248862504749422014-12-14T12:12:00.000-05:002014-12-14T12:34:24.180-05:00Syllabi<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><i style="font-size: 14px;">Note: today's column is an actual syllabus that seems to have fallen through a crack between the universes. It comes from what appears to be a parallel dimension where lawyers and people who study pedagogy have not yet <strike>destroyed</strike> improved the education system. I do </i><span style="font-size: 14px;"><b><u>not</u></b> </span><i><span style="font-size: 14px;">approve, of course, as indicated by my own ten page syllabi that leave absolutely nothing to chance. But my doppleganger in the parallel dimension seems to be somewhat more reckless than me. </span></i></span><br />
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<i>Professor</i> or<i> Dr</i>. Graham Broad. You may also call me Death, Destroyer of Worlds. </div>
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<b>Office Hours: </b>When I’m in my office. Note that I am a <i>professional historian</i>. I’ve written books about it. Whole books. And I’ve read books about it. Lots of them. Come to see me. I can probably point you in the right direction. </div>
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<b>Office Phone:</b> Phone currently is buried under books.</div>
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<b>E-Mail:</b> No. </div>
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<b>Course Website:</b> No. There are also no circus acts, no candy floss machines, foot massages, smoothies, or therapy pets. </div>
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<b>Course Description:</b></div>
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In this course we will learn about history, including politics, war, religion, families, gender, childhood, ethnicity, migrations, art, literature, philosophy, music, drama, architecture, science, technology, the environment and geography, cuisine, and sports, and their relationship to the present. Some people say that these things have “no value” in the “real world.” Those people are called ‘assholes.’ Avoid them.</div>
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<b>Expectations and Outcomes:</b> Oh, for God’s sake. What do you think they are? </div>
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<b>Grade Breakdown: </b> Learning: 100%</div>
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<b>Required Books:</b> There are a bunch of good books on this topic. Come see me in my office and I’ll recommend some.</div>
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<b>Reading List: </b>You give me one. I'll make suggestions. </div>
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<b>Description of Assignments: </b>You’ll be required to read history, write about history, and talk about history – intelligently. </div>
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<b>Lectures: </b>I will be giving lectures this year, though not that many. Show up or don’t. Whatever. I won’t be telling you entertaining stories about the past or giving you chronology that you easily could learn on your own. I will not be breaking the lecture into ten minute chunks like the pedagogists say, because my goal isn’t to make you dumber. I will not have a scroll of PowerPoint bullets on the screen behind me for you to transcribe because I don’t believe that the designers at Microsoft actually know or care about teaching or learning. I will not be making the same jokes I’ve made for the past five years or five decades, for that matter. I won’t be making learning “fun” at all, actually, because I’m not in the entertainment industry. Trust me when I say that this going to hurt quite a bit.</div>
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<b>Policy on Attendance:</b> There isn’t one. You’re allowed to fail. In fact, you don’t have to attend anything in life. If you want, you can lie in bed for weeks on end until you starve or die of dysentery. It's nice to have options. </div>
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<b>Late Policy: </b>Punctuality is important, but If you need a bit of extra time to complete your assignments, just consult with me in advance and then do your best to get quality work done. But do not come to my office and lie to me.</div>
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<b>Statement on Plagiarism.</b> Ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky? </div>
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<b>Statement on the Use of Electronic Devices: </b> History lesson #1: incredible though it may seem, there was a time, long, long ago when it was considered not merely sensible but actually polite to listen to people who are talking to you. So, whatever. </div>
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<b>Student Code of Conduct</b>: Don’t be a jerk. </div>
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<b>Essay Rubric.</b> Um….seriously? You’ve made it to your <i>fifteenth year </i>of subsidized education and you need to be told what a good essay looks like? Read a book. I can recommend some. </div>
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<b>Frequently Asked Questions</b></div>
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<i>I don’t like speaking in front of others, what should I do? </i> One option is to commit a terrible crime and be sentenced to solitary confinement for the rest of your life. </div>
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<i>I'm not good at writing.</i> <i>Any tips?</i> Sue your high school teachers. Also, read books.</div>
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<i>How will this help me get a job? </i>I dunno. How will your job stop you from being the kind of person who voted for Hitler?</div>
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<i>I have anxiety. How can that be accommodated? </i>Outside my office you’ll see a thing that dispenses numbers. Please take one. Then hand one out to everyone on the planet. Make sure to hand them out in refugee camps in the Middle East and Africa especially. Explain to the people in them that you have <i>a lot reading to do</i>. Then invent a time machine, travel back in time to 1939 and then to 1914, and hand them out to everyone your age in university. Remember to tell them that you are <i>under a lot of pressure</i>. </div>
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<i>Do you even care?</i> Of course I do. If I didn’t care, I would make things easier for you. </div>
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<i>Any final thoughts?</i> Start reading – now. Write clearly and carefully. Consult with me often. In class, pick a side and argue persuasively for it, and then the next day argue for the other side. Change your mind when you’re proven wrong – that’s what it means to be ‘objective.’ Hold yourself and your classmates and your professors to the highest standards. Call them out when they make mistakes. Loathe cliches. Detest pointless bureaucracy. Know when you're being condescended to. Refuse to fill out student evaluations of teaching. Tell the guy playing video games in front of you to close his laptop because it’s distracting everyone. Drink beer and wine long into the night and fight about what you learned that day but be up and ready for class the next morning without fail, every single time. Make friends – and enemies. Go to a play and an art opening and see visiting speakers in other disciplines. Get lost in the library. </div>
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Do anything but be boring. </div>
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Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-16732897338561592392014-11-24T20:28:00.000-05:002014-11-24T20:28:42.026-05:00Templates<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">School sucks, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that the mere mention of teachers or schools in an on-line article brings out a torrent of spittle-spewing rage from the kinds of people who like to spew spittle ragefully and by the torrent on message boards. I’ve <a href="http://measureofdoubt.blogspot.ca/2010/05/posting.html" target="_blank">written elsewhere</a> about how such people are the worst humanity has to offer and, boy, do they have a lot crabbin’ to do. <br /><br /><i>Measure of Doubt</i> regards itself as an equal-opportunity public service and therefore has developed the following template for spittle-spewing reactionaries to use on Internet message boards following any article about teachers or schools in the hopes that it might save them time. They can then turn their attention to trolling about firefighters or public art or bicycles or those damn kids who keep getting on their lawn. Here it is:<br /><br />——————<br /><br /><b>A Template for Spittle-Spewing Reactionaries to Use on Internet Message Boards Following Any Article About Teachers or Schools, by <i>Measure of Doubt</i></b><br /><br />The problem with education today is (my personal bugaboo here) which they didn't have (insert when you were in school) and also the (overpaid / coddled / lazy / uncaring) (teachers / administrators/ parents) who have (abandoned all standards / given up caring ) and instead embraced (multiculturalism / political correctness / secularism / gay agenda / communism) because all they care about (is /are) (money / sick days / P.D. days) and indoctrinating youth into the ( Liberal Party / union / gay agenda / international communist conspiracy / ISIS ). Whatever happened to (our values / common sense / plain old hard work)? We need to bring back (three R’s / male teachers / basics / corporal punishment / fatal beatings / conscription) because the youth of today are (stupid / lazy / cowardly / fat / communists / atheists / terrorists / gay) who (can’t read / can’t write cursive / only take sex ed / only take square dancing) and this is the reason why we have (global warming hysteria / wind turbines / Kathleen Wynne / bicycle lanes / hip hop) (that/which/who/whom) is leading our (once great / formerly great) country that (our veterans / brave men and women in uniform) (sacrificed / suffered for) to (hell / chaos / anarchy / collapse). I would (call / e-mail / text / visit ) my (child’s teacher / school board head / city councillor / MP / MPP) if I (believed they weren’t part of the problem / knew who they are) and give (him/her/them) (a piece of my mind / something to think about / a knuckle sandwich). Anyone who is disagrees is probably (Kathleen Wynne / a foreigner / a communist / a hip hop artist / a bicycle commuter / gay).<br /><br />For example: <br /><br />“The problem with education today is the use of <b>cell phones</b> which they didn’t have <b>in the 1890s</b> when I went to school and also the <b>overpaid teachers</b> who have <b>abandoned all standards</b> and instead <b>embraced multiculturalism</b> because all they care about are <b>sick days</b> and indoctrinating youth into the <b>gay agenda</b>. Whatever happened to <b>common sense</b>? We need to bring back <b>male teachers </b>because the youth of today are <b>communists </b>who can’t <b>write cursive</b> and this is the reason why we have <b>wind turbines</b> that are leading our <b>once great </b>country that our veterans <b>suffered for</b> to <b>hell</b>. I would call my <b>MP</b> <b>if I knew who they were</b> and give them <b>a knuckle sandwich</b>. Anyone who disagrees is probably <b>Kathleen Wynne</b>.”</span></span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-90877319903617229502014-11-20T08:27:00.002-05:002014-11-20T08:40:54.615-05:00Addendum<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">N</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ews
this morning that the Legion in Kenora, Ontario, fired its chaplain
because she criticized cuts to veterans' care during her Remembrance Day
benediction. Good for them. The day is supposed to be about the simple
act of remembering, <i>not politics</i>. In fact, next year I expect to
see no politicians laying wreaths at my local cenotaph. Also, they
better not breathe a word about "freedom" and "democracy" either,
because those are political concepts. National anthem? Got to go,
because it mentions "Canada", which is a political construct.
God Save the Queen? Please. Oh, and <i>no</i> poppies, either. According
to the Legion, the money raised from them goes to veteran's care, and
we don't want to bring that up on Remembrance Day. So make sure
your next Remembrance Day bears no relationship to anything in the real
world, <i>especially</i> if it happened in the past. Just do what you're
supposed to, please: stand there and feel guilty because your generation
hasn't had a world war, you bunch of entitled slackers.</span><br />
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Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-71380241249455143952014-11-10T11:42:00.001-05:002014-11-10T13:03:40.683-05:00Remembering<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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I don’t want to trust a seventeen year old memory very far, but I think it went something like this. I was watching a debate on CBC or CTV about Canada’s involvement in Kosovo. They assembled a panel: a journalist, somebody from a peace group, an RCAF veteran from the Legion (for some reason), and finally a political scientist, because in a debate it’s a good idea to have one person who might know what the hell is going on. I don’t recall much about the debate, but one thing is lodged in my memory. In rebuttal to the one panelist’s opposition to Canada’s participation in the air campaign, the veteran said, “This young lady should go watch the first twenty minutes of the movie <i>Saving Private Ryan </i>to learn what soldiers sacrifice for freedom.” </div>
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This might seem like a non-sequitur and a particularly incoherent one at that, but <i>au contraire</i>. Have Canadians had <i>any </i>societal debate in the past century that hasn’t witnessed an effort by one side or another to imbue their position with the sanctified suffering of The Fallen? Back in the day, when I read actual newspapers (and worked for one) I used to keep a clip file. In it were examples of people deploying mawkish memories of our own “Greatest Generation(s)” into debates over everything from multiculturalism to same sex marriage to educational reform to indoor smoking bans, as if the worldview of the dead – and especially the war dead – were entitled to hold dominion over the living forever. And it happens in debates over history, too. We needn’t look far for examples of historians or historical institutions who have been bullied into silence by people that Paul Fussell called “the loony patriotic.” </div>
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<a href="http://measureofdoubt.blogspot.ca/2013/11/remembrance.html" target="_blank">I’ve written before</a> about my growing unease with Remembrance Day, and especially about the day’s tendency to blur the distinction between commemoration and historiography. Historiography is evidence based, skeptical, and provisional in its conclusions; commemoration is subjective and emotional. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t mind so much, if it were only for a single ceremony and for an hour. One doesn’t go to a funeral and expect to hear the unmitigated truth about the departed, after all. But when have our circumstances ever been normal? Not since September 2001, to be sure, fourteen years in which we’ve seen the Western powers engaged in perpetual low-level war, turning the world upside down and killing – even if not intentionally – far greater numbers of innocent people than ever were killed on 9/11. </div>
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“Oh, stop,” I’m told. “The day’s not about that. The day is simply about remembrance, not politics.” Oh, please, I reply. What does that even mean? Remembering is <i>not </i>simple – not cognitively, not socially, not historically, and remembering for commemorative purposes complicates it still further. It is most decidedly <i>not </i>apolitical. Commemorate what? Those who fought for freedom? Tread lightly, friends, around so subjective a term: not many of those who went to war in 1914 or 1939 shared your conception of freedom. Victory, then? So am I to exclude the enemy, many of whom were, to quote Bertrand Russell, “fellow sufferers in the same tragedy as our own”? Commemorate all combatants, then? But that would include perpetrators of hideous war crimes, and you’ll forgive me if I choose not to spare a moment to reflect on those who served that the Holocaust might continue. For starters. </div>
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Okay. Maybe you need a moment to “just remember” (whatever that means) and you can cut through the cognitive dissonance. Maybe you don’t cringe when you hear “fought for our country” when you know damn well that sometimes they fought for our government; maybe you don’t clench your teeth when you hear “fought for our freedom” when you know that sometimes they categorically did not. So, do what you need to on November 11th. Commemoration, like funerals, are about the living, after all, and the stories we tell ourselves so that we can carry on. I’ll go, and reflect on victims of war and especially on those who died to defeat enemies for whom martial virtues were the only ones worth having. But I’ll also reflect that, too often, our own commemorations tread too close to that terrain, terrain where there is an implicit contempt for civilian life; terrain where there is no distinction between serving one’s country and serving one’s government; terrain where it is assumed that there is an <i>inherent </i>nobility in military service, regardless of the cause in which one served; terrain where, as C.P. Stacey put it in a different context, the golden haze of historical romance combines with the fog of war to reduce visibility to zero.</div>
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“Support our troops” doesn’t mean support every stupid and immoral thing that our government wishes to do with them, and people who can’t understand the difference shouldn’t be allowed to play with soldiers.</div>
Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-32643267601914693332014-10-25T12:33:00.001-04:002014-10-25T14:43:20.520-04:00Disengagement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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-</style><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"></span></i><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">A Parable.</span></i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"></span>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Meet Jane Doe, a second year English and
History major at a mid-sized university in Canada. Jane has just turned
nineteen and is not sure what she wants to do when she graduates, but she’s
thinking of becoming a teacher or maybe a lawyer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Like nearly every school in the country, Jane’s
university boasts that it offers small classes and excellent teaching, but she
went there because it’s in her home town and her high school average of 78
wasn’t strong enough to gain her entrance to a really first-tier university,
where the entrance averages are now in the mid-to-high 80s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane’s father works for a contracting firm and
her mother is a secretary in a dental office. They had wanted her to major in
business and economics, but at the end of her first year of university Jane’s
overall average was 63 and was just 58 in Economics. She never was any good at
math. This disqualified her from her school’s business program. After first
year, she decided to major in English and History because she finished those
classes with marks of 64 and 66 respectively, good enough to declare them as a
major.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jane’s sixteen-mark drop between
Grade 12 and the end of 1st year university is fairly typical. A few of her
friends from high school dropped out after first year, or were required to
withdraw because they failed most of their courses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane lived at home first year but now rents a
room in a house with three other female students. Her share of the rent is $400
per month, plus one-fifth of the heat and electricity bill. She also pays $35
per month for an Internet connection and $65 per month for the plan for her
iPhone. She owns a used car that she makes payments on, and she also has to
cover the cost of her gas and insurance. Her parents put $2,000 per year
towards her tuition, leaving her with $4000 to pay on her own, plus another
$750 for books. To pay for her education, Jane is taking out student loans and
has two jobs, one at a clothing store in the mall on Saturdays and one evening
per week, and the other, two nights per week or three when she can get it, in a
downtown restaurant. She is looking for volunteer work at local schools to pad
her resume in the hopes of getting into teacher’s college. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">It is the Tuesday after the Canadian
Thanksgiving long weekend. Tuesday is Jane’s “heavy” day, with three classes.
She chose her courses that way so that she could have one day per week off to
study, although she usually ends up taking a shift at work instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At 9:30 AM, Jane arrives for her first class,
Canadian history, five minutes late. She has a coffee and a muffin she bought
for breakfast on her drive in. Prof. Jones always begins class by playing music
from the period they’re studying, so Jane knows she won’t miss anything. She
sits near the back and opens her laptop and puts her iPhone down beside her.
She sends two quick texts and updates her Facebook status. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">When the music is done, Prof. Jones says, “I’ll
explain that music to you later.” (He actually forgets to do so.) Prof. Jones
begins the lecture with a few announcements. He reminds them to keep up in the
textbook, because it's testable material for the mid-term, even if he didn't
lecture about it in class. Jane started the year well, but is three weeks
behind in textbook readings now. She bought the book used for half the cover
price. It was in very good condition, with only a little bit of yellow
highlighting in the first chapter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Prof. Jones also announces that the History Club is bringing in a “very,
very famous” historian to speak the following week. Jane heard from a friend
that one History Club speaker last year was very boring and droned on and on.
She writes down the details of the event — hoping Prof. Jones will see her
doing this — but has no intention of going. (Jane is not alone in this: more than
three hundred students will hear the announcement for the “very, very famous
speaker.” Eighteen will attend the talk.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Prof. Jones launches into his lecture, which is
about New France. He uses PowerPoint slides and Youtube clips of historical
re-enactments to liven things up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even
so, Jane finds her attention wandering after about twenty minutes. She is tired
and yawns. She worked late at the restaurant the night before, well past
closing, and wasn’t home until after midnight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then she’d tried to work on an assignment which is overdue for her Human
Sexuality course, a critical analysis of an old article by someone named
Durkheim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Jane opened the article,
she found that it was thirty-seven pages long. It was very boring. She read four
or five pages (this took her twenty minutes: Jane usually checks e-mail,
Facebook, and surfs the web while she’s reading) and she decided that since the
assignment was only worth 5%, it could wait another day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane looks around. There are about thirty
people in the room, which is about half of the number actually enrolled in the
class. A classmate in front of her is watching a replay of a hockey game on his
laptop. He has one earbud in. Another is playing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">World of Warcraft</i>. Other classmates are on Facebook or are texting.
During the class, Jane herself receives and answers a dozen text messages,
hiding the phone under the long row of tables. A friend from work is
complaining about their boss.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">In the very front row, eight rows down from
Jane, a girl shoots her hand up to ask a question. People roll their eyes. Jane
dislikes this girl. She only asks questions to make herself look smart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prof. Jones answers the question, speaking to
that student alone. Everyone else’s attention begins to fade and chatter starts
to rise in the room. After a couple of minutes Prof. Jones resumes lecturing
after calling everyone to order. A minute later, though, somebody’s cell phone
goes off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Sorry! Sorry!” a student
cries out. There’s a disruption until she shuts the phone off, its ringtone
clearly recognizable to the class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Prof. Jones says, “No problem. Hey! I know that
song! It’s “Toxic” by Britney Spears!” He sings a few bars in a broken voice.
This gets a big laugh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane likes Prof. Jones. He is young and full of
energy, seems nice and doesn’t mark too hard. When the course is over, she will
give him excellent teaching evaluation scores. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Just before class ends, forty-five minutes
after it began, Prof. Jones reminds everyone that they have an essay due in two
weeks. “Come to see me in my office,” he says. Someone asks where his office is
and what his hours are. These are on the course syllabus but Jane makes a note
of them anyway and closes her laptop. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane has an hour before next class so she heads
for the Learning Commons, a new metal and glass building on campus.
There are big windows, a coffee shop, flat screen TVs showing the news or “The
View”, and plenty of lounge chairs. There are about forty or fifty students
around, either standing in line for coffee or sitting with their laptops or
phones, surfing the web and texting, or talking with friends. A few are
reading. A small group of students is setting up a table. They’re selling
tickets to an AIDs-awareness fashion show. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane passes by a bulletin board covered in
notices for campus events, including the famous History Club speaker that Prof. Jones
mentioned before. The title of the talk is "Towards a New Hermeneutics of Discourse Analysis in High Medieval Parish Registers." The Political Science club is planning a trip to see
Parliament in session. There’s a pub crawl next Thursday to raise money for a
student trip to El Salvador. Women’s self-defense classes are being held in the
women’s residence. (In pen somebody has written, “this is sexist” on the
poster.) The Justice program is bringing in a refugee from Syria to talk
about his experience. The Student Writing Centre has drop-in hours on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. Beside this, somebody put up an unauthorized flier for an
Internet service that sells “Example Essays” written by graduate students.
There are auditions for a student performance of <i>Twelfth Night. </i>Someone
is selling textbooks, cheap.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane glances at all this without much interest,
then sits and checks her e-mail, her Facebook page, and sends some texts. She
has a reading she has to do for her next class. It’s a poem called “Religio
Laici” by a writer named John Dryden. She flips through it in her <i>Norton
Anthology of English Literature. </i>It’s very long. She puts her feet up and
starts reading. Over the next fifteen minutes, she reads about a quarter of the
poem, which is very boring, highlights a few passages, and sends three text messages and looks at some
pictures from a friend’s party on Facebook, “liking” this and that. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then a guy from her next class sits down
across from her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Did
you do the reading?” he asks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Most
of it,” Jane says. “It was so long.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
know, I was like, uggh. What the fuck? I didn’t think this class would be so
boring.” He asks her if he can borrow her notes from the last class.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Another
classmate shows up, with a coffee and a doughnut. She says that she found a
summary of the poem on Wikipedia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
talk for a bit about their other classes and professors. “I heard he’s tough,”
Jane’s classmate says about Prof. Jones. </span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">They
talk until class. Jane knows that the instructor, Prof. Gilbert, always covers
the poem anyway and there isn’t much discussion so she doesn’t need to have it
read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prof. Gilbert is one of the older
professors in the college. He lectures from paper notes without PowerPoint. He
drones on and on and tells jokes that nobody laughs at. A few minutes later,
when they get to the classroom door, they find a note saying that Prof. Gilbert
is away and that class is cancelled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane
looks at the sign indifferently. If she’d known she would have skipped Jones’s
class and slept in until 11. Behind her a student says, “He only does this
because he has tenure and can get away with it.” Jane isn’t sure what ten-year
is but reflects that this student usually doesn’t go to class anyway. (In fact,
Prof. Gilbert had announced he wouldn’t be present the week before, but Jane
and about half the class weren’t there that day, either.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Maybe
now would be a good time to see Prof. Jones about her essay. It is due the
following Friday but she hasn’t started. She has decided to write something
about women in New France. She heads to Prof. Jones’s office. In the hall,
there are professors milling about. She catches snippets of a heated
conversation. They seem to be complaining about something to do with the
school. When she gets to Prof. Jones’s office, Jane reads the sign next to the
door:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Prof. R. Strong, English</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Prof. M. Kuffert, Sociology</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Prof. A. Jones, History</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Prof. A. Xao, Business and Economics</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Dr. D. Bryson, English (on Sabbatical Leave)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane knocks. There is no answer. A professor emerges
from the office next door. “Do you know if Prof. Jones is around?” Jane asks her.
The professor doesn’t seem to know who Jones is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jane explains that he teaches Canadian
history. “Oh!” the professor says. “No, haven’t seen him.”</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane
sits on an old chair at the end of the hall and starts up her laptop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The professors who were having the heated
conversation up the hall retreat into an office and close the door.</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Beside Jane is a bulletin board next to the
office nearest to her. There are quotations and <i>Far Side</i> comics on it, and a
poster for a conference that happened last year. There’s also a recent news
story from the campus paper about Prof. Gilbert being inducted into something
called the Royal Society of Canada. That reminds Jane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She e-mails Prof. Gilbert asking if next week
they’ll be doing this week’s readings, since class was cancelled, or moving on
to next week’s readings. (Gilbert does not reply and Jane will decide for
herself that she doesn’t need to do next week’s reading.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">After
twenty minutes of texting and surfing and waiting for Prof. Jones, Jane goes
back to the Learning Commons, hoping some friends will be there. There aren’t,
so she buys a coffee and cookie for four dollars and then decides to go to the
library, maybe to get in some work on her essay. On the library computers,
students are checking e-mail and Facebook and a few are printing essays. Jane
sits in front of a library computer and logs on. Next to her, a group of three
are gathered around a computer, watching a Youtube video of a dog and laughing.</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane
rarely goes to the library. In first year, she tried looking a book up but got
intimidated by the rows and rows of shelves and gave up after a few minutes of
trying to find it. She seldom goes looking anymore, relying on Google
Books or her local public library instead. One time, she even went back to her
old high school and got advice for a paper from her favourite high school
teacher. The university library offers regular tours and workshops about using
the library, but Jane has never taken one. She doesn’t ask the library staff
for help because she doesn’t want to seem stupid. </span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">There is something new on the library
webpage now, a search engine that says, “find articles.” Jane spends a few
minutes with this, typing in keywords like “women” and “New France.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She takes the first two articles that appear
at random and prints them off. One of them, she will later be told, is a book
review, but she won’t understand why that can’t be a source.</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">It
is now nearly noon. Jane has a two hour American history class at 12:30. She
buys a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke for seven dollars and sits with some
friends in the nearest cafeteria, which is named “Rendezvous.” There are flat
screen TV’s showing the news and sports. She talks with her friends about shows
they’ve watched on Netflix and they complain about how many assignments they
have do. One student complains about Prof. Jones. “Why does he talk about stuff
if it’s not going to be on the final exam?” he asks.</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">At
12:20, Jane heads to her American history class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In her usual spot near the back, two guys in
baseball caps and sweats are sitting and talking hockey. They have almost never
been in class. They smell like tobacco smoke and say “fuck” a lot. Jane sits
away from them, but still at the back. Today there is a student presentation
before the lecture. Jane has to do a presentation in three weeks. She is
supposed to talk to Prof. Merrill about her topic, but hasn’t yet. Since Merrill
hasn’t e-mailed her, Jane thinks that maybe it’s not a big deal. She doesn’t
like doing presentations or participating in discussion because she doesn’t
like speaking in front of other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Prof. Merrill distributes a form to all the students. As a way of
ensuring that everyone is paying attention to the presenter, Prof. Merrill asks
everyone to provide a letter grade and some feedback for each presenter.</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">A
student Jane doesn't know gives a ten-minute presentation on a book called <i>The
Radicalism of the American Revolution</i>. The student begins: “Okay, like,
when I was reading this I was, like, this is so <i>sick</i> because, like...”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody is really listening. People are
fooling around on the Internet, texting, or playing games, even though they
have a form to fill out. The two guys at the back are talking in low voices.
Jane's attention wanders. She checks her e-mail and Facebook and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sends some texts. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the presentation is over, there is some
applause and Prof. Merrill asks, “Are there any questions?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody moves or says anything. “Any
questions?” she asks again. “Okay, well, I guess you did such a good job that
there are no questions.” Nobody laughs at this. After a second, Prof. Merrill
asks a couple of questions of her own that the student answers in jumbles. When
the questions are over, there is more applause. Jane gives the student an
"A" and writes, "Great job! This was <u>so</u> interesting.” She
sends the handout forward.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Now
Merrill begins her own lecture. She announces that the topic of today’s lecture
will be the Constitution of 1787.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You
have to know this,” she says. “Or nothing else in the course will make sense.”
Jane writes that down. As Merrill lectures, a steady scroll of bulleted
PowerPoint points summarizing her speaking points goes on behind her. When the
course began, Jane took notes, but now she knows that the PowerPoint slides are
on the Internet so she doesn’t really bother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now and then, Merrill<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>says, “And
this is important” or “and I want you to know this” and Jane will type it on
her laptop. “Sorry, what was that date?” a student asks. “Dates aren’t
important - think big picture,” Merrill says. Jane wonders why she mentions
dates at all, then. Merrill goes back to lecturing.</span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">By
the thirty minute mark in the lecture, Jane’s eyes begin to droop. She is very,
very sleepy. The remainder of the lecture goes by in a sort of auditory blur.
She snaps back to awareness when Merrill says, “OK, well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that’s good enough for today.” She
sounds a bit angry. Jane wonders what’s going on. They have only been in class
for a little over an hour, total. People begin to pack up their bags and head
for the door. Jane thinks that maybe she should ask Prof. Merrill about her
presentation after all, but there’s a lineup to students in front of her
already, including the one weird guy – Jane can never remember his name –
who is always talking to Merrill about politics. Jane waits a few minutes and
then heads out the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">It’s 2:15 PM. Jane drives home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two of her roommates are watching TV and
smoking pot, which Jane has tried but doesn’t really like. They all sit and
talk for over an hour. One of her room-mates is thinking of getting back
together with her boyfriend. Another is failing most of her courses and is
thinking about not coming back next year and “just working instead” or “maybe
going to college for something.” Jane goes to her room. She opens her laptop
and checks her e-mail. There’s a message from her Human Sexuality professor,
who noticed that she didn’t hand in her critical analysis. Jane sends her an
e-mail saying that she had computer problems and promises to bring it by during
her office hours, tells the professor she is really enjoying the class and learning
a lot and that she hopes she won’t lose any marks. </span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jane
has a wipe board above her bed. She has an essay due on Monday that she hasn’t
started. She needs to finish that Human Sexuality paper. Tomorrow she is
supposed to have read <i>Henry IV, Part Two </i>for her Shakespeare class, but
there are no discussions in that class so she doesn’t do the readings. She'll
get caught up before the midterm. Jane has a nap for half an hour then gets
ready for work. She decides to get Subway for dinner at the mall before her
shift.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later that evening, at work, she
gets a text from some friends. They’re going out to the bars. Did she want to
meet them after work? Jane thinks about it. Tomorrow’s her light day: just one
class and a tutorial. She’ll have plenty of time between them to get that Human
Sexuality assignment done and go to the library to get books for Prof. Jones's
essay. She says yes.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane’s
day, her Tuesday, is much like any day she’ll experience in university.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Depending on the time of year, she spends no
more than fifteen or twenty hours per week on all aspects of her school-work:
attending class, reading, writing essays, and studying. If one were to take
into consideration the number of hours she spends in partial attention to the
matter at hand, the number of hours spent on actual schoolwork would be smaller
still.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But her grades are usually decent
and sometimes a little better. She finishes courses with C’s and B’s by
producing work that, in a former age, would have been deemed utterly
unsatisfactory. If some bold educational reformer (or a coalition of taxpayers)
were really rigorously to test her, to demand that she write clearly, speak articulately,
and demonstrate mastery over what she has been taught, they would find that
Jane, mid-way through her 15th year of publicly-subsidized education,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hasn’t read much (in fact, she dislikes
reading altogether), struggles to write clear sentences, gropes for vocabulary
when she speaks in class (which is not very often) and doesn’t remember much
about what she has been taught for very long. But her professors have learned,
through a generation of accumulated experience, not to expect too much, and
Jane rewards them by not demanding too much in return. She gets decent grades; professors
get good teaching evaluations; politicians get another finished product,
another tick on their vast statistical indices which prove that the system is
working. And, indeed, the assembly line is very efficient. It keeps moving Jane
and thousands of others like her along. Along the way they receive a small
cultural deposit before emerging to great fanfare at the all-important moment
of graduation.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">So, there is Jane, thirty-four months later,
coming off the assembly line. She is at commencement, graduating with a major
in History and a minor in Sociology — she switched out of English after year
two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a happy day, but there’s a
slight tightness in her chest when she thinks about what she’s going to do
next. She is twenty-one years old, and graduating with a B- average. She didn’t
get into teacher’s college but thinks that maybe she might do a 5th year — what
the students call a “Victory Lap” — to pull her marks up a bit, and then maybe
re-apply for teacher’s college or perhaps try to get into grad school and “do”
her Master’s Degree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe Prof. Jones
would write her a letter of reference? </span><br />
<br />
</div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The principal, who Jane has never seen before,
gives a long and boring speech about how “proud the university community is of
its graduates”, how the graduates have “learned how to think and reason and
face the many challenges posed by the diverse and rapidly changing economy of
today”, but also about the threats to “spirit of higher education” and “the
essential mission of producing students who are ethical citizens.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jane remembers that in first year she had a
philosophy lecture about the difference between morality and ethics. She can’t
remember what it was.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Her attention drifts as the principal drones on
and on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A phone rings. It belongs to
someone’s parent. The principal’s speech finally ends. A handful of students
involved in students’ council begin a standing ovation. Everyone follows. Jane
watches as a few of her friends cross the stage to get their degrees. She knows
that a few of them are coming back. Others are going to teacher’s college. Her
friend Rachel is going to teach English in South Korea. Rachel is graduating
with a C+ average.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Jane's name is called. She crosses the stage in
a rush, feeling very nervous. Professor Dearness, who Jane had for a course in
third year, hoods her and gives her a hug. Jane is handed her degree or,
rather, a paper representation of her degree. Her real one will arrive in the
mail three weeks later, after she has paid her library fines.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Meet Jane Doe, B.A.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has $44,000 in student debt, $7,000 more
on her credit cards, a BA in History and Sociology, and a job at the mall. Out
in the audience, Jane’s mother takes pictures and cries. </span></div>
Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-19095614674771030032014-06-05T22:01:00.001-04:002014-06-05T22:08:00.376-04:00Overlord<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Note: this is a heavily edited version of a column that first appeared on </i>Measure of Doubt <i>five years ago.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">"War is Not the Answer" says a poster on a bulletin board where I work. Well, it depends on the question, doesn't it? The problem in the 1930s was not that peaceful negotiation failed, it was that peaceful negotiation was attempted for far too long. Negotiation is not possible when confronted with an ideology that regards peace only as a pause in the preparation for war, and war as the desired outcome of politics, an instrument for imposing "racial purity" on a vast scale. Nazism could not be appeased, contained, or co-existed with: it could only be destroyed, and its destruction was, as the late Stephen Ambrose put it, "the supreme accomplishment of the first half of the 20th century." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />Seventy years ago today, a combined Anglo-Canadian-American force fought its way, inch by bloody inch, up the beaches of Normandy in what was probably the single most complex military operation in history: Overlord. In the following ten weeks, they would utterly destroy two German field armies in the Battle of Normandy, decisively proving that the Nazis and their subsequent admirers were wrong to believe that totalitarian societies are better at war than democracies. Sufficiently aroused, the power of free people and capitalist economies to wage war proved to be far greater than that of the dictatorships. While fighting in Normandy, the Allies simultaneously conducted vast campaigns on land, sea, and air on many fronts across two major theatres of war, while all the while supplying — crucially, as we now know — logistical support to the Red Army through the auspices of the Lend-Lease program. As the civilians of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were to learn, the fury of democratic societies, aroused to what was for them the very unnatural state of war, was both awesome and terrible. Allied bombers had reduced nearly every major Germany city to rubble and ash before the Red Army — carried, incidentally, on American trucks — set foot on Germany soil, while the Japanese were to suffer the immolation of dozens of their towns and cities, acts of vengeance culminating in the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />All those who fought and died in that terrible war deserve to be remembered, but historians have to remember them<i> for what they actually did</i>. This October will mark the 70th anniversary of a large-scale prisoner uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but no moral person will spend that day in somber commemoration of those Germans who gave their lives that the Holocaust go on. Their uniforms are not totems that protect them from moral scrutiny. Their sacrifice is rendered worthless by the hideousness of their cause. The fact that they may have thought they were in the right is of historical interest but morally irrelevant, because they were objectively wrong. If this raises uncomfortable questions about the commemoration of Allied soldiers who may also have been complicit in atrocities, so be it. Uncritical veneration belongs to the realm of evangelical religion, not history. Some historians will reply that we cannot make moral judgments about the past in the first place. That being the case, I can only assume that such people are indifferent about the outcome of D-Day, and indeed about the whole Second World War. Axis victory or defeat, Holocaust or no, in fact every atrocity in the history of the world: all must be met with shrugging indifference. Who am I to judge? Just report what happened and move on: the historian as glorified clerical worker. But nobody really believes that, so their position is incoherent.<br /><br />So it is with the position that "war is not the answer." War is a dreadful thing. But it is not always to be avoided nor at all costs, nor is it true that there are no winners in war or that nothing good ever comes from it. Pacifism is morally defensible only when it is a choice you make for yourself. The pacifist who allows himself to be beaten has made one kind of moral choice; if he allows someone else to be beaten, he has made another one entirely. Sometimes we must fight. The destruction of National Socialism and of Japanese militarism was necessary for the safety and survival of free societies throughout the world. For all their faults and foibles — and these are, as we all know, numerous — the liberal democracies were and are clearly better than the monstrous regimes they fought. Today, we are the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most culturally prosperous people in the history of the world, and in large measure because a previous generation had thrust upon them the dreadful duty to fight those who would have enslaved us all.</span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-92096261118618955482014-04-22T00:30:00.000-04:002014-04-22T05:54:58.243-04:00Earth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><speaker crackles=""> (Speaker Crackles) Uhhh...good morning, on behalf of myself and the flight crew I’d like to welcome you to day 1.6 trillion aboard planet Earth. Our current cruising speed relative to the sun is 100,000 kilometres per hour. We’re expecting a smooth flight today with occasional bumps along the way. Temperatures will reach a high of +44 celsius and a low of -62, and we’re currently experiencing periods of sun, rain, flurries, cloudiness, and periodic nighttime. Special welcome to passengers Broad and Hunter, celebrating the anniversary of their inaugural circumnavigation of the solar system today along with 20 million others. I’ll turn things over now to the flight attendants and thank you once again for flying planet Earth. </speaker></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><recorded font=""></recorded></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Pleasant </span></span>Female Voice Begins) Welcome to planet Earth. At this time we would like to draw your attention to absence of emergency exits. Please refrain from destroying the biosphere. Ride bicycles, carpool, or take public transportation wherever practicable. Pick up after yourself. And please do not adjust the cabin temperature.<br /><br />Passengers are reminded that killing one another, especially over matters of faith, is expressly prohibited. We ask that you be courteous to your fellow passengers at all times, even if they look different than you. A further reminder that all human passengers are born equal, regardless of sex or race, and that nonhuman species and should be treated respectfully as well. Local administrators are required to abide by these regulations.<br /><br />For your comfort, food, shelter, and clothing are provided. First class passengers are encouraged to share with passengers in economy class. <br /><br />Earth is pleased to offer a variety of recreational activities including art, literature, film, music, and sport, and encourages local administrators to extend public funding to such activities. <br /><br />Employers are required to pay their employees decent wages and to provide safe working conditions. Employees should refrain from being smug, self-satisfied, passive-aggressive know-it-all jerks in department meetings.<br /><br />Please do not play your headphones so loud that everyone else can hear your music, too. The same goes for music in your car or back yard. Avoid participating in sports-related rioting. Young human passengers are encouraged to keep their sticky fingers off of things that do not belong to them and to attempt to behave like rational people when in public. Teenagers are reminded that everything will work out okay and he/she wasn’t right for you anyway. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />If you choose
to procreate, please avoid taking babies to weddings, funerals, nice
restaurants, the opera, theatre, or the movies. </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />Please do not date someone who has seen all of the <i>Fast and Furious </i>movies.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Passengers are asked to avoid texting while driving. In addition, do not text while on a date or while out with friends. Do not text when your teacher is talking to you. In fact, just put the goddamn phone away and have a look around because the world is pretty freaking fantastic if you’d bother to check it out for the six or seven seconds that you’ve reduced your attention span to. You’re the product of millions of years of accumulated adaptive advantages and this is what you do with your time? Why don’t you just move into your parents’ basement, learn Klingon, and play <i>World of Warcraft </i>for the rest of your life?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Pause). </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Ahem. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><pause .=""><br />At this time, the flight crew would like to reiterate that persistent rumours of another world on standby after the completion of this trip are not verifiable and must therefore be treated with the utmost of suspicion. In consideration of other passengers, please desist from spreading such rumours. <br /><br />For the comfort of your fellow passengers, a reminder that Earth is a smoke-free environment. For the convenience of passengers wishing to shorten the duration of their trip by approximately a decade, a smoking section is provided on the dark side of the moon. <br /><br />Finally, would passengers Coulter, Ford, Palin, Putin, McCarthy, and O’Reilly please report to the shuttle bay for immediate deportation?<br /><br />Thank you, and we hope you enjoy your flight on planet Earth. </pause></span></span><br />
<br />Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-69680871435587131842014-03-16T11:54:00.001-04:002014-11-11T09:12:23.812-05:00Doom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Back in the day, I used to participate in message boards on AOL. We discussed history, politics, and whatnot. It was fun, you got to talk about your hobbies to people who actually cared, spar a bit over points of disagreement, and even occasionally become friends (or, indeed, enemies) of a sort with the other participants. Some list-serves – the kind that came to your e-mail box – followed. But my participation in such discussions fell off rapidly in graduate school, where there always seemed to be real people to argue with. <br /><br />Nowadays, nearly every page on the Internet has a message board affixed to it, and some – like Facebook – are basically nothing but. Make no mistake: these boards do not exist in order to democratize the media or any of that nonsense. They exist to generate page views, information about viewership that can then be sold to potential advertisers. Over time, I found myself drawn to reading the comments in a "can’t look at it, can’t look away" sort of manner. Sometimes I even posted a comment of my own, and then felt like taking a shower afterwards. And so I decided to conduct an experiment. For about a year I partook in discussions on a variety of different pages. I posted, in all, six or seven hundred times (rarely more than twenty or thirty words at a time) and probably read ten times that number of posts. My intent: report my findings on <i>Measure of Doubt</i> when I eventually revived it. <br /><br />I approached this with some rules. First, I’d use my real name, not a pseudonym. Second, I would never lie. Third, I would mainly respond by pointing out errors of fact and/or argumentative errors in the articles on which I was commenting and/or in the posts of others. Fourth, I would never resort to name calling or ad hominem of any kind. (Only once, near the end, did I break this rule. A poster suggested that he didn’t care if texting while driving endangered others – it’s a free country and he ought to be allowed to do it. I replied that we needn’t be worried in his case, as one needed friends in order to have anyone to send texts to in the first place. He replied, predictably, that he would be texting my mom. I said that, in that case, he ought to be careful, as texting on a flip-phone was hard enough, let alone while driving a late-model Datsun and when spelling isn’t your forte. Ding, ding, ding: and the winnah by knockout...) Fifth, I decided that my natural tone would be ironic. The Rob Ford business gave me both motive and opportunity to really sharpen these skills, which had grown quite dull and rusty sheathed in their scabbard since about 2005. Sixth, when participating in a discussion that lasted more than three exchanges back-and-forth (and on some boards, like CNN, the messages poured in so fast – literally dozens would arrive every second on big stories – that no “discussion” was possible at all) I would always thank my interlocutor for chatting, no matter how badly it went.<br /><br />After a few months of participating on various boards, I reached certain conclusions, some of which I believe, and some of which (marked with an *) other people believe. Here they are, in order. <br /><br />1) <b>Humanity is doomed</b>. I have no words to describe how totally, viciously, and horrifically boned we are as a species. My odds-on favourite for possible outcomes at the moment is some sort of global nuclear holocaust resulting from environmental catastrophe, followed by the total collapse of civilization. The survivors on the political right will turn to cannibalism and burn the contents of our libraries and museums in a forlorn attempt to stave off freezing to death in the nuclear winter. The survivors from the political left will say that civilization had it coming anyway and talk about the need for solidarity. Then they’ll get baked, try to (finally) make it past page five in <i>Das Kapita</i>l, and plan for some sort of direct action tomorrow. <br /><br />2) People are horrible. They are ill-informed, irrational, bigoted, tribal, tasteless, tactless, petty, self-interested, self-absorbed, and just plain mean. No part of the political spectrum has a monopoly on stupid; civility accrues nothing in your favour. My grandmother was right: people are garbage. Stay away from them.<br /><br />3) No one works hard except for the person currently posting.* Everyone else is overpaid, underworked, and suckling at the bosom of the nanny state. Especially teachers. In addition, no one knows how to drive properly except for the person currently posting.<br /><br />4) I have it on good authority that if it’s cold right now where you live, global warming is a hoax.<br /><br />5) People who begin a sentence with a phrase such as “I’m not a racist, but...” are always racists. There are a lot of them.<br /><br />6) Arguing with a Creationist about evolution is like arguing with a Big Mac about vegetarianism. Too. Far. Gone.<br /><br />7) Bush is Hitler.*<br /><br />8) Obama is also Hitler.*<br /><br />9) Stephen Harper is worse than Hitler.*<br /><br />10) The only political leader ever who is not Hitler is Hitler. Mention Hitler anywhere and hordes will rush to his defense.<br /><br />11) But they’re “not racist.” They just want "white pride."*<br /><br />12) Countries that aren’t the United States are permitted to kill, torture, and generally knock about pretty much anybody they want. Everybody gets a free pass because of what the United States did in Vietnam, to the natives, and because of slavery. Slow clap.*<br /><br />13) Things used to be great. But now we have lost our values because of either a) immigrants or b) big corporations. Or both.*<br /><br />14) Jesus is coming back soon. We’re not kidding this time.*<br /><br />15) There is a cure for cancer, but they aren’t telling you what it is.*<br /><br />16) There is also a cure for obesity, and the person posting knows what it is.*<br /><br />17) Everything everywhere has been cured but they don’t want you to know.*<br /><br />18) Educated people don’t know anything about the “real world.” They “can’t see the forest for the trees.”* People who make this argument often have difficulty distinguishing between “your” and “you’re” and “it’s” and “its”. <br /><br />19) Misogyny is real. For proof, read the message boards on IMDB where they discuss <i>Sex and the City</i> and <i>Girls. </i><br /><br />20) The moderators of any particular message board are trying to silence at least one of the people currently posting, usually because the person they’re trying to silence is the only one exposing their lies.* Such statements are often accompanied by metaphors about emperors not having any clothes on. <br /><br />21) Nobody hates <i>Star Trek</i> more than <i>Star Trek</i> fans. The principal holds true for obsessive fans of everything from other science fiction franchises to sports teams.<br /><br />22) Except for Ayn Rand fans. Ayn Rand fans are the most rabidly indoctrinated sociopaths in recent history, with the possible exception of parents who rioted to get Cabbage Patch dolls for their children. They are probably the same people, I suspect.<br /><br />24) Humanity is doomed. Mainly because of Ayn Rand fans.</span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-77117109550963677392014-03-02T14:03:00.000-05:002014-06-05T07:23:47.969-04:00Hockey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Your noble author contains multitudes, faithful readers, and so it came to pass that on the 23rd day of February in the Year of Lord 2014, he rose at his customary hour on Sunday, fed the felines, made coffee, and turned on the computer. Heedless of the peril that he might start drinking Coors Light, calling other males “man” “bro” and “buddy” and giving them suspiciously long hugs punctuated by thumping yet strangely tender pats on the back, he watched the Olympic Gold Medal hockey game. It was the first hockey game he had ever watched from one end to the other. In commemoration of this momentous and never-to-be repeated event, he took notes on his reactions to the extraordinary spectacle of watching millionaires skate around for an hour. Well, half of them are millionaires. He isn’t so sure about the Swedes. Below is the unedited transcript:</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />===<br /><br />7 AM. Coffee in hand (done right, in a French press); cats are momentarily content. Computer is on. I am one of 4 million people live-streaming this on CBC.ca. Don Cherry, who ranked 8th on the list of Greatest Canadians a decade ago, is screaming at me. To quell the noise and incoherence I contemplate banging some pots and pans together while shrieking like Yoko Ono but the moment passes.<br /><br />7:07 AM. They are playing. There is much analysis going on between the CBC Broadcasters. The Canadians need to play a tight defense. And a tight offense. I am a hockey neophyte and have trouble keeping up with their strategizing. <br /><br />7:07:28. Swedish player goes off the ice after less than thirty seconds. This must be some kind of hockey rule or something. <br /><br />7:15 AM or thereabouts. Canadians score. I miss this as I was reboiling the kettle for more coffee (I have a problem, I admit.) CBC broadcasts crowds of Canadians in various places across the country, cheering like mad. The shots look staged, or at least highly performative. They do not replay the goal. <br /><br />7:18. People are skating. <br /><br />7:21 AM. Occurs to me that nobody is racist about Swedes.<br /><br />7:22 AM. I minimize the viewer to the corner and check e-mail. Send a couple of replies to the usual morning dross. (“Dear Professor, I have been very sick and my dog died and my grandmother has been diagnosed with certain death and my girlfriend left me for Bill Clinton. Can I please get an extension on the essay that was due last month?”) <br /><br />7:23 AM. I look at bicycles. Surly Long Haul Trucker or the venerable Trek 520? Do I want a Rohloff hub for my touring bike? Good for 100,000 KM they say. <br /><br />7:26 AM. Paying more attention to the game for a bit. Men are skating around. Looking at the uniforms, I keep thinking “stop if you can” and “stop”.<br /><br />7:27 AM. Intermission. This is called the “end of first period.” Ah.<br /><br />7:28 AM. More Don Cherry. Shouting. Intolerable. Didn’t he support Rob Ford? Say something about pinkos on bicycles, too? Strange: as I understand it cycling is a core component of off-season training for many hockey players. <br /><br />7:35 AM. Don Cherry says to Canadian kids that if they work hard they too can end up NHL players, just like their heroes. I check. There are 5.6 million Canadians under the age of 14. There are 488 Canadians in the NHL. Assuming the same percentages: you’ve got one shot in 125,000. So stop readin’ books you sissies and get out there and skate. <br /><br />I lose track of time.<br /><br />Second “period” begins. Men skate around. At one point, a bunch of them gather by the boards and there’s this cluster trying to get the puck. They hack at it like a bunch of guys trying to chop up a gopher emerging from a hole. Best metaphor I had for this.<br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />Minimized viewer again. It plays in the corner while I surf the web. Twitter. Hilary Clinton’s tweet feed identifies her as “Wife, mother, U.S. Senator” in that order. They had a focus group for that, you know. They did - guaranteed. They had focus groups and ran small polls to determine the best order in which to put that. Senator, mom, wife? Wife, Senator, mom? Gotta please the family values types…<br /><br />Hockey. People are skating. Icing call. I picture my mother calling me to the kitchen to lick the spatula when she’s finished a cake. Icing call.<br /><br />Skating. I Facebook. A friend notes that Ikea doesn’t sell hockey sticks. Ten minutes too late I reply that hockey sticks are hard to assemble with an Allen key.<br /><br />Penalty against a Canadian. Occurs to me that there are slight advantages to getting a penalty: you get to rest for a couple of minutes, and you have an awesome seat for the game.<br /><br />Skating. Am joined by Amanda. Tea and more coffee.<br /><br />Canadians score another. I feel mildly elated but am reminded of the immortal words of Han Solo: “Don’t get cocky, kid.” Always good advice.<br /><br />Carey Price probably got made fun of in school for his name. Those people are sorry now, because they’re watching him play. And drinking Coors Light before 8 AM. <br /><br />Is it checking or chequing? Which way do we spell it in Canada?<br /><br />16:08 in second period. Champlain founded Quebec that year. <br /><br />Skating. <br /><br />Skating. <br /><br />Whistles.<br /><br />Some chequing. <br /><br />Why is there no fighting? Is this hockey not as good because it doesn’t have fighting? If I were a hockey player, I would use reasoned argument to solve problems on the ice. “Sorry about that ill-timed cheque, kind sir. It was my fault entirely. Can we discuss how to avoid such incidents in the future? Again, my most sincere apologies.”<br /><br />Second period ends. Swedes are down by two. More analysis. Hockey analyst guy is very incisive. Actual quotation: “Swedes need to play a tough offensive game now. When you’re down by two, you can’t lay back and be defensive.” I find this very helpful. I would have thought that when you’re losing by two goals the key would have been defensive play. Forgive me, I am new to the game.<br /><br />Third period.<br /><br />Skating. Skating. Skating. Play-by-play announcers could be making up names for all I know. <br /><br />Puck goes over the glass. Do they show a fan catching it, holding it up in the air? No. Odd.<br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />I check Sweden’s population. Just under 10 million. Could we take them in a war? Hard to say. They had conscription until recently. I consider how much I would have hated military life. Orders. Conformity. Shouting. Large groups of aggressive men. Green. I would have used reason argument with my senior drill instruction. “Sarge, I don’t respond well to the shouting. Maybe we could discuss this over coffee?” <br /><br />Skating. I notice on Wikipedia that most Swedish military kit is home grown. How can they afford the R & D for such small procurement numbers? I need to look this up.<br /><br />I like Saab automobiles. I had a Saab ball cap when I was a teenager. I wore it everywhere. It was part of my identity. Weird: I don’t drive. <br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />When I was ten or eleven my parents sent me to a sports day camp for two weeks. The people who ran it were awful: mean, slovenly, foul-mouthed. And I was not good at sports, which pretty much was the equivalent of a tattoo on my forehead that said “please beat me up”, which the other boys did with enthusiasm, and the beatings were usually accompanied by all manner of homophobic epithets. Sports build character. It did in my case. I learned that coping with being bullied is an important life skill. Certainly it has been one of the keys to success in my chosen profession.<br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />Oh my god. <br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />Skating.<br /><br />I check the news from Syria, which nobody seems to care about anymore. Many dead. Upheaval. Also, Canada’s Senate scandal seems to have blown over. But Harper got a case of beer from Obama. Sam Adams. Not a bad choice.<br /><br />I begin to make breakfast. Tex-Mex breakfast burritos.<br /><br />Skating. Whistles. Canada gets a third goal. I feel bad for the Swedes now. They are nice and have a fine social welfare system. And Ikea. And write good crime novels. I thought Kenneth Branagh was good in the BBC version of Wallander. I check IMDB to see if it’s coming back for more. It is. Awesomeness. But so is Heroes. Why?<br /><br />Skating. Whistles. Swedes look sad. I feel bad for them. Is their king watching? I look up the king of Sweden, guess his name is either “Carl” or “Gustaf”. Holy crap: he’s Carl Gustaf. There’s a picture of him. He’s an Honorary Admiral in the British Royal Navy. Weird. He also is a Knight with Collar of the Order of the Elephant in Denmark. This I have to check on Wikipedia. It’s the highest order in Denmark. Nothing to do with actual elephants, which are not native to Denmark.<br /><br />I watch hockey. Amanda is reading about Ukraine. This will end badly.<br /><br />Skating. Three minutes remain.<br /><br />Breakfast is about ready. Eggs got a bit browned on the bottom. We fold them into wraps with onions, mushrooms, peppers, avocado, and goat cheese. I wonder again if I could or should be vegetarian. Probably yes to both.<br /><br />Skating. Countdown. Ten, nine, etc. <br /><br />Canada wins. I feel a tiny twinge of national pride. And also that this is vengeance for all the poorly drilled holes and missing pieces from Ikea furniture over the years.<br /><br />Mentally, I cross “watch a hockey game” off my bucket list. It comes just below “write a bucket list” and just above “get a colonoscopy”. <br /><br />Much cheering across Canada on CBC. Looks staged again. In Russia, the players shake hands. Some replays. I see Sidney Crosby remove his helmet. I was hoping for female and flowing red hair, like Eowyn in<i> Lord of the Rings</i> when she reveals herself. “I am NO man!” That would have been awesome.<br /><br />Am pretty sure I see a Canadian player mouth, “Fuck, yeah.” Camera moves away from him rather quickly.<br /><br />According to CBC, 15 million watched the game. I check: 13 million voted in the last federal election. Apples and oranges? I dunno. I’m just sayin’</span></span></div>
<br />Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-19906803650262467602014-02-15T08:42:00.001-05:002016-02-13T07:00:52.024-05:00Firestorm<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-08778-0001%2C_Dresden%2C_Tote_nach_Bombenangriff.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-08778-0001, Dresden, Tote nach Bombenangriff.jpg" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-08778-0001%2C_Dresden%2C_Tote_nach_Bombenangriff.jpg" height="230" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><i>Note: this is a heavily revised version of an Op-Ed piece that originally appeared in the </i>London Free Press <i>in 2009. </i></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"The aim of the combined bomber offensive should be unambiguously stated as the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany...the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport, and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale...are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." </span></span></i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">- Arthur Harris, October 1943. </span></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">February 13th to 15th is the anniversary of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, a horrific
series of fire raids that killed 25,000 civilians and left much of that beautiful
medieval city a smouldering ruin. With the exception of the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no action by the Allies in the
Second World War has generated so much moral condemnation. Ever since,
critics have charged that the city was defenseless and of no military
value. Neither of these claims is true, but even Winston Churchill
conceded that the attack<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, conducted when victory was imminent, </span>represented a serious “query” against the moral
conduct of Allies.<br /><br />Area bombing — usually described as the
indiscriminate bombardment of <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">towns and cities</span> — was a tactic adopted by
the RAF’s Bomber Command in 1941. It was an inevitable decision at the
time, when the British were without major allies and confronted by a
totalitarian enemy that had conquered much of Europe. Without the
technology to hit military and industrial targets precisely, Bomber
Command aimed at what it couldn’t miss – whole towns and cities. Make no mistake, <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">c</span>ivilians were made the deliberate object of attack, although contemporary authorities sometimes disguised this with such euphemisms as "dehousing" and "breaking morale" – euphemisms that modern historians are too often wont to take seriously. But at the time the meaning was clear: you break enemy morale by burning down their houses, with them in them. Or does anyone really suppose that Bomber Command thought the occupants would be out for the evening? </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As its navigational and
targeting abilities improved steadily over the course of 1943 and 1944, Bomber Command
increasingly raided oil, transportation, and other such enemy assets, too, but in absolute terms the tonnage dropped in area raids continued to
grow, peaking in February 1945. </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For months after there was any prospect
of German victory, <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">British heavy bombers </span>continued to reduce towns and cities
to rubble and ash. Almost forgotten, to give <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">one example among many</span>, is the February 23rd attack on the small town of Pforzheim, in which as many as 17,000 people – a third of town's population – were killed. <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bomber Command raided the town an additional eight times after that.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />Major anniversaries of this kind always stir
up a brouhaha, but the controversy over the strategic bombing offensive
has been simmering away for decades now. Historians and military <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">scholars </span>of
unimpeachable patriotic credentials have been raising serious questions
about the campaign’s efficacy and morality ever since the first bomb
fell. Today, most scholars agree that the Anglo-American bomber offensive forced the Germans to devote huge resources to air defense, destroyed the Luftwaffe, </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">cracked civilian morale, </span></span>and dealt crippling blows
to Hitler’s war industry. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />But were the attacks moral? This is a
different question entirely. Historians tread lightly here, for they are
wary travelers in the realm of moral philosophy. Some people would argue
that historians have no business making moral judgments at all, but
clearly this will not do. No one would deny us the right to
condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or the 9/11 terrorists. (And surely the only thing more chilling than a
Holocaust denier would be someone who admits that it happened
but refuses to say it was wrong.) Nor should we submit to the temptation of
moral relativism, for we cannot judge monsters by their own monstrous
standards. By what standard can we judge, then? The philosophy <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">of</span> ethics provides us with many possible answers, but historians <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">don't often</span> read moral philosoph<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">y</span>.
What about judging by the moral standards of the time? Again, we must be
cautious. There was no consensus about the morality of killing enemy
civilians. Polls, including the Mass Observation reports in the UK, showed surprising levels of opposition to <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">killing German</span> civilians. Allied propaganda
consistently downplayed the fact that it was happening and indeed <i>had to</i>: the same propaganda vehemently condemned the Germans for their inhumanity when they did it. Can we judge? Of course. How do we judge? There is no easy answer. But where the moral debate over the
bombing of Dresden goes awry, in my opinion, is in focusing too much on
the actions of the Allies, and not enough on the guilt of the enemy.<br /><br />In
about sixty days in the late spring and early summer of 1943, the
Second World War turned decisively against the Germans. In May 1943,
they effectively conceded defeat in the Battle of Atlantic by
withdrawing their U-Boats from convoy routes. Then, in July, a
succession of haymakers sent the Axis reeling: the German offensive
against the Soviets at Kursk was repulsed with catastrophic losses; the
Allies invaded Sicily and Mussolini’s government fell; and a
dreadful firestorm immolated Hamburg and perhaps 40,000 of its people
following a<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">series of heavy raids by </span></span>Bomber Command. After the summer of 1943, and
certainly no later the D-Day, a year later, it was no longer possible
for any rational person to doubt what the eventual outcome of the war
would be. The Nazis’ continued resistance was explicable only in light
of their pathological addiction to redrawing the racial map of Europe<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">by violence.</span></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is too often misund<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">erstood, and the Allies instead are chastised for their insistence on "unconditional surrender" <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">and their</span></span></span> heavy handed prosecution of a war that the
Nazis started and then refused to end. After the
Holocaust itself, this is the worst of the atrocities that the Nazis and their very willing<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> collab<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">orators in the German armed forces</span></span>
committed: their refusal to surrender unconditionally, even long after
it was clear that unconditional surrender would be eventual outcome
anyway. How many millions died, in the final months of the war, to
satiate their insatiable bloodlust?<br /><br />We cannot know. But <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the</span>
thousands of German civilians who died by fire and asphyxiation at Dresden were
victims not just of the remorseless logic of Allied area bombing, but
also of the death fetishism of a government <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">that</span> many of them had once
cheered on to victory.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-54955756673948758952014-01-30T22:29:00.000-05:002014-01-30T22:36:10.664-05:00Smallpox<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In 1967, the year <i>Sgt. Pepper</i> came out, it killed two million people, more than were killed in the entire eighteen years of the Vietnam War. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In 1948, the year it was founded, the World Health Organization estimated that smallpox was infecting <i>fifty million</i> people per year, and in some regions killing as many as a third of them, and leaving millions of survivors blind. <br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So smallpox killed more people in the twentieth century than the World Wars put together, two or three times over.<br /><br />It had been with us since the beginning of civilization and perhaps longer. It made no distinction for rank or social station. It killed Ramses V, Pharaoh of ancient Egypt. It may have killed Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor. It nearly killed Elizabeth I of England, fourteen hundred years later. It did kill Tsar Peter II of Russia in 1730, and the Emperor Komei of Japan in 1867, and the Emperor T’ung Chih of China in 1875. Abraham Lincoln contracted an unusually mild case after giving his famous Gettysburg Address. He survived, but not before passing it on to a White House servant, who did not.<br /><br />The infected suffered fever, damage to their internal organs, and above all the hideous eruptions – the pox – that covered the body and burst. For hundreds of generations, millions were powerless before it. They prayed and died; died wondering why their gods had abandoned them and were punishing them. When Europeans introduced it to the New World at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century it tore through the indigenous people. Thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the human race had left them without so much as a shred of resistance to it; it shattered their social cohesion at exactly the historical moment when they needed it most to resist the invaders. They prayed and they died.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It killed and it killed, for ten thousand years or more. And then it was gone. Two million people in 1967. None at all ten years later, and not a single solitary human being since. Not one. It had been in decline in parts of the world for nearly two centuries, but had persisted in spite of progress for a long time, mainly because people – who are by nature not rational – superstitiously and irrationally feared the cure more than the disease. But in the end reason triumphed. And how was this ancient scourge, this killer among killers, this dread disease that the Aztecs called the Great Fire, finally overcome?<br /><br />Not with prayer. Not by strengthening our immune system in "natural" ways with herbs or homeopathy. Not with chiropractics or <i>chi kung</i>.<br /><br />No, they wiped it out, eradicated it from the face of the Earth, the good old-fashioned way.<br /><br />With vaccination.</span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-646270360657804892014-01-10T09:45:00.001-05:002014-01-12T18:05:46.993-05:00Ascension<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Last term during a break in my historical theory and methods course a student hit me with a question that set me back on my heels a bit. It was a doozy: “Professor Broad, do you, as an historian, believe in Jesus?” <br /><br />I was slightly irritated by the imprecision of the question, like that time a pollster on the phone asked me if I believed that 9/11 conspiracy theories exist. Yes. I believe that 9/11 conspiracy theories <i>exist</i>. So there I am in a poll somewhere, recorded as one of the weirdos who think that Bush planned the whole thing, when in fact I doubt very much that the former President had the intellectual acuity to plan a BBQ. <br /><br />“Do you, as an historian, believe in Jesus?” My response was that I believed that one Yeshua of Nazareth, a Jewish rabbi, executed by the Romans, whose immediate followers established a rather significant sect within Judaism, certainly existed. I braced myself for what I knew was coming. “But as a historian do you believe He was God?” My initial inclination was to throw myself out the window. But I considered that, actually, it was a perfectly fair question and deserving of a fair answer. I said that I considered the evidence insufficient to establish the validity of that hypothesis, but observed that this wasn’t necessarily my belief “as an historian”, because I know better historians, more accomplished and smarter than me, who think otherwise. I did, however, observe that modern history is an empirical discipline: we deal in what’s probable, and that miracles are highly improbable by definition: if people went around resurrecting all the time there wouldn’t be any particular reason to get all excited about it. And so I felt that history, as a profession, might be mute where such things are concerned, for the same reason that the field of geography doesn’t have much to say about musical appreciation. <br /><br />I had the feeling that the student felt this was a cop-out, but it really wasn’t intended to be. In the historio-critical tradition that is the dominant mode of investigating and understanding scripture in academe, and indeed in most mainline protestant and Catholic seminaries these days, scripture is understood as a testament of faith and theology, never intended – not even by its anonymous authors – to be understood as “history” in the way we understand history today. <br /><br />But there’s a problem. There are indeed some denominations that regard scripture as a literal and inerrant account of the past. And polls show that, in the United States in particular, such people aren’t a small minority. There are tens of millions who think like that, although <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/" target="_blank">polls also show that such people usually know very little about what’s actually<i> in</i> scripture</a>. But to such people, let me pose a question of my own, in the form of an extended observation. <br /><br />For Christians, the Ascension is an important milestone in the life of Jesus, the moment when He, in the presence of His apostles, was taken up into Heaven. <br /><br />I’ll leave aside the fact that I remain mute on whether or not this actually occurred as an historical event (i.e.: an historical event in the way that, say, Lincoln delivered a speech at Gettysburg) because I don’t understand what “Ascension” means. I literally have no idea what is meant by “taken up into Heaven” so I can hardly be expected to decide whether or not it actually happened. But I do want to point out something interesting.<br /><br />The Ascension is described in the Acts of the Apostles and in two of the four canonical Gospels. It’s in Mark 16:19 and Luke 24:50-53.<br /><br />Well, sort of. Today there is a virtual consensus of scholars in the field of <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=define:+exegesis&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&gws_rd=cr&ei=NynQUseXHu_eyQHBhIC4DQ" target="_blank">exegesis</a> that verses 9-20 of Mark 16 were later additions to the original and rather dark ending of Mark in verse 8, where the “Three Marys” open Jesus’ tomb, find it empty, and run away afraid. Some scholars therefore regard 9-20, with its accounts of the resurrected Jesus and His Ascension to be “inauthentic”, and you can find Bibles where it is relegated to a footnote. As for Luke 24:50-53, have a look at the photo, top left. What don’t you notice? Ascension. I own three Bibles, which is pretty good for a guy like me. And my <i>Revised Standard Version King James</i> doesn’t mention the Ascension in 50-53, although it includes the following footnote: “Other ancient authorities <u>add</u> <i>and was carried up into Heaven</i>” after verse 51. By contrast, my <i>Oxford Annotated RSV </i>includes the phrase but with an opposite footnote: “Other ancient authorities <u>omit</u> <i>and was carried up into Heaven</i>.” <br /><br />Now, look. There are some atheists out there who make great sport out of this sort of thing, but I have little patience for those kinds of narrow strawman attacks. But I do have a question for those of you who regard the Bible as literally true and inerrant: <i>which Bible</i>? </span></span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-77769224187343302092013-12-26T09:52:00.001-05:002013-12-27T08:41:37.743-05:00Surrender<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe_zkmd9Qn1LiSL7TvE0lHK3EO5R06uuYm61XIFMvSqV1Kf8rljD5hcl7ESK71b9lDLaPB9UT7jxuQ6OoPZyrDpWfzhs-E7zAnh5U68CqlTUn5K0PwFhyXJvz4bElQfY0rItiEW66lu6yL/s1600/img_4098.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe_zkmd9Qn1LiSL7TvE0lHK3EO5R06uuYm61XIFMvSqV1Kf8rljD5hcl7ESK71b9lDLaPB9UT7jxuQ6OoPZyrDpWfzhs-E7zAnh5U68CqlTUn5K0PwFhyXJvz4bElQfY0rItiEW66lu6yL/s320/img_4098.jpg" width="240" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>“And the day after Christmas, the whole family gathered into the SUV and drove to the big box plaza, which was FAR, FAR away from the core of the city where nasty hipsters and EVEN people needing social assistance lived. Then they returned all the crap they didn’t want and snapped up things they did at bargain prices! And ran their credit card balances UP and UP and UP! The end.” </i> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For immediate release:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The War on Christmas, one of the least effective military campaigns in the history of the world, has been lost. Anti-Christmas forces, having been reduced to a handful of deviants muttering something about the winter solstice and Jesus not having been born on the 25th of December, surrendered unconditionally, their efforts having been proven futile for the 50th year in a row. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Once again this year, the Christmas season returned on November 1st (some localities waited until November 12th out of respect for those who gave their lives in the early battles to save Christmas) and stayed for its customary seven weeks. During this period, multicoloured lights appeared on trees and rooftops everywhere, alongside the visage of the <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=santa&client=firefox-a&hs=aLY&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Ij-8UtWfNaTgyQGv74DgDg&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=1280&bih=611" target="_blank">Great Leader</a> – who, you will recall, has children under perpetual surveillance to ensure their compliance with behavioural norms – and variations on the same dozen songs played incessantly from speakers in every public place in the Western hemisphere. A minority even went to “church”, but most, as is the custom of the past half-century, went to shopping malls and spent themselves into oblivion, despite the cluck-clucking from a handful of Christian conservatives, who represent the last bastion of anti-capitalist thought in our society. Meanwhile, televisions bombarded revelers with hours of familiar but repetitious entertainment, including <i>Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas</i>, and of course the annual mawkish, maudlin, mediocre and incomprehensible <i>Dr. Who Christmas Special</i>. As usual, the North American Aerospace Defense Command issued reports of the Dear Leader’s progress across the Northern Hemisphere on Christmas Eve, part of an ongoing disinformation campaign. On the day itself, "families" (groups of people associated on a biological basis but barely known to one another) gathered for stressful meals where they outwardly cooed over how very good everything tasted, but inwardly reflected that pretty much everything was overcooked and cold by the time everybody sat down to eat. <br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In other news, on a local street corner, one of the few surviving anti-Christmas cranks was heard to say, “Political correctness has run amok. You used to be able to say 'Happy Holidays' and 'Seasons Greetings' to people without anybody getting offended. Now, if you don’t go around saying “Merry Christmas” they jump all over you." He has been evacuated to a nearby Toys ‘r’ Us where he will be required to listen to “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” over and over until he is fit to rejoin society. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">-30-</span></div>
Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-83182456972764745942013-12-15T09:03:00.002-05:002013-12-15T09:26:18.755-05:00Commuting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2o2JezLzYNN7PsPOfubIDgv0xPuuvMgRXOa1CAbcRrPxnKCH3SPmyrNQ4Gwu6JcSnhyPPmXCxd9LgydprMYmUtlshXm_M2tbkT3MvSwMjjkeLlp9CHRpJwNzqKBobilfwGAnm4dqArOw/s1600/commute-health.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2o2JezLzYNN7PsPOfubIDgv0xPuuvMgRXOa1CAbcRrPxnKCH3SPmyrNQ4Gwu6JcSnhyPPmXCxd9LgydprMYmUtlshXm_M2tbkT3MvSwMjjkeLlp9CHRpJwNzqKBobilfwGAnm4dqArOw/s320/commute-health.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Behold, my friends, the form of self-inflicted brain damage called the rush-hour commute. Is there any single greater waste of time, productivity, and money that our society has imposed upon itself?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Well, my wife and I have rarely had to contend with anything <i>that </i>bad, but we've spent our share of time accomplishing nothing but raising our blood pressure and the global temperature while sitting in an expensive automobile going nowhere. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So we've made an important decision. This week, we’re getting rid of our car. It’s an experiment. It might fail. I doubt this will be our last car, and we’ll be renting occasionally, too. But there’s no harm in trying it for a while. We're three-quarters of the way there, anyway. In four years we’ve put a paltry 25,000 kilometres on a car that, all told, costs us around $500 per month. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Still, people look at us like we’re crazy. Getting rid of the car! It’s like we told them we’re getting rid of our heads. Some people have told us that not owning a car is irresponsible: the automotive industry being one of the cornerstones of our economy, after all. And a couple of people have actually gotten angry. Actual anger. The problem, you see, is all that <i>fancy book learnin’ </i>we’ve done. Don’t know what the <i>real world </i>is like. No <i>common sense</i>. Them degrees are just <i>expensive bits of paper</i>. Can’t see the <i>forest for the trees</i>. One wonders how we function at all, boneheads that we are.<br /><br />Speaking of forests and trees, they’re one of our major concerns. I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of peer reviewed scientific evidence proves that climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and that human beings are the major contributor to it. So one way or another, sooner or later, we’re all going to be driving less, or at least driving vehicles that are less polluting. But there I go again, with my fancy-pants evidence-based thinking.<br /><br />An interesting thing: for millions of people, there is an astonishing invention that offers inexpensive, reliable, emission-free transportation. It can hugely reduce urban traffic congestion if properly utilized. It can even help its operator lose weight. It’s called a bicycle, and in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M" target="_blank">some cities it’s just taken for granted that it’s how huge numbers of people get where they’re going</a>.<br /><br />My wife and I are bicycle commuters for about nine months out of the year, and in snatches for the winter months, too. We're fortunate to live near bike paths and most mornings can beat the rush-hour traffic to work. People always ask about the rain and cold, but it’s a mild inconvenience next to the stress of the morning commute for drivers. Seriously: when is the last time you <i>enjoyed </i>driving to work? By contrast, our commute is stress-free and nothing quite matches that feeling of smug superiority when you ride up and your colleagues avert your gaze, simultaneously envious of you and humiliated about the hideous state of their own decrepit and decaying carcasses. <br /><br />The bicycle has been a mature technology for a better part of a century now. <a href="http://www.cervelo.com/en/bikes/p-series.html" target="_blank">This bike</a> might look like a revolution in design but fundamentally it’s not that much different than sometime your grandfather might have owned. And yet there was a time in North America, not long ago, when bicycles were considered something for children and a small number of adult hobbyists. In the last three decades, however, a huge adult bicycle culture has emerged. For a while, the industry floundered around trying to find the right bikes for ordinary people. The bike shops are full of beautiful, featherweight carbon frame bikes that cost thousands of dollars, but for the average person looking to commute those are like buying a Ferrari to go to the mall and back. Thankfully, <a href="http://www.vintage-velo.com/bicycle-sales.html" target="_blank">for a few hundred dollars</a> now you can get a very good commuter bike (and I don’t mean some ten-ton hunk of junk purchased at Canadian Tire) that will suit your needs perfectly. <br /><br /><a href="http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/b6/2d/90/b62d90a2238116291e618d5c54fdacf0.jpg" target="_blank">Now have a look at these</a>. They’re breathtaking, decadent, handmade titanium bikes from a company called Budnitz. They’ll cost you about $8,000. Seriously: <a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/75294624992605201/" target="_blank">have a look</a>. The bike community has its share of snobs and on the message boards these have generated a lot of hate, mostly about the cost. But really it’s just expensive in the way that a luxury car is. Now, I’m not endorsing this particular brand, just using it to illustrate a point: even one of these sumptuous machines, the Rolls Royce of commuter bikes, is actually a pittance compared to what people spend on their cars. <br /><br />In 2012, the CAA estimated that a car on average costs its owners $10,452 dollars per year – that’s the cost of payments, insurance, gasoline, maintenance, and depreciation factored in. Consider, too, that after ten years most cars are hunks of junk ready to go to the scrap yard. By contrast, a good bicycle frame will last forever and a day. Maintenance and replacing parts on most commuter bikes will set you back a couple of hundred bucks per year. <br /><br />So, we have a means of commuting that is cheap, environmentally sound, and makes us healthier: the bicycle. Why do more people not use it? Well, some people just can’t. I get that. It’s hard to haul your tool kit to the job site on your panniers. Or they have kids to get to soccer practice. Or maybe their commute is too long, or it’s just not practicable to show up at work and have to shower and change. And heavy snow is a big obstacle, though perhaps <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=surly+moonlander&client=firefox-a&hs=zrD&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=OLatUrWgCoTj2QXGtoG4CQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=611#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=kLdgXHAYhlwHrM%3A%3Bw1Dvf39_TAoeWM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Frichvibe.com%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2012%252F12%252FSurly-Moonlander-Bike.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Frichvibe.com%252Frides%252Fthe-surly-moonlander-bike%252F%3B660%3B439" target="_blank">not to these</a>. There are safety issues, because cities don’t often factor cyclists well into their transportation plans. But the biggest problem for people with short commutes is simply a psychological one. They can’t quite imagine getting where they’re going without their cars. But millions of people do, every day. The way I see it: we’re going to do what we’ve mostly been doing anyway, and get paid $500 a month to do it.</span></span>Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-32998082356012241242013-11-29T18:08:00.001-05:002014-06-05T22:34:59.422-04:00Atheism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp-9GfLfNaWvG8hwXkSVMK9K3V1ymYmXHlWpdwHyCQRcqQOPtgVO7hvf0G9QK2_rr5j6lBGoseoAUb3k_H76rWgTYZ-eJsgD2Y_poUqo-lQ7pLJHBH1InRb0uC_BAan1GqoqoW3Yd2KsQX/s1600/1381795_694515037236177_387626022_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp-9GfLfNaWvG8hwXkSVMK9K3V1ymYmXHlWpdwHyCQRcqQOPtgVO7hvf0G9QK2_rr5j6lBGoseoAUb3k_H76rWgTYZ-eJsgD2Y_poUqo-lQ7pLJHBH1InRb0uC_BAan1GqoqoW3Yd2KsQX/s320/1381795_694515037236177_387626022_n.jpg" height="320" width="313" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The worst thing is when people try to talk me out of it, as if it’s just something soft I’ve gotten stuck in. "Stalin was an atheist," they say. Okay. And? What do they expect to me say? "Stalin was an atheist? I had no idea. In that case, I <i>do</i> believe in God." And yes, I’ve heard of Pascal's Wager, and Paley’s pocket watch on the heath, and every other variation of the argument from design. These things do tend to enter your consciousness after three decades of daily study and reflection.<br /><br />And yet my personal progress towards disbelief involved no turning points, revelations, or eureka moments. It simply began with a gradual realization, in boyhood, that my school’s daily prayers and Bible readings were just white noise to me. I stopped believing in God by the time I was about twelve and this early, intuitive disbelief has been buttressed by three subsequent decades of study, all of which has deepened my conviction that there isn’t enough evidence to support the God hypothesis.<br /><br />There’s no reason to get all uppity about it, but people tend to. This was the second or third column I wrote for <i>Measure of Doubt</i>, nearly five years ago, but it’s the 109th that I’ve actually posted. I keep hesitating for a simple reason. I've found it’s best to keep quiet about my disbelief because it’s a stigma. I'll say that again: disbelief is a stigma. I almost never discuss it with family or friends. This is the first time I’ve unequivocally professed my atheism in public, and I raise the issue now with serious trepidation. <br /><br />Oh, I know that some believers think of themselves as the persecuted minority, huddled around the flickering candle of faith in the encroaching darkness. Well, maybe. But it must be crowded around that candle, what with ninety percent of the population elbowing for room. The assertion, made by some conservative believers, that atheists aggressively dominate the public discourse on religion is based on the worst sort of hyperbolic selection bias. <br /><br />And I really don’t see what the problem is. Why would anyone be bothered by my skepticism, let alone offended by it? I don’t think believers are delusional, I think they’re wrong. Why would anyone be offended by this? It's precisely what they think about me. Moreover, I assume that most Christians reject most non-Christian beliefs. Presumably they don’t believe that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism" target="_blank">God has taken human form on many occasions</a>, that First Nations have o<a href="http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/firstnations/world.html" target="_blank">ccupied the Great Plains since the beginning of time</a>, that we’re bound to an endless cycle of reincarnation <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism" target="_blank">unless we follow the Eightfold Noble Path</a>, or that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam" target="_blank">Qu'ran is the final and perfect revelation of God</a>. That being the case, they too are atheists – about other peoples' religions. Again, I fail to see what the problem is.<br /><br />Admittedly some people are faithful in a more amorphous way, arguing that all religions are just different versions of the same truth. When they consider such things at all, they say that they believe in some sort of "divine spirit" a warm and fuzzy though sometimes disapproving God: a celestial Oprah. Confess your sins. Jump on the living room set sofa forever and ever.<br /><br /> "Maybe God is just the word we give to love," I heard a liberal theologian say on TV one time. "Oh, please!" I shouted. I nearly dropped my copy of <i>The Satanic Verses</i>. And yet the amazing thing was that this purveyor superficially conceived, cloyingly sophomoric ooze got a free pass from the fundamentalist on the same show. "At least she believes in <i>something</i>," he said. By contrast, the atheist on the panel, who professed a thoroughly considered, rigorously examined, and continuously re-evaluated disbelief was told he was going to Hell. The fundamentalist described how he himself had always suffered persecution for his faith. Incredible: he goes around telling people they’re going to be tortured for eternity but says he’s being persecuted when they defend themselves. Incredible.<br /><br />Well, I don’t think <i>anybody’s</i> going to Hell. In fact, nothing follows automatically from my atheism, and certainly not any conclusions about religion as a social institution. I don’t believe that it "poisons everything" as the title of a recent book put it. Personally, as I’ve grown older, I’ve taken far more interest in religious studies and my respect for certain aspects of religious institutions has grown, even as my atheistic convictions have solidified. I was very irritated not long ago to hear someone remark with pride, "I’m an atheist and I’ve never been in a church in my life." That’s a shame: he’s missed out on some great architecture and a pile of history. Comparative religion is one of the cornerstones of a good liberal education and I insist that my students know something about it. But people often mistake the meaning of all this. A few years ago, on a teaching evaluation, one student wrote, "Prof. Broad seems <i>very</i> religious." I should have framed it.<br /><br />Moreover, I teach at an institution with a religious affiliation. Why? Well, for many reasons, not the least of which is because it is an excellent liberal arts college with a superb faculty. But it is also because that institution is actually far more amendable to the serious discussion of religion than the secular university I graduated from, where legions of the self-righteously politically correct maintain that the critical discussion of religion is the exact equivalent of racism. Their position – that ideas have rights – is both insipid and insidious, and is one that, moreover, they do not themselves believe, as they are perfectly willing to hurl stones in the direction of the Catholic Church, for example, when its precepts on matters concerning abortion, the ordination of women, and same sex marriage differ from their own. Let us be very clear about this: you hear that academe is dominated by atheists. It isn’t. I can count on my fingers the number of real ones I’ve met. It’s dominated by moderately secular liberals, most of them positively popping with New Age spiritual beliefs. They're just mad about organized Christianity. Criticize other religions and they’ll haul you before a human rights tribunal. I tremble slightly to type those words.<br /><br />Friends among the faithful, it's not the nonbelievers you should worry about. They just think you’re wrong. It's the devout of certain other religions and denominations that should concern you. They think you're wrong <i>and</i> that you're going to Hell for it. Some of them even believe that they are retribution's earthly instruments. And since even the largest single denomination can claim no more than a fifth of the world's population as even nominal adherents, it is undeniably the case that, regardless of what faith you profess, the majority of the world's population thinks you’re wrong, that you’re guilty of some degree of theological or liturgical malpractice, and indeed from countless thousands of temples, mosques, and churches there emerges an even stronger claim from millions of truly devout believers. They <i>know</i> in their hearts that you are not just wrong, but are wicked, sinful, and destined to spend eternity in damnation.<br /><br /> So I'll <a href="http://measureofdoubt.blogspot.ca/2011/01/hell.html" target="_blank">see you there</a>. </span></span> </div>
Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2729438366466237834.post-83555415058170775422013-11-10T13:13:00.002-05:002014-11-10T11:45:10.631-05:00Remembrance<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYFjZ_tm3plTFYpenmXdpl3g77pOpezSeNIk9vh_f0kyrHIeNYsB4OJ6hCTN1m2ogvUYzPfcsMNX6WLh9ACa08BXG3LlZ9klHHG-vCR-GK_Wp7Tc6LSUh3CXfF1Q07SXXq8uKvAGDB-CFL/s1600/Kiev_Jew_Killings_in_Ivangorod_(1942).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYFjZ_tm3plTFYpenmXdpl3g77pOpezSeNIk9vh_f0kyrHIeNYsB4OJ6hCTN1m2ogvUYzPfcsMNX6WLh9ACa08BXG3LlZ9klHHG-vCR-GK_Wp7Tc6LSUh3CXfF1Q07SXXq8uKvAGDB-CFL/s320/Kiev_Jew_Killings_in_Ivangorod_(1942).jpg" height="220" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The brouhaha about white poppies is back and boring again, this year exacerbated by a seething campaign of fake indignation mounted by the herd of hacks at Canada’s worst newspaper. Well, it gives them something to do in the brief period before they begin to seethe with fake indignation about retailers who say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” and all that portends for the imminent collapse of civilization. This year, Ottawa’s Rideau Institute produced something like 2,500 white poppies versus the Legion’s 18 million red ones and yet to read the populist piffle in the <i>Toronto Sun</i> (and its various unwilling progeny) is to get the impression that this insidious commie plot, well, portends the imminent collapse of civilization. Can’t make a living as an ideologue if you don’t have a crisis.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />More and more each year I find myself discomforted by Remembrance Day, and especially by the efforts of some organizations to impose a singular interpretation on the memory of the wars and how we should feel about them. As an historian of the home front, I find the most remarkable thing about Canadian society in wartime to be the disjuncture between propaganda that stressed unanimity and common purpose and the actuality of what went on. Political, social, and economic debates were <i>not</i> set aside for the common good in wartime: they intensified as virtually every group with an axe to grind surged forth to argue that their cause had greater urgency than ever before. Propaganda, persecution, and misty-eyed patriotism tended to to paper over the unpleasantness (and this time of year it still does), but the fact is that some of the most divisive social and political debates in this country’s history occurred during the world wars. The generation of Canadians that fought them did not agree about why they were fighting, how they should fight, and what they wanted when peace resumed. And so it is positively incredible that some groups seem desperate to fix the meaning of remembrance after the fact, as if we could find consensus where wartime generations could not. <br /><br />On Monday, though, we will hear about how the generation that fought the world wars fought “for us” and “for our freedoms.” But did they? Fight for <i>us</i>? Fight for <i>our </i>freedoms? Surely they fought for their world, and if they fought for freedom at all it was almost certainly not for our conception of freedom. We may grow misty eyed over the grave of a young man, cut down in his prime in 1918, but reflect that, were he typical of his generation, he would hold attitudes on matters of (for starters) gender, race, and sexuality that many of us would consider positively repugnant and indeed totalitarian today. What would a typical soldier, killed at Amiens, having died without ever having heard the radio or seen a colour photograph, think of the world a century a later? Think of our secular, smoke-free, multicultural, Canada? Think of women in Parliament, a black man as President of the United States, of same-sex and interracial couples, <i>Breaking Bad, Twilight</i>, and hip hop? Even the idea of a fully independent Canada might very well repulse him. <br /><br />An eminent colleague of mine believes that, on November 11th itself, such questions of politics and history should go by the wayside and instead the day should be dedicated to the simple act of remembrance of those who fell. But what does this mean? Remember who? Remember what? And how? The act of “remembrance” – and in the context of Remembrance Day that almost always means "veneration" – is not simple. Consider even the question of "who": am I just remembering Canadians? And what does that even mean, prior to 1947? A great many of the 65,000 “Canadians” killed in the First World War weren’t born here, and probably didn’t think of themselves as Canadians at all. What about those who fought badly, were cowardly, or who even betrayed their comrades? And am I remembering our allies, too? The French? The British? The Americans? All their wars? Even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War" target="_blank">the cruel and stupid ones</a>? Even the Red Army, which brutalized its way across Eastern Europe, the spearhead of a totalitarian state whose cumulative death toll exceeded Hitler’s? And am I remembering the enemy fallen, too – remembering those who fought against “our freedoms”? Tread carefully here. <br /><br />Consider, if you will, the rifleman in the infamous photograph above, about to gun down a woman and her infant child and then, presumably, the others, huddled defenceless, terrified, and weeping, perhaps begging for their lives. Very probably he was killed or maimed in subsequent fighting on the Eastern Front. Should I “remember” him tomorrow, merely because he wore a uniform and fought for a cause he believed in, even though that cause was objectively evil? Even though the success of that cause would have spelled the end of European civilization as we know it? Is his uniform some sort of totem that grants him moral absolution, regardless of his actions or the cause in which he served? I find the notion that it does positively fascistic – a sign that no small part of his ideological worldview has, in fact, not merely survived eradication, but actually emerged victorious from the war. I know some people reading this will disagree.<br /><br />But that's my whole point. I object. I object, I object, I object. I object to the idea that there is single, simple meaning to “remembrance” – that there is a correct way to remember the wars that has been passed down to us from the generation that fought them. Above all I object to the idea that the worldview of the dead – even assuming that a unitary worldview belonging to the past generations could be located – must somehow determine our own. <i>We</i> impart meaning on the act of remembrance, we write history for our own purposes and for the benefit of our own society.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />So there I will be, tomorrow, with a red poppy on my lapel and a white one in my heart, unsure about what to think of any of it. And perhaps that’s the real reason why I’m there – because of that uncertainty. Because if the liberal democracies succeeded in accomplishing anything in the world wars, it was in defending at least one part of the world from consensus. </span></span><br />
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<br />Graham Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11174645167288053843noreply@blogger.com0