johnfabian
11mo ago
It's usually framed using words like "resilience and strength" or "vibrant". The leading newspapers regularly feature columns from or interviewing people with incentives to encourage immigration with little critical analysis applied. Here's an example. Great emphasis is placed on the importance of housing prices continuing to rise in perpetuity.
johnfabian
11mo ago
I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.
Something I can speak of when I talk to friends and family about their shifting opinions on immigration is that there's a widespread sentiment that people feel their tolerance and generosity has been abused. Not necessarily by immigrants alone (or more accurately, not by immigrants who aren't international students), but also by federal and provincial governments. Most people I know are small-l liberals and up until a year or two ago were broadly supportive of immigration. Now people are much more skeptical, and think they might have been naïve about the intentions of government/business as well as the attitude of prospective immigrants. The change in opinions has been very rapid and has not necessarily come from people I would have expected. I think the Liberals might have killed the golden goose here by going too hard, too fast.
With respect to francophone immigrants from North Africa, in Canada there's been somewhat of a friction historically between them and middle Eastern Muslims. Maghrebien Canadians tend to be much more hostile to the hijab and other things they view as signs of Arabic cultural dominance within the Muslim world. Maghrebien immigrants broadly supported the Québec's government banning of public employees wearing "religious symbols" (which was effectively targeted specifically at the hijab).
johnfabian
11mo ago
This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
johnfabian
11mo ago
a joke that didn't land then but does now, is that after this scene the PFJ internally schisms over whether a man can identify as a woman
johnfabian
1yr ago
The development of the fire bombing campaign against Japan was a very late shift in the war; it started in February 1945 but really only got truly going in May. There were a number of unique circumstances that essentially only then made very low-level night bombing attacks viable, with B-29s literally stripped of all their defenses crammed to the gills with incendiaries.
johnfabian
1yr ago
One of the combat experiences about WWI is that the effect of chemical weapons in the battlefield environment were awful, but not decisive. With both sides prepared for the possibility, it raised the upper bound on human suffering without making your chance of victory any more certain. Chemical weapons were always fickle allies; they were very sensitive to changes in weather, they did unpredictable things, and ultimately if you were trying to use them to achieve some breakthrough you were inundating the areas you hoped to yourself capture.
There were various uses of chemical weapons against populations who could not fight back by the Germans and Japanese (moreso the latter), which was in many respects their "ideal" use case. But given the ability of both sides to be able to both manufacture large amounts of chemical weapons and deploy them against enemy civilian populations, and their marginal battlefield use, ultimately neither side saw them as practical.
But contingency planning and a German air raid led to the accidental discovery of chemotherapy, so that was cool.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I suppose at its heart it's a more complex trolley problem with a historical context. It's an interesting moral dilemma to tease out.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Not sure what innocent French civilians have to do with this.
johnfabian
1yr ago
There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause.
While this idea was not pursued with respect to targeting French cities, it was employed in the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Learning from experiences from the Blitz and the early years of strategic bombing, it became to be understood that attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure were in some respects more effective than targeting enemy manufacturing. Mass civilian casualties, and both damaging transport infrastructure and then deluging it with fleeing/wounded civilians, had larger downstream effects on military capabilities than directly targeting military elements themselves. The apogee of this mentality was the firebombing of Dresden, which was deliberately designed to cause maximum chaos in the German rear to limit their ability to co-ordinate a response to concurrent Soviet offensives.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Certainly the western allies saw very little distinction to be drawn between German civilians and combatants. There was sometimes an employment of various euphemisms to skirt around the brutal logic of this worldview (the proponents of strategic bombing liked to talk about "damaging enemy morale" or "targeting worker housing"), but generally the perspective was that the ultimate good was forcing unconditional surrender as soon as possible, by any means possible.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I mean it is a direct analogy to a current geopolitical crisis to bring this up now.
I was merely inspired by a discussion with a friend. No point on sitting on the prompt for a few months hoping Israel/Palestine clears up.
johnfabian
1yr ago
There were similar discussions to the hypothetical I mentioned before D-Day as well. Churchill was probably the most outspoken advocate for French civilians, and constantly fretted about their lives, even though he also ordered the infamous (but in my mind, eminently justified) raid on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir.
johnfabian
1yr ago
This is outside the bounds of the hypothetical. Dwight Eisenhower is not relinquishing command of the Allied Expeditionary Force to you, nor are you personally replacing the Allied heads of state as chief coordinators of war strategy. The only role you have is to advise Eisenhower to what degree French civilian casualties are acceptable.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"
What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)
This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.
johnfabian
1yr ago
There have been criminal/civil prosecutions for hockey violence in the NHL. They usually involve pre-meditated acts where the victim was unable to consent to fight. Two recentish examples would be when Marty McSorley hit Donald Brashear with his stick, and Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punching Steve Moore, both incidents where the aggressor attacked a player unawares.
johnfabian
1yr ago
The other thing to understand is that hockey developed on the Canadian frontier: it was the game of soldiers, hunters, fur-traders, trappers, prospectors. Hard men, violent men, playing a sport that was adapted from indigenous stick-and-ball games that were themselves proxies for war. The need for a self-policing element to the game was clear, and fighting was already entrenched enough in the culture of the game that by the time it established itself in "civilized" areas, the first official rules accommodated it.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I finally caved and watched it. I had seen Malarchuk, I had seen Zednik (much less worse), wasn't particularly interested in seeing this one until I became aware there was a debate over whether it was intentional or not.
Do I think Petgrave deliberately kicked him in the throat? No. Do I think he deliberately raised his leg? That's harder to say. I play hockey and I flatter myself into thinking I have a generally decent understanding of this sort of thing. It's really, really difficult to try and parse intent by slowing down a video frame-by-frame. Hockey is a very fast sport and these sorts of collisions occur in fractions of a second. It is extremely tempting to read into these sort of things more than is actually there.
A little bit of background: about 15 years ago pro hockey started cracking down on hits to the head. There were a rash of bad concussions to high-profile players like Sidney Crosby and the general rumblings about the concerns of CTE, so the NHL, fans, and the general public were supportive of further restricting what was legal. (Before you could more or less hit people in the head without getting penalized, provided you did not commit another penalty in the process - this resulted in hits like this being entirely legal and generally celebrated). Before players were generally held to be responsible for themselves - don't want to get hit in the head? Don't skate through the neutral zone with your head down. Now the onus was reversed; it was the responsibility of the player hitting not to target their opponent's head.
This created two general trends: first, since the ban players have been generally less "heads up" in their play. It used to be keeping your head up was important for not getting concussed by the meathead on the other team; now you can more safely watch the puck while you're stickhandling. Part of the reason Johnson gets caught in the neck here is that he's looking down as he comes across the blueline (previously a very risky move), and so he's both unaware of the player coming at him and more crouched over.
Secondly, it has created a professional and hobbyist enthusiasm for watching slo-mo videos. In order to determine whether a hit merits a suspension, the league would look over video repeatedly from different angles and with different speeds trying to parse intent, and when they would announce the results of an inquiry they'd produce a handy film, JFK style (example). Similarly every time there's a big hit in the NHL you will see on social media fans poring over every frame trying to prove or disprove intent to injure. Very frequently you will see very absurd manipulations by fans to try and conjure up something that isn't there. A favourite tactic is to slow down the video before impact, and then speed it up at impact; this gives the impression of more deliberation by the hitter and a more violent impact.
So for Petgrave's hit: no I can't say for sure either way. It looks somewhat suspicious; he may well have been trying to stick a leg out to sort of block or hamstring Johnson. He might have lost his balance. He might have been trying to stick a leg out and then lost his balance. I think it would be fair to rule out any deliberate intent to hit Johnson so high, but whether the play itself was dirty I feel like I could be convinced either way.
What this incident reminds me of is a play about a decade ago where Matt Cooke, notorious head-hunter, severed the Achilles' of superstar Erik Karlsson. This was another incident where a notoriously dirty player injured a star, and there was an intense debate over the time whether it was deliberate or accidental. The discussion on it was inevitably coloured by the reputations of the two players.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I think you're underestimating how much one can do with makeup. Among my siblings, me and my younger sister have brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexions, and at least with my sister I've seen her very convincingly go "mock Indian" with the right makeup/style/accessories (we're like around 5% Métis or whatever; multiple full-blood indigenous relatives from the early 19th century, by all accounts more than Ms Ste-Marie).
My older sisters are both fair, blonde, blue-eyed and would not pass muster as indigenous even though we all have the same parents and otherwise resemble each other strongly. Similarly Ste-Marie looks very much like her (fairer) brother
johnfabian
1yr ago
Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.
I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.
"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"
Canada's most famous indigenous woman: not indigenous, not even Canadian
Buffy Ste-Marie is a musician. She has a deep discography of folk music that incorporates her indigenous identity and activism. She has lived a long and productive life as arguably the most famous Canadian indigenous woman. For Americans she's probably better known as the first woman to breastfeed on television, an interesting milestone in its own right. It's also good that this proves she's a woman, as it's the only element of her public identity that is still standing. In news that should shock exactly zero people who are tangentially aware of the notion of "Pretendians" in Canadian high society, the CBC has rather convincing evidence that Buffy Ste-Marie's version of her life's history is fraudulent.
The details have changed over the years - a sign in itself, if anyone would have risked official censure to point it out - but in general Ste-Marie has claimed herself to have been born to a Piapot Cree woman, and then subsequently removed from her birth mother (either because of her death, or forcibly as part of the "Sixties Scoop", which should have itself been a red flag considering she was born in 1941). She claimed to have been adopted by an American family, and later reconnected with and adopted by her birth people in Canada. Well, the documentary evidence seems fairly irrefutable: her "adoptive" parents were her birth parents. Her siblings are her full-siblings. She was born Beverly Santamaria in Massachusetts, and has no ancestral connection to Canada at all. Her father was Italian, her mother English.
She appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry in her early 20s, first claiming to be Mi'kmaq, a perhaps more believable white lie having grown up in New England. Alternatively, she said she was Algonqiun. A few years later she claimed she was Cree, which prompted her paternal uncle to correct a local newspaper on that fact in 1964. In the next few decades as her career began to take off, coinciding with a general surge of interest in Native American arts and culture, she increasingly resorted to legal threats to silence her family members from contradicting her self-constructed origin story, including threatening her brother that she would tell the world that he had sexually abused her.
I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published. It seems clear to me that Ste-Marie's story was not borne of confusion or innocent mistake, but was rather a deliberately and cynically constructed narrative that was upheld through threats and intimidation. The investigation was much more thorough and dug into a lot more nasty stuff than I expected. Ste-Marie was a Canadian legend, and had been endlessly fêted by the CBC (and other Canadian media) prior to this. I would point out that although the CBC has generally gone mushy progressive, its investigative journalism programs, namely Marketplace and The Fifth Estate (who undertook this project) have remained excellent and provide very good value for taxpayer money.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.
Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression
johnfabian
1yr ago
Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, and the limits of what you can imagine
A couple times on this forum Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR, for short) has come up. He's an American science fiction writer who plies mainly in hard(er) science fiction, and especially likes to play with themes that explore the interactions between technology, culture, and economics. He takes some limitation of humans and imagines: what if it were not so? How would we change, what could we do, what new things would we discover about ourselves? He's a bit of a granola-eating utopian socialist so I'm sure some here would have certain ideological objections to his writing. But it's nice sometimes to read work from someone who has a fundamental sort of optimism for humanity, that we might one day be able to put aside our differences and Figure It All Out.
His "Mars trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) might be his masterpiece, and extends his inquisitive nature. A depiction of the colonization of Mars over centuries, there is an endless series of problems for the characters to solve; some scientific in nature, but more than that organizational and cultural. The colonization of a virgin world yields all kinds of conflicts where there can be no true compromise between people with differing fundamental values. Alongside the geoengineering of Mars proceeds the genetic engineering of the human race, as scientists begin to unlock the ability to greatly extend the lifespan of humans. This might just have originated as a conceit by KSR to keep most of the characters across the centuries required for the geological drama to play out, but he dives fully into imaging all the upheaval such an advance would yield.
There are Luddites, reactionaries, those who wish to monopolize longevity for themselves, a great and deep anger from the masses at the prospect that immortality might be denied to them. There are myriad complications and problems; certain limits prove tricky to overcome. But technological progress is an unyielding wave, and by the end of the series humans dabble in every kind of imaginable self-customization, from the crucial to the trivial: yes, all sorts of environmental adaptations to Mars' ecosystems are quickly developed, but so are custom mixes of psychoactive drugs. People create physical backups of themselves so they can do dangerous sports. All sorts of modifications can be sought to fill the spiritual and emotional void. People delay their physical decrepitude indefinitely. Women put off having children into their 300s.
But what people don't do is change their sex. The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child. There is no mention of purely cosmetic alterations to simply imitate the opposite sex, or become some even more complex sexual entity now that technology enables them to do so. No character ever feels any deep or emergent desire to push past this one final barrier, when all the others have already been crossed. And it's not like KSR is some prude or philosophically opposed to it; his more recent novels feature trans and non-binary characters, and in those that feature similar types of possibility with respect to genetic engineering people freely experiment with switching sexes even if they do not have some form of dysphoria. The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.
Most of the original hundred colonists are either American or Russian; one might speculate that if the books had been started five years earlier, the latter would have been Soviet, and if they had been started five years later, perhaps Chinese. To some extent this is the problem of all science fiction that deals in the near future (the the trilogy begins in the far-off future of 2026); it is far enough away to be unable to predict with certainty but close enough that mistakes seem obvious in hindsight. But I think this is also somewhat of a humbling notion that we just might not be as good at predicting societal changes as we might flatter ourselves to be. I used to feel that they were more strongly tied to material/economic forces; in recent years I've become less sure. When it comes to predicting the grand arc of human civilization it is a lot easier to look a fool than a wise man. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to ignore that and take a stab.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Really, if Lenin was as influential and powerful of a figure as he was claimed to be, then Russia would've gotten off much lighter at Brest-Litovsk; he was the one pushing for peace, and Trotsky ended up convincing the rest of the Bolsheviks to follow his harebrained "neither war nor peace" strategy instead.
Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.
Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.
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