Even realtors were embarrassed at the shananigans outside One Bloor East this week.
Hired paupers (some paid up to $2,000, and so arguably ex-paupers) had been camped outside Toronto's next super-luxury downtown condo building for over a week to keep a place for the well-heeled real estate agents who wanted first crack at the apartments for their overseas clients, some of which will fly off the shelves at $8-million.
This was sleazy enough, especially as the line, predictably enough, deteriorated into a mini shanty town. But then the arguments started.
Some maintained they could hold their place in line by putting themselves on a paper list. Some were up in arms at this idiocy. Some just waltzed straight to the front of the line anyway. Tempers frayed.
A more unedifying spectacle you could not hope to witness.
But, as of yesterday, it was all over. The ex-paupers had their pay-offs. The realtors made their killings. Their shadowy foreign investors had their footholds in the Toronto real estate bubble.
Apparently, there are 13 or 14 more of these super-deluxe condo buildings under construction right now in downtown Toronto, so presumably we can expect more such exhibitions of captialism at its finest in the near future.
Still, it's good to know that at least someone somewhere has plenty of disposable income.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Friday, November 09, 2007
Sir John A. Who?
We Canadians regularly used to sneer at reports of Americans' lack of historical and geographical knowledge, but it turns out that we are not much better ourselves.
A Dominion Institute report suggest that less than half of our 18-to-24 year olds know who Canada's first Prime Minister was (even with multiple choice options) and only one in four know the year of Confederation (that one really surprised me).
Even more worrying, the results have worsened considerably over the last ten years.
Try the quiz yourself. As someone who has studied for the Canadian citizenship test (even if not that recently), I didn't find it that hard, although I will admit to getting a couple wrong.
I think this has much more to say about the general standard of education in Canada than about our patriotism.
A Dominion Institute report suggest that less than half of our 18-to-24 year olds know who Canada's first Prime Minister was (even with multiple choice options) and only one in four know the year of Confederation (that one really surprised me).
Even more worrying, the results have worsened considerably over the last ten years.
Try the quiz yourself. As someone who has studied for the Canadian citizenship test (even if not that recently), I didn't find it that hard, although I will admit to getting a couple wrong.
I think this has much more to say about the general standard of education in Canada than about our patriotism.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Foreign Phrases Commonly Used in English
I'm continuing, in my spare hours, to get around to little projects I have wanted to tick off my list for some time.
Hot on the heels of Utopian Literature comes Foreign Phrases Commonly Used in English, a database of, well, foreign phrases commonly used in English.
Motivated by my increasingly common reaction of "I think I know what that means, but actually I'm not 100% sure, and I'm even less sure of the the more subtle sense it carries", I realized that there isn't a really good, comprehensive and easy-to-use resource on the web for answering that kind of a question.
So, now there is.
Currently there are 314 phrases in 14 different languages in the database, searchable alphabetically by first letter, or by language, or by foreign or English keywords. I have tried to give some indication of the specific sense some phrases can carry, and I have made up example sentences which are designed to further explain the meanings.
I even explain how to type those funny foreign accents...
Hot on the heels of Utopian Literature comes Foreign Phrases Commonly Used in English, a database of, well, foreign phrases commonly used in English.
Motivated by my increasingly common reaction of "I think I know what that means, but actually I'm not 100% sure, and I'm even less sure of the the more subtle sense it carries", I realized that there isn't a really good, comprehensive and easy-to-use resource on the web for answering that kind of a question.
So, now there is.
Currently there are 314 phrases in 14 different languages in the database, searchable alphabetically by first letter, or by language, or by foreign or English keywords. I have tried to give some indication of the specific sense some phrases can carry, and I have made up example sentences which are designed to further explain the meanings.
I even explain how to type those funny foreign accents...
Friday, November 02, 2007
Black Pride = White Guilt
Intrigued by an article in the paper, I recently read “White Guilt” by Shelby Steele, a respected black American intellectual and outspoken speaker on race relations. Its long and in-your-face sub-title is “How blacks and whites together destroyed the promise of the civil rights era”.
It certainly made for some interesting reading for a while, although his writing style is quite dense and self-consciously erudite. After a while, though, I realized that he was making his two or three points over and over again in (slightly) different words. And, from what he writes, he has obviously been plugging variations on those same points for thirty or forty years now.
Still, for what it is worth - and, don’t get me wrong, it IS worth hearing his unusual perspective - his argument proceeds as follows (apologies to Mr. Steele for any misinterpretations I make in this summary, but I think this is the gist of it):
Ever since the mid-sixties, with the de facto passing away of the white supremacist/segregation era of American society, black America has lost its way. Instead of building on what was then something much closer to a level playing field and asserting a black identity through hard work and fair competition, America’s blacks became bogged down in decades of radicalism, black nationalism and in-fighting.
This misguided effort and simmering rage has been predicated on something he calls “white guilt” - the idea that, in the aftermath of the civil rights struggle, white America has been so intent on proving to themselves and to the world that they are no longer racist that they would do anything, and agree to anything, so long as it showed them in a good light as regards race relations.
According to Mr. Steel, millions of dollars in aid and hours of public speaking have been wasted over the years in pursuance of this goal, and in salving the collective white conscience of centuries of slavery and discrimination.
Throughout it all, whites have completely missed the point that any help offered should be to individuals and to humans, and not to a race or an invisible representative of a race. Knee-jerk accommodations of black demands (in preference to being labelled racist) and affirmative action programs have actually hurt blacks in the long run, and made them lazy and over-reliant on that self-same white guilt.
Steele argues that a lot of pointless black anger and rage has been fuelled by white guilt over the years, as has a feeling of black inferiority (after all, he argues, why would affirmative action policies be needed if blacks were not in fact inferior?)
He even goes so far as to argue that this “vacuum of moral authority” (which is white guilt and the “dissociation” of liberals) has also led to a dilution of many of the good things about America as a whole, and that in some ways America as a nation was better in the days of segregation than since. Strong stuff indeed!
Furthermore, he suggests that the decline of America’s public education system from one of the world’s best to one of its worst (both debatable propositions at best, I would have thought) is all at the door of ... you guessed it, white guilt.
The book ends with a strong avowal of pride in his new-found black conservatism, and a blanket priase for President Bush’s policy on race (and on everything else for that matter). And by the time I got there, I wasn’t too surprised.
It certainly made for some interesting reading for a while, although his writing style is quite dense and self-consciously erudite. After a while, though, I realized that he was making his two or three points over and over again in (slightly) different words. And, from what he writes, he has obviously been plugging variations on those same points for thirty or forty years now.
Still, for what it is worth - and, don’t get me wrong, it IS worth hearing his unusual perspective - his argument proceeds as follows (apologies to Mr. Steele for any misinterpretations I make in this summary, but I think this is the gist of it):
Ever since the mid-sixties, with the de facto passing away of the white supremacist/segregation era of American society, black America has lost its way. Instead of building on what was then something much closer to a level playing field and asserting a black identity through hard work and fair competition, America’s blacks became bogged down in decades of radicalism, black nationalism and in-fighting.
This misguided effort and simmering rage has been predicated on something he calls “white guilt” - the idea that, in the aftermath of the civil rights struggle, white America has been so intent on proving to themselves and to the world that they are no longer racist that they would do anything, and agree to anything, so long as it showed them in a good light as regards race relations.
According to Mr. Steel, millions of dollars in aid and hours of public speaking have been wasted over the years in pursuance of this goal, and in salving the collective white conscience of centuries of slavery and discrimination.
Throughout it all, whites have completely missed the point that any help offered should be to individuals and to humans, and not to a race or an invisible representative of a race. Knee-jerk accommodations of black demands (in preference to being labelled racist) and affirmative action programs have actually hurt blacks in the long run, and made them lazy and over-reliant on that self-same white guilt.
Steele argues that a lot of pointless black anger and rage has been fuelled by white guilt over the years, as has a feeling of black inferiority (after all, he argues, why would affirmative action policies be needed if blacks were not in fact inferior?)
He even goes so far as to argue that this “vacuum of moral authority” (which is white guilt and the “dissociation” of liberals) has also led to a dilution of many of the good things about America as a whole, and that in some ways America as a nation was better in the days of segregation than since. Strong stuff indeed!
Furthermore, he suggests that the decline of America’s public education system from one of the world’s best to one of its worst (both debatable propositions at best, I would have thought) is all at the door of ... you guessed it, white guilt.
The book ends with a strong avowal of pride in his new-found black conservatism, and a blanket priase for President Bush’s policy on race (and on everything else for that matter). And by the time I got there, I wasn’t too surprised.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Biofuels - boon or bane?
The United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food has concluded that the continued development of biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel, is ill-conceived and that there should be a five-year moratorium.
I used to go out of my way to fill up at gas stations which used a higher percentage of ethanol, but I no longer do, and I have a suspicion that Mr. Ziegler may well be right on this.
Despite its climate change advantages (growing the plants absorbs a comparable amount of carbon dioxide as the burning of the resulting fuel emits), biofuels have several drawbacks:
I used to go out of my way to fill up at gas stations which used a higher percentage of ethanol, but I no longer do, and I have a suspicion that Mr. Ziegler may well be right on this.
Despite its climate change advantages (growing the plants absorbs a comparable amount of carbon dioxide as the burning of the resulting fuel emits), biofuels have several drawbacks:
- any agricultural land devoted to biofuels production is agricultural land not available for food production which, in a world where food is in short supply, seems immoral;
- in Brazil and Southeast Asia, pristine rainforest is being burned down for sugarcane, soy bean and oil palm plantations for biofuels, which has climate change as well as species habitat consequences;
- growing corn for biofuels in the first world requires fertilizer, tractor use and transportation, to the extent that it has been estimated that it uses almost as much energy as the final fuel provides, as well as leaving behind eroded soils and polluted run-off;
- meeting the increasing demand for biofuels would require an unconscionable proportion of the available arable land;
- some estimates show that ethanol only achieves carbon savings of about 13% when the pollution from the production process and reduced mileage efficiency is taken into account (even if that estimate is disputed, more conservative estimates put the savings at no more than 50%);
- evidence from the current sugar and palm oil industries indicates that biofuels production will push up food prices significantly, with worldwide consequences;
- potential problems with genetically-modified plants and mono-culture agricultural practices loom on the horizon, with implications for bio-diversity and species habitat;
- developing biofuels will take away the impetus needed for conservation measures and improvements in fuel efficiency (a 20% overall improvement in fuel efficiency standards - quite feasible using existing technology - would apparently save far more energy than Europe's biomass could produce).
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Donuts, saxophones, nihilism and satire
I am enjoying Chris Turner's Planet Simpson at the moment - 450 large-format pages of encomium, homage and rant.
It helps that I'm a Simpsons fan, of course. If you've never seen, or (Heaven forbid!) don't like, The Simpsons - whose remit, according to creator Matt Groening, is to "entertain and subvert" - much of it may be lost on you, but as a critique of modern society and popular culture, it's still a good read.
Sub-titled "How a cartoon masterpiece documented an era and defined a generation", the book focusses in turn on each of the main characters and what they tell us about our world, as well as dissecting the creative process and pointing out some of the clever-clever homages to old movies, some of which flash past in a moment and are all too easily missed. Some of the illustrative quotes and scene descriptions are almost as hilarious as the originals, and tiny details are blown up and deconstructed level by level.
Turner's analysis of 1990's North America is pretty sharp and inciteful, and his prose is suitably ascerbic and irreverent. He touches on family mores, punk rock and grunge, rampant consumption, media control, corporatism, environmental activism, religion and race, libertarianism, irresponsible advertising, the Internet ("Interweb") revolution and much else besides.
Who would have expected section titles like "Existential Angst and Cultural Criticism" or "Ironic Culture and the Sleek Surface of Modernity" in a book about a Fox cartoon series? Who would have expected to find an analysis of Michel Foucoult's comments on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon theory sandwiched in between a bunch of expletives and guffaws at the cartoon violence of the "Itchy and Scratchy Show".
"Woo-hoo!"
It helps that I'm a Simpsons fan, of course. If you've never seen, or (Heaven forbid!) don't like, The Simpsons - whose remit, according to creator Matt Groening, is to "entertain and subvert" - much of it may be lost on you, but as a critique of modern society and popular culture, it's still a good read.
Sub-titled "How a cartoon masterpiece documented an era and defined a generation", the book focusses in turn on each of the main characters and what they tell us about our world, as well as dissecting the creative process and pointing out some of the clever-clever homages to old movies, some of which flash past in a moment and are all too easily missed. Some of the illustrative quotes and scene descriptions are almost as hilarious as the originals, and tiny details are blown up and deconstructed level by level.
Turner's analysis of 1990's North America is pretty sharp and inciteful, and his prose is suitably ascerbic and irreverent. He touches on family mores, punk rock and grunge, rampant consumption, media control, corporatism, environmental activism, religion and race, libertarianism, irresponsible advertising, the Internet ("Interweb") revolution and much else besides.
Who would have expected section titles like "Existential Angst and Cultural Criticism" or "Ironic Culture and the Sleek Surface of Modernity" in a book about a Fox cartoon series? Who would have expected to find an analysis of Michel Foucoult's comments on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon theory sandwiched in between a bunch of expletives and guffaws at the cartoon violence of the "Itchy and Scratchy Show".
"Woo-hoo!"
Friday, October 19, 2007
Utopian Literature
I have recently spent some time (while business is slack) creating and researching a website on Utopian Literature (www.lukemastin.com/utopia).For some reason, ever since first discovering the genre as a teenager (introduced to 1984 and Brave New World at school) I have been fascinated by utopias and dystopias. But I realized recently, while looking something up, that there is not a whole lot of information on the subject available on the web.
So I thought I would cobble together some resources from various provenances, and list and briefly review the main examples. My contribution to posterity.
Rumblings from Québec
Despite an apparently weaker showing for Québec separatism recently than for many years, ominous reports keep trickling out of the province. In today's Globe and Mail alone, there are three such.
We learn than the Parti Québécois want to establish a "Québec citizenship" requiring an "appropriate knowledge" of French. While I find it difficult to believe that anyone would immigrate into Québec without a reasonable knowledge of French anyway, as much for their own comfort as anything else, Québec is not a legal nation and so cannot impose or enforce this kind of framework. Immigrants to Canada have to prove a working knowledge of French or English, and one has to assume that those with a working knowledge of French and not English are likely to end up in Québec, so what would be the point?
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe recenty waded into the ongoing debate (in Québec and elsewhere in Canada, but particularly in Québec) on what constitutes "reasonable accommodation" of minorities, by offering that "Quebeckers form a francophone nation in America, not a bilingual nation." Ho hum...
And then the Mouvement Montréal français (luckily not an organization with a great deal of clout) is insisting that Second Cup coffee shops call themselves "Les cafés Second Cup" within the boundaries of la belle province, on the grounds that French is being eroded by companies that have English-only names. This, clearly, is verging on the ridiculous, and conjures up images of Québec strip malls festooned with signs for "Le Burger King", "le Home Depot", "le Future Shop", etc. And what would be the appropriate translation for "Femme de Carrière", "Esprit" or "La vie en rose" (or for that matter "La Senza") in the rest of Canada? If French is so threatened by something of this nature, which I strongly doubt, then is it really worth protecting?
We learn than the Parti Québécois want to establish a "Québec citizenship" requiring an "appropriate knowledge" of French. While I find it difficult to believe that anyone would immigrate into Québec without a reasonable knowledge of French anyway, as much for their own comfort as anything else, Québec is not a legal nation and so cannot impose or enforce this kind of framework. Immigrants to Canada have to prove a working knowledge of French or English, and one has to assume that those with a working knowledge of French and not English are likely to end up in Québec, so what would be the point?
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe recenty waded into the ongoing debate (in Québec and elsewhere in Canada, but particularly in Québec) on what constitutes "reasonable accommodation" of minorities, by offering that "Quebeckers form a francophone nation in America, not a bilingual nation." Ho hum...
And then the Mouvement Montréal français (luckily not an organization with a great deal of clout) is insisting that Second Cup coffee shops call themselves "Les cafés Second Cup" within the boundaries of la belle province, on the grounds that French is being eroded by companies that have English-only names. This, clearly, is verging on the ridiculous, and conjures up images of Québec strip malls festooned with signs for "Le Burger King", "le Home Depot", "le Future Shop", etc. And what would be the appropriate translation for "Femme de Carrière", "Esprit" or "La vie en rose" (or for that matter "La Senza") in the rest of Canada? If French is so threatened by something of this nature, which I strongly doubt, then is it really worth protecting?