Cat Person - exceptional short fiction or just another humdrum story?

There has been so much virtual ink spilled about Kristen Roupenian's short story, Cat Person, that I felt I had to read it. Well, that's the way viral internet fads work, isn't it? The story originally came out in the New Yorker magazine back in December 2017, over a year ago now, but the 24-year old author has just published a book a short stories in which Cat Person also appears, so the fad has had a new lease of life (that's how the marketing of fads works, right?).
And, yes, it's OK, I guess. Maybe not the best thing I have read this year, and I'm not going to rush out and by Ms. Roupenian' new book, but it's a perfectly respectable piece of short fiction.
Why though has it garnered such praise (and citicism)? Why has it generated so much buzz, and become probably the first short story ever to go viral?
Apparently, it is being acclaimed because of the brutal honesty with which it describes the dating experience of young people in the 21st century, the awkwardness and anxiety of it all. It is its very familiarity that lends it power. For some people, it seems that the mere idea of story told from the point of view of a young woman is some kind of revelation, although I am not sure why, as there is actually no shortage of such stories.
Of course, not everyone has reacted positively to the piece. Some maintain that it's actually pretty ordinary, and that people who think it is great have not read enough short stories (and it does seem like a good part of its popularity is among young people more used to listening to podcasts and watching YouTube than reading short stories). Yet others think that this is a patronizing, even sexist, attitude to take, which it probably is. There is even a (fairly misogynistic) Men React to Cat Person Twitter group.
So, is it an extraordinary piece of fiction, a fat-shaming anti-men screed, or merely a passable but ordinary story by a reasonably immature young author? In a way, it hardly matters - it's just impressive that there is a whole debate going on about new literature. It seems to have been a viral event waiting to happen, an idea whose time just happened to come (perhaps in much the same way as Rupi Kaur's poetry became a best-seller out of nowhere). Whether we will still be discussing short stories in a couple of months time is much less certain. I have a suspicion something else will have snagged people's attention. Cat videos, maybe?

Recent spat with China shows how little Canada can trust China

As the diplomatic ballet between China and Canada (and the USA, which started the whole thing) totters along, the downward-spiralling level of diplomatic discourse may actually be a salutary warning for any country looking to cozy up with China from a trade perspective (and that would include both Canada and the USA). China does not do cozy or warm, and the recent shenanigans has given us a public glimpse of just how bleak and frosty the soul of modern China actually is.
Beginning with Donald Trump's peremptory and largely inexplicable demand for Canada to do its dirty work and arrest Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou, and Canada's ill-advised decision to actually do it, relations between Canada and China have followed a dizzying downward spiral. The tit-for-tat arbitrary arrests of two Canadians in China, was followed by the extraordinary retrial of Robert Schellenberg for drug trafficking offenses (his first trial took four years, partly due to the scant evidence against him - the retrial, however, took mere days to arrange, and a single day in court and a 70-minute deliberation by the judge was enough to convert a 15-year jail sentence into a death penalty). Meanwhile China's interrogation of former diplomat Michael Kovrig appears to violate all rules of diplomatic immunity enshrined in international law.
Canada then felt the need to issue a travel advisory for Canadian citizens thinking of travelling to China, due to a risk of arbitrary enforcement of laws in the country. So, of course, China did the same back, with the same justification, and followed through with complaints that Canada's actions and comments "lack the most basic awareness of the legal system" and that it should "stop making irresponsible remarks". And then, of course, the pièce de la résistance, the icing on the proverbial cake, when the Chinese ambassador to Canada accused Canada and other Western nations of "Western arrogance and white supremacy".
Meanwhile, Canada is also under pressure from most of the other members of the so-called Five Eyes group (comprising USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to block Huawei from any role in building the new 5G communications networks in their various countries, on the grounds of security and spying risks (principally because Chinese companies are obliged to share data with the Chinese government). Although Canada has not yet made its decision on the issue, China has already responded to even the possibility with its trademark aggressive bluster, darkly threatening that "there will be repercussions".
All in all, it's been a pretty crazy few weeks from a diplomacy point of view, and there is no end in sight (until the USA gets its act together and arranges the extradition of Ms. Meng, which apparently could take months, Canada remains in China's firing line). The normally delicate art of diplomacy has sunk, in record time, to the level of a shouting match and schoolyard taunts. Some of it may be Canada's fault, due to having being put in an impossible position by one, Donald J. Trump, but most it come straight from Beijing.
China must know that Canada had no choice in the matter, bound as they are by extradition treaties with the USA (although I still maintain they could have avoided a lot of trouble by "accidentally" managing to miss Ms. Meng). They must also know that any stunts they pull in the way of reprisals against Canada are not going to have any beneficial results - Canada can not now "lose" Ms. Meng, who is currently under house arrest at her British Columbia mansion, they are committed to continuing on the course the USA has set for them. But instead of locking horns with the much more powerful United States, whose equally arbitrary actions precipitated the whole sorry chapter, China is targeting hapless little Canada (another ploy of schoolyard bullies).
The overwhelming feeling one gets, after all this tooing and froing, is that China is very difficult to deal with, to say the least, and that the Chinese are somehow just "not like us". Edicts can come down from Beijing, and circumstances can change, seemingly at the drop of a hat. A carrot can suddenly become a very big stick. For all of its talk about the "rule of law", China will happily ignore or wilfully misinterpret any rules that it finds inconvenient. And it has become abundantly clear that dealing with any Chinese corporation also involves dealing with the Chinese state and the Communist Party of China. Moreover, the Chinese attitude toward human rights is clearly very different from ours. Put simply, they can not be trusted.
Is this the kind of nation we want to strike a long-lasting and all-encompassing trade relationship with? Sure, trade is important, but some other things are even more important.

How can it ever be in the national interest to allow a foreign takeover?

With Newmont Mining Corp's buyout of Goldcorp Inc., Canada has now lost its two largest goldmining companies in quick succession (just a few months ago, Canada's Barrick Gold technically bought out South Africa's Randgold Resources, but it was, in effect, a reverse takeover, as management of the combined company was handed over to Randgold executives and Barrick's Toronto headquarters was gutted - a strange deal that I never did understand).

The phrase "hollowing out" is being bandied around again, just as it was ten years ago, when much of Canada's heavy industry was sold off (think Inco, Falconbridge, Alcan, Dofasco, Stelco, etc), not to mention other iconic Canadian companies like Hudson's Bay, Molson, Fairmont, Four Seasons, etc. It does seem like the country has lost control of an awful lot of its industrial powerhouses in recent years. But what does that actually mean, and what practical effect does it have on the country when a Canadian company is sold abroad?

Foreign mergers and acquisitions (M&A) do come with mutual advantages, whether from economies of scale, shake-ups of supply lines and management styles, improved productivity and R&D strategies, etc, etc. They have to, or such deals would not be struck or even mooted. But there must also be drawbacks, no? Under the Investment Canada Act, all major foreign takeovers are subject to a government review, and the final decision on whether to allow a takeover - essentially whether the deal would be a "net benefit" to Canada, from the point of view of employment, productivity, competition, national security - rests with the Minister of Industry. Some mergers are disallowed (usually from a national security perspective), but most seem to go through.

A major 2008 analysis of "corporate takeover effects" (CTEs) by the Conference Board of Canada called Hollowing Out - Myth or Reality? concludes that CTEs on acquired companies are typically "positive for shareholders, mildly positive or neutral for operations, capital, people and community involvement, and negative for governance". It also maintains that "there is no evidence of any decline in the overall level of head office employment in Canada" as a result of foreign M&A, which I must confess surprises me.

Surely, there must be more evidence from elsewhere - that's what the Internet is for, right? A 2014 German report on the impacts of foreign takeovers suggests a negative impact on employment and no productivity improvements to speak of, although it also notes that these findings are a direct contradiction of previous German empirical evidence, so it is not clear which evidence should be believed. A couple of years ago, the Dutch government put forward new rules that would hinder takeover bids by foreign companies, so they must have been convinced that foreign takeovers are bad in some way. The proposal met with almost worldwide condemnation, and dire warnings that it would put the Dutch market "in an unfavourable light" with foreign investors. After that, I start to struggle; there seems to be less evidence, on either side, than I had thought.

These reports are all well and good, but they are inconclusive, and they don't really answer my questions. How can it ever be in the national interest to agree to a foreign takeover of a major company (especially an iconic one)? My impression is that, after every takeover, there are a whole load of redundancies, usually as a drastic cost-cutting measure, but also to avoid duplication of core services. And wouldn't there also be a substantial loss of tax revenue as profits are repatriated elsewhere? It has not, though, been as easy to find out as I had anticipated.

Gillette's attempt at sensitivity backfires

Razor maker Gillette has experienced a huge backlash to its latest ad campaign, which tries to drag the company and its macho image kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Replacing the decades old tagline "the best a man can get" with "the best men can be", the new ad contrasts traditional aggressive male behaviour with a more sensitive vision of masculinity.

Well, it doesn't seem to have gone down too well with Gillette's core clientele, and has garnered about ten times more dislikes than likes (I don't have any stats on how many of each were male and how many female). An extraordinary number of complaints appear to be heart-felt grievances about how Gillette was considered a last bastion of support for "masculine men", who clearly feel themselves to be under siege from an epidemic of sensitivity in the aftermath of #MeToo and #TimesUp.

Who knew that people took ads so seriously? Or that they even paid attention to them, for that matter? And who know the undercurrent of toxic masculinity was quite so vigorous and tenacious? Just shows how much I know about men...

Canada needs to be cautious about how it handles its newest refugee

Most people in Canada are, I think, pleased to welcome our latest immigrant, 18-year old Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun (yeah, she's going to have to do something about that middle name, especially given that she has renounced Islam...)

After an exciting, and necessarily high-profile, caper, worthy of a straight-to-TV movie, Ms. al-Qunun arrived in Toronto yesterday to much media attention. She seems a bright, engaging and personable young lady, and I'm sure she'll do just fine. You certainly have to admire her chutzpah.

I just worry that, if she is too high-profile, she is putting herself (and possibly those around her) at risk from malcontents, whether that be from Islamists, anti-immigration fascist types, or even other immigrants bitter at the ease and the manner in which she has just waltzed into the country while thousands of others are left hanging on for months, even years.

Because that's a whole other issue. Ms. al-Qunun has been "fast-tracked", a mechanism that, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) "is available only to a fraction of the world's 25.4 million refugees, typically those at greatest risk, such as women at risk". Certainly, she can never go back to Saudi Arabia (or any Islamic country, for that matter), given that apostasy is a capital offence there, and she has already received death threats over Twitter. Nor would she want to go back to a family which she claims have physically abused her.

But it must rankle with other refugees that she has basically skipped the usual immigration process through having the money to take a plane to Thailand at the drop of a hat, and having enough technological know-how to leverage social media to get through to some influential people. Some would call it gumption, but some would probably call it cheating. Ryerson professor and immigration expert Mehrunnisa Ali points out that, "the message we may be giving is that, rather than go through the system, reach a powerful person".

Global Affairs Canada is, obviously, playing down that particular narrative, merely repeating that UNHCR requested that Canada grant Ms. al-Qunun asylum, and that Canada accepted "out of concern for her safety". Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, thankfully, contented himself with trotting out the usual platitudes that "Canada has always been unequivocal that we will always stand up for human rights and women's rights around the world". Which is just as well because, as former Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia Dennis Horak cautions, although taking in Ms. al-Qunun may have been the right thing to do, Canada should be careful not to "trot her out as a prop in a diplomatic game", but to encourage a low profile while things calm down (Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland was on hand to welcome the Saudi teen to Canada - that in itself was probably a higher profile start than may have been strictly wise). Canadian relations with Saudi Arabia are already at an all-time low, for a bunch of different reasons, and rubbing their noses in this particular politico-religious coup can only end in more tears.
The idea that the whole shebang was cooked up by the higher echelons of the Canadian Liberal Party in an attempt to make themselves look good in an election year, and distract attention away from their continued support for arms sales to Saudi Arabia, as some contend, must be considered to be in the realm of conspiracy theories, though.

Ms. al-Qunun has said that she wants "to start living a normal, private life", but Ms. al-Qunun herself should quickly put aside any ideas that she is now on easy street. She is living under constant security surveillance (for her own safety), and is accompanied by a staff member from refugee settlement organization COSTI whenever she leaves her temporary accommodation. She is also concerned about how she will support herself financially (a GoFundMe campaign will help with that, at least temporarily). For now, she is still a cause célèbre, but it is possible that she may never live a "normal" Canadian life.

UPDATE
It turns that she has now completely dropped her family name, al-Qunun, since her family has officially disowned her (on social media!),.and nownrwferes to herself as Rahaf Mohammed. I guess she's OK with the name after all. But isn't it a bit like a lapsed Christian calling himself John Christ or something...?

Health Canada backtracks on restricting food marketing to children

Health Canada is paring back its plans to restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks to children. It probably comes as no surprise, but the food and drink and advertising industries took issue with the proposed revisions, and the food and drink industry in particular has a lot of clout, probably much more clout than Health Canada.

Currently, there is a system of self-regulation in place, whereby those advertisers participating in the Canadian Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Inititative limit advertising to children under 13 for foods that do not meet the Inititative's own nutritional standards. Health Canada is merely seeking to extend and broaden that idea. But, predictably, there has been some serious push-back from industry, which sees its profit margins being potentially squeezed, and unwarranted government interference taking hold, both of which are absolute no-no's.

The government agency wants to limit advertising of foods that have more than a prescribed thresholds of salt, sugar and saturated fats to children, specifically on TV programs where children typically make up a certain percentage of the audience. It also wants to ban the sponsorship of childrens sports by the makers of such foods and drinks, which would include such heavy hitters as Unilever, Nestlé and the Dairy Farmers of Canada. It may sound laudable in principle, but the practice is beset with any number of difficulties, drawbacks and challenges, challenges that the food industry made the most of in their consultations and submissions in response to Health Canada's proposals.

Many of the points raised by the food industry were more or less valid, and I do have a certain amount of sympathy with the idea expressed by many companies that "there is no such thing as good foods and bad foods; instead, there are good diets and bad diets". They argue that, even if their products are not healthy per se, people should be allowed to have them as treats from time to time. Which is all good and fine, except that it presupposes that people are rational, restrained beings, and that they are definitely not (children least of all). And, after all no-one is seeking to ban unhealthy food - well, some people are, but that is another battle and another issue - merely to rein in some of the more questionable advertising practices.

Some points made buy commentators were not so valid, though. The Association of Canadian Advertisers and the Food and Consumer Products of Canada lobby group both argued that Health Canada's proposals would restrict advertiser's freedom of expression, and thereby contravene the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It seems to me that, that way, madness lies. Advertisers can not just say anything they like, claiming that they have freedom of expression - there are rules and there are ethics. Surely, advertisers have to operate within the laws of the land, and if Health Canada or the government (theoretically, at least, reflecting the will of the people) change that law, then the advertisers must change with it. And surely Health Canada has the authority to impose rules that the industry does not like, where the health of the Canadian people is involved - otherwise what is its value?

Be that as it may, the upshot appears to be that Health Canada has agreed to water down its initial recommendations substantially. It is a classic battle of free markets versus government regulation, much like we have seen many times before. We do need regulation - unbridled capitalism has repeatedly shown itself to have too narrow a purview. This particular battle, though, seems to be going towards a victory of corporate might over regulatory purpose, you might say.

Are faux meats really such a bad thing?

Having just got back from our favourite vegetarian Chinese restaurant - we frequent several in the Toronto area, but our favourite is way out in the suburbs of Scarborough, a trek that we think is worth the effort - I got to thinking about something I have heard from several different sources over the years: why do vegetarians and vegans eat mock or "fake" meats, and isn't that kind of hypocritical?
In short, we do it because we can and because it tastes good, and no it isn't hypocritical.
The concept of producing vegan versions of popular meat dishes apparently dates back to 7th century Japan, although we have mainly encountered it in Buddhist Chinese restaurants, so there is clearly a Chinese tradition too. There is also a Jewish tradition, which includes a vegetarian version of chopped liver. Mock beef, pork, chicken, duck, sausage, prawn, fish, you name it - for pretty much anything you can find on a regular Chinese restaurant menu you can find a vegan equivalent in a vegetarian Chinese restaurant. Veggie burgers, sausages, wieners, turkey, paté, pepperoni and bacon are widely available in supermarkets and in many restaurants, fast food and otherwise, sometimes employing cute, punny labels like "chick-un", "neatballs". "cheez", etc. Hell, I've even tried a veggie haggis and vegan tuna, although they were both just about as bad as I remember the real things being. A plethora of up-market vegan restaurants have also popped up in Toronto recently, many of which produce their own delicious vegan versions of cheese, egg, mayonnaise, gravy, etc, etc.
Some vegetarians and some meat-eaters find this hypocritical in some way, and some vegans consider it downright disagreeable, even repugnant, as though we are letting the side down in some obscure manner. Personally, I've never understood why. Most vegetarians are not vegetarian because they don't like the taste of meat, but for a variety of other reasons, and most convert to vegetarianism after some years of being meat-eaters, so why begrudge them vegan versions of familiar dishes and comfort foods? It is a quick and easy way of obtaining good quality protein in a familiar and easy format, and no-one ever said that being vegetarian or vegan had to be hard, did they?
There is also apparently a movement against vegetarian options being stocked in supermarkets along with their meat equivalents, rather than in a separate section, as though it would be a major problem if a meat-eater mistakenly picked up a veggie burger by mistake! France, that nation of paranoid foodies, has even passed a law prohibiting stores from calling faux meat "meat".
So, whether it's Quorn in the UK, Gardein or Beyond Meat in the US, or Yves here in Canada, let's celebrate being able to find good quality comfort food again. There is nothing inherently wrong in craving a good dose of umami, or even saltiness, from time to time, and wanting a wicked break from lentils and kale. Often, it may not be a healthy choice - many faux meats have high sodium and fat contents - and don't think too hard about the farming methods and industrial processing employed in the commercial production of tofu (or wheat gluten for that matter). But if it tastes good, let's not overthink it, let's just enjoy!

Is James Watson just a racist old fossil, or does he have a point?

James Watson is clearly a bright guy. He earned a share of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in the 1950s on describing the double helix structure of DNA. Unfortunately, he has spent most of his time since then doing his level best to undo his legacy by making sweeping unscientific statements about all manner of things, and generally being as politically incorrect as possible. The great biologist E.O. Wilson has called Watson "the most unpleasant human being I have ever met".
In 2014, he became the first person ever to sell a Nobel Prize medal. The medal fetched over $4 million, some of which Watson has earmarked for a David Hockey painting he has always wanted. Watson said that he needed the money, given that he has now been ostracized by most of his friends and the scientific community, and that he feels like an "unperson" and that "no-one really wants to admit that I exist". The buyer of the medal, Alisher Usmanov, then the richest man in Russia, then promptly returned it to Watson, saying that he found it unacceptable that's great scientist should have to resort to selling his Nobel Prize.

The main reason Watson is persona non grata these days is his repeated assertion that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than fairer skinned individuals. He has also proposed various other less-than-scientific hypotheses, but it is his contentious views on race that have garnered the most attention. Back in 2007, he mused that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa", and stated, "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas the testing says not really", which he followed up with the sucker punch of, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true". How scientific is that?
After he was removed from his position as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a result of these views, Watson tried to walk back his comments, and apologized unreservedly. Now, though, in another public interview with PBS, he has reinstated them in full, effectively retracting his earlier apology. This has put him right back in the spotlight, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has responded by stripping him of all titles and honours.
Watson, just for the record, contends that he is "not a racist in a conventional way", and there are some (equally controversial) claims that Watson himself is 16% black. But he has certainly been pilloried by the press for his controversial opinions, and has had lectures cancelled and honorary titles withdrawn for his stated views on race, gender, etc.
But enough about the man. Is there any truth in what he claims?

I have struggled to find the "testing" that Watson refers to - he did not specify - until I came across an archived BBC article, also from 2007, which talks about the IQ findings of Richard Lynn at the University of Ulster, and I can only think that this is the "testing" that Watson speaks of. Lynn found that East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) have the highest average IQ (around 105), followed by Europeans (100), Inuit (91), South East Asians (87), Native Americans (87), Pacific Islanders (85), black people in the United States (85), South Asian (84), North Africans (84), Sub-Saharan Aricans (67), Australian Aborigines (62), and, the lowest of all, the Pygmies of the Congo rainforest (54). In his 2006 book, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, Lynn hypothesizes an evolutionary explanation for this disparity (early humans migrated out of Africa to Eurasia, where the cold and the seasonal food sources forced them to become more creative and, arguably, more intelligent).

Another possible source is Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's 1994 book The Bell Curve, which looks at the IQ scores of different races within American society, and concludes that the differences are real, significant, and are probably both genetic and environmental in nature.

This research appears to bear out James Watson's claims, although of course we then get into the whole debate about IQ testing, cultural bias, and the nature of intelligence. What evidence, then, is there to the contrary? Again, I have struggled to find anything specific, although Stephen Jay Gould's earlier  (1981) critique of biological determinism, The Mismeasure of Man, does a pretty good job in general terms. Much more recently, an article in The Guardian by Kevin Mitchell argues that genetic variations in intelligence are "unlikely to be stable and systematic genetic differences that make one population more intelligent than the next". And Ewan Birney from the European Bioinfomatics Institute has taken issue with the idea of self-identification of ethnicity (on which the results in The Bell Curve are based), arguing that African-Americans actually have a substantial amount if European genetic ancestry. But, all in all, there is a surprising dearth of evidence directly challenging these controversial findings.

So, is Watson just racist, sexist, politically incorrect and everything else that goes with it? Is he a curmudgeonly old fossil who just tells it like he sees it? He is probably both of those things, and he definitely has the look of an ancient giant tortoise in his old age (he is now 90 years old). But we should also be wary of closing off the purview of science for political or religious (or any other) reasons. It can be argued that there is nothing inherently racist or scientifically illegitimate about at least investigating links between intelligence and race, although any results do need to be interpreted very carefully.

Having said that, there is also a case against pursuing any such research, often pejoratively referred to as "race science" or" scientific racism", on the grounds that any conclusions might be used by unscrupulous politicians of the alt-right to push through unsavoury and discriminatory policies. Another article in Scientific American, asks, "Why, given all world's problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it?", and quotes from Noam Chomsky's 1987 book, Language and Problems of Knowledge: "Discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like".

I suppose that, as with anything involving race, emotions tend to run high, and a softly softly approach is called for.