As we head into the first day of the Sask NDP Leadership Convention, I thought I’d post a fun article (h/t to GG) on behalf of the members of Team Meili, most of whom who are of the Y chromosome persuasion, will be sporting beards of varying degrees of length and lushness this weekend.
Very telling that beards keep you healthy – perhaps the good doctor knows something! 😉
For some reason, the campaign didn’t want to use that “putting the hospital in “hospitality” line” for their invitations and instead went with something classy and dignified as befitting the next leader of the Saskatchewan NDP. Can you imagine?
Anyhow, if you’re in Saskatoon for convention, why not stop by Ryan’s hospitality suite (and those for Trent and Cam too – one thing I’m unified in is my love of parties!)
Stompin’ Tom Connors died today.
Shea and I had the privilege of seeing him at the Calgary Folk Fest and is usually the case for old vets like him (see Dolly Parton at Craven or any number of “vets” who’ve come to Regina Folk Fest), he came out and stole the show.
How fitting that the first video I ever uploaded to YouTube had Stompin’ Tom playing in the background…
My mother-in-law was a big fan – she also introduced me to one of his lesser known gems…
Luckily others are picking up the mantle…
No word on who Chewy is supporting…
Hard to believe it’s less than a week until the Leadership Convention!
I was chatting with someone over the weekend about how the party might build unity once the race is over, no matter who wins. He made a pretty profound observation:
It has nothing to do with how “positive” you were or how aggressive you were vs. other people, it has to do with the fact that you are supporting someone different from the person they are supporting. End of story.
This is just an unavoidable fact of life in internal party contests, be they leadership races or nomination races. When you say “Ryan is great and is the best person to be leader” everyone else hears “you think my candidate sucks and I am stupid for supporting them”
At various points during the race, I’ve had exchanges with supporters of all candidates (yes, including my own!), both publicly and privately as we discussed our differing views on topics ranging from how we treat our newest members to debates about the size of the pens certain candidates wield to inquiries about how to best formulate a tweet.
Although it may appear otherwise to an outside observer (or, even to the people involved in these discussions at the time), none of these exchanges were entered into with malice or anger.
Instead, like our respective candidates, most of these exchanges happen on a foundation of “vigourous agreement” with only small differences of opinion existing with regards to approaches, strategies and techniques.
In fact, rather than thinking of supporters of other candidates as being “wrong” for not picking Ryan as #1, I respect and appreciate the reasons they tell me why they picked the candidates that they did. There are many good reasons for all four to be someone’s choice. Just some I’ve heard include Trent’s loyalty and listening ability, Cam’s well-roundedness and command of policy, Erin’s knowledge of economics and ability to get positive media coverage.
Sometimes the strengths of all four candidates got lost in the appearance of conflict, whether intentional or not. Chad Moats, one of Erin Weir’s supporters is someone I had more clashes with than anyone else by far. But as another Meili team member observed, “That’s actually an extremely valuable skill he displayed. He got otherwise rational people like yourself to respond in an emotional fashion. Can you imagine turning that ability loose on the Sask Party?”
Many of our clashes came because I disagreed with Moats’ aggressive approach towards others who are “on the same team” but, to continue the sports analogy, some people prefer full-contact practices to get ready for the real game (him) and some worry about the risk of injury to your own team when doing so (me). Anyhow, although I disagreed with Chad’s approach, I never thought that he was wrong or mis-guided to have chosen Erin over Ryan. And truth be told, after many of our Twitter exchanges, we’d exchange cordial DM’s and in fact, I’ve publicly offered to buy him a beer if he’s at convention. (I hesitate to make the same offer to anyone else as that could lead to dozens of people “remembering” that I’d crossed swords with them at some point!)
I can’t remember which candidate first said it but in an ideal world, there would be a magic blender where could put in all four of the candidates and it would spit out the perfectly blended candidate with the best qualities of each.
That doesn’t exist of course but this race is going to leave the NDP with the next best thing – four former leadership candidates, one of whom is now the leader, but also three others who are all committed to working together for the betterment of the party and therefore, the province.
So no matter what happens this Saturday, I think that means there won’t be any losers, sore or otherwise.
(By the way, the quote above came from Steven Lloyd, Erin Weir’s campaign manager. Some think I was pissed off at Weir’s campaign for what I felt was a mis-leading use of a positive quote about Erin on his blog. But in keeping with the theme of this post, I’m happy to report that Steven and I have chatted regularly since that “incident” with no hard feelings. I did however, make sure I got his permission to quote him for this blog post!) 😉
Every year, Freedom to Read Week comes to an end and I feel like I have so many posts I could do left in the hopper. I thought about doing a link dump of all the things I’ve collected but instead, I’ll just post one last one…
One of the great things about working at Regina Public Library is that we have a couple very unique elements compared to most other public libraries in Canada – we have an in-house, fully operational art gallery and we also have a single screen art house theatre.
As far as I know, this was the first year that RPL had a formal Freedom to Read Week Committee and I was very proud to be a part of it – planning not only the typical type of events (book discussions, displays, readings, etc.) but to also be able to bring the Film Theatre and Dunlop Art Gallery into our plans as well.
How good was the week? I’d say the first planning meeting the newly struck committee had was probably the single best meeting I’ve attended in my nearly five years at RPL (and trust me, I’ve been to lots of meetings in that time!)
Our FTRW plans this year were great but I can’t wait until next year – we only touched a small sliver of what we could do!
/r/ImGoingToHellForThis is a sub-Reddit dedicated to “Tasteless “politically incorrect” dark, offensive, & twisted humor of all types is welcome here. Absolutely NOTHING & NOBODY is sacred, taboo, or beyond being joked about.” aka a perfect way to end Freedom to Read Week.
Yesterday, I said that during Freedom to Read Week, often everything starts to look like a Freedom of Expression issue. I didn’t mention another aspect of this in that sometimes, something that looks like a freedom of expression issue could also actually highlight something else – potentially even something criminal.
And lo and behold, something along those lines happened today as former Senior Advisor to Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, was caught on video making some *very* controversial remarks about people who view child pornography, the harm (or lack thereof) and criminality (or lack thereof) of engaging in such activity.
Now, the immediate reaction was a giant uproar as you might expect.
But, as I cautioned at the start of FTRW, one of the first things we have to do if we truly believe in freedom of expression is not to rush to judgement because of mere words – whether it is something as simple as saying something is “crazy” (which might offend mental health advocates) to words as loaded as “child pornography”. And then, even if the words (not the actions) are (potentially) offensive defend them even more.
I’ve had my own experience with what I felt was an over-reaction to a single word when I tried to get my paper on user fees in Alberta Public Libraries published. The original title was “Useless as Tits on a Bull: User Fees in Alberta Public Libraries” (which is a simile referring to something not needed rather than having any real connection to tits, human or otherwise. I thought the title was quite clever as I was using various bovine similes as sub-headers throughout this paper about some shenanigans in Wild Rose country and felt that a provocative paper needed a provocative title. The title was eventually changed to the equally effective “Cash Cow: User Fees in Alberta Public Libraries” but I could never get past the feeling that I wasn’t being asked to change my title because one was more or less effective, just that the editor either didn’t like the word and/or didn’t want to deal with potential complaints.
So that’s just one recent example of why I’m cautious about over-reaction to words, no matter how loaded they might be. For example, I have defended something which I felt was mis-labeled as “child porn” once in the past but that post was extremely difficult to write because how do you defend something that it feels like everybody else has already labeled as evil, illegal scum?
Anyhow, I’ve watched the Flanagan video and read the text of his comments. Although I absolutely defend Flanagan’s right to say whatever he wants, I also celebrate that the consequences for his comments were swift – he was let go from a pundit position at CBC, cut loose by the Wild Rose Party whose campaign he managed in the last Alberta election, been distanced by the University of Calgary where he’s a prof (er, since my first draft earlier today, he’s now “retiring”) and been condemned by the PMO.
I mentioned off the top that this situation felt closer to criminal than freedom of speech and I have some strong circumstantial evidence that leads me to that conclusion and why this I feel this isn’t just a case of “oops, I mis-spoke” which is what he’s claiming.
Again, this is all circumstantial but like I said, to me, this goes beyond a free speech issue and there are lots of pointers that make me think this might be a criminal situation. I don’t know if the RCMP have the authority to inspect his computer because of what he said and the other things I’ve listed.
But I do have pretty strong suspicions about what they might find if he’s a guy who thinks child pornography hurts no one. (It wouldn’t be the first time police have had to investigate his over-the-line comments so there’s definitely precedent.)
During past Freedom to Read weeks, I’ve noticed that everything starts to look like a Freedom of Expression issue. (That’s probably a good thing that we should keep in mind year-round anyhow.) For example, we’re only halfway through the week and I’ve had three distinct experiences that weren’t official FTRW events but which brought forward freedom of expression/censorship issues in a variety of ways.
The Oscars (aka “Boob-gate”)
And specifically, the hosting job of Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy who is either did a great job or was horribly offensive. Probably no surprise that I’m on the “he was fine” band wagon.
One of the things I always point out at FTRW time is that censorship comes from both the right and the left and some of the reaction to MacFarlane is a perfect example – many are saying how dare he objectify women by making jokes about their boobs! How dare he make light of domestic violence by joking about Chris Brown and Rhianna! How dare he joke about foreigners having difficult-to-understand accents? Guess what folks? These are all *jokes* and not making the jokes doesn’t change the fact that actresses do go topless in movies, Chris Brown *did* pop Rhianna in the nose and sometimes, foreigners (yes, even Oscar-calibre actors) have strong accents.
It goes back to the ultimate point of believing in freedom of expression – people have the right to say what they want, you have the right to be offended but you do not have the right *not* to be offended. Trying to tell people which jokes are “appropriate” and which are offensive is just as problematic behaviour as you ascribe to the person making the joke in my mind.
(Of course, it gets more complicated when somebody says something incredibly offensive and later apologies for it – or at least his boss does. Do I still defend that expression? Ultimately, I do defend the person’s right to say what they did, even if I don’t agree with the original sentiment at all.)
Anyhow, back to MacFarlane… here’s a great defense of his choice not to take the Seinfeld route of “lowest common denominator/no foul language/offend no one” comedy that sums up what I’m trying to say better than I can.
Comedy, like art in general, is incredibly personal and subjective. We have a right to voice our opinions (key word “opinions”) as to what’s funny and what isn’t. But the criticism becomes dangerous, and takes on a whole new ugliness, when entertainers are attacked for being “offensive, sexist and racist” simply because some folks may dislike the content and/or fail to see the humor. That sort of mass condemnation typically leads to censorship. Are we going back to the days when Lenny Bruce was arrested for using “obscenities” on-stage? Has our culture not evolved in fifty years? Or are we simply witnessing the PC-ification of America? What one person finds “offensive” another finds brilliant art (see Pryor, Carlin, Elvis, The Beatles, Mapplethorpe, Bertolucci, et al.).
Walls
Happened to see on Facebook that Marcello di Cintio, a writer I knew from Calgary was going to be in Regina launching his new book, “Walls: Travels Along the Barricades” on Tuesday. I’d gotten his book from the library when it first came out as Marcello is one of the best non-fiction writers going. But I only got a chapter or two into it before I had to take it back – not because it wasn’t any good but pretty much all of my personal time is spent on Meili campaign-related reading/work these days. 🙁
Anyhow, I went to the launch and it was great. Arrived early and got to catch up with Marcello a bit about Calgary, the Writers Guld of Alberta where I used to work (and which is how I first met him. Funny coincidence – the in-laws of the person who got my job at the WGA when I left were also in the audience!), Calgary politics and how his career is going.
His book, where he visits various “walls” around the world from those in Belfast to Israel/Palestine to the walls along the US-Mexico border, speak obviously and enormously to the issue of freedom of expression and censorship – not just of words but indeed of people’s *lives* being censored.
The reading and Q&A that followed were so good, I wished I’d recorded the audio of the whole thing (ah, he’s got a TEDxCalgary talk – that’ll give a summary anyhow!) to put online so everyone could hear what he said. But I did take a couple video clips including the following where Marcello was talking about how we in Canada are often defined by our smugness and don’t think of things like this happening here. So he specifically found a Canadian barricade – true, not a wall like the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall, but nonetheless a fence in Montreal that divides rich from poor (or “other from other” whether ethnicity, wealth, religion or whatever difference is being separated and maintained) just as other walls and fences do around the world.
The Book Thief
The Outreach Unit where I currently work at RPL has had a “Book Club for the Blind & Visually Impaired” for just over a year. Every couple months, approximately 4-8 members of the group come together to read and discuss a book (some people might put “read” in quotes but for me – and for these patrons – reading an audio book is as legitimate a form of reading as what you do with a printed book).
All group members are provided with a spoken word CD version of that month’s title to read before the meeting and Outreach’s Library Assistant who runs the program uses the Book Club Guides that are already created for RPL’s very popular “Book Club in a Bag” service to guide the discussion. Obviously, this group speaks to censorship in a different way than we tend to think of it – partly because of how the participants’ disabilities might limit their ability to read/absorb material in various ways and partly due to the simple fact that the world of spoken word CD’s and MP3 audiobooks is much smaller than what is available to a fully-sighted person so these people don’t have full access to the thousands of books that most people do (there’s a huge lack of Canadian content. Such a small example but the RPL Book Club in a Bag might add Marcello di Cintio’s “Walls” to their collection but it’s doubtful that we’d ever be able to get an audio version.)
My library assistant and I might now tell you that it was intentional but quite coincidentally, this month’s book, taken up by the group earlier today, was “The Book Thief” which is a novel that explores issues of censorship through the actions of a book-loving protagonist in the book-burning time of Nazi Germany. Although unintentional, this book was a perfect choice given that the group was meeting during Freedom to Read Week!
The week’s only half over – I can’t wait to see what other freedom of expression and censorship issues I’ll happen upon during the rest of the week!
