How the alt-right weaponized free speech

2017/05/03 Leave a comment

Refreshing and needed historical perspective on the free-speech movement and its co-opting by the right:

Indeed, Berkeley’s far-right agitators routinely invoke the memory of activist Mario Savio, the standard-bearer of the FSM, going so far as to declare themselves “the new Free Speech Movement.” This, while boasting of the endorsement of America’s highest office: “The more abuse and harassment we suffer,” warned the Berkeley College Republicans in a joint op-ed following Yiannopoulos’s cancelled appearance, “the more controversial speakers we will invite to campus. We proceed fearlessly because we know we have the president of the United States on our side.”

Indeed, in February, President Trump implicitly threatened to withhold federal funds from the university for failing to cater to Yiannopoulos who, amid the renewed controversy involving Coulter, has announced a comeback, sensing an opportunity to regain status and rehabilitate his ego—not to mention, profit mightily.

“We will give out a new free speech prize—the Mario Savio Award—to the person we believe has done most to protect free expression at UC Berkeley and its surrounding area,” proclaimed Yiannopoulos in promoting Milo’s “Free Speech Week.” “Each day will be dedicated to a different enemy of free speech, including feminism, Black Lives Matter and Islam.”

This co-opting of Savio’s legacy is a calculated provocation, one that his son Daniel calls “some kind of sick joke.” Savio led the FSM to victory in ending all restrictions to political activity on campus, which included the rights of orators from all political perspectives. “Rather than ban speakers he disagreed with, Savio debated them, whether they were deans, faculty, the student-body president, or whoever,” wrote Robert Cohen, author of Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. “And this was the spirit not only of Savio but of the FSM, which had an almost Gandhian faith that through open discourse anyone had the potential to be won over” to a cause.

Savio was a veteran of the civil-rights movement, and as Cohen details, “sought to convince the editors of the student newspaper there that their use of the term “n—-r” in the paper was hurtful and irresponsible … Savio did not deny students had the right to print what they chose, but asked that they reach out to their black classmates and reflect on whether in the future they could be more thoughtful about the impact their words had on the campus community.”

The FSM’s quest was decent and honest—it was about engaging in open, rigorous debate and the exchange of ideas, no matter how inflammatory or loathsome, with a goal of making progress. What’s happening now isn’t about discussion: it’s pure political tribalism. People like Coulter and Yiannopoulos aren’t brought to campus to contribute substance—hearing either speak for a few minutes quickly puts lie to claims of their brilliance. They are skilled antagonists who can reliably incite backlash from a perceived enemy; they are, as Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian describes, the “outcome of a grotesque convergence of politics, entertainment and the internet in which an empty vessel can thrive unchecked by turning hate speech into show business.”

Where trauma, real or perceived, has become a sort of morbid currency in some circles of the left, often used to justify unworkable demands of individuals and institutions, the self-described “politically incorrect”—adults who consider childlike behaviour to be heroically subversive—are in the grievance trade. Because each provocation inflates the value of a carefully-crafted persona, victimhood is actively—and ironically—sought; they prey on the vulnerable, ridicule targets of well-documented discrimination, then cry persecution when met with resistance.

While it’s vital to uphold and protect the right of all speech on campus—even the most abhorrent rhetoric from the ranks of the alt-right—it’s crucial to identify this new game being played and, as Savio desired, critically judge “whether the speech … is really free, or merely cant.”

And it matters that influential voices, while rightly demanding institutions uphold free speech norms, explicitly make that distinction.

Source: How the alt-right weaponized free speech – Macleans.ca

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Indonesians Seek to Export a Modernized Vision of Islam – The New York Times

2017/05/03 Leave a comment

I think the notes of caution by the experts cited are valid.

That being said, this initiative will likely be useful in broadening the discussions and debates regarding religion and minority rights, and understanding of Islam.

But I am always cautious about “exporting” models. Each country’s geography, history, demographics is different, and thus policies and programs need to take these differences into account, but within an overall human rights perspective:

Leaders of Nahdlatul Ulama’s youth wing, known as Ansor, say that elements of Shariah, which Muslims consider divine law, are being manipulated by groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda to justify terrorist attacks around the world, invoked to rally fighters to battle in the Middle East and elsewhere, and distorted by movements that seek to turn Islam into a political weapon.

“The classical Islamic perspective is dominated by views that position non-Muslims as enemies or, at best, as suspicious figures not worthy of trust,” H. Yaqut Qoumas, Ansor’s chairman, said in an interview.

“Fiqh,” or the body of jurisprudence that applies Shariah to everyday life, “explicitly rejects the possibility of non-Muslims enjoying equal rights with Muslims in the public sphere, including the right to occupy certain positions,” he said. “This classical Islamic perspective continues to possess an extraordinarily powerful authority in the eyes of most Muslims, and is regarded as standard, orthodox Islam.”

Some interpretations of classical Islamic law teach that Muslims have a duty to seek out and fight Christians, Jews and followers of Zoroastrianism until they either convert to Islam or submit to its rule and pay a head tax.

These interpretations have been enthusiastically adopted by the Islamic State.

Also, some interpretations of classical Islamic law, and of certain passages in the Quran, forbid Muslims from having non-Muslim political leaders. Medieval Islamic jurisprudence, still regarded as valid by some, is used to justify slavery and the execution of prisoners.

A 2006 painting by the Dutch artist John van der Sterren depicts Indonesia’s founding leader, Sukarno, cradling an independence fighter in the 1940s. The rebel’s Christian cross has made the image a symbol of the drive to reinterpret Islamic law.Nahdlatul Ulama

Some predominantly Muslim countries have been moving to reinterpret Islamic law within their borders, with some sending delegations to a 2016 international conference of scholars, religious leaders and clergy members in Morocco on protecting the legal rights of religious minorities living among them.

The Indonesian initiative, however, aims to directly approach governments around the world, both Muslim-majority and otherwise, as well as at the United Nations, to achieve a global consensus on reforming what it views as archaic interpretations of Islam.

“The challenge we face is not confined to religious views that emerged through an intellectual process conducted a thousand years ago. We are also confronted by religious and political authorities whose institutions are deeply intertwined with these views, and thus continue to inculcate such teachings among each new generation of Muslims,” Mr. Yaqut said.

“There’s a whole library of interpretations of jihad — Muslims must fight non-Muslim states to expand territory, for example,” said Ruud Peters, an emeritus professor of Islamic law at the University of Amsterdam. “But since the 19th century, there have been interpretations followed by many Muslim states to only defend against attack from non-Muslim states.”

Another problem, scholars and experts said, is the cultural differences among predominantly Muslim countries in interpreting Islamic law. Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, for example, practices one of the most liberal forms of Islam in the world, while simultaneously having a secular government and Constitution, with full rights for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other religious minorities.

Saudi Arabia, in the Middle East, however, practices the conservative Wahhabi Islam, and its government does not officially recognize any of its citizens as being Christian.

“If you want to have only one universal interpretation, you have to deal with the cultural differences and also find an international central authority. This is impossible,” said Abdel Rahman El Haj, a professor at Ankara Social Sciences University in Turkey.

He added that while Indonesian Islamic leaders had good intentions, substantive changes would be successful only if support for them emerged within the Arab world.

The Ansor initiative is seen as another move by young Muslims in Indonesia, as well as Islamic clerics and other Muslim organizations in Europe and the Middle East, to push back against extreme, conservative interpretations of Islam.

“The general impression we sometimes get in the West about Islam is one of radicalization,” said Raphaël Lefèvre, a nonresident political Islam scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, “while an equally if not more important trend is the ongoing struggle by Muslim clerics to redefine what Islamic law has to say about society and politics in ways deemed more compatible with modern life.”

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Diversity Dividend: Canada’s Global Advantage

2017/05/03 Leave a comment

The report by Bessma Momani and Jillian Stirk has now been posted on their website.

Their main recommendations, largely familiar, focus on domestic policies. Not much that is new, but nevertheless worth repeating and been given broader distribution.

They have been holding a series of cross-country roundtables and discussions to share the results and follow-up the earlier round of consultations that helped inform report.

Source: Diversity Dividend Report

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Des Africains se disent exclus de l’enquête sur le racisme systémique | Le Devoir

2017/05/03 Leave a comment

I am not sure that the experiences with systemic racism of sub-Saharan Africans is that different from Haitians, although given that Haitians have been in Quebec longer, there may be a difference.

But the article’s reporting of the criticism focusses purely on the representation issue, with no examples of any substantive difference in lived experiences:

Des Québécois originaires de l’Afrique subsaharienne déplorent l’absence de membres de leur communauté au sein du comité-conseil sur le racisme et la discrimination systémique, créé il y a un mois par le ministère de l’Immigration. « Un manque flagrant », qui doit être corrigé, déplore le Comité d’initiative provisoire des Afro-Québécois (CIPAQ), qui signe une lettre ouverte pour réclamer que leur voix soit entendue dans une « étape aussi cruciale du processus. »

« C’est surprenant que la catégorie la plus touchée en matière d’intégration à l’emploi ne soit pas représentée à ce comité », s’étonne Doudou Sow, consultant formateur en intégration professionnelle et gestion de la diversité et membre du CIPAQ. Il fait ainsi référence à une étude publiée en 2012 par la Commission des droits de la personne qui révélait que, sur le marché du travail, les noms à consonance africaine étaient les plus discriminés (42 %), comparativement aux noms arabes (35 %) et latino-américains (28 %).

Présidé par Maryse Alcindor, première sous-ministre noire, le comité-conseil, qui se penchera sur les modalités de la consultation sur le racisme et la discrimination systémique, compte 14 membres, qui sont pour la plupart des universitaires haïtiens d’origine ou issus de la communauté arabo-musulmane. Tout en saluant l’initiative, certaines personnes nommées à ce comité ont néanmoins souligné le fait qu’il y ait effectivement beaucoup d’universitaires et aucun représentant des 85 organismes ayant réclamé un tel exercice, à part les quatre porte-parole qui en avaient fait publiquement la demande au début de l’année.

Basé sur l’« expertise »

Mise au fait de ces critiques, la ministre de l’Immigration a rappelé que le rôle du comité n’est pas de « lutter » contre le racisme et la discrimination, mais plutôt de « conseiller » le gouvernement sur la consultation prévue pour cet automne. « Le comité est composé notamment de chercheurs qui ont été choisis en fonction de leur expertise et de leur expérience », a indiqué l’attachée de presse de la ministre, Gabrielle Tellier. Les organismes seront plus tard invités à participer à la consultation elle-même, y compris des membres de la communauté subsaharienne.

Pour Doudou Sow, le fait que le ministère ait justifié que ses nominations ont été faites sur la base de « l’expertise » est un comble. « C’est l’arroseur arrosé. Le ministère met en place une commission qui prétend combattre, et à juste titre, les causes de la discrimination, mais tombe dans le même panneau. »

M. Sow est d’autant plus étonné qu’il est reconnu pour son expertise sur les questions de l’intégration au marché du travail — il travaille depuis longtemps sur le sujet et a écrit des livres — et qu’il avait même été pressenti par la ministre Kathleen Weil et sa garde rapprochée. « Je n’ai jamais eu de retour. Mais même si le gouvernement venait me voir demain pour m’inclure, je dirais non. Je ne veux pas que ce soit perçu comme un combat pour ma personne. Je le fais pour mes enfants et toute la prochaine génération. »

Paul Eid, sociologue spécialiste de l’immigration qui fait partie de ce comité-conseil, se veut rassurant. « Je ne travaille pas pour un groupe ou un autre. L’idée c’est de documenter les causes, et ça touche tous les groupes racisés », soutient-il. « Je crois que c’est la même chose pour tous les membres du groupe ».

Pas des Haïtiens

Mame Moussa Sy, du centre communautaire Bon courage de Place Benoit, est lui aussi déçu de la composition du comité-conseil. « Ça ne tient pas la route. Ça ne reflète pas la diversité », dit-il. Après avoir partagé son coup de gueule sur les réseaux sociaux, il a lancé une pétition qui a récolté environ 500 signatures jusqu’ici.

Certes, des Haïtiens siègent au comité-conseil, mais leur voix n’est pas celle des Africains subsahariens, explique-t-il. « Le scientifique, le professeur, l’intervenant haïtien qui est là, il sera toujours porté à prendre des exemples de son quotidien, de ce qu’il a vécu. Mais c’est très différent de ce qui se passe au Sénégal, au Congo », explique-t-il.

Source: Des Africains se disent exclus de l’enquête sur le racisme systémique | Le Devoir

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Our New ‘American Gods’: A Celebration of Immigrants in the Face of Trumpism

2017/05/02 Leave a comment

Haven’t read the book or watched the show but this interview with the creator, Neil Gaiman, is particularly relevant to current times:

To assert these stories as quintessentially American—to acknowledge the global melting pot of cultures, faiths, and trauma that defines America—is something Gaiman, himself an English immigrant, never fathomed as controversial when the book was first published in 2001. “I never got shit for it then,” he says plainly.

Today, unfortunately, it is. Anti-immigrant sentiment fuels many of the current administration’s policies. Verbal attacks and heightened xenophobia have given way todeadly violence. Promises of border walls, deportations, and eliminating “filth” have instilled debilitating fear in immigrant communities.

“I wish the world hadn’t gone mad,” Gaiman sighs.

“It’s sort of like, we took this weird lurch to the right in which fringe Nazi beliefs are now just the right-wing,” he laments, hunched over a table inside a hotel room in New York. “Like, no. No. You guys used to be over there, hung against the wall, dressing up in your fucking sheets. You’re not meant to be in the White House. You’re not meant to be going, ‘We are the rational middle.’”

Imitating Press Secretary Sean Spicer claiming Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” and Trump supporter Carl Higbie citing World War II-era internment camps as “precedent” for an immigrant registry, Gaiman mock-whines: “Obviously we’re not reallyNazis because we don’t actually want to send anybody to camps—well, we might but there won’t be showers and they’re not gonna gas people!”

American Gods is anchored in the odyssey of an ex-con named Shadow (Ricky Whittle), who takes a job as servant and accomplice to a mysterious god named Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) after discovering his wife has died in a car accident. It wasn’t exactly intended as a direct response to current events, as co-creators Fuller and Green explain.

“When we first started talking about doing this [show] two and a half years ago, the immigrant stories were always the emotional foundation because everyone could get on board with immigrant stories,” says Green. “Now, representing immigrant stories has become a political act. And that’s fascinating in a very dark way.”

“We are living in a political climate where hate has been pushed out of many Americans and it’s what we see first before we see the color of their eyes,” laments Fuller. “And that is a great travesty that this administration has inflicted on the country.”

Source: Our New ‘American Gods’: A Celebration of Immigrants in the Face of Trumpism

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True test of Trudeau’s expensive data devotion will be whether he follows the numbers – Politics – CBC New

2017/05/02 Leave a comment

Better data may not guarantee better policy and outcomes, but at least it can ensure more informed discussion and debate:

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are a group that enthuses about “evidence-based policy” and “smarter decisions” and has concerned itself with “deliverology.”

And they are apparently hungry for more data.

“The challenge that we’re facing is one of — and we saw this more acutely a year ago in Vancouver — a dearth of data,” the prime minister said recently when asked about what his government might do about Toronto’s heated real estate market.

Adam Vaughan, a parliamentary secretary and Liberal MP in downtown Toronto, says there are theories about what’s happening within the city’s real estate market, but not enough is known about what’s actually going on.

“We’ve got to … get the data,” he told CBC’s Power & Politics. “We have to manage the data so that we can understand where the problems are emerging and deal with them quickly.”

Such concerns follow a spring budget that, between the promises of jobs and roads and social assistance, included new commitments to data: tens of millions of dollars to be spent collecting new numbers on health care, housing, transportation and other concerns.

More money for more data

The Liberals have promised $39.9 million for the creation of a new “Housing Statistics Framework,” while another $241 million will go to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to, in part, “improve data collection and analytics.”

The Canadian Institute for Health Information will receive $53 million to address “health data gaps” and strengthen “reporting on health system performance,” while $13.6 million will go to Statistics Canada to “broaden tourism data collection.”

Developing a “Clean Technology Data Strategy” will cost $14.5 million and Transport Canada will receive $50 million to establish a new “Canadian Centre on Transportation Data.”

Meanwhile, the new infrastructure bank will be committed to working with other levels of government and Statistics Canada to “undertake an ambitious data initiative on Canadian infrastructure.”

A week after the budget’s release, the government announced $95 million would be spent gathering data on the availability of child care.

So what might all these numbers add up to?

It might simply give government a better understanding of what’s happening across the country. As one senior Liberal official notes, more data can also lead to the discovery of previously unrecognised problems.

Such data would then, in theory, inform and guide government decisions.

That’s an ideal of evidence-based policy, an aspiration for more rational politics that has arisen in recent years and might now be viewed as a technocratic rival to the emotional, anti-establishment populism that brought Donald Trump to the White House. Witness this month’s marches for science across the United States, which echoed a similar protest on Parliament Hill in 2012.

EARTH-DAY/USA-MARCH

Marchers advance toward city hall during the March for Science Los Angeles on April 22. (Kyle Grillot/Reuters)

“Data allows you to know what is the scope of the problem you’re trying to solve, or is there a problem that actually needs solving, and to measure how you’re doing and if [your policy] is working,” said the senior Liberal official.

If all that data is made public, it could also foster a better policy debate.

Incomplete record on evidence

The signature first act of Trudeau’s government was to restore the mandatory long-form census, the cancellation of which galvanized concerns about the former Conservative government’s approach to evidence and policy.

The rest of their agenda in this regard remains a work in progress. A chief science adviser has not yet been appointed. Still pending are improvements to the annual reporting on the performance of government programs and reform of the estimates process, through which Parliament approves the government’s spending plans. New legislation for the parliamentary budget officer has been panned as too weak and restrictive.

‘Will they use the data? Will they listen to it? Even if it shows that some of their policies aren’t working? That will be the true test.’– Katie Gibbs, Evidence for Democracy

Liberals nonetheless express interest in focusing on outcomes, not inputs: on what is accomplished with public money, not just what is spent. More information about what’s happening in and around the areas touched by public policy would help with that.

“Collecting the data is the first step in making policies that are informed by evidence and, even more importantly, actually evaluating public policies to see if they are doing what we hoped they would,” said Katie Gibbs, executive director of the group Evidence for Democracy.

“So it’s certainly important, but it’s still just the first step. Will they use the data? Will they listen to it? Even if it shows that some of their policies aren’t working? That will be the true test.”

Source: True test of Trudeau’s expensive data devotion will be whether he follows the numbers – Politics – CBC News

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More than a hashtag: Making diverse, inclusive theatre the norm

2017/05/02 Leave a comment

Interesting story on some of the challenges in improving diversity in theatre:

Personal stories of race, gender and sexuality shared in a Caribbean hair stylist’s chair. A glimpse into a convenience store and an Asian-Canadian family’s struggles. A thoroughly remixed Hamlet delivered in English and American Sign Language.

Canada is no stranger to acclaimed plays told from diverse perspectives, but a new wave of theatre artists is pushing past existing boundaries to make inclusive storytelling the new normal.

“I want a contemporary colour palette. I want the people of the world that I see around me to be telling those stories,” says director Ravi Jain.

“That homogenous world that I see onstage [traditionally]? It’s just not my world. I don’t recognize that.”

Toronto-based Jain’s latest work is his Shakespeare reboot Prince Hamlet, featuring actors in gender-swapped roles, performers from different racial backgrounds and a key character who is deaf and narrates the story in American Sign Language.

Prince Hamlet

Why Not Theatre’s latest production is Prince Hamlet, a reboot of the Bard featuring actors in gender-swapped roles, performers from different racial backgrounds and a key character who narrates the story in American Sign Language. (Bronwen Sharp/Why Not Theatre)

It’s the latest reason his aptly named Why Not Theatre, currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, has earned kudos for innovative, thought-provoking and entertaining productions that offer something fresh to devoted theatre-goers, while also appealing to communities underrepresented in the performing arts.

“That’s the thing for me,” he says. “Can we let people be their fullest selves when we tell stories and let their experiences they had growing up be the lens through which we see the story told?”

Making change

Canada has seen past blockbusters like Trey Anthony’s da Kink in my Hair or Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience and the work of indie troupes such as Cahoots, FuGEN and Obsidian, which specialize in stories from diverse communities. But Canadian theatre overall has long been a bastion of white, European stories. There’s still a distance to go toward more inclusive representation, especially for the larger, more established companies.

“If you look around, you go to the theatre and a lot of times – especially at the established ones – the audience is predominantly aging white people,” admits Martin Morrow, president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association.

“There’s definitely a serious awareness of a lack of diversity in the past and a real sincere attempt to improve that today,” he says.

Theatre has yet to regularly reach some large, untapped audiences – in part “because what people are seeing on the stage are not the faces on the street,” according to Morrow.

Chantelle Han and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee in Kim's Convenience.

Despite the massive success of plays like Kim’s Convenience, truly diverse stories and productions are still more the exception than the norm in Canadian theatre. (Bruce Monk)

A generation of artists raised on traditional Canadian theatre is now changing the game, settling into roles as sought-after and influential creators, leaders and decision-makers.

They’re revitalizing the scene by casting a wider net of collaborators and highlighting unheard perspectives. The argument heard in the past, that Canada didn’t have the necessary pool of diverse actors, directors, playwrights and other creators, no longer holds. Being inclusive – as other industries have shown – makes financial sense.

“The private sector figured out that it was good for business and good for society to have a more diversified workforce and to try to promote change at all levels of leadership. It seems like we’re just figuring that out now [in theatre],” says director and playwright Jovanni Sy,

The challenge of every theatre company in Canada, especially in urban centres, is to navigate the divide between engaging existing subscribers and attracting new ones, he says. Sy has seen thousands of new audience members visit Richmond, B.C.’s Gateway Theatre for the first time after he introduced a contemporary, Chinese-language adjunct to the mainstage offering: one that appeals directly to residents of Chinese heritage (who comprise nearly half of Richmond’s total population).

As artistic director, Sy’s approach has been two-pronged: choosing programming that “shows the rich, multicultural nature of modern-day Richmond,” and reaching out with initiatives like the Gateway Pacific Theatre Festival “as a way of opening our doors and making a bigger tent.

“People want what’s comfortable to them,” he explains, but “one of the beautiful things about theatre is it lets you glimpse into someone else’s reality, lets you sit in someone else’s shoes for a couple of hours.”

Source: More than a hashtag: Making diverse, inclusive theatre the norm – Entertainment – CBC News

Rick Salutin’s related comments about entry barriers to the arts, particularly for those from less wealthy families:

A recent depressing study of Toronto schools found that kids who go into public high schools for the arts are disproportionately white and wealthy: 67 per cent white versus 29 per cent in the general school population.

Half of the students come from 18 “feeder schools” that lacked diversity; a quarter from just five largely “homogeneous” schools; 57 per cent come from “high income” families versus about half that in the general school population.

Not surprising since the former, unlamented school board director Chris Spence once said the purpose of “academies” and special schools was to offer “private school opportunities within the public system.” Whose kids did you think all those special programs (including French immersion) were created for?

But it got me thinking about who rules in the arts altogether. A few years ago I found myself frequently checking family backgrounds of actors, mostly because with Wikipedia, you can: they usually start with family background.

So Hugh Grant’s forebears are “a tapestry of warriors, empire-builders and aristocracy.” Zooey Deschanel’s parents were a cinematographer and actor. Benedict Cumberbatch’s are actors; his granddad was from “London high society” and his great-granddad was Queen Victoria’s consul-general in Turkey. Gene Hackman’s dad, though, was a typesetter who abandoned the family.

Let’s not overstate. The arts have typically implied nepotism and privilege, even in cases of black sheep who scorned the family firm to run off with a theatre troupe. But there was something down-market about the arts that made room for the lower orders — especially with the mass audience that came along with movies. Most of all, you didn’t need a university degree to get a foot in.

There were outsiders and scalawags like Charlie Chaplin, who grew up rough and learned to hate middle class dogooding social workers; or Edward G. Robinson, who lived in a tenement and became a toney art collector to compensate. There was a coarser look to many of them; you didn’t need perfect features. It was even was an asset not to have them since that mass movie audience could identify. Charles Laughton actually played romantic roles. One of the last was Hackman, who didn’t seem to know he wasn’t Cary Grant. (Grant’s parents, on the other hand, were a factory worker and a seamstress.)

But the privilege element has now moved up to another level. This is partly due to the so-called “culturalization” of the economy, where art is no longer economically peripheral. It’s as gainful and respected (or more so) to be an actor, musician (or news anchor) than a tycoon. In fact, they all sort of blend.

This shift gets most noted, naturally, in the U.K. with its hyper sense of class. There’s debate about a takeover by “posh” actors: Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hollander — stars of The Night Manager — who all went to the same private elementary school; the former two went on to Eton, alongside Eddie Redmayne and Damien Lewis. Almost everyone attended Oxford. This may underpin the “Downtonization” of British TV drama. In Canada, we tend to phrase these trends in terms of race, but it largely amounts to the same thing.

Much (in fact, too much) depends on education, especially with the decline of other routes to the arts, like provincial rep companies in the U.K. In the early years there are arts programs, where wealthier parents can fundraise for supplies, such as musical instruments or theatre trips — though here they can’t yet buy actual arts teachers for their kids’ schools.

Then come university programs that are harder to access with rising tuition; and even if you get there as a poor kid, you probably need to work rather than try out for plays.

The grad programs follow, which require auditions (which often demand fees) and prepping for those. The same goes for writing, where postgrad creative writing degrees have become ubiquitous, though what they mostly provide is simply time to write.

What gets lost? Voices — literally in the case of actors. I knew a theatre director who made a note during auditions: “has access to class.” That won’t matter much if you don’t have writers who write about class, as David Fennario did in Canada.

What would’ve been lost if Mozart’s or Chopin’s dads hadn’t been composers and teachers? But wait — what of all the latent Mozarts and Chopins whose dads weren’t? How much richer might the world that kids arrive in have been?

Not to mention the small matter of justice (social variant).

Source: Guess who’s coming to auditions: SalutinThe arts use to be more welcoming of outsiders and scalawags but now appears to be the domain of the privileged.

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How disruptive technologies are eroding our trust in government – The Globe and Mail

2017/05/02 Leave a comment

Always worth reading, anything by Kevin Lynch. This piece is much stronger on the diagnostic side than policy proscriptions, reflecting the nature of the challenges:

We are in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, driven by disruptive technological change. These technologies, such as big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain are intersecting and combining in extraordinary ways to create a “technology 4.0 world.” Few revolutions unfold without upheaval, uncertainty and swaths of winners and losers, however, and this one is no different. Its impact will be felt well beyond commerce – in how we communicate, interact, date, learn, gather news and govern ourselves.

An autonomous-driving truck carrying a load of beer on an interstate highway; self-driving cars; drones delivering parcels; robots reading X-rays and offering diagnoses; algorithms providing investment advice; artificial intelligence allowing computers to learn, infer and predict – the essence of many middle-class jobs. All are disruptive technologies producing gains in productivity and growth, to be sure, but also the inevitable displacement of jobs – and a looming quandary for policymakers.

Part of this quandary is the growing gap between the scale, scope and speed of these transformations and the capacity of government to implement timely and effective policy changes. Put simply, in today’s dynamic world, last-generation governance and policy processes are a poor match for next-generation disruptive trends, and trust in government is an early casualty.

Let’s drill down on the causes of this governance gap.

First, there is the ever-increasing pace of technical change versus the pace of policymaking, which is static at best. The game Angry Birds went from launch to 50-million customers within 35 days; Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., the new Indian wireless firm, acquired 100-million customers within six months; Facebook, Snapchat and Google roll out new platform services at astounding speed. Government is simply not wired today to respond at this pace.

Second, the scope of technological change is vast and shifting compared with the scope of government policymaking, which is typically compartmentalized into silos. Few technological innovations mirror departmental boundaries and regulatory powers, and few government departments were designed for the hyper-connected world of technology 4.0.

Third, disruptive innovation by its intrinsic nature is risk-taking, unlike governments, which are typically risk-averse. This clash of risk cultures exacerbates the gap between changing technology and policy making, with both needing to move more to risk-management models and behaviours.

Fourth, disruptive innovations know few borders, unlike governments, whose borders define their sovereignty and within which they are typically loath to share. The global financial crisis amply demonstrated the gap between “new” financial products traded globally and a patchwork quilt of national regulations and regulators with little cross-border co-operation.

Fifth, many of today’s transformative technologies are platform-based, with non-linear scalability and near-zero marginal costs, compared with policy changes in government, which have a bias toward incrementality because it is easier to garner political and public support for tweaking the status quo than embarking on bold new policies.

Sixth, disruptive innovations evolve through trial and error, unlike governments, whose policy ability to respond is hampered by uncertainty – the known unknowns and unknown unknowns are significant in an era of disruption. Too early, policy reactions can impede innovation and competition; too late can allow systemic risks to accumulate.

And seventh, the disruption of traditional media by interactive social-media platforms with enormous scale has allowed the creation of virtual communities of interest and vast arrays of unfiltered commentary, unlike with governments, where governing and considered policy analysis are too often the casualties of the immediacy of Twitter and Facebook.

What can governments do to respond to this growing gap?

In an era of disruption, policy thinking has to move from hindsight to foresight. Governmental structures require more flexibility and fluidity. They need to use social media better, to crowd-source public insights. Policy making must become more risk-tolerant and innovative. Communications should eschew excessive short-termism, and offer a longer-term focus. To regain trust, start today to tackle the big issues that will dominate tomorrow. How do economies and societies handle disruption on this scale? What are the new jobs technological change will create and the skills they will require? What are the models to reskill and retrain the work force? How are the benefits of this technological change and costs of its adjustment going to be shared? All questions the public instinctively gets.

This governance gap poses a broader political problem as well. Workers made redundant by robots and global supply chains, aware of increasing income inequality and decreasing equality of opportunity, are embracing populist tenets ranging from nationalism to protectionism, from distrust of institutions to anger. As history teaches us, bouts of fervent populism seldom end well. So, to respond to the dual challenge of rebuilding growth through innovation and of facilitating adjustment to technological change, we have to get ahead of the disruption curve in our policy analysis and thinking.

Source: How disruptive technologies are eroding our trust in government – The Globe and Mail

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Le PQ invité à s’ouvrir à la diversité | Le Devoir

2017/05/02 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to watch and how they reconcile this “diversity and inclusion” messaging with their past in playing identity politics:

Le Parti québécois (PQ) a encore une « pente à remonter » auprès des communautés culturelles. Le chef du parti, Jean-François Lisée, lance un blitz de recrutement de candidats issus des minorités et affirme que la lutte contre la discrimination et le racisme sera un des thèmes importants de la campagne électorale de 2018.

Le chef péquiste a demandé à ses 125 associations de circonscription de tout mettre en oeuvre pour qu’au moins 12 % des délégués au congrès du parti, en septembre prochain, soient issus des minorités. Déjà, plus de 12 % des employés du parti à l’Assemblée nationale proviennent des communautés culturelles.

« On a encore du travail à faire au niveau de la diversité du sein du parti et on est en marche. On prend toutes sortes d’initiatives, on voit des résultats », a dit Paul St-Pierre Plamondon au cours d’un point de presse dimanche. La diversité reste un « réel défi »pour le parti, et « rien n’est encore joué », écrit-il.

L’ex-candidat à la chefferie du PQ, nommé conseiller de Jean-François Lisée, a dévoilé le rapport final de la vaste consultation qu’il a menée depuis l’automne dernier dans le but de renouveler le parti. Le rapport Osez repenser le PQ formule 156 recommandations destinées à renforcer les liens entre le PQ et les communautés culturelles, les jeunes et les entrepreneurs.

Brasser la cage

« Il ne faut pas craindre la critique et la voir plutôt comme une occasion de bâtir des ponts », écrit Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. Son rapport d’étape, publié en février dernier, avait créé un « léger tourbillon médiatique », admet l’avocat de 40 ans : il décrivait le PQ comme « un parti figé, conservateur et vieillissant » aux allures de « club social ».

Depuis, le parti semble avoir amorcé un rajeunissement. Le nombre de membres de 40 ans et moins a grimpé de 31 % en six mois ; 16 683 des 90 000 membres du PQ appartiennent désormais à cette catégorie d’âge. Près du tiers des 125 présidents d’association — et 37,4 % des membres des exécutifs de circonscription — sont âgés de 40 ans et moins.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon a mené 162 consultations auprès de 3600 personnes, surtout des gens qui ne sont pas membres du PQ, pour arriver à son diagnostic. Pas moins de 43 des recommandations visent à tisser des liens entre le PQ et les communautés culturelles. Le diagnostic est presque aussi vieux que le parti : les nouveaux arrivants et les anglophones se méfient du mouvement indépendantiste.

L’auteur du rapport Osez repenser le PQ invite le parti à « revoir la notion de nationalisme de manière à valoriser un nationalisme civique et inclusif ». Il insiste pour que la lutte contre la discrimination à l’emploi, contre le racisme et contre le profilage racial par la police soit une priorité pour le PQ aux élections de l’automne 2018.

« Le PQ doit en quelque sorte briser l’association malsaine que certains font entre PQ et racisme (une allégation qui est non fondée lorsqu’on interroge les militants de la diversité culturelle qui militent au sein du PQ), en étant le champion de la lutte contre le racisme, au moment où un vent de populisme et d’extrême droite souffle à plusieurs endroits en Occident. »

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon recommande que le parti délègue 100 « ambassadeurs »pour nouer des liens avec les communautés culturelles « sans chercher quoi que ce soit ni attendre quelque chose en retour ».

Pour rapprocher le PQ des jeunes et des minorités, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon recommande au parti de « s’approprier les thèmes de l’international, de la mondialisation et de l’ouverture sur le monde ». Il estime aussi que les souverainistes doivent tourner la page sur l’épisode de la charte des valeurs.

« La laïcité et l’identité québécoise sont deux choses dissociables pour les moins de 40 ans. Le Parti québécois doit désormais parler de l’identité québécoise en faisant référence à la langue française, à la spécificité québécoise et à la culture du Québec. La laïcité doit être présentée comme un enjeu politique qui contribue au vivre-ensemble. Elle n’est cependant pas une composante de l’identité des citoyens et des citoyennes. »

Source: Le PQ invité à s’ouvrir à la diversité | Le Devoir

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Were Humans Really in America 100,000 Years Before We Thought?

2017/05/01 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary on the politics regarding the origin of the first “settlers” of North America:

In the United States, the lightning rod in this conversation has been the racial identity of those people who are supposed to have pre-dated Native Americans. In Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture, Smithsonian archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley argued that almost 15,000 years before native Americans arrived in the Americas from Siberia (approximately 13,000-14,000 years ago), the North West was populated by early Europeans.

Their argument is based on the similarities between American Clovis stone points and French Solutrean points. The similarities between the two were first noted in the 1970s, but scholars could not account for the chronological distance between the evidence, the lack of evidence for maritime activity during this period, and the absence of non-technological cultural transfer from France to the Americas.

The lack of evidence did not prevent Kyle Bristow, a lawyer and former Michigan State University student known for inviting white supremacists to speak at his college chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, to use the Solutrean hypothesis to author the novel White Apocalypse. The conceit of the book is that Solutrean culture was mercilessly wiped out by invading Beringians (the ancestors of modern Native Americans). The genocide of the ancient Europeans, we learn through the rogue anthropologist protagonist, has been concealed from us in a giant conspiracy. Bristow’s purpose is to deny status to the First Nations, and he found his audience with reviewers like Billy Roper of White Resistance and Kevin Alfred Strom, the founder of National Vanguard. Bristow is now a lawyer who represents, among others, Matthew Heimbach, the head of the white nationalist traditionalist Youth Network, being sued for allegedly shoving a woman of color and calling her a “c**t” and a “n****r” at a Trump rally in 2016.

But I digress.

Scientists today almost exclusively reject the Solutrean hypothesis, but twenty years ago a variant on this hypothesis was used to argue that Kennewick Man was not Native American. The prehistoric remains of Kennewick Man, as he was known, were discovered along the banks of the Columbia River region in Kennewick, Washington in 1996. To the dismay of the anthropological community, he was initially racialized as a European and, against the objections of the local Umatilla people, his remains were removed for further study.

The archaeologists who initially worked on the bones, James Chatters and Douglas Owsley, argued quite forcefully that the remains were not Native American and thus unrelated to the Umatilla people. Chatters argued that the skull was “Caucasoid” and literally resembled Patrick Stewart. Owsley argued for Polynesian origins.

Kennewick Man was the focal point of a nine-year court case in which Native American tribes fought to gain ownership of the Kennewick Man (whom they referred to as ‘the Ancient One’). In 2004 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that because a cultural link could not be established between the remains and any of the Native American tribes, the scientific community could continue to study them.

It was only in 2015, when geneticists at the University of Copenhagen demonstrated that, among living peoples, the Kennewick Man is most closely related to the Native American tribes, including the Umatilla, that the question was settled. He has since been repatriated under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but for nearly a decade scholarly claims about his racial identity were used to strip Native Americans of their cultural heritage.

It is not the case that the scientists performing the latest study, or any study on human origins, are racist themselves. Rather, it’s that this whole question is racially and politically loaded. Anytime a person makes the claim that there were people on a particular continent that predate the indigenous peoples encountered by later Westerners, they are making the kind of claim that, historically speaking, has been used to justify the subjugation of those people.

If there were people here before the Native Americans, that’s historically and anthropologically important information, but it has to be strongly supported. As Marks said, “This isn’t fruit-fly science…[It’s] a strong bio-political statement, and needs to have a firmer basis.”

 Source: Were Humans Really in America 100,000 Years Before We Thought?

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