What are friends for, if not to politely ignore the fact that you’ve become an alcoholic and started beating your children? In such a spirit, Canada proved itself once again a faithful and utterly harmless pal of the United States yesterday when our government fell all over itself to retract a “torture awareness” manual given to its [...]
Entries from January 2008
January 13, 2008
Goodbye to the Good Death
Worth reading this winter: This Republic of Suffering (Knopf, 342pp) Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of the changing nature of death at the time of the U.S. Civil War, and the ways in which such changes in turn helped to transform Americans’ relationship with their government. A graf from my San Francisco Chronicle review:
The displacement of [...]
January 11, 2008
A MAD, MAD future
I’m looking forward to seeing this building in person. Scheduled for completion in 2010, the 50-story Absolute Tower will be located in the condo-choked heart of my home, um, sprawl of Mississauga, Ontario, and promises to nudge the city in a far more interesting visual direction. The building was designed by Beijing-based MAD (an abbreviation of [...]
January 10, 2008
One less voice
I wasn’t a terribly frequent visitor to France 24’s website, but as an English-language expression of the French view of the world, I thought it was a timely and useful alternative to the big media outlets of the “Anglosphere” like CNN and the BBC. Unfortunately, it appears that French President Nicolas Sarkozy does not feel [...]
January 2, 2008
Canada’s not-nearly-as-bad-as-the-U.S. surveillance society
The map and legend shown above are from Privacy International’s latest report on the state of surveillance and privacy protection in 47 countries. As Scott Horton has pointed out, the United States now ranks with Russia and China (along with camera-on-every-corner Britain) as “endemic surveillance societies”. Canada, by greyish contrast, ranks below “adequate” in its [...]
