IT'S WINTER SO WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT SEALING AGAIN

Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, or that I continue to read Canadian newspapers, but I have been hearing far too much noise about the seal hunt recently.
Apparently the seal hunt is super cruel, so cruel the EU had to ban the importation of seal products. Apparently it is inhumane to murder seals and eat their meat and use their fur and oil. That is probably true. But it's also pretty rude that we keep millions of cows and chickens and pigs in terrible conditions and kill them and then eat their meat and use their skins. Seals at least live outside and get to do seal things; domestic animals mostly live inside and don't get to perform their normal behaviours. I don't need to get into debeaking or mulesing or any of the other awful practices done to animals kept in captivity for the purposes of keeping them docile and immobile; the videos and documents are already out there for anyone who cares to look for them. I think we can all acknowledge that humans don't have a great track record with animals, unless that animal looks adorable on the front page of the paper.

Look, I am no paragon of virtue. But I believe that if you are unprepared to deal with the way your food lived and died, you don't deserve to eat it. The opportunity has not yet arisen, but I would certainly eat venison, because before it became meat, that deer lived outside and did deer stuff until it was killed, hopefully cleanly and with as little suffering as possible. I am not a vegetarian because I believe it's wrong to eat meat; we are an omnivorous species and meat has a lot of nutrients in it; nutrients difficult to derive from plants. Grazing cattle used to be a way to turn grass, which humans can't eat, into beef, which humans can eat. It's not wrong to raise cows in a field; wild cows and domestic cows alike wander around eating grass as part of their normal daily lives. But cows aren't meant to be raised in confined spaces, fed on grain and slaughtered under stressful conditions. It's not ecologically efficient - humans can eat grain; feeding it to cows and then eating the cows produces only 10% of the same food energy as humans eating those grains directly - it's terrible for the cows' quality of life, and it affects the health and taste of the beef - stress hormones and antibiotics are FUCKING UP YOUR STEAK. If I cannot appeal to you on the grounds of animal welfare or human decency or the environment, let me appeal to you on the basis of flavour - COWS TASTE BETTER WHEN THEIR LIVES AND DEATHS DON'T SUCK.

It's that simple. Instead, we waste time weeping over seal pups, because they have cute faces and the image of red blood on white snow is much more visually shocking than the image of red blood on a dirty abattoir floor. Anyone interested in protesting the deaths of harp seals (which, for the record, are not endangered, and whose hunts are controlled by strict quotas from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a government body staffed by scientists, not economists) should start with the real culprit - global warming. Seal pups are born on ice floes; when the ice is thin or soft, the pups are set adrift in the ocean before they learn to swim, and they drown. Interestingly enough, the largest contributor to the production of greenhouse gases and subsequent global warming, larger even than the transport sector, is livestock. 

Anyway, don't listen to me, I'm just an anonymous Internet blowhard. But maybe listen to Jacques Cousteau, who was probably pretty qualified to talk about oceans and what lives in them:

"We have to be logical. We have to aim our activity first to the endangered species. Those who are moved by the plight of the harp seal could also be moved by the plight of the pig – the way they are slaughtered is horrible."

ANOTHER FAIRLY STUPID SCANDAL FROM MY HOME AND NATIVE LAND

Really, now.

So Joachim Stroink, an MLA from Nova Scotia, went to a Dutch Christmas party and sat on Zwarte Piet's knee. Zwarte Piet is a mythical character usually portrayed by someone wearing blackface; Mr. Stroink decided to tweet his nice picture and was then very surprised when people got upset. 

"I didn't sign up for this," quoth he as the maelstrom broke. Presumably, Mr. Stroink refers to the scrutiny of his life and photographs. Is it right that members of government have every detail of their lives picked apart? Probably not. But it happens, and when you're posting the pictures yourself, I don't think you're allowed to be upset with the press for demonizing you. 

What's really irksome is this description of Zwarte Piet:
"A traditional song refers to the character as a “servant” to the elderly St. Nicholas, but in recent years those references have largely been replaced with the idea that he is black from chimney soot as he scrambles down to deliver toys and sweets for children who leave their shoes out overnight."

No. Zwarte Piet is not a white dude covered in soot from hustling up and down chimneys. The Dutch held colonies in Africa and captured slaves too. Let's not elide that part of history away, and let's not practice this kind of malignant euphemism, the same effort that produced the concept of "colour-blindness", that we don't see race when we look at other humans. Of course we see race; pretending skin colour doesn't mean anything does a fundamental disservice to people of colour. Feigning colour-blindness is the act of well-meaning white people trying to pretend that treating everyone the same is the same as treating everyone equitably, that we can just forge ahead as a united whole and leave all those nasty memories of slavery and segregation and lynchings behind. Similarly, claiming Zwarte Piet is just a sooty white man is harmful revisionism that attempts to avoid both history and the well-deserved controversy blackface performance generates. Zwarte Piet is a racist historical representation of a black servant. That is a fact. So, where does Canada's Dutch community go from this point? Ideally, by acknowledging these three things:

1. Yes, that happened. 
2. It was wrong.
3. Let's consign that tradition to the past.

I can already imagine the uproar, the claims that pluralism is neutering cultural celebrations. Never mind that if any other ethnic group in Canada had a special figure who was represented in whiteface, we would raise holy hell about it. The fact is, there is a lot of racist crap that we used to do that we don't do any more because it is no longer compatible with the world we inhabit. The cartoon image of the "darkey" eating watermelon or "talkin jive" was present in mainstream American culture for decades; it no longer resides there because it is offensive. It was deemed to be an unacceptable portrayal of real, live humans with feelings and individual personalities, so it faded away. Zwarte Piet, or at least his representation by humans in blackface, can fade too. 

CRISIS OF FAITH #5969

What am I even doing with my life.

I don't believe in Education to 18.
I believe in Education Forever, School to 14. Or maybe School to Whenever. Or School Never, Just Parasailing, if that's your thing.

We know teenagers have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes; it's why they come up with amazing ideas but can't predict the consequences of riding a skateboard off the roof. They lack impulse control; it's why we lock them up during the day under the guise of teaching them stuff.

I was thinking about geometry. Angles seem useful; I am in favour of children learning what a degree is and how to measure angles using a protractor. But we also teach kids a bunch of words like "acute" and "obtuse" and "reflex", which are words whose meanings they have to memorize. But why? Why is it important for a child to know that an angle less than 90 degrees is considered acute? I would argue that it is not.

I was also thinking about kidneys. In the Ontario curriculum, we spend a long time teaching students about the kidney, in a lot of detail. The names of all the pieces of the kidney, the impermeable regions of the loop of Henle, when the solutes move in and out. I don't know why we do this. When I teach the kidney, I relearn it all the night before because the little details always escape me. Fortunately, I have about 12304839 resources at my disposal, most of them digital, that are happy to instruct me in the minutiae of the kidney. I like kidneys; I think they're neat, I think they're elegant, I think it's weird that they are connected to blood pressure and red blood cell manufacturing and hormone release. I think it's important for doctors and nurses and diabetes educators and pharmacists to know how kidneys work. I don't understand why I have to make sure every seventeen-year-old can tell me how a kidney works before he or she leaves high school. Even those who will use that information later are going to relearn it. It's easier every time, sure. But is it worth precious class hours, drawing the nephron over and over, making students memorize words devoid of inherent meaning - glomerulus, Bowman's capsule, efferent arteriole - because 10% are going to need the information again later?

So the question is, what do we need to teach our students? I don't know. Reading. Fractions. How to amortize a mortgage. What it means when the car makes that weird ka-clunk-a-clunk noise. Why tontines are a pretty solid insurance idea on the surface but actually a good way to encourage murder. When do I get to just show Family Guy in class and then have my students figure out what all the literary allusions are? When do I get to smack phones out of kids' hands and tell them to stop texting in class because that is fucking rude, dammit? Not because I am your teacher but because we are all humans in this room, and when we talk, we look each other in the face and give each other the undivided attention and respect we deserve? When does my student come to me and say they want to do a marketing project where they use physics to analyse the claim that Company X's snowboards are better than Company Y's? When do I tell my students that we're making a garden and they can grow whatever they want as long as it's not something that the police would disapprove of? When do they get to build decoding bombes and we play WWII-at-Bletchley-Park? Never, because I am supposed to teach children to be quiet and open their textbooks.

DEFINITELY THE ORIGINAL TEXT FROM THE LOST FOLIO

My favourite part of Othello, shortly after the titular character smothers Desdemona with a pillow (spoiler alert!) and the maid Emilia finds her breathing her last:


             EMILIA
123       Oh no, you're dying, Desdemona! Who did this to you?

             DESDEMONA
124       Nobody. I did it. Peace out.

[she dies]

             OTHELLO
125       Crap, why is she dead?

             EMILIA
126      Dunno.

             OTHELLO
127       Well, like she said, I didn't do it.

             EMILIA
128       She did say that.

             OTHELLO
129       ...She's a big liar, I definitely killed her!

             EMILIA
130       Aw, you're an a-hole!

HUMANS CONTINUE TO DISAPPOINT ME

I read a blog post. I will not link to it here; its author does not deserve the recognition or the free advertising, but it was about the inherent falseness of the idea of female self-esteem. Apparently, women should have absolutely no good feelings about themselves beyond the bare minimum needed to “prevent them committing suicide” (interesting, it’s never been my self-esteem but rather my awareness of reality that makes me want to reach for the pills). He says self-esteem should be earned through accomplishment – a sentiment (the only one in the entire article) with which I can wholeheartedly agree. What is so truly baffling, though, is that he follows this statement with the automatic assumption that women do not or cannot accomplish anything worthy of respect or merit.

The author then delivers an underhanded remark about women “barely squeaking through” colleges with low admission standards and earning their “masters in puppetry”. Hardly. It was at this point that I stopped reading; the gentleman (and I use the term verrrry loosely) was clearly no longer presenting an argument but merely baiting female readers in the hopes that one would reply and he could call her a rabid lesbian or something of that nature. (Hmm, maybe that should be the title of this blog – Rabid Lesbian: I Will Bite You In The Leg. Well, it’s a working title).

Of course he was American; he was possessed of the incredible hubris that only the young white American heterosexual male can really pull off. He encompasses an enormous part of what I find distasteful about Americans (and I generalize, of course; I refer mostly to those who embrace the American ethos, not specifically its geographical inhabitants) and what I find distasteful about men’s rights activitists the world over. The rhetoric is always the same and perpetually ignores the fact that there is no evidence other than mere cultural construction that women are inherently inferior to men. Different, yes, but inferior, not in the slightest. I am not so much angered as I am saddened, to see how “education” and “enlightenment” are shaking out in the global West. Not well, it seems; perhaps the author would have been better off getting his masters of puppetry instead.

A WHALE OF A PROBLEM

My father sent me this. I don't know why.

Basically, there was a dead whale on the beach and nobody knew what to do about it, but it was rotting and started to stink. The whale was too big to push back into the ocean, nobody was willing to cut it up to bury it, and it couldn't be burned (on this last part, I don't know why; the whale certainly would have burned with a little gasoline, but maybe the townspeople didn't want a giant grease fire on the beach). So they hired an engineer, who placed a whole lot of dynamite (20 crates, in fact) on the leeward side of the whale. It was supposed to blow the whale towards the ocean, and break it up into tiny pieces that crabs and birds would eat. Instead, it sprayed large chunks of decaying whale all over the surrounding area, including on passers-by and their vehicles. The next few days were spent repairing damage and using machinery to bury huge pieces of whale. After the fact, everyone sort of shook their collective heads and said, "Wait, we tried to blow up a whale? That was stupid." But the fact is, it wasn't that stupid. The problem wasn't the method - I defy you to find a better solution to dispose of a rotting whale. The real problem? They used too much dynamite.

Dynamite is a high explosive, meaning that the shock wave of the detonating material moves faster than the speed of sound...meaning that it blows stuff up really fast and really hard. The engineer in question decided that the whale should be treated as a "large boulder". Unfortunately, the force a boulder can absorb before cracking is a whole lot more than the force a decomposing whale body can withstand. The blood-red mist appearing high over the blast site is already an indication of a serious miscalculation. Small wonder that, instead of a controlled detonation, bits of whale ended up showering the area in a quarter-mile radius.

The plan was good; the execution was lacking. According to a quick Google search of "How much crap can I blow up with a case of dynamite?" (cue CSIS knocking at my door in 3, 2, 1...) a few sticks, not crates, nestled under the whale would have done the trick without the whale shower.

Also, how is this the first time anyone has dealt with a dead whale?! Whales beach themselves frequently, to my understanding, and not all of them are pushed back to the water in time. Surely, even in 1970, somebody must have already developed a method for handling whale carcasses. Or at least an estimate of how much dynamite it would really take to blow one up.

I AM NOT GETTING OUT OF BED TODAY

This country has made me far too serious.

A friend sent me an essay that drew together three threads of human tragedy, which I won't further elaborate upon, as the author hasn't given consent and I've no idea if he intends to publish. Suffice to say that it explores our inadequacies as humans. One of many intriguing considerations is our inability for any remedy, any kind word or embrace, to relieve the pain of the most fundamentally damaged.

I do not like to think of myself or any human, indeed, as damaged in ways beyond repair. But what stops us from being so? Some divine law preventing unfairness? Karma? The healing power of the universe? There is little justice on earth, especially where the law casts its shadow. It must be in the afterlife, then, that we are rewarded or condemned for our choices. Maybe that’s so. But it is guaranteed that this life, at least, may be filled with much more suffering than hope.

I have, after great struggle, found my own sense of God. But His existence does not mean, in my mind, a corresponding sense of purpose, or dedication to goodness, or even a natural order or process of events. Atheists live in a world where our existence was brought on by chance, and by the laws of physics; I would argue that the world of believers is worse. We live in an existence where God is real but cannot alleviate our suffering; our clockworks have been assembled by the Watchmaker but we have broken nonetheless; God created us of nothing but set us at odds with the rest of creation. If we are the chosen ones, meant to speak and read and invent, then our heartlessness and corruptibility means we have somehow broken a sacred contract. And if we are not, if we rose by accident long after the hand of God finished molding our planet, then our awfulness is inherent to all creatures; any living thing that becomes sentient will also likely take on our bizarre mix of good and evil. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are also the only other animals besides ourselves known to kill for fun. Either our nature is a violation of God’s intent, or it is a symptom of self-awareness. Neither is palatable.

I will not say that there is no goodness in us, just that our goodness is so fleeting, so difficult to transform into real, tangible things. We are indeed crippled by the vast difference between intent and results. Some people are irreparably damaged and it is almost certainly other humans that damaged them. We are indentured to Nature at birth, but worse, we are indentured to each other. We rely on each other to survive, and yet, we too often make it difficult for each other. We hurt those who create for us, underestimate their needs, punish them for trying to negate their own pain - even for trying to negate ours. Our goodness is mired in mediocrity, hate, imagined differences, bitterness, jealousy, apathy. Each one of us creates suffering or hope; failure to produce one is a de facto creation of the other. Not enough of us create hope so it is suffering that overwhelms us. 

So part of me believes there is other life out there. All of me believes it is smart enough to stay the hell away from us.