State of Health Care in Canada - Miss Polly and Her Dolly Would Die

Did you sing the Miss Polly tune in kindergarten? If so, that would be back in the day when the Canadian health care system could generally be relied on. Do you remember the tune? Try singing the new version:

By golly it's not jolly to be sick sick sick

When there isn't any doctor coming quick quick quick 

He won't be coming with his stethoscope

And a black bag of headache pills and fever-dope

The doctors have retired or they have gone online

So you'll line up at a clinic for a very long time

Someone walking by might frown and shake their head

And say these patients should be home and lying in bed

The health care officials never think about that

As they peck away at keyboards with a rat-a-tat-tat               

Bureaucrats regulate and germs thrive well                      

Health Departments send the bill, and taxes swell  

                                                                                

Censorship -- first Roald Dahl, now Dilbert (Scott Adams)

Last week the victim was a kids-lit author, this week a cartoonist:  https://vancouversun.com/news/world/media-drop-dilbert-comic-after-creators-black-hate-group-remark/wcm/cfc72a46-200d-4ee2-aa28-81211ff6059d

Media de-platforming is itself a version of hate -- hate by censorship.

Some ethnic groups are allowed to denounce "hate", others are not. (Blacks accusing whites of hate nevertheless eagerly hate them back.) It's part of the "privileged" vs "marginalized" rhetoric that plays out in social discourse.  

Censorship is a lost cause anyway: governments and corporations can ban speech but they can't ban emotion. They can only replace hate speech with hate silence. People feel what they feel. 

The Power Behind the Reading Chair

Librarians, contrary to their traditional image, are powerful social agents. Whether in public or university and college libraries, the collections they build to serve readers and researchers also curate today's readers and their research.

Librarians hold significant power because what they include or exclude from library collections shapes minds, which is why diversity of subject matter is vital. We are currently in the middle of Freedom To Read Week, and how freely people choose what to read depends largely on what they find on library shelves. Librarians must use their power to get beyond merely promoting what's already popular -- the ideological flavour of the moment which the fashionable influencers chatter about on social media.

Bookstores are in the business of providing what sells (a best seller is a book that sells because it sells best). Stores promote fashionable authors with large displays, and libraries do this too with "Fast Read" options (short borrowing periods that create fast turnaround) and face-out display on the Hot Releases shelves.

These books become hot because they're displayed and promoted, a self-fulfilling process which shapes public opinion about "good books".

It's up to the individual reader to go deeper into both the collection catalogue and the stacks behind the display shelves. If all the books on a particular topic, especially from earlier periods, seem suddenly to have gone missing, readers need to query the librarians about it.

Libraries cull book and periodical collections as well as build them, just like opinion-makers "cull" attitudes which the cancel-culturati deem inappropriate. There are plenty of library patrons (and non-patrons) who object to particular authors and subjects in these days of raging identity-bias. It's up to broad-minded readers and librarians together to resist these incursions on our shared freedom to read.

(Of further interest: https://cfe.torontomu.ca/page/cfla-and-cfe-work-together-library-challenges-database )

See also: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/11/on-scroll.html

and:  https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/trigger-warning.html

Insensitivity Editors

The Lords of Sensitivity -- editors lording it over writers from Bowdlerizing keyboards -- have insensitively made life harder for satirists. How can satire parody something that insists on comprehensibly parodying itself? 

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/oompa-loompas-no-longer-tiny-sensitivity-readers-take-the-gnarl-out-of-dahl

The latest victim of "sensitivation" is kids-lit author Roald Dahl. His writing is certainly not to everyone's taste, but that doesn't give anyone the right to vandalize and steal it -- only the right to not read it. Would it be legal to seize your neighbour's car, give it a new coat of paint, and say -- here, this looks better, so get over it? Why is it legal thus to vandalize a writer's property and legacy? Whatever happened to copyright? 

Of course, a corporation like Netflix can (as they did) buy an author's legacy (in this case creating the Roald Dahl Story Company). So that gets around silly issues like respecting an author's ... authorship. The Roald Dahl Story Company is a branch of the international corporate chain of Cancel-Culture Inc.

Dahl, like Dr. Seuss and others, has been worked over by the "sensitivity" gang, part of a woke army which is nothing but insensitive to literature and the intelligence of readers. Aiming to be "progressive", this army is in fact regressive -- regressing back to the time of censorious Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825).

Bowdler, a British doctor, took it upon himself (with his sister) to re-write Shakespeare in a fashion "suitable for women and children to listen to when read aloud". Women! They need things well-sanitized of course -- but we get over the sexism of that today by doing it to all genders, including the non-binary ones or those in which men are women simply because they say they are ... And if that nonsense is protected from being criticized for scientific ridiculousness, why isn't Dahl protected? (At least his books won't suddenly pop up un-invited in women-only change rooms.)

If people want to enjoy role playing, gender-blending and cross-dressing, they should go for it. But why should those who enjoy reading freely what authors freely write, be forbidden from doing that?

(See best-selling word-craftsman Anthony Horowitz, British novelist, discussing the matter here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-clash-with-sensitivity-readers/)

Bowdler had his own reasons for re-writing Shakespeare; here's how the current sensitivity-censors do it:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2021/11/shakespeare-for-modern-audience.html

The Food-For-Thought Bank

– Hello, is this the Submissions Editor?

– Um … who is this? 

– I wondered whether you’d received my submission.

– I wonder how you got this phone number.

– “Research”! I sent my manuscript to you two months ago …?

– Our response time is twelve months.

– Twelve? That’s a year! Don’t tell me: it’s because of the pandemic, supply chains, inflation, Russia, staff shortage, quiet quitting … How am I doing?

– (Sigh ..) What’s your title?

– Haven’t got one, I’m a commoner. I’m not Bipoc, Black, Indigenous, marginalized, gender-variant, or particularly youthful … is that why you haven’t read my submission?

– Of course not, we practice inclusion and equity. And monetization.

– Monetization?

– Yeah, you know: making money. What’s the title of your submission?

– The True Death of History.

– Oh. We don’t deal in Truth here. You can’t monetize Truth, only “truths”.

– Oh?

– All our authors are skillful self-marketing influencers. To have your manuscript accepted, you must have an existing social media audience, and you’ll reflect back to them their own opinions so they’ll share your site with others and the algorithms will give you more hits because you had more hits. They metastasize …

– Huh. Amazing. Maybe The Truly Metastasizing Logarithm would be a catchier title.

– Yes. But it’s not about the book anyway, it’s about the author. What you’re selling is yourself. 

– It’s a self-auction? 

– Yes, on Zoom, Instagram, TikTok … you must perform on them.

– I don’t do much online stuff, I do print stuff. Would the audience see me, or could I have my face blurred out? 

– Of course they must see you. Ideally your performance would include music – and dance is good – and studies have shown that when people cry online their audience grows exponentially. Also, photos of cooking are popular. And a cat or dog is a huge asset, especially if it’s a rescue and when you tell the tale of its rescue, you cry …

– Look, I’m a writer, not a dancer or actor. Don’t you market books? Ideas? Free speech? Why would algorithms like me, what would those platforms get from my audience?

– Advertising revenue, of course, earned by you telling people what they already think. Most don’t read much, they watch dancing. That’s why bookshops go bankrupt, even chains like Chapters need to devote half their floor space to non-book merchandise.

– But not to merchants of thought. I get it.

– No, you don’t. Media influencers too are merchants of thought. They sell people’s group-think back to them, so they feel heard and “see themselves” in the media. 

– So is that the “circular economy”? Nothing wasted, all recycled to consumers wanting same-again assurance that their tribe is the right-thinking one?

– Now you’re getting it! So call me next year with links to your social media sites, which could form the basis for monetization of what you quaintly call your ideas.

– But will my book be in print?

– Print? Who knows?

– I’d be better off self-publishing and setting up a sales table at a community market. 

– Maybe.

– If I don’t sell a book to a publisher or a column to a periodical soon, I’ll be at the Food Bank. Hey, there’s an idea! What if independent authors were to market books at Food Banks? (Some people still put reading right up there with eating.) Maybe the authors could be persuaded to cry as the food recipients walk by with full grocery bags, and they'd get some donations … We could call it the Food-For-Thought Bank. Thanks, Editor, you’ve been really helpful.

 

Can You Sue a Robot?

And can robots be censored for hate-speech or other "wrong-speech" written by Artificial Intelligence content creation software? What legal liability will news outlets have, once robots write their columns?

Contentbot service providers ("chatbots") offer prices affordable for students wanting to buy AI-produced essays (the concept of plagiarism is mere nostalgia). This service is also affordable for freelancers who submit a lot of material to magazines. If even only a few online mags per month publish their submissions, they could soon cover the cost of contentbots and start profiting.

Is this seriously where the "knowledge economy" is going (the economy comprising journalism, the arts, entertainment, law, tech, finance, consulting, education, and research)? Then you'll need only feed into your contentbot provider the terms which hip magazine editors use in their Submission Guidelines (terms like "inclusive, indigenous, racialized, marginalized, ablist, trans-supportive, fat-supportive, anti-colonialist" and so on).

Journalists and news reporters thought the rising tide of unemployment was already bad, but newspapers and magazines won't need journalists at all once owner-

editors feed requirements straight to their robot staff, based on polls showing what readers want and what the identity-biases of the moment are.

So never mind cancel culture -- we've got pre-cancel culture. But what happens when a magazine is sued for defamation or for discriminating against someone? Can you sue a robot? (Soon we'll be asking, can a robot sue me?)

And who would defend the news outlet or magazine in court? Will lawyers and judges too be robots that automatically search precedents which lead to the only logically-artificially-intelligent decision?

What if a radio host wants to interview the "source" of a controversial article -- and the source is a robot? (Can robots use four-letter words on the radio, or will another robot bleep them out automatically?)

Clergy are already debating among themselves the morality of using AI-generated sermons (though some people say the fundamentalists already do ...)

Some call these trends "DeepAI". Others call them Final Shallowing -- of the life of the mind.

Best response? Maybe thinkers still able to articulate their own thoughts should have a soapbox in every town square where they can be heard by a public who can see that they're made of actual flesh and blood. But wait ... that's been done! The ancient Greeks called the town square the agora, and the Romans the "porch" (stoa), where the Stoic philosophers spoke to the passing crowd. And in Enlightenment Europe the cafes and salons filled the same role, and people knew how to be good conversationalists. 

So best response? Get offline, and communicate in the flesh -- especially in classrooms.

 

 

It's a God-Eat-God World Out There

Always has been. First the Great Mother was buried for three days, kept prisoner underground by her sister Death until she was rescued by Ninshubur (perhaps, from ancient Sumeria, the first recorded resurrection story). 

Then Persephone had to spend half the year underground because Demeter her mother had offended the wrong deity, and poor old Osirus was killed by Seth and had his body parts scattered over the Nile, until the Great Mother, now in the person of Isis, lay upon the river as moonlight and gathered him together again thereby conceiving Horus.

And we haven’t even got to the Celtic gods yet. Lugh the thunderstorm deity was a warrior who slew other gods between fathering heroes, and the Celtic goddess Babd was a supernatural demon who would bring about the end of the Earth (although she also was goddess of enlightenment and wisdom). Her English name is Crow. 

Like Astarte, also over in the Middle East, the Irish goddess Morrigan was a Goddess of War. Celtic gods who killed other gods are too numerous to mention, as are the Asian ones. Consider the bloodthirsty goddess Kali. Even Shiva the Hindu protector was also dubbed the destroyer. 

Meanwhile, Jehovah was kicking Adam and Eve out of paradise, and kicking the Great Mother out of the Judaeo-Christian pantheon altogether.

Many deities of love, wisdom, nature and plenty also populated the pantheons which human civilizations came up with, but they’re always beset by violent counterparts and lethal rivalries – amazingly similar to human society in that way.

Odin, Zeus, Astarte and Indra are boss-gods who mirror the bloodthirsty rivalries of human kings, queens, presidents and leaders of revolts and revolutions. Given our dual nature, compassionate and violent, cooperative and competitive, it’s no surprise that our deities are equally conflicted, being supernatural mirrors of ourselves. The gods experience what we experience, writ large and projected against our background conception of eternity, behaving, as do we, like packs of ravenous dogs. What other kind of world, being our archetypal doubles, would our gods live in? Considering the examples we have worshipfully made them reflect back to ourselves, it’s no surprise that they and we act out the same dramas.

As every practitioner of visualization knows, action follows thought. What we imagine is what we become. 

(See also:  https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/replace-culture-war-with-culture-games.html)  

A List of Permitted Words Is As Censorious As a List of Banned Words

Even worse than a list of banned words, is a list of permitted words. Adoption of approved speech (policed speech) causes starvation of language and poverty of thought. 

Take the simple but richly evocative word “field”, used in physics, consciousness studies, scholarship, professional accreditation, agriculture … as well as in casual speech. In French as well as English, we see the array of connotations: “le champ’, “la domaine”, “le terrain”, and in Spanish “arena” (seaside or sand). Will we never again be allowed to refer to these things because “field” is considered (at least at the University of Southern California) a “trigger” word? USC departments will no longer present subject areas as "fields" of study.

 

Will ornithologists no longer be allowed to mention that pheasants are found in fields – and we must look in grassy spaces of variegated photosynthesizing plants with seasonally changing green-brown blades?

What word isn’t a trigger, to somebody? Who can account for every association every person might make as a result of memory and emotion? If you fear the possibility of giving offence, simply keep your mouth shut (forever?). There will always be somebody somewhere who has an anxiety attack at the existence of vocabulary. This is tough on someone whose vocation (from “vox” – voice, sound, calling) is communication. Shall we then adopt mass self-imposed censorship?

 

The problem with “field”, according to politically correct academics, is that it can by a few associative steps call to mind places where slaves once worked. Slavery is of course horrendous, a blight on world history going back to primitive tribal times (and recent tribal times), but due to current media obsessions we ironically read and hear astronomically more often the word “slavery” than ever before. So why censor “field” when we throw “slavery” itself into every narrative?

 

And before anyone denounces use of the word “primitive”, please consider that it simply means “first” – from the word “prime”. If we create a list of only the words we are allowed to use it will naturally become an ever-dwindling one, until no one may speak or write at all. Perhaps then we should all take a vow of silence, or communicate only through pictorial symbols such as pre-literate tribes used.

(Speaking of ornithology, a related lunacy is taking place around changing genus and species labels throughout the life sciences – removing the names of the “colonial” collectors who first identified and described them for scientific classification.)

See also: some ideologues would no longer even permit the use of the word “the” when describing a group of people -- https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/will-we-be-allowed-to-say-ridiculous.html 

Trigger Warning

          This story may not be suitable for all readers. Mature subject matter:             reader discretion is advised.   

Caution: diverse viewpoints within

Strong language (politically non-correct): may offend some readers 

Novel concepts may be encountered

Characters may appear in this story who identify differently than you

You may not "see yourself" here

You may see others here

Characters in this story may include anti-hero as well as hero, an antagonist as well as protagonist

In this story, bad things might happen

This story might contain jokes

Read at your own risk: some readers have experienced broadening of mind 

Persons allergic to ideas are advised to shut this book immediately

            Call 111 if an Emergency Philosopher is needed

                    

Free Speech Is Not Racism

Who needs words to prove a theory, when your opponents' actions already prove it? That happened at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta on Feb.2nd, when hundreds of students shouted down speaker Frances Widdowson. She had warned us that mob-mentality was threatening the free exchange of ideas -- and the mob obliged by proving her point.

The mob came out in force to "amplify black, trans and indigenous voices" when Professor Widdowson tried to deliver a talk at an institution supposedly meant to be a forum for talk.

"Racism is not free speech," screeched the mob. But if it thinks the opposite -- that free speech is racist -- we are in trouble. Free speech is the underpinning of democracy, which is measured, as one author has put it, not by the number of citizens who vote but by the number who feel free to say what they think in public.*

Professor Widdowson's topic was "How Woke-ism Threatens Academic Freedom". By saying what she thinks about that, Professor Widdowson was simply doing her job. As an academic in a university she is supposed to offer alternative thinking -- alternative, that is, to mob-thought, herd-thought and ideological hypnosis. Most politicians merely repeat back at the electorate what the electorate has shouted to them, because they want to be re-elected. Most professors also toe the correctness line, as they too want to keep their jobs.

We need universities, though, to play their role as arenas for free expression of ideas (to embody universality). 

If the arena is taken over by the herd, the Professor Widdowsons of the world are driven into media outlets where their views are already accepted. In other words they're only allowed to talk to their followers, and the famous "bi-polarity" we are said to be living with only deepens. 

Professor Widdowson had already been censored and de-platformed at a different university for suggesting there are various ways of judging Canada's variety of residential schools. (In a variety run by different agencies and individuals with multiple objectives over more than a century, maybe some students did learn to read, write and do arithmetic -- as intended?) 

The two sides on that inflamed debate will never listen to each other in the community at large if they can't even do so at a university.  

(The same shouting-down technique was used by trans activists at McGill University on January 10th of this year: https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/shutdown-of-talk-at-mcgill-threatens-freedom-of-expression-in-canada-jamie-sarkonak-for-inside-policy/)

* Ramaswamy, V. Woke, Inc. Center Street, 2021