Bulldozing Language in the Name of Urban Re-Development

What is "human-scaled design"? Not what it used to be. The connotations suggest something not massive. In terms of domestic architecture this would not mean a 46-storey building towering over any humans in the vicinity -- and containing "units" so micro you couldn't swing the proverbial cat in them (although there's room for cat-astrophe, design-wise). 

Downtown living in a commercial core is not human-scaled; it's business-scaled. (But then, maybe both renters and the units they live in are but commodities -- a renter simply a customer of the housing industry.)

What matters is that the language around this real estate "development" is dishonest. In the mid-sized west-coast city of Victoria, BC, the small downtown core once shelved off gradually into well-treed suburbia. The low-rise route leading out of downtown was christened "Antique Row" by advertisers and tourism promoters because most shops sold old furniture and collectables. 

Now that this heritage is being destroyed by growth and development and the shops replaced by towers, Antique Row is being re-christened, mendaciously, "Heritage Corridor" -- now that its heritage is being erased. 

The City pitches the coming 46-storey high-rise as a "sensitive and innovative response to the existing character" of the neighbourhood: the opposite of what it is. How can dense high-rise blocks of "units" with no parking replace rows of low shops and easy customer access and be called "human-scaled"? 

Neighbourhood history is being erased -- but that happens in growing cities. The worst destruction is to language. Describing things by words that mean the opposite is reprehensible dishonesty, not to mention illogical illiteracy. 

The foundations of language and communication are being bulldozed -- our heritage of reasoned speech, and not "sensitively". We live in a post-postmodern era when people in pursuit of real estate profit from overpopulation can apparently "innovate" new heritage, and if that sounds counter-intuitive to you, you're in the wrong "heritage corridor" in the race to urban uglification. 

Loss of Professional Training Means Loss of Workers -- Does Compelled Thought fill the gap?

Canada is short of qualified workers. Businesses are closing for lack of staff, air transport and local ferry services are in total disarray, and hospital emergency rooms are closing while medical personnel resign in droves. 

It's hardly surprising. What are people trained for today? What do universities teach? Who gets qualified to do real jobs?

A few things we're short of: nurses, lab technicians, doctors, veterinarians, ship pilots, airline pilots, bus drivers, lifeguards, emergency personnel. Even waiters and cashiers.

Take a look at some subjects the universities feel it helpful to offer:

Disability Studies, Gender Studies (e.g. "Power & Difference"), Queer Film, and "Queering the Undead" (that's essential knowledge for a well-prepared work force, eh?) 

Also in Cinema is "Decolonizing the Screen", and in History: "Decolonizing Settler Societies", and "Hockey Nation and Canadian Identity". In Philosophy, "Meta-ethics", and the whole spectrum of Social Justice Studies ...

Graduate programs offered at UBC include: "Antiracism Education", "Indigenous Pathways Through Social and Emotional Learning", "Principles of Applied Sports Analytics", "Meaning and Identity in the Digital Age", "Knowledge Translation and Implementation Sciences", and most curious of all: "Climate Studies and Action Capstones ..." Action Capstones, you ask?? It's education-jargon for something once called doing a Thesis ... except without the research. Quelle surprise.) 

There's even a shortage of tree-planters. (Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of loggers. Why don't universities teach Climate Studies and Forest Regeneration, instead of "capstones"?)

No wonder no one can drive a bus or fly a plane. Educators are "translating and implementing" the wrong knowledge. 

What work do graduates choose to do? We seem to have a lot of web designers, financial advisors, YouTube makers, podcasters, graphic novelists, singer-songwriters, counsellors, coaches and "influencers". So who gets the actual work done? 

So: Flight Is Cancelled. Ferry Cancelled. Emergency Department Closed. Even swimming pool closed.

Lots of teens used to go in for lifeguard training, but now to take the program they have to sign a contract agreeing to "decolonization and equity" in order to learn to swim (as far as I recall, they always were taught to rescue all drowning persons equally).

Many Admissions Departments of schools and post-secondary institutions are now requiring Declarations of Compelled Thought. No wonder a thinking student is loathe to enroll. So now we get an under-trained populace, and a dangerous shrinkage of essential services. 

CLOSED

PLEASE POSTPONE YOUR EMERGENCY

TO A LATER DATE

Civil Frights in Canada

A historic Canadian university recently changed its name. First named after Egerton Ryerson, the 19th century journalist and polymath, promoter of education and free speech, it's been re-christened Toronto Metropolitan University so as to sound less "colonial".

Its new values are anti-racism, "equity", "indigenization" and other phrases we've become used to in government-speak. 

George Brown College in Toronto also commits to anti-colonialism -- which it identifies with "anti-oppression". George Brown the person was another 19th century upholder of responsible government, literacy and journalism (founded Globe, forerunner of the Globe & Mail). George Brown College forbids "hate speech". It's not defined, but anyone with questions about what they may or may not say on campus must contact the "OAREHRS". 

Any office with that many bureaucratic letters is sure no bastion of elegant speech. It means Office of Anti-racism, Equity and Human Rights Services -- and the cause it serves is not the cause of Civil Liberties. College staff are called Thought Leaders, and their mission is to "infuse anti-racism into everything we do".

"Thought-leadership"?? Is that a cousin of thought-control? And as for "mission to infuse" ... Doesn't such language trigger certain negative historic associations -- and dubious contemporary ones? Scary, to free-thinkers and civil liberties advocates.

And while institutions of higher learning compel speech and fiddle with "equity" obsessions, the Canadian government steals our freedom from surveillance -- but everyone's equally. (Check out Canada's Digital Identity Framework.)

Whatever happened to a university's job of promoting free exchange of ideas, open-minded discussion, non-ideological scholarship, and non-denial of historical fact? On those principles, rests civil liberty.

What passes for one group's "civil rights" may stand for another group's Civil Frights. People who value freedom of thought and speech are starting to be very afraid indeed.

Here's a list of Civil Frights of the moment:    

    Censorship

    Religious fundamentalism

    Group-think

    Denial of reproductive choice

    Gun-obsession

    Surveillance

    Digital Identity Programs

Feel free to add your own fears to the list.

Re-discovering the 'Doctrine of Discovery'

An "Indigenous Corporate Training" organization says that the "Doctrine of Discovery" is the basis of Canadian Law. Not true.

First of all: never trust "training" -- too much like molding and grooming. (And brainwashing.) Secondly, the antecedents of the evolution of Law in Canada came way before that Age of Exploration during which Europeans found their way to other continents. Canadian (British-based) law has roots in Celtic and Druidic justice, pre-Anglo-Saxon. Those communities settled disputes in much subtler ways than historians often give them credit for. 

When European explorers discovered that North and South America existed (having previously discovered that the Earth was round, and therefore deciding to sail around it), they found tribes that settled disputes through raids, warfare, and the taking of slaves (a fact which they noted but today's commentators are loathe to acknowledge). 

Who has sovereignty over a landscape? Not humanity, humans living but a moment on a planet billions of years old which has hosted a churning cauldron of billions of other species. But, our fundamental transitoriness notwithstanding, the practical arrangement is that national governments have sovereignty over citizens -- and in a democracy use it in protection of life, liberty and property for all citizens equally.

During the Age of Discovery and the Age of Settlement, democracy too was being discovered, and developed in Europe and North America simultaneously. 

Where do property rights come from? From legal use, i.e. from working the land. Where your labour goes, you have ownership interest. To buy, sell and bequeath your interest, government sets up Land Title Offices. (Settlers didn't find such offices among the tribes they encountered in the "New World", so they proceeded under Old World legalities.) 

When non-Catholic monarchies like the British claimed territory (as in Canada) they made claim against other monarchies, not against aboriginals living there. With the multiplicity of aboriginal groups they made Peace and Friendship Treaties, exhibiting the opposite of dispossession (see the Royal Proclamation of King George III, 1763). 

The organized legal transference of real estate (land) is a foundation of peaceful society. Is that a thing we want to throw away, adopting a Doctrine of Strife instead of a Doctrine of Discovery? 

No. Nor did people want to in Canada's colonial years; in fact the way they (as it turned out, naively) thought they'd include aboriginal people in the mainstream of opportunity was through education -- but we know how that turned out. Education takes more than a generation, and we see now that schooling shouldn't have been left in the hands of punitive clergy with rigid religious agenda of their own. 

Their punitive harshness wreaked misery on generations of white students also ... but that, in contemporary thinking, is overlooked. No doubt in future those students too will stake a claim to compensation. 

The Serial Re-discovery of North America

North America is discovered every day -- masses of immigrants arrive at airports and discover it for themselves. Layers of Canada are constantly uncovered, something new appearing not noticed by everyone else. 

They say no one creates, only re-creates; it's the same with discovery. As an infant you discover the world beyond your crib, and then your neighbourhood as a child venturing out on your first bike. Maybe one day you discover a mountain-top, a stunning view, after a laborious hike. It's irrelevant whether you're the first to see this view; this is your discovery of the place. 

Let's stop arguing about which race saw something first, since everything is serially re-discovered in every generation. With unsettling speed things are often rediscovered in another guise: live animal becomes meat, wild space becomes farmland, tribal territories becomes a country, an oasis becomes a tourist resort. Life is all discovery -- of change.

Scientists discover new species. They've always been there, but they're new to science. Their evolutionary descent is uncovered through genetic analysis. 

A stream is altered by flooding, a shoreline altered by a cliff collapse. If you're not discovering new things in your surroundings most days, you're not alive -- or at least not looking around. Everyone brings new eyes to a locale, and it keeps offering something new to discover. Yes, it will be transformed, and the documents describing it can also be changed: new values discovered, and then, in the future, past values rediscovered. "History" is the history of rediscovery.

Prairie becomes pasture, then lawn, then pavement. Each generation sees what previous ones never knew. Discovering the same place, generations see different places. So who's the first discoverer? There's no such person. What you discover isn't about where you are, but what you notice, and we tend to find what we are looking for.

Maybe we should focus on uncovering joy instead of tribal resentment. Sharing instead of evicting. We need to discover open-mindedness, especially in education. Schools shouldn't re-shape information to fit political correctness of the day. Learning new information is scary, but that's not news: book-banning by religious and nationalist forces has always been about fearing to uncover inconvenient historical facts -- and other people's ideas. That's why it's essential to keep a country's National Archives preserved and away from the political agendas of rivalrous groups. That's why the recent deletion of certain words, facts and records from the National Archives of Canada is deeply dangerous -- it's an official cover-up.*

Whenever records are suppressed, historians silenced and history itself made ahistorical, we discover ourselves to be lost in a wilderness of muddle and dispute.

So who "discovered" North America? Primitive Asian tribes migrating over an ice bridge from the northwest thousands of years ago? Vikings crossing the Atlantic from the northeast? Spanish explorers sailing up from the south? 

Once Europeans discovered that the planet was round, mariners sailed around it. Looking for a water-way to the Far East, Europeans found continents: North and South America. Whatever lands adventurers explore and settle in, someone else always wants to cover up parts of history they dislike. But no fear: it's fuel for RE-discovery. The partisan cover-ups of documents today will supply revelations for generations to come -- lots of material for new history scholars to do their PhDs about. 

*See Purge of 'offensive content' in national archives a guess to employees | Toronto Sun :        “Much of the content on the Library and Archives Canada website reflects the time at which it was written,” wrote Canada's Chief Archivist in a June 9, 2021 email.  Of course it reflects its time! It's supposed to. That's why it's in an archive (the "place in which government records are kept"). This archivist goes on to say "much of this content may be offensive". All historical content offends somebody, but an Archive's job is to preserve it, not delete it.

Has "safety-ism" gone mad?

Someone online demanded that the government create free programs in parks during school holidays, for kids whose parents can't afford summer daycare programs. 

Governments already have: the parks themselves. That's why we have them -- so kids can go there and play. Together. With other kids, of all ages, using the playground equipment provided, or racing around the grass and hiding-and-seeking among the trees -- without adults.

"Go out and play" parents used to tell kids in the summer holidays, and kids reveled in freedom from school, rules and supervising adults. They hung out with other free-range kids, learning to make their own entertainment and plan their own day. "Be home by dinner" was the rule, plus "look both ways when you cross the street".

Today kids are prisoners in lockdown, pandemic or no pandemic, living a merely virtual life, becoming unfit and often obese. 

If you do see kids at a playground, the parents or minders won't be far away yet they're usually mentally absent: heads bent over phones, texting, scrolling ... not actually interacting with the kids they're helicoptering around.

The playgrounds themselves are peppered with warnings, for we have helicoptering bureaucracy too, in mortal fear of lawsuits, and caught in the grip of Safety-ism:

Parents won't even let their kids ride around quiet neighbourhoods on bikes. Assuming they're not unfortunate enough to live downtown, that's a major brake on independence. Much better to learn the best rules early: stay on the curb, use hand signals, obey stop signs, and watch what's going on around you. The road to responsibility -- so many kids never take it. 

There May Be a Shortage of Workers, But Don't Go Short of Humour

Is the current shortage of staff (in retail, wholesale, transport, airports, ferries, health care, construction) linked to a reluctance of upcoming generations to seek employment? A preference of graduates (or drop-outs) to keep living with parents (citing existing rental unaffordability), while dreaming of careers "working online", i.e. never having to step away from the computer screen? 

Does the worker shortage (and shortage of qualifications for positions of responsibility) also result from changes in the education system? What do schools teach, today? They've given up on Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, that's obvious. Those are replaced by texting, TikTok and "oral traditions". Arts and Science (literally and originally, meaning "skill and knowledge") have been replaced in the K-12 curriculum by subjects like Safetyism, Competitive Victimhood, Neuro-variance (Curating Your Moods), Gender-rights, Data Violence, and Dysphoria (the state of feeling dissatisfied). 

Students certainly aren't being groomed to be satisfied with customer service work or jobs involving skill, physical labour, or commitment. (On-again off-again gigs are always short-term, for when you want to be off again. This is called work-life balance.)  

Does this sound like a typical aging person's grumpy assessment of the "younger generation", as offered since time immemorial? Yes, indeed. Yet, some things are different now: the technology-driven ones (retreat to life on-line) and ideological ones (creating mediocre education through PC virtue-notions of equity, diversity,  inclusion ... and colonials' exclusion). 

Maybe the healthiest thing is to keep a droll sense of humour -- our best armor against "dysphoria". Some folks choose to be "On the Droll":  

On the Droll | Mad Swirl

Some kids choose to drop out of school.