Justice Stew -- the difference between "Social Justice" and the "Just Society" is ...?

Remember when "social justice" had something to do with a "just society"? Now it's linked to other, slippery concepts: identitarian politics and "critical race theory". Does social justice mean social thought control (group think)? 

What then was the Just Society, back in the 20th century when it was the ideal? It was a society in which everyone had equal rights. There weren't separate racial rights, marginalized rights, disability rights, gender rights and so on. They were the same for all -- called "civil rights". 

"Civil" is related to "city" and "citizen", and civil rights developed to keep things fair and non-violent when humanity began massing together in large centres (cities). Spread out in rural lifestyles everyone could be individualistic, dreamy-imaginative, in touch with natural rhythms, or, in a word -- pagan ("of the countryside"). But living with the madding crowd was more of a challenge, in terms of keeping the peace.

So do we still have a concept of civil justice as practised in a Just City? What civil rights would it depend on? Some would be:

Right to free speech

Right to not read speech you don't like

Right to be offended, or to choose not to be offended, by multiple opinions

Right to congregate with soul-mates

Right to walk away

Right to privacy and quietness (un-stalked by CCTV and smartphones, or harassed by noise)

Right to access health care, contraception, and assistance in choosing to die, according to individual choice

Right to access nature, green-space, and the refreshing company of non-human animals

            The right to add to this list -- please do so.

What systems do these rights rest on? 

Government by elected representatives, separation of church and state, an independent justice system, and an uncensored press (and literacy to read it)

What institutions protect those? 

Schools, Science-and-Humanities study, public libraries                     (Can't afford university fees? Many a genius, inventor and leader educated herself using civic public library systems as set up by the self-educated Scot, Andrew Carnegie, and others 

Systems of professional certification in: health care, teaching, conservation, legal services.

Add some attitudinal flavours to this justice-stew, such as open-mindedness, historical perspective, and humanitarian spirit. Blend and serve! 

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Letter To Santa Claus

Dear Santa Claus,

I don't want anything new for Christmas; I just want to stop losing what I already have. Some Favourite Things are disappearing: books in print, clock radios, landline phones, pay-phones, lawns, paper money, folding maps, greeting cards, stamps ... (and the whole Post Office ...)

Instead of hanging a stocking for you to fill I have left a stocking full of things for you to take away: shopping "membership" cards, cellphones, Global Positioning System, CCTV camera, fit-bit monitors, Kindle readers, plastic packaging, cat-leash, meat, and "apps".

Thanks, Santa -- just close the chimney when you leave. 

Shipped off to torture and execution -- the horses of Canada

 

The Canadian Government is "... balancing the need to develop effective and science-informed policies and strategies with the perspectives of stakeholders who are affected by its decisions. Stakeholders will be engaged in consultations, as applicable ...". 

Have you ever heard a more appalling piece of bureaucratic bafflegab by a government? Well yes -- it happens all the time. This one is about why the Gov of Canada cannot stop torturing innocent horses. "Stakeholders" might not like it if they did. Let these stakeholders show their faces, as they watch no-longer-wanted horses forced into a 28 hour flight without food or water to the slaughter houses of foreign customers. 

Yes, the Canadian Government -- friend of the abused -- can't even stop that abuse. 

Some things they really can't stop -- they can't suddenly make climate change go away, or make Russia, Afghanistan and Iran stop torturing people. But how is it they can't even stop themselves torturing innocent horses? Herding them into trucks and planes as live meat ready for butchering. Old racehorses, the winners and the losers, old saddle-horses, show jumpers and rodeo performers -- all now surplus to requirements. 

The question is, why don't Canadians require ethical behavior and decency from their government? The PM's "Mandate Letter" of one year ago to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food included "ban the live export of horses for slaughter". 

So what happened? Oh yeah, that "stakeholder" thing. If you feel you have an ethical stake in non-cruelty, write to your MP, and to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food: marie-claude.bibeau@parl.gc.ca  

If you need help find some here: https://cpj.ca/writing-a-letter-to-your-mp/  (from Citizens For Public Justice)

C

BAD History

The Rearranged-History Institute has a mission: re-frame the past. It should never have happened. A new breed of graduating historians is committed to pretending it didn't, or at least that it happened differently. Committed to equity, inclusion and diversity they are intersectionally dedicated to authenticating new heroes. The old ones will have their statues knocked down.

Statistical data, historical records, documented research, archives, eye-witness accounts by participants at historical events ... these sources are deemed untrustworthy, for they reveal history outside the correct narrative, history that doesn't obey ideological instructions. (BAD History! "Marginalized" groups are very angry with you. They think you hate them, so they consider you Hate-History.)

"We have ways of re-arranging you", they warn. So take cover, History. But take heart -- in a generation or two the re-discovery of your hiding places will launch a thousand new PhD papers. History is nothing if not cyclical.

SEE ALSO:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/06/manufactured-history-can-you-study.html

Oh Christmas Tree

To be sung ...  You know the tune🎄  (Alter-carols for the Christmas Season)

OH CHRISTMAS TREE

Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree,
How slippery your branches are
Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree
How brightly shines your styro-star
How sturdy your metallic stem
Lights twinkle off, then on again
Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree
Your branches are so fragrance-free

Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree,
Much puzzlement you bring to me

From in a box they bring you out 

No cones or needles drift about

Oh Christmas tree, oh plastic tree

You limply stand, so tinsel-y

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On a Scroll

Walking, sitting at a bus stop, in a cafe or waiting room, lining up in a shop, walking the dog, visiting a playground with the kids -- whatever else they're doing, everyone seems to be scrolling through a smartphone at the same time. When do you ever see anyone reading a book, watching a sunset, or just sitting? Just thinking? Thoughts are buried under the spillage which content-providers lay out online. Advertisers and meme-merchants are on a roll.

The device-addicted are like pollinators primed by evolution to flit from bloom to bloom until they die. No thought is required because their brains are pre-wired. 

Once they learned that people's brains were pre-wired to crave gratification, and once digital innovation provided the perfect tool for harnessing cravings, advertisers and influencers found it easy to herd us. 

We are told the Internet offers free choice, but the algorithmic influencers and persuaders have pre-arranged the choices ("-range" coming from the French "ranger", to rank). This parody of freedom reminds us of Marx's theory that the State would wither away once the working class awoke. Instead, a pan-national state has come into being with an iron grip on our brains: the Cyber-state (and the world's workers never awoke, they just got "woke".)

Can we break out of cyber-bondage? Re-discover scattered bits of personal thought "recollected in tranquillity", phone turned off? We could replace social media with private media by turning our gaze to the physical world, to weather, birds, nature, passers-by, and our own ideas. Non-democratic governments now outnumber democratic ones on the obsessively phone-checking world stage; maybe because democracy depends on free-thinking citizens?

As we re-claim individual thought our addicted fingers might itch to start pecking again. We'll have to sit on our hands and free up our eyes. Yours might be rolling at this suggestion, but then again they might enjoy time off the scroll. They might even read a book in print. It's interesting how before the advent of the printed (or handwritten) book there was the ancient scroll -- of papyrus, say -- and after the printed book there was the online scroll. In between, we lived in a special literary moment.

Now, as in some of those earlier times, we live in a period of ideological thought control. Call something "hate" and it's banned. In former times people scratched messages in crypts, or like spies wrote coded secrets on scrolls slipped into holes in a rock wall: the romance of censor-dodging. Today, it's almost more fun to write for a world that tries to stop you than for one that scans-and-forgets you, un-noticing. 

What's ahead? More constriction, thought police and censorship as far as we can tell. So, more scrolls in the holes in walls, but also more challenges to the censors for readers are drawn to the forbidden, which becomes the secret, which becomes the mysterious. Often the best thing that happens to a book is to be banned. Sometimes it becomes a best-seller -- underground, newly "rare". Such irony: controversy sells, controversy does its own marketing ("contra"/against "verse"/speech). Speaking against is speaking for -- and often means being on a scroll. 

The Ghost Reader

Ghost Reader is the reader unknown, the one who reads a book anonymously, who invisibly borrows it from a friend or communal library or maybe finds it in a charity box, who neither recommends nor denounces it to others. The Ghost Reader is the one whose name isn't on a library card the book was borrowed under, or an Amazon order it was purchased through, the one who doesn't send a note to the author or follow him/her on social media, the one whose thoughts about a book leave no trace.

To the writer, Ghost Reader is a phantom, a fleeting figure imagined like all those familiar literary characters that do and do not exist. Ghost Reader may have attended a book's launch, sitting at the back during the reading and saying nothing, before slipping away with the author's words forever scooped into her neural circuitry .. but s/he might on the other hand never have existed. 

Some readers send messages to authors, ask questions, write reviews, reveal their identities. Any author's glad to hear from them of course, but the best true follower, the one who really "gets" her themes and characters is the Ideal Reader who looms large in her writerly mind. Ghost Reader is the mirror image of Ghost Writer, and like that participant in the publishing world might well remain Anonymous forever.