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Driving to work on Saturday and Sunday I tune to CBC to get an idea of what is going on in Alberta and the world. On Sunday though I was quite perplexed. The topic was – I think – bear safety.
Bear safety, especially during spring, is a relevant topic in many parts of Alberta as human and wild habitats are now entangled. Reminding humans not to be stupid around bears saves human and bear lives. I was expecting a rundown of the basic tips for not being an idiot around bears. Something like this (also found on CBC).
You know, relevant fact based information that will useful most people. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, I was introduced to ‘indigenous ways’ of coexisting with bears, and how important it was to work with indigenous Canadians. The news piece featured a short interview with an individual who said that coexisting with bears was the indigenous way of life and it was culturally important feature of their heritage.
What I took from the piece was that it was important to, in an ‘indigenous way’ coexist with bears – because Indigenous Canadian Culture…
What was missing from the news story was any sort of factual information on keeping yourself safe during the annual spring bear awakening season(!). I’m pretty sure the phrase ‘indigenous ways of knowing” was repeated at least three times during the piece, and I thought to myself, “What additional knowledge is being added to the topic of bear safety?”.
I’m guessing the answer is pretty close to zero. Biologists have done a fairly good job at studying, recording, and making knowledgeable observations about bear behaviour why not share some of those with the public? But no, our national broadcaster decided to make the story about (undefined) mystical ways of knowing how to coexist with bears.
I know mornings can be a slow news time, but maybe CBC, just maybe make your news stories contain well, news?
The Paradox of Tolerance has been misused by those, mostly the activist left, in an attempt to quell freedom of speech and expression. Find the full essay here.
Transgender ideology is being debated and discussed in legislatures. If you value material reality you need to get involved and show up and participate otherwise this bullshit will get even more of a foothold in public institutions.
So brutal. Let’s erase females from society in the name of ‘trans inclusivity’. Absolutely not. We will use terms that accurately describe the reality we all share.
While performing this song, the soloist takes flight leading with beautiful passages, but then when the choir joins the piece soars even higher. Singing and sharing this during a performance can only be fully realized if you are in it.
This is an excerpt from Helen Joyce’s essay published in The Critic. It poses some answers to questions as to why our society is going the way it is, and what happened to the notion of people debating topics like adults and having adult sensibilities.
“More generally, this is a culture that encourages young people to regard themselves as traumatised. According to Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, US schools and universities have started to promote three pernicious falsehoods: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that feelings are a good guide to reality and action; and that life is a battle between good people and evil ones.
These dysfunctional beliefs, which Haidt dubs “anti-cognitive behavioural therapy”, promote mental fragility. They encourage people to feel fearful of ordinary words and to regard censorship as virtuous. The logic goes like this: being dis-agreed with makes you a victim; victims are good; people saying things you disagree with therefore deserve to be silenced and punished. This is the culture of “crybullying”: using claims of victimhood to harass others.
Haidt thinks social media, with its polarising and conflict-inducing algorithms, is largely to blame. Another culprit is the “post-modern turn” that was underway before the internet era, in which academics, activists and political theorists stopped thinking of reality as something that could be described objectively and studied empirically, embracing a radical subjectivity instead.”
The fragility of the next generation will be the doom of us all.
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