The “woke” phenomenon seems to be everywhere these days. Universities, businesses and government agencies annually spend millions of dollars to promote wokeness, which, in those settings goes under the well-known DEI acronym: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Like the...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
The intersection of music and politics has been one of the most striking features of modern culture. Almost all of the nation-building movements that swept through the West after the American and French revolutions owe some of their energy to the emotional appeal of...
A free society puts parents above the state and educators. Thankfully, that’s what Manitoba premier Heather Stefanson wants to do. While on the mid-August campaign trail, the Progressive Conservative premier proposed four new parental rights for the Public Schools...
The United Nations (UN) was born out of an idea for creating a society of nations, a global community, a brotherhood of nations built on a set of higher ideals. These ideals would give rise to a global village with accountability to each other, including social...
The Alberta premier’s plan to treat the coronavirus as endemic was the way out of the COVID crisis. That he is once again adopting restrictions for the province, for the fourth time, does not negate the endemic approach. But his declaration, paraphrasing President...
The last few weeks exposed schizophrenic aspects of Canadian culture and their influence on governments’ behaviour. The most palpable example lies in how we trampled, in fear, over memory and institutions, obsessively protective and morally dismissive of dignity and...
Lack of understanding of the hidden police culture will, once again, only result in superficial changes, all the while the festering cinders remaining to reignite another bonfire. Despite the promises made during the past decade, particularly with the adoption and...
In a famous 60 Minutes interview, Mike Wallace asks Morgan Freeman how to get rid of racism. Freeman instantly responds by saying that it’s easy: stop referring to him as a Black man and he will stop referring to Wallace as a White man. Freeman says only by removing...
Throughout history, when one religion succeeds in achieving political dominance over another, one of the first things that happens is that places of worship change hands. When the Romans put down the second of two great Jewish rebellions against their rule, Emperor...
To its credit, Australia, together with strong leadership from the United States, is leading the charge to conduct an inquiry into the origin of the novel coronavirus that has killed hundreds of thousands and severely disrupted the lives of billions of the world’s...
Words are important tools in human interaction and, used in certain ways, they become weapons. Politics these days is the art of twisting language to do harm to your enemies. Let us examine how certain words and phrases have lost their original meanings and have...
Since the early days of the internet, it has been a digital environment of communication across wide distances, a repository of shared files, and a place of shadowy exchanges of digital media of dubious ownership. The internet has exploded in use and user base since...
Where there is no police, every man is a warrior, and every group is a regiment. Carrying out ethnographic field research as a cultural anthropologist, I lived for two years in Baluchistan, a cultural region in southeastern Iran, western Pakistan, and southern...
Social Media Is Here to Stay, Better to Adapt than Resist Over the years, the legacy press has gone from arrogance to hysteria as social-media firms eat up its advertising lunch. Rather than adjust to modern trends, the once-feared fourth estate is now begging the...