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I was born in Sweden in 1946 after my parents and brother and additional members of our extended family fled Estonia in 1944 before the Soviet occupying forces sealed the borders of the Baltic states. I grew up in Montreal. A memory from the first five years of my life, in Sweden in the late […]
Update A Dec. 6, 2016 Toronto Star article is entitled: “College of teachers finds Chris Spence guilty of professional misconduct: Former TDSB education director, accused of plagiarism, will now face penalty hearing.” [end] Definitions According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second edition, to plagiarize is 1 to take and use (the thoughts, writings, inventions, etc. […]
Update: A May 19, 2013 Globe and Mail article by Donald J. Savoie is entitled: “Nigel Wright’s resignation sends a powerful signal: serving Canadians is high risks with few rewards.” Where is power? (2009) In Power: Where is it? (2010), political scientist Donald J. Savoie argues that in contemporary society, power does not reside in institutions and […]
I read with interest this Jan. 6, 2013 interview in The Toronto Star with Anne Applebaum, author of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. The opening up of archives and the availability of personal accounts of the postwar years in Eastern Europe is, I believe, a significant achievement. Accurate and balanced overviews based on such resources are […]
Updates When I say that perception is reality does not apply in the case of climate change I’m saying that reality in this case obtrudes – as contested to many other situations in life, where evidence and facts can readily be ignored in favour of varied preferred ways of seeing things. A book that comes […]
Update: It may be added that the concept of a networked society is appealing but has limitations. [End of update] I’ve borrowed a Toronto Public Library copy of Communication power (2009) by Manuel Castells. I borrowed it after reading Burke (2005). As noted in the latter link, Castells argues that networks constitute the new ‘social […]
There was nothing liberal about the British empire, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. In Ghosts of Empire (2011), Kwasi Kwarteng argues that “Britain’s empire was not liberal in the sense of being a plural, democratic society. The empire openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of a chosen elite, drawn […]
In a previous post, I’ve referred to the argument that the introduction of a moral logic has turned out to be an effective way to sell public and private goods. This is a dimension of civic advocacy that I did not pay much attention to, when I first read the concluding chapter of Endless propaganda (Rutherford, […]
A city of one’s own (2008) addresses the distinction between what is private and what is public. The subtitle of the book is: “Blurring the boundaries between private and public.” Chapter 5, by Renaud Le Goix of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, is entitled “Gated communities: Generic patterns in suburban landscapes?” The chapter argues that “gated enclaves should not […]