News item: Ontario sex ed: Protesters disrupt school meeting Protesters turned out in force at a Scarborough school Thursday night, disrupting efforts by two local MPPs to discuss Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum. The information session at Agincourt Collegiate Institute was cut short when demonstrators moved inside — chanting “We say no” at MPPs Soo Wong and Bas Balkissoon. The new curriculum has […]
Guest post by award-winning, bestselling author Samreen Ahsan Our world is trending on controversial hashtags these days: be it #JeSuisCharlie, #PeshawarAttack or #IWillRideWithYou. We all have our own opinions and thoughts—but what exactly does “freedom of speech” mean? Is it having the right to express an opinion on something that you observe or read, […]
Photo Credit: CanStockPhoto under creative commons licence Where is the line between the right to free expression and the responsibility to respect others? There’s a debate going on now about whether media outlets should republish the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that enraged three men in France enough to kill 25 people at the magazine and […]
There is a world-wide, religious war going on right now, even though Western, democratic and governmental leaders don’t want to admit it. It’s not a war prosecuted by all Muslims, not by any stretch. But it is a war, a campaign against freedoms the West purports to stand for: freedom of thought, freedom of […]
Exodus, Christmas and other mythic narratives I’ve been reading a lot about “narrative” in news and social media lately. Not as in literature, as in a story arc, but narrative applied to public discourse about current events. The narrative of global warming, for example, is now being derided by climate change deniers. In other […]
“I’m still running away” by Flickr user Vincepal, used under a Creative CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license. I have noticed a shift in my Facebook news feed: there are now fewer ridiculous rants against Obama and pro-gun-rights posts, fewer Creationists going on with spurious proofs of their improvable ideas, and thankfully fewer racists with equally implausible, unsupportable ideas. […]
Annihilus, copyright Marvel Comics Parliament has reconvened in Ottawa, and the buzz is already about the next election—which could be more than a year away. I’m bracing myself for a year of public negativity to come. In Canada, all the parties are already in full campaign mode. And in the US, the presidential election process […]