Evening Star

OK, cool. I was kind of guessing that we were on the same page and it was an issue of hyperbole. It's all good.

As opposed to what? A blog post citing "an encyclopedia chapter summarizing survey data from various countries"? He gives the author's name but no further publication info. Why would you take that as more reliable than the 2001 census? (xpost)

(By the way, olp1fan, my screen name is a reference to an album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. I can see the confusion.)

You can read the census data directly from StatsCan: http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/demo30a-eng.htm

I'm not saying women don't face challenges. I'm saying that women can be appreciated for qualities other than their looks (and I don't think these points contradict that). I'd be the first to say that it should happen more often but it's going too far to say that it doesn't happen at all (and that's the reason why any woman enjoys being admired for her looks). Presumably the women who are getting 75% of MA-level SSHRC grants and 50% of PhD-level SSHRC grants are not getting them based on a head shot.

I watched the trailer. I don't disagree with its points but I think it's going too far to say that women can't be appreciated for anything other than their looks in our culture. (Margaret Cho and Rachel Maddow themselves are prominent media personalities for one thing.) I gave you an example in the academic sphere. There are many brilliant women scholars whose work I appreciate without even knowing what the women look like in some cases. (I mean, I think I'm still closer to your side of this than to olp1fan's.)

No one said they're not Liberals.

Sorry, you're losing me, cc. I'll never deny that our culture places a lot of importance on women's looks but it's definitely going too far to say that women can't be appreciated for anything else. I appreciate women for other things, for starters. (I definitely don't mark my female students based on their looks, for one thing.) I'm sure you do. And I mean, many men appreciate being seen as good-looking/attractive. Who doesn't? It doesn't mean it's the only thing someone can be appreciated for. (I have thought this through, btw.)

You could make it a prerequisite for voting perhaps... I'm kind of riffing here, admittedly. I haven't really thought it through...

This relates to what I was wondering as well.

Who's "we"? I'm not leaving it at that. You don't think that a political party can shift its positions on issues or that there can be a range of opinions within a political party? As far as I know, every prominent member of the LPC agrees with me that they are not a left-wing party.

I would be interested in hearing more practical discussion of what exactly meeting Kyoto or Copenhagen or any other targets would actually mean: i.e. What would we have to do in order to achieve x% reductions in y time? Would we need to close some factories? Switch z number of coal generators to wind or solar? Increase the federal tax on gasoline by 2%? Put w more dollars into public transit? Can we do these things? What would be the economic costs and benefits? Does anyone even know? What if the whole country adopted Ontario's or Nova Scotia's green energy plans? It seems a bit hollow to commit to a certain percentage of emissions reduction if we can't really know how or if we can.

As I said already, I'm not opposed to this! American kids recite a pledge of allegiance every day in school! I really like your idea of making every Canadian pass the citizenship test too.

He was criticizing the Liberals. And, yes, they were Liberals but they were not very left-wing. There's no contradiction there. Anyway, I have trouble getting really worked up over Canada quitting Kyoto because it was probably not very realistic that we would have met those targets anyway, especially since the Liberals hadn't done much at all to make it possible. If we can actually meet the Copenhagen targets that the government is apparently committing to, we'd be doing OK. I'll give the Conservatives credit for that if it happens. Gary Doer sounded very supportive of the feds' current plan. I realize that, as ambassador, he probably can't oppose the government line but this still did sway me a bit, since I don't doubt his sincerity on environmental issues.

This thread is making me very sad.

This sounds reasonable to me. I have trouble with the whole line of reasoning that the oath is an empty and meaningless ceremony anyway: if you believe this, then you should be advocating for the abolition of the requirement for the whole ceremony and oath altogether, for people of any religious or cultural background. If we're going to preserve the ceremony, then it makes sense to see that everyone is participating.

Ha, fair point. I was getting carried away there, probably.

Yeah, I was gonna say. I'm with you on some things here, cybercoma, but this line of reasoning seems a little fallacious to me. Any culture is going to have standards of attractiveness, which will privilege some people over others. And in ours, there are social expectations, concerning attractiveness as well as other things, of men as well as women. (I had real self-esteem issues over being a scrawny, unathletic bookish kid with thick glasses.) I don't think this is the equivalent of the customs you are comparing it to.

But the point is that they recited the oath. Thus, it's a matter of record that they betrayed it. You could probably say the same thing about courtroom oaths too. I mean, I place some value on procedure and ceremony. I would probably be in favour of requiring native-born citizens to recite the oath when they reach adulthood as well.

Ah, OK, that makes sense now.

Don't think that's his point.

(I am also curious why AW would have expected this issue to come up first in the US.)

I don't have a problem with requiring the veil to be removed in cases where someone's identity needs to be verified. And, unlike some posters here, I think the citizenship oath is of great significance. However, I'm a little confused as to why it's so important that the veil be removed in this case. Isn't the oath spoken aloud? I've never been to a citizenship ceremony but I administered oaths (not citizenship oaths) as a DRO at the last election. Each time, the person had to speak the oath out loud. Wouldn't you know if someone was reciting the oath regardless of whether their face was covered? What am I missing?

None of those are reasons to keep giving public money to Catholic schools. Reasons to raise standards in public schools? Perhaps.

Seems like the best approach. A lot of those Catholic schools are pretty swank too, at least in Ottawa. I hate hate hate that Ontario still funds Catholic schools but how easy would the change be, constitutionally?