Archive for: September 2009
Sedated and body-snatched
You have to wonder who in Michael Ignatieff’s camp thinks it’s smart for him to keep giving long form interviews to plummy foreign journals. First it was the New Yorker, now it’s The Guardian, a left-of-centre daily in Britain, where Iggy hosted a BBC-TV arts program for six years.
Interviewer Rachel Cooke is a tad shaky on Canadian politics—she calls Ignatieff “the man most likely to be Canada’s next prime minister,” and describes the Harper government as “on its knees”—but she does get off a few delicious zingers.
On his return to Canada:
[H]e likes to attribute his return at least as much to homesickness as to pragmatism. Honestly! It wasn’t like he disliked Canada, or anything, for all that he chose to live elsewhere, and for so long. He missed the place: the cold, the skating rinks, the desperate need for mittens in winter.
On his new book:
This is what has had [critics] holding their noses. Now that he is a politician, they say, it’s hard to see True Patriot Love as anything other than a grotesquely over-blown campaign leaflet. Ignatieff, who has the aloof manner and the half-closed, upwardly-tilting eyes of a pedigree cat, looks at me more in sorrow than in anger when I bring this up. It is so very… painful because, after all, he was a writer long before he was a politician.
On his manner:
His tone, as he tells me this, is slow, excessively careful, and completely without irony, none of which would be surprising were he a career politician. Since when did irony and politics go? But Ignatieff used to be a writer. Listening to him now, it’s as if he’s been sedated, or body-snatched, or something. He’s like a jazz man who’s lost his sense of rhythm…
[E]verything I know about Canada has been gleaned from the stories of Alice Munro, and the novels of Carol Shields. Ignatieff nods approvingly at this: “Good for you!” he says, in the manner of a kindly don to a kid from a council estate.
On his Iraq War cock-up:
[I]n Canada, his former support for Bush continues to hang over him, like a cloud of midges.
Cooke gets a few interesting quotes out of Iggy, too:
Going to meet the president of the United States is a big deal. You do get, erm, a little apprehensive. But he is a master political animal. Grips you by the elbow, tells you that he’s read your books, sits you down, makes you feel like you’re the only guy in the world. Thirty-five minutes later, you think: that was a great guy. But you don’t feel surreal. You feel you’re sitting down with an extremely intelligent, good listener who’s locked right in. A month into his presidency, and he conveyed the impression that he’s always been president. That was genuinely astounding. He was at ease in some amazing way.
“I married the right woman,” he says. “That has turned out to be the most important single fact. I’m not going to die out there if people don’t like me because there’s someone at home who thinks I’m OK.”
Hat tip: A.N.
Or maybe you’re doing a breathtakingly crappy job – updated
Introducing Globe and Mail columnist and CTV host Jane Taber on a CBC panel today, Sunday Edition host Michael Enright said the following:
She is often accused by Tories of being a Liberal, and by Liberals of being a Tory, which means she is doing her job.
This canard is so common among journalists as to qualify as hackneyed. If both sides in a dispute criticize you, you much be striking the right balance. But there is an obvious alternative explanation: You could be doing such a crappy job that all sides find something to attack in your work.
Let me be clear that Contrarian is not offering a criticism of Ms. Taber, but of the smug imperviousness to criticism that pervades journalism.
A journalist friend responds:
The quote is glib, for sure. But if it’s accurate – that is, if Mr E. or the producer who wrote the script could actually attribute it to Grit & Tory sources – there’s the possible corollary that politicians from at least two parties assume that critical reportage or comment can only be partisan and not disinterested.
Good point. Politicians, take heed. But as for journalists, it’s a dangerous conceit to mark criticism as evidence of a job well done. It can be that. It can be the opposite.
The fiddle tree grows a concert
For years, North River fiddlemaker Otis Tomas had his eye on a giant sugar maple that grew on a hillside near his home. Finally one day, he cut it down.
At a Celtic Colours concert in Sydney Mines October 12, musicians from Cape Breton, Vermont, Scotland, and Ireland will play two fiddles, a guitar, a cello, and a harp, all built by Tomas using wood from the fiddle tree.
Subsidizing dirty coal instead of insulating houses
The provincial budget introduced this week fulfilled the Dexter Government’s campaign promise to bribe support middle class consumers with $30 million in annual subsidies for greenhouse gas production. The cynical gambit election promise will rebate provincial HST on residential electricity, an energy source fueled by filthy, health-degrading, planet-destroying coal. It will save consumers about $10 per month.
Writing at Rabble.ca, Christine Saulnier, Nova Scotia director of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternative, gives the plan a drubbing. Money quote:
This is not a significant saving for those who are struggling to pay their bills. It is, however, a significant loss of revenue to the government of approximately $15 million this year and $30 million next year… [A]n across the board energy rebate also benefits those who are not struggling to pay their bills; those who have high energy costs because they choose to own large homes, for example. This program will also benefit landlords who may or may not pass on savings to their tenants.
Saulnier doesn’t share Contrarian‘s worry that the election handout will encourage consumption of dirty electricity, but it certainly will do nothing to curb it. Instead of pissing away $30 million a year in a manner most Nova Scotians won’t even notice, government could have put the money into its anemic $1 million program to support home energy refits. Instead of 1,000 homes per year, the program could have cut energy consumption to 30,000. Over a 12-year period, that would cover every household in Nova Scotia.
I don’t know what’s more disturbing: the indifference to environmental issues this displays, or the pretense that it’s an attempt to “help families.”
Hat tip: Mike Targett.
Ignatieff disappoints but Harper frightens
Jeffrey Simpson delivered a devastating smackdown of Michael Ignatieff yesterday. Money quote:
The rhetoric infecting these speeches suggests wide differences and new ideas. Strip the rhetoric away, and the differences narrow and the search for interesting new ideas shrivels.
No question, Ignatieff is, to this point, a bewildering disappointment on policy and leadership, but there’s one thing missing from Simpson’s analysis.
The old saw about Liberal Party strategy says, “Campaign left, govern right.” These days, just about everyone campaigns moderate, even the Conservatives. Stephen Harper’s main contribution to his party’s revived fortunes has been the strategic good sense to slip a robe of moderation over its reformist undergarments. It’s a mirror image of the formula that brought Darrell Dexter to the premier’s office.
As Jim Nunn rightly warns, if we’re ever incautious enough to give Harper a majority, watch out. Unlike Dexter, who really is a moderate, Harper will change Canada in ways so radical, they will be hard to undo. They will be designed to be hard to undo, and Harper’s unprecedented concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s office will make it possible for him to move swiftly.
In years past, it was possible for Harper admirers to ridicule fears of a “secret Reform agenda” as a figment of fevered lefty paranoia. Harper settled that discussion a year ago, with the Neanderthal immoderate mini-budget that nearly brought down his government in favor of a coalition.
He flashed the secret agenda again yesterday by playing hooky from the UN Climate Change conference, and Barack Obama’s speech thereto, in favor of a commercial appearance at a Tim Horton’s in New York Oakville, where the company re-announced what Susan Delacourt points our was a three month old decision.
United flirts with another ditty disaster
Buried in a Herald story about Dave Carroll‘s testimony before a passenger rights organization-sponsored hearing in Washington, lies this little nugget: Last week, for the first time since his YouTube hit went Stage 6 pandemic, Carroll inadvertently flew United Airlines—a long booked connecting flight to a gig in Chicago.
As the flight prepared for takeoff, a United attendant, apparently oblivious to Carroll’s musical history with the airline, chastised him for not placing his (Taylor?) guitar in an overhead bin. A nearby passenger watched in amusement.
“Oh, he’s going to write a song about you,” she said.
The Dartmouth company and the Rhino
A Dartmouth manufacturer has come to the aid of a rhinoceros suffering from dry itchy skin in a Georgia zoo.
Dr. Hayley Murphy, director of veterinary services for Zoo Atlanta, thought the “dry, flaky, skin [with] some ulcerations” exhibited by Boma, the zoo’s black rhino, likely reflected broader health problems. When she met reps from Dartmouth-based Ascenta Health Ltd., at a trade show earlier this year, she decided to try an omega-3 dietary supplement Ascenta markets for horses.
An Ascenta news release says Equine Omega-3 produced a dramatic improvement in Boma’s skin problems after three months of use.
Ascenta also makes human health products using Omega-3 fatty acids, for which the news release makes various health claims. A quick check with my favorite debunker of alternative health scams, Quackwatch.org, raises no alarm about omega-3 fatty acid supplements.
So… (cont.)
Maritime Noon host Costas Halavrezos has interviewed hundreds of so-talkers:
“So” is the name of a great Peter Gabriel album, but I’ve had precisely the same discussion with colleagues about its use as a preface to answers.
I first noticed the “so” tic when interviewing American academics and bureaucrats, but it has clearly become an invasive species here, with increasing prevalence over the past year.
(I should start assembling the digital detritus I’ve edited out of interviews: so, um, well, uh.)
So a linguist and a blogger walked into a bar…
Nothing stirs up readers like English usage. Several have responded to my earlier post about a habit many interviewees have recently developed: beginning their answers with, “So…” John Hugh Edwards got the ball rolling here, but CBC’s Quirks and Quarks had interviewed a linguist about this verbal tic more than a year ago.
Jonathan Dursi, a “young academic” from U of T, writes:
It’s definitely *not* an American thing; it’s much broader than that. My generation of academics do this. No idea where we picked it up from, if not from the previous generation. Just as [Simon Fraser linguist Maite Taboada] said: it’s a marker for “I’m introducing something new here” or “I’m going to answer your question, but I have to give you a bunch of background information first.”
Well, the “introducing new topic” explanation doesn’t fit with placing the word at the start of a specific answer to a specific question. But the “First here’s some background information you need” could be right.
Our friend CD Cook has really gone to town:
Beginning a sentence or utterance with so, for no apparent reason that falls within defined use of the word, appears to be a new phenomenon in English that is not restricted at all to academics. See discussions here, here, here, and here. It is clearly being noticed across the board(s).
This blogger has noticed this use of ‘so’ in tech talk, and offers a plausible explanation:
“‘So’ suggests the speaker is continuing a previous train of thought. ‘So’ is a conjunction that can be used to connect two clauses. Perhaps it’s a way for a slightly anxious speaker to launch into their talk with a feeling that they are already on a roll rather than starting from a cold start.In any case, it’s a redundant element at the start of a sentence, that seems to have crept into wide use. I hope it dies out.”
Good luck on that one. Cook goes on to raise another possibility:
When someone is asked to give a response in an interview, their answer may first go through their mind in terms they are comfortable with (professional jargon etc), but they quickly process it into something they discern as more palatable for a lay audience. They may do this reduction process mentally, and then use so as a joining word between the two. I think this links very much with the idea presented above in the technical talk blog that the person is either using this to link to things they have processed internally, or they don’t want to start their talk cold, so to speak.
So how about you get off the back of the academics? It’s probably the frigging teenagers who started it all anyway.
Moral panic: computer memory is bad for you! – rebuttal
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose interview on Spark was the subject of a somewhat testy post on Contrarian yesterday, has returned fire.
I saw your blog entry on my interview with CBC and my book “Delete”. From your entry it is obvious that you have not read the book. [True.] That’s perfectly fine – except that you then move to render a flawed judgment on the book.
To start with, the example that I used in the interview is not about photographic memory, but about a biological condition of a very small number of people who cannot forget – or at least remember a great deal more than average humans. Photographic memory is very different – and susceptible to Dan Schacter’s “seven sins of memory”.
Contrary to what you seem to insinuate I have not blamed Google for Andrew Feldmar’s difficulties; rather I used his case to highlight the fact that with the help of the digital tools that surround us institutions and organizations can now – at very low cost – store and retrieve massive amounts of information about others. In the informational privacy literature this has been well described as potentially leading to power imbalances, which it is argued ought to worry us.
However, in my book – as well as in the interview! – I make clear that my major concern has to do with how humans perceive time, and place information in a temporal context; it is this central element, linked to research of cognitive psychologists that your blog entry misses.
Thus, your judgment that I am guilty of category error is simply incorrect – especially since the central message of the book is emphatically not that technology is to blame, or could provide a simple solution, but that changes in human behavior facilitated by information economics and technological change have made us forget remembering, and that it will take us humans to reset this balance.
In the spirit of fact-based discussion, perhaps you might be even interested in reading the book?
It’s true that I did not read the book, nor did I purport to have done so. My post explicitly responded to the interview, and mentioned the book only by way of introductory credentials.
I hope people will listen to the interview or download it; encouraging readers to do so was one purpose of the post. They can judge for themselves. To my ear, on two careful listenings, there was a clear tone of alarmed hand-wringing about a technological process that has got out of control. It strikes me as a subtle variant of the “Internet pedophiles will ensnare your kids” stories so favored by newspapers.
The ever tactful Nora Young also responded:
I think new technologies of communication do change the way we think, remember, and relate to one another. I suppose I’m a McLuhanite in that sense. I would say the same about the move from oral to written communication, for instance, so I don’t think it’s really uncharacteristic for Spark, or indeed, part of a moral panic. More than that, though, what I love about Spark is that it’s an opportunity to air provocative ideas about technology, and hopefully inspire debate and dialogue, of which your post is an excellent example.
