The former idealists who built The Coast into a substantial Halifax institution let down their readers and their craft today by failing to contest an order to help identify people who posted controversial opinions on their website. Madam Justice Heather Robertson granted an application by HRM Fire Chief Bill Mosher and Deputy Chief Stephen Thurber, who say the posters made allegations of racism, cronyism and incompetence against them. I want to stress that Contrarian has not read the comments in question, or the article that provoked them, and I have no opinion as to the merits of the dispute. But...

14 April, 2010

The Brain Repair Centre at the QEII Health Sciences Centre took a magnetic resonance image of Contrarian's brain today, as part of a study on memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease. The researchers assured me I was there solely as a control! While the machine buzzed, clicked, and roared, the kindly technicians played CBC radio through my headphones. This is what Contrarian's brain looks like while listening to Costas Halavrezos....

12 April, 2010

A CBC interviewer once asked Winnipeg lawyer Jack London, who often commented on legal issues, what qualities make a good judge. "Politeness" topped London's list. This struck me as apt. People who wield great authority should have the grace to do so without lording their stature over those whose lives they will rule upon. In this morning's New York Times,  Jeffrey L. Fisher, a Stanford law professor who once clerked for soon-to-retire US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, recalls Stevens’s trademark courteousness: During William Rehnquist’s tenure as chief justice, a lawyer was arguing in the court for the first...

11 April, 2010

On The Moth storytelling podcast, the great Lewis Lapham reminisces about his first job, covering Oakland City Hall for the San Francisco Examiner in an era when reporters wore hats. Featuring The Horny Photographer, The One-Legged Woman, and The Unencumbered Widow. Hat tip: Silas....

11 April, 2010

Writing on the US website The Daily Beast, Ottawa patent consultant and occasional Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan condemns Quebec Premier Jean Charest's bill to ban the traditional Muslim niqab. In a stand reminiscent of Maurice Duplessis's Grande Noirceur, Charest would ban religious veils on grounds  they "subjugate" women. Khan, who holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, nails the double-standard at play: The most vehement reactions against face-veiling have come from women, who have projected their own fears, assumptions, and judgments onto attire worn by a minority within a minority. They think of the bad old...

09 April, 2010

Former reporters turn up in the darndest places. Alan Jeffers, erstwhile ink-stained wretch for the Chronicle-Herald and Canadian Press, turned up this week on the website of Mother Jones, the "smart, fearless" left-wing American magazine once edited by Michael Moore. Jeffers was defending his current employer, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, from claims in both MoJo and Forbes Magazine, a rather more conservative journal, that it paid no US income tax in 2009 despite earnings of *cough* US$19.3 billion. And a fine job he did. In case you were wondering, $19.3 billion is enough to put a new Cadillac...

09 April, 2010

The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes: You can't help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter.  It's both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their "work".   Even when they learn that children have been injured it's no big...

08 April, 2010

Complex systems, writes Clay Shirky, have a habit of collapsing catastrophically, and that, he says, is the best way to understand what's happened to big media since the arrival of the Internet. About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now. To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the...

08 April, 2010
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