Mystery of the day

Overheard on campus, one student dogmatically insisting to another: "It should be the law, like in Quebec. There you *have* to have --" and at that moment they disappeared into inaudibility.

So, what the heck do you have to have in Quebec, by law, that you don't in Ontario? I can tell you my stereotypes are tottering.

Keep it clean, eh.

Same as the old boss

At last, we have a budget (covered pretty comprehensively in print, but fragmented on-line: can it really be old news already?), and it's much as one would have expected: tax cuts, goodies for the construction industry, regional development stuff... 'stimulus', as they say. I'm skeptical as to how stimulated anyone will be, but what really baffles me is the assumption repeated ad nauseam that this is some massive departure from Conservative principles. I've been following North American politics for over thirty years, and I've never had an actual sighting of those fabled conservative principles. Mulroney ran deficits, Reagan ran deficits, both Bushes ran deficits. Harper hasn't been doing so, but then until the recent meltdown it would have been politically impossible for any leader to do so after the anti-deficit campaigns of the preceding Liberal governments. During my lifetime, a conservative has consistently been someone who hates paying taxes, hates the poor and hates the environment; but government spending and deficits have been neither here nor there ideologically (as opposed to rhetorically, of course). And if in a few years all this spending makes it easier to cut social programs and blow off environmental regulation, in the name of fiscal responsibility -- and you just know that's how they're going to play it -- the Conservative base will be tickled pink.

Who gurs? Uighurs!

As you will have noticed, I can't be bothered to post anything really serious about Guantanamo: the moral 'issues' are not hard enough to be intellectually interesting, and you can always go read Glenn Greenwald to get good and fired up. But I would like to offer up a brief prayer to the fickle gods of immigration that (instead of/in addition to Omar Khadr) Canada gets sent some of the Guantanamo Uighurs. They've been treated atrociously, to put it mildly; the probability of there being an Al-Qaeda mastermind among them is close to zero; it would deeply, deeply piss off the tyrannical and racist Chinese regime they made the mistake of standing up to, which is an intrinsically good thing to do; and the Uighurs make noodles.

A fascinating Silk Road culture, a burbling hotpot of East and Western culinary influences, the Uighurs may be the most significant noodle-making culture still unrepresented domestically. Canada has a proud tradition of noodle- and dumpling-oriented refugee policy: we welcomed the Hungarians in '56, the Vietnamese boat people decades later, and the Tibetans more recently (momos!). But so far as I can tell, still no significant Uighur presence (except for this poor guy). It is time that this un-Canadian injustice was rectified, and we got us some of them flung noodles that Alford and Duguid keep going on about.

Updates from all over

(1) Our Man on the Allegheny notes that a different version of the Obama-Astaire meme has reached the semi-hallowed halls of the NYT:

On Tuesday, our new president did offer one subtle whiff of the Great Depression. His injunction that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” was a paraphrase of the great songwriter Dorothy Fields, who wrote that lyric for “Swing Time” (1936), arguably the best of the escapist musicals Hollywood churned out to lift the nation’s spirits in hard times. But Obama yoked that light-hearted evocation of Astaire and Rogers to a call for sacrifice that was deliberately somber, not radiantly Kennedyesque.

But it's admittedly a different kettle of fish and (b), I'm not taking responsibility for anything Frank Rich writes. And having finally bothered to importune Mister Google about it, I see that of course I wasn't really the first to note the Obama-Astaire resemblances: so far as I can tell this guy was, and with better pictures too.

(2) A well-connected source, we'll just call him Gerald the Mole, points out that my snark at the Sunday Times' rather introverted circulation policy is misplaced. For their Canadian circulation efforts are entirely outsourced to... take a guess... the Globe and Mail! Which simply buys up some quota of papers and uses them to sweeten its own circulation efforts. Such as they are.

Gerald also confirms my worst fears, much less elegantly stated in Sunday's other post:

On another more urgent matter, you should know that a guiding principle of journalism is that "news" is something that editors have heard over and over and over.

Yes, that would be the problem in a nutshell.

UPDATE: Apparently 'outsourced' is an overstatement: it's just that these Sunday-only Canadian subscriptions to the NYT are part of a Globe campaign and my snark is more properly directed at them. (Though I suppose for them it may make business sense to use the Times as short-term bait.) 

Your morning aargh

Mostly not a bad paper today, but I must say it makes me angry that the Globe gives op-ed space to the drivelings of Margaret Somerville. God knows how she got to be "founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University"* but her reasoning is never less than excruciatingly embarrassing, and probably quite a few readers draw the natural inference about academic ethics as a whole. There really should be some kind of consumer warning tag-line: "plays an ethicist on teevee" or similar.

Today's column, so you don't have to torment yourself as I did: religion is kinda useful, Richard Dawkins is a meanie, and if you don't have a religion then that's your religion so there! So let's all be nice to religion.

Four hundred years of rather sophisticated and detailed argument about the genuinely difficult issues raised by the relations of church and state, modern liberalism pluralism and secularism ... all bypassed in blithe ignorance for maunderings so contentless as to be unfiskable. There's just no way they'd print something of comparable murk and incompetence about sports or business -- you know, stuff that matters -- but hey, you're an expert in ethics if you think you are.

* OK, she's a lawyer. And a licensed pharmacist in Australia! I have a feeling that Wikipedia is not giving me the full story here, but her lack of relevant credentials is certainly confirmed.

Digging their own graves

So Bill Kristol won't be writing a column for the New York Times any more. Instead, he'll be writing a column for the Washington Post! And the betting seems to be that the NYT will get some other ignorant right-wing doofus (that being the kind that's always in stock) to fill his slot. So there we are.

I think this will go down as the moment, or one of the pivotal moments, at which mainsteam American print journalism really jumped the shark. There is just no way that the editors of either the NYT or the WP are stupid enough not to realise that Bill Kristol is, in fact, stupid. They just don't care, because they have a cynical contempt for their readers. The thinking is that those readers are either themselves right-wing dickheads who don't care about that whole true/false distinction; or, that if they're reality-based, they're masochists who will be enthralled by a paper that makes them mad. But banking on the masochism of your customers is really not a great long-term business strategy.*

I used to have a subscription to the Sunday Times, but I can't say I was sorry when it lapsed. (Which it did because when my credit card rolled over they couldn't be bothered to contact me for the new expiry date -- I know an anecdote is not data, but that still seems to me to cast a lurid light on the NYT's circulation promotion efforts.) They have plenty of good 'content', but I just scan it whenever it suits me on line. I do not miss having it in the house. What do I subscribe to (besides the Globe)? The New Yorker, which they'd have to pry out of my cold dead hands. I also pay rather a lot to get the London Review of Books delivered. I read both when I dine alone; they're welcome in my house as good company. I trust them. I'm fond of them.

Now nothing stops a newspaper from being a beloved brand like that. I'm sure there are crazy-ass rightwing businessmen who are genuinely fond of the Wall Street Journal. I've heard people speak with affection of the Financial Times. And time was when the most treasured luxury in a lefty North American household was the copy of Manchester Guardian, airmailed worldwide every week at fantastic expense. (Imagine caring that much about a newspaper!) But then the Guardian decided to become just like every other paper, and sure enough now it sucks. And every time the NYT or WP hires a right-wing moron just for 'controversy' or a 'balance' nobody believes in, it's a sign that they just don't think it matters whether anybody actually likes their brand. As revenues plummet, in an era of almost infinite free content... yeah, good luck with that.

*Or maybe, dumbest of all, they maybe think it doesn't matter if you have a few nutbars and liars on staff so long as you also have columnists who cater to the reader who happens to prefer truth. So long as you have Paul Krugman, why mind about Bill Kristol? Think of it as balance! An even bigger tent! It's like a restaurant deciding to enhance its weekend brunch buffet with a poisoned rat dish -- I mean hey, what's the problem, we've still got the omelets for folks who like them, and now we'll be getting the poisoned rat market too! It just doesn't work that way.

Your morning aargh

I understand the pressures to fill those column inches, but is it really, really necessary for both my Saturday papers this week to have utterly identical, utterly tedious articles on Robbie Burns Day, Chinese New Year, and the Academy Award nominations? The first two I swear are just recycled from year to year; and there seems to be more and more bilge about the Oscars every year, even as normal people lose interest and the ratings drop. But then journalists are terrified of the responsibility of deciding for themselves what might be an important story. So if they covered Robbie Burns Day last year, and the Tourism Scotland p.r. office sends the same press release this year, they'll happily run the same damn story all over again, probably with a feeling of relief and satisfaction. And if the Oscars become boring, irrelevant, and uninteresting, if the televised show becomes unwatchable and people in fact stop watching, well, they'll just take it as fodder for a further genre of article moaning and whining about the Oscars. Whereas a rational person would respond by, you know, paying less attention to them.

I guess the truth is that at bottom the newspapers and the readers have radically different interests. As a reader, I want to learn important stuff I didn't know and read about things I haven't heard of before. (Pulau Weh, baby!) But new information is costly and time-consuming to acquire, and then there's the dread risk of controversy if you make your own editorial call about what's important. So a huge proportion of newspaper articles now are press release-driven, and/or a statement of the totally fucking obvious: weekend box office figures, stories about the Christmas shopping season, Oscar nominees, Robbie Burns Day blah blah blah. If there's one thing 'the news' should be it's unpredictable, but the papers are digging their own graves.