Adam Kingsmith 2013-05-24T01:29:52-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=adam-kingsmith Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Adam Kingsmith Good old fashioned elbow grease. Canada's "Mosaic" Has Racist Cracks tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3269960 2013-05-14T11:16:18-04:00 2013-05-14T12:21:33-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
Here in the "Canadian Mosaic", issues of race are largely stricken from the language of the everyday. We prefer not to speak openly about racism, for deconstructing it might chip away at that illusory façade of Canada as a nation of perpetual tolerance and chronic multiculturalism -- a delusion we all hold dear to our glowing hearts.

Unfortunately for all those "liberal-minded" Canadians out there who view our country to be so forward thinking and accommodating that racism is a non-issue, institutionalized multiculturalism is not the same thing as social racial equality.

To borrow from novelist James Baldwin, prejudicial racial viewpoints in Canada are reaffirmed through "the evidence of things not seen." Histories of African and Chinese slave labour, Aboriginal genocide and Japanese internment are all washed over by propagandized narratives of multicultural progress, creating a racial logic which has made it impossible for many Canadians to even recognize the racism taking place in the banal spaces all around them -- from the subway ride to the dining room table.

Yet the structurally repressive policies implemented by our government, the subtle prejudices of our media and propagation of the multicultural myth by the citizenry say more about the clandestine state of racism in Canada than the sheepish, feathery championing of omnipresent cultural tolerance and ethnic diversity ever could.

So while Canada is indeed a nation of immigrants -- according to new data from the controversial 2011 National Household Survey, 6.8 million foreign-born residents now call Canada home -- many of us are still ambivalent and suspicious regarding immigration -- even people who were themselves migrants only 30 years ago, are as eager as the next to stop the flow of newcomers from "taking all our jobs."

For his part, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney insists that 2013 will mark the 7th consecutive year in which Canada will admit 240,00 to 260,000 new permanent residents -- "the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history." Yet 260,000 immigrants are equal to only 0.74 per cent of the population -- nowhere near the record-breaking numbers that the Harper government brazenly claims.

As data from the archives of Immigration Canada shows, immigration levels have surpassed that meagre 0.74 per cent countless times in the last century. During a 7-year stretch in the 1950s, the average was around 1 per cent of the population -- equal to 350,000 Canadians. During the 1920s, immigration swelled to 1.4 per cent, in the 1880s, as much as 2 per cent -- comparable to 700,000 immigrants annually.

Last year, despite protests from health care professionals, the Harper Government eliminated all but the most basic healthcare for refugee groups -- reaffirming the widely held belief that most refugees are merely scamming our healthcare system. A belief that is completely unfounded according to the Canadian Health Coalition.

Moreover, since 2006 the refusal rate for Canadian citizenship applications has more than doubled thanks in part to more selective testing requirements, causing the number of immigrants from Asian countries such as China and India to halve.

Thus in reality, immigration is substantially more regulated than the government would have us believe -- welcoming newcomers only if they "meet our national economic, cultural and social needs in a highly effective manner." What those vague needs are is anybody's guess, but as more and more studies show that the future of Canadian prosperity is directly linked to increased immigration, the current of racism may very well be restricting the flow of much-needed skilled workers into Canada.

Beyond immigration, a recent report from Amnesty International -- which was condemned as irrelevant and cast aside by the Harper Government, highlights many of Canada's deep-seeded racial prejudices against Indigenous populations.

"Be it respect for treaty and land rights, levels of poverty, average lifespans, violence against women and girls, dramatically disproportionate levels of arrest and incarceration, or access to government services such as housing, healthcare, education, water and child protection, Indigenous peoples across Canada continue to face grave a human rights crisis."


Just take a look at the abhorrent conditions on a First Nations reserve, or the immense discrepancies in quality of life between Indigenous populations and the rest of Canada, and you can see that Amnesty is really getting at something here.

What's more a recent report to the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination has concluded that Canadian media outlets continue to reinforce negative stereotypes of First Nations, thereby creating an environment of prejudice that allows for a largely uninformed public to perpetuate acts of racial discrimination.

In a recent blog post, Professor Leanne Simpson brilliantly catalogues numerous examples of how both mainstream media, and a prejudice populous desperate to reaffirm Aboriginal cultural inferiority continue to view Indigenous issues through the lens of the colonial ideology that permeates every aspect of Canadian culture.

Thus if chronically structuralized Indigenous poverty, an increasingly racially-charged media bias, and the Harper Government's refusal to permit the UN special rapporteur on Indigenous peoples from investigating the state of racial equality in Canada are stitched together, the ideal of multicultural Canada seems a tad porous.

Couple this with a squeeze on immigration in the face of an economic necessity for sustained population growth, a rise in racially motivated hate crimes against Arab and Muslim populations, and the subsequent whitewashing of Canadian cultural institutions such as our new 100-dollar bill, and you have a narrative fueled by more "evidence of things unseen" than many of us seem willing to acknowledge.

And make no mistake, until Canadians are willing to acknowledge these prejudices which permeate subtly and not-so-subtly through our government, our media, and our collective national consciousness, we will remain a delusional society of "regular," ethnicity-free, whitewashed Canadians, where the ethnic or Indigenous "Canadians" are merely tolerated -- sort of, as guests in "our" cultural homeland.

]]> The Slow and Painful Death of Freedom in Canada tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2946418 2013-04-29T08:13:05-04:00 2013-04-29T08:14:27-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
In 1982, Canada adopted the Access to Information Act -- making it one of the first countries to pass legislation recognizing the right of citizens to access information held by government, and as recently as 2002, Canada ranked among the top 5 most open and transparent countries when it came to respect for freedom of the press.

Fast-forward a decade, and we've become a true north suppressed and disparate -- where unregistered civic demonstrations are inhibited and repressed, rebellious Internet activities are scrutinised and supervised, government scientists are hushed and muzzled, and public information is stalled and mired by bureaucratic firewalls.

In the 2013 World Press Freedom Index -- an evaluation done by Reporters Without Borders on the autonomy of a country's media environment, Canada came in at a paltry 20th, putting us behind liberal-democratic powerhouses such as Namibia, Costa Rica, and the Western Hemisphere's new champion of free media -- Jamaica.

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So what the devil is going on?

According to page 8 of the report, this uneasy drop "was due to obstruction of journalists during the so-called 'Maple Spring' student movement and to continuing threats to the confidentiality of journalists' sources and Internet users' personal data, in particular, from the C-30 bill on cyber-crime."


Yet perhaps more distressing than the consistent during Quebec's Maple Spring has been the abrupt confiscation of the right of citizens in the province to spontaneously demonstrate and protest in public spaces -- seen recently at the totalitarian debacle known as the Anti-Police Brutality Protest, where over 250 people were arrested for failing to register with authorities before assembling.

Passed last May by the National Assembly of Quebec in the midst of the student upheaval, Bill 78 requires organisers of assemblies involving 50 or more people to register the details of any demonstration with the police at least eight hours before it begins. Anyone who does not comply with the law faces a fine from $1000 up to $125,000 depending on his or her involvement and leadership in the protest.

Not to be outdone by Quebec's anti-demonstration legislation however, the federal government decided to continue the trend with Bill C-309 -- criminalising the act of covering one's face during any sort of display of civil disobedience. And as opposed to the customary fine, the bill carries with it a penalty of up to five years in prison.

But don't worry -- it's for our protection.

Speaking of our "protection," Bill C-30, or the Lawful Access Act -- proposed by the Harper government in February of last year, attempted to grant authorities the power to monitor and track the digital activities of all Canadians in real-time.

This internationally-condemned Orwellian "cyber-crime legislation" planned to force service providers to log and surrender browsing information about their customers upon government request as well as permit the remote access to any personal computer in the country -- all without the need of any sort of warrant.

And while Bill C-30 has been tabled for the time being, Bill C-12 -- which similarly authorises the warrantless acquisition of customer information from ISPs, email hosts, and social media sites on a voluntary basis, looks poised to creep in and achieve many of Bill C-30's initial objectives by reducing the need for warrants, and gradually circumnavigating safeguards that protect our personal information online.

Of course we've all had the rhetoric jammed down our throats -- these adjustments to a citizen's right to public assembly, defiant anonymity, and digital privacy are the necessary sacrifices we must be willing to make in order to shelter ourselves from half-heartedly articulated illusory threats such as "terrorism" or "extremism".

But the undemocratic stifling doesn't stop here either. Even our taxpayer-funded government scientists -- the last line of defense against ignorance and uncritical thinking, are increasingly coerced into suppressing unwelcome findings.

According to a report by researchers at the University of Victoria titled Muzzling Civil Servants: A Threat to Democracy, "the federal government has recently made concerted efforts to prevent the media - and through them, the general public - from speaking to government scientists, and this, in turn, impoverishes the public debate on issues of significant national concern."


When Canadian scientists are permitted by their handlers to speak to journalists or international colleagues, they are forced to regurgitate pre-approved party findings that rest neatly within the confines of official government policies -- regardless of what the yields of their research and expert opinions may actually be telling them.

What's even more concerning is that in a recent study by the Center for Law and Democracy -- which classifies the strength and effectiveness of access to information laws in 93 countries, Canada ranked an utterly humiliating 55th, thanks in large part to the bureaucratic red tape that smothers requests for access to public records.

So perhaps it is time for us Canadians to wake up and smell the suppression -- no longer are censorships solely the purview of tin-pot dictators in far away regimes.

These seemingly gradual erosions to the freedoms of assembly, expression and information in Canada are all very real -- just last week, Parliament actually struck down a bill claiming that "public science, basic research and the free and open exchange of scientific information are essential to evidence-based policy-making."

And I have the sinking suspicion that whichever party is in power, these rights will continue to decompose unless the citizenry is willing to vocalise this as a major election issue. After all, even in democracy new governments seldom willingly return rights and freedoms back to the people once in office -- power can be just too enticing.

One day it's the right to spontaneously demonstrate, next it's the right to wear a mask well doing so, then Internet privacy, scientific inquiry, public records, and so on as the vice compressing freedom and civil disobedience slowly tightens on us all.

But then again, this is Canada. That sort of thing could never happen here, right?]]> Boston Bombing Showed the Break in "Breaking News" tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3139919 2013-04-23T17:00:14-04:00 2013-04-23T17:25:36-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/ "I like my news right, not fast," wrote Huffington Post Canada Blogs Editor Angelina Chapin last week.

What Chapin is touching on here is an unsettling new practice sweeping the ranks of major mainstream media outlets -- scooping the news instead of vetting the facts.

For in a recent attempt to keep up with rabid Internet speculation, supposedly "professional" media channels including The Associated Press, CNN, The New York Post, Fox News, and The Boston Globe, have all inaccurately reported major aspects of the various stories continuing to unfold in the aftermath of the Boston bombings.

Unsurprisingly, the frequent mishaps from the past week are by no means the first instances of "trusted" media outlets misreporting critical parts of a major story.

In 1948, The Chicago Tribune mistakenly declared Thomas Dewey the winner of that year's presidential election. After the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt, multiple news networks wrongly announced his spokesperson -- James Brady, to have been killed in the crossfire. And in 2000, CNN infamously miscalculated Florida's vote count -- reporting a win for the Democrats and Al Gore in the presidential election.

But people make mistakes -- it's understandable that even the titans of media let the occasional error slip through their rigorous screening processes. Yet the problem -- for the media anyways, is the advent of user-driven reporting via the Internet has drastically reduced the news cycle from a matter of hours to a matter of seconds.

And in a misguided attempt to keep pace with the simultaneous chatter and speculation running rampant on content-aggregated social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter, more traditional media outlets are giving themselves less time to thoroughly scrutinise the facts behind a story before pushing it through to posting.

Expectedly, this "journalism by rat race" is resulting in a dramatic decline in quality, earnestness, and the general investigative ethos of the content currently being peddled by the daily newspapers, 24-hour television networks, and subsequent online subsidiaries which have come to define the conventional media landscape.

Of course, the news has never been -- and will never be, perfect. Information collected and interpreted by people will always reflect their own inherent subjectivities and partialities. But the decay we are presently witnessing is much more concerning than a mere, unavoidable media bias -- it is lazy, impulsive, sensationalistic journalism.

Just look at the media's disconcerting track record as of late. Since the rise of real-time amateur reporting on the Web has effectively eroded the media's longstanding monopoly over what information constitutes the news, reporting errors have reached their highest level in the 70 years that journalistic statistics have been collected.

In 2011, NPR, CBS, and Reuters all misreported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords died in an assassination attempt. In June 2012, CNN and Fox News wrongly declared that the US Supreme Court found the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to be unconstitutional, and in the Newtown shootings later the same year, countless news agencies misidentified the shooter and mixed up who was on staff in the school.

As for Boston, The New York Post ran two innocent men on the cover as suspects in the bombing, the usual offenders jumped the gun by reporting that there had been an arrest, and CNN took the cake for what may very well be the most embarrassing and sensationalistic hour of televised network journalism in recent media memory.

So if the past few years of melodramatic reporting, non-existent fact-checking, and informational apathy have taught us anything, it's that the days of mainstream media as an institution of sober-second thought and critical reflection are over -- no wonder just 25% of those recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that news organizations get their facts straight, while 66% said stories are "often inaccurate."

Thanks to that incessant need to keep up with the pitfalls and pandering found in social media reporting, the line between an informed media and the speculative masses has effectively disappeared -- now they're almost one and the same. And if professional reporters are not even going to take responsibility for redacting errors and running corrections, what makes them any different from fallible citizen journalists?

Obviously amateur social media reporting isn't perfect, far from it -- I've written an entire piece dedicated to uncovering some censoring pitfalls of user-driven content-aggregating websites, but the big difference is that the majority of users tend to take what they read from unprofessional sources on the Internet with a grain of salt -- something many of us still don't do when it comes to claims made by "expert" media.

Unfortunately, as Boston has reminded us, it seems that same salinization must now be applied to the big dogs. It's not that amateur sources on Twitter and Reddit have become more reliable than say CNN or The Associated Press -- unless perhaps said amateur is tweeting on location -- it's that the two have become indistinguishable.

As the majority of major media have decided to trade in diligence for speed, there is no longer a guarantee that the conclusions made by a career reporter tweeting from a news room will reflect a well thought out, well researched, critically reflexive point of view -- his or her thoughts may be just as zealous and fanatical as the rest of ours.

And that's fine. With the advent of the Internet, the curation of the news has become more of a conversation that a lecture. All the pitfalls of stitching together a story -- the theories, leads, mistakes, hunches, verifications, and conclusions are all out in the open in real-time, as opposed to dead on the nightly news' cutting room floor.

I for one prefer it this way -- the benefits of seeing how a story comes together far outweigh the negatives.

But with great informational access, comes great sceptical responsibility. This means think before you re-tweet, pause before you assume, and above all, examine claims by everyone from CNN lead anchor Wolf Blitzer to this amateur commentator through a rose-coloured lens of informed and guarded cynicism.

]]> Trudeau Has More of a Platform Than We Think tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3106160 2013-04-19T12:01:56-04:00 2013-04-19T12:14:59-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
And now that the most anticlimactic leadership race in recent memory is finally in the books -- we can all turn our attention towards the unpleasant trudge to 2015. I say unpleasant because for all the rhetoric that each side will undoubtedly spew, not much is going to change in Canada regardless of which party takes Parliament Hill.

Running their playbook to the letter, Harper and the Tories will initiate hostilities with a fierce barrage of Justin Trudeau attack ads. Never being big on originality, the ads will likely poke fun at the new Liberal leader for his inexperience, lack of policy, dynastic namesake, and apparent charity fundraiser striptease capabilities.

During the leadership race Trudeau was rather ambiguous when it came to tangible policy proposals -- instead insisting it's not the leader's role to hand down decrees from on high to grassroots Liberals, and if elected, he would consult both partisan Liberals and other Canadians so to develop his party's platform from the bottom up.

Fair point in theory, but let's wring out what little Trudeau has said so far.

In an interview with the National Post he ruled out pushing Quebec to sign the constitution, and threw his support behind the Clarity Act -- which stipulates a clear majority of Quebecers must vote "Yes" to a referendum question on independence before the federal government would agree to negotiate the terms of a divorce.

Moreover, Trudeau has also signified his intentions to: increase access to post-secondary education, focus on "better appointed" as opposed to elected Senators, support the development of the Keystone XL Pipeline, foster the foreign ownership of state-owned enterprise, and has ruled out any changes to corporate tax rates.

Interestingly enough, Trudeau has also unveiled a unique 5-point plan regarding democratic reform that promises to lighten up backbench muzzling, modify first-past-the-post so that seats in the House of Commons better represent the popular vote, and institute more third-party oversight on federal advertising and elections.

Granted it's still very early, but from what we do know -- this "I'll believe it when I see it" democratic reform notwithstanding, Trudeau's policies do not exactly provide that "clear, strong alternative" which the Liberal Party is trying to convey.

Under Trudeau, richer Canadians will not pay more tax -- neither will corporations, the Senate will stay the same -- appointed not elected, post-secondary education enrolment may increase -- no word on unemployment though, Quebec will keep its status quo -- Canadian only by geography, and as is tradition, the environment will be on the backburner -- fossil fuels are just fine, so long as they are the "green" ones.

Yet in Justin's defense, it's not like the New Democratic Party is any better.

Under the leadership of ex-Liberal Thomas Mulcair, the party is doing everything it can to wash away its foundations, voting overwhelming to strip most references to socialism from the preamble of the party constitution -- opting for business-friendly language that emphasizes buzzwords such as sustainable economic development.

According to Mulcair, this rebranding is "a better way for us to reach out beyond our traditional base," which is short for, "we got many of the Liberal voters last time around, so we're going to go ahead and become the Liberals in order to keep them."

As NDP Socialist Caucus Chair Barry Weisleder points out -- the party now "refers to socialism as being basically in the rear-view mirror... something in the tradition of some of the members, but it is not 'active' in terms of how we grapple with the environmental crisis, the ever-present and deepening world economic crisis, the wars of intervention, the threat of nuclear war... We're at risk of becoming another Liberal party -- opportunism run mad."


Of course the race is still very young -- why not give Trudeau and Mulcair the benefit of the doubt and assume that they will eventually get around to providing tangible policy alternatives that will erode that deep-rooted conservative status quo?

Because they won't -- since Canadians aren't forcing them to do so.

If the overlap between our major political parties is any indication of what it is we're asking for, then the vast majority of Canadians still seem to value inequitable free markets over a strong social safety net, endless cash from exploiting the tar sands over preserving the environment for future generations, and safety from omnipresent "terrorism" over an outspoken, transparent, and tolerant society.

For as it stands, whichever party actually gets elected in 2015 is of little consequence -- these conservative views are going to define the winning party's platform regardless, that is, unless Canadians start insisting on policy prescriptions which are much more drastic and foundationally-challenging from our political opposition.

And before all of you partisan Liberals and NDPers come back with a few nitpicky details that essentially boil down to nothing more than a narcissism of small differences, ask yourselves this -- do you really believe that a few petty policy shuffles are going to solve the chronic structural inequality problems in the country? What about unemployment? The environment? The xenophobic culture of fear?

If you answered "yes" to these questions than you've already had way too much of the partisan Kool-Aid -- for as it currently stands, our opposition leaders are offering up nothing but Band-Aids for the treatment of bullet wounds -- and that's not going to stop the bleeding.



]]> 6 Cognitive Biases That Make Politics Irrational tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3077740 2013-04-15T00:00:39-04:00 2013-04-14T23:20:09-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
Perhaps there may be a correlation here?

Sexism, war, corruption, racism, torture, slavery, and inequality seem to be chronic societal problems -- democratic freedoms are sharply declining, the global economy is limping along, the environment is inching ever closer to that point of irreversible decay, and to top it off, we have a fickle dictatorship threatening nuclear war.

Yet our current worldwide political, economic, environmental, and nuclear troubles are not entirely our own doing -- well at least not consciously that is.

Critical psychological analyses have observed time and again that we humans are somewhat of a predictably irrational species -- repeatedly engaging in a multitude of nonsensical behaviours -- evolutionary hand-me-downs from a forlorn period of human tribal interaction that scientists have come to refer to as cognitive biases.

In turn, these seemingly irrational flaws in judgement can lead to perpetual distortion, inaccurate judgement, and illogical interpretation -- all of which are key ingredients in the widening of cultural rifts, the deepening of global disparity gaps, and the general intensifying of political upheavals.

The good news is that just by being aware of how cognitive biases alter our thinking and decision-making, we may be less likely to fall victim to them in the first place -- paving the way for a more globally conscious international citizenry to arrive at more politically, socially, economically, and environmentally cognisant conclusions.

1) Confirmation bias -- We tend to agree with people who agree with us, forming culturally cohesive social circles based upon similar viewpoints, and unconsciously referencing only those perspectives which reaffirm our deeply entrenched beliefs -- as I've written before, the Internet can in part be attributed to the increasing prevalence of this bias.

At the same time, we overly-scrutinize, dismiss, and outright ignore opinions, figures, or evaluations -- no matter how comprehensive -- that challenge our self-constructed worldviews. This contributes to overconfidence in one's personal beliefs, leading to lopsided decision-making in political and economic contexts.

2) Ingroup bias -- Similarly to confirmation bias, due to our species innate tribal desire to be socially accepted, we tend to favour the thoughts, ideals, and sentiments of those with whom we racially, culturally, and ethnocentrically identify with most.

Unsurprisingly, this means we are inadvertently -- and at times advertently -- suspicious, fearful, and even disdainful of the preferences, wants, needs, and values of groups that we struggle to identify with. Racial profiling, Islamophobia, and the predominant culture of fearing "the other" all characterise such ingroup biases.

3) Status-quo bias -- Due to our unproven assumption that fresh alternatives are inferior to our current state of affairs, we are apprehensive of change. Thus people's preferences tend to be motivated by a desire to keep things as familiar as possible.

The repercussions of this bias confines us to the same routines, political parties, and economic strategies -- i.e. America's perpetual inability to enact healthcare reform -- and overall, this nostalgic longing for an antiquated and illusory status quo serves as the driving force behind many of the unfounded ideologies of modern conservatism.

4) Negativity bias -- People seem to give more weight to negative experiences -- not just because we're morbid, but because given the choice, our cognitive selective attention processes identify negative news as inherently important or profound.

There are plenty of theories why we emphasise pessimism -- suspicion, boredom, the fact that evolutionarily, heeding bad news could be more advantageous than disregarding good news, but nonetheless, violence, crime, and other injustices are steadily declining -- yet most people still believe the world to be getting worse.

5) False-consensus bias -- As we are limited in understanding circumstances outside of our own consciousness, we tend to believe that most other people think just like we do -- although there may be no justification for such an assumption.

Especially rampant in group settings, false consensus biases can make us accept that the opinions, preferences, and values of our own group match those of the larger population -- since group members reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everyone thinks that way. This is the sort of groupthink that convinces religious and political radicals they have greater support.

6) Temporal bias -- A psychological tragedy of the commons, we have much difficulty imagining ourselves and our global commons in the future, and thus we struggle at altering our behaviours in order to safeguard said imagined future.

This lack of self-control, where most of us would rather exchange serious pains in the not-to-distant future for menial pleasures in the moment, personifies the impulsive decision-making that has led to the financial meltdown, urban saturation, political corruption, and general slighting of imminent environmental cataclysms.

With all this narcissism, egotism, prejudice, conformity, pessimism, and impulsiveness, it's a wonder that we've made it this far -- yet here we stand, alive and kicking, just as irrationally as ever.

But if there's something positive to draw from these realisations, it's that the content and direction of cognitive biases are not arbitrary -- once exposed, these psychological deficiencies can be successfully mitigated and controlled.

So while the majority of us may be prone to these errors in rational judgement, we can also be more aware of them. And who knows, if we can manage to re-rationalise how we think, act, and treat one another, perhaps our politics will follow suit.]]> We're Not Entitled, We're Just Screwed tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2825840 2013-03-07T12:47:46-05:00 2013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
We don't need anyone's permission to start a free blog of our choosing, Twitter keeps us both informed and engrossed in current affairs, Facebook enables us to connect and conspire with old friends and fresh acquaintances, and LinkedIn allows us search for new jobs and associates -- all from the comfort of our smartphones.

With this in mind, many critics argue that us Gen Y'ers should be more grateful for these technological liberties we've grown into -- after all, thanks to the unprecedented informational access afforded by the Internet, we've become the most culturally conscious, socially boisterous, and politically self-aware generation in history.

Yet the way I see it, this heightened sense of self-awareness vis-à-vis the workings of the world and our precarious place within it is as much a burden as it is a blessing. For we've grown up with the world at our fingertips, raised on the assumption that our financial prospects would be the same, if not greater, than those of our parents.

In short, we were told we could have the world, and unsurprisingly, we're getting more than a little anxious out about the idea that we won't be so fortunate.

What I mean by this is that I think it's a myth that the majority of Millennials have some sort of burning desire to rage against the machine by retreating into some sort of minimalistic bohemian lifestyle. I've got a sinking suspicion it's quite the contrary.

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Most of Generation Y simply wants what our parents had. A graduation met with impending job prospects, a steady source of engaging employment, health benefits and a retirement plan, a partner, homeownership, a family, and a two-car garage.

To be frank, all we really want is for that ugly lie our high school guidance councillors told us in senior year "if you go to a good university and work hard, doors will open for you," to be true.

But it's not.

Instead, thanks to a particularly nasty and seemingly irreversible combination of inflation and recession, the North American dream that was enjoyed by the Baby Boomers seems to be becoming more and more unattainable with each passing year.

I'm sure many will brush these frustrations off as nothing more than the ramblings of an overly entitled generation of suburbans unwilling to pull themselves up by those same bootstraps that they did, but let's take a quick look at the numbers.

In 1979 it took roughly 800 hours of minimum wage work to earn the cost of bachelors' degree ($2,568), by 2012 the cost had risen to 2,200 hours ($22,324). As a consequence, most current post-secondary students are forced to take on lofty loans to cover the spread, leaving Millennials in a situation where over half of us will owe upwards of $20,000 when we finally enter that increasingly barren job market.

As for housing costs, the average Canadian home in 1984 cost $76,214, adjusted for inflation that's $154,587. Yet in 2012, the actual average was more like $369,677 -- an annualised gain of 5.8 per cent. So while in the mid-80s a home may have cost a family around 1.6 times its annual income, the multiple today is somewhere closer to 6.

Thus when it comes time to approach an insolvent and saturated job market ripe with 14.1 per cent youth unemployment in our misguided attempt to make enough to pay off those loans, save for that house down payment, and eat regularly, we're increasingly met with hiring freezes, short-term contracts, unpaid internships, underemployment, and unemployment altogether.

In my opinion, this unapologetic letter by an anonymous Millennial on the difficulties of landing that first job serves as the perfect snapshot for the perpetually frustrating and utterly distressing process of entering adulthood for our generation.

Yet we march onward, labelled as lazy and spoiled by an older generation who could pay tuition in a few summers, afford a house by 30, and enjoy full benefits coupled with a fully functional and institutionally preserved social safety net. No matter how hard we work, these goals are unrealistic for most of us -- this is not some apathetic plea for pity, it's a reflection of our current socio-economic reality.

And with this reality showing no real signs of the drastic reversion necessary for us Millennials to build more financially stable foundations anytime soon, perhaps it's time for us to stop clinging to that unsustainable and excessive status quo set by the Baby Boomers in the feeble hope that we'll someday be invited to re-perpetuate it.

Perhaps it's time to stop squirming and come to terms with the realization that the excessive consumption and political anachronism that has come to embody our parents' generation is nothing to aspire to, and in fact cannot -- nor should not, be repeated.

Instead, we've got a golden opportunity to re-define how we conceptualise key pillars of society such as wealth, environmental mindfulness, and political engagement.

Let me be clear -- I'm not advocating the manifestation of some instantaneous socialist utopia where the grass is green, the birds are chirping, and the workers have broken their chains. What I am saying is much more attainable than that.

Wealth shouldn't be a 5,000 square ft. home with three SUVs, when a modest bungalow and a smart car will do just fine, environmental mindfulness shouldn't be "greener" oil when plausible renewable solutions exist, and political engagement shouldn't be sheepishly voting for whatever candidate we're presented with when a democratic government is supposed to serve citizens with its policies, not the other way around.

We're equipped like no other generation to do this. All these technologies we're supposed to be thankful for -- the ones which we've unknowingly traded in our right to a real job or home in order to enjoy, serve as tools that can allow us Millennials to connect our minds and our movements around the world in order to take back our indefinitely postponed futures.]]> Has Facebook Peaked? tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2591616 2013-02-01T07:12:19-05:00 2013-04-03T05:12:01-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
Facebook is a social networking behemoth -- a cultural mainstay. It is an edifying medium that has forever changed the way we talk, share, court, and even think.

Yet it is also irritating, over-stimulating, and campy -- invasive, censored, and exploitative. And above all, its users are starting to show signs of Facebook fatigue.

Just take a look at the numbers. Last December in the U.S. and the U.K., Facebook's largest developed markets -- approximately 1.4 million Americans and 600 thousand Brits -- left the site. Only a drop in the 1 billion-plus user bucket of course, but this mass exodus may be a sign of the bad things to come for the social networking giant.

I know what many of you are thinking -- "Facebook is too big to fail, it's intertwined into our cultural complexion." But is it really? If the history of the Internet has taught us anything, it's that no company, no matter how dominant, is too big to fail.

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Take the brutal decline of Yahoo, an industry leader in content curation in the 1990s, Yahoo seemed poised to dominate the search engine market. But an identity crisis, lack of innovation, and a series of squandered opportunities paved that way for Google to easily overtake the fledging former titan, despite Yahoo's huge head start.

What's more, popular culture is not so much driven by Facebook specifically, as it is by social media more generally. Sure, Facebook seems to dominate the discourse right now, but that's only because it's still at the top -- they have some substantial ground to make up, but Google + and YouTube are nipping at Facebook's heels.

So while social media will likely drive our cultural consciousness for many years to come, that does not necessarily mean that Facebook will always be a huge part of this cognizance. Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Google's tandem of Google+ and YouTube are on the up -- some of which is at the expense of Facebook's user traffic.

In my opinion, there are two key reasons as to why Facebook's once immovable foundations are beginning to show signs of gradual erosion. I want to emphasize the word gradual here, because I think that the decline of Facebook will be a very slow process -- a steady deterioration as the network struggles to stay fresh and relevant.

The first of these is market oversaturation.

What I mean by this is Facebook has critically saturated its largest markets -- Europe, Canada, and the U.S., which account for 78 per cent of the site's total revenue. In these markets, over 80 per cent of possible users are already on Facebook, meaning there is little room for further user-based growth in the developed world.

In an ironic twist of fate, this last 20 per cent of older and less digitally inclined users which are finally trickling onto Facebook are starting to ostracize the site's core age group. For as more parents, grandparents, and teachers filter onto Facebook, the network becomes less exclusive, and thereby less popular amongst younger users.

As these older users scare away their kids and students -- for fear of that awkward comment or scandalous photo, Facebook loses some of its highest value users. And at the risk of sounding ageist, it is the young professionals and college students who are the most engaged online, and trading them in for grandparents is disconcerting.

So why doesn't Facebook just expand to developing markets chock-full of those 15- to 30-year-olds who provided the foundation for the site's initial explosion you say?

Easier said that done. For example, China pops up on everyone's radar as the world's most fertile online market, but gaining access to the country's 1-billion potential users would require Facebook to turn over some control of its Chinese operations to the communist government's Central Committee -- a slap in the face to the site's core principles.

That brings me to the second reason, informational negligence.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post exploring the linkages between social media and politics. In it, I discussed just how censoring social networking sites such as Facebook -- which pays foreign workers one dollar an hour to scour the site for any content which challenges its comprehensive 17-page censorship manual -- can be.

Moreover, Facebook publically supports CISPA -- the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a proposed American law permitting the sharing of Internet traffic information between various government agencies and private technology firms in the interest of "national security." Firms including -- you guessed it, Facebook.

At the individual level, many of Facebook's features also seem to show little concern for user privacy. For example, the frictionless sharing app automatically latches onto your account and broadcasts articles you've read, videos you've watched, and songs you've listened to, while the new graph search allows for any and all content -- text, photos, videos -- ever posted by you, or posted about you, to be easily located.

But why does this negligence on the part of Facebook make users want to deactivate their accounts for good?

Well as Huffington Post technology editor Bianca Bosker puts it, "lack of trust, mostly -- a sense that Facebook can't be depended on to protect our personal information and will sell us out to make a buck."


Of course, beyond abusing trust and oversaturating core markets, there are other factors which signal that Facebook has peaked. For starters -- while it may own Instagram, Facebook's flagship mobile efforts have been lacklustre at best, its ads remain a point of contention among users and advertisers, and its IPO -- hyped as the "must buy of the decade" -- continues to be a complete and utter failure.

Yet perhaps even more important than all that is the fact that in the tech industry, generational failure seems to be accelerated. No company, not even Apple, appears to be able to continually reinvent itself in such a way that it is impervious to decay.

So in that familiar vein of Yahoo, MySpace, and Digg, the great and impregnable Facebook is starting to show signs of wear. The collapse probably won't happen any time soon, but it will happen -- nothing can rule the World Wide Web forever.

]]> Non-Aboriginal? Idle From the Sidelines tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2539079 2013-01-24T12:59:21-05:00 2013-03-26T05:12:01-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
Allow me to clarify.

I'm in solidarity with the movement -- even a staunch supporter of it, but only if the First Nations themselves are the ones leading the march.

In my opinion, non-Aboriginals with little knowledge of treaty laws or reservation conditions dictating to First Nations activists -- even with good intentions -- is an unwelcome restoration of the patronizing relationship which laid the foundations for #IdleNoMore's current outpouring of frustration and anger in the first place.

So, I trust you understand my irritation when every time I log onto my computer or flip through a newspaper, I am flooded with smug commentary by an entitled Caucasian detachment of buzzing commentators, pundits, and activists, claiming to know what exactly is best for the Indigenous populations in this country.

Doesn't anyone else see a discerning pattern forming when, yet again, we have non-Aboriginal government employees and under-informed right-wing think tankers telling the Indigenous protesters within the movement what exactly they should be protesting, and how exactly they should be doing it?

Petty post-colonialist commentaries such as these reek of a dated condescension that is better suited for the 1800s than the 2000s.

Moreover, they fail to recognize one of the movement's biggest complications. Not only must #IdleNoMore contend with a condescending administration that responds best to displays of power and strength, it must also reprimand its own entrenched band leaders -- "a leadership which long ago made a deal with the neo-colonial devil: you pay us and we will pretend to lead while you pretend to listen."

Thus, there is a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, both by an administration reluctant to cede more autonomy to Indigenous populations, and until perhaps very recently, by many of the First Nations leaders themselves -- some of whom were made dependent on the Canadian government in the 1960s with the targeted government funding of salaries for elected board members of Metis and Native organisations.

In short, many of the very same aboriginal leaders currently engaged in protest under the banner of the #IdleNoMore movement, have in fact previously entered into relationships of total dependency with the nation-state that they are currently trying to play hardball with -- a complicated love-hate relationship indeed.

On top of all this, #IdleNoMore still faces the crucial test thrust upon all de-structuralizing protest movements which represent the interests of a diverse group of peoples -- how does it determine what exactly it wants to accomplish?

Again, those of us who have enjoyed a life relatively free from that patronizing relationship -- never spending more than a novelty moment on a reservation, must resist the temptation to speak for the wants and needs of #IdleNoMore.

Even if our intentions are admirable, un-informed non-aboriginals need to take a passive support role. Listening instead of talking, heeding instead of telling, and following instead of leading.

Muffling out the voices of the oppressed in an attempt to blindly emancipate them always ends up doing much more harm than good -- the White Man's Burden is largely responsible for underpinning these unequal relationships in the first place.

To clarify, I'm not saying that non-Aboriginal Canadians should not be openly and actively supportive -- and at times critical -- of our brothers and sisters in their fight against the oppressive structures that currently keep their people trapped in cyclical poverty. Not in the least.

What I am saying is this -- agree or disagree, #IdleNoMore isn't our movement to lead.

After all, there are many things that the average non-Indigenous, non-activist, yet conscious Canadian can do to show his or her support that won't muffle the First Nations voices central to the movement -- #IdleNoMore is about more than just colonial guilt, it's about cooperation.

Demonstrate your solidarity by attending a rally -- educate yourself regarding current reservation conditions and treaty negotiations -- challenge the racist stereotypes that you hear time and again in public spaces -- write a letter to your MLA, MP, or local newspaper voicing your solidarity.

Or don't do any of these things -- it's a free country. But for the last time, please stop thinking that as a non-Aboriginal you have the same speaking authority as an Indigenous activist fighting for their people. We don't.



]]> Quebec Is Keeping the Assisted Death Debate Alive -- With Dignity tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2496705 2013-01-17T17:59:59-05:00 2013-03-19T05:12:01-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/ provincial panel of legal experts on medically assisted end-of-life procedures, the government of Quebec has announced plans to proceed with its "dying with dignity" legislation -- paving the way for doctors in the province to assist terminally ill patients in ending their lives.

"Every person should be able to make their own choice according to their values and according to their experience, their life, at the end of their life," said Jean-Paul Ménard, who led the legal panel.


As expected however, the federal government has made it clear that it is unwilling to change the current laws prohibiting medically assisted life-ending procedures -- even announcing plans to appeal last June's ruling in the B.C. Supreme Court partially striking down the ban.

Usually, this would be the point where both sides get stuck at that tired old impasse.

Yet the legal experts conclude that Quebec could bypass the Criminal Code altogether due to the provincial healthcare system's continuum of care -- permitting a terminally ill patient receiving palliative treatments who can demonstrate a lucid desire to end their life, assistance in doing so by virtue of the Quebec government's duty to care for its citizens.

"The constitutional basis is clear... We are really in a field of regulating end-of-life care -- and adding the possibility for somebody to have access to medical aid in dying," concluded Véronique Hivon, Quebec's social services minister.


In case you haven't already noticed, there is one term that is missing from both the legal panels' findings, and the statements made by the Quebec government on the matter -- euthanasia.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this was done on purpose -- euthanasia is one of those smooth sounding words that inescapably stirs up an unproductive debate fuelled by passion as opposed to pragmatism.

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It's a word which has been annexed by some of the overly zealous pro-lifers -- proclaiming their respect for "human life," whilst simultaneously showing none to any human who wants a sliver of control over their own life as they struggle through a horrendous situation, the likes of which I doubt many pro-lifers have personally experienced.

It's a word that conjures up images of fear-mongering and disjointed propaganda, which attempt to draw parallels between the consenting death of a very sick and competent person and the threatened suicide of a manically depressed teenager.

In short, the lexicon for the term is pejorative -- forever linked to depression, suicide, and elderly abuse. Don't get me wrong, those are huge problems we need to address as a society, but they are by no means directly correlated to the medically assisted suicide of a terminally ill and competent adult.

So can we please stop treating them as such.

It is for these very reasons that the choice -- a conscious one in my opinion, was made by the provincial panel and the Quebec government to refer to its medically assisted end-of-life procedures as "dying with dignity" as opposed to euthanasia.

I'm sure this clever phrasing won't deter the staunchest pro-lifers from once again climbing into your hospital beds and telling you or your loved ones to stop complaining and just suffer through the insurmountable pain quietly so that they can go to bed at night knowing they "protected human life."

It might however, pull the debate surrounding euthanasia back from the precipice of absurdity on which it currently teeters by reminding us all that the discussion should not be a nationwide showdown between pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

It's much less complicated than that.

Instead, the discussion should be a private one between a palliative and terminally ill patent and their doctor regarding the role said physician will play in accompanying them towards the inevitability of death with as much dignity and medical assistance as possible.

I can already hear the critics barking back -- "euthanasia is a slippery slope."

But it's not really -- if a culturally comparable locale that legally permits dying with dignity such as Oregon is any indication, this slope isn't very slippery at all.

Physician-assisted suicide has been legal in the state for over a decade, but it only accounts for one in every 1,000 deaths each year. So even though the number of patents discussing the option with their families -- 1 in 6, or their doctors -- 1 in 50, is actually quite high, the safeguards appear to work.

That fact that very few people opt for the procedure shows that while many may seek out information regarding a medically assisted end-of-life, virtually none of them go through with it -- instead choosing to take mere solace in the fact that it's an option if the pain becomes too unbearable.

So to reiterate for the umpteenth time, there aren't really any scary precedents or slippery slopes here. What there is, is an alternative to an existence of suffering and pain that should, and can be afforded to a terminally ill, palliative treated, mentally competent adult.

It's time to shift away from the messy public spectacles regarding euthanasia. Instead let's follow Quebec's lead -- Canadians everywhere should be able to choose from a full range of end-of-life options, including -- if the prerequisites are met, the option of a medically assisted suicide.

After all, isn't that what democracy is about -- barring that no one else is directly affronted without his or her consent, the freedom to live life, or end it, as one sees fit? If so, then why does this freedom somehow become contingent when one is on their deathbed?

]]> Can a Hashtag Really Influence Politics? tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2467928 2013-01-15T12:22:43-05:00 2013-03-17T05:12:01-04:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
There are the idealists, those who believe that social media affords a palpable voice to disenfranchised citizenries around the world -- a direct and unfiltered democracy which serves as an invaluable public forum for critique, debate, and assembly.

And there are the pessimists, those who see social media as a distraction, a trend, as indifference par excellence -- a way for angsty 20-somethings to feel both political and important without having to do so much as get up from their iPads.

Personally, I think that both camps are missing the point entirely. Social media isn't a replacement for real-world action -- it's a way to coordinate it.

The fact that apathetic Internet users who plague our respective newsfeeds cannot click their way to a better tomorrow does not mean that dedicated actors -- those who would be in the trenches regardless -- cannot employ social media effectively.

While all very different narratives, #ArabSpring, #Occupy, and now #IdleNoMore, are testaments to the fact that staunch activists can circumvent rigid hierarchies and successfully engage interactive web platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness, manifest demonstrations, and sustain diverse exhibitions of dissent.

After all, there is something to be said for the encroachment of political issues, however superficial, into the average person's everyday life -- formerly dominated by the consumerist apprehensions of a mundane day-to-day existence. Give me an informal discussion of aboriginal rights over an episode of reality television any day.

Moreover, speaking of television, while anchors and hosts sever the link of common humanity between audiences in one part of the world and victims in another by monotonously presenting muddled issues in orderly packages on nightly newscasts and talks shows, the information on social media is more holistic, more visceral.

By showing us drawbacks and unverified stories, by bringing us words, links, and images directly from victims and protesters on the ground, social media figuratively curtails the divide between those who are directly experiencing, reporting, and living an event, and those of us who are safely in another part of the world.

In short, for all the time it lends itself to procrastination, social media has given us the tools for the coordination of de-structuralising protest movements, a medium with which to casually engage more frequently in political conversation, and a closer sense of connectivity with people suffering through far-away crises and disasters.

Yet, social media isn't necessarily the great alternative to a bias and corrupt mainstream media as many idealists bill it to be either. Interactive web technologies and news aggregators are plagued by censorship too -- they're just better at hiding it.

For starters, the white knight that is Facebook pays foreign workers around one dollar an hour to delete undesirable content based on a comprehensive 17-page censorship manual. Pornography and breastfeeding are first to go, but so is anything breaching Facebook's policy of "international compliance," such as pages belonging to Palestinian resistance movements and groups critical of Atatürk -- Turkey's founder.

A year ago, Twitter unveiled a new policy of region specific-censorship regarding tweets which are deemed counterintuitive to local laws and customs. Meaning that now government officials, corporations, or other outside parties can insist on the removal of content they consider to be illegal or blasphemous -- a policy met with a fair bit of trepidation when it was invoked for the first time in Germany last October.

YouTube -- the third most visited site in the world, is gradually getting a reputation for its blatant and whimsical censorship practices as well. Examples of which include removing videos criticising the British government's official sanctioning of Sharia law courts by comic Pat Condell, as well as shutting down the account of award-winning Egyptian anti-torture and human rights activist Wael Abbas.

While Reddit -- a popular user-driven news and entertainment website owned by Advanced Publications, goes as far as to censor entire classes of news media. The site's WorldNews category, which has 2.5 million subscribers -- more than most TV newscasts, censors all blogs, refusing to consider them as real sources. Unfortunate considering that most independent experts have their own blogs, and these blogs serve to debunk many of the myths that slip through traditional media outlets.

So clearly social media isn't the uncensored news pipeline fueled by a free market of populism that the idealists would like have us believe it is. But neither is it merely some sort of temporary fad, as the pessimists contend. I think that it is equally naïve to believe that social media can save us all, as it is to believe that it can ruin us.

What we should believe is this -- for better or worse, social media has become fused into our collective cultural consciousness. Not through platforms or technologies per se, but because social media allows us to rediscover the sorts of social interactions that defined human relationships before they were interrupted by mass migrations to the suburbs -- which replaced a sense of community with a television set.

Thanks to social media we can now reconnect socially, politically, and culturally in order to form groups, share passions, and voice concerns. Of course we need to be aware of the fact that we tend to connect with, and befriend those whose interests mirror are own, but regardless, social media provides a vital service by employing a digital medium to refill that communal void.

Social media is by no means unflawed -- it's market-driven after all -- but as media theorist Marshall McLuhan contends, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

That is exactly what social media is doing -- it's shaping us, engaging us, entertaining us, and while it can be both a trivial distraction and a revolutionary tool depending on the context and the user, one thing we should all acknowledge is that it's not going anywhere.]]> Why I No Longer Give a Puck About NHL Hockey tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2422204 2013-01-06T20:48:43-05:00 2013-03-08T05:12:01-05:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/ a tentative deal has been reached between the players and the owners of the NHL. For most of the world, this means absolutely nothing.

For many Canadians, however, it means the return of Hockey Night in Canada, a spring chock-full of gut-wrenching playoff runs, and for those few who can actually afford it, arenas packed with crazed fans and $15 beers.

Yet I'm no longer one of those Canadians. I find the NHL more and more irrelevant every time it returns from another one of these temper-tantrums, these hissy fits, these futile tussles between overpaid millionaires and manipulative billionaires.

What's more, I'm not alone.

In my adolescence I had a love affair with NHL hockey. My favourite players were brave warriors fighting for the honour of their respective city-states. I memorized all their stats, watched all their games, and spent more of my meagre teenage income on their memorabilia than I care to say.

Some of my favourite players were probably your favourites too: "Burnaby" Joe Sakic, Stevie "Y" Yzerman, Jerome "Iggy" Iginla -- in my mind, these guys were heroes, taking Stanley Cups for their teams and gold medals for their country. I idolized them, and accordingly, I considered everything else to be ancillary.

Alas, in hockey, as in life, all good things must come to an end.

The 2004-05 NHL lockout shattered many of our worlds. It was the first time a major professional sports league in North America had cancelled an entire season due to a labour dispute, and consequently, the first time I was exposed to what truly drives professional sports -- money, and lots of it. Sound familiar?

There were many excuses offered up for the lockout, but no matter how much they spun it, it was all about the bottom line. The owners wanted new private jets and the players wanted new luxury sports cars. Sorry, I mean the owners wanted a salary cap and the players wanted salaries based exclusively on the market.

Both sides hunkered down and refused to budge. The owners stayed afloat by drawing from a $300-million "war chest", while the players kept themselves comfortable on union checks of between $10,000 and $15,000 a month.

Oh, the austerity!

In the end, it was all for not. The players' union succumbed to infighting and the threat of replacement players -- begrudgingly accepting a hard salary cap, lower revenue sharing, and immediate salary rollbacks amongst other things.

But as usual, it was the little guys who got the short end of the stick. The work stoppage forced the layoffs of thousands of people behind the scenes, from stadium attendants to office personnel -- none of whom saw any of that cushy $15,000 a month afforded to the players.

Not to mention the fans -- people who spent their hard-earned money on overpriced merchandise and extortionate ticket sales, who got screwed out of a whole year of professional hockey because some grown men couldn't put their egos aside long enough to sort out a deal for a fandom which keeps them all in the lifestyles they have grown accustomed to.

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In short, the NHL fan in me died somewhere between 2004-05, when I was exposed to the fact that the people representing my heroes cared more about profits than people. It's also probably why myself, and more and more other Canadians are greeting this news of a new agreement between the owners and the players with some reservation and trepidation.

As a recovered NHL addict, I can't help but wonder why we want to put so much energy and passion, offer so much devotion and piety, to a league that has done this to its fans four times in the past 20 years. Why do both the league brass and the players' union continue to overestimate Canada's passion for the NHL?

Canada's national pastime is so much more than the NHL. It is street hockey on the west coast, pond hockey on the east coast, new Timbits learning how to skate, and old dogs lacing up in beer leagues to see if they've still got it. The passion for the sport is bigger and better than a league focused on money and stardom, as are its fans.

So in the next few weeks, as the NHL undoubtedly spends millions on advertising campaigns encouraging its fans to come crawling back to a league that continues to take them for granted, try and remember all the other great things you have done over the past few months in that time you would have spent watching NHL hockey.

Perhaps you took up a new sport? Spent more time with your family? Took a stab at a new hobby? Either way, it was most likely a much better use of your time than fawning over spoiled multi-millionaires.

So maybe, just maybe, those of you who haven't lost faith already should consider giving hockey the cold shoulder this season. Show the players, the owners, and all the bureaucrats who have turned a cultural pastime into a business that behaving like entitled children for the umpteenth time is not okay.

As in many abusive relationships, I'm sure some of you will still take the NHL back. That's your prerogative. But you shouldn't, because if you do, nothing will change, and you all deserve to be treated better than this by something that you love.]]> Why We Self-Censor When We Read Online tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2403378 2013-01-03T17:41:39-05:00 2013-03-05T05:12:01-05:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
Rather paradoxically, this resulting abundance of information, a.k.a. infobesity, can be the source of more productivity lost than gained. Any regular, honest Internet user can attest to this. Check Gmail, update LinkedIn, troll Reddit, upload to Flickr, pin to Pinterest, browse the HuffPost -- I could go on and on but this clip sums it up nicely.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted the suffocating effects of information overload back in the 1960s. He argued that far from media being just a passive channel of information, the medium that we employ to engage with the media -- in this case the Internet -- actively determines how exactly we interact with the content.

In short, the Internet not only changes what media we view, but how we view it. The "how" being short blocks of conversational text injected with hyperlinks, blinking adds, infographics, pop-ups, videos, and sound bites. Not only is the amount of content available online mentally stifling -- an estimated 14.18 billion pages as of January 3 -- but the process by which we are relentlessly bombarded by this stifling content is over-stimulating in itself.

In order to avoid being overwhelmed by informational anxiety as so much data prattles uncontrollably at us from our screens, we have subconsciously become our own content editors and censorship committees, determining for ourselves which sites are worth frequenting and which ones are not, what content is good and what content is bad.

These forms of self-censorship are, perhaps justifiably, a defence mechanism, a barrier between our brains and the vast recesses of cyberspace. Yet there are many negative repercussions when users engage in self-censoring practices on the Web.

First off, a problem created by the lack of authority-approval online, we, the self-appointed editor-in-chief of our cyberspace adventures, still tend to believe far too much of what we read on the Internet merely because our brains our lazy.



According to researchers at the University of Western Australia, this laziness is due in part to the fact that weighing the source and credibility of a message is cognitively more difficult than merely accepting the message as true -- it requires additional motivation and cognitive resources that many readers subconsciously decide not to employ.

Thus, when met with the option of fact-checking statements or figures, our lethargic brains prefer to make a snap decision. If the argument does a good job of convincing us, we tend to believe it. If not, we tend to reject it. "Obama is a Muslim," "global warming is a hoax," last year's U.S. Presidential election was ripe with such unfounded allegations, many of which continue to stick thanks to our intuitive disdain for factual scrutiny.

But how does an argument do a good job of convincing us in the first place? What's more, why does the persuasiveness of an argument have much more to do with our preconceived notions than it does with some lofty concept of truthfulness?

Well for starters, every person's cognitive reasoning is plagued by something psychologists refer to as the confirmation bias. Meaning that we only trust an expert, data, research, or opinion if the conclusions are in line with our previously held beliefs. Hence, we tend to monopolize our time online skimming articles, blog posts, and websites that reconfirm our own ideals. Accepting complacent arguments with little or no scrutiny because we want to believe them.

In doing so, we censor ourselves from a whole breadth of stimulating and informative content online because it may not tell us exactly what it is we want to hear. Opting instead to have our opinions regurgitated back to us by like-minded individuals in safe spaces of media that reify the validity of our personal ideologies.

Take a hypothetical labour activist and an investment banker. This activist is about as unlikely to stray from the angsty embraces of the message boards of rabble.ca as the banker is from the monetarist cliques of the comments section in the Financial Post. And the longer both parties refuse to cogitate opposing sources, the more confident they become in their one-sided world-views.

Eventually these one-sided world-views of this activist or banker can become so interwoven into the underpinnings of their own self-image, they reach a point where they are afraid to scrutinize their own beliefs because that would mean questioning the core foundations from which they have based their lives upon. Once it has taken hold, this transformation from opinion to dogma is hard to reverse.

So how do we get around the cognitive laziness and the confirmation biases that hinder our experiences online in order to better challenge our accepted beliefs this year?

We need to read more self-aware. This starts by familiarizing yourself with your personal biases and seeking evidence to the contrary of every opinion -- especially those which you have appropriated for yourself. A well-formulated guide to your research online such as the one created by Lifehacker should help to get you started.

Moreover, it is important to remember that everyone has the same problems with the confirmation bias and cognitive laziness as you do. This means that whenever you consider someone else's opinions, you must simultaneously consider their biases. At the risk of sounding cliché, you must be sure to put yourself in the advice-givers' shoes, being aware that a person's history, personality, and experiences weigh heavily on whatever information they're imparting upon you.

After all, as many of us have experienced first hand, the Internet can be a great tool of knowledge, allowing a curious citizen, researcher, student, journalist, or this Huffington Post blogger to discover in hours from the comfort of their own home, what used to take days buried in paperwork down at the city archives or university library.

Yet with great access to information comes great cognitive responsibility. And it is up to us as our own personal editors, to fight self-censorship in all its forms by always pushing ourselves to seek out evidence to the contrary of what we believe. There are enough people out there attempting to censor online activity already, let's try not to make their jobs any easier.

]]> 2012: Canadian Politics Was a Game of Tomato, Tomahto tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2366089 2012-12-27T08:17:45-05:00 2013-02-26T05:12:01-05:00 Adam Kingsmith http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-kingsmith/
"I'm a Conservative... a Liberal... a New Democrat... a Green." From the way we threw around such narrow-minded signifiers this year when describing which political party best embodied our ideals, you would think there might be some substantial distinctions between the various party's platforms.

Regrettably, 2012 has shown us that there aren't anymore. Due to an unfounded speculation that garnering votes means emulating the party in power -- which took under 40 per cent of the vote in 2011, these days partisan politics in Canada seems to be nothing but a general convergence alongside the Conservatives at the centre-right.

Think about it. Liberal leadership candidates have been preaching more and more conservatively this year, at times advocating for policies that the party once spoke out brazenly against. Frontrunner Justin Trudeau recently scrutinized his own party's now-defunct long-gun registry, asserting that guns are part of Canada's identity. He even went as far as to lament Harper for not permitting more foreign investment in Canada's oil sands, a direct contradiction to his father's infamous manifesto of economic nationalism.

What's more, fellow Liberal leadership hopefuls Marc Garneau and Martha Hall Findlay have begun to blast government interference in the technology and dairy industries, proposing instead what they called "smart government" (a favourite buzzword of the Tories), while Findlay continued to relentlessly lobby for increased investment in Alberta's oil sands and the proposed northern pipelines between Alberta and BC.

In the case of Canada's once proudly left-learning party in 2012, any vestiges of the NDP's eroding social-democratic values have all but vanished. By advocating that the party needed to adjust with the times, newly-elected leader Thomas Mulcair succumbed to the indicative "Blairite temptation" -- the impulse to garner votes by shifting sharply to the centre as Britain's Labour party did under former leader Tony Blair.

Of course, this year's shift in NDP policy could be attributed in part to Mulcair's politically muddled Liberal sensibilities, a remnant from his days as a Liberal Cabinet Minister for Charest's Quebec government. Nevertheless, through his visionless pursuit of power this year Mulcair has rendered the New Democrats doctrinally invisible to long-time supporters by making it impossible to differentiate the NDP from the Harper Conservatives.

Even the Green Party, which began as a home for the politically disgruntled and the environmentally concerned, has has embraced a more pro-business agenda that is utterly fiscally conservative in addition to its ecological foundation.

Now, thanks in large part to this swing from eco-centrism, natural constituents of the Conservative Party would feel almost as comfortable amongst the Green Party ranks. An unsurprising shift considering party leader Elizabeth May, who Maclean's named 2012 Parliamentarian of the Year, served as a policy advisor to the federal Minister of Environment between 1986 and 1988 when Mulroney's Conservative government was in power.

Thus while on paper Canadian voters had four different options in 2012, in reality nothing drastic will change regardless of which party wins the next election; social services will continue to deteriorate, corporate taxes decrease, and military spending increase. For the Liberal party has shifted right to meet the Tories, and the NDP has quickly followed suit. As for the Greens, they have become a fringe version of the Conservative party, with less of the experience, and even lesser of the seats.

Yet if all the party platforms this year have become so similar, why all this mindless bickering amongst them?

The answer is simple. The manifestation of variance amongst Canada's major political parties is a carefully constructed illusion sustained by what Sigmund Freud called "the narcissism of small differences."

The Tories, the Grits, the NDP, even the Greens, they are all guilty of making 2012 the year of the rhetorical language game, a game where each party magnified a superficial sense of uniqueness in order to mask Canada's underlying partisan ubiquitous-ness.

After all, it wouldn't make for a very interesting election if all the candidates conceded the fact that they offer little in the way of real alternatives to one another. Moreover, that if we continue on our present course, this country's political culture and economic development will change very little regardless of who ends up taking Parliament Hill. If they admitted to this, voter turnout in Canada would probably sit even lower than it already does.

For example, besides a few minor schoolyard squabbles when it comes to G.S.T., the once-great rivalry between the Grits and the Tories has all but evaporated over the past few years into an indivisible mess of centre-right policy consolidation. The war in Afghanistan, stimulus spending, gay marriage, abortion, healthcare, slashing social services, at one time or another both parties have maintained relatively similar platforms regarding these issues and many more.

In short, if voters sit down and scrutinize the political and economic policy proposals put forth by each party in 2012, it becomes apparent that it is nearly impossible to tell where one party stops and another begins.

So unless you sit slightly to the right -- in which case every party embodies your politics -- the next time a canvasser, pollster, government official, or public figure asks, "which political party do you support?" consider responding "none of them."

While such a non-partisan response may be met with charges of apathy and political lethargy from those who've drank too much of the Kool-Aid, what's really more apathetic?

Choosing for the sake of choosing while reifying a centric status quo? Or flexing your democratic agency by voicing to those who determine party policy that egalitarianism is supposed to be about distinctive parties embodying the diverse wants and needs of different levels of citizenry, not merely conforming to the ideals of those in presently in power?

For the sake of the more marginalized, a group of Canadians which continues to grow drastically in size and scale each year, let's hope the 60 per cent of us who didn't vote Conservative choose the latter in 2013. Furthermore let's hope that next year, the politicians who claim to represent our interests decide to listen.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article called Elizabeth May a "recent Tory convert." She was never a party member.



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