Articles by Comment Editor

Comment December 1, 2015

The lack of meaning in Christmas

What do yoga and Christmas have in common? Both are ancient, both are deeply spiritual, and both have been swallowed by the gaping wound that exists in place of our collective soul. Our consumer culture has rendered the most beautiful fruits of human endeavour, living spiritual traditions, into experiences engaged in for personal pleasure.

Things that were the epitome of the sacred – the mastery of the body by the soul, the celebration of the mercy of the divine – are profaned, and not innocently so. To innocently profane yoga would be to do it unmindfully. To innocently profane Christmas would be to ignore it. But instead, both these have been defiled by consumerism: emptied of their original meanings, they have been re-filled with the most disgusting aspect of our culture.

Comment December 1, 2015

Solidarity with what?

The recent downing of a Russian Su-24 jet by Turkish forces over Syria is the first time a NATO member has destroyed a Russian aircraft since the 1950s. Given the complex, fractious conflict that is the Syrian civil war, such a move could have proved catastrophic. This is especially true considering the authoritarian and uncompromising nature of both Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, neither of whom is keen to appear weak.

LettersToTheEditor

Letters November 24, 2015

Re: Closing the STEM gender gap

I would like to respond to the article “Closing the STEM gender gap” by Chantelle Dubois, published in the Nov. 4 issue of the Manitoban. Dubois provides her opinion on the broadly studied STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) gender gap, and closes her article with the incredible sentence “The gender gap will fix itself with time.”

Comment November 24, 2015

Mandatory courses: who, and why?

There’s been discussion recently about imposing additional mandatory courses on students at the University of Manitoba. In the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU) Annual Survey, students were asked if they support an Indigenous Studies course requirement.

Comment November 17, 2015

The journey of the poppy

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow…” A hundred years ago, these familiar lines by John McCrae first showed the connection between our fallen soldiers and…

Comment November 17, 2015

‘World-class’ is going a bit far

In a full-page trumpeting of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU) executive’s accomplishments, UMSU president Jeremiah Kopp refers to the renovations begun and planned to the hallway on the third floor of University Centre as a “marquee, $1.4-million, world-class capital project.”

That’s the kind of hyperbole (some might call it bullshit) that makes me blush, and then write an article about it.

Comment November 10, 2015

Vacation is not a treatment

I fully support an UMSU campaign on mental health. Public health insurance does not fund most mental health services, particularly preventive ones. The university offers limited student counselling, but it’s not the university’s role to operate as a pseudo-healthcare system. As such, students may be unable to access the care they need when they need it.

Comment November 10, 2015

Putting poutine in its place

You may have noticed that, for some time, there’s been a food truck parked on campus. A welcome relief from the unrelenting mediocrity of campus food services (though I’ve yet to actually see anyone buying poutine there), the Poutine King is inarguably an asset to life on campus.

The whole point of a food truck, however, is that you can park it anywhere; the specific spot the truck currently occupies is not only inappropriate, it is offensive. The truck should be moved – perhaps more importantly, whoever told it to park there should have known better in the first place.

Comment November 3, 2015

Building momentum for Shoal Lake 40’s Freedom Road

This past September, nearly 1,000 Winnipeggers gathered at the Legislative Building to participate in the Winnipeg Water Walk, an event which called for hard commitments from the local, provincial, and federal governments towards the building of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation’s “Freedom Road.” At this event, Premier Greg Selinger announced that Freedom Road would be included in the next provincial budget.

Comment October 27, 2015

Legalize it – and by ‘it,’ I mean ‘all of it’

Commanding a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, and with the already-established support of the courts, there is no reason the incoming Liberal government cannot make good on its promise to legalize, tax, and regulate the sale of marijuana. The ending of the prohibition on marijuana is the proper time to reconsider our society’s stance on other drugs as well.

Many drugs, like marijuana, are not illegal because they are inherently addictive or harmful – the arguments put forward as justification for the legalization of marijuana apply to them also. There is no reason (other than the weight of tradition and old attitudes) that a significant part of currently outlawed substances cannot be legalized, taxed, and sold.