Comment

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.

Editorial November 24, 2015

Darkness in the City of Light

Paris has loomed large in my mind the past few months. In Paris, on Nov. 30, the COP21 climate talks will convene. These talks must succeed. If they do not then we do not have a snowball’s hope in hell of avoiding the worst, most catastrophic effects of climate change.

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 21, 2015

Legitimate pain and antisocial media

Blue, white, and red. Over the last week my Facebook feed has been filled with profile pictures tinted in those colours. It’s not only the images, though; everyone seems to have something they want to say to address the tragedy in Paris in which roughly 130 people were killed by ISIS terrorists.

Editorial November 17, 2015

Off with our head

Watching Justin Trudeau and his 30-member cabinet being sworn in earlier this month, something struck me as extremely off-putting about the whole affair: the oath Trudeau and his ministers made to our head of state, the monarch of Canada, Queen Elizabeth II.

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.