Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Wanted: a shared experience that makes it feel like life is getting better

When our library accounts finally came back online, I could feel a frisson pass through both Internet Toronto and Real-Life Toronto. The news ricocheted through the city, we all dropped everything and ran to be reunited with our holds lists...and promptly crashed the site!

Still, the spirits were high - "We hugged it to death!" squeed one redditor - and millions of Torontonians spread the news, rejoiced, and did a happy dance while they waited their turn for the 503 error to go away.

I hadn't felt that very specific emotion in quite some time, and, after some thought, I realized what it reminded me of: vaccine hunting.

When COVID vaccines first became available, everyone rushed to sign up and promptly crashed the site. But we spread the news enthusiastically, shared tips for finding an appointment, and squeed at each other as we got in.

It's a very specific emotion: a shared experience that makes you feel like life is getting better.

I haven't felt that in so long - not since I was queued up for a mass vaxx clinic at the community centre - and I didn't think I'd ever feel it again.

In the first year of the pandemic, I was confident I'd feel that feeling again. Everyone was working to make things better, we were all in this together, surely one day we'd delight in the shared experience of things being better again!

Except...they never got better again. Those in power just stopped addressing it, and in fact took away some of the tools we can use to address it individually.

So I wasn't expecting to experience this solidarity of life getting better ever again, which made it a particular delight to experience when the library came back online!

But...the only reason we got to experience this feeling of something getting better is because someone did harm by cyberattacking the library!

Is there any hope for things to get better for everyone without getting worse first??

***

Some people are able to experience this feeling of a shared experience of life getting better through activism, but that just doesn't work for me and hasn't for a long time. Activism seems more and more about desperately fighting to stop things from getting worse. It feels like victories aren't even improvements any more, just temporary respites.

When I try to think of examples of activism resulting in things actually getting better rather than just stopping them from getting worse, the most recent thing that comes to mind is the legalization of same-sex marriage, which was over 20 years ago.

Is stuff getting better for everyone without first getting worse even a possibility any more? Because I sure wouldn't mind experiencing that emotion again!

Saturday, March 19, 2016

If you haven't sponsored Eddie Izzard yet, now's the time!

Tomorrow is the last day of Eddie Izzard 27 marathons in 27 day challenge.

So far, he has completed 25 marathons in 26 days, after losing a day to a medical emergency.  So he decided he's going to make it up by running two marathons (84 km) tomorrow, even though he's never done a double marathon before.  And, because apparently that's not challenging enough, he then decided to up his last day's run to 90 km, in honour of South Africa's Comrades Marathon.

Eddie is scheduled to start his double marathon at 5 a.m. South African time (which is about 2 hours after I click Publish on this post), and to end 12 hour later. 

I ardently wish him all the good luck in the known universe, and sincerely hope that enough money is raised that everyone involved feels fully satisfied that this increasingly herculean undertaking was completely worthwhile.

You can follow Eddie's adventure live on BBC, Twitter, and Periscope, and donate via Sport Relief.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

Contemplating the ethics of donating food to the Salvation Army food bank

I do not donate money to the Salvation Army because their history of anti-gay action.

However, the easiest way for me to donate food to a food bank is to put it in the food bank bin outside my local supermarket. This is the only place I know of in my immediate neighbourhood where you drop off a food bank donation.  And this bin happens to be for the Salvation Army food bank.

I don't normally buy food for food banks, choosing instead to give them money so they can buy what they need and take advantage of bulk discounts and wholesale pricing, but from time to time I find myself with unwanted food or household products (I buy something that ended up not being right for me, I get a free sample box that includes stuff I'm never going to use, etc.), and I feel that the food bank is the best place for these things.

So I'm wondering where food bank donations fall ethically.

On one hand, they can't use food donations for anti-gay actions like they can with money donations, and having a busy food bank to run might take their attention away from other things.

But, on the other hand, would donating food to the food bank free up money that would otherwise be spent on the food bank for harmful political action? 

Also, what would happen if their food bank failed because they didn't receive any food donations?  Would people who need food suffer, or just be redirected to another food bank? Would the Salvation Army suffer, or just have more time and attention for activities that are less helpful than a food bank?

In short, could the Salvation Army do harm with donations of food like they've been known to do with donations of money? Or is the only possible outcome that the food goes to hungry people?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

On Gary Webster

I am sickened and disgusted and terrified by the firing of Gary Webster, and I am so absolutely livid that this is being done in my name.

In addition to being an insult to Mr. Webster, the TTC, the people of Toronto, and basic good sense, this disgraceful behaviour is a slap in the face of the hundreds of thousands of Torontonians who came here specifically to flee this kind of corruption.

On top of that, this raises the very important question of what kind of person would be willing to replace him under these working conditions? When the previous incumbent was fired for refusing to falsify a business case, do we have any chance of getting a competent or ethical replacement?

I sincerely hope Mr. Webster wins millions and millions of dollars that the city can't afford in a massive wrongful dismissal suit. Even if he doesn't need the money, I hope he wins on principle.

If I were a lawyer, I would be volunteering to represent him pro bono.

If I owned a business, I'd be wracking my brains to figure out how to hire him for more than he made at the TTC.

Things They Should Invent: consulting firm staffed entirely by former senior civil servants driven out of their jobs for doing their jobs. (Gary Webster, Linda Keen, Richard Colvin, Munir Sheikh, etc.)

I've never donated money to a political campaign. I dislike the fact that you cannot donate anonymously. More than once I've googled someone and their political donations have come up on the first page of results, and I don't like the idea of a prospective employer or client or someone else with whom my relationship would be purely professional and apolitical having access to that information.

But my visceral reaction here, for the first time in my life, was that I want to donate as much money as possible to whomever has the best chance of beating out the people responsible for firing Mr. Webster in the next election.

In the meantime, there's a petition to get them removed from the TTC Board.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Causes I would like to get involved in

1. Sufficient and reliable funding for all medical research

Many charity fundraisers are raising money for research into various diseases. Our first thought when we hear this is that it's a good cause. But why is such vital medical research dependent on charity? There should be a better way to make sure that all medical research gets the funding it needs without having to resort to begging or be dependent on the kindness of strangers.

2. Replace property tax with income tax

As I've blogged about before, property tax is silly because it does not directly reflect ability to pay. I know that municipalities use it because that's what the law limits them to, but I think it would serve us all far better if property tax were eliminated and replaced with an income tax at the municipal level.

However, I don't know how to make either of these things happen. Does anyone know of any organizations that are already working on these issues?

Monday, January 10, 2011

Things They Should Invent: political system wherein you only have to express your opinion once for it to count

This post was inspired by this development.

A lot of activism is repeating the same message over and over and over again. You have to sign petitions and write letters to the editor and attend rallies and contact your elected representatives and repeat the same thing over and over and over.

That's inefficient. We need a system where you express your opinion once to the pertinent people, and that's sufficient. And expressing your opinion more than once gains no further reward, and perhaps even annoys people and/or is detrimental to the credibility of your cause.

Case in point: I wrote a cogent and persuasive email to the appropriate elected representatives about the importance of Transit City to me personally and to our city as a whole. But now there are people convinced that I don't really care about Transit City because I didn't attend this one rally that I didn't know was a rally, or because I sent an email instead of making phone calls, or because I didn't skip work and attend some city meeting. And meanwhile I've been spending the past month thinking constantly about what I can do to convince the powers that be that Transit City is important.

Wouldn't the world be a better place if that one email was literally all I could do, and the powers that be would give it precisely my share of all due consideration no matter how much noise the other people make? Then my attendance at the rally would be redundant (maybe we wouldn't need to go to all the trouble to have rallies at all!) and I could have spent the past month putting my thoughts and energy into a wide range of other things, all of which could also be knocked off with a single well-composed email. Politicos' offices would run more smoothly, people would feel more engaged in the political process, people could inform themselves about and commit effort to a wider range of issues, and the world would be a better, more informed, less stressful place.

Friday, January 07, 2011

Things They Should Invent: all public meetings must be justified or obsoleted

I received an email inviting me to a community meeting regarding a political issue I'm interested in. Unfortunately, it didn't say anything about why there was a community meeting. Is there new information that they can't post on the internet for some reason? Are they trying to physically carry out a specific action? They didn't say. They got my email (and, I assume, everyone else's that they copied on this) in the first place through a piece of slacktivism, so why would they think I'd put on make-up and pants and go somewhere at a set time without some hint of why this needs to be in person?

I also saw a tweet recently by someone who was attending a public meeting, and said that they wished more people could be there so they could find out all this information. But why should you have to be there to find out the information? Why can't they just post it on the internet?

It isn't always necessary for people to be in a specific place at a specific time for consultation or information dissemination or activism to happen. Often an email or a website will do the job. Instead of constantly holding public meetings, they should think critically about how much of this can be achieved online. And, conversely, if they do in fact need people to be present in person, they need to specify why.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Building a better protest rally

The problem with protest rallies is ultimately they are boring and not particularly productive. You're standing there in a crowd while the people on stage tell you stuff you already know, then you walk around a bit and make noise so people notice you. Not especially fun or interesting, and doesn't achieve anything other than visibility.

I do get that visibility is the point. A big loud crowd of people gets attention and makes it clear that a lot of people feel strongly about the cause. Critics are likely to dismiss petitions, email campaigns, facebook groups etc. far more readily than an actual crowd of people. But instead of just showing up and making noise and shouting at each other stuff we already know, we should do something, make something, create something, help something. Surely we can make better use of thousands of intelligent, engaged Canadians than just being extras in a crowd scene!

So here's what our Something has to be:

1. Tangible: The value of the crowd is its tangibility, and we need to retain that. If everyone showed up in Yonge Dundas Square and left their mittens behind, that would show how many people were there (problem: then we'd all have to buy new mittens).

2. Visually impressive: Close to 10,000 people is a lot of people. It's "Holy shit, look at all those people." The Something has to be similarly visually impressive. For example, if everyone put their business card in a jar (problems: not everyone has a business card, and not everyone is free to take political action in their employer's name) that wouldn't be visually impressive - 10,000 business cards isn't really a lot. If everyone left their mittens behind or brought a can of food, that wouldn't be particularly visually impressive either - it would look like a lot, but it wouldn't be "Holy shit!" But if everyone brought a live squirrel and released it in Yonge Dundas Square (obvious problems: how do you catch and transport a live squirrel? Plus it's cruel to squirrels), the reaction would be "Holy shit, look at all those squirrels!"

3. Practical and feasible: So suppose everyone showed up at Yonge Dundas Square, stood there and knitted a scarf, and then we left all the scarves on the ground, carpeting the entire square. Tangible and visually impressive, but the problem is not everyone knows how to knit. If everyone got in a car and drove around really slowly with a sign on their roof tying up traffic, that would be tangible and visually impressive, but would severely reduce the numbers because you can't assume everyone has a car. But if we all showed up and drew chalk outlines of our bodies (problems: symbolically inappropriate for this protest, dependent on the media being willing to go to the trouble of photographing it from above) that would be extremely feasible. Leaving your mittens behind might be impractical enough to deter people, but bringing a can of food is generally doable (the problem being that 10,000 cans of food aren't that visually impressive.)

4. Productive and helpful: The ideal would be for the protest to have some lasting positive impact, beyond political awareness. That would give us more of the moral high ground and be good PR vis-a-vis people who are wary of protests in general. The squirrels and the slow-driving cars would just annoy people (and squirrels) so we wouldn't want to do that. The scarves, the mittens, and the cans of food could all be donated somewhere where they'd do some good. It would be even better if the Something could be permanent, like building Habitat for Humanity houses (problem: even if a tract of Habitat for Humanity houses springs up overnight, it isn't obvious to the non-expert how many people were involved).

While writing this I came up with the idea of everyone coming to the protest site and building a small (like 1 or 2 feet high) inukshuk. But that's not super-feasible and not particularly productive. (Where would we get rocks from? How would we make it visually apparent what the inukshuks represent? Plus critics would say that maybe just a few people showed up and built many inukshuks each, and it would annoy people if we cluttered up Yonge Dundas Square with inukshuks.) Plus I don't know whether 10,000 small inukshuks in Yonge Dundas Square would be visually impressive or not.

Then I had the idea of building inukshuks out of nonperishable food, and after the protest is over donating all the food to a food bank. Questions: is it architecturally feasible to build an inukshuk out of nonperishable food, and would the amount of food required be generally affordable? How much trouble/annoyance would it be? What would we do about critics' inevitable allegations that maybe it was just a small number of people building a large number of inukshuks? And would it be visually impressive?

Any other ideas?

Sunday, June 21, 2009

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran, please consider writing it in Farsi. Not all Iranians are going to be tweeting in English.

I believe this is how you say Tehran, Iran in Farsi:

تهران ، ایران

It should be copy-pastable.

I'm not 100% certain - I can't read Farsi - but Google's Farsi interface doesn't correct the spelling and it returns results for things located in Tehran.

If the Farsi is wrong, please post the correct spelling in the comments and I'll update this post and my twitter.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that if you were actually IN Iran, you wouldn't write "Tehran, Iran" as your location. You'd just write Tehran, like how I just wrote Toronto. So here's Tehran in Farsi: تهران

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Petition to open the Canadian Embassy to injured Iranians

You can sign here if you're interested. The petition is intended for Canadian residents only.

Monday, June 16, 2008

How to make our point about the Copyright Act

If you ever get a chance to talk to an artist whose work is among what the new Copyright Act is supposed to be protecting, ask them if they, personally, mind if their audience circumvents the electronic copy protection on their legally-purchased CDs/DVDs for the purpose of conversion to another medium for personal use.

Take a video of the question and the answer, and post it to YouTube.

The more celebrity the artist, the better.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

How do embassies work?

So people are sending panties to Burma again. This is good timing - I actually do need to clean out my underwear drawer, and I'm about to get my period.

So you pop your panties in the post and send them to the Burmese embassy. I get that much. But what happens then? Are they actually going to get close enough to insult someone? Or does their summer intern just throw them straight into the garbage and no one notices?

What happens after the panties arrive at the embassy really does affect how I carry this out, like whether the panties are clean, dirty, clean but stained, stained with red or white or brown, etc. (Aside: I wonder if it's illegal to send bodily fluids in the mail like that?) If I knew they were going to end up literally in Than Shwe's hands, for example, I'd be shopping for a menstrual cup and a fine paintbrush and a Burmese dictionary. If they were going to end up with someone not particularly influential but the message will still be noted, maybe I'd send them laundered with some strategically placed set-in ketchup stains. If they aren't going to be effective, I may or may not bother (I do still have to clean out my underwear drawer) but if I send them I'll make sure they're clean, and maybe include a nice note thanking them for helping me with my spring cleaning. I wonder if some (unused) Always would also help? I accidentally bought the wrong kind a while back and haven't figured out what to do with them (you can't donate an open package and I opened it before I realized it was wrong.)

This also makes me wonder if something insinuating that Than Shwe wear's women's underwear would make a good googlebomb? On one hand, I can see how it might be the Burmese equivalent of small penis. On the other hand, it might imply that he's even more powerful if he can continue to rule the junta despite the draining effect of the panties. Any experts on Burmese male insecurity out there?

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Things They Should Invent: a googlebomb that mocks Than Shwe's penis size

The more I read about Burma, the more I'm thinking this Than Shwe fellow seems really insecure. Like bizarrely ridiculously insecure. After all, a real man who's in charge of a whole country and a whole army wouldn't need to go around oppressing people like that, he could get the people to do what he wants by the sheer strength of his leadership.

So what's the best way to express this sentiment? Googlebomb! Why am I posting this as a Thing They Should Invent rather than just starting it myself? Haven't decided on the optimal phrasing. Small penis? Tiny dick? Smallest penis in the world? Suggestions welcome.

(As an informational aside: in googling for potential phrasing, I found that small penises is a pornography subgenre. Good to know.)

Edit: Would it be productive for the googlebomb to imply that Than Shwe wears women's underwear? Or would that just imply that he's more powerful?

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

How to boycott the olympics on the internet

Some people are talking about boycotting the olympics because of China's human rights issues. I assume the plan is to not watch the olympics and not buy any olympic merchandise. But I think it might be more effective to boycott them on the internet. For example:

- During the olympics, don't mention the olympics on the internet, not even in passing. (Unless someone comes up with a good googlebombing.) Don't blog about them. Ideally everyone should blog about human rights instead (without mentioning the olympics at all), but that's a very demanding blog topic, so blog about anything else instead. The goal is to make it look like no one cares about the olympics at all. We don't want them to show up as a trend in Google Trends. It would be beautiful if human rights were getting exponentially more internet attention than the olympics, but it would also be quite helpful there were more posts like "Look at my new haircut!" and "OMG PUPPY!" and "Today I ate a sandwich" than there were about the olympics.

- Don't read any online articles about the olympics. Not even in the newspaper. Don't click through to anything. Do read all articles about human rights (or, if you don't feel like reading them, click on them so they get hits) and click on all their ads. No one should get any hits or ad revenue for writing about the olympics.

The beauty of this technique is that, if you really want to, you can still watch the olympics. I think TV still uses the sample household reporting system to determine ratings (please do correct me if I'm wrong) so you can turn on your TV without anyone noticing. You can still read about the olympics in the print version of the newspaper and no one will ever know. But on the internet, where it is remarkably easy for people to gather information about what gets them read, it will look like no one cares about the olympics at all.

0.7%

The situation in Burmyanmar (I'm not even going to venture into the treacherous waters of what to call it) got me thinking about foreign aid. We're supposed to give 0.7% of our GDP to foreign aid, but the last I heard we don't give the full amount. I couldn't google up any information that's more recent than 2005, so I decided to do some research of my own.

According to Statistics Canada, our GDP is currently $1,558,844,000,000 (i.e. approx. $1.5 trillion, if you don't feel like counding digits).

I couldn't seem to google up information on how much we're currently spending on foreign aid. However, the 2008 Budget says that they plan to bring Canada's total international aid budget up to $5 billion in 2010-11. (If you can find information on our current foreign aid budget for 2008, please do post it.)

So let's work with those numbers. Our economy's collapsing, our dollar is high, maybe foreign aid of $5 billion over a GDP of $1.5 trillion isn't that far-fetched. So if you run the numbers, you'll find that $5 billion is 0.32% of Canada's GDP, leaving us 0.38% short.

Let's play with that 0.38%. Go to Google and type in 0.38% of $$$$$, replacing $$$$$ with your annual salary. Check out the resulting amount.

It's not that much, is it? I mean, it's not nothing. Buying shoes that cost that much would be a splurge, but it would certainly be a good price for Perfect Shoes (i.e. comfy, attractive, timeless, something you can wear every day then get reheeled and wear again next year). It would be too much to spend on a friend's birthday present, but if your best friend lost their wallet the Friday before a long weekend, you certainly wouldn't hestitate to press that amount of cash into their palm, waving away their protests, to tide them over until they can get down to the bank on Tuesday. If that were the price of tickets to something that makes you squee like a fangirl at the prospect of getting tickets for it, you wouldn't think twice before going to Ticketmaster the minute the sale opened and frantically pressing refresh. If something important - house, car, computer, dog - had some kind of emergency and you needed to throw money at it to fix it, you'd breathe a sigh of relief if the total bill came out to only 0.38% of your annual salary.

It really surprised me that our aid shortfall was such a relatively small amount. When you look at it on personal terms, it's an amount that if you had to pay it out unexpectedly and in one lump sum, you might feel it in your budget for a month, but after that you wouldn't even notice.

So I went to the Red Cross website and donated that amount to Burmyanmar. Maybe if our country won't step up, we can each make up our individual share of the shortfall.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

So what does a petition have to do to get into the news?

I've seen several mentions in the news of the fact that a facebook group opposing proposed changes to Canada's copyright law got something like 30,000 members in only a few days.

But the avaaz.org "stop being a dickhead about climate change" (traduction libre) petition got over 100,000 signatures in three or four days, and I haven't seen that in the news anywhere.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

A petition

Canadians: Please read this and sign if you're interested.

(Aside: Have you ever felt tempted to email a politician saying nothing but "Dude, WTF?")

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Petition

A petition against female genital mutiliation. Available in French only. (Pétition contre les mutilations génitales féminines).

Pour celles et ceux d'entre vous qui peuvent lire le français, veuillez cliquer, lire, et signer si vous le jugez approprié. Moi, je le juge approprié.

Sunday, May 25, 2003

In Ontario, minimum wage is $6.85 per hour. That works out to $12,500 per year. The poverty line in Ontario for a single adult is around $18,000 per year. Minimum wage has been constant since 1995, the same year that rents jumped 19%. For some families with children, welfare provides more financial stability than a minimum wage job.

Phone and urge Brad Clark, Ontario minister of labour, 416-326-7600, to raise the minimum wage to $10. After all, that just meets the poverty line.

And phone or e-mail Justice for Workers (416-531-2411, ext. 246 or justice_for_workers@yahoo.ca) if you want to help the Ontario Needs a Raise campaign to distribute leaflets around the city and the province on May 31 and June 5.

Friday, May 23, 2003

I'm pondering whether it would be an effective political statement to list myself on my municipal assessment as Catholic by religion, but as a supporter of the public school board. Do they keep stats that would show the number of Catholics voting public? I do have the right to identify as Catholic since I was baptized, but I'd rather not do so unless it would be an effective political statement.