I should have expected it, but I was naive enough to expect the tories to do everything in their power to investigate these claims. If you don’t know what claims I’m talking about just click this Link .
The tories rejection of the opportunity to clear their name only solidifies my belief that these allegation are at least partially true. I will illustrate with logic why I believe this. Allegations come forward that you condoned torture in Afghanistan. As soon as these claims come forward, you deny the authenticity of the source. So, at this point you would be dieing to clear your name, right? But the Conservatives said it wasn’t necessary because apparently there’s no proof detainees were tortured. So a source that says something contrary to what the government says is automatically discounted in the Canadian public inquiry system. Call me inexperienced, but I thought the government was elected to improve the welfare of all Canadians, protect our country and to keep Canada’s image and interests constant and unwavering in the rest of the world. The image of Canada that I know is the image of a peaceful haven for all peoples and ethnic group at home, and a peacekeeping nation abroad.
If you ignore the other parties in Canada, it is mind-boggling that the Conservatives continue to receive votes. (It’s a little less mind-boggling if you look at the quality of the rest of the parties.) The Conservative government is decisively Un-Canadian (against gay marriage, wants tougher immigration policies, doesn’t support rehabilitation), and I think that just because all of Alberta votes for them doesn’t mean they should make decisions for all Canadians.
I finally come to the Geneva Convention. It is quite troubling that our Generals could do anything to incite someone to testify to the condoning of torture, let alone actually torture anyone. Every self-respecting politician should realize that this document is close to sacred for right activists, and any sign of deviating from it’s contents will be treated with utmost disgust.
I long ago stopped trusting Canadian politicians, but in some way you have to believe that no person would condone torture. Even from a non-ethical standpoint torture is ineffective. Torture has never been identified as a reliable way of acquiring information, as false confession are quite common in war zones. I am obviously also opposed to torture from an ethical standpoint (just to clear that up). I advocate that the Canadian government create an independent investigation led by a Supreme Court Judge, and this investigation would be for the sole purpose of proving the truth of the falsehood of the claims.
It may not be fully apparent what this has to do with apathy, but I believe I need to cover this issue because it has a distinct lack of buzz surrounding the implications.
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Tags: afghanistan, convention, geneva, inquiry, tories, torture
As anyone who follows news in Vancouver will know, gang crime has been proliferating as of late. This is due to an ongoing gang war between many factions. Already this year there has been 42 homicides that are believed to be gang related. I will not delve into the specifics of how or why these homicides occurred, but I will talk about Youth’s perception of this topic and how it needs to change.
Youth have long been under the impression that gang warfare and it’s related activities have kind of appeal. The risk and reward thing, making it big or going down. To youth growing up in relative poverty, the whole thing sounds lucrative. They must think “Well, even if I get caught it can’t be as bad as being poor”. Now, to anyone with a reasonable train of thought would see the many fallacies within this approach. One such fallacy is their complete rejection of the option of trying for a regular career. I realize that this option is the harder path in life and that not all people who go down this path will succeed, but if you are successful in establishing a career then you will be guaranteed a happier life then in the life and gangs and drugs. I think that some people might see me as a person with a lack of empathy towards their situation just because I say they should get a better life, but I would argue that many people have come from horrendous backgrounds turned out to be amazingly successful people.
Now I come to a point that I don’t really like discussing, which is the people who think I’m advocating books like “The Secret”, which I’m not at all. I’ve listened to many successful people talk about what makes a successful person in life, and the answer is always the same. How hard you work. They talk about people in their companies that were brilliant, smarter then Bill Gates may have been, but these people had it easy in high-school and thought they could just sit back and let life come to them. They ended up sitting back for most of their working careers with nothing to do, because they didn’t seek out new opportunities and options, because they thought they would automatically be better then everyone else. Life doesn’t work like that. It’s not survival of the smartest in today’s world, it’s the survival of those who are smartest about their smarts.
Now that was a bit a of a tangent, so let’s come back to the original topic at hand. Youth in Metro Vancouver, especially those in the higher risk areas like East Van and Surrey see the effects of gang crime every day. It blows my mind that even with all these obvious deterrents youth still continue to join the ranks of these horrible organization. I’m not usually for tough jail sentences and I am a supporter of rehabilitation, but I feel no sympathy for the disgusting people that romanticize gang violence and gang crime for their own twisted purposes. I believe there should be a special charge for corrupting the mind of innocent youth, and that charge should be very severe, because picking on innocent citizen for purposes of violence is absolutely unspeakable.
That being said, youth have to make a concerted effort to keep themselves informed and too all you youth our there, you should always remember that first and foremost, YOU are responsible for your own safety.
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Tags: choices, crime, gang, life, vancouver, youth
Free Speech Zones?
Next year, as you probably aware, Vancouver will play host to the Winter Olympic Games. These Games will be an amazing event, whether you support them or not. But the Games come with some downsides. Quite a few Vancouverites seem blind to these downsides. I am a Vancouverite, and it seems that many of my my fellows either don’t know or don’t care about how their personal freedoms and safety will be affected by the new laws and rules being enacted for the sole purpose of the Olympics Many of these problems have been documented elsewhere, so I will focus on one particular one. The implementation of so-called “Free Speech Zones”.
The Olympic security officials have been very vague about the use of these “Free Speech Zones”, and so their purpose is very unclear. Take this one quote for example:
“Anywhere you participate in lawful protest is legal and lawful in Canada. It doesn’t have to be in a free speech area.” Bud Mercer, head of security for the 2010 Olympics.
Now if you can protest anywhere why in the world would you need a “Free Speech Zone”? The security officials haven’t given any reasons for using these zones, so they seem pointless. These “Free Speech Zones” might be in low profile locations, so protesters hoping to get media coverage would want to pick a higher profile location. Also, there would be the possibility that people would avoid these zones because it would get too busy, and therefore the protesters would fail to get their message out. The only upside I see to having “Free Speech Zones” would be that media can cover all the protests at once. But even that has downsides. The protests could possibly amalgamate, causing the original messages behind the protests to become unclear.
I have suspicions about the intention of security forces creating “Free Speech Zones”, because why would someone create a “Free Speech Zone” unless they intended to have “Regulated Speech Zones”? I have no proof saying that they intend to break up protests outside “Free Speech Zones”, but it is food for thought.
Vancouverites have shown an amazing amount of apathy to to the goings-on in the world of Olympic security. Did you know that the BC government was trying to pass a bill that allowed police and security forces to enter your home without a warrant if they believed you had anti-Olympic propaganda? (That bill failed.) Or that in high security areas there will be random searches by private security? I encourage you to educate yourself on the security measures that will be taken during the 2010 Olympic Games. I also encourage you to check the news daily for breaking stories, because they are often very pertinent to your daily life. Read all the stories you can, and form your opinion carefully.
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Tags: apathy, free, olympics, security, speech, vancouver, zones
There has been much speculation on the importance of Barrack Obama to the recovery of America’s political system, and how he will bring politics into the mainstream. Many proponents of Obama say he will improve public knowledge and better the public’s understanding of politics by making politics “cool” and/or “hip”. This could be the case for some people. They might see Obama and say, “Wow, I can be a politician and be cool too? Awesome!” and then become heavily interested in politics. But the majority of people who aren’t politically savvy will feel a large amount of pressure from their peers to like and support Obama. These people might not even know any of Obama’s policies, but will pretend to wholeheartedly support him in any conversation. I will present a case from my own personal experience.
One of my friends, Austin Herrmann (Co-founder of this blog), said something about how Obama would progress America towards full Socialism (I will not argue this point either way, and it is not pertinent to this discussion) around me and one other friend. This other friend went on to say, “Oh my god, you’re an Obama hater!”. Austin then went on to state his point and then asked the other friend why he supported Obama. My other friend replied, “because he’s cool”, and then said that Austin and I should support Obama. Austin rebuffed the friend and then left. I talked to the friend and told him I was undecided about what candidate I would support. The friend told me that if I was undecided that I should support Obama. (This was before the Election last year. It just stayed in my mind because I realized how Obama was affecting the attitudes of people who weren’t politically savvy.) I found this discussion distressing. I didn’t know this person very well so I couldn’t just go up to the person and say, “Why are you ignorant?”
I am going to go ahead and coin a term here. I will call these people “Political Social Conformists”. This term is pretty self explanatory, but I will create a definition page for this word. I will refer to Political Social Conformists as PSC for short, because I don’t want to type that all the time.
If a large number a of people who are disenchanted with the Democratic system start pretending that they are interested in politics, then it bring up a number of different issues. Some of these issues are:
- If many people who are slightly ignorant pressure others who are ignorant, this spreads ignorance.
- It disrupts democracy by creating a society where a social pressure translates into a vote. Previously, politics was isolated from social pressures by the fact that it was a personal decision you vote for, not a social call sign.
- It will be easier to spread misinformation through PSCs who don’t really know what they’re talking about, but want to fit in by spreading facts that look good, but in actuality may be false
Now, I just want to conclude by saying that in no way do think that Obama being president supports apathy. In fact, I believe the opposite. But every good side must have a bad side, and not very many people are willing to point out the bad side.
Just some completely partisan info: I partially support Obama
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Tags: apathy, conformist, Obama, politcal, PSC, social
Introduction: Apathy = Tyranny
Well, first of all, welcome to a school project blog called Apathy = Death. It’s run by Austin S. Herrmann (myself) and Delan Elliot. We’re writing this blog for Activism class, because we needed to do something to incite change in under three weeks. Both of us thought doing Apathy was a good idea (Because everybody else was being treehugging hippies and going for ‘global warming’ and ‘animal liberation’) so after about an hour of thought and assorted music (ranging from Muse to Metallica) we decided that writing a blog about the subject would be a good idea because we could reach the maximum amount of people through the internet. So in this introduction we will cover basic examples of how apathy has killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone.
Example one, and the most widely known one, is the Austrian-born (NOT GERMAN BORN, HE CAME OVER TO GERMANY AND MESSED MY GREAT GRANDPARENTS STUFF UP) fascist head of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany (Nazi party, for you uninformed people who think Adolf was a right-winger). Ring any bells? Yeah, Adolf-freaking-Hitler. The most well known (but least effective at killing his own people) dictator of the 20th century, and arguably the main reason for the Second World War. Everybody knows he killed more than six million people, but how many people know how he came to power, or even care? Well, not too many.
But guess what? He was brought to power because people of good conscience decided to be lazy and do nothing. And a decent percent of them got thrown is mass graves. Hitler had a large and violent group of followers, who threatened, harmed or even killed people who opposed him during the election (HITLER WAS DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED). Because so few people acted in opposition, Hitler’s zealots outnumbered conservative, liberal, libertarian and communist critics and allowed Hitler to take power.
Kind of makes you think about apathy, doesn’t it?
More of these examples will come with time (sooner than later).
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Tags: adolf, apathy, hitler, nazi, tyranny
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Apathy = Death 