On Debate...

With our own elections looming in the near distance, and our southern neighbour's already underway, we can look forward to an autumn of heated debates between various candidates in various levels of politics.

This causes me to reflect on the nature of debate, and the role that it has in our political process. During a verbal debate, candidates do not have the luxury to take the time to actually give some honest consideration to their opponents' point of view - to consider if some of their opponents' arguments may actually have some merit, to critically reflect on their own perspectives and to consider a collaborative solution to the issue which includes these diverse perspectives. In fact, this would be highly discouraged, and it would be considered a sign of weakness.

No, the goal of debate is to show a stubborn adherance to one's own point of view, to show that one can refute any argument no matter how valid it may be. The "winner" is not the one who can intellectually take in all the various arguments and formulate a solution which is collaborative and which may embody new and courageous ideals. The winner instead is someone who refuses to consider opposing reason, and who insists on a partisan solution to complex issues - and he/she who can most effectly avoid giving genuine consideration to the points of the other party and remain rigid in their own view is the one who is deemed the better leader!

Through this process we effectively seek out stubborn, rigid, opinionated leaders rather than intellectually curious, collaborative, and inclusive leaders. And then we act shocked when the democratic process doesn't work, and when the minority's voice and dissenting views are not taken legitimately. Is it really any surprise?

"Excercises" in Narcissism

Staying course on the theme of the Olympics, I'd like to put some thoughts I've had out on the table to see if anyone can enlighten me....

My main thought consists of "what really is our fascination with this??". Yes, these atheletes have ENORMOUS talent. And they have all demonstrated the greatest heights of human discipline. But they have also demonstrated the greatest heights of another less revered human quality - narcissism.

Why does one need to the best in the world? How much stroking of one's ego could one possibly desire, if one needs to prove that they are better than the rest of the 6 billion people wandering this planet?

Let's really think about this for a second....aside from inspiring young people to play sports (and I highly doubt that everyone would stop playing sports if the Olympics ceased to exist), what else do the heights of their careers actually accomplish for anyone other than themselves??

Can you imagine spending 95% of your time working on perfecting one skill, that is of no use to anyone in this world except yourself and your teammates? And somehow then it is not enough to be in the top 1% of your sport, you need to spend even more time making sure that you can beat the others in the top 1% by 0.01 of a second - just to prove that you are the best!

Of course it is fascinating to see what the limits of the human body are - and like everyone else, I have a huge amount of respect for people who are able to reach those limits. But deciding whether you are a fraction of a second (or 5 seconds for that matter) faster than the next guy goes WAY beyond determining the limits of the human body.

I truly do not understand this need to be "best", this need to quantify things to the minutiae of 1/100th of a second, this desire to put on blinders and focus only on the one thing that will make you swell with the pride of superiority. And I really don't understand why we as a society (myself included) place such value on it. I don't get why this display of narcissism is considered a positive thing, rather than a negative thing.

Despite the fact that I myself have found myself on the edge of my seat watching these events, I truly don't have answers to the above questions...

GUEST POST - Michael Phelps’ Teeth and the Ugly Chinese Girl

Hi, it's Jen and I have the pleasure of being Shifi's first guest blogger.....

A few thoughts regarding the lip-synching cute girl/ugly girl story from the Olympics opening ceremony…..

Why is this a front-page story for apparently every North American news outlet? Seriously, why? Front page. Above the fold. Top of the webpage. On the front page of what I’ve been led to believe is the intelligent Canadian’s newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Why are even our “best” media outlets so tabloidy these days?

And it wasn’t just headlines. But big side-by-side pictures so you could easily compare the sublime adorableness of one girl to the shocking ugliness of the other. The other one being seven years old, by the way. And famous throughout the world now, at the age of seven, thanks to the professional media, for being not so cute.

Here’s a question my host blogger would ask, I’m sure…. if they weren’t Chinese and somehow “the other”, would the North American media have done this? If they were Canadian or American, would they be posting big comparison pictures on their front pages so you could decide for yourself just how unpleasant-looking this seven-year-old is? (Yeah, maybe I’m giving them to too much credit.)

So we make a big deal about this… (for one day, anyway - writing about it a day later, it already feels irrelevant.) So we potentially ruin someone’s life so we can shake our heads at the Chinese for five minutes. So we tisk-tisk and feel superior with our authenticity and our free speech. But is it really any different than the airbrushing and excessive tooth-whitening we see in half of the pictures in our magazines? Any Torontonians see the picture of Michael Phelps on the front page of the Metro newspaper yesterday (oops, I guess the little girls didn’t make the front of every newspaper)? Apparently in the process of cropping the picture to overlap the masthead, someone took the liberty of normalizing his orthodontically unique teeth. What’s the difference?

Out of sight, out of mind...

As I've travelled around the world, and around more remote parts of Canada over the past few years, it has occured to me that Westerners seem to complain alot about litter.

I cannot count how many white-folk I heard complaining about the garbage in India. In Vietnam I was even "lucky" enough to listen to an 18 year-old Australian girl conduct a twenty-minute monologue on how horrible the litter is, and how the Vietnamese should make a law where they can shoot anyone who litters (this young girl clearly thought she was on to something!).

The same holds true for First Nations reserves in Canada - when I visit these communities, I invariably find myself enduring some snide comments from various (non-Native) nurses who are "appalled" by all of the litter. "If only they kept it clean..." they say, in a judgemental colonial tone.

Forget the fact that the average Torontonian creates 365 kg of garbage per year (that's 1 kg per person per day!). And how about the reality that the average North American eco-footprint is at least 7 times higher than the people from "those poor, dirty countries" that we enjoy chastising and feeling sorry for.

No, we're not any better at "keeping it clean" - we're just better at hiding our mess!