Category Archives: philosophy

Falling in the Forest: Dialogue and Readings for Freedom to Read Week

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The Shebeen Club and 50Books.com Present:

Falling in the Forest:
Dialogue and Readings for Freedom to Read Week

When: 7-10pm, Tuesday, February 20th

Where: the Shebeen, behind the Irish Heather, 217 Carrall Street, Vancouver BC

How: reserve in advance by emailing lorraine.murphy at gmail.com or show up at the door

How Much: $15 includes meeting plus set dinner and a drink; strictly limited to 25 places

What: This month in honour of Freedom to Read Week we will host a discussion of literary freedom in Canada. Bring your opinions, your manifestos, and your forbidden writings! We will feature banned books with readings by CBC radio personalities Lisa Christiansen and Tammy Everts, quotations from great political thinkers, and a participatory discussion of the recent Supreme Court case involving Vancouver’s own Little Sister’s Bookstore.

Who: The Shebeen Club, Vancouver’s Literary Gathering, in association with 50Books.com. See http://www.shebeenclub.com and http://www.50books.com and http://www.freedomtoread.ca/ or email lorraine.murphy at gmail.com for more info.

Dress code: Orange jumpsuits, plum velvet frock coats, and gags optional.

Door prizes: We have a don’t ask, don’t tell door prize policy. We don’t ask you if you like ’em, we expect you not to tell us if you don’t. Book donations snivellingly accepted.

Meet and Mingle 7-7:30

Listen and Learn 7:30-9 (going to be a VERY involved night, eat your Wheaties)

Manifesto Manifesting 9-10 or whenever they finally throw us out

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a turning point in modern politics: just watch me

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Humanity is born free, yet everywhere it is … in thrall to the military-industrial complex using threats of terrorism to manipulate the cowed multitudes.

My question is this: why, when Pierre Elliot Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act (as a response to the kidnapping of only two individuals and with no sign of a war) did we accept this as right and good, yet when Tony Blair and George W. Bush impose similar measures (and they are both actively fighting wars…well, the poor people in their countries are; and there have been terrorist attacks in each of their countries which have killed a significant number of regular citizens) we reject it as nothing more than a cynical fascist control technique?

For me, I have an excuse: I was little when Trudeau ruled the Earth. But even then I was anti-fascist. I don’t think there’s any question about whether or not the technique if fascist: it is. The question is why did it seem right then but not now?

Is it personality-driven? Is it the charm factor? Is it because Trudeau was so obviously more intelligent than either Blair or Bush? or, come to think of it, more intelligent than the citizenry and we damn well knew it? Blair‘s no moron, though; is it because he’s so much Bush‘s catamite that he gets zero IQ points by association (or as a penalty for bad taste)? And can you imagine Stephen “RoboTory” Harper getting away with something like that? He’d be run out of Ottawa at the head of a mob armed with insulated buckets of boiling Steeped Tea™.

Pierre Trudeau‘s speech announcing the imposition of the War Measures Act is after the jump, and very interesting reading it makes, too:

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today in confirming your worst suspicions about humanity news…

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Kimveer Gill and his gun 

Sales of the Beretta CX4 Storm 9-mm, semi-automatic carbine tripled in the month after Kimveer Gill used one in his infamous shooting rampage at Dawson College in Montreal which left himself and business student Anastasia De Sousa dead.

This is certainly a case that brings out the very best in people. And that’s the very best in these people.

Is it so very wrong to wish that all those additional sales result in suicides?

Kimveer Gill

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quiz: which character from the Iliad are you?

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Here is my all-time favorite mass transit story, and it’s even true!

My English professor rode the bus every day. He rode the bus in from White Rock. It took long hours.

Sorry, channelling Hemingway; it’s the English major in me.

Anyway, on the bus, he met many an interesting character, as one does. He met so many, in fact, that he eventually decided to stop meeting anyone at all, and began reading on the bus.

This was not a successful solution, for lo the world is never short of those with an opinion or two to spare on the subject of a total stranger’s taste in books (to the point where I used to use a book cover that said “I want YOU…to leave me alone”).

One day, he was reading a book, as I think I have explained was his wont, which I suppose means what he wonted to do, and the book just happened to be the Iliad (in translation; he was no showoff). Well, onto the bus lumbers and BAM! down into the seat next to him sits a huge, hulking biker of much black leather, clanking chains, and many a fierce and prison-made tattoo.

Great, thinks the mild-mannered and moderate-bodied English professor. Try to be invisible, he thinks.

He fails.

POKE goes the biker’s finger into the book.

Da Iliad! he shouts. I love dat book! Rumble in Troy, eh! Ah, it’s all women, man. All da trouble in da world: It’s always all about da fuckin’ women.

  Which Greek Warrior From The Iliad Are You?  

Agamemnon: You are the king of Mycenae…and assholery. I’m telling you, sacrificing your daughter to fuel your ambitions doesn’t win you too many friends.
Take this quiz!

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the perfect religion!

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 Theological potholes ahead, check your shocks!

In a primarily Relativist culture, we are often faced with the difficulty of acknowledging and expressing the equality of all faiths, no matter how loopy, unproductive or just plain unfashionable they may be. This service, by the Frantics, has finally answered the great question which lies at the heart of all religions:

in an imperfect world where the message of the divine is often difficult for us to hear,
just exactly how do we completely cover our asses?

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