[LINK] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treasons' Andrew Barton blogs about the power problems of Iqaluit, capital of the Arctic territory of Nunavut, as symptomatic of Canada's neglect of the north and wonders if a compact nuclear reactor might be a good solution.


• Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow reproduces part of a 1965 IKEA catalogue.


• At Broadsides, Antonia Zerbisias blogs about how anti-choice activists have consistently lied about so-called "abortion trauma syndrome."


• Centauri Dreams speculates as to the possibility of whether or not a brown dwarf--briefly, a massive object heavier than a planet but not heavy enough to become a star--lies close to Earth. The blog also reports on speculation that stars with massive planets may have evolved nearer to the galactic core than others.


• Will Baird reports that fog has been found on Titan, suggesting the recycling of liquid in Titan's atmosphere in a model very similar to the water cycle on Earth.


• Far Outliers mentions intra-Buddhist civil war in late medieval/early modern Japan.


• Hunting Monsters suggests that British relatives of the dead in the Lockerbie disaster seem to be reacting to the convicted Libyan al-Megrahi's release less negatively than their American counterparts because they're aware of questions over the official conclusions and because they know about many wrongful prosecution cases at home.


• Joe. My. God reports on new studies which report that, in the United States, gay/bi men contract HIV at 50 times the rate of the general population.


• Marginal Revolution rehearses the ancient debate as to whether Americans or Europeans live better and more prosperous lives.


• Noel Maurer wonders why the Mexican government's response to the recession is to cut spending, rather than increase it in good counter-cyclical manner. Also, he has questions about Canadian oil taxes.


• Slap Upside the Head blogs about how a Minnesota pastor blames a recent tornado in that state on same-sex blessings.


• Towleroad reports that Uruguay, already one of the most GLBT-friendly countries in South America, is about to legalize gay adoption.


• The Vanity Press' Chet Scoville writes about the disconnection of so many right-wingers in the United States with reality. Death panels indeed!


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Medvedev is referring to Ukraine as--roughly speaking--"the" Ukraine as opposed to Ukraine, I think, perhaps suggesting a certain tension regarding Ukrainian nationhood.

[LINK] "New poll suggests Canadians are warming to minority rule"

Yes, it's in the National Post, but it's originally from Reuters' Chris Wattie and tells an interesting story besides.

After five years of constant election speculation, Canadians may be warming to the idea of minority governments, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted by Nanos Research, suggests that more than half of Canadians, 53.9%, say their impression of minority governments is positive or somewhat positive.

With Conservative MPs beginning to ramp up rhetoric about the need for a majority in the next election, the poll suggests they may not have a high degree of support for that view, said Nanos president and CEO Nik Nanos.

"The Conservatives have said that they want a majority government for stability, but the polling suggests that only about 31.5% of Canadians would even like them to see them get re-elected," Mr. Nanos said.

[. . .]

The appetite for minority governments is partially driven by the fact that Canadians don't see a single leader as particularly strong or desirable, so electing a leader into a minority situation provides a check on power, Mr. Nanos said. This situation played out with Paul Martin in 2004, and now twice with Stephen Harper in 2006 and 2008.

"It's a bit of a reflection on the state of affairs in regards to the leadership of the federal political parties," Mr. Nanos said.

The poll indicated that those in Quebec are most in favour of a minority government, with 29.7% of respondents saying the idea of a minority government was positive. On the Prairies, only 11% of respondents said the idea of a minority government was positive.

For the record, I support minority governments myself.

[LINK] A TTC expansion that never happened

Toronto's Steve Munro has an interesting post about a possible expansion of Toronto's subway/rapid transit system that never happened.

Back in October 1974, the TTC was considering various proposals for new rapid transit lines, one of which was the Queen Street subway. This line would have run from Roncesvalles and Queen east to somewhere beyond Broadview, then turned north past Greenwood yard and continued via Donlands to O’Connor. At that point, the line would cross the Don River to serve Thorncliffe and Flemingdon Parks winding up at the CPR crossing north of Eglinton.

There's plenty of text and images at Munro's site.

[LINK] "Stuck in version 1.0"

Once upon a time, Toronto--the downtown area, at least--was going to have free wireless. That never happened. Now, in the most recent issue of Now Toronto, Joshua Errett takes the city to task.

Standing at the podium at City Hall, Mayor David Miller whips out his BlackBerry, his fingers dance around the keypad, and he faces the crowd.

The most tech-positive politician in Toronto’s history, Miller is usually at ease talking to the normally adoring group gathered in front of him for last November’s Web 2.0 summit.

But this question vexes him: when will Toronto get its own Google Transit map?

After a quick smartphone consult, he’s got a reply.

Google Transit for the TTC, a Toronto version of the much-loved map that puts public transit routes, schedule and service info in an at-your-fingertips format, would be ready in the spring, he said to applause.

For transit enthusiasts and those just wanting to know the quickest route from Chinatown to the St. Lawrence Market, it was about time. The Google partnership is already in place in nearly every other Canadian city with public transportation, from Fredericton to Victoria and Vaughan, just north of Toronto.

Only now, almost a year later, there’s still no map, and it would take another map to retrace the failed promises, starting in 2006.

[. . .]

[Toronto]’s in the world's top 10 in Twittering, in the top 20 in overall Internet use, and has loads of Web start-ups. Tons of small tech conferences like ChangeCamp are held here, with the online activists to go with them. Mozilla, maker of the popular browser Firefox, even has an office in Toronto.

But when it comes to ranking the most cutting-edge cities in the world, T.O. is a pretender – from the failure of city-wide wireless to the absence of big-name Web firms and the lack of work-friendly Internet cafés.

Most importantly, while cities like Vancouver, Washington, DC, and Pittsburgh (of all places) zoom onward to the future, Toronto’s moves toward more participatory city government, using democratizing open-source technology, are snail-like.

Errett suggests that a lack of vision, including the failure to recognize Toronto as a hub of innovation, is responsible. In a related piece, Errett also suggests all kinds of digital role models for Toronto, from Portland to Munich to Singapore.

[LINK] "Yemen's tiny Jewish minority shrinking fast"

The vestigial presence of Yemenite Jews in their homeland, decades after the mass exoduses to Israel and the United States, turns out to be threatened by violence in perennially unstable Yemen.

Three more Jewish families will leave Yemen for Israel this week, according to a Yemeni rabbi who laments the dwindling of an ancient community unnerved by threats and by the murder of a Jew last year.

A Shi'ite revolt in the strongly tribal northern mountains and the growth of Sunni Islamist fervour in Yemen have made Jews uncomfortable in a land where they have deep roots.

Only 200 to 300 Jews still live among Yemen's 23 million Muslims, mostly in the north.

Rabbi Yahya Yusuf Musa, 31, told Reuters the three families were from Raida, a town about 70 km (45 miles) north of the capital Sanaa, where a Jew was killed in December by a Muslim compatriot who has been sentenced to death for the crime.

Sixteen Yemeni Jews from Raidah moved to Israel in June, including relatives of the victim, Mashaa Yaeesh al-Nahari.

An official at Israel's immigration ministry declined to comment due to the sensitivity of the subject.

There's more at the Reuters site.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On the immorality, even stupidity, of pretending that any atrocity is singular

Idly searching through Google News, I came across a rather interesting article by one Israeli Nazi-hunter named Efraim Zuroff written for the Jerusalem Post, "Rewriting Shoah history in Estonia".

[I]n the Baltics, which suffered German and Soviet occupations, the historical concepts generally accepted throughout Europe and the rest of the world are turned topsy turvy, with the Nazis being regarded as the by-far lesser of the two evils and the Soviets considered the arch-villains.

Where can one start? The Holocaust in the Baltic States was profoundly complicated. Perhaps we can follow Zuroff and examine Estonia. Yes, Estonia was the first country in Europe to be declared judenfrei, but that's because there were hardly any Jews living in Estonia in the first place, perhaps two thousand. The environment for Jews was hardly hostile, especially since very liberal minority legislation assigned the Jews a substantial amount of communal autonomy. The Soviet Union liquidated the Estonian state and many Estonian Jewish leaders, then the Nazis invaded and began their massacres without any possibility of organized Estonian opposition, so I'm rather curious as to how Estonia could be fairly viewed as responsible for its Judenfrei status.

Why this extra hostility to the Soviet Union? As I blogged way back in June 2004, the Soviet Union was considerably more harsh in Estonia than the Nazis.

"[D]uring the first Soviet occupation from 1940 to 1941, Estonia lost about 48,000 people. The three years of German occupation resulted in the death of about 32,000 citizens of various nationalities, including 929 Jews and 243 Gypsies who were either killed in concentration camps or in battle. During the second Soviet occupation, which lasted from 1944 to 1994, Estonia lost nearly 121,000 people. In all, the country lost about 180,000 people, or nearly 18 percent of the population." To break the statistics down: In the space of a year and a half, the Soviet Union--in the 1940-1941 occupation--managed to kill half again as many Estonians as in three years of Nazi occupation. In the second occupation, more than four times as many Estonians died under Soviet rule--mainly in the Stalinist era, when the Soviet Union was concerned with eliminating all possible opposition to its rule in its newly annexed territories.

The 1939-1941 period in Estonia was rather nasty, including mass executions and the deportation of 6% of the Estonian population into the Soviet interior. The rate of mass murders and deportations slowed down under Nazi rule, not stopped, true, but it was a relief. Why not appreciate that? And why be surprised that military units, even those associated with the Nazis, which fought against the invading Soviet forces in 1944-1945, might still be honoured? (The units that Zuroff writes about seem to be ones uninvolved in atrocities.)

Zuroff gets even better.

The annual SS veterans reunion is only the tip of the iceberg of sympathy for these men who are considered fighters for Estonian independence even though the victory they sought to achieve was for Nazi Germany, which had no intention of granting them sovereignty. Thus all sorts of souvenirs of the unit are widely available for purchase, its outstanding soldiers are lauded as local heroes and their exploits are memorialized in an impressive album readily available which emphasizes "their selfless courage against communism and for the restoration of Estonian independence," but which begrudgingly admits only in passing that they "had to wear a German uniform to do so" (The Estonian Legion in Words and Pictures, Tallinn, 2008, coedited by none other than former [twice] Estonian prime minister Mart Laar).

DURING MY visit, I encountered several additional examples of the Estonians' reversal of conventional historical wisdom about World War II. The most famous, and the incident which sparked violent riots in Tallinn in the spring of 2007, was the removal of a monument honoring the Soviet soldiers who liberated the country from the yoke of the Nazi occupation, from its central location in the capital to a military cemetery on the outskirts of the city.

Besides grievously insulting the large Russian minority which views the Soviet troops as heroes who achieved a vital victory in the fight against Nazism, the removal of the statue was also a painful blow to the Estonian Jewish community, whose annihilation in 1941 was orchestrated by the Nazis and their Estonian collaborators. Having visited both the monument's original location opposite the national library and its new site, it is clear that Estonians prefer not be reminded that their current narrative is a distortion of the historical events of World War II.

As I noted above, in the case of Estonia the local inhabitants bore very little responsibility for the Holocaust in their lands, inasmuch as anti-Semitism doesn't seem to have been a notable force there and there wasn't any local state or other agency to restrain the Nazis as in, say, Finland. Again, Zuroff doesn't seem interested in considering the possibility that the Bronze Soldier might itself represent a foreign tyranny that was as bloody if not more so than the Nazis. Estonia was not liberated by the Soviet Union. Instead, it was occupied. Why honour that memory?7

Today [the 22nd of August] will be marked in Estonia as a day of remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes. This ostensibly innocuous initiative to commemorate Nazi and communist victims together is actually just a first step towards obtaining official recognition that communism and Nazism were equally evil, a major step toward undermining the current status of the Shoah as a unique tragedy and one which will help deflect attention and criticism from the Estonians' distortion of history and failure to face their Holocaust past. (They have since independence, failed to prosecute a single Estonian Holocaust perpetrator, while bringing to trial numerous communist criminals.)

This is where Zuroff really loses me. Why shouldn't a country mourn the victims of all totalitarian states? The Holocaust was only one crime among many committed by the briefly allied Nazi and Soviet states in the unfortunate belt of countries between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Certainly the occupation of the Baltic States and the invasion of Finland were both precipitated by the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany, certainly the Soviet Union had demonstrated its autogenocidal tendencies towards any number of ethnic, regional and class populations, certainly the occupation of a country by one side or another resulted at best in the exchange of a less murderous regime for a more murderous one. Certainly Stalin himself seems to have been planning a mass deportation of Jews to Soviet Asia on the Volga German/Chechen model. Certainly all the massacred were just as dead and just as worthy of some sort of commemoration. But no, Zuroff disagrees. Only one set of atrocities matter.

The dangerous point in pretending that one genocide or sets of acts of genocide are of singular importance, mattering more than others just because they do, is that it detracts from the whole legal concept of genocide as a thing that can happen in any number of situations. Raphael Lemkin certainly didn't intend "genocide" to stand for a single crime. The concept of genocide was invented to apply to all manner of cases. Taking "Never again" and making it instead "Never again will the Jews by murdered by Nazi Germany and its local sympathizers in the mid-20th century" degrades the concept, denying the commonalities behind all these crimes and letting them be hidden, worse like Zuroff making these crimes political footballs and avoiding any real dialogue that could just possibly prevent the identification of future atrocities.

The article notes that Zuroff went to Tallinn in order to preside over the publication ceremony of a Russian-language holocaust text. Why, a commenter at the page wondered, if he was so concerned about Estonia's attitude, did he not present an Estonian-language holocaust text? Obviously, he didn't care. Only one sort of dead and persecuted people matters to him, to his shame. May other people be spared his bigotry.