[PHOTO] Photos of old: Charlottetown PE, September 2002

Over at Facebook I've an album featuring some photos that I took around Charlottetown, capital of Prince Edward Island, in 2002. They were digitized after I took them, but these images are very, very, low-resolution. We're talking about pictures that amount to dozens of kilobytes at most.

Below are a few of the most notable images, with brief explanations.

Me, in front of Province House
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Province House
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Province House is the seat of Prince Edward Island's provincial legislature, and a major historical site as the place where the founders of Canada met in a conference in 1864.

Veterans' memorial
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This monuments commemorates veterans of the First and Second World Wars, as well as of the Korean War.

The Confederation Centre of the Arts
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The Confederation Centre, built in typical blocky 1960s style, is a combined art gallery and theatre complex, the last hosting the famed musical Anne of Green Gables.

Victoria Row
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Victoria Row is a short stretch of Richmond Street that's a small pedestrian mall in summer, with upscale cafes and craft shops.

Boer War memorial
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This commemorates the Prince Edward Islanders who died on behalf of Empire in the Boer War's 1900 Battle of Paardeberg. I blogged about it at length here last year.

St. Dunstan's Cathedral
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This imposing building, located just south of Province House, is the centre of Roman Catholicism on Prince Edward Island.

Looking at Charlottetown harbour's moorings
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Looking north along the harbour
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Charlottetown's harbour can be quite photogenic.

Ceremony in front of UPEI's Main Building
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I don't know what the ceremony was for, but I do know that the Main Building houses the English, Anthropology, and History departments which provided me with the skills necessary to eventually win my degrees.

A stubbly field
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Still inside Charlottetown city limits and across from my home, this field exists, regularly farmed and annually rotated.

The rest of the album is hosted on Facebook, and is open to the public. Come, see!

[DM] "On how Senegalese migrants measure risk and why they still migrate"

I've a post up at Demography Matters linking to an interesting paper (here) that makes what is, in retrospect blindingly obvious, point that Senegalese migrants who try to reach Spain via dangerous boats aren't being foolish and reckless, but rather are acting on the basis of a compliated decision-making process that in the end makes the risk of travel acceptable in the context of a goal of becoming prosperous on successful arrival. Go, read.

[LINK] "Canadian Forces to learn French from Americans"

Canada's really a bilingual country on the ground, is it?

Canadian Forces personnel stationed in Colorado will get French lessons through an American firm, after the military received poor grades for its record on bilingualism, the Ottawa Citizen reported Wednesday.

According to a Department of National Defence (DND) notice issued Tuesday, a $285,000-contract was awarded to Globelink Foreign Language Centre in Colorado Springs to tutor Canadians at the North American Aerospace Defence Command headquarters, the newspaper said.

The company has done work for DND before, owner Fadia Gnoske told the paper.

Gnoske, who is fluent in French, said she believes it is important for Canadian Forces personnel to continue their language training.

"Just because they are posted outside of Canada, does not mean they should not have access to the training they need," she said.

In his last report card, for 2007-08, Canada's Official Languages Commissioner, Graham Fraser, gave the Canadian Forces a 'D'.

Over the past three years he said language complaints have increased, and a survey showed "low satisfaction levels among both Anglophone and Francophone members of the Forces with their right to use the language of their choice when working in a minority setting."

This year, Canada marked the 40th anniversary of its Official Languages Act, which gives English and French equal status as the country's languages of government and justice.

The mandate of the Official Languages Commissioner is to ensure the goals of the act are met.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how the media can so quickly be polarized

Daniel Drezner makes an interesting point.

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of Jon Stewart's verbal skewering of Crossfire in particular and the whole genre of left-right cable gabfests in general.  Stewart said these kind of shows were "hurting America" because of their general blather and failure to ask politicians good, sharp questions. 

Stewart's appearance on Crossfire generated quite the navel-gazing among the commentariat, and played no small role in the eventual disappearance of Crossfire, The Capitol Gang, Hannity & Colmes, and shows of that ilk.

So, five years later, I have a half-assed blog question to ask -- did Jon Stewart hurt America by driving these shows off the air? 

If you're expecting a lengthy defense of the Crossfire format right now, well, you're going to be disappointed.  My point rather, is to question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement? 

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  Nowadays, if you're looking for that kind of exchange, you either have to fast all week until the Sunday morning talk shows, or go visit bloggingheads.

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the most batsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

This, incidentally, dovetails nicely with my reading of American legal scholar Cass Sunstein'sRepublic 2.0. In that tome, Sunstein argues that the Internet and other media technologies (satellite television, say) are having the effect of increasing the number of viewpoints and media sources available to different people, even giving individuals the chance to construct their own personalized newsfeed, but at the expense of mass media which could help promote the sense of common identity and ideological diversity necessary for a fully functional democracy. His argument makes too much sense to me, frankly. The blogs on my blogroll are mostly liberal blogs, with relatively rare exceptions like the Volokh Conspiracy, and while I read quite a few articles from a few different news sources in Canada via RSS, I don't read the National Post's RSS feed and I come across conservative news articles only via Google News.

[LINK] "EU Report on South Ossetia War"

Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley suggests, after noting the evenhandedness of the recent European Union report on the Russo-Georgian war, that by some metrics Georgia did much better than one would have expected given past precedents.

I think it has to be noted that the scope of Russia's assault against Georgia was really trivial when compared to the scope of Israeli activity towards either Hezbollah or Hamas, or of US air attacks against Serbia during the Kosovo War. This is to say that the Russian attack looks positively restrained when compared with the intensity of the assaults against Serbia, Lebanon, or Iraq. Questions of moral equivalency aside, Georgia suffered far less, by any metric, in its war against Russia than Serbia suffered in its war against NATO. Now, it may be fairly argued that Russia is constrained by capabilities rather than intent; the Russian Air Force is simply not capable of carrying out a large scale assault of the same type that we saw in Kosovo or Lebanon, and as such Russia's deserves no kudos for restraint. I'm not sure that I agree 100% with that, since it does seem that Russia was at least somewhat sensitive to international opinion during the war. Nevertheless, we'd do well to keep in mind that Russian "brutality" was in fact far less brutal in effect (if not intent) than has become the norm for military intervention in the last decade.

[LINK] "Germany Has a Gay Minister -- Yäwn!"

Who would have thought that Foreign Policy would ever publish an article describing the progress of gay rights in Germany? It did, though, and Cameron Abadi wrote it. Naturally the article began by tying the issue into German politics.

For more than 50 years, the tabloid daily

Bild -- currently Europe's best-selling newspaper -- has served as both a reliable barometer of Germany's conservative movement and a steady vent of its populist id. The editors have never felt compelled to question their winning formula: The conservative parties' current talking points go above the fold, the naked "Page One Girl" below it. The self-appointed guarantors of all that is traditionally Deutsch aren't much interested in the finer points of sensitivity training.

And in that way, the tabloid might have been expected at some point this week to express ambivalence, if not disapproval, of the fact that the country's newly elected vice-chancellor and foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, is gay. Instead, though, Bildwaved a white flag on one of the fronts of the country's decades-long culture war. As part of its gleeful coverage of the victory of the country's two main conservative parties in Sunday's election, the newspaper paid its respect to Westerwelle in the form of a sentimental page-one profile of his boyfriend, complete with a trashy headline: "His Boyfriend Makes Him Strong!"

Taking its cues from voters, Bild's editors didn't wring their hands over Westerwelle's sexual orientation, nor did they sensationalize it as a novelty. For one thing, it wasn't news: The chairman of the FDP, the free market Free Democratic Party, hadn't hidden his sexual orientation during the campaign -- his partner, event manager Michael Mronz, was often on stage with him at his rallies -- and no one he encountered on the trail seemed inclined to make an issue of it. Being a gay politician in Germany, it seems, is well on its way to being utterly normal, even banal.

Abadi suggests that the shift from a post-war Germany which criminalized homosexuality (both parts, the East until 1958 and the West until 1969) to the early 21st century's much more accepting atmosphere can be traced to the West German student movement, the embrace of gay rights by first the Green Party then eventually Westerwelle's own Free Democratic Party, the decline of religiosity with its associated homophobias in East and West, and finally, the appreciation of German voters for their political candidates' openness on personal issues including their sexual orientation.