[DM] "'Singapore is not serious ...'"

I've a post up at Demography Matters linking to a post by The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer that took a look at the actual subsidies, mentioned in passing in the recent post on Singaporean population policy. Briefly, even the various financial incentives offered by the Singaporean government--heavily subsidized fertility treatments, baby bonuses and tax incentives, child care subsidies--aren't that significant relative to the costs of parenthood.

[PHOTO] Waiting for the southbound train to come in, Dupont station

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• In a recent essay, Paul Belshaw writes about the often overlooked diversity of the different groups which contributed to the founding of modern Australia, whether Aborigines, the peoples of the British Isles, or Germans.


• The Burgh Diaspora notes that, attracted by a prosperous economy back home, many Brazilian immigrants in New England are returning.


• Eastern Approaches notes a controversial event in Kosovo: the publication of a book memorializing the dead of that disputed country.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh argues that despite export success, domestic demand in Spain has collapsed sufficiently to make economic recovery impossible.


• Geocurrents maps the strong regional identities of South Korea as expressed in the vote in last year's presidential election.


• Sociology, the Global Sociology Blog suggests, is the science of "slow violence", of bad things happening so quietly over such a long stretch of time as to obscure their existence (or the responsibility for said).


• Language Hat links approvingly to an essayist writing about the role of women in introducing language change, like "vocal fry".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis writes more about the desperation of New England cod fishers. It looks so familiar.


• Peter Rukavina found the first use of the word "Internet" in Prince Edward Island's legislative assembly (April 1996, in a speech by Premier Catherine Callbeck about the province's new website).


• Concerns about the intrusion of the Latin alphabet into Cyrillic-using areas of the former Soviet Union are present at Window on Eurasia, whether we're talking of the spread of Latin script and local norms generally in Belarus or concerns by Kazakh writers that switching that language's script from Cyrillic to Latin could cut off Kazakh users from their language's extensive past.

[LINK] "Wynne says she's hopeful she can work with NDP to pass budget and avoid election"

So reports the Hamilton Spectator. How long will this last is anyone's guess.

Premier Kathleen Wynne says she's hopeful that she can work with the New Democrats to pass the spring budget and avoid an election.

The Conservatives say they won't support the throne speech and that the only way to save Ontario from Liberal mismanagement is to "change the team."

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath says her party will keep the minority government afloat for now by voting for the throne speech.

But she says if the budget doesn't meet her list of demands, she'll withdraw that support — which could trigger an election.

Wynne says people often bring demands to the table, but that's just the starting point.

She says her hope is that as the talks continue, they'll find some common ground, such as tackling youth unemployment.

[CAT] "A Cat’s Guide to Human Beings"

John Scalzi posted a column of his he wrote for the Fresno Bee back in 1995 at his blog, Whatever. I was sufficiently amused to share it.

(Note: The following material is taken from a small gray book that I found underneath my couch, a favorite hiding spot of my cat Rex. I can’t vouch for the veracity of what is written below, other than to say when Rex found me reading it, he looked mighty annoyed.)

EXCERPTS FROM “A CAT’S GUIDE TO HUMAN BEINGS”

Introduction: Why Do We Need Humans?
So you’ve decided to get yourself a human being. In doing so, you’ve joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and often frustrating creatures. There will be any number of times, during the course of your association with humans, when you will wonder why you have bothered to grace them with your presence. What’s so great about humans, anyway? Why not just hang around with other cats? Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple:

THEY HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS.

Which makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations and other activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do ourselves. True, chimps, orangutans and lemurs also have opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train.

[LINK] "The Iron Closet: Documentary Explores Gay Life in East Germany"

Writing for Spiegel International, James Kirchick describes a documentary, Out in Ost-Berlin - Lesben und Schwule in der DDR
, which recounted the history of GLBT rights and people in East Germany. The seeming tolerance evidenced by the decriminalization of homosexuality in East Germany--something that took West Germany longer--didn't necessarily translate into pro-gay policies at any level. Difference was dissidence.

The case of Günter Litfin, the first East German citizen to be shot for attempting to cross the Berlin Wall, provides an example of the ways in which anti-gay sentiment could be utilized as a political tool against regime opponents. A week after his death on Aug. 24th, 1961, Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of East Germany's Socialist Unity Party, published an article accusing Litfin of being a homosexual who tried to flee the country because he had been caught performing unspecified "criminal acts." Responding to the creation of a makeshift memorial by West Berliners to commemorate Litfin's murder, the paper published an article entitled, "A Memorial to Dolly?" ("Dolly" apparently being Litfin's homosexual pet name).

It may seem ironic to some, but many gays and lesbians found comfort and organizational support from the church, which itself was emerging in the 1970's and 80's as a major fount of resistance to the communist regime. Numerous gay "working groups" arose in congregations across the country, actively aided by sympathetic church officials. Many, if not all, of these organizations -- oftentimes little more than discussion clubs -- were secretly monitored by the Stasi, which considered any sort of grassroots political action as a threat to the hegemony of the communist regime. The flim depicts several of its subjects, long time targets of Stasi surveillance, poring over their files, astonished at the extent to which the regime monitored their activities in an operation dubbed "Orion." "Romeos," single, attractive men recruited by the Stasi to sexually blackmail the secretaries of high-ranking West German officials in Bonn, were also used to infiltrate the nascent gay liberation scene throughout the East by coming on to gay political activists.

While homosexuality had been officially decriminalized in much of the East Bloc by the end of the 1960's, it merely provided a mask over a deeply ingrained homophobia that existed within many socialist milieus. One of the more fascinating interviews comes not from a German but rather the British gay activist Peter Tatchell. In 1973, he visited East Berlin for the World Youth Festival, a quadrennial extravaganza hosted by the communist bloc where tens of thousands of leftist young people from around the world gathered for massive processions and conclaves discussing ways to overthrow capitalism and imperialism. He tells the interviewers that he was the only openly gay delegate in East Berlin that year, a status that earned him harsh verbal and at times violent abuse from his comrades. Most of the participants, Tatchell recalls, saw homosexuality as a "bourgeois perversion." When Tatchell tried to march in the festival's parade with a sign promoting gay rights, Stasi officers chased him through the crowd. It was, Tatchell says, "probably the first gay rights protest in a communist country."

[LINK] "The most Catholic country in Europe? Croatia and the Catholic church"

As Croatia is set to become the 28th member-state of the European Union, Alex Sakalis' Open Democracy essay describing the role of that other transnational institution in post-Second World War Croatia, the Roman Catholic Church. In Sakalis' telling, the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia has definitely capitalized on its historical status as institutional guardian of Croat national identity, to the exclusion of alternative narratives as described below (or, for that matter, as demonstrated by the protests against sex education). How long this will continue to be viable is another question: Ireland, Spain, Portugal all ended up opting for secularization, after all.

One of the first actions of the Church was to attempt to reclaim land and property that had been nationalised during the communist period. This was part of a broader policy of privatisation that Tudjman enacted and which is blamed for much of the corruption and inequality that plagues Croatia today. Some notable church figures, such as Cardinal Bozanić, the Archbishop of Zagreb, criticised this swathe of privatisation measures as being harmful to the social renewal of the country. However, that has not prevented the church from asking for over €100 million-worth of nationalised land property to be returned to their ownership. A 2004 report estimated that the Catholic church received a stipend of around 180 million kuna per year from the state budget. The best paid Catholic clerics could earn up to 9,000 kuna a year (compare to the average of 10,000 kuna a Croatian doctor would earn in 2004), plus additional earnings from various pastoral services. Ordinary parish priests receive around 4,000 kuna. While these sums are not colossal, they do make being a cleric one of the more economically viable professions in Croatia. Overall, the results of privatisation and state privileges are clear to see – in 2005, the Catholic church was ranked among the five wealthiest entities in Croatia, comparable to oil and communications corporations.

Following the visit of Pope John Paul II to Croatia in 1998, the government and the Holy See signed a treaty which regulated issues between state and church. One of the most controversial parts was the introduction of the Catholic catechism into schools, effectively requiring the Croatian taxpayer to fund the Catholic church, regardless of their beliefs. The Law on Religious Communities, passed in 2002, went some way to rectifying the situation, although the Catholic church continues to be criticised for overtly trying to influence politics and society, with the BTI Development Index accusing it of trying to “incorporate its norms and values into a secular state.”

The role of the Catholic church in Croatia today is more than just that of a religious institution. It is, as the eminent Croat historian Vjekoslav Perica writes, an institution whose “agendas of spiritual awakening and nation-construction have required a suitable past that glorifies success and emphasises Croatia’s western European character and its suffering at the hands of godless communism”. This has consequently involved much amnesia about infamous episodes in its history, such as that of the Ustaše.

The reimagining of history has been an important part of the Church’s development in post-communist Yugoslavia as they have sought to balance the stigma of the Ustaše regime with the suffering of the church under communism. Archbishop Stepinac is no longer a controversial churchman but a blessed martyr (with a Cardinal Stepinac Day celebrated in many schools), and the red star is on a par with the swastika in terms of offensiveness.

Coupled with this has been the systematic defacement and removal of numerous anti-fascist monuments that were erected during the communist era. Around 3,000 of these memorials in Croatia have been vandalised or removed by local authorities, with little or no attempt made to restore them. Many of these monuments were of artistic or historical value, commemorating the mass murder of Serbs and Jews by the Ustaše, or the Croat anti-fascists who died during the liberation of their land. Their place has been taken by memorials to Ustaše criminals such as Mile Budak (a monument to him in Lika was later taken down to facilitate EU accession negotiations). At the centre of all this has been the Catholic church, which has welcomed the removal of partisan monuments and tacitly supported the erection of monuments and instituted debates which revise Croatia’s WW2 history.

[LINK] "Why Libraries Should Be the Next Great Start-Up Incubators"

Emily Badger's suggestion at The Atlantic Cities has the sort of novelty attached to it that seems, on first hearing, actually reasonable and plausible.

One of the world’s first and most famous libraries, in Alexandria, Egypt, was frequently home some 2,000 years ago to the self-starters and self-employed of that era. “When you look back in history, they had philosophers and mathematicians and all sorts of folks who would get together and solve the problems of their time,” says Tracy Lea, the venture manager with Arizona State University’s economic development and community engagement arm. “We kind of look at it as the first template for the university. They had lecture halls, gathering spaces. They had co-working spaces.”

This old idea of the public library as co-working space now offers a modern answer – one among many – for how these aging institutions could become more relevant two millennia after the original Alexandria library burned to the ground. Would-be entrepreneurs everywhere are looking for business know-how and physical space to incubate their start-ups. Libraries meanwhile may be associated today with an outmoded product in paper books. But they also happen to have just about everything a 21st century innovator could need: Internet access, work space, reference materials, professional guidance.

Why not, Lea suggests, put these two ideas together? Arizona State is planning in the next few months to roll out a network of co-working business incubators inside public libraries, starting with a pilot in the downtown Civic Center Library in Scottsdale. The university is calling the plan, ambitiously, the Alexandria Network.

Participating libraries will host dedicated co-working spaces for the program, as well as both formal classes and informal mentoring from the university’s start-up resources. The librarians themselves will be trained by the university to help deliver some of the material. The network will offer everything, in short, but seed money. “As we develop this pilot and start to scale it out,” Lea adds, “we would like to be able to direct people on how to find those resources.”

[DM] "'Why Permanent Residents Should Be Allowed to Vote in Toronto'"

I've a post up at Demography Matters commenting positively upon Desmond Cole's Torontoist post suggesting that permanent residents in the city of Toronto should be able to vote in municipal elections. His words are below.

In 2006, Ryerson municipal affairs expert Myer Siemiatycki estimated that at least 250,000 Toronto residents, or 16 per cent of the city’s population, could not vote in municipal elections because they were not citizens. He describes this as a “lost city” of residents—who pay municipal taxes through their mortgages or rent, and contribute to services and programs through various user fees—but have no say in electing the mayor, city council, and school board trustees.

We have much to gain from giving permanent residents a direct say in Toronto’s election. Those who use and pay for services have a right to hold their relevant elected officials to account.

It is important for these residents to feel as welcome to shape programs and services as any citizen. Non-citizen residents can do this through advocacy, public consultations, and many other general forms of engagement, but with voting comes a more powerful kind of inclusion, symbolic and otherwise. Extending the vote empowers those who qualify to proudly identify themselves as fully engaged participants in civic life, not merely ratepayers or service users. Having more Torontonians taking up this responsibility is a good thing for our politics.

In Thorncliffe Park, a central east Toronto neighbourhood, one in three people is a child between five and 13 years of age. Thorncliffe is also home to immigrants from South America, South Asia, and the Middle East. But parents of children in Thorncliffe can’t choose their school board trustee simply because they are not citizens. Yes, politicians in these neighbourhoods are charged with representing everyone, non-voting residents included. But at election time, their decisions not to canvas houses, apartment buildings, and areas with high non-citizen populations tells those residents that their opinions matter less because they are not the ones going to the polling stations.

Canada has one of the highest rates of naturalization, or turning immigrants into citizens, in the world. Statistics Canada found in 2006 that four in five Canadian immigrants had become citizens, and that figure was on the rise. Some see this as an argument against extending the franchise to non-citizens: if most immigrants will become citizens anyway, why not wait until they have to give them the vote? But this is backwards. Since we know the vast majority of immigrants will pursue and obtain citizenship, delaying what in most cases will happen anyway is an artificial barrier to more robust participation in civic life.