[META] On technical problems and the future

Hello!

Unfortunately, due to technical issues--a laptop that was sent back to the manufacturer for repairs, a desktop that is no longer working, a tablet that is a bit wonky--the frequency and nature of my posts here may be limited. I'll try to keep things up, but I can't make any promises.

For technical reasons, posting to my Wordpress account is likely to be rather easier than posting to my Livejournal. A Bit More Detail's address there is

http://abitmoredetail.wordpress.com

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions as to future content at A Bit More Detail, please leave them in the comments field. Thanks!

Randy

[CAT] Shakespeare, bemused by the late hour

This photo was taken at just past one in the morning in Saturday. It still counts as a Caturday post, I'd think.

[PHOTO] TTC selfie, approaching Yonge and Bloor

I took this photo during my morning commute. It might not be the sharpest picture, but I'm sure you get the idea.

[LINK] "Singapore, the country run like a corporation"

Today, the day after the death of Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, I thought I'd link to a June 1974 article in Fortune written by one Louis Kraar praising Singapore at the beginning of its economic boom. The article is worth reading, for all of its biases.

Pime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a fifty-year-old lawyer educated at Cambridge, calls himself a “democratic socialist.” But he shows more concern with rates of return (for both investors and the state) than with political dogma. In fact, Lee rules as though he were the autocratic chief executive of Singapore Inc.

Under his tight managerial control, nothing is long tolerated if it interferes with economic performance. Young men are prohibited from wearing modishly long hair, which the chairman regards as a symbol of the Western counterculture and a menace to the work ethic that he prizes. Lee keeps the country’s labor force cheap and disciplined by setting strict guidelines for both wage increases and working conditions. Since he has the political power to enforce his rules, factory wages, which are about one-fifth of those in the U.S., help to keep Singapore products internationally competitive.

Lee’s economic philosophy is stern and simple. “We do not expect something for nothing,” he says. In a characteristic jab at his less energetic Asian neighbors, he explains: “We haven’t got oil and minerals on which other people have to pay royalties. So we develop a different approach to life.” He calls it “the rugged society,” but it is really his own special blend of pragmatic socialism, freewheeling capitalism, and plain opportunism.

The Prime Minister has hitched the island to the global economy through multinational corporations, which supply needed capital, expertise, and export markets. Singapore ardently woos foreign business, a rare policy among countries that have only recently emerged from colonialism. Besides providing such familiar tax incentives as a five-year income-tax exemption for coveted corporations, the government often shares the cost of training workers and even puts up part of the capital for plants and equipment.

[. . .]

An avowedly nonaligned foreign policy makes Singapore useful—for a price—to nearly every trading nation. Soviet merchant ships as well as vessels of the U.S. Seventh Fleet patronize its efficient port and repair yards. Peking maintains a busy Bank of China branch, while within walking distance Taiwan runs an active trade office. Arab oil producers, which provide most of the crude for the refineries, are now being urged to invest in Singapore industries. And Lee’s government has entered into a joint venture with an Israeli concern that produces communication equipment, and has hired Israeli military advisers to shape Singapore’s fledgling armed forces. His country’s real protection against undue influence by any foreign power, says Lee, is to maintain a balance of investment by the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe.

[LINK] On the planned relocation of Aborigine communities in Australia

The Australian Broadcast Corporation's report by Rebecca Curtin and Jane Norman about the Australian government's plan to relocate economically unviable Aborigine communities is stunning. Part of me does wonder if the Australian government's openness is better than the neglect of the Canadian government of similarly situated communities: The end result, the depopulation of indigenous communities in national hinterlands, is the same.

The Federal Opposition is demanding the Prime Minister apologise after he suggested it is a lifestyle choice to live in remote Indigenous communities.

Tony Abbott has backed the West Australian Government's plans to close nearly half of the state's 274 remote communities and said it was not unreasonable if the cost of providing services such as schools, outweighed the benefits.

"What we can't do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have," he said.

Mr Abbott said if people choose to live in areas where there are no schools or jobs, there is a limit to what they can expect the state to provide.

"If people choose to live miles away from where there's a school, if people choose not to access the school of the air, if people choose to live where there's no jobs, obviously it's very, very difficult to close the gap," he said.

The WA Government flagged the closure of up to 150 of the state's remote Aboriginal communities after the Federal Government, which funded about two-thirds of the state's remote Indigenous settlements, announced in September it was transitioning that responsibility to the states over the next two years.

[LINK] "Tintin comic temporarily pulled from Winnipeg Chapters over racism complaint"

This CBC report about complaints lodged against a Tintin graphic novel for its allegedly racist stereotypes of First Nations people surprises me only in that it came so recently to light.

A First Nations educator asked a Winnipeg Chapters to pull the comic Tintin in America from its shelves on Saturday, citing "the impact of racist images and perpetuating harmful narratives." At first, Chapters pulled the book, but it is now back on the shelves after the chain determined it does not violate its policy.

The cover image depicts stereotypical images of indigenous people in buckskin, and a chief brandishing an axe over his head while Tintin is tied to a post in the background.

Tintin comics have sold hundreds of millions of copies since they were first serialized in 1929 by their Belgian creator, Hergé, and many of them contain cultural stereotypes of the past.​

"The manager told us that the company doesn't feel like there is anything wrong with the imagery or the content of the book," Tasha Spillett posted Sunday morning on her Facebook page after attempting to have the book removed from the Winnipeg store.

[. . .]

In an email received by the CBC on Monday, Chapters vice-president of public affairs Janet Eger said the chain has a clear policy regarding which books it will or won't carry.

In order for Chapters to not carry a book, it must meet one of three criteria: child pornography; material with instructions on how to build weapons of mass destruction; and "anything written with the sole intent of inciting society toward the annihilation of one group."

[LINK] "Why Nemtsov's Murder Got Pinned on Chechens"

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky takes a look at the perplexing role of Chechens in the current incarnation of the Russian body politic, as disposable but reliable proxies.

The Kremlin's version of the murder of President Vladimir Putin's long-time opponent, Boris Nemtsov, has now coalesced. The main suspect is a Chechen who apparently decided to punish Nemtsov for his defense of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo.

But this story has obvious weaknesses -- beginning with the fact that Nemtsov wasn't an anti-Islam radical. If anything, the official narrative about the assassination makes the involvement of the Kremlin and its allies in Chechnya seem more, not less, likely.

Over the weekend, five men were detained on suspicion of organizing and carrying out Nemtsov's murder. All of them are natives of Chechnya, the formerly separatist region in the Russian North Caucasus that is now run like a personal fiefdom by Ramzan Kadyrov, the former separatist field commander who switched sides in 1999 and pledged loyalty to Putin. One of the five, Zaur Dadaev, admitted having played a key role in the assassination.

Under Putin, Russian prosecutors have often drawn a "Chechen trail" in high-profile murder cases: the government has found it convenient to pin crimes on the residents of the country's most restive region. Since Chechnya's wars of secession in the 1990s and 2000s, in which thousands of Russian soldiers lost their lives, Chechens have been highly unpopular in Russia.

In 2006, I was called as a witness in the trial of three Chechen men for the 2004 murder of Paul Khlebnikov, editor of the Russian version of Forbes magazine, where I was publisher at the time of his death. The prosecutor maintained the men had been sent by a retired Chechen field commander about whom Khlebnikov had written an unflattering book. Since the book had been published in 2003 and Khlebnikov never took any security precautions in the interim, I said I found the connection implausible. The jury later acquitted the three men.

Chechens were convicted for organizing the 2006 killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose coverage of Chechnya was controversial but hardly more so than that of many other journalists. I still don't understand what motive they could have had.

[URBAN NOTE] "Parkdale tenants battle back-to-back rent increases"

This Toronto Star article by Manisha Krishnam makes for grim reading, especially since the neighbourhood of Parkdale is one of the few downtown (or near-downtown) neighbourhoods still affordable for low-income people. The effect on Toronto's Tibetan-Canadian community is also noteworthy.

Property manager Akelius Canada applied to increase the rent at 188 Jameson Ave. by 4.1 per cent in 2014; this year it doubled down, seeking a 4.6 per cent hike. At least 50 residents of the midrise apartment building, including many Tibetan refugees, say they can’t afford to pay that much and are planning to protest outside Akelius’ Toronto head office Monday.

“The amount they want to increase, it’s just too much,” says Namgyal Lhamo, 39, a personal support worker who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her three-year-old daughter and her cousin.

In a statement to the Star, Akelius spokesman Ben Scott said the increases are meant to subsidize costs Akelius incurred from municipal taxes and utilities, increased security measures and extensive renovations. The provincially recommended guidelines for rent increases were 0.8 per cent and 1.6 per cent for 2014 and 2015, respectively.

[. . .]

Lhamo, a Tibetan refugee, moved to Canada from a small village in India in 2010. As a single mom, she said she works long hours at Baycrest hospital, followed by chores when she gets home, often at around midnight. Making ends meet is difficult enough without the rent hike, she said, adding she can’t afford to move elsewhere.

Akelius, a Swedish company, acquired 188 Jameson Ave. and a handful of other Parkdale properties between December 2012 and November 2013. Last summer, residents from four Parkdale buildings filed an application to the Landlord and Tenant Board claiming Akelius’ decision to remove on site superintendents has resulted in neglect. That issue will also be discussed at an April 28 hearing.

[URBAN NOTE] "Montreal's gay village seeking ways to reinvent itself"

The CBC carries Guiseppe Valiante's Canadian Press article about the decline of Montréal's gay village. I mourn this, I suppose, but then I last visited it in 2003. If it can't find a new niche in our era, then it may well be for the best that it disappears.

Whither Montreal's gay village?

The area anchored by the Beaudry Metro station has for the past few years been faced with the challenge of reinventing itself. Merchants in the area are looking for new ways to attract people to the area after major cultural shifts in technology and LGBT acceptance have changed the neighbourhood's makeup.

Business owners and gay activists point to mobile dating applications as a key reason for young LGBT people ditching bars and nightclubs as places to find partners.

"The determining factor is the internet," says Yves Lafontaine, editor-in-chief of Fugues magazine, the largest French-language gay publication in the province.

"Before 2005–06 the only place gay people could meet was in gay establishments. Now, the paysage has changed."

Lafontaine also believes young gay men and women feel more at ease in many parts of the city and don't look only to the village to live, shop and party.

What's left is a neighbourhood in flux as businesses rely more and more on the summer tourist season to stay financially sustainable.

[DM] On the case of Open Borders

I've a post up at Demography Matters noting how, last Monday at the American libertarian blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin made a post announcing his support for the thesis of the Open Borders
NGO that migration should be as unhindered as possible. Linking to various authors' arguments in favour of this thesis, Somin makes the argument that the tendency worldwide should be not to raise barriers to migration but to lower them.

As the Open Borders Manifesto notes, and as I have said in the past, most open borders advocates do not claim that the right to free migration is absolute and always trumps opposing considerations. Just as I reject absolute property rights or absolute freedom of speech, so too I reject absolute rights to free migration. But we do believe there should be a strong presumption in favor of free migration that can only be overcome by strong evidence that restriction is the only way to prevent a harm great enough to outweigh the vast benefits of freedom to natives and migrants alike.</blockquote Many of the commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy are unconvinced, arguing that the author underestimates the costs involved. I myself am undecided about the thesis: There do seem to be great potential gains in GDP globally if there was a freer global market in labour alongside other global markets, but I'm also quite aware that there could be significant political costs if these associated migrations ever became problematic. What do you think of the argument?

[BRIEF NOTE] On the justified controversy around the Joker variant cover of Batgirl #41

In the past couple of years, I've become a fan of the graphic novel. Based on my purchases, I'd have to admit to be being particularly interested in the mainstream North American superhero comic, the material put out by Marvel and DC and the like. At its best, this tradition's combination of the grand-scale soap opera and science fiction can, with the right art, be sublime. Marvel's The Dark Phoenix Saga comes to mind as one example of this. Smaller-scale triumphs are also possible, dealing with the struggles of characters to function as best as they can in a world not unlike ours. One of the smaller-scale successes I've been following is that of DC's Batgirl, one of the strongest successes of that publisher's--let's say--problematic New 52 relaunch. First written by Gail Simone, then by a new creative time, Batgirl works for me as a character study of Barbara Gordon, a member of the Bat Family who in addition to coping with the minutiae of life as a customed hero in Gotham City is also continuing her recovery from her crippling by the Joker. It's not a story without artistic problems, but on the whole Batgirl works for me quite nicely.

Yes, I was aware of Rafael Albuquerque's very controversial variant cover from a very early point. Yes, I had problems with it.



To start, the reference to the events of 1988's Batman: The Killing Joke, wherein writer Alan Moore was apparently told by his editors bored with Batgirl that it was fine to go ahead and "cripple the bitch", is problematic because the storyline there is itself problematic. Moore himself has said that he probably should have been reined in by his editors on this point. The Killing Joke is very good, an engaging and entertaining graphic novel that does a great job of examining the character of the Joker. Its signal flaw is that it does so by inflicting a crippling injury on the prominent female character of Batgirl so as to cause great angst for male characters, here Jim Gordon and Batman himself. The Killing Joke and this cover also very strongly evoke the imagery of sexual assault in the bargain. The consensus appears to be that, in Moore's book, while Barbara Gordon was not raped, she was sexually assaulted, being forcibly stripped and photographed. The only thing that keeps the shot Barbara Gordon from being a stand-in for the prototype of Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators list is that, unlike Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alex DeWitt, Batgirl did not die.

The cover brings the reader back to that moment again when it really need not. The character of Barbara Gordon has been explored at length since 1988, both in the original DC Comics continuity when she became the wheelchair-wielding information superhero Oracle and in the New 52 setting where advanced medical treatments have healed her damaged spine. In each instance, Barbara Gordon has been explicitly depicted, at length and often, as a character who has been dealing with the legacies of Joker's attack much more effectively than the character depicted in this image. She resists; she struggles; she even fights back. Here, she is shown defeated, looking out with teary eyes at the audience pleading for help. It just doesn't fit with the character as developed for the past couple of decades by, among others, Gail Simone herself. As this recent Comics Alliance interview with the book's current creative team makes clear, this cover just does not fit the content of the book.

For that matter, it doesn't fit with the other covers in June's upcoming Joker month feature. I first saw this cover as part of a collection of covers, still more covers being available via links at the Scans Daily post. The other covers are either light-hearted or surreal. Possibly the most vulnerable one features Wonder Woman dancing with the Joker as he holds a bomb to her back, but even in that one she is depicted as poised and prepared. Albuquerque's cover is accomplished, but it misses the playfulness that the other covers seem to achieve. This is a major problem for a book that's targeted towards--among others--a female audience that likes seeing an ongoing series about an accomplished woman superhero who isn't just fodder for Women in Refrigerators.

If there is a tragedy to this at all, it's that a simple change could have made this cover significantly less objectionable. A minor alteration to the cover publicized by Sam Sykes has recently been spreading across Twitter.

​

In Albuquerque's original, Batgirl is begging her readers for help. In this retelling, simply changing the expression in her eyes and her mouth depicts a Batgirl who is angry, ready to take advantage of the Joker's weakness for the camera to strike. This still would have been a dark cover, darker than the theme of the series to date, but it would also have been a cover that would have been a much better fit for the series and the whole Joker month.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen argues that as a result of various factors including shrinking populations, economic bubbles are going to be quite likely.


• blogTO argues that Toronto's strip clubs are in trouble.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly wonders who is going to pay for journalism in the future.


• Centauri Dreams looks at ringed Centaur objects.


• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies describes his family's recent experience in New Zealand. Want to find out how the Maori are like the Welsh?


• D-Brief notes the return of wood bison to the United States.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting Alpha Centauri Bb is a superdense world.


• The Dragon's Tales note Indonesia's upset with Chinese claims to the South China Sea.


• Far Outliers reports on how NGOs feed corruption in Cambodia.


• Language Hat links to a gazetteer of placenames in Jamaica.


• Language Log's Victor Mair looks at some Sino-English constructions.


• Marginal Revolution points to its collection of Singapore-related posts.


• The Planetary Society Blog considers Cassini's footage of Saturn's F ring.


• The Power and the Money hosts Will Baird's argument that the Ukrainian east will soon see an explosion of violence.


• Spacing Toronto and Torontoist look at the architectural competition for the Toronto Islands ferry terminal.


• Torontoist reports on Martin Luther King's 1962 visit to Toronto.


• Towleroad notes a raging syphillis epidemic among gay men in New York City's Chelsea neighbourhood.


• Window on Eurasia notes changes in the Islam of Tatarstan, notes Russia's transition towards totalitarianism, observes Russian claims of Finnish meddling in Karelia, and looks at polls suggesting Ukrainians fear Russia but do not trust the European Union.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell describes what seems to have been a shambolic attempt to co-opt the English Defense League somehow. (I don't understand it. All I can figure out is that.