George Case's Blog, page 16
March 11, 2022
Reckon With This
One thing professional and amateur historians have long understood is that the scholarship around given topics often evolves over time. What is fiercely debated by one generation can become the consensus opinion of the next, while a sudden upset of conventional wisdom may itself be thoroughly debunked by later research. We are witnessing this process […]
March 4, 2022
Babel On and On
Imagine, if you will, a world where knowledge and opinion can be shared almost instantly among millions of people. Imagine a world where powerful men and women can be openly mocked, denounced, and accused by the weak with impunity. Imagine a world where the humblest person can consult the same sprawling archives of information as […]
February 25, 2022
Back Lash Matters
It should be obvious by now that the new generation of progressive political movements, manifested everywhere from Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police to #Me Too and Idle No More, has not gone unchallenged. Opposition, certainly, is fundamental to democratic discourse, but what is notable today is the depth of the backlash. Endless channels of communication […]
February 18, 2022
Freedom and Weep
My oddest experience with Freedom to Read Week, the annual anti-censorship campaign observed in Canada from February 20 to February 26 this year, came during my stint in a Vancouver book shop. I was enlisted to collect a stack of titles to put in the storefront display along with a poster and other bumf announcing […]
February 13, 2022
My Amble and the Siege of Ottawa
Yesterday afternoon (Saturday) I journeyed from my suburban home to downtown Ottawa, where, as much of the world knows, an anti-vaccine-mandate protest gathering has settled in for over two weeks. Up until the arrival of the trucker convoy in Canada’s capital city, I daily took a similar trip to my workplace, which is a short […]
February 11, 2022
The Joke’s On Us
So: a priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk walk into a bar – Or wait, a white guy, a Black guy, and an Asian guy have just died and are standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven – No, I mean, a straight person, a gay person, and a paraplegic are in […]
February 4, 2022
Diss Information
The scramble by news outlets and tech corporations to prevent the spread of mis- or disinformation has itself become a news story. When advertorials, Photoshopped pictures, deepfake videos, inflammatory social media posts, and the alternative facts of spinmeisters and conspiracy theorists can incite millions of citizens to dangerous or undemocratic behavior, there’s a responsibility to […]
January 28, 2022
Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese military’s sweep through the Asia-Pacific region in December 1941, the Canadian government ordered the forced relocation of Japanese Canadian citizens from their homes in Vancouver, Victoria, and other areas of coastal British Columbia. Their property, including private dwellings, businesses, and personal possessions, was confiscated and never […]
January 21, 2022
Gently Down the Mainstream
Here are a few classic cartoons, book covers, and online jokes which should take some older readers back about twenty years: How quaint it is to recall such an innocent era of skepticism towards what we now consider “legacy media”- the peer-reviewed product of professional correspondents and qualified experts that’s lately upheld as a bulwark […]
January 14, 2022
Just Like Witches…
Most of us are familiar with the term “Black Mass,” denoting the supposed rituals of devil worshippers, and broadly used to describe any clandestine or illicit gathering of initiates into any closed community. Yet confirmed histories of the phenomenon are scarce. Some contemporary self-described Satanic groups have promoted their own Black Masses, but these events, […]
