All in the Family: The disabled in activist Black American families by Leroy Moore Jr and Tamari Kitossa Artist Ace Robles Year 2017 In the book. Black Disabled Art History 101 publisher Xocitl Press San Francisco What happens when well-known Black activists and prominent individuals become disabled or have a history of disability in their […]
All in the Family: The disabled in activist Black American families Read More »
Defending the ‘Culture of Critical Discourse’ The culture of critical discourse (CCD) is an historically evolved set of rules, a grammar of discourse, which (1) is concerned to justify its assertions, but (2) whose mode of justification does not proceed by invoking authority, and (3) prefers to elicit the voluntary consent of those addressed solely on the basis of arguments adduced…The
Defending the ‘Culture of Critical Discourse’ Read More »
It is not self-evident to most that we are full throttle in an era of State-sponsored tyranny passing under the colour of the medicalization of everything.
Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Academic Freedom Read More »
In an article in the St. Catharine’s Standard (“Brock University reviewing sociology Professor’s blog posts,” The Standard, March 15) political science professor Emmett McFarlane is quoted as saying that if Professor Kitossa were “saying something like, all Jewish people are genocidal, that might trip Canada’s hate speech laws, but to say the State of Israel is genocidal—and even to assert that Zionism is a genocidal ideology — doesn’t.” And he adds: “Not all Zionists are Jewish and not all Jewish people are Zionist.
Zionism is an ideology and people are free to criticize that no matter how offensive or even repugnant some of that might be.”
Guest commentary: Professor Murray Miles Read More »
The so-called “racial reckoning” that went on in the United States last year, inspired by the most recent shootings of unarmed Black people by police officers, but crystallizing around the murder of George Lloyd, has caused me to think a lot about comparisons that might be made between the country in which I was born and the country in which I now live. Whenever one of my American friends or colleagues good-naturedly or just benignly mentions that I am Canadian, I correct them, and tell them that I was born in Canada, it is true, but that never—not a single day
in my life—did I ever feel Canadian. My move to the United States almost nine years ago has helped me put into words what I have instinctively felt since I was a child, usually as the only Black kid in my class, sometimes in my grade. The difficulty in coming up with the accurate
words to describe this feeling of dislocation from what others might call their home results from a fundamental distinction that I have recognized between being made to feel like a visitor in a country when you are, in fact, a visitor, and being made to feel like a visitor in the country of your birth. Put another way—I don’t mind feeling like a visitor in the US, since I did not grow up here and there are more aspects about everyday American life than I can count that remind me that I didn’t grow up here. This seems as it should be. But being made to feel that I don’t belong should never have been an acceptable part of my life in the country of my birth.
A call for a Canadian racial reckoning–for better and for worse Read More »
I have launched my podcast Nullius In Verba. It has been a long time in coming. I would be lying if I said it was not, in part, motivated by my disgust with academia at present. The CoVID-19(84) live Milgram drill and the near total collapse of academic freedom, unless in the death sciences, is utterly spectacular. August Comte would be proud of his intellectual progeny. Indeed, we are in the early stages of global totalitarianism, which will only proceed if we let it. We academics have a vital role to play in exposing this trend and we must have the courage of our convictions to defend freedom of inquiry. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, academic freedom, and freedom of speech more generally, is the best safeguard against totalitarianism.
Academic Freedom and the Debate about Debate Read More »
Frances Widdowson was a tenured professor who was wrongfully terminated from Mount Royal University in 2021. She is currently a board member of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship and a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
The Tomáš Hudlický Memorial Lecture forAcademic Freedom Presents Read More »
If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.
Zionism and the ‘Destruction of Palestinians’: Apartheid or Nazism? (UPDATED) Read More »
The Jewish Holocaust of Gaza continues. Jewish, yes, because Israel, however Zionist, is the only Jewish State in the world. And, yes, while Zionism crosses religious lines, there is something deeply emotive about linking Jews with committing a holocaust and undertaking genocide the past 75-years. Of course, there have been Jews resisting and protesting Israel’s 75-year long genocide, even to the point of questioning the very legitimacy of the State. But now that a larger number of Jews are belatedly protesting – “not in my name” – the holocaust of Gaza, they need to ask themselves where were they the past 75-years. Did they not know that Israel from its inception was a conquistadorial project with the explicit intent of ‘wiping out’ the Palestinians as though they are/were a human stain? Why is this important in view that the State of Israel was formed by incredible acts of terror by those who would go on to establish the leadership and high administration of the State? Easy answer: Because this earth-shattering task was undertaken just three years after the Nazi terror and genocide of Jews, and others, in Germany and occupied lands, especially in Poland and Ukraine.
Zionism-as-Nazism, Still: Genocide was always the plan (UPDATED) Read More »
I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country.1 This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind. (John Diefenbaker, House of Commons Debates, 1 July 1960) …curiosity is insubordination in its purest form, an attitude that in today’s United States would draw you a prison term for anti-American activity. The heritage of western [protestant] Christian civilization defends the freedom of the individual mind against the coercion of mass culture, mass propaganda or mass mobilization. (Daniel Estulin, Tavistock Institute: Social engineering the Masses)
