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 The suit against responsibility
2009-03-19
Editorial - It is impossible to deny that Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is an enormous problem. Nor that it demands swift and serious action. The question of how to address it, though, is not so clear. Speaking to the CBC earlier this week, a pediatrician from Prince George suggested that class action lawsuits should be filed on behalf of those suffering FASD against alcohol companies. Again, while it is indisputable that something must be done, this particular proposal is deeply problematic.
Dr. Marie Hay advocated launching class action suits against alcohol companies, hoping that the legal battle would produce similar results to the class actions against tobacco companies: cut down on the propensity for this type of abuse taking place and increase the financial means for dealing with its resultant problems. The comparison with the tobacco suits is interesting, but troubling. In that case, there was the problem of the nature of advertising for those products and the dubious denials of the harm and addictiveness that accompanied smoking. In the case of FASD, this does not seem to apply nearly as well.
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 DON'T SPEAK
Director Bruce McDonald takes on unconventional zombie flick
2009-03-19
movies - The English language can be, at best, maddening at times. With homonyms, parallel structure and the horrors of their, there and they're, the language's eccentricities can drive a person to kill sometimes.
In Bruce McDonald's latest horror flick, Pontypool, a virus infects the townspeople's speech, slowly and insidiously destroying the small town community of Pontypool, Ontario. People-- dubbed conversationalists by McDonald-- have their ability to communicate via speaking ripped away from them. They can only vomit out terms of endearment and gibberish ad nauseum, finally losing their sanity from it all with particularly bloody and gory results.
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 Burning down racism
The Aryan Guard in Calgary
2009-03-19
I had my first experience with anti-Semitism when I was 11. My synagogue, Agudas Israel, was hit with a Molotov cocktail in the middle of the night and over $130,000 worth of old books and foundation was destroyed. Many were brought from Israel and could never be replaced.
I grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan as part of the only Jewish family and really didn't think it was a big deal. Despite Canada's strong multiculturalism, rural prairie towns are mainly Caucasian and I matched the physical profile enough to fit in. Coming to Calgary I didn't expect to encounter public racism. But I only lived here for a few months before I heard of the Aryan Guard-- a Calgary-based neo-Nazi group.
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