George Case's Blog, page 16

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Another unexamined cliché scattered throughout contemporary discourse is stolen land, referring to the Native versus non-Native dynamic in the Americas and elsewhere. Book titles like Stolen Continents, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands, and Broken Promises, Stolen Land reinforce the message of illegitmate acquisition, which is also repeated by […]