Sibley: Meaningless Symbols

[Ottawa Citizen] A good (read: bad) local example of this tendency is the Human Rights monument on Elgin Street. A collection of interconnecting pillars and polished slabs inscribed with abstract words such as “justice,” “equality” and “dignity,” it fails to evoke an emotional attachment to its ideals. It creates no lump in the throat.

Such monuments ignore a fundamental dynamic of human life, what psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton refers to as the “drive to symbolization.” Humans, Lifton says, “are truly an animal symbolicum, beings that live and die, succeed and fail, delight and suffer, work and play, with, by and through their symbols … With our symbols we humans not only create our world, but create ourselves.”

So it seems. Bulldoze landmarks, raze old neighbourhoods, stick up some postmodern pile with which few can identify, and you weaken the symbol system by which people display love, empathy and attachment. Erect monuments that people understand, however incompletely, and you foster a meaning-filled world.

The rest.

Guardian Writer: If Bush Indicted For War Crimes, Americans Couldn’t Do Squat

From the Writers On Crack file.

[Guardian] Still, the most likely scenario for a torture prosecution is something like what happened to ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. His own country wouldn’t touch him, but an industrious Spanish prosecutor - aided by the work of human rights activists and backed by international opinion - indicted him for torture and war crimes and nearly snared him. If Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld faced a similar indictment from abroad, Americans would be outraged - but not really. The US government would try to head it off, but wouldn’t be able to do much.

The rest.

Burnaby Paper To BC Human Rights Tribunal: Shame On You

[Burnaby Now] The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal members should feel ashamed.

Comedian Guy Earle is now the latest target heading for a showdown at the tribunal over comments Earle allegedly made while at an open microphone during a weekly standup comedy night in March of this year.

The revelation that Earle is now scrambling for legal advice comes just weeks after the human rights tribunal sat for several days to hear a complaint about an article written by journalist Mark Steyn and published in Maclean’s magazine.

The rest.

Rex Murphy: The Glorious Insanity Of Canadian Human Rights Commissions

[Globe and Mail] Incidentally, one of them, Syed Soharwardy, withdrew his complaint 2½ years in. Did he get a tap on the wrist for instigating so costly and disturbing a process and then - on a whim? on a soul-awakening? out of boredom? - cancelling it? Of course not.

This is one of the less-noticed glories of the Canadian human-rights insanity. Complainants float unburdened like puffballs in a summer breeze - blowing whither they list. Targets - Catholic bishops, Catholic magazines, fundamentalist pastors, genital surgeons, heckled comedians, school boards, fast-food joints, school-prom nights, Maclean’s magazine - empty bank machines and call in lawyers while the “leisurely” process unfurls in an eerie, Kafkaesque slow motion.

The rest.