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Volume 102, Issue 22

November 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

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03 NEWS Gaza demonstration held in Montreal SSMU Council discusses body’s effectiveness International Students’ Day celebration in Community Square

06 COMMENTARY Ending trans* erasure at McGill A critique of the recent AUS referendum On fighting Nazis in Quebec Comments on The Daily’s Commentary

09 SCIENCE+TECH

Photo Camille Chabrol | The McGill Daily

The state of user privacy on the internet

Reconstruction plan for Turcot Interchange faces strong opposition

Assessing how ‘green’ electric vehicles are How coming together can lead to polarization

11 SPORTS The new sports media landscape

12

CULTURE

Montreal’s changing skyline Telling stories Falling in love with fictional characters Inkwell and artwork

15

EDITORIAL

The importance of memorializing victims of transphobia

16

COMPENDIUM!

Hipsters unable to poop Radicals enjoy “bro-ing out”

Environment, corruption, traffic among activists’ concerns Carla Green The McGill Daily

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here is one thing everyone agrees on: the Turcot Interchange is crumbling, and in desperate need of repair.

The Interchange is a massive threelevel highway that cuts through St. Henri. Since 2007, the city has been in a struggle with architects, activists, and engineers over its reconstruction.

The history of the Turcot Interchange is littered with social movements, class struggle, and politics. The Interchange was rushed to completion in time for the 1967 World Expo as part of a larger international movement towards developing superhighways, even amid popular dissidence and social mobilization against its construction.

The Ville-Marie Expressway, which connects to the Turcot and has been included in its reconstruction plans, was built in 1970. Its construction involved raising about 2,000 homes.

This displacement was part of a series of construction and demolition projects in the name of modernization in Montreal. Altogether, these projects caused the displacement of as many as 20,000 people and fully eliminated three lower-

income neighborhoods, including the former red light district.

In many ways, the current situation mirrors that of the original construction in the sixties.

Shannon Franssen is the spokesperson for Mobilization Turcot, a citizen’s group with the goal of constructing “a better Turcot” and informing Montrealers about the reconstruction project.

“There are a lot of parallels between the original construction and its reconstruction, but what’s especially clear is that the current project is as focused on a vision of urban transport centered around the car as it was in the sixties,” Franssen told The Daily. “Nowadays, we see that as a very dated vision of urban transport.”

In October, Mobilization Turcot endorsed the Cure Minceur, a reconstruction plan developed by architect Pierre Brisset and Concordia Urban Planning professor Pierre Gauthier in 2010.

Previously, Mobilization Turcot supported Turcot 375, another alternative plan that put a strong emphasis on public transport.

However, Franssen explained that because Turcot 375 was never formally considered by the Liberal government and renovation of the Interchange has become urgent, Mobilization Turcot decided to

adopt the Cure Minceur.

“What we’re proposing right now is that they simplify the project and don’t make the highway bigger or increase the capacity, saving money and time,” said Franssen.

“With the money that’s saved, we can invest in public transit infrastructure, so that we can start really solving some of these congestion problems in a sustainable way.”

The city of Montreal commissioned the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) to oversee the reconstruction of the Interchange.

[The MTQ’s] proposal involves renovation of the Ville-Marie as part of the Turcot reconstruction, which Brisset argues isn’t yet necessary.

“The Ville-Marie has a survival of another ten years, because it was built six years after [the Turcot Interchange], and under different conditions,” he told The Daily.

“There are alternative solutions to recuperate it. Between now and 2022, let’s look at real alternatives.”

However, the MTQ firmly holds the position that the VilleMarie needs to be reconstructed just as urgently as does the Turcot.

Caroline Larose is the ministry spokesperson.

“The Turcot Interchange and the Ville-Marie are both at the end of their lives,” MTQ Spokesperson Caroline Larose told The Daily in

French. “The reconstruction of each is equally as urgent.”

The city’s plan has evolved over the years, responding to some of the complaints of its opponents.

Central to this discourse has been traffic volume – in particular, its environmental impact and implications for the residents of St. Henri.

Larose emphasized that the MTQ’s plan “strictly maintains the current capacity of the Interchange, and would in no way increase traffic volume.”

However, according to Franssen, under the MTQ’s plan, the highways’ vehicle capacities would increase, increasing the environmental impact on surrounding neighborhoods and possibly worsening highway congestion.

“Although [the MTQ] says that their plan wouldn’t significantly increase the capacity of the two highways that meet at the Interchange, it’s not true. There will be lanes added to the Ville-Marie, and by their own estimates, it will increase the capacity by at least 30,000 vehicles per day.”

Cure Minceur – which translates roughly to “diet plan” – refers both to trimming down the Turcot itself and to the scope of its reconstruction. In the MTQ’s current proposal, a branch of the highway Continued on page 4

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NEWS

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Demonstrators protest Israel’s latest Gaza offensive At least 15 dead, 118 wounded in first day of operation

Photo Cem Ertekin

Israel’s latest military operation in Gaza was protested at Concordia last Wednesday.

ver fifty people gathered in front of the Hall Building of Concordia University at 6 p.m. last Wednesday to protest the launch of Israel’s most recent Gaza military operation, “Operation Pillar of Defence,” which began earlier that day.

Sara Sheltony, one of the organizers of the demonstration and a member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Concordia (SPHR Concordia) told The Daily that the purpose of the demonstration was to “give a place for Palestinians in Montreal and others to express

their sadness, frustration, and anger at what is happening in Gaza and Palestine in general.”

She also mentioned that they wished to “raise awareness among the Canadian population and the population in Montreal about the occupation and the apartheid that is happening in Israel, and about the massacre that is about to happen in Gaza and the massacre that happened in 2008 and 2009.”

Sheltony attributed the speed with which they managed to organize the demonstration to “the power of Facebook.” According to Sheltony, the event was posted to Facebook at 12:30 p.m., and by 3 p.m. over 100 people had confirmed their attendance.

Operation Pillar of Defence came four years after Israel’s three-month “Operation Cast Lead” from December 2008 to January 2009 – also known as the Gaza War – in which over 1,400 Gazans were killed.

Escorted by police cars, the demonstrators marched down Ste. Catherine – which had been blocked off by police cars from Concordia to Phillips Square for the march – chanting “Solidarité avec des Palestiniens,” “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea,” and “Israel terrorist, Harper complicit.”

Scarlet Harris, a McGill student who participated in the demonstration, told The Daily, “The international community cannot

sit back and watch bombs fall on Gaza. We are complicit in Israel’s war crimes, and therefore I’m here to show my solidarity.”

When the demonstration reached Phillips Square, speakers Doug Smith, Dan Freeman-Maloy, Mostafa Henaway, and Antoine Bustros gave speeches on the issue.

Henaway, a member of the Tadamon! collective, explained that Canada was the first country to cut off aid to Palestine when Hamas was elected.

Activist and writer FreemanMaloy agreed, accusing Canada of “cheering whenever Israel attacks Palestinians.” According to Freeman-Maloy, it is critical to build international pressure to block

Israel from being able to commit these kinds of crimes.

One demonstrator called the operation “an insult to the modern Western society.”

“I am a Palestinian, I was born in Lebanon, I am Canadian,” they said. “I do not believe in lands, borders, and citizenships.”

At the time of the demonstration, Palestinians reported 15 dead – including an 11-month old boy and 7-year-old girl – and 118 wounded. Among the dead was the top military commander of Hamas.

According to Sheltony, these “indiscriminate” killings were “done by a state that definitely has the military capability to target accurately,” and are “very hard to justify.”

Continued from page 3 loops around to permit access to the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), a feature that is excluded from the Cure Minceur plan. “[MUHC] somehow managed to convince Transport Québec to start building special ramps for them,” said Brisset.

Larose argued that constructing special access to the hospital was a “good citizen” act that would be universally beneficial. “[MUHC] is already close to the Interchange, and the ramp will be maintained by the hospital and therefore won’t add extra costs to the city’s plans. It will reduce traffic going to the hospital in residential neighbourhoods. I don’t understand why people are making a problem out of this.”

Franssen challenged the notion that the planned route to the hospital would reduce traffic through residential areas.

“The way that the access road is designed would reroute traffic through St. Henri. So this idea that it won’t go through residential neighbourhoods – well, it won’t

go through Westmount,” she said.

“Does St. Henri not matter because the medium income is a whole lot lower there and the people have a lot less political influence?”

Franssen, among others, has struggled to understand the inconsistencies in the MTQ’s plan and the government’s resistance to adopting an alternative plan like the Cure Minceur.

“There are lots of people who propose theories that the government’s plans to make the highway bigger and keep transport car-centered come from their connections with the construction industry, [connections that] we’re learning more about every day,” said Franssen.

“It’s an interesting theory, because it’s pretty clear that what they’ve proposed is not in the public interest, so who’s interest is it in? Well, somebody’s going to be making $3 billion off of it.”

Another difference between the two proposals is the degree of demolition that they would require. While the MTQ’s plan would displace somewhere between 90 and 130 residents of

St. Henri and Westmount, this number has been greatly reduced from the thousands who would have been uprooted from their homes under the original 2007 plan. The Cure Minceur requires no demolition.

Victor Arroyo is a filmmaker working in Concordia’s department of Film Studies. His video installation project, Turcot 2.0, illustrates the displacement that occurs as a result of the demolition required by the original construction of the highways, as well as by their reconstruction. The installation is currently on display at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

“You have to ask the question: why is [St. Henri] being affected and not Westmount? I call it annihilation; you’re just cleaning,” Arroyo told The Daily. “It was even acknowledged by the government when it was done the first time [in the construction of the Ville-Marie] – it’s just a little bit of cleaning.”

Arroyo drew a contrast between Brisset and Gauthier’s motivation in developing their plan and that

of the MTQ in their proposal. “[Brisset and Gauthier] are architects by profession, but they also have a social perspective, so they have a social concern. They have the social perspective that no displacement is necessary.”

It seems that the new provincial government may be more open to reviewing the plan than its predecessors. The MTQ is currently holding an online public forum about the Turcot project, although the project already went through the requisite public audience process in 2009.

Franssen said she remains cautiously optimistic that the government will take another look at the concerns highlighted

by Mobilization Turcot and revise the reconstruction plans. The organization has put out a letter to the Minister of Transport about the Cure Minceur, which supporters can sign online at turcot.info/en/letter.

“The sense that we’re getting is that Pauline Marois’s government is much more focused on doing things in the public interest than their

Liberal predecessors. That being said, we don’t really know what their final decision will be,” said Franssen.

Larose confirmed that the MTQ has received the Cure Minceur proposal, but refused to comment on whether it would be incorporated into the final plan and emphasized the urgency of renovation of the Interchange.

“The Minister is looking at how to improve the plan, but I’m not in a position to say what those improvements will be. You must understand, we can’t allow delays in reconstructing the Interchange.”

But according to Brisset, adopting the Cure Minceur would allow construction to start in early 2013 as planned, and there is still time to alter the renovation plan.

“It’s happened before with construction plans in Montreal, even after they’d passed public audience and been ratified,” Brisset told The Daily.

The city of Montreal declined to comment for this story, citing the fact that the Turcot project is still under review by the provincial government.

Cem Ertekin News Writer

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NEWS

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The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Students gather to celebrate International Students’ Day November 10 commemorated in Community Square Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

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ast Friday, around sixty students gathered in Community Square in front of the James Administration building to celebrate International Students’ Day. The event featured a series of student and faculty speakers who discussed the diversity of struggles at McGill, in Quebec, and around the world.

The event also commemorated the events of November 10, 2011, when riot police were present on campus following an occupation of James Administration. Last year, students also organized an initiative in response to November 10 – also in Community Square – called “We Are All McGill.”

The “Community Square Lunch” this year was co-organized by SSMU and the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS), with their respective external executives spearheading the effort. The student unions provided free food to attendees with the help of the student-run food collective Midnight Kitchen.

SSMU VP External Robin ReidFraser told The Daily that the event

was meant to be a “remembrance and a celebration.”

“It was a time to reflect on the year since November 10 from last year, but also a celebration of the International Students’ Day,” said Reid-Fraser.

PGSS External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon also mentioned that the goal was to address some of the ongoing issues that haven’t been resolved.

“The tuition fee for international students hasn’t been reimbursed yet and then there’s still some disciplinary charges as a result of the student strike that hasn’t been resolved yet,” said Salamon.

He pointed out that the McGill Summit on Higher Education, organized by PGSS and slated for December 3, would address these issues as well.

The event featured short presentations focusing on a several topics including gender, LGBTQ, international students, unions, and faculty struggles.

Justin Marleau, the VicePresident (Teaching Assistants) of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill, talked about the struggle his union has historically faced.

“We have been fighting with this administration for over twenty years for basic rights, like having an actual contract,” said Marleau. “The administration likes to treat us like children because we’re students, and we all know better. But we’re not just students; a lot of us are also workers and we have rights to be treated with respect, treated with dignity, and not to be discriminated against

because maybe you are from a foreign country and because we don’t really understand the technicalities that McGill brings in to the contracts, and they take advantage of that.”

East Asian Studies associate professor Thomas Lamarre characterized the faculty struggle at McGill as a struggle against antiprogressive politics. “[The administration at] McGill is

always giving an image that the form that our struggle can take is democracy, that we are supposed to sit in meetings and deliberate and pass bills and vote on things, but the truth is, a university is not structured like a democracy. So when we are told that if we behave and it will become democratic, it’s simply a lie, it simply misdirects all the energy from the actual struggle,” he said.

SSMU President responds to criticisms from The Daily at Council Quebec student federation representation also discussed Esther Lee The McGill Daily

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he Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) held its Thursday bi-monthly Legislative Council meeting at Burnside 511, as part of the Roaming Council initiative that seeks to increase SSMU Councillors’ understanding of the greater McGill community.

After the adoption of the Report of the Steering Committee, Council moved its agenda to attend to a note from President Josh Redel, who commented on The Daily’s recent editorial, “SSMU Council illogical and misguided,” (November 8, page 19) and Compendium! article, “SSMU Council does nothing,” (November 8, page 20) both of which criticized the effectiveness of the SSMU Legislative Council.

In a casual commentary addressed to the councillors, Redel outlined his grievances regarding the pieces and expressed the importance of working past the criticism to create a stronger Legislative Council body. “I’ll be completely honest and tell you that I took it quite personally. I never viewed myself as your superior, and never will. But I do feel like Council is a family whose well-being I am responsible for. As such you can imagine how I felt when that family was criticized,” he said.

Redel further urged members of Council to look beyond the initial frustration to appreciate the criticisms made in the pieces. As members of a transparent body, Redel suggested that this exposure to open assessment be used as a tool to strengthen the dialogue within and between the arguments made in Council.

“On the other hand, when certain

pieces decide that childish name-calling is an effective means of communicating a point, you need to laugh it off exactly as that: childish,” he added.

Redel closed his commentary by reflecting on the Council dynamic in the November 1 session that drew the criticisms – which saw intense debate over a CKUT endorsement that ultimately failed – asking the councillors to acknowledge the purpose of Council as a team.

“You cannot and should not categorically…mistrust other councillors because they hail from a certain faculty,” Redel continued. “If you find yourself discounting someone’s comments and arguments because they are a rogue, radical, moderate, or whatever else you can think of, you need to take a few minutes to revaluate your thought process.”

He concluded, “The power of a

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body like Council lies in the collective action of people with different thought processes…. Hating or discounting someone because they think differently than you is a slippery slope, and I discourage all from going down that path, though I do not think that you have done that thus far.”

Council then moved into the discussion of McGill’s representation within the Table de concertation étudiante du Quebec (TaCEQ), a federation of Québec student unions of which SSMU is a member.

Led by VP External Robin ReidFraser, Council debated the issue of electing delegates to attend TaCEQ meetings on behalf of SSMU and the McGill community in general.

“We technically have four voting seats at these [TaCEQ] meetings, but we very rarely actually use all four of them because rarely are there four

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SSMU representatives there…these [positions] do not need to be people who are already elected members, if we can run an election next semester just for people who want to take on this role,” Reid-Fraser explained.

Speaking on importance of campus representation in TaCEQ, Faculty of Music Councillor Katie Larson asked, “Should they be representatives from campus, or should they be representatives from the [SSMU] Council, as a whole… to represent the undergraduates strategically?”

After the short consultative discussion on McGill’s representatives to TaCEQ, the agenda moved to a closed members’ feedback session in which the SSMU executives temporarily left the session to allow open debate from the general councillors.

Press was asked to leave Council for the matters of confidentiality.

commentary

The McGill Daily Monday, November 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

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Trans*forming the classroom The erasure of trans* folks at McGill, why it matters, and how to change it Queer McGill Trans* Working Group Commentary Writers

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ou’re in Leacock 132 for your Physiology 209 class, and the professor is talking about hemoglobin and iron levels in blood. She states that women must ingest 28 milligrams of iron a month more than men, due to loss of blood during menstruation. Calling this a women’s issue might not seem problematic at first glance, but it is one of many forms of trans* erasure that happen in McGill classrooms.

Trans* erasure is the refusal to acknowledge the existence of trans* people, often excluding them out of a desire for simplicity. The idea that someone might identify and live as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, have more than two chromosomes, or identify anywhere outside of binary assumptions of sex and gender is rarely brought up in class.

Trans* erasure happens every time we look at a study of ‘men versus women’ without recognizing that nonbinary people exist. It happens every time we learn about the pregnant woman’s health needs, when these needs apply to all pregnancies. It’s when we learn about the effect of testosterone levels, and instead of specifying this, the professor says something like, “men show heightened levels of aggression.” Gender identity is independent from physiological processes such as menstruation; the characteristics often attributed to various genders are dependent on cultural norms, and are not universal.

Trans* erasure doesn’t only harm

trans* people: it also misinforms all students, who walk away with inaccurate beliefs that continue the cycle of trans* ignorance. For example, if an undergrad student sits through every science class learning a simplified and inaccurate version of human biology and human experience, and then goes on to medical school where they learn the same thing, our education system will be producing doctors who are ill-prepared to provide trans* patients with adequate care. Gaps in our education system result in gaps in societal knowledge; this is a self-perpetuating cycle that must be stopped.

But it’s not just biology-based classes that are problematic. In almost any subject that deals with people, assumptions are made about ‘men’ and ‘women’ without middle ground, alternatives, or nuance. Why can’t we learn about psychology or nutrition without ignoring the incredible diversity that the nearly seven billion people on this planet have to offer?

There is a certain amount of trust that society puts in our educators.

We expect students to come out of our education system knowing how to behave in the world. Shouldn’t the aim, then, be to teach in a way which is as accurate and inclusive as possible? Professors and TAs must present material that accurately represents the world we live in – that is, a world where trans* and intersex people exist – and model trans* inclusivity.

For example, avoiding gender essentialist claims is very easy. Instead of “women” in the first paragraph, the professor could have simply said, “people who menstruate must ingest 28 milligrams of iron a month more than those who don’t.” People with

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

uteruses can get pregnant and those with prostates can have prostate cancer, regardless of their gender identity.

Educators and students alike need to challenge normalized academic discourse and practices, which ignore that trans* people exist. A start can be as easy as having a ‘checkin’ at a first conference or seminar, where people are given the chance to express their preferred name and pronoun(s). When faced with problematic class material that assumes that gender and sex are equivalent, or that there are only two possible genders, we should talk about it critically and acknowledge that the material is

lacking. Finally, as teachers and students who also do our own research, we must be wary of reproducing these same problematic models in our own work.

Fighting trans* erasure in the classroom is a step toward making our campus a safer and more inclusive space, and our graduates more accurately informed members of society.

What is there to lose? *“Trans*” is an umbrella term describing people whose gender identity does not match the gender they were assigned at birth. It includes both binary-identified trans folks (trans

men and women) as well as those who identify outside the binary. Intersex describes a number of conditions in which one’s physiological sex characteristics do not easily fit the medical definitions of either male or female.

The Trans* Working Group is a subset of Queer McGill. It was created at the end of the Winter 2012 semester to better serve the trans* community at McGill, and to encourage the participation and inclusion of trans*-identified folks within the community. The authors of this article can be contacted at trans.workinggroup@gmail.com.

Abusing indifference Manipulation in the AUS referendum Daniel Braden Commentary Writer

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f all the inane contradictions that define student culture at McGill, perhaps my favourite is the stark dichotomy of fiercely motivated political activism and exasperated apathy. At a school where student politics are more cutthroat than much of what plays out on the national stage, seemingly inconsequential actions or opinions can lead to controversy almost unparalleled at other comparable institutions of higher learning.

As someone who has built a reputation on exposing the sheer absurdity that defines political discourse at our university, I can tell you that we are truly the punch line of our own jokes.

For every drastic action, there is an equally ridiculous reaction. It is a spi-

ral that works as a centrifuge to force students to extremes of an artificially contentious spectrum, where the most dedicated stake out diametrically opposed positions and the rest feel alienated by a system that over-politicizes the day to day business of their undergraduate education. With such a toxic environment pervading student government, a structure meant to represent the entirety of the student body, decisions are left to those with the fortitude to withstand the nauseating process of democracy. In short, our university government is dictated not by ideology, but attendance.

Given such a grossly unrepresentative and exclusive arrangement, you can imagine my indignation when I received the latest email from Elections AUS. What was billed as a routine and benign Fall Referendum turned out to be little more than a slate of questions designed to radi-

cally alter the governing structure of McGill’s largest faculty. Among the proposed changes being considered in this referendum (read: impromptu constitutional convention) would allow the AUS President to circumvent a by-election and appoint an interim replacement without the consent of the Arts Faculty electorate, and would make it easier for politically savvy and motivated students to amend the Constitution by abandoning the traditional two-thirds majority in favour of a 50 per cent plus one model, depleting the democratic legitimacy of a super majority.

Now here’s the kicker: in an election dominated by amendments designed to fundamentally curtail the power of elected senators and representatives in favour of the executive, the inherent apathy and disengagement which characterize the voting public at McGill

means that AUS President Devon LaBuik’s power play went almost entirely unnoticed. A man who was elected on a Warren G. Hardingesque platform emphasizing moderation and centrist competence, LaBuik knows that student indifference is an enormous asset when making contentious decisions (see: Jobbook). Having moved all of the proposed amendments to the AUS Constitution from which he stands to benefit, President LaBuik is undoubtedly banking on low turnout and a highly mobilized contingent of ideologically sympathetic cohorts to expand his political power and create a more exclusive and, in his view, streamlined environment in which he can unilaterally dictate policy.

I fully appreciate the irony of someone who mocks student government taking such a hardline

stance on a political issue which would normally serve as little more than comedic fodder. But in an age of dire call and response politics, such political maneuvering has led to a situation where small but committed factions create increasingly extreme policies that guide a largely centrist majority. While universities must never cease to be fora for political discussion, if we wish to move forward with a sense of not only legitimacy but efficiency, we must abandon dirty politics and create a system that seeks not to inspire the far ends of the spectrum, but which aims to engage the students it left behind.

Daniel Braden is a Michelle Obama devotee and sometimes comedian through his blog McGill Memes. He can be reached at danielmbraden@gmail.com.

commentary

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The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Smashing Nazis Antifa and free speech Davide Mastracci The McGill Daily

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n November 24, Nazis from across Quebec are planning a demonstration somewhere between Montreal and Quebec City. The exact location of the demonstration will not be released until the night of the 23rd – a means of security against the Nazis’ ‘ideological opponents.’ Ideally, the precautions taken by the Nazis will not have been unnecessary.

The demonstration is being planned by La Fédération des Québécois de Souche and La Légion Nationale, both of which are known neo-Nazi organizations.

Maxime Fiset, the supposed leader of La Fédération des Québécois de Souche, pleaded guilty to charges of hate propaganda and possession of a prohibited weapon in 2008.

Patrick Grenier, one of the alleged co-founders of La Légion Nationale, has been spotted giving the fascist salute and wearing shirts with Nazi symbols. The behaviour of Fiset and Grenier reflect upon the behaviour of both groups as a whole, as they are quite open about their sympathies with Nazism and fascism.

Last year, on November 26, organizations in Quebec such as La Fédération des Québécois de Souche led a demonstration mirroring the one planned for this year. The group of approximately thirty neo-Nazis who participated in the demonstration were pelted by bottles and rocks thrown by anti-

fascists who had organized a counter demonstration. The mainstream media, such as the CBC, La Presse, and Radio Canada, widely described the demonstrations as being held by peaceful “independence groups” and claimed they were attacked for unknown reasons.

Though I cannot speak for the anti-fascist protesters at least year’s demonstration, I would like to offer the mainstream media some possible reasons for their counter demonstration. I also offer these reasons as a justification for another, hopefully stronger, counter demonstration this year, which I hope you will attend.

Essentially, any effort from neoNazis or fascists to enter the public sphere must be smashed. Some will argue that we should simply ignore Nazis, as they only desire attention.

This does not seem to be the case.

Most Nazi political activity takes place privately, because Nazis know that they are extremely unpopular amongst the general public. Any sort of public displays organized by Nazis are usually done in order to show potential and current recruits that they hold some sort of power, or that their views are legitimate.

By combating public displays from Nazis, we make it clear that their politics are neither acceptable nor safe in our communities. Our methods of combat can vary. In Edmonton earlier this year, angry anti-fascists and local families alike chased down a small group of neoNazis; in Athens, squads of anti-fascists on motorcycles patrol the city at night, attacking Golden Dawn

members, thereby helping to protect immigrants from attacks.

Of course, some will claim that the best way to refute Nazis is to refute their ideology academically.

Certainly we can combat Nazis ideologically through articles such as this one, but this will do little to stop Nazism. Nazi recruits are often taken in because of a desire for power or belonging, not because of the intellectual merits of bonehead thugs. By ensuring that belonging to a Nazi group means belonging to a group despised and attacked by the rest of society, we will likely see a reduction in Nazi recruits.

There is also the issue of free speech. Certain free speech extremists will insist that free speech only means anything if you extend it to the views of all those you do not like. Nazis are a different case. We have no institutional power to control the literature they publish in print and on the internet. We have no judicial power to determine when their speech becomes hate speech. We also have no police power to determine when their demonstrations become illegal. All of these means of fighting Nazism are possible, but the power to realize them is largely out of our hands.

Yet we do have the power to decide that we will not tolerate Nazis regardless of their legal standing, for example, we can disrupt demonstrations such as the one on November 24. Some will state that, ‘I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

right to say it.’ If we defend Nazis’ supposed right to free speech for too long, our death may come at their hands. This is not fear mongering or exaggeration, as it happens across the world often.

Neo-Nazis may not be as powerful here as they are in Europe, but they are still responsible for numerous violent hate crimes. To give just one example, in 2008, two neo-Nazis in Montreal attacked a group of Arabic youths and a black taxi driver with knives and fists, leaving one victim with gashes on their head requiring over fifty

stitches. As such, though most racism occurs in day to day institutionalized forms, we cannot downplay the threat of direct violence.

Therefore, I call for you to show neo-Nazis that they are not welcome anywhere in Quebec: join the anti-fascist march on November 24.

To receive updates on the details of the march, check out the Facho Watch website closer to the date.

Davide Mastracci is a U2 History and Political Science student. He can be reached at davide.mastracci@mail.mcgill.ca.

Engaging the other side Or, how to talk to people who have no idea what you’re talking about Austin Lloyd Reader’s Advocate

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once heard that the secret to writing on the internet is never to read the comment section. I can’t remember who gave me that advice, but I believe it.

The Daily’s online comment section is no exception – it’s a land where discourse goes to die. But, within this junkyard of half-formed opinions and rage-fuelled rants, there is one finding of significance – the readers and writers are no longer communicating meaningfully.

You might think that is because the commenters are racist, sexist, homophobic rabble unworthy of your time, and you wouldn’t be totally wrong. Some people are lost causes. But, they’re the extreme cases. A lot of folks out there are well-meaning and reasonable, but were never really exposed to socially-progressive thought.

I grew up in Texas, where – as stereotypes have taught you, my dear Canadians – homophobia and racism are relatively common.

Of course, most of those that hold these views aren’t monsters; they just grew up in the wrong situation and never learned better.

Well, at McGill we get a milder version of that. And, as I see it, publications like The Daily exist to be the progressive exposure some people have missed. That brings us to today’s problem: how can it fulfill that role when so many students have written it off as delusional and combative?

And, I get it. The Daily exists to call out oppression, and that will make some people uncomfortable – no matter how it is presented.

But somewhere, the connection is severed. The message is not getting across. Sure, there is a core readership that is eternally receptive to all anti-oppressive ideas, but they’re mostly the same people who have

already internalized the message – we’re preaching to a dead horse.

So how do you engage people not predisposed to agreeing with you? It’s one thing to tell someone that they’re being racist, but another to make them understand the perspective of the oppressed.

Take the controversial piece entitled “You are racist” (Guillermo Martínez de Velasco, October 18, Commentary, page 7), from a few weeks back. The piece made some good points, but, rather than trying to communicate, it attacked. Rather than making people aware of the casual racisms of everyday life, it puts them on the defensive from the start. The reader rationalizes casual racism, rather than reconsidering it.

At the other end of the spectrum are pieces that make the reader see their privilege from the vantage point of the oppressed. Christiana Collison (sometimes) and Ryan Thom (so far) do a good job of this – not only are they unyielding on the

issues, but they’re also charismatic writers. They show you what society is doing wrong, and then they make you understand why you should care. When Thom describes the way that “[they] knew that [their] body was less lovable by far than those of the beautiful white men I fantasized about,” the reader feels their pain and begins to understand their perspective. Conversely, when Martínez de Velasco declares that “asking someone to explain to you why you are racist” is racist, the reader has no emotional context for the statement – the reader is not presented with any reason why this instance of racism matters; it is instead presented as a blanket accusation grounded largely in the theoretical with few real world implications.

I don’t mean to belittle and dismiss the theoretical and philosophical aspects of racism, but when the author focuses exclusively on them – and especially when the author uses them as a basis to level accusations at

the reader – many of the readers are unable to connect and don’t retain the most important ideas of the piece. If, instead, the author can discuss casual racism (or any form of oppression) in a pragmatic way, generating an emotional response from the reader, the piece becomes accessible and stands a stronger chance of imparting the ideas that it seeks to get across.

So I guess this question goes out to the extended community of Commentary writers: what do you want to accomplish? Do you want to write self-congratulatory and condescending jargon-laden rants that alienate the readership, or can we reach out and begin to spread the message, not to those that already know it, but to those that need to hear it?

The Readers’ Advocate is a twicemonthly column written by Austin Lloyd addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily.

You can reach him at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

sci+tech

The McGill Daily Monday, November 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

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Illustration Akanksa Chubal

Not-so-private practice How everyday websites use our information Emily Dehority Science+Technology Writer

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ebsite sign-up forms have a universal, familiar format. When signing up for a website, a user is asked to provide their name, email, and sometimes, age. At the bottom of the form, there is a tiny check box with small print beside it that reads “I agree to the Terms and Conditions.” There is usually a link to another page containing a legal document, but almost nobody actually reads this. They click the box, consenting to a long list of privacy requests that they may not understand.

In exchange for the website’s service, they consent to their information being shared with advertisement agencies, local law enforcement, credit card companies, and future bosses. And of course, users understand this completely, and are so okay with this that they don’t even bother reading the contract they sign.

That doesn’t sound right, does it? Although most computer users sign Terms of Service contracts without a second thought, there is an assumed level of pri-

vacy on the internet, especially on social networking and business websites. However, users of sites like Facebook and Gmail are often unaware of how little control they have over what data is shared and with whom. Privacy policies are often practically unreadable – full of legal jargon and in paragraphs the size of skyscrapers. And what websites actually do with its users’ data is even harder to know or understand.

For example, earlier this year, Facebook introduced “Sponsored Stories.” When a Facebook user “liked” a product or tagged a company in a post, that company could pay Facebook to display the story more prominently on that user’s friends’ news feeds, with the company’s logo beside it. Advertisement companies liked this structure because it created the impression that a friend was suggesting a product. To do this, Facebook created a filter so that only likes, and positive comments or reviews were sold to companies interested in advertising this way. However, Facebook users disliked this new feature.

In fact, a group of Facebook users in California were so upset that their names and photos were sold and used without their knowl-

edge as advertisements that they took up a class action suit with Facebook – and won. Although your “likes” are still sold to advertisers to personalize the ads you see, and although your friends’ photos continue to appear on the sidebar ads if said friends have “liked” a product or brand, Facebook no longer sells Sponsored Stories.

Google has appeared frequently in the media for issues of privacy, and has also gotten into trouble with U.S. and international law enforcement agencies.

Several years ago, Google signed a twenty-year agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) pledging to respect user privacy rights. Last year, Google broke this agreement, and was fined $22.5 million dollars (the largest sum ever fined by the FTC, but equivalent to Google’s average earnings in five hours) for its use of cookies to collect iPhone users’ data. People who used the Safari browser on their iPhones had been inadvertently giving Google all of their browsing data. Google accomplished this through a hidden “consent form” on all of its affiliated websites, so that when a Safari user opened Google or YouTube, amongst oth-

ers, Google’s cookies would track their web use. This also extended to some sites outside of Google’s ownership. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Google placed the code within ads displayed on major sites including movie site Fandango.com, dating site Match. com, AOL.com, TMZ.com, and UrbanDictionary.com, among others.” Google has since removed the code that accomplished this, and the fine has been paid.

Google has recently come under fire for its new privacy policy, which came into effect in May. All Google products (Gmail, Youtube, Google Search, Google+, Picassa, et cetera) now share data, so information that you give to Gmail (for example, the subject or text of an email, or the email address you send it to) can change the advertisements you see when you use Google’s search engine. It can be sold to other companies as well.

The general public response has been overwhelmingly negative. The loudest complaint? The new policy was not opt-outable – all Google users were forced to comply, or to delete their accounts for all Google products. There was no option to keep all of their internet identities separate. A

personal post on Google+ about a divorce, say, could be sold to a bank and reduce someone’s ability to get a low mortgage, because recent divorcees have been shown to be more fiscally irresponsible.

Googling a medical condition might keep you from getting private health insurance.

An article in the Huffington Post written by a former FTC lawyer, William Rothbard, explained that in reality, advertisement agencies are the customers of websites like Google and Facebook, and users – and their data – are the product that is sold. The free service provided by many websites isn’t free at all.

Instead of money, users are trading those experiences for personal data and brain time, at a considerable profit to websites.

As students, many of us have grown up using the internet, and have grown comfortable sharing data about ourselves with websites in a way that older generations were not. Children, especially, are unaware of the information they may be giving away, and websites using that information are not held accountable. Often it is users’ ignorance, rather than apathy, that allows websites their opacity.

sci+tech

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The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Illustration Akanksa Chubal

Electric vehicles: The real deal, or green hype?

The future of alternative energy transportation Omar Saadeh Science+Technology Writer

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hevy Volt, Toyota Prius, Honda Fit, and the Nissan Leaf – it seems that most of the major car manufacturers have new models coming out every year, but are electric vehicles (EVs) really the future of cars, or just an expensive trend that is bound to disappear?

To start off on a positive note – there are many benefits, both environmental and financial, of electric and hybrid vehicles. Fact: driving a Toyota Prius is more environmentally friendly than a Ford F1 pickup. Fact: an EV can convert up to 70 per cent of a battery’s energy, while a gas guzzler only reaches about 25 per cent efficiency. Fact: an EV also means less money spent at the pump.

Putting things into perspective, the global motor vehicle industry adds about 50 million new cars to those already on the road per year. Of these, only a few thousand are electric. Of the estimated 1 billion cars in use today, just under 4.5 per cent are considered alternate vehicles (hybrids, electric, or hydrogen based). But that’s because people are just

warming up to the idea, right?

Let’s face it, even disregarding the relative smaller sizes of EVs or the lack of the apparent “manliness” aura we are meant to associate with turning the keys of a V8 engine, tacking on an additional $10,000 to $16,000 to the base price of a car doesn’t necessarily translate into a good sales pitch. According to J.D. Power and Associates, a self-described “marketing information services company,” charging an EV adds roughly $18 per month to a user’s electricity bill, while saving them $147 per month at the pump. This translates into a payback period of 6.5 years for an EV and 11 years for a plug-in hybrid, based on today’s prices. However, due to the uncertainty of the price of oil, these numbers could become more attractive in the future.

While BMW and Cadillac will soon be launching their first EVs, Toyota’s vice chairman, Takeshi Uchiyamada, recently announced that Toyota would be scaling back their EV development, citing high production costs, long charging delays, and poor electric mileage.

It might also be important to note that this is the same man who, in 1994, spearheaded the Prius electric vehicle program for Toyota.

One wonders why he has recently had a change of heart.

One of the big questions is, “Are EVs actually green?” To answer this question, we need to look at where our electricity actually comes from. The goal of modernizing the global vehicle fleet is to ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, if there’s a dirty coal power plant on the other side of the power cord, is it any better than running on gas?

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 45 per cent of the electricity generated in the U.S. still comes from coal, emitting literally tons of pollutants into the air, while only 3.6 per cent comes from renewable sources.

On the other hand, the U.S. government gives up to $7,500 in tax credits for purchasing an EV as an added bonus for environmentallyconscious buyers.

Aside from the bad rap Canada gets for digging into tar sands, its energy profile is actually much cleaner with hydroelectricity accounting for almost 58 per cent of the total generation. There are also provincial incentive programs in place for buying EVs. As of January 1, 2013, the Quebec government will give you up to a $8,500 rebate if you decide to buy an EV.

It is clear that the energy profile of the country is important in assessing how ‘green’ EVs really are. Because of the relative means by which electricity is generated, it seems that Canadian EVs are more environmentally friendly than their American counterparts. Regardless of personal opinion, however, alternative energy sources and alternative vehicles are a major area of research, especially at McGill.

At McGill’s Alternate Fuels Lab, Professor Jeff Bergthorson and his group of mechanical engineering students look into hot topics such as combustion and the emission properties of burning diverse biofuels. Furthermore, they tackle the big questions surrounding the development of a safe and effective metal-based battery with potentially zero carbon emissions. According to Bergthorson, “today’s industry is…far too conservative and…too wedded to fossil fuels to consider any big shifts.”

In an effort to change the status quo, work is being conducted to test the concept of using reactive metals as alternative energy carriers for future transportation vehicles, eliminating harmful pollutants associated with fossil fuels.

In the Power Engineering

Research Lab, professors and their grad students are inspecting the bigger picture, working on new techniques to incorporate EVs into daily life. Some interesting ideas floating around include the use of the EV’s battery to power some household appliances, or better yet, sell excess electricity back to the power grid. On a cloudy day or when the wind stops blowing, stored electricity in EVs may also hold the key to a future of renewable energy. Diego Mascarella, a second year master’s student working in the lab, told The Daily that he has “no doubt that electric vehicles will dominate future markets, but until then, drivers will still need to weigh the higher price tags against the self-satisfaction of reducing carbon emissions.”

Outside the glamorous showrooms and media frenzy over whose electric vehicle can drive the furthest, many of the big car manufacturers are making tough decisions. Some have opted to continue down the path of EVs while a few others have decided to scale back. Many of these decision factors are based on the origins of electricity, efficiency of vehicles, and productions costs – all of which require both improvement and research.

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sci+tech

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Divided we stand How our online communities move us further apart

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ith Facebook recently registering its billionth member, Twitter reaching 140 million users, and Tumblr hitting 50 million bloggers, it is safe to say that social media has a pivotal role in our lives. You often hear people talk about their self-proclaimed ‘addictions’ to these networks, claiming they cannot function without social media, and don’t know how they did so in the time that preceded Facebook’s, Twitter’s, or Tumblr’s existence.

Besides keeping in touch with friends, being able to Facebook stalk that girl you met in your Biology lab, or tweeting to inform everyone that you just coughed, social media have other, more intellectual applications.

They serve as platforms to communicate, to educate, to debate, to inform, and to spread awareness. At the same time, they act as more lighthearted forums to simply express oneself.

Social media has its own place at McGill, where students have unwav-

Illustration Amina Batyreva The McGill Daily

S. Azam Mahmood Synapses and Systems

ering opinions no matter how little they know about the subject. Take Facebook, for example, which has its own McGill network that is further divided by faculty, class, program, et cetera. The “Class of 2015” page has a new debate every few days. Classic debates include the Canadian Blood Service’s blood ban, controversial articles in The Daily, and, of course, last year’s student strikes and anything and everything that had to do with them.

Each with opinions upon opinions, essays upon essays (which I am convinced no one reads – not even the other participants in the argument), people take to Facebook as a forum to express their sentiments on issues they feel strongly about.

What’s particularly interesting, however, is how almost every discussion sparks from negativity, from uniting against something. For example, the radical opinions of pieces published in The Daily have been met with more opposition than support on Facebook. Or, when the sixth floor of the James Administration Building was occupied, there were two events on Facebook on which the prevalent atmosphere seemed to be more against the opinions

they disparaged than for those they believed in. Such activism and discussion on Facebook, ultimately, perpetuates a divide, yet strengthens an intangible sense of community within the stratified groups.

Another example is that of the seemingly innocuous McGill Memes.

While the memes in no way personally offend me, the profile picture of the page is interesting. It shows a picture of McGill (the classic picture used for most of its memes) with the text “THAT’S OFFENSIVE” – something that seems to be how every McGill student feels about everything. The memes poke fun at particular groups of people on campus – from privileged students who are disappointed that their platinum cards don’t work

at Sinfully Asian, to professors whose classes require expensive textbooks.

Again, while this can be flippant, the underlying theme remains that we unite on the basis of negative feelings toward something or someone.

Another newly emerging McGill-specific social media outlet is the Tumblr page, ‘whatshouldwecallmcgill,’ which is a spinoff of ‘whatshouldwecallme.’ The McGill version has become increasingly popular, with GIFs pertaining to life at McGill, and a humorous outlook on them. Popular GIFs poke fun at freshmen, the Milton-Parc neighbourhood, and the way girls may dress on Halloween, among many other topics. Again, while amusing and somewhat true, this tends to

perpetuate a sense of divide and reinforce stereotypes that some may not be comfortable with.

I’m not one to get offended easily, nor am I one to oppose harmless jokes, but it’s noteworthy that along with the spread of social media at McGill has come negativity and criticism for everything under the sun.

This isn’t unique to McGill, but it’s interesting to see the developing sense of divide and frustration – even alongside unity within these divisions – that is slowly growing in the McGill ‘community.’

Synapses and Systems is a Science+Technology column. S. Azam Mahmood can be reached at synapses@mcgilldaily.com.

sports

The McGill Daily Monday, November 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

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Illustration Akanksa Chubal

How low can you go?

The new face of sports media Evan Dent The McGill Daily

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n a recent report by Deadspin. com, internal sources within Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) – the American sports entertainment megacompany recently valued at $40 billion – revealed that the network has made a concerted effort to shift away from solely reporting the news (what one might call journalism) and toward debates about sports. Jim Miller, the compiler of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All the Fun, told Deadspin that ESPN has “risk[ed] losing an identity for a news organization that they’ve been building for twenty years.”

While the news is disappointing for serious sports fans, it is not very surprising. The current trend in sports journalism, across the board, is a stratification into two types of sports media – highbrow and lowbrow. The new sports media is concerned with one of two audiences – the ‘smart’ sports fans versus the majority of sports fans. Unfortunately, most major sports media outlets have chosen the low road in search of the everelusive dollar.

ESPN, the most prominent sports media network in North America (they own 20 per cent of their Canadian counterpart, TSN), is the first choice for most sports fans. As outlined in the Deadspin

report, ESPN, up until a couple of years ago, had a comprehensive news program that gave nuanced coverage to any topic they wanted to fully cover – and could be counted on to give good coverage.

With their pre-eminence as the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” ESPN has gained the power to create the story they cover. Instead of closely following the most interesting or most worthy stories, though, ESPN has instead given full treatment to what they believe will give them the best ratings – now that ESPN has become a broadcaster of major sports, they can create build up for their own programming, and casually ignore or give less coverage to sports for which they don’t own the broadcasting rights.

With their new debate-heavy style, ESPN can create stories to fill the 24-hour news cycle. Earlier this year, ESPN commentator Tedy Bruschi publically picked his former team, the New England Patriots, to lose their Week 4 game against the Buffalo Bills. Bruschi’s pick in itself became a topic of further discussion by other ESPN analysts. The new ESPN model basically eats its own tail; they create the stories they want, create the discussion, and then, when it gets high ratings, use that as an excuse for further coverage. It is sports journalism based on the power of a manipulated viewer – the network decides what viewers see, discerns what they like, and amps up the volume

on that subject. No matter what, ESPN begins the conversation and then profits from it.

It’s odd, then, that ESPN owns Grantland.com, a website committed to an almost completely different set of standards. Grantland features long, often complicated sports writing: basically, sports for the “enlightened” fan who wants more than just a recap on what happened in last night’s game and a couple of basic statements about “what this means for (team/player x).” ESPN has nominal (luckily, not editorial) control over the antidote for people who are sick of its own content.

Grantland often features posts using detailed statistical analysis that is often criticized by ESPN commentators as the domain of “geeks.” Funnily enough, ESPN commentator Rob Parker recently tweeted an anti-stats analysis tweet; yet, you can watch him daily on ESPN’s debate show Numbers Never Lie*.

Grantland is part of the opposite movement in sports – content for the ‘highbrow’ fan.

Grantland is joined by sites such as SportsonEarth.com (a subsidiary of USA Today, who are known for offering base-level sports coverage), TheClassical.org (a sports website funded by a Kickstarter campaign, which promises a “considerate, intelligent community for talking about sports” while proclaiming that they are “not the

media,” or a “smarter version of what you can find elsewhere.”), the previously mentioned Deadspin, and a bevy of other sports blogs committed to nuanced journalism.

The internet, and the ease of nonprofit blog creation by anybody has allowed for more nuanced sports writing to flourish, despite the fact that major outlets have moved away from high-quality content.

But the seemingly good news that nuanced sports reporting is flourishing on the internet comes with a caveat – these blogs are often not well-read, and a site such as Grantland would not exist were it not owned by the monolith that is ESPN; its deep cast of professional writers wouldn’t be supportable by non-corporationbacked blogs that don’t have quite the same war chest. Deadspin, too, balances its more nuanced coverage with TMZ-style sports “scandal” stories, like nude photos of athletes that leak to the internet, in order to receive the web traffic to remain solvent.

Still, the ability for anyone to have a voice on the internet has allowed for good sports journalism to thrive in the midst of profit-hungry media. It provides a conversation other than the one pushed by the major outlets.

This race for the wider base is not just limited to ESPN, though, and is not restricted to the televised domain. A separate Deadspin report has shed light on

Bleacher Report, one of the fastest-growing sports media outlets.

Bleacher Report is entirely webbased; their editors pitch stories to their writers (many of whom are unpaid, trying to make inroads in the industry) based on research by search engine experts. In essence, the editors pitch stories (most often slideshows or lists) that these experts predict will be most searched for in the future. Their content is based on what people are most likely to type into their Google search bar – not any sense of what, by virtue of its worth or impact, ought to be covered.

To sum it up, the sports media world has been considerably dumbed down and lost quality as it shifts from news to entertainment in search of maximizing profits (mirroring the trend in most sectors of journalism). Sports journalism does not have to be what an episode of the sitcom 30 Rock makes it out to be – four talking heads on a screen, yelling at each other incomprehensibly in a program called “Sports Shouting.” But that is what the major platforms are moving toward – sound, fury, signifying a whole lot of nothing.

Fortunately, thanks in large part to the internet, there should always be a small corner of the market committed to covering stories somewhat above the newly low standard. It just takes more effort to find them in the vast expanse of watered down sports stories.

culture

The McGill Daily Monday, November 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

New additions to Montreal’s skyline Matthew Herzfeld The McGill Daily

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s a carless city-dweller, the two things that matter most are always the most difficult: laundry and public transit. On one occasion a few weeks ago, public transit left me disoriented and deconstructed in a way that only a great metropolis can do.

Due to various construction projects, my beloved 107 bus that floats me down past the delightful excesses of Peel near Sherbrooke to Griffintown, where I work part time, was rerouted. Rather than dropping me off at the bottom of Peel across from what once was a massive brewery, the bus spit me out further south, near a bunch of construction projects, none of which seemed near completion. I was reminded of something a tour guide once told me about the national bird of China being the crane – the construction crane, that is.

Though the revitalization of Griffintown is well documented here and elsewhere, my experience that early afternoon was particularly striking. With an underlying sense of determination in my step, I traipsed hurriedly across empty streets past empty buildings with “For Rent” signs with a swiftness that belied any prevailing sense of calm, until I came to what I’ll call a green pasture.

At the edge of the green was an unassuming sign with a black and white photograph: “Here stood St. Ann’s Church, once the center of Montreal’s Irish-Catholic community.” Beyond the sign several stones stood in line like a ghost of lost past – a past that is quickly being superseded by a new group of people and buildings. *** The song goes: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” These days in Montreal, the paradigm seems reversed, as developers construct vast condo complexes on former parking lots, and market once-static areas as up-and-coming. In the next three years, five buildings with heights over 100 metres (328 feet) will be completed. Beyond that, a total of nine such additional buildings are in the planning stages and at least half sold.

This marks the first major development period in Montreal in at least twenty years, when the two tallest skyscrapers, 1000 de la Gauchetière and 1200 René Lévesque were completed. While Toronto crept out of second place in the 1970s to become Canada’s largest city, another stage of development gave us much of what we see on the horizon when we enter Montreal. During the mid-1960s, a number of landmark International Style buildings – those

Culture HAPS

We built this city on ruins

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Detropia

November 16 Cinema du Parc 3575 du Parc $8.50 for students Detropia, if we’re to believe the critics, is the definitive Detroit documentary. Why did a once-great American city decline into an urban wasteland? Detropia answers the question with a nuanced look at both the Motor City’s past hundred years and its depressing economic present. For some, Detroit is the poster child of a failed economic system; for others, it is simply a case study in municipal mismanagement. Significantly, Detropia presents some radical visions for the renaissance of the forsaken metropolis. Check cinemaduparc.com for showtimes.

Lakes of Canada November 21 8:30 p.m.

Casa del Popolo 4873 St. Laurent $10

Photo Simone Sinclair Walker | The McGill Daily

bastions of sleek corporate excess, including I.M. Pei’s cruciform Place Ville Marie, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Westmount Square, and Luigi Moretti’s Tour de la Bourse – sprouted from the vertiginous bedrock of centre-ville. In addition, the Place des Arts complex, the Montreal metro, the underground city, and Expo 67 were some of the lasting legacies of this brief but prolific period.

Though the skyscrapers of Toronto, like the overall population, have well eclipsed Montreal in number and height, strict zoning laws in Montreal have kept the city well centred and bustling at its core. In order to maintain the visual integrity and psycho-spatial centrality of Montreal’s best green space, building heights have been restricted to the height of Mont Royal (233 metres above sea level).

The city comes together at the street level, where divergent paths coalesce, collide, and ignore one another. The mountain has always been the focal point around which the city was built.

Unlike many other North American metropolises, high rises in Montreal have historically been more affordable and less high-class.

A good example is the preponderance of crumbling ten- to twentystorey-plus apartment buildings in the Milton-Parc area and the western half of downtown. The great extravagant quarters of Westmount and Montreal’s Golden Square Mile have historically been one-to-three level affairs; in these traditionally wealthy areas, ostentation rather than height conveys power.

According to preeminent architectural critic and former McGill professor Witold Rybczynski, Montreal springs from a Latin culture where

people like to see and be seen, hence bewildering lines of skimpily clad pedestrians cavorting in winter outside the clubs on St. Laurent on weekend nights. Compared to L.A. or Toronto, Montreal apartments tend to be on the smaller side, so even during the coldest of winters, people are itching to get out.

Though the skyline is effectively the fingerprint of any North American city, great cities are great because of what happens at the street level – that otherworldly feeling of chaos that supersedes any grid.

What’s striking about the majority of the new skyscraper projects is that they’re mostly luxury condos, a market that economists have warned is becoming saturated in Montreal.

One such example is a complex called “Tour des Canadiens” being built above the Bell Centre, part of a larger development program in the area by the Toronto-based development company, Cadillac Fairview.

In a press release, the development company stated, “The 48-storey building [...] will become Montreal’s tallest residential building and an unmistakable visual landmark.”

Given that most of these new development projects respect or integrate historically significant structures, this development should, in general, be an exciting time.

Nevertheless, one must wonder how much these structures will reflect the period in which they were constructed. I bring you two cases in point.

First, let’s consider the legacy of Jean Drapeau’s sixties-era mega-projects. While Expo 67 and the Olympic stadium brought international fanfare to Montreal, they also plunged the city into massive debt. To this day, the Olympic stadium remains a symbol for reckless government spending.

Second, while the 1960s were a time of unprecedented urban development, part of the legacy of that time is hurried construction and shoddy craftsmanship. While new buildings are being built and planned, daily stories of crumbling and endangered highway overpasses and high-rise apartments riddle the news. Even more disconcerting, the Montreal municipality has recently been stung with revelations of highly pervasive mafia manipulation of public construction contracts that have stalled municipal projects, forced the mayor to resign, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Here my initial foray into Griffintown becomes more relevant.

In a time of great inequality between the very rich and the middle class, the majority of the omnipresent construction is centred on the affluent few and their pre-fabricated gleaming towers of luxury. The very absence of that church in Griffintown is emblematic of other projects of historical erasure in that part of the city. We commodify re-vamped ruins as areas of renewal, but in fact few will ever recall the 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus in 1847, only to be re-discovered by more working-class Irish in 1860, when they built the Victoria Bridge.

The question remains, how will these expensive condo projects come to embody our time? Are we blindly pursuing a developmental path that ignores the city’s cultural, social, and economic reality? Or is Montreal simply catching up to more successful cities that are defined by the height and contemporary aesthetic of their skyline?

As Mayor Drapeau declared as this city lost its place as the largest in the country: “Let Toronto become Milan. Montreal will always be Rome.”

Lakes of Canada is a bunch of talented multiinstrumentalists, both local and from the States, who have capitalized on their master’s degrees in music by forming a folk-pop band. Formed only in 2010, they graced the stages of POP Montreal no less than three times this year, and their most recent album, Toll the Bell, was greeted with local acclaim.

Conversations in Contemporary Art: Raphaëlle de Groot November 23 5:30 p.m.

Visual Arts building Concordia University 1395 René Lévesque West (VA 114) Free

The Conversations in Contemporary Art lecture series continues with artist Raphaëlle de Groot. The artist will be presenting a performance that relates to her current exhibit at Galerie Graff.

Relation is a part of a larger series within the artist’s works, in which she gathers objects into a personal collection, re-interpreting them through her various interactions with the items.

The Red Herring Comedy Show November 30 7:00 p.m.

Les 3 Minots 3812 St. Laurent $5

The Red Herring Show Comedy and music time Happy Fun for you Come on Nov 30 At Trois Minots on Saint Lo Only five dollars

culture

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The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

A city of stories The Storytelling Guild of Montreal Marcello Ferrara The McGill Daily

“

With stories,” the storyteller began, glancing at all the young faces with a warm smile, “we should start at the beginning.”

Once upon a time, there was a city, built on the slope of a hill… not the largest city, mind, but big enough to have tall buildings with ten or more floors stacked to the sky, streets of three or four lanes with constant daytime traffic, sidewalks traveled by people of all sorts, dressed simply, elaborately, all with different faces that spoke with distinct voices – some childish, some sombre – and oh did they talk!

They spoke in cafes over coffee, at construction sites while the cement hardened, telling each other stories; stories about themselves or somebody else; stories of intrigue, action, drama.

Stories to make you laugh, to make you cry, or both; but most of all, stories just to pass the time until the coffee cup was empty and the cement was set.

One night, in this same city, behind a yellow door, down the basement steps, thirty young students sat on brown, blue, and orange seats, dipping chocolate chip cookies into cocoa with attentive ears in front and around of a woman with curly silver-white hair and brilliant white teeth. “I

am a storyteller,” she said, “I have been telling stories for almost eighty years.”

The stories the storyteller told were not the kind of stories you would hear around town. Her stories were not native to the town, or even the times. They were stories from places far away, and from people long gone. These stories were quite old, older than the storyteller that stood in front of the young audience. The storyteller’s name is Christine Mayr, a member of Montreal’s Storytelling Guild.

“Why tell such old stories?” she asked. “Even though times have changed,” she smiled, “I think they still touch us.” Once her words settled in the subterranean air, once she was sure all the young people were silent, she told stories, stories from around the world. Her voice rose and fell with a sprung rhythm. Her hands delicately mirrored the actions of the stories’ subjects.

She spoke of the sad love of a Japanese crane, the journey of an African spider son and father and their encounter with death, the river-ride of Australia’s red riding hood, and others. Each story seemed to belong not to any time in particular, but to the unchanging demands of the human heart.

Certainly, the crowd was touched by her stories that night. They were quiet in the sad parts, and laughing in the comic bits. And at the end

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

of her time, everyone clapped, and Mayr thanked the young people for coming and keeping the tradition alive, from one generation of storytellers to the next.

“Relatively few people are given to mathematics or physics, but nar-

rative seems to be within everyone’s grasp,” E.L. Doctorow once wrote. “Perhaps because it comes to the nature of language itself.

The moment you have nouns and verbs and prepositions…subjects and objects, you have stories.”

The Storytelling Guild of Montreal meets at the Westmount Library, 4574 Sherbrooke, every second Thursday of the month from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. People are welcome to come, listen, and share stories of their own.

Spoiler alert Delving into relationships with fictional characters Ralph Haddad The McGill Daily

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hough you may not want to admit it to yourself, many of us have shared this experience – we wake up and struggle to get through the day, all in anticipation of the moment when we can climb into bed once more. Clutching our pillows, we pretend that it is a certain person. Not just any person, though, but someone who does not actually exist in reality. Yes, many of us have had unhealthy relationships with fictional characters.

I have cried exactly twice in my adolescence. The first time was during Snape’s flashbacks in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and the second time was only a short while ago when Sybil Crawley passed away, very abruptly and to my utter astonishment, in television’s Downton Abbey. I may

have also shed a tear or two when Blaine and Kurt broke up on Glee.

I was taken aback when I saw Ned Stark’s head being chopped off at the end of the first season of Game of Thrones, which was followed by at least a week of Stark withdrawal.

Finally, for all the Grey’s Anatomy fans out there: who wasn’t sobbing and banging their fists on the wall after the season eight finale?

Mary-Lou Galician, in her book Research and Theories of Mass Media Effects on Individuals and Society, points at the fact that “obsessive extreme, ‘romantic’ relationships are a form of addiction,” and that such obsession with fictional characters can cause “emotionally disabling attachments filled with anxiety, fantasy and over-dependence.” If Tumblr fandoms all over the world read this, they would have a field day.

However, these kinds of relationships act as a bond between real people. If one were to study the

intricate internal structure of a fandom, they would find people working in unison to fuel each other’s addiction on a daily basis. GIFs of Sherlock circulate the Internet and are shared by millions of people during one of the show’s long hiatus periods. Others take time out of their days trying to make their Teen Wolf photosets just right in order to finally post them on the internet, and get approval from like-minded addicts all around (yes, I am talking about you). Homestuck is a fandom that started as an interactive web comic in which fans could influence the outcome of the story. It grew to such a large size that it bled off the internet and into real life, resulting in huge (I’m talking about hundreds of people) reunions in which fans dress up as their favourite purple-headed, grey-skinned, zodiac alien thing.

Then we have the mother of all forms of fanaticism, fan fiction.

These short stories, which extend the imagined world’s story as per the writer’s own imagination, take over the writer and their reader’s lives. What’s more intriguing, fan fiction has a subsection commonly known as “slash fics,” which are homoerotic stories about the sex lives of fictional characters we have come to love, regardless of whether or not they are gay. Sherlock and Watson, Derek and Stiles, Harry and Draco, the list is endless. People share these stories, swoon, think about how much better the world would have been if they were actually true, and then cry in unison.

There are different levels to this madness. On one end of the spectrum, there lie the LiveJournal and Tumblr fandoms; on the other there are a large number of people in the world, who, at one point or another, have had a crush on Edward Cullen (or Jacob Black).

Another branch of these kinds

of relationships are people who are in love with anime characters.

According to one close source, the character Kida Masaomi, from the show DRRR!! (pronounced Durarara), was a very big part of her life during high school – her friend even wrote a fanfiction about how Kida took her to her high school prom, because she had no date at the time.

Don’t get me wrong – I encourage all forms of affection toward cartoon characters as well (I had a huge crush on Aladdin when I was a kid). These strange, but often totally understandable obsessions bring people together and give us all something to freak out over.

However, we do have to remember to keep at least one foot grounded in reality. Bear in mind the relationships that we can cultivate with real people, without having to bond over an unhealthy love for a fictional character (or not).

14

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

culture

Inkwell - Joanna Schacter Halves Sometimes, they wake late at night and realize they’ve forgotten who they are. Nothing but a sense of emptiness and loss and it terrifies them each time. They flail about – eyes wide, legs tangling in the sheets – until they lurch out of bed and meet each other half way, their fingertips and palms and arms and chests and cheeks pressed flush against each other through the glass as they wait for their breathing to slow. Siamese twins, mirror image, reflection and photograph and soul; they are one. Perhaps it isn’t that they’ve forgotten; perhaps they’ve never known.

It’s then that they darken their eyes and smear their lips

with their mother’s rouge: much too deep – obscene, provocative, unintentional. Brief moments of separation, but then they catch each other’s eyes and they’re together again: in car doors and in puddles and broken glass; all the way down to the tunnels and the trains. They sit side by side in a single seat by a window and they ride the line from one end to the other and back again until they feel whole once more.

Tonight, a man, stumbling and slurring grabs fistfuls of their hair and calls them a word they don’t understand and she’s scared for a moment, until a boy, not much older than her, steers him away and asks her name. At a loss, they

remember what the man had called her. The boy laughs and says that’s what he had thought, that her lipstick and kohl-smudged eyes gave her away, and as the train slows, he stands and motions for her to follow. They hesitate a moment too long, so her blouse catches between the sliding doors and she feels a tug, but then she’s free and rushing after him.

Soon there’s deafening music, the smell of sweat and her father’s aftershave. It’s too hot, too crowded and she can’t move, can’t see and her chest and lungs and heart and insides clench. There are hands, on her hips, insistent, demanding; her breathing quickens, and she pulls away, free – but

Art essay - Amina Batyreva

he’s there, leaning against a wall, hand extended in a mockery of welcome and he grabs her forearm and exclaims that he’s been looking all over for you, darling.

She shakes her head and twists away. She doesn’t know what this is, hasn’t seen it in movies, or read about it in magazines, or heard it sung in songs. And then she’s in the restroom, door locked behind her, and, oh, God. But there is no one, not even God, who she’s been told is merciful but she’s never believed that and perhaps she should have, but no.

She’s alone, was alone even while out there pressed between hundreds, she realizes. She curls her fingers around the white por-

celain sink and pulls herself close to the mirror. Her other half, her reflection, stares back at her.

Relief, and she smiles, and it smiles back. Hello, she whispers; hello, it mouths. Could you help me? she asks, for she has never asked anything of it, but all it offers is mimicry, and the boy, his voice muffled, utters empty promises through the door. And please, she cries, please save me, but her shadow, her only friend for so long just stares and pities, and does nothing, for they are no longer they, but her and it and she knows not who she is or who it is, and then, there are not just two of them, not just two halves, but a thousand splendid pieces shattering.

EDITORIAL

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Warning: This article contains potentially triggering discussion of transphobia and violent crime.

According to results of the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, which took place from January 2008 to June 2009, reports show that every three days there is a murder of a trans* person. Transgender Europe (TGEU), a network of support and resource organizations for trans* people, compiled a list of 221 trans* people reported murdered between November 20, 2010 to November 14, 2011. The reports range from 17-year-old women killed by family members to older sex workers who fell victim to their own clients, with the majority of these murders taking place in South America.

However, this violent hatred extends beyond any borders. Of 27 hate murders reported in the U.S. against LGBTQ and HIV-positive people in 2010, a disproportionate 70 per cent were people of colour, and 44 per cent of those people were trans* women, when trans* Americans are estimated to make up under 1 per cent of the population.

Active threats of harm from strangers, family, or acquaintances, the oppressive gatekeeping in medical institutions, and other instances of both outright and subtle attack are all but inescapable for trans* people worldwide. At McGill, trans* students face erasure both in classrooms and in everyday conversations. Things as seemingly easy as using the washroom, selecting a box for ‘gender’ on a survey, or simply being referred to by the correct name or pronouns can be a daily uphill battle. Let alone the often years-long challenge of medical and social transition for those who pursue it, and the staggering suicide rates – 77 per cent of trans* Ontarians have contemplated suicide, and 43 per cent have attempted suicide, according to a 2010 report by Trans PULSE, a research initiative based in Ontario.

With only a fraction of a percentage of students at McGill identifying as trans*, it is crucial to recognize that these odds are stacked against an extremely small group of our peers. Considering the personal struggles of individual trans* people at McGill, true allyship is a rare occurrence, but one that is often welcomed with open arms. Active campaigning and petitioning for governmental action aside, acts as small as inquiring about and respecting a person’s preferred pronouns, or keeping trans* people and nonnormative bodies in mind rather than generalizing statements according to a gender binary can all contribute to a safer environment for our peers and colleagues as they study and work alongside us.

November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a memorial for victims of transphobic hate murders that ends the annual Transgender Awareness Week. This year, members of the Queer McGill Trans* Working Group have organized a vigil at the Y-intersection on campus at 6 p.m.

While this is an event centered around trans* people, with an emphasis on the trans* women of colour that are most often targeted in violent hate crimes, all allies are welcome to attend to support their fellow students and community members. By memorializing the dead, we can show support for those around us who are still engaged in a perpetual fight for existence, recognition, and respect.

contributors Daniel Braden, Camille Chabrol, Akanksa Chubal, Emily Dehority, Cem Ertekin, Marcello Ferrara, Carla Green, Ralph Haddad, Matt Herzfeld, Esther Lee, Austin Lloyd, S. Azam Mahmood, Davide Mastracci, Omar Saadeh, Joanna Schacter, Queer McGill Trans* Working Group, Simone Sinclair Walker, Dana Wray

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compendium!

The McGill Daily Monday, November 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

lies, half-truths, and the visual culture of the dutch republic

i6

Hipsters likely to be full of shit Study recommends never talking to one Euan EK The Twice-a-Weekly

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he Institute for Studies (IfS) has found that hipsters are likely to be full of shit. The results confirm most people’s long-held opinions about hipsters, who are known by the collective noun “septic tank,” as in the well-known Montreal phrase, “oh, look at that septic tank of hipsters dancing in the Mile End.” The IfS study looked at hipster behavioural patterns over a three-year period in order to test the hypothesis, “should you ever talk to a hipster?” While the results emphatically recommend that you never talk to a hipster,

of hipsters around every minute of the day for the three-year duration of the study. The hipsters were monitored at all times, and all bowel movements were to be tallied on the back of a first edition copy of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Fortunately for Cohen collectors, no tally was ever recorded, because, as The Twice-a-Weekly can now reveal, hipsters never take a dump.

“We didn’t believe it at first,” said McRational. “Literally every other species of mammal on this planet shits. Sure, species vary in their dumping patterns, you have you frequent crappers and your more docile, part-time ejectors, but even the most reluctant chihuahua eventually realizes that it too must shit. And then it shits.

they also suggest that hipsters are likely to be full of shit almost all of the time.

Joan McRational, director of the IfS and self-proclaimed Coldplay fan, told The Twice-aWeekly that the IfS wanted to build on earlier work studying anarchist students and French philosophers.

“Previous studies have confirmed the link between wearing scarves indoors and being a pretentious asshole, and we know from work done in the early 2000s in Brooklyn that all hipsters are pretentious assholes, so it was only a small jump from there to confirming that hipsters are really always full of shit.”

As part of the study, IfS fellows had to follow several septic tanks

Radical students secretly “bro-out” Left-wing activists also fans of new Twilight movie Euan EK The Twice-a-Weekly

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he Twice-a-Weekly can exclusively reveal that McGill’s left wing activists secretly attend beer-pong parties where they listen to Avicii at least once a week.

Despite claiming that beer was “only invented to keep the masses from seeing the truth,” and that Avicii represents “the triumph of the capitalist spectacle economy,” activists cannot keep themselves from partaking in “the circus of oppression.”

“I know it’s counter-revolutionary to chant ‘Three cheers for McGill’ while listening to

Deniz Koyu and fist-pumping into the ceiling,” said U3 Criticism and Critiquing student Marxius Leninius. “But, damn, that sheezy feel good.”

Leninius has been identified as one of this campus’s main rabble-rousers, but has recently been spotted on Thursday nights at Tokyo, buying people drinks with his father’s Amex Platinum and preaching the virtues of a four to the floor beat with an aggressive wobble bass line.

“I know that there is absolutely nothing sexy about this aggressive and emotionallystunted music,” said Leninius.

“But I also know that it makes me take me shirt off. Look at dem guns. Looooooook.”

Apart from overlooking the thirty-year-old history of sexy house music in favour of nonsense that was made on Ableton yesterday, the activists have revealed an interest in “everything Twilight.”

“Omgggggggggggggg Bellla.

Omgggggggg,” said King Sharzem O’Granny, U6 SSMU Studies student. “I love her.”

Despite the terrible reviews the film has been getting, O’Granny claims she and several other “anarcho-anarchists” get together and “just, like, screammm” once every two weeks.

“Fighting capitalism is hard,” said Sharzem O’Granny. “But I love Blockbuster movies in a totally non-ironic way. Yay.”

So to say we were shocked is a bit of an understatement.”

In fact, the results so shocked researchers that they nearly called off the study completely, before an IfS intern, Samuel Numbercruncher, accidentally talked to a hipster.

“It was remarkable,” Numbercruncher told The Twice-aWeekly. “Here was a living animal that was quite definitely full of shit. As he talked about his newfound interest in the links between post-crunk hip hop and 19th century French anarchism, I could literally see the shit filling up inside him. I thought he had to shit soon, for a moment I thought he’d drop trou’ right there and just splurt excrement all out onto the sidewalk, but he

didn’t. He seemed to be feeding off his own faeces.”

Since the revelation, several septic tanks of hipsters have been seen squatting low over the St. Lawrence river trying to coax fecal matter from their frozen bum-holes.

“We’ve been here, squeezing them muscles on full pressure, for four days,” hipster Grimius Boucher said. “I think we may have to give it up soon. We keep on pushin’ but that shit ain’t comin’. I miss loft-parties and synths, too.

It seems we may just have to live with being full of shit.”

Euan EK is the lovechild of the Anarchist Dean and Taylor Swift. He celebrated the third anniversary of his canonization yesterday.

New eco-friendly library building opens Students thrilled by “wall-less” design

Compendium!

is looking for crossword fairies.

Wings not essential. Spelling is.

Photo Hieronymus Chanski | The Twice-a-Weekly