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Canadian Government Muzzling Scientists
IllogicalStudent writes with this excerpt from The Vancouver Sun:
"The Harper government has tightened the muzzle on federal scientists, going so far as to control when and what they can say about floods at the end of the last ice age. Natural Resources Canada scientists were told this spring they need 'pre-approval' from Minister Christian Paradis' office to speak with journalists. Their 'media lines' also need ministerial approval, say documents obtained by Postmedia News through access-to-information legislation. The documents say the 'new' rules went into force in March and reveal how they apply not only to contentious issues, including the oilsands, but benign subjects such as floods that occurred 13,000 years ago. They also give a glimpse of how Canadians are being cut off from scientists whose work is financed by taxpayers, critics say, and is often of significant public interest — be it about fish stocks, genetically modified crops or mercury pollution in the Athabasca River."
My parents are retired scientists of world-class standing, previously employed by the Canadian federal government, with extensive networks of colleagues around the world as well as here in Canada. The current government's efforts to muzzle and control what scientists say is widely viewed as completely unacceptable by the scientists themselves, but the highest levels of the departments which employ them have long been taken over by bureacrats.
I would not be concerned with bias toward government goals on the part of the scientists, though. The government's attempts to vet and spin their public communications speaks quite eloquently to the scientists' integrity... and to this government's perfidy.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Having lived and gone to school in both the US and Canada, I have to call complete BS on this. I've also worked for the Canadian government in and around historical monuments and sites and it is nothing like what your trying to declare. Canada always declares that "the Allies" not "Canada" helped win WW2, that the Bush plane (not pilot...) while is a well known plane is not the be all end all of anything in history, nor do they declare "everything" was invented in Canada. While in the US though, I found that things like the Vietnam war are altered and edited (my history text books enter listing of that war was "The US entered Vietnam, fought the rebels, then the war protests happened, and then in the 80s..." completely removing any mentioning of the end of the Vietnam war, the removal of troops, the fact that the US lost that war (the teachers aren't to mention this)). The US also always wants to declare that WW2 only started after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and not in 1939 (since the US was supplying both sides with weapons and supplies) and that the US single handedly ended the war. That they are the center of the world, ect...
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Forget that, they ran on a platform of transparency.
I'm advising a friend who is running for office (city council in a smallish town) and she's been hit with a lot of questions about what her platform is, whereas she's really a pragamatic problem solver with a great record of listening to people and using the best factual information available to fix stuff.
I told her to reply to questions about her platform by saying, "Platforms are what politicians say before they're elected, and we know how that works out. The Harper government ran on a platform of greater transparency. So I'm not going to make you any grand promises, except to say that I'll listen to the voices of my constituents and do my best to find practical, affordable, sustainable solutions to their problems."
The number one issue in the district where she's running--based on talking to the people there door-to-door--is quality of roads and sidewalks, which are not mentioned in anyone's platform.
The whole media circus of political platforms is old and tired and will hopefully be dead soon. We've all seen how it ends far too often. Time to stop listening to politicians lies and start asking them, "Why should we think you're going to respresent us rather than your party after we vote for you?"
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I don't know where you live. Around here its pretty much the opposite. They start off in school believing in "authority" without any consideration about where that authority comes from (most 5 years olds don't care what political party is in power).
By the time they start hitting high school (mid-teens), they're usually anti-authority of any kind, but still without much consideration.. they just want to do whatever they feel like and think they should have that freedom.
Once they start hitting their early to mid 20s (especially if they go to college/university where actually thinking about things is encouraged), they start putting some real thought into why they like (or dislike) what they do. They actually are able to vote so they start actually considering what they're voting for (as much as the propaganda allows.. we're all well aware that what the parties say they'll do often gets ignored or even 180'd).
By the time they've hit their 30s they've pretty much figured out where they lie on the political spectrum. Sure they'll differ slightly from year to year, but short of some massive bullocks on the part of their chosen party (such as the liberal scandal that got Harper elected in the first place), its pretty rare for people to do much of a party swap beyond a certain age.. they've already become set in their ways.. and they've got real responsibilities (work, family) and less time to think about their choices, and so on.
Obviously I'm generalizing and I'm sure there's loads of counter-examples but that's sort of a general flow of things.