Discrimination based on genetic predispositions to disease? Genetic chauvinism was something I witnessed in Japan, particularly against the hibakusha. People avoid marrying hibakusha because a belief that radiation sickness or genetic defects will be passed through family blood lines. The Japanese are big on blood lines. Hibakusha are also discriminated against by employers, and are socially ostracised.

In the US a new federal law was passed against the discrimination on the basis of genetic background. Is castism and racism not already a form of genetic discrimination? And what of the prejudices we will witness from transhumanists who are proponents of body enhancements who will eventually economically, physically and socially differentiate or favour based on those enhancements?

I marvel at the privacy issues around heath information. I consider that most sacred of information safe guarding as an indicator of socio-health discrimination. Instead of addressing the social misconceptions around disease, we hide our personal data to avoid the social implications of dealing with the potential results of healthhism or diseaseism. Instead we hide behind the veal of health purity and physical perfection via non-disclosure. Members of the disabled community have lobbied for the cultural acceptance of their physical form, but what of the cultural acceptance of what we cannot see - genetic predispositions. Autism for instance, with manifestations that are not always physically obvious, is the poster ability/disability (I speculate because it is one that affects boys mostly and is associated with savants or genius like qualities which we all like and therefore it gains societal acceptance and even reverence), is being relabelled as a form exceptionalness and therefore desired. We have socially adjusted our acceptance of it as a condition and are beginning to build social structures to facilitate the inclusion of people labelled with autism into a variety of institutions, we help families, exceptionalities are instrumentally being economically harnessed and it is being popularized in television and movies in such a way that we are being inculturated to accept the behavioural bundles of traits of this sub-population as normal and we are adjusting accordingly. Schizophrenia however is not a desired condition along with many others. How do perceptions and labels change? I just finished reading Making Up People by Ian Hacking, who discusses how labelling a condition suddenly makes up groups of people who fit that label and demonstrates how labels and categories are not only made up, they are not static and dynamically. The label of homosexuality as a psychological disorder and a deviance for instance is now a genetic trait which makes the ‘condition’ more socially acceptable. These people cannot help themselves so lets accept them. This is a societal response, and a strong lobby toward redefinition and social acceptance. Now that it is a genetic predisposition, does that mean we could weed it out? Will people be tested for it in-vitro? Just like how ultra-sound is being used to eliminate girl babies in India and China? Is that genetic discrimination - having girl genes? And what of the discussion of gender classification that is physiologically being redefined, particularly with the testing of female athletes that are being labelled male. What of alchohol fetal syndrome that is been passed on between and among generations of entire aboriginal communities? What of the social implications intellectual deficiencies caused by under and mal nutrition of entire populations? How do we know who is who? What does predisposition mean? How do we go from population to individual and back? If we are continuously told we are predisposed to something do we suddenly believe it and become it? Margaret Lock for instance discusses bio-social differences, where culture doesn’t just interpret biology, it also shapes it. We have medical labelling making acceptance of once socially unacceptable traits. But what of medically unacceptable traits?

And what of people who consciously choose to risk passing on illnesses/diseases or the chance thereof to their offspring? Is that merely an individual choice? Are there larger bio-social implications to those choices? Is that eugenics thinking? The will to improve hereditary traits? Weed out the bad ones with genetic testing and improve the gene pool for us all? What are the criteria used to decide? Does this make us go more underground? How do we understand the probabilities, the science, the statistics that inform the odds? Probability can tell us something about the chance of something occurring in a population but cannot predict at the scale of the individual. What are good and bad odds? Societally, in North-America we are pretty much innumerate, so how do we judge probabilities? Are insurance companies the new arbiters? Are health care costs and time lost at work the real reasons behind genetic purification? Is it social ostracization? The fear of being associated with someone physically inferior? Is it the fear of eugenics thinking and the way it was used that thwarts the sharing of our health records? The fear of being judged as inferior or of having unacceptable traits?

What of progeneration? Some individuals and couples want, at all costs, a child of their own bodies. I have met people with incredible urges and consider this a must. Is that genetic chauvanism? is that not already genetic discrimination or differentiation? What of cultural propensities against adoption? Many would rather risk bearing a child with an illness rather than avoid that risk and adopt. Are the risks of adopting a child with an illness greater or lesser than bearing one where there is a high likeliness of passing on a ‘bad’ gene? Do kids on adoption rolls come with DNA certifications?

I do not really know what or how to think about any of these issues. I do know that I have many questions and do believe we are avoiding asking really hard questions and have no mechanisms to discuss them in a free and open way as a society. So we hide our health records because we are afraid of discrimination and judgement, and we create genetic anti-discrimination acts because we have not societally dealt with our inability to understand what is underneath our fears, and so we temper our behaviours with laws, and in the short term that is perhaps the best course of action, we continue to marry within our classes, casts and races, while that is changing somewhat, we remain innumerate which reduces our chance of a fair debate or of making informed personal decisions, we are rightly petrified of eugenics past while not creating a society that can rationally temper itself (just watch the health care debate in the US) and we have this strange belief in physical perfection which, in reality, if we are really lucky, is but a fleeting short period of time either in or teen or adult lives, one we pretend is for ever and we have somehow subconsciously decided it is what we have to all strive for perfection.

I was a able to physically tire myself out enough to be able to sit and listen to a CBC Ideas series I have been slowly working through today: How to Think About Science. I was listening to Episode 2, with Lorraine Datson the director of the The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I was mesmerized and dazzled by how she thinks, how seamlessly she wove together the history of objectivity and the eloquence of her vocabulary. The paucity of my vocabulary became very conspicuous.

Then I visited the Institutes website and as I was about to leave, thinking that there is no way I can spend time reading her work right now, I came across one of her new research themes The Sciences of the Archive (2010-15). I was so excited, I have a thing for archives and just last week I received my first lesson on how to search archival records.

But no, that was not enough, as I kept reading, I discovered she is also looking a the cultural history of data. I almost cried and wanted to toss everything I had done so far into the garbage - not even into the recycling! I have been looking for this type of work for a few years, and there it is! Just starting up.

“Data” (literally, “the givens”) is perhaps the most taken-for-granted word in all the sciences: short and unpretentious, it expresses the simplest and apparently most straightforward elements of empirical research. Whether inscribed as jottings on notecards, traces on photographic emulsions, entries in lab notebooks, or digital information, data supply the essential raw materials for all further scientific activity, from observing to theorizing. It is a category considered too basic to merit a history, too innocent to deserve a philosophy.

The philosophy of data! I am crying!

JANUARY 2010: GEOGRAPHY 4024

Subject to sufficient demand, a seminar course focused on:

“GLOBALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY”

If interested, Sign Up ASAP!

Instructor – Dale Armstrong

Introduction: Globalization is commonly taken to be an amalgam of five main elements: culture, economics, environment, geopolitics, and technology. The purpose of this course is to highlight the technological component of globalization. Crucial to understanding the nature of technological progress is to realize that technology does not simply ‘happen’ in a vacuum but, rather, is a function of both new technical innovations and the political decisions surrounding their implementation. In fact, ‘technogeopolitical’ decisions occur at a variety of scales across different environments, and are motivated by the idea of achieving particular end states to suit certain purposes.

Thus, what is important to keep in mind is that while globalization tends to ‘flatten’ the cultural and economic landscape, the politics of technology may well be applied in ways that perpetuate inequalities at various scales. Using both historical and contemporary examples, this seminar course draws attention to politics, strategy, and technology at the global, national, and regional/local levels. Particularly important from the contemporary perspective is the fact that the emerging, global, ‘infosphere’, and the networks therein, represent a new landscape of contested political control.

Provisional Topics:

It is kind of silly, but I was pretty excited to see it!

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech.

Richard Wollin, a close reader of Heidegger and Faye says:

“I’m not by any means dismissing any of these fields because of Heidegger’s influence,” he wrote in an e-mail message referring to postmodernism’s influence across the academy. “I’m merely saying that we should know more about the ideological residues and connotations of a thinker like Heidegger before we accept his discourse ready-made or naïvely.”

I had no clue and was naively reading his work. Not knowing his roots is like reifying Robert Moses without taking into account his deep racism and how that influenced his infrastructure building in New York, or glorifying Athenian democracy by forgetting that slave ownership was rampant, only wealthy men could participate and women were non persons and treated worse in Athens than in other Greek cities at the time. To claim that technology is socially or politically neutral?

How to read? How to think about technology, infrastructure, works? Most of what I have been exposed to in academia was written by white men of power, most of our technology and infrastructure was built by the same batch, many amazing artists are creeps like Woody Allen, Michael Jackson or Roman Polanski. Do we dismiss their art, thinking, artefacts? I have refused to see a Woody Allen movies since he got away with marrying his step daughter, but I do not dismiss his skill as a cinematographer, and I always considered Michael Jackson to be a sad sick person who also happened to be a musical genius, while what’s his name is nothing but a rich perverted creep. Glenn Gould? What about Ayn Rand? Her writings reflected her very disturbed psyche, and perhaps if people knew a little more about her before reading her work, they could at least frame it as writings stemming from a very disturbed mind. Or how my respect for Edward Said grew once I knew more about him.

I have great difficulty with judgemenalism and reading because I sometimes loose or gain respect for the authors once I know about them. Should the work stand on its own? I can easily dismiss the work because of the person, is that fair? Do I falsely claim a connection? I find it hard to read the work of people who write about equality and reflexivity when they cannot seem to practice it. Do these not go hand in hand?

Bref, I think it is important to learn about the people whose work we/I read. I am not promoting essentialism yet I am really not sure if we/I can separate the person from the work, that we/I should, but maybe some of their personal history does determine what they pursue and how they do so. I certainly wonder all the time about where I have come from and the reasons why I pursue the work that I do. I have not yet figured out all the details, but I can certainly see that my past, personal experience and learning trajectory very much influences how I think and how my thinking has evolved overtime. If people know our pasts, will they judge the work from that lens? Will they dismiss what we do if they judge who we are and perhaps falsely associate what they think about the work based on what they can only partially know about the person? With Heidegger, it is not just the person, but also the ideology, and as a philospher, I presume that the ideology and the philosophy are inseparable, yet we do not dismiss the entire German nation for their technology prowess? Nor do we stop using IBM computers or driving BMWs because of their historical roots with the Nazi regime either! Do we stop using electricity because because Edison was a megalomaniac? Or dismiss Turin because he was gay, as the British establishment did at the end of the war? Or should we at least know so that we can position these technologies in a historical context and then consider these when we build new ones? In the case of Turin, does it matter? Should Glenn Gould’s should his music be dismissed because he was autistic and somewhat OCD? When does it matter?

Inspired by: An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?

If you do not get to watch tomorrow, the videos and the presentation will eventually be archived and available for viewing at a later date.

See you there!

Cake. Books. Music. Great people. 40 years of Octopus history. What else could you wish for?

It’s hard to figure out how to mark the 40th birthday of a bookstore that has seen hundreds of people behind the scenes, keeping it alive and thousands of customers who have stuck with us through it all. BUT! We think we have done it - a little something for everyone who has helped make it what it was, what it is and what it will be.

If you have ever volunteered, worked, shopped or visited the store please join us for a great celebration of all that is good in the world!

Friday October 30, 2009

The Carleton Tavern 223 Armstrong Avenue (at Parkdale and Armstrong)

Doors open at 6:30

7:00 Jean-Claude Parrot (of CUPW fame) - his theme “the past 40 years - where have we been,where are we going?”

8:00 Jennifer Whiteford (local author and one time Octopus staff member ) will read some of her newest work

9:00 Archival Footage - a fabulous local band will kick off the musical portion of the evening (p.s. three former Octopus staff members in this band!)

10:00 The Brothers Creeggan

11:00 The Bidiniband

It promises to be a night of fun, friends and fabulous entertainment.. Please join us for all or some of it!

2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”

If we changed the word woman for the work black, there would be protests in the streets. Sexism and double standards for women are so ubiquitous in our societies that we just accept this way of thinking and doing as the norm. How much longer do we have to wait?