We know we can change the world, but should we?

It’s World Environment Day (who knew?!), and the Independent published a collection of hopeful messages despite the world not being on track to keep temperatures below two degrees this century. Some are pinning cautious optimism on youth climate movements. Others are hopeful that this time, at COP26, things might be different since tackling climate can transform society. If we fix this one big problem, then everything will be better. Others point to stats: 70% of GDP in the UK is covered by net-zero targets, up from 30%, and the G7…

An excellent book, mixing biography, history, and social justice seemlessly.

Just on Friday, Vancouver police were looking for a 40-year-old suspect, and arrested an 81-year-old Black man who happened to be a former judge with much to say about the state of the police department that would shackle a man on an early morning walk. We know how horrifically racist some police actions have been, and Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller takes us through to solutions for it all. It’s a beautifully written book that takes us step by step through his own journey from racism/not-racism towards antiracism mixed in with…

Another climate change book. Will this one finally save the world?

It’s not all that new. There are tons of books on this topic now, so it would be hard to find a completely new angle. But the public still needs to learn the basics, and Mann does a good enough job of explaining it all in a very conversational writing style that’s approachable for casual readers of science. …

Sandel attempts to dismantle an underlying premise around meritocracy to show the way through our current state of affairs.

This excellent read, The Tyranny of Merit, by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel, actually shifted some of my thinking, and I love a good lightbulb moment provoked by a book! I found the book sometimes a little outside my reach in places enough to need to read a few chapters numerous times, but I think I’ve got the gist of it all.

In a nutshell, some of us hope that judging people based on their merit makes for a more fair…

A primer on the history and ways to define and combat nihilism.

A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Dr. Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism, an “examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.” It’s a really short book, but it took a while to wade through it all. Here it all is even more briefly assembled with my own understanding here and there.

We typically think of nihilism as very simply meaning, “we believe in nothing” (4), but he counters that from the start with the polar opposite definition of Russian nihilism…

The history of how Canada got sucked into the privatization and deregulation of free market capitalism.

Linda McQuaig’s newest book, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, is a fast read full of local history and written as history should be written, as colourful stories about fascinating people! But, in order to try to remember any of it, I’ve whittled it down to the bare bones here. …

A conversation between Robert Reich and Michael Sandel.

Robert Reich, an economist and professor of economics at Princeton who served under Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations, had a great discussion with Michael Sandel, political philosophy professor at Harvard, about Reich’s new book: The System: Who Rigged It and How to Fix It. I can only find the 60 minute video on facebook, but here’s my summary of the ideas below. …

What was Michael Moore thinking??

So I just noticed I’m getting a lot of traffic for a post I wrote 8 months ago that advertised the release. Back then I wrote about some concerns with the film based just on the trailer and the backstory.

I actually watched the film on Tuesday, Earth Day’s eve. It’s free for the next month. It’s a weird production overall. The music is a mix of 70s rock and iMovie background choices. There’s some Emerson Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, and Black Sabbath in there at odd random times. I mean, if you’re going…