Wall of Silence Conference Continued- Jane Doe and more

Toronto Star May 20, 2007 (Section A7)

Police Seek Help after York U assault

Police are asking the public for help investigating an assault on a woman at York University Thursday evening. The assault occurred on the south side of Harry Arthurs Common. Anyone with information is asked to call 416-808-2222.

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In my last post on the Wall of Silence of Conference I specifically discussed the increased number of "assaults" occuring on their campus, and that's why this little tid-bit was particularly disturbing and chilling. First of all, this little citation is literally all the publicity the incident was given, and on top of that, the euphemism assault had to be used, making the incident seem less serious than it really is. How about describing it as what it really is: sexual violation. Would that stir up too much controversy? I don't understand why we have to refer to the rape and violation of women as "assault". It does no one justice, and only serves to devalue and depoliticize what is happening to women every day. And on a university campus at that; where we are all supposed to be mature, and dignified human beings. This is a systematic problem occurring on the York Campus, (and other university campuses too) and fairly soon female enrollment is going to go down because so far nothing is happening to ensure the safety of the women.

York University and local media needs to wake up and smell the fucking coffee on this one:
This is a huge problem, and really, it should be getting more than 5 lines buried in the middle of the paper. How many rapes and assaults have their been on the York campus since September? At least three, and that is so unacceptable, and this hiding of it is despicable. What The Star needs to do is write a huge series on this type of behaviour among our men, and, just as was discussed in the conference, challenge the framework in which these rapes are occurring, which is apparently the 'permissive' environment of the university campus.

I am too pissed right now to write about Jane Doe. I could never do her justice...

Considerations for the Future?

Today while I was sitting at work, I happened to find a copy of yesterday's National Post on the desk, with a cover article discussing the soaring prices of food and oil predicted over the next four years. (2012)

This article was very disheartening and horrifying to read:

- The price of rice jumped by 5% in Thailand ($1000/tonne)
- Walmart is beginning to ration rice as consumers begin to hoard in a panic about soaring grocery prices
- Wholesalers are being forced to raise their prices 15%
- there are riots because people do not have enough food

- BY 2012 the cost of oil is expected to soar to roughly $225 a barrel

The articles discussed these crises and the economical impact we can expect them to have:
- Car companies are going to see their profits dip dramatically as more people opt not to purchase cars, move closer to work, and ultimately aim only to purchase fuel efficient cars in order to deflect this inflation. So many people are now buying cars that there is not enough oil to go around.

It is truly a scary thought that we are coming to such a point in our consumption that there are riots happening because people don't have enough food/rice, and that gas will eventually soar to $2.25/litre.

This is actually horrifying.

I was really thinking that I may have to purchase a car, however, with these types of predictions, I will definitely be waiting until later for this; I hope to be able to purchase an electric car as my first car, and will probably be in my 30s before I actually am able to afford the costs associated with a traditionally powered car.

Eating habits are also going to have to change world-wide in order to avoid high costs for food: particularly, I will be buying The 100-Mile Diet and beginning my committment to local eating.

This was an endeavour I intended to follow through with this summer either way, however, it was propelled mostly by environmental concern. Now, it will be a combination of environmental responsibility as well as an attempt to save money.

I've also seen stories on the news about this food crisis, and restaurant prices will be soaring as well within due time. So, I will also have to more consciously begin to order food from restaurants which order locally.

I guess there is also no time like the present to commit to my decision to eat Vegetarian as well...

This truly is a horrifying situation that we find ourselves in, with a food crisis and the prospect of gas running $2.25/litre.

Hopefully consumers will take heed to this crisis and drive less, buy fuel efficient cars and be more conscientous in their food purchases in order to make this crisis become managable... and hopefully car companies are hasty with the introduction of electric cars on the market....

Update: More to come on this topic. After reading this newspaper article I picked up the 100-mile diet, In Defense of Food, and The Sexual Politics of Meat... I'd like to provide a "plan for action" at least for myself, that I can share as well

Who Killed the Electric Car: General Motors Crime Against Humanity and Mother Earth

Between watching Who Killed the Electric Car and The Corporation, I have gotten really riled up about branding and consumerism all over again. (and of course, ethics)

I am particularly pissed off at GM, and will never purchase a car made by them. Basically a brief synopsis of the documentary is that The California Air Resource Board (CARB) passed a law stating that a certain percentage of vehicles sold in California had to be zero emissions. This of course gave car companies two options: to comply, or to fight it.

In the beginning they complied, and GM came up with an electric car which as it turned out, everybody wanted. The car was sytlish, "sexy" and fast, with a excellent milage, something like 120 miles per charge. This car could meet the needs of 90% of the population and have zero emissions. This is exactly the type of car that the world needs, but of course, the almighty dollar and the oil companies got in the way. The cars were all leased out, but the contracts were not those with an option to buy out at the end of the lease.

So, what happens is a ton of complicated and corrupt stuff which I'll try to summarize as best as I can, though it may be incoherent:

- the car companies, not just general motors decided to sue CARB. They argued that there was not a market for the electric cars. (even though there were huge waiting lists for a product that wasn't even available) GM took the waiting list of 4000 people and managed to whittle it down to 50 people who were willing to actually sign on the dotted line. They said (paraphrased): "Once we explained all the limitations of the product, no one wanted to sign." Well of course no one wanted to sign, the company began with the limitations of the product. No company ever does that with a product they genuinely want to sell. As Naomi Klein illustrates in "No Logo," it's not hard to plant desire or want for a product in the mind of a consumer, particularly with advertising technologies available today.

- right around the same time that the car companies were suing CARB, the federal government in the US starts to push fuel cell technology. There are video clips of George Bush talking about how fuel cells are the way to the future etc. Well, this is so stupid, and has so many problems. First of all, hydrogen fuel cells are still a finite resource, second is that the infrastructure would be impossible to create to a level at which it wasn't inconvenient for commuters to fill up. There are gas stations everywhere, the infrastructure is there. Hydrogen cars will never become popular enough because the infrastructure isn't there and is prohibitively expensive to set up. So, the cars will never sell, so the industry will never have the resources to create the needed infrastructure. Further, a fuel cell car does not have very good mileage, and requires frequent re-fuelling, which, is prohibitive because of a lack of infrastructure. Hydrogen fuel cells are destined to fail. Even if the electricity comes from a carbon plant, it is still the best option with the lowest emissions. (If one had Bullfrog Power, then everything would be completely emissions free.)

- CARB ruled in favour of the car companies, and struck down it's clean air act, essentially "giving it away" by not forcing car companies to comply. The car and oil companies would end up losing profit through the electric car.

What happened with the electric car was that as soon as CARB ruled, GM started going around and collecting the cars (EV1). No one's lease had the possibility of the buy-out, and though the car owners begged and pleaded to keep the cars, GM reclaimed all of them, and took them to a junk yard to have the crushed and shredded.

The irony of all this is that now, there are a plethora of hybrid cars available. Japanese brands began to make hybrids because they feared a loss of profit if they didn't offer something comparable to the EV1, and GM and American car companies destroyed all their electric cars. After all of this, the Japanese and other imports began to outsell the American companies. So what do we have today? Nissan, Toyota, and (most annoyingly) GM, all with hybrid or electric models available. Car companies are touting the technology of the future when we had the exact car to solve our problems of global warming, and they took it away and destroyed it. That is so morally, and ethically corrupt, it just makes me want to scream. I don't want a hybrid car. I want the zero emission car that we had and then saw snatched away from us and literally destroyed.

It really does come down to the almighty dollar for the car companies. GM committed a crime against humanity and the environment by destroying a car with zero emissions, and now American car companies play the hero with their new technologies of "hybrid" vehicles. It really goes to show how corrupt the oil industry has made everyone. We digging ourselves a huge carbon grave, and yet, GM and all the others are still getting away with their facade of actually caring about the future of the earth. How can a company which claims to care about the future of the earth and climate change try to pass off the hybrid as the technology of "today" when, as was illustrated in the documentary, it is really the technology of "yesterday"?

Now, what really gets me and my hatred for GM, is the most recent issue of Green Living grabbed the last time I was at the Big Carrot on the Danforth. Here is a screen shot of one of the ads in the magazine, and please observe the irony. This is an ad for GM. Of course it is. Touting
their innovative technology for making environmentally friendly vehicles. In fact, I'm surprised that they actually advertise an electric car in this ad (also infuriated as well because they have literally come full circle, at the expense of tax payers money and purely motivated by greed). The amount of advertising that GM does in this issue of Green Living is vomit inducing. The facade that they actually care about the environment is overshadowed by their complete disregard for it about 4 years ago. I cannot view GM as a credible company at all, and do not trust that they *actually* care in any way shape or form about climate change or ethics.
I am reminded right now of Emmanuel Kant, who maintains in his essay "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals" that no action has moral worth at all if not driven by the intention to bring about a morally positive outcome. GM's marketing of electric/hybrid/fuel cell technology is nothing but an attempt to ensure that they do not lose any profit to the imports and nothing to do with an environmental conscience.

It was also infuriating for me to continue to flip through the magazine and find an article called "Giving cars the Green Light: Auto Makers are listening to consumers" which, ironically enough, featured GM; they were talked about first, and also had the largest picture of their car. (The page can be found here on page 19) This makes me question the politics behind putting together the magazine itself. How much of a role did GM pay in order to have this feature presented as independant of corporate influence? I wonder actually, how much of Green Living was funded by GM through these endorsements, and the amount of advertising they have in the magazine. Is Green Living a credible source for living a green lifestyle? Of course, all solutions in the magazine are figured through purchases and consumption. Is this magazine really just one gigantic product endorsement? Because that's the impression I get now that I analyze further. The prominence of GM advertising in Green Living is what set off the alarm bells, and now, as I "read" the magazine, I find it's a ton of ads intersparced with articles about the products advertised. It's advertising disguised as literature. This ad really helps to illustrate the illusion of "caring" that GM wishes to convey to the general product, about their values as a company. The representation of "car heaven" as something that actually does resemble the dominant understanding of what heaven is like devalues the notion of heaven along with deceiving the consumer into believing that GM is a company to be trusted. A company who truly does want to "improve air quality" and "protect the climate" would not create and market an electric car, and then take the car off the market and send it to "car heaven" when the oil companies put the pressure on to keep the money in the industry. A company that truly cared about the environment and a moral duty to do what they could to protect our environment would have done everything they could to sell as many of those cars as they could. Unfortunately, as I learned in the The Corporation today, corporations are literally by definition, forced to only consider the bottom line. The money. Apparently ethics has been sacrificed at the hands of the the corporation, and then, when the trends show that an electric car will indeed be profitable, then the marketing and branding frenzy begins again. It seems that this sudden availability of hybrid/electric cars has been driven by expedience. However, this is not to say that I don't think that Hybrid cars are exciting! However, it is just really annoying that corporations deceive the public like this. They have betrayed all of humanity and all of life by selfishly halting production of the electric car, and now that profits are there, the cars are available, marketed as "fresh" ideas, a conscious effort to save the environment. The CARB let down the world when they revoked the clean air act by essentially allowing GM and other American Auto industries to abandon work on electric cars, and redirect focus to carbon and oil.


I believe that I will end it here. But seriously, the documentary is amazing and I recommend that you watch it. It will truly open your eyes to the deceit that exists all around us, particularly with the perception that the technology for the electric car does not exist yet and is far off in the future.

A final note: The documentary shows us "car heaven." the reality is a lot less fluffy and feel good than the ad. It is a god-forsaken landfill essentially, where cars are crushed and then shredded into a million tiny pieces. It is dingy and it is sad to know that all those electric cars were just crushed and destroyed like that, when we had the answer to our problems at our finger tips.

Coming up next: A closer look at "The Corporation," revisit Naomi Klein's "No Logo," with a particular focus on the concept of sponsored individuals on university campuses.

I don't know what to think!

please note that this article seems to contradict this one also published by the Toronto Star.

what IS a 'killer profile?'

This event serves to remind me that our campuses continue to get less and less safe every day. What is more "baffling" is that the student who went into the Illinois University and open fired in a lecture hall did not "fit the killer profile." There is no way to attribute this individual's behaviour to being previously bullied or a social recluse. He was personable, and he was a student in the school.

The previous shootings (Virginia Tech and Dawson College in Montreal) were "less threatening" because the shooters were described as socially inept, rejects essentially bordering on psychotic. This individual however, was part of the wood work. He didn't act unusual in the days leading up to the shooting, he wasn't known for his social problems, but was in fact seen to have great potential.

I did not read the article released on the day of the shooting, however I just read the article from the Saturday edition of the Saturday Star, and what really grabbed my attention was the headline of "Gunman didn't fit killer profile." This article goes on to describe the promising life that Steven Kazmierczak was predicted to have, and this only served to cause me more distress than any of the other reports of recent campus shootings have given me. After reading this article I put down the paper with the grave reminder that anyone can be a killer and, as this distinct case demonstrates, he or she might not necessarily fit the "profile" of a serial killer. (Thanks, I didn't think that 'normal' people were capable of killing- only the obvious psychos)

This article, and others which discuss our recent campus shootings are problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, it reenforces a stereotype of what serial campus shooters are like. From Columbine until today, all of the shooters have been "abnormal" socially, have been loners who were visibly disturbed. Which in turn also reenforces a false notion of security for students who feel that their campuses are "safe" from shooters because there is no "known" social recluse in their midst.

I finished reading this article feeling less safe than I did when I first began reading it because *shock* this individual did not meet the "killer profile," reminding me that every day each person I encounter on campus could be a shooter waiting for their moment to attack. They just might be really good at hiding the fact that they're planning a massacre. This article left me wondering if perhaps the characteristics of the other murderers were ways for us to displace our guilt about what had happened- this man gives us no excuse or scapegoat.

However, what I find it important to remind myself of is that this threat has always been there, it is the representation of this particular incident which gives it the appearance of a new threat; because the killer did not stand out against the societal norms we have constructed. We know that any day someone could open fire on the school, but we always assume that we'll be able to detect it, that we'll be able to spot the individual from a mile away due to their social tendencies. We almost assume that there will be warning bells when a killer is in our midst, but this article is a cruel reminder that while their may be warning signs that someone is a potential murderer, this will not always be the case. The Virgina Tech and Dawson College shooters happened to exhibit warning signs, however the Illinois shooter was able to blend in with his surroundings and come out under the radar.

I am still trying to figure out how the Star wants me to interpret this article.

Is it an "How could we see it coming? he was 'normal'! Campus killers are psycho, and obviously so" or is it a "We have to recognize that there isn't really one 'killer profile.' It can be anyone."

In all reality, we are reminded by this incident that yes, Kazmierczak was obviously not of sound mind if he was able to open fire in a lecture hall and then shoot himself, even though he seemed to have the appearance of it. Not all killers are going to send off warning bells, and it is a sad fact of life. I'm sure that he did fit the "killer profile," people were simply blinded by his academic excellence and his "normalcy" to see past it. But perhaps we couldn't seen through it, perhaps he was able to hide his crazy extremely well. The lesson remains to be learned that a killer could be anyone, they could be the guy or girl you sit next to in class who is brilliant and smart and who you lend a pen occasionally and discuss feminist theory with. The truth is we never know, and every time there is another campus shooting each university student finds themselves hard pressed to embrace the "community" we are each a part of and begins to wonder if perhaps one day their own life could be torn apart by the person they least expect in the environment they should always feel safe in.

As members of our individual university communities we have an automatic trust for our fellow students, and its sad that once again we are reminded that this is dangerous. However, at the same time, we also reminded of just how helpless we are to stop it! Short of metal detectors, how could his ever be regulated? A university is not as contained and controlled as a high school (even though they are not as safe anymore, and even though we like to think that we are all rational/ethics/moral adults since we've been admitted into the university). I really don't sit here with answers at all, but questions, and fear.

Most importantly I comment on how we are so "surprised" because this individual didn't meet the "killer profile" but we have to remember that just because one doesn't exhibit the "killer profile" obviously doesn't mean that it's not there. It's sad and scary, but it could be anyone and I am a little irritated that this is apparently big news. Perhaps now that there has been an infiltration by a "normal" student of the University in Question there will be more discourse, and as a result, action, in regards to campus safety and the social culture that pervades these attacks.