The cover itself doesn’t tell you to vote “for” or “against” anything, but a regular reader probably has some idea of the significance of the various terms in Daily journalism. “Activists” are against inequality: good. “Dodging the question” is done by oppressors: bad. “Opacity” is what we have: bad; “transparency” is what we want: good.

Art in The Daily has a similar capacity to evoke a quick response. Though art with a “cause” tends to draw our attention, not all artwork in The Daily has a bone to pick – art also exists in The Daily for art’s sake. Still, the less political categories of Daily imagery are not necessarily apolitical. From Health & Education to Sci+Tech, to Compendium! (see March 15) and the photos used for News stories, we have seen that choice of imagery, like choice of word, can be a political statement.

The political images that accompany articles in The Daily derive from the struggles of marginalized communities, against “oppressors,” in “issues and events most media ignore,” (Statement of Principles, 2.3).

In “Locking the doors of the Knesset,” (Commentary, March 6) the indignation at restricted “civic and economic participation” for Palestinians was reinforced by the image of an (oppressed) hand turned away from a double-locked door. The Palestinians have it more than hard – they have no way out; they are “locked-in.”

This reality of human hardship is what Daily authors, and thus artists, have tended to see as the crux of the Palestinian crisis, more than the letter of the laws written for the Palestinians (though these are important in their own right.) While Daily art comprises diverse media, political articles often feature illustrations or collage, which allow for a more imaginative, symbolic depiction of “real” conflicts.

In some sense it makes the conflicts less real. In another, it makes them more meaningful. Either way, it is advantageous for The Daily’s political artists, since they must communicate with their artwork the same entangled conflicts (racism, sexism, heteronormativity) and the same forward-looking, often distant ideals (for example, equality) that authors articulate in their writings.

An editorial “abstention” (March 4) got us thinking about the use of the word “apartheid” in the context of Palestinian affairs, and whether this word might be misplaced.

The unfolding debate on Palestine and mixed reactions to The Daily’s coverage of the frenzied and surprisingly catty SSMU elections have led to questions about the limits to The Daily’s say in political and moral issues.

In the first place, The Daily should not have one single opinion on any subject. The Daily is available for students to introduce events and issues – in news, culture, and science – to the student body.

It is then the paper’s responsibility to dig deeper into the issues. The Daily invites authors and readers to comment on the issues introduced in the moral context of the Statement of Principles, which is to say with an eye to power relations, but also from their own perspective.

The year has seen sensational stories where it has been easy to make a moral pronouncement. Perhaps it’s been a bad couple of years for humankind. But if The Daily serves us well, we also know the folly of this kind of declaration in light of the smallness, the essentially a-global nature, of our lives at McGill.

In this world, who are we anyway? As some seek again to ban a pro-life group in Canada (“Are we complicit in marginalization?,” March 18), in Turkey, trips abroad for artificial insemination (already illegal in the country) are criminalized. As our drugs issue goes to print with new approaches to addiction and drug medication (“Addicts helping addicts,” March 15), five million Russians are hooked, a number that threatens to grow as the drug war recedes from Afghanistan to splash more on Mexico. While a woman fights for the right to wear the niqab in French classes in Quebec (“Muslim women don’t need saving from themselves,” March 18), it is forced on millions of women elsewhere, who will probably never go to school. And Israel – maddeningly, inexplicably – continues to encroach on Palestine.

Perhaps the reality will be that we cannot really dictate our morality to people who are a world away from us and our way of life. What would we do in a world like that?

Mike Prebil writes in this space every other week. Send him your thoughts post-haste – the semester’s wrapping up soon: public.editor@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The politics of imagery appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“One of the perceived dangers of the Internet is that we cannot classify and stereotype the ‘dangerous’ and marked bodies of those who are raced, classed, or gendered as deviant or criminals,” writes Julie Alsop. The article specifically addresses sex work on the Internet. A promising commercial domain, potentially much safer than street-walking, the web nonetheless facilitates sexual harassment and child pornography, among other things, and so presents a slew of new problems to vulnerable communities.

These crimes could be legitimately called “deviant,” since for you, me, and most everyone we know, they are morally unacceptable – completely contrary to “normative” behaviour. Because of the possibility of these abhorrent (though, the author notes, age-old) crimes, the net demands regulation of some sort. In establishing these governing rules, however, the authorities effect the simultaneous imposition – the “remapping” – of “hegemonic structures” onto the new realm. Prostitution and queer sexuality – in “virtual space” as well as in real life – thus represent areas of struggle for Daily authors, against patriarchal control of the body on the one hand and heteronormativity on the other.

The Daily sees these struggles as products of an uneven distribution of power, and, affirming the “inherently political” character of all events in its Statement of Principles (SoP), resolves to “depict and analyze power relations accurately in it coverage.” Thus the Statement guides Daily authors with regard to what they choose to write about, but it does not advise authors on how they should represent a perceived conflict or oppressor. Since a topic’s “marginality” is the only criterion for judging an article according to the SoP, an article’s adherence to the SoP does not guarantee its accurate, constructive representation of a given conflict, which to me is a more significant indicator of an article’s “success.”

We don’t always have to be nice. The type of writing mandated by the SoP is not strictly neutral, and so authors are right to quickly implicate parties responsible for what they (the authors) see as abuses of social and economic power. We should, however, be aware of the weight of the language with which we frame our arguments. Misrepresentation of the “other side” of a debate spells the end of anything like a diplomatic solution to practical problems, as evidenced, I’d say, everywhere from the Copenhagen climate summit of last December, where people argued themselves into dangerous inaction, to the current health care reform stalemate in the U.S., and even to SSMU’s Choose Life debate.

“We need to stop militarizing our minds and words,” writes “Louis” in the comment section of “It isn’t apartheid” (Editorial, March 3), quoting Daily columnist Sana Saeed. Again, we don’t have to pull punches (or nut-kicks, I guess), but we should hesitate to use the paper to declare ideological war on anything – even obvious “evils” like patriarchy or heteronormativity.

In a world-class twist of Daily theatrics this week, conservative scapegoat Ricky Kreitner appealed to The Daily’s need for a “consistent moral compass” in a web comment posted to “The Daily’s silence on Iran” (Commentary, February 18).

While this will probably just give most Daily readers another reason to suspect him one of those conservative conspiracies (he’s already been called an “Israelophile”), it raises the important question of why morality is stereotypically conservative in the first place, and if morality itself is perhaps not such a bad thing. The Daily’s preferential coverage of Gaza over Iran inspired Kreitner’s article in protest, but since the ongoing human suffering at the hands of the Israeli authorities is a longstanding moral concern of the paper, it seems The Daily’s choice was not really inconsistent.

Kreitner is right though that coverage of Gaza would be enhanced by better coverage of Iran and the rest of the Middle East, an arguably more “mainstream” topic. Richer, larger, or more notorious countries – China and Japan, Pakistan and India, Iraq and Afghanistan, Germany and France, the U.S. and the U.K. – are more common sights in the Globe and Mail, but this should not be taken to mean that these places are not also home to “communities marginalized on the basis of the criteria mentioned in section 2.2.”

The post The Statement of Principles examined appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Though Li’l Hyde Parks have been somewhat redeemed by a memorable statement on Choose Life’s resurrection (“Stay classy, pro-choice crowd,” Commentary, February 4), they might be a wrong turn for The Daily’s current-events journalism.

They have been confrontational and heavy on ideology – roughly equivalent to full-size Hyde Parks. Samantha Burton’s ordeal was recounted angrily and succeeded in inspiring anger at Americans, represented by Floridians, who treat women not as “a human being but a shell around a fetus.” The next li’l guy briefly mentioned the Supreme Court decision on campaign funding before proclaiming the U.S. “a country where the Congress is already composed of plutocrats who by and large rose to power on huge piles of cash.” (“Three big losses,” Commentary, January 28).

“True enough,” we say – after that, there isn’t much to say. So the bigger problem with this genre is that for as much discussion as the articles should raise, there won’t be any, because you just don’t argue “for” a pregnant woman being confined to bed rest, a Supreme Court order to let politicians have more money from corporations, or Howard Zinn dying. There are issues here, buried inside, but stating your belief and some bad news to back it up will not get at them.

Money has been a hot topic. The first line of the piece on the Supreme Court ruling proclaimed: “Corporations are not people and money is not speech,” which is nice and easy to remember. But in a very real sense, corporations are some of our parents. Because of my parents’ jobs, I’m at McGill, writing about this stuff – money is talking in The Daily right now.

If we’re going to take a stab at money, we had better do with a realistic understanding of its place in our other goals. Daily authors have demanded money for education, arts, health, and the environment, among other things, and these will not pay for themselves without the help of a global economy. “Montreal hosts Haiti aid talks” (News, January 28) quoted sources criticizing U.S. involvement while also quoting sources that called for more aid dollars, and so showed a situation where money, with all its unseemly entanglements, is indispensible – a natural disaster.

The past fortnight’s additions to The Daily’s sex oeuvre have been uninspired. Moderate sexual novelty, which drove us to read on in spite of the truly horrifying illustration that accompanied “Make the next decade sexier” (Mind and Body, January 20), no longer suffices to float a Daily article.

This is probably for the better. The more risqué articles, like the call to go kinky, seemed out-of-touch at places. People have been doing kinky stuff since the dawn of time, or at least since the sixties, and the authors’ depictions of “kink” as appertaining to a particular category of people was entirely counterproductive to the article’s ostensibly missionary – haha – aim. The Daily excels at making simple things more complicated and obscure, but this strategy has proven itself incompatible with sex-help writing.

Other articles have tended to make simple things out of complicated issues. “Binary is for Computers” criticized a Los Angeles Times article for mentioning the gory details of gender reassignment surgery (“Mind your own business,” Commentary, February 1) with the author expressing their personal exasperation with frequent questions about transsexual sex and identity. At one point the author reports: “Our society cannot conceive of a man being pregnant.”

Perhaps it cannot – until recently, men did not have babies. Until recently, a penis could not be created out of a thigh. Some people are revolted by these ideas; other people can get over them. But if we are truly walking into a brave new world beyond gender, then everybody will be curious, and according to us, everybody should be. If activist authors don’t deign to address the mainstream concerns related to their theories, or are tight-lipped about their details, then they will be assured the public’s disinterest (or otherwise its antagonism) when it comes time to put their ideas into action.

Privacy is another issue entirely, and it’s big, very personal kind of like “freedom of expression.” The two are not dissimilar – Western worries about China’s Google situation, for example, are spurred by concern for both. There have been smart articles dealing with each but these have been drowned out by a mass of lesser attempts. Longer columns are not always better, but even the most perfectly-written 300-word letter “on the nature of free speech” will be necessarily full of platitudes and vagaries – we have all the time in the world (two and a half months) to give each issue its due, and we should make full use of it.

Mike Prebil is The Daily’s public editor. He lives and breathes reader-response. Send him your thoughts: publiceditor@mcgilldaily.com.

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, the original text of this article read ‘“Montreal hosts Haiti aid talks” (News, January 28) criticized U.S. involvement while also quoting sources that called for more aid dollars.’ It now reads: ‘”Montreal hosts Haiti aid talks” quoted sources criticizing U.S. involvement.”

The post Money and sex appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In that column I suggested that the cattiness of Daily authors resulted from a sense of obligation that the paper’s lofty ideological goals seem likely to instill in them. Our interest in those three topics also stems from our concern with the school’s politics and reputation, though I think we would deny this if so “accused.” But, in News and Commentary articles on each of the three stories, there were admonitions from all sides to do the right thing for the University’s sake.

The Engineering Frosh uproar ended by making feminism obscure and aggressive, without producing a full report on, for example, the effect of language in the formation of stereotypes. A few murmurs on the ripe issue of student expatriates were all that followed the ridiculing of the instigating author in the IDS internships thing. Articles about Choose Life and its demise didn’t change anybody’s mind about abortion, and took on the free speech issue too gingerly. By now the three stories have slunk away; luckily, the “University We Want” (November 30) issue is just young enough to save it from oblivion.

Bah, “we.” Whoever “we” are, we are for a lot of things (equity, sustainability, integrity, democracy, minimal tuition, unions) and against a lot of things (multiculturalism, dirty money, worrying workers, library disorganization.) Still, few of the issue’s articles spoke to how we get from what we have to what we want, which is all the more important since whatever we want to do at McGill we probably want to do with the world.

The abovementioned web comment goes on to lament that The Daily’s global pieces and features (e.g., social justice at South American mines), can be difficult for readers to relate to, and concludes that it will be hard to achieve the paper’s global-scale aspirations with so apathetic a student body. The charge of “apathy” has been an ineffectual and insipid criticism of McGill students and The Daily, though it should not be discounted completely. It’s clear that this criticism – that other people can’t accomplish what we think up, and that if they could we’d be doing a lot better things – needs a student author’s fuller articulation.

And we’ve seen that authors can provide that. “White guilt fantasy,” as purportedly evidenced in James Cameron’s Avatar (“The modern minstrel show,” Culture, January 20), made for a good point and would make a great name for a smoothie, but it didn’t hold up as an article. Jake Sully might have been a white guy because most American guys are white guys, or because of a nationwide web of commercialized white guilt.

Most regrettably, there is probably an element of truth to the latter, but by going all-in for the white-man-behind-the-curtain theory, the article overshot the crucial and undeniably marginal issue of white feelings about the colonial legacy. Mass culture is always relevant and should be read into. But pointing out awful things about mass culture is easy, and so to say something serious and insightful about the issue means the discussion needs to go deeper than stating a possible instance of a certain racial theory. Do white people – not James Cameron – feel guilty for the world? Ideally this should be done in Commentary, since Culture itself has tended to turn out as commentary.

Though it can also suffer from an excess of politics, News has been strong. Comments about web articles as well as blog reports from the COP15 Conference kept The Daily’s web site lively over break. The December 14 errata addressed reader comments about the presentation of facts in news articles; The Daily’s sources will be a topic of next week’s column. In the meantime authors should stop offering “history lessons” in articles, because that is an obnoxious thing to write. And “Fuck This!,” which you can thank for making you even less comfortable about doing anything anywhere on campus, needs to either get really funny or get the hell out.

The Daily looks to be on a sex track, and, with breaking news on lubrication last Thursday, seems comfortable there. I hope we can look forward to more articles developing on The Daily’s new tack, fan mail from the newly sexually enlightened, and objections from anyone who worries The Daily’s gotten too horny. I’d say speak now or forever hold your peace.

Mike Prebil is The Daily’s public editor. He feeds off your comments: public.editor@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The public editor returns appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Daily’s four-step editing process, as it relates to an article’s content, deserves treatment at greater length in a future column. The problem at hand lies in grammatical editing, and is entirely sympathetic: editors strive to maximize clarity while retaining the author’s original content and tone, and cannot always succeed at both. My first column, however, evinces the consequences of editorial overzealousness, and the importance of distinguishing between grammatical error and stylistic preference. Editors: what it is at stake here is the journalistic diversity of The Daily. If articles are edited to suit the stylistic preferences of the 18 members of the editorial staff (four at a time,) then we will end up with a paper filled with pieces that sound like you but have our names on them.

I would also like to fill in an omission made by one of the editors: what read “This year I have read the paper for the topics that stir my interest” should have read “I, like you, have read for the topics that stir my interest.” That I hope my column will be relatable to The Daily’s readers is, for me and for the column, a hugely important affirmation, which the editor deleted along with those three small words.

Mike Prebil
Daily public editor
U2 History

The post Oh, how meta appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This year I have read the paper for the topics that stir my interest. At their best, Daily writers have published work that is well-researched and enlightening. At their worst, their work has been incoherent, and their journalistic discussions have collapsed into din.

We might say of this that we are true to ourselves as students – that we say what we feel we must, as often and for as long as we feel we must. We might say that we just say what we want to – loudly. The past months saw memorable articles published at an astonishing rate; some developed into discussions that spanned several issues – sexism at Frosh, IDS internships, and the Choose Life controversy all occupied the spotlight for some time. These three big topics make up a small fraction of The Daily’s content, but this year they have captivated us, perhaps because they show us what The Daily really is: students, real students, writing. The action is live and it is raw.

The Daily’s role at McGill and its service as a representative of student concerns will be a constant theme in this column, which I hope you will weigh in on throughout the year. The paper’s Statement of Principles (SoP), which is available at mcgilldaily.com/SoP, prescribes The Daily’s journalistic focus and is thus an important element of this discussion. “The staff of The Daily recognizes that all events and issues are inherently political, involving relations of social and economic power,” one section of the SoP reads. Though we may not agree on the nature of these power relations, we can agree that in writing our newspaper with an eye on them, we involve ourselves from afar in real events and issues. Thus involved, we almost always choose a side, and so in writing we commit a political act. This, as they say, is big.

In a letter that appeared on October 1, I responded to an article on Queer McGill’s then-upcoming queering operations (“Queering Montreal,” Commentary, September 24). I did not take issue with the ideology that motivated the action, but with the language that was used to justify it. In the same way, the newspaper’s style – its look and its language – deserves our attention as much as the stories and opinions published. Part of each column will be dedicated to stylistic comments and advice for Daily contributors.

Artist submissions, especially illustrations, have been numerous this year and the visual aspect of the paper has been frankly excellent. Still, we must scrutinize The Daily’s photographs, illustrations, and artwork in the same way as we do the written word. For now I would say that we do not need to shy away from drawing anything: a trio of obese, cigar-smoking Mafiosi gorging on poutine stuck with dollars and Quebec flags; a stone-faced army medic holding a stethoscope to an assault rifle; a man speaking into a microphone that is an acorn. If we can say it to ourselves aloud and not think our journalistic integrity is thereby damaged.

Hopefully The Daily will remind us later this year of the many other good things that could have been said about the paper up to this point – for now these are old news.

Mike Prebil is The Daily’s public editor. He’ll be writing every other week next semester. In the meantime, let him know how you feel: public.editor@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Say hello to your new public editor appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I could not help but imagine myself, with a cohort of my chalkie friends, “recontextualizing” Club Choices, 1815 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, in a guerrilla whiting operation. What sort of reaction would we receive? In fists or in words, it would be angry. The response to a queer group storming a “hetero-bar” would be quite similar, I think. In either case, social differences would aggravate the ensuing situation.

But “power dynamics and oppressions” do not change the violence inherent to the action. The act of storming a space, however “political,” is aggressive. Thus it is not surprising that Wheeler’s call to action was couched in the language of war. What is jarring is the imprecision and brutality evident in his justification of this “war,” coldly and uncompromisingly divided into the side of the “deviants” and the side of the “moral masses,” the faceless, voiceless, unequivocally evil “them.” I hope that Queer McGill’s participants were able to explain the “need to keep challenging bars, restaurants, and venues” to the targeted masses of moral patrons, because Wheeler did not.

“Who are these people? And why are they bothering me at a bar?” Consider yourself interrupted over a drink, on a date, during a dance, wherever, by the surprise recontextualization of your surroundings. Your feelings on power dynamics, your complicity with oppressions, or whatever, would not be the primary source of your irritation. We must consider the genderless, raceless, sexless, apolitical significance of our ideological aggression, whatever its end purpose. There may be a “better way to challenge them than by bringing in a host of queers for a pervy party!”

Mike Prebil
U2 History

The post Sit-ins are so last century appeared first on The McGill Daily.