New Media

The Greg Felton anti-Semitic literary travesty at Vancouver Public Library took place tonight. Owing to professional commitments, I was unable to attend. Hopefully, someone else was able to come and smack the author over the head with a bag full of intellectual heft flavored by the side of good. Vancouverific true blue blog Covenant Zone has the most complete commentary on the issue (hopefully with a writeup on the event in question soon to follow), much in line with my own views:

“We cannot entirely answer the real question that the library’s invitation of an “anti-Zionist” to highlight “Freedom to Read Week” poses unless we attempt to explain how professional librarians could be enticed into thinking that Felton’s claims of a Jewish (or “Zionist”) conspiracy to run America and its foreign policy, to create al Qaeda (and 9/11) as America’s whipping boy, had any kind of merit.”

Those librarians have got a looooooooooot of explaining to do.

UPDATE: Covenant Zone has published a comprehensive report on the riotous event at the library. A quick note: some of it seems to be written verbatim from notes recording Felton’s words verbatim without a qualifier, so don’t be confused when the author of the blog seems to be agreeing with Felton’s conspiracy theories. He ain’t.

I met the most important Matt in the world today at Vancouver’s super-cool blogger conference, Northern Voice. Matthew Mullenweg is the number one Matt on the planet, according to Google, thanks to his work as founding developer of the WordPress blogging platform. For those who happen to like the visual layout and functionality of this blog, you can thank Matt and his friends.

To me, he is the blogging equivalent of Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the first working typewriter (I was tempted to make the comparison to Johannes Gutenberg (the inventor of movable-type printing in Europe), but let’s face it, there were many blogging platforms before WordPress ever came along).

To find out more about this guy, just follow these directions which are the only information to be found on his business card:

1. Go to google.com
2. Type in “Matt”
3. Press “I’m feeling lucky”

That’s one cool business card. By the way, this guy is Matt’s number-one competition for top Matt-spot on Google.

Oh, didn’t you know that Al Queda doesn’t really exist, the White House organized 9/11 and the Jews are behind the BIG CONSPIRACY?

Well, you would know it if you read and believed what you read in former Vancouver Courier columnist/Arab webzine writer/neo-Nazi website commentator Greg Felton’s book. At least, you would “know” that Greg Felton thinks these things, even if most educated people would dismiss them as the hateful ravings of a lunatic. When asked why the Vancouver Public Library’s people chose Felton to host a Freedom to Read event happening on Monday at VPL, the Library’s rationale seemed to pretty much boil down to: “well, it’s not hate speech”. Yet, as BC author and journalist Terry Glavin wrote in the Vancouver Sun, what exactly is the word for “Felton’s thesis, which is that a Zionist ‘junta’ was at work on Sept. 11, 2001, and that al-Qaida is a mere concoction in a secret plan to subvert the American Constitution, demonize Muslims and commit mass murder?”

This event isn’t about intellectual freedom; indeed, this incident seems to demonstrate that Canada is a country where the “freedom to read” is already so ingrained that the only books that don’t get read are the ones that don’t deserve it. When an author fills up a book with hateful lies, the vast majority of the population studiously ignores it.

That Felton’s book hasn’t been reviewed by mainstream media and no libraries in Canada stock it isn’t an indication of censorship; it’s really just that Canadians are too smart to waste their time with rotten books.

This story is well-covered by the dauntless Terry Glavin here, with additional erudite commentary by Covenant Zone.

Apparently, it has taken time out of Vancouver marketing maven and blogger extraordinaire Jeremy Lim‘s social agenda – although, to judge by the title of his blog, marketing had already ruined his life prior to the advent of Facebook.

As a butterfly on the periphery of Vancouver’s tech/marketing/blogging/whatever scene, I’ve definitely heard my share of anecdotes about whether or not social media applications are just taking up too much time to be worth it. As an addiction, I’d say Facebook hit me pretty hard at first, but in time, I’ve definitely gotten control over it. That may have something to do with the fact that I NEVER CLICK ON ANY FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS THAT I THINK WILL WASTE TIME, like Werewolves versus Vampires (who the hell cares that you’ve infected 200 chumps? What, do you actually get to boss them around in a hypnotic state, or what? If so, then I really do need to start infecting chumps…). This ensures I only get a quality Facebooking every time without the distracting (and annoying extras).

Also, this ensures people don’t post pornographic images on my Facebook site, which is always a good thing. Some things really ought to remain between a man and his monitor.

Castro steps down as President of Cuba! Now, he is to be replaced by… Castro.

Who knew? Cubans had a revolution to replace a vile dictatorship with another dictatorship that has evolved into… a vile monarchy. Wasn’t that stage of political development supposed to take place centuries BEFORE the arrival of communism?

Ah, well. The people at Stopwar.ca must be happy. As they might say, hands off the Latin American kings! Democrats, go put a sock in it!