News, Events & Comments

Once a techy, always a techy... Though Facebook and its founders were key transformers of online space from a technically gated one into populist playground, with the “metaverse” their original will to “dominate” is inevitably migrating from real worlds so limiting for many including the poor, disabled, and, in the current case of the Ukraine, ethno-culturally  victimized, to a meta (above and beyond) type science fiction realm. The above and beyond TorontotheBetter seeks is not primarily a technological  one but a world of sufficiency for all, without hunger or prejudice. In other words the Meta of Better, not just humanly empty outer space. Up there in the Meta, there is no sound or sight or taste, Or human society. It is still and silent up there, despite the loud advertising that is coming. Maybe r=there will be answers out there in the Meta ether, but there should be a clear path from Meta to Better as we continue our long journey.

At this time of international danger precipitated by Russia's incursion into Ukraine, the protest of the Polish football association and star player Robert Lewandowski in refusing to play European championship games with Russia  is a model for sports participants everywhere. TorontotheBetter hopes that such actions will finally consign to the garbage dump of history the absurd belief that sports and politics can, or should, be separate. All life, including sport, is political. If nothing else emerges from this momentous time, encouragement to stand up for non-violence and world peace is the most important and, hopefully, the most long lasting. There are more important things than sports but at certain moments like the present sports can, and must, be important as rallying tools; Poland's representatives are showing us how.     

                                                                         

The legalization of choosing your own time of medically assisted death [MAID] was a welcome liberation for those suffering from intolerable pain, and so was, at its passage into law in 2016, a better way of dying for many in Canada. Truckers have a valid reason for their current protest when the vaccination requirement is not applied to all workers, as is currently the case in Canada.  The difficulty with the trucker protest against mandatory COVID-19  vaccination is not that it violates truckers’ “freedom” to refuse vaccination in contrast to the vast majority of truckers who had already exercised their freedom to get vaccinated before the requirement, but that, in pursuit of their freedom, their unvaccinated  state, heavily correlated, as it is, with COVID19 infection and mortality, endangers others. If the exercise of your freedom endangers others’ freedoms then such freedom is not merely compromised it is potentially lethal to those who choose otherwise, and so is unfair. But, for all that, truckers are validly aggrieved to be selected for imposition when other employment categories are not. Notwithstanding the ambiguous class status of many trucker owner-occupiers, their grievance strikes a chord with many because of the apparent class basis of differential vaccination mandates. TorontotheBetter’s suggestion: require vaccination for all workers or remove the trucker specific regulation.