via my favourite blog, Racialicious: A Chinese blogger has been beaten to death over his filming of city administration officials clashing with citizen protesters. I try to imagine Montreal city administrators acting as paid thugs, beating anyone that won't follow rules, or those that try to expose their violence, but I can't. I can't understand exactly why things like that don't generally happen here, while in China this particular kind of thing barely makes the news anymore (except when someone dies, I guess, and soon maybe that will mean nothing.). What do we have that they do not? Are the people just so unruly that violence is the only thing they understand? Are the rulers just that corrupt? Are there so many people that it is hard to care about any of them? And couldn't they have stopped themselves from killing the poor guy? Wouldn't destroying his cell phone have been enough?

A father has allegedly thrown his four children off a bridge after a fight with his wife. What kills me is...well the obvious. But even more, good ol' CNN has this link to video that I won't watch for various reasons on that page that says, "watch the mother grieve". Watch the mother grieve?? Like it's some show for entertainment! Two of this 23-year-old woman's kids are dead and the 2 others are likely to be presumed dead soon. Come watch this woman life fall apart! Fucking scum.

Critiquing Gloria Steinem:

The roots of racism and sexism are the same -- the desire to maintain power and privilege for some at the expense of everyone else . Our only hope of addressing EITHER racism or sexism is to address them BOTH together. Rooting racism AND sexism from every facet of our social, economic and political institutions and practices to create a better America is far more worthwhile than debating which form of oppression is faring worse.

Word. What a hornet's nest of race and gender the US is. I wish I could get more information about Canada, though. I'd start up a Racialicious Canada blog if I knew the right things, people and where to start. So far, race has never been an issue as far as federal elections go AFAIK.

Diversity and affirmative action—two things that many people are just sick of hearing about—could have a real economic reason to exist. Scott Page suggests that diversity means increased productivity because people with different backgrounds come up with different kinds of solutions to problems. Teams of diverse people get stuck in different places, and in each of these places, there are people to help overcome the problem. Teams of people with the same background all tend to get stuck in fewer places, with a smaller chance of solving the problem. Diversity in this article refers to what you bring to the table in terms of how you are productive, but Page suggests that culture, ethnicity, gender and education are the main sources of what people bring to the table.

There is a reason that this type of thing does not happen here, but, according to the media, happens in Africa with astonishing regularity. But I don't know what that reason is. Do you?