My most recent weekly column at GuildMag is now online. Lots of footage from last weekend’s beta event, plus some new speculation about a release date announcement.
June 15, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Anthem thoughts by Colby Cosh
In the opening ceremonies of the England vs Sweden match, Colby muses on the opposing national anthems:
Swedish national anthem is "Kill all bastards who aren't us"-themed like everyone else's, yeah? No verses about preventing STDs or anything.
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) June 15, 2012
Funnily enough, what passes for England's anthem is one of the LEAST kill-all-bastardsy out there. "Our Queen is nice! We like her a lot!"
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) June 15, 2012
And Andrew Coyne finds an ominous atmosphere:
https://twitter.com/acoyne/statuses/213707315503841281
The horrific environmental scourge of the plastic bag
Terence Corcoran on Toronto City Council’s most recent brainfart — banning plastic bags — and the actual environmental impact of same:
Meantime, most Canadians, through the media, would be relying on green activists and demagogic politicians who have been promoting plastic bags as a local and national environmental scourge for more than a decade. There’s not enough space here to review the mindset of politicians, including the inhabitants of Toronto city council, who last week voted 27-17 to ban plastic bags by 2013. Most of the bylaw’s backers would be getting their information from professionals, including Dr. Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense.
[. . .]
Canadians who answer polls should know that Mr. Smith holds a PhD in green bull. He said Canadians know at a “gut level” that plastic bags are a “not terribly complicated environmental issue.” Well, here are three complications:
Litter The last city of Toronto audit of litter across the city, in 2006, found six plastic bags out of 4,341 items. That’s 0.14% by item. By weight, the percentage would be less.
Waste The 450 million plastic bags Mr. Smith mentions is a 2008 number. The city says the current number of bags is now estimated at about 215 million (the science of calculating this is something else). But even the 450 million-bag total, at about six grams per bag, works out to 2,600 tonnes. As a percentage of the city’s estimated 800,000 tonnes of waste, plastic bags would account for 0.3%. If all plastic bags were eliminated — an impossibility given their necessity as garbage-bin liners and other uses — Toronto’s waste stream would be essentially unchanged. Not a penny will be saved, and costs would likely go up under complications brought on by the ban.
Environment Numerous comprehensive studies by people who are as green or greener than Mr. Smith suggest plastic bags are better than the alternatives — whether paper or cloth. Plastic is less polluting and toxic than paper and cotton, according to a 2011 U.K. Environment Agency report. As for global warming, a cloth bag would have to be reused 327 times, and a paper bag nine times, to match the low warming impact of a high-density polyethylene bag that’s reused as a garbage-bin liner.
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Perhaps “Dad” is not superfluous after all
In the National Post, Misty Harris reports that — contrary to certain assertions from the gender war front — fathers actually do have a positive role to play in the lives of their children:
Though the prevailing Father’s Day question is what to get Dad, a new study suggests the more pressing issue is what dads can give in return.
In a long-term analysis of 36 international studies of nearly 11,000 parents and children, researchers have found that a father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child’s development as that of a mother, while perceived rejection creates a larger ripple on personality than any other type of experience.
The power of paternal rejection or acceptance is especially strong in cases where the father is seen by his child as having heightened prestige in the family, as this tends to boost his influence.
“In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent an effect on personality as does the experience of rejection — especially by parents in childhood,” says co-author Ronald Rohner, whose study appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.
My relationship with my father was less than positive, and I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it by calling it “rejection”. However, he did provide me with a useful parenting template: I could usually figure out what to do as a parent by remembering what my own father did … then not doing that.
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The Canadian War Museum’s 1812 exhibit
Maclean’s finds the Canadian War Museum’s War of 1812 exhibit lacking in the triumphal chest-beating one might expect:
“If you’re a Canadian, the Americans invaded, and we pushed them back, and we evolved into an independent country. So as far as we’re concerned, it’s hardly worth saying that Canada won,” says exhibition curator Peter MacLeod, the museum’s pre-Confederation historian. “But the Americans have their own take on it. They went to war with the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world. And they fought them to a draw. They forced them to respect American independence and American sovereignty. So as far as the Americans are concerned, it’s just as obvious that they won.”
To the British, says MacLeod, the conflict in North America was a sideshow to the more important war against Napoleon in Europe. They invested the weapons and men they could spare, and the Royal Navy blockaded American ports, but defending Canada was of secondary importance.
For Native Americans, it was an existential fight. “Here is a chance presented to us,” the Shawnee leader Tecumseh said, “a chance such as will never occur again, for us Indians of North America to form ourselves into a great combination and cast our lot with the British in this war.”
Tecumseh’s coalition of Native American tribes believed that by aligning themselves with the British, they might stop American expansionism. “This is the last war where they have a serious chance to roll back the American frontier,” says MacLeod. “And it’s the last war where they have a European ally on their side. After this they’re facing the United States on their own, and the Americans basically roll straight to the Pacific.”
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