wander

I like the earnestness of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and performed by Band Aid support victims of the 1984-1985 Ethiopian famine. It's an important song, not only musically but because of its role in the emergent global noosphere: a spontaneously assembled and performed song, it was released globally and became a huge hit because its listeners wanted to help people in a distant country of which they knew little.



Is it therefore wrong to criticize it? Hardly; the practice of charity deserves as much attention, and as much critical attention, as any other practice.

The song title might have made for a rousing chorus, but it was nonsensical. Of course the Ethiopians knew it was Christmas. Ethiopia has been a Christian country for centuries, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (an Oriental Orthodox Church associated quite closely with the Christianities of the Copts and the Eritreans) dating to the 4th century, long before Britain, Germany, or Russia were brought into the fold, never mind the rest of the planet. Yes, the Ethiopian calendar marks Christmas as coming on the 7th of January, but I don't think that absolves the songwriters. As for the line "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime," it's worth noting that Ethiopia's climate is such that, even in the most mountainous areas of the relatively temperate Ethiopian plateau, snow is a rare occurrence. Charity's certain a good virtue, but a charity that doesn't seem to take notice of the particulars of the people it seeks to help has issues.

Charity misunderstanding its objects is one thing; charity misunderstanding the causes of the objects' suffering is another.Amartya Sen's suggestion, drawn from his studies of the 1943 Bengal famine, that famines are products of non-democratic regimes which lack the ability and/or interest to intervene in cases of food markets' failure, is controversial in many instances (see here for a Sen-supporting paper, see here for a more critical response). Sen's theory is perfectly applicable to the 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia, triggered by climate issues but immensely exacerbated by the Derg's governance, as its counterinsurgency campaigns destabilized the agrarian economy that was already being mismanaged by the Derg's restrictions on peasant mobility and autonomy that culminated in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions weren't dying and suffering for no particular reason to do with humankind; millions were dying and suffering because of specific decisions being made by specific people. The song, and, it seems, the contemporary press reaction to the famine, didn't touch on this.

I'm being a bit hard on this song, I know. Despite not touching on the realities of the people suffering and the causes of their suffering, it is a good song, it is a song that highlighted an egregious case of mass human suffering, and it is a song that by its reception demonstrates the emerging noosphere, or at least the emergence of some sort of concern for the fate of even people far over the horizon. It's just that the song is but a first step on the path towards true global community, a reaction to suffering without going much deeper. This isn't as good, but baby steps. We have to start somewhere, don't we?

I'm getting duelling Christmas carols on the piano, one from the apartment above me to the left, one from the apartment directly above me. Obviously, neither can hear the other, so it's not like they're in sync or playing the same song or anything.

Now all we need is for the guy downstairs to start playing his bass and we'll be all set.

Living in the Toronto neighbourhoods I've lived in, with their strong Latin Roman Catholic traditions, I've gotten to appreciate the sort of plastic religious statuary that you see in the above picture. It's simple, but it's an earnest expression of what the purchasers and displayers believe. I respect that.

Wrapping presents, of course. What else would one do on Christmas morning? *grin*

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. To those who don't, Merry Warrenmas. (It's Warren's birthday today, and that's something we can *all* celebrate!)

Clear blue skies made the still-white snow brilliant among the tall, thin trees. The trees are silvered-brown, with a glow of red to them, elegant and towering. They feel so much taller than the forest I live near in England, so much narrower and flimsy than the strong, over-arching oaks of Des Moines. I associate them strongly with Connecticut; the woodland perched among the bluffs and excavated cut-throughs of the highways here.

We left D.C. this morning in darkness. Dawn rose, pink and gold, over Maryland, and by Delaware, it shone sharp and clear. I spent New Jersey thinking about the geography of friendship, all the people I know temporary or long-term staying along my route, unvisitable in the rapid tour which is this trip. The air was so clear over the Hudson that we could see New York City crisply backlit off in the far distance from the Tappan Zee bridge.

In Connecticut, sun-warmed water dripped slowly from tall, thin trees, and the air smelled fresh and clean from the light breeze over snow.

Yesterday, we perched up in the seats above the US Senate. Rows upon rows of wooden desks, like magnificient school desks, stood empty. There were at most six senators present - not that we could see them all from our vantage point. Not far below us, we could watch over an editor's shoulder, seeing the out-of-sight senators speak.

Of course much of government is largely conducted in empty rooms, but I can't remember thinking of it that way before. These senators weren't orating to us, up in the balcony, or even very much to each other. Their audience was whoever happened to flip through channels and pause on C-Span for a moment. Their charts were reiterated from the day before. Their points were largely along the lines of, "As I said earlier..." or "As I was saying yesterday..." It wasn't debate. It was filling time by looking good.

Some of them might even sound good, but most were waffling on, deliberately filling time. I was grateful for McCain, who still had wit and a spark of life in him, despite the emptiness of the room's grandeur.

It began to seem like a pageant, each senator coming on when the script called for it, otherwise off in the wings, doing business, on vacation, not cluttering up the stage.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, Marc and I suddenly found ourselves this morning with an unexpected free day. So we did what any good-thinking couple would do with a whole lazy day stretched out ahead of them, we made pancakes. We used this recipe and added a tsp of vanilla (I love vanilla). We don't have a sifter, so we whisked it instead.

Final verdict: oh, so tasty. Definitely a keeper.

In fairness to my regular reader who are no doubt wondering "where's the monstrous calamity that usually accompanies Julie's adventures in cooking posts?", I say that Marc did all the actual pancake cooking. If it were me, there would no doubt have been a groan-inducing anecdote right around now. Wait for it. There's always next time.

This Techcrunch map breaks down the countries of the world by dominant social networking system. As the title suggests, Facebook is in the lead globally.

Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.

Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.

Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.

Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).

Interesting, if personally unsurprising. I see large and growing manga shelves wherever I go book shopping here in Toronto, too.

Young adults are a growing market in publishing: Walk into a bookstore in a European city on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and you can find teenagers crowded in front of a wall of the comic books – a sight nearly non-existent a few years ago.

On Duesseldorf's Immermannstrasse, an avenue lined with shops catering to the city's Japanese population, is a scene that could come straight from Harajuku, where Tokyo's youth congregate – except the butcher around the corner sells sausages.

German teenagers dressed as Japanese goth rock stars, with multicoloured hair and heavy eyeliner, mingle with Japanese schoolchildren in a bookstore on the street, giggling as they step into “purikura” photo booths that shoot instant snapshots that people decorate themselves and print as stickers.

“They have something special,” said Berenike Schmoldt, whose fascination with manga has turned the German teenager into a full-blown Japanophile at 17, during a Friday expedition with her friends. “I spend hours every week reading them.”

Already fluent in basic Japanese, she is making her fourth visit to Japan this month to soak up the culture, eat her favourite dish of ‘yakisoba' fried noodles, and read manga.

It's a scene replicated in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rome: local bookshops have expanded their manga sections and feature hundreds of French, Dutch and Italian titles. Often without the credit cards to shop online, these teenagers visit the stores as part of their social life.

“It is something that is much more than a fad,” said Paul Gravett, a publisher and expert on comics in Europe.

“The term ‘manga' is becoming a global word.”

Many thanks to Erin for pointing me to Jason Richard's parody in NOW Toronto of Chandler Levack's mystifying "Facebook suicide" article. "Hotmail suicide" is a serious thing.

My name is Jason Richards, and I am a Hotmail whore.

I love Hotmail like a crystal meth addict loves crystal meth (an analogy I am qualified to make, as a functional crystal meth addict who consumes crystal meth like it's Crystal Lite).

My ideal Saturday night consists of a little Santana featuring Rob Thomas on the stereo, a bag of crystal meth, a Hotmail window open on my laptop, and me, nude, clicking refresh in feverish anticipation of a hot new email. Mmm, oh yeah, that's good, Internet. Just like that, yeah. Unzip my compressed folder. Give me a 40 per cent discount on Cialis. Stick it in my inbox like you mean it.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not exactly foreign to the iSocial me-networking applications. I maintain blogs on livejournal, Blogger, Tumblr, Geocities, Flim-flam, and Glurb. I do an unofficial vlog for myspacemusic.co.uk and host weekly crags for dipdive.com. I occasionally glog about men's formalwear for myflog.vlorp, and have live-blarted on numerous occasions for paulblartmallcop.com.

But I always come back to Hotmail.

[. . .]

With all this thinking about me, I had the sudden, unquenchable urge to escape myself. I fled my salon, holding my petticoat and ran through the snow, outside to a frozen pond, where I stared into my reflection, searching my own face for an answer. Eventually, it came to me.

I was terrified but resolved. I would do something courageous, controversial, borderline blasphemous, unthinkable and extraordinary in this modern day and age – but also beautiful, revolutionary, and profoundly heroic: I – yes, me – would pull the trigger. I would delete my Hotmail account. Little did I know, that would be easier said than done. The powers that be at Hotmail do everything they can to get you to stay.

I've applied a LJ-cut to today's image because it's somewhat graphic, post-mortem wildlife, but I decided to post the photo here regardless because there is a strange sort of beauty to it. The cycle continues.

( Read more... )

I'm a bad person. Somehow, I broke Marc's coffee machine. I cleaned it with water and vinegar; well and good. Ran the first rinse through (just plain water, for goodness sake!) and when I went to switch off the machine, the toggle switch wouldn't work. It just sort of bounced back and forth instead of, y'know, toggling.

So now we're using the backup coffee machine that takes forever. (Yes, foolish people, of course we have a backup coffee machine!) Despite the apparent warning from God, we're cleaning this one too. A new coffee machine has suddenly been added to our shopping list.

On the other hand, the apartment is much cleaner.

Marc and I decided to set aside today for cleaning (much as it might shock my mother). We've been at it for a good two hours now, maybe three. I have just declared the living room finished, except for my desk with is another job entirely. I even moved the couches to clean behind them and everything, and I didn't even destroy the display case while I was at it. (It was a near thing.)

Marc's still working on the kitchen cupboards: taking everything out, washing, vacuuming. (Yes, vacuuming.) I don't think he's even gotten to the counters yet. I've got a good boyfriend.

Next is probably gonna be the hallways or maybe (gasp!) the bedroom. I'm officially taking a break. Whew!

The small eastern Ontario city of Cornwall has just seen the end of an exorbitantly expensive inquiry into claims of an organized pedophile ring there. Triggered when police officer Perry Dunlop learned of a sexual abuse scandal that the Roman Catholic Church had quietly settled in 1994, matters quickly spiraled into speculation that dozens of men were systematically abusing young men. Following a series of failed trials, an inquiry into the who affair began, and was already going badly by the time that Dunlop skipped the inquiry. The whole situation is a catastrophe.

It wasn't long before the original premise grew to shocking proportions: a ring or clan of pedophiles that reached into the city's highest corners -- priests, a bishop, a Crown attorney, lawyers, probation officers, possibly senior police officers.

Because so many powerful people were involved, went the theory, the original investigation was blocked, forcing Mr. Dunlop to circle around his own police force. He was the whistleblower extraordinaire, unafraid to put his career on the line to protect abused children.

[. . .]

Mr. Dunlop's role in the case, however well intended, has contributed to a breathtaking expenditure of public resources -- time and money -- not to mention the stain on an entire community.

And Mr. Dunlop doesn't want to talk about it?

Briefly, there were two Cornwall police investigations in 1993, an Ontario Provincial Police probe in 1994 and, finally, the launching of Project Truth in 1997. It spared nothing: The allegations of 69 complainants were investigated, leading to 672 interviews.

Four years later, the OPP were satisfied there was no pedophile ring in the city, but laid 115 charges against 15 individuals. There was but one conviction.

[. . .]

At least one of the witnesses -- an original complainant -- has testified he never saw evidence of a pedophile ring, contrary to an earlier written statement. Those named in the statement? Nah, never saw them. The statement itself? Didn't even read it, he testified.

He claimed he was pressured into making the statements by one Perry Dunlop. Nor was he the only witness to retract outlandish allegations.

"I did anything (Mr. Dunlop) told me to do," said one alleged victim.

Even though the inquiry has, 53 million dollars later, come to the conclusion that there wasn't a conspiracy, the idea will still remain active.

An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others' suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

"It's very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky," he said.

Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.

They're psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy "should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses," Peterson said.

"A good rule of thumb is: Don't presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation," he said.

"Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that."

While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.

By now, the majority of Cornwall has dismissed the allegation that once spread like wildfire there, but among a small group of people the theory will never die, said columnist Claude McIntosh with the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.

When historical allegations of sex abuse started surfacing in the 1990s people were certainly talking about the issue, he said. Then a group of townspeople started a website and posted names of people they named as pedophiles.

They also posted an affidavit from one man detailing the most sensational allegation, that ritual sex abuse was performed by men in robes with candles on weekend retreats. He would later recant that allegation at the inquiry.

This sounds a lot like the various panics over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s, triggered by moral panic related to concern over the breakdown of traditional mores, like the nuclear family or conventional religion. What happened in Cornwall seems to me the consequence of the moral crisis triggered by revelations of clerical abuse. Cornwall is not only a strongly Roman Catholic community, it's a community that has experienced significant economic stresses with high unemployment and low education levels and a relative lack of investment in public facilities. A Roman Catholic priest really did abuse a child; the Roman Catholic Church really did try to cover it up. Especially when life is already strained, it's not such a big stretch go from a trusted religious authority betraying the public interest in a specific fashion to any number of trusted authorities engaging in orchestrated horrors. Besides, as Peterson notes, conspiracies tend to be more coherent than the idea that bad things just happen in isolation for no particular reason, more comforting in a way since they offer a sense of predictability and thus an ability to control the conspirators through public action.

I also recommend Religioustolerance.org's analysis.

The Toronto Star has it.

he United Church of Canada and other Canadian churches are demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain why one of his cabinet ministers accused them of being anti-Semitic.

The United, Catholic and Anglican churches are part of KAIROS, an aid group that was shocked to hear Immigration Minister Jason Kenney say its funding was lifted as part of the Conservatives' effort to cut off anti-Semitic organizations.

"It's a horrible charge to make, and to do it with so little thought cheapens the reality of anti-Semitism in the world and diminishes the very careful attention that it deserves," said United Church spokesperson Bruce Gregersen. "We're quite disappointed in the government on this.

"The policies of KAIROS have all been approved by the collective board of KAIROS, so in a sense what Mr. Kenney is doing is accusing Canadian churches of being anti-Semitic and I think that's really unfortunate," Gregersen said in an interview.

Sam Carrière, director of communications for the Anglican Church of Canada, said the church supports a statement released Friday by KAIROS, which condemned Kenney's remarks as false and warned the Harper government against letting politics dominate Ottawa's foreign aid priorities.

Besides the United and Anglican churches, Toronto-based KAIROS's members include the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee – Canada.

Working with 21 partner organizations around the world, KAIROS sponsors projects promoting social and economic justice in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Canada's development community appeared stunned after Kenney, in a speech in Jerusalem, cited Ottawa's decision to end 35 years of funding for KAIROS as an example of the Conservatives' push to cut funding for anti-Semitic groups.

KAIROS was "defunded," Kenney said, because it took a leadership role in "the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign" against Israel.

"Minister Kenney's charge against KAIROS is false," the group said in its public response.

KAIROS has raised questions about Israeli government policies but rejected the idea of a national boycott against Israel two years ago, its executives pointed out.

"To label KAIROS's criticism of Israeli government actions as `anti-Semitic' silences dissent and honours no one," the statement said. "KAIROS has a clear position of support for the legitimate right of the Israeli people to a safe and secure state."

Like Canada, Australia, Argentina, or another states and/or regions, Israel is a country of mass immigration. How can't it be, when the whole point of Zionism was to bring millions of Jews to a territory thinly populated by tens of thousands who constituted only a small minority, and when only one Israel president has actually been born in Israel? Like these other countries of mass immigration, Israel has remnant native populations, survivors of state-building. Unlike all of these countries of mass immigration save South Africa, these natives not only retain a strong sense of their own identity but actually live by the millions in their homeland. This, of necessity, complicates Israeli life in much the same way as the African majority complicated apartheid-era South African life. (Much the same way. I'm not claiming an absolute identity, although the fact that both countries ban marriage across ethnoreligious groups says something.)

Israel's a state that actively pursues policies of ethnic discrimination on a vast scale. People who belong to the Jewish ethnic majority are privileged, not only relative to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territory, but relative to the Palestinians living within Israel who are themselves Israeli citizens. People who are Israelis are immensely privileged relative to Palestinians, who get to see their land and their resources appropriated while any number of Israelis hope that if they make life for Palestinians difficult they'll leave. This is a detestable policies, just as detestable as the Serbian discrimination against Bosniaks and Albanians in the 1990s, or East Timorese in the 1970s and 1980s, or Western Saharans now. So long as an Israeli consensus in favour of these discriminatory policies exists, why not place public pressure on Israel?

Yes, yes, I know that there are other societies where worse things happen, but so what? Yes, yes, I know that critics might come from societies with their own problems, but so what? So long as the critiques are valid, and so long as the critics aren't denying the charges own relevance to their own societies' issues, the standard act of dismissing critics--here in the case of Israel as elsewhere--can only be read as an intellectually lazy and morally contemptuous effort to shrug off legitimate dissent. Trying to drown out criticisms by demanding an infinity of footnotes is silly. Yes, yes, I know that the Palestinians have done bad things, but we're not talking about that. Arguably they wouldn't be if not for ongoing Israeli colonization.

Israel might well have achieved some sort of integration into the Middle East had it sincerely entered peace negotiations instead of having an electorate unwilling to make sacrifices for a fair settlement. (I'm not talking about Israel's neighbours because Israel's neighbours aren't the subjects here.) Instead, Israel seems to have opted for a future as a Western marcher state, Israeli leaders talking about the threats of Muslims and warning about Eurabia.

And this can't be criticized? I never liked Jason Kenney. I now have another reason to hold him in contempt.

Wow. Just wow. Such a shocking lock of medical ethics, such an apparent willingness to embrace a version of the blood libel.

Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, ''We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.''

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. ''This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,'' the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. ''We'd glue the eyelid shut,'' he said. ''We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.''

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

[. . .]

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report ''anti-Semitic.''

The academic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Scheper-Hughes said that while Palestinians were ''by a long shot'' not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because ''the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.''

What is there to say, apart from noting that at this stage unquestioning diasporic support for Israel is about as morally sketchy as unquestioning diasporic support for Serbia or Armenia or any other country involved in atrocities directed against the disfavoured?

Grand news re: possible Canadian complicity in torture in Afghanistan

As Richard Colvin fired off warnings about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan in 2006, the diplomat's missives bounced into the computers of Foreign Affairs without ever really landing.

Inside the Department of Foreign Affairs, the biggest Canadian overseas commitment since the Korean War was organized like any other file. Diplomats in Kabul and Kandahar had different supervisors. In separate corners of the department's Sussex Drive headquarters in the Pearson building, the peacekeeping desk would handle one memo, the human rights desk another, defence relations a third.

Mr. Colvin sparked a firestorm at the highest levels in Ottawa when he told a parliamentary committee that he warned for a full year that detainees Canadian troops handed over to Afghan forces faced torture before the government began to monitor them.

But behind that furor is another story: outside the combat-focused military, no one was in charge in the early part of the Afghan mission.

A scattered batch of mid-level officials, lacking the incontrovertible proof that Canadians had no means to find, didn't have the overall responsibility or weight to push for big change.

“The buck stopped nowhere,” said one official involved in the Afghan mission.

Worse, apparently the Canadian military was hostile to the oversight of civilians like Colvin.

Mr. Mulroney needed the co-operation of generals, who hated having a diplomat vet their plans. The military had long viewed Mr. Colvin as a nuisance because he persistently pushed different views on issues such as limiting civilian casualties and removing Kandahar's governor, and interrupted during officers' briefings.

“It became easy to discount Richard because he's a pain in the ass,” recalled an official. “David could go to senior military people and say, ‘I understand. People like Colvin, they're part of the old mentality, and I'm going to rein them in.' It threw them an olive branch.”

But at the end of April, 2007, Mr. Harper's government was under fire in Parliament over the treatment of detainees after The Globe and Mail published prisoners' accounts of torture.

Mr. Mulroney issued orders for diplomatic pressure. Mr. Colvin replied that Canada needed a new transfer arrangement with Afghanistan – and Mr. Mulroney curtly told him to follow his orders.

This article doesn't surprise me that much.

In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, University of Toronto researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong studied how students behaved after being given the option of purchasing environmentally friendly products, like organic yogourt or biodegradable laundry detergent, or conventional items.

They found students who chose green products were less likely to act altruistically afterwards than those who were simply exposed to green products.

The study, said Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing with the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, builds on research into the idea of "moral regulation" - that people either consciously or unconsciously balance bad deeds with good ones.

"What has been shown so far is that when we engage in actions that give us some kind of moral, warm glow - let's call it that - that afterwards we are more likely to transgress," Mazar said.

"What we don't know, and what the interesting question is, is how much is really a conscious, deliberate thought process? We don't know that."

In one experiment, students were assigned to one of two computerized "stores" filled with either predominantly green products or conventional items. Once assigned to a store, some students were asked to think critically about the products, while others were told to go shopping.

The students were then given six dollars and told there was a person in another room with whom they were supposed to share the money, keeping whatever they didn't give away for themselves.

The students who were simply exposed to the green items parted with more money than those who were exposed to the conventional products. But when it came to the students who made purchases, the opposite was true: those who bought green items actually gave less than those who spent their money on non-green alternatives.

As Mazar goes on to note, this doesn't mean buying environmentally friendly products is bad.

While the findings might deflate the self-righteous air of those who brag about bringing canvas bags to the grocery store, Mazar says it definitely shouldn't be seen as a condemnation of environmentally friendly purchasing habits.

That, she feels, would be a gross misunderstanding of the point of the research. The study shows we should be aware of our tendency to treat buying green as a moral act, said Mazar, rather than as our responsibility to the planet.

"What we wanted to point out is if you start to moralize particular actions . . . then there is a danger that people get this kind of warm glow. And that can be used afterwards to engage in less, maybe, social or altruistic behaviour," said Mazar.

"But this doesn't mean that you should not buy environmental products."

Mindfulness clearly matters. Still more important, I'd say, would be the introduction of mandatory rules regarding environmentally friendly consumption as opposed to voluntary opt-ins. If people don't, in fact, have to think about deciding between products which are more or less environmentally friendly (or non-hostile), then there would not be this risk of consumers unconsciously takking their green consumption as a license to do whatever.

Everyone, I'd like to you welcome my friend Stephen Degrace's Infinite Recursion to the blogroll! Tech, and django and more, it's all there at this three-in-one blog.

I photographed this pensive wooden head looking out of an enclosed front porch on Ossington Avenue at the beginning of this month.