Marie Snyder is a retired high school teacher (civics, philosophy, social sciences, and film studies) living in Ontario. She writes sporadically and conversationally about politics, philosophy, environmental issues, pop culture, autism, and her own struggles with the inane decisions made by those with power. Mask, vax, and ventilate, and not about us without us. Find her on BlueSky at MarieSnyder or through email: marie.snyder.27 [at] gmail.com.
by Marie Snyder Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands came highly recommended. The title refers to the effect that being enslaved had on his grandmother, and Menakem traces the violence of racism through the specific perspectives of people on either end of racial conflicts. Beyond just explaining how racism affects all of us in variable ways,…
by Marie Snyder He received the Order of Canada, profoundly helped many people with addiction on the streets of Vancouver, and is much loved and admired, but some of Dr. Gabor Maté’s claims feel like they don’t hold water. And some claims might actually be dangerous if blindly accepted. I’ve encountered Maté in a few…
by Marie Snyder The second half of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was added in 1962 to provide greater detail of Logotherapy, in which patients must hear difficult things in contrast to psychoanalysts provoking telling difficult things. It’s less introspective and more focused on our place in the world: “Logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations…
by Marie Snyder A dear friend of mine recently passed away unexpectedly. He had recommended I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which I gobbled up in no time, yet it was too late to talk to him about it. That’s destroying me a bit these days, so I’m writing about it instead. Frankl…
by Marie Snyder Some people are arguing that the removal of mask mandates in hospitals is a form of eugenics. Tamara Taggart, President of Down Syndrome BC, said on “This is Vancolour,” “This is eugenics, like 100%. So now we don’t care about people. . . . All those people are expensive. I mean, it’s…
by Marie Snyder The season finale of The Last of Us sets up a great deontological v. teleological conundrum with the big question (tiny spoiler), which ends up being an episode-long trolley problem: Is it right to kill one person if doing so could save multitudes? In a utilitarian view, of course we should sacrifice…
by Marie Snyder Freud got some things right, and this isn’t a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It’s a lot like Aristotle’s science, with the cause and effect going in the wrong direction. It’s still pretty impressive how far they got as they laid the…
by Marie Snyder Lots of people discredit the Myers-Briggs as just a horoscope, but it’s significantly different and can be useful in recognizing that we’re all innately different kinds of people. This awareness can help us get along in this world and maybe even find love, or at least a better roommate. Dividing people into…
by Marie Snyder Now that the hangover from New Year’s Eve is abating for many, and we might be freshly open to some self-improvement, consider a Buddhist view of using meditation to tackle addictions. I don’t just mean for substance abuse, but also for that incessant drive to check social media just once more before…
by Marie Snyder The anger that escalated at a recent Ottawa-Carlton school board meeting when a trustee proposed and lost a motion to mandate masks, in a setting that typically elicits polite discussion, makes it seem like this type of anger is new and shocking in its inappropriateness. But this video of the history of…
by Marie Snyder Climate change and covid are revealing an ongoing inability for our society to make wise decisions in the face of calamity, which may be leading us to a collapse of our civilization. Perhaps if we accept (or just believe) that we’re nearing the end, we can shift our priorities enough to usher…
by Marie Snyder I’m running for an elected position: school board trustee. It’s a relatively minor position and non-partisan, so there’s no budget or staff. There’s also no speeches or debates, just lawn signs and fliers. Campaigning is like an expensive two-month long job interview that requires a daily walking and stairs regimen that goes…
by Marie Snyder A student asked, “How many bad actions does a good person have to do before becoming a bad person?” The notion of good and bad people raises the image of final judgment at the pearly gates. We have a scale somewhere with our actions added incrementally to one side or the other…
by Marie Snyder A mandate isn’t necessarily tyrannical. It’s a rule that, in any good government, is devised to protect the people from harm so we can better live and work together. We must monitor legislation to ensure we stop laws that can harm people, but we also need to get involved when harm comes…
by Marie Snyder I knew it was coming, yet I was still surprised when it hit my classroom. “We shouldn’t be looking at this.” Students have complained about my course before, certain that they should not be expected to read anything so difficult in a high school philosophy course. The effect of this grumbling can…