Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.
New search button for the BIFHSGO website
I’ve been pestering BIFHSGO, and its long-suffering webmaster, for a simple way to search the Society website, especially the contents of back issues of Anglo-Celtic Roots. Harrah! It just appeared.
Go to the top left-hand corner of every page to find the search button “ENHANCED BY Google.” Type in the term you want to search and click on “Enter.”
Look for more changes coming to the website.
Counting the climate costs of abandoned shopping trolleys
Three Times As Good!
Unusually, on three successive days, 21-23 July, Dick Eastman posted about the Genealogy Fair in Fergus, Ontario . It’s on Saturday, 6 Sept from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Do I detect AI at work?
Bradford Trade Directories 1861 -1901
Hockey’s Violence Problem – And Ours
The article Hockey Canada sex assault verdict: Sports culture should have also been on trial is food for thought.
The acquittal of five former Hockey Canada players has reignited debates about sports culture and sexual assault. While victims deserve our support regardless of a trial’s outcome, the conversation raises uncomfortable questions about hockey’s unique relationship with violence and how society processes men’s issues only when they intersect with women’s safety.
As an immigrant from Britain, where football and cricket predominate, along with tennis and bowls, none of them contact sports, I’ve always found the violence in (ice) hockey disturbing. Unlike boxing or MMA, where violence is contained within formal combat rules, hockey players learn that hitting opponents, fighting, and intimidation are strategic necessities. From minor hockey onward, controlled aggression against those who threaten your team becomes a core skill.
Compare this to basketball, soccer, tennis, or even American football which has established rules governing contact. While American football involves physical contact, it doesn’t condone the interpersonal feuds and targeted aggression that hockey often celebrates. The physical dominance that wins hockey games doesn’t magically switch off in hotel rooms, suggesting the problem may be more fundamental than policy reforms can address.
The original article notes that male athletes are “socialized to comply with peer cultures that equate vulnerability with weakness”, that’s the same conditioning that produces hockey’s alarming rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Yet we only examine this socialization when men become perpetrators, not when they become victims.
Systems that dehumanize people rarely limit their damage to one group. The culture that treats women as objects may also destroy the mental health of men within it. Meanwhile, men also face forms of prejudice, from assumptions about their inherent violence and untrustworthiness around children, to dismissal of their experiences as domestic violence victims or sexual assault survivors.
Selective empathy and gendered prejudice serve no one well.
Thanks to the following for comments and tips: Ann Burns, Anonymous, Brenda Turner, Christine Jackson, Ken McKinlay, Sheila Dohoo Faure, Teresa, Unknown
Re: Hockey’s Violence Problem
I learned a long time ago that use and abuse of drugs and alcohol often leads to situations where consent can’t be given and restraint is unlikely simply due to the impairment of brain function. This is exacerbated by the shutting down of the amygdala, the part of the brain which creates and stores our memories, once a certain level of inebriation is reached. From what I have heard about the case in London, all the participants had reached this stage. And so claims of memories from any of those involved are likely not real memories. This should be understood by the courts but I doubt that it is. And so, any reforms that are suggested should also include changing our societal attitude to excessive alcohol and drug use – everywhere – but especially in groups of young people and in the circles of elite athletes. Bad things happen on both sides of the sexual divide when excessive alcohol and drugs are involved.
We also need to stop the objectifying of both women and men (but more so women) and we need to believe women – much more than we do currently. I’m sure there are cases when women are not telling the truth but I know that the rate of falsehood is much lower than our court system would suggest – by both the cases taken to court but result in a Not Guilty verdict, but more so by the vast number of cases that never get reported in the first place, let alone litigated.
Ice hockey- when played by the rules is not the violent sport portrayed by the “National Hockey League (NHL)”. Ice hockey as played by the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) or European leagues (such as the KHL) is a game of skill and finesse. The NHL is a sad example of corruption for monetary gain.