Thursday Think Tank

Every Thursday, CBC Radio's Sounds Like Canada features the Thursday Think Tank.

The Think Tank brings together people with basically nothing in common, to comment on issues they may or may not know something about.

The most entertainment value comes from artist Carolina Echeverria, who can be counted on to kick things off with a completely wacko argument.

Today's topic was youth crime. She started by telling us the first-round hockey riots in Montreal showed that the true pulse of Canada is rage, and that once hockey fans left the Bell Centre their true emotions showed. She went on to bring up the pepper spraying of protesters at the 1997 APEC summit, the war in Afghanistan, old people dying alone in nursing homes, and... well, I lost track.

I did note, though that she thinks community service is good and jail time bad, although on a previous panel on crime she'd said that we should simply accept that some kids are born bad and that parents should crack down on their teens hard enough that the teens will hate them.

I'm sympathetic to people looking at the big picture and trying to connect disparate threads into a coherent argument. But coherent this ain't.

Nobody said you needed consistency or being able to put together a decent argument in order to be an artist. But those things might be a little bit helpful if you're trying to be some kind of pundit.