schmevil

Info

Wikipedia: 2009 Iranian election protests and Iranian presidential election, 2009

Revolutionary Road has been updating regularly

The Tehran Bureau and on facebook

Andrew Sullivan

BBC has some good links

ladycat777: More Iran and a rundown of what's going on

Ben Parr: HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media

Use google blog search to find updates

HuffPo is liveblogging

Twitter

HuffPo on twitter feeds

Use Monitter to get real time updates of Twitter conversations (#IranElection, Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Tehran)

Iran tweets aggregated on Twazzup

To get tweets from around Tehran enter this string into the search box near:Tehran within:15mi

ingrid_m: This Will Not Stand

The Twitter hashtag is #iranelection. If corresponding with an Iranian protester, please remove their handles from your Reply To and replace with this tag instead for the sake of their safety as they are being monitored.

DDOS attacks and proxies

4chan members have been ddosing Iranian government sites

Austin Heap: How to set up a proxy for Iranian citizens

The Great Moose suggests using Page Reboot to help overload the following sites:

http://www.khamenei.ir/
http://presstv.ir/
http://irna.ir/
http://www.president.ir/ (Ahmedinejad's site)
http://police.ir/

Photos and videos

Tehranlive.org

iReport

Iran elections and Iran Riots 2009 on Flickr

A quick search on You Tube brings up lots of results

There is an ethical imperative in intellectual work, which Leonardo called 'obsinate rigour'. It means, in practical terms--and especially when one is dealing with political matters, which are always highly charged with emotion--that one has to resist several temptations. They can be condensed into a single formula: never succumb to the terrorism of words. As Freud wrote, one must avoid making concessions to faintheartedness: 'One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too.'

LACLAU FUCK YEAH!

Current Music: The Tragically Hip - Love Is A First

I'm reading Ernesto Laclau's "On Populist Reason" and he's deep into a discussion of Freud's "Crowd Psychology." Hence the icon. HOLY GOOD GOD I'M THIS CLOSE TO SNAPPING. I have a libidinal bond with Freud, that bond being HATE. HOLY SHIT. The hell was I thinking in developing this project? It's too late to go back now. D: Must push through to the non-Freud parts. Urgh. 10 pages.

Current Music: Ladytron - Ghosts

Status of brain: utterly fried
Status of presentation: coming along

Have a quote from the book I'm working with:

"There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order."

Where natural order is actually 'natural order', or the naturalized order of social organization/domination.

ETA: What kind of dictionary doesn't recognize 'telos'? God dammit GoogleDocs.

Current Music: Madonna - Drowned World / Substitute for Love | Powered by Last.fm

G-20 Protesters Jam London, Target Banks

Thousands of G-20 protesters jammed downtown London on Wednesday and some tried to storm the Bank of England, pelting police with eggs and fruit and rocking the barricades designed to control them.

Demonstrators shouted "Abolish Money!" and clogged streets in the financial district known as "The City" even as Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama held a news conference elsewhere in the British capital.

Protesters had branded the day "Financial Fool's Day" ahead of Thursday's summit of world leaders who are gathering in hopes of resolving the global financial crisis that has lashed nations and workers worldwide.

"Every job I apply for there's already 150 people who have also applied," said protester Nathan Dean, 35, who lost his information technology job three weeks ago. "I have had to sign on to the dole (welfare) for the first time in my life. You end up having to pay your mortgage on your credit card and you fall into debt twice over."

Demonstrators hoisted effigies of the "four horsemen of the apocalypse," representing war, climate chaos, financial crimes and homelessness.

NPR.org, April 1, 2009

Abolish money, huh? That'll be received well.

Am busily researching Pakistani foreign policy re small arms proliferation, and non-state paramilitary groups for ridiculous UN simulation. Two weeks of this madness. *flail*

Seriously puzzled as to how this guy finds the time.

I'm deep into researching my preemptive war paper, and I came across a quote that's interesting to read, eight years later.

“Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have
the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear:
to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. War has been
waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful,
but fierce when stirred to anger. The conflict was begun on the timing and terms
of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.”

President Bush
Washington, D.C. (The National Cathedral)
September 14, 2001

And thank the Great Gazoo for the distance of history. Would that you'd had the benefit of his guidance, Mr. Bush.

Current Music: Led Zeppelin - No Quarter

Obama's speech was a cliched dud

Put him on a platform and Barack Obama can take any string of words and make them sing. He's the best speech performer of our day.

His voice has charm and power. He has an instinctive sense of the lyric and rhythmic underpinning of language, those surplus properties that impart a power beyond sense, beyond just what the words say. He has mastered the timing of public address, when to pause, when to rush a phrase, how to link gesture and stance to moments of emphasis. This is the full package.

Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they'd heard the Gettysburg address.

He gave a great performance Tuesday. The speech itself, however, was a dud. So much skill operating on so lifeless a text. It was Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopsticks. A speech that has hardly begun gives us clouds that are "gathering," storms that are "raging," a fear that is "nagging," grievances that are "petty," interests that are "narrow" and decisions that are "unpleasant" displays an alarming hospitality to cliché. Is there a dull-adjective shop in the new White House?

If they carve this one in marble, the appropriate subscript will read: Bring me your poor, your tired, your hackneyed phrases - your obvious descriptors yearning to be twee.

Rex Murphy for The Globe and Mail
January 24, 2009

Aside from the somewhat alarming suggestion that Obama failed to fulfill the Dr. King shoutout requirement, I find myself agreeing. The speech was impressive because of the man giving it, not because the speech itself was impressively written. Sort of the inverse of Elizabeth Alexander's performance of Praise Song for the Day, which I posted here, for those of you who haven't given the text a second chance. Separated from Alexander's halting, amateurish delivery, it comes off as a much better poem. I hardly recognized it! Still, some of Murphy's criticisms could apply here too. Like the speech it leans to much on cliche, and could stand to lose a word here or there.

Inauguration day in general, was rife with cliche. I had hoped to see a little more risk taking, but I suppose you can't blame them for playing it safe, at least when it comes to the symbolic stuff. It's a shortcut to some kind of shared understanding, which is sorely needed.

Unlike Rex Murphy, Stanley Fish writes about the speech here, with appreciation for its style.

Obama's Prose Style

Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror. But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.

The comparison to Biblical prose is a helpful one, for me at least, because it helps to clarify exactly what I didn't like about the speech. There was a sense of invoking the imagined character of America, and thereby reasserting its truth. Sort of the form of prayer, or a creation story, but with such hackneyed phrasing that it failed to fly. There was no imaginative spark, just a tired call and response. America is great! America will be great again. I do want to read and reread the text of the speech, because there were some awesome bits of rhetoric in it, but that's a project for another day.

I really don't update enough. I'm going to try to update every day in January and see if eljay is habit-forming.

But for now, a short entry on mining, for the season devoted to celebrating conspicuous consumption. John Maynard Keynes called the gold standard a "barbarous relic" but as Brook Larmer points out in National Geo, our obsession with precious metals is as barbarous a relic of more superstitious times. I've read two fantastic articles recently about metals mining that take you inside a luxury trade with wide-ranging and truly devastating socio-economic and environmental consequences.

The Mountain That Eats Men
Andrew Westoll
The Walrus

Legend has it that the Inca knew about the riches lying beneath the Cerro. According to Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, an Inca named Huayna Capaj led a team of treasure seekers to its summit long before the Spanish arrived. As they began to dig, though, a fearsome voice thundered from the heavens. “This is not for you,” it warned. “God is keeping these riches for those who come from afar.” The Incas fled, terrified, but not before dubbing the mountain Potojsi, Quechua for “to thunder, burst, explode.”

In 1545, during the early days of the conquest, the prophecy of the mountain came true. An unlucky Indian named Huallpa spent a shivering night on the Cerro, after passing the day in pursuit of an escaped llama. By the light of his campfire, he glimpsed a huge vein of pure silver glittering on the mountain’s surface. Word spread quickly, and, as Galeano puts it, “the Spanish avalanche was unleashed.”

The Spaniards opened the mine that same year. Within three decades, Potosí had grown more affluent than Paris or London, making it the New World’s first genuine boom town. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, named Potosí an Imperial City, and upon its shield were inscribed the lines “I am rich Potosí, treasure of the world, king of the mountains, envy of kings.” Popular theory holds that the old mark of the Potosí mint (the letters ptsi superimposed on one another) was the precursor of the modern dollar sign.

The true amount of silver extracted from the Cerro is impossible to measure, but Bolivians often claim that enough was chiselled from the mountain to build a shimmering bridge from the summit all the way to Madrid. In Spain, even today, if something is “worth a Potosí,” it is worth a fortune. But this astonishing wealth came at an awful cost: untold numbers of indigenous workers perished inside the mines, after living lives of incomparable torment.

The Real Price of Gold
Brook Larmer
National Geographic

Like many of his Inca ancestors, Juan Apaza is possessed by gold. Descending into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, the 44-year-old miner stuffs a wad of coca leaves into his mouth to brace himself for the inevitable hunger and fatigue. For 30 days each month Apaza toils, without pay, deep inside this mine dug down under a glacier above the world's highest town, La Rinconada. For 30 days he faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold that the world demands. Apaza does all this, without pay, so that he can make it to today, the 31st day, when he and his fellow miners are given a single shift, four hours or maybe a little more, to haul out and keep as much rock as their weary shoulders can bear. Under the ancient lottery system that still prevails in the high Andes, known as the cachorreo, this is what passes for a paycheck: a sack of rocks that may contain a small fortune in gold or, far more often, very little at all.

Apaza is still waiting for a stroke of luck. "Maybe today will be the big one," he says, flashing a smile that reveals a single gold tooth. To improve his odds, the miner has already made his "payment to the Earth": a bottle of pisco, the local liquor, placed near the mouth of the mine; a few coca leaves slipped under a rock; and, several months back, a rooster sacrificed by a shaman on the sacred mountaintop. Now, heading into the tunnel, he mumbles a prayer in his native Quechua language to the deity who rules the mountain and all the gold within.

"She is our Sleeping Beauty," says Apaza, nodding toward a sinuous curve in the snowfield high above the mine. "Without her blessing we would never find any gold. We might not make it out of here alive."

It isn't El Dorado, exactly. But for more than 500 years the glittering seams trapped beneath the glacial ice here, three miles above sea level, have drawn people to this place in Peru. Among the first were the Inca, who saw the perpetually lustrous metal as the "sweat of the sun"; then the Spanish, whose lust for gold and silver spurred the conquest of the New World. But it is only now, as the price of gold soars—it has risen 235 percent in the past eight years—that 30,000 people have flocked to La Rinconada, turning a lonely prospectors' camp into a squalid shantytown on top of the world. Fueled by luck and desperation, sinking in its own toxic waste and lawlessness, this no-man's-land now teems with dreamers and schemers anxious to strike it rich, even if it means destroying their environment—and themselves—in the process.

The scene may sound almost medieval, but La Rinconada is one of the frontiers of a thoroughly modern phenomenon: a 21st-century gold rush.

Current Music: Nirvana - On A Plain

Some minor personal triumphs I have the pleasure of reporting: I crawled out of my sickbed to jog on the treadmill, took a needle to a vexatious splinter in my thumb, and fit into my old skinny jeans. Victory is mine. \o/

In other news, the Governor General of Canada has, as predicted, prorogued Parliament. This sets a bad precedent for future governments to try to dodge confidence votes through prorogation, but had she chosen not to suspend Parliament, that would have set another bad precedent. Either way, Michaelle Jean didn't have a lot of options, and she picked the safe one: heeding the advice of the sitting Prime Minister.

So now we're plunged back into something like election mode, with all the party propaganda machines plowing full steam ahead, straight into our living rooms. Hoping to win our hearts and minds, but likely to annoy a good number of Canadians. How this plays out is very much up to the feckless Liberal party, who've spent the last two decades tearing each other to shreds. Even now, when their full support for the coalition (at least in public) is crucial, some members broke ranks, suggesting the coalition won't survive the break. The Ignatieff camp has voiced concerns that being part of the coalition cabinet could crush his treasured dreams of leadership. Truly the Liberals have reached new absurd depths of self-destructiveness.

Stephane Dion is not a compelling leader, it's true, but he's only an interim leader. So in the meantime people, you have no excuse - pull it together and win this one!

***

I haven't posted about art in... a long time. Here are 'Yellow Cosmos' and 'Growing From the Cracks', by Julian Messer. Art MoCo says that:

Lesser works from his imagination to recreate gardens, maps and journeys, using colour as a vehicle for thoughts and emotions. Lesser's expression results in paintings that explode with movement, pattern and flowers, of course. The artist often works with a combination of acrylic, ink and resin on paper mounted on pine.

I don't know about you guys, but I think they're gorgeous.

I'm going to make this brief, because I've caught the mother of all cold viruses and I'm due for a spell of unconsciousness in about five.

Steven Harper asked the national networks for some time today, to speak to Canadians, and explain why the new coalition could not be allowed to govern. What did he give us? Lies, and damn lies.

Throughout question period and during his remarks tonight, he characterized the coalition as being 'separatist' and 'dangerous' for Canada. This in direct contradiction of facts: the Liberals and NDP have signed an agreement to form a governing coalition, and the Bloc Quebecois have agreed to support this government on confidence votes. For the purposes of the agreement, confidence votes have been defined as a throne speech and two budgets. After that, they can either continue to support the government, or ally with the Conservatives to bring it down. They would be free to vote however they like on any other measure, and would have NO SAY in the nitty gritty of the legislative agenda. They have agreed to support this coalition, based on the broad outline which the Liberals and NDP have developed. That's it.

Steven Harper and the Conservatives keep asking, What's in it for the separatists? What's in it for them, is a rollback of all the budget and program cuts you've dropped on them. What's in it for them is an economic stimulus package. There's no mystery here. In an effort to prop up his sinking government, Harper is trying to play the nationalist card, in one of the few, non-hockey-related ways you can: by invoking the spectre of separatist Quebecois, out to destroy our country. The only trouble is that he's been working with the Bloc for years. Now, after all his cozying up to Quebecers, he's ready to demonize legitimately elected Members of Parliament. He is willing to provoke a unity crisis, in order to hang on to power.

He is burning every bridge to the Quebecers that he built. He is appealing to the worst instincts of every Canadian. He wants to kindle in our hearts base fear of those who think differently, by invoking the bogeymen of old, socialists and separatists. But in truth, there's no basis to this appeal - don't forget, the Bloc and Parti Quebecois' nationalist rhetoric has been toned down in recent years, by necessity. While the spirit of Quebec nationalism remains strong, the actuality of it has become unpopular. The imperative to form a country of their own has fallen by the wayside of sovereignty associations, or nations within a state. Harper is stirring up fears of the Bloc at a time when we have very little to fear from them.

Tomorrow we will find out the result of his meeting with the Governor General. Most likely he will ask her to prorogue (ie suspend) Parliament. Most likely she will grant his request. In spite of everything else, he still remains the sitting Prime Minister, and the Governor General would have a hard time taking an activist stance in the 21st century.

I do think the coalition can survive a prorogation, but the Liberals and NDP will have to fight tooth and nail, with the incredible political machine that is the Conservative organization. I want the coalition to survive, because I think that Harper, has finally demonstrated that he is incapable of accepting the role of the opposition. He is incapable of accepting opposition, period. Of any kind, in any place. He is a bully and a coward, and unfit for the office of Prime Minister.

Moreover, there's potential in the idea. Jack Layton, leader of the NDP said that the coalition represented a new kind of government, and that's something that I think a lot of Canadians would welcome at this point. Especially if it meant a renewal of civility and democratic dialog.

In any case, I'm to bed, with the help of a heavy dose of NyQuil. If I missed your comment, or responded late, I apologize. I worked a double yesterday, and have spent today napping and watching CBC Newsworld - I'm dead tired.

There is a phrase that I want banned: Canadian politics is boring. Canadian politics is no more boring than any other state's; like all political ecosystems it is by turns tedious and alarming. The key difference between American politics (which usually wins the competition of interest), and Canadian politics, or American politics and Finnish politics even, is money. Power too is pretty significant - when you're the world's lone hyperpower, people are bound to be fascinated by your political goings on. But money is the big difference between the American political scene, and everyone else's. Every part of their political process, from the budgets at stake, to the media conglomerates that play a big part in determining the national agenda, has more digits before the decimal in play. Even Britain, France and India, with their sophisticated and powerful media, can't quite match the Americans. (Ching-ching?) ( Read more... )

Before this most recent election, I said that public opinion to the contrary, this one was important. With the Conservatives now barely keeping their heads above water, and the Liberals, Bloc and NDP preparing to form a coalition, I think I've been proven right. *g* Canada may soon have its first coalition government since the First World War, the united Right is showing strain, and the fragmented Left is considering alliance. The vilified Stephan Dion is now being touted as the next Prime Minister of Canada. A shocking upset that shouldn't be a shock to people who have been paying attention to the pressure cooker the House has become. Harper has spent his time in government running roughshod over media elites, opposition politicians and even his own party. The recent move to end public funding to political parties is only the latest salvo, in a sustained cold war with the Left.

As complacent as Canadians have become since Harper first became PM, his government has never been rock solid. His ability to govern as though he had a majority, despite the Conservatives consistently taking only a minority of seats, has been the result of a fragmented and confused opposition, made up of the NDP, who've never really held power, the Bloc, who don't exactly want it, and a Liberal party ravaged by two decades of bloody infighting. But now, thanks to Flaherty's laughable economic report, the move to end public financing of political parties and eliminate the right of public employess to strike, the Conservatives have handed their opposition the greatest gift of all: issues around which all three parties can form a consensus that will serve as the foundation of a broader agenda. Harper has been saying for years that the Left should unite (for various reasons that I won't get into), but now he's managed to get them united in precisely the worst possible way for him, and at the worst possible time.

Hilariously, the Conservatives are trying the mesmerize the Canadian public into supporting them with blatant lies about our political system. Are you ready to debunk some myths? Let's go. ( Read more... )

Now, the coalition is not a done deal. Harper could still prorogue Parliament. The Governor General could call yet another election (sigh!). Needless to say, I think that any suspension of parliamentary activity to support a faltering Conservative government would be the worst sort of hypocrisy, from a party that continues to campaign on ethics (ha!).

This story has more details.

Liberals, NDP, Bloc Sign Deal On Proposed Coalition
December 1, 2008
CBC.ca

The six-point accord includes a description of the role of the Liberal and NDP caucuses, which will meet separately and will sit next to each other on the government benches in the House of Commons, Dion told a news conference alongside Layton and Duceppe.

The proposed coalition cabinet will be composed of 24 ministers and the prime minister. Six of these ministers will be appointed from within the NDP caucus.

The accord will expire on June 30, 2011, unless it is renewed. It includes a "policy accord" to address the "present economic crisis," which states that the accord "is built on a foundation of fiscal responsibility."

An economic stimulus package will be the new government's top priority, while other policies include a commitment to improve child benefits and childcare "as finances permit."

There is also a commitment to "pursue a North American cap-and-trade market" to limit carbon emissions.

The Bloc Québécois would not officially be a part of the coalition, but the new government's survival would depend on its support.

Americans, did you know that your new President Elect is funny? Barack Obama at the Roast of Representative Rahm Emanuel. (Also, that Rahm's brother Ari might be the inspiration for Entourage's Ari Gold? *fangirls*)

Bush vs. Zombies. The sitting president wants to up defense spending for protection against zombies. "Is there any scientific evidence of an actual, biological difference between these zombies and slow-moving tourists?"

Dexter 3.8 "The Damage A Man Can Do": I liked this episode. ( spoilers )

True Blood 1.10 "I Don't Wanna Know": I also liked this episode. ( more spoilers )

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

Echoes of Kennedy (New Frontier), and Roosevelt, quoting King (Mount Baker). Calling all Americans to a new era of service. Damn. Damn that was a fine speech.

And John - where have you been? I almost recognized the John McCain of old in you tonight.

Those are incredible numbers - exactly what America, and the rest of us, needed in this election. A clear and indisputable victory for Barack Obama. And look at those crowds!

I can't wait for his speech.

Beyonce - If I Were A Boy ( Lyrics )

Usher - Trading Places ( Lryics )

Tagging this as music and politics. Politics, Usher? Oh yes, baby. Beyonce's is more obvious, but Usher's got some interesting things to say too. This video is highly sexual, as most of his videos are, but it's about how we do sex and how we define pleasure and work. I swear. Plus, yeah the usual sexism, but it's interesting.

Conservative minority. Big surprise. The Liberals continue to be plagued by a host of organizational and leadership problems. No one but the Bloc really got out the vote. Even they struggled in some ridings. It's going to be years before we see a strong majority, but it would be nice to see more movement than ten seats for the $300 million we spent on this election.

Canadian federal politics: an exercise in frustration.

A couple of people expressed the opinion that if Michael Ignatieff had been elected Liberal leader, they wouldn't have had as poor a showing. This flies in the face of the serious organizational and image problems of the party, and the significant dislike for the man, outside the Liberal base. The thing is, Ignatieff supported the war in Iraq. He supported the Neo-Con agenda and even water-boarding. He's descended from Russian gentry and writes interminably long and wordy opinion pieces worthy of Lord Black. There are reasons for the dislike.

Bob Rae, another leadership possibility, is largely despised in Ontario for his days as an NDP premier, disliked by the center for his association with the left, and by the rust belt for his Rhodes-scholar-smarty-pants-ness. That leaves... who exactly?

Putting aside the leadership quandary there's still the lingering odour of the Sponsorship Scandal, the damage done by over ten years of infighting, and ten more of arrogance and right-shifting. There is nothing that could have won this election for the Liberals, short of Steven Harper being discovered to be a sex offender. But they definitely could have done better. *cringe*

I feel so betrayed by my fellow Ontarians, who continue to defect to the Conservatives.

The good news of this election is threefold:

1) Conservative minority, not majority. This is good news insofar as it will be somewhat harder for Harper to implement his environmentally destructive agenda. Yay. It also forces him to continue to play to the center, at least a little. He can't go all fundie whackjob on us.

2) The NDP and Green parties had strong showings in the popular vote. Yes, the NDP fell short of their historic high number of seats, but they have enough to be a voice in Parliament, and that's crucial. With the Liberals spinning their collective wheels, the NDP are the Conservatives most effective critics. The Greens failed to capture a single seat, thanks in part to leader Elizabeth May's foolish decision to run against Conservative mainstay Peter McKay. Their share of the popular vote went up and though they don't have a voice in Parliament, the attention the campaign has lent them, will make them legitimate players on the national stage. Even if only as a pressure group, it's pressure that needs to be brought to bear on the government.

3) Michel Fortier, the former Conservative Senatorial appointee failed in his bid to be elected MP. HA and HA HA!

Something I don't care about nearly as much as the national media elites think I do: Justin Trudeau has been elected to Parliament. You can't see it, but my eyes are rolling. Freaking rolling over the disgusting coverage of this issue. It's ok guys, I can do without a another political ~~royal family~~ dynasty.

Ho hum.

Eunoia, by Christian Bok was posted on

greatpoets today.

Relentless, the rebel peddles these theses, even when vexed peers deem the new precepts ‘mere dreck’. The plebes resent newer verse; nevertheless, the rebel perseveres, never deterred, never dejected; heedless, even when hecklers heckle the vehement speeches. We feel perplexed whenever we see these exerpted sentences. We sneer when we detect the clever scheme – the emergent repetend: the letter E. We jeer; we jest. We express resentment. We detest these depthless pretenses – these present-tense verbs expressed pell-mell. We prefer genteel speech, where sense redeems senselessness.

It's an interesting piece, one I've never read before. I try as much as possible to avoid Bok. The deal is, I studied modern Canadian fiction under him, and he made a vast array of brilliant works unreadable, by virtue of his blinding pretension. I still can't make it through the first chapter of Mauve Desert without cringing, and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is staring at me from my bookshelf, as I type this. My seminar leader, a friend of his, refused to meet with me regarding course work, after I confessed to taking the course in order to fulfill a degree requirement, and all but drove me out of the class. It was one of my worst experiences with the post-secondary education system. Somehow I can't get past my distaste for the man, to see the work for itself.

***

Have you seen today's utterly ridic Writer's Block Question?

It’s the Day of German Unity, marking the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany. In our current period of global instability, do you ever feel nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War?

I'm extremely pleased with all the boggling going on in the responses.

Quoting

filbypott for truth: This is one of the most insultingly stupid things I've read all day, and I've read defenses of Sarah Palin. Whoever wrote this should be ashamed.

psychox says: Yes. I often long for an era when the planet was constantly two steps away from nuclear annihilation. . . . I'm...going to pretend I didn't see this question.

Actually, I'm going to pretend that by "simplicity," the prompt is referring to the balance of power between two nation-states deadlocked by the concept of mutually-assured-destruction. And I'm going to presume that "global instability" is referring to the dangers of living in a world dominated by the one superpower that emerged triumphant after the Cold War to become the world hegemony.

If I can't convince myself of that, I'm going to pretend this prompt never happened.

Me too, dude. Me too.

You can watch the French language debate live right now, in French or English translation. Right now they're talking about climate change. Gilles Duceppe and Elizabeth May are lighting into Steven Harper in the round table discussion. It's gold.

Am I the only one who's getting frustrated with media portrayals of the Green Shift as being incomprehensible to the average Canadian?

A) The average Canadian is more than capable of understanding political policy.

B) The Green Shift is actually quite simple. Tax carbon emissions, lower income tax. Revenue neutral. Done. (Well, not that simple but come on, through people a text box with some bullet points and they'll be fine).

Stehpen Harper has requested that Michaelle Jean, our Governor General dissolve the Parliament. According to Harper, it's become dysfunctional and ineffective. On October 14, Canadians will elect our 40th Parliament.

I, like many people, disagree with Harper - in a minority situation things are always going to come a little harder, and Harper's done an admirable job of pretending he has a majority. If this wasn't a bold-faced political maneuver, I don't know what is.

The real reason he's calling an election now, well ahead of the new fixed date, (and in contravention of his own law), is that he wants to cement his mandate before things get any worse. It's a smart move, because what's coming down the pike has very little to do with him, and he's got next to no chance of fixing things. Kind of hard to stand in the way of the developing American recession, and hope that the economic woes of our biggest trading partner don't hurt us. Hard too, for one man to solve the problems of: rising fuel prices, the developing world food crisis, global warming, and the geopolitical instability of the Middle East and Asia (exacerbated by the Americans' bungling of their democracy-exportation).

Harper, being the very smart fellow that he is, wants to sew up a new mandate and this time possibly, maybe, hopefully, a majority, before things go to hell. Canada still has decent growth rates, decent interest rates, decent unemployment rates and one hell of a budgetary surplus, but if all the economic wonks are right, that's going to change soon. When that does, Harper's chances of winning a majority will tank, because at that point, he becomes the Prime Minister who presided over the declining economic fortunes of the Great Not-So-White North, and not the warrior elected to battle such fearsome foes.

The thing is, Canadians don't want an election. All the polls agree: we don't see the point. Not enough has changed since the last election. There's been no scandal big enough to shake up the status quo, no change in the generally disappointing leadership. Unless Stephane Dion screws up royally - definitely possible! - or Stephan Harper knocks it out of the park - also possible - we're all too likely to end up with a Parliament much like this one. Just as 'dysfunctional' and 'ineffective'. The Conservatives might win a majority, but they won't have an easy time trying to make a right turn in the national consensus.* And unlike our neighbors to the south, we don't have a sense of urgency about this election; there's no feeling that when all the votes are counted, things in this country will change forever, for good or ill.

* (I use that term knowing that there kind of isn't one. *g*)

Despite all that, this is an important election. I've decided to do a bunch of posts on the why. Probably no one will read them, but they'll be fun to write. ;) ( why this election matters to the Liberals and the Conservatives )

Next post: NDP, Greens and the Bloc.

no future

Iran (links)

The single best part of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason:

this icon is strangely appropriate

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abolish money!

I yield my time to the hypocrite from another state

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"Obama's speech was a cliched dud" or "he invites us to compliment"

Extreme mining

Parliament Prorogued

Lies, and Damn Lies: Stephen Harper addresses the nation

Potential Coalition Government for Canada?

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\o/

Must watch videos:

ARGH!

Christian Bok and Cold War Nostalgia

Reminder to the Canadians on the flist-

Canadian Election '08 - the Liberals and Conservatives

Profile

July 2012

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