What could possibly be worse than the alignment of highly conservative political factions with fundamentalist Christianity? Xemu knows the answer to that question. As an aside, also from my Hump of Hate, even ignoring who this award was given to, doesn’t this sentence from the article encapsulate so much that is hate-worthy about North American society? Members of the group… Read more →
Category: Political
Nick Anderson, Pulitzer Prize Winer
The 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded to Nick Anderson “for his unusual graphic style that produced extraordinarily thoughtful and powerful messages.” You can see portfolio sample at The Washington Post Writers Group. Read more →
Hump of Hate: Fascism Anyone?
A while back, Laurence Britt published an article in Free Inquiry magazine entitled “Fascism Anyone?”. In the article Britt looked at a number of fascist regimes (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia) and finds fourteen common characteristics of all of them. The “14 characteristics of fascism” from the article have spread… Read more →
U.S. Currency wonkery
Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School of Business at NYU, and Brad Setser at University College, Oxford, have co-authored a paper on the possible unraveling of the Bretton Woods 2 system, and the consequent hard landing scenario for US currency. A PDF copy of the report is online, and makes interesting reading, if you think currency issues are interesting. Both… Read more →
Hump Of Hate: Canadian Immigration Policies
One of my fave leftie Canadian magazines, THIS, has a piece this month on how the Canadian government is essentially screwing over Hungarian Roma who are trying to get refugee status–and doing it primarily so Hungary can pretend that there is no internal problem for the Roma. (Not that Hungary is the only country that the Roma could legitimately claim… Read more →
Once again I give you Steve Grant…
This week’s Permanent Damage asks the questions I’ve been wondering about: why aren’t (and haven’t) the Democrats acting like they stand for something? Scroll down in this week’s column until you reach the With Democrats Like These header: Since losing the election and seats in both the Senate and the House, the Democrats have been on the defensive, facing a… Read more →
Pointing to CommonBits
So, let’s take a moment to talk about CommonBits. What, you may be asking yourself, is CommonBits? Well, let’s pinch the answer straight from the site: What is CommonBits? CommonBits is a free community directory of progressive political media that anyone can contribute to. Search for audio, video, photos, reports, transcripts and other files in the directory. Submit links and… Read more →
Not a snowball’s chance in hell
So, I read today on Daily Kos about the election reform bill that Senators Boxer and Clinton have introduced. (A PDF of the full text of the bill is available. There are several things in this bill that just make sense, especially in regards the electronic voting machines (as an aside, I should point out that even with our unique… Read more →
Where you might least expect it
I think I have mentioned this before, but one of my favourite sources for actual analysis of political events is a column, written by a comic book writer, on a comics web site. The columns are quite long, and usually start out with comic-related material, but they eventually get around to a few paragraphs (or a few dozen if Steve… Read more →
Krugman on Social Security
Once again, in his NY Times op-ed piece, our hero of the dismal science, Paul Krugman, brings a little sanity to an economic issue. This time it’s the Bush administration ‘Social Security Crisis’ talking point. With a tiny bit of math, and a lot of reasoning, Krugman takes apart the projections on which the Bush plan is based, reaching an… Read more →
Silence fear, engage brain
The thing about doing security analysis is that you really have to think about the threats, and you really have to look at your assumptions, and then you have to evaluate the costs of security measures against the threat reduction. It’s hard to do that while you are being terrified. For example, imagine two security systems A, and B, that… Read more →
It’s about time
Well, the CBC is reporting that things are finally rolling. (If you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of years, you can catch up at the CBC Indepth page for this issue.) The Liberal government introduced its same-sex marriage bill in the House of Commons Tuesday, kicking off the next stage of a fierce debate that will… Read more →
The Importance of Education Can Not Be Overemphasized
During many political arguments, my proposed solutions to The Big Problems are often extremely long-term solutions, predicated on the notion that education can be the cornerstone of a civilization–if it takes as its goal the production of citizens trained in critical thinking, rather than the production of employable units. I am frequently mocked for my view of education as a… Read more →
Edmund Burke wishes he could have written like this
This post will be a bunch of quotations from a great man. Words that I think are very important in these times when we seem to be suffering from a very dangerous lack of outrage. “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against… Read more →
I am full of bile
Several readers of this blog have asked me why I haven’t said anything about the tsunami. For the record, the answer is that I simply have nothing to say that isn’t obvious to everyone, and that wouldn’t sound incredibly trite. The other answer is that I am full of bile–it is killing me to see Americans so apparently full of… Read more →
