religious freedom. that strange, orwellian contradiction in terms.

for, the colonizers once carried out the same pattern everywhere. they would arrive on the shores of a distant land - be it the fringes of scandinavia or the south of africa - and begin the process of enslavement through forced conversion. the forced conversion works at the level of cultural assimilation; to become a christian was to become a roman, regardless of what one was before. and, so the expanse of northern europe became roman, as the expanse of africa became arab.

there was struggle, but in the end it was futile. the futility of the struggle against religion was less a statement of defeat and more a level of resignation. if far enough away from the centres of power, one need not actively practice the religion of the colonizers - one need only not revert to the indigenous belief systems.

but, after many years this was forgotten. we had all became romans; we had all become arabs. we quarrelled amongst ourselves as they did, arguing over specific natures of our brainwashing.

"the lord has but one nature!", cried the first slave.

"nay! it has three!", cried the second as he lunged at the first with his sword.

and, so the romans experienced blowback as a consequence of their use of religion. what was meant to control had become a means of revolt. "we demand freedom to worship as we choose!".

a sad irony that continues.

but, sadder still is that we musn't push too hard to discard the shackles. this old debate. it's because it is at the very centre of capitalist oppression that this mirror is so difficult to raise up, and results in such dramatic backlashes.

we have learned that religious persecution merely strengthens it's resolve. it's difficult to accept that. i'll be happy when the day comes that a speech like this is wildly mocked.

canada being on the verge of electing a....well, they're not really a socialist party. but they're a third party. this is a pretty big deal. we're a left-leaning country. our liberal party has swung about as far left as you can without embracing socialism. for example, we nationalized the oil industry in the 70s - under a liberal government. and the party poised to win isn't likely to do anything like that. but, it's still a big deal in the landscape of the political system.

the liberal party of canada is often called the most successful political party of the 20th century. in terms of electoral victories, it is a true statement. they won long mandates and governed for long periods. they wrote the bulk of our existing constitution. in a three party system, no party is ever completely safe from losing party status. to see the party collapse would be to lose a little piece of the country's history and culture.

but, it's looking increasingly necessary.

it's not completely unprecedented. the liberals were in this position once before, in the mid-80s. canada was the last to embrace thatcherism and did so with the least amount of zeal. in the end, the banks forced a lot of the policies that we did half-adopt on to us. even our conservatives are really liberals, and they just didn't fall for any of that 80s economic mumbo jumbo. it's largely politics rather than economics, but we were flirting with a junk status credit rating for a while - because our conservative party wouldn't make the cuts being pushed, because they knew it didn't actually make sense to get to the the end demanded of them. this is a bit of a stand that canada took against the imf that i wish was more thoroughly covered. and, it was our conservative party that took it. they privatized a few things - like the oil industry: a disastrous decision that is now politically out of bounds to discuss. but, instead of rolling off health care and other services, they took the bold policy decision of raising taxes. it destroyed the party. but it may have saved the nature of the country.

when the conservatives won in 1984 under the tide of thatcherism, it was a convincing win. mulroney got over 50% of the vote. they won, fair and square. no excuses. the liberals and the then third place party (the quasi-socialist ndp) were really at a roughly equal footing for the next couple of years. there was a lot of talk of the ndp overtaking the liberals. but, that didn't happen. rather, the liberals won a very large majority in 1993 and held on to it until 2004.

why was it different then?

a lot of analysts have focused on the fact that the ndp had a female leader over much of this period. it's not something for anybody to be proud of, but it may have had a small effect. i don't think this is the dominant factor.

i think the dominant factor is the liberals' record in government in the preceding periods, combined with their following policy proposals.

standing in 1993, one would look back at the trudeau government as a pretty progressive one. it was a liberal capitalist government, so all that criticism applies. but, it moved about as far out of that rubric as it possibly could. it created universal healthcare. it nationalized oil. it wrote a very forward-thinking constitution. i could go on for a while, but it's pointless. so, when chretien showed up and said he was going to renegotiate nafta and reorganize the gst as a luxury tax, left-leaning voters had every reason to believe him - the party had a record of it. they campaigned on the left, with a history of left-leaning policies and won based on that strength.

but, the 90s were different. canada had the imf breathing over it's shoulder and had to make some deep cuts. there's two subtleties that the left misses in this debate. the first is that the cuts were meant to be temporary, until various structural adjustments asserted themselves; the harper government has all but demolished this plan, but it was very real and did result in large funding restorations in the early 00s. the second is that the imf was pushing hard for "market liberalization", and threatening consequences; temporary funding cuts hurt people, but they were better than full privatization, which was the only other option. canada could not have continued on the path it was on and accept junk credit rating status. a hefty level of criticism should be levelled at these international bodies for their interference, but the world is as it is.

that's not the easiest debate to articulate, let alone win. looking at the liberals' 90s record today does not have the same pull to left-leaning voters as it's 70s record did to left-leaning voters in the 90s. it's a combination of fiscal conservatism and mixed market economics, pastiched together under a desire to squirm out of heavy international pressure to conform to the washington consensus amidst heavy domestic opposition to it. as a collection of policies, it's not going to appeal to anybody at all. it's only in understanding the context that it appears to even make sense, and that's beyond the realm of the average voter. educated voters don't even tend to really realize exactly what was happening.

so, they can't campaign to the left on a record of leftist policies because they haven't had leftist policies in decades.

and, the electorate's shift is consequently entirely rational. this is different.

the establishment hates clinton. she can't win. that's why they bankrolled obama to victory in 2008. i'm entirely expecting the banks to step in and bankroll somebody.

the narrative, of course, was backwards. people saw obama as the underdog, taking out the establishment candidate. the opposite was true.

i'm getting deja vu.

you're talking about sanders' fundraising as a good thing. rather, it should be a red flag. had voters listened to the people that were pointing out that obama was working for goldman sachs, we might have avoided electing him.

i think it's very important that people know where he's getting that money from. as mentioned: i was expecting them to come in and fund somebody to knock hillary out. i'm a little shellshocked that this person appears to be bernie sanders. but, i guess we all have a price.

i don't want to go through this again. the liberal media has a responsibility to vet his funding sources, and get the information out there.

i'm not saying hillary is a great choice. i'm saying i don't want to go through another wall street commercial for hope and change and end up with the heritage foundation dictating policy again.

imagine forcing everybody to go to college, or pay a fine.

i'm going to take a middle position on this. i'll argue that raising the minimum wage doesn't have an effect on jobs, but it's to a point, of course. i think that more to the point is that, somewhere along the way, we have to agree that what we call the "living wage" should not be the minimum wage - but also that there should be more living wage jobs and less minimum wage jobs. i think that we need to apply a needs-based model to get to a fair answer here. market economics aren't capable of really addressing this, as they gloss over too many details and they're approaching the issue from the wrong perspective.

the idea behind calculating the living wage is sound. lots of people have families. they require a certain amount of income to exist. wages in some sense should reflect what they need. i don't argue with this, and i agree that these are calculations that need to be done to create policies that need to be implemented.

however, the truth is that the labour force is full of plenty of people that don't have families. young people. people that are single. i'm from ontario, and we're relatively progressive, but the minimum wage has still always been considerably less than the living wage, as it's calculated here - and that varies from city to city. even so, the truth is that i've never had a problem making ends meet on minimum wage. but, there's lots of factors with that. i don't pay for cable. i don't have kids. i walk, bike or take public transportation; i don't have a car. etc. nor do i want any of these things, nor would increasing my income incentivize me to want any of these things. what the living wage calculation is missing is that i represent a fairly large fraction of the workforce; the truth is that it really doesn't make a lot of sense to pay me a minimum wage that is calculated as the minimum required for a single mother to live in a city with a car, because i'm not a single mother with a car and never will be. that's almost twice what i really need. as a rational agent, i wouldn't turn down the money. but, the truth is that i'm going to spend it on concerts and guitar effects. which is good for the economy and everything. but the point is clear. what i require as a minimum wage is considerably less than what a single mother would require as a living wage.

if you take a look at the workforce, you realize that a large percentage of minimum wage workers are older people with families. this strikes me as more of a root of the problem. there has to be way to find better jobs for these people, that pay living wages - and allow me to continue flying solo rather comfortably on the minimum wage.

so, if this is an issue for federal politics, it reduces to the need for a better jobs strategy, rather than a mandated wage increase. and, if that is deemed impossible, i'm left with the conclusion that there ought to be a legislative framework that determines salaries based on needs - and restricts discrimination on the point with the highest penalties. it's very much in contradiction with liberal market values, but i'm sorry - if i'm working the same job as a mother with two kids, you really ought to be paying her twice as much as you're paying me.

even if that's not something anybody wants to jump at, it's still not really a federal issue, because the living wage is dramatically different across the country. the only way it becomes a federal issue is if the legislation mandates action at a state or even municipal level. and, while my understanding of the united states constitution is weaker than my understanding of the canadan constitution, i'm pretty sure it's unconstitutional for the president to pass a law telling the states to pass a law.

so, i think this needs to be decoupled and approached a lot more subtly. throwing a flat number out there is easy politics, in some sense. i don't think it's good policy.

the strangest thing about this is that tony banks manages to look like the archetype of the 80s pop geek - in 1972. at least you can't accuse him of following a bad fashion trend.

the return of the giant hogweed

news reports are indicating that the giant hogweed is currently invading canada, and is indeed immune to our herbicidal battering. warnings have been produced that children should be aware of their presence. can we charge the plants with nursery crimes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f59EKHdeyKc