This post is intended to fill a void on Google that does not, as yet, have a non-partisan summary of the basic facts about the candidates running in the Parkdale-Highpark riding in the 2011 Ontario Election. I will not offer any commentary here but sha…
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Progressive Proselytizing: On Political Correctness
I am always somewhat bemused that in today’s usage the expression ‘political correctness’ is overwhelmingly considered a pejorative. One might accuse somebody else of being racist or sexist, but one would hardly accuse them of the crime of political in…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Mandatory Sentences Really Mean Mandatory
Canada’s top legal group, the Canadian Bar Association, was not exactly kind to Harper’s approach to crime in its recent annual conference. It identified many issues from overcrowding to the rates of mentally ill in the prison system. But the issue tha…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: On ‘Ritual Nick’ or ‘Pinprick’ Female Circumcision
Whenever the topic of female genital mutilation or circumcision is brought up, most people experience a poignant and visceral reaction at the mere thought of such atrocity. Almost everything to do with female circumcision is to be strongly rejected, bu…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Ontario Election 2011: This is, and must be, a referendum on green energy
In all of North America, Ontario is unique in its approach and scale of tackling the dual problems of declining cheap fossil fuel availability and global warming. It has implemented North America’s highest rates for feed-in-tariffs, a program that pays…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: What Global Warming And Abortion Have In Common
When trying to understand the political landscape it is often useful to figure out the various couplings and interdependencies between superficially disparate political positions. Politics divides itself into widespread factions, or parties, where ea…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The Debt Deal and Defense Spending
Defense spending factors into the recent deal to avert the entirely political debt “crisis” in a couple of ways. Firstly, amazingly, the deal actually increases defense spending in a certain sense. Given the wind down in Iraq and proposed end of Afghan…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: A not so clever move in a broken political game
Previously: A clever move in a broken political game
Unlike a couple weeks ago, the Aug 2nd deadline really, really, is approaching fast. There was a time when playing empty political games to try and win a bit of public opinion was, perhaps, even log…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Religion’s Changing Domain of Knowledge
Religion has long claimed ultimate Truth in two differing domains of knowledge: what is, and what ought to be; descriptive and normative; knowledge about the nature of the universe and knowledge of the morality of the universe. But these claims to know…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Oslo vs Tuscan: Asymmetric Reactions
When Jared Loughner shot dead six people in Tuscan in an attempted murder of congresswoman Gabby Giffords, there was several interesting reactions outside of the obviously deserved expressions of sympathy and horror at the tragedy. It is worth comparin…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: My Central Tension in Moral Philosophy
It would be nice to be able to say that my moral leanings followed a consistent system of moral belief and didn’t leave central questions such as the source of morality unanswered. Were that the case, it might superficially lend credence to the weight …
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Marriage Equality, Obama, Jurisdiction
Which of these sounds like a true leader, a president one can get behind: the man who strongly and emphatically declares what he thinks is morally right and acts accordingly, or the man who tries to make enough small improvements in the right direction…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Hate Speech, Religious Freedoms, and Islamophobia
Competing with the concurrent LGBT Pride parade in Toronto, a local imam took it upon himself to very publicly condemn homosexuality, referencing how Islamic law instructs us to execute those caught in the act. Sigh, it really would be so much easier d…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: On Cultural and Technological Selection
In my previous post, regarding the Hydraulic Thesis’s role in history, I referred somewhat vaguely to the idea of competitive pressures selecting for groups that had adopted the more advantageous hydraulic technologies. Comparisons with Darwinian biolo…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: A clever move in a broken political game
The “negotiations” surrounding raising the debt limit in the United States is a particularly poignant example of the oh-too-funny-if-not-so-serious circus of partisan, brinkmanship showboating that dominants so much of American politics. It is hard to …
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: A Canadian Republic (with a new anthem to boot)
It is worth remembering, every once in a while, that Canada remains a constitutional monarchy. Precisely because the monarchy has no de facto power, most of us – myself included – rarely give it much thought and when we do it is of a mild form of bemus…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Middle powers, Great Powers, and incentives in war
Many, but certainly not all, US led military campaigns share a common element: a widespread international coalition that supports and participates in the campaigns. We will see that it is two motivations – the need for legitimacy among the leaders an…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Incentives in Prosecuting Dictators
The International Criminal Court has recently sought the arrest of Qaddafi, and others in the Libyan regime, for crimes against humanity. Justified, surely, but is this move wise? To answer the broader questions about charging dictators in internationa…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: On the Hydraulic Thesis
The Hydraulic Thesis is related to the interplay between the rise of states in certain societies and the production of large scale irrigation and other ‘hydraulic’ systems that increase per area food production. Historically we see there is a loose tem…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Afghan public opinion and it’s consequences
If we care about the Afghan people, and if we believe in democracy as a normative system for determining what is best for a people, it becomes imperative when conducting a unilateral action such as war that we learn what the Afghan people actually thin…
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