Lorne over at Politics and its Discontents posted an excellent essay today on the decline of democracy that is occurring in part because of the death of newspapers and professional journalism in general. I have been thinking a lot lately about the othe…
Continue readingAuthor: Kirby Evans
kirbycairo: Capitalism’s Crisis . . . .
Economic and political instability are often impulses to change. Long waves of capitalism (originally outlined by Nikolai Kondratiev and then taken up by thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Ernest Mandel) have low and hi points. When you are headed to …
Continue readingkirbycairo: Whither Democracy ?
I think that there is little doubt that Western democracy has ‘lost it’s way’ a little bit, or is a state of increasing crisis. The roots of this crisis are, ironically, not in the politics of democracy per se, but in the economic path of Western Capit…
Continue readingkirbycairo: The Real Weakness of the Rightwing. . .
It seems that an increasing number of people are beginning to see the irony (and correlate hypocrisy) in the rightwing messaging around the issue of ‘terrorism.’ The right continually tells us that we have to be ‘strong’ and that we can’t be …
Continue readingkirbycairo: Aesthetic Politics and the new (neo) Liberal Era. . . . .
In the modern era particularly since the Victorian times onward, politics has been a surprisingly aesthetic matter. This is because the rich and powerful people who overwhelmingly control government and politics in Western democracies are dependent on a largely lazy and ill-informed public to continually ratify and legitimize the continued
Continue readingkirbycairo: Affirmative Action, Merit, and Wealthy, Middle-Aged White Men. . .
Sometimes I think of Andrew Coyne as our national poster child for intellectual impairment. There are, as we are painfully aware, certainly more obtuse, dim-witted individuals on the national political and journalistic scene than Mr. Coyne. But more of these, such as Margaret Wente for example, are so thick that
Continue readingkirbycairo: Political Irony and Emotional Intelligence. . . .
It is interesting that it is only in the wake of Harper’s downfall that the full weight of the irony involved in the decade of Conservative rule begins to become clear to many. The last time a conservative party lost their federal majority they lost not only to the Liberal
Continue readingkirbycairo: Did we Reject Harper or his Agenda?
On the back side of an election loss the Conservative Party is desperately trying to spin a narrative that Canadians rejected Harper but not his rightwing agenda. We should be quick to disabuse the Conservative Criminals of that myth. The fact is that Canadians always rejected the Conservative Party agenda.
Continue readingkirbycairo: Going Forward after Harper’s Destruction of the Public Sphere. . . .
In the 1960s the German philosopher Jugen Habermas wrote a book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. When this book was finally translated around 1990 it helped to spark significant debate in the Anglophone world about what we usually refer to as Civil Society. It is a vague,
Continue readingkirbycairo: The Mediaeval Agenda of Conservatives. . .
I know people are probably too involved in election day to bother reading too many blogposts but as I read through the Blogging Tories posts to see how the Rightwing faithful were reacting to the failure of their savour, I ran across an interesting blogpost that really expresses just how
Continue readingkirbycairo: The Bizarre, not so Bizarre, Globe endorsement. . .
Surely the most bizarre culmination of the ten years of Harper’s political tenure was seen yesterday with the Globe and Mail’s surreal endorsement of the Conservative Party with the addendum that Harper should resign as soon as he has been handed an election victory. One can only imagine that this
Continue readingkirbycairo: Irony Impairment and the HarperCons. . . .
Well, so far this campaign has, at the very least, been interesting. As the ‘dump Harper’ forces cheer at what the polls seem to suggest is a late surge for the Liberals and stagnation of the Cons (depending on which polls you look at), the HarperCons are ratcheting up the
Continue readingkirbycairo: Harper and Godwin’s Law. . .
All comparisons are, by their nature, imperfect. You can only compare things because they are, in one sense or another, dissimilar. If two things were the same, they would afford no comparison; pointing out an endless list of similarities does not a comparison make. Comparing disparate objects or actions is
Continue readingkirbycairo: The Real Threat of Harper . . .
As we inch toward Election day and the NDP looks to be out of the running and much the anti-Harper vote edges toward the Liberals, many people are, I believe, soul-searching. Despite its turn to the Right in recent years, it seems clear that the NDP is definitely left of
Continue readingkirbycairo: Harper’s Poisoning of the Nation. . .
When I was seven or eight years old and living in California, I went on a school trip to a public swimming pool. Such experiences should be the material of pleasant childhood memories, but this one was memorable for more than a playful day in the water. There was a
Continue readingkirbycairo: The Fight Against Racism and Bigotry Continues. . .
Racists, even the worst, most blatant sort, tend to look for justifications for their hate. The most ignorant forms of racism rely on very basic forms of hate speech, reducing its targets to a non-human-status or mere animal. Primitive racists alienate ‘the other’ by calling them ‘savages’ or ‘lazy’ or
Continue readingkirbycairo: Political Shifts and the (apparent) Falling fortunes of the NDP . . . .
The apparent gradual decline in NDP fortunes over the course of this gruellingly long campaign has carried a morbid fascination for me. As polls stand today, the NDP are thoroughly out of this race now (at least in terms of forming government), the Liberal Party seems to be on the
Continue readingkirbycairo: We Have Met the Enemy. . .
An important part of my youth was spent in the United States in the 60s and 70s. I grew up against the backdrop of the fight to end legal segregation and the racism that was at its root. I was never, I don’t think, naive enough to believe that I
Continue readingkirbycairo: Harper’s Fear of the "other" . . .
The various racializing tropes to which Harper and his minions have begun to appeal in a desperate attempt to win the election (“UnCanadian,” “Old-Stock,” “Our Values,”) are intended as ‘power-markers.’ They mark off the power relations between an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ generating a passionate defence of certain perceived identities
Continue readingkirbycairo: More on the Question of Freedom and the Niqab. . .
It is interesting and bizarre to me how the foot-soldiers of the rightwing have continually railed against the so-called “nanny-state” and yet they are the first to call for state intervention when they find something that they don’t like. They don’t want the state to tell them that they can’t,
Continue reading