Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Stephanie Desmon interviews Ziyad Al-Aly about the danger COVID-19 poses for the heart – even for people with mild cases which have otherwise seemingly run their course. Megan Ogilvie, May Warren and Kenyon Wallace report on new research showing the avoidable risk that unvaccinated people
Continue readingTag: neoliberalism
Northern Currents –: Neoliberal failures expose the need to defund the police
Police cannot ever solve broad social and political problems created by the neglect of the neoliberal state. They will forever be locked in a chase to find more crime which is continuously generated by our economic system. A dog chasing its tail. Alternatives must be found.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Monique Beals reports on Anthony Fauci’s recognition that attacks directed against him are based solely on denialists’ hostility toward the truth, while Mike Baker and Danielle Ivory discuss the U.S.’ public health crisis. And Zak Vescera examines why Saskatchewan’s vaccination rate is so
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Hannah Devlin asks why the UK is accepting a thousand lives a week as the price of incompetence in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. – Meanwhile, Marlene Leung reports on new research showing that surface contact on high-contact areas of grocery stores
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Ricky Leong discusses the complete lack of any reasonable explanation for the UCP’s failure to protect the health of Albertans in the face of the fourth wave of COVID-19. And Murray Mandryk comments that the Sask Party likewise insists on doing too
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – John Michael McGrath highlights how the COVID-19 B.1.617 variant represents a serious threat to the prospect of safely relaxing restrictions over the summer. And Morgan Modjeski reports on the COVID outbreak at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre. – D.T. Cochrane highlights a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Katie Raso describes the coronavirus pandemic as the neoliberal Chernobyl, having exposed how we’re not only unable to respond to a disaster in progress – though it’s worth adding the even more alarming reality that we’re even falling short of consensus as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Tenille Bonogoure writes about the human costs of Canada’s choice to respond to a deadly infectious disease with polite deference rather than a determined effort to stamp it out. Matt Rivers notes that Brazil’s outright denial has led to even worse, including the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Freedom at Any Cost
I believe it’s not a coincidence that the UK, US, and much of Canada – the trio that promoted neoliberal free market politics – are not doing enough to restrict the spread of Covid. The rightwing in our countries (and some centre and left players) still act on the dogmatic
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Leo Panitch, intellectual pillar of the Canadian left, dead at 75 of COVID-19
Leo Victor Panitch, one of the intellectual pillars of the Canadian left and a leading scholar of the global depredations of neoliberalism, died Saturday from COVID-19. He was 75. Born into a working class Jewish family in Winnipeg in 1945, Dr. Panitch was a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit
I haven’t yet read his newest book, but Michael Sandel is everywhere these days promoting his new book. An excerpt from a Guardian interview: Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Greek Philosophy In The 21st Century: Sanity Amidst The Madness?
Platonist, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic, Cynic or Sophist? None of the above are satisfactory, as ready-made off-the-shelf pre-packaged philosophies, at least. They should be studied; not ingested whole, nor regurgitated whole. Plato was best in terms of the ancient Greeks, with regards to metaphysics, on ontology and epistemology, or the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Oh–What’s a Teacher to Do?
Starting next Friday, secondary students in my board will be forced to be in a room with about 15 other students they might not know, many of whom will take off their masks for a 45 minute mid-morning snack deemed necessary to get them through to lunchtime dismissal. They’re not
Continue readingScripturient: Whatever happened to conservatives?
It’s hard to believe these days, but in many nations, conservative political parties were once actually the defenders of the nation’s interests, of the greater good, of the public, and of the state. They weren’t always the corporate shills, protectors of billionaires, privatizing libertarians, lobbyist puppets, Talibangelist lapdogs*, and racists
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Jen Gerson rightly argues that we should be closing bars – and otherwise limiting dangerous contacts within our communities – in order to ensure safer school environments for students this fall. And Jana Pruden discusses how the coronavirus pandemic has forced people
Continue readingAlberta Politics: From us to WE: The Dickensian ‘Big Society’ seems to be back again, if it ever left
Who can forget the “Big Society”? Just about everyone, it turns out. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Photo: Justin Trudeau/Flickr). “The Big Society,” cooked up by a senior aide to former British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, was the ridiculous idea neoliberal governments could shuffle off their key responsibility for assuring
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On McQuaig’s Sport and Prey
Linda McQuaig’s newest book, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, is a fast read full of local history and written as history should be written, as colourful stories about fascinating people! But, in order to try to remember any of it, I’ve whittled
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Thatcher brouhaha: When your slippery opponent’s on the ropes, maybe you should focus on keeping him there!
When you’ve got a slippery political opponent on the ropes with a completely legitimate issue, what’s it profit a New Democrat to stand up in the Legislature and create a massive distraction from the fight the party’s winning with one that has no advantage for it? This is what NDP
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jonathan Aldred highlights how COVID-19 has laid bare the folly of a neoliberal economic structure which encourages insecurity, fragility and illusions of control over the unforeseen. And Merran Smith and Michel Letellier discuss how a rebuilding program centred on clean energy will
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Brink Lindsey discusses what the coronavirus pandemic has revealed about the failings of both libertarian philosophy, and the public sector apparatus left after decades of neoliberal neglect. – Paul Krugman writes that the U.S. is failing the marshmallow test when it comes to
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