No Federal Childcare Program: An Exercise In Strengthening Hegemony
Canada, a nation among the wealthiest in the world, cannot meet its daycare needs. The problem has grown to crisis proportions in the country’s largest cities. In Toronto there are…
political theory
Beyond the ‘Republican’ Economy: Hayek and Pettit on Private Property
Republican political theorists have spilled a lot of ink in the attempt to present ‘republicanism’ as a distinctive alternative to liberalism. The landmark book is, of course, Philip Pettit’s Republicanism:…
New studies show babies have basically decent impulses and are strongly driven by moral imperatives
More research shows once again that compassion, empathy and mutual aid, and an instinct toward cooperation, are innate in human beings, confirming what the great Russian biologist and anarchist philosopher…
New studies show generosity and cooperation are both natural and intelligent
A new study shows a mathematical proof that generosity leads to evolutionary success. Biologists offer a mathematically based explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature “Ever since…
Love, sympathy and mutual aid are natural – we have to be taught to be greedy little narcissists
During a California wildfire rescue workers ran out of crates to place rescued animals, forcing them to put a fawn and a bobcat kitten in an office together. When they…
Debt and Democracy
While this was written by Cicero in 44 BCE, after the assassination of Caesar and a year before Antony had Cicero murdered, the sentiment can be heard in today republicans–particularly…
Liberty: Revealing J.S. Mill As A Visionary And J.J Rousseau As A Totalitarian
By Joe Fantauzzi @jjfantauzzi At the core of many modern democracies is the concept of freedom. Variations of the word “free” appear 27 times in the text of Canada’s Charter…
Saturday Afternoon Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Toby Sanger asks who really bears the risk when governments agree to hand over billions to the private sector through P3 arrangements:…
A Q&A on Syria and the “Responsibility to Protect”
What is “Responsibility to Protect”? “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P, is a doctrine that grew out of a 2001 report by the Canadian-established International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty…
Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that to end your weekend. – Dave Coles introduces readers to the Cons’ latest attack on labour – with a backbencher’s private member’s bill again serving as an…
Top Priorities of the 21st Century
If I were asked what I felt were the top priorities facing human beings today, in the 21st century, I would have to say there are four that top the…
A Socialist’s Lament
Let’s be clear about one thing: the New Democratic Party of Canada was never a socialist party. For all the hands wrung and tears shed over its newly amended constitution,…
A Socialist’s Lament
Let’s be clear about one thing: the New Democratic Party of Canada was never a socialist party. For all the hands wrung and tears shed over its newly amended constitution,…
Reflections on democracy
There is a global war on democracy underway, and if it is not addressed, our future will be bleak. But let us start with the ground work of democracy, and…
Defining a Liberal identity in a narrowing political spectrum
The reality of the narrowing political spectrum in Canada is a huge problem for the Federal Liberals as they go about choosing their next leader. I discussed some of the…
A 30,000 foot view of the Canadian political landscape
In this post I investigate the 30,000 foot view of the Canadian political landscape, and consider various factors for what I consider to be a defining political trend of the…
False Flags and Vapour Trails: Reflections on Conspiracy Theory
Yesterday, I attended a talk here in Vancouver by author and activist Yves Engler, promoting his latest book The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy. While the talk was very…
Has Centralization of Power to the PMO Put Canadian Democracy on Life Support?
Don Lenihan has a must-read column up today, on how centralization of power to the Prime Minister’s office over the past several decades has atrophied the connection Canadians — especially…
The N-Party Problem
There is a famous problem in classical mechanics, a branch of physics, called the n-body problem. While interesting in its own right, the problem can be used as an analogy…
Occupy Wall Street: The emerging global pro-democracy movement, where it stands, what it means, and where we go from here
The Occupy Wall Street movement, which has already become a global grassroots populist pro-democracy movement, if we have eyes to see, has clearly already won a broad and growing base…