Canada’s Debate

They said it couldn’t be done, but I didn’t take “said it couldn’t be done” for an answer!

That’s right. Turns out that with a little bit of rejigging with Joomla’s category and link setups I was able to incorporate all of the necessary features for the Canadian Bloggers’ Congress webpage, and do it two weeks ahead of schedule. There are still some minor details that I need to work out, and I do have other features that I would like to incorporate when I have the time and expertise to do so, but for now it is what it is.

This of course means that it’s time to get my shit together and get it actually running. For that, I need three things:

1. A final site name
2. A matching domain name
3. Participation

The first one I will put to the public. The new poll is pretty straightforward… if you vote for other please leave your suggestion in this discussion. The domain I will register as soon as I have the name settled (and the migration shouldn’t take too long at all); which of course leaves the tricky part: participation. (more…)

Ontario’s federal transfers will skyrocketed by $1.1 billion, from $11.65 billion in 2006-07 to $12.76 billion in 2007-08. The news is even better for McGuinty – and Harper - next fiscal year, when transfers from Ottawa will increase by another $1.23 billion to $13.97 billion.

Link.

This reads more like a passage from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy than a genuine newspaper article: Had you will have been looking forward to it?

Such is the state of journalism nowadays.

Apologies for not posting yesterday. Dreamhost has apparently dropped the ball, and I’ve been having server problems all weekend long.

With the “please God don’t vote for the Liberals” budget set to drop, I find myself curiously disinterested. Rather, I find myself turning towards this story, appearing today in the New York Times:

Cloistered by two decades of war and then the strict Islamic rule of the Taliban, Afghanistan was long shielded from the ravages of the AIDS pandemic. Not anymore.

H.I.V. and AIDS have quietly arrived in this land of a thousand calamities. They remain almost completely underground, shrouded in ignorance and stigma as the government struggles with the help of American and NATO forces to rebuild the country in the face of a new offensive by Taliban insurgents.

This is a subject I’ve written about in the past, although mostly in a speculative fashion. The tragedy of AIDS is one that has been told by countless others, but the connection between infection and morality is a subject that usually triggers stronger passions than arguments. The argument often goes that the prevalence of AIDS is a function of weak or relaxed moral laws and attitudes. This argument unfortunately ignores the case of AIDS in the Arab world, a growing calamity with a shrinking spotlight.

In 1995, for example, Indonesia’s Council of Ulemas urged that condoms only be sold to married couples with prescriptions from general practitioners. It was felt that strong religious convictions would prevent people from having extramarital sex. Members of the international public health community, for their part, have not only seemed to accept the presumptions behind those arguments but on occasion have also espoused them. As recently as February, an official Pakistan’s National AIDS Control Programme asserted that HIV prevalence was lower in Pakistan than in other countries thanks largely to “better social and Islamic values.”

I don’t have much to contribute to the AIDS debate, either in terms of perspective or discourse, but if there’s one thing that I can do it’s fault specious reasoning from a mile away; and the foolish notion that strong social morals informed by religion can innoculate a society from AIDS is a prime example. Whenever someone makes such an argument I invite you to refer them to this passage from July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Policy:

An instructive tale for the Muslim world lies in the differing responses to HIV/AIDS in Thailand and South Africa. Int he early 1990s, both countries had an official national prevalence of between 2 and 3 percent. Thailand embarked on an aggressive anti-HIV campaign that reached all sectors of society…. As a result of this campaign, HIV rates remained low throughout the 1990s. By comparison, South Africa did little to halt the spread of HIV until the dawn of this millennium and now has the nightmarish task of controlling a disease that already infects nearly a quarter of its adult population.

Well, my skin is almost done for the Bloggers’ Congress. It’s still pretty primitive, but I can bring myself to look at it while I develop the content and functionality. I still intend to launch by the end of the month.

PS: If someone can suggest a good RSS feed that I can use on the frontpage for Federal political news I’m all ears, the Government of Canada one doesn’t seem to load properly so I’m stuck using the CBC’s national feed.

The relationship between democracy and freedom is a very deep one, but the two are not the same. Never have been, and never will be. It is entirely possible to have democracy without freedom… so, the question remains, is it possible to have freedom without democracy, or more pointedly, is it possible to have democracy with no freedom? The reason I ask is simple. For the past thirty years the West (and the United States has led the charge) has been trying to fashion Democracy wherever it could. I use Democracy to denote a specific iteration of democratic government: a stable political regime with formalized public institutions, that is open to Western interests, and features enough participation to dispel potential social upheaval.

Now, whenever someone talks about “spreading democracy” they either do so in terms of benevolence or extreme distrust, but the reality of the “project” is much less idealistic. The truth is that western liberal democracy seeks to replicate itself in the same way that Communism does. Those in power in our democracies view them as the pinnacle of social development and naturally seek to replicate that success elsewhere.

So lets talk about freedom for a bit. There are two “types” of freedom employed by the Political analyst crowd: Political Freedom and Economic freedom… and while nobody knows the formula itself, the idea is that real democracy isn’t necessary so long as there is sufficient freedom of one sort or another. (more…)

Well, I’ve got the bare-bones of the Bloggers’ Congress online at congress.canadasdebate.com. The layout is still a bit rough, but I think I can polish it off pretty much completely over the next four or five days. I am of course always taking suggestions or contributions (technical or artistic, not financial.)

Once I’ve finished the design I can move forward and try to figure out how to make it actually work the way that it does in convoluted imagination. Stay tuned…

Well it appears the debate over the NDP’s place in the Canadian political landscape has graduated from the blogosphere to the front-pages and party caucuses. Two stories have broken this which are worth noting. First, an NDP MP has called for the party to “Unite The Left” somehow…

The federal New Democratic Party may have to enter into “some kind of informal coalition” with the Liberals or risk political obscurity, says a veteran NDP MP.

“It shouldn’t be considered heresy to state the obvious,” Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre) told the Toronto Star yesterday, adding that the next election will be a make-or-break moment for the NDP.

This is of course in response to Jack Layton’s earlier comments that:

Contrary to one of his caucus members who suggested the NDP may be doomed to oblivion, New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton said Tuesday the party is playing “a very important role” in the second minority government in a row.

Just days before a federal budget Layton said the NDP forced the previous Liberal government to make budget concessions and is influencing the current government’s economic and environment policy.

While I won’t bother trying to merit the ideological merits of the NDP party, we can evaluate this idea that the NDP as it is currently run is able to influence government policy. While in the most literal sense this is true, Layton has been able to extract some moderate concessions from Harper and Martin in the past, the reality is that he has about as much influence as a child whining for more allowance. (more…)

I’ve got nothing. Nada, zilch, zero… Call it complete political burnout. I can’t muster any sort of enthusiasm or interest in politics today. Apologies all around. Anyone else ever get this feeling?