RT'ing Andrew Coyne

The Short Parliament

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, December 30, 2009 - 59 Comments

As Canadian democracy spirals further down the drain:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will prorogue Parliament Wednesday for a two-month break.

The House of Commons and the Senate will come back in March, after the Vancouver Olympics, for a Speech from the Throne and a budget. The move will have the effect of stalling all bills currently in Parliament, including crime bills that the government had said were being delayed by the opposition.

A post-Olympic return would also shut down government committees, which would stop MPs from pursuing the Afghan detainee controversy until Parliament returned.

Question: In what other democracy is it permissible for the government of the day to hide from the legislature for months at a time? To ignore explicit parliamentary votes demanding the production of documents? To stonewall independent inquiries? Perhaps the rules allow it elsewhere, but is it the practice? Does convention not still forbid it? Is it not viewed in other countries as dictatorial behaviour, and therefore, you know … not done?

So, rather than submit himself to the inquiries of elected parliamentarians, the King will dismiss Parliament, in the grand tradition of kings past. The question is: what will Parliament do now? If historical precedent is any guide, it should meet anyway. Let those MPs who wish to do the people’s business convene on the usual timetable, and let those with other loyalties disport themselves as they may.

If MPs are barred at the doors to Parliament — and wouldn’t that be an interesting scene — let them meet somewhere else. A tennis court would do nicely.

I'm afraid of engineers

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"Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mindset among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society, and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote."

This has totally been the decade of "you can't make this shit up".

"Expect to hear a lot about the fact that America's Transportation Security Administration is currently leaderless. Talking Points Memo says that's because Sen. Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, has blocked the confirmation of a prospective head for the agency. Mr DeMint says he's blocking the confirmation because the nominee won't say whether or not he will support TSA screeners' attempts to form a union. In any case, Democrats plan to force a vote on the issue when members of Congress return to Washington next month."

Everyone should read this, srsly

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23519

"For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste. Consider the 1996 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act' (a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive), the Clinton-era legislation that sought to gut welfare provision here in the US. The terms of this act should put us in mind of another act, passed in England nearly two centuries ago: the New Poor Law of 1834. The provisions of the New Poor Law are familiar to us, thanks to Charles Dickens's depiction of its workings in Oliver Twist. When Noah Claypole famously sneers at little Oliver, calling him 'Work'us' ('Workhouse'), he is implying, for 1838, precisely what we convey today when we speak disparagingly of 'welfare queens.' The New Poor Law was an outrage, forcing the indigent and the unemployed to choose between work at any wage, however low, and the humiliation of the workhouse. Here and in most other forms of nineteenth-century public assistance (still thought of and described as "charity"), the level of aid and support was calibrated so as to be less appealing than the worst available alternative. This system drew on classical economic theories that denied the very possibility of unemployment in an efficient market: if wages fell low enough and there was no attractive alternative to work, everyone would find a job. For the next 150 years, reformers strove to replace such demeaning practices. In due course, the New Poor Law and its foreign analogues were succeeded by the public provision of assistance as a matter of right. Workless citizens were no longer deemed any the less deserving for that; they were not penalized for their condition nor were implicit aspersions cast upon their good standing as members of society. More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-twentieth century established the profound impropriety of defining civic status as a function of economic participation. In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens. [...] Conversely, it is not humiliating to be on the receiving end of a right. If you are entitled to unemployment payments, pension, disability, municipal housing, or any other publicly furnished assistance as of right—without anyone investigating to determine whether you have sunk low enough to 'deserve' help—then you will not be embarrassed to accept it. However, such universal rights and entitlements are expensive. But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify 'humiliation'? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers? [...] The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments."

Are Americans a Broken People?

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"Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt. [...] Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable. Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, 'often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults.' An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the 'disease' goes away. When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a 'passive-aggressive revolution' by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution. Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the 'Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy'. Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.