Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Greg picks up on some of the positives of the NDP's youthful new caucus. But the appeal should be broader than campus outreach: after all, what better contrast could one build to a theme of "tired old politics" than to be able to point to plenty of bright, young MPs as the future of both the NDP and the country?

- Meanwhile, in the department of old and outdated politics, Brigitte Alepin notes how tax laws have utterly failed to keep up with widespread evasion techniques. And the answer is to coordinate on laws and enforcement mechanisms, not to buy the corporatist line that we should instead give up on taxing wealthy individuals or businesses or entirely.

- Have you prostrated yourself sufficiently before your Conservative overlords? Apparently Michael Ignatieff hasn't.

- Finally, while I don't agree with all of Sixth Estate's analysis, I'll heartily endorse this suggestion as to how we can put the wave of interest in politics to good use:
For the moment the Internet is considerably more democratic than the rest of the media. That gives us some room to move, and about the only good thing about a majority is that we can say for certain we have time to work with. There will be at least one more election in Canada — contrary to what some scared people are saying, there will probably be many more. This is good, because the core Harper team is so demonstrably, inexplicably corrupt and incompetent (batting one for three against the weakest Liberal leaders in generations) that there is a very real chance this party will spectacularly self-destruct in the future, much like the Tories did in 1993 and in 1935. We’ve got until that happens to change the political climate of this country so that whoever replaces him is forced to make real reforms, not just mouth platitudes and turn his back on the electorate like, say, Barack Obama.

I don’t want to understate the magnitude of the problem. It’s very serious. The media are openly arrayed in favour of Conservative government because it is pro-business and because it has mastered the art of simple, misleading, headline-driven stories. The polling system makes coordination vital, to an extent that progressive and centrist Canadians are going to have extreme difficulty. And we’re running out of time, probably no matter what Canada does...

But I also think it would be wrong to underestimate the tools we have available to us. Right now it is a trivial matter for me or another blogger to build a site that could be read by every politically conscious Canadian on a regular basis. Not that every politically conscious Canadian would want to, of course. But it could be done. When it comes to information and communication, the technical disparity between elites and dissidents is now lower than it has been in literally thousands of years. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the failed revolutions in Iran, Bahrain, and several other countries, are a testament to this. And we don’t have to worry about the army shooting at us, like they did. The problem we have is coordinating our efforts and getting people to notice. Those are big problems, but not as big as the problem the Internet solved for us in the first place.

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