The anthropology of blogging (1)

Kate McMillan has sent off her rabid pack again, this time to savage Maclean's Magazine writer Kady O'Malley. O'Malley's sin was to write an article decrying Stephen Harper's plans to establish a media centre in a renovated shoestore on Sparks Street, where the Dear Leader could dole out access to his hagiographers. (Cost to the taxpayer: around $2 million. Thanks to premature publicity afforded us through the Access to Information Act, this plan now appears to be on hold.)

The comments on this post, charmingly entitled "A kitten spits," are genuinely worth looking at, as a window onto a certain political subculture that forms much of Harper's original base. That subculture was not slow to respond.

As usual, McMillan frames the discussion and sets the tone: "You seem to be suffering some confusion as to your professional role. Allow me to clarify - you work on behalf of the media. Before you may claim 'behalf of the people' status, you'll need our permission. Run for office." As in a previous post about Native people ("Mark my words - the moment is approaching when a bandana [sic] prowling these police protected barricades will end up in the crosshairs of someone's high powered rifle"), McMillan pushes the buttons and the machine warms up.

Here the buttons are "kitten," "media" and "our permission." The first is a means of mobilizing the abundant sexism of the subculture. The second is a favourite construction of McMillan's clientele, and signifies "the Other's narratives." The third is an empowering phrase: "our," while ostensibly referring to all of the people of Canada, or at least all of the people in one riding, is assumed as a synechdoche, precisely as intended, referring instead to regular readers of her blog.

The comments bear very little relation to the actual issue that O'Malley introduces. The notion of "permission" establishes a prior power relationship between commenters and O'Malley that short-circuits discussion and moves directly to admonishment, almost entirely of a personal nature. Hence O'Malley is described, sometimes in the second person, as a prostitute, a drunk suffering from a personal relationship gone wrong, an idiot, an "asshat" who is a product of privilege, a nobody, unattractive, a propagandist, a "little kitten," an "Eyes-Wide-Shut" reporter who can't write and whose real job is "sales hack," a "pretentious, brainwashed twenty-something kid," an "affirmative action hired" woman who probably sleeps with her boss, a person without a real job, for whom a "Want fries with that" McJob would be an appropriate lateral move, a person who prefers sounding clever to making sense, a "reporter" (in shudder quotes), a "gossip columnist...posing as a 'reporter,'" an "ego-tripping gasbag" with a "bloated head," a reporter who "cherry-pick[s] facts" to promote "Stalinist policies," a "fifth columnist" whose work amounts to "small scribblings," "unprofessional," "Buffoonette Kady," someone with a "puffed up sense of self-importance," "Kady, dear," "dear Kady," a "leftard," a "teenybopper," a "bleached blonde" who lives in "Mommy's basement," who writes "untalented but stylized drivel," a "drama queen," a "champagne clinker who could care less how many white males lose jobs each year because of affirmative action," and a "useful idiot" who "appeared to have a runny nose the first time I saw her and ...appeared very low maintenance."

Sometimes commenters run into serious contradiction:

If I had my way, those MSM idiots would have zero access, and I would force them to go do their job. You know, investigate and report.

Infantilizing the opposition often goes hand in hand with sexism:

Someone should axe her some hard questions.

Kady's just so damn cute when she's pretending to be all righteous.

Just what do you do with teenaqers [sic] these days?

In some venues, of course, much of this would appear as delirious, psychotic raving. Within the frame that McMillan establishes, however, the comments do possess a consistent logic of their own. It should be remembered that political engagement is not the purpose, either of McMillan's award-winning blog, or of the majority of commenters who post on it. Nor, to any great extent, is analysis the aim. Rather, the blog exists (to use McMillan's own words) to allow "ordinary" Canadians to "[yell] back at the radio." It is a virtual place, in other words, where largely anonymous commentators can react, can vent, can literally make a scene. For the commenters, with McMillan artfully directing, do perform their emotional reaction to the Other in an almost choreographed fashion.

The virtual space provided by McMillan for the performance becomes a place of refuge from the discourses of the "mainstream media," or "MSM." Although it is obvious that, without "MSM" sources, McMillan would have little to blog about and her commenters have little to react to, we have observations such as the following:

Kady is the reason why we go to the blogs, because the msm DOESN'T speak for us!

[There is a] mass exodus away from MSM to blogs.

Long live the blogosphere - an ecosystem of information and opinion.

The problem articulated in one way or another by most commenters is that the media mediate; they believe that they can read between the lines, but their reading is so at odds with the "lines" that they feel and express immense frustration. Yet this "correct" reading against the bias of the "MSM" arrives bundled, as it were, with the mediated message. And the commenters just above would prefer that a further mediation take place, by McMillan and other like-minded bloggers. Any reflection of "reality" would thus pass through two distorting lenses instead of one. But because the expressed values of the bloggers are consistent with those of the commenters, the bloggers' messages are seen as a decoding of the bias, instead of a further recoding of information that originally derives almost entirely from the "MSM" themselves.

It will not be lost on readers that there are cultish elements in the subculture being described here. It is, for one thing, a closed system. Occasional commenters with opposing points of view are inevitably harassed and insulted until they go away. Those who remain serve as an on-going negative reference group for the regulars. The formation of this group around McMillan herself is not in itself surprising, of course, since she provides the space for them, but the fierce loyalty to her that her commenters express, their intolerance of dissent, their evident sense of mission, and the expressed wish (seen above) that she and other like-minded bloggers should become their sole source of information, is characteristic of the classic cult group.

Kady O'Malley, I think it's fair to say, sees herself as having a role, not simply a job. I am not in agreement, let me stress, with her declaration that "We are not typists. We work on behalf of the people, not government." I think that's naive, given the role that the corporate media have in manufacturing assent. A quick glance at their lock-step positioning on the recent Mixed Member Proportional referendum in Ontario should send that one to the compost forthwith. But I cannot challenge her commitment, and that of many other reporters, to digging up information and being personally honest about presenting it to the public. A few head-bangings from editors may harden her, make her more cynical and less forthright, but until then we hear something like a real voice and point of view.

Standing up to cyber-bullies is easy, Ms. O'Malley. Don't sweat the small stuff. Standing up to the relentless groupthink of the corporate media machine is far more challenging and, I suspect, ultimately soul-destroying--for anyone with a soul. Until that day comes, though, I for one wish you well.

Terrorized in New Zealand

Under an anti-terrorism law passed in 2002 (let no one think that New Zealand is behind the times), Māori, environmentalist and peace groups across the country have been raided or "visited" by black-uniformed police. 17 people have been arrested so far, allegedly for taking part in "terrorist training camps." By no coincidence, the raids took place at the same time as the New Zealand government is actively considering strengthening the Terrorism Suppression Act. The best-known of those rounded up is veteran Māori activist Tame Iti, shown in the picture.

Reaction has been swift. "It's not the first time that Māori have been targeted as terrorists," said Māori Party co-leader Tariana Turia. "We know some years ago when Māori people went to Cuba they were accused of terrorism then, nobody's blown up since then."

A number of other commentators have raised serious concerns. Barry Wilson, from the Council for Civil Liberties, noted the suspiciously broad scope of the police action: "[P]eace groups, community groups, anti-mining protesters, the Save Happy Valley coalition" were targeted, he said.

Union officials have pointed to the suspicious timing of the raids. "The police have raised the spectre that there is terrorism involved here... I'm willing to predict now, that that will quietly disappear because they will not have evidence of terrorist activity. In the meantime, they've created this climate of fear in the community, as a way to push forward the latest anti-terrorist legislation," said union organizer John Minto.

A counter-terrorism expert at the University of Canterbury, David Small, put it best: "They say now the public has nothing to fear because they've nipped this in the bud, but raising this whole spectre does create a climate of fear... and this is a way to use and to increase the resources [and] the powers police and the surveillance agencies have got."

Stay tuned: this is going to get interesting. Kia kaha, e Tame.

UPDATE: (October 17) Tame Iti denied bail. Here is part of the backstory: Iti's Tuhoe iwi.

More:

A demonstration against the raids:



Another counter-terrorism expert weighs in.

The criminalization of indigenous protest:

C. The criminalization of indigenous protest activities.

44. One of the more serious human rights protection deficiencies in recent years is the trend towards the use of laws and the justice system to penalize and criminalize social protest activities and legitimate demands made by indigenous organizations and movements in defence of their rights. Reports indicate that these tendencies appear in two guises: the application of emergency legislation such as anti-terrorist laws, and accusing social protesters of common misdemeanors(such as trespassing) to punish social protests. Examples from various parts of the world have come to the attention of the Special Rapporteur.

Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people (E/CN.4/2004/80), COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, Sixtieth session, Item 15 of the provisional agenda, 26 January 2004, para. 44.

And why the new anti-terrorist measures are bad for New Zealand. (H/t Ana from the tino-rangatiratanga listserv)

Don't Tase me, Bro!

Don't taze me bro - Rap Remix
Uploaded by DoobieMusic

Since Tasers are once again in the news...

There's plenty of merchandise and money being made from University of Florida student Andrew Meyer's adventures with the First Amendment a few weeks back, when he tried to ask questions at a public meeting. Anything and everything is a commodity these days, but that's nothing new: that's just capitalism.

Nevertheless, this rap song has its moments.

Political depravity, II

Nothing I can say or write will sum up what passes for U.S. Republican "politics" better than these two.

H/t Cathie from Canada.

Devil in the flesh

Move over, Larry Craig, you of the wide stance: a Vatican official, caught on a hidden TV camera making advances to a young man and telling him that gay sex wasn't really a sin, says he was only pretending to be gay.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico apparently hung around gay chatrooms and gay men a fair bit, but now says that he was gathering information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity." It was unclear what he was going to do with the information, but he is a psychoanalyst by profession. "It's all false; it was a trap," he said. "I was a victim of my own attempts to contribute to cleaning up the Church with my psychoanalyst work."

He was suspended by the Vatican this past Saturday, but spoke up vigorously in his own defence in an interview with La Repubblica. He is reported as saying that he had met with the young man and pretended to talk about homosexuality "to better understand this mysterious and faraway world which, by the fault of a few people — among them some priests — is doing so much harm to the Church."

I'm tempted to ask how one pretends to talk about anything, but no matter. Hearing the tortuous verbal twists and turns deployed by both Father Stenico and Senator Larry Craig, both of them denouncers of all things gay, and both caught, at least figuratively, with their pants down, one has to ask a more pertinent question: wouldn't it have been a lot less trouble in the long run just to come out?

Judicial lynching in Jena

No point mincing words here, and I won't: a cracker judge in the town of Jena, Louisiana, has just sent Mychal Bell, one of the Jena Six, to jail for eighteen months for an alleged "breach of probation." I'm amazed that a white mob hasn't taken the cue and shown up to bust the kid out of jail to give him a "nigger necktie." A caricature? These people caricature themselves. Welcome to the Red State of Louisiana. In 2007.

State District Judge J.P. Mauffrey, Jr., whose decision to try Bell as an adult was overturned recently by a Louisiana appeals court, had another kick at the cat Thursday, and he kicked hard. Bell had been on probation, it seems, for an unrelated juvenile matter. The judge, whose removal from the case had been requested earlier by Bell's attorneys, seized on this opportunity for vengeance, claiming that the charges against Bell, for which a new trial had been ordered by the appeals court, constituted a breach of probation. This 21st century version of Judge William Callaghan (the unlettered hillbilly who sentenced the Scottsboro boys to death in a celebrated miscarriage of justice in the 1930s) also assessed court costs against Bell's struggling parents, who are now facing bankruptcy as a result.

My gut reaction, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this: the demonstrators who went to Jena scant weeks ago to show their disgust at peckerwood justice should have seized and occupied the town until real justice was done. Maybe next time they show up they'll stick around. And may that day come soon.

H/t Mattbastard.

Al Gore's crimes

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Aieee! It burns! The shrieks of pain from the starboard side of the blogosphere have been making me feel as tingly-warm as a sadist with a riding crop. You can almost hear the simultaneous stamping of armies of tiny feet as the Right shifts its attentions away from 12-year-old Graeme Frost (except for Stalkin' Malkin, who just can't let go) and at least picks on someone its own size for a change.

Several simultaneous lines of attack are already in evidence:

1) Gore has been found to have exaggerated in the past;
2) The Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless anyway (and so, for good measure, is the Literature Prize: who reads William Faulkner and Seamus Heaney? Never heard of them);
3) A British judge has found errors and inaccuracies in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth. Give back that Oscar, you...you...you...wretch!

I'm not going to touch (1) and (2). I'm not certain what relevance they have to serious discussion of Gore's achievement or of the quality of his environmental work. But (3) merits a closer look.

Here's the judgement, helpfully posted by a grungy front site for Big Oil and Big Tobacco. (H/t Bruce Rheinstein.)

And here is what has been reported. Variations of this may be found all over the internet, and enshrined in various jeering posts on the right side of the blogosphere.

So let's have a close peek at the judgement, arising from an action by a right-wing party operative who brought the case under the 1996 Education Act (Sections 406 and 407). The point at issue was whether An Inconvenient Truth, distributed to all UK secondary schools by the government, constituted "political indoctrination" under the law.

Much has been made of the guidance notes that the judge was reported to have insisted be created to accompany the film. It turns out that there were always guidance notes, on a website to which the teachers showing the film were directed. The judge conceded that this had led to appropriate in-school discussions of global warming, but he was of the opinion that these notes should accompany the course pack in hard copy. And he agreed with the plaintiff that these notes should include reference to nine "errors" (the quotation marks are the judge's, not mine) that had been identified in the course of the film.

Before getting into the substance of these errors, however, we should note two matters of interest. First, the judge found that the film "is substantially founded upon scientific research and fact...." He quotes the lawyer for the defence, Mr. Chamberlain:

"The Film advances four main scientific hypotheses, each
of which is very well supported by research published in
respected, peer-reviewed journals and accords with the
latest conclusions of the IPCC:

(1) global average temperatures have been rising
significantly over the past half century and are likely to
continue to rise (“climate change”);
(2) climate change is mainly attributable to man-made
emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide
(“greenhouse gases”);
(3) climate change will, if unchecked, have significant
adverse effects on the world and its populations; and
(4) there are measures which individuals and
governments can take which will help to reduce climate
change or mitigate its effects."

These propositions, Mr Chamberlain submits (and I accept), are supported by a vast quantity of research published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide and by the great majority of the world’s climate scientists. [emphasis mine--DD]

And the judge notes further on that the lawyer for the plaintiff, Mr. Downes, "was prepared to accept that the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report represented the present scientific consensus." Indeed, where Gore comes in for criticism is in his alleged departures from that scientific consensus. As for global warming deniers, the judge cites an earlier court judgment: "[T]he High Court has made clear the law does not require teaching staff to adopt a position of neutrality between views which accord with the great majority of scientific opinion and those which do not."

So far, then, there is not a lot of aid or comfort here for the deniers, to put it mildly. But little of this has filtered into the media, and none has made it into the right-wing cheering section of the blogosphere. The focus instead has been upon the nine "errors." So let's have a look at them:

"Error" 1: "Sea level rise of up to 20 feet (7 metres) will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland in the near future."

But the passage from the film to which he refers says absolutely nothing about "the near future." It simply refers to what the results of the melting of these ice-masses would be. So the judge's statement that this constitutes "alarmism" is not founded. It is the judge's inference that Gore "suggests" this will happen in "the near future," but nowhere in the film is this stated.

"Error 2": "Low lying inhabited Pacific atolls are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming."

The judge takes issue with the following: "In scene 20, Mr. Gore states 'that’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.' There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened."

Well, not so fast. The citizens of Tuvalu are already beginning to emigrate to New Zealand as their island sinks into the Pacific. Resettlement of the entire population is envisioned by the Prime Minister of Tuvalu. (The Maldives are also under threat, although, unlike the Tuvaluans, the population has no immediate place to flee.) The Tech Central Station deniers, of course, claim that the sea level isn't rising at all, and that misuse of the land is responsible for the Tuvaluans' troubles. They quote a Tuvaluan official:

An environmental official of Tuvalu, Elisala Pita, is concerned with the alarmism of western eco-imperialists. In an interview in the Canadian Globe and Mail on November 24, Pita says that, "This [coastal] erosion is caused by man-made infrastructure. Tuvalu is being used for the issue of climate change. People are telling all these lies, just using Tuvalu to prove their point. No island is sinking. Tuvalu is not sinking. It is still floating."

How very odd. At almost exactly the same time, the government of Tuvalu announced its intention to sue the US and Australia because of their contributions to global warming.

In other words, Gore was not entirely accurate--but not all that inaccurate either.

"Error" 3: "Shutting down of the 'Ocean Conveyor.'"

This is the Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is actually slowing down significantly--by 30% between 1957 and 2004. The judge is right to state that the IPCC does not predict a complete shut-down in this century. But Gore doesn't actually say that it will happen either: he does suggest that the melting of the Greenland ice-cap is something to worry about. This is hardly political indoctrination.

"Error 4": "Direct coincidence between rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and in temperature, by reference to two graphs."

Gore makes this claim, the judge says, by means of ridiculing those who are sceptical of a correlation between increasing levels of CO2 and rising temperatures. "Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection," says the judge, "the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts."

In other words, Gore was wrong to assert (if he did so, indirectly) that the connection is an exact fit, but right to assert that a connection exists.

"Error 5": "The snows of Kilimanjaro."

The judge says there is insufficient evidence that the retreating of the snow on this mountain is due to androgenic global warming. He may, indeed, be correct: two researchers who do support the notion that global warming is causing glacier melt-offs believe that the Kilimanjaro snow cap is melting for other reasons. But this would appear to be anything but a settled question, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor: "Regardless of what may have triggered the glacier's shrinkage, researchers say global warming is a plausible, if not fully verified, reason for its accelerating disappearance."

So Gore is overstating the case, but there is indeed a case.

"Error 6": "Lake Chad etc."

The drying up of Lake Chad, once the sixth-largest lake in the world, is quite probably due to factors other than global warming. This is a bona fide error on Gore's part.

"Error 7": "Hurricane Katrina."

The judge says that there is insufficient evidence to blame Hurricane Katrina on global warming. He is right: this is only one event. However, there is strong evidence that a a rise in greenhouse gases leads to an increase in ocean temperatures, and that the latter increases the destructiveness of hurricanes.

Gore, therefore, is wrong on the particular point, but, on the evidence, right on the implied general one.

"Error 8": "Death of polar bears."

The judge is sceptical of the claim that global warming causes the drowning of polar bears, as the film asserts. The only deaths of polar bears before him was a report of four drownings after a storm. But there is more to it. The Wall Street Journal reports that the population of polar bears in western Hudson's Bay dropped by 22%, from 1,194 in 1987 to 935 in 2004. An unusually large number of bears has congregated along the Beaufort Sea beaches between Alaska and the Canadian border due to melting ice, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Again, if Gore is wrong about observed drownings [and he is on pretty firm ground here--DD], he is clearly correct that polar bears are suffering the effects of global warming. The judge is simply quibbling here.

"Error 9": "Coral reefs."

The judge is sceptical that coral reefs are bleaching due to global warming, but he doesn't actually say Gore is wrong on this matter at all. He cites the IPCC to the effect that separating climate change from other factors such as overfishing and pollution is "difficult." But that's not the same thing. In fact in this instance it is the judge himself who is plainly wrong, if he is actually suggesting that other factors could be responsible for the bleaching all by themselves. The bleaching of coral reefs due to rising ocean temperatures caused by global warming is undisputed. One for Mr. Gore.

So let's sum up. The judgement, trumpeted by the "climate sceptics," is unfriendly to their position. The IPCC, ridiculed by the sceptics, serves as the judge's point of reference. His criticisms of the film, when examined, amount to mere nit-picking, and are not always right. An Inconvenient Truth remains standing, barely a scratch on it.

So keep the Oscar, Al, and congratulations on the Nobel. Your film will continue to raise popular consciousness about global warming. And for the petrochemical industry and its flat-earther political shills, this is all too damned inconvenient. Hence the screaming: try not to enjoy it.

UPDATE: (October 14) More discussion of Gore's "errors" here. H/t Chet Scoville. And of dim-witted journalistic hackery here.

UPPERDATE: (October 14) And who funded the UK court battle against the distribution of Gore's film? Why...I'm shocked, I tell you!

Democracy and our broken system

"If you like the Senate, you’ll love this," Mike Duffy chuckled on CTV last night about proposed electoral reform in Ontario. MMP is dead. Nearly two-thirds of the less than 47% of the electorate who actually took part in the referendum voted against it. Long live first-past-the-post. Hey, that's what they've got in…Zimbabwe, right?

Go back to sleep, Ontario, those of you who didn't snore through yesterday's election. Nearly half of you didn't bother showing up to the polls. 42% of the ones who did gave us a majority Liberal government. It was a thumping win—66% of the seats. Liberal majority rule, mandated by less than 22% of the electorate.

Today, as longtime Fair Vote Canada activist Peter Black put it, the press is calling the 37% vote for MMP a crushing defeat, and a 42% vote for the Liberals a massive victory. First-past-the-post. Whoopee! Sorry, didn't mean to wake you.

But the under-35s supported reform by more than two-thirds. They don't take the Mike Duffys of the world very seriously. Anything is better than what we have, which is frankly boring. It's rock versus minuet. They'll take the chance. There is, therefore, some hope. But do we have to wait until Duffy's generation dies off, taking its mouldering ideas with it?

Democracy is in trouble, but too few care, least of all the corporate media, whose lock-step opposition to electoral reform was possibly a deciding factor—but very far from the only one—in the outcome of the referendum. Duffy (wouldn't you like to push that guy off the wall and watch the king's horses and men do their thing?) was typical of the media "pundits" whose groupthink was so evident in the weeks leading up to the referendum. The system's fine as it is. Don't change a thing. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. Tra-la-bloody-la.

But it would be wrong to blame everything on the scribes, those unreflective, unthinking mouthpieces of the status quo whose job it is to anaesthetize the public. There are also the Pharisees, the high priests of politics who did whatever they could, in the front rooms and the back, to ensure that their privileged access to power remained unimpeded. The Ontario Citizens' Assembly report was never given much play, little or no public education was done, and as a result, six short days ago, only a quarter of the electorate knew very much about MMP.

Now, the tough part. Let's put a chunk of the blame where it really lies: on our own campaign. Yup, I know we worked hard. People strove tirelessly and thanklessly for electoral reform. Letters to the editor were written, signs were put up, meetings held, leaflets distributed, blog-posts crafted. Kudos to everyone who busied themselves heart and soul to make democratic change a reality. We did everything—except involve, at the outset, the very people who made the final decision.

I shall have more to say on this in an article that is to appear in the next issue of the CCPA Monitor. But let me just note a couple of things for now: the mandate of the Ontario Citizens' Assembly was very broad. We had the opportunity to look at comprehensive, across-the-board democratic renewal. We could have organized community workshops across Ontario where people could have been encouraged to develop their own ideas about democracy. Ordinary citizens, not activists, could have contributed input that might have been as startlingly original as MMP or STV or even FPTP once were.

Instead, we used the same-old, same-old campaigning tricks. We were looking for substantial change, but we couldn't drill down to communicate the need for it. People don't vote for serious change unless they personally feel that they have a stake in the outcome. But we didn't ask them for their opinions. We were just another in a chorus of voices telling them what we thought was best for them. We had a new system that they were really gonna like. Only a few could hear us in the general clamour, and other voices opposing us told them that everything was just fine.

Democracy is more than choosing between expert voices. At its most fundamental, it's having your own voice, and seeing something of yourself in the outcome of a process of which you were personally a part. If we really want to remedy the yawning democratic deficit, and by "we" I mean we democratic activists, then it's time to look at new ways of organizing. Because the old tried and true methods, as we have just seen, are as defunct as first-past-the post.

Political depravity

If federal funds were required [the Frost children] could die for all I care. Let the parents get second jobs, let their state foot the bill or let them seek help from private charities. ... I would hire a team of PIs and find out exactly how much their parents made and where they spent every nickel. Then I'd do everything possible to destroy their lives with that info. --Red State conservative

Hang ‘em. Publically. Let ‘em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens. Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice. --Another one

A new benchmark has now been set by the American far Right--attacking a brain-damaged 12-year-old child and stalking his family. The usual suspects--Mark Steyn (who said the kid was "fair game"), stalker Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Free Republic (which published the family's home and work addresses) and other extremists--are positively slobbering venom about the Frosts, who dared stand up for a bipartisan effort in Congress to expand public medicare benefits for children, after the measure was vetoed by George W. Bush.

Don't take my word for it. Check out the comments of these vicious political psychopaths for yourselves, and I'm sorry to have to link to them. It's all been too much for at least one conservative blogger, who's leaving the Republican Party because of it. Read this blogpost to get the facts. And this one. And then be thankful that you live in Canada, where these wingnuts are a small, drooling minority--for now.

H/t Canadian Cynic

UPDATE: (October 11) TIME Magazine weighs in on the side of political morality. CNN gets it wrong. And Digby predicts blowback.

The power of the people

With literally minutes to go, the London Metropolitan police called off their ban of an anti-war march at the British Parliament set to coincide with the start of a new parliamentary session. The police, in fact, proved to be capable organizers: their ban attracted crowds of new protesters incensed at this blatant attack on democratic rights. Faced with force majeure, and not wanting pictures of a police attack on peaceful protesters to be flashed world-wide, the cops caved. Or, rather, the Home Office officials who had been pulling their strings caved.

A number of similar demonstrations had come off without incident in the past. Indeed, as is usual, the Stop the War Coalition had been working with the police for some time to plan the march. But suddenly, in a meeting a few days ago, the police said the march would not be possible--not within a mile of Parliament. Plans for the march continued anyway, and the march took place.

Meanwhile, in quite a different part of the world, it looks as though the Burmese (Myanmarian?) kleptocrats have won this round. But nothing can stop people, vulnerable though they be to laws, police and the military, from demanding and winning the right to self-determination in that word's most fundamental sense. Even the tinpots of Burma seem to be dimly aware of this. Whether it's victory for freedom of assembly in England, or a fiercer, long-term struggle for democratic rights in Burma, no popular protest is ever unsuccessful in the long run.

H/t The Whiskey Priest.

UPDATE: (October 10) I'm starting to have second thoughts about posting the picture above, given the Right's current propensity for stalking children. H/t Canadian Cynic.

UPDATE: (October 11) And here is mana tangata whenua, the power of the Maori struggles for tino-rangatiratanga ("self-determination" being the imperfect translation). Police violence will not stop them. Police violence will not stop us. Ka whawhai tonu matou ki a koutou, ake, ake, ake! (We shall fight on against you, forever!) The clip was banned by the Bebo Network. Pokokohua!

H/t Mike Smith.

Government by journalist: MMP vs. the press

Randall Denley wasn't overjoyed with my recent post refuting his new-found "expertise" on Mixed-Member Proportional. "Every dog will have his blog," he grumbled to me. And now yet another from the Ottawa Citizen's stable of instant experts weighs in: Mark Sutcliffe, with "10 reasons to say no to MMP." So it's time for another bit of heel-nipping.

But first, a general frustrated word. There have been a few columnists and editorialists here and there who have actually endorsed the proposal for electoral change in Ontario. But the vast majority of the ink-stained wretches have retailed the same tired old arguments for the status quo, again and again and again, to the point that one almost begins to believe in cabals. If we were to have government by journalist, we would never change a thing. We could let them do all our thinking for us, dispensing their spontaneous expertise in every field, and never strain a brain cell.

Uh...wait a minute. That's what's happening right now.

Sutcliffe, in fact, makes this point admirably in his very first "reason." Ontarians, he says, aren't "clamouring for change." A lot of them don't seem to be paying attention to the referendum. Hence (he concludes) they don't have problems with the current system.

Now, that's a bit of a leap in logic. There has been little outreach, little public education, little grassroots organizing other than the usual well-worn tactics of holding a few meetings, sending letters to the editor and putting up signs. Most Ontarians have not been involved in the debates from the start, and they remain that way. Many of them will stay away from the polls on October 10 in any case, as they always do. It's not that they don't think the first-past-the-post system is fundamentally flawed. They're casualties of it. Their vote very often doesn't count; the government of the day invariably reflects minority opinion, which statistically isn't likely to be theirs. This sort of thing breeds cynicism. It breeds apathy. And so the journos jump into the breach, molding public opinion in their own image, which is to say, injecting more anesthetic into the body politic.

Sutcliffe likens elections to the hiring of an employee. You have three candidates for the job; you can't hire them all. But the analogy is a silly one. We aren't hiring candidates when we go to the polls. We are voting for a government. And we are not one employer, but many, with widely divergent opinions about the candidates before us. Why not elect a legislature that honestly reflects this division of opinion, so that everyone's vote matters? First-past-the-post doesn't do that. MMP does.

"We want local representation," Sutcliffe says, but "MMP would make the popular vote paramount." Has he even bothered to read the MMP proposal? MMP preserves local representation--in fact, such local representatives would fill two-thirds of the legislature. But the popular vote, last I heard, was what democracy is supposed to be based on.

"You shouldn't get two votes," he says, disapprovingly. Under MMP, you get a vote for your local representative, and another vote for your party of choice. "That's not a decision," he sniffs. Well, it's actually two decisions. But for some reason, electors should not be given new opportunities to exercise their freedom of political choice. Denley said that a few days ago; his colleague Sutcliffe is saying the same thing now. Why not? Personally, I'm a little leery of "authorities" telling us that we shouldn't have more political freedom.

The 3% threshold, he says, is too low. I actually agree with him on this point; I think it should be more like 5%. But that's just tinkering. Let's try the proposal as it stands, not toss the whole thing out because of a minor nuts-and-bolts issue that can be quickly fixed without another referendum if the proposed threshold needs to be raised.

The spectre of "more politicians" is raised once again. What convenient memories these people have! We had 130 MPPs in Ontario before 1996, when Mike Harris lowered the number with his Fewer Politicians Act. But this isn't about politicians--it's about the proper representation of our varying political views in Ontario. The list MPPs, he says, would be like senators, without constituencies, accountable only to their parties. But that's not how it works in Germany, which has had MMP for decades, and where list legislators do as much constituency work as any other legislator. List MMPs would be accountable to the people who voted them in. That's us.

MMP will promote division, Sutcliffe claims, forgetting perhaps that first-past-the -post encourages narrow regionalism as parties need to concentrate their votes in a few constituencies, knowing that even significant appeal across ridings can leave them with no seats. There will be more parties, he says, based on single issues. We'll have a series of minority governments. In other words, we can't have democracy--it's scary. We need majority government at all costs, even when a majority of electors vote the other way. Such arguments have been raised in the past to justify one-man rule. They're being raised now to justify the near-permanent rule of minorities, which is what first-past-the-post gets us. In both cases, democracy itself is rejected as inefficient and unstable.

Small parties will hold disproportionate power under MMP, he says. Well, no: their MPPs will hold the same power as any other MPPs. When it comes time to build coalitions, either before or after an election, no major party will want to make deals with extremists or fringe groups, which will cost them dearly in the next election; far more likely (and Germany is again an example) coalitions are made between larger, more mainstream parties. Parties campaign on platforms, and compromise will mean that those platforms are altered somewhat if coalitions are formed after an election. But when was the last time anyone saw a party implement its platform after an election? No tax increases, McGuinty said. No NAFTA, the Chrétien Liberals said. No wage and price controls, Trudeau said. These were priority campaign issues. Come on, Mark, pull the other one.

Sutcliffe's solution to the utterly inadequate and undemocratic first-past-the-post system is a runoff system. You get to mark a ballot with your first, second, etc., preferences. Names at the bottom of the ballot are eliminated until someone at the top has 50%. Liberals love this idea. If you aren't a Liberal, you're likely to consider them second-best no matter where you're located on the political spectrum. It's a great recipe for Liberal governments until the end of time. But it's not democracy. Democracy means that your first preference counts. And it's democracy that's up for grabs on October 10.

And in other news...

...it looks as though the Vatican may shortly be absolving the Knights Templar of 700-year-old charges of heresy.

Check out the Google references on this group of warrior monks. Among other things, they are, or were, the guardians of the Holy Grail. And now, darn it, they're about to go mainstream. They were just misunderstood Catholics, after all, creditors of Philip The Fair, king of France at the time, who hunted them down to wipe out his debts. Their mythos becomes mere history.

The effects on conspiracy theorizing world-wide could well be catastrophic. On the other hand, the "discovery" of a mis-filed document absolving the Templars of heresy could be seen as an attempt to throw us all off the scent. Ah, that's better.

The Templar mentality, if so it can be called, lives on in the conspiracy theorizing with which we are all familiar: 9/11 was an inside job! The world is controlled by a) the Jews; b) the Illuminati; c) the Freemasons; d) [insert your favourite cabal here.] And the Templars themselves persist, in various closed delusional systems.

Author Umberto Eco ("Foucault's Pendulum") sums up:

The lunatic is all idee fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Who will now fill this much-needed gap? (Solecism intentional.) Incidentally, Truthers, et al., tinfoil doesn't work. Indeed, it attracts and focuses the rays. The rumour that it acts as a protection was put about by the...well, I'm not at liberty to tell you.

Tutu much for St. Thomas University

The fear of offending "Jews" has led, unbelievably, to the banning of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu from the campus of St. Thomas University, Minnesota, where he had been scheduled to speak. The Chair of the university's Justice and Peace Studies Program, Chris Toffolo, protested this decision, and found out what academic freedom means at that institution: she is now the ex-Chair of the Justice and Peace Studies Program.

I placed the word "Jews" in scare-quotes, above, for two reasons. First, it appears that Archbishop Tutu had made the serious error of criticizing Israel in an earlier speech. He was unaware, it seems, that this is not advisable if you want to speak in the future on any subject whatsoever at a growing number of American universities. Here is what Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St. Thomas, and the one who issued the banning order, had to say:

He [Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he's said.

This really speaks for itself, but the apt conflation of Jews and the State of Israel is not unfamilar to those of us who follow US and Middle East politics.

Secondly, not all Jews, by any means, are in favour of this banning order by the university administrators. Marv Davidov, for one, an adjunct professor at St. Thomas who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, was incensed: "I think the Israeli lobby in our country has been attempting to silence criticisms of Israel in the academic world. That does a disservice to the state of Israel and all Jews," he said.

In case people haven't been noticing, academic freedom is on the endangered species list on US campuses these days. Just a few weeks ago, we had the termination of Erwin Chemerinski at the University of California before he had even taken up residence, apparently simply for being too liberal. That was reversed only after massive protests. (Indeed, it was such an egregious case of political interference that even principled conservatives joined in the chorus of condemnation.) Earlier, we witnessed the denial of tenure of Norman Finklestein, against the recommendation of his university's own tenure committee, but evidently on the advice of torture advocate Alan Dershowitz. And we have seen what happens to academics brave enough to speak up for their purged colleagues.

Other casualties: Professor Douglas Giles, fired from Roosevelt University in Chicago in November 2005. Professor Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan, denied a Middle East Studies position at Yale. Professor Joseph Massad, harassed and persecuted at Columbia University. Archaeologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose tenure bid at Barnard University is under sustained attack as I write this. And there are many others--all having committed the cardinal sin of being critical of Israel.

Archnishop Tutu, of course, is all-too-familiar with banning. No doubt he'll smile ruefully and go back to his campaign on behalf of the Tibetans.

Not a peep so far in protest about the Tutu matter from the starboard side of the blogosphere, whose inhabitants are usually noisy and lightning-swift in denouncing imagined left-wing assaults on freedom on university campuses. (Some have joyfully supported the university's decision, in fact.) I've written to David Horowitz, the redoubtable editor of FrontPageMag.com, to ask how he is planning to defend academic freedom in this case. Ditto that great defender of tolerance and diversity, Daniel Pipes, founder of the McCarthyite snitch service known as Campus Watch. Will any in this crowd jump into action to defend freedom of thought and expression on campus?

[Warning: Unsafe to hold breath for extended periods. Just inhale normally and enjoy the crickets.]

H/t Stageleft.

UPDATE: (October 11) St. Thomas reverses course: Tutu re-invited.

Curmudgeonly fudge on MMP

I never quite know what to make of the Ottawa Citizen's cantankerous Randall Denley. I like the guy, in spite of myself. He's smart, and capable. He has the Ottawa City Hall beat, and delivers the goods with an obvious command of the facts. He's got a conservative sensibility--he has no time for progressive members of Ottawa City Council--but he supported Alex Munter for mayor in the last civic election. Given all of this, his rash anti-MMP column today was surprising and disappointing.

Normally it's party hacks who have been pushing the "No MMP" line. A bell-like sound of disingenuousness has filled the crisp Fall air, as known Liberals and Tories have been publicly wringing their hands about the alleged power that MMP would give to parties. You mean like parachuting candidates in over the wishes of the local riding associations? Party leaders hand-picking candidates? Er...no. That's what happens now.

Do the parties that exist to take power suddenly think that power is a Bad Thing? Well, not exactly. Quite the opposite, in fact. Under first-past-the-post, parties can rule unimpeded when the majority, sometimes the vast majority, of voters didn't vote for them (e.g., Bob Rae's 1990 majority, based on 38% of the vote). And they don't even have to win the popular vote to form the government (e.g., the 2006 New Brunswick election).

So we can take their sudden public concern that MMP would give parties too much power with a very large grain of salt. If MMP did any such thing, those same Tories and Liberals would be leading the charge to get it implemented.

But Denley's main point is that self-same canard. MMP "will reduce the limited power voters have now." It will "create a two-tier political system." Party lists will fill 39 seats in a 129-seat legislature: we "will have no control at all over these people, who will have no constituency responsibilities," Denley claims. It's a job for life for people who please their parties, he says.

Like most of the "No MMP" folks, Denley ignores, or is perhaps simply unaware of, the experience of other countries with MMP. Germany has has this system in place for decades. List members do as much constituency work as any other MP. In fact, the average German elector perceives no difference between a list MP and a riding MP. The notion of a two-tier system, in other words, is a bogus one. And the major Ontario parties, sniffing the wind, have now all gone on record as supporting a democratic process for creating their lists.

But Denley's just warming up. Under MMP, voters will be able to vote for both a candidate in their riding and the party of their choice. He mocks this new freedom offered to voters, calling it a "boon for the indecisive," and then tosses away logic altogether: such improved voter power, he says, "evades the central question of any election: which party do we want to be the government?" Somehow, having the right to choose the party of your choice "evades the question" of which party we want. Someone will have to explain that one to me.

Then the difficulty of forming coalitions is raised: how would conflicting campaign platforms be reconciled? Good point: but that's what the hard business of political compromise is about. Remember that coalition-building is really society-building in microcosm. If Ontario citizens are badly split over an issue, the job of the legislature is, or should be, to find ways of bringing the sides together. That doesn't happen when one minority "side" wins majority rule because of our antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system. It can evade that split, rather than trying to heal it, for four years. A system that requires the parties to buckle down and look for solutions is far preferable: and that's what MMP does.

Certainly we all hope that our party will be able to carry out the platform that we have voted for. But there will be friends and neighbours who favour a different party and a different platform. Denley claims that MMP offers the parties an "easy out" for not delivering on promises; but the necessity of creating coalitions may work in the opposite direction. Would Dalton McGuinty's Liberals have been able to renege so easily on health-care premiums if they had been forced to look for political coalition partners with whom to form a government?

Denley concludes with the false statement, by now a political cliché, that MMP "would guarantee a future of backroom deals and unelected politicians." "Unelected?" The electors vote for both riding candidates and the party list candidates. "Backroom deals?" Political coalition-building is no more "backroom" than the current processes within parties; and the methods of assembling party lists under MMP will have to be revealed to Elections Ontario, which will publish the information widely. Any party stuffing its list with hacks and favourites will be a target of rival parties, who can be counted on to make an election issue out of it.

I find it difficult to challenge Denley's good faith or his intelligence. And that makes the appearance of this staggering collection of ill-thought-out claims about MMP all the more difficult to understand. He's absolutely right on one thing, though: there has been far too little electoral outreach on voting reform during the months leading up to the referendum. In fact, he has evidently escaped it himself. So at this point, thanks to insufficient engagement of citizens throughout the process of electoral change, it's columnists with their knee-jerk assumptions who may well decide the outcome. But surely politics--and democracy--are too important to be left to the journalists.

The "Stéphane Dion" construction

Stéphane Dion. Except for the die-hards, what attributes does the name conjure up? Weak. Indecisive. Nerdy. More at home in some ivory tower. Not a leader. Just a few moments ago, he came to mind for no particular reason. "Weak," I thought. "They're going to have to replace him."

I'd just been reading John Ivison, who takes a good, hard poke at Quebec and then goes after Dion. A "failure," he says. He quotes the fair and balanced Tom Flanagan: "People don't just vote for good ideas; they vote for potential rulers whose character they can trust and who can inspire passion of loyalty and support." It seems that Dion falls down on all counts.

But how, I suddenly wondered, do I know all this? I've never met the man; I've never even seen him except through TV glass. I would never vote for him, no matter what he was really like--the Liberals aren't a political party, as a veteran journalist once said in a closed meeting I attended, but an elaborate distribution system for the spoils of office. After the last Liberal convention, it was a case of different captain, same old ship. But I digress for a reason. This has nothing to do with Liberals, really; and everything to do with media constructions.

We need to be wary of a number of the home-truths about Dion. First, most of us don't know him. Secondly, the question of what a leader is or should be is something we might like to decide for ourselves, rather than having various journalists and commentators with axes to grind define it for us.

We sometimes take the profession a little too seriously. In spite of ourselves, we find ourselves assenting to mediated views of the world that may bear no relation whatsoever to what we might see ourselves if we only looked or had the opportunity to do so. When journalists deal with a subject that we know something about, we see right away how shallow and foolish many of them are. I read the coverage of Pitcairn Island's recent woes; at the time, Desmond Morris was quoted as an anthropologist, for goodness sake. When they want to talk about ethical questions, they go running off to that fountain of Catholic natural law, Margaret Somerville. They love authorities, these scribes and chatterers, and they almost inevitably pick spurious ones with a great flair for the sound-bite.

And they are great at offering unlettered, wiseacre analyses, too. All you have to do is read these folks on MMP, something on which most of them have done no research whatsoever, by the look of it--just read and listen to the half-truths and outright lies they are telling, on their own or possibly on others' behalf. That alone should be enough and to have us all scrambling furiously for other ways to learn about any topic these folks happen to cover.

Let me qualify the above with two observations. First, journalists work to deadline, have a busy schedule, and cannot be expected to be experts on everything. Secondly, they are not a conspiracy, and hardly monolithic in their views or ideology. But they do tend to converge on a lot of things, feeding off each other and taking no risks. They don't have a lot of time (and too often little inclination) to reflect and think for themselves. So the banks of received wisdom are tapped for a few column-inches, or some pithy TV commentary, the usual suspects are interviewed as "experts," and we come to share in and accept the wealth of idées, both fixes and reçues, that constitutes most reportage and editorial commentary today. Do they hold up a mirror to the world or do they create it? If the former, which I for one do not accept, we see through a glass very darkly indeed.

Now when it comes to assessing a leader, I don't know how we fix the problem. I watched the media (assisted by some of her own caucus) take down Audrey McLaughlin a few years back: she was "not a leader" either. She rejected the prevailing notion of leadership, in fact: too macho, too simple, too mystified a notion. She liked consensus. She liked working with people so that all of them got heard. Obviously she wasn't cut out for the job.

So when I see the forest of media knives out for Dion, structural problems in the Liberal party all attributed to him, every move he makes being spun, and spun, and spun, I start to get suspicious. Sure, he might be all of the things that the media construct "Dion" supposedly replicates. Maybe he's precisely what the "pundits" (and I shall always use shudder-quotes in deploying that word) are telling us that he is. But people who are thoughtful and reflective, and answer questions in more than ten-second clips, are the natural prey of reporters and commentators. Maybe he does lack the killer instinct. Maybe he needs better flaks.Or just maybe he's doing a different kind of leadership.

And therein lies the nub of the question. We need to look at precisely what we mean by a leader, and what kind of leadership we want. Do we want Tom Flanagan's "rulers?" Do we go on accepting the mystical concept of the "leader" as a kind of avatar, summing up in one incarnation an entire political party, its principles, its policies, its program and its history? When that is done a little too obviously, and such people start to sum up their nations as well, we flinch and use upper-case: "the Leader." But are we really so far removed from this invidious notion?

The media transmit the image of an ideal leader as an articulate, tough-minded, decisive authority figure. As I stare at those words, I find myself asking if we really want "leaders" at all. Perhaps we should all be encouraged to be tough-minded decision-makers. Perhaps anyone who claims to speak for us should, to do so legitimately, be delegated that authority by us, and be accountable at all times to us. And on what basis might we cautiously delegate such authority? On the ability to deliver sound-bites? On the skills of a CEO--coordinating and managing from on high? Or on the ability to reflect, to imagine, to think, and the companion ability to communicate and to create enthusiasm, based always upon his or her delegated authority to represent and to speak for others?

There are no definitive answers to such questions. But they should be asked, and they seldom are. The world is constructed for us, mediated, pre-digested: and questioning the "natural order" thus manufactured is not encouraged. Indeed, it is very difficult to do. It's more than getting to know Stéphane Dion, or any other political figure of whatever stripe. It's what we demand of such a person, of anyone who seeks to stand for us, or represent us, or perform that odd, mysterious task of "running the country" in our name. Perhaps asking that fundamental question might better help us to create our own radically different assessment of individuals who seek to perform that role. Or to recast, or even reject, that role altogether.

Your weekly smile: David Warren on MMP

David Warren, the Ottawa Citizen columnist and sworn enemy of Darwin, feminism and Islam, to mention but three of his pet peeves, takes a poke at Mixed Member Proportional representation today.

It's actually quite a fun piece to read, if only to see the particular type of argumentation that Warren specializes in--and the increasing desperation of the "No MMP" forces.

Warren, being a pontificator by trade, doesn't actually get to his anti-MMP assertions until the middle of his tract. He begins by describing the MMP voting process, which we should worry about, he says, because its advocates think it will operate "fairly." (At least, wisely in my opinion, he doesn't try to defend the proposition that FPTP works fairly.)

Then the familiar spectre of "sectarian, fringe and fruitcake parties" is invoked, in which he includes the Greens (currently at about 10% in the polls--that's some fruitcake) and the Family Coalition (Warren's description is more apt in this case: his own political values, as it happens, are just about identical with those of the Family Coalition).

First Past the Post, Warren avers, eliminates these groups in favour of broad-based parties in which differences are hashed out internally. But none of this really matters anyway, because unaccountable law-school elites have taken over the legislative function in Canada. Still, on principle, we should stand up against the menace of MMP and what it represents.

He proceeds to lump MMP in with every other form of proportional representation imaginable, and then to claim that all of them make government less accountable to the public. Now, in Ontario since the 1930s, every single majority government has a) been elected by a minority of the voters, and b) been able to do pretty much what it wanted between elections. Hence government after government has broken promises it never meant to keep in the first place, has effectively ruled out of the Premier's office, and has been accountable to no one at all for most of its term, taking comfort in the knowledge that it will require only another minority to re-install them in the next election. Accountability under FPTP is a joke. The old saying that our system is a "dictatorship punctuated by elections" is, I think, pretty accurate.

The political strategy under this system has been to ensure that another type of fringe group--the swing vote--is kept happy when E-Day rolls around. Because, under FPTP, a very modest shift in public opinion can mean a major political upset.

But finally, to Warren's specific claims:

1) Minority governments are nearly inevitable. This means that every special-interest party "can hope for a direct place at the public trough" in return for "shutting up about what is most important to it."

To return to Warren's original comment about broad-based parties, these too, of course, are coalitions. The Liberals can accommodate everyone from Hedy Fry to Tom Wappel; the Conservatives, everyone from Peter MacKay to Rob Anders. Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that minority governments are springing up all over the place under FPTP, the experience with MMP elsewhere, as in Germany, has been that coalitions are hashed out and prove to be quite stable. In one way or another, then, compromises are made across a range of political philosophies and positions, whether under FPTP or under MMP. Nor it is a wise political strategy for parties seeking coalition partners to form shaky alliances with fringe parties: the experience has been that coalitions of moderate parties are the rule.

2) Large parties will stack their lists with the very people that the electorate despises.

Perhaps I'm a political neophyte, but it occurs to me that a better strategy for electoral success might be to ensure that the list candidates have been chosen in an acceptable manner and comprise people of whom the electorate will approve. In Germany, the vast majority of list MPs have also run in constituencies, and do their share of constituency work. They are known, in other words, to the electors. I suggest that being despicable may not be a recipe for electoral success, on or off a list.

3) MMP makes it impossible to throw out a corrupt government entirely: parts of it will always return in the next coalition. This encourages corruption: we've seen it all across Europe.

In Germany? In Scotland? Is New Zealand famous for its corrupt governments? Some examples of MMP-fostered corruption would be welcome, but I suspect Warren doesn't have any. In the absence of concrete instances, in any case, one cannot carry this argument further. One might note, however, that FPTP right here in Canada has produced grossly corrupt governments (Jean Chrétien's Liberals, for example) that have been returned time and again against the wishes of a majority of the electors.

4) Repulsive party members will be spared the bother of having to campaign; they'll just be put on a list. The "shallow charmers" in the party will be the ones who run in constituencies, and they'll have no influence when the government is formed.

At this point, we're entering the realm of the surreal. Again, it doesn't seem to be much of an electoral strategy to stuff the lists with reptiles, and sideline the majority of the legislative caucus who were elected in constituencies when it comes to Cabinet formation and the like. A party that committed such offences against the electorate would disappear from the political map. Hint: parties need to court the electors, not insult them. Governments need to keep their support, not destroy it. Rival parties would be given heaven-sent opportunities to win hearts and minds if any party behaved in this hypothetically suicidal fashion.

5) MMP will allow divisive, sectarian parties to get easy representation. Reasonable minorities will be sidelined, because mainstream parties will be spared "the trouble of arguing with them internally."

I'll try to follow this. First, FPTP, not MMP, exacerbates divisiveness. Regional differences are over-emphasized, as parties try to shore up their votes in specific constituencies, knowing that a good showing evened up across all ridings may deny them even a single seat. Hence the Reform Party, voicing so-called "Western alienation." Hence the Bloc Québécois. Rather than promoting some kind of operating consensus among very different regions, the current system encourages the exaggeration of those differences as a political strategy.

The second point is virtually incomprehensible. I think Warren is suggesting that the broad-based parties will no longer have to sort out their internal differences, but can ignore the reasonable minority positions in their own ranks in favour of forming opportunistic alliances with fringe parties in coalitions. If I have this right, I have no idea how it would work. There is apparently a role for "intimidation and 'political correctness'" as well. I don't know how that would work either. At this point, some examples would have been appreciated.

6) MMP will "create unforeseeable constitutional and bureaucratic headaches." Accepting it will lead to further innovations.

The thing about the "unforeseeable" is that it's, well, unforeseeable. But, just as those who invoke the "silent majority" always seem to hear their own politics through the silence, so too Warren appears to be able to see the unforeseeable very well indeed.

However, I am happy to find, at last, a point of agreement with him. If MMP succeeds, people will no longer see "the system" in the same way. They will realize that they themselves have the power to change their governance. And, no doubt, that will encourage constructive public debate about other changes: should the Premier be chosen by a party and elected in a single riding? Should the Cabinet be appointed at the pleasure of the Premier? Can we do more to ensure accountability of governments between elections? When governance is not simply part of the natural order of things, but for the people to determine through active participation, we might indeed see further changes in a democratic direction. I for one welcome such future public debate.

Two final points: Warren's knowledge of civics is apparently deficient. MMP does not require a constitutional change, so his referring to it as a "quick constitutional fiddle" is politically illiterate. And if "changing public opinion" is the challenge to which we should all rise, as he claims, then I would respectfully suggest that MMP, unlike FPTP, at least offers us a level playing field, allowing the full political expression of public opinion by making all our votes count.