Truth vs. Evidence

Long time political insider and former Tory pollster Allan Gregg has written (and delivered) an excellent summing up of where we stand right now. And it seems, to him, to look like the edge of a precipice.

Reason has taught us that it is cheaper and more efficient to enter into a commercial arrangement with our neighbours than to invade, plunder or colonize them. Trade of goods and services between nations, in turn, inflates and widens our empathy beyond kin and tribe and encourages immigration and pluralism.
Beyond empathy, science has revealed that all races and peoples share common traits and therefore deserve to be treated equally. This humanism and the placement of the rights of the individual on an even plane, above the rights of states, draws us inevitably towards concepts such as the responsibility to protect. While the scriptures might tell us we are all each other’s keepers, it is reason that compels us to behave in this way.
In fact, our entire notion of progress has reason at its core. As Ronald Wright reminds us in his brilliant lecture series, “A Short History of Progress”, this is a relatively modern concept. For most of civilization, people believed their station in life would be pretty much the same when they died as when they were born. And they believed this because it was true – mortality, health and wealth improved little for most of human history. It was only when we began to imagine that man and society was, if not perfectible, certainly improvable, that optimism and scientific endeavour sought to propel mankind forward.
And more than anything else, societal progress has been advanced by enlightened public policy that marshals our collective resources towards a larger public good. Once again it has been reason and scientific evidence that has delineated effective from ineffective policy. We have discovered that effective solutions can only be generated when they correspond to an accurate understanding of the problems they are designed to solve. Evidence, facts and reason therefore form the sine qua non of not only good policy, but good government.

This long address goes well with Andrew Nikiforuk's piece in the Tyee discussing why Canadians have the right and necessity to know about Stephen Haprper's church and its creed.

Unknown to most Canadians, the prime minister belongs to the Christian and Missionary Alliance, an evangelical Protestant church with two million members. Alberta, a petro state, is one of its great strongholds on the continent. The church believes that the free market is divinely inspired and that non-believers are "lost."
Now let's be clear: I am a Christian and a social conservative and a long time advocate of rural landowners and an unabashed conservationist. I have spent many pleasant hours in a variety of evangelical churches and fundamentalist communities. Faith is not the concern here.
But transparency and full disclosure has become the issue of paramount importance. To date, Harper has refused to answer media questions about his beliefs or which groups inform them. If he answered media queries about his minority creed (and fewer than 10 per cent of Canadians would call themselves evangelicals) he'd have to admit that he openly sympathizes if not endorses what's known as "evangelical climate skepticism."
No one knows this fossil fuel friendly ideology better than Dr. David Gushee, a distinguished professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and a Holocaust scholar. The evangelical Christian is also one of the drafters of the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative. It declared climate change a serious threat to Creation that demands an ethical Christian response.
But that's not the wing of the evangelical movement that Harper listens to. Given his government's pointed attacks on environmentalists and science of any kind, Harper would seem to take his advice from the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of right-wing scholars, economists and evangelicals. The Alliance questions mainstream science, doubts climate change, views environmentalist as a "native evil," champions fossil fuels and supports libertarian economics.

Hmm. Who To Believe...

The Guardian (and others) are reporting on a new report from Human Rights Watch, alleging:

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the US government of covering up the extent of waterboarding at secret CIA prisons, alleging that Libyan opponents of Muammar Gaddafi were subjected to the torture before being handed over to the former dictator's security police.
The New York-based human rights group has cast "serious doubt" on Washington's claim that only three people, all members of al-Qaida, were waterboarded in American custody, claiming in a new report to have fresh evidence that the CIA used the technique to simulate drowning on Libyans snatched from countries in Africa and Asia.
The report, Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi's Libya, also says that the CIA, Britain's MI6 and other western intelligence services were responsible for "delivering Gaddafi his enemies on a silver platter" by sending the captured men to Tripoli for further abuse after the American interrogations.

"only three people, all members of al-Qaida, were waterboarded in American custody" Now, two things spring to mind. First, the acknowledgement that three people were waterboarded opens up members of the Bush administration to charges of torture at the International Criminal Court. Now that it's been acknowledged, this should make arrest easier in any country other than the US.
Second, do I believe them that they only tortured three people? I certainly can't think of any other country that has restricted its use of torture so strictly. By the time you've begun torturing, you've pretty much abandoned "civilized" behaviour. So no, I don't believe them. Do I think that HRW might make a few mistakes, be mislead by others for their own political ends? Of course. Which is why I think members of the Bush administration should be standing trial. Courts may be imperfect, but they are the best venue we currently have for determining were the truth lies when we're faced with a Rashomon situation.

Not Much To Add

...as the stealth program to convert Canada into a banana republic continues apace. Our military command structure is now completely subsumed in the American one and the "War On Terror "continues to target North American citizens who speak about about the direction our lords and masters are taking us.
From The Tyee:

A top lawyer at the world's largest civil liberties organization warns that Canada's increasing participation in the so-called "War on Terror" has jeopardized democracy.
The unchecked political influence of "deep state" spy agencies -- whether the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or our own Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) -- is threatening citizens' ability to hold the state accountable, says Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"The larger idea that we are engaged in a global war against terrorism (is) a very dangerous idea," Jaffer told the Tyee, where he addressed a BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) event on Monday. "It's a dangerous proposition that we are involved in this war that has no temporal boundary, no geographic boundary, and is against an enemy that is really difficult to identify.
"(It's) drastic and radical: it's to propose that we're in a forever war and in an everywhere war... In Canada, the Charter is a very useful tool for litigators and public interest advocates to use in articulating arguments against these kinds of counter-terrorism policies that are inconsistent with democratic values."

Agent Provocateur

No, not the lingerie company. Rather the infiltration of civic groups (typically radical or interested in progressive causes) by police or other security organizations in order to incite violent or illegal actions. Like Mark Kennedy, recently outed in Britain as having spent years undercover in the UK environmental movement. And now the Guardian is reporting on three major energy firms that have employed private security firms to carry out covert intelligence-gathering operations on environmental activists and groups.
Governments in the UK have viewed environmental protest as potentially violent terrorism since at least the rule of Margret Thatcher. Infiltration with agent provocateurs in the US environmental movement go back to the monkeywrenchers of the 80s and even earlier (Nixon's enemy list shows that paranoia has long been a feature of the ruling class south of the border). In Canada, RCMP agent provocateurs were responsible for much of the paranoia around the French-Canadian separatist movement in the 1970s.
George Monbiot reports that he could not find "a single proven instance of a planned attempt in the UK to harm people in the cause of defending the environment". This jibes with reports from the mid-1980s here in the Pacific Northwest when a tremendous panic was being whipped up against "tree spiking," where large nails, it was claimed, were being pounded into trees in order to damage mill machinery. Despite the hysteria whipped up by the local media and public pronouncements from various logging companies, only one incident of possible tree spiking was reported when, in 1987, California mill worker George Alexander was seriously injured when the bandsaw he was operating was shattered by either an old nail or a tree spike. One unproven case of possible spiking became the basis for tree spiking being declared a federal felony in the United States in 1988.
The agent provocateur is an excellent tactic for keeping track of a group while simultaneously discrediting it. Which, of course is why it's used. But there are some actions that such agents really cannot guard against. Like the new Greenpeace ad.

Having a Nice Day? I Can Fix That.

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education--in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs.  They will become the new class.Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible.  It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. "Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty," Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration. 

Hedges, Chris  American fascists : the Christian Right and the war on America  New York : Free Press, ©2006

If you haven't read this book yet, you really should. No, really. the Christian Right from the inside.

Mad, And With Good Reason

Stephen Maher is mad as hell. Out in Nova Scotia, he writes in the Chronicle Herald:

In order to create a database of federal stimulus spending in Nova Scotia, it was necessary to look at all kinds of different federal websites, all with scraps of information, and then find out from other levels of government how much money was spent on each project and figure out where the shovels were hitting the ground.

In the United States, on the recovery.gov website, you can, in seconds, download exhaustively detailed databases showing where and how stimulus is being spent, who is getting the contracts, for how much, when, and how many jobs are created.
In Canada, on the actionplan.gc.ca site, there’s a map with icons showing where projects are located, but if you click on the icons, you get a popup with a charming picture of what’s his name, our prime minister, but no dollar amount.
There is a link to a video of the same guy singing a Beatles song, but there’s no database of projects available for download.

Not just one guy's experience, this is being noted by journalists across the country. The Harper government has no intention of telling the people anything. They've figured out that if you can't actually tell where the billions of dollars they claim to be spending are being spent (or not being spent), then they can claim and reclaim and re-re-claim to be spending that money. We saw this before the crisis when they would re-announce the same spending every two to three months, to make it appear that they were actually doing things that Canadians wanted.

Now, of course, they've been handed the gift of a lifetime; a demand for stimulus spending that Canadians understand and support. Not that they have any desire to actually spend it where it will do any serious long-term good, but still, they get to hand out those oversize novelty cheques and people won't be mad at them for doing so.

The rule is that the government in power gets to hand out the cheques, not the MP in a riding. Although, that point is moot when you're only spending real money in riding's that either voted Conservative or you hope you can swing Conservative. But the Harperites aren't content with politics as usual. They have to go one further and add big Conservative Party logos to the novelty cheques and have them signed with the signature of the local MP.

But this isn't the Conservative Party's money. This is money from the taxpayers of Canada to the taxpayers of Canada via their federal government. The MP gets to say "It is due to my efforts that this project was approved for funding, and I get to present this cheque." He (and, painfully, it's still primarily he in this country) does NOT get to say "My party and I are giving you this money." It's not only untrue, but it has been recognized as an unreasonable intrusion of partisan politics into the operation of government. Partisanship and governing are supposed to have a firewall between them: the visibility of being the ruling party is supposed to be all the partisan gain the ruling party gets. The linking of government spending to the way a riding voted is called (what's that name again? oh yeah,) pork-barrelling. And it's been falling out of favour among the electorate for the past half-century.

And the reason it's been falling out of favour is the blatant unfairness of pork-barrel politics. It doesn't serve the public good. Yes, it continues. After all, you have to repay the faithful somehow. But this is more in the vein of "Hey, we can finally fund those projects we think are valuable" rather than "Here's the payoff for voting Liberal (or Conservative)." One can be seen as being sympathetic with "them that brung ya" and still be seen as governing and spending with the best interests of the country at heart.

This is not true of the current government. They are not governing with the best interests of the country at heart. They are governing, and spending, only with the best interests of the Conservative Party at heart. They are proving to be incompetent at practical politics--the art of governing for all while supporting your own. The Conservative Party, Under Stephen Harper, has taken on the Prime Minister's own paranoia. Liberals, the NDP, etc. are not Canadians with differing views, but are at best unwitting dupes of pure evil in the Harperite worldview. Their belief that sometime in the past there was a perfect Canadian world and that we've gotten off track with all this crap about rights for bitches, hos, and faggots, that we need to have respect for our betters (you know them, they already have money and power), and (to quote Denny Crane) "I'm here to enjoy nature. Don't talk to me about the environment" approach to industry and the environment, well, if they had organized supporters who used physical intimidation to shut down dissent, the party would fit nicely into pre-WW II Italy. It's the same line of crap, fuelled by the same hate, the same fear, as we heard then. Thankfully, Canwest-Global is collapsing and the National Post is losing money hand over fist. Canada doesn't quite have a Fox propaganda network yet. That gives us some breathing room to fight this worldwide rightward drift here in our own country.

Propaganda; Shouldn't It Really Be The Word Of God?

Over at the Conservapedia, there's a proposal being floated to re-translate the Bible. The Conservative Bible Project suggest that:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

The nutbars Conservatives over at Conservapedia are really worried about the liberal bias in the Bible.They state that:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[5] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

I'm particularly fascinated by #6 & #7: "Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning" and "Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story." To state so baldly next to each other that you want to remove what you think is liberal cant and insert what can only be described as conservative cant, and that you don't see a problem with this, is, to me, mind-boggling. But apparently this is not so on the far right: the belief that others have done something--whether or not that belief is supported by evidence--is apparently justification for doing the exact same thing. Instantly any concept of "truth" disappears and is replaced by the concept of competing propagandas. Any appeal to evidence is immediately seen to be a call on biased propaganda. "Things fall" is liberal propaganda, and any appeal to the senses (look out the window! Gravity is in operation!) as dismissed as biased and propagandistic nonsense ("that's just what they want you to believe! Gravity doesn't even work on those who believe in it!). This kind of thinking is completely resistant to argument; it is thouroughly magical and any appeal to reason, evidence, or even sanity is, by definition, biased and propagandistic, and can be dismissed out of hand. Logic and reason have no place in a hermetically sealed belief system, and are seen as enemies of faith or belief.
This program, on the part of the Amerikan Right, to create a political community where spiritual, economic, and political concepts are adopted and are then unchangeable proceeds apace. Mutually antithetical concepts like "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" are normal inside this doublethink groupmind. Regretfully, this type of thinking and political community building has spread into Canada as well. Alberta and Saskatchewan are hotbeds of it.

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A Note To The ICC

And any lawyers trying to jail members of the Bush administration on war crimes charges. There's a pretty good timeline of events here.

Conservative dirty tricks--not just in Amerika anymore

From Rabble.ca:

By Rebecca Granovsky-Larsen, Editor-in-Chief and Nora Loreto, News Editor

Audio recordings, photographs and documents that were leaked from a recent Conservative Party student workshop at the University of Waterloo expose a partisan attempt to take over student unions and undermine Ontario Public Interest Research Groups (OPIRGs) on campuses across Ontario.

At a session held in early February by the Ontario Progressive Campus Conservative Association (OPCCA) and the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, campus Conservatives, party campaigners, and a Member of Parliament discussed strategies to gain funding from student unions for the Conservative Party and ways to run for-and win-positions within student unions.

The leaked materials were posted on WikiLeaks.org over the weekend and add to the growing body of evidence that the Conservative Party has a strategy for interfering in campus student unions. In early 2002, the campus press first learned of a secret Millennium Leadership Fund that the party's campus wing used to fund candidates in student union elections. Now it appears that strategy has evolved into a campaign to falsely obtain student union funding and destabilize student clubs with a social justice mandate.

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Rick Warren uber alles

From Alternet comes this piece about Rick Warren, the guy tapped to deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration:

In Bruce Wilson's video, on April 17, 2005 Rick Warren tells 30,000 of his followers at a rally in Angel Stadium, right next to Disneyland, that he had been given a vision, a three point plan for the next 25 years:

It is the global expansion of the Kingdom of God.

It is the total mobilization of this church.

And the third part of this dream is a radical devotion of every believer.

Warren goes on to deliver this horrifying homily:

In April 1939, In a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil. And in that stadium those with the brown shirts formed a sign that said in in the whole stadium "Hitler we are yours." And they nearly took the world...

Warren then decribes the dedication of Lenin and Mao's followers and then in a jaw dropping moment says:

When I hear those kinds of stories, I think, what would happen if American
Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium said, "Jesus, we are yours"? What kind of spiritual awakening would be have?

Warren then exhorts the crowd to hold up the sign by their seats that say "Whatever it takes" and concludes his speech with:

Whatever it takes

Seig heil, baby.

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Wackaloon from Wasilia

Seriously, she does look nuts as well as talk nuts. And I was watching her on CBC introducing her husband as "the First Dude." Really? First dude? That would make him John McCain's husband, which would shock Cindy McCain, I suspect. Best he could be is Second Dude, or Vice Dude, and where's the fun in that?
And ABC News is reporting the Wackaloon as saying (in an interview with WMAL-AM radio):

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the First Amendment is about. The US press is supposed to call you on your bullshit--exactly what has been missing (with the occasional John Stewart exception) for the last eight years. And if your point is legit, then they are expected to say that as well.
But it is typical of the Amerikan Right that criticism is automatically assumed to be an attack on their constitutional rights. Their case seems to be that it is inherently unfair to criticize them. That the Bush II administration has been working as hard as it can to actually make criticism of the Amerikan government illegal seems to be a logical outgrowth of this whiney, pissy attitude among the divorced-from-reality Right.
This denial of reality, the development of what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" ("We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist," Colbert explained. "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore.") on the Right, the attempt to convince the world that up is down, left is right, true is false, is what draws parallels to Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda. (But as Chomsky et al. have pointed out, Goebbels got a lot of his ideas on the manufacturing of consent in the public from the American Walter Lippmann).
So when the Wackaloon from Wasalia gets into the act, trying to generate a reality more to her liking than the one she's forced to inhabit (~"I never supported earmarks. Or the Bridge to Nowhere. I don't abuse power."~), she is absolutely in the mainstream of Amerikan thinking. It's as if the ability to reinvent oneself--long an Amerikan tradition and a valuable one--has been extended to reinventing reality to a more congenial version. This kind of magical thinking leads to national obsessions like fascism and empire--as Amerika parallels Nazi Germany in the rise of fascist thought and over-reaching into empire based on the belief in the intrinsic unworthiness of the enemy.

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