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The Market Faerie ain’t no Tinker Bell, folks. (h/t Union Thugs) Related posts: Let’s stop fetishizing “The Market” | #cdnpoli #TOpoli #classwarfare #austerity In defence of the public sphere | #TOpoli #TeamFord How exactly is busting the unions going to benefit me? 
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The Market Faerie ain’t no Tinker Bell, folks.

(h/t Union Thugs)

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Some people use Québec to scare non-Québec Canadians to whip up nationalistic feelings of patriotism so that we simply fall in line. Just like Marois has done to avoid talking about real policies, commentators in the ROC are doing the same thing.
It’s easier to scare people with the belief that Canada is about to collapse because of Québec than to allow Canadians to see which public policies are possible, like 7$/day daycare. If Canadians knew about Québec’s approach to social programs they might just start demanding them in Nova Scotia or Ontario. They might start taking to the streets in the hundreds of thousands.
Instead: fear separation. Fear the separatists who hate Canada like terrorists hate freedom.

Quebec and the rest of Canada: Why we shouldn’t fear conversations about sovereignty | rabble.ca

From the wondrously awesome Nora Loreto.

Source: rabble.ca

Video: The Ethical Oil spokespuppet rap | #tarsands #cdnpoli #EthicalOilBullshit

Oh dear. Look what some guy named knagata has done. Typical mean-spirited biased liberal lamestream media smear … 

(h/t Jymn)

I’m going to miss you, Posterous.

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Unethical oil and its Canadian friends | The Vancouver Observer | #EthicalOilBullshit #tarsands

Partnerships with Myanmar and Sudan… links to Burmese heroin traffickers… With this cast of characters partnering in the development of the Northern Gateway, you’d think Ethical Oil would be at the front of the line condemning the pipeline.

That is if you think Ethical Oil’s real purpose is to oppose unethical oil.

If, on the other hand, its real purpose is to front for Enbridge with scurrilous attacks on pipeline opponents….  Well then its actions to date make sense.

via vancouverobserver.com

More untreated tar-sands effluent, spewing into Canada’s public discourse. I don’t want to think about the effect it’s having on our civic ecosystem.

Apparently the arguments are so convincing that they need to pay some worthless little putz to redirect the conversation by squealing obscenities at people on television.

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Ignore the trolls, or engage? Mudwrestling with pigs and other dilemmas for 2012 | #cdnpoli

Every now and then you want to pause and re-evaluate. Is this working? What am I trying to do here? Is this the best way to go about it? Is it producing the results I want?

Now seems as good a time as any. Last night on FB, I offered this:

Aspiration for 2012: win back the words, reclaim the public sphere, raise the tone of civic discourse, make citizenship something to which we can all rededicate ourselves with pride. In other words, carry on being an insufferably sanctimonious wanker.

While I’m not worried about the sanctimonious wanker thing, I’m curious about the larger picture. It’s sometimes helpful to cast off the intellectual equivalent of yellow-wax buildup and go back to first principles. Going through the reasoning will, I hope, help clarify some things.

In brief, I’ve tried, in this little corner at least, to avoid engaging directly with people whose sole purpose seems to be filling cyberspace with specious bullshit. It’s an arbitrary, personal judgment on my part, naturally, but there’s a clear difference between honest disagreement and empty sophistry. Until now, my attitude toward the latter has been “don’t bother. You’re wasting your time and energy,” or “paying attention to them just gives them the validation they’re looking for,” or “don’t get into a pissing match with a skunk,” or perhaps most vividly, “never get into a mud-wrestling fight with a pig. You’ll ruin your clothes, and the pig will just enjoy it.”

Then I saw this.

So while there’s much to be said for the “don’t engage” approach, @wicary’s elegant scalpel work is a pretty eloquent argument for taking the opposite tack. And in truth, it feeds into the larger project of reclaiming public conversation. There’s a persuasive argument for not letting this kind of nonsense go unchallenged; lies, astroturf, propaganda and manufactured controversies have to be addressed, because if not, they’ll just keep being propagated and amplified and eventually they’ll come to dominate the conversation. 

Again, it goes back to fundamental critical-thinking skills. Who’s advancing this storyline? Whose interests are being served? Does it make sense? Do the underlying assumptions hold up in the face of the evidence? Why is this narrative being advanced? What else is going on? Is it meant to draw attention away from anything else? 

As always, the first question has to be: what are we trying to accomplish? It can’t be to make the other side shut up; a., that’s never going to happen, and b., we don’t want to give them an excuse to whine about censorship and act like victims. 

No. Ultimately it has to be about reclaiming the discursive turf, about re-framing the way we approach issues of public policy and what kind of society we want, and about not letting the noise machine and echo chamber hijack the conversation and / or drown everything else out. 

It’s a long and exhausting undertaking. No illusions here; it takes a lot of time and energy going through things over and over again, especially when they’re things that ought to be obvious, and when the other side’s devoted so many resources to its own insidious and calculated framing. We’re facing a disciplined, focused campaign that’s willing to advance untruths, to smear, to misdirect, to take things out of context, and to drag the conversation into the gutter every day if that’s what it takes. The buffoonish antics of some of its mouthpieces haven’t made it any less effective.

Strong arguments both ways, and thus far I haven’t found either way definitive. What say you, internets?

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The #EthicalOil meme is pathetic PR bullshit | #cdnpoli #tarsands

Yes, I said it, the whole concept is brilliant.

This is a fantastic way to change the debate to an issue that doesn’t really matter. Has anyone seriously thought that we would not be able to sell our oil?

Come on.  This is much ado about nothing. Actually, I’m sure the outrage has more to do with the fact the claim is based on the carbon footprint reasoning than anything else.

via canadatoo.blogspot.com

@wicary has done yeoman’s work on this already, but in subsequent surfing, I can’t really improve on this.

Really, what’s the EthicalOil meme missing? It’s got it all:

  • manufactured outrage 
  • artificial crisis 
  • astroturf 
  • conveniently swarthy boogeymen that just happen to feed into a parallel Islamophobic narrative

… and of course the gibbering, adolescent “victimhood” of its smirking mouthpieces …

And Canada II knocks it down like a house of cards in just a few short paragraphs.

Here’s an idea for 2012: let’s reclaim public discourse from the gutter into which the Ezra IrreLevants of the world have dragged it.

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Manufacturing ‘Good’: False consciousness in the People for Good movement | The Mass Ornament

Media_httpthemassorna_nulfb via themassornament.com

Someone’s finally hit upon what’s been bothering me about this.

Be nice to people, but don’t question the fundamental order of things. Charles Dickens used the same formula for Scrooge’s redemption in A Christmas Carol. Because anything that smacks of basic social restructuring or, god forbid, class warfare, is just so … vulgar.

Over at @SixthEstate, an important contribution to the health-care debate

The author of this blog has launched something he calls the Doctors Project.

In it, he’s attempting to provide a counterpoint to the narrative, pushed by institutions like the Fraser Institute and the like, that says Canada’s public health care system is out of control and unaffordable, and that the only solutions lie in privatization, cuts, and “adult conversations” about the “demographic time bomb.”