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Diemer.ca | Radical Digressions Diemer.ca Radical Digressions Home Articles The Attic Quotes Links Search Diemer.ca Gleanings Why Israel? Why does Israel deserve sanctions? Green Maven: green, conscious, and sustainable websites. Safe streets: Not pedaling can kill you Royal Moments in Broadcasting Past Gleanings... Selected Articles Abandoning the public interest – The neo-liberal drive to cut red tape is costing lives. Exposing the hidden costs of deregulation and privatization. On Self-Determination – Does 'the right to self-determination' actually mean anything, or is it an empty slogan whose main use is that it relieves us of the trouble of thinking critically? Dances with Guilt: Looking at Men Looking at Violence – When we throw around indiscriminate terms like 'male violence' and give credence to theories that men are inherently violent, we slander men who are not violent and perpetuate the stereotype that to be a man is to be violent. One Vote for Democracy – The ‘consensus’ model of group decision-making rarely works well. The democratic model is better both in principle and in practice. Ten Health Care Myths – Medicare's opponents have launched a sustained ideological attack on medicare. Their propaganda relies on myths and misrepresentations. The Iraq Crisis in Context – A rogue state, heavily armed with weapons of mass destruction, openly contempuous of international law and the United Nations, plunges the world into crisis. Contamination: The Poisonous Legacy of Ontario's Environmental Cutbacks – A story about fanaticism and death: How a neo-conservative government gutted health and environmental protection polices, leading to the Walkerton water disaster. Capital Punishment – The cold-blooded killing of a human being is horrifying. The existence of capital punishment make us all complicit in killing, and degrades us as a society. Anarchism vs. Marxism – Anarchist critiques of Marxism typically reveal a lack of knowledge of what Karl Marx actually wrote, resulting in sterile denunciations of a straw-man opponent. What Do We Do Now? Building a social movement in the aftermath of Free Trade – We have the potential to create a social movement in this country that goes beyond single-issue organizing to work toward an integrated vision of a more just and caring society. More Articles... Language Guide - Available in French - Available in Spanish - Available in Greek Blogs Latest Post Notebook 4 Notebook 3 Notebook 2 Notebook 1 Today’s Quote Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide More Quotes... Favourite Links Connexions CounterPunch Marxist Archive News & Letters Bureau of Public Secrets Noam Chomsky Middle East Resources Sources More Links... Samplings The shadow which haunts the power structure is the danger that those who are controlled will come to realize that they are powerless only so long as they think they are. Once people stop believing they are powerless, then the whole edifice which they support is in danger of collapse.Against All Odds Believe it or not, some of us would rather not have customs officials and cops deciding what we can read or look at. We'd rather decide for ourselves.Against Censorship Radical Digressions Ulli Diemer's Notebook Bad news: Unemployment is down and wages are up November 3, 2007 - # Normally, the corporate media are violently allergic to any suggestion that class conflict exists at all, let alone that it is fundamental to our capitalist economic system. However, in the business news one is more likely to encounter plain speaking. A case in point is the Globe and Mail’s report on the fears and upset that October's economic data have sparked among economic forecasters and currency traders. The reasons for their worries? A fall in the unemployment rate, an increase in real wages, and a climb in the value of the Canadian dollar. The data show that, during the month of October 2006, “the Canadian economy churned out 63,000 jobs, roughly five times the number that had been expected. The jobless rate in Canada fell to a 33-year low of 5.8 per cent, from 5.9 per cent in September, and the employment rate for adult women hit record levels.” According to the Globe, currency traders had been hoping for action by the Bank of Canada to counteract these trends. “Instead, we get another blowout, and the jobless rate at a 33-year-low, and the average wage of a permanent employee is up 4.2 per cent and accelerating,” said David Watt, senior currency strategist at RBC Capital Markets. “You're sitting in the market looking at this, and you're like, there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop this.” That’s right: they're upset because unemployment down slightly and wages are up a little, and nothing is being done to stop it. If working people are better off, even only slightly, it’s bad news. Nothing personal, just business November 2, 2007 - # “A street entrepreneur or a life-destroying psychopath?” asks a review of the film American Gangster, which portrays the life of drug kingpin Frank Lucas. How is that an either-or choice? The Corporation, the film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, demonstrates that the capitalist corporation “fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a ‘psychopath.’” As they put it, “the operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social ‘personality’: it is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.” Or, as Howard Scott so nicely put it, “a criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.” In a society whose dominant value system says that the only thing that matters is to get as much for yourself as possible, crime is an alternative form of entrepreneurship. Were Marx’s principles only skin deep? October 31, 2007 - # A British dermatologist has managed to get himself worldwide publicity with an article suggesting that Karl Marx’s painful skin condition may have caused him to say all those mean things about capitalism. “Skin disease causes tremendous upset,” said Prof. Sam Shuster. “He [Marx] was writing his big works like Das Kapital at a time when the disease was particularly bad and it was pretty clear that he was not in the best of moods when he was writing it.” According to Prof. Shuster, the disease, hidradenitis (known as ‘carbuncles’ in Marx’s time), “greatly reduced his self-esteem. This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.” That must have been quite the nasty skin condition, to have kept Marx in an uncompromisingly revolutionary frame of mind from the time of his 1844 manuscripts right up to his death in 1883. Imagine how differently everything could have turned out if Prof. Shuster had been able to hop on a time machine and travel back in time to cure Marx of his skin ailment. Cured, too, of his hatred of oppression and injustice, Marx would then have felt no need to proclaim “workers of all lands, unite,” and or to imagine a future society governed by the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Instead, Marx and his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels could have poured their energy into penning upbeat musicals extolling the lives of the wealthy – imagine such hits as Les Comfortables or Adam Smith, Superstar, or The Sound of Money – and made a fortune. Pity. Syria's suspicious behaviour October 26, 2007 - # Today’s New York Times features a breathless exposé, widely picked up by other media, about Syria's “suspicious” cleanup of the Syrian site bombed by Israel on September 6. Before-and-after satellite photos show a square building standing on the site before the bombing, whereas the post-bombing image shows an empty lot where the building had been. The NYT article features all the elements that distinguished the Times’ credulous reporting on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction in the build-up to the U.S. invasion, including unclear satellite photos and comments from unnamed U.S. government sources. An anonymous “senior intelligence official” in the administration is quoted as saying that it's “incredible” that Syria would have cleared away the rubble left by the Israeli attack. The Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, which analyzed the satellite photos on which the Times article is based, excitedly reports that “tractors or bulldozers could be seen” in the aerial photo, as well as “scrape marks on the ground.” The Institute's president, David Albright, said that clearing away the rubble after the attack was “inherently suspicious”. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something,” he said. Other anonymous “federal and private analysts” – one might be suspicious that they are the same people who provided the 'evidence' for the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – speculate that the removal of the remains of the building “could be interpreted as a tacit admission of guilt.” The article speculates about what action might be taken against Syria by the United Nations Security Council if evidence were to emerge that Syria is in violation of international agreements. Naturally, the Times does not speculate about what action ought to be taken against Israel for its undisputed attack on Syria, a act of aggression that the UN charter defines as a war crime. That’s what ideological filters are for – to keep questions like that from even being asked. We are left to speculate what the media coverage would be if Syria were somehow able to launch a successful attack on the sites in Israel where Israel’s nuclear weapons are located. It’s probably safe to say, though, that it wouldn“t be concerned with the suspicious activities of bulldozers clearing away rubble. Condoleezza Rice admits mistakes in Arar case October 25, 2007 - # U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made headlines by admitting yesterday that the U.S. government had made mistakes in the Maher Arar case. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was kidnapped by the U.S on the basis of false evidence that he was involved with a terrorist group, and sent to Syria to be imprisoned and tortured. He was eventually returned to Canada, exonerated by a Canadian government inquiry, and awarded damges for his ordeal. While not apologizing for her government’s use of kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, and torture, Secretary of State Rice did acknowledge that “our communication with the Canadian government about this was by no means perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect. We have told the Canadian government that we did not think this was handled particularly well in terms of our own relationship, and that we will try to do better in the future.” As a Canadian, I’m much relieved. At last, we have assurances from a top American official that in the future, when they kidnap a Canadian citizen and ship him off to be tortured, they let our government know that they have done so. I’m sure we all appreciate the courtesy. Skeptic no more October 21, 2007 - # I used to be a hard-boiled cynic when it came to those alleged miraculous apparations of religious or pop culture figures whose images are always being spotted in various and sundry mundane objects. Jesus in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary in a watermelon, Elvis in a peanut butter sandwich – I scoffed. Where others saw Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun, or a pretzel in the shape of Mary holding the baby Jesus, I saw credulous believers with over-active imaginations. Until this week, when something quite extraordinary happened. My cat, the peerless Button, had been sitting on top of a book of Peanuts cartoons (Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz). After a long period of seeming inactivity, she suddenly got up and jumped into my lap. When I stroked her, I noticed she had a mat in her fur. I worked it loose. When I looked at what I had pulled out of her fur, I was stunned. The hairmat was in the exact shape of Woodstock, Snoopy's klutzy bird-buddy in the Peanuts cartoons. You don't have to take my word for it: here is an actual photograph of the hairmat. It was a miracle. There is simply no other word to describe it. I'd like to know what Joe Nickell or Richard Dawkins have to say about this! Preston Manning sees an Inquisition in science's name June 20, 2007 - # Preston Manning, the founder of Canada's right-wing Reform Party, wrote an article for today's Globe and Mail newspaper in which he pretends to speak in the voice of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Roman Catholic Inquisitor who had Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for heresy in 1600. Manning-as-Bellarmine claims to see in atheists like Richard Dawkins the new face of a scientific Inquistion which would persecute believers. This reply to Manning was sent to the Globe and Mail: Cardinal Bellarmine, the Inquisitor who had the philosopher Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for holding views contrary to the Catholic Church, clearly chose well in selecting Preston Manning to channel his views. Mr. Manning evidently shares the Inquisitor's ability to disregard facts and logic in the cause of condemning opinions he dislikes. Factually and logically, Mr. Manning's attempt to equate atheists with religious zealots who persecute dissenters is grotesquely misplaced. Atheists don't burn books they dislike: they simply explain why they disagree with the views they contain. Atheists certainly don't burn authors at the stake, nor do we issue fatwas sentencing writers or cartoonists to death for expressing themselves in ways we disapprove of. Mr. Manning's demagogic suggestion that atheists seek to deny believers freedom of conscience and expression has no basis in reality. On the contrary: no atheist would wish to deny Mr. Manning his right to believe in the Easter Bunny, or Zeus, or Jehovah, or any other supernatural being that appeals to him. We simply ask for the right to express our dissent from those beliefs openly, without being threatened or censured, and we ask that Mr. Manning and his co-believers refrain from trying to inject their private religious beliefs into public institutions like schools and legislatures. Abraham Lincoln saw it January 6, 2007 - # An observation of Abraham Lincoln's about his Democratic opponent Stephen Douglas seems as pertinent today as it was in 1859. Speaking of Douglas's indifference to the outrage of slavery, Lincoln scathingly characterized Douglas's ‘peculiar’ nature: “He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else's back does not hurt him.” In those twenty-seven words, Lincoln, it seems to me, captured the very essence of yesterday's – and today's – hard-core reactionaries. For all that the neo-con agenda is driven by ideology and class interests, isn't there something about its leading proponents, its ideologues, that seems to transcends ideology, economics, even history? Isn't there a essential quality to such people, a basic lack of empathy for their fellow human beings, that draws them to the camp of privilege throughout the centuries, always and forever praising the merits of the powerful? No wonder they believe, as Margaret Thatcher said, that “there is no such thing as society”. Most of us feel an instinctive bond with our fellow human beings. If we see others hurt or oppressed, we feel sympathy or outrage. But there are some who don't feel that bond, who feel nothing when they see a lash falling on someone else's back. Peculiar indeed – and chilling. The 80-20 Law January 1, 2007 - # New Year's. Time for plans, projects, resolutions. And time to remember the 80-20 Law of time management: The first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time. The last 20% of the project takes the other 80%. National Post columnist traumatized by having to wait his turn December 26, 2006 - # It started with a telemarketer's call. He opened with a question: Was I familiar with the National Post? I try to be polite to telemarketers. They're doing a lousy job for lousy pay, and I see no need to make their day worse by being rude. So I admitted, truthfully if unenthusiastically, that I knew of the Post. I was about to add that I wasn't interested in subscribing to it, when he popped his question: How would I like to get it for $39 a year? That caught my attention: I pay $356 per annum for my subscription to the Globe and Mail. Could I really get the Post for $39 a year? Yes I could, he assured me. He had me hooked. Excusing myself with the thought that I work with the media and always find it illuminating to compare how different publications cover the news, I agreed to buy my thirty-nine-dollar subscription. And so it came to be that the National Post started arriving at my doorstep. **************************************** For those who know the National Post only by its right-wing reputation — be assured that reputation is well-earned. Some of the straight news coverage is reasonably unbiased, and occasionally an interesting feature appears, but for the most part the Post resembles a propaganda broadsheet more than it does than a newspaper. The Post's columnists are uniformly smug and negative: day in and day out, they whine and complain that Canada is socialistic and inferior — inferior to that utopia to our south, of course. Picture a Dr. Frankenstein who spawns an automaton with Ronald Reagan's brain and Attila the Hun's heart, clones the result a dozen times, and then teaches his creations a few simple phrases from a script written by the Fraser Institute, and you'll have a pretty accurate picture of the Post's parade of columnists. What makes them so tiresome is not merely their opinions, but their utter predictability. You know in advance not only what they will say about a given topic, but the very words and phrases they will use to say it. George Orwell might well have been talking about the Post when he wrote, in ‘Politics and the English Language’, that “no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” One of the few Post columnists who gives the impression of actually thinking before he writes - sometimes anyway - is Jonathan Kay. On occasion, he has been known to stray from the script - he wrote a column saying he now thought he had been wrong to support the invasion of Iraq, and an article he wrote about censorship actually led me to send him an E-mail complimenting him on the piece. Mostly though, Kay can be counted on to stick to the party line. In fact, a recent piece [Dec 5, 2006] on the horrors of socialized medicine could well earn him an award as right-wing propagandist of the month. This particular horror story — Kay calls it his “run-in with the system” — begins when he shows up at his local hospital's emergency room with an infected knee. The trouble is with his left knee, he tells us - reinforcing his belief, no doubt, that anything on the left is unreliable and troublesome. The inefficient socialistic health care system sends him off for treatment within ten minutes - not too shabby, most of us might say - but it takes a lot more than efficiency and high-quality appropriate care to please a National Post columnist. Soon he is lying in a public hospital bed, intravenous clindamycin trickling through his veins, and thoughts about how much nicer a private hospital bed would be flooding through his brain. Mr. Kay returns to the hospital the next day for a follow-up treatment, and this time - the horror! - he has to sit and wait before he's seen. In fact, he tells us, “all but the most acute cases” have to sit and wait their turn. There is - hard to believe, but it's true - no special queue for the affluent and the privileged, not even if they are National Post columnists. So Mr. Kay sits and seethes. Yet he is not totally without sympathy for others: he feels sorry for the triage nurse, whose skills, he proclaims, are being squandered having to deal with “surly immigrants and delirious seniors”. If only we had private health care, he moans, “middle-class people like me could pay for prompt treatment and then spend the rest of the day at work or with their family, instead of reading a Stephen King novel and breathing in other people's germs in a hospital waiting room”. If only - if only! - we had private emergency-room service, then “people with some money to spare would plunk down their Visa cards and get fast, dignified service”. Let the people who don't require prompt dignified service — the people who aren't middle-class and don't have "money to spare", the “surly immigrants and delirious seniors” — let them spend their time breathing in other people's germs. People like that don't have families they'd rather be with, or other things they'd rather be doing with their time As it happens, the same week that Mr. Kay paid his visit to the emergency room, I found myself in another emergency department in the same city with my mother, who had been admitted for an infection. My mother is one of those people - an immigrant and a senior - whom Mr. Kay would like to shove aside so that he can plunk down his Visa card and get fast, dignified service. But here's a shocking piece of news for Mr. Kay: most Canadians feel that immigrants like my mother and me, and seniors, and the poor, are just as deserving of prompt dignified health care as are those who, like him, are more well-off. We’re appalled at the idea that access to care should be prioritized not on the basis of need, but on the basis of who walks into the hospital with the biggest wad of cash. Most Canadians understand that the pretense that private facilities would take the pressure off the public system is just a con job to hide the fact that a two-tier system means better care for the affluent, and worse or no care for the rest. The obvious fact is that private clinics don't add a single doctor, nurse, or technician to the health care system. They just hire them away from the public system by offering them more money. It’s a zero-sum game in which the affluent win and the poor lose. If Mr. Kay can buy himself quicker care by waving his credit card or a wad of $20-bills, my mother will have to wait longer for her care. No thanks, Mr. Kay. See also: Ten Health Care Myths: Understanding Canada's Medicare Debate Recommended Web sites/links: Canadian Health Coalition Profit is Not the Cure/Council of Canadians Canadian Doctors for Medicare Connexions I blog therefore I am. Home • Articles • Quotes • The Attic • Links • Feedback © 2007 Ulli Diemer. Phone: 416-964-1511 Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

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