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26 January 2005  

Margaret Wente was ticked off (subscribers only, but see the handy tip at the end of this post) with Stephen Harper's fear-mongering polygamy comments, too. And her thoughts pretty much echo my own:

I want to get behind Stephen Harper, I really do. I think of myself as a natural-born, small-c conservative -- one of those tolerant, live-and-let-live types who think governments work best when they are modest in their ambitions and stay out of your hair. I'm also sick and tired of the federal Liberals, who are way overdue for a nice long time-out.

There are lots of people like me across the country -- people desperate for a chance to cast their vote for a decent, halfway credible alternative to the globe-trotting Mr. Dithers and his band of tired, clapped-out has-beens. We are low-hanging fruit. We are practically begging to fall into Mr. Harper's lap. All he has to do is stand there, act statesmanlike, and gently pluck us.

Instead, he yanks our chain.

"I don't want to get into the polygamy debate," he said last week, "but I fear if we do this, the next thing on the Liberal agenda will be polygamy, and who knows what else."

Excuse me? Until Mr. Harper brought it up, there was no polygamy debate, except on the outer lunatic fringes. But, according to him, gay marriage is just the first step on the slippery slope, and next thing you know, the Liberals will probably be arguing for your right to marry your pet goat.

Even Mr. Harper must have realized that his remark about polygamy was ridiculous.

02:17 PM |

22 January 2005  

Harper adds heat, not light, to marriage debate.

I don't want to get into the polygamy debate, but I fear if we do this [legalize same-sex marriage], the next thing on the Liberal agenda will be polygamy, and who knows what else.

- Stephen Harper, quoted in the Globe and Mail, 21 Jan 05, p. A4

Even aside from his own unexpressed ideas on the slipperiness of the gay-marriage slope, it seems unlikely that Harper really fears that the Liberals will soon be rolling out pro-polygamy legislation, let alone "who knows what else." If he does, again, he should provide some evidence for that fear. In the absence of this, his comments are pretty clearly an attempt to gain support by pandering to voters who do have such fears. Just like the Conservatives' placing of anti-gay marriage ads only in ethnic newspapers, it seems to be a purely political ploy, and one intended to appeal to emotions, not minds.

Cynics will say that telling people what they want to hear, what will get them on your side, is necessary in politics today. I still have a naive hope, however, that integrity and principles are not completely irrelevant, at least in my own party.

(Cross-posted to The Shotgun, where Ezra Levant has kindly invited me to participate. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the post below.)

04:05 PM |

20 January 2005  

Ezra Levant for Prime Minister. If his views on media and government are any indication, anyway, he's got my vote. Excerpts from his testimony before a senate committe in November:

Senator Tkachuk: Do you think there is a role for the CRTC?
Mr. Levant: I do not think there is....

Senator Tkachuk: Should it be the role of the Competition Bureau or the CRTC to prevent monopolies in markets, or do we need either?
Mr. Levant: I do not believe we need either. I am hard-pressed to find a single example in history of a monopoly that has managed to keep its monopoly without government support in one way or another. In fact, if you look historically at Canada's greatest monopolies, they did not exist naturally. Some government intervention created them in the first place.

Senator Tkachuk: What role, then, should the CBC have as part of Canada's media family?
Mr. Levant:... I think that the CBC could be liberated from the government and put into private hands.... It may have had a place in the past, but I do not believe that it needs the government support....

Senator Munson: On another subject, you say you do not think there is a role for the CRTC. Reading all the regulatory business with the CRTC and saying there must be certain things — for example, Al-Jazeera cannot do live television and cannot come here, and so on — but you say eliminate the CRTC. Is it just people coming in here and building radio and television stations and newspapers without any regulation of any sort, just a free-for-all with foreign ownership, American stations...?
Mr. Levant: That sounds exciting to me.

10:40 PM |

Compassionate Conservatism: Take Two.The best and the worst in Bush's inauguration speech, according to Michael Hurd.

05:29 PM |

19 January 2005  

This is great news. From Google:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

09:55 AM |

16 January 2005  

Apparently not a joke. Let It Bleed relays the news that our mayor David Miller liked this idea suggested by a participant at a public forum recently:

... Build a Statue of Responsibility, a takeoff on New York's Statue of Liberty. Instead of celebrating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the Toronto statue — Miller says it could be built on Albion Rd. in Rexdale — would symbolize the city's vision of "life, responsibility and the pursuit of equality."

10:19 PM |

12 January 2005  

I'm back from a Christmas trip to Italy (pictures of which are being posted daily over at Selective Memory; start here), have finished my two fall term classes, and have no pressing extra-work activities planned for the next few months, so this blog may see some non-trivial activity in the near future. For now, here are a few worthwhile links:

• Noumenal Self returns with a good post on the Ayn Rand Institute tsunami aid op-ed kerfuffle. I admit to not seeing a problem with the original piece when it was released. That bothers me (slightly) now because the clarification was undoubtedly justified. A good opportunity to resolve to think more critically in 2005. Another angle to this story was in the over-the-top, visceral, and wrong-headed reactions to the op-ed. We have so far to go before an op-ed like that gets criticized for the right reasons. One more indication of the futility of treating politics as completely independent of the deeper philosophical premises upon which they depend.
• A new favorite website: 43 Folders. I read Getting Things Done a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised by how useful its advice is. Around the same time, I also discovered Moleskine notebooks. Yum. The 43 Folders site's fascination with these and related obsessions like Fisher Bullet pens (mine's on order) and Macs is an irresistible combination.
• Michael Crichton's State of Fear is in my to-read pile. In this interview, Crichton addresses some of the book's environmentalist critics.

12:56 PM |