Diversity of tactics = rubbish
I’m trying to make sense of this whole diversity of tactics business. And I can’t. I’m going to earn the enmity of a lot of folks who might normally consider me an ally, but what the hell. I understand the phrase to mean: deliberate property damage as a protest tactic is okay.
Leader summits: older and stupider
Though you’d scarcely think that possible given where we’ve been.
Labo(u)r’s Media Strategy
I was on this panel at Labornotes 2010 on what the trade union movement’s media strategy should be. And Steve Zeltzer, the moderator, suggested that we write something about what were going to say and post it on the internet. I thought I’d oblige.
Race and reporting: are we backsliding?
UPDATE: The Citizen has edited the online version of this story (haven’t seen a print copy) to just use ‘black’ and ‘white’. CBC has removed all references to race but notes that the victim shouted racial epithets at his killer.
Two media outlets reporting a verdict in a trial. Some guys get drunk and pick a fight with some other guys, complete with baseball bats. There’s a tussle and one of the picked-on guys grabs a bat from his tormentors.
Hurt locker: CSI goes to Iraq and sweats a lot
This must have been a really bad year for movies. Or maybe the Academy wanted to reward a director for making a low-budget film where normally one would have expected them to blow more than the GNP of a populous, earthquake-ravaged Caribbean island to make 90 minutes of eye candy. Or maybe they thought ‘this is the year that we finally give best picture to a woman’.
Surging cost of Stephen Harper likely to play role in your future ill health
A more appropriate headline for this Tory trial balloon trussed up as a Globe and Mail piece.
How to lose popularity and still keep power
So there’s this EKOS poll out today that has the Tories and the Liberals statistically equal in terms of voter intention.
December 6 depoliticized
I will own the cliché nature of this post: yes, for many people my age, Dec. 6 is our Kennedy assassination moment. Most people I know remember where they were and what they were doing when first they heard that a man had separated the men from the women in a Montréal University engineering class, screamed “you’re all feminists†then opened fire, killing 14.
Nortel execs give themselves raises
Are they effing kidding? Their only function right now seems to be to parcel up chunks of the former corporate behemoth and sell it off garage sale like.
Lansdowne Live should be put in a medically induced coma
I just sent this letter to Ottawa city council, Larry O’Brien et al at Let’s get it right. You should send one too.
Who signs the cheques, who’s got the keys?
There’s much online kvetching about all the power unions have as garbage piles up in Toronto, Windsor and as a strike deadline at VIA Rail approaches. But when I hear someone complain that unions have too much power, I understand they’re complaining that unions have any power at all.
Relative greed
How to say this nicely. I’m bombarded with negative feedback about the municipal strike in Toronto and Windsor. It’s mostly over the top, often violent, homophobic and abusive. It seems to come from a limited number of voices – men universally.
Murray Dobbin asks a lot of Toronto strikers
Murray Dobbin’s post on the Toronto municipal strike points out how much effort goes into making public sector workers unpopular. He’s big on the value of the public sector and here I agree with him.
When would be a good time to strike
On the face of it, striking during a recession would seem to be pretty daft.
Model villages in Afghanistan
Creepy. The US used the technique in Vietnam to, as did the Guatemalan military – to devastating effect – in its war against its own population in the 1980s.
