J. Baglow

Trudeau prepares to cede Canadian sovereignty to U.S. border officials

J. Baglow — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 15:59:05 +0000

Political deep integration continues apace. The Liberal government is in the process of passing an extraordinary piece of legislation, C-23, which effectively cedes Canadian sovereignty to U.S. border officials.

Originalism and the U.S. Constitution is a mug's game

J. Baglow — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 18:49:04 +0000

The Donald's pick to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States is Neil Gorsuch. He is a constitutional originalist.

That means he interprets the U.S. Constitution according to its original meaning. I haven't gone deeply enough into the man's beliefs to determine whether he is among the minority of originalists who look for the drafters' intent, or, instead, is a textualist who goes by the original plain-language meaning of the Constitution as understood at the time it was written.

Both propositions, of course, are a nonsense.

The rise of what-you-see-is-what-you-get politics

J. Baglow — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 17:44:34 +0000

Until very recently, electoral politics has been a contest of façades, rhetorical and visual simulacra competing with other ones. Somewhere underneath it all, real flesh-and-blood people are straitjacketed in talking-points and boilerplate, forming over them like a full-body mask.

This is such a commonplace that no one questions it. We expect it. Even those of us who like to get at the root of things -- literally, radicals -- find ourselves quite at home in this discursive world of the anodyne, the commonplace, the glib and thoughtless formulation. We, too, share in the babbled, incoherent language of somnambulists, and speak it too often ourselves.

Getting on -- and getting over the ageism that comes with it

J. Baglow — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 17:57:52 +0000

Disclosure: I'm now a septuagenarian. Sounds better in Latin.

The odd thing is, I don't feel it. Not a bit. So when I first encountered ageism, I went into denial. Or laughed as though it was a joke.

But it isn't. Ours is one of the few human societies in which the default position for age is disrespect. You have to earn your stripes all over again. You either become invisible, or are too often shrugged off with amused or not-so-amused contempt.

Joseph Boyden and the identity trap

J. Baglow — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 01:05:53 +0000

"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." - George Orwell, "Shooting An Elephant"

Much has already been said on the Boyden scandal, more than likely too much. I would be foolhardy indeed to attempt to recapitulate the eloquence of indigenous writers and scholars like Hayden King, and will not make any such attempt here. Instead, as a white, relatively comfortable Canadian, I'd like to come at the issue tangentially: in particular, regarding the question of identity itself.

Right-wing media takes an Islamophobic twist on the tragic deaths of two Ottawa sisters

J. Baglow — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 02:10:26 +0000

A tragic story out of Ottawa -- and the carrion-eaters are already out in force.

Survey on electoral reform asks misleading questions

J. Baglow — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 02:45:19 +0000

The Liberal government, trying to recover from Minister Maryam Monsef's astonishingly bumbled performance in the House of Commons last week, has decided to seek a little consultation camouflage, using an online survey that has already been roundly mocked for its heavy-handed tendentiousness.

The new yokels of the Liberal party ridicule math and evidence in the House of Commons

J. Baglow — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 22:24:11 +0000

"Evidence-based policy" is a cant phrase that has been around for a while. I first heard it used -- repeatedly -- at Justin Trudeau's coronation in Montreal in 2012. It was clearly a term that was intended to set the Liberals off from the Conservatives, who governed in the teeth of evidence, facts, logic and science.

But once in power, this fresh new approach to governance was not to be. Climate change? Here are a couple more pipelines. And mind your manners, Injuns—we've got police and the military to sort you out if need be, and you've seen that movie before.

America flips the bird

J. Baglow — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:23:17 +0000

"Trump's election is going to be the biggest 'fuck you' ever recorded in human history -- and it will feel good....He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system."

-- Michael Moore

Last night I learned a lesson. And I now have questions about everything I have lazily taken for granted over the decades of my life, both political and personal.

I think Moore got it right several months ago, but it runs much deeper. Not everyone who voted for Trump was financially ruined by free trade and Wall Street. Not all of them were racist and sexist hooligans.

Police violence at Standing Rock shows America still addicted to frontier justice

J. Baglow — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 20:15:25 +0000

The woman being brutalized by America's finest in the photograph is an elderly person holding a prayer staff. Local authorities claim that she was brandishing a gun. She is one of a number of "water protectors" who have been protesting the laying of an oil pipeline that threatens the water supply of the Standing Rock Lakota and Dakota reservation. (A brief background to the conflict may be found here.)

Adam Capay is a case study in the banality of evil [with updates]

J. Baglow — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 20:20:01 +0000

UPDATE: CBC is reporting that Capay has been moved from his solitary confinement cell, where he has spent the last four years, to a different cell "with appropriate lighting and access to day rooms, spending time out of their cell for showers, phone calls and access to TV."

Adam Capay, a young First Nations man, has spent four years in solitary confinement in a plexiglass cell where the lights are kept on 24 hours a day. He has not had a trial. He is now likely to be clinically insane. He has no idea whether it is day or night, his speech is slurred, and he has hallucinations.

'The Picture of Justin Trudeau': One year later, Liberals still masters of the façade

J. Baglow — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 20:52:43 +0000

"There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candor of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world….He was made to be worshipped." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

One year ago, we had our made-in-Canada Hope and Change moment. A dark decade of brutish and nasty rule had been replaced overnight. Even hardened cynics like myself dared to feel the warmth of sunlight streaming through the windows the next morning.

Bob Dylan's well-deserved Nobel

J. Baglow — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 21:19:30 +0000

Bob Dylan's Nobel prize for literature is richly deserved; it was an audacious and inspired choice. Some of his songs are better than others, and you can't point to any one song and claim greatness for it. But one has to take Dylan's entire oeuvre as one thing: a cartography of the American mythos. He has extended an enormous reach through space and time.

Saints preserve us from the canonization of Mother Teresa

J. Baglow — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 16:16:24 +0000

If anything sums up everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church, it is the canonization of a monstrously vicious, sadistic, racist, colonial control freak born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu and known to the world as Mother Teresa -- now St. Teresa of Calcutta. Oh, Calcutta!

France's fear of the 'burkini' has nothing to do with protecting women

J. Baglow — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 13:54:17 +0000

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There was, of course, a subtext to the Paris murders of Charlie Hebdo staff and Jewish shoppers in a kosher supermarket all along. Vile crimes by any standard, these were the work of ISIS-supporting Islamists, and so the murders immediately became iconic. The Other had struck again.