Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage is a parody music video paying homage to Alice Paul and the generations of brave women who joined together in the fight to pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote in 1920.
H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward for the link.
Brendan O’Neill says that one of the driving factors for those demanding military action in Syria is narcissism:
Failed Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff recently made waves with an op-ed in the Financial Times calling for Western intervention in Syria. Revisiting some of the themes of his 1990s writings (Ignatieff made a living championing ‘humanitarian interventionism’ before he led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst electoral defeat ever), Igantieff said the West should impose a ‘comprehensive quarantine of Syria’ in order to ‘force [Assad] from power’.
Yet the most startling thing about his piece was not its extreme short-term historical amnesia, its ignorance of the disasters unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan following Western meddling, but rather its exhibition of self-regard and self-concern, even of that most malignant form of self-love: narcissism. Ignatieff mentioned his own feelings about what is happening in Homs six times and the possible feelings of the people of Homs themselves only three times. His short op-ed mainly focused on the ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ felt by people like Igantieff — that is, Western observers possessed of a good, caring, Sarajevo-informed ‘international conscience’ — while the ‘fear’ and ‘desperation’ of the people of Homs were given far briefer treatment.
This ratio of 2:1 between Ignatieff’s feelings of guilt and Syrians’ feelings of desperation not only suggests that modern Western interventionists are two times more obsessed with themselves than they are with the victims of foreign conflicts they claim to care so much about — it also reveals that what is really motoring the demands for Western intervention in Syria are the emotional needs of Western observers rather than the practical needs of Syrians. This kind of narcissism is now widespread among those who desperately want the ‘international community’ to intervene in Syria. These people are so amazingly vain that they see the bombing of Syria as a kind of balm for their guilt-ridden consciences, a physical act that might help to make their own emotional turmoil that bit more bearable. Their rallying cry should be: ‘Bomb Syria so that I can sleep at night.’
If you assume that there’s no behavioural response, then each percentage point added to the federal CIT will generate roughly $2b in new revenues. So you’d conclude that the January 1, 2012 reduction in the CIT rate from 16.5% to 15% would reduce revenues by about $3b, and increasing the federal rate from 16.5% back to (say) 24% would increase CIT revenues by some $15b — almost one per cent of GDP.
This is the the sort of answer ‘static analysis’ gives. In a world in which multinationals file 57,000-page tax returns, one can only marvel at the faith in human nature among those who would make policy based on the belief that the only behavioural change on the part of corporations to an increase in CIT rates will be to put larger numbers on the cheques they send to the Receiver-General.
Stephen Gordon, “How much new revenue will be generated by an increase in federal corporate taxes?”, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, 2012-03-11
Powered by WordPress