Quotulatiousness

January 17, 2012

Stop SOPA!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

Although this is a Canadian blog and SOPA is proposed legislation in the United States, it is extremely likely that Canadian websites and internet users will be directly affected by provisions of it. Michael Geist has a list of reasons why Canadians should be concerned:

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines “domestic Internet protocol addresses” — the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection — as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it. Should a Canadian website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in another way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge (described as a “counter notification”), the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.

Along with thousands of other bloggers and major internet sites like Wikipedia, Quotulatiousness will be marking the anti-SOPA effort tomorrow. Unless I’ve misconfigured it, you should see a “Down Against SOPA” page the first time you visit the blog tomorrow (either on the main page or on a particular post), but then it should allow you to have normal access. I considered going “dark” as Wikipedia will be, but this seems to be a better way of registering my opposition without inconveniencing my readers too much.

January 10, 2012

When “everyone agrees” about excessive executive pay, something else is being sold

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Tim Black on the amazing unanimity of thought that the most pressing problem in the world right now is big pay packets for corporate CEOs:

Occupy London, the Labour Party, the Lib-Con coalition, the Archbishop of York… It doesn’t matter to what or to whom you look, you’ll find the same simple-minded sentiment: the root cause of our economic and social problems is greed. The greed, that is, of bankers, of overpaid CEOs, of those at the top of society who simply have and want too much.

[. . .]

If there was ever a striking indication of the deadening political conformism, the dearth of social imagination, that so characterises our contemporary impasse, it is there in the sheer ubiquity of the Greed-is-Bad argument.

So what is driving this pervy, across-the-board obsession with the pay packets of super execs? It’s certainly not impelled by a desire to get to grips with the economic crisis that holds most of the developed world in its grip. No doubt there are some simple-minded souls in a state of Occupation who believe that blaming and bashing company CEOs or bankers is somehow to understand the economic crisis. But just as the remuneration packages of a few bankers and bosses did not bring about the current crisis, so seeking to limit their wages, to impose a maximum national wage, will not solve the crisis. And while £3million or £4milllion for a CEO’s annual salary does seem huge, such figures amount to very little in the grand economic scheme of things. As the Investor’s Chronicle points out: ‘The average FTSE 100 CEO is paid £3.9million year. But this is only one four-thousandth (0.025 per cent) of the average market capitalisation of a FTSE 100 company.’

The current fashion for attacking large pay packages, then, is economic neither in impulse nor intent. Rather it is driven, in the first instance, by a narrow moralism. For its numerous proponents, either in party offices or in spartan tents, it represents an easy posture, a cheap critical pose. One Guardian columnist virtually gave the game away: ‘Like phone hacking or MPs’ fiddled expenses, this is an issue that only needs to be described to seem reprehensible.’ That is, to the right-thinking types on liberal broadsheets, criticising large salaries is just too good an opportunity to miss. Indeed, like attacking tabloids and MPs, it is a mark of one’s membership of the right-thinking to have a pop at the really, really rich.

But there’s a deeper, darker impulse driving this cheap attack on exorbitant pay packages than just preening self-righteousness. And that’s the belief that the large pay packets pursued by the undeservedly wealthy are a symbol of a society-wide pathology. The cheap attack on top earners is also an attack on the material aspirations of the rest of us. We are, in short, just too greedy now to be left to our own unregulated, uncontrolled devices. A report from the High Pay Commission — a grandiosely monikered body established by centre-left think tank Compass, a few trade unionists and business secretary Vince Cable — makes this clear by drawing the highly questionable link between this putative celebration of ‘greed’ — or ‘an elevation of the concept of the rational self-interested man to unprecedented heights’ — and the August riots. ‘It should not perhaps surprise us’, the report states, ‘that the rioters took the trappings of wealth that they could not afford — the TVs and designer trainers. It reflects a sense of entitlement that pervades society from the very top to the bottom.’

December 20, 2011

The kind of folks who make up the bulk of the “Occupy” movement

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:49

Charles Cooke reports on a recent study of the membership of the “Occupy” groups:

The report, Shortselling America, reveals that, below the surface, there is a lot more going on than meets the eye, and most of it has very little to do with “social justice.” Its author, Frontier Lab takes an interesting approach, applying techniques of market research to political science. The group’s aim is to move away from the short-term model employed by political pollsters — which, although valuable, essentially provides just a fleeting snapshot — and instead to conduct a more thorough assessment of participants’ values. From these data, they then seek to predict future behavior. An example: Surface-level polling will see consumers tell us that the reason they buy a particular dish soap is because it is green, or cheap, or conveniently sized. But research shows the deeper truth is that, overwhelmingly, people buy the same brand as their mother did. (Nobody will write that on a survey.)

What did Frontier Lab discover? First, that many of the rank-and-file occupiers feel isolated in their lives, and appear to lack basic community ties such as are provided by participation in clubs, churches, and strong families. Indeed, much of the report could have come from the early chapters of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. They thus attach to their political causes with something like a religious fervor. For many, a commitment to “social justice” is “not the end, but rather a means to an inflated sense of self and purpose in their own lives.” Crucially, involvement with others who agree with them provides an “overwhelming feeling of being part of a family.” I noticed this on my first trip down to Zuccotti Park, when I saw a telling sign adorning the entrance to the tent city: “For the first time in my life, I feel at home.” On subsequent visits I was struck by the importance of the commune to the project. As much as anything else, vast swathes of occupiers were simply looking for a new club. This group, Frontier Lab dubs the “Communitarians.”

The second group, which to all intents and purposes forms the leadership, is less existentially lost, and derives its fulfillment from the “prestige,” “validation,” and “control” afforded by the movement’s coverage in the media. Frontier Lab calls this group the “Professionals.” Its members fill the ranks of the professional Left and boast long histories of attending and organizing protests. For them, indignation is quotidian, “community action” is a career, and they feel “validated by the fame and attention” and “rewarded for their life choices.” Unlike the Communitarians, the Professionals actually want tangible change, or a “win,” but politics is still playing second fiddle to self. There is nothing spontaneous or organic about the movements they lead. They are waiting for the revolution and hope to be in its vanguard. Their careers depend upon it.

H/T to Ace, who added this post-script to the quote: “Testing on the Myers-Briggs personality profile consistently put the rank-and-file in the Stunted Weakling category, and the leadership in the Gigantic Colossal Douchebag group”

Next on the protest agenda: Occupy Xmas

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Patrick Hayes talks about the new agenda item for the self-declared 99%:

At a time when Occupy protesters are closing up camps the world over — either due to force by the authorities or because it’s too cold to protest outside — the widely acknowledged founders of the Occupy movement, Vancouver-based magazine AdBusters has claimed protesters’ next move should be to ‘Occupy Christmas’. The rationale for this, is as follows: ‘You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper-sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support Occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s.’

What bastards the 99 per cent are! Occupy protesters have experienced an ordeal akin to Christ being nailed to the cross, and all the greedy, selfish, Judas-like masses want to do is shop! The new Occupy protests began on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) in the US last month, where goods are heavily discounted in shops in an attempt to kick-start spending and get shops’ P&L sheets ‘into the black’ in the run-up to Christmas. Occupy protesters left their tents and headed to the malls to tell consumers — or ‘cum-sumer whores’ as some protesters put it in their leaflets — to stop buying Christmas presents at discounted prices for their loved ones.

The idea behind this, as AdBusters — renowned also for founding Buy Nothing Day — noted is that ‘Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now let’s give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits… This year’s Black Friday will be the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS.’

December 17, 2011

Charles Stross divines the real reason for SOPA

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:39

Read the whole thing, but the last few points help to explain why the push for SOPA is coming right now:

7. Modern communications technologies (including the internet) provide people with a limitless channel for self-expression (not to mention distraction — endless circuses without the bread). They also provide the police state with a limitless flow of intelligence about the people. Note also that it’s possible to not merely listen in on mobile phone calls, but to use a mobile phone as a GPS-aware bugging device, and (with a bit more smarts) to have it report on physical proximity (within bluetooth range — about 20 feet) to other suspects. The flip side of social networking is that the police state knows all your acquaintances.

8. So I infer that the purpose of SOPA is to close the loop, and allow the oligarchy to shut down hostile coordinating sites as and when the anticipated revolution kicks off. Piracy/copyright is a distraction — those folks pointing to similarities to Iranian/Chinese net censorship regimes are correct, but they’re not focussing on the real implication (which is a ham-fisted desire to be able to shut down large chunks of the internet at will, if and when it becomes expedient to do so).

December 14, 2011

Revolt in a Chinese fishing village

Filed under: China, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

Local unrest is hardly uncommon in China, but unrest of this nature is almost unheard of:

For the first time on record, the Chinese Communist party has lost all control, with the population of 20,000 in this southern fishing village now in open revolt.

The last of Wukan’s dozen party officials fled on Monday after thousands of people blocked armed police from retaking the village, standing firm against tear gas and water cannons.

Since then, the police have retreated to a roadblock, some three miles away, in order to prevent food and water from entering, and villagers from leaving. Wukan’s fishing fleet, its main source of income, has also been stopped from leaving harbour.

The plan appears to be to lay siege to Wukan and choke a rebellion which began three months ago when an angry mob, incensed at having the village’s land sold off, rampaged through the streets and overturned cars.

Of course, one of the reasons we rarely hear about protests of this nature is that the Chinese government actively suppresses media coverage. This is only coming to our attention because western journalists are there and able to communicate with their employers.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who commented “You have to admire these 20,000 future organ donors for their intestinal fortitude”.

December 13, 2011

The Zero Sum Fallacy

Filed under: Economics, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

P.J. O’Rourke on the big economic issue that the Occupy folks always get wrong:

The “Occupy This, That and the Other Place” people are right about the sins of the financial system and right about the evil of government supporting and subsidizing this malfeasance. It’s not fair that 1 percent of Americans are rolling in dough while the rest of us are scrimping to pay for our Internet connection so we can go on Groupon.

But the Occupiers are wrong about something much more important. They believe in the Zero Sum Fallacy — the idea that there is a fixed amount of the good things in life. Anything I get, I’m taking from you. If I have too many slices of pizza, you have to eat the Dominos box. The Zero Sum Fallacy is a bad idea — dangerous to economics, politics, and world peace. It means any time we want good things we have to fight with each other to get them. We don’t. We can make more good things. We can make more pizza — or more tofu, windmills and solar panels, if you like.

The Zero Sum Fallacy is just that, a fallacy. Economic history since the Industrial Revolution proves — be the rich however stinking rich — we ordinary people can make more of the good things in life. But we have to make them ourselves, with our knowledge, skills and hard work. Government can’t give us good things. Government doesn’t make things, it just redistributes them. This brings us back to fighting with each other.

December 6, 2011

Guardian study finds that August rioters were motivated by Guardian editorials

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Brendan O’Neill on the recent study, carried out by the London School of Economics and the Guardian:

Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? A four-month Guardian/London School of Economics study into the riots that rocked English cities in August has found that the rioters were pretty much Guardian editorials made flesh. Concerned about government cuts, annoyed by unfair policing, shocked by social inequality and outraged by the MPs’ expenses scandal, it seems the young men and women who looted shops and burnt down bus stops weren’t Thatcher’s children after all — they were Rusbridger’s children, the moral offspring of those moral guardians of chattering-class liberalism.

This is a blatant case of advocacy research, of researchers finding what they wanted to find, or at least desperately hoped to find. For months now, the Guardian has been publishing articles arguing that the rioters were politically motivated, under headlines such as ‘These riots were political’ and with claims such as ‘the looting was highly political’ and the riots were a protest against ‘brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. And now, lo and behold, a Guardian study, Reading the Riots, has discovered that the rioters were indeed ‘rebels with a cause’, with 86 per cent of the 270 rioters interviewed claiming the violence was caused by poverty, 85 per cent arguing that policing was the big issue, and 80 per cent saying they were riled by government policies. Reading this study, we are left to marvel either at the extraordinary perspicacity of Guardian writers, or at their ability to carry out research in such a way that it confirms their own political preconceptions.

This study looks less like a cool-headed, neutral piece of sociology, and more like a semi-conscious piece of political ventriloquism, where rioters have been coaxed to mouth the political beliefs of the middle-class commentariat. This is not to say the Guardian and LSE researchers have been purposely deceitful, inventing evidence to suit a political thesis. Advocacy research is more subtle and less conscious than that. It involves a kind of inexorable pursuit of facts that fit and evidence that helps bolster a pre-existing conviction. So mental-health charities keen to garner greater press coverage always find high levels of mental illness, children’s charities that want to raise awareness about child abuse always find rising levels of child neglect, and now Guardian researchers who want to show that they’re right to fret about Lib-Con policies and outdated policing have found that these are burning issues amongst volatile English yoof, too.

December 5, 2011

Debunking memes: the Gini co-efficient as a spark for rioting

Filed under: Britain, Economics, France, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Theodore Dalrymple shows that the widespread habit of journalists in Britain to attempt to attribute the root cause of August riots to the Gini co-efficient fails the common-sense test:

An August feature story on the riots in Time offered a particularly striking example. The author suggested that to understand the riots, we should start with “something called the Gini co-efficient, a figure used by economists to indicate how equally (or unequally) income is distributed across a population.” In this traditional measure, the article notes, Britain fares worse than almost every other country in the West.

This little passage is interesting for at least two reasons. First is the unthinking assumption that more equality is better; complete equality would presumably be best. Second is that the author apparently did not think carefully about the table of Gini coefficients printed on the very same page and what it implied about his claim. Portugal headed the list as the most unequal of the countries selected, with a 0.36 coefficient. Next followed the U.K. and Italy, both with a 0.34 coefficient. Toward the bottom of the list, one found France, with a 0.29 coefficient, the same as the Netherlands. Now, it is true that journalists are not historians and that, for professional reasons, their time horizons are often limited to the period between the last edition of their publication and the next. Even so, one might have expected a Time reporter to remember that in 2005 — not exactly a historical epoch ago — similar riots swept France, even though its Gini coefficient was already lower than Britain’s. (Having segregated its welfare dependents geographically, though, France saw none of its town or city centers affected by the disorder.)

As it happened, when I read the Time story, I had an old notebook with me. In it, among miscellaneous scribblings, was the following list, referring to the riots in France and made contemporaneously:

    Cities affected 300
    Detained 2,921
    Imprisoned 590
    Burned cars 9,071
    Injured 126
    Dead 1
    Police involved 11,200
    Average number of cars burned per day before riots 98

And all this with a Gini coefficient of only 0.29! How, then, could it have happened? It might also be worth mentioning that the Netherlands, with its relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.

November 29, 2011

Comparing the Tea Party and Occupy movements

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:04

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

November 26, 2011

Daniel Hannan on how the “Occupy” movement misunderstands the right

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

In his latest column in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan lists ten mistaken beliefs that the “Occupy” folks seem to have about conservatives:

1. Free-marketeers resent the bank bailouts. This might seem obvious: we are, after all, opposed to state subsidies and nationalisations. Yet it often surprises commentators, who mistake our support for open competition and free trade for a belief in plutocracy. There is a world of difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes, the two positions happen to coincide; often they don’t.

2. What has happened since 2008 is not capitalism. In a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to fail, their profitable operations bought by more efficient competitors. Shareholders, bondholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers would not have contributed a penny.

[. . .]

6. Nor, by the way, does state intervention seem to be an effective way to promote equality. On the most elemental indicators — height, calorie intake, infant mortality, literacy, longevity — Britain has been becoming a steadily more equal society since the calamity of 1066. It’s true that, around half a century ago, this approximation halted and, on some measures, went into reverse. There are competing theories as to why, but one thing is undeniable: the recent widening of the wealth gap has taken place at a time when the state controls a far greater share of national wealth than ever before.

7. Let’s tackle the idea that being on the Left means being on the side of ordinary people, while being on the Right means defending privileged elites. It’s hard to think of a single tax, or a single regulation, that doesn’t end up privileging some vested interest at the expense of the general population. The reason governments keep growing is because of what economists call ‘dispersed costs and concentrated gains’: people are generally more aware the benefits they receive than of the taxes they pay.

November 17, 2011

Updating 1984 to 2011: tweetcrime replaces thoughtcrime

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:12

Patrick Hayes in the Independent:

Who’s afraid of the English Defence League (EDL) clicktivists? Well the police for a start, who decided to undertake a mass pre-emptive arrest of 179 EDL supporters, while they were drinking in a Westminster pub on Armistice Day, for supposedly planning an ‘attack’ on Occupy London protesters at St Paul’s. The police were tipped off by bloggers who had scoured the EDL’s Facebook posts for threatening remarks, and were apparently also assisted in the arrests by some Occupy London supporters, with the administrator of an Occupy London Facebook page boasting he played a role.

These arrests have rightly chilled civil liberties activists. As human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell tweeted at the time: ‘Democracies don’t arrest people who have committed no crime. EDL today, who next? Civil liberties are for all, even odious EDL.’ Brendan O’Neill has argued on spiked, ‘it seems pretty clear that [EDL] supporters were arrested for committing a tweetcrime, the modern-day equivalent of Orwell’s thoughtcrime, where you’re nicked for what lurks inside your head rather than for anything you’ve done in the real world.’

Strikingly, this illiberal, anti-democratic crackdown on EDL protesters came less than a fortnight after the publication of the most extensive research into the EDL yet: one that reveals the EDL to largely be all tweets and no action.

Snapshots from Greece

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Brendan O’Neill has a few snippets from Athens:

‘Prime ministers should be chosen by us, not Angela Merkel,’ says the taxi driver taking me to the Acropolis. Taxi drivers here love talking politics, and they love hating Merkel. She’s treated as the arch villain of this tragedy. Magazine covers show a massive Merkel playing with Greek politicians as if they were dolls. Graffiti invites her to do things that are probably anatomically impossible. My advice to her is to avoid visiting Greece for the duration of The 100 Days. Probably longer.

•••

The taxi driver also tells me he can’t relate to Papademos. ‘He’s not a man of the people’. But it’s precisely Papademos’s lack of experience in dealing with the grubby, demanding demos that endears him to the EU elite, which fought tooth-and-catapult to have him installed as PM. As one European economist put it: for Brussels the great thing about Papademos is that he ‘speaks the language and shares the philosophy of [the] EU and ECB’ and that he ‘comes in without officially representing a party’. That is, he’s apolitical, unchosen, boring and bureaucratic — just the kind of politician the EU likes. It’s already a cliché, but that doesn’t stop it being true: Athens is now both the birthplace and graveyard of European democracy.

•••

Yet the graffiti expresses exasperation as well as anger — a deep disappointment with Greek workers. Commonly scrawled phrases are ‘Wake up!’ and ‘Stop being slaves!’ You get the impression that the Greek left, which is rowdier and noisier than its western European counterpart, is as annoyed with the masses as it is with Merkel. In Syntagma Square, nothing much remains of the radical protest camp that so excited outside observers earlier this year and which provided the template for the global ‘Occupy’ movement. There is just a memorial tree, with political paraphernalia attached to it in remembrance of the camp. It’s like one of those shrines that pops up on roadsides where someone has been killed by a speeding car, only it is adorned, not with wreaths, but with balaclavas, goggles and batteries (which were thrown at the police). It has the unwitting whiff of being a gravestone not only for the Greek left, but for Greek politics itself.

November 15, 2011

The Occupy movement: the height of 21st century civilization?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Natalie Rothschild takes issue with a fellow journalist’s characterization of the Occupy movement:

A late October edition of the New Yorker carried a ‘postcard’ piece on Occupy Wall Street (OWS). On the third re-read it began to dawn on me that, perhaps, the writer was not being sarcastic, despite her grandiose opening line: ‘Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week . . . was a bit like visiting civilisation at its peak: Paris in the Twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at the very least, Timbuktu in the fifteen hundreds.’

Really? I mean, really? I had recently visited the OWS Zuccotti Park encampment, too, and I’ve been there several more times. Over time, the camp has become better organised. There are now tents, clean-up teams, a set of portable toilets, a library and information points. But ‘the height of civilisation’? Come on.

[. . .]

None of this fawning has stopped occupiers and their supporters from decrying the mainstream media’s coverage — there’s not enough of it, apparently, and most of it is anyway shallow or negatively skewed. In truth, the OWS coverage has been dense and overwhelmingly positive.

The few critics of OWS have been slammed as contemptuous ignoramuses, as corrupt apologists for ‘the one per cent’. Or it is said that they simply ‘just don’t get it’ because they haven’t engaged with the new form of direct, participatory democracy practiced in Zuccotti Park. But, then, even those journalists who have reported directly from the Occupy headquarters and have taken note of the eccentricity and confusion that undoubtedly exist there have been said to be blinkered by prejudice or interested only in shallow, headline-grabbing snapshots. Any commentary that is less than praising is slammed as mocking or as right-wing mud-slinging.

November 6, 2011

QotD: The Occupy movement

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:01

There are lessons in this history for the leftist protester. The Occupy movement is bristling with changes it wants made (I’m told we’re not supposed to call them “demands”); these changes won’t, and shouldn’t, happen outside the ballot box. The goal of protest in a liberal-democratic society must therefore be to advance one’s pet issue further ahead on the agenda of the sympathetic, for when they do attain power, and to weaken the morale of moderates on the other side. One must locate specific injustices rather than nebulous cosmic ones, confronting them and defying their perpetrators directly. Deeds will accomplish more than any amount of eloquence. And it should not be necessary to claim to be a majority (let alone a majority of 99-to-one); one individual suffices, where he has a true claim to our attention.

It’s not really clear, anyway, how an “Occupation” that is meeting no serious resistance from authorities anywhere is supposed to elicit sympathy. The main effect of the movement so far seems to have been an elaborate proof-by-demonstration that Canadian municipalities are incredibly respectful of political protest and fawningly deferential to the Charter of Rights. So . . . hooray?

Colby Cosh, “Want political change? Talk to a farmer”, Maclean’s, 2011-11-06

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