Toronto
Joined February 2021
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Just a note here that I continue to write essays on all manner of topics on my own website. Link in bio.
This is nothing — once my parents turn 80, I'm gonna get my dad to publicly renounce Springsteen
Benjamin Moser, author of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, told Rashid Khalidi that his 80-year-old mother, who had all but called him a Hamas member, apologized after reading his book: “I’m ashamed I ever said I was a Zionist.”
His book traces Jewish opposition to Zionism over the past century and challenges their exclusion in discussions over Palestine. “No, you don’t get to set the rules anymore. We’re setting the rules now,” Moser said.
Khalidi added that he had never seen so many people change their views so rapidly, noting that major publishers are now embracing books on Palestine that would have been virtually unpublishable just three or four years ago.
You guys need to stop pulling out the Salieri Overcome With Emotion clip for every half-clever turn of phrase on here
This is admittedly one of my pet themes, but I would refine this point: the origin of virtually all societies tends to be a bloody business. It's not unique to modern states, but it creates particular political tensions because of the rights-based claims of most nation-states.
Yep, the birth of many or even most modern nation-states was bloody and traumatic, based on *narrowing* the answer to the question, "Who belongs?"
As a Catholic, I don't fetishize the nation-state form. But neither can one be so naive to imagine that nation-states will dismantle themselves anytime soon. Or blind to the fact that many democratic nation-states today are both ethnic-majoritarian and non-racist.
With Toronto's municipal elections coming to a head tomorrow, I wrote about what I take to the central question: why can't Olivia Chow's supporters make a positive case for her mayoralty?
thestar.com/opinion/contribu…
This is really good news. Anyone who has spent time in BC knows it's basically paradise on earth but governed by incompetents and lunatics. This will be an interesting test of the possibilities of normalcy.
I must say that I’m more invested in the success of the incoming Doerkson government than I’ve been in any goverment in nearly a decade.
What interests me most is the potential fecundity of the premier-elect’s back-to-basics, normie conservatism. Doerkson isn’t offering political dopamine. His whole pitch is about competent government, economic growth, and public institutions that fulfill their basic purposes. The magnitude of his victory is a sign of how broadly that proposition can appeal.
The story, in a nutshell, is a guy from Williams Lake offered a recognizable conservatism that could win in Vancouver-Yaletown. His temperament helped bring together rural communities, suburban families, and urban voters around some straightforward expectations about how their province should work.
Schools should teach. The justice system should protect the public. Hospitals should treat patients. The civil service should deliver services competently and impartially. These institutions have important yet bounded missions. They should discharge them effectively and resist the temptation to become vehicles for every passing political or ideological cause.
The same practical instinct should guide economic policy: make it possible to build homes, grow businesses, develop resources, and attract investment. Give people reasons to believe that hard work and initiative can produce a better life here.
This is the politics of normalcy in practice. And even if its rhetoric is moderate, its ambitions are considerable. Restoring focus and competence to institutions that have lost them will require conviction, persistence, and capable people.
That’s another reason for optimism: the quality of the candidates and potential front bench, along with the talented people Doerkson’s leadership drew to the campaign. @gavindew is someone to watch in particular. His interest in both economic growth and making government more productive—including through AI—could make him an important contributor to this governing agenda.
The test now is governing. There will be hard choices and inevitable disappointments along the way. But this is a conservatism that I want to see succeed—and an unusually promising opportunity to show what it can accomplish.
Should be a bigger story—was shocked at the numbers here
Canada will struggle to find another stock-market success story like Shopify as the country grapples with a public-listing drought and a delisting trend, according to Daniel Nowlan at National Bank Capital Markets bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Confession: back before you could readily look these things up, when the glorious Dick's Picks 1 credited Donna Jean Godchaux as "giving birth" in the liner notes, I assumed this was a comment on her singing.
How great is The Sun Also Rises? Despite the fact that I am generally ambivalent on Papa Hemingway, and I detest the actual experience of fishing, I never tired of reading about Jake and Bill fishing for trout on the Irati river.
I always liked Just and Unjust Wars for taking a casuistic approach, rather than a deontological one, to political dilemmas, though one can see how a particularly difficult case like Israel/Gaza to which he is also emotionally close would stymie his approach.
Michael Walzer published “Just and Unjust Wars,” an attempt to delineate the rights and wrongs of warfare in both its causes and its conduct, in 1977. In the nearly 50 years since, no other book on the subject has matched its influence. The precepts are not complicated: it is just to defend your country from an invasion and it is unjust to invade a country that has not attacked you—although Walzer does allow for exceptions, mostly for humanitarian causes. It is just to assume certain risks to avoid civilian casualties and it is unjust to bomb towns indiscriminately to compel an enemy to surrender. The justice of going to war—what philosophers call jus ad bellum—is separate from jus in bello, the justice of how a war is fought.
The war in Gaza has made Walzer rethink one of the book’s fundamental principles. “The wall between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which had sustained his theory for almost half a century, was no longer sturdy,” Jordi Graupera writes. As Walzer said to him, “There is a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust.” Read about why a philosopher of war is now reconsidering his seminal work: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/T7…
And if Walzer increasingly believes that there was simply no acceptable way to fight it out after 10/7 (which may be true!), one wonders how much his other cases were conditioned by violent processes of group formation/separation for which his theories again could not serve.
One way to square this circle is simply to deny that Israel's conduct has been remarkable by the standards of warmaking. Another way, as Matthews does, is to pretend the question is one of occupation and resistance.
xitter.cf/Heidi__Matthews/status…
Funny that this reads as a much harsher indictment of the financial system than anything that, say, Viscount Bolingbroke might have come up with
I am genuinely mystified by this entire discussion—the stealing our precious fluids thing feels very Strangelove.
Mayoral candidate Brad Bradford is pushing back against concerns that his plan to restructure Toronto Water could lead to privatization, as environmental activist David Suzuki joins incumbent Mayor Olivia Chow in criticizing the proposal. #Toronto
nowtoronto.com/news/toronto-…
