Harper Derangement Syndrome lives on

If you thought Bush-hatred in America was bad, you should get a load of Harper-hate in Canada, the subject of my latest article for the Huffington Post.

It’s a testament to the power of social media and the increasingly biased way most of us choose to consume our news that the Canadian party system is now largely polarized on the basis of a false dichotomy that exists only in the fevered imaginations of the country’s most dogmatic left-wing ideologues. Jack Layton may have claimed that hope is better than fear, but vast quantities of Canadian progressives seem to be motivated by little else.

They scream passionate answers to questions no one is asking, and organize ferociously to quash proposals no one has offered. It’s a particularly creepy style of democracy-by-fantasy, but it may well be the new normal.

Read the whole thing here.

The betrayal of the right in British Columbia

In my latest article for the Huffington Post, I look at the British Columbia Liberal Party’s ongoing indifference to right-wing voters in the province, despite the fact that they clearly need their support in order to beat the opposition NDP. Quote:

In a particularly dopey piece in the Globe and Mail this week, Gary Mason commented that “the Premier’s efforts to cast her Liberal administration in a bluer hue has had all the subtlety of football’s end-zone dance,” which is certainly the beleaguered party’s preferred narrative at the moment. Yet in terms of actual, real-world sightings of ostentatious conservatism, Mason could only spot two: Clark’s recent import of “a top federal Tory strategist as her new chief of staff,” and the fact that she recently sat beside Prime Minister Harper at her son’s pewee hockey game.

I certainly hope she didn’t strain something from all that reaching out.

Read the whole thing here, and be sure to leave a comment!

Two reviews of two random things

Just to mix things up a bit, I just wanted to write a quick post reviewing two things I’ve come into contact with lately, one bad, and one good.

The first is The Iron Lady, which is a movie so awful and poorly-made I simply cannot believe anyone approved its release.

Other reviewers have danced around this fact, but I want to put it as bluntly as I can: it’s not a movie about the life and times of Margaret Thatcher. It’s primarily a fictionalized, speculative drama about her life as an old woman, long since retired from politics, and the difficulties and frustrations she experiences as she mourns the death of her husband and copes with her own descent into senility.

There are flashbacks to her political life, certainly, and these are all the stunning clips you see in the remarkably deceptive trailers. But the Iron Lady is not even a movie that uses nostalgia as a simple framing device to tell a story of the past, in the way, say, Hoover dictating his memoirs was the frame of J. Edgar. The point of the flashbacks is primarily to reveal character and emotion, not history. The three main characters are Thatcher, her daughter, and the ghost of Denis, and the climax of the plot is the ailing widow gaining the courage to clean out her dead husband’s closet. It’s not even worth harping on about all the important political episodes the film fails to show because, again, that’s not even the point of this movie.

I think anyone who’s interested in politics and politicians has often wondered what life is like for former heads of state after they leave office, and how they cope with a life of anonymity and weakness after years as the most powerful and well-known person in their nation. In the extremely unlikely event she would have agreed to it, a documentary about post-politics Thatcher might have been quite fascinating, and perhaps a different director could have made a compelling little film about the sad retired life of some other foreign prime minister who’s considerably less famous and important. But to ruin what should have been one of the great bio-pics of our time with one of the greatest actresses of our time is simply inexcusable, and outright depressing in its carelessness.

Changing gears, entirely, this Christmas I asked my parents to buy me a new computer monitor. Get me a big one, I said, and they bought me a 27-inch Samsung, which cost them around $300. At the risk of sounding like a spoiled brat, it wasn’t very good, but that was more my fault than theirs. I had done absolutely no research into how monitors work, and since returning it I’ve realized that you actually have to be a pretty discriminating shopper in order to come home satisfied.

My monitor set-up. Dell Ultrasharp attached to a Macbook pro.

Unless you are willing to spend over a grand for one of those super top-of-the-line Mac Thunderbolt things, most monitors on the market today max out at a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Which really isn’t really that great. As this clever XKCD comic notes, that’s an amazing twice the resolution of your average smartphone. In practical terms, this means there’s a very clear limit at how big a 1920 by 1080 screen can get before everything  just starts looking stretchy, blurry, and pixely, and in my experience that’s somewhere around 23 inches. I guess if all you want to do is watch movies, a stretched display doesn’t matter much, but if you’re an artist like me, and sharp focus and crisp pixels are important, anything above 23 is going to cause more problems than it solves.

Color also appears to be something most monitors simply aren’t interested in bothering to do right in any serious capacity. Apparently if you take color seriously, you’re supposed to buy some manner of $60 color-matching contraption to calibrate your monitor, since merely fiddling with the “RGB balance” settings won’t do much. Again, this might not matter much to some, but using a double-screen monitor set-up, as I do, I find it incredibly irritating to pull windows from one screen to the other only for all the hues and shades to brighten or darken or yellow or whatever.

I originally returned the Samsung for a smaller model, then returned that second Samsung again for my current monitor, a Dell Ultrasharp 23-inch, which I am incredibly satisfied with. It  also cost 300 bucks, but has much better sharpness, color, and clarity than the 27-inch Samsung, and did not require any special ports or cables I didn’t already own. It’s also capable of swinging around to provide a “vertical display,” which I must say, has already become one of those how-did-I-ever-live-without-it-experiences, in terms of how much more user-friendly it’s made word processing and web-browsing.

But I ordered it online, and only on the recommendation of a particularly tech-savvy friend, which was unto itself fairly revealing of how needlessly difficult monitor shopping remains for a layperson like me. I suppose it’s uniquely frustrating because few things seem like they should be easier to select based on nothing more than looks than a big, shiny, glowing screen.

Is Harper the last neo-con?

In my latest column for the Huffington Post, I look at Prime Minister Harper’s approach to foreign policy. To quote myself:

In contrast to the man’s constant waffling elsewhere, foreign policy is the only real realm of “Harperism” where the PM has never significantly recanted, ignored, or undermined his own past views — an occurrence only made possible by a shifting political culture that has moved foreign affairs to a conveniently low rung on the ladder of priorities. It’s the one realm, in short, where Harper still sounds like the unabashed right-wing Republican we were always promised (or feared).

You can read the whole thing here.

Canada needs primaries

My latest for the Huffington Post, in which I contrast the Canadian and American methods of choosing party leaders. If I may be a conventional blogger, here’s a quote from it:

Last Tuesday, Mitt Romney eked out his narrow victory in the Iowa caucus with a total of 30,015 votes. That slim tally in a single, Midwestern state is nevertheless only slightly fewer than the 31,150 votes that elected Jack Layton leader of the national New Democratic Party in 2003, and much greater than the 16,149 that elected Stephen Harper leader of the federal Conservatives in 2004.

And keep in mind, these are both parties that use (or, in the Tories’ case, used to use) the so-called “one-member-one-vote” system. When the Liberals installed Paul Martin as the 21st Prime Minister of Canadain their 2003 convention, by contrast, the 3,453 “party delegates” who made that decision were a notably smaller group than the 6,073 voters who gave Michelle Bachmann her last-place finish in Iowa, to say nothing of (as some wags noted at the time) the 3.3 million voters who crowned Ryan Malcolm the first Canadian Idol.

Read the whole thing here.

Canada’s royal year that wasn’t

Got a new article posted on the Huffington Post, in which I summarize Canada’s royal headlines of 2011.

Check it out, and be sure to comment on the HuffPo page, rather than here. Helps me out more that way.

The iconoclast everyone could agree on

Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, the same day America’s nine-year adventure in Iraq, a war he so vigorously encouraged, glorified, and excused, formally concluded with the lowering of US colors at Baghdad International. Though perhaps not quite as rich in symbolism as the Fourth of July death of Thomas Jefferson — one of Hitchens’ “heroes, if I had heroes,” as he was fond of saying — for an author who devoted much of his later years to crafting eloquent defenses of that most controversial of American foreign policy decisions, the coincidence still seems fitting enough. One can even imagine the sort of quip the man himself might have made about the synchronicity: “I’d proceed further, but the challenge is gone,” perhaps.

The greater irony, of course, is that in death, Hitchens is now being feted and glorified with the same sort of sentimentalist eulogies he rebelled so strongly against in life. Rarely did Hitch regard the passing of a beloved public figure as anything other than an opportunity for snide revisionism and legacy-stomping iconoclasm.  Bob Hope was “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny.” The Queen Mother was a probable Nazi sympathizer. John Paul II was the protective patriarch of a “child-rape racket,” while Ronald Reagan was simply a “a cruel and stupid lizard.” For those who have grown accustomed to anticipating the tasteless prose of such an accomplished grave dancer, it must be a tragedy indeed that the savage post-mortems Hitchens was reserving for surviving foes like Henry Kissinger and Billy Graham will forever go unheard.

It’s because of this tradition that I regard the occasion of Christopher Hitchens’ death as a more opportune time to berate the man than exalt him, my own generally positive feelings for his accomplishments notwithstanding. Read the rest of this entry »

China: friend or foe?

Here’s a new article I wrote for the Huffington Post entitled China: it’s not all cheap toys and Panda bears. It is, as you might expect kind of down on China.

New article!

Hey everyone, I got my first-ever article published on the Huffington Post. It’s an editorial about Prime Minister Harper’s incoherent immigration policy, entitled Tories’ Immigration Incoherence.

If you want to comment on it, which I hope you will, please do it on the HuffPo page! Have to stimulate on-site discussion!

Filibuster podcast, episode eight!

And we’re back! In this week’s episode, Jake and I talk about the official failure of the Super Committee, the rise of Newt Gingrich, America’s growing troubles with Pakistan, and the retirement of longtime Congressman Barney Frank.

Filibuster podcast, November 29, 2011