The monarchy paradox: If it’s so great, why do we all hate it?

Elizabeth II, the queen most Canadians don't want

The fact that a certain policy or proposal polls badly is not necessarily an indication that it lacks wisdom. Many perfectly good ideas generate unreasonably high levels of derision for a variety of ignorant reasons, and it can take a long time for public opinion to swing in a more enlightened direction. Mere controversy is not a sufficient case for outright rejection.

The monarchy is kind of a different matter, though. A monarchy claims, as one of its justifications for existence, to already be universally popular, since universal popularity is deemed a highly desirable quality that only a monarch can possess. Politicians, the monarchist argument goes, are divisive figures. They are chosen through messy elections which polarize public opinion and form lasting legacies of partisan distrust. A monarch, by contrast, holds office by birthright, and is thus “above” the divisive nature of the party system. She can be — nay, is — beloved by all citizens equally as a result.

The problem with this argument is that it’s so incredibly easy to disprove. According to a recent Ipsos-Reid poll, a full 58% of Canadians believe Canada should end its ties to the British monarchy and have a Canadian citizen as the country’s head of state, rather than the Queen. The high negative numbers are hardly earth-shattering; pretty much every public survey of at least the last decade has generated similar results.

Again, by citing this statistic I am not necessarily making the point that monarchy is a good or bad form of government — simply that monarchy is not doing what it claims to do. It’s a performance review argument much more than a utilitarian argument, though the two are of course closely interrelated. If the monarchy’s usefulness can only be justified by making a number of obviously false statements about its popularity and past performance, then the system deserves a failing grade on those grounds alone. Which is good news for Canada’s republican majority, since obviously false statements seem to be the only weapon in the monarchist arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »

The Potemkin village of Canadian music fame

Justin Bieber and the guy from Hedley

If you want a good example of the Twightlight Zone-esque way that Canadian nationalism twists observable reality into all sorts of freaky distortions, you need look no further than your typical Canadian pop music award show. They’re a swirling vortex of feel-good deception, designed for the sole purpose of creating a pleasing alternate dimension — similar to, but quite unlike our own — in which a thriving, popular, independent Canadian music industry actually exists.

Last Sunday was the night of the Much Music Video Awards, Much Music being a sort of lamer, Canadian MTV knockoff. Things were predictably dominated by Ontario-born Justin Bieber, but the other big victor was a band called Hedley, who managed to pick up a total of three different awards as well. To the best of my ability to research, very few people in Canada actually like Hedley, yet they still seem to rampage gleefully across the countryside, picking up awards and honours left and right. Along with the MMVAs, Hedley was nominated for “best album” and “best group” at this April’s Junos, and has won no less than four different Canadian Radio Music Awards. They even got to play at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Yet such consistent acclaim flies in the face of a much crueler commercial reality. Read the rest of this entry »

How the Japanese lost video games

When I was in Japan I started work on a cynical article about the Japanese video game industry, inspired by some of my first-hand observations in the country. My basic conclusion was that the Japanese were running the industry almost entirely for themselves, which made absolutely no business sense since Japanese developers rely so heavily on international sales. This irrationality was in turn symbolic of the larger spirit of irrationality that governs so much of Japanese life, and what seems to be dooming the country to an era of increased irrelevance in the ever-more interconnected global order.

The article was never completed, alas. I wanted to release it before the dawn of the new decade but never quite got around to it. Still, in reading some of the disappointed coverage of this year’s E3 gaming expo, I was reminded of some of the critiques I had originally made, and thought it might be worthwhile to just publish the half-finished piece. It’s hopefully entirely readable, though I apologize if some ideas seem half-developed or insufficiently supported. I also wrote this to be accessible to all, so if you’re a hardcore gaming type person and find some of the tone patronizing, a thousand pardons.

Read the rest of this entry »

More exciting new Filibuster community type stuff!

If you look to the right of this column, you may notice that I’ve added some swanky new community buttons to the site. As a good member of the Web 2.0 community, I am trying to encourage more fan interaction with Filibuster. You guys have been really awesome with all your support over the years, and I always enjoy reading your thoughtful and insightful emails. I clearly have a lot of very intelligent readers, and since political commentary is an inherently participatory sport, I’m keen to have everyone get more publicly involved in debating and discussing some of the issues I talk about on the site.

To summarize, Filibuster now has a Facebook fan page, where you can comment on cartoons or blog posts and discuss stuff, and Formspring page, where you can ask me questions about anything. You can also follow me, personally, on Twitter. More to come, I’m sure, but for now I’m really pleased that all this stuff has been so well received so far. Be sure to let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions of your own.

How Wikipedia is ruining everything

Longtime readers of this site will know that I like to prattle on and on about various things. I’ve written a number of essays, made a lot of charts, even authored a thorough guide to my country. When I’m gathering facts for this kind of stuff, I make it a conscious point to never consult Wikipedia.

I really don’t like Wikipedia. I don’t care for its awkward and ugly layout, I don’t trust it’s information, and I don’t have high regard for the people who run it. These are not uncommon criticisms, and the Internet is full of sites entirely devoted to documenting Wikipedia’s numerous sins, especially in regards to the reliability of its articles and the sanity of its ruling clique. Wiki-bashing, in short, has been around as long as the site itself.

Yet even so, to take a stand against Wikipedia still puts you on fairly defensive ground. Particularly among those of us who enjoy learning for its own sake, accumulating trivia and fun facts as a path to personal betterment, Wikipedia has become something of a beloved plaything. How wonderful it is to have so much information consolidated within a single site! How fun it is to spend the evening hopping from link to link to link, reading dozens of pages on such a crazy diversity of topics! Sure, we can raise some mild criticisms here and there, but overall, the site is far more helpful than harmful.

The very people who, in ordinary circumstances should be most critical of Wikipedia (and in an earlier era, probably were) have become its most outspoken apologists, moist-eyed at its bottomless content and ease of use. It’s these people who I want to direct my Wiki-criticisms to. If you truly value the idea of the Internet as overflowing cornucopia of diverse human knowledge, then it must be acknowledged that Wikipedia represents the most serious threat to both the quality and quantity of factual information available on the web today. If present trends continue, Wikipedia’s hegemony will only further depress our already collectively low standards of what constitutes a well-informed or well-read individual. And when such intellectual standards suffer, so too does everything else: the media, our popular culture, our political discourse, the education system… The unchecked spread of crappy information is a serious cause for alarm on many, many fronts.

So how is Wikipedia ruining everything? Let us count the ways:

Read the rest of this entry »

Q and A section

I know I’m not nearly popular or interesting enough to justify this, but I have set up a Q&A page on Formspring. So if you have ever wanted to ask a question to me, about Filibuster or politics or whatever, there’s the place to do it. It’s fun and easy and there is no registration or anything!

Bad portraits of politicians

Former prime minister Jean Chretien unveiled his official portrait in the House of Commons gallery earlier this week. And it was awful. See for yourself:

Like everything else in modern politics, the once-great art of political portraiture is becoming increasingly cheapened through a lack of maturity and respect. Official portraits are simply a lot worse today than they were in previous decades (to say nothing of previous centuries), and with each new unveiling we seem to be sliding further and further down the pole of what exactly constitutes tasteful political art.

A huge part of the problem is that the politicians themselves are now usually in charge of commissioning their own official portrait, unlike in previous eras where the job was outsourced to some government-funded archivist or interior decorator or whatever. When disinterred parties ran the show, we got some nice paintings. With the politicians in charge, however, portraits have (predictably) become a ever-more-grotesque exercise in over-the-top vanity and self-importance.

I’d say there are four main trends of awful political portraits in the 21st Century. Read the rest of this entry »

Away this week

I’m going to visit Alberta for the next couple of days for reasons that are unclear even to me. So there’ll be no new cartoons or articles this week, alas.

Self-important politicians make for better government

I’m reading a really excellent book at the moment called The United States of Ambition. The author, Alan Ehrenhalt, tries to figure out what sort of person runs for public office in modern America, and thereby determine to what extent the government Americans receive is a product of the unique personalities of these individuals. I’m quite fond of thinkers who analyze politics from such an explicitly human perspective, as opposed to the standard economic-sociological-ideological stuff you get everywhere else. As the book notes, It’s very easy to take the political process at face value, and simply view politicians as empty vessels of ideologies or interests that carry the agenda of some faction of the electorate. Much less frequently do we bother to analyze politicians as a faction unto themselves.

Anyway, some of Ehrenhalt’s conclusions are quite interesting in regards to how they relate to the topics I’ve been discussing in some of my previous blog posts, namely how different systems of government generate different political cultures. Read the rest of this entry »

Letter time: Would the US be better off under a parliamentary system?

In response to my critique of the parliamentary system I received a lengthy letter from an American reader, which I have posted in full after the jump. He defends the system on a number of grounds I find quite interesting, since, as an American, he has the privilege of being able to view parliamentary government through fairly neutral eyes.

Check out his thoughts, into which I have interspliced my various responses.

Read the rest of this entry »