Practical Metaphors

US Encouraged by Vietnam Vote

Does this sound familiar? – via Anxiety Culture

Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Civilization: What is it Good For?

I've been having issues with my culture. And not just North American culture versus, say, European culture, or Western culture versus Eastern culture. It's this whole process of "civilization", of dragging ourselves up from the caves and swamps we supposedly used to live in before we discovered the technologies to build houses, make paper, extract pure metals from the earth, and, most importantly it seems, plant seeds.

As the story goes, the Agricultural Revolution got us producing enough food to free up our minds so we could start inventing all the wonderful things we have today. It gave us security from starvation that no hunter-gatherer tribe could ever have, and that is why our way is the best way to live. Aren't we glad that, after millions of years of having humans living on the planet, we finally discovered the path 10,000 years ago?

Tsunami Devastation Greatly Exacerbated by Economic "Development"

In the United Press International article Outside View: Tsunami, Mangroves & Economy, Devinder Sharma argues that shrimp farming and other modern economic development has enormously worsened the effects of the recent tsunami by destroying the mangroves that used to buffer the region against such disasters.

Read the article here.

STV Information

With a referendum on the proposed BC-STV electoral system approaching, I thought I'd post a few good articles I've come across on how STV works and the theory behind it.

The Wikipedia entry on STV is a good place to start. The Accurate Democracy also has a good short article on STV.

But if you really want to get down and dirty, read How To Conduct an STV Election. Here's an excerpt:

Make a Freedom of Information Request

If you are interested in which of your personal information held by the BC government may be available to American authorities in secret throught the USA Patriot Act, make a freedom of information request to the government. The < a href="http://www.bcgeu.ca/2380">BCGEU has a website about the issue, and is challenging the government's privatization of certain administrative duties to American companies in BC Supreme Court in March.

Below is a form letter you can send to request your information. Apparently the government is being swamped with these...

Full Employment?

On a discussion board thread, someone posted that "full employment is important because prolonged unemployment puts people at risk to social exclusion." Something tweaked in my head and I wrote this response:

So shouldn't the principle of the system be inclusion rather than full employment? Have we really questioned why the unemployed are socially excluded? Have we considered that the system works to purposely make life difficult for the marginalized in order to force them back into the mainstream, regardless of the overall direction of that mainstream, and that progressive social policy can be complicit in this endeavour?

For example, why do we seem to assume that all homeless who live by scavenging would prefer a room and a regular job? Is it not possible that some of them value their type of freedom more than the security and comforts (ie, the freedom to consume) that the mainstream provides? And yet the system does not recognize this choice. The system as it stands dictates that everyone must live a certain way, and everyone who is physically able must work to contribute to this way of living.

Citizens' Assembly Releases Final Report

Almost a year ago, 160 ordinary people chosen randomly from across British Columbia first got together to begin learning about electoral systems and deciding whether to recommend a new one for BC. Today, the BC Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform has released its final report recommending a single transferable vote system. The report is short, simple, and a surprisingly good read:

As citizens, we all are responsible for the health of our democracy, and therefore we must have the fullest possible opportunity to choose the candidates that best represent our interests. Our choice in elections should include choosing among party candidates, as well as across all parties. To give voters a stronger voice, greater voter choice should be part of our voting system.

Their recommendation goes to BC voters in a referendum at the next provincial election in May.

Also check out the animated demonstration of how STV works.

If you're in BC, don't forget to vote Yes to STV on May 17, 2005.

My Response to Bill Tieleman's "Single Transferable Vote Equals Multiple Problems"

Here is my response to Bill Tieleman's "Single Transferable Vote Equals Multiple Problems" in the Georgia Straight last week. (An edited version was published in this week's Straight.)

Bill Tieleman needs to do a little more research about STV before writing another column like November 10th's "Single Transferable Vote Equals Multiple Problems". First of all, the problems he describes in New Zealand are due to poor election administration, not the STV system. We need only look south of the border to find examples of equally poor administration under the "simpler" first-past-the-post system. Ireland, Malta, and Australia seem to be able to conduct STV elections without any trouble.

The Urban Archipelago

The Urban Archipelago is a message to city-dwellers: forget those redneck right-wing-voting rural hicks. Let's build strong, progressive, friendly, shining cities and forget about trying to protect those country bumpkins from their own gun-toting, environment-destroying, hate-mongering ways. A reaction to the American election, but applicable to Canada as well.

Who needs federal and provincial/state governments? They just bleed tax dollars out of cities to support rural areas. Why send our money to Ottawa just to squabble to get it back? I would gladly support a call for our tax dollars to go to our city first, with the unused portion passed on to the provincial and federal levels. Look at the prosperity achieved by independent city-states such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco, Kuwait, and Dubai...

Progressive Economics

I've created a new blog: Progressive Economics to outline some of my ideas on Economic Activism. It will go way beyond "buy stuff in alignment with your values", to explore how to stimulate both the supply and demand for progressive products, services and ideas.