The Toronto Globe & Mail

This is my favourite newspaper. Read it - it's good stuff. Its reporters, columnists, editorialists and editor-in-chief seem, to the reader, to work as a pretty finely honed machine mixing hard news, analysis, and opinions into a cohesive, balanced read. Here's a link to it's site.

I never miss the Globe's cryptic crossword puzzle. Try it, you'll get addicted.

And if you do get addicted, try the Toronto Star puzzle called "The Prize" published in the Saturday edition. It usually takes 'til Wednesday to get it done.

A Great Read

 Halls, Peter: Anti-Gravity, Toronto, Badgerow Press, 2003. This is a great book. I couldn't put it down.

Wither a Fiscally Conservative-Socially Liberal Political System

We've all watched the philosophical purists run their Democratic Socialist and Neo-con theories by us. We've elected them and then sat by and watched as they struggled to impose a rigid and narrow "body of theory" on a pluralist society. They've both failed miserably. What seems to be emerging in Canada is a general feeling that we ought to put a pox put on both their houses.

Horrors for the idealist, but a pragmatic mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism seems to be what Canadians find preferable. A pluralist society must have flexible rules of social conduct and discourse. But, it must do so under the constraints of fiscal prudence.

Currently, we see tolerance of pluralistic social values becoming more widely held. Evidence for this rests in recent changes in marijuana laws and the granting of gay marriage licenses in parts of Canada.

But these are only harbingers. Canada is a country of immigrants who have come here from more than 100 countries around the world. We are, more and more, celebrating this diversity, not decrying it. All over the country, there are "ethnic" celebratory events occurring regularly. Varied social customs and morays are becoming very unremarkable. The Canadian Mosaic is piecing itself together inexorably.

It seems to me that we are doing this without any over-arching political philosophy. Maybe it just has to be done that way. Maybe the philosophy will only be written after the outcomes are known. And, just maybe, that's exactly the way to develop such a body of theory and knowledge, carts and horses notwithstanding.

Purists hate the "find your way then write the story" approach to public policy. They want to start with a rigid philosophical position, derive the path to be taken, and stick to it no matter what unforeseen adverse consequences arise. They explain away the adverse consequences as being just "transitional" and, given enough time, their policies will turn out to be most beneficial.

But how much time is reasonable? The Soviet Union installed a rigid philosophically-based system, took 80 years to try to make it work, and their way never turned out to be very beneficial.

Look up "disjoint incrementalism". It's a little known, but interesting, story about how decisions can be made successfully without an underlying rigid socio-political philosophy.

And there endeth the rant for today.

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