Liberals: Say, "No!" to Duffy narrative and provide a more complex and more compelling one

By John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail, March 21, 2012
Mr. Rae has solid support in caucus, and can point to rising poll numbers as proof of his effectiveness on the job. He may also be the best candidate to execute a strategy penned by John Duffy, a former adviser to Paul Martin, whose recent article in Policy Options magazine has been widely and carefully read by Liberals everywhere.

Mr. Duffy believes Canada is fracturing between the commodity producing West and the industrial East, which is suffering from the high dollar those commodities fetch.
“If the Liberals can convincingly tag the Conservatives as favouring the commodity economies of their political heartland at the expense of the rest,” he wrote, then the Liberals will possess “narrative and demographic and regional bases of support that truly challenge the foundations of Conservative power.”
The Liberals believe that Mr. Rae has more experience and popular support in Quebec than Montreal MP Thomas Mulcair, who is favoured to become Leader of the Official Opposition after Saturday’s leadership vote. (If the NDP chooses a leader from outside Quebec, so much the better for the Liberals.) The path to power for Mr. Rae and the Grits lies in stripping away from the NDP their Quebec gains while appealing to financially stressed voters in suburban ridings outside Toronto and other Ontario cities. Such a coalition would also embrace voters everywhere who can be found on the losing side of the “two Canadas” that Mr. Duffy sees: one prospering and happy with smaller government, the other struggling and in need of help.
To destroy Mr. Rae’s credibility before it becomes too deeply entrenched, the Conservatives are already trying to tar him with his record as Ontario NDP premier in the 1990s. Whether Ontario voters are ready to forgive and forget that unhappy past could determine Mr. Rae’s future. In any case, for the Tories the 2015 election is clearly already underway.
The Conservatives and the NDP would both benefit from seeing the Liberal Party expunged. For the NDP, it would make them the only realistic alternative to the Conservatives. For the Conservatives, a two-party race against social democrats is a race they are confident of winning over and over again.
I believe it was Hugh MacLennan who wrote about "Two Solitudes" in a novel depicting the alienation of the Irish in Quebec, although Athanase Tallard had indeed married an Irish woman, and a similar  alienation for the same man in Ottawa, for not being English. English and French as two solitudes engaged, for decades in what Margaret Atwood called the "dialogue of the deaf."
There is another aspect to the history of 'two Canada's' in our tradition of "have" and "have-not" provinces that, under Prime Minister Mike Pearson, found through "regional economic expansion" some softening of the hard realities of economic prosperity and economic poverty.
It seems that Mr. Duffy is trying to extend the metaphor, only by broadening the definition of "have" (to the west) and "have-not" to the east.
In a culture more characterized by competition and free market capitalism than by co-operative federalism, it seems his metaphor might be a little "out of context" to put it mildly.
For example, on foreign policy, hard neo-cons regardless of their province of either birth or current address, favour more military action (Lybia) as opposed to the more moderate "No" of Jean Chretien to George W. Bush and his horrendous war with Iraq. Also neo-cons from all provinces favour the most recent omnibus crime bill, while "progressives" oppose it utterly and totally.
Progressives favour balancing the economy and the environment, while the Harper gang unidimensionally choose the oil companies and their profits, and it would seem that there are progressives in all provinces and territories, as there are, apparently, neo-cons.
On lowering corporate taxes, of course the Harper gang favours anything that will keep those dollars flowing into their political coffers, so that they can, quite literally, remain in power for decades, supported by those "blue-rinse" dollars. Progressives, on the other hand, prefer a more balanced approach, lowering taxes for middle and lower incomes, while possibly at the same time increasing the taxes on the wealthy, no matter where each group lives.
Mr. Duffy's "profitable west" versus "poor east" does not seem to be either a workable, or a winning electoral theme, from this vantage point, especially given the kind of "superiority-condescension" wave it would generate from the west.
It was, if I remember right, Pierre Trudeau who proposed a National Energy Policy, including the purchase of PetroCanada, so that all Canadians could enjoy some equality and some economy on oil prices, based then on the incredible wealth that was being generated by "western oil" projects. I also recall the howls of protest from the west, howls that will be heard once again, should the Liberal Party fall victim/heir/ to the Duffy portrayal of the current Canadian reality. "You have had a century of wealth from industrial, economic and political power in the east!" they will say, write, pontificate and editorialize."And now it is our turn! So get lost with your characterization of any kind of national government that panders, once again, to the 'poor' east. Rebuild and revive your manufacturing sector; grow your biodiversity and bio-health technologies, if you think you can outdo us in the west. We are not buying into the rich west versus the poor east, and all that nanny state stuff about co-operative federalism, forget it. That was the '60's and the '70's and that is ancient history. This is the 21st century, where capitalism has finally found its legs and we are going to ride them off into the sunset!"So, Liberals, it must be a much more complex equation than that proposed by Mr. Duffy, if the party is going to have any hope of winning power.
The east has to become aware of its innate strengths, gifts and potential for economic improvement in the short medium and long terms. And the west has to become aware that, while the east is not the "captive of Quebec," as they see us, the Canadian culture is and always has been much more than the sum of the bank accounts in any one section. And the party that can rise about mere dollars and profit, for the wealthy, and extend a captivating narrative about the generosity and the compassion and the care and the international leadership that the country has provided and can provide once again will have much more success at the polls, than the party that seeks to ride the "opportunism" of a current economic phase.
If the Duffy narrative is designed to camouflage the potential of a class war, using geography and provincial income as cover, that is no way to "run a railroad" either. Let's be frank about the situation...the poor, the uneducated and the dispossessed, whether born in Canada or "from away" are struggling in all provinces and territories, while the rich are wallowing in their filthy lucre. It is already a division of opportunity and national attention so deep and so wide as to require the efforts of both the NDP and the Liberals to provide the more workable, sustainable and credible narrative to help all Canadian "boats rise" and to design both policies and an enveloping narrative to present to the Canadian voter.
Enlightened voters cannot help but see the canyon that grows daily between the have's and the havenots, and their geographic location is not the primary determinant of that difference. And even if it were, policies that will benefit one region or province must be adaptable to all other provinces, and the Liberal party has a history of being capable of designing both the policies and the campaign rhetoric and advertising that will speak directly to the highest aspirations of all Canadians, and not seek to build a political opportunity by driving another wedge between the east and the west.
Let's reinvigorate the spirit of innovation, and of research and of a culture that celebrates Canadian inventiveness among all provinces and peoples. Let's bring more public attention to the details of foreign affairs, so that we can produce another Lester Pearson candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize. Let's show the world that our health care was not a three-decade flash in a pan, and that we can build both structure and protocols within which all provincial governments can operate without bankrupting the system. Let's assure that more Canadian youth graduate from both undergraduate and graduate schools, including both men and women, to serve their country, including their country's corporations for the next several decades. Let's send an army of youth to the developing world to serve, to educate and to develop infrastructure so that our culture comes to be appreciated and admired once again, as it has been in the not-so-distant past. Let's build bridges between professions and academic disciplines so that more students have a deepened and more comprehensive perspective on their studies and their world, and, without denigrating the specialist orientation of the last half century, provide another balance to the pendulum that has swung too far, in all provinces, territories, towns and cities. And let's provide the foundations for the complete elimination of poverty, not only in Attawapiskat and on the First Nations reserves, but in every community, neighbourhood and rural region in the country.
And let's design a training and job-creation integrated program that will bring our employment  rate, and provide the skilled workers for those sectors facing job shortages. Let's also build an entente cordiale between labour and management, that will see both workers rewarded and corporations confident in the growth of both their bottom line and their individual employees for the next decade.
And let's get over our fear of tackling the gordion knot of global warming and climate change, with both education and policies that both corporate and consumer sectors can and will accept, encourage and sustain.
Of course, these are "grand bargains" as Thomas L. Friedman calls them, and they require statesmanship, diligent in camera deliberations and debates, and less time on "frivolities" on the front pages in the contention of partisanship. There is so much opportunity, hanging like ripe fruit ready for the picking, much of it gifts of the incompetent gang currently in power, and the Liberals are adequately positioned both historically and intellectually to return to power, should they not self-sabotage through their own narcissism, hubris and narrow pursuit of power for its own sake.

Worldviews under microscope amid human tragedies...are we still searching?

By David Brooks, New York Times, March 19, 2012
Any of us would be shocked if someone we knew and admired killed children. But these days it’s especially hard to think through these situations because of the worldview that prevails in our culture.

According to this view, most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil.
This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don’t have to contemplate the evil in ourselves. But when somebody who seems mostly good does something completely awful, we’re rendered mute or confused.
But of course it happens all the time. That’s because even people who contain reservoirs of compassion and neighborliness also possess a latent potential to commit murder. ...
In centuries past most people would have been less shocked by the homicidal eruptions of formerly good men. That’s because people in those centuries grew up with a worldview that put sinfulness at the center of the human personality.

John Calvin believed that babies come out depraved (he was sort of right; the most violent stage of life is age 2). G. K. Chesterton wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved.
This worldview held that people are a problem to themselves. The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside. The worst thing you can do is, in a fit of pride, to imagine your insecurity comes from outside and to try to resolve it yourself. If you try to “fix” the other people who you think are responsible for your inner turmoil, you’ll end up trying to kill them, or maybe whole races of them.
This earlier worldview was both darker and brighter than the one prevailing today. It held, as C. S. Lewis put it, that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.
Because nature is good, then people are good vs sinfulness at the centre of human personality....
And we are still trying to accommodate our nature to the reality of events we see occurring every day around us. In Florida, a volunteer neighbourhood watchman (armed) allegedly shoots an unarmed teen with Skittles in his hand, after phoning in warnings to police that often went unheeded. An alleged AlQaeda suspect rides up to a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, and opens fires on a Jewish rabbi and his children, all the while apparently filming his horror. An American marine allegedly leaves his camp in Afghanistan and enters a village and the homes of its residents, and opens fire on women and children, killing 16 and then burning their bodies....all in the same week.
And our televisions are filled with the questions....and some of us merely reflect on our world view that 2% of the world's population are evil and commit such acts, leaving the rest of us free of guilt, conscience and grief, except for whatever compassion we might feel for the victims and their families.
How sad is such a view, eliminating the need for including oneself in the potential of committing such acts.
And then there is the Christian view, centred on "sin" at the core of the human personality...and an inner conflict between good and evil in every human and "each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of both extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism." While this view comes more naturally and easily to most people in the west. given our cultural debt to Christianity, what would it be like if humans were able to point to the "messiah" in each of us, more readily, more traditionally and more culturally.
Are we stuck between Calvin and Rousseau, believing as Calvin did that babies came out depraved or as Rousseau did that we are naturally good, and learn our evil as we grow?
Clearly, we have the potential for both good and evil. And yet, there is so much cultural fixation with our individual and collective evil as to suggest that we hunger for the feeding such stories provide. Conflict, and its motivations are the menu of most of our fiction, politics, sports, and even academic pursuits. Some of the conflict is evidently providing some good results, while much of it is generating both piles of broken and deceased bodies and broken and rusted equipment.
It seems impossible for us currently to dissuade the 2 percenters from their view, and it also seems unlikely to completely accept the more balanced view of two thousand years of christian doctrine.
Is there not some as yet uncovered perception of reality that frees us from this dichotomy, pointing us in the direction of our "noble angels" as a common, shared ambition and motivation, rather than to pit such minuscule differences between us as "power or control conflicts" generating much more heat than light, in a world needing light?
Are we so proud that only what our ancestors have told us is acceptable in the midst of such profound mystery? Are we so imbued with fitting it that we deny the potential for evil in 98% of all people or we include sin as the centrepiece of our theology and worldview, without fulling understanding how we contribute to its exponential growth every day by our thoughts, attitudes, actions and beliefs?
While we are living in a time of extended absence from "global war" (as in the great wars) we are nevertheless drowning in smaller, continuous and potentially more dangerous acts of crimes against humanity every day, and generating a full and growing industry in distributing the stories of those crimes, their perpetrators and their victims daily.
It is also interesting to note that our attention falls and remains much more with the perpetrators than with the victims of heinous acts against humanity almost as if we have an insatiable appetite for the horror.
And every day we generate and support more violence, and more hate and more revenge and reprisals and complain that "they" are doing it, not us, and continue to pour our cash into the box offices and the cable networks that feed us this stuff.
I am not confident that we have found a comprehensive, and commendable, and worthy worldview that does not debase human life, while at the same time also does not deny the potential for evil in each of us.

Drug-resistant TB: a growing man-made problem needing better medical treatment

By Kate Kelland, London Reuters, in Globe and Mail, March 19, 2012
Tuberculosis is often seen in the wealthy West as a disease of bygone eras – evoking impoverished 18th or 19th century women and children dying slowly of a disease then commonly known as “consumption” or the “white plague.”

But rapidly rising rates of drug-resistant TB in some of the wealthiest cities in the world, as well as across Africa and Asia, are again making history.
London has been dubbed the “tuberculosis capital of Europe”, and a startling recent study documenting new cases of so-called “totally drug resistant” TB in India suggests the modern-day tale of this disease could get a lot worse.
“We can’t afford this genie to get out of the bag. Because once it has, I don’t know how we’ll control TB,” said Ruth McNerney, an expert on tuberculosis at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
TB is a bacterial infection that destroys patients’ lung tissue, making them cough and sneeze, and spread germs through the air. Anyone with active TB can easily infect another 10 to 15 people a year.
In 2010, 8.8 million people had TB, and the Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) has predicted that more than 2 million people will contract multi-drug resistant TB by 2015. The worldwide TB death rate currently runs at between two and three people a minute.
Little surprise, then, that the apparently totally untreatable cases in India have raised international alarm.
The WHO has convened a special meeting on Wednesday to discuss whether the emergence of TB strains that seem to be resistant to all known medicines merits a new class definition of “totally drug-resistant TB,” or TDR-TB.
If so, it would add a new level to an evolution over the years from normal TB, which is curable with six months of antibiotic treatment, to the emergence of MDR-TB, then extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).
What’s so frustrating about that progression, says Lucica Ditiu of the WHO’s Stop TB Partnership, is that all drug-resistant TB “is a totally man-made disease.”
Like other bacteria, the TB bug Mycobacterium tuberculosis can evolve to fight its way past antibiotic medicines. The more treatment courses patients are given and fail to complete, the stronger and more widespread the resistance becomes.
“The doctors, the health-care workers, the nurses, entire health-care systems have produced MDR-TB. It’s not a bug that has come from nature. It’s not a spontaneous mutation. It came about because patients were treated badly – either with poor quality drugs, or not enough drugs, or with insufficient observation so the patient didn’t finish the treatment course,” said Ms. Ditiu
So the medical profession, in treating patients badly, is responsible for the drug-resistant variety of TB....so, who is patrolling the profession?
Over-the-counter drugs, over-medication of patients with antibiotics, failure to monitor patients on prescribed drugs...these are some of the overt reasons for the development of this new form of TB and once again, we are looking at "human error" on a rather large scale.
Just as in the case of prevention, in medicine, or in social ills, follow-up treatment is boring, time-consuming and much like watching grass grow, or paint dry-not very exciting.
How many times have you been asked by a medical professional, "Did you finish taking the medication?" Can anyone remember even once? Not likely.
And yet, on many vials of prescription medication, one finds the words, "Do not stop taking this medication until finished!" Clear, unambiguous and forthright instruction....and for those who actually complete the instructions, a small insurance policy against cases like the drug-resistant TB that seems to be gaining a foothold in many large urban areas of the world and spreading to the rest of the world very easily.
Nations are, of course, responsible for the practice of medicine; however, there is a commonly held view that TC has been wiped out, so there is very little public consciousness about its potential return, in a more virulent and less treatable variety. Doctors are less trained and much less consciousness of its potential, perhaps even less likely to be able to diagnose it. Furthermore, with so many "urgent" cases of more publicly "acclaimed" diseases, injuries and conditions, TB has virtually slipped off the radar both in the public and in the medical profession.
Does that sound a little like how individual patients slip off the radar of the individual practitioner?
We have made an icon of busyness, of intervention, of getting the medical profession paid...and the monitoring of patients, including the monitoring of prescriptions is often left to the coroner's court, after the patient has died and even then many of the recommendations of such courts are left languishing in the archives of those court documents, whether in "hard copy" or now in digital format.
In short, there is no newsworthiness in many of those recommendations. And consequently, there is also little monitoring of their implementation, unless the case has public attention and the public demands implementation.
Some of the best ideas on both large-scale public controversies and medical monitoring can be found in documents no one reads after they have been prepared. We move on! As if that phrase were a mantra for "not obsessing on the past" a trap into which no one, least of all the medical or political professions, wishes to fall.
Quality control is not needed only on the manufacturing floors of our large industries, or on our freeways. Quality control is an essential part of all of our human systems, and we need to be vigilant to generate and to implement quality control strategies and tactics with some vigor and some imagination and some teeth if we are to move toward a more comprehensive and more vigorous health care delivery system.
And, like the growing regimen of hand-washing, and removal of carpets in hospitals, we are still in the dark about demanding more stringent quality controls of the medical profession, so trusting and so naive and so "politically correct" are we in attempt to "fit in" that we abdicate our responsibility to be more like sandpaper in the way we approach omissions in the practice of medicine....apparently to our peril!

John Duffy: Politics of technology poses serious questions for us all

By John Duffy, Globe and Mail, March 19, 2012
John Duffy is a founder of StrategyCorp and one of Canada's leading government relations and public affairs consultants. He has worked inside the Liberal Party of Canada for many years, as an adviser.

For weeks, Ottawa has been consumed with “robo-gate” – an unfolding probe of abuses of new voter outreach technology. Think of it as a question: How do we regulate these powerful new technologies and ensure that they do not subvert democracy?

The broader question – how we regulate technology as a whole – is popping up all over the political landscape. Here are a few examples:
Last month, Israeli scientists more or less discovered the fountain of youth. Researchers treating mice with a sirtuin protein found increased lifespans of up to 15 per cent – the first time this effect has been found in mammals. An anti-aging pill, enabling humans to live easily past 100, could be in the works within 20 years.
The politics of this issue seem straightforward. The question is mainly one of access – will we simply allow the price of life-extending medicine to float, or will it be regulated in the name of equal access to life? It’s easy to see a free-market conservative answer – let the market decide. A progressive suggestion involving price regulation seems likely as well. On the margins, some may refrain for spiritual reasons and choose death over “playing God.” So far, nothing too earth-shaking.
Now, look at cloud computing – treating computing less like buying a fireplace, and more like paying for electricity on an as-needed basis. The issue is that, like the electricity grid a century ago, the computing cloud will rapidly become a vital public common whose stability simply must be maintained. Many of those hostile to government intervention – large corporations, libertarians and basement bloggers, to name a few, most identifying as conservatives – might find themselves pressing for public regulation to guarantee the cloud’s integrity.
Similar dynamics will likely apply as headlong intervention by individual humans in the natural order continues to generate more unforeseen, negative consequences. Stockbrokers with homes on the outer banks of the southeastern United States will call for government buybacks of their land in the name of environmental good. Conservation activists will clamour for the commodification of water to permit the full-cost pricing needed to stop the resource’s wholesale depletion. A lot of us are going to wake up and find we’re in the wrong party.
And for a real coalition-buster, consider artificial intelligence. Unmanned drones are popular when it comes to hunting down al-Qaeda, but is everyone comfortable with robot airplanes that can land on moving aircraft carriers? That’s happening now. So, who’s in charge here? This is the basic question posed by the emerging politics of technology: Are we running the technology or is the technology running us? And what, if anything, do we want to do about it?
Attitudes toward technology cut right across existing partisan lines, which are essentially carved at present by views about the role of government. Thinking critically about technology changes all that: It puts free-market conservatives at odds with traditionalist evangelicals and pro-technology liberals against state regulators. Left-wingers are left seeking to impose democratic control on technological systems that are splintering and recombining at lightning speed.
The great question of the 20th century – How do we govern our economy? – is giving way to the great question of the 21st century – How do we govern our technology? All over the world, the challenges currently posed by our tech-enabled way of life – such as limiting climate change, maintaining the biosphere, containing pandemics and securing energy and water supplies – are running out ahead of our institutions’ abilities to manage them. And a whole new crop of major changes are coming on fast. Parties and governments need to engage these issues in a serious way, and soon, or risk losing the ability to influence outcomes entirely.
While there is no doubt that technology is changing many of the traditional perceptions, both negatively and positively, of our society, it is not yet sufficiently understood how it does or should affect political policy.
While not attempting an exhaustive list of guidelines, here are some givens, and a list of perceived needs that might serve as an opening salvo in the public debate that naturally follows Mr. Duffy's provocative piece.

• we do value our privacy, and do not want technology used by anyone, including governments, to snoop into our private lives.
• we also value the research into life-enhancing, learning-enhancing and life-span-enhancing technology, while at the same time reserving omnipotence for our definition of God.
• we value personal, individual accomplishment, enhanced potentially by group participation and learning systems that create a balanced approach to learning and its certifications
• we also value honesty and integrity in our organizations and in our professional interactions never to be replaced by some form of technology that compromises this value
• we also value creative ingenuity and the ambition that generates many of the experiments that both design new technology and tweek it for broader and more sophisticated applications, presuming, probably naively, that both will serve only to enhance the highest aspirations and goals of human, family, organizational and societal life
• we value measured progress that brings a new perspective to our conventional ways of both seeing and doing, tested presumably by respected and legitimate "gate-keepers" who can and will advise the public on approvals of new technologies and their applications, so that governments can and will approve those for which their is public acceptance and concensus
• we have for too long taken the "NIMBY" approach to change, and need both educating and experience to demonstrate that international co-operation, collaboration and decision-making, especially on the major global issues affecting every country and every human, are the only option available to a world seeking joint decisions that preserve clean air, clean water, clean land and a limit to the potential ravages of climate change, nuclear proliferation, disease generation and distribution and economic catastrophe
• we place considerable value on making new research findings available from respected experimenters and theorists, and require and expect from government, the release of all such findings in order to better enable public debate and public decision-making to inform government decisions as opposed to restricted flow of information leaving government as the principal source of the findings
• we need broad thinkers who willingly and eagerly seek the opportunity to connect the dots that link academic disciplines, including those of technology, into some coherent and organized data base, including the competing theories about the applications of that data and our education systems need to begin to develop curricula to generate such cross-disciplined thinkers
• we need to foster and encourage the development of artists, poets, philosophers and futurists in all our academic institutions, so that their perspectives can imbue our discussions with their critical in-and-fore-sights on the potential of all our available, planned and merely envisioned technological advances, developments
•  we need a protocol for public/private partnerships in research, where public dollars command the release of the implications of that research, if not the actual results of the experiments, and we need the parameters of that research to be publicly debated prior to the establishment of such funding and prior to the design of the terms of the research grants.
• we also need a public/private agency through which all corporate monies designated for research would flow, to the various applicants in the universities and the private laboratories, thereby providing a firewall between the corporation underwriting the research and the findings of that research, this is first needed in the pharmaceutical sector, and then in the military sector and finally in the technology sector generally.
• we also need to establish a set of objectives for every government for benchmarks of achievements, with respect to the development of protocols on which research public funds will underwrite, what terms will govern that research and the public contributions of each research project 
• we also need national and international discussions leading to joint agreements to support the establishment of public/private research institutions, their ethical parameters and their willingness to collaborate on their findings, especially on those issues directly or indirectly impinging on the health and longevity of humans living everywhere
• we need a research reporting segment in every major daily newspaper, to follow and to report on all aspects of publicly funded research, and to discern which research remain under confidentiality guidelines, because it is privately funded and this not open to public scrutiny

Sacred vs Satan: the Manichean view of politics in U.S.

By Jonathan Haidt, New York Times, March 17, 2012
Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and a visiting professor of business ethics at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business. Parts of this essay were excerpted from “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” which was just released
If you follow the sacredness, you can understand some of the weirdness of the last few months in politics. In January, the Obama administration announced that religiously affiliated hospitals and other institutions must offer health plans that provide free contraception to their members. It’s one thing for the government to insist that people have a right to buy a product that their employer abhors. But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for many Christians) for the government to force religious institutions to pay for that product. The outraged reaction galvanized the Christian right and gave a lift to Rick Santorum’s campaign.

Around this time, bills were making their way through state legislatures requiring that women undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound before they can have an abortion. It’s one thing for a state government to make abortions harder to get (as with a waiting period). But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for nearly all liberals as well as libertarians) for a state to force a doctor to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina. The outraged reaction galvanized the secular left and gave a lift to President Obama.
This is why we’ve seen the sudden re-emergence of the older culture war — the one between the religious right and the secular left that raged for so many years before the financial crisis and the rise of the Tea Party. When sacred objects are threatened, we can expect a ferocious tribal response. The right perceives a “war on Christianity” and gears up for a holy war. The left perceives a “war on women” and gears up for, well, a holy war.
The timing could hardly be worse. America faces multiple threats and challenges, many of which will require each side to accept a “grand bargain” that imposes, at the very least, painful compromises on core economic values. But when your opponent is the devil, bargaining and compromise are themselves forms of sacrilege.
Thanks to Professor Haidt for his highlighting of the sacred, and the tribal in political persuasions.
There is another problem from this vantage, to the reality of American politics, if this view is correct.
And that is that Manicheanism, whereby there are two options, and only two options, one of which is the devil and the other of which is "holy" is certainly no way to "run a railroad" as the saying goes.
Talk about dumbing down the multiple issues and their multiple nuanced possibilities, in terms of how legislation might be written! When the whole "gestalt" comes down to a human definition of what is holy, and what is thereby evil, we have little more than another religious war, by another name.
The capitalist advertising dogma of never demonizing your business opponent has given way to a far more sinister depiction of the problem, for the purpose of generating a form of propaganda that would make the former Soviet Communists smile in derision, compared to the sacralazing of democracy committed by the Americans.
This Haist analysis does certainly hold some insight for those struggling to comprehend the many strange bedfellows, but finding and assassinating some mythical "devil" or "Satan", in the form of either a specific person, or an idea, or a piece of legislation, or a trend based on an incomplete presentation of data will not result in healthy choices, simply because of its reduction to the absurd.
Pre-pubescent adolescents do this every day, in their bullying, and in their demonizing of at least one of their teachers, and/or their principals, and certainly their law enforcement officers.
If democracy as practiced by the country that sees itself as the  "beacon on the hill" that achieved that status by making government the "devil" is the model of the most enlightened form of government in the world, surely we can expect multiple problems implementing such a scheme in countries where the culture has not been completely sold out to capitalism.
Are we not watching a religious war, under the guise of a democratic election?
Is the U.S. not in danger of becoming so intelectually and morally rigid and frozen as to be in danger of falling victim to a form of political "theology" in which fundamentalisms reign?
And when fundamentalism reigns, what is left of the complexities, when they have been relegated to the trash heap? A once sophisticated body politic is being reduced to its cartoon absurd...by the same people whose education attempted to paint a very different picture of the need for insight, intellect, compromise and healthy judgement.
Is it the insulting of the electorate that we can blame on this reductionism, by those ambitious enough to throw open their private lives to the microscope of a rapacious media, starved for the most scurrilous details that paint these political candidates as charicatures of human beings...all in the name of the pursuit of power?
If this is leadership, and we expect the next president to emerge from this cauldron of boiling epithets, and then turn the leadership of the western world over to the victor, then how can we expect that leadership to be helpful and nuanced and balanced?

Thanks for pain killers and infection fighting pills....when needed!

My contempt for much of what passes as corporate modus operandi by the pharmaceutical companies has, this weekend, been tempered by the reality of a dying nerve in a bi-cuspid tooth, requiring extensive doses of anti-biotics and liberal applications of pain killers.
Amoxicillin, for the infection, and ibuprofen, or tylenol-one with codeine were the medications that finally suppressed the rather extreme discomfort.
Prior to a visit to the dentist, I had pictured "something" (I did not know what) actually dying. There is this atrophy that changes the composition and form and shape and even function of the dying entity, almost as if we are given these micro-incidents as foreshadowing of our own mortality. There is a throbbing pulse within the tooth, as the nerve "gives up its own ghost" in a valiant attempt to stay living, that I pictured as almost  a person in the last throes of life, akin to what is commonly known as Cheyne-Stokes breathing.
And then I realized, in both body and mind, how significant, yet taken for granted, is the great amount of time we spend without pain. And, suddenly, not for the first time, but "again for the first time" became humbly grateful for the many hours, days, weeks, months and even years I have enjoyed without long-term pain.
For that gift, I am grateful to God, and to the genes of my parents, that passed on a relatively healthy body to engage with life on terms that I can respect. Nevertheless, there are hints of mortality in my experience this weekend.
I have been privileged, as chaplain intern and later as clergy, to attend dozens of patients in the palliative care ward, where each was facing directly and immently his or her own death. And while one sees others coping with their own mortality, one does not grasp its totality, as one does with one's own.
Some of these patients wanted to deliver their last homily, in how I should live my life; others merely wanted to go to lunch and say goodbye; others were happy to share a few last thoughts about how difficult it is to say goodbye to all those one had intended to say it to; others wanted to share their most memorable moments in their life, as they were now alone without family to share those memories with.
And while there are hints of mortality in any deep and lasting pain, there is also the potential for real care and connection near the end.
It is the mystery along with the pain that we face in coming to terms with our own mortality. And while we recognize the mystery within life, we often do not enter into conversations about death, in North America.
And that omission is one of the most serious gaps in our conventional view of life, to exclude consideration of death, our's and that of our loved ones.
We all know the cliche that death is a natural part of life; and yet, we treat it very differently from how we treat the rest of "nature" partly because many of the deaths we experience result from untimely accidents, tragedies that did not respect a full term of life expectancy and because we do not have answers for what is on the "other side" we either fantasize about it, or we demonize it.
Nevertheless, have been given seven full decades, one is obliged to begin to come to terms with this natural event, our own mortality, and do that in stages as they are presented, so that when the final curtain falls, it will come as no shock, insofar as we are able to minimize the shock both for ourselves and for our loved ones.
So, a hearty thanks for those pain-relieving and those infection fighting pills that came from those behemoths, the pharmaceutical companies....the pain is now bearable, and the prospect of a "root canal" as the next step slightly more acceptable.
Men may say that have a "high pain threshold" but, for most of us, I think we are falling into the bravado trap....It is women whose capacity to bear pain far exceeds that of most men, (if we were willing to admit the truth) and I, for one, acknowledge a very low pain threshold, of which I may not be exactly proud, but neither am I embarrassed.

Men: put an end to "passive aggression" and admit women as equal partners!

Editorial, Globe and Mail, March 7, 2012
Canada, and its NATO allies, must speak out against Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempt to appease the Taliban by taking away the rights of women. Ottawa should reconsider its support of the Karzai government in light of his apparent willingness to ignore his country’s own laws.

Mr. Karzai has publicly supported an edict from the Ulema Council, composed of 150 Muslim clerics, that classifies men as fundamental and women as “secondary.” The council’s code bans women from travelling without a male guardian, prohibits women from mingling with men in offices, schools and markets, and allows men to beat their wives in certain circumstances. The clerics, who call the code “voluntary,” believe it is in line with a literalist interpretation of Islamic law.
But gender apartheid cannot be justified in the name of Islam. A state where men have one set of rights and women another is not only morally repugnant but contradicts the country’s own 2004 constitution, which re-established equality between men and women. If Afghan’s female parliamentarians cannot work with their male counterparts, then Parliament cannot function.

With international forces set to withdraw by 2014, Mr. Karzai is under increasing pressure to appease the Taliban. He must resist the temptation to sacrifice women in order to bring the insurgents and other hard-line conservatives to the negotiating table. “While the code is not legally binding, it comes at a critical time for Afghan women. Many are already concerned about the future, especially if peace talks with the Taliban move ahead,” said Robert Fox, Oxfam’s executive director.
Part of the justification for the 2001 military overthrow of the Taliban was the regime’s shocking treatment of women and girls; girls were prohibited from going to school and women forced to cover themselves in head-to-toe burkas. Some of the 158 Canadian soldiers who have died in Afghanistan since 2002 no doubt felt they were fighting more than just the insurgents; they were fighting for justice.
Canada has also spent millions of dollars in international aid to strengthen the country’s institutions, with an emphasis on improving the lives of women and children. Today, 2.7 million girls are enrolled in school, and 30 per cent of the country’s teachers are women. A record number of female candidates ran in the 2010 parliamentary elections.
It would be wrong to reverse a decade of progress. A peace process that excludes women is not sustainable. Afghanistan’s leader must stand up for all members of society. If he cannot defend justice, it is right to ask whether his government is worth defending.
In Afghanistan, women fear Karzai's appeasement of the Taliban will render them as puppets to their male "dominators"....while in America, women fear the appeasement of the church as the Santorums threaten to ban contraception, abortion and effectively remove a woman's right to make her own decisions about her own body.
In their defence, Hillary shed her self-imposed silence on domestic issues last Saturday when speaking to a woman's conference. Paraphrasing her, she told her audience that she was appalled that extremists consistently make women a target for their extremism. What a polite way to call apartheid tendencies demeaning!
It is time these men wakened up to the 21st century and the realities that men no longer control the world, the corporation, the politics or the family. In the best case scenario, there is an equal partnership between both genders, whether that means running a company, or raising a family (including families of two gay or lesbian partners). In the worst case scenario, one gender quite literally dominates the other, leaving little or no room for "the other" to breathe.
Quite often the "other" simply withdraws from the relationship, effectively "quits and stays" and too often this withdrawing partner is the male, leaving the woman wondering whether or not she married a scarecrow...so similar to the straw-man of the farmer's field has he become.
As we watch men clinging to their masculinity, by denigrating women, through blind ignorance and even blinder arrogance, it is the weakness of those same men that must be highlighter. What are they afraid of? Are they afraid of the empowered women that we have seen, some of whom are now mentioned as potential candidates for the job as President of the World Bank. One accomplished woman now serves as head of the International Monetary Fund, while others serve admirably as CEO of major corporations, while still functioning effectively as mothers, spouses and friends of their communities.
It is long past time, whether for religious or political or other reasons, to bring men to their senses about the need to regard women as full equal partners in every endeavour on the planet, and to shape male attitudes into such a model that will make such a full partnership flourish, and not wither through detachment and disinterest.
That's called passive aggression, and it is no longer tolerable in domestic relationships, nor in political leadership.