“Revolution requires a transformation of human nature so that people are capable of democracy.” – Michael Hardt, Examined Life (2008)

Last week, commenter and contributor to Grad Student Madness, Rufus, offered the following comment to my post on the inherent and historical  craziness of our modern politics,

I agree completely with the signal to noise argument here. But I’m not entirely comfortable with equating blogging with political “engagement”. It’s certainly intellectual engagement (well, at least, on occasion); but political participation is embodied, isn’t it? Or is that so 20th century? I mean, going to the town council meeting and ranting for your allotted five minutes is clearly engagement. But does that mean that posting the same rant on liberals-suck dot com is also engagement in the political process? I don’t know.

A smart comment and a useful question, to be sure. Rufus was responding to the part of the post where I said,

With the increase in noise, you get an increase in signal that results in more information being available to more people  in a more engaging fashion than ever before. It only makes sense that the din which has always attended political sparring would get all the more rancorous given the necessity of those circumstances. And if the increase in polemics indicates, at very base, an increase in engagement of average individuals in matters political, even if I happen to find that engagement, like Jason, rather tiresome at times, I’ll take it. Democracy is a messy business and it runs on the fuel of participation. Sorting through the muck that results is, frankly, part of the job of caring and ultimately the more muck the greater the potential for those singular gestures of grace.

The “on the face of it” answer to Rufus’ query is to say, no, blogging and political engagement are not the same thing. Indeed, as I suggested in my rant-post on online voting,

Don’t me wrong, I’m a big fan of the Internet, which has provided me with a means of voicing my thoughts to a much wider audience than I would have ever dreamed possible only years prior. But the Internet itself, as a tool, hasn’t made me more civic-minded. Spending time reading about issues, considering those issues and how I feel about them, speaking with other people, cultivating a greater sense of my community, and considering the relationship between my sense of self and those identities that extend into the local, regional, national, and global spheres have made me passionate about politics and my civic life.

So I think there is a real need to be careful about seeing the virtual reality of online activity is an appropriate stand-in for good old fashioned civic engagement and I don’t think that cultivating such a skepticism is, as Rufus puts it, “so 20th century”, as much as it is critical in the twenty-first century. At the same time, and getting back to the meat of Rufus’ question, neither do I think that blogging/Facebooking/etc. have nothing to do with political engagement and civic responsibility. My weekend is a good example of how this is the case. [Read more →]

Since I wrote that post, former Chief of Defense and high profile Canadian Rick Hillier has claimed that Colvin’s memos and concerns didn’t raise any flags for him, saying, “[t]he guy said some things and, really, nothing ever caught my attention based on what he perceived he said or perceived he sent[.]” Additionally, the federal government has come out and said that it halted detainee transfer on three separate occasions in 2009 due to concerns over prisoner treatment and access to facilities. And now, a high-level federal bureaucrat who used to run the government’s Afghanistan Task Force, David Mulroney, is set to rebuff the charges.

On the other side of the coin, recently surfaced documents support Colvin’s claims that Canadian officials have been slow in alerting the Red Cross to prisoner transfers and today Amnesty International has issued a call for a full public inquiry into the matter (video from a reporter who attended the press release here).

My own thoughts are that the waters have been muddied enough and that the allegations are of a serious enough nature that the only responsible thing to do is to coordinate a full public inquiry. In my original post and in other posts at the League I have lamented the state of Canadians’ interest in their own politics and talked about the need for, lacking a better phrase, a grassroots resurgence of civil and political engagement by Canadians from across the spectrum. Given how important this issue is and how much its potential ramifications concern me, I have decided that now is the time for me to put my money where my mouth is and lead by example. [Read more →]

To the Democrats in Congress who don’t quite get it: I want to offer a personal pledge. I – and a lot of other people – have every intention of removing you from Congress in the next election if you stand in the way of health care legislation that the people want[.]

One has to always be careful with and wary of the use of phrases like, “the people”, of course. Moore can’t possibly think (or at least certainly shouldn’t think) that every single Democratic voter, let alone the moniker of all Americans to which a catch-all like, “the people” might point, are supportive of a public option in the way that he and those who agree with him are. But it remains true that for all the controversy and haggling, there is reasonable base of support for the public option amongst Americans.

Given that support, the kind of galling concern-trollery one hears coming from the lips of Max Baucus sort of begs to be met with war cries. To the point I made last Friday, there is a troublesome disingenuous in the studied ballet of Baucus’ political pirouettes that has left many wondering what the real intentions at play here are. Politics as the art of the possible notwithstanding, do we really know what is possible before even trying or in the facing of hedging against possible outcomes from the outset of the debate? [Read more →]