You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2014.
The last big bump has been before the long yawn that is January and February has just been crossed. Happy New Year everyone.
The mighty Jimquisition, with the help of a three foot long purple dildo lays the smack down on the worst games of 2014. And of course, thank god for Jim Sterling.
This is but a pale shadow of a New Year’s Resolutions List. I’m not into NYR’s because the psychology behind NYR’s pretty much dooms the person to failure.
Think of our habits, both bad and good, as grooves on a phonographic record. One does not simply scratch the needle out of the old behaviour groove and into another new one expecting the new groove to be as comfortable and worn as the old set of behaviours.
It just does not happen (in regular circumstances).
So rather than go about announcing sweeping changes and what not, I intend this year to smooth a few more grooves here and there, lay down the base for a few new ones and continue forging the small changes I’d like so see happen with regards to my blogular activities.
So yeah, in terms of blogtacular goodness, I intend to continue to forge the idea that women, indeed, are people too and deserve all of the rights and benefits that come with being thought of as fully human in society. I intend to continue the analysis of the downward spiral of crony-capitalism that is currently plaguing Canada, and show how social democratic ideas can be used to make this country a better place. I’ll continue to call out and mock the shit-for-brains people on the internet who jangle my SIWOTI nerve to the nth degree. I’ve got a new irony-meter for Xmas, so we’ll see how long the “new and improved” model will last.
What I’d like to move toward in blogging in the next year is to see more pieces from the zesty nest of authors here at DWR. Most of the gentle readers here are familiar with my opinions by now and how I generally look at issues – fresh insight from The Intransigent One, Mystro and Bleatmop would be welcome additional variety to the crusty second-wave dirge I usually follow. I think we should talk about anything we would like to share with the internets – Gaming, crotcheting, tech stories, pretty much anything is fair game – let’s try and run the gamut this year of things we can be biasedly opinionated on.
That’s all for now. :)
The Neo-Liberal dogma that attempts to shroud us from the realities of the world is on display in not one, but two cartoons for your edification.
Ah, here we see Neo-Liberalism invade our thinking. The thoroughly naive notion that we are all equal in society and if we just acted “nicer” (by ignoring systemic inequalities society) things would be peachy-freakn’-awesome. In dogmatic Neo-Liberal thought we are just individuals making choices – no class, no sex, no position in society. The structural factors of society are simply ignored.
Boom! Class analysis based in a grounded historical perspective. Radical Feminist/Political theory appreciates this notion and uses it in analyzing our society. On the contrary our choosy-choice 3rd wave Liberal Feminists/Liberals almost always overlook the insidious nature of the neo-liberal agenda and its toxic effects to community and people. Choices are never made in a vacuum.
The so called war on drugs contains so much irony, we’ll need a new solar system to keep it in check.
“As long as demand and prices remain at current levels in wealthy drug-consuming nations, traders will enter almost any potential production area with wads of currency to elicit supply that can meet this demand. Over the past thirty years, the U.S. and UN prohibition has simply served to push production and processing, and smuggling of illicit drugs back and forth across the globe’s three critical trafficking areas – between Turkey and Laos within the Asian opium zone, from Bolivia to Columbia in the Andes coca belt, and from south Florida to northern Mexico along the U.S. border. At each turn and twist in this futile war on drugs, production has ratcheted upward.
Since opium can be grown in any temperate or highland area, crop suppression shifts cultivation elsewhere within the vastness of the Eurasian landmass or to the other continents, such as South America. And since the human brain’s chemistry makes all of humanity potential addicts, repression merely forces traffickers to seek new markets in another neighbourhood, nation, or continent. With such flexible market constraints, the blunt baton of repression has become the wand of stimulus, pushing consumption and production into ever-widening spheres and thereby compounding the drug problem.
[…]
In the last half of the 20th century, drug prohibition thus fostered a global illicit economy that funds criminal syndicates, highland warlords, ethnic liberation movements, terrorist networks and covert operations. Failing to understand the character of these commodities, the United Nations and the United States have attempted suppression with a range of ineffective, ultimately counterproductive, policies that include arresting consumers, pursuing dealers, and harassing growers.
Looking back on this sordid past gives little cause for optimism or celebration. To ordinary Americans who witness the dismal spectacle of the drug traffic at street level, it may seem inconceivable that the U.S. Government could somehow be implicated, directly or indirectly, in the international narcotics trade. During the cold war, American diplomats and CIA agents were involved at three levels: (1) a coincidental complicity through their covert alliances with major drug traffickers; (2) support for known traffickers by condoning their involvement and concealing their criminality from investigation; and on occasion, (3) active involvement in the actual transport of opium. More broadly, Washington has remained wedded to its prohibition policy and refuses to recognize that its attempts at eradication, from Turkey in the 1970’s to Columbia today, have actualy stimulated production and increased the global supply or illicit drugs.
It is ironic, to say the least, that America’s drug problem is of its own making.”
-from The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Alfred W. McCoy. p.22-23
This should be basis for an argument for legalization of all illicit drugs. We should make them available and tax the crap out of them putting the revenue into treatment programs and rehabilitation, rather than incarceration trajectories. I think it would work like gangbusters.
Ouch.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…