Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Sarmishta Subramanian writes that messages of exclusion and division tend to be amplified for political purposes rather than because they actually reflect broad public opinion. And Christopher Cheung discusses how the PPC in particular has chosen to use the language of selective inclusion
Continue readingTag: Paul Adams
Accidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Kate Aronoff highlights the lack of realism on the part of “adult” politicians demanding that the existential threat of climate breakdown be met with a grossly insufficient response. And Anders Fremstad and Mark Paul write about the dangers of an ideology of climate
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Report on Calgary civic election polling failures sharply criticizes Postmedia coverage of ‘radically mistaken’ polls by partner firm
A report by three high-profile academics with expertise in public opinion research who were commissioned to look into polling failures that marred the 2017 Calgary municipal election campaign sharply criticizes the role of the city’s media in covering and sponsoring the polls. Christopher Adams of the University of Manitoba, Paul
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Sudden closing of polling oversight group could mean Albertans never see report on botched Calgary polls
If you were wondering about that inquiry by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association into inaccurate polling that marred the October 2017 Calgary civic election, don’t hold your breath. Publication of the inquiry by three panelists engaged by the national standards association for public opinion research companies was expected soon
Continue readingAlberta Politics: The full-court press is now under way to get Canadians ship their tax dollars to right-wing ‘legacy’ media
PHOTOS: Canada’s newspaper publishers are finally getting a grip on how to deal with this new-fangled technology stuff, like that Internet thing. Just pick up the phone and get the federal government to give you money! Below: Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne, Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey, former Globe and CBC journalist
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Following up on last week’s column, Frances Ryan laments the UK Conservatives’ choice to inflict needless suffering on anybody receiving public benefits: During seven weeks of undercover work at a universal credit contact centre in Bolton, Channel 4 journalists witnessed a farcical
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson link inequality and climate change as massive problems which are generated by political choices (and thus amenable to correction through the political system): Rising inequality is no more natural than global warming. And just as with global
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that to start your year. – Ian Welsh comments on the challenges we face in trying to turn wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few into a better world for everybody: The irony is that we have, again, produced a cornucopia. We have the potential to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Eugene Lang discusses the importance of fiscal choice in the lead up to the 2015 federal election. And Don Cayo reminds us that the Cons’ determination to hand free money to the wealthy – most recently through income-splitting and increased TFSA limits –
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – George Monbiot discusses how a market-based society makes people unhealthy in a myriad of ways – and how it’s worth maintaining our innate reluctance to value everything and everybody around us solely in terms of dollar values: The market was meant to emancipate
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Larry Bartels highlights how class plays a particularly large role in U.S. politics, as opinions about the role of government are particularly polarized based on income. And Paul Krugman notes that as a consequence, any demand to “stop class warfare” in favour of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Paul Krugman’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century includes his commentary on our new gilded age: Still, today’s economic elite is very different from that of the nineteenth century, isn’t it? Back then, great wealth tended to be inherited;
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Brian and Karen Foster question why steadily improving productivity has led to increasing stratification rather than better lives for a large number of people: (W)ith all the optimism, why hasn’t technological progress actually opened up a world where we all work, and we
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Lynn Stuart Parramore offers five convincing pieces of evidence to suggest that the U.S.’ plutocrats are losing their minds in their effort to set themselves apart from the rabble. Kevin Roose tells a story about some awful, awful (and disturbingly wealthy and powerful)
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Den Tandt and Jonathan Kay both point out the willingness of conservative (and Conservative) supporters to brush off the obvious misdeeds of their political leaders. And Glen Pearson rightly concludes that the responsibility to elect deserving leaders ultimately lies with voters: We
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jordan Brennan and Jim Stanford put to rest any attempt to minimize the growth of inequality in Canada: (I)ncome inequality has reached a historic extreme. Inequality was high during the 1920s and 1930s (the “gilded age”), but fell sharply during the Second World
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Dean Baker discusses the strong relationship between union organization and the elimination of poverty: A simple regression shows that a 10 percentage point increase in the percentage of workers covered by a union contract is associated with a 0.7 percentage point drop in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Jordon Cooper writes about the dangers of growing income inequality in Saskatchewan and around the world: Income inequality is driven largely by market forces. Technology has changed the job market, and globalization has moved markets overseas or driven down wages. It’s also driven
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Dan Leger points to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion as an all-too-vivid example of the intersection of privatized profits and socialized risks: Are we tough enough on corporations that destroy, burn and kill? What’s happening at Lac-Mégantic suggests we aren’t. There’s a scramble on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Deborah Gyapong discusses CMA President Anna Reid’s presentation to the federal All-Party Anti-Poverty Caucus, with the positive response of MPs from all parties looking like a particularly noteworthy development: The CMA put forward seven recommendations for governments at all levels to examine
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