Searching for Tao

This has been going around and I thought it worth preserving here for my friends and family who don't do the whole Twitter/Facebook thing. The author apparently loves to do this sort of thing, and obviously has a stake in the outcome of the upcoming election. Please visit the original page for more information and feel free to pass the link around. The way I see it, every Canadian considering support for the Conservatives really needs to see this.

As an added bonus, the site also includes a bunch of links I'll be able to use for my voteharper.ca site.

I may be living in Amsterdam, but I'm still Canadian.

There's an election coming up and Stephen Harper has to lose it. He's been actively working against democracy in the House, and using the power of the PMO to cut taxes on the rich, spend money on prisons we don't need and pollute the biosphere... to name a few of many transgressions. The man has got to go, and I'm hoping you can help me push him out.

I've combined forces with Dianna and her awesome graphical/UX talents to build a new simple website: voteharper.ca. It's not up yet, and that's where you come in. This site will be a collection of Stephen Harper's record on a series of issues ranging from democracy, to the environment, to women's rights, to international affairs. Whatever the topic, I need information regarding his actions on it.

Here's what I need from you: I need facts of what he's done sent to my email in the following format:

• What he did/said
• Why this is bad (if it's not obvious)
• Any number of links (at least one) that corroborates this fact.

Once I have a good bunch of data, I'll load it into the code I wrote just now and launch the site. Hopefully, it'll make a big splash. I've already contacted the other parties asking for help from them as well.

One last note, it's important to point out that the purpose of this site is to oppose Harper, and not the Conservative Party. It will also not be promoting any other party as I want this to be non-partisan. The key message I want to share is that Harper has proven himself to be Bad for Canada and that he has to go.

So lets see those emails! (me at danielquinn dot org)

Has anyone else got the feeling that world governments haven't learnt the right lesson from the latest series of cables released by Wikileaks?

Here's a newsflash guys, the key isn't to be sorry that you got caught, it's to be sorry that you committed the acts for which you (should be) ashamed in the first place.

Wikileaks should be commended for their dedication to promoting openness in our relations with our neighbours, rather than vilified for distributing to the truth to the world.

It's an ugly phrase. Often overused and misunderstood, it's important to know that despite what you may have heard, Canada is not such a place. It is however equally important to accept that we are closer to it now than we have ever been, and each day I read more and more about us losing the Canada we want for ourselves. Whether we believe it or not, we're closer to a police state than most of us want to admit.

Our police officers in every jurisdiction are out of control. Responsible to the public only in the minds of people who haven't been paying attention, we've seen officers commit murder in Vancouver, sexual assault in Ottawa, and beat non-violent protesters in Toronto. There have even been claims of subverting federal elections. The consequences for these actions have been made clear: there aren't any. In Ontario, officers aren't even compelled to speak to the SIU, the supposedly impartial body designed to look into police assaults against civilians.

This is our Canada, glorious and free.

To those of you who would still defend these people, I say that these acts are indefencible. In the G20 case, the SIU has found that no one may be charged because no one can be identified. The appropriate response to this then is to argue that any officer refusing to identify themselves is in fact a criminal -- at best, a thuggish terrorist at worst. Is it safe then to assume that self-defence can be invoked when assaulting an unidentified officer committing acts of brutatlity? And what, if anything will become of the officers higher up in the chain of command after this incident? Who gave the orders to arrest non-violent protesters, and who allowed the city to burn while our freedoms were crushed beneath combat boots and riot shields?

There is anger brewing in this country... at least, I hope there is.

For my part, I honestly don't know what to do. I feel like I'm abandonning my country when it needs me, that I could do something to fight this if I stayed. But I don't know what that something is. To those reading this, I ask you: what, outside of violent revolution can we do? How do you fight thugs thugs and Fingermen without resorting to bloodshed?

Today is the day that we reserve for Remembrance, a day when each of us are expected to take a moment to acknowledge and remember the bravery and devotion to duty of the millions of men and women who fought and often died "for King and Country" in dozens of wars past. It's also a day when we must remember that it's not only soldiers who die in war, but civilians as well. Often it is the case that for every one soldier killed in the line of duty, ten, or even one hundred civilians are killed.

As a society, we tell ourselves that war is a terrible, but sometimes necessary Last Line of Defence against those who would attack our Freedoms. It is therefore with bitter irony that I must point out that today the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Union of Public and General Employees are co-hosting public hearings to examine police activity during the recent G20 Summit in Toronto.

Every Canadian owes it to themselves to read these testimonies. Canadian citizens, rounded up, arrested, and held for upwards of 32hours in squalid cells, or tagged with bogus charges like possession of tools for burglary (door keys). Unarmed, non-violent citizens punched and kicked, by police not wearing name tags or badge numbers. In one holding cell case, a woman apparently asked for a tampon and was told that she "should have thought about it before", after which he threw his sock into her cell.

In a Free country, citizens must be allowed to peacefully assemble, and to criticise the government openly, and they must be able to do this without fear of persecution from the state. What we saw in Toronto was not what Canada should be, but whether we like it or not, it was our Canada. Unless we stand up and fight those responsible for abridging our freedoms that day, claims that our military "defends our freedoms" will become even more hollow than they already are.

Please take a moment to read one of the following:

• The Canadian Civil Liberties Association's explanation on their own site
• Rabble.ca's live blogging coverage
• CCLA's twitter feed (live-tweeted from the event, and copied for archival purposes here)

I remember the day I heard that Rob Ford would be running for Mayor in Toronto. I figured this to be great news. Ford, a blustering idiot councillor from the suburbs needed a good smack down, and there was no way that a racist bigot like him could ever win in a city as beautifully diverse as Toronto. He would be ejected from politics, outed for who he was, an ignorant blowhard who couldn't possibly hope to represnet the most multicultural city in Canada.

Oh how it hurts to be so wrong.

Not only did Rob Ford win, he won with 47% of the vote. That means that 47% of Torontonians either voted for a bigot or didn't bother to do the research themselves to find out that that they were going to vote for a bigot. On top of that, 50% didn't even show up to vote at all. We're past a question of "who stole votes from whom" here, this is problem is systemic.

Dave Meslin had part of it right when he talked about Toronto's invisible primaries, an ugly byproduct of our antiquated first-past-the-post voting system is that we exclude voices from the debate because they aren't loud enough to win. Remember that 50% that didn't even show up to vote? Well knowing that your vote actually counts for something is a great way to energise interest in politics.

But there's a second element that we don't hear discussed enough and that's interest by virtue of time and energy. Ford won because he ran a great campaign. It painted him as a straight-talking, no-nonsense guy who's going to "clean up City Hall" while somehow obscuring the fact that he himself was a millionaire, bent on destroying everything most Torontonians hold in high regard. All anyone had to do was Google his name to find out who he really was, but too few people did -- 380,201 people actually, and now we have four years to find out just how much this man can do, both to the city itself, and to its reputation on the world stage.

For political devotees like myself, it's easy to dismiss 47% of the voting public as either ignorant or crazy, but it's just not true. I honestly believe that people want to understand the politics of their city, province and country, but they simply don't have time. For those of us for whom politics is a hobby or interest, it's hard to accept that someone wouldn't want to burn a few hours a day reading up on local events, or watching a news show, but for most of us, a few hours is all we have, and many of us would rather spend that time on something that makes us happy, whether that be painting, reading, hockey, or just socialising. Democracy is work for many of us, and it's a commitment that some of us can't make without sacrificing our sanity.

Now I'm not excusing political apathy, far from it. For the next four years, every one of the 380,201 people who voted for Ford and the million or so who didn't vote should be reminded that the state of things is in fact their fault. No, I'm trying to point out that any society that doesn't allow for enough time to both do what we personally need for our sanity as well as take part in our own governance isn't really a Democracy. In a real Democracy, a blustering fool like Ford couldn't hope to succeed because the public would actually know what kind of person he is. His comments about cyclists being at fault when they're hit by trucks and his tirades in council would be lunch counter conversation in every home in a real Democracy, his archaic views on homosexuality, a joke told over dinner.

We need to slow down, decompress and work less, engage more... with each other and with our community. Activist groups are great, but they're not much good if they only include people between the ages of 18 and 28, or those over 65. Too many people are just too busy paying rent and feeding their kids to worry about more than the 30second spot they saw on TV and that is the real problem here.

I've attached some Youtube videos to this post along the side to give you a taste for what kind of man is sitting in the Big Chair now. Know that Toronto is not unique in this, in fact I'd argue that such misfortune is just as likely to happen anywhere where the public is sufficiently overburdened and disenfranchised. I can only hope that he angers enough people in these next four years that it inspires others to re-engage with their Democracy.

Q: How long will this attack go on for?

A: There is no time frame. We will keep going until we stop being angry.

- An interview with Anonymous

Something really fascinating is happening right now. Thousands of people, pissed off at law firms and media conglomerates for persecuting individuals with multi-million dollar file sharing lawsuits are fighting back. They're using their combined efforts to attack and take down the websites of the media bullies and their proxies (their law firms) and they're succeeding at every turn.

The tactic being used is called DDoS, which in layman's terms is essentially hammering a website from multiple targets as to render it unable to communicate properly with legitimate visitors. The result is that the site will slow to a crawl, and in some cases go completely offline as the server buckles under the load. In one of the more advanced cases, the attackers grabbed 350MB of email from one unscrupulous law firm in the UK and published it on the Pirate Bay for all the world to see.

And who are the perpetrators of these attacks? Nobody knows. They are "Anonymous", the horde of pissed-off people, tired of being persecuted for participating in our Shared Culture. More importantly though, they've gone on the offencive against those who have gotten used to treating the public like an ATM.

This is just the beginning, but it's an exciting first step. The Internet has allowed groups to collectively organise, and to do things no individual or big city law firm could ever hope to accomplish on their own. Now that the tools are becoming more ubiquitous, it's inevitable that these sorts of actions will increase both in popularity and in scale.

Imagine being able to download a tiny program to anonymously contribute the computational power of your desktop, and the bandwidth of your internet connection to help destroy Royal Dutch Shell's communication network, or hack the RIAA's VPN. The possibilities are both awesome and terrifying, but I'm confident that the anarchy it produces will lead to a more egalitarian world.

It's interesting then, that on the evening I'd set aside to write about this phenomenon, I discovered this excellent TED talk about the differences between institutional organisations and collaborative ones. The talk is about five years old, but couldn't be more relevant:

Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration

I'd like you to take 30seconds to watch something for me:

Violence has its place, and that place is when words are no longer enough. Anyone paying attention to what's going on in the world can tell you that the gap between the rich and the poor is dangerously wide and that the priorities of the rich minority are not in the best interests of the poor majority. Ecological disasters like the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the recent world-wide economic collapse are symptoms of a greater problem, one the "civil" protesters are campaigning for... if only someone were listening.

But no one is listening... at least no one with any measurable power. Instead, our leaders erect fences and spend billions dollars on making sure that the voices of the people aren't heard at these events. They take our money and construct elaborate indoor lakes to placate the media, while they conduct the business of governance behind closed doors. This is not democracy, and people insisting that standing in a street and waving a sign is the best response to such injustice just don't get it: we should be angry! Those are our streets, our spaces, and our leaders, talking about issues that relate directly to our lives and they shut us out with wire fences, concrete walls, and thousands of violent police? Where's the rage?

Martin Luther King had it right when he said that "a riot is the language of the unheard". The overwhelming majority of Canadians want action on things like the environment, peace, the economy, and poverty, but rather than moving on these issues, our leaders consistently work against our interests. Chants and sign-waving clearly aren't getting it done, and so a few among us have started smashing things. It's not intelligent, it's not tactical, it doesn't even have to make sense. It's rage, and it's not only justified in such a situation, but called for.

That video clip is about oppression:

1. Convince the majority that opposition isn't worthwhile.
2. Beat the remainder into submission.
3. Simultaneously encourage and incite violence from the reactionary minority, so that the press sides against them. This returns us to #1.

I'll be the first to concede that violence is not the answer here, but the time for chanting and sign-waving is through. I don't want to hear any more of this "if the violent people would just stop, then maybe they'd listen" business because sadly, that's just not true. Something has got to be done, or soon it might not just be a Starbucks and a few police cars that get smashed.

Ask anyone in this town and most of them will tell you that the primary problems in Vancouver are homelessness, and the high cost of living. It's so bad that over the Olympics, the Pivot, an activist group based in the Lower East Side, held a sit-in protest in the form of a field of red tents surrounded by placards and signs with slogans like "homes not games" and "homes for everyone". (Flickr, Now Public) There were staged protests downtown and even a riot -- all for good reason: here in Vancouver, the disparity between the rich and poor is out of control.

So what do we do about this? Obviously the current tactics aren't working. The world came to Vancouver and no one cared to really do anything about our most desperate citizens. For the most part, that whole area was ignored and tourists were advised not to go there. What good is a protest if no one cares about what you're saying? A riot? That only fuels the opposition. No, what's needed is to move counter to the gentrifying forces in this city.

The problem is the location. Everyone in Vancouver knows that the poorest people live in the Lower East Side. We also know that that neighbourhood is something we want to avoid if we don't fancy the stench of human urine, or the sight of public drunkenness and dirty needles. The richest, most powerful people in Vancouver never go there. They don't even drive through Hastings if they can help it. What good is a protest if the only people who see it, are affected by it, are those who already support you? No, if you want action to be taken, you need to inconvenience people, you need to make people see what's going on and remind them that just because they've managed to ignore the problem, the problem hasn't solved itself.

The red tent protest was held near Abbot & Cordova in an empty lot opposite an Army & Navy frequented only by people who live in the neighbourhood. Given that fixing the homelessness problem will require action by a considerable number of people outside of this demographic, this is not a good choice for action. Instead, I think that the homeless population needs to get the held somewhere, anywhere that isn't the Lower East Side. Hold tent-city protests in David Lam Park (Yaletown has one of the highest per-capita incomes in Vancouver) or in any open (public) spaces south of 16th... you know, where all the rich folks who own most of this city live?

Sleeping in the street is an accepted norm at Hastings and Main, but about Granville and Broadway? Generally speaking, cities (especially Vancouver) like to corral their poorest citizens and then gradually push them from neighbourhood to neighbourhood through gentrification, never solving the problem. Therefore, the answer to newer, more expensive buildings moving into the Lower East Side shouldn't be to move East (as the powers that be are hoping), but instead to relocate to Kits and Point Grey so those responsible for the gentrification can experience the fruit of their labours.

The problem in Vancouver isn't homelessness and the high cost of living, it's not even that nobody cares about these issues, because thousands of people do. No, the problem in Vancouver is that the right people don't care about these issues because they don't have to. Fix that, and I'm sure something useful will be done.

I was walking to work one day when the headline from the cover of the Asian Pacific Post caught my eye: What do Hedy Fry and the Taliban have in common?. Mildly amused, I picked up the free rag and read it on the way to work.

If you're not interested in reading it, I'll save you the time. The editorial is outrageous. Even as a bigtime non-fan of the Liberal party as well as Hedy Fry, I found the article to be offencive in the extreme and said as much on their site:

I don't usually read your paper, but with a headline like that, I couldn't resist. Now after reading it, I'm reminded why I usually pass it by on the street.

Granted, this is an editorial, but could you possibly have conjured up more biased, inflammatory, and unsubstantiated propaganda? I don't even like the Liberals and I found this to be surprisingly offencive.

Of course the Liberals haven't done much better in recent years, but to compare Ms. Fry to a group of terrorists? Have you no shame? No integrity? You quote these people out of context and then proceed to put words in their mouths finishing it all off with claims that Ignatieff is "unpatriotic". Are you aspiring to the journalistic integrity of Fox "News", or just pursuing a new career as a Conservative Party speech writer?

The fact is that Harper *has* embarrassed this country on the international stage, most notoriously by abandoning our legal obligations to Kyoto, and continuously subverting the democratic process. Our reputation around the world has been diminished as a direct result of his actions and there's nothing wrong with the Official Opposition pointing that out.

Your actions on this issue however cross the line between editorial opinion and propaganda. They serve only to solidify your place as a fringe paper that no one with a modicum of intelligence would take seriously.

Anyway, I'm feeling vengeful. Mostly because I really don't think that this kind of thing should pass as "journalism" in any shape or form. I'm considering contacting all of their advertisers and including a copy of the editorial along with some comments regarding how this paper might reflect poorly on their brand in an effort to get them to pressure the paper to clean up its act.

The question I post to you though, is that immoral? legal? Right?