Michael Boyle — Page 10

Globe editorial: Keep calm and carry on, world

January 21, 2017 by Michael Boyle

Critics should also focus on attacking Mr. Trump’s positions on their merits, not on his rhetoric. Take the threat he poses seriously, but don’t exaggerate it. Each and every Trump pronouncement is not one step closer to the end of the world.Above all, don’t respond intemperately. The President’s shock tactics encourage both followers and opponents to go overboard. But there is no victory in retaliating in a similar fashion, or in becoming enraged by his calculated hypocrisies and lies, which are only meant to provoke.

Source: Globe editorial: Keep calm and carry on, world – The Globe and Mail

Krugman: Donald the Unready

January 21, 2017 by Michael Boyle

Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.

But as far as we know, almost no people meeting that description will be in the new administration, except possibly the nominee for defense secretary — whose nickname just happens to be “Mad Dog.”

Source: Donald the Unready – The New York Times

When the best of the bunch (of Trump’s Cabinet appointments) is named “Mad Dog”… there might be a problem. Just sayin’…

A Few Thoughts on Entering the Trump Era

January 21, 2017 by Michael Boyle

From Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo:

And yet here we have the opportunity to be its guardians and protectors at a unique moment, perhaps a moment of especial peril. Who would not embrace that challenge? We know the curse: may you live in interesting times. We are living in interesting times. Most of us would not have chosen it. But we have it. I think many of us look back at critical momentous moments in our history, the Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and other comparable passages in the country’s history and think, what would I have done? Where would I have been? Well, now’s your moment to find out. We are living in interesting times. We should embrace it rather than feel afraid or powerless. We have a fabric of 240 years of republican government behind us. We have the tools we need.

Source: A Few Thoughts on Entering the Trump Era

Looking to literature on inauguration day

January 20, 2017 by Michael Boyle

Today’s a rough day for a lot of people. I’m not going to get into this in detail at this point, but I will point out some resonant quotes from literature that I’ve come across recently.

From Chapter 9 of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

From the movie version of The Two Towers, spoken by Sam Gamgee as Frodo is losing the ability to continue:

It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

From Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (via Bette Midler’s Twitter Feed @BetteMidler):

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Election 2015 Live blog

October 19, 2015 by Michael Boyle

~~I’m temporarily bringing mikel.org out of retirement so that I may live blog with election results of the October 19th 2015 Canadian Federal Election.~~

~~I’ll be adding everything in this post and new material will be at the top.~~

OK so the live blogging never really happened…

I will share some notes and thoughts about the results now that things are pretty much decided in today’s federal election.

First of all: wow. What a result! And I don’t mean whether I am happy about it or not – just the magnitude of the victory for the Liberals is very impressive. From coast to coast, in rural ridings, urban ridings, and suburban ridings, the Liberals made huge gains.
I think this election has to go into the “polls are really unreliable” file. The polls have been radically incorrect for almost every election in Canada in the past 5 years, and this election is no exception.
One of the talking points by the TV commentators so far has been that this has been the best-run and best-designed political campaigns in Canadian history. From my perspective this is a bang-on comment – and furthermore, that that’s what was required for the Liberals to get anywhere.
Some individual riding results I find interesting…
- Stéphane Dion seems to have won in his usual Ahuntsic-Cartierville riding. I have a soft spot for Mr. Dion for many reasons and it’s quite frankly a great testament to a humble public servant that he continues after having reached the highs and lows of Liberal Party leadership over the past decade.
- It looks like Hélène Laverdière (NDP) will hold her riding in Laurier-Ville-Marie in central Montreal (my old riding for years) over Gilles Duceppe. I am a little sad for Duceppe that he was almost forced to return to the Bloc just to lose in *his* riding. I hope he will be able to retire once and for all.
- Gutted for Andrew Cash in the Davenport riding in Western Toronto. I didn’t follow his political career TOO closely but he always seemed like a great representative and a hard-working MP. At least Charlie Angus seems to have won his riding in Northern Ontario. (If you don’t know their names, they’re both legendary Canadian musicians).
While I understand it, I’m a little disappointed for the NDP tonight. They have really become an important force for good in Canadian politics during this recent period of ascendency. For instance, I believe they had more women candidates in this election than any other party in Canadian history – and this is important. I hope people don’t just write them off now.
Personally, I was most impressed by far by Justin Trudeau during this campaign. I was very vocal among my politically-inclined friends that the Liberals seemed to me to be making huge errors, basically shutting up and trying not to say anything on the expectation that they would be once again tapped for form a government by natural Canadian law or something. In fact, though, during this campaign Justin Trudeau clearly annunciated a very human and humane vision for Canada, and was quite forceful about a return to traditional Canadian values that had been lost under a decade of Harper/Conservative leadership. As a referendum on Justin’s ability as a leader, he clearly passed with flying colours.