To expect nature to adapt to our destructive ways is to say that whatever does not conform to the needs of the current socioeconomic system is unnatural and should be allowed to die a quiet death. It is to conflate social Darwinism and biological Darwinism. It is to prescribe the sacrifice of the 4,000,000,000 years of evolution to the 200 years of industrial capitalism. Nature will always be with us, whether we deign to call ourselves a part of it or not. The same cannot be said about capitalism and the urge to maximize profit at all cost. Staggering power and profit for the very few, along with powerlessness and degradation for the many and for the environment, are fairly new phenomena. The powerlessness that is implied in succumbing to the needs of profit making is in fact the powerlessness caused by capitalist relations between capital owners and those who work for them. That state is neither natural nor eternal.

Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the so-called neo-cons are not aberrations. They are expressions of the essential character of the American imperial project that has been going on for over two hundred years. That project began with the genocide of the native population of the continent. Once all the land to the Pacific Ocean had been taken from the natives and Mexico through massacre and war, the imperial project expanded to other countries and continents. It has been based on the unquestioned assumption that whatever is done in the name of the United States is the essence of righteousness. And, what is more, the project will continue, no matter who occupies the White House.

I am back from Cuba, more sad than wise.  Sad, because I saw firsthand how the Cuban Revolution’s wondrous experiment in human emancipation is being crushed by capitalism and the Empire.  A little wiser too, because I now realize that we, the so-called progressives, cannot begin to understand human emancipation until we try to rid ourselves of our deeply-ingrained class prejudices.

Kicking someone when they are down does not necessarily arise from evil or selfish intentions.  In fact, it may arise from very good, nay altruistic, intentions.  Normally people are so full of themselves that it is next to impossible to arouse them out of their dogmatic slumber by a well-intentioned kick, that is, criticism of even the most constructive kind, the kind that tries to help the other person help themselves.  If, on the other hand, the person is already down from having received a kick from someone else, this may be the best time to state or reiterate the constructive criticism, because the person is “prone” to accept, at such a juncture, that he or she is less than perfect.  If, for instance, someone has been chastised at some public forum, this may be the best time to get through to the person with oft-reiterated criticism, and to have a realistic hope that the person would agree to fundamental reforms that would have been considered out of the question before.

The fact that by choice or necessity people sometimes give up their citizenship does not mean that they give up their nationality.  This is why a multicultural society like Canada can really only survive if it is willing to implement a quite radical form of multiculturalism.  Especially for a first-generation immigrant, the culture of the old country, its poetry, literature, and generally its ways of being are integral elements of his or her identity.  To ask this person to give all this up is akin to asking someone to not be who he or she is.  Of course, the supposedly insurmountable objection that is always made is that a country can only have one culture, one way of being, and one nationality.  In other words, encouraging different cultures to express these differences will only increase the alienation and segregation of different cultural and ethnic groups in the country.  The reality, however, is that this alienation is an existing fact, and not something that multiculturalism has created.  Canadians reject “foreigners,” whether or not these “foreigners” adopt Canadian ways.  So things cannot get worse than they already are.  Multiculturalism has not created the problem.  It can, however, be a step towards its solution.  Education is the solution.  It should aim to increase people’s appreciation of different cultures, of multi-cultures, and ways of being.  This can be a solution both for the social problem, as well as for the individual problem of the immigrant individual who is forced by the current circumstances to suppress his or her identity.

What the experience of first-generation immigrants is most similar to is the experience of early Canadians and some of the pioneers.  What?  How can there be much similarity between the experience of those hardy self-reliant individuals and that of the supposedly soft, subsidy-dependent immigrant?  Immigrants, when they first arrive, mostly have to put up with apartment-living for many years, even if, as is mostly the case, they are from a middle class and relatively well-to-do background.  This is similar to the pioneer building a primitive shack that serves to keep out (some of) the elements, until many years later, when he can perhaps build himself something better.  Like the immigrant who, many years later, and at the expense of much risk and sacrifice, builds or buys himself a home.  The pioneer’s life consists of a constant battle against a hostile environment that has no place in it for him.  The first-generation immigrant’s life much the same.

There is a perception that children are more violent than they used to be.  One way in which this is expressed is that children are not really the innocent little creatures they used to be.  This notion, however, is not a new one.  Its older form was the idea that to realize that children are not really innocent is to look at their cruelty to each other.  But all this is a case of category error.  When we say children are innocent, we are not making an ethical statement, or a moral statement about their having good or evil actions in their past.  We are merely saying that they have very little experience of the world and its ways.  Of course the problem is connected with the superimposition of the labels or concepts of good and evil onto our actions.  Instead of calling actions what they are, for example, antisocial, etc., and dealing with the question of how to improve or encourage them, we abdicate our own responsibility to deal with them, by abandoning them to labels such as blessed or villainous.

There is a sense of eternity about books, works of art, and generally all human achievements.  Or perhaps a consolation.  One tells oneself: surely if human beings can create such works, their lives must mean something?  Surely it can’t be the case that they just live a few decades and turn into nothing and that’s that?  Perhaps this is more of a consolation than a fact.  The consolation is that even if we are in fact highly ephemeral beings, we at least have the power to expand and extend the width of our live indefinitely.  The obverse interpretation perhaps takes two forms: Camus’ defiance of meaninglessness, and Dylan Thomas’s “Rage against the dying of the light!”  Think of Proust, dying at 51…

Looking at old buildings in the Rococo style, one sometimes get the feeling that their ornamentation is somehow inauthentic, that it has been put there to give the eye something to play with.  One purpose of 20^th century architects may have been to introduce more honesty into architecture.  A wall becomes just the wall.  A window becomes just a window.  But don’t we need the deception?  Don’t we need an architect that makes a building disguise its function, and pretend to be a work of art?

Windex has a new product that has a “potpourri” smell.  It used to be that Windex smelled of what it is, that is an NH3, and potpourri smell of what it is, that is, pleasant flowers and plants.  Windex smelled of something inherently undesirable and unpleasant, which is what it is; we use it because its evil nature has the accidental characteristic of producing some good – cleansing.  Potpourri smelled of something inherently pleasant, which is what it is.  But now something inherently evil has a pleasant smell!

“Religion free of old and new dogmas.” Catholic Bishops are worried that evangelical sects, ritualistic sects, and New Age beliefs are winning adherents from the Church. These movements promise a more immediate and involving form of religion. The bishops envy the spiritual uplift the new groups provide. They feel the Church has neglected spiritual questions. One problem I see is that both groups derive spirituality from dogma. True spirituality should be founded on human reality, not baseless and antiquated superstition. Both groups also neglect the necessary social dimension of spirituality, as, e.g., in Kant. One group seeks spirituality in crystals, the in rosaries and votive candles – all “idols.” The concentration on dogma and ritual to a large extent focuses on the exterior of the region, rather than its interior. It only takes away from true religiosity. Results include hypocrisy, ranging from finding religious reasons to do evil, to a complete unawareness of the ethical dimension of religion.

During the recent Ontario election campaign, it was surprising to see that the letters to the editor in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail in in each case opposite to the respective papers' editorial position.  The Globe's letters were consistently opposed to and critical of Harris' plans; the Star's were on both sides, though perhaps the majority were in one way or another supportive of Harris' "ideas."  It has been said that you can't fool all of the people all of the time.  But perhaps you can fool most of the people all of the time, if they happen to be foolish and uneducated to begin with.  It is quite likely that the average Globe reader is more highly educated than that of the Star.  So although one would expect the Globe reader's "objective interests" can be better served by the Harris agenda than by the Liberal or NDP ones, it is probably simply a lot more difficult to fool the Globe's average reader.  He or she is not going to fall for a foolish political platform, no matter what.  Compassion and doing the right thing are not simply subjective "liberal" bleeding-heart emotionalisms.  They also have an objective side, which is intelligence and higher education.  The intellectual elite, out of a kind of "good" snobbery, will not go in for plebian right-wing stances that repudiate high human ideals, which, after all, the elite imagines itself as having created.  Of course in fact another class' struggles created those ideals, but they are a bond between some of the lowest and highest classes.

What used to be "negative opinion of women" is now "misogyny." "Dislike of Blacks" is now "racism." "Dislike of foreigners" is now "xenophobia." and so on and so forth. What used to belong to the realm of personal attitudes (whether feeling or opinion) now has an objective impersonal interpretation. It has been removed from the socially-defined and/or sanctioned (either as allowed or as encouraged) personal realm to the social realm of psycho-socially defined ideosyncracy. A similar phenomenon has taken place in what is more strictly the realm of morality. In some cultures, it is considered a father's duty to avenge a "dishonoured" daughter. To us moderns, however, such an idea of moral duty seems rather farcical. The process is again the same as in the other case. In the case of the avenging father, the social sanction coincides with the personal attitude; society and the father agree on what is the right thing to do. In the modern situation, society has taken the decision as to what is the right thing to do out of the father's hand. However, what may at first seem like a loss of freedom is an increase of freedom. The old father was given no alternatives. The modern father has alternatives, including personal revenge.

The contemporary changes in the nature of the forces of production (the social content) have destabilized the relations of production (the social form) to the extent of destabilizing the liberal democratic political system itself. On the issue of the electorate's "loss of faith" in politicians, it should be remembered that this is in fact a "good thing," because, when translated out of the language of liberal democracy and into the language of revolutionary Marxism, it signifies a partial liberation from the constraints of capitalist ideology. Capital is inehrently incapable of justifying faith.

Jack London describes an England where crimes against property received far harsher penalties than crimes against persons.  The current economic outlook defines economic prosperity as increase of profits, rather than declining unemployment.  There is a connection here, because "the new economy" and "reinventing government" are attempts to return society to the way things where prior to the creation of the welfare state.

If we call ourselves human beings, we must act accordingly.  Being human means giving, and wanting to give.  Having too much when one's neighbor is starving is inhuman, immoral, and, ideally, illegal.

This type of argument, applied to the question of immigration, implies that citizenship confers legal privileges, but no moral ones.  As Canadians, we have a right to keep others out of this country.  As human beings, though, we have no such right.

The line one usually hears these days is: "There was some form of socialism in the Soviet Union because there was nationalized property.  But now has been capitalist restoration, and the nationalized property is more or less gone.  Now we have to wait and hope that through some process the nationalized property will be restored."

Doesn't this line of argument put the cart before the horse, in that it stresses the forces of production at the expense of the relations of production?  Wouldn't it be appropriate to move away from this non-dialectical form of thinking, and towards a more Hegelian form that revolves around class struggle and relations of production?  Such as line of thought would see the Russian situation as a dialectical development.  In other words, it would see the current state of matter as a continuation, not of reversal, of the social developments in Russia during the 20th Century.  plane MOIS show during the 20th century.  It could be based on the idea that forces of production are almost an epiphenomenon of the relations of production.  In other words, the condition of the forces of production is a response to changes in the relations of production, and therefore that the "defeat" of socialism in Russia may in fact indicate an accelerated phase of development in the relations of production, and not the reverse.  Such a seemingly farfetched idea can be defended if one remembers that that in the relations between capital and labour, labour is the reality and capital the epiphenomenon.  In other words, whatever action capital takes is a reaction, not an action, and therefore when it takes a really drastic step, such as dismantling a social system, this may be taken as a sign of the strength and vitality of class struggle at that conjuncture.

In the same way that materialism is a necessary foundation for any social science, existentialism is a necessary foundation for materialism.  Materialist explorations help take incoherencies and inconsistencies out of ordinary explanations.

Left politics applied to social issues, i.e., political correctness, was originally an attempt to show that values are situation dependent, i.e., "relative."  The right, however, may try to turn left values, such as anti-harassment, on their head by making them into absolutes.  The response to this should be, e.g., that if someone does not feel harassed, then he or she is not being harassed

Custom mediates between class consciousness and cultural development.  Casual "friendly" conversation between persons of unequal rank and socioeconomic status, for example within an organization, can be construed, on the one hand, as an unconscious admission of the injustice of the current arrangement, and, on the other hand, as a step toward a more advanced arrangement.