Best of counterweights 2011 A : Politics, economics, and philosophy in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Beyond

Dec 20th, 2011 | By L. Frank Bunting | Category: In Brief

On various scores 2011 seems to at least most of us here to have been one of those years that actually can be seriously described as a hinge of fate (well … more or less).

And so over the past few weeks everyone in the office or otherwise attached to this somewhat crazed but still essentially mild and moderate “political blogazine” (and see the second item in the list below for more on this term) has been submitting potential “best of counterweights 2011” suggestions to my email inbox.

(Which is of course not to say that anything posted on this site over the fateful global village year of 2011 has been all that good . But hey … like more than a few others, we are at least trying to fill some kind of gap with something different, and we hope intermittently refreshing too? And our ultimate principle is that if we are having fun, so will our most discerning and valued readers, sort of, etc, etc. Although, of course again, we can’t always manage to have fun ourselves!)

Because I am one of the few involved who is still in the city and occasionally on the skeleton crew over the last two weeks of the hinge of fate in question, it has fallen to me to arrange these suggestions in semi-coherent lists of 12 items (a dozen roses as it were, for some kind of quasi-intellectual Lady Gaga goddess, or Madonna, or Lindsay Lohan, or Merella Fernandez, Pooja Handa, Farah Nasser, or even Ann Rohmer, or our very own gifted feminist office manager, etc). The first of these lists follows below, broadly dealing with subjects hinted at in the title above. There will be a few other lists before the evening of Saturday, December 31, 2011 – two or perhaps even three more. X, who is also occasionally lurking about the office, proposing going for drinks, etc, is supposed to be helping. But … here at any rate is the first list: