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

Dec 20th, 2011 | By | 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:

JANUARY 17 – Why John A. Macdonald can never be Canada’s George Washington

FEBRUARY 18 – Minerva’s owl spreads its wings on Stephen Harper’s last gasp of the British monarchy in Canada

MARCH 14 – Ancient destruction of Atlantis and tragic disaster in Japan today

APRIL 4 – Fear and hatred on the campaign trail in Canada .. is this Unknown Country about to become still more unknown?

JUNE 29 – Saying yes to Canada by voting no ..  two cheers for the death of the TMX-LSE merger deal

AUGUST 8 – Disciplining the bond vigilantes with the Province of Ontario Savings Office .. a teachable moment from the 1930s

AUGUST 11 – What would Orwell think about the UK riots in the summer of 2011?

AUGUST 28 – Following Olivia and Jack’s last walk together .. because all of us need to be able to make a difference

SEPTEMBER 16 – The latest grim trends .. and the “best single article I’ve read on the current phase of the economic crisis”

OCTOBER 7 – The bittersweet Ontario election of 2011

NOVEMBER 14 – Geronimo : An American Legend .. thoughts almost 18 years later : Occupy Wall Street has some very deep roots?

DECEMBER 1 – More cheers for Nathan Cullen’s NDP leadership bid .. the new republic in Canada may be closer than we think?

Tags: , , , , ,


Leave Comment