elanya

An article claiming to explain why Liberals and Conservatives don't get along flashed across my friends page today.

It basically breaks morality down in to five precepts:

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.

• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.

• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.

• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.

• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

The general answer is that liberals and conservatives value different aspects of this. I'm not sure I agree with this - I'm not convinced that you can neatly divide and separate them when you are looking at specific issues. For example, the article says that Liberals generally are most concerned with the 'harm' impulse, but that Conservatives aren't. However, it later brings up abortion, and says that it is a touchy issue for conservatives because of their concern with the 'purity' impulse - essentially because of their believe in souls and the sanctity...of.... life? How is this different from harm? I would think that attitudes to abortion show that harm certainly *does* register as an important concern for conservatives, in certain contexts at least. Its not so neat as first appears.

Despite some misgivings, however, it is an interesting notion, and potentially useful if used carefully... Obviously I thought it was worth sharing :V

Courtesy of the devious mind of astatine210....

Celebrate The inauguration of the 44th president of the United States with.... Motorhead?

via earis, I bring you Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys's heartwarming little ditty, There's No One as Irish as Barack OBama!

:D

I am pretty sure that I don't actually need to encourage any of my American friends to get out and vote today - I know many of you already have, and some others are going to great pains to ensure that they can participate i your democracy, but I thought I'd make an encouraging post nonetheless.

Please get out and vote if you hadn't already!

And good luck for America's future!

From a silly radio drama put on by The House (CBC radio political commentary program)

(After Harper proposes a slew of increasingly ridiculous confidence motions to see how far Dion will go to avoid an election)

Stephen Harper: Come on, Dion, how long are you going to let me walk all over you?
Stephan Dion: I love that kind of massage.

In other amusing political commentary, Stephen Harper = Voldemort?

...I'm still waiting for there to be remarks about 'Pierre' Pettigrew. I think this is an important first step!

A reminder to my American friends that they should vote today! 

Extra props to those who are planning to volunteer!

The rest of Canada knows and cares who Jacques Cartier is, I'm sure! As interesting as I find this news, I found about it through a historical archaeology listserv. The guy who posted it gave two links. One was to the subscribers only Montreal gazette, and the other was to the French CBC site.

The gist of things is that while looking for evidence of a Champlain occupation of Quebec city, they found some Italian glass that dates back to the Cartier expeditions, from the 1540's. They believe it marks the presence of a fort (plausible). The 400th's anniversary of the founding of Quebec is coming up in 2008, and so the provincial government is pouring huge piles of cash into the site in order to develop it as a heritage site and be open by that date. Must be a good time to be an archaeologist in Quebec :o They actually found this all last fall, but this is the first I've heard about it.... If my French is not completely shit, they were sitting on the news until they could confirm the dates via radio carbon dating.

This find excites me, but the fact that the news has yet to trickle out to English Canada is kind of disappointing. Google gives me nothin' :/