@marcusbgee is right about Bloor Street, but for the wrong reasons

Ah, Marcus. The Globe's ideologically reliable municipal-affairs curmudgeon is kind of like a stopped clock that way.

Of course, the analogy only goes so far, because you don't have to ask a stopped clock why it's right twice a day, and that's a degree of frequency and predictability that ... well, let's just say it's not in the same postal code as Marcus.

Bitter partisan politics, the ethnic vote, and Israeli apartheid hysteria

Never underestimate the sheer batshit stupidity that can come of combining the wrong ingredients in the wrong proportions under the wrong conditions.

First example is an easy two points. Some guy working for a Conservative candidate in Etobicoke wants a bunch of funny brown people to serve as a background mosaic for a Harper photo op, so what does he do?

On @meslin, @nowtoronto, principle and pragmatism

Taking a break from #elxn41 for a minute here.

Toronto tweeters will, I'm sure, have followed the contretemps between Dave Meslin and Now magazine with some interest. A couple of days ago, Meslin finally lost his patience with Now and took exception to their characterization of him as a "seal" because of his willingness to swallow the fish tossed by Rob Ford.

Stop the attacks on mentally disabled Parkdale residents

Time out from talk of elections.

Sixty-two-year-old George Wass died earlier this week after someone attacked him on the steps of a Parkdale rooming house last Friday. He was hospitalized briefly and then released. He had been kicked repeatedly in the head and the ribs. He suffered two cracked ribs, cuts to his head and face, a black eye, and had trouble breathing. The autopsy said he died from blunt force trauma to the chest.

It was the fifth attack on a mentally disabled Parkdale resident since January. It's believed that the same person is behind all the attacks.

This video from Paisley Rae is a response to George's death.



Can't really add much to it.

Organized labour under attack, from Pinochet to Ford to Wisconsin

Sometimes the connections between history and current events aren't that easy to see. Sometimes, however, they're hard not to see – especially when they're framed in the context of the widening gap between haves and have-nots, the polarization of society between those who have power and those who do not, and the attendant implications for social cohesion and democratic governance.

Oh look, the cops are investigating themselves ...

... again.

This should go well.

Moments of optimism on the Queen car

It's quite possible that I'm investing this with more significance than it really merits. What can I say – sometimes my inner drama queen needs to get out.

All the wankers taking cellphone pictures of TTC operators ...

... should take a fucking pill.

Honestly, they're like kids with extremely annoying toys.

Police brutality at the G20: Steve Paikin testifies

It just gets better and better, doesn't it. When it comes to sadistic assholes in police uniforms, the G20 really is the gift that keeps on giving.

This really doesn't have anything to do with Allen Funt, does it

Hi there. I'm cuddly and harmless.

Well, looky here. The cops want to keep the surveillance cameras they brought in for the G20. And the sound cannons.

Best use of Craigslist ever

Someone in Toronto wants to swap mayors with Calgary. I can't imagine why.

Or maybe it's the other way around. I could be wrong, you know. Who knows what kids get up to on the intertoobz these days?

Can we stop talking about taxpayers?

I know, I know. It's not going to be easy to push back against 30 years of right-wing stupidity. And I think I recall someone saying, once upon a time, that an election campaign is no time for a discussion of serious issues.

But we're coming down to the home stretch of the Toronto civic election, and Rob Ford's still the odds-on favourite. Don't know whether it's too late to keep this particular bus from going off the cliff, but either way, there's a lot of damage to undo, and it's not going to get undone unless we start the pushback.

I've written in some detail about why Ford's message seems to be resonating with so many voters. Nothing's changed in that regard: both he and they are idiots (h/t thwap). But let's look a little more deeply at the essence of his message: spending is out of control, the city is falling apart, and people are sick and tired of their taxes going to waste.

Breaking down a message like that isn't easy, because it sounds so simple. The simplicity, however, is deceptive, because it's based on a number of assumptions that just don't stand up once you look past the ideological and discursive constraints. So, let's begin with the most basic and easily digested component of that message: the whole notion of "taxpayers' money."

First off, let's stop calling it that. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, taxes are what buy us civilization. We get to have roads, public health departments, electricity, clean water, hockey rinks, fire departments and schools because we pay taxes. They are the mechanism whereby the citizens of any society pool their resources to accomplish things they can't do on their own. They are the means whereby we act for the common good. They are part of the fabric that holds communities together. It gets more than a little tiresome hearing people bitching about them.

That's part one. Part two: it's not Your Money, Mr. and Ms. Pissed-Off Taxpayer. It is the price you pay for living in a civilized society instead of a state of savagery. It is a collectively owned resource, to be used in the pursuit of the public good and in accordance with publicly determined priorities. You get to participate in that determination through your inherent right to participate in the public decision-making process: by voting, by talking to your elected representatives, by exercising your rights of free speech and free assembly, and by having conversations with your fellow citizens. And once that determination is made, you live with it. You don't get to take your ball and go home just because you didn't get what you wanted.

Thirdly, it's time we stopped talking about ourselves as "taxpayers." That kind of discourse is based on a very limited and restrictive view of our relationships to our community, to our government, and to one another. When you reduce your view of those relationships to just "me" versus "the government that takes my hard-earned money," you're setting yourself up for nothing but anger and resentment – the very things that Ford's tapping into. Take those away and he's really got nothing else.

That's the way public discourse has been drifting for at least 30 years, ever since our southern brethren decided to send a second-rate Hollywood has-been to Washington. And setting out the resultant damage could be the work of an entire career, never mind a blog post. But perhaps the worst aspect of that damage has been the vandalism done to language and public discourse; if words and ideas are degraded and stripped of their meanings, we can't even have productive conversations any more. If all we can do is throw around tired clichés and discredited tropes, then there goes any hope for meaningful and effective communication – the first step in fixing things.

Therefore, a challenge to both fellow progressives and anyone else: let us, henceforth, resolve to stop talking about "taxpayers" or "shareholders" or "consumers," and instead embrace and revitalize the notion of "citizenship."

Yes, citizenship. A privilege, a badge of honour, an indicator that you're something more than an apathetic disengaged dullard. Citizenship carries rights, but it also carries obligations to your community and to your fellow citizens. In return for the rights conferred by citizenship, you assume certain responsibilities – critical thought and active civic engagement most of all.

It means thinking beyond clichés.

It means recognizing that there's an entity out there larger than yourself.

It means resisting the atomizing influence of corporations and manufactured narratives that seek to distract us from genuine issues and turn us against one another.

And it means participating in the civic life of your community.

This goes beyond labels like "right" or "left" or "conservative" or "liberal" or "socialist." Citizenship is a proud and honourable idea, organically developed through centuries of patience, care, learning, and preservation of intellectual and moral traditions. And it's been disfigured almost beyond recognition by decades of misdirection, lies, and bullshit. It's time to reclaim it.

(Tomorrow: that "elitist" thing.)

Cops with cameras, or cops on camera? A modest proposal

Via OpenFile, a report that Toronto police are considering the use of body cameras – small digital cameras that can be clipped to an officer's ear, headgear or uniform. Spokesman Mark Pugash casts the idea as something that would contribute to public and officer safety, as well as accountability.

Nebulous and flexible notion, that accountability thing. An official at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association wonders how much discretion individual officers would have regarding when the devices are turned on and recording, and wonders how long such recordings would be kept and what they would be used for.

And bluntly, Toronto police haven't exactly distinguished themselves when it comes to accountability. Indeed, the organization, its managers and the leaders of its union have a pretty sorry record of conflict and dysfunction, both internally and with their civilian overseers. If it's a question of reforming an outmoded organizational and occupational culture, one really has to wonder whether body cameras are going to help.

What needs to be looked at is the broader issue of videotaping police, period. Again, reduced to its essence, this is a struggle over narrative. This is all about controlling the story and how it gets told.

Remember Said Jama Jama and Roy Preston? In August 2003, Preston, a lying thug who happened to be wearing a police uniform, hauled off an unprovoked sucker punch on Jama Jama, knocking out a couple of his teeth. Jama Jama was subsequently charged with assaulting police and at one point was even facing the possibility of deportation. The truth only came out because someone happened to videotape the incident. The judge at Preston's assault trial described Preston's conduct as particularly cowardly and reprehensible. After Preston was sentenced – to 30 days, mind – the head of the Toronto police union complained about the media coverage, as if that were the problem.

So, in sum, we have a cowardly abuse of power, a lying asshole cop backed up by his buddies, and a failed cover-up. Does anyone seriously think things would have turned out this way if someone hadn't been there with a video camera?

And then there's Robert Dziekanski. It seems that the RCMP tried to seize the infamous video. Can't really blame them for trying. But again, if someone hadn't been there to tape it, those taser-happy SOBs would have been able to tell their lies and get away with it. The Braidwood Inquiry found that the four cops who tasered Robert Dziekanski to death were not justified in using the taser and that they deliberately misrepresented their actions. In other words, they zapped the poor guy for no reason and then lied about it. I've written previously about the futility of waiting for a meaningful institutional response, but at least in the wake of the inquiry, the cops who killed Robert Dziekanski were held up for the public scorn they deserve.

Most recently, from the G20 summit in Toronto, we have more examples of police misconduct than I can count. I've linked to this video before, but particularly instructive is the passage about Lisa Walter's arrest that begins at about the 6:40 mark.

As the video shows, she isn't doing anything except watching and documenting a brutal arrest, but what happens? She gets arrested for “obstructing” and "causing a disturbance." Bullshit charges that probably wouldn't stand up in court, but it's not as if anyone's going to have to answer for laying them in the first place, let alone the disgusting sexist and homophobic treatment she was subjected to afterward. It's not the first time cops have objected to having their actions recorded, either. You can read about it here, here and here. (I'm tempted to pull the old “well, if you've got nothing to hide ... ” shtick on them, but I'll resist the temptation for now.)

So, I have a proposal for Mark Pugash, the Toronto Police, and the suppliers lining up to sell them these cool new toys: Fill your boots. Buy as many of these as you like. Have your fun. But I don't ever want to hear another cop complaining about being videotaped again.

Deal?