New Media » politics

Human Rights and Halftime Shows in America

jnarvey — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:07:01 +0000

Here’s a human rights condundrum for you:

You are reasonably certain that an asylum seeker sent back to his country of origin could face torture.
You are equally certain that this person poses a lethal terrorist threat to citizens in the local community (or abroad, if this person is given a chance to incite violence from the safe haven of your own shores).

In many countries, the practical solution has been to keep the suspected threat here, either monitored at ruinous expense, or left to his own devices in the hopes that he does not commit the terrorist offenses you were worried about in the first place. I argue it doesn’t have to be this way, in Terrorism, Asylum Seekers and the Human Right to Life

Also, do check out the Halftime in America video. If only because it’s Clint Eastwood.

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Occupy Movement on a Low Boil. For Now

jnarvey — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:22:45 +0000

Isolated pockets of the Occupy Movement’s anarchic resistance appear to be popping up in cities around North America with almost random timing. The movement is sure to come back hard when the winter snow gives way to Spring sunshine — it’s not like the 99 percent’s complaints have been met (or could be met) so far. And while I have noted with disdain some of the more visible stupidities of the Occupy movement, I’ve also been heartened by some of the signs I’ve seen on the protest sites from Vancouver to New York City.

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SOPA and the End of the Internet

jnarvey — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:30:08 +0000

Every blogger in the universe should be up in arms against this SOPA legislation coming out of the USA. This is soooooooo bad. Watch the video.

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Christopher Hitchens. He Never Missed A Deadline

jnarvey — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:53:04 +0000

No, I’m not being mean. Apparently, the man some called the most brilliant writer in the English speaking world really did want that for his epitaph (according to Francis Wheen). Another alternative that he quite enjoyed was ‘I sleep mad.”

Sleep mad, Christopher.

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Disband the First Nations Reserves. Start with Attawapiskat

jnarvey — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:36:32 +0000

Imagine you’re the slumlord owner of a rent-controlled bedbug-infested hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. You’ve pocketed big bucks over the years from the government that was supposed to pay for essential renovations. Your welfare-dependent tenants usually don’t complain too loudly about the mold or the rats or the lack of working toilets, for fear of being tossed out on the street.

But this time, they couldn’t help themselves, when a wall fell down, exposing several families to the elements and the shocked stares of onlookers from Hastings Street. They spilled the beans. Reporters from all over the country started talking about the deplorable crisis. It’s downright embarrassing.

An independent auditor comes knocking to go over your financials. He wants to find out what you’ve done with the millions of dollars that you were supposed to use to fix the leaky plumbing and the crumbling brickwork and rotten wood and broken windows. You tell him to take a hike. When he objects, you physically throw him out.

Then you get an epiphany. Oh, this is brilliant. You file a grievance with the United Nations over your ill treatment.

How do you think this story ends? With you keeping your hotel? With the United Nations giving you a badge of honor? With your long-suffering tenants patting you on the back for your courageous stand? With you not going to jail?

No.

No, no, no, no.

The crisis of Attawapiskat has thankfully helped put the entire system of First Nations reserves under more scrutiny. Band leaders on many (most?) reserves operate with impunity and an explicit rejection of democracy. The nepotism, corruption and wastefulness not merely of money but of human beings is something that people in the rest of the country would never stand for.

I’ve been ambivalent about this problem over the years because I don’t live next to it. I see the conditions on reserves in the news from time to time. The places do look awful. But that’s not the fault of the government shoveling cash into these places. No amount of cash can paper over this perpetual horror show. Not with band leaders demanding 280 new houses at $250,000 a pop, according to the NDP — houses in the middle of nowhere that are just going to fall apart again after a few years because under the rules on reserves, no one actually owns the property.

Think about that figure again: $250,000 per house. That’s just to build a house, since the land has no value. This is a house that will stand in an isolated community with no jobs, no schools, no hospital, no reason to live there at all. Why does it cost that much to build a house there? Because that’s what the band council says it costs… for houses that are going to end up as firewood.

This problem needs to be solved yesterday.

The solution? Simple. Stop the flow of money. There are some examples of well-run, prosperous reserves that are closer in development to Whistler than Attawapiskat. They will survive, maybe even thrive. But those reserves like Attawapiskat that cannot survive without massive infusions of funds (or fail even with such generous support) need to be dismantled. Let the people living on those reserves migrate to places with education, jobs and a hope for a future.

No more money. No more reserves.

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The End of Section 13

jnarvey — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:52:48 +0000

Canadian politicians look set to repeal Section 13, a law that effectively tramples on human rights — specifically, the right to freedom of expression — perversely, in the name of protecting human rights.

This is a win for freedom. Good riddance to the censorship law.

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The Winner of The 2nd Annual Essay Contest for The Propagandist

jnarvey — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 04:06:21 +0000

It wasn’t me, that’s for sure. There’s no formal rule disqualifying me, but I am the Editor of The Propagandist Magazine, so I would have felt like a real crumb if the judge had awarded the grand prize to me. I really could have used that thousand bucks, though.

Congratulations to Adam Levick for winning, based on his excellent essay, Better Jews. The Moral Vanity of Israel’s Leftist Jewish Critics. And a congratulatory nod as well to contest runner-up Farzana Hassan for Combat Jihad By Destroying Its Conceptual Roots

Confusion to our enemies!

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Traveling in New York City

jnarvey — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:49:15 +0000

Some highlights of my vacation in New York City so far:

Not getting deported immediately upon arrival at JFK. I thought I lost my passport and scrambled to find it for 5 minutes (It was in my backpack).
A slice of pizza from the restaurant where Peter Parker worked as a delivery guy before pursuing a different career as a superhero.
Eating octopus in the Greek neighborhood of Astoria in Queens.
Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Pints of various Brooklyn beverages during happy hour. $3 a beer? Seriously.

I’ll be meeting some fellow propagandists tomorrow, taking part in a writing meetup and checking out “Occupy Wall Street” (For those who know me well and are asking themselves, “what took you so long?”, all I can say is politics and headline news have been on the back burner for this trip). I’m looking forward to actually hanging out with some cool locals.

If you’re a New York-based blogger, political pundit, social media nerd or related sort of creative type, please do feel free to get in touch while I’m here. Cheers.

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Anonymous Political Bloggers Are Cowards

jnarvey — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:30:48 +0000

Yup. That’s my opinion. Anonymous political bloggers are cowards who don’t have the guts to stand by their own words.

This blog post is an open thread. Bring the debate, people. Comments are open.

Mind you, anonymous commenters are cowards, too, IMO.

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More Media Coverage of a History of The Middle Eastside

jnarvey — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:09:43 +0000

Shortly I first arrived in Vancouver, one of my first freelance journalism gigs here was writing for the Western Jewish Bulletin (which today is called the Jewish Independent). So it’s particularly heartwarming to see my novel, A History of the Middle Eastside, covered in that worthy publication. Thanks for the feature, people.

Explained Narvey to the Independent, “Two clichés I’ve often heard when discussing the politics of the Middle East, whether in formal surroundings or over pints at the pub: ‘It’s a rough neighborhood’ and ‘It’s complicated.’ So I ran with that: ‘What if I write a novel that breaks down the 20th century of the region into a simple parable of street gangs stabbing each other over turf?’

“I thought back to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. I was also reading Michael Chabon’s incredible novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I thought that writing in that style, with the story set in a surreal world of gangsters and the underworld, might be both entertaining and also accessible for a mainstream audience.”

He added, “If you like a rip-roaring tale of action, it works straight up as a pulp fiction gangster novel. If you’ve already got a pretty thorough grounding in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and world diplomacy in the 20th century, or want to learn a bit more about it, it works on a deeper level as well. I like the idea that it can educate, though from what I’ve heard from some of my readers, it can also feed into preexisting biases. It is what you make of it.”

Buy a copy of A History of the Middle Eastside on Amazon

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