Why you should not embrace risk

Posted by on | Uncategorized

Don’t ask me why, but I was reading this goofy article by John Snobelin this morning. (Snobelin, for those who don’t remember, is the high-school dropout who became Minister of Education in the Ontario government of Mike Harris, signalling the triumph of “common sense” over the petty reign of us pointy-headed intellectuals.)

In it, Snobelin tells us about a meeting he recently attended, “a small gathering of business leaders from across North America. We huddled for a couple of days in New York to work on our futures.” There is a bit more blah-blah, until he gets to this part: “Extraordinary leaders, they share three characteristics: They have had great success, they embrace big risks and they are highly self-aware.”

The bit about “embracing big risks” is what caught my eye. This is a line that I must have heard a thousand times, in stuff on leadership and success. People are constantly being told to take bigger risks.… Continue reading

Mindfulness in an Unjust World

Posted by on | culture, health care

Mindfulness meditation has become very popular. Its exotic Buddhist origins combined with the mounting evidence produced by Western science that meditation is (mostly because of brain plasticity) good for us, makes it very appealing. Many therapists are now designing new mindfulness-based cognitive and behavioural therapies, and some physicians now recommend it to their patients. Mindfulness-based programs are used to treat depression, anxiety, chronic stress, chronic pain, and so on.

Being mindful is being able to focus our attention, moment by moment, on stimuli such as one’s breath or bodily sensations and, in doing so, to step out of the constant flow of thoughts and feelings that inhabits our mind under normal conditions. This is why many think that meditation “quiets the mind”. It is recognized that thoughts and emotions will always irrupt, but such mental states should be welcomed in a non-judgemental manner and objectified, i.e. observed as external phenomena by the reflexive and compassionate self that we are when we practice mindfulness meditation.… Continue reading

Himelfarb talking sense on taxes

Posted by on | Uncategorized

I missed this when it first aired. Great conversation with Alex Himelfarb (former Clerk of the Privy Council to Chretien, Martin and briefly Harper) on taxes:

Several very interesting points made — the one about municipalities I thought was particularly good. The point about austerity being self-imposed I also thought was very important (particularly in the wake of the last Ontario election, where so many commentators were going on about how Ontario will be the new Argentina, forgetting that this is a province that, within recent memory, cut its income tax rate by 30%).

 … Continue reading

Why gay marriage is such a problem for Christians

Posted by on | Uncategorized

Unlike some of my co-bloggers here on In Due Course, I will admit to having some sympathy for the Christians who have been dragging their heels on our society’s recent embrace of gay marriage, and of gay pride more generally. This is not to say that I have any sympathy for their position — I don’t. But I have sympathy for them in the sense that I feel bad for them. The reason I feel bad for them is that I can see how, intellectually, they’re in a really tight spot. They are under intense social pressure to change a particular moral belief that they hold, but they can’t see any reason to change this belief, other than that they’re under intense social pressure to do so. Should they buckle under and change the belief, this would reveal a deep truth about morality that they are unwilling to acknowledge, and that in many ways undermines the point of having religious beliefs at all.… Continue reading

Introducing Morality, Competition, and the Firm

Posted by on | Uncategorized

I’m not trying to be annoying here, but I just received a copy of my new book, Morality, Competition and the Firm, published by Oxford University Press. This one’s an academic book, a collection of papers on business ethics, as well as some more general stuff on the normative foundations of capitalism. Five of the pieces are new, nine are previously published (some in hard-to-find books).

mcf

This is the third time that I’ve had two books come out in the same year — the reason has to do with the fact that trade publishing and academic publishing work at a completely different pace. For those who are curious, I don’t actually write these things simultaneously, it’s that the trade books take about half as long as the academic ones to make their way into print (primarily because they are not refereed). So I write a bunch of academic stuff, then I write a popular book, and then they both come out at the same time.… Continue reading

The two worst talking points on carbon taxes/pricing

Posted by on | economy, environment, Uncategorized

My little disquisition on carbon pricing earlier this week was actually just a warm-up for what I really wanted to write about, which is the two incredibly irritating talking points that have pretty much made up the entirety of the federal government’s communications strategy on this issue, for at least five years now. The first is the claim that a carbon tax would be a “tax on everything” or that it would increase the “price of everything.” The second is the claim that a carbon tax would be “job killing.”

What’s infuriating about these talking points is that they both sound vaguely correct, even though they are completely wrong. Thus they have all the hallmarks of our “post truth” political environment, where government no longer even tries to defend its actions or policies, it simply adopts a communications strategy that is calculated to be effective with a target segment of the electoral, then sticks to it through thick and thin.… Continue reading

Débat sur le franglais: miser sur le pouvoir d’attraction du français

Posted by on | culture, politics, Quebec

Ce n’est pas d’hier qu’une frange du mouvement nationaliste québécois se lamente de l’état de la culture québécoise et s’inquiète de son sort. Les penseurs phares du néo-nationalisme des années 1960 comme les historiens de l’« École de Montréal » ou des auteurs comme Pierre Vadeboncoeur et Fernand Dumont ont alimenté ce diagnostic pessimiste quant au devenir de l’identité québécoise. Dans un essai publié en 2000, j’ai consacré un chapitre au « nationalisme mélancolique » québécois. L’éventuelle disparition ou folklorisation du français–la « lousianistation » du Québec–est le plus souvent le point focal du discours sombre, et parfois catastrophiste, sur l’avenir de la culture québécoise francophone.

Comme je suis de bonne humeur après une agréable semaine de vacances au Québec, je n’ai pas lu les textes d’opinion sur les Dead Obies, le « franglais » et les menaces de « créolisation » et d’« anglicisation ». Tout ce que je sais vient de ce texte de Marc Cassivi partagé hier par plusieurs de mes contacts sur Facebook.… Continue reading

Three Faces of Canadian Homophobia

Posted by on | culture, inequality, law

Thankfully most Canadians find the homophobic bigotry of people like Rob Ford as repugnant and silly as Ford himself. Of course, it remains disturbing that polls suggest that some 20% of Toronto Area voters seemed prepared to vote for Ford even though he has been disgraced and discredited along so many so many dimensions it is hard to keep track. Perhaps some of these people are bamboozled by Ford’s insistence that he is ‘spendaphobic’ rather than ‘homophobic’. But in wake of Ford’s well-known refusal to participate in Pride celebrations, his boozed and drug fueled rants and his petty (and apparently sober) refusal to support a study of homeless shelter space for LGBT youth Ford has become the ugly face of Canadian homophobia. Ford’s variety of homophobia, replete with familiar hateful epithets and evident anxiety about with even distant association with anything vaguely gay, is easy to dismiss and mock. Indeed, Ford himself is such a buffoon that he provides an unwitting performative self-refutation of this variety of homophobia.… Continue reading

When is a tax not a tax? Carbon taxes vs. carbon prices

Posted by on | economy, environment

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion across the land about the idea of a “carbon tax” and whether it deserves to be called a “tax” or not (e.g. here). Proponents of such a scheme – myself included – have taken to calling it a “carbon pricing” system, in order to emphasize the dissimilarity between a carbon tax and more conventional taxation schemes, such as the income tax or the GST (and also to avoid getting caught up in the “all taxes are bad” dragnet currently being thrown by the right). This has led opponents of the scheme, including the current federal government, not to mention their lackeys in the right-wing press, to insist that it is a “tax.” Indeed, the Minister of the Environment never misses an opportunity to repeat the government’s mantra, that a carbon pricing system would be, not just a tax, but a “tax on everything” (and the previous Minister claimed that “carbon pricing in any form is a carbon tax.… Continue reading

More me

Posted by on | Uncategorized

I did an interview with Steve Paiken for The Agenda, sort-of on my book, sort-of a postmortem on the Ontario election. It unfortunately never made it to air, before everyone went off to the cottage for the summer, but they did make it available online. I thought it was a good conversation:

 … Continue reading