We live in a society of laws. Everybody knows it, and everybody agrees that this is a good thing. Even Ayn Rand, fire-breathing she-dragon of the libertarian right, conceded that government had a small role to play in enforcing laws and contracts.

And what are laws? They are codified rules that spell out what is right and wrong in a given situation. If you break the rule, you’ve done wrong and you should be punished. Laws may not always be correct, but they’re always the law.

Rules and laws are also immutable in the face of intention. You may break a law with good intent – say burning down your local community centre after trying to get rid of the rats in the basement – but you’re still on hook for arson. Some laws are designed to take intent into account, or are modified by other laws. But if those modifications don’t exist, you’re out of luck.

Lest you think I’m wasting your time with a rudimentary civics lesson, I’m bringing this up because some people (often but not always employees of the Quebecor owned media outlets) appear to have a little trouble with the basics.

We’re in the midst of two significant cases of alleged public rule-breaking: the much ballyhooed ‘robocalls’ scandal currently spilling blood and ink all over Parliament Hill, and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s violation of conflict of interest legislation. In both, it is clear that something unsavory was done – voter supression in one, and using public office to pursue personal interests in the other. But we don’t know how bad it was, or who was responsible. Elections Canada is investigating the robocalls, and an upcoming court case will decide if Ford broke the law. The prudent thing to do is wait for the investigations to conclude, evaluate the results, and apply corrective action as needed. But prudence is not the name of the game in the current political discourse.

Ezra Levant wrote an editorial about the supposed media “manufacturing” of the robocalls scandal. But he doesn’t argue that rules weren’t broken. He argues that nobody cares except the media, and therefore it’s not an issue (he also takes a distasteful shot at ‘foreign citizens’, but I’ll leave that for another day). That’s not how rules work. If a political party in Canada perverted the course of democracy, they need to be held to account regardless of how many people show up to protest. That’s the nice thing about laws: they work whether we’re interested or not, doing the work of good governance even when we can’t be bothered.

Another Sun columnist, Michael Coren, goes even further. He suggests that the whole robocalls scandal is actually a conspiracy led by the paranoid right’s favorite bogeyman, George Soros. Despite there being not one scrap of evidence to support this claim, he makes the following statement:

What we now know is that the moaning calls were being encouraged and orchestrated, often by radical organizations based in the United States.

No, Michael. We don’t know that. You only think that, because Glen Beck said so:

Aside: what the Hell is Glen Beck wearing in that clip? I mean, I know he webcasts from his basement now, but why the pajamas?

Anyway, Coren isn’t prepared to wait for the investigation, or even admit that a rule has been broken. His tact is to discredit and inflame, which get no one closer to the truth.

Turning to Rob Ford’s latest legal troubles, Sue-Anne Levy writes today that the court case brought against the Mayor is absurd because of who is making the accusations. In her view, it’s all a plot by desperate ‘Silk Stocking Socialists’ and ‘lefties’, her code words for people who disagree with her. But surpisingly, Levy gives the game away and admits that Ford is at fault:

He should have declared a conflict of interest at the Feb. 7 council meeting and not spoken or voted on whether he had to repay the $3,150 in donations made by lobbyists to his Football Foundation.

She freely admits that Ford broke the law, but that doesn’t matter because the accusations were made by her – and the mayor’s – political opponents. If this were the basis for jurisprudence in Canada, we’d  all be in a lot of trouble. The court case against Ford may well prove spurious and inane, but only on legal merits, not personal preference.

We need to know the truth about the robocalls and Rob Ford’s ethics. Nobody likes it when their choice of party or leader is accused of cheating, lying, and breaking the rules. But the only vindication that counts is proof that no wrong-doing occurred. Levant, Coren, and Levy’s tactics of deflecting, disparaging and diminishing demonstrate little interest in the rule of law, or even in determining what’s right and wrong. It is shallow partisan nonsense, and we should all – no matter our personal politics – demand better from our pundits.

I’ve spent the better part of my morning reading Christopher Hitchens’ obituaries. Fitting that such a great writer should draw so much articulate praise. I admired him greatly, and I will miss his work very much.

I also indulged in a little Twitter trolling around Hitch’s death, and was disgusted by the reactions of those who took exception to his anti-theism. These people adopt some permutation of three basic arguments: ‘God killed him with Cancer’, ‘Only now does Hitchens know the truth’, and ‘He died, so that means there is a god’. The last one is particularly weird, since I have never know an atheist anywhere to claim he was immortal.

These reactions made me think of an idea that was at the core of Hitchens’ work – when you challenge a powerful idea or person, you become as powerful as they are thought to be. Hitchens’ targets – Reagan, Clinton, Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, Princess Diana, God, among others – are powerful because we agree that they are. When that agreement is confronted, a crack forms in the mantle of  their authority. Put another way, when you fight ‘God’, you become as mighty as God because you dare to fight him on his own terms. Hitchens dared, and dared, and then dared some more.  This, I think, is why he drives religious people crazy.

So, thank you. We’ll try to keep up the good work.

This one goes out to those who continue to misread Adam Smith and claim that the “invisible hand” of the Market will make everything OK. The market doesn’t care about you, your family, or our society. It doesn’t have your interests at heart, and it isn’t in your corner. Why? Because it is amoral. It is thing created by humans that follows its own logic.

And because it is made by us, it can be controlled by us. Want the market to do a better job producing good results for normal people? Then get on board with some sensible regulations. A world where this guy and his friends can do whatever they want is not a world where most people can live.

I was very sad to hear the news that Jack Layton had passed away today. Much will be written about him in the next few days, by people who knew him much better than I did, and by people much better at paying tribute. So, I’ll offer only this: the goal of politics should always be (yet rarely is) to make things better. One may disagree with the means a leader prescribes for achieving that goal, and these prescriptions might even be wrong. But if the leader pursues this goal with integrity and honesty, he can’t help but do a great deal of good.

Jack Layton wanted things to be better. He was an honest and passionate advocate for the better world he sought. This is a rare quality in politics, and we are poorer for having lost him.

I’ll be away from the blog until August 22nd. Keep an eye on the place while I’m gone.

Over at Macleans OnCampus, Robyn Urback shrugs off the political and social causes and implications of the UK riots. Fair enough; you can make a reasoned argument in that direction, even though I disagree. But she does one very unfortunate thing while making her case, which is fairly emblematic of the problems I’ve noticed with media coverage of the unrest.

In arguing that the riots had nothing to do with poverty or inequality, she makes the following statement:

And many of the rioters, in fact, are not disadvantaged youth, but 30-something teachers, youth workers, and graphic designers. To ponder socio-economic excuses for these crimes is to give those who have succumbed to mob mentality a political agenda to fall back on.

The first problem here is to pluralize ‘teachers’, ‘youth workers’ and ‘graphic designers’. If you follow Urback’s own links, it is clear that only one teacher, one youth worker, and one graphic designer have been arrested. Contrary to what Urback suggests, wild packs of young professionals are not roaming the streets of London, and the vast majority of the rioters remain young, under- or unemployed, and poor.

Urback also makes the mistake of suggesting that the outlier is in fact representative of the whole. The teacher, designer, youth worker, future soldier and grad student (these latter two being identified in other media reports as counter-intuitive examples of riot participants) represent about 0.5 per cent of the total arrests (the latest arrest reports indicate that “more than 900″ people have been detained, so I’m pegging the number at about 950). In quantitative analysis, this is what we refer to as “statistically insignificant”. There may well be more young professionals arrested, but we don’t actually know if this is true or how many there are. It is therefore wrong to suggest that the rioters include a large number of comfy middle class folks, and to further conclude that this means the riots have nothing to do with inequality.

Urback is by no means the only reporter to confuse weather (a discrete phenomenon) with climate (a generalized trend) in the riot story. Her example is nevertheless important in understanding how this distorts debate. The pictures and video of the riots discomfit many observers, and this kind of outlier-as-reality is a convenient way to insulate analysis from deeper questions of cause and context. Portraying the violence as a kind of random, inexplicable outbreak of mindless criminality is comforting to many, because it prevents the necessary consideration of why the riots are happening, and how they might be complicit in the overarching social and economic circumstances that fueled the unrest. This is an understandable response, as no one likes being uncomfortable. However, I would suggest it is not an appropriate response for members of the media, those who are tasked with interpreting these events for the rest of us.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language“, George Orwell explains how the political use of language is more often employed to obscure meaning than to illuminate it. In his words,

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed.

To wit: words have meanings. These meanings may be complex, but they are specific. When words don’t refer to specific things, we lose the ability to speak about those things. Anyone who is careless with the meaning of words is careless with reality, and should be viewed with suspicion.

This brings us to Giorgio Mammoliti. The Toronto Councillor for York West has always been a political clown, a kind of gross caricature of whatever ideology he currently thinks will serve his own self interest. Years ago, he was an NDP MPP and leader of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. He is now a stooge for Rob Ford’s slobocracy, the guy they send out when they want to say something offensive but would rather the quote not be attached to the mayor. We should not expect much from this type of opportunist, but he keeps finding ways to disappoint our already low expectations

Giorgio, apparently tired of hearing from the ‘communists’ who presented at the marathon 22-hour City Council meeting on the proposed service cuts, has created a Facebook page called “Save the City…Support the Ford Administration” (I’ve linked to it, but I warn you that its utility is marginal). I have no problem with this in itself. Mammoliti can do whatever he wants on Facebook. But I do take issue with what he has been saying about the page. From The Globe:

“I don’t want to hear from communists,” he said. “I won’t be calling them communists on the site, but I will be using the word ‘whatever’ to reply to them. If you see that word you can be pretty sure they’re a communist and I’ll be cutting them off of the site.”

He maintains a broad definition of the term “communist” as “anyone who is able to work, doesn’t want to work and wants everything for free,” he said.

From the Star:

“I’m really sick and tired of hearing from the communists in this city,” he said in an interview. “I don’t want anything to do with them. I don’t want to listen to them. I don’t want to listen to their griping and their whining. I want to listen to people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way. I’m clearly trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining.”

What’s fascinating here is Giorgio’s frequent and brazen misuse of the term “communist”. Communism refers to a specific political and economic program which, among other things, calls for worker control of the means of production, collectivization of industry and agriculture, and the reconfiguration of the state as an instrument for economic planning. In practice, the term can also apply to states which refer to themselves as ‘communist’, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea. It does not apply to union members. Some of these individuals may be communists, but the connection is not a necessary one. Nor does ‘communist’ refer to people who are defending public services that enjoy broad support. It is also inappropriate for Mammoliti to apply this term to all of his critics simply for being critical, unless extensive public polling reveals that the majority of them do, in fact, hold communist views. I am unaware of any such research, but would be happy to review it should Mammoliti’s office make it available.

So why does Mammoliti call his critics communist? While I don’t doubt that he is largely ignorant of broad swaths of history and political theory, and may not actually know what ‘communist’ means, I think something else is going on here. He obviously intends it as a slur, a way of lumping together a diverse collection of individuals of a variety of different political viewpoints, united only by their opposition to his politics. His abuse of the term is a way of labeling and sidelining otherwise legitimate criticism, of presenting absolutely credible and mainstream views as somehow radical and extreme. Opposing cuts to services such as libraries and pools is a reasonable position for liberals, conservatives, and  social democrats alike, but by labelling this opinion “communist” he is attempting to remove this argument from the range of acceptable policy options.  It perverts the dialogue around public services and city finances, and is a form of exclusion unacceptable to anyone who cares about meaningful debate. Mammoliti’s abuse of language reveals a fondness for thug tactics and a distaste for democracy rather unbecoming of a democratically elected politician.

Orwell closes his essay by stating  that”political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” By cynically exploiting the meaning of words, Mammoliti does little to dispel the widespread belief that the sum total of all his public comments amount to anything more than exactly this – pure wind.

Photo by alienbeatpoet.