by Sandwichman
Sun Aug 6th, 2006 at 12:48:19 PM EST
With reference to the notion that le Parti pour la décroissance and de-growth is the "capricious idea of perfectly selfish spoilt kids," I would like to mention the American public intellectual, Lewis Mumford, who wrote, at the time of the moon landing in 1969:
The most conspicuous scientific and technical achievements of our age -- nuclear bombs, rockets, computers -- are all direct products of war... The moon-landing program is no exception: it is a symbolic act of war... [I]t was deliberately planned as a means of swiftly perfecting the equipment for total extermination -- the strategic goal toward which our entire megatechnic power system, in the lethal grip of the 'myth of the machine' is now pointed.
This sandwichman would be interested to hear if anyone can offer a rebuttal to the notion that the strategic goal of national economy is today directed -- at least to a very considerable extent -- at perfecting the equipment for extermination, not forgetting that the form of national income accounting currently in use was predicated on arguments about how to pay for the second world war.
by Sandwichman
Sun Apr 23rd, 2006 at 11:40:05 PM EST
"[I]ntellectualism is constitutively insufficient to ethics, and no final moral source to date has ever been vindicated so consummately that all reasonable people feel themselves commanded by intellect or revelation to accept it.[italics in original]"
"Fundamentalism is the shape the desire for a slow, centred world takes when its temporal conditions of possibility are absent."
Disclaimer: Quotation doesn't necessarily imply either agreement or disagreement.
by Sandwichman
Fri Apr 21st, 2006 at 09:28:09 AM EST
Yesterday, Sandwichman and his entourage delivered a home-baked devil's food cake inscribed "WORK LESS" to the office of the BC Progress Board as a token of gratitude for their tacit endorsement of the Work Less platform. Very tacit. Video will be posted in good time.
The cake motif might bear some explication. In April of last year, BC Business magazine published an article that profiled the Work Less Party platform. Sarah Efron, author of the piece, also interviewed the opposition. Thus appeared a quote from Jock Finlayson, executive vice president of the British Columbia Business Council, "Tom Walker [aka Sandwichman -ed.] is a passionate advocate of the idea that you can have your cake and eat it too." Upon reading the quote, I fervently clutched the magazine to my breast and exclaimed, "I am! I am! I am!"
by Sandwichman
Sun Apr 16th, 2006 at 08:27:04 PM EST
(posted to MaxSpeak & Work Less Party)
Vancouver, BC -- A discussion paper issued by the BC Progress Board has called for substantially more time off work for British Columbians. Well, not quite. The Progress Board's report didn't actually mention reducing the hours of work. But it did prominently feature a key statistic that, on closer inspection, trumpets the benefits of the Work Less Party platform.
The Progress Board, a quasi-independent advisory group set up in 2001 by British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell, lamented the fact that Canada's productivity ranking among 24 OECD countries had fallen from 5th place in 1970 to 17th in 2004. What they failed to mention, though, is the reason for that low ranking. Fifteen of the countries ranked ahead of Canada work substantially fewer hours per year. And in the 14 European countries with a significant productivity edge, workers averaged 245 hours -- or roughly six weeks -- less per year than Canadians.
The Work Less Party has produced a reply to the BC Progress Board productivity report that calls for a broader dialogue on productivity -- a dialogue based on understanding, rather than overlooking, the role of leisure as a prime contributing factor to productivity.
Read the Work Less Party's Reply to the BC Progress Board's discussion paper on productivity.
