Say "No" to Political Parties

I hear from a number of my fellow Canadians that, surely, ours is the freer of the two when compared to the United States of America. How could one argue otherwise, when they have only two parties to choose from, and we have so many? Surely, nobody could disagree that adding choice to the democratic process increases the freedom felt by those who are ruled by the results of the vote, and you need look for no further confirmation  than that which is found in the disdain with which we discuss countries with single-party elections. The more parties, the better.

I disagree. I think there should be fewer political parties, not more. A lot fewer, actually.

A political party is, for all intents and purposes, a coalition of persons who share political ideologies and use their combined headcount to their advantage by applying the principles of majority rule in order to attain positions of power. In that regard, a political party must garner popular support among the electorate, which is done by campaigning on a party platform. As a general truism, a member of the electorate may expect one NDP candidate to be replaceable by another, politically-identical candidate - republican for republican, liberal for liberal, so on and so forth.

A party must, therefore, rely on this platform in order to garner votes. It is possible, even, to compensate for gross flaws in ideology by adopting popular positions. For example, the Republican Party in the States has, as a factor of its positions on marriage and so forth, a distinct anti-homosexuality bias, however understated. Yet support in the LGBT community for the Republican Party persists, due to the party having popular positions on other issues such as defence. This is true in one way or another of almost all political parties, and is a natural function of another truism: no two people will ever find themselves in total agreement on every matter.

What you end up with is the acceptance of bad/unformed/unpopular ideas on the shoulder of ideas that are, or at least seem, more robust, more elegant, and more accurate.

This is why I suggest the abolition of political parties.  While it would be further ideal to replace representative democracies with pure democracies on the strength of modern telecommunication, that is an issue for an entirely different diatribe. Simply decentralize candidate selection and voting. Let communities decide, on the strength of a person's individual merits and ideas, who would best represent them in the political arena.

How YOU Can Solve Problems... No Effort Edition

Distributed Computing is the practice of breaking up large computing tasks and, well, distributing them across several computers. More specifically, it refers to programs where master projects use code such as BOINC (Berkeley Link) to distribute those tasks across hundreds of thousands or, potentially, millions of computer CPUs, GPUs, and, in some cases, PS3 game consoles, in order to make possible operations that used to require dedicated supercomputers for a fraction of the cost. This works because, while your day-to-day operations might be very taxing to your computer (chances are they aren't), your computer actually spends a lot of time idling, unless you are judicious about shutting it off when you aren't sitting in front of it. When you are idling, you're typically only using about 1% of your CPU's total processing power. Distributed computing programs take advantage of that idle time by performing (with your permission, obviously) operations on your CPU during your down time.

System requirements are going to vary from project to project, but for the average computer, it's not a bad way to be idling, if you're going to leave it idling. Hell, if you're anything like my, your processor is functionally idling most of the time anyway: the occasional very large excel file might cause a bump, but apart from gaming, my system runs pretty flatly at about 5% of capacity, even when I'm using it. Burning just as much power, mind you, but wasting it. If I were to tap into that unused processing potential, all of those billions of calculations-per-second could contribute to solving problems for real people. I've seen everything from using your processing power to help animators do 2D and 3D rendering, to performing analysis of chess games, to helping cull SETI data to look for extraterestrial life.

Some of this stuff has serious applications in molecular biology and, by extension, medicine. I strongly suggest all my readers look into it and see if they can find even one project they are willing to let use some of the calculations they were just throwing away anyway. Whether you want to look at it as an act of charity, an increase in energy efficiency, or Living In The Future is entirely up to you.

Me? I'm going to be running Milkyway@home, Orbit@home, and Folding@home. Processing power permitting, of course.

What's the Ideal Community look like?

I'm asking you all right now: What's the ideal community look like to you? Who's in charge? How's it run? Hit me below in the comments.

Christian Socialism, Solidarity, and the word "Catholic"

Three days into Lent and I'm starting to remember what it's for after all. I was going to post a fantastic image of one of Cam's rosaries, but I decided not to, for, you see, I believe in intellectual property - you get the Divine Mercy, instead... it's my favourite chaplet, when I'm in a chaplet sort of mood. But that, you see, is entirely beside the point.

Between the season and getting mired back in politics, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I think communities should run. While national and international politics is fantastically fun stuff, there's a tendency to forget to think about things in the form of people. Since people are most directly affected by the policies of their community, the governance of a community is perhaps the purest form. Ergo, that's what I've been thinking about.

Communities are organizations, however loose they might seem, and organizational behaviour is actually one of my fields of formal study with the College. A lot of it is common sense. Some of it sounds suspiciously familiar. Some of it even seems like chapters out of a communist manifesto, if that manifesto was written by socially-responsible capitalists instead.

The people who surround you become like a family, even if they aren't really your relatives. Like any family, a community is going to have its smooth and rough patches, whether that community is an office building, a neighbourhood, or the entire municipality. Interpersonal interaction, and the way you treat other people, is as important in government as it is in any other field.

One of the best thinkers on the subject I've ever heard was probably one you've all heard of as well... Jesus Christ.

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,  bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.  If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them.  Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

    “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:27-36, NSV)

For one thing, pretty much this entire passage is speaking directly to me. I'm pretty bad at controlling my anger, which is the stuff of family legend, and rivalled only by that of a few (mostly fictional) people. I'm not violent, I'm just notoriously cranky. It's embarrassing and inappropriate and I hate it... and it's chiefly rooted in feelings of embarrassment. The other cheek, as it were.

More importantly, though, and perhaps more relevantly, it has applications to the community. Turning the other cheek and not raising your temper, caring for those who need it, and generally behaving as mild-mannered as possible is the path to relative office or community harmony. The whole of the gospels are peppered with verses instructing much the same. How it is nobler to give to the poor than to accrue wealth, and so on.

Christ was a Socialist. Maybe the First Socialist.  Certainly the best socialist, though he wouldn't have called himself that, and certainly nobody else would actually say that he was merely a socialist leader either. The fact of the matter is that socialism simply fits many of the criteria for Christ's just society. It is a solidarity of the community, a togetherness. The abandonment of rivalries and idealistic division in order to focus on the things that really matter. Universality. Catholicism.


That's the meaning of that particular word, by the way. Universal. I don't believe that people should be divided from one another. I especially don't believe that Christians should be. I don't really care if a person is Catholic, United Church, Baptist, Lutheran, Orthodox, Anglican, or any other shade of Christian... you're just Christian.

"The one, holy, apostolic Church."

Lent Arrives: Spiritual Spring Returns.

It's Lent, and tradition dictates that it's time to give things up (or pick things up), in a general spirit of trying to, well, improve the spirit. It's a catholic thing, originally, but the tradition has been adopted by a number of other Christian denominations, and even out in the secular world. The origin is found in Christ's life, in his time in the desert, which is why the Lenten season is 40 days. The idea is to... well, actually, I don't really know the teaching. The idea seems to be spiritual self-improvement, and that's just's a fantastic motivation so far as I'm concerned.

What gets given up varies from person to person. Me, I'm planning on making just three shifts: no more overly salty, fatty foods and no more wastefully hot baths that don't serve a practical purpose - and no more anger.

I'm not really that angry any more, compared to how angry I used to be. But it's time to set it aside. Learn not to repeat various people's mistakes, including my own. I'm going to have help. And I'm looking forward to the challenge.