So long Andrew Sheer!

It’s no wonder Canada’s Conservatives failed to gain enough seats for a majority in Parliament following the October election.  Their campaign slogan (“It’s time for you to get ahead”) had all the karma of a Walmart store motto: “Save money.  Live Better.”

John Locke tweets on "robo-calls"

But if a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the People, and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see, whither they are going; ‘tis not to be wonder’d, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at first erected …

Source: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government.  Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 415 [paragraph 225].

Note: Two Treatises of Government was likely written in the period of 1679-80, well before the England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-1689.

Puritanism on Culture and the CBC: Max Weber decodes James Moore and Stephen Harper in 1904

Its attitude [Puritanism] was thus suspicious and often hostile to the aspects of culture without any religious value. …

Although we cannot here enter upon a discussion of the influence of Puritanism in all … directions, we should call attention to the fact that the toleration of pleasure in cultural goods, which contributed to purely aesthetic or athletic enjoyment, certainly ran up against one characteristic limitation: they must not cost anything.[1]

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[1] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958), pp. 168, 170.  This work first appeared in German in 1904-05.