Has the pandemic taught us anything? As we look forward and imagine what the future might look like, we like to think ‘next time will be different.’ But, if we don’t take a serious look back, it won’t. Not as long as the people who made this pandemic so bad face zero consequences. In this episode of Darts and Letters, John Nichols says it’s time for a COVID reckoning.
Happy new year! We’re a few days behind, but as we catch up after the holidays and prepare to enter the third year of the plague, we wanted to bring you a few resolutions from, and for, the left by way of the Darts and Letters team and a handful of our past guests.
As we prepare for a series of 2021 retrospectives looking at the highs and lows of the year, the bests and the worsts, Darts and Letters is embracing the chaos, looking to the printed word, and scouring the stacks to find the dumbest books that found their way to print. We did not have to look far. In fact, the hard part was choosing from a bursting cornucopia of awful. In the spirit of the new year, this week we feature a roundtable with three guests and two call-in friends, each of whom makes the case as to why their book is the dumbest of 2021.
Canada’s intellectual culture is now like a barren soil that struggles to give life to even the simplest flora. They’re just not that smart. We make too many right wing cranks, self-help charlatans, blood-thirsty reactionaries, insipid centrists, and third-rate Hayekians. But which are our worst? We invite our new friends from the Harbinger Media Network to help scour the national intellectual wasteland to find Canada’s dumbest public intellectual.
Canada’s 44th general election was a mess from the start. From wondering why it was called in the first place, to culture war wedge politics, the rise of the extreme-right People’s Party, and along to literal stone throwing–or gravel throwing, anyway. You might want to call that a new low. It’s definitely low. But it’s not the first time Canadian elections have been nasty affairs, and it’s not even the first time rocks have been thrown. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we dive much deeper into the gravel pit. We look at past campaigns, examine the much wider political and intellectual history of Canada’s major parties, and show how all of them have sold out Canadian workers.
You know McKinsey and Co. They worked for a company that was fixing the price of bread in Canada. We could go on and on. They have a long and sordid record as ‘capitalism’s willing executioners,’ to quote a Current Affairs article by an insider. Now, they’re coming onto our turf: higher education. So, we take a closer look. What is even is management consulting, and is there anything to the methods?
This week, Darts and Letters looks to Peru and the election victory of peasant school teacher and socialist Pedro Castillo. He won a close race against Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori. His campaign slogan was simple and powerful: “No more poor people in a rich country.” Of course, the right is now crying foul and seeking to invalidate the election — like Trump’s sad attempt in the United States, it won’t work. We dig into the neoliberal, right-wing populist agenda in Peru and across Latin America and explore the rising socialist alternative.
As the G7 Summit wraps up in the United Kingdom, the blueprint for a kinder, gentler, more generous capitalism is being floated. It’s being called the Cornwall Consensus. Meanwhile, in Canada, a democratic socialist organisation has popped up during the pandemic and is attracting a lot of attention. This week, we plumb the depths of the Cornish new world order, go back to the future with a look at the end of the end of history, and sort out the state of Canada’s political left.
In recent years, the left seems to have ceded the issue of free speech — or, rather, flipped on it. For years, it defended against censorship, stood up to global imperialism, decried efforts to silence resisters and renegades, and mocked the right for culture war stodginess and pearl-clutching that whined ‘won’t somebody please think of the children?!’ But much of the left has retreated on speech. That turn may have implications for those who work to hold power to account in a world full of fallible human beings who often get stuff wrong, and powerful actors and institutions who use censorship as a cudgel.
For a moment, all the eyes of the world were on GameStop. It’s unexpected, meteoric rise. It’s inevitable fall. The saga became a rorschach test for our politics. Was it a revolutionary moment, the many pushing back against the few? Was it an old school pump and dump, just folks out to make some money? And who was against whom, exactly?
Well, it was…a spectacle. That’s for sure. We dive into the wild world of stocks, the bubbles of present and the past, and the spectacularized social media environment that is distorting our very understanding of true politics. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
