Tom Jarmyn

Have conservatives given up on doing good?

I was at a a social technology training conference at the MARS centre in Toronto last week.  It was a very interesting and useful conference.  However, what struck me as the most interesting thing were the people in attendance.  They were all very good people who were very committed to doing good on various things - food, environment, poverty, technology, etc.  After a day or two it became rapidly apparent that I was the only one in the room of a conservative philosophy.

It seems that conservative actors have focused on the economic issues and stopped asking the question about how they can do good in society.  Alternately, there may be groups of conservative people who are unwilling to come out and identify themselves as conservative.  Or, maybe conservatives just do not get invited to conferences like these.

The interesting question is how do conservatives regain the agenda of doing good and of values that mean something to everyday working folk.  The conservatives that I deal with on a daily basis are as concerned about their neighbours as anyone else but they just want to address the problems themselves rather than have some bigger government solution.

The question is how do conservative groups regain their focus on doing good as opposed to being solely associated with economic and crime issues?

The State of Journalism

Timmies, iPods and golf balls, oh my! how does this merit front page placement in the Ottawa Citizen?  $565,000 in spending on promotional items across government is hardly news when you consider that government's program spending is upwards of $80 billion.

The story's placement and the headline suggest that there is some sort of misconduct going on but provides no evidence or proportion to suggest whether the spending is higher or lower than similar sorts of spending in the private sector.

I would put in an ATIP request to figure out the value of public servant's time responding to Mr. Mulcair's Parliamentary Question that led to this story but that would just add to the thousand's of dollars already wasted in generating this headline.

Why not find some real news?!

Dr Tom Barnett

I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by Dr. Barnett tonight (his site is one of my sites of interest).  Dr. Barnett is a strategist who has developed a view of world affairs that explains many of the conflicts in the world today and provides reason for optimism that we can confront those conflicts.  Almost as important he provides good reasons to believe that we HAVE to confront those conflicts if we and our children are going to have happy and productive lives.

Dr. Barnett's presentation was humourous and compelling.  He illustrates his point well with anecdotes and real world experience that lend great credibility to his presentation.  Unfortunately I had to leave as the Q and A session was starting.  If you have not seen Dr. Barnett speak one of his presentations from 2005 is online at the TED Conference website.

One does not have to agree with everything that Dr. Barnett says in order to find his insights valuable.  His theories provide a useful map of where we are going and where we could go.  By adopting a theory that generally explains many of the circumstances in the world it gives us an understanding of the choices that we can make and of the impact of those choices.  I used to tell my my trainee navigating officers that you could never stop a ship at sea because the wind and sea were going to take them somewhere so they may as well pick a course and speed (even if it was slow) because then they would know where they were trying to go and could judge what was being done to them.  These sorts of overarching theories help us pick our course and direction and then to judge where events are taking us.