[PHOTO] Boarding the train at Ossington station

Boarding the train at Ossington station
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I snapped this picture of the average TTC commuter at the Ossington subway station.

[DM] "On Singaporean population trends"

I've a post up on Demography Matters that takes a quick look at the results of the latest Singaporean census, which reports--among other things--a significant increase in the proportion of foreign-born.

Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] What do you think of LinkedIn?

Over the past year or so, I've received several invitations to LinkedIn, an online social networking forum that has been described to me as the businessperson's Facebook.

I've turned these invitations down, so far. I certainly don't want to overburden myself with social networks, but if I can get something useful out of them, why not?

What has your experience been with LinkedIn?

[LINK] "Georgia started war with Russia - EU-backed report"

Surprise.

An independent report blamed Georgia on Wednesday for starting last year's five-day war with Russia, but said Moscow's military response went beyond reasonable limits and violated international law.

The report commissioned by the European Union said both sides had broken international humanitarian laws and found evidence of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Georgians during Russia's intervention in the rebel province of South Ossetia.

Each side said the report backed up its interpretation of the war. But the findings were particularly critical of U.S. ally Georgia's conduct under President Mikheil Saakashvili and are likely to further damage his political standing.

[. . .]

"In the Mission's view, it was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked Tskhinvali (in South Ossetia) with heavy artillery on the night of 7 to 8 August 2008," said Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who led the investigation.

The report said the war followed tensions and provocations by Russia, but Tagliavini said: "None of the explanations given by the Georgian authorities in order to provide some form of legal justification for the attack lend it a valid explanation."

Saakashvili had said Georgia was responding to an invasion by Russian forces when it attacked breakaway South Ossetia, but the report found no evidence of this.

It said Russia's counter-strike was initially legal, but its military response violated international law when Russian forces pushed into Georgia proper.

"Although it should be admitted that it is not easy to decide where the line must be drawn, it seems, however, that much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defence," the report said

[. . .]

Tbilisi says 228 Georgian civilians were killed in the war and 184 Georgian servicemen are dead or missing. Russia says 64 of its servicemen and 162 South Ossetian civilians were killed, but also says the figure for civilian deaths could be higher.

The report found no evidence to support Russian allegations that Georgia was carrying out genocide against the South Ossetian population.

But it said there were "serious indications" of ethnic cleaning against ethnic Georgians in South Ossetia and found Russian forces "would not or could not" stop atrocities by armed groups in areas they controlled.

[LINK] "Britain and England: A Case Of Split Identity"

David Rickard's Open Democracy essay makes for interesting reading, not least because of its parallels with the Canadian situation: Québécois regularly talk about their nation and English Canada being partners within Canada, but English Canadians tend to identify themselves simply as Canadians. It's not as if there is an English Canadian identity comparable to the English, mind, but there you go. Devolution, it seems, has had huge consequences.

It was a definitive refutation of the ‘absolute' character of the Union, in both senses: not only the unitary character of the British polity but the ‘union' (merger, (con)fusion) within the English national identity between England and Great Britain. It was this cultural and psychological union that had sustained the political Union throughout its history, as it secured the loyalty and ‘ownership' of the greater part of the UK, which viewed Great Britain as ‘our nation' and the UK as "one of the great creations of this country", to quote Vince Cable's words at this week's Liberal Democrats' conference (The unconscious irony in Vince Cable's statement is that the UK is supposed to be ‘this country' not something that ‘this country' (England) has created!).

But as a result of devolution, it became possible, indeed necessary, to see the UK no longer as the seamless extension of English parliamentary democracy, nationhood and power. And, more fundamentally still, the English could begin to separate their English and British national identities at a subjective and psychological level, precisely because those identities had also been split apart at the objective, political level - with ‘great(er) Britishness' no longer being defined as a continuation and extension of Englishness but as a set of different national identities from which the English identity, too, was differentiated and distinct.

In some respects, this breaking up of (English) Great Britain, and break-down of the Anglo-British mentality, was highly desirable and long overdue, and commanded the support of most ‘progressive' political opinion at the time when devolution went through. The old Great Britain had been the fundamental vector - driving force and instrument - of British (and, by definition, English) imperial power: the drive to incorporate multiple different nations within a single polity ‘owned' by the English and identified with by the English.

However, this splitting of the English and British identities presented, and continues to present, a huge problem for the British state - again, in two key respects: political and national-cultural. In the former area, as is now widely recognised, asymmetric devolution as implemented by New Labour has resulted in the British government's and parliament's competency in many policy areas being limited to England. Notwithstanding this, all of the members of the UK parliament, including those from the devolved countries, have retained the power to introduce and vote on legislation affecting England only (the West Lothian Question). Understandably, this has led to many questioning the legitimacy of the UK parliament to serve as the legislative body for England, based on the fundamental democratic principle that no MP should make laws affecting citizens that have not voted for that MP and cannot vote them out.