The Canary is run as a private limited company and is funded by advertising and local fundraisers - hardly a grassroots organisation either. Never really bothered with Novara for similar reasons why I am put off the Canary.
By "professional" I meant that it committed itself to more than being a zine that was distributed at protests, social centres and squats and actually committed to being a fully fledged media operation, a bit like what the MULE was and the Salford Star still is.
Never asked
The "anarchist milleu" tended to be (and still does tend to be) an echo chamber in itself though, particularly when it came to working with people who weren't anarchists (or overtly political at all) but who still shared a common cause with on a particular issue.
But have also alienated many others.
Frackers, Fox hunters and Fascists?
None of the campaigns against the above are entirely, dare I say even mostly due to anarchists, all shades of "the Left" play a role in building those campaigns.
What exactly is wrong with that idea?
What the hell is that meant to mean???
I did one
Well, spent hours and hours tidying up the cover image pixel by fucking pixel and plonking it on the cover with some "amusing" sub header, if that counts as "design".
'Evidence based politics' is a term that has grown with technocratic neo-liberalism. It tends towards simplistic interpretations of things that strip politics out of decision-making in favour of rather basic cost-benefit approaches. For instance there is some evidence for the 'Broken windows theory' that says 'disorder' in the environment tends to produce more 'disorder'. Evidence-based politics would simply argue over how good the evidence is on that, before deciding to take action. But once you think about the politics of disordered environments, who defines disorder, or order, what the consequences of trying to eliminate disorder might mean, who it is trying to get rid of the disorder, a whole new range of ways of looking at it opens up. From these other (political) perspectives, whether or not Broken Windows Theory is well-evidenced might come to seem irrelevant.
surely evidence-based politics could consider, as part of the quality of the evidence, the definitional issues within it and the agendas which push it.
I suppose you could define a 'real evidence-based politics' that includes consideration of as many political facets as you can think of*. But I think evidence-based politics has usually been characterised in practice by lack of political thinking, or even deliberate avoidance of thorny political questions, hence the scorn you saw up-thread.
So it's an actual term then, not just a glib statement? Okay, I get you. All sorts of cats let out of the bag there, and with your example it can easily be used to justify gentrification of working-class communities (which New York has indeed suffered from). As for Broken Windows Theory itself, it's adherents are potentially confusing correlation with causation.
That would be how I would have defined an "evidence based" politics. Science has to take this into account, after all.
"Apolitical" solutions to issues are probably quite seductive at present considering how much bullshit is promoted in the name of politics across the political spectrum. Wikipedia's famed "neutral point of view" does provide a much saner output than what tended to come out of Indymedia and its successors in the "alternative media" landscape.
Seems to me what you mean by ebp is not so much politics as the imposition of technocratic 'solutions'.
"Technocratic solutions" of course have been a cover to push neoliberalism on countries in return for foreign aid, debt relief and suchlike, with terms that favour the country offering the aid tremendously. So in reality, "technocratic solutions" are usually very politically charged.
i was thinking of the presentation, that it's all common sense, that there's no obvious politics behind it; whereas - as you declare - the most abominable agendas are at work.
Basically what BrainAddict said. It's a type of liberal crap that 'scientists' like Ferrel Hadley on here champion
I'm not disagreeing with him. I initially thought he was criticising the idea that politics can be evidence-based, rather as opposed to what he really was criticising, a particularly school of political belief that calls itself "Evidence Based Politics".
The problem does go a bit deeper than that. As I said in my little footnote above, once you include politics as part of your 'evidence', everything becomes complicated and you inevitably lose the quantitative rigour that evidenced-based policy is often aiming for. Politics is often about interpretation, so once you allow it into your calculations, the 'right' and 'wrong' answers often become a matter of interpretation - however good some of your evidence might be.
