in the interest of debate ...

i would like to thank everyone who is following and participating in our discussion.

we have been trying to devise a better way to post our debate for clarity. with that in mind, we have installed a new comments widget from IntenseDebate. from their website:

IntenseDebate provides many new features meant to inspire discussion and easily follow the conversation.

In order to better organize the discussion, we've implemented comment threading which allows users to directly reply to one another.

Users also have an identity that spans across all blogs powered by IntenseDebate. Along with this is a reputation value, based on the quantity and quality of the comments users make, meant to give an overview of a user's commenting history. Quality is determined by the users through comment voting, which also serves to move the best comments to the top.

With all of our comment systems being interconnected, we make it easy to track users and their activities across all blogs using our system by providing email and rss notifications.

In short, IntenseDebate has completely transformed the commenting experience.

IntenseDebate. Comments Rediscovered.

thanks again, and we look forward to continuing our debates productively.

a friendly debate

Buck and I were lucky to meet. I was working at an outdoor gear store in Toronto, Ontario, and was responsible for training new staff. Buck came from new york to study economics at the University of Toronto and was hired at the store.

We became good friends and found we had similar interests: motorcycles (check out our blog 'rubber on the road'), film, travel, the outdoors ... and debating current events.

We both approached issues from different perspectives - Buck was educated in economics and from an American, republican background, I was a visual arts student with a liberal Canadian background - but we agreed that partisanship was both counter productive and unfortunately prevalent. We began to debate what we considered important issues via email and, while it may seem like it got heated, we remained good friends and never let our debates get in the way of that. It was never anything that a couple of beers couldn't cure.

Months passed and the debates continued. Sometimes we would write multiple emails a day, sometimes we'd be busy with work and weeks would pass before we'd respond to one another, but they were always thought provoking and challenging.

After more then a year, we have amassed over 50 pages worth of debate, spanning many subjects and issues. We thought it would be nice to engage others, to incite thoughtful and productive debate.

This blog is the medium.

We will be posting our debates here, from the beginning, and we invite others to read and join the conversation. The only thing we ask is that, in the spirit of our debate, you respect each other and try to participate in a productive manner. Understand that neither of us claim to be experts or authoritative in any regard, but hope that through discussion we can understand the subject from other perspectives. We both believe that we have infinitely more to learn from someone with whom we disagree rather than from someone with whom we share a point of view, and it is with this goal in mind that we invite others to join in the discussion.

Thanks in advance for reading.