the ekos analysis is pretty good, although it's hard to get those numbers out of it. he seemed to be implying that he thinks the conservatives were overweighted and the liberals took the full 3.4, minus the bit the greens took.

i'm fully expecting the greens to inch up something like a quarter of a point week over week, steadily, until the election, as traditional ndp voters drop out. a trickle. you probably won't notice it. it will only cost the ndp the election if the liberals can recover their left flank. i think that little bump is real, even if it dips a little next week (.6 is a bit high).

a few weeks ago i was suggesting that the liberals are going to destroy themselves by going out and campaigning on balanced budgets. it's the last thing liberal voters wanted to hear after a decade of harper. they were going to bolt to the ndp. even if mulcair promised to balance budgets, too. it was just a poke-in-the-eye. nauseating, really. deflating...

but, to my surprise, they didn't do that. they took a more economically informed approach. it was what people wanted to hear. and, my argument got pulled out from under itself. by not doing what i thought was going to shoot themselves in the foot, they seem to have buoyed themselves a little. and, it throws a wrench in mulcair's plan.

listen. i don't think the ndp are positioning themselves where they are out of pragmatism. i think mulcair is legitimately to the right of trudeau on most issues. it's consequently not as easy as just flipping a switch back. he's trying to architect a structural change in the party. he has no desire to fight the election on his left.

but, perception and fact are not always the same thing. footage of mulcair literally praising thatcher herself could surface, and it might not alter perception.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polltracker-sep4-1.3216128

Tracker
In summary of your deep analysis at this early stage:

Canadians are sick of Harper, they'll vote Anything But Cons.

Jessica Murray
i don't think we're going to lose our heads over it, though. i'm not going to be able to vote for mulcair. i may not be a majority, but i think i'm measurable.

the gcc states are the source of isis funding. the reason that they are not accepting refugees is that they are fully in favour of slaughtering shiites, christians, druze, moderate sunnis and anybody else that deviates from their rigid interpretation of islam.

they are not doing next to nothing. they are not ignoring the problem. they are pro-actively supporting the genocide. it's on their orders. their design. their desire.

www.cbc.ca/news/world/refugees-hungary-riot-police-1.3215706

@qricket
it is not confusing. they are funding the "terrorist" groups. they are the root cause. a greater influence for the gcc states is a faster path to genocide. and, ignoring this reality is sentencing the minorities in these regions to their deaths.

a military solution is necessary. but it is not in bombing isis. isis is the symptom. the cause is saudi imperial policy, which is cleansing the region in preparation for expansion. and, the inevitability - now or twenty years from now - is that we will need to have regime change in riyadh.

in the meantime, these people must be allowed an escape route. and an escape route to their tormentors is not an escape route.

the only difference between being a refugee in syria and a refugee in saudi arabia is that you can be *legally* executed in public in saudi arabia.

@CeeDeeEnn
if they did allow them in, they would behead them in public for heresy.

you cannot be a christian in saudi arabia. that is punishable by death. you cannot be a shia, either. this is a nonstarter, because these countries are as tyrannical as what they're fleeing from and would not treat the refugees differently than the terrorists do.

@Leigh
this is complicated. for example, the egyptian dictatorship is very reliant on saudi money, and is of course dealing with it's own internal problems (caused largely by overpopulation). and both lebanon and jordan are full of palestinian refugees - as was syria, before the mess hit. libya is dealing with the same problems. and, algeria is sort of quiet lately, but isn't exactly a bastion of stability. neither turkey nor iran are arab countries, but they're both doing about as much as they can. whatever the causes for all of this, the reality is that only the gulf countries have the potential resources to really step in and make a serious difference. but, they're actively funding the groups that are killing people, to further their own social engineering goals.

all long term options rely on regime change in riyadh. bombing isis doesn't accomplish much if the gcc countries continue to send them funds. and, even with russian help, the reality is that the people in these places are outmatched. if you want a wwII comparison, it's like belgium trying to fight against germany. hitler was not defeated by french and polish radicals. he was defeated by a massive soviet offensive. and, as it was for minorities in belgium and poland, there is no short term option here for these people but escape.

fwiw, "alan" is not an arabic name or even a kurdish one. it's an an ethnonym for an iranian people that the greeks referred to as "scythians". they occupied an area to the north of the black sea, and were involved in waves of migrations into europe (including the hunnic and gothic migrations) which saw them settle across europe, and especially in breton areas of france. you might recognize the french name of alain and think it is celtic. in fact, this is a consequence of iranians settling in france; the english "alan" came to britain with the normans.

the alans, today, are associated with ossetian groups in the caucasus, which is that area on the map in between the black and caspian seas. they're not quite russians, and not quite kurds - but are certainly not arabs.

@Mikey
for the sake of historical accuracy, it is worth pointing out that germany was in fact a colonial power, albeit not in the middle east. most of the countries that we see in eastern europe did not exist at the time - they were either in the ottoman empire (itself a colonial state) or austria-hungary, which through a fluke of history had few colonial possessions outside of it's own territories [because they almost all ended up in spanish possession].

i would push back against trying to blame the current situation on colonialism, exactly. it's an oversimplification.

the state with the longest history of colonialism in the region is the turks. the british & french actually cut a deal with the arabs in world war one to help them throw off turkish domination. to the arabs, world war one was a war of liberation from turkish colonial rule. but, of course, the anglo-french pact was slow to live up to expectations and put in place a series of repressive governments to uphold it's own interests.

this led to a cold war conflict, where masses of arab peoples got together - with soviet backing - under the banner of "arab socialism", which was a kind of stalinism designed for local consumption. it didn't help matters much, it just swung some dictators to moscow instead of washington. but, the hard reality is that many arabs would have rather lived in a syrian stalinist state than a salafist saudi state. they were both awful, but we tended to support the more extreme religious dictators while the russians supported military despots that wanted to push secularism and modernization by force.

after the cold war, these russian-supported areas became lost in a time warp. they were stuck in stalinist systems, while russia had moved on. the americans have adopted a geo-political strategy of trying to take control of these old russian satellites, which included afghanistan, libya and syria, as a sort of "cleaning up" process of the cold war - although the russians obviously don't like this, and have tried to reverse the premise. but what that's done is open up a vacuum for control. the turks were the colonial power in syria up to ww1, but the saudis see it as in their sphere for deeper historical reasons. and, this conflict between the turks and the saudis for control of the area in a post-soviet reality (while the russians and iranians continue to back the assad regime) is what is driving the bulk of the fighting on the ground.

so, it's not exactly a consequence of western colonialism. i mean, it's hard to frame it that way - the turks were the colonizers. it's more a consequence of the process of decolonization, which itself is kind of funny language, because saudis controlling syria is still colonization. but it's a fight over who gets to be in control of the region in the post cold war period. sort of. the russians are still a big factor...

well, i was going to suggest that’s a deep analysis for results that are mostly within the margin of error, but i do agree that you’re pulling out a measurable trend in the liberals being preferred to the ndp on the economy.

www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/09/three-way-tie-as-voters-try-and-sort-out-who-can-solve-the-economy/

well, they need the rain. i'm still curious as to just how possible a hurricane up the coast might be, given how warm the water there has been for the last several years.

www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/bcs-coast-in-the-forecast-track-of-hurricane-ignacio--/56715/

Jessica Murray 
i like the humidity. let's have it persist longer, please. it would just be nice to stop the thunderstorms that inevitably follow.

Miss Cinderella 
Actually JM obviously lives in the air-conditioned part of London while KVH lives in a sauna and MB lives beside a dehumidifier. Now for the really important issue from a Canadian perspective:- are heat and humidity a federal responsibility or a provincial responsibility?

Jessica Murray 
i don't deny it's humid - i said i like the humidity. my upstairs neighbour has an a/c, but i actually tend to keep the window open to fight it because i prefer the hot/humid air. if i did have an a/c, i wouldn't even think about turning it on until it gets to 30 degrees outside. and i'm in windsor....

www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/heat-warnings-in-ontario-heres-how-long-it-will-last/56655/

i need to start by stating that i don't have an opinion on this.

and i'm sorry if i burst anybody's bubble.

but, the truth is that it is removing the tax that is discriminatory, because it only applies to a specific group of the population. i'm not sure how to get my head around the idea that taxing a general good is discrimination. there's not a special tax rate involved. there's nobody being singled out. but, an exemption of the tax under the argument that it is only purchased by women is actually preferential treatment. it's not going to alleviate any existing inequalities. it's therefore consequently rather blatantly unconstitutional.

it opens up some questions about "essential goods", though. let's ignore discussions about removing gst on male-only products because that would be unconstitutional for the same reason. but, let's consider something like toilet paper. if tampons are essential, toilet paper certainly is. and, that's something you could get away with legislating without breaking the constitution - because everybody uses toilet paper.

this kind of strange, circular, post-modernist anti-logical thinking is quite common on both the left and the right nowadays. but i think this is the first time that i've ever seen it legislated. and, if anybody wanted to push it, the court would have to strike it down.

"i have to pay this tax because i'm a woman" is not a coherent legal perspective. it's a general good. it's taxed just like anything else. it may be purchased entirely by women, but it's still a general good. and, as mentioned, i don't want to start talking about gender wars, because it's missing the point.

however, "because i'm a woman, i shouldn't have to pay tax on this item" *is* a coherent (and wrong) legal perspective. and, it's a discriminatory one.

one way to make the amendment constitutional would be to remove the gendered language from it. it is the "exclusively for feminine" part that is unconstitutional. i don't know what a way to broaden that would be. you'd have to make a category of "hygiene products" that is gender neutral and that it is a subset of. i suppose that would probably include toilet paper, table napkins, diapers...

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/28/tampon-tax-canada_n_7462582.html

i have a special level of dislike for ezra levant, but chomsky is legitimately dancing around the questions. on the one hand, you have to understand that if you're noam chomsky then the only reason you even consider talking to ezra levant is to plug your book to a different type of audience. noam knows he can't get through to this audience over the course of an interview. he's a smart guy. and he does his research. but the real reason he's skirting the questions is that they necessitate a two hour lecture to address. he often tries to ignore questions, and that's almost always the reason: he knows he can't even begin to address it in five minutes.

but, the short answer is that the people levant are calling leftists are, in fact, not leftists.

in america, this kind of "left" has two sources - one organic and the other academic. the organic source is the progressive/populist movement, which is often referred to as leftist but is actually extremely hard to understand as leftist if you scratch the surface a little. these were essentially evangelical puritan movements, but they were spliced with socialism. canadians might say they're socially conservative and economically liberal. and, we have a history of this in our western provinces; the ndp is a consequence of it. the result was something that is almost impossible to categorize in our current spectrum. these people supported unions, fought for alcohol prohibition, supported women's suffrage and were often openly racist. they get placed on the left due to the mainstream's tendency to classify things by economic system. but, that logic also places hitler on the left. if we were to classify these movements based on their social opinions, they would be on the far right.

these movements faded in the 40s, as new deal liberalism took over the left and steered it towards oldskool academic liberalism. and, frankly, it's no coincidence that the replacement of populism with liberalism happened at the same time as the normalization of post-secondary education. but, deeply rooted political attitudes can die hard and these ideas started coming back in the 70s - not coincidentally as higher education began to be commodified, and it became the reality that anyone with a pulse could get a university education.

if you argue with these people on the ground, they will generally sound like the evangelical puritans of the progressive and populist days, because that is what they truly are. but, they will often cite a canon of literature that has a french philosopher by the name of michel foucault as it's patron saint. now, chomsky's interaction with these people is a matter of the public record, and it's not collaborative. he's stated that he has more respect for foucault than he does for foucault's contemporaries, but that is far from an endorsement and the truth is that the feeling was never mutual - foucault always hated chomsky. where does foucault stand on the spectrum? is he a leftist?

the truth is that this has been an open question for many years. habermas referred to him as a "young conservative" - that is, a member of what at the time was called the "new right". that's one of many examples. but, my own feelings is that he's really an old fashioned burkean conservative. and, these kids out there that are running around calling themselves leftists and trying to police people's thoughts by quoting foucault like it's the koran are really social conservatives in disguise, trying to enforce their concept of objective morality.

deathtokoalas
+C MM foucault is just the one they always cite. or, at least, it is in my experience.

i want to point out, though, that i didn't say "like the koran" arbitrarily, or out of some bias or something. i meant to draw attention to foucault's support for the iranian revolution, which was a student movement.

now, you need to put that in context with the shah and everything. something clearly had to change in iran. and, foucault stepped back from that after he saw the results. but, he drew a connection with the revolution to his writings. and, i consequently think it's something to keep in mind when you're analyzing what these kids are really saying. it very well might be what the outcome is, if they get their way.

i think that when you analyze his analysis of power, what comes out are very strong parallels to the old conservative idea of "class harmony" through strict adherence to arbitrary systems of hierarchy. this idea that if everybody knows their place, we will have a society at peace with itself. the analysis may have been designed to counteract this, but if you hang out with them for a bit you'll see very clearly that the application tends to reinforce rather than collapse it. and, i think that if you read foucault very carefully, it becomes an open question as to whether he's upholding the burkean system or deconstructing it.

you can find essays that explore this point if you search around the internet a little. you could maybe say something about left and right meeting, or whatever. and, i'd argue that if you read marx himself carefully, you get the same questions - he seems to be more into the then contemporary idea of "enlightened despotism" and was trying to derive a formula for it that was less aristocratic. he tended to often side with the right in typical liberal-conservative debates. but, in the end, i find it hard to disentangle their viewpoints from what you'd call a "classical conservative" one and, all the intellectual debates aside, i think that's the more important observation, on the ground.

and, no, of course they don't really realize it. i've brought it up more than once and you just get blank stares. nobody reads burkean conservative philosophy, anymore.

to be a little more specific, and a little more concise, it's two primary points:

1) the skepticism of rationality. that's not to uphold homo economicus - there's some big problems, there. but, they tend to follow foucault back to burke in rejecting logic altogether. you'll hear statements like "empiricism is a white supremacist philosophy" and "logic is inherently intertwined within heteropatriarchy". they will then wilfully argue points they agree are irrational.

2) the way they enforce hierarchy. orwell is probably important, here, because they claim they're fighting it. but, the way it happens on the ground reinforces it. an example - and i've seen this repeatedly - is a white male standing up and speaking for a female of colour, while she's biting her lip, because she supposedly cannot speak for herself due to the oppressive hierarchy - while she's standing in front of you, trying to speak for herself.

deathtokoalas
+C MM i think ezra was mostly talking about speech issues.

i'd label myself a left libertarian. i'm not quite as liberal on speech as chomsky, but it's a question of applying the harm principle rather than a difference in approach. chomsky's been pretty clear that he thinks speech can almost never cause harm, because people can determine the facts on their own. i'm a little more inclined to suggest that speech can cause harm, but only in very extreme circumstances; i wouldn't have a problem in shutting down a nazi march, for example, if it was really a nazi march. most of the examples we see in the media don't meet a stringent enough criteria for me to deduce that the speech is truly harmful. they will cite foucault on this, as well - stuff about language framing reality, and suppressing this being more important than allowing people to think for themselves, because we can't truly think for ourselves anyways (because individualism is just a capitalist myth).

but, i broadly agree with these kids about hierarchy on paper, anyways. what i'm getting at with the hierarchical thing is that, in practice, you get the exact opposite. if you track down any of these groups, they are almost without exception run primarily by upper middle class, white, male organizers.

they start off with these "anti-oppression" information sessions that establish what the hierarchy is. then, everything that happens in the context of the organizing occurs through the prism of this established hierarchy, as they imagine it exists rigorously in society. this is very much just old school conservatism. somewhere along the way, it may have initially been intended to break these divisions down and have people more aware of unconscious social biases - which i would again agree no doubt exist, albeit less dramatically than others would claim. but, as soon as you define the framework, people align within it. the white, wealthy men take control and the rest are relegated to "diversity", as a sort of public relations tactic to "broaden the movement". it's just out of an understanding that you're not getting anywhere nowadays if you're just a bunch of white dudes, and the pragmatic realization that you need a "minority strategy".

and, this - fwiw - is the reason the movements dissipate so quickly. within a few weeks, there's nobody left besides white men and masculine white women because nobody else gets listened to.

in practice, the example you used actually tends to get inverted. the woman of colour is given the chance to express her perspective, but that itself is seen as little more than a concession. people sit patiently, wait - and suppress the urge to yawn through it. and, when she's done, it still remains up to the wealthy, white male organizers to express the opinion she's expressing to others, because she's seen as unable to do it herself due to the social biases preventing her from doing so. the result is the enforcement of precisely the hierarchical relationship that is supposedly being deconstructed - she has to sit in the shadows and let others express her opinion, because they'd never listen to her, anyways. then, as mentioned, she gets up and walks out because nobody is actually listening to her.

but, i agree that i've taken this way off topic. i made this post some time ago. i didn't rewatch the video this morning. i just jumped to the broader connection to old fashioned conservatism. it does all go through foucault's analysis of power, and it's orwellian connections to burkean conservatism. but i got a little carried away.