the reason that a police state exists is that people desire one. no system of oppression can maintain itself without the compliance of the public, at large.

stop pretending that there will be an uprising if enough people understand what's going on. there will not be. they approve.

i don't want to say that it's wrong, exactly, but that doesn't mean it's permissible, either. you want to avoid doing this. and, if you must, you should really clean the area asap.

personally, i always habitually pee before i enter the shower. even if it's just a little one.

yeah.

but you should see them try and change a lightbulb.

just be happy it was non-lethal force. if they had guns, this guy would be dead.

it's a good demonstration of why cops should not have guns.

well, this was predictable - i tried to warn them. i might rant more when i wake up, right now i'm just kind of tired and flatly rather disgusted.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-syria-refugees-neil-macdonald-analysis-1.3219789

i think this is probably accurate, but the intangible is on the right. i've pointed this out a few places. i don't have much more than phantom read-ins and a common sense argument on historical precedent; it's not convincing right now, but my intuition is not letting up on it.

if this phantom force on the right actually exists, it won't take a lot to swing seats. i need it to account for about 2-3% of the national polling, which is going to be under 10% in alberta. a uniform minimum swing of 3% to the right of harper across the province could be the bump somebody needs in edmonton (or in saskatoon for that matter), and if it ends up closer to 5-6% in some places....

the ndp obviously got a bump in the last election, but if you look at it carefully, it was really liberal voters shifting to the ndp in concert, and getting lucky on the split on the right. maybe a little identity politics, coming out of being the only female candidate (and there being two female frontrunners in the previous election). a 40% showing on the left has never been infeasible in alberta, it's just been split between two parties - and the right has always been united. the point is that it doesn't seem like there were a lot of voters moving right to left. wildrose seems to have attracted liberal voters under smith, who bailed under jean - but went to the ndp instead. but, it does seem like there were a lot of voters moving from the pcs to the wildrose.

i think that the dynamics are such that, once you try voting for somebody other than the pcs, it's hard to go back. it's just a mental block. an escape from the status quo. hard to bottle back up.

at the end of the day, it may be an excursion, and harper may recover in alberta. or somebody new might be sneaking in under the radar...

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/several-alberta-seats-could-be-up-for-grabs-poll-analyst-says-1.3220302

Zeeman
How about QATAR, the UNITED ARAB EMIRATES and SAUDI ARABIA start taking refugees??

Jessica Murray
as others have pointed out, these are the sources of isis funding. but, it's worse than this. isis is mostly attacking non-arab, non-sunni groups - christians, shiites, druze, jews, assyrians, kurds, etc. that corridor in the middle east is actually a very diverse place. the fact is that these people would have no rights in the gulf states. they carry out public beheadings, public floggings and the other types of barbaric acts that you're seeing from isis, by citing the same scriptures and interpreting them in the same way.

sending them to saudi arabia is not an escape from the persecution, it's the continuation of it.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-refugees-sep9-1.3219544

the brookings institute as a valid source of information? really?

it's not that you shouldn't read information from the brookings institute. it's useful to understand the propaganda. it's that you shouldn't take it seriously. this is ground zero for the source of right-wing lies to fuel the american war machine.

if you want to know what's going on in syria, i would advise looking into the work of the independent left-leaning journalists in the area, like robert fisk and patrick cockburn.

there has never been a civil war in syria. it was invaded by foreign troops looking to topple the government, of which isis is a rogue contingent. if it weren't for assad protecting the civilians in this region from this onslaught, we would not be talking about the "syrian civil war". we would be talking about the genocide in syria.

that's not to say the assad government should be shielded of criticism, but it's the kind of criticism that you would level at churchill for the firebombing of dresden. which is not to compare him to churchill, either. but, he's fighting bad guys with surplus russian arms that are largely unable to carry out the pinpoint strikes we claim we can. and he's been fighting bad guys from the start.

just take a look at syrian public opinion. it is firmly backing assad.

taking out isis is the right strategy. but, it's not possible by merely bombing them. their source of funding and supplies needs to be cut. and, washington refuses to do what is necessary to accomplish this.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/susan-on-soapbox/2015/09/new-robocall-poll-assesses-stephen-harpers-response-to-syria

Arachne646
Umm...I would agree with pretty much everything you say, except that President Assad is a cruel dictator, even more than his father. However, he did hold a democratic Presidential election last year, I was surprised to see, with multiple candidates, and multiple international observers proclaimed it "free, fair and transparent". There is some opposition in Syria. There's Kurdistan, with a Kurdish militia, and opposition like our Occupy or Black Lives Matter, which takes guts to go up against the army violently suppressing you from the start, apparently; the protesters were violent from the start, I guess, too, armed and destroying government buildings.

But, as you say, from the start, there was foreign involvement, by the Turkish intelligence agency, which transported anti-tank weapons to the rebels. Soon tens of thousands of extreme Islamist foreign fighters, and weapons and supplies to match, were trucked in by Western countries, in the summer of 2012, because secular, religiously diverse Syria that Assad ruled was not at all what they envisioned. It is a proxy war to remove a Russian-backed dictator and install a U.S./Israel puppet dictator as in Egypt. This was planned ahead of time in Washington, and many other places.

deathtokoalas
your second paragraph gets it right (although it is missing the dynamic of a struggle between the turks and saudis for control. when you hear talk of a conflict between "moderate" and "extremist" rebels, what it means is a proxy war between turkey and saudi arabia. and, this is much to the annoyance of washington.). but, the first is propaganda.

the current assad was not groomed for power. it was his brother that was supposed to take over. but, his brother was killed and the role fell to him - against his will.

the truth is that this guy is a doctor. he planned his life around running a medical practice. when the circumstances came up that he had to step in, he accepted it but he immediately set in motion a transfer of power to a democratic system. if you listen to hillary clinton talk about the (now not so) recent elections in syria, she makes it sound like they were meant as a concession. in fact, it was the first thing assad did when he was appointed, because he was an unwilling participant from the start.

but, when the war started, he had to modify the situation because....you can't transfer from decades of military rule to pluralism when you're fighting a war against extremists.

it's widely understood that he has no influence in the military, which is co-ordinating the anti-terror campaign largely as a proxy of russia. well, he has no military training.

i mean, go down to your local hospital and find a doctor and tell me how good you think this person would be at running a military dictatorship. they wouldn't have the slightest idea...

in the long run, the military will need to be dismantled entirely. they cannot be left in place at the conclusion of the war, as they cannot be expected to forgive and forget (and understandably so - this is an existential struggle, for the syrians). but, this will do nothing to end the conflicts that exist. it's a post-war, reconstruction aim. and, few people in syria would be more likely to agree with this than assad himself, should the circumstances bring us to that point.

the lawsuit is based on the premise that canada borrowed interest free from the 30s until the 70s, which is false. i think the source for this is paul hellyer (who is a perennial canadian crackpot), although it's been repeated in a popular book by ellen brown. all these people think we went from total interest-free borrowing to total private bank borrowing, and they blame the ballooning of the debt in the 70s on it. they think that if we borrowed less from private banks then the debt would decrease, and we'd stop being taxed to pay interest. they even go so far as to attribute the famous rothschild quote to the canadian pm of the time, mackenzie king. it's an elaborate pile of nonsense, but it's been rather resilient.

what actually happened in '74 was that the prime minister made a policy to change the ratio of borrowing, to conform to an international conference on stagflation. interest-free bank of canada borrowing was always a minority of money creation, and always directed towards specific state stimulus funding. the vast majority of money in canada was always created from private banks. and, the debt did grow steadily in the period up to '74.

but, then they drop out of the narrative altogether - because the prime minister realized quickly that it wasn't working. speculation is rife that he never thought it would work in the first place - but there was that conference. so, he fell back on keynesian theory - before the americans did - and put interest rates through the roof to try and fight the continuing inflation. it was over 20% for a while. this is the actual reason that the debt ballooned, not a shift to private banks (which was minimal).

i've never seen a source where trudeau acknowledges the effects of the oil embargo, but he must have known it was having some effect. i've always assumed he was hoping that the standard keynesian approach would work anyways, as a short term solution to a short term problem.

it might have ultimately been benign with the proper adjustments, but the problem was not addressed by the conservatives in the 80s, although they introduced a new tax at the end of their mandate, and hit crisis levels in the 90s. but, it hit crisis levels because it wasn't dealt with. we can argue whether cranking interest rates was right or wrong, but it was a messy situation that nobody really had an answer to and it was at least an attempt. but, regardless of how we view this, it's inarguable that it needed to be dealt with after the effects of the embargo had subsided. it wasn't, and it eventually required some short-term austerity (and devaluation), under threats by the imf, to structurally rebalance.

the situation was stable until the mid 00s when another conservative government came in and slashed taxes across the board (as well as created billions in subsidies), but didn't cut spending, which has created another structural mess.

i'll take the position that it ultimately doesn't matter who you borrow from, so long as you maintain high enough tax rates and don't break the bank on subsidies. but, these people basically just have their history wrong, and are simply drawing false conclusions out of an incorrect grasp of the facts.

https://www.mises.ca/the-underlying-goal-of-the-bank-of-canada-lawsuit/

again: what's the problem here, exactly?

it's one thing to just not say it. it's another to say it and then backtrack on it. what is the implication: that the ndp considers the catholic church a moral authority? and, what are the implications of this?

i really don't like the new ndp. at all.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-shawn-dearn-ndp-mulcair-twitter-apology-1.3220283

Think Berta Cáceres
I'm a Catholic but frankly his criticism understandable. Certainly some over the top vitriol and a little viscous but the Church hurt a lot of people.

Agent J
The problem is not with you nor with his tweets. The problem is with Mulcair attempting to keep his hold on Quebec since it has a very large Catholic community. If Mulcair is smart he will drop this guy before it becomes a political mess for him. I am betting he will do nothing and show Canadians that Mulcair is no better than Harper for choosing people to be close to him with questionable ethics. Remember, people have already read this mans tweets and this story just made them even more public, seeing is perception.

Myself I hope Mulcair will do nothing and the other parties pounce on him for this. I do not trust anyone that was very quick to point fingers at a problem and then go and do the very same thing.

Jessica Murray
does quebec really still have a practicing catholic majority? i mean, the quiet revolution was a long time ago, now.

Fascism Lives
I lived in Montreal for 20 years. Quebecers are largely Catholic, but they're also very open-minded. They know and recognize the problems with the Church. They will not hold Mr. Dearn's past tweets against him.

Jessica Murray
when did you live in montreal? the 60s? the quiet revolution was a pretty dramatic shift towards secularization in quebec. i'd hazard a guess that it might actually be one of the least religious places in the western world.

if you look at public polling on issues in quebec, it's just about the most socially liberal place you could find. iirc, support for assisted suicide is something like 80%. there's consensus support on abortion, birth control, gay marriage. you won't find anywhere else in north america that is as consistently opposed to catholic doctrine on these issues.

the reality is that a practicing catholic would never consider voting for the ndp in the first place.

--

letsgetreal
Well, his comments are pretty legit, if a bit harsh...

Jessica Murray
can you name me another group that is misogynistic, homophobic and seems to have an institutional problem with child molestation, and yet continues to fancy itself some kind of moral authority - despite it's history of every depravity you could possibly imagine?