i want to clarify my point, because it's the same thing that just happened in the united states and i don't think it's being understood very well.

what the liberals are doing is attaching minority representation to establishment politics, so that when voters see a minority candidate they immediately assume that this person does not represent their interests, but is essentially a pawn of the party and by extension the banks. it's classic blowback, because it's rooted in the racist assumption that minorities don't care about politics, and just vote on identity.

what they thought that they could do is fly in all of these minorities and just use them as a cover to push through their right-wing agenda. the thinking is that they can get away with a lot more when it's being done by asian woman and black men than when it's being done by a bourgeois elite of white men. so, they selected the minorities that did exactly what they were told by the party and then promoted them as replacements for dissenting voices. at the end of the day, the corporatocracy gets it's pipelines and tax cuts, all while voters are patting themselves on the backs for increasing the diversity of parliament.

what they've done, instead, is install minorities as the face of the establishment, and create the perception that minority candidates do not represent the interests of voters, but instead are working for the political elite.

this is what actually happened in the united states during the obama administration (although it started happening during the clinton administration, and the bush administration actually used the same tactics). people started to notice that the government consistently sent minorities to do it's dirty work. so, it came to be that they started voting against minorities, in order to try and protect their own interests.

if the government continues to use minority groups as a way to gloss over it's right-wing agenda and push through unpopular measures, it's going to create the same backlash. we're already seeing this happen, internally, at the riding level. and, while it may be a necessary reaction to bone-headed government policy, it's not a can of worms you want to really open.

the government needs to change it's strategy before it creates a mess - and we need to be clear in assigning blame where it belongs, here, which is in the pmo.

more signs of internal revolt.

it's no secret that yolande james was pushed by the party because of her gender & ethnicity. i guess the riding members were less enthused by the prospect.

the liberals are making all of the same stupid mistakes that the democrats made, and are going to have to deal with all of the same consequences. you can't enforce diversity from the top down, and then go out and pretend it's more representative of the population, as though minority voters only care about identity. people won't tolerate that.

"i know that she works for the bankers on bay street, but look - she's black. you're not going to vote for that white person just because she better represents your views are you? what are you, a race traitor?"

they honestly think that's going to work - because they're actually secretly brutal racists, just like the democrats are.

it wasn't always this way, and there are good people in the liberal party. the liberals don't have the history that the democrats do, and quite the opposite. but, this leadership team is horrific and needs to go.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emmanuella-lambropoulos-saint-laurent-montreal-liberals-byelection-1.4016891

it's really far too easy to take lennon out of context, and completely misunderstand him.

yes - he sang "give peace a chance". but, he was also a substantial financial contributor to the black panthers, and had the american intelligence groups all over him because of it. the right-wing rhetoric about terrorism aside, the black panthers were not pacifists. what you're missing is context - he was specifically talking about pointless colonial wars, and the rhetoric should not be extrapolated from a specific to a universal.

he was interested in the traditions of other cultures - he was after all a white englishman performing black rock music in germany in the late 50s - but it was always with a concept of post-culturalism rather than one of multi-culturalism. he wanted a single world culture that was built on the syncretism of all of the others, and discarded religion as primitive backwardsness. he'd like the idea of jews and christians holding hands, but his messaging was around them renouncing their tribal creeds and joining together in a new culture that belonged to both of them, but was neither of one or of the other. remember: the broad struggle of the time was around abolishing segregation. as a product of his era, he would have seen the idea of multi-culturalism as regressive, and instead argued for deeper integration into a new global culture - but not one based on the neo-liberalism being exported by america, but rather one based on the abolition of scarcity. his preferred new world order was deeply marxist, fully egalitarian - and totally secular.

he sang that woman is the nigger of the world and invited you to confirm as much by observing your own, and he was absolutely fucking right in his analysis, but he did so with the intent of making you angry about it, not with the intent of making you smug about it.

and, this can go on for a while, but there's a kind of easy out.

do you know who actually sounds a whole lot like john lennon and has similar views? the answer is myself......because he's a dramatic and profound influence.

this song is explicitly marxist. it points to religion as the tool that capital uses to promote violence, nationalism and bigotry with and asks you to imagine a world in which religion - and by extension capitalism - does not exist.

it is set to the motif of a christian hymn in order to mock religion, and present an alternative to it. the idea is for you to sing this song instead of singing your hymns.

those who wish to co-opt the track to promote a vision of neo-liberalism, multiculturalism or globalism are either misunderstanding the track by accident or on purpose, and ultimately twisting the song to promote a vision that the artist would have vehemently rejected.

the song is blatantly anti-religious and blatantly marxist, and was written by an artist that was blatantly iconoclastic and blatantly anti-capitalist. deal with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8

when you start a conversation by referring to standards, you're already conceding the debate to the right. the reason is that liberals don't believe in holding things up to a moral standard, or occupying a moral high ground, in the first place - they believe in analyzing situations on a case-by-case basis and ultimately conceding to evidence. it's the difference between being an ideologue and following the scientific method.

so, when somebody tells me that i have a "double standard" on something, i immediately agree with them - because i'm not an ideologue in the first place. i have triple and quadruple and quintuple standards. i don't look at a situation and try and force it to adhere to my moral worldview, i react to the evidence in front of me in the most pragmatic way possible.

this was actually the conclusion i came to from studying case law for a few years: we shouldn't have law because we shouldn't be trying to interpret the world through written rules, but rather reacting to it based on what's in front of us in terms of broad principles and subjective perceptions. that creates as many standards as there are situations. sure: sometimes killing somebody may actually be the right choice, and we should be flexible in analyzing that. there should not be a rule that forbids all killing, no matter what - that is absurd, when truly contemplated. that doesn't mean rejecting the need to uphold evidence, mind you - it means prioritizing evidence ahead of morals, which are ultimately subjective in the first place.

so, when you talk about violence, i don't perceive it in terms of a moral question, i interpret it in terms of pure pragmatism: will violence help us achieve our goals? and, that also means recognizing that sometimes violence is necessary to help us achieve our goals.

i grasp that our society is so overwhelmingly right-wing that you perhaps can't even get your head around a truly liberal worldview. but, let's approach the question as it ought to be. i'm not interested in having a debate about whether i have a double standard on things or interested in denying or defending against the accusation in any way; rather, i will willingly concede the point, and instead accuse you of being an ideologue and moral absolutist for raising it.