he's looking a lot more relaxed, and this came off relatively well.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-interview-1.3219479
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
this is the surreal side of big data and micro-polling.
the campaign has likely determined that this is a little voice inside of some people's heads, and they're trying to enforce what they think these people are thinking, subconsciously.
it's more creepy than comical.
www.cbc.ca/news/trending/canada-election-2015-stephen-harper-not-perfect-ad-1.3219282
the campaign has likely determined that this is a little voice inside of some people's heads, and they're trying to enforce what they think these people are thinking, subconsciously.
it's more creepy than comical.
www.cbc.ca/news/trending/canada-election-2015-stephen-harper-not-perfect-ad-1.3219282
at
23:05
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
silversaab
The party with the greatest number of seats always gets an opportunity to form a government but if it fails to have the confidence of the house it is incumbent on Parliament to try to form a working agreement between parties to govern.
Jessica Murray
technically, the existing prime minister gets the first chance. so, under the rules of the system, if harper were to come in second, or even third, he would have first crack at forming a government. but, he needs to get the confidence of the house, first. if he fails, then the governor general needs to call on the party "most likely to gain the confidence of the house" - and that's going to be hard to figure out, although it will almost certainly be the party with the most seats.
the elder trudeau won the popular vote, but he came in second in the seat count. he *did* defer to the party with the largest seat count, although the political calculations at the time also suggested it was smarter to let clark hang himself than it was to govern in a coalition with the ndp. and, if you look at the situation today, that's also what the younger trudeau is really saying - it's not in his interests to place mulcair in power, he'd rather let the conservatives sit in a minority and hope the situation turns around in his favour.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-interview-peter-mansbridge-1.3218597
The party with the greatest number of seats always gets an opportunity to form a government but if it fails to have the confidence of the house it is incumbent on Parliament to try to form a working agreement between parties to govern.
Jessica Murray
technically, the existing prime minister gets the first chance. so, under the rules of the system, if harper were to come in second, or even third, he would have first crack at forming a government. but, he needs to get the confidence of the house, first. if he fails, then the governor general needs to call on the party "most likely to gain the confidence of the house" - and that's going to be hard to figure out, although it will almost certainly be the party with the most seats.
the elder trudeau won the popular vote, but he came in second in the seat count. he *did* defer to the party with the largest seat count, although the political calculations at the time also suggested it was smarter to let clark hang himself than it was to govern in a coalition with the ndp. and, if you look at the situation today, that's also what the younger trudeau is really saying - it's not in his interests to place mulcair in power, he'd rather let the conservatives sit in a minority and hope the situation turns around in his favour.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-interview-peter-mansbridge-1.3218597
at
22:42
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
well, his father also "allowed" clark to govern for a few months in the name of democracy. c'mon, peter, you should know that you need to carefully pick apart pierre's words to get to what he's actually saying. goofy headline.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-interview-peter-mansbridge-1.3218597
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-interview-peter-mansbridge-1.3218597
at
22:31
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
meh. i think it's targeted largely at seniors. but, you have to remember that tv advertising is mostly a seniors game now, in the first place, because young people (which i'm describing pretty ridiculously as under 40) don't watch much tv in real-time; when we do, we set pvrs or stream things online, or even buy dvds. if it's intent is "don't freak out, old folks" - well, maybe it gets it's point across. i guess it's the "stay calm" meme in tv ad form. but, i think it will probably barely register at all for most people. it's like wallpaper. and, the few non-seniors that pay attention are going to get the message that this is an old guy appealing to old people.
i think it's well understood that the polling for the ndp for many years has exceeded election results because young people are less likely to vote. and, that might be a better read out of it: the ndp may be concerned that it's lead in the polls may not translate into actual votes, and is trying to appeal more to a demographic that is more likely to actually cast a ballot. the problem is that older people tend to lean right. but, as many have pointed out, this is broadly irrational. and, if i was mulcair, and i was looking to get seniors to vote, i'd be campaigning on health care - not clawing back the transfer increases until the budget balances.
as i've said elsewhere, i don't think it will do much harm. but, i don't think it will have a large effect, either.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-ad-hawk-ndp-mulcair-family-1.3218473
i think it's well understood that the polling for the ndp for many years has exceeded election results because young people are less likely to vote. and, that might be a better read out of it: the ndp may be concerned that it's lead in the polls may not translate into actual votes, and is trying to appeal more to a demographic that is more likely to actually cast a ballot. the problem is that older people tend to lean right. but, as many have pointed out, this is broadly irrational. and, if i was mulcair, and i was looking to get seniors to vote, i'd be campaigning on health care - not clawing back the transfer increases until the budget balances.
as i've said elsewhere, i don't think it will do much harm. but, i don't think it will have a large effect, either.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-ad-hawk-ndp-mulcair-family-1.3218473
at
22:12
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
noninfo
Nanos has cons at 26%.Not a NDP or Lib friendly pollster.
This guy is messing with the numbers big time.
Jessica Murray
any polling that puts the conservatives under 30% consistently is difficult to believe - they have never polled that low. well, except when they were split in two.
it's a faint signal right now (and i'm not actually doing any real math, i'm just looking at bar graphs), but i'm convinced that there is a swing towards "other" happening in alberta - and that this will become more obvious over the next few weeks. this is essentially wildrose voters swinging right. it's not clear who is benefiting, because it's just going in as "other". chp? social credit? libertarian?
29% is a a disaster. 28% is a historic low. 27% is adding insult to injury. these numbers are arbitrary, but when you start getting lower than that there has to be some kind of force on the right that's siphoning votes out of the spectrum.
it's the only way i can take these numbers seriously.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polls-sep8-1.3218215
Nanos has cons at 26%.Not a NDP or Lib friendly pollster.
This guy is messing with the numbers big time.
Jessica Murray
any polling that puts the conservatives under 30% consistently is difficult to believe - they have never polled that low. well, except when they were split in two.
it's a faint signal right now (and i'm not actually doing any real math, i'm just looking at bar graphs), but i'm convinced that there is a swing towards "other" happening in alberta - and that this will become more obvious over the next few weeks. this is essentially wildrose voters swinging right. it's not clear who is benefiting, because it's just going in as "other". chp? social credit? libertarian?
29% is a a disaster. 28% is a historic low. 27% is adding insult to injury. these numbers are arbitrary, but when you start getting lower than that there has to be some kind of force on the right that's siphoning votes out of the spectrum.
it's the only way i can take these numbers seriously.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polls-sep8-1.3218215
at
21:47
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
he's just not analyzing the root cause correctly. and his answer is consequently a formula to exacerbate the problem. although he is half right: we can't take them all. and, while the only short term solution is getting as many out as possible, where to put them is a harder question to answer.
and, then there's this:
"We don't, you know, elect a bunch of parties who then, as in some countries, get together and decide who will govern."
well, we kind of do, actually.
he's mentioned he'd step down if he loses before. and, i don't think this a plot. i don't think it takes a lot of psychological analysis to conclude that he doesn't want to work with the opposition, or compromise on bills or really stick around at all if he's not in charge. i'd even think it likely that he'll resign his seat.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-peter-mansbridge-interview-stephen-harper-1.3218348
and, then there's this:
"We don't, you know, elect a bunch of parties who then, as in some countries, get together and decide who will govern."
well, we kind of do, actually.
he's mentioned he'd step down if he loses before. and, i don't think this a plot. i don't think it takes a lot of psychological analysis to conclude that he doesn't want to work with the opposition, or compromise on bills or really stick around at all if he's not in charge. i'd even think it likely that he'll resign his seat.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-peter-mansbridge-interview-stephen-harper-1.3218348
at
21:33
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
am i correct in deducing that the national average of “other” is 2%, but the value in alberta is 4%?
your polling has put the conservatives not far from their historical floor, which is more believable. and you’ve got big sample sizes and proven methods. but, other polling firms are consistently putting them in the mid 20s – numbers that the national conservative party has only ever seen when it’s fractured on it’s RIGHT.
so, it’s getting harder and harder to deny that they’re polling in the 20s. but, that requires an explanation, and “they’re voting for the ndp” kind of doesn’t cut it. demographics change over time, sure. maybe the country is on the brink of a generational overhaul. it does happen. but, i think that occam’s razor means paying close to attention to this “other” vote, first. you’re actually doing this right, so you’re probably the best firm to draw attention to this to.
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/09/three-way-tie-as-voters-try-and-sort-out-who-can-solve-the-economy/
your polling has put the conservatives not far from their historical floor, which is more believable. and you’ve got big sample sizes and proven methods. but, other polling firms are consistently putting them in the mid 20s – numbers that the national conservative party has only ever seen when it’s fractured on it’s RIGHT.
so, it’s getting harder and harder to deny that they’re polling in the 20s. but, that requires an explanation, and “they’re voting for the ndp” kind of doesn’t cut it. demographics change over time, sure. maybe the country is on the brink of a generational overhaul. it does happen. but, i think that occam’s razor means paying close to attention to this “other” vote, first. you’re actually doing this right, so you’re probably the best firm to draw attention to this to.
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/09/three-way-tie-as-voters-try-and-sort-out-who-can-solve-the-economy/
at
09:01
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
that shrinking conservative vote in alberta doesn’t seem to be going to the other parties. 54–>47, with movements from the other parties wavering amongst themselves, within a small margin. where are those voters actually going? are they provincial wildrose voters?
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/08/fractured-country-produces-tight-and-unpredictable-race/
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/08/fractured-country-produces-tight-and-unpredictable-race/
at
08:06
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i think you need to be careful with this line of reasoning.
i'm not one to fall into the orwellian language of contemporary social activism, but they have a term for this - they call it "silencing". no, not them - you. i know. it's ironic. and logically problematic. but, they nonetheless have somewhat of a point. telling people to shut up is telling people to shut up, regardless of the context.
i think it's an error to assume this was merely a comedic routine. i mean, we can see she was trying to draw attention to herself, sure. but, you've got some emo running in the background, so i'm going to assume you know a little about punk rock - you create a ridiculous platform for the purpose of getting a serious message across, not the other way around. i think it's more that she was making a point by being shocking, rather than she was being shocking for the sake of being shocking.
and, the purpose of anybody doing this is to start a discussion.
so, let's have this discussion, then. is over-eating to the point of being unhealthy something protected by individual rights that we should accept as a personal choice, or is it anti-social behaviour that affects everybody negatively and that society has a collective right to try and coerce people away from?
but, keep in mind that while the obese may be a minority, they're a third of the population. that's larger than virtually any other minority you could articulate.
i'm not one to fall into the orwellian language of contemporary social activism, but they have a term for this - they call it "silencing". no, not them - you. i know. it's ironic. and logically problematic. but, they nonetheless have somewhat of a point. telling people to shut up is telling people to shut up, regardless of the context.
i think it's an error to assume this was merely a comedic routine. i mean, we can see she was trying to draw attention to herself, sure. but, you've got some emo running in the background, so i'm going to assume you know a little about punk rock - you create a ridiculous platform for the purpose of getting a serious message across, not the other way around. i think it's more that she was making a point by being shocking, rather than she was being shocking for the sake of being shocking.
and, the purpose of anybody doing this is to start a discussion.
so, let's have this discussion, then. is over-eating to the point of being unhealthy something protected by individual rights that we should accept as a personal choice, or is it anti-social behaviour that affects everybody negatively and that society has a collective right to try and coerce people away from?
but, keep in mind that while the obese may be a minority, they're a third of the population. that's larger than virtually any other minority you could articulate.
at
02:25
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i think she made a very cogent point, and you've merely strengthened her argument.
but, i've gleaned from another post here that this woman is a canadian. and i need to interject a cultural difference related to our health care systems.
even on the other side of the forced insurance scheme that is obamacare, the united states remains a society where people pay for their own health care. whatever the inefficiencies in such a system, an american individual is ultimately responsible for funding the consequences of their own health decisions. should they decide to be obese (and spare me the nonsense), then the costs for this decision will ultimately come out of their own pocket. such a system more or less seems to shield the individual from the sort of criticism in the original post.
in canada, we have a single payer system. what that means is that we all pay into a system of limited resources to take care of each other. over-eating is consequently not a victimless crime, as the resources used to treat obesity are siphoned out of other, more legitimate uses. it's not just obesity. it's smoking. it's intravenous drug use. the consequences of all of these things are preventable, and because the society pays for care collectively, it reserves the right to try and coerce others into behaviour that reduces the social costs.
it is out of this different health care delivery system that the idea of fat shaming - and smoke shaming - becomes entirely justified. it's not restricted to an individual choice, it's also a public health issue regarding the use of public funds and the expenditure of public resources.
now, this isn't entirely divorced from the american system - there are not infinite health resources in america. but, the artificial scarcity produced by high costs buffers the effects on the system, somewhat - but only somewhat. at the end of the day, the obese are still siphoning out resources as a consequence of preventable health issues created by making bad choices.
the idea that we ought to be able to do whatever we want, and fuck everybody else, is very american. but it is not sustainable. and it is not canadian. whether you like her video or not, there are hard truths in it that we all need to grapple with.
---
Nana M
correlation: a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things
mjsteele42
He was making fun of her mispronouncing the word. She was saying it as though it had a hyphen: "co-relation."
phnexOice
I don't know if the pronunciation is a Canadian thing, or if she's just an idiot, most likely the latter.
deathtokoalas
i think you might want to take a closer look at the word and think really carefully about how it was constructed and what it means.
but, i've gleaned from another post here that this woman is a canadian. and i need to interject a cultural difference related to our health care systems.
even on the other side of the forced insurance scheme that is obamacare, the united states remains a society where people pay for their own health care. whatever the inefficiencies in such a system, an american individual is ultimately responsible for funding the consequences of their own health decisions. should they decide to be obese (and spare me the nonsense), then the costs for this decision will ultimately come out of their own pocket. such a system more or less seems to shield the individual from the sort of criticism in the original post.
in canada, we have a single payer system. what that means is that we all pay into a system of limited resources to take care of each other. over-eating is consequently not a victimless crime, as the resources used to treat obesity are siphoned out of other, more legitimate uses. it's not just obesity. it's smoking. it's intravenous drug use. the consequences of all of these things are preventable, and because the society pays for care collectively, it reserves the right to try and coerce others into behaviour that reduces the social costs.
it is out of this different health care delivery system that the idea of fat shaming - and smoke shaming - becomes entirely justified. it's not restricted to an individual choice, it's also a public health issue regarding the use of public funds and the expenditure of public resources.
now, this isn't entirely divorced from the american system - there are not infinite health resources in america. but, the artificial scarcity produced by high costs buffers the effects on the system, somewhat - but only somewhat. at the end of the day, the obese are still siphoning out resources as a consequence of preventable health issues created by making bad choices.
the idea that we ought to be able to do whatever we want, and fuck everybody else, is very american. but it is not sustainable. and it is not canadian. whether you like her video or not, there are hard truths in it that we all need to grapple with.
---
Nana M
correlation: a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things
mjsteele42
He was making fun of her mispronouncing the word. She was saying it as though it had a hyphen: "co-relation."
phnexOice
I don't know if the pronunciation is a Canadian thing, or if she's just an idiot, most likely the latter.
deathtokoalas
i think you might want to take a closer look at the word and think really carefully about how it was constructed and what it means.
at
01:45
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Monday, September 7, 2015
was a little misinformed by this; the media is not helping. the '93 mulroney law actually gave ex-pats the right to vote, along with some other categories of people. this legislation was "reinterpreted" by elections canada in 2008, hence the court case challenging it and the overturning of the "reinterpretation" last year.
i'm not really sure exactly what the right legal approach is regarding challenging the "reinterpretation" of existing legislation. you'd expect that the way legislation is interpreted should be based on the existing precedent of how it was interpreted previously - and that any judicial body would uphold that. if there's a precedent for this, i'm really not aware of it. it's almost kafkaesque, really. can the government "reinterpret" any legislation at all, in any way it so desires? that's itself unconstitutional, as the common law precedents are a key aspect of the rule of law.
there was a bill in parliament, c-50, that would have rewritten the five-year limitation to explicitly exclude non-residents, but the election halted it.
i don't like the ruling itself, either. the oakes test is meant for extreme circumstances, and should not be applied willy-nilly like it was. it's kind of a mockery of the constitution, really. you've gotta jump through some serious hoops to conclude that restricting voting is a reasonable limitation in a free and democratic society, and those hoops were seriously jumped through.
it's easy to see why there's so much confusion around it. it's a messy situation at just about every point. it's so messy that it's hard to even produce a remedy. i mean, the question in front of the court isn't actually the legislation. it's the way the government interprets it. i don't think that's ever happened....
i've tried googling various of interpretations of "government reinterprets legislation" and the idea seems to just not exist.
the government writes legislation.
the court interprets it.
no wonder people are confused...
ok. so, if you back up...
it seems like the people challenging the decision are going about this through the wrong channels. the decision to "reinterpret legislation" would have to be seen as an executive/administrative decision, and that's consequently what the primary challenge should have been based around. can the government "reinterpret" the legislation as they have, in the first place?
it's only after you get through that process - once you determine what the legislation actually says - that you can start questioning it's constitutionality. and, i have a very hard time with the way the oakes test was used, here...
this strikes me as both unreasonable and incorrect, if we base correctness on existing precedent.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-expats-cant-vote-1.3204664
i'm not really sure exactly what the right legal approach is regarding challenging the "reinterpretation" of existing legislation. you'd expect that the way legislation is interpreted should be based on the existing precedent of how it was interpreted previously - and that any judicial body would uphold that. if there's a precedent for this, i'm really not aware of it. it's almost kafkaesque, really. can the government "reinterpret" any legislation at all, in any way it so desires? that's itself unconstitutional, as the common law precedents are a key aspect of the rule of law.
there was a bill in parliament, c-50, that would have rewritten the five-year limitation to explicitly exclude non-residents, but the election halted it.
i don't like the ruling itself, either. the oakes test is meant for extreme circumstances, and should not be applied willy-nilly like it was. it's kind of a mockery of the constitution, really. you've gotta jump through some serious hoops to conclude that restricting voting is a reasonable limitation in a free and democratic society, and those hoops were seriously jumped through.
it's easy to see why there's so much confusion around it. it's a messy situation at just about every point. it's so messy that it's hard to even produce a remedy. i mean, the question in front of the court isn't actually the legislation. it's the way the government interprets it. i don't think that's ever happened....
i've tried googling various of interpretations of "government reinterprets legislation" and the idea seems to just not exist.
the government writes legislation.
the court interprets it.
no wonder people are confused...
ok. so, if you back up...
it seems like the people challenging the decision are going about this through the wrong channels. the decision to "reinterpret legislation" would have to be seen as an executive/administrative decision, and that's consequently what the primary challenge should have been based around. can the government "reinterpret" the legislation as they have, in the first place?
it's only after you get through that process - once you determine what the legislation actually says - that you can start questioning it's constitutionality. and, i have a very hard time with the way the oakes test was used, here...
this strikes me as both unreasonable and incorrect, if we base correctness on existing precedent.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-expats-cant-vote-1.3204664
at
01:48
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i think what these narratives indicate is that it's ultimately up to the ex-pat to decide whether they're engaged or not. it's a kind of a strange argument. if people aren't interested or aware, there's not much chance that they're going to go through the lengthy process of registering and casting a ballot. the fact that they're jumping through these hoops largely indicates that they are actually engaged and informed.
all those headaches kind of have the effect of separating out the people that have left the country permanently from the people that are gone for a bit and are planning on coming back. the hypothetical of an individual who has no interest in canada and never plans on coming back, but wants to vote, is sort of untenable.
i think this is just fallout from the ignatieff attacks. it's not a specific vote altering scheme. it's just an attempt to maintain a narrative.
and, i do believe that the supreme court will overturn this.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-expats-cant-vote-1.3204664
Sue Russell
how do you know that maybe they just want media on them?
Jessica Murray
there's some things you can't know for sure, but can carefully rule out as unlikely. most things, really.
TruthUponYou
they shouldn't even get 5 years cause they have no riding to vote in, they are not residents in any riding, how do they pick and choose which riding they vote in?
Jessica Murray
they would generally vote in the riding they last lived in, which is also the riding they're likely to return to. generally, coming home means coming home, not migrating across the country.
TruthUponYou
Canadians only maintain residency for 3 months,
even if they are likely to return there are some point in the future, doesn't matter, its 3 months.
unless you keep a residence in that riding you can't vote there unless you leave the country but should be 3 months and not 5 years.
Jessica Murray
well, i think that's the point of contention.
all those headaches kind of have the effect of separating out the people that have left the country permanently from the people that are gone for a bit and are planning on coming back. the hypothetical of an individual who has no interest in canada and never plans on coming back, but wants to vote, is sort of untenable.
i think this is just fallout from the ignatieff attacks. it's not a specific vote altering scheme. it's just an attempt to maintain a narrative.
and, i do believe that the supreme court will overturn this.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-expats-cant-vote-1.3204664
Sue Russell
how do you know that maybe they just want media on them?
Jessica Murray
there's some things you can't know for sure, but can carefully rule out as unlikely. most things, really.
TruthUponYou
they shouldn't even get 5 years cause they have no riding to vote in, they are not residents in any riding, how do they pick and choose which riding they vote in?
Jessica Murray
they would generally vote in the riding they last lived in, which is also the riding they're likely to return to. generally, coming home means coming home, not migrating across the country.
TruthUponYou
Canadians only maintain residency for 3 months,
even if they are likely to return there are some point in the future, doesn't matter, its 3 months.
unless you keep a residence in that riding you can't vote there unless you leave the country but should be 3 months and not 5 years.
Jessica Murray
well, i think that's the point of contention.
at
00:33
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i'm sorry, what's the problem here, exactly? show me the part in the criminal code where peeing in a mug is prohibited. and, it had better be biblical, too. THOU SHALT NOT DRAIN THY SNAKE IN THINE MUG.
i hope he runs as an independent. i see absolutely nothing contentious here, except the micromanagement of candidates from the politburo in ottawa.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jerry-bance-marketplace-1.3217797
rogerroger
have you seen a doctor lately?
Jessica Murray
yup. few days ago. another appointment in a few weeks.
what's next? hiring or firing people over their hair?
pst0xuj
I am curious. Is the house that you live in on wheels?
Jessica Murray
you're not addressing the issue, which is that there is no legal basis for this - it is a wrongful dismissal.
you can judge people by their social class if you'd like. in the end, it says more about your own classlessness than it says about theirs. but, there's still not any legal basis for dropping this candidate. and, this level of control from head office should be more concerning to voters than harmlessly peeing in a cup.
True Dough Mania
Ok Jessica, well how about you hire Jerry Bance to do some work and leave him a few coffee mugs. I mean come on. You hire a guy to fix something and he pees in your coffee mug? REALLY? I'm sorry we don't have a direct prohibition in the criminal code for peeing in a mug. Didn't think we needed one.
pst0xuj
I am not certain as to whether this is a legal issue. However, Bance was running to be a representative of the CPC and based on what he did, he was deemed (in hindsight) to be an unsuitable candidate. I agree with the actions taken as I would NOT want him on my property.
True Dough Mania
I seriously don't a candidate for a political party is treated like an employee. Otherwise you would see wrongful dismissal law suits for candidates who have been forced to resign due to all kinds of controversies. Normal employment law likely doesn't apply to them, seeing as they aren't necessarily employees of the party.
Jessica Murray
urine is sterile on immediate emission; clutching your pearls over it is not an argument as to why it's a reason for dismissal.
Christ Bearer World Domination of Fortification
I could probably argue it as 'trespassing' or something along those lines. Plus can fire people for behavior, happens all the time.
Jessica Murray
this is true, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't operate broadly within it's purview. and, showing open contempt for the laws, as harper does consistently, is part of a pattern of increasing power in the prime minister's office.
he was invited in. there were no signs posted.
True Dough Mania
Jessica you have a fundamental misunderstanding of employment law. Bance would not be considered an employee of the CPC. That would make no sense, how could a MP ever vote out of their own conscience? How many MPs and candidates have been booted from parties for voting the wrong way, or some embarrassing comment. Careers destroyed, yet not one successful wrongful dismissal lawsuit brought? Why?
BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO LEGAL STANDING TO SUE BECAUSE THERE IS NO EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT TO SUE ON.
You're creating an issue where one doesn't exist.
Its a legal loop hole. Employers pull it all the time. Some pizza delivery guys are considered "independent contractors". It would be up to Parliament to legislate on the issue, but I'm guessing they won't. Its not a contempt for the law, its the way the law is. You might not like it, but thats the way the law is written and interpreted by the courts.
Jessica Murray
i think we have an expectation to hold our political bodies to a level of accountability in terms of how they treat their candidates, which requires them to follow the outlines of employment law, even if there is not a technical contract. conservative supporters often fall back to these strict, nineteenth century interpretations of contract law, but this is generally not the way our legal system works any more.
it is the centralization of power that is the concern here, not the harmless act of peeing in a cup. when we allow the prime minister to make arbitrary decisions of this sort about harmless actions, we are all placed in the danger of his abuses of power.
True Dough Mania
First off, I'm not a Conservative supporter. Never have been, never will be. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "this not the way our legal system works any more". I'm not sure exactly what you are invoking, but what seems glaringly obvious is you have little to no working knowledge of the law as it is, only as you see it as it should be.
A court will not invent a contract where one does not exist. Also this is at best a microcosm of the issue of centralized power.
As Mr. Bance is only a candidate, his rights would be governed by the Canada Elections Act, which imposes no obligation on a party to treat him as an employee. The courts cannot supplant the intent of Parliament unless that intent violates the constitution, which it does not here.
Jessica Murray
well, if you're not a conservative supporter then why are you defending harper's abuse of power, here?
there were a number of changes to the way the court interprets contracts in the 1940s. it will in fact enforce laws based on analogy - it will claim a law written for another circumstance ought to apply in a circumstance it was not written in.
but, that's not what i'm saying, here. what i'm saying is that we ought to expect the parties to respect the law, anyways. it doesn't matter if it's technically applicable or not. it's a question of whether they have the moral guidance to treat their candidates with respect, or if they treat them as slaves that are void of rights or individual thought.
and, it's clear where harper stands on this.
so, we can expect conservative supporters to only treat people with the dignity that the law demands of them. and, worse, they don't see a problem with this.
it's one of the big problems with the current conservative government. it is only able to understand the letter of the law. it rejects the entire concept of the spirit of the law.
True Dough Mania
Jessica, if you want to change the law of how Members of Parliament or election candidates are treated, then lobby government. But when you come out and make outlandish claims that the legal system does not operate this way, without any means to defend those claims, be prepared to be shot down. A court still needs an actual contract to interpret. And it is exactly what you said. You tried to argue that the law is not being followed in this case, when quite clearly it is. Yes the law of contract has changed, but privity of contract has not. Unless there are two parties who agreed to contract with each other, there is no contract. Anyone running for office would not be under the impression they were in an employment contract, and no one in the CPC would ever make such representations. Nor would any political party.
It absolutely matters if it is applicable, otherwise there is no certainty in our laws. The approach you advocate would introduce tremendous uncertainty. I respect you for not liking the rules of Parliament, but to introduce your logic into our justice system would be chaotic
Jessica Murray
i would suggest that you read my argument more carefully, because you do not understand it.
True Dough Mania
Jessica, no political party would endorse this candidate. They just wouldn't. They probably came to the mutual decision to resign, because this is a tremendous embarrassment that would destroy his local campaign. This isn't part of Harper's great scheme for centralized control, which I agree is a horrific trend in our democracy. One look at the PMO emails from the Nigel Wright trial should send all Canadians to the ballot box to punish this government for its blatant abuse of our supposedly independent institutions. But this isn't quite the same. This is a matter of a party not wanting to be affiliated with a particular individual.
Jessica Murray
it's an example of a power-hungry autocrat running rough shod over anybody that stands in his way. a party with the slightest levels of principle or adherence to individual freedom would have stood up for this candidate and argued for his rights, rather than thrown him under the bus.
True Dough Mania
Jessica I understand your argument perfectly, I"m simply eliminating the first part of it which was clearly superfluous fluff that you added in to appear coherent.
You believe this is an abuse of power and a direct corollary to Harper's move for greater centralized control. I agree that such a move has been happening during Harper's tenure, and many PMs who came before him. Unfortunately, the only way to curtail prime ministerial powers would be through a series of constitutional amendments and drastic restructuring of our political system. Not saying that is a bad thing, but I deal in the facts and reality and that is what we're facing.
But this isn't the same thing whatsoever. This is about how Harper governs the country, or how he uses the Senate as his personal finger puppet. Its about a party not wanting to be associated with a candidate for his embarrassing conduct.
Jessica there is no right to pee in a coffee mug, I doubt even the freedom of expression could be bent far enough to protect it. There is no right for someone to run for office under a political party. You must be endorsed by that party, and if that party chooses to get rid of you, that is their choice. How can you legitimately expect a party seeking re-election to waste its time trying to play down the fact that one of its candidates pees in coffee mugs of his customers?
The Liberal party has lost candidates for extremists views, as has the NDP. Its the nature of the beast, not a rallying call to protect our fundamental freedoms. You are conflating issues. Your passion is genuine, but sadly misplaced.
Jessica Murray
there is no right to piss in the wind, either - it doesn't mean it's a reason for punishment. again, this is taking a literal and statist position of rights being granted by the state, rather than the historically liberal position of canadian jurisprudence, which consistently comes down on the side of harmless crimes not being crimes. and, in this case, we seem to agree that there isn't even an articulated "crime".
i am not arguing that he would win a court case for wrongful dismissal. i am arguing that this dismissal breaks the spirit of the law, and voters should expect more out of their political parties than cynical calculations to maximize power.
i presume this candidate won a primary to get to where he is. it is up to voters in the riding to determine their candidates, not the centralized bureaucracy in ottawa.
interference in that process is an abuse of power. regardless of which party is doing it. i've been critical of the ndp as well, especially in kings-hants. i am not aware of a comparable case for the liberals in this election, but i would not be partisan in my lack of condemnation of it if one were to be presented to me.
i hope he runs as an independent. i see absolutely nothing contentious here, except the micromanagement of candidates from the politburo in ottawa.
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jerry-bance-marketplace-1.3217797
rogerroger
have you seen a doctor lately?
Jessica Murray
yup. few days ago. another appointment in a few weeks.
what's next? hiring or firing people over their hair?
pst0xuj
I am curious. Is the house that you live in on wheels?
Jessica Murray
you're not addressing the issue, which is that there is no legal basis for this - it is a wrongful dismissal.
you can judge people by their social class if you'd like. in the end, it says more about your own classlessness than it says about theirs. but, there's still not any legal basis for dropping this candidate. and, this level of control from head office should be more concerning to voters than harmlessly peeing in a cup.
True Dough Mania
Ok Jessica, well how about you hire Jerry Bance to do some work and leave him a few coffee mugs. I mean come on. You hire a guy to fix something and he pees in your coffee mug? REALLY? I'm sorry we don't have a direct prohibition in the criminal code for peeing in a mug. Didn't think we needed one.
pst0xuj
I am not certain as to whether this is a legal issue. However, Bance was running to be a representative of the CPC and based on what he did, he was deemed (in hindsight) to be an unsuitable candidate. I agree with the actions taken as I would NOT want him on my property.
True Dough Mania
I seriously don't a candidate for a political party is treated like an employee. Otherwise you would see wrongful dismissal law suits for candidates who have been forced to resign due to all kinds of controversies. Normal employment law likely doesn't apply to them, seeing as they aren't necessarily employees of the party.
Jessica Murray
urine is sterile on immediate emission; clutching your pearls over it is not an argument as to why it's a reason for dismissal.
Christ Bearer World Domination of Fortification
I could probably argue it as 'trespassing' or something along those lines. Plus can fire people for behavior, happens all the time.
Jessica Murray
this is true, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't operate broadly within it's purview. and, showing open contempt for the laws, as harper does consistently, is part of a pattern of increasing power in the prime minister's office.
he was invited in. there were no signs posted.
True Dough Mania
Jessica you have a fundamental misunderstanding of employment law. Bance would not be considered an employee of the CPC. That would make no sense, how could a MP ever vote out of their own conscience? How many MPs and candidates have been booted from parties for voting the wrong way, or some embarrassing comment. Careers destroyed, yet not one successful wrongful dismissal lawsuit brought? Why?
BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO LEGAL STANDING TO SUE BECAUSE THERE IS NO EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT TO SUE ON.
You're creating an issue where one doesn't exist.
Its a legal loop hole. Employers pull it all the time. Some pizza delivery guys are considered "independent contractors". It would be up to Parliament to legislate on the issue, but I'm guessing they won't. Its not a contempt for the law, its the way the law is. You might not like it, but thats the way the law is written and interpreted by the courts.
Jessica Murray
i think we have an expectation to hold our political bodies to a level of accountability in terms of how they treat their candidates, which requires them to follow the outlines of employment law, even if there is not a technical contract. conservative supporters often fall back to these strict, nineteenth century interpretations of contract law, but this is generally not the way our legal system works any more.
it is the centralization of power that is the concern here, not the harmless act of peeing in a cup. when we allow the prime minister to make arbitrary decisions of this sort about harmless actions, we are all placed in the danger of his abuses of power.
True Dough Mania
First off, I'm not a Conservative supporter. Never have been, never will be. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "this not the way our legal system works any more". I'm not sure exactly what you are invoking, but what seems glaringly obvious is you have little to no working knowledge of the law as it is, only as you see it as it should be.
A court will not invent a contract where one does not exist. Also this is at best a microcosm of the issue of centralized power.
As Mr. Bance is only a candidate, his rights would be governed by the Canada Elections Act, which imposes no obligation on a party to treat him as an employee. The courts cannot supplant the intent of Parliament unless that intent violates the constitution, which it does not here.
Jessica Murray
well, if you're not a conservative supporter then why are you defending harper's abuse of power, here?
there were a number of changes to the way the court interprets contracts in the 1940s. it will in fact enforce laws based on analogy - it will claim a law written for another circumstance ought to apply in a circumstance it was not written in.
but, that's not what i'm saying, here. what i'm saying is that we ought to expect the parties to respect the law, anyways. it doesn't matter if it's technically applicable or not. it's a question of whether they have the moral guidance to treat their candidates with respect, or if they treat them as slaves that are void of rights or individual thought.
and, it's clear where harper stands on this.
so, we can expect conservative supporters to only treat people with the dignity that the law demands of them. and, worse, they don't see a problem with this.
it's one of the big problems with the current conservative government. it is only able to understand the letter of the law. it rejects the entire concept of the spirit of the law.
True Dough Mania
Jessica, if you want to change the law of how Members of Parliament or election candidates are treated, then lobby government. But when you come out and make outlandish claims that the legal system does not operate this way, without any means to defend those claims, be prepared to be shot down. A court still needs an actual contract to interpret. And it is exactly what you said. You tried to argue that the law is not being followed in this case, when quite clearly it is. Yes the law of contract has changed, but privity of contract has not. Unless there are two parties who agreed to contract with each other, there is no contract. Anyone running for office would not be under the impression they were in an employment contract, and no one in the CPC would ever make such representations. Nor would any political party.
It absolutely matters if it is applicable, otherwise there is no certainty in our laws. The approach you advocate would introduce tremendous uncertainty. I respect you for not liking the rules of Parliament, but to introduce your logic into our justice system would be chaotic
Jessica Murray
i would suggest that you read my argument more carefully, because you do not understand it.
True Dough Mania
Jessica, no political party would endorse this candidate. They just wouldn't. They probably came to the mutual decision to resign, because this is a tremendous embarrassment that would destroy his local campaign. This isn't part of Harper's great scheme for centralized control, which I agree is a horrific trend in our democracy. One look at the PMO emails from the Nigel Wright trial should send all Canadians to the ballot box to punish this government for its blatant abuse of our supposedly independent institutions. But this isn't quite the same. This is a matter of a party not wanting to be affiliated with a particular individual.
Jessica Murray
it's an example of a power-hungry autocrat running rough shod over anybody that stands in his way. a party with the slightest levels of principle or adherence to individual freedom would have stood up for this candidate and argued for his rights, rather than thrown him under the bus.
True Dough Mania
Jessica I understand your argument perfectly, I"m simply eliminating the first part of it which was clearly superfluous fluff that you added in to appear coherent.
You believe this is an abuse of power and a direct corollary to Harper's move for greater centralized control. I agree that such a move has been happening during Harper's tenure, and many PMs who came before him. Unfortunately, the only way to curtail prime ministerial powers would be through a series of constitutional amendments and drastic restructuring of our political system. Not saying that is a bad thing, but I deal in the facts and reality and that is what we're facing.
But this isn't the same thing whatsoever. This is about how Harper governs the country, or how he uses the Senate as his personal finger puppet. Its about a party not wanting to be associated with a candidate for his embarrassing conduct.
Jessica there is no right to pee in a coffee mug, I doubt even the freedom of expression could be bent far enough to protect it. There is no right for someone to run for office under a political party. You must be endorsed by that party, and if that party chooses to get rid of you, that is their choice. How can you legitimately expect a party seeking re-election to waste its time trying to play down the fact that one of its candidates pees in coffee mugs of his customers?
The Liberal party has lost candidates for extremists views, as has the NDP. Its the nature of the beast, not a rallying call to protect our fundamental freedoms. You are conflating issues. Your passion is genuine, but sadly misplaced.
Jessica Murray
there is no right to piss in the wind, either - it doesn't mean it's a reason for punishment. again, this is taking a literal and statist position of rights being granted by the state, rather than the historically liberal position of canadian jurisprudence, which consistently comes down on the side of harmless crimes not being crimes. and, in this case, we seem to agree that there isn't even an articulated "crime".
i am not arguing that he would win a court case for wrongful dismissal. i am arguing that this dismissal breaks the spirit of the law, and voters should expect more out of their political parties than cynical calculations to maximize power.
i presume this candidate won a primary to get to where he is. it is up to voters in the riding to determine their candidates, not the centralized bureaucracy in ottawa.
interference in that process is an abuse of power. regardless of which party is doing it. i've been critical of the ndp as well, especially in kings-hants. i am not aware of a comparable case for the liberals in this election, but i would not be partisan in my lack of condemnation of it if one were to be presented to me.
at
00:12
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Sunday, September 6, 2015
an influx of thousands of people will eventually grow the size of the economy by the nature of the economic development required to accommodate them. you can't add thousands of people without creating thousands of jobs: you need more food, more housing, more transit, etc. that job creation should largely offset downward pressures on wages - especially of there's a minimum wage and service jobs are already at or near it.
but, let's take a step back. who says they want to stay forever?
syria has some problems with freedom of expression, but (under normal circumstances) it's not a place where people are starving. it's a secular country. it has a welfare state with social services. syrians would broadly be better off in syria, if it were properly functioning, than they would be in the united states. home is an intangible concept. and a lot of people will go home when it's safe. not everybody, but plenty.
the question is whether it will ever be safe. and it won't be if the united states continues to funnel weapons to isis through the saudis, and the saudis maintain their policies in the region. but, i don't think this is particularly amenable to pressure, even if it were to materialize. the saudi regime is not really a rational agent.
i don't like war, but my honest assessment is that a serious one is building in this region that will primarily pit the saudis against the turks, and that we will need to take the turks' side on - eventually. and, that's going to be extremely messy. the alliances in this region are quite complex. we tend to compare every conflict to world war two, because we're trained to. this one looks more like world war one, where it's not entirely clear who is fighting who or even why they're fighting when they are.
i don't think we can just accept the spread of salafism like this. but this is not the era of conscription. being a soldier in today's world requires a lot of training and a specific kind of mindset. we can't force people to fight. and, it's not in our recent history to do this, either. there is no circumstance where it is justifiable to give civilians guns and march them off as cannon fodder.
but, it doesn't change the reality that there is no clear, short-term answer. if we withdraw altogether, we're telling these people that they can never go home - because the extremists will have won. and, that merely sets up future battles. it's appeasement, and appeasement always fails. if we keep bombing like we are, we're just fueling an endless war. to get to the root causes means to get to the funding of these groups and cut them off. but, there's no political will to do this, and very little understanding of what it even means to do this.
i'm partial to the idea that accepting large amounts of refugees comes with the _obligation_ of helping them go home. not as an expulsion strategy. but, as a part of the humanitarian process of alleviating the problem. what's frustrating is the impossibility of following through with this obligation, given the current policies in washington.
www.cbc.ca/news/world/refugees-austria-germany-1.3217421
Never 4Get - Never 4Give....(The 1 Who Lies)
.... uh so by that rational I guess India with 1.2b people must be doing great...
Jessica Murray
again with your "most absurd possible" comparisons. i'd like to visit your planet some day to get a better understanding of it, but i'm sure glad i don't live there.
obviously, europe would have a hard time allowing 800 million people in at the same time. that's a lot more people than 800,000.
but, india's problems are not due entirely to overpopulation, either. that's a complicated discussion that i'm not going to bite on.
Western U.
What do you call recent history...because in WW2 conscription was in several countries...and right now if your in Israel, male or female you have to enlist...the States had conscription for Vietnam....Canada has had conscription...Germany sure did...as did Russia...don't know if they still do...all forces are cannon fodder...it is just a matter of who gives in first.
Jessica, it has been an endless war for centuries...it isn't going to change anytime soon, and I doubt in your lifetime...there are just some places on the planet that you don't plan a vacation and the Middle East is one of them.
Jessica Murray
canada has not had conscription in it's recent history, and it allowed americans who were conscripted against their will to settle here during vietnam. if you would prefer to live in a country with conscription, i would suggest migrating to north korea.
it hasn't been an endless war of this nature for centuries - there have been very long periods of stability and relative prosperity. some people will no doubt jump through hoops of rationalization that allow them to deduce that the levant belongs to the saudis, and they're carrying out their extremism in their sphere of influence. not only do i have a hard time doing that, i feel we should be helping the opposition forces in saudi arabia, proper. it's a regime that we shouldn't just not let spread but should be actively working against.
but, let's take a step back. who says they want to stay forever?
syria has some problems with freedom of expression, but (under normal circumstances) it's not a place where people are starving. it's a secular country. it has a welfare state with social services. syrians would broadly be better off in syria, if it were properly functioning, than they would be in the united states. home is an intangible concept. and a lot of people will go home when it's safe. not everybody, but plenty.
the question is whether it will ever be safe. and it won't be if the united states continues to funnel weapons to isis through the saudis, and the saudis maintain their policies in the region. but, i don't think this is particularly amenable to pressure, even if it were to materialize. the saudi regime is not really a rational agent.
i don't like war, but my honest assessment is that a serious one is building in this region that will primarily pit the saudis against the turks, and that we will need to take the turks' side on - eventually. and, that's going to be extremely messy. the alliances in this region are quite complex. we tend to compare every conflict to world war two, because we're trained to. this one looks more like world war one, where it's not entirely clear who is fighting who or even why they're fighting when they are.
i don't think we can just accept the spread of salafism like this. but this is not the era of conscription. being a soldier in today's world requires a lot of training and a specific kind of mindset. we can't force people to fight. and, it's not in our recent history to do this, either. there is no circumstance where it is justifiable to give civilians guns and march them off as cannon fodder.
but, it doesn't change the reality that there is no clear, short-term answer. if we withdraw altogether, we're telling these people that they can never go home - because the extremists will have won. and, that merely sets up future battles. it's appeasement, and appeasement always fails. if we keep bombing like we are, we're just fueling an endless war. to get to the root causes means to get to the funding of these groups and cut them off. but, there's no political will to do this, and very little understanding of what it even means to do this.
i'm partial to the idea that accepting large amounts of refugees comes with the _obligation_ of helping them go home. not as an expulsion strategy. but, as a part of the humanitarian process of alleviating the problem. what's frustrating is the impossibility of following through with this obligation, given the current policies in washington.
www.cbc.ca/news/world/refugees-austria-germany-1.3217421
Never 4Get - Never 4Give....(The 1 Who Lies)
.... uh so by that rational I guess India with 1.2b people must be doing great...
Jessica Murray
again with your "most absurd possible" comparisons. i'd like to visit your planet some day to get a better understanding of it, but i'm sure glad i don't live there.
obviously, europe would have a hard time allowing 800 million people in at the same time. that's a lot more people than 800,000.
but, india's problems are not due entirely to overpopulation, either. that's a complicated discussion that i'm not going to bite on.
Western U.
What do you call recent history...because in WW2 conscription was in several countries...and right now if your in Israel, male or female you have to enlist...the States had conscription for Vietnam....Canada has had conscription...Germany sure did...as did Russia...don't know if they still do...all forces are cannon fodder...it is just a matter of who gives in first.
Jessica, it has been an endless war for centuries...it isn't going to change anytime soon, and I doubt in your lifetime...there are just some places on the planet that you don't plan a vacation and the Middle East is one of them.
Jessica Murray
canada has not had conscription in it's recent history, and it allowed americans who were conscripted against their will to settle here during vietnam. if you would prefer to live in a country with conscription, i would suggest migrating to north korea.
it hasn't been an endless war of this nature for centuries - there have been very long periods of stability and relative prosperity. some people will no doubt jump through hoops of rationalization that allow them to deduce that the levant belongs to the saudis, and they're carrying out their extremism in their sphere of influence. not only do i have a hard time doing that, i feel we should be helping the opposition forces in saudi arabia, proper. it's a regime that we shouldn't just not let spread but should be actively working against.
at
06:06
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
so, i'm a pretty typical left-leaning liberal voter in a lot of ways. in other ways, i'm out of the spectrum. but, on budgets i think i represent that liberal-ndp split constituency.
the writer of this article sounds like a red tory. and, that's ok. but, let's be clear about a few things.
to begin with, the voters that the writer speaks of are conservatives. the liberals can hold them for a while, when the conservatives are riding low in the polls. but, unless the liberals decided to make a fundamental shift to the right, they cannot hold them in the long run. and, even if they do make a fundamental shift to the right, it is not clear that they will hold them; party allegiances are a messy truth. we know from years of polling and election results that the conservatives essentially never push under 30%. that means that for the liberals to make a strategy of holding these voters, they would limit themselves to the mid 20s in the polls. it's a formula for certain failure.
moving back from this may help harper a tad, sure. i'm not sure the dynamics of this election are such that harper can really get those votes back in the next month. next year, maybe. i think the red tories are broadly fed up right now and are swinging red. but, it's a dead-end for the liberals in the long run; once the red tories go back, they're back at ignatieff levels - or worse, because pushing balanced budgets for months is just bleeding them to death on the left.
so, by pushing balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism, the liberals will merely find themselves pushed up against a brick wall of tory support - whatever it is, in the worst case (for the tories). 27%. 25%. any further, and the party begins to fracture.
now, if there's a strategy there, it's that - to fracture the conservatives and try and walk in. but, as mentioned that is only feasible if it means becoming conservatives. progressive conservatives, perhaps. but, conservatives nonetheless. you can't command a conservative base unless you're a conservative party - it's a rational statement, but even if we accept that the world is not rational, it nonetheless holds due to the nature of conservative supporters. in fact, they'd even have to change their name. conservative supporters will never vote for the liberal party in the long term.
but what happens when they're fighting over the center-right vote, however small it is? if it's the red tory vote, it's about 8-10%. well, what happens is that the 30% of the vote on the left moves entirely to the ndp. and, gee, what did we see happen when he *was* walking around sounding like a fiscal conservative?
i don't think they're out of this. they're apparently beating the ndp pretty soundly in ontario. and, the numbers in quebec are misleading (mid to high 20s could triple their existing seat count).
but, you're right that it's not just about this election - it's about the viability of the party. there's nowhere to go on the right. because somebody like me will never vote for you if you're campaigning on balanced budgets.
and, what do i actually think about budgets?
it's a non-issue for me. i understand that it's mostly meaningless. so, i care about funding things first, and paying for it later. when somebody says "i'm going to balance the budget", what i hear is "i'm going to cut services". the budget itself is meaningless to me. it's the cutting services part that i don't like.
and, i don't think the polling on the issue is surprising. i don't think that stephen harper was elected in order to balance the budget. i think that stephen harper was elected because paul martin cut services to balance the budget, and a lot of liberal voters didn't like that. note that it's not that we didn't like the balanced budget. we didn't care about that at all. we didn't like the cut in services.
what i'm hoping is that the liberal party has had the epiphany they need. it might not win them this election. but, it seems like it has taken them off the road to collapse.
when it seemed certain that he was going to campaign on balanced budgets, i was thinking the ndp could hit 50% support with a bit of luck.
now that the situation has shifted, i think the race is really up in the air. and, we're going to watch the polls flip because of it.
and, again: it's not the budget itself. it's because "balanced budgets" is code for "cutting services". that's what we hear. and we don't like that. because we're not conservatives. we know conservatives like that, and that's fine. but we're not conservatives...
but, let's be clear: it is not *only* that trudeau walked away from the ideology (and that is what it really is) of balanced budgets.
it is *also* that mulcair drank the kool-aid.
if it's just one or the other, it's a wash. it's the difference that is going to result in some movement. because what voters (on the left, specifically) actually *hear* is that mulcair is going to cut services and trudeau isn't.
http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/05/trudeaus-deficit-gamble-and-the-fight-for-the-left/
(deleted post)
you know, i've been noticing this perspective quite a bit from ndp supporters, paid or not, and it's really rather amazing. i'm presenting a very informed perspective, here. you have a lot of gall to suggest that *i'm* the one that's lacking in intelligence. and, that's just a reflection of the facts in the case.
i'm not somebody that's going to go waving it around like a flag, but i'm actually somebody that's been identified as of extreme intelligence since i was in grade school. they had me at a grade 10 reading and math level when i was eight. every standardized test i've ever done is at the 99th percentile. they put me through all kinds of enriched programs as a kid. i have the equivalence of a masters degree in mathematics, a bachelor's degree in computer science and a number of minors in diverse subjects, including law - and it's rare to see somebody with degrees in both technical fields and literary fields. the competency testing i've done for employment purposes has also continuously been very high. i'm actually rather certain that the reason i couldn't get a job in the federal government is that my test scores are too high; i've been to several interviews where the interviewers can't believe the scores they're seeing, and have told me they've never seen anything like it.
and, you have the gall to question my intelligence, because i'm aware of the historical fact that ndp governments always slash spending, and that mulcair has in fact promised as much?
it's astounding.
and, it's the kind of arrogance that doesn't belong on the left.
dtgraham
Personally I've never doubted your almost unimaginable brilliance, but you might want to take a second look at the grammar, syntax, and sentence structure of the post you just left. It kind of detracts from someone who puts Pascal and Oppenheimer to shame.
deathtokoalas
this is another interesting perspective that i get a lot. it's funny that it rarely crosses people's mind that i may write the way i do entirely consciously; that i may actually reject certain rules of grammar out of principle, rather than out of ignorance.
consider capitalization, for example. you'll notice that i almost never capitalize anything - i will capitalize things sardonically from time to time, but that's about it. it's not some accident. it's not that i'm unaware of when things "should" be capitalized. it's that i reject the idea of capitalization. call me an anti-capitalist. or perhaps an alphabetical egalitarian. but, i am of the firm opinion that the way we use capitalization in every day writing is a process of enforcing hierarchical relationships in our minds. and, i would argue that changing the language is a part of changing the way we think about hierarchical relationships. when i refuse to capitalize the ceo or the prime minister or any other position of authority, there's a reason for it - and hopefully that seeps in a little, when people are reading what i write.
i'd also invite any linguist to really carefully analyze the way that i write, because there's an underlying recursive logic to it. the tendency to stop at a conjunction, for example. it's against the rules, and i know that, but it think it's a more expressive way to get across what i'm trying to get across in the way that i'm trying to get it across. i'll stop and start where i want, not where i'm ordered to.
by constructing rules of grammar into stone and forcing children to obey those rules, we're ordering their thoughts for them. we're setting the terms of how they think. if we want a really free thinking society, that's one of the first things we need to reverse.
grammar should be unique to the individual. we should all have our own idiosyncratic systems of grammar that uniquely reflect our own thoughts, and how we choose to express them.
that said, and as mentioned, you'll notice the writing is very logical in the way that it splits ideas into small pieces. you are really reacting to it's exaggerated underlying logic. but, this is forum writing, not formal writing - it is simple by nature. my essays, on the other hand, tend to be in the 30s in terms of flesch-kincaid readability scores.
but, this article is not about me. so, let's move on.
i just want to clarify what i said in the first post with concrete numbers.
base conservative support is around 30%
red tory swing support is around 8%.
so, if the conservatives are running around 30% and the liberals are running around 28%, that means you're looking at actual liberal support of the liberal party at somewhere around 20%. it's easy to understand this given current events. keep in mind that the liberals were running close to 40% in the late 90s, while the tory-reform vote combined to around 38%.
if the liberals were to run on balanced budgets (thereby further alienating it's left flank) and any kind of "event" were to happen that would swing red tory support back home, it would put them back in ignatieff territory.
further, there is almost no way they could poll much higher than 30% with that strategy, even in a worst case scenario for the conservatives.
it follows that the only way they have a chance of winning any election - this one or the next one - is to try and win back the huge number of voters they lost on the left.
it's really not even a choice.
(deleted post)
what i'm pointing out here is that they can't win by campaigning on the right because they've already hit their maximal potential of red tory swing voters, and the barrier is around 30%. please re-read what i wrote and try harder to understand it.
the writer of this article sounds like a red tory. and, that's ok. but, let's be clear about a few things.
to begin with, the voters that the writer speaks of are conservatives. the liberals can hold them for a while, when the conservatives are riding low in the polls. but, unless the liberals decided to make a fundamental shift to the right, they cannot hold them in the long run. and, even if they do make a fundamental shift to the right, it is not clear that they will hold them; party allegiances are a messy truth. we know from years of polling and election results that the conservatives essentially never push under 30%. that means that for the liberals to make a strategy of holding these voters, they would limit themselves to the mid 20s in the polls. it's a formula for certain failure.
moving back from this may help harper a tad, sure. i'm not sure the dynamics of this election are such that harper can really get those votes back in the next month. next year, maybe. i think the red tories are broadly fed up right now and are swinging red. but, it's a dead-end for the liberals in the long run; once the red tories go back, they're back at ignatieff levels - or worse, because pushing balanced budgets for months is just bleeding them to death on the left.
so, by pushing balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism, the liberals will merely find themselves pushed up against a brick wall of tory support - whatever it is, in the worst case (for the tories). 27%. 25%. any further, and the party begins to fracture.
now, if there's a strategy there, it's that - to fracture the conservatives and try and walk in. but, as mentioned that is only feasible if it means becoming conservatives. progressive conservatives, perhaps. but, conservatives nonetheless. you can't command a conservative base unless you're a conservative party - it's a rational statement, but even if we accept that the world is not rational, it nonetheless holds due to the nature of conservative supporters. in fact, they'd even have to change their name. conservative supporters will never vote for the liberal party in the long term.
but what happens when they're fighting over the center-right vote, however small it is? if it's the red tory vote, it's about 8-10%. well, what happens is that the 30% of the vote on the left moves entirely to the ndp. and, gee, what did we see happen when he *was* walking around sounding like a fiscal conservative?
i don't think they're out of this. they're apparently beating the ndp pretty soundly in ontario. and, the numbers in quebec are misleading (mid to high 20s could triple their existing seat count).
but, you're right that it's not just about this election - it's about the viability of the party. there's nowhere to go on the right. because somebody like me will never vote for you if you're campaigning on balanced budgets.
and, what do i actually think about budgets?
it's a non-issue for me. i understand that it's mostly meaningless. so, i care about funding things first, and paying for it later. when somebody says "i'm going to balance the budget", what i hear is "i'm going to cut services". the budget itself is meaningless to me. it's the cutting services part that i don't like.
and, i don't think the polling on the issue is surprising. i don't think that stephen harper was elected in order to balance the budget. i think that stephen harper was elected because paul martin cut services to balance the budget, and a lot of liberal voters didn't like that. note that it's not that we didn't like the balanced budget. we didn't care about that at all. we didn't like the cut in services.
what i'm hoping is that the liberal party has had the epiphany they need. it might not win them this election. but, it seems like it has taken them off the road to collapse.
when it seemed certain that he was going to campaign on balanced budgets, i was thinking the ndp could hit 50% support with a bit of luck.
now that the situation has shifted, i think the race is really up in the air. and, we're going to watch the polls flip because of it.
and, again: it's not the budget itself. it's because "balanced budgets" is code for "cutting services". that's what we hear. and we don't like that. because we're not conservatives. we know conservatives like that, and that's fine. but we're not conservatives...
but, let's be clear: it is not *only* that trudeau walked away from the ideology (and that is what it really is) of balanced budgets.
it is *also* that mulcair drank the kool-aid.
if it's just one or the other, it's a wash. it's the difference that is going to result in some movement. because what voters (on the left, specifically) actually *hear* is that mulcair is going to cut services and trudeau isn't.
http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/05/trudeaus-deficit-gamble-and-the-fight-for-the-left/
(deleted post)
you know, i've been noticing this perspective quite a bit from ndp supporters, paid or not, and it's really rather amazing. i'm presenting a very informed perspective, here. you have a lot of gall to suggest that *i'm* the one that's lacking in intelligence. and, that's just a reflection of the facts in the case.
i'm not somebody that's going to go waving it around like a flag, but i'm actually somebody that's been identified as of extreme intelligence since i was in grade school. they had me at a grade 10 reading and math level when i was eight. every standardized test i've ever done is at the 99th percentile. they put me through all kinds of enriched programs as a kid. i have the equivalence of a masters degree in mathematics, a bachelor's degree in computer science and a number of minors in diverse subjects, including law - and it's rare to see somebody with degrees in both technical fields and literary fields. the competency testing i've done for employment purposes has also continuously been very high. i'm actually rather certain that the reason i couldn't get a job in the federal government is that my test scores are too high; i've been to several interviews where the interviewers can't believe the scores they're seeing, and have told me they've never seen anything like it.
and, you have the gall to question my intelligence, because i'm aware of the historical fact that ndp governments always slash spending, and that mulcair has in fact promised as much?
it's astounding.
and, it's the kind of arrogance that doesn't belong on the left.
dtgraham
Personally I've never doubted your almost unimaginable brilliance, but you might want to take a second look at the grammar, syntax, and sentence structure of the post you just left. It kind of detracts from someone who puts Pascal and Oppenheimer to shame.
deathtokoalas
this is another interesting perspective that i get a lot. it's funny that it rarely crosses people's mind that i may write the way i do entirely consciously; that i may actually reject certain rules of grammar out of principle, rather than out of ignorance.
consider capitalization, for example. you'll notice that i almost never capitalize anything - i will capitalize things sardonically from time to time, but that's about it. it's not some accident. it's not that i'm unaware of when things "should" be capitalized. it's that i reject the idea of capitalization. call me an anti-capitalist. or perhaps an alphabetical egalitarian. but, i am of the firm opinion that the way we use capitalization in every day writing is a process of enforcing hierarchical relationships in our minds. and, i would argue that changing the language is a part of changing the way we think about hierarchical relationships. when i refuse to capitalize the ceo or the prime minister or any other position of authority, there's a reason for it - and hopefully that seeps in a little, when people are reading what i write.
i'd also invite any linguist to really carefully analyze the way that i write, because there's an underlying recursive logic to it. the tendency to stop at a conjunction, for example. it's against the rules, and i know that, but it think it's a more expressive way to get across what i'm trying to get across in the way that i'm trying to get it across. i'll stop and start where i want, not where i'm ordered to.
by constructing rules of grammar into stone and forcing children to obey those rules, we're ordering their thoughts for them. we're setting the terms of how they think. if we want a really free thinking society, that's one of the first things we need to reverse.
grammar should be unique to the individual. we should all have our own idiosyncratic systems of grammar that uniquely reflect our own thoughts, and how we choose to express them.
that said, and as mentioned, you'll notice the writing is very logical in the way that it splits ideas into small pieces. you are really reacting to it's exaggerated underlying logic. but, this is forum writing, not formal writing - it is simple by nature. my essays, on the other hand, tend to be in the 30s in terms of flesch-kincaid readability scores.
but, this article is not about me. so, let's move on.
i just want to clarify what i said in the first post with concrete numbers.
base conservative support is around 30%
red tory swing support is around 8%.
so, if the conservatives are running around 30% and the liberals are running around 28%, that means you're looking at actual liberal support of the liberal party at somewhere around 20%. it's easy to understand this given current events. keep in mind that the liberals were running close to 40% in the late 90s, while the tory-reform vote combined to around 38%.
if the liberals were to run on balanced budgets (thereby further alienating it's left flank) and any kind of "event" were to happen that would swing red tory support back home, it would put them back in ignatieff territory.
further, there is almost no way they could poll much higher than 30% with that strategy, even in a worst case scenario for the conservatives.
it follows that the only way they have a chance of winning any election - this one or the next one - is to try and win back the huge number of voters they lost on the left.
it's really not even a choice.
(deleted post)
what i'm pointing out here is that they can't win by campaigning on the right because they've already hit their maximal potential of red tory swing voters, and the barrier is around 30%. please re-read what i wrote and try harder to understand it.
at
05:12
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i didn't hear anything particularly confusing in this. non-enforcement and mandatory minimums are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to argue that you won't actively police it, but will enforce mandatory minimums when it is policed. like, if you've got a warrant for weapons and you find a gram. what that does, rather, is expose the legislation as toothless. and, in fact a lot of harper's legislation of this sort is toothless, redundant or unenforceable. it's designed to appeal to the base. it often looks scary on first glance, and may waste some people's time if they're unlucky enough to be the ones stuck fighting it to the supreme court, but it's got holes in it on purpose.
in that sense, what's eyebrow raising is that it's moving out of that base-revving space. but, she does still want them to donate money. of course.
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/04/laureen-harper-marijuana_n_8090204.html
in that sense, what's eyebrow raising is that it's moving out of that base-revving space. but, she does still want them to donate money. of course.
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/04/laureen-harper-marijuana_n_8090204.html
at
02:17
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
more lowest common denominator identity politics from the ndp. with each
passing day, they're digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole
with educated voters. i'd expect the next round of polls to show some
daylight for one of the other parties.
canadians are more interested in the qualifications of the candidates than they are in their genders.
this is flatly moronic.
"Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you."
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/03/trudeau-questioned-on-optics-as-14-male-candidates-appear-at-quebec-city-event_n_8081150.html
canadians are more interested in the qualifications of the candidates than they are in their genders.
this is flatly moronic.
"Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you."
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/03/trudeau-questioned-on-optics-as-14-male-candidates-appear-at-quebec-city-event_n_8081150.html
at
01:39
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
it's perhaps not entirely irrational to be fearful of the plague. but, i got sort of obsessed with it when i was a kid, and it's always the first thing that goes through my mind when i get sick.
if you think you've got the plague, get to a doctor immediately. and, when the people come around, make sure you promptly bring out your dead, too.
but, listen - we've got antibiotics that can get rid of this pretty effectively. with proper medical treatment, this is not the scary disease it once was. we can treat this.
if you think you've got the plague, get to a doctor immediately. and, when the people come around, make sure you promptly bring out your dead, too.
but, listen - we've got antibiotics that can get rid of this pretty effectively. with proper medical treatment, this is not the scary disease it once was. we can treat this.
at
01:04
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
he often points out this difference between indigenous peoples and "advanced peoples", but rather than attempt to explain it he just throws it out as a kind of a shock tactic. and, you know, i don't know how valid that presumption really is. i'd like to think we're beyond being shocked that the so-called inferior indigenous people are figuring this out better than we are. but, are we really? hey, he's the most cited writer ever, i'm just a youtube rambler. maybe he's more on point than i'd like to admit.
but, you really need to take it to the next level. because, it's not surprising and shouldn't be shocking. the judaic religions place human beings at the centre of the universe. the sun revolves around us, after all. and, so the eco-systems should revolve around us, too. shocking? far from it - it's what ought to be expected from the culmination of western culture. and, conversely, indigenous cultures tend to place themselves in a holistic balance with the systems around them. that's not to romanticize or exaggerate, but they don't take this judaic perspective of human beings being at the center of creation. they're consequently not warped by it.
---
John NoNameGibbon
Something curious about American culture regarding our weird settler-colony history is that we sort of gloss over the fact that we killed off all of our Natives. That's weird enough, but then we sort of exaggerate/distort the amount of Natives killed in neighboring countries like Mexico, to make ourselves seem better by comparison. We started calling people of native blood "latinos" to mask it recently, I noticed. The subject has always interested me. It shows our weird psychology.
xyZenTV
We call them 'Latinos' because they are no longer strictly native. Modern (Continental) Americans predominately have a mixture of Native American and European heritage. The real tragedy in all of this is not our ignorance of our history, but our ignorance of the ongoing difficulty facing modern Native Americans. It is a real tragedy that we are STILL turning a blind eye to the plight of the ancestors of the people from whom we stole our lands.
John NoNameGibbon
No country is strictly anything, but the vast majority are in fact Native. Which is the point. A more recent study on Mexico, for example, found that about sixty percent of the people tested were just Native. Thirty percent had some European in them, but it ranged from half to much less. Plus, even if they were half white, which really isn't the case for most people living south of us, they'd still be half Native. Most of the people we acknowledge as Native in our own reservations are much less than half. Yet we still consider them "Native". Why are they any different?
We apply a double standard to Mexicans and other Latin Americans, in my view, as an attempt to hide the obvious fact that they're by and large indigenous. It's kind of self-evident, yet we hide it. "Latino" still implies they're something other than Native.
And guess what? After hearing the terms Latino and Hispanic for the last half century, people have actually began denying the obvious. Most Mexicans and Latin Americans are offended when they hear that most people in the region are Native. It's a type of self-shaming that was encouraged by the terms.
They are no longer strictly Native in the same way Jamaicans and Haitians aren't strictly black. But most are. In my view that's an attempt to blow smoke and distort the obvious. And it works.
xyZenTV
That's interesting. Do you have sources for your claims that the majority in Mexican nationals are predominately native, and that most counted as natives on US reservations have only a small percentage of actual native heritage? I'd love to learn more about how much of the native population actually remains, and where they actually are.
John NoNameGibbon
A lot of this isn't and hasn't really been studied too well because as Chomsky would say, it's not the right question to ask in our society. You're suppose to assume that our Indians are Indians and theirs are somehow fake or illegitimate. And that's the way it's framed.
My reasoning comes from a study I read earlier this year by an American doctor (I think) living in Mexico who wanted to know their genetic makeup for medical reasons. I'll post it separately if I can find it again today, but I'm afraid Google might get rid of the comment because it has a link in it. And Google hates links. They assume it's spam.
As for our Natives actually being the real Mestizos (or much less than that), I arrived at the conclusion by studying our tribal blood quantum laws for Native Reservations. Often the standards are extremely laxed, bordering on absurd.
I'm not bashing US Natives and I understand that there is more to tribal affiliation than blood ties, but I can' help but see some purposeful distortion of facts there. It makes us feel better about exploiting their labor, I guess.
Yes, most of the Americas are still indigenous, though you won't hear that outside of a few anthropology circles that are in the know. It's sort of suppressed by both sides.
John willow
Don't forget that the U.S. basically stole about a third of Mexico. Of course, it offered Mexico a choice - sell us what is now the Southwest or we'll invade you and take it anyway.
John NoNameGibbon
Exactly. A lot of people say "Hey, John, we paid for that land fair and square, why do you frame it that way?"
And I have to remind them that we did it at gunpoint. Like all conquerors.
Code Python
C'mon John. We could have taken it all. Instead we paid 15 million for the southwest. Add in the 100 million to wage the war (not to mention about 14,000 lives lost) and we got the entire southwest for the bargain basement price of about $3.5 billion in today's dollars. But that was when imperialism paid. Today we spend 2-3 trillion dollars on one country in the middle east and have nothing to show for it except a lot of extra debt.
Curious? What do you mean curious? Kind of like we committed genocide on an entire race of millions like Hitler, but pretty much completed the job? Or curious like we did it all in the name of god like a jihadist would?
John NoNameGibbon
Curious like we casual dismiss it ever occurred and ironically act like our more Native neighbors to the south were somehow guiltier of Indian killing than us, despite us being white and them being Indian still.
Curious as in insane. Perhaps like a fox.
Jared Lupton
if we killed them all off, how are they still here. But I get your point- most of them were killed off.
John NoNameGibbon
We virtually killed them all off, which is a feat that would make Hitler blush. Latin Americans were saved because they were outside of our borders. Notice most of our more pure looking American reservations used to be Mexican?
Douglas Jack
What is at stake in how people of the whole world view ourselves. Whether we consider ourselves from within the very recent colonial 'exogenous' (Latin 'other-generated') submissive frame or from all humanity's true ancient roots as 'indigenous' (L 'self-generating') peoples in our traditions of free & equal sovereignty. Europeans forget our indigenous Celtic traditions pre-Semite, Greek & Roman violence and we in turn have beat it out of just about everyone & everywhere we have gone as ecological-economic refugees from our war-torn Europe. Rediscovering our ancestor's indigenous knowledge of abundant polyculture orchards & peaceful relations is what we need to restore the earth & peace among us. If humanity musters only colonial subservience, then life is lost. www.indigenecommunity.info
John NoNameGibbon
You're referring to first nations style cultures? Yes, they, ironically, seem to be the only ones interested in democracy and preserving nature. And, yes, I study Iberian history (Southwestern Europe) and though people tend to view them as Latin Europeans, they're actually originally Celts. And that is the bedrock of where Spain developed its anarchistic traditions. They almost beat Rome without a central government. And Rome stole a lot of technology and battle formations from them shamelessly. So that runs deep in Western European culture. But it was beaten out of most of the culture in Britain and Ireland.
Douglas Jack
Please share more about your studies of the Celtic Appenine & Iberian peninsula's before their original colonization & perversion into violent empires. Humanity's worldwide 'sylvalizations' were sustainable, abundant, peaceful & collectively-intelligent The problem of violent colonization has subverted human memory & will to unjust hierarchy. Never before in human history have people known so little about human heritage & how to pilot spaceship earth & its life support systems. Here's a section on Economic Democracy upon which all indigenous peoples founded political democracy as a subset. @8
John NoNameGibbon
I've been studying the region mostly for fun since I was in high school. I noticed that a lot of the history of Spain was buried by England and we inherited English history and their slant on it, so most Americans know very little of the region. We study Britain, but never Spain.
The thing that stood out to me about the anarchistic nature of Spain's early Celtic culture was the fabled kingdom of Tartessos. Archaeologists are baffled by it since they can't find much about it other than a few accounts of it's splendor and wealth, but not too much evidence other than a lot of scatter sources. Then it turned out that the reason for this was because they were not one kingdom, but more like a loose patchwork of advanced tribes. In other words, what Chomsky often mentions. This is the bedrock that Iberian Anarchism was formed from. It can be found in pre-English Ireland, as well. Before the Flight of the Earls to Spain, Ireland had less centralized government. And a lot of their textile technology was stolen by England.
After Rome occupied the Celts of Spain, they finally admitted that they were never really Barbarians. According to a Greek/Roman historian they lived too well to be labeled as such and were more advanced in the metal works than Rome proper. And for the last golden years of Rome's history most of it's best leaders were of Iberian (Celtic) heritage.
It's a good bit of Celtic history that often goes unacknowledged because it's tied to Spain. And Spain's been all but wiped out of English and American history for a myriad of reasons.
Douglas Jack
Wonderful research. I'd like to add the 'economic' (Greek 'oikos' = 'home' + 'namein' = 'gift or service') engine of indigenous Celtic & all humanity's worldwide 'indigenous' (Latin 'self-generating') peoples, which is based in systematic intentionally planned: 1) multihome (Longhouse/apartment, Pueblo/townhouse & Kanata/village) living with designed privacy in the proximity of a critical mass of 100 people for collective female-male intergenerational collaboration. 2) time-based human-resource accounting on the string-shell (accounting tool & value measure) based in the specialized Production-Society/Guilds with universal progressive ownership for all over the course of their lifetimes. These 2 are the foundation of what the 'Haudenosaunee' (Iroquois 'People of the extended rafters or welcome') in NE US & Canada call the 'Kaianerekowa' ('Great-good-way-of-kindness') or the Nguni of southern Africa call 'Human-kindness'. Kindness forms the basis of indigenous nation constitutions. Petr Kropotkin (anarchist) correctly describes the Guild aspects of these in his descriptions of Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. @2 I'd love to look at this in detail with you. douglasf.jack@gmail.com
Douglas Jack
This website had trouble with the last weblinks which I included, but here they are again. If they don't work send me an email to douglasf.jack@gmail.com Celtic @3 Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. @2
John NoNameGibbon
That view is frankly ridiculous and backwards. Considering the vast majority of Americans today are White and Mexicans are clearly indigenous. I'd say the population that was wiped out was obviously those in English speaking America, not Mexico and Central America. Why do you think they aren't white? Magic?
That's a very strange view found in the US.
We romanticize our Natives because they barely exists. When we are confronted by swarms of ingenious people south of the border we pretend they aren't native as to rob them of their culture. That's called denial.
The very reason we don't like Mexicans is because they're too Indian looking.
Douglas Jack
1491 & 1493 are 2 books by Charles C. Mann who gives an ethnohistorical account collected from 1st Nation sources on the history of the Americas North, South & Central before & after invasion. These serve as a good overview with excellent references, upon which we can understand some substance beyond the colonial propaganda which negates 1st Nation sovereignty with 1000s of lies. Indigene Community compiles humanity's universal worldwide 'indigenous' (Latin 'self-generating') heritage including economy, food-growing & balances for peace & prosperity. The road forward is back-to-the-future.
John NoNameGibbon
Yes, but you have to see how bizarre claiming that our Natives (which makes no sense because they had more in common with our neighbors to the south than us culturally) are somehow more valiant and fought harder considering we have almost none left, while Mexico is chock-full of indigenous people. So much so that people there brag about having a distant white relative, while we here brag about a distant, often mythical, Native great grandparent.
It's just funny how backwards it all was.
Douglas Jack
I don't identify with the "valiant" statement. The invasion genocide brutality here on Turtle-Island, North-America still is atrocious in terms of 10s of 1000s of years of heritage, we disavow & try to erase. All humanity's 'indigenous' heritage is the core of being integral parts of life on earth. Each of us for that part of us from Europe or elsewhere in the world, need to understand the pain & tragedy which we carry around inside of us for the great loss of life capacity we have experienced & continue to grieve unconsciously. All US, Canadian, NATO, Israel violence which we create for others in our colonial consumption of the earth, is based in our subconscious desire to recreate the pain we have suffered in an attempt to make it tangible. Our goal should be to understand our stewardship role as primates on earth. Humans as primates are the stewards of the Polyculture Orchard, which is the operating climate-control, food, water, energy, materials, co-pilot species diversity system for spaceship earth.
deathtokoalas
you're on to something, but you're missing the thing we gloss over the most: there was actually large amounts of interbreeding between settlers and colonists - and on both sides of the frontier. instead of accepting this, we pretend we killed them all and replaced them. and, we certainly did kill a lot of them. but, we assimilated even more of them.
if you study the genetics in the native american population on the east coast, some populations have european genotypes of astonishing frequencies - upwards of 80% in some cases. the first giveaway is the r1b that dominates western europe and could not have come from any other source. the second is the blood types, which show influence from both europe and africa. if you look at colonial history carefully, you will see this constant stream of largely forgotten stories of europeans escaping the colonies to "join the indians". it was something that happened from the day we set foot here, this tendency to flee european civilization and escape into the wilderness. it's consistently kept track of in the margins - but there is never any attention drawn to it. and, it's left a dramatic genetic footprint. the english and french merged with the natives as much or more than we slaughtered them. but, it is immensely important that we don't know this, that we maintain the mental hierarchical separation of colonizer and colonized.
by contrast, the spaniards would not intermarry with anybody. they just slaughtered whole populations outright (under warped religious justifications), and enslaved what was left. and, they didn't really settle the areas to the same extent, either, and when they did it was to set up systems of exploitation that were broadly always seen as temporary. so, the natives were able to maintain their own identity, repopulate and eventually become majorities again in their own land, while in the north they became assimilated and have largely forgotten their identity.
if you take a walk through canada, and you know what to look for, it is easy to see that the so-called white population is almost entirely metis.
but, you really need to take it to the next level. because, it's not surprising and shouldn't be shocking. the judaic religions place human beings at the centre of the universe. the sun revolves around us, after all. and, so the eco-systems should revolve around us, too. shocking? far from it - it's what ought to be expected from the culmination of western culture. and, conversely, indigenous cultures tend to place themselves in a holistic balance with the systems around them. that's not to romanticize or exaggerate, but they don't take this judaic perspective of human beings being at the center of creation. they're consequently not warped by it.
John NoNameGibbon
Something curious about American culture regarding our weird settler-colony history is that we sort of gloss over the fact that we killed off all of our Natives. That's weird enough, but then we sort of exaggerate/distort the amount of Natives killed in neighboring countries like Mexico, to make ourselves seem better by comparison. We started calling people of native blood "latinos" to mask it recently, I noticed. The subject has always interested me. It shows our weird psychology.
xyZenTV
We call them 'Latinos' because they are no longer strictly native. Modern (Continental) Americans predominately have a mixture of Native American and European heritage. The real tragedy in all of this is not our ignorance of our history, but our ignorance of the ongoing difficulty facing modern Native Americans. It is a real tragedy that we are STILL turning a blind eye to the plight of the ancestors of the people from whom we stole our lands.
John NoNameGibbon
No country is strictly anything, but the vast majority are in fact Native. Which is the point. A more recent study on Mexico, for example, found that about sixty percent of the people tested were just Native. Thirty percent had some European in them, but it ranged from half to much less. Plus, even if they were half white, which really isn't the case for most people living south of us, they'd still be half Native. Most of the people we acknowledge as Native in our own reservations are much less than half. Yet we still consider them "Native". Why are they any different?
We apply a double standard to Mexicans and other Latin Americans, in my view, as an attempt to hide the obvious fact that they're by and large indigenous. It's kind of self-evident, yet we hide it. "Latino" still implies they're something other than Native.
And guess what? After hearing the terms Latino and Hispanic for the last half century, people have actually began denying the obvious. Most Mexicans and Latin Americans are offended when they hear that most people in the region are Native. It's a type of self-shaming that was encouraged by the terms.
They are no longer strictly Native in the same way Jamaicans and Haitians aren't strictly black. But most are. In my view that's an attempt to blow smoke and distort the obvious. And it works.
xyZenTV
That's interesting. Do you have sources for your claims that the majority in Mexican nationals are predominately native, and that most counted as natives on US reservations have only a small percentage of actual native heritage? I'd love to learn more about how much of the native population actually remains, and where they actually are.
John NoNameGibbon
A lot of this isn't and hasn't really been studied too well because as Chomsky would say, it's not the right question to ask in our society. You're suppose to assume that our Indians are Indians and theirs are somehow fake or illegitimate. And that's the way it's framed.
My reasoning comes from a study I read earlier this year by an American doctor (I think) living in Mexico who wanted to know their genetic makeup for medical reasons. I'll post it separately if I can find it again today, but I'm afraid Google might get rid of the comment because it has a link in it. And Google hates links. They assume it's spam.
As for our Natives actually being the real Mestizos (or much less than that), I arrived at the conclusion by studying our tribal blood quantum laws for Native Reservations. Often the standards are extremely laxed, bordering on absurd.
I'm not bashing US Natives and I understand that there is more to tribal affiliation than blood ties, but I can' help but see some purposeful distortion of facts there. It makes us feel better about exploiting their labor, I guess.
Yes, most of the Americas are still indigenous, though you won't hear that outside of a few anthropology circles that are in the know. It's sort of suppressed by both sides.
John willow
Don't forget that the U.S. basically stole about a third of Mexico. Of course, it offered Mexico a choice - sell us what is now the Southwest or we'll invade you and take it anyway.
John NoNameGibbon
Exactly. A lot of people say "Hey, John, we paid for that land fair and square, why do you frame it that way?"
And I have to remind them that we did it at gunpoint. Like all conquerors.
Code Python
C'mon John. We could have taken it all. Instead we paid 15 million for the southwest. Add in the 100 million to wage the war (not to mention about 14,000 lives lost) and we got the entire southwest for the bargain basement price of about $3.5 billion in today's dollars. But that was when imperialism paid. Today we spend 2-3 trillion dollars on one country in the middle east and have nothing to show for it except a lot of extra debt.
Curious? What do you mean curious? Kind of like we committed genocide on an entire race of millions like Hitler, but pretty much completed the job? Or curious like we did it all in the name of god like a jihadist would?
John NoNameGibbon
Curious like we casual dismiss it ever occurred and ironically act like our more Native neighbors to the south were somehow guiltier of Indian killing than us, despite us being white and them being Indian still.
Curious as in insane. Perhaps like a fox.
Jared Lupton
if we killed them all off, how are they still here. But I get your point- most of them were killed off.
John NoNameGibbon
We virtually killed them all off, which is a feat that would make Hitler blush. Latin Americans were saved because they were outside of our borders. Notice most of our more pure looking American reservations used to be Mexican?
Douglas Jack
What is at stake in how people of the whole world view ourselves. Whether we consider ourselves from within the very recent colonial 'exogenous' (Latin 'other-generated') submissive frame or from all humanity's true ancient roots as 'indigenous' (L 'self-generating') peoples in our traditions of free & equal sovereignty. Europeans forget our indigenous Celtic traditions pre-Semite, Greek & Roman violence and we in turn have beat it out of just about everyone & everywhere we have gone as ecological-economic refugees from our war-torn Europe. Rediscovering our ancestor's indigenous knowledge of abundant polyculture orchards & peaceful relations is what we need to restore the earth & peace among us. If humanity musters only colonial subservience, then life is lost. www.indigenecommunity.info
John NoNameGibbon
You're referring to first nations style cultures? Yes, they, ironically, seem to be the only ones interested in democracy and preserving nature. And, yes, I study Iberian history (Southwestern Europe) and though people tend to view them as Latin Europeans, they're actually originally Celts. And that is the bedrock of where Spain developed its anarchistic traditions. They almost beat Rome without a central government. And Rome stole a lot of technology and battle formations from them shamelessly. So that runs deep in Western European culture. But it was beaten out of most of the culture in Britain and Ireland.
Douglas Jack
Please share more about your studies of the Celtic Appenine & Iberian peninsula's before their original colonization & perversion into violent empires. Humanity's worldwide 'sylvalizations' were sustainable, abundant, peaceful & collectively-intelligent The problem of violent colonization has subverted human memory & will to unjust hierarchy. Never before in human history have people known so little about human heritage & how to pilot spaceship earth & its life support systems. Here's a section on Economic Democracy upon which all indigenous peoples founded political democracy as a subset. @8
John NoNameGibbon
I've been studying the region mostly for fun since I was in high school. I noticed that a lot of the history of Spain was buried by England and we inherited English history and their slant on it, so most Americans know very little of the region. We study Britain, but never Spain.
The thing that stood out to me about the anarchistic nature of Spain's early Celtic culture was the fabled kingdom of Tartessos. Archaeologists are baffled by it since they can't find much about it other than a few accounts of it's splendor and wealth, but not too much evidence other than a lot of scatter sources. Then it turned out that the reason for this was because they were not one kingdom, but more like a loose patchwork of advanced tribes. In other words, what Chomsky often mentions. This is the bedrock that Iberian Anarchism was formed from. It can be found in pre-English Ireland, as well. Before the Flight of the Earls to Spain, Ireland had less centralized government. And a lot of their textile technology was stolen by England.
After Rome occupied the Celts of Spain, they finally admitted that they were never really Barbarians. According to a Greek/Roman historian they lived too well to be labeled as such and were more advanced in the metal works than Rome proper. And for the last golden years of Rome's history most of it's best leaders were of Iberian (Celtic) heritage.
It's a good bit of Celtic history that often goes unacknowledged because it's tied to Spain. And Spain's been all but wiped out of English and American history for a myriad of reasons.
Douglas Jack
Wonderful research. I'd like to add the 'economic' (Greek 'oikos' = 'home' + 'namein' = 'gift or service') engine of indigenous Celtic & all humanity's worldwide 'indigenous' (Latin 'self-generating') peoples, which is based in systematic intentionally planned: 1) multihome (Longhouse/apartment, Pueblo/townhouse & Kanata/village) living with designed privacy in the proximity of a critical mass of 100 people for collective female-male intergenerational collaboration. 2) time-based human-resource accounting on the string-shell (accounting tool & value measure) based in the specialized Production-Society/Guilds with universal progressive ownership for all over the course of their lifetimes. These 2 are the foundation of what the 'Haudenosaunee' (Iroquois 'People of the extended rafters or welcome') in NE US & Canada call the 'Kaianerekowa' ('Great-good-way-of-kindness') or the Nguni of southern Africa call 'Human-kindness'. Kindness forms the basis of indigenous nation constitutions. Petr Kropotkin (anarchist) correctly describes the Guild aspects of these in his descriptions of Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. @2 I'd love to look at this in detail with you. douglasf.jack@gmail.com
Douglas Jack
This website had trouble with the last weblinks which I included, but here they are again. If they don't work send me an email to douglasf.jack@gmail.com Celtic @3 Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. @2
John NoNameGibbon
That view is frankly ridiculous and backwards. Considering the vast majority of Americans today are White and Mexicans are clearly indigenous. I'd say the population that was wiped out was obviously those in English speaking America, not Mexico and Central America. Why do you think they aren't white? Magic?
That's a very strange view found in the US.
We romanticize our Natives because they barely exists. When we are confronted by swarms of ingenious people south of the border we pretend they aren't native as to rob them of their culture. That's called denial.
The very reason we don't like Mexicans is because they're too Indian looking.
Douglas Jack
1491 & 1493 are 2 books by Charles C. Mann who gives an ethnohistorical account collected from 1st Nation sources on the history of the Americas North, South & Central before & after invasion. These serve as a good overview with excellent references, upon which we can understand some substance beyond the colonial propaganda which negates 1st Nation sovereignty with 1000s of lies. Indigene Community compiles humanity's universal worldwide 'indigenous' (Latin 'self-generating') heritage including economy, food-growing & balances for peace & prosperity. The road forward is back-to-the-future.
John NoNameGibbon
Yes, but you have to see how bizarre claiming that our Natives (which makes no sense because they had more in common with our neighbors to the south than us culturally) are somehow more valiant and fought harder considering we have almost none left, while Mexico is chock-full of indigenous people. So much so that people there brag about having a distant white relative, while we here brag about a distant, often mythical, Native great grandparent.
It's just funny how backwards it all was.
Douglas Jack
I don't identify with the "valiant" statement. The invasion genocide brutality here on Turtle-Island, North-America still is atrocious in terms of 10s of 1000s of years of heritage, we disavow & try to erase. All humanity's 'indigenous' heritage is the core of being integral parts of life on earth. Each of us for that part of us from Europe or elsewhere in the world, need to understand the pain & tragedy which we carry around inside of us for the great loss of life capacity we have experienced & continue to grieve unconsciously. All US, Canadian, NATO, Israel violence which we create for others in our colonial consumption of the earth, is based in our subconscious desire to recreate the pain we have suffered in an attempt to make it tangible. Our goal should be to understand our stewardship role as primates on earth. Humans as primates are the stewards of the Polyculture Orchard, which is the operating climate-control, food, water, energy, materials, co-pilot species diversity system for spaceship earth.
deathtokoalas
you're on to something, but you're missing the thing we gloss over the most: there was actually large amounts of interbreeding between settlers and colonists - and on both sides of the frontier. instead of accepting this, we pretend we killed them all and replaced them. and, we certainly did kill a lot of them. but, we assimilated even more of them.
if you study the genetics in the native american population on the east coast, some populations have european genotypes of astonishing frequencies - upwards of 80% in some cases. the first giveaway is the r1b that dominates western europe and could not have come from any other source. the second is the blood types, which show influence from both europe and africa. if you look at colonial history carefully, you will see this constant stream of largely forgotten stories of europeans escaping the colonies to "join the indians". it was something that happened from the day we set foot here, this tendency to flee european civilization and escape into the wilderness. it's consistently kept track of in the margins - but there is never any attention drawn to it. and, it's left a dramatic genetic footprint. the english and french merged with the natives as much or more than we slaughtered them. but, it is immensely important that we don't know this, that we maintain the mental hierarchical separation of colonizer and colonized.
by contrast, the spaniards would not intermarry with anybody. they just slaughtered whole populations outright (under warped religious justifications), and enslaved what was left. and, they didn't really settle the areas to the same extent, either, and when they did it was to set up systems of exploitation that were broadly always seen as temporary. so, the natives were able to maintain their own identity, repopulate and eventually become majorities again in their own land, while in the north they became assimilated and have largely forgotten their identity.
if you take a walk through canada, and you know what to look for, it is easy to see that the so-called white population is almost entirely metis.
at
00:10
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Saturday, September 5, 2015
harper is actually hard to place on the american spectrum. the reason is that canadian conservatism is historical toryism, although he's coming out of a merger of historical toryism with a movement in canada called social credit. the result is that he's actually pushing what is somewhat of a novel political position even in canada. it's probably best to look at these two ideas separately.
historical toryism is something that probably needs to be explained to americans, because it itself will not make sense to american conservatives. that probably has to do with it's founder's role (edmund burke) in the american revolution, which was a confusing mess that got him despised by everybody. but, it's based on this idea of class harmony through obedience to authority. everybody in their right place, and everybody knowing their right place and everybody respecting everybody else's place. god and country and king. over time, this morphed into what americans would more readily identify as nanny-state socialism; first bismarck and then churchill advocated massive government-controlled social systems. in canada, the conservatives' primary defining policy position for the first half of the twentieth century was it's opposition to free trade, in support of the british cartel system (the "crony capitalist" mercantilist system). in the 60s, the canadian tories actually supported single payer health care when it was introduced and wrote the bill of rights that became the core of our very, very liberal constitution in the early 80s. in the 70s, they campaigned on "wage and price controls" that were state restrictions on inflation - total market interference at the most fundamental level. and, they even supported marijuana decriminalization. they were against markets, in favour of individual freedom and yet maintained a mild level of social conservatism regarding the role of tradition and religion.
the social credit movement is something a little different. it was based on some weird economic ideas that were a kind of watered down marxism and argued that what marx called surplus value should be collected by the state in taxes and redistributed to the population as a dividend. not very conservative in american terms, but not that weird in the context of a society where the right is british toryism. but, when the movement got off the ground in western canada, it quickly became a right-wing christian movement and the economic side of it was mostly forgotten. the guy that built this movement was nicknamed "bible bill". that should give you a good idea of what social credit was all about. social credit never came close to forming a government in canada, and never existed in any coalition, but it sometimes elected enough mps to be the third largest party. it could often get over 20% of the vote.
by a fluke of history, social credit got it's one shot at being important in 1979. the liberals won the popular vote, but the conservatives won more seats in the house of commons. it was, however, not enough to govern - it was a handful of seats short. a conservative-ndp or conservative-liberal coalition was out of the question. that meant that the conservatives' only chance of forming a government was to enter into a coalition with social credit, and the conservative leader of the time refused to do so - for good reasons. social credit was also associated strongly with anti-semitism. whatever the consequences, it is hard to criticize joe clark for rejecting them as a coalition partner. instead, he decided to try and govern as though he had a majority. this did not last long, because he did not have a majority, and his attacks on social credit alienated them.
but, this decision killed social credit. their right-wing base began to understand that, by voting social credit, they were electing liberals. at the same time, the thatcher revolution began to have some effect on the tories; they began to adopt some neo-liberal economic positions, although it was never to the scope of the tories in britain or the republicans in the united states. partly on the back of traditional social credit voters, the conservatives won a large majority in 1984 and a smaller one in 1988.
but, those social credit voters were turned off by the tories at almost the same time as they entered office. remember: the tories were not a socially conservative party, and social credit was. by the 1988 election, they had recreated themselves under a new party called "reform" (led by the son of a former social credit leader) that dropped the difficult associations that social credit had and attempted to position itself as a socially conservative, neo-liberal alternative to the socially liberal and only tentatively neo-liberal tories. stephen harper is a creature of this socred/reform movement, rather than a creature of the old tories. and, you can see this in his policies.
the conservatives were destroyed in 1993; they went from a majority in parliament to two seats. yes. two seats. that was it. the reform party won a large number of seats in the western part of the country. this was largely the consequence of western voters feeling that the tories were too liberal. but, the result of that, for many years, was that eastern voters refused to vote for the reform party because they were too conservative. it's a real cultural issue that splits the country less in half and more into rural and urban components. from 1993 to 2003, canada had two conservative parties - the old tories (who were only competitive in the east, and never won more than 20 seats) and the new reform/socred party (who dominated the west of the country).
realizing that they'd never win an election like this, the tories and reform party merged in 2003. at the time, stephen harper was the leader of the socially conservative reform faction, which was seen by most of the country as taking over the right - much to the chagrin of old tories.
but, where harper stood was always sort of a mystery. it really was. the liberals ran ads talking of a "hidden agenda", and they worked because nobody really knew where this guy stood. when he first started off, he was kind of a right-libertarian like ron paul. not exactly. he held some neo-conservative foreign policy views. but he was running a party that was primarily built around the anti-abortion vote, and that probably won power primarily on reaction to the gay marriage ruling. it was never clear if he was going to fold to that pressure or try and hold it off long enough to move his party back into the old tory space. it turns out that he's done neither - he's swung the party towards the republicans in the united states.
which is not to compare him to rick santorum. but, he is clearly not the reform/socred social conservative that people feared - he has ruled out any action on marriage equality, abortion, the death penalty and all the other things that, in truth, continue to drive his voter base. although if you look at his tax policies, they look a little like dividends. he's got a tax credit for anything you could imagine. he mails out billions of dollars in checks every year in subsidies, for everything from child care to volunteering at kiwanis. nor is he the old protectionist, liberal tory. he's tough on crime, even if it's largely a mirage. he's staunchly neo-liberal in economic persuasion.
but, he's very aligned with the american neo-cons on foreign policy. he basically rejects climate change, and, really, a lot of science. he has no attachment to truth; he's very rovian, in that way. he's brought in patriot act type legislation. and, while he hasn't gutted the social services, he's taken steps to slowly claw them back. he wants to starve the beast in increments, not cut the cord immediately. it's lulled a lot of people into a sense of false complacency. it's meant to.
what he's been trying to do is redefine this kind of republicanism-lite as the new canadian right by holding everybody in place and slowly easing people into it. from a distance, it may seem moderate. but, this is a big change from what the canadian right once was. and, it's still not clear whether he's succeeded in this task, or merely set himself up for a crash. the conservatives, as they exist, will forever be teetering on the brink of collapse back into old tory and socred factions. and, in the meantime, the liberals seem to have done a relatively good job in pulling socially liberal tories out and cementing them into their own base. if he loses power, his entire plan is likely done as the stack of cards falls apart.
so, putting him to the left of hillary clinton is pretty wrong. they're not far apart on foreign policy, but she's to his left on pretty much everything else. he's more like a new york republican: a tad right of giuliani. or a slightly less bellicose trump.
putting him a tad to the right of giuliani sounds moderate.
but the previous conservative prime minister, brian mulroney, was somewhere in the spectrum that's more comparable to tony blair.
and, the one before that (john diefenbaker) was truly broadly comparable to bernie sanders.
historical toryism is something that probably needs to be explained to americans, because it itself will not make sense to american conservatives. that probably has to do with it's founder's role (edmund burke) in the american revolution, which was a confusing mess that got him despised by everybody. but, it's based on this idea of class harmony through obedience to authority. everybody in their right place, and everybody knowing their right place and everybody respecting everybody else's place. god and country and king. over time, this morphed into what americans would more readily identify as nanny-state socialism; first bismarck and then churchill advocated massive government-controlled social systems. in canada, the conservatives' primary defining policy position for the first half of the twentieth century was it's opposition to free trade, in support of the british cartel system (the "crony capitalist" mercantilist system). in the 60s, the canadian tories actually supported single payer health care when it was introduced and wrote the bill of rights that became the core of our very, very liberal constitution in the early 80s. in the 70s, they campaigned on "wage and price controls" that were state restrictions on inflation - total market interference at the most fundamental level. and, they even supported marijuana decriminalization. they were against markets, in favour of individual freedom and yet maintained a mild level of social conservatism regarding the role of tradition and religion.
the social credit movement is something a little different. it was based on some weird economic ideas that were a kind of watered down marxism and argued that what marx called surplus value should be collected by the state in taxes and redistributed to the population as a dividend. not very conservative in american terms, but not that weird in the context of a society where the right is british toryism. but, when the movement got off the ground in western canada, it quickly became a right-wing christian movement and the economic side of it was mostly forgotten. the guy that built this movement was nicknamed "bible bill". that should give you a good idea of what social credit was all about. social credit never came close to forming a government in canada, and never existed in any coalition, but it sometimes elected enough mps to be the third largest party. it could often get over 20% of the vote.
by a fluke of history, social credit got it's one shot at being important in 1979. the liberals won the popular vote, but the conservatives won more seats in the house of commons. it was, however, not enough to govern - it was a handful of seats short. a conservative-ndp or conservative-liberal coalition was out of the question. that meant that the conservatives' only chance of forming a government was to enter into a coalition with social credit, and the conservative leader of the time refused to do so - for good reasons. social credit was also associated strongly with anti-semitism. whatever the consequences, it is hard to criticize joe clark for rejecting them as a coalition partner. instead, he decided to try and govern as though he had a majority. this did not last long, because he did not have a majority, and his attacks on social credit alienated them.
but, this decision killed social credit. their right-wing base began to understand that, by voting social credit, they were electing liberals. at the same time, the thatcher revolution began to have some effect on the tories; they began to adopt some neo-liberal economic positions, although it was never to the scope of the tories in britain or the republicans in the united states. partly on the back of traditional social credit voters, the conservatives won a large majority in 1984 and a smaller one in 1988.
but, those social credit voters were turned off by the tories at almost the same time as they entered office. remember: the tories were not a socially conservative party, and social credit was. by the 1988 election, they had recreated themselves under a new party called "reform" (led by the son of a former social credit leader) that dropped the difficult associations that social credit had and attempted to position itself as a socially conservative, neo-liberal alternative to the socially liberal and only tentatively neo-liberal tories. stephen harper is a creature of this socred/reform movement, rather than a creature of the old tories. and, you can see this in his policies.
the conservatives were destroyed in 1993; they went from a majority in parliament to two seats. yes. two seats. that was it. the reform party won a large number of seats in the western part of the country. this was largely the consequence of western voters feeling that the tories were too liberal. but, the result of that, for many years, was that eastern voters refused to vote for the reform party because they were too conservative. it's a real cultural issue that splits the country less in half and more into rural and urban components. from 1993 to 2003, canada had two conservative parties - the old tories (who were only competitive in the east, and never won more than 20 seats) and the new reform/socred party (who dominated the west of the country).
realizing that they'd never win an election like this, the tories and reform party merged in 2003. at the time, stephen harper was the leader of the socially conservative reform faction, which was seen by most of the country as taking over the right - much to the chagrin of old tories.
but, where harper stood was always sort of a mystery. it really was. the liberals ran ads talking of a "hidden agenda", and they worked because nobody really knew where this guy stood. when he first started off, he was kind of a right-libertarian like ron paul. not exactly. he held some neo-conservative foreign policy views. but he was running a party that was primarily built around the anti-abortion vote, and that probably won power primarily on reaction to the gay marriage ruling. it was never clear if he was going to fold to that pressure or try and hold it off long enough to move his party back into the old tory space. it turns out that he's done neither - he's swung the party towards the republicans in the united states.
which is not to compare him to rick santorum. but, he is clearly not the reform/socred social conservative that people feared - he has ruled out any action on marriage equality, abortion, the death penalty and all the other things that, in truth, continue to drive his voter base. although if you look at his tax policies, they look a little like dividends. he's got a tax credit for anything you could imagine. he mails out billions of dollars in checks every year in subsidies, for everything from child care to volunteering at kiwanis. nor is he the old protectionist, liberal tory. he's tough on crime, even if it's largely a mirage. he's staunchly neo-liberal in economic persuasion.
but, he's very aligned with the american neo-cons on foreign policy. he basically rejects climate change, and, really, a lot of science. he has no attachment to truth; he's very rovian, in that way. he's brought in patriot act type legislation. and, while he hasn't gutted the social services, he's taken steps to slowly claw them back. he wants to starve the beast in increments, not cut the cord immediately. it's lulled a lot of people into a sense of false complacency. it's meant to.
what he's been trying to do is redefine this kind of republicanism-lite as the new canadian right by holding everybody in place and slowly easing people into it. from a distance, it may seem moderate. but, this is a big change from what the canadian right once was. and, it's still not clear whether he's succeeded in this task, or merely set himself up for a crash. the conservatives, as they exist, will forever be teetering on the brink of collapse back into old tory and socred factions. and, in the meantime, the liberals seem to have done a relatively good job in pulling socially liberal tories out and cementing them into their own base. if he loses power, his entire plan is likely done as the stack of cards falls apart.
so, putting him to the left of hillary clinton is pretty wrong. they're not far apart on foreign policy, but she's to his left on pretty much everything else. he's more like a new york republican: a tad right of giuliani. or a slightly less bellicose trump.
putting him a tad to the right of giuliani sounds moderate.
but the previous conservative prime minister, brian mulroney, was somewhere in the spectrum that's more comparable to tony blair.
and, the one before that (john diefenbaker) was truly broadly comparable to bernie sanders.
at
04:18
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i've tried to express this perspective whenever i can. and, it's a hard truth, but she's absolutely right.
at
03:47
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
or, it could be that the seeming inability to alter certain experiments at the subatomic level implies that the universe is fixed into a single set out of outcomes, and we are all playing out a script that is predetermined. the uncertainty principle does not necessarily state that these outcomes are unpredictable. it does, however, necessarily state that these outcomes are inalterable. it's somewhat of a misnomer. it should be called the certainty principle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncOGU90e1mI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncOGU90e1mI
at
03:28
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
this is a kind of a mainstream, right-wing narrative. the ndp are neither likely to oppose the pipelines nor the tpp. that's just conservative party propaganda. it's kind of like when republicans call obama a socialist.
the ndp's position on the pipelines is that they want to use the environmental review processes to shut down the opposition. they're clear as day about it. it's a pr strategy for the oil industry. what they want are these review processes that they can take out and wave in front of the crowd and say "look. we studied it. it's safe. we're building it.". but, the liberals are not a progressive option on pipelines, either - although they are probably a better option on investment in green infrastructure. this has been a big election issue in canada for several years, coming out of the liberals trying to swallow the greens in 2008 by adopting almost their entire platform. the ndp have tended to lean towards carbon trading ideas (which everybody knows don't work), while the liberals have toyed with carbon taxes, rewrites of the tax code to penalize heavy carbon users, subsidizing renewable industry and other things of the sort - which are all classical liberal economics ideas, remember. all three parties will try to build pipelines; this is not an issue on the table. but, the liberals are the better bet for trying to position us moving out of a carbon economy. think of it like this: the liberals don't want to bite this, but they want to put things in motion for the future. the ndp want to reroute the tax money towards services. it doesn't make sense to boost taxes on oil companies and then try and shut them down; if you're boosting taxes, you want to help the companies grow - that's why you're boosting taxes, to get higher revenue streams.
but, here's some good news: alberta crude is low quality. it sells at about $20 less than texas crude. that means it's currently selling around $20. but, it's also very expensive to make and very expensive to transport. on top of that, there is massive indigenous opposition to the pipelines. the pipelines may not get built due to a combination of legal headaches and a lack of profitability. and, it's in that context that ideas to move past carbon should take precedence.
but, ironically, the conservative propaganda seems to be drowning out the reality. they keep calling the ndp anti-oil and making a big stink about it. and, despite the fact that it's not actually true, it's probably helping them substantially. it's a function of how out of touch the government is.
the only serious possible wrench is related to syria. both the liberals and the ndp will probably remove themselves from active combat. on a smaller note, they're both likely to legalize marijuana outright (although the ndp are calling from decriminalization & study, and the liberals are calling for immediate legalization). nowadays, i think that's less of a major concern than it was before. we came close to legalization in the early 00s, but the bush administration essentially vetoed it (not legally, but through threats).
i also need to point out that it really hasn't been a two party state. the ndp has never held power, but they've had huge amounts of influence. for example, back in the early 70s, they got the liberals to nationalize the oil industry in exchange for supporting the budget. yeah. we had a state oil company until the 80s, when the conservatives spun it back off. and, it was the ndp's refusal to support what was really a pretty good liberal budget that got us into this conservative mess (because they didn't want that pretty good liberal budget to pass, because they felt that would hurt them).
but, the ndp doesn't talk like that anymore. they would prefer trade agreements with countries that have comparable labour standards. but, they've made it clear as day that they will sign the tpp and they will support oil pipelines - although they'd rather pipe it to new brunswick so they can build refineries in the country. and, they're running on a platform of fiscal conservatism: functional cuts to health care (that's perennially an important election issue in canada) and balanced budgets.
the actual reason the ndp have been ahead in the polls is that they've managed to confuse people about an anti-terrorism bill, called c-51. it has the kind of government spying provisions in it that nobody likes. now, the conservatives had a majority at the time it was tabled, so it was going to pass, regardless. the liberals took the position of opposing the bill, but trying to make amendments to it. the ndp took the position of opposing the bill, and then politicking around the liberal amendments. the result is that the public gets the impression that the liberals supported the bill and the ndp opposed it, even though they basically have the same position on it. this resulted in a big swing from the liberals to the ndp that hasn't yet receded, but may be starting to. the corporate media has refused to talk about this, and instead points to everything else you could imagine - the alberta election, conservative ads, trudeau's comments on syria, even marijuana legalization (which actually has ~80% support). so, even the narrative as to why the ndp is ahead is warped by the conservative-dominated media. the actual truth is c-51.
i'll tell you a way that the liberal democrats could win in texas: run a right-wing independent. the alberta election had three major parties:
- the wildrose party (tea-party style hard right)
- the conservative party (they're moderate republicans/democrats in alberta)
- the ndp (they're not very left-wing in alberta, either)
a lot of ridings had the conservatives and wildrose get as much as 65% of the vote between them, which let the ndp sneak through on the split. it wasn't a shift in public support, it was just vote splitting on the right.
as an aside, the greens are in clear opposition to the chapter 11 style sections of the tpp. and, they could get close to 10%.
the ndp's position on the pipelines is that they want to use the environmental review processes to shut down the opposition. they're clear as day about it. it's a pr strategy for the oil industry. what they want are these review processes that they can take out and wave in front of the crowd and say "look. we studied it. it's safe. we're building it.". but, the liberals are not a progressive option on pipelines, either - although they are probably a better option on investment in green infrastructure. this has been a big election issue in canada for several years, coming out of the liberals trying to swallow the greens in 2008 by adopting almost their entire platform. the ndp have tended to lean towards carbon trading ideas (which everybody knows don't work), while the liberals have toyed with carbon taxes, rewrites of the tax code to penalize heavy carbon users, subsidizing renewable industry and other things of the sort - which are all classical liberal economics ideas, remember. all three parties will try to build pipelines; this is not an issue on the table. but, the liberals are the better bet for trying to position us moving out of a carbon economy. think of it like this: the liberals don't want to bite this, but they want to put things in motion for the future. the ndp want to reroute the tax money towards services. it doesn't make sense to boost taxes on oil companies and then try and shut them down; if you're boosting taxes, you want to help the companies grow - that's why you're boosting taxes, to get higher revenue streams.
but, here's some good news: alberta crude is low quality. it sells at about $20 less than texas crude. that means it's currently selling around $20. but, it's also very expensive to make and very expensive to transport. on top of that, there is massive indigenous opposition to the pipelines. the pipelines may not get built due to a combination of legal headaches and a lack of profitability. and, it's in that context that ideas to move past carbon should take precedence.
but, ironically, the conservative propaganda seems to be drowning out the reality. they keep calling the ndp anti-oil and making a big stink about it. and, despite the fact that it's not actually true, it's probably helping them substantially. it's a function of how out of touch the government is.
the only serious possible wrench is related to syria. both the liberals and the ndp will probably remove themselves from active combat. on a smaller note, they're both likely to legalize marijuana outright (although the ndp are calling from decriminalization & study, and the liberals are calling for immediate legalization). nowadays, i think that's less of a major concern than it was before. we came close to legalization in the early 00s, but the bush administration essentially vetoed it (not legally, but through threats).
i also need to point out that it really hasn't been a two party state. the ndp has never held power, but they've had huge amounts of influence. for example, back in the early 70s, they got the liberals to nationalize the oil industry in exchange for supporting the budget. yeah. we had a state oil company until the 80s, when the conservatives spun it back off. and, it was the ndp's refusal to support what was really a pretty good liberal budget that got us into this conservative mess (because they didn't want that pretty good liberal budget to pass, because they felt that would hurt them).
but, the ndp doesn't talk like that anymore. they would prefer trade agreements with countries that have comparable labour standards. but, they've made it clear as day that they will sign the tpp and they will support oil pipelines - although they'd rather pipe it to new brunswick so they can build refineries in the country. and, they're running on a platform of fiscal conservatism: functional cuts to health care (that's perennially an important election issue in canada) and balanced budgets.
the actual reason the ndp have been ahead in the polls is that they've managed to confuse people about an anti-terrorism bill, called c-51. it has the kind of government spying provisions in it that nobody likes. now, the conservatives had a majority at the time it was tabled, so it was going to pass, regardless. the liberals took the position of opposing the bill, but trying to make amendments to it. the ndp took the position of opposing the bill, and then politicking around the liberal amendments. the result is that the public gets the impression that the liberals supported the bill and the ndp opposed it, even though they basically have the same position on it. this resulted in a big swing from the liberals to the ndp that hasn't yet receded, but may be starting to. the corporate media has refused to talk about this, and instead points to everything else you could imagine - the alberta election, conservative ads, trudeau's comments on syria, even marijuana legalization (which actually has ~80% support). so, even the narrative as to why the ndp is ahead is warped by the conservative-dominated media. the actual truth is c-51.
i'll tell you a way that the liberal democrats could win in texas: run a right-wing independent. the alberta election had three major parties:
- the wildrose party (tea-party style hard right)
- the conservative party (they're moderate republicans/democrats in alberta)
- the ndp (they're not very left-wing in alberta, either)
a lot of ridings had the conservatives and wildrose get as much as 65% of the vote between them, which let the ndp sneak through on the split. it wasn't a shift in public support, it was just vote splitting on the right.
as an aside, the greens are in clear opposition to the chapter 11 style sections of the tpp. and, they could get close to 10%.
at
02:14
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
this is the kind of vague, substanceless fluff that the ndp have spent the last ten years accusing the liberals of. i don't know if i'd say it's useless enough to turn people off, exactly. but, it's certainly not going to convince anybody.
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/05/ndp-ad-thomas-mulcair-ready-family_n_8094308.html
Propaganda Con Job
It's too bad Mulcair is boycotting the largest Consortium debate, broadcast on the 3 major TV networks, seen by the most Canadians.
Like Harper, Mulcair likes to push propaganda Con Jobs,
but they don't like to debate their questionable policies with the oposition leaders, in front of Canadians.
Karen Lund
Without Harper in the debates. the center/left is left with debating was is different in their platform which is minor and divisive compared to the corruption and fascist leaning of the conservatives. Job#1 is to get rid of Harper and get back Canada. Dividing the center/left plays into his agenda.
Propaganda Con Job
there are big differences in the Liberal & NDP platforms. Mulcair needs to be a man and show up.
Mulcair's promise to lower the threshold for Quebec to separate and Canada to break up, is not minor.
I believe Canadians would be very interested in Mulcair's response to the Bloc, since Mulcair has been evasive with Trudeau, in answering his pro-separation policy.
Trudeau, May & the Bloc are willing to show up and demonstrate what a looser Harper is for ducking questions, but Mulcair shows he's just as conniving.
If Job#1 is too get rid of Con artists, then Mulcair needs to show up.
But because Mulcair is also a Con artist like Harper, he hides in the shadows with him.
Mulcair took the "D" out of NDP.
Jessica Amber Murray
let's drop the chauvinism, please. you can make your point without it.
mulcair has not given me a lot of reasons to think he'd be very different than harper. see, and what's worse is that i'm entirely aware that he's done that on purpose - he's running as harper, because he seems to think that running as harper is the way to win the election. which suggests that he seems to think we actually want to carry on with harper.
i'm consequently not currently feeling much of a drive to vote strategically. it's actually left me rather cynical about the process. the ndp base has worked pretty hard to present an alternative to canadians, and in the end the party leadership has taken that away from us and given us a carbon copy of harper.
my comment was related to the ad. i've already made up my mind that i'm not voting for this party. but, i don't know who this is targeted at, besides perhaps a certain subset of the senior vote that harper currently owns.
www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/05/ndp-ad-thomas-mulcair-ready-family_n_8094308.html
Propaganda Con Job
It's too bad Mulcair is boycotting the largest Consortium debate, broadcast on the 3 major TV networks, seen by the most Canadians.
Like Harper, Mulcair likes to push propaganda Con Jobs,
but they don't like to debate their questionable policies with the oposition leaders, in front of Canadians.
Karen Lund
Without Harper in the debates. the center/left is left with debating was is different in their platform which is minor and divisive compared to the corruption and fascist leaning of the conservatives. Job#1 is to get rid of Harper and get back Canada. Dividing the center/left plays into his agenda.
Propaganda Con Job
there are big differences in the Liberal & NDP platforms. Mulcair needs to be a man and show up.
Mulcair's promise to lower the threshold for Quebec to separate and Canada to break up, is not minor.
I believe Canadians would be very interested in Mulcair's response to the Bloc, since Mulcair has been evasive with Trudeau, in answering his pro-separation policy.
Trudeau, May & the Bloc are willing to show up and demonstrate what a looser Harper is for ducking questions, but Mulcair shows he's just as conniving.
If Job#1 is too get rid of Con artists, then Mulcair needs to show up.
But because Mulcair is also a Con artist like Harper, he hides in the shadows with him.
Mulcair took the "D" out of NDP.
Jessica Amber Murray
let's drop the chauvinism, please. you can make your point without it.
mulcair has not given me a lot of reasons to think he'd be very different than harper. see, and what's worse is that i'm entirely aware that he's done that on purpose - he's running as harper, because he seems to think that running as harper is the way to win the election. which suggests that he seems to think we actually want to carry on with harper.
i'm consequently not currently feeling much of a drive to vote strategically. it's actually left me rather cynical about the process. the ndp base has worked pretty hard to present an alternative to canadians, and in the end the party leadership has taken that away from us and given us a carbon copy of harper.
my comment was related to the ad. i've already made up my mind that i'm not voting for this party. but, i don't know who this is targeted at, besides perhaps a certain subset of the senior vote that harper currently owns.
at
01:01
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
they all support "free trade".
they all support pipelines.
they all support keeping corporate tax rates stupidly low.
they all support militarism and war (although they may have mild disagreements on tactics)
they are all right of centre neo-liberal capitalist parties. it's just a difference of scale.
globalnews.ca/news/2204193/poll-shows-40-of-voters-think-ndp-liberals-tories-are-basically-the-same-thats-good-news-for-harper/
they all support pipelines.
they all support keeping corporate tax rates stupidly low.
they all support militarism and war (although they may have mild disagreements on tactics)
they are all right of centre neo-liberal capitalist parties. it's just a difference of scale.
globalnews.ca/news/2204193/poll-shows-40-of-voters-think-ndp-liberals-tories-are-basically-the-same-thats-good-news-for-harper/
at
00:33
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
the results are about what i'd expect; maybe a little less progressive, but in the right range. this isn't one of the issues i'd expect to get in a fight with *practicing* christians about either; they're generally egalitarians, it's baked right into the religion.
but, see, what i was concerned about was that 40% of liberals and dippers that are opposed to their party's positions, because i think we all know, from experience, how intense people can get about this. normally left-leaning people that tick off every box on the leftist checksheet can just get incensed about this.
if you're me, you want to support politicians on an issue like this. you really do. but, it just seemed like they were walking into a minefield of public opinion that they had little apparent recognition of. it would be heartbreaking to lose the election on a good intention.
thankfully, harper has been moderate on this point. the polling results are in spite of harper, not because of him.
but, i remain concerned that this has opened up a swing vote that, frankly, none of the major parties are going to want. no: kenny doesn't want your nonsense, either. and, i'd like to see the media move past it.
(link lost)
but, see, what i was concerned about was that 40% of liberals and dippers that are opposed to their party's positions, because i think we all know, from experience, how intense people can get about this. normally left-leaning people that tick off every box on the leftist checksheet can just get incensed about this.
if you're me, you want to support politicians on an issue like this. you really do. but, it just seemed like they were walking into a minefield of public opinion that they had little apparent recognition of. it would be heartbreaking to lose the election on a good intention.
thankfully, harper has been moderate on this point. the polling results are in spite of harper, not because of him.
but, i remain concerned that this has opened up a swing vote that, frankly, none of the major parties are going to want. no: kenny doesn't want your nonsense, either. and, i'd like to see the media move past it.
(link lost)
at
00:03
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Friday, September 4, 2015
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.
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.
at
05:12
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
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...
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...
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