Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Nap Time's Over

Yup. If anyone thought this new temporary cooperation between the PC's and the other parties was going to last more than five minutes, well, along comes another by-election to put us right back on the war footing. And you know how these Liberals work- they never have one byelection at once- especially not one in Tim Hudak's backyard- so someone else is going to take a dive. My money's on Harinder Takhar.

Oh, and coming off the heels of the London convention where all doubts were put to rest, of course everyone's going to have fresh questions about Hudak's leadership in the event that this byelection in his own backyard not go the way that it should! Yaaaaaaay!

I'm sure Craitor's heading for the exits is totally above board. After all, Queen Kathleen is all about a new spirit of cooperation, which would imply allowing the PC's to take a breath after the crazy past few months they've had, right?

Monday, September 16, 2013

What If They Held A Revolution And Nobody Came?

I have been expending a considerable amount of effort trying to not comment on the three ring circus that has been the run-up to this week's PC Party Policy Convention, but then I chanced to happen across this article in the London Free Press stating that half of the proposers of the world-famous dump Hudak motion would not be showing themselves at the convention.

A month ago, these people set off a pipe bomb that has
a) ensured that nobody will be wanting to talk about policy at this policy conference and everyone will want to talk about the leader
b) caused day after day of ghastly headlines
c) created a situation where every time the question of Hudak's leadership died down, someone had to kick the can and bring it right back up again

Now that the party has given them an opportunity to debate the motion on the floor, half of them have decided that they don't want to debate the motion. They don't want to become lightning rods for discontent (after proposing a motion that was a lightning rod for discontent). There is an extremely cumbersome process that involves lobbying and all kinds of work for their motion to succeed. They've got their reputations to worry about. If there's a mess, it's Hudak and co.'s job to clean it up.

It would seem that in an ideal world, all you have to do is propose an amendment and be hailed by the commons for speaking truth to power. You'll get carried to London on the shoulders of well-wishers, and you'll all receive medals for being so brave as to suggest that Hudak be replaced by no one in particular, so long as it isn't Hudak.

But we don't live in an ideal world, and we don't have some conservative superhero, some blue-tinged Justin Trudeau it would seem, running the party, doing all the work and taking all the criticism whilst everyone else reaps the benefits.

A lot has been said about the machinations of central party, but until we have a group of people who can do the job better than the group currently running the show, the "grassroots" has no business putting forward any further motions or challenges to the leadership, the presidency, or any other office- although they will keep trying, of course. They have had their chance, not once, but twice, and they made a colossal hash of it both times. And even though we have gone through this rigmarole once already, and will be going through it again on Sunday to the same effect, the whiners are still not satisfied. They will continue to gripe passive-aggressively about the controlling hand of Central like teenagers being told they can't go to the Justin Bieber concert.  

It's really sad, because nobody disagrees with the fact that the leader and the people around him need to pull up their socks. But at the same time, nobody wants to talk about solutions for fixing the mess the province is in. Nobody wants to prove that they could come up with better ideas than what the leader's office is putting out. And despite all the complaining about the leader, nobody else is offering themselves for the job. No saviour is descending from the heavens to lead the flock to the promised land.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Everything That Rises Must Converge

A fundamentalist is someone who:
-believes that there is a vaguely defined campaign of evil to oppress, silence, and generally make them feel bad and responsible for their own situation
-is obsessed with purity
-comes up with reasons why they are justified in being intolerant
-rejects moderate voices and is deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to reach out to them
-creates "safe spaces" wherein their doctrine is paramount, because they reeeeeeeally hate having to justify their nonsense with factual stuff to those who may question them
-does not interact with members of other groups, especially those they think are oppressing them

and most importantly:

-moves to oppress as many people as possible as soon as they attain some small measure of power.

Who fits this definition? Religious bigots? Occupy Movement activists? Union frontliners? Principled Conservatives seeking to purge various parties of Red Tories? Of course, this is a trick question, because they all fit the definition, and they all fit the definition because, however they dress, whatever their skin colour or gender or orientation may be, whether they believe in a supreme deity or not, and whatever their level of education or income or privilege may be, THEY ARE THE SAME.

In Quebec, doctrinaire leftist politicians are imposing a hard line on immigrant behaviour and dress and this has a lot of people confused. But there is no need to be confused, as these doctrinaire leftist politicians are no different from any other type of fundamentalist. 

We have a collective problem as a society accepting that any person on the left could be a fundamentalist. That's why we ask dumb questions like, "Why doesn't the left condemn human rights abuses by religious fanatics in (insert country with non-white majority here)?" The reason why they don't condemn those abuses by religious fanatics is because they themselves are fanatics. They desire power, and they desire bloody revenge against their oppressors. They desire to get their hands on the handle of the hammer of the state and to use it indiscriminately against their enemies. We know this.

We know these things, and yet we still have trouble attaching the label of "fundamentalist" or "intolerant" to the PQ, or basically anyone on the left. This is what is known as pervasive left-wing bias.

We also have a problem with the PQ being a pack of racists because they can count among their number many prominent Quebec intellectuals. Somewhere along the way we decided that intellectual leftists are not supposed to be racists, and yet, here we are.

The reason why the PQ are racists is because while they may be university educated, they enforce the same kind of separation between themselves and the outside world that you would find in any one of the religious communities they are trying to stomp out with their Charter of Values. When you don't engage in dialogue with the other side, you imagine all kinds of horrible things about them, and you are very receptive to "evidence" that they are plotting against you. This is how an entire province is put on edge by the presence of the word "pasta" on a menu at an Italian restaurant.

This puts the lie to the popular leftist notion that education is some sort of antidote to racism or sexism or homophobia. The real antidote to these social ills is talking to the people outside your social group and learning more about how their thinking works, and educating them about how your thinking works. If you understand how something works, it's not scary.

But as I said above, the fundamentalists don't want to "educate their oppressors" because that means that they would have to come out of their little cocoons of like minded people. Also, convincing like minded people that they are being oppressed by a shadowy conspiracy of privileged people is great for business and helps recruit volunteers. Consider any bit of Ontario union propaganda in this light, and a lot of things begin to make sense.

And should a group like the NDP gain control of the Ontario government, there can be no doubt that they will impose their own intolerant, fundamentalist agenda on Ontarians. We know this too. We've seen it happen.