All good and honest Liberals, wherever you are- make like Laurel Broten, like Margarett Best, and head for the exits. Get out while you still can, lest you face the guillotine.
And to think the OLP could have had Sandra Pupatello, but turned away from her because she wasn't interested enough in having conversations and hearing everyone out before making decisions.
Well, I'm sure the voters are good and pissed off now! Those unions are in for a world of hurt!
For a very long time now- years, even- I have been searching for the perfect way to encapsulate a problem opposition parties and leaders face, using a symbol that people can understand.
Most people look at opposition politicians and write them off as whiners and complainers who just want power for themselves. Too glib, too negative, too focused on capturing soundbites, too unfocused on policy. So many reasons why we can't vote for the prospective Other Guy despite all the free-flowing anger people have towards governments.
Then, I was watching TV at a friend's house and I discovered Gordon Ramsay, foul-mouthed top chef and star of approximately 100 different reality shows.
I don't watch a lot of reality TV (I consider it bad for my soul) and I had never heard of Gordon Ramsay until I accidentally happened upon an old episode of one of his reality shows and saw him absolutely demolish the completely-out-of-his-league individual in the clip above. Ramsay crushes him so hard that I felt almost physically ill watching it.
Watching this man in action and learning more about him was fascinating and terrifying. Look at him reduce an angry and tired woman to a smouldering wreck. Look at the way he effortlessly grabs her wrist when she tries to slap him. Here he is humiliating another chef challenging him to a fight- just by doing nothing. Here he is verbally stomping a mudhole into a paying customer(well, at least I think it's a paying customer- these shows have some pretty obvious scripting, but we're not going to get into that today). People are made to look stupid just for having stood up to him, despite how harsh he is. You would think that there would be some people calling him out for being a bully, but all he seems to get is praise for dedication to his craft.
Now think to yourselves how it would go for you if you tried to treat your incompetent employees or co-workers that way. You want to yell and swear at that one person who keeps screwing up? Wanna fight back against a Level 5 jerkwad customer calling you all sorts of names and calling your competence into question? You're not going to do that. You already know why not- because if you did, you'd be the one who got in trouble. Your rudeness would be the issue, or an issue, not his or her incompetence. Does it matter if you, like Gordon Ramsay, just want to get it right? Do you win any points from people for having your heart in the right place? Nope. You're supposed to motivate people without getting angry. That's what leaders do. Except we're fine with Ramsay tearing people new orifices left and right.....and documentaries about him take pains to point out that, well, he's a really nice guy outside of the kitchen, and he has a really tragic backstory, so he can't be all that bad!
Doesn't seem fair, does it? When did we get to the point where you couldn't call out incompetence without being called out yourself for being overly negative and harsh? And why is it that when Gordon Ramsay does it, people start commenting on Youtube videos for him to go into the political arena with guns blazing and clear everyone out instead of calling for him to be medicated?
Well, here's the hard truth: You're not Gordon Ramsay. Gordon Ramsay is a goddamn apex predator. Look at him. He's a 6'2, clean-cut, blond and blue eyed master chef (one of the best in the world) and ex-athlete worth millions of dollars with a sexy foreign accent and a deep booming voice, all of which combine to make women positively drip with excitement. You look like nothing next to him. You have no business wishing you could be like him.
And if you're going to criticize someone for incompetence- even if you are 100% right- you had better be an apex predator yourself. We, the reality TV loving public, demand no less.
The incomparable War Room Boss demonstrates this beautifully with his defense of the Wynne government over the deleted power plant emails. We have a Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, whose job it is "to uphold and promote open government and the protection of personal privacy in Ontario." She did so with respect to the Wynne government. And she may be Raffi's sister, which is kinda cool, but she's by no means an apex predator. What did the War Room Boss do? The same thing he did to John Gomery during the sponsorship scandal- go after the fact that her report had flaws and that the way she went about putting it together left something to be desired. By the end of it you completely forget that the Wynne government may have done something illegal.
Then, he posted this: "If you start criminally investigating every pol who deletes email, you’d better build a lot more jails. They’re gonna fill up fast. #onpoli" In other words, let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone. So, if you're going to cast that stone, you- not the person who did the incorrect deed in the first place- had better be without fault, or at least look the part.
In the nether regions of our brains, we know that attractive, dominating people are more deserving of respect and acclaim and to have their negative qualities and behaviours ignored. Maybe if our politicians looked more like reality TV stars, we'd have more people actually listening to what they said. Or rather, pretending to listen while being enthralled by how flawless they look and sound. We'd also stop worrying about ethical lapses and treat ridiculous public statements and out-of-control behaviour like tabloid news.
What Canadian politics needs is not better people- it's better looking people.
What was life like before the Rob Ford circus came to town? I can hardly remember. It seems like some long-ago, dimly remembered past Age of Man.
Nothing, nothing but Rob Ford stories as far as the eye can see and as far as the ear can hear. Until we're all past sick of it. But they don't care. The pack of jackals continue to rip and tear at this story, to breathlessly report every single detail, to leave us time and time again with blue balls, agonizing over what's going to happen next. Inserting themselves into the story, naturally. Making themselves the story, the story of Rob Ford vs. The Media. Of course.
What must it be like for them to have completely lost any sense of proportion and regressed back to some primitive state where there was absolutely no room for anything else but Rob Ford? Where eating, going to the bathroom, and showering takes second place to Rob Ford? It must be like some sort of Burning Man ceremony, like some drugged-out ancient religious ritual.
And what do they have to show for it? Did these hunters bag their prey? Did they get Ford? Well, he's still Mayor. Instead, a guy is dead, and a bunch of staffers resigned. One life lost, a bunch of others forever altered. Not what the future Pulitzer winners at the Star and Globe probably wanted, but they're not going to let a few bystanders get in the way of their paper chase.
And no, Premier Wynne. You will not have the opportunity to live out your fantasy of removing Ford from office. Oh, we know you would so love to show that big brute Ford who wears the pants around here just like you did to Paul Godfrey when he got all saucy a few weeks ago, but that would just ruin this entertaining train wreck for everyone. It can't always be about the short-term thrill, darling. Like the great Buddy Cole once said, "I may have been born yesterday, but I still went shopping." (.....actually....that doesn't make sense, even in the original context. Oh well.)
Gotta love the suddenly cautious tone of that Globe editorial saying that Wynne ordering Ford off the field would be an unwanted intrusion, given that the city services are actually running "as smoothly as they ever do." This, after saying the previous day that Ford needed to resign no matter what. Ford's personal life is a disaster, sure, but it doesn't seem to be affecting the way the city is actually run all that much. The city certainly isn't considering a unilateral HST hike to pay for transit.....which makes even less sense when you consider that the point of the HARMONIZED sales tax is that it's supposed to be HARMONIZED. That means it's supposed to be the same across Canada, except Queen Kathleen is once again all about unilateralism.
Is the Star going to call for Wynne to wave her magic wand and make this Ford issue disappear? No? Martin Regg Cohn is suddenly all about respecting the division of powers? How bizarre- when Wynne does her Marie Antoinette impression with respect to Paul Godfrey or jacking up the HST, the Star and Globe are nowhere near as quick to put the brakes on. One of these things is clearly not like the others.
For actual critical news reporting, we have to go not to one of the Big Four newspapers, but to Huffington Post Canada. They think the Rob Ford story is distracting everyone from the Wynne government getting into trouble over deleting emails related to That Power Plant. How is it that an online news website can find time to actually do a non-Rob Ford political story, and a bunch of rapidly-declining broadsheets have nothing else on their minds?
Shall we say that the media are putting "profits before people", and engaging in "a race to the bottom", as they are perfectly content to let hardworking staffers get caught in the crossfire? Or perhaps we need to go a little further and say that this story has become a daily fix, and although they know it's bad for them, they don't want to let go. They could let Wynne stage an intervention here, but no.....everything's fine.
Have you noticed? We have an NDP government here in Ontario.
Yeah, yeah, Wynne is Premier and everything, but let's not kid ourselves; we know who's setting the agenda. We had a bunch of NDP budget demands that were agreed to, a LCBO strike that was averted through Lord knows what kind of concessions, the head of the OLG getting unceremoniously dumped to head off the building of a casino that downtown Toronto NDP NIMBYists didn't want, and now, morebudget demands that are getting agreed to.
Is this really what the OLP wanted when they appointed Wynne Premier of the province? Letting the NDP basically run things? Are they that interested in achieving a consensus? Looks like it.
Do we, as a province, ever ask ourselves where this ends? No we don't. And is the NDP satisfied with what they're getting? Well, just days ago the unions were running radio ads calling the LCBO evil and greedy for not meeting their demands fast enough, accusing them of not allowing LCBO workers to make a living. Now that the LCBO situation has been temporarily taken care of, you can better believe that they will be right back with a list of other atrocities that need to be rectified yesterday. What the hell has this government done for them lately, anyway?
Wynne can blow all the cash she wants, and we can natter on all we want about the need to find common ground with the perpetually aggrieved underclass, but as I've been documenting here on my little blog, these people are never going to run out of stuff to be mad about.
For example, was the recent BC election bought by corporations, resulting in a BC Liberal election victory? Most definitely! But somehow those big corporations couldn't stop Christy Clark from losing her own seat. Maybe that's because the local NDP campaign gave a damn while the rest of the NDP were trying to take the high road. But it's much easier to blame evil corporations, so let's go with that.
Let's take another example from the world of stuff people care about. At this moment there is currently a low-level backlash about the fact that in the new Star Trek movie, the bad guy, Alternate Universe Khan Noonien Singh, is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a white person. These Internet anti-racism crusaders are furious about this "whitewashing", and that a terrorist is not being played by a.....brown person......uh ohhhhh..........
No, hold on a minute.....they're mad about the fact that a genocidal maniac who revels in his superiority over other humans and is proud of his own abilities- who says in the trailer that he's better at everything than everyone else- is portrayed by a......white person......ummmm.....
Well, he was brown-ish in the original Trek continuity, and he was depicted in the original TV series as an exotic tyrant who conquered most of Asia and the Middle East, which doesn't at all play into the stereotype of Asia and the Middle East being a playground for dictators and people who hate freedom........and because America and Europe are so advanced, the idea of white tyrants would just be craziness, and, um......
You know what I would like to see? A backlash against the fact that the threat of a strike led to a massive run on LCBO's across the province, coincidentally just in time for the Victoria Day long weekend! If the LCBO was anything other than a government monopoly, these same people would be questioning whether the whole thing was a false flag operation to drive up sales. We can accuse the LCBO of being greedy, even evil, but we're never going to spin conspiracy theories about its bottom line the way we would about big corporations.
It's about continuing to find "evidence" of systemic discrimination, then using that evidence as a pretext to rage and to win more concessions from privileged people. But if you imagine that we're eventually going to get to a point where nobody is privileged, then you're as naïve as Kathleen Wynne. It's not about eliminating privilege- it's about appropriating privilege. Remember- these people are the wealth redistributors, and it must therefore follow that they're also the privilege redistributors.
Kathleen Wynne thinks that she can reach out to the NDP and bring them onside. She is wrong. As she, and (I hope) Ontarians will soon discover, feeding everything she can find to the crocodile is only going to ensure that it eats her last.
I'm a religious and racial minority, and I have to say that there is nothing funnier than watching a white liberal attempt to show how enlightened and free of prejudice they are and fail horribly (and they always fail horribly). I pity my European-born Christian friends who will never know the sublime pleasure of standing there with a smile on your face as you listen to some pasty overeducated individual attempting to explain how bothered they are by their own white privilege and the white privilege of others.
Unlike our white liberal friends, I'm not going to pretend to be able to speak for anyone else, but if I had to choose between open naked bigotry and quiet polite racism perpetrated by condescending liberals, I'd definitely opt for the former, because I know where they stand. If someone makes a joke about my people, I won't mind so long as I can make a joke about theirs without them getting offended. (White people are very easily offended, I find.)
White liberals are right about one thing, and that's that white people have disproportionate amounts of power compared to minorities. But it's entirely obvious to me, at least, that white liberals have the lion's share of that power. In ridings across Ontario that are packed with people of colour, you have hapless and completely clueless white Liberal MPP's surrounded by coteries of "advisors" that try to keep their bosses from humiliating themselves too severely whenever it's time to meet the ethnics. When a minority Liberal MPP is elevated to cabinet, that's supposed to be a big victory for whatever group that MPP belongs to, but invariably I hear lots of under-the-radar complaining from Liberals about how those MPP's supposedly can't manage themselves and need to be supervised. Does anyone ever call these Liberals out for what they're doing?
And whenever there's a leadership campaign, like the one the Liberals just had, they have designated people who are supposed to be the representative of each community. The idea is, that when White Candidate X becomes Premier or Prime Minister, you go through the designated gatekeeper, and if the gatekeeper likes you, then the enlightened whitey at the top will pull the appropriate lever. Don't bother trying to get stuff done on your own.
Do Conservatives do this? Of course. But Conservatives don't claim to have knowledge that they actually don't. They don't endlessly relate to my race or religion as if it's the only thing about me and how it's something to be carefully tiptoed around.
White liberal atheists are fascinated by my religious practices. They don't ever stop asking questions. But why? Well, because they're not really atheists; they just had bad experiences at Catholic school.
Offer them some ethnic food they've never tried before? They look at it like it's going to bite them. "Well, I'm not sure how to eat it!" they burble. Then they become terrified that I will lose my mind if they serve something I'm not used to.
Invite them to a holiday celebration that they've never been to? "Oh dear, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? Look at all the differently coloured people! Super uncomfortable! Super awkward!" Aren't these people supposed to be experts on the effects of systematic racism and stuff like that? So how about learning a little bit about the cultures you're supposed to be "protecting"?
But the absolute best is when white liberals pick a side in a conflict happening halfway around the world. They can't help doing this. There isn't enough oppression happening here in Canada for them; they have to elevate themselves to global oppression-fighters. But what do you do when the culture who's doing the alleged oppressing are themselves minorities? Oh noez!
Well, actually it isn't really that much of a problem (for them). Because it's not happening here in Canada, most white liberals immediately side with whoever's being oppressed and make loud statements about (insert country here) atrocities and war crimes without thinking about how the Canadian diaspora will react.
It's important to remember that for the most part, we're not talking about people who are doing Ph.D.'s in IR here; these are your garden variety hipsters who didn't even know the country they're excoriating today existed yesterday. If you've been to whatever country you're slamming, if you can demonstrate some expertise in the area, if you understand the reasons for the conflict, then you might have something worthwhile to say. The majority of these people getting their rage on do not.
Now here is where the magic happens. If you are a white conservative (or any conservative, really) and you say something like, "The Occupy Movement people need to get off their asses and get a job," or "Quebeckers should stop sucking on the taxpayer's tit" or "Native people should stop threatening Canadians who've never done anything to them", then you are the worst person ever according to these white liberals for judging people you know nothing about using your privileged white perspective on society. Then these exact same people turn around and blast a country they've never been to and that they know practically nothing about!
Then something even funnier happens. When these overeducated palefaces dump on whatever country it is, people who have relatives or some connection to that country react negatively to the criticism, as you might appreciate. Sometimes these hyphenated Canadians even call them racists! And how do these people react? By explaining! By denying their criticisms are based in hatred! By accusing others of shutting down debate! Of not wanting to have a conversation! Of being too sensitive!
Which are.....all things privilege-deniers (yes, that is a word that they use to talk about us....similar to "climate-change denier") do that infuriate leftists. When a leftist pulls this trick on you- saying, "Sorry, I don't care how progressive you claim to be, you can't ever understand what it's like to understand what it's like to be a person who's discriminated against, so by denying that it's as bad as we say it is, you're part of the problem".....well, guess what. If those same leftists criticize a country for carrying out "human rights abuses", and they can't understand what it's like to live there, I guess they must be racists! They're not acknowledging how criticism of (whatever country) contributes to discrimination against whatever minority comes from that country! By their own insane leftist non-logic, they must be racists too, and they have no right to claim that they are NOT racists!
So another provincial election is concluded, and another high-flying opposition party cruise controlled their way right back to the opposition benches.
This opposition party, the BC NDP, thought they were going to appeal to people's better natures. Fatigue with the reigning BC Liberals was going to drive a wave of change. They didn't need to stoop to gutter politics and pulling other people down. There was absolutely, positively, no way the BC Liberals could pull this one out.
Lots of PC Party of Ontario people were involved in this BC provincial election. They ran successful BC Liberal campaigns. Kudos to them, for that.
These same PC Party of Ontario people are now going to come back to Ontario and plug themselves right back into the PC Party of Ontario mindset, which is "If we talk about jobs and the economy and "bold ideas" enough, a wave of change is going to catapult us into government and catapult the Liberals out. There's absolutely, positively, no way anyone's going to vote for these tired, out-of-gas and out-of-ideas Liberals."
These same PC Party of Ontario people, by and large, support the federal CPC, who just got their rear ends handed to them out in Labrador by the Justin Trudeau Liberals. But there's absolutely, positively, no way the in-over-his-head Justin Trudeau is going to channel this win into bigger and better things, because the CPC has love-tap attack ads showing JT stripping and playing up his Quebec roots.
If none of these arguments are sinking in, let's think about our beloved Toronto Maple Leafs, who pissed away a 4-1 lead in the middle of the third period because there was absolutely, positively, no way anyone could blow a lead that big.
We are not a country of nice people. We pretend we are because that makes us feel good. We, like our neighbours to the south, are a country composed of people who take, and people from whom things are taken. We should acknowledge and accept this fact. But we don't. We can't. Not publicly.
When we act as though everything is on the line, and treat our opponents accordingly, we win. When we try to debate policy or talk about ideas, they eat our lunch. And when our lunch gets eaten, we come up with a huge range of excuses for why it got eaten. Talk about "conservative principles" predominates. But it's got nothing to do with conservative principles or principles of any sort.
The B.C. Liberals also talked about jobs and the economy. But by running those ads, they showed voters that they were willing to fight to protect what was theirs. They didn't act like the government was about to fall into their laps and they took their opponents seriously instead of writing them off as kooky socialists.
When the CPC won government for the first time, it did so by recognizing that principled conservatism represented a one-way ticket back to the opposition benches, and that doing what was necessary was called for. Now the same CPC thinks that we can treat Justin Trudeau with kid gloves, and he'll fall right over. But what they don't seem to realize at the moment is that this man believes he is the King of Canada, and unless we show him, and Canadians, that he is mortal and bleeds the same colour as any other man, he will leave us bloodied on the canvas like Patrick Brazeau. The CPC may have decided like the rest of Canada that Trudeau is the rightful King of this country, and that it is treason to draw a sword against the king.
And because we chose to use cutesy-wutesy TV spots instead of drawing a sword against Trudeau and his candidate in Labrador, Liberals are starting to believe that they have a God-given right to rule this country again. And that is absolutely fatal to us, no matter what the spinmasters tell you.
The PC Party of Ontario should be conducting itself as if it has a God-given right to rule this province and that the notion of a Liberal government is folly, and that every member of the OLP has no right to occupy the seats that they do. Kathleen Wynne sat at the cabinet table when Dalton McGuinty ordered the cancellation of a power plant to save seats for purely political reasons. Then she testified that she knew nothing before a sham of an inquiry that will yield nothing we didn't know already, and we basically acted as if it was just another day at the office and put out another press release about jobs and the economy.
She did this because she knows she can make us feel ashamed by talking about having conversations while we are sulking in the corner. But as we have seen, Kathleen Wynne's Liberals have no problem going after Tim Hudak's wife, and we know that she has no interest in having conversations with any conservative, because she believes conservatives are a lower order of humanity. Her nice lady act is a total sham. We know this. We're not going to call her on it.
The exact same PC Party of Ontario people who just spent the past month making Adrian Dix's life a living hell are not, I repeat, not going to make Kathleen Wynne's life a living hell. They obviously can, but they won't. Instead we're going to get passive aggressive attacks that nobody understands on Liberal policies nobody understands, and then the Liberals are going to call us sexist, racist, and especially homophobic.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it is this way. We know what we have to do, and we're not going to do it.
Thomas Mulcair's ravings about a 30-year old conspiracy by the Supreme Court to screw Quebec have been getting a lot of column inches recently. For some reason, it's news that a member of the NDP suspects that powerful people are secretly plotting to harm those who can't defend themselves.
The prevailing explanation is that Mulcair is Quebec-pandering in an attempt to outflank Trudeau, and there's more than likely some truth to that. I don't know how this is being received in Quebec, so I don't know if there's some kind of method to Mulcair's madness. All I know is that far-left socialists like Mulcair are extremely rageful about any number of conspiracies, past and present.
Most NDP activists are incredibly chipper, relentlessly upbeat, and friendly people who genuinely love others, but harbour this deep seated fury which they unleash the moment they see something that for them represents oppression or inequality. Jack Layton was like this, smiling and yelling at the same time.
You will bump into these bespectacled, geeky women with wide smiles who loathe Stephen Harper and the 1% with every facet of their beings, so much so that their entire essence vibrates when they are standing next to you, yet will remain incredibly perky throughout, and proudly tell you stories about how they crush oppression beneath their heels. These women believe, for example, that they are embedded in a culture that causes them to hate their own bodies, to buy things they don't want, and to conform to images dreamed up by advertisers backed by shadowy corporations. If you let them, they will rant at length about the insensate evil that drives this whole process and how it operates just below the level of human consciousness, and how your arguments about the marketplace of ideas and how we're smart enough to decide what to buy and what not to buy were planted into your head by the corporations to make it easier for them to operate undisturbed. Without meaning to, they will communicate the message, "You're a sheeple who doesn't have my exquisitely developed understanding of how the world works."
So, yeah. Of course the Supreme Court is perpetrating a conspiracy on the virtuous poor. Everyone is a victim of a conspiracy by the powerful. And if you don't agree, guess what- you're a part of the conspiracy, wittingly or unwittingly.
These are people who will, without hesitation, say that the CBC is immoderately right wing because it allows Don Cherry and Kevin O'Leary to have a platform to express their ideas. Just chew on that for a moment.
Now the great thing about seeing the world this way- as a series of interlocking corporate conspiracies that make zillions of dollars but operate just out of sight- is that it makes self improvement or self actualization almost completely impossible, and thus frees you of any kind of real responsibilities. You can't love yourself or drag yourself out of poverty or change the way things are because reality is set up to crush you from the get go. If you are flat broke, it's the fault of the corporations making you buy stuff you don't want. Just feeling good about yourself is a titanic achievement. You absolutely cannot talk about freedom because the corporations have enslaved you by controlling your emotions. (Oh, and btw, medical conditions like depression are absolutely invented wholesale by drug companies to sell pills that don't work. People lived for thousands of years eating plants without ever having to worry about depression, etc. etc.)
Reality isn't supposed to be this way though. It's only this way because rich people run things and game the system to their benefit and prevent any real change from happening. Reality, as it originally was, is basically "Imagine" by John Lennon until evil corporations ruined it. Your own natural self is pure and has everything it needs already. Rich people who want to steal your money (and yeah, of course all monetary transactions are theft, the same way that in a casino, it's set up so the house always wins in the long run) make up problems with the help of advertisers and then market the solution. And you thought Inside Jobs were just for 9/11 truthers!
Even better is that when you are super mad about corporations, you can't be mad about governments, except for those that are tainted by corporations, of course. Stephen Harper's government is all about corporations and wealthy people, so it's corrupt and he should be charged with treason. The farther away from a conservative government you get, the more noble and pure that government becomes. Liberal governments like Kathleen Wynne's government are also corrupt, yes, but they are less dependent on corporations, so they are just better. Do not question (as much) the motives of the comparatively less conservative government! Just don't!
Hey, what if governments sold themselves as the answers to problems they created and NOOOOOOO SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP
If you put someone who believes the above in power, that would be, um, pretty freakin' dangerous. But notice how in all the negative media coverage Mulcair is getting, there is nothing about how his nutty leftism is a driving force behind his comments, whereas whenever a conservative says something stupid, it's all about the dangers of right wing extremism and bigotry run amok.
