Now that the Rob Ford tornado has blown out of the area for the moment, leaving a fresh trail of devastation everywhere, it is time- as is the case after any natural disaster - to see if there is anything that can be salvaged.
Let us begin with the fact that despite all the carnage, Rob Ford retains a measure of popularity. This is an extremely significant discovery, one that should (but of course won't) turn the entire political establishment upside down.
If Rob Ford can emerge from the last couple of weeks with people still behind him, then it raises questions about whether there is a point at which everyone says, "OK. No more." Is there such a point of no return? Will anything cause the Ford faithful, the real and true believers, to say enough is enough? Probably not.
And, it must be said, there is an equally large segment of people for whom everything Ford does is wrong, and wrong before he does it. Tomorrow, Ford could invent a totally new energy source. It's not likely, but there is a chance it could happen, and if he did, these people would never use it, just because Ford invented it.
So if there is nothing that can be said to convince Ford lovers and haters that the other side has a point, then we need to reexamine a few assumptions.
The first assumption is that the reason why a politician, or campaign, or idea doesn't catch on is because the messaging is flawed in some way. Or, if a politician, campaign, or idea does catch on, it's because the messengers were on point. But with the case of Rob Ford, the Ford haters have a message, and it's been stuck to better than the best political campaign could hope for. The Ford haters say that the man is simply unfit for office and shouldn't be there, and they give reasons to support it. It's not a question of whether his decisions are unpopular- it's whether the guy can get through a day without detonating a massive PR bomb that totally obscures anything else.
The second assumption is that the reason things are the way they are is that people are misinformed or uninformed. Lefties like to use this excuse, but right wingers do it often as well. The reason why we have (problem) is because the media doesn't report on it enough. There is an agenda at work to keep the real reason for (problem) out of the headlines. The agenda is systematic and put into place by powerful interests, and "the grassroots" can't get a fair shake. But for the past few weeks, the Rob Ford coverage has been nothing short of a constant feed. Every detail has been put out there, reblogged, retweeted. It's been on The Daily Show, folks. Nobody can say that the supposedly bought and paid for media has treated Rob Ford lightly. And yet, there he stands, stripped of power but still enjoying the support of people ready to believe that he's the victim of a conspiracy.
Finally- and here's where things get scary- we have to ask ourselves if it makes sense debating things with people at all when the question of Rob Ford still remains unsettled after all that has happened.
Because democracy gives voting power to people, it kind of follows logically that for democracy to work, people have to use that power appropriately, or in some way approaching appropriately. We -especially conservatives- assume that people are smart enough to make their own decisions and vote appropriately, and if they don't, they need to accept the consequences and do better.
But that's not what's been happening. We have people in every province beset by terror, voting in massive stampedes this way and that without any thought to what the message is or where the message is coming from. That is the behaviour of herds of animals, not people.
After the last round of by-elections, Justin Trudeau didn't win any new seats and was declared the victor. Nobody said that Harper's handling of the Senate scandal, or the delivery of any "message" through whatever medium, or the efforts of this or that campaign worker or team, kept Brandon Souris in the CPC fold. The Liberals didn't actually win in Brandon Souris, but it was close enough not to really matter- Justin Trudeau is the winner and will be Prime Minister soon. Continue on as you did before.
Tim Hudak has been banging away at scandals, waste and mismanagement, overspending, job losses, and the like for two years since the last election. Yet PC Party "grassroots" have a problem with the guy, and can't seem to agree on a way for him to get it right, nor can they figure out who'd they'd rather have instead of him. Every other week the man is beset by some upset party person who has been wronged or slighted and decides to run to the media to voice their complaint. They complain Hudak is a wimp, while focus groups turn up the opposite result- that Hudak is too mean and snarly. What's the problem here? Is it "messaging?" Is it "media bias"? Or is it the fact that the Ontario voter is so terrified of the unions and of tumbling into the economic abyss that they cannot be talked to, cannot be convinced that Tim Hudak's favourite topics are worth discussing?
How many scandals, waste, overspending, etc. have to happen before Ontario says, "Enough is enough?" Is there a threshold? Is there a point of no return? If we get the message right and if the Toronto Star stops being a bunch of dicks to the PC Party, will Tim Hudak fly to the top of the polls? Well, I have to take a lesson from the Rob Ford situation and say no. If people love or hate Rob Ford and won't hear a word of the other side, then there's no reason to expect that they are any more rational about the question of what the hell we're going to do about all this debt.
If I needed more proof that people are not rational about the question of what we're going to do about the debt, I could consider that there is precisely nobody in the whole of Ontario that is willing to give up anything without a bloody fight to the very end. Nobody says, "OK, the economy is in the toilet, let's do what we need to fix it. Let's invest more. Let's take a tax hike. Let's make do with less." Kathleen Wynne is on her knees before the unions because she has absolutely no authority as Premier to say that the party is over, because if she does the unions will take another riding away from her. Hudak's views on unions are problematic amongst the PC Party grassroots, the same people who gripe about Hudak not being conservative enough. And the unions are of the opinion that any cutbacks constitute a war on the middle class and put us right back to a time and place where the poor were in effect wage slaves to the rich.
We have evolved as a culture to the point where Rob Ford is the worst thing that you can encounter all day, and where the issue of whether video games depict women properly, or anything relating to Miley Cyrus, is a subject of intense debate. Yet somehow all this will be lost if we permit the tiniest of cuts, the slightest change to the way things are. A little oppression is as bad as all of the oppression. A lessening of oppression does nothing; evolving attitudes and openness does nothing; better communication and increased standards of living does nothing; technology and science and literacy and all these things do nothing. Then, as now, 100 years ago, the issue is the divide between the 1% and the 99%, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or whatever you wish to call them. Life is hell, jobs are not voluntary, oppression is the order of the day.
Don't go blaming capitalism, the Toronto Star, or mediums and messages for your problems. Settle the question of Rob Ford, or an absolute standard will imposed on us from without, from a power beyond control. If we don't want that, then it's up to us to make a better choice. If we in Ontario give up control to the unions, that is our own fault. If we give ourselves over to Trudeau and make him our king and hope we will be better off for it, we will be sorely disappointed.
Get to work and master yourselves, or give yourselves over to the jungle, to the force of nature, and be ripped apart. Your call.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
The Fault Lies Not In Our Stars
We choose our culture.
The left believes that our messed up culture is the result of the 1% foisting things on us we don't want. Powerful privileged people control our world and exert such a degree of control that we don't even notice all the ways in which we are being controlled. Our minds are battlegrounds. Our bodies are battlegrounds.
Paradoxically, they also believe that mass popular uprisings- emphasis on the mass, because none of us are as strong as all of us- can and have improved our culture. If a mass popular uprising leads to widespread death and repression and people being generally worse off than they were before, that's because 1) the uprising didn't go far enough, i.e. it didn't remove capitalism entirely, and 2) people not on board with the uprising sabotaged it from within or without, thus proving the absolute power of the people doing the oppressing in the first place.
And these two beliefs, hand in hand, are so very powerful because they remove all responsibility from the individual.
Nobody- not even conservatives- wants to be responsible for their actions. Freedom is great, but responsibility.....not so much. If there's one thing we all get, left or right, it's how there are ALL of the reasons why whatever happened to us was the result of something utterly beyond our control.
None of us, for example, is responsible for the Rob Ford story. Not Ford himself (who's in the grip of something bigger than himself he can't control), not Doug Ford (who was only protecting his brother), not the Toronto Star (who do Activist Journalism which is super important), not the people who voted for him (because he was authentic and the message of stop the gravy train "resonated"), not the international media (who grabbed this story and lifted it up for the world to see) so that now, going forward, the Rob Ford story will be the new standard in what Canadian political journalism looks like. After Ford is gone, we will have to elect some other bozo just so the media will have something to play with. And then nobody will be responsible for the fallout from that either. It's not our fault- it's what's expected.
The Liberals are not responsible for Justin Trudeau's general vacuity, for events hosted by the Liberal Party of Canada that are advertised as if they are meant to procure women for the Liberal Leader, for the ongoing debts of the other leadership hopefuls, for an absence of policy, for being out of power since forever, for anything at all.
You don't tell people who are below the poverty line that maybe they could make changes that could benefit themselves because their poverty is in no way, shape or form their fault. You don't tell Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin that maybe they should have realized that what worked in the world of broadcast journalism doesn't work in the Senate.
You don't tell Kathleen Wynne that the economy is important because she's off making ads about running down a country road. She's the Premier, and it's the Premier's job not to fiddle about while the province slowly crumbles, but here she is with an ad about running. Running is a nice activity that doesn't hurt anyone and nobody can be blamed for having a nice run. Everybody runs! Why do you hate running? The PCPO will close and/or privatize running!
None of this, of course, really obscures the fact that there are, and there must be, hard, brutal consequences for actions. The province will burn. That is obvious, especially since people unable to accept the fact that the PCPO lost the last election two years after the fact are busily leaking election plans to the media.
But when Ontario does burn- likely after yet another mass popular NDP-and-union-fuelled uprising gone wrong- it will be so, so important for each of us to be able to put up our hands and say, "It wasn't me! It was the one-armed man!"
We just had Remembrance Day, where we're supposed to remember the horrors of war and all that kind of stuff, and in some vague way think about what it means to go to war and put your comfortable life aside and take responsibility for your life, the lives of your fellow men and women, and the lives of the people on the other side and who you're protecting, and about how we're supposed to be carrying the torch that these soldiers threw to us from failing hands, or something. Whatever.
Then after that ordeal is over, let's go right back to being like Kathleen Wynne in that ridiculous ad, so utterly insubstantial as to not even register, running down a deserted road that leads nowhere, talking about goals that don't exist, looking all the while like you are doing something so meaningful and so significant that you have to make an ad about it and share it with Ontarians who have bigger problems.
We choose our culture.
The left believes that our messed up culture is the result of the 1% foisting things on us we don't want. Powerful privileged people control our world and exert such a degree of control that we don't even notice all the ways in which we are being controlled. Our minds are battlegrounds. Our bodies are battlegrounds.
Paradoxically, they also believe that mass popular uprisings- emphasis on the mass, because none of us are as strong as all of us- can and have improved our culture. If a mass popular uprising leads to widespread death and repression and people being generally worse off than they were before, that's because 1) the uprising didn't go far enough, i.e. it didn't remove capitalism entirely, and 2) people not on board with the uprising sabotaged it from within or without, thus proving the absolute power of the people doing the oppressing in the first place.
And these two beliefs, hand in hand, are so very powerful because they remove all responsibility from the individual.
Nobody- not even conservatives- wants to be responsible for their actions. Freedom is great, but responsibility.....not so much. If there's one thing we all get, left or right, it's how there are ALL of the reasons why whatever happened to us was the result of something utterly beyond our control.
None of us, for example, is responsible for the Rob Ford story. Not Ford himself (who's in the grip of something bigger than himself he can't control), not Doug Ford (who was only protecting his brother), not the Toronto Star (who do Activist Journalism which is super important), not the people who voted for him (because he was authentic and the message of stop the gravy train "resonated"), not the international media (who grabbed this story and lifted it up for the world to see) so that now, going forward, the Rob Ford story will be the new standard in what Canadian political journalism looks like. After Ford is gone, we will have to elect some other bozo just so the media will have something to play with. And then nobody will be responsible for the fallout from that either. It's not our fault- it's what's expected.
The Liberals are not responsible for Justin Trudeau's general vacuity, for events hosted by the Liberal Party of Canada that are advertised as if they are meant to procure women for the Liberal Leader, for the ongoing debts of the other leadership hopefuls, for an absence of policy, for being out of power since forever, for anything at all.
You don't tell people who are below the poverty line that maybe they could make changes that could benefit themselves because their poverty is in no way, shape or form their fault. You don't tell Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin that maybe they should have realized that what worked in the world of broadcast journalism doesn't work in the Senate.
You don't tell Kathleen Wynne that the economy is important because she's off making ads about running down a country road. She's the Premier, and it's the Premier's job not to fiddle about while the province slowly crumbles, but here she is with an ad about running. Running is a nice activity that doesn't hurt anyone and nobody can be blamed for having a nice run. Everybody runs! Why do you hate running? The PCPO will close and/or privatize running!
None of this, of course, really obscures the fact that there are, and there must be, hard, brutal consequences for actions. The province will burn. That is obvious, especially since people unable to accept the fact that the PCPO lost the last election two years after the fact are busily leaking election plans to the media.
But when Ontario does burn- likely after yet another mass popular NDP-and-union-fuelled uprising gone wrong- it will be so, so important for each of us to be able to put up our hands and say, "It wasn't me! It was the one-armed man!"
We just had Remembrance Day, where we're supposed to remember the horrors of war and all that kind of stuff, and in some vague way think about what it means to go to war and put your comfortable life aside and take responsibility for your life, the lives of your fellow men and women, and the lives of the people on the other side and who you're protecting, and about how we're supposed to be carrying the torch that these soldiers threw to us from failing hands, or something. Whatever.
Then after that ordeal is over, let's go right back to being like Kathleen Wynne in that ridiculous ad, so utterly insubstantial as to not even register, running down a deserted road that leads nowhere, talking about goals that don't exist, looking all the while like you are doing something so meaningful and so significant that you have to make an ad about it and share it with Ontarians who have bigger problems.
We choose our culture.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Silence Of The Lambs
We have:
-reality-show style accusations that Mike Duffy was forced- under great duress and in a truly diabolical fashion- to accept more money than most of us see all year for expenses he racked up (and no doubt he was forced to rack them up, too!)
-a Native uprising in New Brunswick that gets neither the Natives nor the New Brunswickers anywhere except hating each other worse than they did before
-a Premier of Ontario who is so disingenuous that she announced an Open Goverment Initiative- not an Open Government Initiative, you see, but an Open Goverment Initiative- because the idea of providing transparency into some parallel not-real thing that isn't quite "Government" to distract people from That Power Plant is so typically Kathleen Wynne that it's hard to believe the damn thing was a typo and not intentional
-a by-election in Toronto Centre that resembles one of those movies where two rival dance crews battle for supremacy and where there is no real story and no reason why we should care about any of the "actors" involved and yet we have to go through the exercise of pretending to care, except instead of rival dance crews serving one another we've got Chrystia Freeland and Linda McQuaig seeing who can pretend to care about poor people more whilst doing nothing
and
-a recent provincial election in Nova Scotia where the Liberals won a crushing majority, because, well, Justin Trudeau
What is the common denominator? All of this insane behaviour is the result of panicked rushes towards or away from something. Kathleen Wynne REALLY REALLY REALLY wants to prove that she isn't totally disingenuous and just ends up drawing attention to the fact that she is totally and utterly and completely disingenuous. An entire province of people didn't want to think too hard about the election they were in, so they engaged in a stampede to the Liberals as an offering to Trudeau. Everybody you know thinks Justin Trudeau is just the tops. They can't tell you why. They just know everyone around them thinks so, so they'd better think so too.
Duffy and Wallin and Brazeau racked up expenses and jet setted around the country because, well, that's what happens in the Senate. Duffy, if he's to be believed, accepted the money because that's what you do, that's what's expected. It's all part and parcel and somehow all the shenanigans that have taken place in the Senate before these three got there, in which guys like Michel Cogger ended up with an actual rap sheet, don't apply. None of them seemed to have the first clue that something like this could happen to them before it was too late.
In Toronto Centre the NDP have concluded that they are 100% right on the subject of scrapping the Senate altogether, and they're going to pound their pointy little heads against that wall from now till the end of November to no discernible effect. One NDP greybeard actually came into my place of business today fresh from the campaign office and started yammering to everyone he could find on the subject of consigning the Senate to the history books. And though nobody disagreed with him, you can be sure that Dame Chrystia Freeland will be the next MP for Toronto Centre, thus continuing the long, long, long, long, long streak of above-it-all Rosedale Liberals in that riding notwithstanding any Liberal contribution to Senate sleaze over the years.
The brain trust advising Duffy, Wallin et al., the voters of Nova Scotia who hoped Prince Justin would favour them by booting the NDP out, the Natives out in NB who think the rest of Canada will rise up alongside them, the lemmings in the Premier's Office who are so eager to prove their commitment to transparency that they forgot how to spell the word "Government" correctly and the phony war between NDPers and Liberals who want basically the same thing in Toronto Centre all have one thing in common, and that is that they follow the leader and do what they're told, confident that nothing could possibly go wrong. They don't know what's happening, so they follow the person at the front of the line who looks like they know what's happening.
Something about huddling together in a room with like-minded individuals removes the ability to step back and say, "Wait a second, what we're doing here is totally kookoo bananas." That's all it takes to turn YOU into a sheep being herded with all the others.
And who's doing the herding? People who think they know what's going on, and don't. Issuing threats of death from above and "If you don't do this or support him or her, here are the consequences." Making people believe that their careers and the safety of those they care about are at stake. Getting people to terrify themselves into doing unspeakably dumb things, with these scandals being the result. Spinmasters at the mercy of other spinmasters who are at the mercy of other spinmasters.
What a shame for all of these nominally progressive people, believing in the basic good of humanity, to discover that they are motivated by fear of punishment and social censure by their fellow humans, pushed to extremism because they feel- and have good reason to feel- like no one will listen, rooted to the spot, terrified to move a muscle until some overseer cracks the whip and sends them scurrying this way or that.
Baaaaaa!!!!
-reality-show style accusations that Mike Duffy was forced- under great duress and in a truly diabolical fashion- to accept more money than most of us see all year for expenses he racked up (and no doubt he was forced to rack them up, too!)
-a Native uprising in New Brunswick that gets neither the Natives nor the New Brunswickers anywhere except hating each other worse than they did before
-a Premier of Ontario who is so disingenuous that she announced an Open Goverment Initiative- not an Open Government Initiative, you see, but an Open Goverment Initiative- because the idea of providing transparency into some parallel not-real thing that isn't quite "Government" to distract people from That Power Plant is so typically Kathleen Wynne that it's hard to believe the damn thing was a typo and not intentional
-a by-election in Toronto Centre that resembles one of those movies where two rival dance crews battle for supremacy and where there is no real story and no reason why we should care about any of the "actors" involved and yet we have to go through the exercise of pretending to care, except instead of rival dance crews serving one another we've got Chrystia Freeland and Linda McQuaig seeing who can pretend to care about poor people more whilst doing nothing
and
-a recent provincial election in Nova Scotia where the Liberals won a crushing majority, because, well, Justin Trudeau
What is the common denominator? All of this insane behaviour is the result of panicked rushes towards or away from something. Kathleen Wynne REALLY REALLY REALLY wants to prove that she isn't totally disingenuous and just ends up drawing attention to the fact that she is totally and utterly and completely disingenuous. An entire province of people didn't want to think too hard about the election they were in, so they engaged in a stampede to the Liberals as an offering to Trudeau. Everybody you know thinks Justin Trudeau is just the tops. They can't tell you why. They just know everyone around them thinks so, so they'd better think so too.
Duffy and Wallin and Brazeau racked up expenses and jet setted around the country because, well, that's what happens in the Senate. Duffy, if he's to be believed, accepted the money because that's what you do, that's what's expected. It's all part and parcel and somehow all the shenanigans that have taken place in the Senate before these three got there, in which guys like Michel Cogger ended up with an actual rap sheet, don't apply. None of them seemed to have the first clue that something like this could happen to them before it was too late.
In Toronto Centre the NDP have concluded that they are 100% right on the subject of scrapping the Senate altogether, and they're going to pound their pointy little heads against that wall from now till the end of November to no discernible effect. One NDP greybeard actually came into my place of business today fresh from the campaign office and started yammering to everyone he could find on the subject of consigning the Senate to the history books. And though nobody disagreed with him, you can be sure that Dame Chrystia Freeland will be the next MP for Toronto Centre, thus continuing the long, long, long, long, long streak of above-it-all Rosedale Liberals in that riding notwithstanding any Liberal contribution to Senate sleaze over the years.
The brain trust advising Duffy, Wallin et al., the voters of Nova Scotia who hoped Prince Justin would favour them by booting the NDP out, the Natives out in NB who think the rest of Canada will rise up alongside them, the lemmings in the Premier's Office who are so eager to prove their commitment to transparency that they forgot how to spell the word "Government" correctly and the phony war between NDPers and Liberals who want basically the same thing in Toronto Centre all have one thing in common, and that is that they follow the leader and do what they're told, confident that nothing could possibly go wrong. They don't know what's happening, so they follow the person at the front of the line who looks like they know what's happening.
Something about huddling together in a room with like-minded individuals removes the ability to step back and say, "Wait a second, what we're doing here is totally kookoo bananas." That's all it takes to turn YOU into a sheep being herded with all the others.
And who's doing the herding? People who think they know what's going on, and don't. Issuing threats of death from above and "If you don't do this or support him or her, here are the consequences." Making people believe that their careers and the safety of those they care about are at stake. Getting people to terrify themselves into doing unspeakably dumb things, with these scandals being the result. Spinmasters at the mercy of other spinmasters who are at the mercy of other spinmasters.
What a shame for all of these nominally progressive people, believing in the basic good of humanity, to discover that they are motivated by fear of punishment and social censure by their fellow humans, pushed to extremism because they feel- and have good reason to feel- like no one will listen, rooted to the spot, terrified to move a muscle until some overseer cracks the whip and sends them scurrying this way or that.
Baaaaaa!!!!
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Balls To The Wall
You mocked him in your cups for not being conservative enough. You accused him of being too wishy washy and too afraid to present real conservative policies. You sniffed at him for not differentiating himself from the Liberals and the NDP.
Now that Tim Hudak has said the he is absolutely, positively, no-way, N-O-T spells not backing down on yanking back the curtains on the unions, you change your tune. Whoa whoa whoa, says "the grassroots". Let's not start getting crazy here. This could be another faith based schools or worse. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Suddenly we are a divided party again, not two weeks after joining hands and singing Kumbaya in London. But then, we didn't really fool anyone, did we? 47% of us don't believe our own talk about being rough-and-ready conservatives who want to bring on Common Sense Revolution 2.0, because we're frightened of the big bad unions. So why should anyone else believe our talk?
And lest you think that these dissenters are the same bunch of Red Tories that have been ruining everything, I have not forgotten about how, while we were frittering away the days before the non-event that was London, the news broke that the King of the Principled Conservatives, that bold defender of the common vox populi Randy Hillier, was concerned that siding with Ellis Don would make us look like a bunch of uncaring bullies.
I had to read the headline three times to make sure the sun wasn't playing tricks with my eyes.
For this is Randy Hillier we're talking about here. The guy who believes in "non-violent civil disobedience". The guy who put a dead deer on Leona Dombrowsky's lawn, while the rest of us usually settle for a burning bag of poop or a ding-dong-ditch. The guy who ran Norm Sterling out of his riding is worried about the party handing unions a loaded gun that could be used against us in the next election. It is to laugh.
Let's refresh our memories with some of the policies Mr. Hillier put forward in his erstwhile run for leader of the PC Party of Ontario back in 2010.
Allowing Ontarians to vote to elect their senators;
Enacting a law, which he proposed to call the Freedom of Association and Conscience Act, which would allow health care professionals and other government-paid individuals to refuse to provide services to which, for religious or moral reasons, they were personally opposed (such as doctors and nurses refusing to perform abortions and marriage commissioners refusing to perform same-sex marriages);
Abolishing the Ontario Human Rights Commission and allowing all legal proceedings under the province’s Human Rights Act to be dealt with in the regular court system.
Allowing the sale of beer and wine in corner stores;
Restoration of the spring bear hunt;
Ending the closed shop in unionized workplaces;
Reverse the ban on the cosmetic use of pesticides;
abolition of the province's property tax assessment agency (MPAC);
Increasing the speed limit on Ontario highways;
Allowing the de-amalgamation of municipalities which had been forcibly amalgamated in the 1990s;
Cracking down on the aboriginal occupations in places like Caledonia
Had Hillier become leader of the PCPO (something the Principled Conservatives have wished for once or twice), instead of the guy we've got now, I'm sure he would have backed off on all of these fine Principled Conservative policies. After all, who wants to look like a bunch of hard-nosed, uncaring meanypantses by "ending the closed shop in unionized workplaces"? Not Mr. Hillier, that's for sure!!
How did it ever come to this? What kind of a world are we living in when unabashed rural radicals like Randy Hillier get their knees-a-knockin' when the unions start talkin'? What kind of an epic letdown must it be to hype yourself up for the revolution only to find that the party of the bosses is more afraid of you than you are afraid of them?
When 47% of the PCPO is afraid of putting their money where their mouth is on unions, then it's time to stop all talk of corporations being above the law. The Occupy people can stop mounting the barricades, because we've apparently decided that this union-bashing is just another silly game we play. We didn't mean it, honest! It's just really, really hard to let go of all this money. Please don't hurt us!
You will note that nowhere did Mr. Hillier say that he was worried about handing the Liberals a loaded gun. He's not afraid of the Liberals. The Liberals are off babbling pleasantries about how they're not going to run a negative campaign......and for once, I have no reason to doubt them because we all know that that task will be left to the WFC. Unless the unions decide it's time for Premier Horwath. Or maybe they'll just kill us all and let God sort it out. Ours not to reason why.
Everyone from Randy Hillier to Kathleen Wynne is terrified of the unions. Everyone understands that these people run the province. Everyone, that is, except Tim Hudak. Because you asked for it, the man is (I hope) going to take this ball and run with it as far as he can get. There'll be no cushy afterjob in the public sector a la Michael Ignatieff for Tim Hudak if he fails. He might have to leave the province altogether like Laurel Broten did.
But dammit, he's going all the way on this one, or so he says, even as the PCPO wiffles and waffles around him. And for that, for a stand that might make him Premier or might be utter suicide, I say, Kudos to you, Tim Hudak! Shine on, you crazy diamond! And then won't we all feel guilty with ourselves for complaining about Tim Hudak's lack of conservative principles if he and the family he loves so much are made examples of by the unions so that none of us PC'ers ever take it into our heads to meddle in their affairs again.
Now that Tim Hudak has said the he is absolutely, positively, no-way, N-O-T spells not backing down on yanking back the curtains on the unions, you change your tune. Whoa whoa whoa, says "the grassroots". Let's not start getting crazy here. This could be another faith based schools or worse. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Suddenly we are a divided party again, not two weeks after joining hands and singing Kumbaya in London. But then, we didn't really fool anyone, did we? 47% of us don't believe our own talk about being rough-and-ready conservatives who want to bring on Common Sense Revolution 2.0, because we're frightened of the big bad unions. So why should anyone else believe our talk?
And lest you think that these dissenters are the same bunch of Red Tories that have been ruining everything, I have not forgotten about how, while we were frittering away the days before the non-event that was London, the news broke that the King of the Principled Conservatives, that bold defender of the common vox populi Randy Hillier, was concerned that siding with Ellis Don would make us look like a bunch of uncaring bullies.
I had to read the headline three times to make sure the sun wasn't playing tricks with my eyes.
For this is Randy Hillier we're talking about here. The guy who believes in "non-violent civil disobedience". The guy who put a dead deer on Leona Dombrowsky's lawn, while the rest of us usually settle for a burning bag of poop or a ding-dong-ditch. The guy who ran Norm Sterling out of his riding is worried about the party handing unions a loaded gun that could be used against us in the next election. It is to laugh.
Let's refresh our memories with some of the policies Mr. Hillier put forward in his erstwhile run for leader of the PC Party of Ontario back in 2010.
Had Hillier become leader of the PCPO (something the Principled Conservatives have wished for once or twice), instead of the guy we've got now, I'm sure he would have backed off on all of these fine Principled Conservative policies. After all, who wants to look like a bunch of hard-nosed, uncaring meanypantses by "ending the closed shop in unionized workplaces"? Not Mr. Hillier, that's for sure!!
How did it ever come to this? What kind of a world are we living in when unabashed rural radicals like Randy Hillier get their knees-a-knockin' when the unions start talkin'? What kind of an epic letdown must it be to hype yourself up for the revolution only to find that the party of the bosses is more afraid of you than you are afraid of them?
When 47% of the PCPO is afraid of putting their money where their mouth is on unions, then it's time to stop all talk of corporations being above the law. The Occupy people can stop mounting the barricades, because we've apparently decided that this union-bashing is just another silly game we play. We didn't mean it, honest! It's just really, really hard to let go of all this money. Please don't hurt us!
You will note that nowhere did Mr. Hillier say that he was worried about handing the Liberals a loaded gun. He's not afraid of the Liberals. The Liberals are off babbling pleasantries about how they're not going to run a negative campaign......and for once, I have no reason to doubt them because we all know that that task will be left to the WFC. Unless the unions decide it's time for Premier Horwath. Or maybe they'll just kill us all and let God sort it out. Ours not to reason why.
Everyone from Randy Hillier to Kathleen Wynne is terrified of the unions. Everyone understands that these people run the province. Everyone, that is, except Tim Hudak. Because you asked for it, the man is (I hope) going to take this ball and run with it as far as he can get. There'll be no cushy afterjob in the public sector a la Michael Ignatieff for Tim Hudak if he fails. He might have to leave the province altogether like Laurel Broten did.
But dammit, he's going all the way on this one, or so he says, even as the PCPO wiffles and waffles around him. And for that, for a stand that might make him Premier or might be utter suicide, I say, Kudos to you, Tim Hudak! Shine on, you crazy diamond! And then won't we all feel guilty with ourselves for complaining about Tim Hudak's lack of conservative principles if he and the family he loves so much are made examples of by the unions so that none of us PC'ers ever take it into our heads to meddle in their affairs again.
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?
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.
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.
-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.
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