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?

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.

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.

Blurred Lines

Today I'm going to talk about the left's response to something actually popular instead of Canadian politics, so you have your chance to stop reading now should you choose to do so.

Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke are two people who currently have extremely boring hit songs on the radio. At the MTV Video Music Awards this week, Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke performed a mashup of their boring songs, and at one point during the performance Miley Cyrus rubbed her butt on Robin Thicke's genitals. This caused the entire Internet to explode into a million offended pieces. As I write this, nobody is not offended by Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke's performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Left-leaning people on the Internet are super-dee-duper offended. They were already kind of offended at the two songs separately. Robin Thicke's boring song has a video where models dance topless and features lyrics about women being animals and men not being able to tell whether women are good girls or if they really want "it." Miley Cyrus's boring song has a video where she "twerks"- a type of jigglybutt dance that is practiced by and apparently reserved exclusively for women of African descent. The fact that Miley Cyrus, a white woman, did this in her video is problematic because it constitutes "cultural appropriation", which is basically the idea that people are not supposed to dress like, talk like, dance like, or do anything that is done by another culture without express permission.

So taking these two and putting them together onstage was like provoking a fistfight between two nuclear explosions. First people attacked Cyrus for being trashy onstage. Then people attacked the people attacking Cyrus for not calling Robin Thicke out for his own raunchiness. Then people attacked those people for focusing on sexism and ignoring how racist the entire spectacle was. Before long, everyone was just calling each other racists and sexists and slut-shamers. It was a 137-car pileup of identity-politics players. It got to the point where left leaning people wrote entirely serious articles about how it was good that everyone was so offended, but how it was bad that those people were offended about the wrong things.

(This is totally unrelated, but leftists use the word literally a lot when they complain. Have you ever noticed that?)

As a result of this kerfuffle, the performance was literally all anyone could talk about. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and every online magazine are awash in talkity talk about Miley Cyrus rubbing her butt on Robin Thicke's genitals. I don't know what "media hits" are, but I bet this performance has an awful lot of them.

Having viewed the assault on rights and dignity that was Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke at the MTV Music Awards and having, as a movement, sworn Never Again, the left might have decided to  completely disappoint the evil corporaciopatriarchists who- bereft of conscience- designed this orgy of privilege, calculated down to the last detail to cause maximum hurtfeels and to generate an ever increasing embarrassment of riches for the invisible empire of sin that rules us all by.....ignoring it entirely. No pileup of outrage means no "media hits" and therefore no incentive to wait a few years and then do the whole thing again and make another boatload of cash.

Instead, those who viewed that performance as a sexist, racist, slut-shaming crime against humanity that exposes any number of secret agendas are busily making sure that this grows into the biggest news story ever by complaining ever more loudly about the performance and how people are offended by the wrong aspects of the performance and how that offends them even more. Whoopsy-doodle!

Back in the day, savvy promoters could always count on the Right to get offended at their pushing the envelope and do half their work for them. When the Christians started talking about how Janet Jackson's boob being exposed by Justin Timberlake at the Super Bowl was bringing the family down, they knew they had made it, baby. Now they have something even better- angry leftists on Tumblr fighting each other about which ways this performance reinforced systematic oppression.

None of these unbought and unbossed lefties would ever dream that they are making the rich richer with their combatting of all of the oppression. Every one of these people believe themselves to be on the cutting edge, and yet they are played against one another so easily that it's almost not fair.

They build their own prison, and then they rail against The Man for putting them there against their will.

I bring you this very silly example to show, once again, that it is possible to play these factions against one another by exploiting the fault lines between them. But we here in Ontario don't want to do that.

A Dirty Shame

It is hard to overstate how important the practice of shaming is to the left. It is the foundation of everything they do, to themselves and to their opponents.

Shaming is distinct from attacking. Shaming an opponent is a practice unique to the left. When conservatives attack people, they attack things about the person, things the person did or didn't do, say or didn't say, or things the person believes. Those on the left do all this and more, but they also attack feelings in addition to more tangible things. They think that by making people feel bad about themselves, they can make them do things more easily, and they are absolutely  right.

Conservatives do not try to make liberals feel bad about themselves. Instead they want to talk about scandals, or waste, or jobs, or other abstract things, forgetting that there are people who do not care about scandals, waste, or jobs. But everyone has feelings.

Shaming is a deliberate practice. This is not just some reactive hitting out. Leftists love making conservatives feel guilty. Leftists know that if they use certain words and phrases, we will back down and apologize. It is so deliberate that they can configure Twitter bots to do it for them.

One time, I was sitting in a pub in the midst of a gathering of Liberal and Conservative partisans. I was talking to a woman who has recently been promoted from oft-quoted ministerial spokesperson up to the Premier's Office. Somehow the subject turned to women in politics. We had been speaking in reasonably calm tones of voice when- as if she had just remembered to do this- she fixed me with a terrible look and belted out, "I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU DON'T WANT MORE WOMEN IN POLITICS". I was so stunned by this outburst that I forgot, temporarily, that the candidate I was working for at the time was herself female. This was an attempt at shaming, and it worked to the extent that I could have had a ready reply for her, but because I was surprised, I didn't. The thing I remember most was how it seemed like a practiced movement- like a golf swing. It more than likely was, and it was not the last time a Liberal has tried this with me.

Liberals know that even though we supposedly reject the liberal consensus, we want to be liked by others. We don't like being thought of as racist, sexist, homophobic, and all the rest of it. So we try to demonstrate that we are not, and the Liberals declare that we have a hidden agenda.

Hidden Agenda, as a strategy, is old and boring, but it still works. It works because it puts us on our back foot, and it puts us on our back foot because we don't like having to prove that we are not racist, sexist, and homophobic. You cannot stay on message when you have to constantly prove that you are not racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Some conservatives make the mistake of thinking that all they have to do is try really hard to not say anything that is socially unacceptable. For example, John Tory hates being shamed so much that he does more than any other person I know to prevent himself from saying or doing things that are offensive to others. This doesn't help him at all, though. During the 2007 election, the OLP sold Ontario voters the patently ridiculous notion that John Tory was a secret social conservative, and the Ontario voters bought it.

By contrast, Rob Ford is immune to being shamed. He does not appear to feel the emotion at all. I do not know if Ford is just not capable of being shamed, or if he's figured out a way to not feel it. The how is not as important. So long as Ford isn't shamed by anything, whatever his opponents try to tar him with just bounces off. The Toronto Star in full outrage combined with rabid media attention and former Ford loyalists running for cover does not matter worth a damn as far as Ford is concerned because Ford is not concerned. And because the left has no other tricks in their bag besides trying to shame Ford out of office, he's not going anywhere.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we are not Rob Ford. Don't deny that you cringe inwardly, if even just a little, every time that the Star reports that Ford Did A Thing. And even if we were composed entirely of Rob Fords, that might not get us very far either. The Alberta Wild Rose found out to their dismay some time ago that if you don't condemn some obscure blog post made by a candidate to the effect that gay people will- through magical procedures that are unclear- end up in a lake of fire, you very well might lose an election.

Because, even if the party leadership decides that the idea of there being a lake of fire in hell (a place which may or may not exist, depending on whom you ask) reserved exclusively for gay people is too ridiculous to require condemnation, the voters will be too ashamed to be seen voting for that party. Even if nobody knows how they voted, the people voting for the party with unacceptable social views would be too ashamed of themselves for having voted the way they did.

So because trying to avoid doing shameworthy things doesn't work, and because we can't all be Rob Fords, and because the voting public certainly can't all be Rob Fords, the solution is to develop our own methods of shaming those on the left. But as I've documented more times than I care to count, we don't want to put those on the left on their back foot. We don't want to hurt their feelings. We just aren't capable of living with ourselves for having ideas that aren't popular with people. When people say we are "mean-spirited", it hurts our feelings and we have to make the sad feels stop.

Long Division

Try as I might I cannot understand the line of thinking suggesting that since we are in difficult times economically, we need to avoid difficult policies that might be "divisive" and cause "social unrest".

Does the average voter assume that we can put off the hard solutions forever? Do they think we can just wait this out? Is the social unrest happening elsewhere in the world something that can't happen here?

Kathleen Wynne thinks so. She thinks she can build bridges and work across aisles, have conversations and consultations, and move forward. But her efforts have fallen somewhat short. The unions, ever hungry for more privilege, continue to press her sorely.  Municipalities are mad about wind turbines, parents are upset about tragedy-stricken daycares, and full-day kindergarten is an expensive nightmare. Things don't look like they are going to get better for Kathleen Wynne despite what may or may not be sincere attempts to fight off social unrest.

Furthermore, the voters have been chipping away at the Ontario Liberals for years. They have lost ground with each subsequent election and round of byelections ever since 2007. They lost their majority in 2011, couldn't regain it in 2012, and with the losses of Etobicoke Lakeshore, Windsor Tecumseh and London West, let it slip even farther away. A good portion of Dalton's team has moved on, Don Guy is off doing his thing elsewhere, and OLP standouts (I can't believe I just wrote that) like Bentley, Duncan, Pupatello, and Sorbara have bowed out. The OLP can still fend off a challenge but less and less people are parking their votes with them. Because the Liberals did so much to infuriate the unions and everyone else during the 2012 political season, their claim to be the protectors of public peace is even more shaky.

As we have seen, the NDP wants to put in divisive policies of their own. As a given, as per their own rhetoric, they want the rich to suffer. They make up all kinds of reasons as to why it's a good thing for the rich to suffer, but if you don't want a government that will set one group of people against another, you can't expect that from the NDP. The last time we had an NDP government in Ontario there was actually more social unrest than there had been in a long while.

What if the PC Party of Ontario tried sincerely to rid themselves of policies that were hard to swallow? Nobody remembers anything about John Tory's platform from the 2007 election except faith based schools, and that's because there was nothing of note and nothing all that offensive or divisive except for faith based schools. We had pages and pages of bland, inoffensive policies and one divisive policy, and that was too much for people. So that doesn't work either.

Then we have the argument that Hudak, being too snarly and negative for some, needs to put forward a "positive economic vision" for Ontario. But why should he do that when journalists are engaging in brain-twisting analysis of why Hudak comes across as "inauthentic"? Disingenuity comes more naturally to Kathleen Wynne, it would seem.  

So none of the options before the people of Ontario will keep the rising levels of social unrest at bay. Divisive policies of one type or another will become the order of the day if this trend continues. The strands are fraying. Nobody can claim, least of all after the byelections earlier this month, that Ontario is becoming a happier, more chilled out place where people don't have to work harder and harder to keep themselves from seeing the truth.

London Confidential

Only in the PC Party of Ontario could you have an attempted leadership coup "organized" by people who insist on speaking to newspapers "on condition of anonymity." This, after they, um, signed their names- which I hope were their real names, not their ultra-secret codenames- to the leadership review motion in question.

How in the name of heaven are you supposed to organize delegates to support your motion and fundraise to send those delegates to the convention- especially when you KNOW central party doesn't want your motion anywhere near the floor- when you don't even make yourselves public? No Twitter accounts, no e-mail addresses, no websites? No designated point people? Just going to coast along until September on the assumption that "the grassroots" are behind you, huh? What a bunch of Double-O-Stupids.

Take a hint, Hudak haters: As long as this low-level cloak and dagger nonsense is the best you can do, Tim isn't going anywhere.