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Brent Rathgeber wrote a book!http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ex--conservative-mp-describes-pmos-tight-control/article20464480/?service=mobile posted:Upset with the Conservative government’s handling of the F-35 jet purchase, Brent Rathgeber wrote a blog entry critiquing it. It was an innocuous act, save for one detail: He was a Conservative MP himself.  I'm sure many pages will be spent blaming the Libs for increasing PMO powers, but something tells me Harper won't come off too well here.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:59
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Dreylad posted:A lot of the universities in this country just can't stop building either! Gotta build that new research facility because alumni doners like names on buildings and ignore maintenance on our older buildings! - every university in canada The flip side to this is the requirement some fields have for constant improvement in equipment, the costs of which are significant and often depending on the buildings age it would cost more to retrofit the existing building than just building new. I know when I graduated Queens was in danger of losing accreditation for the Mech Eng program as they needed new equipment, and the current Mech building quite literally couldn't support the required upgrades.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:01
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Morroque posted:Would you believe they changed the logo again since then? 'cause they did. I'll believe just about anything at this point. I spent two years unemployed after graduation, and went back to college to get an accounting diploma. With the exception of people that already had connections (like one girl whose mom worked at Bell Globe Media and got a job in poo poo like that), I'm actually doing much better than most of my friends who graduated.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:34
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TrueChaos posted:The flip side to this is the requirement some fields have for constant improvement in equipment, the costs of which are significant and often depending on the buildings age it would cost more to retrofit the existing building than just building new. vyelkin posted:Brutalist monstrosity is the best kind of university architecture. Albino Squirrel fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 14:45
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Brutalist monstrosity is the best kind of university architecture.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:48
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Sorry for disappearing before the huge discussion my post started. I do think the NDP need to move further left, but (and I may be wrong on this) basically anytime a socialist party or group has any success is if there is a further left party that is growing in popularity. Communists in Russia had the Anarchists, Labour in Germany had the Spartacists, etc. I mean we talk about the Overton window, it makes sense for a party to be pushing the limits on the left. The Communist party did get banned in Canada when it was getting a little popular, I don't think anyone could argue that, although that one guy didn't seem to know that. Basically my understanding of history and politics is the people with the power only are willing to give up some of their power if they are at risk of losing all of it. Every political development which has seen an increase in political power amongst the least in society has come from that. The Magna Carta got signed because otherwise the King would have been overthrown, India got independence so that the British businesses didn't have to worry about nationalisation in a bloody independence war. There are plenty more examples. Really I feel it's self evident, if you have power, what would make you give it up? They are willing to make concessions so long as they still have the lion's share of power.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:57
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You can only move left, once you've moved from the right to the centre. When the right gently caress up, people will tend to vote for an alternative. If the alternative is more centre based, they will vote for that. Someone who has voted Con for years, but who is disillusioned by them, will most likely vote for the Libs, since they're the closest other major party to them, but will most likely NOT vote for the NDP. The Libs are, arguably, still left of the Cons at least on social issues. The people who are going to vote NDP, will most likely still do so unless they're trying to play 4th dimension chess and force a Con loss by bolstering the Libs. If the Libs are in power and they gently caress up, their base will generally split between both the NDP and Cons going to whichever is most like them. If the NDP gently caress up, then it becomes the reverse of the Con scenario, with more people voting Libs but most likely not Con. If you want politics to move to the left more, you have to somehow convince more people who generally vote Con to vote Lib. Unfortunately, we've been under Con rule for so long, that the average citizen is probably more right than they would like to admit. It's not reasonable to believe that the NDP will come to power during the election as there are still far more right leaning people than left. However, if the Libs take power, they will inherently pull the narrative to the left (if only for social issues). The job of the Libs is to show that some left-wing economics is better than what the Cons are doing (essentially what the Democrats are attempting). Even if they fail in other aspects of economics, if showing that SOME of those left-wing ideas work better than anything Harper has ever proposed, then people will start to be more receptive to it. It is at that point that the NDP have to step up and continue to push their economics as a progression of what needs to be done to correct the parts the Libs fail at. Expecting change by running to the left when you've been under right rule for a decade is self-defeating. You can't fix a broken system in one election. But if you generally vote NDP, then you should vote NDP simply to keep their numbers up. The Libs will be pulling in more Con voters than the NDP ever will, so expecting a win by the NDP isn't realistic. People who vote NDP should pressure the Libs, once they come into power, to start the process of moving to the left again.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:36
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vyelkin posted:Brutalist monstrosity is the best kind of university architecture.   Where is this beautiful place?
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Sep 8, 2014 15:38
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People laugh at Robarts but it'll be the last building standing in Toronto. Future civilizations will marvel at the ingenuity of constructing a library built to the standards of a nuclear war bunker in order to preserve knowledge. They will assume that this "turkey" thing it is modeled on was the supreme mythical creature of our culture.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:43
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Haha holy poo poo it is a turkey. I wiki'd it and no mention that it's officially trying to look like a huge concrete glorious turkey. It was surely on purpose right? Or a peacock maybe?  Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 15:48
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No it's a peacock, brutalist turkeys don't have windows come on.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:50
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Throwdini posted:Go gently caress yourself, shithead. Un-Canadian posting is a punishable offence around these parts. 
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Sep 8, 2014 15:55
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eXXon posted:No it's a peacock, brutalist turkeys don't have windows come on. But I don't see a fedora.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:11
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It probably is a peacock but we call it a turkey to ruffle UofT's feathers.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:14
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Brutalism is awesome, and that is a cool-rear end building.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:19
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I'll give them credit for doing something interesting with Brutalism. Boring Brutalism is just horrid, though.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:28
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Albino Squirrel posted:Wasn't MechE based in Goodwin Hall? It's a Brutalist monstrosity but you'd think it at least could hold up some equipment. It's in McLaughlin, which was built in the late 40's. They've been trying to get rid of that building forever, as the running joke is it heats the street more than the actual rooms. There's a lot more to it than just structural stuff - wheelchair access is pathetic, there's little / no way of getting large equipment upstairs, the wiring is old enough that if you start adding much more they're going to have to replace all of it, it's a stone building so wifi is spotty at best and Ethernet wiring is lacking, they struggle to keep the building warm enough for classes (no really - there were a few days where we could see our breath inside the class). Add in that there's very little space in the building for group work (which is the direction engineering programs are heading in) and no ability to support interdisciplinary projects and you hit the point where the building is reaching its end of useful life as the MechE building. The problem is that a lot of buildings are around the same age, as development in universities tends to go in spurts (from what I've seen) so the result is that over a 10 year span you need to significantly upgrade/replace a boatload of science & tech related buildings. It's not to say these buildings aren't useful as classroom space any more, but their ability to support tech intensive faculties decreases a lot as they age. McLaughlin is closing in on 70 years old - there's only so much future proofing you can do. Goodwin was built in the '70's and connected to the new compsci / compeng building in the late 80's, it still has plenty of life left.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:31
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God, I really miss Robarts.. I miss so much about the downtown campus, especially finding nooks and crannies to do studying with a giant mug of coffee and cigarettes. edit: we're sending troops to Iraq eleven years late and all we've got is building-chat, haha
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Sep 8, 2014 17:01
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Dal's Killam library: How is that for brutal (my father worked on it while going to Dal)
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Sep 8, 2014 17:30
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I believe Robarts is indeed supposed to be a Peacock, which is pretty funny considering that the defining feature of a Turkey is supposed to be its bright feathery tail, and Robarts is made of grey concrete. Either way, it was always comforting to know that if a nuclear bomb had hit Toronto in the midst of exam period then I would have probably survived unscathed deep in the concrete bowels of "Fort Book". Ardent Communist posted:Sorry for disappearing before the huge discussion my post started. I do think the NDP need to move further left, but (and I may be wrong on this) basically anytime a socialist party or group has any success is if there is a further left party that is growing in popularity. Communists in Russia had the Anarchists, Labour in Germany had the Spartacists, etc. I mean we talk about the Overton window, it makes sense for a party to be pushing the limits on the left. There's probably something to this but it's not altogether clear what is cause and what is effect. It could be that moderate left forces succeed because of the radical left, or it could be that the radical left and the moderate left both share the same cause. It could just be that the right economic or social circumstances will generate both radical and moderate leftist parties simultaneously rather than the success of the one being directly caused by the presence of the other. Either way, if we want to push Canada to the left then I think there really needs to be some social force outside the realm of electoral politics that is generating pressure for leftist reforms. If you look at the right in Canada they have churches, they have think tanks like the Fraser institute, they have a number of media outlets, they have school programs like Calgary's School of Public Policy or Carleton's Clayton Riddell Grad Program in Political Management. Most importantly, they have the corporate world. The Conservative Party doesn't self generate all of it's political stances. Instead these different tenatcles of the conservative movement each have demands or interests they want to see fulfilled, and through a long and messy process of agitation, negotiation and persuasion they get these ideas filtered up into the Conservative party itself. Obviously the different Conservative stakeholders have different levels of influence: a small rural church in Alberta has less pull than the CEO of Tim Hortons. But the point is that if you really want to understand where the policies of the CPC come from you have to look beyond the party itself and toward the constellation of people and institutions that form the backbone of Canadian conservatism. The left doesn't really have anything resembling that constellation of forces. There are some left leaning campuses like York, there are some unions, and there's the NDP, but these groups are underfunded, scattered, and most importantly, severely demoralized. They really see themselves as a movement sharing a goal, they don't communicate enough with each other, they don't have a ruthless enough attitude toward political combat, and their stance on the issues tends to be short sighted and defensive. They can mobilize to stop specific cuts but they don't have the will or the foresight to go beyond that and actually make positive demands on the system. Some of this problem is structural: the left just doesn't have the kind of money that the right has. The left is also more fractured ideologically, as we can see just from the last couple pages of this thread. But the point remains that if you want to shift the direction of Canadian society then that push can't originate inside the NDP. Obviously the NDP should be a part of the solution and we need to fight tooth and nail to stop it drifting further to the right, but the fundamental problem here runs deeper. quote:The Communist party did get banned in Canada when it was getting a little popular, I don't think anyone could argue that, although that one guy didn't seem to know that. Like I said, there is some truth to this idea, but it's also worth noting that sometimes the opposite happens. The left was strong and growing stronger in Germany and that lead to the rise of Nazism. The left was perceived to be getting stronger in North America and Europe during the 1970s and that helped lead to neoliberalism. History rarely moves in straight lines and you can't just reduce the direction of politics to a simple formula where 'radical left agitation leads to moderate left reform'. HBNRW posted:You can only move left, once you've moved from the right to the centre. When the right gently caress up, people will tend to vote for an alternative. If the alternative is more centre based, they will vote for that. Someone who has voted Con for years, but who is disillusioned by them, will most likely vote for the Libs, since they're the closest other major party to them, but will most likely NOT vote for the NDP. The Libs are, arguably, still left of the Cons at least on social issues. The people who are going to vote NDP, will most likely still do so unless they're trying to play 4th dimension chess and force a Con loss by bolstering the Libs. To reiterate my point above: I think its dangerous for leftists to focus on electoral politics to the exclusion of everything else. There's an old expression in the military. "Amateurs worry about strategy, experts worry about logistics". That applies to politics as well. Rather than thinking about individual elections I think its more important to think about the logistically capability of the movement as a whole. Can it attract new recruits? Can it generate new ideas? Can it get people's attention? Can it somehow support political campaigns? Can it retain loyal followers? etc. etc. The political Right currently has those capacities, the Left doesn't. That's what needs to be fixed. Until then elections are just going to be a stopgap measure.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:39
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Baronjutter posted:Haha holy poo poo it is a turkey. That thing brings this immediately to mind: 
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Sep 8, 2014 18:37
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Nakedly self-serving propaganda, funded by taxes: part of BC's education plan
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Sep 8, 2014 19:54
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"Twice as much" good god are they really trying to deceive people into thinking the teachers want their wages doubled? Maybe it's because I grew up in a rural area where the grade/high school teachers were familiar if not friends with a majority of parents, but I really can't imagine that this will fly.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:12
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Helsing posted:Like I said, there is some truth to this idea, but it's also worth noting that sometimes the opposite happens. The left was strong and growing stronger in Germany and that lead to the rise of Nazism. The left was perceived to be getting stronger in North America and Europe during the 1970s and that helped lead to neoliberalism. History rarely moves in straight lines and you can't just reduce the direction of politics to a simple formula where 'radical left agitation leads to moderate left reform'. To bring this back to Canadian discussion, what's people's opinion on the RCMP planting bombs and blaming it on their opponents? They did it recently against an anti-fracking advocate, and one of the few bombs that killed somebody during the FLQ crisis.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:15
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Heavy neutrino posted:"Twice as much" good god are they really trying to deceive people into thinking the teachers want their wages doubled? Prepare to be disappointed, as it is definitely getting traction here.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:27
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The public falls over themselves trying to scream about how teachers are just in it for the money and aren't thinking of the children! whenever contract negotiations come up. I don't know of any other field that riles people up more than teaching. I think it's because Teacher's Unions are holding up while others fall, so it makes it an easy target for politicians to turn the public against. You know, instead of the public demanding the same for themselves. Interestingly, the Liberals in NS allied themselves with the teachers last election and have been putting more money into it. This school year teachers have even received more power in the classroom re: marking and such. For example, we can give zeros now, though that may have little to do with provincial politics.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:36
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Professor Shark posted:For example, we can give zeros now, though that may have little to do with provincial politics. It still blows me away that this isn't a possibility elsewhere anymore given that kids were definitely failed, or held back grades when I went through elementary/high-school usually when I'm talking to folks here in BC about this I ask them what they do for a living, and how they'd feel if they got no pay raises for 10 years while having their workload increase.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:39
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If you think the teachers are getting it raw, you should take a look at what happened to BC's paramedics.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:40
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THC posted:Nakedly self-serving propaganda, funded by taxes: part of BC's education plan They are running it on Facebook as well. Great use of tax dollars. This sort of thing really shouldn't be legal.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:50
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Cultural Imperial posted:If you think the teachers are getting it raw, you should take a look at what happened to BC's paramedics. What did they do? My sister is a paramedic in Alberta and she swears that hell will freeze over before she ever works in BC.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:42
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As usual BC is better at everything than everyone and that includes having big monstrosities made of concrete as universities:
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Sep 8, 2014 23:40
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IMG crying condo building with BC flag back drop.
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Sep 8, 2014 23:47
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Robarts is the only nice brutalist building I've seen. barf  double barf
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Sep 8, 2014 23:47
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 Ottawa U's library is boring and not super ugly.
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Sep 8, 2014 23:50
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HookShot posted:As usual BC is better at everything than everyone and that includes having big monstrosities made of concrete as universities: Lies. That's the planet Tollana from Stargate SG-1. 
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Sep 8, 2014 23:50
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HookShot posted:As usual BC is better at everything than everyone and that includes having big monstrosities made of concrete as universities: ah the old suicide inducing grey of my school, hello old friend way up on the mountain e: 
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Sep 8, 2014 23:59
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It's also a public square on Caprica from Battlestar Galactica. I've always been a fan of the McMaster University Medical Center.  The Home of the Michael C. DeGroote School of medicine, next to the Michael C. DeGroote School of Business, with regular bus service to the Michael C. DeGroote Business building in Burlington Michael C. DeGroote!
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Sep 9, 2014 00:06
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MA-Horus posted:It's also a public square on Caprica from Battlestar Galactica. Man, I never knew McMaster had tree men!
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Sep 9, 2014 00:32
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Sorry for the double post But criminal charges were just filed against the BC libs drat, how many provincial govs have criminal investigations going on now? (My count is 4, BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Coincidentally the four biggest Provinces in pop)
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Sep 9, 2014 01:11
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bunnyofdoom posted:Sorry for the double post But criminal charges were just filed against the BC libs It is worth pointing out that unfortunately for Quebec, because the corruption inquiry is an open-immunity type deal process, it is not an actual criminal investigation. Nothing will change, we will only get to know who used to be the most crooked.
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Sep 9, 2014 01:12
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