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A Good Policy
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Nov 5, 2015 18:35
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Yeah, to pick out some examples: if you think that Jody Wilson-Raybould is not qualified to be Minister of Justice, or that Harjit Sajjan is not qualified to be Minister of National Defence, you're probably a heinous racist, sexist, or both! There are certainly people in cabinet that are younger and less experienced (as far as anyone knows at this point) and consequently have less important portfolios, but I still haven't seen anything to suggest they are unqualified or will not be able to handle the duties of their office.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:37
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I just loving love how no one even mentioned merit of cabinet ministers until it was women being talked about 
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Nov 5, 2015 18:37
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CLAM DOWN posted:I just loving love how no one even mentioned merit of cabinet ministers until it was women being talked about Did you hear one of them is from Afghanistan? Oh my word...
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Nov 5, 2015 18:39
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PT6A posted:Yeah, to pick out some examples: if you think that Jody Wilson-Raybould is not qualified to be Minister of Justice, or that Harjit Sajjan is not qualified to be Minister of National Defence, you're probably a heinous racist, sexist, or both! There are certainly people in cabinet that are younger and less experienced (as far as anyone knows at this point) and consequently have less important portfolios, but I still haven't seen anything to suggest they are unqualified or will not be able to handle the duties of their office.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:41
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bunnyofdoom posted:....Did you read my facebook post to mmy former friend? Cause those were the two people I used to point out he's full of poo poo. No, it's just that they make really, really good, obvious examples.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:41
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POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION REVERSE RACISM!!!!!!!! Merit is dog whistle racist and sexist bullshit.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:43
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CLAM DOWN posted:I just loving love how no one even mentioned merit of cabinet ministers until it was women being talked about To be fair, when the Minister of Science and Technology looked like he might be a creationist I was. Though I'm not now; this cabinet looks great to me.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:45
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vyelkin posted:I'm down to get rid of the royalty but only because I don't want Charles' face on Canadian money. Something is wrong with you if you don't want that goofy looking gently caress on our money.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:45
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cowofwar posted:Merit is dog whistle racist and sexist bullshit. The thing is: I can understand why people would be upset with choosing minority candidates over better-qualified white/male candidates in the name of diversity, but I don't think anything close to that has happened here at all. These racists and sexists have created an alternate world in their minds where they refuse to acknowledge the qualifications of the people selected to cabinet. Especially considering how absolutely unqualified many people in the Harper cabinet were for their positions, I should add. If even one of the women or visible minority ministers in Trudeau's cabinet is even half as unqualified as Gary loving Goodyear was to be Minister for Science and Technology, I'll eat my loving hat, but apparently that was never an issue because he was white and had a penis. PT6A fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 18:48
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:That's because regressive poo poo heads assume the most qualified candidates are defacto Male (also usually white) so the idea that women and minorities could be eminently qualified for a position is not something they can reconcile. I don't know if you've put this quite the right way. It's true that regressive shitheads assume white men are the most qualified at everything. But there's also a second layer to this, which is the difference between equality of treatment and equality of outcome. Conservative when they talk about equality are almost always talking about equality of treatment, whereas when the left talks about it (I don't say liberals because I don't want to confuse it with the party) we talk about equality of outcome. Equal treatment in choosing your cabinet means you would look at every MP you've got and decide who is the "most qualified", meaning who has the most experience, who has the most degrees, who has the most time in office, etc. By doing this you would end up with a cabinet dominated by white men, because historically white men have advantages such as being admitted to better schools, rising through corporate or military hierarchies faster, getting elected more often, and getting appointed to influential posts more often. Therefore the cabinet would end up mostly older white men because they have the most experience, but you would not be recognizing the fact that those men got their experience by having small advantages at every stage of their life. You would not necessarily be appointing the most "qualified" candidate for each office, because you are inherently biasing your selection towards people with advantages in life and away from people with disadvantages in life. On the other hand, equal outcome in choosing your cabinet means you would try to achieve a balanced cabinet along gender, ethnic, etc. lines the way Trudeau did. You will not necessarily be appointing the most experienced person or the person with the most credentials, because you recognize that they may have received those credentials because of built-in advantages due to their gender or race, without actually being more qualified for the post than their competition. It also inherently assumes that women are as smart and competent as men, and minorities are as smart and competent as white people, and that even if you just randomly plotted the intelligence and competence of all your MPs on a bell curve it would be extremely unlikely that all the best ones would be white men. So you end up appointing people with less experience, but who may end up being more competent at their jobs because they might actually be smarter than the white guys who picked up more experience than them along the way. But the problem is there's no way to measure competence and intelligence before someone is appointed. So when applying equality of outcome to a policy problem, whether it's picking a cabinet or affirmative action or anything else, you face the problem of measurement: it's easy to measure "this white guy has ten years of experience whereas the black woman only has five years" or "this white student has a 90% average whereas the First Nations student has an 85% average" and think it's unjust that the black woman gets picked for cabinet and the First Nations student gets the scholarship, without recognizing that it's easier for the white guy to get experience and the white student to get higher grades because of built-in advantages. But if you're someone who firmly believes that equality should mean equal treatment (David Cameron gave an important speech about this recently calling the British Conservative Party "the party of equality"), which a lot of the time implicitly means "give everyone a fair interview and then appoint the white guy because he has a better resume" then no amount of argument is necessarily going to convince you that a minority woman should get a job over a white man who has more measurable experience. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 18:50
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My thoughts Re the monarchy: I think Canada should recognize a pretender to the British throne after Elizabeth dies. The simplest way would be for the Canadian parliament to annul the ACt of Settlement of 1701 and recognize Franz, Duke of Bavaria, or as we would refer to him: "Francis II, by the Grace of God, King of Canada, England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.". Alternatively we could elevate a Canadian. Perhaps Shatner the 1st, by the Grace of God, King of Starfleet. vyelkin posted:TPP's words on expropriation actually sound reasonable to me, but IANAL so who knows. I don't have the time to actually look at the text so I'll have to withhold judgement but the biggest issue with the TPP is almost certainly going to be the system for resolving disputes. The ISDS approach they seem to be going with will largely cut out the Canadian legal system and shift power to largely unaccountable tribunals run by the same corporate lawyers that the large multinational firms pay millions of dollars to. The checks and balances within a system of governance tend to be a lot more important than the formal rules. If you look at the Soviet Union (or plenty of other dictatorships) it had a lovely constitution guaranteeing all kinds of freedoms. But because of the way power was concentrated in the USSR there was no meaningful protection or enforcement of those freedoms and in practice the system was quite repressive to any kind of dissent. It didn't matter that the Soviet constitution technically entitled everyone to freedom of press, association, conscious, assembly and religious worship. Slightly Toasted posted:By most accounts the royals spend the majority of their time on philanthropy and charity work and their assets are shrinking in a world where they're less relevant than ever. I'm not sure I really understand the hostility. The Queen is a neat lady that's been in her position for an unprecedented length of time during which her influence has been mostly positive. I think it mostly comes down to the fact that while the Royal Family is mostly a harmless curiosity today (though they theoretically have some very real constitutional power) they represent a genuinely evil institution. If you ever want to feel thoroughly depressed then pick up a copy of Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. The British Empire didn't just kill people in the process of conquering their countries, in the 19th century it actively contributed to famines (and withheld relief explicitly on the grounds of not violating free market principles, going so far as to discipline local governors who tried to distribute food) that resulted in millions of deaths, especially though not exclusively in India (though Ireland is the example we actually think of most of the time). British controlled countries in the 19th century were exporting food for profit while people literally starved in the streets or resorted to cannibalism. In terms of moral intent, scale and impact it's entirely comparable to the crimes of men like Hitler. Personally I don't really think it's worth wasting the political capital on such a symbolic issue as the monarchy but I entirely understand why people don't like what the Monarch symbolizes. And bringing up those 19th century famines is just one small example in a long multi-century story of the British raping, killing and impoverishing the rest of the world while flying the royal colours. BGrifter posted:I think we have a chain of succession in place! "It's an outrage! I'll have to sleep in the same room as my wife."
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Nov 5, 2015 18:54
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vyelkin posted:I don't know if you've put this quite the right way. It's true that regressive shitheads assume white men are the most qualified at everything. this is all true but doesn't make my statement about adherents being regressive any less valid. Equality of treatment is a convenient fiction to allow contemporary regressives to ignore the inequality in the past and that still exists today. They say they are treating everyone equally, but they ignore that society at large does not. It's obfuscation, either conscious or not, to allow marginalization to continue despite the prevalent moral sentiment against it.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:56
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To use my favorite example of Gary Goodyear, he was Minister for Science and Technology without even holding a university degree, much less a relevant one. So, I disagree with your assessment that white men were only getting placed due to their better resumes, because fundamentally, they had shittier resumes than, I have to assume, many if not most of the people they were competing against. That's also why I used the examples of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Harjit Sajjan, because they each have extremely impressive and relevant experience to their posts.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:57
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Well, you can't really compare Harper's joke cabinet with this one.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:59
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThrkJKxRNXo
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Nov 5, 2015 18:59
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Sure, but especially following on the heels of a cabinet where the minister of defense ( and former minister of a bunch of other important departments) has add his qualifications "former head of Canadian Taxpayers Federation and excellent toadie" it comes off as especially disingenuous. These people really do just care about merit when it's not a white guy. E: beaten but I guarantee you not over of the people whining about merit now had anything to say about Harper's rear end-kissong entourage of soulless drones. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 19:00
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I would also argue that for ministerial positions perspectives matter a lot, and having people actually coming from marginalized communities placed in roles that can directly affect the outcomes for those communities (and not just using them all like sock puppets for the PMO the way Harper did) has a lot of value but certainly wouldn't be something those who profess 'equality of treatment' would consider as merit.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:02
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Sedge and Bee posted:Sure, but especially following on the heels of a cabinet where the minister of defense ( and former minister of a bunch of other important departments) has add his qualifications "former head of Canadian Taxpayers Federation and excellent toadie" it comes off as especially disingenuous. These people really do just care about merit when it's not a white guy. Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely people out there who use "merit" as a smokescreen for racism, whether they know it or not. But I think it's very important to recognize that there's a deeper underling political fissure over issues just like this one, and saying "it's because they're racists", while at times true, doesn't actually help very much.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:03
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facebook posted:The fact that he made a point to highlight just how fair and balanced he made the cabinet gender-wise speaks for itself. This is gender-baiting at its finest. The Libs and the NP do the same thing with race-baiting. I personally couldn't give a poo poo if all 183 were women, just make sure that they're the best. This isn't a goddamn McDonalds where the whole Get-Along Gang mentality and standards gets you by. A country in dire need of stability in a very economically shakey western world doesn't need feel good stories; it needs the best of the best. So gently caress gender, race or any other special interest. Just give us the best.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:03
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vyelkin posted:Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely people out there who use "merit" as a smokescreen for racism, whether they know it or not. But I think it's very important to recognize that there's a deeper underling political fissure over issues just like this one, and saying "it's because they're racists", while at times true, doesn't actually help very much. fair point; it's because they are ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the racism, sexism and inequality that still pervades society. the most vocal are usually racist and/or sexist though.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:05
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Saalkin posted:Something is wrong with you if you don't want that goofy looking gently caress on our money. We could call them ChuckBucks
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Nov 5, 2015 19:11
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I think I'm going to make a graphic of Harjit Sajjan beside his predecessor Jason Kenny just to point out how absurd the "merit" claims are.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:12
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PT6A posted:I think I'm going to make a graphic of Harjit Sajjan beside his predecessor Jason Kenny just to point out how absurd the "merit" claims are. This would be an apt comparison if Kenney had been appointed Minister of Defence in 2007, but you won't convince anyone by saying "This guy who spent eight years as a minister and high profile party leader was unfit to be Minister of Defence."
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Nov 5, 2015 19:14
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vyelkin posted:This would be an apt comparison if Kenney had been appointed Minister of Defence in 2007, but you won't convince anyone by saying "This guy who spent eight years as a minister and high profile party leader was unfit to be Minister of Defence." True, but he's an out-of-shape gently caress with no military experience whatsoever.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:19
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vyelkin posted:This would be an apt comparison if Kenney had been appointed Minister of Defence in 2007, but you won't convince anyone by saying "This guy who spent eight years as a minister and high profile party leader was unfit to be Minister of Defence." Spending 8 years with Stephen Harper's hand jammed up your rear end in the hopes of eventually replacing him is a form of experience I guess.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:21
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experience is basically irrelevant unless you have a specific agenda you want to push looking forward to 8 years of rule by deputy ministers with actual expertise instead of religious clowns from alberta ruling the bureaucracy
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Nov 5, 2015 19:27
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Wasn't Peter MacKay the Minister of Defence before Kenney? MacKay had no military of educational qualifications to be in that position in the least. He was a lawyer if I recall correctly.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:44
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then again, the new finance minister's wife is literally a mccain foods billionaire and im sure is going to fight for real change for the middle class
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Nov 5, 2015 19:44
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RBC posted:experience is basically irrelevant unless you have a specific agenda you want to push Yeah, at best good ministers will take on a couple of pet projects while setting good policy decisions based on the evidence and recommendations by various stakeholders and let the deputy ministers and senior civil service get on with it.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:50
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But JT's been creating such progressivy spectacles, surely that will translate into progressive policies. You really think a political party would focus on a bunch of feel-good progressive optics and talking points while pushing a brutally regressive agenda???? Why would they do that? Why would anyone campaign from the left then govern from the right? The voters, who are not idiots with the memory of goldfish, would remember and not trust that party in the future.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:53
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:That's because regressive poo poo heads assume the most qualified candidates are defacto Male (also usually white) so the idea that women and minorities could be eminently qualified for a position is not something they can reconcile. Trudeau missed a golden trolling opportunity by not saying "on further reflection I have decided not to have gender quotas and will appoint my cabinet solely on the basis of merit" and then revealing a 60% female cabinet.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:53
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Dreylad posted:Yeah, at best good ministers will take on a couple of pet projects while setting good policy decisions based on the evidence and recommendations by various stakeholders and let the deputy ministers and senior civil service get on with it. The (big) difference this time is that scientific or in other words actual evidence may be taken into consideration instead of moral or religious conviction
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Nov 5, 2015 19:54
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jm20 posted:The (big) difference this time is that scientific or in other words actual evidence may be taken into consideration instead of moral or religious conviction We've objectively crunched the numbers and hired the best merit-based experts and found privatization works and all wealth stems from job creators. God bless neo-liberal capitalism and its representatives on earth, the holy job creator.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:14
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Maybe, just maybe, having a FinMin who has actually been involved in finance is a good idea, instead of picking someone who knows little to nothing about the field. Maybe it's not all a dastardly neo-liberal plot.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:23
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the circle jerking in this thread is painful. at least i guess justin didn't appoint someone like notely did in sarah hoffman, a fat health minister of health who hasn't done anything healthy be it work or exercise in her life
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Nov 5, 2015 20:23
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Do it ironically posted:at least i guess justin didn't appoint someone like notely did in sarah hoffman, a fat health minister of health who hasn't done anything healthy be it work or exercise in her life Don't even remind me of either two of those stupid people, thank you. They are living proof, by way of contrast, that Trudeau did consider merit over simply picking minority tokens.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:25
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Do it ironically posted:the circle jerking in this thread is painful. Feel free to add a right wing view and link to rebelmedia. Her personal life choices aside, she would be better served with the education file. I believe we had this discussion a while ago actually.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:27
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Do it ironically posted:the circle jerking in this thread is painful. This is definitely a big deal in the bizzaro alternate universe where the Health Minister is a personal fitness instructor for the entire province rather than a paper pushing bureaucrat.
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Nov 5, 2015 20:30
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god forbid a health minister know anything about nutrition, or medicine, or had worked in a heatlh related finance capacity just gives me hope though i'll get a cushy tax free job one day
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Nov 5, 2015 20:32
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