CanPol 2019 - you won't drink whiskey, and talk politics and vote like us

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > CanPol 2019 - you won't drink whiskey, and talk politics and vote like us

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Risky Bisquick: Jan 18, 2008; PLEASE LET ME WRITE YOUR VICTIM IMPACT STATEMENT SO I CAN FURTHER DEMONSTRATE THE CALAMITY THAT IS OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM.; Buglord

Maneck posted:

In a way, it is impressive that the cite to a fake suicide note isn't the most deranged, baseless part of your post. If you were going for satire of the thread, well done. Otherwise, stop and go away for a while.

In what way was the note a fake? Because the outcome wasn�t death? Those notes should be treated as dead loving serious so Kindly, gently caress off

# ? Apr 18, 2019 06:40

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 07:09

Juul-Whip: Mar 10, 2008

https://twitter.com/james_m_wilt/status/1118641164847128577?s=21

# ? Apr 18, 2019 06:41

drjuggalo: Jul 26, 2014

I was so mad I put 100 on the aves and not only am I cashing out but I�m laughing at white people on Stephen Ave about it and this ALMOST makes up the UCP facefucking I�m about to receive

# ? Apr 18, 2019 06:48

James Baud: May 24, 2015; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Powershift posted:

You completely lack empathy. You know what it is because you're willing to fake it from time to time but can't maintain the appearance for more than 2 or 3 posts in a row. That might be a gift in this lovely world, but it makes you come off as the rear end in a top hat in every discussion. That combined with skin so loving thin you can't be called out on it means you're going to be told to gently caress off, a lot. And you should, So gently caress off.

Speaking of empathy, I websurfed my way across this earlier Wednesday, only gave it about a 60% skim and didn't look up backing data since I was busy, could be fun though:

The End Of Empathy

quote:

But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture � one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone's-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the '70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons � or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an "empathy pill" so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation � 40 percent!

It's strange to think of empathy � a natural human impulse � as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.

The "So much for the tolerant left!" joke writes itself. But seriously, seemed like it might actually be interesting. Timeline for change to trend is also rather 9/11 clash of civilizations-ish. (Also 2009 is a while ago now - did the trend reverse?)

...
2009 is last year because they published in 2010, bit of a story rehash there by NPR.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empathy-gap/201006/the-end-empathy posted:

Recently Fox News covered our study on declining empathy in American college students with this alarming title: "The End of Empathy."

Is this true? Are we now living in a society entirely devoid of the basic glue of human connection and interaction?

[...]

The good news is that empathy is not "destroyed" or "under siege," as the author of the Fox News post suggests. Instead, empathy may be sick. Not "you have 6 months to live" sick, more like "you need to spend a few days in bed" sick. In other words, although there has been a decline in empathy, there are a few key things to consider about the data before declaring a state of emergency on the moral health of the nation.

Why this is not a total crisis:
3) American college students are not the most prototypical Americans. They are richer, whiter, more female.
[...]

Not a total crisis because, among other reasons, it's possibly due to sampling including more women than before? Oh fun!

Here's a survey they used along the way, you can look and/or compare yourself to the study.

James Baud fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Apr 18, 2019

# ? Apr 18, 2019 09:51

shades of eternity: Nov 9, 2013; Where kitties raise dragons in the world's largest mall.

I think a lot of it is the communicating equivalent of the uncanny valley.

people online don't feel as real as in real life.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 12:11

Mr. Apollo: Nov 8, 2000

PT6A posted:

He's not entirely wrong here. Everyone I talked to agrees Jason Kenney is a loving rear end in a top hat. No one likes him. They are desperate for big oil money and the associated jobs to come back, Kenney sold them a false bill of goods that they nonetheless bought hook, line and sinker, and neither the NDP nor any other party could find any way to effectively challenge it. Whether it's the oil industry in Alberta, or coal mining in the States, progressives need to figure out a counter-strategy to populist morons promising things they can't possibly ever deliver, because God knows everything they've tried so far has failed pitifully.

I agree, I was just surprised that Murphy wrote the piece from the point of view that Kenney will bring back all the lost oil jobs and not that he sold people a false promise and the voters bought into it.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 13:39

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

James Baud posted:

Speaking of empathy, I websurfed my way across this earlier Wednesday, only gave it about a 60% skim and didn't look up backing data since I was busy, could be fun though:

The End Of Empathy

The "So much for the tolerant left!" joke writes itself. But seriously, seemed like it might actually be interesting. Timeline for change to trend is also rather 9/11 clash of civilizations-ish. (Also 2009 is a while ago now - did the trend reverse?)

I find it very interesting that you read "around 2000 the line starts to slide and by 2009 college students are 40% less empathetic than previous generations" and your response is "so much for the tolerant left" instead of "this is the result of a generation being raised by extreme individualistic capitalism". Students between 2000 and 2009 aren't even old enough to have grown up on social media (reminder that Facebook didn't even exist until 2004 and wasn't public until 2006, which is the same year Twitter launched) so you can't blame it on that. Instead, that's the generation born in the 80s and 90s under Reagan and Thatcher and Clinton and Blair and, in Canada, Mulroney/Chretien, who grew up being told that there's no such thing as society and greed is good and the only thing that matters is making as much money as possible and gently caress everybody else.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 14:17

TheKingofSprings: Oct 9, 2012

I tend to want to discuss politics in USPOL a lot more than here nowadays because what's happening down there seems almost as impactful for us, but also because reading about everyone sounding like they want to kill themselves, talking about killing themselves or talking about killing each-other makes me want to kill myself

# ? Apr 18, 2019 14:31

Toalpaz: Mar 20, 2012; Peace through overwhelming determination

Re:end of the empathy

I too am served those Firefox articles.

I worry about reading them because it's such a massive platform that they just gave themselves, and it's supposed to be a browser not a news aggregater that I signed up for.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 14:34

Rime: Nov 2, 2011; by Games Forum

We're killing all life on earth with our lifestyles, death is just the state of the modern world fam. :shrug:

# ? Apr 18, 2019 14:35

Maneck: Sep 11, 2011

Risky Bisquick posted:

In what way was the note a fake? Because the outcome wasn�t death? Those notes should be treated as dead loving serious so Kindly, gently caress off

Itt multiple people think it's a great idea to use the contents of an (apparently fake) suicide note which wished death upon a person to attack the target of those threats, using those threats. Naturally, they get self-righteously sweary about it.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Apr 18, 2019 15:17

infernal machines: Oct 11, 2012; we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

Do you think you'll get a new red text for having opinions on the veracity of a suicide note?

# ? Apr 18, 2019 15:35

Arc Hammer: Mar 4, 2013; Got any deathsticks?

Yeah that note wasn't fake, genius, unless you mean to infer that any suicide note left by someone who then chooses not to commit suicide are also fake.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 15:47

Cerepol: Dec 2, 2011

Maneck posted:

Itt multiple people think it's a great idea to use the contents of an (apparently fake) suicide note which wished death upon a person to attack the target of those threats, using those threats. Naturally, they get self-righteously sweary about it.

I was gonna say I'm curious what criteria is necessary for a suicide note to be real vs fake but tbh I don't really care.

On another note: https://globalnews.ca/news/5179164/canada-philippines-garbage-law/

quote:

Canada broke international rules when it dumped more than 100 shipping containers of garbage disguised as plastics for recycling into the Philippines six years ago, a Victoria-based environmental law firm says.

Anthony Ho, a lawyer for the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation, said the shipments violate multiple parts of the Basel Convention, a 30-year-old treaty that prevents countries from shipping hazardous waste to the developing world without consent.
...

He said the fact the Canadian company that shipped the containers inaccurately described their contents �in itself makes those shipments illegal traffic under the Basel Convention.�
Canada�s failure to take responsibility for the waste is another violation of the convention, Ho said, noting the law forbids the country of origin from transferring the obligation to properly manage the hazardous waste to the country importing it.

Canadian authorities argue the convention didn�t apply at the time of the shipments because this country didn�t consider the waste to be hazardous, and have been trying to get the Philippines to dispose of the contents there for the last five years.

Good Canadian Values

# ? Apr 18, 2019 15:53

Aces High: Mar 26, 2010; Nah! A little chocolate will do

Cerepol posted:

I was gonna say I'm curious what criteria is necessary for a suicide note to be real vs fake but tbh I don't really care.

On another note: https://globalnews.ca/news/5179164/canada-philippines-garbage-law/

Good Canadian Values

eh, just put it all in a giant ball and launch it into space. As much as people keep going "The Simpsons predicted the future" I think we are at the point where we can safely start saying some joke predictions from Futurama are starting to occur too.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 16:04

Cerepol: Dec 2, 2011

Aces High posted:

eh, just put it all in a giant ball and launch it into space. As much as people keep going "The Simpsons predicted the future" I think we are at the point where we can safely start saying some joke predictions from Futurama are starting to occur too.

Unforuntately I think space garbage is still too expensive, Canada should take leadership here and we MUST build a pipeline to space. Once we have a pipeline to space we can charge others to space their garbage for em.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 16:51

Nine of Eight: Apr 28, 2011; LICK IT OFF, AND PUT IT BACK IN; Dinosaur Gum

Nuh uh, that garbage is in *your lawn* now.

I hope this one will bring a little smile to everyone who is cursed to live in Alberta

The dead account �Une m�re de famille a Ville Mont-Royal� makes a triumphant resurrection.

Context: last week a CAQ deputy �accidentally� read out loud a letter of congratulations from a white supremacist group in the Chambre d�assembl�e, entering it into the record.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 16:59

BGrifter: Mar 16, 2007; Winner of Something Awful PS5 thread's Posting Excellence Award June 2022

Congratulations!

TheKingofSprings posted:

I tend to want to discuss politics in USPOL a lot more than here nowadays because what's happening down there seems almost as impactful for us, but also because reading about everyone sounding like they want to kill themselves, talking about killing themselves or talking about killing each-other makes me want to kill myself

Agreed. At least in the US there�s some reasons for optimism. (Bernie, AOC, Ilhan Omar) In Canada it feels impossibly grim with no hope at least for another election cycle or two.

Federally there�s no good option. Gains by the NDP would just cement Jagmeet and those centrist fucks at the head of the party. The Tories and Libs are interchangeably terrible.

The best case scenario is an implosion of the NDP that forces Jagmeet to step down, followed by a rebuilding of the party under someone like Ashton. That�s a process of many years and a whole lotta misery first.

CanPol is just too drat depressing to dwell on for more than a few moments here and there.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 17:47

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

What's the non racist problem with Jagmeet again? What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:09

Pleads: Jun 9, 2005; pew pew pew

We probably missed our last chance at electoral reform when Trudeau went back on things, if the cons take power again they're only going to entrench the broken poo poo more since it all benefits them.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:10

folytopo: Nov 5, 2013

Raenir Salazar posted:

What's the non racist problem with Jagmeet again? What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

Not much difference now at all. Which is why all the left leaning people are annoyed. Also not being on the cusp of forming government loosens a lot of tongues.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:20

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Raenir Salazar posted:

What's the non racist problem with Jagmeet again? What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

There are a lot of problems with him but we've had this discussion a lot. Here's a post I wrote in the last thread critiquing an article about him on the campaign trail, which I think exemplifies a lot of the problems the thread has with him:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3748577&pagenumber=2299&perpage=40#post492820501

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:34

Nine of Eight: Apr 28, 2011; LICK IT OFF, AND PUT IT BACK IN; Dinosaur Gum

Raenir Salazar posted:

What's the non racist problem with Jagmeet again? What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

At least Mulcair was able to get angry and articulate a point, and even a controversial one. Without the benefit of hindsightitis nowadays, we should remember that lots of us were more willing to forgive his weird Thatcher comments back when he was yelling about Dutch disease at the cons, and calling the liberals cowardly hypocrites for voting for C-51. Then the election happened and someone at NDP HQ told him to soften up and go for a gentle grandpa look and he lost all his effectiveness.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:37

PittTheElder: Feb 13, 2012; Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Raenir Salazar posted:

What's the non racist problem with Jagmeet again? What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

He's just a boring rear end centrist.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:38

infernal machines: Oct 11, 2012; we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

Raenir Salazar posted:

What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

I think is likely part of the problem.

Mulcair was presumably replaced for a reason, if you're legitimately asking if there's any difference with the party under his replacement, it doesn't suggest that they've made any significant changes.

infernal machines fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Apr 18, 2019

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:42

Maneck: Sep 11, 2011

PittTheElder posted:

He's just a boring rear end centrist.

"Centrist" by the standards of this thread, which goes into histrionics if they suspect someone is a Liberal.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:43

infernal machines: Oct 11, 2012; we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

If Canadians want to elect a centrist, the Liberals already exist.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:46

BGrifter: Mar 16, 2007; Winner of Something Awful PS5 thread's Posting Excellence Award June 2022

Congratulations!

Raenir Salazar posted:

What's the non racist problem with Jagmeet again? What's different about the NDP now vs under Mulcair?

I don't have as much time as I'd like to reply as I'm running late for work, but in short: there's very little difference between Jagmeet and Mulcair. The big difference is me.

After the utter failure of Mulcair and watching Obama's failures in the US, I'm no longer willing to entertain a party leader or a party running on that kind of milquetoast centrism. I'm done with incremental change and fiddling around the margins. It doesn't work and just sets the stage for the next right-wing government, Liberal or Conservative, to be even more heinous than the last. If the NDP wants to earn my support it'll require a bold, unabashedly social-democratic agenda and I don't trust Singh or the current party leaders to implement that.

Ten years ago I might have bought into what Singh and the centrists in the party were selling. They haven't changed all that much, I have.

Definitely read vyelkin's post linked above though. It covers some of the reasons why I don't trust Singh to be any better than Mulcair.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:47

Rockstar Massacre: Mar 2, 2009; i only have a crazy life
because i make risky decisions
from a position of
unreasonable self-confidence

if you think positive change can be accomplished while maintaining the status quo, you're a centrist. that isn't controversial.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 18:48

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Here are some other things I've written on the problems with the modern NDP from the last thread, in roughly reverse chronological order:

quote:

The major difference is that politicians like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are pushing for policies much farther outside the political mainstream in the United States. They're pushing for universal healthcare, a jobs guarantee, a Green New Deal, things like that. The NDP pushes for slight tweaks to tax rates, means-tested social programs for selected groups of the population, and pipelines.

They may both fit under the broad umbrella of social democracy in that they both want to push for a larger role for state intervention and regulation to promote better social outcomes, and neither wants to abolish the capitalist mode of production, but the US's new generation of social democrats are far more ambitious and are demonstrating that ambition and mobilization for left-wing causes can be winning strategies, whereas the NDP continue to go all-in on Third Way centrist triangulation and don't even get the electoral success that that triangulation is supposed to achieve.

quote:

quote:
enki42 posted:
I feel like you're judging the NDP solely based on Muclair's platform (with a bit of Notley mixed in), which is widely agreed by just about everyone to be way more of a swing to the right than was warranted or really representative of what the NDP usually argues for.

Taking the example of the Ontario NDP's recent platform, the only thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is having employer-assisted universal dentalcare (where people with jobs get an employer-provided plan with an additional public plan that's means-tested). Their pharmacare, education, and energy sector plans were miles away from the typical Liberal plan.

I'm basing this assessment on years if not decades of the NDP's slow drift to the centre, with some big jumps in that direction especially under Layton and Mulcair. But provincial NDP governments aren't immune to this either: Horwath, for example, may have tacked back to the left in the last election, but considering the one before that she ran on ATM fees and barely even had a platform, let alone one calling for real progressive reform to our broken system, I remain unconvinced that anything the Ontario NDP does represents a meaningful commitment to progressive change rather than electoral triangulation that they'd be happy to reverse in the next election if they think it would win more votes. And even in this year's election, Horwath's plans may have been "miles away from the typical Liberal plan" and would have represented positive steps forward for the province, but they were still incremental and/or deeply flawed tinkering around the edges rather than calling for wholesale reform of the system, like leftists are arguing for in the US. For example, the means-tested Obamacare version of dental care instead of just building dental into OHIP compared to leftists in the US calling for universal healthcare including universal dental and pharmacare, or giving student grants instead of student loans compared to leftists in the US calling for free postsecondary education. Would those be positive changes for Ontario? Sure. They'd be better than what we had before and better than what we have now. I voted for the NDP in the Ontario election and I was much happier about that vote than I was in previous elections. Regardless, they're still a reflection of the less ambitious nature of the modern NDP, which like moderate Democrats in the US, starts out asking for a foot and ends up with an inch, instead of asking for a mile and ending up with a foot.

I'm not going to go into huge detail here because we've had this exact discussion in this thread before and I've made this exact post, but the NDP has been on a slow drift to the third-way centre for a long time and there aren't really signs of countervailing forces dragging it back to the left the way there are for the Democrats in the US. Leadership contests are a good sign of this: faced with the explicit choice between turning back to the left or staying in the centre and hoping for better luck next time, in the last two leadership contests the federal NDP have chosen to stay in the centre.

quote:

This is what this thread often doesn't get about the modern NDP, they are fighting for the values they believe in. They believe in tweaking things around the edges but mostly keeping stuff as is, so they can show how serious and third-way they are and become a normal part of the political landscape instead of those weird commies off on the edge. The NDP is not filled with radicals, it's filled with policy wonks and middle managers. We like to project our own beliefs onto the NDP, but the average political position of this thread is far, far to the left of any NDP party or government in the country. Their values, and their goals, are not to implement some kind of leftist change. Their values and their goals are to be taken seriously as a political party so they can become part of the rotating left-right cycle of Canadian politics instead of always being the third-place runners-up.

This may have started out as a way to get left-wing policies implemented, thinking along the lines of "if we actually come closer to winning elections we'll have a better chance of implementing our great socialist policies" but over time it's morphed into "all that matters is winning elections" and the socialist policies were seen as an impediment to that so away they go. They've 100% bought the liberal kool-aid that the way to win elections is to be the adults in the room and show how serious you take everything and there's nothing more serious and adult than showing you can compromise by adopting all your opponent's policies while abandoning your own values.

quote:

quote:
Baronjutter posted:
God drat why can't the NDP take a loving hint from british labour? Why are they doubling down on radical centrism?

The current NDP has very little interest in being an actual left-wing party. It's not a party composed of activists and socialists, it's a party composed of middle managers with MPAs. The base of the party fundamentally doesn't want major changes in society. They want things to keep going as they're currently going, but just get better a little faster than they are now. Which, sure, makes them the best choice as a political party to support, but also means they have no real driving purpose the way Labour suddenly does under Corbyn. But remember that it's not like Corbyn rode in on a white horse to rescue the party all by himself, he was chosen as leader by a popular movement that took over the Labour Party because it had swung too far to the right for them. Without Momentum there's no Corbyn which means Labour is still a milquetoast third-way waste of space. That's the Labour Party base.

The NDP base venerates Jack Layton, the man who led the NDP to the centre, as a god because he was more electorally successful than anyone before him, even though his actual list of major political accomplishments amounts to: 1) toppling a Liberal minority government and getting a Conservative minority instead; and 2) finishing runner-up to a Conservative majority government, which meant the NDP got literally nothing they wanted for the next four years and then lost all their seats.

And who did the NDP base choose to replace Layton? In an election that was specifically framed by several of the candidates as a choice between continuing with centrism or tacking back to the left, they chose Tom Mulcair, a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister who idolized Margaret Thatcher. And when he lost the election and more NDP candidates tried to frame the next leadership election as a choice between centrism and leftism, they chose Jagmeet Singh because he was young and charismatic and they thought he would be more electorally competitive with young charismatic Trudeau.

The NDP does not care about enacting its policies or making change in society. What it cares about is winning. If you offered random NDP staffers the choice between getting their entire platform enacted by another party, or winning an election and being unable to pass any legislation, they would choose the second option because it means they won an election. But also they don't understand how leftists are winning elections in the modern world, because they come from the same privileged background as the rest of our political class, which means they're dedicated to preserving the status quo and decorum in ways that make them demur from real leftist change - and this often isn't even a conscious choice, they just gravitate towards what makes them personally feel comfortable, which is and continuing with the status quo of unsustainable capitalism, just with slightly better managers in charge.

I would say the real problem with the NDP is this kind of elite professional managerialism. It makes the party extremely resistant to major change, because major change threatens the comfort and security that the NDP base and NDP staffers enjoy. They're dedicated to just being slightly better managers than the other parties, making some tweaks around the edges of the glaring problems in front of them, and then getting destroyed in the next election because even though they were just slightly centre-left but accepted all the fundamental tenets of our unsustainable capitalist society, the opposition ran years of propaganda that they were literally communists whose goal was to destroy our way of life.

To use a lovely US politics analogy, the problem with our country is that we have two parties of centrist Democrats and one party of Republicans and no leftists. But, unlike the US where the primary system means specific lovely politicians can be challenged from within their own party, our more centralized systems of party discipline mean that the terrible leaders our parties keep electing have basically complete control over who gets to be a politician within their party. So long as 51% of the members of each political party are terrible people, 100% of the candidates for that party will reflect their ideology.

quote:

quote:
Dreylad posted:
Is there any group that will seriously talk about left-wing politics in Canada? It seems like America has a more engaged left in spite of being a tiny minority in the electorate.

I think the left is engaged in America because of the particular dynamics of American politics from 2015 to the present. The high-profile Sanders campaign showed leftists that some of their ideas really could find purchase in contemporary America, which really shattered the TINA idea that the Democratic Party has been built on for the past three decades. Then Clinton's embarrassing loss showed that milquetoast third-wayism can't even accomplish the one thing it was supposed to accomplish, which was to win elections so that society could make incremental progress rather than regressing under the right-wing--which I would argue was a big part of inspiring the progressive left to start fighting the primary battles that have led to some high-profile losses for Democratic leaders and other Democrats being forced to at least adopt the rhetoric of left-wing ideas like universal healthcare. And of course the last two years of Trump have really galvanized opposition the same way the American right was galvanized under Obama.

We don't have any of those conditions in Canada. The closest I think we're coming is the QS campaign in Quebec right now, which will most likely not win power but, if we're lucky, will mobilize leftist ideas for future elections. Instead we're in a situation that continues to remind me a lot of the US under Obama, where we have a charismatic leader who says a lot of things that imitate progressivism while simultaneously not really acting on any of them, in favour of neoliberal centrism. Which has the dual result of firing up the right-wing that hates when he says progressive things and depressing the left-wing that either gets complacent because they think one of their own is in power, or gets discouraged because handsome centrism appears so popular, and moves to imitate that rather than offer an alternative.

I've been thinking a lot about something Helsing posted a few weeks ago, which is the idea of losing well in politics. The article Helsing posted was talking about how Obama was a bad loser in the sense that he didn't make his opponents fight for their wins, conceded too much, and wasn't willing to use the power he had to win the long-term fight even if he was losing the short-term battles. This is something the Democratic Party is really bad at, but I think there are a couple examples of the American left losing really well in the last few years. The Sanders campaign lost well, because it actually galvanized people into fighting for change long after it was over, and really shifted the boundaries of what Democratic politicians will talk about and fight for, which looks like it could have really important long-term political ramifications. The current fight against Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation will probably lose, but it seems to be losing well by exposing the entire process as a corrupt, partisan sham that will potentially delegitimize Kavanaugh as a justice if/when he does get confirmed.

The American left has been galvanized by a few moments where they lost well. The Canadian left consistently loses with a whimper and a "well maybe you'll like us more if we act just like the other guys?" And in the rare cases when they do win, they accomplish very little and just try to be slightly more socially responsible and slightly more competent managers of rapacious capitalism. As you've pointed out, the structure of Canada's institutions, and the people produced by those institutions, are much more geared towards order and stability than towards the anarchic chaos of the American system that allows political movements to build themselves through the mechanisms of politics itself. To illustrate what I mean, you need only look at how the US primary system allows anyone to run and win an election if they get lucky enough, whereas the Canadian party system means the central leadership of a party exercises complete control over who that party nominates to run. The one example we have in the modern world of a real leftist taking power through the Westminster system was Corbyn and, as Helsing loves to mention, he succeeded purely because he was at the head of a mass movement outside political institutions. If Momentum wasn't behind him (well, he wouldn't have even run, but that's neither here nor there) he would have just been another failed and forgotten leadership candidate who was runner-up to the next Tony Blair or Ed Milliband, just like the random professed leftists that occasionally run in NDP leadership campaigns.

Political discourse doesn't randomly shift on its own, political parties play an important role in constructing how we talk about politics, but they are far from the only bodies that can do that. The ecosystem of political discourse is vast and right now ours is dominated by a professional managerialism that affects all our major political parties and the sources of discourse outside them. It would be entirely possible for a political party like the NDP to lead the charge for real left-wing thought within a changing political discourse, the way Labour has in the UK under Corbyn, but that would require a leftist to win the NDP leadership election and at the present moment I don't think that's possible because the NDP is so committed to the professional managerial form of political institutions and policy debate.

quote:

Layton was the epitome of the NDP's turn to third-wayism. He led the charge to make the NDP less socialist and removed the word "socialist" from the party's constitution because he was so dedicated to triangulating to the centre in the hopes that the NDP could win an election and form government. Needless to say, that didn't happen and instead the NDP lost all the power it had at the beginning of his tenure propping up a Liberal minority.

But he was charismatic and people liked him, and his personal popularity temporarily increased the NDP's share of the vote so he's remembered fondly as a successful leader.

Really, if you want to understand how the NDP changed under Layton's near-decade as leader, look at who they chose as leader after him. In a race where the other candidates explicitly framed the decision as a choice between turning the NDP back to the left or triangulating further towards the centre, the NDP chose Tom Mulcair, a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister who ran his sole election on a platform of a balanced budget and idolized Margaret Thatcher. But hey, he was an excellent parliamentarian.

And that pretty much sums up the modern NDP, which is 100% committed to being excellent parliamentarians with MPAs who triangulate, triangulate, triangulate, and hope to shoot the moon and somehow win an election one day if all the other parties collapse in the same election. The problem is if that ever happens, they've become so dedicated to centrist managerialism that they would think it was sufficient to tweak tax rates a little, raise social spending a little, means test a new social program, and get completely wiped out the next election.

The problem with Jagmeet isn't that there's anything particularly wrong about him as a person or a party leader (though nobody likes him and he's bad at fundraising which means the NDP has no money), it's that he perfectly exemplifies all the things we've been bitching about in this thread for years.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:11

Maneck: Sep 11, 2011

vyelkin posted:

The problem with Jagmeet isn't that there's anything particularly wrong about him as a person or a party leader (though nobody likes him and he's bad at fundraising which means the NDP has no money), it's that he perfectly exemplifies all the things we've been bitching about in this thread for years.

Also he keeps getting tripped up during interviews for whatever reason. Having the leader come off as unprepared is bad for morale, which is probably already in the toilet given the NDP's fundraising predicament.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:18

DynamicSloth: Jul 30, 2006; "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

I'm sure the NDP's new climate change policy release today will turn us around.

Home energy retrofits!

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:30

Aces High: Mar 26, 2010; Nah! A little chocolate will do

Unfortunately it also seems to be a bit of damned if they do, damned if they don't, as far as :decorum:

is concerned. Just here in Alberta we saw that Notley was being outright malicious towards Kenney and that didn't mean gently caress all.

The CBC panelists said that her concession speech should have been how she carried herself through the election and highlighting all the good things she accomplished in 4 years. But that's a false equivalency, it doesn't loving matter how she would have gone about it, Albertans don't want actual change, they want things to stay the same, come hell or oil prices bottoming out.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:41

DariusLikewise: Oct 4, 2008; You wore that on Halloween?

I don't know how anybody in thread can look at the current state of politics in this country and say that centrism, liberalism, or whatever term you want to use for it is working and think that the NDP in it's current state is going to fix any of it

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:42

Kraftwerk: Aug 13, 2011; i do not have 10,000 bircoins, please stop asking

You won�t see any changes in the NDP or any European social Democratic Party until Bernie becomes president and somehow wins two terms.

Like it or not the USA sets the tone for all political discourse in the west. The Clinton Administration is why we have third way-ism in all these left of center parties and is provably the source of the issues we face with the rise of the alt right.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:50

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Aces High posted:

Unfortunately it also seems to be a bit of damned if they do, damned if they don't, as far as is concerned. Just here in Alberta we saw that Notley was being outright malicious towards Kenney and that didn't mean gently caress all.

The CBC panelists said that her concession speech should have been how she carried herself through the election and highlighting all the good things she accomplished in 4 years. But that's a false equivalency, it doesn't loving matter how she would have gone about it, Albertans don't want actual change, they want things to stay the same, come hell or oil prices bottoming out.

Literally nothing Notley did would have made a difference. In the 2015 election the two conservative parties combined got 52% of the vote. 2019 election the conservative party got 55% of the vote. Kenney's got the easiest job in politics because over 50% of the Albertan vote has gone to conservative parties every single election since 1993 and now he's got no competition again, all he had to do was not die before election day and he would become premier.

2015 Alberta when everyone else imploded on live television and the NDP were the last party standing shouldn't be the model for the NDP anywhere else in the country.

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:55

Postess with the Mostest: Apr 4, 2007; Arabian nights
'neath Arabian moons
A fool off his guard
could fall and fall hard
out there on the dunes

DariusLikewise posted:

I don't know how anybody in thread can look at the current state of politics in this country and say that centrism, liberalism, or whatever term you want to use for it is working and think that the NDP in it's current state is going to fix any of it

Literally the best time to be a human being on this planet, we're killin it as a species

# ? Apr 18, 2019 19:59

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Postess with the Mostest posted:

Literally the best time to be a human being on this planet, we're killin it as a species

If by "it" you mean the biosphere, then yes

# ? Apr 18, 2019 20:00

cowofwar: Jul 30, 2002; by Athanatos

vyelkin posted:

Literally nothing Notley did would have made a difference. In the 2015 election the two conservative parties combined got 52% of the vote. 2019 election the conservative party got 55% of the vote. Kenney's got the easiest job in politics because over 50% of the Albertan vote has gone to conservative parties every single election since 1993 and now he's got no competition again, all he had to do was not die before election day and he would become premier.

2015 Alberta when everyone else imploded on live television and the NDP were the last party standing shouldn't be the model for the NDP anywhere else in the country.

They could have implemented electoral reform and everyone would have been better off in 2019

# ? Apr 18, 2019 20:31

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 07:09

Juul-Whip: Mar 10, 2008

Aces High posted:

Unfortunately it also seems to be a bit of damned if they do, damned if they don't, as far as is concerned. Just here in Alberta we saw that Notley was being outright malicious towards Kenney and that didn't mean gently caress all.

The CBC panelists said that her concession speech should have been how she carried herself through the election and highlighting all the good things she accomplished in 4 years. But that's a false equivalency, it doesn't loving matter how she would have gone about it, Albertans don't want actual change, they want things to stay the same, come hell or oil prices bottoming out.

I've mentioned this before but during the Ontario election at one point Doug said he was afraid of an NDP government and Horwath's response was to say "oh no no, not at all, Ontarians have nothing to fear from us" and it was such garbage. Her response should have been: "yes Doug Ford you loving detestable sack of poo poo, you thug, you should be very afraid. We're coming for your poo poo." I'm convinced she would have won the election if she'd done that because most people actually do find Doug Ford disgusting. But she didn't do that because she's Andrea Horwath and she's been the leader of the ONDP since 2009, the era of toxic liberal :decorum:

# ? Apr 18, 2019 20:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > CanPol 2019 - you won't drink whiskey, and talk politics and vote like us

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