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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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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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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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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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jm20 posted:Is anyone else getting Trudeau overload? Everything he says or does seems to have an article or video. Can we not have a middle ground between no information (Harper) and being verbose (Trudeau) It's just the honeymoon period, it'll wear off soon enough.
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Nov 5, 2015 22:01
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Brannock you're not necessarily wrong about some of what you're saying but you're discounting a hell of a lot of genetic factors that kick in once a person does become significantly overweight (obese) that make it incredibly difficult to return to a normal weight, and virtually impossible to return to a normal weight permanently. Those of us with good genes or who have never been overweight often try to make a connection between "I put on 20 pounds once and then worked it off by eating healthier and working out, so why can't 300 pound people do the same thing on a larger scale?" but it's really not that simple.quote:A paper published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews proposed that “food addiction” is a less accurate description of this condition than “eating addiction”. There is little evidence that people who are driven to overeat become dependent on a single ingredient; instead they tend to seek out a range of highly palatable, energy-dense foods, of the kind with which we are now surrounded. quote:People who are merely overweight, rather than obese (in other words who have a body mass index of 25 to 30) appear not to suffer from the same biochemical adaptations: their size is not “stamped in”. For them, changes of diet and exercise are likely to be effective. But urging obese people to buck up produces nothing but misery. quote:Why do we have an obesity epidemic? Has the composition of the human species changed? Have we suffered a general collapse in willpower? No. The evidence points to high-fat, high-sugar foods that overwhelm the impulse control of children and young adults, packaged and promoted to create the impression that they are fun, cool and life-enhancing. Many are placed in the shops where children are bound to encounter them: around the tills, at grasping height. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/11/obesity-incurable-disease-cameron-punishing-sufferers The way to tackle obesity is not to say "Buck up, fat people, you lazy slobs, and buy a gym membership!" It's to go to the source and regulate food producers to stop literally poisoning children in order to get them addicted to food that will slowly kill them.
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Nov 5, 2015 23:11
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HappyHippo posted:That's exactly what he said: "it will absolutely work for an individual as long as that individual is honest with themselves and honest in their effort to change" is not exactly true though. quote:across a nine-year study of 176,000 obese people, 98.3% of the men and 97.8% of the women failed to return to a healthy weight But I guess "Buck up, fat people, you have a 2% chance of returning to a healthy weight" is better, sure.
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Nov 5, 2015 23:22
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Suicide is also a net benefit to healthcare spending, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have suicide prevention efforts.
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Nov 6, 2015 02:44
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BattleMaster posted:Oh man I hope so hard that they dump that dumb thing. This. It's one of the dumbest wastes of money the Conservatives ever dreamed up and that's saying something.
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Nov 6, 2015 04:06
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Brannock posted:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/more-sports/pan-am-games-within-24-billion-budget-ontario-government-says/article27128619/ Depressingly predictable, but at least Tory was smart enough not to bid for the Olympics.
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Nov 6, 2015 06:58
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colonel_korn posted:Too bad he didn't have those second thoughts before he forced the head of StatsCan to resign rather than peddle incredibly obvious lies on his behalf. lmao well at least we got a cabinet that truly represents Canada, wage gap and all.
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Nov 6, 2015 14:06
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Sedge and Bee posted:A few more major departments heads could have been women, especially since long time mps like Joyce Murray got snubbed, but these positions and all the procedure surrounding them are decades old. The Liberals didn't just decide to make them ministers of state instead of full ones. They did decide to make all the ministers of state in their cabinet women though, which tells you something.
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Nov 6, 2015 15:02
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:while certain parts of the gender parity cabinet are not ideal, we have a women, aboriginal chief as Justice Minister. No, but it is an excellent example of how even when you're intentionally and openly trying to get good optics and be equitable by appointing equal numbers of women, overall women still end up in more subordinate and less senior positions than men. One of the traditional big four positions went to a woman, and five out of five of the subordinate positions went to women. It may not say a lot, but it does say something. It's like saying you appointed half of your company's board of directors to be women, and then it turns out that half the board are subordinate roles that don't get to vote on board decisions, and oh would you look at that coincidentally it turns out those are the roles women ended up filling.
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Nov 6, 2015 15:04
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Good news.
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Nov 6, 2015 15:54
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It's interesting that Catherine McKenna is the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, yet Dion chairs the committee on environment, climate change, and energy.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:26
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It's a conspiracy, dummies!  
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Nov 7, 2015 07:33
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It's not about safety. Keystone, for whatever reason, has become a symbol of the environmental movement in the United States, with rejection of it standing in place for the notion that a large amount of the world's fossil fuels have to remain in the ground forever if we want to not be severely affected by global warming. Pipelines make it easier, faster, and cheaper to transport oil, which makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to extract and sell it, which encourages higher use of oil, which makes global warming worse. For better or for worse, in the United States Keystone XL is the most prominent symbol of this, and rejection of it can override a lot of other bad decision in the optics war--just look at how people have forgotten that Obama allowed drilling in the Alaskan wildlife reserve, just because that happened to be around the same time that he announced he would reject Keystone. Pipelines aren't scary because they might spill oil, they're scary because they represent a subservience and subordination to the interests of an industry that is eventually going to kill us all, or at the very least make us dramatically readjust the ways we live our lives because the world becomes a more hostile place to live. Fundamentally, we should be rejecting all new pipelines on that principle alone, and even if Warren Buffett happens to make some money out of it (which is not outside the realm of possibility, but typically things that start with "FW: FW: FW: What the Main Street Media Won't Tell You!!!" are not reliable sources of information) I don't give a poo poo. In the US, the most high profile fossil fuel project that is currently the face of this issue is Keystone, and the fact that the various Democratic leaders have all said they oppose it is a good thing.
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Nov 7, 2015 14:38
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eXXon posted:I hate to quote a CI post but I'm still wondering what this was supposed to be in response to, or is it just a mini-Hal post apropos of nothing? Apparently CI is a big fan of Richard Gere. Who knew.
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Nov 7, 2015 16:11
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bunnyofdoom posted:So, who will get the JT paperdoll as an av? Needs to zoom back and forth between his face and the maple leaf imo
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Nov 7, 2015 21:02
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Mike Holmes's True Story book was one of the best presents I've ever gotten and that Jack Layton comic is perhaps his greatest work.
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Nov 7, 2015 23:57
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Uber and Airbnb are both run by human scum but they are offering a better service than the older industries with which they compete and I would like it if the businesses that are not run by human scum would adapt their business models to accommodate. Welp that's my opinion on *~the sharing economy~*, thanks for reading.
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Nov 8, 2015 00:21
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http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thehouse/me...allum-1.3305978quote:The new Liberal government will fully restore refugee health care as part of their commitment to refugees, said Canada's new immigration minister John McCallum. quote:Another file on McCallum's agenda is revoking Bill C-24, he said.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:06
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They're also going to let scientists talk again. It's funny how just undoing a whole bunch of stuff Harper did is enough to look like good governance.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:43
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toe knee hand posted:My mom just had eye surgery for something that sounds pretty similar and it was covered (in BC). She had to pay to rent some equipment to make the recovery easier, but that was it. There's a difference between literally surgery only on your eye (often covered) and regular eye checkups and glasses/contact lenses (not covered except in certain specific circumstances). Funnily enough afaik the same doesn't apply to dental procedures, dental surgery is almost never covered.
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Nov 8, 2015 20:02
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Danny LaFever posted:Conservatives should hit up Brad Wall. He has conservative creds the base will like without sounding like a knuckle dragging troglodyte. For whatever reason it's very uncommon for Canadian politicians to migrate from provincial to federal politics. You see them move down from federal to provincial fairly regularly (usually, I would imagine, after realizing they'll never get a shot at the top job but they could still be a premier or provincial cabinet minister) but it's very rare for premiers or provincial party leaders, even successful and popular ones, to try and move up. We're very unlike the US in that regard, where it seems like half the country's governors only see their role as a temporary one until they can run for president.
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Nov 9, 2015 05:38
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Eej posted:Wow I just realized that Olivia Chow resigned from her MP spot in her failed bid for mayor of Toronto and then didn't get re-elected in the federal election. She got completely crushed, too. Vaughan had over twice as many votes as her and won an outright majority (57%) of all votes cast.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:44
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Femtosecond posted:What do you think were the main causes of this? I think it has the most to do with this:  The Liberals absolutely swept Toronto, they completely wiped out the NDP in every single riding. Of course there are local factors that Helsing mentioned, like Chow never actually being a particularly inspiring campaigner and the redistricting shifting the riding boundaries, and Vaughan being a pretty popular politician in the area dating back to his time as a much-liked city councillor for the area, but the crux of the matter is that Trudeau's national campaign crushed Mulcair's and Toronto was no exception.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:06
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jm20 posted:Doesn't Alberta have basically 3D6+X as their price guide? Insurance is meant to cover you when bad things happen as well, you would be wise to have some lest you become a debt slave (to a non mortgage lender) afaik he's a self-employed tech contractor, so he doesn't get benefits unless he buys them himself. But yeah for 99.9% of Canadians you either don't have dental/vision benefits or your employer provides them. I don't think I know anybody who actually buys dental insurance on their own.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:47
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cowofwar posted:Man the trudeaumetre site is a cesspool in the comments. Heh, bring in those 25,000, but be forewarned, that anywhere between 2% to 30% will be islamists that hate our way of life, and have been brought up with a daily diet of Jew and Western hatred. We are already spending over $2 billion on CSIS and security from the 5th column that we already let in, so there is no problem with our soon spending close to $10 billion a year on CSIS to protect us from the islamists that will surely be imbedded with these refugees, as promised by ISIS. That I now have to wait for 6 months for my cancer treatments, because of the lack of facilities, and being pushed to the back of the line, doesn't really bother me. No new health facilities being built, tax attacks against our Doctors, make me real happy. I must admit, that I like your creativity, and God willing, I will be around to see the fruits of that creativity. I also wish you and Justin, all the best in your discussions with Caliph al-Bagdhadi. Perhaps, YOU will be successful in convincing al-Bagdhadi that he doesn't really understand the peaceful islam of that famous warlord mohammed. As i stated earlier, if I'm still around in 5 years, I'll check back with you on your progress. Just remember, your approach of kumbaya, has been tried, all be it partially against the islamic state, for over 2 years now, and ISIS is bigger and stronger than ever, and yes, they have now graduated to bringing down civilian airliners. I'm waiting. Good luck and God bless e: note how this exact post by some Trun Canadian Patroit would also function equally well as ISIS propaganda.
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Nov 10, 2015 14:29
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My solution to the poo poo water dilemma is to levy a fine on the city of Montreal that is large enough that it makes it cheaper for them to build new infrastructure than to dump it in the river. Literally the only thing that will make them not do this is if we somehow make it more expensive to dump poo water than to properly deal with it, so that is what we should do.
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Nov 10, 2015 14:57
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Spelling it "apparatchick" makes me think of sexy lady bureaucrats which is probably not what they were going for.
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Nov 11, 2015 01:22
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The Toronto Airport shenanigans are a perfect example of how a lot of fights in our country come down to corporate interests versus public interests. Namely, the people who live there don't want this thing to happen, but corporations do want it to happen so they can make slightly more money. Theoretically, in a democracy like ours, the people who actually live there should have a say in whether or not something disruptive to their lives happens. Of course, sometimes this leads to NIMBYism and people resisting wind turbines in rural areas, but in a case like this one I'm pretty glad that the airport won't be expanded considering it's not like Toronto lacks air connections to anywhere at the moment, and I hate the fact that so much of our society revolves around what rich businesspeople want.
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Nov 13, 2015 16:12
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Presto is dumb and bad though. Like, of all my friends who live in the city maybe like, one of them has it. I sure as hell don't. Sure if you live in the burbs and take GO but it's just not practical yet. Because it's at like, half the subway stations, like two streetcar lines (I know they were promising to upgrade all the old streetcars but have they actually got off their asses and super-glued the readers to them yet?) and no or barely any buses. Pretty soon tourists will have to rely on just Presto because the TTC's plan is to have the entire system run solely on Presto by the end of 2016, when they will stop selling tickets and tokens, and by the middle of 2017 they will stop accepting tickets and tokens so it's either use Presto or pay the full cash fare. Presto is not a great system compared to card systems in other transit networks around the world, but it is about 1000% better than what the TTC has now.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:13
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bunnyofdoom posted:So, to change from buschat here is all the ministerial mandate letters for you guys. Yes, we made them public. Why? I like some of what I see here. For example, in the Defence letter: quote:working with the Minister of Public Services and Procurement to launch an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft, focusing on options that match Canada’s defence needs No more F-35?  quote:Work with senior leaders of the Canadian Armed Forces to establish and maintain a workplace free from harassment and discrimination. in Justice: quote:Lead a process, supported by the Minister of Health, to work with provinces and territories to respond to the Supreme Court of Canada decision regarding physician-assisted death. quote:Support the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in his efforts to repeal key elements of Bill C-51, and introduce new legislation that strengthens accountability with respect to national security and better balances collective security with rights and freedoms. quote:Introduce government legislation to add gender identity as a prohibited ground for discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to the list of distinguishing characteristics of “identifiable group” protected by the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code. I would post more, but holy hell that website is making GBS threads the bed for me.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:31
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Amgard posted:Where does JT talk about weed. This is critical. That's in Justice: quote:Working with the Ministers of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and Health, create a federal-provincial-territorial process that will lead to the legalization and regulation of marijuana.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:59
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The sheer irony of a Liberal named Trudeau sweeping to power and undoing everything Harper did is somehow so delicious that it makes up for the fact that the Libs will eventually Lib.
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Nov 13, 2015 20:25
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OSI bean dip posted:Ikantski, I bet you cannot go a week without posting about the OLP and their follies. Ikantski will go a week without posting about how terrible the OLP is when the OLP goes a week without being terrible.
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Nov 13, 2015 23:41
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Melian Dialogue posted:But don't worry, its all probably just a group of people with mental illness who randomly scouted out locations, geared up and assaulted and killed over 40 people. Im sure this won';t have anything to do with the Islamic State, no need to worry guys. Random event, just like a natural disaster. Jesus Christ, Melian, now is really not the time for your weird vendetta against certain points of view that disagree with yours.
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Nov 14, 2015 00:43
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Melian Dialogue posted:"Now's not the time" as if our posting on a comedy forum in Canada has some effect on a live situation. I picture a French cop just about to gear up and storm the Bataclan but then, a pop up comes with my message and he stops and angrily has to respond, unfortunately letting precious minutes tick by. Do you seriously not see the difference between what people were saying about Zehaf-Bibeau and this? It's not about you actually having an effect on the situation, it's about you trying to score weird points in some imaginary shitposting conflict no one else cares about. "Heh, 40 people are dead? Sweet time for me to make a sick burn on CanPol posters who disagree with me  "Go gently caress yourself.
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Nov 14, 2015 00:50
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From a Canadian context, since this is still a CanPol thread, let's remember that our military is in very very poor shape and even if we do decide to do an abrupt about-turn and not withdraw our forces from Syria, they make very little difference there. On the other hand, we do have a fairly well developed humanitarian relief system that could help ameliorate the suffering of the millions of displaced people in and outside of Syria, and a safe society that can welcome Syrian refugees. If you ask me, we should probably be leaving the military stuff to countries that actually have a strong capacity to act on that, like France and the United States, and we should instead be focusing our efforts on relieving the suffering of the Syrian civilian population, especially since this is theoretically something military powers like France and the US would be doing anyway so we can still be lightening their workload and allowing them to focus slightly more on the military mission that everyone has a hardon for. Division of labour and specialization is a thing outside of economics, and this is a case where our specialization is really not in the application of military force. Also, friendly reminder that if anyone you know starts spouting off about how the Paris attack means we shouldn't be allowing Syrian refugees into Canada, probably the best response you can make is to point out that trying to get away from men like that is exactly the reason these refugees are fleeing Syria in the first place. If we're scared for ourselves in a safe country like Canada, imagine how afraid the refugees must feel having lost their homes, their friends, their family members, and their belongings, and try to feel some empathy for them by imagining how amazing it must be to be granted a new home in a country where you no longer have to fear for your life on a daily basis.
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Nov 14, 2015 15:05
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