mik posted:

A lot of the forthcoming/past international agreements on climate change are going to be ultimately negotiated through foreign affairs so I would imagine he's going to have just as much influence on Canadian climate policy as being in the actual Environment Ministry.

BGrifter posted:

Nah, the obvious solution is Queen Marg Delahunty.



Seems much more relevant and useful than the current Queen.

PT6A posted:

This is a good first step, and god forgive me for saying this, but Dion might make a decent Minister of Foreign Affairs if he keeps this up.

BGrifter posted:

I don't have anything in particular against the current queen, she's been as inoffensive as you could hope. It just irks me funding vacations for rich douchebags while in the same breath cutting valuable social spending. It's not an issue that would move my vote. I'm definitely game for replacing the Queen with a fictional character of some sort though, seems much more cost effective.

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.

flakeloaf posted:

I'd wager she's significantly more popular than the institution she represents. She also got some pretty good boosts from her mother and husband, both of whom were hilarious.

flakeloaf posted:

Her dogs are assholes who snap at people and aren't housetrained.


Yeah but they don't let him talk anymore.

PT6A posted:

Man, all the Sikh cabinet ministers seem so chill, and actually pretty good at what little they've done so far.

I can't believe there's people still pissing and moaning about "the death of merit" when every cabinet minister appears to be eminently qualified for their respective positions.

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.

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 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.

vyelkin posted:

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.

Cultural Imperial posted:

u mad your NDP hugbox just got smashed

jm20 posted:

OSI bean dip posted:

rawrr posted:

Right, so how do we wipe out ISIS without another extremist extremist organization taking its place on the world stage? Even if ISIS ceased to exist the problems and circumstances that has caused extremist organizations like ISIS and AQ to exist in the first place remain.

Pinterest Mom posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R0U8PgOkSY&t=90s

vyelkin posted:

It happens whenever there's a Conservative -> Liberal government transition these days. The Conservatives say they left a surplus, the Liberals come in and say there's a hidden deficit, and no one's quite sure who to believe because both of those things play into both parties' hands. The Eves -> McGuinty handover in Ontario in 2003 apparently had a $5B hidden deficit, so it could be worse.

Ikantski posted:

Including. CBC says "Current numbers are 10k by the end of the year, 25k by Feb. 2016, and then 35k or more by end of 2016." 10k of the 35k are private sponsorships.

So instead of sponsoring 25k refugees in 2 months like he promised, his deadline slipped a little and he's sponsoring 25k refugees in 14 months. I can't believe the Trudeau Meter douchebags are giving him a hard time about this, he's still keeping at least half his promise, he never said poo poo about bringing any in 2016.


What is this?

THC posted:

Balanced budgets are good though and they are not the solely the domain of evil neoliberals.

senae posted:

That'd be really interesting, but it kind of seems like the biggest contributor to the LPC winning and the NDP crashing was the sudden appearance of a million pissed off canadians voting for whoever would beat Harper. Which seems like kind of a hard thing to predict.

I mean, I'm not saying the individual campaigns didn't matter (well, the CPC campaign didn't matter), just that I think whoever most polls said was going to win on october 19'th were going to win, because that entire voting block was going to align with the polls.

The polls that are complete garbage and don't actually reflect reality.

PT6A posted:

I agree, I'm just saying that "taking your kid on the tractor with you" is like a trucker taking their kid on a ride with them. The danger seems minimal, and I don't expect it is actually prohibited, I'd just like it to be clarified so these whiners can get called on their bullshit.

Baronjutter posted:

What's amazing about Putin is that he has a western cult on both sides. There's a lot of low-info "radical left" who love Putin because Putin is an enemy of the west and the west = evil neoliberal colonialism thus putin is good standing up to US and capitalist hegemony!

Do it ironically posted:

actually all of them are and I have yet to see someone explain to me how a true functioning communist government would work that wasn't worse that what we have here at our current state.

Stretch Marx posted:

Here in NB someone started The Manatee for the same purpose and, just like the onion and beaverton, they are generally creepily close to reality.

PT6A posted:

I agree that Notley would probably be getting the same attacks if she were Richard Notley instead, if she followed the same policies. The language used would be different, but I don't think the farmers would suddenly be okay with Bill 6 if it were championed by a man instead of a woman, nor do I think they would be less insane in their disproportionate reaction.

Sexism in politics continues to be a very serious issue, but I don't think Notley is getting death threats because of her gender.

Stretch Marx posted:

Look at Kansas. That's a pretty good example of how quickly poo poo goes downhill when Tea Party type parties get ahead. Now look at the US congress. Idiot implosion always seems inevitable. The only difference between the Wild Rose and the GOP is that the GOP has a PC wing trying desperately to message control while the Wild Rose have no filters.

HookShot posted:

My husband drove a Smart car from Brisbane to Sydney and got out of a speeding ticket by sheepishly telling the cop "I don't think this car even goes up to 120" and the cop laughing and going "yeah probably not" and letting him go.

PT6A posted:

Trudeau got presented with a headdress by the Tsuu Tina Nation today. I look forward to the disgusting racist comments from pretty much everyone.

Probably that oval office Canada Post driver especially. He seemed like a very closed-minded fellow, and he is a white male in Calgary.

Chicken posted:

At least they aren't being driven out of town and dropped off in a wheat field in the middle of winter anymore. Progress!

bunnyofdoom posted:

Rob Ford died

PT6A posted:

That's too bad. He wasn't a good person, but he didn't deserve to die of cancer.

Holy Jesus, he was only 46? I always thought he was mid-50s at least.