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ZShakespeare)
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I, for one, am ready for a mug-pissing good time.bunnyofdoom posted:I am here and no longer thr thread liberal hack. Thank gently caress. Pretty sure I actually have PTSD from working in politics Write a memoir.
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May 28, 2021 18:54
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vyelkin posted:A few years ago they openly announced they would no longer have comments on articles about Indigenous people, you know, because of all the hate speech. In response, the commenters started using the comments sections on other articles published on the same day as any article about Indigenous people to shittalk the articles about Indigenous people and also the CBC for censoring their free speech by not letting them put their hateful comments underneath the actual article they hated. First they came for the people hollering slurs and you'll never guess what they had to say about it.
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Jun 2, 2021 15:33
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Beelzebufo posted:There was a canadaland podcast (I think it was them) that actually dealt with how right-wing partisans were courted and aided after they came to Canada as a way of suppressing the much more prarie socialist leanings of the Ukrainian Canadian community at the time. Ukrainian Nazis in Canada aren't an accident, they are (as ever) part of a deliberate effort to suppress socialism and left-wing goals and foment anti-communism in specific communities. There's an academic named Per Anders Rudling who has written quite a bit on this subject. He identifies a very interesting dynamic of official multiculturalism, which is that by recognizing 'Ukrainian' as a constituent part of the Canadian identity the federal government gets to elevate both particular peoples/groups as representatives of the Ukrainian identity, and also particular conceptions of Ukrainianness as official. Needless to say, the government was very friendly to Banderites and other anti-communists, and not particularly helpful to the prairie socialists.
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Aug 15, 2021 02:02
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Kraftwerk posted:Why does the NDP continue to be so toxic to the electorate that they can never entertain it as a serious alterative to the liberals? There's this commonsense idea that the NDP just can't win because they're intrinsically unserious, so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, as you note with the media bigging up O'Toole, it's not like the NDP has much media sympathy to raise them up. Rather, they stick around, popular but unsupported, and thereby function as proof that the Canadian electorate "means well."
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Aug 25, 2021 14:39
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Calumanjaro posted:It happened with a Harper minority. Iirc the conservatives took out ads basically calling coalitions undemocratic. And also the liberals would rather conservatives govern, than compromise with the NDP. There’s an additional confounding factor with that one. While the Bloc signed that they would support the Liberal-NDP coalition, they would not be part of the coalition themselves. Being an actual part of the coalition would’ve involved, on their interpretation, ceding that Quebec was merely a province within Canada. Without the BQ the actual proposed coalition fell short of a majority. (Jean still shouldn’t have allowed the proroguement.)
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Sep 11, 2021 14:02
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tagesschau posted:On what basis? The prime minister has always had significant leeway to advise the governor general, and even in granting the prorogation, she required there to be a confidence vote pretty quickly after Parliament resumed. Given that this was in the context of parties constituting a majority of the house signing a declaration to unseat the governing party, it was unclear whether the the Prime Minister actually commanded the confidence of the legislature. The reason the Governor General is supposed to follow the advisement of the PM is because the PM is presumed to have the confidence of the House (and through that democratic legitimacy). Since the confidence was ambiguous in such case, the Governor General should have asked the House to endorse the request itself. This seems to me to be the best way to ensure that the technically-existing power of the Crown, which is supposed to only exist in technicality, is not exerted to undermine the operation of the democratic(ish) institutions which are supposed to actually wield that power in practice.
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Sep 12, 2021 15:50
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tagesschau posted:No, it wasn't. The government has the confidence of the House until it doesn't, and the House had not defeated the government on a matter of confidence. Convention dictates that the prime minister should resign if it is clear that they will lose the confidence of the House. I'm well aware of what convention dictates. Convention is bad because, in cases like these, it allows for the power of the Crown to be abused.
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Sep 13, 2021 16:28
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enki42 posted:i mean, if the alternative is the crown actually has an opinion and decides things, i'm not 100% sure that's a better option. The power of the Crown is bad whether being wielded by the governor general or the prime minister. This is why the governor general is supposed to only do things that have the support of the house, because the house has some level of democratic legitimacy. It's also why saying 'but the mace man hadn't read the right magical incantations yet' isn't a convincing justification of Jean granting Harper's request to prorogue. This is part of why: flakeloaf posted:The Crown is a colonialist institution rebranded as a tourist attraction, and the only power it should have is the power to go quietly away and let someone other than the CEO of Ethnic Cleansing, Inc. act as our head of state.
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Sep 13, 2021 17:34
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Much like the 'Open for Business' stuff, this campaign has the strong undertone of 'Doug Ford: Takes Bribes.'
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Oct 5, 2021 15:57
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Alctel posted:Are you sure about that? I forget where the last place I saw this was, but don't a lot of Conservative voters just straight up not have second choices?
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Oct 19, 2021 19:21
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I heard the "how old are you now" thing so frequently I'm surprised to learn it's a Canadian affectation. Definitely heard the counting thing before, though I can't remember where or when. Daycare, maybe?
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Oct 21, 2021 14:46
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infernal machines posted:I remember during the initial furor over the Sammy Yatim shooting someone in a previous version of this thread broke out the "wheel of force" to demonstrate why Forcillo was justified in emptying a magazine into Yatim Forcillo getting done for attempted murder but not murder because they separated the shooting into two distinct events was... certainly creative prosecuting.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:08
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infernal machines posted:Well, the fact that he died from the justified use of force and not the unjustified use of force was certainly fortunate for Forcillo I mean the use of force was determined as unjustified quite precisely because Yatim was already obviously dead. I guess there's a way in which it's politically clever, to essentially defend the cops' right to use lethal force at the drop of the hat, but convict Forcillo for getting carried away, or overkill, or getting carried away.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:19
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In all fairness, endorsing and supporting the slaveholding south in the Civil War is quite authentically Canadian.
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Dec 29, 2021 00:57
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EvilJoven posted:What the gently caress. Do you really think that this is me loving endorsing slavery? loving hell. Just because I was taught that the abolitionist movement, which yes did have a LOT of sincere supporters, didn't receive mainstream support from capital and government until there was self serving motivation to do so, doesn't mean that I think that slavery was a good thing. Holy poo poo what the gently caress is wrong with you. It is a joke about the Canadian aristocracy. Chill.
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Dec 29, 2021 01:14
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Vintersorg posted:When the unvaxxed plague rats are the majority of hospitalizations loving things up then shut the gently caress up about not vaccinating our way out of this. Cause it’s all we have right now. Some of us not only are ethically uncomfortable with "let the impure die," but are further worried about the consequences of "it's acceptable if people we don't like die" becoming (more) standard operating procedure going forwards.
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Jan 8, 2022 16:11
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Count Roland posted:Pretty sure that would still count as causal death, especially if they were admitted because covid was destroying their lungs. One of the concerns, informed by what has happened in the US, is that this distinction would be used as an excuse to classify such deaths as non-covid deaths for the sake of artificially deflating the coronavirus-related death total. So of course you're right that someone whose lungs have been racked by the coronavirus and then dies of a respiratory condition is rightfully considered as someone who died from the coronavirus, but the concern is not (entirely) over the rightful classifications.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:45
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Mr. Apollo posted:Or he figures it’ll garner sympathy from his supporters and increase is Patreon income. I don’t know what it’s at now, but I remember when he first started getting attention, he was earning C$65,000 a month. He then changed his setting so the monthly income was hidden. Didn’t he nix his patreon in preparation to move to a conservative alternative that never got off the ground?
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Jan 23, 2022 02:15
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Entropic posted:https://twitter.com/qaomene/status/1491590330608664579?s=20&t=JYOEnQvGBI3xWiUkm4GwbQ It whips rear end that I’m gonna be murdered in the street by a bunch of idiots who repost Minions memes.
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Feb 10, 2022 05:52
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Mr. Apollo posted:He said he's not running "to show people what freedom looks like". I feel freer already.
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Mar 4, 2022 15:07
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Thinking out loud, but getting rid of both Hillier and Elliott makes sense if the PCPO sees them as electoral vulnerabilities to one or another group they think they need to win. You get rid of the health minister if you don't want to be burdened with the "mandates" minister and so lose voters to the PPC, and you get rid of the screaming crazy guy if you don't want to lose the suburban OLP-PCPO swing voters. Though Hillier was already kicked out of the party, wasn't he?
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Mar 4, 2022 17:01
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infernal machines posted:A while ago, he's been sitting as an independent since. I guess, with the way politics works, someone could've still dropped Hillier a line saying it would be worth his time to simmer down.
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Mar 4, 2022 17:22
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Were people expecting Charest to do better than that?
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Sep 11, 2022 01:17
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PT6A posted:I dislike how worldwide Torydom seems to be on a course away from conventional evil Tories like Harper and Johnson and Kenney and their ilk, to lunatic submorons like Truss, Smith and Polliver, to say nothing of the state of the GOP down south. It's the same ideology just less and less constrained by the ever-deteriorating post-war liberal institutions.
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Oct 7, 2022 13:44
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Servetus posted:Why would the Liberals back PP over their own leader, Justin or whoever follows him, when the incumbent gets first crack at forming a government? Do you seriously believe that is Justin Trudeau stands up in the house with enough Liberals and NDP MPs to form a government, that Liberal MPs will commit career suicide to crown Poilievre because there are more Conservative MPs than Liberal ones? While the incumbent formally gets first shot at forming a government, it feels like norms are firmly in favour of the electoral 'winner' getting first shot. Liberal support of a Conservative government would almost certainly look like it did under Harper, where the LPC simply doesn't team up with the NDP and, for the most part, the CPC legislates on the areas where there is ideological overlap between them and the LPC. You combine this with all the poo poo that the government gets to do that doesn't run through legislature, and there is a fair bit of damage a conservative minority government can do even if they are restrained by commons.
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Oct 8, 2022 18:11
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redbrouw posted:Progress Toronto has a good night electing half decent trustees and councillors with like 30 percent turnout, and it was all ground game. Is there a good rundown somewhere on the new balance of council?
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Oct 25, 2022 12:46
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tagesschau posted:Not getting the policy outcomes you personally prefer also doesn't let you change the definition of democracy so that you can claim we don't live in one. I think a more fair reading of their post isn't (just) that the policy outcomes are bad, but that the political system we have isn't (sufficiently) sensitive to the needs or wants of those outside the capital class. If a democracy, to be a democracy, has to allow for effective collective self-determination, then the fact that a broad swath of the population is effectively cut out from that seems pretty important. Maybe you don't like talking about this in terms of categories, that Canada is or is not a democracy. But it's not so hard to rephrase things charitably, like "the majority of the populace lacks effective democratic representation," or "our system is far less democratic than minimum standards require it to be."
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Oct 25, 2022 14:57
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eXXon posted:Are there actual historical examples of spoiled ballots leading to consequences for politicians in FPP systems or otherwise? I can't see how, say, 100k spoiled ballots would get more attention than 100k protestors marching in Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver. That's ~10x as large as the G20 protests and those led to... well, basically no long-term changes, despite garnering plenty of attention. Going on intuition alone, I feel like if you had a critical mass to effect massive positive change by just spoiling ballots then you'd probably have critical mass to just, you know, have good outcomes through conventional representative elections.
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Oct 25, 2022 15:19
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tagesschau posted:There's no right to have your elected representatives vote the way you want all the time, and we're still a democracy because those representatives are handily voted out if their constituents actually want them to go away. If it turns out that a particular riding's constituents will vote for a potted plant as long as it's running for the Tories, what knowledge do you have that permits you to say that that result is incorrect? Voters are dumb because people are dumb. I don't think this works as an effective response. The force of cat botherer's point is that there is a persistent lack of democracy despite elections, so simply pointing to the continued fact of elections doesn't address their concerns. We can draw out two main ways that there's a lack of democracy despite elections: first that a substantial part of the power that shapes our lives (and society more broadly) is not subject to electoral control, and second that various social forces shape who can achieve electoral power. These seem like pretty reasonable points, even if they've been backed down to being kind of abstract. Decades of privatization and deregulation has moved the control of many social institutions from state government to private institutions. Running for office requires a combination of education, wealth and connections that not only excludes many but provides a pressure that elected officials will have certain priorities (think about how many elected officials are landlords). Maybe you disagree about the severity of these problems, but they are problems and they do seem to damage the effectiveness of Canadian democracy. Maybe there's an option here to really double down on elections here. Something like "sure these forces and circumstances exist, but people could change them if they voted for politicians to to change them." Services could be nationalized. Regulations could be enforced. Jim Gilgan could be stuffed into a trebuchet and launched over the castle battlements. If only people voted for a government that would do that. I think that's still insufficient. There's always going to be a sense that "if everybody's mind suddenly changed, then they could immediately do the thing they all agreed to do," sort of like how in Galapagos everyone suddenly decides money is worthless. A picture like that is probably too fanciful because people don't just start magically acting in concert. It takes heavy duty organizing work to create the necessary institutions, to convince people to work within them, and to get those people moving. And here we return to a version of the original point: the ability to do this sort of organizational work, the work that underpins politics, is largely or entirely not available to certain segments of the population. And if that sort of collectively self-determining work isn't available to certain segments of the population, then that at least gives us a reason to believe that Canada is not as democratic as it should be. Or something like that.
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Oct 25, 2022 16:50
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infernal machines posted:This appears to be the problem ITT. Everyone here knows the system doesn't work for millions of Canadians, and they assume that because it doesn't work, millions of Canadians want change. The problem is millions of Canadians seem perfectly fine with the status quo, every single time they're polled on it, they don't want change, and they've voted to ensure that. Maybe there's a silent majority hungering for an alternative, but what with them being silent and all, they're being drowned out by the people who choose to make their voices heard. I mean, poll results can be pretty squishy. Are people responding descriptively or expressively? How are they understanding the question? Are they contrasting the status quo with negative change or positive change? What options do they think are out there? Have they simply adapted to the world they live in? This is all to say that I think you can take the poll results as reasonably genuine, not think of them as a result of people being duped, and still hold that there's a serious democratic deficit.
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Oct 25, 2022 17:09
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infernal machines posted:Poll as in electoral poll, in which you cast a vote or votes for candidates. Ah, yeah. I think that makes my point stronger not weaker, though.
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Oct 25, 2022 17:13
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tagesschau posted:The conclusion that we aren't a democracy doesn't follow from this. Doesn't seem so hard to do: (1) If a society is effectively democratic then the political activities involved in collective self-determination are reasonably available to all relevant segments of the population. (2) The political activities involved in collective self-determination are not reasonably available to all relevant segments of the population. --- (C) Society is not effectively democratic.
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Oct 25, 2022 17:19
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tagesschau posted:It's absolutely worth noting here that the fact that some less popular ideas don't ever make it into public policy is not evidence for this being true. While that wasn't how I spelled out that point (which was in my post previous to that) there's still a few things worth making explicit as a response: (1) The popularity of ideas can be affected by political organization and advocacy campaigns. Such that different segments of the population (and different political groups) have greatly different ability to engage in organization and advocacy, an idea's lack of popularity can be the result of a poorly- or non-functioning democracy. (2) Popular ideas can also not make it into public policy. In fact, research from the US on affective polarization and political efficacy suggests that there's very little correlation between popularity and enactment such that a lot of very popular policies do not get enacted. (As a kind of (2a), I think that you've inserted "less popular" for yourself, and none of myself nor cat botherer nor bleck nor anyone else has committed to that.) (3) The lack of implementation of certain sorts of policies is absolutely evidence for some kind of democratic deficit. It's not conclusive, of course, but a relative lack of implementation of policies which, for example, benefit renters rather than landlords is certainly evidence that the interests of some group of people (in this case renters) are having trouble finding democratic expression.
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Oct 25, 2022 19:08
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Panderfringe posted:Yeah, like, this is going to work better than he could have ever hoped for. Not only will Ford get his way with cupe, but because this test case will go amazingly well it will b used on every other union in the province. The federal government will do nothing, because the Liberals do in fact like what Doug's doing. They could stop it at any moment but choose not to, instead sitting on the sidelines seeing how things shake out. I can absolutely see cops coming in to disperse an illegal strike AND jailing all the strikers for owing so much money from the absurd fines. I guess it’s worth discussing what “success” looks like. The Winnipeg General Strike, for example, didn’t “win” as such but was a pretty important moment in the growth of the labour movement. Even if the strike itself was eventually broken it forced costs on state and capital that strengthened labour’s position going forwards.
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Nov 7, 2022 00:20
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:45 |
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TheCenturion posted:I will say, the one thing that did trouble me was that the only questions that the Union speakers really dodged during that press conference was 'So, are you guys all going to keep voting conservative?' I wouldn’t expect leadership to come out and say “oh yeah a bunch of our members are real dumb, really screwed the pooch on that one.”
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Nov 7, 2022 20:57
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