Long term strategic thinking…I think I can remember back to when the U.S. did that, too (and not always in ways that involved the deaths of people in other countries).
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Further to the “just how big an asshole is Jordan Peterson anyhow?” discussion:
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Nooo! Don’t bring them here!
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Wow. For someone who has apparently never lived in Canada, he understands the language very well.
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Well, he does have common sense, so picking up the language becomes easy. 
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Exactly. And he is from another Commonwealth country.
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As a reminder that Canadians aren’t just about burning down American presidential residences…
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Given how fucked up the Ministry of Children and Family Development can be, it says something that it’s actually the better choice for the child.
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Ah, I see you have an analogous family destroying entity to what is commonly known as CPS in th US. That sucks.
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Dammit…
If anyone’s unfamiliar with the name “Doug Ford,” you may remember his brother Rob, who had a few threads opened up at the other place about his death.
Amusing note: my autocorrect changed “Doug Ford” to “Dog Food.”
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He’s a racketeering, racist, sexist piece of shit who has gotten away with everything from drug running to outright bribery.
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FUUUUUUUUUUCCK.
And the same fools who vote for him will be whining about how their jobs are gone and everything is so expensive.
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Yuuuuup. I am not looking forward to Federal Election 2019. There is a veritable swarm of spiteful, aging, fragile white people, and by God, they’re out to make everyone as miserable as they are.
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We need electoral reform now. This is a comfortable electoral majority that represents 40% of the electorate - 60% will very definitely not be represented by this government’s policies.
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Am I understanding this correctly? The newly-elected premier of Ontario is proposing straight-up ethnic cleansing and y’all elected him anyway?!? WTF?
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Never underestimate the power of white “middle class” spite. As long as they get to shaft somebody else, they will put any asshole in power.
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Let me translate:
“But her e-mails! Let’s elect Trump! Fuck you, Obama!”
=
“But hydro! Let’s elect the Tories! Fuck you, Wynne!”
One problem, one I’ve already seen expressed, is that people have traditionally voted PC when they think taxes are too high, government employees paid too much, etc. It’s what gave us the Harris government last time around.
Plus, people forget about The Big Blue Machine, a version of the Tories that ruled Ontario for decades, and that people still believe in the way some British people still believe King Arthur will come back. A lot of Tory supporters haven’t figured out the party they support isn’t the one the signed on with.
And, (going Godwin and I don’t care), it’s the same logic that let Jewish people vote for Hitler with a clear conscience.
Because, c’mon, his party will keep him in check. They’re not going to do something so obviously hideous. That’s stupid. /s
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<sigh> I was discussing this the other evening with my little brother (who is lucky enough to live on the other side of the river). 40% voted Conservative, which, under our system, was enough to ensure a solid majority of seats when the centre & left vote is split (as it was), and the defecting Liberal Party vote went to both the Tories and the NDP.
This shouldn’t be too surprising, as the Liberals have become a centre-right, small-c conservative party for the most part, with enough flex to move to centre-left when it is politic to do so. This, however, means that the party’s core support is quite small - in this case, limited to those for whom both the NDP and Tories are too radical in their respective directions, i.e., what used to be Red Tories.
In contrast, core Tory support is probably in the neighbourhood of 30-35%. which is pretty much the same as Trump’s core support down South. As I was saying to my brother, I suspect that Stalin’s core support was 30-35%. It seems to be a fairly fixed figure for what Bob Altemeyer calls authoritarian followers. (These aren’t Altemeyer’s figures, but my own surmise.) In our case, that tail can wag the dog when, as happened here, the soft right defects further right, and the vote of the majority is split between two or more parties. At times, you don’t even need the split vote: while I was still in Québec, I lived through a Péquiste majority in a two-party system, where the PQ received less of the popular vote than the PLQ. In Québec, the Greater Montréal region cannot elect a government by itself despite possessing more than half of Québec’s population (and Montréal is normally pretty Red).
This is a “feature”, not a bug: the political systems of the English-speaking world were designed by agrarian aristocracies to weight the government toward rural, predominantly conservative interests. I include the American system in this - the Republic was founded by people who didn’t want to pay their taxes. (Sound familiar?)
So we have a situation where a bare plurality can govern essentially without check, partly because the Right is comparatively cohesive (which our system favours - the Liberals benefited from this back when the Right was split between the Progressive Conservatives and Reform, but now that the parties have amalgamated and Reform has ousted small-c conservatives…), and partly because most people don’t like to make waves. This latter happens for admirable reasons (the self-doubt that arises from the realisation that one might be wrong) and less-than-admirable reasons (“Can’t be arsed because it won’t affect me”).
I’m not sure we can do much about the authoritarian followers, I’m not sure we can do much about the diffidence of the average decent Joe, but we can do something about the systems that keep sociopaths in power. It becomes a lot easier to prevent their access to unfettered power if we have electoral systems that actually reflect the popular vote. I’d advise every one of us to start, at the least, yapping about it, and preferably start organising.
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You know that Trump has really pissed people off when he manages to get the NDP, the Conservatives, and the Bloc to unite and vote in support of the Liberals.
It’s like seeing a goat, a vulture, a coyote, and a pig, all standing united to present a common front against a common threat. It’s eerie.
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