Recently in Politics Category

A few weeks or a month ago, I got into a conversation about politicians that looked something like this:

Me: I'm not voting for them because they're not like me and they say they are. They don't share some opinions I have.

Other: Of course they're not like you, and nobody will share all your opinions.

He was correct, of course, but that wasn't my point. My complaint was two-fold; I'll address the second half first.

I don't expect any other human being to share my opinion on everything. That would be boring, even if it did make my election-day decision easier. Besides, I don't even know what my opinion *is* on many subjects. While it would be nice if there was at least some congruency, not everything is important, and I still respect people with whom I strongly disagree. For instance, while I'm anti-organised religion, I still think Augustine was a pretty cool guy. I'm very much not a pacifist, but I'm friends with (at least) two practising Quakers.

That being said, there are some opinions I have that are non-negotiable. I don't think of our military as peacekeepers, for instance, and would have difficulty voting for anybody who would neuter our armed forces in such a way. I think our poor and middle-class already pay their fair share of taxes, so if the government needs more revenue, take it from the 150k+ annual set. I don't mind at all if gasoline hits European price points, and I really don't mind if the government takes better than half that in taxes. The first opinion puts me in strong opposition to many in my demographic, and the latter two would actually put a fair crimp in the lives of many more of those, but c'est la vie.

I don't actually care if a politician is like me. In fact, it's difficult to find anybody at all even close to me, never mind precisely like me. How many former soldiers do you know who have a BA, are earning another, and work as a system administrator in a school of computer science while paying for their disabled common-law wife to go to university? Thought so.

What I care about though, is politicians who claim to be like... well, anybody else at all. How many times have you heard "I'm like Joe Sixpack, I like beer and hockey and I know what it's like to be lower to middle class"?

Stephen Harper does still actually sit in the stands at hockey games, but he does so with a retinue, unobtrusive as it is, and he can't pick a favourite because whatever he picks, it's wrong. Sarah Palin may indeed once have been the moose-hunting hockey mom she professes to be, but she isn't any more. She's a state governor turned VP candidate. Even Liz May, who tipped a few pints back at the Grad House on campus here, is not much like you or I. She's the leader of a national political party and when she speaks, leaders of other parties listen. Andrew Telegdi was once an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, but he hasn't been for as long as I've been alive.

Tyler Durden says: "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!"

Politicians are nothing like me or you (unless you're a politician too), and it's insulting when they pretend to be. Even if Stephen Harper's favourite NHL team really is the Oilers, that just means that he and I both happen to like the same team, nothing more. If Liz May favours the same Grad House beer I do, that just means she has good taste. If Peter Braid runs a business like I used to, that just means we were both once small businessmen.

That being said, I found James Bow's writeups of the local candidates valuable in helping to understand where the local politicians come from. And to their credit, I don't think any of them pretended to be like me beyond the most superficial qualities: well-educated well-off white folk living in Southwestern Ontario. I didn't change my mind based on what I saw, and the candidate for whom I will vote Tuesday is not at all like me, but I'm cool with that. So should you be.

Media outlets, both mainstream and idiots like me, are abuzz with the news that Henry Morgentaler may be named to the Order of Canada.

Love him or hate him, like the news or not, it seems pretty clear that the various commenters on the issue are dead wrong. The G&M story quotes the executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League as saying, "[w]ith this choice, the one thing that everybody really agrees on about Morgentaler is that he is a very divisive figure." A Liberal MP is noted as saying "if he is admitted to the order, it will polarize Canadians." (That's the Globe and Mail's wording, it's not a direct quotation.)

Canadians are already divided and polarized around the issue of abortion. Morgentaler's appointment would merely bring that polarization back out into the light; that division is there whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. Poll 100, 1000, a million, or thirty million Canadians; I'm sure you'd see that most Canadians already have an opinion on abortion and would argue their point of view quite vociferously. Morgentaler's appointment can't cause what's already done, so in that respect the anti-abortionists are either deluding themselves, or trying to delude those few still on the fence.

Edit an hour later: he's admitted. Bring on the polarization.

The CBC ran a blurb about the Chinese Paralympic committee's documentation on dealing with people with disabilities.

While the language used in said docs is indeed fairly shocking to (at least some) Western ears, the reaction of one of the (now-former) athletes was interesting. He said, "Their society has come a fair distance already, but I think it's clear that there is still a fair distance to come."

Without speaking to Chinese society at all, having a disabled wife has opened my eyes somewhat to our own mores. She has a disabled pass, and uses a cane to walk more often than not. Her handful of meds both morning and night is just that - a handful. She has crutches which get used semi-regularly, and probably should be in a wheelchair a week every month, but we can't afford one and live in a third story walkup anyway. Her meds leave her sometimes unable to remember conversations 15 minutes later. She is, by any account, physically disabled. She also suffers from PTSD. Yet a couple of times a month, she meets new doctors who have the amazing ability to diagnose disability at a distance and without an examination. At least, that's the only conclusion I can draw, since they are somehow able to tell at a glance that she is not worthy of parking in a disabled spot - and tell her so. On a couple of notable occasions, she's literally been ganged up on; once, one of the gangers-up didn't even know the original interlocutor.

I think it's clear that regardless of Chinese progress, our own society has a long way to go itself.

While I'm not entirely comfortable with government deciding who gets funding based on 'moral' grounds, I'm unsure about how pulling funding equates to censorship. The government would not be saying "you can't make that film", it would be saying, "we're not going to give you money to make that film." David Cronenburg isn't being escorted to jail here. A violation of Charter Rights? No, I really don't think so. The government doesn't fund my blawg, but that doesn't mean it's violating my right to free speech.

Assuming that the quote from the lawyer in the Hollywood Reporter story are accurate, it is disturbing that funding could be retroactively pulled. We don't need another MPAA.

It's quite annoying that none of the stories seem to feel it necessary to link to the actual text of the bill, just what everybody else says it says. So, I think this is it, although I see nothing in there about films or tax credits for film makers. If anybody knows where the exact and full text under question is, I'd appreciate a link.

Incidentally, I'm glad that Parliament has done some historical detective work about the history of the finance minister wearing new shoes on budget day. I can now sleep at night. I found that while I was looking for the actual text in question.

33% of Canadians don't know where the 2010 Olympics are.  That should be a clue to the organisers about the current relevance of the Olympics.

I'm not even sure what the Olympics are supposed to be any more.  Amateur sport?  Not even technically since the US "Dream Team" in basketball at the 92 Summers, and the men's ice hockey teams comprised mostly of NHLers has sealed the deal.  (Funny how the rhetoric switched from "the purity of amateur sport" to "but it's not the best players in the world" once we wanted the pros in.) We now explicitly pay for medal wins, not that athletes weren't receiving sponsorship deals essentially based off wins anyway.  Anybody remember those Alex Baumann commercials that he did for the Egg Council?  Suppose he did those for free?  Think they'd have been made with somebody else instead if Baumann hadn't won?  Even if athletes weren't paid, the Olys have been smirched for some time with the political aspect - boycotts galore in the 70s and 80s, Cold War tensions leaking out through the seams.

So why are the games still held?  Most people I know watch one or two events (men's and women's ice hockey), sometimes count the medals as if they mean something personally, and that's it.  In Vancouver, it seems to be mostly about the local business the games generate.  Oh, and sweeping up the trash.  For China, it appears to be a way for the government to show the rest of the world that it's not really all that bad.  Oh, and sweeping up some more trash.  Besides, the rest of the world really doesn't care anyway, as long as the Chinese keep selling us cheap consumer goods.

This is not intended to disrespect Olympians in particular or "amateur" sport in general.  I understand that to the athletes, the Games are the ultimate competition, the aspiration and dream of a lifetime.  I just wonder about everything else, and if having the Games continues means the everything else must escalate, as it seems to be doing, then the price is too high.  "Swifter, higher, stronger" means "more, more, more," and it's sickening.

A rare political post. I used to get ranty on the subject of politics, and I still occasionally do in private - root knows my wife has been the recipient of more than a few - but, well, it's so charged that I mostly don't bother posting about it. Anyway, on to the post.

CTV has been reporting on the numerous accidents on the 400-series highways this year, particularly nearer to Toronto.

Well, as OPP commissioner Julian Fantino says:

It's a shared responsibility,'' he said. "People have to take more responsibility for what they do, and so many of these things are preventable. They're not accidents -- they're a caused occurrence.

I've been a fan of that sort of pedantry for quite some time now. Something that's easily preventable (say, by putting one's foot down a bit less) is not an accident. It's not deliberate - only the most anti-social set out to kill somebody deliberately - but it's not an accident either, when somebody gets killed because they, or somebody else, were doing 180km/h. The same article quotes a traffic sergeant as saying "Whether the police catch you or not, physics is enforced all the time, and there's a death penalty for speeding." Preach it, brother. Same article, same man:

When I joined the OPP 29 years ago, drinking and driving was somewhat socially unacceptable, and then the tide turned and people would no longer accept the preventable deaths and injuries from drunk drivers.

I think we're at the same point now that we were 30 years ago. Society acknowledges that there is a problem, but (currently) nobody is really willing to admit that they might be part of it. On the 401, you risk death if you don't go at least 110km/h - speaking from very personal experience, even that is too slow. You can do it in the far right hand lane, but you don't want to be there anywhere near an exit, since some schmuck doing 150km/h+ will cut you off as they fly across 3 lanes of traffic to take it. Also, that's where dumptrucks hauling gravel and such tend to sit, so you risk getting hit by flying gravel, or being rear-ended by the same schmuck doing 150 as he weaves around traffic. 20-30 years ago, I'm sure it was "those bastards shouldn't be driving drunk, we need to crack down on that, but I've only had 3 beer so I'm not drunk." Now I watch traffic on the 401, and I'm sure half those soccer moms and dads doing 140km/h in their Mercedeses and BMWs and Porsche SUVs are screaming at the people doing 160 saying "slow down!"

The Ontario government has passed legislation limiting commercial truckers to 105, which frankly surprises the hell out of me. It's a start, I guess - part of the reason less than 110 is death on the 401 is truckers like tailgating you if you're in one of their two lanes doing less than 120. But it's not the truckers that are doing 150+, it's the soccer moms and young men driving daddy's sports car - or the daddies themselves. It's especially fun on long weekends. I call those people the "hurry up and get the fuck out of my way so I can get to my cottage and RELAX!" types, and I'd laugh at them if they weren't endangering my life in their urgent need to get to their chalet on the Muskokas 15 minutes earlier.

I'll admit it - I've done 190km/h driving a Mustang on a highway. It was stupid, and I could have easily killed myself (bad), or somebody else (much much worse). I did, in fact, get tagged for doing 90 in a 70 zone once, and another time for doing 75 in a 50 (that wasn't as bad as it sounds given the road there and the conditions, but still). The first time I had to do a defensive driving course, since I was 18 - else I'd have possibly had my license suspended. The course was eye-opening, not because of what we "learned" (I already knew the dangers of speeding, I just didn't care), but because of what I saw in my fellow enforced course takers. One fellow was a 50ish year old man, who got nabbed for his third offense, and was in the same situation I was - take the course or risk a suspension. He was pissed off because he'd been chosen from a line of traffic doing 130km/h on a 100km/h limit highway. He was annoyed because he wasn't the only one speeding, and had been chosen arbitrarily. "All those other guys were speeding too!" If you're caught speeding egregiously, pay your dues and shut up, I say. All these hints and tips ("contest the ticket, chances are the cop won't show up and you'll get off") make me sick. Yes, speeding tickets are a source of revenue for the province. So are taxes, and lots of people hate paying those but do so anyway. It's not "just a money grab", if you're doing 150km/h on roads designed for 100 - and everybody else is doing 120 or so - you're not just risking your life, you're risking the lives of a lot of other people too. Paying your $150 ticket is the least you can do for penance.

One of those many CTV articles talks about cameras designed to nab speeders, and says 2/3 of Canadians polled supports the cameras, so why doesn't the McGuinty government put them in? I'll say why, loud and clear, what Dalton McGuinty won't say because it would be political suicide: because the general public thinks the problem is everybody else, not them. It's the same reason why something like 60% of Canadians think of themselves as above average drivers (mathematically possible, but unlikely): the cameras won't work until people admit that *they* might be the problem, because those same people will take the generally accepted advice and fight the tickets - and win more often than not. Why? Because yes, the police really do have better things to do than to catch speeders, they'd dearly love to be catching murderers and thieves.

Our speeding and racing epidemic will not go away until people start looking in the mirror when they're looking for the source of the problem, and admitting that maybe, just maybe, they might be contributors.

(Image shamelessly stolen from NASCAR's website, in case you were wondering. Slightly edited and changed to a PNG.)

Hockey because this is directed squarely at the CBC commentators, *especially you Don Cherry*.

We're not American. We don't pronounce the rank spelled Lieutenant "loo-ten-ant", that's how the Americans do it. We do it British style, "lef-ten-ant" or "left-en-ant" (depending on your cadence).

Cherry, you say you love the troops - learn to pronounce their ranks correctly.

Just something small, but it's important, y'know?

Ron MacLean got a pass earlier this season, but Cherry ripped into people for calling the Memorial Cup "the Mem Cup" - hypocrisy is one of the worst sins in my book.

Dear Captain Copyright: I hate you and what you stand for. But I'm going to link to you anyway. Have fun trying to stop me.

(Reference: here.)

Original post to which I am replying is
here.

These are USian-centric questions, but where possible I'll attempt to extend them to include Canada and other democracy-style countries as well.