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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Having seen Poillievre, I don’t think he will do this.

    If he just shuts up about “the woke” and just talks about the price of milk, he’d have this in the bag, but he can’t shut up about “the woke” because the kind of people who vote in CPC conventions talk about “woke” all the goddamn time, and he knows that if doesn’t go on about “the woke” some opportunistic usurper will shiv him.

    I sorely wish the CPC party members had voted for Chong or kept O’Toole. I’d be annoyed about austerity spending, but not worried about fascism.


  • Considering he’s in power purely as a result of catering to the whackjob right that thought O’Toole was too sane, I would not put faith in his ability to keep the whackjobs under control.

    It’s the old “What’s the problem with riding a tiger? You can’t get off without getting eaten.” problem that comes from courting populism.







  • As we’re seeing in the US now, and the in the UK with the ratfucking of Jeremy Corbyn, the owners of the mainstream media are not interested in covering actual left-wing values. Singh isn’t great–I preferred Angus–but anything progressive he says will either get laundered by the media, or ignored completely

    What just happened with the LA Times and the Washington Post vis a vis endorsing Harris should be a warning sign to progressives everywhere: the media, or at least it’s owners, are already in the tank for the political right. It doesn’t matter how much you try to be serious or sensible: the mass media will ignore or belittle you, while they throw softballs to the Conservatives.

    It’s especially an issue in Canada, where media ownership consolidation is worse than it is in the US.

    This isn’t to let the NDP off the hook: they need someone like Bernie Sanders, someone willing to bang the class-war drum, but what they’re getting are consensus-builders who aren’t much better than Trudeau et al.


  • It would have to be an outsider candidate, and the LPC party structure does not do well with outsiders.

    If you’ve ever experienced dealing with the LPC, you can see why: they’re primary composed of compulsive board-of-directors members. Every Liberal representative and most of the party and riding executives are all from the same incestuous BoD members. They encounter each other all the time in their professional circles: they’re on the committee for this, the board for that, the council for something else, the executive director for fill in the blank. They know each other because they’re each other’s lawyers, estate agents, consultants and so forth.

    They’re so socially inbred that it’s incredibly difficult for an outsider to break in.

    And before you say “All politicians are like this”, they aren’t:

    • the NDP is getting this way, but they’re not there yet; with the weakening of organized labour, more of them are from the Director class, but a lot are still union folk and a few are student radicals. They’re nowhere near as institutionalized as the Liberals
    • the Cons are composed of a mix of small-business douchebags and grifter-ideologues (sometimes in the same body!). It’s actually pretty easy to break into the CPC: just have money and be a loud, obnoxious dick; support is something you can buy.
    • the Greens are pretty much split between true-believers that don’t like the NDP’s professionalism, and grifters that are working a green angle for their next scam. Again, easy to break into if you’re loud enough. (side note, it’s scary how many failed Green candidates pivot to the Conservatives).

    Compared to the above, the Liberals place a much, much higher value on consensus and favour-trading, and have a visceral reaction against outsiders.

    By Liberal standards, Trudeau is an outsider candidate. What the LPC wanted was a Dionne or Ignatieff.












  • He wins in urban areas

    He wins in suburban areas, as do all conservatives: above a certain density across the country if not the entire world, urban spaces reject conservatism. That map you linked to pretty much tells that story.

    Where do you think all the “urban elites want to make you gay, take away your pickup truck and make you drink plant-based beer” comments come from?