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I'm putting this here because I can't swear in other groups. Now let me admit that at first, not knowing a helluva lot about the guy, I had some hopes here. I have a vast disrespect for professional politicians, especially in the US, because most of them are political whores. I thought, yeah, an outsider, a billionaire who didn't need to be beholden to special interests, who could bring a fresh attitude to things, that could be really good! I'm not politically correct. Most of what Trump said that pissed off the media and liberals didn't bother me. I like the idea of far stronger fencing along the Mexican border, if not an actual wall along the ENTIRE distance. I'm a conservative. I believe in securing borders. No problem with me. I think I first began to doubt the wisdom of Trump as president was when I started reading about how he conducted his business. Basically, he did his best to cheat everyone involved, from suppliers to partners to customers. And he was a guy who sued people all the time, and got sued a lot himself. He basically sued anyone who criticized him. The next thing I read was about how he went bankrupt with his casinos. Basically he got into the casino business and started building them without doing the slightest research. No businessman does that. You need to know what your expenses will be along with your likely revenue. Trump didn't bother. He went bananas furnishing his casinos with the most expensive stuff he could find, wanting to cater to the cream of the crop of gamblers. Problem is the cream of the crop has no interest in going to Atlantic city in the winter. So someone in the industry did a study based on publicly available information on how much he was spending, how much he would owe, how much he'd have to pay for staff, utilities, etc., and then fed in the normal intake expected for hotels and casinos (per foot revenue) in Atlantic city. What he said was that the casinos would start going into a deep hole once the fall hit. Trump found out and threatened to sue the company, forcing them to fire him. But the guy was 100% accurate in everything he wrote. Trump, the moron, had built two incredibly expensive casinos that you could fire a cannon through in the winter. His airline was the same thing. No research, no studies. He went on his 'gut'. Same with so many other of his enterprises that went under. How he treated his wives didn't go over well with me either. Things like calling a radio station and pretending to be his publicist to brag about his sexual prowess with his then mistress. Or seating his mistress (who everyone knew was his mistress) at the same table as his wife at a public event. He loved to humiliate his wife because he wanted to force her to divorce him. Basically, what I took from all the stuff I read was that Trump was both a shitty businessman and a scumbag. Then came the election, then came him as president. Holy fuck. I didn't expect much but I had no idea just how ignorant this guy was. I mean, how anyone can grow up rich in Manhattan and know nothing about virtually EVERYTHING is beyond me. Not only is he astonishingly ignorant but he's also, as many have testified "incurious', ie, he has no interest in learning. He reads nothing. He won't take briefings that are more than a few minutes long. He considers himself to be smarter than his generals and more knowledgeable than his intelligence people. He knows nothing about government, the military, or the world outside Manhattan real estate. If you pulled a bumpkin with a grade 3 education out of a corn patch in the most rural part of Iowa and put him in the oval office he'd still be more knowledgeable than Trump. And at least he'd be willing to take advise. Trump is, without question, the dumbest fuck ever to enter the Oval Office. And I don't just mean presidents. I mean no one in the history of America has even entered that room who was as pig-ignorant as Donald Fucking Trump. Even the cleaning staff are smarter! Add to this he's a mean spirited bully, narcissist, rapacious, money grubbing greedhead, whore-mongering serial adulterer, compulsive liar, braggart and coward and you've got a man with almost every character defect imaginable. I cannot think of a single positive character trait this man owns. Now saying this does not suggest I am blind to the defects of Hillary Clinton and the identity politics democrats. But I can at least find some good things to say about most of them. There's nothing honest anyone can say about Trump that's positive. He's scum. He's vermin. The world will be a cleaner place when he exits it. And they'll probably need a 24 hour guard on his grave to keep legions of people from using it as a toilet. This latest business in Syria where he got hundreds of people killed and basically gave Turkey what it's been demanding for years, and is now bragging about it like he's accomplished some mighty deed is a perfect example. He is a simplistic fuckwit that the world's strongmen have no difficulty twisting around their little fingers. It got people killed in Ukraine and it's gotten people killed in Syria. And this glutinous, brainless shit stain of a man, who works maybe an hour and a half a day, continues to stuff burgers down his fat throat, slurp coke, and jab his puffy little fingers onto his keypad to whine about how hard-done-by he is. And the fact he's managed to surround himself with a group of grifters, liars, cheats, kooks, and suckups, and that the entire Republican caucus kisses his ass, just goes to show how morally bankrupt that party has become.

So much noise from a loud minority and at the end, a major failure. It just goes to show that this kind of "populism" has very little support in Canada. I would be surprised if the PPC or Maxime Bernier, who couldn't even win in his own riding, will try to make any comebacks. Good riddance.

These butter soft young people who think that not getting a discount on their smart phone bill is "hard times" are going to be the reactionary foot soldiers when they find out what hard times are really like. The Sunny Ways youth of today, are the reactionary pseudo fascists of the future. Zeitgeist knows.

Any right wing party is going to attract such elements. They do need a better organizational structure to back-check people and keep them out. Rather, it's perceived that way by the mainstream media which is almost 100% progressive on social values issues. But there's nothing they can do about that. Anyone who advocates cutting immigration will be the mortal enemy of all mainstream journalists in Canada. The Tories could have done this, which would have done a lot to sap the PPC of interest, but they chose instead to embrace Trudeau's immigration program. I don't personally see where anything the PPC proposed would bother most Canadians - aside from the progressives who would never vote for them anyway. But they need to do a better job of getting that information out there.

BTW, how would the CPC be stupid enough to replace their leader in a minority parliament? Petulant JT would call a snap election for the week of the convention.

Alberta's oil glory days are over and Alberta governments haven't planned enough for a longer term sustainable economy: A popular bumper sticker in Alberta reads: “Please God, give me one more oil boom. I promise not to piss it all away next time.” https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/after-50-years-of-trying-to-diversify-its-economy-alberta-is-still-stuck-on-oil A refinery would be an excellent idea, and "central planning" - ie, making that suggestion to Albertans - isn't out of line at all. Notley's petrochemical industry diversification is another. Kenney's millions spent fighting and wailing about environmentalists is not useful. A travelling friend met a guy in an Alberta bar, an oil worker who introduced himself by hollering angrily "What are you damn hippie freaks doing in our bar?!" ... but he smoked his weed nonetheless. Buddy didn't have to graduate high school to get a job in the oil field and a truck (he was paying for) worth $120,000. Ya, for buddy with no education and used to ridiculously expensive toys, coming down off oil is going to be pretty hard. You can't get a min. wage job flipping burgers in Ontario without a high school diploma. Is Alberta's repeated lack of planning really Canada's 'emergency'? Canada can't fix the price of oil, nor the fact that oil is increasingly out of favour. Canada can't fix Alberta's lack of diversification into downstream industries. But Canada can help redirect, educate and retrain workers to diversify themselves into sustainable energy industries, energy retrofitting, downstream petro manufacturing industries, etc. Canada can help the workers bail out of a dying industry ... but NOT by throwing our money away bailing out the dying fossil fuel industries. Alberta needs better leadership than Jason Kenney frothing at the mouth in his 'war room', railing at the fates, plotting and blaming. Alberta needs to attract new industries for the long term, to retrain and employ its own work force. But the oil workers who come from across Canada are perhaps not so much Alberta's problem, and Canada can play a role in transitioning them to other industries.

The PPC was a vanity project by Maxime. How is the CPC selling out? If you go back and look at Mulroney's party and its policies, you'll see that they were actually closer to the centre than the current CPC party. They actually took steps to protect and conserve the environment. Mulroney led the way in the world with policies to heal the ozone layer, from damage caused by aerosol sprays and coolants. The fear being displayed by some conservatives right now has nothing to do with changes in the policies of the CPC, because their policies have not changed much. Those who are mad at the CPC are mad because the party refuses to pull a suicidal act, like Bernier did, to appease a loud minority, by denouncing immigration and immigrants.

I'm old enough to remember when Canada wasn't a repugnant totalitarian life support system for impotent Anti-American rage and resentment and not much else. The fact that you would invoke the fallen in Afghanistan so cheaply, merely to hurl invective at their American brothers in arms, speaks to the depths to which Canadians have sunk.

Activity in all political discussion groups rises near and during elections. It always has. Regulars talk more. Those who are occasional members post more. And those who want to talk about politics join to do so. There's nothing suspicious about it.

There are a couple of people here who do not like Islam being criticized. You cannot point out poor behaviour or barbaric beliefs of Islam without being called a racist or an Islamophobe. You can speak about FGM - but only in regard to obscure Christian groups that practice it in Muslim majority countries. You cannot point out that it is mainly an Islamic practice. You can speak about misogyny in other religions, but not in Islam. You can speak about terrorism - but only white supremacist or antifa terrorism, not Islamic terrorism. You can speak about religious fundamentalism, but you cannot mention Islam as being extremist. Hasidic Jews, Christian fundamentalist groups, even the few bad Buddhists - you can talk about all that - but not extremism in Islam. And definitely do not say anything except positive comments about hijabs and burkas. They defend those things to the death.

I posted a study somewhere on this site regarding what is called 'in-group loyalty'. This is the nearly universal human trait of being more comfortable with and loyal to members of your own 'group', be it a religion, a race, a nationality, a sect, a tribe, or even a neighborhood, than to 'outsiders'. There was only one group which felt otherwise, which actually felt 'out group loyalty' or more friendship and comfort with people who are NOT of their group, and that is white liberals. And unfortunately, this is the group in power in most of the West. They adore foreigners and their different cultures, beliefs and habits. And they disdain their own and sneer at their own country's past history of accomplishments and achievements because their ancestors weren't enlightened and progressive enough. They are also weirdly racist, or as someone put it, 'the soft liberal bigotry of low expectations'. They hold white people to very high standards of behaviour, but when it comes to people of color, well... they make allowances. Thus you have righteous white feminists angrily denouncing the slightest sign of sexism from white culture but fiercely defending Islam despite its horrible levels of misogyny and violence towards women. Or as Douglas Murray once put it in referring to one such group "Gays for Palestine?! Give me a break, if Gays for Palestine were IN Palestine they'd have to move to Israel!" As to Canadian values. They are largely not shared by liberals when it comes to identity politics. The left has adopted a 'victim hierarchy' which puts various identity groups at the top, as more important and more worthy of their 'protection' and concern, and all of them are above 'straight white people' whom they label as oppressors. Any unflattering judgement of any of those identity groups or members of those groups based upon their behaviour and beliefs is furiously attacked and denounced. Just look at the sniveling race-card being played over the harassment of the Syrian family in Toronto after their scummy son was unmasked as being among those who blocked a little old lady with a walker and screamed curses at her. This had nothing to do with race, but the Left sees EVERYTHING involving someone of color as involving race and starts to fling epithets. Scumbag attacks police and is shot? So what? Oh, he's Black! Aghh! Racism! Racism! If Muslims were all from Norway the Left in Canada would despise them for their behaviour and views, but since they're Brown, they cannot be judged badly except out of bigotry. That's the rule and they're sticking to it. Muslims are very near the top of their 'protection' hierarchy, just under transgenders, largely because they see conservatives as not liking either group. And if conservatives disapprove then the self-styled 'progressives' feel they have to rush to take the other side. It's brainless, but progressive tend to BE brainless (just look at our moron prime minister). That's particularly so on social media, because social media is overwhelmingly populated by younger people, and often by university people and recent grads who have been indoctrinated by far left professors. But social media is not a true indicator of Canadian values. You need only read the pollsters when they ask people their views about multiculturalism and immigration to know that.