SpankyMcFarland

Who was this Canadian guy Lord North? The lad who did so well managing the colonies in North America? I guess one's views on PR depend how seriously you take the popular vote. FPTP favours the biggest party and can lead to bizarre results with more than two parties, e.g. our 1993 federal election where a regional party with 13.5% of the popular vote got 54 seats while a national one with 16% got 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_1993 Lord North's countrymen are seeing the same problem with regional parties like the SNP, DUP and SF who win way more seats than their vote share would suggest compared to small national parties: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2015#/media/File%3A2015_UK_General_Election_Gallagher_Index.png BTW PR does not necessarily deny voting for independents e.g. STV.

There’s quite a bit of debate about those figures and everyone is at high risk in RSA. A distant relative of my family who owned a gas station was killed the other day. The attacker took his cell phone.

Large numbers of Anglos have moved to Britain over the last thirty years - you'll bump into them in London all the time. Funnily enough, one daughter of Joe Slovo's, a leading political activist and theorist in the anti-apartheid struggle, lives in London now. By contrast, Afrikaners would generally have fewer recent family links with Europe but, like Canada, there's loads of SA doctors there of many ethno-cultural flavours. The Anglo-Boer, or South African, war left little mark on Britain and its other colonies apart from monuments and the Anfield Kop of Liverpool FC. For South Africans, of course, it was a much more traumatic experience, including Kitchener's concentration camps, but you can still see statues commemorating British victories that have been left standing.

There's very little I'm sure of at this stage but I'm fairly certain I would never move to Russia under any circumstances if it was still 'governed' by somebody like Mr. Putin.

I presume you're asking rhetorical questions there because you should know full well how toxic these policies are on the left if you've talked to any lefties. Divide politics into quadrants: Bernier is a low tax nativist while most left wingers are high tax multiculturalists. So the answer is he can't attract them for policy reasons and probably not many right of centre voters for various other good reasons, including that his defection looks like a matter of petulance as much as principle.

Corroopt as he called them. Bernier’s charm may work better on a one-to-one basis. He probably sees this as the high road of principle. There’s not nearly enough of the patient, cunning political animal in him.

Bernier should have bided his time and challenged Scheer after an election defeat. He seems unaware how far from the centre of Canadian politics his ideas are. He almost sounds like Rand Paul.

Which effectively means you have to be a native English speaker. Apart from Jean Charest, very few of our politicians have been perfectly bilingual and the Anglophones usually sound awful in French.

Against the carbon tax: http://www.maximebernier.com/unleashing_canada_s_potential

FPTP means that Bernier can ruin Conservative chances with a few per cent of the vote but I think it’s unlikely he’ll get there. Although immigration is an issue that concerns Canadians across the political spectrum at the moment, I don’t think you can build a national party on one issue alone and Rempel will be stridently clarifying her party’s position in competition with anything he might come up with. In addition, populists tend to be economically centrist and Bernier certainly isn’t that. How well is he even going to do in Quebec, fertile ground for a native son with an anti-immigrant message, given his desire to scrap supply management? This looks like another example of poor impulse control on Bernier’s part.

The US has got to this low point by constantly dissing career politicians, which opened the way for a rich and glib celeb, completely clueless about the job, to mouth a few phrases and win. Trump associated with, let’s say, dubious characters for years and thought he could just carry on in the same fashion in the presidential campaign, even involving his family. As usual with this brilliant entrepreneur, the consequences will be disastrous for many around him, and even he may not escape unscathed this time.

I don't agree. One might never happen - the other always will.

Mrs.Thatcher took a very dim view of referendums and felt they were not in the British parliamentary tradition of government.

The Brexiteers don’t understand that the EU position is not based on vindictiveness but fear. Bernier and Co. feel obliged to protect the internal market and its rules. They can’t give the Brits a super-duper bespoke deal because that would threaten the whole EU. It’s not personal. What’s unforgivable is that BJ and the lads didn’t agree on a realistic UK negotiating position before starting the clock running on Article 50. Instead a hard Brexit becomes more likely by the day.

Russia remains governed by one absolute ruler so there’s that. I would go to Putin’s Russia only as a last resort.

If I had to allot blame it would be 90% for the Saudis. They are behaving hysterically with a completely disproportionate response. If the West stood together such extortion would not even be tried by these tyrannies.

I hope there’s no compromise. The British have humiliated themselves on numerous occasions by dealing with KSA so let’s not be cowards like they are. The family in question in here have substantial Canadian links and are thus different from many other similar situations around the world. It’s always an eye-opener to see how lightly many people hold principles when money is at stake.

One of the few countries that can say what it likes about anybody, including China, is Norway. For that you need the per capita equivalent of their trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund. The rest of us have to trim our sails and tell lies or deceive by not telling the truth. However, where we draw the line on such squalid compromises is our business.

My comment about tweeting was directed at a fervent Trump supporter. The Canadian govt does know the Saudis - and how previous more prudent Saudi administrations would have behaved here - but tact and diplomacy become craven silence and complicity at a certain point. The new Saudi regime has already shown itself to be highly reckless with its relentless bombing of Yemen and its blockade of Qatar which almost turned into an invasion. MBS even extorted money from his own wealthy businessmen. As expected, he’s clueless about diplomacy or running a country. There’s a serious downside to doing business with these people. Do you agree we should apologize as the Saudis are now demanding? It’s a hysterical over-reaction. We have absolutely nothing to apologize for. And I hope none of the critics of Iran’s human rights abuses are urging tact here. That would be kind of hypocritical.

It was a comment on the mistreatment of peaceful protesters in a foreign country. There's no hope for reform in KSA if it can't even tolerate that. And you're really going to criticize Canadian politicians for using Twitter indiscreetly?

The thing is we don't send an ambassador home because their govt highlighted our asbestos problem or the deplorable conditions on our reserves. KSA will never reform if it can't accept mild criticism from abroad.

We’ll have to see how this ‘reform’ works out in practice. I doubt the ANC are going to go full Mugabe and destroy their wine and fruit exports but you never know. South Africans I have talked to are uncertain how this will work out in practice. Let’s hope it’s a political ploy aimed at reducing the appeal of Malema and his fellow maniacs. Regarding a new start in Russia, that didn’t work out so well for descendants of the Volga Germans invited in by Catherine the Great and on the violence angle it’s pretty dodgy for everybody in RSA these days, not just white farmers.

Doing deals with the Saudi regime comes with substantial strings attached. If they want to cut us off over some anodyne remarks maybe that’s best for both sides. After all, they are a fairly despicable bunch.

Liberal democracy took centuries to develop in England. Magna Carta preceded universal suffrage by seven hundred years. Brilliant students aren’t enough either as China demonstrates. Furthermore, violence is less likely to produce a tolerant society respectful of minority rights.

10 years of democracy compared with two and a half millennia of absolute rule of various sorts - such cultural habits may be hard to break. The small numbers of Iranians I meet are usually militantly secular but I suspect there are many at home who are more conservative. I’d say the long term future is bright - I see another person born in Iran, this time Kurdish and working in Cambridge University, has been awarded a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics, but many others stand to lose from change. The least worst outcome for all is surely gradual, peaceful reform. One way this might occur is if Khameini’s successor largely withdraws from the political sphere and takes on a role more like that of Ayatollah Sistani next door in Iraq. A tolerant, prosperous Iran would transform the entire region. There’s a reason Farsi was once the language of scholars from Anatolia to India.