Remiel

Have you guys been leaving offerings on the altar of False Equivalency, or what? Sexuality is not a concept, it is a real thing independent of our narrative around it. Not so with race. Imagine growing up on an island as a heterosexual person without ever seeing or ever being taught that there is such a thing as another sex. Once you hit puberty you will start to feel things that regardless, even if you cannot describe what it is your feelings are trying to tell you. Now, imagine growing up on an island and everyone around you is exactly the same "race" and no one has a clue that people that have different types of features even exist. No one is going to spontaneously have "racial" urges because race is not equivalent to sex. You may say, "Well, gender is not the same thing as sex." Well duh. But transgender is eminently related to transsexual. There is nothing for "transracial" to map onto at all. Not to mention that the idea of a transracial black or white or Asian is just stupid, because it divorces race from ethnicity. You cannot be black without being descended from some kind or many kinds of African. Trying to be black without having even an idea that you might Nigerian, South African, Congolese, Somali, or Zulu or Massai is just absurd. That is not being transracial, it is just being transcultural. Or assimilated.

In a system with equal representation by province it would have more like 40 out of 105 seats. With one other province and the Territories they would be able to exercise ironclad control. The same could be said for Western Canada. Suddenly domination by a bloc is a lot easier than the current system. And as bad as tyranny of the majority can be sometimes, it beats tyranny of the minority.

Every single Canadian Prime Minister who has appointed more than 20 people to the Senate managed to appoint at least one person who did not sit as a member of their own party. Except Steven Harper.

How does anyone even consider it reasonable to expect CBC to go into character assassination mode over a colleague fired mere hours ago over a few art deals? Solomon's behaviour may have been a breach of ethics, one worthy of losing his position, but that does not automatically make it one of "Oh my God, he is such a wicked man!" proportions. I do not think I would expect a panel to have gone any differently for the people at CTV or Global if it had been one of their own.

Canada does not have enough official territorial subdivisions for a Senate with equal territorial representation. And I am not interested in a chamber that allows Atlantic Canada to hold the rest of the country hostage with only minimal addition support. You could only even think of moving to that sort of system if the Senate were changed to a suspensory veto instead of a lethal veto, like the House of Lords these days I believe. Personally I would prefer to see as many Senate appointments as possible come from the ranks of the Order of Canada. The Order is sometimes accused of not being representative enough of Canadians, so it would not serve well as an absolute limiter. But it would be something. And what happened to the Liberal Senate caucus should be enforced upon all Senators: separation from like-minded House members. Collusion between members of the two houses should be thereafter grounds for dismissal.

I do not pay enough attention to know what is going on with moderating, and I am not sure I particularly care, but I know that is it entirely possible to make a sub-form on a bulletin boards where the person who started the thread can moderate the thread themselves. Maybe that is what is really needed: an area with a moderation free for all. The wheat will be separated from the chaff, platitude platitude, blah blah blah. You get the point.

I almost have to wonder whether the biggest improvement this forum could make would be to shut itself down.

I am not going to read through all billionty pages to determine whether the point I want to make from a discussion eight pages ago has already been brought up. The problem with genocide is that despite the fact that its conception was closely tied to its legal institution the way people use the word has become rather more specific and limited, mostly I think on account of its etymological resemblance to an entire class of words that we all ready understand as meaning one thing only. And in the long run usage is king in language. If you look at the progressive position on emerging "dialects" of English like Ebonix, which embraces how language diverges sometimes and that this should be acceptable at some level, it seems passing strange for the same people to turn around and insist that the meaning of genocide is the legal meaning of genocide and every should adapt their vocabulary to that. The same goes with the word "racism" to an extent, though it is, I think, rather less charged even than genocide. And for the most part, the way people use genocide is to mean to attempt to kill off large numbers or proportions of people of an identifiable group or otherwise limit their ability to propagate. I have a hard time thinking that anyone would object to forced sterilization of a group being called genocidal. It is all this other stuff that mucks up the word. And, though it is perhaps a natural impulse, people on the side of the agrieved insist on labelling everything in the maximalist way, whereas those who are being accused of something nefarious insist that it should be minimalist, one which hews much more closely I think to the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" .

Extermination means dead bodies. So does genocide. Cultural extinguishment would be a far superior term for what we mean by destroying culture. Also, forced sterilization is not like those other things at all. Forced sterilization is definitely treading on genocide territory. As in, not merely awful, but actually completely effed up. An assimilated person can still have children and their children can have children and so on. Apparently being assimilated makes them worth less as human beings, at least one could easily draw that conclusion from the way activists talk about these things, but their lot is orders of magnitude better than those than have forcibly sterilized.

Probably around the time frightened, trigger happy cops became generally immune to consequences for killing people just to avert risk to their own skins. I swear to God it seems we now live in an age where civilians exist to be the human shields for cops rather than the other way around.

When did Maple Leaf Web recruit so many apologists for death squads?

Dude, Ted Hsu was elected for the first time in 2011.

Guy, stop feeding the troll.

Have you ever heard of a male haredim asking not to be seated next to men? No? Should one surmise from this that there are no gay haredim males or that impure contact is perfectly okay if you are hiding your sexuality from the world?

I guess the Constitution really does hold pull much weight these days when its headline vision of the country, "Peace, Order, and Good Government", is not a principle to base a party on.

People on the wrong side will always claim bias. Look at that obscene debate in the US in States where people are trying to get creationism taught alongside evolution in schools on the premise that there is a real "debate" to be had on that issue. Similarly, if the entire mainstream media is saying there is something wrong with your favourite politician you should be open to the idea that there is in fact something wrong with them.

They should really just have a poll asking the simple question: How eager are you to buy a shirt with this logo on it on a scale of 1 to 10? Personally, I would say a 2, and that is being generous. Not something I would go out of my way to wear at all.

Seriously, you guys make my point for me with the "tempest in a teapot" rhetoric. For one, I actually voted Green in the last Ontario election, and I kind of think I might vote that way again next time around. And do you know why? Because the Ontario Liberals have taken too many management queues from the federal Conservatives. Harper's antics give license to many of Ontario's misdeeds. That said, how many times has Ontario legislation been challenged and defeated in the courts since the Liberals came to power?

The ironic thing here is that only emotion can explain the repeated dismissal of all of Stephen Harper's misdeeds. The baseline reasonable response in an election is that when one guy screws up over and over and over again you change guys. The reasonable thing to do would probably be to ignore everything the main parties say and actually try to intuit how they would govern. We already have all the evidence we need of how Stephen Harper governs: badly. Trudeau might be gaffe prone but once he is in office he can dispense to a great degree with guessing the will of the electorate, which is probably at the source of some of his mistakes, and actually focus on what needs to be done from a policy perspective. The reasonable thing to do would be to give Trudeau and Mulcair at least a small benefit of the doubt in how they run things. They are, after all, reacting against an extremely top heavy Harper example of how Government is run. The Liberal field tends to be deeper than the other parties in terms of experience, and while that has not protected Trudeau rhetorically per se when it comes to actually crafting laws it should matter. What we really need at this point is a Government that does not reject the opinions of experts out of hand. Since we do not aspire exactly to technocracy the experts are not quite the be all and end all, but in the current Government they appear to mean nothing when they do not agree with the direction of the Government. Personally I cannot support the NDP because of their loose terms for separation talks, but from an actual governance perspective I would easily choose them over the Conservatives from a reasonable perspective. Reasonably speaking I think we can better afford to roll the dice and see what kind of Government the NDP would actually run because with the Conservatives whenever you roll you know one of the dice is rigged to always come up a 1 (for being crap). Whoever came up with the expression "better the Devil You Know" was probably, in fact, the Devil You Know; they were biased.

"The Consortium" has invited Elizabeth May to the debates. Looks like a done deal.

Why is it only unreasonable to spew nonsense on the environment? Why are candidates who do nothing but spew nonsense on other topics not get threatened with exclusion. Like Stephen Harper.

Neither the Bloc nor the FD are national parties. They have no business at all in the English debates, given the Bloc's drastically reduced statue and the fact that FD has never actually had someone elected to Parliament. This is where the Green Party is different: they have actually elected someone to Parliament. I would put the candidate threshhold a bit higher, at 90%, and say that anyone who both meets that criteria and had members elected to Parliament (as a member of the party in question) in at least one of the previous two elections automatically gains inclusion. A second method of gaining entry to debates would be having candidates running in 90% of ridings and possessing in the House of Commons more than 2% of the seats, rounded up (so 7). The French debates are a bit different. I would venture similar rules, but they would be counted as a proportion of seats that have a base percentage, say 20-25%, of francophone residents.

Cuba Derangement Syndrome is the King of All Derangement Syndromes.

May should be in. My bet is that Conservatives fear her participation because plenty of Canadian, even those who do not support her party, trust her on parliamentary ethics. You know, that thing Stephen Harper completely lacks, and which could play a big part in the upcoming election.

Without agreeing with any of the points suggested in this thread (other than perhaps family court issues), I have my own slightly ridiculous point to bring up, so... I am a bit worried that society is becoming way to eager to describe anything with men having close friendships with other men as homo-erotic or a mask for closet homosexuality. In a time when men are presumably already emotionally stunted by the expectations society puts on us it seems that some people are implying that (straight) men are just incapable of deep and lasting friendships. And if my read of the situation is right, that could be an incredibly unjust (and potentially dangerous) idea that is being pushed on us. I do not say this to mean that actual homosexuality is bad. It is not. But that does not mean that the existence of homosexuality should be some kind of limiter on the spectrum of male social behavior.