ScottSA

Har har! LOL! Arff Arff!

There is no such thing as a philosophical centrist. The very suggestion presupposes and therefore depends upon the existence and solid definition of where the extreme poles lie. In Pol Pot's Cambodia, a "centrist" position would be advocating hard labour instead of summary execution for the crime of being educated, and in early Victorian England for advocating workhouses for orphans instead of death by starvation. In Canada today, the problem of defining goalposts is so obscured by ideological rhetoric that it's impossible to determine a viable label for the term "centrist." Witness the oft-used lable "far right" to describe a Harper government that lies far to the left of the allegedly leftist Democrats in the US. What you call "centrist", I see as at best left leaning and at worst full blown socialism. The Liberal Party is not "centrist," it's best described as "pragmatic." At least it was pragmatic before Dion came along and tried to yank it into headcaseland by riding one of the periodic "environmental" fads. Now he's stuck in a rut on the left and forced almost certainly to fight the election on a platform of "the environment"...a fad that carried some marginal currency when everyone believed the apocalyptic snakeoil coming out of Gore and Suzuki's corner, but which carries very little today. So there he sits in a puddle of embarrassment, bereft of a viable platform and damned near bereft of a party, getting outmaneuvered at every turn by Harper and hemorrhaging support right, left, and center. The Liberal prospects, unless something changes real fast, look like a thousand miles of bad road.

For someone who didn't read it, you sure have a lot to say about it.

If I have misread his post, then I apologize. I tend to stay away from the canadian politics forum, so i'm not familiar with the ideologies of regular posters.

I think one of the real problems facing the Liberals is the Parties inability to treat canadians as thinking human beings. I know it's common marketing currency to dumb things down to the lowest denominator, and that's just peachy, but we're not talking here about underarm deodorant, we're talking about the future direction of a country. When the Reform Party swept into office in 93, I swept into Ottawa as a hangeron with them, and I'll always remember the sheer arrogance of the Liberal mentality. Then I watched for years as they produced a series of "red books" which were promptly discarded the minute they got the next mandate, and quite cynically discarded at that. I remember watching Reg Alcock defending the Liberal's utter disregard of red book policies with an appeal to "complexity"; why didn't the Liberals abolish the GST as they promised? "Things are more complex than simply doing away with it" was his paraphrased reply. Why didn't the Liberals protect healthcare as promised? "Because experiential nocturnals ifn blithe bafflegab eta. It's complex." No one thought to ask him why these complexities weren't apparent when the red book was being platituded into existence, but it didn't really matter, because the Liberals were by that time being openly talked about as the only "national" party. I suppose there will always be people like geoffrey, who, if I interpret his comments correctly, simply wants the government to take care of him, but those people are becoming fewer and fewer. That attitude is a distinctly Liberal/NDP attitude...the nanny state thesis...and if the electorate were still stuck in that rut, the Liberals would hold power well nigh until the end of time. To give credit where credit is due, the Liberals have cynically drifted right as the winds blow that way, but even that highlights more the lack of any steel in its backbone. Good grief, when we have to get permission from the UN to go to war, things are bad in the backbone department...but that's another story. The Liberal Party's real stumbling block, aside from the immediate spike belt of Dion, is its inability to see the Canadian electorate as thinking adults instead of sheep. Look at this statement from the article above: "'The Prime Minister is just continuing to demonstrate that he is a bully and doesn't understand that the people of Canada elected a minority Parliament so that his policies would be moderated,' Ms. Bennett said." WTF? That's the kind of language you use on the playground when two kids are fighting. And what about the thesis being suggested; that Canadians went out and elected a minority government to curb the Tories...no they didn't. Many voted for the Tories and some didn't. No one voted for a "minority government." That's just silly. The Liberals will be in trouble until they stop pitching to a kindergarten class and start treating Canadians like thinking adults.

An assertion and its own discrediting all in the same sentence!

Bush will probably go down to history alongside Lincoln and Roosevelt when serious historians, who actually know what they're talking about, and who don't have Bush Derangement Syndrome, review his presidency.

It reminds me of a couple years ago when I asked my 16 year old daughter to vacuum the house whiole I was at work. I came home to a note: "I don't know how to turn the vacuum on. Get one that works!"

Oh yay. It's hardly relevant whether you "buy it" or not. Usual sophist nonsense. Yeah, we don't speak with English accents so we're not like Britain at all. Did you even read what I said in context?

Have your say, but don't cheat! Click for the answer, but only after voting!

And that would be bad, why?

Why, them's the exact words about half the German electorate used in the elections of 1933.

You're really having trouble today, eh? The book is at the root of the culture, and sustains it by deifying the culture. The culture is the immediate effect. I don't know what your other three points are in aid of, but: 1 I don't begin to understand what this supposed to mean, but that's ok Mikey, because I don't care either. 2 It doesn't matter what Western culture "should" do; what matters is that if even 1% of them are not "moderated", we have a serious problem. Why bring Nazis here in hopes of being a moderating influence on them? Why bother? That makes no sense. 3 no, bringing them to Canada is not a good thing, in either the long or the short term.

How do you propose that she be "brought home" when she fought tooth and nail the entire time, just to be cuffed?

It works better.

I caught the "war has become useless" part, and I kind of gather that what we need is a demagogue who will presumably restore its usefulness? Where's Mr Hitler when ya need him?

Yes, but you see, they have the entire east coast to pick from. Further, do you know what happened in Britain? They imported hordes of Pakistanis to work in the mines in the 70s. Then they closed the mines. Two decades later the towns have become seething polarized ghettos full of unemployed Pakistanis and their extended families, including now a second generation. I'm sure the arguments were exactly the same in the 70s. What to you think will happen after these direly required immigrants suddenly aren't required anymore in Alberta? And in case you haven't noticed, the immigrants all head for TO, not the oil rigs, except for Chinese immigrants, who have pretty much caused a tinderkeg of racial animosity in Vancouver. I can't wait to see what happens when tensions rise with China. It'll be quite tohe jolly "diverse and vibrant" time, eh wot?

Alrighty then. I take your "I feel sorry for you" and raise it one "I laugh in your general direction."

Apparently it would be a waste of time too, although your post before this one showed an element of sentience I must admit. But you misunderstand the intentions of the multiculturalists. They don't want people here to boast production; that's just a meme they throw out as a half-hearted defence. They want immigration because it has become an object in and of itself.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Dimes to dollars the above groups stand to lose funding if Harper's reforms go through, which goes a very very long way towards explaining why they're agin' them. As outdated as Harper's ideas may be, it appears that the newfangled cutting edge ideas of actually supporting drug habits aren't working very well, since the problem is ballooning because of them. Oh I suppose it works ok in employing "counsellors" and various social workers, but it probably ought to try to solve the problem it's supposed to be set up to solve as well...just as a side benefit an' all, you know.

This is simply not true. In a minority government it behooves the government to compromise if it wants to stay out of elections, but nowhere is there a job description claiming the government must compromise. Why don't the opposition parties compromise instead?

This character is out of control. It's not surprising that his semiliterate rants are banned from so many sites. Good grief.

If I saw my daughter behaving like that she'd have her backside tanned when she got home.

Is this another of Shavluk's buddies?

Would it be impolite to ask you to learn to write properly before clogging up threads with stoned irrelevant rants?