Wild Bill

I hate to be a conspiracy nut but this idea has been bubbling under my tinfoil hat for some weeks now. Only a couple of months ago I remember wondering how our economy could stand having gas prices jump so high so quickly. Not that long later the world goes into a financial crisis. Gas prices immediately drop like a rock, almost as if some Illuminati financial troll had muttered "OOPS! Guess we pushed things a bit too far! Hopefully, if we make gasoline cheap again the economy will re-start ok." I know better than most that you shouldn't confuse cause with effect and that you can't plot a curve with only one data point but still, the timing seems SO suspicious! Then I thought, "Gee, if anybody could answer this question they would hang out on MapleLeafWeb!" So here's my post. Hopefully somebody can give me some "edification".

You have to be trolling! You throw my name into your argument, conveniently ignoring the pertinent facts. I've been dinged when I owed them nothing! I haven't used their road in over 10 years! I think you are trying to make some kind of slam against "right wingers", or at least those who might question public ownership of facilities. If so, you've picked a bad model to make your point. Just because the 407 consortium is so flawed has nothing to do with the idea of privatization being flawed. It simply means that THIS CONSORTIUM is flawed! And that the provincial government refuses to effectively deal with the problems, hiding behind the courts. Almost as if they too had a hidden interest, wouldn't you think? I'm sure that if we thought long enough we could probably come up with something run by the public sector that works well, is self-sustaining and is cost-effective. Might take a while but sooner or later we'd think of something. I'm constantly amazed by how many people think digitally - all off or all on. The logical flaw is always the same. We hear "Your party is bad so mine must be good!", "Tories made a mistake so Liberals must always be perfect!", and now apparently "The 407 is an example of what must always come with privatization of a public service!" Things are the way they are, period. And the 407 is the epitome of bad customer service in making mistakes and dealing with them. Trying to make them out to be some kind of poster boy for an anti-privatization argument is just too much of a stretch for me to follow. One could make a better argument for how politicians and public servants could make such a bonehead deal with no proper checks and balances. Trying to argue that Harris and crew did it deliberately out of fiendish malice is just "reptilian kitten-eating" rubbish! They too were politicians and they too had the civil service flesh out the details. Would this not be proof that the public sector is ALWAYS incompetent? Not at all. Try harder, Max!

Sorry, but you're quoting an "official" line that has no connection to the reality that HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Ontarioan drivers have experienced! Just do a google. I'm a "johnny-come -lately" to this sad situation. There are PAGES of websites about these problems! There have been parliamentary investigations and all the talk radio blather one could stand. The situation remains unchanged. In my case even though I had to pay while things were in dispute there is no guarantee that I won't get dinged again NEXT plate renewal! They simply won't acknowledge that my account was closed years ago. I haven't driven that highway in over 10 years and don't live in Toronto anyway. The 407 privatization is a unique case. You're cheering the symbol of private roads and ignoring the reality of the 407. They have unbelievable numbers of accounting errors and disputes that go unresolved for years. Meanwhile, they collect the highest tolls of anywhere in the world, by a quantum level! American truck drivers have been flabbergasted when they found out how much they had to pay compared to those anywhere in America. Privatization of roads is only an academic question. In practice the debate over the 407 is whether the problem was the result of incompetence or outright corruption. Or both!

I would think that would be obvious! The "clap-trap" is dragged out to define which fellow citizens are worthy of our respect. Those that scorn our Canadian "clap-trap" can rot in Git-mo without triggering any feeling of guilt amongst the rest of us!

Despising any generalized group is illogical. People are individuals and shared guilt is a ridiculous notion. That being said, while not a right winger I do despise SOME aboriginals, just as I despise SOME other individuals. It depends on the actions of those SPECIFIC individuals. For example, I despise some of the protesters from Six Nations at Caledonia, specifically for their TACTICS in their protest. It has nothing to do with them being aboriginals. It's all in their individual deeds. Yet I have no such feelings for any other aboriginals and in general support other bands rights claims. From talking to my granddad and uncles who had served in WWII, they voiced no quarrel with peoples as a group. There was no Hollywood talk like "Them dirty Nazis!" They totally understood that the "other guy" was likely not a fanatic but just fighting for his country the same as them. Their leadership was our real enemy. They had no generalized hate for the enemy soldier. They reserved that only for those who committed atrocities and war crimes. It was a dirty job but they didn't want the Germans or the Japanese to be able to impose their will on free peoples. They fought for our freedom and then they came home. Every Remembrance Day I'm reminded of an example right here in my own town. One of our former Mayors had been captured at Dieppe and became POW. While there he had struck up a "friendship" with one of the guards. Mind you, the fact that he was a guard still meant that you couldn't entirely be open with him but they got along. This guard was Austrian and like many such had never wanted to be taken over by Germany. One day Hitler's troops marched into town and declared "You are no longer Austrian but German!" The next day he had been singled out for his electronic knowledge and he was drafted! He wound up fixing tank radios for Rommel in the desert. He hated it and eventually managed to score the job as a prison guard. After the war the future mayor came home and got a job at National Steel Car. They were organized into 2 man teams to electrically wire up railroad cars. Much to his surprise he found his partner to be his former camp guard! They spent the next year or so working together. The guard helped him wire and he taught him better English. Eventually they ended up going into business together, starting one of the first cable tv companies in Canada. They remained great friends until they both grew old and died some years ago. I was mightily impressed when I first heard their story. It taught me that we should always look at each other as individuals and not as some faceless enemy. I could understand why some Legion branches would welcome veterans from "the other side" as members today! Tomorrow I will open some of my expensive scotch (not the stuff I keep around for unwanted relatives!) and raise a toast to these two men, my relatives who had fought and to ALL the people who had striven even to the point of losing their lives in defense of what they thought was best for themselves, their loved ones and their country!

Who cares? It's enough that no Taliban type regime will ever again expect to shelter a Bin Laden without being forcibly deposed. Osama is on his own. He has fewer options today than before 9/11. What should the main goal be? The symbol of catching Bin Laden or the consequences of doing what he did?

I think Eyeball and others may be missing the main point. Argus. The West HAD to depose the Taliban for a very simple reason - they had aided and abetted those who broke the rules by attacking America on its own soil with the fall of the Twin Towers! America at that point had only two choices. She could wimp out with meaningless and ineffective cries for diplomatic solutions, which would GUARANTEE future such attacks by showing a harmless amount of retaliation. The American people would never have stood for that. It would have been political suicide for Bush to have taken that course. Or, they could identify the source of the attack and strike it back so hard that an overwhelmingly powerful message would have been sent to any and all such fanatic groups that the price for such attacks would be higher than they might be prepared to pay. The Taliban may not have actively participated in the attack but it is generally agreed that they did aid and abet the attackers with money, resources and protected areas for training camps. Moreover, their regime was particularly odious in their treatment of women and other human rights issues. So in short order the Taliban was deposed and have become hunted fugitives within their own country. People can nitpick about whether we are "winning the war" in Afghanistan but it can't be denied that the situation for the Taliban is nowhere near as comfortable as it was before. Up till that point terrorist groups often could operate as proxies for such regimes. Since there might be no proof of any official involvement by a particular country it left the victimized country without a formal target for retaliation. Deposing the Taliban removed this shield. If a foreign government sheltered, aided and abetted an attacking terrorist group then it would be made to pay by a massive military strike that would depose such a government. So far I've never heard any other EFFECTIVE strategy that would have protected the American people (or those of any other nation, for that matter) from such terrorist attacks that they suffered in New York. People can quibble if it was technically justified or too blunt a response or collateral damage but they are ignoring the forest of realpolitik for the trees. The first duty of any government is to protect its people, by any means necessary and by any method that WILL WORK! Failure to do so is an immoral dereliction of that duty. That first duty is NOT to abide by every nitpicking international legality that armchair quarterbacks can dream up! It is plain and simply to PROTECT from any further and future attacks, period! The attempt in Afghanistan today is to totally change its society so that it will have a more civilized government that will likely never again be a threat to western societies. Perhaps it is too ambitious a goal to expect such a primitive people to go from goat herding to modern democracy within a single generation. Still, such a goal is a noble one! Just allowing little girls to have a modern education is enough for me. If I were a New Yorker I would have a very simple answer to any politician that wanted my vote, after seeing the Towers come crashing down. I would tell them "Protect me in a way that ABSOLUTELY WILL WORK, TODAY AND NOT TOMORROW or I will NOT vote for you, period!" If they could not convince me that they could accomplish that then I would have nothing to do with them. If we ever find ourselves in a similar situation here in Canada, I would take the same attitude.

Jdobbin, you yourself have pointed out many times how broke the LPC was before the last election. Now they must be even more in the hole, unless you would claim they suddenly came across a windfall. Are you seriously claiming that over the next year the LPC has the financial means to weather another election? Is there anyway they could defy Harper and yet avoid bankruptcy? You're going to need a better argument if you expect us to accept your statements as more than sheer bravado. My prediction is that the Liberals will do anything possible to avoid an election during the next 12 months, even if the Bloc or the NDP look like they're going to pull the trigger! Actually, if I were running the LPC that would be my bigger fear! It would be in the Bloc or NDP's interests to trigger an election that might bankrupt the LPC. Certainly the NDP would welcome the demise of the Liberal party! Why wouldn't Jack engineer another election, particularly if he could do it simply by going along with a Tory Bill and repeatedly leaving the LPC as the "centre-shots" who don't dare vote against it? Harper doesn't need another election. Why? After all, we've constantly been told that the Tories have a secret agenda and intend to slowly implement it. Questions about why they might do such things when it would result in political suicide have gone ignored and unanswered, at least on this board. So if they truly don't care about election results, why have another one when they know that the Liberals will perpetually "cave" and pass all the Tory Bills? It would seem only consistent, would it not?

I wonder if when the "powers that be" calculate energy costs if they include transportation costs. After all, in smaller european countries if you have a power source it is always relatively close. Here in Canada most of the sources always seem to be hundreds or thousands of miles away, with the exception of Niagara Falls. Power from Churchill Falls in Labrador doesn't appear in Kingston, Ontario with no costs for transmission lines and their losses. Oil and gas from the NWT still need pipelines and Ontario doesn't get electricity from Manitoba or much gas from Alberta. It doesn't seem fair not to include these factors when some tropical third world country wants to have us snowbound folks declared energy pigs that owe them a pile of Kyoto credits! Apples and apples, after all.

Well, that's not how the NEP worked the first time! We Easterners never got cheap oil! The feds did! The way it worked was that we in the East got oil from countries like Libya and Venezuela. With no pipeline to Alberta it was cheaper by tanker. We had to pay world price for each barrel. The NEP gave Alberta $14/bbl and the feds took the difference from the world price for themselves! This of course gave the Liberals a nice slush fund to dole back as grants to buy votes all around the country. I am REALLY tired of Westerners who still believe that we in the East got their oil cheap. The story is a load of crap! We paid the same price at the pumps as we always did... a HIGH one! If there was a PetroCan somewhere selling gas way cheaper than any other station, it must have been very well hidden! I never heard of anyone in Ontario ever finding it! As Manning said years ago, the real enemy is not each other. It's Ottawa!!!

Completely different? Perhaps, but to those of us of a classic liberal political persuasion they're equally immoral! Censorship of the media and jailing of political dissenters seem to go hand in hand...

This started LONG before Charest became a Liberal! Yet even the Liberals now find it politically expedient to cater to this attitude. Ends do NOT justify means! As a society, HOW we go about attaining goals reveals our true character! The "pur laine" movement can be pretty ugly. It was some Quebecois fellow workers who first explained this to me. They were of Irish and Italian descent. Although their families had been in Quebec for over a hundred years to a die hard Pequiste they were still "second class" and not "true" Quebecois. Hey, have you forgotten Parizeau on the night of his loss telling us all it was the fault of anglo money and immigrants?

Once again no one seems to want to say that the emperor has no clothes, Angus! So I will. These type of laws are simply a form of racism, pure and simple. The Pequistes can bleat all they like about protecting their culture. That's not the issue. The issue is really about their methods in achieving their goals. Some can be positive and some negative but one can't do anything one likes with the blanket excuse of cultural protection. It's just another racist tactic from the "pur laine", pure and simple.

"Sure he is Canadian, he has the papers to prove it - but actions speak louder than words my friend" Exactly! We agree. Today too many of us seem to get all anal-retentive about nitpicking details and forget about the spirit behind the rules. We write rule books to try to ensure positive results, NOT to try to achieve blind adherence to rules! Perhaps more than anything, citizenship should represent a core culture. Those that prefer to scorn it should not be entitled to its protection.

Well, that's your opinion! I didn't vote vote them and I don't respect much of what they've done! I could use "progressive" logic to make the claim that since Dalton did not receive a clear majority of the popular vote then the majority of my fellow Ontarioans must be Tory, or at least anti-Liberal. Why not, since the claim is constantly being made whenever a Conservative government, federal or provincial is elected. Dalton won the last election for one reason only. John Tory and his team blew it big time over religious school funding! If not for that bonehead move Dalton would have had a real fight on his hands and may well have lost. Whatever, one thing's for sure. Dalton will have a hard time pulling votes in Caledonia for years to come. After seeing how he valued the rights of those poor townsfolk I can clearly see how much my own rights would be protected in any conflict by a Ontario Liberal government.

There's that word "progressive" again, implying that one view is NON "progressive". Doubleplusungood! Anyhow, the argument seems to be revolving around lawyer nitpicking. Perhaps it would be easier to define the technical details as the letter of the law and our cultural values (like not blowing up innocents) as its SPIRIT!

You're confusing me in trying to understand how your arguments could work in the real world. First off, Hitler DID attack countries before they attacked his! Second, he succeeded so well because those countries WERE woefully unprepared for war! Now today the situation is even more extreme. Any large scale war would be over in weeks and months, if not even days! There would be no time for Canada to draft and train troops. No time to take a year setting up a British Commonwealth Air Training Program. Wars today are "come as you are" affairs and if you're not prepared, then that's just too bad! Canada is poorly prepared. That's a fact. We've relied on Uncle Sam to protect us for free and then got crabby if we lost some respect on the world stage for being military freeloaders.. I smile every time someone brings up the example of Jean Chretien keeping our F-18's out of the direct combat of the first Iraqi war, as if he did it out of some moral sense. In actual fact, our planes were so obsolete with their electronics, particularly "Friend or Foe" automatic radar identification and scrambled communications that the other countries refused to ALLOW Canada to fly into combat as it would only confuse things and add to the risk of accidents! Perhaps I missed something and you could elucidate.

All I can go by is my own personal experience. I do NOT believe I trolled that board! I DO believe I was polite and civilized in ALL my posts! Yet I WAS summarily dissed and pissed! So frankly, you can mouth all the convoluted arguments you want but since you only contradict my direct personal experience I have the choice between believing that I was totally mistaken and my senses lied about reality or that you are full of hooey! I choose to believe the latter. Now, since I believe you to be full of it perhaps you can tell me just exactly what "hooey" IS?

The quote speaks of only 4 "essential values". Anyone reading the posts will quickly see that you can respect those 4 listed values but provoke vitriol over disagreement on a myriad others. Again I say, be grateful those kind of people have such a site. They would quickly destroy any use of a board such as this one, not for their ideas but rather for their pitiful lack of good manners! "Rabble" is an excellent and descriptive name for such people.

Perhaps we should be happy that "Rubble" acts as sugar water in a wasp trap. The kind of people who prefer such a board are mostly those who we would not want coming over to boards such as this one. Let them preach to each other all they want. Someday perhaps we can get them to board the "B" Ark!

Just go look! It's bloody flippin' obvious! Read through the threads and look for any post that shows even the least amount of dissent. Better yet, make even a polite disagreement post of your own. I warn you, you better immediately brace yourself!

Good description! Could've maybe used some alliteration but pretty pungent, all in all! "Rubble" was the first political board I tried. I just couldn't believe those people! I was polite and civilized but whenever I disagreed with ANYTHING I was snottily attacked! I kept my cool until a couple of the yahoos called me some out and out profanities, including the "F" word. So I started a new thread asking if "Rubble" was a board that hated all those of "non-leftie" persuasion and preferred that they not bother to post. The thread went crazy! One of the most rabid posters was a moderator! Eventually some kind of higher level moderator made a post soft-pedaling the whole issue, denying that there was any attempt to drown conflicting views and graciously suggesting that I was welcome to stick around. I was too disgusted. I just bailed and googled up some more sites. Right away I found this one and I've been here ever since. One of the more interesting facts about "Rubble" is how they appear to be trying to co-opt the word "progressive". Their opening banner claims to be a home for "progressive thought". George Carlin would have had great fun with this one! By definition, any thought different from theirs must be "non-progressive". Orwell would have been proud! I find this attempt at semantic manipulation to be "doubleplusungood". What's frightening is that I've heard the term from time to time leaking into the media, like CBC NewsWorld. Now THAT'S "scary, scary, scary"!

"Every one a confidence vote?" Wasn't that one of Reform's biggest planks? My observation is that every Bill being one of confidence has been the norm throughout our history. That's one of the things Manning wanted to change! Perhaps that's the "secret agenda"! Harper can earn some brownie points by being a nice guy and adding that little preamble to the opening Throne Speech that says that only Bills of money or those declared of "national substance" would be considered to be confidence motions. This would let the Liberals and others vote against most Bills without any fear of triggering an election. If Harper feels strongly enough about a particular Bill he could always re-introduce it as a "Bill of Substance", to either force it through or force an election. The Opposition could hardly be against this new policy! They would look like idiots for being against it. The important thing would be the establishment of a new precedent as to free votes in the Commons! Manning's dream of MP's being able to vote their constituents' wishes instead of the party line would be in place. If the opposition parties continued to vote according to party solidarity eventually the difference in style would become visible to the public and would get much comment in the media. I don't think they would have any choice but to start allowing free votes among their own caucuses too. You might say I'm a dreamer, but I'm NOT the only one!

Ah, Mr. 'Saur! You must understand the "logic" of the "progressive" political mind! First, accept the premise that anyone who doesn't share your political views must be inherently evil. The higher up the political food chain you find a particular "evil" person, the more evil they must be. Leaders of nations like Harper are obviously the most evil of all! Once you've accepted them as evil you then can make any accusation as to their motives and character you wish. People in your own choir will be impressed! The more you put someone "evil" down the more they will raise you UP! Don't worry about people not in your choir. By definition, they must be evil too! No need for psychic powers! Just the strength of your self-defined moral character and the comfort of having a peer group that will automatically agree with you! Please, just accept the poster's position as gospel! I wouldn't want to think that you have gone over to the Dark Side!

I keep hearing suggestions made in this and other threads about choosing immigrants from compatible countries and cultures, as far as language and skills. Do we have this luxury? Seems to me like the world changed decades ago. Those multi-lingual and highly educated Europeans have a higher standard of living today than that of Canada. Why on earth would they wish to come here? Outside of a few old folks coming to live with their children, of course. The premise seems to be that Canada is as attractive to this type of potential immigrant today as it was in the 1950's, after WWII. Is this still true? Perhaps the "emperor has no clothes" secret is that Canada must take what it can get! Maybe this should be a new thread...