#121
Post rating: +++++
10 hours of walking in a canadian city as a prime minister
#122
Post rating: +
*checks watch* well it's been a couple days, time to legislate some knee jerk racism

'Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act' introduced in Canada
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201411062048-0024323

so at this point I'm pretty sure the conservative strategy for quashing resistance to their bills is to deploy a naming scheme that makes us laugh so hard we suffocate
#123
Post rating: ~
It's going to get pretty awkward when canada starts deporting all the mormons
#124
Post rating: +
http://whatsupic.com/special-canada/canada%E2%80%99s-quiet-coup.html

Author, poet, academic, and former Canadian diplomat Prof. Peter Dale Scott recently disclosed a wikileaks cable indicating that the International Republican Institute (IRI), an off-shoot of the CIA, and a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) helped install Stephen Harper as Canada’s Prime Minister.

lol
#125
mt.real
Post rating: +
yeah, there was a fledgling right-wing party here with a solid base and once there was a rupture in canadian politics (one of the oldest parties imploded) suddenly the new guys were super-organized and were using tons of tactics imported from the US on dividing the electorate and playing the system, and now they basically ignore parliamentary process and most laws, lean the system pro-american at every turn and put as many right-wing people into appointed positions as possible.

these days their opposition are a bunch of confused centrists or (i guess) centre-leftists who can barely organize a press release. maybe you've heard this story before.
#126
Post rating: ~
is peter dale scott worth a read? he has a few books about CIA drug conspiracies which seem extremely my shit. also a JFK conspiracy book
#127
Post rating: +
it was such a non-surprise to me that time has bent back on itself and now I have known that the CPC is cia since 2003
#128
Post rating: +

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

is peter dale scott worth a read? he has a few books about CIA drug conspiracies which seem extremely my shit. also a JFK conspiracy book


is that the journalist who very creatively committed suicide via multiple gunshot wounds to the back of his head?

#129
Kurdt
Post rating: +
no that was gary webb
#130
Kurdt
Post rating: +
peter dale scott is the non-marxist poet who consistently erases class by drawing black helicopters over it
#131
Post rating: +
oh wow i completely forgot that i had just posted an article by peter dale scott and was like "who is that"

maybe i should sober up a little
#132
Post rating: ~
Peter Dale Scott has written a lot of very good stuff about the deep state and the transnational right wing over the past few decades, I have been planning a special update to the Petrol Library with a selection of his work both older and newer. I'm not particularly interested in anything to do with JFK and I don't agree with all his conclusions but he's pretty on point with a lot of stuff, makes useful connections and provides good leads for further reading.
#133
chickeon
Post rating: ~
jfk stuff is so dumb ahha
#134
Kurdt
Post rating: ~
ya jk hes cool
#135
[account deactivated]
#136
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

tpaine posted:

jeff k was funny

nice sig clarence

#137
[account deactivated]
#138
Online
Post rating: ~
i noticed it always looks like that if youre the first one to load the page after the bad gateway on the halfhour
#139
Post rating: ~
I get that fucken bad gateway thing all the damn time.
#140
political car tune
Post rating: ~
heh... yeah sometimes the ironic stalinist web forum where i post fails to even load properly, that's how elite tier my... hey wait, where are you going?
#141
Kurdt
Post rating: +++++
tHE rHizzonE: ironic doesnt even begin to describe our stalinism
#142
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
alright so tomorrow i'm heading to toronto to be an ~official delegate~ at the ontario NDP convention. the reason i am going is that i want to vote for a leadership review. my guess is that there will be about 1,000 delegates. that means i can shift the vote by 0.1%. the leader said she'll stay on if she gets 65% i heard somewhere. my guess is that someone will say "we don't want a big party fight before the 2015 federal election" and the convention will vote 80%+ in favour of keeping her on for now. but i enjoy conventions so i figured i'd go and visit family and such. i'm meeting up with some trots too. which is sort of my main hope, to just meet some weird people and chat about how great hoxha was or whatever.
#143
Kurdt
Post rating: ~
goonspeed
#144
[account deactivated]
#145
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~
my two main beefs with the ontario ndp platform were that there was no serious child care plan and the minimum wage increase was an insulting $1 (to $12) and that was basically the whole antipoverty plan. anyway tom mulcair (federal leader) isn't dumb so he did two things in the past few weeks. first he announced a real federal minimum wage of $15 in first mandate. then he said he'll build a real national child care plan. so i mean those are nice to hear. and andrea horwath (ontario leader) immediately jumped on those as a reason to pivot left a bit, by saying ontario should match/participate in those programs. so i mean she should be turfed but i'm not sure her replacement is going to do much more than that. there are lots of things they could promise that would be much better but that would take a more solid reformist instead of just a blairite type.
#146
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
trip report: ontario new democratic party convention

alright so i only went to one day of the convention, which is all i could really tolerate. i mean everyone was nice and such, i wasn't anxious or anything, it's just that they all clearly have different politics from me.

i met the two main groups of trotskyists at the convention. one of them called for the leader to be dumped but didn't seem organized to try to do so. the other group (fightback) basically assumed there was no way the leader would be dumped so they put all their energy into floor resolutions commiting the party to tough policies.

one of the debates called for a living wage, but people pointed out that like... liberals call $11 a living wage so it's not really a matter of saying that, it's the meat. so some people amended it to be a $17 wage and that was voted down by a 2-to-1 margin. one of the reasons given was that they didn't want to "tie their hands" in case the minimum wage should be like $20 or something. anyway yes all their debates were stupid. everyone just wanted to talk on the microphone.

there are all sorts of socialist policies in the proposed section of the convention book but obviously the convention council just prioritizes the most bland and reformist ones because it assumes (rightly) that like calling for social ownership won't go anywhere in the party (the NDP is the canadian analogue of the labour party).

i saw the leader speak a bit in the morning and her whole thing was being a left-wing as possible in rhetoric to win the leadership review. she basically used the strongest language a social-democrat can use without stating any specific policies, like calling for a much more equal society, making it normal to join a union, etc... most of the unions had been lined up behind her on the principle that she shape up and talk left more. so she won the leadership vote with 77% in favour of her continuing on as leader. that's pretty good for her.

the leader's chief of staff gave a speech on how they were going to win and it was the worst nonsense ever. like he used social-democratic language but he talked about how he worked for the National Democratic Institute to promote democracy in former Yugoslavia and I wanted him to crumple to the floor.

anyway i'm going to quit because it was a waste of time. but i guess i needed to see that in person. these people are only vaguely progressive and they can't "win" in the real sense. there were so many young people who looked like young bankers walking around and you knew they all had NGO jobs and such. it wasn't a social movement thing at all.
#147
Online
Post rating: +

Petrol posted:

I get that fucken bad gateway thing all the damn time.

every half hour on the dot. it's an automatic rebooting mechanism thats been installed to prevent the OTHER bad gateways we get from lasting forever

#148
Post rating: +
the utah democratic party is that, but in a tiny room, and even worse politics. the utah republican party is that, but larger, and in a private club with really nice catering and excellent cigars.
#149
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
yeah at conservative convention dinners they would have a few bottles of wine on each table and you could take them home with you if you were a rapscallion. they didn't even have a dinner at this one.

about ten years ago the rules for donations weren't exactly clear so the parties had a thing where they would, like, buy turkeys in bulk for christmas. let's say their cost to the party was $15 each but normally the consumer would pay $20 or something. anyway the party member would then give a donation of $50 to the party. they'd get a tax receipt for that amount. that tax receipt would generally give them $37.50 off their taxes. so the turkey costs them (net) $12.50 instead of $20, and the party pockets $35 per turkey. pretty good scam.
#150
Post rating: +
that's my favorite part of catch 22