Will we get to see Canadians fight in this thread? That would be great.
Hopefully, October will see that chucklefuck gone; there seems to be something of a shift in people’s percetions recently vis a vis their shithead ‘leaders’.
They didn’t invent LOCKSS, though it’s good that they’re using it. See http://www.lockss.org
It is most unlikely that many of Harper’s supporters are even aware of BoingBoing, let alone commenting on it; if they use the intertubes for anything other than porn it might be Facebook at best. So I expect any intra-Canadian fights here would be mighty lopsided.
See, our brave Prime Minister (who literally hid in a closet when a lone gunman attacked the parliament buildings last year) represents a hard core voting block of the scared, and facts and reason and news of the new are the last thing you want when your political life depends on fear and fantasy, facts having a well known liberal slant and all.
There are a few Conservative Canadians reading here.
Wanna drop gloves?
This and a multitude of other reasons - ie. reducing the waterways protection act to a handful of rivers and lakes - mainly because they wanted remove restrictions on building pipelines from the tarsands, muzzling scientists, destroying data and libraries, and generally bending over backwards for big oil (ironic for a supposedly free market party) and major privacy invasion bill C51, and various crooked electioneering practices such as calling up known opposition supporters and telling them they should vote in a non-existent location,
- is why they should be kicked out in the next election.
The problem is that the opposition (centre and left) is really split into two parties so the Conservatives have been winning, not by popular vote but because of the split on the centre/left ie Liberals and New Democratic Party.
Canada was able to weather the economic downturn better than much of the rest of the OECD primarily because there was no sub-prime real estate bubble here- as the former (Liberal) Prime Minister Paul Martin did not allow the big banks to merge, and while finance minister Martin paid down the deficit in the 90s. All of which the Conservatives like to take credit for, but not for the loss in manufacturing jobs thanks to the Petro dollar when the Loonie went from 67cents in 2001 to 1.25 in ten years and all the US subsidiaries unsurprisingly closed down (and 300,000 jobs) in Canada.
Lately of course the oil in the egg basket policy hasn’t worked out so well, thanks to the 50% drop in price and Canada is the only G7 country in recession. But hey, they’re not taking any responsibility for that because “its the whole world economy… blah blah”.
But pigs flew in Alberta a few months ago when the NDP got elected after decades of conservative govt’s. You know Norway was able to build a sovereign wealth fund from oil of nearly a trillion dollars, but all Alberta has is $16 billion which hasnt’ been added to since 95, even East Timor has done better.
So with any luck they should be turfed out next month.
Oh and the science thing, the one pet project of Harpers is the search for Franklin’s expedition (because Arctic sovereignty and resources etc) so plenty of funding for that. And when they found one of the ships last summer - the scientists involved did not even get to make the announcement, instead it was the head of the Canadian Geographic who happened to be a conservative party contributor and had nothing to do with the search.
This makes me regret giving up my US citizenship.
Well, no…not really. Gave up my citizenship last week to become only Canadian. Some pretty shitty stuff has been happening here for the last 9 years or so, but at least Canada has a fighting chance. There is a real possibility of a minority government of either Liberal or NDP with the other party in opposition. If that happens (hopefully…) the opposition party will temper the crazies of the party in power and good will come.
But, that’s only if the left doesn’t split the vote and get the Cons back in.
+1111
Fantastic article just came out about the search for the Franklin expedition. Anyone who has any interest in knowing the subtle, but extremely harmful effects of muzzling should read this.
Canada has embraced a deepening, suspicious secrecy
This should really read, “The Conservative Government of Canada has embraced a deepening, suspicious secrecy”. The actual citizens of Canada have certainly not embraced this.
No. There’s no hockey game to mask the agression.
I think that Canada, England, and the US are waking up to the insidious harm that their respective conservative governments have done. From eroding the the rights of the people to being in the pockets of the corporations at the expense of the people, everything they’ve done has hurt their countries.
Folks in England have not, will not and seemingly cannot wake up to such a realisation. Everyone who’s protesting those despicable scum was awake long ago.
Here in the US we’ve had our own version of the problem, though it’s been a bit more narrowly targeted towards Congress. When Gingrich took office as speaker back in the 90s he drastically cut Congressional staff, nominally on the grounds of starting at home in cutting government bloat. In reality his goal was, as Bruce Bartlett wrote, “to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it.” One of the results has been to make Congressmen more reliant on lobbyists, as without institutional Congressional expertise lobbyists are the only folks handy with knowledge of the issues.
The LOCKSS approach is good, and I wonder why it was not more prevalent even before the Burning of the Libraries. Things can go down for a number of reasons, the political malevolence is only a relatively small problem; a flood can take down a datacenter, there are fires, disk failures, freak accidents that take both the master and the backup. Having lots of places the data lurk at is the best way to keep them for long time.
For data objects of a few-megabyte size, mailing lists are an excellent distribution method. Few seconds to minutes after sending, the object can be distributed around the globe in a takedown-resistant way. Take this, you vulnerable, centralized, cloud-dependent Web-2.0!
Kipling: “We are the people of England, that never have spoken yet”. It’s been a long time. And Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers and Lord Rothermere are determined that it will continue.
Even the BBC has now been got at: disgracefully, it reported in so many words “the Conservative Party warns that Jeremy Corbyn will damage national security”, reporting a controversial opinion as fact. (It should have said “claims that”, or put the whole thing in quotes. But they know that the Government can further cut their funding…all claws and teeth drawn.)
Fortunately the UK has enough world class universities to make a similar attack to that in Canada more difficult; but the Government is degrading universities with high tuition fees and rules making things difficult for overseas students.
Canadians need to look hard at what is happening here, in Australia and the US, get together and vote the bastards out. Because you can.
The most extreme Orthodox rabbis believed that all secular knowledge was evil, and some Muslim tyrants felt the same way. Because secular knowledge is the enemy of “because I say so”. People like Gingrich are spiritually akin to the Taliban, which I suspect explains why the Republicans in the US have such an ambivalent attitude to Muslim fundamentalists; at some level not too far below the surface, they would love to be running a Saudi Arabia.
I’m up in Scotland where exactly that kind of chicanery and fear mongering by the BBC has contributed to the already tsunamic groundswell of popular opinion against the regime. Recent revelations about our illustrious security services throw the recent referendum into a new light if one is prepared to believe a government, and moreover a civil service, is willing to lie to and manipulate the public to their own ends. Of course, probably still about 50% of folks couldn’t give a shit how much fear is mongered at them and lap it all up with a smile and ask for more.
Wankers.
Thanks for this link. I went to John Geiger’s Wikipedia page, and saw no mention of the controversy. I think it would be helpful to the rest of the world if some BoingBoinger were to edit Mr. Geiger’s page to note these facts for posterity.
