I’ve been doing a lot of political reading, and engaging in the odd debate on various forums (which have nothing in and of themselves to do with politics). Usually, this involves butting heads with neo-con idiots. As part of the fun, I ran across two interesting videos available online.
The first was a “homebrew” 9/11 documentary called Loose Change, which basically asks a lot of the hard questions that the american media was reluctant to ask, or unable to get any answers for. Like Farenheit 9/11, you probably should take some of this with a grain of salt, but the important thing about it, like with Michael Moore’s work, is that it promotes discussion and inquiry, which is the exact opposite message that people have been getting from the american media (especially on Fox). The video can be seen on Google Video here.
And speaking of the american media, and Fox, a while ago, the fifth estate put on a feature called Sticks and Stones, about the degeneration of the american media into a mouthpiece for the conservative, right-wing, neo-con agenda. It covers the Ann Coulter affair in some detail, and even reveals subversive elements within our own traditionally soft-core socialist country. It runs about 42 minutes and I found it worth every second of my life devoted to watching it.
Posted by Ron as Media, Politics at 12:16 PM EDT
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I haven’t posted anything political in a while, but this just incenses me. STUPID fucking conservatives. Yes, let’s just fund all our lovely tax cuts by letting our environment go to shit. Great idea. Sorry, Steve, you lose.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 9:46 AM EDT
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Look what we have here, a Conservative minority. I called that one.
From the Silver Lining department, the NDP made impressive gains from last time.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 12:13 AM EST
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Going merely off of heresay, conjecture, and what I read in the news, I’m making a prediction that we will soon have a Conservative minority government. I hope I’m wrong.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 10:23 AM EST
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All this talk of politics in the news has moved me to finish the second of two entries that I’d promised in late October.
I’ve never truly understood where I stood politically. I knew that I was left of centre, just not how far or where, exactly. I like a lot of the NDP policies, for example, but at the same time found some of them overly restrictive on a personal level. I already know what I am, I know what I believe, but I didn’t know what to call it before. Now I do. I’m a Libertarian Socialist.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 10:45 AM EST
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I haven’t made too many political posts lately, and there’s a reason for it, but lately something has really been irking me and I feel that I need to rant about it.
There has been a lot of talk in the news recently about the Conservatives’ plan to get elected by lowering the GST. Out of one corner of their mouths, they accuse the Liberals of pandering to get votes with the spending spree, then, out of the other corner of their mouths, they do their own version. Lowering the hated tax is a vote grab, pure and simple. And the part that scares me is that it seems to be working. People think it will be sooooo great to have all this imaginary excess cash in their pockets.
Harper has played a numbers game, and played it poorly. He says the ‘average’ Canadian family of 4 with an income of $60k will save 400$ per year. That means they would have to spend $40k on taxable goods. Rent, groceries, and other necessities are not taxable. Besides that, I’m willing to bet that those things cost most families more than 1/3 of their income. Plus, people tend to think of gross income when he mentions these figures, but you can’t spend it if it’s already been taxed away on income tax. That makes his ‘average family’ seem a little less average. He’s talking about upper middle class here, precisely the voters he would like to woo away from the grits.
Then there’s the part of his plan he isn’t talking about, the ‘bait-and-switch’ part. I’m also willing to bet that the tax reduction will be financed largely by slashing or eliminating the GST rebate program. The rebate program was as close as the Liberals came to actually eliminating it, something the Neo-Cons say they didn’t deliver on. Let’s again look at the numbers.
I, personally, get in the ballpark of 300$ per year in GST rebate. That 300$ represents taxable spending on roughly a third of my (admittedly pathetic) income. Even assuming ol’ Steve’s wildly inaccurate amount of taxable spending as 2/3 of my income, the GST credit still represents a 50% reduction in the tax rate, or about 3.5% in real numbers. In order to gain that much back under Harper’s plan, I’d have to spend over $30k annually on taxable goods. I don’t even make that much.
No, as usual, the Neo-cons serve only the interests of the rich, who spend far more of their income on the non-evadeable GST, and businesses, who have to spend money to make money. Keep that in mind when you select your allegiance on the ballot this winter.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 10:59 AM EST
7 Comments »
This weekend was my first break from working in 11 days. Not a record by any means, but it does go a long way to explaining the lack of updates.
On Saturday, while out shopping downtown at the Galleria, we encountered a small display of activists campaigning on behalf of Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the International Action Network on Small Arms in the Control Arms campaign. Essentially, this campaign seeks to slow down the unrestricted trade of small arms around the world and destroy exsisting stockpiles when they can convince armed groups to do lay down their weapons. I also signed a petition to release a human rights activist, who was being held as a political prisoner in Kazakhstan.
I told the group’s leader that I’d like to help out more, so I’m going to email him and see what I can do.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 11:52 PM EST
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I was at the police station today to pick up a criminal background check. I needed it for a job I didn’t end up getting last month, so I didn’t bother going to get it. After 30 days, they’re supposed to destroy them, but they didn’t, and instead called me last week to let me know they’d be keeping it a few more days.
So I went to get it today. That went swimmingly, but I noticed something while I was there that I found a little bit disturbing: the secretary in the kiosk that handles that kind of thing had a calendar of shirtless “buff guy” pinups on the inside wall of her cubicle. Firefighters, perhaps.
That kind of thing doesn’t bother me, in and of itself. Rather, it’s the principle of the matter. This was not a private area at all. The kiosks are separated from the main lobby of the police station only by glass, much like a ticket booth in a theatre or amusement park. Anyone walking in there can see it. Like I said, it doesn’t bother me, and I doubt any of the other guys in the office (if there are any) would even care, but it might bother some people.
What if there were a man working in that office? What if he wanted to put up a “bikini girls” calendar? Do you think they’d let him get away with that? I really, really doubt it. I’m sure that the girls in the office would take issue with it. That kind of thing could even get a guy fired, and probably would, especially from something so publicly accountable as the police.
Egalitarian issues aside, the biggest problem I have with it is the fact that it’s a public office, taxpayer funded. You expect a certain degree of credibility from that kind of position, and a healthy dose of professionalism. Something like that does nothing to foster either of those things. On the contrary. I could see it in a small, “mom and pop” type operation. Maybe even a corporate office. But the police station? Come on.
How would it be to have a judge with a pinup behind the bench? Behind the counter (but still visible) at the local Futureshop technical department? At the MTO office, when you go to renew your vehicle license? Or behind the anchor’s chair on the evening news? On the wall at the HRSDC? Your doctor’s office? An embassy? Queen’s park? It’s just inappropriate and unprofessional.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 2:52 PM EDT
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Last week I finally got around to watching the Incredibles. I’m pretty disconnected from modern media (mostly on purpose) so I hadn’t seen much advertising for it, but a bunch of my friends here were bugging me to see it a while ago at the cinema.
In the end, I declined to go, for several reasons; partly because of hype, partly because I thought it actually looked a little stupid, partly because it was a Disney thing, and partly because the whole ‘comic book super hero’ thing is a lot overdone these days. Sure, I really liked the 1989 version of Batman, for example, but I’m just not a graphic novel fetishist, and as such, mostly don’t give a crap about the latest comic-book-to-movie licensing arrangements between a bunch of assholes that maybe once had artistic vision, but now would rather pimp that vision to the mass media.
I was actually surprised by the level of allegory in this movie though. Unlike a lot of other ‘comic superhero’ genre movies, this one is blatantly aimed at kids. And yet here you have a movie whose antagonist is obviously a terrorist, created by none other than the protagonist. There are messages in it, flat out saying how the villains don’t care if you’re just kids or not, they’ll be happy to kill you all the same. Sounding familiar yet?
I’m not saying what I think of this message, because it’s kind of bi-partisan. On the one hand, it plays nicely into the hands of the Republicans and their army of suburban “security mom” drones, while at the same time addressing the fact that the problem wouldn’t exist if only the good guys had been more careful in how they treated others they viewed as lesser / weaker than themselves (obvious slam against U.S. foreign policy). One could easily argue that this is nothing new, as this last aspect is simliar to the message in the aforementioned 1989 version of Batman, but in that one the situation is reversed, and so it was much less immediately relevant and sinister.
So maybe that’s not news, I don’t know, since as I said, I unplugged from the hype. Look at the latest Star Wars flick though; it may be a merchandising money grab, but it’s not just a merchandising money grab. It is also chock full of political allegory, which is pretty much everywhere these days. Or maybe I’m just getting better at spotting it. The thing that I find hard to believe is how so many can miss or ignore it.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 10:29 PM EDT
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Amidst the chaos surrounding the recent RCMP tragedy, Ralph Klein, a man I’d sooner laugh at as he gets pies smashed in his face, actually used the opportunity to bring up a good point.
I remember back when the gun registry was first being pushed through, and the controversy surrounding it. I was still in high school in rural Northern Ontario, where support for gun control is lacking at best. When I go up north to visit, I still see the rotting remains of bumper stickers on old pickup trucks that defiantly read, “Remember Bill C-68 when you vote.”
I don’t remember what my position on it was back then, but the more I think about it, the more I have to agree: When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws have guns. Situations like this simply underscore that fact. This could have happened anywhere. Even Kynoch.
Posted by Ron as Politics at 10:56 AM EST
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