Whileaway North: Place your bets

Since the candidates are starting to declare themselves, it’s time to make some predictions about the Liberal leadership race.

The Liberals were very proud to have the largest percentage of women of any of the parties among their candidates in this last election.

How many women do you think will run for the leadership? How many will actually be on the ballot when the convention rolls around? How many will make it past the first ballot?

And, while we’re at it, how many non-white people will run? How many will actually be on the ballot?

Any guesses?

unrepentant old hippie: Stood up

unrepentant old hippie: Let this be a warning

Arrgghh!

USians, whatever you do on Tuesday, don’t forget to VOTE!!!

(via ellroon)

unrepentant old hippie: Look out, Obama

Here comes the kitchen sink! BAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

unrepentant old hippie: The fab almost-forty

Behold the fabulous fabulousity of Harper’s new gay cabinet!

unrepentant old hippie: Dobson predicts grim future

unrepentant old hippie: Psst — First one’s for free

This is one of the most irritating sites I’ve surfed onto lately, so naturally I had to share it.

Go ahead, try it.

(via adfreak)

unrepentant old hippie: Manhattan Mini-Storage strikes again

Here’s their latest one:

(via feministing)

unrepentant old hippie: Haloscan issues

unrepentant old hippie: Demanding

unrepentant old hippie: Cue the outra– err, crickets?

redjenny: Visual Hybridity

Read More From redjenny

Whileaway North: Why I shouldn’t read the National Post

I’m trying to decide what’s most wrong with this National Post column.

Is it the complete failure to understand the Canadian political system? The Tories may have “increased their majority” last week, but they did so with only 38% of the popular vote, which kind of undermines the argument here.

Or is it the utterly unexamined assumption that Canadian Conservatives, Nicholas Sarkozy, and the American Republicans all occupy a similar place on the political spectrum? (For the record, Canada’s “right wing” is nowhere near as far right as the American Republican party, no matter how much we like to call Harper “Bush lite”.)

Or might it be the rather peculiar claim that people (not pundits, mind you — people asked in opinion polls) base their opinions on foreign politicians entirely on those politicians’ foreign policy?

We snark; you decide.

Whileaway North: On heroism and feminism

I’m not completely sure what Dave Brown’s point is in this recent column. I’m not sure he knows, either, except that the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket and it’s somehow all those awful feminists’ fault. His profile proudly describes him as a ‘contrarian,’ which, at least in this case, can be defined as “curmudgeon who thinks the world really was exactly like Leave it to Beaver”.

At the top of their list of things a man must do was the protection issue. It used to be an obligation of the strong to protect the weak.

This is the basic argument of the article. In “the good old days”, men were strong and women were weak, and men were praised and rewarded and given “backpats” for protecting those weak and helpless women from other men.

Now, Mr. Brown is astonished to learn, the authorities encourage people to, er, call the authorities when they see something untoward happen. And to intervene only if they have the appropriate training to do so safely.

I’m having a hard time understanding why this is a bad idea. Does Mr. Brown really think that the world would be a better place if we all — or rather, all men — tried to be untrained vigilantes? How many more people would be hurt or killed than if we just let the experts handle the situation?

Now, what Israel Grant Carver did was a very courageous thing: he tried to help another person. I’m sure this is an entirely inadequate “backpat,” but I wish more people — both men and women — had the courage to intervene when they see someone being attacked…even if their intervention is nothing more than a call to 911. I’d much rather see an assaulter put in prison or otherwise removed from his victim than beaten up — so that he has one more reason to take out his anger on the victim.

In Mr. Brown’s view, this attitude is just a pernicious outgrowth of feminism. “The fishes have come home to roost,” he crows — women, apparently, should just expect to be beaten up now that we’re no longer encouraging white knights to rescue us. Or something. The women in the Carver case went on to marry her attacker, so clearly she didn’t deserve to be the beneficiary of manly heroism.

And then it turns out that this isn’t really about Israel Grant Carver and his lack of recognition at all:

Without fear of being branded cowards, they don’t have to face bullies, hijackers or nutbars on buses.

That’s what this was really all about. The Greyhound bus incident. Those wimpy, embarrassing men who kept the attacker inside the bus and prevented him from harming anyone else rather than launching heroic charges to try to save a man who was already dead.

Whileaway North: Strategic voting, vote swapping, and who elected that guy anyway?

Strategic voting is a factor in any election, and it’s certainly been part of the Canadian election discourse for as long as I can remember. But it seems to much more front and centre this election than ever before. Partly, I suspect, that’s due to our having had a couple of minority governments in a row — with an election that feels perilously close, people are much more worried about ensuring the success of their preferred party or preventing a hated party from getting a majority than they are when the outcome seems inevitable. Partly, too, I suspect it’s a spillover from the proportional representation debate. It’s become clear that we’re not getting prop rep anytime soon, so people are more concerned than ever about how to maximize their vote.

Is strategic voting a good idea? As with almost anything else electoral, the answer depends on a slew of factors: how strongly you feel about your preferred party, especially as compared with the party you’d vote strategically for; the race in your particular riding; how strongly you are opposed to another party; how you feel about the local candidates.

There are certainly arguments against voting strategically. Not least, there’s the fact that each vote is worth a few dollars in funding for your electoral party of choice. So if you’re a small-party supporter considering making a strategic vote, you might want to consider making a small donation to your preferred small party to try and offset the financial damage associated with losing your vote. But it’s not just financial damage; small parties that don’t get enough votes don’t ever become big enough parties to have an influence on the country as a whole. And if you give your vote to a larger party that doesn’t quite represent your views, then you’re certainly not encouraging the large parties to change or to take into consideration the issues that matter to you.

But let’s not forget that voting is not only about expressing your true essential beliefs — it’s also about choosing your representatives, the people who will govern the country. And you should be realistic about what effect your vote will actually have. Will it help elect a reasonably good MP belonging to a reasonably good party that isn’t 100% in synch with you, or will it be just one more vote against the guy who gets in because no one opponent was able to muster enough votes? Unfortunately, there’s no way to know the outcome before you go and vote, so we all have to make our decisions based on incomplete information.

What’s clear to me, though, is that there’s something not quite right about our electoral system that’s prompting these ongoing discussions about how to best vote. I don’t know if prop rep is _the_ solution, but it seems that some variation on that theme should be at least part of the solution. We shouldn’t be stuck chosing between voting our conscience/throwing our vote away and holding our nose/voting for the least bad alternative.

Whileaway North: A few scattered thoughts about last night’s debate

• The format actually worked suprisingly well — no one was allowed to dominate the conversation, but there was still the opportunity for a few back-and-forth moments between the leaders. About as much as you could expect with five of them sitting around the table. (The table itself gave the whole thing quite an informal feel, which is — different.)
• Anyone who says Stéphane Dion isn’t charismatic or a good speaker has obviously never hear him in his native language. He’s downright eloquent when he gets going
• Stephen Harper’s clearly been practicing that “softer tone” he was using. He sounded like he was trying to hypnotize all of us. Except when he sounded like he was falling asleep. I suppose it’s meant to defuse his “scary, aggressive” image, but it didn’t sound natural to me.
• Elizabeth May did a surprisingly good job — I know everyone’s saying it, but it’s true. Her French is actually quite good, although she has a strong accent and somewhat limited vocabulary. Not only was she keeping up in French, she was able to be wonderfully aggressive — the only one who was really aggressive for most of the debate (the only one with nothing to lose, I suppose).
• For sheer entertainment value, there’s nothing like “turn to the person to your left, and say something nice about them, while looking in their eyes”. It was fun to watch them all scramble to come up with something nice that wouldn’t undermine their positions at all. Elizabeth May was, without a doubt, the meanest, telling Harper that, well, he’s a good father. I did find it interesting how few of them actually managed to maintain eye contact for very long (they all kept going back to the cameras, I think).

Tonight’s English debate should be interesting. It’s a shame it got cross-programmed against the US V.P. debates — but those will be on YouTube, especially if anything amusing happens or there’s a proper knockout blow.