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[Canada] Politics of the Democratic Friedmanite Republic of the Government of Harper
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Oh you poor fucking martyr you.
And yes, if they "mistrust" the Liberals/NDP and keep voting for the Conservatives despite the policies the they enact, they are fucking stupid.
There's also an element of vindictiveness in my attitude, I won't deny that. As far as I'm concerned, they have it coming.
Somehow, formatting keeps getting fucked up with these posts and I keep having to correct them :S
I guess I can ignore this thread, then, since being from Alberta, I'm just a dumb, ignorant redneck with nothing to offer anyone.
EDIT: And seeing as I have nothing to offer, I can stop educating myself about Canadian politics, and I can stop promoting tolerance and I can stop working against the continued dominance of conservative politics.
Want some nails for your strawman cross?
No one has said anything like "you are a a dumb, ignorant redneck with nothing to offer anyone".
You are just getting all goosey because people have pointed out your province votes for shitty parties constantly and mindlessly.
Who did I strawman?
Might as well hand me some too since you're being an complete prick. Guess my NDP votes never happened, I'm just a stupid conservative shill.
I'm sorry, when did this get said?
Seriously, what is with the martyr complex? You are making me think this is displaced guilt or something...
I'm sorry, but voter patterns in Alberta kinda speak for themselves.
So I'll take back the 'dumb' part of my post.
Saying 51% of Canadians are female doesn't say anything about you specifically. That's not how statistics work.
But don't those same Albertans make the same complaints about the Bloc? (That is my understanding, anyways, based on how Harper always (or used to anyways) railed against the Bloc.) They fundamentally supported regionalism back when - and I wasn't around back then, but I assume - Ontario wasn't so much voting Liberal for regional purposes but because they were legitimately the largest province in the country. (Quebec, arguably, was voting in regionalistic manners when voting for French-speaking candidates and all?) I mean, not to get all, "They started it," in here, but I don't think the typical Albertan voter gives a shit about regionalism right now, because they're the ones who perceived a need for it in the first place.
If we're talking about how Albertans can't vote anything but Conservative, because they're right-of-centre and they're aggrieved regionalists 30 years on after the NEP, fuck all y'all, doesn't the same logic apply to progressive Ontarians who are left-of-centre, and are being aggrieved by regionalist Albertan interests providing a strong political and volunteer base for the Conservatives?
Either we all have free will or none of us do.
The thing I don't understand is that Albertans seem to feel the need to excuse this behaviour by blaming it on something. Albertans vote for right-wingers because that's what they've always done. It's not because of the NEP or the so-called Eastern parties shitting on the West or anything like that. Those things may exacerbate the situation to some extent, but they're certainly not the cause.
There's no particular reason to be angry about it, either. A lot of places elect or re-elect shitty politicians simply due to their party affiliation. It happens more on the conservative side simply because we only have one legitimate right-wing party, but at least when a second right-wing party pops up, Albertans are willing to turf the old for the new.
I've had some major gripes with the Provincial Conservatives, like allowing a major coal plant expansion by calling it a remodel/renovation. Or cancelling a Nuclear plant to power the Oilsands due to NIMBY. Giving out refund cheques instead of investing it in renewables or non Oil & Gas industries. Having lower Royalties rates than other developed countries.
Wanting the Wildrose party to destroy Alberta is like wanting all of Ontario to get their drinking water unfiltered from the shores of the great lakes.
Danielle Smith's current sop to the public is paying all Albertans a dividend if the government ends up with excess cash. She wants to call this...no joke...Alberta Bucks.
I hate the idea of those dividends.
Yeah, $300 or whatever that everyone is just going to fucking blow away is soooo much better than some kind of productive investment
I don't know what you mean. Are you saying that Joe Albertan doesn't know how to spend his money? Are you saying that hard-working Albertans aren't the best possible people to be spending tiny fractions of our budget surplus? You'd probably rather that money be thrown away on wasteful infrastructure and needless social programs wouldn't you? You don't like Alberta very much at all do you?
Now I feel nauseous.
She also wanted to overturn the closing of the Edmonton City Centre airport, ignoring that we had just held a municipal election and proponents of keeping it open were resoundly defeated. (It was pretty much the defining issue for the city election).
She seems to be very much like a female Mitt Romney, say or do anything to get attention and get elected.
The ring road's mitigated that a little. From the perspective of someone that lived in St. Albert anyway.
Also, just wait a few years and it will BE the downtown ariport.
I can get from St Albert to Leduc in 40 minutes during rush hour assuming no traffic accidents on the ring road. It would take just as long to get to the City Centre airport from the southside during rush hour. But now because the International Airport is in Nisku, they can greatly expand the airport and there is way more parking available. Not to mention it also free's up a lot of land downtown to be rezoned for student residential, considering how close it is to NAIT and Grant MacEwan.
EDIT: I also look forward to them completing the LRT line all the way to the airport.
I voted con. for a long time but I am just can't anymore. the problem is no other party in my eyes deserves a vote. I find the NDP's socialist platform terrible, the liberals still think they are the opposition and the green's are ridiculous.
gamertag: Canadianllama
Oh wait, I'm not a villain, damn. I guess I need to go switch teams and join 'em since clearly they are the winning team.
Oh wait, I'm an American, so I just have to watch MY rich scumbags reap the larger share of the benefits of doing deals with YOUR rich scumbags. Double-awesome.
Maybe think of something beyond just their jobs, like the future of the entire fucking planet? That's what I expect them to do. Think slightly more long term than their next fucking paycheque. I mean, I get that they depend entirely on the oil sands for the province's economy (which is entirely their own fucking fault, they've had decades to diversify) and we can't just cut that off at the knees, but they refuse to even CONTEMPLATE anything other than extract every last ounce of oil from the ground, damn the consequence.
And what the hell is wrong with the NDP, other than being "socialist"? All the data I have ever seen shows convincingly that socialism optimises the wealth and health of the entire population, at the cost of a few less billionaires.
Didn't they think that when they built the damn thing? Anyway, Edmonton didn't seem to be growing quite that fast when I was there.
But seriously, holy fuck that stupid airport is so fucking far from the city.
Um, what? Fishing is an INCREDIBLY heavily regulated industry. From Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, Environment Canada, Health Canada, Transport Canada, and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada all the way up to the United Nations General Assembly. To say that having Environment Canada, one of many federal ministries involved in regulation of the fishing industry, come in and regulate the oilsands industry is "anti-oilsands" and will irrevocably harm the oilsands industry, when oil is a much more precious resource than fish is anyways, shows a complete disregard for reality.
gamertag: Canadianllama
I'm saying that I'm okay with a party campaigning on regulating the nuclear energy industry, despite the fact that we have nuclear power plants here, because nuclear power plants are dangerous unlike fish, which are already heavily regulated up to the INTERNATIONAL LEVEL.
You're comparing oil and fish here.
Edit: Also, as an Ontarian, totally okay with them regulating the manufacturing industry a bit more so as to prevent workplace hazards, which have been increasing in recent years as unions have lost their power, and idiotic tax breaks for multinationals that then outsource everything.
Ditto. Which makes me think Mulclair probably fertilizes his garden at home with the remains of the underage prostitutes he sacrifices to his favorite demon(s) of the abyss.
I'm saying every time I get a positive vibe from a Canadian politician, something awful is revealed about them some time later.
This is hilarious in all of the right ways.
They don't 'distrust' the Liberals or NDP. Most of the rhetoric in Edmonton & Red Deer is, "If the Conservatives lost control, I could lose my job."
And a lot of the people saying that, huddled in desperation around Suncor's little pet, are probably correct.
So, a lot of Albertans have made their choice: selfish careers at the expense of the rest of the public & that will ensure Alberta has zero future. That's pretty shitty of them.
I have lived in the province my whole life: moved from a rural farming community called Haynes outside of the Nova Joffree Plant to Sylvan Lake to Red Deer to Edmonton to Calgary to Cochrane and then, finally, I managed to get out.
It is a shit hole, dotted with shitty little towns and two burned-out old cities that aren't safe to walk through at night. It's a frozen wasteland for, what, 8 of 12 months in the year? The entire province is fanatically hydrocarbon friendly - this is the busiest bar in downtown Edmonton (or it was when I was there; Whyte obviously had other venues, but Whyte services the suburbs more than the city core), and SAIT's facilities are all bought & paid for by Suncor & Enbridge. the U of C and SAIT regularly lease-out space for pseudo-scientific bullshit spiels held by Enbridge that try to 'debunk' global warming and a variety of other environmentally detrimental effects of shovelling dead stuff out of the ground to burn.
There's no diversity, in anything. If you think there's diversity, it's because you've never been outside of Alberta.
Doesn't mean you were a participant just because you were a resident. I wasn't. But most Albertans most definitely were.
I'm not saying it will go over well. I'm saying the reason it goes over badly is that they are idiots with no ability to think past their own immediate well-being, so fuck 'em.
And by fuck 'em I mean "describe it in the most positive way and try to educate people to get as many people on board so that the changes will be more successful, but don't let idiots stand in the way of necessary change".
I'm feeling rather unsure about the election in AB right now. I'm not too excited on Wild Rose, but that's only because of this energy dividend program they're proposing. So much wrong with it. Other than that though, I'm not too familiar with any alternatives that even feasibly have a shot of taking the top spot. And I live in Victoria now soooooo while I am still eligible to vote (still technically an AB resident) it's like... eeehhhh.
But that comes off as horrible voter apathy and I hate that.
So you want people to basically willingly throw away the ability to feed their families because you're smarter than them. That's gonna totally change their mind.
Slavery, open air atomic testing, dumping factory run-off into rivers and all sorts of other shit fed alot of people's families too. What's your point again?
He doesn't have one.
It's a load of crap to even claim the average worker in Alberta is 'supporting their family'. More like 'supporting their trophy wife who they will dump for a 20-something fling in 10~ years', assuming they haven't been laid-off and dumped themselves.
Even in the case of someone in a stable-for-now family, you're 'supporting' them in within an unstable economy. Do you think the oil sands will offer jobs forever? If not, where are your children going to get their jobs? If you're not sure of the answer to question, you're not really supporting them - you're just being a temporary breadwinner to prop-up an illusion of responsibility while guaranteeing that the next generation will grow-up destitute.
Was this a joke?