I'm Getting Bad Vibes

Not so much because of the invite/event itself:

...although it does strike me as a bit silly.  Your "favorite virtue"?  What?  Is this some kind of virgins only event?  But because it reminds me too much of this:

And we all know what happened last time the LPC invoked Andy Warhol.

Yo Federal Liberal Leadership Candidates (Esp. Justin Trudeau): Bullshit Cometh Before The Fall

If you take the numbers from the last NDP leadership convention as a guide--and there is no reason not to--about 10% of the people you recruit on-line will be arsed enough about the whole enterprise to actually vote. The rest will forget they signed up.  So this story is just puff.  As a matter of fact, I think the only possible way to defeat Justin Trudeau at this leadership thingy in April is to get actual bodies on the floor and hope his internet army is busy dating their bong that weekend.  Though it probably won't work.

And, the thing is, with the NDP nobody cared because nobody watched.  I know real political affairs professionals who managed to entirely avoid that weekend of conventioneering, and I was the one to tell them how shitty the whole thing went.  But it didn't matter.  Mulcair gave a nice interview on Sunday, and here we are. The LPoC doesn't have that advantage.  The media obsesses over us even when we're the 3rd party.  We are just that sexxxy.  So no flaw will go unexposed.  Over-hype your on-line ambitions, and all you'll hear about afterwards is how disappointing the result was.

Word, sexxxy babies.

Trudeau and Garneau On Guns

I have been pondering the recent policy reverals on the long-gun registry from LPoC leadership candidates Justin Trudeau and, now, Marc Garneau.  I actually don't find Justin's response that hard to parse: if there was a registry left to defend, he would defend it, but now that its gone resurrecting the thing would come at too great a political cost. And  I accept that walking away from the registry at this time may be an unfortunate political necessity.

But I also whole-heartedly agree with The Cowboy: in rural Canada, where opposition to the registry has been strongest (in fact I would say: the only part of Canada where opposition to it is particularly marked) a long gun is the murderer's weapon of choice.  I would also point out that most violent per capita municipalities  in Canada are out in Toryland, and suggest that at least some of the overblown reaction to the registry was the same kind of defensiveness you get from Scarberians when you mention gang violence.

So as policy the gun registry was clearly defensible, and given the way our healthcare system is structured, without it taxpayers in urban Canada will see a larger proportion of their hard-earned money funneled away to pay for the prosthetic feet of Alta. oil-rig workers who get drunk and try to kill one another with rifles but accidentally blow their own toes off instead. But I just don't see the registry as an achievable goal at the moment.  So leave it be.  Eventually demographics will solve the problem for us.  The registry's most vocal critics are, demographically, angry old men who yell at passing clouds, and as time goes by there will be fewer and fewer of them.  Then... a private member's bill late in the night and ....Ptonk!  The West is civilized again.