Stephen Roney's Blog, page 184

Vote Prediction for the Canadian Election

 

I have no idea who will win today's Canadian federal election, and I have no special insight. Just for fun, though, here is a seat projection--more or less what I think justice should produce as a result of the campaign. Now let's see how far it is from the reality.

NDP 40

Given that everybody likes Singh, and O'Toole does not look threatening to the left, and the Green vote will collapse, and a lot of people are fed up with Trudeau, I think the NDP's numbers should go up.

Bloc 40

Blanchet is good, and found a good issue. Again, I think people are annoyed with Trudeau. So the Bloc ought to pick up seats.

PPC 10

Okay, this is mostly wishful thinking. But the PPC is getting a lot of attention, and if people are really fed up, it is the ideal protest vote vehicle.

Greens 1

Elizabeth May holds her seat.

Liberals 120

Trudeau will probably do better than this based on the polls, but he really should not based on the campaign. He took the worst hit during the debates, Jody Wilson-Raybould's book came out, he called an unnecessary election, and there was nothing inspiring in his platform.

Conservatives 127

Also mostly wishful thinking--just enough to pip Trudeau. Basically calculated by giving them the remainder by default. This would be a gain of six from last time, which feels about right. O'Toole's campaign did a better job than Scheer. He came out of the starting gate well, and did not stumble in the debates. I do not see the PPC being much of a spoiler for him. The votes they get might have stayed home or gone to the Greens as the next best "plague on both your houses" option. If they cut his margin in some places, that works two ways: it may leave the Tory support more economically distributed, so they do not waste so much of it on unnecessarily high margins in Alberta. So the same rough voting percentage as last time could give them more seats.

Dumbest move in the election: O'Toole getting endorsed by Brian Mulroney. Mulroney is not remembered fondly even by Conservatives, and his term as leader ended in disaster for the party.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Voting Day

 Just returned from voting. Surprised by the lineup. When the polls opened there were at least two dozen people in line. When I exited, there were still twenty outside waiting to get in, not counting the lines inside the polling place. This is despite the fact that there seem to be no real lightning rod issues in the election, the platforms of the major parties are very similar, this riding is not competitive in an ordinary election, and the Conservative candidate was forced to withdraw before voting day.

Usually a heavy turnout is supposed to help the Liberals. But it might also betoken a “throw the rascals out” mood.

Late polls predict a Liberal, minority.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Confucius and Solomon on Whom to Vote for Tomorrow

 

Erin O'Toole

The first reading at mass this morning sounds like a comment on Erin O’Toole:

“The wicked say: 

Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us;

        he sets himself against our doings,

    reproaches us for transgressions of the law

        and charges us with violations of our training.

    Let us see whether his words be true;

        let us find out what will happen to him.

    For if the just one be the son of God, God will defend him

        and deliver him from the hand of his foes.

    With revilement and torture let us put the just one to the test

        that we may have proof of his gentleness

        and try his patience.

    Let us condemn him to a shameful death;

        for according to his own words, God will take care of him.”—Wisdom 2:12, 17-20

If someone pretends to be a friend to all, he is a friend to none; he is only acting in his own self-interest.

Anyone who is genuinely moral will stir up strenuous opposition: whether he calls them out or not, the evil will hate him.

Confucius made the same point. From memory: “If a man has no friends, it is necessary to make enquiries. If a man has no enemies, it is necessary to make enquiries.”

Just saying. I'd still be pleased if O'Toole removed Trudeau.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

No Waltzing with France

 

American submarine
Baguette.

A strange thing is going on Down Under. The Australians have suddenly announced a new strategic partnership with the UK and USA to equip their navy with nuclear submarines. In response, France has called their ambassadors to the US and Australia home for consultations—a very serious diplomatic gesture. The new deal means the sudden abrogation of a huge contract with France for conventional submarines. In addition, it appears that a number of Australian companies involved in the French contract will be hit hard by this about-face.

So why did the Australians do this? You could call it a dumb move, as the French have; but apparently the Australian government did this in consultation with the main opposition party, Labour. Moreover, the governments of the US and UK must be assumed to be making the same mistake.

This surely speaks instead of a rapidly changing strategic situation. The risk of war with China is now serious enough that business considerations or current diplomatic relations with an ally must take a rear seat to national security. Australia apparently believes its survival may depend on having these superior nuclear submarines, and perhaps more importantly, on a closer alliance and military coordination with the US and UK. The fact that the Aussie government got the opposition on board reinforces this assumption. This looks like an all-hands-on-deck situation.

The actual manufacture of the subs will take years; the alliance with the UK and US may be more immediately important.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Norm Macdonald on Canadian Elections

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Maxime Bernier: An Endorsement

 

Max Bernier

Everybody seems to be endorsing someone in the current Canadian federal election, over the last few days. Probably nobody cares; I’m just a guy; but it is time to again endorse Maxime Bernier.

Erin O’Toole has been warning against vote-splitting on the right. “If you want to get rid of Justin Trudeau, there’s only one choice.” This does not sound reasonable. O’Toole has run on a platform barely distinguishable from Trudeau’s; that makes the stakes trivial. Moreover, if the polls are right, we are going to get a minority government. If it is a Tory majority, they are going to need the cooperation of the NDP or Bloc to stay in power; this will pull them further left. 

So why waste your vote?

A vote for the PPC that is a vote for change. If we can get PPC representation in parliament, we can change the political discourse. We will start pulling the debate to the right, just as the NDP and the CCF before it have pulled it to the left for so long. Making the Liberals the Natural Governing Party.

I actually do not care much about Bernier’s signature issue this iteration, opposition to vaccine mandates. I do not think vaccine mandates are that sinister. They are an imposition on our freedom, but they seem reasonable; even Jason Kenney explains “we have run out of options.” As with the War Measures Act, when the emergency passes, such restrictions have always in the past been rescinded.

What does alarm me is the tendency to scapegoat the unvaccinated. A recent correspondent wrote “They're not listening to the bells in any temple except their own. They cling to their ‘rights’ without any corresponding sense of ‘responsibility’ to the wider community. And yet, they're the ones currently clogging our hospital systems.”

Logically, if the vaccines work, there is no reason to worry about anyone else being vaccinated, so long as you are. If the vaccines do not work, there is no reason to get vaccinated. 

So the issue is only the secondary one of “crowding the ICUs.” Others might miss treatments. Politicians like Trudeau are lying and stirring up hate by suggesting it is more than this. The appeal is “fifteen days to slow the spread.” Oops, sorry, make that eighteen months and counting.

But it is ambitious to expect many more than 72.9%--the current figure--to agree to vaccination. For some people—kids, for example, or people with allergies—the risk of vaccination is greater than the risk from the virus. Others will have phobias about vaccinations; phobia is not trivial. Others, especially racial minorities, do not trust the health system or the government. Do we want to target racial minorities for general condemnation?

The bottom line is, we are probably near the limit of what we can accomplish without coercive measures. Coercive measures are not warranted, and must be anathema. So insisting on vaccination rates higher than this may only be postponing our return to normalcy indefinitely.

But we are also near the limit we were told would lead to at least partial herd immunity; the more so when you realize that some of the unvaccinated will have already had COVID. Presumably, at 72.9%, almost everyone at high risk has been vaccinated. The wisest course might be to drop all restrictions and let the virus itself give us herd immunity quickly. The UK government seems to have decided on this course. 

Whether we do this or not, that it is a reasonable option means it is a misdirection to blame the continued lockdowns or the persistence of the virus on the unvaccinated.

The idea is being pushed aggressively by politicians and health officials, I suspect, because they have a tiger by the tail. If they lift restrictions, cases will spike for a time, and they will be blamed. Jason Kenney is living through this nightmare now in Alberta. If they continue the restrictions, people will blame them as they lose their savings, lose their jobs, lose their businesses, lose their homes, inflation gets worse and food becomes a problem too. Those in charge need a scapegoat, to deflect blame from themselves, and to avoid having to make a tough decision. “The unvaccinated” serves their purpose.

We ought not to fall for it. For one thing, if we do, innocents will suffer. For another, so long as we do, lockdowns will probably continue, as no politician has the nerve to end them.

Bernier says he will end them.

And his other policies are even better.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Interpretation of Dreams

 

Freud, apparently homosexual without knowing it, fingers somebody's penis.

It is unwise to listen to the psychologists about dreams. Most of what we think we know from psychology is from Freud. Freudianism has no scientific basis. He just made stuff up. 

Are his notions right? All we can do, since we have no evidence for them, is, first, to decide whether they make sense; whether they are at least internally consistent. Second, we can ask whether they conform to previous beliefs about dreams, which, while we equally may not know what evidence or reasoning they are based on, at least reflect the wisdom of the ages.  

On both counts, the answer has to be no. Freud is nonsense.

To begin with, Freud’s concept of a “subconscious” of repressed memories or urges has been debunked. Troubling memories are not repressed; if troubling or alarming, they are far more likely to be conscious. We have known this at least since Aristotle. Everybody remembers where they were on 9/11, for example, precisely because the experience was traumatic. Repression of urges, in turn, is not subconscious. It requires a conscious effort to fight urges. We have known this at least since Moses. That’s why we have the Ten Commandments.

One common idea about dreams is that all the characters in a dream are aspects of oneself. That is from Jung more than Freud, but Jung too has no scientific basis. When it is not based on Freud, Jung’s ideas come from old gnostic texts, which he apparently misunderstood. Even if he did not, there is a reason why Gnosticism is not a living school of thought—it did not survive the test of time.

You could say the same of the characters in Shakespeare—that they are all aspects of Shakespeare’s own mind. True, but only trivially true; Shakespeare is not trying to explain or understand himself, but the world. It makes more sense to see dreams as the working out in symbolic and narrative form of the problems we face during the day. Some of our problems may be with our selves; but some with other people, or God, or nature, or fate, or the post office. Think of the seven conflicts: man vs. man, man vs, self, etc. Dreams are stories, and all stories are based on these seven conflicts.

Perhaps the craziest idea about dream interpretation that we inherit from Freud is that things in dreams mean the opposite of what they say. This notion, absurd on its face, has become “common knowledge.” Freud seems to have invented the principle so that he could make anything mean anything he wished. For example, there is no trace of Freud’s “Oedipus complex” in the actual legend of Oedipus. Oedipus has no desire to kill his father or have sex with his mother. His father, on the other hand, wants to kill him, and his mother wants to have sex with him. Yet Freud cites this as his main literary evidence for the “Oedipus complex.” A cigar can be a cigar, if Freud wants it to be a cigar; or if he prefers, it can mean anything else.

Unfortunately, Freud has poisoned pretty much everything we think of as psychology, even if real psychology has mostly disavowed him, or thinks it has.

Best to assume that whatever you have heard from “psychology” is wrong.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Posted as a Public Service

 

Longtime Liberal ooperative Warren Kinsella says "don't vote for Justin Trudeau."

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Much Ado About Nothing

 

The recall of Gavin Newsom as California governor failed. This is disappointing but not surprising; it would have been revolutionary had he been removed, and Larry Elder made governor. But this does mean that a huge amount of money was spent, and the business of government interrupted, for no result.

Now the same thing is likely to happen in Canada. The probable outcome of the current federal election is a Liberal minority government, just as existed before the unnecessary election. A great deal of money spent, and the business of government suspended, to produce no change.

Even if the Canadian government is replaced by the Conservatives, it will not matter much; the Liberals and Conservatives are running on similar platforms, supporting the same things, differing only in detail.

One can expend a great deal of effort on democratic politics, and achieve nothing. It is useful for preventing the government from ignoring the interests of the people, and it is useful for managing the orderly succession in power, and giving the government legitimacy, but not for much else; not, despite our illusions, for making major changes in public policy. Politicians are almost always chiefly in the business of gaining and holding office. So they look at the opinion polls, and craft policies to attract majority support. So long as they do this, it makes little difference whether Party A or Party B is in power. Both main parties will run on more or less the same platform. Erin O’Toole’s current campaign is a case in point. 

Smaller parties, who have no chance of government, will instead stake out a distinct minority position, to appeal to some portion of the electorate that has strong feelings. This will be enough to get a few candidates elected; but not to get anything done, because they will never form a government. If they get close to taking power, they shift to seeking the majority position. We saw this when the NDP challenged for power in 2015: Mulcair actually moved to the right of the liberals.

All of this means that except for the occasional fluke, little gets done by electoral politics. It only reflects the culture.

The place where policies are forged is in the media. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Norm Macdonald

 

Until yesterday, when I heard he had died, I had never heard of Norm Macdonald. I also learn, from several sources, that he is the funniest man who ever lived. And he was Canadian. I have become that out of touch by living abroad for some years.

Then again, Macdonald may not have been all that famous. Other comedians idolized him, but his jokes did not, I hear in YouTube clips, often get loud hoots of laughter from the audience. He was not there to entertain. He was not there to please the audience.

So, if he was not an entertainer, what was he?

Reviewing clips on YouTube now, I think he was not just funny. He was not even just an artist, who did it for the craft, for beauty—although that is already immensely honourable. He was a saint. In Old Testament terms, he was a prophet.

he shows a relentless, courageous commitment to the truth, regardless of what those around him say or think. He shows a relentless sense of and concern for right and wrong. He will not be silent about OJ Simpson’s murders, or Bill Clinton’s, or Michael Jackson’s pedophilia.

This is what true sainthood is; not some nominal commitment to Jesus Christ, or believing this or that particular thing, or saying you do, or going regularly to a particular church, or synagogue, or mosque, or temple. That is Pharisaism, and Jesus himself condemned it above all things. True commitment to Christ is commitment to truth and good and beauty, wherever it leads.

Macdonald got away with speaking the truth publicly through the time-honoured tactic of pretending to be stupid or mad—his relentless grin, his belittling of himself, his remarkably well-feigned lack of awareness of how others might react. Much or all “insanity” may be such a mask; Shakespeare suggests so. The court fools of earlier times certainly employed the ruse.

Macdonald’s theology is very basic; or he pretends it is. He just claims “intuition” and arbitrary “belief.” But his jokes nail some of society’s acts of denial. Notably, the idea that alcoholism is a “disease” rather than a vice. Or that casual sex is perfectly okay. Or that any comment about blacks other than unambiguous praise is “racist.”

Macdonald had leukemia for nine years before he died; and nobody knew. He did not even tell his family. This sounds like heroic virtue. He did not want them to worry or suffer.

Why did he die so young? Because he had done his best, fought the good fight, won the race, and had earned his reward.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.