Some people have no luck.
Here the Conservative Party spends all this time and effort to do outreach to ethnic communities, with more success than failure, I believe (obviously the black community is a total loss).
And then their BFF in the Fraser Institute come along with a report that calls immigrants parasites who suck more from the country than they give. The reaction from leaders of the immigrant communities is predictable, of course.
Thomas Tam of the Chinese support organization S.U.C.C.E.S.S. (a very successful organization, all sarcastic punning aside) complained, "There are many bright, highly educated immigrants who did not cost Canada anything in education. If [the authors] are economists, why didn't they quantify the social benefits?" (The Asian Pacific Post, May 26 edition, p. 15).
Well, Mr. Tam, it's very simple. They hate colored folk.
And they include you among the colored folk, though they're happy to have your votes at elections and your stupider members as MPs and Vice-Secretary in Charge of Sitting By The Door And Pretending We Are Not Bigots.
Hope you didn't vote Conservative. It's going to be a long few years for me, but it's going to be a longer few years for anyone with more than a touch of melanin in their skin. A lot longer.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Trying to explain
I can't really get annoyed at others who find it difficult to understand my condition. After all, I lived inside it for five decades and didn't understand it very well.
I was talking with my dear one last night, after we had finished a game of Left 4 Dead 2. She, being a normally motivated person, wants to up the difficulty of the games we play so as to get a greater sense of accomplishment at winning. I don't. I never play video games at anything other than the Very Easy setting, because I get nothing from it. She's trying to understand that, but it's hard, especially for a former CounterStrike player.
So why play the games at all? I certainly don't get a kick out of "winning," at any difficulty level. If I've been enjoying the game, my feeling when it ends is more one of sadness than anything else, especially with slower-paced RPG games like Fallout: New Vegas, which ends by detailing the consequences for other people and organizations of all the decisions you have made during the game. (It's virtually impossible to have a completely happy ending, by the way -- somebody always gets screwed.) Sometimes I don't bother to go to the ending at all -- I've never finished Crysis, for example, because I find aliens in video games mostly asinine. But I've played the first and middle parts again and again.
Process. Process is all. I'm closing in now on a thousand hours of playing Fallout: New Vegas alone, which is a bit lunatic, especially for a single-player game. It's because I focus on process. When the game ends, it's always tempting to see what another character with other attributes would make of it. I'm playing a woman now (for some reason I only play women) who has Strength, Charisma, and Luck maxed out at the expense of other attributes. It's worked fairly well, at least better than I feared. I've developed her Barter attribute to 80+ when I usually just ignore that part of character development, with interesting effects on the game as a whole (shitloads of money make a difference here, as anywhere). Now she's working her way through the add-on campaign Dead Money, with me wondering whether my original skimping on Perception is going to screw up my relationship with the mute Christine. Oh well. I suppose I'll survive it. But I also suspect I'll be back with a character with Perception maxed out, just to see what happens to the flow of the game under those different conditions.
Process. It fascinates me. The journey, rather than the arrival. I need to stay in the middle of things always. That's harder than it sounds.
I was talking with my dear one last night, after we had finished a game of Left 4 Dead 2. She, being a normally motivated person, wants to up the difficulty of the games we play so as to get a greater sense of accomplishment at winning. I don't. I never play video games at anything other than the Very Easy setting, because I get nothing from it. She's trying to understand that, but it's hard, especially for a former CounterStrike player.
So why play the games at all? I certainly don't get a kick out of "winning," at any difficulty level. If I've been enjoying the game, my feeling when it ends is more one of sadness than anything else, especially with slower-paced RPG games like Fallout: New Vegas, which ends by detailing the consequences for other people and organizations of all the decisions you have made during the game. (It's virtually impossible to have a completely happy ending, by the way -- somebody always gets screwed.) Sometimes I don't bother to go to the ending at all -- I've never finished Crysis, for example, because I find aliens in video games mostly asinine. But I've played the first and middle parts again and again.
Process. Process is all. I'm closing in now on a thousand hours of playing Fallout: New Vegas alone, which is a bit lunatic, especially for a single-player game. It's because I focus on process. When the game ends, it's always tempting to see what another character with other attributes would make of it. I'm playing a woman now (for some reason I only play women) who has Strength, Charisma, and Luck maxed out at the expense of other attributes. It's worked fairly well, at least better than I feared. I've developed her Barter attribute to 80+ when I usually just ignore that part of character development, with interesting effects on the game as a whole (shitloads of money make a difference here, as anywhere). Now she's working her way through the add-on campaign Dead Money, with me wondering whether my original skimping on Perception is going to screw up my relationship with the mute Christine. Oh well. I suppose I'll survive it. But I also suspect I'll be back with a character with Perception maxed out, just to see what happens to the flow of the game under those different conditions.
Process. It fascinates me. The journey, rather than the arrival. I need to stay in the middle of things always. That's harder than it sounds.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Vain Hopers
I didn't think it would happen so soon.
Thanks to here for bringing the good news.
Already, the threats are being made: a radical Right agenda or bust. Not threats to Canadians in general (though they are surely under threat) but to Harper from some of his own "supporters."
These people live in an alternate reality where less than 40% of the vote, secured by soft-pedaling extremist views, is a landslide victory. Where Canadians just can't wait to ban gay marriage and abortion, and restore capital punishment. Where guns are a fetish and the protests of police chiefs at loosening regulations becomes stupid babble to be ignored.
They'll make Harper into the Kim Campbell of the new millennium if they get their way. They'll throw a huge tantrum and possibly walk out if they don't.
Popcorn time.
Thanks to here for bringing the good news.
Already, the threats are being made: a radical Right agenda or bust. Not threats to Canadians in general (though they are surely under threat) but to Harper from some of his own "supporters."
...the Harper minority government did precious little to implement a conservative agenda. Rather than making government smaller, the Harper Tories made it bigger; rather than cutting spending they massively increased it; rather than providing fiscally responsible policies, they amassed record-setting deficits.And now it's time to become true conservatives, or else they will take their ball and go play elsewhere.
These people live in an alternate reality where less than 40% of the vote, secured by soft-pedaling extremist views, is a landslide victory. Where Canadians just can't wait to ban gay marriage and abortion, and restore capital punishment. Where guns are a fetish and the protests of police chiefs at loosening regulations becomes stupid babble to be ignored.
They'll make Harper into the Kim Campbell of the new millennium if they get their way. They'll throw a huge tantrum and possibly walk out if they don't.
Popcorn time.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
How very interesting
I noticed at the supermarket that an NDP MP who was dubious about the received account of bin Laden's death got front-page coverage in the Notional Past.
I eagerly await similar treatment for Conservative MPs who question evolution and global warming, the latter in particular. Doubting a US government story is not going to get anyone killed, though I don't think the doubt is justified in this case. Doing nothing about global warming will get us killed.
I eagerly await similar treatment for Conservative MPs who question evolution and global warming, the latter in particular. Doubting a US government story is not going to get anyone killed, though I don't think the doubt is justified in this case. Doing nothing about global warming will get us killed.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Oy vey.....
Whining is tedious. Believe me, I've done enough of it in my time.
When I cruised some of my favorite blogs to survey the results of the Canadian election, it was easy enough to shrug off the gloating of the right. It's a good sign, since pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit presages destruction. Humility after victory is not only good taste but good sense, since victory often lays the foundation for a later defeat. Let them nag Harper all the way to the right edge of sanity, and over it. They'll kill him if he lets them, and if he fails to play the game their way, they'll be at his throat. That's popcorn time for progressives.
The plain fact is that although this is a majority fair and square by the rules everyone was using, it is also a government that has minority support among the Canadian people as a whole. Some of Harper's "friends" seem to think that a majority of seats means the "silent majority" of citizens have spoken. With friends like that, Harper's not going to need enemies. The people did speak, and they said Harper sucks, although they did not speak with the united voice the rules of the game require to remove him. Fair enough. Still, if the Conservative Party insists on behaving as if a 40% level of support is 60 or 70 per cent, they will kill themselves, no ifs, ands, or buts.
No, the nattering of the tighty righties is music to my ears. They're no more than the liveliest maggots in the animated corpse that is Canadian conservatism today. It's my friends that annoy me.
You know? The ones who are sure everything is over because one election was narrowly lost. Oy vey. What if Harper had won a real majority, sixty or seventy per cent of the vote? What would they do then? Move to Antarctica?
No. Even if Harper had won with 90 per cent, he would still be a petty, vindictive piece of work motivated by the obscure fermentation of a set of private hatreds and fears that would fascinate a psychiatrist. He would still be wrong. And he would still deserve to be opposed. It would be more difficult, but it would still be the right thing to do.
Of course it would have been better to win, but we didn't. Live with it.
And now, if he cannot rigidly control the lunatics in his ranks, Harper is going to begin to win the next election for us. I think he will try, being an excellent politician, but I also think he will fail. They're out and howling at the moon already. I don't envy him.
The task immediately before us is to make the next four years the longest and most miserable, harried four years of Harper's life. He lied his way through the election, but now reality will be calling in the checks he wrote on it, and there isn't enough in the bank to cover them. Take the F-35 fighter project. What happens when people fully realize that this is going to cost us over four hundred million dollars a plane rather than seventy-five million? (The $400 million is the price the Danish government has budgeted for.) How does he explain that one?
Oh, some will complain, people didn't listen to that before. Well, people need a lot of reminding sometimes. It is our job to make sure they get it. Don't bother complaining that they're stupid. Stupid or not, they still vote, and most of them can count well enough. If Harper continues to waste their money chasing his phantoms, sooner or later they will become aware of it.
When I cruised some of my favorite blogs to survey the results of the Canadian election, it was easy enough to shrug off the gloating of the right. It's a good sign, since pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit presages destruction. Humility after victory is not only good taste but good sense, since victory often lays the foundation for a later defeat. Let them nag Harper all the way to the right edge of sanity, and over it. They'll kill him if he lets them, and if he fails to play the game their way, they'll be at his throat. That's popcorn time for progressives.
The plain fact is that although this is a majority fair and square by the rules everyone was using, it is also a government that has minority support among the Canadian people as a whole. Some of Harper's "friends" seem to think that a majority of seats means the "silent majority" of citizens have spoken. With friends like that, Harper's not going to need enemies. The people did speak, and they said Harper sucks, although they did not speak with the united voice the rules of the game require to remove him. Fair enough. Still, if the Conservative Party insists on behaving as if a 40% level of support is 60 or 70 per cent, they will kill themselves, no ifs, ands, or buts.
No, the nattering of the tighty righties is music to my ears. They're no more than the liveliest maggots in the animated corpse that is Canadian conservatism today. It's my friends that annoy me.
You know? The ones who are sure everything is over because one election was narrowly lost. Oy vey. What if Harper had won a real majority, sixty or seventy per cent of the vote? What would they do then? Move to Antarctica?
No. Even if Harper had won with 90 per cent, he would still be a petty, vindictive piece of work motivated by the obscure fermentation of a set of private hatreds and fears that would fascinate a psychiatrist. He would still be wrong. And he would still deserve to be opposed. It would be more difficult, but it would still be the right thing to do.
Of course it would have been better to win, but we didn't. Live with it.
And now, if he cannot rigidly control the lunatics in his ranks, Harper is going to begin to win the next election for us. I think he will try, being an excellent politician, but I also think he will fail. They're out and howling at the moon already. I don't envy him.
The task immediately before us is to make the next four years the longest and most miserable, harried four years of Harper's life. He lied his way through the election, but now reality will be calling in the checks he wrote on it, and there isn't enough in the bank to cover them. Take the F-35 fighter project. What happens when people fully realize that this is going to cost us over four hundred million dollars a plane rather than seventy-five million? (The $400 million is the price the Danish government has budgeted for.) How does he explain that one?
Oh, some will complain, people didn't listen to that before. Well, people need a lot of reminding sometimes. It is our job to make sure they get it. Don't bother complaining that they're stupid. Stupid or not, they still vote, and most of them can count well enough. If Harper continues to waste their money chasing his phantoms, sooner or later they will become aware of it.
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