Barrel Strength

Essentially for the same reason that Bismarck favoured the Russians crushing the Polish rebellion. They do for us what we could not do for ourselves. They also allow us to govern all of Canada by letting the Conservatives hold English Canada. It is a sweet deal. We ought to be more grateful to them.

What!!??
Let me explain.

1. The Bloc ties down forty to sixty seats which are not easily available to Conservatives but which might be available to the Liberals. Despite the fact that the Liberals have been weak in Quebec outside of Montreal (RoQ) for a generation, this is  much more their possible territory than it is the Conservitives’.
2. With the Bloc denying the Liberals an easy majority in Quebec, electoral majorities must now be formed in English Canada.
(Think about that for a moment. English Canada is now the electoral pivot)
3. The Conservatives are better able to respond to the needs inclinations and interests of English Canada than the Liberals.
4. Michael Ignatieff and his advisors do not realize this yet.
5. Michael Ignatieff is the last Liberal leader who will fail to realize this.

So I say, thank you Bloc Québécois, for giving us the victory. It should never be forgotten what passionate hatred the French Canadian bear the Liberals for shaming them with the sponsorship scandals of a few years ago. French Canadians in Quebec had cleaned up their politics for a generation, except for the federal Liberals in Quebec. As long as the Bloc chooses not to participate in the federal Cabinet, and consents to receive the benefits of federalism without participating in government, the Conservatives will govern Canada. This suggests that Prime Minister Harper needs to avoid calling them nasty names.

I was talking to the former editor of a major Canadian newspaper and the subject came up why the mainstream media are so relentlessly left-wing, of the we-are-always-wrong school. My friend the Dark Lord had occasioned this discussion by sending me Barbara Oakley’ article on the same subject.
Oakley explains the group think well:
“But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it’s actually not the right thing at all. It’s rather like the Skinnerian viewpoint on psychology. For a full half century, psychologists insisted it wasn’t proper to posit anything going on inside people’s heads. Advances in psychology ground to a halt during that time, but it was impossible to convince mainstream psychologists that there was anything wrong to their approach. After all–everybody was using Skinner’s approach, and everybody couldn’t be wrong.”

We had nothing to add to the view the journalists are mentally lazy conformists who believe, for whatever reasons, that they are morally superior to most conservatives (i.e liberals) as well as the millions of others who do not share their bohemian self-regard. What he did say however, struck home.

“They (mainstream media) will continue to be that way until the last newsroom turns off the lights. And when the last lights are turned off, the Canadian public will say: so what?”

Today’s Dear Abby column features a letter from a Reverend Alton Paris, “American” (sic) who  explains the evolution of the terms used to designate American black people. The letter is instructive because it sets out what an American black man thinks of the various labels applied over time to American blacks/Negroes/African Americans/whatever they are called this decade.

“We were called by many names – most of them negative, such as “Negro”, “Coloured”, “African,” the infamous “N-word,” “Afro-American” and finally, “black.” All of these at one time we considered negative because they didn’t represent self-identification.

“The black power movement occurred when Black Americans changed the negative term “black” to the positive term “Black.”

Eh? How does Black with a capital B constitute positivity and black  with a small b negativity?

The argument comes down to: it is because we say it is.

I am reminded of one of the weirdest things I ever witnessed. About a decade ago, a leftist Canadian woman heard her American leftist friend use the word “Eskimo”, as nearly everyone does in the United States. The Canadian gently pointed out that the correct term for Eskimo was Inuit. What was surprising was the immense gratitude with which the American received this knowledge. It was if the faithful had taken Communion at the hands of the Pope. Her face lit up with pleasure. Now she had the politically correct term, with which she could  correct the speech of other Americans, and another code word to distinguish the politically Saved from the politically Damned. Like Black (enlightened) and black (benighted).