With the 2011 Canadian federal election a week away, voter turnout looking to thankfully exceed 2008’s embarrassingly dismal 58.8%, the polls are starting to look extremely interesting. While earlier polls indicated we could expect very nearly an identical Parliament to the one that existed before the election, an apparent surge in support for the NDP […]
Posts Categorized: Politics
Boobquake: in which Catherine gets annoyed at the press
“So! Boobs, huh?” That’s right, boobs. Or what-have-you. “I don’t get it.” Well, the other day, Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi–yes, he’s not even an Ayatollah. I know, right?–went and said some crazy shit about boobs and how they cause earthquakes. Or more specifically, no, he didn’t really. As PBS explains: While delivering […]
Sure, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t put–oh, right.
I’m skeptical of the usefulness of manned spaceflight, even as I believe in its long-term necessity. (Besides, should it be necessary for humans to leave Earth, we could get that going on fairly short order. The technology’s straightforward, even if we don’t have interplanetary ships today.) I was born almost a decade after the last time […]
Critical Pride Part 2: Midnight Mass & the Dyke March
As a followup to some of the discussion resulting from yesterday’s post comparing Pride and Critical Mass, I thought I’d extend the metaphor to my preferred alternative events: Midnight Mass and the Dyke March. Speaking personally, Pride is generally not generally my thing: it’s loud, it’s hot, and the parade, at least, is not really participatory. […]
Critical Pride
On his blog this morning, Buzz Bishop posed the question: Are you proud of Pride? In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sunday is really the best way to demonstrate that gays are just like everyone else. This reminded me of another familiar argument, about Critical Mass: are […]
Blogathon 2009: “Legally, we have to refer to you as Catherine December.”
After hearing Dave Olsen talk a bit about the restrictions being applied — in particular, to the “pedestrian corridors” being established here in Vancouver during the Olympics, I’m concerned about the implications for free speech, as well as the potential for these laws to endure after the Olympics have ended. I’ve been convinced for a long […]
How to write a US Political Thriller: Start with the Secret Service codenames.
So the most pressing question of the post US-election period, beyond “did adults seriously come up with the name ‘labradoodle’?” and “will Team Obama need to buy their own keyboards?” is clearly, “what is Sasha Obama’s Secret Service codename?” Apparently, it’s Rosebud. I find that a little weird on its own, but particularly so in […]
A question about Russia
Has Russia, in any of her historic guises, ever invaded a neighbouring state, won, and then withdrawn? I see.
Jack Bauer wouldn’t have stood for that!
I thought this was kind of interesting: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas”. I don’t just mean the culture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepiness that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the RCMP Security Service and the subsequent creation of CSIS, Canada’s modern intelligence agency. (For those of you outside Canada, CSIS is known […]