The Accidental Weblog

So one of the cars was at the dealer this morning. Maintenance thing. And while normally I could wait ‘til later to get it, when we had another vehicle around and even going that way, I had this weird computer problem, had to hit a local office for a bit…

Anyway, so I wind up in a cab, enroute to the dealer to get the car. And, as is generally the case in cabs, some AM talk radio pinhead is on the speaker.

So I am now qualified to give you the latest excuse some sad sack objectively pro-torture talk radio wanker is giving for the government not handing over documents in the Afghan detainee abuse scandal. It’s like, hawesome. Are you ready for this one, people? It doth take your breath away, truly…

It’s ‘cos Gilles Duceppe might see them.

Yeah, seriously, that’s the excuse now. See, sure he’s a duly elected federal representative of his riding, but, see, he’s also a separatist. And those are probably for killing soldiers or deliberately exposing intel sources in Afghanistan or somethin’… And obviously, the document trail on prisoner exchange policies would be just the way for him to do that, too… National security! It’s about national security! Honest! And copping to the fact that we really screwed the pooch, here, people, obviously that would compromise our brave soldiers’ lives… Somehow…

Honestly, I wonder where the nutjob Conservative supporters would even be without the separatists, where authoritarian dickweed governments in general would be without ‘national security’… On the former, especially, it seems to me the separatist thing was the excuse for proroguing parliament rather than accepting the reality they were, effectively, no longer the government some months back… Now they’re the reason they should keep stonewalling on why we handed folk over to be tortured?

Wow. That’s one flexible excuse, that one…

Oh noes. The separatists are comin’. Hide the women and children. Also: any potentially politically inconvenient documents, while you’re at it.

(And don’t go playing by the traditional governance rules of your democracy, dammit, whatever you do… I mean, that’s just what they’re expecting you to do…)

Ah, but what can ya do. Talk radio pinheads are apparently above such dreary concerns as, say, not colluding in torture… And anyway, I amused the driver a bit, when I proceeded to swear a blue streak at his radio for most of the ride. Tho’ I’m thinking: they probably get that a lot, these days…

Seriously, anyway, we need a proper conclusion, here, so let me make this short ‘n sweet:

Give it the fuck up, ya wanks. Shit’s gonna come out, whether you like or not; get over it. So shut it now and hand it over; no one with an IQ with more ‘n a single digit is buying all this distraction bullshit anymore. And thankee kindly.

Eamon’s sent a letter on the utterly appalling affaire Abdelrazik. I’ve been following this sporadically on The Current, made a mental note a few weeks ago (I think) that I really should say a word or two, virtually and in print to appropriate authorities… Tho’ the word ‘authority’ in this case tastes a bit too much like vomit in my mouth…

Let me sketch this out for you, how this Kafkaesque bullshit happens, again, in case you missed it: guy gets put on watch list, possibly for decent reason, possibly for less than decent reason, but intelligence is like that, I’m afraid. Information sources are good, bad, ugly, self-interested, misinformed, motivated by moolah, you know how it goes… So you’re supposed to do due diligence, check shit out…

Sometimes, especially in paranoid times, this goes awry all the same. Sometimes very awry. And innocent men—or as innocent as any of us are, anyway—get railroaded to some hellhole where they’re more than a bit too free in their use of electrical cables.

Now if the bureaucrats and elected representatives holding the bag for such missteps have any ethics, this can be fixed, again, as much as any such thing can be fixed. It’s hard to fix torture, really, it’s true…

But then there’s this danger, here, too, one that has arisen entirely too frequently in the west, this past decade… This danger they won’t have those ethics. Or not quite enough. There’s this huge ethical failing that becomes possible, here. Even sadly common…

See, that kinda event, that’s really embarrassing, even quite horrifying, and sitting in your nice little office or cubicle or what have you in Ottawa, it can get a bit abstract. See on one side, you’ve got your career and your political fortunes and those of all the folk you actually meet. On the other: your real responsibilities, and simple human dignity, and this minor thing you may have had occasional relations with in your workday life: the simple folk of the world call it the truth.

Naive, I know.

Now the former considerations too often seem to weigh more. So you obfuscate. And deny. And pass the buck. And that innocent man languishes forever in limbo, suffers smear after smear, sling and arrow after sling and arrow…

This pretty much makes you a total fucking asshole, yes. But you don’t notice. Or not enough. Career, remember? Political fortunes, remember? Never mind you’ve made this man’s life hell through no fault of his own…

Oh, but assholes? Just so you know: you’re not fooling anyone. Give it the fuck up. The whole country is on to you, now. It ain’t like it isn’t obvious now, dumbfucks.

Letter to come, I guess… mebbe a bit more formal/diplomatic. Can’t say I’m much in the mood for that, right now. Might have to swallow a stiff drink, first, do some stretching exercises…

I’m generally fascinated by the psychology of deception. It’s an old truism in the area, too, that frequently, you lie to yourself best and first. The guy who starts out by convincing people he’s heard a message from his god for purely pragmatic (political, military, or financial) reasons can and rather frequently does start believing it himself.

This may or may not actually be useful to the con. Believing it true probably makes you a more convincing liar (or are you still a liar… here the terminology does get complicated, but ya know). But there can be hazards to this. It’s all well and good convincing people you can deflect bullets with your bare hands if you’re just in it for the sponsorship deals, and never forget the vital sleight of hand in which your assistant’s live rounds get switched for blanks… No worries, there. Right up until you lose track of reality, and try to catch a real bullet…

In some fields, in which the truth is more a matter of interpretation, it’s even more complicated, I guess. Politics and economics are full of those. And if you’re trying to move popular opinion toward your position, as you argue for the position, your own committment to the position is likely to harden or even become more extreme. Start out by saying as an academic that a tight money supply is probably a good thing, then wind up running a political party that holds to that ideology, and it’s entirely possible you’ll start sounding less and less like an academic with a coupla theories he kinda likes and more and more like a fanatical zealot who will tighten the money supply over the dead bodies of your central banker and all of his staff, if they won’t go along with it…

And then there’s convincing yourself you’ve got a ‘mandate’ and the Canadian people are all on board with your program when your share of the popular vote rose by a whole 1.4 percent to all of 37.65, and well, the trouble you can get into is clear enough, I guess…

It’s funny. I’ve been listening to the Harper shills taking this to the airwaves for the last coupla days, as they desperately try to paint the opposition’s coalition plans as a horrifically antidemocratic coup or something, and I’ve heard an awful lot about that ‘mandate’ of theirs. And it struck me: they really believe it now, don’t they? No one’s been in their meetings politely reminding them they’re a minority government and will have to act like it; they’ve been trying to move public opinion toward this notion they can act like a majority if they damned well feel like it—trying, I suspect, to get into everyone’s heads, including the opposition’s, with that message—and apparently, prior to bringing in that economic statement, they’d started to believe it a little too well.

Better than just about everyone else, apparently. Which is always bad for a con.

I get that it’s probably ugly for them. I mean, they haven’t held the strings of power in a real way since Mulroney flamed out (or Campbell, technically, if you still wish to blame her)—or ever, if you see the Harperites more as a pretty thin rebranding of Reform than as a real coalition with the old Tories—as some of us do. Then they saw the Liberals go arrogantly corrupt in the sponsorship scandal, they figured it was their turn to reap the rewards of not being the ones caught in the act. But they’re still neocons in a country that really isn’t much behind that philosophy, apparently, and it hasn’t been going their way nearly so far as they’d like. Sure, they’d successfully painted Dion as a loser in the last election—and then watched as most of the support his party lost went to parties other than their own. Ripe stituation for convincing yourself things are better than they are, you’re doing better than you are…

So they told themselves they deserved to be a majority, dammit, and started acting like it, anyway… And, well, that went about as well for them as it usually does for minority governments.

What can ya say. I’m sitting here bemused, honestly. It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast of a choice, if you ask me: I’m okay with the notion of a Liberal-NDP coalition, but really, the Bloc, that’s another matter. Which is worse: neocon zealots or nationalist zealots? How heavily will the Bloc’s stamp lie on things in the coalition versus their influence now? Looks kinda like we’re about to see, I guess.

But anyway, like I said: here’s another point of data for your consideration: you’re always the easiest person to fool. But that’s not always in your interest.

… governments, that is. The news today is a certain band of minority neoliberal thugs, in a move that should surprise no-one who knows said mob’s capacity for this kind of ideologically-motivated BS, are playing the standard crap such parties always do: trying to use a crisis to hack big pieces out of their political enemies, instead of actually, y’know, trying to do anything substantitive about the oncoming economic mess.

More precisely: they’re trying to take away the federal public service’s right to strike (right… people are gonna strike now, chuckleheads), and, icing on the cake, kill some $27 million that normally goes to registered political parties on a per-vote basis…

As you may be able to work out, or may already know, that’s about $1.90 a vote, and I’d rather expect most folk between these shining seas aren’t too upset to think some $1.90 of their money might go to the party they themselves voted for… It’s not uncommon in democracies, and a nice side effect is that smaller parties not really up to large-scale fundraising get a better shot than they might otherwise, if they can just convince people to vote for them… But this hasn’t stopped the usual neanderthal shock jock types from calling it ‘political welfare’…

I’d call it more larceny to take it away, really. Seeing as most politically educated voters know perfectly well their vote gives that small chunk of their money to their party of choice—and these are voters and parties that already got screwed out of appropriate representation by vote splitting giving the advantage to the thugs currently (nominally, and for now) in power.

More fun ‘n games. The $27 million it is, of course, somewhere a little over 1/100th of one percent of the $200 billion federal budget, and they’re trying to call this sensible and necessary austerity. There’s a fiscal crisis, y’know… So hey, when you’ve got an uneducated, rabid base who can be turned on a dime to carp about anything you can plausibly call ‘welfare’, why would you put real work into addressing that incoming crisis when you can just dick around with that chump change—the very chump change that will hamstring your now very divided and disorganized opposition, who are, yes, currently very much relying on that subsidy to pay back their costs from the last election they just went through (oh… yeah… also one they wound up fighting at Harper’s initiative). Essentially, the Harper ideologues are saying: yes, you had to fight this on our timetable, and people voted for you—more for you than for us, actually—but we’re gonna try to burn you and them for that subsidy, anyway, see if we can’t bankrupt our opposition…

Anyway: the fun part. That previously very divided opposition is now looking a bit less divided, all of a sudden, and talking coalition.

This would amuse me, it would, if the buggers who only got in on vote splitting on the left suddenly lost it when they tried a stunt like this and managed, with such petty politicking in the face of a crisis, to get those votes put back together.

Let’s hope.

Tonight on Doc Zone: The U.S. vs Omar Khadr.

I’m not gonna say much about it yet. PVR’s set; more to follow time permitting. Maybe just this, I guess, as preliminaries:

• The Guantanamo detentions are, quite simply, illegal, in so very many ways and in so blatant a fashion that brandishing more precise, legalistic descriptions of why it is appropriate to describe them as such is now a few miles beyond redundant. If you’re curious about those finer points of law (tho’ this is a bit like asking whether flying airplanes into buildings and killing thousands might have been a technical violation of certain miscellaneous civic ordinances—a parallel I use with obvious consideration), do feel free to google habeas corpus, torture, and so on, work it out for yourself. Bodies and persons finding, generally, that the place is about as embarrassing a stain on a western government’s record of human rights and respect for the rule of law as currently exists include HRW and prominent advisers to the UN, among others. The US’ own supreme court has ruled the place isn’t getting habeas corpus even remotely right (gee… seven years without a trial… where do you suppose they get that idea?), and Canada’s supreme court, citing this decision, has ruled Canadian officials have been complicit in human rights abuses violating Canadian, US, and international charters, in participating in the process (CSIS agents interviewed Khadr at Guantanamo, and Canada has turned over documents on Khadr to the US).
• The gentleman who ‘interviewed’ Khadr in procuring the ‘evidence’ the prosecution is to use in his ‘trial’ (note: yes, the scare quotes have their place) has himself said he considered what he did torture. The prosecution, apparently, disagrees.
• Canada is the only country that has not demanded the return of its detainees from Guantanamo. The ever brilliant Stockwell Day has simply said he disagrees with the supreme court’s findings, here. Nice to know. I believe the appropriate phrase here is somethin’ along the lines of: ‘Thank you, Mr. Day; your opinion is noted, and stupid.’

Y’know, I could also write the now standard boilerplate commenting that I really haven’t a whole lot of affection for some of the folk who were running Afghanistan around the time Khadr wound up in US hands, nor am I particularly onboard with some of the friends this kid was running with at 15 years of age (yes, he was also a child soldier at the time of capture… adding a few UN principles to the violations our nations are already on the hook for in this mess). But I figure this should go without saying. The larger and rather more critical point is: if you’d like to argue the West actually has a point to make here about concepts of justice and democracy allegedly being defended in kicking the Taliban outta Afghanistan, it might help our position a bit if, y’know, we actually demonstrated we have some respect for those ourselves.

Anyway. Like I said. 9pm ET this eve. Probably worth watching.

So we do the snap election thing. Get a coupla weeks of campaigning. Phone and doorbell ringing intermittently with candidates and/or the candidates’ volunteers and/or the candidates’ computers calling to request my support… And what do we get?

The same guys. And it’s still a minority. Tho’ a slightly bigger one.

In other words, the sum total of this exercise, after Mr. ‘Oh, no, elections of convenience are baaaad; I’m agin’ em’, honest’ called his election of convenience was: slightly more of the Conservative MPs can now go to the bathroom at once.

Yes, Mr. Still-The-Prime-Minister-Technically-Anyway, we the electorate will grant you and your less continent members this boon…

You’re welcome. Use this power wisely. And we’ll see y’all again in another year or so, I guess.

Sure, you don’t really hear much about active, deliberate political intimidation or voter suppression in Canada. Caging lists, slimy operators calling students tellin’ em’ they’re not allowed to vote if they’re still dependents on their parents’ tax forms, rumours circulating you can’t vote if you’ve got unpaid parking tickets or if your home’s just been foreclosed upon, deliberate operations to jam an opposing party’s phone banks a la New Hampshire… Not the sort of thing you hear about, ‘round here. Nor, for that matter, thugs out to directly intimidate the supporters of rival parties. I mean, what the hell do you think this is, Zimbabwe?

But… erm… then again…

Right. Threatening phone calls and snipped brake lines, ‘cos someone ain’t buyin’ your particular candidate? Nice.

Y’know, if I believed in a hell, I’d reserve a special place there for the assholes who do this kind of thing. Failing that, I guess what I can hope is these lovely pieces of work earn ‘emselves a most memorable jail sentence.

So there’s this other debate tomorrow, apparently. Some Paulson or Pele or Peilin person versus some guy called Biding or somethin’. Anyway, word is, people might be watching, instead of the main event, the Canadian leaders’ debate…

No accountin’ fer taste.

Seriously, the comments in the linked story are sadly true. Here we are, in Canada, sitting on the verge of giving the Harper Conservatives (note: no, not ‘Progressive-Conservatives’… that would be… wrong… very, very wrong…) a majority, and no one so much wants to watch, do they? That whole bit about someone nominating the mayor of Wasilla as their VP candidate, and her bouncing around between, apparently, formidable sound-bite jingoism judo in the Alaska debates at last report, and coming off a bit like a deer in the headlights in an interview with a normally pretty easygoing reporter last week, it’s gonna spur some curiosity about what’s gonna happen there, sure…

Me, I guess I’m gonna do my civic duty and watch the locals do their thing… Y’know… Possibly with Atrios’ comment threads on the US VP thing running on a laptop, so I can at least get the reaction/gist stuff…

Truth be told, yes, I sure as hell do care. Beyond general distrust of the party that gave us Stockwell Day, it mostly comes down to thinking anyone as dedicated as the Harper conservatives to keeping their candidates from actually showing up at candidates’ meetings or talking to the press—to the point they stage manage the fuck outta Hill press conferences and whisk their people into the RCMP-protected holding area to avoid such ugly complications as national reporters asking awkward questions—probably isn’t so likely to do democracy real well. So please, please, please, let’s not give these nutters a majority. Please. Pretty please. You don’t want those assholes to get a majority…

Erm… Sorry… I said that ‘assholes’ part out loud, didn’t I?

Anyway. Yeah. Just reminding folks who vote up here. There’s a couple debates tomorrow. Multitask, if you must.

Not making this up. One Stephen Harper did, just the other day, use the precise and now entirely too-resonant phrase “the fundamentals of the Canadian economy are sound”.

Erm… Great. Thanks. Great way to put it, dude. That’s ever so reassuring, now, really…

(Hides under bed.)

So a colleague of mine was in town for a bit last week—and while exiting a restaurant at which we’d stopped for lunch, we were discussing l’affaire Bernier.

We got to the subject of how close to perfect the whole thing was. It had almost everything: sex, documents of interest to intelligence organizations, bikers, hell, even allegations of a bug in a bedroom. What more do you need? asks said colleague.

Car chases, I suggest. It needs a car chase. Otherwise, it’s perfect.

Ah, I’m so behind the curve. Wasn’t even thinking. No, no, a car chase mighta had a certain quality, but damn, what this story really needs is a mafioso.

Erm… Yeah. Just like that.

Perfect.