Quotulatiousness

March 19, 2014

Running a Canadian political campaign

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

At Gods of the Copybook Headings, Richard Anderson explains the nuts and bolts of setting up and running a federal political campaign (in this particular example, he’s discussing the Liberal Party of Canada):

In order to run a political campaign you need many people. You need a leader, who is the public face of the party and all around political Messiah. You’ll also need lots of overpaid and over credentialed back office strategists. If you’re wondering what a “strategist” does it depends on the individual and the party. Some fetch coffee and others drink that coffee. It’s an open question as to which of these two groups is the least valuable to a political campaign. My bet is on the coffee drinkers.

Beyond the Messiah and his coffee fetching / drinking entourage there are some actual technical people. There are pollsters who know something about math, admittedly just statistics rather than anything with letters and weird Greek looking symbols, but stats is a type of math so we’ll give them a pass. Then there are the IT people who design the website. There are also the communications people. In days gone by these were writers, as in people who loved and respected the English language. Today writers have been replaced by “communications specialists.” This latter group treats the English language the way a sailor treats a Marseilles whore.

The above groups are paid political operatives. Their salaries are quite pricey, since bull shitting is apparently a highly marketable skill set in modern Canada. But to run a big political campaign you need a lot more people. Someone has got to knock on doors, nail in signs, man phone banks and get insulted by angry voters. To pay all these people is beyond the resources of a Canadian political party whose annual budgets are rounding errors in most US Senatorial races. That’s why you need volunteers.

[…]

So why would an otherwise semi-rational person volunteer for a political campaign? Well there are the idealists fighting for a better world. God Bless Them. No one else will. This explains a significant portion of those who volunteer for the Conservatives and the NDP. The Liberal Party hasn’t had any principles since they buried Laurier, both figuratively and literally. A sane person no more joins the Liberal Party out of idealism than a man visits a prostitute in search of true love.

That’s two whore jokes in almost as many paragraphs. That’s quality writing people. Appreciate it.

The Grits are the party of political operatives. There are the actual paid political operatives and then there are the interns, otherwise known as volunteers. You volunteer for the Liberal Party largely because you believe that one day, should the political stars align, you too will have someone else fetch the coffee. Besides it looks good on the law school application.

Alex Marwood: “Fred Phelps might finally be teaching us a lesson”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

Alex Marwood contemplates the actual lessons to be drawn from the impending death of the head (former head?) of the flamboyantly repellant Westboro Baptist Church:

But here’s the thing that might indeed deserve celebrating: I think that, in his final hours, Fred Phelps might finally be teaching us a lesson. And it’s not the lesson that his spittle-bowed ranting, his family’s laughable adaptations of pop songs and psychotic banner-waving have been intended to teach us. For years now, I’ve looked at Westboro and wanted to ask them about their take on the Seven Deadly Sins. The old man and his numerous offspring seemed, you see, to base their style upon them. Wrath he had, in plenty — but Phelps also seem to be driven as much by envy (of the “fags” who were getting preferential enabling), a prideful self-belief only challenged by that of L Ron Hubbard, greed, as demonstrated in all those juicy court settlements from local councils who sought to limit his ‘freedom of speech’ and, well, frankly, quite a bit of sloth, sitting about in his compound sending the grandkids out to demonstrate. As to gluttony and lust — well, no one really knows what went on behind the walls of that compound when Louis Theroux wasn’t filming, but the guy has 13 kids and a bit of a paunch, which suggests a degree of busyness, to say the least. And here he is, at the end of his life, alone, unmourned and, as many people believe, anyway, probably going to hell.

So thank you, Fred. You’ve taught us how not to live our lives. Actually, I would hazard that, if anything, Fred’s career has done gay rights a favour. For every sad-act who got themselves sucked in by them, there will be thousands upon thousands who will have thought “well, if that’s the face of the moral Right, I’m out,” and gone and shaken hands with their local homosexuals. In a land where the values of Christianity often seem to have been warped by the twin evils of psychopathically Right-wing Right-wingers and greed-fuelled fraudsters, Phelps picked up the ball, glued spikes on it and kicked it into the faces of small children and then sued them for getting in the way. He will have done more to turn people away from his brand of God than even Morris Cerullo. So thanks, Fred! If any of the kids are looking for an example of a Christian life, we now have a perfect example to show them, and say “the opposite of that, basically”. Well played, and flights of something sing thee to thy rest!

This isn’t Cold War 2.0, it’s a return to historical norm

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:31

Jonah Goldberg asks everyone to stop talking about a new Cold War, because the old one was a unique event (or event-chain) and what we’re seeing now is more like history unfolded before the Cold War came along to freeze geopolitics for a few decades.

… the Cold War was far more than a conflict with Russia. Everyone should agree on that. Communism, anti-Communism, and anti-anti-Communism divided Americans for decades, particularly among academic and media elites. Right and Left may still argue over the merits of those divisions, but no informed person disputes that the topic of Communism — the real version and the imagined ideal — incited riots of intellectual and political disagreement in the West for a half-century.

Meanwhile, Putin’s ideology holds little such allure to Americans or the populations of the European Union. With the exception of a few cranky apologists and flacks, it’s hard to find anyone in the West openly defending Putin on the merits. And even those who come close are generally doing so in a backhanded way to criticize U.S. policies or the Obama administration. The dream of a “greater Russia” or a “Eurasian Union” simply does not put fire in the minds of men — non-Russian men, at least — the way the dream of global socialist revolution once did. And that’s a good thing.

[…]

Many have called the decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11 a “holiday from history.” The truth is closer to the opposite. The Cold War years, while historic in a literal sense, were something of a great parentheses, a sharp departure from historical norms. Communism was a transnational ideology imposed on nationalist movements. That’s why every supposedly Communist movement eventually became nationalist once in power. Still, the rhetorical and psychological power of Communist ideology, combined with the fear of nuclear war, made international relations seem like a sharp break with how foreign affairs worked before 1945 — or 1917.

It turns out, the Berlin Wall wasn’t blocking us from a new world order, it was holding back the tide of history. Western Europe was especially slow to realize this. Its politicians and intellectuals persuaded themselves that they had created a continental “zone of peace” through diplomacy, when in reality they were taking U.S. protection for granted. They let their militaries atrophy to the point of being little more than ceremonial.

The end of the Cold War fostered the illusion that the “guns or butter” argument had been permanently settled and we “wouldn’t study war no more”. The peace dividend was always an illusion — a very attractive illusion to politicians who wanted to spend money on things that would get them re-elected — and voters rewarded them appropriately. It’s going to be psychologically difficult for the countries of the West to come to terms with the return of the traditional forces of history.

“The French Revolution was a ‘revolution of ideas’ before it became ‘a revolution of fact'”

Filed under: Books, Europe, France, History, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:35

Duncan Kelly reviews Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, by Jonathan Israel.

According to this hefty new study of the French Revolution by Jonathan Israel, a professor of history at Princeton, what such events really show is the motivating power of ideas in guiding and transforming events. In his terms, the French Revolution was a “revolution of ideas” before it became “a revolution of fact”; indeed, it was three revolutions all at once.

Ideas about political equality, anticlericalism and modern republicanism grounded in “reason” motivated Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet and Thomas Paine, while they clashed with the “moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism” embodied by more pro-royalist factions (the Feuillants) and aristocratic supporters such as Lafayette. Both struggled against Robespierre’s “authoritarian populism”, which for Israel prefigures modern fascism.

The radical compound in this instance might have been uniquely French but its impact spread widely. The resounding Declaration of the Rights of Man, writes Israel, was a “manifesto entirely incompatible with all ancien régime notions of social, racial, and religious hierarchy”. Revolution lent support to Caribbean struggles for black emancipation such as that of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti, memorably described in CLR James’s 1938 classic The Black Jacobins. James’s book, however, is an odd omission in Israel’s otherwise compendious bibliography.

[…]

Historians have often criticised Israel for flattening out all the differences between these radical ideas except those he wants to retain and, when applied to the French Revolution, his arguments can feel like the inverse of some 19th-century Marxist schema. Instead of subterranean economic determinations, it is Radical Enlightenment that provides the means by which everything from press freedom to de-Christianisation can be slotted into a matrix requiring little in the way of extra interpretation.

What you get from such a focus on subversive editors, disenchanted priests and materialist philosophers has much in common with a more conventional account: food shortages, public debt crises and social grievances from Paris to the Vendée, combined with a plethora of radical ideas about press freedom, absolute equality, political liberty and radical democracy. Yet the vaulting ambition to ascribe such a momentous transformation to one cause still feels hubristic. The obvious parallel in this year of all years would be the thought that there might be a single idea or singular complex of ideas behind the outbreak of the first world war. Can you imagine such a claim commanding general assent?

Dark Dungeons Teaser Trailer

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Published on 18 Mar 2014

Dark Dungeons brings Jack Chick’s 1984 masterpiece to the silver screen. Visit http://darkdungeonsthemovie.com/ for exclusive updates!

Debbie and Marcie arrive at college unaware of the dangers of RPGing. They are soon indoctrinated into this dangerous lifestyle where they face the threat of learning real life magical powers, being invited to join a witches’ coven, and resisting the lure of Ms. Frost, a vile temptress of a GM. But what peril must the two friends face when they stumble across the Necronomicon and their fantasy game becomes a reality game? Find out in Dark Dungeons!

Powered by WordPress