Or it's just noting that the person in question is making a policy decision for vindictive rather than selfless reasons.
Ya that's it, Harpo and company have been formulating policy just to get back at the Liberals. :roll:
Actually, at that point I wasn't talking about Harper. I was talking about the phenomena in general of what might be going on in a person's head in order to motivate them to make a decision from the bad-side (aka dark-side, i.e. the shoulder with the little devil whispering advise as opposed to the little angel giving opposite advice from the other shoulder) of their nature.
However, if you want to bring it back to Harpy... hmm... I suppose it's not inconceivable that perhaps he could be packing a grudge from his days as a junior in the Liberal party who got disillusioned by the obnoxiousness of Ottawa big-party internal-politics where some characters always feel a gut-rushing thrill-and-need to turn everything into a fight, such that maybe he went back to Alberta and found himself chatting to uppers in the Reform Party who sympathized and gave him copies of C.S.Lewis to read in order to induce a restored motivation with a renewed conviction and focus, such that an explanation for some of his otherwise inexplicable policies might be vindication against the freaks who hurt him in the past and who probably deserve a thumping, but I don't know...
I love ideologies, they're so easy to spot and oh so much fun to poke holes in.
:lol:
What kind of ideologies? The kind that say (in effect and when boiled down to their most basic cognitive framework) that something cannot be both true-and-false at the same time, or the kind saying that all things are relative?
It makes me miss those guys holding the line in-between like how Sergeant Sam Steele used to do it.
The man? The myth? Or the cruel authoritarian who passed severe sentences without the benefit of jurisprudence and held nothing but contempt for all things "Yankee"?
I didn't say Sam Steele in particular, did I? I said guys *like* Sam Steele, and I meant it in terms of their understanding of, and attitude towards, the essence of the objective of their job, which is to maintain order, within the context of situations that don't fit a simple-minded "Methodist" view on life.
But you want to make it about Sam Steele in particular? Okee dokee, let's do that.
He's the guy who nailed down order in the last two frontiers of the nation wherein it was still a question whether or not those territories would fall under American versus Canadian jurisdiction.
The first was southern Alberta, and he secured that, which was no mean feat, and it would be wise to restrain any compulsion towards flippant and trivial offhand remarks until one has at least half a clue about the relatively complex history of that little region.
In order to get a grip, start with wondering why the Mormon's fourth temple (still one of the largest) was built in Cardston, and what the implications were in terms of the de-facto range of "greater Utah". Then dig into the details of Treaty no. 7 compared to other Treaties, and note how it's not a Treaty of subjugation nor surrender; rather, it's a Treaty between nations, which means that to this day the Blood Indian Reserve - the largest in Canada - is technically a sovereign state that *could* be sending reps to the UN if it wanted to, and for extra points ponder why Hutterites first settled in that region.
Even after the actions of Colonel MacCleod it was not certain that southern Alberta would fall under Canadian jurisdiction. MacCloed was the vanguard which did the initial work of kicking out the American Whiskey Traders (Gosh, what a terrible expression of anti-"Yankee"ism that was; did you know that American settlers in Fort Benton, which was the US source-point of the whiskey being shipped to Fort Whoop-up, were *delighted* to see Ottawa do something about the whiskey traders sullying their town? Did you know the phrase "RCMP always get their man" was a statement of admiration coined by an *American* editor writing for a Fort Benton newspaper?)
Anyway, MacCleod was the vanguard to push back the American whiskey traders, which is a military-type action, but in order for an operation like that to deliver a final objective (which was establishment, once and for all, of Canadian jurisdiction over southern Alberta), it had to be followed by a second wave, which was that of establishing a stable police force, and that's what Sam Steele did.
Did Sam Steel use some "questionable" methods? Did he "pass severe sentences without the benefit of jurisprudence"? Yeah, sometimes. Do you understand what he was dealing with?
Let's put it in perspective with something more current.
Imagine that a vanguard military-force has effectively pushed back Al Qieda and the Taliban out of a place like Afghanistan, and now, in order to secure the hold, the second wave of a police-force is moved in to establish order. (It's because the allies did not do that second stage which will be why historians will probably record all the efforts expended on Afghanistan as being a waste; but suppose they had.)
If they had, can you see, given the general nuttiness of the local population, how establishment of the initial police force would come with some "complicated situations", requiring some possible "severe sentences" without all the idealistic "jurisprudence" for the criminals that it sounds like you think they should call up Israel to fly out some lawyers to represent?
Talk about your "ideologies" easy to poke holes in.
But he didn't stop there. After securing southern Alberta, he next gets shipped to take on holding order during the Yukon gold rush.
All the prospectors were coming from the states, and using the same logic that Washington used to justify taking Texas from Mexico (because of all the Americans who'd moved into Texas to homestead), the US was in a position to annex the Yukon into Alaska, so who held the line and ensured Canadian jurisdiction over the Yukon?
He knew that women were operating brothels in Dawson, and he knew there were gambling houses, etc. etc. bla bla bla, all of which ran contrary to English Canada's Methodist thinking, but he had his eyes on the prize, which was maintenance of order and securing Canadian jurisdiction, and so he masterfully allowed such things to be tolerated insolong as order was maintained and the jurisdiction remained Canadian.
And *who* was it who received the most sever punishments for transgressing? It was RCMP officers of his own contingent who got the harshest penalties for misbehaving.
And after all that, the English establishment in Ottawa hated him because they knew he knew how full of sh!t they were, and so he got cold-shouldered, so he left Canada to fight in the Boer War, and the only people to give him any recognition were the Brits, and he died of a broken heart because the leaders of the country he loved and had worked his tailbone off for had rejected him.
You said: "[Sam Steele,] The man? The myth? Or the cruel authoritarian who passed severe sentences without the benefit of jurisprudence and held nothing but contempt for all things "Yankee"?". You wanna try asking that question again?
Who would [the last qualified person to be PM] be?
Pearson.
Interesting. I would tend to agree.
You know, you've really got to get a grip on how to more effectively use this emoticon.
The purpose of emoticons is to clarify the intent of a statement, because of the way tone-of-voice and facial expressions are not communicated through text, but you toss that particular emoticon around in a way where people can't figure out if you're laughing at them, or laughing with them, which is why you'll notice that people tend not to respond to posts you've made with that emoticon.
You might think they don't reply because you've made your point, but actually they're not replying because it's not possible to see how they're supposed to take it.
Consider sub-scripting, i.e:
-at-you
-with-you
-haha
-strange
etc.
He [Harper] has been anything but conservative. Pandering to Quebec, huge spending deficits. Yep, that's a conservative platform through and through alright!
I was talking about it specifically in the context of how Paul Martin had already optimized the corporate tax structure such that no business or corporation was complaining, and the country was running a surplus, which could be applied towards paying off the national debt, or towards saving in case of a rainy-day catastrophe like an imminent collapse of the financial system.
So what does Harper do, just to prove to his constituents that he's oh-so "conservative"? He cuts the corporate taxes when they were not complaining, leaving the nation vulnerable to a rainy-day catastrophe, which *did* happen when the financial system nearly collapsed, such that Harper's government was caught with it's pants down and had to start cranking up the deficits in order to do the spending to forestall total financial collapse.
If he'd just left the budget alone, which was already as conservative as any *responsible* conservative would want to have their budget be, then he wouldn't have had to do as much deficit spending, but NOooo... in Harper's desire to demonstrate how "conservative" he is, he missed the *Responsible* part that goes with being an *effective* Conservative!
I don't know of anybody that meets my high standards. And if there was such a person, I highly doubt you'd like my choice anyways, he'd likely appear to be a benevolent dictator, who cared not for feelings and emotions, but about the health and financial bottom line of the Nation.
You mean like Trudeau? Paul Martin?
Which means on the outside he'd be as charismatic as Harpo,
You think Harper's charismatic?
To me he looks like a drag-queen out of costume, what with that shiny face and those glossy lips...
while not giving a sh!t about the bleeding hearts and ideologues that permeate the country. Ignoring the handout capitalists and the NIMBY's. Doing what is best for the Nation as a whole. Kind of like Buckley's, it tastes like sh!t, but it works.
I'm not that kind of bleak. And I'm talking about Canada, not the world.
Well, take heart in knowing that you've got your antenna pointed in the right direction when it comes to understanding what it means to have a nation, and what it takes to have one as good as this one (could be... but it's slipping).
Of course, which is caused by the fact that the electorate have become so politically un-savy, uneducated, uninformed and swayed by ideologies.
Yeah, that sucks, doesn't it.
