I Have Opinions

Queer nerd, aspiring social justice cleric; he/him

[quasi-normalcy]

Cheat Sheet on the Canadian Election for my American Friends (and for Canadians who didn’t take civics in high school)

How the System Works

Canadians do not vote directly for our Prime Ministers the way you vote for Presidents; rather, Canadians elect representatives (called ‘Members of Parliament’ or ‘MPs’) for their local district (called a ‘riding’), to control one seat in the House of Commons (roughly analogous to Congress).

Each candidate in a riding represents one political party. When all of the votes are counted in every riding, the party that controls the most seats in the House of Commons forms the government, and their leader becomes the Prime Minister.

A candidate wins the election in a particular riding if they get more votes than any one of the other candidates; note, that I didn’t say “the majority of the votes.” This system is called ‘First-Past-the-Post’ and it can create serious problems.

There are more than two parties here. Depending on where you live in the country, there could be as many as six parties with a serious shot at winning your seat. What this means is that it’s possible (common, in fact) for a candidate to be elected with most of the population voting for other parties.

Who the Players Are

The Liberal Party of Canada (Leader: Justin Trudeau). A centrist, neoliberal political party and the government for the last four years. Has formed the government, on and off, for most of the last century. Generally campaigns on a relatively left-wing platform and then governs in a much more capitalistic sort of way. Basically your Democrats.

The Conservative Party of Canada (Leader: Andrew Scheer) A right-wing party and official opposition for the last four years. Created from a merger between the old Progressive Conservative (moderate right-wing) and Reform (far-right wing) parties. Roughly analogous to your Republican Party.

The New Democratic Party (Leader: Jagmeet Singh) A left-wing party. Recently returned to its socialist roots. They’ve never formed the government at the federal level, but they have governed most of the provinces at one time or another. Roughly analogous to Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Occasio-Cortez

The Green Party of Canada (Leader: Elizabeth May) An Environmentalist party. Their policy platform is arguably somewhat to the right of the NDP, but still left of the Liberals. Roughly analogous to your Green Party, except somewhat more successful

The Bloc Quebecois (Leader: Yves-François Blanchet) A Quebec nationalist party. Politically, they tend to be socialist on economic issues, but in recent years they have adopted right-wing policies on immigration and accommodation of religious minorities (especially Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews). Have their roots in Quebec separatism, but it’s not a priority this time around. There is no analogue to the Bloc in American politics.

The People’s Party of Canada (Leader: Maxime Bernier) A fascist “right-wing populist and nationalist” political party. Basically a vehicle for Bernier’s ego masquerading as a political party. Anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-immigration, anti-LGBT, anti-environmentalist. Generally awful all around. Fuck them with a jackhammer. Roughly analogous to Trumpism, except that for “populists” they have remarkably little popular support. Seriously, fuck these guys.

What the Issues Are:

Global warming is the big one this time around. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives (and the People’s Party, but who cares) are wholly committed to development of Canada’s massively polluting oil sands, though the Liberals favour a carbon tax. The NDP and the Greens have ‘green new deal’-style plans. The Bloc doesn’t like pipelines.

Trudeau’s record. Four years ago, Trudeau came into office on a platform of infrastructure stimulus spending, electoral reform, improving Canada’s relations with First Nations, and revising environmental regulations, which had been gutted by the previous government. He has since done none of these things, and a lot of people are upset about that.

The SNC Lavalin scandal. Basically, Trudeau put pressure on his attorney general to help one of his corporate donors evade prosecution for corruption and it blew up in his face.

Income inequality has been a bit of a sleeper issue, in that the NDP proposed a new wealth tax and it has proven more popular than the media was expecting.

Immigration was supposed to be a big issue, especially with the People’s Party running in direct opposition to multiculturalism, but it hasn’t really caught on.

Justin Trudeau himself. His image as a woke, laid-back, yoga-doing Disney prince was a major draw last time around, but many people have soured on the whole thing, especially after all of those photos emerged of him doing blackface 20 years ago.

[apersnicketylemon]

Found this on Facebook, and if isn’t the biggest elxn43 mood I’ve seen yet… 

[loveisreligionlostintranslation]

Can someone tell me who this is

[apersnicketylemon]

That’s Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP party in Canada, and we’re desperate to elect him and his party because he’s the only decent leader for a party we’ve got. 

[thekarleffect]

@allthecanadianpolitics

[shlevy]

As part of our initial fertility specialist workup, I have to provide a semen sample. The paperwork strongly recommends masturbation, but if my religion prohibits it I can also fallback to “Coitus interruptus [sic, including mid-sentence capitalization]”.

Is there any religion that bans masturbation but is cool with pulling out?

Would any religions describe this case as onanism anyway? I mean the ultimate goal is more kids right?

[argumate]

*to the pope, who scuttles away as I approach*

[shieldfoss]

Honestly how do you even keep getting past the guards

[shacklesburst]

[whataseamus]

Coitus interruptus is actually what we should define as onanism, not masturbation. Onan's "spilling his seed" was sinful not because he was wasting sperm (or at least not just because of it). He had married his deceased brother's widow, Tamar, as was the law. And according to that law, any children he and Tamar had would be legally his brother's children and receive his brother's inheritance. If Tamar never had children, the inheritance would be his. So his pulling out was sinful because he was taking advantage of Tamar without giving her a child.

[ds9vgrconfessions]

I really hope that Harry Kim is brought into the Picard series. I think it would be nice if he became a protégé of Captain Picard.

[quasi-normalcy]

It’s set 20 years after Voyager gets home, so presumably Harry should be Lieutenant (junior grade) by then.

[opheliaownsyou]

Bold of you to assume he’s not still an ensign

[whataseamus]

My ideal series concept for a while now has been Harry Kim as captain of a ship fitted with tech adapted from the Borg or a rediscovered spore drive or what have you that allows them to easily travel vast distances, going back to the Delta Quadrant to do some more deliberate exploration and diplomacy. He’d have Nog as his first officer and Naomi Wildman as his science officer. I filled out the roster with an Andorian security chief and a misanthropic Betazoid chief engineer. When this series was first announced, I even amended it to include Ambassador Picard. I’m certain this series will actually be nothing like that, but I can dream.

[quasi-normalcy]

So does Storm just use her powers to ensure that her hair is always whipping around dramatically in the wind or what?

[whataseamus]

If you're familiar with the '90s cartoon version of Storm with her INCREDIBLY MELODRAMATIC PRONOUNCEMENTS, I think you know the answer is yes. ⚡

[apisashla]

Boksheviks: finally, we have instituted free and directly democratic election of officials through the proletariat’s own natural organ of government, the soviets

Proles of Russia: Thank you so much, we choose the Socialist Revolutionary Party with a significant Bolshevik minority

Bolsheviks:

[whataseamus]

See also Justin Trudeau when he learned that while Canadians do want electoral reform, it's not the specific kind he wanted.

[memewhore]

[whataseamus]

I feel personally attacked

[whataseamus]

Watching conservatives defend Doug Ford and prior to that, Trump, Putin, and others, it becomes pretty obvious that the core tenet (maybe the only one these days) of conservative ideology is worship of power.

That’s why they love it when Ford or Trump “speaks his mind” or “gets things done”. Their ideal is someone who says and does whatever he wants regardless of consequences or morals or social conventions.

It’s why they revere police and the military, empowered as they are to imprison or kill. 

It’s why conservative policies are so cruel, not to make people suffer for suffering’s sake exactly, but because what more naked exercise of power is there than to do something to someone they don’t want you to do. It’s why they don’t condemn sexual assault in their leaders; indeed, although rape is a dirty word even for them, I suspect they secretly lionize it.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why they’d fall lockstep in line with Doug Ford ignoring the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Superior Court of Ontario, and all political precedent in the name of a political vendetta.

[prokopetz]

Sometimes logical inconsistencies in my dreams will clue me into the fact that I’m dreaming, but my brain has very particular standards for what qualifies as unbelievable. Purple dragons and interdimensional travel will pass entirely unremarked-upon; on the other hand, one time dream-me was seeing a doctor for some unspecified ailment and my train of thought went: “Waaiit a minute… I didn’t make an appointment, and there’s no possible way I could have gotten in for a walk-in consultation with such a short wait. I must be dreaming!”

[whataseamus]

To be fair, I think that's just how suspension of disbelief works, while conscious or not. We accept all kinds of bizarre fantasy or sci-fi concepts, but it's when people don't act like real people or actions don't have realistic consequences that we get taken out of the story.

[prokopetz]

It amuses me to imagine that the Omen film franchise exists in the DC universe and Talia al Ghul knew exactly what she was doing when she named her kid Damien.

[whataseamus]

I always assumed it was as deliberate on Talia's part as it was on the writer's.

[whataseamus]

I like the idea of the monarchy, even though I know it is archaic. I think it’s the fantasy geek in me that appreciates that we still have a Queen. That said, it really doesn’t serve any practical purpose in our government and hasn’t for a long time. I think we should probably keep it for the rest of Queen Elizabeth’s reign at least as a gesture of respect, but after that, I’d like to see it, not abolished per se, but replaced.

What I’d like to see in place of the monarchy is to have the role of the Crown filled by Indigenous representatives. Whether this would be a single person elected by Canada’s Indigenous population or a larger body comprised of the leaders of each of the country’s Indigenous nations, the important part is that they would have the Crown’s power of Royal Assent and, unlike the Governor-General currently, actually have the mandate to exercise that power, refusing to enact laws they feel are not in the best interests of Indigenous people in Canada.

I’m sure this is a pretty facile solution. This is just armchair politics and I’m no expert on Indigenous issues in particular. But in my head at least, it is an elegant way to replace the monarchy with something functional that would also give Indigenous people a powerful voice in the actual governance of the country.

[dcstrider-deactivated20230210]

[gravemouth]

Godrat. Not bad.

[wilwheaton]

fuckyeahheathenmouth.tumblr.com for the win.

[whataseamus]

I got divinegore, which is pretty cool, but my husband is hilariously shitshit.

[videofame]

[whataseamus]

I loved this game when I was a kid! It was the first NES game that was mine (instead of my stepbrothers'). I've got an abiding love for Greek mythology to this day.

[quasi-normalcy]

I’d like to think that when Spock was living on Romulus, he had an affair with the commander from The Enterprise Incident

[whataseamus]

Headcanon accepted!

[quasi-normalcy]

Unpopular Opinion: People who claim to be just joking when spouting Nazi ideology should be assumed to actually be Nazis until they knock it off. Sucky jokes aren’t worth giving real Nazis plausible deniability.

[whataseamus]

It would be one thing if such "jokes" were making fun of Nazis, but they're usually at the expense of the marginalized folks Nazis want to hurt, so even if they are "just joking", these guys are still on the Nazis' side.

[prokopetz]

Concept: Marvel/DC comics, except all the characters who are regular humans with thematic gadgets now have super powers based on their names, and all the characters who have super powers are now regular humans with thematic gadgets.

[whataseamus]

Does that mean Spider-Man shoots organic webs as his only inherent super-power and his strength, agility, and wall-crawling all come from his suit?

[whataseamus]

I'm running a tabletop RPG set in the Battlestar Galactica universe. Tonight will be my first session in a month as various travel plans among our group have made it difficult to get together. To get myself back into the spirit of it, I figured I would commit a few ideas about the setting, the cylons in particular, into writing.

Ronald Moore originally said that there were 12 humanoid cylon models because they looked at humanity and realized that there were really only that many types of person. In the show, that gets mucked up by the whole Final Five divide, so I will be ignoring that. Because it fits so elegantly in with the Colonies themselves, I'll be basing the 12 types of humanoid cylon after the signs of the Zodiac.

I will also be aiming for better diversity of race and sex among the cylons. It always seemed ridiculous to me that of the 12, there was one black man, two Asian women, three white women, and six white men. Not a great ratio when you are supposedly representing all of humanity. I don't want to plan out who all the cylons are in advance, both to allow the PCs to reveal themselves as cylons if they want and to give myself the freedom to make a specific NPC a cylon for drama's sake, but I have set myself a rule that there should be no more than two from any given race/ethnicity and that they should be evenly divided between male and female, lining up with the Zodiac signs.

Cylon society lacks gender roles, so cylons are essentially agender. When infiltrating human society, any given cylon might be cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary as their assumed human identity demands. Colonial society itself holds no bigotry towards transgender or nonbinary people.

To reconcile the fact that cylons are both clearly machines and yet someone completely indistinguishable from humans, I have decided that the humanoid cylons are actually composed of nanomachines designs to perfectly emulate human cells. They can thus perfectly emulate human biological processes and would to most tests appear to be human, but they would still be machines and can repurpose those machines to accomplish the feats of superhuman strength and durability or direct computer interfacing they seem capable of on the show.

In part because one of my players is extremely put off by the cylon "farms" and the notion of forced pregnancy in general and in part because the mechanics of cylon-human and cylon-cylon reproduction never made any sense, the attempt to reproduce sexually will not be part of the cylons' agenda.

Instead, their "plan" will revolve around their religious convictions. The humanoid cylons are at the top of the cylon hierarchy because they were created to be perfect by their monotheistic God in Zir own image.. The centurions and raiders are flawed because they were created by humans, themselves the flawed creations of the Lords of Kobol. The reason the cylons don't simply annihilate the survivors is because their goal is actually to convert the human remnant to worship of their God and purge them of sin, thereby allowing the mechanical cylons to transcend human imperfection and draw closer to God.