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Short answer: Absolutely, yes. She has a very good chance.
Long answer: Still probably yes. However, if she runs her campaign the way she ran her candidacy “announcement”, then she could be in serious trouble.
Elizabeth May seems to have definitively chosen British Columbia’s Saanich—Gulf Islands riding as her choice in which to run in the next federal election. I have to admit that I am intrigued by May’s decision to run there. The circumstances around this move have been less than ideal for May and the Greens, however I don’t think it’s a bad move (though the data clearly shows it probably wasn’t the best move if you take “best” to mean “highest chances of success”). This move possibly could very well end up paying off for the Greens (more on that later), however the manner in which May has done this has been amateur hour at the comedy club.
First the downside for May and the Greens, then I’ll end on an upbeat note.
In speaking to media earlier this month, May stated that there was still a variety of issues not yet resolved within the party regarding her candidacy in Saanich—Gulf Islands. However, in the same breath, she said that Saanich—Gulf Islands was her choice for where to run.
I guarantee you May’s political operatives cringed when she gave that quotation. This raises several questions all of which reflect poorly on May:
- If she comes out and states that this riding is her choice, then why is the Green Party senior organization still “considering” it?
- Has a rift broken out between Elizabeth May and the Green Party senior organization?
- Why is Elizabeth May announcing this while a process to decide which riding to select is still ongoing? Wouldn’t this announcement render such a process moot?
Furthermore, the Greens already have an announced candidate in the riding who hails from the left flank of the party and does not appear willing to step down. May’s party is one of the most ideologically diverse in the country, and in such situations, it is generally important to keep all wings of the party happy. May’s hasty move now risks stoking the ire of the left wing of the Green Party which, when combined with the criticism May’s been receiving from the right flank of her party, makes finding that winning dynamic that more difficult (though not impossible).
May needs to learn that there’s a reason why serious politicians don’t give a solid answer to a question when the decision is not yet firm and all of the ramifications have not been fully itemized. This is a pretty remedial lesson in political circles and it usually comes around the same time that political operatives learn that decisions don’t get made in committees and that you never ask a question in front of a microphone to which you do not already know the answer.
Moving on to the good news for May and the Greens:
Despite all of this, the data still show that May has at least a decent chance of snatching this riding from the clutches of the Tories.
Greg Morrow over at Democratic Space has a post analysing whether Elizabeth May can beat Gary Lunn in Saanich—Gulf Islands. Greg concludes that May doesn’t have a chance against Lunn and that even the best possible outcomes have her loosing by several thousand votes.
I think Greg is a fantastic political analyst and I have a great deal of respect for him. However I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with his conclusion in this matter.
So far May has run in two elections (London North Centre in a 2006 by-election and Central Nova in 2008).
In the 2006 general election in London North Centre, the election results were as follows:
When May ran in the by-election in London North Centre, the results were as follows:
As you can see, May improved the Greens’ showing by 20.3%.
As for Central Nova, in the 2006 general election, the results were:
When May ran in 2008, the results were:
As you can see, May improved the Greens’ showing this time by 30.5%.
From this data, we can extrapolate a few things. When Elizabeth May runs in a riding, on average the following happens:
- The Greens go up by 25.4%
- The Conservatives go down by 1.3%
- The Liberals go down by 5.3%
- The New Democrats go down by 12.8%
However, the overall Green vote increased in Atlantic Canada by just shy of 4% between 2006 and 2008. So roughly 4% of Elizabeth May’s increase wasn’t due to her presence but rather was due to an overall rise in Green Party fortunes in that region. Because of this, we need to reduce her number (25.4%) by roughly 4% to fully take into account just the amount that Elizabeth May’s presence increases the Green vote in a riding isolated from other factors. Doing this, we end up with the following data:
- The Greens go up by 21.4%
- The Conservatives go down by 1.3%
- The Liberals go down by 5.3%
- The New Democrats go down by 12.8%
Now, we need to apply these numbers to last election’s results in Saanich—Gulf Islands.
But before we do, there is one problem. Last election in Saanich—Gulf Islands, the NDP candidate had to drop out after his skinny dipping incident came to light. We know that whenever an NDP candidate drops out, it has an effect not just on the NDP’s total numbers but also on the other progressive parties’ numbers as the disaffected New Democrats “park” their vote elsewhere. Thus, assuming that next time the NDP candidate in this riding is unlikely to become disgraced again, I will be using the 2008 election results for the Conservatives and the 2006 numbers for the Liberals, NDP and Greens. (Note that, if anything, this will provide a slight bias in favour of the Conservatives as their vote total was slightly higher in 2008 than in 2006).
So we have this as our base:
Applying the “Elizabeth May change numbers” to this base projection, we get:
Now that’s still a win for the Conservatives (and a safe one at that).
But…
Remember that we earlier stripped the change in the Green Party’s vote between 2006 and 2008 out of Elizabeth’s May’s numbers. So now we have to reintroduce the change in the Green Party’s (and the other parties’) polling numbers but this time we have to do so looking at the region of British Columbia rather than Atlantic Canada.
It turns out that the Greens have an overall more favourable climate in BC than they do in Atlantic Canada and this is important.
Beginning from the “raw vote projection” just calculated above, we now will apply the changes to each party in order to obtain our final projections.
Now, I do not vouch for the exact vote totals appearing in these final two columns. However, as a rough predictor of how probable an Elizabeth May victory is, I think this is a strong indicator that it is entirely possible.
*UPDATE:
Greg Morrow below noted that I forgot to take into account the fact of the change in each party’s support between the polling data and the actual vote results. I thank Greg for pointing this out because this is an important revelation considering that the Conservatives tend to do better in elections than in polls whereas the Greens tend to do much worse.
So, applying these changes to the above above projections, we get the following “final final” projections (as best as we can given the sparse data available):
So we have a much tighter race in the Arithmetic projections here. Furthermore, the race could definitely slide back into Gary Lunn’s hands if the Conservatives can retain their 2008 vote/poll discrepancy rather than what they witnessed in 2006. The race could also slide back into Gary Lunn’s hands if the Greens get closer to their 2008 vote/poll discrepancy rather than what they witnessed in 2006. However, my theory is that the vote/poll discrepancy for the progressive parties witnessed in 2008 was partly exaccerbated by the fact that the vote was held so early in the academic school year which meant that all young 1st year university students studying in a different town might not have yet received the two pieces of mail necessary to vote which thus put the hammer to the most important progressive demographic. This year, it’s looking like the vote will be in late October at the earliest (rather than early-to-mid October) which might help out the youth vote and make the discrepancy closer to that witnessed in 2006. I could, of course, be totally wrong about this, but that is my feeling talking with staffers on Parliament Hill from multiple parties.
I certainly wouldn’t want to wager a great sum of money on it, but I would argue that this analysis still nevertheless establishes that Elizabeth May does have at least a fighting chance of securing the riding.
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Very few things Stephen Harper has done while in power have genuinely scared me.
Sure he’s done plenty of stupid things (denying gays the right to donate organs even if they’ve been tested, and opposing the UN conference to end racial discrimination to name two examples). Sure, he’s done some mean-spirited things (creating a more regressive tax structure so that poorer Canadians must carry a heavier load of the federal budget, for example). Sure he’s continued some of the most horrendously right-wing policies the Liberals implemented in their time in office (Employment Insurance comes to mind).
But in terms of 3rd world banana republic dictator-esque supervillany, this in my mind takes the cake. In 2008, after having almost lost his government trying to emaciate and eviscerate his opposition like a would-be dictator and after having stretched the bounds of constitutionality by putting undue power into the hands of the unelected Governor General, Harper is now at it again.
U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Pinochet saluting his military guards
Harper just ordered Stephen Fletcher — the same guy who proudly boasted about how “The Japs” were “bastards” and then refused to apologize about it — to try once again to destroy and permanently cripple the opposition parties thus ensuring him a virtually untrammelled reign of terror for the foreseeable future.
This move by Harper isn’t just stupid; it isn’t just mean-spirited; and it isn’t just Conservative/Liberal politics as usual. It’s scary and both anti-democratic and irreversible if implemented. And that is a horrible combination.
]]>in America.”
-William Bourke Cockran
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich
as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg
in the streets, and to steal bread.”
-Anatole France
Contrary to the myth that Western capitalist society obeys the rule of law, it has long been understood that the wealthy live under a different set of laws than the rest of us. The crimes against property and against the wealthy are not weighted on the same scale as crimes against the weak and the destitute.
The average OSHA penalty for a wilful violation of the workplace safety laws causing death is $27,000 (USD).
On the other hand… The average penalty for uttering profanity (which would naturally cut into advertising revenue) on radio or television in the United States is $500,000.‡
The penalty for downloading 24 songs online (and thus depriving capitalists of that potential revenue) is $1,920,000 (source, source).
On the other hand… Child abduction will cost you only $25,000. Committing burglary against your non-wealthy neighbour is worth only a $375,000. Arson is worth roughly the same as burglary. Stalking is worth a pittance of just $175,000. (source)
Vandalizing a something that isn’t even a primary dwelling or domus nets you $260,000 in France.
On the other hand… in British Columbia, Canada, the police (RCMP) can actually vandalize the primary residence of homeless people with impunity. (source)
A while back, TVO had a great speech by Darryl Davies which dealt precisely with the crippling inequality in the way we approach what is “criminal” and what is not. For your viewing pleasure, I have included this lecture below.
We must start thinking of our modern capitalist society as not that far removed from feudalism in terms of the legal basis reinforcing the privilege of the wealthy. I think this lecture goes a long way toward accomplishing precisely this.
Darryl Davies on crime (opens in new window)
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‡ Nader, Raph. The Good Fight. Regan Books: New York, 2004. 154
]]>Unfortunately, any progressive who wishes to buy in to that comforting and pacifying story is being sold a bill of goods. Real organizing and the real fight to sweep the Tories from Canada’s most progressive province depends on being able to accurately estimate Conservative Party support. The data now suggests that in the last four months the Conservatives have recovered as much as — if not more than — 50% of their lost ground in La Belle Province.
To be sure, the Conservatives are still down by 5-6 points from their 2008 election showing and are in risk of loosing at least one or two seats. However even the most pessimistic numbers (from the Conservatives’ perspective) do not have the Tories loosing even half of their seats in Quebec.
Election planners with Canada’s two largest progressive parties — the NDP and the Bloc Québécois (the Liberals are not, under any definition of the term, progressive) — would be foolish to adopt a strategy that counts the Tories out or that does not consider them a continuing threat in the province.
Quebec Rolling-5 Poll Results:
Before I had seen Naomi Klein and her husband Avi Lewis‘s 2004 documentary The Take, I was somewhat ashamed that I had not taken the time to sit down and watch it.
After viewing the documentary recently, I can say with certainty that I now deeply regret not watching it as soon as it came out. I feel like I should have been shouting this film’s praises from rooftops for several years now. This amazing, soaring, soul-wrenching, powerful, simple and yet also profound film is without a doubt the best documentary I have seen in the last 5 years (and possibly ever).
After watching The Corporation — another documentary in which Naomi Klein is featured extensively — with an old Marxist philosophy professor of mine, I was somewhat surprised to hear him so thoroughly bash its content.
“There’s nothing revolutionary in it. There is nothing Marxist in it. It’s nothing but the same old reformism,” he told me.
Upon reflection, I suppose my former professor was entirely right about The Corporation. However, The Take should put to rest once and for all any denigration of Naomi Klein personally as a non-revolutionary even if The Corporation may not have met expectations. If there are any Marxists, anarchists or other revolutionary comrades out there who doubt Naomi Klein’s progressive and revolutionary bona fides, I challenge them to watch The Take and still hold that opinion.
Naomi Klein is no pseudo-socialist, she’s the real deal. This is the film that puts her over the top in my estimation into Noam Chomsky-esque territory (and coming from me, that is possibly the highest compliment I can give).
Anyway, for your viewing pleasure, I now present to you The Take by Naomi Klein. If you enjoy it, I strongly urge you to go to the film’s website and consider purchasing a copy of it. This calibre of film making deserves our support.
]]>It is well worth the read and I highly recommend it (despite the brief lapse into puritanism in paragraph 8).
~
Women at Risk
“I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.
Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.
What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”
I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.
Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”
Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
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EDIT:
A very religous friend of mine pointed out to me elsewhere that this school is not technically “fundamentalist” since they do not necessarily subscribe to a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. Rather, this school represents a non-fundamentalist type of über-conservative religious schools. While this obviously does not change the thrust of the issue at hand, I apologize for the error.
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Don Newman, the former host of CBC Newsworld’s marquee programme Politics, gave an interview in a recent edition of The Hill Times wherein he touched on the subject of blogs and blog readers. His comments on the phenomenon of blogs are elucidating in part because he is by no means an ignorant man nor does he normally demonstrate any obvious partisan bias toward one of the five big mainstream parties or the other. He is, in short, a living embodiment of the well-meaning yet nevertheless reactionary nature of the mainstream media which, I would argue, makes his opinions highly indicative of the media elite’s overall opinion of blogs.
Newman has generally positive things to say about his own profession in this same interview, but he makes it explicitly clear that he views blogs as either a negative development or at the very least not as a positive development.
What are the reasons, you ask, why he believes this? Newman explains:
“They’re just people’s opinions and some of them are obviously used by political parties or people with political points of view to push.… There are a lot of people who can’t tell the difference between reading The Globe and Mail blog, or CBC.ca and reading a political blog that someone is writing either to entertain themselves or promote a political cause.”
In short, blogs are a negative development because they represent just an ‘ordinary’ person’s opinions as opposed to a paid political operative or professional journalist’s opinions. Furthermore, people can’t differentiate between the real journalists’ opinions (which Newman believes should be listened to) and the opinions of these ‘ordinary’ people.
Now this formulation, as it stands there, isn’t technically an argument since it doesn’t have even the most basic structure of a syllogism. Thus most people who subscribe to this belief, when they put it in the form of an argument, tend to posit that bloggers, unlike real journalists, are generally more ignorant and therefore that the rise of blogs is a negative development.
This, however, is a red herring.
I, for one, am a blogger and I have more education than many if not most journalists. Ignoring my years of ground school and two pilot’s licenses, I graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor’s degree in political science from one of the top three political science post-secondary institutions in the country and then I went on to obtain a Master’s degree also in political science and also from the same institution. However, the vast majority of readers of this blog probably didn’t know that about me and they (hopefully) don’t care about it either. Blog readers understand that arguments stand or fall on their own merits irrespective of the personal pedigree (or the perceived or actual ignorance) of the author.
And herein lies the crux of why media elites do not get the phenomenon of “the blogs”. Media elites still operate in a profoundly conservative and Burkean worldview that places a high premium on the importance of listening to the ‘right people’. This is obviously so, since the ‘right people’ to listen to according to the media elites — the so-called experts — are themselves.
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The British government has commissioned a shocking new report from the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA) which among other things argues that the law should be changed so that political commentators cannot draw comparisons between the actions of the Israeli state and those of Nazi Germany.
Antony Lerman writes:
“If you said ‘the way the IDF operated in Gaza was like the way the SS acted in Poland’ and a Jew found this offensive, hurtful or harmful, you could, in theory, go to jail.”
However that is neither the most shocking or hypocritical aspect of this report. No, that prize goes to the section of the report which argues that one of the ways antisemitism is manifested is by:
“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”
Israel and the United States, of course, both permit and praise the Israeli military as well as Israel’s “sovereign right to defend itself” (source, source, source) while at the same time requiring and expecting the Palestinian government to renounce violence and agree never to develop a military (source, source, source).
To read The Guardian‘s fantastic piece on this report, click here.
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*Based on entering the 2008 election result data into the 2006 projection model.
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This programme and the overwhelmingly pro-Israel North American (and, to a lesser extent, European) media coverage were however not enough for the powerful and extremely well organized lobby. The Israeli lobby then created a desktop application called “Megaphone” about which many political commentators still remain blissfully unaware. Megaphone serves as a syphoning tool which has the power to instantly send pro-Israel activists flooding into any online discussion, web poll or other forum where Israel is being discussed in order to grossly unbalance the discussion thus creating the impression among Internet users that Israel’s support is both much wider and deeper than it actually is. However, as frightening and undemocratic as these two operations were, they pale in comparison to what the government of Israel is doing now in terms of making “crimestop” a reality.
The Israeli press is now reporting that, in addition to the considerable influence of the Israeli lobby, the government of Israel has decided to marshal its state treasury to the cause further unbalancing the already obscenely unbalanced debate over Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. The government of Israel will now directly pay pro-Israeli agents and bloggers to infiltrate online discussions, message boards, online newspaper comments et cetera with a ubiquitously pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian message.
In the original Paulitics post on StandWithUs.org, I commented on their Orwellian use of doves and other peace imagery despite the fact that Israel has steadfastly rejected international law which calls for the right of all refugees to return to their homes and the Geneva conventions which proscribe against the acquisition of land through military conquest. I can now without reservation say that I was dead wrong in my initial estimation of the situation. Calling the initial programmes “Orwellian” does a disservice to the now genuinely Orwellian levels of deception and subterfuge being engaged in directly by the state.
On the bright side, however, if all of the favourable and unballanced meainstream media coverage; an impressive array of applications and an intimidating lobby group are together not enough to secure Israel’s outright hegemony, then there surely is hope that the illegal Israeli occupation is unsustainable.
]]>Many of the findings are fairly banal, however I was surprised to discover this one particularly interesting finding. It turns out that of the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Québécois; Liberal Party supporters are the least likely to believe that their own party shares their values.
I’m not quite sure what that means. Is it an indication that the Liberals are a “big tent” with people with many divergent ideas all peacefully coexisting together? Or, does it mean that the Liberals have alienated their own supporters more than any other party and thus their supporters are tending to support them not because they agree with their policies but rather simply as a way of punishing some other party?
I’ll leave that for you to decide on your own. But either way, this would suggest to me that the normal data on the relative ‘softness’ of each party’s support conceals something very interesting happening with the Liberals.
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About eight days ago John Baird, the Conservative Infrastructure Minister, gave his second figurative “F— you” to struggling workers in Thunder Bay, Ontario. This gesture comes in addition to his literal “F— you” to Toronto mayor David Miller earlier this month.
(Yes, he actually said “F—“.)
David Miller, who has been lobbying for a $300 million stimulus package from the federal government, last week had his request officially denied by the Harper government. The City of Toronto had plans to spend the more than $300 million in stimulus money to offset the cost of purchasing 204 Bombardier LRVs which were to be built in Thunder Bay, ON — one of the hardest hit cities in Canada in terms of employment rates and property value.
What adds even more insult to injury is that the reason the federal government gave for denying the $300 million wasn’t that it was too great a sum. Indeed the figure is exactly equal to Toronto’s share of the federal stimulus package. Instead, the Conservatives argued that Toronto can’t get the $300 million federal assistance in buying 204 Bombardier trains BECAUSE the money will be spent predominantly in Thunder Bay and not Toronto. The federal Conservatives, in short, were trying to fight to stop federal money from being spent in Thunder Bay.
Just to reiterate: the Harper conservatives are trying to stop $300 million from being spent in Thunder Bay because they would rather see the money spent in Toronto on several small projects despite the wishes of the mayor of Toronto and the Toronto City Council.
None of this, so far, is new news.
What is news, however, is that the Thunder Bay economy will still be getting this major boost despite the best efforts of the federal conservatives. While Baird and the federal Conservative Party seem perfectly willing to play political games with this struggling Northern Ontario community — to say nothing of TTC public transit users in Toronto — the reports which began last week are now confirmed and the purchase of the 204 Bombardier LRVs has been made official. In order to keep its intended purchase with the Thunder Bay Bombardier plant, the Toronto City Council was forced to cancel six large-scale capital infrastructure projects scheduled for all around Toronto.
While the prospects of being a Conservative candidate in Toronto are never particularly good, I certainly would not want to be a Thunder Bay Conservative candidate in the next federal election and have to explain that one to the voters. Come to think of it, I also really wouldn’t want to be a Liberal candidate and have to explain why Thunder Bay-ites should vote for my party which voted to support the Conservative government and and keep them in power through confidence vote after confidence vote.
Sources:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/657018
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This week marks the newly-proclaimed “Sovereignty Day” in Iraq (June 30), Canada Day here in Canada (July 1), and the Fourth of July celebrations in the United States.
I’ve always thought that it was the most fortunate of happenstance that, throughout history, most people who believe Canada to be the best nation on earth just happen to have been born in Canada; most people who believe England to be the best were born in England; most people who believe France to be the best, were born in France and so on and so forth. The Americans are actually the luckiest of all in this regard since not only do a majority of them believe they live in the best country on Earth, but a recent poll found that a supermajority (61%) of Americans also believe that God — the putative creator of the universe, heaven and hell — has literally blessed their country specifically and has not similarly blessed any other country in the world (or universe?).
In honour of these august nationalist occasions, it is worth sharing some of my favourite quotes on nationalism and patriotism.
~
“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior because you were born in it.”
-George Bernard Shaw
“Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?”
-H.L. Mencken
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
-Albert Einstein
“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.”
-William Ralph Inge
“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist 
dictatorship… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
-Hermann Goering (Nazi party official)
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
-J. Krishnamurti
“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take 
from them what that have not got.”
-Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
-U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
Reports are coming in from multiple press outlets that right-wing forces have staged a military coup d’état against the democratically-elected leftist president of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya.
After Zelaya’s election in 2005, Honduras joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, a progressive international cooperation organization which is also known by its Spanish acronym “ALBA”. ALBA (which also means “dawn” in Spanish) is an international cooperation agreement 
designed as an alternative to the U.S.-backed neo-liberal Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It was largely because of opposition to the FTAA from countries like Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominica, Nicaragua and Cuba (all of which are now ALBA members) that the U.S.-backed FTAA failed.
The coup comes as Zelaya was expected to win a popular referrendum allowing him to stand for re-election in 2010 by removing term limits for the office of the President. The Honduran Supreme Court and military have both declared the vote by the people of Honduras to be unconstitutional.
Currently, heads of government in most advanced democracies including Canada, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Israel, India and Japan all have no term limits.
Unlike the US-backed coup d’état attempt in Venezuela in 2002, so far, there is no direct evidence of direct US involvement in this Honduran military coup despite the long-standing support and training that the United States has provided to the Honduran military. It will be interesting to see whether the Obama administration — long fallaciously thought to be leftist and progressive — will stand on the side of democracy and the people of Honduras or whether he will side with the military junta.
This is not the first time the Honduran military has been used as a right-wing force to overthrow a surging democratic leftist popular movement. In fall 1963, the Honduaran military overthrew the leftist government of Dr. Ramón Villeda Morales and then ruled as a US-backed military junta until the early 1980s when power was finally transferred to a US-backed civilian administration.
Noam Chomsky notes that the US involvement in Honduaras has been a bloody affair both before, during and after the period of military rule in the 1960s and 70s. Chomsky writes:
“Congress compelled the [Reagan] administration to state repeatedly that the human rights condition was improving not only in Guatemala but in El Salvador and Honduras so that the US could continue to support the regimes.”
-Noam Chomsky, Rogue States, p. 94
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/06/28/honduras.president.arrested/index.html
https://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/06/28/honduras-zelaya-arrested.html
https://uk.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55R0US20090628
Unfortunately for Mr. Wright, as he continued talking he revealed far more than he intended. Now that he has been talking, he seems to have stumbled headfirst into what I believe is a contradiction against himself and I invite my readers to think critically for themselves about whether they share in this analysis.
In one of his initial comments here at Paulitics, John Wright claimed that the source for his polling data was “Elections Canada”. The suggestion was, of course, that his data integrity was superior to mine and that therefore his numbers should also be more valid. At the time that he wrote this, I thought it was a bit strange since I was unaware of Elections Canada publishing or even keeping a database of polls released by private polling firms. I even did a search of the Elections Canada website, and found that in the last 12 months, Elections Canada hasn’t published a single article containing the word “Ipsos”.
However, Mr. Wright gave me enough material to respond to that I just let it be. While I knew that it was unlikely, I also knew that it was certainly not impossible that I could be missing some polls from 2009 and thus I asked him for the first time to provide his source. This week Mr. Wright is now claiming his source as nodice.ca and that his source this whole time has been not just 2009 polls but also some 2008 polls (presumably also from nodice.ca).
(makes Scooby-Doo “Ruh-roh” sound)
This is a big problem for Mr. Wright as nodice.ca contains nowhere even close to an exhaustive list of all polls.
The Paulitics Polling Resource and Wikipedia both documented a total 33 polls between the start of 2009 and when this whole episode blew up (two new polls have since been released, neither of which is by Ipsos Reid). At only 12 polls, Nodice has less than half of all the polls conducted in 2009 and this is the source John Wright has been using (in addition to 2008 polls which I haven’t analysed once yet, but which I would be happy to take a look at.
Mr. Wright then states a complete and demonstrable falsehood. He writes that
In the last of our 4 polls the NDP have been in the lower range (running 14-15 points) with EKOS and Harris Decima roughly the same and the others at the higher end. This is when Paulitics made the calculations. But just previous to that are 4 of our polls with the NDP running between 18-19 points. [emphasis added] (source)
Below is a list of the last four polls Ipsos Reid released in 2008. See for yourself if the last four of Ipsos’s 2008 polls all have the NDP “running between 18-19 points”
If anybody is interested in seeing for themselves, the published sources for these four polls can be found here, here, here and here. Furthermore, the October 9th, 2008 Ipsos Reid poll, even though it shows the NDP at 18 percent is actually still an outlier because it comes directly before a Nanos, Angus and Ekos trifecta of polls which put the NDP at an average of 20%; and it came on the same day as Segma poll which put the NDP at 21%, a Nanos poll which put the NDP at 22%, and an Ekos poll which put the NDP at 19% (source).
Finally, Mr. Wright again attempts to reiterate his claim that taking the unweighted averages of several unevenly-weighted averages is not problemmatic despite multiple, solid, irrefutable proofs to the contrary. Mr. Wright also attempts to argue that his method of calculating averages is “perfectly legit and pretty much what the original author [i.e. me, Paul] did with his handful of polls in his charts.” (source)
I am truly sorry John, but this “new math” method calculating averages is neither legitimate nor has it been used by me. Furthermore, since I’ve demonstrated why this technique is not “perfectly legit”, I think this argument is just a particularly sad attempt to attack the messenger when the data and the arguments presented here speak for themselves.
So, to reiterate:
- Mr. Wright seems to have forgotten his original source for 2009 polls (originally it was elections canada, now he says it’s nodice.ca)
- Mr. Wright then admits that his numbers are actually based on a database (nodice.ca) that contains less than 50% of the pertinent data
- (perhaps because of this) Mr. Wright has been unable to provide a single poll which I have missed in my data.
- Mr. Wright then demonstrates a shocking lack of knowledge about the polls that his own firm released in late 2008.
- Mr. Wright then proved unable to articulate a single methodological fault in any of my analyses.
- Mr. Wright then admits that he has supplemented his 2009 data with 2008 polls
- Mr. Wright then reiterates once again that taking the unweighted averages of several unevently-weighted averages is not problemmatic despite multiple instances in which I have provided mathematical proof to the contrary
I’ll tell you, Mr. Wright is the gift that keeps on giving. Swing and a miss, Mr. Wright, swing and a miss.
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