{"id":6254,"date":"2015-10-08T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T17:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6254"},"modified":"2015-10-08T14:36:55","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T22:36:55","slug":"squirrel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6254","title":{"rendered":"Squirrel!"},"content":{"rendered":"

So that thing I can’t talk about is looking more likely to happen, and the rest of my 2015 is looking increasingly hectic, so (with the exception of the occasional Nowa Fantastique<\/em> reprint) any blog posts I’m likely to make for the next little while will be short on deeply researched science and long on opinion.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, I have a lot<\/em> of opinion. Unfortunately, much of it is wrong. Like, for example, my intermittent belief\u2014 although perhaps “faint hope” would be a better term\u2014 that we Canadians are not, after all, such a profoundly stupid people.<\/p>\n

What galls me is that this particular belief was so hard-won. It had to fight upstream against years of evidence to the contrary. After all, we were the nation that voted for the government of Stephen Harper\u2014 not once, not twice, but three times<\/em>, ending in a majority. The administration that quit Kyoto; that muzzles Elections officials and gags scientists, that shuts down the collection of new data and destroys archives of old, that literally burns books. <\/em>The government that audits birdwatching groups if they have the temerity to speak out about protecting bees; that presided over the greatest violation of civil rights, the greatest mass arrest in Canadian History; that suppressed voter turnout in unfriendly ridings through the use of faked robocalls. The government that describes anyone opposed to warrantless online surveillance as pro-pedophile. A government dissolved after being found to be literally in Contempt of Parliament, a government so corrupt that even Brian Mulroney\u2014 Brian Goddamn Mulroney<\/em>\u2014 excoriated it.<\/p>\n

That<\/em><\/a> government.<\/p>\n

And if my hopes have been raised and dashed in the past\u2014 if, for example, I begin to take heart in the Tories’ occasional inability to ram through whatever rights-corroding Bill they’ve introduced this week, only to discover how many Canadians actually believe<\/em> that “if you’re not a terrorist you have nothing to fear<\/a>“\u2014 well, that’s the price I pay for being a perennial optimist. And when the writ was dropped this past summer, the polls gave me such cause for hope. Recession and senate scandals and endless corruption all seemed to be taking their toll. The NDP\u2014 the NDP!<\/em>\u2014 was leading in the polls, and the Conservatives were sinking like a bag of shit to the bottom of a swamp. Maybe we weren’t<\/em> the brightest bunch of vertebrates on the planet, thought I; but if we’re not quite smart enough to turn against the guy who’s been beating us with a stick after five years, at least we seem to be catching on after nine. So I dared to hope again.<\/p>\n

Look at us now. Just look at us now:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"From<\/a>

From \u00c9ric Grenier’s Poll Tracker, via the CBC.<\/p><\/div>\n

What caused the turnaround? The niqab. A bit of cloth draped across the face in deference, apparently, to the demands of one of our more prudish Sky Fairies.<\/p>\n

\"Really?<\/a>

Really? This<\/i> is the hill we’re gonna die on? (Patrick Doyle\/Canadian Press)<\/p><\/div>\n

Yes, of course it’s dumb. So’s the rosary, the crucifix\u2014 all the myriad beads and rattles shaken in thrall to invisible masters of any stripe. (Of course, if you simply dig the iconography as pure fashion statement, more power to you.) So what? Does anyone seriously think that Zunera Ishaq<\/a> is going to pull a gun at her citizenship ceremony? Does anyone think her religious garb would disguise her, help her escape justice, if she did? You can’t even invoke the argument that she’s being oppressed by a misogynistic culture (actually you can, but it’s irrelevant in this case) because this is pretty obviously something she wants<\/em>. The mind boggles, to reflect on the sheer idiocy required to think of it as a security issue\u2014 more fundamentally, to think that it’s anyone’s fucking business, much less the government’s.<\/p>\n

The mind boggles, to see how many Canadians think exactly that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a flash, we forget it all: the tar sands, the long-form census, the flouting of electoral laws and the gutting of environmental ones, a foreign policy that has reduced us to an international laughingstock on every front from human rights to the environment to the Middle East.\u00a0 Warrantless surveillance, a dismal economy, rising unemployment. The criminalisation of free speech and the unsupervised expansion of police powers. A Minister of Science and Technology who describes evolution as a “religious belief”. The evisceration of the CBC. Secret trade deals. Harper waves a colored rag in our faces and right on cue we bark\u2014<\/p>\n

Squirrel!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014completely forgetting that we’re chest-deep in quicksand.<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>

My goddamned country. (Modified from “Liza_Tigress”.)<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s worked so well, in fact, that Harper is now musing<\/a> about passing legislation to ban niqabs from the federal workplace. It doesn’t matter that the federal court has told him to fuck off, that just this week that same court even turned down his lackey’s request<\/a> for a stay<\/em> on that verdict, pending appeal. Hell, that all probably helped<\/em> his cause. And now\u2014 now they’re promising to institute an actual honest-to-God fink line<\/em><\/a> to encourage neighbors can snoop on each other and report “barbaric cultural practices.”<\/p>\n

Now Muslim women are being physically attacked on the street (not that there’s anything especially new about this, I suspect, beyond the sudden attendant publicity) and Justin Trudeau ineffectually bleats “This is not Canada!<\/a>” But he’s wrong: this is exactly <\/em>Canada. Harper’s ploy wouldn’t stand a chance if this wasn’t<\/em> Canada. And Trudeau should know: he was right there helping Harper build the damn thing when he cravenly supported a panopticon bill<\/a> redefining “terrorist” as anyone who expresses support for someone the government doesn’t like. And because this is Canada, the only major political party with the ‘nads to vote against<\/em> C-51 is now trailing badly in the polls.<\/p>\n

Don’t talk to me about percentages. Don’t tell me that I’m being too harsh, that two thirds of Canada’s population wouldn’t spit on Harper if he was on fire, that he owes his power entirely to gerrymandered riding boundaries and vote-splitting on the left. That shouldn’t matter. Harper’s contempt for empirical fact, his evangelical devotion to ideology over evidence\u2014 his ongoing campaign to actively destroy<\/em> evidence when it doesn’t accord with said ideology\u2014 is so blatant that gerrymandering every riding in the whole damn country shouldn’t be enough to save him in any nation whose mean IQ rises above room temperature. It’s like trying to claim that the USA is not populated by scientific illiterates; you’re not gonna make that case by pointing out that hey, when you give them a multiple-choice question about how long it takes the Earth to circle the sun, only half of them get it wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We’ve learned nothing. Our dalliance with the center wasn’t a considered decision, empirically derived, after all. It was just another distraction\u2014 a sparkly thing pounced upon and then forgotten by an electorate with the attention span of a gnat. And once again, my hard-won opinionated optimism proves to be so much shit.<\/p>\n

I don’t know whats going to happen in two weeks. I hope conventional wisdom is wrong, that we don’t after all get the government we deserve. But at least you can fly to Iceland now for ninety bucks. Iceland’s nice. They live on geothermal, they jailed their bankers after the meltdown of 2008, and their pop stars sing the praises of biology.<\/p>\n

I wonder if their citizenship requirements include a dress code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So that thing I can’t talk about is looking more likely to happen, and the rest of my 2015 is looking increasingly hectic, so (with the exception of the occasional Nowa Fantastique reprint) any blog posts I’m likely to make for the next little while will be short on deeply researched science and long on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rant","category-scilitics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6254"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6280,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254\/revisions\/6280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}