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If you want more non-white non-males in political office, then support electoral reform. Both whiteness and maleness are built in to our obsolete electoral system invented before electricity.
I agree, unionist, I think some individual babblers are a secondary target, the primary and real target is those who are leaning towards supporting the NDP and are put off by the negativity that arises.
If the NDP wants non-white persons at the podium at its convention, it can just invite them. No fuss no muss, no polling, no voting, nothing at all.
You're on too us. Me and the cabal just had a meeting last night, and you just named the chief agenda item: "Deep strategies for unermining the NDP through Rabble.ca"
It sounds like Alice stepping through the looking glass.
If someone complained, "They're attacking some individual babblers, but their real undeclared target is the NDP" - at least I could comprehend that.
But why would someone be interested in attacking, embarrassing, bullying a few anonymous strangers who support the NDP, while pretending that their real target was the NDP itself?
I've just repeated it, and it sounds a lot worse than outlandish.
This is absurd. Whiteness and maleness have monopolized real political power in Ottawa for 140 years in a row. How do we change that if whiteness and maleness continue to monopolize power and share power between the two wings of the same mostly white and male parties?
We aren't talking about political power in Ottawa, we are talking about political power in the NDP.
It goes both ways. We are not entirely strangers on this board. There is personal antipathy between some posters. The board rules state you may not attack other babblers. Some people might well attack disguise attacks on other babblers as attacks on the NDP.
"But why would someone be interested in attacking, embarrassing, bullying a few anonymous strangers who support the NDP, while pretending that their real target was the NDP itself?"
Hmmm...interesting, on thinking I about this question, the only thing I could come up with is to drive them away, the less NDP voices and info, the better. Isolated out of the msm and here too.
A win win in the long game, perhaps?
Worth a repeat of my own words, instead of saying much the same thing in response to acoounts of that thread and on the fall out. Fallout that continues, and will continue, to occur, especially if such blatent misrepresentations, hypocrisy and personal attacks allegeging extreme racism, continue to occur.
No we were talking about whiteness in the NDP as opposed to both whiteness and maleness in the two old line parties dictating things in Canada in general since 1867. All I was saying is that all parties are obligated to go with the candidate with the best chance of winning a phony majority of voter support in a given riding. And any political scientists worth his weight will inform us that the stereotypical winning candidate across Canada owns a resume longer than his sleeve and is typically white and male. You can't blame the NDP for having the highest percentage of females in our party, so you attack from this other obscure point of electoral strategy by insisting that the NDP not play the obligatory FPTP game with hand-picking candidates with the best chance of winning FPP style. The NDP can't make a move for what outsider critics of the party jump all over them for without really understanding what makes them jump in the first place. And thanks for pointing out yet another obvious downside for our obsolete electoral system which the two old white and old male parties on the right dont seem to fret about at all. Liberals and Tories are mostly male and mostly white, and that's just the way they like Canadian politics to be. If you dont like it, vote NDP. Good point.
Yes, it is good to push the NDP into progressive action in all areas of their organization but when people get into labeling the NDP as a white supremist or whatever it was, organization, it is being overdone - remember Boom Boom's reaction to that thread title a while back..
But yes I agree that the NDP needs a consistent in your face diversity program which includes youth by-the-way, for all facets of the NDP organization. I would think most, if not all NDP supporters would probably agree.
Using an elephant gun? Pretty high stakes hunting. Do you think there's someone here who really is supportive or neutral about the NDP, but would attack the party just to obliquely get at a babbler they don't personally like?
Sorry jrootham, it still sounds farfetched.
Here's my theory. Some people can't tolerate any criticism whatsoever of the NDP - including by those of us who vote for it, generally support it, but want it to not sell out on some vital issues. They know they'll get nowhere by saying, "no criticism allowed of the NDP!!!" So, they construe such criticism as being an attack on an individual. It's easier for them to handle it that way.
That's something, by the way, that I have never seen Fidel do. He doggedly defends the NDP, and responds to criticism of the NDP as such - he never takes it as an attack on Fidel.
"some people" "the NDP" "them" "they construe" "for easier handling" is all meaning people here doing things and NOT, the NDP political head.
So...some of us NDP partisans here, are apparently on purpose, as part of a conspiracy scheme, to get criticism of the NDP stopped here, are declaring such things as personal attacks, frankly that is a pretty big and nasty accusation.
Especially given it was in fact an attack on all babblers who are decalred NDP partisans, and who are claiming broad personal attacks occur, cloaked as other, except of course Fidel.
.
Me old mum used to say it takes all kinds to make a world, but, unfortunately, what is happening here is that a few who are critical of the NDP for reasons impossible for any political party to overcome, it becomes just a bullying scenario. The one complaint of people out there who despair of the left idealism here - while the bloody world overpopulates, heats up, and thanks to capitalism's new ploys frm the Chicago school and importing cheap goods from the sweat shops of the east - is that babble is politically irrelevant. The discussion does nothing to help the marginalized. It's the New Democrats on the line there, But the egotistical philosophs continually carp and destroy attempts at putting forward positive solutions.
If the grand theorists would just take a peek at what the Great Unread respond to, out there in the honest to god polls where the politicos ask these questions, they would have to admit that their theoretically beautiful solutions from revolutions are not worth a fiddler's fart in the real world.
I do not enter into discussions of theory - did that long ago and there came to be no audience in the real world. In desperation at the obvious environmental catostrophe shaping up, I joined a dozen others in forming a new political party in '83. Turned out disastrously green and libertarian.
But in discussion here, why not leave NDP politics to those who actually go out and evaluate the critical social needs and aim at at least ameliorating, somewhat, the miserable conditions they live in? It's the only party that has always gone to bat for them, and it is just so damned unfair to wade in with pretensions of a higher morality. Where praxis fails, theory is just a bucket of crap.
Unionist will miss this because I'm on Ignore list. No doubt there are many others of you out there on the threshold of such a hideous fate... so be careful.... he may have more than one babble persona.
But I could not let this gem of his go without speaking my mind on this point of his - not him:
"Do you think there's someone here who really is supportive or neutral about the NDP, but would attack the party just to obliquely get at a babbler they don't personally like?"
Yes. I do believe that. Someone tell Unionist I agree with his question.
Huh. That's the first time I understood and agreed with one of George Victor's posts. The NDP convention must have made me smarter.
I am still trying to digest "generally support it".
Is it any of a bigger and nastier accusation than that non-NDP affiliated leftist babblers are in some big conspiracy scheme to drive the NDPers out?
So, anyone who doesn't accept the dominant capitalist orthodoxy (the social-democratic variety is popular in these parts) or isn't in the NDP are left idealists, "egotistical philosophs continually carp and destroy attempts at putting forward positive solutions", "grand theorists" (despite whatever concrete experiences they have in left social movements), with "theoretically beautiful solutions from revolutions are not worth a fiddler's fart in the real world"
Seems to me like whatever we're talking about in this thread goes both ways.
My 2 cents: I've been around the left and union politics all my life. As were my folks. As a union person, we didn't get what rights we have by letting people push us around. Union politics and left politics is tough. I mean, we're naturally tough people. We say what we want and goddamn them who don't like it. I'm old and I've never voted for anybody else but the NDP. Take that any way you like. I never had any use for Communist Party or that crowd precisely because of this fascist B.S. of not being able to criticize policy as required. In fact, politics is exactly about criticizing policy. That is exactly how policy evolves.
If you can't take a punch you should stay out of the big room because our enemies aren't throwing punches, they're shooting bullets. My Metis ancestors were shot down with Gatling guns, sent up here by the Americans to try 'em out on human victims. In Winnipeg in 1919 they shot the strikers down with Browning machine guns, also sent up here by the Americans to try 'em out. Hitler murdered millions of socialists and trade unionists. The story of the left is the story of blood.
If folks don't like the way the party is going, maybe because it's going wrong. Don't think so? Demonstrate that fact. And if they try to hurt you for it, spit right in their eye.
Don't forget.. scum Harper and that traitor Iggy will happily.. HAPPILY.. turn the drones and the assassins on us to accomodate the bankers. Our history says this is so. Fight for policy then. Don't let the bastards beat us.
Thanks B9sus4 for a great post.
I find the formula for having us suspended goes like this: We reply to criticism about the NDP with something substantial. They either slink off without replying directly to the points we'ev made, or they resort to personal attack. And then an NDPer either has to put up with a barrage of posts focussing on the progressive NDP poster him or herself, or be chastized and even suspended immediately without so much as a warning or critical comment of the sword operatives who've, by then, driven the thread so far into the rhubarb that the whole thing needs a tow truck. Increased security is then called for against the reds, and a state of national security is declared etc
And so if I say that the NDP is essentially patriarchal in nature, does that mean I am saying that it, or the people in it, support arranged marriage, the repeal of sufferage? Not at all. One can make an analysis that assert that the NDP is a Patriarchal organization, as are all organizations that are part of the socio-political structure of society. But when someone makes an analysis that ties the NDP in with the foundational elements of society formed out of european colonialism based in an ideology of "white supremacism" and note that it still expresses that legacy of colonialism in the very fiber of its organization, as can be seen by the makeup of those chosen to speak at its conference, then there is a big panic attack.
No big deal at all, imo.
Did anyone actually say that the NDP is akin to the KKK? No. So who is blowing this all out of proportion?
WHat? Are you saying that you think some babblers are just plain mean spirited bullies engaging in personal attacks against NDP partisans, for the fun of it?
No the KKK more resembles the all white male old line parties and white boys' club known as the red chamber in Ottawa. I think old line party senators even have a goofy handshake and hold three straightened fingers on belt buckles for group photos.
No, I'm not saying that. You said essentially that other babblers are trying to drive NDPers out. I was just comparing that to your statement that Unionist is making a big and nasty accusation when you're making some big and nasty accusations yourself.
Honestly, I think Unionist's theory is closer to the truth of what has been going on here over the past couple of days.
Manifesto point of order number one for all Canadian Marxists is always-always to overthrow the NDP. And from there on out, the world. I even know a few socialists who could easily convince the average stranger that they are political Liberals on voting day. They can even quote Laurier, Pearson, and Trudeau and be really authentic about it, too.
And somehow, there are whole threads on how it's the non-NDP leftists who are baiting and harassing the NDP posters through general criticisms of the NDP which are secretly intended as personal attacks.