Homophobic Maine and a Bottle of Rum

Well, there you go. Again the American electorate is asked to allow loving couples to live together under the same social and legal protections as exist for half-miserable (50% divorce rate) straight couples and again, the idea of two dudes kissing has proven just too damned icky to allow such a thing as equality, decency or compassion to gain even an inch of ground.

It's fucking sickening to think that such an inhuman mass of knee-jerk, unthinking, prejudicial and downright cruel people lives just a stone's throw from my home.

Shame on you, Maine. You're better than that.

On Voting in Canada

I just got back from voting in my municipal election and, in a bizarre twist of circumstance, my vote will be counted. Usually, by day’s end, the election officials look at my ballot and say, “Fuck.”

I spoil my ballots.

Hear me out: Canada functions using the First Past the Post, Plurality system; no runoffs, no second round, nothing to give any candidate any more than his 30% – 40% “legitimacy.” It’s an anti-democratic fraud foisted upon the Canadian people more regularly than we’d like with results you might expect; corruption, dissatisfaction and generalized apathy pervade the Canadian political climate and no one harbours any hope of changing it.

You’ll recall from my discussions of Minority Governments that it is only through these that, in our system, we manage anything near democratic representation (Remember, if the Conservatives got 37% of the vote, that means fully 63% of the population voted against them).

So I’ve taken a stand, now; every time I vote in an election with more than two parties and no hope of a runoff or second round election, I don’t cross either box and I write “La Pluralité est Anti-Démocratique” across the names of all the candidates – it is a practice I urge (whether in french or english doesn’t matter) on all electors, that we might one day, maybe, effect a change in the system.

Not today, though; in my little suburb, the election was between two candidates and the result was guaranteed to be a genuine majority-rules election. So I voted.

That being said, it was only a majority election by default and had there been a third candidate, I would again have spoiled my ballot. I don’t believe in two party systems, so I urge everyone to urge their MPs to discuss election reform that would include runoff elections to proper plurality votes that we may end up with a truly representative parliament.

Louise Harel and a Bottle of Rum

Which, for the record, is the only way you could convince me to vote for her. Drinking is the sole explanation for how a significant portion of the population could be lining up behind a woman who is proud of her refusal to debate in the language of fully one third of the island she wants to be in charge of.

That's really the heart of this, for me; Harel, by refusing to communicate her message to the massive number of electors in Montreal who might want to hear it but who simply don't understand French has essentially told them that she is not concerned with them. So does Montreal want a mayoral candidate who will not represent its whole population? Does Montreal want a mayoral candidate who'll once again try to divide it along linguistic lines?

Nearly 3 centuries of coexistence in Montreal has finally begun to unite the population in common interests; Harel isn't charismatic enough to undo that, but with power she could push some people to saying and doing very stupid things. It's something we don't need.

Anti-Vax and a Bottle of Rum

Alright, I'm posting from my iPod for the first time since it got all appstored, so bear with any difference in formatting and all that. All future iPod posts will bear the "...and a Bottle of Rum" suffix in the title.

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Okay, this H1N1 thing has got the crazies coming out of the woodwork. "Injecting a disease in your arm is dangerous!" they shriek; "I knew someone who got crazy sick because of the flu vaccine!" they continue. All of it faster than you can say "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy" Which I guess is true of most phrases.

Here's the brass tacs: polio and smallpox are GONE. They don't exist in the western world BECAUSE of vaccination. Influenza mutates more quickly and dramatically, so we haven't been as lucky, but vaccines do help us build up partial immunities, so that if the strain we were vaccinated against comes around, we're unaffected and if some variation on that strain comes around, our odds of dying are significantly lower.

We don't have any native immunity to H1N1. The government of Canada is giving away vaccines. H1N1 is killing young adults and pregnant women. Smarten up, take an hour off work and take a god damned jab in the arm.

For better, more educated info, check out www.sciencebasedmedicine.org and glance at Thunderf00t on Youtube. The blog is obviously more complete than the videos.

Just Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say

iTunes is, in my opinion, one of the heaviest, most unwieldy and least useful pieces of software ever created by any major developer in the history of computing. It is clearly a lazy port job from the apple platform over to windows and it needs to be scrapped and built from scratch in a platform-specific way. That or it needs a team of competent porting programmers.