Danielle Smith Puts a Limit on Free Speech

"I think if you want me to comment on something, you have to share it before hand. I don't know the context of the statement so I'm going to have to look at the context of the statement," said Smith.

So, Danielle Smith is all about free speech, but when put under the gun, she wants context before speaking herself.

Not going to criticize her on that - I agree with the idea of thinking about consequences before you speak.  The question is, what kinds of consequences are you focused on?  If you believe in the validity of what you have to say, you should be willing to speak truth to power and say it regardless of the impact on personal fortunes.  Yes, people mince words, but if the goal of both parties is understanding, you just need to take the time to ensure you've gotten your message across. 

When you step into the realm of understanding, though, you're forced to drop the "them-against-us" mentality and understand those you want to reach, so you can reach them effectively.  It's a matter of putting the Public Good before personal interest, which can be hard to do.  Do it enough, your starting point will eventually become more pro-social; if we all thought things through, thoroughly, before acting, the world wold be a different place.

But Ms. Smith can tell that to her candidate-elect.

RELATED:  "Our words completely undermined our intentions and went further to harm the world we're trying to have a positive impact on…As a young startup, we learned a lot today and are better people and a better company for it."

ALSO RELATED: The Internet makes the world smaller but also more complicated. People think differently.

I've been around the world and I can tell you, there is no such thing as common sense.  Cultural, geographic, demographic, etc. realities change everything.  Assuming everyone thinks the same way you do is like assuming everyone speaks American.  Becoming conscious of our internal limitations is the only way we can overcome them and move forward.

A Social Illness: The Crime of Being Sick

As the conversation ended, they tried to explain what it’s like to be poor and disabled in Ontario. “It’s like you’re always being judged and found guilty of some crime,” Koo said. Smith gave it a name: “the crime of being sick.”

Recently, I was hit by a car.  I was very lucky in that I bounced back.  Even then, the challenges I face in trying to get myself back to full functionality are not slight.  The fact that the guy who hit me got off without any repercussions didn't help any.  Worse - this fella belittled a police officer during the process of the investigation.  The driver, Ryan Bornstein (not his real name, but the name he gave me), is a lawyer - knowing the rules, he knows how to skirt them.  He broke the law, lied about it, lied about his name and is facing zero legal repercussions.  It doesn't occur to him that there should be any; for Mr. Pseudonym, the very concept of responsibility doesn't enter the picture. 

Now, magnify that sentiment a million fold. 

"I never give money to homeless people. I can’t reward failure in good conscience."

"I'm not concerned about the very poor."

"His private, personal religious views would not interfere in his role as an MLA.”

As a society, we aren't making much of an effort to encourage responsibility on the part of the empowered; the 1%, as it were.  The prevailing logic asks us - why should we?  Those at the top were successful.  It's everyone else that needs to step up their game.  To the victor go the spoils, etc.  Don't whine if you lose, just play dirtier next time.  The 1% certainly feel that it's the poor and the disenfranchised that own all the responsibility for their lot in life.  The failures of the 99% are due to their own incompetence, sloth, short-sightedness or a lack of moral fortitude.  The idea of disability through physical illness hardly registers; most people refuse to acknowledge the idea of mental illness as a problem.

Well, Mr. Bornstein is hardly the quickest bunny in the forest.  By seeking to immediately and fully abdicate responsibility, he's opened himself up to a host of challenges in the court of public opinion.  Of course, that's an outcome you risk when you underestimate your opponent.

Here's my question back to those folk who either see themselves as social puppet masters or completely removed from the goings on of the rest of society; if success comes through toughness and toughness implies the ability to get ahead at the expense of others, does that not imply there will always be those who are left behind?  The bear's going to get someone, right?

It sure will.  This is reality the supposed rain makers of the world seem blind to.  When you see yourself as history's actors, after all, you get to make reality up as you go, right?  You can always trade in your production crews.  What these players don't ask themselves is, how long does 'always' tend to last?

If you look at history - pick your revolution, pick Civil Rights or Apartheid or the rise of Fascism and the entirely justified and forceful response to it - you see that the answer is, "not as long as you might think."

This, then is the crossroads we're at right now.  The disenfranchised, fueled by the connectivity of the Internet, are only going to live with feeling helpless for so long.  As their ranks swell with the formerly-successful who have been marginalized in our polarized times, those disenfranchised troops will sooner or later be rallied into taking action.  Maybe it will come at the polls; somehow, that doesn't seem likely.

Occupy has been dismissed as disorganized, having no clear objective and being largely a rallying point for those who don't want to make any efforts on their own behalf.  That may be partially the case, but no revolution begins as a fully-formed organization with clarity of purpose.  That all comes over time and generally gains momentum after hitting some kind of tipping point.

I would expect, in the not-too-far-distant future, that a spark will light off our social powder keg and incite a societal brush fire.  This could be a political scandal that is too egregious to ignore, but so far, such scandals have only proven to be kindling.  It will likely take something more dramatic to wake the sleeping beast.   It's happened before; it'll happen again.

We could avoid all this, of course, if we simply stop and think far enough ahead.  The long-term trend is encouraging in this regard; even as every new regime tries to rewrite history, more and more people have access to accurate versions of yesterday's mistakes.  With every bust, we do look a bit further down the road, but I don't think we have our eye on the destination quite yet.

There's only one way forward.  Disagree with me all you want; just don't blame the messenger for your own failure to heed the message.

Individual Right to Choose / Society's Responsibilty to Think Ahead

Oh, Lorrie...

(2) NDP godfather Tommy Douglas was advocating mass sterilization and special colonies for "defective" and "sub-normal" families -- including those whose ancestors were "French-Irish" and "low type of woman" -- right around the time Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany.

But the fact a politician today can't even raise the issue without being smeared by the liberal political/media establishment speaks volumes.

Yes, the first quote is not a reference to the second.  Yet, they are in the exact same article.  Should a politician be allowed to raise eugenics as an issue today without reprimand?  What about segregation, which is what "firewall" could very easily amount to?  What about indentured servitude?  Where do we draw that line?  What are the risks if we don't?

It's not enough to say "there's no appetite for a debate on (insert contentious issue here)."  There was no appetite for genocide in 1930s Germany, either - only a bitterness against others and a need to come across as dominant.  Feelings can be manipulated and, when the manipulators continually get away with ignoring societal standards, they open the door to all kinds of abuses.  Somewhere, someone has to say "enough;" the successful perpetrators aren't going to regulate themselves.   

Along the same theme; a very common post-war response from these perpetrators is denial.

Another quote, again from the same article:

In the real world, the death penalty isn't coming back because no political party supports it and because, even if they did, our courts view it as cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional.

How many selection-of-the-fittest, Far Right (not Conservative, because Conservative is a much broader category) folk feel the courts have too much power?  How many of them are sceptical about immigration, think tough-on-crime is the way to go and don't believe in "social handouts?"

One last Goldstein quote:

On abortion, polls show most Canadians support a woman's right to choose, but are conflicted on issues such as whether the state should pay for non-emergency abortions in the latter stages of pregnancy. But again, among liberal elites, there is only one "correct" view for a politician to hold -- abortion on demand, regardless of the circumstances.

Individual responsibility and personal feeling trumps all, I get it.  What about when that doesn't work?  Less public education means less educated people.  Less information gathering means less informed decisions.  Less central coordination?  That's proven to lead to unnecessary duplication, waste and missed opportunities.

Let's stick with education for a second, though.  Less educated people reproduce more - that's not speculation, but a lesson from history.  When you don't have facts, you rely on feelings, which rarely take into account such things as long-term costs.  That's one of the main reasons we bother to learn at all; so that we can avoid repeating mistakes.  Uneducated people tend to be more likely to experience poverty.

What do you think a lack of knowledge, a tendency to reproduce more and less easy access to birth control methods (and yes, abortion) leads to?

The more poor, uneducated people you have, the more poor, uneducated people you're going to end up with (keeping in mind that wealthy, educated people reproduce less).  Now, correlate poverty and crime rates.  Then, crime costs on the economy and the price of punishment and incarceration - both fiscally and, over time, socially.  Then look at natural resource dependence in places like Easter Island or Central America.  In fact, look at any failed civilization and you'll see short-term, resource-intensive and elite-centric policies at the root of the collapse - including the Soviet Union.  Where you see successes - like here in Canada - the reverse is true; more shared services, more planning, better education and a broader economic basket with a decent focus on production lead to better, lasting results for all.

The Far-Right, Two-Row Wampum conceptualizers seem to feel they can do it on their own and everyone should be left to their own devices, despite shared geography.  They appear to believe that helping others through centrally coordinated social services is too much like rewarding failure.

It's reactive, not proactive thinking - and it's doomed, time and again, to fail.

You can't consider the individual's right to choose without considering society's responsibility to think ahead.  Consider it a quality over quantity thing.

Maybe the proactive, liberal approach doesn't feel right to the Far Right - but that's the point, isn't it?  The best decisions aren't made based on gut-instinct alone, but are informed.

Those who fail to understand history, etc.

Diversity on Trial

In the past three and a half years, the federal government has appointed 100 new judges in provinces across the country – and 98 of them were white.

“I think as a Caucasian I have an advantage.”

   - Ron Leech, Wildrose Candidate for Calgary Greenway

In his book Blood and Belonging, Michael Ignatieff discusses how easy it is for brothers and sisters to start viewing each other as opponents, given the right external stresses.  As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I know too well how right he is.

The conditions that breed intolerance – economic tension, contentious issues about resource use and of course, a shift in demographic trends – are upon us here in Canada. 

We’re also at a crossroads in the way we plan our society, a challenge unlike any we have faced since Confederation.  As a people, Canadians need to decide what the future is going to look like and how we’re going to get there.  We won’t get there at all if we refuse to acknowledge there is a broader “us” that extends beyond ethnicity, beyond provincial boundaries, beyond faith or political perspective.

The problem is that in our darkest hearts, we’re all bigots.  We have models of understanding that we are comfortable with; we automatically challenge that which is seen to threaten our models and most often ignore those things which we don’t see as having an impact.

Poverty is one of these.  We can decry poverty verbally, but how many of us donate to charitable causes to alleviate poverty?  What of disabilities?  I was at a major conference on Monday with some of Ontario’s brightest minds; despite the cutting edge use of social media technology, nobody thought about accommodating the fellow who was hard-of-hearing in the room with little things like subtitles on videos.  Nobody even thought to ask, “is there something we’re missing?”

Ethnic diversity is another.  When we keep an "us and them" frame in place, the "them" is either a threat to the "us" or not relevant and therefore get no consideration at all.  Women's rights, Civil Rights, Labour Rights are all examples of "didn't think of that" models that held society back until break souls pushed themselves from irrelevant to threat to eventually, integrated.  Mental health is another huge barrier we need to be breaking down to achieve a Knowledge Economy.

The Wildrose folk don’t see themselves as bigots – bigots never do.  They see themselves as understanding the world as it is and probably wonder how the rest of us are missing it.  These folk are living in Plato’s Cave.  The same is true of Team Harper when they focus on natural resources and think they’ve found “the fix” or even in Liberals and NDPers when they figure Conservatives are out to lunch.

Nobody has access to the whole social puzzle.  We all get a little comfortable with our own piece and don’t realize that, if we put those pieces together, we can put together this bigger picture of a United Canada.

We do live in a society where white people, attractive people, connected people have an advantage.  It’s not fair, but it’s reality.  The problem is, when we focus on the status quo of advantage, we miss the latent opportunities in disadvantage.  How many innovations were developed through trying to solve someone else’s problems?  The telephone is just one example.

The more close-minded  we get, as a society (and I do put extra emphasis on the firewall crowd when I talk about limited thinking) the more emerging problems – and emerging solutions – we miss.  We have to think outside of the box if we’re to get through today’s challenges.

I’m confident we will.  We just need to start being conscious in doing so.