Hello everybody

[Kidlicious]

What do you call it when someone stalks Christians and purposefully annoys them until the say something back and then calls them hypocrits. Is that the slang hate or the hate hate.

[Asher]

Your forum title is blasphemous, BTW. Going to hell, you are.

[b etor]

What do you call it when someone stalks Christians and purposefully annoys them until the say something back and then calls them hypocrits. Is that the slang hate or the hate hate.

childish behaviour.

[Kidlicious]

Your forum title is blasphemous, BTW. Going to hell, you are.

I didn't call myself that and I don't know how to change it. Therefore it is apolyton's sin.

[DaShi]

See? That's how you curry favor around here.

You'd be far more interesting if you weren't so transparent.

How so?

[giblets]

I didn't call myself that and I don't know how to change it. Therefore it is apolyton's sin.

Ask for a post count reduction.

[Kidlicious]

Done

[SlowwHand]

I hope they don't ask you to set your hair on fire or something.

[Kidlicious]

I hope they don't ask you to set your hair on fire or something.

Nah, then he would lose my vote on election day.

[Aeson]

It's good to see we've returned to a more historically sustainable ratio of threads about Al. (I have nothing against such threads, but didn't want to see the market saturated to the point they became worthless.) Competition

[molly bloom]

What do you call it when someone stalks Christians and purposefully annoys them until the say something back and then calls them hypocrits.

Could you back up your spurious claim of 'stalking' with any evidence other than the usual self-pity and paranoia ?

You aren't that important (to me at any rate) even if I were in the habit of stalking (which I ain't).


Oh, and whatever happened to 'turn the other cheek' ? Or are we not channeling the Christ model at the moment ?

[Nikolai]

Good post you had there on the other page, joncha.

[Asher]

Not only did the Canucks rightfully lose in the first round embarrassingly early, but the social conservatives in Alberta (Ben's favourites) just got run out of town, largely on bigoted remarks from a homophobic pastor candidate.

And Ben's favourite progressive conservative, Ted Morton, lost his seat. Ben thought he would be leader.

[Wezil]

Asher - Gurney in the NP had an interesting article. Thoughts?

Normally, an anecdote can help illustrate an argument rather than make it. But in light of last night’s surprising result in the Alberta provincial election, in which all the pollsters and most of the journalists were proven flat-out wrong, I’m forced to conclude that one man, my poll with a sample size of one, had it all figured out far better than the professional prognosticators did.

The man is my brother-in-law, a Toronto boy who (like so many other Canadians) has of late found stable, well-paying work in Alberta. He’s been there a few months now, and as fate would have it, arrived back in Toronto for a visit with family on the same day that Albertans went to the polls. He’s an apolitical type at the best of times, and hasn’t been in Alberta long enough to pick up on the local issues, but when I flipped the TV to coverage of the election as the polls closed, he opined, “Everyone says this Wildrose is going to win. But I don’t think they will. Everyone I know hates them and thinks they’re anti-gay.”

With all respect to my dear relative, I admit now that I didn’t believe him. I figured, hey, he’s not that into politics, all the pollsters have been showing a huge Wildrose lead for weeks, all the professional pundits I follow out there are already autopsying the Progressive Conservative campaign, and besides, he’s a young urban professional, who probably hangs out with other young urban professionals. A bit of a skew to the left (or at least left by Alberta standards) is to be expected among that group.

But, in the cold light of the dawn, his offhand remark pretty much cut right to the heart of it. And though it’ll take some time to sift through the numbers to determine exactly what happened, the explanation could really be that simple — Alberta’s younger, more cosmopolitan generation has changed so rapidly over the last few years that not only was it unreceptive to the Wildrose’s pitch, but the professionals tasked with making predictions hadn’t appreciated how radically different things had become in the Alberta electorate.

This new crop of voters, many born outside of the province, wouldn’t appreciate (both in terms of understanding and support) talk of a firewall, and social conservatism. It’s not their issue. They’re the ones who helped elect Naheed Nenshi, hardly the stereotypical old-stock Albertan, as Mayor of Calgary. For better or worse, they just don’t have the prickly hide of Albertans past. It’s not even necessarily that they aren’t right-wing or didn’t like some of the Wildrose’s policies. They just didn’t think the Wildrose could represent them, and worse, suspected they might embarrass them.

Yes — embarrass. Speaking to a close friend last night, who has lived in Calgary for years now, she told me, “Everyone I know supported the Wildrose, but the social conservative outbursts killed them. Albertans are thought of as being these redneck hicks, and they know it. But they’re actually very sensitive to how they’re seen. They don’t want to support a supposedly libertarian party filled with questionable members.”

It’s probably a bit simplistic to suggest that Albertans voted en masse to keep the PCs in power so that they didn’t look back in front of Ontario and British Columbia. Voters will vote in their self-interest, not to protect their self-image. But everyone, from Alberta’s politicians to the pollsters and, yes, the pundits, too, will have to consider the fact that Canada’s youngest province, pulling in workers from all the other regions of the country, has diluted its own hard-headed pool of unrepentant, firewall-buildin’ right-wingers to the point where they won’t vote for a bozo just because he’s their bozo.

That may be good for Alberta in the long run. They’ll need political cover from the rest of Canada if they want to continue to fend off the oil-sand haters, and it’s hard to ask for help from behind a firewall. But it’s clearly not good for the Wildrose, and may sadly make Canadians less interesting than we might have hoped.

National Post
mgurney@nationalpost.com

[Asher]

I think it's spot on. I had a hard time believing the polls as well, as the only people I knew supporting Wildrose were elderly people.

But I'm not only in the young urban professional crowd, but have many gay friends. So I wasn't willing to extrapolate.

But it's really easy to see why this happened: young people got really engaged because of the issues described above -- the Wildrose candidates are embarrassing and are either idiots or think we're idiots (climate change denial, for instance). In my riding, the PC candidate almost got kicked out of office by the Liberals last election in 2008 (which is very rare). This election the Liberals got almost no votes. I think it's largely strategic voting -- the media kept hyping up this landslide victory by Wildrose, which mobilized people to vote in the PCs, the only party capable of stopping them.

My polling station was insanely busy, and there were tons of younger people there -- most of which weren't even registered to vote (and presumably don't often vote).

The bigoted comments sealed their fate, but I don't think they had a real chance to begin with. Pollsters don't know how to poll anymore. People of my generation don't have land-lines, so we don't get many poll calls. People of my generation largely don't own their own homes, so door to door polling isn't effective. People of my generation have little patience - we don't answer online polls, we hang up on robo-calls and surveys, and we generally tell people to just **** off. There's simply no reliable polling for us.

The result is any time the younger vote is mobilized, all bets are off. That's how Nenshi won, too.

Also, the Wildrose needed Calgary to win. I think they blew that chance as soon as Danielle Smith denied climate change. Calgary's got the highest rate of post-secondary education in the country. No reasonable person code vote for someone either so stupid or so deceitful. The racist comments also killed them in the northeast of the city (the man saying he could speak for all ethnicity because he's white). The homophobic comments (the Ben-esque comments) probably mobilized the left into more strategic voting as people were terrified of the kind of social tyranny a Wildrose government may have in store. That was only cemented when Smith called things like gay marriage an "issue of conscience", and instead of rebuking the rednecks she defended them.