The Darker Side of UCP Policy

Welcome to Alberta's 2023 election cycle. Campaigning has effectively been going on for some time now, but the writ was issued yesterday and now it's official. We're in an election cycle. 

This is basically a two horse race. Alberta either elects the UCP, now led by Danielle Smith, or it elects the NDP.  There are a handful of other parties, but frankly between them they might be lucky to pull one or two seats - such is the nature of Alberta politics. 

But, voters need to be absolutely clear:  The UCP is not the PCAA - not even close. The PCAA had drifted a long ways away from where it was when the venerated Peter Lougheed was leading it, but the UCP is even more extreme. Under Klein, the PCAA went strongly towards the 'market fundamentalist' politics of the 90s, the frankenparty that Kenney mashed together is even further to the right with strong roots in rural social conservatism. 

The UCP under Danielle Smith is a much different creature again. Smith herself is a libertarian, but Take Back Alberta (TBA) is something else again, holding much stronger views on a variety of topics and they see Smith as a convenient puppet. 

Let's explore what a TBA controlled UCP seems to actually believe: 

You Do NOT Roll Over For Fascists

So, on Saturday, Jen Gerson published a column in the Globe and Mail titled “The Backlash Against Drag Artists Is Unfair, But It’s No Mystery Why It’s Happening”.  I read it on Saturday, it’s taken me the last couple of days to calm down enough to write a response to it. 

First, it’s the classic “tut-tutting” that the queer community has gotten over decades. More or less, it boils down to “don’t go too far, or you’ll upset someone”. I remember hearing that same argument being made in the 80s - which was basically “well, being gay isn’t a crime any more, you should be happy with that”. Now it’s “well, it’s (sort of) okay to be trans, but don’t let anyone know you’re trans because they might get upset about it”.

It’s condescending, and it’s garbage that basically boils down to “don’t do anything that will make the hardline religious nutcases upset” … and yes, it’s _ALWAYS_ coming from hardline religious nutcases. In my personal archives, the vast preponderance of anti-2SLGBTQ+ material comes from people who profess to be “Christian” (in particular) - and those archives now go back to the mid-1990s. The pattern is consistent.

The thing about these claims is that they tend to treat “rights as pie”, as if recognizing the validity of someone else’s existence is magically going to mean someone else “loses something”. That has never been the case. Never has recognizing the validity of another person’s rights resulted in someone else “losing” anything.

Gerson’s analysis basically says “well, fascism is on the rise, so you can expect to have your rights rolled back”. NO. WE. DO. NOT. History is abundantly clear what happens with movements like fascism. We should be clearly, and loudly demanding that our rights be respected, and our existence normalized in society.

Gerson might be willing to roll over to the fascists. I am not

So ... The Social Woes Of Today Are The Fault of Whom?!

The political right wing's inability to understand things beyond simplistic bromides has always surprised me.  I get that it makes for easy sound bite politicking, but seriously, the conclusions drawn are often laughable in their implausibility.

Then we come to today's entry in "what stupidity will they say today?":  The Rise of the Single, Woke (and Young) Female.