Chandler on CTV

It appears that CFCN picked up on Chandler's little tirade as well - and they've posted an interview with him as well.

In it, he continues to reiterate his asinine "if you're not a conservative, leave" tirade. To which I can only say this: "Piss Off, Craig!" There are Albertans who have lived here a lot longer than you have who are not rabid, fundamentalist conservative ideologues...I'm one of them!

Additionally, I'm sad to say, but Stelmach's comments on the matter don't exactly inspire me, either. This is an issue where Stelmach needs to come out and be very clear, forceful and unambiguous in squelching Chandler's BS. I wouldn't say he did that.

Picking Up On Chandler...

[Update 19:20]
Over at Daveberta's blog, the comments are positively hilarious - especially when someone pops up to defend Chandler's insane rantings

Also via Daveberta, we find this little turd that he mentioned a while ago on Project Alberta as part of his strategy for dragging Alberta's PCs even further into the extreme right wing ...

The domain registration is via Chandler's PGIB group...

[/Update]
I've been waiting for this for some time. At long last, we finally see people in the media picking up on Chandler's latest insanity.

Today, it's columnist Rick Bell in the Calgary Sun, pointing out the utter insanity of Chandler's If you aren't a PC, leave Alberta tirade.

Amusingly, in a move almost as brazenly stupid as Ralph Klein's infamous "Bums-and-Creeps" speech, Chandler basically tries to blame all the people who are moving into Alberta for Ed Stelmach's plummeting support numbers:

Alberta is growing in a way that was never expected and many of the people coming here do not truly appreciate Alberta or even understand the history of this province or the relationship with the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party. To those of you who have come to our great land from out of province, you need to remember that you came here to our home and we vote conservative.

Newsflash, Craig. Not all Albertans vote conservative. Frightening to you, some of might even consider voting Liberal on occasion. After all, anyone who has ties to the liberal party (or anything that is left of Chandler's ideas) is clearly untrustworthy:

Lastly, the polls are manipulated, at least anything by Cameron Strategies. Cameron Strategies are Liberals and can't be trusted.

Sure, Craig. We'll keep in mind that like most bullies, you actually believe that you have a monopoly on "truth"(™).

We are all "real Albertans", Craig - and our opinions do not become invalid because we step into this province.

The Media Awakens ...

Slowly, it would seem.

The uproar over Stephen Harper's deliberate attempt to undermine Canada's democracy by appointing Houston, B.C.'s mayor as the "Conservative Government Liason" in a BC riding has been rattling around the blogosphere for some time now.

At long last, we find a few comments appearing in The Vancouver Sun, making observations that many in the blogosphere have already made since the story first bubbled its way to the surface.

As if Harper's other antics haven't been bad enough, deliberate attempts to undermine the democratic foundations of our government should outrage Canada's electorate. Conservative campaign signs last election read "demand better" - this is one Canadian that is demanding a government a damn sight better than the bunch of thin-skinned partisan yahoos that are currently gorging at the trough on the government side of the House of Commons!

Dr. J. Michael Bailey Admits To Bad Science?

My 'bots are dredging interesting stuff up this morning. Today, I find myself pointed to a transcription of a radio interview with Alice Dreger and J. Michael Bailey that follows up on my earlier post on the furor over Bailey's book.

There's two things that leap out at me in this interview - and they are both statements by Bailey.

Bailey: Well, sure thing. This would be a pretty simple matter to tell you what the book was if there hadn’t been an intentional attempt to defame me and my book. I wrote what is commonly understood to be a popular science book, in which I reviewed serious academic work by myself and other scholars. And the serious scholar who did the traditional academic work, peer reviewed and published in respectable journals, who wrote about transsexuals, is a guy named Ray Blanchard from Toronto, who I think is the world’s expert in transsexualism. And I, kind of coincidentally, because they came to me and wanted to talk to me and tell me about themselves, I came to know a group of transsexual women in Chicago. I was struck when I got to know them that there seemed to be these two completely, utterly distinct types of transsexuals, and I had not known about that. I subsequently became familiar with Ray Blanchard’s work, which was published in the 80s and early 90s, and it completely explained what I was seeing. It made me understand. And so I consulted gender experts, allegedly, such as Randi Ettner, and I read autobiographies of transsexuals, and I was struck by how they don’t write about what I could plainly see with my eyes and was there in Ray Blanchard’s work. And so I decided to write my book in part because of this.

In short, Bailey is essentially arguing that Ray Blanchard's theory supercedes all the other work and study of cross-gender identified people (and in particular, transsexuals) as an explanatory model. While I don't think Blanchard is anywhere near the mark in his classification and evaluation of the evidence, I don't want to entirely dismiss his work which may well contain some valid observations. In short, the jury's still out on this one - I think the evidence I have seen substantially calls into question Blanchard's interpretation of things.

Additionally, Bailey appears to be admitting that his clinical work has not substantially been involved with transgender people, and that isn't an "area of specialization" for him. Which is roughly equivalent to this author writing a book on machine intelligence and claiming that I'm an authority in the subject when my own dalliances in software have only touched upon the notion from time to time.

It's the second part of Bailey's statement that leaves me a little thunderstruck. Basically, Bailey has admitted here to writing a book based on what he and Blanchard infer from what I will broadly call the "transsexual narrative" - oddly in areas such as sexual identity that he freely admits do not appear to any great degree in the narratives themselves. This is as close to a tacit admission of intellectual hackery as I've seen come from an author with Bailey's credentials.

I realize that in science one has to "read between the lines" that the evidence before you contains (whether we are talking about psychology or particle physics), but there are degrees to which such inferences can be made and supported. However, if transsexuals don't talk about their sexual identity in their narrative, it's probably because it isn't important to the discussion of gender identity!

This one statement is the gem that puts the whole Bailey/Blanchard thing into perspective - regardless of the actions of those who sought to intimidate or bully Bailey. His book, and theoretical assertions, are at best transcriptions of Blanchard's work, and inflated considerably by whatever anecdotal evidence Bailey chose to interpret through Blanchard's model.

It's a sad statement that the subtitle of Bailey's book talks of "The Science of Transsexualism", when more and more it becomes clear that very little science was actually involved in the writing of that book.

Right!

More Brilliant Logic ...

From Alderman wannabe Richard Evans...more compassionate conservatism.

Instead of actually postulating solutions to things, we find our erstwhile candidate for Alderman yapping in the classic language of "individual responsibility" - which so often translates into the basic mantra that poverty is the fault of the poor.

Why yes, people should live within their means, and earn as they are able to. In a perfect world, it would all balance out just fine. Sadly, our world is somewhat less than perfect.

Homeless people on our streets are there for a plethora of reasons, not all of them obvious or well managed. Our society does a poor job at best of dealing with people who suffer from mental illness (an all too common problem among the homeless), nor do we manage to examine and deal with the social cycles that perpetuate the grinding poverty of life on the streets.

Whether you are talking about drug addicts, schizophrenia or other issues that are often part and parcel of the "street scene", it is simplistic to claim that they are all the result of "poor choices" and shrug them off.

When we are talking about housing, it is foolish to assume in Calgary's marketplace that "the market will provide". It's rapidly reaching a point where the cost of housing is far beyond the means of many, (Try surviving in this city on less than $30K or so a year...) while wages in many jobs have remained at the levels they were at in the late '90s.

Poverty is a cycle, and part of a complex picture called society. It is facile and unrealistic to simply attribute the social problems that many experience to "poor choices" or "irresponsibility".

What is the price of not dealing effectively with the problems and causes of poverty? Increased crime and violence as those at the bottom of the economic ladder seek to find ways out of their situations. Remember, for many of those people, they have nothing more to lose. If they suffer additionally from mental illness of some sort, their reasoning may be severely impaired as well.

Personal responsibility is fine and dandy - a good place for most of us to start, but it does little to deal with those who have fallen through the cracks and now struggle to survive. We need people on Council who are willing and able to consider constructive approaches to these issues, not simply blaming the people who find themselves in dire straits for their situation.

The Con$ervative "Family Values" Bandwagon

The HarperCon$ have long tried portray themselves as the "family values" party - in a strategy that echoes the path and approaches of the Bush II Rethuglicans in the States.

Well, in their latest little game of undermining Canadian democracy, they apparently forgot to do the requisite sanity checks on whom they were thrusting into the public spotlight.

I like Garth Turner's take on the matter, it more or less echoes my own sentiments. The pictures themselves, I could care less about. What they symbolize, I find outright offensive - a disrespect for an elected office and what it represents.

Perhaps a little like Bill Clinton's dalliances with Monica Lewinsky, the actions themselves reflect poor moral judgment more than anything else. However, when paired with a party that has tried to claim some kind of higher ground morally and ethically with the voters, it is yet another piece of evidence of just how power-hungry and dishonest the HarperCon$ really are ... and apparently hypocrites on their "morality" play as well.

The voters in Skeena deserve far better than this ... they deserve a government that is not so amazingly partisan that it cannot bring itself to listen to MPs from other parties who represent their constituents in Ottawa. The HarperCon$ clearly are not that party.