interesting walls of text

[penis]

i like reading interesting walls of text (shoutouts to yardsale) so post some here so i can read them. any topic. source too if you can.

ill start

Nervous Nellies

Girls don't start out more anxious than boys, but they usually end up that way.

By Taylor Clark

In the jittery world of anxiety research, one of the field's most consistent findings is also perhaps its biggest source of controversy: Women, according to countless studies, are twice as prone to anxiety as men. When pollsters call women up, they always confess to far higher levels of worry than men about everything from crime to the economy. Psychologists diagnose women with anxiety disorders two times as often as men, and research confirms—perhaps unsurprisingly—that women are significantly more inclined toward negative emotion, self-criticism, and endless rumination about problems. From statistics like these, some have even leapt to the Larry Summers-esque claim that women are simply built to be much more nervous than men—an idea that has outraged many women inside (and outside) the psychology community.

According to new evidence, however, the outraged are right: When it comes to our preconceived notions about women and anxiety, women are unfairly being dragged through the mud. While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a cultural setup—one in which major social and parenting biases lead to girls becoming needlessly nervous adults. In reality, the idea that women are "naturally" twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion.

Before we can unleash the vengeance of the furies on this falsehood, though, there's some bad news we need to get out of the way first: a few recent studies have indicated that the hormonal differences between the sexes really do make women a touch more biologically inclined toward anxiety than men. One noteworthy experiment from last year, for example, found that female brains—well, female rat brains—get more rattled by small levels of a major stress hormone called corticotrophin-releasing factor than male brains. Another 2010 study, at Florida State University, likewise revealed that male rats' higher testosterone levels seem to give them a larger buffer against anxiety than female rats have. (Don't get hung up on the fact that these studies were on rodents; most of what we know about the neuroscience of fear actually comes from tormenting lab rats.) Just how big a role these biological factors play in human women's anxiety isn't yet clear.

But one thing we do know for certain is that the way we raise children plays a huge role in determining how disposed toward anxiety they are later in life, and thus the difference in the way we treat boys and girls explains a lot about the heightened nerves we see in many adult women. To show just how important this is, let's start at the very beginning. If women really were fated to be significantly more anxious than men, we would expect them to start showing this nervousness at a very young age, right? Yet precisely the opposite is true: According to the UCLA anxiety expert Michelle Craske, in the first few months of infants' lives, it's boys who show greater emotional neediness. While girls become slightly more prone to negative feelings than boys at two years (which, coincidentally, is the age at which kids begin learning gender roles), research has shown that up until age 11, girls and boys are equally likely to develop an anxiety disorder. By age 15, however, girls are six times more likely to have one than boys are.

Why the sudden gap in diagnosed anxiety? Well, one answer is that as a flood of adolescent hormones sends these boys' and girls' emotions into overdrive, the difference in their upbringings finally catches up with them. After all, whether parents intend to or not, they usually treat the emotional outbursts of girls far differently than those of boys. "From a socialization angle, there's quite a lot of evidence that little girls who exhibit shyness or anxiety are reinforced for it, whereas little boys who exhibit that behavior might even be punished for it," Craske told me.

In my book Nerve, I call this the "skinned knee effect": Parents coddle girls who cry after a painful scrape but tell boys to suck it up, and this formative link between emotional outbursts and kisses from mom predisposes girls to react to unpleasant situations with "negative" feelings like anxiety later in life. On top of this, cultural biases about boys being more capable than girls also lead parents to push sons to show courage and confront their fears, while daughters are far more likely to be sheltered from life's challenges. If little Olivia shows fear, she gets a hug; if little Oliver shows fear, he gets urged to overcome it.

The result of these parenting disparities is that by the time girls grow into young women, they've learned fewer effective coping strategies than their male counterparts, which translates to higher anxiety. The sexes learn to deal with fear in two very different ways: men have been conditioned to tackle problems head-on, while women have been taught to worry, ruminate, and complain to each other (hey, I'm just reporting the research) rather than actively confront challenges. These are generalizations, of course; the fact that I have always been an Olympic-caliber worrier offers us just one example of how men can fret with the best of them, and everyone knows at least one woman who appears not even to know what fear is. Still, these differences in upbringing clarify quite a bit about the gender gap in anxiety.

Yet parenting doesn't tell the full story of feminine nerves, because even if a young woman emerges from childhood as a relatively cool and resilient adult, she still has to do battle with social forces that seem bent on making her anxious. You may expect me to dwell here on the viselike pressure that contemporary culture exerts on women to look beautiful and young forever (one highly questionable survey found that women worry about their bodies an average of 252 times a week), but while this is a significant issue, the cultural biases about women and anxiety run deeper still.

We have an odd tendency to label women as anxious even when they aren't. A recent, highly revealing study showed that even in situations in which male and female subjects experience the same level of an emotion, women are consistently seen—and even see themselves—as being "more emotional" than men. It shouldn't be too surprising, then, that this bias holds for anxiety as well; we buy into the fretful-women stereotypes far too often. Another report, for example, found significant differences in the way doctors respond to patients who report common stress symptoms like chest pain: Whereas men get full cardiac workups, women are more often told that they're just stressed or anxious, and that their symptoms are in their heads.

It should be pretty clear by now that the claims about women being far more innately anxious than men are suspect, but before I depart in a blaze of justice, one final point is in order: Men are getting off much too easily in the anxiety discussion. Probably the most significant reason why women get diagnosed with anxiety disorders twice as often as men isn't that they're doubly fearful. It's because anxious men are much less likely to seek psychological help.

The flip side of being raised to always show strength is that men come to feel that going to a therapist is a sign of weakness or failure (think of Tony Soprano's mopey resistance to the benefits of psychiatry), which is why men constitute just 37 percent of therapy patients, by some estimates. If nearly twice as many women seek help from a psychologist, then they'll obviously be diagnosed more often with anxiety disorders. Troublingly enough, the evidence shows that while women deal with anxiety and stress by worrying, men are more likely to try to bury these feelings with alcohol or drugs—which offers one rationale for why men are at higher risk for "antisocial" disorders like alcoholism.

So take heart, women of the world: You're not necessarily bioengineered to be worry machines. The deeper truth behind the great anxiety divide is this: We all get stressed-out and nervous sometimes. Women are simply more honest about their anxiety, because they've been taught to deal with it through unencumbered fretting. Of course, I'm not about to declare that if we raised boys and girls exactly the same, eradicated the cultural anxiety bias against women, and frog-marched more men into therapy, the gender nervousness gap would magically disappear. We would almost certainly see, though, that this gap is far smaller than we think.

Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2291198/pagenum/all/#p2

[FranklinCosgrove]

tl;dr

.

[sawyer]

Nice thread OP.

[Dropt]

this thread needs pics.

Here's one :

[FranklinCosgrove]

too big; didn't see

[penis]

so sad for me . i just wanted to read things

[southfive]

i read it, but it wasn't interesting

[jayrock]

Excuse the size and petulance of this post. A number of people have pm'd me or plus repped me etc. asking for some kind of story about what exactly makes me want to stab myself repeatedly in the eyeballs every time I step into the office in the morning, so here's the dirty laundry. (this could've gone in "what are you doing with your life" but I really hope that this isn't what I'm doing with my life, just the next few months).

First of all, I didn't study finance, nor am I particularly well versed in the institutional finance that a lot of you are studying. I work in retail banking, which essentially means that I provide mortgages, visas, auto or marine loans, lines of credit, etc...all the shit that keeps a significant percentage of SuFu well dressed and poor. After university I took the first job that came along, one that paid $40k plus bonus, benefits too numerous to list, and got the fuck out of a small town and into Toronto.

I was bright-eyed fresh faced when I first started. I consider myself fairly astute and better than average when it comes to maintaining good rapport with the clients I've had in past jobs, so I really thought I'd be good at this job, and I was excited to start. But over the course of 8 months of employment, any and all motivation I had to succeed in the position was worn away by a combination of the following: middle management, corporate culture, co-workers, and an overall sense of the worthlessness of my position.

Middle Management

Anyone studying finance, business, or maybe even sociology, is probably familiar with the Peter Principle: the Principle that on a long enough time line everyone is promoted to exactly their point of incompentence (the logic being that, if you're not getting promoted past your position, it's probably because you're not very good at the job you're currently doing). The reason it's called the Peter Principle and not the Peter Theory is because it's totally fucking true, and the proof is in middle management. There is no more useless or counterproductive entity on the planet than a middle manager. Anyone who has ever watch "the Wire" knows well enough how useless and ultimately stupid someone like the Deputy Ops or some asshole Major like Valchek can be.

I have worked at two locations under two different managers since starting my career with the bank, and both of them have done more to disrupt client relationships, stoke already flaring tempers, and foster disunity and ill-will among their employees than they have to actually contribute to the well being of the work place.

My co-workers and I joke about how useless my current manager is, but it's become less of a joke lately. He literally cannot perform the most basic functions of his own job. Today he interrupted my lunch in a panic about some crisis that had crossed his desk, and how it needed my immediate attention because "while Bob's on vacation, you're the only licensed investment representative here!"

I had to point out to him that he himself is a licensed rep, a point which he has forgotten because he has no idea a.) how to use our computer systems or b.) what the bank's policies are. there have been numerous occaisions where he has enlisted me to do tasks that it is against policy for me to perform, simply because he can't figure out how to do them himself. This brings us to...

Corporate Culture

Corporations are like governments - they're giant bureaucracies where there is a decision made by one individual, and the consquences of this policy decision can reach thousands or millions with unintended consequences (if you don't watch the Wire, maybe you've heard of the 2008 Sub-Prime Crisis). So, when our group head rolls out a sales goal of $12,000,000 in new business per sales officer, I am expected to meet this goal.

Now, corporations also have a chain of command (also like in the Wire! fun!). I report to my manager, who reports to the district manager, who reports to the district vice president, etc. So, I can never tell the DVP why I'm not meeting my sales goal because I'd be going above my manager and his manager's heads. When the DVP yells at his underlings, ultimately I'm going to have to get yelled at by my Manager.

As you can imagine, it's not ideal for me to tell my manager that my sales are low because I spend all my time doing the retarded menial shit that my manager, himself, is supposed to be doing, and that if he weren't such an imcompetent fuck maybe I'd have more time to do my job. But, due to the corporate structure, I can't tell anyone else that can do shit about it either.

The frustration caused by this unending chain of bitching is compounded by my manager bitching at me to focus on my own work, and remember that my first priority is and always will be sales (before coming and dropping a big fat servicecomplaint on my desk 10 minutes later).

This corporate culture pumps other bullshit from the top too. A policy idea that might sound great to the CEO ("We're not going to offer competitive rates because we will be the Bank of Expertise! We'll use superior knowledge of finances to save people money, and then the rates we offer won't even matter.") are complete bullshit when they hit the ground ("Yes, these people are leveraged to the tits, the only thing that will possibly save them money is the lower rate that our competitor is offering them.") This wouldn't be so bad if more people disagreed with it - specifically the middle management, who either believes the shit that actually comes out of his mouth, or is really great at pretending. Which brings me to...

Co-Workers

I'll keep this one short. The people I work with are either a.) uneducated enough to buy into the bullshit that rolls from the top and therefore infuriating or b.) have been here long enough that they've given up caring. Now, I've given up caring, but only to the extent that it pertains to my own successes. Working with a service team comprised of 50 year old women who treat your clients like shit because they're just trying to "catch their shows" is a pretty quick way to turn you sour on the others in your office. Not that all of this comes back to middle management, but the Pontius Pilate technique is not one that I'm fond of.

A feeling of overall worthlessness

Basically, I move money around. I rarely do anything truly good for my clients. Maybe I'll save them a few bucks here and there, but for the most part it's very difficult to do anything really stellar except make people feel good about their finances. And here's why I've decided I want nothing to do with any financial position ever again: mostly because I feel like the grass isn't going to be any greener anywhere else. At any other big bank, I might find some things I like much more, but there will be something stupid and retarded, and it will once again be a product of working for a corporation with 50,000 employees. I could get out of sales, but there would be similarly shitty pressures from all sides that are ultimately irrational and full of shit - I can't express to you the number of times I've actually found myself "juking the stats", or the number of times I've actually heard the sentence "you've gotta play the game".

my old room mate worked for some I-Banking firm downtown, and he made more than me and was more knowledgable about investing and finance than me. He quit for all the reasons mentioned here. There was always some bullshit to deal with, some stupid decision that meant some menial retarded task for him that he would ultimately be bitched at for doing.

Are all jobs in finance this bad? Obviously, once you get past the bullshit at the bottom, probably not. My mom worked at this company for 37 years and made a killing doing what she did. To be honest, I'm jealous of her in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways she frustrates me because she's part of the world that fucks with my world on a daily basis. The people making decisions that roll down, and make everything shitty. I could work through it, get past it, and be successful here. Ironically, I think it's largely my educational background that makes me unable to do this. I spent 4 years learning how to question things, figure out logical solutions to problems, think critically, only to wind up in a job where if you do any of that shit you fail. My mom just says "You think too much."

Fuck it.

looks promising, will read soon

[16steps]

ha, i was gonna post that

started off with the word petulance so its gonna be good

[squirtlepk]

i like reading interesting walls of text (shoutouts to yardsale) so post some here so i can read them. any topic. source too if you can.

ill start

Nervous Nellies

Girls don't start out more anxious than boys, but they usually end up that way.

By Taylor Clark

In the jittery world of anxiety research, one of the field's most consistent findings is also perhaps its biggest source of controversy: Women, according to countless studies, are twice as prone to anxiety as men. When pollsters call women up, they always confess to far higher levels of worry than men about everything from crime to the economy. Psychologists diagnose women with anxiety disorders two times as often as men, and research confirms—perhaps unsurprisingly—that women are significantly more inclined toward negative emotion, self-criticism, and endless rumination about problems. From statistics like these, some have even leapt to the Larry Summers-esque claim that women are simply built to be much more nervous than men—an idea that has outraged many women inside (and outside) the psychology community.

According to new evidence, however, the outraged are right: When it comes to our preconceived notions about women and anxiety, women are unfairly being dragged through the mud. While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a cultural setup—one in which major social and parenting biases lead to girls becoming needlessly nervous adults. In reality, the idea that women are "naturally" twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion.

Before we can unleash the vengeance of the furies on this falsehood, though, there's some bad news we need to get out of the way first: a few recent studies have indicated that the hormonal differences between the sexes really do make women a touch more biologically inclined toward anxiety than men. One noteworthy experiment from last year, for example, found that female brains—well, female rat brains—get more rattled by small levels of a major stress hormone called corticotrophin-releasing factor than male brains. Another 2010 study, at Florida State University, likewise revealed that male rats' higher testosterone levels seem to give them a larger buffer against anxiety than female rats have. (Don't get hung up on the fact that these studies were on rodents; most of what we know about the neuroscience of fear actually comes from tormenting lab rats.) Just how big a role these biological factors play in human women's anxiety isn't yet clear.

But one thing we do know for certain is that the way we raise children plays a huge role in determining how disposed toward anxiety they are later in life, and thus the difference in the way we treat boys and girls explains a lot about the heightened nerves we see in many adult women. To show just how important this is, let's start at the very beginning. If women really were fated to be significantly more anxious than men, we would expect them to start showing this nervousness at a very young age, right? Yet precisely the opposite is true: According to the UCLA anxiety expert Michelle Craske, in the first few months of infants' lives, it's boys who show greater emotional neediness. While girls become slightly more prone to negative feelings than boys at two years (which, coincidentally, is the age at which kids begin learning gender roles), research has shown that up until age 11, girls and boys are equally likely to develop an anxiety disorder. By age 15, however, girls are six times more likely to have one than boys are.

Why the sudden gap in diagnosed anxiety? Well, one answer is that as a flood of adolescent hormones sends these boys' and girls' emotions into overdrive, the difference in their upbringings finally catches up with them. After all, whether parents intend to or not, they usually treat the emotional outbursts of girls far differently than those of boys. "From a socialization angle, there's quite a lot of evidence that little girls who exhibit shyness or anxiety are reinforced for it, whereas little boys who exhibit that behavior might even be punished for it," Craske told me.

In my book Nerve, I call this the "skinned knee effect": Parents coddle girls who cry after a painful scrape but tell boys to suck it up, and this formative link between emotional outbursts and kisses from mom predisposes girls to react to unpleasant situations with "negative" feelings like anxiety later in life. On top of this, cultural biases about boys being more capable than girls also lead parents to push sons to show courage and confront their fears, while daughters are far more likely to be sheltered from life's challenges. If little Olivia shows fear, she gets a hug; if little Oliver shows fear, he gets urged to overcome it.

The result of these parenting disparities is that by the time girls grow into young women, they've learned fewer effective coping strategies than their male counterparts, which translates to higher anxiety. The sexes learn to deal with fear in two very different ways: men have been conditioned to tackle problems head-on, while women have been taught to worry, ruminate, and complain to each other (hey, I'm just reporting the research) rather than actively confront challenges. These are generalizations, of course; the fact that I have always been an Olympic-caliber worrier offers us just one example of how men can fret with the best of them, and everyone knows at least one woman who appears not even to know what fear is. Still, these differences in upbringing clarify quite a bit about the gender gap in anxiety.

Yet parenting doesn't tell the full story of feminine nerves, because even if a young woman emerges from childhood as a relatively cool and resilient adult, she still has to do battle with social forces that seem bent on making her anxious. You may expect me to dwell here on the viselike pressure that contemporary culture exerts on women to look beautiful and young forever (one highly questionable survey found that women worry about their bodies an average of 252 times a week), but while this is a significant issue, the cultural biases about women and anxiety run deeper still.

We have an odd tendency to label women as anxious even when they aren't. A recent, highly revealing study showed that even in situations in which male and female subjects experience the same level of an emotion, women are consistently seen—and even see themselves—as being "more emotional" than men. It shouldn't be too surprising, then, that this bias holds for anxiety as well; we buy into the fretful-women stereotypes far too often. Another report, for example, found significant differences in the way doctors respond to patients who report common stress symptoms like chest pain: Whereas men get full cardiac workups, women are more often told that they're just stressed or anxious, and that their symptoms are in their heads.

It should be pretty clear by now that the claims about women being far more innately anxious than men are suspect, but before I depart in a blaze of justice, one final point is in order: Men are getting off much too easily in the anxiety discussion. Probably the most significant reason why women get diagnosed with anxiety disorders twice as often as men isn't that they're doubly fearful. It's because anxious men are much less likely to seek psychological help.

The flip side of being raised to always show strength is that men come to feel that going to a therapist is a sign of weakness or failure (think of Tony Soprano's mopey resistance to the benefits of psychiatry), which is why men constitute just 37 percent of therapy patients, by some estimates. If nearly twice as many women seek help from a psychologist, then they'll obviously be diagnosed more often with anxiety disorders. Troublingly enough, the evidence shows that while women deal with anxiety and stress by worrying, men are more likely to try to bury these feelings with alcohol or drugs—which offers one rationale for why men are at higher risk for "antisocial" disorders like alcoholism.

So take heart, women of the world: You're not necessarily bioengineered to be worry machines. The deeper truth behind the great anxiety divide is this: We all get stressed-out and nervous sometimes. Women are simply more honest about their anxiety, because they've been taught to deal with it through unencumbered fretting. Of course, I'm not about to declare that if we raised boys and girls exactly the same, eradicated the cultural anxiety bias against women, and frog-marched more men into therapy, the gender nervousness gap would magically disappear. We would almost certainly see, though, that this gap is far smaller than we think.

Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2291198/pagenum/all/#p2

[funkdoobi]

Canada? How does it work?

1. First things first: In the ’90s, one of the best things to watch on Canadian television (faint praise, that) was This Hour Has 22 Minutes. One of its most popular segments was “Talking To Americans1,” which was, more or less, just what it sounds like. Posing as a journalist, comedian Rick Mercer would get Americans to do things like congratulate Canada on its recent legalization of the stapler. Most of the interviews were conducted in the street-ambush style that makes you feel sorry for the targets, because God, some people were just out shopping and I wouldn’t know the first thing about Mexican politics if you asked me on my way into the Gap. Less sympathetic were the public figures Mercer would occasionally manage to get near. He would get Mike Huckabee to congratulate Canada on having built a glass dome over its “national igloo”; he would get George W. Bush to thank “Prime Minister Jean Poutine” for his endorsement. And oh, Canadians would snicker, but their laughter carried with it a tailwind of depression. Acknowledging one’s own insignificance is funny—until it’s not.

I offer these prefatory remarks not because what I’m about to tell you about Canada, its politics and the upcoming election isn’t worthy of ridicule. Rather, I want to indicate that most American notions of why it’s ridiculous—the “eh” and the “aboot”—are… okay, the word I want here is “wrong.” Just wrong.

2. The election will take place on May 2. It was officially “called” this past Saturday, the day after a non-confidence vote felled the minority Conservative government led by our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. For those of you unclear on the mechanics of parliamentary politics: there is no set “term” between elections in Canada. Instead, the ruling party “calls” them. Unless, as here, the party is in the minority,1 in which case they can be defeated by a vote of non-confidence. Often non-confidence becomes an issue when the budget arrives, because Canadian culture retains, even in this multicultural age, a residue of Scottish Presbyterianism and we like to fight about money. But in the actual case, Friday’s vote took the form of a vote to hold the government in contempt of Parliament2for failing to release financial projections2 about its purchase of 65 fighter jets and certain proposed anti-crime measures. This is the first time in Canadian history a government has been found in contempt of Parliament.3

But no one who isn’t an op-ed pundit cares about that. The real issue is that our politics is paralyzed—largely by mediocrity but also by certain historical circumstances related to the party machinery in Canada.

As illustration, we need look no further than the current strange marriage of the Conservatives with the New Democratic Party (NDP), which is our “far left” party4—a blessed union which came about because the Conservatives, as a minority, needed to team up with another party. And so they ended up with the NDP, a party once once led by Tommy Douglas3, the man who more or less invented Canada’s health care system. (Also, he’s Kiefer Sutherland’s maternal grandfather.) The NDP has never been seen as a viable governing party at the federal level—although the premiers (think “governor”) of Manitoba and Nova Scotia are NDP, currently—but the party usually manages to have at least some seats in the House.

The leader of the NDP is a man named Jack Layton, who, in what is an accurate reflection of the size of Canada’s populace, went to my mother’s high school; but, as she would tell you, she didn’t really know him that well because he was two years behind her.5 I’d like to add an anecdote about Layton here but there aren’t any. That is, other than the general and characteristically vague Canadian sense that he is “out there” when in fact he’s really the scion of a long line of Canadian politicians4, because the political class in Canada, particularly in the East, seems to be hereditary. (Don’t even get me started on Justin Trudeau.) Which, by the way, is also a reason why almost everyone you’re about to hear about are white guys who are utterly unrepresentative of the population at large.6

3. Jon Stewart famously analogized5 the Canadian Conservative Party to “Gay Nader Fans For Peace,” and yes, I laughed. But it wasn’t all that close to the mark. The party is actually relatively young in Canada. It was formed, in 2003, from the ashes of what was once called the Progressive Conservative Party (I know, I know, just run with me here, and we all called them the “Tories” anyway) and a party then known as the “Canadian Alliance,” but which had formerly called itself the Reform Party. That last qualification allows me to report this bit of trivia: The original name proposed for the merged party was the “Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party”—no one apparently bothered to check the acronym before releasing the name to the public.

The Tories were the dominant center-right party in Canada when I was growing up. In American terms, the Tory party would have been described as socially liberal7 and fiscally conservative. Under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister from 1984 to 1993, the party suffered a fall from grace. Complaints included, but were not limited to: free trade policy, an unpopular sales tax, a perception of excessive closeness with America and the fact that Mulroney really is just an enormous horse’s ass of a person. He was forced to step aside shortly before the 1993 election.8 I’ve tried to stay away from numbers, but really what happened in 1993 can only be illustrated with figures: the Tories went from a 151-seat majority government to just two seats. Two seats! It never really recovered and, after limping through the next few elections, merged with the Alliance.

In the meanwhile, the Alliance had crept up to fill the political space vacated by the Tories. The Reform Party came out of the West, specifically, the province of Alberta. If Canada has a Texas (and let us say for our purposes here today that it does, but then never again), it is probably the province of Alberta—its oil reserves appear to have engendered similarly individualistic politics. In its early days, the Reform Party tended towards social conservatism and was headed first by a Ross Perot-esque figure known as Preston Manning, who had as his chief policy adviser—wait for it!—a young Stephen Harper.

Which is to tell you that Stephen Harper does not spring from the long Canadian tradition of “progressive” conservatism. Rather he’s emerged from the fringes of what is viewed in Canada as extreme right-wing politics. He is virulently anti-same-sex-marriage6, although he could never defeat it politically. He “jests” that the NDP’s existence “is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.”7 He admired George W. Bush’s grasp of Middle East politics8. Perhaps most damningly, in an incident you might actually have heard of, in late 2008 he managed to avoid a looming non-confidence vote by “proroguing” Parliament, which nearly set off a Constitutional crisis9.

In short, Stephen Harper is pretty far outside what “Canadian consensus” might be said to exist. Few people, particularly of the political and chattering classes, seem to actively like the man.

4. So why is a guy like that Prime Minister?

The answer has a lot to do with the third of Canada’s major political parties, the Liberals. This is the party of the one Canadian politician most Americans have heard of—Pierre Trudeau. But when it comes to the current Canadian political situation, a more important figurehead to know is Jean Chrétien, who succeeded Trudeau and served as Prime Minister from 1993 to 2003. In his own way, Chrétien was an odd but colorful figure in politics. His face was partially paralyzed, which gave his speaking style a loping quality. He looked frail on television, and styled himself “le petit gars de Shawinigan” (the little guy from Shawinigan), but was built like a lumberjack. He demonstrated this to great effect in 1996 when, confronted by a protester in full view of the cameras, he coolly grabbed the interloper by the throat10 to shove him aside.

With the Tories gone and the right split between two parties, Canada was essentially a one-party state in the Chrétien years. He ruled for a little over ten years, holding three elections, in each of which he sailed easily back into majorities. With each success, he grew more arrogant—entertainingly so. My favorite example came, in 2001, when Queen Elizabeth II nominated the now-disgraced Conrad Black for a peerage. Black’s newspapers, and Black himself, were critical of the Chrétien government. Another important fact about Black, which you may well already know, is that he had an abhorrent personality. Truly abhorrent! So Chrétien decided to dust off the law books and found himself a 1919 law called the “Nickle Resolution” which prevented Canadian citizens from receiving titular honors. Ultimately Black was forced to renounce his Canadian citizenship11 in order to become a Lord, although not before he did a lot of delicious public whining about it. I know of no Canadian who does not cackle in glee when Black’s name is mentioned nowadays. Oh, except maybe David Frum12, but no one likes him.

In 2003, Chrétien became embroiled in a series of patronage scandals that forced him to to step aside in favor of his formerly much-adored Finance Minister Paul Martin. But the public perception of general Liberal corruption—an image that many people believe Martin himself stirred up in an effort to oust Chrétien—remained so strong that Martin could not keep the party in power. To this day they have not recovered from the Chrétien era.

continued in next post......

[funkdoobi]

Today, the Liberal party is headed by Michael Ignatieff. What’s wrong with Michael Ignatieff, you might ask? He’s smart, a real scholar; he’s a perfect standard-bearer, right? Well, here is the thing about Michael Ignatieff: He was out of Canada enjoying an illustrious academic career from 1978 to 2005, when he returned to Canada in a transparent move to position himself for leadership. And, as I’m sure you’ve by now picked up on, Canadians have a fraught emotional relationship with the United States, and particularly with those who go there to work. We call it the “brain drain†and lament the phenomenon—yet those who return home receive scant welcome. Which is the hard truth that Ignatieff has discovered. Being out of the country for too long suggests that you view yourself as “too good†for it, at least where the political culture is concerned. Anyway, I’d go on about Ignatieff, but this Adam Gopnik article will serve you just fine13. I’ll only mention that he might have better ingratiated himself had not one of his initial moves been oversharing to a Globe and Mail reporter14 that “[h]is sexual initiation took place at a campground north of Toronto; he remembers the gravel against his knees and elbows was excruciating.†Suffice to say the Liberals should have made another choice. While anything can happen in a month, few expect that Ignatieff will manage to push Harper out.

5. The other pertinent factor in current Canadian politics, and the one that really deserves a primer all its own, is the presence of a Québec separatist party, the Bloc Québécois, at the national level. Here I have to get a little serious on you. The short and overly abridged version of the story is simply that yes, most people in Québec speak French as a first language (in Canadian parlance, are “francophoneâ€), most people in what is sometimes termed the “Rest of Canada†do not, and there is an entirely separate culture in Québec that has evolved from that distinction. Few Canadians I know, even the most intransigently “anglophone†among them, would disagree with that, assuming they have spent any length of time at all in Québec.

But it’s not merely a cultural or linguistic difference that’s at issue. We negotiated the “re-patriation†of the Constitution in 1982—effectively writing Great Britain out and including a shiny new Bill of Rights. In an incident known as, I’m not kidding, the “Night of the Long Knives,†Québec was cut out of those negotiations, and because of that little maneuver, Québec’s government has never ratified the Constitution, even to this day. Efforts to negotiate some kind of accord have failed, and the issue of Québec sovereignty was put to a referendum in 1995 that came frighteningly close to passing Interest in actual separation has faded since then; it’s hard to say why exactly, except that it probably has something to do with the resurgence of the Québec economy from the late 1990s into the 2000s.

Nevertheless, Québec voters apparently still feel that a distinctively Québécois interest ought to be defended at the national level, and the Bloc currently holds 49 seats in the House. It is led by a bland though kind of rat-like man called Gilles Duceppe, who has held his post since 1997. What Québec’s “distinct†interest consists of, federally speaking, isn’t clear. The Bloc styles itself as a “progressive†party, because it favors strong intervention by the state in social policy, for example. But the separatists have also been tarred by accusations of racism. When the 1995 referendum was lost, then-Premier and leader of the provincial version of the Bloc, the Parti Québécois, Jacques Parizeau drunkenly slurred15 on national television that he blamed “money and the ethnic vote.†(Personally I find old white Québécois men no more nor less racist than old white men anywhere, but your mileage may vary.)

The upshot is, by occupying all those seats, the Bloc effectively creates a situation where, unless one national party is ascendant—as during the Mulroney or Chrétien periods—minority governments in Canada have become a way of life.

6. Are you depressed yet? Nearly every Canadian I know is, about this. It’s funny, because with the exception of the Québec issue this is not a fractured country. Unlike in the States, the Canadian problem isn’t that there is a politically viable faction of people who are seriously threatening to abolish health care or make this a Christian country or nuke some country answering to the description “Islamic.†The problem, instead, is an overwhelming sense of complacency, brewed up simultaneously by the mediocre candidates, the general paralysis in the legislature, and the peculiar though distinctly Canadian sense that we ought to at least be grateful that things here are “okay, if not great.â€

It is almost like we enjoy being disgruntled.

1 For those not versed in Canadian parliamentary politics: When the party with the most seats in the house does not have more than 50% of the seats, it’s a “minority government.â€

2 We have a bicameral legislature, but when Canadians refer to Parliament they generally mean the House of Commons. Our Senate is appointed, and notoriously useless. There’s another wrinkle here that involves a Queen and a Governor-General but basically the realpolitik of the thing is as described above.

3 That said, this was the sixth time in Canadian history16 that a government was felled by a non-confidence vote. That makes it sound more common than it actually is. I grew up thinking of minority governments as rare. But since 2004 we’ve more or less continuously had them. Before that, the last one was in 1979—it lasted about nine months.17

4 Canadians and Americans label the political spectrum differently. As a schoolchild I was taught to identify the American Democrats as a center-right party, a fact I mention to give you a sense of how “out there†the NDP would seem in an American context. (Caveat: While in college at McGill, I was a member of the campus NDP, though I actually never officially joined the party. I did, however, attend a conference about the future of the party held in the summer of 2002. After that conference, however, I dropped my involvement.)

5 In fact, I feel I must add to note 4 that there are likely connections I have that I don’t even know about. Canada is damned small, and I went to law school in Canada, which is an even smaller constituency is the source of a truly appalling number of politicians. I met Layton once, I think, but have retained nothing of the encounter, though he’s my MP (Member of Parliament) now and I’ll probably vote for him. The other day I caught sight of a prominent opposition figure commenting casually on a friend’s Facebook wall.

6 Another part is language politics, which I don’t have time to get into fully, but which—short version—effectively mandate bilingualism in national political leaders, albeit to varying degrees.

7 In Canada, “liberal†does not mean “leftist.†Sometimes you’ll hear reference made to “small-l liberals†if a Canadian wants to use the term in the American way. See note 4 above on the different labeling of the political spectrum.

8 His Justice Minister (although she was in National Defence by the time he stepped down), a woman by the name of Kim Campbell, took over as leader of the Progressive Conservatives, becoming Canada’s first lady prime minister. She is pictured up top.

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