mpjgregoire

mpjgregoire, 11 hours ago (edited 9 hours ago) to politics

"[H]ighly-educated people [...] tend to be significantly worse at gauging others’ political beliefs, often assuming other people are much more extreme or dogmatic than they actually seem to be. This is perhaps because, compared to the general public, highly-educated or intelligent people tend to be more ideological in their thinking, more ideologically rigid, and more extreme in their ideological leanings."

#MusaAlGharbi

https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smugness-partisan-diploma-divide

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#politics #education

mpjgregoire, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago) to random

"What we really ought to learn from history’s grotesqueries isn’t “different strokes for different folks” or “we’re so much better than them.” It’s that we’d better be humble about our own virtue if giants like Macdonald could go so wrong on some issues. [...] So it’s worse than facile to assume if you’d lived back when you’d have supported Aboriginal rights or abolition. You’re not that great."

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-robson-dont-let-utopian-historical-vandals-desecrate-canadian-history

On what important issues am I mistaken? And you?

#NationalPost #memory

mpjgregoire, 7 days ago to random

How do you politely suggest to someone that what he has posted on the Internet might get him in trouble at work, without sounding like you're making a veiled threat? Is staying quiet the best policy, unless the other person knows you well?

"Nice blog you've got here. Shame if someone were to let your boss know what you wrote..." <-- the impression I don't want to give.

#tone

mpjgregoire, 8 days ago to queen

"On a fair day in 1838, barely two years into Queen Victoria’s reign [...] a young, confident and handsome Mississauga Ojibway chief named Kahkewaquonaby [...] came knocking at the doors of Windsor Castle dressed in his finest leather from head to toe and asked to make an appeal to his Sovereign. The door was opened and tea and sympathy were offered. [...] The Queen promised to look into the request and in due course the deeds were handed over."

https://thehub.ca/2024-05-20/john-fraser-canada-stands-alone-in-still-celebrating-queen-victorias-birthday/

#Queen #Victoria

mpjgregoire, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to random

"Menzies said the fundamental problem with the CBC is that it’s not so much a public broadcaster as it is a publicly funded commercial broadcaster that is competing with private news organizations for eyeballs and advertising dollars."

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/liberals-cbc-advisory-panel-may-be-too-late

Here's my plan for the #CBC in the age of streaming. Keep #RadioCanada as is. Keep the news. #Telefilm becomes the home for funding new video; the #NFB produces videos in house and CBC TV becomes the distributer.

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mpjgregoire, 16 days ago to random

Canada Post loses $750M. Taxpayers may be on the hook
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-post-bleeding-money-will-need-big-change

"During the 2015 election, the Liberals promised to end a Canada Post program, which was then underway, converting addresses from door-to-door home delivery to community mailboxes." A bad — but politically popular — decision of the Trudeau ministry.

For more radical change, @acoyne proposed many years ago that we give #CanadaPost to the postal union and let them find solutions.

#CanPol #cdnpoli
#NationalPost

mpjgregoire, 16 days ago to random

If you oppose stock buybacks, how do you feel about dividends?

Stock buybacks and dividends are essentially the same thing, methods for corporations to transfer money to their shareholders.

mpjgregoire, 20 days ago to random

"As a parent of three children, I have spent nearly two decades reading children’s poetry. So I can say with some confidence that, by and large, the stuff is terrible. Marred by incompetent metre and bad rhymes (when it bothers to rhyme at all), most children’s poetry is disposable, written to fill the space next to an illustration. This is unfortunate. Children react to catchy rhythms, clapping their hands and stamping their feet even if they don’t yet understand the meaning of the words."

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mpjgregoire, 20 days ago to Quebec

"On Wednesday, Legault told reporters that the new Musee national de l’histoire du Quebec will focus specifically on the history of the French-speaking Quebecois nation. The 11 Indigenous nations in Quebec likely don’t consider themselves part of the Quebecois nation, he said, adding that their contributions will nonetheless be included in the museum."

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#Québec #polqc

mpjgregoire, 21 days ago to bluesky

@mick
Does #CoSocialCa have any policy about bridging posts to #Bluesky ? I'm inclined to make my account available there.

See https://fosstodon.org/@WetHat/112406647160038626

mpjgregoire, 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago) to random

As I've written in the past, I used to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand, but I've become more open to them in the last ten years. One of theories that I think has some truth in it is the idea that #protests are often not really spontaneous: in many cases there are hidden parties initiating or encouraging them.

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mpjgregoire, 22 days ago to politics

It's always interesting when someone whose politics you think you know supports something unexpected: the NRA member who opposes capital punishment, the socialist who favours free trade, the pro-life feminist. How often are beliefs only found in a set because of a historical coalition, not any deeper principle? Do you hold any beliefs at variance with your political in-group?

#politics #coalition

mpjgregoire, 29 days ago to random

I wish we could take the cameras out of the House of Commons. It was bad enough when politicians were playing for a clip on the evening news; now they're angling for a clip they can share on social media.

Parliament would work better if the real audience speakers were addressing were the other MPs in the House.

#CanPol #cndpoli

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to Montreal

What the stories about the anti-Gaza War encampment at #McGill are missing is that the encampment is located in the same place where the university holds its commencement ceremony, an event occurring at the end of May.

I'm not sure if McGill would be more tolerant if the encampment were elsewhere, but I'm sure they want to re-establish control over that field soon.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/encampment-mcgill-pro-palestinian-1.7187787

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#Montréal #Gaza #protest

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to climate

I supported the #TransMountainPipelineExtension project in principle [0], but not at any cost. For this reason, it was always unwise for the government to be main funder of the project, let alone the sponsor. $34B is a huge amount of money; will the economic benefit of the project come close?

[0] The world does need to act against #ClimateChange, but fossil fuels are so widespread and fungible that unilaterally cutting supply is ineffectual -- we need to reduce demand.

#CanPol #cdnpoli

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to random

'A book just published by the French conservative Catholic Jean-Pierre Moreau portrays Jorge Bergoglio as a liberal iconoclast inspired by quasi-Marxist liberation theology. I think that’s wrong, and he is what he’s always been: a Peronist. Like Juan Perón, the populist President of Argentina during his childhood, he is more interested in power than in ideas. My Vatican source talks of Francis’s “powerful charm, his way of making you think you’re the only person who matters”.'

#PopeFrancis

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mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to egypt

I read a very interesting essay on female #equality in #Egypt, linked to by #MarginalRevolution:

Can Big Data reveal how Egypt - repeatedly - become so Patriarchal?
https://www.ggd.world/p/can-big-data-reveal-how-ancient-egypt

"Change is by no means linear. You may find my findings surprising, perhaps even shocking. Egypt actually transitioned from equality to inequality not once, but twice."

#AliceEvans

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#patriarchy #progress

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to random

#GEMAnscombe objected to giving #HarryTruman an honourary degree:

"Anscombe saw that many of her Oxford colleagues were prepared to accept a conclusion that she and Daniel had presented as a reductio ad absurdum. These philosophers endorsed a doctrine that Anscombe came to call consequentialism, according to which there are no kinds of action—such as murder, rape, torture, and adultery, for example—that any person is prohibited from doing regardless of the situation he or she is in."

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mpjgregoire, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to Quebec

It's a shame that we're talking about #Québec separatism again, but here we are...

If Quebec can separate, can Montreal be partitioned? Not so fast, experts say
https://nationalpost.com/news/local-news/montreal-partition-separtion-quebec-referendum-anglophone-federalists/wcm/53d02b55-b050-4f79-bbae-1427557f7552

Personally, I think the anglophones of Québec have a weak case for partition. The Cree and Inuit (inter alia), on the other hand, have at least as much right to their traditional territories as the residents of Montréal and southern Québec do to them.

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#polqc #CanPol #cdnpoli
#NationalPost

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

"If the result of this budget is a fight on capital gains instead of a fight on the carbon tax, that'll be a political win for the Liberals."

#DanArnold

https://twitter.com/calgarygrit/status/1780334070976708745

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#CanPol #cdnpoli

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to random

It's easy to dismiss an article in the #NationalPost critical of a #Liberal budget. But it's worth paying attention to what #DonDrummond has to say...

Grading the federal budget: The government earns another ‘D’
https://financialpost.com/opinion/grading-federal-budget-government-earns-another-d

#CanPol #cdnpoli

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to Nostalgia

Over at #MarginalRevolution, #TylerCowen lists some things he's nostalgic about: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/what-i-am-nostalgic-about.html#comment-160746217. He's certainly right that newspapers used to be better.

My own contribution follows.

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#nostalgia

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to debian

#Debian #time64 news:

"as the progress on the t64 transition is slowing down, I want to give an
overview of some of the remaining blockers that we need to tackle to get
it unstuck. I tried to identify some clusters of issues, but there might
be other classes of issues."

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/04/msg00331.html

#t64

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to Parenting

As the developed world has become richer and safer, our (fewer) children have become less and less free and independent.

https://www.freerangekids.com/how-children-lost-the-right-to-roam-in-just-4-generations/

#childhood #parenting

mpjgregoire, 1 month ago to random

Still thinking about @justinling's essay in #TheWalrus:

"There is good reason to think that Trudeau will eke out another victory when voters head to the polls in 2025. His previous two victories were earned with the same strategy: to thoroughly trash the Conservative Party as a dangerous threat to our country’s liberal values. He is likely to deploy it again against Poilievre, who seems to relish such an accusation. It may work."

Justin Trudeau’s Last Stand
https://thewalrus.ca/justin-trudeaus-last-stand/

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