About Steve Harper, proto-fascists and hicks

The BBQ Pit
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In this thread, I was told to stop hijacking it and open another one if I wanted to say what I think about Steve Harper, proto-fascists and hicks, so here it is.

For those who don’t want to read the other thread, here is a short recap. While everybody was mourning the victims, I posted a comment about the gun registry. For those who are not aware of the situation, after the Polytechnique massacre, a registry of long guns was established in Canada. The, then, reigning party (the Liberals) claimed it would cost peanuts to establish and run. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The Opposition (the Reform-Alliance-Conservative, a Western-based fiscally and socially conservative regional party) ran in several campaigns with the promise to scrap it if they were elected. They were, last year, and they decided to proceed with their promise, just when the registry is about to be completed and against the advice of most police chiefs in the country, who recognized the flawed nature of the registry, but still considered it a useful tool. So by catering to their rural hicks constituents, they are ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater instead of trying to find a way to make it worth, because the registry is EEEEVIL, concocted by these godless pinkos Eastern liberals (you know, the same folks that brought you bilingualism [“How dare they put French on my box of Cornflakes”], gay marriage, legalized abortion and other issues that improved peoples life).

And in case somebody objects to my ability to identify hicks, I was born in 1955, in Québec. At the time we WERE hicksville squared. Hell, in the 40s, when France surrendered, some priests were saying in the pulpit that it was God’s punishment for beheading the King during the Revolution. It was also the time when before the day elections (traditionally held on a Monday here), priests were routinely saying Rappelez-vous, le ciel est bleu, mais l’enfer est rouge ! (Remember, Heaven is blue [traditional colour of the Conservative], but Hell is red [traditional colour of the Liberals] !) All this started to change rapidly in 1960, mostly quietly but with some violent spots (the FLQ bombing campaigns, the October crisis). Now we are 46 years later and we still have leftover problems from that era and I wouldn’t like anybody else to go through this, if it can be prevented, remember the Chinese curse : “May you live in interesting times”, so you can understand, if I would prefer to nip in the bud ANY outbreak of social conservatism. If I am a bigot for being intolerant of those who are intolerant, then so be it.

BTW, it seems that I am guilty, with my original comment, of jumping the gun (no pun intended) by two days .

Bolding mine

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Okay, so you don’t like Stephen Harper. So?

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You have a cite for this, naturally.

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I think I qualify as a hick. I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, 7 miles from the nearest pavement - a town of 400 people. There are guns on the farm. Several of them, in fact. A couple rifles, a shotgun, and several .22s. They’re all registered, but it’s pretty stupid having to register an old shotgun used occasionally for scaring off some magpies that’s worth virtually nothing in terms of cash. Same with the .22s. Grandpa’s old single shot .22 is never used, but one doesn’t really want to throw it out. So I’m opposed to the gun registry because several thousand dollars have been spent cataloguing Dad’s old .22s, all of which are no more threat to public safety than detop’s kitchen knife. It’s a stupid waste of money. If you want to spend money on gun control, spend it on (1) a comprehensive mandatory safety course to be required for a Firearms Acquisition Certificate (or whatever the new equivalent is called, I don’t recall), and (2) cracking down on gun smuggling from the US and illegal handguns in urban centres. The money spent on the registry will have far greater return spent in that way than it does now.

My family historically votes NDP.

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Will that do as a cite ? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060516.REGISTRY16/TPStory/

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Personally, I don’t really care if the gun registry is kept or not. There are arguments both in favour and against it, but in any case, it’s just not one of the most important issues for me since I don’t own guns. And it’s obvious that the gun registry cannot prevent all gun crimes, after all, Kimveer Gill’s weapons were all legally registered. This said, the fact that several police chiefs are in favour of keeping the registry does make me think. After all, police officers have a sort of “law and order”, conservative aura around them. This isn’t some big city liberals who have never seen in gun in their life who are for the registry. They are people who are more likely to be conservative, who criticize a decision by the Conservative government. I find it somewhat compelling.

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Can anyone point to a single crime that has been solved through the gun registry? I mean, for a billion dollars and forcing millions of people to jump through hoops, it should be a massive success, right?

And the gun registry isn’t ‘almost finished’. There will be large ongoing maintenance costs. Every time a gun is bought, sold, transferred, or destroyed, entries have to be made in the gun registry. It’s also riddled with errors, woefully incomplete (the non-compliance rate is quite high), and most of all, it’s an intrusion into the lives of people for no good reason other than that it made some anti-gun bigots feel all warm and snuggly for a while. It’s always been ill-conceived and no one has ever made a case that it would be useful for anything other than to put yet another roadblock up for gun owners.

It’s just another useless bureaucracy layered on top of an already top-heavy government, sucking up tax money and interfering in the lives of citizens. The day it’s gone I’ll do a little happy dance.

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Those bastards!

It’s called democracy, boss. Get used to it.

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Off-topic, but I wonder how much it would have cost if people hadn’t deliberately done things to sabatoge it? MY brother was telling me about guys he knew who were registering things like soldering irons and hair dryers as well as some joint efforts between Canada and US groups to overload the system with useless enquiries. Would have still run over-budget significantly I suppose.

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Yep. You will definitely be our go-to-guy for all things “hick” in the future! :slight_smile:

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Don’t give up hope. If you like politicians who abandon all their campaign promises once elected, there’s always a chance that the Liberals will form the government again some day.

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Detop you’re looking for a gun ban, not a gun registry.

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How interesting. Given that you don’t support Liberal ideas, by this logic you should vote Liberal every time, since they will abandon the ideals you don’t like. :wink:

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Or all the people that voted Conservative, desperate to be known as intolerant rural hicks with dreams of a fascist state. :rolleyes:

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I don’t even own guns, nor do I anticipate doing so, but I say screw the registry. Spending the money on recruiting, better training and better equipment for cops will be just fine.

The blatant sliminess of the registry’s fee-grabbing repulsed me. Law-abiding citzens have to pay to be in compliance with a law the government just made up? Fuck that.

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I’m somewhat dissapointed to have noticed recently that Canadian politics has caught the mean-spirited and uncivil style that infests politics on this side of the border.

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Don’t flatter youself, Yank. We’re perfectly capable of sinking to sordid depths without your sterling example. Looking at Canada as a (former) bastion of genteel politics is as misguided as fond nostalgia for some never-was pre-Watergate American equivalent.

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Obviously, unwillingness to maintain a program after it failed to prevent a crime proves his insensitivity, evil nature, and all-around caddishness and bounderism. :rolleyes:

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Be honest. If someone (for example) defended the Iraq invasion with the equivalent argument “well, how much would it have cost if the Iraqis had greeted the Americans as liberators and strewn flowers at their feet”, would there be enough :rolleyes: on the server for your response?

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shrug I spent some time in Toronto in the 70s. I don’t remember the level of nastiness then as now. Could be wrong. I was callow then.