We’re prepared by attribution biases to see the “wackos” in the orbit of an out-group as typical of that whole group, while forgiving our own outliers.
What should I make of your (Michael's) omission of PM Trudeau calling Pierre Poilievre "spineless" as well as extremist? Seems to me like a bias right off the top, and I don't like that. It tainted the rest of what may have been a reasonable article. As for the chicanery going on south of the border, one party is more obvious in its methods than the other and more overtly "nuts", but let's not pretend it isn't happening on both sides. That a country of 340,000,000 can't come up with something better than what they have is certainly a mystery. I also sense the slightest hint that the author wouldn't mind if we made an association between that extremely "nuts" party south of the border and one of the parties in Canada.
In Canada, there is *not* an equal distribution of nuts, because the nutty right wingers do not have institutional power, and the nutty leftists absolutely do. Far, far left radical activists control the school boards, such as the TDSB which recently put out a teacher resource saying "Education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized". Public sector unions are led by literal communist revolutionaries like Julius Arscott. Our NGOcracy consists of groups like Egale who used taxpayer funds to assemble a high powered legal team (which dwarfed what the Saskatchewan government could muster) to try and overturn legislation with supermajority support. Radical leftism is dominant in the universities, openly marxist revolutionary professors are commonplace. All that the Liberals can point to is this imaginary crisis of "Diagolon" - about 12 guys in a shed who Poilievre has already condemned unequivocally (after they threatened his wife) and even called the RCMP on. I'm eager to be corrected on this, please show me equivalent examples of Canadian far right nuts with institutional power. I can't even see where the sane and reasonable right wing has any institutional power in this country.
I get the thrust of the article (and completely agree with the point I think it is trying to make) but also sensed an asymmetry that detracted from it – an asymmetry that I think some of the other commenters also detected. The main claim of the article seemed to be that the Conservatives and Liberals are both guilty of nut-picking. The example given was the Junior vs PP showdown in the House last week, specifically, Junior trying to associate PP with Diagalon and PP calling Junior an extremist.
There are a few problems with this comparison. First, say what you will about him (and I am not a fan) PP could not more clearly distance himself from Diagalon than he already has. So, I don’t actually think this is even properly considered an example of nut-picking – Diagalon is not a “nut among the Conservatives”. A Conservative equivalent to this ploy would be something like them trying to associate Junior with the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
Furthermore, PP was not nut-picking at all in the example relied upon. He was attacking Junior himself for specific policies enacted by Junior’s government. Calling Junior and his policies extreme is simply not analogous to Junior trying to associate PP with Diagalon
Very well reasoned discussion of the fallacies that seem to rule Canadian politics.
I was told by a superior at the start of my working life that a great artist always leaves a flaw in a work of art to avoid offending the gods. In this case the flaw consists of taking gratuitous shots at our southern neighbors without citing evidence of the same quality used in the Canada politics discussion. This amounts to pandering to those Canadians whose only sense of national pride is that they are not Americans.
You kind of had me right up until you tried to suggest that only one US political party is populated by kooks. I suspect I know which one you thought you were accusing of being filled with whackos but regardless, it completely - and I mean COMPLETELY - negated whatever sane argument may have preceded it.
Yes, this is my thought as well. Very well reasoned piece, educating me on things I was not aware of. And then, at the end, the author seems to express the same types of biases that he was cautioning people to be cognizant of and try to avoid. Very weird.
Yes, there are "nuts" in all of our political parties. But it's not immediately clear to me, which of our three major national parties has more of them. The problem is that my attention is caught by particular instances, the more egregious the more I pay attention. As a result, I have only anecdotes, and the plural of anecdote is not data.
As to the antics in the House of Commons, these have now spread to the various committees. to the point that they are not worth listening to either. Policy is made in the Prime Minister's Office, and objections are developed in the office of the leader of the opposition. It is not clear to me that ordinary MPs have any role to play any more.
So why have MPs in the first place? Why not vote for parties instead? The leader of the winning party can be Prime Minister and name whomever he chooses as his or her ministers/advisers. The leader of the second-place party could receive honorary recognition.
The savings could be used to fund real entertainment.
Politics has always been performative, involving a great deal of name calling and behaviour that would not get past a kindergarten teacher. The big difference today is the proliferation of communication channels that can generate an information flow that few storm sewers can emulate.
Speeches from the Nineteenth Century in a variety of countries, not just the Anglosphere are hard to match in terms of venom and character assassination. So this isn't entirely new.
Not sure what can be done about it.
I don't like it and like many within my own circles, I find it difficult to decide which squad of rascals is less odious than the other(s). It is frankly depressing.
That said, it would be very helpful if the policy outliers, claiming to belong to one party or another, could be condemned by their party leadership so as to at least imply that the said policy outliers are not going to inform actual policy development and delivery. I live in Saskatchewan and at present we have a moderately right wing government that is goaded by a more robust right wing faction now operating independently from the Saskatchewan Party. Alas, that latter party's leadership is failing to condemn some of the more aggressive hard right ideas and so its 'moderate' right wing credentials are increasingly iffy. Indeed, a number of those ideas are now policy and thereby increasing the real influence of hard right ideas that genuinely appeal to a slender portion of the population. The fear of losing a seat or two, out of 61, trumps all it would appear. And yet, I suspect, a robust denunciation of some of these more extreme right wing views would result in increased support not less. Leaving things ambiguous, or to put it another way, up for grabs for 'later' will potentially drive voters away or to simply not vote at all given the erosion in trust. Pandering to the extremes (right or left) won't win elections. Implying that you might is likely going to result in electoral disappointment.
A bunch of comments effectively saying, "I haven't made any attribution errors! You're the biased one!", seems to validate Professor DeMoor's thesis perfectly.
A balanced viewpoint....the only way to change your world is to change yourself.... and don't allow the black dogs to chase you down you down their path.j
What is considered mainstream orthodoxy in one country can be consider loony left wing nutty nonsense in the rest of the world though.
Look at Canada's ban on "two tier" health care for instance or our new media and online streaming laws. Those are in the world context ridiculous laws but here we are, our chattering classes declare them mainstream. It's all subjective and biased in the end.
One of the significant features of "The West" was a recognition of the value of tolerance. Tolerance doesn't mean you like everything equally (of at all). It means for things that don't impact you directly, you live and let live. It's an important enabling viewpoint for relatively open, free societies.
I like the thesis is this post -- and I think a renewed focus on tolerance; of working together towards common interests, is blocked by the kind of emotive partisanship "nutpicking" represents.
What should I make of your (Michael's) omission of PM Trudeau calling Pierre Poilievre "spineless" as well as extremist? Seems to me like a bias right off the top, and I don't like that. It tainted the rest of what may have been a reasonable article. As for the chicanery going on south of the border, one party is more obvious in its methods than the other and more overtly "nuts", but let's not pretend it isn't happening on both sides. That a country of 340,000,000 can't come up with something better than what they have is certainly a mystery. I also sense the slightest hint that the author wouldn't mind if we made an association between that extremely "nuts" party south of the border and one of the parties in Canada.
Excellent antennae. So far the best comment out of the 5 that are here at the moment.
In Canada, there is *not* an equal distribution of nuts, because the nutty right wingers do not have institutional power, and the nutty leftists absolutely do. Far, far left radical activists control the school boards, such as the TDSB which recently put out a teacher resource saying "Education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized". Public sector unions are led by literal communist revolutionaries like Julius Arscott. Our NGOcracy consists of groups like Egale who used taxpayer funds to assemble a high powered legal team (which dwarfed what the Saskatchewan government could muster) to try and overturn legislation with supermajority support. Radical leftism is dominant in the universities, openly marxist revolutionary professors are commonplace. All that the Liberals can point to is this imaginary crisis of "Diagolon" - about 12 guys in a shed who Poilievre has already condemned unequivocally (after they threatened his wife) and even called the RCMP on. I'm eager to be corrected on this, please show me equivalent examples of Canadian far right nuts with institutional power. I can't even see where the sane and reasonable right wing has any institutional power in this country.
I get the thrust of the article (and completely agree with the point I think it is trying to make) but also sensed an asymmetry that detracted from it – an asymmetry that I think some of the other commenters also detected. The main claim of the article seemed to be that the Conservatives and Liberals are both guilty of nut-picking. The example given was the Junior vs PP showdown in the House last week, specifically, Junior trying to associate PP with Diagalon and PP calling Junior an extremist.
There are a few problems with this comparison. First, say what you will about him (and I am not a fan) PP could not more clearly distance himself from Diagalon than he already has. So, I don’t actually think this is even properly considered an example of nut-picking – Diagalon is not a “nut among the Conservatives”. A Conservative equivalent to this ploy would be something like them trying to associate Junior with the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
Furthermore, PP was not nut-picking at all in the example relied upon. He was attacking Junior himself for specific policies enacted by Junior’s government. Calling Junior and his policies extreme is simply not analogous to Junior trying to associate PP with Diagalon
Very well reasoned discussion of the fallacies that seem to rule Canadian politics.
I was told by a superior at the start of my working life that a great artist always leaves a flaw in a work of art to avoid offending the gods. In this case the flaw consists of taking gratuitous shots at our southern neighbors without citing evidence of the same quality used in the Canada politics discussion. This amounts to pandering to those Canadians whose only sense of national pride is that they are not Americans.
You kind of had me right up until you tried to suggest that only one US political party is populated by kooks. I suspect I know which one you thought you were accusing of being filled with whackos but regardless, it completely - and I mean COMPLETELY - negated whatever sane argument may have preceded it.
There can only be one response --- GO AWAY FOOL.
Yes, this is my thought as well. Very well reasoned piece, educating me on things I was not aware of. And then, at the end, the author seems to express the same types of biases that he was cautioning people to be cognizant of and try to avoid. Very weird.
Yes, there are "nuts" in all of our political parties. But it's not immediately clear to me, which of our three major national parties has more of them. The problem is that my attention is caught by particular instances, the more egregious the more I pay attention. As a result, I have only anecdotes, and the plural of anecdote is not data.
As to the antics in the House of Commons, these have now spread to the various committees. to the point that they are not worth listening to either. Policy is made in the Prime Minister's Office, and objections are developed in the office of the leader of the opposition. It is not clear to me that ordinary MPs have any role to play any more.
So why have MPs in the first place? Why not vote for parties instead? The leader of the winning party can be Prime Minister and name whomever he chooses as his or her ministers/advisers. The leader of the second-place party could receive honorary recognition.
The savings could be used to fund real entertainment.
Politics has always been performative, involving a great deal of name calling and behaviour that would not get past a kindergarten teacher. The big difference today is the proliferation of communication channels that can generate an information flow that few storm sewers can emulate.
Speeches from the Nineteenth Century in a variety of countries, not just the Anglosphere are hard to match in terms of venom and character assassination. So this isn't entirely new.
Not sure what can be done about it.
I don't like it and like many within my own circles, I find it difficult to decide which squad of rascals is less odious than the other(s). It is frankly depressing.
That said, it would be very helpful if the policy outliers, claiming to belong to one party or another, could be condemned by their party leadership so as to at least imply that the said policy outliers are not going to inform actual policy development and delivery. I live in Saskatchewan and at present we have a moderately right wing government that is goaded by a more robust right wing faction now operating independently from the Saskatchewan Party. Alas, that latter party's leadership is failing to condemn some of the more aggressive hard right ideas and so its 'moderate' right wing credentials are increasingly iffy. Indeed, a number of those ideas are now policy and thereby increasing the real influence of hard right ideas that genuinely appeal to a slender portion of the population. The fear of losing a seat or two, out of 61, trumps all it would appear. And yet, I suspect, a robust denunciation of some of these more extreme right wing views would result in increased support not less. Leaving things ambiguous, or to put it another way, up for grabs for 'later' will potentially drive voters away or to simply not vote at all given the erosion in trust. Pandering to the extremes (right or left) won't win elections. Implying that you might is likely going to result in electoral disappointment.
Interesting times continue to unfold.
A bunch of comments effectively saying, "I haven't made any attribution errors! You're the biased one!", seems to validate Professor DeMoor's thesis perfectly.
As Does Professor DeMoor.
A balanced viewpoint....the only way to change your world is to change yourself.... and don't allow the black dogs to chase you down you down their path.j
An old saying “never argue with a fool because they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you on experience” comes into play here.
What is considered mainstream orthodoxy in one country can be consider loony left wing nutty nonsense in the rest of the world though.
Look at Canada's ban on "two tier" health care for instance or our new media and online streaming laws. Those are in the world context ridiculous laws but here we are, our chattering classes declare them mainstream. It's all subjective and biased in the end.
Your last paragraph hits the nail right on the head Michael…..and it is why, tho I often despair, I keep my paid subscription to The Line.
One of the significant features of "The West" was a recognition of the value of tolerance. Tolerance doesn't mean you like everything equally (of at all). It means for things that don't impact you directly, you live and let live. It's an important enabling viewpoint for relatively open, free societies.
I like the thesis is this post -- and I think a renewed focus on tolerance; of working together towards common interests, is blocked by the kind of emotive partisanship "nutpicking" represents.