Can you say President Trump?
Because, from 2020 onwards, that’s what we’re about to get more of.
Lights out
No, not me. (You wish.)
The power. The power’s out. Has been for hours.
That image up above is a pretty good representation of the County, this November 1. Power went out around midnight and is still out.
Right now, I’m wearing several layers and trying to boil some water on the woodstove, for tea. The dogs think everything is great. Me, not so much.
Outside, power lines down, trees and branches down, and – symbolically, perhaps – my beautiful Canadian flag pole is down, too. The wind snapped it in two and it smashed down onto my truck.
So, be safe, everyone. Last night was supposedly Hallowe’en, and – around here, at least – we got more trick than treat!
Huge NME interview with R.E.M.
Here.
I fell out of love with them after the first four (maybe five) albums. But this interview is so, so good.
Here’s the song that used to make me dance in the dark on Sunnyside, all on my own. Chris thought I was weird.
In other news, Christmas is cancelled because of snow
I don’t think they’ve cancelled Hallowe’en around here. But I haven’t had a single kid knock on the door, either.
If I eat all of these tonight, is it a problem?
Disclosure?
We’re all for it.
On humbled post-election Trudeau
In my ongoing quest to be New and Improved Warren™, I note, approvingly, that Justin Trudeau has kind of disappeared in recent days. No costumes, no sock modelling, no social media excess. He’s just gone quiet. Poof.
It’s good. Speak when you have something to say, not when you have to say something, etc. He’s doing that. Kudos.
Woke, schmoke
Two things, woke folks.
One, I read this with extreme interest, because in recent days, quite a few folks have “canceled” Yours Truly for, you know, (a) doing opposition research at an opposition research firm (b) opposing racism and anti-Semitism (c) trying to help a marginalized group pro bono. It’s been something. And it’s mainly why I turned off Twitter and Facebook.
Two, I fully expect no one will heed Obama’s words, here. But I will post the New York Time’s report about them, just the same. Maybe someone will listen.
Maybe.
Former President Barack Obama made a rare foray into the cultural conversation this week, objecting to the prevalence of “call-out culture” and “wokeness” during an interview about youth activism at the Obama Foundation summit on Tuesday.
For more than an hour, Mr. Obama sat onstage with the actress Yara Shahidi and several other young leaders from around the world. The conversation touched on “leadership, grass roots change and the power places have to shape our journeys,” the Obama Foundation said, but it was his remarks about young activists that have ricocheted around the internet, mostly receiving praise from a cohort of bipartisan and intergenerational supporters.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he continued. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture,” which is much remarked upon, but still nebulously defined. It tends to refer to behavior that mostly plays out on the internet when someone has said or done something to which others object. That person is then condemned in a flurry of social media posts. Such people are often referred to as “canceled,” a way of saying that many others (and perhaps the places at which they work) are fed up with them and will have no more to do with them
“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
No GOTV, no ID = no big V
This writer started hearing about CPC problems with voter ID and GOTV efforts well before voting day. In a tight race, there is simply no excuse for that.
Akin, naturally, is the first to report on that.
Conservatives who believe that a mere switch in leaders will vanquish the Liberal foe will likely want to face some other realities, the most important one being that the much-vaunted ‘ground game’ that helped propel Conservative electoral machines from 2006 through to 2015 has rusted and is in dire need of an overhaul.
To wit:
In the Greater Toronto Area, local Conservative campaigns had not done their homework by August to identify their committed support while Liberals had, in fact, done just that. Identifying your support is a crucial and critical job of all local campaigns.
Multiple Conservative sources who worked on GTA campaigns say the pre-writ work was simply not up to previous standards. Jenni Byrne, the veteran of Harper-era Conservative election war rooms, is on the record saying the ’supporter’ lists in the GTA had the kind of numbers on it that the party had in its first election in 2004. That meant that the 2019 version of the Conservative party gave its opponent a significant head-start in this crucial battleground.
There was a significant mid-campaign malfunction of the software that manages the national Conservative voter identification database. The Constituent Information Management System or CIMS (pronounced ‘sims’) has been a key part of Conservative campaigns for more than a decade. But in this election, data collected at the doorstep by Conservative campaigners using a mobile “CIMS-to-Go” app went missing in transmission from the doorstep to the servers at national HQ. As a result, the door-to-door work of thousands of volunteers was not being captured and used properly by the central campaign. For the local campaigns, that also meant they had to re-do many canvasses and thus wasted precious time and resources during a writ period.
At some point in the campaign, local campaigns were asking the CIMS database at HQ for lists of what Conservatives call “likely accessible voters” — the key group of persuadable voters any campaign wants to focus on. But it quickly became apparent to many campaigns in the GTA that what local campaigns received from headquarters in Ottawa was not lists with thousands of names of “likely accessible voters,” but was, in fact, lists of avowed Liberal or New Democrat supporters. So at some point, Conservative campaigners were either wasting their time, or worse, were actually pulling the vote for their opponents. CIMS had to be shut down or curtailed as a result, leaving local campaigns with a huge data blind spot that would prove to be fatal for some campaigns.
Stinking Albatross
Proud
I’ll always be proud to work with those who oppose racism and anti-Semitism and homophobia and misogyny and Islamophobia. Always.
I’ll always be proud to help those who have a just cause, and no resources, and need help getting heard. Always.
That’s all I wanted to say about that stuff.
But stay tuned.
That too.