Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

One of the problems with having a four party system (Conservative, Liberal, NDP, and Green — I’m not counting the BQ), with only one that’s a right wing party, is that you can have the vast majority of people vote left, but end up with an election where the right wins… And… That’s what happened once again.

On one hand I’m happy because the party that I voted for picked up seats from the previous election (although we lost a good MP in our riding), but I’d really like to see Canadian election law changed so that a losing party can pledge their votes to another party — that is, some sort of system of runoff voting. I think without this it’s possible for a party with a view that’s quite distant from that of the average Canadian to get elected. As we just saw!

I understand that some people address this with strategic voting (a la “anyone but Harper”) but I think that strategic voting silences people’s real voice and is fundamentally contrary to the democratic process, so I’d much rather see changes in the voting system to make the system more accurately reflect the desires of Canadians as to how the country is to be governed.

Well, even if my vote “didn’t count” I can help out tonight by donating to my old community radio alma mater, CHRY, who are currently doing their annual fundraiser.

There’s a crazy windstorm going on outside today — from my balcony I just watched a whirlwind of leaves about twenty feet across traveling down the street — and the sky is totally weird looking. Caitlin and I got lucky though today — we got on the elevator to walk down the street to our polling station to vote, and discovered that there was actually a polling station in our building (the third time in my life I’ve been able to vote federally in the building I lived in), so that was a quick mission.

That reminds me, I have to show Nefarious these great pictures of the sun later.

I was reading a story called “Bogus lesbians ‘causing emotional damage“, and it said,

The current trend of gay acceptance is a Trojan horse: on the surface it’s ‘wow, isn’t it great, it’s being talked about’, but it’s not real acceptance — it’s a titillating, easy-on-the-eyes acceptance.

I think a lot of people would argue the same thing happened in body modification as it moved from underground movement (where everyone was in “the wrong”, and everyone was marginalized, so it had a sense of camaraderie) to a commodified movement that strongly codifies a right and wrong… The mainstream acceptance is a sort of gentrification that destroys the original movement, so the people who were happy in the original movement are suddenly outsiders in what they helped make mainstream. I can definitely see how much damage the pop-culture-ification of gay culture has the potential to do…

Speaking of damage, I was reading about how Dubai is drowning in debt, and I had just one exceedingly obvious comment on the story:

Best.
Ghost Town.
Ever.

Seriously, when their economy collapses totally — it’s not as if they have oil propping them up, and the extremes of class stratification have never been able to survive on a mass scale historically — and money evaporates, it’s going to be quite the spectacle watching their monuments decay into the desert…

And Nefarious has been learning to draw on my computer…

Oh — in the time it took to write this entry, the storm seems to be over and the world is back to normal… If I’d been sleepier, I’d never had known it happened at all.

My sister made me this t-shirt a bit over fifteen years ago… It’s long lost, but I saw it in a photo and got a chuckle out of it so I rendered it… I actually thought that my brother made it when I first saw the picture so I might be wrong as to the artist.