Thursday, April 04, 2019

Chill Out. It's Blogging. That's All it Is.



There are some bloggers who imagine their opinions matter - that they make a real difference, shift Earth's axis.  Those bloggers are idiots.

One of these morons accuses me of paving the way for Andrew Scheer's horde to take over this October. Apparently my "sniping" at their idol is meddling with the alignment of the planets.

For the record, I don't think that the readers who visit my blog are the sort that would vote for Andrew Scheer anyway. We disagree on many things but not supporting Andrew Scheer isn't one of them.  I don't want that. You don't want that. And these little blogs aren't going to give Scheer a leg up.

Robert Reich's blog may have some discernible impact on the public. George Monbiot's ditto. Mine? Are you adrift from your sanity? Do you see things in the room at night when the lights are off?

I'm gonna guess that you're not really crazy, just sort of. You don't see any of us as some threat to your Justin.  What has crawled up your ass and died is a sense that we've betrayed some fealty, a deference we somehow owe to the Liberal prime minister that you fawn over for reasons that escape me.

Reality check. I'm not even a Liberal. I don't belong to that party. No membership card in my wallet.  I don't even support the Liberals and haven't for years.

I owe no duty to Justin Trudeau. He is not, to me, the savior of Canada and he's no hell as a prime minister. Those of us who were Liberals during the era of his father can find, in Justin, precious little semblance of Pierre.  The father was a fighter, both before and after he entered politics. He was highly educated, a true intellectual, called by some of his critics a "philosopher prince."

We remember the Three Wise Men, Gerard Pelletier, Jean Marchand and Pierre Elliott Trudeau who found each other fighting for asbestos workers against the corrupt regime of Maurice Duplessis.
Pelletier met an old friend drawn to the strike, a fiery labour leader named Jean Marchand. A 29-year-old lawyer who has just returned to Quebec after a world tour also joined them. His name was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His presence was electrifying. 
"At the time," Pelletier wrote, "he had a blond beard, so the striking miners nicknamed him 'St. Joseph'! But when he took the floor at a meeting, they listened to him very attentively. He knew how to speak on matters of justice, democracy and freedom in a way that was highly relevant to the situation." 
Trudeau, Pelletier and Marchand would later become known as the "Three Wise Men" from Quebec when Prime Minister Lester Pearson recruited them to run for the federal Liberal party in the early 1960s. All became Cabinet ministers in the Pearson government. The asbestos strike was the first time the three met.
...A year after the strike, Pelletier and Trudeau launched a new publication, Cité Libre, which became the intellectual voice of Quebecers against Duplessis (Soon after, the FBI began a file on Trudeau, concerned that he was at best, left-leaning, and at worst, a Communist.)
Your boy, with the school marm manner, wasn't fighting on the picket lines. He wasn't writing radical treatises for a start up journal. He's no great intellectual. His surviving brother eclipses him on that score. The one lost in that icy mountain lake in southeastern BC, he was the intellectual heir to Pierre Trudeau.

If I was to spot you some points I'd call him a mediocre prime minister. Mediocre at best. He's light years nicer than his Tory predecessor. Only we're in a jam today, a very dire predicament. His government's own climate commissioner left no doubt about that in her recent and final report. She's pretty much saying what leading climate scientists have been reporting for years. What she adds is a scorecard on the Dauphin and finds, on the gravest threat facing our nation, your man isn't cutting the mustard. Perhaps he's too busy scrounging up billions we don't have so that he can build pipelines to flood world markets with climate wrecking bitumen.

Don't tell me about all his supposed good works if he's not going to secure the future for our young people, our Greta Thunbergs, and the generations that will follow hers. He's writing their grim future today and he's writing it indelibly with every tankerload of bitumen he puts to sea.

Don't go on about how he can't avoid wrecking the future for our young people because it's not politically practical. If he can't and won't then he's a rank nihilist and no nihilist deserves to be our prime minister.

But, then again, my views of this man and his party pretty much stay right here on this blog. A bunch of people read it but not enough to make any discernible difference to your guy and so, please, just chill out. Besides, you've got much bigger fish to fry, plenty of them. If you want to chew on somebody, there's your meat. It will take more than a blogging pissing contest. That's a fight you'll have to take outside. Only I don't see you going anywhere beyond whinging on blogs.

12 comments:

the salamander said...

.. round here we remain non partisan.. we remain non religious. The idea of mixing the two ? Well that's just laughable
Do we have beliefs? Yes.. rock solid and flexible, adaptive - all at once and heavily dosed with common sense. Anyone can poke fun at me.. I can take it.. And, I will confess to dishing it out here and there, quite cheerfully. I believe in our Environment.. yes, Mother Nature

.. Comment.. or 'opinionation' interests me. Whether on Twitter or via indy blogs, the act of commenting makes me appraise, measure, consider.. then try to gather up my perspective and express that in my own words. I think a lot while I build a comment.. and those thoughts reorganize & refine wherever the hell they're stored in my hard cranium.

I guess my point is.. I remain 'adaptive' .. and I value my vote. I don't utilize it for trifling partisan or religious beliefs.. and I'm astonished when I see political or evangelical opportunists trying to devalue my vote for their political disease. That's right. Disease. I also detest & resist deeply flawed 'lectures'.. Its neck and neck most of the time as politics and religion stumble drunkenly around the racetrack of life and reality. I should bet on such a race ? But what is they're 'colluding' .. haha.. and the so called 'race' is fixed ?? Or politics and religion are both so deeply flawed & similar that it isn't even a race .. its a ludicrous exhibition ??

That where the USA has 'progressed' to.. A laughing stock exhibition of virulent partisan fantasyland steeped in bizarro old stock religious fantasyland. They added a new god or two to the mix though.. the military industry and the greed industries. So just jump back to Canada with that diseased reality in mind.. and take a good gander at current Canadian political attempts to emulate or catch up with our southern bretheren or sisterhood.. Eeowzer !! We get the likes of Harper and Jason Kenney or their lame & churlish disciples Andrew Scheer & Dug Ford.. and we get Lavalin.. Just add $ money $ and look what happens. Too big to jail .. ?

Down here at the macro level.. I watch, read, observe.. stir little pots I can stir with words.. little ideas re my big concerns. I want the Environment protected, not abused and ruined. I want political animals and distorted religious bumpkins to be humiliated when they meddle in Education.. or Women's Issues or Environment. I want farmland and forest protected and understood. I want habitat and our resplendant species respected and defended. Our shared coastal and inland waters protected. If that bothers the Joe Olivers or Koch Brothers or Justin Trudeau or the NRA, well screw them. The whining of blogs, tweets, facebook.. and the posturing of CBC and CTV panels.. is insidious. It points to becoming as stark raving mad as Sean Hannity or Rex Murphy.. or Jerry Fallwell jr. Diseased...

Anonymous said...

The Liberal party is a crazy cult of nothing.

At the top, entitled lawyer-politicians are at the trough auctioning off democratic representation for some form of remuneration.

In the middle, haughty-mediocres believe corruption in high places is good for their bottom line – although they're too greedy and stupid to see it's been causing their living standards to erode for decades.

At the bottom, hysterical useful-idiots believe a 50-year downward-spiral is progress.

Trudeau Sr. ended post-war economic progress and social safety-net development. Mulroney brought Friedmanian disaster capitalism. Chretien and Martin expanded on Mulroney (while promising to end the dreaded Mulroney era.)

Harper expanded on Chretien and Martin. Trudeau Jr. expanded on the Harper era with MOAR pipelines and free-trade deals – quadrupling-down on trickle-down.

But what if Scheer wins a majority? (Oh the humanity!) Canadians will get the exact same rotten government.

Neoliberals and neocons are two sides of the same coin. They both represent the same oligarchs.

If Junior goes down in flames like HRC, this will provide an opportunity for someone better to come along – rather than throwing good money after bad.

Lorne said...

Exceptionally well-written, Mound, and spot on. It would seem that for some bloggers, all perspective have been lost, and they seem drunk on the power they imagine they have.

While I daresay your blog is far more important than many others in the so-called progressive sphere, imparting as it does invaluable information and perspective, we should never lose sight of the fact that most writing today forks little lightning; my target audience, for example, is the progressive element, but I always know that when I write, I am usually preaching to the converted, so the impact is slight, if any.

We write because we care about things; we write because passion drives us; we write to achieve a measure of catharsis. We do not write to change the world. That is a mission only the supreme egotists among us have as their deluded mission.

Anonymous said...

Pay no attention to the drama queen Mound. He's emotionally immature and not worth a second of your time.

Anonymous said...

"It would seem that for some bloggers, all perspective have been lost, and they seem drunk on the power they imagine they have."

No, Montreal Simon hasn't lost perspective. He's always been a demented, lizard-brained propagandist. You just didn't realize it before!

"We do not write to change the world. That is a mission only the supreme egotists among us have as their deluded mission."

The whole idea about blogging is to inform people. Get the debate going. Change the world one meme at a time.

As the Lord Jesus once said:

"Once there was a man who went out to sow grain. As he scattered the seed in the field, some of it fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.

"Some of it fell on rocky ground, where there was little soil. The seeds soon sprouted, because the soil wasn't deep. But when the sun came up, it burned the young plants; and because the roots had not grown deep enough, the plants soon dried up.

"Some of the seed fell among thorn bushes, which grew up and choked the plants.

"But some seeds fell in good soil, and the plants bore grain: some had one hundred grains, others sixty, and others thirty. Listen, then, if you have ears!"

Anonymous said...

Wow, I must have hit a nerve! Lowly reader here, not a blogger and truly believe that continued sniping is harmful.

The Mound of Sound said...

@ Anon 9:22 - how exactly? Make your case. Show me something. For starters prove that I'm sniping. Recognize the difference between sniping and fair criticism. What progress will there be if we only attack when it's the other side that's the bad guy and give our own side a pass? Your logic escapes me. How deeply do you believe this blog is goring our ox and why? Show me.

Anonymous said...

If you run a news blog, you must be held accountable by journalism standards. Your content must be an appeal to reason over an appeal to emotion.

Montreal Simon's blog reminds me of Harper attack ads. He's not helping to lead progressives towards building up some kind of movement that will effect actual change. He's advertising for the Liberal party!

Now Scott 'Diatribe' is a reasonable Liberal partisan. Of course, he rarely has anything to say.

The Mound of Sound said...


Scott has moved to more of a Facebook focus but, yes, he is reasonable and, I think, quite effective. He draws attention to his party and all the people he encounters who work for it, largely behind the scenes. He's engaged with his party and he accepts legitimate criticism of it. Scott Tribe is the kind of guy who makes his party better and rarely wastes much effort on scathing attacks on the Conservatives. He doesn't obsess about "Cons"

Simon said...

Hey Mound are you accusing me of triggering this deranged outburst? Well I had nothing to do with it, and I’d appreciate it if you corrected the record, if you are capable of decency. I don’t write about you, and when left a comment on my blog about I week ago I answered as politely as I answer all the others. So what gives? I mean I could write a post, but quite frankly you’re not worth it. The irony is that there you are screaming it’s only blogging dammit @#!! When you sit on your fat ass blogging from dawn until dusk, because you have no life and there is no bigger pompous ass than yourself. I have never tried to convert you to anything, you are too ignorant and too much of a Con to discuss politics with, and again you’re not worth it. Your blog is monumentally boring, a cut and paste effort, you seem to believe that quantity makes up for quality, and what probably explains your deranged hissy fit is that you are just not popular as you once were, and you know it. Finally I find your comments about Scott Tribe to be highly amusing since I have in my files the classic diatribe against him where you call him every dirty name in the book, and I mean dirty, before declaring you’re leaving Progressive Bloggers, stomping off, only to come crawling back a few days later. Anyway, I’d hate to to bring all of this up in a post, for unlike you I do have a life, so please inform your smutty followers that I had nothing do with your latest breakdown, and I’ll be more than satisfied. Thanks.

The Mound of Sound said...


Simon, I didn't reference you directly. I couldn't. It was an anonymous comment which is why I responded accordingly.

The comments directed at you did not come from me and, again, I didn't suggest they were right or wrong. How would I know?

That said, the unbridled vitriol you regularly display makes those comments understandable. That's not on me, Simon. That's on you.

How I spend my time is none of your damned business although you plainly think otherwise. That, too, speaks plainly.

Anonymous said...

"I don’t write about you". Sorry to interject Mound but I'm not letting this fly. You constantly refer to Mound as a dirty old man or a dirty old con. A matter of fact you have posted a grotesque meme of him on your blog called the "Parksville Pervert" numerous times.