A Script Too Big for a Video

So I’m gonna play a clip for you of Marcus Carniverous’s most recent speech and I want you to pay attention not just to what he’s saying but the order of what he’s saying…

[clip]

So you’ll notice first he talks about telling America, we’ve got other things to do. On the one hand this is obviously a negotiating tactic. If we can move back toward having the free trade agreement we already had, sure we’ll go back to that. But the fact is America right now isn’t a relationship worth investing in. Even once as Yes Frank’s Blanket recently put it, Trump is gone and someone less terrible is in there, the fact is once America gets their act together which we don’t know for sure will happen in four years or forty years. The fact is that they have societal problems due to under funding their education and deregulating their donor class, that they probably won’t ever fix. Like don’t get me wrong, one on one some Americans are lovely people. But they’re buying their kids bullet proof backpacks for a reason.

With Citizens united, they surrended their country to invisible kings. And with this most recent election, they’ve now crowned a emperor with no clothes who loves putting on fashion shows.

The next thing he does, and this is something he’s been doing the whole campaign, and it’s what earned him the nickname Marcus Carniverous. He agrees with Pierre’s insistence on cutting taxes. Not necessarily because it’s a good idea. But because Pierre and every other incompetent politician since Reagan has been harping on it.

Carney’s job isn’t to educate the populous particularly in an election. He’s not going to die on a hill concerned about being right. He’s going to let every Canadian pay a little less tax and be done with it. He also acknowledge’s Pierre’s calls for making regulations easier. He doesn’t argue with it.

Now the thing to remember is that politicians say things that mean one thing to them, but mean different things to voters. And they know what they mean to voters and they plan on voters interpretting it that way, but then when they don’t do the thing the voter wanted or they do something the voter wouldn’t want they say, well I told you that was what I would do.

The fact is through some of the stuff with the housing accelerator fund it’s my understanding the Liberals have already been working to harmonize building codes across jurisdictions and make things more consistent so it’s easier to build a bunch of homes that can be assembled in different locations much quicker than previously with less emissions and less waste.

Of course what Pierre means when he says it is that they’re going to remove any regulations that donors don’t like. And donors generally don’t like regulations that keep people from dying or getting sick or injured at work.

So Carney is able to welcome people who found themselves agreeing with Pierre into the fold, without actually promising to light everything on fire like Pierre would.

Beyond that he acknowledges the need for more housing. Which everyone can agree on. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to claim that the Liberal’s plan is perfect. It is definitely the most likely plan to get a lot of affordable homes built quickly. The conservative’s plan is just further deregulation and tax cuts, which just means more profit for the broken housing market that isn’t going to fix itself because with no competition you just have very profitable collusion.

And the NDP have great theoretical values… which not only have they not communicated well, they also don’t even have a published concrete plan that you could read and then communicate for them. And I think that comes from structural problems where the NDP have too many consevratives involved in running their campaign efforts. Either that or they have drunk hippies doing it I’m not sure. But when you want to appeal to left leaning voters you can’t do what right wing parties do. I have a family member who consumes right wing gulf stream media vosciferously. Sometimes I’m subjected to it and they think I’ll like it. It’s weird. Everything is very simplistic. It’s slogans slogans and emphasis. You see people patting each other on the back at events and repeating the magic words. You see a lot of unkempt beards, and you see a lot of acting like social media figures are celebrities and that politicians are celebrities.

And I just want to point out here that yes at this Rally people do chant Carney’s name. I’m not claiming that vigerous chanting and excitement is exclusive conservatives. All parties do it all parties try and manufacture it. And it’s always weird. Every party wants pretend their candidate is John Stewart but none of them want to just run someone like John Stewart. Like don’t get me wrong, I love John he’s great but the only way in which he’s one in a billion is that other people don’t have his reputation and credibility. But there are funny and engaging people who could run for office. But we’d need to abandon this need for politicians to always be squeaky clean and to have never said an offensive word or to have thought a dumb thought.

We need to accept particularly on the left that people grow and develop with time and the best people to put in charge of things are often not the people who’ve wanted to be in charge since they were five.

Where was I going? Right Carney’s speech is much less meandery than mine.

After he talks about his housing plan. Which apparently only has three billion dollars. That honestly feels low to me, though I suppose they’re using the money for financing so I guess they expect a lot of that to be repayed? I’m not totally sure how money works with all these figures. I tell jokes and encourage skepticism of people who others tell you to worship. Incidentally Pierre thins that the Liberal’s plan will cost way too much. Which makes sense because the only way that you get the kind of cuts Pierre wants is if you just don’t charge anyone but the poor taxes.

But after that Carney transitions toward talking about how due to the planned significant expansion of housing being built, Canada will be creating tons of jobs in the trades. And this is smart for a number of reasons. A lot of people who vote have kids and they’re worried about their kids being able to find a job that they can feel good about. The more and more that automation has taken over, and the more that telecommunications has allowed large companies to offshore Canadian jobs, the more that the Canadian economy has become good jobs that require a lot of education before you can even apply for them… and lots of people end up spending years to get trained for jobs they end up bailing on because they didn’t realize how badly tempered they were for that industry. For example I was really good at ministry, when I still believed in God, but I was terrible at telling narcissists what they wanted to hear because I couldn’t wrap my head around somebody being that needy in ministry. Also when I saw things I said things and apparently the unofficial policy was to sweep things under rugs. But the rugs had no room under them left anyway.

Companies for whatever reason decided that jobs in manufacturing all should be done in Asia becuase the work force is chaeper there and culturally they’re more tollerant of abhorent conditions. But a lot of people get much more satisfaction from working with their hands and building things. Not me, if you ever have the misfortune of asking me to help you move I’m constantly washing my hands after I pick up anything remotely dusty. The sensation drives me nuts!

People love hearing that manufacturing is coming back, but it’s not likely to. The only way you’ll see manufacturing come back is if it’s mostly through methods like 3D printing and then assembling things. Efficiently building housing though? Yeah that’s something where it makes sense to manufacture hosues in Canada. Particularly if we’re building houses in chunks and then assembling them on site.

Anyway, you’ll notice that at no point in the speech do you see him suggest that you should vote for him because you hate somebody. Whenever he talks about Pierre there’s a mixture of pitty and frustration with his ignorance. There’s a sense of, I wish you were smarter so we could have a real conversation about this stuff. And Carney hits that while skillfully never sliding into exasperated territory.

Now this isn’t the only way to do things. If I were running for office, I don’t think I could pull this off becuase I am not great at impulse control. I can be very convincing especially if it’s just me talking to an audience. I rely on speaking from conviction. I also sometimes will especially in topics that I’m very knowledgable with just info dump on people until they feel uncomfortable arguing with me about a topic I’m an expert in.

Anyway, over the next four years we’re hopefully going to see some major shifts on Canada’s left. I think the Green Party needs to accept that being a single issue party ensures that people talk about that issue but the parties in power never contain the most passionate people on the subject. And the NDP need to figure out if their goal is to be a truly left wing party, or if they just want to be a less popular more aggressive version of the Liberals. I vote for the former. I’m very excited about what’s happening with the Revolution Party and I would really love for the three to come together and form a truly unified left party, though with leftists it can be difficult for them to not splinter off because somebody doesn’t pander to the right marginalized group QUITE often enough or doesn’t prioritize one person’s pet issue.

But anyway I just thought that this chunk of a recent speech really demonstrates why Carney has been so effective while doing a very good job of steering clear of attack politics.