Look to your Right. Look to your Left.

I decided to ease back into blogging in the midst of an election campaign, which was an awkward choice, because there's a chance it would involve a massive shifting of gears starting, well, tomorrow. Or not, as the case may be. So initially I decided to start by blogging without posting. If that idea sounds absurd to you, it isn't. It's kind of like, say, endorsing the Conservative Party on the condition that the party leader resign if he wins a majority in the election. Except only the mainstream media has the balls for something like that. I am a mere humble anonymous blogger.

I will say one thing, though, which is true regardless of who wins tomorrow and frames my thinking nowadays, and the despair over which is part of the reason I eventually gave up over at Sixth Estate. Next time you're out, and NOT in a place like the Gulf Islands where they are truly loony, look to your left and look to your right.

If the opinion polls are any indication, one in three of the adults you see in each direction believes that your constitutional rights should be set aside so that they can pick and choose who has the privilege of voting, who should have their lawfully obtained citizenship arbitrarily stripped from them, and who should be allowed to violate electoral law with impunity. One in three of the people you see around you on the street believe that they should have the power to stop you from voting if they suspect that you might mark the ballot in accordance with priorities they don't share, and that they should have the power to remove your citizenship from you if you do something that they don't like.

And they also believe, if their party's choice of rally locations is any indication, that we are better off being led by people who not only smoke crack with gangsters but are so mind-numbingly stupid that they let the gangsters film them while they do so.

And those are only the people that we KNOW are fascists, because of their voting practices.  There may be many more such people who would agree with everything in those two paragraphs but still aren't voting for the Conservative Party for the simple reason that they are not Conservatives.  (Because we now have a teachable moment in elementary philosophy at hand: all Conservatives are fascists, but not all fascists are Conservatives.)

And then contemplate the future.

I'm Sixth Estate, and we'll talk again tomorrow.