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On Thawing Precious Little Snowflakes And Sycophantic Charades

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by Sean Orr | Get ready to hear the word ‘troll’ every single day for the next 3 weeks: B.C. Liberals trolling NDP campaign stops with so-called ‘truth truck’. It would be laughable if it wasn’t also going to be 100% effective toward 80% of the population.

And yet it sets Horgan up for a huge burn:

And now the guy driving the truck will be able to afford a home!

Again, she’s trolling us. There is no way the BC Liberals don’t know about precarious labour by now. They do. But they know that most of that labour pool doesn’t vote and that they live in cities. The rest of the population that is working class believe that they are actually middle class and that the rest of us just need to pull ourselves up by our, um, birkenstraps.

The thing about trolling is that it works. You say something as mind blowingly tone deaf as “you need a job to afford a house” and your opponents get angry. To wit, right on cue:

It was at the end of one of Mr. Horgan’s verbal offensives that Ms. Clark said: “Calm down John,” and reached over and patted his arm. Mr. Horgan flinched: “Don’t touch me again, please.”

It was almost like the Liberal war machine had prepared for the moment. Within seconds, the party’s social-media apparatus had created a hashtag: “CalmDownJohn,” seizing on Ms. Clark’s remark. Such is the hypocrisy of politics.

Double standards aside, it’s a masterful piece of politicking. I almost think Hillary would have won if they had Christy Clark’s campaign team. But as Derrick O’Keefe writes, “This is the perfect distillation of elite technocratic arrogance. If anything Horgan’s not angry enough — there’s so much to be indignant about in this province”.

Indeed, it seems like the media has finally stopped their sycophantic charade and woken up.

Hmm. I wonder if it’s because they themselves have experienced precarious labour … Postmedia and its union reach an agreement to save 21 jobs at Vancouver Sun and Province.

“I voted yes to save jobs even though it’s frustrating to get paid 10 per cent less despite working for a profitable newspaper,” said Vancouver Sun crime reporter Kim Bolan. “I hope [Postmedia CEO Paul] Godfrey really does invest in journalism instead of continuing the cuts.”

And yet somehow Douglas Todd is still given space to write his dumpster fire blog posts: Is UBC student newspaper ‘spoof’ edition bigoted? Nope. “And white males are a smaller minority again, making up only one in six students on the campus, where most students have ethnic Asian backgrounds…” Aw, those poor precious little snowflakes. You’re a white male, Douglas. You can get in a time machine and go to any time and it will be awesome when you get there.

At least Nick Eagland got to keep his job: Canada’s largest 4/20 rally still a ‘protestival’ despite coming legalization. I tried to tip him off about all the worms that died in the mud but it didn’t make the final cut.

Music of the day: A Tale of Two Venues: The Closing of Shea Stadium and The Media Club.

Bonus: I Just Love This Juicero Story So Much.

When we signed up to pump money into this juice company, it was because we thought drinking the juice would be a lot harder and more expensive. That was the selling point, because Silicon Valley is a stupid libertarian dystopia where investor-class vampires are the consumers and a regular person’s money is what they go shopping for.

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