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October, 2024:

BC General Election 2024: Official results

Oct 29th, 2024
by Craig.
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Vote (cropped, Alan Cleaver CC BY 2.0).

The final results of the 19 October 2024 BC General Election are in, and the losers are the voters of British Columbia. Congratulations!

Wait, what? Oh, you were expecting that I was going to celebrate the winner?! Nope, with every election we have I become more and more convinced that the electoral system we use in this province and country was designed by morons. I mean, on the face of it, winner takes all just makes sense, right? You and your friends are deciding where to go for dinner. It has long been my contention that the bigger the group, the more likely it is that you’re all going to end up at White Spot in this part of the world. (Probably Wetherspoons in the UK.) White Spot is a good, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road restaurant, with something to please just about everyone so, just as I said, the bigger the group the more likely it is that there are going to be people who reject a pizza place, a steak place, an “ethnic” place of one stripe or another, or whatever someone in the group will vote against. So someone in the group says, “What about White Spot?” “Yeah, OK, I guess,” grumbles just about everyone. The steak guy can get a half decent (but overdone) steak, the pizza guy can probably get a flatbread thing, the person who wanted something “ethnic” can probably get something resembling a curry or that has had some curry powder waved in its general direction, people can get burgers, and off you go. Ain’t majority rule great?!

Final 2024 BC general election voting results.

Final 2024 BC general election voting results

And so here in British Columbia the NDP have just squeaked by with a 47-seat majority, an absolute bare minimum majority required in a 93-seat house. (And already the Conservatives are promising to bring down the government! Way to read the room guys!) The 46 seats they had until the recounts were completed over the weekend — actually, they weren’t really recounts, they were the counting of mail-in, out-of-district and other miscellaneous ballots — was one seat short of the majority, and they would have required at least one MLA from another party to pass legislation.

Of course, the NDP are happy! Phew! We can get our agenda done! But the fact is that 55.13% of the province voted against the NDP, the majority of voters! (Sound familiar?! 56.73% voted against the Conservatives.) Don’t get me wrong, of the two main parties in the contest I’d far prefer the NDP to win over the Conservatives who, as I said in my earlier post, are led by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who would be premier of the province had the Conservatives won! So thank the gods that they didn’t win, but the issue I have is that everyone seems to think that a minority government is “bad”, when in actual fact a minority government is the absolute best we can possibly hope for in a first-past-the-post system, where it’s usually one dictatorship after another! If you’re using a system where the majority of voters do not get what they voted for, how can you possibly think that that’s the best possible voting system?!

But I’m farting into the wind, because BC voters have twice (or maybe it’s three times, I’ve lost count) rejected some kind of proportional representation system because the maths were “too hard”!

Initial 2024 BC general election voting results.

Initial 2024 BC general election voting results

Let me go back to my White Spot example. Based on my own experience I’m not a big fan of the various food-delivery services out there, but here’s a possible variation on the example I gave: The majority of the group would probably vote against White Spot, not because White Spot is crap (I do love some of their dishes, so I don’t want you to think I have a hate on for them), but because the steak guy would kill for a good steak, and the pizza guy really wants a meat-lover’s pizza right now, and someone really wants a good goat curry. So head for some venue where you can have fun and that will allow you to call in a food delivery, and order from the places that specialise in those foods and eat what you actually want! Maybe it sounds a bit too “pie in the sky”, but you all get to vote on what you want to eat and you all get what you want! In PR, if 40% vote for the NDP, 40% vote for the Conservatives, 10% vote for the Greens, and 10% vote for the Rhinoceros Party, that’s exactly how the seats are divvied up in the legislature (or parliament).

If a group of friends can come up with an arrangement that suits all of them for dinner for the evening, how can a province or country not come up with an electoral system that actually pleases all of the voters all of the time?! I’m not so stupid that I think I know better than Abraham Lincoln but, my god, just about anything has to be better than this farcical first-past-the-post system in which we find ourselves every election cycle where (in this case) 55.13% of the electorate get told to suck it up for another four years. That won’t end well when the revolution happens.

Abandon Harris ’24

Oct 19th, 2024
by Craig.
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Yesterday evening I watched a CBC news story that focused on ex-Palestinians (and Arabs in general) in Michigan who have mounted the “Abandon Harris ’24” campaign, which aims to ensure that Kamala Harris is not elected president of the United States in their election next month. I did a web search and it turns out that this is actually a national movement.

I am blown away by how short-sighted these people are. One Muslim woman said, “If the consequence is a trump presidency, so be it.” I wonder if she has thought this through. Given the incredibly anti-Islamic stands that trump has taken, and given the extent of his fascist statements about mass deportations and turning the United States military on its own citizens (naturalised and not) or “the enemy within”, what makes her so sure that she will not be on the first boat or plane of deportations if she helps him win?

Also in the piece a Muslim or Arab man was interviewed outside either a mosque or perhaps some sort of Islamic cultural centre. He was standing in front of a green awning marked, “WOMEN ENTRANCE”, and in the background was another green awning; there was no way to see what kind of entrance that one was, but I can only assume it was the “MAN ENTRANCE”. I’m well aware that Muslims don’t allow men and women to mix — just like other religions based on the stone-age teachings of one prophet or another — but this interview was obviously conducted in the “free” United States of America! I am an immigrant myself (just not to the United States, thank the gods and my parents) and if I had behaved the way these Palestinians are behaving — including fostering sex discrimination — I myself (and my family) would probably have been deported!

It is people like these — who bring their country’s problems with them when they emigrate/immigrate — that give us immigrants a bad name.

The Joy of Bank (or Getting Banked from Behind)

Oct 16th, 2024
by Craig.
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I was looking for something on my hard drive today, and found this. To be honest, I didn’t remember writing it, so I searched for it online. I didn’t find it, so I’ve come to the conclusion that I did indeed write it, just two years into my sixteen-year relationship with Stanbic Bank Zambia that I terminated (with extreme prejudice) at the end of last month. I was probably saving it for the blog/website that I plan to set up where I will document my sixteen years of torment.

Anyway, enjoy. It even made me chuckle fourteen years after I wrote it.

The Joy of Bank (or Getting Banked from Behind)

By, I.M. Banked, 31 August 2010

The joys of banking (and, by corollary, being banked) are greatly underrated by the general public. I personally experience the joys of being banked by Stanbic on a regular basis. It’s a match made in heaven, because clearly Stanbic enjoys banking me. We often spend hours engaging in phone bank when the banking I usually get via the Internet has gone soft. But sometimes we get together in person, and it doesn’t take an overactive imagination to figure out what position I, as the submissive customer, am required to assume by my banking master.

While I do enjoying the banking I get from Stanbic, I often find myself wondering if I could get banked by another institution. Well, I know I could (bankers have a certain reputation), but will the bank be better? Will the banker whisper sweet nothings in my balance before banking me? One of the things I enjoy most in my relationship with Stanbic is the unpredictability of the withdrawal — will it be an early withdrawal, or will it be late? If things become too predictable, I worry that I’ll become bored with having my monthly banking on the same date and in the same quantity each month. Sometimes I just love the excitement of finding that I’ve been banked earlier in the month than usual, leaving me with not enough to give my other bankers.

Something else I particularly enjoy is being passed from banker to banker, while they laugh and promise me that the next banker will give me the banking that I’m really looking for. I must admit; sometimes I get my hopes up, thinking that the next banker will have a bigger tool with which he (or she) might quench my thirst for customer satisfaction. But while I do so enjoy this particular fetish, I am often disappointed, finding that the next banker’s resolve isn’t as stiff as it had appeared at first. Sometimes though the resolve is certainly quite rigid and inflexible — priapic even — but in those cases the banker turns to his own onanistic needs and I am left wanting yet again.

Back in January I confided in one of my bankers that some of his friends — other bankers — were violating me as I slept, making non-consensual (sometimes simultaneous) transactions. In the nine months since, many promises have been made by my banker that these unwanted acts of bank would be dealt with, but the unsolicited banking I’m receiving continues unabated. Sometimes I despair, telling myself that this is the kind of banking over that we must expect in Africa; yet I hold desperately to the words of my banker: “[W]e take pride in being part of a large banking group rooted in Africa but reaching out to all corners of the world.” [To all you Australians, I urge you not to think of the word “rooted” in the same way most of you already are!] I yearn for the day when a more considerate banker in another corner of our round world might teach my banker how to bank me more tenderly, more considerately, and with due regard to my bottom line. These considerate bankers realise that communication is paramount, and my needs are important too.

If you too like to be banked, I’m happy to tell you that my relationship with Stanbic is not monogamous. While I engage in bank with only a few bankers, Stanbic are quite happy to bank anyone willing to walk through their doors with a reference letter and the appropriate stack of documentation. Come on down and join the party. We can all be banked together!

I think I may have had an obvious point in the “nine months” to which I referred, but I clearly didn’t carry on with it and I don’t remember what it may have been now. And despite the 2010 date on it, I can enthusiastically report that Stanbic are completely and totally banking their customers to this day in 2024! This is why I have dumped their sorry arses; I wasn’t happy with being banked any more.

I just wasted my vote in the 2024 British Columbia provincial general election

Oct 13th, 2024
by Craig.
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Vote (cropped, Alan Cleaver CC BY 2.0).

Yesterday I went to the District Electoral Office in my area and voted in an advance poll. I did it there and early because I expected an issue with my ID, but thankfully I didn’t have one. (At least that part of the provincial government was working properly, as opposed to the part responsible for my ID.) Anyway, since we’re still using the FPTP voting system inherited from middle ages England, I knew that my vote would be wasted because I voted for the Green Party headed by Sonia Furstenau instead of one of the two main parties, one of which is headed by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist.

But oh well. I’ll just consider myself on the vanguard of proportional representation in a province that has its head buried firmly in its ass, having rejected PR in two referenda!