Naheed Nenshi plays the race card.

Last night a Facebook video of Naheed Nenshi reaching out to Calgary’s Pakistani community came to my attention.

There is utterly nothing wrong with campaigning directly to identifiable groups. It is natural and politicians will always campaign strongly in areas where they have cultural ties or strengths.

The problem came when Nenshi began implying that his opponents are organizing a vote base of “haters and racists” in order to set the city back. That was pure, crass, bullshit identity politics and it is well worth calling Nenshi out on it.

Within an hour or two of tweeting links to this controversial video, it suddenly was deleted along with tweets from the originator of the video.

I asked what happened to the video and got this reply:

A message to a specific community? Um OK. So what then? Why does that mean it needs to be deleted in a rush along with all references to it?

What likely really happened was that as the video was quickly going viral on twitter, Nenshi campaigners saw the complete backfiring of this callow race baiting and asked Mashhood to pull the video ASAP.

Alas, it was too late. The video was recorded by multiple news outlets and remains out there for public consumption.

This video reeks of desperation. Nenshi is no fool but he is on the ropes politically and will try anything to keep his hold on the Mayor’s chair. This apparently includes accusing his opponents of being racists. Pathetic.

If this giant segment of racists was so active in Calgary’s political circles, how on earth did Nenshi get elected not once, but twice? The bottom line is that Nenshi is full of shit as usual and wont hesitate to take any tact to smear his opponents. Such a sad ending for what had been such a popular political figure.

Polls are indicating that people in pretty much every measurable category are beginning to reject Nenshi. That means non white folks are rejecting Nenshi too and in great numbers.

Identity politics are disgusting and they lead to the cultural divisions that we are all battling with today. From the white nationalists in Charlottesville to Nenshi and his supporters (who have demanded that white people must atone by voting for Nenshi) this gross style of politics must come to an end.

There is only a week remaining in the campaign. While multiple polls indicate that Naheed Nenshi is going to lose the election, many things can happen before then so those of us hoping for a better mayor can’t count our chickens yet.

One thing we can be sure of though is that Nenshi won’t go out with dignity. He will leave office with the same petulance and propensity for spreading bullshit that he had while sitting on the mayoral throne.

A great medium for political messages.

Just loving how social media is getting political messages out to new audiences in music videos whether through parody as the first couple below demonstrate or even in making economic philosophy palatable and fun as can be seen in the third video (one of my personal favorites).

 

Privacy Versus Accountability

The world has changed in a way that I think few saw coming. Many people feared and foresaw a world where we all were constantly monitored by government cameras and lost all privacy. What has happened instead is that we now have a society where nearly every person is carrying a video camera at all times and it has actually led to more accountability from our authorities.

There are some privacy issues and there always will be but I think this trend of citizen empowerment through personal cameras is a good thing for us all.

In 1991 video captured the reprehensible beating of Rodney King and brought to light just how out of control police officers can become at times when they think nobody is watching. At that time, the video was an anomaly as video cameras were large, bulky and expensive. People rarely had one at the ready to shoot such a scene. People could not help but wonder how many other episodes such as the King beating had occurred when nobody could record the moment.

Videos of police abusing their authority are now becoming unfortunately more common but I suspect that as more and more police officers are finding themselves fired and criminally charged when caught assaulting citizens that many more officers are now showing restraint in knowing that their actions may be recorded.

This new accountability extends to officers and their treatment of their own dogs as the video below demonstrates.

::warning:: Lot’s of expletives.

This accountability extends to criminals too. The video below demonstrates scumbag protestors vandalizing property. These sort of video clips help undercut the claims by protesters that they are being unfairly targeted by police.

The video below demonstrated how shallow, bitter and just outright pointless the “Idle No More” protests were. Without citizen video like this, thugs like those recorded may have retained some credibility in the minds of Canadians.

Of course in the political world, we are finding politicians going down as they fail in adjusting to this new degree of public scrutiny.

Rob Ford has proven not only to have some very serious addiction issues, but has demonstrated an utter inability to learn from his past mistakes as he has been caught in a second crack video.

ford

In Alberta, disgraced former Premier Alison Redford demonstrated that despite losing Alberta’s top political job due to her gross sense of entitlement, she still feels entitled to taking a six-figure salary from Alberta taxpayers to live in luxury in Palm Springs while brazenly refusing to do her job. Had a citizen not taken the picture below, Redford may have been able to convince some that she was on some form of government business.

Alison Redford by Kurt Bowley.jpg

Redford’s ongoing crime against good fashion has been recorded in Palm Springs as well.

redbike

Civil servants are not exempt either. This picture below of 10 city of Calgary workers painting a simple green box demonstrates that there is plenty of room for increased efficiency within the City of Calgary despite Nenshi’s denials and his rather sad claim that this was a training session.

bike

The world is changing and for the most part it is for the better.

Rather than complain about a possible lack of privacy, people should just always act in a manner that is assuming that they are being recorded.

Accountability is never a bad thing.

 

The power of social media.

While I am prone to using thousands of words in a posting to get an idea out there, Amanda Achtman managed to cut the Redford Progressive Conservatives right to the core with a catchy and funny parody video that is less than two minutes long.

In light of Redford’s plummeting support and incredible budget deficit despite such a strong local economy, many many people are wondering just what happened to the party that they used to support.

People are abandoning the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta in droves as they simply really don’t know what the party even stands for anymore. Amanda drove that home excellently in her little video and it is going viral. It is an awesome example of a small grassroots effort making a strong impression on thousands. Proper use of social media can be very politically powerful.

Improper use of social media can be politically devastating. The Redford government see’s their lack of popular presence in the social media world (due to a lack of real grassroots support) so they have hired a cadre of leftover comms staffers from other provinces in a desperate hope of swinging online views. As with most of Redford’s efforts this has been a failure and the flood of tweets and such from her paid gang is really not taken terribly seriously by most.

Never ones to let a small irritation remain small, the Progressive Conservative twitter bunch thought that the best course of action would be to collectively report Amanda Achtman’s twitter account for spamming. This in effect leads to an account being temporarily suspended while they confirm that Amanda indeed was not spamming (and she wasn’t).

The foolish effort above of course then turned Achtman into an online grassroots martyr leading to radio and television coverage of the video. At times I swear the Redford gang will cross a street just to purposely step into a pile of dog crap.

Below is a link to Amanda Achtman on the Source with Ezra Levant discussing the issue.

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/featured/prime-time/867432237001/some-party-that-i-used-to-know/2297143795001

Good work Amanda. I hope we see more efforts such as your video from both you and others. It helps broaden political discourse for us all and as has been seen, it helps expose where the real extremists are.

Video captures the true essence of “Idle No More”

Yesterday around a hundred hipsters and other assorted union-paid layabouts decided to march to the Sun Media building in Toronto to protest against free press in Canada. This unvarnished ten minute video really does show the “Idle No More” clearly for what it is from the gross idiocy, to the intimidation attempts on Ezra Levant as he tried unsuccessfully to get simple questions asked to the fact that natives among the group are actually a tiny minority.

“Idle No More” hasn’t been a native rights group almost since it’s inception. Many media outlets love showcasing the handful of actual natives at the front of demonstrations while neglecting to film the collection of white, urban-dwelling hipsters making up the bulk of the demonstration in the back rows. These union backed idiots with their baseless cause and vapid accusations are the same fools we had to kick out of Canadian parks at great expense last year. Now they are just hiding behind a few natives.

Don’t just take my word for it though, watch the video below and see for yourself.

 

At the 8:40 mark watch as a person almost criminally tries to physically intimidate Levant causing police to intervene and move Levant aside. At the 10:00 mark watch the gross and blatant anti-Semitism erupt from a nut. Watching the entire video really is a must though as it says so much about the entire “movement”.

The video above is what it is all about people. Directionless ire and rage being perpetuated by directionless fools.

There are some real native issues that Canada needs to address. This won’t happen through the fools with “Idle No More” and their bloated fake hunger striking Queen Theresa Spence however.

Credit and thanks to BlogWrath for heading out there to give us this video.

Adding a screen cap from the official “Idle No More” official page. The posting had been up for over an hour at the time of this posting.

Why is the anti-Semitism surfacing so strongly among a Native movement?