There are those who cling to such arbitrary philosophies as intellectual ammunition for their assertions that rationality – the strictly logical consideration of the evidence of our senses, and their logical implications – is not an effective tool for determining how one ought to live ones life, what decisions one ought to make, and how one should be governed. However, most politicians who have plans to engineer society to their liking have an almost instinctual ability to make up their own philosophy as they go, according to the expediency of the moment. They tend, therefore, to dispense with all of the pseudo-philosophical mumbojumbo offered up by Hegel and Kant, and instead simply jump to those philosophers’ ultimate conclusion: that everyone – except themselves – is stupid.

The same cannot be said the Green Party of Canada’s Elizabeth May. Specifically, she simply cannot exempt herself from her own conclusion.

On February 22, 2007, May participated on a panel on the popular TV Ontario (TVO) program “The Agenda”, hosted by Steve Paikin. The program was broadcast live, and had a studio audience. On member of the audience asked “why is there so little political will for a carbon tax?”. Hand in the air, eager to answer, May delivered the following in a tone and manner befitting a person who just wants to cut the bull; who just wants to say what she thinks everyone is thinking:

“All the other politicians are scared-to-death to mention the word ‘tax’, and I think Canadians are stupid and cannot – and I fundamentally agree with that assessment – but most politicians think that if you say that ‘we’re going to put on a carbon tax, and reduce your income tax, they don’t think they can sell it. It’s all about votes.”

I do not recall anyone saying anything about her comment back in February of 2007. Arguably, that is because the best exploding cigars are best lit at election time. On September 10th, 2008, Canada’s major television networks reversed their decision not to include the Green party leader in its televised leaders debate: by alleging that the decision makers were all sexist men and by falsely and smearing them with the false allegation that their decision was based upon the fact that she is a she, May had slandered her way into the debate. As an aside: apparently, Liz White, the leader of the Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada dropped the ball by not playing the sexism card: she, like several merely male political party leaders, was not invited. Anyway, that same day, a YouTuber by the name “stimpyloveseggs” (which, I am led to understand, is the YouTube.com handle of blogger Stephen Taylor) released a short video using the audio from the above-quoted TVO video clip, and the blogosphere erupted.

May speaks quickly in the clip, and some (including May) assert that what she really said was not “I think” but “they think”, as in:

“All the other politicians are scared-to-death to mention the word ‘tax’, and they think Canadians are stupid and cannot – and I fundamentally agree with that assessment – but most politicians think that if you say that ‘we’re going to put on a carbon tax, and reduce your income tax, they don’t think they can sell it. It’s all about votes.”

To verify this quote, and to decide for yourself whether she said “they think” or “I think” you can watch the TVO clip on a blog entry at the Western Standard, here. However, whether she said “I think” or “they think” matters little, because she followed up the “stupid” assessment with the words “and I fundamentally agree with that assessment”. Or, at least that is how its sounds to people who trust their senses and their intelligence.

On September 12, 2008, she was again the guest of “The Agenda”, where she was eager to explain that you should not trust your senses or your intelligence. On the September 12th show, host Steve Paikin and May replayed the 2007 clip and then had the following exchange:

Paikin: Okay, that was the exchange. Let’s just clarify here what you did and did not say.

May: Right.

Paikin: Because some people thought you said ‘I think the Canadian public is stupid’.

May: Which I obviously wouldn’t have ever said, and didn’t say. What I said was I said the reason that there’s no political will, is that the other political parties think that Canadians are stupid and I fundamentally disagree with that assessment. And you do as you explain, you go forward and people will accept it.

Paikin: Okay, but I thought I heard you say ‘I fundamentally agree with that assessment’.

May: No. I know it’s funny how it sounds, but I said ‘fundamentally disagree with that assessment’. So, it’s my problem of talking to fast.

Paikin: You do talk quickly.

May: I do talk quickly. But if you look at my lifetime record as uh, from my first book published in, in the late, uh, in early 1980 actually, all the way through my writings, it’s a constant plea that democracy works; that the electorate is responsible, intelligent and should be engaged; that people must shake off cynicism and apathy and get involved; and that Canadians and the voting public of every electorate, in every democracy, are far more intelligent, and far more able to accept a complicated solution than most politicians will give them credit for.

May explains that, after attending the February 22, 2007 show, she went home and, watching the rebroadcasted tape of it, said to herself “Oh! What happened there?”. On the September 12th show, she gave the following excuse:

And I remember the beginning of when I’m talking the mike wasn’t on, and then it came to me. And it ended up raising the volume on one part of my sentence and somebody else said something, so I was fundamentally disagreeing with that assessment, but turning away.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we have justification for concluding that Ms. May is lying, and does, indeed, believe that you are stupid:

1. First she said that she was “fundamentally disagreeing” with what she herself had said, about Canadians being stupid. Then she changed her story and said that she was fundamentally disagreeing with something said by some other panelist. Which of her statements is false? It doesn’t matter. It cannot be both, so one of the two has to be false.
2. First she said that the problem was that she speaks too fast, and that that made us all hear “fundamentally agree” when she actually said “fundamentally disagree”. Then she switched to some nonsense about her microphone being off at the beginning of a sentence. Which one? It doesn’t really matter because:
   1. it is clear to anyone with normal hearing and intelligence that her microphone was not off at the beginning of her sentence about Canadians being “stupid” and was not off at the beginning of her sentence about fundamentally (dis)agreeing with “that assessment”; and
   2. even had the microphone been off at the beginning of a sentence, the meaning of the relevant sentence would not have been changed. The sentence about Canadians being stupid began with: “All the other politicians are scared-to-death to mention the word tax”. Even had the microphone been off for that beginning part of the sentence, she makes no allegation that the middle of the sentence – where she says that “…I/they think Canadians are stupid and cannot – and I fundamentally agree with that assessment…” – was somehow affected by microphone volume levels. Of course, the beginning of the sentence is not only perfectly audible, but occurs well before the “stupid” comment and the “fundamentally agree” comment. It is simply not credible that the microphone made us hear what she did not say.

Anyway, if there remains any doubt about the foregoing analysis, it luckily does not matter. Leaving aside May’s theory that some deus ex machina combination of a motor mouth and alleged microphone volume changes conspired to make the sentence fragment “and I fundamentally agree with” sound like “and I fundamentally disagree with”, let us follow May’s suggestion and let her prior writings stand as testament to what she really thinks about the intelligence of her fellow Canadians.

In October of 2005, May gave a speech titled “Can Civilization Survive Climate Change?” (until very recently – perhaps as recently as the commencement of the election – it was available on the Green Party of Canada web site). The speech began with a quote from Bertrand Russell:

Ever since Adam ate the apple, man has refrained from no folly of which he was capable. The end.

The meaning of the passage, at least to the extent that it is compatible with May’s speech, is that man’s rational faculty allows him to change his surroundings, but that reason does not confer upon man the ability to know a smart course of action from a stupid one, such that man’s stupidity knows no bounds. In other words: man is stupid when he bases his decisions upon the results of his own rational conclusions. Shorter still: to think is to be stupid. Shortest: man is stupid.

In the speech, May effectively states that humanity is not important:

To gain some perspective on humanity’s importance, if you place the 3.8 billion year span along a time line one kilometer long, humanity (homo sapiens — the self-proclaimed smart species) make our appearance 2 centimetres from the end.

First, note the “self-proclaimed” bit. Such redundancy – who but man could “proclaim” anything at all? – implies it is written and said with the emotional equivalent of a sneer or a rolling of the eyes. Clearly, “self-proclaimed” is intended to imply that man’s evaluation of his intelligence is based not upon any objective criteria, but upon a delusion of grandeur.

Second, judging the importance of man by the duration of his existence is a bit like saying that the space shuttle is less important than syphilis, because the latter has been around for longer. And it leaves unanswered the two key questions that make such evaluations meaningful: important to whom, and for what purpose? Presumably, May does not mean that man is not important to man, and I do not believe that May thinks value to be separable from valuer or from the valuer’s purpose. Clearly, she means that man is relatively unimportant to nature.

Without entering into a full-scale debate about metaphysics and epistemology, let me just point out the obvious. The word “nature” refers to the universe; to “everything”. “Everything” – all existents referred to collectively – is not an entity: it lacks identity, epistemologically-speaking. “Everything” is not distinguishable from “nothing” because “nothing” is that which does not exist (query whether the world would be better off without the word or concept “nothing”). Existence is identity, consciousness is identification. Nature, lacking identity, lacks consciousness. Such being the case, nothing is important or unimportant to nature, and nature does not identify anything as being important or unimportant to itself.

In her speech, May paints a picture of humans as evil entities. She mentioned two books, explaining that “Both chronicle the self-destructive tendencies of the amazing primate known as ‘man.’”

May laments that, since the commencement of the industrial revolution, humans have “…taken the life-giving, life-creating, life-nurturing systems of Planet Earth and pushed them into reverse.” In other words: the time-saving, standard-of-living improving inventions that result from human rationality are contrary to nature, and are life-taking, life-destroying, life-murdering systems of man.

Making it clear that she believes the Garden of Eden actually to have existed – she refers, straight-faced, to the “location of the Garden of Eden” – she concludes her speech with a hope that “we can re-write Russell’s History of the World to say that humanity rejected folly and that we returned to the Garden”. May is telling us that she hopes we can come to realize that it is wrong for man to seek knowledge of the world around him and to modify the world to suit his needs or wants; that she hopes we can, instead, live off of whatever God’s Earth provides naturally to man; that she hopes we are smart enough to dispense with pride and reason, and hold ignorance as a virtue.

In her speech, May, an anti-abortion Christian theist, is implicitly speaking of man’s relative unimportance to a supernatural being, and is regarding all of “creation” as being important to that being. Man, in her view, is an abomination at odds with the rest of God’s creation; the animal that must learn that thinking for himself earned man a one way ticket out of paradise on Earth; the animal that must learn to stop thinking, and to start living at one with the rest of creation, according to God’s plan.

Taken to its logical conclusion, May’s message is a demand for an anti-human atrocity: a return to hunter-gatherer living, and the short life spans and smaller populations it implies. Her belief, founded not on reason but on faith, is that the fruit of rationality – knowledge – leads us always to sin, so we must outlaw productive thought and action, return to a state of naked ignorance, and have a supernatural being provide for us when, where, how, and to the extent that he wants to.

In the end, it matters little whether May said Canadians are stupid. May’s beliefs about man’s nature make it clear that she believes that Canadians – in fact, all humans – are stupid; stupid, because they think. And, clearly, she believes that stupid people should vote Green.

In my view, choosing to run in Stephen Harper’s riding is a mistake if the Libertarian leader expects thereby to boost his vote count. Party loyalists (of just about any big-box political party) like to believe that were things only different (e.g., were they to have a majority), their party would advocate different policies. And, although such hope is usually unjustified, they are more likely to come out and vote for their party if they think there is the slightest chance that someone is trying to horn-in on the “right-wing” action. If the Libertarian runs in Calgary, and takes the approach that he is the capitalist that Harper is not right now, I expect he will get stomped like a narc at a biker rally, electorally.

No matter where he intends to run, the better approach for the Libertarian leader – if he hopes to maximize his vote count – would be to campaign against the Conservatives on Libertarian positions that are not the same as positions thought to be Conservative (i.e., to campaign as a liberal on anti-libertarian Conservative policies), and to campaign against the Liberals on things that nobody, in Alberta (except, perhaps, someone with a large trust fund) could want whether Liberal or Conservative. For example, if the Libertarian Party of Canada is pacifistic – and many of its members are sure to be – it would be easier to get votes by campaigning against military participation in Afghanistan while campaigning against the oil-sector-victimizing, Alberta-milking, Liberal carbon tax.

However, almost any advice one could give to a Libertarian candidate will be of little importance at the end of the day because, in reality, the vast majority of voters do not vote according to policy. Here’s how it will happen, in every riding, amongst the vast majority of voters.

1. They will wake up on election day and say to themselves “well, I’d better figure out who I’m voting for”.
2. They will not base their decision upon the parties’ election platforms: they will not read the election platforms.
3. The radio and television news will not say much about polls etc. on election day, so those sources will be largely useless. They will turn to friends, family and colleagues if they turn to any source of information at all.
4. But, in all likelihood, they will simply ask themselves whether the Harper government is causing them more grief than they are willing to suffer any longer. If so, they will vote Liberal not because of what the Liberals are promising to do or not to do, but because voting Liberal increases the chances that the Conservatives will cease to be the government. If not, they will vote Conservative, and give it no more thought. For the vast majority of voters, it’s really that simple.

Poll after poll demonstrates that the most important factor in determining whether a party is elected is: its size. A person who wants the government to stay in power just votes to reelect the government. A person who wants the government out of power will vote for the biggest alternative party – the party with the greatest chance of knocking the governing party out of power. For those who are sufficiently wanting to change the government, if the biggest alternative party is the communists, the communists will get the vote; if it’s the capitalists, the capitalists will get the vote; if it’s the Nazis, the Nazis will get the vote. In short: most people do not vote for a party not in power, they vote against a party that is in power; they vote not for policies, but against them.

The Libertarians do not enter the running because virtually nobody believes they stand a chance of dislodging Conservatives. Only Liberals, NDP, or Bloc candidates (depending upon the riding) are currently thought of as having the power to knock-out a Conservative MP.

The right approach for any party with no (current) chance of electoral success is to (a) contrast itself with the parties that win seats (so that people gain awareness of the existence and nature of the small party), and (b) to attack, relentlessly, the party that parades around falsely claiming to be the voice of the ideology that the small party really does endorse. For example, the right approach for the Green Party right now is not to co-operate with the Liberal Party (as it has been doing), but to torpedo the Liberal Party. Expose every lie. Expose every ambiguity and equivocation. Expose every bad judgment. And do not be afraid to call a liar, a fake, or a moron a liar, a fake, or a moron, respectively. Until the faux-green Liberals are undone, the truly-Greens have little if any chance of replacing them.

At the end of the day, all countries are two-party countries and the reason for that fact is: people vote against, not for. They are looking for a big hammer, not a good idea.

Sorry.