Ah, Democracy!

Two days ago I got to fulfill my chance to work for Elections Canada at the one of polling stations in my electoral district. It was a long day, but an interesting one too.

One interesting part of my day was seeing just how bad voter turn-out actually is. I shouldn't say I was surprised by this, since the reality of poor voter turn-out is constantly drilled into our heads here in Canada during high school (or, at least it was when I was there) in order that we will all grow up and instantly become good, caring members of the demos as soon as we turn eighteen years old.

Of course this poor turn-out might not necessarily be such a bad thing: if one isn't even bothered to come out and vote, then it may not be unreasonable to assume they don't actually know that much about the issues that a given election is being held over. So perhaps it's better to make no decision at all, rather than an ill informed one.

Then again, our election hasn't generated nearly as much buzz as the American presidential race (and good for them! The amount of interest in politics that race will inspire in young, first time voters is a good thing), and it's easy to get distracted by the politics of our southern neighbour, since the decisions of their president can affect us here almost as much as our own prime minister's governance can.

After about 14 hours at the polls we all packed it in and finished for the night. The Liberal MP won his third term in my electoral district, and Mr. Stephen Harper still gets to be Prime Minister with his minority Conservative Party government.

Bigotry at Home

Here is a bit of religiously inspired bigotry for you.

What shocks me isn't really what he said, since I've gotten used to the fact that religious fundamentalists sometimes spout biblically inspired hate speech ever since I started outing myself to people as an atheist. No, what shocks me is how close to home this is. Sudbury is basically my home town.

It's one thing to see this stuff on the CFI's blog or to hear about it from the Rational Response Squad or from RichardDawkins.net, but to read about it in my own local newspaper was just odd...something I'm not used to at all.

My Life

Rather than continuing on with my feeble and futile struggle to blog about godless philosophical topics in general, I think that from now on I shall simply use this blog to tell you about my somewhat interesting, humanist life...you know, the sorts of things that normal people blog about.