So there we were, minding our own business at the office, trying to set up one of those nerf basketball deals that seem to be all the rage on the new lawyer shows on TV. 
(Both Jimmy Smits and Rob Morrow toss up shots while mulling over television points of law.) Mostly, we were just trying to distract ourselves from the Mad Men-esque wet bar we’d long ago established. The source for many alcohol fueled eruptions and near butter knife fights but precious few drunken trysts, alas.
When this email popped up on our computer screens:
From: “Karl Haab” <khaab@on.aibn.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2010
To: afuitbs@gmail.com
Subject: Fw: Advance polls open tomorrow and who to vote for
City Elections for Mayor and Councillors
You can vote in the advance poll starting tomorrow, Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Locations attached.
If you don’t know who to vote for, find the recommended candidates at www.saveyourbusiness.ca
I’ve not included the attachment as it was pretty much as advertised, a list of advance polling stations. But the link is worth a little look-see if only to see firsthand the level of discourse going on out there as we close in on election day. Misinformed doesn’t do it justice as that would suggest a certain degree of ingenuousness or wide-eyed, golly-gee how `bout this at work. Ill-informed isn’t quite right either as, again, it denotes a passivity to it.
No, I have to Poe-it here, and create a word to strike the note I’m going for. Mal-informed. As in, a deliberate act of becoming misinformed. To cause oneself and others around you to be informationally misinformed.
Why is it that people want to be wrong? How is their cause, whatever that might be, well served if it’s based on lies and distortions? If being right means being so, so wrong, I just don’t want to be right.
These are not simply ideological or philosophical differences of opinion, I’m talking about here either. A quick glance through the site reveals out-and-out lies and mistruths. As if they’re coming straight from the campaign offices of Rob Ford or Rocco Rossi.
Exhibit A: Point #4 under Road Tolls and New Taxes. Taking away automobile lanes to make way for bike lanes on Jarvis Street at a cost of $6 million. Over and over, anti-bike lane candidates have tried to pimp this one. In fact, it cost less than 1/100th of that figure. And while it’s still being studied, so far, the ‘sheer madness’ of the bike lane causing traffic congestion along Jarvis Street does not seem to have materialized as was guaranteed by Rocco Rossi.
Exhibit B: Check out the site’s Ret Hot Lies link. Here you get an entire page dedicated to non-scientist Christopher C. Horner and Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank which gets millions of dollars of funding from Exxon, debunking the myth of climate change.
“A world-wide scam as large as David Miller’s streetcars and is responsible for billions of dollars of government grants and grants by charities to study it.” Blah, blah, blah.
So it goes. There’s no pro-business, anti-Miller candidate the site won’t endorse. None who display even a flash of progressive spirit that it doesn’t want to see go down to ignominious defeat on October 25th.
Who cares, you ask. Why bring such dreck up like some political hairball that has massed in the stomach, causing much nausea and discomfort. Acknowledging it only gives it more credence than it deserves.
Yes but, ignoring it hasn’t helped make it go away either. In fact, the modus operandi behind www.saveyourbusiness.ca has driven this campaign, infecting the debate with lies and misinformation, twisted logic and a mountain of anecdotal evidence that’s not worth the paper it isn’t written on. 
This screed has been treated with de facto legitimacy when in reality it’s nothing more than biased, highly suspect ideology.
It’s tough to engage with any contrary opinion when it’s based on pure and utter subjective bullshit. If people like those behind this website are so off the mark and clearly motivated by such egregious mendacity, why should we concede any point to them? Their motivation is clearly suspect. Their opinions skewed through a perverse lens of deluded bias. Their goal is not legitimate debate or an honest and forthcoming exchange of ideas.
They need to be exposed in order that their views and opinions are derailed, debunked and dismissed before they can cause any further damage.
**Swoosh** That’s a tres, boys! I believe I just earned myself a Manhattan.
— Kobely submitted by Cityslikr
The fact that Himy Syed is your choice says more about your lack of understanding and limited intellectual resources. You implore resources and and inferences that don’t exist in your dismissal of others. It is a sorry state of affairs but typical of those who cannot grasp the situation but feel compelled to try and must write something as if and because you were handed the assignment by by your high scholl English teacher.
Dear Mr. Firth,
Our choice (or not) of Himy Syed may (or may not) be based on a lack of understanding and our limited intellectual resources but it does not come from (or not not come from if we’re not choosing him) from a basis of conscious lies and fabrications. That, we’d hoped at any rate, was the point of this post.
We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke wouldn’t for a moment suggest that your call to build more expressways and foist more cars onto this city was based on deliberate falsehoods. It is a firmly held conviction on your part, relying on misguided and/or misinterpreted data that completely ignores the reality of cities all over the world. That’s just a difference of opinion that might be swayed or changed if you were determined to let go of your own bias. It’s different from just simply lying for your own personal gain.
To quote Vonnegut, “Things die. All things die.”
I would say “People lie. All people lie.” and it applies especially in politics. Everyone in this campaign is telling us what we want to hear in order to be elected, whether it be polished, rough around the edges, from someone tall, someone small, someone fat and someone a bit fatter.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.
Cityslikr,
The 6 mil price tag for bike lanes probably comes from the motion itself. A whole bunch of changes for Jarvis were approved. Not just bicycle lanes. Read: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/05/26/jarvis-bicycle.html
Dear Pielrick,
Yes. This info’s been delivered to the Six Million Dollar Man over and over and over again. Yet, he insists on fudging the facts over and over and over again.
As we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke are fond of saying, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice.. well.. something, something.. won’t get fooled again. Unless we do.