Linux and Religion

[Christopher Browne]

On 2/7/07, Mike Oliver <moliver-fC0AHe2n+mcIvw5+aKnW+Pd9D2ou9A/h at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
>
> > This sort of thing applies identically with the following assorted
> > substitutions:
> >
> > s/religion/football team/g
> > s/religion/operating system/g
> > s/religion/US political party/g
>
> Why *US* political party?  Y'all's parties
> aren't like that?

No, US political stripes are bizarrely exclusionary in their
membership this way.

A lot of Canadians aren't too keen on GWB; generally tend to be a bit
too much on the "left wing of the bird" to consider positions
consistent with the Republicans.

But Americans are *deeply* divided in this manner, and have been for a
terribly long time.  Democrats couldn't *imagine* voting Republican,
and vice-versa.  And it tends to get passed on by the regional
culture.

One bizarreness is that Texas, now "Bush Country," and a place that
is, indeed, very Republican in its voting preferences, has seen a sort
of "sea change" take place over the last 20 or so years.

Back in the day, Texas was *absolutely* Democrat territory.  LBJ was
from there; Texans, while seemingly "independence-oriented," aren't
terribly independently minded, politically, and no right-thinking
Texan in the '60s would have voted for a Republican.

The periodic oddity to US politics is that the parties actually
reshape themselves, over time, which has led to, in the Texas case, a
complete switch.

There are VERY large sets of Americans that lack the imaginativeness
to consider the 'other party,' whichever that one might be.

In contrast, Canada has seen *much* higher variations in what parties
people have been willing to consider.  There was the shift from the
Progressive Conservatives winning their largest ever majority
(*clearly* involving people voting for them) to them being all but
eliminated in the House.  Half of the remaining PCs quit the party, as
Jean Charest took over the Quebec Liberal Party in a successful bid to
become premier of Quebec, effectively eliminating the party that had
clearly seen the majority of the votes.

We have watched Canadian voters bouncing from party to party ever since.

In particular, there have been substantial bounces of voters between
the Liberals, New Conservatives, and NDP.

In the US, it's fairly much guaranteed that "voters of color" will
vote Democrat; they fairly much can't imagine voting Republican.

The traditional equivalent, in Canada, is that immigrant groups, who
commonly came in under the auspices of Liberal policies, were amongst
the strongest Liberal supporters.  Unlike in the US situation,
apparently their imaginations were open enough that when they got
offended by corruption surrounding the Liberal party, some in fact did
migrate to other parties.
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