HILLARY THE REAL DEAL: BARACK HAS NO CLOTHES
Just finished watching the Democrat debate. I have written positively about Barack Obama here before, but to be honest,
I think he lost against Hillary Clinton.On issues such as immigration he seemed painfully naive.
On Iraq he seemed to be very simplistic. On health care he seemed optimistic, but not realistic.
I do not think he is a bad man and still think he has a real shot at the White House. But the more I actually watch him for extended periods, the more
I think the emperor has no clothes. Barack's base is not the working class, it is 'well educated',
largely white university students and Hollywood. That is who he is hoping will get him California on Super Tuesday.
I am not convinced.
If he were in Canada, he would be NDP. Again,
I wanted to believe...but I cannot be so blind to the simplistic rhetoric.Hillary Clinton was all substance. I know she is very divisive among conservatives and I disagree with her on many issues,
but the woman is no fool. She made concrete policy statements and was very complex on Iraq.I will be surprised if she does not win the White House.
FREE SPEECH AND ABORTION
I taught last fall at a career college in the GTA. It was a mixed experience I'll write about later in ways you might not suspect.
But in mid December, during the staff
'Holiday' celebration,
I observed a conversation taking place in one corner between a teacher and two students.Okay, well it really wasn't a discussion.
It was the leafy, hippie teacher prattling on to the two students about free speech in Canada. He waved his hands in the air and insisted Canada was a place where you could say anything you wanted at anytime
unlike America where you could never critique your president.He said if you wanted to in Canada, you could say anything you want about
Harper who he insisted was one of the worst PM's we've ever had. He said you could say anything you want in Canada and there would be no consequences.Then he changed his story saying that things had started to change in America because
Bush was so evil people were taking more risks with their careers and lives and speaking out.The neophyte teens smiled and nodded simplistically.
I walked away."Since the 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision vindicating Morgentaler and decriminalizing all manner of abortion, a political chill descends whenever the subject is broached."
I MET AN OLD MAN
I met an old man two and a half years ago on the corner of Young and Eglinton in Toronto who had on
one of those "No Che" shirts. Y'know, the ones with the picture of Che in the middle of a circle and a slash.
He was taking a smoke break from visiting friends at a local watering hole.
His face was weathered with the experience of life as he basked in the midday sun.As I walked briskly past, I mentioned to him that I loved his shirt. He looked at me curiously for a second.
He thought I was mocking him.
I reassured him that I really did love his shirt. When he knew that I was sincere he opened up to me quickly. He had seen his family killed due to communism in Eastern Europe post WWII.
He could not understand why he saw so many young Torontonians wearing shirts with Che Guevera's picture on it when Che was a symbol of an ideology that had killed millions including his family. He said that's why he came to Canada, to escape the sorts of horrors and genocide he had witnessed first hand.
I was blunt with him.
I told him that my generation and younger were being taught in school that Marxism was good and desirable. That it was about equality. Not a Judeo-Christian definition of equality,
but a Marxist definition of equality. We were not being taught of the horrors and atrocities of communism during the 20th century which are
far greater than any religion or capitalism combined for 2000 years.I even mentioned to him there was an upscale store on Yonge St. where communist paraphenelia and propaganda posters were sold to the elite chattering classes at a very high price.He was dismayed. We talked a little more and I went on my way.
Now much of this goes back to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who,
far from being the 'citizen of the world' and 'complex individual' that he is portrayed as, was actually more of an emotional artist type at heart who had a hard time comprehending the philosophical contradictions inherent within Marxism. Hence, his increased role for state intervention in Canada, his lack of respect for family and the role of the church, his relativist moral world view and lack of acknowledgement of much of the horrors and genocide of the 20th century.
Personally, I do not think history will be kind to his legacy, but that will be for other generations to decide.
Quite frankly, I do not see how some people in the West, largely left-wing 'intellectuals' and media types could be so ignorant as to say this is cool.How can you say there is no freedom of speech in America but like Hugo Chavez when he shuts down and intimidates TV stations and print media that disagree with him?
How can you oppose the war in Iraq and be ignorant to the violence and genocide inflicted upon people in Cambodia, Russia, China and North Korea n the 20th century?
How can you oppose torture in Guantanamo Bay and not acknowledge the same or worse in Cuba when it is even referenced by Amnesty International?
How can you say you are for the poor and then advocate an academic philosophy that is far more oppressive to the poor than any other philosophy in the history of mankind?
Feudal society has a better track record towards the poor than Marxism does.How can a group of people who fancy themselves so smart and intellectually astute, be so ignorant.
Whenever I see people with communist or Che shirts, I see them in the same vein as someone wearing a swastika or a neo-nazi slogan.Sad, pathetic people ignorant to the pain and horror their ideology has caused. One group resides in trailer parks while the other resides in the upper echelons of the Academy.
I'm at a loss to guess which one is worse.
REST IN PEACE, HEATH
Ledger was a genuinely talented young actor who was destined for great things. I do not say that lightly about most of young Hollywood. Sadly, another young artist who will no longer be with us.
I hope you are in a better place.
LIBERAL FRIENDS, LIBERAL ENEMIES
No one can deny that we live in a culture of very divisive times. Whether one is a liberal, conservative, libertarian or of no political belief whatsoever, we all have friends of various political stripes.
What I wonder though, the older I get, is I start to understand what some of the old fashioned platitudes actually meant in a practical sense.
Don't talk about religion, sex or politics around the kitchen table used to be how the saying went. The baby boomers took that addage to be an indication of a culture that was repressed and for forty years went in the opposite direction where everything was talked about at the kitchen table
from what your intestinal gas smells like to what your most intimate sex practice is.
For as long as I can remember, our culture has been one of acrimony that has gotten much much worse in recent years.
My question is, to those of you with strong beliefs, do you find it easy to be friends with people whose beliefs are polar opposite to your own?I don't mean friendly or on nice speaking terms. I mean friends who share deep experiences with each other.
I find in recent years it has become much more difficult for me. I am in the arts; needless to say, most of my friends, aquaintences and business contacts are not just liberal...
they are the most extreme of leftists.Several of these people are card carrying wiccans and pagans who take The DaVinci Code literally and run out naked and howl at the moon during the solstice.
One of those is about to get a PHD from U of T. She calls it enlightenment.Others are true
blue errr red believers in Marxism and all of the oppression that entails.
Yet another is an academic at U of T who confided to me once that he felt oppressed by having to walk past a church everyday and that Churches, Mosques and Synagogues should be forced by the state to perform 'same sex' marriages. His wife is a high ranking member of the Liberal Party. I know she has influence and her views are to the left of him.
Sadly, my relationships with all of these people has dwindled off in recent years because I find that when your beliefs are that divergent,
every conversation becomes an exercise in subtext, hints and views that almost always are argumentative or condescending in nature. Gloriously and joyously, my wife and I recently found out we were having our first baby. This is the first for us and was a huge part of why I didn't write as much in the fall. But, here is a question...this is where things get dificult.
We seek to baptize our child Catholic.
Can one invite the academic or the pagan to the baptism when you know they have communicated to you that they see the faith as a form of oppression and hate?Take the flip side; if one really believes the war in Iraq is about nothing but oil and greed and oppression of other people,
how can that person be good friends with someone who is for it?Unless of course you conclude the opposing side is just ignorant, misinformed and stupid...which is of course just as problematic. I feel like I am at a bit of a turning point in my life as we prepare for our daughter to be born.
And that is my question. I truly believe one should seek out many diverse friends to have with differing views and beliefs.
But realistically, in the arts, I do not have that many conservative, Christian or Catholic friends.Many times, you feel like you are the "low man on the totem pole" (as the late, great Canadian John Candy once said in an SCTV skit), and even conversations that begin well can always take a detour into subtext.For those that care, do you find you have the same experiences? Even though I have been on welfare in my life and my family comes from a humble background where we have been to a food bank to get peanut butter before Christmas when was a child, my Marxist friend, who has never been poor and lives a comfortable life, looks down on me...because I oppress the poor!
He loves Chris McCandless though!I think I need to tell him that being poor is not cool and does not come with an Eddie Vedder soundtrack.My pagan aquaintance is so obsessed with with New Age feminism that when she complained about her weight to me at a Christmas Party and my response was that she looked great, had nothing to worry about and then I jokingly said that she had my
"permission" to never worry about it again, she then snarkily inferred that I was playing the role of the dominant patriarch with her! Insanity.
So my question is, how much longer can our culture go on this way? Regardless of who is in power, it is silly for either side to claim they have a majority on their side.
There have always been cultural debates throughout the ages and they have always been the same...
religion vs science...poor vs rich...politician vs citizen...governance vs control...public vs private...land owner vs worker...They go on and on. Yet right now our culture feels increasingly angry and tense.
Like we no longer talk to each other anymore as individuals but as
"types". So if someone knows which way you vote or what your belief system is they will make assumptions about you and talk to you in subtext.
Does this train of thought make sense to anyone...or is it just me?
PUBLISHER GOES TO JAIL IN BELARUS
I am sure this will not happen to Ezra Levant.But could it, on a long enough time line and if the 'right' cultural factors were lined up?Are there people in Canada who would want it to happen?
Who are they...
judges, lawyers, academics, people on 'human rights' tribunals? Can someone also tell me how a "free press" can discuss a topic if you are not allowed to view or read the topic that is in discussion? If an artist wants to show
"Piss Christ", or
"Chocolate Jesus with an erection in pumpkin sauce", I want to see it so I can discuss it.
I have no problem with my local paper printng a picture of them. And they have no problem printing them with sophomoric glee.If we are going to discuss the Halton School and
The Golden Compass, I want to be able to go to my local bookstore and read a copy.
Which of course, I can.Why can we not do the same with these cartoons? How can we discuss something that we are not allowed to see in any legal sense?The more arguments I read for not being able to print these cartoons, the more I find the emperor has no clothes.
Western, mainstream media is a disgrace.
NOW WE CAN'T EVEN SAY WHAT OUR LAWS ARE
I am not at all surprised at this decision. Now we cannot even say what our laws are.
Madness.The reason the left has to ban the opposing views, such as in this case, the case of Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn or the Pope at the university in Rome
is because they have no more ideas or arguments.Because they refuse to read history they cannot even say they stand on the shoulders of giants. Rather, they hope to censor the giants in the hopes that the rest of society will be as ignorant as they.
If they can find the money, I hope this goes to court.
OBAMA THE NEW REAGAN?
I have a strange feeling about Barack Obama. Not just that he has a real shot at being president, but that he also would
not be as hard left as many think.I know, I know, his voting record
(when he doesn't just say "present") is pretty hard left and his base is the corporate and academic elites I always rail against.
Yet, I think he has bigger designs.This video where he mentions Ronald Reagan also makes me think Obama genuinely wants to be an American president for all and not just run on the fumes of the tired, soggy old 60's baby boomers.
I am not saying he can do that...just that he seems to want to.He has a huge hill to climb as the Clintons will not give up without a huge fight
and many African American leaders have yet to endorse him.Nevertheless, he has made this race one of the most interesting ones in a long time.
As for the Republicans,
I think they might be like the Liberals in Canada. They need to take time to figure out what they stand for and what the believe. Personally,
the current crop of GOP candidates excite me about as much as the crop of candidates that ran for the last Liberal leadership.Yes, I just wrote that.
EZRA, THE FACE OF THE NEW COUNTER CULTURE
In my opinion, I think what probably bothers aging, far left-liberal boomers like
Kinsella most is this...they are no longer that which they defined themselves as...
anti-establishment rebels.NOFX, sheesh, Avril Lavigne and Rihanna have more bite. These guys have been around since I was a child.What we are seeing now in the left, is the final vitriol of the generation of baby-boomers who have seized power and now control all of the establishments they once rebelled against. Arrogantly thinking they were the solution to history, now they lash out in anti-intellectual, vitriol and rage against that which they do not understand.
For all of their rhetoric of how progressive and forward thinking they were, most of their ideas have been abject failures.
Far from giving us a utopia of free love, peace and equality...
...the counter culture baby boomers gave us the pain of broken families, HIV/AIDS, the horrors of ignoring the genocide of Marxism, the censorship of political correctness, a public educational system rife with violence and lots of really bad hair and art.I have never met the man, but what possibly bothers Kinsella the most in the Ezra Levant case,
on some subconcious generational level, are not the politics of free speech...not whether peoples feellings are hurt or not...not the issues of freedom of religion or the press,
but the fact that Ezra Levant is the new young rebel bucking the system. Even alt-rocker Matthew Good had to acknoweldge that in an offhanded way.
Ezra Levant is the new face of the counter-culture in Canada. And the face is not that of a 60's obsessed, bratty rich white student, covered in piercings and tatoos wearing tattered, acid washed clothes with a picture of Che and an upside down cross on his shirt.
No, the counter-culture face is now that of a clean cut, bespectaled, suit wearing, young Jewish man standing up defiantly for what he knows is right. Even if Barack Obama wins the presidency, it will not mean what Boomers want it to mean. It will not mean a return to the 60's. Obama will still have to deal with Christians, Catholics and the moral conservatives who see what is wrong with the culture. The internet is the new technology that they latched onto and they will now be heard.
Remember that there is a huge contingent of Republicans who will vote for Obama.No amount of childish, hand wringing and name calling from aging, balding, boomer rebel wannabees will ever change that.The reaction to Ezra's brilliant You Tube videos show that his voice will now be heard in Canada too. Ezra is now a real person who has real views.
He and his supporters cannot just be labelled and dismissed with childish names and rhetoric. That is the path that a true bigot takes. Bigots reduce people to the most inhuman, garrish stereotypes in their own mind as a way of not having to deal with them as human beings. To deal with them as human beings means accepting new ideas. It means that the old ideas and assumptions were flawed and didn't work.I could be wrong, but that dawning reality is what I suspect bothers boomers like Kinsella the most.
GOD BLESS YOU, EZRA
Obviously there is probably not much I can add to this story other than giving my support and linking to the
man's website.
Ezra Levant's statements here are wonderful. That the government worker can't even back up her views is pathetic. I have said it before, the only people who ever beat Human Rights tribunals are the ones who take them on full steam. That does not mean Ezra will 'win'...but at least he increased his chances.
What he is undergoing here is nothing short of a Star Chamber circa 2008.
But most Canadians just worry about the Coca Cola polar bear book in Halton.
MONEY WILL NOT MAKE OUR SCHOOLS SAFE
At least they are acknowledging that there is a problem. But of course, the response is always the same...more resources, more money...
Money will not stop kids from bringing knives to school. Money will not stop sexual assaults against girls in the school halls. Money will not make kids more respectful of their peers, teachers and each other.One of the reasons (among many) that I trailed off in writing this blog of recent months is that I got tired of writing the same thing over and over again. It's the culture! Even a conservative politician can't change these things until the culture shifts and we are allowed to talk about what really ails us.
You can't have a progressive 60's style school system that says to students that
there is no right or wrong and expect them to make the right decisions. You can't keep telling
teenage gang members that they are oppressed and that the cause of their anger is really the system
they are hopeless to change and expect them to not lash out. You can't encourage a a culture where female students are taught that
feminist empowerment comes from being promiscuous and then expect boys to respect girls who choose not to be so.Until the
McEducation Premiere and his morally relative education Mc Minister realize this, than nothing will change and our children and their families will suffer for generations to come.
That's a helluva price to pay for the
moral relavance of the washed up, burnt out, selfish social engineers of the baby boomer generation.They promised us they would burn out but instead are taking a really long fade away. Rock on, indeed!
DHALLAGATE '08
I
found this interesting. I suspect what is at issue here is whether or not Dhalla is the type of MP that
actually cares whether or not the children were beaten.
I do not know Dhalla, but I lived in Brampton for almost a decade and have seen her on television numerous times and if
I had to guess at who the most vapid, shallow careerist MP was right now...Dhalla would certainly be in the running.If you look at her public conduct and voting record she appears to be an MP with very little principle
and seems to have as her only goal the getting ahead at all costs. I remember her being on Michael Coren several years ago and throwing all kinds of of outrageous 'facts' about conservative misdeeds out into the fray. As I recall, the well researched Coren said he hadn't heard of them and said he would have his researcher verify what she said for the next show. If memory serves, he asked if she would be available for comment on the next show when he found more things out.
The next night he revealed everything she said was inaccurate and of course, she was not available for comment.I remember she was also the
Lib MP they sent to the conservative policy convention a few years ago. S
he gave an interview saying how terrified she was at the extreme Christians in there. She probably even breathed heavy for paranoid effect. She also misled the Sikh community in Brampton which is overwhelming morally conservative and opposed to 'same sex' marriage. As I recall, she would not comment on her views until after the election after which she voted for it.
So
when the Toronto Star reports:An online broadcast by Times Now television described Dhalla’s first response to the incident as “shockingly callous.”
In that initial interview, Dhalla was quoted as saying she “cannot control what the police do ... and I hope that those young kids learn from this incident.” ...my inclination is that is probably true.Again, I only know Dhalla from her own public actions and conduct and my guess is that this is totally in line with her persona of a cold, calculated careerist who has very little compassion for anyone who stands in her way.
She is most likely only seemingly concerned now for PR reasons.I suspect her line tommorow will be to play the race card saying anyone who thinks the children were beaten is a racist with a patriarchal Western view towards impovershed nations. She is probably being councilled on that as we speak.
But that is only my opinion as is everything here based on my observations of her public persona and memory.'Cause that's the kind o' gal she seems to be to me. Does that make me sexist?
JACK BAUER AT THE CBC!
Not bloody likely...
But tonight, they do premiere the latest craptacular CBC waste of your tax payer dollars entitled
The Border!
(exclamation mark added for liberal excited effect)From IMDB;
"This TV series is a fast-paced, hard-driving series set in Toronto in a paranoid post 9/11 world concerned with one topic - The Border, with its security crises, terrorist infiltrations, cross-border police actions, and trafficking in everything from enriched uranium to abducted children."My first reaction was that the terrorist threats will be most likely be an evil evangelical crossing the border to bomb a Canadian abortion clinic or an evil right-wing capitalist who wants to poison the Evian supply just in time for Pride. And guess what episode 7 just happens to be called;
Family Values.More Canadian junk on your dime. Take a look at the bio's if you want a good laugh. Yes, all the "types" are there...
...the evil right wing CSIS head who is a puppy to America;
the dumb but stern Cuban American who must be corrected for her right wing views;
the dumb as nails, jock cowboy who is an ass to women;
the enlightened Muslim officer in a bigotted white man's world;
the enlightened black officer who is now an
urban sophisticate from a happy small town (
hey, I thought small towns in Canada didn't allow minorities to live happily!);the fat, slobby racist conservative cop who loves his beer, hockey and sloppy dogs;
...oh and just for kicks they - do - have a Christian character....it seems one of the female department heads has a daughter who now lives in a trailer park in Niagara Falls with her
"born again" biker boyfriend!
I'll guess this mom character is the token lesbian and the trailer trash daughter will be a - huge - disappointment.
Look for Gemini nods all around.
