Belated Cheers For the Demise of "Free Dominion"

Internet discussion boards appear to be dying. But the rumours of "Free Dominion's" death* have nothing to do with sociological trends. Like many a right-wing boor, some person or persons on the site slandered and libeled an actual person and thought it was protected free speech.

Here's a (too late) legal tip: If you actually believe what you're writing about someone, then it's libel.

To whit: If you really think someone is a terrorist sympathizer, and you say that someone is a terrorist sympathizer on a public forum, you can't turn around later and say you were exaggerating for effect.

Have the courage of your convictions.

The same goes for any idiot who finds someone's real name, uses that name to call them a pedophile, and then gets sued for slander. (At least show up in court to defend yourself, you doofus!)

* I notice that one of the sites mourning the silencing of Free Dominion is the neo-Nazi, white supremacist bastion "Stormfront." Why doesn't that surprise me? (Why do these right-wing assholes insist they're not racists? Are they too stupid to know their protestations are in vain? Yes they are too stupid.)

Fantino the Fuck-Up

All through his career, Julian Fantino has been an arrogant know-nothing. The only time he ever did anything right was when he got pissed-off with the racist windbag, that stupid fuckwad, Gary McHale, who bitched and whined about "two-tier justice" in Caledonia. And that was it. Fantino wasn't so much on the sides of the First Nations protestors as he was mad at McHale for making difficulties.

The impression that I have of his career as a federal politician is of a useless harper stooge. Unthinking, unrepresentative, and quite possibly corrupt. He's a high profile stooge though. Unlike my own "representative" John Carmichael, who eagerly fellates harper in a lesser capacity.

But, anyway, ... all I've got to say to Fantino about his latest mess is: Great job you moron! Your party bases a lot of its street-cred on its militarism and, therefore, its devotion to "the troops." Lord knows you guys have done a lot to undermine yourselves, but you, actually missing a scheduled meeting with veterans protesting the closure of Veterans Affairs offices (just so you could sit like a bump on a log at a cabinet meeting), and then, when you bump into them in a hallway afterwards, you get into a fight with them! You don't even have the sense or the self-control to be contrite. You try to lecture them about the importance of sitting like a lump in a cabinet meeting!

Then you lie about it later.

Julian Fantino, you are such a fuck-up.

Deluded People Talk About Haiti

I'm still reading Stein and Lang's The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar. It's taken me awhile because, .... well, I'll put it this way; I couldn't finish this book on Chartism because it started to get too depressing. With The Unexpected War, I can only take so much on the actions and subsequent reflections of people like John Manley, Paul Martin and Rick Hillier, before I get bored and sleepy.

Here's the thing though: It might just be mainstream Canadian scholar/pundits Stein and Lang's take on it that's influencing me, or it might just be me acknowledging a simple reality that those people in the book have a fair bit of brain-power, when all is said and done. But I still call their policies cretinous because, when all is said and done, they are cretinous. It's like a math question. If you make a mistake somewhere in the equation, your answer comes out wrong, and depending where you made your mistake, your answer could come out very wide off the mark. With the geniuses during the Chretien-Martin years, the mistake was thinking that the USA was justified in going on a global rampage after their own imperialist policies, blundering and incompetence led to the 9-11 terrorist attack. The next mistake was sending Canadian soldiers to Afghanistan to help the US-Americans, with "help the Americans" meaning "fight, kill and die to prop-up an unpopular, corrupt, rapist, warlord, narco-pedophile government on the people of Afghanistan."

But there's an earlier example of stupidity between these supposedly smart people that rankled me even more. On pages 179-181, the new Paul Martin government is looking around for where it can make a big splash in the world other than Afghanistan, which Martin saw as a leftover from the Chretien government. Darfur and Haiti are two possibilities. Of Haiti, the Department of National Defence (DND) says that it's a mess and it will always be a mess and there's nothing we can do. At one point, Foreign Minister (later Defence Minister) Paul Graham remembers Colin Powell telling him:

That the only way to help Haiti was to make it a protectorate and send in tens of thousands of US marines to secure the country indefinitely. Powell admitted there was no appetite for that kind of strategy either in the international community or in Washington.

Oh yeah; Because occupying Haiti with the marines turned out so well the last time:

The atrocities of the idealistic mission, including aerial bombing of a Haitian city, finally reached home, eliciting public protest. A 1927 study of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom recounted such U.S. atrocities as burning men and women alive, summary execution of children, beating and torturing, machine-gunning of civilians, daily shooting of cattle and burning of crops, houses, mills, and so on. It came to be understood that atrocities are best left to local clients, as other imperial powers had long realized. Washington proceeded to create an army that "may have ended forever the possibility of an agrarian revolt against the central authority," anthropologist Sidney Mintz observes, much as it did in the Dominican Republic next door at the same time, and in much the same way. Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes the establishment of "an army to fight the people" as the worst of the legacies of the occupation, which "left the country with two poisoned gifts: a weaker civil society and a solidified state apparatus." Current plans simply continue the process, which has its counterparts through Latin America, and is firmly founded in explicit doctrine.

The fact of the matter is that Haiti was run by murderous, kleptocratic governments for decades, and as long as they were compliant with US orders and anti-communist, it didn't matter. Then, when they elected a non-corrupt, Haitian nationalist who pledged social justice (Bertrand Aristide), they deposed him. Then, when he returned to power, they orchestrated a bullshit political crisis, cut off all foreign aid to the country and financed a rebellion against him before kidnapping him (with Canadian assistance) and sending him off into exile.

This abomination (happened during the Chretien years) was ostensibly done under the imperialistic "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which states that when a poor, weak country's government gets out of line, the imperialist powers have a right to topple it, supposedly to make things better for that country's people.

So we exiled Aristide for the good of the Haitian people, and gave them a government so bad that at one point the poorest Haitians were reduced to eating dirt to fill their bellies and which was later reviled for its corruption and incapacity in the face of the 2010 earthquake.

It's this level of ignorance and delusion amongst our foreign policy elites that they causes them speak so stupidly together about places like Haiti and Afghanistan.

Canada Losing Something Precious

Contrary to what witless "conservatives" think; we aren't in any danger of becoming an Islamic theocracy. How was that supposed to have worked anyhow? A couple of Human Rights Commission rulings that Halal food doesn't have to be labelled as such, followed by a bomb exploding somewhere and then our whole parliamentary system of government collapses and we become part of the Caliphate, ruled from Baghdad?

Also, contrary to "conservative" hysteria and paranoia, the Liberal Party of Canada isn't controlled by Montreal mobsters. The Liberals weren't really robbing and fleecing us all, 24-7 and imposing mandatory gay marriage in solar-powered Unitarian-Pagan churches with the kids in the church basement being minded by transsexual communist daycare providers. (Unionized, natch.)

When you think about it for even a second, the fears of the ilk of KKKate MakkkMillan and her brood, the "blogging tories" or whatever the fuck hard-right harpercon supporter you can find, are pretty ludicrous.

See, the thing is, as a leftist, my most realistic option had always been the NDP. And we NEVER won an election. And I despise and loathe both the Liberals and the Conservatives. But I also realized that with parliamentary government and with the rule of law, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that things would never get TOO bad. So long as the politicians respected these traditions. Governments that got too arrogant or which were too incompetent, would be defeated at the polls. I would never be groaning under genuine Liberal or Conservative dictatorship.

But then, 9-11 changed everything, didn't it? First, the Liberals succumbed to the hysteria and rammed-through their imbecilic Anti-Terrorism Act which took a pick-axe to our rights and freedoms. This was followed by the coming to power of a lifeless-eyed sociopath who holds our entire system of government in contempt. It is stephen harper and his harpercon party of Canada that is destroying every shred of accountability and every last check on abuse of power in our system.

You know, you look at the convulsions being suffered by the people of Egypt as they look for democracy. Then you look at what we were lucky enough to have been born into, and you think about what harper has done to that birthright, ... and then you realize that Canadian leftists were too stupid to be capable of doing anything about it.

Abandoning Chelsea Manning

So Chelsea Manning heroically brought evidence of massive US war crimes to the attention of the world. Then Chelsea was betrayed by some rat-fink, twisted piece of shit and ended up in a military prison where she was tortured for years before finally coming to trial and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

American progressives show their cluelessness by asking President Obama to pardon her.  Obama is a Constitution-shredding, imperialist war-monger, shill for Wall Street criminals scum-bag. Obama would probably have preferred that Manning had been executed. You don't ask for justice from a creep like Obama; you DEMAND it.

But progressives are infamous for our mealy-mouthed "demands" that we have no means (or at least intentions) of enforcing.

I'd like to think that if I was a US-American, I'd be part of a massive campaign of genuine civil-disobedience to compel Obama to pardon Chelsea Manning and obtain her release. Of course, I tried to do something similar to force the harpercon scum government to resign, but was overwhelmed by the tidal-wave of delusion, cowardice and apathy that is the Canadian body-politic, including progressives.

Chelsea Manning will probably die in prison. If not bodily, then mentally and in spirit.

Elections Canada and Legal Immunity

 Here it is!

Elections Canada has rebuffed an offer of information about an alleged reimbursement scheme involving Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro’s 2008 election campaign, saying it doesn’t have the authority to give witnesses immunity from prosecution.
Toronto lawyer Allan Kaufman wrote to Elections Canada in June, offering details of reimbursements of campaign donations allegedly paid by Deltro Electric Ltd., a small Mississauga contractor owned by Del Mastro’s cousin, David.
In exchange, Kaufman requested immunity for a group of donors who had each given $1,000 to Del Mastro’s campaign, allegedly receiving $1050 for each donation, plus a tax rebate, to allow David Del Mastro to secretly donate thousands of dollars to his cousin, exceeding the legal limit — a charge he denies.
But the agency has balked at the offer, telling Kaufman it can only investigate allegations of electoral misconduct and that the power to offer immunity he requested rests with federal prosecutors.

I wondered why it sounded strange that Elections Canada was subsequently able to grant immunity from prosecution to harpercon stooge Andrew Prescott.

A key player in the 2011 Guelph robocalls scandal is getting immunity from prosecution in the Elections Canada investigation into misleading calls in the last federal election, CBC News has learned.
Andrew Prescott was the Conservatives' deputy campaign manager in Guelph, Ont., where supporters of other candidates complained they received misleading phone calls directing them to the wrong polling station.
Prescott has a written guarantee "the Crown has no intention" of charging him in connection with the misleading phone calls, according to a source close to the case.

Go figure 'eh? You'd think the agency either has this power, or it doesn't. Not that the agency can pick and choose when it is so empowered. I'd ask them about it, but I've gotten such bureaucratic ass-covering drivel in response to past inquiries about other matters that I really can't be bothered.

See, Here's the Problem ...

The link title (and the article's sub-title) is "Don't write off stephen harper." But, you see, he SHOULD be written off, BY EVERYBODY. Even if you agree with the basic tilt of his policies, it should be the bare minimum for a person who respects parliamentary democracy, that a politician not demonstrate flagrant contempt for Parliament. We should expect a prime minister to NOT promote ignorance and delusion about our system of government (re: calling a proposed coalition a "coup"). We should expect a politician not to abuse and debase our electoral process as stephen harper and his party have done REPEATEDLY.

The point is, given our shit-headed Supreme Court majority ruling that says it's okay to stuff ballot-boxes, the opposition's failure to work together, and etc., etc., the stupid docility or bullshit "radicalism" of the non-parliamentary left, etc., etc., ... harper might survive in power, but anyone who writes about him and who claims to respect democracy, MUST write him off.

He's a sickening, lunk-headed disgrace. [Just like his comrade-in-arms, Rob Ford.]

Chris Alexander Stands Up For Pro-Western Ukrainians

Laughable hypocrite, harpercon stooge and, now, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander (who has no problem with rape and torture when it's perpetrated by Canada's allies) is standing heroically with what looks like a small crowd of pro-Western Ukrainians) against the terribly undemocratic government of the Ukraine.

Now, I'll tell you: My Grandmother was Ukrainian. They suffered horribly under Stalin and the Nazis and then Stalin again. My heart goes out to them. But I know nothing of the latest political crisis there and I don't really care. There was an "Orange Revolution" that was trumpeted by Western media, and partially financed by the US government, which turned out to only usher in an extremely corrupt coterie of pro-USA stooges. Now, the criminal-authoritarian Putin is on the winning side.

But check out what the Immigration Minister from the corrupt election fraud party of Canada is threatening sanctions for in the Ukraine:

The situation in Ukraine — beset by a government that seems to be moving away from Western-style democracy and into the arms of Russia — worsened last week as the country’s parliament passed legislation designed to stamp out anti-government demonstrations.

The laws make it illegal for protesters to wear face masks, use loudspeakers, or set up tents at rallies.

Yeah right. Hasn't this dip-shit heard about the Toronto G20? Doesn't he know how police-state his own country gets when the corporate agenda is challenged? Of course he does. Chris Alexander is a shameless hypocrite. Perhaps there will also be a comfy jail cell waiting for him, when and if this fucking country ever gets its act together.

Ontario Politics

Should the ONDP's Andrea Horwath have taken the distasteful, but principled stance of siding with the cretinous Tim Hudak against the Ontario Liberal government's appalling and disgusting contempt of the legislature (withholding of information from the majority of MPP's; attempted destruction of government records, repeated lying to the legislature about the cost of the gas plant cancellations)? However obviously bad Hudak's policies would be, is not the principle of respect for the legislature paramount over policy differences?

But what sort of a choice is Hudak? His party had a finance minister present the budget in a Magna auto-parts factory. Hudak himself chose to sit with the obnoxious boor, Randy Hillier, in defiance of the Speaker's order that Hillier leave the legislative chamber.

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives are no friends of the principle of parliamentary democracy.

Besides which, Horwath disgraced herself and her party by running roughshod over local riding democracy, installing sleazy nit-wit Adam Giambrone as the party's candidate in a provincial by-election against the will of the membership and blatantly obstructed any investigation into the sordid mess.

That's politics for you. Or at least the politics of a degenerate culture that doesn't even know what it believes in anymore.

Elections Canada Trundling Along

 So Andrew Prescott has immunity from prosecution in return for, well nothing probably. It's 2014. The election fraud took place in 2011. The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that the next election can be a fucking free-for-all, harper has rammed through two omnibus bills to turn us over to the oil companies, the Chinese and US-America's criminal class.

Whatever those shit-heads at Elections Canada hope to get from Andrew Prescott is probably not going to significantly alter the fact that this is a dead former pseudo-democracy.

But just look at those four Conservative Party imbeciles at the photo at the link. Prescott is wearing some tacky shirt about a "Free Canada." Just like stephen harper himself, these low-life psychopaths have no idea what they believe in because they're all just empty words inside empty brains.

Various and Sundry

Obnoxious young asswipe Justin Beiber is found to have cocaine in his home (after police arrived to investigate the stupid spoiled brat's pelting eggs at a neighbour's house). Seems that homeschooled, Christian Bieber hasn't absorbed enuff of the teachings of his Lord n' Saviour, Jeeziz Christ.

Pompous, untalented, hypocritical. lazy fuckwad David Brooks, who is always going on about how non-white people have to learn to control their animalistic impulses, has decided that being a loud, cretinous, obese slob of a bully is a-okay if it's a white Republican. Hence his kind and tolerant words about the disgusting Chris Christie. Because Brooks is a Republican and as I said above, a hypocrite. What he's really asking for is for Christie to sit on his face and shart all over him.

Rob Ford's 2014 mayoral campaign slogan has been chosen and it's a winner! "Ford for Mayor: He's not smoking crack cocaine with gangsters anymore."

Finally, a Tip O' My Hat to Neil Young. Young is an uneven performer and thinker in my opinion. But he's 100% awesome when it comes to standing up to stephen harper and his parade of criminal half-wits on the issue of the Tar Sands and harper's shameful treatment of the First Nations and our treaty obligations to them. I thoroughly despise the racist, whining, stupid, ignorant harpercons and everything they have to say on this issue is useless garbage and un-fuck them forever.

The Military

So, I'm now actually reading The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang. Here it is - right from the review:

Stein and Lang have made great, sometimes awkwardly charming efforts to make what could have been a baffling policy paper into an eye-popping, very readable, and provocative narrative. They come a hair’s breadth away from pronouncing that the military hijacked Canadian foreign policy.

I wonder if it was the grunts who wanted to fight so bad, ... who wanted to get into combat. You know, ... if you wanted to fight and then you got your leg blown off by a land-mine, would you clench your fist and shout "BOOO=YAHHHH!!!!" as if that was all part of the experience you were hoping for?

Or was it rather the high command and the desk jockeys who wanted to fight? Methinks it's the latter.

Regardless of who it was, the book is an excellent cautionary tale, from two "respectable" Canadian scholars, against letting the military set policy. Afghanistan was a bloody waste of Canadian lives and resources that besmirched our reputation as a nation that respects human rights and the rule of law. It was, and remains, a dark spot in our history.

The Department of Foreign Affairs (and international trade) are also to blame though. Witlessly buying into the notion that the USA is our ally and therefore facts can go to hell, it was quickly decided that we should "do something" to help them and show them that we're their friends after the terrorist attack of 9-11-2001. My thinking at the time was that the US government is involved in so much shit all over the world that you have to expect something to happen once in a while. The country was in no danger of collapse and had more than enough resources to look after itself. The USA inflicts many times that level of trauma on many other countries (proportionately) and they survive, ... even without the international outpourings of support. (If one thinks about how the attacks were aided and abetted by the bush II regime's desires for a "new Pearl Harbour" it makes Canada's snivelling attempts to curry favour look even more pathetic.)

Finally, there's this story at the CBC: "Army commander promises discipline against media leaks." So, this dude says that leaks about how the army is not buying new armoured vehicles because of cash restraints and not because our present vehicles have been upgraded and the new ones are unnecessary, are "hurting the army."

For fuck's sake! I'll tell you what's hurting the army: Sending them into combat and then nickel-and-diming them when they get wounded! And then leaking the psychiatric records of veterans who have the temerity to complain. THAT'S what's hurting the army.

Also, I don't recall anyone complaining about leaks hurting the military when Christie Belchforth and Rosie DiMoron got those CF reports that not even the Parliamentary Committee on Afghanistan were allowed to see, when the powers that be were trying to smear Richard Colvin.

These leaks embarrass the government and their toadying top brass.

- ! -

harper is Like the Weather

Everybody talks about him but nobody does anything about him.

How To Bring harper Down?

War-crimes. Torture. Rape cover-ups. Attacks on First Nations. Attacks on immigrants. Corruption. CORRUPTION. CORRUPTION. Contempt of Parliament. Election fraud.

That's just off the top of my head. Now my friends and fellow bloggers are posting about harper's destruction of public libraries, especially marine science.

My question to you fuckers is: Instead of documenting his latest crime, why don't you think of what's necessary to bring harper down? his hubris, re: the Senate scandal, is a result of his awareness of the complete ineffectuality of us, his critics. Don't blame "the sheeple." Blame us: The wimples, for being unable to lead the "sheeple" in defence of their basic democratic traditions.

Digital Media = Surge in Partisanship?

I just read somewhere that digital media (mainly the internet) is responsible for the increasely partisan nature of political debate in North America. I think there's some truth to that. But I also think it's best to avoid thinking there was ever a "good old days" when society wasn't polarized by something.

Weren't the Second-Wave Feminists accused of being "shrill" and "confrontational"? Were gays in the age of AIDS in the 1980s thought to be an angry, disreputable bunch? Wasn't US society polarized by the Black Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War? Was the FLQ a more polarizing group than the present Bloc and Parti Quebecois, even though there wasn't an internet for them to post their manifesto(s) on? What about the Asbestos Strike? Or the labour battles of the first half of the 20th Century in general?

If things have gotten more polarizing, it's more because of economics than digital media. The present generation of young people aren't going to enjoy even the level of security their parents had, and their parents' incomes and standard of living are stagnating or declining. The left is angry as hell about the stealing and the lies and the corruption. The right-wing has been trained to blame the weakest victims of elite depredations, and/or the leftists who challenge the elite agenda. Justified anger vs. chumps. The digital media thing only intensifies this.

Preconceived Delusions

I think part of the reason for the failure of the left to adequately respond to harper is that new ideas bounce-off of preconceived delusions that people have. "A big rally would bring harper down" is probably flitting through people's minds. So they imagine that a hard struggle involving permanent occupations is a waste of time. Or "the police will shoot us in the street like dogs" keeps Canadian leftists from remembering that (for the time being anyway) Canada is not a total despotism with absolutely no legal protections for basic human rights. (How someone could simultaneously think that Canada is a lawless human rights abuser, and that we can and should still protest, is an incoherent delusion I can't begin to understand.)

Or, there's the possibility that when people hear a sentence with more than two or three words in it, they get tripped-up by the complexity of it all and think you're saying something that you're not, and the whole effort was a waste of time.

Whatever it is, it stinks!

How Would You Get People Out In The Streets?

And what would you do with them once you'd gotten them there?

Most leftists don't appear to give much thought to these questions. It's pathological. We imagine that sitting at home, complaining to like-minded friends online or in real life is sufficient.

I'll continue to type these little complaints off and on until I'm inspired to write about something different.

It Won't Change. Unless ...

... unless we DO SOMETHING.

Do you understand this?

I'd like to read about genuine strategies for change when I go online. Not endless, pointless internet bitch festivals.

Nothing is going to change unless we DO SOMETHING.

Global warming is going to bring hell on earth inevitably. Do you believe this or not? If you do, ... what do you propose to do about it?

Join someone else's rally for an afternoon to "demand" change from governments in thrall to the oil industry? And if your "demands" aren't met after you all go home, then what?

Notice how, for all our anger and criticism and "Idle No More" and "Stop Harper" that stephen harper is still here and we've had zero-impact upon him. (his present problems which have in him hiding are of his own doing.)

If passively voting for Liberal shit-heads or NDP sell-outs doesn't work, what will?

If knocking over garbage cans and breaking windows to bring on police violence doesn't work, what will?

If peacefully marching chanting and listening to speeches for a couple of hours doesn't work, what will?

For fuck's sake people! Give me something to work with!