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.]