Latest Right-Wing Stupidity

As the death-toll of Canadian soldiers continues to rise (though, as you'll remember from here, Canada's fanatical supporters of "the troops" [tm] aren't going to get excited about deaths until they reach Korean War or World War II levels) the pathetic, discredited, unpopular, un-Canadian, right-wing HarperLovers, are reduced to new levels of idiocy to defend propping-up Karzai and Western imperialism.


The latest tactic is to claim that serving as a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan (where 67 soldiers have died as of this writing) is comparable with "Toronto" where there are (roughly) 50 gun-shot deaths per year.

You may accuse me of underestimating the effect of the loss of life among our troops. After all, as I write, 67 have been killed. Every death is a tragedy for family and friends, but we must keep things in perspective: Fifty people are killed in Toronto alone every year, many by gunfire, and many more across the country.

I put "Toronto" in quotations because I'm not exactly sure what these morons are trying to say.


Toronto has a population of 2.48 million. Gun homicides for Toronto in 2000-2002 stood at 0.7 per 100,000 people. Which gives us 17.36 deaths on average. There's been an upsurge in gun violence though, thanks mainly to right-wing social policies and the debasement of the human environment that they cause, as well as by the overall decline in morals caused by the ascendancy of pseudo-human morons who vote for Mike Harris and Stephen Harper. So it appears to have been around 50 in the past couple of years. 50 divided by 2.48 million appears to be .000205 percent or something. So, it's not really all that likely to die from being shot in Toronto.


As I said though, while these morons blather about "Toronto," I'm pretty sure they don't mean to compare Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan with the entire population of Toronto. To accurately do that, they'd have to come up with all firearms deaths in Canada (2.6 per 100,000 in 2002) with all firearms deaths in Afghanistan, which I suspect is much higher, and which therefore doesn't suit their purposes.

My esteemed comrade "No Yards" (.) came up with the idea of calculating all police deaths in Canada for one year against the total number of the RCMP officers in Canada in 2007 (about 24,000) as a way of measuring the dangers of law enforcement. Using 2005 (which was a bad year for Canadian police with 11 officers killed) as the benchmark, the ratio is about 45 per 100,000.

There are about 2,600 Canadian Forces personnel in Afghanistan. The casualities last year were 36. (So far, 2007 casualties stand at 22, and we're only in June, so it doesn't look like last year's number can be dismissed as an aberration.) This gives us a casuality ratio of 1,385 per 100,000. Which, as you can tell, is significantly higher than Toronto's death rate, or that of Canadian police.

This is, of course, a rip-off of the similarly stupid US-wingnut argument that Bagdhad is no more dangerous than any large US city like New York, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C. (Follow that link for a great destroying of said stupid argument.)


Of course, all this playing around with statistics is beside the point. At its base, this argument is essentially that we ought not to care about our soldiers' deaths, because people die all the time. Imagine, if you will, what would have happened had the Justice Minister and the Commissioner of the RCMP had tried to argue this way in response to the mass-killings of four RCMP officers by Jim Rosko in March, 2005? When people asked how that mission was so mismanaged as to cause four officers' deaths, did Canada's Harper-Lovers sit back and intone; "Well, you know, police work is a dangerous business. Shit happens." ? Of course not. Imagine any other government-run project that shows a rising death toll being defended with such a dumb-ass argument.



What these nincompoops are trying to say is that the deaths are "worth it" because the cause is just. Which gets us talking about "the mission" once again. But let's not let go of the demonstrated indifference of the right-wing to the deaths of "the troops", because they will shamelessly throw that in our faces as we try to talk objectively about "the mission."

"The Mission" of course, is to prop-up an increasingly unpopular government that never got, and never will get the necessary funds for the reconstruction Afghanistan so desperately needs, and this government is dependent upon heroin-trafficking, mass-murdering, rapist warlords who are despised by much of the country. "The Mission" is at best thoughtless, and at worst, cynical imperialism. In either case, it is not worth dying for.

If you claim to give a shit about the people of Afghanistan and the dangers of the Taliban, then you should insist that the West abandon its military approach and finance that country's reconstruction, and stop with the air-strikes, check-point shootings, and torturing of prisoners, that is making the Taliban an increasingly popular resistance force.


Finally, remember, according to the right-wing, we're supposed to be in Afghanistan and we should have joined bush II in the slaughterhouse in Iraq, because Canadians were killed on 9-11 along with 3,000 of our American friends. Because of those deaths, we MUST launch an endless, self-perpetuating war of vengeance. We must torture and kill. We must give-up freedom of the press and access to information. We must give up our civil rights. But if twice as many soldiers die in our "response" to terrorism than did victims of that terrorism, ... if the slaughter looks like it's going to be endless, ... well, just remember, it all pales in comparison to World War II.


Which only goes to show the truly appalling intellectual level of the Canadian right-wing.


Not only do they not have originality to come up with their own arguments, but when they rip-off talking points from their US brethren, they're so brainless as to adopt thoroughly discredited, disgusting arguments.


Take a look at the criminal bush II regime, and the gross inequalities, racism, police-state, militaristic nightmare that the US right-wing has turned their country into. That is exactly what the morons at smalldeadanimals, free dominion, and the blogging tories want to turn Canada into.


True, they cannot yet successfully foist a Stockwell Day on us in the same way that the Repugs got drooling idiot bush II installed, but it's only because they don't have the power to do so. They can't have their dunces forced upon us as the party that ran the actual winner curls up in a ball and plays dead.