Michelle Rempel's Blind Rage

So, Michelle Rempel, MP and member of the Corrupt Conservative Party of Canada finds Justin Trudeau's comments about the sources of international conflict to be "blind-rage inducing."

I won't get into the stupidity of her own "thoughts" on international affairs. I'd just like to remind everyone that one of the tiresome refrains that corrupt conservatives like to repeat was that leftists were so very, very angry. We were unhinged from "bush derangement syndrome" or "harper derangement syndrome" so that we couldn't think straight.

IOIYAC though. Rempel trumpets her rage as something honourable when it comes to hating liberals. The hypocrisy has, I'm sure, been unnoticed by the harpercons.

FWIW, I never denied being angry about bush II or about harper. The real "derangement syndrome" is suffered by those boot-licking imbeciles who never saw the criminality and moral depravity of their heroes.

Anarchist Uselessness

The shit-head "slumberjack" typed a comment on a discussion I started over at EnMasse. I thought about finishing my critique for it over here where I could have more control over things. And, actually, because for the second time, I'm pretty sour on EnMasse. "EnMasse" has now degenerated to about ten people, of at least five of whom I have no interest in whatsoever.

This includes the incoherent, pompous blow-hard "slumberjack." I thought his/her comment on that one thread offered some grist for the mill, some telling examples of where and how anarchists go off the rails. But, upon searching for his/her comment, finding it, and re-reading it after a couple of week's passage of time, it seems there was really nothing to it at all. It's not worth all the selective copying and pasting and formatting.

Why don't I just say this: That what is needed is a positive, constructive agenda that people can understand and, if they choose, rally around. (For example, my "Workers as Citizens.") What is useless is either being a solitary, incoherent nut-case, typing your observations for nobody in particular and imagining that at some indeterminate point in the future, everything is going to fall into place and a better world, that you, yourself have no real idea of, will arise. Or, when you're not doing that, you join together into small collectives of activists who bite the heads off of any passers by who express sentiments that haven't reached the empyrean heights that your group has. Keeping your group nice and small and manageable gives you the tactical flexibility to respond to losses of meeting spaces, zero resources and insignificant ability to impact things. Hmmm. Should all five of you get arrested at an anti-poverty event or at an anti-war rally? Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.

Perhaps it's just that it's early, or perhaps it really is the case that when I try to put myself in the head-space of any of these shit-heads, eventually I feel that I'm swimming in murky water, leaving the range of sunlight, and there's just a black, unimportant unknown that I'm moving towards.

Why Can't You Think of Anything?

Thought I'd make today's post about the barren desert that is the Land of Left-wing Alternative visions. To be fair though, some of my readers actually imagine that voting Liberal or NDP or Green or some socialist fringe party IS their alternative. THAT'S the extent of their analysis and activism.

At least in that, they've got it all over bullshit poseur "anarchists" who show up at protests carrying signs that say "No Matter Who They Vote For, We Are Ungovernable!" and who then go home, back to their jobs or their student loans and their paying taxes and rent or whatever.

But still, when no mainstream party wants to tax corporations and the wealthy and thereby redistribute wealth that is either sitting in bank accounts or being lost in corrupt financial markets, voting isn't going to do anything. Corporate media dominance isn't going to be affected. The whole gamut of our society's sins have been accepted as the air we breath has been accepted, by our political parties.

I think most of my readers know this. Most of the lefty-pinkos I've associated with know this. So why don't we spend the time discussing how to actually change it? Why don't we do that? Why don't we sit down and write about what's necessary to change that? Why don't we propose alternative ways of doing things? What's wrong with us? I mean, what's wrong with YOU?

A Positive Response

Here's a nice little essay from "Common Dreams" - "It's Time for a Post-Piketty Vision of Shared Wealth." It praises Thomas Piketty for exposing the lie of neo-liberalism, that reduced inequality is a natural result of "free-market" industrial capitalism, and for showing how it is politics that reducing inequality, not markets.

Far from creating ‘a rising tide that lifts all boats’, however, Piketty’s update of the Kuznets curve shows that a capitalist economy driven by market forces was not the reason behind the reduction in inequality in the post-war period. Rather, this was due to the peculiar circumstances of the era, such as the destruction of wealth following the great depression and two world wars, alongside strong government intervention in the market and broad-based redistributive policies (including, for example, top income tax rates of well over 90 per cent in both the US and Britain).  

Piketty's work shows that left to its own devices, capitalism produces extremes of destabilizing inequality. We therefore need something beyond a tax on capital ...

Many commentators have pointed out that the surest path to reversing inequality within countries is through strategies that create a better distribution of capital in the first instance, rather than relying on top-down, quick-fix and state-centric strategies afterwards. In other words, it’s more effective to address the distribution of wealth at its source, well before it is already stashed away in the bosses’ bank accounts.
This will inevitably require the collective organisation of labour, the protection of workers’ rights, and new ways for capital to be owned broadly by the populace – such as a dramatic ramping up of participatory ownership through cooperatives.

The article also talks about the ecological necessity for a new form of economics:

Another blind side of Piketty’s analysis is his failure to take seriously the ecological limits to growth. It is clear that he defends the free market and the idea of perpetual economic growth, since his proposal for a global wealth tax assumes that a global growth rate of 2-5 percent is sustainable over the long run. Nowhere in the book does he admit that limitless growth is unsustainable on a finite planet, a position which is now conventional wisdom for many scientists, environmental activists and civil society organisations. As often repeated, humanity is currently consuming natural resources at a rate 50 per cent faster than the planet can replenish, and we already require one and a half planets to support today’s consumption levels.

Now, there are lots of links in this article. Most of them, it seems, are going to  go to sources that back-up the factual claims of the article. Some might refer to existing co-operative groups and what-not. I shall check, but the point is that I don't think there's any large-scale initiative at any of those links that is trying to construct the widespread democratic-ecological political-economy that we needed to start building yesterday.

Allow me, once again, to trumpet "Workers as Citizens. "Workers as Citizens" doesn't propose getting people with no access to capital to form co-operatives through some combination of encouragement, innovative fund-raising schemes, or whatever. It doesn't say that the labour movement should form its own co-operative industries to compete (in a rigged game) with the corporations at their own game. No, "Workers as Citizens" proposes making democratic co-operatives of Ford Canada, Microsoft Canada, Wal-Mart Canada, Tim Horton's Canada, all at once, through legal fiat. Every single workplace in Canada (except for the public sector, which will be run by triumvirates of workers, managers and citizens' representatives) will be mandated to be run democratically. Workers and owners and managers in each workplace will be free to determine their own form of democratic practice, subject to a few caveats (such as their being no involuntary expulsions from a workplace other than through a majority vote) to protect workers (or owners and managers) who have found themselves conned into agreeing to a sham democracy.

Using our present political system, "Workers as Citizens" will mobilize to get a political party to run on a platform of imposing this obligation though either ordinary legislation or a constitutional amendment. By using the system that our elites tell us is the only legitimate source of change, our elites will have little in the way of arguments against it, and no legal recourse for opposing it. Obviously, there are practical arguments that can and will be made against it, but these can be dealt with through traditional discussion and debate. What I'm referring to when I say that they can't argue against it is that they cannot say it is illegitimate. They cannot say it is dictatorially imposed. If it is implemented the way every other law or constitutional right is implemented, then the elites will have to suck it up, or lose their own claims to legitimacy. (Truth be told, by endorsing stephen "contempt of Parliament" harper, and his election fraud crimes, and by supporting the unilateral abrogation of our Treaties with the First Nations, our elites have shown their adherence to democracy and the rule-of-law to be a sham already.)

Some of my critics have tried to argue that just as our elites have shown their inherent hypocrisy and insincerity in the past, so too will they do so here. IF (and that's a big IF) a party were elected to power on this platform and IF they weren't intimidated into watering-down the proposal into meaninglessness, our elites would rise up and crush this exercise in naive trust in legislatures and bourgeois elections.

My reply to those critics is to ask what else they propose? A  "revolution" in poorer countries that will magically sweep across the world and bring our whole system crashing down to be replaced by a utopian political-economic social order of "real" democracy and "real" economic justice and "real" this or that? In other words, some unpredictable chain of events that will somehow happen somewhere and somehow not be crushed and somehow, somehow, somehow ....!

Or do they propose giving our dying labour movement a greater emphasis on "organizing" than on protecting their current memberships, in the hopes that we can (in the face of vast difficulties of post-industrial workplaces) bring the movement's membership up to 1950's levels, whereupon we can then, .... do what exactly? Suffer the same reverses of the 1950s - today?

Or, do they propose pointlessly voting for increasingly timid social-democrat parties or green capitalist parties who will do what they're doing at the present time?

Or, do they propose putting on black clothes, covering their faces with masks, and throwing a rock through a window?

Or do they propose writing another critique of present circumstances?

Or, do they propose writing incomprehensible, stupid gibberish such as I parodied here?

I really think my critics have gotten ahead of themselves. If our elites will crush an initiative such as "Workers as Citizens," will they not then totally expose themselves as rebels against their own source of legitimacy? IF such a government were elected, it would have to be elected with something like 40% of the electorate's support to have a majority necessary to implement it. It will be a part of the campaign for this initiative that its opponents will have to obey it or else they will have exposed themselves as enemies of parliamentary democracy. If they blatantly crush the legitimate aspirations of 40% of the electorate, do you not think such an action would not have fatal consequences for their continued authority over us?

And, furthermore, if we believe that our elites will ruthlessly crush such an initiative, why the fuck do we petition them for things that we want? Why do we protest their crimes? If they're ruthless criminals, then they're ruthless criminals, right? Why will they stop militarizing the police, persecuting minorities, engaging in criminal ponzi schemes and bailing themselves out with public funds when their casinos collapse? Why will they stop their wars, their plundering of the planet, their media brainwashing, their polluting of our eco-system, their immiseration of the working class, because we petition them? Because small groups of us protest in the streets against it?

V. I. Lenin was a ruthless, murdering psychopath, but at least he realized that if you're going to take power away from the powerful, the powerful are going to resist. And by "resist" we don't mean protest for an afternoon on the street or make a website to complain. They're going to try to kill you. They'll imprison you at the very least. Lenin's system failed because, partially due to his own tendencies and partly due to the intensity of the opposition against him, he didn't know when to quit killing people. Lenin and Stalin and the rest won for a number of reasons, but one reason was because Lenin had no compunctions against killing anyone and everyone who dared to oppose them. And, he thereby implemented a terrible dictatorship.

What do my critics propose? A magical peaceful revolution. Peaceful how? Revolutionary how? When does this happen? Where does it happen? Why does it happen? Why is everything magically better after it happens?

Please! In the name of FUCK tell me! It's enormously important that you tell me! So that I will know when this magical, peaceful, perfect transformation will occur and can be dressed appropriately. Unless it's all just useless fantasizing.

And that's just it. Unless and until I hear some sort of coherent alternative to "Workers as Citizens", I am going to assume that there is nothing else out there.

Democratic workplaces will bring greater health and safety. Higher wages. Job security. They will mean more attention to environmentalism. There is a lot of literature to back-up the claim that they will be more efficient.

To transition from growth-based consumerism to zero-growth sustainability will require a strong, democratic state. Public health care, pensions, ecological clean-ups, insurance of housing and the basic necessities, ... the redistribution of global wealth to desperately poor countries, ... all of these things will require a democratic state. They're too big for vaguely defined committees of hippies to deal with (or whatever the fuck alternative my "radical" critics have swimming around in their brains).

Workplaces will be taxed and regulated and the state (with less unemployment and other upheavals to deal with) will have ample resources to do these tasks. And workplaces will not flee to lower taxation because the workers who help run the place will vote against their own unemployment.

"Workers as Citizens" is the ONLY realistic means we have for implementing the reforms of capitalism and the implementation of ecological sanity that are articulated in that article.

Too Much Bad News For Me

Reading about harper's racist contempt for violence against First Nations women, and reading the racist garbage from his racist fans.

Idiotic reporting about whether Obama should "save" Iraqis from ISIS. (Why not ask who is funding these maniacs? Why not ask why it would have been okay for them to have conquered Syria, but not Iraq?)

The IPCC report on irreversible climate change.

I don't know what to say.

Bullies Don't Like it When People Fight Back

There are martial people who respect opponents who can give them a good fight. And then there are bullies. Insecure people who see every challenge as a threat to their very lives or at least everything they are. No matter how small the challenge, it could lead to more challenges and more threats to the bullies' fragile worlds.

Thus, Hamas and Hezbollah are presented as mortal threats to Israel's existence.

Canada's First Nations send right-wing racists and the Canadian state into paroxysms of fear.

Black US-Americans threaten to expose the whole racist structure of  the white, male Christian power structure.

The Magic of the Multiplier

The multiplier is a macro-economic concept that states that a government tax cut, or government stimulus spending might boost the economy by much more that the lost tax revenue or the initial government expenditure.  It is possible to calculate the multiplier knowing prevailing economic conditions. But since its discovery, right-wing economists (perhaps even those at the link, which is the right-wing "Economist" after all) have been doing their best to minimize the theoretical potential of the multiplier. It would be inconvenient if everyone agreed that all a government would have to do to end a recession and restore confidence to workers, would be to spend money.

Since right-wing economists are totally discredited, this shouldn't get in our way. Government spending on infrastructure and health and welfare programs can be ramped way up. This reversal of years of austerity will probably have a major positive impact on the economy. But, still and all, we live in an era dominated by idiotic deficit hawks and mercenary credit-rating agencies. Spending is spending and deficits are deficits. Right?

Well, what's changed today is that the wealthy clearly have more money than they know what to do with. And it's rendered our economies top-heavy. Financialization and financial speculation. Which does nothing for ordinary people. Tax-cuts to wealthy and the corporations just go into the banks and into speculation. Tax-increases to the wealthy and the corporations can help mitigate government deficits without harming the economy themselves. Because the wealthy aren't doing anything productive with the money we've been allowing them to miser. We'll get more bang for the buck taxing and spending than we will allowing them to hoard it and gamble with it.

The Answer to Everything

What sort of world do we want to create and how do we intend to get there? There are about seven billion human beings on the planet. The scientific consensus is that the present levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are going to be joined by many more tonnes over the next few decades and that this is going to raise the average temperature of the earth by 5 degrees Celsius, producing radical transformations of climate patterns. Croplands will shift and shrink. Coastal areas will be flooded. Local species will go extinct. Overpopulation will bring wars for basic resources. Governments in many places will not be able to cope with the unrest and mass migrations. The Fordist economy of mass employment and mass production is being replaced by the Post-Fordist economy of automation and de-industrialization and mass unemployment. The official economy centres around financialization and the manipulation of public and private debt to subsidize elite speculation.

I have long argued that it would be more efficient in the long-run to work with the system we presently have and militantly see that it is improved, than to advocate for the total destruction of our present political system and its replacement with something completely new. I have argued this because it seems that the numbers of people who would sign-on to such a project are pitifully few in both numbers and resources. Also, the new society that is supposedly necessary is never clearly articulated. Even if we had a realistic possibility of smashing the capitalist-imperialist system, we would be asking people to take a leap into the dark.

Recently though, I've come across an exciting articulation of all of these issues, which has allowed me to reconsider my pessimism and think that, perhaps, a new world is possible. Allow me to quote from the most relevant part:

Everything that is, is good.  The world of the Qlippoth, the Spectacle, is all entirely evil.  Evil isn’t a substance; if it were it would be good.  The mystery of the effectiveness of evil  comes down to the fact that evil doesn’t exist; it’s just an active nothingness.

What’s evil is not distinguishing evil from good.  Indistinction is its kingdom, indifference is its power.  Men do not love evil, they love the good that’s within it.

Now, obviously, this sort of writing is what's known as "philosophical." Allow me to put it into layman's terms.

"Everything that is" refers to whatever demands the total rejection of the present. That might seem contradictory at first glance, but hear me out: The stuff we want (social justice, environmentalism, peace, etc.,) is "good." Therefore, whatever is opposed to what we want is "evil." As "evil," that which we want "goodness" is absent. Therefore the absence of what we want is "evil." What we want is absent from the present system. Therefore the present system is "evil."

If you still can't see how "Everything that is" means "the rejection of everything that is at present," well, I can't be expected to spoon-feed you. We have to move on, because this is too important to delay with mental stragglers.

"The Spectacle" refers to the bullshit of the present system of sham democracy and sham economics. It is "evil" because it is. It denies what we want, which is "good." And, because it is what is NOT, (which is what we want), it doesn't exist. If it was what we want (a political system built on what is "good" ... which, sadly, we don't have at the present time) it would exist and it would be "good."

No one can deny that the present capitalist-imperialist hegemony (which doesn't exist) is very effective. It's fooled a lot of people. But that's because all it has to do is deny what is, (what we want) which is "good." By that I mean, it's easier to do nothing than to do something. All we have to do to get along is to NOT build a better world. That's it.

We actively do evil when we pretend that the present system is not evil. Our indifference to the evil of the present system is what gives capitalist-imperialism it's ability to continue. It's a different way of saying "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing." Which is a statement that has never been made by anyone who believes in anything "evil."

Lastly of course, it should be added that, contrary to what I just said, that "evil" is more than just NOT doing what we should. Some people actually love the system (which doesn't exist), but that's part of its power.

What does any of this have to do with how to build the world we actually want? What does this have to do with the practical steps we have to take from the world that [doesn't] exist to the world we want to exist [which does already]? It's quite simple actually; we avoid what is "evil" and pursue what is "good."

If even more clarification is desired or needed, simply go to this thread where I, and my esteemed mentor, who goes by the nom de guerre of "slumberjack," explore these concepts further.

ETA:  Obviously, this post is complete bullshit.

I Still Got It

So this right-wing racist was on facebook the other day. Had taken over a friend's thread about the situation in Ferguson. Dude was one of those assholes who constructed their ludicrous, evil defences of George Zimmerman. (This guy regurgitated the nonsense that Trayvon Martin attacked Zimmerman because he was gay!)

So, the guy blurted out a few boners and I noticed his errors and his failures of logic and I zeroed in on them and wouldn't let him go. This guy was decent on rote-recitation of right-wing racist talking-points, but had no real talent or ability. By the end of it, he was desperately throwing out links and ad hominems, desperate to deflect from his own racism and failure.

I'm not going to bring justice to Michael Brown's family. I'm not going to bring an end to racism in the USA or even Canada. But in my little corner of the world, one of these faux-objective, "colour-blind" racist assholes was exposed as a fool and a fraud and their poisons temporarily banished.

Yeah. I have no life.

I didn't have anything else to post.

ISIS is the new ultimate enemy

ISIS is one of the Saudi-funded Sunni radical groups being employed to devastate Syria. Syria's dictator, Assad, is a monster who tortures children. But that's not why he's being attacked. He belongs to the Baath Party, which was an Arab nationalist movement that advocated secular development based on the policies of autarchic industrialization pursued by the Soviets under Stalin. In other words, an independent, nationalist movement.

And that's why Assad has to go. Even if it turns out that his military is strong enough (thanks partially to continued Russian and Chinese assistance) to fight the terrorist militias to a standstill, and, more, ruthless enough to keep fighting for years, even if 170,000 are killed and millions more made refugees. In that, he's as cynical and ruthless and murderous as Washington's foreign policy elite and the Saudi autocrats who are the other side of this catastrophe.

170,000 killed because of these monsters.

ISIS was able to send a two-mile long caravan of white trucks into Iraq and conquer large portions of it, partly because Obama wanted Iraq's Prime Minister Maliki to step down. Maliki is a murderous dictator, but that's not Obama's problem with him. Maliki is a Shiite who has oppressed the Sunni minority. But Obama doesn't care about that either. Maliki's sins are to be too cozy with Iran and to have refused to allow US troops to stay in Iraq with legal immunity.

ISIS also helped to convince the Kurds against declaring out-right independence, but to instead remain part of a weak, fractured Iraq which can be dealt with more easily than three separate, cohesive entities.

And that is why it was "This far and no farther" for ISIS. They've done their job. But they're insane religious lunatics who massacre entire communities if they believe in the wrong delusions. That's why they're being targeted for air-strikes now.

But ISIS knew that. And that's why they're kidnapping US American journalists and promising to kill them one by one. They expected Obama to betray them. This homicidal hostage-taking was their planned response.

And so we have a new "Great Satan." A new group of monsters for Obama (or whatever other figurehead happens to be in charge) to stand-up to, and justify US military action in the world. A new chance for the Washington foreign policy elite to dazzle us with their hypocrisy. A new chance for the US corporate media to display their stenographic skills.

Murderous Conservative Incompetence

Here's the Transit Safety Board's report on the Lac Magnetic rail disaster. Apparently it's pretty damning.

Transport Canada was slammed Tuesday in a long-awaited report into last summer's train disaster that claimed the lives of 47 people, for not forcing Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway to improve its safety record.
"Each time (Transport Canada inspectors) were saying, 'OK, we found this, you've got to do this,' but nobody was looking at it from a big-picture point of view to say, 'Have we got a systemic problem? Have we got a pattern here?' " Wendy Tadros, president of the Transportation Safety Board, said in an interview.
Time and again, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, owners of the errant train involved in the Lac-Mégantic disaster, were found to have lax safety standards, yet no government inspectors stayed on top of the problem until it was fixed.

This is what the "pro-business" bullshit of right-wing idiots means in practice. And you'll notice that nobody is resigning. harper is hiding in the Arctic apparently, leaving Lisa Raitt to mouth banalities in response to her government's gruesome failure.

It's always like this. The Wall Street disaster was ushered in by right-wing politicians who showed themselves wielding giant prop scissors cutting red tape.

It has been "conservative" governments that make meat products deadly dangerous to eat.

It has been "conservative" governments who make it deadly dangerous to drink water.

Hospitals fall apart; police go ape-shit, bridges collapse. Tailing ponds leak. Trains derail. Pipelines crack.

I have no fear that I'll ever meet a right-winger who will cause me to reconsider my beliefs. The governments they support are generally the stupidest, greediest, most corrupt conceivable.

Their trollish defenders will mewl and whine and snigger. But they're stupid scum.

"How Many Divisions Does the Pope Have?"

The quote is from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. In the middle of WWII he was informed by one of his Western allies that the Pope was concerned about the persecution of Catholics in the USSR. Stalin snorted derisively about the Pope's total absence of military power, inferring that it was Stalin whose feelings they should be concerned about, because it was his hundreds of divisions of soldiers doing most of the fighting against Hitler. Churchill and Roosevelt conceded the point.

But the sentiment also applies to leftists. First of all, powerful politicians and capitalists are not going to be swayed by tiny bands of activists in the streets. They just won't and it's time we dismissed such airy fantasies from our minds. (Obviously if you want to simply stand and be counted, to register your protest against things, to try to build something that doesn't get a hearing in the mass media, by all means, go ahead. Just don't think that by itself you action is going to change anything.)

Secondly, even if we have tens of millions of people in agreement, without power it is of little practical use. The Pope in the 1940s had millions of followers, but they were not organized in a fashion that made them significant to Stalin. Remember when millions of us around the world marched to protest the coming invasion of Iraq? Supposedly we were a "new super-power." But a strangely powerless super-power. It's the same thing with opponents of global capitalism. There are hundreds of millions of people opposed to prevailing circumstances, but without power and influence, this means little.

The end.

Hating stephen harper

Hate:

a :  intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury

b :  extreme dislike or antipathy :  loathing hate

What's the problem?

"Hate" is a strong emotion. And strong emotions are really felt by children. They can go from the depths of despair (their ice cream fell out of their ice cream cone) to intense joy (they got a new ice cream cone and the monkey behind the glass is doing something funny) in a matter of minutes.

When adults do that, we (obviously) call them "childish."

One can get swept along by their emotions. (The initial flush of excitement and joy and longing for a new romantic partner.) And we can later regret this. ("He was just another cheating, user asshole!")

Given their lower level of intelligence and emotional maturity, it is the right-wing that exhibits the more "emotional" sort of politics. They will hate their enemies more and love their champions ... well, perhaps "love" is the wrong word for it. But they'll get swept-up by enthusiasm much more easily. 

It's like what Al Franken said about Michelle Bachmann's love for the United States:

 As Franken noted, liberals love America like adults love their parents, while conservatives love America like a four year-old loves his parents. Liberals love America, but can emotionally and intellectually recognize that America sometimes takes an errant path and try to get back on course. This is the same way an adult child loves a parent. Conservatives, on the other hand, think everything America does is right, just as a young child thinks everything Mommy does is right even if Mommy is acting unwisely. And a four year-old will punch you in the nose if you ever say anything bad about Mommy.

But some leftists (not me) feel passionate because they feel themselves infused with a love of humanity in general; or the world in general; or life itself. They feel unashamed of letting themselves be ruled by these emotions. Love, compassion, pity, empathy.

Hatred though? No. Hatred is to be rejected. Hatred is what racists feel towards people with socially-agreed upon, but arbitrary differences. Hatred is what mentally misshapen, childish right-wing types feel. We don't want to be like that.

[And please, right-wingers or random concern trolls, what sorts of political animals are more prone to say things like this:

"Those Hispanic children are bringing diseases into our country. They're moochers and we have to ship them out."

"Listen! You just don't know these people! Black people in this state have two speeds: Slow motion and stop!"

"The 'First Nations' are all a bunch of lazy, entitled, whiners, mobilized by their corrupt leadership to guilt us into spending more money on them."

"So-called 'refugees' are all frauds trying to take advantage of us."

"We had a word for single-mothers: 'Sluts!' And we had a word for people who choose not to work: 'Lazy!' That's what single-mothers on welfare are: Lazy Sluts."

"Palestinians are death-worshipping animals who value their hatred of Jews more than the lives of their own children!"

It's always been right-wingers in my experience. Certainly some leftists (not me) can be accused of hating soldiers (for mindlessly killing defenseless civilians), cops (for trampling over people's rights) corrupt politicians (for protecting corrupt businesspeople) and corrupt business people (for putting short-term profit over the lives and health of human beings). (I only hate some of these people.)

Reading the above, one can discern an important truth: Right-wingers hate weaker groups. Left-wingers hate powerful groups.

Which brings me to my honest admission that I hate stephen harper.

I hate stephen harper because he insults and abuses the First Nations and makes their lives worse.

I hate stephen harper because his response to reports that our allies torture prisoners and rape children in Afghanistan is to cover it up.

I hate stephen harper because he deprives refugees in Canada of all medical care.

I hate stephen harper because he is a shameless tool for the oil industry and he deliberately silences scientists who produce inconvenient truths about global warming. (As well as about the destructive impact of capitalist practices elsewhere.)

I hate stephen harper for cheering on the slaughter of the Palestinians by the IDF in Gaza. 

I hate stephen harper for corrupting our elections.

I hate stephen harper for being the prime minister of the first government in the entire history of the Westminster system of Parliament to be found in contempt of Parliament.

I hate stephen harper for using a stolen majority government to ram through massive omnibus bills totally altering decades of public policy at one go with little discussion or debate.

For these and numerous other sins, t is entirely rational and healthy to hate such an individual.  

Who Broke-in to Justin Trudeau's House?

So, I heard that Justin Trudeau's house was broken into from Montreal Simon's blog. Apparently Mr. Trudeau was on the road and his wife and children were sleeping. Nothing was missing but a "threatening note" was found.

Occam's razor. My last boss was an outside-of-Toronto-living member of Ford Nation. Working-class guy who, through hard work and brains, became the property manager for a fairly big property owner. Obviously though, his brain capacity didn't extend into the world of politics. Anyhow, we were talking in his truck about federal politics and he asked me what I thought the Liberals would be like if they got power. I said "About the same as the Conservatives." He got agitated and shouted: "If that Trudeau guy gets in, we're fucking dead!"

Justin Trudeau and the Liberals; the party that gave us the Anti-Terrorism Act are namby-pamby "soft-on-crime" wussies apparently. Justin Trudeau, who thinks the Tar Sands apocalyptic landscape is "awesome" is just a tree-hugging fanatic who'll have us all wearing rags and lining-up for our granola and tofu gruel at the public feeding centers.

Let me put it this way: The Conservatives have, at times, dominated Canadian federal politics, and at other times, they've been the number two party. They've got corporate Canada's money and media behind them. But these stupid fucks with their nauseating self-pity and persecution complex, actually believe that the dastardly Liberals use every trick in the book to keep them down and that therefore, they're compelled to violate our electoral laws and commit criminal acts and financial fraud to win. Then, being sick, twisted individuals, they project their own shortcomings on others and convince themselves that "everyone else does it" and that the only reason their election fraud is a scandal has to do with the "liberal media" conspiracy against them.

Boo-hoo-hoo. These are the assholes who believe that every single one of their self-inflicted crises are all part of a lefty conspiracy. Election fraud investigation? A liberal witch-hunt. Inquiring into Bev Oda's fraud and lying under oath? Lefty conspiracy. Wanting the harpercon government to release information on Afghan prisoners? A hypocritical partisan sham. Parliament finding harper in contempt for not releasing basic information to the majority of the people's representatives? A "kangaroo court." Wanting to topple the harpercon minority for taking gross partisan advantage of a grave financial-economic crisis? That was a "socialist-separatist coup."

And these are just the "conservatives" with the brains to hold it together in front of the cameras to not descend into spittle-flecked rage (all the time). Their foot-soldiers (the misshapen, dismally stupid humans who inhabit Small Dead Animals or the Blogging Tories, these people have worked themselves up into a lather about the vast left-wing conspiracy against them and their party.

Remember folks; these people are "under attack" because they can't physically attack homosexuals anymore. Their "values" are "under attack" when their children can't bully homosexuals anymore. They're "under attack" when gay kids and straight kids are allowed to form alliance clubs to fight back against bullying.

They see themselves as constantly "under attack" from the gays, the Muslims, the First Nations, the poor, Black people, Chinese people, South Asians, etc. In their eyes it's "Thank God for stephen harper and the Conservative Party of Canada, saving us from the dusky politically-correct, tax-grabbing hordes. And, thankfully, even if there's a Kenyan Socialist-Fascist in the White House, the US military remains a bastion of what's right and true and blah, blah, blah."

To these warped and paranoid minds, Justin Trudeau's father was a Maoist totalitarian. Seriously. And Justin Trudeau will be even worse. His father might have been a communist Fu Manchu, but Justin is the genetic mixing of Fu Manchu and a pot-headed, hippy air-head bimbo. Justin will have none of his father's restraint but all of his totalitarian inclinations. He'll be twice as dangerous as his father.

Can't you see the danger people??? Too many Canadians are brainwashed by liberal propaganda and believe in expensive programs that don't work which are partially paid for by punishing success through ruinous tax increases. These mindless fools let themselves be seduced by Justin Trudeau's pretty face, and they'll march to the polls chanting "Justin! Justin!" like zombies as a result of biased media coverage.

.....

Justin Trudeau will be Canada's Barack Obama. An amoral shill for the status-quo dressed-up in a nicer looking and nicer sounding package. But just as the American right-wing is united in its incoherent rage-gasm against him as a Kenyan usurper, a terrorist, a wimp, a dictator, a pervert, .... so too is the Canadian right-wing fostering an all-encompassing, total hatred for Justin Trudeau, of similar proportions and similar incoherence. And, yes, this irrational hatred is nurtured by the respective Repugs and harpercon parties. It's fostered by right-wing media.

....

In the end, I think it was one of these deluded foot-soldiers, acting alone, who broke into Justin Trudeau's house. Such an act would be too dangerous for even the harpercons to try at this moment. At the very least, it's premature. And while it's possible that a crazed Liberal Party operative did this, it's far, far less likely than that it was just some right-wing fanatic. Being a Canadian, they thought it only fair that Justin receive a warning first.  But I'm afraid that given the circumstances, that one of them will return.

StatsCan Labour Market Correction

Apparently it was "human error" that had them count working Canadians as outside the labour force.

First: As the Globe & Mail link states, the revised job numbers are still nothing to crow about.

Second: Jim Stanford says much the same thing at The Progressive Economists' Forum.

Third: This embarrassment might have been a calculated plan on the part of the beleaguered institution. Angry at budget cuts and staff cuts and harper's stupid messing with the long-form Census. Even if it makes StatsCan look bad, for a while at least, it opened the government to major criticism and embarrassment.

Fourth: If (as is more likely) this is the result of budget cuts and overworked researchers it is even more dreadful. Thanks to the cretinous dogmatism of the harpercons, our national statistical agency, which helps the government, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to understand how their economy is doing, how to evaluate the results of public policies, is now a source of doubt.

Perhaps, as embarrassing as it is to the government that brought us to this sorry state, the "benefits" of being able to base your economic health on manipulation of data from Kijiji, when nobody has counter-information to argue otherwise, outweigh the damage done to national credibility.

It's a helluva way to govern though, isn't it?

But they're serial liars. Lies are their life's blood. Facts are the enemy to them.

EDITED TO ADD:

I haven't seen their work. But given Stanford and the Globe & Mail's and everyone else's complete lack of suspicion, I assume that StatsCanada did make the error. Of course, given stephen harper and his corrupt Conservatives, it's entirely possible that there was no error at all, and StatsCan was just strong-armed into changing the numbers. Nothing is beyond the harperscum.

"We tortured some folks"

"But we were really scared."

The depths of American liberalism.

"We tortured some folks."

"We tortured some folks."

"We tortured some folks."

"WE tortured some folks.."

"We TORTURED some folks."

"We tortured SOME FOLKS."

What a disgusting culture. And it's our culture. Our governments are just as stained. Our "conservatives" are just as debased as those who condemned Obama for admitting what was impossible to deny.

We Don't Know What We've Lost

Many Canadians don't know. Many Canadians are incapable of processing what's immediately before them. They participate in it. I've done some mean, selfish things in my time. The thing is; I feel bad about it. But harpercon supporters on the other hand they're so stupid that they'll do criminal, anti-democratic things and praise themselves to the sky about it. They'll act as if efforts to uncover their criminality are "witch-hunts" whose soul purpose is to victimize them.

The depths of our national failure were recently reached in Gaza, where our [stolen] government party stood side-by-side with the mass-murderers. For fuck's sake! Significant voices with Israel itself called openly for genocide, and we still stood by their side. The Opposition was little better, with both Trudeau and Mulcair using precious speaking time to simultaneously criticize Hamas for firing its unguided rockets at Israel. The mass slaughter of Israel's latest "operation" was the issue. Hamas and its rockets would more properly be placed within a discussion of Israel's illegal occupation and the violence it inflicts on Palestinians as a result.

When you're the one in the airplane, flying over the houses, firing the missiles and dropping the bombs, it is YOU who are responsible for the deaths those missile and bombs cause.

Canadians used to be opposed to torture and it used to be the case that Canadians could say that they're safe from torture at the hands of their own government. Not anymore. In Afghanistan we knowingly turned people over to torturers. Our officials waded through blood and shit in these interrogation centers and their only statement of concern was that they wanted an extra set of boots for such visits. And, apparently, for right-wing harpercon Canadians, it is fine to torture Canadians if they have any Arab blood in their veins, or Muslim ideas circulating in their brains. Some right-wingers, such as the vile, racist, screeching madman Ezra Levant, invent ludicrous arguments that no such torture occurred, but that's just for show. A show that too many of us non-insane Canadians are tolerating. This right-wing scum will say out of one side of their mouth that those terrorists got everything they deserved while saying that nothing happened in those Syrian or Egyptian or Sudanese prisons in the first place.

Canadians used to believe that every four or five years they were allowed to go to the polls and choose from among the candidates filtered for them by financial and media restrictions. Using an archaic voting system, they had a fairly robust ability to turf-out incompetent, and/or arrogant, and/or corrupt governments. Power would see-saw between two incompetent, arrogant and corrupt political parties, but the power of the people to remove them acted as a check on their ambitions.

No more. The harpercons have corrupted even that. They've taken away our one small power, our one check on arbitrary, corrupt government. They called up people and falsely told them polling stations had moved. They called people up at 2 am and posed as rival parties and insulted them. They've probably all violated election finance laws. But Elections Canada has thrown up its hands in defeat at the conclusion of a phony "investigation" and allowed the harpercon regime to keep its stolen majority. And, earlier, the Supreme Court of Canada actually said that its perfectly fine if we don't know who really won an election. We have to assume undocumented votes were made in good faith. One has to PROVE that a hundred extra ballots with an "X" beside the name of the harpercon candidate was filled-out by a partisan hack, before an election can be nullified.

We used to believe that governments were obliged to provide the legislatures, that is, the people's representatives, with basic information about what they were doing and what they were planning. No more. The fate of prisoners taken in war time is apparently an issue of "national security." The cost estimates of major policies are "secrets" for the eyes of the executive cabinet only. Documents and facts can be forged and presented as genuine to Parliament and the politicians who do that can keep their seats.

We can sign treaties and then unilaterally break them. We can use the Canadian Revenue Agency as a partisan weapon. We can turn Statistics Canada into a fact-invention and suppression machine. We can muzzle the public service. We can arrest hundreds of people all at once for no reason, and hold them in inhuman conditions (because the police who arrested them all became "overwhelmed" at the size of their self-imposed task) and there's no significant public outcry.

This is where we are. This is what we on the left tolerate and what we allow many Canadians to remain ignorant about.

Bad Headline

So some cops in someplace called Ferguson USA, shot an UNARMED black teenager about eight times, killing him. Apparently it escalated from the young man and his friend walking on the road on their way to the young man's grandmother's house.

There's been protests and rioting and, in an unexpected turn, hacktivist community "Anonymous" has hacked the city's computers to look for some actionable filth.

Anyway, the CBC has a story based on this ongoing tragedy. And the headline just rubs me the wrong way: "Michael Brown Shooting. Why Blacks in the US believe they're targeted by police." 

They "believe" they're targeted?????

Why is it beyond the CBC to simply state "Why Blacks in the US ARE targeted by the police"? Because at this stage in the game, it's pretty fucking obvious that they are. It's simply a fact.

Then, I read the first comment under the story:

why is this turned into a race issue every single time? where the outrage over the hundreds of african americans gunned down every day by their own colour?
sammy yatim was Syrian and the cop that killed him was white. Where was the outrage from the Syrian community over this killing? i mean the cop was white so that shooting had to be racially motivated, right?? sigh.

Perhaps it's for shitheads like that that compel the CBC to hedge its bets and pretend as if racism among the police is still a hypothetical.

He's 48 Years Old ...

At the time, i was still only 47. I took my (then) 6 year old to Toronto's lakeshore for the celebratory fireworks for Queen Victoria's birthday. It was crowded and full of people. And I remember the (if not confidence) nonchalance with which I walked through the crowd with my boy.

As a teenager I'd have thought about how much of a pimply, short, scrawny fuckwad I was.

As an "adult" of 18 ("Hey!" shouts my 18-year old self) I would have agonized about all the possible love affairs I could have pursued amongst the many nubile females present, if only so many of those females wouldn't have sneered at my advances.

In my mid-20's, I would have thought about the boyfriends of the nubile females or the guys who were just looking for trouble, and would I be able to stand up to them? (I'd once taken the best shots from a guy six-foot-five to my five-foot-six and was still standing, jaw intact.)

In my thirties, better looking, more experience under my belt, I would have thought about second chances to do it all right.

But as it was, at 47, carrying my heart-breakingly handsome 7 year old in my arms (it was getting late and cold and we'd walked a fair bit already) all I knew was that I didn't give a shit about anything or anyone. Nobody was going to hassle a grey-haired guy carrying a kid No teenage or twenty-something dream was going to even notice me. My thirty-something looks and life-experience were both irrelevant. And i simply didn't and don't care.

I had a decent run, and everything turned to shit in the end, and I don't care. My adult idealism (the reason why I started this blog seven years ago) has likewise been defeated by the crushing reality of the shittyness of the world i live in and my own incapacity to change things.

So, whatever-the-fuck-ever.

A Belated Review to the Film "1408"

I stayed up very, very late, waiting for some people to arrive. (They did and all is right with the world.) In the process, I became very, very drunk. So there's this post now. Because I decided to watch the film "1408" again.

And I think it's a damn good spooky movie.

Whatever its weaknesses, 1408 holds you captive. The film may seem like a one-room version of THE SHINING, condensed and tight rather than big and sprawling like the Kubrick movie, but Hafstrom does an impressive job of keeping its limited space visually interesting for feature length, and when all else fails the story succeeds on the strength of Cusack’s performance. The actor is allowed to give a virtual one-man show, ranging from funny to fearful, alternating between broad physical action (when the character explodes in rage against the room’s asault on him) with quieter interludes of angst and despair. Forcing the audience to experience his terror with an almost first-hand immediacy, Cusack runs the emotional gamut, delivering a performance as layered and complex as any of the 2007s Oscar nominees. Thanks in large part to his efforts, 1408 comes close to being a character study rather than a horror film – WILD STRAWBERRIES, with ghosts. Unlike too many movies that aspire to more than mere horror, this one achieves its goal without neglecting the fear factor.

Here's my take: The room seeks out people's weak points and drives them to self-destruction based upon them. We don't know the back-stories of many of the room's victims, but we're given some clues. A Chicago industrialist in the 1920s. Pointless to speculate. A sewing machine salesman. Who knows? But they mention a hotel maid from El Salvador (pointedly), who got locked in the bathroom and gouged her eyes out within a minute. We're to imagine that someone from El Salvador witnessed many horrible things, if she was in that country in the 1980s.. (The Reagan years.) I honestly think that was a subtle political statement

So, anyway, the room has been frustrated, because the manager refuses to rent it out and (for reasons that are explained in the film) allows room service once a month, with him at the door and two maids quickly doing a quick turnover. As a result, the room looks out into the world for a victim. And it finds the lead character; a horror writer who doesn't believe in any after-life or anything supernatural. It seeks him out because he's the only sort of person who would press to stay in the room and, having lived a fairly privileged life (aside from his daughter's death) he is not traumatized and psychologically strong. The room likes a challenge.

It's his relative privilege and psychic strength that (for the sake of argument about this work of fiction) that can be argued shield the writer from the room's psychological assaults. The horrors don't come too thick and fast because he hasn't experienced that many and because he's a strong individual. But the room does gradually insinuate itself into him.

It's a fine horror film. As another reviewer said:

If you like to be creeped out by movies, this is one to see. It reminds us what it's like to be scared in a theater rather than overwhelmed by buckets of blood and gore.

Good night.

Libertarians, Anarchists and Libertarian Socialism

Right off the bat, I'm a libertarian socialist. Unlike self-described, plain, old "libertarians," I believe there's a call for "collectivism." United action organized by the state, which is the institution that carries out the democratically agreed upon wishes of the citizenry. (This does not mean that the Canadian state is, at present, the tool of the democratic majority in Canada. Canada is not a libertarian socialist country.) "Anarchists" share my left-wing values, but share the anti-state proclivities of the libertarians. How one arrives at social justice without a state is something they don't tend to discuss with any degree of consistency or coherency. I've read a few books and articles over the years and have found nothing serious in their proposals.(There might be some writers that I've missed, but since they're an inconsequential political movement, it doesn't seem worth it to attempt to read their entire canon in order to understand them.)

So, the libertarians make more sense than the anarchists when they deny the need for a state, because they don't believe in collective action towards social justice. Like me, the libertarian socialist, they believe in individual liberty. They believe in individual rights. They also believe in individual equality. Unlike me and the anarchists, they deny the reality of discrimination. Most of them are white males, and as white males, they have been more likely to enjoy relative privilege and therefore, lacking empathy (or any sense of historical reality), deny the need for affirmative action or other such programs. They celebrate individual inequality as a spur to initiative and they fantasize about "level playing fields" and "survival of the fittest"

The reason why I started thinking about this subject for today is because I was reading about the Mount Polley mining disaster in British Columbia, after having written about the general childishness of the libertarian analysis of both Elizabeth Warren and left-wing protests and the G20. (Basically, some libertarian dunce pooh-poohed Warren's attempts to regulate Wall Street in the wake of its civilization-threatening criminality and implosion, while another one berated leftists for complaining about police violence at the Toronto G20 conference because leftists were only enjoying the fruits of their call for "big government.")

The Mount Polley mining disaster leaves the childish theories of libertarians with nothing left to say. Now, there hasn't been that much Canadian reporting on the Mount Polley disaster. [sarcasm]Even the Maoist CBC hasn't seen fit to gloat at the environmental catastrophe brought about by insane capitalist greed.[/sarcasm] The Canadian corporate media tends to line-up beside our human rights violating mining industry because it's one of our biggest industries. I haven't been paying much attention because there's nothing that I can do and I've spent years (with countless other leftists) exposing the crimes and idiocy of capitalism, to little effect. But i thought it be a good cudgel to beat libertarians with so I decided to look it up.

Turns out it was a copper and gold mine. Well, there are industrial uses for gold, but much more for copper I think. And the point is, we need to mine these resources. (No, the world doesn't need the excess of useless junk that we Westerners wallow in, but we do require resources.) And who mines these resources? Large industrial firms. Now, who should be in charge of these firms? At present, they're run by executives chosen by corporate boards of directors (who may be puppets of the executive or not). Libertarians would have them run by individual capitalist owners. Anarchists and people like me would have them run by the workers. I differ from the anarchists in having them run by the workers but with government regulatory oversight.

But, the mainstream corporate capitalists and the libertarians together, reject "intrusive" government "meddling" into their affairs. They prefer self-regulation. Well, we see the effects of this self-regulation. A massive environmental catastrophe that is going to cost an absolute minimum of $600 million to clean up. (More like $1.5 billion if we're going to dispense with corporate-friendly minimum forecasts. Toxic sludge is going to otherwise poison fish and water and all the resources and lives that rely on it for decades to come. Perhaps forever.) What is the libertarian answer to this failure of self-regulation? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The inarguable need for regulation on massive industrial projects such as mines is, to them, a harbinger of THE GULAG! It is an intrusion into the workings of the free market that would supposedly do more harm (by mandating spending a few million in safety precautions maximum to prevent a billion dollars in disaster clean up later) than good.

You know, the tendency of states to try to increase their power over us is a serious topic. The origins of states as tools of domination is likewise a serious topic. But the reality that states have dual origins and dual purposes, is a serious thing too. Human beings have always imposed collectivism upon themselves to achieve agreed upon goals and values. To do things together that would be impossible if done individually. It is simply childish to dogmatically insist that democratic societies cannot and must not impose sensible regulations on things like giant mines, or traffic speed, or food production or new medicines. To pretend that it is impossible to impose these regulations without, in the end, sacrificing all of our human rights, is extremist nonsense that doesn't deserve a respectful hearing.

Libertarians Saving Us All From "Collectivism"

So, yesterday i was watching this Youtube video where Senator Elizabeth Warren grills the Federal Reserve Board Chair about the failure of these trillion dollar Wall Street banks to make the "living wills" that their legislatively obligated to do, in order to prevent even bigger messes than happened after Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

But in the comments, there were the usual right-wing fuck-faces, attempting to belittle the brilliant Warren with the sort of stupid tripe that these imbeciles are infamous for. But then, one of the "grown-up" right-wingers piped-up with this gem:

The only thing rational people fear, is that there are so many idiots who would worship a person like this.  She has intelligence and can make many valid points, but she's so focused on collectivism, and is blind to it's inherent flaws.

Ah yes! "Inherent flaws"! What a brilliant mind!

Um, hold on a second pal. Does capitalism have any "inherent flaws"? Are they such as to make the game not worth the candle? Let's have a discussion at some point, where your childish talking points can be exploded for the drivel that they are.

But this post owes its existence to whatever piece-of-shit wrote this comment at a story about how the police were video-taping their strip-searches at the holding pen for the Toronto G-20:

Zog Mossad ·  Top Commenter

Leftards getting "outraged" to their heart content. Hey, assholes, YOU are the ones pushing for big government! Real Big Government as YOU wishing would have done probed your entire colon and urethra to the bladder, so, keep hoping!

This is what that plodding dullard at the Elizabeth Warren video was trying to articulate. "Collectivism" eventually means that you have ZERO rights! Except for the fact that this notion is one of the most dangerously simplistic, inherently stupid, moronic, shit-for-brains-ish, mental pieces of garbage going.

It is so mentally stunted that it boggles the mind! Do these idiots not walk on public sidewalks or drive down public streets? Do they not grasp the complexities of industrial societies? Private provision of goods used or consumed by the general public is often inefficient and unreliable. In order for things to not grind to a halt, we decide to do things collectively. Doing things collectively does not mean that we all become robots in a Stalinist dystopia. There's this thing called "democracy" and these things called "human rights" that leftists are always shouting for, and which we already partially enjoy, that prevents the same authority that is able to erect stop-signs at intersections from metastasizing into Stalinism. You stupid clods.

I wish these assholes could all find an island somewhere, where they can indulge their libertarian fantasies and leave us all the hell alone. (Ah, but to be fair, I'd like the "blogging Tories," "Tea party" types to have their own island too. And the Liberal party, Democratic Party Obama-bots to have their own island.) All of these Islands would devolve into cannibalism.

I can see it all now: The "libertarian" islanders would decide that as individuals they have an inherent right to eat their fellows to survive. And they graciously (and CONSISTENTLY!) extend that same right to their fellows.

The blogging tory/tea-party shlubs would just starve to death as they prayed to Jesus to save them, with cannibalism being the last result of the most desperate of the survivors from the non-existent Jesus's non-arriving help.

The Liberal/Democrat Trudeau-Obamabots would split into back-stabbing factions. They'd take each other out in low-tech drone strikes, all the while spewing the most insulting, sanctimonious and oily bullshit rhetoric about the rule-of-law and the "responsibility to protect" and "giving everyone an equal chance to reach their fullest potential." The victors will have orgies at their feasts.

Arguing on the Internet

In this discussion topic, I argue that what is true about science is not undone by how science is abused, but that at the same time, what is false about religion remains false no matter how nice the intentions. This has descended into a testy exchange with the religious desperado "Fidel" who is having an argument with himself about the evils of corporate science. Occasionally he makes windy, but entirely meaningless claims for religion out of nowhere. I and three others have been trying to re-state the original point several times, to no avail.

Here at Dr. Dawg's, Mandos is trying to argue the obvious point that the current disasters occurring in Iraq are yet more fall-out from the original bad decision to invade that country in the first place. Surprisingly, two stupid assholes are contesting this inarguable truth. Not surprisingly, one of them is the pompous and deceitful "Peter1." (I've only read the first few words in each of his offerings, with no intention to read more. What would be the point?) The other nit-wit calls itself "Daddy Warhola" and he's one of those people gifted with the ability to make their curse of sheer stupidity appear articulate and reasonably sane.

It's all so fucking pointless isn't it?

USA's Air-Strikes on ISIS

So, Wall Street puppet and imperialist shill Barack Obama has decided that the menace of the fundamentalist murderers of ISIS requires US airstrikes in Iraq to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe? I put forward some of my thoughts on these Sunni militants at this post. Basically, I'm just saying that there's a large portion of bullshit in this crisis.

This post is just one of many wherein I announce my knee-jerk opposition to any and all cases for Western humanitarian intervention. Our leaders are vile, inhuman scum-bags who can't be trusted.

There's just no way in hell that US satellites didn't see ISIS on the move. There's just no way in hell that they're not funded by corrupt Sunni governments, mostly from Saudi Arabia. There's just no way in hell that Barack Obama gives a shit about any real potential victims of ISIS. These air-strikes are supposed to bring the USA back in to try to intimidate the recalcitrant Maliki dictatorship.

The Middle East has been suffering World War II levels of devastation since the 1990s. It's time that we stop giving a pass to the architects of this destruction.

I Shall Blog On!

Twitter, twitter. All's a twitter! You've got to get on twitter!

I don't see anything real arising out of this, but given the blog-o-sphere's increasing emptiness, and my own narcissism, I think this is what I'll continue to do.

I sent an email to this public transit activist group about five days ago. I asked 'em if there were any meetings or events coming up. Still haven't heard back from them. Is this why the left divides itself into tiny "coalitions"?

Escapism

Given the fact that the left is so weak and so despised by our  society's leadership, it really isn't the case that the time I spend in escapism is time stolen from saving the world,  You know, if I went out today, or to whatever day there's a protest against Israel's mass-murder of Palestinians, it would have exactly zero impact on stephen harper's insane support for the slaughter.

At the same time though, I'm getting a little tired of the dedicated escapism of stuff like this:

And this:

But, you know, that's the job of special effects people, and actors and script writers and pop music singers, isn't it? Chris Pratt wanted to be an actor. To make a living as an actor, you try to get high-paying gigs. You act in things that people will want to see. Everyone from little kids to adult geeks like space-ships and super-heroes. So, there you go. And all these other super-hero movies where imaginary people with incoherent "powers" wage the battle of good vs. evil, while Wall Street fleeces them and fossil fuels fracking and GMO's poison them, and the National Security State spies on them and abuses them and jails them, while the US military rapes and murders overseas.

And Katy Perry wanted to be a pop-star. Maybe she had some sort of thing about young girls being free to have fun (which is still a "controversial" position for too many North American mindsets) and so, it's just spiraled into this big deal where the good looking young woman with the big boobs now sings about living the good life and having fun while families huddle in terror in Gaza and Barack Obama continues to ship weapons to the Israeli terrorists.

And who knows? Maybe like Mark Ruffalo (who plays the "Incredible Hulk" these days) and Selena Gomez (former "Mouseketeer" former Justin Bieber girlfriend, present pop-star/film ingenue), Chris Pratt or Katy Perry have said something good about some important subject, and in so doing, had more impact than your average left-wing nobody in ten years of activism.

I'm going to finish my son's remaining pancake.

Im Feeling Intolerant Again

Last month I wrote a little screed about why I thought somebody's comment was infuriatingly stupid. I called the piece: "Why I'm So Intolerant." (It turns out that the guy who made the comment has said intelligent things on other matters and that part of what he was saying was correct. It also remains the case that a LOT of what he said in the comment was plain stupid.)

I use the word "intolerant" because there is something about my writing style that makes me appear intolerant of difference of opinion and even broadly contemptuous of the intelligence of anyone who disagrees with me. I've come to live with that. And, the fact of the matter is, the more that I hear from racist shit-heads and their brain-dead justifications for Israel's campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, the more intolerant I become of such scum.

The longer that I think about Librocon assholes and NDP enablers thought patterns, the more angry I become. The sheer stupidity of it all. "Human shields! Human shields! Human shields!" they screech. Lies upon lies upon bloody lies, in the service of killing innocent people. You're goddamned right I'm intolerant of such things.

I've been arguing with one or a few assorted racist trolls at Montreal Simon's place. Complete shit-heads the lot of them. Not a leg to stand on with their imbecilic attempts at argument.

Wouldn't it be great if the left in Canada was ORGANIZED so that cowardly bullies like stephen harper and his corrupt crew of of racists, militarists, religious zealots and closet-cases, felt the slightest bit hesitant to spew their stupid garbage in public? 

Doesn't Israel Have a Right to Defend Itself?

What would you do if terrorists were firing missiles at your people? No country in the world would tolerate that!

Goodness gracious me! Who is firing missiles at you?

Hamas! They've sworn themselves to our destruction! It's in their Charter!

Why that's awful! Are they capable of destroying you?

Happily, no. They're really just a nuisance. A deadly nuisance if you will.

So, these people, who you could easily smash, just fire rockets at you for no reason?

Well, ... it's complicated. But we could smash them. Only we don't. We show forbearance and, with typical Arab ingratitude they respond to our mercy with continued aggression.

Truly, you are a saintly and beautiful people. You don't even defend yourselves? You certainly have that right.

Well, we do defend ourselves. We've blockaded them. We impose curfews on them. We occasionally attack them.

In retaliation for their attacks right?

But of course!

Well, I must say, your position is more than justified.

Thank you.

I just have a few observations to share with you.

Go ahead.

I saw this graphic the other day. It provides a map on Israel's expansionism over the past several decades.

So! You're an anti-Semite!

I wonder if you could tell me how the expansion since 1967 has been achieved? Do Israelis doff their caps and approach sturdy Palestinian farmers and offer them a good price for their lands? Do they then seal the bargain over a cup of tea followed by a friendly handshake, whereupon the Palestinian rents an apartment or buys a condo in an Israeli city or wanders over the border with pockets full of coins to buy land in a neighbouring country?

Why don't you skip straight to the reference to Shylock and get it over with?

Or does the process go more like this?

Since 1967, the Mission’s report notes, Israeli governments have openly led, directly participated in, and had full control of the planning, construction, development, consolidation and encouragement of settlements.
“In compliance with Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel must cease all settlement activities without preconditions,” said Christine Chanet, chair of the three-member inquiry.
Israel must “immediately initiate a process of withdrawal of all settlers from the OPT,” the Mission adds, as well as ensure “adequate, effective and prompt remedy” to all Palestinian victims for the harm suffered as a consequence of human rights violations resulting from the settlements.
The report states that settlements are established and developed for the exclusive benefit of Israeli Jews. They are maintained and advanced through a system of total segregation between the settlers and the rest of the population living in the OPT.
This system of segregation is supported and facilitated by strict military and law enforcement control to the detriment of the rights of the Palestinian population, it adds.
“We are today calling on the Government of Israel to ensure full accountability for all violations, put an end to the policy of impunity and to ensure justice for all victims,” said Asma Jahangir, another member of the Mission.
The report states that Israel is committing serious breaches of its obligations under the right to self-determination and under humanitarian law.
“The magnitude of violations relating to Israel’s policies of dispossessions, evictions, demolitions and displacements from land shows the widespread nature of these breaches of human rights. The motivation behind violence and intimidation against the Palestinians and their properties is to drive the local populations away from their lands, allowing the settlements to expand,” said another member, Unity Dow.
The report, which will be formally presented to the Council on 18 March, states that private entities have also enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction of the settlements – both directly and indirectly.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has taken note of the report, according to his spokesperson, who said Mr. Ban has repeatedly made his views on Israeli settlements clear. “All settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under international law,” the spokesperson said in a note issued to the press.

The UN is a vile nest of anti-Semites and totalitarian hypocrites!

Yes. Of course. And, obviously, Bishop Desmond Tutu is a racist of the worst kind. And Haaretz is, I suppose the newsletter of some die-hard, neo-Nazi skin-head group or something?

"I am especially urging the Assembly to adopt the overture naming Israel as an apartheid state through its domestic policies and maintenance of the occupation, and the overture calling for divestment of certain companies that contribute to the occupation of the Palestinian people," Tutu wrote in an article published in Huffington Post.
"The sustainability of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people has always been dependent on its ability to deliver justice to the Palestinians," Tutu wrote. "I know firsthand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed."

Ah yes! How convenient for you that Bishop Tutu has allowed himself to be deluded about the truth about Israel!

Perhaps. It might also be the case that he's holding a grudge from when Israel was one of the most loyal allies to the detestable apartheid regime during the international campaign of sanctions that eventually brought about its demise.  

Yes. Of course! We're the Devil incarnate! You're just waiting to say that aren't you? It was all that South African gold we couldn't wait to get our hands on it!

I can't recall at this moment, the reasons for Israel's loyalty to the rogue state of apartheid South Africa. It was all of a peace with the loyalty showed to ostracized and abandoned Taiwan at the time. But that's neither here nor there. What we're talking about now is justifications for mass-murder.

Those deaths are entirely the fault of Hamas! Hamas stores weapons under the roofs of civilian homes. Their so-called "fighters" take shelter among civilians!

So, when someone takes hostages, the forces of the state are under no obligation to worry about civilian casualties? If a gunman hides behind a child, the police can feel free to merrily bring both of them down in a hail of bullets?

Israel takes every precaution ...

Actually, we'll get to your stupid bullshit about that in a moment. First, ...

Ah! Now the mask of civility is starting to slip!

...I'd like to return to justifications for mass-murder. We've seen that it's the Occupation that might be at the root of the continued violence in Palestine.

No! It is the provocations of Hamas against Israel!

And what is the face of this occupation? Israeli settlers attack Palestinians at will. Insulting them, taunting them. Throwing stones at them ...

I see! So only Palestinians are allowed to throw stones! The racist double standard again!

Torching their cars.

Yes. Yes. And those three Israeli boys recently brutally murdered by Hamas had it coming to them I suppose?

Well, it doesn't appear to have been Hamas that killed them. And, anyway, you do realize that your whole shtick is that the Palestinians are only getting what they deserve, don't you?

They are suffering because of Hamas! How many times do I have to tell you that???

So Hamas fighters are in those tanks? Firing that artillery? Bombing Gaza from the sky in those fighter-jets?

Israel is responding to ...

Back to the Occupation; Besides daily insults and attacks from "settlers" in illegal settlements, what else is happening? Demolition of homes:

(Jerusalem) – Israeli forces should immediately end unlawful demolitions of Palestinian homes and other structures in Occupied Palestinian Territory. The demolitions have displaced at least 79 Palestinians since August 19, 2013. Demolitions of homes and other structures that compel Palestinians to leave their communities may amount to the forcible transfer of residents of an occupied territory, which is a war crime.

They didn't have the proper permits.

Abuse, sometimes with deadly consequences, at checkpoints:

At the same time, Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented hundreds of cases of abuse by Israeli troops against Palestinians at roadblocks: beatings, shootings, harassment, humiliation and life-threatening delays. Last year, a female Israeli soldier assigned to a Gaza Strip checkpoint was convicted of forcing a Palestinian woman at gunpoint to drink a bottle of cleaning fluid, according to court records. This month, soldiers at the Beit Iba checkpoint, not far from the Hawara checkpoint, ordered a Palestinian to open his violin case and play for them while the lines behind him grew.
At least 83 Palestinians seeking medical care have died during delays at checkpoints, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. At the same time, 39 Israeli soldiers and police officers have been killed at checkpoints and roadblocks, according to the Israeli military. A year ago, two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint south of Jerusalem were shot dead by a Palestinian who carried an automatic rifle rolled in a prayer rug.

Did you notice the part about the killing of those two Israeli soldiers at the end of that piece you idiot?

Yes. Did you notice the part about the sufferings of the Palestinians? Continuing, we have the arbitrary arrests and incarceration of Palestinian children:

Human rights groups reported, however, that Israeli authorities continued to sentence Palestinians according to their age at the time of sentencing even if they were children at the time of the offense, and documented cases in which Israeli authorities arrested children in their homes at night, at gunpoint, questioned them without a family member or a lawyer, and coerced them to sign confessions in Hebrew, which they did not understand.

As of September 31 Israel detained 164 Palestinian children under 18-years-old, and also held 272 Palestinians in administrative detention without charge; 

And the killing of unarmed protesters against land thefts by Israeli settlers:

 In another case, a soldier shot and killed an unarmed resident of Qusra who was protesting against settler incursions on village lands. 

If you read that entire report, you'll see that Hamas is worse!

I'm not holding Israel accountable for the sins of Hamas.

No. You're not even holding Hamas accountable for the sins of Hamas!

The routine practice of torture and beatings in Israeli prisons:

A Palestinian prisoner whose death in Israeli custody fanned violent clashes across the West Bank over the weekend was tortured before he died, the Palestinian Authority has said.
The results of an autopsy conducted in Tel Aviv were revealed at a press conference in Ramallah on Sunday evening after a day of angry protests across the West Bank and Gaza in which dozens were injured.
The findings contradict the Israeli prison service's claim that Arafat Jaradat died on Saturday from a cardiac arrest.
A Palestinian doctor's investigations found that while Jaradat's arteries were clear, the state of his body suggested he had been beaten in the days before his death.

This is sickening. You take the testimony of self-interested terrorists as quoted in the anti-Semitic Guardian as "evidence" of Israeli crimes! You have no idea how ridiculous you look, do you?

Amnesty International:

Torture and other ill-treatment of Palestinians by the General Security Service (GSS) continued to be reported. Methods allegedly used included beatings, sleep deprivation and prolonged periods in stress positions. Israeli domestic law retains “necessity” as a possible justification for torture.

Haaretz.

Traitors!

Beset by an international cabal of anti-Semites and the traitors in your own society?

Of which you are a prime example of the anti-Semitic outsider. I noticed your cowardly dodge when I mentioned the crimes of Hamas against their own people.

It wasn't a dodge. Your point was irrelevant. But fine. I say that Palestinians are justified if they fight back against the crimes of Hamas.

At last! Thank you! Perhaps there's hope for you yet!

Just as I say that Palestinians are justified if they fight back against the crimes of Israel against them.  Especially since it is your argument that no people in the world should be forced to tolerate what Hamas does to you. Or is there a "double standard" at work here? (I haven't even gotten into the effects of the blockade on the economic prospects, the nutritional standards, the health of the Palestinian people.)

Hamas fires rockets indiscriminately. They don't even target their supposed oppressors!

Whereas Israel surgically targets UN shelters where no weapons are hidden? Palestinian hospitals where no weapons are hidden? Precision weaponry and night-vision was used to deliberately target Palestinian boys playing soccer on the beach?

These are tragedies. They are unfortunate. But ...

On the other hand, it seems that you might be off the hook here. Because your precision weaponry isn't really all that precise: 

a margin of error of up to 300 metres, plus a lethal radius of up to 150 metres and an injury radius of 300 metres. So that’s a killing and injury zone of close to half a kilometre from the intended “precise” site of impact – in a territory that is only a few kilometres wide and long. In short, one of the main shells Israel is using in Gaza is completely imprecise.

So, by your logic, your indiscriminate firing of missiles is a war-crime too. It goes back to my example of shooting wildly at a hostage taker. If a crazed gun-man is at a food court in a shopping centre and takes a child and points a gun to his head, you would praise a police-officer for his restraint if he mindlessly took down both the gunman and the child (and anyone standing near them) in a hail of bullets? Are you simple or are you mad?