Would Any Canadian Government Recognize Palestine's Right to Exist

So, the stupid, lying, pathetic closet-case who pretends to be Canada's Foreign Minister says that Canada won't recognize Palestine's right to exist.

Having just torn apart Rosie DiMoron's incoherent, rambling gibberish that was her attempt to defend Canada's involvement in Afghanistan, I realize now that Canada's political culture is so debased that DiMoron is actually taken seriously by a small, but significant minority of people.

I realize that I live in a world where perhaps 50% of Canadians cheered lustily when the Israelis murdered unarmed peace activists on the high seas last summer. There are millions of Canadians who genuinely believe that nuclear-armed Israel, with one of the world's most modern fleets of fighter planes, with a standing army of 150,000, is at risk of destruction from the Palestinians and their rockets and machine-guns.

In such a debased, stupid world, I wonder whether or not any political party in Canada would have the strength of character to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Somehow I doubt it.

"Fisking" Rosie DiMoron's Steaming Pile of Crapola on Afghanistan

Keep watching this space if you're interested. If you haven't read her stream of nonsensical gibberish, here it is.

Bye for now.

AND WE'RE BACK! ...

I don’t have any respect for Rosie DiManno. None whatsoever. I’ll admit that it’s gratifying to read her trashing the moronic thug, TPS Chief Bill Blair over his atrocities at the Toronto G20 Summit, but I don’t give DiManno much credit for her stance. In that case, it’s simply that the truth is so obvious that even Rosie DiManno gets it. Nope. I don’t have an iota of respect for this psychopathic windbag. I’ve heard the theory that The Toronto Star features DiManno as a one-woman freak show because she generates “controversy” and, therefore, readership. I would like to say again, that one of the reasons that I won’t pay for the Star is because they feature this useless, babbling idiot.

KANDAHAR

We don’t listen to soldiers in Canada.

Oh boo-fucking-hoo. You know who else doesn’t get listened to in Canada? The left. The social justice activists. The free trade critics. There are all sorts of occupations that don’t get listened to: teachers, climate scientists, social workers. Why should we listen to soldiers above everyone else? If soldiers feel ignored, they can take a number and get in line with a lot of other people.

What Do We Actually DO, We People of the West?

I've been reading a lot about World War II lately. I don't romanticize the conflict. Unless epic tragedies caused by deluded fuck-wits can be romanticized. But I do think about the future those people were fighting and dying for. (Or, in the case of the civilians murdered by the leaders, the future that many simply missed by being killed.)

To a great degree, in the Western democracies, democracy was never stronger than after the war. The ordinary people, who felt deserving of a say after the shared sacrifices of the war, and all the hooting and hollering about "democracy" and "equality" from those leaders inspiring them to fight, made their demands very clear. And those demands were all about material concerns, and why not? Protection from the appalling insecurities of unemployment in an industrial capitalist economy. The right to unionize to deal with the collective of the industrial corporation or conglomerates with some degree of equality and dignity. The taxation of the super-rich to fund a more human way of life in the great cities. Access to education. Access to decent health care.

Here's the thing: These material benefits helped produce generations of people, of whom, MANY (but not all) had the privilege and comfort and peace of mind, to be able to think about people and issues other than themselves.

I'm talking, of course, about the much-maligned "hippies." The feminists. The peace-movement activists. The civil-rights activists. The environmental activists. Derided by small-minded, stunted, twisted souls today, these people thought beyond their own immediate self-interest and helped to create many improvements and bring a degree of sanity to our civilization. At the same time that they were doing this, our governments and capitalists, were both building things. To a great degree this was made possible by the wealth created by the reforms that had been demanded in the post-War period.

Not all of these things were blessings. The St. Lawrence Seaway has caused a number of unintended ecological consequences. The CN Tower is actually a monstrosity (even though I've been up it twice).

But I look at these public projects, from the 1950s and the 1970s, and I think: Has there been any project of similar ambition and confidence produced since the 1970s? What have we been doing as a people?

For the most part, it's consisted of austerity at home, and, lately, throwing money down rat-holes in military adventures like Afghanistan. Oh, that, and shovelling even more money at the wealthiest in the faint hope that once they're lying on heaps of gold deep enough to swim in, they'll feel some "confidence" and "invest in the economy" to hire people. (This after they've been laying us off for years pronouncing our labour costs as "unrealistic" or "un-competitive" with wage rates prevailing in Mexico, Brazil, China, or India.)

And what have we, as a people, been doing? For the most part we've been complete cowards. Gutless dupes. As the elites have turned against the post-war compromise and counter-attacked, the majority of us, it seems, are all fired up to beat on the weakest and the poorest. Supposedly petty criminals and welfare recipients held us all hostage for decades and wrecked the economy in their mad lust for substandard housing and poverty-level incomes, but NO MORE! Or else it's immigrants; both too lazy to work and stealing our jobs at the same time. Anti-immigration hysterics can't seem to find the time to research the probable causes of immigration to Canada. They're too selfish, stupid, and oafish to look into how the Western elite-managed IMF imposes economy-destroying policies on those countries. US-Americans shriek about the Mexican invasion, never looking at how NAFTA has devastated Mexico's economy.

Large minorities of Canadian voters embrace wars on the weakest and the poorest, as well as upon those groups (some of whom are simultaneously among the weakest and the poorest) whose work over the decades was so crucial for improving the Canadian standard of living (feminists, environmentalists, artists, civil rights activists), and cheerfully support shit-head politicians who blatantly rob them and cheat them, and acquiesce (probably out of laziness and ignorance) to an economic system that increases their economic insecurity and reduces their chances of a future. They read garbage and swill, suitable perhaps to their level of mental and moral illiteracy (Toronto Sun, National Post) that only clouds their minds with delusions and lies.

As a result of the ascendancy of these morons, we have governments that do nothing for us but brutalize us and lie to us. We have an economic system lurching from one crisis to another (larger) crisis. We have an industrial-consumerist way of life that is suicidal. We build nothing. We achieve nothing. Nothing but our own sad, ridiculous demise.

And, while it all goes down, these witless fools will renounce ALL of their legal and civil rights, in the pathetic hope that the governments and elites who betrayed them and led them to ruin, will torture and execute the "right people" to keep them safe.

I Can't Believe the Bullshit that People Fall For

Yeah, ... so apparently we're leaving Afghanistan, but for a few hundred sad sacks forced to work as trainers of the soldiers and police who are notorious for raping and pillaging on behalf of warlord governors and the Karzai kleptocracy.

Ten years of that shit. Ten years of lies. Ten years of "support the troops!" Ten years of torture. Ten years of insulting Canadian democracy.

And then the worst offenders get a majority government.

Don't get me started about the economy.

The fucking G20. Call me crazy, but I expected better of my fellow Canadians. I didn't expect such bovine complacency at the complete waste of one billion dollars and the blatant disregard for their human rights and our international reputation that was demonstrated there.

And now, sick of the thuggish, incompetent, corrupt McGuinty government, my fellow Ontarians seem poised to move all the way across the political spectrum from the centre right to the right-wing. They're prepared to punish the revolting McGuinty by electing the delusional, revolting Tim Hudak, who can then join fellow deluded right-wing fuck-ups Rob Ford and Don Cherry on the stage where they can bray like the stupid jack-asses they are while the world burns around them.

People really are consumed by their own little worlds. And, for the most part, our worlds, mine included, are filled up with wishes and desires created by corporate marketers and public relations brain-washers. Thus, we have the politics of idiocy. It was ever thus. Thus it ever shall be.

Schopenhauer was right, ... except for the part where he believed we could escape.

There's no escape from the ceaseless gravitating between frustrated desire to frustrated boredom.

A Little Footnote on harper's Stupitity

Last year I blogged about an incendiary Toronto Sun cover story about a theatre festival featuring a play about a Canadian terrorist.

I just found out that the festival in question; Summerworks, lost its $47,000 in federal funding. No doubt part of the reason is that the harpercons don't believe in public support for the arts, as much as they believe in spending billions of dollars to beat us, arrest us on bullshit charges, and then incarcerate us in new super-max prisons which will be built at taxpayers' expense but run (at an exorbitant charge to us) by private sector rackateers. But I'm also certain that the biggest reason the harpercons pulled the funding was because they would be loathe to fund anything which challenges the notion that the "War on Terror" isn't the biggest fraud going.

Apparently, the play, which would have received approximately $890 in federal funds from the Summerworks federal grant, is an uneven thing, which tries to portray the accused terrorist sympathetically, but which doesn't (the reviewers say) glorify terrorism in any way, shape, or form.

But in harper's Canada, anything that doesn't have us belching and hooting in delirious, orgasmic joy at the thought of Canadian soldiers dying for the Karzai government, or acquiescing to the tortures of our fellow citizens in Syrian, Sudanese, or other prisons, simply can't be tolerated.

The Maple Leaf Uber Alles.

The New Homophobia

It's fooking amazing innit?

Have you heard of "The New Anti-Semitism"?

Apparently, when people criticize the IDF for shooting Palestinian children in the back, or the government of Israel for launching an illegal invasion of Gaza or Lebanon and carpet-bombing civilians, it's really just an excuse to indulge in "anti-Semitism." (This is different from the old anti-Semitism because, ... um, those old anti-Semites didn't have Israeli atrocities to use as a cover, ... as if the people committing the atrocities can't ever be legitimately criticized for them.)

But have you heard of "The New Homophobia"?

When homophobic creeps like Ford or Mammoliti start wailing about "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid" and political messages at PRIDE, they're really just using it as an excuse to indulge in homophobia. (It's really just the same old homophobia, but the whole brouhaha about QAIA allows me to have fun with two stupid ideas at the same time.)

(That plus the fact that Ford and Mammoliti get turned-on by the idea of shooting Arabs, like all good, upstanding North American "conservatives" do.)

Margie Gillis and the War in Afghanistan

Some, some dumb-ass moron at the wingnut welfare news channel was hypocritically bitching and moaning about how Margie Gillis's dance company got $1.2 million over 13 years.

This in a country where the government won't even tell us what it's multi-billion dollar fighter planes and prisons boondoggles are going to cost.

But then, the self-same dumb-ass moron took Ms. Gillis to task for having an opinion about how compassionate Canada is, dredging up the deaths of 150 Canadian soldiers in our fools' errand in Afghanistan as an example of our compassion as a people.

First of all, this shameless exploitation of the troops as a foil for an irrelevant segue from a conversation about arts funding, is truly sickening. Secondly, if we're going to talk about wasted money and treasure and blood, the ten year idiocy in Afghanistan must surely rank up there as among the greatest wastes.

If that dumb-ass teleprompter reader and incoherent ranter could stir herself to read something sensible, she'd know that those 150 Canadian lives were wasted, absolutely wasted, to prop-up one of the most corrupt governments in the world. A torturing, thieving, raping monstrosity, fraudulently elected, and dependent upon mercenaries and foreign troops for its very survival. An occupation has been conducted, ostensibly to defend and expand the rights of women, but after ten years, Afghanistan remains one of the worst places in the world to be a woman.

True, much of the danger stems from the fact of the conflict itself. However, since the conflict itself is the product of the depredations of the corrupt, brutal government, it's hard to fault the insurgents only.

The whole thing is a tragedy. And as Canadian government policy, one of the biggest wastes, one of the biggest clusterfucks. But because it involves the Canadian military actually shooting at people, it's all good with the wingnut welfare receiving, teleprompter reading, ignorant ranting fool at the useless right-wing news channel.