Catholic Child Abusers

No, I'm not not talking about the priests who are forcibly sodomizing little boys. That deserves attention, undoubtedly, but I'm talking about mental abuse. This kind of bullshit.

It wasn’t until her seven-year-old son asked her if he’d burn in hell that Marjorie Kirsop became concerned.
But this fall, when five-year-old Sarah Kirsop declared she had converted to Catholicism ...

Let's pretend for a moment that I, as a public school Grade 2 teacher, actually did what us "militant" atheists are accused of doing every day - and tried to force everyone to our non-religion.

Imagine, Mrs. Baptist's children came home and said:
"Mommy, Mr. DTK told us in school today that Jesus is a fairy tale. Did you know that? He even showed us parts of the bible that are wrong!"

I'd be fired in a day, union or no union.

So how come the only school board in the town of Morinville, Alberta - a school board which is officially a public school board - is allowed to teach hellfire and brimstone to the children of non-believers?

Riddle me that.

Bunch of jerks.

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DeCloet: Stop hating Americans! Wah-wah!

Go ahead, read it. At least the first two pargagraphs.

Apparently, Canada's relative success in weathering this recession is nothing to be particularly happy about. It's some kind of accident that we did better than the Americans. And anybody who is proud of how our previous government reined in corporate greed, refused to participate in banking shenanigans and what not ... well, those people are just exercising their "latent anti-Americanism".

Or not.

A cure for that smugness lies in the Bank of Canada’s latest review of the financial system, and its warnings that Canadians are still spending money they don’t have. Some facts leap out.

Yes. That's what we need: a "cure" for our "smugness". Right on. 'Cause we all hate Americans, see, and we need to be taught that we're stupid, too!

So here's how it worked. The American government struck down decades-old (even century old) laws regulating banks. They let very wise, very wealthy people run roughshod over the economy and the poor people. Those people left the economy dry as a bone and left the taxpayer holding the bag.

The Canadian government didn't do that.

So then the United States got sick. Really, really sick. And it started to affect us.

So our government and the Bank of Canada, working in tandem, cranked our interest rates down to historic lows in order to stimulate the economy by making it cheap to borrow money.

And we borrowed. And we're in debt.

See?! We're just as dumb as the Americans! Take that you pinko, leftist whackjobs!

Yeah. Yeah.

The difference, in case you missed it, was that we were smart enough not to leave Conservatives in power for too long. We can see their greed. We can see what they're going to do us. Either they'll go directly for the money, or they'll try to take out the education and health care systems first. We notice, and we kick them out.

As long as we had the Liberals in, they marched us toward surplus and conservative (!) fiscal policies with a proper long term outlook. You put Conservatives in, as the Americans did year after year after year, and you get a financial mess.

That, in the end, is the difference. We're willing to take a long term view, tax our wealthy people, and make things work. The Americans took Reagan and two Bushes, let their economy spin downward out of control and instead believed what the liars were saying instead of what they were doing.

No, that's not "anti-Americanism". It's just what happened.

And it's journalists like Derek DeCloet, Americaphiles all, who refuse to see that there are characteristic differences between the populations. It's people like that who are hurting our country by spreading this myth that we're only being different for the sake of difference.

It's time people like that, people who truly hate what this country is about, get called out for what they are: anti-Canadians.

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Our Anti-Canadian Government

With Vic Toews at the front.

They've been secretly crafting a North American security agreement. Why is it done in secret? Why, because Canadians are too stupid, naive and anti-American for this sort of agreement to take place in the light of day.

[a leaked document] provides a rare insight into how the government regards Canadians: as a nation ignorant of the true scale of the security threat it faces and more concerned with privacy rights.

See that? You're too dumb to comprehend the horrid terrorist threats coming our way! You stupid left-wing whackos keep quoting these statistics that say 100 times as many people have died in car accidents as terrorists incidents. Stop doing that and learn to be afraid, dammit!

Is there some reason that Canadians should be worried about their privacy?

“Greater information sharing is part of the initiative. The safeguarding of privacy and sovereignty will be of concern for Canadians,” the document says.

See what your government thinks of you? You're worried about your privacy. Don't you realize that in order for shipping containers to be properly inspected at Canadian ports, the American government needs to have your biometric data, medical history and a bunch of other things they'll use against you. I mean, seriously, people: the guys who are going to interrogate you in Syria need that information to torture you effectively!

“The Canadian public may underestimate the security threat to Canada,” the communication plan says.

No, we don't underestimate it. The problem is that the government overestimates that threat. Here, you do the arithmetic if you want. It looks to me like about 350,000 people have died in traffic accidents since 9-11. That's a hundred times the number who have died from terrorism.

I think Canadians have a pretty shrewd idea how dangerous terrorism is. I think our government is exaggerating so it can get deeper in bed with the Americans.

So let's just get to the meat of this issue:

“Notwithstanding our significant investment to date, a perception exists in the U.S. that Canada has not focused enough on security,” the Public Safety document says.

That's right, puppy. You're a good dog, but not good enough. Now roll over and play dead for Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam wants to handle your immigration for you, so he can extradite refugees he doesn't like to someplace where torture is legal. He wants to see your records, examine your people, know what they're up to ...

And once he has all your records. Once he know exactly what you're doing every moment of every day, then maybe - just maybe - he'll let some of your trucks cross the border without a tonne of harassment.

Or not. Whatever. Terrorism, you know.

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McGuinty Just Wanted to Help the Police

In response to the Ombudsman's report that the use of a wartime act to police the G20 protests in Toronto was probably illegal and unconstitutional, our Premier had the following to say:

“We moved pretty quickly on this thing in order to help our police at the earliest possible opportunity,” he said. “We did not take the appropriate steps to communicate this to the public.”

No, Mr. McGuinty. You've got it all wrong.

The problem isn't that you "didn't take the appropriate steps to communicate ...". The problem is that you didn't take the appropriate steps at all.

Your job, in case you've forgotten, isn't to facilitate the police. Your job isn't to protect the people with riot gear, batons, guns and tasers.

Your job is to protect the freedom of the people. You were supposed to protect our rights. It wasn't that you communicated your unconstitutional law in a poor manner. It's that you invoked an unconstitutional law and interrupted the freedom of the people to speak their minds.

That's the unforgivable crime here.

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The Anti-Canadians don't want to live in Wonderland

That's what the rest of us want, apparently. We have an "Alice In Wonderland" view of politics and terrorism, according to the former head of CSIS.

Someone named "J.L. Granatstein", writing for the Ottawa Citizen, agrees.

It goes along with that "inferiority complex" myth that the Americans, along with Canadian journalists and right wing politicians, like to spread. Because, naturally, if you disagree with American policies, there must be something wrong with you. Maybe you have a small penis? Just sayin'.

Well, it's time to call bullshit. It's also time to call this attitude for what it is:

Anti-Canadianism.

The vast majority of Canadian people believe in a few core values: social medicine; the illegality of torture; international law; peace keeping.

Our elected leaders, a good chunk of our military brass and many of our journalist-pundits, have separate values. Stuff like private medicine, torture-but-keep-it-quiet, dumping on the United Nations, starving peace keeping forces until they fail to function.

They hate Canada. There's no other way to put it. They find themselves at the top of a power structure, elected by people they actually hate.

So they tell us that our values are unrealistic. They tell us our rules are just getting in the way. They deride our hope for the future as naive.

They really, truly, hate us.

If you read that Citizen article, you can see the hatred. Granatstein has to tell us how we aren't "pulling our own weight" and how that threatens our "sovereignty". What he means is that the U.S. will conquer us if we don't do what they want. And then he wonders what part of American policy we could legitimately oppose?

Granatstein is upset that Canadians will easily fall in to "paroxysms of moral outrage" while failing to finish the quote from which that phrase came - namely the interrogation after torture of a child soldier. Yeah, J.L, believe it or not we get pissed off when children are tortured - even if you hold on to them for eight years and torture them as adults.

We're so fucking naive that way.

Regarding Afghanistan, what he says with irony, I say with conviction*:

How much better if the money wasted on defence spending had gone for day care or better medicare.

This is typical of anti-Canadians. Never does he explain or justify what the United States government does. It's enough to assume that America is right and everyone else is naive, stupid or evil.

I'm not naive. I do aim for everyone on this planet to live in a kind of Wonderland. By that I mean: everyone has food to eat; everyone is free from violence; every child is safe and secure; no one in enslaved; everyone can vote for their leaders.

Will it happen in my lifetime, the whole world over? Will people all over this world dump the religions and other vile philosophies that lead them violently all over the globe?

Not likely. But it's still the goal, and it's quite opposite to where Granatstein's heroes would take us - and have been taking us for decades.

I'm reminded of Philip Pullman, from the very end of the his Northern Lights trilogy.

There is no kingdom of heaven. Never was. Never will be. The idea is dead. The only thing we can do is build the republic of heaven. And we have to do that right here, on Earth.

And we will not arrive at the republic of heaven on Earth via extrajudicial killings, secret torture, enslaving people across the globe and out of sight, stealing resources from other countries and forcing other kinds of misery in far off places.

Anyone who believes so is naive, stupid and evil, and it's time we started calling them out on it. It's also time that Canadians stood up, pointed fingers, and called out the people who don't represent our values.

* - sorry Cap'n, had to steal that line.

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Diplomacy and Secrecy

I watched a CBC interview, linked from Greenwald's salon blog.

About half way through that video, a former Canadian diplomat comes on for a interview in which he derides the latest Wikileak as bad for diplomacy. His argument, boiled down, is this:

1. The Indonesian gov't was carrying out horrible human rights abuses against the East Timorese
2. The East Timorese told the Canadian diplomat
3. The Canadian diplomat told the Canadian gov't
4. The Canadian gov't could use this information in negotiations with the torturing, human rights abusing Indonesian gov't.

His argument is basically that, should this path of the information (tortured -> diplomat -> gov't) be broken by a lack of secrecy, it would fall apart. Victims would no longer feel safe to complain. Diplomats like himself would be too scared to report.

Seems reasonable, doesn't it?

Except it's bullshit.

His argument boils down to the idea that I should trust Stephen Harper, Jean Chretien or Paul Martin - under cloak of secrecy - to solve human rights problems the world over.

Really? That's your best argument? That political leaders will do the right thing if we just cover our eyes and ignore them?

I have very little patience for that level of willful stupidity, especially as it comes from someone who ought to know better.

The best thing, Mr. Diplomat, is transparency. You know what stops wars? Seeing little girls burnt by napalm. Seeing helicopters pilots shooting up vans full of Iraqi children. Seeing East Timorese slaughtered and executed by the tens of thousands (which, you'll note was not prevented by our diplomatic cables).

Would I prefer to trust the Internet or the government?

I think you know the answer.

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Arguing About Hate Crime

Once it had been explained to me, I found it pretty simple.

When you single out a group of people as a target for hatred and violence, you assault a whole community (where "assault", legally speaking, includes "threatening"). So we made a law to make it clear that inciting hatred against a visible group of people is a crime.

So if you beat up a black guy or a brown guy or a gay guy, you're only guilty of "aggravated assault". That means, basically, "causing bodily harm".

But if you repeatedly assault members of the same group over and over again in a way that intimidates others of that group, well, you're not just guilty of aggravated assault in each case, but of "assault" against the whole community. Y'know, seeing as they all have to worry about crazy ass bigots beating them up.

Not complicated.

Unless of course, you've got your blinders full on like these guys over at Christian Governance.

Then it's all about how those pansy-ass liberals are bent on keeping the poor, beleagured white male down. Oh, poor white males! How ever will they cope?!

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