Of red waters, allophilia, and timeless masterpieces

There are times when sundry currents of information strike us at the same time, leaving us splashing in the roiled waters of our imagination. (Yes, I've been reading Rex Murphy again. Sorry about that.)

Nevertheless, today's Globe & Mail presents us with a series of images worth a comment or two. The first is of red water, with which those of us who have seen the recent trailer for The Reaping will be familiar. We learn from the Canada in Brief section that the Red River is rising in Selkirk, Manitoba because of an ice-jam, and, immediately adjacent to this report, we are informed of a leak at an Alcan factory near Jonquiere in Quebec, releasing bauxite sludge into the Saguenay River and causing stretches of it to turn red. Concerns have been raised about the effect of the spill on the environment, but an Alcan spokesperson assures us that there will be no ill effects, so I guess we can sleep tight.

This kind of odd juxtaposition can feed our primordial desire for meaning. End times, anyone? A compositor's decision with The Reaping as conscious or unconscious motivator? We look for order in chaos, and when flashes of order appear, we impose narratives--if you want proof, take a look at any conspiracy theory, such as the "inside job" of 9/11. The elements just seem to fit together, don't they? But that's what narrative does: it makes things cohere. On the positive side, it gives us order, however illusory; on the negative side, it can jam everything into one story--the so-called "grand narratives" that Jean-François Lyotard warns us to distrust. Or it can construct the closed delusional system of the paranoid, or of the conspiracy-mongering kerosene-and-rabbit-wire nutbar.

Which brings me, by a circuitous route, to theocracy. The impulse behind religion--the experience of the spiritual, the sense of wonder, the intuitive awareness of the interconnectedness of all things--is transmogrified almost inevitably into a set of rules and admonitions, an order imposed by force. The haunting poetry of al-Rumi turns into the ossified, hateful and simplistic dogma of the Salafist. According to one account,Christ danced with his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane (Acts of John 94-96), but the powers that be wouldn't let that one into the canonical Bible. Popes don't dance: they condemn millions to death in Africa with their opposition to condoms, and their priests destroy the lives of countless children who venture too close to them. The ecstatic William Blake, as always, says it best:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

So long as the spiritual is hijacked by the likes of Osama bin Laden, Benedict XVI and the countless Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells and Jimmy Swaggarts of this world, not to mention George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, we shall have nothing but rods of iron and holy wars. And rivers running red with blood.

Turning now to allophilia, with a hat-tip to the Globe's Sheema Khan, we have a professor at Harvard looking at social cohesion in a new way. Instead of "tolerance" of differences, and figuring out how to deal with xenophobia, Professor Todd L. Pittinsky thinks that we should be promoting and cultivating a positive liking for other groups. What a concept! But a word of warning--someone else tried that a couple of millennia back, and we're observing the anniversary of his execution this very weekend.

And finally, back to where I started--with yet another florid, over-wrought column by Rex Murphy. Today he's exercised because Handel's Samson oratorio is being given "a modern political reading" by an artistic director in Victoria. Samson is being portrayed as a suicide terrorist, which doesn't work for Murphy because the strong man has the wrong religion, and because the artistic director has the wrong politics, a sin that Murphy, with no visible trace of irony, attempts to rebut with political arguments of his own, when he isn't personally attacking the director. But then we come to this: "This insertion of current politics into timeless masterpieces is a form of petty vandalism."

That one took my breath away. Because Murphy is here arguing, not for art, but for religion. What, after all, is a "timeless masterpiece?" Has the man never been to Stratford, to witness the endless interpretations, many of them good, of William Shakespeare's plays? Does the strength of art not lie precisely in its capacity to be endlessly reinterpreted, made real and immediate for audiences across centuries and cultures? Its "timelessness" consists of its almost infinite adaptability, not its persistence as one thing while history and culture eddy around its vast, immoveable bulk. The latter isn't art--it's just another version of that vulgar notion of God that's causing so much trouble. It stems from the self-same desperate clinging to the authority and stability and order that totalitarians promise. It is founded on fear and self-deception, and there is no shortage of politicians and preachers to exploit both for their own ends.

Samson Agonistes, John Milton's poem upon which Handel based his work, is only intelligible to us today because we recognize the emotions and the images that it conjures up: the heroic representative of a people, captured, blinded and enslaved, who sacrifices himself in order to kill his enemies, delivering his people from the "Philistian yoke" and thus carrying out the will of God. In a place called Gaza. Attempting to discern his all-too-human psychology in the poetry, we might well develop a different, and deeper, insight into the mind of a suicide bomber, or a young kid at Vimy, for that matter, fighting the war to end all wars. Battles are at this very moment raging over Samson's grave. We can be stirred by this poem for numerous reasons, centuries after it was written--but not if we treat it as holy writ, timeless and unchanging, and wait for it to be interpreted for us by imperious clerks, high priests and newspaper columnists. The letter killeth.

Looking-glass world

Exploited whites, oppressed heterosexuals and endangered English-speakers should take heart from an article in today's Ottawa Citizen. "Men, Misogyny and Misandry," written by an appropriately gender-balanced duo from McGill University (that august home of Margaret Somerville and assorted animal torturers), sets out the thesis that men are "a silent class of victims" in need of liberation.

Hostility towards women may be increasing among young men, the authors suggest. And this is directly connected, they argue, with a one-sided approach that emphasizes mistreatment of women, but ignores or ridicules what they deem to be the equivalent mistreatment of men. Why is the latter so underreported? Because men are reluctant to admit their vulnerability, and unlikely to be taken seriously if they do complain. Men, too, after all, are victims of domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape.

Popular culture plays a large role in targeting men, making us look stupid, or brutal, or maybe both. We suffer from double standards by which we are censured for comments and behaviour that would be perfectly acceptable if we were women. Movies and commercials make fools of us: "Ridiculing men, but not women, is politically correct."

And then, from these two McGill-based folks, this gem: "The elite culture of academia... routinely relies directly or indirectly on the belief that every major problem is due ultimately to 'patriarchy' (and therefore to men as a class)." Somehow these academics have avoided the elite culture in which they live and breathe, a classic example of the Ishmael effect. But this may simply be because they aren't very good academics, caricaturing, in a single breathless assertion, decades of social, political and economic thought, little or none of which is so absurdly reductionist. Another example, no doubt, of targeting men, in this case straw ones.

The authors go swiftly on to bemoan "statistics abuse" that indicates (through tendentious manipulation) that women are victims in this society, or in danger of becoming victims. The courts, thoroughly brainwashed, are now part of the problem, doing their bit to victimize men. Why, there aren't even any affirmative action programs for men, the authors declare, somehow managing to keep a straight face. And the laws are continually interpreted to the detriment of men.

No examples of "statistics abuse" are provided, so let me assist. In a recent article ("The Hidden Face of Violence") in an Ottawa giveaway magazine, one Suzanne Schmiedel Lapointe resuscitates the canard that women are just as violent towards men as vice-versa. Let's look at the unmanipulated facts.

Statistics Canada reported in 2000 that, of those who have experienced spousal violence, 55.7% were women and 44.3% were men [ed. note: h/t to "2Sheds" in the comments for this clarification]. When the degree of violence is factored in, however, those figures change dramatically: 40% of the assaulted women experienced actual physical injury from their partners, while only 13% of the men did.

More generally, the author would have done well to consult the exhaustive survey of the ‘equivalence literature’ to be found in Dobash et al., "The Myth of Sexual Symmetry in Marital Violence"(R.P. Dobash, R.E. Dobash, M. Wilson, M. Daly, Social Problems, Vol. 39, No.1 [1992], pp. 71-91), which finds it methodologically flawed as well as contradicted by a veritable mountain of research.

Take the myth, repeated in Lapointe's article, that men underreport assault by their wives because of embarrassment and social stigma--an echo of that claim is found in the Citizen article. M.D. Schwartz analyzed U.S. National Crime Survey data from 1973 to 1982, and found that 67.2 percent of men and 56.8 per cent of women called police to report an assault.(Schwartz, M.D. "Gender and injury in spousal assault," Sociological Focus, 20 (1987), pp. 61-75). This finding is replicated in several other studies (Dobash et al., 1992: 76). So much for "statistics abuse"--and its effective debunking.

(As an aside, it was particularly offensive in the earlier piece to read once again of Warren Farrell’s glib comparison of the Montreal Massacre to the murderous rampage by Chicago resident Laurie Dann that took place around the same time. In the former case, Marc Lepine deliberately separated men from women at the Ecole Polytechnique, made a number of references to "feminists," and shot fourteen women dead for daring to pursue what was then a non-traditional occupation. On the other hand, we have no idea about the ideological motivations, if any, of Laurie Dann, a disturbed individual on dangerous psychotropic drugs. It would be more prudent to ask, What percentage of serial or mass killers are women? For every Laurie Dann there is a host of individuals like Ted Bundy and Richard Speck and Clifford Olsen.)

But back to our McGill researchers. The problem, they claim, is misandry, a "word which most people don't even know." These intrepid opponents of academic elitism have not managed, it appears, to shed the arrogance and condescension that accompany it. Misandry "is a form of sexism or even racism (given that maleness is a biological classification)," they state. I'm still scratching my head over that one--are they arguing that race is a biological classification, a grossly antiquated Gobineau-like notion still pushed by their marginal academic colleague Phillippe Rushton over at Western? Are they suggesting that men are a race?

The authors proceed to explain away the income gap between men and women in predictable fashion--women simply lack the qualifications, or they deliberately avoid promotional opportunities, or they prefer to be at home with the young'uns, "and so on." (I enjoyed the last bit--it was as though they had become bored with their regurgitation of these stale clichés.) In any case, women are fast closing the gap, but only because of evil "equity" programs (their shudder-quotes, not mine) and the "downward mobility of men."

As for male dominance of the political scene, it's not only men who vote these guys into office, and besides, women exercise their power through lobby groups and government agencies like Status of Women Canada. Those sneaky broads implement their policies indirectly, "through bureaucratic fiat behind closed doors instead of public discussion in legislative assemblies" --"and so forth." (See "and so on," above.)

Certainly, the authors concede, the women's movement has greatly improved the lives of women, even if by underhanded means. Laws are being interpreted in their favour, while men are simply not seen as victims of discrimination, they assert indignantly, even though men alone were once conscripted into the armed forces. I'm not making this up.

To imagine that men oppress women is just "the conspiracy theory of history," the authors aver--a bit like imagining, I guess, that whites have ever oppressed blacks, or that rich folks have ever enjoyed the fruits of their employees' labour. In any case, it's a bit late at this point to decry conspiracy theorizing, given the prominence of it in this very article.

It's males who are in deep trouble now, the authors claim: their high school drop-out rates are higher (12% as opposed to 7% for girls), and they are now a minority in Canadian university classrooms (although males, it seems, continue to enjoy a comfortable edge in full-time graduate studies, something they fail to note). It's the beginning of the end: the inevitable result will be "an undereducated and impoverished male underclass." Yet men are afraid to speak out, for fear of being labeled misogynists. "It's time to wake up," the authors conclude. Now, where have I heard that before?

Glorifying terrorism

If this stupidity becomes law, the terrorists have won--and even the foregoing statement might result in criminal charges.

What's a "terrorist?" An Israeli settler shooting olive harvesters in Nablus? The guerrillas who eventually won the American War of Independence? Hungarians throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks? The French Resistance? Nelson Mandela? The Stern Gang? The Nicaraguan contras, supported by Ronald Reagan? The Afghan mujahideen? The Taliban? Islamic militants beheading schoolgirls? Just the latter two? All of the above, and more? Just the ones who aren't freedom fighters? Which ones are they?

What's "glorification?" Erecting a monument? Calling terrorists "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers?" Praising the French Resistance in the same breath? Celebrating the Fourth of July? Giving Nelson Mandela the Nobel Peace Prize? Calling the slaughter of hundreds of Lebanese civilians "a measured response" to the capture of two Israeli soldiers? (Can the actions of states be deemed "terrorist? Can supporting those actions be deemed "glorification?")

Second-last question: if legislation is seriously contemplated, will it provide clear answers to the above questions--and many others like them? And the final one--just how cranio-rectally impacted are the Liberals and Conservatives on this House of Commons committee?

UPDATE: (March 28) Damn, I'm forgetting my manners. H/t to Kate.

Ugly Rumours

The rumour around here (Let me be very clear; I am not suggesting that the rumour is true. I am only stating that it is out there) is that Jason Cherniak has been connected with NAMBLA, a notorious pedophile organization.

What, did I say something wrong? [Attempts to look as innocent as a 27-year-old Liberal lawyer.]

UPDATE: (March 26) Jason's non-apology may be found here. Others have righteously parsed the hell out of it. It isn't even offered to the right person (Olivia Chow) or to the NDP. Count me as one of the unimpressed.

Harper and Dion join forces

What do Liberals and Conservatives have in common? They are both Big Business-driven parties, with fundamentally the same agenda, and sharing the same contempt for the working people of this country. Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than Stéphane Dion's spiking of Bill C-257--the anti-scab bill that would have prevented the use of strikebreakers in federally-regulated industries. With help from their Liberal allies, the Conservatives defeated the Bill last night by a vote of 177-122.

Dion's support of strikebreaking turned around a caucus that, until he became leader, was set to pass the Bill. Indeed, the vote in the House of Commons last October was strongly supportive. But furious lobbying by corporations had its obvious effect. The final vote followed a decision by the Speaker that amendments to permit essential services in case of a strike were out of order (a suspect ruling, praised by the corporate sector, which provided the rationale for the Liberal flip-flop).

The essential services issue was, of course, a smokescreen. No such amendments were needed, because legislation covering essential services already exists in Section 87.4 of the Canada Labour Code:

87.4 (1) During a strike or lockout not prohibited by this Part, the employer, the trade union and the employees in the bargaining unit must continue the supply of services, operation of facilities or production of goods to the extent necessary to prevent an immediate and serious danger to the safety or health of the public.

Anti-scab legislation has been in effect in both BC and Quebec for many years, with none of the dire consequences that business lobbyists in Ottawa were claiming would result from the passage of C-257. Two right-wing premiers, Jean Charest and Gordon Campbell, have made no moves to repeal the legislation, and have stayed out of the public debate.

Dion, caving in to the Big Business sector, has now earned his anti-labour stripes. Will it be enough to attract the support of the corporate media in the upcoming election?

The eyes have it

Parti Québécois leader André Boisclair is in hot water, if I can be forgiven the use of an undoubtedly racist metaphor. Referring to students at Harvard, where he was pursuing a master's degree, he said:

I was surprised to see that on campus, about a third of the undergraduate students had slanted eyes [yeux bridés]. They're not going to work in sweatshops. They're people who will later work as engineers, managers, and will create wealth. They're people who will innovate in their countries. There is ferocious competition in the world today.

Fo Niemi, speaking for the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations in Montreal, found the comment "derogatory" and "racially offensive." The Chinese Canadian National Council has now entered the fray, calling the reference to slanted eyes disrespectful and trading on caricature. In a stroke, Boisclair has levelled the electoral playing field, it seems, placing himself right up there (or down there) with Mario Dumont's sleazy defence of hérouxvillisme and Jean Charest's opportunistic opposition to khumur in girls' soccer. But Boisclair has adamantly refused to apologize for any of this, and his electoral rivals, who live in their own glass houses, have wisely declined to throw stones.

Could this be simply a matter of translation? A little over a month ago, well before this controversy broke out, a francophone inquired on an on-line forum:

How would you describe Asian people's eyes? In French we say they have "les yeux bridés". I've looked it up in different dictionaries and have found different adjectives: slant / slanting / slit eyes but don't know which one is really correct- I mean not offensive. Can anyone help?

Some other round-eyes made suggestions, but I think the answer to his last question is a clear No. And his first question unwittingly sets a trap.

"Asian" has come into political vogue to replace the Eurocentric "Oriental." But there are Asians and Asians, and not all of them possess the epicanthic fold. (That sounds reassuringly medical, doesn't it?) It is fair to say, though, that the overwhelming majority of, say, the Chinese and Japanese populations, possess this physical characteristic.

M. Boisclair apparently fell into a similar trap in subsequent comments: upon being asked why he was referring to Chinese students one day and Japanese students the next, he responded that he meant students from various Asian countries, presumably those inhabited by people with the aforementioned epicanthic fold.

I've been struggling with a few thought-experiments. Suppose M. Boisclair, returning to a university campus after several decades,was struck by the fact that half of the students in the engineering faculty were women, whereas the latter were scarce on the ground in relatively recent memory. Pleased at this turn of events, the PQ leader stated that he was "agreeably surprised to see so many students in skirts." It would be a little cack-handed, given that not all women students wear skirts, but would it be sexist? Given this imaginary context, I'd probably respond in the negative. Would he come under attack for sexism? I'm afraid I may know the answer to that one.

Imagine M. Boisclair visiting a medical faculty that used to have a quota system for Jews (McGill comes to mind). He notes, scanning the audience, that a fairly healthy proportion of people in attendance appear to be Jewish. He makes some comment to this effect, perhaps regarding yarmulkes, and is accused of anti-Semitism. Is he guilty of it?

Finally, our intrepid PQ chief is invited to a third campus, where he notes a very high proportion of students in the law faculty are Black. He refers to his delight at seeing so many dark-skinned people in the audience. Racist?

I've been checking my own feelings as I have been writing this, and I admit to some discomfort in each of these hypothetical cases. Why? Because, in our own culture (anglophone Canadian), it is impolite to make what my mother used to call "personal remarks." You don't draw attention to people's physical attributes or clothing if doing so is gratuitous. Certainly you don't, as Nancy Reagan once did, refer to "the beautiful white people" in an audience. But even leaving race out of it, you don't talk about "bodacious babes," or "fat people," or whatever physical category has attracted your attention, when you address a public meeting. This has nothing to do with any of the pernicious "isms." It's just, as my father used to say, "not done."

I suggest that it was breaking that rule that has made so many of us shift in our seats. Our discomfort, in other words, may be largely, if not entirely, unrelated to racism. (I confess that I don't know if such a social rule exists in Québécois culture to the same degree, which may be the nub of the controversy here, given that most of the journalists asking questions about this event were anglophone.)

A University of Toronto sociologist does take the opposite view. George Dei, noting that "all Asians don't look alike," states:

Any time you use a physical attribute to label or describe a people you run the risk of racializing groups. The context in this case is, why does he have to say this to get his meaning across? If he wants to get across the fact that 30 per cent of students were Asian, couldn't he have come out and said it without referring to how they look?

I think he does have a point--group physical descriptors can obviously have that racializing effect--even if he undercuts his point at the same time. Boisclair was not simply referring to "Asians," as we know. He was using a physical characteristic as shorthand for more specific groups. He was not making the implicit assumption that all Asians look alike: but he was settling upon a physical element that the groups to which he was referring have in common.

The unease that we feel about publicly mentioning people's physical characteristics at all may certainly be compounded by the explicit use of physical references by racists. Within that doubly charged context, an entirely innocent remark will almost inevitably receive a colouration that I cannot believe was intended by M. Boisclair, given the rest of the paragraph quoted, in which he actually seeks to dispel a common stereotype about "Asians." So he won't apologize, and other people will demand that he does, and we'll see how all this plays out.

In the meantime, what wide-ranging debates, what expansion of horizons we all miss out on when such inflated controversies are an ever-present possibility. While we are all watching our mouths, not to mention those of others, this sort of thing, and this, find odd corners and niches in which to flourish. Don't you wish--come on now, fellow progressives, admit it--that the whole world would afford us such wild and crazy freedom?

Feeding frenzy

O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful!
I am food! I am food! I am food!
I eat food! I eat food! I eat food!
My name never dies, never dies, never dies!
I was born first in the first of the worlds, earlier than the gods, in the belly of what has no death!
Whoever gives me away has helped me the most!
I, who am food, eat the eater of food!
I have overcome this world!

--Taittiriya Upanishad

After a week of feasting on each other, bloggers seem to be returning to normal. There's too much real news out there, after all. But in my peregrinations through the bizarre realm known as Current Events, through a thousand media lenses and filters, I re-discovered once more the ancient truth that came to light over the past few days: we are all food. And by "we" I mean every living thing.

Some menu items:

• Tastes like chicken. Well, because it is chicken, although this all goes against the grain, in a manner of speaking. "Pasture? No thanks, I'm not in the mooood." What's next--tofu-eating tigers? The universe demands balance.
  
  
• When dog bites man... it assuredly is news. My favourite part of this story? "Peter Krantz, who carried out the autopsy, said that it was not unusual for dogs to eat their dead owners in order to survive, although he said it was more normal behaviour in cats." "More normal?" Good grief, just how much household anthropophagy has been going on while we've been discussing the war in Iraq and the weather?
  
  
• And speaking of pets... what goes around comes around. Nice doggie. Or, if you prefer, have a break. Have a Kit-Kat.
  
  
• Birthday bash. Maybe these party-crashers should have had an invite. But they didn't have to bite his head off.
  
  
• A fox guarding the henhouse? A bit like discovering that David Suzuki drives an SUV. Again, my favourite line: "'If indeed Ms. Dickerson does have ties to ostrich slaughterers, then it certainly seems dangerous to place any birds under her wing,'" said Matt Prescott, PETA manager of factory farming and vegan campaigns."
  

Back to our regular programming shortly. It's time for lunch.

Law 4

Asmahan "Azzy" Mansour, an eleven-year-old child, was recently thrown off a soccer pitch in Laval, Québec (by a Muslim referee), for wearing a khimār ("hijāb" actually refers to the entire modest dress of a Muslim woman). This head covering is allegedly in violation of the International Football Association Board's Law 4.

Reading this "law," however, one sees no prohibition of the khimār at all, only of equipment or apparel that is "dangerous to himself or another player (including any kind of jewellery)." It is simply not evident that this head-covering poses any threat whatsoever to safety. In Ontario, the soccer association permits it; but the Québec association has a "no headgear" rule. In fact, a QSF official, Valmie Ouellet, claimed that a similar call would have been made had any other religion been involved. I wonder: would we have seen the "no headgear" rule applied to the yarmulke?

Despite all of the misleading headlines and blogchatter, IFAB did not uphold the Quebec ban. It didn't want to touch this one, in fact, with a ten foot pole, talking vaguely to the press after a regular meeting and scurrying away, refusing even to state whether the referee's decision had been correct.

All this fuss and bother seems rather odd, on the face of it, because girls in khumur play soccer at the international level all the time. (The photograph here is of the Iranian national women's team receiving silver medals.) But not so odd if one sees this incident for what it is--a convergence of political acts. The khimār for young Muslim girls these days is as much a defiant statement of identity as it is a religious obligation. And Jean Charest's crude demogoguery, matching that of Mario Dumont, is simply playing to the Hérouxville crowd in the midst of an election campaign. The xenophobic undercurrents here carry us far away from an innocent soccer match.

"Azzy" Mansour is just a kid. But now she's the latest site of struggle in the on-going culture wars. Can we just get back to the game, please?

Child Abuse: Nine-Year-Old Canadian Held in Bush's Gulag

A nine-year-old Canadian child suffering from asthma is being held in a secure detention centre in Texas, under appalling conditions. Neither he nor his Iranian parents have been charged with anything at all. They were travelling to Canada, but had to make an emergency stop in Puerto Rico: US officials swept up the whole family and packed them off to jail. (This is starting to sound like a broken record, isn't it?)

If you follow the links, you will see that the father applied for refugee status ten years ago, under Canada's Old Government [tm]. He was sent back to Iran to be tortured, with his spouse and his infant child. (One wonders just how many more of these stories are waiting to be uncovered. The notion that we don't deport people if they are likely to face torture at the other end appears to be a polite fiction, to put it mildly).

Perhaps Canada's New Government [tm] isn't interested in getting a young teenager out of Gitmo. But when the US starts jailing asthmatic nine-year-olds, won't a simple sense of decency move us to act?

We need to get a blogburst going on this one, folks. Send a politely-worded note to Peter MacKay, our Minister of Foreign Affairs. Remind him of Principle Two of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child:

The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.

Jailing sick children--jailing any children at all--is barbaric. Let's stand up together against this child abuse in the name of "national security." And let's demand that our government do the same.

h/t verbena-19.

UPDATE: (March 12) Annamarie of verbena-19, take a bow. Take another one. And everyone who followed up on this, and wrote, and did all those things that people who give a damn do, take one too. Kevin is coming home. h/t this time to Hope and Onions, and I'm not even a cat-lover. :)

Globe & Mail hypocrisy, and the presumption of innocence

After seven years in a Canadian jail, without being charged with anything, Mohammad Mahjoub is finally being released. He has been held for seven years under a security certificate, a star-chamber mechanism through which a person can simply be imprisoned indefinitely and mistreated, right here in Canada, without the inconvenience of a trial.

Canada's Old Government [tm] issued the security certificate in this case, and tried to deport Mahjoub in 2004, admitting that it knew he would be tortured in his native Egypt. (Many of the players from those days are currently rebelling against Stéphane Dion's move to roll back some of the more draconian aspects of anti-terrorism legislation that they rushed to impose after 9/11.) Canada's New Government [tm] finds nothing wrong with security certificates. And "Canada's National Newspaper," the Globe and Mail, continues its slimy support of them, in a chilling editorial, "Canada's no dark hole for terror suspects." (The Globe, one might recall, objected only once to the use of a security certificate, in the case of Ernst Zundel.) Perhaps the most objectionable sentence in this defence of arbitrary measures that the paper claims to oppose on its masthead* is this one: "Their arrival in Canada, where they are assuredly not wanted, places this country in a dilemma."

Just for whom does this anonymous writer imagine he or she is speaking? Why are these men, presumably innocent before being proven guilty (the latter being something Canadian authorities seem reluctant to set about doing), "not wanted?" (And why are convicted neo-Nazi hate criminals like Zundel "wanted," if it comes to that?) One cannot help but observe that just a tinge of racism might be discerned in commentary like that. Arab surname=terrorist, right?

Of course, presumed innocence makes some people impatient. Even in "progressive" ranks, we find the occasional swipe at this fundamental principle, as in Terry Glavin's latest Chronicles post (go find it--he shall get no link from me). "[W]hat, exactly, [would] these protestors ... put in place of Security Certificates, and how many of them believe the detainees are innocent, and how many believe they're guilty[?]"

Easy. In answer to the first, a trial. In answer to the second, they are innocent until proven guilty. That should be clear enough, even to anonymous editorialists and gutter journalists.

UPDATE: (February 23) The Supreme Court of Canada has unanimously struck down security certificates as a violation of life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, no doubt leaving the aforesaid editorialists and journalists choking in its broad judicial wake. It will be interesting to see how this pusillanimous crowd reacts; I'll be following what they have to say closely. They might do well to reflect upon words I have quoted before, likely from Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

UPPERDATE: (February 26) Well, crowing can sometimes mean that you end up eating crow. Bob Tarantino has some comments here that should be read. And I probably owe Lord Kitchener a beer. I'll need one myself to get the carrion bird down, and I hope I don't get West Nile.
____________
*The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate shall neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures. --Junius

Progressives and conservatives

OK, OK, on "what is a progressive" I'm about to give up. The horse is dead, like our friend the parrot:

'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

But what is a conservative?

The word derives, obviously enough, from the verb "to conserve." But when we look at the words and deeds of so-called "conservatives," here is what we see (and please note that not all conservatives subscribe to any one of these positions):

• Blatant disregard for the environment, to the point that ex-professors speaking for the oil and coal industries have more credibility than thousands of climatologists
  
  
• Enthusiastic support of war, now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no doubt someday in Iran and Syria. Many conservatives have supported in lock-step every single American imperial adventure in living memory
  
  
• Anti-evolution thinking (sometimes risibly called "Intelligent Design") that entails a radical departure from two centuries of meticulous scientific observation, substituting blind faith and misrepresentation
  
  
• The destruction of civil discourse, and its replacement with vilification and screechy namecalling
  
  
• Opposition to the notion of human rights, to the point of defending security certificates, the Guantanamo concentration camp, permanent special measures and torture

One might be forgiven for asking what, precisely, these conservatives want to conserve.

Well, wait a minute, in all fairness: they do want to conserve traditional forms of marriage (to the exclusion of any other form), traditional forms of sexuality, and the dominant culture. But that's too easy--none of these need conserving, because they're not under attack in the first place. Claims to the contrary are just tactical: a man and a woman can still get married as easily as ever, heterosexuality looks like it will soldier on somehow, and the dominant culture, allowing of course for the fluidity of the notion of "culture," is not about to give way to one of mad mullahs, stoning and beheading, at least the last time I checked.

So perhaps we need to re-draw the political map. Conservatives, at least the ones I have been referring to here, don't want to conserve, but to destroy. It's leftists, at least the ones who are these conservatives' favourite targets, who want to conserve: the environment, human beings, respect, scientific inquiry and human rights.

Do we have here the key, perhaps, to resolving that "progressive" problem I mentioned? Let's call ourselves Canada's New Conservatives [tm] and really throw a spanner in the works--just in time for the next election.

Quote of the week

"In conservative Egypt, few are likely to stand up for the rights of a gay Israeli spy who quits Islam."

Progressive dirty pool

A cautionary word, first of all, to my readers: I am here departing from a position that I have argued for strongly on a number of occasions--namely, that progressive bloggers should go easy on each other in their blog-posts. Unique circumstances, which I shall describe, lead me to make an exception. I am, needless to say, posting this as Dr.Dawg, not as a ProgBlogMod.

Terry Glavin, a member of Progressive Bloggers, runs a blog called Chronicles & Dissent. (No link, sorry. Go look it up.) He writes columns here and there, and he recently reviewed a new book by Nick Cohen in The Tyee. Cohen is worth reading, although exasperating on occasion: I once had a few words to say about him here. He raises uncomfortable questions that the Left needs to wrestle with, even if he does so in a style that resembles fingernails on a blackboard.

Glavin, however, is no gadfly on a lazy horse, more of a horsefly looking for blood. His weapon isn't puckish critique, but slander. You can get the measure of Terry pretty quickly, in fact, by reading a column of his that appeared a little while ago in the Georgia Straight. (My comments are in italics, in square brackets.)

StopWar's peace is about opposing Israel
By Terry Glavin
Publish Date: August 3, 2006

Things started at a July 18 demonstration in Montreal, when a small group of young Lebanese showed up with a sign that read “Peace for Lebanon and Israel”. They were shouted at and shoved around and driven off. Their sign was torn up. The event then proceeded, with people carrying placards that bore the flag of the fascist organization Hezbollah and pictures of Hezbollah's rabidly anti-Semitic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

[COMMENT: 1)A more balanced view of the give-and-take between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators may be found here: http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/73342.htm
Note that one of the counter-demonstrators adds a comment in the Comments section. There was no organized attempt to shove around or drive off counter-demonstrators. The peace demo was not monolithic: note the references to the “triumph of Islam” demonstrator, whom at least one peace demonstrator figured was a plant (Comments section). 2) One should be careful of applying Western concepts like “fascist” too loosely. It obfuscates, rather than clarifies. And one should also be wary of calling any Arab leader “anti-Semitic” without proof (see below).]

Before the month was out, you could fairly mark July 2006 as one of the most squalid months in the history of the “left” in Canada.

[COMMENT: Empty, insulting language.]

On July 22, at a Toronto rally sponsored by the Canadian Peace Alliance, there were Hezbollah flags, strapping young men in Hezbollah T-shirts, Nasrallah's fat, stupid face in placard-sized photographs, and pictures of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier and lyncher of homosexuals.

[COMMENT: 1) “fat, stupid face” – pointless namecalling. Does Glavin actually have anything of substance to say? 2) Without holding a brief for Ahmadinejad, and his latest antics, did pictures of him represent the CPA, or only the people who carried them? As noted, the demonstration was hardly monolithic.]

To be clear about the depths of this squalor: Hezbollah glorifies death and war to the point of making pornography out of it,

[COMMENT: “Pornography?” Examples? Or is this simply a “snarl-word” used for rhetorical effect?]

calls Jews the descendants of “apes and pigs”

[COMMENT: A reference to a 1998 speech by Nesrallah where he is alleged to have said this has some currency in anti-Hezbollah circles, but quotes like this prove elusive to track down. They seem to erupt exclusively in pro-Israel publications and websites; one has to ask why such things would not be proudly reported in certain Muslim ones. I am not stating that Nasrallah has never uttered such words, or harbours such sentiments; only that they appear to be reported only by his enemies. (Incidentally, Sura 5:60 of the Qur’an, whence all this “apes and pigs” talk keeps arising, does not refer to “the Jews.”)]

, and happily disseminates such fascist classics as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

[COMMENT: Nasrallah “happily disseminates” this rot (which certainly has some currency in some Muslim countries)? Do we have proof here, or simply more allegation?]

Nasrallah himself is helpfully unambiguous about his hatred of Jews: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak, and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology, and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say 'the Israeli.'?”

[COMMENT: This oft-quoted statement has a somewhat mysterious origin. Its “primary” source may be found here: Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal (2001), Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, Pluto Press, p.170. But it appears from her footnote that she got the quote second-hand, from a Hezbollah ally, Mohammed Fnaysh. This is pretty shaky stuff, but it doesn’t stop pro-Israel groups from using it. CAMERA sources the quote to an article in the New Yorker: www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_is. The article quotes Saad-Ghorayeb, quoting Nasrallah, a quote that had been, as indicated, quoted from somebody else. None of this, as noted, is to argue that Nasrallah might not indeed have all of the opinions and attitudes attributed to him. I just would have wanted stronger proof before joining in the demonizing.]

To be clearer: while the Canadian Peace Alliance has been busy with its “Don't Attack Iran” campaign, Ahmadinejad's regime, which is explicit about wanting Israel obliterated, has been busy funding and arming Hezbollah and trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal for itself.

[COMMENT: 1)“wants Israel obliterated.” This, too, has received wide circulation, although Ahmadinejad clarified this a little by stating recently that he expected Israel to go the way of the USSR. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/] Whether we approve of this sentiment or not, it’s a far cry from calling for nuclear obliteration, which is the usual interpretation given in the Western media. 2)“trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal for itself.” This is a common charge, but where is the proof?]

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, on the same day that trade unionists and “peace” activists

[COMMENT: Note the shudder-quotes. Another cheap rhetorical trick.]

were marching under Hezbollah banners in Toronto,

[COMMENT: “Under” them? They didn’t have their own banners? This would be a first for the labour movement.]

about 300 people gathered at the Vancouver Art Gallery for a rally cosponsored by Vancouver's StopWar Coalition. The rally's main speaker was Rafeh Hulays, who has openly declared in a letter to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers””the event that set off all the bloodletting in Lebanon””was “legal, moral, and necessary”.

[COMMENT: Is this all Glavin has got? A speaker at a rally once said something somewhere else, something that could not remotely be deemed anti-Semitic? In fact, the kidnapping of the soldiers occurred after a kidnapping the day before by the IDF, in Gaza, of two Palestinians thought to be members of Hamas, Osama Muamar and his brother Mustafa Muamar. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit]

Shortly after his July 22 address to the Vancouver peace rally, Hulays was again writing to Haaretz, admitting that he didn't believe in peace anyway. “I no longer do,” he wrote. “There are many monsters that need to be dealt with. Israel happens to be the biggest, ugliest, and most dangerous.”

[COMMENT: By this time, Israeli forces had bottled up the entire population of Gaza, with the threat of massive civilian deaths looming (http://counterpunch.org/tilley06302006.html), and had killed more than 300 Lebanese civilians [http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/2]. One can understand Hulays’ emotional state at that point. But in any case, this has little to do with the CPA rally.]

A week later, the StopWar Coalition held another demonstration on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, this one to protest “Canadian complicity in Israeli war crimes”. This time the featured speaker was Hanna Kawas, who openly campaigned against Ottawa's 2003 decision to ban three notorious Palestinian terrorist groups. The StopWar Coalition joined him in that effort.

[COMMENT: Here is the full story (both sides):
www.cpavancouver.org/letter_to_solicitor_gene]

Odd thing for an antiwar group to do, you might say, since war is the reason these terrorist groups exist.

[COMMENT: Unpacking the assumptions in that sentence may be a waste of time. Suffice it to say that many so-called “terrorist” groups exist to defend against the terror imposed by states, e.g., the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, termed “apartheid” by Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter.]

But this isn't about peace at all. “Peace” is just code for opposing Israel. This is about war.

[COMMENT: No, “peace” is code for “peace.” Which will never be achieved so long as Israel continues to occupy Palestine.]

Actually, two wars.
One is the just struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, for their own state, and for peaceful coexistence with Israel.

[COMMENT: Ah. A ray of light?]

The other is an Islamist war against modernity, against liberalism, and, as always, against the Jews. In that larger war, the Palestinian cause is a cover, the Palestinian poor are fodder, and there is no shortage of useful idiots to make light work of it all.

[COMMENT: Back to bluster, assertion and insult. Glavin has no real arguments, it appears.]

Take the famous British demagogue George Galloway, for instance. While Nasrallah's face was being paraded around downtown Toronto on July 22, Galloway, at a similar rally in London, fairly screamed these words: “I am here to glorify the leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.”

[COMMENT: Was that pompous idiot at the CPA rally? I must have missed something.]

Then there are Galloway's friends in the Socialist Workers Party, whose Canadian affiliates provide the key staff positions for the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, and the War Resisters Support Group. And on it goes.

[COMMENT: Well, don’t stop now. First we got second or third-hand quotes attributed to Nasrallah. Now we get “key staff positions” in the peace movement, staffed by “affiliates” of the Socialist Workers Party, some of whom are apparently “friends” of Galloway (who is not a member of the SWP, in case anyone needs reminding). That’s a rather tenuous set of linkages.]

Still, StopWar is perfectly entitled to argue that pro-war, fascist Jew-killers should be allowed to raise money, propagandize, and otherwise operate freely in Canada. Argue away, you might say to StopWar. Just not in my name.

[COMMENT: Emotive language like this is always a good substitute for thought and facts when you have neither of the latter. Has StopWar ever argued any such thing? Or is “pro-war, fascist Jew-killers” just code for “anyone Glavin doesn’t happen to like?”]

But that won't quite do if you're a member of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, or the Hospital Employees Union, or the Vancouver Green party, or the New Democratic Party, or the United Church of Canada. If you belong to any one of about 160 organizations that StopWar lists as endorsing members, or if you simply happen to live in Vancouver or Burnaby, then StopWar is speaking in your name.

[COMMENT: In its own words, too, not in Glavin-speak. But Glavin doesn’t actually quote StopWar; he’s too busy slandering it.]

And don't you dare try to speak for yourself about these things. You will be told you don't know what you're talking about, or that you've “bought into” something called the neoconservative agenda, or, worse still, that you're a Zionist.

[COMMENT: By “speaking for yourself,” could Glavin mean supporting Israel to the point of calling its murderous Lebanon adventure a “measured response?” Do supporters of the Palestinian people never speak for themselves? These empty assertions raise far more questions than they answer. Who will be told such things; and by whom; and on the basis of what?]

So, in July 2006, while Israel was fighting for her very life,

[COMMENT: At this point Glavin is simply hallucinating. Anyone checking out the Lebanese civilian casualty count, the infrastructural damage, the sealing off of Gaza, must wonder what planet Glavin inhabits. Israel massively attacked Lebanon and Gaza, and caused enormous carnage, suffering and destruction--not the other way around.]

and Lebanon and Palestine were being ground to bits,

[COMMENT: By a country “fighting for its life,” I presume.]

and Iraq was descending deeper into a hell of throat-slitting and suicide bombing, Canada's “antiwar” left had openly opted for war.

[COMMENT: Not proven by a single part of this florid polemic.]

And the words on the placards left no doubt about which side it was on: “We Are All Hezbollah”.

[COMMENT: Ah. Was this on all the placards? Or is this a not-so-subtle attempt to suggest that the anti-war movement is "all Hezbollah?"]

So, to sum up: the Left is morally corrupt, hypocritical, and anti-Semitic. Got that?

Now, a sloppy, dishonest, yellow-sheet "journalist" would usually be easy to ignore--there are, after all, so very many of them. But not only is this one going that extra yard by posing as a "progressive"-- he also practises a form of moral cowardice that is exemplary, in its way. Over at his place, he referred to a commenter at The Tyee, recently banned by the Tyee's timorous and inconsistent editor, David Beers, as a "Jew-basher." Knowing Terry's proclivities, I asked for proof. Big mistake.

A short, rancorous exchange commenced, which spilled over into the comments section of another one of his posts, on Monbiot and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I quoted this short passage:

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical.

I was attempting to make the point that one can offer observations like this without being a conspiracy theorist, or "anti-Semitic." (The quotation is from an article in Ha'aretz.) Indeed, I clarified this in my next post, noting Terry's propensity to paint the peace movement and the Left with overly-broad brush-strokes. But you won't find that post: he deleted it. And he went on to say

I certainly can't help you, and I'm not going to engage in a debate with you. You're the internet equivalent of serial crank-telephone caller, or an anonymous graffito artist. Hanging up on some nutcase on the telephone is not a denial of free speech, and graffiti is not debate. It's vandalism, so if you come back here and try to post anything short of an abject apology, I'll delete you. You are perfectly free to go and cry about it and tell more lies about me from the safety of your anonymous nickname somewhere else.

His concern about my "anonymous nickname" (no, he doesn't write very well either) would be more convincing if he weren't surrounded by panting acolytes with names like "ndude" and "Blazing Cat Fur" and "Bookmistress," whose "anonymous nicknames" don't seem to cause him any bother, but no matter. I don't do abject apologies on demand for the likes of him--that sort of thing smacks too much of the glory days of Stalin for my taste. I refused, therefore, and indicated my continuing problems with his mischaracterization of the Left, but that further post was deleted as well. Then his echo-chamber buddies jumped to, with their own crude slander, but no responses on my part were permitted. Osip Mandelstam, writing of the aforementioned Redeemer of the Masses, referred to such people:

And around him the rabble of narrow-necked chiefs--
He plays with the services of half-men

Who warble, or miaow, or moan.
He alone pushes and prods.

Let's be clear: this is Terry's combox, and he can do what he wants with it. If you can't be Czar of your own blog, after all, we've come to a sorry pass indeed. But you are still open to criticism if you use it as a platform for vilification (e.g., some egregiously inaccurate and silly comments about my former union), while refusing the right of rebuttal to the target. It's...a character thing.

Herewith, then, another contribution to our on-going debate about what it means to be "progressive." It has meant, in the recent past, lock-step support for the good citizens of Hérouxville and defence of the Chinese head-tax. Now it apparently means slandering the peace movement and offering up your blogspace to anti-union character assassins with a guarantee that they will froth unopposed. Perhaps a better question, then, for those still interested, is: what isn't "progressive"?

Targeting Professor Attaran

h/t to My Blahg for getting me riled.

Reading the right-wing blogs and the reams of abuse to be found in their comboxes, Professor Amir Attaran, in the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa, is the new Great Satan of the "rah rah" set. For daring to raise the possibility that prisoners, whoops, that's "detainees," have been abused by Canadian troops in Afghanistan, he has become subject to what Robert McClelland rightly calls a swiftboating. He has an agenda. He's inconsistent. He's a Muslim, so that should tell you something. He's a sneak who has managed to raise, once again, his original concerns about turning prisoners, whoops, there I go again, "detainees," over to the tender mercies of the ex-Northern Alliance types in charge of Afghanistan.

Well, just who is this guy? Actually he's not a Muslim, although so what if he were? He's married to a practising Catholic. He's an academic with international credentials in law and public health issues. He's a human rights activist--he doesn't confine himself to scholarly articles and books--and one of his targets has been Robert Mugabe, as it happens. But he's just too brown for some folks--not a "real Canadian." (He was actually born in the US, and is a naturalized Canadian citizen.) This is the sort of repulsive racist calumny that he has been subjected to recently:

I have received a very great amount of hate mail, saying that I am not a real Canadian. Well, I am. And I have received quite a lot of other material attacking me -- and I won't use the real language because it's really vulgar -- as a damn Muslim. Use your imagination to substitute for damn.

And here's a small sampling of combox chatter:

Right out of Al-Qaeda's textbook. The fact that the claims are coming from a professor here in Canada is somewhat worrying though. Either he is a sympathizer for Islamic Terrorists or worse, a collaborator.

--

Another good leftist professor shilling for the enemy--I'd like to know what these "detainees" were up to when they were arrested?

--

It's quite obvious where the professor's loyalties lie.Not once was he questioned as to why he is so interested in this aspect of the Afghan operation, and why he would spend so much time and effort to bring this to light. His own history may bear some looking into.

--

Attaran.."you're busted"...now tell us who your accomplices were...at the very least this punk should lose tenure.

--

Who told this prof wannabe about what happened over there....Send him over there with no protection and let him go out without a flak jacket. Don't let your kids go to that university.

--

What's Attaran's motivation? Well, he's a Muslim who has ingratiated himself into western politics in order to help achieve Islamist goals. Kitman is obvious in his deceptive cover as a 'humanitarian.'

Had enough? Believe me, these are just a few rancid drops spattering from the unsavoury racist stew that's a-boiling fast and furious on the starboard side of the blogosphere at the moment.

It is disappointing to see that even in relatively respectable right-wing blogsites, like Daimnation and The Torch, Attaran himself has become the issue, and the media who have given him prominence recently--not the issues of human rights abuses that he has raised. In a foetid fog of "patriotic" drivel, he has been accused of an agenda-revealing inconsistency: he has complained that the abuse of "detainees" has not until now been investigated by the military; but he had earlier cast some doubt upon the impartiality and thoroughness of the military investigating itself. I see little contradiction here. Even a biased investigation is preferable to sweeping the matter under the rug.

The brass, at least, are taking the possibility of abuse of "detainees" seriously. Now, if we could only track what's become of the "detainees" handed over to the Afghan government's torturers interrogators. That's a far larger question, of course, one that Professor Attaran has been pushing for a year or so. Maybe it's time some people stop fixating on the man's skin colour and start getting a mite curious themselves.

Five things that bug me

My memory could be deceiving me, but I recall that the redoubtable Canadian curmudgeon Gordon Sinclair--whose latter-day incarnation, Don Cherry, is but a poor imitation--once wrote a column with a similar heading. (For him, it was more likely ten things. Or fifty. But what the heck.)

Having officially achieved curmudgeonly status, at least in age, and just ask the kids, I thought I'd start modestly with five perennial blogospheric annoyances that call aloud for irritable comment. So here goes, in no particular order.

1. Bloggers who don't allow comments. You read a really provocative piece, left, right, centre, it doesn't matter, and then you look for the comment button, and it isn't there. The blogger in question has committed the unspeakable sin of trolling you and then taping your mouth shut. Be it known that this qualifies as torture under the UN Convention. Aren't bloggers supposed to foster controversy? Then why the gag?
   
   I know that some people have good reason, or say they do. Kathy Shaidle sees comboxes as "occasions for sin," and, lacking her theological knowledge, how can I presume to argue? (I am assuming that she is referring to her own possible fall from grace, not that of her visitors, but I could be mistaken.) She has been known to venture out into the combox world herself, though, especially when trolled.
   
   But at least Kathy has offered us an explanation. Others simply post, and you can take it or leave it, but there will be no discussion unless you want to go somewhere else. That's dirty pool. It's censorship! It's a violation of the right of freedom of speech! At least, I'm sure I know people who would make that argument. Personally, I think it's just party-pooping, not a Charter violation. But it's irritating.
   
   
2. Bloggers who ban commenters. Now, I think I'm a nice enough sort of fellow, not a troll, at least not all the time, but yesterday I managed to get banned from two blogsites. The word "echo-chamber" leaps to mind, but that's too simple. I think we have here a pathology, manifesting itself in various stages. Remember that I'm not talking about lumpen purveyors of abuse, profanity, all of those egregious violations of the rules of hospitality that call for immediate banishment. I had a couple of those once, and sent them packing. I'm talking about--wait for it--disagreement.
   
   I will forebear to name the two individuals involved. That would be rude, but, more important, pointless. In one case, I simply became an unperson: all posts of mine, innocuous as at least some of them were, vanished into the outer darkness. I would call that Stage Two, Stage One being the elimination of specific posts--a cyber-slap, rather than blogocide.
   
   Stage Three consists of the elimination of your own posts, but not of the posts that attack you. A visitor to the site might be put in mind of Osip Mandelstam's line about "just enough people for half a dialogue." There are accusations and rough commentary about someone or other, but the target has simply been removed, able to listen but not rebut. Perhaps out of my unfailing generosity of spirit, I insist on regarding this cyber-cowardice as a sickness, not a crime. It's just too obvious for there to be intelligent planning behind it.
   
   
3. Blogrolls that fuss about their identity. I need to tread lightly here. Every blogroll has a theme, a commonality, a reason for affiliation. If it doesn't, then it's not really a blogroll, but an agora, and that's what the political blogosphere already is, isn't it? We don't really need mini-versions when we have all outdoors. So I don't expect to see Warren Kinsella trying to join the Blogging Tories, at least yet (joke, Warren, no writs please), or Stephen Taylor getting listed as a Blogging Dipper...well, you get my drift. And on Progressive Bloggers, whatever the heck a "progressive" is, I don't expect to find white supremacists, "men's rights" types, or people who complain about the Chinese moving in next door.
   
   But what to do if one of these surfaces right here at home? Being the good progressives that we are, we agonize about it. Blogging Tories, on the other hand, just kick people out. If I was ever critical of them for this (and I don't recall being so), I take it all back. There's something to be said for expediency on occasion. We could learn from them.
   
   
4. One-trick ponies. Do you ever come across bloggers--I know you have--who really only have one issue, and beat it to death for post after post? The "Muslims are a danger to us all" crowd, for example, or "Jack Layton's moustache sucks," or "Onward to victory in Afghanistan," or "Androgenic global warming is a socialist hoax," or (my current favourite) "the Left are a bunch of anti-Semites." I mean, get a life! There are so many uncleared, untilled fields just waiting for ideological seeding. Kate McMillan runs a blog that really does cover the waterfront. It's interesting, damn it, even if it puts a progressive's teeth on edge. Ditto, closer to home, with Robert McClelland. (What is it with these Scots, anyway?) Incidentally, I'm just picking two sort of equal-but-opposite folks here as examples, so no one should feel left out. There are plenty of interesting blogs out there, right across the political spectrum.
   
   
5. Shills. Again, naming no names, I am weary of blogsites that pop up like mushrooms whenever there's a political convention of some sort. They are so transparent, just a obvious way of avoiding campaign spending limits, and they're boring. Get yourself a real blogsite, like my friend Cerberus, and plug away by all means, but show a bit of imagination. And staying power. (Speaking of which--are you still there, Ted?)

Well, that's about it for me at the moment. Feel free to add your own items to the list. Such as--the propensity for bloggers to make lists?

UPDATE/CORRECTION: (February 9) It should be noted that Robert McClelland co-blogs with the excellent Paladiea. I apologize for having to be prompted on this.

The Good Terrorist

Luis Posada Carriles is not exactly a household name, but it should be. He's a terrorist, a mass-murderer who engineered the bombing of a civilian airliner, along with his good buddy Orlando Bosch. George Bush père was CIA director when the murders were committed, making him Posada Carriles' employer. His administration nixed Bosch's deportation in 1990. If Posada Carriles' last name were Almrei, say, or Jaballah, or Mahjoub, he'd be a headliner. But he's one of ours, see. And the people he killed on Cubana Airlines flight 455 on October 6, 1976 were "seventy-three dogs."

Bosch is now living a quiet and contented life in Miami. Carriles, however, who escaped from Venezuela where he was to stand trial for terrorism and sneaked into the US in 2005, is sitting in a New Mexico jail on immigration charges. Venezuela has demanded his extradition, but Bush fils isn't about to give up his anti-Castro freedom fighter, who has applied to become an American citizen.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, three men who have been held in jail for years on "security certificates," odious Star Chamber artefacts that have no place in a democratic country, are entering a critical phase in their more than two-month-long hunger strike. These men have not been charged with a crime, have not been permitted to see any evidence against them, have not even been allowed the routine access to their families that convicted murderers and rapists receive. They have been badly mistreated in prison--hell, let's call a spade a spade, tortured--denied medical care, and are now at the point of death.

All this is happening under the noses of the regular media, but not a whimper of outrage can be heard, except for the strong views of a couple of guests on CBC's The Current this morning. The fearless Globe & Mail, "Canada's National Newspaper," is against a security certificate when the person held under it is named Ernst Zundel, but stoutly defends them in the case of people called, well, Almrei, or Jaballah, or Mahjoub. Meanwhile, the starboard side of the blogosphere has already tried and convicted these guys--but it hasn't uttered a word about Posada Carriles.

And so the war on terrorism continues. Sleep tight.

Memorandum

To: Margaret Wente, Rex Murphy
From: The Phraser Institute
Subject: IPCC Report

The just-released IPCC report on "global warming" could not have come at a worse time. Just when our Intelligent Design department is making serious headway in reforming school curricula, and our Planar Earth department is revving up to start demanding equal time with the "globe" partisans, this happens:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, said that based on new research over the last six years, it is 90 percent certain that human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half-century.

Even Stephen Harper and George W. Bush are bending in this wind. We need to get busy on this one right away, and we're counting on your assistance.

The language of the debate is, as always, of paramount importance. The other side has managed to sideline us by using terms like "enviro-sceptics" and, more damagingly, "global warming deniers." The first makes no sense, of course--we all know there's an environment, we've never questioned that. This is just another socialist smear. The second carries echoes of Holocaust-denial, as you, Mr. Murphy, have already astutely pointed out. We have to promote our own vocabulary, or turn theirs around--remember what we were able to do with "politically correct." So we respectfully make the following suggestions, which we hope you will take up in future columns.

1. The word "enviro-nuts" is gaining currency. Find a couple of extreme statements or actions that you can point to and repeat often to justify the label, and use the word frequently. It works well adjectivally, too: "Are you enviro-nuts?" accompanied by raised eyebrows is worth a thousand IPCC reports. "Warmers" is good shorthand as well, suggesting that the enviro-nuts might even be the cause of their own imaginary crisis.
   
   
2. We need to brand ourselves: we suggest "Ten Percenters." Note that the scientists, or politicians, or whoever authored that wretched propaganda document, admit that they are only "90 percent certain" that people have anything to do with so-called "global warming." We can quote their own leftist gurus in our support: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." That's Margaret Mead, another socialist. It's time to reclaim the word "change."
   
   
3. What change are we after? A change back. We want to change back to common sense, change back to getting around in our SUVs without feeling under attack all the time. We're sick of trying to figure out if this week it's bottles or cardboard in those stupid recycling boxes. People are tired of being lectured by "green" types all the time. They just want to get on with their lives. Invite them to join the "Ten Percenters."
   
   
4. We need to sound neutral, not antagonistic. We should describe ourselves as "weather-watchers," for example. That doesn't define us as blindly partisan in any way, but the very opposite: observant.
   
   
5. And what are we observing? Take the Everyman approach. "It's just a little unusual weather, no biggie. There used to be palm trees in Greenland. What caused that? Mastodon farts?"
   
   
6. Keep plugging away at the "socialist" thing. The word gets people upset, because it means "bad." Attach it to any comment from the "warming" crowd. It's great word-paint. "Eco-terrorism" works too. Explain that the warmers are causing far more damage than any isolated acts of log-spiking or other sabotage. The costs of the latter add up to a piddling $42.8 million. Contrast that with the costs of one year of Kyoto and you're home free.
   
   
7. Mr. Murphy, we know you are fond of Shakespeare. So use this quotation:
   
   Since I was man,
   Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
   Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
   Remember to have heard; man's nature cannot carry
   The affliction nor the fear....
   
   These alarmists have always been with us.
   
   
8. There has to be some connection with Islam that you can make. They claim to be in favour of "balance," and are full of the usual green nonsense. They sound, in fact, just like more environ-nuts. Make a joke or two about their green deserts. Refer to the Middle East and Afghanistan and 9/11 and terrorism and anti-Semitism. By this time you'll have the warmers on the ropes.

We wish you well, and look forward with some anticipation to your next articles. In the meantime, stay cool, as the kids say.