idiot lefties
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Pour yourself the late Sunday night coffee or glass of wine, get comfortable, and go and read Jonathan Chait’s brilliant deconstruction of one of the left’s saddest cases: Canada’s own Naomi Klein.
But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. the new republic
What has always struck me about Ms. Klein is that her world view admits no possibility of doubt, much less error. She knows the truth and sets out to find the facts that back her up. Chait, a rather more nuanced thinker, finds more than a few facts which shoot her down. Not that it matters: to the sort of people who read Klein, “truthiness” is more important than actual fact. And much more interesting.
Written by jay on July 20th, 2008 with 5 comments.
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A goodly number of pixels have been spilt on the allegedly political removal of two children from their white supremacist mother after the elder was sent to school with a swasika drawn on her arm. Dawg went to the wall in his comments:
“Teaching kids to hate is harmful per se. It seems to me, based upon the precautionary principle, that it’s up to you to prove otherwise.” dr dawg
I think this is an exceptionally dangerous view of the nature of the role of parents, the state and the culture. First off it opens parents to losing their children as the result of thought crime. While these poor kids’ mother is hardly a brilliant parent, if, as Dawg conjectures, the rule is “teach hate, lose kids” then her capacity as a parent is not in issue one way or another. So on that basis the Khadr’s would have lost their kids the instant the authorities became aware of the jihadi views of the parents. I certainly hope Mohamed Elmasry doesn’t have kids because his political/religious views might count as hatred. Anti-Zionist? Lose your kids. Black mother in the Jane Finch corridor blaming whitey for black peoples’ problems - better watch her step. Catholics and fundamentalist who teach their children that abortion is murder and abortionists murderers…no kids for you! Environmentalists who tell their children that the people who run big corporations are killing the Earth and should go to jail…kidless.
But, and one cannot help but notice what this lame brained mum did, maybe we should set the standard higher. Perhaps the test should be that you have to actually do something like draw on your kids. (Frankly I’d start with the parents of the cringing little moppets who are stuck having their faces painted for National holidays.) For example telling your female children that they have to wear a head scarf (or a sack) or Uncle Ali will be over to behead them? Perhaps it would make sense for teachers, as soon as they see a little Muslim girl wearing the hajib to ask if Fatima really wants to wear it and to keep pushing until they are absolutely certain Fatima is not being coerced at home.
Written by jay on July 8th, 2008 with 28 comments.
Read more articles on Education and Homeschooling and Islam and culture and free speech and idiot lefties.
“Relatives of 7/7 London bomber hold party at his grave”
Hang on: he got a grave? The UK actually shipped his body back to Pakistan for a “proper burial” and didn’t wrap it in bacon first? kathy
Garlic for vampires, dogs and pigs for Islamists: works like the wonderfully ancient charm it is. If you are fighting the 7th century you need to use 7th century tactics.
Written by jay on July 8th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Islam and Terror and culture and idiot lefties and religion.
Dr. Dawg is making fun of the IDers. Intellectually this is rather like little boys pulling the wings off flies: cruel, but inconsequential. Only the fundamentalist “no chancers” want to try and run the ID argument and when they do the billions of years and trillions of chemical interactions per year get in their way. However, the Dawg says something which I think suggests that, despite his trade union background and grad student foreground, he might finally be getting a picture of the sheer messiness of the real world.
“The social is simply too complex to attribute it entirely or even significantly to evolution.” Well Dawg I am delighted that you are willing to throw the fundamental premise of Marxism, namely that economics can be understood and even made to obey laws, into the ashcan of history. (Where it belongs.)
Once you have acknowledged that “the social” is too complex to be attributed to evolution you have begun a happy accent to a purely humanist understanding of the world. Science, per se, can only explain so much. (And I entirely agree with you on the looniness of the IDers and anyone else who thinks their particular Sky-God sat down and “created” in any but the most abstract, “lit the fuse for the Big Bang” sense.}
What is fun about your stand against socio-biology is that in taking that position you render absurd the claims of assorted socialists and utopians - not to mention St. Algore - who claim to have the economic, social and scientific answers to the world’s issues. The social, the economic and even the scientific are, indeed, complex. So complex that it would take the same sort of reductionism as the socio-biologists employed to come up with even an approximation of the true state of affairs.
We watched that reductionism play out in the failed states of Russia, fully Communist China, Cuba, the unlamented Warsaw Pact and, currently the delights of Zimbabwe. Poor buggers didn’t have a clue and, on your argument, couldn’t.
Part of the attraction of the libertarian right for me is its humility in the face of what we do not, and likely cannot, know. It is grand to see your gradual progression towards a deeper understanding of our ignorance.
Animals are complicated, humans are complex, populations are entirely unknowable. The fun of social science is to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to take a really close look at a particular belief or behaviour or trend. The danger of social science and economics - which is a social science dressed up in calculus - is that the practitioner is apt to think that he or she “understands” and therefore can “predict” the observed behaviour. This can go very well for quite sometime until, eventually, it doesn’t.
So long as it is an academic parlor game it is both interesting and valuable; but when it begins to encroach upon actual policy decisions it is a dangerous, anti-human, conceit. Which, happily, the Dawg has finally realized.
Written by jay on July 7th, 2008 with 9 comments.
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An individual’s reputation is not to be treated as regrettable but unavoidable road kill on the highway of public controversy, but nor should an overly solicitous regard for personal reputation be permitted to “chill” freewheeling debate on matters of public interest. supreme court of canada
We no longer live in the world of “gentlemen’s clubs” or regimental messes where, to write an NSF cheque got you a room with a table and a gun in the drawer. Contra the LyingJackal, a slight is not a law suit and, at last, the SCC is bring a degree of the Sullivan rules into Canadian defamation law.
Basic takeaway: enter the arena and you ply by rules rather different from those of private life.
Investigative reports get “spiked”, it is contended, because, while true, they are based on facts that are difficult to establish according to rules of evidence. When controversies erupt, statements of claim often follow as night follows day, not only in serious claims (as here) but in actions launched simply for the purpose of intimidation. supreme court of canada
Not a good day for the libel warriors; rather a good day for free speechers.
Update: Reading further Rothstein, Jis quoted in the headnote:
To satisfy the fair comment defence, there is no requirement to prove objective honest belief. The defence of fair comment should only require the defendant to prove (a) that the statement constituted comment, (b) that it had a basis in true facts and (c) that it concerned a matter of public interest. scc
Let’s see: assorted defendants commented on the disgusting nature of the Anne Cools post, they relied on a factually pattern of behaviour which included posting under pseudonyms, and they commented, rather negatively, on the behaviour of a person who would publish such nasty stuff.
Hmmm…I am liking the Canuck 6’s chances a lot more than I did yesterday.
Written by jay on June 27th, 2008 with 7 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Uncategorized and canadian gossip and free speech and idiot lefties.
In Johannesburg, Robert Mugabe was given a rousing welcome by Africans from across the continent. As he addressed the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, we ululated and sang his praises, and after his brief speech we gave him a standing ovation. He spoke of the wonderful work he had achieved in Zimbabwe with his “agrarian reforms” in a country where 70% of prime land had been owned by just 4,000 white farmers
Here was an African leader who was prepared to redress the injustices of the past by giving land back to its rightful indigenous owners. Here was a government doing what our own was afraid to: dealing with the problems of inequitable distribution through one short, swift surgical action. Here was a black man giving the former colonial masters the finger. We went into frenzied applause when he thundered: “So, Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe!”
It did not matter to us that the process was not done in a way that respected the rule of law, or that the so-called agrarian reforms were an election ploy to win votes from a peasantry that had been marginalised since 1980. the guardian!!
Long past time for on the ground adult supervision I’d say: the murderous bastard and his cronies will be re-elected today. Nice to see that the Guardian has noticed that not all African politicians are saints.
Written by jay on June 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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“We can’t ask the people to cast their vote on June 27 when that vote will cost their lives. We will no longer participate in this violent sham of an election,” Tsvangirai said.
He addressed a news conference in Zimbabwe’s capital after thousands of militants loyal to Mugabe prevented opposition supporters from gathering for its main campaign rally. the star
Tsvangirai made the right call. Unfortunately he may have made it too late.
Peter Osborne makes the case for our (meaning the West’s) duty to protect; but given the WEst’s capitulation an Darfur there is no reason at all to suppose we are likely willing to go in and prevent the creeping genocide which is Robert Mugabe and the thugs who surround him.
After all, to march a brigade or two of well equiped Western soldiers into a failed state in Africa would look a bit too much like neo-colonialism (or adult supervision which is even more insulting). Best to leave the Africans to sort it out in their own, culturally approved of, manner with Chinese supplied AK47s and the delights of the machete.
Heaven forbid that we trample on the soverign rights of nations and the inherent right of elderly black potentates to preside over the slaughter or starvation of their political opponents.
The UN, the bien pensant and the lefty internationalists cling to the Treaty of Westphailia and solemnly intone that “We Must Always Forget the Lessons of Rwanda.
And so we shall.
Written by jay on June 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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The wife of a Zimbabwean opposition party member has been brutally murdered in what is being labelled as one the most grotesque atrocities yet committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime.
Dadirai Chipiro, wife of Patson Chipiro who heads the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district, had a hand cut off as well as both of her feet before a petrol bomb was thrown through her window. daily mail
There are some of us who still remember Rwanda and the fact that African and Western governments stood by as the tribal tensions escalated to genocide have to ask what, if anything, we are prepared to do to stop Mugabe’s thugs.
In point of fact, in our post colonial cringe, the answer is not much. After all, interfering in the “internal affairs” of even the most disastrously failed state (viz. Burma) would be, at best, paternalistic, at worst imperialistic. So, rather than breach the core tenets of politically correct post colonial inaction we are likely to sit on the sidelines and let the tribalists have at it.
Post colonial thinkers will, no doubt, think this racist, but a bit of adult supervision might go some distance to preventing the acceleration of a political genocide in Zimbabwe.
Written by jay on June 13th, 2008 with 2 comments.
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A great post over at Enjoy Every Sandwich.
The problem is that while Jason is not terrifically bright, the Lying Jackal combines dumb with ruthless. Jason didn’t know that. Those of us who have been called “crypto-Nazis” by the Jackal do.
Basic strategy Jason, when the Jackal attacks here are the magic words, “Fuck off you Nazi”. He will then sue you and beclown himself…again.
Written by jay on May 24th, 2008 with 6 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Liberals and canadian gossip and free speech and idiot lefties and law.
Go read this thread at Babble.
Intelligent comments, support for the idea of free speech…yikes.
Written by jay on May 9th, 2008 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and culture and free speech and idiot lefties.
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