Quotulatiousness

February 7, 2012

Terrorist training camp just north of Toronto!

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

According to former Toronto Star editor and Ryerson professor John Miller, we’ll be in the grip of terror later in February:

Here is an extended quote from his rant to show that I’m not taking this out of context one bit:

    “Makes you wonder when was the last time a group of ideological warriors went north to train in the backwoods and plot to storm Parliament, blow up the CBC, seize the airwaves and spread terror across the land. Oh yeah, the Toronto 18 did that. Didn’t police arrest the lot of them and call them the gravest threat to our democracy?

    “I think a weekend with Ezra and friends could be something just like that.

    “The only thing that sets them apart from the Muslim extremists is that Sun Media will be charging you admission.”

Sorry, we’re not planning to storm Parliament. Maybe we’ll talk about writing some letters to our MPs. We’re not planning to blow up the CBC. We just want to privatize it. And we don’t believe in spreading terror across the land. In fact, we support our Canadian troops in the war against terror, and don’t want that little terrorist Omar Khadr let back in from Guantanamo Bay.

Miller ended by saying “the only thing” that makes us different from those terrorists is that we charge admission.

What a disgusting man.

Why did he liken me, my fellow Sun personalities and Sun readers to terrorists? For one reason only: We’re conservative, and we refuse to go along with him and the rest of the consensus media.

The fact that someone as vile as Miller has held senior posts at journalism schools and the largest newspaper in Canada is not surprising. Because both the Star and every j-school in the country believe in a uniform, official left-wing view.

They believe in every type of diversity — racial, sexual, ethnic — except for intellectual diversity.

Finns vote to stick with the EU

Filed under: Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

A summary of the recent presidential election results in Finland, from The Economist:

Those who argued that Finland is fast becoming a Eurosceptic country that is against the country’s membership of the European single currency, the euro, have been proved wrong by its presidential election. The run-off on February 5th was contested between the two most pro-European candidates. Timo Soini, leader of the anti-euro True Finns, which took a spectacular 18% of the vote in the general election last April, was humiliatingly pushed out in the first round. The winner, Sauli Niinisto, a former centre-right finance minister, took 63% of the vote to 37% for the loser, Pekka Haavisto of the Greens (who was also the first openly gay candidate for the post).

Mr Niinisto declares himself to be firmly in the pro-EU, pro-euro camp—indeed, as finance minister he helped get the country into the euro in the first place. That matters because the Finnish presidency is more than a ceremonial post, especially in foreign policy, even if recent constitutional changes have made it weaker than it once was. Most power, especially in domestic issues, rests with the government, a cumbersome six-party coalition led by Jyrki Katainen, the conservative prime minister. The arrival in the presidential palace of Mr Niinisto, a fellow conservative, will strengthen Mr Katainen’s hand. Yet strains within the coalition, which was designed largely to keep the True Finns out of power, are likely to persist.

Sailing around the world solo was less trouble for this teen than dealing with the “child welfare” authorities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

Gabrielle Shiner on the remarkable achievement of Laura Dekker both in circumnavigating the globe and in getting around the “authorities” which were determined to stop her for her own protection:

Last month, Dutch teenager Laura Dekker became the youngest sailor ever to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world. This was a phenomenal achievement, requiring incredible personal courage and endurance. But marring her celebrations was the fact that the Guinness Book of Records failed to recognise her achievement on the grounds that it was deemed ‘irresponsible’. Furthermore, Dekker has claimed she may never return to her home country due to the treatment of her, and her parents, by meddling Dutch authorities.

[. . .]

The Dutch authorities’ reaction to Laura Dekker shows that they have become a Frankenstein of the mentality that inspired the introduction of menacing tobacco labels and countless similar policies. The doctrine that individuals need to be saved from themselves has unleashed a swarm of crusading bureaucrats who relentlessly raid our private lives. Joost Lanshage of the Netherlands Bureau of Youth Care exemplified this pervasive creed as he protested, ‘If Laura had drowned we would be accused of not doing enough to protect her.’ Lanshage assumes his responsibility over both Laura and her parents with uncanny ease. More alarming, however, is Lanshage’s testimony that this is what society has come to expect from public authorities.

Forfeiting judgment to a faceless state erodes the importance of personal interactions as it undermines our dependence on family, friends, and community. The state’s hijacking of the responsibility for our lives also robs us of the ability to exercise and develop our personal judgment. This crucial aspect of our development is being debilitated by the craze to squeeze individuals into the shrinking mould of acceptable citizenship. Denying us the right to take risks, enjoy successes and suffer through mistakes restricts our ability to act according to our individual values and develop purposefully. We’re sacrificing our individual autonomy for the comfort of apathetic mediocrity.

As this process continues, unique approaches to life and education increasingly become unacceptable. After Dekker mentioned on her blog that she had to temporarily put schoolwork aside in the face of dangerous storms at sea, Dutch authorities mounted their high horses once again and summoned Laura’s father to court. While the 16-year-old conquered innumerable challenges that the vast majority of adults would not be capable of facing alone, authorities back in the Netherlands fretted at the idea that she would fall behind with her school work. As Dekker rightfully reflected on her blog towards the end of her journey, ‘Now, after sailing around the world, with… the full responsibility of keeping myself and [her boat] Guppy safe, I feel that the nightmares the Dutch government organisations put me through were totally unfair.’

“London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It’s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:40

Faye Planer interviews Will Self in Bristol University’s Epigram on his views about the upcoming London Olympic extravaganza:

I hear that you are unenthusiastic about the prospect of the Olympics this summer. In your eyes, what is the greatest folly of this whole affair?
Rather unenthusiastic is putting it waaaaay mildly: I think the Olympics suck dogshit through a straw. People believe they encourage da yoof to take up running, jumping and fainting in coils — but this is nonsense. They’re a boondoggle for politicians and financiers, a further corruption of an already corrupt self-appointed international coterie of Olympian cunts, an excuse for ‘elite’ athletes to fuck each other, snarf steroids and pick up sponsorship deals, and a senseless hitching of infrastructural investment — if there’s any reality to this anyway — to a useless loss-trailing expenditure on starchitectural bollix. The stadia themselves are a folly. The new Westfield is a temple to moribund consumerism — in ten years time they’ll all be cracked and spalled; a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.

If the Olympics did not exist, would it be necessary to invent them?
They didn’t exist for thousands of years. The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that ‘host’ them. This one is no different, presenting a fine opportunity for the British security state apparatus and its private security firm hangers-on to deploy the mass-suppression and urban paranoiac technologies in the service of export earning. Some peace, some freedom.

[. . .]

‘Really, one may say that the whole Olympic process was a pasteurisation of the city… the microbes disappeared and from a hygienic point of view maybe that was positive, but really what happened is that the variety was destroyed in the process…’ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said this about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Do you believe that London is being pasteurised too?
No, I’m quite confident that London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It’s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.

H/T to Charles Stross for the link.

Contrasting Canadian and Australian approaches to national defence spending

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Matthew Fisher considers the way Australia deals with defence spending in comparison to Canada:

Australia may not immediately spring to mind as the country with which to best compare Canada’s defence spending, but it is not that much of a stretch. They share the same values and allies, have similarly robust resource-based economies, generous welfare nets and military histories from the Boer War through to the war in Afghanistan that usually have dovetailed.

Although Canada’s economy is nearly twice the size of Australia’s — and has about 40 per cent more people — Canada lags far behind in defence spending.

Australia spent $29 billion on its armed forces last year. That is about $7 billion more than Canada did. Given the relative size of the two economies and populations, for the federal government to match Australia on defence spending would require an annual out-lay of between $35 billion and $40 billion, rather than the $22 billion that was spent last year.

There are reasons why Australia spends more. But taken together, they do not account for the staggering gap between the two countries.

Support for — or hostility toward — defence spending in Canada follows the usual political fault lines. This is in sharp contrast to Australia, where there is a broad political consensus that adequate funding is vital to the national interest. So much so, in fact, that for Australian parliamentarians and the media, defence spending is not a hugely controversial subject.

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