Quotulatiousness

June 20, 2021

L’Affaire Annamie Paul – “… it’s like every Liberal across the land forgot about politics”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The weekly wrap-up from The Line wonders why Canadian media outlets pay so much attention to the Green Party (far in excess of their political influence normally), but recent Green Party fratricidal bun-fighting merits attention just because of the injured bystander, the Prime Minister of the current year:

The background of all of this is complicated, and we’re not going to bother recapping it. If you care enough about Canadian politics to follow the Greens, you know it all already. What’s interesting to us — and funny as all hell — is how angry the PM’s die-hard fanbase was, how shocked and sincerely surprised they were, when Paul turned her guns on the PM instead of her own rebelling party executives and grassroots:

    “To the prime minister, Justin Trudeau,” Paul said at a press conference, “I say to you today, you are no ally. And you are no feminist. Your deeds and your words over these past weeks prove that definitively. A real ally and feminist doesn’t end their commitment to those principles whenever they come up against their personal ambition.”

And, gosh. Liberals everywhere were just stunned.

It was cute. As we said, it’s like every Liberal across the land forgot about politics. And that’s ridiculous. Canadian Liberals are the most ruthlessly effective vote winners precisely because they are relentlessly amoral and craven. We don’t even mean this as an insult! Your typical Canadian Liberal constitutes the purest sample of raw partisanship known to human science — which is why they’re so good at winning.

And that’s why they should have instantly understood what Paul was doing when she attacked the PM. She was picking a fight she could win because she’s losing the one she’s actually facing. Paul is a black woman. She’s Jewish. She’s obviously lost control of her own party. The only chance in hell she has of surviving is to lay every possible identity group card down on the table, declare herself the champion of those oppressed groups, and then dare her own party to purge her. She’s adopting the mantle of the WOC woke champion. It’s a lot easier for Paul to fight that battle against the PM than it is for her to fight it against her own party.

As much as Liberals hate to admit it — and they really, really, really hate to admit it — the PM is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy on the feminism and racial equality files. Obviously.

Paul is desperate. She’s in a fight for her political life, and she seems to be losing. So she’s picked a fight with a powerful white man to play up her own “voice of the oppressed” credentials. It’s cynical and desperate. Frankly, the Liberals ought to be honoured. What’s that they say about imitation and flattery?

Tobruk: A second siege? – WW2 – 147 – June 20, 1942

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Jun 2021

Two convoys head from opposite ends of the Mediterranean to supply Malta, hoping to run interference for each other, and the Battle of Sevastopol continues as the Axis slowly wear down the Soviet defenders, but the big news is Erwin Rommel’s continued advances in North Africa, defeating the 8th Army again and again. Can the Allies hold Tobruk? Will they even try? Watch and find out.
(more…)

Is racism a bigger problem than terrorism?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

With Americans being urged to report on “radicalized” friends and family by the government and white supremacy being called the greatest threat, have we reached the point that being seen as racist is worse than allowing a terrorist to kill many people? The inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing shows that’s exactly the state most of the western world is in:

“Manchester Arena Bomb (22 May 2017) – Daily Mirror – 19 dead in pop concert ‘suicide bomb'” by Bradford Timeline is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous “missed opportunities” to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.

Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a “bulging” rucksack so large he “struggled” under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant “missed opportunity”. The “inadequacy” of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?

To be clear, the security guard who was cagey about questioning Abedi is not responsible for the failure to stop Abedi from detonating his device. The first volume of the inquiry’s report – which covers security at and around the arena on the night of 22 May 2017 – criticises certain individuals, including the security guard, for not doing their jobs diligently enough. But it says that it was the organisations responsible for security at the arena – the arena’s own security firm and also the British Transport Police – that were “principally” to blame for the “missed opportunities”. It also makes the reasonable point that it is impossible to know what would have happened if Abedi had been confronted. It proposes that there may still have been loss of life – if, for example, he had detonated his device while being questioned – but that it would have been less severe than the horrors that shortly unfolded.

It is disturbing to read the list of “missed opportunities”. Abedi was in the arena for more than an hour and a half before he detonated his bomb. He arrived at 20.51 and blew himself up at 22.31, as the concert attendees started to leave. In that time, this young man with a massive rucksack was seen by numerous people. He was described by some of them as “nervous” and “fidgety”. He looked out of place – his age “meant that he did not fit the demographic of a parent waiting for a child”, as the inquiry says. And yet as a result of individual and organisational failure – including, the inquiry says, insufficient training of the security guards on duty that night – the message didn’t get through that there was a fidgeting, agitated man with a bulging rucksack hanging around for 90 minutes at the exit area of a venue that was largely packed with children and teenagers.

Remarkably, some people at the arena who saw Abedi thought to themselves that he was a suicide bomber. Christopher Wild and his partner, Julie Whitley, who were picking up Whitley’s daughter, discussed the possibility that Abedi had a bomb in his rucksack. Wild actually did confront Abedi and asked him what was in his bag. Abedi nervously brushed him off. Wild reported his concerns to security guards at 22.15 – 16 minutes before the explosion – but he was “fobbed off”. Another parent said the security guards were “really quite dismissive” of Wild’s concerns. It is deeply disturbing that parents at the arena rightly suspected Abedi was a bomber and yet nothing was done to challenge or remove him.

What’s the Difference between Crosscut and Ripcut Saws? | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 5 Mar 2021

To understand the difference between ripcut and crosscut saws, you must look at the way the teeth are shaped.

There are two types of sawtooth, chisel point as in rip-cut and pinnacle or pyramid point which are three-sided culminating into a sharp point. With the ripcut saw, it’s the chisel edges to each of the teeth that slice along the long grain. The crosscut saw relies on both the sharp point and then the side bevel to the front and back of each tooth. I think that this video will help you to see the difference!
——————–

Want to learn more about woodworking?

Go to Woodworking Masterclasses for weekly project episodes: http://bit.ly/2JeH3a9​

Go to Common Woodworking for step-by-step beginner guides and courses: http://bit.ly/35VQV2o​

http://bit.ly/2BXmuei​ for Paul’s latest ventures on his blog

QotD: Cargo cult thinking in education

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are a lot of things that set the groundwork for this, and I am not an expert on post-modernism and critical race theory. But one factor that is not often credited is a cargo cult mentality. Folks look at successful white people and observe they all went to college, and then infer that if we just get all the black kids into college, they will be successful too. Their resulting plan is to reduce or eliminate standards that are perceived to be keeping black kids out of college.

The problem of course is that college is not the cause of prosperity, but a marker (with prosperity) of other traits — focus on long-term goals, discipline, hard work, and yes knowing 2+2=4. This sort of woke BS just makes it worse, because it attacks the real roots of prosperity. There are real barriers to poor blacks achieving prosperity — eg how do you focus on long-term goals when you don’t know where you are sleeping tonight or when you have no role models who do so — but the purity and objectivity of math is not among these.

This sort of cargo cult thinking can be seen all the time in Progressive economic proscriptions. The government push for home ownership is another — middle class people own homes so if low income people owned homes they would become middle class. Now, this has a bit of accuracy in that, like the stock market, the elite have goosed the housing market to always go up. But leaving that aside for a moment, owning a home vs renting is a terrible decision for many people — it piles on a lot of financial risk but perhaps more importantly it limits geographic mobility which used to be critical to lower-income people improving their lot.

Warren Meyer, “Are the Woke a False Flag Operation of White Supremacists?”, Coyote Blog, 2021-02-16.

Powered by WordPress