The Cold War
Published 3 Aug 2019Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on Gouzenko affair — a spy thriller that provoked the beginning of the Cold War.
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Yes, it’s time to publish some of the silliest political bullshit our “leaders” and their parties are slinging around in the federal “she-lection”:
Let’s start with an interesting one.
We’d recommend watching the whole clip (and we’d also note that there’s a second video clip further down in the thread; technical limitations broke one long clip into two shorter ones). But there’s two piles of dung here, and it’s worth breaking them out separately.
The first is, of course, the patented non-answer to a direct question. Glen McGregor asked Trudeau about our people in Afghanistan who were in that very moment in immediate danger. Trudeau talked about something nice he did in 2015. We understand that this is a campaign, but imagine you or someone you love is stuck Afghanistan in now, and the leader of the country is asked about you/them, and that’s the answer? Really?
The second pile of scat is more nuanced. Check out the part of the clip starting at 1:25. Trudeau says that O’Toole and the Conservatives are “promising to end the very program that brought in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, the very program we’re using to bring in tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing to [safety] in Canada. That doesn’t make sense.”
Well, we mean … it doesn’t make sense because it’s not true.
The Tories are proposing changes to how Canada accepts refugees. Specifically, they want to shift to more heavily rely on privately sponsored refugees, citing research that shows these refugees more easily and more quickly settle into Canada. There would be both government-sponsored and private-sponsored refugees under what the CPC is calling a “joint model” model. This is broken out in the CPC’s campaign platform on page 129.
This seems … pretty reasonable? The Tories are not only promising to maintain current funding levels and numbers of accepted refugees, they just want to structure it differently. Not even very differently, at that: of the 62,000 Syrian refugees that Canada has resettled since Trudeau came to office, half were privately sponsored. The CPC platform also very specifically notes that this wouldn’t apply in “cases of emergency”, which the fall of Afghanistan clearly is. You can criticize that as policy, or even doubt they’ll follow through. Just saying they’ll cancel the program, though, is nonsense.
Of course, Trudeau isn’t the only bullshitter on the campaign trail, so RTWT for the rest of the antics that The Line felt were bullshitty enough to register this week.
Biographics
Published 23 Mar 2020Check out Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/biographics
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Source/Further reading:
Oxford National Dictionary of Biography: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.109…
Interesting podcast on his life: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04n…
Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/…
History Today: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/…
The Thames Tunnel: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor…
The atmospheric railway: https://www.theguardian.com/science/t…
SS Great Britain accident: https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/about-…
“Did you watch the news last night?”
“Yeah, I watched [Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow].”
Except that’s not the news. That’s an editorial program where a person gets performatively angry about their opinion of selected bits of news so that you get angry about it along with them … righteously angry enough to sit through an hour’s worth of commercials.
It’s not news, it’s irritainment.
Tamara Keel, “It makes me so mad!”, View From The Porch, 2021-05-25.
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