Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2019

A spectre is haunting the Liberal war room: the spectre of Jagmeet Singh

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the wake of the English language debate, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is suddenly getting more of the kind of attention I thought he’d get from the media after he became party leader. Back in January, while he was campaigning for a seat in Parliament in a BC byelection, I wrote:

When Jagmeet Singh was elected NDP leader, I really did think he’d be a significant challenge to Justin Trudeau due to the media’s apparent fascination with Singh (a love affair that appeared to be as deep and lasting as that of Justin’s teeny-bopper [media] fan club for their darling), but it faded very quickly indeed. I guess as far as the Canadian media is concerned, there can only be one …

Now it appears that the Liberal Party backroom braintrust has suddenly woken up to the threat that Singh and the NDP are going to retain and even increase their support among left-leaning voters the Liberals had been taking for granted:

An even bigger risk for Trudeau is if lots of so-called low-information voters — who make their decisions late in a campaign — decide to cast a ballot for the charming Singh’s New Democrats.

But the biggest risk of all to the Liberals and Conservatives is if lots and lots of citizens give the finger to both parties and decide to vote NDP or Green to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

It looks like a long shot now with the economy humming along and a low unemployment rate.

But the same circumstances existed in B.C. in 2017. And plenty of voters decided that these were the right conditions for bringing the NDP back to power.

Nobody is expecting that Jagmeet Singh will be prime minister after the October 21 election.

But if he captures far more seats than the CBC poll tracker is projecting, it will be because of his genial nature and his ability to speak like a human being.

Surely, the Liberals realize that. The class differences between Trudeau and Singh are profound — and there are far fewer voters in Trudeau’s realm than Singh’s.

October 10, 2019

Justin Trudeau scrambles to escape from the consequences of his mistakes

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It must be awful to be a Justin Trudeau fan these days, where he seems to spend more time looking awkward as his personal mis-steps keep coming back to haunt him. I’d never vote for the guy — but I wouldn’t vote for his main opponent, the Milk Dud either — but I thought he was a better politician than he’s turning out to be in this election campaign without the dependable strawman of Stephen Harper to struggle against. While I think he’s unfit to be Prime Minister, Barrett Wilson argues he wasn’t even fit to be a teacher:

It should be well established by now that this man is unfit to serve as our Prime Minister.

But if corporate corruption, obstruction of justice, internet censorship, persecution of journalists, buying off the media, and frickin’ blackface weren’t enough to convince you that Trudeau is unfit. Perhaps this latest insanity will.

Trudeau and his campaign team somehow felt it was a good idea for the disgraced Liberal leader to appear on a pre-taped and rehearsed children’s television show today called “New Mom, Who Dis?” The appearance was cringeworthy at best, as host Jesse Cruickshank shamelessly flirted with the PM, but it was also cynical, manipulative, and exploitative, as Trudeau fielded two questions from two young black twin girls.

The first twin asked Trudeau, “Why did you paint your face brown?”

Trudeau answered: “Ooh. Um, it was something I shouldn’t have done because it hurt people. It’s not something that you should do and that is something that I learned. I didn’t know it back then and I know it now, and I’m sorry that I hurt people.”

The second twin followed up: “But did you paint your nose and your hands brown?”

Trudeau: “Mmmhmm. Yeah. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

The clip deserves to be watched more than once just to understand and appreciate how clearly scripted, deeply cynical, and frankly sick, the whole thing is.

Okay. So, this will take a second to unpack. Somehow, Justin Trudeau felt it would be a good idea to use a children’s television show and two young children of colour as a stage for a preplanned apology for his blackface exploits from when he was 29-years-old. Don’t worry everyone. He’s learned from his days of trying to manipulate strong, principled women of colour such as Jody Wilson-Raybould. It’s much easier to exploit young children!

And, by the way — who doesn’t know that blackface is wrong when they are 29-years-old? The culture in 2001 rejected such racist tropes. If Trudeau were actually that stupid at 29, when his brain was fully developed, then how in the hell should he ever lead a G7 country at 47? He can’t even be trusted to properly instruct young school children.

What other stupid things has this guy done that Canada’s enemies could use as blackmail (no pun intended).

October 9, 2019

Theodore Dalrymple on Justin Trudeau and David Cameron

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

He doesn’t hate either of them, he just thinks they are either fools or knaves. As the Instapundit often says, it might be time to “embrace the healing power of ‘and'”:

No doubt it is the mark of bad character to rejoice, as I do, in the spectacle of a man being hoist with his own petard, and as the Canadian Prime Minster, Justin Trudeau, has recently been hoist. And while I am at it, I confess also that, though I know that there is no art to find a mind’s construction in the face, I cannot help also but judge people, at least to an extent, by their physiognomy. And the fact is that Mr Trudeau has a face as characterless as that of the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. They are of the same ilk. You look at them and think “What nullities!” The main character discernible in their faces is lack of character.

David Cameron’s official portrait from the 10 Downing Street website, 3 August 2010.
Open Government Licensed image via Wikimedia Commons.

It is not their fault, perhaps; besides which I, or you, might be mistaken in our assessment of them and actually they have backbones (or what my teachers use to call moral fibre) of enormous strength. In any case, there are worse things to be, especially in the field of politics, than a nullity: an evil monster, for example, would be far worse, and no one could seriously claim that either of Messrs Trudeau and Cameron are, or were, evil monsters, however little they inspire admiration.

No one, then, could accuse me of partiality for Mr Trudeau, and the abjectness of his apology for his behaviour when he was a very young man did nothing to increase my liking for him. But it seems to me that sins as a young man were venial at worst, a callow disregard of the sensibilities of others which I common in youth. I very much doubt that he was a deep-dyed racist in any dangerous way, more a silly boy having a bit of fun.

There is a serious side to this imbroglio, of course. If the political leader of an important country can be overthrown or not re-elected on so relatively trivial a ground, while at the same town no one cares in the least about his shallow but dangerous moral posturing and obviously weak-minded pandering to the ayatollahs of an absurd and ill-founded political morality, then a new nadir of decadence and cowardice has been reached. It is a difficult question of moral philosophy as to whether it would be worse if Mr Trudeau actually believed his own political correctness or merely made use of it as a means to power. If the former, he is a fool; if the latter a knave. I leave it to others to decide which is better in a politician, or indeed in any other human being, foolishness or a knavery.

Political correctness is dangerous because when fools or knaves get into power, they may try to implement its dictates. And since many people are much more concerned to appear good than to do good, and since they are unlikely to suffer the consequences of their own actions (except when hoist on their own petard), the implementation may continue for a long time after the negative effects of its dictates have become clear. When implemented, those dictates create a clientele dependent upon their continuation, which turns any attempt to undo the harm into a nasty social conflict.

Election 2019 is “the most miserable, dishonest, venomous, pandering and altogether trivial exercise in multi-partisan misdirection since the last one”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne curses both houses in his comparison between the Milk Dud’s Conservatives and Blackface Justin’s Liberals:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

The platforms the parties have seen fit to put on public display — those of them that have deigned to present a platform — range from the absurdly unambitious (free museum passes, anyone?) micro-baubles of the Liberals and Conservatives to the utopian free-for-alls of the NDP and the Greens.

If the latter may be discounted as the fantasies of the unelectable, the former are scarcely to be taken more seriously, such is the record of broken promises of both parties once in office — of which the most damning evidence is surely the Liberals’ trumpeting of a book by two dozen academics, published shortly before the election, that found they kept roughly half of their promises from 2015. As defences of integrity go, “what about all the promises that weren’t broken” is not among the more convincing.

That credibility gap — the Liberal platform has the gall to include forecasts for the deficit — may explain why the parties have been less concerned with telling Canadians what they would do in power than with making up stories about what their opponents would do. The Liberals have spent much of the first part of the campaign suggesting a Conservative government would legislate on abortion; the Tories seem bent on spending the rest pretending the Liberals would tax the capital gains on people’s homes.

Or never mind the future. The parties seem unable to tell the truth even about the recent past. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has falsely claimed that British Columbia’s carbon tax “isn’t working” (studies estimate the province’s emissions are five to 15 per cent lower than they would be without the tax), that Canada gives $2.2 billion annually in foreign aid to “middle- and upper-income countries” (the correct figure is closer to $22 million) or that 95 per cent of Canadians already have prescription drug insurance (10 per cent have none, according to a report by the Commons health committee, while another 10 per cent are under-insured).

As for Justin Trudeau, he and his spokespersons have confined themselves to misleading the public about the Conservatives’ tax cuts (a cut in the 15 per cent base rate is hardly “for the wealthy,” even if the wealthy woulds get some benefit from it), or their record on health care transfers (transfers under the Harper government were not “cut” or “frozen,” but increased by nearly six per cent per annum). Oh, and about his part in the SNC-Lavalin affair, up to and including his muzzling of witnesses who might wish to tell their stories to the RCMP.

The Liberals, then, have failed to make a case for their re-election, while the Tories have failed to make the case for why they should replace them. To say this — or to note that their platforms have more in common than they have serious differences — is to risk the ire of partisans of both, who are heavily invested in the idea that this is an election of great import, as they are generally in the idea that politics is a noble calling filled with honourable men and women who keep at least half their promises.

Andrew Scheer meets British Prime Minister Theresa May
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

QotD: The long history of elite Canadian smugness

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

I’m reminded that, in 1966, the late, great former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, reflecting on a long, productive life in the international arena, quipped that Canada, very often, too often he suggested, sounded like “the stern daughter of the voice of God.” It was a reflection of a regrettable Canadian tendency, even in the 1950s when we were more than just “pulling our weight,” to preach when we should have been content to practice in silence. He wasn’t faulting Louis St Laurent or even Mike Pearson, he was simply commenting on the fairly general and unfortunate habit that Canadian elites had, then, and retain, now, towards self congratulatory moralizing.

About all we have done, consistently, for most of the past 50 years is look on and do nothing: we have, mostly, been sitting on the sidelines, doing little except to chide and cast reproving glances at those who are acting. That approach almost certainly makes the Laurentian Elites more comfortable, but I suspect that many, many Canadians are just a little bit ashamed of themselves because of what our government is doing.

Ted Campbell, “Hypocrisy”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-09-27.

October 4, 2019

Foreign aid now an issue in the federal election

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Milk Dud actually said something worthwhile on the campaign trail the other day:

Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

Andrew Scheer’s announcement that a Conservative government would cut foreign aid by 25% has been met with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth by the out-of-touch elites.

Yet, it’s a policy that all Canadians can support because it will benefit all of us.

As I’ve said many times, the Canadian government is called “Canadian” for a reason.

It exists to serve the Canadian People, not to serve foreign, often corrupt, countries.

When we have such serious problems here at home, including a growing opioid epidemic, veterans who are homeless and struggling, and many Indigenous communities that lack access to good housing and even clean drinking water, then it’s obvious to everyone that we need to focus our resources here at home.

Personally, I would like to see all foreign aid (aside from disaster relief) eliminated and redirected towards Canadian citizens.

Still, the Conservative proposal has (along with earlier calls by the PPC to end all foreign aid) finally shifted the conversation around foreign aid, and will help wake up many Canadians to the reality that a large amount of our tax dollars are given away to foreign countries while Canadians here at home are suffering.

It’s appalling that the Canadian government sends money to foreign regimes (where the money is often appropriated by corrupt leaders and used for things very different than aiding the poor and destitute) while First Nations communities here in Canada still lack basic drinking water and sanitation facilities.

October 3, 2019

Toronto’s gun problem

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The city of Toronto has a gun problem, and politicians are lining up to offer variations of the same idea as the solution. You see, unlike every other city in North America, all of the gun crime in Toronto is committed by legal owners of AR-15 and AK-47 “assault weapons”. They’re all fully registered with the federal government, and have taken all the required training courses and keep their weapons under the strict storage and transportation rules, never taking them anywhere but to the legally designated shooting range and always on the permitted route to and from that range (and they’re all life-members of the NRA, of course). This is why, unlike every other city in North America, a ban on “assault weapons” will eliminate 100% of the gun-related crime in Toronto.

In the real-world version of Toronto, however, the proposed ban will have almost no impact on the crime rates, because almost none of the gun-related crimes committed in Toronto involves any kind of “assault weapon”, most being turf disputes involving illegal handguns between drug dealers and personal grudges among “young aspiring rappers who are just about to turn their lives around”:

Colt Canada’s model SA20, a commercial version of the Canadian C7A2 rifle.
Image from the Colt Canada website.

If Liberals are re-elected to a second term in government, their plan to tackle gun violence includes a ban on high-velocity, semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, and gun marketing bans that evoke America’s favourite action figure.

“There are sometimes advertisements and videos that appear (on social media) … to imply that we can be GI Joe on our main street,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said about the Liberal platform’s vague reference to “limit the glorification of violence by changing the way firearms are advertised marketed and sold in Canada.”

During a Q&A with reporters in Ottawa on Sunday, where Goodale fielded questions about their incumbent government’s election promises, the minister attempted to qualify freedom of expression implications with the types of promotional material that could be targeted.

“(It) depicts a kind of behaviour that is simply inappropriate and some people would find it quite threatening … and it leads to the impression of military assault weapons is something you just do, every day,” explained Goodale.

I’m not a big consumer of advertising, but I can’t recall the last time I saw any kind of ad for firearms in Canada that wasn’t in a gun magazine (and there are not many of those sold in typical corner stores). Scary black guns in Hollywood movie ads, sure … they’re everywhere … but that’s not in any way related to the advertising, sale, or use of guns in Canada.

QotD: Media coverage of Liberal and Conservative scandals, respectively

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the Canadian election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has unveiled the centrepiece of its platform:

    A re-elected Liberal government [will] expand the Learn To Camp program.

Under the Learn To Camp program, every Canadian will be provided with a tub of boot polish, a novelty turban, a jewel to stick in your belly button, and genie slippers with curly toes, and trained how to swish across a Vancouver ballroom while asking other guests to tally your banana.

Oh, wait, sorry, that was last week’s Justin story. In America a ten-minute phone call to some fellow in Kiev is all the pretext you need for two years of multi-million-dollar investigation. But in Canada the news that the Prime Minister has spent half his adult life as the world’s wokest mammy singer is just a blip in the day’s news cycle, soon to be supplanted by a genuinely eye-catching scandal such as whether or not the Tory leader had a valid license from the Insurance Councils of Saskatchewan or the Canadian Association of Insurance Brokers back in 1997, or 1978, or whenever. You can understand why the Canadian media would rather stampede after the Andrew Scheer scandal: what journalist with a nose for a great red-meat story wouldn’t prefer chasing down the officially approved accreditation from the Department of Paperwork’s archives than, say, the fruiterer who supplies the Prime Minstrel with his trouser bananas. Was Justin accredited by the Minstrelsy Council of Quebec or the Canadian Association of Burnt Cork Fetishists? Would that make the story more interesting for the CBC et al?

The Toronto Star, like all good government-subsidized Canadian media, has been doing its best to neutralize the mammy songs. The most potentially damaging of the three (so far) blackface incidents is the middle one – a grainy video from the 1990s showing Boy Justin capering about like an ape. So the Star set its crack investigators on the story and tracked down a much better version of the video, and conclusively proved that Tories were misleading the public when they claimed that the Prime Ministrel in blackface, blackarms, blacklegs and blackwhatever-other-appendage was wearing a T-shirt with a banana on it. After all, the banana would imply Justin is a racist who likens black people to monkeys. Whereas prancing around in full-body blackface waving your arms and sticking your tongue out implies no such monkey-like slur.

So the Star‘s new HD minstrel video is of sufficient quality to show that the banana on the T-shirt is, in fact, the beak of a toucan. Unfortunately, the new video is also of sufficient quality to show that the banana is instead stuffed down Justin’s trousers. That risks suggesting the Prime Minstrel is exploiting old white neuroses about the black man’s sexual prowess. But don’t worry – The Toronto Star is only a day or two away from a full-page exclusive asserting that the Negro, impressive though his endowments be, pales in comparison to the average Quebec high-school drama teacher: When Rastus makes the mistake of appearing on stage next to Justin, he’s the one who needs the banana. Not for nothing is Quebec’s provincial dialect called joual, derived from cheval, as in horse.

Mark Steyn, “Blackface Narcissus”, Steyn Online, 2019-09-30.

October 2, 2019

In a crowded field, Election 2019 may be the worst we’ve seen so far

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley makes the case that this year’s federal election is the worst of all:

It has been widely suggested that this might be Canada’s Worst Election. Certainly it is dreary as all get-out. We began with interminable back-and-forth about abortion, which all party leaders pledge to do absolutely nothing about. If one or more of them are lying, it seems very unlikely they would admit to it at a press conference. The next mania was over Justin Trudeau’s blackface revues, which were radioactively damaging to whatever was left of his Most Enlightened Gentleman brand, but which mostly served as an opportunity for exhibitionist partisan insanity and cringeworthy journalism.

[…]

By rights the Conservatives should be mopping the floor. But they can hardly attack Trudeau’s social-engineer budgeting when they’re relaunching their flotilla of boutique tax credits for kids’ sports and arts programs and public transit. Why not just make their tax cut even bigger and let people spend their money how they please?

Similarly, the Conservatives would be on much firmer ground criticizing Trudeau’s housing-market interventions if they weren’t promising to review the mortgage stress test and bring back 30-year mortgages — something Stephen Harper’s government eliminated in 2012. Having decided carbon pricing was evil almost entirely because Justin Trudeau supports it, the Tories still struggle to defend any effective or efficient policy against climate change.

Any hope that Maxime Bernier might hold Scheer’s feet to the fire on free minds and free markets went up in flames ages ago as his People’s Party attracted far more authoritarian/nativist refugees from the Conservative Party of Canada than libertarian ones. Jagmeet Singh is bargaining hard to sell the NDP’s credibility down the river to appease all-but-totally uninterested Quebec nationalists — shamefully promising not to intervene against Bill 21, as if he would ever get the chance. Elizabeth May and her Green Party constantly remind us that they’re really quite odd: May insisting Longueuil candidate Pierre Nantel isn’t a separatist while Nantel shouts “I’m a separatist!” through a bullhorn is the weirdest thing she has done since the last weird thing.

The debates have worked out as badly as conceivably possible: The Leaders’ Debate Commission, created by the Liberals to solve a problem that didn’t exist — aieeee! Too many debates! — has reinvented the wheel, crushing both Maclean’s debate (which Trudeau declined to attend) and the Munk debate on foreign affairs (which has been cancelled due to Trudeau’s lack of interest) beneath it.

September 26, 2019

“Canadian politicians answer questions with talking points so ludicrous, counterfactual or shameless that you wonder how they can look their loved ones in the eye”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The extra-long headline is from Chris Selley’s article discussing how the Prime Racist is handling questions about his documented instances of wearing blackface:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

If anything rational can explain Trudeau’s odd performance at a Monday-morning press conference in Hamilton, Ont., perhaps it’s relief at those findings. Lucas Meyer, a radio reporter for Newstalk 1010 in Toronto, asked the PM a neat question about the video showing him capering around in blackface, apparently with something substantial shoved down the front of his trousers — namely, “what exactly was that costume?”

“I am continuing to be open with Canadians about the mistake I made,” Trudeau responded. “This is something that I take responsibility for. This is something that I should have known better, but didn’t. I will continue to work every day to fight racism, to fight discrimination, to fight intolerance in this country.”

Meyer tried again: “With all due respect, Prime Minister, that wasn’t even close to answering the question. What was that costume?”

“I have been open with Canadians, and I will continue to be open with Canadians,” Trudeau replied, eliciting various noises indicating astonishment from the assembled journalists. “I will continue to fight racism and intolerance every day.”

To be fair, it is by no means unusual to see Canadian politicians answer questions with talking points so ludicrous, counterfactual or shameless that you wonder how they can look their loved ones in the eye. […]

If an honest answer would have been problematic, “I don’t remember” or “it wasn’t a costume, I was just being a goof,” would have worked better. Just about anything would have been better than claiming to be consistently frank and open with Canadians while failing to answer what could be the simplest question he’ll get asked on the whole campaign.

On Tuesday in Burnaby, B.C., Trudeau was asked how he can say he’s being frank and open with Canadians when all he’ll say about the topic at hand is that he’s being frank and open with Canadians.

September 23, 2019

The “Global Climate Strike”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The big “let’s all play hooky from school” event’s Toronto organizers have been getting positive coverage from some of the local media, because of course they have. Here’s Tanya Mok for BlogTO, listing the totally reasonable and not in any way unrealistic “demands” of the movement:

FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.

The coalition has made a list of seven demands, which “reflect the rallying cries of the intersectional movements” they belong to. Some of those demands include:

  • Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
  • The protection of forests, land, and water sources.
  • A shift to publicly-owned renewable energy, and reducing national carbon emission by 65% by 203, reaching zero emissions by 2040.
  • A $15 minimum wage for all, and higher taxation on the rich.
  • Universal public services like health care and dental care, free university and college, housing as a human right, and free public transit.
  • Justice for migrants and refugees, allowing status for all. That includes putting an end to deportations and allowing for the full access to public services.

There will be a concert at Queen’s Park after the rally, as well as a follow-up benefit concert at the Tranzac Club in the evening. A giant street mural project run by Greenpeace will also be taking place prior to the rally, around 10 a.m., at the southern point of Queen’s Park.

September 22, 2019

Justin “Harvey Weinstein” Trudeau to give the NRA his full attention

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on Prime Minister Blackface’s latest attempt to switch the voters’ attention away from his racist activities onto a more traditional target for Liberal vituperation … the NRA and scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun murder machines of death:

On Friday, amidst a force-nine crapstorm that (for now) makes SNC-Lavalin look like a spring shower, Justin Trudeau stood behind a podium in Toronto and announced his government would “ban all military-style assault rifles, including the AR-15.”

“You don’t need a military-grade assault weapon — one designed to take down the most amount of people in the shortest time — to take down a deer,” Trudeau intoned.

It was an utterly shameless, utterly formulaic attempt to change the narrative. Trudeau’s government spent much of its first term studying the need for new gun control measures and the result, Bill C-71, received royal assent exactly three short months ago. There was no ban on assault rifles or the AR-15. In fact, the government emphasized the importance of letting the RCMP’s gun boffins classify individual firearms. “It should not be politicized,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told CBC last year.

Now, well, there’s an election on and the boss isn’t sure how many more photos might be out there of him in blackface. So to hell with all that. A lot of people in Toronto and other big cities will eat it up, after all.

This sort of approach long predated Trudeau, of course, and he has used it many times before. In so many ways, over the past four years, he has shown himself to be a conventional Liberal politician. But recent days have taken us miles past conventional.

If blacking up wasn’t spectacularly uncommon in the days of Trudeau’s youth, it must surely nevertheless be the case that the vast majority of Gen-Xers haven’t ever done it — if not because they thought it was racist or knew it could get them in trouble, then because who on earth has that much time to kill? Those costumes clearly took a ton of effort, and he made a habit of it!

Small Dead Animals has a video of Stefan Molyneux discussing PM Dressup’s latest set of embarrassing incidents.

September 21, 2019

Sexton Tank Chat | Operation Market Garden 75 | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 20 Sep 2019

Here we have a Tank Chat special from the commemorative XXX Corps convoy for Operation Market Garden 75. See David Willey discuss the a Sexton from the Historic Collection of the Royal Netherlands Army, on location in the Netherlands.

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Justin Trudeau will magnanimously forgive Canadians for their systemic racism

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s mighty generous of him, after all, it was our racist country’s culture that forced him to wear “skin-darkening make-up” in a totally innocent moment of amusement (or was it three totally innocent moments of amusement?). Andrew Coyne says Justin is no racist … but he is a sanctimonious fraud:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

If you thought this affair meant an end to the Trudeau brand of conspicuous moral preening — if you thought the rank hypocrisy of lecturing his opponents for their sins against tolerance, even as he was concealing much worse in his past, would deter or even shame him — think again. He seems merely to have exchanged one hypocrisy for another, asking meekly for the forgiveness he has been so unwilling to extend to others.

Which is really what all this is about. It isn’t the insensitivity, or the self-absorption, or the hypocrisy, that will leave the most lasting impression: it’s the calculation, the fakery, the synthetic emotion, the sly manipulation. The prime minister has proved adept at deploying the jargon and cliches of the identitarian left (“microaggressions,” “intersectionalities,” and “ally” all featured highly in the Winnipeg press conference) in moments of maximum political danger: recall his earlier non-denial of having groped a young female reporter, this time as a 28-year-old: “men and women often experience situations differently.”

Is he a racist? No. He is a fraud. The racial masks he wore to conceal his identity 20 years ago are but one in a series: from blackface to feministface to sunnywaysface. If it were just a matter of comparing his youthful errors to his record on racial issues, his partisans might have a point. Certainly the Conservatives, with their record of having exploited fears of Muslims, or asylum-seekers, or God help us, the Global Migration Compact, are in no position to point fingers.

But the character and credibility of a leader is a much broader matter than one issue. It informs every part of his record, the whole of his platform. The leader we saw dissembling so skillfully this week in Winnipeg is the same one who lied to the public, repeatedly, about the SNC-Lavalin affair; who made solemn and explicit promises on electoral reform and balanced budgets he had no intention of keeping; who ran roughshod over Parliament in exactly the same ways he had most decried in his predecessor.

Oh, and: he is the same leader who boasted after the fact of having personally selected a “scrappy tough-guy senator from an Indigenous community” as his opponent for the charity boxing match that would launch his career because he would make “a good foil.” Even on race, that the current occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office is a sanctimonious fraud it is surely at least as significant as that his government sponsors anti-racism seminars.

September 20, 2019

Prime Minister Dressup and the make-up case

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

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s love of dramatic costume has been noted here before, but over the last couple of days it’s become evident that he’s also felt the attraction of stage make-up, even when most people would realize it’s no longer appropriate to wear blackface:

As Oscar Wilde almost said: “To be caught once wearing blackface may be regarded as a misfortune; to be caught doing so on three separate occasions in the run up to an election proves that there is a God, that he loathes liberal hypocrisy, and that he despises Justin Trudeau, especially.”

Here’s the first offending item:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook The View, via Time

[…]

Will Justin Trudeau — President Bieber, as I prefer to call him — finally get his comeuppance as a result?

I doubt it. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals tells us: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

This is what we on the non-woke political side of the argument are doing right now. But it’s not going to make much difference, is it?

The other two “make up” incidents are covered in Time:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday night, following Time‘s publication of the photo, Trudeau apologized: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have known better and I didn’t. I’m really sorry.” When asked if he thought the photograph was racist, he said, “Yes it was. I didn’t consider it racist at the time, but now we know better.”

Trudeau said he wore blackface “makeup” in high school to sing “Day-O,” a Jamaican folk song famously performed by African-American singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. Time has confirmed that a photo shows Trudeau at a school talent show wearing blackface and an afro wig.

[…]

A third instance emerged Thursday — this one a grainy video showing Trudeau in blackface, raising his hands in the air. On Thursday, Astravas confirmed that the video showed Trudeau from the early 1990s. It comes despite Trudeau being asked at his press conference whether there were any other incidents he wanted to own up to.

This is a critical moment for Trudeau, who began his re-election campaign on Sept. 11 under the cloud of a scandal over whether he pressured his then-attorney general to drop corruption charges against a large Canadian engineering firm [that’d be the SNC-Lavalin scandal, if you’re keeping track]. The Liberal Party leader has championed minority groups during his nearly four years as prime minister and made his embrace of Canada’s many cultures a major part of his leadership. At least seven of the 35 members of Trudeau’s cabinet are from ethnic minorities.

I doubt any of the remaining minority cabinet ministers will dare say much, as the Liberal Party has a long, long history of enforcing Omertà … or else. If they want to be back in cabinet on the lengthening odds that PM Dressup wins the October election, they’ll say little or nothing to the media.

The good news is that after careful consideration, the PM has found the guilty party … it’s the rest of Canada and its entrenched “systemic racism”:

Don’t you feel awful, fellow Canadians? That shame … that’s all yours, thanks to your shitty racist attitudes. Poor Justin is merely the victim.

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