Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2012

The rise of celebrity endorsements is a sign of political immaturity

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

In sp!ked, Patrick West points out that celebrities who push political agendas or social issues are actually a sign of the failure of the political class:

This paradoxical egotism — protesting against ‘selfish’ right-wing people in order to make you appear morally superior — was mercilessly parodied in the 2004 film Team America: World Police. In it, marionettes representing the likes of Susan Sarandon, George Clooney and Matt Damon are shown as self-important dupes of Kim Jong-Il, parroting liberal-left vacuities. ‘As actors’, says Janeane Garofolo’s puppet, ‘it is our reponsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion’. Like all good parodies, it helped to change the way people think. Sean Penn’s intervention on the matter of the Falkland Islands earlier this year generated unflattering comparisons to the movie, and I imagine Matt Damon still fears to speak on humanitarian issues, lest he be met with a collective cry of ‘Matt Day-Mon’.

Still, this hasn’t deterred the likes of Clooney and Whoopi Goldberg continuing to make known their support for the Democrats — who are liberal-left, and therefore Good People — in opposition to the Republicans, who are right-wing and by extension Bad People. Now from the pop world they have been joined by Katy Perry, who last week performed at a Las Vegas fundraiser for President Obama in the forthcoming presidential election, and by Madonna, who on Saturday declared at a concert in New Orleans: ‘I don’t care who you vote for as long as you vote for Obama.’ Having been met with jeers and booing, the Material Girl backtracked. ‘Seriously, I don’t care who you vote for as long as you take responsibility for the future of your country’, she recanted. ‘Do not take this privilege for granted. Go vote.’ Other Democrat supporters include Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Will.i.am and Jay-Z.

[. . .]

In terms of hollow egotism, popstars are not far removed from actors. The latter are fantasists and (literally) professional liars, pretending to be someone they aren’t, displaying emotions they don’t have. Popstars are often likewise insecure, craving attention and praise, to be told what good people they are — and consequently ensure that the world knows it.

They have been up to this sort of thing for years. Consider the self-important proclamations of John Lennon, imagining no possessions but having lots of them, Sting’s crusade to save the Brazilian rainforest and its noble savages and, of course, Bono, the humanitarian tax-avoider. The latter two featured in Band Aid, an ostentatiously big-hearted scheme that raised funds for governments in desperate need of more Mercedes-Benzes and Kalashnikovs. This is what happens when you combine paradoxical egotism and a Something Must Be Done mentality. Today, it’s the same toxic compound — intensified — that’s behind the grandstanding and aggressive ‘caring’ censoriousness you see on Twitter.

October 28, 2012

Malaysian group calls for “Films that carry confusing messages” to be banned

Filed under: Asia, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

A Bollywood film is at the centre of controversy in Malaysia:

An influential Muslim youth group said today that Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s “My Name Is Khan” movie confuses Muslims as it promotes liberal Islam and religious pluralism, and warned Malaysian broadcasters not to air the hit film.

The Muslim youth group’s statement comes after the Malay right-wing group Perkasa’s call last week for Muslims nationwide to boycott award-winning singer Jaclyn Victor for singing the Malay-language Christian song “Harapan Bangsa”, which she has said is meant for Christians.

“Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) strongly protests the screening of ‘My Name Is Khan’ on TV3 on the second Hari Raya Aidil Adha.

“Films that carry confusing messages clearly shouldn’t (tidak wajar) be screened by a main Malaysian television station,” the group’s vice-president Ahmad Saparudin Yusup said in a statement today.

He questioned the timing of the film screening, saying that it raises the question of where the “media’s care and responsibility in their broadcasting materials” went.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

October 27, 2012

An argument against further publicizing the Jimmy Savile victims

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

At the Huffington Post, Brendan O’Neill points out that with Savile dead, the hue-and-cry to round up all the alleged victims and have them pour out their stories will not actually benefit anyone except the “theraputic industry”:

The victims themselves don’t get much out of it, since they are cajoled into reliving unpleasant things that happened decades ago. Worse, they’re publicly branded as damaged, as permanently scarred, despite the fact that many of them will have led full, interesting lives since that one time a dirty old man did something bad to them.

They are immortalised as one of Jimmy’s Victims, and in the process they are dehumanised, turned from rounded, complex individuals into simply sufferers.

Justice doesn’t benefit from these revelations, either, since Savile is dead and cannot be found guilty of anything. It is virtually impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the allegations against him are true, because, in a civilised society at least, the dead cannot be put on trial. Which raises the question of why so many of the police’s resources are being pumped into gathering more and more Savile abuse stories.

And society as a whole doesn’t benefit from the open invitation to every person who had a bad encounter with Savile to reveal all. In fact, society, the big communal space we all inhabit, looks set to be the biggest loser in all this.

The Savile scandal will further dent social solidarity. The promotion of the idea that paedophiles lurk everywhere, that, in the words of the deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz, “There isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”, will exacerbate today’s climate of suspicion and mistrust. The now widely accepted idea that there were “paedophile networks” at the Beeb, in the NHS, even around Parliament, will ratchet up already high levels of public cynicism towards institutions and the political sphere.

October 24, 2012

Frank Furedi on the “culture of abuse”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

In sp!ked, Frank Furedi talks about the ongoing investigation into the late British TV personality Jimmy Savile in the context of applying today’s cultural standards to the past:

Back in 1997, when I wrote my first book on the sociology of fear, I argued: ‘The theme of abuse has become one of the most distinct features of contemporary Western culture. The frequency with which the term is used and the growing number of experiences that are defined as abusive are symptomatic of the significance of this artefact of contemporary culture.’

Even in the late 1990s, it was evident that people regarded one another with a level of suspicion that was historically unprecedented. If parents are continually concerned about the motives of carers looking after their children, and if adults must be vetted by the state before they can come into contact with youngsters, than the following question will always emerge: ‘Who can you trust?’ It is precisely because this has become an unanswerable question that British society will continue to discover more and more Jimmy Saviles.

The current fascination with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. Any interaction that touches on the emotions, or which involves physical or sexual experiences, can be potentially labelled as abusive. There are claims that ‘peer abuse’ is the key problem of our time; others demand action against ‘elder abuse’. And for good measure, the alarm has been raised about ‘pet abuse’ and ‘chicken abuse’. There is little resistance to the depiction of most forms of human relationships as potentially abusive.

The metaphor of abuse has a quasi-religious feel to it, signifying a morally corrupt act which brings about the moral pollution of the innocent victim. The implication is always that, through being abused, a person’s very being is invaded, to the extent that he will never be the same person again. So professionals and experts tell us that acts of abuse inflict a legacy of life-long suffering; they talk about people being ‘scarred for life’ or ‘damaged for life’.

Traditionally, the word abuse meant misuse, improper use, perversion; it also carried connotations of violation, pollution and defilement. In the eighteenth century, the term self-abuse was defined as ‘self-pollution’. In the twenty-first century, the emphasis in discussions of abuse is not on the pollution of the self but on the defilement of others. The main achievement of the abuse narrative is that it has redefined relations of conflict through the metaphor of pollution. Like the effects of toxic waste, the effects of human pollution are long-term, apparently. That is why many believe that the causes of our present-day distress can be located in the distant past. Memory is believed to have the power to discover the truth that evades us in the present, and so the official inquiry becomes the institutional setting through which the ritual of revelation is conducted.

October 22, 2012

Warren Ellis on celebrity license and the price of silence

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In his weekly Vice column, Warren Ellis explains how celebrities like Jimmy Savile can set things up to get away with awful things:

My drinking companion had, I think, just finished telling me about this — unless that was someone else, some other time, because, hey, drunk — and, after another drink, said, “and then there’s Jimmy Savile.”

Jimmy Savile, later Sir Jimmy Savile, was a radio DJ, television personality and tireless charity worker, raising many millions for causes like the storied children’s ward at Stoke Mandeville hospital. He was still best known for his TV show Jim’ll Fix It, where he made dreams come true for kids all over the country.

“Jim’ll fuck it,” said this person I was with. “Jimmy Savile’s a nonce.” If you had the misfortune to grow up outside God’s Own Country, “nonce” is a term for paedophile.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Jimmy Savile’s been around forever. He would have gotten caught. Radio 1 Roadshows? Doing Top Of The Pops on TV since the dawn of fucking time?”

“What do you think the price of silence is?”

“What? How could he not get caught? He looks like a nutter. Dripping in gold chains, long silver hair, shiny tracksuits, gurning at cameras with his ‘now then, now then’ like he’s a fucking glam rock Yorkshire miner? Bollocks.”

Update:

October 17, 2012

Matt Gurney on Iran’s anti-Canadian coverage

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

A pair of former First Nations chiefs have been on Iran’s Press TV to denounce Canada and Canadian treatment of natives:

Friends, I have a double dose of bad news for you. There’s no easy way to say it. So here it is. Not only is Canada set on exterminating a whole segment of its population. That would be bad enough. It also turns out that we frankly aren’t very good at it.

These painful revelations come to us from Tehran courtesy of Terry Nelson, formerly chief of the Roseau River Anishinabe nation south of Winnipeg, and Dennis Pashe, of the Dakota Tipi nation. Both men have plenty of time to travel these days, having both lost their jobs as chiefs. Nelson lost his after his own band council gave him the boot, for the third time, last fall. Pashe was fired by Ottawa in 2003, after the federal government sent in a third-party manager in the face of corruption allegations and violence on his reserve, compounded by Pashe’s refusal to call elections.

[. . .]

But ignore Tehran’s pathetic attempts to portray Canada as worse than Iran (or ask some of the protesters gunned down, raped or tortured during the post-2009 election protests what they think about the two nations’ comparative human rights records). The truly sad thing about Nelson and Pashe’s trip is that there are, indeed, systemic issues facing Canada’s native population, and Nelson and Pashe have made a mockery of them.

Nelson isn’t wrong to point out that many native women are missing. Or that natives are overrepresented in the prison population. Or even to point out that many resource extraction projects, including petroleum sites, are on or near native reserves. And many Canadians, native and otherwise, agree that many reserves are essentially designed to fail, and that the living conditions for natives there are unacceptable. These are all fair things to say.

October 12, 2012

McArdle: Biden won debate, but constantly risked going “full frontal jackass”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:57

I didn’t watch either the Presidential or Vice-Presidential debates, but Megan McArdle seems to have the most even-handed analysis of the Veep sock-fest:

Biden launched into the eye rolling and the smirking, the head shaking and the laughing, and of course, the constant interrupting, nearly as soon as Ryan started talking. I assume that means it was part of their debate coaching. I mean, I don’t think that he intended to come off as an obnoxious eighth grader heckling a classmate, or to actually shout himself hoarse with his constant interruptions. I’d guess they told him to come across as genially disappointed, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, and he kind of went off the rails.

Both candidates looked far overcoached for this debate; you could hear the hesitations as they desperately tried to overstuff their responses with canned lines. And that overcoaching showed up in their demeanor. Paul Ryan was speaking so slowly that it sometimes sounded as if he was reading off a teleprompter set at half speed; this made him seem uncertain of his memorized answers, not deliberate. And Biden — well, we seemed to be watching him going through a second puberty, complete with voice changes.

Yet I suspect that MSNBC was right: this was what the Democratic base wanted to see. Yes, they also wanted to hear him defend their issues. But they already agree with him on the issues. Their biggest desire was just for someone to express their disdain for the Republican Party, and particularly its rising young star — to display their collective contempt in a public venue. I’m not sure exactly why this is so important, but I seem to recall that the same dynamic from Republicans in 2004. There’s a lesson there about where American politics is headed, and it’s a pretty grim one.

[. . .]

But unfortunately I thought Biden threw that away that lead with his behavior. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about a candidate who apparently might go full frontal jackass at any moment. I’ve seen a bunch of progressives dismiss this as conservative carping, but watching CNN’s ticker of undecided voter sentiment, it seemed to me that every time Joe Biden started talking over Paul Ryan, Ryan’s ratings went up. And it was the first thing that the CNN hosts, most of whom I guarantee are not Romney/Ryan voters, commented on. The panels of undecided voters also brought it up — and none of them said, “It made Vice President Biden seem really authoritative and in control”. Some of the commentary this morning seemed so suggest that if progressives just insist sufficiently loudly that it was awesome, everyone else will have to agree. I think this rather overestimates both the ability to “work the refs” in the media, and also, the power of doing so.

October 11, 2012

David Suzuki “owes economists an apology”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

In the Globe and Mail, Mike Moffatt examines Suzuki’s latest attack on the economics profession and finds it extremely unpersuasive:

Popular environmentalist David Suzuki has described conventional economics as a form of brain damage. In a documentary called Surviving Progress, he quotes a fictional economist by saying, “who cares whether you keep the forest — cut it down. Put the money somewhere else. When those forests are gone, put it in fish. When those fish are gone, put it in computers.”

Beyond tarring the economics profession, he displays a perplexing lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. First of all, none of the rules taught in undergraduate economics course advise the owner of a resource to deplete it as quickly as possible. Perhaps he was confused with the Tragedy of the Commons problem, where lack of private ownership causes a resource to be overused.

[. . .]

The idea that economists do not care about externalities is a strange one, given how prominently they are featured in economics textbooks. An externality is, simply put, a spillover effect. It is the unintended costs or benefits from a transaction or decision experienced by third parties (that is, they were external to the decision). It does not mean phenomena that are external to economic modelling or things outside the interest of economists. Since, as Dr. Suzuki points out, the world is full of externalities, the concept is crucial in economic research.

October 10, 2012

Mark Steyn “loathes” Sesame Street

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In the National Post, Mark Steyn cuts loose on the sacred-to-American-childhood TV show (and associated toys, games, books, clothing, etc.) Sesame Street:

That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off — and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself — in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy’s performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt’s assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made.

“WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird alone,” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the President mocked Romney for “finally getting tough on Big Bird” — not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally, and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood — the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s special envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes.” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary … well, actually I am.

October 8, 2012

Warren Ellis: A common thread between two political debates

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:31

An uncharacteristically serious column from Warren Ellis this week:

John Kerry, for our younger readers, was a politician who strongly resembled a reanimated Boris Karloff in a badger-pelt wig. He was a distant, charmless waffler who blew every political point he tried to score in the debates by either garbling the headline or shovelling on so much detail that people lost track of what he was trying to say. President Bush, in contrast, rolled up as the smiling ranch boss who weren’t too big to have a laugh an’ a joke with the hands, and whipped the shit out of his opponent on the floor.

The room was actually more excited by a Senator from Chicago who had a speech excerpt broadcast just as the polls closed. This was my first exposure to a dynamic orator called Barack Obama. More than one of the assembled group (which was mostly artists and sex workers, as I dimly recall) said that they’d rather Obama was running for President. John Kerry’s appeal centered largely on the fact that he wasn’t George W Bush. Which was nonsense in many respects. These were both American Patricians, who had even belonged to the same secret society at university. They were facing each other not because of any deep-seated critical political commitment, just a certain conviction that the world is run by people like them and so they were entitled to the Presidency.

[. . .]

By the end of his presidency, Bush was visibly tired, and said in an interview that he was really ready to not be President any more. He was one of the least popular Presidents in American history, the Tea Party (launched in part by his signature of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) had begun to corrode the GOP, and he was eager to go away and live quietly.

The first of the 2012 Presidential debates aired a little under a week ago, as you read this. I was unpleasantly surprised by what I saw. The dynamic orator was gone. In his place was a distant, charmless waffler who blew every political point he tried to score by sounding either confused or incredibly boring. And he also looked tired. While the boss at the other lectern laughed and lied and outright told the debate moderator he was fired when the boss got to trade up to the White House… President Obama looked like a man who was really ready to not be President any more.

October 4, 2012

Here’s a reality TV show that should exist

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has a pitch for a new reality TV show that deserves a chance:

I suggest a game show, So You Think You Can Be President? SYTYCBP would have at least three segments.

Coase it Out: Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. (Bonus points are awarded if the candidate convinces the couple to stay together.)

Game Theory: Candidates compete in a game of Diplomacy. I would also include several ringers — say Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan and Salma Hayek. Why these three? Robin is cold, calculating and merciless — make a logical mistake and he will make you pay. Bryan is crafty and experienced. And Salma? I couldn’t refuse her anything but presidents should be made of stronger stuff so we need a test.

Spot the Fraud: Presidential candidates are provided with an economic scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing, liquidity is tight). Three experts propose plans. The candidate must choose one of the plans. After the candidate chooses, the true identities of the “experts” are revealed. One is a trucker, another a scuba diver instructor and the last a distinguished economist. Which did the candidate choose?

Entertaining? Check. Correlated with important skills for governing? Check. Can the voters tell who the winner is? Check.

“Reality TV may even be the next stage in the evolution of television”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

Grant McCracken goes ultra-contrarian in this article at Wired:

It’s easy to assume reality TV is the place where bad TV went to hide when the rest of TV got a lot better. Like that old Wild West town where criminals congregate, reality TV is often perceived as the last, “vast wasteland”: uncouth, desperate, lawless.

But while some shows seem irredeemably bad (Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, anyone?), others offer an indication of good things to come. In fact, by turning all of us into virtual anthropologists, reality TV may lead to the improvement – dare I say it – of Western civilization. Reality TV may even be the next stage in the evolution of television.

In its early days, TV was confronted with a series of problems. It was a new medium struggling to find a place in the world. It had quality-control problems in sound and image. And it was talking to millions of American for whom English was a second language and American culture was still a mystery. TV solved these problems by relying on genre. Once you understood you were watching a “cop show” or a “Western,” the rest was easy.

Genre was like a cheat sheet. It flattened every difficulty: technical, intellectual, cultural, linguistic.

October 3, 2012

Foodies and foodism

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:43

Getting tired of pretentious twaddle over only slightly out-of-the-ordinary dishes? You’re not alone, as Guardian writer Steven Poole is calling for a “foodie backlash”:

Western industrial civilisation is eating itself stupid. We are living in the Age of Food. Cookery programmes bloat the television schedules, cookbooks strain the bookshop tables, celebrity chefs hawk their own brands of weird mince pies (Heston Blumenthal) or bronze-moulded pasta (Jamie Oliver) in the supermarkets, and cooks in super-expensive restaurants from Chicago to Copenhagen are the subject of hagiographic profiles in serious magazines and newspapers. Food festivals (or, if you will, “Feastivals”) are the new rock festivals, featuring thrilling live stage performances of, er, cooking. As one dumbfounded witness of a stage appearance by Jamie Oliver observed: “The girls at the front — it’s an overwhelmingly female crowd — are already holding up their iPhones […] A group in front of me are saying, ‘Ohmigodohmigodohmigod’ on a loop […] ‘I love you, Jamie,’ yells a girl on the brink of fainting.” The new series of The Great British Bake-Off trounced Parade’s End in the ratings, and canny karaoke-contest supremo Simon Cowell is getting in on the act with a new series in development called Food, Glorious Food! — or, as it’s known among production wags, The Eggs Factor.

[. . .]

It is not in our day considered a sign of serious emotional derangement to announce publicly that “chocolate mousse remains the thing I feel most strongly about”, or to boast that dining with celebrities on the last night of Ferran Adrià’s restaurant elBulli, in Spain, “made me cry”. It is, rather, the mark of a Yahoo not to be able and ready at any social gathering to converse in excruciating detail and at interminable length about food. Food is not only a safe “passion” (in the tellingly etiolated modern sense of “passion” that just means liking something a lot); it has become an obligatory one. [. . .]

People with an overweening interest in food have been calling themselves “foodies” since a Harper’s & Queen article entitled “Cuisine Poseur” in 1982, one of whose editors then co-wrote the semi-satirical The Official Foodie Handbook of 1984. The OED‘s very first citation of “foodie” is from 1980, an oozing New York Times magazine celebration of the mistress of a Parisian restaurant and her “devotees, serious foodies”. “Foodie” has now pretty much everywhere replaced “gourmet”, perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination — even though those qualities are rampant among the “foodies” themselves. The word “foodie”, it is true, lays claim to a kind of cloying, infantile cuteness which is in a way appropriate to its subject; but one should not allow them the rhetorical claim of harmless innocence implied. The Official Foodie Handbook spoke of the “foodism” worldview; I propose to call its adherents foodists.

The term “foodist” is actually much older, used from the late 19th century for hucksters selling fad diets (which is quite apt); and as late as 1987 one New York Times writer proposed it semi-seriously as a positive description, to replace the unlovely “gastronaut”: “In the tradition of nudist, philanthropist and Buddhist, may I suggest ‘foodist’, one who is enthusiastic about good eating?” The writer’s joking offer of “nudist” as an analogy is telling. I like “foodist” precisely for its taint of an -ism. Like a racist or a sexist, a foodist operates under the prejudices of a governing ideology, viewing the whole world through the grease-smeared lenses of a militant eater.

September 25, 2012

QotD: Replacement NFL referees

Filed under: Football, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

The replacement officials are a mockery wrapped in a travesty, dunked in a vat of incompetence, glazed with WTF and set to the Benny Hill theme song.

Scott Feschuk, “In defence of the replacement officials (Kidding: they’re terrible)”, Maclean’s, 2012-09-25

September 20, 2012

Of course they’d say that…

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

NBC News reported that the US State Department has “No secret plan to invade Canada”. But they’d say that even if they did have such a plan (and let’s be honest, they must have thought about it, especially during the Trudeau years):

The U.S. and Mexico are not secretly planning to invade Canada, a State Department spokeswoman confirmed to laughter during a daily press briefing.

Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was taking questions from journalists about its activities Tuesday, which included a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mexico Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa.

She was asked about “a signing ceremony” with Espinosa — what was being signed and why was the ceremony not open to the press.

“I think it’s an update on Merida, but I will get that for you,” Nuland reported, referring to the Merida Initiative to fight organized crime.

The journalist asked, “This isn’t some secret thing … to invade Canada or something like that?”

Amid laughter, Nuland replied: “No, no, no. It’s not anything classified.”

It’s also one of the things that military staff do: prepare plans for all kinds of potential conflicts. Canada had a plan to invade the United States, for example.

Update, 22 September: For your further reading pleasure, why not go through the actual 1935 invasion plan document?

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