Friday Post

Quickly now ...


The Harper has spoken:

The former prime minister says he was worried by what he heard during a recent trip to Washington, where he discussed NAFTA at an event but did not publicly share his misgivings about the Trudeau government.

"I came back alarmed," said the Oct. 25 letter signed by Harper, and sent to clients of his firm Harper & Associates.

"I fear that the NAFTA re-negotiation is going very badly. I also believe that President (Donald) Trump's threat to terminate NAFTA is not a bluff... I believe this threat is real. Therefore, Canada's government needs to get its head around this reality: it does not matter whether current American proposals are worse than what we have now. What matters in evaluating them is whether it is worth having a trade agreement with the Americans or not."

The current government was not pleased by the letter.

Officials in Ottawa accused the former prime minister of essentially negotiating in public — against the government of Canada. They called the release of the two-page note ill-timed and perplexing.

"This is a gift to the Americans," said one current Canadian official.

Shut your face-hole, unnamed official.

It is not a joke if Trump means to re-negotiate NAFTA or scrap it all together. When one's chief negotiator counts his hair conditioner as a rhetorical weapon, one should heed the words of a guy who actually studied economics (not drama) in college.

 

It's just money:

“We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms … when governments, regardless of which stripe, do not defend those rights, Canadians have to pay. I hope people take notice of this. I hope people are angered that governments violated people’s fundamental rights. And I hope people remember to demand of governments, this one and all future governments, that nobody ever has their fundamental rights violated.”

People aren't angered by those governments, Justin. 




But ... but ... Bill 62 is oppressive for women!

A Quebec man has been charged with allegedly assaulting his teenage daughter over a year in what police are calling “honour-based” violence.

Gatineau police say the level of violence escalated once the man discovered the girl was removing her hijab when she was away from the family home.

She decided to file a police complaint, which culminated in an arrest Wednesday.

Also:

While Justin Trudeau expressed his disapproval of the law, he has so far refrained from committing to spearheading a federal crusade against it, disappointing many of the law’s critics and deepening a sense of the party’s hypocrisy. This was the same Trudeau, after all, who’d shamed the Conservative government in 2015 for imposing a ban on face-coverings during citizenship ceremonies. But this time, with Bill 62 popular in Quebec, there are opportunistic reasons for the Liberals to not get involved, particularly since the party will be relying heavily on Quebeckers’ support in the next election.

Wasn't I saying?




We don't have a justice system:

The vast majority of sexual assaults that have been substantiated by police do not result in a criminal conviction or even make it to court, Statistics Canada said Thursday.

New research from the agency surveyed the number of sexual assault allegations that police ruled as founded between 2009 and 2014, noting that this figure is considerably lower than the number of such offences that likely took place.

 

Of those, StatCan said only 12 per cent, or about one in 10, resulted in a criminal conviction. Most cases never had a chance to attain one, as the research found only 49 per cent of substantiated sexual assault complaints made it to court in the first place.

This needs to be said: Communism doesn't work. Marx was all wrong. Things always end in bloodshed:

Many still regard Marxism as a good idea that fell into bad hands, notably Lenin’s and Stalin’s. I prefer the view of Martin Amis, expressed in The New York Times the other day: “It was not a good idea that somehow went wrong. It was a very bad idea from the outset, forced into life with barely imaginable self-righteousness, pedantry, dynamism and horror.” It defied human nature, so humans accepted it only under threat of violence, which inevitably was applied. In the hands of bullies who wanted power, Marxism was a terrifying weapon.

**

The intensity of this conversion in part explains the legions of Westerners who refused to credit the concrete evidence of communist tyranny that began under Lenin. In 1908, Lenin threatened “real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country,” and fulfilled that threat a few years after the revolution in the “merciless war,” as he put it, against the Kulaks, the more prosperous peasants. When someone protested, Lenin answered, “Do you think we can be victors without the most severe revolutionary terror?” The horrors of Stalin were just expansions of Lenin’s brutal practices already well documented before Stalin came into power. As French historian François Furet has written, “Those who wanted to know, could have known. The problem was that few people really wanted to.” Only a cult-like blind faith can explain such a resistance to facts, one obvious in the comment of Europe’s most famous Marxist, Georg Lukács, who said, “Even if every empirical prediction of Marxism were invalidated, he would still hold Marxism to be true.”

The patent failure of Marx’s theoretical “predictions,” the proven record of mass murder and imprisonment, the pollution of social and family life by an infrastructure of surveillance and lies, the 1939 pact with Hitler that laid bare the true aims of an amoral gangster regime––none has been able to shake the faith of Western communists and fellow-travelers, who today still practice such willful blindness, whether it’s Bernie Sanders honeymooning in the old Soviet Union, Sean Penn shilling for a brutal thug in Venezuela, or Barack Obama cavorting with the Castro brothers in Cuba.

**

What are we to make of this? Are we merely to deduce that the life of a young and, apparently, attractive woman behind the Iron Curtain was not completely devoid of pleasure? No. The article is explicit in stating that "communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined."

This is unadulterated rubbish. I grew up under communism, and here is what I recall.

First, all communist countries were run by men; female leaders, like Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, would have been unthinkable. Women who rose to prominence, like Raisa Gorbachev and Elena Ceausescu, did so purely as appendages of their powerful husbands.

Second, the author concedes that "gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and...the communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy." I would say so. In a typical Eastern European family, the woman, in addition to having a day job at a factory, was expected to clean the apartment, shop for food, cook dinner, and raise the children. The Western sexual revolution passed the communist bloc by, and ex-communist countries remain much more patriarchal than their Western counterparts to this day.

Third, communist societies were socially uber-conservative. As such, pornography and prostitution were strictly prohibited, divorces were discouraged and divorced people ostracized, and prophylactics and the pill were hard to obtain. (Think about it for one hot second. Why would economies unable to produce enough bread and toilet paper generate a plentiful and regular supply of condoms? This makes no sense!) The reason why we refer to communist countries as "totalitarian" is because the state wanted to control every aspect of human existence. Sexual autonomy was, well, autonomous. 

Being outside the control of the all-powerful state, it was treated with suspicion and suppressed.

But don't take my word for it. You can still visit a few communist countries, including Cuba and North Korea, and compare the social status and empowerment of their women with those in the West. 

Had the esteemed editors of the Times done so, they would have, I hope, thought twice about publishing a series of pro-communist excreta.

**

Newly released satellite images offer a never-before-seen glimpse of North Korea’s “brutal and inhumane” network of political prisons, including secret labor camps. 

In an accompanying report from the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) published Thursday, David Hawk, former executive director of Amnesty International USA and a former U.N. human rights official, describes the harrowing conditions inside the regime’s “system of arbitrary detention and severe repression.”

Pyongyang denies the existence of its political penal labor camps, known as kwan-li-so, and says prisoners in its long-term “re-education” penitentiaries, termed kyo-hwa-so and run by a police force known as the Ministry of People’s Security, are treated with “warm love and consideration.” 

In stark contrast to such unfounded claims, humanitarian workers and investigators like Hawk detail horrific treatment, including “grossly inadequate food rations” that leave prisoners “in a persistent state of hunger and malnutrition.”

I'm glad we had this talk.