Double Standards in Hate Crime Reporting

This was reported heavily in the national media (hat tip to the Black Kettle) :

The 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who was savagely beaten, lashed to a fence, and left to die near Laramie by two homophobic men…

This was not:

…two gay men abducted and drugged 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising in 1999, bound him with duct tape, gagged him with his own underwear, sodomized him with foreign objects, repeatedly raped him, gave him an enema of urine, and left him to die of suffocation.

Why? Near as I can tell, because the latter might “reinforce homophobic stereotypes”. If you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

However, nobody ever thought that perhaps the former would reinforce homophobic-ophobic stereotypes (Yes, I just made that up. Defined: the fear of people who have been labelled as “homophobic” by the media or the gay lobby.)

Women Voting for Women – The Gender Gap

Here’s an interesting bit of commentary by Myrna Blyth:

… the importance of the gender gap in voting — which we have heard so much about over the years — is frequently overblown. It began in 1980 when Eleanor Smeal, a political scientist who became the president of the National Organization of Women, noticed one bit of good news in what she considered the bad news of Reagan’s victory over Carter. Though more women voted for Reagan than Carter, a higher percentage of men had voted for the Republican candidate. Smeal turned this statistical disparity into an effective long-term political game plan. NOW met with the Democratic National Committee to highlight what they labeled “Reagan’s female problem” and called it “the gender gap.” Throughout the next two decades, in election after election, the notion that women and men voted differently, and that, regardless of class, education, and income, women all voted alike simply because they were women, became an accepted fact, endorsed by Democratic operatives and a sympathetic media.

Blyth ponders when the gender gap matters for campaigns; how to know when it will materialize. Women don’t just vote for women because they are women, rather women are a higher percentage of the voting population, and constituencies of women take certain issues seriously.

The idea that sex necessarily, in an of itself, provides a sense of solidarity with other members of the same sex—except for those who first think it does—seems a bit goofy to me. It seems, obvious enough, that any solidarity relating to sex arises from contingent issues important to a large constituency of one sex rather than much of any constituency in the other sex; greater solidarity resulting from issues effecting one sex by virtue of being of that sex: say the enfranchisement of women 100 years ago. Where there are fewer issues able to bind one sex together as a “constituency,” the gender gap will be weaker.

As an aside, it’s curious to me how so many liberal minded people realize that sex matters come election time—which it does—but they don’t like to think it has any bearing whatsoever on the definition of marriage.   When it comes to actual sexual conduct, sexual orietation becomes a much more convenient dogma for spouting off about the “Genderless Gap;” what we’ve come to know in Canada as “equal marriage,” not between one man and one woman, but equal regardless of sex.

…. Ahhh, and a groan goes out across the blogosphere … here we go again …

CAW scum

The only people who can make me sympathize with Stephane Dion: the CAW.

A sharp contrast: Liberal and Conservative ads

* “We’re not interested in spending millions and millions of dollars on contrived, vicious, mean-spirited television ads to attack our opponents,” said Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc, who unveiled…a digital PowerPoint presentation on [the Liberal party's] website, making the case that Harper has “plagiarized” U.S. President George W. Bush’s tactics and policies.The presentation suggests the Harper government even shares the Bush administration’s taste in interior design – a photo taken through a window in the prime minister’s office building shows a 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign poster hanging on a Harper aide’s wall.

“We’re only interested in low-budget, contrived, vicious, mean-spirited ads to attack our opponents,” he concluded.

Good riddance Tony Blair; HM thinks so too

Apart from one area of agreement with Blair, his staunch support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (his support for his own military another matter entirely), his tenure as Prime Minister has been short on successes and heavy on avoidable disasters. Admirably he pushed and pushed for peace deals in Northern Ireland, not so admirably, he’s reformed the UK by copying Canada at its worst.

Taking advantage of the vast powers that accrue to the Queen’s first minister under the Westminster system, Mr. Blair has set about remaking the United Kingdom with an unprecedented zeal. For example, he’s abolished the old hereditary House of Lords and replaced it with an all-appointed upper chamber of cronies and has-beens. He’s introduced “asymmetrical federalism” to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, allowing the last to maintain privileged relations with foreign governments (the Irish Republic), as Quebec does with France. An Ottawa-style Upper House of pliant deadbeats, “distinct society” status for problematic territories, the introduction to Scotland of a local Parliament divided between separatists and “soft nationalists,” the unceasing demand that ancient institutions and symbols “modernize” themselves for the needs of a multicultural society … After four years, it seems pretty clear that what Tone’s exciting “New Britain” boils down to in practice is boring old Canada. “Cool Britannia” (as the Blair regime dubbed itself) is cool mainly in the sense that Nunavut in February is. One assumes that New Labour is remodelling the mother country along the lines of its forgotten lion cub mostly unintentionally. But nonetheless, when a Blairite think-tank proposes replacing the Union flag with some designer logo, they are, consciously or not, searching for a British Maple Leaf.

Here are four interesting pieces on what is supposedly The Queen’s take: Blairs gone none too soon, but dinner for Queen? maybe … maybe not; New Labour reforms are progressive prattle and not in the Britain’s best interest; Mrs. Blair is a wench; and, seemingly, Tony’s constitutional duties are a chore, which is unfortunate since all his predecessors thought them helpful and good for the country.

Bush’s Ingenius Strategy to Destroy the Left

Explained by Steve Hayward.

Update: Progressive Conservatives become even MORE endangered…

After the thrashing last week that the Manitoba PCs suffered at the hands of the NDP, this week’s sacrificial slab was the PC government of Pat Binns out east in P.E.I. Not to beat on a dead horse too much, but after having a local Ontario PC MPP (that’s what our MLAs are called here thanks to the legacy of Red Tory Premier Bill Davis, for my out-of-province friends) stress to me at a CPC event the other night that the provincial party is the PROGRESSIVE Conservative Party, I figured it’d be useful once again to flood Google with another example of how care bear conservativism isn’t the winning formula in Charlottetown or Winnipeg…and it certainly will not make Toronto become Toryonto! John Tory’s fan club, consider yourself dually warned….

Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Greatest Political Orator of Our Day

With lines like this one he gave at the Council of Foreign Relations, it’s easy to see why Governor Schwarzenegger is such a successful politician:

“If you are against taking actions against greenhouse gases and carbon emissions your political base will melt away as sure as the polar ice caps.

You will become a political penguin on a smaller and smaller ice floe drifting out to sea. Goodbye my little friend.”

He also dresses extremely well, as Nicholas Antongiavanni has noted.

Goodbye my little friends.

Congress 2007/CPSA Conference in Saskatoon – Are You Going?

I’m going to be at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for the rest of the week. Congress is the largest annual academic gathering in Canada and I’ll be attending the Canadian Political Science Association part of the conference.

If you’re planning on attending, drop me an email me [greg - at - mediablitz.ca](or contact me here) and maybe we can discuss the state of the blogosphere over a few drinks

Falklands War Anniversary – Remembering War

On the twenty fifth anniversary of the Falklands War, an ambitious war fought by Britain some 8,000 miles away, here is a good documentary on the conflict, produced for the twentieth anniversary.

In the conflict, Britain took more casualities than they have taken in both Iraq and Afghanistan to date. Winning the conflict took political courage on the part of an embattled Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, defending substantive British sovereignty though it be fought over a seemingly insignificant group of islands, with barely sufficient military hardware to do it.

Anniversaries such as this make us realize that defending one’s national interest and security is always at the chancy cost of high casualties and potential loss of face. War isn’t easy but an ever-present reality in human history; just wars being fought. Further to this point, Rich Lowry provides good commentary on why war history matters and what’s wrong with it in contemporary liberal education:

Battles are so important to history that their names alone — Vienna, Waterloo, Stalingrad — can evoke the beginning or end of epochs and empires. Violent conflict is one of the most persistent characteristics of human history, and warfare features the interplay of strategy, weaponry, chance, logistics, emotion, and leadership. It is an occasion for folly and brutality, and — as we remember on Memorial Day — heroism and sacrifice.

It is for all these reasons that books and TV programming on warfare are so popular; their subject is both fascinating and important, history at its most consequential and dramatic. Nonetheless, military history has been all but banished from college campuses. …

History departments are dominated by a post-Vietnam generation of professors for whom bottom-up “social history” is paramount, and the only areas of interest are race, sex, and class. History focusing on great events and the “great men” central to them is retrograde — let alone military history that ipso facto smacks of militarism. …

Edward Coffman, a former military historian at the University of Wisconsin, studied the 25 best history departments according to U.S. News & World Report rankings and found that a mere 21 professors out of more than 1,000 listed war as their specialty. A Notre Dame student complained recently: “We have more than 30 full-time history faculty members, but not one is a military historian. Even in their self-described interests, not a single professor lists ‘war’ of any era, although half list religious, gender and race relations.” …

The gatekeepers of the profession practically proscribe traditional military history. John A. Lynn recently looked back at the past 30 years of the prestigious academic journal The American Historical Review. He found no articles on the conduct of World War II, the American Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars. There were articles that discussed atrocities in the English Civil War and in the American Civil War and an article on World War I — on women soldiers in the Russian army.

One frustrated teacher of military history jokes that military historians have become “exactly the types of marginalized people that the social historians are supposed to be championing.”

That military history has been chased from the academic field is especially perverse given that, when the classes are offered, they are popular with students. And military history, as a discipline, is as vital as ever. Writing on the American Heritage’s website, Sarah Lawrence College professor Frederic Smoler argues that “the past 30 years have seen a brilliant expansion in the intellectual and methodological breadth of military history,” beginning with the publication of John Keegan’s 1976 classic The Face of Battle.

None of this is enough to overcome the deep intellectual bias against military history. New Republic contributing editor David A. Bell locates that bias deep in the social sciences: “The origin of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational and alien to modern civilization.” This represents a fundamental misapprehension of human nature and thus the nature of history.

Brave men always will be necessary to defend freedom, and what they have done deserves to be remembered, and studied.

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