Libertarianism: Sounds cool, makes no sense

Mike lovingly quotes libertarian Sean Gangol:

If you truly want to live in a free society, you must have tolerance for things you don’t like. You may not like abortion, drugs or homosexuality, but these are things you have to co-exist with if you want to live free. If you are the type that want control over other people’s bodies or if you want to treat a certain group of people like secondary citizens, then a police state is the only place you belong.

To which the obvious response is:

You may not like people who think that life starts at conception, that narcotics debase the human soul, and that homosexuality is a sin, but these are people you have to co-exist with if you want to live free.

And speaking of control and a police state:

What I disagree with, is any politician allowing his/her religious views to determine his/her political decisions.

Ontario: Egalitarian Paradise

Pre-requisite for true social justice: Fill the lawyers full of free caviar and champagne.

Attorney General Michael Bryant says opposition to paying three-quarters of a million dollars to put Crown lawyers and judges up in luxury resorts is just “boneheaded.”

Bryant says two conferences at Blue Mountain and Deerhurst resorts last year — which cost almost $700,000 — were totally legitimate.

I have a dream! A society where tax-paying blue-collar workers pay for lawyers to eat foie gras.

“Hey, it worked for Paul Martin!”

*

Lorne Calvert’s muse revealed:

Say ‘NO’ to the Sask Party’s hidden agenda 

I personally have been enjoying the implementation of Stephen Harper’s much-ballyhooed hidden agenda. Between reinstating public funding for the left-wing Court Challenges Program and handing over billions to corrupt native leaders, it’s hard to see what’s left to hide.

On the other hand…

I know this is not going to make me very popular with certain commenters here, but I do think it’s pretty clear that this video does show three cops (whether Quebec provincial police or RCMP is unclear) caught in the act as provocateurs.

See for yourself.

Stupid Hippies

* Faced with police resistance, the Council of Canadians and others pulled back from the front line about 300 metres, for fear of escalation. Most front-line protesters opted for an impromptu sit-in. Others began dousing their bandannas with vinegar in anticipation of tear gas attacks, forcefully pushing against the wall of police shields and yelling “Peaceful Protest” and other slogans.

Apparently a sense of irony is a bourgeois luxury.

The Promiscuity Vaccine: ’cause Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!

North American governments, and by that I mean all governments, have been doing something very disappointing so far in this budget year. Starting in the upcoming school year, all girls in grade 8 will be given a vaccine, Gardasil, which is supposed to guard against the STD human papilloma virus (or HPV as it’s commonly known as). Gardasil has been getting a bit of coverage because of the controversial purpose for pumping girls full of it; after all, why give a young lady on the verge of puberty a drug that is supposed to protect against an STD unless you expect her to go out there and get an STD (and I think the acronym is pretty clear on how one gets STDs). Once again, the state is making a moral decision on behalf of parents and leaving us with the bill.

Oh, but it gets better! This Macleans article, currently on their website, uncovers how the Holy Grail of social depravity in fact contains a poisoned wine for some girls which could even be lethal! What is the response of governments so far? Insert head (A) into sand (B) basically. The company that produces Gardasil naturally denies any harmful side effects, and I don’t blame them for being slow off the mark, but if the government is going to insist on protecting our kids, wouldn’t you expect them to um, well, protect our kids? This is the stuff lawsuits are made of folks!

Camp Okutta - Viral Campaigns that Work

Obviously Camp Okutta doesn’t exist, but give War Child Canada credit, this is one of the most convincing viral campaign videos released in a long time. Make sure to check out the additional videos at, http://www.campokutta.com/

God Bless You, Progress

Gay wedding underlines progress

Get out your hankies, this one’s a real tear-jerker:

This small-town wedding, traditional in all but one way, tells us all that society can change, and for the better. An event unthinkable 20 years ago, hard to imagine even 10 years ago, has become possible because Canadians accept changes that expand individual freedom without damaging the freedom of others.

Two dude gets married and it provokes these kinds of accolades? Hilarious. Let me guess. When they kissed, the heavens opened up and a dove landed on Brison’s head?

Getting down to Business in Montebello: The Harper Difference

The Montebello summit in Quebec, where, among other matters, Artic sovereignty is to be discussed, demonstrates to Canadians the Harper difference in foreign affairs: the world takes us seriously again!

The Financial Times has a good piece on Harper’s last eighteen months in office, “Canada’s conservative man of action.”

Comedian Robin Williams once described Canada as being “like a loft apartment over a really great party” but it’s doubtful Mr Harper was laughing. Much of his time as prime minister has been spent trying to build Canada-US relations and making sure his country is taken seriously the world over.

During a speech in October, Mr Harper made clear he does not want Canada to sit back and watch the rest of the world act and react, saying the “objective is to make Canada a leader on the international stage…If there is any one thing that has struck me for the short time I have been in this job, it is how critically important foreign affairs has become in everything that we do”.

Thank God we have a leader who finally understands that keeping the Liberal Party in power—or any party—is not the sole reason we have general elections in Canada. Harper’s term in office, being a Canadian leader the world takes seriously because he takes the world seriously, will go down as a great restorative force for Canadian sovereignty, on the heels of Liberal frittering away of our national inheritance.

If Paul Cellucci’s recent comments are any indication, the Americans pay attention to Canada when Canada takes responsibility for it’s own sovereignty and security; they like a Canada that actually acts like the friend it always claims to be.

And in another good turn, in contrast to the constant buttering up of the Liberals to Red China, Harper has never wavered from criticizing China’s human rights record, compensating any trade defecit by looking within the Anglosphere to India:

Harper in his statement to congratulate India on the 60 aniversary of its Independence said, “India’s independence in 1947 has been an inspiration to the world. Using its great diversity to its own advantage, India has evolved into a vibrant democracy.”

“India is rising to global prominence and Canada stands ready to deepen our partnership with India to advance our common interests and to promote new opportunities for economic development and international trade for the benefit of both our peoples,” he said.

UPDATE:  Ten years ago, when asked about the protesters outside the APEC summit in Vancouver, Jean Chretien deflected commenting on their very presence, and the harsh police response to them, by saying he put pepper on his plate.  In contrast, Harper is too sincere to reflect such poor leadership, not feigning to ignore the protesters and their insincere antics.  As far as Harper is concerned, the protesters at Montebello are a sad spectacle. :-)

R.I.P. Lord Deedes

On Friday last, the U.K.’s Telegraph lost one of its finest: W.F. Deedes. He died, age 94, halfway through his final column, putting his laptop to the side of his bed only when he was simply too weak to continue. Check out the Telegraph’s tribute page.

Lord Deedes had been a British peer for over twenty years, being knighted just under ten years ago for services to humanity. Not only did he sit as a Conservative member of Commons, a minister in Harold MacMillan’s government in the 1960s, he is the only person to have served in Cabinet and been the editor of a national newspaper. Bill Deedes was a journalist for 76 years.

I read his columns semi-regularly, always enjoying what he wrote and how he wrote it. If ever there was the “gentleman journalist,” he was it, and he died “in harness,” remaining an active contributor to the paper he loved.

From commentaries on him ….

… on his instinctive compassionate conservatism:

He was not flashy. But if you wanted something done, Bill Deedes was your man.

The virtues that Lord Deedes exhibited are underrated today, when it frequently seems that surface glitter is more appreciated than substance.

Lord Deedes devoted much of his life to trying to help the disadvantaged, without ever drawing attention to that fact.

He was, perhaps, the best exemplar of a compassionate Conservative: someone who sees that the best way to diminish life’s inevitable unfairnesses and injuries is not to set up a government committee or to wait for someone else to do something, but to get on with trying to combat the troubles he encounters.

As the Conservative Party ponders the path to take and which values to project, it should remember Bill Deedes. The life he lived could stand as a model for both.

… on his other-worldly good nature:

In 2000, when I became comment editor of The Daily Telegraph, I was lucky enough to work with him. He would come to the afternoon leader conferences at which it was decided what the leading articles should be and what line they should take. He was only 87 then, but my impressions from meeting him in the corridor or over a pint in the Henry Addington (or later the Cat and Canary) had been that he was rather distant from the world, a bit deaf and isolated. The impression was reinforced by his habit of singing little tunes, a bit like Winnie the Pooh.

But I soon discovered my mistake. I was utterly wrong. He would show immediate insight into topics under discussion in leader conferences, and amusingly bring to bear his memories of parallel political circumstances from the days of Stanley Baldwin, say.

From his own hand …

… on new lefties vrs. old lefties:

And she a Socialist! But Mrs Castle makes no bones about her liking for the good things of life, a good dinner, high company, a little pomp and circumstance - all right, she says, as long as you don’t inhale!

On her own front, through most of these Diaries, she is in pitched battles with consultants, with junior doctors and defenders of paybeds.

Of course one should argue that she misdirected prodigious energy on wrong and damaging objectives. Yet, after reading it all and taking a political holiday, I would argue something different.

These Diaries are, as perhaps she intended, more a portrait of Mrs Castle than of anyone else. They are, overall, the portrait of a parliamentary democrat.

With the advent of the new and nasty Left, one reads Mrs Castle’s Diaries with something like nostalgia. Again, one can argue, and some will, that it was precisely the likes of her that paved the way to the new and nasty Left; that from just such political wombs the monster sprang.

But one thing that distinguishes the old Left from the new Left is the capacity occasionally to laugh at yourself.

… on not blaming all of Africa’s problems on the West:

… not all African woes can be attributed to neglect by the West. That claim raises the temperature, sets people marching to attack greedy nations that misruled Africans in the past and now turn a cold shoulder to their needs. It also falsifies history. I have always conceded that we granted independence to Africa on the tail of Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” too precipitately. No administrative framework was in place. The countries hastily granted independence were up for grabs.

By contrast, Southern Rhodesia was put on the road to freedom by Margaret Thatcher and with an orderly election. And who won? Mugabe, of whose misrule we still read most days of the week. There is no sensible way forward for Africa until we recognise the extent to which African rulers rather than the West are so heavily responsible for its plight.

… on Darfur, his last column, two weeks ago:

It is time the world was shaken awake to the infamy of what is going on in Darfur. In terms of man’s inhumanity to man, what has been going on there for four years is now comparable to the death camps for which Germany’s Nazis were found guilty. That statement may provoke cries of outrage from some: surely the Holocaust stands alone?

Not to me it doesn’t, and as a soldier I had to enter one of those camps and went to the trial of its commandant. I have also been to Darfur.

I can make comparisons. I can never get out of my mind the picture of families in Darfur striving to live under the shelter of thorn bushes, the children’s fingers clutching wretched little cooking pots to keep the rain out.

Women and children were hunted like wild animals, raped, robbed and left for dead. What has been happening in Darfur is unspeakable; and much of the world has simply shrugged its shoulders. They are an unknown people in a far-off land. What business is it of ours? It is very much our business, because behind this ghastly inhumanity lies the iron will of Islam in Khartoum.

I have learnt something about that will from countless visits to Sudan in recent years. It is that will which determines there shall be no effective peacekeeping force in Darfur. This newspaper is right to cry out against the idea that the United Nations could do the job and to reproach Gordon Brown for supporting the idea.

It could not do so because within the UN the influences of Islam are so strong. I don’t wish to seem offensive to Islam, but not to be aware of its power in the world today is to be half-awake.

A remarkable man!

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