Ezra Levant makes some great points about the silliness surrounding the already apologized for duck incident in Fort McMurray.

Every barrel of oil steamed out of the sand in Ft. McMurray is one more barrel that doesn’t come from a misogynist, human rights-violating environmental basket case, usually a dictatorship, and often a sponsor of terrorism. The moral thing to do would be to pump as much oil as technologically possible from Ft. McMurray.

He is right, but missing one crucial problem.

People don’t care about human rights in 3rd world countries anymore.

They’ve given up caring.  It appears that to the informed west, it is futile to complain about women and homosexuals being stoned in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, so they will just keep on supporting buying oil there.  It is futile to complain about the lawlessness of Nigeria because of oil money, because it won’t change.  And so on and so on.

But for Alberta to commit the grievous sin of accidentally hurting some ducks (not endangered ducks, not ducks at-risk, but just ordinary ducks that litter the face of the earth), and then apologizing (because words can never bring back those darling ducks!) the Albertan oil industry, and by extension all Albertans, must be pilloried and shunned (or all oil imported from Alberta must be marked “Not-Green” or “Duck-Killing”).

It’s about what will actually have an effect.  I think this is also why the human rights councils at the UN spend so much time condemning the USA, Canada and Australia for their treatment of aboriginal peoples, while disgusting crimes against women are carried out routinely in places like East Africa with female circumcision and polygamy.  There are countless other much more routine and awful human rights violations in the Middle East against homosexuals and women, not to mention religious minorities like the Buddhists and Christians.  Yet for some reason, nearly every year some resolution gets passed condemning Canada for meanness to natives, who have their own land, are largely self-governing, get massive cash stipends every month, lavishly funded job training, university scholarships at their disposal should they be so inclined, just for their genetic background.

But it’s done because they know we actually care what the international community thinks and we will actually do something about it.

And it keeps us too wrapped up in ourselves, straining to pull the “log out of our own eye” that we never get around to helping out other with their specks.