You The People...

First, before I go on to my somewhat irrelevant tantrum I must send a note to someone in Brazil. You see, one of the nice things about having a counter (that little Sitemeter icon at the bottom right) is that it tells you who read your blog, where they are, and how they found you (search terms, direct links etc...). So, to the person in Brazil who was here yesterday: Dude, whoever you are, get some help. I can't imagine how google found my blog with the search terms you typed in. However, more disturbing to me, is that you thought to type that combination of words into google. Now, I have to figure out how to block your IP. Stay away from my blog you sick, pedo, freak.

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Back to the sideshow now...

If someone needs to be called out, I'll generally be happy to do just that. I've written about, argued in person with, and advocated against some pretty arrogant, ignorant and insolent people in the past few years. Some people are just asking for a dose of coherent vehemence shoveled their way. If I get worked about about someone or something, I have been known to drop an F-bomb here and there, either as an adjective to describe a person or to modify the colossally stupid action they are taking. However, I have a line. That line is hate.

There are some people in the history of human-kind who were and are so evil, so mindbendingly deranged, that to invoke their name to describe another person smacks of the hate that created the namesake in the first place. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ceausescu... just a few names that are responsible for what, 40 - 50 million deaths of innocents? To call George W. Bush or Obama the new Hitler; to claim that these two men (and I really despised W) are cut from the name curtain of Hell that spawned Hitler is just plain ignorant.

I was reading some of the coverage from the Detroit Auto Show today. Apparently some of the worst-informed, cream of the Fox News audience demographic decided to show up and hold the lamest protest ever. Among the protesters was a guy holding a huge picture of Barak with a Hitler mustache inked in. He was standing next to another guy who had a sign that said something like Socialism? Over your dead body! Clever right? Compare the guy to Hitler and threaten his life. Way to go smart guys.

Like him or not, comparing Obama and his brand of so-called, pseudo socialism (and people, compared to most of the rest of the world, he's no socialist) to Hitler and his genocidal mania is the saddest statement I think one can make about their intelligence level. Obama may cost you more in taxes. He may try to spread the wealth around. He may even create policy that sees the dramatic increase in the production of hybrid vehicles at the expense of V8 American iron.

However, he did not, has not and will not create a plan for the extermination of an entire race of people. Comparing rational, non-maniacal people to Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin etc... is just wrong. Get over yourselves and figure out how to make a constructive argument.

As a side note... the socialism thing? Take a political science class and learn something. I find it endlessly entertaining that the people most worked about about the idea that they could find themselves living in a socialist state, are the ones mostly likely to benefit if that actually happened - which it won't; under any President. Socialism at its roots is about creating equity, ensuring that all people have equal access to all resources and spreading wealth through all sectors of society. It's not perfect but it's also not inherently bad. If you are a middle-income American working a 40 hour week with no health insurance, and struggling to put some money away for retirement (I just described about 45 million people), you could use a little social equity. You could use some of the shifting of taxes that would see your taxes fall and the shortfall made up by high income earners and corporations. You could use subsidized or socialized medicine; paid by for by everybody's tax dollars so that the costs of medical are financially catastrophic to you.

And yet, the new Tea Party movement - created by Sean Hannity and the rest of the idiocy at Fox News - seems to be populated by people who need some social supports. These rallies aren't being attended by the uber-wealthy; people who should really be worked up by the thought of a socialist President. These rallies have people screaming about things like estate taxes when they have no idea that an estate tax would affect something like the top 5% of American income-earners and have absolutely no affect on the savings left after a career making $50k/year.

The really weird part, is that I can't figure out how two disparate groups of people have managed to completely misunderstand where their country is headed. On the one side, we have blue-collar, unionized workers railing against socialism and that it's hurting their jobs, when it was largely socialist ideas that created the Labour movement in the first place. Labour unions are all about socialism and the protection of people against the forces of rampant capitalism! On the other side you have right-wing, super-patriots who somehow think that 234 years of America are going down the drain because the new guy in charge feels that "All men shall be created equal" may actually be an idea worth trying to attain. All of these folks are bleating that socialism is destroying their country, when they don't have the foggiest ideas of what socialism is. They just mindless repeat what they hear from Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, that crazy blonde religious gun-nut pundit mouthpiece who's name escapes me, Carlson and the rest of the right-wing, but we'll call ourselves "fair and balanced" media.

I think a lot of what's fueling this is a lack of patience on the part of the American population. I honestly think that people felt they'd wake up the day after the inauguration of Barak Obama and that all would be right in America; they'd get their homes back, their jobs would be re-opened, their retirement funds would magically reappear, Iraq would fix itself and terrorists would simply decide to love America and never do anything bad ever again. Well guess what folks. It doesn't work like that.

Bush Jr & Co. spent eight years screwing over you, your country and by extension, the rest of us. And, as will all things, entopy - the inevitable trending of a non-maintained system to slide toward disorganization - is a faster process than rebuilding. Obama sold you on hope. What he forgot to tell you was to hang on and be patient. My advice is to turn off you tv, or at least watch something without a talking head telling you how bad your life is and who you should blame for it, go outside and take a walk. You still live in a country where capitalists cater to your every whim and desire - sad though that may be.

To the Tea Party protesters: If you must act like uninformed children then do a good job of it. Put down your signs, get an ice-cream cone, ride on a swing and whine to your mommies that the big dark man is being mean to you. Otherwise, grow-up, act your age and educate yourselves.

You'd be doing me a favour because Lord know I can't keep this ranting up.

The Greatest Generation Should Be Pissed

I'm not one for militaristic, flag-waving, ooh-rah for the soldiers, jingoistic-cheerleading. I think war is conducted by the smallest of small minds who cannot work out global issues without resorting to blowing shit up.

As for the recent incursions into Afghanistan, Iraq and all the other post-9/11 bullshit war zones, I think we're still being lied to about why we have troops fighting and dying. The global war on terror as it's being sold to us is a lie. This isn't about keeping terrorists from our shores or protecting innocent civilians from the evils of the Taliban, al Queda and the rest of the terror alphabet. This is about money, trade routes, oil and strategic leverage in key parts of the world.

If it were anything different, you'd have US and NATO troops chasing terrorists across the Philippines or across Java. You'd have US, Canadian and EU soldiers in the Congo and Darfur. If this were truly about combating terror, the rich nations of the world would have troops in every, blistering, third-world jungle and desert where acts of terror are committed daily. Instead, your soldiers are being sent to take part in conflicts that were at best, orchestrated to protect international, corporate interests.

I think soldiers, on the other hand, ought to be commended for the job they do, when they do it well. They get sent to the places where you and I would never dream of treading, put their lives on the line, make the bad guys go away and try to protect the innocents around them.

Modern conflict and the World Wars/Korea are light years from each other. In those cases the threat to home was very real; especially in WW2. In global conflicts of days past, the men and women in uniform were joined in a very real way to the national populations at large. They were fighting for our freedom.

Now, maybe I was a tad fragile after watching Saving Private Ryan between 11:00 - 1:30am last night, but I was hovering around that place in my brain that is reserved for humility and thankfulness. Right around the end of the movie, when Ryan as an old man is standing in front of the grave of Tom Hanks character, and he's pleading with his wife "Tell me I've lived a good life. Tell me I'm a good man.", we cut to commercial. The commercial was for Macy's Veterans' Day Sale.

I got really angry. First, the timing was really not appropriate but more than that, Macy's chose to honour the war dead by giving you 15% off the price of an iPod??!! That's crass, folks.

What Macy's is essentially telling you is "Hey North America, on November 11, take one minute of silence to think about the people who fought and died for you. Then, spend the rest of the day buying crap in their honour."

If you do follow this plan, at least have the decency to show up to a Veteran's Day event or, here in Canada, a Remembrance Day event and tell a vet "Gee I'd love to stay and think about you and your friends and stuff, but I have to go to a sale and buy a big-screen tv."

Thank God I've not seen anything like the Macy's ad affiliated with Canadian business.

Screw Equality

I'm taking a break from school work to write this blog post. It's mostly directed at the citizens of Maine and California, but I suspect that it will be applicable to other states in the near future. As a polite, erudite, nice Canadian I feel obliged to say this to you.

"What is wrong with you, you backwards-thinking, ignorant, hate-filled idiots?!"

Right now at 10:17pm MST, the State of Maine has 52% of its population voting to repeal their same-sex marriage law. California repealed their gay marriage law earlier this year. This effectively says to the American, gay community that all the progress that has been made in the past 30 years has been wasted.

For the life of me, I do not understand why gay marriage so damn threatening to people. Pierre Trudeau very eloquently said "The government has no business in the bedrooms of Canadians." And yet time and again up here in the cold frozen North, our Federal gov't (at least the current flavour of it) wants to do away with gay marriage. Why?

Here's a fast set of questions for anybody who, inexplicably, gives a shit about what two people do behind their own doors.

1. Do you believe that gay marriage makes your own marriage any less legal, sacred, important or valuable?
2. If you answered yes, why is that the problem for a married gay couple and not for you? It would seem to me that if your marriage is so fragile that it can't stand up in the face of two men or two women getting hitched, then you and your partner should get some marriage counselling.

I would pay money to anybody who can make a coherent, logical, intelligent argument as to why gay marriage should be outlawed. There are some ground rules.

1. You can't say "the bible says so". Most of you who feed this line don't live a literally biblical life. Picking and choosing what you like and don't like is the very definition of hypocrisy.
2. I said intelligent. You can't use any of the proven-false statistics that claim children of gay marriage are more likely to commit suicide or fall into a life of crime or make less money or any of the rest of that garbage. All of those studies have been proven to be either a) statistically invalid or b) outright, make-believe.

I know I can rant until I'm blue in the face over this and it won't make a difference in Maine, California or here in red-neck Alberta. I would however leave all of those small-minded, bigots with this:

Look any gay person in the eye and tell them that they are less of a human than you are and that they should be willing to sacrifice their rights to protect your ideals. If you can do that, you're in some interesting company. That's exactly what Hitler did in Poland, what the KKK did in the South and what the Taliban do today in Afghanistan.

Welcome to the club.