Canadian Cincinnatus

The Toronto Mayor’s Niece offers women better advice than the feminist movement

I can certainly see how the victims of the Bloor Annex groper could be offended by Krista Ford's infamous tweet. Nevertheless, the inescapable conclusion from a fair reading of her tweet is that Krista’s heart was in the right place but she worded it poorly. Unfortunately, she is the daughter of Councillor Doug Ford and the niece of Mayor Rob Ford, and the last thing the mayor’s enemies - which comprise the whole of Toronto's left – want to do is to interpret her statement charitably.

To see the truth of the matter, let us review what she actually said:

"Stay alert, walk tall, carry mace, take self-defence classes & don't dress like a whore. #DontBeAVictim #StreetSmart"

All good advice, but advice that feminists don’t appreciate, particularly the last bit.

Earth to feminism: nobody is talking about restricting the right of women to dress as they see fit, not Krista Ford nor the unfortunate cop at the York University safety conference (who unwittingly inspired the latest Childrens' Crusade of the left, the Slut Walk). You can dress any way you want. You can legally even go topless. But, as Krista Ford and the cop advise, there are certain precautions that you can take to make yourself safer from predators. And one of them is to refrain from dressing provocatively.

At this point feminists will object that women have a right not to be raped.

Actually, no. They don’t have a right not to be raped. Just like you don’t have a right not to be murdered. To be sure, we have stringent laws against rape and murder, laws that I and fellow conservatives would like to see strengthened, but laws against rape and murder are a prohibition on would-be criminals not a guarantee by the state to prospective victims that these things won’t happen to them.

And even if the government were so silly as to guarantee such things, what good would it do? Crime doesn’t happen in front of a police station at shift change time. It happens at the time of the predator’s choosing, when you and he are all alone and the deck is stacked as much as possible against you. As a retired police officer friend liked to point out, the police are not there to protect you, they are there to catch your murderer.

This sort of logic surfaced first in the French Revolution when the revolutionaries became obsessed with positive rights emanating from the government. They believed that the best way to solve problems was to hand out rights. Edmund Burke described this thinking best:

What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer or the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.

People who look to the government for every solution are still governed by this logic. They - feminists among them - will be in for a rude shock when the confront a psychopath in the alley.

The advice of Krista Ford is much more practical – and empowering to everyday women: take sensible precautions, learn self-defence and “walk tall”. The only thing missing in her list is to carry a handgun – the only true equalizer between a woman and a rapist.

Oh, can’t get a concealed carry permit? I guess the feminists shouldn’t have supported Alan Rock and the Chrétien Liberals.

Where’s all the grief over Neil Armstrong’s death?

Is it just me or has there been a distinct lack of interest in the passing of Neil Armstrong. I mean, he is, after all, the very first man to walk on the surface of the moon. Shouldn’t we be making a bigger deal of his death than we are currently doing? As space.com points out,

Friday's service will be a private one, which isn't surprising given Armstrong's retiring nature. Though he shot to international fame after stepping onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, Armstrong never sought the spotlight.

OK, he’s modest. I get that. But that’s not a reason to not hold a national memorial for him. There has been some talk of doing that but, as of this writing, it remains talk.

While it can be expected that President Obama would downplay his departure - the Apollo 11 mission is precisely the kind of achievement his post-colonial, anti-American mindset would reflexively despise - it is unfortunately not just him. Mitt Romney, the candidate for the national greatness party, has hardly said a word about the Apollo 11 astronaut. While the hoopla surrounding Paul Ryan is understandable – the man may turn out to be the next Ronald Reagan -  still, Neil Armstrong is a modern day Christopher Columbus. If I were the Republican presidential candidate, I would be working the historic moon landing into every speech I make.

We seem to have enough time in the news-cycle to obsess over the Vegas antics of an historically inconsequential, hereditary princeling but the departure of first man in all history to walk on a celestial object is only given perfunctory treatment by the media.

I hope a national memorial for him happens – and it is fittingly grand - but so far, the reaction has been disappointingly luke-warm.

 

Janet Napolitano accused of sexual harassment

The background to the story from Reuters:

“Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has been accused of sexual harassment and discrimination against male employees.

In the complaint, Napolitano is accused of turning her female-run department into a "frat house" where male staffers were routinely humiliated, reports Forbes.

Along with the culture against men, Napolitano is also accused of providing unequal opportunities for men and women, promoting women to the highest positions while equally qualified men were bypassed.”

“The complaint against Napolitano is instructive to employers as it not only involves a role reversal of men suing women, but also includes both complaints of verbal sexual harassment and discriminatory treatment.”

Normally I am against sexual harassment laws. They are just the kind of intrusive social engineering that socialists love and that everybody else groans under. While it is perfectly reasonable that one should be able to recover damages in court if an employer tries to extort sexual favours from you, sexual harassment laws go a lot farther than that. By making bad manners in the workplace a matter for the courtroom, sexual harassment laws have made Big Brother everybody’s workmate.

But in this case, I say good on her. She strikes me as just the kind of feminist that cheered these intrusive laws on. Let Napolitano be hoisted up on her own petard.

On a more practical note, the only way to get rid of such laws is to make sure they apply equally to everybody – including the left. I think the Republicans blew a golden opportunity by not pointing out that all the legal excesses of the Monica Lewinski scandal that the left complained about were just the typical developments in a run-of-the-mill sexual harassment suit.

Always remember Alinsky’s rule #4:

Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

 

 

 

More PC fascism at the London Olympics

The latest roundup of free speech violations at the 2012 Olympic Games:

First up, there is the German rower, Nadja Drygilla. Her crime: well, she didn’t actually do anything herself. It is just that she has the wrong boyfriend, Michael Fischer. His crime: being “a legal candidate last year in a regional election” for the National Democratic Party. The Globe and Mail characterizes it as “far-right”. It is nevertheless a perfectly legal political party in Germany. The National Socialist German Workers Party remains illegal in Germany. Apparently for the IOC, associating with a perfectly legal political party or with somebody who associates with a perfectly legal party is a no-no. For instance, Drygilla had announced, “I have no connection to his circle of friends and this scene, and I reject it completely.” No matter, she was still pressured to leave the Olympic Village. According to the Globe:

“She quit her career as a police officer last year after her superiors learned about the relationship.”

“But questions remain as to how German Olympic officials could have been caught unaware on such a sensitive issue, especially after she left the police force.” 

Meanwhile in academia, avowed Marxists are free to teach young people. In the 20^th century, governments based on Marxist principles purposely killed 100 million people.

Second up, we have Daniel Thomas, a soccer player who was suspended from his team in the Welsh Premier League.  His crime: he tweeted an ‘alleged homophobic message’ about British diver Tom Daly. Technically, this isn’t the fault of the Olympics as he wasn’t an Olympic athlete, and I fully support the right of the Welsh Premier League to not associate with whoever they don’t want to. Still, what Thomas tweeted about has nothing to do with Welsh soccer so it would have been the decent thing for the league to simply mind its own business. To my mind, what is much more offensive than some ‘allegedly homophobic message’ by a soccer player are petty bureaucrats who can’t resist the urge to play tinpot fascist whenever the opportunity arises.

Finally, we have Mark Warsford. This case does directly concern the Olympic games even though Mark is not an athlete. He was a spectator who was arrested by the Surrey Police at the Olympic men’s cycling road race. His crime: he didn’t smile. I am not making this up, and yes, you read correctly: he was arrested for not smiling as the cyclists went by. His flimsy excuse: his Parkinson’s disease prevented him from making a smile. Come on Mark! Cheer up... or else! 

My God. What on earth has happened to Great Britain? By now it is abundantly clear that these unaccountable, taxpayer-funded, transnational bureaucrats are the avowed enemy of free people everywhere.

But two out of the three incidents weren’t their fault. They were carried out by completely British institutions. Isn’t England the birthplace of modern democracy? The home of the Magna Carta? Where the Glorious Revolution of 1688 happened? And where the world’s first Bill of Rights was written? What is wrong with the English?

Today’s Englishmen should be ashamed of themselves for tolerating these sorts of outrages. Where is their Ezra Levant? 

 

Europe is experiencing the crisis that Milton Friedman predicted 12 years ago

Some lowlights from a doom-and-gloom BBC report on economic conditions in the eurozone:

“The yield on Spanish 10-year bonds, which are taken as a strong indicator of the interest rate the government would have to pay to borrow money, rose above 7%, while Italian bond yields rose to 6.1%.

Yields above 7% are considered to be unsustainable in the long term.”

“But, as BBC Europe correspondent Chris Morris says, by sending its borrowing costs higher, the markets are sending a message to the eurozone that plans to help Spain are not convincing.”

In the year 2000, at a Bank of Canada conference, the great economist Milton Friedman had this to say about the then-forming currency:

“I think the euro is in its honeymoon phase. I hope it succeeds, but I have very low expectations for it. I think that differences are going to accumulate among the various countries and that non-synchronous shocks are going to affect them. Right now, Ireland is a very different state; it needs a very different monetary policy from that of Spain or Italy. On purely theoretical grounds, it’s hard to believe that it’s going to be a stable system for a long time. …

If we look back at recent history, they’ve tried in the past to have rigid exchange rates, and each time it has broken down. … So the verdict isn’t in on the euro. It’s only a year old. Give it time to develop its troubles.”

Over a decade later, the “troubles” are at hand.

 

 

P.S. Notice how Friedman zeros in on Ireland, Spain and Italy.

 

Advice to Senator Harry Reid: if you are a villain in a Martin Scorsese gangster film, you aren’t the best person to call Mitt Romney a tax cheat

Senate majority leader Harry Reid go the ball rolling by claiming that unnamed investors told him that Mitt Romney didn’t pay his taxes for 10 years.

The ensuing brouhaha created some unintended consequences for Harry Reid. One was that conservative activists managed to link his name in the Google search engine with the phrase, “Harry Reid is a pederast.”

A more serious consequence for the senator is that people are now asking him how he was able to amass a personal wealth of $10 million when he spent most of his adult life in public service. But what really surprises me is that nobody has pointed out that Harry Reid was a villain in a Martin Scorsese gangster movie.

Seriously! 

The film is Casino, made in 1995 and starred Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci. The screenplay was written by crime writer Nicholas Pileggi from real-life events that occurred in Las Vegas in the late 1970’s. If you look at the Wikipedia page for the film, you will see that the character played by Dick Smothers, State Senator (and gaming commission chairman) Harrison Roberts, is based on real life character Harry Reid!

If you have seen the film, you will recall that the Dick Smother’s character was a pill popping, prostitute using, freebee grubbing, corrupt local politician and gaming commission chairman who was in bed with the mob. In real life, Harry Reid was the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission from 1977 to 1981, around about the same time the real-life events depicted in the film occurred.

P.S. An interesting aside: the verisimilitude of the film was so good that the mob laywer who defended the Robert De Niro character played himself in the film. He is (in the film and real life) Oscar Goodman, the Democrat mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011 (in real life).

Now tell me the Republicans could get away with this stuff.

 

Thoughtcrime and the International Olympic Commission

I am coming a bit late to this story but it outrages free speech too much to walk by without commenting. Greek triple-jump champion Voulo Papachristou was barred from the London Olympics because she tweeted a lame joke about Africans. Later, Swiss soccer player Michael Morganella was banned for tweeting something a little more violent about South Koreans after they beat Switzerland in a game.

It can be argued that the tweet by Morganella constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct, but if Morganella’s ban had been sold on that basis, I would have no problem with it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. All the news stories described a soccer player ejected for a ‘racist’ tweet, not for unsportsmanlike conduct.

There is no such ambiguity with the Papachristou case. What she said had nothing to do with Olympic competition or sport at all. She was speaking as a private person and therefore what she said should be none of the IOC’s business. She was banned principally because she violated the dictates of Political Correctness.

This trend is authoritarian in its design. For instance, take this comment from the yahoo.com story about Papachristou:

Look, if you have to parse how racist a statement is, then it's already too racist.

Spoken like a true totalitarian: the conclusion is given once the charge has been made.

As I wrote before, charges of racism are insidious because:

For a long time, I have had the vague notion that the word ‘racism’ has been redefined by the Political Indoctrinators to mean something more than what most people mean by that word, and that this ambiguity is used by the PC-heads to their advantage. In other words, they have a wide-ranging, hazy definition that they use to ensnare victims but have a narrow, specific definition that they use to describe the general concept of racism to the general public. In this way, people who are not really paying attention (i.e. centrists or moderates) end up assuming that people charged with racism are guilty according to an exacting definition (that they were never accused of).

As George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he who controls language, controls our thoughts.

For people fighting political correctness, it is important to note that this is not a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment begins with the phrase, “Congress shall make no law…” The rest of us are free to associate or not associate with whomever we want.

What gives issues like this their importance is that they are skirmishes in a larger culture war. Because this is a war the left is determined to win, it is incumbent on all conservatives, libertarians and other defenders of freedom to fight these battles whenever they occur. The Chick-fil-A buycott last Wednesday was one such battle (that the good guys won, while making the thuggish mayors of one-party cities look stupid).

Voulo Papachristou is a harmless athlete. It may be argued that she belonged to the ‘far-right’ Golden Dawn party of Greece. OK, so is she being banned for being a supporter of a legally-constituted political party that attracted 7% of the vote in the last Greek election? Hey IOC, can we see a list of legal political parties that Olympic athletes are not supposed to associate with?

In not unrelated news, the IOC refused to hold a minute of silence for the 40^th anniversary of the Munich Massacre, the worst atrocity to ever occur at Olympic Games. Apparently, they thought such an action would be too offensive for some people who sympathize with terrorism. 

 

Thoughtcrime and the International Olympic Commission

I am coming a bit late to this story but it outrages free speech too much to walk by without commenting. Greek triple-jump champion Voulo Papachristou was barred from the London Olympics because she tweeted a lame joke about Africans. Later, Swiss soccer player Michael Morganella was banned for tweeting something a little more violent about South Koreans after they beat Switzerland in a game.

It can be argued that the tweet by Morganella constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct, but if Morganella’s ban had been sold on that basis, I would have no problem with it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. All the news stories described a soccer player ejected for a ‘racist’ tweet, not for unsportsmanlike conduct.

There is no such ambiguity with the Papachristou case. What she said had nothing to do with Olympic competition or sport at all. She was speaking as a private person and therefore what she said should be none of the IOC’s business. She was banned principally because she violated the dictates of Political Correctness.

This trend is authoritarian in its design. For instance, take this comment from the yahoo.com story about Papachristou:

Look, if you have to parse how racist a statement is, then it's already too racist.

Spoken like a true totalitarian: the conclusion is given once the charge has been made.

As I wrote before, charges of racism are insidious because:

For a long time, I have had the vague notion that the word ‘racism’ has been redefined by the Political Indoctrinators to mean something more than what most people mean by that word, and that this ambiguity is used by the PC-heads to their advantage. In other words, they have a wide-ranging, hazy definition that they use to ensnare victims but have a narrow, specific definition that they use to describe the general concept of racism to the general public. In this way, people who are not really paying attention (i.e. centrists or moderates) end up assuming that people charged with racism are guilty according to an exacting definition (that they were never accused of).

As George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he who controls language, controls our thoughts.

For people fighting political correctness, it is important to note that this is not a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment begins with the phrase, “Congress shall make no law…” The rest of us are free to associate or not associate with whomever we want.

What gives issues like this their importance is that they are skirmishes in a larger culture war. Because this is a war the left is determined to win, it is incumbent on all conservatives, libertarians and other defenders of freedom to fight these battles whenever they occur. The Chick-fil-A buycott last Wednesday was one such battle (that the good guys won, while making the thuggish mayors of one-party cities look stupid).

Voulo Papachristou is a harmless athlete. It may be argued that she belonged to the ‘far-right’ Golden Dawn party of Greece. OK, so is she being banned for being a supporter of a legally-constituted political party that attracted 7% of the vote in the last Greek election? Hey IOC, can we see a list of legal political parties that Olympic athletes are not supposed to associate with?

In not unrelated news, the IOC refused to hold a minute of silence for the 40^th anniversary of the Munich Massacre, the worst atrocity to ever occur at Olympic Games. Apparently, they thought such an action would be too offensive for some people who sympathize with terrorism.