Stay strong, Twitter
Thoughts on the aftermath
From next week’s Hill Times column:
Everyone plays their assigned role, like we are trapped in some grim kabuki play that always, always ends the same way. The gun nuts take to social media, bombarding everyone with all-caps variants on “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The bigots bleat that “lieberals” and “libtards” are to blame, because they let in Muslims and people whose skin isn’t white – you know, white as a Klansman’s sheet.
And, naturally, Ezra Levant and the winged monkeys at Rebel Media fundraise with it all.
The chiefs of police recite statistics, noting (correctly) that crime is down, insisting (incorrectly) that the police could do more if they simply had bigger budgets. The conservative politicians tweet “thoughts and prayers,” which has become 21st Century code for “I plan to do nothing.” And the liberal politicians wring their hands and pass laws that will also achieve nothing – because there are already nearly eight million firearms in the country. Now.
And, by the by: more than a million of those guns – like the one the killer used the Sunday before last – are already restricted or prohibited. His was stolen in a break-in in Saskatoon a few years back, before it commenced slouching towards Toronto’s Danforth Avenue.
And we in the media? We always play our assigned roles, too. Those on the conservative side of the spectrum shrug, and regurgitate the talking points of the NRA and its foul ilk. They call handgun bans “virtue signalling” symbolism – forgetting, or not knowing, that all of politics is about symbols, and the ceaseless pursuit of virtue.
He’s got noooooo chance!
Read it to the end.
From The New York Times.
Dear CBC: what I know, what I don’t
I didn’t know Reese Fallon.
I may have met her, once, when Beaches-East York MP Nate Erskine-Smith – who did know her – held an anti-racism event in our neighbourhood. Nate had a number of Young Liberal club members there, helping out. Reese was a member of that club. I remember feeling sorry for these young people, because a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists had shown up and were disrupting the meeting. It was pretty ugly.
So, I didn’t know her. I do know, however, that she is still being mourned – she isn’t even in the ground, yet – after she was murdered on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue Sunday night. She was there for a birthday celebration with friends. One of her friends was wounded and taken to hospital, too. That’s what I know. That’s all that most of us know.
Here, too, something else I know: it was appalling, and wrong, for CBC Radio to devote a lot of time, this morning, to the killer. In one part, they had what sounded like a professional actor breathlessly read the letter his family sent out. In another part, they had a youth worker who knew the killer come on, and he related how the killer had “a million-dollar smile” and was “humble and reserved.” It went on and on and on like that, for a long time, on CBC Radio.
I don’t know if any those things are true, either. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Personally, I don’t usually associate having “a million-dollar smile” with people who slaughter children on a city street.
What I do know is this: it isn’t just governments that have a role to play in preventing other Reese Fallons from being executed one night. The media has a role to play, too.
And that role does not include treating the killer with more deference than the killer’s victims.
Before they – innocent children – are even in the ground.
My question.
How did someone with diagnosed psychosis get a restricted weapon?
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) July 23, 2018
Column: the Trudeau “movement”
Anyone seen the Liberal Party of Canada, lately?
It was here just a minute ago. You know: one of the most successful political parties in Western democracy. Charter of Rights, bilingualism, multiculturalism, keeping the country together: all that stuff, and more. Did well. Won elections, did good deeds.
But, lately, the Liberal Party has ceased to be a “party.” It has now become a “movement.”
It’s true. That’s what senior, senior Grit operatives have been saying for a while. The Liberals are a “movement,” now, and not merely a political party anymore.
These apparatchiks – and, we are reliably told, the Prime Minister of Canada himself – have taken to disparaging the “party” designation. They are a “movement,” now.
The Oxford folks define “movement” as “a group of people working together to advance their shared political, social, or artistic ideas.” But they’re missing something, with that. It’s too vanilla.
When you are part of a “movement,” you have a higher purpose. Your eyes shine with a transcendent zeal, and you believe you answer to a higher authority.
The higher authority, in this case, is Justin Trudeau.
Those around Justin Trudeau – and what an insular, tightly-knit little group they are! – actually refer to themselves, in private conversation, as a “movement,” now. Justin Trudeau’s.
He was the one who vaulted the Liberals from third place to first, his acolytes say. He was the one, alone, who returned them to the glories of majority rule. He was the one who – upon alighting upon the leadership stage – ushered in a bit of Trudeaumania Redux.
And it is true, he did those things. He did.
And, to give Justin Trudeau his due, too, he hasn’t wrecked the country. Notwithstanding the Indian Imbroglio and Grope-Gate – notwithstanding the lack of any significant legislative achievement – he is still standing. He’s alive, still.
Last week, he presided over a not-bad cabinet shuffle: demoting the singularly inept Melanie Joly; promoting capable stars like Pablo Rodriguez and François-Philippe Champagne; and handing the much-liked Dominic LeBlanc the task of calming the provincial waters – and, while no one was looking, taking Northern Affairs away from Carolyn Bennett and putting LeBlanc in charge. It was a good shuffle.
But Trudeau’s essential problem remains. Because his government is a “movement,” now – and not a political party, per se – Justin Trudeau is the one and only face we associate with it. He is his movement’s brand.
So, when he stumbles – as he indisputably has, in recent weeks, with the groping scandal – there is no one to step up and help absorb some of the body blows. There is no one else to help play defence.
Brian Mulroney had Don Mazankowski and Michael Wilson to watch his back. Jean Chretien had Herb Gray and Sheila Copps and others. Stephen Harper had John Baird and Jim Flaherty.
Justin Trudeau has no one.
Gerald Butts’ ridiculous tweets about the “alt-Right” only make things worse. Because, all evidence to the contrary, Justin Trudeau is indeed human. He pulls on his pants one leg at a time. He brushes his own teeth. He ties his own shoe laces. He makes mistakes.
Paradoxically, Trudeau’s strength has become his weakness. With charm, likeability and an impressive jawline, he lifted Liberals out of the ignominy of third place in 2015. But, somewhere along the way, he neglected to remember the one unalterable political truth: sooner or later, the ones who loved you come to hate you. Sooner or later, they get sick of your face – no matter how handsome that face may be.
He may still recover from all this, of course, mainly because he is lucky. On the world stage, he cannot help but look good when his main antagonist is Donald Trump. In the House of Commons, his principal opponents are a dud and a disappointment (and we don’t even need to identify which is which – you already know).
At the provincial level, he is increasingly surrounded by conservative Premiers – which makes his re-election more likely among the many (many) Canadians who hedge their bets at the ballot box, and who desire partisan balance.
In the end, Justin Trudeau has become, in Trumpian terms, big. His is the biggest name in Canadian politics. He is big, big, big.
But you know what they say about how the big ones: they fall hard.
Movement or not.
What does this mean? I do not know what it means.
https://twitter.com/kinsellawarren/status/1020821001918197760?s=21
SFH at the Bovine!
Maximum Rock’n’Roll calls new Hot Nasties EP poppy, not abrasive and like Joe Strummer!
Maximum Rock’n’Roll is the premier punk rock magazine, and has been for decades. It is the punk rock non plus ultra.
And MRR has reviewed the first Hot Nasties record in decades – calling it “less abrasive” and “poppier” and even says it recalls Joe Strummer’s 101ers! Wow!
Here’s their take:
And here’s the video for the lead tune – now available on Ugly Pop Records!