Would you make an ad that disrespects Sikhs?

— 03.10.2017 03:17 PM

As I am certain you know, among Sikhs, wearing a Dastaar, or turban, is mandatory for all Amritdhari (or initiated) Sikh men and women. For the Sikhs, the Dastaar is an article of faith that represents honour, self-respect, courage, spirituality, and piety.  It is central to the Skin identity and is to be accorded respect.

By all but the BC NDP’s pals in the BC Federation of Labour, that is.

My Huff Po bit on the BC Dips resulted in a number of emails from a number of folks in God’s Country.  One told me a noteworthy story, with supporting evidence.

“Warren: As I’m sure you’ve heard, BC Fed is running an attack ad campaign on the BC Liberals and Christy Clark.  The first ad they ran showed the Christy Clark cartoon character actually jumping on a Sikh person wearing a turban.  When the Sikh community objected, the BC Fed people quickly deleted the scene.  You should put up the two clips I’m sending you on your blog.  They are incredibly disrespectful to the Sikh faith.”

I agree.  Here’s a bit of the slowed-down “before” ad, which I uploaded to YouTube:


 

And, here’s the “after lots of complaints” ad, with the anti-Sikh crap mysteriously absent:


 

BC Fed/BC NDP: we’re working to make life more culturally insensitive!


Comments (4)

The best song of the new (new) Dark Ages

— 03.10.2017 10:30 AM

Truer words not yet spoken:

All you Black folks, you must go
All you Mexicans, you must go
And all you poor folks, you must go
Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways
So all you bad folks, you must go

Somewhere out there, right now, a 16-year-old punk grrrrrl is writing the next anti-Trump Smells Like Teen Spirit anthem, and it’s a song that will change the world.  In the meantime, anticipate lots of punk rock (like this) and hip hop (like below) railing against the New World Disorder.

Bad time for people, but a good time for great rebel music and investigative journalism.



Comments (3)

Are the BC NDP full of crap?

— 03.09.2017 11:54 AM

Yeah, sort of, they are.

They’ve gone bananas about the fact that Elections BC is asking the governing party about fundraising stuff. What they’re not telling anyone is that they’re being asked, too.

And John Horgan’s crew aren’t enthusiastic about anyone probing BC NDP fundraising practices. There’s a history, you see.


Look, no one I know loves to do political fundraising. But, until the media agree to give political parties free ad space, political parties have no choice but to fundraise. And, to put a fine point on it, there’s nothing illegitimate about political fundraising. It happens in every democracy. It happens in every political party.

As the sterling examples of Ross Perot and Pete DuPont always remind us, however, you don’t win elections with money. You win ’em with great leaders, great teams, great ideas. That’s why the BC Liberals are doing well on the fundraising front, I think: Christy Clark’s got the hottest economy in Canada, people like her, and she’s competitive. So BC voters are expressing support in the polls, and with their chequebooks, too.

Politics ain’t free. Modern political campaigns, of every stripe, demand that political parties develop deep grass-roots networks, to communicate with voters, to develop and learn from voter data, to use social media tools to its advantage, and so on. Advertising, too – lots of it. That’s what any party’s fundraising is used for. In some campaigns, 90 per cent of fundraising goes to ads in the media (the selfsame media crying “scandal,” I note without ironic comment).

I’m out here in the Centre of the Universe, and I haven’t been to BC in a long while. But, if I were, I’d say this to Clark’s BC Libs: you shouldn’t take any ethics lessons from the party that skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars from charities over a 20-year period. You shouldn’t take any civics lessons from the BC NDP, which operated lotteries and bingo games with the proceeds going to them, not to local charities.

I was there when it all went down: the BC NDP was, in my experience, the most corrupt political party I’d ever seen. Ripping off charities to fill their coffers?  Seriously?

That’s a scandal. Was then, still is now.


Comments (5)