EYE ON A CRAZY PLANET
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Dilbert creator Scott Adams (ironically) endorses Hillary Clinton for his personal safety
This one called "Clown Genius" is quite good, and keep in mind Adams wrote it back
in August 2015, almost a year ago, and it was very prescient.
If Adams is right, and he's persuaded me that he's at least
got some insight into things, then Trump's attacking the media like no other
national politician has before falls into the plan. The media is obviously
going to be highly critical of Trump, much more than Clinton, both for the
obvious reason that there is plenty of crazy talk that comes out of Trump's
mouth, but also because of the inherent leftist bias in most mainstream media.
So Trump repeating that the media are sleazy, that they are liars, that they
can't be trusted, and pointing out some of the errors and biases of specific
reporters is not just lashing out, but part of a thought-out plan to neutralize
media criticism by instilling distrust of them. To an extent, it's working,
because a number of the subjects of those attacks by Trump have had to go on
the defensive to try to establish their criticism isn't based on bias but them
"just doing their job."
I endorsed Hillary Clinton to protect myself from people like this guy: https://t.co/LXdUthxL6H https://t.co/0n6H1XmHk1— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 6, 2016
...If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind – as she is doing – and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate their own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to take out the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.
So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reason, I’m on team Clinton...
Monday, June 6, 2016
Thomas Sowell: Bernie Sanders' fans don't think
...While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.
With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.
The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist “exploitation,” shouldn’t it?
But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists’ exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.
Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the Left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.
When Senator Sanders cries, “The system is rigged!” no one asks, “Just what specifically does that mean?” or “What facts do you have to back that up?”...
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Liberals' electoral reform is based on a manufactured discontent, advanced by the players — not the voters
It is widely reported that the Trudeau Liberals are backing down on their steamroller approach to what they are pleased to call “electoral reform.” The Bloc Québécois and Green members of the government’s panel on electoral reform will now have voting rights. This means the Liberals, with five members, will hold a minority on the 12-person panel.
Nonetheless I challenge the notion that accepting a more broadly based committee qualifies as “backing down.” It should be read only as less arrogant than what they have been doing on this subject up to now.
The clamour for electoral reform is far less loud and vigorous than professional politicians and their many-handed managers would like you to believe. The system we’ve long had, the dreaded first past the post (FPTP) does not alarm people. It’s not a coffee-shop topic. It is surely not the “undemocratic,” “unrepresentative” and “unfair” system that those with a partisan interest in “fixing” it claim.
In essence, those most offended by the system are those to whom it awards the least success. The Greens, for example, would like to bundle all the dribs and drabs of votes they get in every riding into a single number and claim more seats on that basis.
The other strong motive for change comes from a party that has been successful under FPTP, believing it could even be more successful under some more complex arrangement. Or, and this amounts to the same thing, their main rivals would do worse. They foresee a structural advantage in a changed system. That’s the Trudeau government’s motivation.
None of these “advantages” are of interest or benefit to the broad mass of voters...
Ellen DeGeneres being sued by a woman after using her name for a breast joke
 |
| This is Rihanna and her titty pierce, not Titi Pierce |
A Georgia woman is suing Ellen DeGeneres after mispronouncing her name to make a breast joke during her daytime talk show.
Titi Pierce, 35, name is pronounced “Tee Tee … as grammar dictates”, she said in the lawsuit. But DeGeneres called her “titty Pierce”, reading one of the real estate agent’s adverts during a segment called “What’s Wong With These Ads…. and These Signs?”
“In all of her 35 years of life, no one has ever referred to Ms Pierce as “titty” until the Defendant did so on February 22, 2016 on national television,” the lawsuit reads, adding that it led to “immediate ridicule”...
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Just to mess with your head...
William Shatner said that when he nearly died once, he heard music. One of the songs was Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. So this is what heaven will be like:
Friday, June 3, 2016
Portland State University students pledge money to Hamas to support suicide bombing of innocent people
This is how stupid plenty of Liberal Arts College Students are:
The Bernie Brigade's anti-Americanism will help elect Donald Trump
There's plenty about Donald Trump to criticize, but when the Bernie Sanders' Brigade turns up to protests him and display their outright hatred for America in the process, it helps convince people to vote Republican.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Bernard Lewis at 100: An Appreciation
Chris Selley: Umm, Toronto Star? By my count roughly 99.999992 per cent of Canadian kids are not murdered
...The study, by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, concerns abduction and murder by strangers, which is the No. 1 risk North American society has mismanaged for four decades. It is a tiny subsidiary risk of an already tiny one: by my count roughly 99.999992 per cent of Canadian children are not murdered.
Yet the Star provided no data whatsoever on how stranger abductions fit into any bigger picture. Between 2000 and 2012, the biggest cause by far of death among children under 15 was accidents (29 per cent). Next came cancer (16 per cent); genetic conditions (nine per cent); suicide (four per cent); heart disease (3.4 per cent); and then homicide (3.1 per cent).
Over 41 years, the study identifies 155 victims under age 17 of a “stranger or acquaintance” murder. That’s an average of 3.8 victims a year. Over that time, the population of Canadian children has remained steady at around 6.5 million. Anyone can do that math, surely...
Monday, May 30, 2016
York University Muslim Student Association students distributed pamphlet saying, "women may even enjoy being beaten at times as a sign of love and concern"
The book “Women in Islam & Refutation of some Common Misconceptions,” authored by the Saudi scholar Dr. Abdul-Rahman al-Sheha and printed by the Saudi Dawah organization Muslim World League (رابطة العالم الاسلامي), was also distributed in 2015 by York MSA female students at the Central Square of York University...
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Massive pot raid makes life in Toronto more dangerous
...Those 90 people arrested — who Saunders seemed to emphasize were not dangerous criminals in any conventional sense, by pointing out how the raids had been designed specifically so they were quickly processed and released — will now face the trauma of arrest, the expense of defending themselves, and will have criminal arrest (and possibly conviction) records that they carry with them as they try to get jobs, cross borders, and so on. Life is suddenly more dangerous and more difficult for most everyone involved.
To deal with a few points far too quickly: the war on drugs, on the whole, is an epic disaster and threat to public safety, and should be abandoned; the legal situation of marijuana dispensing is far from as clear-cut as we’re being told, because courts have consistently ruled that “the government cannot prevent reasonable access to medical marijuana,” as lawyer Dan Stein pointed out in a blog post; and, notwithstanding those rulings, the dispensaries involved were well aware they were operating in a potentially dangerous legal grey area, outside existing regulations and licensing requirements.
In fact, one gets the impression that last point is one reason such large numbers had sprung up so quickly. As the government prepares to bring in a new regime for how legal marijuana is regulated, pot store owners want to stake their claim to a business model to ensure they have a chance of being part of the new regime.
Such a “disruptive” business approach carries risks, and warnings from city hall this week that they should shut down should have made those risks clear.
But it’s also true that the last company to take such an approach in the face of licensing requirements they didn’t like was Uber, who, rather than having its owners and drivers raided and arrested on a large scale, was rewarded with rule changes allowing the service to operate legally.
In a city where routine petty law-breaking that actually endangers people (parking in bike lanes, say) is routinely ignored by police, and where distressing levels of serious law-breaking at the other end of the spectrum (the rate of gun violence this year, for instance) is so far not being contained by police, the question is: Why did the police department and the city decide that these were the infractions they wanted to target with a massive crackdown operation? What the hell is this really all about?...
Krauthammer Blasts Obama's Naive, Idiotic Apology in Hiroshima
See also: The Hiroshima Bombing Was Right and Necessary
Today, the president of the United States spoke at Hiroshima, Japan — the site of the first of two American atomic-bomb attacks on Imperial Japan — and served up a heaping helping of moral equivalence and maudlin sentimentality. To Obama, the real lesson of Hiroshima is that it exposes humanity’s “core contradiction.” I am not making this up:
Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction. How the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.No, Mr. President, in the image of the mushroom cloud, were are starkly reminded of the horrific evil of Imperial Japan and the ingenuity and resolve of the American people to defeat one of the most genocidal forces the world has ever seen.
Americans have short memories, and to the extent they think about World War II, they tend to think of Hitler and the Holocaust — and justifiably so. His attempt to exterminate an entire race of people was among the worst crimes in world history. But in remembering Hitler, we cannot forget Japan. It killed an estimated 14 million Chinese citizens in its invasion of China. And during the course of that invasion, its forces acted much like Hitler’s SS, conducting mass-scale rapes, grotesque human experimentation, and enslaving countless men, women, and children...
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Reprehensible activists plan to harass children and the elderly at a Toronto charity walk
One of Toronto's most notable, lovable characters, Kensington Market haberdasher Tom Mihalik, has a regular commercial segment in the mornings on Classical 96.3 FM. It's an unusual minute where Mihalik, who has been keeping Tom's Place running as a thriving enterprise for decades on Baldwin Street in the heart of the Market, goes on a kind of free-thought ramble until morning host Mike Duncan steers the talk back to the subject of selling suits.
With his upbeat enthusiasm and heavy Hungarian accent, Tom sounds reminiscent of a stock comedy actor from a 1940's movie. His monologues vary from subjects as diverse as fan-talk about the Toronto Raptors, to his experiences growing up in the Market, to his celebrity encounters at local galas, to boostering the domestic economy.
The other day, Tom talked about making a generous donation to the upcoming annual charity Walk for Israel.
Tom said a long-time employee of his, an octogenarian, looked forward all year to the walk, which is an expression of support for the Jewish State. The walk, according to Tom, is one of the things that keeps the geriatric gentleman going.
The modern State of Israel, born in 1948 out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the cauldron of turmoil that is middle east geopolitics, was a symbol of renewal and hope. But Israel has faced relentless efforts by the surrounding Muslim countries to exterminate it since its birth. Enduring war, terrorism, and economic pressure from its neighbors as well as unfair criticism from western nations anxious to curry favor with the oil-rich Arabs, it is a miracle that Israel has managed to survive.
Yet this beacon of hope in a region of barbarism has survived as the only pluralistic, liberal democracy in the middle east. Though its survival comes at a great cost. Israel had an occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza forced on them when a combined Arab effort to wipe out Israel in 1967 failed. Despite claims of anti-Israel activists, Israel is not occupying a Palestinian state. From Israel's independence in 1948 until 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, and Gaza was Egyptian territory. There has never been an independent Palestine. It was land controlled by the British after World War 1, the Turks before then, and prior to that, a series of conquerors kept it as vassal territory. The only time there has been an independent country in what came to be called Palestine was when it was Israel in the time before the Greek and Roman Empires came into being.
Israeli efforts to make peace with the Palestinian leadership has only been met with intransigence. US President Bill Clinton talked about how Yasser Arafat turned down an offer that would have created a Palestinian state on 98 percent of the territory the Palestinian Authority President asked for. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza as an experiment to see if the Palestinians would focus on nation-building and peace, the result was more Palestinian terrorism and incessant rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians.
Yet Israel survives. And the gentle old man who still works for Tom Mihalik, and many like him, along with schoolchildren and families, will turn out on Sunday May 29 to walk and raise money to support Israeli charities to maintain that survival.
However some people will be attending the Walk for Israel, not with optimism and philanthropy in their hearts, but with the malicious intent of harassing Jews and proclaiming their desire for the destruction of the Jewish State.
There are places and situations where discussion and criticism of Israeli policies are appropriate. But the Walk for Israel is a charitable, not a political event. It is not a place where expressions of hatred and calls for harm against anyone takes place, except by those who come to protest against it. That makes it distinctly different than the demented, Khomeinist al Quds Day rallies where terrorism is extolled and calls for the murder of Jews ring out.
What kind of malevolent people would chose a charity walk to vent their bile at children and the elderly?
They are vicious, stupid people, some of whom are Islamists, some are Marxists, and some are members of a vile group of depraved Munchausen Jews calling themselves Independent Jewish Voices.
They want a boycott of Israel and anything that expresses support for Israel's right to exist. It is a movement made up of sadists and masochists, some of whom are gays and lesbians whose depravity extends to expressing support for Islamic terrorists who would kill them for their sexual orientation, while trying to extinguish the only country in the middle east where gay rights are enshrined in law.
These are despicable, sick people whose activism is a form of narcissistic attention-seeking. There are only a handful of them, but if you examine the names of those who have committed to attend to persecute the Jews, they are fixtures on the comment sections of newspapers where they post anti-Israel comments so frequently and exclusively that it is readily apparent that the destruction of the Jewish State has become their raison d'etre.
If you look at them, it's not coincidental that they are all physically repulsive. Their activism is their social life. On their facebook group page, they acknowledge they will be ridiculed by the people they have come to offend and degrade. Given the anti-Israel fanatics' degenerate nature, they probably welcome that. Whatever tremble of excitement they get from being insulted is probably a substitute for the sex lives those miserable, rancid gargoyles are missing.
One is tempted to say to such people who come to harass the Walk for Israel to "get a life." But that would do no good, since they obviously have as little an idea of what life is about as they do of human decency.
UPDATE: The activist cretins posted pictures of themselves harassing the Walk for Israel on facebook.
There were a dozen in all. If you think I was exaggerating about how repugnant they are, look for yourself. They included a hideous, wizened, one-armed woman who scoured at passersby. Another was a sickly-looking loser with a sculpted beard that makes him look like a parody of a satanic cult leader, and who apparently thinks it's a fashion statement to wear socks with sandals on a sweltering day. Acting as if being repellent somehow makes them a cause celebre, they featured a dumpy, hirsute woman in shorts and a lattice-laced top whose mustache makes Tom Selleck's look like a thin wisp of lip fuzz. One of them is an ever-present barnacle at anti-Israel protests, an ugly stump of a female who is a picture of what you'd expect would come out of a garbage compressor if you put a hippopotamus wearing a bicycle helmet into one. And as usual, they brandished a couple of pathetic, exploited souls who bear the physical symptoms of people born with Trisomy 21.
With his upbeat enthusiasm and heavy Hungarian accent, Tom sounds reminiscent of a stock comedy actor from a 1940's movie. His monologues vary from subjects as diverse as fan-talk about the Toronto Raptors, to his experiences growing up in the Market, to his celebrity encounters at local galas, to boostering the domestic economy.
The other day, Tom talked about making a generous donation to the upcoming annual charity Walk for Israel.
Tom said a long-time employee of his, an octogenarian, looked forward all year to the walk, which is an expression of support for the Jewish State. The walk, according to Tom, is one of the things that keeps the geriatric gentleman going.
The modern State of Israel, born in 1948 out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the cauldron of turmoil that is middle east geopolitics, was a symbol of renewal and hope. But Israel has faced relentless efforts by the surrounding Muslim countries to exterminate it since its birth. Enduring war, terrorism, and economic pressure from its neighbors as well as unfair criticism from western nations anxious to curry favor with the oil-rich Arabs, it is a miracle that Israel has managed to survive.
Yet this beacon of hope in a region of barbarism has survived as the only pluralistic, liberal democracy in the middle east. Though its survival comes at a great cost. Israel had an occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza forced on them when a combined Arab effort to wipe out Israel in 1967 failed. Despite claims of anti-Israel activists, Israel is not occupying a Palestinian state. From Israel's independence in 1948 until 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, and Gaza was Egyptian territory. There has never been an independent Palestine. It was land controlled by the British after World War 1, the Turks before then, and prior to that, a series of conquerors kept it as vassal territory. The only time there has been an independent country in what came to be called Palestine was when it was Israel in the time before the Greek and Roman Empires came into being.
Israeli efforts to make peace with the Palestinian leadership has only been met with intransigence. US President Bill Clinton talked about how Yasser Arafat turned down an offer that would have created a Palestinian state on 98 percent of the territory the Palestinian Authority President asked for. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza as an experiment to see if the Palestinians would focus on nation-building and peace, the result was more Palestinian terrorism and incessant rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians.
Yet Israel survives. And the gentle old man who still works for Tom Mihalik, and many like him, along with schoolchildren and families, will turn out on Sunday May 29 to walk and raise money to support Israeli charities to maintain that survival.
However some people will be attending the Walk for Israel, not with optimism and philanthropy in their hearts, but with the malicious intent of harassing Jews and proclaiming their desire for the destruction of the Jewish State.
There are places and situations where discussion and criticism of Israeli policies are appropriate. But the Walk for Israel is a charitable, not a political event. It is not a place where expressions of hatred and calls for harm against anyone takes place, except by those who come to protest against it. That makes it distinctly different than the demented, Khomeinist al Quds Day rallies where terrorism is extolled and calls for the murder of Jews ring out.
What kind of malevolent people would chose a charity walk to vent their bile at children and the elderly?
They are vicious, stupid people, some of whom are Islamists, some are Marxists, and some are members of a vile group of depraved Munchausen Jews calling themselves Independent Jewish Voices.
They want a boycott of Israel and anything that expresses support for Israel's right to exist. It is a movement made up of sadists and masochists, some of whom are gays and lesbians whose depravity extends to expressing support for Islamic terrorists who would kill them for their sexual orientation, while trying to extinguish the only country in the middle east where gay rights are enshrined in law.
These are despicable, sick people whose activism is a form of narcissistic attention-seeking. There are only a handful of them, but if you examine the names of those who have committed to attend to persecute the Jews, they are fixtures on the comment sections of newspapers where they post anti-Israel comments so frequently and exclusively that it is readily apparent that the destruction of the Jewish State has become their raison d'etre.
If you look at them, it's not coincidental that they are all physically repulsive. Their activism is their social life. On their facebook group page, they acknowledge they will be ridiculed by the people they have come to offend and degrade. Given the anti-Israel fanatics' degenerate nature, they probably welcome that. Whatever tremble of excitement they get from being insulted is probably a substitute for the sex lives those miserable, rancid gargoyles are missing.
One is tempted to say to such people who come to harass the Walk for Israel to "get a life." But that would do no good, since they obviously have as little an idea of what life is about as they do of human decency.
UPDATE: The activist cretins posted pictures of themselves harassing the Walk for Israel on facebook.
There were a dozen in all. If you think I was exaggerating about how repugnant they are, look for yourself. They included a hideous, wizened, one-armed woman who scoured at passersby. Another was a sickly-looking loser with a sculpted beard that makes him look like a parody of a satanic cult leader, and who apparently thinks it's a fashion statement to wear socks with sandals on a sweltering day. Acting as if being repellent somehow makes them a cause celebre, they featured a dumpy, hirsute woman in shorts and a lattice-laced top whose mustache makes Tom Selleck's look like a thin wisp of lip fuzz. One of them is an ever-present barnacle at anti-Israel protests, an ugly stump of a female who is a picture of what you'd expect would come out of a garbage compressor if you put a hippopotamus wearing a bicycle helmet into one. And as usual, they brandished a couple of pathetic, exploited souls who bear the physical symptoms of people born with Trisomy 21.
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| via facebook |
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| via facebook |
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| via facebook |
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| via facebook The Monty Pythonesque Munchausen Jews of "The United Jewish People's Order" showed up too! All 3 of them! |
Friday, May 27, 2016
State Department’s Office of Inspector General report shreds Clinton’s secret server defence
The State Department’s Office of Inspector General has released its report about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Though the report uncovers no smoking guns — no records of Clinton saying “Heh, heh, heh, they’ll never FOIA my emails NOW!!!!” — what it does lay out is deeply troubling, even though her supporters have already begun the proclamations of “nothing to see here, move along.”
It lays to rest the longtime Clinton defense that this use of a private server was somehow normal and allowed by government rules: It was not normal, and was not allowed by the government rules in place at the time. “The Department’s current policy, implemented in 2005, is that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System (AIS), which “has the proper level of security control to … ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.”
It also shreds the defense that “Well, Colin Powell did it too” into very fine dust, and then neatly disposes of the dust. As the report makes very clear, there are substantial differences between what the two secretaries of State did...
Thursday, May 26, 2016
When TVO says "I'm Right and You're an Idiot," they really mean, "I'm Left and You're an Idiot"
An interesting discussion recently took place between TVO's Steve Paikin and PR consultant James Hoggan, the author of "I'm Right and You're an Idiot," about the toxic state of public discourse. (Video at end of article.)
The problem with the interview on Ontario's public educational broadcaster is that essentially, these two people are engaging in the practice they're condemning.
They make assertions without actual evidence and presume that anyone who doesn't agree with their highly disputed positions must be wrong, duped, or a victim of propaganda.
So their conversation, if in any way enlightening, is mainly so as a window into the minds of people who generate leftist propaganda.
If what they say were true, then oil produced in Canada is not more ethically sourced than oil from Saudi Arabia or Iran. It means that all of David Suzuki's climate change allegations must be accurate even though his "climate experts" can't explain what percentage of it is caused by human activity or why all of their prediction models have proved to be wrong.
It also means that it's not nice to call genital mutilation a "barbaric cultural practice," although I suspect these two white, liberal Canadian men might have an entirely different opinion if they were women whose clitorises had been forcibly sliced off.
These are important subjects where there can be intelligent divergences of opinion. But the way Paikin and Hobban frame it, if you disagree with them, you're wrong and are impervious to facts. Which is ironic, since everything they assert as fact is only opinion.
The media is a huge part of the toxic state of affairs in public discourse. They promote the dishonesty of morons in the way the Toronto Star uncritically gives publicity to false allegations by the emotionally disturbed, Munchausen Jews of "Independent Jewish Voices," a group founded by 9-11 conspiracy weirdo, Diana Ralph.
It works in the way Canada's publicly-funded CBC gives airtime to radical leftist flakes like Scaachi Koul, presenting them as "mainstream."
And it's present on TVO, when Paikin does an interview with Avi Lewis, which he allows to become a 20 minute commercial for Naomi Klein's husband's airheaded, neo-Marxist Leap Manifesto. Paikin didn't ask his friend Lewis a single critical question about that document's extremist, historically-unsuccessful proposals, though every serious economist who has read it considers it preposterous.
Paikin and Hobban are right that people are becoming more tribal and impervious to facts. In order to correct that, people have to take it upon themselves to discover the facts from as many sources as possible. It also means that you can't believe something, just because someone says it in the news or on TV. Even if the news is on TVO.
The problem with the interview on Ontario's public educational broadcaster is that essentially, these two people are engaging in the practice they're condemning.
They make assertions without actual evidence and presume that anyone who doesn't agree with their highly disputed positions must be wrong, duped, or a victim of propaganda.
So their conversation, if in any way enlightening, is mainly so as a window into the minds of people who generate leftist propaganda.
If what they say were true, then oil produced in Canada is not more ethically sourced than oil from Saudi Arabia or Iran. It means that all of David Suzuki's climate change allegations must be accurate even though his "climate experts" can't explain what percentage of it is caused by human activity or why all of their prediction models have proved to be wrong.
It also means that it's not nice to call genital mutilation a "barbaric cultural practice," although I suspect these two white, liberal Canadian men might have an entirely different opinion if they were women whose clitorises had been forcibly sliced off.
These are important subjects where there can be intelligent divergences of opinion. But the way Paikin and Hobban frame it, if you disagree with them, you're wrong and are impervious to facts. Which is ironic, since everything they assert as fact is only opinion.
The media is a huge part of the toxic state of affairs in public discourse. They promote the dishonesty of morons in the way the Toronto Star uncritically gives publicity to false allegations by the emotionally disturbed, Munchausen Jews of "Independent Jewish Voices," a group founded by 9-11 conspiracy weirdo, Diana Ralph.
It works in the way Canada's publicly-funded CBC gives airtime to radical leftist flakes like Scaachi Koul, presenting them as "mainstream."
And it's present on TVO, when Paikin does an interview with Avi Lewis, which he allows to become a 20 minute commercial for Naomi Klein's husband's airheaded, neo-Marxist Leap Manifesto. Paikin didn't ask his friend Lewis a single critical question about that document's extremist, historically-unsuccessful proposals, though every serious economist who has read it considers it preposterous.
Paikin and Hobban are right that people are becoming more tribal and impervious to facts. In order to correct that, people have to take it upon themselves to discover the facts from as many sources as possible. It also means that you can't believe something, just because someone says it in the news or on TV. Even if the news is on TVO.
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