SpankyMcFarland

Has China killed anybody here yet that we know of? I’m not saying the CCP aren’t fully capable of it but this act is even more serious than harassing Chinese Canadians. It’s a big step further and anybody who thinks it doesn’t affect them has a highly limited imagination.

I wasn’t aware AQ had any interest in holding such referendums in India. Political speech of any sort is rather risky over there at the moment if you’re not an upper-caste BJP-supporting Hindu.

Our sovereignty has been grossly violated by a government known for its atrocities at home. That should be enough to unite people. But no.

Modi or his cronies ordered a hit in Canada. That should be the headline here. They’re the bad guys, not us. And I trust CSIS who may not be able to release all the evidence. Assassinations of this type are often never fully investigated to a point where perps land in behind bars. We’ve seen the Israelis, Brits etc. carry out similar ops that remain deniable to some extent. Which doesn’t stop, say, the Israelis bragging about them at the same time.

Or Modi refused to cooperate at their meeting. The briefings given to the Indian media sound like he got his retaliation in first. Given what JT had to tell the Indian PM, it’s not hard to see why things went badly there.

No. What I mean is that the best way to end speculation is to provide all information available. We’ve long moved beyond blaming people for their parentage.

Indeed. The RCMP et al just watched it being planned. In fairness, it was a long time ago and we did spend a fortune trying, and failing, to bring the ringleaders to justice.

You’d hope so. There’s no sign from other politicians that the evidence is weak. The victim had been warned there was a credible threat to his life so evidence has been accumulating for some time. Conspiracies of this type are notoriously difficult to investigate and prosecute in rule of law countries.

I hope it’s primarily about keeping us safe from further attacks.

Some of it may never see the light of day, given that the revelations might reveal people or methods involved. Obviously, India will do its damnedest to dispute the allegations while quietly crowing about them in the style of such governments.

I fear we are going to see a lot more of this from both those countries.

The normal way? A foreign government is alleged to have assassinated a person on Canadian soil. It’s no joke. A little bit of stern talking won’t be enough, I’m afraid, unless you’re happy with a whole lot more disappearances. To save a trade deal, how many Canadians would you be willing to see killed here? How many dots, as Harry Lime put it. And as regards allies, let’s not hope for too much there either. Both Britain and the US are courting Modi - you think Rishi Sunak is going to get tough? Which doesn’t make our little friend in India any less of a thug. We saw how much support we got when we had our spat with MBS. This isn’t about Trudeau. Obviously.

Does his younger brother have the same father? Is his mother still alive? I saw the picture of him meeting his maternal grandfather before he died. It’s of no great concern either way but one is naturally curious about the man who will probably be the next PM.

The paternity of Canadian leaders is something which came to a head with JT, leading to an extremely protracted and tedious discussion. Thus I hesitate to ask the following question: is Poilievre’s biological father known or not? It’s a very minor matter that, obviously, doesn’t reflect on him either way. However, I don’t see why he didn’t clear it up a long time ago one way or the other.

And who better than BeaverFever to discuss this tricky topic? She’s a good-looking woman - if things don’t work out I might be willing to overlook her outlandish beliefs. As the many Democratic ‘friends’ of Marjorie Taylor Greene observed, politics didn’t come up too much in their meetings. There’s still hope for America.

A problem that is now more obvious than it ever was - every country has a MAGA faction, less educated, more traditional, that is sympathetic to authoritarian rule. Turkey is by many measures more advanced than Iran and yet its impressively incompetent and corrupt president keeps on winning elections because he pushes an Islamist agenda popular with both men and women in rural Anatolia. I don’t know how big that constituency is in Iran but it must be a fair size, perhaps a majority?

Fortunately for them, most of the blood wasn’t theirs. Russian casualties dwarfed American and British ones.

It’s an unusually open competition this year. Three southern hemisphere teams have won all World Cups but one since its inception in 1987: NZ, SA and Australia, the other team being England in 2003. NZ and SA would be considered the two strongest teams for most of the years since 1900 if rankings had existed and Apartheid hadn’t intervened. Oz have had organizational problems and also strong competition for elite players, eyeballs and money from rugby league, Australian rules football and soccer (and cricket to a lesser extent). France have been in finals but have not won yet. The betting on them this time is largely because they are at home. Ireland are a special case. They have a small number of elite rugby players who mostly play for one team. This means they do well between world cups when rankings are being decided but have yet to get past the quarter finals in the WC since 1987 when all teams have their best players together. The draw this year actually favours England and Australia who are on one side. NZ are weaker than usual and England have been poor. If one combines rankings, recent performance and WC record, I think SA have a reasonable chance of retaining the cup this time.

Yes, but not as bad a despot as the European tyrants of the time and the British in Ireland. That’s what progress means - something not quite as bad. I don’t expect to get a fair hearing for this man in a country filled with place names like Wellington, Waterloo etc. that has been force-fed a particularly Anglocentric view of European events but he did actually represent progress in Europe, a chance for common men, and even religious minorities like Jews, to enjoy full citizenship and rise according to their merits. Unlike those emperors who feared him he was a competent tyrant who valued talent rather than ‘good breeding’ and made many improvements to France which persist to this day. I believe Russia would have been a better place for most of its people if he had been its ruler rather than the awful Tsar. For his time and place he was relatively enlightened. And like Napoleon I am way off course here. Glory to Ukraine.

One person we certainly shouldn’t trust in this issue is Elon Musk. His extensive business interests in China already compromise him and on top of that he has repeatedly made pro-Beijing comments about Taiwan as well as favouring Russia in Ukraine. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/14/taiwan-elon-musk-china-comments-response-all-in-summit-los-angeles At the very least some sort of investigation is merited. He is dangerous.

Fiji were hard done by there. The Welsh were allowed to slow play down without being penalized sufficiently for it. Like Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Argentina don’t play together enough and that showed in their match against England when they kept on missing passes. Hopefully they’ll improve as the competition progresses. One unexpected controversy has been the anthems. They’ve been sung by recorded choirs and have been very unpopular. That seems about to change. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/13/rugby-world-cup-officials-in-u-turn-as-disturbing-anthems-to-be-re-recorded Another has been getting to the matches. The French are doing a poor job there so far. The three favourites are France, NZ and RSA. France beat NZ the other day. It’s considered a fairly open competition this time with no team looking way better than the others. https://metro.co.uk/2023/09/07/rugby-world-cup-2023-odds-favourites-win-19463585/

I think social media plays some role too. We admire extreme opinions more than we used to.

I agree we should keep some of the greenbelt but there is a problem there from a market point of view. Essentially, the government will create winners and losers among landowners by allowing only some of the belt to be developed, the antithesis of a fair market. What about the other landowners? That process will be even more controversial if the perception is that such decisions were made other than for the reasons stated. I suspect there are many city dwellers who see value in forests, other natural habitats and farms far closer to the belt than those tree huggers.

Dear me. It is A topic. Even Terence Corcoran did not make it THE topic. You need to find someone who disagrees with you a little more vehemently than I do. As I said, I’m agnostic on this issue. Again, would you like to see the entire greenbelt removed? Tower blocks all over the escarpment?

Such attitudes apply across the political spectrum. I’ve seen multiple examples of people of who have changed party in the US and then feel obliged to make their change in policy positions more extreme in order to join their new tribe and denounce their old faith. One factor here is America’s weird two party system that forces disparate positions into only two boxes.