YankAbroad

Nope, private networks favour whatever views are popular amongst profitable demographics (or demographics willing to provide direct support in the form of donations). Every viewpoint under the sun is targeted in private networks -- which offer a far more diverse range of views than public networks in Canada, the USA, or the UK.

And I'm sure that if we were to do something, opponents of same-sex marriage would immediately get behind it and ensure that gays then received full equality under the law. Oh yeah. I'm sure! Actually, this "definition" of marriage is a radical transformation of "traditional" marriage. Tradition had marriage being viewed as the transfer of female property from a father to a husband. The woman had little or no say in who she married, and once she was "sold" or "transferred," she became the property of her husband. That's the reality of the "tradition" which is bandied about so often. An opposite-sex marriage which is voluntary for both parties and in which both spouses are equal is far more radical a transformation of "traditional marriage" than making the existing modern definition embrace same-sex couples as well. That's why the whole "this is tradition" argument is so disingenuous in the first place.

I don't view all government spending as unnecessary. . . certainly spending on courts and appeals. My view is that the soldiers in question were conned. The sad thing is, they'll get in trouble and go to prison if they return to the USA -- but George W. Bush won't -- even though he's the one who committed high crimes and misdemeanours.

I'm simply popping your statist bubble which is, at its core, no different from people who blames Jews, gays or blacks for the world's problems. If the USA was bent on global empire, Canada wouldn't exist, neither would Castro, and it wouldn't be spending hundreds of billions on the ground in Iraq. It also never would have allowed de Gaulle to snub NATO, etc., etc., etc. I'm not defending US policies in that time, but pointing out the ridiculousness of the "America is an interventionist empire" religion.

Well democracy isn't, de facto, a good thing in and of itself. Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected, after all. You know, if we Yanks were half as bellicose and evil as you paint us, do you think Señor Fidel would be in power? Nah, the Marines would have gone in 10 minutes after the Soviet Union dissolved. If we were evil, selfish and hell-bent on invasions to protect oil supplies, why would we bother going into Iraq, which is far away? We'd just head north and take what we wanted in Alberta for ourselves -- a couple hundred years's of oil supplies right in our backyard. When I ask these questions to "Americans are imperialists" sorts, they always respond with "but there'd be world outrage!" You think there isn't world outrage now? If we were a quarter as evil as you claim, the Canadian government wouldn't be able to vehemently criticize the US government from a capital located 50 miles from the border. Simple old fact.

Oh that's a toughie. In the last election, if I could have voted, I'd have voted for the Liberal Democrats. They're the only party consistently protecting civil liberties from Labour's big scary statist schemes like a mandatory citizen DNA database and mandatory ID cards. However, I am impressed with David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative party, and have had several colleagues who are NOT "traditional Tories" get contacted by his deputy and invited to join the party and influence its policies. If he can get together with the LDs and agree on civil liberties, while advancing a free market economic policy and reorganisation of the clogged British government which reduces spending and improves efficiency, he could possibly form quite a compelling government. He is loathed across ideologies. I share their loathing. So does my conservative Tory bunch of friends. So do my ultra-left Green Party bunch of friends. The man is just an odious twat. Actually, I greatly enjoyed listening to a right-wing talk show rip Ms. Coulter to shreds. Apparently, the listeners -- most of whom are gun enthusiasts and privacy advocates of the rural New Hampshire/Montana type -- were enraged over the Patriot Act. Ms. Coulter, expecting a friendly audience which would ignore her inanities, began defending the PATRIOT Act. Bad idea. The bony little battleax got ripped to shreds by conservative callers. My favourite line: Caller: "Why don't you think the PATRIOT Act is all that bad." Coulter: "It's just liberals lying about it like they lie about everything. The PATRIOT Act doesn't give the government any powers they didn't have before." Caller: "Have you read the PATRIOT Act?" Coulter: "No, but--" Caller: "Well if you haven't read the thing, what are you doing talking about it?!? I've read it and it's dangerous. People like you are selling us out to the government!" Coulter: "Oh, this must be a liberal or something."

I'm libertarian and find his show to be useless dreck, like MOST "conservative" talk shows these days. Boring, intellectually vacant mental wanking is what most talk radio is today. "We're right, the opponent is the antichrist who wants to eat your babies." Savage just adds profanity into it and says what he thinks a bit more bluntly. He doesn't beat around the bush (pardon the pun) -- he's the Fred Phelps to Rush Limbaugh's Jerry Falwell. Oh, and lest you mention Air America, they're all a bunch of idiots as well. I don't get very impressed with Demopublican arguments which declare that they're great because the other guys are idiots too.

Well, if they do, it will just hasten their long-time collapse from power (and possible liquidation as a political party). Well, for him to get on air and turn purple over homosexual perverts, while he was friends with Alan Ginsberg, used to go skinnydipping with him, and wrote fondly in his diary of the "exquisite hand tricks" Ginsberg did to him, is a bit over the top. He's just another guy who tells big lies in order to promote big-government socialism under a "conservative" wrapper. The guy screamed for massive penalties against drug users, but abused drugs himself. He demanded that marriage be "protected," but has been divorced four times. He's just another useful idiot in the idiocracy.

Suddenly he's got power, and he's not very savvy with using it. He's managed to tick off a number of people who voted for his party in the hope they'd get a housecleaning with the ministerial situation the last few days. And, of course, the NDP are going to take a truncheon to most of his planned reforms.

It is a very arrogant point of view, isn't it? It essentially boils down to "people are different from me, thus there's something profoundly wrong with them." I like haggis. If you don't like haggis, there's something seriously wrong with you, and if it's genetic, BOY is there something wrong with the gene pool!

Canada also has Irshad Manji, a rather powerful voice against Islamic extremism. She's now Canada's best selling author, internationally.

I'm one of those people. Then again, I hate a criminal in high office, shudder at the idea of the illiterate criminal president on television, and become offended at the fact that he hasn't been impeached for lying to Congress and committing a blatant violation of constitutional law twice -- the Iraq war and his illegal wiretappings. Then again, this whole situation has nothing to do with Bush. He's just a useful idiot in the broader scheme of things, just like Bill Clinton, who was busy spending days begging for forgiveness on behalf of the west for "these horrible, hateful cartoons." That's likely accurate as well. Most fundamentalists are enraged by the idea that there are people who disagree with them.

The war was undeniably illegal -- both under the laws of the USA and "international law" (which I give less respect to). Further, the use of National Guard and reserve troops in the war is also illegal -- anyone in the national guard who signed up under the pretense of homeland defence has a very strong case against the government.

You guys cannot even be sure of the vote totals, remember? Besides, in "Gore vs Bush" you guys argued that the popular vote doesn't matter -- it's the electors that matter. Hey, if you're all for a face-to-face between our two parties, let our guy in your debate, and make it a real debate -- not one of the orchestrated fake-o ones you're so fond of having where all questions are vetted days in advance. Then we'll see how many votes we get, versus you. But I bet you're not willing to let that happen -- nor lift the ballot restrictions you've placed on us either. George Bush would piss himself silly if he had to face down a Libertarian who would poke holes in all his arguments, from Iraq to his constant hidden tax increases and biggest expansion of government in world history. No matter. We're still right, you're still wrong. The fact you couldn't criticize any of the truth I told about your big government socialist party is all the proof I need. And eventually, your comeuppance will come -- conservative socialism, like it's left-wing counterpart, always tumbles down eventually.

Well, while I am sympathetic to your argument, tml12, you should see the advertising and recruitment messaging used for the Army (especially the Guard/Reserves). Nothing about "fighting in Iraq." Instead you "help your community during natural disasters" and "stand as the last line of defense against drug dealers." And the recruiters from the army are notorious for their "agressive" tactics. Not that I have to worry -- I'm not "good enough" to serve in the army (just good enough to pay taxes for its largesse).

That's because they buy their own books and resell them to the bookstores. Regnery Press is particularly notorious for those. WalMart often receives truckloads of "new" books from Regnery which already have Walmart stickers on them -- because Regnery went in, bought the books, stuck them in inventory, and then resold them to Walmart. So the same book counts as being "sold" 20 or 30 times. As for Michael "Savage," he's not one to talk about immoral homosexuals. It's widely assumed that he had a homosexual relationship with his very close friend, gay beat poet Alan Ginsburg. He's rather good at playing his schtick, though, and proves that in American politics, you don't need a point of view so much as you need to tell people what they want to hear and you can be successful. "Savage" caters to the reactionary nuts who think the feminists are out to castrate them and that gays are "interested" in them.

So they claim. Of course, the vast majority of it is outside of their jursidiction anyway, and I don't value surrendering all rights to privacy and reasonable expectation of keeping Big Brother out of my Google searches in exchange for what they SAY is their reason for collecting the information. Besides, what they say and what they do are two different things in most situations anyway. Unless you believe there really are hidden WMDs in Iraq, that Saddam had the bomb, and that George W. Bush would never authorize wiretaps without a FISA court warrant. In which case, I'm afraid I'm all out of brains to lend you.

In other words, he believes that his opinion, and his opinion alone, should govern what is "right and proper." I suspect that if, say, Stockwell Day became a "censor" and began declaring much of Kinsella's expression to be outside the bounds of "reasonable and proper limits on human expression," Kinsella would be screaming bloody murder. God, I hate small-minded government activist statists who want to take our freedoms away to satisfy some political agenda of their own. They make themselves into gods who deign from on high what "is or is not acceptable," and would never subject themselves to others' assessments of their own expression, behaviour or activities. They are hypocrites of the highest order and profoundly dangerous to free and democratic societies.

As a libertarian, I have to take issue with this statist concept, on both the left and the right, that a cartoon, article, book or film can be a "provocation" which justifies violence to any degree. That's a control tactic and justification of criminal activity, plain and simple. Americans are bashed in cartoons and articles all the time. Does that give us the "right" to nuke critics? I see gays ripped apart in cartoons, articles, etc. all over the world. Do I and 5,000 other gays have the right to torch the Iranian embassy in Ottawa to show our rage? Would we have people rushing to the fore to condemn Iran for its "insensitive" words on gays and systematic execution of thousands of gay people over the last two years? Doubtful. The price of a free society is that, often, people will express opinions, ideas or concepts which make you uncomfortable. If you assert a "right not to be offended," then you also assert a right for anyone else to deem you offensive and restrict your liberties -- ergo, you automatically sentence yourself and society to existence in an unfree world.

Which is why the political classes of the moment are so against it! They want us to go to war over cartoons, or close our borders to "protect our markets," or let them eavesdrop on phone sex with our spouses/partners in able to "protect us from terrorists."

Both sides who are arguing all this cultural shit are being manipulated. The whole Cartoongate is over cartoons which were published over four months ago but "not noticed" until recently. The Iranians, using the rhetoric of their useful idiots in the West, have suddenly become "very concerned over western Islamophobia." I mean, Lord knows the Iranian government is a beacon of human rights and tolerance for oppressed people around the world. They've pulled off a masterstroke in that developing all this "rage" allows them to channel it towards the Europeans who are leading the diplomatic effort to prevent them from developing nukes. They've changed the rules of the game from "we're illegally developing nukes and lying about it" to "those European Islamophobes hate all Muslims and want to oppress us." They even took potshots at weak nations which cannot defend themselves -- countries like Denmark and Norway -- rather than strong powers such as Britain or France which are capable of doing so. Pure genius. They've manipulated the dim masses into providing them with cover to get their nukes -- rest assured that any European or American diplomatic or military efforts against Iranian nuclear weapons would be met with a much bigger version of what we're already seeing. Meanwhile, all the people in the US clamouring for a confrontation over this are doing the bidding of the Bushies, who desperately need an "international crisis" in order to divert attention from all the heat they're getting over their illegal activities back home. In short, Bush and Iran are propping each other up. To characterize this situation as a "war" or "clash of cultures" is to give it too much import. This is just a big band of thugs having their way with countries incapable of projecting power or protecting their embassies in Middle Eastern countries, and clever Iranian politicians using the victimhood rhetoric of the politically correct western upper middle classes to transform themselves from perpetrators of horrible violence into "righteous victims of Islamophobia."

Ironically, he's not mentioning the Republican Socialists's massive, crushing debt -- heavily influenced by this laughable joke of a "war" -- which will also be left to our grandchildren (and their grandchildren, at the present rate).

Actually, I am having a real laugh these days. The anti-Americanism looks particularly comic in the face of everything going on in "Cartoon-gate" at the moment. When the radicals in the Middle East showed such rage and hatred towards the Americans, we were informed that "we'd earned it by supporting Israel and all our military strength and cultural imperialism." Now, however, they're taking aim at "mighty" Denmark, which can hardly be called a sponsor of Israel, a military power or a cultural juggernaut. And all the politically correct classes in Europe are absolutely shocked -- just shocked -- that the radicals who they've been defending so long as "righteously angry" at the Americans are suddenly venting such hatred towards THEM! "But. . . but. . . but. . . we're nice! We're European! We don't like the Americans or Israelis, you're supposed to think the world of us!" I suspect they'll be "coming around" to the "isolated American way of thinking" in short order. . . along with Canada.

But this is a canard, not an active goal or even something very many gay couples want. It's like saying that Jews want to force Catholic churches to marry them under existing religious non-discrimination laws. I agree that the best way to disentangle the religious from the civil aspects is to get government out of the marriage business and open up the "benefits" of civil marriage to anybody who wants them. It is ironic that certain religious groups overreached, got their definition (and only their definition) of marriage put into law -- infringing the rights of religious groups which disagree with them -- and as society evolves, now find their own right to govern their religious ceremonies potentially under threat. Had they not involved government in enforcing their views on religions with which they disagree, they'd never have found themselves facing the wrong end of their own gun!

Not particularly, but that's mostly because social conservatives tend not to be "mass communications" sorts. My observation is that it appears to me that most social conservatives don't object to a government broadcaster per se, but rather one which doesn't support their agenda as opposed to an agenda in opposition to theirs. I'm opposed to government broadcasters of all stripes, not because I disagree (or agree) with their content, but because government shouldn't be in the broadcasting business at all. And I agree that FOX News is clearly, ridiculously biased, but unlike PBS, CBC, the BBC, etc., people who don't like FOX News have the option to not pay for it. Whereas the CBC and other "public" broadcasters force everyone to pay for their content -- whether or not it's of any perceived value.