bleeding heart

Is anyone else here getting bored with the idea that the right wing in general, and PM Harper in particular, are continual victims of some left wing media entity?

As if any Canadian can match the visceral disdain heaped upon the neighbouring country....as a certain MLW obsessive.

And the acquiescence continues apace, it seems. But it's not as if a person can reasonably say, "Well, if you want to be a quisling for Power, go right ahead." Because it also affects those who decidedly do not have the commissar-gene.

Presumably we'll get a more sympathetic answer now that weakling teenagers are not the subject.

Nice!

The idea that they "need to be beaten more" is silly. But I agree that the phenomenon of overprotective parents is possibly quite counterproductive. My impression is that a lot this has to do with hysteria over child abductions...but the truth is, outside of the most common "abductions" (ie by the non-custodial parent)....abductions are rare, and not something that parents should focus their entire children's lives around.

??? I'm talking about a coup--an overthrow of an elected leader by the triad of democracy-lovers: Canada, the United States, and France. The real question is this: why in the world do you think we have any right to do such a thing? Yes...a dictatorship of our choosing, in which political killings skyrocketed, and after which there has been no demonstrable improvement in the lives of ordinary Haitians, is much preferable. Mind you, the Haitian rich elite--our natural allies--made out quite well. All according to plan, no doubt. This obviously demands that the lives of ordinary Haitians has improved because of the specific investments we're talking about here. Do you have any evidence of this? And if not, whatever could you be talking about?

They replaced an elected leader with a dictator. Once again, the right (and, it should be noted, liberals) never seems to meet a thug dictator that it doesn't like. Par for the course.

To remark that Haiti was in terrible shape under President Aristide is to point out the obvious. But to claim that Aristide was solely responsible for the deplorable state of the country is absurd. Decades of extremely brutal dictatorial rule, supported by Western nations, took its toll. So why did Canada intervene...overthrowing an elected leader, and in fact an extremely popular one? And why did they then help install a vicious, murderous regime in Aristide's place...since Canadian officials (notably Denis Paradis, Secretary of State for Latin America, Africa and La Francophonie) claimed the awful state of Haiti's leadership as justification? Justification, let's not forget, for getting rid of a sovereign nation's popularly-elected president. (Oh, and by the way, a slight coincidence, the installed, brutal replacement regime...and the winners of future cooked, Canadian-interfered elections....are extremely friendly to Canadian banking and mining interests. But that's, as they say, "correlation, not causation." http://www.dominionpaper.ca/features/2004/08/25/canada_in_.html http://yvesengler.com/2011/04/20/secret-documents-show-canadian-interference-in-haiti/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/haiti-s-jean-bertrand-aristide-1.1014033

You're right that this poll suggests that climate skepticism is growing in Britain. But it's still a minority view, which was one of our original questions. Like I said...time will tell. I'm very rarely married to the notion of being right on a speculative issue.

I think that's a good point. I don't think it's a political conspiracy, either. It's just a kind of institutional sickness.

I'm not seeing it; but like I said, I might well be proven right or wrong in fairly short order, so I guess we'll see. OK, but then why aren't there polls--by anybody (to my knowledge, that is)--that are showing, if not opposite results, at least less dramatic ones? On every issue, from abortion to capital punishment to the popularity of leaders and/or Houses--to I think every single contentious issue of import--we can see varying polls, sometimes with quite varying results. Am I not right about that?

I think Netanyahu's remarks seem pretty out there. While the agreements remain pretty tentative and contingent for the time being, it seems to me a much-welcomed moment of a possible triumph of diplomacy. The hard-liners like Netanyahu are sounding pretty fringe-ish at the moment.

Do you mean this one?: http://www.theguardi...tions08.climate). That's a citation for the Al Gore/$300 mill. point; but Waldo was asking for citation for "The amount of money spent by lobby groups like Greenpeace in support of CO2 mitigation far out-strips the money spent by industry opposing it." A declarative statement, so it should be easy enough to demonstrate.

Are you saying the Australian vote was a single-issue matter of the carbon tax? Do you have any evidence for this? As for the rest, it might be that you're too ensconced in an echo chamber. (Maybe not, I'm just wondering). I'll take your point on polls, for the sake of argument--but I'd also wonder why--unlike every other major contentious issue you could name, probably without exception--we haven't seen any polls going demonstrably and clearly the other way. As you surely agree, it's not above some people who share your views to commission push polls...so where are they? But more to the point, do you have any evidence at all for your claim...and I'm of course only asking for arguable evidence (as that's all we've got on any stance here). The electoral politics don't mean much...when you say "from [Australia to] Germany to Japan...do you mean ONLY Australia, Germany and Japan? And even there, as I said, what were the other electoral issues? The only "single issue" wins we see with any regularity are economic issues...and that in itself is never a "single issue," making the point moot, I think.

I think affirmative action is a highly dubious idea, personally. I think I'm just less promiscuous with the "racist" label than you are.

Actually, there's some evidence--more for than against, at any rate--that the self-described sceptics are in fact losing the battle in terms of public opinion. Time will tell, of course, and I suspect it'll tell fairly soon.

I call it weak-kneed sycophancy to business interests, under the guise of "justice" which doesn't frankly even come into the equation.

Well, that's what I was wondering about, too. Evidently Harper is a part of the "piling-on Left" who has said such unfair things about Mr. Wright.

There's not a single discrete thought in your head that somebody has not tried to parlay into lucrative careers of one kind or another, up to and including the most benign or cherished of human notions.

So you too disagree with the points I was repudiating. Namely, "We no longer adapt to the environment. The environment adapts to us."

Sure. No problem, no issue, in other words, aside from the already-existing political ones.

I didn't realize you were racist, either. I make the error of assessing such things based on what people say and do, I guess.....

Even if that's true, it seems rather like ignoring every idea emanating from the realm of conservative thinkers simply because a proportion of them (a DISproportion, frankly) believe we should teach Creationism in schools, or that End Times theology is a good reason to support Israeli settlements. These two, widely held, cherished notions don't mean that Andrew Coyne or Bernard Lewis or the late Raul Hilberg--or any number of strong conservative thinkers--should be cast aside, or even viewed with suspicion thanks to associative principles.

You might be right. I think with a harsher and firmer stance on maximum sentencing, for the most heinous crimes (and especially for recidivist heinous crimes), the push for mandatory minimums would have duller teeth, for sure.