Hugo

Apparently not, since you did not refute anything I said. Yes, the US gets rich through trade. So do US trading partners, like Western Europe, Japan and more recently, China, whose average income has almost quadrupled since they opened their doors to US trade. After WWII, please tell me how the EU supposedly traded with itself so prosperously when the entire continent was in ruin? Who would Japan have traded with - China, which was mostly rubble and in the midst of civil war? US trade and investment built Western Europe and Japan back to the point where they could trade amongst themselves again. Most US business is internal. Foreign trade forms a fraction of the US economy. The US would be poorer, but not poor as compared to Latin America, for instance. This does not make sense. You base your entire argument on the supposition that the US will have a greater population, when there is no historical evidence that population makes power. If it does, why are China and India not the dominant world powers now? Why is Russia, with the largest population in Europe, an economic and military backwater compared to the far smaller states of France, Germany and the UK? Why is Japan an economic and military giant next to China?

So let me get this straight. This was the sequence of events: 1) You bring up the Charter 2) You accuse me of bringing up the Charter 3) You say that my alleged referral to the Charter is an example of irrelevancy and flailing 4) You tell us that the Charter is intrinsical to the argument and is not irrelevant at all You're not right in the head. KrustyKidd would be one example. I can specifically recall him admonishing you for citing opinion columns as "evidence" for your anti-Bush stance. There's probably others. Do you have a response to anything else that I said? I gave you a whole argument on wage disparity for women and blacks, and your counter seemed to be: That's not an argument, it's an opinion without justification. That makes it a prejudice, or a bigotry, if you will.

Some evidently feel that Iraqi restoration of power is not proceeding fast enough. We are now just over a year after occupation, but apparently Iraqis are not being allowed self-government quickly enough, and the Iraqi military continues to be under the control of the US. But let's look at two historical parallels, post-war Germany and Japan. In Iraq, there is an Iraqi military but it remains under US control. The Bundeswehr (West German Army) was not created until 1955, a decade after occupation. The Iraqi government still has not been decided, but the plans for a West German state were not laid out until July 1948, and the first elections were not held until over a year later. In Japan, the country was occupied until 1952. A new constitution was not drawn up until 1947, two years after the end of the war. A Japanese army was not created until 1954. It would be foolish to regard either Germany or Japan as puppet states of the US, now or at any point in the last half-century or so. Both were in tight alliances with the USA, however, so were nations that US forces did not occupy and administer such as France, Italy or the UK. Bearing this in mind, I feel it is foolish to demand that this process of the rebirth of nationhood be rushed, when good results in the past have taken a long time. Just because Iraqi elections are not being held as we speak does not bode any ill for the future.

That's not what I said, BlackDog. I'm fully aware that discrimination goes on. I think that the cure is to downplay differences, treat everybody as equal before the law, grant equal opportunity as far as possible and wait for it to permeate the culture. Trying to micro-manage social ethics with counterlegislation and attempting to force values upon people who don't believe in them will do more harm than good. Yes, just not by you. Regardless, let's discuss that, and I'll address this to Willy and August too. Women do earn less. The biggest factor here is children. Women bear children, that's a biological fact, and it's also a biological fact that because of breastfeeding and maternal instincts women are better at raising them too. Women take time off for maternity leave, whereas most men won't take their paternity leave and let their wives take it instead. This will push down the average income for a woman despite that, per hour of paid work, a woman is equal. Then, after having children, many women won't go back to work full-time. Once again, not only do women get less hours in which to earn a comparable amount, it also tends to be that part-time work is overwhelmingly in low-paying service jobs. Not that any female lawyers are going to work in grocery stores, but a girl who might have become a grocery store manager might be stuck as a cashier because she's part-time, and management is a full-time responsibility. This is their choice. They have equality of opportunity, and to try to redress this problem is basically saying that motherhood is worthless, money is all-important and if a woman isn't earning, she isn't of value to society. I don't believe any of those things. Looking closely at blacks, too, is very revealing. Just being black is only half of the issue. Ancestry and social factors are crucially important. For instance, American blacks descended from slaves earn less than white people the same age. On the other hand, American blacks descended from freemen earn more than whites the same age. Married blacks, especially those whose children were born in wedlock, also earn more than whites in the same situation. This tells me that colour is not the issue when we find that blacks, on average, earn less. Trying to tackle this issue on the basis of colour is wrongheaded and cannot work. Why are you asking for the same information twice? I know for a fact you looked at the thread I referred you to where I specifically quoted the exact section of the Charter that causes these problems and went into great detail about why it does. You brought up the Charter in the first place! All of these changes in argument were initiated by you! You never cite evidence, BlackDog. Your idea of evidence is opinion columns and editorials, as others have pointed out to you in the past. You either promise facts, or claim that you have delivered facts, but you never actually get around to delivering facts.

You can say that again. Alright, if you aren't going to answer my first question, answer this question: How does more social and institutional discrimination fix the problems of social and institutional discrimination? Where? Show me one, single example. Again, where? Which educational institutions give preferential treatment to white males? Again I want one, concrete example, not more ranting and sweeping statements, please. The working week is shorter for white men? Show me the piece of legislation that makes this the case. Alternatively, show me one employer that requires minorities to work more overtime than white men. Until then, stop pontificating.

You tell me. You started a thread by saying, "this is strictly about the rich and powerful trying to control election outcomes" as though it were a bad thing. Here I have given you an example of a rich and powerful group (gay-rights groups are extremely well-funded and, outside of trade unions, probably the most influential groups in Canada) that has deliberately and blatantly set out to control election outcomes, and you say, so what? Are you recanting your initial contention?

It's supported by the wording of the Charter. It prescribes more discrimination as a cure for discrimination and does not guarantee a citizen's right to enjoy or retain the fruits of his own labour. It's worthless. Whatever you say. The only thread you've started in the last month (apart from your shop-worn Bush-bashing) is about gay rights. You don't start threads on other minorities, you don't participate in threads on other minorities, in short, you don't care a tinker's cuss about any minority that's getting the short end of the stick and can't afford the PR campaign. What gets your attention are the well-funded gay rights groups, and what you say is the same tired old rhetoric that can be heard on pretty much every TV and radio station and read in every magazine in the country. So, I suppose the answer to my question is that there were no heterosexual pride parades and no tax dollars available for them should they exist. You are really clutching at straws. Calgary Stampede, indeed. This thread is starting to look familiar. Please name one incident where emphasising differences instead of downplaying them actually did any social good. Oh, and one last thing: How do you disguise something as a disguise? Is this a compliment, BlackDog? After all, if my arguments are disguised as pseudo-intellectual, perhaps they are really intellectual, hm?

One should fight an unjust law. The Charter promotes discrimination and does not guarantee important rights. There's another thread here where that was done in great detail. I'm not going over it all again, go read it and post in it if you think you can add anything. I notice you had precious little to say in that one, though. No, you won't. Once again, a thread on this topic can be found here, and once again, you had nothing to say. Are you through humiliating yourself yet? Ah, you're not. Please provide some links to the parades that are held in celebration of heterosexuality, and some figures for the amount of tax money that is given to providing these.

See here.

You mean like the gay-rights lobby groups? They've launched a very blatant attempt to influence the outcome of the next election, far more so than any rich man or corporation.

My idea was to get a confederation of a few thousand or better, a few hundred thousand people and all commit fraud on our tax returns, claiming that we earnt $0. They can't throw a few hundred thousand people in jail and it would cost more than it was worth to press charges against all anyway, especially if there were a few good lawyers involved - and I'm sure there would be, good lawyers earn a lot and are probably sick of seeing the government take half of it. I would do this on the basis that the government has failed in its missions, that the Canadian military and security forces are physically incapable of guaranteeing my safety from foreign foes in any way, that the healthcare and welfare systems are so badly run that I will not fund them any more without a management change (shareholders in a company can vote executives out of office) and so forth. More seriously, I would like to see a law that required any tax increase beyond inflation or any new tax or service fee be approved by Parliament before being enacted.

So was the Stamp Act. Enough said. Not at all. I'm arguing for the freedoms of everyone, including people I most definitely do not agree with, such as Ernst Zundel. Once again, I refer you to the classic line of Voltaire that August1991 has in his signature and that CanadaRocks just cited. You can say whatever you like, in my book, whether it's Christian fundamentalist gay-bashing, lesbians screaming that men are scum, or neo-Nazis, or the Black Panthers, or anyone with something to say. Really? Where were you during the suffragette movement and the civil rights movement? Regardless, it's true that you're basically batting for whomever shouts loudest. I notice you don't care one iota for the minorities who get a really bum deal and don't get the press attention, like the aboriginals. But not his own business? That doesn't make any sense. He owns his business as surely as his home, and his patrons are there by his leave as surely as a guest in his home. "Public house" is a misnomer, a bar is actually a private establishment and legally, all patrons are there by invitation only and can be asked to leave at any time for any or no reason. That's why it is legal for some so-called "public houses" to charge door fees.

Yes, but in certain situations they just have to swallow it, but in others, they don't. That's wrong. To my mind, a business should be free to refuse whomsoever they want and bear the consequences. For example, say I'm a Big Nazi™ and I own a grocery store. An orthodox Jew enters and I tell him to leave because I don't serve Jews. That should be my right, it's my business and I reserve the right to do whatever I want with my property and my organisation unless it cause direct harm to somebody else. Let's say the offended Jew then goes and tells all his friends, organises a protest and a mass boycott of my store, gets all the papers, TV and radio stations to run stories about what a Big Nazi™ I am, and I go out of business as a direct result of these actions. That was his right, and I cannot complain about what has happened because I brought it upon myself. Neither the government or legislature was called upon to limit either of our rights. My right to run my own business the way I see fit was preserved. The Jewish would-be customer's right to free speech and peaceful protest was preserved. It's foolish to believe you can legislate people's feelings. This isn't freedom of speech, it's muzzling, and it's immoral. You are still managing to miss the point, and stooping to vulgarity again to boot. What I am saying is that you, and all those who think your way, are not particularly in favour of ending discrimination and in building an egalitarian society but in shouting for whomever happens to be the fad minority group of the day. You decry politicians for pandering to groups that sponsor them, but you are pandering to groups that catch your attention. There's not much difference, you're just selling out for different reasons. Who cares? It's the most ridiculous document of it's kind. I'd give you more credit if you cited Winnie the Pooh.

You've completely missed the point, as usual. All of those things only involve the body of the perpetrator, but they have the potential to offend others. If you don't approve of these things, but you do believe that nobody has a right to be offended by a same-sex couple kissing, that basically means that you feel that people only have a right to be offended by certain things, to be arbitrarily decided. If you are going to insist that everybody accept homosexuals kissing in public and override their own revulsion, why aren't you going to insist that we also accomodate onanists and those who would defecate in public? Furthermore, does the barman not own the premises and all the property contained therein? Does he not have the right to ask anyone he wants to leave for any or no reason?

What would your reaction be if the barman had thrown out one of these women for disrobing and masturbating, urinating into a jar or somesuch act?

I'll tell you why. First of all, who sets the questions, and how do you guarantee they are unbiased? Second, all the losing parties will immediately claim that the questions were rigged and that they lost unfairly, they'll demand a new election and so on - it'll be like the US 2000 election every time. I know that this idea has the best of intentions, and it has occurred to me too, but democracy is the rule of the citizen, not of the smart citizen, or the well-educated citizen. Once you change that, you are moving away from democracy and setting the very dangerous precedent that some people can be denied the right to vote. That's worth saying again: you would be setting a precedent for a portion of the citizenry to be denied the right to vote. Anybody failing this test would not be self-governed, just as surely as if they lived in Castro's Cuba. The best assault on this problem, as I see it, is to make politics and economics compulsory subjects in high school, and ensure that each citizen at least knows the basics of these subjects. So much of the political and economic ignorance I hear spouted - even from supposedly well-informed people - is really 101 stuff.

I don't think you speak from a great knowledge of children or psychology. Children are born completely selfish and only learn tact, grace and selflessness with time, sometimes never. Freud held that the infant began with the id, the competely selfish and self-serving inner self, which is why children up to the age of 2 or so are completely self-centered, and care not a whit for the desires of others. The over-riding and more developed ego and superego develop later, not automatically, but as a result of human interaction and learning. Even up until quite an advanced age, children remain selfish at least in large part. When you hear an elementary-school-age child say, "It's not fair", what they mean is "I didn't get my own way." They never complain that it's unfair if they get the larger portion of ice-cream or the new toy, they only complain if they believe that somebody else has. If you took most children under the age of 10 or so and told them to go into another kid's house and take his toys, they would go ahead and do it without a second thought. After that age, doubts begin to set in, but nevertheless, if an authority figure tells the child it is alright to do that, they will usually go ahead anyway. Questioning authority in the name of superior morality or justice doesn't really appear until teenage years. The idea that children are born loving and sharing, without any racial or gender prejudices, is absurd. Anyone believing such a thing has not been to many playgrounds and observed how mercilessly cruel children are to each other, because of skin color, clothing, intelligence, athletic ability, gender, appearance, even name. Even in schools where parents and teachers strive to avoid any hint of discrimination, children still bully and tease for any reason they can find. Most children will join in with this even if they are not the instigator. I find it very hard to believe that children have a "refined sense of fairness or values" when they delight in reducing each other to tears or in seeing others so reduced. If you want to appeal to common wisdom, think of the connotations of the words childish, immature, puerile, and infantile. Do they conjure up images of selflessness, fair play and morals? None of those words are morally loaded. They all simply describe a child-like state. I do hold a qualification in psychology, specialised in child development, and I am a father of three.

What difference would it have made if they were having sex? After all, it still only involves their bodies and nobody else's. Sure, it might have offended some people, but so did the kissing, apparently, and you don't think that people have any right to be offended by what others do with their own bodies - so why are you so intolerant, maplesyrup, you great bigot?

Sorry, but that's incorrect. Trudeau wanted to include property rights and his first drafts do include them, but in order to get the Charter approved by Parliament he had to have the NDP vote, and they refused to ratify any such document that guaranteed property rights.

Instead of which, Jean Chretien was permitted to decide a Canadian policy based upon continued tolerance of Iraqi human rights abuses in exchange for the continuance of the lucrative oil deals that Chretien's family held with Saddam. It's all very well to want a foreign policy independent of the US, but when that means you are siding with international murderers and criminals of the most egregious kind such as Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, and giving harbour and comfort to the friends of Osama bin Laden, is that what you would like Canada to stand for internationally? Does Canada have any pride left now? Liberal foreign policy has made it clear that Canada values profit over human life, is willing to tolerate any injustice as long as they are personally making money from it, and is happy to help out the scum of the earth against the big, bad USA with her silly notions of human rights, justice and democracy.

That sounds like a much better idea to me. It makes a genuine attempt to bind politicians to their election promises, but doesn't force the electorate to become steeped in politics when they have no real wish to be.

Nice attitude. Probably because we elect them, and the people who do the electing don't agree with each other either. People vote for politicians who share their views, so politicians are as diverse as people.

We only judge crime by the victim where the victim is judged to be more helpless. For example, rape against a man or a woman is punished pretty much equally, but rape against a child is punished more severely because it is given that the child is a more vulnerable member of society who needs greater protection from the law. Does it promote racial, gender or sexual equality to legislate in the belief that gays, or blacks, or women are weaker and need special protection and privilege under the law? Children are not viewed as equal before the law, but then, there are no children's rights groups campaigning for children to be given equal rights and responsibilities with adults (except NAMBLA - but I think we all stand on the same side of the line regarding them). If homosexuals, blacks or women want to be equal with heterosexuals, whites, or men, should they not accept equality before the law too? As long as they are not, they aren't equal, are they? The only justice as I see it is equality before the law. Crime should be judged by the criminal act and the criminal, not by the victim. But none of these touch upon the prejudices and beliefs of the criminal. Serial rape is often a sign of hatred of women, so are some rapes hate crimes, and others not? If a rapist only raped black women, would that make him a hate criminal, and should he be subjected to a harsher penalty than a rapist who only raped white women, or who raped an ethnically diverse group of women?

What if they never adjust? What if the man-on-the-street isn't as politically inclined or well-informed as your average politician, although you say he is? It's pretty much impossible to act with discretion and intelligence when you don't know anything about what you are opining on. I'm a fairly intelligent guy, but any opinion I offer on quantum mechanics is utterly useless and stupid because I don't know the first thing about it. Similarly, your ideas merely give more power to the average citizen without addressing the need for the intelligence and discretion required to exercise it properly. As I said before, teaching of politics and economics in schools would do far more. I think we all know that Canadians, as a people, understand very little of the issues they are voting on. People on this website are a little different, they are what's colloquially termed "political junkies" and know a thing or two. The man on the street, though, is terribly ignorant on modern politics and economics, and those subjects are mostly counter-intuitive and defeat so-called common sense. Your answer to that problem is not to give them more knowledge, just to give them more power. That's akin to putting firearms in the hands of children and likely to be about as destructive to our political system. I'm not being insulting to the average man. Most people have at least one field in which they are well-informed and knowledgeable, but usually that field isn't politics. It's just a human failing. People are not computers who can be stuffed with virtually limitless amounts of information and remain capable of recalling and applying it perfectly.

It shouldn't matter. The differences you have cited - manslaughter vs. first degree, residential vs. commercial burglary - are not different in motive, they are different in the enactment of the crime itself. The motive for a crime is largely irrelevant beyond the very existence of a motive. It doesn't matter what the arsonist burns down except in terms of damage done. In a court of law, you are supposed to judge the crime, not the criminal, and if you make motivation a factor you are judging the criminal not by what he did but by what he thinks. To my mind, a free and democratic society ceases to be free and democratic when it places a limitation on freedom of speech beyond forbidding incitement to violence and breach of the peace. The Charter is an egregious and bigoted piece of law that deserves to be struck down, in my opinion; yet another one of these feel-good pieces of legislation that ensure bigotry and hatred will still be with us in generations to come by laying emphasis on what should be becoming transparent.