Wild Bill

A LOT of people think that way, Bob! Perhaps that should be a thread of it's own. Many people think that passing a law is the same as fixing a problem. They think that "raising the consciousness" of an issue somehow equates to actually doing something about it. They believe in platitudes like "war never solved anything". Well, not everyone. I guess the Poles, the Czechs, the Norwegians and many others during Hitler's reign knew better. Maybe from the perspective of centuries such platitudes may be true but for individuals living their lives a day at a time wars most emphatically DO solve issues! Things worked out well for Attila the Hun. These people seem to have a fundamental disconnect between their wishes and reality. This isn't a problem in newer or frontier type societies. They win Darwin awards and cancel out. However, as a society matures and tends to give up on individual action in favour of looking to the State to protect them and look after them these people begin to win control over the lives of people who don't agree with them. These people naturally end up feeling very insecure and vulnerable, since they are prone to be more practical and reality-driven. They see the flaws in things like Liberal gun registries being scant if not totally false protection and don't WANT to be forced to be so defenceless! The B Ark from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a great concept to address this failing in modern society. Part of what made the idea so funny is that those who were sent out on their own were totally blind to the idea that they were undesirables!

Maybe so, but we've drifted a long way from the opening post. I'm still waiting to hear you explain how with all this talk about natives being a sovereign country any aboriginal party leader has a hope in hell of getting enough Canadians to vote him in as PM.

Yeah! Talk about your pots calling kettles names...

You can talk about the legalities of such a candidate all you want. The rest of us are talking in terms of "Could he win an election?" Nobody can become PM because of a court order. If a candidate does not have a solid appearance of being a Canadian first and foremost I don't see how he could ever get many votes.

If that's true, then why does it make sense that its cargo business has just exploded? The cargo lands at Hamilton, close to Toronto. Again, my point is that Hamilton is NOT close to Toronto! It may be close on a map but in terms of time it can be hours away. 10 years ago if I had a sales call to make in Mississauga at 9:00 am I would have to leave Stoney Creek at 7:00 to be sure of making it on time. Even then, there were times when I was late! The gridlock is even more brutal now. There were one or two mornings when I could have driven to Montreal faster than the total trip including car travel to Pearson and back home! Unless you yourself are one of the poor unfortunates who have to make that commute every day I guess you just can't see it.

If you read my post you will see that my problem is not with the facilities at Pearson. Rather, it is the fact that I don't live in Toronto but the "system" is deliberately manipulated to give me no other real choices. Hamilton has the long runways and the facilites. Despite obvious federal and provincial opposition it has developed into a very large cargo airport. Toronto is so bound up in gridlock and choked up from operating over capacity that the couriers said "Screw it!" and set up in Hamilton. They save BAGS of transit time! Unless you're in the business yourself you don't realize that it's not the distance but the time that costs you. Traveling to and from Toronto takes so friggen long on the highways that using Hamilton saves much time, despite the extra kilometres. Hamilton could easily support the larger planes with sufficient passenger volume but the governments just won't give them to Hamilton. Many people don't realize that in Canada air lines and routes are not at all a free market. Governments, especially the Feds, control everything. So those of us who live outside of the GTA are pretty well forced to fight the traffic on the hwys. As I said, I would spend more time driving than flying to get to Montreal! I'm surprised more flyers just don't stop their cars on the side of the 403, get out and scream "I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore!" It's the tantalizing lure of having a better option right in front of your nose that you can't have because governments favour Toronto that makes it so infuriating!

When's the last time you spent any time here, Oleg? Or even came here at all? 1964?

Unfair? I dunno. Fairness is an opinion. Is it true? Well, I'm not about to make a big research project out of it but my statement stands. I have been reading Shwa's posts since he first showed up under that alias. I have never, ever seen him oppose any stand, position or historical claim made by someone who appears to be an aboriginal spokesman. My comment is not about having bias. It is about objectivity. I too likely have some biases but there are many times I agree with a native issue. Sometimes I post such agreement here on MLW. I've just never seen Shwa do the same. I pointed this out to him some weeks back and he got rather upset. Perhaps this instance is related. Whatever, I do think this is a positive thing. I may not agree with everything Shwa says but he obviously has a great deal of knowledge of many things. If he were less predictable it would be much more worthwhile to pay him heed.

Not as an argument for or against having it. Just as yet another example of how screwed up the LIBERAL gun registry is! If the government came up with a cheap, easy and effective registry I don't think very many folks would have minded. The Liberal registry just confirmed a lot of people's cynicism towards government run programs. I mean, having harsher sentences for not registering than for using a gun to rob a variety store was the height of smarmy callousness! Just another straw that eventually put the Liberals in the position they are today.

Yeah, once again all the spoils go to Toronto. Hamilton gets screwed again! Since I don't live in the GTA, I would sooner suck on the lit end of a road flare than fly out of Pearson! I used to take a flight to Montreal fairly often and it's the honest to God truth that I would spend more time in gridlock driving from Stoney Creek to Pearson than I did in the air! The folks that run Pearson couldn't care less. They are in the enviable position of being filled to capacity. The excess that falls out of the container is no skin off their nose! Flying out of Mt. Hope/Munro airport was FAR more comfortable! You drove up about 10 minutes before your flight left, parked for free close to the terminal, walked in, handed someone your bags and got on your plane! Coming home was similar. You got off the plane, walked into the terminal, a nice person handed you your bags and you went out the door to your car! 15 minutes later you were home! The fly in the ointment is that the only planes that fly into Hamilton are those smaller "darning needles" that are subject to much more nauseating turbulence! That's all Hamilton is ALLOWED to offer! May every skunk in Southern Ontario take a piss on Pearson Airport! We in Hamilton know when we're being manipulated and we bitterly resent it!

Yep! I quoted CR 'cuz he was the one Shwa was contradicting . Sorry for not being clear.

There you go again! This is much of the difficulty in having a debate with you. You are a Marxist! You don't just ask that someone agree with you on a point of history. You also expect them to agree with your socialist premises. For many of us, that's just too big a chunk to swallow! IOW, you don't seem to want any solution for aboriginals except socialist ones! Personally, I view socialism as a philosophy attractive in its appearance but evil in its results. I believe it's like giving a baby sugar water. The baby likes it and stops crying but eventually all his teeth rot out! By linking the two together you have drastically limited your potential pool of support.

It's frustration, obviously! Bob is very logical in his arguments and all he's getting back is the same illogical ideas, expressed in different words. It's really very simple. Criminals do not register their guns. Most crimes are committed with unregistered weapons. A registry will not tell an officer that there is an UNREGISTERED gun behind a homeowner's door! Several billion dollars is not a reasonable price to pay for a gun registry full of errors. These are pretty simple premises and for some people not to accept them is like talking to a thick wall!

Thank you, Jack! You just proved my point! Bill Davis was NOT a conservative but a left winger! Otherwise, Jack would not like him!

Good point, Tim. It may not be fair to any aboriginal candidate who may consider himself Canadian first and foremost but the native activists have made such an issue about native sovereignty that I would expect it to be an albatross around the neck of any aboriginal candidate for mainstream Canada. I expect I'm like most mainstream Canadians. I have no problem with my MP or Prime Minister being aboriginal but if he doesn't consider himself to be a Canadian first then I want no part of him.

I wouldn't dispute that residential schools were often harsh. There may indeed also have been some atrocities committed. Those were frontier times. Police were not as common and the laws were often non-existent or not enforced. An ogre of a school master could indeed likely have sinned with impunity. However, you have made claims of tossing babies into ovens! Of hundreds of thousands of murders! The scale of what you claim is just too great to have possibly been overlooked or ignored. If the numbers were THAT great I'm certain that the parents of those children would have taken the warpath! There would have been armed insurrections everywhere! With your lack of objective historical evidence and your hyperbole you make it hard for anyone to believe you. What's more, there's nothing anyone can do today to right the wrongs done at residential schools. Also, you face the problem that non-natives don't think of themselves as a tribe. We have absolutely no concept of collective guilt! Evil is done by specific individuals. What can you do when those individuals are long dead? Land claims are a different matter because lawyers and lawsuits can live forever. I feel absolutely no connection to what was done at a residential school. I'm not religious, I wasn't alive then and I personally received no benefit from those evil deeds. If those school masters were alive today I would cheerfully help you by pulling the hangman's rope but that of course is impossible. The other sad truth is that today, if a native does NOT get a good education he goes nowhere! This is true of course for everyone in modern society. A native can choose to live his life on a reserve but that will limit him to a rather primitive lifestyle, paid for by what amounts to a welfare system. You might have some idea of past debts eventually being paid as reparations but without some self-sustaining system what would happen to a reserve when the money eventually ran out, even if it were 200 years from now? Perhaps natives could set up their own schools on reserves but if they aren't equal to those off reserve what good would they serve? They might concentrate on instilling pride in native culture but that does nothing to provide a good living standard. I don't know what the eventual solution will be. I'm the type of person that if I was born on a reserve I probably would have left and taken advantage of the better opportunities available. All I know is that any society needs systems that are self-sustaining. When someone else controls your finances you can never be independent. I believe that natives should be given the same rights to property as any other Canadian. I've read with interest how some tribes have opted out of the Indian Act and have much hope that this will be the key to better lives for them. To me, the Indian Act looks like what happens when artsy-fartsy socialists are allowed to social-engineer an entire people. I blame it for much of the negatives afflicting reserve natives today. However, since I never drafted the Indian Act, never voted for it, never had any influence at all over it and have never approved of any politicians involved I feel no personal guilt over it! I WOULD support any efforts to scrap it and give natives the freedoms to improve their own lives. That's all just my personal opinions. I don't pretend to have any power or influence on the situation whatsoever. All I can offer is sympathy and encouragement.

He was just being ironic, Angus! JBG knows well the real situation in those countries.

Well, there's a first! In all the time I've been reading Shwa's posts this is the first time I've EVER seen him contradict a native poster! I should print this out in a large banner and frame it for my wall! If this keeps up he might actually become objective! I guess there's hope for everyone.

What does that link prove? Some lady listens to oral reports from some natives, who may be telling the truth or they may have a political axe to grind. The list of contributing authors at the end is of similar people. How can we tell if these stories are true or just made up by natives pissed off at white folks?

How do you know that? As for myself, I would prefer to make my own choices as to my defense. Either that, or have those who don't think guns are necessary pitch their tents between mine and the bears...

We still have the contradictions between the claimed delivery methods of the smallpox virus and the medical evidence of how well the virus can survive with no human host, on a blanket, a stump or the back of a frog, and for how long. The native anecdotes may or may not be true. The problem is that they DO contradict what is known about the virus! What's more, the anecdotes make no attempt to address these contradictions. They just take it as gospel that's the way it happened. It's like someone telling you about something and mentioning an instance where water ran uphill. When you asked him about it he just looks puzzled and says "So?"

Source, please? Something unbiased, without a conflict of interest. A militant native newspaper won't cut it.

No, it's stupid clever by using inaccurate or inappropriate comparisons. If you punch me in the face, by your logic it would be ok for me to nuke you in your house! I guess all the collateral deaths and damage would just be null factors. We can also reverse your argument and see how it stands up. If it is NOT ok to have weapons to defend yourself then it is not ok to defend yourself at all! If you had a 275 lb bodybuilder break into your home and decide that he didn't want to leave any witnesses, just how would you defend yourself? Or your wife and children? If he was armed, perhaps you could persuade him to register the weapon before he killed you all.

Derek, NO! Perish the thought! BTW, have you ever heard the old bluesman saying, that goes "Well, some I spent on women, some I spent on whiskey and some I just wasted!"

The Liberal gun registry made no distinction between urban and rural residents. Obviously, they must have considered them irrelevant! Tell me, pinko, if you were tent camping in bear country would you take a gun?