Kitchener

Inanely hysterical much?

Not only am I aware of it; I'm quite clear on its complete irrelevance to the fact the that director of ambulance services is a civil servant under the party that won the 2006 elections. Any other daft red herrings you'd like to try?

Israel denies access to foreign reporters, then tries to demand controls even when its supreme court orders this censorship to end. You agree to doubt any news that comes out of Gaza as a result. Any pretext is sufficient, I guess, for a sufficiently abject dupe.

Explain how an ambulance organizer counts as a terrorist. Indeed, do.

Yes, once they kill enough of the Palestinians who've been radicalized by violence against Palestinians, the problem of Palestinians radicalized by violence against Palestinians will be solved. Then there'll be progress with the moderate and compliant people who remain! Because that's worked a treat so far.

Of course. Medical staff and other carers for the sick and wounded, especially when they're civil servants of a democratically elected authority, are terrorists who can be killed out of hand. It's obvious to any staunch supporter of democracy, civilization, and decency.

The director of ambulance services: clearly a notorious merchant of terror!

Hey, I guess insurgents in Iraq don't target civilians either, since they also target and kill lots of soldiers.

For my part, that was the point at which I realized that nothing I could say to Mr Non-Canada would make his views look more degenerate and foolish than the things he says himself.

What do you mean by "If Canada supports Israel"? Supports it more than we support Palestinians? Supports it more than we support Hamas? Supports it no matter what Israel does, ever? It's quite clear that Canada supports Israel to a very substantial extent; certainly our policies are completely preferential toward Israel compared with Hamas. That's consistent with not supporting everything Israel does, and with holding that Israel is not above criticism. Would you like Canadian troops to be in there, too, killing civilians (however innocent and pure their double-effect intentions), targeting Palestinian police officers, and bizarrely hoping to impose a moderate government by violence?

Wow, men have no choice about whether to have a child? And here I thought, as a father of three, I had pretty much figured out what caused pregnancy. Do you think, just maybe, that men exercise that right when they decide whether or not to have sex? Hmm, it's a puzzler... The fact that a woman turns out to have a choice that is "downstream" of the man's choice does not absolve him of responsibility for his actions, when the outcome of those actions is a child. He has no reasonable expectation that it will be all the same to the woman whether she has an abortion or not, so he has no right to wash his hands of the matter should she decide to carry the child to term. I do think it's funny how the PERSUNUL RISPONSABILITY!!!1!! crowd get all worked up when it's a man who's held responsible for his sexual behaviour, contingent on a woman's choice. I mean, sure, people have to take responsibility for their actions and all, but a woman being able to decide whether a man has a kid? That's, like, totally the opposite of what Allah intended!

It defines them? What is that supposed to mean? OMG, a guy on a firearms advocacy website stitched together some quotes! Compelling argumentation reaches a new zenith! Which people? Please be precise. Which people do this? Why should they hide their secularism? Identify the people you have in mind, please. Then, since they do this "often", give just a few examples of what you think are the clearest examples of the people you've identified hiding their secularism "behind a mask of being politically correct and inclusive". You needn't give enough evidence to actually support your claim -- just give quotes and context establishing a few of the most obvious instances. Again, give the clearest examples, if you would. What sane person would, when you're obviously ranting incoherently?

Good grief, you're right! Voters tend to be grossly under-informed, and more focused on the weaknesses of those they oppose than the weaknesses of those they support! How incredibly blushifying that is. Any mention of how the control group did on the control set of questions? Ah, right -- there was no control group answering a control set of questions.

As I understand the argument for why this is A Good Thing: The CMHC insures mortgages so that banks don't entirely take the hit if homeowners can't pay. It's basically backed by the taxpayer already. So the government, in the broad sense, is already on the hook for these mortgages. In the worst case, taxpayers are already committed to ponying up for them. This way, in the best case the public may actually make some money off them. The reason there's "no increase in risk", basically, is because the government is already arse-deep in risk on these things by way of the CMHC. The situation is really very different from the American one. Which is, in case you're interested, summarized from an insider's point of view here, in this excellent article by Michael Lewis. Lewis wrote Liar's Poker, a great book about 1980s Wall Street.

It'd be one thing to sell off the CN Tower (why not, after all?). It's another thing to do it while the market's in the dumper. Neo-cons in Canada have a long and dismal history of privatizing profit and socializing debt. Here's hoping the current crisis doesn't give them cover to do the same thing now.

Plausibly, anyone who said that would be wrong. Being wrong does not imply being an idiot. No, I did not. Could you please cite the work in which Chomsky argues that institutes of higher learning should "divest themselves" of academics from Israel? Thanks. I know that Chomsky once signed a petition, one tangential point of which was to recommend that universities (and others) should divest themselves of financial/corporate investments in Israel. In fact it was by his efforts that this petition made almost no mention of this strategy, since he has publicly, volubly, repeatedly rejected it. For example, in a Washington Post call-in discussion: ]So not only is Chomsky not in favour of divesting from financial/corporate involvement in Israel -- even that claim is a radically different position from the allegation that he says that institutes of higher learning should "divest themselves" of academics from Israel. Surely you could not have confused the two. If this is an example of how carefully you've followed Chomsky's views and how drawn conclusions from the data, I think you need to rethink it. All of it. Chomsky humiliated Dershowitz in their exchange over Dr Israel Shahak [pdf] in the early 1970s, exposing AD's dishonesty, shoddy argument, and disposition to trample facts with vitriol. Dershowitz has never forgiven him, and seems to miss no opportunity to attempt a smear. I have yet to see an attack that held water when examined for factual accuracy and valid reasoning.

Blaming McGuinty for the public giveaway/corrupt balls-up/secret unbreakable contract furball that is the 407ETR is utterly daft. McGuinty didn't make the deal, and he couldn't rescind it when he did get into power. The Harrisites had seen to that.

Did I not get the mail-out ballot by which some guy on an unknown blog was elected Grand Representative of the Left? Gosh, how about this? It's funny how the right all belong to the Klan! Or maybe not. Maybe the guy from my link is just one single, solitary crapstain who happens to be a Republican precinct delegate. And maybe the blogger cited in the OP is just one angry dude blogging in the hours after a slender majority decided he could not marry the person he loves. Doesn't make satisfying Outrage Porn for Alta4ever, but it has the virtue of not being obviously dumb.

I can't find a record of a university saying that there is no way to measure a university. Could you provide a citation? In my experience, at least, university administrators (and statistically informed people in general) are much likelier to say something along the lines of: there are many, many, many ways to measure universities; not all of these are sensible or valid; even ones that are sensible are probably not commensurable; and hence that boiling them down to a single ordinal ranking is an exercise in pseudo-precise misrepresentation. For example: This point, by contrast with the one you assert universities make, is actually plausible. It significantly undermines the entire point of any simplistic "league standings" ranking of complex institutions having a diverse range of aims.

As I wrote earlier, my brother flew these helicopters in SAR for years, when they were in service with the CF. Is there any reason to doubt that they will again have humanitarian roles over the longer term? Oppose the Afghanistan mission if you will. (I do.) But it's silly, I think, to make something with obvious and proven non-combat uses a focus of your opposition, rather than the mission itself.

You're right, they are not. The elections are supposed to represent some degree of choice for the electorate; if they don't do that, it's hard to argue that they are democratic. Yet in no case (that I know of) are these choices completely unconstrained. Western democracies tend to place strong limitations on who can run, where, and when, and on who can vote for them. These constraints may seem invisible if you're used to them, but to an outsider they could seem -- and be rhetorically spun as -- substantial impediments to democractic choice. Many young democracies emerging after a conflict involve parties that have armed factions or militias. We have to bear in mind that democracy isn't something you either have or you don't. It comes in degrees; and no nation has it in a perfect degree. Elections in a single-party state with only one slate of candidates are a mockery, on one hand, yet elections in paradigmatic democracies are often deeply flawed and generate suspect results (as the paranoia about recounts in Canadian elections on this very discussion board will bear witness). Why the existence of armaments should undermine the judgement that a polity is a democracy is far from obvious. (Indeed, much of the electorate is armed in the US; I doubt that's a major factor in whether the USA is a democracy.) Every nation is, at best, partly free. The interesting question is the degree. The involvement of the army in Turkish politics vis a vis freedom is not a simple matter, either, since one of its consistent political goals has been (besides upholding the power of the military) upholding Ataturk's secular constitution. Plausibly, women in Turkey are free, relative to at least some other Islamic nations, because the army has, on occasion, prevented an essentially democratic process from imposing a fundamentalist version of Islamic law on the nation. Arguably, this has promoted freedom, in at least one clear sense, at the expense of democracy. Is this good or bad? Only fools think there are simple pronouncements that can settle the matter.

Still worse, it was shameful to go in with no clear idea of what victory would comprise, nor how our military presence could bring it about.

Our Chinooks, like any D/Fs, can be used for a direct combat role. That's a fact that might motivate an apparent pacifist like eyeball. But it's very unlikely that they will be, which makes it strange, even absurd, to make the Chinooks -- yes, our Chinooks -- the focus of one's opposition to Canada's operations in Afghanistan. This is what I've said, in clear English, from the outset. It remains mysterious -- to you as well, apparently, since you seem to agree with all of that -- why you felt compelled to pontificate about my not knowing just how wrong I was.

Hey, great idea! Let's look at what you actually said, and to whom you said it. You wouldn't be alone in supposing that. However you also wouldn't be alone in how wrong you are. So, that's not responding to eyeball. And it is saying that it's false that the Chinook can play a combat role. Wrong yet again, on both counts. Is it so hard to say -- if true -- "Sorry, I meant to respond to eyeball"? Or "Ah, I see -- you wrote that they can play a direct combat role, not that they will. My mistake; now I see that you explicitly rejected the idea that they'd be directly used to kill people." The advantages of embarrassing self-contradictory BSing over admitting obvious mistakes are still unclear to me.

Whose words am I overlooking? I'm just pointing out that my own post was correct. The Chinook is designed to mount machine guns if desired. Hence it can have a direct combat role. Yet criticizing it as if it was a direct combat aircraft in the Canadian Forces is -- as I said, in English and everything -- "somewhere between misguided and absurd". If you didn't find it easier to fulminate than to read English, you wouldn't have popped off in the first place.