Scotty

Are there whips and chains in it? If there's whips and chains I might be interested.

Unique theories without substantive backing. Most immigrants today don't even know who Trudeau senior was except from history books. And in third world countries, which are the source of most immigrants, the rich are _always_ on the take. Most unlikely. The questions on Harper's governing centre around the style; the uptight, secretive, often seen as mean spirited tone of his government, not his personal integrity. Harper doesn't need Quebec or the maritimes. He did fine without them last election and there will be dozens of new seats next election, most of them in Ontario and the West.

Not talking about what they're wearing. Don't know what they were wearing. I'm talking about the way society and media have built up the image of teenage girls into this sexualized archtype and then castrates any man over eighteen who becomes aroused by them.

Who is blaming the victims? Are you not capable of reading?

Not talking about exonerating him. I'm saying that just as society hypersexualizes young girls it, at the same time, overdramatizes the importance of sex into this toweringly important act, and so because this guy stepped over the line society is crucifying him. If he'd held up a bank, he wouldn't get eighteen months. In all likelihood if he shot someone he wouldn't get that long in jail, not as a first offense at his age. He fondled a couple of teenage girls. That's way rude, and deserving of condemnation, but on a first offense it makes no sense to put him in prison.

It's that two faced aspect which struck my mind. On the one hand society hypersexualizes teenage girls. It pumps out the message in every cultural medium that teenage girls are sexually desirable, see themselves as sexually desirable, and should be seen as sexually desirable. Then on the other hand, it comes down with a ton of bricks on any poor fool who accepts the message and acts awry. Again, I don't condone groping girls. But while I don't blame the girls I do blame society for luring this guy into his sexual interest in them. And I absolutely don't think society should be slamming a 73 year old guy into prison for this, given his lack of previous record, the lack of violence involved, and the fact he's, let's face it, a skinny old man with poor health.

It's nauseatingly self-righteous stuff like that which makes me wish Alberta would just cut off all oil shipments to BC. Then you could either walk wherever you wanted, or import your oil by big, fat tankers...

I'm not suggesting he didn't do wrong. I'm saying that in the first place, putting a first-time offender into prison for 18 months is silly, especially given his age and the lack of violence involved and lack of threat he poses. Society reacts with horror to his relatively unharmful behavior because of its insanely overprotective instincts towards the sexuality of a group which that same society hypersexualizes.

The irony is that once upon a time people lived in one room dwellings. Everyone knew what everyone looked like naked. Parents had sex in those houses, with ten kids around. Hell, they still do it in third world tribal villages. And you know, the kids don't grow up to be traumatized and sexually perverted. They take it in stride as normal human behaviour. Meanwhile, in the West, kids can be traumatized for life because some old man grabs their boob.

I'm inspired to address society's glorious hypocrisy on this topic, inspired by the imprisonment of a 73 year old Sunday school teacher today. Now by all accounts, this old fellow was in almost every way a perfect neighbor, friend and all around nice guy for many decades, including time as a volunteer firefighter. Until he ran afoul of our society's twisted cultural messages regarding teenage girls. We all know what society says about teenage girls. It's absolutely brim full of every possible sexual message, inference, insinuation, and sly innuendo. Teenage girls themselves are taught their value is in their hotness and sexuality, and this message has percolated downward to the point thirteen year olds dress in hot pants, thongs, push-up bras and skin tight tops. I had to look up a documentary I'd caught parts of on the CBC called Sext Up Kids. It's available on their web site. And it delves into the cultural messages teenage girls get, which basically turns them into little porn stars, and sets their self worth by how much boys/men want to have sex with them. So they dress the part, and act the part, and society paints them that way. Oral sex isn't really even sex! Sex between friends is fine! And anal sex is the new oral! If you like a boy, well, send him a naked picture of yourself! That's the culture of young girls today. But then we have that other side to society's cultural view of young girls. That's that any man over the age of 18 who even thinks, even momentarily, about any girl under 18 in any way that is even casually related to lust or sexual appreciation is a filthy pervert society ought to lock up if not castrate. Such men are dispicable, disgusting, beyond redemption... ?? You know, for most of our history as a species, girls were married off right after puberty. As soon as they could be bred, they were wed. Going back before there even WERE weddings, no young girl of fourteen was left to molder without a mate. That wasn't the way we as a species operated. I'd even go so far as to say it's hard-wired into men that once a female has a certain physical shape they ought to be pursuing her for breeding purposes. Of course, we as a society have grown considerably more sophisticated over the years. We shelter young people much longer, and we no longer marry off teenage girls nor want grown men pursuing them in any way. And yet, we as a society turn them into porn stars, sexualizing them in every aspect of our culture. And lo betide any poor fool who actually gets his messages mixed and lets his little head do the thinking for him! Now I'm not making excuses for this old fool and his groping ways. But the funny thing is that a few decades ago he'd have been given a stern talking to from the police and that would have been that. It would be unlikely he would ever try to grab anyone's butt or chest again. And that was before we started sexualizing young girls! Now, it's no mercy. Off to prison with him, the disgusting pervert! There's something seriously wigged out about these kind of mixed messages. On the one hand it tells men that teenage girls are the epitome of sexuality and lust and attractiveness, and on the other slaps them into prison the moment they fall for the bait. No mercy, no second chance, no matter how low risk they are or what their previous record was. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Crown+suggests+three+years+Sunday+school+teacher+assaulted/8311993/story.html

Good. Then you can keep doing that while we sell ours to the Chinese.

I've proposed nothing of the sort. I've said this is in the national interest and Ottawa should give the go-ahead to build it. And if necessary, use RCMP and the military to stop anyone who tries to physically impede the construction.

Obama and his ambassador are threatening Canada's economy again with their whining about the oil sands and climate change. Canada's economy is losing billions and tens of billions because of being unable to ship oil at world prices. And that cost is only going to get worse as our ability to develop oil continues but our ability to ship it anywhere goes nowhere. Do I need to point out the US has done basically NOTHING about climate change, that Clinton couldn't get even his own party to support Kyoto, and that there is not a chance in hell the current congress would agree to anything related to fighting climate change? Yet we're expected to do so or face an attack on our economy! Canada currently ships over 2 billion barrels a day to the US. That amount would rise as we develop more oil, but without Keystone we have no ability to ship it anywhere. We can ship some of it east, once we reverse the pipelines there, but we currently only import about .69bbd so that would only use up a little over a quarter of our current production. The current cost to our economy is $2.5 billion PER MONTH. That's $30 billion a year for the math challenged among you. And that figure is going to dramatically INCREASE if we don't find a way to expand our exports. We need to build another pipeline to the west coast, and we need to do it as a national project which is in the national interest. Over the bodies of anyone who stands in the way, if necessary. We need to be able to remove the US from our customer list and ship ALL our oil overseas where we can get the world price for it. Doing so would mean tens of billions extra to our economy each year. Let the Americans freeze in the dark, or get their oil from those fun loving people in Iran and Venezuela. http://www.cbc.ca/ne...ead-report.html http://www.theglobea...article8718582/

What if you strongly hold a particular opinion on social mores or politics and it offends someone? Should you repress your views?

I am very much in favour of growing a thicker skin.

What is 'sensitive'? How sensitive should we, as members of a society, be acting? Should we be walking on tippy toes in everything we say and do so as to not cause offense? Much like all those stores with their big "HOLIDAY SALE" which everyone knows is for Christmas but which they don't say for fear of giving offense. Which of course, itself causes offense.

This is not about defining whether people get offended. It is about whether we do too much to protect people from being offended. By all means, if you really want to, be offended. But don't ask the government, or human resources, or a web site administrator to punish someone because their opinion offends you. Because I believe the more we're protected from ideas and words that offend us the more insular we become and thus the more easily we become offended by anything which challenges our comfortable assumptions.

What if she's offended because I say women shouldn't be in the work place but should be at home looking after their children? Would I dare make that opinion known around the office? And if I did, would women complain to the boss and get me in trouble? And don't try to suggest circumstances where I'm trying to intimidate someone. That's not the meaning of the 'offending' question. Suppose I tell it to a male colleague, and he tells it to some women and the women at the office find out. Could I not be subjected to some sort of HR complaint? In Europe I bet I could. There are far more limits on freedom of speech in Europe in order to control offensive opinions and behavior.

That's an argument which ignores the fact we have too many already. It's the same thing as happened in Toronto. The Toronto Fire Chief said he could live with the existing budget without any deterioration in service. Even so, the firefighters union managed to get city council to spend millions more. Probably they want to be give they spend most of their time sitting around the firehall playing video games.

Hard to find them all again and not really into doing a long search, but military salaries are fairly easy. Why, for example, does a corporal earn over $60,000 in the Canadian Armed Forces? Bear in mind the great majority of these people never carry weapons of any kind and go nowhere near anyplace dangerous. I've been told corporal is basically the lowest rank for infantrymen after they've been in the service for a few years. Private is basically someone who just joined a year or two ago. A long service captain makes almost $100,000. For a British captain it's $70,000 http://www.forces.ca/en/page/payscales-131 http://www.armedforces.co.uk/armypayscales.htm And this cite from yesterday, which was what got me to thinking, showing British police starting salaries are to be cut to $30,000. Starting salary of a toronto police officer is $60,000 http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/careers/uni_benefits.php http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21027176

But in order to pay eight guys and two trucks we have to have several fewer paramedics driving around. If we had fewer firefighters with big trucks we'd get paramedics there much faster and wouldn't need the firefighters. So give them the jaws of life. I'm a fan of the New York system where paramedics and rescue trucks are assigned to the police department. That makes them multi functional. They can rescue people from cars, do emergency health care work and also policing work.

According to stats-canada "police reported crime' has been dropping. According to stats-canada the percentage of crimes being reported to police has been dropping. I think those two are related.

http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2012/11/29/so-whats-an-oc-transpo-driver-really-make/ http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/788256--ttc-s-big-earners-club-up-by-almost-one-third

Fire services across Canada are a notorious waste of money. Very few of their calls have anything to do with fires. Mostly, they get sent on health calls because they can get there faster than ambulances, and at least they are trained in first aid. But we wind up sending two big fire trucks and a bunch of guys to a heart attack call when we should have far fewer firefighters with big trucks and far more paramedics in little vans.

We have one of the lowest police/citizen ratios in the western world, far lower than many other places. Some of our cities have an abysmally low crime solution rate. And in some places, the time it takes to get a cop to the door is in hours, not minutes, and I'm not talking about the middle of nowhere. It also takes far too long to get a paramedic.