Segacs’s World I Know

Idiocy on the Left. NDP leadership candidate Bill Blaikie said Tuesday night in a debate that he thinks that US President Bush “is planning every minute of his life to kill as many Iraqi children as he can in the name of oil or whatever it is that’s really on the agenda.”

You gotta wonder how much of the marijuana he’s so eager to legalize he’s been smoking. At least with someone like Blaikie at the helm, the NDP isn’t likely to win too much new support.

Just in case you think I’m leaving anyone out . . .

Idiocy on the Right. This guy:

That’s pro-gun activist Jim Turnbull, the guy who’s cowboy hat is only slightly more ludicrous than his habit of borrowing slogans from the American NRA. The guy who urged Canadians to bring guns to a public meeting. Responsible gun ownership indeed! The guy who said: “And to all of you men who registered your firearms, when you go to bed tonight, put your hand in your pyjamas… and see if you can find some balls!” The above photo shows him being arrested for taking out an unlicensed gun in front of scores of police and waving it around. Has he been smoking some of Bill Blaikie’s supply?

The thing is, I sympathize when people complain about federal government overspending on the gun registry. It was supposed to cost $2 million, it’s costing over $1 billion. I get it, ok?

But what I don’t get are people who use that as an argument to scrap gun laws altogether. You don’t have the right to bear arms, okay? Individual rights end where the next guy’s rights begin, and he’s got a right to live without being shot.

Guns kill people. Period. And no legal-technical bullcrap is going to convince me that the gun nuts have got it right. Sorry, but I don’t get why we should protect someone like Jim Turnbull’s right to own a gun over the right of people everywhere to safety. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Maybe, but guns are an incredibly efficient way to kill people.

Any otherwise law-abiding citizen who wants to own a hunting rifle to kill deer, well, fine, but quit whining about filling out a few forms. Maybe not all criminals will comply, but with a federal database containing most guns in the country, it will be a helluvalot easier for police to do their jobs. And if the issue is government overspending, fine, address it, but scrapping the entire idea of registring guns is just a lot of claptrap.

London got hit by a giant snowstorm, the largest snowfall there in 12 years. The storm practically shut the whole city down. (Hat tip: Tom. Yes, you got another mention in my blog, don’t you feel special now?)

How much snow would cause this kind of shutdown? 2 feet? A foot? No, 2 inches! That’s right, two inches were recorded in Central London, and 3-4 inches in surrounding areas.

Before we laugh at the poor Brits too much, though, let’s just remember that we in Montreal get the highest urban snowfall in North America on average, and we know what to do with it. We have snow removal services, salt trucks, snow tires, and snowplows. Most people in London don’t even have so much as a snow brush handy in their cars. I bet most of them don’t even know what one is!

Update: Damian e-mailed me to inform me that I was wrong in stating that Montreal has the highest urban snowfall in North America. According to Statistics Canada, Montreal gets an annual average snowfall of 214.2cm. That puts us in seventh place in Canada, behind Ottawa, Halifax, Fredericton, St. John’s, Charlottetown, and Quebec City. Whoops. I guess the statistics I was reading were off . . . or maybe they were referring to urban centres of above a certain population (Montreal is by far the largest of all the cities listed above).

London, however, gets such a small amount of snow on an annual basis that I couldn’t even find a published average.

Is this a day for plane crashes or something? 72 people have been killed on a Turkish Airlines flight that crashed in southern Turkey.

The cause is not yet known, but initial reports say terrorism does not seem to be a factor.

Update: The media is now reporting that it looks like heavy fog was a factor in the crash.

The Sens’ bankruptcy woes continue, and it’s starting to take a toll on the players.

The team’s in real trouble. While, sure, I want the Habs to beat the Senators, I’d like them to still be able to do it in Ottawa. I’d hate to see another Canadian hockey team disappear to the States for financial reasons. Hockey seems less and less like “Canada’s game” these days, and it would be a real shame to lose the Senators.

Those morons at the EU have issued their typical criticism of Israel in the wake of the double-suicide bombing that killed 23 people in Tel Aviv on Sunday, by calling upon Israel to lift the travel ban on Palestinians:

In a statement issued by Greece, the bloc’s president until the end of June, the EU called on Israel to lift the travel ban because the decision “perpetuates hatred and extremism.”

“The Presidency of the EU calls upon the Israeli government to reconsider this decision and to immediately lift the ban,” the statement said.

Perpetuates hatred and extremism? Israel’s mere existence “perpetuates” this hatred, according to groups like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad who routinely carry out these terrorist attacks. The Palestinians kill 23 innocent people, and Israel issues travel restrictions, and it’s Israel who’s perpetuating the violence? That’s so absurd it could almost be a joke, if it weren’t the regular position of the hypocritical European Union.

My condolences to the families of the victims of flight 5481 in Charlotte, NC. The media is reporting that it appears that all 19 commuter passangers and 2 crew members who were on board died in the crash, after the plane crashed into a maintenance hanger.

Judith from Kesher Talk alerted me to this piece of disturbing news:

AN Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) executive member was physically attacked as last week’s annual National Union of Students (NUS) conference descended into violence.

[. . .]

Conference observer Sibella Stern said that a brawl broke out during the debate on anti-terror legislation when about three students were hit.

“That was very scary for me. It was a moment of panic. We didn’t know what was coming next, what it would turn in to,” Stern said.

The following day, during a debate on Iraq, a knife was found on the conference floor prompting calls for police intervention.

I’m detecting a pattern. Student unions are becoming bastions of antisemitism, intimidation and violence against Jewish students, and prejudice against Israel. University campuses are emitting some of the most virulent hate. Concordia is certainly not alone, as this latest Australian episode proves.

But why is that? Why, when centuries of chronicling racism and hate have shown that it is usually more prevalent among the uneducated or narrow-minded, are universities leading the way for the new antisemitism? Universities! The exact places where people are supposed to learn to think critically, to broaden their horizons, and to make their place in society!

I’d be tempted to say it’s merely the association of the Left with the “Palestinian cause” that has led to student unions turning into cesspools of anti-Israel hatred, but I don’t think that’s it. Why specifically students, as opposed to other unionized people or left-wingers?

Of course, students have long been associated with movements for change, ever since the radical movements of the 60’s and 70’s. Idealism is found more among the young, who believe they have the power to change the world. That in itself is usually a good thing. So where does it go wrong?

As they say, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Buoyed by the false nostalgia for their parents’ generation’s activist politics – which they regret missing out on – many students are choosing to take a limited number of facts and interpret false conclusions from them. This continues when they then teach those conclusions to other students, and so on, and so forth, until we have entire international movements of people who buy in. And they’ve shown repeatedly that they’ll do whatever it takes to shut down their political opponents – including resorting to violence.

The question is, where does it end?

The Grammy nominations are out, and are serving as just another reminder of why I make a point of NEVER watching them. With nominees like Eminem and Nelly, they should just rename the show the “Worst music to ever grate your eardrums” Awards.

Honest Reporting points to some pretty disturbing hate speech on the Raelians’ website. This is what Damian Penny has to say about it:

I used to think the Raelians were just a bunch of cranks with some wacky ideas, but basically harmless. Than I found the Rael-operated “Subversions.com”, a “politically incorrect” “news” website which features one of the most shocking blood libels I’ve ever read: that the Israelis murdered 1,000 Palestinians, “most of whom were women and children” in Jenin. Not even the Palestinians themselves, nor the most hysterically “anti-Zionist” segments of the British media, wrote anything this vile.

Mind you, the Raelians don’t just pick on the Jews. They say say the U.S. Secret Service killed John Lennon and the followers of “Reverend” Jim Jones, and they even accuse the French of murdering members of the “Solar Temple” cult in 1994-95 and planning their own “concentration camps” for minorities. Still, the front page, which rants about “Americano-Israelian terrorism” and purports to show a Palestinian baby murdered by the IDF, makes it clear who their main target is.

Fuck you, Rael. Fuck, fuck, fuck you. Fuck you and the spaceship you rode in on.

Damian, I couldn’t agree more.

It’s scary as hell. Sure, the announcements of this week’s cloned babies are almost certainly hoaxes, but even the idea of them being true is frightening. Is this really who we want owning the technology to clone people? Imagine what kind of people these bigoted freaks would create. A world full of Raelian clones is not the planet Earth I want to live on, that’s for sure!