In Britain, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls channels George Orwell:
The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.
They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
The comments underneath this Daily Express Story show once again the enormous schism in Britain between average citizens and those who would rule them.
Mark Steyn on the transformative power of an all-organic diet:
At the risk of being holed up the next time I’m driving in Vermont for hate crimes for my Vermontophobia, I think the women in Vermont would benefit from eating less organic food. I was down in your part of the world last year, and I must say, the California women look great on it. But…I think if you eat organic in the winter climate, you start to actually take on the character of the organic vegetables…
A Rasmussen poll released today shows Obama’s Approval Index sitting at minus 12 percent, his lowest number yet. 40 percent of American voters now strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance, compared to just 28 percent who strongly approve. Perhaps more significantly, a slight majority of voters now oppose his multi-trillion dollar health-care scheme, with the gap most notable among those who express strong opinions: 41 percent of voters now strongly oppose his planned reforms, with only 25 percent strongly in favour.
The lost ground certainly isn’t due to a lack of raw ambition or nerve on the President’s part. Within the last few weeks he slagged doctors as blood-money butchers (“The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out”), made clear that he views the very existence of a congressional debate on health care as a needless holdup, a throwback to the pre-Obama years (“The legislative process is a little bit like sausage making, and the sausage factory is not an attractive place”) and blamed Republicans for blocking his reforms, despite the fact that
“The Democrats won everything in last year’s election….(They own) the White House, a filibuster-proof Senate, and a 70-seat House majority. As one House Republican aide quipped: ‘We could have every GOP congressman and their parents vote against a Democratic bill and still not stop it.'”
There’s at least some degree of obstinate innumeracy in play. It can no longer be denied that Obama is trying to elide the issue of where the money for his multi-trillion dollar fast-track socialist rewrite is going to come from. When, during last week’s press conference, a reporter noted that Congress is “trying to figure out how to pay for all this reform,” Obama responded “Well, before we talk about how to pay for it, let’s talk about exactly what needs to be done.” Pretty bald, that, considering that his essential demand is for talk and debate to stop in the interests of facilitating passage of his glorious reforms. Questions, too, are evidently unnecessary at this point. From that same press conference:
Q: Thank you, Mr. President. On Medicare, there are obviously millions of Americans who depend on Medicare, and when you talk about bending the long-term cost down, or when you talk about cuts in the current proposal on Capitol Hill, you talk about cuts in Medicare and they talk about cuts in Medicare, but there are never many specifics. Specifically, what kind of pain, what kind of sacrifice, are you calling on beneficiaries to make? And even if not right away, aren’t future beneficiaries going to be getting less generous benefits than today’s?
President Obama: No. No.
Q: And a subsidiary question….
You get the idea. Earlier the President had sternly warned: “This debate is not a game.”
Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight we feature a tune from Richard Berry. He is perhaps most famous for writing the song Louie Louie, which became a controversial hit for frat rock band The Kingsmen. The controversy pertained to the lyrics: although the words were in fact entirely innocuous — banal, even — the recording was so poor as to render them unintelligible, which effectively turned the song into a blank slate upon which prurient teenagers — and concerned parents, as it turns out — could lyrically etch their wildest thoughts. When the FBI decided to investigate whether or not the song violated federal obscenity laws it was in large part due to outraged parents like this one, who wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1964:
“My daughter brought home a record of ‘Louie Louie’ and I, after reading that the record had been banned from being played on the air because it was obscene, proceeded to try to decipher the jumble of words. The lyrics are so filthy that I can-not enclose them in this letter…I would like to see these people, the ‘artists’, the Record company and the promoters prosecuted to the full extent of the law…”
Alas, the FBI ran the radio-friendly single through their lab and found the evidence to be wafer thin: “The lyrics…could not be definitely determined…(so) it was not possible to determine whether this recording is obscene.”
Berry, for his part, went on writing, recording and performing until 1996. Tonight then, for your dancing pleasure, here is Richard Berry singing the persistently yet indeterminately suggestive Have Love Will Travel.
Feel free to drive by and deposit your Reader Tips in the comments.
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight we present a song from The Producers, the Mel Brooks musical in which a Broadway producer named Max Bialystock and his accountant Leo Bloom come to the excited, if nervous, realization that they could – theoretically – reap a one-time financial windfall by staging a lavish, guaranteed flop, and then, after the enterprise has collapsed on opening night, pocketing all the money raised for its production.
The two men find what they believe to be the most unimaginably bad play extant — “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” — but their carefully chosen worst-ever director, Roger Elizabeth De Bris, considers the play’s ending to be not quite cheerful enough for his tastes, and initially refuses to direct the production even when promised complete artistic freedom to do whatever he wishes with the script and the staging. Eventually his susceptibility to flattery and his desire for a Tony Award gets the better of him and he relents, breaking into song at the very prospect of a Broadway juggernaut in bright lights having his name on the side. When he decides to rewrite the ending so that the Germans win in the end, no moral judgement whatsoever is involved: in De Bris’ happy mind, snappy production values — form, line, and gaiety — will trump the unappetizing facticity of war, destruction and dysentery. And it will work.
In tonight’s selection we see the very moment where the eager yet uncontrollably self-equivocating De Bris is finally convinced to direct the play. Here it is then, without further ado, the cast members of the Broadway production of The Producers — including Gary Beach as Roger De Bris, and Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick as Bialystock and Bloom respectively — performing the nimble and humorous Keep It Gay.
Your Reader Tips — keep it light, keep it bright — are welcome, as always, in the comments.
Welcome to the day-early Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s featured song is from Tom Lehrer, a math professor and part-time musical satirist whose musical success happened almost by accident: while attending Harvard, where he first arrived to study math at age 15, Lehrer wrote “Fight Fiercely Harvard” — “hurl that spheroid down the field” — and put it, along with eleven other original songs, on a record he recorded in one hour for $15. His intention had been simply to sell a few records on campus, but the word of mouth on Songs by Tom Lehrer soon led to mail-order requests from across the country, and within a few years he became a — somewhat reluctant — international success.
For a year or so after Lehrer stopped touring in the early 1960’s he performed satiric, topical songs like Werner Von Braun and National Brotherhood Week on the American version of the (originally) British TV program That Was The Week That Was. Tonight’s musical selection, from an album of his songs from the show called That Was the Year That Was, was written about the then-topical subject matter of the forward-looking Second Vatican Council. Lehrer: “There’s been a great deal of ferment in the Roman Catholic Church lately, involving certain reforms which are taking place. For one thing, they are allowing the use of native languages to replace Latin in portions of the mass…also, they are permitting the use of secular music in portions of the liturgy; I thought it would be a nice idea to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have chosen the ragtime form….”
Here then, without further ado, part-time humorist and piano player Tom Lehrer sings The Vatican Rag.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Good evening, welcome to EBD’s Wednesday edition of Late Nite Radio. Several weeks ago at SDA, Paul linked to his Cjunk post, “ Gaze In Wonder at Your Frigidaire.” The title is a line from the song “Auschwitz to Ipswich” by Jarvis Cocker, who is perhaps best known as the frontman for the British band Pulp.
One might expect any song about the West’s passivity and unwillingness to defend itself culturally at home to take an anthemic, “we must fight this” tack, but Cocker takes the opposite approach: his first-person narrator is a faithless, dissipated, sadly self-pleasuring Western everyman who has given up the ghost on the matter of his culture. He recognizes a cultural sunset, but since he uses his own life as a reference point, he sees nothing of real value being lost; since society is just himself writ large, it is no more worthy of being saved than he is. Cocker’s apt use in this case of the small, first-person ironic voice serves to limn the inexorable connectedness between citizens’ seemingly inconsequential personal attributes and civilizational changes of historic consequence.
It’s just a song we’re talking about, of course, one mostly notable for its subject matter. Before we get to it, I have a quick question for SDA readers: are there any other popular songs extant that either mention, refer to, defend, or acknowledge the value of western culture — even if only metaphorically — vis a vis others? I can’t think of any; if you can, please elaborate in the comments.
Anyway, here it is, without further ado: Jarvis Cocker sings From Auschwitz to Ipswich.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio.
What would happen if a group of all-time gospel greats casually assembled in one room and then broke into song? Tonight we find out, as the late Rev. Donald Vails, on piano, is joined by a who’s who of inspirational singers spanning several generations including Jessy Dixon, Walter Hawkins, the Barrett Sisters, Bishop Richard White (aka Mr. Clean), former Chicago Duncanaire Delores Sykes, and surviving members of The Caravans, including Albertina Walker. Fans of the Beatles and Rolling Stones may also recognize the organ player in the red sweater as Billy Preston.
Here then, without further ado, the aforementioned join in an emotionally cathartic performance of Thomas Whitfield’s Only A Look.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. In tonight’s musical selection, a curly-headed 68-year old Minnesota native sings a self-penned tune about undying loyalty to the bitter end in a transitory world.
Here then, for your listening enjoyment, Bob Dylan sings When The Deal Goes Down.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.
Conservative MP Russ Hiebert wasted no time this week grilling the CHRC’s David Langtry during the recent parliamentary hearing: “I note that in recent years the Commission and the Tribunal have conducted secret hearings to withhold evidence from defendants, and to conceal the name from accusers, and to even exclude a defendant from portions of his own hearing, among other things….such practices do not occur in regular courts; if they did, they would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. So my first question is, who approves these kind of legal tactics?”
Langtry replied in soporific, evasion-adorned bureaucratese (“as you well know, we are an administrative tribunal and as such are subject to the rules of procedural fairness”) and in the face of further questioning he professed with a straight face to be entirely unfamiliar with well-known, damning particulars that most every newspaper reader in the country is well aware of. Such opacity and unaccountability is the CHRC’s bread and butter; its recent report manages to insert in its introduction a complete and utter falsity, that the right to be treated with “respect” is a “fundamental right of Canadian democracy.” Mere words can violate this right:
Words can isolate and marginalize our fellow citizens, not because of what people have said or done, but solely because of their personal characteristics, such as ethnicity, religion, race or sexual orientation.
Spot the Trojan Horse there? The CHRC conflates race — something one has no control over, and which is neither an idea nor a philosophy — with religion. Consider Islam: it is not only a religion but also a political force, a globally-surging ideology that demands the preeminence of its own laws and ideas over all others. To suggest that that any given particular Muslim sock has a human “right” to not be disrespected for his religious views is to in effect deem the geopolitical force that is the aggregate of his ideas as being off-limits from debate, examination and criticism.
“In the debate about freedom of expression and freedom from hate, Canada’s commitment to
equality lies at the centre.”
This pretense, that the HRCs and HRTs are interested in equality, is put to the lie by the fact that no Muslim, no matter how radical, hateful or extreme his views, has ever been hauled in front of a HRT for voicing his religious views on homosexuality, women, or any other subject. We’re all familiar by now with the case of the Christian minister who was not only ordered to publish an
The freedom to express ideas and opinions is both the cornerstone of democracy and of human rights.
The CHRC will continue to use these bureaucratic feel-good buzzwords to justify its mandate, but the enormous gap between their self-professed noble intentions and their actual behaviour has never been more evident than in the last few weeks. I believe we’re seeing the beginning of the end.
Langtry’s testimony here.
Every day is April 1:
PEOPLE for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is upset with US President Barack Obama killing a fly during a televised interview.
PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside.
No word on whether PETA has a walk-in freezer to store the thousands of dead flies they had to euthanize when they couldn’t find an above-freezing outdoor environment to release them in.
h/t ghostofaflea.com
In an article published last Saturday in the WSJ.com, Paul Starobin suggests that America, as a direct reaction to an ever-growing and more powerful central government, may edge towards being “an assembly of largely autonomous regional republics.” Starobin sees the unmistakable growth of secessionist sentiment in Texas, Alaska and elsewhere, and notes:
… history seems to be driving one nail after another into the coffin of the big, which is why the Obama planners and their ilk, even if they now ride high, may be doomed to fail. No one anymore expects the best ideas to come from the biggest actors in the economy, so should anyone expect the best thinking to be done by the whales of the political world?
American Thinker’s George Joyce, in a review of Starobin’s piece, writes “A failed presidency for Barack Obama could turn into liberalism’s worst nightmare. Barely six months into his term, the 44th president has succeeded in generating the most widespread and serious discussion of secession since the Civil War. Despite what Newsweek’s Evan Thomas may claim, Obama is not the ‘God’ who will bring us together but the autocratic sponsor of an overbearing, oppressive leviathan from which a growing number of Americans are seeking refuge.
Wouldn’t a new American devolution…be a liberal’s worst nightmare? Beyond the psychosis most liberals would have to endure at the thought of losing any kind of control, the prospect of vibrant, happy, and successful conservative republics in places like Texas, South Carolina or Utah would be an inescapable spotlight forever exposing the failure of liberal ideology…
In light of America’s consistent historic reaction to any attempt to impose control from a distance, some form of major push-back against Obama’s preening emperor-act seems almost inevitable. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Both pieces are well worth reading.
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio.
A faded photo, taken in New Orleans in 1914, shows a short, unathletic, chubby 12-year old black boy standing displeased in the uniform of the reform school he’s been sent to for firing a gun into the air on New Years Eve. His arms are crossed defiantly, but he wears a sad facial expression that suggests a stubborn, so-far fruitless search for respect and sympathy. By the time of his death some fifty-three years later, Louis Armstrong was a beloved figure who’d left an enduring, worldwide legacy of goodwill and superb music. Duke Ellington summed up his life this way: “Born poor, died rich, never harmed anyone along the way.”
The performance selected for tonight’s LNR is from the last few years of his life. Privately beset by health difficulties, he soldiers on, and enjoins us to enjoy life, and to
Start by admitting
from cradle to tomb
isn’t that long a stay…
Here then, without further ado, is the great Louis Armstrong, filmed in France in 1967, performing the title song from the musical Cabaret.
Right this way, your Reader Tips thread is waiting. Blow your own horn.
….I will mess with you in some unspecified way until I am done — and make no doubt, my friend, that it will continue to remain indeterminate what being “done” would entail in this instance, inasmuch as I am using the past participle of “do” without actually giving any — non-Delphic — indication of what specific actions I would necessarily have had to have completed in order to….
Stephen Harper, on today’s meeting with Michael Ignatieff to discuss possible E.I. reforms:
“It is very difficult to respond to an ultimatum that contains no ultimatum…Usually you say ‘do X, or else.’ You don’t just say ‘or else.'”
Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner of the CHRC, gave a speech yesterday in which she said the “cacophony of protest” over the complaint against Macleans had “moved to one of discrediting Commissions’ processes, professionalism and staff” — as if the latter was some unreasonable and out-of-bounds development not congruent with the first. In each instance where she noted criticisms of the HRCs’ mandate and processes she dismissed the legitimacy of those concerns without addressing their substance. To the insular, bureaucratically-cloistered Lynch, it’s self-evident that reasonable people understand that such criticisms are ridiculous and need not be addressed.
Lynch complains in her speech that the HRCs have in effect been a victim of an “unbalanced” debate. After saying “Much of what was written was inaccurate, unfair, and at times scary”, she provides examples of such outrages:
Articles described human rights commissions and their employees in this way:
• “Gestapo”
• “human rights racket”
• “welcome to the whacky world of Canadian human rights
• “a secret and decadent institution”
Apparently it’s a self-evident outrage for Canadians to comment in their own terms on the behavior of the HRCs and their employees. Watch in this next bit how she creates a false “threat” by comprehensively and mindfully eliding the actual context:
One human rights expert who wrote a letter to a major daily paper faced an accusation in a response letter by a journalist the next day asking, ‘is (name of person) a drunken pedophile?’
Here’s the actual passage in question, from a letter written by Mark Steyn in response to a published letter by human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis:
Let me take just one sentence: ‘Are Levant and Steyn hatemongerers? Maybe not. But no one has decided that.’
Overlooking her curious belief that ‘hatemongerers’ is a word, whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? Eliadis stands on its head the bedrock principle of English justice and airily declares that my status as a ‘hatemongerer’ is unknown until ‘decided’ by the apparatchiks of the HRC.
Can anyone play this game? ‘Is Pearl Eliadis a drunken pedophile? Maybe not. But no one has decided that.’ In her justification of the HRC process, Eliadis only confirms what’s wrong with it.
Despite Jennifer Lynch’s repeated spin that she welcomes and wishes to encourage a broad and reasonable debate, she in effect portrays the HRCs as being victimized by the existence of any debate that isn’t undertaken on the HRC-types’ own chosen terms. One needn’t look deeply between the lines to see that, in her view, a reasonable and fair debate about free speech can only begin when the opposing side finally acknowledges the legitimacy of the HRCs and their mandate, and stops being so mean.
If you haven’t already done so, please read Lynch’s speech before commenting.
During his recent appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball, Evan Thomas, who is Newsweek’s assistant managing editor, engaged in a spirited praise-the-dear-leader contest with tingly-legged host Chris Mathews. Thomas’ chances weren’t looking good at the outset because defending champion Mathews, speaking right before him, set what appeared to be an impossibly high bar:
The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world; if he can, he will be honouring what happened on D-day 65 years ago tomorrow, he will be delivering the world, once again, from evil.
In a stunning upset, Evans cleared the bar with ease, and soared to new heights:
Reagan was all about America…Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial, we stand for something. I mean, in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of god, he’s going to bring all different sides together.
Noemie Emery, in the Weekly Standard: “There is the God of the Old Testament, and the God of the New Testament, but this is the God of the Newsroom. Religious tradition tells us that God created man in His image, but the press has created this God in its image–diverse, multilateral, and nonconfrontational…”
In a piece published today in American Thinker entitled “Comedy, Bullies and American Politics,” Rosslyn Smith writes about the media entertainment industry’s ongoing portrayal of the Democrat/left as informed and just, and the Republicans — and their family members — as ridicule-worthy:
The entertainment industry has been bullying Republicans for most of my adult life and I am 56. It started with stereotypes in movies and TV shows. The small town prude, the uncultured suburban hypocrite, the greedy capitalist, the perverted man of God, the southern white bigot. By the 1980s among the self described elite, the very name of Ronald Reagan was treated like the punch line to an inside joke, the way to get a laugh those rubes who supported him could never even begin to understand.
(Along the same lines as what Smith describes, British comedian Alexei Sayle, a member of the Marxist-Leninist faction of Communist Party of Britain, no less, lamented back in the Thatcher era that the lamest comedians extant could get laughs by simply saying “How about that Margaret Thatcher, eh?”)
By the 1990s the assault began in earnest….While Republican men would routinely be portrayed as slow-witted slugs, the worst vitriol was reserved for Republican women and minorities, those who refused to adopt the mantle of victim and the spoils of affirmative action.
…It became a firestorm of rage with the nomination of Sarah Palin, an effective administrator who governed from the libertarian side of the party while following social conservative principles in her personal life, and thus would appeal to many voters. But attacking Palin wasn’t good enough. The attack was carried to her children.
Smith sees the grassroots view in this blog comment: “The anger over this is….more than just about Sarah Palin. It’s about years of being told we are intolerant and intolerable when we are not, and having to eat anything an everything an elitist liberal media culture throws our way,” but she sees a lack of desire among urban Republicans and party insiders to stand up to the assaults and believes this reluctance has consequences:
….By letting the bullies dominate the cultural debate, Republicans have allowed the worst of the stereotypes to rule in the minds of those economically upscale members of urban and suburban America who are mostly passive users of political information….
She concludes,
No matter which way I look at it, while turning the other cheek in the face of the relentless media entertainment industry bully may be good for one’s soul, it has turned out to be a terrible way to build a political party.
The whole thing is definitely worth reading, and is relevant in a Canadian context as well.
From scribblings found in a notebook in Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn’s car:
Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.
From the mouth of Barack Obama’s long time Pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two days ago:
“Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office,” Wright told the Daily Press of Newport News….
Last year the Canadian Human Rights Commission commissioned University of Windsor professor Richard Moon to review the censorship provisions of the Canadian Human Rights act. Alas, his principal recommendation was that section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights act be repealed. The CHRC, refusing to stand idly by in the face of a suggestion that their well-funded bureaucratic censorship racket be dismantled, has now released its own report, the self-laudatory “Freedom of Expression and Freedom from Hate in the Internet Age“, which concludes that section 13 should stand, with a few minor changes.
The CHRC’s new report, a disarmingly banal document full of vaguely Kafka-esque nostrums and presumptuous royal “we” us-words, openly deifies a putative international standard that deems the American model to be behind the times on the matter of free speech. Building its forcefully-announced conclusions on the foundation of its own bureaucrat-mandarin language, the report calls for the HRCs to continue to prosecute hate speech regardless of the speaker’s or writer’s intent. In other words, the report recommends that the effect of your speech on society at large shall be determined by twee bureaucrats, who will then in turn decide whether or not you shall be hounded into silence by the progressive state.
It’s round 2 in the fight for free speech in Canada. Fortunately, we have in our corner Ezra Levant, the free-speech equivalent of Henry Armstrong. A veritable Gatling-gun of damning evidence about the HRCs, Levant is not just capable but willing and eager to chop down the misinformation and falsities put out by the HRC-types; the twee, effete busybody HRC-types know it, too. Judge for yourself: CTV’s “Power Play”, hosted by Tom Clark, invited Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner of the CHRC, to appear on the program, but Lynch informed CTV in no uncertain terms that she would refuse to appear on the program if Ezra Levant was there — in other words, she tried to get CTV to censor Ezra Levant, even though she continues to spin the idea that she wants to have a “real debate” about censorship.
The show went ahead without Lynch. (Kudos, btw, to Tom Clark and CTV for neither acceding to Ms. Lynch’s demand nor downplaying the absurdity of the resulting situation.) Here’s the farcical result:
Tom Clark:
Now inevitably, any discussion about Human Rights Commissions brings up the issue of what role they are playing, what role they should be playing in this country, and therein also lies a very vigorous debate in this country. We wanted to bring you that debate with the principals involved but unfortunately we could not, and let me explain why we could not: we invited Jennifer Lynch, the Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, on the show, but she said she would not appear if on this program if one of her major critics, Ezra Levant, was anywhere appearing on this program. So, the commission then said that they would offer instead Philippe Dufresne — he’s the Director and senior counsel of the Commission — but only on the condition that he did not have to talk to Ezra Levant. So, here’s what we’ve done in order to facilitate a conversation: Mr Dufresne has been invited — he joins me here in fact in the foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill — and Ezra Levant also joins us from out studios in Calgary. Ezra, good to have you on the program.
(Ezra, joking about the absurdity of the situation, pantomimes a few words…)
He is of course the author of Shakedown, which is a critique of the Human Rights Commission in Canada. Well, thank you both very much for being here. And unfortunately, Ezra, because of the conditions set down by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, I have to ask you to be silent for the next few minutes while I talk to Mr. Dufresne, and then, when we’re finished that conversation, I will come back to you and we can have our conversation. Hope everybody’s got that straight…
SDA readers should watch the whole thing.
Perhaps we should conclude here with the words of Jennifer Lynch, from her recent Globe and Mail piece entitled “Hate speech: This debate is out of balance”:
“To be sure, the debate over freedom of expression and hate messages will continue. The Commission welcomes that debate….”
From the WSJ, here’s Mark Leonard, the executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, on the recent election across Europe of MEPs who wish to curb rather than expand the EU’s power:
From the beginning, European integration has been defined by two trends: technocracy and populism.
(…..)
The success of the technocrats has been phenomenal. They created first a coal and steel community, then a customs union, then a single market and even a single currency.
It was the very success of the EU as a bureaucratic phenomenon that fueled a populist backlash. This first started as a localized phenomenon, with Margaret Thatcher famously demanding a refund for Britain in the 1980s. Now, it is a pan-European force. The populists come from the left and right, but their common complaint is that the EU is an elite conspiracy, a project to build “Europe against the people.” In its place, they plan to mobilize the “people against Europe.”
The whole thing at WallStreetJournal.com