Help!

Toronto Makes it to No. 3 (Ahead of Paris) in Global City Rankings

As Publius puts it:

…
There is certainly racism in modern Canada, it is mostly directed at those of European descent. It is a racism that has been devised and implemented overwhelmingly by people of European descent. White people hampering other white people to help non-whites. Think of it as a collectivism where one collective abnegates itself in favour of another collective. Altruistic collectivism in its purest form.
I use the word “help” in a relative way. At some level the self-hating white folks do think they are helping various minorities. Altruism, however, is not their primary motivation. As is often the case altruism is the justification for an irrational psychological need. In this case it is a desire to feel morally superior…

…to come up with this comparison:

…
“There’s still a lot of people who regard at least Kim Il-sung as a god figure, even if they are less happy about Kim Jong-il and the new guy,” he [Canadian North Korea watcher and former Pyongyang resident Erich Weingartner] said.
In that, they’re not as silly as they may seem, according to Prof. [Paul] Evans [director of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia]. “We’ve just gone through a Christmas season of virgin births and stars travelling across the sky,” he said…“That hyper-religiosity is built into the philosophy of the ruling elite in North Korea,” he said.
Do the North Korean people actually believe it?
“Do people in the West believe in transubstantiation?” Prof. Evans asked in reply. “Do they believe in the devil?”..

Here’s an interesting discussion between Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds and Joel Kotkin of New Geography.

Open Questions: Do you currently live in an urban setting, suburb or rural area? If you won $50 Million tomorrow would you move to one of the other two types of areas?

Mark Steyn, all daggers drawn:

…Mr Naumetz doesn’t disappoint. Thus, his key piece of evidence for the new militarism stalking the land:

The Harper government singlehandedly made Vichy a household name in Canada.

Brian Lilley comments:

That’s right, the Harper government has spent years playing up Canada’s role in the French Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany.

As Lilley points out, it was the Liberal Defence Minister John McCallum who made Vichy “a household name” in Canadian history when he confused France’s Second World War collaborationists with Canada’s greatest First World War battle: Vimy, Vichy, what’s the diff? (The Defence Minister made his error in seeking to explain an earlier confession that he’d never heard of the Dieppe Raid.) After blog-mockery from Lilley and others, Mr Naumetz and/or his somnolent editors have belatedly corrected his piece, although without acknowledging the error, never mind addressing the broader question of the cultural void in which he’s operating. I mean, it’s not even a particularly Canadian question: If you don’t know what Vichy is, it’s hard to figure out Casablanca…[for example]

Stupid Canadians. Wherever would we get such an idea?

The reaction to Mr. Ignatieff’s defeat has focused largely on trying to explain how his reputation as one of Harvard’s most respected professors, a charismatic intellectual who could pack classrooms and once graced the cover of GQ magazine, could have worked against him with voters.
Mark Leccese, a journalism professor and media blogger at Boston.com, wrote that Mr. Ignatieff’s colleagues were dismayed that negative connotations about Harvard — long a code word in U.S. political rhetoric for “out-of-touch elitist” — seemed to have crossed the border into Canada.
“If Ignatieff had been a professor at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, would the ad have been as powerful?” he wrote.

h/t Lookout

Pace Inimitable Ibbitson of the Globe (a fellow who truly loathes non-metropolitan Canada, must be a reaction to growing up in small-town Gravenhurst, Ontario), Publius destroys multiculti in a superb essay–a few excerpts, do read it all (hint: Pierre Trudeau was not the fons et origo of all our woes):

As regular readers will have noticed, this blog has dedicate a fair number of electrons in recent weeks to multiculturalism. We are at the beginning stages in Canada of a cultural war, between those seeking to maintain the Big Lie of multiculturalism, and those seeking to defend Canadian culture and tradition. The former is – at best – a dangerously naive idea that all cultures are of equal objective value. The latter is a system of values that upholds individual rights, separation of church and state, free speech, rule of law and a basic market economy.
What is going on in Canada is only one small episode in a wider struggle across the western world. It is as if, on its deathbed, the nations of Europe and North America began to question the path that had lead them hence. In Germany, France and Britain there have been official rebukes to multiculturalism. So far these have only been pro forma declarations of what the general public had already come to understand, but was often afraid to say openly.
It will take decades of fighting to remove multiculturalism, and its fountainhead moral relativism, from the sinews of western nations…
What began as a plea for those most western of values, equality before the law and objectivity, is now ending, decades later, in the quagmire of affirmative action, and calls for Sharia law being supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury. There was a subtle shift in the justification for our immigration policies. Instead of trying to seek out the best immigrants for Canada, our policies transformed themselves into a quest to remake Canadian society. There was nothing special about Canada or the Canadian way. We were just another country. Our values were not better than anyone else’s values. Discrimination on the basis of cultural values, then, was no different than discrimination on racial grounds.
The philosophical idea at the heart of multiculturalism is relativism. It is a complete rejection of objectivity. There is no truth in this view. No right and wrong…
Once enough of the western ruling class had accepted the idea that objectivity was impossible, that all values were subjective to the individual or perhaps a particular group, the West became deaf and dumb. It could not object to barbarism abroad (a foreign policy based on appeasement), or barbarism at home (immigrants from primitive cultures unwilling to integrate). Faced with crises after crises, the West’s response has been apology and retreat…
…It’s easy enough to say that all cultures are equal, if you live in an area surrounded by civilized men and women. Just like it’s easier to be a socialist if you’re rich [that means you, Jack and Olivia]. You don’t pay the price. Someone else does, usually the poor and the middle class, or the generations that follow…

Update: More from Publius along similar lines:

The WASP Suicides

…where he can continue to keep his automatic rifle. The British Independent can barely control its outrage and disdain in a “news” story. As for women:

…
The result amounted to a serious blow to Switzerland’s nascent gun control lobby. It had banked on a high turnout by women voters to get its initiative approved. But results showed that only the cities of Basel and Geneva and a few French-speaking cantons bucked a national trend in favour of keeping guns at home.
Social Democrat and Green women MPs said that they were disappointed by the low turnout among women…

The SIG SG 550 Sturmgewehr 90:

Publius, in one of the best posts I’ve seen for a while, eviscerates the Canadian punditocracy :

Damn Yankees: The Tucson Shootings and Anti-Americanism
When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, the American Left promptly blamed the American Right. The American Right returned the compliment by fingering the gunman as a Left-wing loner. So far, so predictable. The American political and media markets are highly competitive. When a political figure is shot, there is an almost instinctive response to blame the proponents of political Brand Y, since no sensible adherent to Brand X would ever do something so crazy. We see the enemy where we want to see him.
For much of the Canadian MSM, especially in its more Leftish precincts, the culprit was clear: It was America. Not a particular American. Not some group of Americans. It was Uncle Sam himself taking shots at Congresswoman Giffords. The evil that is the United States of America was just expressing itself. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s Warren Kinsella:

Why do these things happen? Because, in some ways, America’s heart is sick, too. Because – unlike up here – Americans make guns far more available than they should. And they make guns more readily available to sick young men such as Loughner.
That, mostly, is why these things keep happening.

Let’s re-read that quote above, and replace the word America with Nigeria and American with Nigerian. The statement is much more accurate in describing an unstable third-world hell hole like Nigeria, than the United States of America. Most of the world is far, far more violent than the United States. Is most of the world sick too?
American murder rates are conspicuous higher than those of most advanced western liberal democracies. The bulk of these “excess” murders occur not among gun toting rednecks, but in urban ghettoes during drug related turf wars. The typical American, who is not a resident of a housing project, or involved in the hard drug trade, is about as safe as any Canadian. America’s blighted inner cities are about as indicative of America, as Canada’s aboriginal reserves are indicative of this country…
Americans are “hostile to opposing viewpoints?” Ever tried questioning the value of Medicare at a Toronto cocktail party? Or fourth-year humanities seminar? Or over a water cooler? It’s been a generation since Canada has any serious public debate on abortion. Who’s afraid of opposing viewpoints?..
The obsession with registration and control by the Left, on both sides of the 49th, manifests both a vast ambition and dangerous naivety. Rather than confront an uncertain world, – where illness, unemployment and all manner of injustice lurk – with a sober eye and cautious attitude, the Left calls for the abolition of uncertainty. Such a thing is impossible…

Read the whole damn thing, please.

Keep clear of Canada.

“The Fall”, or, the essential Margaret Atwood.

“Frogs Fret Fag Funding”.