Sunday, October 05, 2008

Canadians forced to fund hate-rants on CBC.

Canadian tax-payers are on the hook again for some big bucks in support of hate-rants from the Left. One cannot escape it. You live here, you pay for the CBC-- regardless of what they write. Here's some winning analysis from Canada's thinkers on vandalism against Liberal Party workers. The CBC's platform gives much space to those who care to blame Conservative Party workers for it. below is the story and some selection of commentary on it. "Only in Canada?" Pitiful.
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Vandals have cut brake lines on cars of Liberal supporters in the Toronto riding of St. Paul's, Liberal incumbent Carolyn Bennett said in her blog Saturday.

"The official agent for my campaign went through a stop sign and nearly hit a bus because he did not know that his brake lines had been cut," she said.

"I was sickened" by the vandalism, she said, which included graffiti, cut phone lines and cars keyed with a large L.

Toronto police said in a news release late Saturday night that some phone and cable lines in the area had been cut overnight Friday.

The release did not mention that Liberals were targeted, but Staff-Sgt. Shawn Meloche told the Toronto Star that "there appears to be a connection" between the vandalism and houses with Liberal lawn signs.

Police confirmed 10 cases of vandalism, but the riding headquarters said there were 14 by Saturday evening, the Star said.

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"Just the kind of thing Mugabe goons do. Is this another desperate act of an overzealous Harper staffer?"

RichardChong

"I think this is the work of the Cons thugs who has no fear of the law. They have seen their leader can break his own laws (fixed election date), plagiarize and think it is ok. Given Mr. Harper complete disregard to ethics and morals, no wonder his thugs can do that."

Jerry Younge

"Been away for a while, is Vandals the new name for Harper's gang?"

GlenQuayle

"
Wow, Harper has his gestapo all pumped up! Desperate times calls for desperate measures."

Mactator

[This one below seems to be a parody of those above, but with the CBC audience one cannot be sure.]

"This is what happens when you make Harper anger. He turns dark blue, rips off his sweater and becomes the Incredible Fraud then spreads death and destruction on Liberal supporters thru out the region...."


spacholka

"Harper speech-writers have to find something to do in their spare time. Shame [on] the Conservatives."

Hercules

[This might be what passes for intelligent reason at the CBC.]

"I'd like to believe that Harper ordered his hellpers (oops, typo? or Freudian slip?) to do this, but lets be realistic. It's an individual or a group of people acting on their own. Although it would be interesting to see how these 'terrorists' vote...."

Darren83

"Good heavens! Is that why Mr. Harper took the day off? Creative art-work with scissors?"

R5OZENCRANTZ

"Vandals have cut brake lines on cars of Liberal supporters in the Toronto riding of St. Paul's, This is what happens when the cons play negative In TV adds etc It creates a mind set that feeds the criminal distructive mind. Its a sad that we have come to this. Thanks Harper for your contributions to our society. It stinks of the US republican style."

buffordyork

This is what happens when a party leader targets nothing but hatred and slander against his opponents instead of presenting original thoughts and debating ideas on their merits. Inevitably, people take Harper seriously on more than a political level, and think that causing physical harm to opponents is appropriate.

An even bigger problem is that some Canadians haven't noticed the vandalism and mischief in Harper's plans for our future. Having no platform a week before the election - after the debates and advance polls - sabotages the democratic process.

Harper's campaign continues to run stop signs, and is going downhill fast. Let's avoid a big accident by voting Harper out of Canada's driver's seat.

Offenright

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/story/2008/10/05/vandals-cars.html#socialcomments

19 comments:

truepeers said...

well fwiw, in my experience no one hates Liberals like fellow Liberals.

Dag said...

Could be. I have to wonder how likely it is that shady businessmen, greedy stock-brokers, thieving oil company executives, and other fat cat capitalists would get down on the dirty ground and cut someone's brake line so they might die and kill others. It seems unlikely to me that people who value independent living would do that; but from what I read from the Leftists, Conservatives are innately evil people like Hitler who cannot stop from acting like the Gestapo and the SS. To me it seems a manifestation of mental illness to make such claims against people like that, and to see such things paid for by tax-payers is a bit more than I can let pass without pointing out my outrage.

Yes, Liberals probably hate Liberals because they know them better than the rest of us do.

truepeers said...

Dag, Liberals hate Liberals because the Liberals think of themselves, with reason, as Canada's natural ruling party. People join it because they have a desire to access power. Canada's most ambitious s.o.bs. are Liberals; the Young Liberals is full of arrogant youngsters with studied "charm" and a sense of destiny. Some of them are keen to prove they are capable of playing politics hard.

All of this creates feverish rivalries within the party. They are usually in some kind of civil war. The NDP, in contrast, for all their bizarre ideas are more enamored of their "ideas"; and this has a deferring quality, especially since they don't ever expect to form a national government, that the Liberals don't have. Look how the Libs have already stabbed Stephane Dion in the back.

Anonymous said...

I find it rather ironic whenever people point toward private broadcasting channels like FOX as being of a certain bias, and as being a mark against free market journalism and broadcasting, while at the same time ignoring that Canada's own personal broadcast network is probably one of the most left-of-center in the entire country. Or at least the largest left-of-center network in the country.

Dag said...

When I was young I used to red Pravda. I didn't expect to find the truth, not by any means; but I did expect to find what they didn't say, the truth between the lines, the lies dissolving into sense so I could make my way in the world with some kind of guide other than pure stumbling chance. But the CBC doesn't have the beauty of Pravda, the hidden meanings, the secrets waiting to be prized out from the state propaganda. No, the CBC is just vile lunacy, bigoted rants piled higher and more violently on a daily basis. People here like the CBC, it seems. I can't for the life of me understand that. Who can like evil? It' not like Canadians are evil people, but they like this evil CBC. I'm increasingly home-sick.

truepeers said...

Let's be clear about what makes the CBC evil. It's not because it has an obvious political bias; it's because it has that "bias" - if nihilist relativism and worship of victims is a bias - without admitting it, unlike Pravda which was clearly an organ of a specific state and ideology.

The evil of the CBC is actually the same as that Fox promotes: the claim to be fair and balanced, the denial of one's viewpoint, of a real identity, of where one is coming from. The CBC, because it is a state-funded anachronism, pretends to represent all Canadian voices. Not only does it necessarily fail in that - from fear of conflict - but in doing so it doesn't know what it is and falls into a sea of relativism.

Where liberalism is the ultimate value we get an elite that finds its job is to determine what is a respectable voice and what is too extreme, too political. This elite accredits itself, defining who can speak for the "right" and who the "left", in order to be "fair and balanced".

This denial of honest partisanship, something which becomes those in honest participation in democratic self-rule, is in service of the elite, of imperial masters that have an idea how all the "multicultural" subjects and representatives are supposed to fit. The people are not to rule themselves but to be led by the mutually accrediting expert-identity politics class.

When the responsibilities for self-rule are substituted by a code of political correctness, when intellectual honesty, the search for truth, and the need for iconic representatives of the political choices proper to free individuals - and not to groups - is replaced by the relativism of being "unbiased", what you get are people whose response to politics is either to shriek or cheer at what is put on the stage for their entertainment. What you get is elites who don't know who they are other than privileged arbiters among all the contesting groups. The ideally disinterested voice of law is lost alongside the properly interested voice of journalism.

In such a world it becomes more and more common that people stage "crimes" against their persons in order to gain the benefit of the much-desired victim role, the sign of what holds us together once the sacredness of the individual and the constitution of free men dissolves.

I don't have any clue if Bennett's group is staging victimhood, but it is something that happens often enough now.

truepeers said...

In other words, if Carolyn Bennett's people are the genuine victims of a political attack, whoever did it must be among the most stupid people in politics: such an attack is almost guaranteed to help Bennett, politically.

Dag said...

People who finance FOX or the NYT do so by personal choice, by reaching into their pocket and pulling out cash for the product of their choice; but those who finance the CBC have no such choice. That is European paternalism in action, not the end of the world, by any means, but just one more slap in the face to the masses who refuse to live as free people, which is their choice to refuse. Maybe Canada is a place of people who refuse freedom by choice; and if so, then the CBC would be right manifestation of that choice: to have a state run, publicly financed, corporatist Ministry of Media would be the showing of the people that the state is paramount, the people an appendage.

So, if one sees a political party attacked and its people made genuine victims of violence, then it might well be reasonable to have the elite who run the corporation to give voice to the lunacies of the state programme: that it is Conservative Party members acting in violence against individuals. That such a comment is outlandish nd juvenile is of no importance to those who must at all costs the system of state power and control of the narrative. The Ministry of Truth must prevail, no matter what. And the people pay for it, no matter what. That is a dictatorship.

truepeers said...

Hmm, it seems you want your dictatorship to be honest.

But the CBC has achieved a higher destiny in co-opting the people into the system of elite rule. This is dictatorship with a little free market for trade in the acceptable opinions.

As for Fox, sure it is privately owned (if we can conceive of Arab sheiks who hold an influential share having private, and not Islamic, interests...) And that would generally be a sign of greater freedom in the American system; but only to a degree. It is still a news culture run by "fair and balanced" journalism school grads, and hence an agent of a liberal elite. Wouldn't it be better if Fox said openly, this is generally a pro-Republican news outlet (not that we will whitewash those who betray our values); and CNN said the same for the Democrats; and then the two had to go out of their way to find the intellectual honesty to win over the duly warned and critical listeners?

Dag said...

Peers writes above: "This [liberal] elite accredits itself, defining who can speak for the 'right' and who the 'left', in order to be 'fair and balanced'."

Wait a minute! Anyone can accredit himself all he likes, but it's up to the population at large to accept that as worth something or not. People at, for example, FOX tv can claim to be unbiased mediators, and so what if they do? That's normal marketing. No one should be forcing them to promote themselves as reactionaries from the 19th century. Viewers watch or they don't. And so too with the CBC. But the case of the latter is very different in that I pay for the CBC even though I hate it. I don't pay at all for FOX.

Yes, the intelligentsia seem to accredit themselves and each other and then promote themselves as the natural authorities of what is any point on the political spectrum. Nice observation. But who should pay attention to those self-appointed arbiters of political taste and opinion?

We are sadly stuck with "conformity hippies" (example deleted) who haven't got a speck of curiousity or wit enough to think clearly for themselves to see if they are in fact being herded. They are, and so what? The outrage is that the tx-pyer is forced to pay for the CBC even though they have no authority beyond that self-appointed. It shouldn't matter at all if some are conformity hippies. Let them shout their cliches and stupidities. But the outrage is in me having to pay for it.

So long as the state decides who is legitimate in defining the political spectrum nd where or if people are allowed to be within it, then the state will, by virtue of its innate authority, rule the minds of most. Let Heather Mallick write without the "authority" of the government's CBC, and see how long she lasts as a public intellectual.

Dag said...

"The people are not to rule themselves but to be led by the mutually accrediting expert-identity politics class."

That Platonist approach to life is offensive to any American or any democrat anywhere, and yet it is the ethos of the time in America and round the world today, for shame. It comes, perhaps, from miscomprehension of "intellectuals."

Americans are often slighted as being "anti-intellectual." What those who make that claim mean, though they don't seem to understand it, is that Americans are anti-pseudo-intellectuals. Show an American a good thought and useful one or beautiful one, and he or she will respond with glee, fr beyond the greatest hope a European could ever expect from a European. Show a European (or imitator) a bullshit philistinism, and there one will see a crowd of fawners a'bustlin'.

This is no conspiracy to dupe the helots; it's a willing play on the part of the masses to be allowed to pretend that they too are interesting: One may with great encouragement adapt the latest and trendiest pseudo-intellectual wrap, and off one goes to the agora to pose. The people play the part of willing dupes so they can feel sophisticated at cocktail parties or something. Image prevails over content. But that is the choice made by the masses. There is no one else to blame for that.

When the responsibilities for self-rule are substituted by a code of political correctness, when intellectual honesty, the search for truth, and the need for iconic representatives of the political choices proper to free individuals - and not to groups - is replaced by the relativism of being "unbiased", what you get are people whose response to politics is either to shriek or cheer at what is put on the stage for their entertainment. What you get is elites who don't know who they are other than privileged arbiters among all the contesting groups. The ideally disinterested voice of law is lost alongside the properly interested voice of journalism."

Very nicely put. But I come back to the point that authority is only valid if it's acknowledged. If the masses are complicit in the foolery of "politically correct" ideological critique, then they must suffer for it, if only for the sake of feeling-- wrongly-- that they too re intellectuals. Rearranging cookie-cutter cliches is not the path to intellectualism. One need not be a genius to be an intellectual, but one must be able to honestly weigh propositions and attempt to come to an honest decision concerning the proposition. If our intelligentsia are buffoons and poseurs, then so be it; but to allow for them giving place to those they encourage to mimic them is to say the masses are blameless in this public charade. If intellectual fools spout nonsense and reward the masses for repeating it, and if the masses buy the recognition from their intellectual superiors, then we are stick with some serious problems: the rule of conformity hippies. So long s the state controls the means of communications, the masses will be hostage to flattery to maintain the status quo. Make the intelligentsia compete in fair marketplace of ideas and see how long till they're t the soup kitchen with the rest of the bums.

It's a sham and a scam to see the current ruling intelligentsia as intellectuals of any worth. But so long as people buy the flattery, that by repeating the cliches of the politically correct pseudo-intellectuals the masses can think of themselves too as intellectuals, stuck is us.

truepeers said...

People at, for example, FOX tv can claim to be unbiased mediators, and so what if they do? That's normal marketing.

-Dag, I'm not going to argue the CBC, because I agree with you that it's a scandal. But I fear the above comment suggests you fall into the myth that ultimately supports the presence of the CBC. A bad myth is a bad myth even if it's funded by the marketplace (and the limited choices it provides us in terms of news channels in which to invest.)

The present corruption of journalism lies in good part in the 60s hippie idea that the heroic journalist is disinterested and the state, on which the journalist reports, is often corrupted by self-interest. The latter is sometimes, but by no means always true. The former - that the journalist is disinterested - is basically untrue, though it's a question of degree: the more ambitious the work of reporting, the less it can be disinterested. On the other hand, the work of judging the quality of reporting can be somewhat more disinterested than the reporting itself.

The state should be and can be disinterested as to who wins and who loses in the social and economic marketplace. It should set the rules and provide a safety net for losers, but not try to bias the system in favor of one outcome or another. That, at least, is the condition of a free society.

The ideal of the disinterested authority was once so popular, with good reason, that it was allowed to invade arenas where it was not often appropriate, like journalism; it invaded through state-financed institutions like the CBC and the journalism schools.

In doing so the state over-extended itself and this corrupted the state because any attempt to describe reality necessarily takes us beyond the state's proper work of setting rules, and providing a safety net, and into the game of trying to shape outcomes in our various social and economic and political competitions. This is because our descriptions of reality always have a prescriptive connotation. This idea, admittedly, is a little foreign to the Western mind, thanks to our metaphysical traditions that work to separate the descriptive and prescriptive; but it is the essence of classical Chinese thinking, for example. Well, the Chinese grasp certain aspects of human reality, it seems to me (though this has led them to build a state that simultaneously and unabashedly describes and prescribes reality... we separate the two to practical advantage, for greater freedom, until we screw up the necessary distinctions - freedom means recognizing when we need to act as properly interested agents, to make our bets in the marketplace).

The West has become far too ingrained in the habit of distinguishing means and ends, for example, thinking we can build healthy societies through the elaboration of grand and ultimately Utopian "scientific" methodologies for describing society. Journalism has been infected by that Utopia. As we come back to the need for more humility and recognize that our means quickly become our de facto ends, we will become again more inclined to figure out which tasks are ideally suited to disinterested arbitration, and which to properly interested conduct.

Fox News may be a market enterprise, but it is corrupted by the previous corruption of the state and journalism. As a market enterprise it is a properly interested entity. If it can sell people on the idea that it is unbiased, disinterested, that's not just marketing, it's a lie about things that are pretty fundamental. I wouldn't trust them much more than I trust the CBC. In fact I don't.

Anonymous said...

Truepeers, I would say that it's not a matter of trusting them more than CBC, at least for myself.

For certainly the same amount of integrity exists within FOX as within the CBC. Well, theoretically at least.

But at least FOX represents itself as a private institution, instead of being basically an extension of the government.

Quite frankly, and I'm not downplaying the content of the CBC, but I find that there's something vaguely Orwellian about turning on your tv or radio, and being able to tune to quite a few channels which are basically, for all intents and purposes, Government.

At least with FOX I can just turn the channel, but with the CBC, I can see a reflection of the country itself, or at least of the countries' government, and the cost of elitism and Patriarchal behavior.

But I digress...

I would say that in the instance of FOX v. CBC, FOX wins, because at least it is the lowest common denominator. It is a private enterprise, whereas the CBC has many of the same problems, but with the increased problem of being a theoretical extension of the government itself.

In the end, I must depend upon the Free Market first, and the government second, because if I rely on the Government first, I will risk losing the Free Market, with an added cost should I ever decide to revert back to it.

truepeers said...

I can accept that Walker. I just think Fox would be more in tune with the free market if it gave up the "fair and balanced" ideology. Perhaps I read too much into that phrase; I can certainly imagine ways to speak of fairness and balance that would have a place in my conception of what is proper to journalism. But to my mind, "fair and balanced" most likely is meant to invoke the elitist liberalism that pretends reporting the news can be done without showing political bias. I don't think that's possible, which is why we need the free market and why we need Fox, to be honestly interested in what it reports.

Anonymous said...

Oh absolutely. That's the beauty of the free market, and in a way, its' microcosm in the blogosphere. Surely there aren't many bloggers out there who can legitimately call themselves unbiased, but it's through trolling through all of the brouhaha of opinion that one comes to any sort of concensus, if only just to start oneself off with.

An quite frankly, I beleive that the face of modern journalism is not that of an admirable, honorable journalism. The incredible bias that is increasingly showing within our MSM is becoming increasingly disgusting, and while there are some countercultural few who actually say what they feel, and who actually report the facts as they see them, I think that the majority of the industry has just become about the "gotcha" factor, instead of the real business of facts. It's a subversion of one of the basic needs for MSM. Facts, news, information. Conversation starters, if nothing else. But I think it's almost becoming subverted to the point of being just all about the Conversation starters. It's focused so much on the end result of getting to people, that it has lost the reason and purpose of its' own existence.

Of course, I might be kind of shooting myself in the foot as I say that, as I do intend to be a writer at some point.

But as to the CBC, all I was saying is that I would rather have a private organization like FOX be like it is, even if it's lying to me in the process, than have something like the CBC continue down its' biased path, on the taxpayers' dime, and claiming all the while that not only is it unbiased journalistically, but also that it is the Voice of the People and the Government. That to me puts the ball of favor into FOX's court, no matter how unhappy I might be with FOX.

truepeers said...

Absolutely, nothing worse than being lied to by your own tax-supported government. I'm still steaming about Neil McDonald seriously reporting, on CBC's The National, the crazy rumours about Sarah Palin not being the mother of Trig.

I also despise the current climate of gotcha journalism. Basic reporting, attention to reality, can be a great thing, something I'd like to do more of for this blog. But even when I'm giving a detailed (for this blog) account of what someone said at a public event, trying to make it into an interesting narrative of what happened, I'm naturally aware of the inevitably political nature of how I frame "the facts". Facts can never really stand alone. They must be made meaningful. I suppose that somehow it's awareness of this that has led journalists to try and jump ahead to the meaning of things that they wish to promote, and to spend less time on basic reporting.

Yet they wouldn't be so keen to jump ahead if they had to explore facts and reality in open defense of their politics. I think the desire to get quickly to the gotcha moment is actually exacerbated by the presumption that the journalist should not be biased. To openly admit to one's politics hopefully sets oneself up to the necessity of making an intelligent defense thereof. But to pretend to neutrality is to encourage an official ethic of relativism that leaves us floating without a solid sense of the values and shared reality that make possible our conversation and that need to be defended or seriously criticized; and this, I think, puts us in greater need of a scapegoat or victim to make sense of things: gotcha! becomes a substitute for serious discussion. It's a little counter-intuitive but I think we tend to have a greater reliance on myth the less we are openly political, though I wouldn't make that into an absolute rule.

(BTW I assume the trend away from openness about politics to being "balanced" happened when the number of newspapers declined in each city and papers had to appeal to advertisers who didn't want to appear political).

Now I don't want to be fed endless facts because at the end of the day what really matters is the theoretical paradigm with which I make sense of those facts; and i don't want to carry around more information than is useful if holding information comes at a cost of mental resources for serious thinking about how to see those facts. On the other hand, I'd rather have usable information than propaganda on behalf of theoretical paradigms that I've rejected, especially if there are no serious, honest, open discussions about how facts are made sense of by theories I might want to reconsider or contest.

So I guess what I want is some kind of relationship between facts and theories that I think I best get when political and economic interests are out in the open, unashamed of their bias, and thus calling for an intelligent defense, in respect of the various interests and intelligence of the readers. Of course one might not get an intelligent defense; one might get popular myths. But as I say I think there is a greater tendency to uncritical myth making when the journalist can't admit bias, when the bias is wholly the fault of the victim of the gotcha moment, and not a weakness we should all admit.

Dag said...

Early on in this conversation, Peers wrote, "[L]iberals think of themselves, with reason, as Canada's natural ruling party." I've sat for days in amazement as I try to ponder that. It is so fundamentally non-American that I have trouble penetrating the sense of it. I spend my life looking for, seeking out, digging for the weird and uncomfortable in life. I don't shy away from the strange. That doesn't mean I like it or accept it as good. I look because I'm curious. I want to know, regardless. And it is horrifying, mostly.

Plato writes of the natural ruling party as an oligarchy of Golden Oldies. I see the same traits in our intelligentsia, though they are too stupid and sated to recognize themselves as such. They are also un-American. They need to be forced from their oligarchic positions; and only the demos can do that.

I'm a bit under the weather at the moment, but as I recover, assuming I do, I'd like to continue with this in a newer post. At the heart of it is our meetings on Thursday evenings, our agora time.

See you all then.

truepeers said...

Well Dag, the good news is that the Liberals may no longer be Canada's natural ruling party: they've lost most of their former presence in Quebec and the West (central Vancouver and Victoria is now the only major exception). So they can no longer present themselves as the great party of national unity, the brokerage party, especially as between French and English- speaking Canada. They of course try to play this game with the new "multicultural" entities, but even there they are losing ground.

Bad news is they are losing ground to parties who are playing a similar game! There is not enough respect for the free individual in this country. It is not so much the demos that will save us as recognition of a modernity in which group identity politics is passe.

BTW, my brother was telling me about the interesting marriage of a friend in Ottawa whom he described as extremely outgoing, while the groom was, in his words, an agoraphobe. Love conquers all. There may be hope for the next generation yet!

Dag said...

My concern about reactionaries isn't that they're wrong about the Golden Age, but they are wrong to think History can end in utopia, and by their own doing! Wore, our intelligentsia, who consider themselves "Progressive" are reactionaries without thinking it through to realise it as such. We end up with Platonist neo-feudalist Progressives. No, it makes no sense. They refuse to get that part. That's why the people must mobilize against them in public continuously-- forever.

By the bye, thank you for putting me onto this line of reasoning over the years now. I used to be quite satisfied with literature. Now I'm terribly concerned about politics. [Yuck. But thanks anyway.]