Stephen Roney's Blog, page 117
September 24, 2022
Now This Is Interesting
Why the Jews?
The CBC of course uses the death of Queen Elizabeth as an opportunity to slam the British and the monarchy. Just as Easter is always an occasion to question the divinity of Christ.
Both speakers simply assert without argument that empire was a matter of “looting and plundering” the colonies. ”Forty-five trillion dollars of wealth stolen just from the Asian subcontinent.” Even defenders of the monarchy and the British are inclined to argue only that the indecencies of the Empire were long ago.
Yet this is a point that needs to be established. Was government by the British more costly to the colonials than local government? There is no reason to assume so. In fact, historians often suggest that the reason the British, and other European, empires broke up after the Second World War was that the European countries could no longer afford them. They were being subsidized, then.
Were local industries suppressed? India commanded a larger portion of world GDP under the Raj than it did for many decades after independence. That does not sound like a suppression of local industry.
Of course, the issue of slavery is raised. Yet, as Don Lemon learned in a recent interview, if slavery is the premise, it is probably the British who deserve reparations. Slavery was universal. Britain was among the first nations to abolish it, they ended it in all their possessions, and they spent a great deal to end the practice everywhere.
The CBC interviewee actually blames Britain for ending the slave trade, on the grounds that they paid for the slaves’ freedom, instead of paying the slaves.
We have probably all had ancestors who were slaves, and ancestors who were slavers. Who pays whom? The one group who seem more deserving than the rest of us are the British, who ended slavery, fought the slave trade worldwide, and were still paying to end slavery as recently as 2015. That means most Britons still living today.
Surely it is they who deserve reparations.
The interviewer suggests the Koh-I-Noor diamond should be returned “either to India or to South Africa.” But a half-dozen countries in total claim the diamond. They all say it was stolen from them by one of the others. So whom to “give it back” to? England obtained it by a peace treaty, in return for other concessions. If it is returned to India, other elements of that treaty must properly also be renegotiated. In effect, then, it must be bought back. And what if some other country wants to offer Britain more for it?
The interviewee even blames the British Empire for the Caribbean’s sovereign debts, and for climate change.
I doubt any of that sovereign debt was racked up by the colonial authorities. I doubt the British Empire had much effect on greenhouse gases today.
It all reminds me of an old Yiddish joke. A couple of Nazis stop a Jew in the street, and challenge him.
“Who is responsible for Germany’s problems?”
The Jew knows they want an excuse for a beating.
“The Jews,” he answers. “And the bicycle riders.”
“Why the bicycle riders?”
“Why the Jews?”
The answer is simple: because, like the British, they are envied.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.September 23, 2022
Renazification
Help me out here, gang.
Is it just me, or is Canada rapidly turning into not just a Fascist, but a Nazi hellhole?
Help me out here, gang.Is it just me, or is Canada rapid...
Help me out here, gang.
Is it just me, or is Canada rapidly turning into not just a Fascist, but a Nazi hellhole?
Protests in Iran
More.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1572350814882267137
https://twitter.com/i/status/1572716326535462913
Digging for Mass Graves
Kamloops Residential SchoolHere’s a website by a landscape engineer who has dug into the Kamloops claims of a mass grave, so to speak.
Indigenous “oral histories” are necessarily no more reliable than urban legends. That is what they are. As urban legends, they tend towards the genre of horror. They reveal more of human psychology than history.
The "mass graves" detected by surface radar are probably excavations for an old septic tank.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
September 22, 2022
Silver Linings Shining Through
I have felt for some time, intuitively, that we are on the cusp of something this fall; that the old order is passing away. Not just fading, but about to collapse.
I see more signs of this in the day’s news.
Things are getting hot in Iran. The trigger was the death of a young woman in police custody.
One would not normally expect such an event to lead to mass protests; a lot of young people have died suddenly and mysteriously of late. That it has shows the people of Iran were tinder waiting for a match. This might be the end of that oligarchic regime.
In response to Putin’s mobilization of, at last report, one million conscripts, there is also turmoil in the streets of Russia. There are reports of long lineups at the borders, and overbooked flights out. This might be the end of that oligarchy as well.
American generals interviewed seem to agree that this call up sounds like desperation, that it is unlikely to turn things around in Ukraine, but carries huge domestic risks.
If the people are in the streets in Russia and Iran, and especially if one of those governments goes down, it is likely in this globalized world for the protests to spread. The next likely candidate is China, where people have been growing restive and economically desperate.
In Canada, the Twitter hashtag #TrudeauMustGo is becoming a phenomenon reminiscent of the Freedom Convoy. It seems to have caught on with the public, with over half a million Canadians at last count joining in. They—we--post a short bio and demand Trudeau’s resignation for calling us misogynists, racists, and the like.
If only half a million is not enough to turn out a government, Canadians value their social peace and quiet. If the message gets out that a large body of their fellow citizens are outraged by Trudeau, and they all have friendly, human faces, the likely conclusion in the minds of the Canadian majority is that, for social peace, Trudeau must indeed go. The unrest is not the fault of some deplorable “fringe minority.” These are ordinary, honest neighbours.
One of them is even Trudeau's half-brother.
I feel that things are moving fast. The government of Canada may also be gone soon. Nanos says recent polls show the NDP sucking support from the Liberals, This gives the Dippers a motive to pull the plug on the minority government. They can increase their seat total. At the same time, a closer split between Liberals and NDP is likely to throw seats to the Conservatives.
Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
September 21, 2022
Trudeau Must Go
I believe in human rights, including the right to control one's own body. This makes me, I am told, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and a racist. I may not even have a right to occupy space. #TrudeauMustGo
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
Canadian Rhapsody
https://twitter.com/i/status/1572660992005259264
Unfair and Unbalanced
Friend Xerxes laments the decline in journalistic ethics since the dawn of Fox News and talk radio. We are now increasingly vulnerable to “misinformation.”
But the problem with journalistic ethics does not start with Fox News. The original slogans of Fox News were “Fair and balanced,” and “We report—you decide.” They obviously resonated with the public; Fox rocketed to news dominance. Clearly, there was already a public perception that the media were biased. Fox was the antidote.
Fox has dropped these slogans, as more of its schedule has been taken up by commentary. But commentary is not supposed to be neutral—the opinion is why you watch. Xerxes is similarly wrong to accuse “talk radio” of bias. The shows we call “talk radio” are opinion shows, not news. The news side is still, at Fox, pretty unbiased. The same cannot be said of the “legacy media.”
News outlets must decide what to report. The legacy media tend not to report anything they don’t like politically. Even back in the 1980’s, I noticed that whenever the Toronto Star ran a report of a murder, and the suspect was not “white,” no race was mentioned. If, on the other hand, it was a “Caucasian male,” that was always reported.
I recall a few years ago, a pro-life demonstration in Washington that set new records for attendance. It was not reported anywhere I could find in the legacy media.
The “Freedom Convoy” seemed to most of us to come out of the blue—because the media was not reporting on it as it gathered.
The bias is worse than this.
In journalism school, you are told that, whenever you report on a controversy, you quote prominent spokespeople on both sides of the issue.
The legacy media almost never to do this anymore. You never hear two sides on issues like the climate debate, or the efficacy of ivermectin for covid, or the efficacy of wearing masks, or the possible risks of the vaccines, or anything involving Donald Trump, and so on. An obvious breach of ethics.
In journalism school, you are also told to check every fact with three independent sources. Legacy media never seems to check a fact any more if it supports the “narrative.” Things are published as fact that a simply Google search could disprove. It is charity to see this as mere negligence. One example: the Covington kids.
An egregious current example: media always refer to the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa as an “illegal occupation.” I even saw an anchor correct an interviewee who referred to it only as a protest.
In fact, whether it was illegal has not yet been determined in court.
Properly speaking, the media should probably be sued for this. Perhaps, in the fallout, if it is ruled to have been legal, they will be.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
