Time Immortal

“Be vocal. Vote local.” — a new campaign slogan that Liberal Party of Canada candidate Marc Godbout has deployed on his election signs. And he’s evidently not the first Liberal candidate to do so.

The slogan has an unmistakable spin. People who might vote Liberal should not think about Stephane Dion or the rest of the national team. They’re irrelevant. They won’t be around by Halloween. So if a voter is thinking of not voting Liberal because of Stephane Dion, think again, because he won’t be a problem for much longer.

That can’t be a good sign.

I’ve had conversations with my wife that basically involve us saying this sort of thing to each other:

Disgusting. The gang-RAPE of a young girl is euphemized beyond recognition, till it sounds as if she merely had her pigtails pulled in the schoolyard. Her RAPE is videotaped and broadcast, further humiliating her. And her RAPISTS get house arrest and counseling? Heck, why don’t they just get a slap on the back from the boys club, and a cool “Atta boy!”?

Justice James Keaney must not have children, or must be a bit of a sadist himself, to take this so lightly. A “one-time error in judgment”?? A girl was gang-RAPED! He is neither “Honourable” nor “Just” for these actions he has taken in punishing RAPISTS. And for the Crown to be party to this sentencing request means that this girl never had anyone on her side.

The law is an ass if we have asses practicing it. Whatever happened to lynchings, anyway?

A group of boys gang-rape a girl, record the video of the act on a cell phone, and show the video around…and they get house arrest, 21-month conditional sentences, and a requirement to attend counselling? In two years’ time, they’ll all essentially be free? This is the excuse of a justice system that we have in Canada?

Why do these young men still have penises? Why has the state not re-possessed their genitals for their gross sadism in the use thereof?

Seriously! Fix ‘em all…like the pigs that they are.

This doesn’t actually come as a surprise to me, just from what I’ve seen being in the hospital all the times I’ve gone to pick Grace up from work.

But wait, it gets worse:

Just 28 per cent of doctors at 10 hospitals washed their hands between patients, Ontario’s auditor general says in a special report into deadly outbreaks of hospital superbugs like C. difficile.

And that was an improvement from a starting rate of 18 per cent because it came at the end of a recent pilot project to encourage handwashing in efforts to cut infection and death rates.

“The doctors were the lowest,” Auditor General James McCarter said yesterday, noting the handwashing rate for nurses rose to 60 per cent from 44.

Yeeeikes.

Just don’t get sick, O Reader. And if you do get sick, don’t get sick in a “need to be hospitalized” way. And if you do get sick in a “need to be hospitalized” way, try not to get sick in a “need to have surgery” way.

And if you need surgery: bring a gift of soap for your surgeon.

After being branded as an anti-Semite and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, former Liberal Party of Canada candidate Lesley Hughes is back in the news (or rather: back on the blogs) in an attempt to deny the claims made against her.

The Canadian Jewish Congress seems to have assumed that I am one of those who subscribe to a bizarre conspiracy theory that the world’s Jews were responsible for 9-11, a ludicrous idea I have never supported. As a result of the Congress’s assumption, I have been slandered as an odious anti-Semite, a claim accepted by the prime minister, by the leader of the opposition, and the nation’s media. I have also been labelled an extremist nutbar who has promoted, rather than investigated, the possibility that 9-11 was an inside job.

It should be noted that it was the Liberal Party itself which was the first to really label Hughes’ claims as anti-Semitic in nature, and who went to the CJC with them. Once that happened, the outcome was pretty much assuredly not going to be in Hughes’ favour.

Jay Currie, who basically broke and ran with this story, has this to add:

That said, it was not just a single article. You appeared with Troothers on a number of public occasions. Given that your name appears in the Troother’s publicity material it is a pretty clear that you have gone beyond the “just asking questions” stage. Something which, frankly, needed to be exposed to the voters of Kildonan-St. Paul.

There is a not-all-that-fine line between “investigating the possibility that 9-11 was an inside job” and bending/distorting extant facts to fit a narrative that assumes, from the get-go, that it was. Hughes’ writings fell, I think, into the latter category.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May suggests livening up the upcoming leaders’ debates, although apparently her “suite of advisors” has advised against “bringing some wine and glasses to the French debate.”

No word on whether beer is a no-go.

Jay Currie writes in with a comment about this article.

My born again virginity will come as a bit of a surprise to my three boys…

These guys can’t even be funny without being cliched.

Jay

That’s one other thing that I didn’t bother to mention in my article, but which is worth commenting on, because the comments of Scott Reid and Andrew Potter demonstrate that they — and much of the media, of which they are representative — are rather alarmingly out of touch with the concept of blogging, its fast pace, and its methods.

The dismissal of bloggers as basement-dwelling, laptop-wielding, mouth-breathing virgins is just a charicature, and then not a very accurate one. One recalls how Andrew Coyne live-blogged the Mark Steyn/Maclean’s “trial” in front of the BCHRT — at times from his BlackBerry (I also submit that Coyne is probably not a “mouth breather,” likely not a “basement dweller,” and almost assuredly not a “virgin”). My own blog, in like manner to Twitter, is set up to receive blog posts from my cell phone, just in case I’m on the road and have something to post. As yet, that hasn’t happened…but hey, I was a Scout: Be Prepared! (Shut up, Scar from The Lion King…)

Yes, many bloggers use their laptops, but not all of them do. As mentioned, I do about 90% of my blogging from a desktop PC (and then one that is not situated in a basement). Realistically, I do almost all of my blogging from whatever computer my USB key full of portable applications is plugged into, be that a laptop or a desktop.

Other bloggers I know use email to post messages to their sites (I do that at times as well), and it’s even possible to blog from one’s iPod these days, what with the advent of the Web-capable iPod Touch (the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The iPhone“). If one has a cell phone, one can blog, from anywhere one gets reception…and many people do just that. Hence mo-blogging plugins for e.g. Wordpress. Hence Twitter.

Speaking of iPods:

And then we get into the business side of things. Some bloggers can almost live off of the money they bring in due to advertising on their blogs (sadly, I do not fit into this category either), and many have at least turned their site into a source of supplemental revenue. That takes at least a measure of business savvy. Companies like Amazon.com add to a blogger’s ability to generate revenue, by offering “affiliate”-type programs which award revenue-generating links with a percentage commission of resultant sales.

In short, blogging is not the realm of pimply-faced basement dwellers; the most successful bloggers are, in many respects, the exact inverse of that sort of person. And more generally, bloggers are “everymen” (and “everywomen”). They are married…or single. They live alone…or with someone. That someone might be their parents, but is more likely a roommate, or a spouse. They might use a laptop…or they might use any other piece of Web-enabled technology. They might be funny…or serious. They might have kids…or not. They might be virgins…but most probably aren’t. They might be religious…or they might not be. If they met each other on the street, they’d probably strike each other as…normal people, going about their respective lives. They might hit it off and have a beer, or they might not ever notice each other at all.

I think it’s these last points that really terrify the media, that scare the likes of Reid and Potter. In their day, these men would have been the voices of national opinion, and would have been the people to whom others looked when attempting to form their own opinions. When all there was to spread the news was the print media, radio, and television (all fields which it is not easy to get into), such men as Potter and Reid would have been near-kings, and powerful to a certain extent.

Now?

Well…not so much. Now anybody who wants to can articulate his or her opinion and have that opinion read by people as far as half a world away. (Time Immortal’s top five visiting countries are, in order, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Sweden.) And other people, who agree or disagree with that opinion, can respond, sharing their agreement or disagreement with the writer through the use of comments forms or contact pages. Massive, sweeping dialogues can occur, opinions can be formed, shared, dissected, and re-shaped, and real-world changes can occur…without anyone having to do anything so old-fashioned as picking up a newspaper, reading an article therein, and firing off a letter to the editor.

And that, I think, must just burn Andrew Potter’s ass.

But he doesn’t understand this “new media.” And when he tries to insult it, he comes off sounding…well…every bit as lame and as old-fashioned as many bloggers tend to think that the print media actually is.

So sayeth Andrew Potter, national editor of the Ottawa Citizen, and Scott Reid, political speechwriter. Now, I’m sure this stunning revelation of the true nature of bloggers comes as news to, respectively, my nose, my apartment, and my 36.5-weeks pregnant wife…but members of the liberal media said it, so it must be true!

Here’s Andrew Potter, getting things going:

AP: What worries me, though, is that we’re seeing the “democratization” of politics, in the most literal sense of the word: The people — the great idiocratic mass of mouth-breathers out there frantically swiping the drool off their keyboards as they Google around for “dirt” — are running the campaigns now. There aren’t war rooms anymore, directed by parties with smart, educated, responsible adults in charge — it’s Hobbes’ state of nature as imagined by Mike Judge.

To which, bold as brass, Scott Reid — yes, that one, Mr. “Beer and Popcorn” himself — replied:

SR: I actually think it’s A-OK for the media to maintain a few measly standards that separate them from the likes of ‘chubbylover69′ and the rest of the self-defined blogsphere press gallery. One of my pet peeves is the habit of mainstream media ‘reporting’ on bloggers who have posted rumours without source or sense of motivation. The Internet is a wonderful thing for people like me (newshounds with a gambling addiction), but that doesn’t excuse the mainstream media from doing their jobs any more than it excuses Jack Layton’s vetting squad from doing theirs.

That reminds me: what are the three things you need to be a blogger? Your laptop. Your basement. And your virginity.

Note: this also comes as news to my desktop PC, from which I do 90% of my blogging.

It’s at once interesting and alarming to see media mucky-mucks being so bald-faced and open in their contempt for the average citizen and his/her ability to articulate personal opinion freely and openly. It’s at once interesting and alarming to see media mucky-mucks so utterly dead-set against the very idea that an average citizen should have any say or influence over the shape of policy, or any contribution to national opinion. The disconnect from reality that so infests the mindset of the average media flunkie is…profound.

And it should be noted that seeing that contempt here, displayed plain as day, can only serve to embolden the blogosphere that these media types so heartily detest. If only to spite them, bloggers will not shut up.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!