The Recruiting Animal

Experience Changes People

Ex-hostage no longer wants to negotiate with armed opposition.

"I was in chains all the time, 24 hours a day, for three years," she said. "I tried to wear those chains with dignity, even if I felt that it was unbearable."

Asked if she had been tortured, she said, "Yes, yes," and said her captors had fallen into "diabolical behaviour," adding: "It was so monstrous I think they themselves were disgusted."

Some Colombians who recalled the centre-left politician's openness to negotiating with those same rebels during her campaign against Uribe were stunned to hear her praise his 2006 re-election as "very good for Colombia."
-- Associated Press, Toronto Star

Praise For Sarkozy

If anyone had suggested two years ago that France would elect a pro-Israel, Pro-American president, he would have been passed off as wildly out of touch with French sentiment.
-- The Augean Stables

I guess we were wrong about what lots of French people were thinking.
We were wrong. Get it?

Joe Wilson Attacks Obama

Valerie Plame's husband criticizes Barack Obama for falsely accusing Hillary of voting for the war in Iraq.

She supported the president's initiative to go to the UN to get the international community to disarm Saddam in a manner "consistent with the resolutions passed at the time of the first Gulf War."

No one knew how little remained of Saddam's WMD arsenal and after 9/11 it was not reasonable to ignore the issue. Tough diplomacy with the threat of military action got Saddam to readmit the inspectors.

But no one in Congress had the opportunity to oppose the president's decision to invade.

On the other hand, "Obama's long and close relationship with the anti-American hate-monger Wright" and "his careless approach to Iraq" indicates that he does not have the experience and judgement to be president at this time.

I Don't Like Royson James

Someone I respect told me that Royson James of The Toronto Star is a really nice guy and I believe that he has a nice personality. In terms of what he writes, however, he is a misleader of our local community. This fellow is so biased that he tends to obscure the truth, willfully. Take his column today in which he tries to equate Jeremiah Wright and Martin Luther King.

King's rhetoric and mission strongly offended the people of his time, black and white. If YouTube were around in the 1960s it is a sure bet that King would have been branded, like Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, a hate monger.

It's true that King opposed the war in Vietnam and criticized American foreign policy. But that's not surprising; he was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, a pacifist. And, for the same reason, when it came to racial politics, he was an outstanding exponent of equality and harmony.

Why Voters Make Bad Choices

Source: The Economist

1. Anti-Market Bias: People do not understand how the pursuit of private profits often yields public benefits

2. Anti-Foreign Bias: They underestimate the benefits of interactions with foreigners

3. Make-Work Bias: They equate prosperity with employment rather than production

4. Bias For Pessimism: They think economic conditions are worse than they are

Dummy Of The Day

Yeah, it's off topic but I couldn't resist this:

In your leader you describe Cuba as "undemocratic", but this is simply not true. It does not have a multiparty democracy like we do, but there are other kinds of democracy outside that narrow definition.
-- Mary M. Scott, Aberdeen, Scotland, Letter to The Guardian

Norm replies:

It is, of course, true that there are forms of democracy internal to single organizations, and that some organizations are democratically healthier than others, allowing for more debate, internal contestation and so forth.

But... The option of exiting and legally contesting a party's progammes and policies from outside is an indispensable democratic resource.

Hey, Mary, you dope, Fidel promised to restore the democratic constitution when he came to power, not create a one-party state. How many university professors have promoted phony democracies to their naive students? Norm is a Marxist and a university prof but that's something that he doesn't do.

Politics

Bad Communications Management

On December 10, 2007, a 16 year old girl was murdered by her father in Mississauga, a city on the outskirts of Toronto. Her family did not approve of her preference for modern Canadian clothing and her refusal to wear the headscarf.

Friction between immigrant parents from South Asia and their Canadian children is not, it seems, uncommon but it is extremely rare for it to end in this kind of violence. Therefore, I can understand the concern of the broader community that blame for the incident is not pinned on them.

All the same, I found this official communication particularly distasteful.

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

This guy is known for putting his foot in his mouth but seems to have a permanent hold on his position. His local enemy smacks his views down here.

Another organization also tries to deflect unfair blame for the murder by condemning domestic violence in all Canadian communities rather than the one in which it occurred.

This attempt to shift the blame elsewhere is also distasteful as the attack was a response by a member of that community to a rejection of its customs and reflected tensions that are not uncommon, again, in that community in particular.

Tony Blair Explains Iraq

A great article by David Aaronovitch about how and why Britain went to war.

Bush had phoned Blair two days earlier to tell him that Britain could stand aside if it meant saving Blair’s premiership. “I said rather than lose your Government,” Bush told me, “be passive, you know we’ll go without you if need be.”

Blair refused. I asked him why. His answer was impassioned. “Because I think this is the most fundamental struggle of our time and there is only one place to be which is in the thick of it and trying to sort it out.”

"If there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”

Hat Tip: normblog

Idiot Says No Halloween

It's another example of US terror. Here