Sunday, April 22, 2007

Raising the honesty bar, Steve Janke style.


Apparently, we have a definition:

Mark Holland has two statements on his website -- each depicts a different set of events. One must be a lie.

OK, then ... making two logically irreconcilable statements is officially a "lie."

Take it away, readers.

2 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

He would only notice logically irreconcilable statements when it comes to people he needs to smear?

I don't know. And I'm not going over there to find out.

Scotian said...

I stopped reading Janke's site after his crusade against an American anti-war activist opposing a war that Canada was not a participant in (sorry, I consider when we are formally involved as the standard and not the fact we have detached Canadian soldiers in American units in Iraq sufficient to claim we are in that war) once it got to the point of a true witch-hunt. He was trying to find anything, no matter how obscure, irrelevant and unconfirmed it was to smear this woman's name. Now while I personally don't really care one way or the other about Sheehan, she is an American with all the rights that entails (or used to before Bushco anyway) whose son was killed in this war exercising her rights as an American to protest the war which took the life of her son. The way that was attacked not just by American conservatives (which I would expect and find entirely understandable) but by Canadian Conservatives like Janke (which made little to no sense, especially given the dozens of posts and near total monofocus on her during his peak) underscored for me just how delusional and how willing they are to attack any voice that dares challenge their standard bearers.

Indeed, it is the way the Canadian Conservative blogosphere carries so much water and shows such open and unquestioning admiration for the Bush/GOP that leaves them fairly open to the accusation of being too close to Bush in their thinking. You cannot claim to respect and admire the policies of a President, claim these are the ways Canada needs to go, and then try to claim that any bringing up of Bush is a baseless smear by critics of the CPC and its online cheerleaders the BTs to falsely link them together.

My problems with modern conservativism in NA is how disconnected from reality they are, how willing they are to employ the politics of personal destruction, and most worrisome is how they perceive their political opposition not as fellow citizens with a different opinion on how things should be done but a traitorous enemy out to destroy the nation requiring a total war approach to fight them with. That kind of contempt for all citizens that do not acknowledge your own side as the correct/"right" one strikes me as way Way WAY too close to what we once opposed in the USSR, and to see NA conservatives in that mold is truly disconcerting after all their red bashing over the last half century or so. Which of course Harper and the CPCers are replicating in this country with their binary rhetoric which always comes down to a false choice, either you support the CPC government’s approach or you are aiding the enemy/out to destroy the country/etc. That mentality is inherently destructive to any democratic society regardless of their mechanism of government IMHO, and will only lead to worse and more closed/undemocratic societies.

This is also why I am in such opposition to the Layton NDP. If they cannot understand the dangers of the Harper CPC not just to the political chances of the various opposition parties but to the survival of this nation then they are unqualified to govern in my view. If they do recognize the threat but place the partisan interests of increasing their seats by being more concerned with defeating Libs than CPCers despite the risks a CPC majority entails (or even extended CPC minority for that matter) then they have shown they place party before country which is equally disqualifying for government IMHO. Not that NDPers will see it that way as I have found every time I make such a comment and get attacked for it by NDP partisans. I will never understand the mentality that can be a true party partisan regardless of what party is being discussed, all are flawed, all will go though good and bad periods regarding internal integrity/corruption. This is why I could not be the Liberal or PCPC partisan my political mentors growing up had hoped they could make me into. I choose each time on the current political environment, the available choices and what I see as the primary issues of the day and which leader I think will do the best for this country. These days that is Dion, Harper is out, Layton is out, and the rest don't have a chance at government (Layton's being slim but not impossible as 1990 in Ontario reminds us of).