Tag Archives: Liberty

Free speech: Mark Steyn radio interview and Ezra Levant radio debate!

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Blue Like You! Thanks for the link Joanne!

Canadian/American free speech activist Mark Steyn on the line with Chicago radio show host Milt Rosenberg. Commercial free!

Extension 720 – Mark Steyn – June 1, 2009

URL : http://www.wgnradio.com/media/mp3file/2009-06/47337079.mp3

Duration : 1 hours 29 mins 26 secs

He re-caps the history and outcome of his trial in Canada for offending Muslims, and goes on to discuss his previous book “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It” and his new book “Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West“. He reviews the state of free speech, Western Civilization, single-payer health care, welfare, anti-Western attitudes in education, and the 2008 election results.

BONUS

Ezra Levant reports on his debate against secular-leftist professor Lucie Lamarche on CBC radio. Note that the start time is 1:12 into the show. Press pause, let the clip buffer for a few minutes, then drag the slider to the 1:12 position.

Last Sunday I was on Michael Enright’s CBC radio show, The Sunday Edition, debating human rights commissions along with Keith Martin, the Liberal MP, and a nutty professor called Lucie Lamarche.

You can listen to the show here — it’s the May 31 edition. The debate starts at about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the show.

[Lamarche] loses her grip at 1:25 when Enright challenged her on the lack of due process and natural justice in HRCs. Her first response is to dismiss the horrors of HRCs as my own personal story. When I pushed back, citing the very section of the Alberta act that allows warrantless search and seizures, and pointing out that targets of HRCs don’t get legal aid, she just collapsed, saying that “discrimination is about attitudes… and transformation. It’s not only about due process.”

Oh. So to hell with the law or fairness. Guys like me need to have our attitudes transformed. It’s not law. It’s brutal politics pretending to be the law.

I like this Lucie Lamarche — for her honesty.

After a few minutes of her reading her talking points — likely authored by the battallion of PR flacks at the Canadian Human Rights Commission — she just stops pretending that HRCs are about justice. They’re about politics and propaganda — making political dissidents like me conform to the “official line”. And the high costs? That’s just an additional punishment for our thought crimes.

Seriously: when she ran out of her prepared talking points, she said what she truly believed: this was about transforming attitudes.

Ezra also hints at which kind of people fight back to defend human rights, and what kind of people destroy human rights:

Readers, do you think that Orwell or Solzhenitsyn would call Lamarche a defender of human rights, or a destroyer of them?

Do you think that giving the state the power to transform your attitudes is a protection of your freedoms, or an abridgement of them?

Do you think that Lucie Lamarche follows in the footsteps of dissidents who challenged the conventional wisdom, like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi — or is she a descendant of the censors and bullies who tried to shut those two up?

Do not miss this debate podcast! Ezra is on fire!

And remember: we know that the secular-left believes in pounding down the good and lifting up the evil, so that moral judgments become impossible and no one feels badly for being morally evil. Remember Evan Sayet’s explanation for how progressives think: moral equivalence, postmodernism and moral relativism. And atheists do not have the ability to resist Islamo-fascism: they want to be happy, not to be heroes.

Obama’s corporate tax hike would cause Microsoft to outsource jobs

This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)

Are things beginning to turn around in Alberta?

Political Map of Canada
Political Map of Canada

I blogged before about the California school district that is indoctrinating 5-year olds with homosexual propaganda in kindergarten. Well, Canada had a similar problem in the province of British Columbia, where the entire curriculum was going to be designed by gay activists. Now, you might think that the Canadians would be a lot more leftist on such issues, you’d be wrong.

Alberta has a bill in the works to give rights to parents to opt out of programs like this.

Check out this story from the Globe and Mail. (H/T My friend Andrew)

Bill 44, which proposes amendments to Alberta’s Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act, contains two significant changes. The first adds sexual orientation to proscribed grounds of discrimination. This would bring Alberta’s human rights legislation into conformity with a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that “read in” sexual orientation after it had been deliberately omitted three times by the Legislative Assembly in Edmonton. The amendment has been widely praised.

Section 11 of the new act is more controversial. It requires that parents be notified whenever instructional materials are taught dealing “explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” If parents object in writing, the student can be excused from class.

According to Rob Anderson, Conservative MLA from Airdrie-Chestermere, a riding just north of Calgary, Bill 44 “is one of the most positive and meaningful advances for human rights that this province and this country has seen for many years.” Specifically, he explained, the “parental rights clause” enshrines Article 26 (3) of the United Nations universal declaration of human rights: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Premier Ed Stelmach added that his government “supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education.”

This article was written by a political science professor at the University of Calgary, which is the school where their prime minister Stephen Harper got both his degrees in economics. They are known for their conservative views. They even have a special name: the “Calgary School” of economics, just like you might talk about the “Chicago School” and the “Austrian School”. Awesome!

Here’s a letter to the editor from a University of Lethbridge (Alberta) professor that I found in the National Post, (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

Bill 44 is a response to a B. C. Human Rights Tribunal decision mandating two gay activists to commandeer the Ministry of Education in that province to impose a “social justice” course into the curriculum. Parents’ rights, never mind those of local school boards, were overridden.

The B. C. example and Alberta’s Bill 44 indicate how HRCs have poisoned politics in those two provinces.

Now everyone, not just Christian preachers, has to worry about getting dragged before an HRC. A former chairman of the Calgary School Board once proclaimed the state “owns” children who must be liberated from the supposedly claustrophobic viewpoints of their parents. This goes to show how little this debate has to do with promoting critical thinking or cosmopolitanism, as the Post’s article suggests.

If there is an upside to this, perhaps now there will be sufficient support across the political spectrum to dismantle the HRCs.

Go Canada, eh?