My letter to Pravda

This is a copy (with translation) of a letter I sent the editorial team of Pravda.ru following their publication of an article slamming Canada and the Vancouver olympics. I don't say much of substance, but here goes.

Уважаемая редакция Правда.ру,

Пишу из Канады прочитав отклики на статью Тимоти Бэнкрофта-Хинчи и комментарий В. Потапова.

Может Бэнкрофт-Хинчи действительно делает упор на факты, но его рассуждения и выводы предают фанатизм и глубокое заблуждение.

Во всех олимпиадах есть ошибки, и в Сочи их будет множество. Меня одно угнетает: Бэнкрофт-Хинчи надеется задеть комплекс глобальной неполноценности, которым похоже всё ещё страдает Россия и многие Россияне. Он выжал из этого статью и внимание, которого нарцисисту всегда недостаточно.

А вот насчёт тени США и Её Величества он вообще замахнулся. Остановлюсь на второй. Канада пришла к своей независимости без шума и без пыли, и было оставлено то, что работало, включая монархию и Генерал-Губернатора. Вместо балагана, крови, псевдо-национализма и реторики "незалежности" страна выбрала цивильный подход к вопросу. Чем ему это не понравилось?

Ваша газета достойна лучего, чем ТБХ. Он вас провёл своим незнанием, и выставил на всемирное посмешище. Жалко и страну Россию, чей стереотип комплексованнового гиганта опять-таки подтверждается никем иным, как британцем в вашей редакции через русское СМИ.

С уважением,

Лука Манфреди
Монреаль

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Dear Pravda.ru editorial team,

I am writing you after reading media reactions to TBH's article and V. Potapov's further comment. Maybe Bancroft-Hinchey relies on some facts, but his interpretations and conclusions betray fanatism and a deep ignorance. All Olympics have their mistakes, and Sochi will have plenty. One thing bothers me: Bancroft-Hinchey tries to stroke the nerve of the inferiority complex which Russia and many Russians seem afflicted by. He managed to squeeze from it an article and attention, of which a narcissist can never have enough. He really missed the point with his comment on the USA's shadow and Her Majesty. I shall expound on the latter. Canada came to her independence without noise and without dust, leaving the things that worked; these included the monarchy and the Governor-General. No brouhaha, no blood, no pseudo-nationalistic rhetoric: we chose the civilized approach to the question. What didn't suit him?

Your journal deserves better than TBH. He cheated you with his ignorance and made you a global laughing stock. I am also disappointed for Russia, whose stereotypation as a complexed giant is proved again by no other than a Brit in your midst.

Respectfully, Luca Manfredi, Montreal.

By the way, Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey is an anti-american and anti-Israeli nutjob. (here and here).

How the Euro weeds out the losers

Greece is astonishing. The country's economy is in the tank and sinking fast to the bottom, where it belongs anyway. Yet Greek unions somehow think the bonanza isn't over and have called a wave of massive strikes that have already crippled fuel supplies and will cripple the whole country beginning tomorrow.

Ports, borders, transport and tons of public services will all be shut to protest the austerity measures the Greek government is offering in exchange of an EU bailout. The economically savvy union leaders believe that imposing what amounts to an embargo on their own country will force the government to back down and return to spending lots of money.

They just don't get it, from leader to member. There's no money, their country's word on debt is junk. What is the EU doing discussing a bailout when the populace seems so oblivious to the basic rules of common sense?

Let them fail. Countries have defaulted before and survived. Greece, Italy and Spain are incapable of reforming when asked to. The purse strings need to shut tight and throw these spending junkies into the gutter. In the past the government simply leant on the Central Bank to devalue the currency, defrauding its investors.

Well, the party is over. Accountable to the ECB, Greece must now face the music. It should be made an example of, for all of Europe to see. A government's good intentions don't matter if the voters remain so obtuse. It's time for them to feel the hit. Maybe, just maybe, they will begin demanding fiscal responsibility from their rulers in the future.

No value is as traditional as liberty

Right wing candidates score brownie points by babbling about "Judeo-Christian" or "traditional" values. Sometimes they churn out the whole enchilada to the cheers of orgasmic crowds who are none the wiser that they're being had.

This reli-culous window dressing is most of the time used as a generic dividing line to isolate liberalism, secularism and Islam from the audience. Cheering said speaker is therefore absolution from all evil deeds and thoughts, comfortable in the knowledge of not being the bad guy. Bad news are in store.

The incompatibility and sometimes open contrast between the two religions are for everyone to see (but check this one out anyway). The smokescreen conceals a mixture of totalitarian agendas, ignorance or just plain naivete. How many times have we heard "traditional" and "Judeo-Christian" mentioned as arguments to ban abortion, discriminate against large swathes of the human populace, push an agenda or demean an opponent? Isn't the hawk who brags about his christian credentials guilty of the mortal sin of vanity?

The values that hold the Western world together and made it prosperous are values of respect, hard work, charity, loyalty, honesty, ambition and individualism. We can surely find them in Christian and Jewish texts, but these are eggs laid by the chicken of REASON. The same chicken that laid the whopper we call Liberty.

The same Liberty that built the free societies of today and is the founding value of the United States. The Liberty to own what is yours, to live as you please, to relate to others the way you want and to not be harmed. Advocates of traditional values who want to remove, for instance, the right of two people to enter into a contract of mutual relationship and commitment should be barely audible over the screeching of their own hypocrisy.

"Play with mortals and leave the saints alone" says the priest in Act I of La Tosca. It's time to use our God-given power of Reason to cut through the BS and stand up for those values and beliefs which really make men great. God might be glad to have time off from petty mortal politics.

Learn to hold your horses

Bringing youth movements to conferences isn't right for the reasons you might believe. CPAC speeches by the Young America's Foundation and the Young Americans for Freedom often give off a cocky and polarized vibe. Their members are awesome speakers, yet their confrontational rhetoric drowns the message in a tub of soundbites.

Young age is the right time to be a radical. In later years your peers would give you funny looks. Yet the overproof radicalism and bitter hormonal storms make a very bad cocktail one shouldn't serve to customers. Therefore the youth movements at conferences such as CPAC shouldn't just showcase their membership and vocal chords but listen and learn from the seasoned politicos.

Because real politics isn't a college pastime and needs professional attitudes. The two YAFs strive to provide those but nothing can substitute for some good old experience wisdom. And the older politicians should set a prime example.

After all, if you behave and speak childishly at 50, what do you expect the younger guys to take from it? Just a thought.

Is the conservative movement getting over its hangups?

Abortion, homosexuality, birthers, the lot: if there's a reason to squabble and polarize oneself, many conservatives are all too happy to tuck into the controversy smorgasbord.

Well, something's shifting. This year CPAC has its fair share of nuts (as FrumForum shows photographically) but this year also marks the presence of GOProud (a prominent gay Republican group) and a group advocating reducing abortions through more counselling and greater options for expecting mothers rather than bans. To many this sounds irrelevant.

The importance of these invitations is enormous. Liberty University Law School decided to boycott the conference because of GOProud and it caused a bit of a brouhaha. Yet CPAC standing their ground and telling its cosponsors they can't rule the conference is a massive blow to the radical wings of the movement.

For proof of the changing attitudes look no further than the main conference room. A Young Americans for Freedom speaker diverged from his rehearsed speech and openly attacked CPAC, GOProud and homosexuality. To many's surprise and my delight he was booed off the stage in disgrace.

What matters is the economy, the debt and foreign policy. It is time to put the uselessly divisive questions on the back burner and stop frightening independents with nuttery.

Andrew Breitbart speaks off-stage

Breitbart visited the bloggers lounge at CPAC and answered questions from bloggers. His reveations about ACORN were the main focus of the Q&A, but he did manage to mention how the movement needs to stop being defensive and challenge the left's values.

Conservative commentators and new media are often barred from the mainstream by established biases and choked by political correctness. When they have a story it is ostracized through every possible means. Yet despite this concrete ceiling (glass doesn't begin describing it) Americans decided ACORN corruption mattered when the story broke.

His message is simple: stay on course, stay united and get the information out. Bloggers and independent media are an essential resource for keeping an eye on the extreme manifestations of leftism, but they must hold the Right to the very same standards.

If we don't back our folk up in times of need and call crap by its name regardless of its colour we're hardly more than opportunistic partisan cheerleaders. The world has too many of those already.

The party faithful - who gives a s**t!

How callous do you have to be to screw your own party's base? Michael Gove, the UK Tories' schools wonk, has quite a few questions to answer.

The party has been parachuting candidates into safe seats to fill an internal quota for female, minority and gay MPs overriding local constituency associations. They are presented with a list of pre-approved candidates and asked to choose one, leaving any local challenger ostracised. This is grounds for a rebellion. Now we discover it's actually part of a planned cull of traditional Tories by the urban latte-sipping "I do my part to fight global warming" elite. The mastermind: Michael Gove.

The stealthy strategy to denude local party associations of their power to choose their candidates is a chilling read. Though the Daily Mail is, well, the Daily Mail, the document is very believable. It would certainly explain the latest candidate selection fiascos in Westminster North and South-West Norfolk. And it befits Gove's style. He is a member of Cameron's inside circle and a guaranteed cabinet shoo-in, but I get a bad vibe. 

I already criticized Gove in an earlier post. He has caused embarrassment to the Tory party in the islamic schools funding fiasco. If this document is indeed proven to be true, his head must roll faster than Louis XVI's. Otherwise David Cameron will have betrayed the trust of the very party that gave him the chance to become Prime Minister in 2010.

Thiessen at CPAC: telling the real facts about the CIA

How do you feel when you are unable to speak up for yourself? The CIA staff currently going through judicial hell at the hands of Barack Obama's minions are exactly in that situation. They are bound by dozens of agreements and rules that prevent them from telling the truth about their interrogation techniques.

Enter Mark Thiessen. When given access to all the first-hand information necessary to establish the truth he put it into a captivating book: "Courting Disaster". If the Democrats can let the cat out of the bag by revealing all techniques and telling lies, Thiessen churns out the facts that dismantle every myth we've been led to believe in.

His arguments defining torture (and why the CIA methods aren't that) are extremely compelling. Limits on what can be done to the prisoner, the efforts to fake the effect and feeling of what would otherwise be torture and the achievements of the CIA's counter-terrorism unit all testify to how the United States agencies have never tarnished their record.

Today the enemy knows our tricks. We have to outsource interrogation to countries which employ the darkest methods. The information flow has slowed to a trickle, all because the liberals wanted to feel good about themselves. Such folly for so little.

CPAC stands for "let's talk"

What do tea parties, the NRA, pro-life groups and Ron Paul have in common? They all come to CPAC.

Knowing that a whole movement can come together for a big conserva-fest is always heartening, as meeting and speaking are the obvious first steps to building a coalition that can win, especially in first-past-the-post systems. Unlike CNN's interpretation (conservatives agreeing with conservatives) CPAC goes well beyond the main ballroom speeches, applause and standing ovations. As with a party conference it's the fringe events and networking that count.

Which is exactly why movements that have many souls need get-togethers like CPAC desperately. How can they otherwise present a united front at election time? This year there's an even greater incentive to meet and talk: the tea partiers. This phenomenon is a gigantic pool of new voters. They are potentially Republican but will not be toyed with. CPAC and similar conferences are the ideal way for them to showcase their views and dedication without adopting a narrow party brand. What's better: a reception with a party apparatchik or talking to hundreds of ordinary people?

Politics isn't all soundbites and bigwigs. CPAC might mot set the party course, but it's sure a great indicator of where the tide is going. That, for a political party, is a very good asset.

Rights and Democracy shutters its Geneva shop for good

In what is my last post on the Rights and Democracy saga for a while, I'd like to simply say a few words now that the Geneva office has been officially shut, according to the Star.

The whole affair stinks to high heaven. Somebody burgled an office in a secure building in broad daylight. The right hand doesn't seem to know what the left hand is doing. The Government and its appointees to the Board seem to have stirred up a sh*tstorm of epic proportions.

Which brings me to my main question: why bother in the first place? It it the duty of the Canadian government to go out into the world preaching human rights and democracy through a bespoke agency paid out of the tax purse? Because I seriously never heard of the shop until the lid blew.

I don't know what the use of R&D is or was. Yet I struggle to identify an area where they have made a difference. They might have had an influence in Haiti where they have a huge office, but their Afghan office hasn't prevented the country from slipping into the tin-pot near-dictatorship category.

Don't get me wrong, we have to strive for human rights to be respected worldwide and democracy to take hold in more countries. I don't think an outlet such as R&D is the best way to achieve it. If a government has these objectives in mind, it should have the balls to speak with own mouth and act directly in its own name.