A hearty congratulations to my Liberal friends for having just concluded their national convention in Vancouver. Delegates seem to have busied themselves with mostly sensible enthusiasms, but for one bimbo eruption that cannot pass without notice here.Party conventioneers approved an otherwise reasonable motion that would make the Canadian Human Rights Commission accountable to the House of Commons, but would grant the CHRC the power to clamp down on discrimination based on socio-economic class. Should I burn all my Billy Bragg albums now, or can I at least wait until Mike moves into Sussex Drive?
It could have been worse. Fortunately, there's not much evidence that Canada's Liberals are succumbing to the moral leprosy espoused by the bossman at Liberal International, the Ulsterman and smarm-exuder Lord Alderdice, who was on hand at the Vancouver convention to give a speech. A slippery character, he.
Alderdice is fond of jaw-jaw-not-war-war pieites, the too-liberal application of which is always the sort of fate that the Sikhs of Orakzai are now being made to suffer at the hands of the Taliban. And since the mere act of admitting that I have Liberal Party friends will ensure that I remain on the blacklist of certain Conservative Party enthusiasts, I will now affirm my usual place on the New Democratic Party's pacifist blacklist by noticing something else.
I'm happy to see that Max Dunbar has now joined Anne Applebaum, William Grimes, Adam Kirsch and others in helpfully rubbishing Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke for being an ahistorical apologia for pacifism. Baker's efforts at redeeming pacifism's ill-deserved reputation in the context of the Second World War appear to follow exactly the same lines as Mark Kurlansky's Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea, which I was happy to rubbish a while back.
George Orwell was there, of course, long before us, when he noticed that pacifism is "a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security." Will I still be able to refer approvingly to Orwell's many expressions of contempt for the bourgeoisie if the Liberal Party proceeds with granting the CHRC its greater powers?
Well, probably, if truth be told. There is a tendency, especially among Canadian free-speech bloggers - from whom I confess I have learned a thing or two - to make rather overmuch of government threats to free speech in this country, while ignoring the growing threats to free speech elsewhere. Not a few of those free-speech bloggers might wince when I say I agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Potter's take on "tax freedom day" as well.
So say it I will, and use it too as a handy opportunity to observe that yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. Here's a list of the ten most dangerous countries to live if you're a blogger, with some profiles of persecuted bloggers in those countries. Not surprisingly, the regime in Tehran is an especially vicious enemy of mainline journalists and bloggers.
I've been giving out about the persecution of trade unionists in Iran lately, and last Friday I used the opportunity of May Day to point out the inexcusably milquetoast responses to these tyrannies that have come from the trade-union aristocracy and the Left establishment in this country. As a consequence, I would be remiss if I did not also notice the brutal violence visited upon May Day protesters in the workers' paradise of Venezuela: Venezuelan police using rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons broke up a march by unions and political parties opposed to President Hugo Chavez on Friday in the latest clash between the government and critics.
Don't for a moment think I notice these kinds of things just to make enemies. Besides, I've found that for every enemy I make when I do, I usually make three friends. This is reality. Give us some room: