matt damon is a radical leftist who thinks bo is not leftwing enough. he stars in a new anti american Bush basing movie. I will not be attending. REVIEW: Matt Damon & Paul Greengrass Get Their HateAmerica On In ‘Green Zone’by John NolteThe poetic irony of the delayed release of the shaky-cammed Hollywood temper tantrum known as “Green Zone” couldn’t be sweeter. Yes, the very same week our Iraqi allies held a historic election that ended up much more successful than we could have ever hoped, our own Hollywood swoops in with a piece of cinematic sour grapes in the frantic, desperate hope of rewriting the history of a war they were so eager for us to lose. After making the last two “Bourne” films together, director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon have teamed up again in...
petrocan was a horrible marxist trudeau grit idea. It cost billions of dollars, inflated prices were paid for petro fina and I have long suspected grit cronies made a pretty pennu on these deals. It helped alienate the west for a generation. Thank goodness this vile statist experiment is now fully over.Don Martin: Petro-Can's legacy still haunts the westPosted: March 23, 2009, 9:23 PM by Ron NurwisahDon Martin, Canadian politicsIt’s always stood for much more than a gas pump, car wash or souvenir Olympic torch relay glass. The government-created oil giant of 1975 was Liberal ideology at its most interventionist, vilified as the unfair advantage invading an Alberta oil patch where Petro-Canada stood for “Pierre Elliott Trudeau Rips Off Canada.” Its headquarters, which towered over a...
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The Liberals have lost their "centre-right" and are therefore in deep, deep trouble: [T]he party that has been so skillful at complementing its progressive arm with a business side appears to be flying on one wing these days. The so-called natural governing party of old has allowed itself to be characterized as just one of a cluster of parties on the left of the political spectrum, competing for limited votes. In the second week of the election campaign, the Liberals who slew the deficit in the mid-1990s are portrayed by their political opponents and commentators alike as a risky...
privately owned farms produce more food. The big state collective farms in Cuba are an utter failure. Maybe the butcher mugabe should talk to raoul. marxism is a failure.Since the 1959 revolution, some Cubans have been allowed to run small family farms. But most agriculture has been placed in the hands of large, state-owned enterprises.Our correspondent says these have proved highly inefficient - half the land is unused and today Cuba imports more than half its needs. Rising world food prices will cost the country an extra $1bn this year.The presidential decree was published in the country's Communist Party newspaper, Granma....
Last fall I wrote a short article that appeared in the Canadian Student Review on the erosion of economic and political liberalism in Venezuela, and how little Chavez had actually achieved in terms of poverty reduction, equality, and quality of life indicators.Despite an attempt to appeal to both critics and supporters of Chavez, one letter writer felt I was being unfair to the Venezuelan leader. As is customary, I was given the opportunity to respond to his arguments. I'll let you be the judge (it's probably best to read the original article first to get the proper context):The poor and working class of Venezuela have enjoyed noteworthy increases in living standards, especially in the areas of housing, health care, education (especially literacy), and workers’ rights, over the past ten...
The butcher mugabe fooled many for years. he pretended he wanted peace and democracy. he never fooled Ian Smith, who was wrong on so much he understood the true nature of this marxist thug. A great piece by Dan Bjarnason in the Post.Ian Smith would buy into none of this. He was the man who had illegally declared independence from Britain in 1965 rather than accept majority rule (a condition that the British had insisted on). He doubted that Mugabe's love-in would ever have real substance.But he now accepted that he'd lost the war. (Smith once said there will "never be majority rule in Rhodesia in a thousand years." It was a short thousand years.) And he wished his new country well.He ran in the new elections, winning a seat in Parliament -- and remained in the country, operating his farm...
An interesting editorial in the Post. It seems the dmes have strict instructions to be green and have only locally grown food etc at their Denver convention. All of that is pretty hard in a cold place like Colorado (or much of Canada). It once agin shows one ignores market forces at one's peril.The new hordes of green-eating advocates are merely reviving an old and well-known problem in a new form. In the 1920s, the economist Ludwig von Mises argued that rational economic production was impossible under socialism: Denied the price signals that give social needs and preferences an implicit hand in every decision a capitalist entrepreneur makes, a state planner could never hope to predict demand and make informed choices. The debate over economic calculation carried on for decades, but in...
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Terrence Corcoran looks beyond the sound bytes and exposes the recent report from statscan as disingenious to say the least. Why does statscan report things in this way? It is more leftist bias. statscan wants everyone to earn the same amount. If you are a new immigrant or the CEO of a major corporation, you should be earning the same amount of money. God forbid you prosper by your hard work. Perhaps the marxists at statscan should be told we live in a capitalist country.The Census number that most accurately captures the economic wellbeing of Canadians is family incomes. While the headline-grabbing portions of the StatsCan report picked up on individual earnings, what really matters to Canadians is total income at the family level.There are 8.8 million families in Canada, representing...
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The Mcgill Daily was a marxist rag, even when I was going to Mcgill. We tried to defund it then, but the Daily survived. Now there will have to be a referendum to see if students have to pay for this piece of leftist propaganda. I hope the students of Mcgill vote against funding the daily. Writing on the wall for McGill Daily?Students to decide whether to continue funding publicationANDY RIGA, The GazettePublished: 3 hours agoMcGill University students will vote in a referendum next month that could determine whether the McGill Daily - one of Canada's oldest student papers - will continue to publish.Because of a change in university policy, the 97-year-old paper and its French-language sister publication, Le Délit français, must hold the referendum, asking undergraduate students if they...
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Paulitics: Paul’s Socialist Podcast
You can now click on the sidebar to be taken to the new official podcast companion to the Paulitics: Paul’s Socialist Investigations blog.
The podcast is devoted to presenting unique discussions, debates, news commentary and academic lectures to the public from a broadly left-wing or socialist perspective. Occasionally podcasts will be hosted by myself and my lovely co-host (AKA girlfriend) Kimberlee. At other times, the podcasts will feature academic or activist speeches or talks on a variety of subjects ranging from resisting the U.S. Empire to capitalism to media propaganda to philosophy to socialism and to many, many, other topics. Notable featured figures that I’ve already lined up include Noam Chomsky, Alex Callinicos,...
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My god, Orwell was prophetic.
Here’s the latest capitalist Orwellian doublethink, this time via Saskboy.
“Get your vote out Ontario. Mixed Member Proportional is on the ballot today, so even if you don’t like any of the parties (which would bewilder me, since Green is an option ;-) you can still vote in the referendum for MMP. Who doesn’t want a more representative democracy? (Amusing answer: Fascists, Authoritarians, Dictators, Communists, Jason Cherniak, James WDIKGrit, Saskatchewan NDP, most Americans, and political hacks.) “
I understand that not everybody is going to be a communist or a Marxist. Heck, I even appreciate that probably a significant portion of this blog’s readership don’t actively identify as either communist or Marxist. But...
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This is a great interview with Stuart Ryan, a candidate for the Ontario Provincial election in Ottawa-Centre.
To me, this interview just drives home the point that Ryan and his comrades can truly inspire with bold policies (ex. 50% reduction in tuition immediately, $20 billion for public secular schools and giving municipalities the power to tax corporations) whereas the NDP has lost its ability to dream, let alone inspire.
If you haven’t voted yet today, read this interview before you vote. It may not necessarily change your vote, but it will at the very least inspire you — and that’s not nothing.
~~~
Why have you chosen to involve yourself in the political process? Why did you choose to run in this constituency?
I have been involved in the political process for...
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Okay, here’s a fun little intellectual exercise to try out:
Let’s see if we can spot the irrational, blinded-by-ideology individual amongst these two writers using only a writing sample from each on a similar topic.
Keep in mind, that some characteristics of irrational people are that they tend to:
1) Be incapable of using even-headed arguments without resorting to ad hominem attacks.
2) Unable to give an account of their opponent’s behaviour without using over-simplification or straw-men.
3) View those they disagree with as inherently evil, often attributing sadistic and/or even satanistic motivations to their opponent’s actions.
4) Ignore evidence which suggests that the subject of their attack is not the embodiment of pure evil seeking to destroy all of...
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For those of you who are interested, several of the Paulitics resources have been updated in the past couple of days.
•I’ve updated the Quotes Resource by adding a new section for atheist and other deliciously sacreligious quotations. →
•I’ve also updated the Ontario 2007 Polling Resource to include three new polls (two of which I had previously missed, and one that is very recent).
←
•There have also been updates made to the Marx-to-English Dictionary Resource. Some of the new entries in the dictionary include “bourgeoisie”, “petite bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”. ↓
a......
I just came across this cartoon over on reddit.com. This is the best cartoon I’ve read in a very very long time.
See also:
Peace is overrated...
From Bolivian President Evo Morales’ recent speech to the United Nations (the text of which has never been seen in the mainstream media).
“It is important that we learn lessons from some sectors, from some regions. Let me avail myself of this opportunity: I come from a culture based on peace, from a lifestyle based on equality, of living not only in solidarity with all people, but also living in harmony with Mother Earth. For the indigenous movement, land cannot be a commodity; it is a mother that gives us life, so how could we convert it into a commodity as the western model does?
This is a profound lesson which we must learn in order to resolve the problems of humanity that are being discussed here, climate change and pollution. Where does this pollution come from? It comes...
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I came across an interesting passage while surfing a variety of Marxist websites. On newyouth.com, they make a great point about the importance and history of cooperation in society. Remarkably, I can't find anything to disagree with:Human beings rose to the top of the food chain not by competing against each other and crushing one another in the struggle to "get ahead", but through cooperation. Only by cooperating were humans able to combine their resources to hunt, build shelters, and eventually domesticate plants, animals, develop pottery, build the pyramids, etc., etc. Just look at a human baby! Compared to a deer, which can stand up and run within minutes of birth, human young are totally helpless for years. Baby humans could not survive even a few days without the help of others! So...
Help, I need my readers’ advice.
As my regular readers will know, I’ve been contemplating expanding Paulitics: Paul’s Socialist Investigations now for some time.
I’ve been wanting to develop an American Empire Encyclopedia – possibly as a wiki, but at the very least with a clickable map containing links to academic scholarship documenting the democratically-elected governments the U.S. has overthrown throughout history and the brutal dictatorships they’ve supported.
I’ve also been wanting to develop a home for far left bloggers to put their feeds all in one place and read what each other thinks. I figure if libertarians, Liberals, Tories, and New Democrats each have one, there’s no reason why can’t we anarchists, Marxists...
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If anybody out there in reality-based reality was searching for more proof that right-wingers use some pretty tortured logic, search no more.
This is an except from a comment that was left a few days ago.
“I’m reading about what they [by “they” he means the Republican/socialist side in the Spanish Civil War] did in Spain when the commies attacked the state it is scary. Especially when you read the stories vs hearing that they killed 10% of the population of madrid. Killing 10% sounds tame you hear that every woman between the ages of 10-50 had been raped and how they killed all the nuns is more a cult of satan.”
That’s right folks, you read that first part correctly. Despite the fact that there were two sides in the Spanish Civil War —...
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I recently came across these two maps of the world which pretty much demonstrate much of what’s wrong with the world (original source).
These maps try to show what the world would look like if maps were drawn based on something other than geographic mass.
As you can see, there is a complete disjunction between who pays for war and who gets to die for war.
Map: Military spending per country – 2002 (BEFORE the Iraq War!)
Surprise, surprise, the U.S. takes up approximately 45% of the world’s landmass with everyone else — by far and away comprised mostly of Europe – together making up the remainder.
But when we shift over to see who actually receives the crappy end of this equation, we see more or less the same countries who either are currently or have...
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My mother enjoys torturing me by e-mailing me the incoherent rants of right-wing malcontents from time to time. I suppose it’s part of a game she plays with me which I claim to hate but actually in reality secretly don’t mind. But I guess, on the other hand it could also be because maybe she believes that angering up the blood and having your face turn red with frustration periodically is somehow therapeutic.
Either way, she stumbled across this gem of a video and decided that I should have to share in her pain and so she passed it along to me today. (And I’m in an apparently sadistic mood today and thus feel that you, my reader, should also suffer along with me as well… it’s a vicious cycle, it really is.)
(The original link to the video was...
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