Some some of you may have heard that story about the venerable Canadian history magazine The Beaver changing its name because of the confusion it caused over exactly what kind of magazine it was, and apparently also because a lot of school Internet filters blocked it.

It was a funny enough story that even the New York Times ran it, but it got me wondering: now that pubic waxing is apparently de rigueur among young women, are female genitals even called beavers anymore? I mean, when the hair is gone, the resemblance pretty well disappears.

So will “beaver” wind up being one of those funny little linguistic artifacts, like calling a remote control a “clicker” decades after they switched from sonics to infrared, or should the magazine just have held out until we start calling women’s privates “chinchillas”?

Bonus: Apparently the term “beaver” in this sense was popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. I couldn’t find Vonnegut’s drawing of a beaver anywhere online, so here is his rendition of an asshole.

Not too long ago, I jokingly argued in favour of politicians being killed before they reach their natural expiration date. It might not have been a particularly good joke–that was certainly the opinion of a number of commenters–but it was a joke. I’d hope anyone reading it would be able to divine the post’s humourous intent, rather than a murderous one.

In the absence of any additional context, I can’t determine the intent of the person who posted the “Should Obama be killed?” facebook poll from the screen capture at Pam Spaulding’s blog. Perhaps there’s a clue in the Obama image attached to the poll–it’s too small for me to see clearly on any of my immediately available monitors.

Spaulding points out that facebook users can flag the poll as offensive, and she and TalkingPointsMemo.com (where I first learned of the thing) are reporting that the facebook poll app is currently down. There’s some debate in comments over whether the two situations are related, but even if they aren’t, it seems likely that particular poll won’t reappear.

I really wish there was some indication of what the creator of the poll was trying to accomplish by creating it. Knowing whether it’s the work of Trey Parker or Orly Taitz would help me. Part of me wants it to be the work of an artist who’s trying to make some sort of point. Another part fears it was written by some hapless schmuck who just didn’t see how another stupid facebook poll could create problems. God knows I’ve publicly posted things without considering how they might affect those who read them. If I gave that too much thought, I wouldn’t post anything at all.¹

The commenters at TPM, at least, don’t seem to have as much problem as I do ascribing intent to the pollster. I haven’t read all the replies to the post, but the general concensus there seems to be that the person who created the poll is attempting to incite the pollees in some fashion. And they probably are, but on the basis of the available evidence, I’m not sure the pollster’s attempting to incite what the TPM commenters believe they are. The discussion of (and general support for) serious legal ramifications for the pollster worries me for a number of reasons. Some of them are even not entirely selfish.

It takes a lot for words to offend me². So, absent a more specific indicator of what the pollmaker was going for, this poll doesn’t really bother me. Beyond the question of whether it’s tasteful to ask if someone should be killed³ , beyond the writer’s sense or lack of same in specifying the sitting US President as the potential target, what did this person do?

They asked a question. Given the nature of the question, who asked it is something the Secret Service is understandably going to want investigate. I’d think the people who answered “Yes”, if there were any, are also going to find themselves under a bit of a microscope–if I was the SS, I’d be more worried about those folks than the pollster, myself.

It was a provocative question, and I don’t know why the person who asked it wanted to provoke people. Until I do, the degree of vitriol being aimed at the (as far as I know, anonymous) questioner makes me uneasy.

People saying “This guy’s an ass”–that reaction makes sense to me.

Accusing the pollster of deliberately inciting people to violence against the President? I’ve got to admit, I don’t see it, but I’m 1) Canadian, 2) inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, and 3) not as a general rule the biggest fan of politicians.

Wanting the person responsible arrested, solely on the basis of the phrasing of this particular poll…? Chris is a million times more qualified to discuss that than I am, but I’d hope that such an action would be an overreach, even for the American legal system. If it isn’t, that’s a legal net cast mighty wide–wide enough to catch artists, comedians, bloggers with a dubious sense of humour…

-Foley

PS: I wonder what the reaction would’ve been if the poll’s subject had been whether Dick Cheney should be killed. Or Osama bin Laden.

Disclaimer: The positions expressed in the preceding post–actually, in every post Andrew Foley’s ever made–do not necessarily reflect the opinion of MightGodKing.com, Christopher Bird, or Andrew Foley. Nothing to see here, move along.

1. Which is partly why you haven’t seen anything from me here recently. After five years of blogging, knowing someone’s actually reading this stuff is more than a little disconcerting. [↩]
2. Upsetting me, on the other hand–? Dead easy. [↩]
3. Probably not, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be funny or shouldn’t be asked. [↩]

George Galloway plans to sue Jason Kenney, Bernie Faber and CTV.

Ezra Levant on George Galloway’s being barred from entering Canada:

Good friends, and friends of freedom of speech say I’m not being consistent — that I should be for Galloway’s right to be wrong. I am; I don’t think he should be arrested for being a racist, terrorist-loving buffoon. I think he should be arrested for raising money for a criminal terrorist organization. That’s not speech I’m against, that’s fundraising for terrorism I’m against. But that’s not my main point: my main point is that Galloway has no “right” to come to Canada. He’s not Canadian.

I’m all for his free speech — elsewhere.

First off, charges that Galloway has raised money for Hamas are wildly overblown. His participation in/organization of the Viva Palestina aid convoy only qualifies as “aid to Hamas” on the grounds that Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinian people, and thus any aid to Palestinians (the vast majority of whom only manage to survive now thanks to various international aid programs and food donations) has to go through Hamas.

(This would be one of the many reasons that the quasi-official nature of Palestinian governance is a neverending bugbear from an international law standpoint: if Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Palestine then without an official declaration of hostilities Canada can’t actually do anything (because you can’t really say that an entire other country is a criminal organization without completely debasing the term), but if Hamas isn’t a legitimately elected government then Canada is ignoring gross human rights violations on the part of Israel that it has sworn to uphold and is thus violating its own treaty obligations. Many other First World countries have this same thorny issue, which is why none of them ever really officially decides what Hamas actually is.)

Of course, that aid also has to go through Israel, but apparently the fact that the Israelis let the entire convoy through – except for a fire engine and boat which the Egyptian government pre-emptively disallowed, and if anybody can explain why a fire engine would be dangerous please let me know – would imply that they didn’t think Galloway’s “fundraising” was dangerous to the state of Israel. Considering that the aid consisted entirely of humanitarian materiels (food, blankets, toys for kiddies, et cetera), it’s not surprising that the Israelis would let it through. Then again, until the Americans complained, the Israelis weren’t letting dried pasta into Gaza. So who knows.

Oh, and as much as Bernie Faber of the Jewish Defense League might claim otherwise, Galloway wasn’t “smuggling” goods to Hamas. Smuggling traditionally does not involve the type of political grandstanding for which Galloway is known. Because that’s not smuggling. Galloway has never been caught committing any sort of crime, and this is because Galloway knows exactly where the line he can’t cross is. One might, if one was so inclined, draw parallels to religious bigots who have a good grasp of the boundaries of criminal hate speech laws and who metaphorically are all too willing to walk right up to that boundary and wiggle their ass at it.

But none of this is the real issue. The real issue is that Levant’s suggestion that this is an immigration or administrative problem is the worst kind of semantics. It’s semantics because this is entirely about the Conservative government choosing to abridge Galloway’s ability to speak in Canada, using a cheap excuse to do so.

Consider the staggering incongruity of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in complaining that Galloway supports a terrorist organization when Kenney himself attended a rally of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran in 2006, less than a year after the Canadian government declared it to be a terrorist group and a declaration which was upheld by the current Conservative government as recently as this past November. (In fairness, once people found out about Kenney’s attendance, he first claimed that he hadn’t attended the rally, and then when pictures showed up of him at the rally, claimed he hadn’t known it was the PMOI holding the rally and that he had been tricked. Given that Jason Kenney is a very, very stupid man, this is actually slightly plausible. But only slightly.) Given this context, you might think that Kenney’s judgement of Galloway’s potential security risk is suspect, but apparently Ezra Levant trusts him.

Levant’s argument is that Galloway’s supposed criminal acts (for which he has never been tried, because no judge would ever convict him, because as much as certain parties might wish otherwise delivering food and medicine to Palestinians is not yet a crime in Britain or Canada) are good reason to prevent him from speaking in Canada. That’s his position. He can say “no, I think it’s a good reason to bar him from entering Canada and thus as a consequence he can’t speak,” but when Galloway’s entire purpose for visiting Canada is to speak then the two are obviously conflated and pretending otherwise is, as stated, nothing more than semantics.

It’s just the sort of useful semantics that lets Ezra Levant pretend he isn’t an enormous hypocrite, that restricting George Galloway’s ability to speak isn’t restraining free speech because he can describe it a different way thanks to the technicalities of Canada’s constitution. But of course he is being enormously hypocritical, because freedom of expression isn’t derived from the concept that it’s something that just sort of belongs in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but from the idea that speech has intrinsic value in and of itself. Levant has spent the better part of the last few years passionately arguing the latter point; now that it’s become inconvenient for him to do so, he has cheerfully abandoned it.

Which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.