You know, it’s nice to know that Marc Thiessen is exactly the whiny, disingenuous little toad in desperate need of a cockpunching that I imagined him to be.

So a few people emailed me asking me to say something about Warner Todd Huston’s screed about the issue of Captain America where the tea partiers are shown in a less than sympathetic light. Individuals unfamiliar with Warner Todd Huston may need to know that this instance probably represents the apex of his influence as a professional complainant, as Warner Todd has previously complained about all sorts of other things and nobody has ever taken him seriously. However, Marvel Comics is now owned by Disney, which means that Joe Quesada – never exactly one to court the dislike of anybody other than the dedicated fanboys who will buy comics regardless of how many times he makes Spider-Man sell his soul to save an old lady – apologized immediately, because maybe Disney would fire him or something.

(I jest, of course. Let’s be honest: it makes sense for Marvel to apologize because it’s not worth the hassle of Sean Hannity crusading against them. It likewise makes sense for Ed Brubaker to apologize, because regardless of his personal beliefs he’s got a family to feed and there are more important things to go to bat over than a page out of a licensed character comic book that got some cretins’ undies up in a twist.)

This is a multipart saga, so let us begin.

1.) Warner Todd Huston Is Angry About Captain America #602

Warner Todd was very angry about this issue, and the reason he is angry is this:

In it the current Captain (there have been a few of them, apparently) is on the trail of a faux Captain America that is mentally deranged and getting chummy with some white supremacist, anti-government, survivalists types going by the name of “the Watchdogs.”

That “white supremacist” thing is a sticking point for Warner Todd, and it’s part of the reason he’s an idiot. Here are all the quotes from Captain America #602 wherein the Watchdogs are referred to as white supremacists:

(sound of tumbleweed drifting through empty town)

…oh wait, there aren’t any. Now, granted, the Watchdogs were introduced in 1987, a year after Warner “I Know All About Comics, Dammit” Todd says he quit reading them, so maybe he’s not aware that the Watchdogs, while always overtly right-wing and “traditional values”-y, were never actually portrayed as racists. (Mark Gruenwald, as I recall, wasn’t comfortable portraying them as such.) Similarly, in this issue, there is not one mention of the Watchdogs’ attitudes towards race.

Werner Todd is inferring motivation, plain and simple. He sees a mythical organization of baddies modeled after right-wing extremist militias and assumes they must be racist. There is literally not one thing in the entire comic where you can assume anything about the Watchdogs’ or protestors’ racial beliefs based on their actions. You have to want to see it.¹

But there is more:

The Captain tells him, “no it’s perfect… this all fits right into my plan.” After this we find that the Captain’s plan is to send the black man into a redneck bar to pretend to be a black man working for the IRS and to get everyone all mad… because… well, you know that every white person is a racist that hates black civil servants, right?

It feels a bit oversimplistic to point out that Bucky’s plan is actually to draw the attention of traveling Watchdog recruiters by pretending to beat up a civil servant and be all “I hate the gubmint” while they’re watching – because the Watchdogs hate the federal government, you see – but amazingly, Warner Todd was unable to figure out this actually pretty simple bit of plot. Now, granted, Ed Brubaker didn’t write in some expository thought balloons saying things like “Must make this look good… so the Watchdogs notice me and ask me to join them!” but then again I guess he made the mistake of writing above a sixth-grade reading level.

So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just “hate the government,” they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government.

My word, why would anybody ever associate tea partiers with racism? Why would anybody dare suggest that extremists might try to infiltrate the tea party movement for the purposes of recruitment? (I’m not even gonna bother collecting hyperlinks about tea partiers being “angry” or mostly white, because seriously now, come on.)

2.) Carla Hoffman Decides To Be Reasonable With A Jackass

In response to Marvel’s nigh-immediate capitulation to Warner Todd’s offense that a portrayal of a tea party rally would even dare hint at tea partiers being slightly racist rather than upstanding moral whatevers, Carla Hoffman wrote a response, to which Warner Todd immediately wrote both a patronizing comment wherein he was offended that Carla hadn’t heard of him and he did too know about these here comical books, and then, not satisfied with that, an additional blog entry, because he decided that Carla was a stupidhead.

This is mostly Carla’s fault for treating Warner Todd as someone interested in discourse. She made this mistake because Carla, at root, is a nice person who wants to get along with everybody. I, however, am not a nice person and I do not give a tinker’s cuss if I get along with Warner Todd or not. The man is a pustule on public discourse and should be treated as such.²

3.) Warner Todd Escalates

Anyway. After Warner Todd complains about how liberals are stupid and self-righteous and don’t understand complex concepts – and how come they don’t just talk politely to old Warner Todd anyhow? – for a few paragraphs, he gets into the meat of his diatribe.

I should start this discussion by saying that there isn’t anything wrong with enjoying comic books, even as an adult. They can be fun, for sure. But to imagine that comic books offer anything other than lowgrade entertainment is laughable. Comics are not high art (in fact, most of them are horrible even as graphic art) and they most certainly do not equal anything of the sort of deep, consequential literature. Comics are a childish, formulaic, lowest common denominator form of entertainment. It doesn’t make them evil or useless or bad necessarily. It just makes them low-end, fun. They are nothing to be taken seriously. If you are someone that lives for your next comic, or you want to claim that comic books are “art” worthy of serious consideration… you need to get out of your parent’s basement a little more often.

First off, the incidence of a “parents’ basement” joke (with improper use of an apostrophe, way to go you professional writer you!) should be the first and most obvious sign that Warner Todd is a hack of the first degree and that this moment of accidental relevance is indeed the pinnacle of his professional life, and that should make you feel sad if you are a good person. I am not an especially good person, so it makes me feel dark and demonic glee.

Secondly, the fact that Warner Todd declaims comics as “horrible even as graphic art” just goes to show you that he’s an ignoramus who doesn’t know anything about the form generally. But maybe you want specific proof that he’s an idiot in this regard? Here you go:

Let’s start with the visual. Graphically, it isn’t very well drafted. It does have the benefit of being created in the semi-realist style that began to be popular in the 1980s, though, which instantly makes it better than today’s comics drawn in that horrible Japanese Anime/Manga style that has so pervaded the comic book industry of late.

Overcapitalized and barely coherent attack on manga aside, this is excerpted from Warner Todd’s very very long and very very stupid review of Watchmen. Yes, folks. You got that right. Warner Todd thinks that Dave Gibbons’ art on Watchmen “isn’t very well drafted.”

This is the point where you have to just kind of stare. It’s like somebody professing to know a lot about literature and saying something like “Dostoyevsky, he wasn’t really much of a writer” or how they’re very knowledgeable about classical music and saying “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Nothing really special about it.” It’s not that they’re advancing a contrarian opinion, because there are a number of very reasonable critiques one can make of Watchmen – it relies too heavily on a knowledge of the form and is self-referential, Alan Moore is sometimes too self-indulgent in his asides, the pirate story as allegory is forced – but saying that Dave Gibbons’ art and layouts are bad is just so fucking ignorant of the form itself that you have to immediately disqualify the speaker as knowing a damn thing about comics generally, no matter how many comics he collected back before 1986 when he quit collecting.³

(ASIDE: Other things Warner Todd does not like about Watchmen include: Nite Owl not being able to get it up initially for Silk Spectre, Ozymandias winning, the comic’s underlying belief that in order to be a superhero there has to be something more or less wrong with you, and the two Bernies being “unlikeable characters” because they’re Americans being written by an Englishman. No, really. He says all of this. Really, if you want to see the most trite, lazy comics “analysis” I’ve read in quite some time, do yourself a favour and click the link. We could totally have a contest! “Stupidest Thing Warner Todd Huston Says About Watchmen.“)

Anyway. Enough about Warner Todd and Watchmen, the point of which is merely to illustrate the depths of his know-nothingness. Let us continue. After Warner Todd complains at length about Carla saying “welcome to comics” and how he had tons and tons of comics back in the day (which was twenty-five years ago)

The “letter” was written by one Carla Hoffman and is replete with uninformed assumptions, hackneyed pop psychology, all wrapped up in a total failure to observe the first tenet in journalism: contact your subject before you write anything.

I can’t think of anything I’d want to do more than contact an over-ripe douchebag like this guy!

Again, Warner Todd is taking offense that Carla didn’t bother to do her research and find out that he used to read comic books twenty-five years ago so of course he knows everything there is to know about comics. Instead, Carla merely assumed that Warner Todd’s inability to actually discuss the comic in question, combined with his show of naivete over there being multiple Captain Americas, meant that he was unfamiliar with the current state of comics and comic storytelling. I wonder why she thought such a thing!

Of course, this uninformed assumption shows her arrogance. You see, because I criticized the comic book she assumed that I couldn’t possibly have ever liked comics.

No, Warner Todd. She wrote that because she’s polite, and because your argument was whining bullshit with little to no basis in reality dependent on your projection. Carla, being nice, made the assumption that you were ignorant rather than stupid and/or intellectually dishonest.

Unintentionally funny was her prosaic proclamation that the Internet spawns “strong opinion” as if my piece was merely that, yet her’s isn’t.

DEAR “PROFESSIONAL WRITER” WARNER TODD HUSTON: Please learn how to use a fucking apostrophe.

Also, Carla’s piece might be opinion – sure it is – but “strong?” She used very mild language. She didn’t use any invective or make a single personal attack – you finding ways to be insulted by her essay doesn’t count, Warner Todd – or indeed do anything other than say “you took it one way, but isn’t it also possible to read it this way?” That’s not “strong.” That’s mild. You know how I know it’s mild? Because she didn’t start making fun of your name and calling you “Weiner Todd,” which I am certain happened to you in high school in between vigorous masturbation sessions over a copy of Vampirella, wherein you had two, count ‘em TWO, letters to the editor published.

Or, in other words: stop being a whiny-ass titty-baby, Warner Todd.

Apparently someone forgot to alert little Miss Hoffman that there haven’t been any “Pro-Bush rallies” since about 2003 when he last ran for president. Further, Miss Hoffman obviously has no clue that the Tea Party movement is just as mad at Bush as they are Clinton and Obama.

They were so mad at him that they sat on their asses for eight years until President Blacky McBlackerton got elected! That sure showed him. Of course, Carla wasn’t attempting to suggest that Tea Party rallies were explicitly pro-Bush rallies – why would anybody think that – but instead that the Tea Partiers, rather than being apolitical as per their claim, were merely an extension of Republican activism. Of course, reading that would require the ability to understand subtlety and nuance, which Weiner Todd isn’t good at except for when he’s trying to find proof that Ed Brubaker thinks tea partiers are racists.

Uh, no. Sam Wilson is not his “real name.” Sam Wilson is a character’s name. It isn’t a real person we’re talking about here. This poor young lady cannot tell reality from fiction, apparently.

Weiner Todd here feels the need to take a cheap shot at Carla, who was honestly nothing but pleasant to him. “Real name,” in this instance, of course refers to “Sam Wilson’s personal name, as opposed to calling him ‘the Falcon.’” I assume that Weiner Todd knows this, and had to sit back and have a good giggle in his study – fondly remembering his erotic adventures with Vampirella, who whispered in his ear that he was a true comics fan.

Anyway, there’s an awful lot more in this poor girl’s “open letter” that puts her in a pretty bad light for logic, intelligence, and delusion.

“…which I’m not gonna get into. No reason!”

Since right after her letter to me I replied. (You can see my reply here, too), let’s get to the unhinged, hatemongers that chose to reply to my posting after Hoffman’s.

DEAR “PROFESSIONAL WRITER” WERNER TODD HUSTON: Learn how to not splice a fucking comma.

But anyway, the rest of his article is just Weiner Todd whining endlessly about how commenters at Robot 6 weren’t nice to him after he shat copious and unearned condescension on Carla:

There were, of course, all sorts of distempered name calling and obscene language, the sort we’ve come to expect from the left. There was the ever common “asshole,” the varied spellings of “douche bag,” an occasional “jerk,” and “Nazi.” Even at least one “fucking clown” was thrown in for good measure. But remember, each and every one of these poor youngsters assumed that they were more open minded, nicer, more tolerant than that mean old Warner Todd Huston.

This is one of my least favorite tactics: the “barbarians at the gate” argument, ever beloved of conservative writers on the internet. “Oh my heavens! You have said a swear! That completely invalidates every single one of your points because you are clearly no gentleman, sir! Good day! I must exit before I come down with a case of the vapours!”

For the sake of illumination, let me present how Weiner Todd opened his essay attacking Carla:

These emails and replies to my comic book analysis really brought it home that to be a liberal you must make assumptions of your enemy so that they fit neatly into your preconceived notions of the world and you must never try to ask them any questions to determine if they really do fit into the box you’ve constructed for them. You must assume you are more grown up than those you attack. You must assume that you are more intelligent. You also must assume that people that like the same sort of things that you like must think just like you do. In other words, to be a liberal you must begin every discussion, every consideration of ideological premises, with the base assumption that all good people are just like you. Everyone else is venal, mean, stupid or low. Not just wrong, but evil.

I’m not sure what’s more impressive here: the sheer volume of projection on Weiner Todd’s part, or the fact that this is just a long series of personal attacks largely unjustified by the rest of his column where he then complains about other people’s personal attacks. For people like Warner Todd, “civility” isn’t anything to do with attitude or manners; it’s to do with specific words. It’s a set of rules – don’t say this, don’t say that, but this and the other are permissible – rather than a sense of respecting other people. When you understand that attitude, you understand a lot about Weiner Todd.⁴

1. Now, granted, the Falcon is leery of hanging out with the tea partiers in the book. But guess what: Sam Wilson is a black liberal. Do you think black liberals want to hang out with tea partiers generally? I’m sorry, but when did we get so, ahem, politically correct as to demand that tea partiers be perceived equally by citizens of all colours and creeds as upstanding and moral figures in a work of fiction, and even so by fictional figures who would reasonably be leery of them were they real people? Warner Todd, you big ol’ Tolerance Bear, you. [↩]
2. Also, he is the only guy I have ever seen who manages to look worse both with facial hair and without. If he is going to learn anything from comic books, it is the value of a mask. [↩]
3. ”Hey, guys! I know a lot about music! I stopped buying albums back in 1986 but I still know lots about them! Do you guys like Duran Duran? They’re pretty awesome, right?” [↩]
4. And, one hopes, why I completely abandoned any attempt at civility after the first paragraph of this entry. [↩]

Grazzt requested

A comparison of our Reform Party and the American Tea Party movement, and anything the Americans can learn from the Canadian experience with a successful fledgling grassroots movement.

Unfortunately, due to societal differences, the answer is “probably not a lot.”

First off, a quick dime’s worth of exposition for Americans unfamiliar with the history of Canadian politics: the Reform Party was a political party that spun off from the old Progressive Conservatives¹ back in the late 80s, grew to dominate western Canada’s conservative political scene, and then rebranded itself as the Canadian Alliance party because they decided they needed a stupid name too before ultimately re-unifying with the remnants of the PCs to become the new Conservative Party of Canada, which the Reformers dominated far more greatly.

Now, with that exposition out of the way, the first distinguishing factor between the Reform Party and the tea partiers is that Reform had its genesis as an explicitly regionalistic party. Reform was created for no other reason than to address western Canadians’ conservative political concerns. Now, granted, you can argue that the tea partiers are disproportionately located in one portion of the United States (e.g. the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest), but their concerns aren’t really regional in basis.

The second distinguishing factor is that the Reform Party had its real arrival as a national force (okay, still primarily a regionally based national force, but even so, one able to compete electorally across the country) because the Progressive Conservatives from whom they split off were the party in power. The PCs had attempted an ambitious and unpopular Constitutional reform which failed, plus instituted the GST² and led the country during a period of recession and were deeply, deeply unpopular. The new, invigorated base of the Reform Party was thus former PCs. Again, you can attempt to draw similarities by suggesting that the majority of tea partiers are somewhat disaffected Republicans, but there are less Republicans than Democrats in the USA and they’re not in power. This is why you see tea partiers more interested, in a lot of cases, in “taking back” the Republican party by supporting tea-party-friendly candidates over moderate Republicans: they’re still reacting against the party in power, but the party in power is the Democrats, to whom they’re ideologically opposed.

However, the tea partiers have the same problem that Reformers did back in the day, which is that the bulk of the political mainstream sees them as stupid hicks who are, at the very least, slightly racist. The Reform Party dealt with this by disavowing or dropping support for the occasional prominent member or candidate who fucked up and said something too obviously racist or homophobic in public, but generally didn’t bother reprimanding or commenting when one of their run-of-the-mill members did so. This is at least in part the reason why the Reform Party – and later the Canadian Alliance – never really broke through in Ontario or Quebec, which are more liberal provinces than the western half of Canada generally.³

And ultimately, it’s worth remembering that the Reform Party’s success at finally becoming mainstreamed into Canadian politics (rather than a permanent opposition party) only happened when they merged with the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives, a rebranding which made them more accessible to the Canadian general public. However, that rebranding also caused them to become slightly more moderate, or at least to accept more moderately conservative politicians into their framework. I don’t think the tea partiers are really interested in doctrinal inclusivity – mostly because a lot of them don’t have any fucking clue about policy other than they like to shout a lot – so this route to success might pose problematic for them.⁴

Finally, note that this rebranding created a balancing act which is problematic because Stephen Harper is probably the only politician in the entire party that the old-school moderate Tories and the right-wing Reformers will accept as a leader, and Harper can’t be the leader forever: as he straddles the fault line of the conservative movement in Canada he gets stretched further and further, and more and more of the old Reformers grow alienated. Eventually, they’ll demand that one of their idiot MPs take command, and that’ll work about as well as Stockwell Day’s tenure as leader did.

1. Yes, we all know it was a stupid name. Whatever. [↩]
2. New sales taxes have always been a formula for unpopularity. [↩]
3. People think British Columbia is some sort of massive hippie commune because of the existence of Vancouver, but outside of Vancouver there are people so conservative they’re still not sure about these newfangled telephones. [↩]
4. And finally, although I don’t want to get into the details, a parliamentary system such as Canada’s is a lot friendlier to the genesis of new parties than the United States’ governmental system is. [↩]

Well, it was inevitable: US politicians are using the recent blizzard in Washington DC as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. I’m going to pass over this for now, save to mention in passing the strong resemblance between climate change denialists and creationists in their tendency to seize on any evidence against the other position as being fatal while insisting that their position is valid despite the total lack of evidence for it.

No, what I’m more interested is in how the whole idea came about that unusually cold or stormy weather disproves climate change, and I think fundamentally it’s a matter of branding. The abortion debate is a good example of how choosing the right term to describe your position can be essential in framing the debate: who would want to be anti-life or anti-choice? In light of that it’s significant that in this issue, the denialists haven’t attempted to even come up with a name for their position, never mind reframing the debate. The fact that they’re perfectly happy with the terms the other side uses show just what a problem those terms are.

Let’s start with the most common name for the phenomenon, “global warming.” It’s easy to see why the term was first used: it’s a clear and accurate description of what’s happening, as temperatures gradually rise worldwide. The problem, as we’re now seeing, is that while that may be the overall trend, not everything that’s caused by global warming is going to result in warmer weather. Nor is it necessarily going to have a stronger effect than more local weather effects; in other words, you can still have a snowstorm while the Earth is getting warmer. But by calling it “global warming,” scientists and activists created the impression that the world will get warmer, point blank — which is why cynical politicians can now take advantage of a blizzard to score points on CNN. Another problem is that for many of us who live in cold climates, the notion of global warming sounds like a positive thing rather than a negative one, and the generally positive connotations of the word “warming” don’t help. (You’ve never heard of anyone being “warmed to death.”)

The main competitor to “global warming” has been simply “climate change,” but it’s easy to see why that didn’t catch on: it’s too vague, and at any rate sounds too neutral to be any kind of rallying cry. There was an attempt a few years ago to rebrand it as “global weirding,” to reflect the fact that rising temperatures will lead to more extreme weather, but this depends too much on already knowing the term “global warming,” and has the added disadvantage of sounding like a theory to explain the popularity of Lady Gaga.

What’s my suggestion? If it were up to me I would go with “catastrophic climate change,” which opens the gates wide enough to include all of the severe weather effects that may be caused by a rise in temperature and, more importantly, sounds like an unequivocally bad thing. Most likely, though, it’s too late: at this point we’re almost certainly stuck with “global warming”, and as many people are learning, it doesn’t matter how good your data is if you don’t brand it right.

Speaking of cold: there are still three days to read my story “The Coldest War” online and, if you feel so motivated, nominate it for an Aurora Award. Only Canadian citizens and permanent residents can nominate, but anyone can read it.

Peter Sprigg, of the Family Research Council:

And I’m talking repeatedly.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist, as is the latest edition of that thing I do with the making fun of commenters on the internets.

Has there ever been a news story as anticlimatic as the revelation that prisoner “suicides” at Guantanamo Bay were probably actually murders? Seriously, is anybody surprised by the idea that Guantanamo Bay had torturing going on at this point? The BBC had a guard tearfully request forgiveness from his former captives just last week, for crissake. All this story does is confirm what most people already knew; you can practically hear Fox News anchors practicing their “you have to torture a few eggs to make an omelet” speeches already, maybe with a side of “and if it’s so bad why hasn’t Obama shut it down yet?”

Of course, this puts that whole “committing suicide was an act of war” rhetoric that was flying around at the time in proper context. At the time I thought it was just stupid. I should have recognized overcompensation when I saw it.

So for the last week or so the big stupid political hubbub of the week has been the fact that in a private conversation two years ago Harry Reid said that white people don’t generally want to vote for black people, and that lighter-skinned black people generally do better electorally with whites than dark-skinned people, and also that Barack Obama can speak both in White Person and Black Person. All of this is of course unquestionably true (there have been studies conducted to demonstrate the first two issues, and anybody who’s seen Obama in both modes knows that the last is accurate), but Reid also called Obama a “Negro” and that’s kind of weird so everybody had at it.

And the really fun thing is that right-wingers are going on TV to complain about Reid getting a double standard because when Trent Lott said things would be better if Strom “there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches” Thurmond had been elected President, people got all offended. And they don’t understand why all those liberals got pissed about Trent Lott and don’t care about Harry Reid, so they’ve jumped to their stock accusation of hypocrisy.

Here’s the thing. Nobody really gets upset when somebody just says something stupid. We might make fun of them, and I’m sure Reid can take some mockery, but what it boils down to is that Reid said something entirely true with clumsy archaic phrasing that might be construed as offensive while in a private conversation. When the sentence was made public, he immediately apologized. For people who might be offended, that’s generally good enough, because Reid’s got a good record on civil rights (as the Congressional Black Caucus made quite clear this weekend when they gave him their full support). If somebody who by dint of his actions has made it clear he supports your causes says something stupid or offensive then apologizes, there’s no real reason to hang him out to dry.

Of course, the right seems determined to claim that forgiving Reid when other, right-wing pols who have made racist statements is hypocritical, and the reason they do that is because they quite simply don’t understand why the left gets offended by one and not the other. To them, this is about the statement. The actual sentence. They think that’s the reason people get upset: the words in question. (This is also the reason why the right wing thinks making fun of “political correctness” is hilarious. Most of them genuinely don’t know that the term originated on the left-hand side to specifically describe people who talked the talk about inclusivity but didn’t walk the walk, and only later became a catchphrase for the silly “non-offensive” phrasing the term was originally intended to criticize.)

But here’s the thing. You know that old Avenue Q song, “Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist”? It’s true – everybody is, and most people get that. Nobody’s perfect. We can forgive people’s slip-ups, when they’re slip-ups. But when a Trent Lott or a George Allen or a Rush Limbaugh says something racist, it’s not about this one occasion of them saying something offensive; it’s about the fact that these foul fucking bigots, who by their personal histories of action have made it clear that they’re perfectly willing to judge people on the basis of skin colour – these assholes have achieved public prominence without having been made to feel shame, or at least having been publicly shamed for their loathsome beliefs. They deserve that shame, and they don’t get it, and then they have the temerity to make clear how little they think of the public at large by cheerfully saying how great it would be if Strom Thurmond had been elected our first official segregationist president, or calling a black guy at a rally a racial slur, or suggesting that a great black quarterback is only esteemed because he’s black.

That’s why Lott was offensive and Reid wasn’t: deeds, not words. Maybe one day the right will get that. But I’m not holding my breath, because really, all they’re interested in on this issue is juvenilia and playing gotcha, because that’s all they think it is. They don’t get it, and that’s just sad.

So I don’t know if the non-Canadians have been paying attention, but this latest bit of Stephen Harper’s fuckery should probably merit it. Remember this story the next time you complain about your country’s politicians, because there simply isn’t a more pathetic political class in any first-world country than Canada’s.

See, the thing is that right now, the Tories are undergoing a bit of a scandal. Well, they’re always in a bit of a scandal – that’s Canadian politics for you – but right now there’s the Afghan detainee scandal, wherein it increasingly appears that the Conservative government did not merely turn a blind eye to what happened when Afghan detainees were transferred to Afghan custody – where those detainees were almost certainly tortured – but in fact deliberately tried to cover up the fact that they were taking a blind eye (seeing as how that would be illegal). There’s been numerous calls for a independent public inquiry to investigate the matter.¹ The Tories have been very clear that this will not happen on their watch.

However, the Tories have come up with a clever tactic to hopefully make this all go away: Stephen Harper has prorogued Parliament. Or, in less arcane English, he’s shut it down until the budget is due in March, over two months from now. This is the second time in a year Harper has prorogued Parliament in order to buy time and make a difficult political situation go away; the first time was to avoid a coalition government from removing him from the seat of power, which was, to say the least, ethically questionable.

But there isn’t anything questionable about this time: Harper and the Tories are simply trying to buy time so that people will get distracted from the scandal, hopefully by the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And there’s no question that there’s no other reason for them to do this: Harper’s excuse is that the federal government needs to “recalibrate” its response to the economic downturn, which is just an insult to Canada’s collective intelligence. Harper proroguing Parliament stalled progress on his own crime bills – which are terrible, terrible bills, don’t get me wrong, but that he’s done it illustrates just how desperate he is for this to go away.

If Canada’s political leadership had any balls worth mentioning, Harper would be a walking dead man politically. But they don’t, so he might get out of this intact. Which is a shame, because a goddamn three-year-old could pin him to the wall if he felt like it. This is pathetic, a new low in Harper’s only very slender respect for the political traditions of this country: he and his government simply don’t give a damn about the politics of compromise. All those years of jerking off to the Bush Administration’s antics taught Harper the wrong lesson: namely, that government only works when you’re willing to play by the unwritten rules.

It’s not an incorrect lesson, because it’s true. But in order to use it, you have to be amoral in the worst kind of way. And look who we’ve got as Prime Minister.

1. Unsurprisingly, Bob Rae has had to basically lead the Liberals on this issue. This is partially because Michael Ignatieff’s track record on torture makes him look like a staggering hypocrite when he tries to talk about the issue, and partially because Michael Ignatieff is a useless limpdick. [↩]

So far the revival of V has been fairly reliably dull and nonsensical, but this week’s episode brought the first throw-the-remote moment when Our Heroes discover that a key part of the alien invaders’ plan is… flu shots. In what may be the most needlessly convoluted plan in the history of convoluted plans, the Visitors, or “Vs” because apparently “Visitors” takes too long to say (and just FTR, Internet, it’s not “V’s”; learn to pluralize correctly and keep that apostrophe in its holster) introduce some sort of vitamin shot that promises to do all kinds of wonderful things. Our Heroes naturally are suspicious, but discover that the miracle drug is in fact just a blind for the real threat: a chemical to be added to flu vaccine that causes people to die horribly (and I mean horribly: the “test subjects” look like they’ve suffered spontaneous combustion, not a bad drug reaction.) Of course, it seems likely that after the first couple of deaths a) the contaminant will be discovered and b) people will stop getting flu shots, meaning that at best this whole elaborate plan will kill a few dozen people. Or is it actually an insidious alien plot to spread the flu and increase absenteeism, thereby hurting our productivity at this already fragile economic time?

To be honest I don’t really care, and I’m already bored of talking about V. What does interest me is the persistent fascination with vaccines among conspiracy theorists of all stripes. It’s the one thing paranoid right-wingers and paranoid left-wingers have in common: a conviction that vaccination is somehow bad, though the reasons why it’s bad vary somewhat. Now, of all the health innovations of the last few hundred years, vaccines and antibiotics have to be pretty near the top in terms of improving public health (general  antiseptics and reliable supplies of clean drinking water would be the only competition I can think of.) Vaccines are probably the more important of the two because antibiotics are primarily of use in a) curing venereal disease and b) surviving trauma and surgery — both worthy causes, but not really that significant on a population-wide scale. If you want evidence, look at the Spanish conquest of North America: the conquistadors had been more-or-less inoculated against smallpox (mostly by having survived it as children, or being exposed to it and developing antibodies while reacting asymptomatically), while the defenceless Aztecs died by the millions. Or look at the persistent use of milkmaids as icons of beauty in Western art: it’s not just because they look so fetching covered in cow manure, it’s because exposure to cowpox protected them from smallpox and the associated “small pocks” that marred the face of nearly every other person in Europe. (Next time you’re reading one of those epic fantasy novels with the embossed covers, try to imagine every single character’s face with little scars, pits and boils. Your desire for time-travel will drop substantially.)

So what is it about vaccines? Why are people so willing to believe anything bad about them, no matter how flimsy or nonexistent the evidence? (There have, it’s true, been a small number of bad or tainted vaccines distributed, but on average vaccines are still much safer than, say, cars or hamburgers.) Some of it is probably just reflexive post-’60s anti-authoritarianism — if the government, or doctors, or scientists, or any other authority figure wants you to do something, it must be bad — but vaccines are a special case. (We don’t see a similar resistance to antibiotics, for instance; in fact parents insist on getting antibiotics prescribed for children’s ear infections even though the evidence shows they have no positive effect whatsoever and help spread antibiotic resistance in bacteria.) The method of delivery no doubt has a role to play as well: taking a pill has little emotional resonance, but having something injected into you has an instinctive ick factor, with connotations of violence, poisoning and penetration. But the biggest reason, I think, is the power dynamic involved. Even though a doctor prescribes antibiotics, we control the act of ingesting them. Vaccines, on the other hand, are administered to us — and for most of us, our main experience with inoculations is as children. What inspires more terror in an elementary school than “shot day”? Unlike visits to the dentist, which are a solitary trauma, inoculations are often done in large groups, encouraging an “us” versus “them” feeling. Just as children fantasize that their real parents will someday whisk them away to the life of splendour and luxury they deserve, or that ice cream will eventually be deemed healthy and spinach poison, so too do we find it easy to believe that this awful experience — given to us “for our own good,” like so many childhood horrors — is part of some evil plot. We knew it all along.

This column by David Mitchell¹ isn’t wrong per se. Yes, people are hypocritical about their stated wants versus their expressed political desires, and they always have been. (Granted, sentiment of this sort is much more a form of liberal-bashing than it is a free-ranging slam against people of all ideological backgrounds, not least because somewhere over the last fifty or so years a lot of conservatives decided to different degrees that selfishness, brutality and amorality were actually virtues on their own merits. But even so.)

But what I don’t get is how he thinks this is somehow new, or that we haven’t yet figured out how to deal with it. This is not the case. We know how to deal with it: laws and regulation.

Everybody knows, for example, that simple morality on its own isn’t enough to keep you from committing theft. Whether it was candy bars as a kid or jewelry as a teenager or songs you pirated last week, your moral compass is usually insufficient to keep you from stealing – particularly when who you’re stealing from is a faceless entity (be it the convenience store chain, the department store chain or the RIAA). The power of guilt only works sporadically to prevent theft, and usually only on a personal basis. What motivates us not to steal, ultimately, is fear and lack of necessity. We don’t steal because we fear the shame and/or consequences if we get caught, and we don’t steal because we decide that we don’t need to steal it. Over time, the fear and lack of need and occasionally guilt morphs into a moral code as we combine the disincentives against committing theft with our own recognition that stealing is kind of a jerkhole thing to do to people.

But the shame and consequences didn’t arise out of a vacuum: it arose because as a society we decided to make sure there would be shame and consequences for anyone who ventured into thievery. Institutions stigmatized and criminalized the act so that we would not have to rely on personal condemnation to deter would-be thieves. And this is where Mitchell makes his mistake: he places the brunt of his condemnation on the supposedly hypocritical public, rather than the political class which has grown more and more craven with each passing year.²

Look: I want to get the chance to travel at some point. There is plenty of the world I haven’t seen, and which has not been exposed to the awesomeness that is me. That’s an entirely rational desire for me to have. But I also recognize that doing so would probably generate a lot of carbon, far more than my fair share (even given that I don’t drive a car and I cycle everywhere and eat a lot of local food and a lot of other things that would probably make people think I am a hippie³ ). Given the choice, though, I’d have to admit that if I get the chance to travel, I will probably say “well, fuck it” and go on the trips.

That’s why it’s the job of government to make it harder for me to do something we know is bad for me to do. Plane taxes. Economic disincentives. At the harder end of things, hell, criminal laws. (Which probably wouldn’t be needed in this case, but you get the idea as it applies more widely.) Human beings are at heart selfish actors when it comes to personal gratification; it’s the job of government to make sure the drive for personal gratification doesn’t result in harm to the citizenry as a whole.

Which is why Mitchell’s ire is ultimately misdirected: he’s getting angry at people for being, well, people. This seems like a waste of time.⁴ You can’t stop people from being people. But you can feasibly stop political servants from being cowardly hypocrites. We elect political leaders to lead: if they don’t know in advance that people will punish them for hard truths then they’re stupid, and if they think they can avoid it it’s because we’ve allowed systems to fester where they can do so, which is why we’ve all generally concluded that only sociopaths and assholes want to be politicians. (That, and a bit of projection.)

1. Which, incidentally, is also noteworthy for Mitchell disclosing the fact that he has a roommate. The guy is a pretty successful comedian and television star, and he has a roommate. Ah, London rental costs! The next time I am irked about rent in Toronto I shall remember this and feel better. [↩]
2. I don’t feel the need to condemn any given country’s political class. They’re all pretty bad. Can anybody think of a good one? [↩]
3. People who know me personally know that I am not a fucking hippie. [↩]
4. Although the Catholic Church has not given up on it yet. [↩]

Oh my god look at this shit.

I think my favorite bit is where he asserts that “Libertarianism is where young adults live and breathe“, partially because it sounds like a shampoo commercial and partially because it’s so fucking stupid given that every bit of polling available shows that young adults in the United States can overwhelmingly be described as Keynesian liberals.

NO WAIT it’s the bit where he says “ I would raid Reason Magazine, Liberty Magazine, and the CATO Institute for news editors” – NO WAIT it’s when he says he would pay whatever is necessary to get Charles Krauthammer on his network – NO WAIT it’s this bit. “However, due to CNN then leaning libertarian, I would prohibit consideration of any bid that offered tax money to try lure CNN to a city. Instead, I would encourage city leaders to get their state and local governments to give CNN and its employees tax breaks…” Because tax breaks are nothing at all like government expenditures when it comes to a bottom line!

HE’S A 45-YEAR-OLD MARKETER, YOU GUYS!!!!!!

Various Responsible Media Centrists have already started bloviating about how Barack Obama should decline to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, under normal circumstances, this idea could be dismissed as the usual round of said media centrists advancing an idea because it is contrarian and therefore Very Serious, and really, we all know that’s the reason they’re advancing it; not from any genuine thought or concern, but because it is ostensibly a little bit shocking to suggest (and because, let us be honest, there is a certain stripe of media outlet that rather enjoys portraying the President as being unfit to receive the honor).

However, here’s the thing: he should decline to accept it.

The reason is simple: he has already gained all the political advantage of winning the award. Were he to decline now, he would still possess whatever moral authority winning the Nobel Peace Prize conveys at this point; it is impossible for him to unmake the Nobel committee’s decision. They can’t take that away from him, even if he gives it away. But if he declines to accept it, he appears humble, which earns him even more credibility (and at this point, worldwide, he has a lot of it). He can make a speech about how he doesn’t deserve this award when Timmy Who Campaigns Against Landmines or Joan The AIDS Researcher actually deserves it more than him, and give Timmy or Joan or whoever a major spike in credibility for their cause.

The math is simple: he gets more juice out of refusing the award than he does by accepting it. And while it might be nice to have a Nobel on the mantle to show to the grandkids one day, realistically if he can get more diplomatic stroke through refusal, that’s the wisest course of action.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I’ve also done another of those “hey look at these comments” posts , this time about David Miller announcing he won’t run for a third term as Mayor of Toronto.

And if you haven’t read this Leonard Pierce special, you should.

So the Tories up here in the Theoretically Frozen North have managed to stave off an election once again, and what irks me is that they did exactly what they pilloried the Liberals and NDP for doing last year: namely, they got the Bloc on their side with governmental concessions. Somehow I doubt the screaming harpy chorus that cried out “cooperation with the Bloc is treason” when Stephane Dion suggested that maybe the parties which received the support of a majority of Canadian voters should run things will find their indignation quite so stoked.

People complain about the American media all the time, and with good reason, but the Canadian media has its own set of quirks that can really be annoying. One of them is the conceit that governing in Canada’s seemingly permanent minority government environment is difficult, and it simply isn’t. The Harper government figured out the two-part secret of how to do it a long time ago: run policy through the Prime Minister’s office and administrative channels of the government rather than legislating through Parliament, and bribe the Bloc whenever things get dicey.¹ The fact that the Harper Tories have figured out this relatively simple equation and the Canadian media by and large has not is depressing; the fact that the Harperites could figure it out and then be basically dogshit at the actual job of governance, moreso.

Still, we’re most likely stuck with the useless assholes for another couple of years until the Liberals realize that Michael Ignatieff was a huge, huge mistake. (For American readers: Michael Ignatieff is kind of like Evan Bayh, except you want to punch him in the face even more.)

1. You can bribe other parties, but frankly it’s simplest to bribe the Bloc: you just find something the Quebec government wants, and give it to them. That’s the power regional parties bring to the table. [↩]

That’s what the gasping throes of modern conservatism has left in the tank. That’s what they’ve got. Twenty years.

Don’t be afraid by Michelle Malkin claiming two million people showed up: the police estimates are thirty thousand plus. (Besides, we already know what two million people on the Mall looks like.)

In twenty years, the majority of these stupid old white people – and it’s mostly stupid old white people, and where it isn’t all three it’s just about always two out of three – will be dead or senile (or more senile than they are now). The kids aren’t voting Republican, and they’re not voting Republican in massive numbers because it turns out the kids, while not perfect, generally disapprove of instititional racism, homophobia and sexism.

It’s the last gasp of insanity. So chill, everybody. The next couple of years might suck, but even in the worst case scenario there is simply no chance in hell that a Republican is elected President in 2012. No. Chance. In. Hell. If anybody wants to bet me money on this I will take any wager.

In Andrew’s Michelle Bachman post, Andre started a discussion about what rich get out of taxation versus poor people, and concludes:

I’m simply arguing that it is a difficult proposition to prove, one way or another, who the greatest beneficiary is of that system.

Here’s the thing, though: it really isn’t difficult at all.

Wealth is grown only on the back of talent. Your average rich person in the United States is rich because he or she owns a company that generates value through the effort of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people: those people are able to generate value because they were educated by a system primarily public, kept healthy to generate that value through public expenditures on food regulation and water safety (and, anywhere but the United States, healthcare as well), kept alive through public expenditures on policing and fire safety and emergency workers and national defense, able to travel to their place of work to generate value by highways and transportation networks maintained by public funds, and able to have their value quantified by a uniform system of weights and measures and standards applied by public institutions.

The level of income inequality between the poorest and richest is the greatest it ever has been in human history. On the one hand, that kind of sucks; on the other hand, it’s amazing. There’s a reason that feudal lords in the Middle Ages weren’t as comparatively rich as modern tycoons, and it’s not because of technology: it’s because they don’t have to spend money on keeping people alive and healthy and generating value and furthermore able to generate the best possible value, because the government does that for them, and frankly does it better than individuals could anyway.

Without public investment, Bill Gates would never have been able to build Microsoft; he would have had to expend vast sums on apprenticeships, wall off his factories to stop banditry, and convince everybody else to use not only his operating code but the mathematics it was based upon. Microsoft would never have gotten beyond being a niche product in a portion of the country, one of a thousand such businesses: we know this because society already went through a period just like what this fantasy-Microsoft would have undergone.

And that’s why the rich get more out of the public system of taxation than the poor do. The rich get everything the poor do (and, as others have pointed out, depending on how funds are collected and allocated, they can often get more than the poor do), but on top of that they also get more opportunity to get richer, just by nature of the stability of public systems.