Reed Writes

There was something about all those pictures of rebels in Tripoli I couldn’t put my finger on until the one of many feet stomping on a burning flag…. aha!

I wasn’t seeing the footwear of poor people. Au contraire, many of those feet were rather well shod.
A wee bit of digging informs me Libya is 81 out of 226 countries on the world-chart income per capita below.

Looking at Libya compared to its Arab peers only Qatar, UAR, Saudi Arabia, Bahrein and Oman have higher ranking. The first two are higher than Canada.
Significantly downscale from Libya are its immediate neighbours, Tunis 112 and Egypt 135, as are Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Morocco, West Bank and Pakistan.

Israel ranks 45, a bit better than Canada 22 and USA at 11.

So it seems to me Libya nurtures a significant middle class, more so than most of its Arabic-speaking neighbours.
The crazy guy at the top must have been doing something right for forty-odd years, but that wouldn’t jive with the US-led propaganda/belligerence, the same voices who labelled Saddam Hussein as worse than Hitler but who was simultaneously despised and reviled by Alqaeda as a secular liberal/socialist.

Which was closer to the truth?

Seems to me our soft thinking started at least twenty years ago, as we celebrate Gwen’s apparent legal right to go topless in public, which she and all those who championed her topless-ness choose not to exercise.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/07/19/gwen-jacobs.html

Seems to me this does nothing for the litany of valid grievances brought forward by the womens movement, whose brave pioneers sometimes died to make the point that women should have the vote.
A right they deserved and won, from which they moved on to campaign for fair wages, healthcare and abolition of slavery.
Real stuff.
Rights are nothing unless they are both universal and exercised. Can you imagine the scene in the early 1900s sisterhood of suffrage if some ladies announced that although they had the legal right, they didn’t intend to vote?
A sisterly kick in the arse would be their reward.

My first criticism is of policing in general with their nonsensical upholding of daft laws and whims of even dafter politicians. Police-chiefs should be front and centre declaring the lives of officers can be on the line at any moment which is why we allow them to carry firearms and tazers.
Not in taking police-action based on how much, or how little people are wearing.

Would that be aesthetic profiling?
If degrees of skin nakedness are of serious concern to cops, why aren’t they on public beaches arresting older men in speedos*, especially the ones with dyed hair and big moustaches playing killer five-a-side soccer?
Or larger people who can’t reasonably be expected to know their swimming-pants have partially disappeared at any given moment?
Or perfect young girls wearing dental-floss bikinis?

*The Speedo was trademarked in Australia in the early 1900s. Much later Ozzies renamed them “budgie-smugglers”…..

I’d suggest all the money spent on the Gwen Jacob prosecution could have been given to food-banks instead.

In the aftermath (or continuance..?) of the UK riots the debate is now more about clashing ideologies of kick-their-arses right into line on the right, and a weird sense of entitlement to smashing things and looting on the un-right.
Reports are coming in of well-to-do young people under arrest for such behaviours, so it’s not all about skin-colour and unfair distribution of wealth.
Here is a comment from a CBC blog, identifying “liberal intelligentsia” as a significant cause, which had me trying to remember anything the late Ignatieff said about anything.
Maybe there’s something to it. Are the Iggies part of the problem?
The right on the other hand focuses primarily on money, much easier than focusing primarily on intelligence.
So are we caught between the two Poles of hardnosed extended-power policing and nambypamby lib-left posturing? A societal kind of global warming?

“……… We do need to understand what is happening in the UK so that we can hopefully never see it again either over there or here in Canada. As an ex pat of the UK, I can tell you that these riots had nothing to do with poverty, government cuts, dependencies or class innequality. There is in the UK a permanent underclass of “feral youth” born of policies of the liberal intelligensia.

They have no direction because giving them direction would be a violation of their rights. They have no education because forcing people to attend school would be a violation of their rights. They have never had discipline because that would be a violation of their rights. They can do whatever they want because telling them what to do would be a violation of their rights. They generally despise working because that requires discipline which they have never been taught.

The feral kids are not born from poverty or wealth — they exist all throughout UK society and you can see that by looking at who were arrested. Some do come from poor families in places like North London. Many more come from working class families or middle income folks — like the 18 year old girl whose is pictured in the UK media standing outside her family’s beautiful old house in the country genteely sipping wine.

Feral kids have fun rioting — destruction seems to be their thing. I feel sorry for them. They feel they are entitled to whatever they want, and if they cant get it they will take it. Feral kids are a product of wrong-headed government policies which teach nothing and let people get away with everything without having to own up to the consequences of their actions. This is what is going on in the UK and looks like will slowly happen here unless Canada takes a different course……”

Two things worthy of note in closing: no charges have been laid in the recent Vancouver disgrace.

And….. as Rick Mercer says, take a look at this:

http://paulitics.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/in-case-you-missed-it-harper-just-gave-more-than-4-million-of-your-money-to-christian-fundamentalist-school/

Jack Layton has my best wishes as he faces his illness. It is important to bear in mind there is a separation of those who feel this way about him, and those who say they do.
I wonder how Canada’s right-wing creeps can look at themselves in the mirror these days, the ones who called him Taliban Jack and dissed him without even a good reason, they didn’t need one.
They now put on long faces and masks of empathy for a good man they hated.

But the politics must ebb and flow regardless of his illness, and I bet he tunes in daily to the shenanigans of the system whenever possible. Not a man to back down or shy away from a tough question.
Mine? His final executive act as the NDP leader who took his party to unprecedented status in parliament, was to annoint Nycole Turmel as interim leader, which under normal circumstances would make her a strong candidate for the highest party position in the event of a leadership review.

Why, Jack?

I’m sure there are many in my position, wondering what on earth brought about this decision.
Her recent membership of two pro-independence parties in Quebec has painted cross-hairs on the party, now the Harper cabinet knows where to go on slow days in Ottawa.

Never mind the nation’s business, just keep demonising the official opposition as Bloc Light. Particularly depressing in the light of the abysmal standard of political discourse in Ottawa, such as Peter Mackay’s crass linking of the massacre in Norway to Canada’s stamping out of international terrorism by our highly debatable presence in Afghanistan.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/story_print.html?id=5148246&sponsor=

He could have gained respect in many quarters by identifying the accused in Oslo as an ominous manifestation of white-supremacist Christian far-right extremism, every bit as worthy of concern as the Taliban, but that would quickly have him leaving his boss’s office with a one-way ticket back to practicing law.

So was Mr. Layton’s plan to mend fences with powerful unions in Quebec? Select a female interim leader at all costs?

One small consolation is that Quebec leaders switch parties without blinking, sometimes boosting their popularity in the process, sometimes surviving by the skin of their teeth. Jean Charest is a perfect example.
As homage to this political style, was Jack saying don’t have a cow, we can do it too?

I wonder how Quebecers feel who brought about the massive anti-Bloc change by going NDP in May. Is this what they voted for?

Weren’t they done with M. Duceppe and his intransigent comedy of independence?

Any answers out there….?

I am honoured to carry the flag forward for ReedWrites. With Jim gone, I felt the loss most acutely when I sat down at the keyboard to check whatever his spotlight beamed on.

Honesty is essential. I will not attempt to fill his shoes or follow his footsteps into Palestine and Israel. No Gaza, West Bank or Hamas. No Hezbollah, no Golan Heights.  

Jim was among many other things, a veteran of Middle Eastern politics which I am not, and  although we always had lively talks about many things his media-specialty never dominated.

No doubt some readers will weigh in on the international issues Jim knew so much about. This will provide a learning curve for myself and others.

In our last conversation Jim dramatically changed my view of war. I had previously seen warfare as a most unfortunate clash of ideologies where dialogue and diplomacy had failed, or a last resort to stop horrible people with horrible ideas, like the Nazi regime.

That is, when dialogue and diplomacy is attempted. Not always the case like when USA invaded Iraq, contemptuous of international inspectors still on the ground looking for weapons of mass-destruction.

They had no interest in what these professionals had to say. The mindless violence of Shock and Awe trumped everything and perked up Wall Street. Job done.

My understanding from that day with Jim…… war is a perpetual theatre on our planet with victors, vanquished, refugees, innocents, heroes and villains, all egged on by a front row seating all the big bums on earth. Arms-dealers, politicians, militaries and a rabble of rednecks.

And yes, big labour. It is hard to argue against full employment. Yet there is no good war. There is no bad peace.

But someone said that already. Benjamin Franklin.