Grant Rants

Trudeau vs. Brazeau, or why politics has nothing to do with boxing

- April 2nd, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

I honestly cannot tell what is more hilarious to me: that the national press placed so much importance on a charity boxing match, or that most of said press thought that Trudeau was going to lose and were shocked, oh how they were shocked, that he didn’t.

By way of quick background, Liberal MP Justin Trudeau and Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau fought three rounds for a cancer charity in Ottawa Saturday night. And good for them. It takes guts that most people do not have to get into the ring in the first place and they used their profile to raise money for a good cause.  Trudeau won by TKO late in the 3rd round after basically using Brazeau’s head as a heavy bag.

Now, what is amusing here is how reporters from Sun News to the National Post, who clearly haven’t ever seen a Rocky movie, let alone actual boxing, picked Brazeau to basically do to Trudeau what Foreman did to Frazier. (And if you don’t get that reference, you probably shouldn’t have been making predictions about boxing. Just sayin’.)

They will tell you that Brazeau looked bigger (he was only a few pounds heavier than his Liberal opponent) that he has a black belt in karate  and was in the army. (uh yah, so what?) . That Trudeau was taller, with a longer reach and had been hanging around boxing gyms his whole life was no never mind to the political pundits who made him a 3 to 1 underdog.1297249171361_ORIGINAL

The truth was Brazeau was  picked because he is a Conservative and Conservatives are big and tough and rah rah rah. Liberals are meek and wimpy and probably made from tofu instead of muscle. So Trudeau had to lose because, you know, Liberals can’t box.

The punditry  about the fight was, to be frank, embarrassingly and hilariously bad. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the sport would not have favoured Brazeau. He has a black belt? Big deal. Last time I checked, breaking boards and kicking was not allowed in boxing and, the fact of the matter is, most karate schools do not employ full contact sparring. The bit about the army? That would be relevant, I guess, if he boxed in the armed forces. He didn’t, so really, one might as well have said he was also played golf or something.

Trudeau, on the other hand, has been boxing since he was a kid. Never actually fought in the ring, but was in the gym, which gives him a massive edge over someone who wasn’t. Boxing is a balletic craft that takes time to learn. So there is a basic rule when predicting a bout: if one guy has lots of experience and the other guy doesn’t, you don’t pick the noob to win…unless the noob happens to be from Philadelphia. You ALWAYS bet on the fighter from Philadelphia.

The fight itself was sloppy – neither man would last long in a typical club show in St. Catharines – but Trudeau knew enough to open up the can of whup ass on Brazeau, who learned that painful truism about boxing: you play golf, you play tennis. Boxing is the hurt business. You never “play” at boxing at any level of the sport.

Near as I can tell, Brazeau figured that ducking and blocking were against his religion.

It was OBVIOUS this was going to happen, despite some of my Sun media peers gleeful predicting the doom of Trudeau based on his politics. Even the National Post couldn’t admit its silliness afterward, still insisting the non-boxer should have been favoured over the guy who knows boxing because, you know, he looks mean. *sigh*

This is what happens when political commentators decide to talk about the sweet science. You don’t know what you’re doing, boys and girls. Leave it to the pros, ok?

Categories: boxing, General | No comments

RIP Bert Sugar

- March 27th, 2012

“Boxing is like animals that turn on their young and eat them.” – Bert Sugar

bert

One of the great pleasures of working in this business for me has me the occasional contact with people whom I’ve admired, particularly in boxing.

Sometimes, like when I met Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, it was a cold splash of reality. The man was nothing like what I expected and I found whatever admiration his public image had created in my mind evaporated like a cup of water on a hot prairie summer day.

Other times, however, the icon is every bit the man you expect. This was the case of boxing writer and commentator, one of the real, original “Mad Men” of marketing and advertising, Bert Sugar. Bert passed away this weekend from cancer.

I interviewed Bert three or four times since I started writing about boxing, and while I cannot claim to know him well, as a professional he was gracious and funny as hell. He was the master of the one liner, being able to draw as much on classical literature as he was his knowledge of boxing history which appeared to stretch back to the original Olympics in ancient Greece – which I think he may well have attended and written about.  He had a singular wit that was both disarmingly charming and still got straight to the point.

When I first interviewed him about the now defunct boxing TV show “The Contender” he mused about how the fight game suffered in the public eye because the heavy weight division, the only one that seems to matter, had faded into obscurity: “You know, if you took the four heavyweight champions, put them in a police lineup in their robes, gloves and trunks, not only would people not know who they were, they wouldn’t know what these guys do for a living.”

I laughed and then he did too, in that infamous strained, wheeze of a cackle no doubt brought on by the constant consumption of cigars.

“You like that, kid?” he said, still laughing. “Make sure you use that. It was a good one, huh? I’ll have to remember it.”

Later, when I talked to him about the Bernard Hopkins vs. Jean Pascal title fight in Montreal, he summed up the seemingly timeless career of Hopkins (who later won the fight to become the oldest legit boxing champion in history) he said: “You never know when Hopkins will turn into Dorian Gray and just age right before our eyes. But keep in mind he has been written off more times than the national debt.”

The era of boxing writers – hell, of newspaper writers in general – who even know who Dorian Grey is has long since passed. I cannot name a single writer or commentator out there who had Bert’s grasp of metaphor. As writers, we all appear as pygmies by comparison. I’ve learned more about the history of boxing, and how to write about it, from Bert than from anyone else.

What was more striking and often more memorable to me, though, were the things he said that never made it to print in my copy. We talked once for more than an hour after an interview about his previous career in marketing and advertising, including business he did with the company that presently employees me. We weren’t buddies – Bert honestly didn’t know me from a stranger who passed him in the street. But he spoke to me as though we’d known each other for years. He regaled me with stories he probably told others a dozen times over, but always with a mischievous lilt that suggested what I was hearing was for my ears only.

“Good talking to you, kid. Call me anytime. I’m always here for you if you need me,” he’d say after every conversation.

In May, some of my boxing work is up for an Ontario Newspaper Award – it is not to much to say anything about the sport I’ve writing that is worthy of note is due, in part, from lessons learned from Bert Sugar. So I’ll be sure to wear my fedora and smoke a cigar for him at the awards dinner.

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Categories: boxing, General | No comments

Mass Effect 3 and Charles Dickens

- March 22nd, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

So readers of the rant may have become painfully aware of my, um, obsession with all things Mass Effect. I luurrves it! (Yes, “lurve” is a word. It’s perfectly cromulan.)

In my last blog post, I wrote about the fanboy rage over the game’s ending and this insane demand that Bioware, the producer of Mass Effect, change it. Nonsense, said I. The ending is great. It just isn’t spoon fed to you and a writer stays true to his or her vision, even if people hate it. QED.

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Is there a DLC in that light?

Well, if you hop over to fellow Sun Media blogger Matthew Dykstra, you’ll see that Bioware is…well not changing the ending so much as perhaps “clarifying” it with some downloadable content in about a month’s time  to address said fanboy rage.

This still strikes me as a spark of the burning stupid from an artistic point of view. Interactive medium or not, you write your story and let the chips fall where they may. What you don’t do is bend to the fickle will of an audience, right? Right?

Putting aside, for the moment, the principle that an artist puts their work out there to be judged for what it is without compromise, there is, as it turns out, precedent for this sort of thing.

Many moons ago, before people had evolved the skill to text, drive and drink coffee at the same time (Ah, not that I know about that…That’s really dangerous you know…really…no responsible adult would do that…) people read books and went to the theatre. What’s that you say? Well, citizens of the future, books are funny little things where words are printed on, gasp, paper. And theatre? That is sorta like TV without the box. (Speaking of which, be sure to check out the Standard’s Angela Scappatura in Cabaret by Garden City Productions. It’s an excellent show that runs for two more weekends.)

Ok, I was totally going somewhere with this….oh right, ok…so the point was, in this distant past without electronics, there was a charming fellow named Charles Dickens. You may have even heard of him. He wrote a brilliant book called Great Expectations.

The original ending was not well recieved. For most of the tale, Great Expectations’ hero Pip deeply loves the cold hearted Estella. But it doesn’t work out and Pip bravely moves on (although forever remaining single) and one day comes across a life beaten Estella on the street. He walks away saying that time and a hard life had “had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.” (Zeusdamn brilliant line that is.)

A bitter sweet, if sadly realistic ending.

Dicken’s had fanboys before there were fanboys and they freaked. One shudders to think what they would have done to poor Charles if the internet was kicking about back then. You can imagine the internet postings: “Charles Dickens has ruined my life. I demand he changes the ending of Great Expectations or I will never buy another one of his books….oooh wait, what’s that? Bleak House? Coooool. Saw the trailer. Looked awesome…”

The ending was too sad, they said. Estella should see how awesome Pip is and be with him. They’d be happy, for crying out loud and the poor guy’s patience and love needed to be rewarded. Why can’t she see that? Whhyyyyyyy?

(Seriously, they made the people who flipped out over the Star Wars special edition DVDs look reasonable.)

I suppose Dickens was, in his way, like Bioware. Or maybe Bioware is like Dickens. Whatever. In any case, he listened to his readers and rewrote the ending so that Pip and Estella met after her husband died, and they get to spend their twilight years together. Never mind that Estella should have wised up before that and….*sigh* never mind. I’ll start ranting. Point is, most copies of the book you find today do not even contain the original ending and most people remember Pip and Estella finally becoming a happy couple.

Bioware is likely to be criticized by the likes of me for bowing to fan pressure by, perhaps, compromising the integrity of their original work.

But then again, I’m one of the few who prefer the honesty of the original ending of Great Expectations and really, who am I to argue with Charles Dickens?

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Categories: General, philosophy, video games | No comments

Why Bioware SHOULD NOT change the end to Mass Effect 3

- March 20th, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

Alright, some disclaimers right off the start here: if you hate video games or simply do not understand we geeks, leave now. The level of geek here is about to reach a level beyond geekdom. Also, if you are one of my people and haven’t finished ME3 first, shame on you, second, there will be spoilers about the end – you have been warned.

So lately there has been this fanboy web meltdown about the endings to Mass Effect 3, a work of interactive entertainment that, at this point in video game history, is the Citizen Kane of video games. I can think of no other game that transcends the tropes of the medium to present us with something that is this visionary and entertaining.  It stands, in my view, with other science fiction works like War of the Worlds. It’s not just empty action. It has a brain. And it assumes we, the audience, have one too.

If you want spoon fed action, Mass Effect is not for you. The trilogy is not brainless, but the final game in particular is striking in its intellectual and emotional content.Mass Effect 3 Teaser Wallpaper

For those who do not know, Mass Effect has become for video games what Star Wars was for movies or, a closer analogy would be what LOTR is for books. An expensive deeply rich, fictional universe that invests you in the characters and every last little detail of what makes it believable and interesting.

The story follows the tale of Command Shepard, an archetype hero who is archetypal because you, as the player pretty well define what and who he or she is. Shepard’s gender, sexual orientation, attitude, politics, interpersonal skills , methods of problem solving and fighting style are all defined by you. Bioware, the company behind Mass Effect, draws you in with a compelling story, and graphics and characters. But you are in control of a great deal of what defines how the game plays out. Bioware sets the stage, but you play the part.

The first game is a cosmic whodunit, where Shepard works to identify and defeat a threat to galactic civilization, stumbling upon a genocidal race of god like machines called the Reapers bent on wiping out all advanced organic life in the Milky Way. The second game is built around a sci-fi version of the Seven  Samurai: (Or the Magnificent Seven, for the less cultured.) Shepard builds a team of unlikely heroes to confront agents of the Reapers, who are harvesting human beings.  (yes, that is just as creepy as it sounds – a sci-fi take on the Holocaust really.). By the third game, billed as the last (but probably won’t be) the Reapers finally arrive in force. The galaxy is in a full blown war for survival. It is a battle against extinction.

Along the way, you confront ethical dilemmas about war and politics, religion, about science and ethics, about race relations, about what it means to make a hard choice in hard circumstances, about what it means to be human. It even has  a healthy dose of romance and while it is not exactly J.R. Ward (lacking that level of steam), the story is written well enough for you to feel invested in the romantic subplots. (For instance I, along with a lot of Mass Effect players, were more than a little excited to get our Shepard’s girlfriend back after she made only an cameo in the second game. Shepard’s girlfriend’s back and she carries a frakin’ pulse rifle, so yer gonna in trouble. Hey, nah, hey,/ nah.)

None of it is trite, as someone who doesn’t know modern video games might think. But presented in a very mature, often challenging fashion.

But what has people tied up in knots is the ending of the trilogy. (Spoilers my fellow geeks. Twice warned is…well, twice warned).

Mass Effect does not end with Shepard winning the day and riding off with his lady love (or man love depending) into the sunset. Bioware takes the notion of total war very seriously, and the story is as grim as it is engaging. Victory is possible, but not without heavy loss and the total alteration of the status quo. The game can end in several ways, depending on how you play. Even the best victory scenario comes at a price, resulting in the death of friends and allies. In Mass Effect, as in life, you cannot always get what you want and you have to make the best with the options you have, even when those options are not good.

The end also is not straight forward, no matter what scenario plays out. The entire end of the game appears to be an exploration of the human mind. Bioware has taken a page, it seems, from Inception, making it unclear what exactly is “real” what and isn’t. My own view of it is the final sequences of the game are all in Shepard’s mind, as he attempts to fight off a process of Reaper brainwashing called “Indoctrination”. It’s surreal, unsettling, and makes you THINK about what is happening and why. It makes you consider every choice you have made up to this point in the series (one of the clever aspects of the series is that Bioware allows you to import your Shepard from one game to the next, coming with all the choices you have made, good, bad and ugly. Shepard always has baggage.) It makes you question your own assumptions and motives on several fronts, and how you deal with that impacts your final choices.

You do not come away from the end feeling happy. It is, regardless of what you do, a visceral punch to the gut, punctuated with the smallest ray of hope – a ray that is only there if you made particular choices through the series.

Some rabid fans of the game do not like this. They have started web petitions, written blogs, made Youtube videos all about how the end of ME3 “sucks”. There is not typical, flashy, shoot out with a final enemy to win the day. There is no triumphant hero pumping his fist in the air in victory. There is no simplistic, action movie, final moments. You are left instead, to think long and hard about what just happened and why  (which has interestingly resulted in some very cool talk about it, including my favorite bit of fan speculation known know as the “Indoctrination theory” about the end of the game.)

Bioware, which pays close attention to fan reaction to games and often includes tweaks to its products based on that feed back, has said it is listening and knows some fans need more “closure” to the story than the endings presently give, suggesting they might offer up some downloadable content that will change how the story ends in some fashion.

This could be a mistake, in my view. Yes, yes, the fanboys will rant and rave and claim the ending is horrible because, basically, they are not being spoon fed a happy ending. Life doesn’t guarantee us happy endings, loose ends are not always tied up, something Mass Effect has accepted since the start of the series. What Bioware has done is craft an ending one has to deeply consider and interpret, a very rare feat in a medium that is still maturing into a full blown art form: Did Shepard really defeat the Reapers? If so, how much of what we saw was “real” and not just in his head?  The end offers up more questions and it does answers.

Rather than change the ending, my hope is that Bioware will do what it has always done – offer up downloaded additions to the game that expand the universe and lead us in new direction. But change the ending because some players have an over the top, fanboy meltdowns over it? No. We shouldn’t be asking to be spoon fed base pap. There is a legion of sitcoms and awful science fiction programing and lunk headed fighting games for one to delve into if you want that. What Bioware has created is something unique, that should be allowed to stand and players should learn that it is ok to have to think. The low common denominator they appear to ask for isn’t worth it.

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Categories: Geekosity, General, video games | No comments

Sorry, busy fighting the Reapers. You’re welcome, galaxy.

- March 12th, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

Saving the galaxy, one planet at a time. You're weclome.

Saving the galaxy, one planet at a time. You're weclome.

I know this blog is usually the place where I can vent spleen about robocalls, religion, religious robocalls and Glee.  Or maybe religions that robocall about Glee. And I would like to do that right now, I really, really would.

Thing is, Mass Effect 3 has recently been released. Which pretty well means my regular life is now consumed defending you, citizens of the Citadel, from the Reaper invasion. It will be harder for me to  blog for a bit, as I travel about of the galaxy cementing alliances to defeat the horrible mechanical menace. And before you think I am being silly, why don’t you try and get the Korgan and the Turians to get along. I mean, really! I don’t see YOU volunteering to do it.

I also realize only a small number of you may actually know what in the name of Harbinger’s metal tentacles I am talking about. But I don’t care. BECAUSE MASS EFFECT IS AWESOME!!!!!

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Categories: Glee is evil, video games | No comments

On Richard Dawkins and the chattering classes…

- March 2nd, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

Huge news, my fellow heathens. HUGE. Like bigger than the release of Mass Effect 3 huge….well, ok, not THAT huge, but still…

Richard Dawkins, OUR Richard Dawkins, has become most kind of theist. He recently said he was not 100 per cent sure god (small G, thank you very much) doesn’t exist! Clearly, he is about to have a conversion experience. Frankly I am hoping for a conversion to Norse Paganism, because of the parties are better:

 

Well, actually no. Dawkins has not become a theist. Or a deist. Or even a fan of Glee. (I am guessing on the last part. Fair guess though.) During a recent debate, the arch-atheist said on his own scale of religious vs. atheist thinking (one being totally sure god exists and 7 being totally sure it doesn’t) he is a 6.9.

And the choruses of hallelujah burst all over the blogoverse. Dawkins had seen the light!

Oh please. It’s almost as if Dawkins’ most vocal critics haven’t bothered to read or listen to a word he has ever offered up. Surely that wouldn’t happen would it?

Look, the Big D is a scientist. A good one. And the hallmark of a good scientist is to know the limits of one’s knowledge. We cannot disprove the existence of something for which there is no evidence. But you can say there is not evidence to support the claim of the existence of a supernatural space daddy who runs the universe. QED.

In other words, while you cannot slam the door totally on the idea of  a godlike whatsit, we can say that all the evidence so far does nothing to support the faith claims of theistic religions. Or Deistic ones. Or Glee.

Dawkins actually spelled out his view in the God Delusion. He made no secret of it. He doesn’t go all the way to 7 on his scale because, as a scientist, he isn’t going to claim to know something he doesn’t. So while the evidence for all gods proposed so far amounts to zlitch, there is a lot we don’t know. Statements of absolutes are the domain or religion not science.

So, how much of a revelation was Dawkins’ perspective on this count? Did Dr. J play basketball?

Categories: General | No comments

Thursday hodgepodge: new website and big boxing bouts that just aren’t.

- February 23rd, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

Ok so first things first, my pretties: the Standard FINALLY has a revamped webpage.  The  face life and redesign that should make it easier and more fun to read the stories of your favorite local reporters – like devilishly handsome writers  with Quebecois names who hail from Alberta perhaps? Anyway, since you are here you know the link, but just in case, check out www.stcatharinesstandard.ca and let us know what you think.

Now, onto other stuff bouncing around in my head. I don’t watch a lot of sports. Honestly, most of it bores me. Not as much as Glee, but close. Something like the Superbowl, to me, is like having some kind of anesthetizing agent injected directly into my brain. The one exception to the rule is boxing, the best sport here is. You could argue with me on this point, and you would be wrong. (Golf fans: don’t even bother making a case for your game. Walking about a manicured lawn knocking a wee ball into a hole with clubs someone else carries for you lacks not only drama, but a pulse. Twain was right. Golf is a pleasant walk spoiled. Go hang out with the guys who like lawn darts and televised poker.)

However, I have to despair a little about the big fights coming up soon, because they just aren’t. Big I mean. They are approximations of big. Yes, Manny Pacquiao will make a gazillion dollars fighting Tim Bradley in June and Floyd Mayweather will make probably more fighting the always game Miguel Cotto in May. But THE fight is Pacquaio vs. Mayweather. We all know it. And it just never seems to come together for reasons what would be the subject for another day.

So, what will the upcoming fights look like? Prediction time:

Mayweather vs. Cotto: Mayweather by clear decision.

Look, yes Cotto has looked great since Pacquiao beat the unholy hell of him a few years ago. And his demolition of the hated Antonio Margarito was impressive. And yes, he is bigger and stronger than Mayweather. But don’t buy into the hype. Cotto’s only chance to blast Mayweather with something huge to hurt or knock him out QED. A puncher’s chance.

Watch Cotto’s fights. He will stand and brawl if he has to, but his style is to step back, let you come forward and catch you coming in. He is not a counter puncher, al la Mayweather or Marquez – the two best counter punchers in the game today – but he uses his step back and fire style to set his opponent up. And it’s worked very well for him. But Mayweather isn’t going to chase Cotto. He isn’t going to hunt him down. He is going to step back himself, force Cotto to come forward and counter punch him to death – like he does everyone else. Look at Cotto’s fight against Pacquiao. Pacman didn’t need to bull rush him. He made Cotto come forward, and Cotto got caught up in the Pacman buzzsaw.

Mayweather will not likely knock Cotto out, he doesn’t have the power or sustained attack to put down a guy like like that, but he will out point him easily over 12 rounds.

Manny Pacquaio vs. Tim Bradley: TKO by round 9

Forget how Pacquaio looked against Marquez. Marquez is a counter puncher – the one style Manny simply cannot cope well with. (which is why should he ever fight Mayweather, Pacman has to be the underdog by a wide margin). Any fighter who stands with Pacquiao, or come forward, gets mulched. They walked into a blizzard of punches that come from weird angles and – provided Pacman has figured out his leg cramping problem which plagued him and slowed him down in his last two fights – he isn’t there to be hit much.

Bradley is a very very good fighter. Would ruin me inside a few rounds. But he is a straight ahead, come forward puncher. Tailor made for Manny Pacquiao. So unless Bradley suddenly developed new skills, or Pacquiao really is a force in serious decline as his critics say, it’s going to be an easy night for the Pacman. Bradley will learn a painful lesson about allowing himself to be used as cannon fodder.

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Categories: boxing, General, Glee is evil | No comments

Vic Toews, Jean-Luc Picard and drumheads

- February 16th, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

I had an epiphany the other day. Now, this is going to sound a little ka-ray-zee, but bear with me. I think it will eventually make sense.

Our federal politicians need to take a break for a month and do nothing but watch Star Trek. Not the new movie, although it was pretty geektastic. And certainly not Voyager or the last, trippy season of DS9 (seriously does ANYONE understand the series finale? That thing was Lost before Lost was Lost.)

No, I am talking about the Next Generation. In particular, an episode (my fav. of the series actually) entitled “Drumhead” – named after a particularly ghastly 19th century military tradition in Europe where soldiers were tried on the battlefield in vicious kangroo courts. If you were called to one, well, you didn’t need to worry about polishing your boots ever again.

The basic plot is that there was a traitor onboard the Enterprise, which triggers this crazy witch hunt for more traitors. A kangroo court is convened, and any opposition to the process is regarded as a sign of guilt and treachery. The whole sad affair is finally brought to end by our favorite bald captain (after an innocent person’s career is ruined) with a short but brilliant speech about civil liberties:

 (The key bits from the episode are definitely worth watching, particularly the opening scene.)

So why am I going on about this bit of science fiction fun? Because it seems to me to the writers of Star Trek have a better grip on the balance between safety and privacy than our current crop of election officials.

I’m referring in particular to  federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. This week he brought forward a internet surveillance bill — originally called the Lawful Access Act, but since that sounds slightly sketchy, the name was quickly changed to the much more cheerful  Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act — that caused a whole lot of people go sit up and go “uh, yah, hold the phone.”

Essentially, the bill would force internet service providers to hand data on their customers – name, address, phone number, email address  and IP address – over to the police upon request without a warrant. Internet service providers would also have to install software and hardware to record the activity of its customers so the police could access it, although getting at that would require a warrant.

Needless to say this whole getting access to private info about citizens without a warrant stuff caused privacy experts and web denizens to have a freak out. It’s not that anyone says the police shouldn’t, when justified, be able to get that kind of information in timely manner (Internet service providers already cooperate with police requests something like 94% of the time, making the bill itself moot.) It’s just that they shouldn’t be able to get it willy-nilly. Police cannot come into your home, or get your phone records on a whim, so why should they be able to grab your internet info without a warrant?

All reasonable objections to Toews’ pet project. How did our public safety minister react? Did he take these criticisms seriously? Did he try to explain how the privacy of Canadian’s would not be abused should his bill become law?

No.

What he said was that critics of the bill can “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.” thestupiditburns

That’s right. According to Mr. Toews,  if you question what the government is doing you are in league with criminal deviants who hunt children.

Clearly, a rational response.

We’ve heard this sort of pygmy minded nonsense from the feds before. Defense Minister Peter MacKay used to use this line with those who disagreed with the government’s plan to buy new fighter jets. If you debated the issue, he’d say, you hurt the morale of our troops and that would get them killed, so just shut the hell up would you?

The internet bill rationale being kicked around gets even more ridiculous, with some saying that, well, if you are not guilty of anything you don’t need to worry about it, do you? Even the writers of a science fiction TV show knew this kind of police state drivel was nonsense. I mean, seriously, how much trouble are we in when Captain Picard makes more sense than our elected officials?

So I am going to say this as plainly as I can before my head explodes out of frustration thinking about this:

Dear Conservative politicians: Canadians who disagree with you are not automatically siding with terrorists and criminals. It is possible to have a policy disagreement with you without being some kind of super-villain. When you suggest the only option is to agree with you or destroy the country, you make us want to lock you all in a room where you have to sit beside someone who is knitting something that isn’t there whilst endless singing the Coconut song. (Just saying that already put the song in your head, didn’t it? So don’t push us.)

If that isn’t clear enough let me try it in words of less than two syllables: Stop it!

So, Mr. Toews and gang, take a break, buy some Star Trek DVDs and maybe you’ll learn something.

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Categories: Geekosity, General, politics, the stupid it burns | No comments

Abortion, faith by stealth and politics.

- February 13th, 2012

Life is complex.

It may seem a trifle unfair, but life doesn’t guarantee us happy endings.
 Sometimes we are left with a choice between two equally difficult options, neither one without its share of heartache. Sometimes the only way to know if we made the right choice is to let a decision play out and see what comes. The best we can do, I suppose, is to face those choices honestly.

Yah, yah, I know, look at me being all emo and deep. Must have been something I ate.
 However, it does bring me to something bouncing around the news wires the past week – namely the failure of Kitchener Centre MP Stephen Woodworth to reopen the abortion debate in Canada.

There is an element, a small one perhaps, of the governing Conservative Party that wants to establish a Canadian version of the religious right found south of the border. These are the folks who decide most everything through the lens of a 2,000-year-old book, and seek to create a quasi-theocratic state where the law of the land isn’t secular, but Biblical.

While the U.S. has to deal with theocrats attempting to teach creationism in science classes and attacks upon the rights of homosexual citizens,  the Great White North has been able to avoid a lot of that.

(Interestingly, the Liberals are now contending with this as well.  The ailing party is worried pro lifers are going to effectively hijack a Toronto riding by-election.)

After Stephen Harper won his first majority last election, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among some in the chattering classes who assumed Harper would usher in Canada Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin would approve of.

What they failed to understand is that whatever else Harper is, he’s ultimately a pragmatist who knows if he even put one foot down that road, the federal Tories would end up back in the wilderness he only recently led them out of. (Look at what happened to the Ontario PC’s when they tried to run on a platform of funding faith based schools a few years back.) That’s why he won’t reopen the abortion debate. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

His less astute peers, however, are unable to handle this kind of calculation.
Which brings us back to Woodworth. He’s got a motion to form a committee to examine the legal definition of a human being, specifically when is a person a person? The definition Canada uses is simple enough — at birth.

But it’s also apparently a few centuries old and Woodworth thinks it’s in need of updating.
 If it changed, Canada’s abortion laws could also change. 
Of course, Woodworth’s motion doesn’t actually mention abortion. Instead of facing the question honestly, he is attempting to sneak abortion onto the floor of the House of Commons, but has all the subtly of Inspector Clouseau in china shop. Themistocles he ain’t.

I’ve never been able to reach a completely comfortable conclusion to the abortion question. It is difficult dispute the late Christopher Hitchens when he said the unborn ought to be considered candidate members of the species. On the other hand, so far as I am concerned the only person who should have any say over a woman’s body is the woman herself. QED.

These are, I admit, contradictory ideas. That being the case, I lean on the firmer of the two — a woman’s right to choose — to decide the matter.

Some might says it’s a lousy trade off. Maybe so. But I’ve yet to hear and argument sufficiently potent to change my mind.

Woodworth does not bother with this sort of reasoning. He tries to cloak his intentions using a poor man’s version of “the end’s justify the means.”
 It’s not a lie exactly, but it sure isn’t the truth.

Being a backbencher, his motion for a special committee has a snowball’s chance in Hades of becoming much of anything. But his method – the attempt to slip an agenda through the Commons by dressing it up as something else — is something worth watching as it does little to help nation grapple with those issues for which there are never comfortable answers.

Categories: General | 1 comment

I get feedback: the gay conspiracy agenda edition

- January 30th, 2012

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens, and the rest of you!

So it seems my last column has touched more than  few nerves, given by the piles of emails that hit my inbox over the weekend. No surprise really, given that I was poking Ontario Catholic educators in the eye for their “alternative” to gay-straight alliances in their schools in recent guidelines that create “respecting differences” groups for students that do none of the things gay-straight alliances do.

Essentially, I have hard time accepting all the talk of respect and dignity in recent Catholic school guidelines that turn to the Catholic Catechism as it’s foundational document — a catechism which regards homosexuality as being fundamentally depraved. This cannot, I wrote in the Grant Rant, either respect and help gay students, nor will it do much to prevent bullying.

Well, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would try to defend these guidelines. And it was equally inevitable that gay bashing would be part of it. To whit, I offer this bit of feed back to the column for a reader who goes by the handle “thatsallfolks”:

Typical left-wing, religion-bashing distortion. LaFleche is trying to restate Catholic beliefs by accusing Catholics of labeling homosexuals depraved when their teaching clearly reveals that it is “homosexual acts” which are “distorted” and “depraved”. There is a BIG difference between the sin and the sinner. Christianity commands us to love the latter and hate the former.

Wonder when Mr. Grant will do a piece on the inappropriate homosexual indoctrination which is occurring in the youngest grades of our PUBLIC school system via a cloaked anti-bullying curriculum? Can’t we just have generic “bullying” education REGARDLESS of race, sex, and gender? Funny I can’t recall anyone reaching out to the obese, the less than beautiful, or the “four eyes” population like myself?

Oh where to begin?

First, he is technically correct when he says the Catechism describes homosexual “acts” as fundamentally depraved and disordered. And this becomes the first line of defense for this kind of discrimination. You know, the whole “love the sinner, hate the sin” stuff.

First, it’s a fairly absurd precept to being with. It’s a bit like saying “oh well love Darth Vader, but hate Death Star.” I mean, what?

More important for our discussion here, however, is to point out that people are what they do. To say that is fine and dandy to be gay so long as you never have an actual relationship with another gay person is like saying “oh it’s ok for that animal to be a bird, so long as it doesn’t fly.”

Ultimately, it’s just a cover. A po’ duck game of semantics that is used to try and defend a point of view that is fundamentally unfair, unrealistic, outdated and discriminatory. Attempting to the draw the line between gay people and gay sex is a meaningless distinction.

But Mr. Thatsallfolks and a few others readers — not many, mind you, but enough to get my attention — go a step further than this Through the Looking Glass rationalization. I am referring of course to talk of the evil gay agenda bent on turning school children to a legion of homosexuals who will, from what I can gather, destroy the world. Or at least join the cast of Glee or something. Well, you tell me! It’s like these bozos think that gay people gather together in secret meetings and plot the take over the world, one child at a time, until there isn’t a straight person left. It’s never made even a little bit of sense.

The talk of “homosexual indoctrination” and the “gay agenda” is exactly the consequence of the kind of policy the Catholic Church is trying to enact in Ontario’s (public funded) Catholic schools. Once you point to a segment of the population and say “oh THOSE people are screwed up” which is what the church does, it becomes easy to define them as a “them” against you “us.” And of course “them” are always bad, always up to do something to undermine the “us”. I mean, if you listen to all the talk of the gay agenda and replace “gay” with “Jewish” you have something that resembles the paranoid rhetoric from Germany circa 1939.

So I will say it once: there is gay agenda bent on destroying school children in the same way there is Bigfoot, the Lochness Monster, UFOs, a good James Bond movie before the Daniel Craig version and sugar coated happy endings for all us. IT DOESN’T EXIST!

(On the other hand, there is an identifiable Catholic “agenda”. The entire outfit exists to spread the faith by converting, well, everyone. There aren’t gay churches designed to turn straight people gay, are there? So…just sayin’.)

The bottom line here is that that is being established in Ontario’s Catholic schools with public tax dollars is institutionalized discrimination, and that is something that needs to be very carefully looked at.

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Categories: General, Glee is evil, Isn't it absurd?, politics, religion | No comments

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