No laughing matter
By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - 0 Comments
From the front lines of the war on comedy, Le Devoir chronicles the death of the funny:
They may be funny, but, in the end, they’re cheating their audience. To wit: while claiming to be able to laugh at anything, comedians, who are quietly taking over Montreal for the 28th edition of the Just For Laughs festival, have in recent years considerably narrowed the subject and object of their derision.
And that’s not all: far from being the offended rebels many claim to be, these kings of the joke have become less caustic, less subversive, but also more conventional and reassuring.
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“By nature, stupidity is everywhere, on the right as much as the left. We should laugh at it, not only in well-worn fashion. Comedians today, even the ones who claim to be radical politically aware, no longer stand in opposition to the dogmas of our era. They are the incarnation of these dogmas.”
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A missed opportunity for diversity
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 7:00 AM - 228 Comments
Mark Steyn on the opening ceremonies: Where was the genuinely bizarro cavalcade?
Left and middle: Photographs by Brian Howell
Judging by emails from readers in America, Britain, India, Australia, Europe, Africa and beyond, Vancouver’s Olympic ceremony was a gold medal snoozeroo of politically correct braggadocio impressive even by Canadian standards. A Florida correspondent suggested that Beijing’s decision in 2008 to downplay discreetly its official state ideology might have been usefully emulated by Canadian organizers unable to go a minute and a half without reflexive invocations of their own state ideology of “diversity.” A reader in Sydney said he had no idea until the ceremony that the majority of Canada’s population were Aboriginal. Actually, if they were, you’d be hearing a lot less talk about “diversity,” for reasons we’ll come to later.
But don’t take the word of doubtless untypical Steyn readers. Out on the Internet, the Tweeting Twitterers pronounced it a bust, and even in the Toronto Star Richard Ouzounian declared that “the eyes of the world were upon us and we put them to sleep.” On the other hand, the Vancouver Sun’s reporter cooed that this was “the Canada we want the world to see, magical and beautiful, and talented.” This just after she’d written: “Maple leaves fell from the sky. And then, the divine poetess Joni Mitchell and her haunting Clouds fills the air while a young boy floats and soars above the audience, undulating fields of wheat below.” I was pleasantly relieved to discover that a story about “the world’s most lethal cocktail” concerned some enterprising dealers who’ve been lacing heroin with anthrax, and not whichever malevolent genius came up with the idea of having airborne ballet dancers doing interpretative choreography over the Prairies to a mélange of Both Sides Now and W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen The Wind. As is traditional, most of the creativity went into the audience estimates: apparently, this tribute to the only G7 nation comprised solely of high priests of the Great Tree Spirit, armies of Inuit sculptors, and Cape Breton chorus lines of federal grant worshippers was watched by three billion people “worldwide.” As if the Royal Canadian Mint could afford to commission that many commemorative authentic pewter maple-encrusted manacles.
Canada’s message to the world: every cliché you’ve heard about our plonkingly insecure self-flattering PC earnestness has been triumphantly confirmed. You need pay us no further heed until the 2068 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. Half the countries, twice as long!
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Come to think of it, why use "volunteers" to run the Olympics?
By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 11, 2009 at 8:14 PM - 64 Comments
Don’t tell anybody, but I’m rather tickled that the Queen Charlotte Islands have been given back the name of the slaveholding empire that was once centred there. Such a cheeky gesture! So politically incorrect! So contrary to the stifling liberal spirit of our age! It is almost literally as if Mississippi got renamed Whitetopia; and yet the progressives are simply falling over themselves with naïve praise. I raise a glass to you and shoot you a sly wink, Government of British Columbia!
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Major Nidal Hasan had an enabler
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:10 PM - 255 Comments
All those red flags but no one did anything. Political correctness took the lives of 14 people.
Ever since this magazine attracted the attention of Canada’s “human rights” regime, defenders of the system have clung to a familiar argument. In a letter to Maclean’s, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., Canada’s chief censor, put it this way:
“Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred.”“Hateful words” can lead to “unspeakable crimes.” The problem with this line is that it’s ahistorical twaddle, as I’ve pointed out. Yet still it comes up. It did last month, during my testimony to the House of Commons justice committee, when an opposition MP mused on whether it wouldn’t have been better to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf.
“That analysis sounds as if it ought to be right,” I replied. “But the problem with it is that the Weimar Republic—Germany for the 12 years before the Nazi party came to power—had its own version of Section 13 and equivalent laws. It was very much a kind of proto-Canada in its hate speech laws. The Nazi party had 200 prosecutions brought against it for anti-Semitic speech. At one point the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Hitler from giving public speeches.”
And a fat lot of good it all did.
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Megapundit: I can't believe it's margarine!
By selley - Friday, July 11, 2008 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments
Must-reads: …Daphne Bramham on Daniel Igali; Richard Gwyn on foreign aid; Colby Cosh on
Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on Daniel Igali; Richard Gwyn on foreign aid; Colby Cosh on margarine; Dan Gardner on torture.
Nobody’s talking about even remotely the same thing today, so we’re just going to divide today’s Megapundit up newspaper-style. We suggest you enjoy it with coffee and some kind of pastry, drenched in the yellowest margarine you can find.
Canada
The Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe casts doubt on a Daily Telegraph editorial (as one should on anything forwarded to one’s inbox by Ryan Sparrow) that called Stephen Harper “talented but curiously neglected” on the world stage, lauded his record of tax-cutting and keeping “spending in check,” and noted his “popular and successful record in office.” As Yaffe explains, and which you already knew, this is all a tad oversimplified—and in the case of spending, arguably flat-out wrong.Lorne Gunter, writing in the Edmonton Journal, takes issue with David Herle’s argument (in yesterday’s Globe) that Stéphane Dion’s conciliatory approach among carbon-belching Albertans and Saskatchewanians is proof of his belief in a united Canada and of his overarching magnanimity. “Since when do you get brownie points for doing the minimally decent thing?” asks Gunter, who’s more inclined to believe that Dion’s soft-pedal approach was a desperate attempt to hang onto every Liberal vote, and the federal funding that comes with it (see John Ivison yesterday), even as he pitches yet “another wealth transfer from the West to central Canada.”
