Harper's revisionism - updated

PMSHithead is off to Europe to add more selfies to his MASSIVE gallery of photo ops that feature mostly his-self.

This might be awkward, given Harper's first stop, and his government's crusade against unions but ... no.

InCONvenient perhaps, but nothing that a judicious pruning of facts - something that his Politburo/PMO excels at doing - can't fix.

The irony in all this of course is that a large chunk of the CPC base is composed of folks who escaped totalitarian regimes, came to Canada, thrived here and were CONned by the party's Reformist/Evangelical populist rhetoric.

There's a reason certain countries outlaw specific religious organisations, unless they're complicit with those in power.  Authoritarian political parties do not want to be undermined.  Added: Nor do they want religious ideologies competing with their own.

As our Parliament surely devolves into the very type of corrupt Stalinist government that Kenney and Harper denounce but only when it suits their purpose, one sane response is to continue to prick holes in their puffery.

Grand merci to Alison at Creekside for the above.

UPDATE: Now with added totalitarian goodness! 

The [Harper] government is expanding its surveillance of public activities to include all known demonstrations across the country, a move that collects information even on the most mundane of protests by Canadians.

The email requesting such information was sent out Tuesday by the Government Operations Centre in Ottawa to all federal departments.

“The Government Operations Centre is seeking your assistance in compiling a comprehensive listing of all known demonstrations which will occur either in your geographical area or that may touch on your mandate,” noted the email, leaked to the Citizen. “We will compile this information and make this information available to our partners unless of course, this information is not to be shared and not available on open sources. In the case of the latter, this information will only be used by the GOC for our Situational Awareness.”

The Government Operations Centre or GOC is supposed to provide strategic-level coordination on behalf of the federal government “in response to an emerging or occurring event affecting the national interest.”

It assesses the requirement for developing plans to prevent or deal with emergencies such as pandemics, earthquakes, forest fires and floods. It also monitors overseas situations such as the 2011 crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

But the Government Operations Centre has also been involved, as an intelligence clearing house, in compiling information on Aboriginal protesters.

From here.

BOOM!

 
 

That was the MASSIVE sound produced, one might call it a "dis-sonic boom", as R.E.A.L.women's home-schooled fundamentalist christian homophobia collides with the Harper government's Foreign Affairs Minister's efforts to counter homophobia in foreign countries.

From here:

Real Women of Canada, a privately funded socially conservative group, says Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is imposing his own views on Uganda, Kenya and Russia when he criticizes those countries for passing legislation targeting homosexuals.

The group, which describes itself as a "pro-family conservative women's movement," issued a press release Wednesday decrying what it called Baird's "abuse of office" and his awarding of a $200,000 grant to "special interest groups" in Uganda and Kenya "to further his own perspective on homosexuality."

Real Women also lambasted Baird for admitting he worked extensively behind the scenes to persuade Russia not to pass laws restricting foreign adoption of Russian children by gay couples and cracking down on gay rights activism to control the spread of "homosexual propaganda."

Finally, the press release states, "Mr. Baird's actions are destructive to the conservative base in Canada and causing collateral damage to his party."

We have written about R.E.A.L.women's odious, toxic anti-feminist lobby before.

MP Mark (motion 408) Warawa is a huge fan.

They helped pick the Jubilee medal winners, one - a jailed criminal.

They even attacked Helena Guergis when she was still a member in good standing of Harper's cabinet.  Funny though, how virulently gynophobic the CPC Cons get when women like Belinda Stronach, Helena Guergis and Bev Oda and Marjory LeBreton draw attention to their vacuous principles.

Which leads me to think that the unofficial Harper policy towards women which Sen. Nancy Ruth called "friendly advice" - when she addressed it to feminist organizations - will be swiftly and brutally executed.

Pass the popcorn, please.

Added by fh: The Disaffected Lib is on it too. Fun! Popcorn!

Update:

Landolt suggested Baird was meddling when he raised such concerns.

“It really is offensive,” Landolt said Wednesday. “The issue is really why is he interfering in a sovereign country’s legislation? He really has no business to do that.”

“I don’t want other countries to get what we have here where people’s religious values and traditional values are being pushed aside and giving homosexuals priority,” she said.

“According to Mr. Baird it’s a protection of human rights but it’s not universally accepted. It’s not a Canadian value,” she said.

The organization describes itself as a “pro-family conservative women’s movement . . . Our common bond is our belief that the family is the most important unit in society.”

The same news release also says that “homosexual activists” have become a “tyrannical minority.”

Oh really?  Like the fetushist, anti-choice, anti-women's right to reproductive justice,  “tyrannical minority”? 

via Stephen Lautens' tweet.

*Mother* Russia and her Totalitarian Christian Patriarchy

From Putin and Kirill - the dogmatic duo that viciously punished Pussy Riot - more ideological crap.

Christians from Russia's Orthodox community are demanding that the country's Apple division remove the famous half-bitten apple logo from its products and replace it with a cross, because they find the apple image offensive to their beliefs.
In popular culture, an apple is often used to represent the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge when tempted by the devil, as found in Genesis 3 in the Bible – although the exact type of fruit is not mentioned in Scripture.
Still, conservative Christians in Russia have insisted that the logo should be removed and replaced with a cross, Xbitlabs.com reported from a translated article from Interfax news agency.
The Russian conservatives may get their way and force Apple to change its logo because of new laws being proposed in the country's parliament on blasphemy and insults targeting religious, spiritual, or national values. It is expected that President Vladimir Putin will back the laws, especially since the Russian Orthodox Church heavily supported him during his election campaign in 2012. Besides replacing the logo, conservatives may even stop Apple product sales in Russia if they manage to convict the company of committing anti-religious deeds.

From here.

In spite of Amnesty International's concerns for the safety of the Pussy Riot women condemned by Putin's puppet court, they have been sent to serve their sentences in two of the worst prisons in Russia. 

The stench of fundamentalist christian sharia is floating around the Kremlin.

Whether it is islamist misogyny or ultra-orthodox gynophobia, it always ends with violent and murderously vindinctive retaliation against women who won't do men's bidding.

What's new, Pussy Riot?

 
There's more than meets the (public) eye, it appears.

In 2007 I wrote about the social and political, pervasive and persistent, institutional oppression of women in Russia. The change in regime, from diluted Stalinist communism to criminal corporative and oligarchy-driven capitalism has not improved the living circumstances of women. It's the same-old same-old patriarchy, in a different guise.






It would seem gynophobia rules within organizations pledged to denouncing Putin's neo-totalitarianism. For example, Voina that spawned Pussy Riot.

This French abolitionist feminist organization is very critical of les rapports de force between the male and female artists that founded Voina. It deconstructs and savages its protest performances.

You can measure the degree of feminism of an action by how men react to it, and if men collectively cheer and celebrate it, then you can be pretty sure there’s something wrong about it, or that it doesn’t somehow support our liberation from men. And as far as I can recall, even the slutwalks didn’t get as much coverage or public appraisal. What was it that men liked so much about Pussy Riot?


Well, under closer inspection I discovered that the high level of coverage was related to – though indirectly – promoting men’s right to women’s sexual subordination and the pornification of our movement. The arrested women actually form part (and are victims of) a mixed anarchist group called “Voina” (meaning “war”), founded in 2007 by two men called Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaïev, who regularly engage the women in extreme and degrading women-hating pornography as part of their public “political stunts”. Some of Voina’s men have actually already been incarcerated in 2011 for hooliganism – which is punished for 7 years of prison in Russia, but their bail was paid for by an artist named “Banksy” four months after their imprisonment. (More information can be found here and here)

Included in their anti-government actions are a “public orgy” in the national museum of biology in a room full of stuffed bears, where several men anally penetrated their female partners in a position of submission, including one heavily pregnant women, as a metaphor to “bugger/fuck Medvedev”. “Medved” means “bear”, hence all the stuffed bears – this was meant to be symbolic, artistic and revolutionary according to the activists. Here the male anarchists literally used women as dead bodies or receptacles through which to make a political point to other men. Violating women as a means to offend other men is nothing else but an age-old patriarchal mechanism – behind which the intended target are us, for men to bond over our annihilation.

Another planned stunt in the name of “sexual freedom”, inspired by extreme forms of pornography such as zoophilia/ necrophilia, includes a member of Pussy Riot masturbating with a dead chicken in a supermarket under the watch and camera of the anarchist males, after which she inserts the dead chicken entirely into her vagina and hobbles with the chicken inside her out of the supermarket.

More about Voina, and its high-profile, confrontational media events from Libération (google translation provided).

Isn't it tediously predictable that the female members of Voina would be assigned submissive roles?

Think how much more visually transgressive the anti-Medvedev event would have been, had Voina women, equiped with strap-on godemichets, sodomized its men. A MASSIVE role reversal and gender fuck for misogynists. Signify THAT!

Unlikely it would happen though. It's evident that the weeny-waggers in Voina are controlling, macho chauvinists. They're unwilling to abandon their sexual fetishization of women - purportedly their equals - and their position of phallic privilege, particularly in their deliberate choice of agonic-imbued actions fuelling their campaign of provocations aimed at Putin and his male-dominated bureaucracy.

DJ! earlier posts about Pussy Riot, here and here. Perhaps the event staged in the Moscow cathedral was not only directed at Putin and Kirill, but also a statement of feminist revolt and revulsion against the Voina misogynists. I would hope so.

Weaseldicks Vladimir and Kirill silence dissidents.

They are trying to muzzle the members of Pussy Riot and their supporters. To no avail, as this statement from Yekaterina Samutsevich goes viral, alongside their protest video.

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to express my views about the causes of what has happened with us.

The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

Powerful, lucid, trenchant.

The Putin-controlled court may have sentenced the trio to prison for their challenge to his glorious national immanence, but the international media winners of this confrontation are clearly the women. Other dissidents, as well as those opposed to Putin's totalitarianism, are the windfall beneficiaries.

The Putin system has made a PR catastrophe out of a situation that could have been easily contained with an administrative fine for a public order offence. Its actions have also revealed its clear desire to align itself closely with the Orthodox Church as a source of political support. The visible price of this policy has been the fusion of the Church’s principles and values with the “legal” process in the trial of the Pussy Riot activists.
The result has been to sow divisions within the ruling elite about how to handle the case and, at the same time, to create new dividing lines in society, including among Orthodox believers, about the type of justice that should be applied to Pussy Riot and the form it should take.

The authorities have also gifted a rallying point to the nascent and amorphous political opposition. Paradoxically, this comes at a time when opposition forces are struggling to rekindle the protest mood that swept Moscow in March during the run-up to the presidential election.

How is it that the Putin system was able to produce these outcomes that run counter to its interests of dividing the opposition and demonstrating the futility of protest?

There is more. Unlike the New York Times which dismissed the Pussy Riot's deliberately engineered protest as a "stunt", other media have considered the dissidence, the trial and the outcome.

In a chilling passage of the verdict read aloud in a Moscow court today, three members of punk group Pussy Riot were said to be "motivated by religious enmity and hatred". A reasonable response might be that those who have locked up these young singers for the crime of blasphemy in Vladimir Putin's Russia were motivated by religious bigotry and fear.

Far from being hooligans, as the prosecution alleged, the three feminists were unconventional campaigners whose anti-Putin songs in a Moscow Cathedral achieved a much vaster audience than originally anticipated.

The Kremlin's foolish over-reaction, which included keeping the band members in custody and away from their families for five months, led it to a lose-lose situation today. Hand down the full sentence of seven years and incur the wrath of international condemnation; let them go free and appear weak.

No open society can brutally suppress free expression in the name of preserving other people from offence. If such suppression becomes the norm, it will inevitably be mobilised at the convenience of those in power. So it is, by all accounts, in Moscow now. The scenes outside the courtroom today, which included the bundling into a police van of former chess champion Garry Kasparov, suggest the country's slide into autocracy is, if anything, accelerating.

The Pussy Riot saga (DJ! original post last month).

It appears Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the three women sentenced today, has a Canadian connection through her husband.

Two Population Problems. . .

. . . same solution. Heed the patriarchal church and control the women.

In Russia.

MOSCOW -- Russia's Orthodox Church teamed with Conservative parliamentarians Monday to push legislation that would radically restrict abortions in a nation struggling to cope with one of the world's lowest birthrates.

The legislation would ban free abortions at government-run clinics and prohibit the sale of the morning-after pill without a prescription, said Yelena Mizulina, who heads a parliamentary committee on families, women and children.

She added that abortion for a married woman would also require the permission of her spouse, while teenage girls would need their parents' consent. If the legislation is passed, a week's waiting period would also be introduced so women could consider their decision to terminate their pregnancy, Mizulina said.

In the Philippines.

MANILA, Philippines - The Senate is expected to start plenary debates on the controversial Reproductive Health (RH) bill next week.

Senate committee on health and demography chair Pia Cayetano said that she is now fine-tuning the committee report and would have it ready for debates by next week.

A separate bill on the protection of the unborn child filed by a number of senators, including those who are against the RH bill, is seen by some quarters as counterweight to the controversial measure.

The committee on youth, women and family relations, also chaired by Cayetano, conducted a public hearing on the protection of the unborn child bill yesterday.

Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III, a staunch critic of the RH bill and one of the authors of the protection of the unborn child bill, argued that the RH bill should remove the provisions on the promotion and distribution of contraceptives by the government.

“It was revealed that a significant number of these contraceptives are abortifacients,” Sotto said after yesterday’s hearing.

He noted that even the so-called morning after pill, considered by many as abortifacient, may be purchased over-the-counter in spite of the claims of authorities to the contrary. Sotto reiterated that abortion is unconstitutional.

The Philippines has a serious population and poverty problem.

With an estimated population of about 94 million people, the Philippines is the world's 12th most populous country. An additional 11 million Filipinos live overseas.

The government has been wrangling over a reproductive health policy for nine years. But the Catlick Church has been stomping its tiny feet and nixing all attempts at rationality. It is opposed to all contraception, despite the people's overwhelming support for it.

But, hey, that's what patriarchal religion does.

Pravda Blames Canada!

OK, it's Pravda, but wow. In an article titled 'Vancouver: Mutton Dressed as Lamb', the author -- who is British, according to The Star (h/t) -- looses a long litany of laments about the treatment of Russian athletes at the Owe-lympics, then poses a possible reason:

We all know Canada has problems with the future lines drawn on Arctic maps and we all know Canada lives in the shadow of its larger neighbour to the south. The abject cruelty shown by Canadian soldiers in international conflicts is scantily referred to, as indeed is the utter incapacity of this county to host a major international event, due to its inferiority complex, born of a trauma being the skinny and weakling bro to a beefy United States and a colonial outpost to the United Kingdom, whose Queen smiles happily from Canadian postage stamps.

Maybe it is this which makes the Canadians so…retentive, or cowardly.

I find it hard to believe that the author is British. That last sentence quoted is kinda weird for a native English speaker, isn't it? That's how it appears, with the dots before 'retentive'. Meant to indicate that 'anal' was left out? And since when does retentive, either anal or not, equal cowardly?

Anyway, I look forward to more from this writer. That piece was written before the retentive Canucks whupped the Russians' collective ass last night. *smirk*

Revisionism is a genetic trait - who knew?

From the BBC we learn that Joseph Stalin's grandson's attempt to remove opprobrium attached to the family name has been unsuccessful.

A Moscow court has rejected a lawsuit filed by the grandson of Joseph Stalin claiming a Russian newspaper had defamed the Soviet dictator.

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili said an article published in Novaya Gazeta claiming Stalin personally ordered the deaths of Soviet citizens was a lie. He had requested a public apology and damages from the opposition newspaper. But the court rejected his petition.

The Novaya Gazeta had published a piece referring to declassified death warrants, which it said bore Stalin's personal signature. Mr Dzhugashvili had argued that this was a lie and that Stalin never directly ordered any deaths.

The case was seen by many as part of a Kremlin-backed campaign to rehabilitate Stalin's reputation, correspondents say.

More about the case here.

The wheels on the propaganda bus still go round and round in Russia, it would seem.

The Novaya Gazeta employed writer and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya; four of its journalists have been murdered by persons unknown since 2001.