A very CON-veeenient shock and outrage.

The advance team for CPC MP Woodworth's M312 also known as "The kinder, küche, kirche Motion" has started tactically framing the discussion for the CONservatives.

Last year, the CPC sent out Rona Ambrose to cluck about "Sex selection feticide denies millions of girls the right to be born merely because they are girls."

The specific language used is chosen ^NOT to denounce the fundamentalist religions and patriarchal societies that support many, many, many forms of violence against women, but to attack women's rights to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. That was in December.

Now, this.

There's a name for a pathologically threatening mental disturbance whereby an individual exercises his need for attention and control by appropriating another person's reality. It's called Münchausen syndrome by proxy and this is how it manifests itself when men tell women what's good for them.

A paternalistic columnist for a national newspaper - viz. Jonathan Kay - deliberately exaggerates facts and fabricates outrage by declaring himself to be a de facto defender of vulnerable females; whether impregnated or fetus. With deception at its core, this tactic proposes to decide on behalf of the victims what the outcome should be, without addressing the religious, social and political forces that have produced the alleged victimization.

Got it? The use of inflammatory terms like "missing women", "snuffed out" and "exterminate" is sex-selective manipulation and rhetoric.

When Kay and other rightwing gynophobes start crying genuine tears over Aboriginal "missing women" and girls who have been "exterminated" and "snuffed out" (as they are now doing metaphorically to curtail women's right to choose) on that day I might consider the authenticity of their outrage.

Until then, I will correctly assume that anything they say is a CONtemptible stratagem used to justify their misogynist imperative to control women's procreative choices.

Illustration source.

Natural welfare "queens"

The "Welfare Queen" moniker is an American meme with both racist and sexist components that was intended to arouse the ire of ordinary people against small-time free riders in order to distract from the long-standing effort to make it possible for big-time free riders to get away with robbing the American public blind.

What does this have to do with Canada?

We keep hearing that the "political center" of Canada is shifting Westward, and that Ontario's manufacturing economy is in the doldrums and that it is a have-not province. And we keep hearing that this is fuelling the political shift to the right. If so, this situation is merely confirmation of something we already knew: that right-wing populist politics is only possible in the presence of large-scale free riding. In this case, the free riding is on oil, oil, and more oil---because it no longer pays to be an actual entrepreneur in (foolishly) export-dependent Canada.

The Canadian right is all about being the true welfare "queens"*---the welfare "queens" of nature, of the dinosaur plants that died so long ago. Of course, it is always the case that we living things subsist on and affect the world in unpredictable ways; but we must never pretend that it is anything other than what it is.

Now if there's anything that will fracture the Reformatory crypto-coalition, it is that fact: will Ontario and the Rest-of-Canada (relative to resource extracting provinces) share in that welfare-"queendom"? I thought that was taboo.

*In reality, welfare "kings" more than anything else.

Shriek! My parents turned me into a rightwing zombie!

That seems to be the core message of Raphael Alexander's, oops, Adrian MacNair's blogpost about global warming. Notice how the title parrots Christopher Monkton's verbal defamation of the young climate change activists who challenged him in Copenhagen?

MacNair also blames his parents for forcing him to attend anti-nuclear weapons demos and consequently turning him into an individual repelled by progressive values.

During the fifties, on television and in schools across the country, Diefenbaker's government used graphic visuals - mushroom clouds, skin and flesh melting to reveal the skullbones beneath - to impress the public with the urgency of war preparedness. It instilled in my parents a life-long need to keep an overstocked pantry but I can't say it traumatized me to the point I now run screaming from the supermarket whenever I see shelves crammed full of canned goods.

MacNair singles out the evulness of this particular video. He appears absolutely enraged - ENRAGED! - that innocent children could be exploited thus and on their behalf, mothers are challenging the premise of an economy based on the complete depletion of our planet's resources.

I know how he feels. It turns my stomach whenever I see MacNair's hero, Stevie Spiteful using babies in his election photos and video propaganda opportunities.



With any luck, MacNair's children will likely reject their father's rank and rabid, passive-agressive, rightwing socon politics as he rejected his parents political activism.

The Onion has nothing to fear.

If this is the competition, The Onion still reigns supreme for the best in parody and satirical writing.

The object depicted is a Nipple Tassel t-shirt that, according to its creator,

"... was designed as a response to my own distaste at seeing mini versions of sexy clothes on young children. Five-year-olds wearing slashed mini skirts and boob tubes, little thumb-sucking Britneys.”

It's a modest design, though I'd imagine those tassels would go all gnarly in the dryer.

Gateway Pundit aims for ... sarcasm? Disapproval, yes that's the dominant note and underneath there's a dissonant and off-key attempt to besmirch all non-conservatives parents as godless, perverted and mmm, godless for even thinking that the above is an wry response to fashion that sexualizes toddlers.

And the comments! Don't look for any humour there. Typical tone-deaf shrieeeking.

Rightwingnut haters howl and shrieeek.

Suaad Hagi Mohamud and her lawyers have given legal notice that they are going to Federal Court to sue the Canadian government as well as to demand a public inquiry and to secure a formal apology. From here:

An inquiry must be called to investigate whether Mohamud's race and culture played a role in how she was treated, said one of Mohamud's lawyers, Julian Falconer.

Falconer represented Maher Arar in his lawsuit against Ottawa. "If a Caucasian person had been in Suaad's position in Kenya, would she have received the callous and reckless treatment she did?" he said.

"We don't know the answer. We need someone to look at it and answer that question, because frankly, I find it hard to believe that a white, Anglo-Saxon person in her position would have been treated the same way."

Read the irrational loathing spewed in the 300+ comments at the CBC website following the news item from supporters of Stevie's Harpocrites if you have the stomach for it.

As we observed here and here, there's a certain selective political opportunism at play when anti-feminists shrieeeek "Where are the feminists?"

Though it's possible a few fundamentalist christian, rightwing religious conservatives just might support the legal rights of brown-skinned women if they're dead, pregnant, or a fetus. Even then, not so much.

Ewwwwwww

OK, on one level this makes sense.

Two Cornell University studies revealed those who are squeamish are more conservative politically, especially in attitudes towards lesbians and gays. The role of disgust helps human maintain a safe clean environment but is also involved in judgments of purity and morality, according to scientific results explained by study leader David Pizarro, Cornell assistant professor of psychology.

But these are the very people who drive around in big honking feto-mobiles and festoon their blogs with dead feto-pron.

Over at JJ's we're talking about addiction to hate. Maybe hate comes so easily to them because they're in a constant state of ewwwwww.

And for me, the theory doesn't work. I'm squeamish as allgetout, and yet all lefty-like.

(I was going to put a picture of a feto-mobile on this post. I found a really gory one with requisite spledding mistakes. But then, I thought, hmmm, deBeauxOs wouldn't like that. And she knows where I live.)