Most retarded story in the Globe & Mail today

The Korean extortionist at the Circle K just bumped the price for the Saturday edition to $9.45. Back in the day I had that paper delivered to the door every morning, and a week later the paper-boy would come round to collect a buck and a half… or maybe that was for two weeks. Have you noticed that although they keep ramping the price, the news doesn’t get any better? Nor does the journalism. I suppose it would be smart to bypass the Korean altogether, since I have the digital subscription, but once a week we like to go for a leisurely breakfast at the European Bakery, with the newspaper spread out on the table in front of us. How decadent! How 1965! In good weather, we’ll do this on the dog-friendly patio with Bruno at our feet. So there we are, and on page 8 of the opinion section, I find this headline; “Authoritarianism is a military weakness.” We are told the writer is an “author and professor,” which I suppose imbues her insights with somewhat more cred than I get, having styled myself the “pot-addled hillbilly.” So here’s the gist of Professor Elyse Graham’s argument. Democracies are inherently stronger military powers because of their openness to diverse ideas and diverse people. We know this because Democracy defeated Authoritarianism 80 years ago. Sorry to break it to you professor, but during the WWII, the US Army was racially segregated, gays were drummed out of our militaries with dishonorable discharges or worse, tens of thousands of Japanese had their farms, houses, and businesses stolen by our diversity-loving governments, and both USA and Canada turned away the MS St. Louis, a refugee ship carrying 900 Jews fleeing Hitler. Such was our diversity and tolerance. Furthermore, nine out of ten German soldiers who died in that war died on the Eastern front. The war was won not by Democracies in the West, but by the Soviet Red Army, led by one of the most ruthless authoritarians of all time, Joseph Stalin. But 80 years on, our national newspaper of record sees fit to publish such ahistorical nonsense?