What trading a basketball player for an arms dealer says about US-Russia power dynamics

What it says to me is that one side holds a significantly more potent hand than the other. This exchange is a symbolic manifestation of American decline. Americans generally won’t notice. After all, every American knows Putin is evil, and freeing a Black lesbian from the clutches of an evil homophobic dictator can be sold to the US public as a triumph of Western values. You know; democracy, human rights, freedom of speech… all that good stuff that our ruling elite squelch at home but promote abroad. PM Fluffy is all for anti-government protests in Iran and China, but God forbid, not in freedom-loving democratic Canada. By all accounts, the Russian arms dealer was a serious person. He made serious money arranging the delivery of serious weapons to a variety of the enemies of Western values, resistance groups all over the world. The American basketball player was just a basketball player. This exchange occurs in the shadow of the US/NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. Western media have assured us Ukraine has been winning this war since February. It is considered impolite in the American vassalsphere to question that fundamental truth. After all, we have been treated non-stop to reportage praising the many glorious imaginary victories of the UAF. They drove the Russians out of Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson. They have the momentum! Momentum or not, their geography has shrunk by 20% and their GDP by 40%. How is that “winning?” How is that momentum? Ukraine lost this war in February. The collective “West,” the aforementioned vassalsphere, orchestrated by Washington, has invested many billions of dollars in keeping it going. If our US masters, leaders of the “free world,” trade a basketball player for an international arms trafficker, I’m reading weakness on the cusp of disintegration. American exceptionalism and the empire it spawned are well past their stale date. Canadians should consider how tightly they want to tie their ship of state to an empire in obvious decline.

Ramping up the hokum at Global Affairs Canada

Never imagined I'd say this, but I miss Bullshittin' Baird.

Those were simpler days, and Big John always wore his heart on his sleeve. When John was "deeply concerned" you always got a sense that, at some level, he probably was.

With the Trudeau crowd, you're pretty sure they're only "deeply concerned" if the object of their concern has passed muster with the usual partisan focus groups.

With the Harper Gang, the hypocrisy was hit and miss.

With the Sunny Daze Gang, the hypocrisy is systemic.

Take a gander at the Global Affairs website. The last three news items are about gender equality in Ethiopia, Canada's leadership in global gender equity, and Canada's leadership role in calling out the horrific human rights situation in Iran.

You know Iran; the only Middle East country outside of Israel where Jews are constitutionally protected, and a country where women have never NOT had the right to drive cars. Ya, that country. We're really upset about their human rights...

Yup, no way we'd ever sell those guys military hardware, because that would just be wrong, and besides, our besties in Likud wouldn't like it. We'll call out human rights in Iran, but we'll spout nonsense non-stop about Israel's right to defend itself while the human rights of Palestinians are trampled underfoot.

And while the KSA is setting liberal hearts a-flutter by allowing some women to drive, we'll not get too bothered about their overall track record on human rights, because, after all, they buy military stuff from US branch plants in Canada that employ Canadian workers.

And how lovely that we're gung-ho for gender equality in Ethiopia and beyond.

By the way, women in Canada are still a good distance away from achieving gender equality, but that's no reason not to champion ideals globally that we've not yet achieved here at home.


How about we address the beam in our own eye before we lecture the rest of the planet about the mote in theirs.

Sticking it to the Ayatollahs

ACTIONS NOT WORDS screams the all caps headline on page O3 of today's Globe and Mail. It's the only story in the entire paper with an all caps headline, so it must be very important.

The gist of the piece is that Canada must do more to bring freedom and democracy to Iran, where a "freedom movement" erupted into widespread street demos in December. The caption under the picture informs us that "Iranian protesters chant slogans at a rally in Tehran, on Dec. 30."

That was my first chuckle. Those may well be Iranians chanting slogans, but they're carrying placards bearing the likeness of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some doofus photo editor used a picture of a pro-government rally to illustrate an anti-government screed!

The authors of the piece should set off some alarms if you were expecting an honest opinion piece on the state of freedom and democracy in Iran. Nazanin Afshin-Jam Mackay, we are told, "is a long-time Iran human rights activist." She is also the wife of former Defence Minister Peter "Pinocchio" Mackay. If you follow her "activism" you'll be well aware it consists mostly of pining for the good old days of Iran's liberal democracy that prevailed from 1953 right up until the Ayatollahs came along and wrecked everything in 1979.

Her co-author is Shuvaloy Majumdar, whose last headline in a Canadian paper came after Trump announced the US embassy move to Jerusalem in December. Majumdar thought that a jolly good idea and argued that Canada should follow the American example, just to, you know, promote peace and human rights in the Middle East.

Majumdar turned up in Harper's inner circle after spending a few years in Afghanistan, spreading freedom and democratic goodness on behalf of the "International Republican Institute," one of the numerous US government "Non Government Organizations" charged with meddling in the politics of other countries. He was the mastermind behind Baird's decision to sever diplomatic relations with Tehran in 2012, a self-defeating exercise in idiocy unmatched in recent diplomatic history.

But it got Baird and Big Steve a pat on the back from Israel's PM Netanyahu, another long-time activist for human-rights in Iran. Funny how so many "human-rights activists" who are tireless advocates for the oppressed in Iran never have a word to say about the human rights of people who live under Israeli occupation. By all accounts, Jews in Iran enjoy far greater freedom and human rights than Palestinians in the West Bank.

Given the authorship, the opinions expressed are pretty much what you'd expect. Us good, them bad. We must therefore help freedom flourish in Iran the way it's flourishing in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan and all the other beneficiaries of our meddling, and never forget that those Ayatollahs have rendered their country an isolated pariah state.

In fact, more countries have embassies in Iran than in Israel, so we should perhaps take more care in who we label a pariah state.

Ironically, the Mackay - Majumber rant shares page O3 with another opinion piece about the December demonstrations, this one penned by U of T luminaries Farhaan Ladhani, Peter Loewen, and Janice Gross Stein. They actually did some research to measure support for the protests by the Iranian public.

Their conclusion? "We found that support for the protests is thin. Only 27 per cent of respondents agreed that they supported them... "

Hmm... looks like the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute and the Open Society folks have lots more work ahead of them before Iran is ripe for the plucking.

Canadian media blame Trudeau for Harper's Saudi arms deal

When the Canada-Saudi armoured car deal was first announced over two years ago, there wasn't a whole lot of squawking about Saudi Arabia's abhorrent human rights record in our media. Virtually all of the coverage focused on what a glorious win this was for our export sector.

So Harper gets voted out, POTHEAD gets voted in, and poof!.. the moral ambiguities saturating this deal suddenly rise to the surface!

I like to brag about the fact that the think tank here at Falling Downs was all over this story from the get-go. Ya, that's satire at that link. Nobody here really thought that the armoured war wagons were gonna be used to ferry the fairies home when the underground gay clubs closed. Nevertheless, the controversy missed Harper but has landed on Trudeau.

There's quite a crowd that thinks Trudeau needs to establish his human rights bona fides by cancelling this deal. It's an appealing argument; virtuous Canada will not trade with egregious human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia. Case closed.

It's not that simple.

First off, Canada has no right to finger-point at the alleged human rights abuses of other states so long as we haven't remedied the open wound that is our relationship with our native peoples. A cursory survey of incarceration rates, poverty rates, suicide rates, and so on puts the lie to the claim that we are a nation of virtue. We're not.

Secondly, why single out the Saudis? Our biggest trading partners are Mexico, China, and the USA. Any human rights issues in those countries? Will we continue to do business with them? Of course we will! And didn't the Harper government enter into a free trade agreement with Israel? Is anyone clamouring for Trudeau to abrogate that deal because of Israel's wanton disregard for the human rights of Palestinians?

Of course not!

So lets get off the high horse on this Saudi deal. Business is business. Where government had a chance to do something was when GM Defence was sold to General Dynamics in 2003. Canada could have blocked that sale. It was, in case you've forgotten, a Liberal government that let it go through. Getting sentimental about the 3000 Canadian jobs at stake today is more than a little disingenuous.

Faith McGregor is not Bill Whatcott

The National Post has this fascinating story about "colliding rights" today.

Faith is the woman who walked into a downtown Toronto store-front haircutting place a few weeks ago, and on being refused a haircut by the devout Muslim wielding the scissors that day, launched a human rights complaint against the barber and the shop.

According to the Post, Faith has since come around to respecting the right of a devout Muslim to refuse her a haircut, since his religion forbids contact with females that are not family.

But according to the Post, that puts her in the same league as Bill Whatcott. Bill is a long-time anti-gay activist based in Saskatchewan.

Bill is anti-gay and anti-abortion. That's shorthand for saying Bill is a Christian fundamentalist with too much time on his hands.

How does that make him "just like" a woman who wanted a haircut?

And since Faith has acknowledged the right of that particular hair-cutter to put his respect for his religious faith before her need for a haircut, and Bill Whatcott has in no way acknowledged that it might be alright for gays to marry or women to have abortions, I have no idea why the National Post would so scurrilously link these two stories in one article.

Saudi researchers discover women drivers are sluts

In a finding that is bound to entrench the Saudi Kingdom's prohibitions against female drivers, a research team headed by Professor Kamal Al-Subhi at King Fahd University has discovered that women who drive have sex.

Flying in the face of conventional Western wisdom, which holds that women may be lousy drivers but that a driver's licence is independent of one's slut factor, the report is the result of many years of investigative work by highly trained research teams. The social scientists employed thousands of operatives to track the movements of women in Saudi Arabia who drive cars.

Since only 47 women in the Kingdom have ever driven a car, the research is considered definitive in its conclusions. "All of the women had sex" Professor Al-Subhi informed an academic gathering at his university, "including the three in our sample who were unmarried. Therefore the conclusion is irrefutable: the Kingdom must preserve the prohibitions against female driving or all our women will be fallen women."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, currently touring Myanmar to promote human rights, has not commented on the report, but analysts note that since we send the Saudis well over one hundred million dollars every day for their oil, anything they do is just fine with us.