January 26, 2002
Not many posts today
, as my loving family intend to gently but firmly escort me out of my warm cyber-cave in order to feel once more the sun on my face (no chance) and wind in my hair (can do). Before I go, any teletubby survivors among you, such as the Distinguished Correspondent (bet he's never been called that before) who e-mailed me the other day, might like to see this winsome ditty that did the rounds of the playground some time ago.:
(To the tune of "Nick Nack Paddywack")I love Po
Po loves me
Let's gang up and kill Dipsy
With a knife in the back and a bullet in the head
Tough luck La-la, Dipsy's dead!
January 25, 2002
The sad fate of my Blaireys.
The first thing they teach aspiring journos in j-school is a trick of the trade known as the Tim Blair gambit, often inexplicably abbreviated to "Blairey". It works thus. You write an op-ed dissing something. Then you wait for replies saying "you're too mean." Then, and only then, you release the killer fact held in reserve. For an example see Fxxzzplt. (Noise indicates utter failure of Blogger archive to smoothly implement my request to link to that Tamin Ansary thing where this gambit was first revealed.)Twice in the last few weeks I have sought to provoke the scheming Blair by jocular insults against his country, while all the time holding ready a quiverfull of shafts of repartee poised to shoot down all his most likely replies. Not only has he failed to respond for so long that I have forgotten what my own V-1 and V-2 Vengeance Jokes actually were, although I do recall that one of them somehow involved asserting that wombats are made of fibreglass*, he has further oppressed me by himself bringing up a glorious bit of Ozmockery.
*a fact personally checked out by my husband who fell into a trance while wombat-viewing at Sydney Zoo. He reported that waiting for it to move was a deeply disquieting, ego-deconstructive yet oddly transformative experience of ephiphany-through-boredom.
My day for fulfilling promises.
I also said I'd give answers to my little quiz on the breakdown of body count for the conflict in Northern Ireland. The place to go, as two and a half million viewers already know, is the Conflict Archive on the Internet site, known by its rather contrived acronym CAIN.One grimly fascinating section of this site consists of statistics tablulated by Malcolm Sutton and can be found on http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/index.html.
Who did the killing?
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/tables/Organisation_Summary.html
Deaths (caused) by Organisation Summary
British Security 363
Irish Security 5
Loyalist Paramilitary 991
not known 78
Republican Paramilitary 2043
TOTAL 3480
So Republicans killed more than twice the number of victims claimed by Loyalists. (Note: No, I do NOT think that excuses Loyalist killers.) But my question was a cheat, dear readers, for it hid an interesting and little known paradox. Namely that there were more Catholic victims than Protestant.
Who did the dying?
Deaths by Religion Summary
Catholic 1506
Not from Northern Ireland 713
Protestant 1261
TOTAL 3480
How come? Because as well as killing Protestants the Republican paramilitaries killed loads of people of their own - and my own - Catholic religion. Neither sort of killing makes me like them very much, but I think the second type ought to be better known.
Oh yes, I also said I would supply the population ratio. It's 58% Protestant to 42% Catholic. Although the word "minority" is often, accurately, used to refer to the Catholic population, there is a curious tendency to simply use the word as a sympathy-getter without any consideration of the logically necessary implication that the non-Catholics are the majority. Can I supply examples? No, because one can't supply examples of an absence. Just read a lot about NI and you'll see what I mean, once you start looking for it.
I've found it really saves on mental wear and tear when discussing NI to get all your caveats in first. Please take it as read that I am the last person to think that mere numbers make a cause righteous. My point is only that the lack of interest in the Protestants amounts to bias.
Last post I promised examples
showing a determined effort not to notice that the really heavy restraint on the Camp X-ray prisoners was for only for the flight. Here's one from the lovable Sheikh Abdullah Azzam."However, we may ask: "Is there one single incident of the Taliban treating their prisoners, whether Muslim, non- Muslim, Northern Alliance, Western, in this manner, depriving them of the ability to speak, hear, smell, move, etc. throughout the seven years that they were in power?"We may indeed ask. Let's ask Sayed Abdullah. The Washington Post article telling his story describes how Taliban beatings and imprisonment crippled him, blurred his vision and speech, damaged his brain, rendered him incontinent, and, in a perfect emblem of the Taliban, killed his pleasure in books. The numerous prisoners of the Taliban who had hads and feet amputated might also score as "incidents", no?
Azzam finished his article on a note intended to be stirring:
"The next time there is a martyrdom operation carried out by individuals for whom the Sunnah of the Prophet is worth more than the lives of American civilians, America only has itself to blame: it cannot point the finger at anyone when the 'chickens come home to roost'. "No, but it can point daisy-cutters. Good news, when you're dealing with people who think that the proof that a man does value the Sunnah of the Prophet is that he does not value the lives of American civilians.
January 24, 2002
Correction.
I was posting too fast on the 22nd and ended up being inaccurate when "quoting Instapundit quoting Jim Bennett" about that Richard and Judy show poll. Jim Bennett himself wrote in to put me straight:"Actually, it was Instapundit quoting Jim Bennett quoting a Washington Post Article. The funny thing about the article was that it was a typical effort by T.R.Reid, the Post's incredibly Europhile London man. Almost all the article was about how Britons are shocked, shocked, by the X-Ray treatment -- except for the last four sentences which bring up the Richard and Judy poll.My column was mostly about the fact that the supposed "America vs. the World" opinion gap is, at least within the English-speaking countries, a gap between the chattering classes on the one hand, and ordinary sensible people on the other.
The latter group realize that when dealing with people who have expressed their intention to stage suicidal attacks to kill as many people as possible and die in the process (and whose buddies did exactly that at Mazur-e-Sharif -- in fact, some of the X-Ray crowd are survivors of Mazur-e-Sharif), you might not want to treat them the same way we treated surrendering Italian conscripts in World War Two."
I'll add that the latter group also realize that the prisoners are not sitting in their cells muffled up to the eyeballs; the really heavy restraint was just for the time of maximum danger, namely the journey. (I bet the pilots of those flights had a stiff drink afterwards.) There seems to be a determined effort not to notice this fact. I'd post a few links showing what I mean, but, such is the unfairness of life that I have to wash up instead.
How others see us.
I found this Palestinian Media Watch site via Kesher Talk. The general style of high-flown murderous hysteria featured in its translations will be familiar to those who've seen what is reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute.PMW makes no bones about its message and lacks the more moderate Arab voices which MEMRI does feature. PMW's ideological bent doesn't bother me - so long as the translations are accurate it has every right to bring them to the attention of the world - but if it wants solid credibility it should also indicate how mainstream the publications quoted are. Yes, I know the Palestinian Authority does not allow a free press so in a sense anything they put out is "mainstream." Yet even within that there might be degrees and nuances, kite-flyers for mad ideas and pet moderates for western eyes.
"BEFORE THE NEW YORK TIMES
STARTS RUNNING "PORTRAITS IN GRIEF" OF FORMER ENRON EMPLOYEES," said Dawson.com, and I thought, wow that is one biting line, gotta blog that, and then I went on and read the next bit: "IT'S WORTH REMEMBERING THAT EVEN AFTER THE COLLAPSE, ENRON STOCK IS STILL WORTH MORE THAN THE ENTIRE SOCIAL SECURITY "TRUST FUND" which turned out to be a really sweet little thrust of the stiletto, too.BUT I HATE THE CAPITALS! THEY REALLY TIRE MY EYES OUT! DAWSON ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? COS I'M SURE SHOUTING AT YOU!
Siren song.
I tried to resist but I knew I would be sucked over to Unremitting Verse eventually. There's something simply irresistible about the whole idea. Despite the quotes I'd heard bandied about the web, it's not all about Tom Ridge and the present war. For instance there is vast sequel-fodder in verses such as "If My Grocery Store Wrote Me As My Old College Does."
Al Quaeda don't watch movies
but they talk to people who do, or they did watch when they were kids, and the somehow the idea of the city-in-peril-from-Dr Strange percolates through the same interconnections that put Bert the Muppet on a pro Bin Laden poster in Pakistan. So I think Robert Altman is right and Damian Penny is wrong. Not a comment I often make.
I've read the first of Pullman's fantasy series
, here reviewed by Andrew Marr in the Telegraph. A good review by a man whose ethos and influence I don't like of a good book whose ethos and influence I don't like.
A pro-Mugabe guest column from the Guardian.
This is by George Shire It's difficult to know what to say about this, except that to say the bits I do know about are full of distortions and smears, which doesn't give me confidence in the rest. He writes,"You would never know from the way Zimbabwean politics is usually reported in Britain that Zanu-PF supports a broadly social democratic programme...."You'd never know it from this Amnesty page on Zimbabwe either. (And it doesn't even yet include the moves to end freedom of speech in the last two months.) I let my Amnesty subscription lapse because I got tired of their other agendas (anti death-penalty, anti-arms trade) crowding out the core work of writing to free or protect prisoners of conscience, but I still respect them for this sort of work.
"As long as Muslims like Mohammad Wakil have a voice,"
says Bjørn Stærk, "there is hope for Pakistan." He gives a quote from Wakil which encapsulates my see-saw of feelings about the present state of Islam:"The world is relieved to know that 99.9 per cent of our billion plus Muslims are not terrorists. However, this relief is swiftly displaced by the fact that today, over 90 per cent of the world's terrorists are Muslims. These ignorant, misguided Muslims justify their terrorism as "jehad". And we, the moderate, secular and educated Muslim elite have, for decades, bought into their argument to pacify their wrath against us."
Silly note: there's hope for me, too: if I put Bjorn Staerk's name in as the link I automatically get the funny characters.
January 23, 2002
Who is this chap Krugman anyway?
Whoever he is, Random Jottings flags up a nuance often ignored, while quoting another good Mark Steyn column.UPDATE: A hypocrite, that's who. I've just re-read both Mark Steyn's column and John Weidner's commentary. Both of them need a bit more shouting about than I gave them a minute ago. The Steyn thing is ace. Sample quote:
"In other words, if the producer's girlfriend gets $50,000 for being "script consultant" on a movie (as happened to a friend of mine), she can be forgiven for not knowing about how any of this icky money business works. But, if an economist gets offered 50,000 for nothing, he should at least understand it doesn't come out of thin air -- down the line, it might even come out of the pockets of all those little people he bleats on about."Plus lots of stuff about the way the paper media are being soft on one of their own. And John Weidner's point, which I have not seen anywhere else, about the difference between donations to a political campaign and donations to a person's own bank account, makes Krugman look worse yet.
Captain Kirk as villain?
Thomas Sipos drops me a line every now and again. As well as being a lawyer he is a luminary in a writers' salon called the Karl Hess Club, and this website of theirs mentions the "Prometheus Awards", established by the Libertarian Futurist Society "to honor books in which the Captain Kirks of the galaxy are the villains. Books in which the only good starship captains are those who smuggle contraband past interplanetary governments." Yeah! But nothing can dent my affection for Classic Trek, polystyrene rocks and all.
Some letters you just post uncut.
"The ultimate parody of this subgenre of science fiction [Trials of Humanity] has to be the Eighth Voyage of Ijon Tichy, described by Stanislaw Lem in his Star Diaries. It is hilarious - full of descriptions of humans as lopsided bags of mucus ("snot monsters") by the disgusted Representatives to the Star Congress. The trial culminates when it turns out that humans are the corrupted evolution of a higher-beings illegal refuse pile. Actually, it is quite hilarious, as is most of the rest of the book, especially the Seventh Voyage which is a hilarious time-travel-paradox-meet-your-parents story. -- Dave Bakin" Gee thanks, Mr Bakin, so good of you to share.
Some poll results showing why Jack Straw should keep his mouth shut if he wants to stay popular.
.- From Andrew Sullivan on a poll carried out by the enormously popular radio host, Jimmy Young: "Not scientific, I know. But he got 32,000 calls. 92 percent backed the U.S. Just remember: the Guardian is the paper the media elites read. It has influence, like NPR or the New York Times. But it’s not indicative of the real mood in the country."
- From England's Sword: "Even the Mirror, which has payed up the "torture angle" to the hilt has to admit: 91 per cent of readers in a Mirror poll backed the US treatment of the prisoners. It was a phone-in poll, so unscientific, but it was the largest vote they've ever recorded and the results were so emphatic it must be indicative of something. I hope Gallup or MORI are conducting a poll as we speak (heck, the American Embassy in the UK should be paying for one) on this subject so we can know the real state of public opinion, but I suspect it'd be overwhelmingly pro-US."
- Instapundit,quoting Jim Bennett: "After the the issue was discussed today on the "Richard and Judy Show," Britain's equivalent of "Oprah," the hosts held a telephone poll. About 5,000 responses came in, producers said. The result: Only 8 percent felt the prison was "inhumane," with 92 percent supporting the U.S. treatment of the suspects."
Intelligent concern about treatment of prisoners is a good thing. A yawning gulf between the so-called leaders of opinion and ordinary people is also a good thing, if it presages the fast-approaching appearance of aforesaid opinion leaders in the dole queue.
[UPDATE/CORRECTION: Jim Bennett was actually himself quoting a Washington Post article.]
Lileks on Richard Scarry: the dark side.
Have fun. He has not yet begun to suffer. When his Gnat is a year or two older Lileks Senior will taste the full horror of singing the Teletubbies theme tune while driving even when, for the first time in months, he is alone in the car. A friend of mine got seriously into an SF scenario where the Tubbies were test-tube grown* clone-descendants of aliens imprisoned for long forgotten crimes on a planet run by robots. Sort of like Australians, really. I didn't say that, you imagined it.Talking of those aliens, have you seen my new "Ranting and Roaring" link over there to the left? Go there and see an awe-inspiring picture of one of the original aliens in its spaceship. This one is an example of the species before it was genetically engineered into the green, purple, yellow and red-skinned forms.
*Look at them. They didn't propagate sexually, now, did they?
What on earth was I talking about two posts down?
These two Telegraph pieces cover it well. First take a look at yesterday's leading article "Another Surrender" then at an article published the day before on the recent Bloody Sunday film.It's the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, so there has been a rash of films and documentaries about it. Fine, normal, OK. What is not fine and OK though it definitely is normal is the glaring absence of any portrayal of or interest in the Protestant side of the story. ('m talking about the whole Northern Ireland conflict here, not just Bloody Sunday.) The British Army take on things is shamefully underepresented but not utterly ignored. The Protestants... hey man it's weird. They've been written out. Invisible.
Do this quiz in your heads. Answers in a day or two's time.
- What is the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in Northern Ireland?
- What is the ratio of Catholics killed by Protestants to Protestants killed by Catholics during the Troubles?
And no, I'm not under the impression that two wrongs make a right, nor that the rightness or wrongness of a cause is decided by population numbers, still less that the identifiers "Protestant" and "Catholic" have any significant connection to varying beliefs about transubstantiation and the Real Presence.
I swoop like a harpy!
With my cruel beak I snatch links from Perry de Havilland's very mouth! Uncatchable, I fly away to gloat and consume this Onion piece about a gun-besotted peace activist at my leisure.
January 22, 2002
Exciting new 25th anniversary drama in production from BBC!
Already in production, ready for screening on the anniversary this time next year is a vivid reconstruction, of the human cost of the La Mon House Hotel bombing. Twelve people were killed, several by being burnt alive, when the Provisional IRA blew up this hotel. This drama will tell their story...Just kidding.
Philistines take over Reason magazine?
I heard it from the Kolkata Libertarian. Reason magazine have published an article by Charles Freund who says that when the Taliban trashed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan they did more to wrap the statues in greatness than their builders ever did. A very careful reading of the article reveals it as stopping short of cheering the Taliban on, more observing that "fame accrues to those who die untimely deaths" applies even to statues. So Suman Palit is a little harsh to Freund, but I did admire the rest of his comment on the way art made according to quite different precepts reminds us of lost civilizations.
January 21, 2002
Shock horror! Canadian blogger PICKS UP PHONE!
It has to be admitted that some of us are so mentally stuck in the cyber-province that it comes as a shock when you find intrepid souls like Lawrence Garvin of What Fresh Hell ........?, willing to pick up phones, seek out officials by name and ask them for their side of the story. For a phone-phobic like me, that ranks only just short of ringing up Sauron and asking him, does he think he has an image problem?You will remember the Ms Jan Ovens in the FORCES Canada controversy. She was the official who asked that the Canadian flag be removed from the pro-smoking website. Mr Garvin tracked her down and spoke to her, and reports that she picks up her own phone (which favourably impresses him and in turn me) and was happy to explain.
He says, "It turns out that the flag itself, while it is technically Trademarked, can be used by anyone so long as it is not used in a style that would tend to cause confusion between the user and an official government agency. That was the beef in this case. "
He concludes that the smokers oversold their story.
I don't. I feel sympathy for Ms Ovens because I, like her, have been a civil servant obliged to pick up the phone and explain a government policy to sometimes irate members of the public. But that same fellow feeling also supplies me with a certain amount of cynicism. I've been there. I've done my share of soothing the public, and when I read that the only beef was the possibility of confusion between FORCES and the Government of Canada, I'm afraid that the background music swells in my head, and the tune is a medley of lullabies.
There is one point which favours the government case. "FORCES" is an unfortunate acronym. The phrase "Canadian FORCES" genuinely might be taken to mean "Canadian Armed Forces." But if you look at the snapshot of the original web page you will see that, right next to the flag, the very first line of the explanation says that FORCES Canada is the Canadian chapter of an international smokers' rights organization. How much clearer can you get?
Did any member of the public actually complain that they had been misled by the presence of the flag into thinking FORCES was a government site?
Lawrence Garvin, in saying that the smokers oversold their case, points out that the repressive-sounding section 9 of the Trademark Act,
(1) No person shall adopt in connection with a business, as a trade-mark or otherwise, any mark consisting of, or so nearly resembling as to be likely to be mistaken for,
(n) any badge, crest, emblem or mark
(iii) adopted and used by any public authority, in Canada as an official mark for wares or services,
in respect of which the Registrar has, at the request of Her Majesty or of the university or public authority, as the case may be, given public notice of its adoption and use;
is cited in the e-mail exchange between the FORCES-Canada rep. and the govt. rep but the next and more liberal-sounding section is not. The liberal-sounding bit reads:
(2) Nothing in this section prevents the adoption, use or registration as a trade-mark or otherwise, in connection with a business, of any mark(ii) an armorial bearing, flag, emblem or abbreviation mentioned in paragraph (1)(i.3), unless the use of the mark is likely to mislead the public as to a connection between the user and the organization.
I don't think that the omission by FORCES of this section damages their case. For one thing, I may be missing something that a lawyer would see, but the way I read it the two sections say nearly the same thing anyway, just in different order. For another, I say again what on earth was there likely to mislead the public? And if the only objection to the use of the flag is the possibility of confusion, can the government please advise its citizens in FORCES Canada of ways in which they can put the flag back on the website in a non-confusing manner?
And this part of Mr Garvin's report was the clincher in leading me to conclude that my sympathies are still with the smokers: "Ms. Ovens told me that this type of intervention had been made "two or three" times before but that there is no organized effort to chase down abuses of trademark on the flag."
If they only chase down two or three then this is a dead-letter law. When a dead-letter law is revived just to nab two or three violators then there must be a reason for those two or three. Much as I disapprove of trademarking a national flag, I can see why it would be a good thing to stop fraudsters pretending a product had some sort of Government approval or backing when it did not. FORCES never made or implied such a claim. No one is saying that they did. So why was the decision made to crack down on FORCES in particular? Were the other two also smokers' rights groups? It looks to me as if this is a case of selective enforcement of the law according to political criteria.
In case anyone's wondering, I am not a smoker and never have been. I never could manage to inhale - I had to fake it when having the obligatory surreptitious attempt at smoking on the way to school. Embarrassing at the time, but lucky for my health in retrospect. Nor have I any connection with FORCES. The first communication I ever had from them was when Mr Walt Hanley sent me an e-mail last night drawing my attention to this webpage.
If any of the relevant officials are reading this, the questions I think you should answer as part of your commitment to being seen to enforce the law equally to all, are in bold.. But don't read Walt Hanley's web page, because he specifically forbids you to in the disclaimer at the end. I'm telling you this because you might otherwise read all the way down the page and only realize when it was too late.
It's a pity. If people keep banging on about this then Ms Ovens will stop answering her own phone, and the relatively human face of the Canadian government will be dimished by a small amount. But I still think the removal of the flag is quietly oppressive and bang on we should.
A good wigging
. Blogs of War links to an article that makes fun of the venerable if sometimes lousy headgear that weighs down the brain of the British Judge, and hints they should be jettisoned. I believe that Australian judges did get rid of the wigs some years ago, but then went back to wearing them. The reason was that off-duty judges found themselves much more prone to be accosted by aggrieved ex-cons when shopping. The wig also puts a brake on judicial showing off. Would the judges castigated by AintNoBadDude be so prone to play to the gallery if they knew they looked like plonkers?I like the wigs. As I-forget-who said, "are our lives so full of colour and drama that we must set out to make them greyer and more boring?" Finally the wigs and other anachronistic regalia might - and now the edge comes into my voice and it all gets a bit less jolly - they might remind some of our trendy modern judges that the law, including trial by jury, is their entailed inheritance not their bloody productivity bonus.
Must've been in a snappy mood this morning
when I made a dig at Instapundit over the Cornell West saga. Actually - you know how you do these things - I was actually quite happy to keep hearing about the egregious West but had noticed the big peak of West stories a few days ago and somehow felt obliged to make a dig because I could. Y' know. Or maybe you are nicer than me and don't. Anyway in recompense I'll say that tucked into a post about K-mart was one of those little buried gems of Reynolds humour that you could so easily miss: "I haven't followed the issue that closely, if you can believe it, but..." Italics mine.
Smiles again
. I'm glad Ken Layne seems to have made peace with Scourge of the Warblogs Tim Cavanaugh.
Rail safety is costing lives
, says the Telegraph's Neil Collins. I respect him for this. Anyone can sound off about this issue on a blog, and I often do, at zero emotional cost to myself. Mr Collins comes right out and says it in reply to an "how would you feel if it was your son who died?" e-mail from the mother of a young man killed in the Paddington rail crash. He does not abuse a person who has suffered, but nor does he deviate from saying what must be said.
Got to grit my teeth and say it:
well done David Blunkett, Lord Irvine and Lord Goldsmith if it was really you who "saved trial by jury", as the front page of the Times put it. Was there any principle there, or was it just reluctance to be unpopular, I wonder?
I'm trying to shut up
about the Canadian flag for a bit, lest I be accused of "doing a Cornell West". Unfortunately Hawspipe posted a whole lot of detailed stuff which mentions me a lot. That is completely irrelevant, of course. Just look at the "life's little choices" picture below.
CIA, CIA, How many Al-Quaeda did you burn today?
Tacky I know. But how odd it is that everybody's swapped round from talking about wicked CIA activity to wicked CIA inactivity. Dawson.com has a link to a review of three books about the CIA, which like all the best book reviews goes way beyond the actual books.
January 20, 2002
Mail from David Janes
. "Well, I just did some goggling and found this:The Canadian Flag is protected by the Trade Marks Act, and protected"The next question is: did someone tell FORCES that this use was, unathorized, or did they do this a publicity stunt?"
against "unauthorized use!"
Note from NS: I heard about this whole thing from the Libertarian Alliance Forum (it's on Yahoo, but you need to register, and unfortunately there is a stupid hacker loose in it at the moment.) That gave the impression that FORCES Canada were merely using the flag as a visual identifier to lead readers to their bit of the site. But I don't know. And while the question is interesting, it makes no difference to the principle.
UPDATE: Looks like Mr Janes' own blog, "Ranting and Roaring" has more info. I've just added a link to his name above. Gosh, he gets mail from Mark Steyn!
Rare agreement
between Aint No Bad Dude and Samizdata on why you shouldn't have cameras in courts. Kudos, Dude, you've moved me from undecided to decided in one fell swoop. And the times when that has happened all stand out clearly in my mind.
Take on the flag issue:
Quote from a letter to Instapundit:"That's nuts," he murmured. "My dad was a POW in World War II. He and his dead buddies earned that fellow the right to carry his flag and speak nonsense."
From the context of the letter it's clear that the flag referred to is actually the swastika. Now, the evil associations of that symbol are about as far away as you can get from the friendly thoughts that I have when presented with the Canadian flag. But the same sentiment should apply in this case as well. Let's assume that you think that smoking is a thoroughly unpleasant habit and that the smokers' rights group are speaking nonsense. So what! A whole load of Canadians (a great many most likely smokers) died to preserve freedom of speech, and that includes freedom of pictures and symbols.
Many libertarians think that the nation is an accident of geography unworthy of their loyalty. I'm not one of them. I think that loving your own country is as natural and need be no more aggressive than loving your own family. But it has to be said that patriotism has been corrupted many times with worship of the current ruling man or group, which is indeed worship of an accident of the times, unworthy of anyone's loyalty. One of the triumphs of our civilization is the partial unbundling of these two ideas. We sneer at the Third World countries with their Presidents for Life and at the old communist countries where the Party and the People were, so we were told, forever indivisible. The reason I'm so het up about one little arrangement of pixels on a screen is that Canada, a civilized country, one of our own, has taken a step in that same terrible direction.
The Canadian flag does not belong to the Canadian government. Neither does Canada.