I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

WHINY SPINELESS PUSSY ACTIVIST ALERT

Actually, I was going to write about two things here. As usual, Concordia anti-Israel pro-Palestinian activists are bleating about something or other, this time taking a few comments by their favourite local scrape goath**, "Zionist" Concordia University Rector Frederick Lowry out-of-context as well as calling for all charges against the fascist thugs that prevented Concordia students from listening to Benjamin Netanyahu last September by rioting to be dropped, since a lot more Arabs were charged than non-Arabs. Well, if it's something about silly Middle East antics at Concordia U, Sari Stein has something to say about it, so I really don't have too much to add, but, well, if the majority of the people charged in these riots were Arabs, maybe it's because that's what the majority of people doing the rioting were Arabs, though, I suppose, if you want to balance things out, you could always lay some charges against the mostly-white outgoing Concordia Student Union execs that were complicit in the violence. (Funny how you never hear about unruly Jewish mobs at Concordia... of course, if you point that out, they'll call you "racist" even if you're not and even if you point out that the majority of Arabs at Concordia don't take part in that sort of thing, but being called "racist" by that crowd means you're probably saying the right thing, so wear it as a badge of honour.) Also, a lot of the activists are pro-Hamas, or, at least, they implicitly condone the actions of Hamas as being equal or morally superior to the actions against terrorists by the Israeli military. Need I remind you of the awful, awful (just from a writing, punctuation and capitalization standpoint, as well as from a "confusing 'hear' with 'here'" standpoint) poem that served as the introduction to last year's "student handbook" (it had a calendar, but nothing else that you'd find in a normal college or university student handbook, just hundreds of pages of far left agit-prop) that called for "Intifada"?

But there is an issue near and dear to my heart that I wish to address. Yesterday a bunch of "nanny state"-loving busybody activists called for the Canadian government to reign in private television channels (well, reign in even more than they've already been "reigned in") and eliminate violence on TV... prior to 10 p.m. (at least for now... I don't trust these guys any farther than I can throw them). Kevin Holden was rightfully going apeshit about this on CJAD yesterday afternoon so I thought this was a major story, but, even using Google News seach the only thing I could find about this proposal online was this short CBC article as well as a small article in the "on-old dead tree" version of the Montreal Gazette. Still, I want to make a whole bunch of points:

a) Up yours!

b) I like my TV nice and violent... don't tell me what I can and can't watch.

c) The government doesn't, and shouldn't, take the role of the parent... If you don't like it or don't want your kids watching it, turn it off. If I ever have kids, once they reach about early elementary school age, I'll let 'em watch the violent toy commercial cartoons, just as I did in the 80s; they're loads of fun to watch, and, if you're a kid and you know certain sorts of adults don't like you watching those sorts of cartoons, that just increases the appeal. And if the busybodies succeed in taking all of the fun, interesting, un-nice cartoons off the Canadian kids' channels, well, there's always the American border channels, or do you want the cable/satellite TV companies to black those sort of programmes out? Well, I have a nice, big, phallic outdoor TV antennae. And if the American busybodies ever do they same thing and get the violent stuff taken off TV there... well, there's always DVDs.

d) The stuff that's on TV today seems pretty tame compared to G.I. Joe and The A Team, at least in terms of "shit blowing up real good".

e) The Gazette article says that this time the pressure is coming mainly from the French-language school boards here in Quebec. Well, if they limit the pressure to the French-language TV networks, it's not like I'll notice, me being so out-of-touch with what's on French-language TV here that I thought Star Acad�mie was the name of some spiffy new business in the same building as the main Archambault book/music/video store at the corner of Sainte Catherine's and Berri (since the building is plastered with signs for it... it's the Quebec TV equivalent of American Idol, apparently). Honestly, about the only reason I ever watch French-language TV other than the occassional programme on TV5, the International channel, is for the nipple content late at night.

f) I noticed you all didn't specify whether you meant just the broadcast networks, or the premium cable channels as well... if you're proposing controlling the content of channels we have to pay for (more than they've been cotrolled already), up yours even more.

g) What about those of us with the mini-dish satellite TV service where we can watch channels from all over Canada? Would channels in the Eastern Time Zone have to put violent stuff after 1 a.m., so that the kids in British Columbia (in the Pacific Time Zone) wouldn't see violent TV before 10 p.m. there?

h) In conclusion, fuck you.

**Yes, I know it's really "scapegoat"; it's a little in-joke for people who come here from a certain message board...

posted by Steve Brandon @ 6:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Sorry, I just haven't felt like Blogging much lately. Last weekend I had the sort of personal situation that I can't really write about here, involving an online friend that seems to be, as far as I can tell and from what his/her friends tell me, very troubled and confused over events that happened in his/her personal life, and various things tangental to the situation things spiralled out of control, and I was depressed for several days, though I'm feeling better now, and s/he probably is too.

It probably says something about the nature of the world we live in today that this person's troubles affect me so deeply when, to the best of my knowledge, I've never been within 1500 miles or so of this person, yet I don't recall ever feeling quite as sad about any situations involving people I know personally in real life (well, I'm a loner).

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:20 PM 0 Comments Links to this post