Critical Perspectives and Reflections

I thought I would share my response to a Con Cockwobble who thought that a statement, that the right in Canada will be pushing hard to reopen the abortion issue, was the raving of a madman. After putting out the standard Con talking points, i.e., falsehoods, he called me a few names. He, of course, blamed Trudeau for everything. Standard procedure. My response: The issue of Roe vs Wade is not going away and will remain in the headlines for a long time. The timing of this frankly couldn’t be better for Maxime Bernier and the PPC, and couldn’t be worse for PP and the Tories. The hue and cry from their troglodyte base will be deafening as it demands that Canada revoke a woman’s right to choose. Timing is everything in life, this is particularly true in politics with the chaotic, insane comings and goings in America on so many issues. Canadians feel like we live above a meth lab and many will no longer visit the omnishambles, be it due to gun violence, racism etc. Now that the knuckle drag...

Recently I came across what I initially assumed to be a satirical take on the Rapture. That, for the uninitiated, is the belief, by some Christians, that one day in the foreseeable future a bunch of people will, at some point, be whooshed up bodily into heaven. I assume that these would be believers, who had lived lives of purity, go to church every Sunday, send in donations to various televangelists and believe that the bible is the ultimate in scientific truth. They doubtless don’t drink, smoke, swear, fornicate, believe in abortion and avoid non-believers unless in attempts to convert them. They would be the crème de la crème of the fundamentalist Christian set. This particular post, on Facebook, was aimed at believers, who were being offered a pet care service should they be among the elect to be “raptured up” as the phrase is. It seems, at least in the illustration in the ad, that the elect would all be naked. I guess there is not much call for clothing in heaven but maybe it mean...

By any standards we’d have to say that last couple of weeks constitute a “sabbattis horribilis”, a hell of a nightmare for democracy and decency in the USA. In week one the myopic “originalist” right-wing “elders” of the Supreme Court struck down the right of women, to access abortion, by a six to three margin1. This, though a reported 72% of US voters support the 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade (Saunders, 2022). Interestingly and distressingly, there is evidence that one of the robed “wise persons” (one of them is a woman), the dreadful Clarence Thomas, has in his gun-sights the right to same sex marriage as well as the right to freely use contraception. It is as yet unclear to what degree the other five ideologically blind denizens of the right-wing majority are of the same opinion. Then on Friday of the same week, the court made another six to three decision that will make it more difficult for the states to regulate which individuals may possess lethal ordinance, i.e., guns...