One to file under the heading of "irony"

The daily mails is reporting that one of the largest supporters of the British National Party has a Serbian wife:

Clearly, then, they don't know much about their own squire's new bride. For, by the deepest of ironies, the Mail has discovered that the latest lady in the Wentworth manor is of Eastern European extraction.
Strolling along a damp autumnal lane in her Wellingtons and padded jacket this week, her pet Doberman straining at the leash, the wife of the BNP's arch-backer looked every inch the English landowner's wife.
Yet the maiden name of 39-year-old Zorka Wentworth was Ilic. Her mother is from Kosovo, her late father Serbian. Having fled to Britain in the 1950s to escape the tyrannical communism of Yugoslavia under Tito, they were precisely the sort of immigrants who would be barred from entering the country if Griffin had his way.

BNP leader: Nick Griffin's policies would ban Zorka from joining his party
Although she was born in Bedfordshire, Zorka considers herself half-English and half-Serb, speaks with a very slight Eastern European accent (presumably because she was raised to be bilingual), is Serb Orthodox by religion and celebrates both Serbian and English festivals.
This kind of duality would hardly be welcomed in Griffin's ethnically sanitised Utopia. After all, during last week's Question Time debacle, the BNP leader described white Britons as 'aboriginals': English, Scots, Irish and Welsh people 'who have been here for the last 17,000 years'.
Ludicrously, Mrs Wentworth - who met her husband eight years ago, when she was working as a chef in the local pub, and became his third wife last year - would not even be permitted to join the party her husband bankrolls so generously.

Speaking of narcissism

George Will makes an odd point:

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

A linguist objects at language log: Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time, but not for the first time:

• "Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009)
  
• "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009)
  
• "Inaugural pronouns" (6/8/2009)
  
• "Another pack member heard from" (6/9/2009)
  
• "I again" (7/13/2009)
  
• "'I' is a camera" (7/18/2009).

Now, to make a public fool out of yourself by writing an intellectually lazy column once is part of being a columnist. But to do it repeatedly because you haven't bothered to look at reactions to your columns, might that be a sign of narcissism?

CJC weighs in on the Lemire decision

With regard to this, the Canadian Jewish Congress says Lemire case decision wrong in law:

Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) said today it believes the decision in the case of Warman v. Lemire is wrong in law and should be appealed. CJC also noted it believes section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) remains constitutional.

The case involves a complaint filed against Marc Lemire, webmaster of freedomsite.org, by Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman, for a number of alleged antisemitic postings on Lemire's web site.

"We are pleased that Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Member Athanasios Hadjis found that some of the material posted by Lemire violated s. 13 of the CHRA. However, we strongly disagree with his decision not to impose a cease and desist order because he believed the penalty provisions in the Act render s. 13 unconstitutional," said Joel Richler, CJC National Honourary Legal Counsel.

"Reasonable people can differ regarding the penalty provisions of the Act - that is a matter for the Federal Court of Canada to determine," said Richler.

"The Supreme Court of Canada clearly ruled that s. 13 was constitutional long before the penalty provisions were added to it. As such, Mr. Hadjis should have simply ignored the penalty provisions and applied the appropriate cease and desist order against Mr. Lemire," he added.

CHRT decision on Lemire

Interesting news yesterday. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled in a case about Marc Lemire and his site, freedomsite.org. Lemire has more or less been acquited: what he wrote himself was (apart from one post) not sufficiently hate-inducing to be penalized. Also, the CHRT finds that the section of the act covering penalties was unconstitutional, which surprises me. More later.

too true

I'd like one of these, please

FT: Apple Tablet Coming for Christmas:

Rumors that Apple is planning to release some kind of tablet-type device in the near future have been gaining steam over the past few weeks, and now The Financial Times is on board with reports that it will hit store shelves in time for the holiday buying season. Apparently the device will launch along with new content deals from the entertainment industry, and will also include some type of Internet connectivity -- most likely Wi-Fi.

The entertainment industry seems to be excited about Apple's tablet. "It's a portable entertainment device," an unnamed entertainment executive commented. "It's going to be fabulous for watching movies."

The tablet may also offer interactive booklets and liner notes to go along with electronic album purchases, which is likely a move to help boost CD-length album sales.

Scare tactics unjustified

There's quite an upset back in Canada on the recent advertisements of Shona Holmes, who has made a commercial for an American lobby group in which she claims that she had a brain tumour that threatened her life, that her treatment was delayed in Ontario, and that she had to pay for her own treatment by going to the Mayo clinic in the States. There is plenty of reason to wonder whether her story has not been so exaggerated that the story is essentially false (see Canadian blogger Creative Revolution on the groups who are funding Ms. Holmes other anti-medicare legal cases.

What I want to say now is that every system has cracks, and Ms. Holmes may have fallen through one. But having lived in Canada most of my life and now being in the States, I think I should assure my American neighbours that in my life I've never heard of anything like what Ms. Holmes reports. Yes, people have to wait sometimes for non-life threatening treatment. Sometimes they are suffering to various degrees during the wait. But life-threatening conditions gets quick attention. And most importantly -- everyone in Canada has access. No one goes untreated because they're uninsured.

Man wins rights case against B.C. neo-Nazi.

I just noticed this story from last month.

Man wins rights case against B.C. neo-Nazi:

Richard Warman has settled his federal human rights complaint about Internet hate posted by a Coquitlam man.

As part of a mediated settlement, Ciaran Paul Donnelly of Coquitlam agreed to permanently close his account on Stormfront, a U.S. website through which the hate messages were distributed, and ask to have his earlier postings deleted. He has also agreed to pay $1,000 in damages for making veiled threats against Warman and posting a picture of a sign reading: "The Church of Dead Warman."

Terms of the settlement, which prohibit Donnelly from posting further hate propaganda on the Internet or engaging in additional retaliation against Warman, will be registered with the Federal Court of Canada.

Small world

One of the interesting aspects of being a new blogger is finding friends and acquaintances in the blogging community.

For example, the blog Winters in Israel is written by a fellow from Jersey I happened to meet last year. He describes his experiences being a snowbird (as we Canadians call them) in Israel. In this interesting post, David Stolow describes a plumbing accident and the buckets and mops and other clean-up stuff needed to clean up a plumbing mishap. Elsewhere he gives his views on the Israeli election.

Blood and Politics and the mainstreaming of the White Nationalist movement

Over at the TPMCafé bookclub, Leonard Zeskind offers a brief description of his book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. In it, he describes how

While this movement draws heavily from the constitutional understandings common at the time of the Dred Scott decision, they do not seek a return to Jim Crow segregation. Rather they are looking to create in the future a whites-only republic on the North American continent. In the vernacular of the civil rights movement, these white supremacists are not trying to put black people (and other people of color) in their "place," rather in their world there is no place for black people.

He urges against seeing these movements as necessarily allied or harmonious:

White power skinheads in this treatment are less "street soldiers" for older racists, and more a sub-cultural mini-movement searching for its own political territory. You will watch the anti-immigrant movement grow out of racist and white nationalist concerns, not out of economic hard times for white people.