One almost has to feel sorry for John "Dr Dawg" Baglow.
For years, Baglow has built himself an ill-deserved reputation by digging into issues that other people simply don't have the time or patience to dig into. In the absence of people with said time or patience, he managed to build quite a niche within the Canadian blogosphere.
Now that niche is clearly under threat as his favourite pet issue, the controversy surrounding Rights and Democracy, has been addressed by another individual with the time and patience to explore the matter more thoroughly.
Evidently, the best response Baglow can offer up is this:
It's a remarkably dishonest response to Glavin's article. While Glavin mentions a belief in a Zionist conspiracy that Baglow himself alleges...
...Glavin never once mentions the word "anti-semite", nor any other variation of the word.
It reminds one of what John Baglow really embraced when he embraced Chickenwankerism: he not only embraced intellectual cowardice, but also embraced intellectual futility.
After all, refusing to debate honestly is how they prove they're smarter, isn't it?
One is almost uncertain about how to break the bad news to Baglow, but:
Kanellos is a dog.
It isn't as if Kanellos understands the issues at the heart of the protests he shows up at. And considering the scope of the fiscal situation in Greece, one wonders if some those protesting against austerity measures on the part of the government understand why they are protesting.
Greece owes as much as 120% of its Gross Domestic Product to foreign creditors, a figure that is increasing with Greece's deficit, accounting for 13% of its GDP.
The rioters are clearly so ideologically blinded that they couldn't even possibly understand the consequences of a failure to control and contain Greece's debt.
Just as a dog doesn't understand political issues -- and doesn't care -- he Greek rioters clearly don't understand the issue at hand. Nor do they seem to care.
"We are all Kanellos."
In the most fundamental sense, truer words have never been spoken.
It should be stated right off the bat that John "Dr Dawg" Baglow is not a complete idiot.
In fact, Canada's progressive blogosphere seems to view him as their best and brightest. And while they delight in keeping company with people who delight in calling other people stupid, it's amazing the kind of idiocy that their "best and brightest" can produce.
It also notes the work of Dr Sigmund Rascher, who conducted medical experiments at Dachau that are well-known to have been fatal to the subjects.
Yet another commenter points out that the gas chambers at Dachau had actually been used, and also notes that Baglow's thesis would also have to omit the thousands of Jews who died on the famed "death marches" of concentration camp prisoners to camps in central Germany.
(Daniel Goldhagen's landmark work on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners, also notes that these were not, by any means, direct routes. Rather they were winding routes, planned to pass through as many German towns and villages as possible, so the German populace could see these Jews on their death marches.)
But the greatest problem for Baglow may come from his very own Nizkor source:
When Baglow wants to argue that none of the Holocaust exterminations took place on German soil, he may want to avoid relying on a source that seems to express some sympathy for, of all individuals, Ernst Zundel.
(Evidently sharing Baglow's hostility to Israel should do nothing to mitigate that.)
One should wonder precisely how it is that someone who is otherwise as intelligent as John Baglow could be so utterly and inexcusably remiss.
It doesn't take a top Holocaust historian to point out the number of ways in which Baglow is wrong. And yet Baglow somehow felt a need to take a stand on an historical error that anyone with a lick of sense had to know that they couldn't defend.
Unless one considers the tendency of many of Baglow's cohorts to argue in a manner along the lines of Stephen Colbert's famed concept of truthiness.
As Colbert has so often described it, truthiness encapsulates an inherently selfish intellectual methodology in which one is not only entitled to their own opinions, but also entitled to their own facts.
When one is entitled to their own facts, one is entitled to their own history -- one divorced from any inconvenient facts. One in which the Soviet Union did not oppress religion adhering to a communist doctrine that held that atheism and communism were inseparable. One in which National Socialism is divorced from the socialism. One in which the exterminations of the Holocaust took place entirely outside of German borders.
One that bears only a passing resemblence to actual history -- and sometimes not even that.
It makes clear the enterprise of groups such as the Progressive Historians -- a group intent on twisting history to their ideological designs. At least a few of them even seem to understand that the historical revisionism of tomorrow is best accomplished today.
Baglow and so many of his cohorts seem to take this particular concept of entitlement even further: they are entitled to their own reality. Things are as they say they are because they say they are. And no amount of evidence will be allowed to convince them otherwise.
The truth is that John Baglow is not really a Holocaust denier. Not in the same sense that Ernst Zundel is. But it's clear that Baglow is more than willing to deny some of the details of the Holocaust out of a historical ignorance that, from someone as otherwise intelligent as Baglow, can really only be wilful and self-assumed.
After all, Baglow is not a complete idiot. But in his urge to try to score points against the opposing ideological camp, he has argued something truly idiotic.
Those things happen. But until he's willing to admit the extent of his error, there's no reason why he should be simply courteously allowed off the hook.
John Baglow conducts himself without intellectual honesty or intellectual dignity. Thus, he receives no quarter. None.
It's a story about a Calgary white supremacist group in Calgary offering to pay the damage deposit on rental housing for any white supremacists moving from anywhere in Canada to Calgary.
Baglow links it to a snide remark about Alberta being "the land of the free".
But one wonders if Baglow has ever actually understood the actual significance of this ancient story: that apparently there are not nearly enough white supremacists in Alberta for these groups to survive, so they must offer a cash incentive to get white supremacists to move to Calgary from elsewhere in the country.
But farbeit for a bit of context like that to sneak into Baglow's thinking -- not when there are cheap ideological points to be scored.
When dealing with The Chickenwankers, that collection of "Progressive" bloggers who lacks the courage to decide for themselves who may or may not comment on their blogs, one can expect one thing above all others:
The intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of The Chickenwankers truly knows no bounds.
"It never seems to stop. This time, it appears that the CBC is now afflicted with LDS. It is now helping the Harpercons do that whole 'blame the Libruls' thang back in order to deflect and distract. Yikes!"
Apparently, in the mind of CK, the role of the CBC isn't to report the news -- not by a long shot. Rather, CK seems to think that the role of the CBC is to suppress any story that doesn't directly benefit her ideological agenda.
And it would now seem that the CBC is off the reservation.
Recently, Eileen Olexiuk, who was the second-in-command of the Canadian embassy in Kabul, recently reported that she warned the Paul Martin government on many occasions that torture was common in Afghan prisons.
Her warnings went unheeded.
"I don't think anybody really cared, quite frankly," she said.
The Martin government had apparently considered establishing a Canadian detention centre in Afghanistan, or handing detainees over to US Forces to be held in their facilities. Both options were rejected out of fear of a Guantanamo Bay-esque scandal.
Instead, the Liberals ignored the warnings regarding torture, and negotiated a prisoner transfer agreement with the government of Afghanistan that did not allow Canadian forces sufficient monitoring powers over detainees transferred -- an oversight that the Stephen Harper government has since corrected.
CK goes on to insist that the Liberal Party isn't very troubled by the notion that their complicitly would -- or, rather, already has -- come to light. Admittedly, Ujjal Dosanjh certainly doesn't seem worried.
"We want to be transparent, and learn what mistakes were made, and who knew what and what was hidden from the public, either by the Liberal government or the current Conservative government," Dosanjh insisted.
Of course, Dosanjh has every reason to be confident. His party has been doing everything it can to make an issue out of the highly-questionable Richard Colvin allegations for months, all while the media declined to report on the pre-2006 timeline.
All but overheard in Liberal Party circles was "seriously, do you believe this? Do you fucking believe this? It's a matter of public record that our government negotiated and signed the PTA under which the torture took place, and the media isn't saying 'boo'. We get to tar the Conservatives for our supreme fuck up! Do you believe this? It's too good to be true!"
If CK and John Baglow are guilty of anything, it's of two things.
The first is trying to sell something that was too good to be true. They both knew, just like any Canadians who have paid even passing attention to this story, that the Liberal Party made the torture of detainees transferred by Canadian forces possible in the first place.
The second, clearly, is an act of historical revisionism. They are just as guilty as anyone else for the phenomenon of the orphan timeline, a bizarre rhetorical approach to the matter that has attempted to omit the entire pre-2006 timeline and the entire post-2007 timeline from the public discourse.
Having invested so much time and energy in peddling a derangement syndrome to anyone foolish enough to listen to them, they simply cannot bring themselves to admit that if the Conservative government is guilty of anything it's of not taking torture allegations seriously enough. The Liberal Party is clearly guilty of the same.
Considering the well-known Al Qaida/Taliban tendency to falsely claim torture, it would be hard to blame either.
The difference between the two, of course, is that the Conservative Party didn't sign a fatally flawed Prisoner Transfer Agreement despite having been warned.
The Liberals did.
CK and John Baglow may consider themselves free to desperately try and spin that.
"A Conservative real estate lawyer has been appointed 'interim chair' of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. Ian McPhail replaces outgoing chair Paul Kennedy, whose critical reports offended the Harper administration."
The critical report that Baglow refers directly to is the Robert Dzienkanski case, in which a Polish immigrant to Canada was brutally tasered to death by RCMP officers responding to his frustrated outburst.
The problem for Baglow is that there doesn't seem to be any support for Baglow's caim that Kennedy's report on the Dzienkanski affair offended the government.
In fact, the closest to criticism of Kennedy by the "Harper administration" that seems to be available is criticism by Conservative backbench MP Blake Richards. Richards didn't speak specifically about the Dzienkanski case, but merely criticized "bureaucrats and paper-pushers".
That's a far cry from denouncing Kennedy for his rightly-scathing report on the Dzienanski incident.
Then again, McPhail is only being appointed as interim chairman of the Public Complaints Commission. Presumably, the hunt for a more suitable permanent chairman is continuing. If it isn't, it should be.
That being said, this just doesn't justify John Baglow making unsubstantiated claims that are clearly intended to use the death of Robert Dzienkanski to provoke outrage against the Harper government.
Requests that Baglow substantiate this claim -- that Kennedy was not re-appointed becauase of the Dzienkansi report -- with some evidence have, unfortunately, not only been ignored, but have actually been deleted.
That's unfortunately how John Baglow operates. He doesn't handle dissent very well -- even when he's just being asked to back up his own claims.
With John Baglow now taking a place among the writers of the National Post's Full Comment blog, one has to remember that stranger attempts at bringing ideological diversity to such an outlet have been tried before.
In a recent post there, Baglow helps demonstrate the futility of such exercises if they aren't built on a foundation of respect for the truth.
In the post, Baglow demonstrates that he simply has none.
In a post clearly intended to dispel some of the controversy surrounding the recent exposure of emails from East Anglia University's Hadley Climate Research Unit, Baglow takes on the allegorical role of King Canute, the Egyptian King who believed he could command the tide not to come in.
In Baglow's case, however, he's arguing against more than simply the tide. He's attempting to convince a flood to not breach the levies, and apparently thinks he can do so by arguing far less convincingly than even a historical demagogue like Canute would have dared.
In the post, Baglow attempts to argue against the conclusiveness of the leaked emails, but oddly enough makes no direct reference to any of the emails themselves.
"I grew up with scientists -- astronomers and physicists, mostly -- and they were about the most apolitical crowd I know. They were far too interested in what they were doing. I try to imagine sometimes how these gentle folk might have reacted had some discovery of theirs, and the documentation that accrued around it, led to sudden and savage public attacks from howling cranks and scientific illiterates, including threats, thefts and loony accusations.
They wouldn't even have had the survival-schooling that Galileo had in the art of dancing carefully around the powers that be. A mis-step in those days could kill you. The bold man insisted on his views to the point that he was tried for heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. But he still managed to keep friends in the Church: his books were not burned, and neither was he."
Of course, what Baglow declines to mention is that Galileo wasn't dealing with anything nearly so complex as attempting to delineate shifts in the Earth's temperature from tree ring data or ice cores. Galileo was dealing with something as fundamental, basic, and verifiable as the Earth orbiting the sun, as opposed to the other way around.
The conclusions offered by these scientists deal with claims that human activity is leading to an oncoming environmental apocalypse via a warming trend that they cannot irrefutably demonstrate. This inability to irrefutably support their hypotheses even, in time, led to the establishment of "climate change" as a fallback position from "global warming".
The simplicity of this truth is as glaring as the notion of the apolitical scientist. The political agendas attached to the climate change/global warming/whatever they plan to call it tomorrow issue have been as eagerly supported by a legion of activist scientists -- many of whom, like George Monbiot and David Suzuki, are not climatologists.
Yet in the wake of the release of the extremely-damning emails -- in which scientists discuss "tricks" used to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, plans to exclude dissenters from the peer review process, undermine scientific journals that publish dissenting papers, and even fantasize about committing violence against dissenters -- to the researchers in question merely being human.
"The embattled folks at the CRU in East Anglia, deluged with FOI requests, excoriated by denialists (few of whom are scientists, and even fewer, scientists in the field), reacted like human beings. In other words, they did not speak among themselves in that 'neutral' fashion that we have come, stereotypically, to expect of scientists. They called a spade a spade and a crank a crank, and their frustration showed. Now they're paying the price."
What Baglow declines to mention is that they also refuse to cooperate with FOI requests and refused to share their data with other scientists. The emails also speak of the discounting of entire data sets that simply didn't support their theories, and the artificial bolstering of other data sets in order to (in the now-famous phrase) "hide the decline".
"After two weeks, the so-called mainstream media have joined in on the feeding frenzy already bloodying the blogosphere, and they're doing nearly as badly. I read Doug Saunders' piece in the Globe this morning, in which he uses phrases like 'dangerous bunker mentality' and 'data-fudging scandal' as though the first was unexpected and the second, established. He quotes an excitable scientist who claims the mass theft of emails has 'set the climate debate back 20 years.'"
Indeed, the emails have set the climate debate back 20 years -- to when there was a debate, before activist scientists like those at East Anglia University worked so hard to shut the debate down.
On that note, setting back the debate 20 years has actually been a good thing, even if -- or especially because -- it imperils the political agendas swirling around the issue.
"On a political level, he says, the 'controversy has been catastrophic.' That, too, is grossly overstated, I think, but it is certainly the case that political denialists have not been slow to seize an opportunity and leverage it, as we saw just a few days ago in Australia, and then in Saudi Arabia, where it's all about oil. The latter, according to the breathless Saunders, 'will argue in Copenhagen that carbon-emissions controls are pointless because the CRU scandal has nullified any evidence of human-caused atmospheric temperature increase.'
'Nullified?' Did the earth stop rotating around the sun because Galileo was indiscreet enough to insult the Pope in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems?"
Leave it to a true believer like Baglow to continue pushing this increasingly ill-fitting analogy. Unlike the CRU emails, Galileo's diaries contain no revelations about Galileo deliberately tailoring his scientific method to produce the kind of astronomical data that would support his theory.
There are no such revelations in Galileo's journals because he, unlike the CRU researchers, did no such thing.
"Says a critical climate scientist from East Anglia, Mike Hulme, 'I think there is a serious problem with the way scientists are used, and they way they position themselves, in climate-policy debates. Wherever you look around climate change, people are bringing their ideologies, beliefs and values to bear on the science.'
No kidding. Perhaps one positive thing that might emerge from this political tempest in a teapot is a public awareness that scientists are fallible, emotional, and anything but value-free--just like everyone else. Rather than having privileged access to some 'objective' realm denied to the rest of us, they are equipped with a well-tested and productive procedure. The only ethical question is how that procedure--observation, analysis of data, tests of replication, predictability and empirical adequacy, and so on--is administered."
That's a rather odd admission from someone who had previously promoted the myth of the apolitical scientist. But no matter.
Baglow goes on to claim that "thus far we simply have no smoking gun", despite the numerous emails that reveal the Hadley CRU's perversion of the very scientific methods Baglow speaks of here: observation, analysis of data, tests of replication, and empirical adequacy (at one point one of the researchers even decries their inability to produce data that supports their theories).
Baglow goes on to offer the same tired old denunciations of scientific dissenters at this point, even envoking the spectre of oil companies.
But odder still is that, even as Baglow dismisses the importance of the revelations offered by the Climategate emails without any reference to any of the emails themselves, Baglow goes on to state that he isn't very well versed in the science himself.
One supposes that his faith in climate research stems from him simply accepting the assurances of researchers like those at the now rightfully-discredited Hadley CRU that their science was unassailable, their conclusions irrefutable, and the debate settled.
Even as the flood of well-and-rightly-inspired skepticism washes over the climate debate, John Baglow seeks to stand at the levies so recently broken -- whether by computer hacker or by an internal whistle blower remains unknown -- like a modern-day King Canute and try to convince the flood not to burst forth.
But it's far, far too late for that. Whether Baglow likes it or not, the flood is now upon he and his contemporaries. It will take better arguments than the ones Baglow offers to convince the waters to recede.
This post should probably start off with an apology to any Jewish readers -- or just Jews in general -- if they're offended by the title. Please forgive.
Recently, Toronto Star columnist and blogger Antonia Zerbisias sparked another blogosphere controversy when she twittered the following:
"MP Irwin Cotler's children join IDF. http://bit.ly/1Ttsq0 Which country are you loyal to, sir?"
Irwin Cotler, as Kay notes, is known around the world for his work fighting anti-Semitism. He has also been instrumental in highlighting Canada's past failure to detect and deport Nazi war criminals.
So it's clear that Zerbisias is a critic of Israel. There's actually nothing wrong with that -- there's plenty of room for constructive criticism of any state, especially Israel.
But to target Irwin Cotler and challenge his patriotism because his children -- who are dual Canadian-Israeli citizens, by virtue of Cotler's marriage to an Israeli woman -- is far, far beyond the pale.
To impugn Cotler's citizenship based on the actions of his children is nothing short of irresponsible.
It could even be interpreted as a form of neo-McCarthyism, as Dr John Baglow accuses Kay of in noting that Zerbisias' comments at least reinforce the impressions of Zerbisias' well-known anti-Zionism.
As Kay notes, Zerbisias recently noted, on her Facebook page, that "it doesn't seem possible for Jewish people to have a RATIONAL discussion about Israel!"
So it would seem that Zerbisias insists that Israel is the problem. But more than that, she infers, the real problem is the Jews.
At a certain point, a spade just has to be called a spade. Zerbisias' criticisms of Israel themselves are far short of malignant. But when mixed with the kind of rhetoric she's indulged herself in, it becomes clear that there are darker motivations underlying her criticism.
Which brings one back to the Sheeny Curse.
Who knows? Perhaps Antonia Zerbisias would be surprissed to learn that the Sheeny Curse doesn't actually exist. Stranger things have been published in the pages of the Star -- often by Zerbisias herself.
In the post, Raphael renews the call for the trial of Omar Khadr to begin:
"Seven years in prison without trial is certainly a lengthy incarceration without due process, and I am concerned that we may never get to see Omar Khadr’s day in court."
What emerges as so distasteful however, is the notion that Alexander would think that Khadr is likely guilty:"
...This is still a man 22 years of age who, if released in the next few years, would still have his entire life to make amends with his fellow Canadian citizens, to whom he has brought shame and embarrassment"
"Seven years without trial -- and still guilty," Baglow complains.
Which leads one to ask themselves this question:
What, precisely, do John Baglow and company think Omar Khadr was doing in Afghanistan in the first place? Enjoying tea and crumpets?
"Raph does not even entertain the possibility that Omar is not guilty of the crime his is accused of and is the victim of his circumstances - brought to Afghanistan by his father at a young age and brought up in that environment.
Its simple: if he is guilty of an actual crime, produce the evidence and convict him. Now. Otherwise, bring him home and let him go. Now."
Apparently, in the mind of Mike -- and one wonders how many share his particularly fevered and hazardous way of thinking -- a "not guilty" verdict in a trial means that Omar Khadr walks free immediately.
And if a judge were particularly reckless with Canadian national security, that very well may be the case.
After all, Canadians know full well what Omar Khadr was doing in Afghanistan -- or, rather, what Ahmed Said Khadr was doing on the many occasions when he had his family overseas. In 2003, Ahmed, a known Al Qaida financier, was killed in a firefight in Pakistan.
He was continuing to indoctrinate his children in his militant Islamic religious beliefs, and involving them in militant Islamic groups. In 2002, Ahmed Khadr sent Omar with a band of Arab Muslims who associated Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Al Qaida leader.
Ahmed Khadr had a habit of putting his sons into warzones that should disquiet even the most unscrupulous "peace" activist -- the kind of "peace" activist that have often been willing to participate in rallies with the Khadrs. Not only did Ahmed Khadr expose Omar to the rigours of warfare, but his son Abdul Karim Khadr was paralyzed during the same firefight in which Ahmed himself was killed.
Omar Khadr is a child soldier -- not simply a child soldier, but a child terrorist soldier. And that makes his prospect of immediate release far cloudier than Mike is giving it credit for.
Demobilizing child soldiers is a long and arduous process. Child soldiers need to be provided with education and psychiatric care. The rehabilitation of Omar Khadr would only be further complicated by the fact that his enlistment as a child soldier was also a gross act of child abuse -- even though he and his family may not recognize it.
To turn Khadr loose into the public would be allowing a ticking time bomb to go free. While Mike is close to spot-on when he notes the resentment that comes with seven years of imprisonment without trial -- only another reason why said detention is a miscarriage of justice -- but to credit that with any militancy is to ignore his family history, and ignore what his father indoctrinated him in, and subjected him to.
That he can't conceive of the very real possibility -- even likelihood -- that a child soldier indoctrinated in Islamic militancy could be dangerous is just another example of the burning stupidity of Canada's far left.
