As If The Name Wasn't A Tell.

Political parties come and go in Canada.  The latest group trying to get party status from Elections Canada calls itself the Canadian Nationalist Party.  Seeing nationalist in a party name is generally a good sign their ideology will be crap.  And that seems to be the case here, as the would be party is facing an RCMP hate crime investigation.  Party founder Travis Patron claims he's not referring to Jews in a recently posted video, but anyone familiar with the language of the hard right knows that "globalists" is commonly used as a shorthand for the international Jewish conspiracy they believe in.  Patron also uses the term "parasitic tribe," which is pretty hard to interpret as anything but a reference to Jews.  The party is also opposed to immigration and LGBTQ rights.

If the CNP does get party status it will be able to issue tax receipts for contributions.  If they manage to get 2 percent of the vote nationally, or 5 percent of the vote in ridings they run in, they will also get 50 percent of their election expenses paid.  But that's really not much of an if.  The CNP will be like most fringe parties.  It will get a handful of votes, which probably won't make a difference in any riding.  Chances are it won't exist 10 years from now.

It's Sad I Was Right.

Back in 2013 I posted about seeing a piece of fanart for the DC Comics character Starfire on Deviantart.  I thought the artist made her look African American, and speculated what might happen if someone like Beyoncé was cast in the role.  5 years later a live action TV version of Teen Titans is on the way, with Anna Diop cast as Starfire.  The result?  A bunch of racist dumbasses complaining Starfire isn't black.  Well, yeah, but she's an alien.  So if you're going to go in that direction no Earth woman should be playing her period.  Which would make it damn difficult to have a live action Starfire at all.

I'm Not Good At Math...

...but apparently I'm better at it than Australian politician Pauline Hanson.  Hanson was someone I would have assumed was gone from the Australian political scene, but it seems she's back in the news after Australia's recent election.  Her party got enough votes to secure a seat in the Australian Senate for Hanson, who had some brief popularity back in the '90s.  Like many anti-immigrant types she's latched on to Muslims as the target du jour, claiming that Australia is in danger of being "swamped" by Muslims.  Australia's Muslim population is about 2 percent of the total population.  Yep, they're going to be introducing Sharia Law any day now with that many Muslims.

Hopefully no one will let Hanson do their finances, because with math skills like that she'd probably really screw things up.

It Never Was.

Looking around Deviantart tonight I stumbled across an anti-immigrant cartoon. (I won't link to it to avoid giving the artist hits)  It claimed that immigration only occurs to "white countries."  I checked the profile of the artist, and he lives in the United States, which I was entirely unsurprised at.  He, and anyone else with similar beliefs, needs to get a clue.  The United States was never a "white country."  Before colonists showed up those lands were the home of various indigenous peoples.  That remained the case after large scale colonisation began.  As the United States expanded it also took in territories where significant numbers of people of Spanish descent lived, many of whom also had indigenous ancestry.  Then there were all the African slaves brought in before the US Civil War finally ended that crime.  Chinese workers were brought in to build the railways, Hawaiians began to move to the mainland after the US annexed it, as did Puerto Ricans after their island met the same fate.  And on it went.  Of course the past equivalents of today's believers in this nonsense didn't always want white people immigrating either, if they came from places like Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, or were European Jews.  That should come as no surprise, given that racism isn't in any way rational.

Listening To A Ghost.

Since it's a nice evening I decided to take my Grundig G5 shortwave portable outside and tune around a bit, hoping to avoid a bit of the indoor electrical noise.  As I turned the dial I came across a preacher that sounded familiar.  I assumed it was Pastor Pete Peters with his Scriptures For America program and sure enough that's who it was.  Peters, a believer in the racist Identity brand of Christianity, was a fixture on shortwave when I was a heavy listener in the early '90s.

But when I typed "Scriptures For America" into Google I got a surprise.  Peters died in 2011.  I'd been listening to a ghost!  Or, rather, even though he's dead the miracle of audio recording allows Peters to keep spreading his racist claptrap from beyond the grave.  Too bad.  Incidentally the show didn't note that Peters has died.

The church Peters ran in LaPorte, Colorado, apparently only has 100 members.  I wonder where they've been getting the money to pay for his broadcasts all these years, along with their other activities. 

Just Imagine.

I was just looking at someone's favourites over on Deviantart.  One of them was some fanart of Starfire and Wonder Girl from the Teen Titans.  The artist drew what I thought was a rather African-American looking Starfire, and the thought came to mind of Beyoncé playing her in a movie.  And with that thought came the thought of the howls of indignation that would probably result in the dumber and, to be blunt, more racist section of comic book fandom.   They would ignore the fact that Starfire, being an alien, doesn't fit into human concepts of race, and decide that the character is white.  All one has to do is look at the idiot comments that came from some Hunger Games fans when one of the characters  was portrayed by an African-American actress in the movie adaptation.  Apparently the fact the character was described as having dark brown skin in the novel somehow eluded their grasp, and they thought she was a cute little white girl.

(Beyoncé would obviously be the wrong choice to play Starfire in a Teen Titans movie, being too old, but would be a good choice if the character was portrayed in a context where she was older.)

Klan Kanned.

I recently posted about finding a Ku Klux Klan page on Deviantart.  I speculated that the account would soon be banned.  Sure enough I checked it today and the user has been permanently banned.  I presume Deviantart has some way of keeping banned people from simply creating a new account, but I'm sure they'll try.  And of course they'll whine about censorship.  Too bad, fools.  Deviantart is a private website and can kick off anyone they want.  Their behaviour regarding bans has often been arbitrary, but I doubt too many people will disagree with this one.

Klansmen On Deviantart.

You can imagine my surprise when I came across this on the popular art site Deviantart.  According to the account info this one has been up for a month, which surprises me even more.  You'd think DA would have pulled their account already.  An obvious question is which version of the Ku Klux Klan this one is, given that there are at least 5 rival versions running around the US right now.  Of course the person who created this page may be a member of none of them.  In any case don't be surprised if you click on that link and there's nothing there but the announcement of a banned acount.

They Didn't Get The Notice.

Calgary was struck by racist vandals last night, who painted antisemitic grafitti in various places. I saw a shot of one example that shows the idiots involved apparently didn't get the message from scumbag central. It read "Six million more," refering of course to the Holocaust. I guess these guys didn't hear you're not supposed to believe in the Holocaust if you're that sort of bigot.

Too Bad The Inside Didn't Match The Outside.

Today I received more spam from those wastes of oxygen calling themselves The New Order. The subject line was "We Fought on the Wrong Side!" Of course this wasn't an indication that they finally shed their ignorance and realised the vileness of Nazism. Of course the article enclosed was the usual nonsense about the wonders of Hitler and the horrors of the EVIIIIIIIL JOOOOOS, who started WW2 to defeat "the great man." Of course as with many issues these fools demonstrate their ignorance of history with such talk. After all it was Hitler who attacked Poland in 1939 despite warnings from the French and British not to, that doing so would cause them to declare war on Germany. It was Hitler who attacked Norway, France and the Low Countries in 1940, turning what had been a low level conflict that might very well have petered out, to Germany's benefit, into an all out conflict. It was Hitler who attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, ignoring the historical example of Napoleon's failed invasion of Imperial Russia more than a century before. And it was Hitler who declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. Only in the fantasies of the utterly ignorant or the crazed was Hitler some innocent bystander beset by evil forces. Rather it was the greed of Hitler and his cronies that brought Germany into conflict with other states, and the arrogance and racism of the Nazis that convinced them they could fight wars against several major powers at once.

One thing I'm surprised the Katrina disaster has yet to generate is lawsuits, or at the very least talk of lawsuits. Its a target rich enviroment for potential litigants, with the federal government, the Louisiana government, the city of New Orleans, various US government agencies and more all being potential respondents in lawsuits. Of course it may simply be the case that lawyers are having trouble getting in touch with potential clients because the disaster is ongoing. Until the displaced have found permanent or semipermanent places to live it will be nearly impossible to have consistent contact with them.

I would guess that con artists are already working to exploit the charity angle. If you're interested in donating money to the relief efforts it would be best to donate to a well established charitable organisation like United Way or the Red Cross. I'm sure the Nigerian scam crowd and their emulators will soon be sending out letters claiming to be from some poor victim of the disaster who really needs your help to get that 20 million bucks out of his bank account, and he'll share 10 percent with you to thank you for your help.

Many New Orleans residents will not be returning to the city, including many of its poor. And some people in the city are saying good riddance to the latter. They see this as an opportunity to get rid of the lower classes who they say cause crime and hurt the city's image. The fact that the city's underclass is heavily black of course leads one to suspect racism plays a role in some of these attitudes, although I would suspect you'd find such thinking amongst some of the city's well to do blacks as well. As is often the case with such attitudes those who hold them apparently have no problem with these people continuing their supposed evil ways, just as long as they do it in someone else's backyard.

Speaking of racism those idiots at the New Order, who I mentioned in a previous post as a source of some of my e-mail spam, have been more active of late. They see the disaster as a perfect excuse to spew more of their poison. I would imagine their fellow travelers in other such groups have been doing the same thing.

And some responses to the Katrina disaster are just silly and tasteless. Some writers of fanfiction are already using the disaster in their stories. Take this example, courtesy of the Godawful Fan Fiction Forum, of a Harry Potter story where evil Chinese wizards cause Katrina. Riiiiight.

From the Silly Redundancy department: I was watching CNN Headline News this afternoon for a few minutes, and it featured coverage of an Atlanta bride to be who has disappeared. The segment ended with a comment about the wedding being postponed. I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a wedding in absentia.

Is there some requirement that franchisees of the Denny's Restaurant chain must be idiots? A group of Arab American men are suing after they were told "We don't serve Bin Ladens here," and made to leave a Florida Denny's in January 2004. Denny's were sued in the early '90s after black customers complained of mistreatment.

With this week being the 60th anniversary of the Soviets seizing the Auschwitz concentration camp not surprisingly stories about the Holocaust have been appearing on network newscasts and so forth. And not surprisingly the Holocaust deniers and other Nazi nitwits have been whining about the coverage. Sometimes you have to wonder about these losers, as they are ironically one of biggest forces in keeping discussion of the Holocaust so common as they keep bringing it up. You'd think they'd realise that if they shut up about it people wouldn't be exposed to what their spiritual counterparts did 60 years ago, and hence wouldn't look on them as such losers and scum.

One thing that is interesting to read in accounts by those victims and potential victims who survived the Nazi genocide efforts was how many people who were actually at threat just couldn't believe the stories they were hearing. The idea that the Germans were engaging in deliberate mass murder just didn't seem compatible with their views of the Germans as a civilised and rational people. Unfortunately the Nazis managed to create a climate where the darkest part of human nature could come forth, and millions of murders were a result.

Reading some stuff about eugenics online tonight an amusing thought popped to mind. Many modern fans of the concept are racist booboos who think their particular ethnic group or skin colour is the most wonderful one of them all, and hence must be preserved, its genetics unsullied by combining with other supposedly inferior groups. But if one were to be truly eugenic one would have to advocate mating the most "suitable" humans for whatever trait you were trying to enhance, regardless of their supposed race. In other words engage in the "race mixing" that drives these kind of people up the wall. After all if one wants to maximise intelligence via eugenics then a white woman with a genius level IQ should be mating with others of that level of IQ, even if they're black, or Asian, or whatever.