15-03-2013, 09:23 PM
Tom Flanagan … is the neocon pope no more, having uttered the astonishing opinion at a seminar the previous evening in the deep-south Alberta city of Lethbridge that child pornography is, if not exactly OK, more of a freedom of expression issue than an exploitation of children issue. Not only that, but in response to a questioner at the University of Lethbridge seminar, Flanagan informed his audience he'd once been on the mailing list of the North American Man-Boy Love Association for two years. One can only hope this was in error, as he seemed to be implying. …
I it's been understood for a while that Flanagan hitherto best known for his role as self-proclaimed godfather to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's political career, signatory to the Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto, chief strategist of Alberta's far-right Wildrose Party and advocate of the assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has a small problem with knowing when not to use his outside voice. But one would have thought that he would have realized by now in the age of the tiny phone-mounted digital camera that any voice one chooses to use even a whisper is in effect your outside voice. …
Perhaps the U of L's classroom ambience made the American-born neocon icon forget he was not back in the loving embrace of the University of Calgary, where his odious economic views have been treated as infallible and inspired by generations of students and administrators since the late 1960s? …
Alas for Flanagan, he is also known for controversial and unsympathetic views about First Nations rights, which inspired Idle No More activists to attend his lecture. One of them, a young man from the nearby Blood Tribe named Levi Little Moustache, brought a digital camera and asked an unsympathetic question although he, like many others in the room and out of it, gasped with shock when Flanagan uttered his career-ending opinion.
Within hours Flanagan discovered that even for a pal of the prime minister and comfortable senior Conservative party ideologue known as the Karl Rove of Canadian politics, there are limits to what may be said aloud without consequences especially when it's posted on Youtube.
In the hours after the video of Flanagan's remarks went viral, spokesthingies for conservative groups and political parties, previously obsequious media organizations and once-sympathetic employers were practically knocking over the furniture in their haste to be the first to tack their former neoconservative idol to the wall. …
I it's been understood for a while that Flanagan hitherto best known for his role as self-proclaimed godfather to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's political career, signatory to the Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto, chief strategist of Alberta's far-right Wildrose Party and advocate of the assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has a small problem with knowing when not to use his outside voice. But one would have thought that he would have realized by now in the age of the tiny phone-mounted digital camera that any voice one chooses to use even a whisper is in effect your outside voice. …
Perhaps the U of L's classroom ambience made the American-born neocon icon forget he was not back in the loving embrace of the University of Calgary, where his odious economic views have been treated as infallible and inspired by generations of students and administrators since the late 1960s? …
Alas for Flanagan, he is also known for controversial and unsympathetic views about First Nations rights, which inspired Idle No More activists to attend his lecture. One of them, a young man from the nearby Blood Tribe named Levi Little Moustache, brought a digital camera and asked an unsympathetic question although he, like many others in the room and out of it, gasped with shock when Flanagan uttered his career-ending opinion.
Within hours Flanagan discovered that even for a pal of the prime minister and comfortable senior Conservative party ideologue known as the Karl Rove of Canadian politics, there are limits to what may be said aloud without consequences especially when it's posted on Youtube.
In the hours after the video of Flanagan's remarks went viral, spokesthingies for conservative groups and political parties, previously obsequious media organizations and once-sympathetic employers were practically knocking over the furniture in their haste to be the first to tack their former neoconservative idol to the wall. …
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass