It should be fairly obvious that I have no problem with people making outrageous statements; that is, as long as "outrageous" is used in it's literal sense. Something that causes outrage usually does so due to a subjective reaction on the part of individuals or perhaps groups. Something outrageous does not become untrue simply because it's not popular in some quarters. "Ridiculous" is another type of statement, and that is something that provokes ridicule by being foolish, stupid, etc. and the connotation is that it is also false. 9/11 "truthers" (not even a word!) who foment conspiracy theories involving "nano-thermite" in the Trade Centre towers are a good example of something ridiculous.
So Ann Coulter was supposed to speak last night at Ottawa U. So what? Ann says stuff that even I think goes too far, but much of her delivery may be for rhetorical effect. She is a narrow-minded religious type, and as such I don't want her running things any more than I want the Green Party to run Canada. I'm closer to Coulter's end of the spectrum, but closer isn't collocated. Having said that, even if Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein were headlining something at my alma mater I'd just stay away; people who aren't threatening you (and I don't mean your ideas, I mean your precious skin) don't require violent protests, sit-ins and intimidation.
It makes these leftist Brown Shirts feel big to hector speakers they don't like out of the country, and for all of their ability to grab hold of the media they don't grasp the secondary effects of giving the Ann Coulters, David Irvings and Geert Wilders' of the world that kind of exposure. I must hasten to add that I only include Mr. Wilders in with the other two for his effect on cringing leftists; the West needs more people like him and I can't necessarily say that about Coulter and Irving as there are a fair number of them already.
OTTAWA - Hundreds of screaming students succeeded in what few thought possible Tuesday night - they silenced incendiary right-winger Ann Coulter.
Mm, not quite silenced; she got MASSIVELY more mainstream media coverage due to the screaming mob and the threatening (with legal prosecution) email generated in reaction to her mere presence than she would have had the local intelligencia ignored her. I also note that the CBC used the worst available photos of her; she's a good-looking woman and you don't get goofy shots of her without trying to. That (and the tone of the articles to a less-subtle extent) is subtle manipulation of the media, albeit BY the media. If 100 or so people who haven't been brainwashed by the relentless PC Marxism of our University system want to come and bask in her conservative glow, will that undermine all of our human rights?
The system is good at stamping out little PC clones that possess the illusion of independent thought, so not that many university students would show up for her anyway. Back in the day I probably would have (if I wasn't going out clubbing that night at least) but mostly because it baits these PC twits and I like to spar with them. I remember going to see Gwynne Dyer during Gulf War 1 with some leftish friends who obviously had never actually read what he had to say about war. They just assumed that a critic of the military must be against it. That is a product of the bullshit "Critical Theory" that likes to tear down everything that made the soft squishy society that these people inhabit possible. Western Civilization is the font from whence comes both the technology which makes 6B+ people on this planet possible AND the self-hating philosophy that stifles the free expression of ideas and has the potential to pull the whole thing down.
I confess to some ignorance (no excuse, I know) about the precise laws in Canada about expression, but I do know that we have no equivalent of the First Amendment. I cannot say "Let's kill all of the _" and expect to get away with it, so I won't. I would be interested to see the legal reaction in Canada to someone saying "Muhammad was a pedophile", evidence being him consummating his marriage to Aisha when she was nine (9) years old. I'll make an observation/prediction though: if it were libel it'd go to a real court, not some PC kangaroo version thereof.
Saying "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims" is not strictly accurate, but not so far off the mark as to be "ridiculous" rather than merely "outrageous". The (Muslim) girl at Western who challenged Coulter on her proposition that Muslims should take "flying carpets" so that they wouldn't blow up our airliners handled it with some class, merely leaving after being offered the option of a camel when she mentioned she didn't have a flying carpet. Coulter scored some cheap points with her base, but did nothing to use her provocative premise as an entrée to a serious discussion of the source of all of these attacks. That marks Coulter to me as a lightweight, and suggests that the dumb-ass things that she says are likely what she actually thinks.
As for the "flying carpet" comment itself, it has potential. Make an opening by pissing people off with that, then riposte their frothing outrage with something along the lines of: Muslims wouldn't even have planes if it wasn't for Christians, or at very least Western Civilization. It therefore follows that camels certainly are an appropriate transport alternative for a group who SHOULD be preferentially profiled on the basis of their religion due to their demonstrated inclination to try to blow up things that they couldn't come up with themselves. There are enough bad apples in that particular barrel to taint the bunch; Islam DICTATES that non-believers should be subjugated (when not forcibly converted or killed), so ipso facto all Muslims are a potential threat to all non-Muslims (insert relevant verse etc. of Koran here for full effect).
That, Ann, is how it's done, and I'm not even all that clever so it can be and has been done even better. It's easy to outmanoeuvre the dogmatic of any stripe, especially the ideologues, and all that it requires is a) you get them riled up first, and b) that you can back up your wacky pronouncements with FACTS, not cheap jokes to the mouth breathers in your peanut gallery. You're good at a) and it's not too late to work on b) as long as you're flexible enough to separate the "mostly-true" from the factually unassailable and recombine them for maximum rhetorical impact. You've got a pretty good gig already though , so what could I know?
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