You are looking for a haiku about Gaza?

okay

Rockets fly, few die,
obviously justified,
kill thirteen-hundred

And.. the worst TV show ever made was the Trouble with Tracy. I remember as a child my hippy mother saying "turn that off now, it's garbage". I wasn't even watching it, just in the livingroom room playing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tracy

Superbowl:
I have watched it from time to time, each time hoping that this time will be different, that I wont be bored - but I always am.

Harper:
This is typical of his leadership and government. A total innability to react to changing circumstances - and the economic downturn is about the biggest of quickly changing circumstances out there. He does great when he can stick to his plan, but is awful when someone or something throws him off. He finds it so surprising and such an affront that someon or something would dare to get in his way.

Olyimpics:
Who cares.

January and winter in general:
I like it. As long is there enough snow and it stays below -10. No snow is just depressing and warmer than -10 creates slop throughout the city.

The only sports I watch are English Premiership Footie and NE Pats games. American football is the epitome of team/squad tactic based sport whereas football (soccer) is more of an individual within a team based skill sport. Both are enjoyable on difefrent levels. As my team is not in the SB I'll be loathe to watch it, however even if it were, the mere fact that we are forced to watch un-entertaining poorly made Canadian commercials and aged un-entertaining rockers trying to look young at the half time show, my interest level is lower than low.

And yes, Olympics, who cares...

Hamas is insane:

"We thank God when we see our houses bombed and our institutions destroyed, but our people say yes to the resistance and yes to martyrdom for the sake of God," al-Hayeh said, standing in front of the damaged Palestinian parliament building. "We say proudly that Gaza has won the war, the resistance has won the war, and Hamas has won the war."

In a western society, the people of Gaza would gather up all of the Hamas doughheads, put them in sacks and drop them over the fence to let the Israelis deal with them. Problem is, that in a fundamentalist Muslim society, any attack made to a fellow of their community is interpreted as an attack on the whole. Its the way they have evolved ( I say tongue in cheek) to protect the group as a whole over the centuries.

Funny thing is, thats how the US Republicans and the more flag waving of their society feel as well. Someone in Madeupistan shoots a US citizen, and the whole nation wants to nuke them.

As Ted Menzies, the parliamentary secretary for finance, pointed out in the House yesterday, equalization payments to Quebec have risen 74% since the Conservatives came to power in 2006.

Harper should have been phasing out or down transfer payments in the last three years, or left the provinces to come up with their own formula based on pieces of pie from 100%. Instead, like so many things apparently, he thought he could do a Brian Mulrooney-like "fix" that would incidentally of course buy the CPC votes. That this does nothing good for Canada or conservative economics seemed beyond the point, laughable even.

I'm done with Harper and his band of mute clowns.

Hey! Lay off the mute clowns.

"...in a fundamentalist Muslim society..."

It is not a fundamentalist Muslim society, it is a ghetto run by the goon squad. Few are without a measure of fault for creating the situation but this isn't Yemen, these are among the most westernized of Islamic populations subject to a gang of thugs who use them as instruments and examples for their ends.

The gang of thugs and their supporters are, if only on the surface, promoters of a Muslim Fundamentalist society. The people in Gaza elected them. Ipso facto etcetera.

No, that does not make it a Muslim Fundamentalist society any more than Germany is a totalitarian fascist society because it was led and even infused with by totalitarian fascist thugs. It may create that E-Z thought like thing that gets one through the day to pick up and apply the broad brush but it does not make it correct.

From wikipedia:

"The Hamas charter (or covenant) calls for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine, in place of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.[71] The charter states this view as an Islamic religious prophesy arising from Hadith, the oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The 1988 Charter also states that "renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith. ."

IMHO, any state or claim for legitimacy of a state being established based on religion is a form of religious fundamentalism. The above to me, is pretty plain as day that they are a fundamentalist Muslim organization.

And I was under the assumption that while Germany was under control of said military supported dictatorship, the world pretty much was under the opinion that they WER a totalitarian fascist society. Doesn't mean Hans the butcher was necessarily a supporter of such, but he had to live under their rules.

Please think: "eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine" means future. Your HO is pretty H. There is a huge difference between the political ideology of a ruling gang of thugs and the nature of the society over which it imposes its thuggery.

Sorry Alan, but I believe you are dead wrong on this one.

Germany was a totalitarian society. Single-party, expansionist, committed to the extermination of all opponents and undesirables. German people not on board with it? They liked it just fine because it came along with restriction of rights for non-ethnic-Germans, pension increases, free public education, and so on. Lots of bread and circuses with the camps and horror carefully hideen from view.

The Allies conducted extensive polling after the surrender and guess what they found? A majority of Germans thought Nazi principles were sound, just poorly applied. In 1946, a third of Germans (in the US zone) thought Jews should not have the same rights as so-called Aryans. In 1952, another poll of West Germans found a higher percentage of respondents (37%) that said Germany should have no Jews on its territory. And in that same year, a quarter of Germans still had a favourable opinion of Hitler.

Sure there was some internal resistance, but it's not like Germans heaved a great sigh of relief and said "thank goodness he's gone." They had been fed eighteen years of BS and had to be thoroughly deprogrammed. And that deprogramming was incomplete due to Cold War tensions forcing the West to put Germany back on its feet before they'd finished the job.

Go read Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt. All levels of German society, particularly the educated middle class, were heavily invested in the Nazi Party. The bulk of Germany's doctors, lawyers and civil servants were Party members, crafting and policing the day-to-day operations of the regime. That is why de-Nazification took more than a decade. Practically all professional classes and skilled labourers were Nazis, and there had to be Allied supervision involved because we rightly feared they would do something stupid after all that indoctrination.

"This one" was my analogy but you make a point. I think, however, you will agree there is, which is my point, a vast difference between traditional societal values and political ones. Which would not deny any of what you quite rightly point out but would also accept the difference between Germany and Japan perhaps. Is there is a difference between deNazification and, say, not undoing Shinto religion? Maybe I am wrong on the analogy but my point is that the gang of thugs in Gaza do not make for society's culture. But sure people can be indoctrinated. The Yankees, after all, have fans. And where I lived in Poland Kaszubians (Kashubia) were deemed to be inherently less capable.

All of which begs the question about the western liberal tradition.

I'd b willing to accept at, least partly, your analogy Alan, were it not for the fact that a good portion of the people of Gaza elected Hammas.

I am sure that a lot of people in Europe think that Canada is a country of right wing conservatives, even after it is pointed out that only X percent of canadians voted and only a percentage of them voted Conservative.

And Chris makes good points about Germany. The ruling party wasn't 99% about antiSemitism. A good portion of their policies were about other things, in some cases, the pro-healthy lifestyles, anti-smoking, anti-asbestos etc etc, bits were very modern by todays standards. A person who was not of the subjugated groups in Germany during the 30s and 40s was in many ways happier than under the previous rule.

Well, let's just leave it that you can't get the point. There is a vast difference between a political platform and a culture but you don't understand that.

I agree that there is a difference between traditional societal values and political ones, Alan But after the political values have been in the fore (or just part of the governing platform) long enough, they start to accrete into societal values.

Like (ahem) Tommy Douglas' famous socialised medicine. =) Or so-called peacekeeping, which is really just old-school 18th century gunboat diplomacy dressed up in a fancy and misleading title. The Canada of 1867 would cast a jaundiced eye at our modern policies. But they have been government policy long enough in our time to become something of societal values, too.

Jew-hatred may not be part of the Palestinian people's natural traditional values, but honestly, that is a hard sell. It certainly features very prominently in the animating philosophies of Fatah and Hamas, the only political parties they see fit to elect on a regular basis. In order for it to cease being a traditional social value, they would have to have a few decades under a government with other values. And even then it is built right into the example of Mohammed.

So, short version -- yes I agree there is a difference, in principle. But there's no firewall between the two, and political and social values move easily between the two spheres. I think Sean and I agree that in this case, animosity towards Jewry has graduated on to being a social, and not merely political, value.

I agree but for your last sentence and I think this is where too many fail so don't take it personally. I think you do not need to discuss Palestinian people's natural traditional values to find bigotry. In my travels, I have been amazed who hates who when you scratch the surface. Did you know that the Dutch think that Belgians are dirty people? And the list, unfortunately, of who has animosity towards Jewish people is long.

But that is very different from taking it to the point that one sacrifices one's own people for a failed attempt at the cause of turning your hate into a tenent of a fundamentalist Muslim society. The Palestinians in Gaza are hostages to Hamas, to history and their own failed society that cannot stand up to thuggish leadership. The IRA used knee capping to enforce compliance and we don't consider that an Irish cultural trait. Do you consider the Iraqis naturally Ba'athist? They were far longer under that cruel regime.

They are hostage to Hamas? They elected Hamas. And in a few years, they will have an opportunity to elect another party. I grant that Hamas are habitual and casual employers of violence, so it's not without risk, but somehow they managed to dump the equally violent Fatah without a generation of Palestinians going kneecap-less. What it is that prevents them from dumping Hamas next time around?

Are the Iraqis naturally Baathist? I don't know how to answer that. Historical Baathism has always been about Pan-Arab unity and anti-colonialism, whereas Saddam's regime was all about particular nepotism of the hometown tribe.

I think Iraqis have had a long period of living under tyranny without any experience of living in a modern, secular, democratic state; they do not even have a Weimar-style interregnum to provide a counterpoint within living memory. They have needed and will continue to require our guidance in constructing and maintaining a modern, secular, pluralist democracy. There will probably always be some hardcore true-believers, but in the main, a decade or two of Western assistance should leave them with some idea of what is possible when the religious and tribal take up their proper place in the private realm, and take a back seat in the public sphere.

Where the intersection is between historical Baathism and Iraqi cultural norms, I don't really know. But it's not hard to see how Saddam's version, focusing on traditional Arab tribalism, is still at work in many hearts and minds today.

You think that people voted for the thuggery being turned on themselves? What stops them from dumping the thugs? Thugs!

Saddam was focusing on traditional Arab tribalism as much as Hitler was using German themes in creating Nazism. It is co-opting and twisting the real to make the evil work. It's in the Bible. False prophets. Hamas is no different. 1760-70s anti-Whig British governance was somewhat like this, too. Star chamber over bill of rights and magna carta. The populace is always subject to these sorts of things when the tyrant gets a foothold.

Thuggery didn't stop Fatah from rolling over when they got the boot. Maybe Hamas has more guts—I kind of doubt it. The second these guys let the mask slip for Carter and the Davos set, the money stops rolling in. Only a stupid thug stops the robbery when the cash is still rolling in and there's no chance of the cops showing up. Halting elections permanently will bring the whole grostesque masquerade to a halt. Fatah put them off several times, but once the money dried up, they rolled.

I have no doubt Hamas will do exactly the same thing.

The real question is, why are we paying for the charade?

Did Fatah push Islamic adherents off buildings? I don't think they are the same as Hamas (though I want to live with neither down the street) and, going back to the original point, none of it is indicative of "a fundamentalist Muslim society," just thugs practicing terror on their own as well as their neighbours. Sure cutting off money might be a way out but there is more at play.

Alan, really. I see no qualitative difference between Fatah and Hamas. Just because the rest of the western world chooses to turn a blind eye to Fatah's crimes doesn't mean they don't exist.

Fatah has been around since 1959, they have had plenty of time to amass an appalling record. Like the IRA and Sinn Fein, Fatah has been smart enough to try to firewall its "wet" work under ostensibly independent arms, like Black September and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. You want to find Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, Google those groups and see what they've been up to. Fatah doesn't have clean hands nor any greater compunctions about blue-on-blue violence.

At any rate, in the case of Palestine, you are describing a notional difference, not an operative one. In most modern societies, political values are distinct from social values. In the case of Palestine, I don't think that can be said to be true. I know Palestinians in Canada who are some of the nicest and most politically relaxed people going, but that is precisely because they have abandoned the old tribal arguments and gotten on board with our democracy, whisky and sexy. The ones who don't want to be caught up in the insanity flee. Ask your elderly German or Polish neighbours for confirmation.

Well, we think you have to take our lead from Israel and not our own opinions. One was seen as a potential partner they could work with and move forward and the other is a mad gang of thugs. Again, values skew when you are being attacked by those who you yourself elected. Nothing to do with old tribal arguments so much as staying alive. But I knew some Druze fighters back in the 80s who moved to Nova Scotia so I do appreciate where you are going. One decided to get to the Maritimes after playing soccer with a human head.

My last elderly German and Polish neighbours were in Pomerania in 1991. We actually had a neighbour who stuck around after WWII. Nice old gal I could talk in my bad Dutch with.

Clearly a two-dimensional fundamentalist Muslim society.