Top Tier: 5-1
“He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, thinks he’s gaming society, doesn’t pay his taxes. He’s an embarrassment to this country.”
Anyone who has passed through an education in the past decade will have encountered the term ‘toxic masculinity’. It is one of the many charming phrases that our age has come up with to pathologise ordinary people. Brewing for some decades, the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ was brought into the mainstream in the last ten years by fourth-wave feminists intent on portraying half of our species as ‘problematic’, to use another of the delightful watchwords of our era.
On May 28, Sky News Australia posted a video titled “New York bearing signs of ‘societal decay.'” The video shows a man (who seems as if he is on drugs) entering a train car and sitting next to a young woman. He then touches her without consent, grabs her, drags her around a bit, and generally is an extremely unpleasant nuisance. He eventually leaves her alone and proceeds to try to kick out one of the windows.
I have the strangest feeling that my body has been stolen from me. When I started my transition, I was not aware of any options besides medical treatment to modify my body. Years later, I still ask myself why no one told me that I could have left my body the way it was; why no one ever explained that sexuality in that body was possible. There was no violence involved, no threats were made.
But I feel that I was robbed of the possibility to experience my body any other way. I don’t believe this is a universal truth for all trans people. It’s simply something that I feel, something that pains me.
Why can’t we get rid of ‘non-crime hate incidents’?
Britain’s thoughtpolice are a law unto themselves. Nothing captures this more clearly than the continued existence of the ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI) – a policing tool that refuses to die. At the weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the Home Office is drawing up new plans to increase the use of NCHIs, as part of its new hate-crime strategy. There are fears this could effectively criminalise comedians like Ricky Gervais for joking about trans issues.
NCHIs are a sinister form of thoughtpolicing. They can be recorded by the police whenever someone is accused of showing ‘hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity’. There does not need to be any evidence of hate – just as with hate crimes more broadly, the only requirement is that the victim or anyone else perceives the motive of the non-crime incident to have been hateful. In other words, literally anything can be logged as a hate incident.
Whatever happened to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s famous promise of “deliverology” to Canadians when he was elected in 2015?
Back then, Trudeau told us three of his priorities were delivering action on climate change, reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous people and running an open government.
His record tells us a different story.
The City of Toronto overspent by $13.2 million over two years on emergency hotel shelters, according to a fiscal audit by the city’s auditor general.
Money intended for housing support instead went to pay a host of hotel fees, the auditor general says, including one earmarked for tourism. That’s despite the fact the contracts preclude such fees.
In two years, $5.4 million was spent on hotel room vacancy fees, $5.3 million was spent on facility surcharges on meal invoices, and $2.4 million came out of a voluntary three per cent tax that the Greater Toronto Hotel Association uses to promote tourism.
Canadian military veterans play an outsized role in anti-government movements, a shift exacerbated by pandemic restrictions, according to a report by an extremist monitoring organization that tracks online activity.
The influence of former military status within anti-government movements is so strong that some adherents falsely claim to be veterans to bolster their status as leaders, the report says.
The Ford PCs have 38.8 per cent support among decided voters, according to a new poll conducted between Sunday and Tuesday for CP24 and CTV News by Nanos Research.
Meanwhile, the Liberals have 26.3 per cent support and the NDP have 24.7 per cent support.
OTTAWA—The public inquiry into the federal government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act is asking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to provide information currently kept secret under cabinet confidence principles, stressing the need for transparency and openness as it studies why the controversial decision was made to deal with the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests this year.
In documents published Wednesday, the Public Order Emergency Commission conducting the inquiry said the starting point of its study is to look at why the Liberal government invoked the act for the first time since it became law in 1988.
“It is the government that must explain its decision to do so,” the documents say. “In light of this, the commission has asked the government to disclose … the information, including advice and information that may be protected by cabinet confidence or any applicable privilege.”
This person uses the emoji “🦷” as a pronoun because her gender relates to teeth. pic.twitter.com/RA9TnDyi3p
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 1, 2022
A child smearing her friend’s blood on herself in an attempt to play dead. Agonised parents waiting to learn if their children had survived. The death of teacher Irma Garcia’s husband immediately after she was shot and killed, leaving their four children orphaned. It has been more than a week since Salvador Ramos stormed Robb Elementary School in Uvalde armed with a semiautomatic rifle, but the true nature of the tragedy — and the horror — is still coming into focus.
As soon as President Biden took office, his administration announced a “whole-of-government” approach to climate change that would “ensure that every federal infrastructure investment reduces climate pollution and that steps are taken to accelerate clean energy and transmission projects under federal siting and permitting processes in an environmentally sustainable manner.” Climate hawks appear to have interpreted this language as a promise to elevate carbon-emissions reductions over all other government priorities.
California’s first-in-the-nation taskforce on reparations for African Americans will release a report on Wednesday documenting in detail the harms perpetrated by the state and recommending steps to address those wrongs, including expanded voter registration, making it easier to hold violent police accountable and improving Black neighborhoods.
It also recommends the creation of a special office that would, in part, help African Americans descended from free or enslaved Black people in the country at the end of the 19th century document their eligibility for financial restitution.
Iran’s mullahs are continuing to meddle in the internal affairs of Arab countries, especially Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
This is happening while the US administration and other Western powers continue to delude themselves into thinking that appeasing Iran’s rulers and signing a new nuclear deal with them will bring security and stability to the Middle East and the rest of the world.
The goal of Iran’s mullahs is to spread their control to as many countries as possible by using their terrorist proxies, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi militia in Yemen.
