Hi, @AnneMarieOwens.
Just thought I’d let you know why one of your customers is cancelling his subscription to the @TorontoStar today.
Short version: being called idiotic by your reporter, Althia Raj, for a mildly critical tweet this morning.
Longer version in the following 🧵…
It starts with my tweet about current defensiveness amongst @cdnmedia in general (not directed to Ms Raj personally at all):
Right after posting that, up pops Ms Raj’s (unrelated), rather condescending tweet effectively setting out an ultimatum for the terms on which she’ll stay on Twitter:
QThat was so à propos my own comment, I followed up with this:
To which Ms Raj delivers this highly professional reply:
And our conversation ends thus, just before she blocks me:
Astonishing, really, the contempt in which one of your journalists holds your readers. And she’s not alone amongst your #cdnmedia colleagues. Others, in fairness, know that strenuous criticism comes with the job (not excusing vile abuse) - eg @acoyne, @JohnIbbitson, @RobynUrback
and many others.
Frankly, your Ms Raj needs to grow up a bit.
Meanwhile, my final thought on this: #LetsAllCancelTheTorontoStar
Have a great day.
PS: just called the @TorontoStar to cancel, and they want $106 to allow me to do so.
So, they call their customer an idiot, and then want to charge him big bucks to get rid of them 🤷🏼🤔🧐🙄😒🤷🏼 #LetsAllCancelTheTorontoStar
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Layman’s thoughts on all the handwringing over Canada’s GDP per capita.
It’s just a number. A ratio. The denominator is population. Increase population fast via high levels of immigration and the denominator will grow. New arrivals will inevitably not be as productive in … 1/5
their early years of settlement, so GDP growth (the numerator) may well lag growth of the denominator. So the ratio’s growth slows or might even fall. But that doesn’t mean people who’ve been here for their whole lives necessarily have lower standards of living (subject to … 2/5
wage suppression in some sectors). They don’t eat the ratio. It’s just a number.
Sure, Canada’s GDP per capita is lower than some of our competitors’ like the USA. But it’s also lower than some advanced, high tax countries (that piffleswipe @PierrePoilievre would… 3/5
So, piffleswipe @PierrePoilievre, proponent of lean, mean government, has a shadow cabinet with, um, 78 members.
Let’s take a look at some of the leading, uh, lights. …
1/12 conservative.ca/team/shadow-ca…
Melissa Lantsman, Deputy PM in Waiting, would certainly qualify for the mean gene. Posted English empty grocery shelves photo as Canadian. Former Walmart lobbyist. Former advisor to Stephen Harper and Doug Ford. Conservative since adolescence. Nice hair though. …
2/12
Andrew Scheer, Government House Leader (or something) in Waiting. Failed candidate for Prime Minister. Secret American who broke promise to become 100% Canadian. Famous for campaigning behind a hedge, misappropriating party funds, inciting #KuKluxKonvoy hooligans. …
3/12
🧵To summarize, piffleswipe @PierrePoilievre would:
▪️End $10/day childcare
▪️End pharmacare
▪️End denticare
▪️Cut child benefits and bring back child poverty
▪️Restore OAS to age 67 where he and Harper put it
▪️Fire Governor of Bank of Canada
▪️Encourage cupboards full of …
assault-style style weapons in every Canadian parent’s bedroom
▪️Impose Charter-banned cruel and unusual punishment in Canadian prisons via the notwithstanding clause
▪️Deny accused persons Charter-protected reasonable access to bail via the notwithstanding clause
▪️Chip away …
at womens’ Charter-protected reproductive freedoms via the notwithstanding clause
▪️Shovel $billions to Conservative-dominated tinpot provinces at their behest, no strings attached.
▪️Withdraw Canada from the United Nations
▪️Give up on 🇺🇦Ukraine
▪️Give up on climate change
▪️And
If a group of police officers charge someone with murdering one of their colleagues, get together afterwards to collude in writing up their notes of the incident in question, and at the bail hearing a Superior Court judge tells the Crown their case is weak, …1/4
and then at trial the police officers all testify under oath that the killing happened in a way consistent with both their collusive notes and with an intention to kill, and then the Crown itself calls an expert witness who testifies that it couldn’t have happened that way, 2/4
and the Crown nonetheless insists on pursuing the case through to verdict, which turns out to be an acquittal on all counts, after which the trial judge very unusually apologizes to the accused person for what he’s been put through, d’ya think the State, without having to be 3/4
🧵Here we go again, another anti-#MAID activist in academe spouting the usual intellectually dishonest misread of Canada’s assisted dying laws, trying to convince the lay public there’s something grievously wrong.
There isn’t.
Here, the @globeandmail’s learned contributor
1/13
employs the usual semantic trick of claiming the law is self-contradictory by suggesting ‘intolerable suffering’ is the key legislated criterion for MAID. By definition, the sophistry goes, suffering can’t ever be “intolerable” because the consenting adult is …
2/13
in fact tolerating it.🤔
The nonsense goes on from to conjure up a spectre of MAID providers making purely subjective judgments about the “intolerability” (already a contradiction in terms) of a patients’ suffering: “completely subjective clinical and legal judgments.”
3/13
🧵 A seldom mentioned fact about @jordanbpeterson is that before he became a “public intellectual”, he tried to run a different gig …
alongside his then-professorial duties at the University of Toronto, presenting as an “expert” for litigants in various court cases.
Under forensic examination, he did not fare well. Judges are notoriously polite in their choice of language when commenting on experts, but …
they were scathing about this good doctor.
In one case, Peterson’s report was characterized as being “as close to junk science as I have ever been asked to consider”. …
… at para. 19.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc