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Just Right 001—Left and Right: An Orientation

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The views expressed in this program are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Bob Metz:
Well, I never thought I’d be sitting here again at this seat. Welcome! It’s Bob Metz on what I hope to be the first of many, perhaps, shows of the first edition of what I want to call Just Right. After almost 10 years of being on a Wednesday program called Left, Right, and Center, as you all know, those of you who are regular listeners to the Jim Chapman show here on CHRW, Jim retired from radio last week, and I thought I was going to be retiring right along with him. But I have been offered a rare and quite an unexpected opportunity to continue voicing what I think is a point of view that is exceedingly rare anywhere in politics and humanities, and that’s basically what I call my philosophy of freedom.

So we’re in test phase. Testing, testing. I don’t know whether the format of the show will be what it is today. I certainly have some interesting ideas of what I’d like to do with the show. I want to make it clear, no, it’s not right wing, it’s just right, because for me the philosophy of freedom is just right, and I’m hoping during this period of time to do some frank talk on the issues of our day, expanding on the base of subjects that basically we limited ourselves to in Left, Right, and Center.

What I’d like to do in terms of Just Right is talk about news, views, commentary, and opinion, and entertainment as well, which I think is a very important aspect of basically how philosophy and ideas get out into society. It’s the TV shows we watch, it’s what we see. TV really, there is not much talk about what happens on TV. You get movie reviews a lot, but I’d like to do a little bit more with respect to television and stuff.

I won’t get a chance to do too much of that today, but if you haven’t seen the show Drive, which just started last week, I got a prediction to make about that show. I think it’s going to be the next Lost, the next Heroes or so, and I think it’s going to give them a good run for their money, because I don’t know how many of you know about the show. It just started, debuted last week. Interesting change in television these days. They’re giving us sort of the cerebral, not linear shows like Lost. I guarantee you the race in Drive is to the drivers what the island in Lost is to the people on that island. It’s not really what it is. And the good news is they started playing the episodes in order. That’s really good, which they did not do with Firefly, which was Nathan Fillion’s previous show, which was just a brilliant show. But unfortunately, the people who aired it and marketed it played them all in wrong order. They played the second episode first. They played the first episode twelfth, and then they played a few other episodes out of order, and they wondered why the fans weren’t tuning in. But anyways, those of you who’ve ever seen Firefly, by the way, there’s a show you want to see too. It’s actually a science fiction, but I would call it a science fiction for people who might not even like science fiction. By that, I mean, if I was to describe the show in any way, I’d call it an outer space western. There are no aliens, no beaming, none of that stuff you see on Star Trek. It’s just pretty well down to earth. Downright gunslinging, six shooters, horses, the odd laser beam, but nothing more technological than what you get today. But what a brilliant concept. Probably talk about that sometime in the future.

But talking about TV shows and the reviews and how they affect this, and what they’re really all about is almost a mirror of society in terms of politics and religion and all those fundamental personal issues that are so much of a part of everything. Yes, I’m going to have a right bias on this show. I want to make it clear that bias is not prejudice. It’s not doctrinaire. It’s not necessarily ideologue. It’s just basically a point of view. I have been everywhere on the political spectrum, so to speak. And with that, I think I want to make it clear what exactly it is that I do mean by left and right, and why I say that I don’t really think I’m right wing, but I don’t mind the label right without the wing on it.

To me, left and right wing are basically the same thing, and I have to give you a couple of examples on that. I remember back in ’97 when Jim Chapman first called me, and he said, Bob, come on in. We’re going to do a show. We’re going to call it Left, Right, and Center. You, me, and Jeff Schlemmer will pop in and do the show. And I honestly thought when I was going in that I was going to be the guy in the center. And I was surprised that when I arrived, I was the guy on the right, because I kind of always saw myself in the center. I didn’t see myself as a right winger, that’s for sure, because my opinions certainly don’t coincide with the right wing, as most people understand it.

You know, my political and philosophical awareness didn’t even begin until I was well into my late 20s. I voted for all the major parties at one time. Yes, even NDP, believe it or not. And by the time I got seriously involved in political activity, I had all but ceased voting. I wasn’t even voting anymore. But got involved quite inadvertently. That’s a story I’ll tell sometime in the future.

But to give you an idea of why I don’t see myself as left or right, a couple of typical examples. Issue of abortion, for example. I’m in favor of freedom of choice in abortion, believe it or not, but that’s not considered a right wing basic kind of view. The right wing wants to basically ban abortion. The left wing, on the other hand, isn’t satisfied with freedom of choice in abortion. They want free abortions. So they want all the people who don’t even agree with abortion to pay for it, and thus they create a conflict that will never go away. Whereas me, who thinks he’s sitting in the center, is saying, I won’t ban and I won’t subsidize, but nobody’s happy with that. And that’s why you get this constant battle. To me, the answer is always freedom.

Same with Sunday shopping. That was an issue, believe it or not, Ontario’s only had Sunday shopping for a little over a decade, thanks to me, by the way, and a group of people that together with Freedom Party, Paul Magder, the Toronto Furrier, Marc Emory went to jail for it. But it’s really funny, I never ever got so much hate mail and just bad feelings directed towards me. Guess from where? From the right wing. On the right wing on Sunday shopping, I remember I did a show in Brantford, and boy, I never got more abusive people calling in than I ever saw in my life. Just telling me about how we need our religious day of rest, even businesses called in saying, oh no, if my neighbor opens, I got to open. Just saw an article in the paper the other day talking about how business now covets the Sunday shopping day. And I’m thinking, boy, how funny it is. And on the left side, of course, Labour always wants Labour protections. Oh, you’re going to work on the Sunday and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I say treat Sunday as far as the law is concerned, like every other day of the week. If you have something else to do on a Sunday, that’s the way it is. If you’re religious, then that’s your conviction. You can’t be putting it on to other people.

Pornography, the same kind of thing. I’m talking a little more about that today. The left wing, they want to ban it for feminist reasons. The right wing, they want to ban it for religious reasons. And I say freedom of speech. I just don’t share that view of pornography. I’ll get into that a lot deeper because of the issue that’s arisen here on campus. But, you know, from my point of view, all of Canada’s and Ontario’s officially registered parties are on the left. Certainly left and right wings are both left in terms of how I look at it. Liberal, Conservative, PC, NDP, Green, all of them. They are left wing parties in a very real sense, in the sense, not left wing, sorry, I’m already making the same mistake, but left. And I’m going to explain what I mean by that.

You’ve heard that saying, maybe, I don’t know where it came from, but if you’re not a lefty when you’re young, you haven’t got a heart, and if you’re still a lefty in your 40s, you haven’t got a mind. But there’s some truth to that. And I certainly wasn’t aware of what I was saying when I was a so-called lefty. So I want to put, you know, left and right have actual ideological absolute perspectives that do not change. I’ve been in this business for over 20 years now. And if I was going to break them down, here’s how I would do it. I’m going to do it once by comparison, and then once again by list, and then I’ll show you why I’m on the one side of the issue.

If you go back far enough in history, left and right, you can start with Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right. Plato, some of you are going to really object to these terms, but you’ve got to consider them in context. On the left, you have unreality, basically, mind over matter. On the right, you have reality, matter over mind. In other words, Aristotle and Plato, you still always argue about Plato would say, well, reality’s not really what’s here. It’s out there in the ether. There’s a supernatural dimension, and from that came all kinds of religious beliefs and everything. Whereas Aristotle was saying, it doesn’t matter what your mind thinks, reality doesn’t change whether you’re here or not. The earth is still going to be here. The laws of physics still operate the same. It has nothing to do with your mind, and that’s what we mean by matter over mind.

The left is basically whim. The right is reason. Not left and right wing, remember now. The left is involuntary. The right is voluntary. The left is no or limited choice. The right is freedom of choice. The left is social justice. The right is individual justice. The left is anti-science or into junk science. The right is into science. The left is into government-controlled economies, whereas the right is into economic freedom. The left is into force to implement all the above of the things that are on the left, and the right is into persuasion and consent and freedom of speech and association. The left is into statism, which means the state is superior to the individual. The right is into freedom. The left is into group rights, inequality as in egalitarianism, no right to individual self-defense. The right is into individual rights, equality under the law, the right to self-defense. The left is quite bluntly, and I’m going to demonstrate that today, is very intolerant, whereas the right is quite respectful and tolerant.

So that’s basically, when I say I’m right, here’s what I basically mean, and here’s what I mean by left. Left is unreality. It’s whim. It means involuntary. No choice. It’s blaming others for the action. Social justice means blaming the environment instead of the person who actually did something. It’s anti-science. It’s government-controlled. It’s force. It’s statism. Group rights and intolerance. That’s what the left is, and whether it’s a conservative on the left or a liberal on the left, it doesn’t matter. They all share these ideas. You look at the major parties, and every one of those words applies. On the right, reality, reason, volunteerism, freedom of choice, individual justice, science, economic freedom, personal freedom, individual rights, respect and tolerance.

So that’s what I mean when I say that I’m right, and that’s why I want to make this show about just being right. And just because it may be a law too, doesn’t mean it’s right.

Now, before we come back from the break, from the commercials coming up, I’m going to get into something a little controversial. It affects the campus here. It affects basically all of us, in fact, and it has to do with that Gazette spoof that just doesn’t want to go away. So when we return, we’ll talk about our April Fool’s joke that was on everyone.

Yeah, we’re back, and you’re listening to Bob Metz on Just Right, the first broadcast of Just Right. It is Thursday, April the 19th, a beautiful sunny day in London. Probably the spring is now coming on, which is probably a good backdrop to the next subject I have to get into, because folks, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been listening to the debate I saw in the article in the London Free Press about the Gazette Chief, quote, apologizes for spoof. Now, you know, a spoof, folks. It’s a spoof. It’s supposed to laugh at it. It’s supposed to be funny. I’m reading this article here in the London Free Press, and I want to get back into this in a very much deeper way, because there’s some arguments behind us that just spill onto a number of issues that are just permeating our society, particularly when it comes to violence from everything unhindered, violence against women.

But I’m going to start off with this article in the London Free Press. Looks like the battle is already lost from the way this article has the battle for free speech I’m referring to here. I notice that… oh, by the way, I do have to say that I have not actually seen this spoof myself, and everything I’m going to say about it is less about the spoof itself than about people’s reaction to it. I’m sure I’m going to get to see this sometime, and I have a feeling it’s probably going to be a little soft, and maybe not as analytical as I might be today, but nevertheless, freedom of speech is an issue.

Now, I know I’m on the university campus, and, you know, in the absolute sense, freedom of speech isn’t an issue, because, hey, this is private property, okay, this isn’t the public forum. The University of Western Ontario is private property, and he who pays the piper calls the tune. It’s as simple as that. If Grant, the producer here, or DJ Soudzolten wants to haul me out of here right now for expressing what is most definitely a minority opinion, he has every right to do so. I’m here at his invitation, and I’ve got no more authority than what they allow me to do here.

But, okay, so let’s take that as a given, and now let’s pretend we’re in a free society, and on a university campus where we’re supposed to have a free exchange of ideas and opinions, and where just about anything goes, and let’s play it within the context of free speech. There were very many disturbing things discussed about this spoof. Now, we flat out apologize, said, I guess, Fab Dolan on behalf of the Gazette, and apparently as a result of this, the Gazette will operate with a Code of Ethics by September 1, with editors receiving sensitivity training, a complaints procedure will be established, and a process for removing editors by student plebiscite will be implemented. Wow! You know, in the context of a free society, we call that fascism, and that’s what it is. I can just imagine, you know, 90% of the people don’t agree with you, so you can’t say what you want to say.

And of course there were offensive things in this, at least as I see them described. I’m not even sure if it was a political cartoon, or if it was a picture, or if it was a written article, because in the Free Press article, they kind of screwed around that issue. They say the article contained content about London police chief Murray Faulkner raping a student with a night stick. Now, that sounds pretty offensive and is pretty ridiculous, but when I first saw that, the first thing that it brought to mind was Faulkner’s comments in the London Free Press, and I go back to October 7, 2006, Ian Gillespie’s article, where he did an article regarding Murray Faulkner’s comments on how, quote, our cultural concept of manliness has become twisted into a vision of power, control, and dominance, and this distortion is contributing to violence. You know, and basically just jumped on the old violence against women bandwagon, which is not even an issue. I was talking on the show earlier how even violence is a false issue. That’s not an issue at all.

I noticed in the paper it also said some speakers at an event last Friday night where they were taking the editors to task, I guess, criticized the student newspaper for a recent history of sexist, racist, and homophobic articles, citing examples of such stories. Well, it strikes me that maybe that’s what they’re really after and not the spoof, because, and of course what they want is concrete policies to put an end to sexism, which means the force of law. We’re going to resort to the violent force of law to fight violence and stuff like this.

But here’s a funny thing. The mayor, you know, she writes a letter and she says that the hateful content of this article, which blatantly trivializes violence, condones rape, and abusive women, and defames the good name of London’s police chief. Yeah, okay, it’s in bad taste. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m going to take your word on it. It is. But you know, that’s what a spoof is. A spoof is something that trivializes what it spoofs. If you’re going to spoof a James Bond movie, you’re going to trivialize a James Bond movie. You’re going to make everything they do on that movie seem ridiculous, seem stupid, seem silly. It’s called humor. And humor affects different people in totally different ways. But, you know, basically what’s at stake here is the thou shalt not criticize my cause kind of a mentality, and that’s really what’s happening here.

But anyways, I’m very concerned about the intellectual environment on campus, on any campus, and this campus is no exception. Tuned into this very, you know, this time slot on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week, just to see what the kids were saying and what was happening. I heard Mario Sercelli and Ian Morrison talking about the spoof edition on Monday, and, you know, I’m talking about the Gazette and the Take Back the Night thing, which supposedly quote, and this is their word, they said it pissed off a lot of people who were not exactly identified. And Mario Sercelli remarked that with power comes responsibility. This is going to get us into trouble. People will react. Yeah, good heavens, they might write a letter to the editor or something.

But, you know, this whole thing of offending people is becoming a disease in our country. You remember Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me? Well, there’s a new philosophy that says, yeah, names will hurt me when that wasn’t even what the original rhyme meant. What the original rhyme meant was sticks and stones will break my bones, but names cannot break my bones. It’s a physical thing. It’s about physical force. If you don’t like where you are, you remove yourself from that environment. That’s why we have, you know, private property and things like that.

Then again, on Tuesday April’s show, there was a panel discussion, which I found very disturbing. Some of the, and these are innocent people making innocent comments. I remember I used to be in this category, but it’s interesting. Someone was saying, you know, they want to fire the editor of the Gazette. And then saying it’s not censorship. It’s about bad management. It’s about bad business. Well, I got news for you. It is censorship. If it was about bad business or management, you wouldn’t have waited for an event like this to occur. And it’s the kind of thing that, you know, is an ongoing thing. It has nothing to do with the content per se.

Another panelist referred to some female editor who had views that quote, 90% of the student body rejected. And she said, it’s not satire to pick on minorities or minority institutions. Well, that’s really interesting because people pick on me all the time and they pick on freedom and they pick on a lot of minorities and a lot of individuals. But here was one that really bothered me. Somebody, one of the participants, I don’t know who it was, said, we live in a rape culture where rape is acceptable for control. Well, what can I say to that?

Got an article here. December 11th, 2006, National Post, top of the page. Islamists rally against rule that reduces burden of proof on rape victims. Quote, Thousands of Islamist protesters demonstrated in southern Pakistan yesterday against a new law that reduces the burden of proof on rape victims by allowing them to seek justice without the need for four male witnesses. Some 10,000 supporters of Islamist parties, most of them bearded, chanted slogans of down with women protection law. And this was reported by Reuters on the National Post again, December 11th. Now I can guarantee you that that country doesn’t have freedom of speech and doesn’t allow pornography and things like that. And makes you wonder which societies are these people talking about?

You know, violence against women is not a new phenomenon. It’s been here on the planet Earth for centuries, for millennia. In Canada. Well, first of all, men and women, slavery wasn’t even abolished in Canada or Britain until August 23rd, 1833. Women were not even considered persons in Canada until October 18, 1929. So, you know, women have come a long way. And I believe women’s rights, I believe in freedom of choice and abortion and all those things, but I don’t believe in censoring people because they have a different point of view. And quite often what we see here is a confusion of sexism with sexuality, and that too is another tragedy.

Then there was yesterday’s show. It was April 18th. Yesterday, Megan Walker was on. Megan Walker and I go back a long way. We’ve debated over at CJBK when she was a host with husband Morris D’Alacosta for quite a while. I’ve been in public forums debating her, and basically, boy, do we come from the opposite side of the spectrum. But it’s interesting what she had to say yesterday. When somebody comes out and says, you know, governments on all levels are not giving this issue the priority that it deserves, and that the most dangerous place for a woman to be is in her own home, that’s a pretty outrageous statement to make. I mean, what is the danger in the home? Well, of course, it’s that there’s a man there, and they’re always denying that the feminist movement is anti-male, is anti-this, is anti-that. Well, I want to see if that’s really true. Let’s take an investigation of what really it is about.

But let’s go through some of the things that Megan was talking about yesterday. Basically, of course, she’s after money. She wants money. She wants money to provide her service. And I’m not going to speak to the service. She’s, you know, I totally accept the argument that she made that, yes, violence, spousal violence is a little different from what would you call an odd act of violence that’s just in the public, for example, because if somebody assaults you on the street, you’re not going to go home to that person that night, or you don’t share a property with them or anything, and that’s understandable. And I think mechanisms like that should be in place. But to attach to that tragedy, this whole agenda of what is going on, what they have loosely defined as feminism is a little disturbing because I’ll explain what I mean by that by carrying on.

Now this is Megan’s comment on the spoof article here at Western yesterday. She says, I’ve really been following what’s been going on at the University with the Gazette spoof article and was disappointed and wrote a letter to the editor and attended a meeting Friday, she said. And there she says she heard two basic views, basically. Then she said that one of the views was that the students are just students and they make mistakes and we should give them some slack. And Megan’s response was that she expects so much more from students, particularly I expect students to be consistent with the human rights code and not do anything that would incite hatred or misogyny, which I believe that article did. That’s Megan speaking.

So it’s interesting that she expects more from students than from adults because I thought the maturity process went the other way around, but I guess in her way of thinking it goes backwards. You get more maturity when you’re young and you lose it when you get older, at least maybe that’s what she’s trying to demonstrate. But it’s interesting. She talks about what it really is to be a feminist and ending violence and abuse against women and equality for women. You don’t have to create equality for women, just create equality for everybody. And then it gets countered in, but they always exclude the other side of the equation.

Anyways, I’m going to take a break for a sec, get back to some specifics to tell you why I’m saying what I’m saying. Back in a minute.

We’re back. Carrying on with this Western spoof here, Jackie in the control room just gave me a copy of the article. It is just a written article. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll get to that and maybe give you my comments the next time I’m in on what I actually think about the article itself. But yesterday’s comment or yesterday’s discussion here on in this time slot basically was about feminism and I heard a lot of talk about people trying to define feminism, what feminism is and what it isn’t. And one of the hosts there, one of the people on the panelists said and I quote, the whole idea of identifying yourself as a feminist, it’s a word that carries just so much weight it can through the years sort of change a little bit and it’s personal. I think it’s sort of like spirituality. It’s a personal thing and is defined only by you. Your feminism is a personal thing. And I think once we carry that, decide that, then it’s easier to say that I’m a feminist instead of people thinking that it means all of these things, that you’re a man-hater, that you’re a lesbian, you know.

And then Walker responds, Megan Walker, that yes, it’s interesting that people do identify you as a feminist as being a man-hater, a lesbian or any other derogatory term or light they can place you in and that’s what we call backlash. Well, here I am, the backlash. I didn’t think I was backlash. I thought I always thought this way. I wasn’t really reacting to anything. But I didn’t know lesbian was a derogatory term either but didn’t look at that.

But anyways, I’ve got a quote for you here. And it’s a very disturbing quote and I’m going to quote it and it’s from a book called Take Back the Night. Page 148, page 149, and Take Back the Night, edited by Laura Lederer. And that was from an essay by Andrea Dworkin in an essay called Why So-Called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography, which is a strange thing to say. Another essay, same book, quote, page 85, Take Back the Night, quote, that only by overthrowing this society will the violence against women cease and I am prepared to use violence against an ideology that says that women are inferior to men and I’m prepared to fight against a government in the capitalistic economic system which strengthens such an ideology.

Well, my goodness, did you hear what I just said about left and right and all that stuff? And here she’s saying that all those values on the right will strengthen an ideology of violence against women. It’s just so absurd. And then the same author refers to the striking examples of China and Cuba where pornography and the exploitation of women as prostitutes have been virtually eliminated. Unbelievable that they can say stuff like that. And where capitalism has been overthrown by workers’ socialist revolutions. Totalitarianism to these feminists seems to be a small price to pay for fighting their sexual exploitation.

So you can see why there’s a big fight over defining feminism. How do you distance yourself from that trash, which I thought was thrown in the garbage decades ago? I didn’t think anybody thought like that anymore. Until yesterday I hear that we live in this rape culture. This is an absurdity. You know, the whole idea, oh, then another one of the, she says, another one of the, this is not Megan Walker talking, but someone else on the panel. Quote, well, Stephen Lewis is really pointing out that where, oh, where he wants all the money to go to women and women’s charities in Africa, and he’s telling the world that it’s women who are going to make the world better. And he’s so right, end quote.

And I’m thinking, what is this? Is this vaginal intelligence of some sort? Or what do you, how can somebody’s sexual organs possibly determine whether they are capable of understanding the principles on which a better society works? This is absurdity. This is the stuff that I thought we were supposed to be fighting. Not going around and, you know, women’s studies. Man, oh man, what is this all about? Tell me this is not man-hating. And tell me it’s not misogyny in reverse. Tell me it’s not inciting hatred and a disrespect for a whole half of the human race. It’s just unbelievable. And they just carry on as though they’re in their little world and the rest of the world has to go right along with them and believe everything they say.

The other thing too is, you know, they want to work, quote, and here’s a term I heard yesterday, the goal of ending violence against women. Not going to happen, folks. You can’t end violence. You can’t prevent it. Violence is a consequence of a conflict. And conflicts are natural. They happen all the time. Violence is not an issue. What is an issue is justice and justice is for everybody, not just women and men.

You know, I was stunned. You know, if I had just turned on the radio and heard Megan Walker talking yesterday when she said, quote, and so although, quote, this horrendous, horrible thing happened up here at the university, end quote, I would have thought she was talking about Virginia Tech. But no, she’s talking about a spoof on campus. And I just wonder what words would she have used to describe the horrendous and horrible thing that happened at Virginia Tech? Probably wouldn’t talk about it because, you know, it’s not like the incident in Montreal, is it? You know what I’m talking about? Oh, boy. Talk about prejudice, narrow-minded people.

Then there’s their favorite. Favorite, oh, I’ve heard this for 20 years, desensitization. We’ve got to, people are desensitized. You know, you hear Dr. Peter Jaffe in town talking about this constantly. You know, people are getting insensitive to all sorts of things. Well, I’m all for desensitization, quite frankly. I don’t know what they mean by desensitization, but personally, I think desensitization is necessary for survival, especially in extreme or emergency situations. You know, if you’re in, say, a war situation, the bombs are falling around you, you better not be sensitive to blood and guts. You better get your butt moving or you’re not going to be able to react. You know, people who are too sensitive are paralyzed into inaction, and that’s why they want to sensitize you. So that they can threaten you with this slightest thing. Oh, you hurt my feelings. Oh, I can’t say that. We’re going to have a panel. We’ll vote on it. We’ll do this. We’ll do that. And in the process, they destroy everything that they’ve earned in the last century.

You know, feminists are sensitive. Anybody is sensitive if they believe something that they can’t properly, intellectually or morally defend in a public forum. So instead of resorting to persuasion, they resort to force. And we’ll use the human rights code. We’ll use the law. We’ll use censorship. Oh, it’s not censorship. No, it’s not censorship. All these wonderful anti-violence people, I tell you.

I have to desensitize myself just to read a bloody newspaper. You know, if I allowed myself to become sensitive to all the horror and the suffering and irrationality that I have to look at daily in the newspaper, you know, I’d be a basket case. One of the things that affects me the most personally is it just drives me emotionally, drives me, it bothers me for days whenever I hear about the death of a child. It doesn’t matter whose kid it is, because we all share in that pain, don’t we? There’s been a lot of school bus accidents for some reason lately, just tragedies. And you know, I don’t know the person. I don’t know the child involved. And it sticks with you for days. You go, God, I hope that never happens to me. You know, and you can just see the pain. And if you let every one of these events in life get to you and you become too sensitive to all of them, you’re not doing yourself much good. And you’re not going to be able to act. Sensitive people don’t act. They’re the ones that sit back and take it.

So, you know, sensitivity training, I don’t know about that. Being held responsible for the feelings of others is just an outrageous and positively evil concept, I think. There are objective grounds for things that you shouldn’t say in a given forum, especially on private property where the rules are all spelled out in advance. But anything I could say at any time could upset somebody and make them feel bad. Am I supposed to be held legally responsible for someone I don’t even know? I don’t know their values. I don’t know their experience. They have a certain feeling that they relate to me. I don’t know.

You know, when people scream about you’re being insensitive, what they really mean is that they want you to pay attention to them and to their needs and to their issues. And if you aren’t responding the way they want you to, or God forbid you should actually disagree, well out come the feminist calls of appeals to the Human Rights Commission, to the criminal code to censoring to the law, and all sorts of rules and regulations that fit into their way of thinking things.

So, you know, hello, it’s a spoof, eh? Come on, folks, it’s a spoof. And even if it weren’t, even if it weren’t, I don’t think I would have any different point of view.

Now, I heard Megan Walker also on the news item on another radio station in the news earlier in the week, calling for a public apology and sensitivity training for the editors of the Gazette. You know, I’ve always called Megan Walker London’s own jihadist for feminism, and she knows all about a public apology. So let me tell you, she was forced to make one to me on CJBK Radio two summers ago and something I said offended her. And then she went on a diatribe on the radio show when I wasn’t on the air, calling me all kinds of nasty names and saying that I shouldn’t be allowed to say this, that, and the other thing. Well, the joke was on her. It turns out it wasn’t me that said those things. It was her hubby Morris Delacosta. But I was the guy that got blamed for saying it. And so she tossed a whole bunch of verbal abuse my way. I alerted the station. I said, hey, I didn’t say this. And never implied this. It was Morris. And, you know, I can see the spousal relationship there. I must have been an interesting day. But anyway, she spent 20 minutes apologizing to me on the air for the things that she called me. I won’t even go into that.

But we saw her in action again in the London-North by-election, where she accused both the Liberal candidate, Glenn Pearson, the Conservative candidate and former London Mayor, Diane Haskett, of everything from racism to sexism and just made a mockery out of the whole political process in that London-North riding. And I think that had a lot to do with Elizabeth May’s victory for the Greens. I mean, the Greens are going rah, rah, rah. And in fact, maybe they should be talking about Megan Walker and cleaning up her act and being maybe a little more respectful and polite of people who disagree with her because it works two ways. You want freedom of speech, you’ve got to give it to other people. And it’s an absolute. There’s no, oh, we’ll have some little bit of freedom of speech for some people and not for others. That’s not freedom of speech at all. It’s a switch. It’s on or off. There’s no middle position.

And, you know, so I guess the lesson of all of this in terms of at least the feminist movement and the whole speech movement is that before you go apologizing for offending someone, be certain you know who that someone is and that you aren’t just playing into the hands of some extremist agenda that just wants to silence the opposition. That’s what it’s all about. When they start yelling at you, they just want you to shut up. They’re basically saying, you can’t criticize my cause. You can’t criticize what I’m saying.

You know, one would think that after all the outrage about, you know, freedom of the press and that whole Dutch political cartoon that, you know, we’d be much quicker to spot our own local jihadists who want to just shut up any criticism of what they do or of the morality on which they act.

When I come back after the ad, going to get into another side issue on this, and I think you need to hear a little history on this too, and that’s about the issue of pornography itself, and we shall return in one moment.

Back in the mid-1980s, I think, roughly around ’85, ’86, that was about the period I started getting involved in politics, and one of the first things we were called upon to do was to address the federal government’s committee. It was called the Fraser Committee on Pornography and Prostitution, and it did a roadshow here in London and around the country, you know, taking in public opinion and stuff like this, which was very interesting. I got a headline at the time in the Free Press for pointing out the fact that as they were going around taking opinions on pornography and prostitution, the legislation that they were taking the opinions for was already being tabled in Parliament on the very day that we were making submissions, but so obviously, like every roadshow, you know, the government runs, they make up their mind first, and they send out the roadshow to get everybody to agree with them, and then they say that they did it because everybody agreed with them.

But concurrently at the same time, October ’84, there were US Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography, and ironically what came out of all these things in the long term was a tremendous liberalization of pornography laws. We were far more restrictive with pornography back then, and I think that was a great thing, a great thing for the emancipation of women in so many ways to take what was a seedy, terrible underground operation and at least let it go above ground. It’s become commonplace. You can turn on Showcase, watch a Showcase on any given Friday or Saturday night, the stuff they have on there wasn’t allowed at the downtown cinemas here 20 years ago.

What was very interesting is that the battle, of course, against pornography was constantly going on, and one of the icons of the anti-porn movement at that time was the late Linda Marchiano, otherwise known as Linda Lovelace, who became very popularized through the movie Deep Throat, which of course has become an icon of sorts too. The term has even become a political one used in matters of, well, kind of spy stuff and stuff like this.

But the big issue at the time, I know a lot of people still think this is true, that Linda Lovelace was forced to do porn and all that stuff, because that’s what the media was saying, and there was a book she put out after her movie, it was called Ordeal. But unlike everyone else who talked about it and said, oh, how terrible the porn industry is, I actually picked the book up and I read it, and it was not a story about the pornography industry as the people in the public were saying. I remember in the Toronto Sun, I know about this because of course I addressed the committee, I’m pulling my notes out, and I wrote an article back in the 80s to which I’m referring, and out of the Toronto Sun, March 20th, 1981, there was a quote from Linda Lovelace that said, when you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that that movie is still showing. There was a gun to my head the entire time, end quote.

Now that’s what she said in the Toronto Sun, and at least at that time, and of course she was being manipulated by all kinds of people who were making an issue out of it, but I actually picked up the book to find out the book Ordeal, which was the book to which everyone was referring to at the time, and I read the thing, and it told a completely different story. First of all, yeah, Linda Lovelace had an ordeal, but it wasn’t in the porn industry. It began oddly enough with her mother, and let me quote from the book here, you know, where Lovelace’s ordeal apparently began at a very early age, quote, when I was four years old, my mother started beating me. First with a belt, later with the buckle of the belt, she would hit me for the smallest thing. One time she sent me down to the drugstore for nose drops, and I came back with the wrong brand. I was only 11, and she hit me with a broomstick for that mistake. She said I would have gotten the right bottle if I didn’t have my mind on boys so much. Boys, that was a laugh. Boys were the last thing on my mind. No one ever told me anything about sex. Only one message ever came through clearly, sex was bad, end quote.

Now that’s actually in her book. So what does she do after this? She escapes her mother. She meets up with a guy who is her husband slash, I guess, entertainment promoter, but she went into a life of prostitution, and that’s where her real ordeal began, and she hooked up with a guy named Chuck Traynor, and led this life of prostitution, which was not too pleasant for anything I have heard. And, but through this guy, she got a contact and started, got this opportunity to do something in the porn industry. And of course, that was the movie Deep Throat that became so fascinating, or so popular and well fascinating in a way too, because listen to what she actually said in her book, not in the Toronto Sun, but in her actual book Ordeal about her experience on the set of this movie, quote. Something was happening to me, something strange. It had to do with the fact that Nolan was treating me like garbage. And maybe it was just a chemistry of being part of a group. For the first time in many months, I was thrown in with other people, other people who weren’t perverted and threatening. I became part of a group. I began to ease up. I was laughing along with the rest of them. And I thought my face would break. I hadn’t laughed, really laughed in so long that my face had to carve new smile lines. And no one was asking me to do anything I didn’t want to do, end quote.

Okay. And that’s what she says in her book. And then out in public when later, a religious group got a hold of her. She’s going out and saying, well, you know, you’re watching me being raped. I had a gun to my head the whole time. In fact, actually, during that whole time, you know, there was a lot of controversy about Linda Lovelace being in the porn industry. I know that Larry Flynt of Hustler magazine was totally opposed to her being there. And many people in the industry spoke out against her being there because they said, no, she doesn’t belong here. She’s not one of us. She’s not our culture, not our lifestyle. But in any event, you know, Deep Throat said Linda Lovelace, Marchiano in retrospect became for her both a low point and a salvation. It was really the fame that was created by the popularity of the movie that proved to be her avenue of escape from that life that she said that she didn’t like. And of course, her horrible relationship with Chuck Traynor and her mother, who was not a man, but a woman. Okay.

So you can see how people bend and twist the truth and even what they themselves are saying about things. You know, if you want to see the real spousal violence incidents, thanks to Ian Gillespie for providing some of these, reciting a few surveys, you know, just looking here from 1999 to 2004, there were about 654,000 violent spousal incidents against women and about 546,000 against men. And that’s almost like even in a way. And they said an estimated 7% of women and 6% of men encountered some form of violence by a current or previous spouse or common law partner. Another research, you know, that women are found at least as likely to instigate violence as men. I mean, this stuff is all over the place.

So, you know, you’ve got a lot of propagandists out there. Don’t let them tell you what to think and what to do and what to say about anything when it really comes down to that. Press freedom is so important. If you do not have the right to disagree with people, you don’t live in a free society anymore. So keep that in mind. And remember that when one person’s rights are violated, every person’s rights are violated. There’s no such thing as freedom of speech for Bill and not for Jane and not for Mary or freedom of speech for somebody, one person and not for the other.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got to say about that particular issue. Just one of those things that’s never going to go away, I don’t think. I’m sure there’s going to be some feedback perhaps on this issue. And that’s about it. I’m getting a signal there now. Are we almost getting ready to wind up there, Jackie? Don’t know whether I’ll be back next week. I don’t know if I’m going to be back in this time slot. Don’t know what the show is going to be. Don’t know if I’ll be here Wednesday or whatever day or even if everything’s going to be different next week. But you’ll be the first to know by tuning in again roughly during this time spot here.

By the way, just one quick thought to leave with you. You know, I was sitting in the dentist’s office the other day and I read this true and false thing about a whole bunch of unrelated things. And one of the questions said, what do you think? True or false? Do turtles age? I found out that they don’t age. Turtles do not age. They only die of misfortune and of disease. When they are mature, they do not age. And I’m wondering, why aren’t there a whole bunch of turtle institutes from coast to coast across the country? Why aren’t we studying this phenomenon? I realize they’re cold-blooded animals, but I had no idea. Is that actually true? I have a hard time believing that. And if it is, how come we don’t know much more about it?

Anyways, just a thought to leave with you before we go. And if we see you again next week, all the better. Take care and mind how you go, as Jim Chapman would have said. And God bless. Take care.