Just Right… with Bob Metz and Robert Vaughan

556 – Raging against the political machine

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May 172018

Rage against the political machine all you want, but as long as every gear in that machine turns leftward, the option of shifting gears in the right direction simply doesn’t exist. With few exceptions, that’s the reality in Ontario politics today – particularly now that the June 7 general election is underway.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government certainly deserves all of the criticism it is getting – and more. But simply ridding the province of Kathleen Wynne will do little to help alleviate the chronic shortage of doctors and hospital beds, or reduce the unprecedented cost of electricity, nor address the dramatically increasing poverty and drug addiction rates.

Considered Wynne’s leading opponent is Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford, hailed by many as the man to rescue Ontario. Unfortunately for Ford, he is ‘progressively’ being found to be far more of a ‘progressive’ than a ‘conservative’ – a circumstance that has found many traditional Conservative supporters in a quandary about how to justify their vote. Continue reading »

555 – Guests: Lindsay Shepherd, Gad Saad, David Haskell, Rick Mehta

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May 102018

As learning institutions, universities were once considered to be the environment where a diversity of ideas was both encouraged and tolerated. Today, that diversity of ideas and opinion has been abandoned in favor of a ‘diversity’ of racial, sexual, and cultural ‘identities’ that make the discovery of reality almost impossible.

Just ask Lindsay Shepherd, Gad Saad, David Haskell, and Rick Mehta, each a member of Canada’s academic university community who attended last weekend’s Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) annual General meeting.

As our guests on today’s show, you will learn how each has been outspoken against the climate of fear and censorship that has become so ingrained in campus culture. Each is an advocate of free speech and a free exchange of ideas. Each has achieved a level of notoriety because of challenges by, and to, the ‘politically correct’ forces on their campuses.

Each is empowered by debate and knows that their opponents are weakened by debate. Whatever their views on ‘left’ or ‘right,’ they all recognize that it is views pointing in the right direction that are most under attack on university campuses.

Unavoidable in every controversy, as always, is the polarity between Left and Right. Also unavoidable is the conclusion that when it comes to freedom of speech, those who defend it are always Just Right.

554 – Possibly political? Probably.

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May 032018

Is it possible? Is it probable? Is it plausible? Those are just a few of the ‘p’ words that strike at the heart of Obama-appointed ex-FBI director James Comey‘s stating it was “possible” that a “pee tape” involving Donald Trump and Russian prostitutes actually exists.

“I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” said Comey on a broadcast breakfast television interview relating to the release of his book.

It’s possible, but I don’t know.

Welcome to the politics of ‘possibilities’ – an increasingly popular way of spreading fake news without accountability. Continue reading »

553 – Manufacturing hate – The social disease of the Left

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Apr 262018

On April 6, a tragic highway accident claimed the lives of 16 people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team on their way to a playoff game in the town of Nipawin, Saskatchewan. The outpouring of international support resulted in a GoFundMe campaign that raised millions of dollars for the families of the victims.

So it is understandably beyond the understanding of most people why anyone would express ‘cynicism’ about the “maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness” of those who died. Yet that’s exactly what left-wing activist and journalist Nora Loreto posted to her Twitter account in her ostensible effort to promote “justice and more for so many other grieving parents and communities.” But when one considers that Loreto’s past tweets include comments like “White men are the worst beings that orbit the Sun,” it is clear that she is not motivated by any sense of “justice” for “other grieving parents.”

That Loreto is a racist and a sexist is undeniable – by any objective definition of those words, and by the comments and actions of Loreto herself. But racism and sexism are mere symptoms of a greater social disease: thinking of individuals as mere members of some subjectively pre-defined collective who all think and look alike. Continue reading »

552 – Guest: Salim Mansur – Free speech to free trade

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Apr 192018

In attempting to live up to the ideals of free speech and free trade, the complexity of achieving each soon becomes apparent. That’s because in practice, neither of these ideals literally exists – even in the Western nations that rightly hold them as high virtues.

Given the best of intentions, it is highly doubtful that Mark Zuckerberg’s recent grilling before a US Senate hearing committee will actually pave the way towards any guarantee of ‘free speech’ on Facebook. His hauntingly welcome acceptance of government regulation on ‘privacy’ issues that would affect how he runs his Facebook business model may well open the barn door to the entrenchment of regulated speech – by government.

Said Zuckerberg: “Our position is not that regulation is bad. I think the Internet is so important in people’s lives and it’s getting more important, the expectations on Internet companies and technology companies overall are growing. And I think the real question is ‘What is the right framework for this?’ not ‘Should there be one?’” Continue reading »

551 – Still negative on ‘affirmative consent’

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Apr 122018

What do ‘affirmative consent,’ ‘indigenous knowledge,’ and the trial of Bill Cosby have in common? In addition to being our discussion topics of the day, each controversy revolves around an epistemological war of words.

It’s a battle of definitions, as efforts to change or affect the social and political environment stretch beyond the political sphere. From the world of TV fantasy, monsters, and superheroes, to the real world that sometimes seems more unreal than the fantasies, the promotion of anti-concepts like ‘affirmative consent’ has already produced a host of real world injustices, not the least of which have been those directed at Bill Cosby.

Just as ‘social justice’ is not justice, so too, ‘affirmative consent’ is not consent.

And so too ‘indigenous knowledge’ is not ‘knowledge,’ particularly in the context of being used as an argument that ‘scientific knowledge is offensive.’ Nor are ‘indigenous’ rights true rights accorded to the individual. Yet these are the very things being asserted by Quebec’s indigenous leaders, at least two Quebec cabinet ministers, and several university law professors. Continue reading »

550 – Guest: Andrew Lawton – Unpacking the Left and Right

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Apr 052018

On the heels of an unexpected departure from CFPL AM 980 radio in London Ontario, radio broadcaster Andrew Lawton joins us in a compelling discussion that unpacks many of the political controversies of our day.

As everyone knows, political ideas and philosophies come with labels that can be ascribed to either the ideas themselves or to the people who hold those ideas.

However, when everyone defines these terms in different ways, we often find ourselves in a political Tower of Babel that prevents the issues, the ideas, and the players from being objectively, or even just consistently, identified.

It is in this political climate and context that Andrew Lawton joins us to unpack the ideas and to illustrate how these ideas manifest themselves in our daily lives or in the news.

As Andrew notes, to add to all of the already-confused political labels, the Left continues to introduce anti-concepts like ‘normalization,’ ‘micro-aggression,’ ‘censorables,’ and even uses the term ‘unpacking the ideas’ as a means of stopping debate and stifling free speech – not as a means of encouraging it.

Even when it comes to freedom itself, the Left and Right have opposing views. By unpacking the ideas behind everything from the inequity of Canada’s Summer Jobs Program to the myth of Margaret Mead’s sexually liberated cultures in the south seas islands, our conversation about freedom leads us, as always, in the direction that is Just Right.