From thumbing through her collection of essays: One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, I like Intar-Webs newspaper editor Scaachi Koul. She speaks fluent French--not "French" as in the official language of Québec, but rather French in the New York sense of the word, in which context the word is usually preceded in a sentence by "Pardon my..." She is sassy and outspoken, in which qualities she reminds me of Gore Vidal, Billy Martin, Howard Cosell and Al Goldstein, icons of mine, not because of their politics or philosophy, but rather because of their unbridled sonofabitchery and eternal aspirations to win the Misanthrope of the Year Award. Like these late gents, Scaachi Koul has something a significant number of the denizens of the YouTubes do not. That something is called character.
Ms. Koul's character, just like the late Gore Vidal's character, is why I can still like her despite disagreeing with her on key points and despite significant differences in our backgrounds. Ms. Koul identifies as a feminist and, in One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, she reports being harmed by sexism/misogyny and racism (she is a Canadian born to parents from India.) She extrapolates from these experiences to say that Canada is a racist and sexist place, an extrapolation which has some validity. The Western world as a whole, however, not so much. Monisha Kaltenborn is also a woman. She immigrated to Austria from India, became a lawyer, got an advanced degree from the London School of Economics and is now the Team Principal of Formula 1's Sauber Team. Nikki Haley was born in America to parents from India, and she rose to become Governor of South Carolina (which still had the Confederate Flag as part of its State Flag when she took over) and is now America's Ambassador to the United Nations. As well, I heard that former American Idol contestant Nalani Quintello is of Indian extraction, albeit born in Germany and raised in Florida. More precisely, Nalani Quintello was recruited straight off the bat as a Technical Sergeant (equivalent to a Staff Sergeant in the Army and Marine Corps and a Petty Officer, 1st Class in the Navy) for the USAF's rock band Max Impact. In other words, Ms. Koul, as a woman of Indian ancestry living in Canada did have some entirely negative experiences. This does not mean that her experiences and the way she reacted to them are necessarily standard-issue for women of Indian extraction. Nevertheless, Ms. Koul does resemble Mrs. Kaltenborn and TSgt. Quintello in one important respect. She found something she was really good at (writing, in her case), chose to excel in this skill and translated that excellence into a well-paying job.
I do not know how much Ms. Koul makes, nor am I particularly interested in finding out. I do know from One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, however, that, like me. Gore Vidal, Billy Martin and Howard Cosell, she is enamoured of the sauce. One difference between us in this regard is that she prefers top-shelf sauce while I stick to ye olde Buckfast. Another, even more significant, difference is how each of us regards our ginsottery, and, for that matter, university education In One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, Ms. Koul has an essay dedicated to her university years. Her attending class is only mentioned once in this essay, which is mostly a collection of drinking stories. In this regard, Ms. Koul, whether wittingly or not, proves what Professors Craig Brandon and Laura Penny argue in their respective 2010 books The Five Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up On Educating Your Child And What You Can Do About It and More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College Is Crap And Idiots Think , namely that universities in North America are only peripherally, elliptically and coincidentally about education, a point Sargon of Akkad, Vee, Kraut&Lies and the rest of the Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain's eurotrash WAG faction would have done well to understand before shitting out petitions and YouTubes vids about "how SJWs corrupt campuses in America," not a one of them ever having been to America. Ms. Koul, if her Wikipedia is accurate, was born in 1991, and Professor Brandon dates the bastardisation of the North American university from a place of education to a money-making machine which trains Student-Customers to become career alcoholics in exchange for five to six years' worth of tuition, normal baccalaureate education taking only four years, to the 1990's.
My post-secondary education was interrupted and spanned approximately a decade and a half of intermittence thanks to the accident that destroyed by family and all that involved. By the 1990's, however, I was done with my first go-round at post-secondary education, which involved studying Biology. In my first go-round at university, alcohol was strictly prohibited on campus. Yes, there were parties and party animals, just like there were salad bars at the mess. I avoided both. Although I was barracked on campus, my sole objective on campus was to learn in the official sense. Biology required a lot of time in the class, in the lab and studying. There were biology students who were into the party thing. They almost uniformly changed majors or dropped out after a couple of terms. Monday-to-Friday, when I was not studying, I was either reading newspapers or magazines or novels or histories. Early on, Friday and Saturday nights were spent, as they had been through latter primary and secondary education, at the local Grindhouse or drive-in. Later on in my first go-round at university came the Beta-Max, which killed the Grindhouse but which was good entertainment nevertheless. As for socialising, although I was barracked on campus, the county my university was located in had locals of the Junior Lodges and a couple of other social clubs I had belonged to for decades by that time. I was cordial with my classmates, but I did my socialising with my Brethren.
Sometimes after the accident, I re-entered university to a) try to pick up the pieces of my life, and b) upgrade my skills. The institutions of the latter half of my post-secondary education were all within commuting distance of my kraal, so I was on their campuses 8 to 5, purely for coursework and library work. I was also older than most of my fellow students, which put some distance between us, as did the fact that this was post-accident, at which point I had learned not to become too close to people because dying is something that happens to young people who are free of pathology just as readily and unexpectedly as it happens to the old and the infirm and the best way to keep some semblance of sanity is to avoid getting close to someone.
As for drinking, for me, this, like religion and sex, is a private affair done behind closed doors. Billy Martin drank heavily, and was constantly caught up in bar fights as a result. To me, this constitutes a superb lesson as to why one should avoid bars. If that is not enough, there is another difference between Ms. Koul and myself when it comes to our views on drinking. Ms. Koul, being born in 1991, was not even ten years old (and thus not of drinking age) when the second of the two massive North American turf wars ended. Ms. Koul is from Calgary which, unlike points eastwards thereof, was an extremely quiet sector as far as these two turf wars were concerned. This means that, whenever it was put to Ms. Koul to go to a drinking establishment, she most likely did not have the instinctive reaction of "Who are these people affiliated with? Was there 'activity' this week? Maybe there was and it just was not published. Best to drink in private where there is no chance I will get shot or blown up in a retaliatory attack."
That being said, bar-hoping was never without its risks for Ms. Koul. She did not know the wars, but she does report being surveiled by would-be rapists at bars. Some would argue that we must automatically dismiss what Ms. Koul says about this because she is a feminist. This is wrong-headed. Doctor Jonathan Shay, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, reports some Holocaust survivors dismissing incest survivors' accounts as being "merely confessional," something which Dr. Shay condemns as a "pissing contest" which helps no one. Ms. Koul most likely never had to worry about being shot or blown to bits or burned with a Molotov cocktail because of the affiliations of the proprietors of where she chose to drink, but this does not in any way diminish the hazards and fears that were and are associated with her drinking in public.
Ms. Koul is a feminist. I am not. I am a supporter of Jordan Owen, and I love and fully endorse his movie The Sarkeesian Effect. That being said, I realise that this is 2017 and not 2014. On top of being thoroughly exposed by Mr. Owen, Sarkeesian completely failed to get #GamerGate originator Adam Baldwin fired from his steady TV gig on The Last Ship. Justice, and not Steph Guthrie, prevailed in the Gregory Alan Elliott case. Justice, and not Lucy DeCoutere, prevailed in the case of Jian Ghomeshi (who was successfully defended by a feminist lawyer, Me Marie Henein.) Rolling Stone has been forced to pay the subjects of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's fairy tale. In 2017, feminists are still around, but they have been shown a) to not all be like Anita Sarkeesian and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, b) for those who are like Sarkeesian and Erdely, the limits of their power have also been demarcated by a series of court decisions. As well, #GamerGate, which started out with good intentions, has degenerated into being a mouthpiece for Stephen Bannon and Richard Spencer, re-branding itself the Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain.
On a related note, there are a couple of cases on which it would be most interesting to hear Ms. Koul's opinion. Those would be the cases of Gerry Sklavounos, Chris Brown and Nate Parker. Ms. Koul identifies as a person of colour, a title that could also reasonably be ascribed to Messrs Sklavounos, Brown and Parker. Messrs Sklavounos and Brown were both accused of assault by white women. Not quite Emmet Till, but with enough to bring back eerie comparisons, especially since Messers Slavounos and Brown (as well as Mr. Parker) were cleared of wrongdoing. Would Ms. Koul stand with the majority white accusers because they are women? The Brown and Parker cases are one reason I have no use at all for #BlackLivesMatter, which is more appropriately called #SOMEBlackLivesMatter since they were not exactly vocal in rushing to Messers Brown and Parker's defence. This makes #BLM a bunch of hypocrites who are only selectively pro-Black. Another reason I have no use at all for #BLM is that they are just like Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, lawless rioters. That being said, unlike the Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain, I do not see #BLM as the end of the world. To someone who thinks 2016-2017 constitutes the Year Zero, #BLM as well as some Superbowl entertainers doing the Black Panthers sign constitutes terrorism. To those of us who have been around and remember actual terrorism such as Joshua N'komo's ZIPRA shooting down a civilian airliner and massacring survivors on the ground, #BLM, Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers are Junior G-Men.
Ms. Koul talks a lot about racism and sexism in her essays in One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. She recounts how she received abuse from primary and secondary school classmates because she had darker skin than most of them. I was never the object of racist abuse at primary or secondary school. But Ms. Koul's experience is not entirely dissimilar to mine. (The preceding sentence, of course, assumes, that the reader understands that there is a difference between "not dissimilar" and "identical," which maybe it should not.) I grew up in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic area of New York State. When I was not in hospital, the majority of the kids at the primary and secondary schools I attended were Roman Catholics and they let us, as well as the Italian kids, the Polish kids and the German kids know that we were outsiders. You will perhaps think that there is a contradiction in the previous sentence in that I said that the Roman Catholic kids made the Italian and Polish kids feel like outsiders, since most Italians and Poles are Catholics. That is most likely because you use the term "Roman Catholic" as it is generally used in North America, England and the ANZAC countries, which is to say "anyone who is a) of Catholic origin/parentage and/or b) who hangs his or her hat up in Rome on Sundays." As per the fifth paragraph of this entry, that is not at all what I mean when I say "Roman Catholic." I use the adjective as it is understood in Ulster and Glasgow, which is to say as a synonym of Sinn-Fein/IRA/Septic FC/Hibs FC/the SNP, a prime specimen thereof being epitomised by the thoroughly vile Robert Carlyle (a supporter of the Famous in real life) character "Franco" in Trainspotting T2. In America, Roman Catholics as I use the word have a history of rioting against and lynching Blacks/Africans in New York, rioting against Chinese in California and rioting against Black/African children being allowed to use public buses in Boston, where they also call a Portuguese Bishop--their coreligionist and nominal superior--a racial slur. In my experience, Roman Catholics in America use racial slurs far more often than do non-Roman Catholics in America. Roman Catholics in Canada are different, but, unlike America, which has often refused to hand over Sinn Fein-IRA terrorists, Canada has an extradition treaty with Britain, so perhaps it is fear of MI5, and not any innate decency on their part, that is the reason Canadian Roman Catholics tend to behave themselves. This would explain why Montréal Roman Catholics allow explicitly Protestant groups to take part in their parades.
Ms. Koul does not identify her primary and secondary school abusers in any way other than "white." With this limited description, I can only say that her abusers fit the general description of Canadians as a whole, which is to say ignorant, backwards, backwater, fourth rate colonials. In his novel Reaper, Royal Irish Regiment Captain (and current Ulster Unionist Party MLA) Doug Beattie describes British special duties personnel with artificially tanned skin and contact lenses that give their eyes a brown colour so that they blend in with Afghans. As well, SEAL Team Six founder Commander Dick Marcinko specifically recounts how he selected swarthy, dark-haired sailors like him, and how he deliberately excluded blonde, blue-eyed farm boys from Iowa, for his Team. The damned colonials who harassed Ms. Koul because of her skin colour at school are very obviously not the men that are Doug Beattie and Dick Marcinko. The very same can be said of all the online bampots who attacked Ms. Koul when she specifically solicited non-white, non-male editors for her online newspaper.
Ms. Koul reacted to these bampots, first by showing some understanding of where they were coming from, then by taking a social media sabbatical. For the latter, she has received nonsense from both supporters and detractors. Ms. Koul, however, is not the first person to take a social media sabbatical. Conservative politicians (by which I generically mean supporters of the Williamite Resettlement Act, the military and the police and opponents of terrorism and the Kim Jong Un/Nicolàs Maduro School of Economics as opposed to any particular party or politician) and Veterans have done the exact same thing.
There is one point regarding racism in Canada where I strongly disagree with Ms. Koul. She says
While Canada purports to be multicultural[...]our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we're punished[...]The white majority does doesn't like being reminded that the cultural landscape is still flawed, still broken, and while my entry into something like Canadian media, for instance, hasn't been an easy ride, it has been made more palatable for other people because I am passable.
The last sentence partially explains Ms. Koul's outlook. She works in Canadian media and has been a frequent commentator on State Television (CBC), which means she has the standard-issue milquetoast line on racism on Canada that misses a lot. Another thing that explains Ms. Koul's reiteration of what is essentially the Ministry of Heritage (i.e., the Ministry that controls state television) line on racism is the fact that she was born in 1991 and grew up in a relatively well-off quarter of Calgary.
In 1994 (when Ms. Koul was around three or so), British Army Intelligence Officer Adrian Weale publicly reported that there had been Canadians who served in Hitler's SS. These were not Germans or other Europeans who served in the SS during the war, then moved to Canada and became Canadian citizens, nor were they, as in the case of Americans serving in the German military of the Second World War, first-generation immigrants or dual nationals. No, the Canadians who served in Hitler's SS were all born and raised in Canada and had all served in the Canadian Army before joining the SS. The is not something state television or the Ministry of Heritage acknowledges, but it is something that is very much known in Canada thanks to journalist Normand Lester. It is known, but ignored by the Canadian government and media which prefers to obsess over Vimy (which was nowhere near the scale of the Brusilov Offencive) or Juno Beach (which was nowhere near the scale of Operation Bagration) or the Battle of the Atlantic (where, between 1939 and 1945, the Canadian Navy lost around 25 ships, or the amount of ships lost by both the US Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1942 at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal alone.)
As well, the 1985 Deschênes Commission reported that Canada had taken in a number of Eastern European Nazis, one of who was the grandfather of current Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, who helped to obscure her grandfather's true nature. Canada also has an entire constellation of neo-Nazi organisations, the Canadian branch of the Aryan Nations being based in Ms. Koul's home province of Alberta. In 1981, some of these Canadian neo-Nazis unsuccessfully to seize an island in the Caribbean.
The One Who Knows All The Keyboard Shortcuts, Lauren Southern, Jordan Peterson as well as the damned colonials who gave Ms. Koul problems in school and online are not exceptional, but are rather simply extensions/savvy rebrandings of Canada's Nazi past and present. It may be that, in the circles Ms. Koul moves in, the subject of Canada's Nazi connections are not talked about. However, chapters of books, entire books themselves and official government commission reports on these Nazi connections have been published and have been in the public domain for some decades now. The Heritage Ministry, which controls state television on which Ms. Koul is a frequent guest like Alan Dershowitz and Van Jones are on the CNN, does not want to talk about all of Canada's damned Nazis, preferring to propagate the myth of how "Canadians are much nicer than Americans." This does not negate the fact that, from before the Second World War was over, Nazism has played a predominant role in Canadian life. I cannot accept Ms. Koul's assessment that racism in Canada is "insidious" because the publicly available documentary evidence of Canadian Nazism has abounded since before she was born.
As I said, Ms. Koul has been a guest commentator on state television. Here are some clips thereof.
This clips show, at once, a) points on which I disagree with Ms. Koul, as well as b) one reason I like Ms. Koul while I do not like Lauren Southern, the Honey Boo-Boos, Jordan Peterson and John The Other.
With regards to Trudeau's gender parity in cabinet, Ms. Koul likes this and praises Trudeau for this. To me, this indicates that Ms. Koul did not closely examine which women got which positions in Trudeau's cabinet. Until the pro-Nazi Christia Freeland replaced Stéphane Dion as foreign minister earlier this year, the only important cabinet post held by a woman was Justice/AG. Most women in Trudeau's cabinet held useless, make-work ministries like Canadian Heritage. Trudeau is not so much a genuine feminist as he is a savvy politician. He knew that most feminists would be happy simply by seeing more women in cabinet and would not check him for giving the vast majority of these women useless, make-work posts, while important ministries (like Finance, Public Security, Industry and Science, and Defence) remain firmly in the hands of men. It is disappointing that Ms. Koul and other feminists allowed themselves to be conned by Trudeau.
Ms. Koul also has a generally negative view of the Mens' Rights Movement. I agree with her as far as organised Mens' Rights mobs like the Honey Boo-Boos are concerned. What Wooly Bumblebee, a superb artist in her own right who also honchoes Anti-Intellectuals, and Mr. Bumblebee, who honchoes this rad new site, AkkadianTimes.com, which solicits written contributions from all but the denizens of the alt-right race realist white nationalist Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain--endured at the hands of organised Men's Rights is sufficient for me not to like, or want anything to do, with that particular mob. That being said, I regard Ms. Koul as an individual and not merely a standard-issue feminist.. By the same token, not all individual Mens' Rights activists are Paul Elam/AVFM. Alternate_F4cts/David Sherratt is a decent individual Men's Rights activist, and he has spent the better part of the last couple of months battling Sargon, Vee, Kraut&Lies and the rest of the Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain, who labelled him a "suppressive person," called for his "disconnection," and have been consistently Squirrel-Busting him. I do not inflict unto Scaachi Koul the baggage of Anita Sarkeesian, Chanty Binx and Triggly Puff, so it is only kosher that I also do not inflict onto David Sherratt the baggage of Paul Elam, the Honey-Boo-Boos and John The Other.
Speaking of the Honey Boo-Boos, the contrast between their presentation and that of Scaachi Koul is another reason I much prefer Ms. Koul. Ms. Koul, you see, like the late Jonathan Frid, like Wooly Bumblebee, like Ksenia Solo, like Tatiana Maslany and like Dwayne Johnson, is one of those Canadians who speaks Nice, Normal Person English. In contrast, the Honey Boo-Boos, Lauren Southern, John the Other and Jordan Peterson all speak thick, ratchet-as-all-get-out Old Canadian, channeling the vile, repulsive, disgusting, beastly Trailer Park Bhoys whenever they open their pie-holes. This predisposes me to be less than sympathetic when Peterson, and Armoured Skeptic, whinge about "freedom of speech" being suddenly limited by recent parliamentary motions. In the case of Peterson, he actively sought out this fight, unlike Ernst Kantorowicz and James Sallis who were fired from their university positions for refusing to take oaths of loyalty forced onto them. As well, Peterson and Armoured Skeptic's born-again concern for "freedom of speech in Canada" rings hollow when neither of them is known to have objected to the CRTC, the Canadian state censor, banning HBO in Canada and forcing the company to set up a Canadian branch plant while forcing "Canadian content" (in lieu of actual free speech) on Canadian airwaves for decades now.
Scaachi Koul, as I intimated at the outset, is a very interesting person, and her collection of essays One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter is very much worth a read. Sargon, Vee, Kraut&Lies and the rest of the Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain would, since Ms. Koul identifies as a feminist and a racial minority, insist that the only place for One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter is next to Thomas Mann in the fire. I am not a feminist, but I would like to think that there are other non-feminists who are a bit more clever than the Republic of Ka-Ka-Stain. For those, I would suggest you do onto One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter exactly what I suggested can be done onto the collection of first-hand accounts, The Parent Track. Do exactly what "Dom Torretto" does to the hoopty he is racing against a street-worthy car in The Fate of the Furious and what everyman high volume, medium-to-high value supply chain manager "Willie T. Stokes' " Field Associate does with the VHS set in the first Bad Santa filim. 86 the useless parts like "patriarchy" and "feminist this" and "feminist that." Then, use what remains of One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter---which is the vast majority of this collection of essays--as a first hand account. First hand accounts generally make for good reading, as this collection of essays does. Being a first hand account, it is subject to the limitations of first-hand accounts in general, described by District Level Phoenix Programme advisor then-Captain (later Colonel) Stu Herrington as "The difference between a fairy tale and a war story is that the former begins 'Once upon a time," while the latter begins 'There I was,' " and described by old Soldier of Fortune hand Jim Morris as "The difference between a fairy tale and a war story is that the former begins 'Once upon a time," while the latter begins 'You won't believe this shit!'" When Scotty Bowers talks about the hell of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, he can be regarded as kosher since what he says is independently corroborated, something that cannot be said about what he alleges about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. Nevertheless, Bowers, just like One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, makes for an interesting read.
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