My Rule Of Thumb On Immigrants At the National Post?

They're not quite ready for it!

I sent my 700-word blog post "Indian Immigration Lawyer's Take on Dual Citizenship" verbatim to the Op-Ed section of the National Post. I really didn't expect a reply. I thought my opinion (or perspective) was too direct, and despite the National Post being a "conservative" magazine, it actually supports things like multiculturalism (or diversity, as they like to call it), and advocates some kind of immigration based on economic premises.

I did get a reply back, with a name signed off with "best,----", saying "Thanks for this, but I'm afraid [afraid?] I'm unable to use this."

I don't know what that means, but perhaps people like honest, straightforward opinions, even if it goes against their belief systems.

My Rule Of Thumb On Immigrants Has An Exception

Another TVO debate, this time on Canadian citizenship

A few days ago, I wrote, "My rule of thumb is that an immigrant will always behave like an immigrants", by which I meant that immigrants in general will support a multicultural Canada with high immigration intakes. Although I do find this to be true almost all the time, I have given this rule of thumb a small margin of error (maybe 0.001%?). In any case, in another stellar panel discussion (the topic and the questions, not necessarily the actual panel itself) by Steve Paiken on TVO, this time a debate on Canadian citizenship, provided that lone voice of an immigrant who doesn't behave like an immigrant.

Mahfooz Kanwar, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal College, was making sane, measured and honest statements about his observations on immigrants in Canada, and how they should behave as Canadian citizens. He was clearly against multiculturalism, which he thinks divides loyalties and puts people in ethnic ghettos. His counterpoint, Avvy Go, a "clinic director" at the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic - which I presume means she is a lawyer - was loud and aggressive.

The funny thing was that Steve Paiken was paying more attention to her, and accepting her horrendous statements, such as Canadians shouldn't be too smug about their history, tainted as it is with the conquest and oppression of the native Indian peoples, not to mention the Chinese head taxes set at the latter part of the 18th century. The quieter Mr. Kanwar was getting slightly ridiculed by our esteemed host.

Now, I don't think it is anything in Steve Paikin's personality which made him behave like that towards Mr. Kanwar. I think aggressive anti-Canadian statements seem to have a strange attraction for Canadians. Maybe it is a lack of confidence in their country, maybe it is decades (now) of beatings they got from blacks, Chinese, Indians about their oh so heinous crimes, but in any case, the more aggressive and rude an immigrant is, the more Canadians will accept the "beating" and acquiesce to their demands.

The video is worth watching only for the impassioned remarks made by the sole, brave voice of Mr. Kanwar.

Can Movies Change Human Nature?

The impossible goal of current movies

Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in "Bringing up Baby".
Grant ends up in jail, but proposes to Hepburn when he gets out.

Movies are really the gateway to modern society. However bad they may be, they still gauge for us something of the society's positions. They tell us how a society thinks, behaves and what it holds important.

There is such a strange earnestness about contemporary movies. It’s all about getting everything "just right". I don’t think anyone does a belly laugh over contemporary comedies the way that people would have done in those original screwballs comedies. To laugh like that, you would have to admit the incongruity and absurdity of a situation. No director wants to be incongruent or absurd these days, and least of all an actor. Just give them the politically correct, please. Of course, this goes for other emotions like anger, sorrow and deep indignation. No movie makes people deeply indignant anymore.

I think people feel an irrational anger more than indignation these days. This makes people a little crazy. When defending illegal immigrants, for example, who are for all practical purposes criminals, how do people support them other than to lie to themselves? What do they tell themselves about this or that illegal person? They can defend his humanity, but how can they defend his actions without being insincere (i.e. lying) to themselves? Such ambiguous feelings do not make for indignation. So people just get irrationally mad instead, and no longer go for the Good vs. Bad, anymore, because their story is already coated in lies. Such was the mood of the immigration movie "Crossing Over", although the director tried to be as honest as possible.

So, part of art's pleasure, to see truth reveal itself, becomes near to impossible in current movies, since so much is camouflaged with untruth. Even comedies, where we should be doing belly laughs, fall short. In the screwball comedies of yonder years, for example, slightly nutty women ran circles around unsuspecting men to finally return to "a man-above-woman world order", as one film critic put it. This is no longer possible. The comedy of the sexes is now no longer is a comedy of the sexes because we have equal opportunity, and career women, and politically correct men who dare not ruffle the feathers of their women colleagues (and wives). How do you return to "a man-above-woman world order" when everything has to be equal?

Still, art, whether the artists like it or not, does reveal some of the truth some of the time, especially if it is in the hands of a good artist.

Here is a review I did of a recent film "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and the trajectory screwball comedy took from the 1930s to this 2009 version. Despite all the meddlesome feminism, this 2009 version does give credit to the original masterpieces. People cannot completely change human nature, after all, although they may try to in their imaginations.

The Destruction of Art by Artists

Comment on Bruce Elder's film "The Young Prince"



I just finished watching Bruce Elder's latest film "The Young Prince". Being a prolific artist and writer, this two hour "experimental" film was made at the same time as he was writing his book "Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century".

As I wrote in the short (preliminary) review on the book, my observations that modern-day avant-garde filmmakers (and artists in general) are interested in non-Christian ways of reaching the transcendence are being validated. Although Elder never elucidates this in his book (he takes a more of a descriptive approach, writing about this phenomenon, rather than expressing his views), his film is a clear indication of his approach. More on this later, but his final quote in his film, from the apocryphal Acts of St. John (which according to many Christian theologians is heretical), shows me that I am going in the right direction.

I am so glad that I went with my instincts, and refused to enter into the strange, trance-inducing films of these "avant-garde" filmmakers. Sometimes all you really have to go on is a non-rational, but equally strong and true, perception.

Again, I will write more on this, and how (and why) most modern artists are really in the realm that Elder and his filmmakers inhabit. And why art suffers and is destroyed as a consequence. Yes, strong words, but now I can finally say them.

Indian Immigration Lawyer's Take on Dual Citizenship

My rule of thumb is that an immigrant will always behave like an immigrant


Immigration lawyer Ravi Jain, who is a first generation immigrant of Indian background, was on Steve Paikin's panel on dual citizenship: "Dual Citizenship, Dual Loyalties?". He was behaving in a manner typical of immigrants. He has an automatic, knee-jerk, expectation that the whole world (or more precisely, the non-Western world) is entitled to immigrate to U.S. and Canada, and once there, to obtain an uncontested guarantee of citizenship. I don't know why immigrants such as Jain (that is 99.9% of immigrants) never question the logic of their argument. Still, Jain is an immigration lawyer, so part of the answer lies in his professional background. He has to accept and support the concept of immigration to win his clients' cases. And if I were a little more cynical, I would have to say that it is a lucrative business being an immigration lawyer.

But this arrogant sense of entitlement goes deeper than career opportunism. I've thought long and hard about it, and I think that non-Westerners come to Canada or the U.S. (and to European countries as well) with a "they owe us" dig. Of course, this hails back to all the perceived insults and oppressions of the colonial period, and the American influence around the world since then.

The contradiction is that Jain's India is one of the more prosperous countries in the world, and I would say that it is thanks to the institutions the British left behind, and the economic benefits Indians reap from American businesses.

And the fact that many of these immigrants are opting for dual citizenship shows that their countries are no longer the dismal, economically non-viable back waters which they presumably left never to return to again.

The phenomenon of dual citizenship has been brewing for the past twenty years or so, with about 150 countries (including Canada and the U.S.) now accepting such a status compared to only a handful in the early 1990s.

I would like to say that claiming dual citizenship is a good thing. After all, if more Indians return to India, they will find much to attract them there, including living happy Indian lives with their relatives, their traditions, their cultures and the many beautiful things that are part of their Indianness. And then they will stay in India.

But what the modern non-Western immigrant does is keep all his options open. For Indians, it would be to live and enjoy their Indian life, but keep the other foot firmly planted in Canada, including encouraging (coercing) more, ever-increasing Indian immigration to Canada. And going through impossible hoops to change Canada into their version of a Nordic India (if ever possible).

The objectives of non-Westerners like Jain is not Canadian nation building, but the acquisition of the rights and privileges of living in a prosperous nation and to glean as much as they can from it. Such “Canadians” will never publicly admit this, but their hearts and minds, all the way down to their second and third generation offspring, are back in their ancestral lands. The “We Love Canada” mantra of many non-Western Canadians is easily dismantled when asked what their affiliations to their non-Western lands are, and more succinctly, if they have, or agree with dual citizenship.

So, this is all a tidy(!) quagmire the thoughtless wielders of our immigration policies have come up with. A set-up for people like Jain, whose loyalties, despite his family living in Canada for multiple generations, will always be as an Indian first (a non-Westerner), and when push comes to shove, a Canadian next. When pressed, “Why Canadian” his reply will eventually reveal that all he wants is the gains, and let’s face it, it is mostly economic gains, he will get from Canada. In the mean time, he will be busy working under the radar to make sure that this prosperous Canada will continue to be a temporary haven (or a displaced haven) for people like him, and for thousands more whose entrance to Canada he will facilitate.

This is the stark reality of non-Western “Canadians”. Don’t listen to what they say, look at what they do. Or, if you’re Steve Paikin, bring them on TVO and ask them pertinent questions to reveal the truth behind their layers of lies.

Below is the full hour panel on dual citizenship with panelists:

- Martin Collacott, senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.
- Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute
- Ravi Jain, partner with Green and Spiegel
- Audrey Macklin, associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto
- Michele Wucker, executive director of the World Policy Institute

A Race-Obsessed Feminist With No Sense of Humor

And who can't do algebra either


Poet, writer and professor Rozena Maart is described thus in wikipedia:

Dr. Rozena Maart (born 1962) is a South African writer, professor and psychotherapist, currently living in Canada... [She] was nominated for the "Woman of the Year" award hosted in Johannesburg, for her work opposing violence against women and for starting, with four women, the first Black feminist organization in Cape Town, Women Against Repression (WAR).

She exercised her activist tendencies, and wrote a letter to the editors of the Globe and Mail about a cartoon entitled "Afrocentric Algebra".

The cartoon was in reaction to the Afrocentric schools that were opened up experimentally in Toronto last year.

Part of the joke is that the cartoon character is mimicking a popular American Idol judge who often exclaims, "What's up, Dawg (dog)" whenever he is pleased with a singing contestant. Jackson is an accomplished musician, and his colleagues on American Idol, as well as the contestants, admire him and respect his viewpoints.

So, the cartoon was in no way diminishing this black teacher, or his pupils, with that slang. In fact, it was a respectful (and humorous) reference to Randy Jackson's enthusiastic outbursts.

Of course, someone obsessed with race (racism, to be precise), sexism, and is an avowed feminist, as Maart is, would find this cartoon insulting.

But, that is all beside the point (and predictable). What is funny is the follow-up apology by the Globe and Mail editors, who after listing all the positive references and writings the paper has published about Afrocentric schools, wrote this zinger (and I think the bigger joke), which of course Maart missed:

Moreover, through a mistake in transcription, the equations on the blackboard were not quite correct. This was our mistake, and there was no intention to suggest that the imaginary teacher in the cartoon was not competent.

Or race-obsessed feminist are not either.

Benny Hill Does Have A Sense of Humor

Although he never comes out and says "catsmeat"

I've never really liked Benny Hill, especially his propensity to include dubious looking ladies in his skits.

But, in view of a a harmless joke on a lefty's blog( a lefty dubbed forever Catsmeat Kinsella by the the right wing faction), and the retaliation of the Chinese community to his harmless joke, I thought that in a sane world, this Benny Hill skit might get a few chuckles. That is, until the various levels of the Chinese community political branches decide that it's an HRC-worthy offense.

Here's the Youtube skit, uncannily titled: "Benny Hill as Chinese fish & chip shop owner Chow Mein, found guilty by Industrial Tribunal":


This skit, a little long at eight minutes, but you can get the gist after a couple - make sure to watch until the Indian walks in - is funnier and more timely, than it initially looks.

A Chinese shop owner is brought to an "industrial tribunal" by an Indian staff for work-related injuries. Language, accent, idioms and many other subtleties get in the way. The Indian and the Chinese are happily chattering away while the poor tribunal is jumping hoops to understand what exactly is going on.

Welcome to our multi-culti twenty-first century.