Wente Watch

The end of Wente Watch

2007-01-10T18:04:00.000-06:00

As most of you have noticed, there have been no posts recently. This is partly because I was on vacation, and before that was very busy at my regular job, but also the Globe appears to have closed the Google News loophole for editorialists and columnists.

I could, of course, simply take out a subscription. But to do so for the primary purpose of reading Margaret Wente, of all people? It would be a sad irony indeed if one effect of this blog were to increase the money going into her pockets.

Margaret Wente is not the worst columnist in the Globe's stable - that honour goes to the insufferably narcissistic, jejune, and misandrist Leah McLaren. Unlike McLaren, however, people actually take Wente seriously. She shows up regularly as a TV talking head, has won several National Newspaper Awards, frequently provides fodder for the most rabid blogs in both Canada and the United States, and has a good deal of power at the nation's most influential newspaper.

And what does she do with this media spotlight? A count of the fifty-odd columns refuted in this blog shows that fully a third are devoted to criticism of one or another non-Western culture or nonwhite people. It is hard to think of any other writer in English who is so single-mindedly concentrated on ethnocentrism as an ideology. There are, indeed, writers more Islamophobic, or more hostile to blacks, or anti-immigrant, especially in the United States. But I know of no one else who works so hard on smearing all non-white peoples with a broad brush, who will invent social problems where none exist, who will scurry to find any possible racial angle to a story.

And indeed this is why Margaret Wente provokes such fury in me, for I am everything she despises. I was born in Canada. I am not white. I look to Tiruvalluvar or Kalidasa for inspiration every bit as much as Shakespeare or Dickens. I believe the Bhagavad Gita has as much to teach us today as does Locke or Montesquieu. I make no apologies for eating samosas, celebrating Diwali, dressing my children in traditional dress, or sending them to Tamil classes. I take pride in my ancestors and their achievements.

None of these things make me any less Canadian. To Wente, however, I have not "assimilated" (in other words, abandoned my identity) and am therefore at best a living example of overly tolerant political correctness, at worst a potential terrorist. Over and over again, she tells us we don't fit in, that we don't belong. The welfare state doesn't work if we are around. Feminism cannot coexist with us. Liberal democracy breaks down under the threat of our clothes alone.

Is there any limit to the lies and distortions Wente's pen will cast? An immigrant to Canada herself, she has no hesitation in telling native-born Canadians what they should wear, how they should behave, what our identity is, merely on account of the colour of our skin. She has only contempt for our ancestors, our traditions, and our values.

Every possible stereotype, every smug expression of superiority, every casual smear at a nonwhite culture that one can conceive of has found its way into Margaret Wente's columns. She cannot see past the colour of our skins, to read us as individuals and not symbols of our races. In her world, Muslims are destroying democracy in Europe, blacks are firing guns in a gangsta rap-induced frenzy, South Asians are beating their wives, Africans are deliberately infecting women with AIDS, and aboriginal Canadians abandon their children to alcohol and drugs.

The various social problems Wente describes exist in white communities as well, and she rarely has any empirical evidence to back up her claims that patriarchy and violence are endemic to non-white communities. Indeed, she does little actual research, relying mostly on unknown cranks and "everybody knows" statements.

Her popularity is due to her uncanny ability to strike a chord in the reader's id, the hidden coterie of prejudice that all of us have but that we like to think we have let go of in a modern society. Wente strikes this atavistic nerve, reawakens the fear of all that is dark and different, tells us it's okay to let logic, reason, and evidence fall aboard, and trust the evidence not of our eyes, not even of our hearts, but of our fears.

Pay money to read such a person, even if for the sole purpose of refuting her? Never.

Yes, that means those who predicted this blog would not last long were correct. On the other hand, more than a few people have said they don't waste their time with Wente, so why should I? From now on, I won't.

Thanks to all who have read my posts, and extra thanks to those who have commented or emailed. I appreciated every one, even the hostile ones.

I do have another blog, and will start to post regularly there, constructing ideas instead of refuting them. If you like my writing, I invite you to find your way there.

On holiday

2006-12-23T17:11:00.000-06:00

As might be guessed, I'm away on holiday.

But it's also true that the future of Wente Watch is in doubt. Stay tuned.

The conservative circle

2006-12-18T08:13:00.000-06:00

Wente talks about Islamic schools in the UK. You can see the tension between her different conservative biases. On the one hand, the schools are Muslim and Wente's instinct is to decry their existence as a training school for terrorism. On the other, a good conservative seldom passes up a chance to bash secular, public schools.

So Wente writes a relatively sympathetic article. Too sympathetic. She makes the same mistake most conservative writers make about private schools - because they draw mostly from upper-income families, their outcomes (test scores, university entrance) appear higher than public schools, which must deal with all types of families, or lack thereof. If she were to compare Leicester Academy's performance with that of state schools for children from similar family incomes, would there be as much difference? We don't know, and Wente did not trouble to find out.

And she can't resist her trademark dig:

Mr. Moghal...is a strong believer in the obligation to fit in with the majority culture. He is clean-shaven, and wears an immaculate business suit and tie

As opposed to those other dirty darkies who are unkempt and unclean, no doubt. The quote reveals Wente's biases more than Moghal's. Nonwhites are welcome in her society, if and only if they dress, talk, cook, listen to music, and in all other ways behave exactly as whites do. Not merely integrate, but assimilate - give up all sense of history, identity, and culture in order to ease Wente's instinctive distrust of "other" cultures.

And then, they shall know that a prophet has been among them

2006-12-14T17:58:00.000-06:00

This is starting to get repetitive. It's hardly worth bothering to refute Wente when she essentially writes the same column over and over again. Islamists are taking over Europe, doom and gloom, head for the hills, zzzzzzzz.....

The column says 3-5 percent of German Muslims are radicals. That works out to 0.09-0.15 percent of the total German population. Wente is all antsy about that, but apparently the 7 percent of the vote obtained by neo-Nazis in a recent state election is nothing to worry about.

The problem is that European countries are not immigrant-based societies like North America, and they will always view nonwhites as outsiders. In other words, they think the way Margaret Wente does. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as staunch a critic of radical Islam as one can find, was threatened with expulsion from the Netherlands for lying on a refugee application years earlier. Bassam Tibi is leaving Germany, stultified not by political correctness, but by the absence of it; he can never be accepted as a German, no matter how he tries.

And, paradoxically, a prime reason for this is conservative ideologues constantly haranguing, as Wente does, that Islam is a sinister, dangerous force worthly only of distrust and suspicion.

Miracles

2006-12-12T10:59:00.000-06:00

Miracles happen. Wente actually took the trouble to find a nonwhite's side of the story, and listened without judgment. In other words, she actually behaved like a journalist.

Of course, it might have been a good idea to do that before writing two columns on the niqab subject.

The patriarchal furriners

2006-12-09T21:55:00.000-06:00

Wente's third article in a row bashing Turkish immigrants in Germany.

Most of the practices she describes - honour killings, child marriage - are already illegal in Turkey and have been so for decades. Turkey is perhaps the most aggressively secular country in the Muslim world, where even headscarves are banned.

That, of course, does not fit into Wente's script. If a crime against women is committed by a white person, it does not exist. As many as 40,000 women were trafficked into Germany to serve as sex slaves during the World Cup, but Wente wouldn't be interested in that; the traffickers and their victims were white. Nor, one thinks, would she care that 25 percent of German women have faced physical or sexual violence from their partners.

Just once could Wente talk about the problems women face without dragging race and religion into it?

Wente goes downstream

2006-12-07T21:49:00.000-06:00

Wente bashes immigrants in Germany again. They don't push their kids, they hate women, they don't value education, their kids are lazy thugs who don't want to fit in. Blah blah blah.

Does Wente even know, or care, what a Hauptschule is? It is, again, a concept virtually unknown in North America. Most schools here have streams for students of different abilities (in my day, in Ontario, they were called "advanced", "general", and "basic"); Germany has entire schools for that purpose; the university-bound Gymnasia, the technical Realschulen, and the no-hoper Hauptschulen, which for all practical purposes educate kids for a lifetime of low-skill jobs and unemployment.

Hauptschulen have a higher number of kids from poorer, disadvantaged backgrounds, and not surprisingly have more problems. Furthermore, schools in the former East Germany have many more problems than those in the West, again caused by the region's high rates of poverty and unemployment.

Wente could have argued, (as some conservative West Germans do) that decades of communism have left easterners poor and lazy. She doesn't, probably not because it is a ridiculous argument, but because they are white, and in her mind beyond reproach. Cherchez le nonwhite.

Of course, the real problem is the ghastly German system of segregated schools, a holdover from the old European class snobbery, something that would be unthinkable in Canada and even in the United States tolerated only by subterfuge. Canadians believe in public education, and they believe in educating rich and poor, white and nonwhite, in the same schools. And by and large, they are succeeding.

The enemy within

2006-12-06T16:15:00.000-06:00

Wente thinks Muslims are the enemy within.

The ethnic enclaves have become a breeding ground for the enemy within. Wente is writing this about Germany, a country where such thinking can and has led to horrific results.

We could try to point out facts, like that less than half of foreign residents of Germany are Muslim, or that unemployment in Germany just hit a four-year low, or that Germany has recently tightened its social programs. But such trivialities would surely not faze Wente.

The enemy within comment exposes the ugliness that seldom strays far from the surface of Wente's writing. Ostensibly, she is talking about terrorists. In actuality, that is nonsense - Germany has not had an act of Islamic terrorism on its soil since the 1972 Olympics, and even that was not carried out by immigrants. Wente is really talking about all persons of colour, and the cultures they represent.

Muslims don't have to actually commit terror for Wente to regard them as an enemy within. They merely have to wear a headscarf, or any costume she doesn't like. They merely have to be different, to be someone raised in an upbringing different from Wente's. She regards her culture (American) as superior to all others, and other ethnicities are only deserving of equality if they abandon every sense of their identity, every fibre of who they are, everything they may believe in, to fit into her narrow American mold.

Immigrants in Canada and the United States do integrate better than those in Europe. That is because attitudes like Wente's - that immigrants are a sinister presence worthy only of distrust and contempt - are much more common in Europe than in North America. Europeans are much more likely to believe, as Wente does, that ethnicity determines nationality. Until recently, children born in Germany was not eligible for German citizenship unless they were ethnic Germans, a policy that would spark outrage in North America. And even now, Germany has trouble attracting the skilled, highly-educated immigrants who are enduring long waiting lists for the chance to get into North America. Why should they move to Germany, when citizenship and integration are doors deliberately slammed in their face?

Multiculturalism works. Europe's ethnic tensions are not the result of too much multiculturalism, but too little. And if North Americans listened to our own enemy within - ethnocentrics like Wente - we would share Europe's fate.

A hack attack

2006-11-26T19:31:00.000-06:00

Wente complains about the Québec-as-a-nation debate rearing its ugly head again.

No argument there. I don't know of anyone, except maybe Michael Ignatieff, who really wants to reopen the constitutional file. Wente could have ended her column after the first two thirds and it would have been pretty good.

But then, of course, she has to delve into hackery. Stephen Harper is a Conservative; therefore, everything he does must be good. So she gushes on how his parliamentary motion "drove a stake through the vampire's heart."

Only someone who slavishly worshiped the Conservative Party and everything it stands for would write something so obviously bizarre. Oh wait...

Privatize your ankle

2006-11-24T09:52:00.000-06:00

Wente tells a story, with the apparent implicit point that medicare should pay for private clinics.

Actually, several provinces do pay for private clinics. The issue is not whether they are publicly or privately run, the issue is whether they are run for a profit. If medicare pays for these, it has to pay for the clinics' profits as well as their operating costs, which are not any lower than public clinics. For this particular example, they are even higher, since this is the very clinic where doctors scrub floors.

Why does the private clinic offer instant surgery while the public system has multi-year waits? Very simple: the private clinic charges $20K an ankle. Funny how high fees make waiting lists vanish.

The bottom ideological point Wente is trying to argue is that punitive waiting times are an inevitable consequence of publicly-run medicare. That is false. Countries like France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, and Austria have no waiting times to speak of, and they manage with publicly-run systems.

France spends less on health care per capita than Canada does, yet it manages to have nearly twice as many acute-care hospital beds, and 50% more doctors, per capita, as does Canada.

And why is that? Because deficit hawks in Ottawa and Queen's Park made careers out of closing hospitals, shuttering beds, capping nurses' salaries, and cutting medical school enrollments in the early 1990s, convinced that "medical technology" had made actual practitioners obsolete. They were wrong. Patients are paying the price - and ideologues like Wente are neatly deflecting the blame.

Wente and autism

2006-11-21T10:37:00.000-06:00

Wente believes medicare should cover children's treatment for autism.

For someone who has long supported two-tier medicine, Wente sure makes plenty of demands on the public sector. Last week it was $3,000-a-dose cancer drugs, now autism.

The Autism Society of Canada estimates that 1 in 200 children born today will suffer this illness. Canada has 9.5 million children. Divide by 200, multiply by $50,000, and you get a price tag of $2.4 billion a year.

Only a nut would think that the private sector could possibly turn a profit out of funding autism treatment. Governments must supply the money, and that means what it always does: cutting other programs, or raising taxes.

Intellectual quackery

2006-11-20T10:35:00.000-06:00

Wente's latest rant is attacking alternative medicine.

Rather oddly, most of the evidence she cites is actually in favor of alternative medicine. She reports that alternative practitioners offer faster service, more personal care, and spend more time with patients than conventional doctors. Furthermore, in the only two case histories Wente cites - herself and her friend Pam - both patients got better!

Instead of medical quackery, let's take a look at intellectual quackery - specificially, Wente's old tactic of finding some crank nobody else has heard of to support her right-wing, ethnocentric views. In this case, the pigeon is Zhang Gongyao, a philosophy professor who has called for the end of TCM treatment in China.

The Chinese Ministry of Health refused. About 25 percent of medical care in China is based on TCM, amounting to more than 300 million visits per year. Not exactly a sign China is retreating from it.

Wente's little mind may be incapable of realizing this, but this is not an either/or situation. It is possible to combine conventional and alternative medicine. Millions of people do this, in both China and North America, and lead healthier lives as a result.

Medical dilemmas

2006-11-16T09:40:00.001-06:00

Wente writes about a cancer patient whose treatments are not covered by medicare, and is paying out of pocket.

Perhaps she wrote this as a way of boosting her own pet project, two-tier medicine. If so, she's undermined her case. For, of course, this is two-tier in action; the patient she describes is not forbidden from going outside the system for his care. And the results are not pretty. The patient is going into debt to save his life, just as is common in the United States.

Medicare should cover the cost of these treatments. But it is expensive to do so, and the Wente crowd would be the first to oppose a tax increase.

But why are the drugs so expensive in the first place? Wente carelessly assumes that this is due to the high costs of drug research and development. It is not.

The real reason is that there is no free market in pharmaceuticals. New drugs are under patent for twenty years, sometimes longer. The drug company has no competition. It is free to raise the price as high as it likes, and the patient must either find up to $3,000 a dose, or face sickness or even death.

Drug companies and their conservative apologists claim that they need these monopoly profits in order to fund research and development. This, however, does not explain why they spend twice as much on marketing as they do on research.

When patent protections are excessively generous, companies are taken off the treadmill of speeding new drugs to market as fast as possible before older patents expire. They are then free to squeeze ~~blood~~ money out of patients, pounding them with intense and sometimes misleading marketing, and footing them with the bill.

What research is done is distorted, with illnesses affecting a small number of people in rich countries getting more attention than deadly diseases that kill millions in poor countries.

Cutting patent protection down to ten years, from the current twenty or more, would almost certainly lower drug costs without hurting innovation. But Canada's hands are tied; largely at U.S. insistence, the 20-year protection is written into "free" trade agreements.

A misnomer if there ever was one; patent protection is a restriction on trade, not a freeing of it. Would Wente call for reopening the WTO and NAFTA to help out patients like these, and cut the costs faced by public health-care programs?

A true believer in free markets and lower taxes would say "yes". A partisan hack would say "no". Let's see what side Wente is on.

A climate of ignorance

2006-11-14T10:29:00.000-06:00

Once again Wente makes a fool of herself on global warming.

This is almost too easy. For starters, Wente combines three separate conservative critiques of global warming; 1) it isn't happening; 2) it's happening but is due to natural causes, and 3) it's man-made but isn't dangerous to human life.

Only #3 has even a smidgen of scientific respectability, but Wente is apparently unable to distinguish between them. In fact, of the various "smart people" she quotes, only one (Bjorn Lomborg) is an advocate of this position. The others (oil-funded cranks and tired old Thatcherites) are in camps #1 and #2.

Trust it to Wente to claim that conspiracy theorists are actually the lone brave souls defending the world against a conspiracy theory.

It's telling that Wente chooses to write yet another lame climate change denial column, instead of on the major news event of the week, the American midterm elections. Her hero George W. Bush got his ass kicked, but Wente, like him, is still living in fantasyland.

View from a bubble

2006-11-11T21:42:00.000-06:00

Wente's Remembrance Day column starts out as a fairly standard, if boring, family memoir about veterans. But it reveals its true colours at the end.

She writes of her childhood as a "still-patriotic age", implying that neither Canadians nor Americans today are patriotic anymore. Oh really?

She writes nobody argued about the morality of wars back then. It was a simpler and more innocent time. Wrong on two levels. First of all, if you fight and kill without hesitation, that makes you less innocent, not more. Second of all, neither of World Wars I and II were uncontroversial. Quebec largely opposed both and reacted furiously when conscription was imposed. The United States delayed entry into both for years because of its strong sense of isolationism.

She goes on to complain that war is no longer a universal experience, and that, apparently is a "loss". The estimated 650,000 Iraqis who have died in that country's conflict would beg to disagree. Rich, powerful countries no longer fight each other as they did decades ago; they pick smaller, weaker victims who do most of the suffering and dying.

And let's not forget that Margaret Wente supported the war in Iraq - a war that even she now admits was a mistake. It is easy for her, sitting comfortably in her cosseted newspaper office, to call for death and destruction to be rained on someone else's country.

It's not her, don't worry

2006-11-09T22:14:00.000-06:00

A couple readers have pointed out that one "Margaret Wente" has been appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Not to worry. Reader skdadl points out that this is actually the niece of the columnist.

Aunt Wente admitted, in a column last year, that her niece violently disagrees with almost everything I write, going so far as to not even read the elder Wente's columns.

Wish I'd done that.

Blaming the victim, again

2006-11-09T10:03:00.000-06:00

I can almost entirely agree with today's Wente on income trusts.

Except for her characterization of retail investors as dumb clucks. Elsewhere in the column, Wente admits that the real villain is the financial services industry, which basically swindled its customers. Yet her natural sympathy for the rich and powerful shines through, as it always does.

Wente, the faux citizen

2006-11-08T13:36:00.000-06:00

A good citizen pays attention to what is happening in their community and tries to keep informed. A faux citizen, like Margaret Wente, engages in silly screeds.

Wente believes that Toronto business taxes are too high, and this is the fault of the mayor and council. Would that be the same mayor and council who earlier this year approved a 40 percent cut in business taxes over the next 15 years?

As for gridlock, what does Wente propose be done about it? She has only contempt for public transit. Does she propose bulldozing existing homes and businesses to free up land for new expressways? Who is going to pay for them? Not the private sector - look up "407" in the rip-off file.

The province bailing out Toronto is not a favour it does for the city. It is a consequence of the policies of Wente's old hero, Mike Harris. It is he who downloaded expenses onto the municipalities without sharing tax revenue, and large cities were the hardest hit.

Wente might spare a word to curse Harris' megacity plan, which failed in nearly all its objectives. It did not hold down taxes or spending, it did not improve city services. It didn't even rein in the old left-wing downtown council Harris so despised - today the NDP holds the mayoralty and a plurality of councillors in the entire metro.

If Wente wants to take lessons from Calgary, she might want to start with its highly regarded public transit system, including inexpensively-built LRT lines and free downtown fares. Discovering oil wouldn't hurt either.

Wente the liar

2006-11-05T20:57:00.000-06:00

Wente continues her jihad against South Asian culture, saying, again, that it is backward and patriarchal compared to white culture. And once again she fails to present any actual evidence in support of her case, only anecdotes.

Is there a bias in South Asian culture that condones violence against women? Of course there is. Every culture in the world condones violence against women, bar none, and white Western culture is certainly no exception. If Wente believe that it is, then she, not feminists, is the one covering up for abusive husbands.

Indeed, for someone who claims to be writing all this in the name of feminism, Wente has a low opinion of feminists. Just listen to her various accusations:

Yet [Western feminists] also excuse and even endorse patriarchal behaviour -- so long as it's imported from somewhere else. Feminists (along with folks like Mr. Khalid) were among the leading proponents of introducing sharia law in Ontario.
you don't hear very many Western feminists standing up to argue for the right of South Asian and Muslim women to not be slapped around by their husbands
Western feminists endorse the veil as an instrument of female empowerment.

Wente does not quote a single actual feminist who really believes any of these things. Real feminists argue for the right of all women, not just South Asians, to not be "slapped around by their husbands." I know of no Western feminist who has endorsed the veil - at most, merely saying that women should not be forbidden from wearing it. And as for sharia law, that is a flat lie. Feminist groups led the successful campaign opposing it.

The reactionary imam she quoted, M.D. Khalid, endorsed Stockwell Day in the 2000 election, not exactly in agreement with most Canadian feminists, unless you count Wente.

Not only is Wente a hypocrite and ethnocentrist, she has now revealed herself a deliberate liar as well. She is pounding away at a straw man - or straw woman - who simply does not exist, and Wente knows it.

Who beats who?

2006-11-02T12:19:00.000-06:00

One of Margaret Wente's favorite themes is to equate women's rights with white ethnocentrism. In her mind, white culture is the only one that respects women's rights. All others - aboriginal, black, Muslim, and now South Asian are patriarchal and abuse women.

She is able to get away with this because of the stereotypes that these cultures are backward and retrograde compared to white Western culture. It may seem an alien concept to Wente, but how about discarding stereotypes for a moment and looking at actual facts?

51% of Canadian women have been victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence since age 16;
Nearly 30,000 Canadian women report spousal violence each year. And that's just the tip of the iceberg - nobody knows how many cases go unreported.
In Wente's favorite country, the United States, 22 percent of women report being a victim of domestic violence. Fully 60% of the population knows someone who is a victim.

Canada is 87 percent white, the United States 75 percent.

For all Wente's pontificating, she has never presented any hard data showing a correlation between ethnicity and domestic violence. An intellectually honest journalist would try to ascertain the facts before casually stereotyping a community, but Wente is neither intellectual, nor honest, nor a journalist. Her agenda is ethnocentrism, and she uses women's rights as a club to bash nonwhites.

When it comes to white women, Wente's feminism disappears. Another of her regular themes is the so-called excesses of Western feminism. She loves quoting anti-feminists, from Anne Cools to Christina Hoff Sommers. She repeatedly claims that Western culture makes fun of men and masculine virtues.

On Google, Wente's most highly ranked article jeers at Naomi Wolf's claim that she was sexually harassed as an undergraduate. And yet, Wente accuses South Asians of being the ones who minimize the problems of women, or ostracize women who report abuse.

Across Canada today, there are thousands of women being beaten. They come in all ages, sizes, and colours. But Wente has no real sympathy for them. They are not people to her, not human beings each with a unique story. If they are dark-skinned, they are political fodder, weapons to use in her campaign to divide ethnic groups against each other, to set fear and suspicion between the nation's many cultures. If they are white-skinned, they mean nothing to her.

This is not journalism. It is not commentary. It is hackery, and both she and the newspaper that employs her should be ashamed of themselves.

Mind your own business

2006-10-31T08:47:00.000-06:00

Everyone among us knows of the gossipy old woman - the busybody who is always nosing into everyone's personal lives. The Marie character on Everybody Loves Raymond, although a caricature, reflects real people whom nearly all of us have known at one time or another.

Well, here is a real-life example: Margaret Wente. Last week she was telling women what they can and can't wear. Now she is setting herself up as judge on whether or not they can have children.

Here's a challenge for Wente. Go to Vernon, B.C, and tell Felicia Simms, to her face, that her children should have been aborted.

This column is full of the self-serving hypocrisy that marks so much of Wente's writing. I don't begrudge the expense these poor infants will incur. Bullshit. Why would she even be writing this column if she didn't grudge the expense? She wants her tax cuts so badly that disabled children must be aborted to pay for them.

Wente can't resist mentioning that the children's mother is on social assistance. You can almost taste the upper-class snobbery; contempt for the rabble who dare make reproductive decisions for themselves. They're supposed to be cleaning Wente's nails for slave wages, not having families and living their own lives.

A woman's right to choose to end a pregnancy is a precious right. But it only applies to her own pregnancy. Not to anyone else's.

Yawn

2006-10-28T18:00:00.000-05:00

Wente doesn't know much about technology.

For once she actually admits when she doesn't know something. I wish she'd do that on other subjects.

It's getting warm in Maseru

2006-10-27T17:38:00.000-05:00

Wente chatted today about the veil and global warming, again.

This is frankly getting repetitive. Wente says nothing that she hasn't already stated in two columns on the subject. So instead let me point out this Karen Armstrong article, probably the best piece I've seen so far on the niqab.

On global warming, she claims that reducing greenhouse gases would require going to the economic standards of Lesotho! And yet, apparently, it's environmentalists who are the scaremongers. Never mind that the Kyoto treaty calls for cuts back to 1990 levels. Last I heard, Canada was well ahead of Lesotho at that time.

Global warming and hot air

2006-10-26T10:31:00.000-05:00

Wente thinks that, since Canada produces only 2% of carbon dioxide emissions, any cuts it makes will have no meaning.

Yes, and since one ballot rarely swings an election, it's not worth voting. Or since one person's taxes are barely a blip on total government revenues, there's no point in paying them.

This birdbrain is a National Newspaper Award-winning columnist?

Veiled hostility

2006-10-24T17:38:00.000-05:00

Can Wente ever give it a rest?

Today's column is basically a repeat of two weeks ago.

Wente writes For many people, [the niqab] stands for the deliberate rejection of Western norms. They argue that it is a political symbol as much as a religious one. Funny how everyone has an opinion on what the niqab means except the people actually wearing it.

We are seeing the rise of reverse political correctness, where inferences are drawn from even the tiniest statements or practices. Ideological hawks monitor people's words, and now, their clothing. To a sane person, a niqab is a sign of a particular cultural attitude; but to the new ideological thought police, it is a sign saying "I hate the West".

Wente can cite no survey correlating niqab wearing with radical or extremist political views. She just assumes things, inferring words into people's minds. The niqab furor says more about those who oppose it than those who wear it. Fundamentally, it is about being uncomfortable with people who are visibly different, or seem alien.

If you don't like the niqab, don't look at it. Why is that so hard?

Boycott Wente

2006-10-23T09:34:00.000-05:00

Weekend Wente mocks consumer boycotts.

An old tactic of right-wingers is to find the most extreme, easy-to-caricature leftist position they can find and make it sound like the mainstream of progressive thinking. So Wente waxes eloquent about the United Church's anti-bottled water campaign, or a British bishop's criticism of air travel.

But right-wingers have plenty of silly ideas of their own. How about that Globe columnist, Margaret Wente, who believes that Janet Jackson makes teens have oral sex, and that 50 Cent makes black people commit murders. Not to mention her belief, until recently, that global warming is a myth.

There's enough material to come up with an entire blog devoted to mocking Wente.

Stars in her eyes

2006-10-19T11:25:00.000-05:00

Wente snarks at the Star for infighting.

Really, who cares? It's not as if the Globe has never had infighting.

The fact remains that for decades the Star has enjoyed a higher circulation than the Globe. It is the only liberal paper in a liberal city, with three conservative competitors. You do the math.

Oh say does that star-spangled delusion yet wave

2006-10-17T13:25:00.000-05:00

Wente's latest paean to the United States.

If a Somali immigrant wrote a similar piece saying how Somalia is much better than Canada, Wente would be the first grumbing they should have stayed there. But it's okay for American immigrants to moan about home.

Even that might be okay if she recited real facts instead of ideological stereotypes. As usual, she does not.

...anyone can start out in a log cabin, or wheeling a pushcart, or fiddling around with computer code in a garage, and wind up on top. These three ideas — immigrant vitality, entrepreneurship and meritocracy — are the ones that set the United States (and Canada) apart from every other modern state.

Actually, social mobility in the US, once much greater than Europe, is now much less. See this article in the conservative Economist. It is not particularly common for the children of poor migrant Mexican workers to rise to become CEOs. Much less, in fact, than it was for the children of Irish or Italian migrants a century ago.

As Europe struggles with its immigrants, America's immigrants will be charging toward the mainstream. This is rich. The immigrants Europe is struggling with are, of course, largely of North African or Turkish origin. The chief divide between the communities is the belief that the Islamic religion is fundamentally alien and un-assimilable - a belief that Wente herself has done her share to promote.

The problems faced by Europe's Arab communities - weakening family structures, high rates of crime, barriers to the labour market - are also found in large chunks of America's native-born population. Life expectancy for African-Americans in Harlem, for example, is barely ahead of Bangladesh, and well behind Cuba. Has Wente forgotten the horrors of poverty unearthed by Hurricane Katrina? It is hard to imagine something like that happening in Canada or Europe. (Then again, Wente believes that gangsta rap causes black crime.)

And for all [America's] social problems, they're far better ones to have than Europe's. You mean the health care system, most expensive in the world, but barely available to nearly 20 percent of the population? Or the world's most corrupt and lavishly paid CEOs? Or is it most unequal income distribution, highest infant mortality, lowest life expectancy, highest rate of teenage pregnancy, and longest working hours in the developed world?

If you hate this country and love the United States so much, what the hell are you doing here?

They dark, they poor; ergo, they corrupt

2006-10-16T10:35:00.000-05:00

Who among us does not feel pity for the plight of Africa? croons Wente. The answer is easy: Wente herself clearly does not. In column after column, including this one, she has shown only withering contempt for the continent and its people.

But of course, Wente doesn't like to admit, even to her fans, just how vicious and ethnocentric she is. So she picks an easier target: celebrities who have tried to help Africa or publicize its problems. It's certainly easier to pick on a wealthy celebrity than a poor AIDS orphan, even though Wente's natural instinct is to side with the rich. In any case, Wente's real goal is to denigrate any effort to help Africa that doesn't come from either conservative think tanks or the Bush administration. Never mind, of course, that those two have come up with nothing more than punishing structural adjustment programs and silly abstinence-only hectoring.

She repeats the same old lies conservative love to spin about Africa. Africa has gotten poorer, in spite of half-a-trillion dollars' worth of Western aid. Said half-trillion dollars is over a period of nearly fifty years. Crunch the numbers and it works out to about $14 per person per year. A good portion of that was military aid during the Cold War, funding right-wing dictators in order to stave off left-wing ones. Most of the civilian aid was, and still is, tied to imports from the donor country. Nor have donors done all they could to stamp out corruption and improve governance; they have, and still do, tried to manipulate it to their advantage in order to win concessions for their own companies.

This is not to stay that Western aid is all Africa needs; ultimately, Africans must find a path to development that works for them on their own. But Wente is not interested in a thoughtful discussion of Africa's problems.

She only cares about her stereotypes and her polemics.

Let them eat snide remarks.

Out, damned spot in my eye

2006-10-12T14:23:00.000-05:00

Wente does what she likes best: criticizing nonwhites.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to oppose the niqab. The most basic are theological; there is no mention of niqabs in the Koran or the hadiths. They were added centuries later, much like celibacy in the Catholic Church. Even today, they are not worn most of the Muslim world. A genuine case exists that they are a symbol of the subjugation of women.

But if the niqab is a symbol of patriarchy, that would be as true in Saudi Arabia as in Canada. Much more, in fact, since in Saudi Arabia thuggish morality police force women to wear it, whereas in Canada it is to a large degree voluntary. It should not matter what country you are wearing it in for it to be right or wrong.

But Wente is not really interested in improving the status of women worldwide. That would be feminist (or, in her mind, man-hating). To her it doesn't really matter if darky women are oppressed in "their" countries. What matters is how they behave in a white country. She quotes a London Times op-ed:

If you don't like living here and don't want to integrate, then what the hell are you doing here?

and adds her own spin:

There is a growing sentiment that immigrants should be more like "us"

"Us", of course, means white people, and "immigrants" means nonwhite people.

Now Wente has never, as far as I know, opposed immigration. To her, nonwhites are welcome to stay in Canada, provided that they dress, talk, eat, listen to the same music, and make themselves indistinguishable from whites. Eating McDonald's and watching Friends reruns is Canadian, but nibbling on chapatis and teaching your kids Punjabi is not. The niqab does not originate in Europe or a European-settled country, therefore it is foreign, and inferior.

A key implication of this idea is that immigrants of colour, no matter how long they may have been in Canada, are not "true" Canadians. They are mere guests in the country, who must be deferential to their white hosts, never complaining or rocking the boat. The key differential is not birth, but ethnicity. A third-generation Canadian of Pakistani origin is an immigrant, while an white immigrant from the United States (such as Wente herself) is every inch a pure laine Canadian.

It logically follows that nonwhites, in spirit if not in law, are second-class citizens. No one would dream of telling Wente to return to her country of birth because of her decidedly un-Canadian right-wing views, but Wente shows no hesitation in telling niqab wearers to leave the country because she doesn't like to look at them.

Wente concludes with please, ladies, take off your veil. If the veil is being worn voluntarily, it is none of Wente's business what other women wear. If the woman is being coerced into it, Wente's pontificating isn't going to make any difference.

The Wente transit dance

2006-10-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

Step 1: Cheer on politicians who gut funding for public transit.
Step 2: Complain that public transit is slow and inconvenient.
Step 3: Return to step 1.

Wente whines about Toronto transit. I only read the first third of the article (the only part outside the subscription firewall) but it's enough to get the gist.

I'm not even sure Wente's route was the best for her location. She seems to have taken the Queen 501 streetcar all the way from around Main Street to Spadina Avenue, and walked the rest of the way. I won't swear to this, but would it not have been quicker to take the Main 64 bus up to the Bloor-Danforth line and take that across town? She could then have taken the Spadina LRT all the way to Front Street and avoided nearly all her walk.

More fundamentally, Wente misses the reason public transit exists. It is not to provide a complete replacement for the car. Rather, it is there to provide an alternative to the high cost of owning a car. Car ownership costs most people up to $10,000 a year in depreciation, gasoline, insurance, parking, fees, repairs, and maintenance; transit is barely a tenth of that sum. Used cars have less depreciation but much more in repair and maintenance costs; for those on low incomes, they are an option best avoided.

For the very poor, the TTC is a lifeline. When service is cut, their lives are affected for the worse. For Wente, riding the TTC is just a fun experiment, and poor service something to jeer at; for us plebeians, it's a lot more serious.

Even for middle-class suburbanites who can afford cars, downtown remains off limits. Virtually everyone I know who works downtown drives to a subway or GO station and rides the rest of the way. Perhaps Wente gets free parking at the Globe; ordinary mortals pay $200 a month, or more.

The Lakeshore GO line alone takes almost as many people into downtown as the entire Gardiner Expressway, many of whom own cars. If GO didn't exist, Wente's 20 minute car commute would be a lot longer.

Update: Steve Munro has more.

Duck this column

2006-10-09T15:32:00.000-05:00

Something about ducks. Whatever point this column was supposed to have escapes me.

Tweedledum and tweedledee

2006-10-05T10:07:00.000-05:00

Wente gloats that Dalton McGuinty is not that different from Mike Harris.

Not exactly a surprise, really; this is why Wente endorsed McGuinty in the 2003 election. Her meme is, presumably, that hard-right policies are inevitable, because, in Wente's mind, they are what's best.

Except of course that they're clearly not - witness the overcrowded ERs and school board fiscal crises. Maybe Bob Rae wasn't so bad after all.

This is the liberal hour

2006-10-03T09:51:00.000-05:00

Wente's assorted snark on the Liberal leadership race.

It hardly seems worthwhile to bother refuting this column, since it has no real point. It is just a motley series of snide remarks. Nonetheless, as is usual for Wente, it takes a few liberties with the facts.

[Bob Rae's] real problem is that the people with the clearest memories of his time in office would rather vote for a purple-bottomed baboon. That may be true for conservatives like Wente, but for a Liberal, comparing Bob Rae with Mike Harris is really no contest. Rae is the NDP's version of Pierre Trudeau; deeply unpopular when he left office, but steadily rising in esteem afterward, even as his party tumbled under a hapless successor. Rae is now a leading candidate for the Liberal leadership, while Harris had to stay out of the 2004 Conservative leadership race.

[Stéphane Dion's] biggest problem is that he's French. And west of Montreal, that spells out N-O S-A-L-E. How soon we forget Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney. This kind of Central Canadian elitism is the very thing that infuriates Western Canadians.

It's time to draft Belinda.. Odd attitude for someone who wrote a column snarking at Belinda just last week.

Wente Family Values

2006-09-30T20:25:00.000-05:00

Wente thinks traditional, heterosexual married, non-adoptive families are best for children. Exactly how she knows this she doesn't say. The only actual study she cites compares Ozzie-and-Harriet style families to divorcees and single-parent families. What relevance does that have for adoption or same-sex couples?

None, of course. And Wente's penchant for junk science is here in all its glory. Biological parents share half their genes with their kids. That means they're hard-wired to look out for them. It means nothing of the sort. Humans in general are hardwired to take care of children they believe are theirs. Usually this is through biology, but it can just as easily be adoption. Or does Wente (who, it should be noted, has no children of her own) think adoptive parents don't truly love their children?

The nuclear family is often painted by social conservatives as the mainstay of human society for millenia, but as usual the truth is more complicated. In fact, the model of man as breadwinner, wife as stay-at-home cook/maid is a largely twentieth-century invention. For most of history, entire extended families lived together. A child might be raised as much by grandmothers and aunts as by his or her own mother. Men and women (and frequently, children too) worked side by side in the fields. Nor were family arrangements always benevolent; biological parents regularly sold their children into slavery or abandoned them in times of famine or other hardship. (Remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? It didn't come out of a vacuum.)

The implications of Wente's argument render it absurd. For if children need to be raised by their biological parents, then any form of adoption or divorce becomes something to be discouraged. The results are clear; shotgun marriages, broken homes, wife and child abuse, pointless suffering.

There was a time when, indeed, millions did live this way. But we have moved beyond that kind of life, and recognize that people should be free to choose the family structure that works for them, not have sanctimonious busybodies like Wente dictate one.

Even a stopped clock...

2006-09-28T09:21:00.000-05:00

I fully agree with today's Wente. There is nothing positive I have to say about Joe Volpe, Belinda Stronach, and most odiously of all, Conrad Black.

What's interesting is what's not in the column. Two of Wente's three targets are Liberal, and the third owns newspapers that are direct competitors of Wente's Globe.

Would Wente be snarking at Stronach if the latter was still a Conservative? Somehow I doubt it.

Math Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Wente

2006-09-26T10:53:00.000-05:00

A common meme in conservative circles is to crow that educational standards are too low, and schools spend too much time teaching students to think and not enough on rote learning and obeying orders. Such is today's Wente.

To answer that, here is a simple problem:

A carpenter has a board 200 inches long and 12 inches wide. He makes 4 identical shelves and still has a piece of board 36 inches long left over. How long is each shelf?

This is really the essence of mathematics: using basic tools - division and subtraction, in this case - to solve real-world problems.

Notice here that memorizing the times tables and how to long-divide and add and subtract with pencil and paper is not enough. If you do not understand the principles of what to do, the calculator will not help you. Neither will rote learning. The actual calculations are not the hard part - figuring out what the calculation should be is.

Any Grade 7 student should be able to solve this problem, but I'd guess even many adults in North America cannot. This is a real issue, but getting into silly ideological wars over whether rote learning or calculators should be used will not solve it.

A more likely explanation for Asian schools' better performance in mathematics is cultural. In Asia, the mathematician or scientist is admired and honoured. In North America, he (and it is, overwhelmingly, "he") is looked down upon, dismissed as a "nerd", regarded as a social misfit with ugly glasses and buck teeth.

Wente dates 1989 as the beginning of the decline in American math standards, but Asian schools were outperforming Americans even before that. Usually conservatives love to have culture explain everything, but maybe that only applies to the culture of dark-skinned peoples.

Now she cares about the poor

2006-09-26T10:29:00.000-05:00

Wente gets to gloat about the World Health Organization's policy reversal over DDT. Wente has never liked environmentalists, and finding an issue like this where they really were wrong must be making her head explode with delight.

But as is usual with Wente, she contradicts herself. She blames Western aid agencies for the spread of malaria, saying they refused to fund DDT-spraying programs. Since when has Wente believed aid agencies should even exist, let alone fund anything? In column after column, Wente has decried corruption in Africa, accused Western governments of perpetuating it by supplying the continent with aid or debt relief, and jeered at activists like Bono or Bob Geldof.

Apparently forgiving onerous debt burdens, funding schools, building roads, or giving out condoms are a waste of aid money, but DDT spraying is an exception, just because environmentalists used to oppose it.

We tortured Goldstein

2006-09-21T09:53:00.000-05:00

Today Wente calls the media to task for its treatment of Maher Arar. There is nothing in the column I disagree with. But there is plenty more that needs to be said, and isn't.

The Maher Arar case is an inevitable byproduct of the "war on terror", a largely bogus construct designed to fuel public hysteria for the pursuit of political ends. It is what Orwell depicted as Goldstein: the shadowy enemy of all that is good, the object of mass fear and hate, relentlessly pursued, always defeated, but who never seems to actually disappear. As John Mueller pointed out in a recent Foreign Affairs article:

the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaedalike operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year...the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000)

Al Qaeda isn't a giant, shadowy organization with tentacles poking all over the West, ready to kill or maim. It is nothing more than a small group of extremists in northwest Pakistan who got away with one big strike and several small ones. It inspires various amateur groups around the world, including a few socially alienated second-generation Muslim immigrants in Western countries, who more often than not are foiled by law enforcement well before their planned attacks.

For the world as a whole, the toll from violent deaths comes overwhelmingly from wars and civil wars. The war in DR Congo alone took over four million lives, or more than a thousand times as many as have died from terrorism in all human history.

But people don't think logically with respect to terrorism. It is an unknown that can seemingly strike anywhere, it undermines our sense of safety. So we let our imaginations run wild, worrying about a terrorist under every bush. We vow to move heaven and earth, engage in whatever war it takes, undermine any civil liberty, torture any suspect to give us our elusive sense of safety.

Is Islamic terrorism a threat? Yes. But it is not a major threat. It only feels like one. American foreign policy since 2001 has been a giant emotional overreaction, like a homeowner maniacally spraying his entire neighborhood with insecticide because he saw a single roach on his dinner table.

And Margaret Wente is one of Canada's leading scare-mongers. She has repeatedly stereotyped and stigmatized Muslim immigrants. She has cheerleaded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and called for more human rights abuses there. She has done her best to whip up a climate of fear and distrust, where every Muslim is looked at with suspicion, every illegal imprisonment justified as a sacrifice needed to beat ~~Goldstein~~ the nefarious Islamofascists.

Who knows how many more like Maher Arar there are now, or will be in future?

Guns don't kill people; blacks do

2006-09-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

I could almost agree with today's Wente: random murders happen, and they tend to set off moral panics way out of proportion to the actual loss of life.

But suppose Kimveer Gill had been black or Muslim. Does anyone believe Wente would have written a just-stay-calm column like today's?

Compare today's piece with Wente's reaction to the Boxing Day shooting, where the shooters were black. She waxed eloquent on Jamaica's "violent culture", claimed flatly that "80-percent or more of the city's gun crime is Jamaica-related" and went on to blame that old punching bag, gangsta rap music.

Margaret Wente's grand sociological theory: gangsta rap causes crime! Somehow blaming actual weapons for crime is a "moral panic", but blaming CD players and radios is not. Do the new iPods fire bullets too?

Millions of people listen to rap, and they don't start shooting people, but in a December 2005 column, Wente had an answer for that too. It's okay for whites to listen to rap, she allows; they're civilized at heart and just listen to violent lyrics to blow off steam. But black people are different; apparently their culture is so dysfunctional that merely listening to 50 Cent music turns them into murderers. Wente quoted two American black conservatives in support of this point, but that doesn't make it any less offensive. Or any less nonsensical.

(Wente has a particular animus for 50 Cent; she once freaked out merely because he sang about oral sex.)

The bottom line: moral panics are perfectly fine with Wente as long as they target darker-skinned people, but let the panickers move to the ideological left, and she gets on her high horse and preaches about "logic".

Hypocrite.

God save our gracious whatchamacallit

2006-09-17T16:39:00.000-05:00

So Wente doesn't like Adrienne Clarkson. What else is new?

Instead of the colourless, virtually unknown governors-general Canada had had for a quarter century, we got someone who actually behaved like a head of state. But, of course, Clarkson was a left-winger (she even worked for the CBC, the Commie Broadcasting Corporation itself!) and even worse, a nonwhite. Wente thus has nothing but snark for her.

She deliberately twists Clarkson's words - saying the former governor-general "compares herself to Tolstoy", when it is clear from Wente's own quotes that Clarkson was using Tolstoy as an analogy, not claiming to match Tolstoy's prowess as a writer.

More ugly is the implication that Clarkson disapproves of her successor, Michaëlle Jean. How does Wente know this? Merely because Clarkson says her own appointment was painstakingly vetted by the prime minister's office. That "implies", Wente writes, that Clarkson believes Jean was not similarly vetted, so must be unqualified.

It means nothing of the sort, of course. It means Wente thinks Jean is unqualified. This is what Freudians call "projection". Wente would admittedly not be alone in this opinion, but she lacks the intellectual courage to come out and say so.

It would be nice if Wente were to write a column which actually had a point, not a motley collection of snide remarks. (It would be even better if she stopped writing altogether, but we can't have everything.)

Those funny accents are so cute

2006-09-15T14:48:00.000-05:00

Trust it to Margaret Wente to put ethnic stereotypes in a column about nail bars.

Wente doesn't just quote her Vietnamese-born stylist, she quotes the stylist's accent, by conveniently omitting verbs. "My English not good...your eyebrows beautiful...". And of course, Wente can't resist describing how stereotypically petite the stylist is.

To Wente, nonwhite people are a strange, exotic breed. Even when she has praise for them, she has to emphasize whatever can be laughed at, whatever can be found unusual or different.

And if she wonders why immigrants flock to small businesses, one very good reason is their exclusion from the formal labour market. Canadian employers are notorious for insisting on "Canadian experience" for even the most highly educated immigrants. This leads to the phenomenon of Indians with medical degrees driving taxis in Toronto while Canada has a doctor shortage.

Self-employment is not always a path to riches. If one divides profit by hours worked, it can be well below the legal minimum wage. Sweatshops, where owners exploit workers with ultra-low wages, are illegal in Canada, but self-exploitation is not. So we have Vietnamese immigrants working 80-hour weeks cleaning newspaper columnists' nails, for ridiculously low prices. Does Wente really believe they would be doing that if they had any other choice?

Wente pays $38 for a mani-pedi to an immigrant struggling to pay the rent, a service that once cost much more. To her, that's justice.

Wente's trip to Damascus

2006-09-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

Margaret Wente now believes that nothing can stop global warming!

That's certainly news, coming from her. Wente has spent years denying that global warming exists, and that there is a scientific consensus on that fact. She has approvingly quoted cranks who tried to deny the evidence with junk science. She arguably plagiarized a John Tierney column to make the same point.

As a matter of fact, it is indeed too late to stop global warming. Why was action not taken earlier? In no small part because of the denialism of gasbag conservative pundits like Wente.

Jimmy Carter's 1977 energy plan, beaten back by Big Oil, would have left the United States self-sufficient in oil by now. Joe Clark's much-maligned 1979 gas tax plan might have cut Canada's energy use by the same amount. We'll never know now.

Wente says politicians should become more scientifically literate. As DeSmogBlog puts it: would it be too obvious to add newspaper columnists to that list?

Would you like freedom fries with your crow?

2006-09-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

Margaret Wente now writes: It was in October, 2003, when I began to realize the U.S. mission in Iraq was probably doomed.

Ha, bloody, ha.

There were plenty who realized that in October 2002, a full year earlier. And Wente had nothing but contempt for those, alternately sliming them as lefties, peaceniks, appeasers, Saddam apologists, and (to her) the strongest epithet of all, "anti-American".

The leftists were right and the conservatives were wrong. And the price has been terrible. In July of this year alone, three thousand perished in Iraq's civil war, a war the American invasion set off and which the Americans are powerless to stop. Military intelligence has concluded that Anbar province, which takes up a third of Iraq's land area, is already lost.

But Wente lacks the humility to simply admit that she was wrong. The Iraq quagmire is squarely the fault of those who implemented the policies she cheerleaded in 2003. So she puts the blame where she always does: on a non-white people. The Middle East is a profoundly tribal place. For a Western secular individualist, its deepest values...are almost impossible to comprehend. The colossally foolish American mistake was to think that the Iraqis, after all, are really just like us.

They are not like us, Wente believes. "We" whites are the proud, democratic, peaceful people, the kind who would never invade a country halfway around the world on a pretext long since proven to be bogus. No, it is they, the furriners, who are "tribal", violent, primitive, barbaric.

Having overthrown a dictator, would the United States proceed to disband the invaded country's army and police as well, virtually guaranteeing the breakdown of law and order? Of course not. Westerners respect the right of self-determination; they would never continue to construct 14 permanent military bases in a land where surveys show the people have wanted their troops out for over two years.

Americans would surely never use white-phosphorus weapons on civilians. Their constitution is founded on liberty; they would never arrest suspects and hold them without a trial. And we cannot imagine, of course, that Americans would sexually torture prisoners, at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else.

After all, we're not tribal.

Exterminate the brutes

2006-09-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

Last week Wente posited that Canada is too "nice" in Afghanistan.

Wente loves to sit on a high horse and sneer at anyone who has a sense of compassion towards their fellow human beings. We're too nice, apparently. Presumably, we should bomb villages indiscriminately and massacre anyone who looks like a terrorist in order to prevent another 9/11.

Is brute force was the only thing the brute Afghans understand? The Soviet Communists certainly thought so. The Red Army committed massacres on a nationwide scale. Villagers were bombed, shelled, gassed, or bayoneted one by one. Suspected mujahdeen rebels were tortured; among the favourite techniques were electric shocks, slow pulling out of fingernails, and hanging women by their arms and beating their legs. Perhaps most hideously of all, the country was dotted with land mines disguised as toys, with the deliberate aim of luring young children to death or dismemberment.

Afghanistan had 15 million people in 1978; a decade later it was down to 10 million. Fully half of the world's refugee population - four million people - was Afghan.

And did all this savagery win the war with the Islamist rebels? Quite obviously not. The Soviet Union no longer exists, in no small part due to its Afghan misadventure, but the Islamists are still there. Wente's own column has the answer to why: killing off civilians is bound to alienate the locals. Islamic extremism became as powerful as it is in no small part in fury at the viciousness of the infidel invaders of the day. Years later, Osama bin Laden would boast that, having taken down one superpower, he was ready to go for the other one.

Wente has on occasion pontificated on how the Soviet Union showed that state intervention in the economy doesn't work. Would that she paid as much attention to its lessons in counterinsurgency.

Ahem

2006-09-14T15:51:00.000-05:00

Why have there been no posts recently? Because I went on vacation, and forgot to post as much before heading out. Sorry to anyone who came by looking for a refutation and didn't find one - I should have posted an away message first.

I will be posting rebuttals to Wente's recent columns over the next few days. Promise.

Who is this person?

2006-08-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias thinks I shouldn't hide behind anonymity. I'm not sure what difference it makes, but just to make her happy you can now see my full name and photo (don't laugh too loud, please) by clicking the About the author link.

Wente's lobster dinner

2006-08-27T22:00:00.000-05:00

Weekend Wente decides to make fun of animal-rights activists, but then towards the end of her piece sounds like she half-agrees with them, going so far as to compare the treatment of pigs today with that of slaves last century.

No joke, she really wrote that.

This demonstrates a key part of Wente's writing style. Her dislike of anything that sounds liberal or progressive is so intense that she has to make digs at them even when she is in agreement.

In any case, Wente glosses over the complexities of the story as usual. Clearwater's "lobster condos" were actually more a marketing stunt than a serious attempt at being humane to lobsters. Chicago's ban on foie gras may be easy to mock, but it didn't make much actual difference. Most Illinois restaurants had already stopped selling it, as people weren't buying after word got around.

More Medicare muddles

2006-08-24T15:36:00.000-05:00

Today Wente hosted a question-and-answer on medicare. Q&A sessions, by their nature, do not have the deliberately provocative tone Wente uses in her columns. Nonetheless, glimpses of her ideology, and the mindset behind them, can be seen through the cracks.

Wente appears to support the following proposals:

Privatize most clinics and hospitals, and have them bill the government directly;
Introduce user fees, perhaps with an exemption for the poor;
Allow people to use private insurance to get faster treatment than in the public system.
Weaken unions in the health-care sector (presumably through said privatization).

Wente insists she doesn't support a privatized American-style system (a bit surprising, given her general enthusiasm for all things American). She cites as models France, Australia, Sweden, and other European countries, all of which, she says, have elements of the above in their health-care systems.

Except that that most of these countries have a higher, not lower, percentage of public money in health care, as these figures show. Canada has 70 percent of health-care costs funded publicly. France (ranked best in the world by a WHO study) covers 78 percent, Sweden 85 percent. Australia does spend less than Canada does, but its performance is also worse; the same WHO study ranked Australia 32nd in the world, while Canada was 30th and the US 37th.

Wente's other points fare no better. Private clinics are not actually illegal in Canada. The stipulation is that they must either bill Medicare entirely, or not at all. It is combining the two that is verboten, since that would enable funding a private system with public dollars.

What about user fees? These have been extensively studied. Most research shows that the users who cut back most are the poor and the chronically ill. Furthermore, what is sacrificed is not urgent care, but preventive care. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but then, Wente believes that preventive medicine is a crock.

The most widely debated issue in the Canadian health sector, is, of course, whether to allow richer people to purchase private insurance for fast-track care. Here again the appeal to Europe is not entirely correct. The UK and Australia do indeed offer faster service in their private systems. But not France or Germany; they barely have wait times at all, even in their public systems, and the quality of care is as high in the public as in the private system.

So let's offer Wente a deal. You like French health care? Fine. Then give Canada the entire French package, and get rid of wait times across the board, for the rich and poor.

Canadians will never accept a private system as an express train for the rich while the majority remains trapped in cruel waiting lists.

An overweight argument

2006-08-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

I actually agree with the substance of today's Wente. Obesity is rising because people are eating more and exercising less than they once did, and parents give their children too much junk food. Poor people are indeed more likely to be overweight than the well-off.

But as usual, Wente can't resist making her trademark digs - "Latte Land", and imaginary forces of political correctness that are supposedly covering up the problem. In fact, Wente herself has done her share on this score.

She once approvingly cited a book called The Obesity Myth and grumbled about the proselytizers and the demonizers, the moralizers and the food prudes who warned about the dangers of obesity, and whose ranks she now appears to have joined. In a later column, Wente again denied the presence of an obesity epidemic, and wrote public campaigns nagging fat people to slim down are useless. If that were true, why bother with today's column nagging parents?

You can't help but see the pattern - when Wente believed that obesity mostly afflicted rich people, she churned out columns denying or minimizing it, and told food-naggers to buzz off. Now that she sees it as a poor people's problem, moral hectoring is back in vogue.

Doctors should scrub floors

2006-08-22T10:19:00.000-05:00

Margaret Wente has found the solution to Canada's health care funding crisis. Doctors should scrub floors! Why has no one thought of that before? That's just the thing to stop med school grads emigrating to the US!

I can see the recruiting posters now. Sign up for medical school and get your dream job scrubbing floors! We offer the newest and most exciting soaps, and the most technologically advanced mops in the world!

Maybe we could run ads in US medical journals aimed at Canadian emigrés. Bored with the best research labs in the world? Tired of all that fancy-ass medical technology? Come back to Canada and scrub floors!

That "bureaucratic" public health-care system wastes a mind-boggling $15 an hour on janitors. Free of "union costs" and "rigid work rules", the private clinics can hire doctors to do the job for as little as $200 an hour.

Isn't capitalism great?

Tied in knots over profiling

2006-08-20T16:25:00.000-05:00

Wente's latest column is a bit incoherent. At first she talks favourably about racial profiling, but then admits that El Al does things differently, finally winds up by bashing British Muslims. Let's deal with her points in turn.

Racial profiling. Ah yes, the old conservative dream: let Muslims suffer in those hideous airport queues, while white people smoothly sail through. In answer, take a look at this photo:

The Iranian flags and T-shirts give away what country these people hail from, but not their physical appearance. Religion has no skin colour. There are more than a billion Muslims in the world and they come in all colours. Airport staffers cannot tell the difference between southern Italians and Arab North Africans, or between Indian Hindus and Muslims, or between Indonesians and Filipinos.

Conservatives might respond that surely, white, blonde types (i.e. those who look like Margaret Wente) aren't Muslim, and therefore couldn't be a security threat. Following such a policy creates an obvious weakness. If only people who "look like Muslims" (whatever that means) are profiled, terrorists have only to use those who don't. Wente herself cites an example; in 1986, a white Irish woman was found with explosives that had been planted in her luggage by her Lebanese boyfriend.

Profiling can backfire, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. Today, two Monarch Airlines passengers were forced off a plane merely for speaking Arabic (the plane was also delayed three hours). Last year, London police shot dead a Brazilian man who turned out to be innocent of any wrongdoing, merely because he looked Muslim.

Never has racial profiling actually foiled a terrorist plot. More than one of the 9/11 hijackers were pulled aside for extra screening, but nothing came of it as they weren't carrying explosives or anything else that was then considered a weapon.

Perhaps realizing what thin ground she is on, Wente moves on to attacking British Muslims. Is it worrisome that 10 percent of that community wants to impose shari'a law on Britain? Of course. But then it should be equally worrisome that 22 percent of British whites think you have to be white to be British. Twenty-three percent said they would be unhappy if someone of another race moved next door. The BBC survey reporting these findings has, of course, received a fraction of the attention given to polls highlighting radicalism in the Muslim community.

There is no easy answer to the problem of Islamic radicalism in the UK, or anywhere else. But somehow, I don't think strip-searching young Muslim men in airports while they watch whites airily stroll by is going to help.

"Changing the behaviour of African men is probably hopeless"

2006-08-18T14:49:00.000-05:00

Margaret Wente has made many ugly remarks during her career as a columnist, but this is the one that finally angered me enough to start this blog.

If someone had said that of "white men", or even just "men", can anyone doubt that Wente herself would be the first one screaming about radical feminism? But change the skin color of the men, and misandrist remarks become fine with her. Her jeer has no basis in fact; Uganda's famous ABC campaign proved that the sexual behavior of Africans, both men and women, could and would change with a community-based program of education.

But to Margaret Wente, this doesn't matter. Facts contrary to her ideological worldview don't exist. She is a writer who sees the world through the prism of good guys and bad guys. The good guys are capitalists, the United States, and white people; the bad guys are activists, critics of the US, and people of color. With that blinker in mind, her columns often follow a predictable formula:
1) Find a social issue, preferably one dear to the heart of liberal-leaning activists;
2) Blame it on nonwhite people;
3) Claim that only through conservative solutions can the problem be solved.

Back in May she tried to blame the Darfur genocide on Jack Layton and George Clooney, claiming that only US troops could stop the genocide, and Layton, Clooney, and other leftists were staunchly opposed to that. Never mind that the US administration was also opposed to sending troops, going so far as to block legislation in Congress that would have forced it to act.

So on we go to AIDS. In Wente's mind, AIDS must be the fault of darker-skinned peoples and their leftist enablers in the West. In her Tuesday column, she blamed Canada's AIDS problem on immigration from Africa. Today, she waxes eloquent on South African President Thabo Mbeki's claim six years ago that HIV was not the root cause of AIDS: I sometimes wonder why the protesters don't denounce South African President Thabo Mbeki the way they denounce George W. Bush. She doesn't seem to have read her own newspaper:

[Stephen Lewis] savaged the South African government, which has been reluctant to state that the human immunodeficiency virus causes AIDS, has been slow to offer drug treatment to the infected, and whose senior officials tout bizarre treatments..."It is the only country in Africa...whose government is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment. It is the only country in Africa whose government continues to propound theories...worthy of a lunatic fringe" Mr. Lewis said.

It is true that Mbeki has denied that HIV is the cause of AIDS. But it is also true that, under international pressure from AIDS activists (you know, those people Wente calls "madcap"), the South African president was forced to back down and approve what is now among the world's largest retroviral programs. We have not seen a similar concession from George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI, both of whom maintain firm opposition to the use of condoms and have pulled funding from programs to educate people about safe sex. In any case, Mbeki's opposition has no relevance outside his own land. What country now has the world's largest number of AIDS cases? Not South Africa, not anywhere in Africa, even, but India.

Wente recites the old canard that foreign aid to those corrupt darkies won't work, and that what African women need is education and microbicide. Exactly how the poorest countries on earth are supposed to pay for said education and microbicide without foreign aid she doesn't say. I suppose Santa Claus will provide the money. If he does, he might be accused of promoting feminism by Wente's ideological soulmates.

Wente tells Stephen Lewis to "take an Ativan". But guess who once wrote that "Those who compare AIDS to the Holocaust, in its scope and human devastation, are correct"? That's right - Wente, safe within the confines of a column accusing leftists of ignoring the disease. The Globe later had to apologize for the column under threat of a libel suit.

But no libel suit will come from the millions of people suffering and dying of AIDS around the world. No suit will come from the thousands of activists who have struggled to relieve their suffering. No one, apparently, cares to call out a spiteful, vindictive, ethnocentric columnist who uses a human catastrophe to score cheap political points on her ideological foes.