Good riddance

[sabotabby]

Ralph Klein, who played a huge role in bringing fascism to Canada, is dead at age 70. And while nice liberals don't believe you should be gleeful at anyone's death, I can only say that it wasn't soon enough.

I mean, hey, does anyone remembering him fondly recall that time he walked drunkenly into a homeless shelter and started berating and abusing the residents there? Heck of a guy. A microcosm of the toxic political stew that's turned this country into a festering shithole.

Well anyway, my day is made; I think I will have a beer in celebration. I was going to have a beer anyway, but now it'll be a happier beer.

Comments

[culpster.livejournal.com]

Read the Globe article if you dare. I'll dance on his grave.

[sabotabby]

Shit, no. Not until after the beer, anyway.

[culpster.livejournal.com]

Rob Ford with a cowboy hat and a wider margin of functionality - feast away, grim reaper!

I just hope he doesn't roll away the stone on Monday, then we're all fucked.

[sabotabby]

This.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Drive a stake through his chest, just to be on the safe side.

[sabotabby]

Nuke him from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

At first glance, I read "berating and abusing the residents there" as "beating and abusing."

[sabotabby]

It wasn't far from it. He tossed coins at them.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Interesting that, just like Margaret Thatcher, he escaped into dementia rather than live with the aftermath of what he'd done.

[sabotabby]

Right? If I had my way they'd all be hanging from lampposts.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Softy. Some people I talked to thought he should have been set upon by a pack of wild dogs; at least then he would have fed others in death.
Perhaps they could tie his remains to the top of a derrick and cremate them in a gas flare....

[sabotabby]

I will consider you for the position of Chief Executioner after the revolution.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Poor a beer on his grave, after you drink it!

[sabotabby]

Waste of a beer. Unless it's PBR or some such shit. I would rather drink the beer and piss on his grave.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Indeed, that's what I was on about "after you drink it", lol!

[sabotabby]

Reading comprehension: I haz it.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I'll trade you. I'm spacey as hell lately!

Werd

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Sabs, sometimes you put me to shame. I won't admit to being taken in by his folksy charms, but I've been entertained and distracted by them — and that's shameful enough.

A microcosm of the toxic political stew that's turned this country into a festering shithole.

I would change the above from "that's turned" to "is turning" — the jobs not finished, and where there's life there's hope (as they say) — but otherwise your lack of sentimental bullshit impresses hell out of me.

Gonna signal-boost, unless you say otherwise.

[sabotabby]

By all means.

There are, of course, ways out of a festering shithole, but it won't be easy. There've been just too many deep cuts to reconstruct the social fabric.

Done

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Something I try to keep in mind, during these times of reactionary triumphalism, is that the good old days weren't all that great.

We spend so much time trying to defend the fraying Eisenhower consensus here at home, we forget that was a walled garden maintained by a poverty-stricken, powerless and thoroughly exploited Third World.

We shouldn't be looking to "reconstruct" the old social fabric here, but rather, to be constructing an entirely new one, globally.

(Yes, a tall order ...)

[sabotabby]

Oh, agreed. I just think that so many of the things that were good about those days would be good to have back, extended to everyone.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I was at a party in Edmonton once when Klein was Premier, and I remember a conversation with a guy who was a nurse working with AIDS patients. He told me that his allowed sick time had just been cut. Think about that for a minute, a man who works with immunocompromised people being told he can't take time off work every time he's sick.

That is just fucking evil right there.

[sabotabby]

Completely evil. But no one ever keeps track of lives taken that way.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

No shit. To this day I cannot understand why Mike Harris isn't in jail for the deaths he caused.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

Oh I dunno. That might be slowly changing. I don't know if you've heard about the numerous ATOS deaths (after the Tories and Lib Dems took seriously ill peoples' benefits away and forced them to work in actual slave labour programmes), but there is one ex-policeman who is responding by suing the Department of Work and Pensions for corporate manslaughter. Annoyingly, I can't remember his name! But in the UK the law was recently changed so that government bodies can now be convicted of corporate manslaughter, and a lot of disability campaigners are VERY interested in that.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

"Inna al-batila kana zahuqa - Indeed is the wrong ever vanishing (from the Quran 17:81).

(although my friend Jawad quoted that in relation to Hugo Chavez - the wholesale support for Qaddafi does not sit well with some Libyans apparently - but it applies here)

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

Wasn't there also a Canadian politician who walked into a Job Centre and started haranguing people there? Perhaps all homeless hang-outs should keep a zjuk by the door in future (it's a rope with a nail-studded brick on the end of it it that you swing into someone's face when they've annoyed you. Apparently if you do it right the victim's entire face comes off when people try to remove the zjuk!) Sadly our politicians tend to be more cautious, but recently Ian Duncan Smith was hounded by hordes of angry jobless when he tried to walk to a northern JobCentre from his car. He was caught on camera repeatedly wimpering "are we nearly there yet?" or words to that effect.

[sabotabby]

Excellent idea. I have never heard of a zjuk but it is quite relevant to my interests.

[the_axel]

I hadn't either, I Googled it so you don't have to :-)

[sabotabby]

Thank you, intertubes.