I’m a bit too steamed about things at the moment to just post a response in comments here, so I’m opening a poppet valve here instead.

For one, wishing someone Merry Christmas isn’t ignorant. It’s what people who celebrate Christmas do. In the past week or so, a half-dozen people have said “Happy Hanukkah” to me, and these people are not ignorant. And people who don’t know the difference between a burqa and a hijab aren’t ignorant people, either. They’re just people who don’t know the difference between a burqa and a hijab.

Canadians can be just as ignorant as Americans, though. In the few hours since this appeared, I’ve been dismissed as a racist and a Zionist. But ignorance is all over the place. Five mouseclicks will get you from a blank Google search screen to a site that blames Zionists for the Irish bloody famine.

But no, you can’t equate the depth of Americans’ ignorance of the world (and even of the continent they’re on) with the level of ignorance on similar subjects among Canadians. The distance between these two levels of ignorance is enormous.

That much I will say in my Constable Transmontanus, Royal Canadian Thought Police voice.

Heres’ what I have to say in my Johnny Canuck voice.

In my offending post on this site, I even apologized for Celine Dion, for Christ’s sake. Plus I said Canada wasn’t better, just different. Plus in the column I linked to, when I referred to Britain and France and Americaland, I wrote: “These countries are better than us in many ways.” So lighten the fuck up.

I admit that I came to the column with a bit of attitude. I’d just read that “Toothless Canada Borrows Crescent Fangs” essay Abe Greenwald wrote in Jewcy, a webzine I think is otherwise terrific, and it occurred to me I am fed up to the teeth of hearing Yankees sneer, shout and snigger about what we’re trying to do up here. They’re no better than Canadians who think Americans have smaller brains than us.

Still, I have to confess that I’m sick and tired of the kind of Americans who give out of themselves about “Soviet Canuckistan” and I’m sick and tired of Americans who imagine that Canadians are just Americans with no guns and a good health care plan, and if I encounter one more American who comes up here and pats us on the head and says “thanks for helping us in Afghanistan” as if our soldiers are dying in the fucking dust of that country just to help Americans I’ll put his teeth down his throat for him. And I’m also sick to my stomach of Americans who use my country like some kind of white liberal gated community to which they think they are by some magic entitled to resort without so much as a by-your-leave every time their countrymen elect some goofball president they don’t like. Go home.

We’re involved in a massive experiment up here. We’ve got the highest rates of immigration in the world, and ninety percent of our Muslims are foreign-born, and a civil national conversation is difficult for us to maintain at the best of times, being bilingual and all, and it doesn’t help being strung out across the top of the most vibrant cultural dynamo in the history of nation states with a population ten times our own. Nevertheless, so far, it’s working out pretty well.

We screw up all the time. But when it comes to free speech and “race relations” and immigration, we don’t need lectures from Americans, thank you very much. On these these subjects, it just might be best if Americans busied themselves with their own affairs and left us alone and shut their big yappers.

There. I feel better now.

Sorry for the intemperate language. I realize bad words are frowned upon at this blog.

Sorry.

Go Elf yourself.

Via the Gadgemeister himself

Have I told you the one about the Christians, the Jews and the Sunni Muslim?

Video here.

Everyone’s working themselves into a lather about the case of the Canadian Islamic Congress Versus Mark Steyn and Civilization As We Know It, prompted by an excerpt from Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It that appeared in the 102-year-old Canadian newsmagazine, Maclean’s. So thought I’d weigh in. And a little more here.

Just so everybody knows, the flag is still flying on our government buildings. I checked, this morning.

Also, Canada is not the United States, or France, or Britain. We’re a bit slow, and we have sinned, but when it comes to multiculturalism, we don’t just mean “more pavilions at folkfest.” On this front, we ride shotgun to nobody. The right to bear arms isn’t entrenched in our Constitution. Multiculturalism is,  and we like it that way. We like it even better than hockey. True story.

And we don’t have a First Amendment, either. We have something better. (Sorry. I meant to say “We have something different.”)

And thanks Ali, but I don’t think the Canadian Islamic Congress will agree to drop everything if you “help them get published in the Guardian.” Nine out of ten Canadian Muslims say they’re proud of their country. So long as that remains true, I don’t think a bit of “Comment Is Free” space will be sufficient to satisfy the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Some people just need to take a dang pill. Others might profit by swallowing the whole bottle.

This whole thing is going to get nasty, and the last thing we need right now is batshit crazy talk.

Picking up a theme from the preceding two posts … marking 50 years since the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Russell Brand and Matt Morgan drove from Lowell, Massachusetts to San Francisco with a film crew. Here, Brand and Morgan get to see the efficacy of capitalism at first hand:

Just after Brand gets back into the car, a no-neck-having city official pokes his head in the window and tells him–in a very unfriendly tone–’I run this corner … go back to England’. Brand remarks that no-neck is clearly doing a splendid job of running the corner.

Askari, all of 5-feet-7 and 140 pounds, said he was left with a swollen face. He said he didn’t go to the doctor because he’s too busy working two waiter jobs and doesn’t have the money for medical care.

Prick.

The sooner the world is rid of this fucknut the better for all.