Right Right Right (Not Centre)

Its the oddest thing. People, forced with the prospect of Harper and the Ig, are floundering.

All I can say is thank almighty God that Canada doesn't have an army the size of the US. Even though Canada is entering the age of totalitarianism, which was blessed in Ig's writings as the perfect solution to the modern world, people are testing each other by putting tentative toes into the river of dissent and then jerking them back- afraid, stunned, looking to see if anyone noticed and will swat them down.

Quotables from Ignatieff in 2004:

"The Roman answer to (this type of) problem was temporary dictatorship..(democratic)executives recurrently need dictatorial perogative to cope with a crisis."

"Only liberal democracies have a guilty conscience about punishment. Totalitarian societies have enthusiastically embraced coercion as a positive as a positive social instrument to create desired social types, ideal workers, obedient citizens, enthusiastic party appartchiks. Only in liberal societies have people believed that the pain and suffering involved in depriving people of their liberty must make us think twice about imposing this constraint even on those who justly deserve it."

"Schmitt notoriously said that politics was about punishing enemies and rewarding friends. Constitutional regimes, he went on, cannot save themselves from attack unless the friends of constitutionalism withdraw the law's protection from its enemies."

"..it could be permissible to ban political parties when they engage in incitement, intimidation, or association with terrorist groups."

"..final victory in wars on terror is not always possible."

(On 9/11:) "Such an attack cannot be met by politics but only by war."

"Terrorist movements like al Qaeda or Hamas are death cults."

"So pre-emptive war.. would be a lesser evil. It will kill people and cause humanitarian harms even if it succeeds in eliminating a dangerous regime and confisticating weapons of mass destruction."

"The point of ethics is to enable us to encounter the reality of evil.. to combat it with constitutionally regulated lesser evils."

"I am not losing sleep over it (civilian deaths in Lebanon)."- 2006, comments to the Canadian press corps.