[BRIEF NOTE] One note about political correctness

pompe is the first person on my friends list to have linked to this BBC news item, a report on the opinions of British broadcaster and writer Sir Patrick Moore regarding the influence of women on British television.

[Moore] said: "The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days."

"I would like to see two independent wavelengths - one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men."

He claimed that interesting programmes were screened too late at night, and said he would "rather be dead in a ditch" than appear on Celebrity Big Brother. And asked about his favourite series, Sir Patrick said he no longer enjoyed certain programmes because of their modern storylines.

"I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."

Is it just me, or are some of the people who complain about the tyranny of political correctness just jackasses?

[BRIEF NOTE] One final note on Québec and Scotland

Yesterday in the Toronto Star, Chantal Hébert's article "Ahead of Scotland on issue of sovereignty" was one article of many examining the similarities between Québécois and Scottish separatism. After pointing out that independence isn't an inevitable outcome of either movement, Hébert points out that Chrétien's decision to keep Canada out of Iraq was smart.

As for the Scotland result, if it fits anywhere in the Canadian puzzle, it is as a validation of Jean Chrétien's decision to keep Canada out of the Iraq war rather than as a condemnation of policies designed to accommodate the autonomous aspirations of a national minority.

The Scotland vote is part of the larger pattern of a backlash against the Iraq fiasco and those such as Blair who played a leading role in bringing it about.

That pattern also includes last week's faceoff between President George W. Bush and Congress.

The Iraq war has unleashed powerful domestic tensions within the countries that joined the coalition.

By staying out of it, Chrétien may have deprived the Quebec sovereignty movement of one of its last best opportunities to relaunch its crusade. By the same token, the Quebec-Canada dynamics have gone a long way to keep Canada out of a quagmire of historic proportions.

To this, one might add the case of Spain, where there were considerable tensions between the government of conservative Spanish Perime Minister José María Aznar that brought Spain into Iraq (against the support of ~90% of the population) and the autonomous regions of the Basque Country and Catalonia. Iraq and regional nationalisms intersected, in the Spanish case, in the decision of Aznar to blame the Basque group ETA for the 2004 Madrid train bombings even after it became apparent that ETA was not responsible, and in so doing try to settle domestic political scores.