So what did Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new prime – minister do the moment he was elected? Started posting selfies with shrouded women, of course.
This brave Liberal wants to make it abundantly clear that there is no issue more important in Canada than ensuring that all women remember very clearly that it’s very easy to turn each of them into a beaten down creature who has no role other than to signal her complete belonging to somebody with a penis.
Clarissa's Blog 
Canada will survive him. At least he is not a Communist or a BQ nationalist.
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Yes, a Prime Minister is not that important in Canada. The country will be fine.
Women are screwed, though, but that’s nothing new.
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Trudeau may be a Liberal, but at least he’s intelligent enough to be a strong supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline — and he’ll still be Prime Minister in 2016, when the U.S. elects a sane (i.e., Republican) President. 🙂
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Ah, so he probably already got his bribe. Good for him.
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A link, perhaps?
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It’s in his Twitter, third from the top. The shrouded are identified as “Montrealers”. Because that’s what Montrealers should invariably be like to please this fellow.
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Went to twitter the first time in my life… Seriously. 🙂 Couple of women in headscarves, no niqabs. Various women without headscarves or niqabs in the pictures around… But then again, you are not known for understatements. 🙂
Anyway, I do not want to troll you, so I will explain my position nicely. This is North America. The only real owners of this land (if you subscribe to a paradigm where some ethnic, linguistic or religious group are “owners of the land” and minorities or legal immigrants are second-class citizens) here are the First Nations. Everyone else is an immigrant. So I oppose on principle any political moves that originate from a paradigm “there are owners of the land and there are those who have to adapt to them”. For instance, I oppose PQ not because I do not like French, but because the politics of the PQ are too much informed by “Quebec for Quebecois” mentality. I do not live in my own country in part because there is too much of the similar mentality. Why should I tolerate similar mentality from the Federal Government of Canada? Because they speak English and let me speak English???
And yes, I identify with minorities and immigrants, even though I am not a visible minority, I’d pass any PQ Bill 60 test except for French language, and can, in principle, behave as if I am more Canadian than the Canadians themselves. But I understand that if today the “owners of the land mentality” directed at Muslims goes unchallenged, some other day it may get directed at me. Because I publicly say something the “owners of the land” do not like, for example… My freshly elected Liberal MP shares this view of mine: at the anti-Bill 60 demonstration he said something to the effect “The PQ is unofficially letting us know that Bill 60 is not aimed at Jews. But this is a question of principle, and we need to express solidarity with our Muslim citizens”. And he is Jewish. I was deeply impressed.
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@valter07:
For the record, I am the OWNER of the plot of land that I live on here in the Arizona desert!
The U.S. took it from Mexico in 1848 following the Mexican-American War, some centuries after the Spanish took it away from the last group of Indians who’d chased off the previous group of Native Americans before them, etc. Now all of that is over and done, and the issue has been decided by the latest group of victors. Until/unless another powerful conqueror comes along and displaces the U.S. (won’t happen in my lifetime), this land is mine — period.
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🙂 🙂 Obviously I am not talking about anyone’s right to privately own some piece of land. Own what you please. Even if couple hundred years ago it belonged to Mexico. I am referring to the imaginary ownership rights of the ethnic/linguistic/religious group X to the country called X-land.
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I can promise you that the owners of the shrouded creatures will have no qualms as to who has the right to own which country when it becomes easy and convenient to them to curtail the rights of normal women like me. And while we sit here, contorting ourselves into all kinds of shapes trying to be as accommodating as possible to their inalienable right to insult, degrade and own women, they think nothing of threatening, stalking and persecuting normal women at this very moment right there in Montréal.
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Can you please point out who in those pictures are “the owners of the shrouded creatures”? Who exactly among the men depicted on Trudeau twitter is stalking them? Some seriously oppressed Muslim women would not be allowed to do selfies with the infidel male prime minister anyway…
And not everyone is contorting to be accommodating. I am believing what I am believing in my own very personal and gender-neutral selfish interests: I do not want to be told that I somehow have less right to shape the future of Canada than some third- or fifth-generation immigrant. And I do not want any woman, of any origin, to be told that either. I want to preserve my right and everybody’s right to tell that I disagree with Harper or that I disagree with Trudeau, or that I disagree with the PQ, etc, whenever they deserve that, in my opinion.
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Nobody is going to stalk them, obviously. The whole point of the shrouds is to signal that these are objects in somebody’s ownership and should not be hassled. And the ones who are unshrouded are nobody’s property and can be hassled.
It’s beyond weird that one person after another would assume that I fret over the fates of the shrouded and consider them oppressed. I have stated over and over that I have zero interest in protecting them from the idiocy of their choices. I’m only interested in myself and my right not to be exposed to scenes of female degradation, be that degradation willing or not.
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The central point of the post remains unaddressed and uncontested. For the very first photos of his new role Trudeau did not choose any women whose attire suggests professional success or personal achievement. He very specifically sought out women whose attire speaks of their ownership by men. I find that to be very sad.
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I’m just waiting for somebody to express solidarity with women, you know? I care about women’s rights more than anything else, I said that many times. Everything else takes the backseat, immigrants, religions, Putin, worker’s unions – everything comes not even second but one thousandth after rights of women. This is who I am. What Trudeau did is an egregious insult to me as a woman, and I will point it out even if the rest of women are too afraid to make a peep about it.
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Well, I can honestly express solidarity for equal rights for women (reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work, protection from sexual harassment on the job, etc.).
But if you are saying that some women have to be protected from their own choices — such as choosing, for whatever reason, to live in an oppressive religious group that treats them as worthless appendages to their male masters and compels a certain dress code — isn’t your view in conflict with some of your own statements on human choice?
In older posts (e.g., on the death penalty for a woman who merely told another person to commit murder), you’ve stated clearly that every individual is responsible for his/her own behavior and actions, and no one else’s — that no individual can ever truly force another person to do anything that person chooses not to.
Would you have Trudeau outlaw niqabs and burqas like France has done — tell these women what they can’t do?
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I have no interest in protecting the shrouded from their degradation. All I want is to be protected from their owners harassing and persecuting me in the streets. I lived in Montréal for 6 years, and let me tell you, the sight of these shrouded things dragged around on leashes insults me. I don’t care about them and their choices. I care about me.
And yes, I want it to be illegal to hit women, drag them around on leashes and have them degrade me by spectacles of their humiliation irrespective of whether they “choose” all this or not. We don’t seem to have a problem with a legal ban on people selling themselves into slavery of their own free will, do we? We don’t have a problem outlawing all forms of “choices” that we collectively find degrading to us. So why not this one?
I’m not a “choice feminist”, by the way. I actually detest them. My choices are more valid than those of the shrouded creatures because my civilization is vastly superior.
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Isn’t most of what you object to (women being beaten, you being personally persecuted in the streets) already illegal, with the current laws unfortunately being enforced arbitrarily?
Nothing in the world can protect a person from feeling hurt or angry or insulted by the sight of injustices beyond their control.
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None of this is outside our control. It only looks like it does. And when we convince ourselves that nothing can be done, Rotherham happens: https://clarissasblog.com/2014/09/20/rapes-in-rotherham-part-ii/
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To the pipeline support, or to the bribe claim?
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I thought we were still on the shrouded Montrealers.
In what concerns the bribe, I only know that Liberals are famous for taking them.
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Sorry, I posted simultaneously with Clarissa’s response — you don’t want the links to the pipeline info, do you?
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I want the pipeline link.
I’m the one who messes up the comment stacking because I post comments from an app that follows its own logic.
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If anyone can explain to me what kind of logic WordPress uses in stacking “Reply” comments, I’d like to hear it.
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Shit is spreading like wildfire. This is how international periodicals see our new prime minister: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2015/10/20/america/1445370249_628024.html#?ref=rss&format=simple&link=guid
Women in lab coats, judge’s robes, surgeon’s smocks, police uniforms, etc don’t even exist in this world. Just the degraded pieces of male property. Yippee.
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Here’s one of several links Google brings up about Trudeau’s position on the Keystone pipeline:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/10/justin-trudeau-canada-climate-change-keystone-pipeline
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But none of us has any “right” not to be exposed to the farce of human existence. That’s the price we all pay for being sentient beings.
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If somebody “agrees” to be publicly flogged or sexually violated in the middle of the street, they will be prevented from doing so in a flash. Moreover, one can’t even do something as innocent as walk around naked or enter a restaurant in a swimsuit. If it’s possible to enforce all these (and many more) limitations on people’s behavior, then what’s the problem with forbidding some women in Canada from getting photographed for federal documents with their faces fully covered? Because that was the main point of contention in this election. There are things that are more farcical than others, and this particular one does win the competition.
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The thing of it is is that this is pandering and it never works.
The people that think women who show their hair in public are immoral are not made happy when people humor them. They don’t want to be humored. The want to be respected for their beliefs.
Humoring them by saying: “Oh, of course you can practice your silly little custom, I’ll even pretend to take it seriously!” does not satisfy them – it merely makes them look for more extreme practices to force on others.
I can’t find it at the moment but there was a survey that showed muslim immigrants in western Europe had positive feelings about their new countries in an inverse proportion to accomodations made for their traditional practices.
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Of course. There is no respect in what Trudeau is doing. These women are only relevant inasmuch as they can serve as mannequins for headscarves allowing him to snap a photo next to them to send a message about himself, not them. They are like mirrors reflecting his good qualities. After they serve that purpose, they are tossed away.
And not a single feminist (that I’m aware of) is seeing anything problematic in all this.
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So the Muslim women preferred migrating to countries that forced them to be freer! That’s not surprising, but most European governments don’t seem to be getting the message.
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People want to be treated like people, human beings and not stray kittens. As an immigrant, I always know the difference between respect and the saccharine “come be a good savage for me.”
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I agree with you here, ma’am. Whenever I see one of those broads with that carp on their heads, I want to yank it off and tell them they are supposed to be free. I see that and think this chick is a slave to a man following an ass backwards tradition and who most likely treats women like shit. I’m tired of being told to respect this crap and that to criticize that is racist, fuck it.
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