Stupidity: the Same as Evil if You Judge by the Results
is Mark Carney stupid or evil and is there a difference at this point?
“We make our own independent foreign policy decisions, Prime Minister Mark Carney said when asked by a reporter whether the U.S. was briefed on Canada’s decision to recognize Palestine as a state.” — CBC
“Canada intends to recognize the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025.”
Reader, don’t get too excited about this, it’s too stupid to waste much energy on this folly. It’s a fool’s errand.
Consider the wise words of
—“In other words, the persistence of the conflict is not an accident. It endures because it is embedded within multiple overlapping systems of power, geopolitical, economic, and symbolic, whose reproduction depends in part on the maintenance of the status quo. Across successive decades, many have treated the conflict as a policy challenge to be managed or resolved. This managerial lens, most evident in the cyclical revival of the “peace process,” obscures the reality. Neither side currently possesses the combination of capacity, leadership, and incentive required to alter the balance. More crucially, no external force, whether American, Arab, European, or multilateral, has the strategic alignment or political will to adjust its own strategic political complex in a way that actually produces an outcome. It is not simply a site of unresolved grievance; it is a strategic terrain, through which broader regional and global actors pursue divergent, often contradictory, goals. A field in which regional powers compete to extract resources and concessions from the global system.” — from There is Actually No Solution (embedded link below)
Today, July 30, 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced his intention to begin the process of formally recognising Palestine as a state in September. So, Carney has this fantasy that, within a month Hamas and the Palestinian Authority will meet the following conditions:
Hamas will release the hostages it took in its October 7 pogrom
Hamas will disarm
Hamas will relinquish power and control
Hamas will agree to play no role in the future governance of Palestine
Palestine will recognise Israel’s inalienable right to security and peace
the Palestinian Authority President Abbas commits to fundamentally reform its mechanism and mode of governance
the Palestinian Authority President Abbas commits to holding general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part
the Palestinian Authority President Abbas commits to demilitarize the Palestinian state
Sure, reader, also pigs fly, and the Tooth Fairy is real and lives next door to me, and Santa Claus is also real he’s bringing Mrs Claus over to have drinks on my balcony tonight.
So, reader, to what do we attribute this twitch? Evil? Stupidity? Does it matter, at this point? As Margaret Atwood wrote, they’re the same when you judge them by their results.
Whilst the US Congress investigates the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian NGO—fiscal sponsorship industry, bringing Wespac to near collapse, pressing for the revocation of tax-exempt status for Alliance for Global Justice, and dismantling the woke funding pot known as USAID, Carney ignores the ongoing (661 days and counting) glorification of terrorism, relegating it to free expression. Carney has sidestepped the hostage crisis, he has ignored the explosive antisemitism crisis in Canada, he has ignored the growing threats of violence to the Canadian Jewish community, he has pandered to the Islamophobia industry in flagrant fcuk you to the Jewish diaspora, and he ignores Samidoun, which despite its designation as a proscribed entity, has retained tax exemption status as a federal nonprofit organisation (NPO). According to the government of Canada website, “an NPO is exempt from tax under Part I of the Act on all or part of its taxable income for a fiscal period if it meets all of the following requirements for that period.”
What is a non-profit organization?
An NPO, as described in paragraph 149(1)(l), is a club, society, or association that is not a charity and that is organized and operated solely for: social welfare, civic improvement, pleasure or recreation, any other purpose except profit.
To be considered an NPO, no part of the income of such an organization can be payable to or available for the personal benefit of any proprietor, member, or shareholder, unless the proprietor, member, or shareholder is a club, society, or association whose primary purpose and function is to promote amateur athletics in Canada.
Yes reader, a proscribed terrorist organisation continues to operate in Canada with impunity, and it continues to enjoy tax-exempt status as a federal NPO. Meanwhile, the Liberals have removed NPO status from a Jewish organisation. And now Carney has decided it makes sense to recognise a terrorist state that beats and persecutes its own people, steals their food aide, and continues to hold 50 Israeli hostages in torturous Gaza hell. Today on Instagram, PYM posted a video of their activists storming the Egyptian consulate in Montréal. As usual the Montreal police remain impotent and ineffectual. Note: consulates remain under the jurisdiction of the host country.
Whilst Carney’s latest tap dance feels like a giant fcuk you to Canadians, especially Jewish Canadians, it’s a nothing-burger. Reader, do you see those eight conditions above getting met in the next month? Only the delusional see the possibility.
Still, as a nation we must ask ourselves what kind of society we wish to become. We spend too much time and energy reacting and smoking our outrage and I’m offended crack pipes. We spend too much time and energy plotting to cancel and destroy each other, forgetting we belong to the same team! We spend too little time and energy critically thinking about things in foundational and solution-oriented ways. Currently we enable violent crime with catch and release bail conditions, and little to no jail time, we spend vast amounts of resources on thought crimes, we have mandated chemical castration and sex changes for mentally distressed children, we cancel and fire women for saying that men can’t be women, we have destroyed women’s rights and gay rights and we put rapists in female prison all in the name of pandering to fetish-crazed men, we have vast and widespread corruption in the public sector and alarming levels of misspending of public funds, we have public sector unions openly endorsing terrorist movements.
I could go on. Readers know all too well.
We have a weak news media which no longer functions as the fourth estate, instead functioning as the propaganda machine of the country, purveying deliberately misleading information and stoking division and anger. The media in Canada behaves like a pack of high schoolers. Unserious and puerile and complacent and arrogant and morally confused.
So, whilst the country has a meltdown over Carney’s latest moronic political dance move, I will hang back and think about important stuff. What is Canada’s national identity? What role could the media play in the cultivation of political discourse, in service of Canada’s national identity? Who holds the government and the politicians accountable for their shenanigans? What about truth? Was Foucault right in saying truth flows from and takes its shape from power relations?
“Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true …” — Truth and Power, Michel Foucault