... and the horse you rode in on, and the dog that followed you

[zingerella]

Dear Michael Coren,

Fuck you you sanctimonious, condescending coward.

Dave said it best:

I can't recall when I've read anything so sexist and so wrong in this century.

Last week a young girl dressed up as a soldier died in the increasingly futile and pointless war in Afghanistan. She was 21 years old, had been in the country for two weeks

Comments

[bunsen_h]

... Wow. What a, um, remarkable piece of... "journalism".

'So when I say that she was "dressed up as a soldier" I mean it as a compliment.'

Perhaps if he'd said "dressed as a soldier" it might have been more complimentary.

'Yes, yes, yes, I know it's fundamentally anti-Canadian to say this...'

Couple of "troll bingo" points right there.

[zingerella]

Yeah. Even by the standards of conservatroll editorials, this one stinks to kingdom come.

I think even "dressed as a soldier" would have been problematic. She was a soldier, she was soldiering when she died, so how else would she have been dressed? In a tutu? If we regender the edited statement ("So when I say he was 'dressed as a soldier' I mean it as a compliment...") it's just bizarre. If we change the profession it's bizarre.

So many trollpoints, it's just not even funny.

[bunsen_h]

I'm not particularly bothered by "dressed as a soldier", given the importance placed on the uniform to someone's identity as a member of an armed service. In a context that wasn't otherwise full of crap, I'm not sure if that phrase would seem problematic. Of course, the closest I've ever come to being in such a group myself was a couple of years in the Boy Scouts (before I gave up on the group as being too gung-ho/militaristic for my tastes).

[pecunium]

Dressed up got me seeing red, the rest is what moved me to draw-dropping, gob-smacked, incoherence.

As a quibble, this wasn't an editorial (God, I hope not). An editorial is the opinion of the paper. As such it is (usually) unsigned, since it represents the corporate opinion of the entire staff (this, of course attenuates as the staff gets larger; at some point we have to say, "official" rather than collective).

An owner/publisher may have a signed one, but that has a different connotation.

(removes old, battered, and somewhat faded reporter's jacket and editor hats).

I used to do journalism on a small paper (circulation, about 8,000), with a smallish staff. We had a pretty good sense of what the staff thought about things, and if it was controversial that we'd get it right, we did pro/con pieces, or spiked it.

This waste of ink was his personal opinion. Please let it have been his personal opinion.

[zingerella]

You're correct. It was in the "Comment" section, where it appears that the dregs of the Canadian media and literary scene are consigned after they've written unsuccessful books.

So it's not properly an editorial, but to call it "journalism" gives journalists everywhere a bad name.

Punditry? Or a good, old-fashioned conservatroll screed?

His editors should still be ashamed.

[pecunium]

Punditry? Or a good, old-fashioned conservatroll screed?

Filth.

[zingerella]

BINGO.

We have a winner.