Carney comes to his own rescue

Two weeks later and people are still talking about Mark Carney as if he were some sort of leftist hero. Don’t bother watching his speech. It’s self-serving trash that boils down to: We are only dissatisfied with a system once it starts being disadvantageous to us. The exploitation of others never bothered us in the least.

FULL SPEECH: PM Carney’s Most Inspiring Remarks at Davos — Greenland, Trump Tariff Threats | AQ1B by DRM News (YouTube)

He never names the U.S. or Trump. He just complains that things are hard for his poor country, which is accustomed to being one of the predators but is now scared that it might end up as prey. If you didn’t know enough context, you’d think he was complaining about Russia and China. Carney’s main example of authoritarianism in this speech is communism. I thought for a second that he thought Russia was still communist. Or that China was. You really need to bring a lot of context to fill in the blanks.

He names the glorious institutions of the WTO, the UN, the COP … the UN is the only one that has any humanitarian inclinations, mostly thwarted by its authoritarian structure. The WTO and COP are tools for extraction from the poor and weak.

And then the second half is a boring speech that he seems to think he’s giving to a board of directors as a boring, boring CEO. It’s incredible that this was considered to be a groundbreaking speech. People probably got boners because he quotes Václav Havel and they were blown away by his erudition.

This is a speech given by a middle king to other middle kings. This is one of the other leaders bitching about how Cersei is going nuts in King’s Landing. This is pathetically Game of Thrones.

He ended with a sales job for Canada, talking about how it’s the best at so many things. He brags about its “public square”, which, like, no. Remember the trucker protest? They canceled all of those people’s bank accounts. There is no real freedom of speech in Canada.

This is not the speech of a humanitarian. This is not the speech of a man with principles. This is just more of the same: he represents people who are content—blissfully or deliberately—to have their lifestyles built on a pile of skulls—on the backs of the poor, the weak, the subjugable—but will complain when there is even the threat that he and his ilk might be treated in the same way.

Being a humanitarian—being a socialist, being a leftist—means being willing to give up personal benefits based on injustice to others. It means being just as incensed by injustice to others as injustice to ourselves.

He’s realizing that his country may no longer be under the umbrella, that the price extracted for staying under the umbrella may be too high. As long as the price was the lives and well-being of others, he was fine with it. That’s not a principle. That’s disgusting.

I don’t remember Carney saying anything much about Palestine. Or the kidnapping of Maduro. I bet if I would dig a bit, I would find veiled approval. Let’s stop kidding ourselves.

Overall, it was a fitting speech for a former Goldman Sachs bigwig. He’s a jackass.

And, oh God, is he boring. Fifteen minutes is ten minutes too long.

I mean: look at him. This ain’t Lenin.