December 23, 2002
The cover story in the December 9 issue, which also appeared in the December edition of Toronto Free Press, was editor Judi McLeod’s article about the city of Toronto giving $50,000 of taxpayers’ money to an outside advocacy group, the Federation of Metro Tenants Association (FMTA). The article alleges that FMTA has a conflict of interest when it comes out in favour of the status quo of property taxes on rental units being substantially higher than those that are paid by homeowners. Equity in taxation would result in landlords incurring lower costs and the savings could be passed on to tenants in the form of rent reductions.
It is not unusual to get a lot of letters to the editor when special interest groups such as FMTA are attacked and this story was no exception. The following letter stands out.
Hey bitch!
We are going to go after and boycott every one of your advertisers until they stop advertising in your dirty little rag.
You will go bankrupt.
Thats [sic] what you deserve for running your cover story you twat. You have 1,000,000 tenants who hate you and will bury your paper.
johnsmith2048@hotmail.com
Let’s put the language used in the letter aside for the time being. The letter is typical of the way activist lefties think and respond to issues. The author of the letter attacks the writer but not the content of the article. If "johnsmith2048" disagrees with any of the stated facts or the conclusions drawn from those facts, he never got around to mentioning it. Either he has more mouth than brains or he simply can’t deny the factual basis of the story. Perhaps both. His most persuasive argument is that anyone who would write what McLeod wrote is, well, a twat.
As I wrote in an article a few weeks ago, the fact that lefties have no real argument against a certain position does not prevent them from arguing anyway. Those that don’t have the intelligence to change the premise of the argument around and argue something else, merely resort to name-calling. The example that I used was Elinor Caplan calling Canadian Alliance supporters racists, bigots and holocaust deniers when she could not articulate why her constituents, many of them Jewish, should support the Liberals instead of the pro-Israel CA. It is very rare to hear a conservative use name-calling as a debating tactic.
Lefties like 2048 have an overblown sense of their own self -righteousness. He pompously states that a million other tenants will agree with him. As all on the left do, johnsmith has no respect for individuals; only groups. The fact that there are many hard working taxpaying tenants that don’t like to see their hard-earned tax dollars squandered on special interest groups, has never crossed his indoctrinated little mind.
The letter writer needs to get a life. While busy people can always find the time to dispute the views of others through intelligent argument, anyone who sits down to email the type of letter that johnsmith2048 sent, has too much time on his hands. His language and silly threats indicate that he indeed does not have enough to do.
He likes making threats although he gives the impression that if the threats to call advertisers is carried out, the bulk of those calls will be made by others. Our friend is really brave--unlike the majority of writers of letters to the editor, he hides behind the anonymity of a hotmail email address. The advertisers know what kind of publications Toronto Free Press and canadafreepress.com are. If he’s trying to scare us, he hasn’t succeeded.
Now we get to the language. Lefties take pride in the fight against gender stereotyping and violence against women. Johnny probably wears the appropriate ribbons and marches every December 6. But if a woman disagrees with any of his principles, she’s a "bitch" and a "twat". What hypocrisy. Using sexist slurs to put a woman down is permissible in lefty-land if the woman doesn’t have the correct view of things. This is no different than a man who knows violence against women is wrong but only beats his wife when she deserves it.
It’s not easy coming up with article ideas week after week. Thank you for your help, johnsmith2048.
The original article can be found at:
www.canadafreepress.com/archives/2002/main120902.htm
Arthur Weinreb is a lawyer and author and Associate Editor of Canadafreepress.com, he can be reached at: aweinreb@interlog.com
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