- on a really dumb level this could be revenge for the way the right-wing geeks went after the lady Ghostbusters and Captain Marvel movies; it's unfortunate but it's something we have to face because these idiots from both sides are not going to stop making movies, TV, and genre-fiction books part of their non-stop to-the-death political fights

Justin Trudeau Wore Brownface at 2001 ‘Arabian Nights’ Party While He Taught at a Private School, Canada's Liberal Party Admits

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, wore brownface makeup to a party at the private school where he was teaching in the spring of 2001. TIME has obtained a photograph of the incident.

The photograph has not been previously reported. The picture was taken at an “Arabian Nights”-themed gala. It shows Trudeau, then the 29-year-old son of the late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, wearing a turban and robes with his face, neck and hands completely darkened. The photograph appears in the 2000-2001 yearbook of West Point Grey Academy, a private day school where Trudeau was a teacher.

Earlier this month, TIME obtained a copy of the yearbook, The View, with the photograph of Trudeau in brownface from Vancouver businessman Michael Adamson, who was part of the West Point Grey Academy community. Adamson was not at the party, which was attended by school faculty, administrators and parents of students. He said that he first saw the photograph in July and felt it should be made public.

The yearbook from the 2000/2001 school year at West Point Grey Academy shows several people, some of whom are still on staff at the school, dressed up for the gala—however only Trudeau appears to have darkened his skin.

TIME

On Wednesday, Zita Astravas, the media relations lead of the Liberal Party of Canada, which Trudeau is the leader of, confirmed that the Prime Minister was in the photo. “It was a photo taken while he was teaching in Vancouver, at the school’s annual dinner which had a costume theme of ‘Arabian Nights.’ He attended with friends and colleagues dressed as a character from Aladdin,” said Astravas. Trudeau is planning on addressing the photograph to the media later this evening, according to the Astravas. The prime minister’s official director of communications did not return multiple calls.

This is a critical moment for Trudeau, who began his re-election campaign on Sept. 11 under the cloud of a scandal over whether he pressured his then-attorney general to drop corruption charges against a large Canadian engineering firm. The Liberal Party leader has championed minority groups during his nearly four years as prime minister and made his embrace of Canada’s many cultures a major part of his leadership. At least seven of the 35 members of Trudeau’s cabinet are from ethnic minorities.

Trudeau has previously garnered regular media attention in the Canadian and global press for his choice of attire. In 2018, he was mocked for the elaborate Indian garb that he, his wife and their three children wore during a visit to India.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Gregoire pay their respects at the SSikh Golden Temple in Amritsar on Feb. 21, 2018.

Narinder Nanu—AFP/Getty Images

Trudeau was also criticized by artist Robert Davidson, who is a member of the Haida indigenous people, because of a tattoo on his left arm that is based on the artist’s work. Davidson said in 2016 that the Trudeau government’s approval of a natural gas facility opposed by the Haida showed the prime minister was not genuinely sensitive to concerns of Canada’s indigenous population.

TIME reached out to multiple people who attended West Point Grey’s spring gala in 2001, including three of the four women in the photo with Trudeau. Most were reluctant to talk about it. One former staff member declined to comment, citing loyalty to Trudeau. Others said they did not remember Trudeau at the party. Two people contacted by TIME acknowledged the existence of the picture, which has been the subject of gossip within the West Point Grey community.

Trudeau was not the only person in costume at the 2001 gala event. Of the individuals in six photographs from the event published in the yearbook, Trudeau appears to be the only one who darkened his skin. Many who dressed up for the “Arabian Nights” gala are still at the school, including current headmaster Stephen Anthony, who is pictured wearing what appears to be a crown.

The yearbook shows Trudeau among the staff at West Point Grey, a private day school. He downplayed his experience there during his campaign in 2015.

TIME

Anthony did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the photo and the event.

Trudeau taught classes, including French, until he left after the spring of 2001. West Point Grey Academy is currently among the most expensive private day schools in Vancouver, with annual tuition ranging from just under $22,000 to about $23,500. During his 2015 election campaign, Trudeau downplayed his experience at the private academy, instead focusing on his time teaching at a public school in Vancouver.

Trudeau is far from the only public figure who darkened his skin in the past for a costume.

The United States has a long and painful history of white performers darkening their faces to demean and dehumanize African-Americans—a practice made popular by minstrel shows in the 19th century. Blackface continued into the 20th century in Broadway shows and Hollywood movies.

In February, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam first apologized for, and then denied he was in a 1984 medical school yearbook photo that surfaced earlier this year showing a man in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan hood. Despite criticism, Northam declined to step aside. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey also apologized this year after a radio interview from the 1960s surfaced in which she was described as wearing blackface.

Filmmakers say a Toronto cinema has cancelled a weeklong screening of their documentary about Jordan Peterson, the controversial psychology professor known for opposing political correctness and refusing to use preferred gender pronouns.

Director Patricia Marcoccia said the film, The Rise of Jordan Peterson, was scheduled for a theatrical run at the Carlton Cinema beginning in late September. Marcoccia said the theatre was apologetic but cancelled the screening because some employees were uncomfortable with it.

Today's news from society's deep mental sickness:

https://calgarysun.com/news/world/barbi ... d010e461b9

1) I thought Barbie and Ken were already neutral considering neither of them have genitals
2) why not just issue a Boy George retro-doll because for the longest time no one could figure out what the hell he was either
3) obviously The Movement has copied the rules of religion down to the fine print - go for the kids and you'll end up in control of the future, no matter how twisted and freakish that future is going to be

Conclusion: simply sickening.

Boys get construction sets and chemistry sets and sports equipment while girls get a bunch of useless shit focused almost exclusively on hair and makeup and fashion. And it’s all pink. Boys clothes and toys come in any colour imaginable (except pink) while girls stuff is ONLY pink and you have to pay more for the privilege of having no choice in colour.

Don't agree about Barbie being a menace. Saying that Barbie turns girls into useless bubbleheads is the same as saying that toy guns turn little boys into mass shooters. Negative effects on a small number of few don't equate to permanent damage to the many. Ditto with rock & roll, marijuana, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, violent movies, and about a million other harmless entertainments that unfairly end up the crosshairs of those searching for a moral panic to initiate and exploit for their own benefit.

Filmmakers say a Toronto cinema has cancelled a weeklong screening of their documentary about Jordan Peterson

Spend an hour watching “Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures” or “Barbie: life in the Dreamhouse” and you will quickly come to realize it is fascist poison to any young girls brain and self esteem.

See, it is actually possible (and really not all that difficult either) to hold more than one idea in your head at the same time!

Peterson being a junkie really helps explain his stellar performance in the Zizek "debate" lmao

Žižek didn’t really address the matter at hand, either, preferring to relish his enmities. “Most of the attacks on me are from left-liberals,” he began, hoping that “they would be turning in their graves even if they were still alive”. His remarks were just as rambling as Peterson’s, veering from Trump and Sanders to Dostoevsky to the refugee crisis to the aesthetics of Nazism. If Peterson was an ill-prepared prof, Žižek was a columnist stitching together a bunch of 1,000-worders. He too finished his remarks with a critique of political correctness, which he described as the world of impotence that masks pure defeat.

The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.

One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing: capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was perhaps too civil.

They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer. Peterson is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is a conservative. He seemed, in person, quite gentle. But when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. Somehow hectoring mobs have managed to turn him into an icon of all they are not. Remove him from his enemies and he is a very poor example of a very old thing – the type of writer whom, from Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, have promised simple answers to complex problems. Rules for Life, as if there were such things.

The mere dumb presence of the celebrities on the stage mattered vastly more than anything they said, naturally. But there was one truly fascinating moment in the evening. It came right at the end of Žižek’s opening 30-minute remarks.


Pity Jordan Peterson. Can a giant lobster analogy ever replace a sense of humour?
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“We will probably slide towards apocalypse,” he said. And Peterson agreed with him: “It is not obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us.” They are both self-described “radical pessimists”, about people and the world. It made me wonder about the rage consuming all public discussion at the moment: are we screaming at each other because we disagree or because we do agree and we can’t imagine a solution?

Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat.

Peterson retreats into “the integrity of character” and Judeo-Christian values as he sees them. Žižek is more or less a Gen X nostalgia act at this point, a living memento from a time when you would sit around the college bar and regale your fellow students about the time you saw that eastern European prof eating a couple of hot dogs in the street.

Unfortunately, this brief moment of confrontation of their shared failure couldn’t last. They returned to their natural subject: who is the enemy? Žižek asked what Peterson meant by cultural Marxists when postmodern thinkers, like Foucault, weren’t Marxist at all. Peterson was an expert on this subject, at least. He gave a minor history of the French critical theorists who transposed categories of class oppression for group oppression in the 1960s.

And they both agreed, could not have agreed more, that it was all the fault of the “academic left”. They seemed to believe that the “academic left”, whoever that might be, was some all-powerful cultural force rather than the impotent shrinking collection of irrelevances it is. If the academic left is all-powerful, they get to indulge in their victimization.

And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point.

In the end Peterson-Žižek was less of a heavyweight boxing match than a WWE Grand Slam. Not that I was disappointed. I did see “the debate of the century”, the debate of our century. It was full of the stench of burning strawmen. A big deal, with huge numbers, and really very little underneath