Fill'er Up With Unleaded Ethical Please

From the National Post:

Kudos to EthicalOil.org. In the space of 30 seconds, the non-profit group has managed to enrage an entire kingdom, put an army of lawyers to work, and make the front page of newspapers across Canada. All thanks to a television ad which does nothing but state a set of facts, and posit a choice between two products, one produced “ethically” and the other “unethically”.

Ethics? Ethics? I got to show you no steeeking ethics infidel.

The ethical product is of course Canadian crude, extracted from the oil sands, while the unethical stuff flows from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. As the ad points out, Saudi doesn’t allow women to drive, leave their homes without a male guardian present, and values their court testimony at half that of a man. As a timely aside, Newsweek magazine recently surveyed the 165 “best and worst places to be a woman”: Canada placed third, while Saudi Arabia clocked in at a dismal 147th.

But in today’s era of cultural relativism, “ethics” have become a relative term as well. How else can one explain the silence of the left, particularly feminists, on this issue? Instead of valuing the rights of half the human population, most focus their efforts instead on “protecting the planet”. When it comes to fashionable causes, oil-soaked birds take precedence over Saudi girls murdered for having a boyfriend, or women jailed for getting behind the wheel.

The Saudis also llike to lop their heads off for suspected witchcraft, drugs and just about anything else that pisses the Saudis off. And for the past 15 years or so they do it with swords. Here's how it works:

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. Judges — appointed by the king on the recommendation of the Supreme Judicial Council — have complete discretion to set sentences, except in cases where Sharia outlines a punishment, such as capital crimes.

That means no two judges would likely hand down the same verdict for similar crimes. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light or no sentence to death, depending on the judge.

But what atrocities have the Canadians perpetrated? There's got to be something about their culture that pisses us off.

William Shatner and Keanu Reeves.