Being Mean to Our Elected Representatives

 

Let them eat merde.

Our local MP has complained on Facebook about being told by a local business owner, “we will attack you because you signed up for it.” He decries the lack of civility this represents. “I’m human and hurt too.” “Nobody signs up to be abused.”

I’d feel more sympathy if his own party leader, Justin Trudeau, had not called ordinary Canadians who resisted the Covid vaccinations—and for no other reason-- “fascists,” “Nazi sympathizers,” Russian agents, “homophobes,” “Islamophobes,” “misogynists,” “white supremacists,” “racists,” “transphobes,” holding “unacceptable views,” and pondered publicly on whether they should be allowed to “take up space.” Not to mention forcing them out of their jobs and livelihoods, freezing their bank accounts, and imprisoning many for mere protest. While two wrongs do not make a right, it seems only natural, and natural justice, for a member of the public to be angry, and want to respond in the only way they are still allowed.

If our local rep now finds this sort of hurtful language unacceptable, why did he not condemn it in Trudeau? Aren’t people people too? Did the rest of us sign up for it?

It also leaves a bad taste in the mouth that he is concerned about being attacked verbally when so many Canadians are suffering terrible times, and government seems to be responsible for much of it: the housing and homelessness crisis, people freezing in the streets, while the government keeps letting in a record number of immigrants and imposing onerous environmental regulations on any construction. Inflation and the spiralling cost of food, while the government keeps raising the carbon tax, spending lavishly, had recklessly printed money, and seemingly stuck any sticks they had available in the spokes of farmers and truckers, forcing food costs ever higher. Not to mention supply management and enforced shortages of the most basic foodstuffs. The health care crisis, caused largely or mainly by the government cutting their contributions to health care, but also by firing health care professionals who resisted vaccination, and preventing trained nurses and doctors from pursuing their profession. This looks like a government at war with its people. 

And the problem is that the people are complaining?

The kindest explanation is that the ruling cadre is out of touch. 

How can they not see the tents? Do they never walk to the supermarket? 

But then again, how did all the writers, performers, and crew on Saturday Night Live recently mock Trump for inventing the word “de-bank.” It is not just that they must never have never heard it, when it is a current issue—and keeping track of current issues is an essential part of their job. How could they have been so arrogantly sure of themselves as to not even look it up? This is supposed to be standard practice in any writing shop.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with hubris. We are at that point when the madness is obvious to everyone but themselves. They think they are gods.

Do Facebook's Algorithms Pose a Public Threat?

 

Friend Xerxes is concerned about people falling into self-confirming information silos on the Internet, because of Facebook’s algorithms. The result, he fears, is that bizarre conspiracy theories are spread widely without ever being contradicted; and violence may result. He speaks of “A rising tide of people in this country [who] apparently believe … that they are called overthrow the established powers-that-be. By any means. Including physical insurrection.”

There does seem to be a general decline in civil discourse. Let’s assume the theory is true. 

Logically, people falling into limited information silos is equally likely on either the left or the right—or, for that matter, in the middle. At first glance, any of these is equally troublesome. 

But if we are talking of the potential for overthrowing the establishment and for violence, the bigger problem is on the left. “The right” is, by and large, conservative, and conservative means wanting to maintain traditions. Accordingly, the right is the one group least likely to attempt any kind of insurrection or radical change of government or how we are governed. They might want to throw the current rascals out, but it would be by established, constitutional means. If our form of government had changed recently, this might not be so—the right might then want to go back to an earlier constitution—but both the US and Canada have been stable for unusually long periods of time. There is not a constituency in the US for a return to the monarchy, or in Canada for a return to direct rule from London. Currently, as Xerxes himself notes, no visible group on the right wants an insurrection to change our system of government.

This is not true of the left. The left is by definition seeking change. Black Lives Matter wants a radical change in a society it calls “systemically racist.” Antifa does too; the advocates of critical race theory do. In my riding, last election, the ballot included candidates from both the Communist and the Marxist-Leninist parties. A bit quaint in 2021, but these leftist groups too, in principle, want to radically change our system of government, by violence if necessary.

So if the issue is social instability, to “overthrow the established powers,” the practical argument is entirely for breaking up silos on the left.

You might object that fascists are a counter-example, a rightist group that advocates overturning the establishment and violent revolution. But fascists are deader than Marley’s ghost. Unlike Communists, they do not appear on any ballots anywhere. And there is nothing actually placing them on the right. Historically, they are a Marxist movement, “right-wing” only in comparison to the Leninists. Others have called them the “radical centre.” Historically, the conservatives were their chief opposition, and they have many more views in common with the contemporary North American left than the contemporary North American right. Arguably, the present government of China is fascist.

The specific conspiracy theories Xerxes cites hearing in his daily rounds sound as though they come from left-wing sources. Something about the Queen, Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden being clones; that sounds like a garbled version of David Icke’s thesis that they and other world leaders are aliens. Icke is New Age, and was the national spokesman for the UK’s Green Party. Xerxes’s barber is against cops and immigrants. Being against cops is a position lately promoted aggressively by the left. Neither left nor right is against immigrants currently. This was historically more a left-wing position, as a supposed threat to labour; the current right wants to stop illegal immigration. Xerxes cited the anti-vaxxers. The anti-vaccine movement began on the left, and was primarily leftist as recently as a year ago. The right is anti-vaccine mandates currently, but only over the last few months. 

At a minimum, you are not going to stop any of these movements by breaking open the right-wing information silo. If they are not exclusively on the left, they are found in more than one silo. 

To be fair, there are conspiracy theories on the right: QAnon, Pizzagate. There are just a lot more on the left, and on the left they are more generally accepted: the idea that rich capitalists control everything, for example, or corporations, or “Big Oil,” or “Big Pharma,” or the “whites,” or the “patriarchy.”

The left is also more inclined to violence. Some PPC local official threw gravel at Justin Trudeau in the recent Canadian election; violence at a low level. Some people trespassed last January 6 in the US Capitol building. Nobody told them to do it, and their actions were immediately condemned on the right. Compare Maxine Waters, elected Democrat, calling on her supporters to “get more active, get more confrontational.” Compare Antifa, calling for physical assaults on “Fascists”—meaning, in reality, anyone they disagree with. Compare Black Lives Matter rioting, looting, burning, and killing last year; and Kamala Harris endorsing their actions, then bailing out those arrested. The PPC official, by contrast, was immediately expelled from his position.

So should we step in and shut down left-wing news outlets? This strikes me as exactly the wrong step. Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of full information, as the “information silos” thesis itself suggests. Rumours take over. Reducing access to any news source therefore makes conspiracy theories more likely, and plausible. Perhaps the Facebook algorithm should be adjusted. While it is obviously desirable in general to try to predict what the audience wants to see—that is the whole point of a search engine--political slants might be omitted from the equation.

And if you stop and think, at worst, we are in a better situation than before the Internet. All of us were then trapped in the same information silo, without any choice, a silo determined by the fairness doctrine, the need for media corporations to appeal to the largest audience, and the relatively small number of people who work in the mainstream media. A smaller number than we perhaps realize: due to time pressures, social pressures within the profession, intellectual timidity, and a fear of taking risks, most media took their cue on any new story or controversy from a handful of outlets. 

This made it easy to manipulate the news, and popular opinion. Conspiracies were more possible, and conspiracy theories more plausible. 

Whether the algorithms automatically direct us there or not, we now have full access to any information source we choose. We can now, for the first time, hear all sides, not just some arbitrarily selected one or two, and make more informed decisions.

In sum, if civil society is becoming less civil, it is not because of the Internet.

BBC vs. Nigel Farage

Now another BBC interviewer has tried exactly the same character assassination technique against Nigel Farage that Andrew Neil used a couple of days ago against Ben Shapiro. Dredging up old quotes instead of addressing the current issue or his arguments. Farage reacts in a similar fashion, although more temperately.

This blog has been very active recently. More active than I would like; I have other things to do. But it seems to me we are witnessing a revolution, and matters are changing now almost moment by moment. The real establishment, the professional elite, the "deep state," the ancien regime, is panicked, and is discarding any pretense of ethics or good will. We are more or less at the moment at which the Czar's troops fire on the crowd.

How bad is it going to get before the inevitable collapse?

Latest polls suggest Farage's newly created "Brexit" Party may blow away both Conservatives and Labour at the upcoming EU vote. A party only weeks old. If a national election were held today, polls suggest he might even defeat them both and become PM. It looks as though the Tories could not even salvage the situation by quickly turning to Boris Johnson. Too late. There is no more patience for such a moderate.

At the same time the establishment has been declaring Farage a "racist," a "Nazi," an "extremist," and so on, the majority of the people support him. At the same time they have been demanding he be silenced, and deplatforming and even jailing people with similar opinions left and right. Or rather, right to moderate left. But such labels hardly even matter any more.

The ruling class have, in other words, lost the confidence of the people. The BBC has lost the confidence of the people. The Conservative Party has lost the confidence of the people. The Labour Party has lost the confidence of  the people. The academy has lost the confidence of the people. The schools have lost the confidence of the people. They are locked in their palace, talking only to themselves. Nobody else is listening.

The rise of Farage's Brexit Party is a sudden and dramatic, even historically unprecedented, turn. When Brexit passed, it was a surprise to almost everyone. It passed by only a thin margin.

But now the lines seem to have emerged plainly: it is not "left" vs. "right." There is no "alt-right." That was always a fraud. It is the people vs. the government and the grey elite.

Let's just hope Britain ends up being run by someone as responsible as Nigel Farage. Revolutions rarely end well.

But the fault lies, in the beginning and the end, with the corrupt establishment which forces things to such a pass rather than surrender power.

Ben Shapiro vs. The BBC

I really don’t know where to begin on this one. It shows how depraved the discourse has become.

What sets Ben Shapiro off is Andrew Neil’s repeated description of Georgia’s proposed partial ban on abortions as “a return to the Dark Ages.”

This supports what I have always believed: that abortion is at the core of our current social discord. Until we can honestly discuss that issue, we cannot honestly discuss anything. And the current demand for censorship and blacklisting is at base a no-holds-barred attempt to prevent us from discussing that issue.

Neil does not explain why he sees a connection between opposing abortion and being barbaric. He simply declares opposition to abortion to be self-evidently wrong.

This is not legitimate political discourse, let alone legitimate in a supposedly impartial interviewer on a publicly-funded network. In the effort to avoid the abortion issue, all other morality is jettisoned.

Shapiro is apparently wrong in his assumption that Neil is a doctrinaire left-winger. But that does not matter nearly as much as Neil's position on this one particular issue. Because this is the fundamental issue. If you want to support abortion, in the end, you are in irreconcilable opposition to morality itself; and you must be in unprincipled opposition to anyone, like Shapiro, who advocates morality per se.

Neil goes on to try to convict Shapiro of hypocrisy in calling for more civil discourse, by quoting damning examples of harsh language from his old tweets or columns.

This is a standard tactic by those who want to discredit any moral teaching. And it can easily be used to discredit any moral teaching. But it is not legitimate. Quite simply, the whole issue about sin is that people commit them. If they never did, sin would not be an issue.

That someone does not always live up to their own moral standards is not therefore an argument against those moral standards. It is, rather, simply the reality of being human and not God. The hypocrite is not the person who claims there is a right and a wrong, but the person who claims he never did anything wrong. If there is a hypocrite here, then, it is Neil, for this would seem to be his own implicit position.

All Neil is really doing is, in debating terms, going ad hominem, and in an especially vicious way: trying to attack the reputation of Shapiro in order to avoid addressing his argument.

And in order to accomplish this objective, Neil is prepared to resort to bullying and abusive behaviour. Neil has the texts he excerpts quotes from in front of him. Shapiro of course does not, and cannot guess what is coming. He must work from memory of things written years ago. This is obviously not fair play, and obviously not an effort to arrive at the truth of Shapiro’s views, or what he actually said. Instead, it is purely an attempt at character assassination.

And Neil is now being celebrated for this on the left.

The Postmodern Paradox

Benito Mussolini, 27th prime minister of Italy and, arguably, the founder of postmodernism.

Surely it should be apparent to all that intolerance was been growing exponentially in our society and culture, throughout the developed world. It has now gotten so extreme that public discourse seems almost no longer possible. No compromise over anything; Trump is evil; into the streets with tire irons.

And where is the intolerance coming from? From the very people who claim their core issue is “tolerance.” From the postmodernists. They are the ones shutting all dissenting voices down, or trying to.

And this was perfectly predictable from the beginning.

Postmodernism called itself tolerance of differing views. It might even have believed so. The problem was with being “absolutist,” “judgmental,” or “extremist.” Declare that all truth is relative, and everyone gets to live together in perfect harmony. After all, there is no truth. Truth is merely a social construct.

That’s exactly wrong, and now we are seeing the fruits of the premise. So long as there is a core of shared standards, values, truths, it is possible to politely have disagreements and usually to resolve them. Because we can appeal to these standards. Standards like tolerance itself.

Once you remove those standards, once there is no absolute truth, everything becomes a matter of personal opinion, or, put another way, of personal will. You believe whatever you want to believe.

So what happens when the guy beside you believes something different, and something openly contradictory to your “truth”?

There is no basis on which to discuss matters; no basis on which to compromise; no basis on which to peacefully co-exist. The only course is to either submit to his will, or attempt to impose your own will, your own version of “reality,” on him.

Bring out the tire irons. There is now no other way.

He must use your chosen pronoun. His opinion is not allowed rights. He is not allowed rights. He must accept that you are really a woman, and assent to this publicly. “Racism” becomes whatever you want to call racism. “Anti-racism” becomes whatever you want to call anti-racism. Individual words only mean whatever you want them to mean at the moment. The very idea of discourse is ridiculous, if not threatening. Laws, social norms, morality and reason itself are to be subverted if they do not produce the willed result.

There is only one solution, and it is a simple one: a re-commitment to the Good, the True, the Beautiful. We must at least agree that we seek these things, and that they are the standard measure.

From there, we could move forward together. We would have a foundation on which to build.

The Postmodern Contribution to Contemporary Life

While I think abortion is ground zero for our dissolving social consensus, I think postmodernism was a critical point on the path that brought us to this general collapse. It is why nobody will discuss or debate anything any longer, but instead will unfriend, ban, censor, blacklist, boycott, divest, shout down, bully, throw punches, and so forth.

Postmodernism holds that there is no truth. “Our truth” is whatever we choose to believe. Truth is willed.

This becomes an immediate and critical problem the moment we encounter someone else whose “truth” contradicts our own. Since reality is an act of will, there is no way to resolve this difference other than imposing one’s own will, using whatever force is at hand to make then recant, or die. This becomes a total war of all against all.

Immoral? If there is no truth, there is no true moral good either, is there? “Good” too is whatever I will it to be. Meaning good is getting whatever I want, as expeditiously as possible. This is really the core belief of postmodernism. Postmodernism arose as a way to justify the obvious moral wrong of abortion.

There could be no more objectively evil or socially destructive doctrine than this.

Sodom and Gomorrah disappeared in sheets of flame for less than this. Beyond a certain point, there is no way a society can recover from this sort of thing.

Perhaps this is what Glenn Beck or Leonard Cohen have been sensing.