Maybe This Explains It

 

One possible explanation for the strangely destructive behaviour of elites over the last few years is that they have calculated, rightly or wrongly, that with AI emerging, they simply do not need people any longer to do their bidding. The vast mass of humanity becomes excess baggage. Why not kill them off and have a better view from the cottage?

Not With a Whimper but a Bang

 

The stock markets are crashing today. People are talking major recession. To follow Covid lockdowns, rampant inflation, and war in Europe. 

If they are right, this should be the final nail in the coffins of Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US, and Justin Trudeau in Canada. They were set to lose anyway, but this could be historic, like RB Bennet or Herbert Hoover in their day. The left might be discredited for a generation. It may also be lucky for Farage in the UK and LePen in France that they were snookered, in part by political machinations, in the recent elections: that leaves the left holding this bag.

Meantime, in his most recent column, written before today’s news from the world’s stock markets, Xerxes the leftist columnist already comes out hard against “the system.” He quotes left-wing Anglo-Irish blogger Paul Kingsnorth: “We like to believe that we live in independent nation states run by leaders of our choosing, but this is a mirage designed to disguise the reality: The Machine is a giant, global, digitized web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think.”

Strikingly, this is exactly what the right is saying. This is just what Trump and Farage and Poilievre have been saying. To be fair, it is not just the left that has shifted. A few years ago, the right would have resisted blaming transnational corporations. Not any more. Both left and right are now alarmed at elite powerbrokers and the trend to globalization. 

Of course, in the recent past, as soon as some leftist raises this alarm, he is declared by the left to be “far right”—see RFK, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. But even if this continues, if the shadowy elites sustain their control over the Democratic Party or the Liberals and NDP, the end result will be the same. The people are uniting against the powers that be.

Kingsworth and Xerxes think the problem is that things are getting more complicated due to technology, so that there is a greater distance between the elites and the common people. I think the exact opposite is happening: the new technology is levelling things, removing the need for an elite, and all its advantages. And making it easier for he people to seize control.

The Revolution Has Begun

Things are coming unglued for the ruling elites. People no longer trust them. This is largely due to the growth of social media: they can no longer force discussion and information within prescribed bounds. This is of course why they have been censoring so openly recently. But that has always been a rear-guard action.

We saw a somewhat similar ungluing back in the 1960s, prompted I think by the nuclear threat and the Kennedy assassination. People began to suspect that idiots were in charge. Or dark forces.

And that, for those of us who remember, was a time of chaos. Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II put things back together.

But this is bigger.

The evidence coming out that the establishment and establishment media lied about everything during the Covid pandemic seems to have been a watershed. Yes, it did leak from a government lab. Yes, it was lab-created. Yes, it was funded in part by the US government. No, wearing masks was not effective. No, social distancing was not effective. No, the vaccines did not stop the spread. No, they were not safe and effective. Yes, ivermectin did work against the virus. Yes, the jump in mortality rates since is due to the vaccine.

Even at the time, the pandemic seemed to me like a flash of lightning showing us all where the zombies were.

Who will ever trust government again?

Now all heck is breaking loose. The woke are waking up.

Mass immigration used to be a third rail issue. Nobody dared object, because they would be called racist. Trump broke the seal with regards to illegal immigration in 2016. Now it has spread to legal immigration as well. It is a key issue in Europe, looking as though it will bring down the governments of the UK and France within the next few weeks. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre has finally calculated it is worth saying, in French and in Quebec, that he will lower immigration levels. Until now, he had been sidestepping the issue. 

“It's going to be much lower, especially for temporary immigration. It is impossible to invite 1.2 million new people to Canada every year when you build 200,000 homes. That's impossible. There is no room. Quebec is at the breaking point.”

People are now also speaking openly against multiculturalism, defying the inevitable accusations of racism. Only a few years ago, Don Cherry was fired for saying everyone should wear the poppy. Now Rishi Sunak is being condemned everywhere for leaving D-Day ceremonies early. How could he? That is some measure of how much how quickly the political climate has changed. 

Even though, awkwardly, disastrously, multiculturalism is enshrined in the Canadian constitution.

“Climate change” is the next likely pin to fall. It was always an improbable claim. It was always based on “computer modelling,” not scientific evidence. Thirty years ago, when the average member of the public still imagined computers were magical, this sounded compelling. We are more sophisticated about computers now. The general public is also realizing that “fighting climate change” through ever growing taxes and regulations is costing a lot of money with no visible results, in a difficult economic time. It increasingly looks like it always really was: a power and money grab by the government bureaucracy.

I think the edifice of feminism is crumbling fast as well. It is now unfashionable on the left, who want to sacrifice it to trans rights, with which feminism conflicts. Others are seeing the effect of feminism in declining birth rates, declining marriage rates, men opting out of all relationships, and growing legions of bitter middle-aged women feeling deceived. There is worse yet to be uncovered.

Confidence in the public school system is already gone. Confidence in the academy is crumbling. Confidence in the objectivity and reliability of science itself is going. Peer review, we discover, does not work. Only certain areas of investigation get funded. Experiments are never reproduced, and when someone tries, they can’t be. Scientists are no longer looked on as semi-divine beings and moral examplars above suspicion of ulterior motives.

I suspect most importantly, atheism, which had become increasingly fashionable over the past 150 years or so, is crumbling. Darwinism, its modern intellectual underpinning, is crumbling. Freud and scientific psychology, religion’s intended “scientific” replacement, has already been pretty well discredited. This is the biggest and most far-reaching revolution currently underway.

Or maybe it is just me.

Why Governments Are Doing Strange Things

 

Neil Oliver makes the point that the powers that be would never be going after Donald Trump so aggressively in court if they thought they could win the next election with the usual ballot stuffing and fraud. It is dangerous for them to be so blatant. It discredits them. They are burning through their credibility and their social capital.

And that, it seems to me, is the key to much that is going on in the world right now. Ruling elites around the world are rapidly becoming more oppressive, or trying to be, because the jig is up. They are resorting to desperate measures because things are getting beyond their control. The dam is about to burst on them; it is bursting.

The Devil always says the opposite of the truth. The elites are spreading the idea that the unskilled and less educated will soon have no social utility due to computerization and robots, and will have to be supported on Universal Basic Income to eat crickets. This is our clearest signal that the elites are about to become redundant due to computerization, and they know it. Each one of us will have all expertise and all available information at our fingertips, without the need for these expensive and often bullying gatekeepers.

You are also seeing the elite now starting to turn on their own. The US media is turning on Biden; the Canadian media grows critical of Justin Trudeau. Our local Liberal member boasted proudly to Facebook that he voted against his own government on a recent NDP motion. It was all for show; the motion hd no chance of passing. But The Vicar of Bray knows how to preserve his own position: there is panc among the deck chairs.

I Feel That Sanity Is Breaking Through on the Left

 

Great rant by Neil Oliver.

Karma Comes to Call

 

Fuseli

I recently speculated on why Hollywood, the media, and big tech seem bound on committing suicide. All are doing things counter to their financial interests or indeed to preserving their credibility. I thought it might be a delusion caused by postmodernism’s claim that we can make our own reality. Or it might be a hysterical reaction to seeing their power and influence slipping away.

Here is another possibility.

It might be the voice of conscience catching up to them. The powers that currently be are terminally morally compromised. One word: abortion. In the cause of sexual pleasure, they have endorsed an ongoing mass murder. 

The Erinyes must be satisfied.

The activity of repressed conscience is often observed in serial killers. They start taking bigger and bigger risks. They return to the scene of the crime. They start sending clues to the police. They want to be caught. One famously left the message at a murder scene, “For God’s sake, stop me before I kill again.” Ted Bundy started his killing spree in the Pacific Northwest, but ended it in Florida—one of the few states at the time that had the death penalty. When finally arrested, his comment was, “What took you so long.”

And, when murderers are caught, their first night in a cell, reputedly, they usually sleep like a baby. 

The current elites are crying out to be replaced. The nobles in pre-revolutionary France did something similar, insisting on deferring to the Third Estate.

In this we also see the hand of God—or, if you are a pagan Greek, the gods, punishing hubris. In the Old Testament, the principle is laid down that a depraved culture, specifically one which murders its own children, must be and will be overthrown, including divine intervention if necessary. This is what happened to the Canaanites, to Sodom, to Gomorrah. The Egyptians were scourged for killing the firstborn of the Hebrews. This is also what happened to the Carthaginians at the hands of the Romans. Such a depraved culture must be defeated, even if this requires salting the earth.

Disturbingly, we are in such a culture, almost world-wide. Being visited by fires, floods, and plagues may be part of the story. As the Chinese would say, the mandate of heaven has passed.

Let’s hope we can turn things around before they get to the salting the earth stage.

Why Poetry Is So Bad

A man who should need no introduction.

We were discussing the other night, I and a prominent local poet, the sad fact that no one is interested in poetry any more.

“Even other writers,” she laments, “never come out for poetry readings.”

I remarked on the dramatic change from my youth, when perhaps a dozen poets were national celebrities, and everyone had read at least one of their poems. Irving Layton, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, Milton Acorn, Leonard Cohen, F. R. Scott, P.K. Page, George Bowering, bpNichol ….

And we both immediately agreed on the problem: it is that poets in Canada now write only to impress one another, and not for the general public. It had become, in proper Canadian style, a Family Compact.

It seemed to me the solution was simple: launch our own poetry journal, to bypass all this and get directly to the public. We could have a podcast, a YouTube channel.

No, she explained, she did not have time for that. Too much editing required.

I did not see the problem—just a matter of selecting the poems to feature, right?

Ah, she explained, but we would need to find experienced poets with a strong publication record to evaluate each entry.

I could not make her see the irony of her position. This is exactly what we were trying to get away from.

“But,” a colleague intervened, “who else is qualified to evaluate a poem? Would you let non-doctors evaluate a medical treatment?”

Here, I think, we see the essential problem. Not just with poetry, not just with art in general, but with our current society. The very problem that is getting some folks out in the streets wearing yellow vests, and others voting Johnson or Trump.

It is the forming of little cartels everywhere, seizing control of everything. Generally under the banner of “professionalism.” While it does make some limited sense for doctors or engineers, it does not for most other endeavours. It is a disaster for poets, or any artists, or journalists, or teachers. Can you imagine the rule applied to comedians? Only other comedians get to decide what is funny?

Even for doctors or lawyers, it is a dangerous seizure of power by a self-selected group, with little oversight; and, in effect, a cartel in restraint of trade.

Prior to this, and driving it, is an obsession among the educated with the concept of power. This is why politics has permeated everything: they think life itself is all about grabbing power and money for themselves and their group.

And the obsession with power probably comes, in turn, from a collapse of morality. Take ethics out of the picture, and what is left? Grabbing as much as possible for yourself.

But power and politics is especially a blasphemy against art.

A Painful Blockage of the Memory Hole?

John Ivison writes in the National Post, “If the elites are wrong about their ‘man-made climate change’ fixation, they’ll pay dearly for it.” He figures that have gone so all-in that their credibility will be shot.

I don’t see why. The mistakes of the elite seem generally to disappear quietly and completely down the memory hole. Why should this time be different?

Remember “peak oil”? Remember how we were going to run out of water? Remember how the world would soon dissolve in war over basic resources? Remember how we were going to run out of food? Remember global cooling? Remember the population bomb?

When you’re my age, you’ll remember when it was imperative to get out and get some sun, then it was imperative to stay out of the sun, now it’s imperative to get out and get some sun. You must not eat eggs. You must eat eggs. Cholesterol is bad. Some cholesterol is good. You need cholesterol. Use artificial sweeteners to get thin. Avoid artificial sweeteners: they make you fat.

What usually happens is just silence regarding the previous, disproven error. Nobody says anything.

What sometimes happens is that it is claimed later to all have been a joke. You mean anyone took me literally? This is especially the case, it seems, with feminist inventions, like the one that “rule of thumb” originally meant the right to beat your wife with a stick. It turns out such things were always meant “ironically.”

If all else fails, or even when it does not, the cutest tactic is to run around to the head of the parade and start to denounce those guys who believe such old nonsense. A good thing you have experts like me to enlighten you that the “general opinion” is wrong! Never noting that it was not the general opinion, but the opinion of the experts in the field. Sometimes including the speaker.

Has anything changed to make it no longer so?

Perhaps it has. At least the elites no longer have a lid on the media. And you can Google up old news stories now.

Trump and the Case for the Republican Establishment

The latest national poll on the Republican field shows Trump at 49%. It was taken on February 29; his results in the Super Tuesday primaries just the day after do not bear this out. I hope this means the Trump bubble is at last popping.

Still, the fact that Trump has come so far does not speak well of the average American voter or for democracy. For all that folks, including commentators, are critical these days of the Republican establishment, I think on balance this shows that a sense of civic responsibility in the establishment generally has been all that has been keeping the US from disaster. Otherwise, why have we not seen campaigns like Trump's before? Even previous populists—William Jennings Bryan, for example—had a strong core of principle that they would not violate. This may have been the difference between the US and, say, the Weimar Republic.

In another sense, though, we are indeed seeing the failure of the ruling classes. In part, they have grown much less principled since the Sixties or so, and so they have lost their moral authority. As happened in the Weimar Republic, where the elite became sexually libertine, and were in any case blamed for the German failure of the First World War and the postwar economic chaos. In part, I suspect, the vastly improved communication technology over the past few years—internet, social media, smart phones—has exposed their flaws to the rest of us and rendered their leadership less necessary. A Trump and his followers can now organize without them.

Apparently, there is a case to be made for elites.