Paranoia Strikes Deep

 

Expressions of insanity appear now all the time. A commentator on my friend Xerxes’s latest column says “January 6 was the day the Republican Party illustrated its true purpose—white supremacy.” 

Really? 

There were probably more genuine communists in the State Department back in Joe McCarthy’s day than there are white supremacists in the entire US today. I have never encountered one, in person or in print, although I have not gone looking. They used to be around, but probably not since the 1960s.

I have seen nothing in the Republican Party on January 6 or any other day that would suggest even tolerance within its ranks for such a view. I recall when Trent Lott was drummed out of the party leadership for a muted suggestion that the Dixiecrats were right back in 1948. While not necessarily “white supremacist,” the Dixicrats—a faction of the Democratic Party of the day—were segregationist. A position still heard in the Democratic Party today, but not among Republicans.

Of course, it is also debatable whether those who illegally entered the capitol building were, indeed, Republicans. Whether they were or not, there is no evidence whatsoever that they did so because of a belief in “white supremacy,” as opposed to a belief that the recent election had been stolen. Had they or even any faction of them indeed been interested in demonstrating in favour of white supremacy, one would have expected at a minimum the publication of a manifesto.

The simplest explanation for this comment is simply that the author of it is insane, in the proper sense of the term. He is completely disconnected from external realities.

Another leftist comments, in alarm, referring still to the events sin Washington on January 6th, “there are, at the last count I could find, 165 well-armed civilian militia groups across the U.S.” This is actually what the framers intended with the Second Amendment: it was to ensure the existence of “a well-regulated militia.” There is nothing sinister about a militia per se, except to a government up to no good. A well-armed citizenry was understood by the framers to be, and is, a protection against abusive government. 

Said commentator writes “all it takes is incendiary speech from misguided leaders to ignite them”—i.e., the militias. If he is referring to January 6, there is no evidence that any militia was involved. Nor that the people who did enter the capitol illegally were inspired by any particular speech. Those who did enter the building did so only minutes after Trump finished his speech, some distance away. They could not have been listening to it. Moreover, there is much evidence online that their invasion of the capitol was planned in advance.

This commentator, too, seems to be delusional; or at least badly misinformed.

He writes, of Republican objections to now being scanned by metal detectors on entering the building, “Can you imagine wanting to carry a concealed handgun into a congressional chamber?”

I can. Mass shootings usually take advantage of gun-free zones. The certain knowledge that no representatives are armed makes them sitting ducks.

As to being concerned about the representatives themselves acting responsibly, these are the people chosen by their peers as the most responsible in their communities, and entrusted with the powers of government, including the power to declare war. Nobody has the authority to overrule the vetting of the people. To demand that authority is itself an attempt to usurp the government; it is a coup attempt.

Another respondent finds it “chilling” that some right-wing outlets are openly suspecting Joe Biden of being a “socialist radical.” This leads her to the conclusion that “the virulence and irrationality of the opposition is very frightening.”

During the recent primaries, Bernie Sanders was Biden’s chief opposition within the Democratic Party; it looked in the early going as though Sanders was going to take the nomination. It seemed to take some fast work in the backrooms to grab the nomination instead for Biden.

Bernie Sanders openly calls himself a socialist. 

It follows that a large proportion of the Democratic Party, perhaps a majority, is socialist in their allegiances. And they have just been elected into power. It is reasonable to at least suspect that Biden either agrees with them, or has cut a deal. It is certainly exponentially more plausible a suspicion than that the Republican Party is “white supremacist.” Literally nobody in the Republican Party, I warrant, would say they are a “white supremacist.”

Another commentator actually quotes Trump telling the crowd on January 6th “to ‘get’ Pence if he didn't stop the certification process.” 

The transcript of his speech, which is available online, shows that Trump did not say this, or anything like it. The quotation is either deliberately invented, or hallucinated.

The characterization, common throughout the left, of the illegal entry into the capitol building as an attempt to seize control of the government seems similarly delusional—indeed, paranoid. Few of the civilians present seem to have been armed. As your correspondent notes, they had no plan for any alternative government. 

By this standard, any political demonstration could be characterized as an attempt to seize control of the government.

The left likes to stress that five people died during the event—as if this demonstrates that it was a violent attempt to seize government. CTV News refers to it in headlines as "the deadly capitol riot." They do not note that four of those five were demonstrators. One woman shot dead by capitol police. Of the other three, one man died of a heart attack; another of a stroke. One was trampled in the crush. These are the sort of things that might happen in any large gathering, especially of relatively elderly people. The officer died the next day of a stroke. As far as we can tell, the worst he suffered at the hands of demonstrators was being pepper sprayed. His death may or may not have been related to the stress of dealing with the protesters.

What are we to make of the fact that a large proportion of the general public seems to have gone insane? How can we respond?

The Mask of Authoritarianism

 

Icarus asserts his liberty.

My friend Xerxes, the left-leaning columnist, has recently made the Orwellian assertion that anyone who resists wearing a mask is an authoritarian.

No doubt he is sincere; Project Veritas recently released recordings of internal conversations at CNN, and they too sound absolutely sincere. This is the Devil’s work. The Devil, the Accuser, predisposes us, once we go off the moral rails, to begin to assert the very opposite of the truth. Xerxes, I can deduce, wants a nice authoritarian government, and he wants to blame someone else for it.

His logic is this:

1. people who resist masks do so because the experts keep changing their advice.

3. it is authoritarian to expect truth to be objective and unchanging.

To be clear on how wrong this is, Merriam-Webster gives its first definition of “authoritarianism" as “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority.” Oxford defines "authoritarian" as “A person who favours obedience to authority as opposed to personal liberty; an authoritarian person.”

But that would not matter to Xerxes; in the same column, he objects to dictionary definitions as “authoritarian.”

Xerxes acknowledges that the experts have indeed kept changing their advice. Although it would be more accurate to say that different experts have expressed different opinions all along, and it is government that have been changing their advice.

But, he points out, that is how science operates.

“Initially, masks were considered useless. Immediately, experimenters began testing that hypothesis. They measured aerosol transmission indoors and outdoors. Medical recommendations changed to reflect those findings. That’s the scientific mindset.” For science, “any advice that doesn’t change will be suspect.”

So those who resist current government authority fail to understand science. They want “An absolute, unimpeachable, forever and ever, authority. Which is the opposite of the scientific approach.”

Here he gets the scientific enterprise backwards. Science is and has always been the quest for natural laws: that is, for maxims about nature that are always true: the Law of Gravity, the Law of Inertia, and so forth. It is true, by the nature of things, that any such established law of nature might be overturned tomorrow by a “black swan” event; natural laws do not have the certainty of the laws of reason. But that is not considered by science the goal; rather, it would represent a failure of the science.

It is also true that science progresses by disproving things, never by proving things. However, the likelihood that a given model or theory is true is measured in science by the fact that it has been tested over a long period and not been disproven. That is the scientific method. If you find theories and models being rapidly overturned or changed, this means science has, in this case, clearly been failing to approach truth. To see the change itself as evidence science is getting closer to truth is like seeing pollution as proof that a factory is working efficiently, or fever as evidence of good health.

As this suggests, more broadly, truth is stable and unchanging by its nature. It is not the truth that keeps changing; it is theories that keep changing if they fail to correspond with reality. Were this no so, there would be no grounds but whim on which to change our theories. To say that science now thinks relativity is more accurate, and Newtonian physics inadequate, is not to say that the cosmos changed between Newton and Einstein.

Nor is it some sort of infringement on personal liberty to seek the truth, or to act in conformity with it. It is nonsense to argue that acknowledging gravity is authoritarian because it denies us our freedom to fly at will.

But that is where the political left now is: that is the sort of thing they now assert. That is what we see now, for example, in “gender studies.”

Third Person Singular

 

While languages find it natural to assimilate new words for things—content words—the grammar is pretty fixed. It is the grammar, for example, that identifies English as a Germanic language, although most of the actual vocabulary is Latinate. When the French-speaking Normans poured in, the vocabulary changed, but the grammar was more resistant to political control.

It is because it violates grammar that a term like “ain’t” has never been accepted as correct, even though it has been common for centuries. Or “youse.”

A standard current text on teaching English vocabulary notes:

“Content words are an open set: that is, there is no limit to the number of content words that can be added to the language. Here are a few that have been added recently — airbag, emoticon; carjacking, cybersex, quark. Grammatical words, on the other hand, are a closed set. The last time a pronoun was added to the language was in the early sixteenth century. (It was them.)”

This throws into stark relief the extremism, indeed the absurdity, of the current demand, by Canadian governments, for everyone to use an unlimited number of new pronouns.

It would be hard to come up with a more extreme intrusion on the culture.

Shuffling Right?

As we look back on an ending decade, a couple of commentators make the case that overall, it was a story of the left is dying, and the right rising. Witness the recent historic election in the UK. Following Brexit, following the surprise election of Trump.

And in Europe. When I was young, the contest was always between the right and the socialists or even communists. The communists were a significant factor in Italy and France. Europe was seen as well to the left of the US, and leftists generally saw America as simply lagging behind the parade.

This no longer seems to be clearly so. The social democrats are slipping to third-party status or worse in Germany, the socialists are down to sixth in France. The contest now is often between the centre or centre-right and a party farther right. This means that policies in general are being pulled rightward rather than leftward in the civic debate.

Back in America, Trump’s breakthrough into the upper Midwest last election, like the Tories’ success in the north of England, seems portentous. The old industrial working class is moving over to the right.

There is less movement visible in Canada; but it seems significant that a right-wing party recently won in Quebec, where all major parties had been left-wing for the past fifty years. It all speaks well in strategic terms for Maxime Bernier’s notion of launching a new right-wing alternative. If Canada has not been following the same trajectory as the UK, US, and Europe recently, it may be for lack of electoral alternatives.

Michael Knowles makes the case that in the last ten years, the right in the US has won elections pretty consistently. If you track the number of seats changing hands at the federal and state level combined, there seems to be a definite and strong shift right. What look like continuing major defeats in the culture wars have come, he points out, at the hands of judges. They have been imposed by courts; even if, after the fact, the rest of the country seems to have accepted them. If we are seeing a revolt of the general population against the views of the elites, the courts are going to be a lagging indicator: here we get the views of a small professional elite.

And even this is likely to change, as Trump gets to appoint more judges.

Send in the Clowns

I had a little epiphany recently while rummaging through old files.

I found there a weathered note from an old friend from grad school, dating to back in the 1980s. She was expressing her delight that I had tried to get back in touch; but at the same time warning me that she was “fragile,” and urging that we not discuss either politics or religion.

I think I may have uncovered here a very early example of the attitude of censorship that has now overtaken the left. This young woman was a canary in the mine—in the academy from which this has all sprung.

At the time, I recall, I found it odd, that she wanted to avoid all talk of religion. Since our graduate field had been religion. And we were of the same religion.

I took it then as expressing some very personal problem; and my friend did indeed seem “fragile,” as she said, always complaining of a bad back, and of a history of depression.

Because it is being expressed through political action, people tend to see the growing intolerance on the left as political. Jordan Peterson calls it “cultural Marxism.”

But perhaps my friend’s case indicates that the first cause is not political, but psychological and spiritual. Marx just offers a convenient political analogue.

And it may be a bit callous to scoff at such fragile people as “snowflakes.” They may be responding to some real spiritual anguish with their talk of “triggers.”

Better perhaps to blame not Marx, but Freud. What we are seeing now may be less cultural Marxism than political Freudianism.

Freud’s thesis, in an A-cup, was that mental illness was caused by repressing natural urges. “Civilization and its discontents” were the problem. Accordingly, if someone like my friend went to a psychiatrist or psychologist with emotional problems, perhaps originally caused by the torment of an aching back, the advice they would be given would be to throw off their “hangups” about conventional morality and start thinking seriously about having sex.

My friend was into that.

And rather than helping, this may well have led sufferers, especially those who like my friend had religious sentiments, into a downward spiral. Increasingly tormented by the voice of conscience, it came to the point that they, like she, could no longer bear any mention of religion.

It all makes you wonder.

But then, why politics too? She could not tolerate politics. And why has this mental illness now spread from individuals like my friend to the political left in general, seemingly a majority or almost a majority of the population?

Carl Rogers.

That may be thanks to Carl Rogers. Rogers was the dominant voice in American psychiatry during the 1960s. He followed Freud, Jung, and the rest of the field in holding that the solution to mental illness was to throw off the shackles of conventional morality and the demands of being civilized and satisfy your natural passions. But he expanded the possible clientele, arguing that we are all suffering from these oppressive influences: we would all be healthier and happier if we adopted psychiatry as our religion and reached our full “human potential,” by which he meant, getting whatever we wanted. This was the meaning of life: “Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced.”

Surely this, perhaps best immortalized by Disney’s Baloo the Bear, was the essential doctrine of the Sixties. “Let it all hang out.” One was supposed to be ashamed only of having “hangups,” meaning moral scruples. The term itself comes from Kerouac; but Kerouac meant something very different. He meant simply things that hold our attention, as a hobby might. Nothing negative about it.

And note the Sixties slogan, “if it feels good, do it.” “Follow your bliss.” “Do your own thing.” “Don’t be judgmental.”

The premise, then, was that the natural man, man in the state of nature, our natural urges, were good; the restraints placed on them by morality, culture, and civilization, were bad. Morality was bad. Civilization was bad. We had to get “back to nature,” “back to the garden,” “back to the land.” Witness too the whole ecology thing.

This is awful advice, if conventional morality and civilization happen to be anything other than ignorant prejudice. And that is not a possible hypothesis. If ignorant prejudice, given original blessedness, where did they come from? If all our natural instincts are right and good how did sin and error, these hurtful demands of civilization, ever come into the world? It could not have come from humans. It must have been some outside agency, then: alien mind control?

Then too, if all preceding generations got it wrong, and we in the Sixties were the first to realize this, we must believe that all our ancestors were idiots.

Logically not credible, then; but fatally appealing. Natural urges are naturally seductive.

But because it was logical nonsense, this fact was bound to become obvious over time. The wheels were going to come off this handcart. What then?

Folks in the Sixties and in the human potential movement were not generally reckless enough to believe that you could always ignore morality in favour of satisfying your natural urges. Manson family aside, most hippies stopped short of murder. Or theft, despite feints like Abby Hoffman’s “Steal This Book,” and talk of “liberating” whatever you wanted. Theft might be good, but unlike most sex, there was the practical risk of being arrested.

This is where Marxism comes in. One could through it at least be working towards a solution: Marx’s communist cloud cuckoo land, in which everyone could just have whatever they wanted.

In the meantime, more immediately, the human potential revolution concentrated on the sexual urges. Sexual sins, we were assured, were “crimes with no victims.” So that any such laws or prohibitions were simply oppressive, and easily abolished.

It was actually obvious form the start that this was not so: abortion. It was never that there were no victims; it was that the victims were defenseless.

And over time, it has become apparent that there are lots more victims too; our ancestors were indeed not just prejudiced self-hating fools. The sexual revolution has been devastating for family life, which means devastating for children. But again, children are voiceless and vulnerable members of society.

Less obviously, it has been devastating for everyone else.

Gradually, the toll has mounted. But that is only the half of it. At the same time, the voice of conscience has become louder and louder, making those who bought in to the doctrine increasingly emotionally “fragile,” terrified of their own shadows, terrified of certain matters being raised.

As we now see all around us.

In Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chronicling the beginnings of the hippie movement in Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their van trip across America to meet Timothy Leary, he already reports the case of a female passenger who goes suddenly psychotic over thoughts of a child she had abandoned or aborted as a requirement of their free-love lifestyle. She is herself abandoned at the next stop. The van rolls on. 

Kesey's van.

Along with the need for censorship has grown the need to find scapegoats. The original and classic move in this regard was feminism: blame everything bad on men. Women’s urges were still all good: but men were all depraved and their urges immoral. Then whites have become scapegoats, for the obvious reason that they really did play a disproportionate role in forming our “oppressive” culture and civilization. So they are a fifth column that must be suppressed or eliminated. And, of course, the Catholic Church, the right, any memorials to shared history, anyone who will not openly endorse this or that given sexual perversion, anyone who retains the conventional faith in right and wrong.

Some on the right have taken recently to calling this all “clown world.” That is to give it too much credit. It is pathological and objectively evil. Perhaps the beginning of a return to civilizational health is to say so.

Contra Relativism

My politically southpawed pal Xerxes has declared of late that he knows nothing for certain. “I am absolutely sure that I can’t be absolutely sure of anything anymore. Life evolves. Knowledge changes. Sooner or later, everything I’m sure of will require reconsideration.”

To the contrary, as Aquinas would say, I maintain there are a series of truths that are self-evident and undeniable:

The truths of mathematics. Two and two will always equal four. The Pythagorean theorem will hold in all relevant cases.

Logical truths. Both A and not-A cannot simultaneously be true. If B follows from A, and C from B, then C follows from A. And so on.

Ethical truths. Kant’s categorical imperative, the golden rule. Although there can be argument over specific cases, we all know in our conscience that all are created equal, and that murder or lying, for example, are morally wrong.

The intrinsic value of truth, good, and beauty. The transcendentals.

Aside from the many other formal proofs of the existence of God, I think it is close to self-evident to the light of reason that there is a complex pattern and organization to the natural world, which forces the conclusion that there is an intelligence that designed it. Therefore, the existence of God seems like certain knowledge, even though some claim to dispute it.

Even were this not so as a logical proposition, the existence of God can be directly experienced, in such a way that it is known with certainty, whether or not one can convey this experience and this certainty to anyone else. Being able to convey this truth is a separate matter from the knowledge itself: I can be certain that I love my wife, without necessarily being able to convince her of this.

From this set of propositions—perhaps there are more self-evident truths that I overlook here, but from these alone—a great deal more can be reliable deduced to be true.

Counter to this, Xerxes cites Heisenberg’s “uncertainly principle” as proving that nothing is certain.

Heisenberg’s principle refers to a specific problem in observing subatomic structures. To apply it outside this context is not legitimate. That is like saying, for a random analogy, that because jaywalking is illegal, all possible human actions are illegal. At most, it tends to throw into doubt the scientistic notion that science is capable of discovering all truth: an unscientific and philosophically false idea in any case.

The same is so for the observer paradox, which Xerxes goes on to cite. This is a problem for science, in its claim of objectivity, not for ontology or for epistemology.

It can indeed be argued that science has little necessary relation to truth in the first place. As Popper, for example, has argued recently, or as did Copernicus at its origin.

Xerxes goes on to endorse what he calls “both/and” reasoning over “either/or.” He seems to here be directly rejecting Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction: that both A and not A cannot simultaneously be true. This is a non-starter. Some choices, of course, are not binary; but even such more complex choices, as we can see from computer architecture, are built on prior binary choices. Consider for analogy a Xerxian computer in which each bit was not either 1 or 0, but both 1 and 0 at the same time. It is intrinsically nonsensical, of course, when so graphically illustrated. And of course, no such computer would function. So too with human judgement.

Which I suspect is the underlying point, here and so often with leftward thought: the motive is a desire to escape all moral judgements. Xerxes goes on, not for the first time, to speak against conventional morality, conventional ideas of good and evil, on the premise that things like water, science, or fossil fuels, are in themselves neither good or bad. Rather, what matters is that they be in the right proportion. Too little water kills; so does too much. And so forth.

This idea of “everything in moderation,” however, cannot work. Because it is immediately self-contradictory: too much moderation is itself immoderate. Moreover, why is moderation preferable? Because it produces good? But then aren’t you being immoderate if you always choose the good?

Xerxes is misrepresenting conventional morality in the first place in implying that it holds anything to be intrinsically evil. God created all things; it follows that all things are intrinsically good. However, you must integrate this with the idea of hierarchy; not all things are equally good. Otherwise there is no way of settling on the "right" proportion of anything. What is right depends on what the goal is—and the goal must itself therefore be seen as having an intrinsic value greater than other possible goals.

Moral judgements are therefore not properly applied to things as things, but to human thoughts or actions. Here it is essential to make moral judgements. Murder is evil; even a little bit of it is evil. Hate is evil; even a little bit of it is evil. Conversely, there is no such thing as too much love of God. Self-evidently, too much good (or virtue) does not become evil. One can argue otherwise, but only by falsifying the proper meaning of “virtue” or “good.” More broadly, evil consists in preferring a lesser to a greater good.

One more typical left-wing thought from Xerxes: he writes that “Individuals are in some way the sum of their relationships.”

That is dangerously misleading without an explicit reference to one’s relationship with God. It is ultimately only this relationship that counts, as any mystic will tell you, and other relationships are of value only to the extent that they conform to this one. Otherwise Xerxes’s ethic here is to “go along to get along,” which is the broad and level road to Hell. It is the ethic that sustained Nazi Germany, or that sustains the Mafia.

The Oppression Olympics

My cargo-shifted-to-port pal Cyrus, not to be confused with Xerxes, sought the other evening to explain why the left seemed to spin on a dime from being irreconcilably opposed to Islam for oppressing women to making the extirpation of “Islamophobia” one of its main policies. He acknowledges the inconsistency, but suggests that, once the left identifies a group as oppressed, they immediately tend to overlook any faults, perhaps as overcompensation.

That seems admission enough—but also leads to the next question. How are Muslims in general an oppressed group?

His response seemed to me tentative: “colonialism.”

Problem: if the issue is having been colonized, and recently, Muslims are simply in the same situation as just about everyone else in the world. So why this special concern for Muslims, and not for Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Bahais, or Christians? Granted that some European countries—England, one or two others—have not been colonized in recent times. Neither has Muslim Turkey.

Moreover, Muslims have been up to quite recent times among the world’s most eager colonizers themselves. In principle, for Islam, empire is the proper form of government. The Ottoman Empire, which in the 19th century still held large swaths of Christian Europe, ended only in 1922. Muslim Indonesia allowed independence to Christian Timor-Leste only in 2002. Muslim Sudan allowed independence to Christian South Sudan only in 2011. Muslim Mauritania became the last country in the world to legally abolish slavery in 1981, following soon after Saudi Arabia and Oman. Reports are that slavery continues de facto in Muslim Libya.

Strictly speaking, on balance, Muslims are probably the single least-historically-oppressed demographic in the universe; with perhaps the exception of the English, Germans, French, or Russians.

Which brings up the wider question, how many other of the left’s supposedly “oppressed” client groups are in fact not oppressed? If the left is wrong here, are they wrong in other cases?

I think they are systematically wrong. While, granted, some of their client groups have been historically oppressed or discriminated against, this would have been in the past, not in the present. It was other people at another time. Almost by definition, once there is a consensus that a given group has been oppressed, that oppression must be over. Because nobody at all is prepared to admit they are oppressing anyone. The left is, at best, always in the business of urgently pouring water on fires that have been out for generations. While other fires blaze untended.

Who currently is genuinely oppressed? Falun Gong. Christians in the Middle East. Christians in China and North Korea. Yazidis. Jews in Europe and the Middle East. Kurds. Muslims in China. White South Africans. Is the left interested in doing anything to help?

Not a bit.

The Decriminalization of Dissent

The classical method of "cutting people off."

My left-listing friend Xerxes just surprised me by coming out against censorship, against unfriending in social media, and against shouting down speakers with whom you disagree. This would seem to buck the trend on the left, of demanding ever-increasing and ever-more-stringent censorship.

His may be only one voice. Or this may be a symptom that the left has gone too far, and that the “Just Walk Away” movement is spreading. Gag reflexes may be kicking in.

Xerxes writes of receiving offensive emails:

“You have these friends, see, who keep sending you emails filled with racist slurs against Muslims, abortionists, ‘Indians’ (they still use that term), Hindus, Asians, and immigrants in general.”

And he ponders:

“Should you cut them off? Block their emails? Terminate the friendship?”

But concludes:

“Isolating persons with whom we disagree simply amplifies the echo chamber they live in.”

There are a lot of problems here. But in a backhanded, incoherent way, he seems to recognize that something has gone wrong. He’s just not clear yet whodunit.

To begin, note that he speaks of “racist slurs” against abortionists. You may have noticed that abortionists are not actually a race.

Neither are Muslims, Hindus, or immigrants.

So he is using the term “racism” incorrectly.

This might be trivial, if it is simply a matter of saying “racism” when he meant “prejudice.” But that does not work either. It is hard to see how one would be prejudiced against abortionists. To call someone an “abortionist” is to say they have performed a specific act. What then is one pre-judging? If it is a matter of saying that the act is wrong, that is not a prejudice, but a “judice”— a moral judgement.

It looks as though Xerxes is still simply using the term “racism” to refer to views or political positions with which he disagrees.

Now, the thought that you should “cut someone off” and end a friendship simply because you disagree with them seems self-evidently wrong. Let’s look at his justification:

“Should you cut them off? Block their emails? Terminate the friendship?
Or do you try to reason with them? Prove their so-called facts incorrect? Point out the flaws in their logic?
That might work if they reached their views as a reasoned conviction. But that’s unlikely. More likely, they’re regurgitating cultural memes they’ve accepted without any conscious analysis.”

That is, he says it is impossible to reason with them because they are only repeating things they have heard, and have never thought about.

But that is an obvious non sequitur. If they hold their opinions from ignorance, it is commonly held that people are capable of both thinking and learning. Entire schools have been founded on this premise. If this were the issue, it is the perfect argument for continuing the dialogue. They are misinformed; you inform them.

So whatever the real reason Xerxes and the left previously wanted to censor, deplatform, and silence dissenting views, and still does at some level, this cannot be it. And since this claim is so obviously through-the-looking-glass, I think we can assume that the real reason is discreditable. Otherwise nobody would be able to convince themselves of something so absurd. This is what psychology calls “denial.”

I think he hints at the real reason with his conclusion. It is as though truth is beginning to dawn.

“Isolating persons with whom we disagree simply amplifies the echo chamber they live in.”

Now, who is isolating themselves, the friends who send him the emails, or him, if he “cuts them off”?

This is where the left, and the clerisy who presume they rule the rest of us, have been living. And they are perhaps, if Xerxes is an indication, now beginning to realize it.

In a list of oddly random complaints, as though he does not want to look at the issue too directly, Xerxes then expresses dissatisfaction with “various right-and/or-left-wing advocacy groups who shout down speakers they don’t approve of...”

The next thing he needs to realize, of course, is that it has been exclusively left-wing groups doing this. That’s too much, no doubt, for now.

But I sense a shift in the wind. Sometimes you don’t need a weatherman.

Is Paris Burning?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

What is happening in Paris?

It looks like one more stage in the general collapse of the left, following in the footsteps of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Granted, Macron's government is centrist, not leftist, but the nominal cause of these riots is high gas prices due to carbon taxes, and the protesters are apparently flooding in from the conservative countryside.

Gandhi supposedly said that fundamental change comes about in three stages. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

This seems to have been the trajectory followed by the modern “right,” and we are at the “fight” stage. Or maybe now past it. Not long ago, in Canada and Europe, you just did not hear any but a limited set of “politically correct views” anywhere in the media. A vast range of possible views were simply and literally publicly unspeakable. Then voices like Rush Limbaugh began to be heard. And they were mocked and ridiculed. Then as they demonstrably gained a large audience, the Fox News and National Post stage, they were declared dangerous, racist, fascist, “far right,” alt-right, “white supremacist.” Leftists poured into the streets wearing black masks to disrupt. They began mobbing people in restaurants. They began campaigns of lawfare against rightists. They began strong-arming through a leftist judiciary.

This looks bad, but is actually a sign of desperation. Nothing else has worked. You would not need to resort to an activist judiciary, for example, or a rogue bureaucracy, if popular opinion was with you. You do not need to use force and intimidation if you can count on winning elections or arguments. We now seem to be at the stage at which an overall, if still slender, majority of the population in the developed world are actually “far right.” Making this description a contradiction in terms.

Probably it is already really more than a slender majority. The average person can always be cowed into pretending to accept and believe the socially acceptable line, out of fear of ridicule or other social consequences. If everyone else is using the Nazi salute, he does not want to be  seen not using the Nazi salute. If he is told that only racist bigots and uneducated antisocial egotists are against carbon taxes, for some time, he can be counted on not to express opposition to carbon taxes, no matter what his real views, for fear of being declared a racist bigot and an uneducated antisocial egotist.

But when allegiance is maintained by fear and intimidation, it can collapse quickly and violently.

And there, perhaps, we are.

No Irish Need Apply

Newsweek magazine has just published an openly racist anti-Irish article. The good news is that it is being pilloried across the Internet. Perhaps, in light of this, there is little need for me to comment. But still…

The piece laments the passing of the days when “the biggest names, faces, and voices on television” were “all sober, serious Americans—and all Protestants too.” “Why,” the author asks, “has the ascent of a bunch of people who in an earlier period might have been called Micks drawn no notice at all?”

“Micks,” after all, are not sober or serious. Right?

The author laments this, at the same time, as showing the supposed “collapse” of Irish-American culture, its “drying up and blowing away.”

Isn’t that odd? The fact that Irish Catholics have become more prominent is the death of Irish Catholic culture?

And his problem with Sean Hannity is that he “makes $29 million a year: his ilk care a lot about money, never a major priority of the older Irish America, where it was fatal to get above yourself.”

In other words, Irish culture is apparently supposed to be poor and powerless. It is not right to rise above your station.

Worse, in his eyes, the Irish have ceased to be reliably Democratic voters. It is their ethnic duty, it seems, to vote Democrat.

The author blames it all on Joe McCarthy. “All of them can be traced to Joe McCarthy’s rise to stardom.”

Joe McCarthy the leader of Irish America? My first reaction was to realize for the first time that, yes, Joe McCarthy must have been Irish.

Granted, he was ethnically Irish, and not the villain he is often painted on the left to be, but he was never seen in his day by the Irish or anyone else as an Irish political leader. He was a Midwestern farm boy; the Irish in the US were resolutely urban. His constituency was German-American. And he was Republican when most Irish Americans were Democrats.

Far more significant as Irish political leaders in the 20th century were Al Smith, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. In the second tier, maybe Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Eugene McCarthy, and a selection of longtime big city mayors. Joe McCarthy, by comparison, is barely a blip. If you want to point to a leader of Irish conservatism, the obvious figure, next to Reagan, is William F. Buckley Jr., often considered the father of the modern American right.

There is an obvious reason why Irish Catholics in the US have moved from left to right over the past fifty or sixty years. Remarkably, the author does not mention it. Over the last fifty or sixty years, the left has turned against the Catholic Church and its values; most notably on the issue of abortion. Why is it surprising if, in reaction, many Catholics turned against the left? It is not just the Irish: you see the same movement among Italians, and there is a fair representation of Italian-Americans as well as Irish-Americans on Fox News: Neil Cavuto, Andrew Napolitano, Jeanine Pirro.

The author equates being Irish with “a talent for invective,” and accuses Irish commentators of a “sneering, baiting, biting style.” Yet he calls Bill O’Reilly a “beady-eyed Grand Inquisitor” and refers to “Beefy Hannity.” Steve Bannon is "dissolute but scary." I guess it is just the Irish who must not use invective, then?

Not that I have ever heard such invective from Bill O’Reilly or Megyn Kelly or Steve Bannon. Possibly Sean Hannity.

On Sean Spicer Being Uncool

What all the cool kids are wearing.

A very odd piece appeared the other day in the National Post. It argues, almost without explanation or justification, that it was simply wrong, in some moral sense, for Stephen Colbert and the administration of the Emmys to allow Sean Spicer to appear onstage during the ceremony, even though he was doing so essentially to poke fun at himself as White House Press Secretary. Worse, Spicer was actually invited to some of the Emmy parties after the broadcast. This is unacceptable!

This is a classic example of bullying, of a familiar and pernicious high school variety. Some kid or kids are designated uncool, and to be part of the cool in-group it is necessary not to be seen hanging out with them. You must shun them. Why?

No good reason is offered. This is not a moral act. Because they have been designated by the “popular” crowd to be uncool. You show your supposed superiority by knowing, without it being explained, that they are uncool. If you challenge this, if someone has to explain it to you, you are just showing you are uncool. The matter could be completely capricious; but it is necessary to show membership in the herd of the cool.

It is all terribly nasty and immature. But kids are cruel. It is very like the choir in Lord of the Flies, with Spicer here in the role of Simon or Piggy. It is especially ugly to see this sort of thing in a national newspaper.

But it is the tactic now of the left as a whole. No arguments are presented for why Sean Spicer is somehow as a human being beyond the pale of polite company. Indeed, no arguments are given any more for most leftist positions, You must either passionately subscribe to them without question, or you are revealing yourself as uncool.

In this case, there are a few vague mentions of supposed sins: “being caught in multiple lies, exaggerations and, of course, the time he tried to make a worse than Hitler comparison to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.”

Only one example is given, then, of supposed lies and exaggerations. The reader is supposed to accept this all as so, or reveal themselves as uncool. This is a reference to Assad—being the only example given, we have a right to assume it is the worst thing Spicer has ever said.

What he actually said was “someone as despicable as Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons [in World War II].” On the face of it, this is perfectly true, and a common observation.

Some at the time protested that this was not true strictly speaking, because Hitler indeed used sarin gas in the concentration camps.

I think it would be fair to dispute whether an execution technique counts as a “weapon,” especially when the context was given as war. It is not assumed to be such in common speech.

If all press secretaries are all to be held to this standard, all of them would appear to be at least as lying and deceitful as Spicer.

As would any one of us.

In other words, the bill of indictment against Spicer is objectively nuts. He is just a designated scapegoat, an uncool kid. It does not matter what he ever actually said or did.

A Twitter twit is quoted as saying he “passionately advocated against human rights, health care, & American values.” Again, with no examples.

This is obviously untrue. You are just expected to accept it as true without evidence, or reveal yourself as uncool.

This attitude, standard on the left, is suicidal.

Spicer was the official spokesperson for the US President, elected by roughly 50% of the American people. It follows that what he advocated reflected the views of fifty percent of the American people. Half the population of the US and their opinions is here being branded beyond the pale of polite society, “against human rights, health care, & American values.” Americans’ values are against American values? Who gets to say so?

How long are the majority of the student body—continuing the high school example—going to continue to support a group that thinks of them this way? Or continue, for that matter, to read a newspaper that does? The proportion of Trump supporters might be lower in Canada. On the other hand, this newspaper, the National Post, has traditionally been seen as on the right.

This is why the mainstream media is dying; and it is why the left as we now know it will die. They think of themselves as the popular and admired in-group at school, and of the general public as humble supplicants who crave but do not merit their approval.

This works only so long as everyone buys into the illusion. It helps if you have all the hunky athletes and the pretty girls in your group. Sex appeal, at a certain age, works wonders. The modern left cannot claim this to be so. They are sitting high on a branch unconnected to any tree.

They should have noticed that the illusion is evaporating. Trump got elected. Rolling Stone Magazine was just sold for one dollar. Movie attendance is cratering.

Yet they are so self-absorbed and unaware they think they have the power to socially shun the elected head of the student body.

It is a quick drop from this position to one of general ridicule.

History will not mourn them, this modern left.

White Privilege

Evidence of white privilege on display at Auschwitz

The dogma of “white privilege” seems to have fixed now hard as cement on the left. It can be used, of course, to justify any sort of discrimination against someone with white skin.

Are we all aware that this tactic has been used before, many times?

It is, in fact, the alibi for most historical genocides. They are usually represented as a matter of “getting our own back,” of evening the score for supposed past harm or discrimination. This almost has to be so, for some such alibi is needed to quiet the human conscience. No massacre is ever presented as unprovoked.

Here are a few notes on the Jews from a Nazi party monthly for propagandists, circa 1936:

“There are still Jewish lackeys today who attempt to disrupt our storm attack on the Jewish world rulers, trying to stop us or even cause us to fall. The following hints show how one can reply to these arguments by our opponents, or even turn their arguments against them.”

Note the Nazi claim that the Jews ruled the world. Just as “whites” are claimed to today. This is what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were all about: the supposed Jewish hegemony. The system had been rigged in their favour, and to oppress poor ordinary Germans.

“Even if a few hundred Jewish families in Germany really did have to go hungry, what is that against the many millions of German families that the Jew murdered over the course of centuries through wars, revolutions, and civil strife, not to mention those ruined through usury and fraud.”

Reparations were due. Yeah. What about slavery? What about European colonialism? You know the drill. “White” people are responsible for all of history’s wars, not to mention raping the world through capitalism, through “usury and fraud.”

(Quotes from Kurt Hilmar Eitzen, “Zehn Knüppel wider die Judenknechte,” Unser Wille und Weg 6, 1936, pp. 309-310).

Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi chief of ideology, wrote,

“It is almost a miracle that absolutely nothing has happened to Jews in Germany, but rather that only gradually the rights they stole from the Germans in politics and culture have been restored.”

Nothing sinister here. Just poor exploited Aryans finally getting their own back.

The same dynamic gave us the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s. The Tutsis had been dominant in Rwandan politics before and during the colonial period. And so, the Rwandan Patriotic Front spread the notion that the Tutsis were oppressors.

In the end, when they came to power, 70 percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda were massacred.

The same claim of “getting our own back,” if not “reverse racism” specifically, is of course always behind the Communist genocides: in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia. Collectively, these are probably the worst the world has ever seen. The bourgeois have, according to Marxist doctrine, been exploiting the workers. And so they ought to all be put to death. Just evening the score.

This is the road down which we travel. This is the ideology Antifa is attempting to enforce by violence in the streets.

Don’t pretend it isn’t.