More Sanity from the Left

 

This sounds like the left I used to know.

Situation Report from the American Civil War

 

I think I see the morning star appear: the woke left is finished. 

The “rainbow coalition” of special interest groups that has been the foundation of the American left since the Eighties has always been fragile, because it is a random group without shared interests: feminists, African Americans, various immigrant groups, notably Hispanics and Muslims, and gays. As I have long noted, these groups have few interests or opinions in common. They were united only by a shared hatred of straight white Christian males. Each of these groups, taken individually, actually has more in common with straight white Christian males and the American mainstream than with each other. It was only a matter of time until some of them began to figure this out.

Dylan Mulvaney and the extreme, visibly pedophilic demands of the trans activists turned out to be the straw that set afire the camel’s back in a holocaust of mixed metaphors. We now see demonstrations by Muslim parents against trans pride in the schools. It is not good to anger the Muslims. Asian-American immigrants  have been pulling away rom the left for some time. Suburban moms have been protesting at local school boards; so much for the women’s vote. Latinos are uniting against the LA Dodgers’ celebration of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, fairly described as an anti-Catholic hate group. The left, completely detached from the lives and concerns of actual immigrants, seem never to have noticed that Latinos are Catholic. Prominent feminists like Margaret Atwood and J.K. Rowling have pointed out that trans rights are fundamentally incompatible with women’s rights. A growing number of gays have dissociated themselves rom the trans movement. After all, the difference between men and women is the whole reason they are gay. 

The working class, once the foundation of the left, has been of course abandoned long ago. They are now the deplorables, who should not be allowed to take up space. Especially not on Parliament Hill or on the Capitol Building.

African-Americans, blacks, seem to be lagging in figuring this out and moving beyond their prejudices. But there are voices of growing prominence: Larry Elder, Tim Scott, Candace Owens, “Tyrus.” It is happening; and it is inevitable. The trans and leftist hostility to Christian values goes against a deeply religious strain in the African-American soul.

Why, in face of this, is so much of the leadership on the left still embracing and identifying themselves with the trans activists? Why did they embrace the movement to begin with?

To begin with, because they are out of touch; and this is their own fault. They have plugged their ears, sought to silence and deplatform, voices and opinions they did not like. The necessary result is that they have been living in a thought bubble, unaware of what is really going on.

Secondly, because their fundamental philosophical principle, that there is no truth, reality, or true morality; that each of us is radically free to create our own universe; is perfectly expressed by the trans movement. It is their flagship, their battle standard. It is their hill to die on.

And I think they will.

Lutherans and the Alt-Right

 

"Green Lives Matter"

Xerxes, my larboard columnist friend, is impressed of late that President Harrison of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the US has come out in opposition to the “alt-right,” condemning it in members of his congregation. Xerxes thinks this is impressive because the LCMS has a reputation as a conservative denomination.

Xerxes is wrong to be impressed. It is no surprise if a conservative Christian denomination denounces the “alt-right.” This is dog-bites-man. 

There is a reason why the “alt-right” calls itself and is called the “alt-right.” Because it is an alternative to the right. There is no reason for a conservative denomination to love it.

Conservatism means wanting to conserve established traditions. In the US that means, pre-eminently, equality and civil rights: respecting and preserving the ideals of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. American conservatism is thus necessarily liberal, in the true sense of that word. It believes in democracy, equality, and limited government. It is anti-authoritarian. An authoritarian or totalitarian American right is therefore a contradiction in terms. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism is a plausible position only on the left. Hence the term “alt-right” for those eccentric American individuals who embrace ideas of a non-orthodox-Marxist but autocratic regime. Not to say that, even in European terms, Nazism or fascism are clearly on the right. An autocratic monarchy might be.

There’s not a big constituency for making America a kingdom.

Accordingly, in condemning the “alt-right,” or “Christian nationalism,” President Harrison of the LCMS is doing nothing surprising or bold; any more than coming out against vampires and werewolves. 

There is nothing so alarming about Christian nationalism. It is the status quo in such liberal democratic countries as the United Kingdom or Denmark. Because of the First Amendment, it has no support among conservatives in the US. I am a news hound, and regularly sample media outlets often accused by the left of being “far right,” like Fox News, Daily Wire, Small Dead Animals, Instapundit, and so forth. Nobody there is talking about Christian nationalism. Nobody there uses the term. The concept seems to exist only on the left.

President Harrison, in condemning the perhaps two or three members of his denomination who are alt-right and have active Twitter accounts, cites advocacy for “white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, and genocide.”

Most of what is considered the alt-right is actually trolling; it is practical joking by juveniles to make authorities look foolish for taking it seriously. It is fun, at a certain age, to show up your elders as gullible idiots. Actually, it is fun at any age. I’d guess that is true of all the items Harrison lists here—someone is pulling his leg. 

More alarming than this semi-mythical “alt-right” is the tendency on the left—and not some tiny “alt-left”--to associate such absurd gag views with anyone who is—to quote Xerxes’s own charges--“pro-Bible, anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-abortion, anti-newcomer, anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-Trudeau.” 

This is far more nefarious. Take the charge that anyone who is “anti-Trudeau” is “alt-right.” This means calling the majority of Canadians alt-right, and charging them with supporting slavery and genocide. After all, a super-majority of Canadians are anti-Trudeau. They always have been; they have been for the past three elections. 

Being opposed to the current government, and organizing to bring it down, is how democracy works. Oppose this, and it is you who are demanding a totalitarian, fascist government. Not as a gag—in all seriousness.

All Canadians also have a right to freedom of conscience, as the right would insist, and therefore a right to hold and proclaim pro-Bible views. Since all major world religions teach that homosexual sex is a sin, they have a right to hold and proclaim this view as well—just as anyone else has the right to argue the opposite. Feminism is a particular political ideology, a set of political demands, with which, in a free society, people have a right to disagree, and have a right to resist. In a non-totalitarian society, politics may be openly discussed, and people may dissent. So too with abortion; it is an issue we must legislate on, and must discuss, if we are a democracy. So too with immigration levels. Finally, we have a right, as the right insists, to decide for ourselves any medical treatment; this is security of the person. 

It is those on the left who seem to be subverting our rights and freedoms. This is creeping fascism; or perhaps galloping fascism.

Dilbert Quits

 

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, has just gotten himself cancelled. Dilbert has been pulled from the newspapers, his syndicate has cut him loose, and his book publisher will no longer publish him. He is still, for the moment, on YouTube.

This is because Adams on his daily YouTube broadcast cited a poll in which something like 47% of blacks could not agree with the statement “it’s okay to be white.” He says this shows that identifying as black now means you are a member of a “hate group”; he is sick of seeing videos of blacks beating up non-blacks on YouTube. He advised whites to stay away from blacks as much as possible.

Adams always calculates what he says. He knows what he is doing. He did this deliberately. He was being deliberately provocative. Those who say, "okay, he's right that there is a problem with black racism, but he went too far and should not have phrased it in such harsh terms" have missed the point. Adams wanted to create a stir. One does that by being provocative. One does that not by saying politely that buses really shouldn't be segregated, for example, but by refusing to give up your seat on the bus.

I think he was tired of drawing the daily comic. He has all the money he will ever need. He is ready to retire. As long as he is going to retire anyway, he might as well do something useful, and force a conversation on the growing problem of black racism. And on the growing problem of censorship.

I think this is part of a larger sense on the right that accommodating to the forever expanding demands of the left, as Adams has tended to do until now, is no longer tolerable or really even possible. It is appeasement, and it works no better now than it did with Hitler. Their demands simply grow more outrageous. 

The left has been at war with civilization, with “whites,” with America and Canada and “the West,” with reason and objectivity itself, for a long time. They are like children throwing tantrums; they will never stop. It is time that the right recognized this and stopped trying to get along.

Adams is right that there is a growing problem of racism in America, it is primarily anti-white racism, and it is primarily among blacks.

It's the Jews. It's Always the Jews

 

My leftist friend Xerxes surprises me by devoting his latest column to how “the Jews” have 

“re-invented” Christmas. This they have done, according to him, by dominating the music industry and writing Christmas songs on purely secular themes.

This is where we are. It is not a good place.

Xerxes is wrong, to begin with, to suggest that non-religious Christmas songs are any new thing. Christmas has always been a celebration of winter and the solstice as well as of the birth of Christ. It has always had its secular side of general merriment and misrule.

Here is a brief selection of old and purely secular Christmas tunes:

Deck the Halls

We Wish You a Merry Christmas

The Wren

Jingle Bells

Here We Come a Wassailing

O Tannenbaum

He is wrong too to say that all modern secular Christmas songs are written by “the Jews.” Here are a few secularist songs and songwriters I am pretty sure are not Jewish.

“Little St. Nick” – Brian Wilson

“(Simply Having) A Wonderful Christmas Time”—Paul McCartney

“Happy Christmas (War is Over)” – John Lennon

“All I Want for Christmas Is You” – Mariah Carey

When I was a kid, “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” was a popular novelty song. The author also wrote hymns—not Jewish.

Not that Xerxes is complaining all that loudly. Almost the last thing he cares about is anything going secular. He ends the column saying that St. Paul condemned holidays anyway.

But that leaves the whole point of the column being to blame the Jews for something, anything.

Without demanding punishment, Xerxes includes all the elements of anti-semitism. First, the idea that Jews act as a unit; that they have an agenda. Second, that they are powerful, and more or less secretly powerful. They are controlling things behind the curtain. Third, that their agenda goes against the interests and desires of the majority.

Very sinister. And Bob’s your uncle, you have the International Jewish Conspiracy. You have the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This was always the predictable end of “intersectionality.” The inevitable trajectory was to target the smallest distinct group with the greatest available concentration of wealth to pillage. So the scapegoat class who owed reparations perhaps started out as “whites,” but then “white males,” then “cis white males,” or non-disabled cis white males; while the supposedly oppressed class expanded from blacks to blacks and women, blacks, women, and people of any skin tone other than white, but then also Muslims, then also sexual nonconformists of any description. The inevitable end-point was everybody versus the Jews, the smallest identifiable minority with the greatest wealth. Modern leftists see this just as Hitler saw it. 

I expect Kanye West’s recent outbursts have a lot to do with other people feeling freer to go here—although everyone was going here already.

One aspect of West’s argument was “Why can’t I complain about the Jews? I can complain about everybody else, but not the Jews.”

But that is not true. Black people have licence to complain publicly about everybody else, except the Jews. The only people white people can complain about are cis white males. And apart from complaining--the fact seems suppressed, but Jews are, in proportion, the one group most targeted by hate crimes. 

The modern left is not just Fascist. It is becoming Nazi.

The Know Nothings

 

It is interesting to scan the comments on the latest column by Xerxes, my leftist columnist friend. They are a window into the leftward mind.

The first reader writes, most revealingly, “I cannot see any MAGA Republicans subscribing to your columns.”

This shows us that leftists only read opinions and columns with which they agree.

This means they can be easily led about by the nose. They do not want the truth, they want whatever comforts them. They risk being easily blindsided.

I am not a “MAGA Republican”: I do not live in the USA. But I read Xerxes’s columns precisely because I disagree. This is typical of those on the right; you need to know both sides of an argument.

Next comment:

“I think Biden will go down in history as one of the most successful Presidents ever. …. He brought in policies that people liked, like increases in health care and forgiveness of student loans. He got things done.”

It does not occur to this commentator that these policies could have been disliked by anyone. Another artifact of selective reading. After all, it’s free money. Right?

Instead, of course, it has to be taken in taxes. The government takes it from one pocket, deducts some of it as operating expenses, and returns the remainder to the other pocket.

Apparently the left does not grasp or want to grasp this simple dynamic. “Free money” is more comforting.

            “I think that most Americans were tired of the drama and divisiveness of Politics.  They voted for quiet efficiency and national unity instead. I think they’re telling their politicians to scrap the divisive rhetoric and get on with the job they were elected to do.”

The shambolic evacuation of Afghanistan does not look like quiet efficiency. Neither does a government that boosts spending to unprecedented levels during a supply chain crisis, and denies that inflation is possible. Wars, fuel shortages, and recessions do not seem quiet or efficient.

As for national unity, it is not much helped along by pitting ethnic group against ethnic group, gender against gender, class against class; or by declaring those who support your chief opponent a “threat to democracy.”

Spending endless time and resources on impeachments and collusion investigations against your opponent, all of which turn out to be based on false accounts and trivialities, instead of spending that time on legislation, does not look like getting on with the job they were elected to do.

Another reader writes: “I don’t understand why so many on this planet continue in awe of a nation that is so destructive, that pretends to have other nations’ well-being at heart when it is the exact opposite.  We need to realize that, even without the U.S., the world continues to rotate.”

This is akin to the leftist drive to “Defund the police.” For the sake of world peace and prosperity, it is a good thing for one power to be dominant, for the same reason it is better to have any government than anarchy. A dominant power enforces peace: Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana.

Given one dominant power, there is no luckier choice than the USA: a nation uniquely founded on the principles of human rights and human equality. With no modern territorial ambitions.

As Leonard Cohen observed, “You’re not going to like what comes after America.”

Another respondent wrote of Trump’s making another run, “Trump isn't interested in anything except himself. Any political operative would seek other's opinions before announcing a run for office.”

This assumes that Trump asked no one for their opinion before declaring. Why?

Another artifact of the leftist refusal to read anything they disagree with. This writer presumes that “everybody” was saying Trump should not run. Those blinders never come off.

In Search of a Man on a White Horse

 

Dave Rubin says, “at this point, you only have to be sane to find yourself on the right.”

That seems obviously true. To be on the left, you have to believe that men can decide to be women, and women men. You have to believe that there is nothing morally troubling about abortion. You have to believe that there was an attempted coup by a crowd of people pushing into the Capitol Building. You have to believe that human equality is a racist concept. And so on and on, with a new impossibility seemingly added every day.

A lot of people are surprised to find themselves on the right. Including Dave Rubin. Or me.

Surely this means the left must implode. It falls under the category of “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.” Such movements generally end with a crash, as everyone suddenly sobers up. 

Indeed, those on the left seem to be deliberately pushing into more and more ridiculous contradictions, as though desperate to be called out.

I fear they are implicitly calling for a dictator, some strong parent-like voice that will take over the responsibility and discipline they are having trouble with and tell them what to believe. A daddy who will set some boundaries.  A Charlie Manson or a Hitler, possibly. Or a Mark Zuckerberg, a Tony Fauci, or a Jordan Peterson.

It bears remembering that Hitler and Mussolini arose on the left, not the right.

Epic Fails

 

In Canadian federal politics, unfortunately, often the Conservative leaders also lack records of accomplishment.

As the situation in the US gets worse, I ponder: is it just me, or why isn’t it obvious to everyone that left-wing policies make things generally worse, seem even deliberately destructive, while right-wing policies seem to turn out better for nearly everyone?

I think of Margaret Thatcher turning the UK around after years under Labour governments. I think of Regan turning things around after Carter and winning the Cold War. I think of Rudy Giuliani turning NYC around after decades of the entire city being thought of as a no-go zone—and how quickly things are going back to rack under a Democratic administration. I think of how much better things seemed to be in Canada under Harper than under Justin Trudeau, or how quickly things went sour in Ontario when Bob Rae’s NDP got in, after decades of solid government under the PCs.

And now we see things sliding quickly under Biden, after general good times under Trump. Can’t others see this?

It seems to me as well that Republican candidates for office generally have solid records of accomplishment when they run. Democratic candidates have in comparison relatively scanty resumes. Bill Clinton was governor of the relatively small state of Arkansas, and had lost his first bid for re-election. Barack Obama was a first-term senator. Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa primary and briefly looked like the best bet to be the Democratic presidential nominee after only being mayor of South Bend, Indiana—population 100,000. And with no striking accomplishments in that office. Justin Trudeau was a high school drama teacher.

By comparison, Trump, although without political experience, had built a business empire. Mitt Romney had rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics, and managed to get elected governor as a Republican in the nation’s bluest state. Boris Johnson had been a popular mayor of London, famously a leftist electorate. John McCain had been a senator for 22 years, and was a war hero.

The Democrats seem to have a chronic problem here. Each primary season, they seem to lack candidates with actual records of accomplishment. 

This may be explained by the simple fact that leftist policies do not work. They go for the fresh face at least in part because any familiar faces are probably discredited by a record of failure.

Why do people persist in voting for parties and policies that do not work?

You can fool some of the people all of the time. Not infrequently, it is enough of them to form an electoral plurality. 

The Democrats and the left elsewhere concentrate on looking good, not on doing good. They promise people free stuff.

The Real Impetus Behind Cancel Culture

 

Do you realize what “cancel culture” is really all about? It is the clearest possible evidence that the left has lost the culture wars. I have seen it happen again and again at the individual level. If someone decisively loses an argument, so much so that they feel they look foolish, they unfriend you. They want to end the conversation by whatever means necessary. Nobody ever concedes or admits they were wrong. Instead, to avoid this, they will predictably attack you on any available premise, and shut down the discussion. They will aggressively assert obvious falsehoods to be true. If they do not have the power to silence you, then they will leave. When it happens, you should know that you have won. They are desperately protecting their crushed ego.

That is exactly what we are seeing now: the “woke” left is declaring everyone a racist and a Nazi, and trying to silence them.

The collapse is bound to happen at any moment, and it may be swift. First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you have won.

Incidentally, the3 black commentator in the clip above is indeed wrong on what is in the Iowa bill, as common sense should have told him. The things he is reading out as prohibited are actually subjects the bill singles out as still to be taught.

The Day My Mama Socked It to the Loudon County PTA

 

There was a dustup a day or so ago at a school board meeting in Loudon Country, Virginia—a large number of parents came out to protest critical race theory, and were shut down by the board. It seems that the general public was unaware of just what was going on in the schools—perhaps until the pandemic let them listen in on their children’s classes—and now that they know, there is a backlash. With luck, it will carry the day.

But critical race theory is just one tentacle of an academic octopus called critical theory. It has really been around for a long time, and has spread far beyond the public schools, in one form or another. It was around already when I was in grad school back in the 1970s, although it did not have the name “critical theory” yet. I think it has been around, in essence, at least since Nietzsche.

A recent journal article gives an overview of the state of the field. It is no doubt not unimpeachable, but it is at least from the Trojan horse’s mouth: a declared critical theorist.

Our author, a professor at the University of British Columbia, identifies three intellectual strands making up “critical teory”: postmodernism, Marxism, and postcolonialism. He does not include feminism. Feminism and critical theory used to be conjoined, but there has been a recent falling out. The goals of feminism clash with the goals of transgenderism, and transgenderism has won the intersectionality sweeps. Feminism requires the assumption that there are such things as women. Postmodernism will not allow the premise.

Postmodernism holds that nothing is real. We just make things up as convenient. In the words of the present author, “meanings are neither fixed nor singular, but rather multiple and ever-shifting.”

Marxism insists that everything is at the group or social level, and everything is about power. In the words of our author, Marxism “thinks in binary terms between the oppressor and the oppressed,” and everyone must be one or the other.

Traditionally, Marxism sees this in economic terms, with the bourgeoisie as the oppressors, and the proletariat as the oppressed. Postcolonialism switches this to race instead of class. If anything is less than desirable in the world, as determined by whomever wields the arbitrary power to determine it (for nothing, according to postmodernism, can ever be good or bad in itself)  it is the fault of “Whites” or “Europeans.” For they are uniquely “colonizers.”

Put together and examined in this way, it is the very same ideology as Nazism, with “Whites” replacing “Jews” as racial scapegoats.

It is, of course, aside from being malicious, malicious nonsense.  

Postmodernism is immediately self-contradictory. The present author, for example, ponders the question, “What does criticality really mean?”--without realizing the question is now nonsensical. There are no meanings, and is no “really,“ according to criticality.

Marxism, rather than being immediately self-contradictory, is merely disproven. Marx’s plan was to put the study and management of society on a “scientific” basis: Marxism was “scientific socialism.” 

The proof of any scientific contention is in its ability to predict: this is what experiment is about. But every prediction made by Marx about the subsequent course of human history has been false. He expected a growing proletariat, and a shrinking bourgeoisie. The opposite has happened. He postulated growing wealth inequality. The opposite has happened. He anticipated a worldwide revolution led by the proletariat, happening first in the most developed countries. Nowhere has this happened, including in Russia or China. By scientific standards, he was simply wrong.

Postcolonialism maintains that colonization and empire are a uniquely European creation. This is easily disproven by a study of history. Most parts of the world have been empires and colonies throughout recorded time. The peculiarly European innovation was the nation state—in a word, postcolonialism is what Europe brought to the world. Leaving “postcolonialism” arguing against itself.

Where has such obvious nonsense come from? 

I suggest it is from the secularization of our education system. Until perhaps a hundred years ago, or roughly until Darwinism became popular, the universities and the schools were founded on religious principles. This sense of cosmic direction is necessary for education to work: if you do not know where you are going, you cannot know how to get there. Theology was Queen of the sciences, and the most advanced academic degree was “doctor of philosophy.”

But somewhere about the turn of the 20th century, that place was taken by physical science. Physical science is inadequate to the task. It is simply a tool, and offers no goal or meaning or reasons. 

Since then, we have seen the emergence of a series of “scientific” pseudo-religions to fill the vacuum: Freudian psychology, fascism-Nazism, Marxism, and so forth. Each has, after a few decades, failed in turn. Critical theory is basically the current synthesis. Marxism, disproven by science, has been put on life support by asserting, through postmodernism, that science itself is of no value. Postmodernism is nonsense, but postmodernism refuses to acknowledge sense. Postcolonialism allows all standards failed by either postmodern theory or Marxist theory to be dismissed as a racist white cultural imposition.

It actually smells very much like desperation. I would be surprised not to see it all collapse within the next few years.

It Took Seven Years

The Right Wing Virus

The left-wing drive for censorship and deplatforming is in effect an admission that, if anyone gets to hear the right wing’s arguments, they will be convinced by them.

But even more telling is how the left has taken to declaring people, like Joe Rogan or Lindsay Shepherd, “right wing” simply for talking or listening to someone who is, or was previously declared, right wing. This is a plain admission that you cannot hear the right wing’s arguments without agreeing with them.

Are the Winds in Canada Shifting?

Seems like I scored a clear miss on my reading of the recent Canadian leaders’ debate. I thought Jagmeet Singh did not do what he needed to do. But it seems to be the consensus among the pundits that Singh was “the winner.”

Mainstream media left-wing bias? But Steve Paikin had a pollster reporting the same, based on overnight polling. It seems it was I who was blinded by ideological bias.

I agree that Singh scored for being likeable. I just did not think that mattered, because for likeability he was ideologically up against Elizabeth May, who is more so. So that, I thought, was not going to sway votes.

The pollster says it has.

Partisans of Scheer need not panic, however. This should be good news for them. Singh pulls votes from the Liberals, for the most part. A more even split between them lets the Tories take more ridings. Singh would have a lot of ground to make up before he actually challenged for power.

But buoyed by my wrong call here, let me make another.

I have a vague sense that we have come to an inflection point in the campaign, and in Canadian politics. Possibly even a watershed.

I mean the recent video of Antifa members harassing an elderly woman with a walker who was trying to attend a Bernier event in Hamilton. They blocked her way; they loudly chanted “Nazi scum! Off our streets!” 

Note that the clip featured here is from RT, Russian TV. It is getting international attention.

It may have pulled the claimed moral high ground out from under the forces of “progressivism” in the public mind. The absurdity of the charge was too apparent. It was too apparent who was the bully, and who the bullied. Mainstream media reports have tried to obscure it, but the video itself was too vivid.

Someone was then able to ID one of the Antifa members in the video, and outed the man behind the mask on YouTube. He turned out to be a recent (2015) Syrian immigrant. Who, we are then shown, has a history of rioting. 

https://www.facebook.com/rick.boswick/videos/2667612919944522/

The optics could not have been better for Bernier’s cause: a recent immigrant from Syria, of all places, declaring exclusive ownership of the streets of Canada, showing hatred towards a native-born Canadian simply exercising her democratic franchise. And a little old disabled lady, at that.

“They hate us, they are violent, they lack all humane instincts, and they plan to take over.” That’s the visual message.

His family runs a restaurant on Queen West. More bad optics, violating the popular meme of destitute Syrian refugees. Looks like they were economic migrants after all.

Said restaurant was soon identified, as it bore the suspect’s family name, and some online called for a boycott.

Within days, the family announced the restaurant’s closing. They said the hostility they were getting on social media was apparently too much.

Doxxing is immoral. The family, as opposed to the individual, may bear no blame.

On the other hand: the perp was wearing a mask. Like the masks once worn by the KKK, almost demands a public unmasking.

And was this deliberate doxxing? Or was the matter simply self-evident by the restaurant’s name?

It was the family’s decision to close the restaurant. Nobody else made them do this, and so nobody else may deserve any blame for it. Obviously, they had suffered some very bad publicity, very likely to harm their business. Welcome to the free market.

Some were calling for a boycott. Okay: the left has made boycotting businesses for the slightest of reasons standard practice. It is something right-wingers have long just had to live through.

Did they get death threats? Any prominent figure on the right has been getting death threats for years.

The message the closing of the restaurant conveyed seems to be that the left has a glass jaw.

I think some people on the right now smell blood. And some on the left are smelling their own.

Predator may suddenly be prey, and prey may now need to be reckoned with. They, these despicable “right-wingers,” may be really angry, it seems, and not inclined to just take it anymore. It’s no longer going to be just fun for the left.

It’s probably nothing, as Kate McMillan would say.

But I attended a local all-candidates rally a couple of weeks ago, I think the day after the video surfaced, and then another just last night. The same set of candidates. At the first, the other parties tried to hammer the PPC to death, with their verbal bicycle locks, for their stand on immigration and on climate change. I noted pushback from some in the audience then. I thought I detected surprise in the candidates. Their expected applause lines were suddenly drawing flak. They seemed to pull back for the rest of the night.

Politicians are always brave at attacking nonexistent or absent enemies. But they are not going to oppose anyone real to their face. They might have a vote.

Last night, nobody took a jab at the PPC. The unkindest cut was just the Liberal saying he had no idea how they planned to finance their promises. That seemed a backhanded compliment. It was as if suddenly they were understood as an otherwise appealing electoral option.

Aside from the Liberal, none of the other candidates, all further to the left, even referred to the PPC or their stands on the issues. It was as though they were afraid to test those waters; afraid that if they made their disagreement plain, it might lose them support.

Meantime, Andrew Scheer just announced a new tougher stand on turning away refugees at the border. His pollsters may have told him something. Until now, he has been triangulating to the left.

It is all unrepresentative, anecdotal, and mostly just my sense of smell. Which has recently been proven unreliable.

Make of it what you will.

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 Postmodern Iceberg

Given how dangerous postmodernism is, what is to become of us all? How bad is it going to get?

For postmodernism seems essentially the same virus that once infected Nazi Germany.

Luckily, if I’m right, postmodernism is most likely to destroy postmodernism before it becomes strong enough to destroy society as a whole.

For under its current multiculti principles, its proponents are the ones first coming into close contact with incompatible world views.

The left now has Muslims marching alongside Marxist atheists, feminists, transgender activists, black activists, Hispanic immigration activists, and gays. Some of these world views are anathema to one another.

And they certainly are not united in embracing cultural relativism. There is no way Islam works into that equation. The groups being pulled together here are really united only in a shared hatred of one particular world view: “Western civilization,” or more honestly, Judeo-Christian ethics. That is not likely to be sustainable. These groups actually have less in common with one another, in their principles and beliefs, than each does with this “mainstream” culture. Tolerance is a very Christian value.

They are bound to become aware of the incompatibility. There is bound to be culture shock.

This multiculti approach is very different from Fascism. It pitched its appeal to one large group, based on its vaunted supposed homogeneity, and scapegoated a small minority, perhaps 6%. Postmodernism’s current strategy is a good cover for the fact that underlying it is the same philosophy, but given that philosophy, it is less logical, and looks less sustainable. It is pitching its appeal to a variety of smaller groups, each of them stressing homogeneity and purity within themselves, and each incompatible with the others. And it is scapegoating what is still a large minority, “cisgendered heterosexual white males,” perhaps 33% of the population. It is only too likely that their victim will be able to resist. French Canadians, at only 24% of the Canadian population, have been able to do a pretty good job of protecting their interests.

If things have been able to go as far as they have, it is because this large chunk of the electorate have been complacent, busy with their own affairs and not very aware of what is going on. Aided, of course, by a steady diet of postmodernist propaganda in the media and the academy.

But surely we can already see this is changing. Trump is in power in the US. Brexit passed. Macron faces rioting in the streets. Doug Ford just won in Ontario. This kraken is waking up. Not that long ago, you did not hear dissenting voices in the media. Then came Rush Limbaugh. Then came Fox News. Then came social media. Then the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, subverting the academic monolith. Now there are two sides being heard all over the place. There is a growing YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter genre of people declaring themselves “woke,” “red pilled” or “just walking away.” Postmodernism may already have peaked; and the peak of evident craziness it seems to have reached may itself be a sign of desperation. It is in the angry tantrum stage, over not getting its will.

And this is even aside from the extreme potential disunity within their own ranks. Islam is, among all the major world religions, the most absolutist, the most perfectly antithetical to relativism and postmodernism. The prime reason the 9/11 bombers flew airliners into the Twin Towers was to protest Western feminism and gay rights. The postmoderns, in trying to embrace and digest it, were perhaps already showing desperation. A few years ago, the left themselves were foremost in demanding military intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East to end the hijab, end the supposed subjugation of women, end female genital mutilation. They seem to have swallowed a poison pill; and maybe there is divine justice in that.

And the closer the jihadists get to those holding such relativist ideologies in the flesh, to feminists and gays and atheists and transgenders, the angrier and more violent they are likely to get. Any minute now …

Even apart from Islam, other incompatibilities are becoming obvious. The doctrine of transgenderism is incompatible with feminism. If being male or female is a matter of choice, any question of either oppression or new privileges for women is off the table. Set up an affirmative action program, and men can just declare themselves women and get the same advantage. Bar this, and you are discriminating against them as transgenders. Even demanding they identify themselves as either male or female is now discriminatory, so any affirmative action scheme based on sex is discriminatory in its very premise. If biological men are allowed to compete as women in sports, to cite only one trivial but visible example, Title IX requirements that women’s sports be equally funded become moot, and only an extravagant waste of money. “Genetic” women are not going to win any medals. And women purportedly no longer have a right to the safety of separate bathrooms. Any man can just declare himself a woman, and walk in. It was just this concern that killed the old Equal Rights Amendment, back in the day.

And, of course, if transgenders have this right, what is the justification for denying it to cisgenders? Isn’t that discriminatory in just the same way? In other words, if any man can enter any washroom he likes by declaring himself a transgendered female, it must hold that any man declaring himself a cisgendered male must also have that right. Or else you are discriminating against cisgenders.

Transgenderism is also incompatible with all demands based on racial identity; with either Hispanic, or black, or Native American activism. For if sex is a matter of choice, why not race? Race is a far more dubious and ambiguous classification in biological terms. And what about gay rights: if sex is a matter of choice, why not sexual orientation? The whole basis of gay rights is that nobody can choose to be gay. Lesbians are starting to notice, and openly oppose transgender rights.

Transgenderism seems another poison pill.

And what about immigration activists calling for more and more open immigration? Every new immigrant is potentially a job taken away from a struggling black already here. Or theoretically lowers their wages. Sooner or later, blacks are going to notice.

Nor are recent Hispanic immigrants likely to be big fans of postmodernism and relativism, feminism, gay rights, or Marxism. A lot of them are going to be Catholics. Within their own group, in their own families, they are traditionalist and conservative. Only a shallow cadre of Marxist intellectuals within this group are on board with the postmodernist program: probably a smaller, shallower, less connected cadre than with Anglo whites, now rebelling against the self-appointed experts. As this group becomes better able to connect individually, thanks to social media, the authority of such leaders cannot last.

And the same is true for American Indians/First Nations. The average Indian is pretty conservative in his views. He likes hockey, the military, Christianity, and country and western music. He has almost nothing in common with the handful of people claiming to speak for him. And he may not forever remain idle.

It looks as though the reality began to seep through in the most recent Women’s March. Many state organizations and former leaders, including the founder of the first Women’s March, pulled out, declaring of the current organizers, “they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform.” This seems largely the clash of the Muslim groups with some of the others. It’s only the tip of the iceberg; but little more sank the Titanic.

It does not seem probable that the postmodern delusion can hold together much longer.

A lot of what is holding it together is peer pressure. It is just as Andersen describes it in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Most people are moral cowards and will just go along with whatever they hear those around them say. The postmodernists have grabbed and long held control of all the megaphones.

That’s the sort of situation that can collapse very suddenly.

The single worst mistake those who oppose postmodernism could make, however, is to fail to make their own coalitions. It would be fatal to begin to demonize Hispanics, or Muslims, or gays, or Indians.

Not to mention, it would be directly against the principles of Judeo-Christian civilization itself, which is what they presumably seek to defend. It makes no sense to fight postmodernism and relativism by becoming a postmodern relativist.

Individualism vs. Community

Nuremberg shows its community spirit.

I think my leftist friend Xerxes has hit upon something in his latest column: the essential difference between the modern North American left and right. He speaks of joining his church choir as a transcendent experience:

“We have stopped being a collection of individuals, and have become a collective organism. A single mind. And in a sense, a single body – we even have to breathe as one, line by line.

We transcend our individuality. And it feels wonderful.”

And he concludes:

“Worship also attempts to connect with the most transcendent reality of all – merging with the divine.

Granted, not everyone in a choir will reason that singing derives from a universal desire for transcendence. But they all know intuitively they’re part of a community.”

And that's probably the key to it all. To a leftist, this sense of losing the individual in community is a self-evident good. After all, it transcends “selfishness.” So it partakes of the divine. The group is divine.

But any rightist reads that first sentence with horror, and thinks of the tight coordination of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies or the North Korean mass choreographed displays in sports stadia. The solidarity bred by a choir? Like Jack's choir boys in Lord of the Flies? Community is the danger; individualism is what partakes of the divine. 

Pyongyang shows its community spirit.

And I am here to explain why the left is wrong and the right is right.

Individualism is no more “selfish” than community. Every community, by definition, excludes as well as includes. Not all sentient beings are members, or we would not refer to a community. If, then, the members of that community seek their own mutual interests, they are corporately acting as selfishly as any individual would be who did the same acting alone. So selfishness is unrelated to individualism. Either a group or an individual can act either selfishly or unselfishly.

At the same time, individualism means taking responsibility. If you surrender that moral responsibility to a community, and defer to their judgement, you are waiving any ability to act morally. You are, on the other hand, perfectly able to act immorally: if you do something immoral as a member of a group, you are still individually responsible. You cannot say you were “only following orders.” But if, conversely, you help the poor only because you see others doing it, or because it improves your social position, it is no longer a moral act. 

Jonestown shows its community spirit.

This is why “Community,” losing your individuality in the group, is in fact traditionally considered one of the great temptations to sin. “The world, the flesh, and the devil.” Following the social consensus, the community, is “the world.” First named.

Community was the whole idea behind Fascism. That's what the symbol of the fasces was meant to represent. And, of course, community was also the whole idea behind Communism, as the name declares. It was the community of the day who put Jesus to death. A sense of community is, in turn, the underlying essence of all racism, all discrimination, all prejudice. It is the reaction to one "not in our group."  Communitarianism has produced the worst human evils in history.

Community is indeed a human need, or at least a natural human want. Just like food and sex. Accordingly, we legitimately seek community. There is nothing wrong with that. But we do not idolize it, any more than we should food or sex. Bad things then quickly happen.

The important thing is that, when we seek community, we seek it on the basis of morality; we seek to belong only to groups engaged in moral behaviour. And retain our individual judgement.

Selma shows its community spirit.

Marx and the Marks

A Nazi image of the traditional "greedy capitalist."

Why is cultural Marxism a thing? Objectively, it seems mad. Marx was effectively disproved by 1917, the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was supposed, after all, to be an uprising by an impoverished and oppressed proletariat. Instead, it was the intellectuals, and it still is. In a country that had almost no proletariat; and this is now generally true in the West. Nothing since 1917 has done anything to restore anyone else's faith in Marx's notions. Yet the intellectuals generally, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences at just about every university across the developed world, still all enforce this crackpot theory as a sort of orthodox dogma.

There are several reasons. One is that you actually need an ideology in education; without a goal, you cannot meaningfully do anything. When they cast out theology as the queen of the sciences, in favour of “scientific” materialism, the non-science subjects needed some new ideology that justified them in scientific terms. Marxism and Freudianism, pseudo-sciences working with the same subject matter, seemed to fit the bill.

But there is another reason.

Any profession is a cartel in restraint of trade; and Adam Smith's wisdom holds here. Whenever two or more men engaged in the same trade meet and talk, for any reason, even purely socially, the conversation will inevitably turn to how to improve their own position at the expense of the general public.

In creating and assigning special rights to professions, we are enabling and encouraging this. Our only protection against it is the naive confidence that people in the professions are moral paragons, who will naturally put the general interest above their own.

Every profession has a vested interest in failing to do what they are supposed to be there to do. Try the thought experiment: suppose some psychiatrist found a simple, inexpensive way to cure all mental illness. It might be in his own interest to publicize it; if he were an independent entrepreneur; but it certainly would not be in the interests of the profession. They would all swiftly be out of work: out of a job and a career they have invested hugely in, and that gives them immense rewards and prestige. How confident can we be that given the chance, this or any profession would wheel into action to destroy itself?

Dentistry stands apart as one profession that genuinely seems to act to reduce the problems dentists face. But this, I think, is due to the peculiar circumstances of that profession. Most dentists hate their job. The problem is that everyone hates to go to the dentist. This has to wear you down after a while. The suicide rate among dentists is high. So they are driven to justify themselves; and not that upset at perhaps being required to switch profession.

But look at lawyers. It is in that trade's vested interests to have more and more laws, and to make them harder and harder to understand. Then there is more and more need to hire lawyers. And so we have lawyers gravitating to government, where they pass more and more laws. And so we have the problem of legalese, odd lawyerly language designed so that non-lawyers cannot read it.

Look at government bureaucrats. It is in their vested interests, similarly, to have more and more regulations, and make them more difficult to understand. And so we have reams more, year by year, proposed and implemented by bureaucrats.

It is in the vested interest of academics to make their fields sound more difficult than they are. Just read and try to make sense out of the standard academic paper.

It is in the vested interest of teachers not to teach efficiently. I have dealt with this in detail elsewhere. Since we have allowed teachers to organize as a self-regulating profession, the cost of schools has shot up, while student results on standardized tests have flatlined or declined.

Since we have allowed journalists to organize as a profession, the quality of the media has declined in most folk's estimation—as demonstrated by falling readerships and viewerships.

Professionalizing a field is a lousy idea, and ought to be avoided whenever possible.

It is all predictable. In fact, it is all there in the New Testament. The professions are the people Jesus called “scribes and Pharisees”; scribe and Pharisee were the two learned professions of his day. They are the villains of the piece.

Already then, before, and ever since, the learned professions, scribes, priests, physicians, lawyers, clerks, and so on, have held all real power in society. The nominal rulers, kings and nobles and Roman procurators, got to live in great comfort and to go about hunting or doing whatever they like, but they were not the ones directly exercising power over others. Those were their estate agents, their clerks, their chancellors, their rent collectors and bailiffs, their tax collectors, their gamekeepers. The professionals. Such positions naturally attract the power-hungry: the bullies and the abusers.

It is no different in a democracy. The nominal rulers, the general public, vote once every four years, to appoint the highest ranks of the managers. But the bureaucrats and the professions are the ones exercising all real power over others daily.

The true value of Marxism to this class is that it distracts attention from the actual state of affairs. It sets up a cartoon villain, “the greedy capitalists,” or “the corporations,” and assigns to them all the supposed power and all the blame for anything wrong. “The Jews” works too, or used to, until Hitler overplayed his hand. “Americans” still works in most parts of the world. And “straight white men.” All these groups are conveniently identified by Marxists with the imaginary “greedy capitalists.”

By pointing fingers elsewhere, we are encouraged to overlook the power held by the professions, or how it might be abused. They can represent themselves as the great defenders of the poor and ordinary folks against their oppressors. And demand more power for this imaginary fight. Great con job, and it has worked for millennia.

It has always worked better in Europe than in America, of course. Better in Europe, because Europeans have a longer and deeper tradition of always deferring to their “betters.” The American working class is not so prepared to let others think or speak for them. Bunch of rednecks!

Fortunately, with the growth of the Internet, the power of the professions is probably declining. Much of what they once held as a private preserve—knowledge--is now readily available. Better access to media is shining light into dark corners. The recent taping of an inquisition at Wilfrid Laurier University is a case of this. We are starting to see the little men pulling the levers behind the curtain, and are not inclined to be awed.

We are also beginning to see what looks like a crackup. We witness the professions—broadly, “the left”--become extreme and violent, as they no longer seem to be able to get and do what they want. It begins to look hysterical; or like a tantrum. Let's all scream at the sky, shall we? Antifa, for example, seems to be composed of professionals on their days off wearing masks. They are making it all too clear now that they are not in any kind of solidarity with the rest of us.

Happy American Thanksgiving, Racists!

Just in time for American Thanksgiving, a host of leftist websites in the US are priming their audience to disrupt the family meal with political talking points.

This is an obvious violation of good manners, and destructive to families. How could anyone justify it?

Lifehacker does by arguing we have a moral duty to respond if someone else says something “racist.” I agree. If some other family member brings up politics, you have a right and quite possibly a duty to respond. They have committed the aggression, on the family and on all present. You must defend.

But, to begin with, the comments Lifehacker calls “racist” clearly are not. They cite complaints about voter fraud, “welfare queens,” and “faux outrage about blue lives mattering.” Splinter adds the need to deal with those objectionable “Trump isn't racist” comments. None of these things have anything to do with race, let alone racism. If the listener on the left insists they do, he is the racist, not the person he is speaking to: he is insisting that only blacks abuse welfare, only non-whites vote illegally, and all policemen are white. And that saying someone is not racist is racist.

Moreover, given these examples, who is more likely to be initiating the political conversation? The phrase “blue lives matter” is a response to the phrase “black lives matter.” Who is going to say it except in response to the first? Who is going to suddenly burst out with “Trump isn't racist” in the absence of the prior assertion that he is?

Splinter advises that the organization SURJ ("Showing Up For Racial Justice") "also created an anti-racist placemat you can print and set under your plate if you want to avoid grabbing your cell phone. The placemat focuses on indigenous solidarity and challenging familiar narratives about Thanksgiving.”

So—isn't putting such placemats under everyone's meal initiating the argument? Isn't pulling out the placemat you have been given, and replacing it with this, also ostentatiously starting the argument? And, without it, are racist comments against American Indians likely to come up? After all, the “familiar narrative” of the “First Thanksgiving,” smarmy as it may be, is all about how the local Indians helped the first settlers, and they shared their Thanksgiving meal in peace and harmony. This is racist? This is hostile to American Indians?

It is getting hard to believe the modern left have any agenda other than destroying any traces of civilization they can reach: destroying the Thanksgiving celebration, destroying the extended family. I do not mean American culture, or American civilization. I mean civilization. I think they hate all civilization equally, and it would not matter if it were Chinese.

The Cultural Revolution proceeds apace.

The Left Finds Religion

A couple of silly posts are circulating on Facebook at the moment. Leftists are claiming Jesus as one of their own.

This may be a good sign. In recent years the left has had nothing good to say about Jesus. It seems like a defensive move; as though they feel a need either for outreach or to justify themselves. It beats just calling all Christians “deplorable.”

But they sure do get things garbled. Let us assume they do this honestly. I guess such misapprehensions are possible, if you never read the Bible.

Taking the claims one by one:

“Homeless”: yes, Jesus was homeless. But this was a matter of religious observance, like a mendicant Buddhist monk, so it is probably not fairly comparable with the situation of people who are homeless due to poverty. He certainly did make clear, on the other hand, his concern for the poor.

“Palestinian”? This is a worse howler than, say, calling St. Nicholas “Turkish,” or St. Patrick “English.” There was not such place as “Palestine” in Jesus’s time, and the people we currently call “Palestinians”—Palestinian Arabs—were not in the area. Jesus was a Jew who lived in what is now Israel. You want to call Netanyahu a “Palestinian”?

“Anarchist”? Jesus was asked about paying taxes, and said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Showing, at the same time, a coin with Caesar’s face on it. He said “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not a political figure. He accepted the civil authority of his day as given. There were political radicals, although not anarchists, in Jesus’s place and time—the Zealots. Jesus could have endorsed them, or joined them, if that was what he was about.

“Held protests at oppressive temples”? Jesus did not consider the temple in Jerusalem oppressive. His concern was the opposite, to keep it holy. Nor did he “hold a protest.” This suggests an organized political action.

“Advocated for universal health care”? This is invention. Do they get this from the fact that he went around healing people? Do doctors necessarily endorse, let alone advocate, universal health care?

“Advocated for redistribution of wealth.” I suspect they get this from his advice to a rich young man to give all he had to the poor.

But look at the passage. Jesus does not call for redistribution of wealth here. A rich young man comes to him and asks what he must do to enter heaven. And Jesus says, keep the commandments. That’s what is needed to enter heaven. The young man says he already does that. Is there anything more he can do? Then Jesus says, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor. Then you will have treasures in heaven.”

The passage is clear, then, that nobody is under any moral obligation to give their possessions to the poor. This earns extra merit.

Of course, no such merit is earned if the giving is legally required by government. Although we might very well want to do this. Giving to the poor is a moral act. Voting that everyone should give to the poor is not a moral act. It is as likely to be a way to avoid guilt over your own moral choices.

If leftists indeed want to follow Jesus on this, government does not prevent them from giving all they have to charity.

And conservatives as a group give more to charity than leftists do.

Note Matthew 26:

While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, 7 woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.
8When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. 9“This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”
10Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”

A general redistribution of wealth? Hardly a clear mandate for it here.

“Arrested for terrorism”: this is completely fabricated. Jesus was not arrested for terrorism, was not charged with terrorism, was not executed for terrorism, and there is nothing anywhere in the Bible that hints he engaged in terrorism.

Including this in the evidence that Jesus was a left-wingert and not a right-winger, even at the cost of making it up, tells us something important about the left. They are, here, implicitly saying terrorists are on their side. They support terrorism.

This indeed explains why the left has recently found fierce common cause with “Islam,” even though all the values of Islam run directly counter to leftist beliefs, far more than do those of Christianity, which they despise. The key here has to be that they do not support Islam: they support terrorism. They support Islam only to the extent that they think it leads to terrorism.

Really: think about it. They used to support the IRA for the same reason. It was masked as a concern for the rights of Catholics, but seriously: does the left otherwise support Catholics or Catholicism?

Yeah, Jesus would be entirely down with that: destroying things and killing innocent people.

“Executed for crimes against the state.” Technically true, but according to the Bible this was a bogus charge that even the Roman prefect, Pilate, did not believe.

The next image claims that Jesus was “Everything Conservatives hate.”

“Bleeding heart.” The tone of the post is very old-fashioned, and I guess maybe back in the Sixties “bleeding heart” really was a term that was often used. It is not something you see contemporary conservative saying, so it is not evidence, if true, that contemporary conservatives would have disagreed with Jesus in the first place.

But was Jesus a “bleeding heart”? The Urban dictionary gives the top meaning of “bleeding heart” as “Feeling sorry for everything and everyone and giving in to emotions quickly.” If this is the correct definition, Jesus was clearly not one, and to call him such is necessarily a criticism. He did not feel sorrow for the scribes and the Pharisees. He showed himself to be calm, as in the storm on Galilee, or when seized in Gethsemane, when those about him were emotional. Somebody here is simply imagining Jesus to be as they want him to be.

“Long-haired”: Jesus did indeed, in the traditional depiction, wear his hair long. A reasonable argument can be made that he did not do so in imitation of the hippies of the 1960s. More likely, they wore their hair long in imitation of him. Nor is wearing long hair an indication of left-wing politics. Ever watch “Duck Dynasty”? The left can get upset about people wearing corn rolls, but the right could not care less how you wear your hair.

“Peace-loving”: Jesus was peace-loving, as are most of us, but not a pacifist. He said, for example,

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).

Peace a good, but it is not the ultimate value. Nor is it clear, currently, whether the left or the right is more concerned with maintaining the peace. Who, currently, is more inclined to riot? Who is more supportive of the police?

“Anti-establishment”: yes, Jesus was anti-establishment. But let us be clear: what establishment? He said nothing against the civil or political establishment. He said nothing against Roman rule. Jesus refused to condemn publicans or tax collectors. He was opposed to the scribes and Pharisees: the intellectual establishment of his day.

Who is the intellectual establishment of today? Who are the scribes and Pharisees? Most literally, most directly, the media and the academy. Scribes were professional writers, Pharisees were professional teachers. Both groups lean overwhelmingly to the left currently. And are heartily disliked on the right.

“Liberal.” Properly speaking, “liberal” means believing in human rights, civil liberties. Which means, on the whole, small government. I think a good argument can be made that Jesus was indeed liberal in this sense: he carved out a religious sphere independent of the state. But it would be more accurate to say that liberalism is largely founded on his teachings: the equality of man, the separation of church and state. But while Jesus seems plainly liberal, the modern left plainly is not. It is all about big government and group rights.

“Hippie freak”: again, this is a case of the hippies imitating Jesus, not Jesus imitating the hippies. But there is something to this: the hippies were at least in part a spiritual movement, and did appeal to Christian values. Unfortunately, just about everyone sold out except the Jesus Freaks, the Hare Krishnas, and George Harrison. For most of them, the imitation was sadly superficial, and only about appearances and material things. Jesus was not that big on sex, drugs, or rock and roll.

“With strange ideas”: this one is the dead giveaway. Strange to whom? Presumably, to whoever is making the meme.

In other words, they do not actually share Jesus’s views at all. They find them strange.

A Compilation of Leftist Views on "Cultural Appropriation"

Grey Owl.

Reading my friend Xerxes’s column is a valuable window on left-wing thought. He wrote recently on cultural appropriation. This week, he printed responses from readers on the topic.

I am herewith appropriating their comments in order to analyse them. This counts as fair dealing, I believe: for research purposes and for comment.

Xerxes:

I got letters of support for my views about “cultural appropriation.” [He, uncharacteristically, did not take the usual leftist line, and refused to condemn it.] But I noted that they came, mostly, from white males. Who are, of course, the dominant social group that minorities and marginalized rebel against.

Me:

If you stop and think for a moment, that is lucky for the rest of us, and selfless and generous of white males. Just suppose if they started objecting to anyone else “appropriating” anything developed by white males, like so many other groups do.

Want a list?

Fortunately, however, some of these “white males,” at least, still believe in the brotherhood of man.

Xerxes:

X, who describes herself as “Dweller on unceded Algonquin territory,” wrote, “Please add to your analysis the context of colonization on Turtle Island. This is what matters in the recent debates. Not ‘freedom of expression’ or quid pro quo. Abandon those. Forever. Please.

Me:

Excuse me. Unless she is simply being incoherent, she just called for abandoning freedom of expression, forever.

No. She is a Nazi.

You can see what the alt-right is on about.

Xerxes, again quoting X:

… “At a larger level, please give up on reconciliation. It is a proposition fueled by white liberal guilt.”

Me:

Right. She is also against reconciliation. Instead, she demands “decolonization.” She does not say what this means.

She is declaring war to the death. Just so we’re clear.

Xerxes (quoting another reader):

“Our laws protect your words or your invention based on their ‘fixed form.’ They don't protect a people's stories or cultural practices, so the non-Indigenous have appropriated them and don't see the problem: after all, it's *legal* to rewrite my story in your own words or manufacture your somewhat-modified version of my widget.

Me:

Dear Reader is confusing two things: the moral aspect of imitation of another’s work, and the idea that you own someone else’s work because of your race. The first is just morally and legally dubious; the second is an unrelated and obviously immoral claim.

The latter is the claim made by those who condemn “cultural appropriation.”

It is, among other things, extreme racism.

Xerxes (still quoting the same Dear Reader):

“… those who dismiss cultural appropriation as ‘political correctness’ show a definite lack of empathy. They don't get the point that they may be misrepresenting what they appropriate, violating a religious taboo,”

Me:

Interesting to hear someone on the left express concern about violating a religious taboo.

Currently on Facebook, for example, I see protests against the Trump entourage because, in posting a photograph of the NATO leaders’ wives, they failed to identify as such the male gay “wife” (or “husband”) of Luxembourg’s PM. This is supposedly “homophobic.”

Does it not matter that even including him in the photo "violates a religious taboo" for not just one, but most or all of the world’s major religions? Matrimony, after all, is a sacrament.

Religious rights must be allowed fully and equally to all. Not just to preferred groups.

Xerxes (quoting the same reader):

... or even -- and this is a sore point-- blocking the way for the people who can tell the story from lived experience and full awareness of its meaning.

Me:

This is a classic straw man argument. Blocking the way? Nobody ever, anywhere, has argued that aboriginal writers should not be allowed to write, or should not be published.

Actually, of recent years, we have instead heard aboriginal writers complain instead of being taught English and how to write. That’s the residential school thing, for example.

Xerxes, quoting Dear Reader:

“… the reality is that it's (still!) hard for a non-majority-culture writer to get his or her stories published.”

This is perfectly counterfactual. The reality is that everyone is fascinated by Indians, and there has always—always—been a healthy market for anyone claiming to reveal aboriginal culture. An obvious example currently is Joseph Boyden. Do you really think he assumed an Indian identity because he thought it would make it harder to get published? Did Grey Owl? Elizabeth Warren? Iron-Eyes Cody? Carlos Casteneda (“Don Juan Maquis”)? John Neihardt (Black Elk Speaks)? Ward Churchill? Jamake Highwater? Hyemeyohsts Storm? Zane Grey?

For all of North American history, claiming to be aboriginal has been a clever if dishonest way to get published.

The problem rather has been a shortage of competent aboriginal writers to meet the demand. In the end, you have to be able to write. Even today, most Canadian (status) Indians do not finish high school.

Xerxes (Dear Reader):

“The loudest voices in favour of the ‘Appropriation prize’ were certain middle-aged white males not noted for sensitive journalism.”

Me:

This is a deeply racist observation, and a profound assertion of privilege. As well, of course, as a classic ad hominem.

Some are not allowed opinions because of their sex or race? Uppity white males, shut up?

Xerxes:

Y, ..., seems to have followed the controversy closer than I did: “It was NOT the idea of people from dominant cultures writing about non-dominant cultures that was at the root of the dispute. It was the idea of an award for such writing that offended people, and rightly so, because as several people pointed out, such an award would become another way for (mostly) white, (mostly) male authors to receive kudos at the expense, or perceived expense, of people of color and/or women. The consensus was yes, please, learn and write about cultures not your own, but no thank you, no awards.”

Me:

The problem is that the awards might go to someone of the wrong sex or race?

The author apparently believes that art should be valued not for its quality, but for the race and sex of the person who created it.

This is racism of the most pernicious sort.