Playing the Indian Card

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Laugh Test

 


In a recent Club Random interview, John Cleese and Bill Maher make the important observation that psychopaths have no sense of humour. Nor do sociopaths or narcissists—I suspect it is all the same ball of wax. This is not exactly true; a psychopath will laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. But they are utterly literal-minded, and so cannot get irony, satire, or even puns.

Then Bill Maher ruins it by citing Donald Trump as an example of this.

It is true that I have never seen Trump laugh in public. But then, try to think of any other prominent politician you have seen laughing. I can’t, with one exception. Kamala Harris.

And she gets raked over the coals for it. People cite it as unlikeable. This may be a perfectly adequate explanation why politicians do not laugh in public. I guess people see it as frivolous, when there are important issues on the table; and perhaps as being out of control of oneself; not wanted in a leader.

Even aside from this, it is reasonably possible to fake a laugh or titter when one really does not get the joke. Accordingly, we cannot use laughing as a measure.

 But there is another, better measure: can they tell a joke, especially extemporaneously? This is a surer test. Even a canned joke, to work, has to have the right timing; being able to judge that shows a sense of humour. And, confounding the original laugh test, the best comedians often do not laugh on stage. It generally spoils the joke, by pointing out the irony and telegraphing it.

By this measure, Trump scores especially high. He can do a two-hour standup routine without notes. Pierre Poilievre seems pretty funny off the cuff.

Those who hate Trump, on the other hand, inevitably do not get his jokes. They always take him absurdly literally. They are the narcissists.

Who is conspicuously not funny, especially off script? I say Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden. Biden’s idea of a joke seems to be a mere insult: “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” And he prefaces every lie with the phrase “not a joke”—implying that he does not understand what a joke is. He thinks it is the same as a lie. 

I cannot picture Trudeau ever attempting a joke. I don’t think he could do it even scripted.

QED.

Narcissists and psychopaths are literal-minded, Cleese and Maher go one to agree, because they are nervous; nervous people are afraid of anything unexpected. They jump at shadows. They will therefore fear, resist, and deny the reversal of expectations that is every joke’s premise and punch line. 

“What an elephant was doing in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.”

That they fear the unexpected disproves the claim of current psychology that a psychopath has no conscience. What else do they fear? Truth being told and being exposed is what they fear; they would not fear it if they did not know they were lying and doing wrong. 

This is a life lesson worth remembering: beware people who do not laugh, except at slapstick, and are not witty.

And definitely do not elect them to high office.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

Everybody's Going Christian?

 

Benny Johnson is also noticing the ground shifting:





Self-Esteem

 

Satan in his original glory, by William Blake

I recall reading somewhere the estimate that medical science only began doing more good than harm in about the 1920s. Bloodletting, inserting a bellows in the rectum, and introducing new infections with septic conditions was until shockingly recently the largest part of the trade.

Yet, for thousands of years, physicians have plied a recognized and profitable profession. 

Because people in pain are desperate, quackery always has an audience. Then, should the quack by chance achieve a cure, or a cure by chance happen after their ministrations, they will be venerated by the sufferer almost as a god. It works like fortune telling works: people always remember the hits, and forget the misses.

That’s medical science of the proper, physical sort. Psychiatry and psychology are nowhere near the point of doing more good than harm. The common advice given someone who is struggling with some mental conflict, “get help,” is therefore cruel. Unless you are directing them to a priest, you are as likely throwing them to the lions.

Modern psychiatry begins by throwing in the dustbin all the accumulated wisdom of the ages about the human soul. This is called the Humanities. It is what the Humanities is all about. It is what philosophy, the arts, and religion are there for.

One terrible thing psychology has done recently is the drive for “self-esteem.” Self-esteem is formerly known as pride, or hubris: the first and deadliest of sins. We are reaping the fully predictable benefits now in generations of narcissists, snowflakes, and acts of random violence.

It is not about either self-esteem or self-debasement. The problem is the same in either case: thinking of yourself all the time. The nature of consciousness is such that you experience yourself on an entirely different plane of existence than everyone else. In the end, we only know our own thought and our own perceptions—not anyone else’s.

It is easy to imagine that no one else matters—or exists.

Berkeley struggled with this in his otherwise seemingly unassailable esse es percipio philosophy: how can we actually know that anyone else is out there perceiving? All other life is alien life.

This is the core problem that must be overcome in bringing up any child, of making them fit for company. 

Encourage them to believe they are unconditionally wonderful, and you are making the problem irreparably worse, by taking out any objective measures of their limits by which they can calibrate self. It is just as damaging as if you encourage them to believe they are unconditionally wrong or evil. Either way, the self, the soul, is destroyed.

Will we, as a civilization, as a species, be able to escape the morass psychiatry and psychology has gotten us into?

While they keep coming up with new problems for us?


Saturday, March 16, 2024

Bravery Is Now Required to Be on the Left

 



Signs of the great turning proliferate. I mean a victory in the “culture wars.” I mean the cultural pendulum swinging right. For example, friend Xerxes, left-wing columnist of my acquaintance, has stopped running political columns. Now he sticks to topics like memories and growing old. He seems no longer to want to be identified as leftist, or to defend leftist beliefs. 

I rarely see leftist screeds on Facebook any longer. They used to be a relentless drumbeat. Of course, this may have to do with leftist friends “unfriending” me on Facebook when they realized I was not on the bandwagon. On the other hand, one of the bitterest of them, I now hear third hand, has been asking whether she should read Ayn Rand. I suspect she requested that the question be forwarded to me.

Another sign of the times is this rare Facebook rant by another leftist friend, who does not know my politics.

What the hell did you expect me to do?

You told me to love my neighbors, to model the life of Jesus. To be kind and considerate, and to stand up for the bullied.

You told me to love people, consider others as more important than myself. "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." We sang it together, pressing the volume pedal and leaning our hearts into the chorus.

You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never "hate" anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.

You told me it's better to give than receive, to be last instead of first.

You told me that Jesus looks at what I do for the least-of-these as the true depth of my faith. You told me to focus on my own sin and not to judge. You told me to be accepting and forgiving.

I payed attention.

I took every lesson.

And I did what you told me.

But now, you call me a libtard. A queer-lover.

You call me "woke." A backslider.

You call me a heretic. A child of the devil. 

You call me soft. A snowflake. A socialist.

What the hell did you expect me to do?

I thought you were serious, apparently not.

We were once friends. But now, the lines have been drawn. You hate nearly all the people I love. You stand against nearly all the things I stand for. I'm trying to see a way forward, but it's hard when I survey all the hurt, harm, and darkness that comes in the wake of your beliefs and presence.

What the hell did you expect me to do?

I believed it all the way.

I'm still believing it all the way.

Which leaves me wondering, what happened to you?

Grace is brave. Be brave.

-Chris Katzer


This is not another new demand, as we had come to expect, in order to built “hope and change” and a leftist future. Like demands that we use his preferred pronouns, or that some statue be torn down or street renamed, or that someone be silenced. The tone has changed. This sounds defensive.

Whoever the “you” here spoken to is, the opinion of this “you” seems more important to the speaker than the speaker’s own opinion. The speaker insists they have always been obedient and compliant to this “you.” That is a concession that the left has lost the argument. It sounds like a convicted felon pleading for a lighter sentence.

Instead of condemning “conventional morality” and “Christian nationalism,” this most recent effusion tries to claim that the left were the real Christians all along. This is a major concession. After loudly rejecting all moral standards as “social constructs,” they now want to appeal to some common set of values. They want to come to the negotiating table. They know they are losing.

The author (my friend was quoting this) says he learned to sing: "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." So far, so good. But he carefully prefaces this with “You told me to consider others as more important than myself.”

This is not what Christianity teaches. Christianity teaches “love thy neighbour as thyself,” not “love thy neighbour more than thyself.” This straw man looks like a tacit admission that the left have been racist; while admitting that Christianity demands human equality.

 “You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never ‘hate’ anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.”

That the word “hate” is put in quotation marks seems another backhanded admission of wrongdoing, that the left has altered the meaning of the word “hate.” Christianity does not tell us to “do good to those who wish for bad things,” and certainly not to encourage those who have sinned, but to wish the best for everyone. This looks like a belated admission that the left has been endorsing and encouraging sin. Of course they have: but now they seem to admit that sin is a real thing.

The author interprets “woke” is an insult. That is perhaps the most significant sea change. The term of course comes from the left, as a boast: they were “enlightened.” Now they do not want to be associated with it--that’s conceding the whole game. Only a few years ago, in the days of the Bernie bros, they were proud of being socialists. Now they find the term offensive.

They are unrepentant, yes, but they know they have lost the argument.


Friday, March 15, 2024

Richard Dawkins Is Right

 


Richard Dawkins, celebrated atheist, makes an important point. If you call yourself a Christian, attend church, and say you believe in Jesus and God simply because you were brought up to do so, it is meaningless. You are not a real Christian. Any more than you can become a real Buddhist simply by being raised in a Buddhist milieu. Salvation is individual. 

Salvation comes not from saying the name “Jesus,” but from seeking truth and seeking to do what is right. 

Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In other words, to follow Jesus, you must follow truth, and follow his way. Simply mouthing “Lord, Lord” is of little significance.

One must sincerely seek truth wherever that leads.

The real Christian must and will make themselves aware of what Jesus actually said and taught—they must read the gospel. They must make themselves aware of his way and his life. 

The Christian claim is that, if anyone sincerely does this, undertakes this study, they will know in their heart that this man was whom he said he was, and his teaching is correct. The words will speak to them.

This is what confirmation is supposed to be about; or adult baptism, in the Protestant tradition, or being “born again.” One must be personally convicted.

 A sincere Christian ought also to acquaint themselves with alternative philosophies: with Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, existentialism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhist, Hinduism. One is not seeking truth if one wears blinders. They must honestly consider and judge the plausibility of each.  A sincere and ethical atheist is a better Christian than a nominal Catholic. The latter is merely a hypocrite.

And a sincere Christian will recognize a sincere Muslim, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jew, as a brother.


Thursday, March 14, 2024

Blessed Are the Poor

 


I have a friend with whom I regularly share our nostalgia about N.D.G.—Notre-Dame-de-Grace, an old inner suburb of Montreal. We both grew up there, at about the same time, and went to the same church and school, although we did not know each other then. 

Recently, he sent me a vintage photo of Montreal West, knowing I had lived there for a time as well. 

But I do not have fond memories of Montreal West. The feeling is completely different.

Which makes me wonder why. 

Growing up, I lived in and around Gananoque, a small town in Ontario; N.D.G.; Westmount, another part of greater Montreal; Montreal West; and then to university in Kingston. I have fond memories of Gananoque and N.D.G., and an abiding distaste for Westmount, Montreal West, and Kingston.

Thinking about it, I recognize the commonality. Westmount and Montreal West are posh. Kingston is cut by Princess Street, and this border is deeply significant. We lived on the south side, the posh side. And I was going to Queen’s, perhaps the poshest of Canadian universities. Gananoque was necessarily, as a small town, mixed. N.D.G. was mostly recent immigrants, many families in rented apartments.  In Montreal West, I found my friends down the hill in the duplexes of Ronald Drive, the one non-posh part of the neighbourhood. My truest friend in Kingston grew up north of Princess, and had no contacts with the university.

At one point, as the family business collapsed, we moved from a huge house in Montreal West to a house without running water four miles outside of Gananoque, where we slept two to a bed. Both I and my brother, in more recent years, have reminisced about how happy we were then. “Away from it all.”

I conclude that I do not tend to like rich people, and they are on the wrong side of life. To begin with, rich people tend to be aggressive and competitive. They tend to be emotionally unavailable, always wearing a mask and blinders; not open to new ideas or new experiences. They also tend to be one-dimensional, lacking interests. This makes them seem unintelligent. They are relatively robotic. They are not fully alive. They have sacrificed real life and selfhood to an appearance of life and self.

Poor people are more varied in their characteristics and their interests. They have fewer shared assumptions, and are more open to the assumptions of others. They are often creative, and often kind. 

They smile more. 

My poorer grandmother, a farmer’s wife with eight kids, used to laugh with her whole body; I remember her always smiling. 

I never remember my richer grandmother laughing; she would titter, but it was obviously calculated. She was a good woman, I believe, and kind to a fault, a rebel against her class and its assumptions; but not a happy person.

It can all perhaps be summed up in a short phrase: blessed are the poor.

Some rich people are good people, and some have diverse interests. But those who do suffer for this, because they are then alienated from their milieu. Their milieu is full of  the sort of people the New Testament calls hypocrites.

It is possible that what I say about the Canadian upper class would not apply in other countries; Canada does not have an upper class in the European sense. What I describe in Canada as upper class values might correspond to what Europeans call “bourgeois values.”

But I think of Jesus’s call in the Beatitudes. He plainly spoke of the lower class, the poor, or the poor in spirit, as his people, and not the rich nor the professional class. The rich, more or less by definition, are all in on this world, have committed to it and endorsed its rules. As Jesus says, “they already have their reward.” But, as St. Paul says, the wisdom of this world is folly to God. 

The relatively poor are often the more thoughtful, who consider things more carefully, who have more diverse or more balanced goals. Things like family, friendship, faith, morality, beauty, art.

The rich do not often get this; they see the only issue as money. But I remember the resistance of one factory worker when his progressive employer wanted to end the assembly line to make his work more meaningful: “they pay me for my time. I do not want to sell them my mind. I want my mind to be free.”

Probably the philosophy of most long-distance truckers; or most farmers. Or most shepherds, traditionally. One of the most interesting and erudite people I ever met was a shepherd at the livestock market in Al Ain, Saudi Arabia. Such people have time to think.

By contrast, I was acutely conscious going to grad school, and then working as a professional editor and college prof, that one was always required to accept and endorse some shared ideology; some group idolatry. Much of what we call professional education is really vetting people for conformity.

This being so, it is the poor who are the creative element in our, or any, society. The great breakthroughs and insights and poetic epics will appear in garages, or be proclaimed by shepherds returning from the hills.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Is She or Isn"t She?

 


The internet is percolating with claims that Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Macron, is actually a man. Without rehashing it here, the evidence looks convincing; and the Elysee Palace has not seemed able yet to rebut it.

So what? 

Candace Owens calls this “the biggest scandal in the history of the world.” But why should anyone even care?

Because it leaves the President of France vulnerable to blackmail? But he is only vulnerable to blackmail if we care in the first place. A good argument for leaving the private lives of politicians private.

But perhaps there is something more. Why, after all, if it is true, did they feel the need to cover it up? 

It might be that the historic prohibition on homosexuality has a hidden logic to it; the same logic that until recently required segregation of the sexes in the workplace. Sexual attraction makes people do crazy things: like promoting a lover over a more competent but less sexy candidate, say. Or sacrificing the interests of your employer in order to get sexual favours from an attractive supplier or competitor.

Ask the many spy agencies who regularly use “honey traps.” 

Blackmail is only one possibility. 

Over time, as well, a “gay mafia” might form within an organization, or an orgiastic “hellfire club,” a cabal of lovers promoting one another’s interests in return for sexual favours; with each able to blackmail the others should they deviate from some group programme.

Which might explain how gay and transgender issues have become dominant in political discussions everywhere, despite gays being only a tiny fraction, perhaps one percent, of the general population. They may form a higher percentage at the top of the social pyramid, due to logrolling.

And it may be important to keep their sexuality secret, so the general public does not realize there is a cabal.

What other world leaders might secretly be gay?

What other world leaders might secretly be pedophiles?


Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Real Victims of Prejudice.

 



I am a big fan of the Coen brothers. And MacBeth is my favourite Shakespeare play. But I have never bothered to see Joel Coen’s 2021 MacBeth. I dislike resettings and modernizations of Shakespeare plays. At best, it seems a gimmick. And messing with the Shakespeare original is like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Coen’s MacBeth made MacBeth a black man—an absurdity in 11th century Scotland.

Why, of all Shakespeare’s plays, must C0oen choose this one in particular to do in blackface? Shakespeare sets most of his plays either in England, or in the romantic Mediterranean. At least in the latter case,  there are more legitimate places to plausibly put a sub-Saharan African character. Othello comes to mind—although of course a Moor is not a sub-Saharan African, the miscasting would not be so jarring. There is, by contrast,  only one Shakespeare play set ijn Scotland, and its uncanny Scottishness is integral to it. It is often referred to simply as “the Scottish play.”

So it seems pretty in-your-face and up-yours to Scotland to culturally appropriate its main character. 

I suspect this is an example of a larger and longstanding effort in the English-speaking world to devalue and to efface the Scottish and Irish and their cultures. 

Others have noticed what seems to be a recent prejudice against characters who are “ginger”: Green Gables is now being partly converted into a display of aboriginal culture. Disney recently turned the Littlest Mermaid black. There is a common wisecrack in England: “do gingers have souls?”

Red hair is especially characteristic of the Irish and Scottish. It is far less common almost everywhere else.

And the Irish and Scottish are insulted regularly. Although “the n-word” cannot be spoken, nor even the innocuous Eskimo or “redskin.” Yet the terms “hillbilly” and “redneck” sare in common use, and are unambiguously pejorative.

I recently read that the term “hillbilly” was originally a term for the Scots-Irish: “billies” because they supported William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. So, reputedly, is “redneck”: Scots-Irish Presbyterians wore red scarves to show their resistance to the imposed Anglican faith. 

And, of course, the actual people usually referred to as “rednecks” and “hillbillies” in the US are the Scots-Irish. Whose ancestors usually came to these shores as indentured servants, as term-limited slaves, driven out of Ireland and Scotland by clearances.

While blackface is prohibited in polite society, nobody objects to whiteface: the traditional clown makeup, supposed to show an ignorant yokel. Clowns also usually also have red hair. They are a parody of an Irishman or Scot. And you laugh at them, not with them.

The English, and the Anglosphere, always had a benevolent attitude to darker-skinned people: subSaharan Africans, East or South Asians, or Native Americans. As an island people, they could afford to; they had no natural enemies there. Yes, they used Africans as slaves; but they had convinced themselves they were doing this in the best interests of these poor primitives. They were like children; do adults usually hate their children?

Even Jews were little known in the British Isles, and so little thought of. The ancient enemy, and the ancestral hatreds, are reserved for the Scots and the Irish. They represented rival cultures in the home islands. Worst of all, they were Catholic. Or Presbyterians, who were also an ideological threat.

The old prejudices are stronger then ever now, and growing. Extravagant favours now granted to blacks, aboriginals, immigrants, can perhaps best be understood not as some newfound  tolerance, but a way to humiliate, efface, and keep down poor “whites”—that is, disproportionately, the Scots and the Irish.

Arguably, so, in its day, was slavery.