Uganda's Anti-Gay Law

 

Uganda has just made being openly homosexual illegal. Protests are pouring in that this is a violation of human rights.

It is not. 

Making public advocacy of homosexual sex illegal may be unkind, but it is not a violation of human rights. Any more than making public advocacy of sex outside marriage illegal, or banning pornography, would be. There is a human right to procreation, but not to recreational sex. Specific sexual acts can be prohibited. Rape is prohibited. Sex with a minor is prohibited. Incest is prohibited.

There may be a public interest in prohibiting homosexuality. For example, in a time of collapsing birth rates worldwide, a government might consider it important to impose such a measure to encourage heterosexuality and procreation. The dogma of the homosexual rights lobby is that homosexuals are “born this way,” and there is no possibility of social contagion. But this claim has never been proven, and seems improbable. A government might want to suppress homosexual propaganda, not only for the sake of population support, and for the benefit of unmarried women, but because an addiction to homosexual sex is unfortunate for the addict, just as becoming addicted to some drug would be. The vast majority of those a gay man is sexually attracted to will reject his advances. It cannot be easy to find a loving partner, or to experience constant unrequited love.

The Ugandan law seems especially concerned with the spread of disease, including AIDS. And this too is reasonable. It is simply true that homosexual sex is more likely to spread diseases than heterosexual sex. This might also justify a law against its promotion.

Pearls before Swine

 

Friend Xerxes has reinforced my view that most people cannot understand any message conveyed in parable or narrative form. He has recently weighed in on the meaning of several popular fairy tales.

He advises that Hansel and Gretel teaches us that “adding a new person to an existing group always creates tensions.”

He means the stepmother.

This is not a viable interpretation. To begin with, it ignores morality. Apparently, she meant no harm in leaving the children in the forest to be devoured by wild beasts. It was just some perfectly reasonable or else instinctive reaction to the tension of being new to the family. No doubt any of us would have done the same. 

Next, in the original version of the story, she is the childrens’ biological mother, not a stepmother. The Grimms introduced the “stepmother” concept, here and elsewhere, because they thought the story was otherwise too disturbing for their readership.  Being unfair to stepmothers everywhere. 

So stepmotherhood is hardly the main point of the story. She is not a new person added to the group.

Next, this ignores the culpability of the father, who agrees to the deed.

Next, it ignores the witch, who is the worse villain.

The real message of Hansel and Gretel is that children should not trust adults. Including their own parents. They should be alert to the dangers, and they should stick together in solidarity.

Next, Xerxes explains that Goldilocks and the Three Bears teaches us that the good is always found in the mean, the average between two extremes. Goldilocks discovers this by sampling the three bowls of porridge, sitting on the three chairs, and sleeping in the three beds. In each case, one is “just right.”

Yet it is not clear that Goldie’s preference is always for the mean. Of the three beds, she prefers not the one of average size, for example, but the smallest, and specifically on the basis of its size. It was neither too long at the head, nor too long at the foot. It is forced to see that as an average. Similarly, while she preferred one chair as neither too soft nor too hard, it was also the smallest, and the weakest—a point made most salient by the fact that she broke it. Again, it is arbitrary to read this as the average of the three chairs.

And it is hard to see how, had she chosen to prefer a different bowl of porridge, chair, or bed as her favourite, this would have had any impact on the major action of the story. She still would have been eaten by the bears—as the original story ends. Or have had to jump out the window and run away—as the common bowdlerized version has it. 

The real message of Goldilocks is that children should be respectful of others’ property, and not trespass or greedily grab things. The bit of business about trying each bowl of porridge, each bed, and each chair, is to show that Goldilocks has no concern for others, supposing everything is for her pleasure.

Lastly, our faithful lefty correspondent tackles Little Red Riding Hood. It is apparently about how we expect to be rescued from our troubles by some trusty woodsman. The issue is who that woodsman is: is it government, or private enterprise?

He prefers government

However, in the original story, there is no woodsman. Little Red Riding Hood just gets eaten by the wolf, as does her grandmother. The woodsman, like the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel, was introduced by modern reteller fearing the original story was too shocking for readers.

The point of the story of LRRH is the same as that of Hansel and Gretel—and of most fairy tales. Children should not trust adults. Not even their own grandmother. And they must therefore always be on their guard, keep their wits about them.

Why does Xerxes consistently get the point wrong? Aren’t the real messages obvious?

I think it is because he, and most of us, avoid moral interpretations and any reference to morals at all cost. Moral references or any suggestion of divine retribution make us feel frightened and guilty.

The Sisters of Perpetual Hate

 

The current controversy over the LA Dodgers officially honouring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at their Pride Night illustrates the folly of the “turn the other cheek” approach for Christians, in most circumstances. This is probably the favorite Biblical passage among non-Christians: for to them, it means “Christians, shut up.”

It properly refers to a situation in which one is powerless; where resistance would be futile, or not worth the risk. Elsewhere, Jesus tells his disciples to buy knives. In such a situation, when one faces overwhelming force, the best strategy is to try to shame the aggressor. It worked for Gandhi, or O’Connell, or MLK.

It does not apply to transgender hate groups.

Keeping silent about transgenderism does no good. For the Catholic Church always has, and it makes no difference. The Catholic Catechism has no position on crossdressing. Crossdressing is firmly established in Filipino culture, and the Philippines is perhaps the most Catholic country on Earth. No, a man is not a woman. But that is not a moral issue: it is an issue of basic sanity.

Nevertheless, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, as their name implies, categorically hate the Catholic Church as their prime enemy, and want to attack it in any way possible. They mock Christ on the cross; they show up to protest any important Christian events. They claim it is because the Catholic Church shames or attacks them; yet it does not.

For that matter, the Catholic Church has never had a special problem with homosexuality. Yes, it is a sin. But so on the same grounds i heterosexual sex outside of marriage, masturbation, and use of artificial birth control. Since these apply to both homosexuals and heterosexuals, one cannot plausibly accuse the Church of being “homophobic.” A significant proportion of Catholic clergy are said to be homosexual in their sexual inclinations, and prominent homosexuals have often found their spiritual home in the Church: Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Evelyn Waugh, Andy Warhol, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Milo Yiannopolis. One must simply abstain from sex, just as the heteros, most often, must.

So refusing to condemn apparently does not staunch anti-Catholic hatred. And it obviously does nothing to reduce the incidence of homosexuality or cross-dressing, if that were the goal. It also transparently does nothing to make either homosexuals or cross-dressers feel better about themselves. Instead, the silence of the Catholic Church and of Catholics seems to encourage this anti-Catholicism—like not standing up to a bully. Compare the attitude of Islam, and note how many groups have formed to mock and protest Islam the way the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence mock and protest Catholicism.

The Sisters and their ilk hate Catholicism because they claim Catholicism makes them feel guilty. If they could simply stamp out Catholicism, they could be happy. But it will never work, because it is demonstrably not the Catholic Church, but their own conscience, that is causing these guilt feelings. So long as they refuse to accept the real source of these feelings, the feelings of guilt will get stronger and stronger. And so they will become more and more hostile to their scapegoat, Christians and Catholics, and perhaps more and more violent. If they could only, like the Tennessee school shooter, kill all the Christians…

The only way for the Church to counter this is to stand up and defend itself. It must not turn the other cheek in a case like this.

Nothing to See Here: Johnston

 

Sensible people do not believe in conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theory” has become a decisive put-down in any argument.

Which ought to make us suspicious. If there were conspiracies afoot, this would be the ideal way to protect them, wouldn’t it? By ruling the possibility out of consideration. Perhaps we should suspect anyone who dismisses conspiracy theories.

I used to accept the logic that any widespread conspiracy was unlikely to succeed. The reasoning is that, if many people are involved, the odds of someone blowing the whistle go up exponentially. As the conspiracy continues over a longer period, the odds of someone blowing the whistle go up. And, I might add, the more nefarious the activity, the greater the likelihood that somebody’s conscience is going to become unbearable.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is probably the most famous discredited conspiracy theory. But the example is ambiguous. If the claim of an International Jewish Conspiracy was false, there was a conspiracy by some group to propagate this forgery. Nobody knows who was actually behind the Protocols—nobody talked. A successful and enduring conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories were also more common before Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Intentionally or not, Stone seems to have killed the whole notion of conspiracies by advocating a particularly improbable conspiracy in that film.

Yet more recently, the idea of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy has begun to look more credible again. We see how the intelligence establishment colluded to subvert Trump—why not Kennedy? RFK Jr. reveals that his father assumed the death was the work of the CIA. And, as Attorney-General, RFK Sr. was in a position to know more than we.

We have seen a good many real conspiracies uncovered, too, in recent years: the conspiracy to suppress knowledge of Hunter Biden’s laptop; the conspiracy to tie Trump to Russian collusion; the conspiracy to suppress problems with the Covid vaccines; denial of the Wuhan lab leak and of gain-of-function research; Cardinal McCarrick’s gay mafia within the Catholic Church; Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Island. We know the Chinese government has been trying to subvert Canadian elections, and American congressmen have been sleeping with Chinese spies. 

There has to be a flaw in the argument against conspiracy theories; and I now think I see it. Yes, a whistleblower is likely. But how likely is he to be believed? 

In Wiesel’s Night, Moishe the Beadle returns to their Transylvanian village near the end of the Second World War, within sight of the end of the Nazi regime, with news of mass executions of Jews, from which he himself barely escaped. And nobody believes it. In 1944, among European Jews, no one believes it.

“But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.”

We need to factor in the human instinct for denial. The more disturbing the news of the conspiracy, the less likely people are to believe it, so long as denial is possible, and perhaps beyond. Because thinking of it is disturbing.

Nobody will touch the topic of Epstein’s death; nobody is demanding the client list. Nobody gets to see the manifesto from the Nashville shooter. There were whistles blown on McCarrick; they were ignored. YouTube still censors any suggestion that the Covid vaccines were not safe and effective; and there is no pushback from the media. Eric Swalwell continued on the House Intelligence Committee, after his affair with sa Chinese spy was known. A paper from Thailand pointed out the almost certainly synthetic origin of the Covid virus only months after it appeared; it was discounted and scorned. It was fairly obvious to any alert reader from the beginning that the Trump Russian collusion hoax was a hoax, and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real. But the media went along and did not challenge “the narrative.” Not, I think, because the entire media is part of some vast conspiracy, but from simple denial. You don’t want to believe the people in charge are baddies.

Which brings us to a few unanswered questions about current Canadian politics. 

Why did David Johnston agree to be Justin Trudeau’s “special rapporteur” on Chinese interference? In doing so, and in then not calling for a public inquiry, he is risking destroying what was a sterling public reputation, perhaps destroying his place in history. 

Everyone says he is a fine and upright person. Everyone also says he should never have agreed to take this job, due to apparent conflict of interest. Everyone also says that, having taken it, he had no choice but to call for a public enquiry.

So how to account for his actions? Why is he throwing away a lifetime’s work to protect Justin Trudeau?

People suggest it is because he is buddies with Trudeau. But the self-harm involved seems to go beyond what friendship could expect; indeed, if Trudeau were his friend, he would not ask him to do it.

His path in turn eerily parallels that of Judge Rouleau before him; and several other Trudeau-appointed ethics investigators; as if this is all predetermined.

Why is Jagmeet Singh supporting Trudeau and keeping him safely in power, in the face of successive scandals? It seems obviously destructive to his party’s fortunes, and to his own. He is lashing his fortunes to those of a party almost inevitably near the end of its tenure, and eliminating his party as an alternative; like a rat boarding a sinking ship. Indeed, why did he publicly sign on in the immediate wake of the Emergency Act, when Trudeau looked vulnerable, as if rallying to his side?

Wait; don’t leave out the Conservatives. Why, after seeming to show initial interest, and seeing a groundswell of support, did Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest, Candice Bergen, and Rona Ambrose all back out of running for the leadership in 2020, within a couple of weeks of one another? Any of the three could probably have won against O’Toole or McKay. And no one can say neither Poilievre or Charest were interested in the job: they ran two years later.

The simplest explanation is that there is some conspiracy afoot. And I see how it could work.

Stanley Kubrick warned us of Hellfire Clubs among the rich and powerful in Eyes Wide Shut—before dying in post-production, like one character in the film who blew the whistle. Epstein and McCarrick have demonstrated that such Hellfire Clubs are indeed currently in operation in the US. Once a member has been brought in, through the attraction of free unorthodox sex or some other illegal activity, he can be blackmailed. So everyone is kept in line. 

Francis Dashwood, reputed founder of the original Hellfire Club

If, on the other hand, you will not buy in, the club will close ranks to do what it can to keep you out of power.

The tactic is obvious, and likely to be effective. 

David Johnston did not kill himself.

A New Target

 

Target is now in the sights of the right, joining Bud Light. And the LA Dodgers, North Face, Miller Lite, and others every day now. Having realized their power, the anti-woke have woken up. Boycotts will spread.

Aside from any possible backlash from the normies, why did Target think it would be profitable to carry and devote a large amount of floor space to a line of trans clothes for children? How many trans people do you know? How many do you see walking down the streets? Surely the trans market is miniscule. How many of those items are they likely to sell? 

And yet, they are not prepared even now in the face of collapsing sales to pull the stock. They have only moved it, in some stores, to a less prominent position. 

How big is the trans market for light beer? Yet Budweiser seems prepared to lose billions rather than disavow Mulvaney.

And as for the LA Dodgers: Mulvaney made a thing in his Bud Light ad about trans people being totally uninterested in sports. So how mad is it for the Dodgers to insist, even in the face of popular backlash, on honouring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at centre field? How big is their trans fan base really?

I think that last example holds the key. It is not about the trans. The trans are just the visible symbols, the flagbearers. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not being honoured because they are trans, but because they mock Christianity. People want to buy trans clothes at Target not because they are trans, or their babies trans, but to show defiance of Christian morality. That is the big market: those who want to reject morality. As a good many people always want to do. Morality means not getting to do what you want.

This is what “woke” means. People seem to have trouble defining the term, but it makes sense as a gnostic reference. To gnostics, morality is for the ignorant masses. They are as if asleep. Superior people, the awakened or enlightened, see beyond that, see that morality is just a way to keep the deplorables in check. As superior beings, they themselves are radically free to do whatever they want. And declaring their freedom from morality declares their superiority as well.

This gnostic concept has infected the great monotheisms from their beginning. Before that, it seems to have infected Classical paganism’s “mystery religions.” The same tendency exists in Hinduism and Buddhism as Tantra. In China, it is represented by Taoism, the undercurrent pulling against Confucian morality. It is also the fundamental concept behind fascism and Nazism. 

Put more simply, and accurately, it is Satanism. As Aleister Crowley put it, “"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Let us hope the good people are now rising up against it.

See No Evil

 

Reports are that Vladimir Putin does not use the Internet. He relies entirely on printed reports.

An autocratic ruler, over time, is no longer told the truth by his advisers. He is in an information cocoon. It is safer to tell him what he wants to hear; and to assure him they have everything under control. 

This can lead to disastrous decisions.

With the rise of social media, a smart dictator has another option. They can monitor cyberspace for independent accounts of affairs on the ground. 

Putin, sources claim, has deliberately cut himself off from this. Why?

Anyone who has taken to themselves autocratic power is a narcissist. No non-narcissist would be so interested as to think this worthwhile.

Narcissists do not want to accept the existence of any external reality which they cannot control. 

They are therefore automatically delusional, and will demand that those around them support their delusions. 

They do not want the facts.

With luck, and some natural caution, they may still die in their beds, like Mao or Stalin. But collapse can also come suddenly, as with Saddam; or less suddenly, but as surely, as with Hitler.

The best way to tempt the latter fate is to start a war.

We are perhaps beginning to see how this war will end. A band of Russian partisans has invaded Russia from Ukraine. This is probably really a Ukrainian operation, just to draw reinforcements away from the site of the coming Ukrainian offensive. But it is also impressive how quickly and easily they made progress. It may be instructive to others: disaffected Chechens, the Wagner group, other independent armies Putin has unwisely allowed to organize.

Russian troops might u-turn from Kyiv or Bakhmut, and take the road to Moscow.

Field of Screams

 

W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe is magnificently written. It is a pity it is Fascist.

It shows the appeal of Fascism; which is worth understanding. After all, how did it attract so many in the early and middle years of the last century? It must have had something going for it. 

It seems to be especially appealing to artists. The artistic movement known as Futurism was in the Fascist vanguard. Ezra Pound was famously drawn in. Gabriel D’Annunzio, the original Fascist dictator, in Trieste, was  prominent poet. Hitler was a wannabe painter, Mussolini wrote short stories. Fascism made a strong appeal to the imagination. As does “Shoeless Joe.”

“If you build it, they will come.” If you just wish for a thing strongly enough, believe in it strongly enough, it will happen.

In other words, the triumph of the will.

Like Fascism’s elevation of the volk and the volkish, Shoeless Joe elevates traditional American folk culture to sacred status: Kid Scissons even, on the point of death, preaches a kind of Sermon on the Mound.

“I take the word of baseball and begin to talk it. I begin to speak it. I begin to live it. The word is baseball. Say it after me,” says Eddie Scissons, and raises his arms.

“The word is baseball,” we barely whisper.

“Say it out loud,” exhorts Eddie.

“The word is baseball,” we say louder, but still self-consciously. 

“The word is what?”

“Baseball …”

“Is what?”

“Baseball…”

“Is what?” As his voice rises, so do ours. “Baseball!”

He pauses dramatically. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” His voice is filled with evangelical fervor. “Can you imagine walking around with the very word of baseball enshrined inside you? Because the word of salvation is baseball. It gets inside you. Inside me. And the words that speak are spirit, and are baseball.”

At the same time, our narrator is scornful of conventional religion. 

The great advantage of seeing life as a game is that there is no morality involved. One only seeks to win.

There is an underlying conflict in the book: the narrator’s brother-in-law wants to buy his farm. He does not want to sell.

And, tellingly, morality is not involved. Ray, the narrator, attempt no moral case that his desire to stay on this farm is more important than brother-in-law Mark’s desire to incorporate the farm in a more profitable larger section. Rather the reverse: he has not kept up with his mortgage, his brother-in-law offers attractive terms, and his brother-in-law will be financially ruined if he refuses. Morality is clearly not the point. It is only a matter of winning the game, again, a triumph of personal desire, of the will.

To cap it off, Mark’s business partner, the true villain in the tale, is an accountant named Bluestein. A suspiciously semitic-sounding name. A foreign, cosmopolitan presence in an Iowa wheat field.

The core premise of the novel, the core premise of Fascism, is also the core premise of postmodernism, seen for example in current gender ideology: there is no objective reality, and we are free to construct and impose our own narratives.

It is pretty liberating. But Kinsella himself seems to as much as admit that The Voice speaking to the narrator throughout the novel is in fact the Devil.

Kinsella killed himself by assisted suicide in 2017.

Depopulation and Its Causes: A Thought for Victoria Day

 

I’ve been warning about population decline since the nineties. I remember a piece I wrote for the Western Standard in around 2002. It has taken an astonishing time for the media to notice what the demographic projections have been saying for generations.

Canada is delaying the reckoning through mass immigration; as are most European countries. This brings its own problems; but even so, soon, immigration from where? Numbers will be falling everywhere.

I think the cause i a general loss of meaning. In The Descent of Man, Darwin, writing back in the mid 19th century, observed the curious fact that, whenever Europeans encountered some remote tribe, of the sort we used to refer to as “primitive,” the latter’s numbers entered a steep decline. Not due to contagious diseases brought by the Europeans; die-offs from epidemics are part of a normal cycle in remote tribes. Because of low population density, these tribes cannot harbour natural immunity past a couple of generations. Every new disease decimates them.

Rather, women just stopped having babies. 

The encounter with another culture that was so much more advanced (politically incorrect to say this now, but obviously true) shattered all their notions about life and the universe. Life lost its meaning; “loss of soul,” some African tribesmen called it when speaking with Carl Jung. Compare the English term “dispirited.” On the individual level, this is what we call “depression.” We get a taste of it when our own cherished assumptions about the world, or about a close relationship, are shattered. The cosmic egg cracks. 

The whole world is now dispirited, depressed. Our world view no longer holds up. We do not see a direction to human development, a sense of mission, a point to human life other than, perhaps, gaining transitory pleasures and avoiding pains. We no longer have religious faith. The arts are moribund, and what we have from the past is being pulled down or censored. Making it meaningless to create art, in other ages a place where meaning can be generated and a life justified. Family relationships are breaking down. We are merely living for pleasure from day to day, and trying not to think about our death.

So why have children? It’ll just be the same damned thing all over again. A child’s birth is an expression of hope in the future.

The last time we had a strong shared sense of mission, was the time we now tend to scorn as the Victorian age. The days of the social gospel, prohibition, abolition, and the European civilizing mission: we imagined then our efforts were making the world a better place. Yeats captures it in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen:

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;

 

The First World War killed that optimism. It revealed, said Yeats,

 

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

The fight against Nazism, and then the fight against the Soviet Bloc, kept us duck-taped together for a time. It even brought back a wave of religious faith, in the US, in about the 1950s. And we had the baby boom. But things were coming unravelled spiritually and intellectually underneath the fine veneer—Nazism and Communism were themselves unravelling strands, tin idolatries. All the old verities were being replaced by scientism, materialism, existentialism, postmodernism, dadaism, all improvisations on the one theme of meaninglessness. None of them have been able to justify human existence. They were only blind guides wandering into walls.

In past ages, when a civilization became decadent, some new tribe, motivated by some new vision and robust from hardship, would charge out of the desert, sea, or steppes and take command. Ibn Khaldun analysed this grand historical process back in about the 14th century. But now there are no more unexamined seas or steppes or deserts from which they might come.

What is the escape from this collapse? Only God’s intervention. Only some infusion of the Spirit.

Waking Up

 We are accustomed to say we are in a culture war. But what are the two sides? It is not two warring cultures. One side seems in favour of culture, the other opposed. 

Why would anyone be opposed to culture?

The answer is simple: those who seek power oppose culture; cultural norms are a restraint on power. See the Cultural Revolution in China, the French Reign of Terror, or the Cambodian Killing Fields.

So the real battle in the “culture war” is the bullies against the decent common folk. In political terms, say authoritarian government against liberty; but, culturally, it is broader than that. As broad as good against evil; the scribes and Pharisees against those Jesus identified as his own in the Beatitudes.

The bullies see the new technologies as the ideal opportunity for Big Brother—level control. They are pushing for constant oversight, censorship, and control as hard as they can. I have long believed, on the other hand, that the natural consequences of improved communications technology, and technology as a whole, favour over the longer term liberty against the bullies. It is harder for a small group of bullies to control and compel people who can communicate and organize among themselves. Indeed, I suspect that much of the current woke drive to authoritarianism is more a fear reaction to cats escaping bags.

What we currently call “woke” culture is the vanguard of the authoritarian bullying impulse. Consider the things it demands. One is now compelled to say that a man is a woman: the overlords demand the right to dictate reality itself. This is eerily parallel to O’Brien, in 1984, demanding Winston Smith admit that he sees three fingers when O’Brien holds up only two. What could be more complete control than a godlike control over reality itself? This is why bullies gaslight.

Language has long been under their control: “politically correct” is what Orwell called “newspeak.” It has gotten so far as the compulsory use of new pronouns. Or, in Canada, face a prison term.

The right to life has been negated by abortion, and now at warp speed in Canada by euthanasia.

Freedom of conscience, is increasingly denied. Expressing any of the major world religions’ teachings on homosexuality is now illegal. This is not because anyone cares much about homosexual sex or the supposed rights of homosexuals. It is an excuse to suppress religion. Religion, with its ethical restrictions, is the main constraint on bullies everywhere, and they always hate it. They will, at the same time, thoroughly infiltrate it, as did the Biblical Pharisees, for the same reason Saudi Arabia, China, and Afghanistan insist on always having seats on the UN Commission on Human Rights: to co-opt and subvert them. Let God actually appear, and they will try to kill him. 

But mere subversion is not enough. They will also attack frontally. The Catholic Church will be condemned and suppressed, and churches will be burned down with no one held accountable, on the grounds that Catholicism is homophobic; at the same time that a huge proportion of the Catholic clergy are revealed to be active homosexuals, a “velvet mafia.”

The issue is not homosexuality. It is getting rid of morality.

Although the night seems dark, and no place left to turn, there are signs of impending dawn. I anticipated dawn for this spring, and I believe the morning star is here.

Styxenhammer notices an interesting recent shift: previously, when an aggressively woke movie got a low audience score on a site like Rotten Tomatoes, it got a high critics’ score. See the all-female remake of Ghostbusters. The scribes were closing ranks against the common people, who were condemned as misogynists, homophobes, racists, “white supremacists,” “Christian nationalists,” deplorables. However, the recent Queen Cleopatra series, which tries to gaslight the public to accept against all historical evidence that Cleopatra was black, is scoring almost as badly with both the critics and the viewers. Latest tally: 15% among critics, 3% with the audience. 

This suggests the scribes and Pharisees, not all of whom are themselves bullies, some of whom are honest working stiffs who have been bullied into line, or suckered into line or have been going along to get along, like Joseph of Arimathea, are beginning to break ranks. The same thing happened with the nobility in the French Revolution, and it was a crucial moment. 

In the meantime, the general public is also increasingly fed up with this stuff; there is much less of the cap-doffing syndrome and deference to authority than there was a couple of years ago. The woke movies and series are now consistently bombing at the box office: The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan and Wendy, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest Star Wars bumpf. Literally, the public isn’t buying it any more.

Polls show that the main issue in the minds of Republicans in the US is now the battle against “wokeness.” Above the economy, above inflation, above government corruption (which is number two), above immigration, above national security.

Somebody has indeed woke; but not as advertised. As with most calculated lies, the term “woke” was always the opposite of the truth.

The bullies always have one great advantage: while they are single-mindedly bent on the acquisition and exercise of power, the average person just wants to either help their neighbour, or be left alone, and assumes the same good will of everyone else. So for some time, the bully can run wild and jackbooted without resistance—in fact, with the help and cooperation of those seeking peace at any price.

As a result, we have seen the rise of “woke” corporations. Their actions seem superficially mad; they are supposed to be making money for their shareholders, not pushing a political agenda. And, generally, the political agenda they push is against the interests and sentiments of their customers. In the case of media platforms, Facebook, YouTube and the like, their profitability depends on being the platform everyone needs to be on to engage in the public discourse. Yet they are banning users, increasingly driving the to other platforms or networks to suppress the public discourse. How can this make business sense?

It actually does. They have learned that if they fall afoul of the demands of the bullies, their business will suffer. There will be demands for boycotts, for divestment, for bans on advertising with them, for freezing their assets, silencing them on social media, and so forth. Disney learned this when they made the villain in The Lion King, Scar, appear to be gay. 

If they appease the bullies, they avoid this. 

As the demands of the bullies grow and grow.

On the other hand, they face little or no downside for this appeasement—because their other customers generally just want to buy a needed product, and do not care much whether a man dresses in women’s clothes, say, or has sex with another man, or whether it was a man or a woman who invented beer.

But the bullies have now overplayed their hand. This was inevitable; when you crave power above all, sooner or later you get drunk on it. They went too far with the pandemic lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of news, defamations, false prosecutions, fake hate crimes, drag shows for children, pornographic children’s books in school libraries, and endless cries of “wolf.” The bullying has gotten too directly threatening for the passive and amoral general public. Now they rise up.

The Bud Light boycott looks like a watershed. The customers showed they now care enough about the woke bullying to do something about it. And they have discovered their power. At last, corporations must calculate on paying a price for appeasing bullies. The woke corporate complex may collapse quickly.

As for the woke political complex, Trump is currently running away with the Republican nomination: up 42 points over his nearest competitor, the highly credible Ron DeSantis. If that trend continues, he will enter the general election with a strong party united behind him. 

Why the Trump surge? Because he has the right enemies. He is being legally persecuted, indicted and prosecuted. This establishes his bone fides as the hero of the common man against the corrupt elite. If the bad guys hate him so, he can be trusted.

The Democratic nomination is being contested by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also has anti-establishment credibility as an anti-vaccination activist. And he is surging in the polls against a sitting president. The usual Democratic backroom chicanery will probably keep him from the nomination; but he will probably weaken Biden in the primaries, encourage others to come out against the establishment “narrative,” and possibly tempt the dark powers to overreach in order to stop him.

In Canada, we now have the rhetorically magnificent Pierre Poilievre. He has apparently decided to make the war on woke a central issue. No doubt he is reading polls, and sees the same surge in concern over wokeness as in the US. I recently saw a clip of Erin O’Toole, and remembered how luck we are to have Poilievre. 

Things will never be as they ought to be, until the clouds part and Jesus comes trailing glory. But I have hopes that in two years, with Trump in power, a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, an originality majority on the Supreme Court, Poilievre presiding over a Conservative government in Canada, and the woke advertising blockade and the regime of censorship on social media broken, the cultural atmosphere will feel quite different.

Bernier Raises the Scarlet Letter A

 

He said it.

Maxime Bernier has firmly grasped the third rail of Canadian politics, and is running in Portage-Lisgar on the issue of abortion.

This was predictable fallout from the US Supreme Court voiding Roe v. Wade. In fact, I predicted it. Canada always looks south. If the US is debating abortion, Canada has to.

It is also a shrewd move, and puts the Conservatives in a difficult spot. Bernier is proposing a very moderate restriction, one that has public support. It will be hard for the Conservatives to oppose it without losing a possibly significant portion of their base. 

On the other hand, the Liberals have already signalled their desire to run on the issue of abortion instead of corruption, loss of freedom, or the economy. If they give any hint of supporting Bernier’s position, the Tories play into their hands.

Polls suggest the majority of Canadians favour such a restriction on abortion as Bernier proposes. So why is this a winning issue for the left, and a losing one for the right? 

The calculation is that, while most people favour restrictions, they do not feel that strongly about it. The issue is unlikely to determine their vote. On the other hand, those who want abortion, although a minority, make this their most important issue--due to a guilty conscience. So, on balance, it is a lose-lose for the right.

Except for Bernier. He has nothing to lose, sitting at 3-4 percent nationally in the polls, and everything to gain.

One can sympathize with Pierre Poilievre, now caught between a rock and a hard place. If I were he, I would say nothing unless challenged. But he will be challenged. Challenged, I would respond that the Conservative Party and a Conservative government would not introduce any bill restricting abortion. 

But would Conservatives be allowed to support a private members’ bill?

Then he should answer yes. Conservative MPs should have the right to vote with their conscience on any private members’ bills. Now let’s talk about more urgent issues.

This will lose Poilievre some support among the pro-abortion crowd.

But it is also a test of his honour and his leadership. Is he just another political hack, or does he have principles?

What Canada Now Looks Like from Abroad

 

A Bug's Life

 

A man, not an insect.

Everybody thinks that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about a man who turns into a giant insect. This is a good example of how everyone misreads parables. I suspect denial.

To begin with, people do not turn into giant insects. When an author describes something impossible as happening, this tells us we must understand the thing as symbolic, not literal. Not a complicated principle.

Second, Kafka never says that Gregor Samsa turns into a giant insect. What he actually says, in German, is “monstrous vermin.” A “monstrous impure, unholy, and/or defective and undesirable animal or human,” to work out all the connotations of the original German. 

Kafka always forbade any illustration of Gregor. Any drawing would be an immediate falsehood.

Artists usually show Gregor as a cockroach. But cockroaches have six, not “many” legs. Gregor makes frequent reference to “many” legs, all moving independently. Nor is he a centipede or caterpillar; centipedes and caterpillars do not have rounded shells, as Gregor does; they would not need to struggle, as he does, to turn or to roll over. Kafka has deliberately given Gregor features that do not correspond to any real physical insect or other bug.

And then there is the apple. Gregor’s father bombards him with apples. One lodges in his back.

This Is not realistic. Why apples, of all things? And how could one lodge permanently in his back, and cause him great suffering?

The apple too must be symbolic.

The need to resort to symbols is usually to express some emotion. As T.S. Eliot pointed out, one cannot convey an emotion to a reader by simply stating it. The experience of an emotion is purely subjective; you therefore cannot know whether what I call “love” is the same thing you feel as “love.” Ask any anxious fiancée.

Therefore, in order to convey an emotion to a reader, you must find and describe some object that evokes that emotion; what Eliot calls an “objective correlative.” Hope, Emily Dickenson wrote, is “that thing with feathers.” Love, Robbie Burns wrote, “Is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June.”

And depression is like thinking of yourself as a “monstrous vermin.”

Gregor shows all the symptoms of depression. Before the transformation, he has been, according to the office manager, lax at his job, and has not been bringing in any sales. For everything that happens, he blames himself. He blames himself for missing work, even if sick. He takes it upon himself entirely to make up for his family’s misfortune over the past five years. He blames himself for his family’s disgust at his appearance. He is more upset at his mother’s fainting than at his own slow death by starvation. He loses interest in food—this is not explained, but is a common depressive symptom. He is unable to get out of bed. Towards the end of the tale, he cannot move out of sheer disappointment.

The apple? Like any great author, Kafka is a great psychologist, and is able to tell us exactly where depression comes from. It comes from a narcissistic parent. This apple is as old as Eden, and it always hits you in the back, comes from the person you most trust, your parent. It is the apple of original sin, which passes down, generation by generation. A parent given over to vice inflicts depression on a child. Samsa Senior, we discover if we read attentively, is wholly given over to sloth, greed, gluttony, and wrath.

The next important and mysterious story element is Gregor’s sister Grete. Having been his lone ally, having taken care of him, why does she lose interest and then turn on him? Why is she in the end the one who wants him dead?

Because, in an abusive family, if one child is driven to depression by persecution, another will be favoured and trained into narcissism; and so the apple of sin is passed on, generation to generation. There will be an Abel, and there will be a Cain. Like Grete, the spoiled child will usually be of the sex opposite to that of the dominant narcissistic parent. Because narcissists are also into lust, along with the other vices. And narcissists do not respect family responsibilities. They may not act out their sexual fantasies—unless they are stupid—but they will favour their little trophy child, just as Gregor adores the woman in the picture on is wall. A caveat: this will occasionally vary if the dominant narcissistic parent has homosexual tendencies. Which is intrinsically common among narcissists. But that is a sidebar here.

Grete is the golden child, allowed to lounge around, go out for entertainments, devote herself to the violin. Nothing is asked of her, in stark contrast to Gregor. She is being groomed for narcissism. She even craves a little responsibility, and so is fiercely possessive of Gregor.

Another sidebar, but shown in the story: when one parent is a dominant narcissist, the other parent will inevitably be conspicuously passive, submissive. This is the only pairing that works with a dominant narcissist. But the submissive parent will be narcissistic too, in his or her way, like Echo in the original legend of narcissus, or like the oddly absent fathers of Snow White or Cinderella in the fairy tales. Their submissiveness is a strategy to avoid responsibility for their acts—a licence for self-indulgence without guilt.

The spoiled child will generally choose the path of narcissism at adolescence. In the end, whatever grooming is done, one must still choose to be a narcissist, because it is a moral issue. Just as, whatever the grooming, one still chooses at adolescence whether to be promiscuous, and are still responsible for that choice. Grete succumbs at adolescence to both lust and narcissism, and this is why she turns on Gregor. He has interfered with her chance to get something going with one of the bearded lodgers. 

Kafka leaves us with her parents thinking of a marriage for Grete. The original sin thereby reproduces itself, like one of Richard Dawkins’s selfish genes.

Kafka offers no escape, no solution. Gregor finds respite in art, in the violin music, or in the picture on his wall, as Kafka did in writing; but this aesthetic escape, real as it is, is only transitory. The only solution is religion Kafka does not get that far here. As, perhaps, he did not in life.

The Real World of White Privilege

 

Most things most people pretend to believe are the opposite of the truth; for most people are in denial, and the Devil rules this world.

One example is “white privilege”: the idea that white people, and Asian people, have it easier from birth because they are given special advantages due to the colour of their skin.

I teach Chinese and Korean students. I have lived in China and Korea. I can attest that the life of an East Asian child is hell. I have had to watch kids beaten in front of me; over the Internet. I have had to try to teach kids unable to keep their eyes open, taking extra tuition on weekends, first thing in the morning,  and late into the night.

Jewish parents are similarly demanding. I have just finished “Maus” and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” with my students. Either suggests the hell of a Jewish childhood. As does Cohen’s “Favourite Game.” If it isn’t the hypercritical father, it is the Jewish mother smothering you, making constant demands.

To a lesser extent Anglo and other “white” parents are demanding of their children. They allow them relatively little time for idle childhood fun: for listening to their favourite music, for playing with friends, for hanging out. They may go out for sports; but then they must bring home trophies.

By contrast, very little pressure is put on black kids or aboriginal kids. In part because many do not have a father around; but either aboriginal or African childrearing was always culturally relaxed. They get to be kids and do as they like growing up. They get praised and coddled. They are brought up to think they are wonderful, and deserve anything.

There is a similar contrast in how we raise boys and girls. Little girls are always adored, given the benefit of any doubt, and treated like princesses. Little boys get suspected of the worst and criticized. One of my earliest memories is of being driven out of a public playground, that I had innocently entered, and before I could actually do anything, by adults, because there were girls playing there, and “boys play too rough.”

This harsher treatment in childhood, this lack of parental warmth, may or may not lead to success in later life. Some are destroyed by it.

But it is certain that these white, Jewish, Asian, and/or male kids are not brought up with “privilege.” It is the black and aboriginal kids, and the girls, who are accorded privileges they did not earn.

Being used to privilege, they continue to demand it in adulthood, and cry injustice if they do not get it. The white, Asian, and Jewish men just grit their teeth, accept the expected abuse, and get back to the grindstone.

Something Rotten in Stratford

 

I really dislike Shakespearean acting; I hate listening to actors read poetry. It is because they insist on acting. They keep peppering their lines with odd pauses, caterwauls, tears and gestures, to express emotion. 

This treads all over the words. It is a distraction, like a moustache on the Mona Lisa. For either Shakespeare or poetry, they make a hash of the rhythm, and generally also other sound elements, like alliteration. They are even often inaudible.

Perhaps they do not grasp that Shakespeare was written for the stage, and for large open -air performances. The manner required is oration, like giving a speech. Small hand gestures and mumbling and grieved expressions would be lost in such a venue. The imperative is that the words be timed and enunciated clearly.

But surely ignorance is not the entire explanation. After all, Shakespeare is still most often presented on the stage, and even movie actors probably apprenticed treading the boards. I think it speaks instead of an unfortunate aspect of human nature: envy. Presented with someone else’s great art, having control of it, if briefly, the typical actor seems driven to make it uniquely their own; and to draw attention to themselves instead of Shakespeare. Or Keats, or whatever poet.

This would account as well for the undying inclination to restage Shakespeare in modern times. Or to make MacBeth black instead of Scottish. Tiresome; but the director is saying “look at me. Never mind Shakespeare; notice my clever reinterpretation of him. But there is nothing either clever or innovative about setting Shakespeare on Manhatttan’s West Side. Everybody does it.

Is the Dam Cracking?

 

Several substantial Hollywood names have just come out against aspects of the woke agenda: Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Richard Dreyfus. They might have only publicly objected to this or that point; but that does not matter. With wokeism, you are either all in, and question nothing, or you are out, and the enemy. Ask Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, or Tulsi Gabbard.

This begins to look as though the dam might be bursting. A huge proportion of people, in Hollywood and in the wider society, have been going along not out of any conviction, but either just to get along or to avoid having their career destroyed. Artists—and these people are, in the end, artists—are rarely really ideological. They don’t care about politics, and will generally just accept and roll with what those around them say. They are highly empathetic. But they are also free spirits; they will entertain any idea, however mad, but will soon hate being restricted to it. The chameleon poet. So they could embrace the woke assertions at first, and superficially, but over time, will feel desperately constrained by them. The strengthening of the woke dam, I suggest, is why the arts have been so moribund over the past few years and decades. Hollywood more than anywhere.

Pressure has been building up behind that dam. Now, if enough artists too big to be destroyed start speaking out, it will be like the tension being released in a deluge. The woke will suddenly go from being seemingly all-powerful to being common objects of ridicule. I think this is happening now to Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.

More evidence that the arts may be about to flip: at a recent meeting of the League of Canadian Poets, I was encouraged to hear that they were having continuing trouble finding members for their inevitable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee—the woke police. The chair of the Feminist Caucus declared her suspicion that one current member of that DEI committee was a mole. The Feminist Caucus is feeling vulnerable. A recent online reading provoked a high level of negative comments—it got ratioed, it seems,  in YouTube jargon. So the next time they disabled comments; and found that attendance dropped by half. In other words, half their audience seems to have been coming to jeer. 

And, while the Feminist Caucus motors on, the committee for Queer Poets is moribund--not enough members any longer to hold a meeting. This despite the fact that there are a lot of homosexual and lesbian poets. The Aboriginal Poets continue, but the chair looks less aboriginal than I do—blonde, very pale of skin, with an Anglo name. By contrast, new committees for Parenting Poets and Poets of Faith have recently formed, and are apparently growing fast.

I am hopeful that things are happening, or are about to happen, in the culture.

Pretty Great Rhetoric from Pierre Poilievre

 

The Death of Everyone

 

This film on the growing problem of depopulation has been prevented from being shown at Cambridge University, so far, by protests. This, the protesters say, is because it is prejudicial to feminism. They necessarily have not seen the film, as the entire film has not yet been generally available. This was to be the local premiere.

What you see on YouTube is only part 1. Judge for yourself. 

Here we see the zombie culture, the NPC culture. They do not want to think; they do not want to learn; they do not want to know. This is what denial looks like, and what it does.

What really has them agitated? I suspect that the problem of depopulation is a prima face argument, if not a direct one, against abortion. Which then also means against unrestricted sex. An unrestricted sex and perhaps abortion these students are themselves already guilty of. And so, denial.

Welcome to the roots of the current zombie apocalypse.

The creator of the film keeps saying the cause for the decline in birth rate is unclear. There seems to be no unifying underlying factor; it is as if it is all happening at once spontaneously. It is not the availability of the pill; the birth rate declined in Japan at the same rate as Europe, although in Japan the pill was not legal. It is not the growing cost of raising children. The birth rate declined in Germany at the same rate as elsewhere, although tertiary education is free in Germany. It is not families leaving the farm for the cities—that happened in Europe a hundred years ago or more, and, as the film points out, the significant change is not from large to smaller families, but from having children to not having children at all. 

The film correlates the declines to specific financial shocks; but this does not work. The shocks they cite are different in different countries; there have always been financial shocks, at any point in history; and the cited shocks are transitory. They can only be seen as triggers, if that.

The real reason for the decline in childbearing is a loss of meaning. Darwin more or less pointed this out back in the 19th century, in the Descent of Man. He noticed that, wherever Europeans came in contact with some previously isolated, technologically primitive society, the men stopped working and the women stopped having babies.

Having children is an expression of confidence in the world, and hope in the future. To these primitive people, the world as they knew it had fallen apart. Nothing made sense any longer. They succumbed to depression: spiritual despair.

The baby boom from 1945-65 supports the point by showing the opposite. After decades of war and economic depression, with the worst rascals apparently wiped out, there was a burst of optimism for the future. So, having babies seemed like a good idea. The optimism lasted until about the assassination of Kennedy and the escalation of the war in Vietnam; that killed both the optimism and the baby boom. 

There has been an accelerating loss of meaning in the past few decades: a turning away from religion; a rejection of existing culture, history, morality, and norms. Scientism and wokeism have been wholly inadequate substitutes. Because they almost immediately stop making sense. 

The film keeps citing Germany, Japan, and Italy as examples of the birth gap. Perhaps this means they have been leading this trend. They are the nations that most succumbed to the post-religious scientistic doctrines of fascism and Nazism. Granted that there was a delay of a generation or two before the loss of the war discredited these world views, but it may have taken that time for a sense of guilt to have overcome the sense of release from the sufferings of the war.

The collapse in birth rate seems most severe now in Eastern Europe. These are the nations that most succumbed to the post-religious scientistic doctrine of Marxism. If the subject populations have little cause to feel personal or even cultural shared guilt for this, their situation is like that of someone who has had an abusive childhood. It is hard to cast off the lies one’s parents have raised you with without a profound disorientation and period of despair.

Meantime, the only area that seems to have resisted the population collapse, so far, is subSaharan Africa. A place where Christianity is spreading rapidly.

Kind of makes you think.

All the Way with RFK

 

I am glad RFK Jr. is in the race. I might disagree with him on many things, I might never vote for him, but he is speaking sense and raising important issues others are not talking about.

RFK is right in this clip on the connection of mass shootings to SSRIs. 

The problem is not guns. Other countries have stricter or looser gun regulations than the US, more or fewer guns, but this does not correlate with the number of mass shootings. Nor do they correlate state by state.

The problem is not mental illness. We do not need more money for mental health. The reality is, all these shooters were already being treated. And other nations spend more or less money on “mental health,” but this does not correlate with the statistics on mass shooting. 

What does correlate, and possibly 1:1, is the treatments we are using for “mental illness”: the problem is SSRIs. That is, Prozac and its kin, the standard treatments we use for depression and anxiety.

Or rather, the problem is our inability to diagnose. SSRIs may be helpful for many, for those suffering anxiety and grief over false guilt and moral confusion produced by an abusive childhood or other abuse. But many others also suffer anxiety and grief, but over their own bad behaviour. The anxiety and the grief are actually their conscience calling them to account.

SSRIs deaden the ill-feelings in either case. 

In the first case, this is beneficial. They can allow the unjustly suffering to lead relatively normal lives—at the expense of never dealing with the problem causing the pain. 

In the case of the latter, this is catastrophic. It frees the narcissistic predator of all restraints. 

Modern psychiatry/psychology cannot see the difference, and cannot accept the difference, because it will not recognize, and denies, all moral issues. All it sees are the symptoms, of anxiety and grief, and so prescribes the same pill.

In either case, the better treatment is a call to true religion; to straighten out a smashed moral compass.

Nor is it that hard to make an accurate diagnosis, were we not in denial of morality generally. The effects of SSRIs are like those of alcohol. Either eases inhibitions. 

So observe someone drunk. If they remain good company, and simply become more talkative and sociable, they are safe for SSRIs. If the difference is notable, they are naturally too inhibited. If they just become sleepy and dopey, this is a bad sign, they are an addictive personality, who do not need more comfort, but at least they will not likely become violent. If they become critical of those around them, pick fights, or show outbursts of anger, they are a risk for violence with SSRIs. They need what inhibitions they still have.

If a true depressive feels bad, they blame and may harm themselves. If a narcissist feels bad—and they inevitably will, for the universe will always disappoint their sense of their just desserts—they will blame and seek to harm whoever else is available.

The Turning?

 

I may be a cockeyed optimist, but I see yet growing signs that the tide of woke is going out, and some are about to be left high and dry.

The Bud Light boycott is critical here. But Disney is also shedding jobs and viewers. So is Fox, after firing Tucker Carlson. Biden is tanking in the polls; as is Trudeau in Canada. And dark things are coming out: the criminal dishonesty of “Big Pharma” and the lies told during the pandemic. The dealings of the Biden family. The influence of the CPC on our politicians. 

All of this looks as though the general public has at last awakened, and shifted allegiances. They are no longer buying the increasingly unreasonable claims of the elites, and the common sense of the common man, as Pierre Poilievre calls it, is asserting itself. They are beginning to listen instead to the dissident right

It also looks as though significant numbers of members of the elite are starting to turn. The leaks and revelations are coming from whistleblowers inside the “deep state.” RFK Jr. has turned, and is perhaps going to make it respectable for elitists to turn. This was a critical moment in the French Revolution: when members of the First and Second Estate, the clergy and the aristocracy moved over to join the Third.

I think the woke left went too far, drunk with the hubris we call narcissism, and has finally killed their credibility. 

What Rough Beast?

 

A random comment seen on Twitter, in response to a local school banning Mother’s Day: “woke destroys everything good.”

A simple statement, but truth is usually simple. I think it is deeply true.

Begin with the premise, known and accepted from ancient times, that the purpose of human life is to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is so regardless of your particular religion, regardless even of whether you are a monotheist, a secularist, or a pagan. The absolute value of these three things is intrinsic, self-evident and beyond argument. You simply cannot coherently say that good is not good, or truth is not true. The response to beauty is immediate, unmediated, not a matter for judgment or doubt. The monotheisms merely posit a personal God as the ultimate source and essence of all three.

Now we see a contrary spirit, roaming the landscape as if to devour, a rough beast; which we currently call “woke.” It targets these three, goodness, truth, and beauty, as if a guided missile. 

Begin with motherhood; for the present epidemic seems to have begun here. It is an emblem of the good. In a healthy culture, motherhood is inviolate. Remember “motherhood and apple pie?” This is why the cow is sacred in India: as a symbol of motherhood. Individual mothers fall short, but motherhood itself is an image of selfless love, of wanting the best for the other; and this is the essence of the Good. Perhaps even more, the child’s reverence for the mother or father is an image of the proper loving attitude towards the divine. Which is why we pray the “Our Father.” 

And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

For comparison, it is because they do not nurture their young that serpents and reptiles have become, everywhere, a symbol of moral evil.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the culture turned against motherhood and children. Witness feminism. The premise of feminism is that motherhood is bad; all else follows from this. And this was reinforced, suddenly, with a concern over “overpopulation.” Having children was bad. Indeed, they should be actively done away with. And then we have abortion. Now actually glorified as a kind of sacrament. We are now moving on to genital mutilation of children to ensure that the next generation is infertile.

Homosexuality became admirable, largely or entirely because it does not lead to motherhood and children. 

Parallel is the attack on “conventional morality,” i.e., morality as such, and the common constructivist claim of moral relativism. Churches are vandalized; priests and ministers jailed; crosses replaced by snowflakes. We are now “spiritual, but not religious.” Why the difference? Religion implies a commitment to moral conduct.

The term “woke” is itself an attack on truth. It means here the opposite of its literal meaning. The “woke” become like NPCs. If they think for themselves, if they diverge even slightly from the “narrative”—and this term is itself a denial of truth—they are no longer “woke.” They are like sleepwalkers, in sum. The concept of a “zombie apocalypse” has so captured the popular imagination in recent decades because it is exactly what we are experiencing, day to day.

“Political correctness,” a term that emerged in the 1970s in its current sense, as a shorthand for adherence to “woke” doctrine, is a systematic reversal of the meaning of words, an assault on truth and truth-telling. A spade must not be called a spade. “Exceptional children” are now not the most intelligent or talented, but the least. “Gender-affirming care” destroys one’s gender. “Pro-choice” strips the child, the father, the grandparents of all choice. “Reproductive rights” deny men’s reproductive rights. “Equity” means inequality. “Social justice” means systemic social injustice. “Anti-racism” means racism. “Antifascism” means fascism. “Community” means alienation from your neighbours in favour of strangers who share some political interest. “Health care” means killing, of unborn children or, more recently and increasingly, the old, the poor, the despondent.

The “deplatforming,” the “unfriending,” the censoring, the cancelling, and the “hate laws,” are also an assault on truth, because it is only through free discussion that truth can be sought or known. Now everyone must guard their speech, and anyone who seems to say what they actually believe is, for that reason, and apparently no other, condemned, perhaps fired. Witness Tucker Carlson. Witness Joe Rogan. Witness Trump Derangement Syndrome.

As for the assault on beauty: feminism made a virtue out of making oneself appear ugly. The current issue of “fat shaming” is in this mold: one is now obliged to accept a woman’s declaration that she is beautiful, regardless of one’s own senses. But then, just as often, if you say she is beautiful, you are harassing her. And this is surely at least  a part of the current celebration of crossdressing: the bottom line is that Dylan Mulvaney and other “drag queens” are grotesque, a parody of feminine beauty. 

As for the beauty of art, that has been under attack since perhaps R. Mutt in 1917. Witness more recently the pulling down of statues, of public art, the burning down of beautiful churches, the assaults on paintings in the galleries of Europe.

Many attribute it all to George Soros or to Klaus Schweib and the WEF. But this is not an adequate explanation. Even if they plan evil, these people would not have the power to do so much. They are themselves zombies. The real culprit has to be a powerful spirit with a capability for mind control, for possession, fascination, or ecstasy; these are the characteristics of the pagan gods, the daemons, the obsessions. And a spirit bent systematically on evil and the destruction of man. Perhaps you can, as the Rolling Stones once sang, guess his name. There is a spirit of destruction in the universe, who hates God and mankind.

The term “woke” is a funny little tipoff here. It seems borrowed from the Gnostics, the Satanic heresy that has dogged the monotheisms throughout the centuries. Gnostics imagine themselves superior to the general run of mankind, because they are “awake,” possessing secret knowledge. This puts them above concerns like morality or truth that delude the common rabble. They can create their own morality, invent their own truths. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment was the type. Hitler was apparently an acolyte. Self-styled “elites,” along with those who have been pampered growing up, are particularly vulnerable to such thinking.

Where does this all lead? We must have faith. God is in control, and evil is self-limiting. It will go so far, and then it will collapse.

The Trudeau Crown

 

The Trudeau government plans to exploit the occasion of King Charles’s coronation to create a new “Canadian” crown for the Canadian coat of arms. Anything that hints at religion—crosses, fleurs de lys—is stripped out. The cross on top is replaced by a snowflake.

This leaves Canada open to derision.

The crown is supposed to represent solidity and continuity; foundation. That is why crowns are, when possible, made of incorruptible gold. That is why they are encrusted with jewels, the hardest of substances. Crowning the crown itself with a snowflake looks like a parody: the most ephemeral and weakest thing in nature. It mocks Canada as of no consequence.

The removal of religious symbolism is more sinister. This is appalling at a time when the rates of suicide, mental illness, and drug use are skyrocketing. The need for meaning and direction among Canadians could not be more urgent. That is what religion is for. That is being withdrawn when most needed.

No doubt the Trudeauites argue that symbolism like the cross or fleur de lys, being Christian is improper in a multicultural Canada, which includes people of many faiths.

This is disingenuous. Does anyone really think that a devout Muslim or Jew feels more at home among atheists or secularists than among Christians? That they are happier with no God than with the Christian conception of Him? No; the new design discriminates in favour of atheism.

And the real reason is that monotheistic religion implies morality. The immoral will always hate it, as Hitler did; as did those who crucified Christ. 

Such are those who currently rule us. And they mean to use their power.

The Name Game along the Saint John

 

There is a drive to rename the Saint John River in New Brunswick “The Wolostoq,” on the grounds that this is the traditional Indian name. Band spokespeople say "It is the obligation of the province to do so," and not doing so is an “assault.”

I like Indian place names—we all do. We already have a lot of them in Canada. Beginning with “Canada.” Or “Ottawa,” “Toronto,” “Quebec,” “Ontario,” “Manitoba,” “Winnipeg,” Saskatchewan,” ”Nunavut,” “Yukon” “Miramichi” … or my home town of Gananoque. Indian names are already well-represented. Shouldn’t we also recognize names from other groups of Canadians, and other periods in our history? The name “Saint John” was given by Samuel de Champlain. It is an artifact of our French-Canadian heritage. 

There is a total of 17,000 registered and recognized members of First Nations in New Brunswick. There are 200,000 of French ancestry. Why are they and  their culture worth less than the First Nations? And the First Nations, for that matter, are of three different linguistic groups. Only one of them would call the river “Wolostoq.” And, being nomadic, all historically passed along the river. Why should we give the river the name used by the Maliseet, say, instead of the Micmac name?

And, of course, any renaming costs money, and does nobody any material good. So there’s that.

You’d think the people of New Brunswick, and the native people of New Brunswick in particular, would have more pressing problems.

Lay On, MacDuff

 

Writers and poets are the true psychologists, the authorities on the psyche. It takes a deep empathy, a deep understanding of how the human psyche works, to make a believable fictional character, or to write a poem that resonates with many souls, not just your own. This is what Keats called “negative capability.” Their fruits—the beauty of their writings—certifies their wisdom and expertise. We are mad that we do not turn to them first when in mental turmoil.

By contrast, we have no way of knowing if a scientific psychologist or analyst knows what they are talking about; and can generally assume they don’t. Because the psyche cannot be studied “scientifically.”

As the greatest of writers, this makes Shakespeare the greatest of authorities on the human mind. His characters always have authentic motivations.

He has much to say on the matter of madness.

MacBeth is one example. Both MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go mad in the play. Both have what psychologists these days call “psychotic breaks”: they hallucinate. Lady MacBeth commits suicide.

And Shakespeare makes the cause clear: guilt. People are commonly driven mad, psychotic, by their own guilty conscience. A concept familiar too in classical mythology: one is hounded to madness by the Erinyes.

Modern psychiatry/psychology rules this out altogether. Moral considerations are not allowed in modern psychiatry. Meaning that in such cases modern psychiatry is useless, or worse than useless.

No wonder that, in modern times, “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder,” the psychotic forms of madness, are considered incurable. Psychiatry only dulls the symptoms with drugs.

By contrast, in Shakespeare’s play, while Lady MacBeth kills herself, MacBeth seems to recover lucidity by the end of the play—seemingly because he accepts that he is about to be killed, and accepts it as his proper fate. He has ended his rebellion against God, and returned to an appreciation and acceptance of divine justice.

Once, abroad, needing something to read, I picked up a paperback on Florida’s Death Row. And the author claimed the prisoners on Death Row were invariably barking mad.

Yet they cannot have been mad when they committed their murders: some were mob hit men, professional murderers. They did it for money, and had to plan for the killings. You can’t do that if you are out of touch with the physical world around you.

They too seem, then, to have been driven mad by guilt.

This is not the cause for all mental illness; Shakespeare makes this, too, clear.

Lady MacBeth’s Doctor remarks: “yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.”

“More needs she the divine than the physician.”

Implying that others will, to the contrary, need a physician. Some madness is caused by physical illness. Some is caused by bad upbringing: Plato and the New Testament agree on this.

But when, as is often the case, the problem is moral, no “physic” can work.

MacBeth:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:

Therein the patient Must minister to himself.

The cure is confession, repentance, and restitution.

However, the sufferer also has an obvious vested interest in avoiding confession. This conflict is what drives them mad. On the one hand, fearing discovery, they become paranoid, and will add sin to sin in defiance of their conscience, now an enemy.

“I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

Himmler said more or less the same thing in justifying the Nazi Holocaust.

“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”

Sin hardens into vice. 

This is why it is up to the patient to minister to themselves. If their only help is confession, they will try to destroy anyone who tries to help.

On the other hand, the desire to confess, to “make a clean breast of it,” also becomes overwhelming. This causes them often to, as if inadvertently, let their guilt slip out. As MacBeth does before a table full of prominent nobles. As Lady MacBeth feigns doing with her nighttime notes.

“I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”

The cure for such mental illness is obvious. And you will never get it from a psychiatrist.

Asymmetrical Warfare

 

It is an unnerving thought, but it seems increasingly clear that Justin Trudeau here in Canada, and Joe Biden in the States, have for years been in the pay of the Communist Chinese government. And that this has influenced them to go at times against the interests of their own country.

And after all, why wouldn’t this be so? Bribery is the standard way to do business in China. Now that China is the second-largest world economy, their government has vast financial resources. Plenty enough to bribe foreign leaders. Why wouldn’t they apply their business culture abroad?

In past generations, even were this attempted, we could probably count on our leadership, our political elites, to be too committed to the ideals of Canada, or the USA, to their homeland and its people, to take such bribes. But now, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, our elites no longer feel this way: Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden have made it no secret that they do not feel this way. There is, we are told, no Canadian mainstream culture. Biden and Trudeau and those around them have open contempt for Canada, or the US, as patriarchies, “white supremacist,” and “settler colonies.” They pretty much must be torn down. This can surely justify, at least in their own minds, dealing with the enemy. Especially if they is a lot in it for them. 

It is telling that much or all the money seems to have gone to close relatives, rather than to the two politicians themselves. To the Chinese way of thinking, the family is an indissoluble unit: money given to any member is money given to “the big guy.” It is also an essential part of Chinese culture that any gift implies a quid pro quo. This is not optional; they will keep accounts and balance sheets.

Which may explain why they were so livid at Canada’s detaining the HuaWei CFO.

Without assuming this Chinese control, it is hard to account for many of the actions of the Trudeau government’s, or indeed Biden’s. They often seem to go against the national interest. Or they resist and stall when action against China seems advisable.

Why is this coming out now, and at the same time in both countries?

It is “whistle blowers” somewhere in the security service.

Why are they leaking now?

Because a few years ago, such payments might have looked corrupt, but not alarming. 

Since Xi Jinping has gone totalitarian, and seized Hong Kong, the bribery has begun to look more like a direct threat to national security. Making  it seem now necessary to take the risk of blowing the whistle.

If Canada is worth the subverting, we can be sure the CCP is doing the same in many other places. New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, show evidence of this. I wonder about France, the Netherlands, South Korea. That they have bought many African leaders is common knowledge.

Sun Tzu says that the war is won before the first shot is fired. This is what the CCP is doing. They are undermining Canada and the West from within.

O Wad Pow'r the Gift He Gie Us

 ... To see oursels as others see us.

Remember those old days when Americans or Europeans had no idea what was going on in Canada?

Like this better, now that Canada is on everyone's mind?

Madness and Civilization

 

Since it came up in our reading, I posed to my students in the last few days the question, “is there a rule book of a program for life? Is there a purpose to life?”

Unfortunately, none could give a satisfactory answer.

My most thoughtful student first offered the constructivist position: the goal and the rules and the real are whatever one’s own society has decided they are.

So, okay, is it, on this basis, legitimate to criticise Nazi Germany—let alone go to war with them? Is it legitimate to go to war to end slavery in a society that accepts it as proper? What about child sacrifice? Cannibalism? Wife-beating? They can be no better or worse in principle than any other random moral standard, right?

And when the world believed the world was flat, then it was flat.

He backed away at this, and proposed instead the existentialist position. We are free to decide for ourselves on our own particular life goals.

We had been reading MacBeth. So, did MacBeth or Lady MacBeth choose properly, in making their life goal to gain power no matter who else got harmed? Don’t they themselves soon come to regret the choice? And indeed, on this basis, o we have any right to criticize John Wayne Gacy? Execute, perhaps; but arbitrarily, in the end.

These are the official, and it seems prevalent, views on ethics and ontology in our time. They are logically and indeed morally untenable. For right and wrong, justice, and reality are actually objective and immutable qualities. You cannot will a thing into being, or into being right.

This shows why mental illness is rapidly on the rise. It explains why drug use and suicide are surging. And it explains why mass shootings and such desperate escapes as transvestitism are on the rise. It explains  social breakdown generally.

The problem is quite simple, and it is drastic: to most moderns, life itself is pointless.

Some, the good among us, will sink into hopeless depression. Some will seek death, a chemical escape, or self-mutilation. Others will conclude that the only value left is self-interest, and become like MacBeth.

This is often a failure of parenting. But then, if the parent has no moral core or values, they have nothing to pass on. And our culture has suffered a collapse of values. 

Going to Catholic schools growing up, the answer to the question was obvious. The purpose of life was to know and love God, and to serve him in this world and the next. There was a rule book: the Ten Commandments. One might reject it, but at least the answer was held out to you. 

Public schools, of course, no longer teach any such thing. They teach constructivism, or existentialism.

There I no excuse for this; for even across all religious beliefs, the purpose of life is clear, and always has been, even to the ancient pagans. The purpose of life is—in fact, self-evidently—to seek and promote truth, justice, and beauty. This corresponds to the Catholic teaching, because that is what God is: the perfect ultimate source and essence of truth, justice, and beauty. But it is equally true ithout that insight. There is, leaving aside the Ten Commandments, necessarily, a necessary rule: the rule of universal love, expressed in all cultures as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Kant demonstrated that, apart from any specific religious belief, this was a categorical imperative: treat others as an end, never a means. Act as you would wish all others to act. Stray from these essential truths, and you are insane.

Most of us are, in the true sense, insane.

It makes me fear to even walk among other men.