Guyana's Argument Applied to Canada

 

Happy Easter

 

On this Easter, people are noticing that neither the Prime Minister of Canada, the leader of the NDP, or the leader of the BQ sent out any sort of greetings on Good Friday. The three leftist Canadian parties are clearly not comfortable with Christianity, and it is hard to see how any Christian could be comfortable with them. I assume they will say something for Easter Sunday.

Right-wing commentators are pointing out that Trudeau did not miss honouring Ramadan, or Diwali, or Vaisakhi. Perhaps because, unlike Christianity, they and their moral demands need not be taken seriously by politicians in Canada. They can seem harmless and colourful. Perhaps because celebrating their existence feels like a thumb in the eye of Christians and Christianity. 

Down in the US, Biden sent out a message honouring today, March 31, as “Transgender Day of Visibility.” It is coincidence that it falls this year on Easter; but the optics are troublesome. They underline the fact that transgender ideology is incompatible with Christian teaching. No government can really support both. They will inevitably end up favouring one or the other.

At the same time, churches are being burned down or vandalized across Canada; forcing them to stay closed to worshippers when services are not in progress. Denying solace to many in crisis. Priests have been assaulted at the altar. There is a private member’s bill before Parliament to remove the exemption from Hate Speech Laws for expressing a sincerely held religious belief. In the admittedly unlikely event that it should pass, the Bible itself would presumably become illegal.

Pulling our focus back to the wide view, there is more persecution of Christians worldwide today than at any other time in history; and Christianity is the world’s most persecuted religion.

All of this, should we need it, is proof of the truth of Christianity. 

One only suppresses or discriminates against opinions and beliefs one thinks are true.

Everyone in Canada Is on the Brink of Losing Everything

 

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1773879171728691395?s=20

"A huge feeling of hopelessness all across Canada."

The State of Young White Males

 

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1773879171728691395?s=20

Posted by Elon Musk on Twitter with the simple comment "yup!"

Christ Is King

 

Jesus Pantocrator Chora, Istanbul

Daily Wire seems to be losing the PR war over their parting of ways with Candace Owens. But I believe their position is being misrepresented. People are upset because they supposedly called the statement “Christ is King” antisemitic. Christians are naturally offended by this.

But Jeremy Boreing did not say this. This is a straw man. He said that the statement ”Christ is king”  was “weaponized” to be antisemitic, not that it was antisemitic in itself. I agree with him that it is at best obnoxious, and weaponizing the statement, to say it to a Jew in the course of an unrelated argument. As a Christian, I think he has a good case that it is an example of taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Others are saying this shows Daily Wire will not tolerate any criticism of Israel. This is the fallacy of overgeneralization, or drawing a conclusion from insufficient evidence. One cannot know this from a specific instance, One needs to consider and address Candace Owens’ actual statements and actual criticisms of Israel.

What were they? First, she sent out a tweet on November 3 saying “No government ever has the right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide.”

Given the date, she was apparently accusing the Israeli government of genocide almost at the beginning of their response to the Hamas terrorist attack. Their ground invasion had begun only on October 27, seven days earlier. While the case that Israelis are using excessive force may have grown since, this was an almost immediate reaction to the Israelis’ invasion of Gaza. Notably, the Hamas raid that killed 1,200 Israelis and seized hostages was not officially a “government” attack, but done by “Hamas militants” (Wikipedia). So Owens was condemning the Israelis, not Hamas. The implication was that Israel had no right to retaliate, or indeed to defend its citizens.

I can understand any supporter of Israel considering such a position immoral and beyond what they could stomach being associated with.

Owens soon thereafter objected to Israeli apartheid on the basis that there was a recognized “Muslim quarter” in Old Jerusalem. “These are the Muslim quarters, this is where the Muslims are allowed to live.” This is no more true than that the Italians in New York are forced to live in Little Italy; yet I believe she has never retracted the comment. I suspect this is what Ben Shapiro was referring to when he spoke of her “faux sophistication.”

It very much looks to me as though Candace Owens is an antisemite. She is prejudiced against Israel, and by extension probably against Jews. Challenged by Ben Shapiro for her views on Israel, she responded “one cannot serve both God and money.” This seems to me to be a veiled endorsement of the racist stereotype that Jews are only interested in money, and unscrupulously so. 

And, given the disingenuity of the case made by her supporters, I believe they too are primarily motivated by antisemitism as well; and by envy of The Daily Wire’s success. Envy also being the inevitable root of all antisemitism. They want an excuse to go after Jews and the Daily Wire, and Owens has thrown them some red meat.

It is disgraceful. I spontaneously use the same words Ben Shapiro used.

The Atheist and the Problem of Evil

 

I had an interesting conversation today with a thoughtful student in China. His view is not necessarily commonly shared in China; but it is interesting to see how an atheist, without Christian influences, thinks about morality.

His initial premise is that human nature is evil. We are animals. As animals, we are only programmed for survival. The example he uses is this: there is one bottle of water. Two people want it. If necessary, in nature, one will kill the other to take the water. This is evil.

The process of education is the process of making us “good.” Or rather, we do not really become good; our hearts, or desires, are still animal. But we are taught to behave differently in order be able to cooperate with other people, to fit into society. For one thing, this is necessary in order to find a mate and reproduce. It is also necessary so that society as a whole can function, without descending into chaos. The herd them protects each member.

It all makes good sense to me.

Except for this: now by what standard do we judge any action either “good” or “evil”? Why, to begin with, is individual survival good? 

Would we agree that it is perfectly moral to steal the bottle of water, so long as nobody sees you? Would we agree that, if one person or group can indeed benefit themselves by destroying another, this is a perfectly righteous thing to do?

It all seems to require an absolute standard of good and evil; and where does that come from?

How can atheists even raise the problem of evil, without any standard for determining what is evil?

Shanahan In

 

I knew nothing about her until her name came up as a possible RFK VP pick, but I think Nicole Shanahan was a good choice for that ticket. That she has no political experience, in the current climate, is a plus. RFK is running to change things. She can at least pose as a “tech entrepreneur,” and that’s a background demonstrated to be marketable by such figures as Andrew Yang and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tech entrepreneurs are modern culture heroes. Her youth contrasts well with old Joe Biden and old Donald Trump. She is a glamorous figure, which plays into the Kennedy brand: “return to Camelot.”

The immediate criticism from the right is that she is too left-wing. I don’t think most voters think in those terms. They simply either want change or the status quo. She introduces an issue which is neither obviously left nor right, but could appeal across the spectrum: chronic disease and what is causing it. This dovetails with Kennedy’s concern over vaccines and the environment to make what looks like a coherent ticket and platform. Which speaks of sincerity, an important part of RFK Jr.’s appeal. And it serves to shift the political discourse, which is the whole point of a third-party effort.

Something else occurs to me: she looks like a replacement for Tulsi Gabbard. She ticks a number of the same boxes. As if Kennedy had his mind set on Gabbard, had his strategies worked out assuming she was his running mate, and then could not get her; so he went for a reasonable facsimile. There were indeed early rumours that Gabbard would be his pick; at one point he went to Honolulu, in her home state, to make some rumoured announcement that did not happen. I thought Kennedy-Gabbard would be a dream ticket.

Perhaps a planned announcement was called off because Gabbard got a better offer. Perhaps Trump, seeing this about to happen, picked up the phone and told Gabbard to hold off, and she would be his own VP pick. There are recent rumours that Ramaswamy is out of contention, and Gabbard has recently publicly said she would be honoured. This is not something a politician usually says if they do not expect to be selected—it makes them look needy and embarrasses them when they are not chose.

Gabbard makes excellent sense for Trump as well. If Trump does not pick a woman, when both Biden and Kennedy have, that could hurt his image with women, a huge voting block. Especially in the face of prior claims by his Democrat opponents that Trump is anti-woman. As a Samoan and a Hindu, she also blunts charges of racism or “Christian nationalism” against Trump. But as a woman of faith, she is probably also viewed favourably by his Christian supporters. As an independent and former Democrat, she could broaden appeal to independent voters and disaffected Democrats. She is, like Trump, an anti-establishment figure; this would send a reassuring message to his supporters that he is not going to be controlled by the existing party bosses. Because Trump’s appeal is always that he will stand up to the “uniparty” and the beltway mafia.

Owens Out

 

There is now a feud going on between Candace Owens and the Daily Wire. They recently “parted ways.” And the matter has split the entire right wing. 

My own take is that Daily Wire is consistently right in this dispute, and Owens is consistently wrong—that is, on her veiled antisemitism and her criticism of Israel in Gaza. Moreover, in the current context of rising antisemitism everywhere, Owens’s comments are dangerous.

I think what is really going on is that Candace Owens loves a fight, and fighting has always been, after all, good for her ratings. It is her established MO. She has waded unprovoked into big public spats with Steven Crowder, Cardi B, Megyn Kelly.

She has been trying to provoke Boring and Shapiro. Tweeting “Christ is King” to a Jew in the middle of an unrelated argument may not be antisemitic, but it is deliberately provocative.

We want people like Owens around. Every now and then, we need a cat belled, or someone to notice the Emperor is naked. 

On the other hand, while courage is the essential virtue, it does not ensure the presence of other virtues. Courage was Hitler’s one great virtue. Because he had this virtue, he was not the worst of men; but because he had this virtue, he did the worst of harm.

Were I the Daily Wire, I believe I too would have “parted ways” with Candace Owens. Not that I want to silence her; and the Daily Wire is certainly not silencing her by doing so. They are probably giving her free publicity. But I would not want to be associated with her; for I cannot see her principles.

Signs of the Times

 

Catholicism Is Growing in Korea

 

Canada Seen from Abroad

 

Peace at Any Price

 

The current fate of the left reminds me of the fable of the Boy Who Cried “Wolf.” They have gotten themselves into this situation, of nobody any longer taking them seriously, either because they were never taught this wisdom growing up, out of hubris, or out of desperation. They have repeatedly stirred up imaginary crises and called everyone to the barricades: the “climate crisis”; the Covid lockdowns and the urgency of vaccination; describing January 6 as an insurrection; pulling the cord on the Emergency Act over the truckers’ protest; declaring a sudden assault on and urgent need to protect aboriginal rights, gay rights, trans rights; warning of a white supremacist or a Nazi under every bed; and so on and on seemingly ad infinitem. The latest being the charge that Trump, if not elected, will somehow launch a “bloodbath.”

It worked so well for them, they kept doing it. Now I feel the general public is fed up. The general public wants peace and quiet. When appeasing the left’s concerns looked like the easiest path, they appeased. But they are never appeased; appeasement has not worked. There is always a new, and more extreme, demand. 

Right about now, the general public is deciding that the only way to restore social peace is to turn decisively away from the left and refuse any more demands.

They should have stopped at the Sudetenland.

Now We're All Far Right

 

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1771934645380100570?s=20

The Potter's Hands

 

Elon Musk predicts that soon, AI will replace all human jobs. He says this does not mean we all go on Universal Basic Income—rather, on Universal High Income. “There will be no shortage of goods and services.”

I have some trouble getting my head around how this can work. And just because Musk is the world’s proven leading expert on technological futures does not mean his prediction is right. Experts are usually wrong about the future. But if he is right, what will people actually end up doing all day?

It seems to me there is one area of human endeavour that AI cannot ever automate. Create genuine art. Sure, it can create commercial art, Hallmark card level “art,” doggerel. But AI cannot, after all, be inspired. All it is every doing is recycling what has already been done by someone somewhere. In writing terms, it will always be boilerplate and cliché. One way to understand art and the aesthetic experience is that it is a direct Vulcan mind tap, a revelation that one is listening to a fellow intelligent soul. You’re never going to get that, and anyone with a functioning sense of beauty will find this apparent. You will get only the soulless suburbs. You will get endless Star Wars sequels. You will get formula. You will get mere prettiness or, at best, mere entertainment.

That said, it is also true that very few real people can generate genuine art either.

Be that as it may, given the apparent fact that everything else can do can be done as well by machines, it seems to follow that the reason we are here on Earth, the reason God created man, is to create art, to produce beauty. Or at least to all do our best to do so. To sit on the clouds or hilltops with our harps or lyres, and sing. It is fairly obvious that this is just what Jesus and the Bible says:

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

That “city on a hill” is the New Jerusalem:

“The city shone like a precious stone, like a jasper, clear as crystal. … The city was perfectly square, as wide as it was long. … The wall was made of jasper, and the city itself was made of pure gold, as clear as glass. 19 The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. The first foundation stone was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh yellow quartz, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chalcedony, the eleventh turquoise, the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls; each gate was made from a single pearl. The street of the city was of pure gold, transparent as glass.”

The completed cosmos is a vast and perfect work of art. God has given us nature, and the potter’s wheel, our minds. We are to perfect it as co-creators, and that is what art is.

If we can’t do it, we can at least try.

The Single Bullet

 

Because humans are herd animals, like dogs, our instinct is to defer to authority, and assume that those in power are smarter and more honest than we are. We see this in the Stockholm syndrome when people are kidnapped. Of course it also applies to authorities and governments in general.

Every now and then, the curtain gets ripped away.

It was torn badly in 1963 when JFK was assassinated. Just about everyone felt it did not smell right. Conspiracy theories abounded. The young at least briefly adopted the slogan “question authority.” And widely bucked the call to fight in Vietnam. Trust was lost.

Over time, this settled down, at least to a large extent. In Sixties terms, we all sold out. For one thing, Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” came along, and was so unconvincing in its claims that, intentionally or not, the entire enterprise of questioning the Warren Commission findings was discredited. The cool kids weren’t supposed to believe in “conspiracy theories” any more. Blaming the CIA for anything domestic was “tinfoil hat” stuff, compelling evidence of mental illness.

That alone should make us suspicious—whenever a given position is ruled out of public or polite discourse, it is probably because it is inconveniently true.

Now even the JFK assassination is hot again. Now people are again asking questions. Because recent events have caused another collapse in trust in the government and in authorities generally. I think a bigger one than we saw in the Sixties.

In light of the draconian Covid lockdowns, the fixing of the primary process in the US, the Chinese election interference in Canada, the Epstein affair, the lies about the vaccine, the attempts to silence free speech, to shut down truckers and farmers, the lawfare against Trump and the obvious persecution of protesters on January 6 in the US and the Freedom Convoy in Canada, the charge that the “Deep State” actually staged a silent coup in 1963 sounds plausible, even likely. 

We all know nefarious things are going on. How far do they extend?

And how, short of revolution, do we re-establish social trust?

Catholicism and the Bible

 

A friend of mine who is a Protestant minister put a post critical of Catholicism up on Facebook a few days ago. It has now disappeared from her feed. It listed a series of Catholic dogmas which were purportedly “not in the Bible.” 

I assume she got some pushback from Catholics, or even from fellow Protestant ministers, and thought better of it. 

Catholic teaching is always Biblical, in the sense that the Bible is the primary evidence for the teaching. It is always an inference from the text. One can, no doubt, have other interpretations. But if your interpretation is different, you need to make your argument.

But there is a more fundamental problem with this charge: it assumes the doctrine of “sola scriptura,” that all truth comes from scripture. This is a Protestant tenet, not a Catholic one. It is from Martin Luther. So even if you could establish that some Catholic teaching is not “in the Bible,” you have only proven that Catholicism is not Protestantism. Science is also not Protestantism. This does not prove that it is wrong.  

And, for Protestants, from whence comes the assurance that the Bible as we have it is complete, accurate, and authoritative? What gives them such assurance? Private revelation?

The Catholic answer is that its accuracy is certified by the Catholic Church, which selected and preserved this canon. Jesus gave his mandate to the church, not to a book of writings. “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” (Granted, this itself is recorded in the Bible) So the Bible cannot logically disprove Catholicism; Catholicism proves the Bible.

The Real Genocide

 

In a recent article, unfortunately behind a paywall, Greg Piasetzki, himself legally considered Metis, writes for the Epoch Times that a federal government commission back in 1944, and again in 1948, wanted to close the Indian residential schools. “Wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.”

The federal government had never wanted the schools: they were expensive. They were, in the first place, required by treaty. The Indians wanted them. Since some Indian families were transient, and some loving in extremely remote locations, boarding was often necessary.

However, they soon realized they could not close the schools for an additional reason—because too many Indian children had nowhere else to go. The residential schools were in effect orphanages for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to care for them. “A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems.” For others, their parents could not feed them as well as the schools would. The Truth and Reconciliation report cites this as a consideration: if the schools did not feed the children better than at home, the parents would not send them.

The Epoch Times article also notes that there was no drive to force Indian families to send their children to a residential school. School attendance became compulsory for non-native children in Ontario in 1871. It became compulsory for Indian children only in 1920, and even then the law was rarely enforced. “About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5.” Obviously, they were not being compelled to attend, and if they or their families did not find conditions satisfactory, they left. Those who stayed were largely those who had no place else to go.

The Epoch Times traces the problems of the Indian family to alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), which the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report admits is still an epidemic on reserves. “Studies suggest FASD occurs among indigenous children on and off reserves at rates between 10 and 100 times greater than in the rest of Canada.” “Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.”

Alcoholism is not the real problem, though. It is a symptom. This is due to a general collapse of morale, a shared depression due to culture shock. Charles Darwin recognized in the nineteenth century that whenever Europeans came into contact with a significantly more primitive culture, the primitive culture tends to collapse into a sense of pointlessness, very much like depression on an individual level. Men stopped working; women stopped looking after the children.

The cure, as everyone knows who has gone through culture shock, is to get out there and assimilate. Learn what your new surroundings have to offer. This is now being discouraged as “cultural genocide.” And the, better, ultimate cure is to get a new grounding in the eternal verities and the ultimate purpose of life. In other words, to get religion. And this option too is being systematically removed from the reserves and from modern Indian life, with churches actually being burned down.

In order to shut down the residential schools, officials turned to adoption for at-risk Indian children: the “Sixties scoop.” This is now condemned as another attempt at “cultural genocide.” Still today, “Nationwide, according to the 2021 Census, native children under 14 account for 53.8 percent of children in care, despite representing less than 8 percent of children that age in Canada.” They are simply now no longer adopted, but must remain in long-term care.

And we pretend to wonder why there are suicide pacts among young people on reserves. And why there are so many “missing and murdered (young) indigenous women.”

We have systematically prevented and then punished any efforts to help them.

The Loss of Beauty

 

“In evangelization,” Bishop Baron has said, “start with beauty.”

There is a problem with this. Bishop Barron is assuming that beauty, unlike ethics, is accessible to everyone. Many people do not get beauty. Perhaps as many as do not get ethics.

Attending a writers’ meet last evening, I was disappointed that nobody else pointed out the beautiful turns of phrase the featured writer used. “Warmoon.” “None of man, none of nonsense.” “Only the steel husk of empires.” 

“He really ought to be a poet,” I observed.

“Why? You can have beautiful language in prose.” 

You can, up to a point, but then what is the difference between prose and poetry? Poetry is, definitively, beautiful language: “the best words in the best order,” per Coleridge. If the beauty of the language is the focus, that is poetry, not prose.

I gather that poetry was invisible to those present, because beauty in language was invisible to those present—none of them, after all, noticed it in the passage. To them, although writers, writing was apparently about entertainment—an exciting and captivating plot.

One can, of course, have an exciting or captivating plot in either poetry or prose. See Beowulf, or the Odyssey. But put it in beautiful language, and it is poetry.

Even in a supposed poetry group I attended a week ago, a group of published poets, I found no sensitivity to beauty of language. All were to submit a poem on the theme, “on Earth we are all briefly gorgeous.” All submitted, with no special elegance, an expression of some trauma they experienced personally; as if poetry was about venting emotions or grievances. It was only a matter of “my suffering is greater than your suffering.”

This is psychotherapy, not poetry. 

Worse, psychotherapy doesn’t work. It leads only to narcissism.

When I remarked to a well-intentioned friend that I found a particular woman unutterably beautiful, he assumed I wanted to hook up with her. Despite being married. 

We seem to commonly associate beauty with mere sexual attractiveness. With a physical rather than a spiritual pleasure.

Most people say they get a sunset. I wonder… do they? Or do they just know they are supposed to?

Most people seem to like music. But are they reacting only to some physical sensation, like the urge to move your body and feel the healthy stretch of muscles and deep breathing?

Entire religions seem not to get beauty: Islam, with its iconoclasm, banning visual representations. Protestantism, wanting once to ban dancing, the theatre, and celebrations like Christmas. Such things were, according to the Puritans, if not idolatrous, sinfully frivolous. 

This is disturbing, because beauty is one of the three transcendentals, along with the true and the good, from which value itself comes. God himself is definitely, as St. Augustine formulated it, perfect beauty, perfect truth or being, and perfect good.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!”

To be insensitive to beauty is to turn away from God. 

And I think we are losing our sense of beauty in recent years. The world is getting uglier. The arts seem moribund. 

Perhaps Bishop Barron is right, however. Jesus did not come for everyone; he makes this clear in the Beatitudes. Perhaps sensitivity to beauty is the sign that you are of his flock.

Cultures differ widely in their ability to appreciate beauty. The English, Germans, and Americans have no sense of beauty. The Romance nations, France, Spain, Italy, are good at it. So are the Slavs, and the Celts. The Koreans are much better at it than the Japanese or Chinese. 

In Canada, it is easy to see the difference. Toronto has little beauty. Even the people are slovenly in dress. In Montreal or Quebec City, there is beauty around every corner. The beauty in Ontario is only in small towns settled by the Irish or Scots: Westport, Perth, Elora. Saint John, heavily settled by the Irish, is awash in beauty, the houses brightly coloured.

Why the difference? To some extent, no doubt, religion—the difference between Catholic and Protestant—has its influence. But it also seems to me that the ability to appreciate beauty is related in some mysterious way to the experience of suffering. Jesus more or less says this in the Beatitudes. 

Fallacies We Live By

 

I have special difficulty explaining to students the ad populum fallacy and the ad temperantiam fallacy. The problem is that public discourse as a whole is largely currently founded on these two fallacies. Pointing them out causes major cognitive dissonance. They tend to do a double take, and at first be incredulous. 

This is precisely why it is vital to teach them. The fact that we do not teach the logical fallacies in every school is profoundly sinister. It allows us to be manipulated.

The “ad populum” fallacy is the notion that truth is a majority mandate. If everyone thinks something is true, that proves it is true: “everybody knows.” This is the very premise of “constructivism,” the currently dominant educational philosophy. Constructivism holds that all truth is “socially constructed.” Truth is whatever the majority of any given social group says it is, and accordingly varies between cultures. Which is why we get “cultural relativism” and the insistence that all cultures must be accepted to be equal. It is also why we get transsexualism: according to constructivism, if an interest group can just get everyone to agree that a man can become a woman, it is a fact. For this very reason, dissent cannot be tolerated.

This is why classroom teachers always want to break into small groups. They cannot teach; the group must decide. The current Vatican synod on synodality seems to be based on the same dynamic: there is no truth other than whatever the people in the pews want to hear. We all get to vote on whether the sun goes around the earth, or vice versa. In fact, until the time of Copernicus, according to this theory, the sun DID go around the earth. Galileo was dead wrong. Einstein was a lunatic. Slavery was perfectly moral in the US South until those meddling Yankees got involved. 

Interestingly, based on constructivism, a bridge built in India by Scottish engineers, would probably collapse. Scottish mathematics and physics cannot work in India.

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy holds that, whenever there are two opposing views, the truth must lie in the middle. A popular view, as old as Delphi, but also already exploded in ancient times. This fallacy is implicit whenever people object to “extremists”; as if holding a view strongly proves it is wrong. This is perfectly illogical. 

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy is also implied when people demand an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement for, say, the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine. As though the problem is always a refusal of both or either side to compromise.

If two people hold opposing views strongly, there is no reason to think that a position in the middle between the two, which perhaps no one holds or would argue, is more correct than either of them. If some people think the sky is blue, and some people think the sky is red, this is not proof that the sky is purple. If teacher thinks 2 + 2 = 4, and little Johnny thinks 2 + 2 = 7, this does not prove that 2 + 2 = 5.5. If some people believe the sun goes around the earth, and others that the earth goes around the sun, it does not follow that the heavenly bodies dance around each other. If one country invades another, it does not prove that they have a legitimate grievance, and their opponent is equally responsible for the war in pig-headedly defending themselves.

In the natural course of things, if there is a disagreement between two parties or two positions, one position is probably wrong, in error, and the other correct.

Don't Mention It

 

Whatever you are not allowed to say must be the truth. Nobody needs to ban lies, generally speaking, because they can be disproven.

This is the secret to the “walking on eggshells” experience in the typical dysfunctional family: there is an elephant in the room, and nobody is allowed to notice it.

When speech is restricted in this way, it is a sure sign that a narcissist is involved, and up to no good.

One must not question global warming, or climate change; or else you are a “climate denier.” Because the case for global warming is obviously thin. But the premise is useful for expanding government control.

This is why you must not propose any “conspiracy theories”: because there is at least one monstrous conspiracy afoot. We can now see this much. The deep state is out to get Trump. Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. 

One is not allowed to say the 2020 election was stolen. Nobody objected much about anyone saying an election was stolen in the US before 2020. This is itself proof that the 2020 election was stolen.

This is why you must not “misgender” anyone: because a man of course cannot become a woman, or a woman a man. No real, sane man ever took serious offense at being mistaken for a woman, or vice versa. 

This is also why, to tiptoe through a minefield, any criticism of homosexual behaviour is dismissed as “homophobia”: because there is a legitimate case to be raised against homosexual behavior. So it must not be raised. 

And one must not criticize Islam for current violence without being called “Islamophobic,” because there is an obvious case that Islam is inherently violent, and has something to do with the terrorism we are seeing.

This is again the truth behind the common perversion of Godwin’s Law: that the first person to make a comparison to Hitler loses the argument. This proves some people are doing things they know are comparable to Hitler. Be wary of the first person in any discussion who appeals to “Godwin’s Law.”

The one apparent outlier is “Holocaust denial.” I am in no position to deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust. I believe it is real; I know virulent antisemitism is real; but have not done the research. Perhaps in this case, perhaps in some others, the prohibition is indirect: the ban is to discourage research in the area. It is an attempt to close the book, because some of the guilty parties are still in control and do not want their guilt exposed. And some of the purported victims were actually among the perpetrators.

Just go down the list of prohibited speech to discover truth.

The Meaning of Life

 

“Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” John 12:25

This was in the gospel reading for last Sunday. It puts paid, in one verse, to the “happy happy joy joy” Hallmark Cards perverted mock Christianity. Life in this world is not about happiness. This world is, as Keats said, the vale of soulmaking.

It is impossible in this world to be intelligent, good, and happy. You can, at best, choose two. 

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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. 

Thoughts in Saint John Cathedral

 

14 as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up

15 so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

16 For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17 For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.

18 No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God's only Son.

19 And the judgement is this: though the light has come into the world people have preferred darkness to the light because their deeds were evil.

20 And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up;

21 but whoever does the truth comes out into the light, so that what he is doing may plainly appear as done in God.

-- John 3: 14-21

Sitting in Saint John’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, it seems strange to me that this church is not packed every Sunday. One is surrounded by beauty: the gothic arches, the dizzying vault of the nave, the sunlight streaming through stained glass, the statues, the paintings; the bright vestments, the incense; we have an exceptional choir. And there is the beauty of the ritual performance, that connects us with the ages.

This is the sort of live experience people would otherwise pay a good deal for, in a theatre or a gallery or a concert hall. Here we have all three, and it is free, and yet many seats are vacant.

In Korea, my favourite thing was to visit Buddhist temples on the weekend. Not that I am Buddhist; but beauty is beauty, peace is peace, tranquility is tranquility. Few were as substantial as this cathedral.

The only explanation, it seems to me, for all the empty pews, here and elsewhere in the magnificent churches we find in Eastern Canada, is that people understand full well that God is there. And this scares them away. 

Today’s mass reading says it. 

“Everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up.”

Declining attendance at church, let alone the rash of church burnings, speaks ill of us as a society. 

The Need for Smaller Class Sizes

 

A new study suggests that classroom size does not affect student results: smaller classrooms are not better. But this has been known for years. Many previous studies have shown the same. It is an eternal surprise only because teachers’ unions eternally assert the opposite.

They do so, I imagine, because a larger class demands the lecture format, whereas a small enough class can be run as a seminar, a group discussion.

The currently fashionable education philosophy, “constructivism,” holds that truth is not a constant, there is no objective truth. Knowledge is “constructed” in groups, making the seminar approach mandatory. If the group decides that China is in Europe, then it is in Europe. If they decide the sun goes around the Earth, then the sun goes around the Earth.

Constructivism does not account for what happens if groups in contact with one another arrive at different conclusions. Might makes right seems the inevitable, necessary approach: you pass a law or fight a war and force submission.

This is how fascism works. And this is how our schools currently work. Increasingly, under the influence of the schools and constructivism, this is how our society works.

The attraction for the teaching tribe, however, is that running a seminar takes no effort on their part. There is no need for them to either actually know anything about the subject, or know how to explain it. They just get to sit in judgement over the conclusions the students come up with in their seminar. And on what basis can they judge, given that there is no truth? The only possibility is to object if any group comes to an opinion that differs from that of the teacher. Meaning the teacher has no responsibilities, but gets to be the absolute dictator in the classroom.

It's a good life, as long as the money keeps pouring in.

The Politics of Envy

 

I see, in a recent Facebook post, the flag of Palestine flying over Grant Hall, at my old Alma Mater, Queen’s University. 

At the same time, the Canadian government is announcing the resumption of support to UNWRA, which as been implicated in the planning and execution of the October 6 attack on Israel. This means there has not even been an interruption of funding from Canada.

Back in more innocent days, it used to be a common classroom question: had you been around in the day, would you have stood up against Hitler’s holocaust? Or would you have done nothing?

Now we know. Had the bulk of those in apparent charge in Canada been around then, they would have supported Hitler.

But we already knew that; we already had the holocaust of abortion, bigger than Hitler’s holocaust. We already had postmodernism, essentially the fascist concept. We already had “Medical Assistance in Dying.” We were already scapegoating “cis white males” and “whites” generally for all conceivable ills, in the same way Hitler scapegoated Jews, and for the same reason. Jews are simply “ultra-white.” It was bound again to come around to them. They work too hard, are too smart, and are too successful. Envy is the game.

We’re the baddies.

Gatsby as Marx Sees Him

 

Literature classes in these times are endlessly complicated, indeed rendered pointless, by our refusal to see the  religious context of Western (or Eastern) culture. All great art deals with ultimate questions, which means that all great art is necessarily religious. Unless we are prepared to go there, we cannot understand great art.

Yet instead, at all academic levels, we go down interpretive rabbit holes leading nowhere: Freudian interpretations, Jungian interpretations, Marxist interpretations, feminist interpretations, structuralist interpretations, deconstructions, and other such meaningless races with our tails.

A student in China was asked by his English literature teacher to interpret a segment from the film “The Great Gatsby.” I can’t show the entire sequence here, for copyright reasons; but I attach roughly the second half of it from YouTube.

It shows Nick, the narrator, on his way by train with friend Tom, who is wealthy, to a lunch at Tom’s apartment in the “golden city” of New York, coming from the exurbs of Long Island. But Tom has them jump off the train in an intermediate “valley of ashes,” a “dumping ground” for the coal dust from the metropolis. The scene is presided over, as in the book, by an old billboard advertising a long-gone oculist, two huge eyes. Tom takes Nick to a garage, where he meets Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, made up and dressed in red. Tom arranges a rendez-vous that afternoon in his Manhattan apartment, almost under the eyes of Myrtle’s mechanic husband, and urges Myrtle, despite Nick’s protestations, to bring along a sister for Nick.

And my student was dutifully trying to make sense of it in Marxist terms: the valley of ashes was the working class, exploited by the rich capitalists. The huge eyes were the eyes of capitalism. He felt there was some special significance to a brief scene in which a boy in the valley was feeding a dog a bun; then at the end of the sequence, a Scotty was feeding on red velvet cushions. These were images, he felt, of the working and upper classes. His teacher had made the cuts to end with the Scotty, suggesting it was supposed to be a kind of summation of the scene.

But he was well aware that things were just not fitting together. What point, then, was the clip trying to make? 

It did seem as though rich Tom was doing wrong by working-class Myrtle’s husband, for his pleasure. But if so, he was equally betraying his wife, who was upper class like him. Because he was rich, he could do as he wanted? But then, it seems, so could working-class Myrtle; while Tom’s rich wife was helpless. 

So where was he supposed to go from there?

It was all immediately sensible in Christian terms. The “golden city,” a term used in the narration, is the New Jerusalem, a Biblical image of heaven. It is our rightful destination; but we are led astray, as Nick is by Tom, into carnal pleasures. This takes us to some dark valley: a “dumping ground,” the phrase used in the movie’s narration. This actually translates to Hebrew as Gehenna, that is, to use the Anglo-Saxon word, “Hell.” 

The eyes of the oculist on the billboard are the all-seeing eyes of God, of conscience. The narration, clubbing us over the head with it, actually says “like the eyes of God.” 

“But God doesn’t exist,” the student protests weakly. “He can’t do anything.” 

Doesn’t matter. You cannot impose your own beliefs on the text. You have to go with what it is saying. 

Identifying these fictional eyes as the eyes of capitalism does not work. Capitalism is just an abstract concept, not some entity that can think, observe, or judge. Moreover, an out-of-business oculist is not a capitalist except in an incidental sense. You could have chosen better if you’d wanted a symbol of capitalism. If this is capitalism, it is now, by implication, out of business: the vision of hell we see is socialism. 

Interpreting the dark valley as the realm of the working class also leads to the awkward conclusion that the poor are poor because they have sinned, done wrong—for this is also clearly the place of temptation, from the point of view of the narrator, Nick. And the soundtrack sings “let’s misbehave,” over a closeup of his face looking perturbed. Not a proper Marxist message, then, let alone a Christian message: the rich deserve to be rich, because of their higher morality, and the poor deserve to be poor.

This place, the valley of ashes, is not primarily where manual labour is done. There are images of men swinging picks, which happens to be a form of manual labour. In the book, the relevant passage is “the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.” Sounds more symbolic than a description of the real life of an average working man. This is not productive labour: Sisyphean labour, that accomplishes nothing visible, as in the classical concept of Tantalus, the Greek Hell.

As to the two dogs: granted that the first dog is a working-class dog, and the second is an upper-class dog--what point is being made? That the poor are kind to dogs—and so are the rich? The only visible contrast is that the poor dog eats standing in the street, and being petted, while the rich dog is shown alone, and on velvet cushions. Does this suggest that the rich have it better than the poor?

What difference does it make to a dog whether he is eating on velvet cushions? Probably none. 

The point, I assume, is either that we too should not care whether we are rich and high in social status or poor; or else that dogs do not face moral issues. In contrast to us.

Either works well as a Christian message. Neither works well as a Marxist message.

Why the Conservatives Will Lose?

 

Don Martin, in a recent column, repeats all the tired old talking points of the leftist commentariat on how the Conservatives are unelectable, and must change their tune and stop being conservative.

First, of course, they must “move to the centre” to appeal to more voters. Despite already appealing to more voters than any other party.

Obviously bad advice. If a voter is dissatisfied with the current government, they will want to vote for something different—or why are they dissatisfied? If they are satisfied with the current government and its policies, why vote for someone merely similar? If it’s just a matter of changing names or faces, why vote at all?

Then the old saw about there being nothing the Conservatives can reasonably cut from the federal budget. As soon as they get down to details on what they would do, they are bound to cut programmes that everybody wants. They must name specific programmes they will cut. If they do not give details, and name the programmes, they have a hidden agenda. It is not as though the current government could have misspent a penny.

Here are areas where the Conservatives could cut.

To begin with, the federal payroll has grown 31% under Trudeau; while ordinary Canadians have found government services declining. Demonstrably, therefore, the federal payroll could be cut by 30% without affecting services. It is bloated. Milei in Argentina has reputedly cut their government payroll by 70%. Elon Musk did something similar with Twitter, with no visible problems. Yes, there is a huge amount of fat in the bureaucracy.

Aside from numbers of employees, work hours, and measurable productivity, in principle, in order not to become parasitic on the productive economy, no one working in government should receive a pay package as high as the equivalent job would earn in the private sector. At present, they earn more.

Reducing regulations should lead to automatic savings. Every regulation requires a bureaucracy to enforce it; while reducing economic activity and therefore tax revenues.

Next, all subsidies to the CBC and to the media should be ended. This does nothing for the public but undermine democracy.

More broadly, end all corporate welfare. Government should not play favourites in the market. It never makes economic sense in the long run, always costs the common people more, and is an open invitation to graft.

Next, although it is not a direct federal responsibility, no government transfers should pay for abortion or for gender transition therapy. Neither are legitimately health care, both are discretionary, and both raise freedom of conscience issues if taxpayer funded.

Next, no government money should go to multiculturalism. This is a waste of taxpayers’ money. It is offensive to immigrants. It is discriminatory. And it erodes the social fabric.

Although it might not be politically palatable, for many of the same reasons, the endless payouts in the name of “reconciliation” with indigenous groups should be ended. They are almost never required by treaty, they are discriminatory, they never achieve reconciliation, and they almost never do anything to improve the lives of actual Indians.

More generally, no government funding should go to advocacy groups. These increase government costs, create a feedback loop increasing bureaucracy and bureaucratic control, artificially skew the political discourse, and subvert democracy.

Is a Conservative government really going to institute such reforms? 

One can at least hope.

The Durham Byelection

 

Jamil Jivani’s win in the Durham byelection illustrates an important trend. The Liberal vote collapsed, but did not go to the NDP. The NDP vote declined even more dramatically. This defies the conventional political wisdom that Canada has a baked-in left-wing majority, and the Conservatives only win when the Liberals and the Dippers split the vote. 

People are not that ideological. People are either for or against the status quo, satisfied or dissatisfied with things as they are. When Robert Kennedy was shot during the 1968 US presidential race, the bulk of his popular support in polls went to George Wallace. It wasn’t the specific issue, it was getting the rascals out.

The left now obviously represents the powers that be; and Jagmeet Singh has cemented that with his informal coalition. Those who want change will go to the Tories or the PPC.

The NDP has made its brand that of opposing the state of things as they are; and along with the Liberals most often being the power that is, representing the powers that be, and both being on the left, that created an illusion of Canada having a permanent left-wing majority. And, conveniently, protected the powers that be from any real challenge. It was a controlled opposition.

That may be changing now. Perhaps only for a Diefenbaker moment; perhaps for the longer term.

The Democrats' Box

 

John Fetterman, second from the right. Kamala Harris, third from the left.

The Democrats in the US are in a quandary. They fixed the nomination last time to give it to Joe Biden. This was already a desperate choice; they knew he was old and unsteady. An op ed at the time said “just stay alive until election day, Joe.” But Bernie Sanders was even older, and not even a Democrat: he was, officially, an Independent Socialist. He looked like he was about to take the nomination. Pete Buttigieg, the next possible option, was only the mayor of a small midwestern city. Michael Bloomberg, only recently a Republican, had fizzled with the voters, despite a huge cash outlay. And nobody else was in striking distance in the party’s primaries.

So the idea was to push Biden as at least a safe pair of hands, who would be a one-term president and then pass it off to the anointed. Kamala Harris was the one they really wanted, primarily on racial and gender grounds: a black woman. But she had fizzled in the campaign. Now they would have time to coach her and to build some buzz.

Three years later, things have not worked out for them. Harris has not jelled; she does not seem capable of it. Biden is obviously failing. 

Which puts them in a box. They can’t safely run Harris; and Biden is failing in the polls. Any other candidate amounts to a rejection of Harris, and charges of racism and sexism. Nor is there another plausible candidate of sufficient stature. People speak of Michelle Obama; but she has no real qualifications for the job, reputedly has no interest in it, and her popularity would probably nosedive as soon as she started taking positions on issues and being seen as a politician. 

The essential problem here is a lack of quality candidates on the left, both in 2020 and now. Two words: John Fetterman.

The Canadian Liberals face a similar problem. Justin Trudeau is now an albatross around their collective necks; but there is no plausible replacement waiting in the wings, as there always had been in the past: no Paul Martin, no Jean Chretien, no John Turner, not even a Michael Ignatieff. No figure of independent stature around whom there is some real buzz. Mark Carney, perhaps; but he seems a faceless bureaucrat. Trudeau himself, as leader, was something of a Hail Mary pass, obviously underqualified, and there is no one else behind him. 

Why there are no leaders available on the left?

Because they seem to suppress and force out those of any leadership potential: RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Jodi Wilson Raybould. In the wider culture, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Warren Kinsella, Stephen LeDrew. Which is to say, they cannot tolerate and force out anyone with principles and independent thoughts. This is what leadership is about, and what it requires.

This is the mark of a cult, which has some guilty secret to conceal. You cannot trust someone with principles who thinks independently; they are bound to see and mention it.

This is death to any human progress. It is death to any democracy.

Why do people still vote for the Democrats, or the Liberals, despite the lack of any real leadership?

Because they are complicit. The shared guilty secret turns them into NPCs, zombies. And they react violently to any independent thought.

The guilty secret: a foetus is a human life.

The Matriarchy

 

A Chinese student of mine has, for homework, written an essay advocating classes segregated by sex. He rightly points out that the research is overwhelming—both boys and girls learn faster when segregated. 

However, he illogically assumes we never knew this until recently, and that previous sexual segregation in the schools was based on discrimination against women.

Feminist dogma now apparently dominates the world—even China. And it is impossible to disprove, because it is presupposed a priori regardless of evidence.

In earliest times, my student begins, women were given no formal education, because of their low social status.

However, the European ruling classes were also, traditionally, given no formal education. Often they could not read or write. The same was true in India or China. I believe the present King Charles was actually the first member of the British Royal Family to attend university.

This was a job for clerks. An aristocrat, not needing to work for a living, was above such tedious labours.

So the fact that women were traditionally given no formal education might as well be cited as evidence of higher social status. They did not have to work, but could expect to be provided for.

My student then asserts that women were later educated separately from men because they were being discriminated against. This sounded plausible in the early days of feminism because of the US Supreme Court’s rejection of school segregation on racial grounds. “Separate but equal.” But does it apply in the case of the sexes?

It overlooks two other possible explanations. 

Firstly, the moral argument, that having boys and girls mix casually and daily past puberty and before marriage might lead to teenage pregnancy, sexual harassment, emotional upsets, sexual favours, sexual blackmail, and the entire #metoo morass that we currently have to deal with.

Secondly, the obvious one emerging again from current research, that both men and women learn faster when taught apart. The feminist case must assume that our ancestors were profoundly stupid. That is itself a form of prejudice. 

All traditional Chinese philosophy, back to the Classics, endorsed and was based on the idea of the bagua, the harmonious balance of yin and yang forces, being the key to the universe. And yang represented masculine, and yin feminine—they were meant to be in perfect balance.

He’d forgotten all about that. Feminism puts blinders on. It forces historical amnesia.

The same concept is familiar in ancient Indian thought. Perhaps not in Western thought, but I would challenge anyone to find in the Bible any clear assertion that men are superior to women.

The fact that God is portrayed as masculine? But that also implies that the human soul is feminine—as it is in Greek thought.

And if men have indeed dominated women, always and everywhere until modern times, how did they possibly pull it off?

Amusingly, the original argument, back in the early Sixties, were that men were better at cooperating in groups. This is why there was a drive to end "old boys' clubs," to desegregate all-male organizations.

Ironically, feminism now asserts the opposite, that men are naturally competitive, and women naturally cooperative. Yet they do not see that this undermines their entire argument.

It has, perhaps, been replaced by a more crassly materialist idea, than men have been able to control women because men are naturally more physically powerful—at least when it does not come to performing on the job or in a sport. Or in the movies.

But this does not work either. Yes, men are more physically powerful. But women have everywhere and always been in charge of preparing food. Poisoning is easy enough. A man must trust his wife implicitly.

Feminism is obviously false; and yet it rules the world.

Because men are too accustomed to deferring to women, whatever they want.