Lilley on Pro-Terrorism Demonstrations in Ottawa

 

Spotting the Good Guys

 

MEP Christine Anderson has been on a Canadian tour. She has been welcomed by Rebel News, Maxime Bernier and the PPC, Leslyn Lewis, and the leaders of the Freedom Convoy. On the other hand, Brian Lilley, previously considered a conservative columnist for the Toronto Sun, Justin Trudeau, and Pierre Poilievre have denounced her in quite intemperate terms.

Trudeau:

She is “responsible for a particularly vile level of rhetoric and hatred … hateful, vile, intolerant rhetoric.”

Poilievre’s office:

“Christine Anderson's views are vile and have no place in our politics. … Frankly, it would be better if Anderson never visited Canada in the first place. She and her racist, hateful views are not welcome here."

Yet neither Lilley, Trudeau, nor Poilievre quote anything Anderson has said. We must take their word for it.

My web search also turns up nothing. The most controversial thing I find is that Anderson posed for a photograph with Jeremy MacKenzie and the flag of Diagolon. Many people, it is true, claim Diagolon is a dangerous terrorist group; but again, we have to take their word for it. MacKenzie claims it is only a meme, a gag.

I cannot imagine Osama Bin Laden insisting that Al Qaeda was a gag, or Hitler that his antisemitism was.

It is conceivable that either Diagolon or Anderson do hold racist views. We cannot tell, because those who accuse them not only present no evidence, but will not allow us to see the evidence. They are the same people who are censoring anything on the Internet they disagree with. Anderson’s or Diagolon’s views are silenced.

This being so, we must assume innocence of Anderson and Diagolon. They have never been given a hearing here.

We’re in a deeper hole in Canada than I had imagined. Brian Lilley appears to be a member of a Fifth column. Perhaps he once was a conservative, but he has joined the Family Compact and started attending the cocktail and Kool-ade parties. Poilievre, so previously promising, looks like another O’Toole. He’s just a politician playing the game, will run cover for the established interests, and will change nothing.

This was a litmus test, and we need to remember who passed and who did not.

A Season in Pandemonium

Pandemonium, the capital of Satan and his subjects.

It looks as though George Floyd may have killed himself after all. Autopsy has shown he had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system. We do not know how much; but an overdose of fentanyl is deadly on its own, and causes death by asphyxiation. It is possible the officer was just following standard procedure, a procedure regularly used by Minneapolis police without serious consequences, but there were unknown additional factors in this case. This would explain why none of the other officers seemed concerned.

If so, it is awful to think of the poor officer, who is as much a victim in all this as Floyd himself. Even if he is acquitted of murder, he has lost his job, career, and marriage, and his face is known and hated worldwide. How can he live? And he might have only been doing his job.

A lot of people are publicly endorsing the “justified peaceful protests” since the killing. Police officers themselves have joined in. Slate magazine has run a piece helpfully advising on how you can demonstrate—or riot—without being identified by the police.

I think peaceful protests are illegitimate here, even without the rioting. What are they protesting against, or for? Against the killing of Floyd? But the policeman responsible is already charged with murder; the matter will be dealt with by the courts. They can only, then, be protesting this process; which is dangerous. Getting your day in court, and a fair, unprejudiced trial before a jury of one’s peers is a foundation of our freedom and our system of government. Mob rule and lynchings are unlikely to be an improvement. The very act of protesting publicly subverts the possibility of a fair trial.

Are they protesting police racism more generally? It seems hard to make the case that the Minneapolis police force is anti-black, since the police chief is black. Are there statistics showing that black suspects are treated more roughly than white? If so, that needs to be demonstrated by reasoned argument, not imposed by shouting in the streets, let alone threats of force.

And it seems incumbent on anyone making that charge to also offer specific solutions. It is hard to make proposals by shouting in the streets; but even given that, has anyone shouted or spraypainted any workable ideas for improvement? I’m not sure “down with capitalism” or “abolish the police” counts.

So long as we have freedom of speech and a free press, there is scant justification for taking any protest to the streets in any case. If you had a good argument, you pretty obviously wouldn’t. And while we can certainly criticize the media for limiting the opinions “given a platform,” it is still more possible to be heard now, with the Internet, than ever before in anyone’s history.

And the present context is not peaceful protest. That is an egregious lie. It is unrestrained looting, rioting, and what indeed looks like terrorism, violence directed at a political purpose. Trump is right about that, and whatever the practical consequences, it is essential to call a spade a spade. Anyone who sincerely believes in peaceful protest would nevertheless stay home in this case until and unless the rioting ends. Anyone present at a riot, even if they are not themselves engaged, unless they are trying to stop it, is aiding and abetting that riot. None so guilty as the innocent bystander, at least in this case; they serve as human cover. They grant the terrorists their opportunity and their anonymity.

Not to mention the obvious fact that milling about in crowds right now is likely spreading a deadly pandemic, and delaying the day when desperately poor people can again make a livelihood. If you sincerely care about the death of George Floyd, why would you immediately do your best to cause the deaths of more innocent people?

Those of us who genuinely care about George Floyd will stay home, light a candle, and put it in our window to express our concern and solidarity. Then we will pray for his soul’s repose.

Extremism

Extremist

On February 24, a young man went into a Toronto massage parlour with a machete and killed one of the masseuses. He has now been charged with terrorism—on the grounds that his motive was support of the “incel” movement, defined by CSIS as “violent misogyny.” 

The press and media consistently describe him as an “extremist.” As they invariably do other terrorists.

The term presumes that the problem with his thinking is that it strayed too far from the average. This implies that the average person shares the same basic ideas in a more muted form.

In this case, that apparently means that we are all misogynists. We all believe we are entitled to sex, and that it is the duty of random women to give it to us. Most of us are simply not prepared to resort to violence.

I have a problem with the tacit assumption that sex on demand is okay.

Similarly, it is nonsense to call the attackers on 9/11 Muslim “extremists.” We have ample evidence that they were not particularly observant Muslims. They came from secularized, Westernized backgrounds. Al Qaeda ran brothels in Iraq.

I also have a problem with the notion that the average person and what he thinks and does is the standard of morality, or truth. This is what the term “extremist,” used as an accusation or charge, implies: “extreme” makes sense only in relation to a norm.

You want an obvious example of a person whose thinking strayed far from the norm? Here are a few: the Buddha. Socrates. Jesus Christ. Mother Theresa. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Oskar Schindler. Churchill. Copernicus. Steve Jobs, with his personal slogan, “think different.” Any individual who has ever contributed any significant good to mankind. Any was, literally, an extremist.

By contrast, it is not so clear that the guy who stabbed the masseuse was an extremist. The term, remember, makes sense only in terms of a social norm. If you are surrounded by people who think the same way you do, you are not an “extremist,” but a conformist.

The RCMP investigation determined that the "crime was in fact one in which the accused was inspired by the ideologically motivated extremist [sic] movement commonly known as incel."

Most of his social dealing may well have been with that movement, which apparently thrives online. Incels are not generally the type who get out a lot. Accordingly, he was not an extremist—he was a moderate in relation to the social group to which he belonged.

The same is true of the team of hijackers who rammed the World Trade Center on 9/11. They were not extremists at all, but conformists within their social group. Indeed, a large proportion of the populations of some Middle Eastern Muslim countries probably supported the attacks at the time.

To call such people “extremists” is a perfect inversion of the truth, and is, worse, calculated to encourage such incidents in future. Going along with those around you is the opposite of morality.

Ezra Levant: Canadian Hero

Ezra Levant

I'm thinking now I may have been conned by official claims that the Danforth mass shooting in Toronto was not a terrorist attack.

I think Ezra Levant was first on the case, pointing out that the shooter's obviously Muslim name was not immediately released, and then released at effectively the same time as a “letter from the family” explaining that he was severely mentally ill. And the letter was suspiciously slick, as if written by some PR flack. When this is pointed out, it does look as though the authorities themselves were colluding to convince the public that it was not a terrorist attack.

Such a deliberate misdirection of the public would be entirely within the traditions of the British civil service. Broadly, the British civil service has always considered it their duty to mislead the public if this seemed to be in the best interests of the state and of public order. Witness the recent suppression of the existence of rape gangs in parts of Britain.

So why wouldn't the Canadian public services have the same ethos?

You don't want public panic. You don't want lynch mobs attacking local Muslims. Most of all, you don't want people thinking the government does not have everything under control.

Levant wanted to know where a crazy person got an illegal gun, and where did he learn to shoot it so well? He looked like a soldier.

Another good question. This is generally a problem with attributing such mass killings to mental illness. Severe mental illness, mental illness severe enough to plausibly cause such an outburst of violence, would also be disabling. It is hard to make any long range plan and pull it off if you are hallucinating and delusional. Granted that the killer had “mental health problems”; as do just about all mass shooters. But these “mental health problems” do not themselves explain what happened.

Reports are that the killer regularly met a large group of people in an area near his apartment. Maybe twenty people. Something like a gang. He worked at a grocery store, and neighbours and co-workers said he was friendly and always seemed cheerful.

Not very disabled socially. Severe mental illness is generally alienating from others; that's why psychiatrists used to be called “alienists.” This level of social contact does not tally with a severe “mental illness.” Other, that is, than the “personality disorders”: psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism, borderline personality, antisocial personality etc. Which are now called “mental illnesses.” They can be very social. And serial killers invariably have them. But these are not really mental illnesses as commonly understood; they pretty much amount to simply being a habitually bad person.

Where did he get the gun? Now it turns out that his brother's apartment was raided by police just last September, and they turned up 33 guns. So that one's not hard to figure. But the fact that his brother was hoarding 33 guns really does suggest that something organized, and not mental illness, was behind the attack. There was some gang activity going on. It does not help allay suspicions, either, that ISIS has taken credit for the attack.

On top of that, the police found 43 kilos of the drug carfentanil in the brother's apartment. This is an extremely potent drug, apparently, that can be sold like heroin on the street.

However, the quantity found is almost absurdly large for that purpose: enough not just to get the entire population of Canada high at once, but to kill them all at once with an overdose. Seems that supply and demand are out of kilter here.

And there's the thing. Carfentanil is powerful enough to be an effective chemical weapon even in very small quantities. It is recognized as one, and has been used as one. And this is actually the simplest explanation for such a huge quantity being found along with 33 firearms: a terrorist attack was being planned. They had a WMD, in the middle of Toronto, and were all ready to go. Hit a subway station, hit the Eaton Centre. The brother somehow managed to inadvertently expose himself to the drug and went into coma, the cache was discovered, and little brother was left to undertake plan B.

This time, we were lucky.

Terrorism Insurance

Does this make me look fat?

On the Manchester bombing, I still like my idea of commemorative pig statues named Mohammed, but the barbarity seems to have escalated: killing children at a concert! No more. Here’s something else we can do.

It involves no government expense, and might end terrorism pretty quickly.

I speak of terrorism insurance.

Insurance companies would, for a fee covering the risk undertaken, as with any other insurance, guarantee against a given person committing a terrorist act. If he or she did, the policy would pay double the entire medical expenses of victims, say, plus a fixed amount in “blood money,” say $500,000, or $1,000,000 to the estate of anyone killed.

Then just stand back and let the actuarial tables do their magic. If it turns out that Muslims are more prone to terrorism than others, fine; such insurance will cost them more. No need to ban Muslims as such. No need to “discriminate” against anybody.

Governments should then require a terrorism insurance policy, valid for ten years, before allowing any immigrant or refugee into the country. Such policies are going to be cheaper for the better immigrants, more expensive for the riskier ones, doing our work of immigrant selection for us. 

Such insurance policies should also then be required, the same as accident insurance, for anyone applying for a driver’s license, or a gun license, or a plane ticket. 

Anyone holding a large event as in Manchester might also wish to require such a live insurance policy from all attendees. True, it might limit the audience, but it would also reassure many that attending was safe. On balance, perhaps an advantage, perhaps a wash. Given the odds, it would probably not be an onerous burden on fifteen-year-old Christian girls.

This could be a source of revenue for religious organizations. On obvious way to cut the odds, for the underwriting organization, would be to ask for certification of good character from a minister of religion. For which service they might reasonably request some compensation. If, in turn, this or that Muslim minister’s guarantee turned out to be unreliable, they would lose this revenue source, giving them an incentive to encourage peace instead of violence. And it would give any Muslim groups an incentive to shun and disassociate themselves from anyone with violent aims.

It would also drain much of the propaganda value from such attacks. Would the killers have accomplished anything, by their own lights? The blood money is paid automatically. Set the blood money high enough, and it becomes automatic revenge. Nor would the perpetrator escape this any longer by committing suicide in the act.

I wager the fashion for jihadi suicide bombings would soon disappear.

The Coming End of Islamist Terror

While terrorist attacks have become increasingly common, I think there is hope they will soon disappear.

It has happened before. In the Sixties to Eighties, we had terror too. But it was from the left: the IRA, the ETA, the FLQ, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Symbionese Liberation Front, the Weather Underground, and so on.

It abated by about the end of the Eighties.

Now why would that be? What happened then?

They lost their funding. The Soviet Union pulled out of the geopolitical game.

For a time, some of them got money from Libya; but then Gaddafi lost interest. And the shooting and bombing mostly stopped; until Islamism took up the slack.

It takes money. And why did Islamism take over? Because just as the funding dried up from the Communist Bloc, the price of oil skyrocketed, and suddenly there was a lot of money washing around in the Middle East.

Some of it, one way or another, has been available to promote the ideology of radical Islam/political Islamism.

Thanks to fracking, those oil-producing countries are now scrambling to meet their budgets. That does not look as though it is going to end any time soon.

And who else has been stirring up trouble for the West?

Venezuela and Russia. Again, their ability to make problems has been based on their oil revenues: Russia in Eastern Europe, Venezuela by propping up Cuba.

They are facing the same problem now.

On top of this, Iran in particular is facing a demographic collapse. Iranian families have more or less stopped having children.

So the man current challenge to the peace and security of the West looks as though it is about to die of natural causes. No doubt something else will soon show up, but this puppy seems bound for the pound.

The most upsetting thing is that, instead of taking advantage of this, when miscreants really had no choice but to come to the table, the Obama regime did not make any hard bargains, but instead threw Cuba and Iran generous lifelines. They now have the money to foment trouble for a few more years. Not to mention vacating Iraq and leaving the field free for ISIS militants to grab some revenue and some oil. They really could not have done worse in terms of foreign policy.

But even so, when it comes to ending Islamic terrorism the future looks bright.

Who Shot Charlie Hebdo?

With the current attacks in Paris, perhaps it is time again to make clear what exactly “religious fundamentalism” is all about. It is not the same as “religious extremism.” In fact, it is the opposite. The Christian religious extremists are all in monasteries. In Judaism, they are opposed to the existence of the State of Israel. In Islam, they are in the mosques, not in the streets.

“Religious fundamentalism” is real enough, and it is identifiable currently in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. But it is a rather new thing. The term originally refers to a movement in US Protestantism that arose only in the early 20th century, which insisted on a strictly literal reading of the Bible. Precursors can be traced as far back as the late 19th century. Before that, importantly, nobody ever thought to read the Bible literally.

The term has since been applied as well to Islamic movements. I think fairly—the salient feature, a strictly literalist treading of the Quran and Hadith, is again the font from which all else flows. Including a strictly literal reading of the term “jihad.” Again, this movement appeared in the late 19th century, not before, and has grown in influence especially in recent decades.

In Hinduism, the same approach can be traced back to 1923. Roughly the same time. And it too is growing in recent years.

Now, why did this movement/these movements suddenly appear? What changed? What else has been growing at the same time? Simple answer: social science and scientism, i.e., the idea that the principles and techniques of science can be applied to all aspects of human life. Not coincidentally, Nazism and Communism arose at this same time and from this same concept: the application of scientific principles to human society and government.

Religious fundamentalism is, quite simply, the attempted application of the principles and techniques of science to religious texts and beliefs. It has, therefore, more to do with science than it does with religion. There is a reason why so many of the known terrorists and suicide bombers, notably including Osama Bin Laden, trained as engineers or medical personnel. And had not formally studied religion, or  been known previously to be devout. They weren't, and they aren't. Science is unrelentingly literalist in its approach to the world: what appears is what is, and there is nothing more behind it. Read the Bible or the Quran as if it were a science text, and you get fundamentalism.

This is less of a problem in Christianity than it is in Islam (or in Judaism), because even the literal reading of the specifically Christian texts is pretty non-violent. But it is important to understand what is happening.

The worst possible thing to do to end the current troubles with terrorism would be to blame it on “Islam” or on “religion.” It would make more sense to blame it on science, but that is not particularly helpful either. "Scientism," the elevation of science to the status of a religion, is the problem ,and should be aggressively fought. Next to that, the best solution is to ensure that everyone is better grounded in their given religious tradition.

The Geopolitical Importance of Depression

This is what depression looks like.

Just saw this interesting map of depression rates by country.

It could be wildly misleading, because depression is an invisible thing, and so rates of diagnosis could be very different from actual rates of occurrence. For example, I do not buy the extremely low rate of depression the map shows for East Asia—China, Japan, Korea. I have lived in some of those countries, and my impression is that the real rate of depression is very high. The difference is that suicide is culturally accepted: instead of seeking therapy, people just go off and kill themselves.

The map seems to disprove the claim, sometimes heard, that depression is a disease of prosperity, or of modernity, or a kind of spoiled malingering of the rich. Even though you would expect reported depression to be higher in richer countries simply because the medical infrastructure is better, this turns out not to be the case. Western Europe and North America do well on the depression scale; sub-Saharan Africa does poorly.

But I was struck by the rather consistently high rate of reported depression across what is sometimes called the MENA region—Middle East and North Africa, aka the Muslim world. As if to prove the point, Israel and Lebanon, Jewish and semi-Christian enclaves within the Middle East, do not conform to the overall trend.

I think this illustrates my own thesis that depression is caused by being caught in a double bind, a situation in which you are wrong no matter what you do—the kind of situation commonly caused by emotional abuse. Specifically, the Muslim world is caught in a double bind of conflicting values, pulled in two different ways. Traditional Muslim law says one thing, and the liberal secular doctrine of the West says another, and the two are not compatible. So what's the point of anything?

The same problem is surely at the root of “Islamist terrorism.” People feel a natural rage at being told to do two contradictory things at the same time, and the obvious solution is to go with the one and reject the other as oppressive. This would be why Islamic terrorism invariably arises among the ranks of Muslims who have had the greatest exposure to the West and Western ideas.

This problem would not be as acute in South Asia, among Hindus, or in East Asia, because Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese folk religions are not ethically prescriptive. They do not lay out any strict moral requirements, any strict doctrine of right and wrong. Accordingly, there is less conflict with modern secularism.

In general, too, there is less conflict with Christianity, because, although it, like Islam, is an ethical religion, modernism has emerged from it, and it has had many more years to adjust to the moral conflict. In this connection, however, it is worth noticing that the Netherlands is a standout among European nations for having high levels of depression. Why? Perhaps because the Netherlands has put itself in the forefront of secularization, with things like free and open prostitution and free and open drug use, so boosting the sense of conflict with more traditional values.

Air Vatican - Just That Much Closer to Heaven

I have a business idea for the Catholic Church: it's time the Vatican, like most other sovereign states, had its own airline.

Here's the unique selling proposition: like communion, it would be for Catholics only. Flying becomes a sacrament. The airplane would be, officially, a church. In order to book a ticket or to board, you would have to show a valid baptismal certificate.

Why would anyone fly Air Vatican? Not just for the tasty wafers, the incense, or the fine Italian food. Given that it is restricted to Catholics, they could also be reasonably assured that there are no Muslims on board—meaning no hijackers, shoe bombs, or underwear bombs.

Of course, other airlines could theoretically do the same—simply ban all Muslims from their flights. But since they are not registered as religions, this would probably be illegal in many countries they hope to serve.

Would this be unfair to Muslims? I don't think so—are Catholics allowed in Mecca? For the vast majority of Muslims who are not terrorists, this arrangement is equally advantageous. Muslims would not lack flights or carriers: some of the best airlines in the world are Muslim owned. Muslims flying on all-Muslims flights would gain the same security advantages as non-Muslims on non-Muslim flights: no terrorist is going to blow them up in the name of Islam. And they could draw on a clientele as large as that of Air Vatican.

Those most likely to suffer would be secularists and Protestants from the smaller denominations. But the solution for the latter is fairly simple: ecumenicism. Not such a terrible consequence, even if unintended.

Would terrorists forge baptismal certificates in order to board? Let them—there could be additional protections available. Only non-halal meals served on board. Passengers must cross themselves, drink the communion wine, and say the Nicene Creed in a common mass before boarding. Any Islamist suicide bomber who passed these tests would fear dying in a state of sin.

Other religious groups could do the same, if there was a demand; in fact, any enterprising pastor could probably start this tomorrow, by chartering a flight and placing an ad.

Probably lots more money in it than Bingo.