Greater Canuckistan

 The USA is dissolving into warring camps.

Here’s a solution. 

Some of the left-leaning bits should join Canada.

Not all of the left-leaning bits. That would demographically overwhelm. It might also leave the USA too weak: losing, for example, the entire west coast.

But there are portions of the USA that Canada has something of a claim on, historically and/or geographically; that just make more sense as part of the upper nation, and always did. And they tend to be leftist bits. 

They and their citizens would not be disadvantaged by this. Apart from sentimental ties, they would of course retain their democratic rights, and would have a louder voice in a smaller nation; with a political tilt more to their liking. Instantly they get stricter gun control, government health care, more restrictions on hate speech, all those things they want.

Their inclusion would probably not change Canadian politics much: leftist in US terms is middle-of-the-road for Canada.

The bulk of the rest of the USA might be happy too: for the remainder would tilt further right, and be freer to have things their way too. Bad news, perhaps, for California or Massachusetts. But as a whole, the Remaining States of America might not protest. 

Since the US and Canada are close allies, there should be no issues in terms of future defense or world diplomatic footprint. Since they are joined in a free trade zone, there should be no worries in terms of trade opportunities.

Here are some options:

1. Maine. Maine was historically part of French Acadia, not New England. It was British-occupied down to the Penobscot River at the end of the American War of Independence, and again at the end of the War of 1812. Each time, Britain gave it to the US. Ending plans to make it New Ireland to balance Nova Scotia as New Scotland.

But it makes more sense as part of Canada. It gives Montreal a winter port, Portland. It makes the haul from Quebec to the Maritimes a straight run, instead of an awkward dogs-leg north. The territory is geographically more useful, more integrated, and potentially more prosperous as part of Canada than as part of the USA.

2. Greater Vermont. You might have noticed that Vermont was not one of the original 13 states. They did not secede. After the revolution, it was wondering briefly whether to go with the rebels or be joined to Quebec. But, the French and Catholic nature of Quebec being perhaps too intimidating, they then cast in with the rebels.

But one obvious reason why they hesitated is that it always made more economic sense for Vermont to integrate with the St. Lawrence and Quebec. 

The geography and natural trade routes tie it more easily to Montreal than to New York; Lake Champlain flows north, to the St. Lawrence. The traditional dividing line between New France and New York was Fort Ticonderoga, near the base of the state.

It is a very left-leaning state, home to Bernie Sanders. It would probably also be politically more at home in Canada.

The geography and natural transportation routes argue for upstate New York, above Fort Ticonderoga, to move with it over to Canada. This area was purely a free gift to the new United States in the peace treaty that ended the Revolution. The Adirondack region is geologically an extension of the Canadian Shield. It further disrupts transportation south to New York City, while the rivers flow north into Quebec.

A land swap of the bottom of Vermont, below Ticonderoga, for the top of New Hampshire, also makes sense. The northern border of New Hampshire was also for some time in dispute, and there was a move in that region to join Quebec. 

This would rationalize the border, and at the same time allow a straight haul overland from Ontario to the Maritimes without passing through Quebec. This could be a valuable safety net in the future if Quebec chose to separate. Canada would not be split in two.

3. Michigan. Given the financial troubles of Detroit and Flint, the US might be happy enough to hive off Michigan, quite apart from any political alienation. It is apparently not thriving as part of the US. Give it to Canada in receivership, and things might improve.

The entire Midwest was originally part of New France, not of the British Thirteen Colonies. When Britain won the Seven Years War, it became part of Quebec. At the end of the Revolution, it was still in British hands. At the end of the War of 1812, it was again in British hands. Each time the British handed it over. But the fact that they so easily held it or took it illustrates the fact that it is naturally more accessible from Canada than from the Eastern Seaboard, from Montreal than from New York or Philadelphia. 

Taking the entire industrial Midwest might demographically overwhelm Canada, and rip the heartland out of the US, leaving it unacceptably weakened. 

Much of the southern part of the industrial Midwest is also probably not that leftist: as one gets closer to the Ohio River, as one gets closer to Kentucky.

The Ohio River flows south into the Mississippi.

 But the Great Lakes flow north through Quebec to reach the sea. Canada, following New France, was formed along these water routes, over which the couriers de bois and the fur traders travelled. They remain the natural highways of commerce, as water freight is cheaper than land freight.

Michigan, bordered by the Great Lakes on three sides, really belongs to the Canadian natural economic zone. 

4. Wisconsin. Michigan’s northern peninsula awkwardly dead-ends in Wisconsin. To complete the natural trade routes, Wisconsin probably ought to be tacked on. Another left-leaning state.

5. Minnesota. The logic of the rivers and waterways as natural transportation systems was strong enough that the American insisted on independence that the border with Canada should end in the West at the source of the Mississippi: commerce naturally flowed south, not north, below this point.

However, they got it wrong. They put the source of the Mississippi, and so the border, too far north. It should be at about 47.2 degrees north, not the 49th parallel. 

Moreover, the Red River, on Minnesota’s western border, flows north to Winnipeg, and that area was first colonized as part of Britain’s Selkirk Settlement. 

The problem with correcting this error all the way across to the Pacific, moving the border down from the 49th to the 47th parallel, is that it moves some quite conservative areas of the US over to Canada; which defeats a large part of our purpose, the peaceful separation of America’s warring tribes.

I propose a swap, like the swap of land between New Hampshire and Vermont further east. Let all of Minnesota, a resolutely left-leaning state, join Canada, and leave the rest of the border to the West as is.

Annexing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to Canada rationalizes land as well as water routes: now rail and road do not need to make that long lonesome arc over the north of Lake Superior to get from Toronto and Montreal to Winnipeg and points west. There is an alternative more direct route for trade across the North Peninsula and through Minnesota.

Reconnecting the natural trade routes here ought to boost prosperity for Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as well as for the rest of Canada.

For what it is worth, incorporating Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along with northern New York State, into Canada, repatriates the entire Canadian Shield, Canada’s most characteristic landscape, with its many hills and lakes.

6. Lesser Washington State. The Oregon Territory, comprising Oregon, Washington, and BC, was originally disputed between Britain and the US. But the main British outpost was at Vancouver, Washington, on Washington State’s southern border and the Columbia River. When the negotiatiors decided to extend the 49th parallel border to the Pacific, it disrupted the obvious trade route from the interior, the Columbia River, which runs from the BC interior to the sea at this point. The British and the Hudson’s Bay Company were forced to pick up stakes and transfer everything to what is now the new Vancouver, Vancouver, BC. Which can connect with its interior only by going over the Cascade Mountains, North America’s highest mountain range.

A thoughtless border. The natural integration of the region is so obvious that a separatist-unification movement has developed, for a “Cascadia” union of BC, Washington, and Oregon, with its own flag. 

At the same time, the rural eastern counties of Washington have been militating for separation from the extremely left-leaning coastal portion.

Solution: let Washington State west of the Columbia River join Canada. The eastern portion joins Idaho. 

For Canada, the addition of urban Washington State would give added influence to the West coast, which often feels dominated by the East. A sense of imbalance between East and West has been a problem for Canada. Washington State plus BC gives a population of 12 million, in better balance with Ontario’s 14.5 million or Quebec’s 8 million.

For Canada as a whole, taking all of these add-ons together, we get about 26 million added on to the Canadian population. Not enough to overwhelm Canada’s 37.5 million, but enough to bring Canada up to roughly the population level of the large European powers, Britain, France, Germany or Italy.

While the US remains at over 300 million.

I think there is no chance that any of this would happen. But it could solve a variety of problems.

A map of the expanded Canada, showing new land transportation corridors.

A Ghost Story

 

Darkmoon, Pixabay.

Xerxes has seen a ghost. He had a vivid experience one night recently, while lying fully awake, of the weight of his wife getting out of the other side of the bed, shuffling off to the bathroom, then returning.

His wife died a year ago.

He also sometimes hears her speak.

Xerxes dismisses, although he cannot explain, the experience:

            “Tradition says that there is a soul, distinct from the physical body. The body ends, but the soul carries on.

            Reason balks at that distinction. We are embodied souls. All that makes us unique individuals depends on the combination of body and spirit. Our minds need sensory input from our bodies; without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.

            Once we are gone, reason says, we are gone. Period.”

He gives no reasons he think this—he just says “reason.”

Many important philosophers reason the opposite: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, Berkeley. Most of the world’s cultures reason the opposite.

Are they all wrong? Perhaps; but one at least needs to present one’s reasons.

“Our minds need sensory input from our bodies.”

This is easily shown to be false. We can think in a darkened room. We can dream while asleep.

You mean we need original sense-impressions at some point in order to form these mental images? Aristotle or Locke thought so. But Plato, for example, thought sense-impressions merely reflected ideal forms already in the mind. Berkeley pointed out that we have no idea whether the physical senses exist except in our mind—let alone the things we imagine they perceive. All perceptions, for all we know, are purely mental.

“without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.”

All the evidence goes the opposite way. Everything mental seems to be eternal; only the physical can die. Anything that dies or disappears physically persists mentally. We call this “memory.” And aside from memories, abstractions, mathematics, emotions all seem immortal. You will say a memory or an emotion may “fad.” Yes, fade; but not die. It is always still there somewhere, and something as trivial as the taste of a madeleine or a particular smell may bring it all flooding back.

No need to even go into ghosts. Or so-called “near-death experiences” in which the consciousness survives clinical death, or out-of-body experiences. They are no doubt evidence, but they are needless evidence of the almost self-evident.

Some atheists claim that belief in an afterlife is merely “wishful thinking.” That might be true, if you invented a religion that believed only in a heaven, and not purgatory or hell. None do.

Essentially every human culture has come to the same obvious conclusion, based on the hard logic and the evidence.

Not-Gay Milo

 

Milo Yiannopoulos has come out as straight.

Of course this is heresy. We are supposed to believe that homosexuality is a permanent part of a person. Gender may be fluid, but for some reason, not sexual preference.

I know at least one former gay personally who has gone straight. Kathy Shaidle claimed that every homosexual she knew back in high school later went straight. Perhaps your experience is similar. But, as in so many things these days, we must remain silent and deny our doubts. Public people keep telling us that, after living most of their lives as “straight,” they have decided they are really gay. It is absurd to think the transformation can only work one way.

No previous generation supposed there was such a thing as a “homosexual.” There were only urges for homosexual sex, perhaps indulgence, and perhaps addiction to it. Some prefer redheads. 

Were our ancestors, who did not suppose homosexuality was an inborn thing, all fools and idiots? What is the statistical probability of that? 

How does innate homosexuality survive the mechanism of Darwinian evolution? Wouldn’t a genetic condition that prevents reproduction be promptly bred out?

The ancient Greeks assumed that men would practice homosexual sex, at least until marriage. So were all Greeks “born that way”?

Yiannopoulis speaks of it now as an addiction: like alcohol. I think this is exactly right. 

I had always presumed it comes from some early sexual experience with an older homosexual. Yiannopoulis has suggested this was true for him in the past. But in a recent interview with LifeSite News, he gives a possible second factor:

“When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking.”

Perhaps some young men are attracted to homosexual sex because they are repulsed by heterosexual sex. And they may be repulsed because they have suffered sexual abuse.

Allen Ginsberg rather hints as much in his case, remembering his mother in his poem “Kaddish”:

Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.

       One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

I have another acquaintance who became a lesbian seemingly because she was sexually abused by her father.

Yiannopoulis now plans to advocate for “conversion therapy”—officially now illegal in Canada.

It works, he maintains, so long as it has a religious basis.

“Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

He surely goes too far in saying this is possible only through Catholicism; but Alcoholics Anonymous too maintains that overcoming addiction is only possible through appealing to a “higher power.”

This is why psychiatry and psychology cannot cure mental illness. All they can do is drug down the symptoms. In former days, mental illnesses were regularly cured. They still are in less developed countries, where they still resort to religious methods.

This is not to say that mental illness is caused by personal sin, or by anything justly referred to as addiction—in most cases. But, like addictions, it involves settled habits of thought.

Megan, Harry, and Oprah

 

Everyone is talking about Megan Markle and Harry Windsor’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. I have not posted on it. It looks to me like gossip: a family matter.

Everyone is upset at Markle’s claim that some unnamed member of the royal family was concerned that her princely son’s skin might be dark. This is apparently reason, in many minds, to abolish the monarchy.

Excuse me, but are we not aware that, for centuries, it has been prohibited for the British/Canadian/Australian monarch to be Catholic? Convert, and you are instantly deposed, or tossed from the line of succession.

And this does not bother us; that we have always been fine with. Yet we find a mere unsubstantiated assertion of a remark about skin colour intolerable?

We have our values badly messed up.

Not that I think it likely that any member of the royal family really fussed over skin colour in any racial sense. South Asian parents do; African-American parents do, according to Toni Morrison. I doubt any “white” parents do. And British royals traditionally care about class, but not race. They are happy to hobnob with maharajahs; but not with Eastenders.

Am I accusing Megan Markle of lying? Yes; I think she is playing the race card shamelessly for profit. Sells interviews; sells books. Or possibly utterly misunderstanding some chance remark. 

Canada State by State

 A British Twitter/Facebook account, Milkman Memes for Lib Dem Teens, has related each English county to a supposedly comparable US state. Cornwall is Florida, Greater London is New York, and so forth.

I have long thought that many Canadian provinces seem to weirdly correspond to US states. I might even have posted that here before.

British Columbia is California. It is our left coast, with much the same vibe. A place where anything seems possible.

Yukon is our Alaska. More broadly, all the territories are our Alaska.

Alberta is our Texas. Oil, cowboys, a right-wing political slant. 

Saskatchewan is Kansas, the perfectly representative Prairie state/province. All straight lines.

Manitoba is Missouri. The gateway to the West. Winnipeg is St. Louis.

Ottawa is the entire industrial Midwest: Illinois to Ohio.

Past this it gets trickier. Provinces east of the Ottawa have a more distinct character. Quebec is like no one place in the US, part New York, part Louisiana. 

The Maritime provinces resemble New England, but there are no clear one-to-one comparisons province to state. PEI is like Rhode Island in being the smallest province; but PEI is rural, Rhode Island urban. Nova Scotia is the regional hub, like Massachusetts. New Brunswick might correspond to upper New England in general, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Newfoundland’s reputation within Canada is reasonably comparable to that of the US South in general: hillbilly country.

The Cat in the Hat Bites Back

 

My friend Xerxes always gives me something to talk about. He is my window into the leftist soul. Without him, I would find it utterly unpredictable, because it seems mad.

I think it is significant that, in his latest column, he has come out, if obliquely, against the banning of Dr. Seuss books. He even expresses some qualified regret at the passing of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Sure, they “reek of southern slavery,” but he quotes a descendant of the original Aunt Jemima saying “"I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything.” He is careful to put the sentiment in the mouth of a minority member, but still…

I am hopeful that, with Dr. Seuss, if not with Aunt Jemima, the book banners and the blacklisters may at last have gone too far. This is an attack on too many comfortable leftist people’s childhoods. 

For comparison, “conspiracy theory” was not always an automatic pejorative. It used to be fashionable to suggest conspiracies. I think the turning point came with Oliver Stone’s film “JFK.” It was so over-the-top with a particularly weak conspiracy theory that it discredited the entire genre for a generation or more. Now “conspiracy theory” is actually accepted as something immoral, and automatically worthy of banning. 

Something of the like may be happening with the attack on Dr. Seuss. Not a wise choice of target. It looks like overreach.

Xerxes terms this general movement to topple statues and ban books “revisionism.”

Revisionism, however, implies some reinterpretation of history. That is not happening here. Nobody before this wave of mass hysteria thought the South were in the right in the US Civil War, or that slavery or colonialism was fine. No vision has revisioned. I think it is safe to assert that nobody bought Aunt Jemima syrup or Uncle Ben’s rice thinking this was endorsing slavery. A more accurate term than “revisionism” would be “iconoclasm”; or, better yet, “memory holing.” This is a matter of erasing history, not changing our interpretation of it.

Erasing history is much more sinister than revisionism. It makes it easier to justify slavery or colonialism or Nazism in the present or future: the comparison, and the counter arguments, have been removed. Those who do not learn from history …

But I do not believe this is the actual motivation among the iconoclasts. That, after all, would be a conspiracy theory. It is just a fearful unintended consequence.

Xerxes points out that even great Biblical heroes did things wrong; even they could not withstand being judged by modern standards. He notes that King David was a murderer, a rebel, a terrorist.

This too is not the real explanation, however. It is not that morals have progressed, and we are judging our ancestors unfairly because “times have changed.” King David would have been as wrong to commit murder and adultery in his own time as in ours: check the Ten Commandments.

Nobody seems any longer to notice, but all the Old Testament patriarchs, and all the New Testament apostles, were sinners. Moses too was a murderer. Noah, as soon as he was rescued from the flood, got flaming drunk, then cursed his son. Lot got flaming drunk and had sex with his daughters. Abraham abandoned one son in the wilderness, and fully intended to slaughter a second. Having married his sister. . Isaac shamelessly favoured one son over another. Jacob cheated his brother Esau out of his inheritance. Solomon took a thousand concubines and sacrificed to Baal.

The Bible makes clear it is not condoning these sins. David may not build the temple; Moses may not enter the Promised Land. 

The point is that we are all sinners, even the most righteous among us. So long as we keep faith with God, our sins are not fatal—although they will not pass without punishment. 

The same error is often made by non-Catholics with respect to Catholic saints. Protestants object to Thomas More being canonized, because as Lord Chancellor he presided over the execution of Protestants for heresy. Is the Catholic Church supporting such practices? 

No. No Catholic saint is believed to be without sin; that would be the worst possible blasphemy. Canonization recognizes not the absence of sin, but positive acts of “heroic virtue.”

The same standard should obviously be applied to any figure from our past; no other standard is possible among humans. Robert E. Lee was a great general, and deserves recognition for that alone. Moreover, he sacrificed his own interests in refusing command of the Union Army rather than abandon his homeland, Virginia. He again behaved nobly in refusing to continue the fight as a guerilla war, and urging Southerners to lay down their arms and seek reintegration. Washington owned slaves; but he deserves eternal respect if only for declining absolute power when he might have seized it. This was heroism. Jefferson owned slaves too, but deserves eternal respect for having drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

I do not care so much for fictional characters with no story, like Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben. But their disappearance is disrespect to the countless honest working people they represent, the many good-hearted nannies and waiters and cooks. And all for no fault of their own, but only because they remind others of sins against them.

And perhaps that is the key. It is not enough that the people we choose to remember must never have sinned. They must not remind us of any sins. 

It is not, then, that those doing the statue-toppling, banning, boycotting, and deplatforming, imagine that they themselves are without sin. This seems too improbable to be believed, or too monstrous. We all have a conscience, and know we have violated it. Unless, perhaps, these leftist mobs are all psychopaths. 

More probably, they hate to be reminded of sin, of the very existence of sin, because they are too aware of having sinned. And the sin our generation is conscious of is not slavery, and not colonialism--those were generations long ago. And so those are safe sins to condemn.

Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Dr. Seuss are being scapegoated. The sins of the community are being cast on them, and then they are driven out. It is the eternal way with scapegoating.

Dr. Seuss is being crucified for our sins.

A Cat in the Woodpile

This is a repost of an older blog entry that is newly relevant.

So today I learned that Dr. Seuss is racist. I loved him as a kid. I had no idea. I feel so dirty.

It’s probably true, too--by today’s standards. I went back and checked his book, If I Ran the Zoo, which has been mentioned in this regard. In it Seuss writes of trips to exotic destinations to capture exotic beats. None of the destinations are real, but the people of Zomba-ma-Tant all wear their eyes at a slant. It is racist nowadays to notice such things. The inhabitants of the African island of Yerka are drawn wearing grass skirts and nothing else.

Of course, logically, there is nothing inherently wrong with having eyes that slant, or wearing grass skirts. Some find both attractive. So why is featuring them racist?

I suppose Seuss might be accused of not seeing these exotic folk as fully human. That’s a stretch—it involves mind-reading. But then again, if so, he is at least fair-minded and non-discriminatory in his racism. Besides these portraits of East Asians and Africans, his child protagonist also hunts the Russian Palooski, apparently a rara avis, among heavily bearded men wearing high fur hats. Its belly, we are told, is blueski.

Another expedition is “to the wilds of Nantucket.”

The book is about imagining exotic animals and exotic places. Really, if you portrayed people all around the world as looking just the same, where’s your book?

The other “racist” book he wrote, I am informed, is And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street. This one features a “Chinese boy who eats with sticks,” again in the context of trying to imagine something remarkable and exotic. Yet Chinese boys do eat with sticks, and it would not occur to me that they ought to be ashamed of this. Who’s the racist here? Are you supposed to be ashamed of being Chinese, or African, and holding to traditional practices?

I suppose I should be offended too, as someone of Irish ancestry. The book gives the chief of police a distinctly Irish name, Mulvaney. Stereotype!

This all came up, as you have probably read, when a librarian in Cambridge Massachusetts actually rejected a donation of a collection of Dr. Seuss books from Melania Trump on the grounds that they were racist. Interestingly, none of those books was If I Ran the Zoo or And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, although she cites them as the prime examples of what she objects to.

But then, she mentions “The Cat in the Hat.” Apparently the cat mocks black people. The librarian refers to a study by Katie Ishizuka, whose claim to fame, at least as the librarian’s source puts it, is that her husband is a grad student at UCSD. “She [Ishizuka] points out that the Cat in the Hat, perhaps Seuss’ most famous character, is based on minstrel stereotypes. ‘The Cat’s physical appearance, including the Cat’s oversized top hat, floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual blackface performers; as does the role he plays as ‘entertainer’ to the white family—in whose house he doesn’t belong.’”

Now let’s be honest here. Ishizuka is probably right that elements of the cat’s appearance really do come from minstrel shows. Minstrels did tend to wear top hats, big bow ties, and white gloves, like the cat. But there are a lot of leaps of logic here.

First, it is a perfectly arbitrary re-interpretation of history to hold that minstrel shows were insulting to blacks. As I have written here before, they were thought of as pro-black in their day, and often banned in the South before the Civil War. They were especially popular with black audiences. They were, in principle, about as anti-black as the Rolling Stones, in emulating the American black music that they love.

Second, every other cartoon character before the Cat in the Hat came along wore a bow tie and white gloves. How is Seuss being racist, if he is simply following the conventions of his genre?

Third, there are good reasons for the convention. For example, fingers are hard to draw; gloves get you out of all the fussy detail. In general, these bits of costume have been tried and tested in the minstrel shows, and shown to be useful and popular. Why would you refuse to use them? White gloved hands make gestures clearer and more dramatic. Bow tie and top hat frame and draw attention to the face and its expressions.

Fourth, given that nobody else has noticed this minstrel allusion over the sixty years or so since the book was published, is it reasonable to assume that Geisel himself ever noticed this? Isn’t it the person who sees this and points it out who is being racist? As someone once says, if you keep hearing dog whistles that nobody else hears, chances are, you’re the dog.

But then, racism is not the librarian’s main reason for rejecting the books. It is, she says to the First Lady, “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature.” 

And this is the really striking thing.

How does a children’s book ever become “cliched,” “tired,” or “worn”? Think about it. For any children’s book, an entirely new generation of readers comes along every five to seven years or so, and they necessarily have not heard it all before. Nothing that was once good can possibly, for these intended readers, have become tired or cliched by the time they get to read it. Our familiar fairy tales can often be traced back to the bronze age.

Consider, too, objecting to the Cat in the Hat for perhaps having echoes of the minstrel shows. How can this be important if you are thinking about the actual readers? They were born five to seven years ago. They have never seen nor heard of a minstrel show. They will be perfectly unaware of any such references, even if they are there, and even if Seuss meant them maliciously.

In other words, this school librarian, whose job it is to find and curate books for children, has never taken a moment to think about the children. She does not care about the children in the least. It is all about herself and other librarians and their professional expertise. The library is there for her benefit.

This illustrates well the dangers of “professionalism.”

Fire them all.

How to Hold a Postmodern Discussion Group

 Friend Xerxes has proposed some formal rules for any discussion:

1.     Speak from your own experience. 

2.     Everyone’s experience is valid.

3.     No one’s experience is ever wrong. That’s how they experienced it; that’s the way it is for them.

He objects, by contrast, to Christians relying on quoting the Bible. He objects to referring to dictionary definitions. This, he believes, prevents discussion. 

Among the other things he thinks prevent discussion is discussion. Another proposed rule is:

4.     Accept that anyone may tell you, at any time, that you have said enough.

Xerxes is half right about appeals to authority. A simple appeal to authority is a recognized logical fallacy. It is not enough to say “Einstein said X,” or “Aquinas said Y”; you need to offer reasons and evidence. You may have gotten them from such a figure; but the reasons or evidence stand on their own. They cannot be accepted simply because Einstein or Aquinas said it. This is a version of the ad hominem fallacy.

But the alternative is not individual “experience.”

Consider science. Science rejects all appeals to authority. Its standard of proof is controlled and repeated experiment: the scientific method. Which itself has accepted rules and standards. Only if everyone agrees on and follows these rules—an authority—can any legitimate scientific assertion be made. The scientific discussion is invariably over whether these rules were indeed properly followed.  To rely on personal experience instead is to rely on mere anecdote and superstition. It throws everything back to the Cro-Magnon: the sun rotates around the flat earth, and the moon is made of moldy cheese.

For a discussion among Christians, the text of the Bible is the proper authority. Only if everyone accepts this authority, along with certain rules of textual criticism, and perhaps a common creed, can any meaningful discussion occur. Without this, the conversation easily veers off in any direction; there are no grounds for agreement or disagreement on anything. Satan might be the messiah.

In politics, or in court, the standard is the constitution and the doctrine of human rights. If all parties do not agree on this much, civil discourse breaks down and revolution, war or civil war ensues. Everyone asserts what they want, and, if others do not agree, come to blows or guns or guillotines.

Sadly, that is about where we are in political discourse in North America right now. The left has aggressively rejected the constitution, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the doctrine of human rights as “white supremacy.”

For any discussion at all, you need to rely on a shared definition of the words you use. Otherwise you are only making animal sounds. This is what dictionaries are for. Lacking that, the meaning of each new word must be agreed upon or asserted before being used. Which cannot be done unless the meaning of all the words used to define this word are themselves previously agreed upon. Otherwise, the speaker is only wasting everyone’s time. But to require this is almost equally wasting everyone’s time.

Also in any conversation at all, if you rely on “everyone’s experience,” and “no one’s experience is ever wrong,” if no one’s experience can ever be challenged, there is no basis for any discussion. 

Bethlehem Asylum, London.

The person beside you declares that, in his experience, he is Napoleon Bonaparte, but is currently being pursued relentlessly by the CIA in collusion with lizard-formed aliens. 

All you can properly do in response is nod and smile. If you say your experience is different, that is a challenge. That is denying his lived experience. If you say your experience is the same—that too is a challenge, since you can’t both be Napoleon, can you?

The person across from you then complains angrily that in their experience every Jew is cunning and malicious, and something ought to be done about them. Germans, however, and other Northern Europeans, are clearly a superior race.

You nod and smile.

The woman on your right insists that it is only proper to kill babies and eat them; and she plans to do so this Saturday. 

You nod and smile. Perhaps you hope it is not your baby she is thinking of.

At all of this you must simply nod and smile; there is no possibility of discussion.

But then someone over to the left pipes up impudently that in their experience, there is a right and a wrong which applies to all mankind, that murder is always wrong, people are equal in moral worth, and some things are real, and others not.

This person you must silence or drive out of the discussion. 

Or perhaps eat.

And to Think That I Saw It in 2021

 

The current hysteria of blacklisting and censorship has now reached Dr. Seuss. A year ago, this sounded absurd. What still sounds absurd today is likely to be law tomorrow.

I managed to dig up online some of the offending images that have prompted this.

These are simply comic stereotypes. All figures in any cartoon format are comic stereotypes.

Imagine, for comparison, if you are Canadian like me, a Seuss illustration of a Canadian as a lumberjack wearing a red plaid shirt, suspenders, hobnail boots, and a cap with ear flaps? Or a Mountie uniform? We might roll our eyes at the supposedly ignorant Yank. But would we feel offended? Why?

Reality check: my Filipina wife and my half-Filipina children have no problem talking about slanted eyes. Are they supposed to be ashamed of them?

Invictus

 

My pal Jack Rigg reads the poem commonly known as "Invictus."

Read a Book Week

 

From March 7 to March 13, the electronic version of Playing the Indian Card will be available for half-price at Smashwords.com. That's $2.49 for the sort of book that would usually retail for over $30.

If you enjoy having your mind blown, you'll enjoy the book.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/787100

The "A" Word Is Invoked

 

In his recent column supporting assisted suicide, Xerxes brought up the fact that abortion is legal to justify legalizing extending “assisted suicide” to the mentally ill as well.

So there, anyone who refuses to believe in slippery slopes. All slopes are slippery in the law.

Xerxes writes:

            “On the one hand, a mother – who may or may not have consented to becoming pregnant – imposes her will on a fetus that cannot yet express its own wishes.

            On the other hand, a group of outsiders – in the U.S., a collusion of elderly white male politicians – imposes their standards, their values, to prevent that mother from having an abortion.

            It seems to me just as wrong to say a woman cannot have an abortion as it would be to require that she must have an abortion.”

Let’s parse this. A woman may not have consented to becoming pregnant, per se; but we are responsible for the consequences of our actions. You could as easily say that, if the father did not intend to make the mother pregnant, he has no legal responsibility for that child. No paternity suit could stand. Nor could any father be required to support a child within marriage. Nor could anyone be held responsible for running someone over with his car while drunk.

If the mother then chooses to abort, she is not, as Xerxes formulates it, merely “imposing her will” on the fetus. One “imposes one’s will” if one breaks into a line; indeed, one might be imposing one’s will on a number of people. Yet we do not consider that equivalent to mass murder. She is killing it.

She is also imposing her will on the father of that child, who has equal moral rights to it.  She is denying his reproductive rights. He cannot require her to have an abortion, and he cannot prevent her from having one.

I suspect we do not want an individual father to have either of those rights. It follows that we cannot allow the mother to have them either.

Laws against abortion are not, as Xerxes disingenuously claims, a “collusion of elderly white male politicians” to impose their will. In a democracy, politicians are elected by the population as a whole. They express the will of the people.

Indeed, this same argument, used here to justify abortion, and then assisted suicide, would equally argue that murder must be legalized, and rape, and pedophilia.

If there is an argument for abortion to be legal, this isn’t it.

Government-Assisted Murder?

 

"Life Unworthy of Life": 1938 Nazi German poster.

Friend Xerxes the leftist columnist has weighed in on assisted suicide for the mentally ill. He is for it.

I am not current on “Medical Assistance in Dying,” but the issue of what to do about the mentally ill seems to me to confirm the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton: if anyone wants to tear down a fence, they must first demonstrate awareness of why it was there in the first place.

If, on the one hand, one refuses the same right to the mentally ill that we extend to everyone else, this is discrimination against the mentally ill. So, apparently, the Quebec courts have now ruled. The right to be put to death by the state must now be extended to the mentally ill, those with Alzheimer’s, the unconscious, minors, and the mentally retarded.

But “suicidal ideation” is a standard symptom of virtually all mental illness. Which is as much as to say, if we extend this right to them, it arguably amounts to a genocide against the mentally ill; they are in effect being killed for being mentally ill. Awkwardly, that is just how Hitler’s policy of genocide began: with exterminating the mentally ill, those with Alzheimer’s, and the mentally retarded, as “life not worthy of life.” 

Worse, there is a growing belief among psychiatrists/psychologists that mental illness in general is akin to PTSD: it is caused, in other words, by one’s environment, one’s life situation, by those around the victim, especially in childhood. “Gaslighting” is becoming a familiar term, and a familiar notion: people are driven mad. If this is true, mental illness is a case of someone being driven to kill themselves. Having the government assist makes the government complicit in murder. A perfect way to get rid of an unwanted spouse, child, or other relative.

The same consideration arises to a lesser extent for those with Alzheimer’s, or in a coma. But at least in this latter case, the relative or intimate making the decision to kill has not themselves caused the problem.

The only solution is to pull away from the whole business of assisted dying. Bad idea. Some will suffer. But there was a reason for that fence.

Mary and Islam

 

A Muslim (Persian) depiction of Mary with Jesus

Nobody gets religion; on the left or on the right.

A piece from PJ Media claims the Vatican has “betrayed” Mary by saying she is a bridge among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. They object to the claim in a Vatican document that she was “a Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman.” After all, how could she have been a Muslim -- “A religion that came into being 600 years after Mary died.”

Bad theology there, pal. Mary did not die, in the conventional sense. The term is “dormition.” She ascended bodily into heaven. At least, that is what Catholics believe. Even if she hadn’t, she, like all the saints, is alive in heaven. Accordingly, why couldn’t she have become a Muslim at some point after 622 AD?

This further supposes, falsely, that Islam began with Muhammad, as Christianity began with Jesus Christ. By that assumption, when did Judaism begin? “Islam”” means “submission”: that is, submission to the one true God. Accordingly, as far as Muslims are concerned, there were Muslims long before Muhammed, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and, of course, Mary. They would have thought and believed all the same things Muhammed thought. Muhammed did not come to change anything, but to restore the true faith, and place a seal on it.

The article’s second objection is that “Islam presents Mary, the Mother of Christ, as ‘married’ to and ‘copulating’ with Muhammad in paradise.” Shocking? Why? Did you suppose God was against sex?

Ah, but, the article says, this claim violates the Christian doctrine that she was eternally a virgin.

That is not the Christian doctrine. That is the Catholic and Orthodox doctrine. If this fatally alienates Islam from Christianity, it equally divides Christianity. 

Moreover, the Muslim claim is actually compatible with Mary being eternally a virgin. In fact, Islam believes she was. They are closer to Catholicism here than Protestantism is. Marriage in heaven is necessarily a very different matter from marriage on earth. The article makes the point that the Arabic word implies copulation, not some Platonic relationship. Fine—but imagine how “sex” works in heaven, given that in heaven one does not, until the resurrection, have a body. Perhaps Mary, uniquely, does; even if so, Muhammed does not. Does this really contradict the concept of Mary’s virginity? How exactly?

Third, even if this hadith were controversial for Christians, it is not an article of faith for Muslims. A hadith is a tradition about Muhammed, not something from the Quran, and all hadiths are not equal. The chain of authority behind this particular hadith, according to a Muslim site, is “weak.” Any Muslim is free to take it or leave it.

Undeniably, there are differences between Christianity and Islam. But there is a tendency to exaggerate them. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

 

Charlotte and Uncle

Charlotte’s Web is a fable. Whenever you have animals talking and acting like humans, you are reading a fable. 

Okay, or maybe a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Why talking animals? 

Because animals can swiftly and unambiguously illustrate human character traits and types: ants industry, wolves malice, foxes cleverness, and so on.

And this is to teach a moral, some broad general advice about life. Be like the ant; don’t be like the fox.

Charlotte’s Web plays with this convention. Rats are selfish, and Templeton is selfish. Geese are silly, and the geese in Zuckerman’s farm are silly. Pigs are supposed to be slothful and greedy; Uncle, one pig in the story, is slothful and greedy. But then Wilbur breaks the mold. He is greedy enough about his slops. He enjoys lying in manure. But he also does improbable backflips, and is eager to try spinning a web. Spiders are controlling and devouring; bloodthirsty. Charlotte is bloodthirsty, and she also schemes; but in a good way.

White more or less openly explains his point in Charlotte’s farewell soliloquy:

"After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

The message is that we are all horribly flawed, all animals; we all eat bacon, and slaughter. And yet we can redeem ourselves, by good works: which is to say, by gratuitous acts of friendship--and by art. Charlotte is a writer: “a true friend and a good writer” serves in the book as her epitaph. Wilbur cannot weave words as she can; but his art is his backflips. His art is the dance, and this makes him “radiant.”

Trying not to prompt or lead them, I asked a class of Chinese students what they thought the moral of the fable was. They identified friendship; but when I asked for the book’s argument in favour of friendship, their response was, “if you do something for a friend, they will do something for you.”

This is an interpretation the book itself rules out. Wilbur is keenly aware that when Charlotte decided to save his life, he had done nothing for her; and was obviously unlikely to be able to. When she takes her great care building her egg sac, giving it her entire life force, she is doing something for children she will never meet, who will therefore never be able to do anything for her in return. When Wilbur brings the egg sac back to the barn, and nurses it, he is doing nothing for Charlotte in return for her kindness, but for other spiders she will never see and he does not know.

But the quid pro quo notion of morality that my Chinese students exhibit is exactly the argument for morality given by Xenophon in his parable, “The Choice of Hercules.” 

“If you would gain the favor of the gods, you must be at the pains of worshiping them: if the friendship of good men, you must study to oblige them: if you would be honored by your country, you must take care to serve it.”

This was the classic ancient argument for moral behavior. It is obviously wrong from a Christian perspective. If you are doing good only in return for an expected reward, to Christians, you are not doing good at all.

Yet it seems to me this is the inevitable view of morality among pagans and atheists. Without God, there is no transcendent right and wrong; morality is just a business transaction. 

And there is nothing intrinsically wrong, in the first place, with being a lazy swine or a bloodsucking spider.

Mirrors

 

Scott Adams, in his daily podcasts, has pronounced himself puzzled by the apparent truth of an insight from Tucker Carlson: that whatever the left accuses the right of doing seems to be just what they have been doing themselves.

They accuse Trump’s followers of trying to stage an insurrection; they use this as an excuse to try to stage an insurrection. A second or third insurrection, following the Russia hoax and the Ukraine impeachment. They accuse Trump of encouraging rioting; after a year of encouraging rioting. They accuse Trump of authoritarianism, for considering calling in the National Guard to protect the White House under siege, or for considering calling in the Guard to cities torn by rioting. As soon as they are in power, they call in the National Guard to protect Washington, and keep them there. And plan to impose COVID regulations on the states. They accuse Trump of colluding with Russia; Hillary Clinton was colluding with Russia, Joe Biden was colluding with Russia, not to mention China and the Ukraine. They impeach Trump for supposedly, perhaps, interfering in Ukrainian legal affairs and demanding a quid pro quo for aid. Yet Biden is on video boasting about interfering in Ukrainian legal affairs and demanding a quid pro quo for aid. They have called Republicans Nazis and Fascists for years; that’s the entire “Antifa” thing. Then when Gina Carano tweets a comparison of the left to the early Nazis, this is intolerable. She must lose her livelihood for it. They declare the right “anti-Semitic” while being anti-Semitic. They accuse the right of being racist, while making everything about race. They actually declare not being racist, racist. They claim the Republicans are for the rich and against the poor, while openly expressing contempt for the poor.  It is only too obvious there is a pattern here.

The principle is simple, and known since ancient times. When someone commits consciously to evil, to something they know is wrong, the truth becomes their enemy. They feel the need to get as far away from truth as possible. They will come to consistently say the opposite of the truth, and accuse the innocent of their sins.

War by Other Means

 

Joe Biden is working for the government of China.

I was recently watching a video on the history of Iran. As a matter of policy, Britain controlled the government of Iran for years in the early 20th century simply by strategically bribing key officials.

Why not? In the end, it is the cheapest option: cheaper than fighting a war, or sending foreign aid, or making any sort of a government-to-government deal. And it avoids provoking possible conflict with other powers also seeking influence.

So why not China? Now that China’s prosperity gives its government some serious money to work with, why wouldn’t they do the same thing Britain once did? They are not strong enough to overcome the US in war; strategic bribery costs much less.

Especially since, unlike in the case of Britain, bribery is a part of the traditional Chinese way of doing business. 

Surely, then, they will have tried; they will have tried to bribe key figures in a country as important to them as the USA.

If this has not previously been an issue, it is because, in the developed world, we could count on most of our elite being too honourable to sell out their country. That was in some significant part why Britain could control Iran through bribery, but Iran could not control Britain. 

But we have seen a visible decline in the morality of our elite in the past few decades. That sort of patriotism is long dead on the left. They will openly declare the US evil in its inception.

We know, in fact, that the Chinese are doing so: they are bribing, infiltrating, and compromising. We heard recently of prominent academics accepting secret funding from China. We hear of Diane Feinstein’s office, and Eric Swalwell’s office, being infiltrated by Chinese spies. We hear of huge numbers of Chinese spies present in the US. 

Joe Biden, as a longterm senator and then VP, on the left and not publicly predisposed to be anti-CCP, would have been an obviously worthwhile target. He must have been approached.

Biden has a reputation of being for sale. He has acquired a personal fortune in office. He has long been understood to be in the pocket of the insurance industry in his home state.

And we have direct evidence he is on the Chinese payroll, from his son’s laptop, confirmed by his son’s business partner.

I think Biden spoke with surprising openness when asked about China’s treatment of its Uyghurs at a recent town hall:

“So, the central -- to vastly overstate it, the central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China. And he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that. I point out to him, no American president can be sustained as a president if he doesn't reflect the values of the United States. And so the idea I'm not going to speak out against what he's doing in Hong Kong, what he's doing with the Uyghurs in western mountains of China, and Taiwan, trying to end the One-China policy by making it forceful, I said -- by the way, he said he gets it.

Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow.”

He is excusing the Uyghur genocide as “different cultural norms.” And he seems to have assured Xi Jinping that his opposition to the genocide or to the Hong Kong takeover is purely pro forma, to satisfy public opinion. It does not reflect his own views, and he is not actually going to do anything.

The same attitude could have maintained good relations with Hitler in 1938. Biden sees himself as fundamentally on the same side as Xi, and essentially in opposition to the US population. They must just be kept quiet so business can be done.

If China owns Joe Biden, who else have they bought? 

Justin Trudeau probably need not have been bought. He looks to me like what Lenin used to call a “useful idiot,” with delusions of glamour about Communism. On the other hand, Trudeau has shown himself to be buyable by others. And his actions towards China seem contrary to good sense and Canadian interests. To be sure, his government has also been in conflict with China; but that seems to have been forced on him by the need to honour an extradition treaty with the US.

I suspect from their actions and public stances that China has down payments as well on President Duterte of the Philippines, and President Moon of South Korea.

Nobody in China goes in through the front door. Everything has a back door.

The US, or Britain, or someone, ought to be smart enough to buy Xi Jinping.

Work of Human Hands

 

These are the words of consecration at the mass:

“the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.

“the wine we offer you: fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink.”

I suddenly realize it is significant that the bread and wine have two sources: nature plus human effort. This is their essential nature, and this is why they are the things we consecrate.

They are works of art, in the proper sense: they are co-productions of God and man.

This is the divine plan of salvation: God made the natural world to be perfected by man in art. God offers each of us grace and salvation, and it is up to us to respond and to work with it, as in the creation of art.

This is the contrast between the wine of the Eucharist, and the apple of Eden.

We are saved by art—not just the fine arts, but by every craft and skill. We are made, in Genesis, to be gardeners. We are made out of red clay by Yahweh, as a pot is made, and made in his image—to be potters. We are to imitate Christ--and Christ was a carpenter.

Through each work of art, we are building the New Jerusalem.

Wild in the Senate Chamber

 

Many are celebrating the acquittal of Donald Trump in his Senate trial. Others, of course, are lamenting it.

I am more shocked that 57 Senators could vote for a conviction. The only practical result of a conviction would have been to prevent Trump from running in the next election. That would be irrelevant unless the Democrats believed he had a real chance of getting re-elected. In other words, their intent was to subvert the will of the people, to subvert democracy. To deny the entire population the right to vote.

This was an attempted coup.

It was also a blatant assault on freedom of speech. Trump was being tried for something he said, and for campaign rhetoric. Besides the issue of human rights, freedom of speech is necessary, as John Stuart Mill demonstrated, to have a functioning democracy. This is why no representative can be sued for slander, for example, for anything they say on the floor of the House of Commons. It is essential that political speech by elected officials be unrestricted. Unless all views are heard, the people are not being allowed a choice.

This was an attempted coup, shameless and in broad daylight. It was an attempt to overturn the constitution of the United States, and its system of government. The regrettable January 6 incident, whoever was responsible, was not.

And this attempted coup in the Senate came alarmingly close to succeeding. With alarmingly little objection from anyone.

Thinking Way Too Far Ahead

 

Possible Republican contenders for presidency in 2024:

Donald Trump. The Republicans make a grave error if they turn away from Trump. If they do, his followers will stay home or form a new party. He is their best shot.

He may, on the other hand, not be up to it after four more years. If so, the ideal contender for the leadership of the Trump faction is Jared Kushner. His involvement in the Abrahamic Accords has demonstrated his ability; he would not just be a Trump surrogate or dynastic successor. And he comes with Ivanka.

There are other possible contenders for the Trump crown: Mike Pompeo, any of Trump’s children; but only one of this group can run. The advantage this faction has is that they will probably only run one of their number; the others will stand down, ensuring a strong showing in the early primaries. If any of them ran against the Trump-backed candidate on their own, they would lose all support for doing so.

If not Trump, there is a large constituency for another non-politician. Another populist candidate might convince people he could do a better job than Trump at draining the swamp, and that is the underlying source of Trump’s appeal. Politicians in general are in disrepute, and the just-concluded impeachment trial has accentuated this. 

This leaves a big opportunity for Tucker Carlson, who is sounding populist now; but I doubt he would want to give up his media position, which probably has more real power to change things. Or Kanye West, as another billionaire; but since he is reputedly crazy, and inexperienced in politics, he comes with a high risk of self-immolation. Other obvious billionaires lack Trumpiness—as Arnold Schwarzenegger discovered when he tried to replace the master on The Apprentice, or as Mike Bloomberg discovered in the Democratic primaries. Doing the in-command billionaire role is not that easy. Elon Musk might be able to do it, but Elon Musk has more important things to do with his genius. Candace Owens has hinted at interest in running; but I’m not sure she has the intellectual chops. I’ve seen her flat-footed in an interview. If it were my choice, I’d love to see Ben Shapiro.

Traditional and religious conservatives are another large constituency within the party. Trump and Trumpites are actually rather odd bedfellows for them. They ought by rights to coalesce around Mike Pence; but Pence may not be capable now of being a unifying figure within the party. He was unfairly blamed by Trump for accepting the Electoral College results, and if he has to run against Trump or a Trumpite in the primaries, this adversarial image will be reinforced.

Ted Cruz is another prominent possibility for the TRCs. He has kept on the good side of the Trump populists. The rap against him is that he is unlikeable. That stopped Bob Dole; it did not stop Richard Nixon. Other possibilities in this slot are Tom Cotton, Tim Scott, Josh Hawley. The problem here is that there are too many possible standard-bearers, and they are unlikely to step aside for one another. This may spread the TRC vote too thin in early primaries, and eliminate them all.

Then there is the libertarian wing of the party. They have an obvious leader in Rand Paul, who has also stayed on the good side of the Trump faction. Paul’s problem, to my mind, is that he sounds unpresidential, whiny. Cut out for opposition, not leadership. Someone has floated a unity ticket of Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard. Great idea, but probably not achievable, politics being the art of the possible,

Ron DeSantis as Governor of Florida is making waves these days. But sitting governors are sitting ducks; they have to govern, and bucks stop there when things go wrong. Andrew Cuomo has recently gone from Democrat star to Democrats demanding he resign. Kristi Noem has faded as COVID numbers have risen in her state. Chris Christie was supposed to be the odds-on favourite for the nomination in 2020--and then there was that bridge thing. Some governor may rise, but it is unpredictable four years in advance. 

Dan Crenshaw looks good, and charismatic. But he also seems too new and inexperienced.

What about the party stalwarts, the professionals, the guys who would have backed Jeb Bush last time? I think they have long had their eyes on Nikki Haley. I think Haley may have won their support, but killed her chances of becoming president, by coming out publicly against Trump recently. I don’t see the Republicans winning if they run against Trump instead of the Democrats.

My track record for predicting nominees has been awful. I called it for Jeb Bush last time, for Newt Gingrich the time before, for Rudy Giuliani the time before that. So don’t trust me on this. But I think the next Republican nominee will be Nigel Farage.

The Real Issue

 

Some years ago, on an email list populated by professionals, I came out as a fan of free markets. The immediate response was that I must be an objectivist, a Randite. And that, apparently, would have been okay. But when I insisted I was not, that her philosophy seemed to me immoral, I was suddenly shunned.

When the left shows itself so intolerant of the right, it is not “capitalism” or any sort of economic policy that bothers them. It is the hint of a moral order. This is why so much of leftist politics is about sex.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Art

 

This CBC Report is disturbing: the government of Canada is giving $19 million dollars to the families of missing indigenous women for works of art.

Even if we ignore the RCMP statistics, common sense tells us that murdered women and girls are relatively unlikely to have been murdered by random strangers. The likeliest suspect is a family member. Aside from such direct murders, girls vulnerable to murder by a stranger are most likely in that vulnerable position because they are trying to escape an abusive family situation. They are trying to “disappear” as a matter of survival. And of the rest, neglect or rejection by their family is most likely to have led them to be on those remote highways alone.

Indians, especially Indian youth, are being sacrificed by the Canadian government to twin idolatries: on the one hand, the myth of the “noble savage,” which holds that no Indian can be held morally responsible for their actions; and on the other, the myth of “family values,” which holds that all families are loving and supportive.

Rejecting the reports of the police, the federal government set up a commission that interviewed only family members of the missing women, in order to get to the “truth” about the missing women.

Great idea. Kind of like interviewing only OJ Simpson to get the “truth” about the death of his wife Nicole.

And OJ didn’t even get a painting out of it.

The Real Face of Racism

Woodrow Wilson, who wanted all states to be ethnically segregated. See his "Fourteen Points."

The left has recently redefined “racism” to mean any commitment to the founding principles of liberal democracy. Therefore, anyone who holds either conservative or liberal beliefs is “racist,” or “white supremacist.” Only Marxists or anarchists, apparently, are non-racist. And only if they are not themselves white.

Unfortunately, dictionaries can no longer be trusted on any political issues. They are now often altered in real time to reflect current usage, whatever it may be. Accordingly, Merriam-Webster now includes, as a possible definition of racism, “a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles.” Leftists can therefore argue that the US or Canada were “founded on racism”—supposedly, on slavery, on the unfair seizure of Indian lands--and everything since has accordingly been racism. Supporting the continuance of their systems of liberal democracy thus becomes “racism.” 

This attitude among the publishers of dictionaries, unfortunately, makes dictionaries useless. There is no point looking to them for correct usage: they are looking to you. And this ability to alter the language for political purposes also violates dire warnings left to us by Confucius and by Orwell. The meanings of words are subject to the memory hole.

Webster’s New World Dictionary still gives us the established definition. Quoted in full, racism means “Feelings or actions of hatred and bigotry toward a person or persons because of their race. Discrimination or prejudice based on race. Racism is a belief that one race is superior to the other or the practice of treating a person or group of people differently on the basis of their race.”

Given this definition, the modern left is racist. The political right is not, and I warrant has never been.

It is an old tactic to taunt the left that segregation in the US South was purely a Democratic Party project. It was; the Republicans freed the slaves. The left, however, can respond that “Democratic Party” does not correspond to “leftist”; that these were conservatives who happened then to be Democrats, and are now Republicans. 

But does this wash? The same people who supported segregation were solid supporters of FDR for four elections, with his program more or less defining the modern left. Who in the modern left is against the TVA? They, the segregationists, were almost the sole supporters of Al Smith before him, that supposed radical progressive, and before that solid supporters of Woodrow Wilson, commonly considered the godfather of modern “progressivism.” Wilson’s administration was largely responsible for the entire segregationist system at the federal level.

Indeed, racism was deeply embedded in the progressivism of the early twentieth century; one might even argue it was at the core. “Progressivism” was all about science, and injecting this new expertise into the business of government and social order. And one of science’s brilliant new discoveries was this matter of human races. At least, we could see the dawning of the millennium: the human race could now be genetically perfected. Eugenics was one of its cornerstones. Tommy Douglas wrote his thesis arguing for it. Chinese immigration, at the same time, was banned at the insistence of the labour unions. Immigration was unfair competition for the working class. Although its contents were rather ambiguous, as befits a politician, J.S. Woodsworth wrote a book with the provocative title “Strangers at our Gates.”

The left will counter with “But what about the Nazis? They were the ultimate racists, and they were on the right.”

But by what logic have the Nazis ever been placed on the right? They were, by their own account, socialist revolutionaries and progressives. The associated movement in the arts was called “futurism.” The claim seems based on only two things: that they considered the communists their chief rivals, and that they were racists.

The latter claim is tautological. In fact, the Nazis here were in the mainstream of the left in their day.

The Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for “racism.” The term was invented after the dictionary was compiled: it was invented in the early Twentieth Century—the era of the first “progressives.”

Until modern times, and the Marxist/progressive project of setting human society on a properly scientific foundation, mankind was not classified like animals into biological races, and so racism was not even a possibility. In this fundamental sense, the left invented racism. Conservatives would have found the notion alien. And liberals would have rejected it on the grounds of human equality.

It is true that there was discrimination before this period; there was slavery, for one thing. But this previous discrimination was generally on cultural or religious grounds, not on the basis of race. That might have been better or worse—but it was a different animal.

The founding principles of either Canada or the US are the opposite of racist. The Declaration of Independence declares that “all men are created equal,” and the Constitution guarantees “the equal protection of the laws.” The Canadian Constitution declares “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

These promises may or may not have been kept in any given instance, even on a large scale; but they are the system. Those who uphold and defend them, liberals and conservatives, are anti-racist. Those who object to them, Marxists, progressives, and anarchists, in wanting an alternative system, are racists.

The contemporary left aggressively promotes hatred and bigotry based on race: complaints of “white privilege” and overt hatred of “whites,” primarily; sometimes Asians; sometimes Jews. It sees people as groups, races, rather than individuals, and seeks to treat them as such. It demands unequal treatment based on race. This is the dictionary definition of racism.

The left is racist in its nature.

Scientism

 

A traditional unsympathetic portrait of the Qin emperor.

Most of the horrors of the modern world can be traced to scientism.

Do not misunderstand me; scientism is not science. But science is rarely heard from in popular culture. Scientism is the pseudo-religion that considers science the source of meaning and reality. It is the dominant faith of our age, and its consequences are profoundly destructive. Not least to science.

When people claim that doubting climate change is “anti-science,” or that “the science is settled” on any given issue, this is scientism, not science.  True science is based on skepticism and taking nothing on authority. Science makes no truth claims; it is a method of inquiry, not a set of dogmas. 

Besides the damage to science, scientism is, for example, the foundation of all racism. If we can agree that racism is a problem, rejecting scientism is the way to solve it. Before science sought to classify humans as if they were animals, the concept of race did not exist. The ancient Romans, or the Medieval Christians, knew nothing of race, and would have considered it as senseless to discriminate against someone due to their skin colour as due to their hair colour or eye colour. This is why both Roman citizenship and Christian baptism was open to all, without discrimination of birth.

Marxism, and all the mass murders it has produced, is also based on scientism. Marxism wanted to reduce all human life to material, and scientific, terms. It defined itself as “scientific socialism,” and was and is, of course, aggressively atheist. People were merely objects, means rather than ends.

Nazism is also directly based on scientism—it is Darwinism applied to the human species.

Everything we today experience as “mental illness” can, I think, also be attributed to scientism, which strips the world of its meaning. It is a striking fact that, before Freud, “mental illness,” melancholy, was generally considered transitory and curable. Now it is multiplying like an epidemic, and is incurable in all its forms. It is still highly curable in non-Western societies.

A Chinese student of mine, without anything being assigned, chose to write and submit an essay arguing for the need for society to support the Humanities. This looks to me like an appeal: Chinese schools and universities, like those in the old Soviet Bloc, do not teach the Humanities. There are no Humanities departments. There are only the STEM fields, and Marxist ideology.

She contends in her essay that this is why the Soviet Bloc fell—history shows, she writes, that any society that neglects the Humanities must fall in time. She cites, along with Eastern Europe, an earlier example from Chinese history, the Qin Dynasty. The Qin unified China in 221 BC under the banner of “legalism,” which emphasized social order as the only value. Books were collected and burned. 

The dynasty lasted only 15 years. It collapsed as the leaders, guided by no principle but power, began executing one another.

A point we are coming to, I fear, in our current societies. Humanities give us morals and meaning. Without the Humanities, there is no “why.” 

My student is not alone in her perception that scientism is a fatal flaw. When the Berlin Wall fell, the new democratic regimes of Eastern Europe thought the same, and sent their academics to the West to bring back knowledge of the Humanities.

Sadly, they discovered that the West, too, had largely abandoned them, in everything but name. Instead they had themselves been concocting and distilling the poisoned Kool-Ade of scientism. 

It has only gotten worse since.

Now the West seems to be falling apart, just as China is falling apart; from the same poison.

The difference is perhaps that there are more people in China who realize the problem. Chinese culture may recover first.