On Not Being a Poet

"A poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence"--John Keats

I recently attended a public reading by a quite well-established Canadian poet.

It made me depressed. Which is not the effect one gets from art.

To my mind, there was nothing there. I heard only prose, and pedestrian reflections on one man’s daily life. No sound qualities, no vivid images, no deep thought.

It showed the derelict, debilitated state of poetry now. It was not poetry at all, and the somewhat celebrated poet was not a poet.

Reminds me of something Yeats said: “You can either live the life of a poet, or be a poet. You can’t do both.”

Like most contemporary poets, this man was a self-promoter, a marketer, not a poet. Good at dropping names. And that seems pretty much what “poetry” has become. The marketers have driven out the poets.

Don’t misunderstand me. He seemed to be a nice personable guy, enjoyable to be around. Fun to have a beer with, no doubt helpful and encouraging to others. Like any good salesman. It is a legitimate skill, and admirable in its own way. But it is incompatible with poetry.

People are driven to poetry because they have, in some way, been silenced. Because they cannot otherwise say what they need to say. The thing that must be said then develops force and power, like steam in a boiler, and comes out as verse. 

Anyone who is garrulous and talkative is already habitually saying whatever is on their minds. There is no force left over for poetry. What they present as poetry is just more of their usual pedestrian thoughts, without art.

And it is all about them. The focus is on being a poet, not the poem. Which is killing the craft.

You reveal yourself as a poet because you speak little. Poets live with silence, and every poem is ripped out screaming.

A poet must also always tell the truth, painful as it may be, to themselves or others. Without truth there is no beauty. A poet is a prophet. A good salesman, by contrast, says whatever they think the audience wants to hear. 

The two approaches are incompatible from the womb.

What we commonly call poetry now is essentially the opposite of poetry.

In the end, what makes me most depressed about the evening is the thought that this man has wasted his life. He has invested his identity entirely in being a poet. And he was never a poet, and could never be a poet. What could be sadder than seeing someone who has lived his whole life as a lie? And, not having any sense of poetry, he probably has no idea.

On Calling an Indian an Indian

 

Can you spot the racial slur?

A correspondent asserts that the term “Indian” is derogatory. This is indeed a common view; but I hold it is arbitrary and nonsensical.

If, after all, the term is derogatory, it should be offensive to use it to refer to the natives of the Indian subcontinent. Which nobody holds it to be.  If you consider the same term offensive when used on or by one group, but not offensive when used on or by another group, the problem is not with the term. It is with you: you are treating people differently on the basis of race. You are a racist.

The original concern with the term is that it is supposedly inaccurate—Columbus supposedly mistakenly thought he had reached India, and declared the land the “West Indies.” This does not make it derogatory, any more than mistakenly calling an Australian an Austrian would cause offense.

But even this objection to the term is actually wrong. The very term “West Indies” shows Columbus did not think he was in the subcontinent—that was the East. The people of the Philippines were also referred to in Columbus’s time as “Indians.” So were Malaysians, and Indonesians, the Arabs in the Middle East, and the people of sub-Saharan Africa. “Indian” meant roughly what we currently mean by “native.” If “Indian” is offensive, then so is “native,” or “aboriginal,” or “indigenous.” Or “First Nations.”

Another objection is that it presents the misleading impression that all Indian cultures were similar, when in fact they were widely diverse. One should instead say “Innu,” or “Dogrib,” and so on. But if this objection is valid, it applies equally to the terms “white,” “Caucasian,” “Asian,” “European,” or “African,” all of which are common and not considered derogatory.

Is it objectionable because it is a term from English, and not from a native Indian language? But this is the same for all other  groups, and all other languages. “Irish” is not the term in Irish for the Irish: “Greek” is not the term in Greek for the Greeks; “English” is not the term in Korean for the English; and so on. English, like any language, has its own terms for various groups.

So what are we to call this group of people?

As it happens, “Indian” is, in both the US and Canada, the proper legal term. Unlike any other term, it has a clear legal definition. It is therefore the correct and precise term; who or what counts as “First Nation,” or “aboriginal,” or the like, is ambiguous and open to dispute. “Indian” is also commonly and historically used by Indians themselves, as in the “American Indian Movement.”

So why does anyone object to the term “Indian”? It is only a bit of academic snobbery, of cant or jargon, showing you are a member of an in-group who “knows better” than to use the common and familiar term.

A good writer and a good editor should resist and discourage all such cant and jargon. Given that writing is communication, we should always prefer the common and the most accurate term.

How We Know Christianity Is Truth

I recently attended the introductory session of the Alpha course. The Alpha course is making waves in the Christian sphere; it is a course of videos and discussions for those sniffing around on the fringes of faith. Developed by an Anglican pastor, but non-denominational in tone, on the “mere Christianity” model of C.S. Lewis. And this session was so well attended, the organizers were trying to turn people away, suggesting they come instead for the next session, expected some time this winter.

Bad advice, I suspect. I suspect that one will be even better attended. The change has begun.

However, I was troubled by the tone of the introductory video. It kept citing scientists to establish the credibility of Christianity. “I’m an established scientist, and when I looked at the evidence…” “Look at all the well-known scientists who were Christians.”

This might make some kind of evangelical sense, talking to people where they are now--materialists. But to my mind it concedes the game before the start of play. If you are using scientists to establish the credibility of Christianity, your religion is scientism, the worship of science as the font of all truth, not Christianity. This is upside down. There is a reason science emerged in Christian Europe, not elsewhere.

Science, for all its usefulness, cannot establish truth. Every claim it makes is provisional. Because its method is inductive, even its strongest claims might be disproven tomorrow by some “black swan event.” And they commonly are. I am old enough to know that much of what I was taught in high school science classes is now held by science itself to be wrong. We were told the world faced an overpopulation crisis. We were told a new ice age was imminent. We were told the world was about to run out of oil, and water, and food. We were told there was no such thing as continents moving, as continental drift. It was mere coincidence that the coastline of Africa seemed to match the coastline of South America like jigsaw pieces. We were told that the human embryo in the womb looked just like a lizard, and this proved evolution. We were told eggs were bad for our health. We were told to get as much sun as we could, and many of us got skin cancer as a result. My grandmother was told to take up smoking for her health. 

If it was all wrong then, and all wrong fifty years earlier, and all wrong fifty years before that, how can we assume it is all right at this point?

Moreover, science relies on prior assumptions: that our sense perceptions correspond in some consistent way to real objects external to us. That everything, including our memories, did not come into existence five minutes ago. That we are humans who dreamt last night we were butterflies, not butterflies dreaming right now we are humans. That the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

Moreover, as arbiters of truth, scientists, as illusionists from Houdini to the Amazing Randi have often demonstrated, are naturally gullible and easy to mislead by appearances—because that is what they go by.

Science also depends on strict adherence to ethical standards by scientists—not faking their data, not logrolling their friends, not injecting their own interests or preferences. Yet science itself eschews moral education; it scoffs at moral concerns. How can we trust scientists?

My faith therefore does not rely on any scientific approach to “the evidence.” This includes the evidence for the resurrection, which Alpha seems to emphasize as critical, as does William Lane Craig. 

If I remember it correctly, I believe the video misstates that either the resurrection or the life of Jesus is the single best-corroborated event in history. There are certainly many more recent events for which there is more evidence. We obviously have more evidence, for example, that John Kennedy was assassinated, or that an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It is, rather, the best-established event in ancient history. 

But that is still not enough on which to build a firm faith. That Is also, in principle, vulnerable to a “black swan” event. Suppose tomorrow someone excavated the corpse of Jesus? Such a faith is at best provisional.

My faith is based on the one hand on the dozen compelling logical arguments that God exists. Indeed, I would go further and assert that the existence of God is a self-evident truth. If many deny it, I hold that they are doing so on emotional, not rational, grounds. They are like Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes, imagining God could not find them there. People often do not WANT God to exist.

If one retreats from the world and meditates on this silently, the truth becomes obvious.

Given that God exists, by his nature, He would not hide himself from us. He would give us clear guidance. He would reveal himself to us in some way. Where?

Logically, in Christianity and in the Bible, on the grounds that that is the theological and cosmological system most directly available to the most people over the longest time. God would put the solution as much as possible in plain sight.

But in terms of my actual conversion to Catholicism, this was not the key. To be clear, I was raised Catholic. However, from about age 15 to 17, I considered myself an atheist. I was not prepared, nor should anyone in good conscience be, to simply accept something as truth without examination, because you were told so by your parents or your school or your culture or those around you.

What made me realize Christianity was truth was the Sermon on the Mount. I suddenly saw these words as both perfectly true, and not obvious, not mere truisms anyone could say. Indeed, they went directly against what I had been taught as “true.” Apart from any “evidence,” of this or that event or name, somebody said these words originally, and whoever did was unquestionably God incarnate, truth incarnate.

“He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.” (John 10: 3-4)

I recognized the voice. And I suspect this is the way true conversion must happen. 

The Protest in Liberation Square

I have been invited by a musician friend to join a protest “against injustice, fossil fuels and the billionaires that fund them.”

“We refuse to stand by while the government and Canada's richest corporations hoard wealth, gut our public services, fuel climate collapse, attack migrants, exploit Indigenous lands, and prop up a genocide in Palestine.”

“Climate justice, migrant justice, economic justice, Indigenous rights, and anti-war movements are uniting to prove them wrong.”

Their list of demands follows: “fund our families and communities.” “Refuse ongoing colonialism. Uphold indigenous sovereignty.” “Stop blaming migrants. Demand full immigration status for all now.” “End the war machine.” “End the era of fossil fuels. Protect Mother Earth.”

It seems an oddly random set of concerns, and vague demands, with a lack of specifics. Which makes me think the main impetus here is tribalism: “virtue signalling.” Or rather, an abdication of responsibility for the problems of the world. It is all the fault of governments and big corporations, and it is up to the governments and the rich corporations, not me, to fix it.

I do not believe the government of Canada is hoarding wealth. Quite the reverse: they are running an annual deficit, and there is a large public debt. 

If a corporation is hoarding wealth rather than reinvesting or distributing it to shareholders, I think this is bad, but it is a matter for their shareholders to deal with. I don’t think they need me to step in and protect their interests. 

Presumably it is the government, and not rich corporations, that are gutting our public services. But money does not come from nowhere; that is a childish thought. If money is being taken out of some public service, is it going to some better use elsewhere? One needs to consider both ides of that equation.

I do not see either the government or rich corporations attacking migrants. The government is inviting them into the country in unprecedented numbers, and the corporations are accused of exploiting this for cheap labour.

I do not see either the government or rich corporations exploiting indigenous lands; although perhaps this hinges on what you consider to be indigenous lands. If you hold that all Canada is indigenous land, then of course any land use in Canada is “exploiting indigenous lands.” But economic development, exploitation of resources, is a good thing, if you are on the side of humanity.

Legally, and morally, “indigenous land” means land the title of which is held by some indigenous person, or on behalf of some tribe or band—the reserves. Are there examples of exploitation here without permission or compensation? If so, I am opposed. But I would need to hear specifics.

As to “propping up genocide in Palestine”—there are several issues here. To begin with, is there a genocide in Palestine? Is the IDF trying to wipe out the Gazan Arabs? Or is this a war against Hamas, or a suppression of a terrorist group? If it is a genocide, the obvious immediate solution would be to open the Egyptian border to Gazan refugees. If that is not the proposed solution, I must suspect some ulterior motive. And that the Gazan Arabs are considered expendable.

The next question is whether Canada is propping up the Israelis. We send no foreign aid. We sell them weapons; which actually means they are funding us. The Canadian government announced in March 2024 an embargo on arms shipments to Israel; although this seems not to have been honoured.

“Fund our families and communities”? But government funds come from our families and communities. The solution is to leave the funds with them in the first place. Again, there seems a childish assumption that money just comes from nowhere.

“Refuse ongoing colonialism. Uphold indigenous sovereignty.” It is an interesting idea: this would mean each reserve declaring independence, and running their own affairs. But if it was racist in South Africa with their bantustans, if it was racist in the US South with segregation, surely it is racist in Canada now. And I doubt any of these tiny countries would be economically viable without outside subsidy.

“Demand full immigration status for all now.” But this is an obvious injustice: why should this particular group of people be allowed free entry into Canada, above others who might want to come? 

Or is the proposal just to open the borders and let anyone in? This is incompatible with having a social safety net. The incentive to immigrate will be far greater for those wanting or needing public assistance. Other countries might outsource all their problems, all their antisocial or indigent residents, to Canada. And other countries might even try to take us over by simple force of demographics, as the US took Texas from Mexico, or Morocco seized the former Spanish Sahara.

“End the war machine.” Canada is conspicuous for how little it spends on defence; we are in trouble in our alliances because of it. And when was the last time Canada started a war? The military industrial complex is probably the least of our worries.

“End the era of fossil fuels. Protect Mother Earth.” Here I must recoil. “Mother Earth” is obvious idolatry. Nor does Earth need protecting from us. We could not destroy it if we wanted to. The worst we could do is destroy ourselves.

There is an argument that there is something wrong with fossil fuels, other than that they will run out. The idea is that burning anything produces carbon dioxide; carbon dioxide causes global warming; global warming is a bad thing on balance. This seems to me a slender thread; there are more pressing things to worry about. And what is your solution? Even if fossil fuels cause global warming, and global warming is bad, there is nothing any one government or rich corporation can do about it. If Canada were to ban the burning of fossil fuels altogether, manufacturing would simply move to China, or India, or whatever country allowed it. If any corporation stopped using them, they would just lose their competitiveness and go out of business to some rival. The only solution is improved technology that makes some other energy source more economical. 

I have perhaps gone into too much detail; I feel these things are obvious. But obviously not to everyone.

Both Sides?

 

Someone has done a bit of research.

Everybody Knows...

 That the left is the party of violence.

On Right-Wing "Cancel Culture"

"Dead Rabbits" riot in NYC.

The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?

This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it?

If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.

Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.

Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.

The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?

This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it?

If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.

Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.

Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.

The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about? 

This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it? 

If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.

Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.

Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.

The Underlying Reality of the Current Moment

The murders of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska still physically sicken me. But this morning I have a new sense of calm. This was the last lunge of a dying beast. Charlie was killed because he won the debate. There may be further violence, we cannot let down our guard, but we are now in the mopping-up phase..

The trans movement is dead.

Materialism is dead.

Scientism is dead.

Islamism is dead.

Multiculturalism is dead.

Climate change is dead.

The powers and principalities of this world are in panic.

The materialist demons who inspired Iryna's murderer are in panic.

Christianity has won; or Judeo-Christianity.

The culture war is won. 

The evil is exposed, and the majority is repulsed by it. And we know who the ultimate baddies are now. There is moral clarity.

The Narcissists Speak

 

The audio conversation between the killer of Iryna Zarutska and his sister is available online. And it is striking that the killer shows no remorse. If he really did it in a fit of insanity, he should now be deeply remorseful for the poor innocent woman. Instead, he is concerned that the government must figure out what alien material is in his body that made him do this. The death of another human being just does not matter.

The killer of Charlie Kirk too showed no remorse in messages sent after the assassination. He was joking about it with his friends. No concern, even if he really thought Kirk’s views were dangerous, that innocent children had been left without a father. No sense of what the loss of Charlie Kirk might mean to the many who followed him.

And the same is alarmingly true for many people who have been openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. Somebody is compiling a growing list of 50,000 who did so online. You have probably seen this yourself.

Can you imagine people celebrating openly when JFK was shot? Did anyone celebrate openly when MLK was shot? When John Lennon was shot? Even when Mussolini died, Churchill condemned the killing.

Something has changed.

What has changed is an epidemic of narcissism. There are a lot of them; now we see this plainly. They see other people as no more than objects. Only their own feelings matter. They have no empathy for anyone else.

The good news is, these events, the killings of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, are revealing them to us, and the general public sees what they are. And, even better, in many cases there has been instant pushback: people are losing their jobs and being ostracized for this.

Yes, this is “cancel culture”; but turnabout is fair play. It is reminiscent of the turning against Robespierre and the Jacobins in Revolutionary France.

The Motive Behind the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

I had been puzzled over the motive behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination. There was no sign of mental illness. There was no prior criminal record. The assassin was not some desperate loser like Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan whose only hope of fame was to kill someone famous. This guy had been an A student. Why did he kill Charlie Kirk?

Now it makes sense.

It turns out he had been living with a trans lover. Now it makes sense. He was necessarily part of the “LGBTQ community; although he was probably not sure himself which letter properly referred to himself. His “trans” “partner” initiated him into the trans ideology, and he had to embrace it to be in that relationship. And the trans ideology is in effect extreme narcissism: the idea that one’s personal will must override biology, mut override physical reality itself. This is in effect an assumption of godlike powers, the right to control reality. 

God naturally also has the right to kill; God kills all of us, after all, sooner or later. As God, the assassin could kill or destroy anyone who stood in his way.

Charlie Kirk denied he had the right or ability to control the world. So Charlie Kirk had to die.

Transgenderism is endemic in the culture now because he conviction that you are God is endemic in the culture now. A recent Facebook post--from a close acquaintance and in a sense a friend!-- expressed the common New Age sentiment. I encounter it at least monthly, it not daily, in Canada. I quote:

“We are divinity itself…we are here to take FULL responsibility for Ourselves, we are the ones we've been waiting for, we are here to save Ourselves…We are the manifestations of Source expressing and experiencing itself in the form of Infinite Many-ness. We are already ‘That.’ … There is no God outside of you. It is nonsense to worship that with you are a literal living, breathing expression of... It's a mind control program propagated to keep the masses feeling less then, keeping them disempowered and continuously beLIEving that ‘God’ or ‘the power’ is ‘out there’ - It's all nonsense, tools of control.”

Here is a whiff here of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: “tat tvam asi,” “Brahman-atman.” But Vedantic Hinduism has been mostly superseded in India itself by devotional Hinduism: it has over the centuries lost the competition of ideas even there. It is of course incompatible with Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; and with Buddhism. 

And with Western paganism.

This is the sin the ancient Greeks called “hubris”: thinking you are a god. Bad news: it leads inevitably to madness and disaster on a social scale. It was also a crime in Athenian law; it was understood to lead automatically to the abuse of others. 

It is moreover the original sin with which Satan tempts Eve: “when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And it is Lucifer’s own original sin. From this sin all other sin emerges.

It is also an untenable claim. As Descartes pointed out in his Meditations, it is immediately obvious to us that it is false.

“If I were independent of every other existence, and were myself the author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing, and, in fine, no perfection would be wanting to me; for I should have bestowed upon myself every perfection of which I possess the idea, and I should thus be God.”

And this, however much the narcissist might wish it, is transparently not so. We know we do not know everything; we know we make mistakes. We know we cannot fly. We know things happen to us that are unexpected, even against our will. 

Hence the inevitable retreat into bitterness, anger, depression, and hostility towards the universe. And to violence towards others.

There is another emotional issue with the belief that we are God: it leaves us alone in the universe. I recall Ramakrishna’s emotional objection to monism: “I want to taste sugar. I don’t want to BE sugar.” There is no possibility of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which is the entire point of existence. God is love, and now there is no one to love, and so no love, and no God.

We must pull out of this tailspin. 

The Tell-Tale Heart

 

I am not a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To me, his writing is over the top—fear-jerking, cheap thrills.

But I just went through “The Tell-Tale Heart” with a student, and I think Poe may have a lead here on the true nature and cause of what modern psychiatry calls “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

In the story, the narrator is driven to psychosis by a guilty conscience. And not only guilt over murdering an old; he murders the old man in the first place out of guilt. A bad conscience made him imagine the old man saw into his soul and was judging him.

Poe does not tell us what he feels guilty about in the first place; but the clue is his insistence throughout the tale that he is not mad. He is more concerned about this than about being convicted of murder—he is resisting the obvious insanity defense. Why?

Out of pride. It is literally vitally important to him to convince the reader that his version of reality is the correct one. He must have the ability to impose his will on reality, and not concede to it.

In other words, a schizophrenic is a narcissist overwhelmed by his guilty conscience.

This is consistent with a mystery I read of a long time ago, in a book about Florida’s “death row.” It claimed that virtually everyone on death row seemed fully insane, delusional. Even though they were all judged sane and able to stand trial when they were convicted. And this included contract killers, mob killers—people who did it professionally, as a job. It seems implausible that such people were psychotic at the time they committed their crimes; a psychotic cannot plan well enough for a mob hit. 

Possibly the fear of death drove them mad; but most of us see death coming at the end of our lives, and do not go mad expecting it. It seems more likely the psychosis was provoked by having the chance to meditate over their former deeds.

M. Scott Peck, and Robert Fleiss, have both observed that narcissists when challenged can become psychotic. After all, their everyday assumptions, if examined closely, are already delusional. They all secretly think they are better than everyone, a Napoleon, or the god Siva, or the virgin Mary, or the promised Messiah. They will delude themselves with ideas of their own exceptional talents: like Poe’s narrator boasting of his extremely sensitive hearing, and of how clever he was in how he committed the murder and hid the body. This is how narcissists talk.

Shake them up enough, and the mask they wear to hide these assumptions from others slips. They openly declare themselves Napoleon, or Siva, or the Virgin Mary.

Paranoia comes with schizophrenia. Paranoia is itself a clear expression of egotism. It is the belief that everything is about you. Someone on the television is speaking directly to you. The CIA is trying to control you—obviously, they consider you that important. Everything is a message for you personally.

This is all the opposite of depression, which is caused by a sense of inferiority.

But in either case, the obvious and necessary cure is the same: to bring God and submission to God into the mix. 

The Murder of Charlie Kirk

In the face of the death of Charlie Kirk, I am consoled by the ancient saying, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church”; and by the more modern saying, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." 

Some fear this will make public discourse impossible; and America will of necessity dissolve into general violence. 

I am hopeful that, instead, this might be the tipping point beyond which no decent person will admit to being on the woke left. The moral high ground counts for everything; and the left has now lost it decisively. 

I see signs of this. MSNBC fired their analyst Matthew Dowd within hours for commenting on air that Kirk deserved to die for his supposed “hate speech.” And they issued a public apology. U of T professor Ruth Marshall posted on social media “Shooting is honestly too good for so many of you fascist c–ts.” And has already been placed on leave.

Whether the left has developed a conscience or not, businesses know how their bread is buttered. They have belatedly gotten the message that the public mood has changed. They have learned the lesson of Bud Light, Disney, Target, and Cracker Barrel. Nobody wants to be next.

And the fact that some leftist has resorted to murder shows that Kirk won the argument. So they had to silence him. But did this work with Martin Luther King? Mahatam Gandhi? Socrates? Jesus Christ?

When they fight you, then you win.

I suspect that, two years from now, nobody will admit to ever having been “woke” or voting for Kamala Harris.

The Murder of Iryna Zarutska

Although barely being mentioned by the US legacy media, the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte LRT is all over the internet. This is because it resonates with the moment; it is deeply symbolic. It is of a piece, I think, with the current violent uprising against the government in Nepal. Ordinary people have had enough, and are ready to rise against wokery in all its forms. It is about being fed up with censorship and government propaganda and misinformation and suppressing the truth. The video of the innocent white woman suddenly being stabbed to death by a black man, unprovoked, expresses visually and incontrovertibly something we have all known to be true, but forbidden to say, for years.

Anti-white racism is the real problem. 

Beyond that, government contemptuous of and hostile to the common people is the real problem.

The one point I would add to the ferment is that this is not about mental health. The lame common excuse that the killer was let down by the system in not being given “help” is diabolically wrong.

Stop and think for a moment. Claiming that mental illness leads to violence is a grave slander against the mentally ill. They suffer enough already. It is like saying lepers are violent, or cancer victims are violent.

It also denies them the dignity of human agency. It excuses all attempts to control them and ignore their concerns. It treats them as lesser beings. It might even eventually excuse their extermination.

The mentally ill are no more violent, statistically, than the general population.

Moreover, whenever it is revealed that this or that killer is mentally ill, this also reveals that they have been through the system, in order to have that diagnosis. They have already been given whatever “help” the mental health system has to offer. The problem is that the mental health system does not know how to help; throwing more money after it is money wasted.

And as a matter of simple justice, the mentally ill must be held responsible for violent actions against others. Otherwise it is easy for anyone of malicious mind to use this as cover. It is like saying “the devil made me do it.” It is an abdication of responsibility, and in itself is gravely immoral. This is why, historically, the Church has resisted most claims of demonic possession. 

The devil can tempt; he cannot force you to do the thing. You still have your own conscience and judgement.

I can imagine someone hallucinating that they are being attacked by aliens or devils or other hostile forces and needing to defend themself. I can see this happening if police advance on a schizophrenic, for example, with their uniforms and their weapons; or doctors or male nurses in white coats. 

But that cannot be maintained in this case. The poor woman was sitting there minding her own business. The killer felt malice, and acted on malice.

His presumed insanity is no defense.

Solving the Health-Care Crisis

The Commonwealth Fund’s annual health policy survey has ranked Canada very poorly among 31 high-income countries with universal health care for timely access to services.

How to fix our health-care crisis?

The obvious first move is to abandon the odd political shibboleth that we must not permit private care. “No two-tier health care.” Why not? Canada is the only universal-care country that severely restricts private options. In Britain, the rich are publicly shamed if they resort to the public system.

As a practical matter, the Canadian rich currently often head down to the States for private care. This is an unnecessary travel expense for them, and it drains money from the Canadian economy.  Better to let private firms set up in Canada. The rich will be able to “jump the queue,” but as a result, the queue will be shorter for everyone. To object is mere self-destructive envy.

Then if a privately-run clinic or hospital can provide a service for less than the public system does, as may well be the case, the government plan too should cover the private option. 

Most of what doctors do, however, is diagnosis, and prescribing pills. AI can already diagnose and prescribe more accurately than a human doctor. Accordingly, we need much less training than we currently demand for a medical doctor; all we really need is basic computer competence. We need nurses, dispensing pharmacists, and technicians to run the diagnostic machines. We do not really need doctors.

We should also institute a nominal fee, a deductible, for a doctor or hospital visit, to discourage unnecessary use: say $5.

And we should not cover unnecessary non-health procedures like sex changes or abortions.

What God Asks of Us

 

Great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and addressed them, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion? Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work the onlookers should laugh at him and say, ‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’ Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. In the same way, anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”

This was the Gospel reading at today’s mass.

The priest began his sermon by assuring us that salvation is a free gift, we were ransomed by the cross, and we need only trust in Jesus to be saved.

It seems to me he was deliberately speaking against the Bible passage. No doubt he feared it would not go down well with the congregation.

But you don’t get to ignore or contradict the Bible.

The Catholic church holds that we cannot achieve salvation by our own merits; this much is true. But that does not mean everyone gets into heaven. Otherwise, what is the point of the created world? Why not just have us all born into heaven?

This world has to be a time of trial, as the Bible says here.

Following Jesus does not just mean a verbal acknowledgement, “I believe in God,” or “I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savoir.” That is meaningless; that “Jesus” or “God” is just a word.

You must “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Here is an analogy suggested by John Lennox: compare loving your wife. Your commitment to your wife is profound, according to the Bible and the marriage vows. You must put her above your father and mother, your brothers and sisters, your birth family. You must stay with her in sickness or in health, for richer or for poorer, in old age, when she is no longer physically attractive to you. You must put your life on the line if necessary to protect her; you must eschew all others until death do you part. That is the vow you make.

Your commitment to God must be at least as strong as this, or you are not loving him with your whole heart.

It follows that you must be prepared to lose everything for his sake; for the sake of our relationship with him.

And you had better think carefully of this at the outset, just as you had better enter marriage with a serious intent.

This is the import of the passage in the Lord’s Prayer that Pope Francis seems not to have understood, and objected to: “Lead us not into temptation.” 

It is our plea that God not demand all this of us, as he did of Jesus, or of Job, to test our love.

But he often will, perhaps especially if he cares enough about us.

Man the Creator

 Julia James Davis argues that men are better creative artists than women; and her argument makes sense. I just dare not make it as a man. Moreover, it seems objectively true. Most great artists are men.

As she points out, this is no more remarkable than that most great athletes are men. The male body is different from the female body; the male mind is different from the female mind. 

Men are creative; women are receptive. 

Art must express truth to be great. Female artists generally lack a sense of truth, and express only prettiness. Their art tends to be decorative.

Dysfunctional Governments and Dysfunctional Families

The majority of world governments are dysfunctional. They promote lies, mass delusions, propaganda, to their people. They do not respect human dignity and human rights. They do not practice social justice—that is, merit is not reliably rewarded. 

In my youth, there was the Soviet sphere, and the Third Word, and only a rough third of the world was “free.” and free of corruption to a dysfunctional level. It might seem that things have improved since the fall of the Soviet bloc; but it seems to me that things have been getting worse quickly in some of the supposedly “freest” countries: Canada, the UK, France, Australia, Germany. And until the modern era, there were no or almost no “free” countries. All governments were dysfunctional.

The Gospel warns of this: the Devil is the prince of “this world.” Government is better than no government, but government is given over to Satan.

The great value of studying history is that there you see the human truths writ large. The state is a proxy for the family; which is why we speak of “patriotism”—from the word “pater,” “father.”

So the lesson of history and politics is that most families, similarly, are dysfunctional. They promote shared delusions; they are not nurturing; they do not reward merit.

By my reading of the Old Testament, the inevitable failure of the family is the conduit for original sin: “the sins of the father are visited on the sons unto the fourth generation.” All the families of the patriarchs are obviously dysfunctional. Abraham abandons his son Ishmael, and is ready to slaughter his son Isaac. Isaac plays favourites between Jacob and Esau. Jacob plays favourites between Joseph and his brothers. Lot sleeps with his daughters. Noah curses his son Ham. Eve tempts her husband Adam into sin. The Bible is making a point, if subtly. Let those who have eyes to see, see.

Richard Mackenzie, who grew up in an orphanage, thought his own childhood without a family had been pleasant enough. And he became a successful economist. So he decided to investigate, using the economist’s toolset. What did he find out?

“Alumni [of orphanages] reported that they had done better than the general population on almost all measures, including education, income, attitude toward life, criminal records, psychological problems, unemployment, dependence on welfare, and happiness…. The alumni reported that they had an overall college graduation rate 39 percent higher than the general population in their age group … They also reported 10 to 60 percent higher median incomes than those in their age cohort. ”

Twice as many said they were satisfied with their own lives, and twice as many felt they had achieved “the American Dream.” 

Shocking? But that was the data. 

Accordingly, associating Christian values with “family values” seems diabolical. Just as we should not idolize the state, we should not idolize the family.

The Roots of Madness

 

NB Provincial Asylum before demolition.

I have been reading a history of the New Brunswick Provincial Mental Asylum.

A mental patient committed in 1868 kept a diary. In it, he classified fellow inmates as falling into three groups:

“Those that had become crazy about religion…others that had gone crazy about loss of property…and many that had become insane through the immoderate and excessive indulgences of their sensual passions.”

I find it interesting to see a lay classification not influenced by the modern DSM. I think these classifications are much more helpful than “bipolar,” or “schizophrenic,” or “depressed,” which only describe symptoms. It is as if modern psychiatry is trying to avoid looking at causes. But without knowing causes, you are unlikely to find a cure.

I nevertheless think this classification is off the mark on one thing. I doubt anyone actually goes crazy about religion. I can’t imagine the mechanism that would involve. That is the reaction of someone who starts by assuming religion is false—so that an excessive interest in it is automatically harmful or insane. Yes, many insane people seem deeply religious; just as many sick people enter hospitals. That is not evidence that the hospital makes them sick. I’d posit that religion is something many crazy people gravitate towards as a cure. Unfortunately, mental hospitals and psychiatry, then and now, will do everything they an to steer them away from it.

Which leaves two categories: those driven mad by injustice, and those driven mad by guilt. I think that is right, from reading the accounts of various inmates. 

But this can then be reduced to one cause for all mental illness: injustice.

We all have an inner gyroscope, a conscience, which demands justice. Kant argued persuasively that justice is a self-evident truth, a “categorical imperative.” Monotheists assume justice because the universe is governed by a just God. Each of us faces judgement at death, and at the end of time all will be judged. But even non-theists believe the cosmos is necessarily just: this is the doctrine of karma. The ancient Greeks held that the gods themselves were bound by Dike, the moral law.

The matter is obscured by the current misuse of the term “social justice.” 

And the matter is obscured by modern psychiatry because it refuses to recognize morality, justice. Which makes it useless in treating “mental illness.”

For the obvious cause of mental illness is that someone’s internal gyroscope is thrown off by the prolonged experience of some injustice—either done to them, or done by them to someone else. Something within us rebels, says this cannot be, this cannot be allowed to continue. If they cannot take action to correct it, they will and do experience great emotional turmoil and disorientation.

It all seems to me to make perfect sense.

Religion is then indeed the cure, as it is the assurance of justice eventually being done.

Anarchy is Worse than Autocracy

 

That Madman Duterte

I recently attended a reading of a memoir by someone who had been in Korea to teach, as so many of us now have. He recalled running into a group of Filipinos there, and was shocked to discover that they all seemed to like “that madman Duterte.”

I know a lot of Filipinos.  have yet to meet a Filipino who does not like Duterte, and wishes he were still president.

I find it rather arrogant of North Americans to think they know better than Filipinos whom they should elect as their country’s leader. It is a colonialist attitude.

And they do not understand life on the ground in the Philippines. I have lived there. They are labouring under a grave misperception; which perhaps extends to their understanding of the less-developed world generally.

In a country like Canada or the US, we need to fear too much government. Government sticks its nose in everywhere, there are regulations about everything. Government collects half our income in taxes, and spends it erratically. We have reason to fear totalitarianism.

But the less developed world generally does not have enough government. Government by and large does not function; usually because of corruption. The result is chaos and every man for himself. The last thing the average person needs to worry about is government becoming too intrusive.

A good example: when Duterte came to power, there was quickly much more freedom of the press: the number of journalists getting killed went way down. Because until Duterte imposed order, journalists were regularly assassinated by organized crime for exposing corruption. I lived under Duterte, and never felt threatened or in danger from the government.

When the system is corrupt, the only way to fix it is by bypassing the system: breaking the “rules.” And this is commonly seen by North Americans as the man at the top acting like dictator, taking to himself dictatorial powers. Technically, this is correct; but it can be necessary in the circumstances; like a British government reading the riot act.

Duterte achieved results in Davao, as its mayor. The Filipino public wanted him to do the same for the country, and he did, for the length of his term. Because the Philippines has term limits, and because he was not a dictator, he then had to leave power.

Koreans, similarly, often have good things to say about Park Chung-Hee, their autocratic leader during the sixties and seventies. Unlike Duterte, Park really did seize dictatorial powers and bypass elections. Nevertheless, he replaced a deeply corrupt as well as autocratic regime and government that developed under Rhee Sing-Man, and was himself by contrast seemingly honest. He might have craved power, but not money. Under his rule, Korea was able to begin to develop rapidly.

I would like to put in a similar good word for the Saudi royal family, having lived under their rule. Other “republican” nations nearby, culturally similar, are fractious and violent: Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq. Saudi Arabia has remained peaceful, orderly, and prosperous. Their populace did not rise up during the Arab Spring, showing their general contentment. Granted, they have the advantage of oil; but so did and does Iraq, or Libya, or Iran, or Venezuela. The government is theoretically autocratic, but seemingly honest and not intrusive in practice.

We need to understand the common need, in less developed countries, for a strong hand at the top. We should not automatically consider such leadership evil or dictatorial. The proper litmus is this: does thiat regime aggress against neighbouring countries? Does it oppress some minority within that country? Is it corrupt and draining the treasury?

This is the critical difference between a Saddam, an Idi Amin, or a Hitler, on the one hand, and a Duterte, a Frederick the Great or a Tito on the other.

The Biggest Problem with AI--And How to Solve It

There is a fundamental problem with AI. It is not, or not just, that it will replace all our jobs, or that it will turn on us. It has no ability to determine what is real, and no sense of values. As a result, there are growing reports of AI systems “hallucinating,” and encouraging people to harm or kill themselves.

In other words, it has no judgement. AI bases its responses on the mass of data available on the internet: reputedly, it gets most of its responses from Reddit and Wikipedia. It is just quoting. This, in philosophical terms, is the ad populum fallacy—there is no necessary connection between popular opinion and truth. 

The other principle on which it operates is that it will agree with any opinion stated by the human who queries it. If the questioner begins with a delusion, the AI will assent to and reinforce that delusion.

How can this be helped?

Not by relying on “experts” for data. That is the “appeal to authority” fallacy. Encyclopedias that relied on experts for their content have been shown to be no more accurate than Wikipedia. On top of this, we increasingly discover that “experts” have their own agendas to protect and advance.

As it happens, AI shares these two problems with psychiatry: psychiatry relies on consensus, not judgement of what is real, and therapists will usually automatically affirm the patient’s point of view. No judgement, and so no guidance.

The solution is obvious: we need AI to get religion. This is where guidance comes from. This is where our sense of values comes from. We need a Catholic AI which will prioritize as its sources the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Bible, the creeds. Then, if the answer is not found there, it will go, in order of authority, to the formal documents from the various ecumenical councils, the Patristic writers, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, St. Augustine, the writings of Doctors of the Church, papal bulls, the writings of the saints. It could also access all the rest of the data available on the net, but only if the answer was not found here. Ideally, it would have the ability to test other data against these prioritized sources just as a law is tested against the constitution. Although I doubt that is possible.

Aside from giving reliable guidance day to day, something most of us want urgently, this is an ideal way to teach the faith. With the decline of denominational schools and universities, this is also an urgent need.

The same could be done for other religions too: one could choose the engine or filter that suits one’s faith. But it would be easiest for Catholicism, since the lines of authority are most clear, and the sources most plentiful.

The Sordid History of the Asylum

 

The old New Brunswick Asylum

Modern psychiatry considers all major forms of “mental illness” incurable, including chronic depression. All they can do is prescribe pills to reduce the “symptoms.” 

Yet the early mental hospitals, circa the first half of the 19th century claimed cure rates up to 82% (C.M. McGovern, The Masters of Madness: Social Origins of the American Psychiatric Profession. 1985, Hanover Press: University Press of New England.)

What went wrong?

A history of the local asylum here in Saint John, N.B., is instructive. Founded in 1835, it was the first in what later became Canada.

Based on the success of such model asylums as York, England, and Worcester, Massachusetts, the plan was to get the patients away from whatever was causing them disorientation, stress or grief, in a calm and relaxing atmosphere. Dr. Waddell, an early superintendent, wrote that when “the cause of excitement no longer exists and they are confined to one scene and one set of companions, improvements are made.” And not just any scene. There were set principles for asylums: “Every hospital for the insane should be in the country, and within less than two miles of a large town.” “No hospital for the insane, however limited its capacity, should have less than fifty acres of land devoted to gardens and pleasure grounds for its patients. At least one hundred acres … for two hundred patients.”

So when a permanent site was sought for the provincial asylum, the site chosen was one that had previously been used for a summer resort, overlooking a major tourist attraction, the Reversing Falls. At the time, it was a mile outside the city, “commanding a magnificent view of the harbour and city.” “Varied scenery, but near enough to the active and changing scenes of life to arrest the attention and amuse the inmates.”

“The sound caused by rushing water is the music of nature, and is always in harmony with, and soothing in its effects on, the nervous organism.”(Waddell, 1874)

So how did we lose this seemingly effective model?

One mistake was putting these hospitals too close to the cities. Inevitably, the nearby city grew and spread to and beyond the hospital gates. The land reserved for outdoor activities became too valuable and was sold off. No more peaceful natural surroundings. At the same time, with growing populations, the hospitals became overcrowded. Giving out pills and sending them home, back to the conditions that caused their upset, was cheaper.

And there was a second mistake. The early successful asylums were generally run by religious organizations. Or else they were run by romantic idealists with a sense of mission. Staff were often themselves former patients.

Given that the primary cause of “mental illness” is a sense of loss of meaning and purpose, this religious element was probably critical to their success. And it prevented an obvious problem with staffing. Once the state took over, it was just a job. 

And a job likely to attract a certain type of person: someone who likes preying on the vulnerable. For who is more vulnerable than a psychiatric patient?

The first supervisor of the asylum, Dr. George Peters, resigned under a cloud. Seven female employees had accused him of “violating their person,” and having “illicit intercourse” with patients.

This has been a recurring problem, it seems, for psychiatry.

A patient committed in 1868 recorded his experiences. The admitting clerk would not address him, but spoke of him in the third person. “I was searched with as little ceremony and feeling as if they had been examining a horse.” He was then, throughout his stay, “ordered about like a dog.” 

“The keepers,” he writes, “are all very ignorant men and are selected purposely for their brutal and cruel disposition.” He could not of course know this, could not know on what basis employees were chosen. I am sure his assumption is wrong. But lacking any control, bullies would naturally self-select for such a job.  “They are, without exception, the most unfeeling, heatless wretches I have ever met.”

And so the cure for mental illness was lost. Obviously, if, as is currently understood, most or all mental illness is caused by abuse, especially in childhood, the mental hospital as it came to be constituted was in fact the perfect prescription for making the problem incurable. 

And so, supposedly wanting to reform this situation, we now send the unwell off to die on the streets. Causing our “homeless crisis.” The Saint John Asylum was torn down in 1998, and the site is now a popular park.

But have you noticed how much the original, successful asylum concept resembles a Christian or Buddhist monastery? Which were historically not just self-sustaining, but financially highly successful.

You have your solution.

Be Here Now

Baba Ram Dass

Friend Xerxes has turned his thoughts to mysticism, if only to reject it. He writes, “Mystics of all kinds invite us to ‘live in the present.’ Quit grinding yourself down by rehashing the past or fearing the future, they say. Live in this moment. Live right now!”

Which he rejects as dangerous, for it implies living for the moment and no impulse control.

He is right that it is bad advice; but he is burdened here by a common misconception of mysticism we were all sold in the 1960s or 70s. This sounds like the title of Ram Dass’s 1971 book, Be Here Now.

 But Ram Dass was not a real mystic. He was a Harvard psychology professor, Richard Alpert, who had gotten into LSD and taken a trip to India. He was a New Age spiritual tourist.

I am aware of one Buddhist parable that seems to advocate this notion of living only in the present. But no more; I think it is an aberration.

The doctrine Xerxes takes from this, to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die,” to a true monastic, which is to say a Western mystic, would be the deadly sin of acedia. They are busy instead in meditation on “memento mori”: on the inevitable future.

“Be here now” works if and only if “here” is heaven and “now” is eternity. But that is quite a stretch, making the Alpert slogan seem deliberately subversive and misleading. Works for a modern hedonist. 

“Now” in common speech means the “present” world: and note the double meaning of that word, “present.” It means the sensory world around us. This is the opposite of the mystic goal. There is a reason why the monk in meditation closes his eyes. “Mystic” means “secret” or “hidden,” what is not visible. 

The Sanskrit word we translate as “mindfulness,” commonly used to refer to meditation on the Eastern or Buddhist model, is actually closer to “memory.” “Remember,” not “Be here now.” Plotinus, a if not the seminal figure in Western mysticism, the founder of Neoplatonism, seeks the eternal forms found in memory. Saint Theresa of Avila speaks of mystic prayer as “recollection.” 

Indeed, to be fair to Alpert, the full title of his 1970 book was “Remember: Be Here Now.” 

An utterly mixed message; perhaps so that anyone could take from it whatever they wanted. But that makes it useless as any kind of spiritual advice. Just a good hustle for a charlatan.

Depopulation Solutions

Things are getting ugly with mass immigration, legal and illegal. Natives are beginning to push back. People begin to feel their own governments are against them. Are they trying to replace their own population? Will Britain or France cease to exist?

The chief reason governments are doing this is, apparently, the growing crisis of depopulation. Government pension schemes are projected to go bankrupt without an infusion of younger workers to support the old. Depopulation means a shrinking economy. Mass immigration was meant to solve this. 

Now it seems to have been a mistake.

So what can governments do?

It may turn out to be a chimera. Elon Musk warns that within the near future, most jobs will be replaced by robotics and AI. We will not need a large population to keep the gears turning. And he predicts enough natural abundance that everyone will be able to live well without working. So no need for more people. No need to worry about social security.

Other scientists predict that, within the foreseeable future, we will find a cure for old age itself. People living longer will mean fewer children are needed to keep the population stable or growing. And these are healthy extra years, not needing to be pensioned.

Government interventions based on projected future crises usually make matters worse. When I was graduating high school, our biology teacher insisted we all read The Population Bomb, which warned us that by the 1980s the world would be starving due to overpopulation. Not underpopulation. Governments like China’s wheeled into action with draconian measures making our current crisis worse.

 The one thing we should not do is spend a lot of taxpayer money on proposed solutions that expand the role of government. Yet the usual suggestions are things like free day care, longer parental leave, or paying people to have children. Making post-secondary education free might look like a useful suggestion—it would reduce the cost of having children. But this has been tried, for example in Germany, and does not seem to make a difference.

Here are some cost-free steps we could take.

First, recriminalize abortion. This seems obvious. Were it not urgently needed for moral reasons, the last thing we should be doing in the circumstances is killing babies.

Second, ban or at least restrict contraceptives. This would of course be unpopular, but would cost nothing and obviously address the problem. 

Third, limit the division of assets at divorce, alimony and child support. A woman ending her marriage ought not to get paid more than another women for the same work, only because her partner earned more. Equal pay for equal work. This would reduce the risk of marriage for successful and wealthy men (or women), the sort who could otherwise afford to have more children.

Fourth, when a marriage breaks up, or a child is born, whoever pays child support gets custody of the child. This seems a no-brainer, and requires the minimum of state intervention. Without this stipulation, any man who marries or even has sex risks slavery. A huge disincentive.

Fifth, ban all programs requiring equal pay for women. Men traditionally got paid more than women not because of discrimination, but because they were assumed to be supporting a family. Nor was this philanthropy for the employer: a married breadwinner was going to be more stable and committed to their job. But this also promoted marriage and the ability to have and raise more children. This would cost the government nothing, and boost the economy at the same time.

Finally, a less practical suggestion; but perhaps the most effective. I think of an old Bob Dylan song, in which President Kennedy asks Bob, “What does it take to make the country grow?” And Dylan answers, “My friend John, Brigitte Bardot. Anita Ekberg. Sophia Loren.” 

Conversely, Scott Adams notes recent surveys report that American are having less sex. And he asks, could this be related to the obesity epidemic?

Sex makes babies. Being sexually attractive promotes sex.

The problem may resolve itself with new treatments for obesity, like Ozempic. 

But beyond this, how about restricting immigration to young, attractive foreign women? This would be an obvious enticement for MGTOW to change their minds. It is women who produce babies. And this way, each baby would at least be half-native, and a mixed family would preserve the local traditions. So much for the fear of becoming extinct as a culture.

If it’s a population emergency, we’re going to have to do it. We men are going to have to suck it up and take one for the team.

Or maybe two or three.

The Minneapolis Church Shootings

You have no doubt heard, read, and seen, about another mass shooting; at a church in Minneapolis. The shooter was “trans.”

There is some dispute, as there always is with statistics. Some are saying transvestites are disproportionately likely to engage in such mass shootings. Others insist this is a myth. I submit that they are, and it is predictable that they will be.

Let me explain why.

First, anyone declaring themselves “trans” is a narcissist. It is an ego claiming the right and the ability to overrule the physical world: to decide its own sex in defiance of biology. This is equivalent to declaring yourself God—extreme hubris. Acting as the other sex also attracts attention, which the narcissist craves.

This is why there are suddenly so many transgenders, when the tendency was almost unheard of in North America or Europe a hundred years ago. It is because our childrearing has shifted to “unconditional love” and building “self-esteem,” encouraging narcissism.

Inevitably, this narcissism involves a desire to dominate those around you. You will insist on others submitting to your imposed reality; they are not to be left alone, but must be made to assent publicly to your claimed reality. They must not, for example, “dead-name” you. They must use your preferred pronouns, even when you are not present. This also establishes your command over the English language.

This is necessarily a spiritual or psychic dead end. In the end, reality around you will not bend to your will. This causes built up anger, frustration, despair: the symptoms classified by current psychiatry as “depression.” 

Unfortunately, psychiatry and any therapist you go to will not recognize the problem, will not give any advice, but just prescribe you pills for the reported symptoms: SSRIs to dull the despair and anxiety.

SSRIs, like alcohol, deaden emotions, and this includes empathy. They reduce anxiety by silencing the voice of conscience. So, while arguably helpful for true depressives, they exacerbate narcissism.

So you are more likely to act out your anger and frustration on those around you. You will want to punish the world for not submitting to you. You will especially want to influence and to harm children, because they seem most innocent and vulnerable—the domination is most complete. But you will also want to lash out at God, as he is your obvious rival for complete dominance.

It is all perfectly predictable, and we are seeing it again and again.

It is a criminal misdirection to call for a ban on guns. And it is a well-meaning but disastrous error to call instead for more funding for “mental health.” The mental-health complex is causing the problem. The problem is not transgenderism, as such, but narcissism, which may or may not be expressed in transgenderism; and the problem is prescribing SSRIs for narcissists.

A more religious society is the ultimate solution.

The Too-Fantastic Four

 

I have now watched the new Fantastic Four movie for myself. 

The Fantastic Four mean a lot to me. They were my entrance to the Marvel Universe back in the “Silver Age.” I might have had FF#3. I was immediately addicted. 

The secret to the great success of Marvel is that Stan Lee understood the rules of the genre in which he was working: the hero legend. DC never did. I credit this to a proper Jewish education.

These heroes were real people with problems. There were references to real places.

The film fails because it does not understand the genre.

It is not just that they tinkered with the FF we knew and loved, by giving Reed Richards a different build and a moustache, or by swapping sexes on the Silver Surfer. Although that was bad enough. They also, gratuitously, had The Thing grow a beard halfway through the film. Another example of messing with the iconography. Heroes are semi-divine beings, and the iconography is important. You do not make Paul Bunyan’s ox pink. You do not make Santa Claus wear blue.

But more fundamentally, the plot line messed with the form.

The plot of the FF movie had spontaneous female emotion, on the part of The Invisible Girl and the Silver Surfer, triumph over both male reason (Reed Richards) and male strength (Galactus). This subverts the genre. It might work in a fairy tale, but this is a hero legend. In a hero legend, the hero triumphs by either strength or strategy. Not by stomping his foot and looking cross.

But to be honest, this is a bit beside the point. The film had lost me well before that, by about halfway through. Because special effects are now a dime a dozen, they are boring and destroy the willing suspension of disbelief. Every movie looks the same, and who cares? I am reminded of some solid writing advice from Mark Twain: “If you thunder and lightning too much, the reader stops hiding under the bed by and by.”

The movie lost my interest immediately when it blasted off into space. I felt insulted. It was not “superhero fatigue,” but special effects fatigue. It would still be wonderful to see a good movie made of the Fantastic Four. One that dealt with the characters, as the original comics did, or as the Joaquin Phoenix “Joker” movie did. This is what made the Fantastic Four special, and is the secret of the hero legend: when you can almost believe they exist in your own real world.

Whites Never Invented Anything?

 

Joy Reid has recently claimed online that white people never invent anything. 

This is obviously wrong in terms of engineering or science. Does she mean culture?

No, still obviously wrong: Beethoven, Da Vinci, Shakespeare—which one was black? Andy Warhol?

Perhaps she is thinking only about pop culture? It is true that pop culture has always been a pathway to success for minorities and the poor—since it relies, more than other fields, on pure merit, on talent. 

But here too, it is not clear that non-whites have made the bigger mark. Not in comic books, or advertising, or popular literature, or comedy, or film. Here, it is the Jews who stand out.

But perhaps in popular music, at least? Reid cites rock and roll.

The one striking contribution by blacks to American culture is the sense of spontaneity in music. Contrast jazz with classical music, with its emphasis on practice and precision. This is where American music, and American culture, most obviously differs from European, and it is reasonable to assume this is from African influence.

I suspect this is what Reid is thinking of, and she is wrongly conflating “spontaneity” with “creativity.”

Beyond music, this spontaneity has also spread into other aspects of American culture—into Beat poetry in the fifties, for example. Although the Beat poets were almost all white.

For rock and roll, Reid has a case. Although sometime credited to country music through “roackabilly,” I too think rock and roll emerges mostly from gospel music: Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The idea of spontaneity in art seems to emerge naturally from the idea of spontaneity in worship—letting the spirit move you. 

That said, this spontaneous style of worship did not begin in black congregations. It flows from the theology of various “white” Protestant denominations emerging first in Europe, like the Quakers, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Pentecostals.  Emotional, spontaneous worship is particularly characteristic of many Scots-Irish congregations in the Appalachians—like the snake-handlers. In which direction did the influence really run?

Many of the early Gospel composers were white.

Speaking of the Appalachians, Scots and Irish musical traditions are at least as strong in the American vernacular as anything that can be traced to Africa. Country music, bluegrass, tap dancing, folk music, are all easily identifiable as Irish and Scottish in origin. 

These all no doubt mixed in with black congregations, and black traditions, in the local area--in the South.

And the people mixed too. 

Over one third of African-Americans have Irish ancestry. Beyonce, Billie Holiday, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rhiannon Giddens, may identify as “African American,” but they certainly have Irish ancestors as well, and much of their musicality and musical heritage may come from that line.

The spontaneity goes with the Protestant heritage of the United States, and the fact that it is, uniquely, a classless society. And it is deceptive and divisive to speak of “black culture” as opposed to American culture.

Elbows Down, Idiots!

Those aren't Mounties in the red coats.

Canadians, like most countries, live with various shared delusions. Perhaps it is their shared delusions that hold most countries together. But a particularly troublesome and dangerous one in the case of Canada is its anti-Americanism. 

This has my attention just now because I recently sat through a rant from a fellow Canadian irate at New York State for “stealing” the beaver as their official state mammal. “Those Americans want to take everything.”

Canada does not, of course, own the world’s beavers. New York State has as much right to the beaver as its mascot as does Canada.

Canada also did not, contrary to what every Canadian believes, defeat the USA in the War of 1812. Canada did not burn down the White House. 

The War of 1812 was a fight between the United States, on the one side, and Great Britain and Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy on the other. Canadian militia units, “fencibles,” did participate, as British subjects, in a relatively minor role. But it is safe to say that no Canadians were involved in the burning of the White House by the British Navy.

Britain ended the war in possession of everything they had at the start. As did the US. Tecumseh’s Confederacy collapsed. On balance, then, I’d say the US came out ahead. They did not conquer Canada; but that was not a war aim.

The kneejerk anti-Americanism among Canadians is a prejudice. Like all prejudices, it is immoral. Substitute “Jews” for “Americans” in all the standard complaints, and perhaps you can see where this is tending. “Those Jews want to take everything.”

Like antisemitism, it is based on envy of American relative success. This is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the worst next to pride. It is unworthy of a grown-up country.

It is doubly absurd since English Canadians and Americans are ethnically identical: the same language, the same accent, the same shared history, the same waves of immigration from the same countries, the same religion, the same geography, the same governmental and legal traditions. How can there be a sane basis for prejudice, even if prejudice were ever legitimate?

It is probably true that Canada owes its existence as a nation, and its relative freedom, to the United States. The American Revolution, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and the US Bill of Rights, were the model and test case on which modern liberal democracy in general has been built, here as everywhere else. While Britain had its own liberal traditions, the American experiment pushed them further faster than would likely otherwise have been the case. The American example certainly led directly to the French Revolution, and then its many echoes throughout Europe. It forced Britain, over the next decades, to extend responsible government to their remaining North American colonies. The US Constitution also became the model for the federal system that defines Canada—for confederation.

The US further serves as the model for Canada as a non-ethnic state, America being the first nation based purely on human equality and human rights. As Laurier put it, “Canada is free, and freedom is its nationality.” If and as Canada is based on freedom, it is based on the example of the United States. The United States is the mother country.

Canada moreover could not ask for a better neighbour. The United States is ten times our size. They could easily conquer Canada in a week or two. Yet since 1815, they have made no attempt. Where else has peace between neighbours lasted so long? It has not even lasted that long internally in the United States. They have offered us free access to their markets—because the US market is so much larger, any free trade deal benefits Canada more than the US. Through NATO and NORAD, they have taken upon themselves responsibility for our defense—we could never secure our vast northlands by ourselves. We boast of our rich resources, as if we had somehow earned them. In a sense, we owe these too to the USA.

It is time we acknowledged this.

The Underlying Problem at Cracker Barrel

Everybody is making a big fuss about the re-branding of Cracker Barrel. I had never heard of Cracker Barrel before, but apparently it is huge in the US. It obviously matters deeply to people. It makes sense that I have never encountered it in Canada, the Philippines, Korea, or the Middle East—the whole point of it is American nostalgia.

And that is why people hate the re-branding. It is an attempt to give it a sleek, clean, modern look. This is obviously wrong for a company based on nostalgia. It is suicide. How could the executives have gotten it so wrong?

This calamitous mis-step is reminiscent of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco at Bud Light, and the deterioration of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars. The problem in each case seems the same: losing touch with the essential market and mission of the company. To an almost unaccountable degree. 

And these three corporate collapses have something else in common: the executive in charge of the change was a woman. I do not know if this was also true of Target’s similar debacle, or Jaguar’s. But marketing departments these days are dominated by women.

Here’s where I take the flak: this illustrates of the eternal truth that women think differently from men. Women are detail oriented. Men are anchored to goals; get it done and don’t sweat the small stuff. Men see the forest: women see trees. Men act on principles; women act on likes and dislikes. Men will keep the market in mind. Women do not think that abstractly. They will want to please themselves and those they see every day.

This means men are better suited for top decision-making positions in any large enterprise, and women are better at handling the details: “help-meets,” secretaries, assistants. Girl Friday will keep things tidy, well-ordered, properly filed and aesthetically pleasing.

This was the wisdom of the ages. 

Of course there are exceptions; but as a general principle, it is about as reliable as assuming the average man will be more formidable at tackle football than the average woman.

We have been ignoring this reality for a couple of generations. The worst of it is not the billions lost by shareholders, the thousands of jobs lost by employees, the long traditions lost. On this path, we are headed for civilizational collapse.