Stephen Roney's Blog, page 112

Tamara Lich on the Stand

 

I feel this is historic.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Human Rights Hypocrisy

 

Justin Trudeau is slamming Pierre Poilievre in the Commons for failing to condemn Doug Ford’s use of the notwithstanding clause to force Ontario teachers back to work after years of school closures over Covid. This, according to Trudeau, is an assault on charter rights.

Trudeau is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy, as he recently suspended all Canadians’ charter rights by declaring the Emergency Act. He has also failed to object to the use of the notwithstanding clause by the government of Quebec. So his sudden selective concern for human rights is obviously political and insincere.

But is Poilievre also being disingenuous? Should he be condemning Ford, as he did Trudeau, for suspending human rights?

First, it does not seem to be a federal politician’s business to criticize the provinces on what they do in their own jurisdiction. In Canada, doing so could provoke a constitutional crisis. Which is why nobody goes after Quebec for using the notwithstanding clause.

Second, the notwithstanding clause is a part of the Canadian Constitution. It makes no sense to simply object to its ever being used—why is it there? The question is whether it is justified in this case. The same question applies to use of the Emergency Act. There is a need for an Emergency Act--for emergencies. The question is whether there was an emergency.

I submit that Ford is using the notwithstanding clause as intended. Trudeau used the Emergencies Act illegitimately.

By the definition given in the statute, there was no emergency when Trudeau invoked the Act. That makes it an illegal action.

But Ford’s use of the notwithstanding clause is necessitated by judicial overreach. This is why it exists, to ensure the continued supremacy of parliament and the will of the people over a possible cabal of judges.

In recent years, Canadian courts have grown increasingly irresponsible and autocratic, abrogating to themselves legislative power. In the present case, they ruled a few years ago that workers had a right to strike that prevented governments from forcing them back to work in any circumstances, even for essential services.

This cannot be allowed in an orderly and civil society. It means those in essential services can force whatever deal they choose on the public. It gives them dictatorial powers.

Accordingly, Ford must use the notwithstanding clause.

Given the current Canadian situation in general, a more aggressive use of the notwithstanding clause is long overdue. Just as stronger restrictions on invoking the Emergencies Act are clearly required—ideally, specific penalties for any government using it improperly.

Really, in a just and ordered society, Trudeau shoud be behind bars.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Stupid Party

 

Zippy

Does anyone else remember Zippy the Pinhead? I can’t look at John Fetterman without being reminded of that cartoon character.

Not to mock Fetterman for his recent stroke; but even without it, he would look like Zippy the Pinhead; and the logic of his political positions would seem just as random. And even without the stroke, he would have a remarkably scanty resume for a senatorial candidate. Mayor of a small village; one term lieutenant governor. No significant business or professional experience.

Fetterman

So why did Fetterman, post-stroke, end up the Democratic Pennsylvania senatorial candidate? Can it really be that they had no one better or more visibly sane to put up for election? Apparently so.

The bigger question is why the Democratic Party in the US has such a weak bench. Last cycle, the best they could come up with for President was old Joe Biden, corrupt, a hack, and suffering from dementia. And all they could come up with for Vice President was Kamala Harris, who cannot seem to say anything coherent even with speechwriters. The closest competitor in the primaries seemed to be Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg also seems to be many Democrats’ best hope for 2024. And Buttigieg’s qualification is no more than that he was mayor of a small Midwestern city. Or perhaps they could have chosen Bernie Sanders, older than Biden, unknown before he ran for president, and a senator from a small state. In fact, the second smallest, and one in which even a yellow dog would be elected senator so long as he was a Democrat.

How can it be that, despite the fact that they represent roughly half the population of the US, 150 million odd people, this is the best the Democrats can come up with for leadership?

But it is not so hard to account for if you take into account the fact that half the US population is necessarily of average or below IQ. If they all or almost all vote for the same party, you will have the present Democratic situation: even the leaders will be people of roughly average IQ.  

So the problem of leadership reveals the problem with the Democrats, and the modern left. Their ideas are, as Margaret Thatcher said, simply wrong, and only stupid people buy them. Only stupid people think, for example, that when the government gives out money, it is a generous gift from those politicians, and not coming from their own taxpayer pockets.

Never mind the Republicans in the US. Witness as well the Canadian Liberal Party. The best they can come up with as leader is an impulsive and self-indulgent high school drama teacher. And the word on the Hill is that he is secure in his position, because they have nobody else who could plausibly replace him.

Intelligent people no longer become Democrats, leftists, or Liberals; unless they are on the take.

Unfortunately, unintelligent people rarely know, or accept, that they are unintelligent. Witness the Dunning-Kruger Effect: you need to be smart to know you are smart, but equally smart to know you are dumb. Lots of research shows that, if a gap in IQ exists of more than 15 points, one standard deviation, two minds become mutually unintelligible. The less intelligent will not be able to grasp where the more intelligent is coming from, and is likely to suspect they are crazy or evil. Perhaps a “far-right extremist.”

We are separating out into a smart party and a stupid party. And the stupid party is in power.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Lean to the Left, Lean to the Right

 

Stephen LeDrew argues, intending to be provocative, that Justin Trudeau is a right-winger compared to Pierre Poilievre. 

He is right, based on the traditional meaning of the term. Traditionally, since the French Revolution, the left was for liberty, for the individual, for free choice, free markets, and smaller government; and against established elites. The right was for the corporate state, for paternalistic government, for more social control, was respectful of elites and authority, and for bigger government.

That puts our modern right on the left, and our modern left on the right.

This is indeed more philosophically coherent than our common current understanding, which is scrambled by Marxism. This puts Marxism, Trudeau, the NDP, and the US Democrats, on the right-wing. Stalin, Castro and Mao were right wingers. Pierre Poilievre, Maxime Bernier, Milton Friedman, Rand Paul, Tim Poole, the Koch Brothers, and more or less the US Republicans, are the left. As am I. 

We have stood everything on its head when we suggest the US is politically to the right of Canada or Europe. From its inception, by those who rejected the American revolution to stick with king and tradition, Canada has always been conservative to its core. America wants life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Canada wants peace, order, and good government. A decent summary of liberalism and conservatism, left and right.

But the problem is that many get confused and, I suspect like LeDrew, vote Liberal and support Democrats imagining they are left-wing in the true sense. And imagining the right stands for autocracy. Indeed, I think the reason we have gotten these terms garbled is that the Liberals and Democrats have been trying to trick people into believing this. Marxism is less popular. So instead of identifying as Marxist, they began calling their ideas “liberal.”

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

What Was Her Name?

 

Had a bad night awake brooding last night. Probably mostly just Monday blahs. Another week begins, and no sense of progress; just treading water. Just the same damned thing over and over. I began thinking, “What’s the point of a world in which the Holocaust happened?” And I truly believe it could happen again, is happening again. There are several holocausts ongoing: abortion, “mental illness.” We see the growing scapegoating and persecution of “whites,” males, Christians, Catholics, Asians, Jews.

I look at the present Canadian government: to my mind, obviously corrupt, incompetent, and plain evil, and yet voted in three times as if everything is fine…

When we were young, or at least when I was, we imagined we could make the world better. We haven’t. Or if we have, here and there, the incremental change does not seem to justify a life. 

So what’s it all about? Having kids, doing your best for them, and passing on the flame of life? Cockroaches do as much.

Feeling somewhat cheerier by this afternoon. Two conclusions. 

First, this word is not supposed to be a nice place. This is the valley of tears. Our principal job is to just forge on, trying to do what is right. Anybody who is cheerful in this world has no heart.

Second, for some reason I thought of a girl I went to high school with. I probably haven’t thought of her for forty years. Not my girlfriend; the girlfriend of a friend of mine. But he went off to sea for a year, joined the merchant marine, and she started to make a play for me. Then my family moved to Gananoque, and that ended that.

I never loved her then. As I said, I have barely thought of her since. I backed off, not wanting to betray my friend. And yet now she comes to mind, and thinking of her is oddly consoling.

She was not good looking. Her politics were nuts; she thought the ideal form of government would be a benevolent dictatorship. It would be, too, if there were any way to get a benevolent dictator into power, but there isn’t. Her politics were dangerously unrealistic. But she was a brilliant artist.

And thinking of her consoled me. Why? I was not sure at first. But I conclude that she was an example of a worthwhile life and a worthwhile attitude. Regardless of anything else, relentlessly, we can, do, should, and must find our meaning in the creation of beauty. In any way we can. 

Moreover, these two thoughts twine together. Beauty comes from sorrow. Beauty justifies sorrow.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Stick a Feather in Her Cap

 

Somewhere deep in the forests primeval, another unicorn dies.

Posthumously, we discover that yet another famous Native American is not. Her sisters have revealed that Sacheem Littlefeather, the Apache princess who famously declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather to protest the treatment of American Indians, did not have Indian blood. She was of Mexican, specifically Spanish, ancestry. She was putting on the buckskin in vain hopes of getting work as an actress.

And so she joins the long parade of other bogus Indians: Grey Owl, Iron Eyes Cody, Elizabeth Warren, the ahistorical Chief Seattle of the famous speech. “Pretendians” has its own Wikipedia entry.

What does this tell us?

That there is no discrimination against, or oppression of, native Canadians or native Americans. Just the opposite; it is advantageous to one’s career to claim to be Indian. People will always give an Indian the time of day and the benefit of the doubt. Nobody was falsely claiming to be Jewish in Nazi Germany. 

What about blackface? Weren’t blacks oppressed; yet aren’t whites oftgen caught pretending to be black?

Not really. Nobody was ever really fooled here. Blacks sought to “pass” as whites; except on the stage, whites were not trying to pass as blacks. 

Being black was, however, advantageous in a certain context: as entertainers. Blacks were preferred as entertainers. They supposedly sang better, danced better, were better musicians, and better comedians. Contrary to contemporary popular opinion, stage blackface was not a matter of mockery, but of admiration.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Little Match Girl

 

Most literary criticism is awful. Don’t get me started on Hamlet’s supposed “indecision.” 

Most of it is based on the current fashionable academic theory, Marxism or Freudianism or Jungianism or intersectionality, and not at all on real world concerns like religion and family.

Interpretations of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” relentlessly seem to see her problem as poverty. Anderson is supposedly protesting social inequality.

No. It is about child abuse and loveless families. Although we talk about “child abuse” these days, the reality of true child abuse, the loveless family, seems to be the greatest of social taboos. We seem to consistently refuse to see it when it is right before our eyes.

Hamlet being another example…

The little match girl stays out all night and freezes to death not because she is poor. It is not because she cannot afford to go inside and warm herself. She has a home. Granted, “at home it was cold too, for above her she had only the roof, through which the wind whistled, even though the largest cracks were stopped up with straw and rags.” But that is better than the street, and there is no reason to suppose there would be no wood or straw there to make a fire. Certainly, had she gone home, she would not have died of hypothermia.

She cannot go home because “from her father she would certainly get blows” for not selling any matches.

Note too that, when she does not come home, her father or mother do not come out and look for her. And she can assume they will not. The point is not even the blows—it is rejection.

There is no indication that her grandmother had more money than her parents, and this is not mentioned as a consideration. Had she, wouldn’t her parents have inherited it? The significance of her grandmother is not that she will feed and warm the little girl, but that she was “the only person who had loved her.”

And the grandmother’s love matters to her more than the roast goose or the warm fire: “Oh, take me with you! You go away when the match burns out; you vanish like the warm stove, like the delicious roast goose, and like the magnificent Christmas tree!" She is asking for her grandmother’s company, not for the other three.

When they find her corpse, people suppose she had lit the matches to warm herself. “No one had the slightest suspicion …” In other words, physical warmth was not the issue. The cold itself was a metaphor for the emotional coldness she had experienced throughout her young life. Only a crass materialist could see otherwise.

The most telling element in the story is this: “One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself.”

This is a detail unnecessary to the narrative. Both slippers might as easily have been lost in the snow, as one was. It superficially makes no sense, as a slipper would be too small to use as a cradle. 

When we see an anomalous detail like this, we should take it as symbolic.

The street urchin contrasts with the match girl’s father. Although he himself has nothing, no parents, no parental love, his first thought is to provide not for himself but for an imaginary child. And we know children think like this; we are all born with the maternal or paternal instinct. 

Which speaks in condemnation of the match girl’s parents. Her father expects her to provide for him. She does not have shoes, while her mother has slippers.

The frustrating thing about creative writing is that, while it seems to be the only way one is allowed to tell the truth, it hardly matters. Whatever you write will be misinterpreted.

Let he who has ears to hear, hear. Let she who has eyes to see, see.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Growing Climate of Intolerance Towards Unicorns

 

A friend sends along this CBC article. 

They are awfully vague in their charges for most of the piece. You know someone is up to no good when they hide behind uncommunicative terms like “gender-affirming surgery” and “inclusive sex education.” You know they are hiding something.

What “protections” do transgender students need? That is, over and above the protections extended to all of us against bullying, intimidation, violence? Without being given specifics, this smells instead like special privileges. As the aristocracy, no doubt, needs protections against the mob.

What constitutes anti-gay rhetoric? Without being given specifics, this smells instead like an attack on free speech and open debate.

As a rhetorical trick, this is often called “poisoning the well.” The reader is mostly being asked to trust the judgement of the author. Just understand that the other side in this controversy is evil, without specifics.

Here’s what ought to be taught in schools: how to spot and argue against such rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies.

The example they finally give is “to deny the existence of trans and non-binary genders.” Interesting; the contrary position would literally have been considered insane up to a half dozen or so years ago. I believe ‘gender dysphoria” is still listed in the DSM as a mental illness. More broadly, to deny physical reality is definitive of severe mental illness.

I believe we have fallen down a rabbit hole here because we have falsely created a distinction between sex and gender. Take out the concept of “gender” as something apart from sex, and the matter becomes clear.  Sex is a binary system. There are and can be only two sexes, down to the level of egg and sperm.

“Gender” was originally a grammatical concept—this is why we have a separate term. In French, for example, all nouns are either masculine or feminine. It was also then sometimes rather casually used as a synonym for sex; literally, it just means “type.” 

Still no particular confusion here. If gender = sex, there are still only two genders. Or, more accurately, three: masculine, feminine, and neuter. 

Then, as of 1945 and postwar years, feminists started using “gender” to refer to the social role of women, as opposed to their sex. And from this, all the present confusion has emerged. In doing this, feminists intended to reject the feminine gender, the social role of women, and insist that it was all down to body parts and sex. There was no difference to the minds of males and females. “Gender” was a social construct.

But this attempt to separate sex from gender has led to our present confusion. Now, some people are imagining that they have a male sex and a female gender, and vice versa. 

Fine. But following the logic of the original feminist concept as of the postwar years, so what? So act however you like. If you want to go out to work, that does not make you a man. If you want to stay home and bake, that does not make you a woman. If gender really is a thing independent of sex, why then is there any need or call for “gender-affirming surgery”?

My wife is from the Philippines. There, transvestitism is socially acceptable, and always has been. My sister-in-law dresses as a man. No problem. But anyone there would laugh at the notion that she now actually IS a man. She is a “tomboy,” and a male-to-female transvestite is a “ladyboy.” 

Action4Canada, the CBC piece goes on to warn us, “describes gender-affirming surgery as ‘child abuse.’" This “gender-affirming surgery” is a lot more radical than female genital mutilation. Which so many of us fought so hard to end only a few years ago. It is, properly speaking, sex-denying surgery.

You may say that the distinction is that female genital mutilation is involuntary, while transsexual genital mutilation is consensual. Fine, if you are speaking of adults. Insane, yes; sinful, yes. But the individual’s own business. But an essential principle of law is that a child cannot give consent. Sex with a child is automatically abuse; it does not matter that the child “consents.” Therefore, genital mutilation of a child is automatically abuse. As is giving a child hormones which might interfere with their later ability to reproduce, without some pressing medical reason.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Times, They Are A'Changing

 

Rather abruptly,  I realize I no longer get into those flame wars I used to encounter endlessly online. A large part of this, no doubt, is that just about everybody woke has unfriended me by now. But that cannot be the total explanation. Not all of them have, and those who used to post madness to the general universe on Facebook no longer seem to; at least not nearly so often.

I think the realization is beginning to seep in, among many or most of those who have always followed the orthodox and accepted politically correct positions as a matter of course, that they have been had. They have lost their confidence in the moral superiority of their views. They have lost confidence in the defensibility of their views. They are beginning to fear they are being laughed at.

I see a parallel shift on the right. In clips from political debates in the current US congressional elections, I hear Republicans speaking out assertively when they previously seemed to fudge or apologize for their positions. A few years ago, the only candidate who talked like that was Newt Gingrich. I see the same thing in Canada’s parliamentary question period under Poilievre.

The pendulum is in swing.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Back in Style

 

Properly, there is really only one plausible choice to replace Liz Truss as UK Tory leader and PM: Boris Johnson. 

Only Johnson can claim to have a popular mandate, from the big election win in 2019. And only Johnson can claim a mandate from the party members—having previously won the leadership, and never having been voted out by the membership.

If they choose Rishi Sunak, it looks like a coup, and an affront to party members. They had just rejected Sunak for Truss. Penny Mordaunt, too just lost the recent leadership election. And has no popular standing. Who else is there?

Johnson was ejected due to scandal. Yet the scandals always seemed trivial. He has now done his time in the back benches.

Some are concerned about a steady hand to counter the economic turmoil. BJ does not have that reputation. Very well: Johnson can make a public commitment to keep Jeremy Hunt as chancellor until the next election; the markets seem to like him. Such an arrangement would have precedent. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made this deal; so did Jean Chretien and Paul Martin.

I confess to hoping Johnson comes back. He is such a talented politician, and so entertaining, that it just seems a tragic waste for him to leave the stage so soon.

Since this is all so logical, I doubt the UK Tories will do it.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.