Stephen Roney's Blog, page 160
February 4, 2022
Brian Peckford Weighs In
He still has a lot of energy...
Jimmy Dore Goes Off on Neil Young
Pretty devastating.
The Real News
Good summary of recent Canadian events from Candace Malcolm.
Trucker Report
February 3, 2022
How Cancel Culture Must End
I am inclined to be overoptimistic. I have been wrong about this before. But I feel we might be at the tipping point.
It is like the story of the boy who cried wolf. You lie once too often, and get caught, and it is all over.
In Canada, the lies the government and media are telling about the behavior of the “Freedom Convoy” look like this to me. Their wild claims do not match the many visuals all can see on YouTube.
More broadly, their claims about Covid are no longer believed by a large portion of the public, as the Ottawa rally demonstrates.
I think, when the pandemic hit, the governing elites, in the civil service, the universities, the media, the schools, were already in a state of paranoid hysteria, seeing their positions threatened by the new technology.
As a result, they have overreached to the pandemic. They were already afraid of losing control, so they conceived this as a greater threat than it was. And, given control as a result, they are having a hard time releasing their grip. Their knuckles are whitening.
The pandemic, the lockdowns, and the vaccine mandates now become the symbolic rallying point for the opposition, and may bring them down altogether.
I think by now, it is dawning on the average person that the elites are either insane or consistently lying, and the reasonable guys are on the other side.
Joe Rogan stands as the perfect image of this: he is so transparently just folks, straight and honest. And so many people have listened to him, for hours, that it is hard to make any slandering of his actual views stick. It looks suicidal for the leftists to have gone after him.
But they had already gone after Don Cherry, and J.K. Rowling, and the president of the United States, and the logic of revolutionary prestige is that they always wanted to get credit for a bigger and more improbable scalp. It was bound to end in their destruction when they overreached. If they have not yet, they inevitably will.
This also looks like the point at which the guillotine is turned on the Committee for Public Safety itself. Attempting to cancel Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills are cancelling themselves. Whoopi Goldberg got herself suspended for two weeks, and reputedly is threatening to quit—self-cancellation. Her colleagues on The View are also threatening to cancel themselves in protest. Jeff Zucker over at CNN cancelled himself, apparently with a push from Chris Cuomo, whom he cancelled a month or so ago. Arguably, he was this revolution’s Robespierre.
At some point, it makes the most sense not to cower and obey, but to turn on the censors and guillotine them before they get around to guillotining you. Because eventually they will get around to you no matter what you do. So there is a growing incentive for people who feel relatively safe to risk turning openly against the cancel culture. Jon Stewart seems to be a recent convert. John Cleese. Elon Musk. This natural tendency, once it starts, and it seems to have started, means that in short order, the radical censors find themselves as the small irrelevant fringe.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
February 2, 2022
Erin, We Hardly Knew Ye
Erin O’Toole is out as Conservative leader. Watching the CBC speaking about the event, one would think the Conservatives were in disarray, in danger of splitting, losing their direction and losing the voters.
I don’t buy that spin. It is just media partisanship. I think this vote was how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work. Kudos to Michael Chen, who designed this system and got it passed into law. Kudos to the Conservatives, who have now proven themselves Canada’s most responsive and democratic party.
The general public do not elect the Prime Minister. We vote for our local member. The Prime Minister is then whoever has the support of most of these members. Democracy demands that the Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of his members; not vice versa.
This system has been perverted in Canada by the legal requirement, introduced by the Liberals, that the party leader sign the nomination papers for local candidates. This gave the leader power to choose his own electorate, reversing the equation, and to punish or cashier anyone who did not do as he willed. The result has been an elected dictatorship. Debates and votes in parliament have become irrelevant to the nation’s business. Question period has become no more than rhetoric, a battle for the best sound bites.
Chen’s reform bill restored that balance. The Conservative Party embraced it, and deserves credit. O’Toole got voted out in part at least because he was being authoritarian with his own caucus.
Chen’s reform/restoration gives the Canadian or British system a significant advantage over the American system. A failing or disastrous or corrupt leader can be removed within days, if not hours, without tying up t6he nation’s business, without bitter recriminations, without requiring any particular reason or finding of fault. As Theresa May was; as Neville Chamberlain was. O’Toole was able to leave with dignity. The US, currently saddled with a declining Joe Biden in the midst of crisis, should envy us.
Nor is the Conservative Party divided by this. To the contrary, the vote was quick and decisive, so that it should be easy to come together now under a new leader. Had they been obliged to continue under O’Toole, divisions might have festered.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
Lauren Southern on the Canadian Mass Graves
I think Southern gives too much credit to the story that the residential schools were oppressive or malicious generally. There, she has not done the research.
February 1, 2022
Whoopi Goldberg and Holocaust Denial
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Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on the Holocaust are kind of dumb, but not scandalous. There is an old scientific classification of mankind into three or four distinct races: Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Australoid. If Whoopi learned this definition in some science class, it would be right for her to say that Jews were not a different race from the Aryan Germans, and so the Holocaust was not about race, but ethnicity.
It’s a little weird, because the Nazis certainly did consider Semites a separate race from Aryans, so their motivations, even if scientifically mistaken, were racist. But that argument is semantic, and it seems foolish to assume Goldberg was saying something shocking or offensive. Perhaps she intended to, but it cannot be assumed from this.
Erin O'Toole as Seen from a Semi's Rear View Mirror
Pierre PoilievreIt looks as though Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is on his way out. No sure thing—only one third of the caucus voted to force a review. But he seems unlikely to survive such a lack of confidence even if he nominally wins a vote.
I feel relieved. Many objections might be raised to his leadership; his absence from the current Ottawa convoy protest makes him look irrelevant. But in my own mind, to be honest, there is just one. He ran for the leadership as a “True Blue” Tory, then pivoted. Not that I am any “True Blue” Tory. I am not a member of the party, and my own choice for the Tory leadership at that time would have been Jean Charest. But such blatant dishonesty in a politician should not be accepted. It showed contempt.
Pundits suggest the Conservatives are shooting themselves in the left foot: they must not cave to their right wing, as they appear to be doing now, or they are unelectable. There are just not enough conservative-minded voters in Canada.
I disagree. I used to think in those terms. I learned otherwise. I thought the Conservatives were waiving their chance of winning, in favour of rebuilding for the long term, by choosing Stephen Harper, a known hard-right ideologue, as leader. I thought the Republicans were losing their chance by choosing Ronald Reagan in 1980. Margaret Thatcher was also a hard-rightist; she did pretty well at the polls in the end.
The idea of catering to the polls is exactly wrong. So long as conservatives do this, they will always lose, because the media are against them, and the media have the dominant influence on the polls.
The only way the Conservatives can ever win is by choosing a leader who will lead: who will try to change the polls. Who will not accept the framing done by the media, but try to change the framing. Trump is a model: they can only win with someone able to appeal directly to the people. Whoever they choose, anyone who fits that profile, will automatically be condemned by the media as “extremist” and “populist.” Even a moderate like Trump.
They might as well go for Pierre Poilievre. Could make for an exciting next few years.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
