Stephen Roney's Blog, page 73

The One Million March

 

Today I attended the “One Million March for Children.” It was a festive occasion, despite a smaller group of counter protesters that was not kept separate from the main protest. (It strikes me as worrisome that the police were not there separating the two groups. Did they want trouble?) Most of the “Million” marchers, perhaps a few hundred in our small city, were plainly Middle Eastern—Muslims. A few black and white faces interspersed. I saw one clerical collar. 

The counter-protesters were all quite pale; although their hair came in many colours.

The counter-protesters held signs that said “Smash the Cis-tem,” “We refuse to disappear,” and something like “Down with your ignorance.” They waved rainbow flags and pastel trans flags. The Million Marchers chanted “leave our kids alone” and “let kids be kids,” sang “O Canada,” and waved Canadian flags. Many had kids with them. March speakers stressed they had nothing against gays or transvestites.

One of the counter-protesters stood behind me when we reached the town park. She started to heckle the speaker, but was soon engaged instead in rather civil conversation by a marcher. The counter-protester, said she was concerned with every child being safe, including “trans kids.”

The marching parent said, “What about my daughter? She’s bullied at school because she attends church. Shouldn’t she be safe?”

One of the kids said “What about shared washrooms?”

 The counter-protester said she was a teacher, and three of her students had committed suicide. Trans kids. So there’s a real problem.

That’s surely alarming, and is probably true: the rate of depression, anxiety, and suicide has been rising since the end of the Second Word War. Just in the past few years, it has jumped about 28%. Not to mention the skyrocketing rate of death by drug overdose. And Medical Assistance in Dying.

An odd coincidence: there was no suggestion of gender ideology, or even the concept of gender as applying to psychology as opposed to grammar, until 1947. Once it appeared, the rate of depression and suicide began to rise. If there is not a direct connection, the gender ideology may well be a symptom of a larger problem: a general loss of our social bearings, our grip on what is and is not real, or on what is right and wrong. We’ve lost the faith.

We also know from studies that the rate of attempted suicide among kids experiencing “gender dysphoria” is about 48%. It is not lower for those who undergo puberty blocking or surgeries—those “affirmed” in their claim that they are another sex. They end up just as dead.

The obvious conclusion is that introducing SOGI—sexual orientation and gender identity—to the schools does not prevent kids from committing suicide. It murders them.

Depression is a loss of meaning; a feeling that one is trapped in a maze with no sense of the right direction, of no solid ground under your feet. Nothing around you makes sense; you cannot trust those around you, or even perhaps the evidence of your own eyes. You no longer know which way is up, or who you are, or what you are supposed to do or be. It is a loss of the sense of he rules  of the game.

This being so, nothing could be much more poisonous than challenging a young person to question their sex, their “gender.” But SOGI also seems calculated to disorient them with respect to their relationship with their parents and with their religious traditions. Cutting away all the ground on which they can stand and establish their identity.

It could hardly be more sinister—even aside from the fact that it looks like deliberate sexual grooming, an often leads to sterilization and cutting off body parts. Something a depressed kid is already too easy to persuade to do to make the pain stop.

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

Canada's Economy on Course to Surpass China's by 2060

 

Believe it or not.

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

Trudeau Accuses India

 

Hardeep Singh Nijjar

If the Indian government was involved in murdering a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has publicly alleged, it is a very serious matter.

Accordingly, it is a very serious allegation, one the Indian government has denied. India is an important country, the second largest in the world, and the world’s largest democracy. It is a fellow member of the Commonwealth. It is increasingly important not only for trade, especially as the West is trying to decouple from China, but also vital to the other democracies as a potential military ally against China. We cannot afford to pick quarrels with India. It is madness to pick fights with India, unless we are very sure of our allegations.

And Trudeau has no proof—only “credible allegations.” That, in the world of normal diplomacy, is not enough to go public as he has. 

Murder is murder, and people are people, but it is also perhaps worth noting that Trudeau seems to be inflaming the incident by referring to Hardeep Singh Nijjar as a Canadian citizen. It is unclear that he is. He entered Canada illegally on a forged passport in 1997. He then applied for refugee status, and was refused. Eleven days later, he married a Canadian women—what looks like a marriage of convenience. She sponsored him for citizenship. Again he was refused. So it seems he was still in the country illegally when murdered.

He is also, for what it is worth, claimed by India to be the leader of the Khalistan Terror Force and involved in various terrorist acts in that country. He is the subject of an Interpol “notice,” whatever that means.

So he may or may not have been a dangerous criminal. This surely gives the Indian government reason to want to kill him; but it also means people other than the government of India might have had motives for killing him.

Trudeau is acting recklessly.

I suspect it is designed to draw attention away from China’s interference in Canadian elections, and Trudeau and the Liberals’ collusion with that hostile foreign power.

At the same time, it panders to Canada’s large and politically active Sikh population. At Canada’s expense.

The opposition parties sadly will be obliged to play along with Trudeau. Otherwise, they look disloyal. 

It looks to me like an ugly, cynical play.

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

The Million Person March

In a couple of days, on September 20, a “Million Person March” is planned for cities across Canada, “against gender ideology in schools.” The claimed intent is to protect children against abuse by the schools; the common slogan is “leave our kids alone!” The concern is that schools and other authorities are encouraging children to question their gender, explore sexuality at very young ages, even in some cases undergo medical procedures to change their sex, and even without their parents being informed. 

Others are organizing against the march. Those opposed to it also say they are protecting children from abuse—protecting transgender children who might be abused by their own families, should their families be informed of their gender transition.

Who is right?

To begin with, the first question needs to be: who is more likely to have the best interests of the child at heart, the government and the school, or the parents?

Some parents are abusive; this is a truth too rarely acknowledged. On the other hand, historically speaking, most governments and government bureaucracies are openly abusive; most families, by contrast, do care for their children. It is instinctive. Accordingly, the family should be given precedence. There should be some clear reason to suspect abuse in a specific case before the state can intervene. 

Yet here, family abuse is the default assumption.

This looks like an attack on the family rather than a concern for the interests of children.

Beyond this, the concept of “gender” is arbitrary. It is in the first instance a grammatical term: words have gender, not people. “Bridge” is masculine in French. “Sea” is feminine. In this sense it is of course nonsensical to speak of a child changing his or her gender. Can we also ask a bridge what his preferred pronouns might be?

The second meaning of “gender” is as a cognate for the word “sex”: “males or females viewed as a group.” It is nonsensical to speak of children changing sex. Sex is a simple biological fact, programmed into every cell of your body. 

The third meaning first appeared, according to Oxford, in 1945. “The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones.” The term expresses the modern feminist claim that men and women are identical mentally and emotionally, and are arbitrarily forced into social roles based on their physical sex.

If you buy this claim, there is no justification for “gender transition.” Gender is purely a social construct. What is there to transition to or from, other than to deny and reject the construct? Women simply need to refuse to stay in the home, or be sexually passive, and so forth. Men only need to choose to wear nice clothes and cook and clean. Why would there be any sense in surgically altering body parts?

So the bottom line is that gender transition is logical nonsense. It is a mask concealing the sexual grooming of children. And perhaps worse: deliberate intent to do them permanent harm.

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

Reflections at the Beginning of a New School Year

 

When I was young, I trusted and respected teachers. I always went along with the rules. An old diary reminds me I was diligent about never being late; one year I won a prize for best behaved.I was a good kid and a good student.

I now realize this was a mistake.

Not just that the troublemakers and the slackers and the guys ho just hung out did at least as well in the rough and tumble of real life as I. The problem was more that most of what the teachers taught us were lies.

We were taught science as a series of established truths about the physical universe. In later years, many, perhaps most, of these unquestionable truths have turned out not to be true, and I too often look like a fool when I propound them. Science, as they say, marches on. It is not a set of known truths, but an attitude of universal scepticism, that tests everything rather than accept anything on authority. It never makes any claim to truth, only to working hypotheses, and only disproves falsehoods. The false cosmology we were taught as science, in other words, was the opposite of science. It was worse than a waste of our time; it was misinformation.

In English, the later and usually best works of most great poets were not on the curriculum. This was so even through college. We were left with the false and depressing impression that poets always burned out in romantic youth. Yeats was the notable exception—even his latest poems appeared on the curriculum. Because, I suspect, he stayed pagan to the end.  The problem with all the others is that, as they matured, they all became devoutly Christian. And this was suppressed.

Worse, it is impossible to understand even their early works, English literature generally, except in the context of Judeo-Christian cosmology. Most art is religious art; it almost has to be, to be true art, for true art requires profundity. Yet this Judeo-Christian background was never taught, or even referred to. Instead, everything was read through the lens of Freudianism, or feminism, or Marxism, or structuralism, or Jungianism, or queer theory, or postcolonialism, or whatever intellectual fad was on offer. None of them coming near the point; all of them treating the writer himself as some kind of idiot who had no idea what he was actually saying.

English composition was also mistaught: I had to unlearn many of the supposed rules of grammar and composition learned in high school to become a professional editor and writer. Because they produce bad writing. Indeed, the fact that most people are taught how to write badly gave me my careers as an editor and writing coach. Some of the most egregious examples of classroom malpractice in writing have been collected in a book famous among editors, titled “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins.” Most teachers have no idea how to write; and can only be trusted to apply rigid rules, which are invented purely for this purpose.

Fraudulent history was probably less common in my day than now. But the worst was the lie about Social Darwinism. We were taught, without explanation, that Social Darwinism was a misapplication of Darwin’s theory to human society. And I am embarrassed to remember that I bought this.

Darwin himself was a raging social Darwinist. And it is hard to see how his theory does apply to human society.

Darwin is the father of Nazi race theory. They were, they said, aiding the evolutionary struggle. War was the evolutionary struggle; the superior races would win, and evolve into a new, more powerful species.

The real atrocities of European colonialism in the latter half of the 19th century, the days of Heart of Darkness, were also due to Darwinian science. Nobody told us. Instead, longstanding and intrinsic Western cultural chauvinism, or even Christianity, were blamed.

And we were taught that the Christian opponents of Darwin were upset because his theory contravened a simple-minded literal reading of the Book of Genesis, the “seven days of creation.” His Christian opponents, such as William Jennings Bryan, were opposed to his theory primarily because they saw it militating against ethics, altruism, and human equality, and logically leading to racism and a war of all against all.

All this was swept under the carpet. 

As was the fact that the progressive movement, the political left during the first half of the Twentieth Century, embraced eugenics, racial segregation, government control of the economy, social regimentation, and to varying degrees, Mussolini and Hitler. We were taught instead that the Fascists and Nazis were “far right.” 

We were of course indoctrinated into the anti-Catholic “Black Legend.” We were taught of the Inquisition and the Crusades as though the former was a witchhunt, the latter a pogrom or a holocaust. Everyone was somehow given the impression that Galileo was burned at the stake, for asserting heliocentrism.

Most grievously, once I left Catholic grade school, once in high school and above, they gave us all to understand that belief in God was marginal, optional, a matter of faith and of personal opinion. This is grossly wrong: most great philosophers since Aristotle and Plato have asserted and offered proofs of His existence. His existence is the one bit of knowledge about which we can be most certain; more certain than of the existence of the material world, or of our own memories. This is also the most important thing to know, without which nothing else matters. This alone makes the malpractice of the public schools criminal and civilization-destroying. 

Solution: school vouchers, bust the ed schools, and let parents set up religious schools.

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

On Evil People

 

This video seems to me to be pretty accurate. And the best thing about it is that it does not fudge the issue with terms like "narcissist." "Evil" is more accurate.

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

Trudeaunomics: Lowering Inflation by Raising Taxes

 

Justin Trudeau committed a misstep that may end up in the history books, or at least in the lore of Canadian electoral politics, this week. He threatened the big food chains that, if they did not do something to stop the rising food prices, he would slap a new tax on them.

Raising food prices yet again.

It is an embarrassment that Canadians ever voted for him, but it seems as though everyone is now embarrassed by him. It took an alarmingly long time, but folks generally are at last seeing through his tiresome act. “The Canadian people expect …. They know we have their backs…. And that’s exactly what we will do.”

And the inevitable scapegoating. 

If he's going to be a clown, he could at least be funny.

The only anti-Conservative memes I see recently online are to the effect of “Yeah, what Poilievre says sounds great, but he will not deliver.” And “Don’t vote Tory just because you are mad at the Liberals. Ask Ontario.” 

Neither gives a reason for voting Liberal; both concede that the Liberals are awful. 

Why not vote for the mere chance of something better?

And that cannot be the NDP, who simply support the Liberals.

That so, what’s your alternative?

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

Why We Can No Longer Get Along

 

Acceptable


Unacceptable.
Years ago, on an email list that shall remain nameless, I expressed some dissatisfaction with the government interfering in some way in free markets. This in a resolutely left-wing milieu.

There was no immediate backlash. Instead, they wanted to know if I was a Randite, a follower of Ayn Rand.

It was when I objected to Rand’s philosophy as immoral that the backlash began. Had I been an objectivist, it seems it would still have been okay.

So the issue that divides the left and right is not really free markets vs. collectivism, or big government vs small government, as one might have imagined.

Similarly, when people learn I am a vegetarian, their first question is whether it is for health reasons. Why is this the inevitable question? Why does it matter?

Because people do not resent vegetarians if they do it for health reasons. If they do it for moral reasons, I can attest, another’s vegetarianism is indeed resented.

Along the same lines, why do so many object so much to members of minority religions evangelizing them at their door? At a minimum, the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Salvation Army do it of good heart; they want your fellowship, and are trying to save you from Hell. What could be a greater kindness?

The problem is that a growing number of people have very guilty consciences. Those who have a guilty conscience will hate anyone bringing up the subject of right and wrong. They will even hate anyone who acts morally.

To the point of crucifixion.

This explains the current breakdown in civil discourse. The US even seems to be barrelling toward civil war.

The same principle can explain the eternal persecution of the Jews. The Jews, after all, invented/discovered ethical monotheism. They personify and embody The Moral Law.

It also explains the familiar saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Which those who have lived to my age can generally attest is true. Good people will appreciate a good deed; but many bad people will want to hurt you for it.

And it explains why it is those who were most favourably disposed towards Canada’s Indians, Sir John A. Macdonald, Edgerton Ryerson, the Catholic Church, are now so defamed and their statues toppled; in America or Britain, those who were most openly against slavery, like Thomas Jefferson or Sir Henry Dundas, are those condemned as slavers—and not the advocates of slavery.

The usual charge against all moralists, as in these cases, is “hypocrisy.” Which does not apply here at all. . Hypocrisy means holding others to a higher standard than oneself. Believing in and advocating morality is not a claim of personal sinlessness. It is those who old moralists to a higher standard than themselves for believing in the importance of morality who are hypocrites.

I fear a pending housing crisis in hell.

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

Lost in the Land of Frogs

 

Dr. Theresa Tam is calling for us all to get masked up once again, and take a new vaccine. Covid is back.

This might seem odd, given that studies now show that wearing a mask does nothing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and previous vaccines seem to have done more harm than good. So why would Tam give such apparently bad advice?

Some are inclined o believe there is a government conspiracy here to get us all accustomed to taking orders. 

I say, never ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained by a fairy tale.

The relevant fable here is Aesop’s, of the frogs who wanted a king.

The frogs were tired of governing themselves. So they sent a petition to Zeus asking for a king.

To keep them quiet and make them think they had a king he threw down a huge log, which fell into the water with a great splash. The frogs hid themselves among the reeds and grasses, thinking the new king to be some fearful giant. But in a short time the younger frogs were using him for a diving platform, while the older frogs made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Zeus about the government.

So Zeus now sent down a crane to be king of frogland. He gobbled up the poor frogs right and left. 

At last the frogs believed they had a real king, and were content.

The government knows a new strain of the virus is coming. A lot of people are likely to get sick. Some will die. And the people will raise a hue and cry, “Zeus, why didn’t the government do something?” So the government takes some random but plausible action, ideally something that sounds drastic. People will still sicken and die, but the government will not be blamed. Best too to propose something that requires general compliance. Then the government can scapegoat the public for not doing it, or at least not all doing it—for inevitably, not all will do it. 

The frogs fall for it every time.

For the same reason, you are never going to leave a doctor’s office without some prescription.

Another similar story also in the news: the Peel Regional School Board has been pulling all the books from school libraries that were published before 2008, and sending them off to landfill, n the premise that nothing written before that date is “inclusive.” 

This sounds like something out of 1984, an attempt to memory hole our past. 

But the more likely explanation is simpler. The provincial government issued a directive that school libraries cull any book that is not “inclusive,” with special attention to books published before 2008.

Now, what is a school librarian to do? What is and is not “inclusive” is subjective, and what counts as “inclusivity” seems to change hourly. A current example: Disney decided the politically safe move was to remove the dwarfs from their Snow White remake, because they were told by one dwarf this was an obnoxious stereotype. Now they are under the gun for excluding dwarf actors.

In any case, reading or researching every book in the library in order to make an informed judgment of this sort would require a lot of dog work and a lot of mental effort.

The safe and convenient move, is to scrap anything published before 2008. People can’t object to what isn’t there.

Unfortunately, it turns out that empty shelves also look bad. 

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

Still No Unmarked Graves

 

Thread by @jonkay on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

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