Barrel Strength

From today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Men, argues McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, “either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt, both individually and collectively.”

Nathanson and Young have written five books chronicling the rise of misandry, the hatred of men, which they view as a culture war being fought because of the feminist activism that led to the changed role of men.

Like a lot of people these days, I support and have supported the Conservatives in their efforts to get control of the country wrested away from the Liberals. Am I a conservative? Frankly, it is not a question I much bother with. Other people find me conservative, but if someone told me I was a moderate liberal, I might accept the term, depending on what they meant.

What I want is an end to the hysteria, Stalinism, group rights, suppression of free speech, oppression of the ordinary person, oppression of the gun-owner, oppression of the store-owner, oppression of the ordinary citizen of all races and colours against the depredations of the indigent, the mad, the over-privileged mascot groups of the Left, the police – yes, the police – the do-gooders, the thugs, the professional protest groups, and the damage done by the chattering classes who undermine society like termites.

This is why I read with some sympathy an article by Barry Rubin in Pajamas Media about the distinction between liberals, as he describes them, and the left.

“You shouldn’t have to be a conservative to be horrified by the contemporary situation. But while conservatives and Republican are going to lead the opposition to the status quo, they should seek to build a broad front rather than wage a campaign against historical liberals.”

Historical liberals include people like Teddy Roosevelt, in that definition.  When the situation required intervention, Teddy Roosevelt intervened.  Think of food and drug safety as one of his major contributions to the public weal.

I once read a book Radical Son, by the former marxist, David Horowitz, who was editor of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. I recommend it as one of the great memoirs of former totalitarians, up there with Arthur Koestler, Whitaker Chambers and the other departing communists of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Horowitz’ great observation is that, once he left the Left, he entered the land of freedom. There is just the Left: tight, hysterical, heresy-sniffing, unfree, and then there is all other political opinion, left, right and centre. Only once in the free air, outside the prison-camp of Leftism, did he find that people called “conservative” actually had vigorous disagreements with one another. And felt perfectly free to have them. Such is the nature of life in the free air. Let us keep it that way.

It is for this reason I hate, fear and despise what the Liberals tried to do to this country, that they tried to turn it into a leftist prison camp of controlled opinion, with the minds carefully masked by political correctness, which is just Leftism without the bother of Marxist central planning. So am I a conservative? or just a liberal?  I don’t know. But I am sure enjoying Harper putting a stake through their large-L Liberal hearts. Just to make sure.

CBC Radio One: A day’s listening:

Victims: which groups the CBC will cover in a given day in 2011

plight of the gays in the US military, the plight of gays generally, Canadian aboriginals, women generally, Arab protesters, as long as they are against tyrants, but not if they burn Christian churches

Icons: people you will hear from or about regularly

Jane Fonda, feminists generally, the Arab spring, Noam Chomsly, David Suzuki, Greenpeace, social activists, and protesters against capitalism, global warming, or income inequality

Issues: what concerns the CBC and its presumed listenership

The Occupy movement, income inequalities, capitalism, anthropogenic global warming, Conservative lack of compassion

What you do not hear about on CBC:

Victims: Christians in Islamic lands, men abused by women, the average taxpayer, people not employed because of anti-pipeline or anti-forestry movements

People you do not hear from or about on CBC

Icons: Warren Buffett, Conrad Black, George Jonas, David Warren, Mark Steyn, David Frum, and  a very long list of moderates, liberals, and people who think

Issues: issues not discussed by anyone on CBC

Impending collapse of the Eurozone, state bankruptcies from decades of chronic overspending, the implications of the unequal distribution of intelligence in the population generally and between ethnic groups,  biological differences generally, anything that contradicts alarm about global warming.

You can add you own topics that will not be covered, people who will not be heard, ideas that will not be discussed. I welcome your contributions. I am merely scratching the surface.

Also, remember that it is not really state radio because the CBC does not answer effectively either to the government or to the regulator. Nor does it answer to the market. It is public radio, a great whale cruising the ocean of taxpayer money, magnificent, unaccountable, inscrutable, self-directed, self-involved, self-absorbed, and rapidly heading for Captain Stephen Harper and the good ship Tory, armed with sonar and a whale-gun. Flensing cannot be long off. Ambergris, anyone?

Another piece of wondferful news. Charlotte Gray, thinks the GG is “The government’s secret weapon for restoring the power of the monarchy”. Or so she says in the Walrus, the refuge of the Liberal intelligentsia.

After I wiped the snot from my upper lip from reading that, I began to think: “Maybe this is the secret Harper plan we have all been waiting for”.

Says Charlotte:

In an extraordinary return to the Canada of yesteryear, the government is engineering a comeback for the monarchy. Johnston, consciously or not, has been recruited into the prime minister’s campaign to restore the symbols of an older, whiter Canada.

The article then follows with a history of the role of Governor General, and a quick tour of Johnson’s career  – law professor and university president – where Johnson proved successful in rising to the top of the greasiest poles, and raising five highly accomplished daughters. I do not know which accomplishment is more difficult, but he did both.

And now back to Charlotte’s political analysis.

This quiet relaunch of the monarchy forms part of a larger campaign, led by a group of fierce monarchists, including Harper’s principal secretary, Ray Novak; John Baird; and Chris Champion, senior adviser to immigration minister Jason Kenney. These men make no secret of their eagerness to erase the Liberal-dominated narrative of recent Canadian history, with its emphasis on the Charter, multiculturalism, and the flag, and replace it with other, older traditions that embrace military victories and historical identification with Britain. Canadian achievements of the past half century are being expunged: the word “peacekeeping,” the concept for which Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson won the Nobel Prize, is rarely mentioned in Ottawa; and Baird has even redesigned his business card so it no longer features the flag or the name of his department’s headquarters, the Lester B. Pearson Building.

The Tories’ determination to remake Canada to suit their own tastes may come as no surprise, given their virulent aversion for all things Liberal. Nevertheless, it is an odd campaign to pursue in a country where most citizens are not of British origin, and where the idea of Canada as a “warrior nation” can rankle immigrants who have fled wars. The renewed spotlight on the Queen particularly irritates some Quebecers. “Has the Harper government decided to make francophone citizens feel like strangers in their own country?” asks Lysiane Gagnon, Quebec columnist for the Globe and Mail.

So I phoned the PMO and got my old buddy Steve on the phone.

Me: “Prime Minister, is it your intention to restore the Canada of 1965? You know, the low tax, pre-medicare, sound public finances, pre-official bilingualism place it once was? You know, the place with the aircraft carrier and the large air force?”

PM: “Doubtless in the fullness of time you will come to appreciate the amplitude of the conservative take-back of the country, but for now I can say: ‘Just watch me’ “.

Me: “Have you decided to make French Canadians feel like strangers in their own country?”

PM: “They have their country, we have ours. If they want to join Canada, they’re welcome, same as every qualified immigrant.”

Me: “Thank you very much Prime Minister. So is Charlotte Gray right?”

PM: “Who is Charlotte Gray?”

Thus ended the conversation. I swear the Prime Minister will take phone calls from anonymous Tory bloggers, if you ask sweetly enough.

So I have to credit Charlotte Gray for this scoop on the government’s intentions to return us to the whiter Canada of yore, where a protestant male can hope to aspire to the highest position in the land. It gives hope to the rest of us, that we too may aspire to the nation’s highest offices, even if we suffer from melanin and estrogen deficiency. A dark plot indeed, Charlotte.

From time to time I enjoy reading blogs of guys who make me look like the tolerant liberal that I am. After all, a lot of what passes for conservatism is not really conservative in a deep sense; rather it is the cry for a return to common sense, and in doing so, we must reject the cultural Bolshevism and nihilism of the past  60 years. So that makes Barrelstrengthians look like dyed in the wool conservatives, because we oppose submission to Islam, affirmative action,  or anthropogenic global warming, whereas what we really are is sensible people who favour free trade, religious freedom, including especially the right to avow one’s faith in God and the Christian faith in a public place, individual responsibilty, lawful behaviour, and well-brought up children. The rest is discussable.

For these reasons we are considered conservative when what we really oppose is authoritarian leftism, based on group rights, a movement which has appropriated the word “liberal” in the United States and Canada, and is nothing of the sort.

For others of a particular religious or political clarity, such as David Warren, Barrelstrengthians would be found wanting in doctrinal rigor, and quite likely fatally infected with Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism, progressivism, or deism. (I don’t think so but we stand on guard)

To our brethren of schools even more extreme conservative than us, we say: peace. We have no quarrel with you, though you, by rights, may find us wanting in faith, clarity, or political rigor. There remains so much aggressive anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white political thought and agitation out there that I have no time for intra-mural vilification. Even within the Blogging Tories list, it is very difficult to have a frank argument about race, say, when one side of that debate (namely that it is real, politically and statistically significant, and that genetics matters) is declared by the ideological gatekeeper as cause for expulsion.

So if you would like to venture into the deeper realms of rejection of modernity, there are a few blogs by men whose rejection starts at the Reformation, or the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and they are not kidding.

• Throne and Altar
• Stuff Black People Don’t Like
• View from the Right
• Steve Sailer 

Here are some examples of blogs taken to be conservative which are, in my view, simply dealing with matters from a liberal (meaning concerned with individual rights) commonsensical position. I am not intending to insult them for this reason. I agree with that perspective in many respects, and am not certain where I would disagree with it, or their authors.

• Steynonline
• Jihad Watch
• Vlad Tepes

In other words, you do not have to be a throne and altar conservative to oppose islamization or unsustainable public finances. You can simply say, as we do, that a great deal of what needs doing in modern North American society is to stop trying to engineer equality of outcomes, and to support reasonable limits on the power of the state to transform us in the name of silly nineteenth century ideas.

I would be interested in comments on the validity of this division among conservative blogs and in additions to the list of really out-there (but sane) conservative blogs. Which are your guilty pleasures?

What about the men? What about the damage to society caused by all the surplus involuntary bachelors?

In the commendable decision to rule that a law against polygamy (strictly speaking polygyny) did not constitute an offence to Charter rights, the large obvious fact was missed, at least  in any coverage I have seen. My point is that, given the anti-male bias of contemporary society, the harm to men is not perceived, and if perceived, not thought worthy of mention.

Mr. Justice Bauman discussed the damage in terms of reduced male parental investment in children, and hence lower survival rates for children, higher rates of violent crime (from surplus men), exploitation of women and violence in the household, and the “lost-boy” effect, when male children reckon that they will never have a woman to love, so they leave the community.

If all of the society is polygynous, then there is no community which surplus males can leave except by emigration to another country which forbids polygyny. Fat chance of that for the Muslim world, and the 100 million surplus males of China and India.

And what do you do with 50 million surplus males, such as China or India have? The answer is obvious. You go to war. You have an inbuilt incentive to spend your surplus males on warfare, brigandage, and wife-gathering. And how do you gather a wife? You kill her husband, and take her home. Iran got rid of a huge surplus of its male population in the Iran-Iraq war(1980-1988), spending them as wastefully as they could. Half a million battle deaths resulted from the use of World War 1 tactics in that ill-fought conflict.

Among Mr. Justice Bauman’s many findings, these three struck me as closest to the theme of this article:

[785]     The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives. These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

[786]     Another significant harm to children is their exposure to, and potential internalization of, harmful gender stereotypes.

[787]     Polygyny has negative impacts on society flowing from the high fertility rates, large family size and poverty associated with the practice. It generates a class of largely poor, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence and other anti-social behaviour. Polygyny also institutionalizes gender inequality. Patriarchal hierarchy and authoritarian control are common features of polygynous communities.

The damage is done by “the internalization of harmful gender stereotypes” is minuscule compared to the evident unfairness of polygyny to most males. Multiple wives mean sons without effective fathering, and produces  a surplus- unwanted collection of surplus males available for war, and crime, and disinclined for useful work. Osama bin Laden was the result of such an upbringing.

Such is the political correctness of our times, and its anti-male bias, that the principal harm of polygyny is mentioned briefly in the decision, and rates nothing in the media treatment of the question.

“Pope says Mass at Easter.” Most headlines are of this sort. They tell us that the world is still in the same place as it was yesterday.  Other examples: “Fresh trouble in the Arab world”. “Seas rising because of global warming!” “Weather worse because of global warming”. They join the 35 other global warming hysteria headlines this month. For forty years we heard of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and England; it was news when it stopped.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

The recent suit at one of the too many human rights commissions by a Turkish-Canadian woman complained that, as a racialized ethical vegan, she was the victim of discrimination, and that she was part of a racialized minority. What pray tell, is a “racialized” person?

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, by Spencer Wells
• Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
• Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, by Philippe Rushton

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

It has been proven – study shows – that the brains of conservatives are more resistant to change and novelty than those of liberals, or so says Chris Mooney.

“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).

“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”

The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.

As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.

One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.

The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:

• g for general intelligence
• o for openness
• c for conscientiousness
• a for agreeability
• s for stability
• e for extraversion

Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.

And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.

“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”

Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.

The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.

Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.

Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.

One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.

So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.

I know it is unfair to pick on Janice Kennedy, the Citizen columnist of pronounced leftist views and unremitting devotion to the superiority of the female sex. She has obvious problems with a) the fact that males exist and b) don’t care for her blitherings and c) reality as sensible people understand it.

Nevertheless, occasionally she comes out with stuff so stupid, so inane, so unremittingly “we know what’s best for you” that it excites my comment. Today’s hymn of praise to the CBC was one such.

Her praise of the CBC today reached an apex of absurdity. The desperation to produce column-inches prevailed against reason and common sense. First, she allows that the CBC frequently produces drivel, but excuses much of it on budgetary cutbacks.

“Sure, you might justifiably criticize the corporation, past and present, for specific programs or personalities (”comedies” that were never funny, eye-glazing special interest shows, Hinterland Who’s Who interludes, Foster Hewitt); for recent programming desperation, misbegotten and doomed attempts to woo new audiences while alienating old; for excessive advertising on the main nightly newscast and pointless commercial imports – clearly responses to savaged budgets.”

Savaged budgets – read the CBC’s own statements of revenue and expenses here.

The 2011 Parliamentary appropriation was $1,159,938,000; the 2010 appropriation was 1,142,673,000. Avertizing revenue was higher in 2011 compared to 2010:$649,948 versus $566,714,000. So 2011 revenue was $1,809,886, chump change indeed.

Savaged budgets, my ass!

And the apogee of Kennedy’s paean to the Mother Corp? we should support it, regardless of any distortions it causes to the public discourse of this country because it belongs to us!

“No, the point is simply this: the CBC is Canada’s public broadcaster, period. That means it belongs to us – all of us – even when it makes decisions with which we disagree.

“So we have a stake in ensuring that the institution remains true to its mandate, something it can only do when it’s supported, in spirit and in fiscal fact, by most Canadians.”

“Public broadcaster” means, in fact, an organization which is out of the control of its Board of Directors, the Cabinet, the tax-payer, or its token regulator, the CRTC. The CBC is inwardly turned; it responds to neither to the market nor to the government. It was designed this way, by law.

The truth is, the CBC belongs to no one. Its broadasting licenses cannot be revoked by the nominal regulator, the CRTC (see section 23 of the Broadcasting Act). Its Board of Directors cannot fire or hire its President, who is appointed by Cabinet. Hiring and firing the President is the chief job of a a Board of Directors. Hence the Cabinet can appoint all the Tories it likes to the Board; it will have no effect, since they who have the best knowledge of the coroporation, cannot fire its President. The government is bound to respect its independence, meaning whatever the ethos of the Mother Corp determines what is real and true – see sction 52 of the Broadcasting Act.

The CBC is like a great baleen whale, floating through the oceans, solitary, solipsistic, self-involved, and sucking out tons of money from the Canadian taxpayer annually. It calls what it does the satisfaction of other people’s wants.

It is accountable to no one, and acts with impudence towards governments, regulators, private sector rivals, and the large majority of Canadians who lie north of the 401, east of Oshawa and west of Oakville.

The CBC belongs to us in the same sense as the British monarchy, only the monarchy generally behaves with greater sensitivity to the values of the people who pay for it. If ever there was a case for legal reform, it would be to bring the CBC into some kind of accoutability to its Board, to the government, and to the taxpayer.

And no Janice, we do not support the CBC, for the same reasons our ancestors did not support the pretensions of King Charles the First to rule by Divine Right.

A mighty judgment is coming.

I do not think there is anythng that needs to be added to Mark Steyn’s commentary, “Sunset on the Rideau“. Those who speak of the merits of multiculturalism either have not considered what culture actually means, or are active traitors to the ideals of liberal civilization.

There is plenty of justification for anger at how capitalism has become divorced from the rational allocation of resources to deserving projects, and you can read all about it in any number of Michael Lewis books. For those who want to understand how the mortgage crisis led to the meltdown, you can read Gretchen Morgenson’s Reckless Endangerment.

But that will not change my attitude towards all the weedy and possibly well-intentioned protestors one iota.

Remember the Arab Spring? In Egypt it has become an occasion to murder Christians. In Libya, an inter-tribal fight. All the hype – and nothing. Same goes for Syria. As the Syrian marchers say in their signs: “Alawites to the grave, Christians to Beirut.” The Arab Spring is just another pretext for Muslims to massacre, humiliate, and deport their non-Islamic or heteodox minorities.

What really forms my views about the Occupy movement was the death of Princess Di. It is worth a story. We were gathered at a Canadian lakeside with a bunch of Liberals and like-minded bien-pensants for a friendly weekend of discussion of worthy issues. The day was progressing in its usual bland fashion when a woman Toronto journalist began a rant the likes of which I had never heard before or since. “Men don’t get it” she said. Here we were discussing reform of the politics of Canada, when the most important issue in recent human history was occurring – the outpouring of grief for Princess Diana – and all we were doing was showing our insensitivity. Like most canadian men, the gang at the lakeside did not think much of Proncess Di’s death, and we thought even less of the hysterical and largely bogus outpouring of emotion on her by the now deranged British. Regardless of political affiliation, the people at the conference were psychologically normal. They knew a bogus event when they saw one.

Clearly our sang-froid was not merely insensitive, it was offensive. The reporter went on at length with mounting outrage until, this being a liberal gathering, all the usual apologes were offered for our masculine insensitivity.

Yet we were right and she was wrong, and her outrage was a cover for the shallowness of her judgment. Ten years after, it has become clear that Princess Di was a trivial and passing phenomenon.

The economic crisis we are in is neither trivial nor will it be quickly passing. We have been accumulating problems since deficit budgeting became normal. Greece is a harbinger of larger policy failure. But this climb-aboard unfocused Occupy movement is the froth on the coffee. The crisis is real, the protesters are the standard assortment of leftist wankers.

And Lawrence Martin, too, for good measure.

Courtesy of Abe Simpson:

Brian Topp’s argument in favour of recognition of Palestinian statehood in the Globe today drew some mad comments in support. Clearly the man can write and speak calmly, even if, I would argue, wrongly.

Please, o fellow conservatives and moderates, savor the comments in the Globe on Mr. Topps’ views, a selection of which follow, selected for looniness.

#1. “Nice – an opinion based on logic, facts, and rational thinking instead of the Rapture Mythology and Christofascist fundamentalism of THE HARPER GOVERNMENT”.

#2. “Conservatives are generally war mongers. Compromise and cooperation are not in their vocabulary. It’s their way or a gun barrel. Winning on their terms is all that matters to them – not the greater good.”

#3. “Jews, Christians and Muslims lived peacefully together in what was known as Palestine. Than it became Israel and we have had trouble ever since.

“Canada should support a Single state solution where all people have an equal vote and equal rights.

“Enough with the Zionist agenda under which the Israeli economy experiences its greatest economic growth during times of conflict…yes, look at the performance of Israel’s economy and you will find that war is good.

“The Palestinians lands belong to all people of the books. But the Zionist will never allow for democracy as apartheid is there way forward and Harper’s.”

It would be educational for commenter #3 to read Bat Ye’or on the fate of Christians in Muslim lands. I think only the jews have fared worse.

In the meantime I shall entertain myself by repeating “Christofascist fundamentalism of the Harper government” the next time I meet Canada’s foreign minister at elite galas.

On second thought, perhaps not.

No one is fooled.

“A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.”