ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.
———
John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?
“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”
The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”
Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”
Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.
“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”
Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.
—–
The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
April 18, 2018
Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility
Israel at 70
In the National Post, Barbara Kay explains why the world should (but largely will not) celebrate the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel on Thursday:
Making the case for Israel’s territorial and political rights involves a deep knowledge of Jewish and Arab history, understanding of the complexities around the reconstruction of the modern Middle East from the ashes of the Ottoman empire, and a plod through a litany of declarations, mandates, commissions, conferences and international legal documents that most Israel defenders aren’t even aware of, let alone able to deploy in debate with rhetorical economy.
Moreover, since the 1967 war, which changed so much on the ground, even the Israeli government hasn’t pressed itself to defend Israel’s historic rights in any systematic way (apart from crises, as in 2016, when the Palestinians drafted a resolution for UNESCO, whose language deliberately detached Jewish ties from Judaism’s holiest sites). With the 1993 Oslo peace process, the issue of legal rights fell further off the communications radar.
When it became clear over the next tumultuous decade that terrorism could not destroy Israel, Israel’s enemies ramped up the campaign to undermine her legitimacy as a member state within the international community. Once the Palestinian strategy of revisionist history replaced organized physical violence — including outright lies as in the UNESCO fiasco — it became clear that a fact-based counteroffensive was needed.
For in the end, it will be international law and accords, not blood libels and emotional mantras, that will settle the matter of Israel’s literal legitimacy. Israel was created, like many other countries, after a successful war in which no other country came to its aid. Gaza, Judea and Samaria were conquered by Jordan and Egypt illegally, as they had no claim to them, while Israel did. The Palestinian territories are not in fact “occupied” in law; rather they are “disputed.” The word “settlements” imply Jews are foreigners in their own homeland, which they are not. Jews have built 140 communities in Judea and Samaria since 1967, which excites condemnation. The Arabs have built 260 communities in Judea and Samaria since 1967, which excites … silence.
Bo Burnham – Today’s Country Songs
J GiL
Published on 8 Jul 2016
H/T to Victor for the link.
QotD: The United Nations
It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.
And, of course, corrupt organisations rarely stop at just one kind. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food programme, don’t worry, whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits — in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.
Mark Steyn, “UN forces — just a bunch of thugs?”, Telegraph Online 2005-02-15
April 17, 2018
The trap Trudeau carefully laid for himself
Andrew Coyne on the interminable “negotiations” for the Kinder Morgan pipeline:
Whatever anyone’s concerns — economic, environmental, Aboriginal or other — that is the process by which those concerns are adjudicated. And that is the process that approved the pipeline: the NEB, the cabinet and the courts, all ruling in its favour (though not every legal appeal has been exhausted: a case is still before the Federal Court of Appeal on behalf of seven First Nations arguing they were not adequately consulted).
Why, then, do so many feel entitled, not merely to disagree, or to protest, as is their democratic right, but to substitute their own authority for that prescribed by law: to defy the courts, to threaten disorder, and to deny federal jurisdiction?
Much of the blame should be attached to the current custodians of lawful authority, the governments of Canada and British Columbia. It was Justin Trudeau who, campaigning for office, gave his imprimatur to the extralegal, anti-democratic doctrine of “social licence,” telling pipeline opponents that “governments might grant permits, but only communities can grant permission.”
It was Trudeau, too, who lent support to the notion that Aboriginal communities have, not merely a constitutional right to be consulted on projects affecting lands to which they have title, as the courts have found they have, but an absolute veto. And it was Trudeau who legitimized those who, because they did not like the NEB’s decision, had dismissed it as biased or negligent, with his promise of a special panel to review the project.
Likewise it was John Horgan who, campaigning for office, famously promised to “use every tool in the toolbox” to stop the pipeline from being built. We know now that his government has known since at least the time it took office that it had no constitutional authority to do so. But if Horgan had hoped to walk back the promise, in the grand tradition of Canadian politics, after he was elected, he finds his way blocked by his partners in power, the Green Party.
So he has instead opted to stall for time, delaying permits, threatening legislation, and — someday, maybe — referring the whole business to the courts, hoping the project’s sponsor, Kinder Morgan, will give up in frustration. As, at length, it has declared it will do if Horgan’s government is not brought to heel, with spectacular effect: it has spurred the Trudeau government to state, in terms that allow no retreat, that “the pipeline will be built.”
But reasserting lawful authority, after so many years of disuse, will not be as easy as all that. It is not only the Trudeau or Horgan governments, after all, that have played this game: before Horgan, there was Christy Clark and her constitutionally odious “five conditions” for “approving” the Northern Gateway pipeline, and before Trudeau there were decades of federal governments that allowed the provinces to run the jurisdictional table against them, in the name of “co-operative federalism.”
Storm of Steel – Author And Officer Ernst Jünger I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 16 Apr 2018Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) by Ernst Jünger is one of the most harrowing German accounts of World War 1. The author was an officer on the Western Front and fought with the assault troops and stormtroopers until summer 1918.
The renewed controversy over Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech
In Spiked, Mick Hume discusses the resurgent controversy after a BBC re-broadcast of the original Powell speech this past weekend:
Here are the news headlines. There were no reports of race riots, pogroms or waves of hate crimes across Britain on Saturday night, as the BBC broadcast a radio show marking the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s infamously anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In other news, the US, UK and France have bombed Syria…
Why all the overblown fuss about the BBC Radio 4 programme that broadcast the full text of Powell’s 1968 speech for the first time? To judge by the political denunciations and demands for a ban and the many ‘what next – Hitler’s Mein Kampf as Book at Bedtime?’-type tweets, one might imagine that the BBC had cleared the primetime schedules to give the late Powell the full Nuremburg Rally treatment.
In fact, the radio programme, ‘50 Years On: Rivers of Blood’, presented by BBC media editor Amol Rajan, was tucked away in the quiet Saturday evening Archive on 4 slot, where few might have noticed if not for all the calls for it to be taken off air. Far from giving us the full Enoch, the speech was cut up into chunks read by an actor and interspersed with critical commentary that went on rather longer than Powell.
But then, the ruckus over this programme really had little to do with Enoch and the anti-immigrant politics of 1968. The pre-emptive backlash was more about Brexit, and the anti-working-class politics of 2018. The essential message of the protests was that if the demos today heard Powell’s words from 50 years ago, they might go straight out to attack Britain’s immigrant or ethnic-minority communities and turn the Thames or the Tees into real-life rivers of blood. They think we are all Enochs now.
Ironically, it is these leading Remainers who sound more like modern-day Enochs, echoing a PC version of his warnings about a coming race war caused by anti-immigrant feeling. If Powell’s rhetoric was overdone back then, theirs is ridiculous today.
For us colonials who may not have been fully immersed in late-60s British politics, the Wikipedia page helps put it into some sort of perspective.
The “Rivers of Blood” speech is a speech given by British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, addressing a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The speech strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the UK and the then-proposed Race Relations Bill.
Powell always referred to it as “the Birmingham speech” and the expression “rivers of blood” did not appear in the original speech. The phrase is an allusion to a line from Virgil’s Aeneid quoted by Powell (“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”).
The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about, and divisive, politicians in the country, and leading to his controversial dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath. According to most accounts, the popularity of Powell’s perspective on immigration may have played a decisive contributory factor in the Conservatives’ surprise victory in the 1970 general election, and he became one of the most persistent rebels opposing the subsequent Heath government.
Yes Prime Minister – Official Secrets – Expelling the Russians
Navyblue95
Published on 29 Dec 2016
QotD: Named Laws
A good rule of thumb in reviewing contemporary legislation is that if the bill in question is named after a child it is bound to be a bad one. It will be based on pure emotion, rather than reason and any principled opposition to the bill will be stifled at the risk of appearing callous or insensitive to the personal suffering of the bill’s proponents.
Jay Jardine, “A Dumb Law, By Any Other Name”, The Freeway to Serfdom, 2005-01-24.
April 16, 2018
The Empire of Mali – The Twang of a Bow – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 14 Apr 2018While the old Ghana Empire waxed wealthy due to taxes on trade passing through its lands, the new Empire of Mali born in its stead had expanded borders that included vast lands of gold…
Mass extinction or mass genesis? “The net result is that many more species are arriving than are dying out”
We often hear laments for the addition of another species to the endangered list, but that’s not the whole story as evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas explains:
Animals and plants are seemingly disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs died out, 66m years ago. The death knell tolls for life on Earth. Rhinos will soon be gone unless we defend them, Mexico’s final few Vaquita porpoises are drowning in fishing nets, and in America, Franklin trees survive only in parks and gardens.
Yet the survivors are taking advantage of new opportunities created by humans. Many are spreading into new parts of the world, adapting to new conditions, and even evolving into new species. In some respects, diversity is actually increasing in the human epoch, the Anthropocene. It is these biological gains that I contemplate in a new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, in which I argue that it is no longer credible for us to take a loss-only view of the world’s biodiversity.
The beneficiaries surround us all. Glancing out of my study window, I see poppies and camomile plants sprouting in the margins of the adjacent barley field. These plants are southern European “weeds” taking advantage of a new human-created habitat. When I visit London, I see pigeons nesting on human-built cliffs (their ancestors nested on sea cliffs) and I listen out for the cries of skyscraper-dwelling peregrine falcons which hunt them.
Climate change has brought tree bumblebees from continental Europe to my Yorkshire garden in recent years. They are joined by an influx of world travellers, moved by humans as ornamental garden plants, pets, crops, and livestock, or simply by accident, before they escaped into the wild. Neither the hares nor the rabbits in my field are “native” to Britain.
Tank Chats #27 Light Tank Mark IIA | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 17 Oct 2016A British two-man light tank from the early thirties.
The first British light tank, the Mark I, evolved from the Carden-Loyd Carrier. The Mark II was produced in larger numbers and issued for service. Light tanks were regarded as an alternative to armoured cars with a better cross-country performance.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1952-27
QotD: The Canadian media
Ezra Levant, who now runs the Rebel Media online empire as a successor to the deceased Sun News TV network, has a long-running joke/critique about a “Media Party” that croons in unison on every public issue. Every time he mentions the “Media Party,” we, the Media Party, all fall into the same cross and scornful mood. We commiserate ironically with all our old co-workers at rival titles or channels about how there’s totally no such thing as a Media Party.
Ezra knows how to market, whatever else you want to say about him. He is out to devour our audiences and show, if mostly by loud assertion, that we in the Party are all lazy and lily-livered. He is not afraid to say that all the parts of the Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s ecosystem are inferior to his thingamabob. We don’t compete with each other like he does: we lack the spirit of the feud. We all sense there might actually be some kind of unified, monstrous Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s publication one day. And we want to be able to work for it. So even Posties are reluctant to say that the Globe on most days appears to have been edited by a dead Tory prime minister and printed on cobwebs, or that the Star sometimes seems to regard personal nastiness as a social-democratic credential.
The National Post was born in a spirit of newspaper war. If you tried to start such a war today it would seem absurdly counterproductive, almost suicidally stupid; and maybe it was. Now we are all just hanging on for dear life.
Colby Cosh, “Go ahead, hate the media – we deserve it”, National Post, 2016-07-25.
April 15, 2018
Rise of the Nations I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1918 1 of 2
TimeGhost
Published on 14 Apr 2018After the War to End All Wars, there’s more of two things. More nations and more wars. Wars of independence, civil wars, ethnic wars, ideological wars and just plain old wars. In the first Prelude to the Between 2 Wars series, covering the years 1919-1939 from WWI to WWII chronologically, we look at the rise of nationalism out of the ruins of The Great War. Indy Neidell and Spartacus take you on a historical journey through 20 years of dawn, light, and dusk back into the darkness of war.
Join the TimeGhost Army on : http://timeghost.tv
Or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistoryHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson & Indy Neidell
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera and Edit by: Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
From the comments:
TimeGhost
20 hours ago (edited)PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU COMMENT (AVOIDS REPEATING FEEDBACK): The first episode of Between 2 Wars focuses on what happened after The Great War. Out of respect for those of you that are anxiously waiting for the TGW series finale later this year, we’ve avoided any references to WWI as far as possible. This episode is a prologue to future episodes that go into more detail of the actual events starting in 1919. The episode focuses in broad strokes on the rise of nationalism and the conflict that this creates, as well as the situation in Germany and Russia at the end of 1918. Here some notes on feedback we have already received:
1. We will avoid text and pictures at the same time when Indy speaks in the future.
2. There is an error in the map on the Balkan peninsula, we missed to turn off the country layer for modern Macedonia, this country does not exist at the time as it is part of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece in 1919. Our apologies. [Iceland is also labelled as “Island”.]
3. Some borders are drawn as the modern countries (e.g. Finland) although this is not correct at the time. This is a conscious decision to avoid an impossible dilemma. As pointed out in the video borders are in a state of flux in 1919, or even more often; just recently created. In cases where there is border contention that is not relevant to the current events of the video we have to choose between the following scenarios: A) Draw the border as one or the other side saw it – leads to controversy that we would like to avoid. B) Draw the contended area in as contended – doing that for one place leads to us having to do that for the rest of the world, we don’t have the capacity for that. C) Accept that we can’t solve this as the basis is not an exact fact base, but political problems that are way out of our program scope. We have tried other solutions, but C was the only one that worked (B would be the right thing to do, but we just can’t afford to invest the time it requires).
4. Some borders are not exactly right even when they are drawn for the events we speak of. This is due to 3. as well, but also because borders shift even within the year we speak of so that it becomes impossible to choose exactly the right line. We try our best to hit the least erroneous approximation, but it won’t always be perfect.
Canada’s military – the difference between fighting wars in the 20th Century and fighting wars today
In a post from earlier this week about defence spending priorities for the Canadian military, Ted Campbell looks at how wars changed between the first half of the 20th century and the post-Cold War situation we face today:
Is the 2% goal wrong?
No … it’s a pretty sensible level of defence spending for countries that really want to maintain a world at peace, as opposed to those, like Canada and many of its allies, that just want to hope for peace. But 2% is not a magic bullet … 1.5% of GDP, spent carefully, will do more than 2% spent as a job creation slush fund. But spending too little, cutting defence spending again and again and again just because it is unpopular can leave a country with what I have described as a Potemkin Village, a military that is more show than force.
The advent of a nuclear face-off circa 1950 changed the strategic calculus for the rest of the 20th century. We suddenly had the “come as you are war” which meant having regular, professional forces in being and not being able to rely upon time and space to give us time, as we had in past wars, to mobilize our reserves. We would do well, 101 years after the battle of Vimy Ridge, to recall that it, in April 1917, was the first time since war was declared (in the summer of 1914) that the full Canadian Corps, of four infantry divisions, was in battle as a corps ~ it took us over 30 months to get from a tiny standing army backed by small but eager reserves to a full corps composed of about 100,000 of the Canadians who served overseas during that war. We went to war again in the late summer of 1939 and it was not until the summer of 1943, over 40 months later, that we had a small corps, of only two divisions and an independent armoured brigade, in battle, in Italy. It takes a long time to mobilize and equip and train an army. The operational doctrine of the long and expensive cold war said that we could no longer have that time.
It is not clear that we must or even should still have small reserves and a relatively larger permanent force. Perhaps the time has come to re-examine the assumptions that underlie our force structure ideas. Maybe we need 150,000 uniformed people but, maybe, the split should be 50/50 or 75,000 full time and 75,000 part time sailors, soldiers and air force members. Maybe a country like Canada, with a population that will, in 2050, approach 40 million, should have a larger force: say 75,000 full time and even 150,000 part time military members … maybe our reserve force “regiments’ should have 500 or 750 soldiers and be required to “generate” a trained company (125 soldiers) rather than having only 150 soldiers and being hard pressed to “generate” a platoon of only 30 soldiers. I have my own ideas, but someone who has the necessary information at their disposal needs to look ahead at our strategic situation and develop a force model and a sane budget for 2050. That should be a job for skilled civil servants in the defence policy staff.
Our strategic priorities for the next 30 years or more need to be:
- Containing and reducing threats to global peace and security by helping to maintain alliances like NATO and groupings like AUSCANNZUKUS and supporting global peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts, even the generally worthless United Nations efforts;
- Confronting current threats to peace ~ like Russia ~ and deterring (by matching the growth in military power of) potential future threats ~ like China;
- Cooperating with the USA in the protection of North America; and
- Securing the land we claim as our own, the waters contiguous to it and the airspace over both.
When we work out the costs, of people, above all, but also of ships, tanks, guns and aircraft, and of ammunition, food and fuel and everything else, of doing those four things ~ and of doing them well enough ~ then we will know what what sort of forces we need and how much we must budget to build and maintain them. But no matter what the size and what the cost, I guarantee that people will still be the biggest single expense if we keep our priorities straight: and the overarching priority is that people cost more than machines because they matter more than machines.
