First let’s start with the fact that homelessness as it exists in America isn’t poverty. In fact part of the problem with it is that it ISN’T poverty. Look, regardless of what you’ve seen on the movies or TV, most homeless are not families fallen on hard times. Yes, there are some of those now, but most of those while technically “homeless” aren’t living in your local park. They’ve just taken over mom and dad’s basement, moved onto a friend’s living room or whatever. Terrible – I’ve been JUST short of that at least three times in my married life – and humiliating, but NOT “stand in the park and wheedle on yourself.”
90% of the homeless in America and the hard core ones are people with mental health issues, people with drug abuse issues and people who have found they can live without having to do anything for it, and can be “free” and outside society. I’ve overheard conversations in the park, and I suppose that most of the people who “dropped out” in the sixties are dead, but a lot of them are alive and going from soup kitchen to free clinic, with a bit of begging in between.
Yes, there are entire families in this system, including homeless children – but for them to stay in it, the parents need to have some sort of serious issue. Otherwise, even if they can’t find work, there is assistance available to get them at least into public housing, which, nightmarish though it is, is not living in the park.
I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t happen to normal families too – see where I came very close to that level and more than once too – but normal families usually tend to bounce back. They go through a few months of mess and horror, and then they claw back to some semblance of normalcy. (This might change as our economy dives and programs of necessity get cut. The ones for the DESERVING poor will be cut first, of course, since they rarely riot.)
The problem with this is that when people get appalled at the conditions the homeless live in and start offering “homeless services” there is an entire network, not just of homeless but of social workers who direct the homeless to the cities with better services.
I swear to you and I’m not even joking that right now there are plenty more homeless on Colorado Springs streets than in Denver, despite the Springs being much smaller.
The Springs also has its soup kitchens and other services downtown and within easy walking distance of each other.
This means downtown businesses are closing, except for bars and restaurants which can control access. And that the library is of course a place to camp in the cool/warm during the day.
It means more than that. We moved within easy driving distance of downtown, because when we lived downtown when we first came to Colorado Springs, I used to take walks every day. When we moved to our little mountain village, without these, I gained ten pounds a year. I used to love walking downtown, dropping by the deli and the three bookstores (only one left, and it’s MOSTLY a restaurant now) checking out the other little shops which ranged from yarn to weird import crafts.
Now those are gone. Worse – the last two times I walked downtown alone (i.e. without commanding the muscle, aka older son to go with me) someone FOLLOWED me and I had to employ stuff from my childhood to lose them. Once it was a large and addled looking male, and yes, he was following me. And once it was TWO large and addled looking males. For the icing on the cake – not related to this, but from a blog entry – I clicked on the sex offenders registry. Yes, I know, a lot of people there are there because someone accused them and was never proven. Our local one at least has notes on whether it’s accusation, trial or conviction and also whether the crime was against children or adults.
The downtown zipcode is FULL of registered sex offenders who’ve done hard time and who have committed their crimes against adults. The faces are very familiar from my walks, and yep, one was the guy who tried to follow me.
Sarah Hoyt, “Of Books, Compassion And Cruelty A Blast From The Past From June 2013”, According to Hoyt, 2020-03-10.
June 12, 2020
QotD: Homelessness in America
June 11, 2020
QotD: Equal rights
This reminds me of the debate in the late 1980s through mid-1990s about whether homosexuality was nature or nurture, something you were born to be or a lifestyle choice. Conservatives and Christians argued for the “choice” position and this led to efforts to “convert” gays to straight (or “pray the gay away”) because something that is learned can be unlearned. This led the gay community and supporters thereof to argue for the “born this way” position. The cumulative evidence from multiple lines of inquiry led to the nature position more than that of nurture, but this was another example of confusing the empirical question of the origin of homosexuality with the moral question of the rights of gays and lesbians (today the LGBTQ community). It should go without saying — but unfortunately in these times it must be said again and again — it doesn’t matter what the origins of homosexuality turn out to be, gays and lesbians and everyone else in the LGBTQ community are entitled to the same rights and privileges as everyone else protected by the constitution of their nation (and those nations that have yet to extend legal rights to gays and lesbians need to change their constitutions).
Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.
June 5, 2020
Australia’s 1975 constitutional crisis back in the news
Colby Cosh outlines the events of 1975, where the Governer-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used his reserve powers to dismiss the government of Gough Whitlam and call for a fresh federal election in which Whitlam’s party was soundly defeated. In taking this action, Sir John corresponded with Queen Elizabeth and after his retirement deposited those documents with the National Archives. The bulk of his papers were made available to researchers after the statutary 30 year delay, but the letters involving Her Majesty were withheld for 60 years. An Australian historian has now successfully challenged the National Archives in Federal Court:
National Archives of Australia in Parkes, Australian Capital Territory.
Photo by Bidgee via Wikimedia Commons.
The confrontation at Yarralumla, and the various narrative twists and turns leading up to it, are a major event in Australian constitutional history. Which brings us to Jenny Hocking, a left-leaning historian who is a top specialist on the 1975 crisis.
Hocking knew that Kerr, after his retirement, had deposited copies of his correspondence with the Queen in Australia’s National Archives. Hocking made good professional use of Kerr’s formal papers, made available to the public in 2005 under the 30-year rule that covers Australian state papers. But Kerr had, with the agreement of the Archives, made separate arrangements for his letters to and from the Queen — the so-called “(Buckingham) Palace letters”.
[…]
The National Archives, trying to stand by its bargain with Kerr as a donor, successfully argued that while papers generated or received by “the official establishment of the Governor-General” would clearly be ordinary public records under Australian law, the letters that Hocking wanted to see didn’t involve “the official establishment,” but merely Kerr himself as … well, just a guy. The Federal Court found that the Palace letters therefore had the legal status of one of Sir John’s grocery bills, or sex diaries, or anything else that he would be perfectly entitled to stick in a locked box for 50 years.
(Or to burn in private. Which was an option he had, but rejected, explaining explicitly that he wanted future historians to have access to the material. But not for them to have it so soon that it might surprise or embarrass the Queen during her own lifetime.)
What happened last week was that the case reached Australia’s top court and Hocking won a smashing victory. Kerr’s correspondence with the Queen is known to have contained discussions of the Australian constitutional situation, and in view of that, the High Court said, the Federal Court’s distinction between Commonwealth records and personal correspondence must be regarded as a bogus artifice. The concepts aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Archives also asserted that queen-viceroy letters attract a higher level of secrecy “by convention” in all the Queen’s realms, but they couldn’t produce evidence that such a convention exists. Hocking’s costs must be covered by the Archives, and as far as the letters go, the ball is in their court legally. They could still use a “national security” exemption to withhold some of the material, and the freedom with which this magic formula is used by archival gatekeepers is notorious. But it may soon be possible for Australians to read the final chapter of the cataclysmic Kerr-Whitlam story.
June 4, 2020
Trudeauvian “performative sanctimony” on display … again
Chris Selley on the Prime Minstrel’s latest attempt to virtue signal on racial issues:
Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time
In agonizing for 21 seconds before answering a question about President Donald Trump’s threat to send the military after civilian protesters in American cities, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likely risked causing as much trouble as he was hoping to avoid. Those who would like to see him denounce the president in full throat might be as annoyed as those who think he should accept there’s nothing Canada can really do to help and look out for our own best interests while the socio-political nightmare plays out.
Trudeau’s response wasn’t anything inspiring or novel or revolutionary. “It is a time for us as Canadians to recognize that we too have our challenges — that black Canadians and racialized Canadians face discrimination as a lived reality every single day,” he said. “There is systemic discrimination in Canada, which means our systems treat Canadians of colour, Canadians who are racialized, differently than they do others.”
He continued: “We need to see that, not just as a government and take action, but we need to see that as Canadians. We need to be allies in the fight against discrimination. We need to listen, we need to learn and we need to work hard to figure out how we can be part of the solution on fixing things.”
But here, at least, he was getting to the nub of the issue: To the extent the federal government can make things better for marginalized Canadians, Trudeau is the guy driving the boat. To read some of his ministers’ pensées, you would think they were just regular folks.
[…]
In the meantime, however, you can bet the farm we will soon learn that the Liberals’ changes to impaired driving laws — allowing police to stop and breathalyze drivers without any suspicion of impairment — have disproportionately affected black and Indigenous drivers in particular. Literally everybody saw it coming except Trudeau and his ministers.
OK, I’m kidding — they saw it coming too. They might want to log off, dial down the performative sanctimony and think on that a while.
June 3, 2020
Fanatics gonna fanatic … they can’t help it
It’s funny that no matter what the claimed crisis, the answers always go in the same direction, as Kristian Niemietz points out with the demands to turn our still unending lockdown toward “protecting the environment”:
The change, superficially, is to encourage “a safe return to work” allowing more social distancing between pedestrians, but more substantially in order to preserve the cleaner air that has resulted from the lockdown.
The health and safety excuse for the policy change can be largely dismissed. The simple truth of the pandemic and national policy is that if social distancing matters, the centre of London is not safe to return to work. It is too densely populated and almost entirely reliant on mass transit which cannot operate above 10-15% capacity with 2m exclusion rules. With average commutes over 9 miles each way, substitution effects to walking and cycling will be extremely limited and temporary.
It is then hard to see then how the policy’s architects imagine the streets will fill up to the extent urgent measures are needed. Conversely, if social distancing does not matter (and it will cease to matter eventually), then a policy to enable more social distancing outside by widening the pedestrian streetscape is redundant. If it is safe to sit on a crowded train, it is safe to walk on a crowded pavement. It is not hard then to cut through the pandemic packaging to note that the motive for this policy is opportunistic, to accelerate a pedestrianisation plan that is the dream of many an urban planner.
Many will see this as self-evidently a good thing. Removing vehicle traffic from densely populated narrow streets will reduce air pollution, congestion and road traffic accidents. As a policy it will have more supporters than opponents; very few people drive into the centre of London to commute and there is very little capacity for parking. London’s leaders are not wrong to think that this is the future, the question is really one of timing and how they go about it, which is far more difficult and does not have anything to do with managing a coronavirus.
What the pandemic allows is the ability to use emergency powers for something that is not an emergency. This matters, in normal times it took several years to close one dangerous junction at Bank to most traffic, and this under a hail of protests from local businesses and taxi drivers. The same result can now be achieved in a few weeks across many streets. The democratic checks and balances that differentiate the UK from authoritarian states can be ditched and London officialdom granted extraordinary powers to do as they please. If the protestors don’t like it this time, they should note the right to protest has also been suspended, at least for now.
June 2, 2020
Antifa
Arthur Chrenkoff welcomes the move to designate the Antifa movement as domestic terrorists:
“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0
President Trump’s decision to designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation is long overdue.
Whether you call them a terrorist organisation or a criminal organisation – or both – the underlying facts are the same: Antifa is a network of groups committed to a violent revolution to overthrow the democratic system of government and replace it with some sort of a communist “dictatorship of proletariat”, whoever the current proletariat is supposed to be (which does not in the end matter very much, because it’s all about the party organisation rather than “the masses”). To effect such revolution, Antifa uses tactics of violence against people it considers enemies as well as destruction of property. Remember, these people are not Scandinavian social democrats or even Bernie and AOC-style “democratic socialists” who advocate and follow a democratic and peaceful path of transformation to achieve their objectives of building what they consider a better and more just society. Antifa are thugs who desire to tear down and destroy the current political and economic order and erect their utopia on its ashes. They want to abolish democracy, capitalism, liberalism and all the other existing institutions in favour of a Marxist-Leninist state — or just for the fun of it if they are more of an anarchist rather than communist frame of mind. Groups whose the entire modus operandi is based on breaking law and criminal activity have no legitimate place in a democratic society. Antifa are the political organised crime.
The label Antifa has been used and abused too long to muddy the waters and confuse people — many of whom, granted, want to be confused. Because fascism is objectively bad (and considers so by an overwhelming majority of people), calling themselves “anti-fascist”, Antifa seeks to claim the moral high ground and the role of the good guys who stand up to white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extreme element. But you cannot simply judge people by who their enemies are, or who they say their enemies are — you also have to judge them by their intentions, actions and aims. In the Second World War, the United States and the United Kingdom and their Western allies were anti-fascist, but so was the Soviet Union. Stalin hated fascists (except for a period of two years in 1939-41 when he collaborated with them). This did not make him a good guy, even if for the Allies at the time it made him the lesser of the two evils. Coincidentally, for Stalin the label “fascist” was a very broad one, applying not just to German Nazis and their sympathisers but to anyone opposed to communism and the Soviet Union and so in turn opposed by them, including at times even social democrats and other non-revolutionary socialists {“social fascists” in the Stalinist nomenclature). And so it is for Antifa — we are all fascists, from the few skinheads at the political fringes to all the mainstream parties and ideologies of both the right and the left. Just as in Russia in 1917 onward and all the other communist countries in history, your position on the democratic political spectrum can never give you an ultimate immunity, it only determines the order in which you will be shot (left-wingers and anarchists last, because they can be used the longest by the forces of revolution).
May 30, 2020
David Warren reports from “the High Doganate” (Parkdale, Toronto)
I haven’t lived in Toronto for many years now, but as David Warren highlights in his Essays in Idleness posts, things haven’t changed much in all that time:
The Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Map by Alaney2k via Wikimedia Commons.
We continue to be well-as-can-be-expected, up here in the High Doganate, though stir-crazy, and over-informed about the Batflu (also known as the Kung Flu, or Peking Pox). The housefinches on our balconata persist in their social distancing, and at street level, the dogs continue to walk their masters. The brave, without a dog, may go out, without a mask, if they can stand up to the Virtue Signallers (or as I prefer to call them, the Smugly Foocklings). But that is in the respectable parts of town, at least three miles away, where designer masks are now de rigueur. There are plenty of trolleys, but they travel mostly empty. This is because the transit authorities are “committed to keeping customers and staff safe.” Knowing that most of the public health measures are fraudulent, and/or counter-productive, is not helpful to one’s peace of mind.
These measures would include the vast public doles which our guvmints have been generating, electronically. It could be taken as pay, for those who’d otherwise riot. Eventually, the guvmints hope to electronically rake it back, both from those who were paid and those who were not, in the form of much extended taxes. To understand the Batflu response, is to understand the welcome it gave to bureaucrats and their patrons, wherever the Left won the last election. They do not surrender such powers lightly.
Most of the people I hang out with are their particular targets — from freelance giguers to flea marketeers to those with religious vocations. Such people naturally resist the Kafkaesque arrangements our progressives relish and demand. The Batflu “crisis” put as many as possible of these statistically inconvenient people out of work. (Many are compulsive tax-evaders, after all!) These “little people,” especially those trying to support uncool, old-fashioned, frankly heterosexual families, are the ones for whom I most pray, as they and their children face the “green” future, which will exclude them in the name of “diversity.”
But also I think of the vast slave armies, in the “service economy,” with their idiotizing jobs, from flipping hamburgers to humping boxes in the Amazon warehouse — pinned to their minimum wages until their functions can be mechanized. (When they unionize, this happens faster.)
The “professional classes,” who can work from home, because they do nothing of value, needn’t go months without revenue, while their debts are piling up. They sneer at those who oppose a lockdown, that is perfectly comfortable for the professional classes, who at worst save money by dining in, or must order what they want through Amazon.
May 29, 2020
The contagion of fear and the progressive loss of perspective in the modern world
In the Hector Drummond Magazine, Dan C. discusses what he calls the “comfort of fear”:
Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.
This is the sort of glib response (akin to “so you WANT people to die then?”) that has essentially hijacked all conversation and debate since the start of the Coronavirus outbreak. I didn’t respond, partly because I didn’t have the energy for an argument with a friend (at least Twitter rows tend to be anonymous) and quite frankly, what does one say to this? That we shouldn’t send out children back to school ever again in case one child happens to pass away from any illness or disease? That we should continue in lockdown until we cure death itself?
My concern is that this bizarre way of thinking is commonplace right now for many parents. Locked inside their houses for weeks on end, soaking up an endless stream of Netflix programs, mawkish Instagram feeds and daily Government briefings, convinced that Black Death Mk II has landed outside their front door, paid by the state to stop working and lapping up every rainbow-based hashtag that emerges from “our NHS”, all sense of balance and perspective has vanished. With such an unprecedented paradigm shift, this new state of heightened safety has led many to consider their view on illness and risk for the very first time in their lives and unfortunately the concept of critical thinking has been found lacking. Real life, which has been slowly eroded for many decades, has suddenly been switched off completely overnight and the worst of it is that most people don’t seem to care.
The scary part of all of this is that if the adults in the room have suddenly lost their desire to engage in the outside world, to have meaningful human interaction, to take risks (don’t get me started on the definition of “risk”) and to live their lives in the fullest possible way then what chance do children stand? After all, you can’t miss what you’ve never had.
Historians will look back in bewilderment at this period, noting that it took no more than a month during the spring of 2020 for fearlessness to completely evaporate in society. In its place is a comfortable sense of fear.
Aldous Huxley and Brave New World: The Dark Side of Pleasure
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May 28, 2020
Wuhan Coronavirus versus Canadian government planning and implementation
As Chris Selley illustrates, this was a clear failure for the various levels of government:
When Ontarians look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when their government finally ponied up the big bucks and fixed the province’s long-term care system, they will likely also wonder what the hell took so long. As appalled as everyone quite rightly is by the Canadian Forces’ report into the state of five long-term care homes that were in dire enough shape to require military intervention, we really shouldn’t be shocked. As the Ottawa Citizen in particular has reported in recent years, the system’s staffing levels were designed for a much less old, much less sick and much less Alzheimer’s-afflicted population than lives in them today — and it led to some terrible outcomes in normal times.
Perhaps it was easy to blame such incidents on individual villains: Ottawa support worker Jie Xiao, who was caught on video punching 89-year-old Georges Karam 11 times in the face; or Elizabeth Wettlaufer, one of Canada’s most prolific and yet somehow least-famous serial killers, who murdered at least eight senior citizens in long-term care homes during her red flag-festooned nursing career. Perhaps tales of society’s most vulnerable being forced to wallow in their own filth, or even just left alone in confusion and misery, are too much for the human mind to contemplate at length.
In any event, it only stood to reason that a virus as potent as the one that causes COVID-19 would exploit weak points in a long-term care system. Between wandering patients, fans circulating air throughout facilities and a lack of basic sterilization control, you would almost think these five facilities wanted the virus to spread. It’s a wretched understatement to say we can do better.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though: Long-term care homes will always be uniquely vulnerable. And as the economy reopens, it’s essential we keep focusing on them. It’s essential that we focus, period.
There is a tendency among media in Central Canada to treat “Canada’s COVID-19” outbreak as a single thing affecting all of society. It clearly isn’t. The numbers are all over the map. Quebec has reported by far the most cases and deaths: 5,655 and 480 per million population, respectively. Ontario is at roughly one-third of that: 1,778 cases per million and 144 deaths per million. At 1,569 cases per million, Alberta has a comparable number of cases to Ontario — but far fewer deaths, at just 31 per million. British Columbia has the same death rate as Alberta, but with only one-third as many cases. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick have reported just 18 deaths between them. Quebec has nearly 30,000 active cases; Ontario has just over 6,000; Manitoba has 16.
May 27, 2020
Comprehensive planning and communication failures are the hallmark of Canada’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic
Chris Selley understands why the internet shaming community is dunking on the apparently large number of people who crowded into Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park over the weekend but doesn’t feel the need to join them:
Screencap from a CBC report on unorganized social distancing civil disobedience at Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Saturday.
Human beings need to get outside and socialize. They have breaking points, and many are very understandably at them. (An aside: I can’t help noticing how many people venting fury on social media have also treated their followers to images of their back-patio office setups, or updates on their new vegetable gardens.) There is also no surplus of parkland in downtown Toronto. Photographic evidence suggests other neighbourhood greenspaces were very busy as well, though not to the same extent.
In other words, this was always going to happen. So the time is long past when politicians like Ontario Premier Doug Ford or Toronto Mayor John Tory should be able to cluck their tongues or stamp their feet at such people and expect their constituents to nod along in solidarity.
Jurisdictions facing significant COVID-19 outbreaks had one finite period of time in which to try to knock this bastard virus down. After that period of time, the socioeconomic costs of the shutdown would become unsustainable and the economy would have to reopen. We’re seeing that happen all over the world right now: in essence, countries are rolling the dice. If they did well in the allotted time, fewer people will have to die in the name of getting back to normal.
The federal, Ontario and Toronto governments have not done well — certainly not to any extent that justifies their leaders’ soaring approval ratings.
The feds have been abysmal since even before Day One, with Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam actively downplaying the threat. We shipped 16 tonnes of personal protective equipment to China with no viable plan to replace it. Whatever you think of travel bans as an anti-pandemic measure, the government undermined its own credibility by insisting they don’t work, then changing course 180 degrees over the course of a weekend. Most astonishingly, the feds at first utterly failed to communicate the most basic advice to returning travellers — advice such as “don’t stop for groceries or at the pharmacy on your way home.”
And Tam’s initial ludicrous “masks don’t work” narrative has grudgingly evolved to support the use of non-medical masks “where social distancing is not possible.” But the federal government’s official advice on “safe shopping” — indeed the entire web page titled “COVID-19 and food safety” — still doesn’t mention masks, even as the berth shoppers give each other seems to narrow by the day. This anti-mask stance seems to be ideological, bred in the bone.
American passenger trains before Amtrak
George Hamlin reflects on the state of the US passenger rail system before the formation of Amtrak in 1971:
… non-commuter U.S. passenger trains can be said to have been under siege essentially for my entire lifetime, beginning not long after the end of World War II. Many railroads spent large sums to re-equip with streamlined lightweight equipment after the war, only to see what was originally couched as an investment turn into essentially a drain on their companies’ treasuries.
And the “rewards” for this? Passengers decamped to the rapidly-expanding airlines, and their personal automobiles. The decisive blow came in 1956, with the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act, which led to the Interstate Highway System.
Quoting from Joe Welsh’s Pennsy Streamliners, The Blue Ribbon Fleet (page 138), “Referring to the challenge, [PRR President] Symes wrote ‘There is such a thing as planning an orderly retreat in the face of superior forces.’ Clearly, the bugle had been sounded.”
In 1958, an Interstate Commerce Commission Hearing Examiner predicted that there would be no intercity passenger trains by 1970; he only missed by four months, effectively (and didn’t count on the Southern Railway, Rio Grande and Rock Island shying away from the government’s largesse). In 1959, TRAINS magazine devoted an entire issue to what was now clearly a crisis; the cover bore the legend “Who Shot the Passenger Train?”, complete with simulated bullet hole.
The 1960s in the U.S. could well be described as the “train-off” decade from a transportation history perspective; get, and read, Fred Frailey’s Twilight of the Great Trains, for a blow-by-blow analysis. The 1970s quickly produced the Penn Central bankruptcy, which proved to be the catalyst for government intervention; less than a year later, Amtrak was on the scene.
And since, it has frequently found itself in a “Perils of Pauline” existence, ranging from lack of funding to buy equipment, in many cases, to several bouts of route eliminations, to micro-management by politicians that don’t seem to be willing to provide consistent operational funding so that the company can make reasonable plans.
PRR E8A 5803 with Train 72, The Red Bird, passing the Hartsdale, Indiana tower and crossing the NYC and EJ&E on November 26, 1965.
Photo from the Roger Puta collection via Wikimedia Commons.
May 25, 2020
Thoreau would clearly support ending mandatory lockdowns
In an article discussing civil disobedience in the face of unreasonable government action, Lawrence W. Reed recalls the opinions of noted civil disobedience supporter Henry David Thoreau:
Daguerreotype of Thoreau in 1856 by B. D. Maxham.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
History is full of stories of people who practiced peaceful resistance in defense of sound principles in the face of official stupidity and oppression. Sometimes it has been the best way, if not the only one, to get bad policies changed.
One hundred and seventy years ago, a famous American figure wrote,
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
That figure was Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, he was an eminent philosopher, poet and essayist. His best-known works are his book Walden: Life in the Woods and his essay, “Civil Disobedience”. The latter proved influential far beyond his time and place, shaping the thoughts and actions of eminent dissidents the world over. As we ponder the civil disobedience rising in reaction to coronavirus policies, now is a perfect time to give Thoreau’s essay another look. Toward that end, I offer some excerpts below.
One last thing before I do that: I want readers to know that, speaking strictly for myself, I endorse the re-opening of houses of worship (and many other things, for that matter), whether the government officially allows it or not. If that perspective makes life a little uncomfortable for the power-hungry at this time, so be it. The additional articles listed below reflect my reasoning.
Now, to Henry David Thoreau:
- “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison…, the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.”
- “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
- “I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.”
- “If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”
- “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
- “I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”
Thanks for listening. See you in church
QotD: Sociopaths and politicians
The key thing about the modern sociopath is the ambivalence toward the truth. They think saying something is the same as doing something. What matters is if the words get the listener to do what the sociopath wants them to do. Standing in front of crowd, making false claims, is fine if it causes people to buy product. If the truth sells more product, then the truth is better. From the perspective of the modern sociopath, the difference is about the results, not the accuracy of the statements. The truth or a lie, whichever works.
Now replace “sociopath” with “politician” and “product” with “votes” and you have the modern managerial democracy. It’s not that our politicians lie. It’s that for them, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth. That’s why they seem so utterly shameless. Shame requires a sense of right and wrong, a knowledge that what you said or did is intrinsically wrong. For the people who rule over us, right and wrong only exist in the context of their own ambitions. Something is “right” if it benefits the person in the moment.
“The Z Man”, “Rule by Sociopath”, The Z Blog, 2018-02-21.
May 24, 2020
Justin Trudeau explains why Canada is still ferociously invested in getting that temporary UN Security Council seat
Chris Selley strives manfully to avoid directly calling the Prime Minstrel of Canada an utter moron:
The United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York, also known as the Norwegian Room.
Photo by Patrick Gruban via Wikimedia Commons.
“We are doing well managing the economy in the COVID era while keeping to the principles and values that we hold dear,” said Trudeau.
There are times when the prime minister opens his mouth and I genuinely wonder how he doesn’t burst into flame. This was one of those times.
Which principles and values exactly?
Not our international obligations to asylum-seekers, certainly. Until very recently the Liberals would shift into maximum dudgeon at the very suggestion that tens of thousands of people crossing the border “irregularly” — let no one say “illegally”! — at Roxham Road constituted any sort of problem.
“FACT: Providing asylum claimants due process is not a choice. It is the law,” then Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen tweeted in July 2018. Trudeau was dispatched to Queen’s Park to educate Premier Doug Ford, who wasn’t being welcoming enough. “It didn’t seem to me that the premier was quite as aware of our international obligations to the UN convention on refugees, as he might have been,” Trudeau faux-lamented. “So I spent a little time explaining.”
And then in March, it all got chucked into the incinerator. Try to cross the border illegally — we can say it now! — and you’ll get turned back into American custody.
Plus the sardonic amusement that Canada, whose educational and cultural organizations make such a big deal about our critical role in UN peacekeeping over the years, currently has a massive force deployed on such missions … thirty five in total … that’s not 35 missions, that’s 35 people.
