H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.
The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic – against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming – these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.H.L. Mencken, “Moral Indignation”, Damn! A book of calumny, 1918.
November 18, 2019
QotD: H.L. Mencken on “moral crusades”
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November 1, 2019
The “Wokescreen” protecting the Prime Racist
Justin “Blackface” Trudeau has been completely exonerated for any racist acts he committed, thanks to what Julie Burchill calls “the Wokescreen”:
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
Justin Trudeau seems as compulsively drawn to blacking up as his mother was to hanging around pop groups; after the third example of him doing so was revealed this year, he admitted that he had actually lost count of the number of times he’d done it. Nevertheless, he was defended by minority spokesmen and liberal commentators. This contrasts strikingly with the fate of Atlantic Records UK president Ben Cook, who was forced to resign earlier this month after old photographs of him in blackface emerged. As Cook is responsible for launching the career of Ed Sheeran, some might say he had it coming. But it’s weird how Trudeau, an ostentatiously woke politician, has survived and thrived, while Cook has limped away in disgrace. You’d think the former had betrayed both his beliefs and his followers far more.
[…]
So how come Trudeau got away with it? It’s part of a broader dodge – what the commentator Daniel Norris calls the Wokescreen. From behind this magical canopy, cliques can rob women of their hard-won private spaces (transgender activists) and enjoy the brutish thrill of racism (Corbynite anti-Semites) and because they’ve ticked the box which says Brotherhood Of Man it doesn’t make them bad people! Those people over there are the bad ones – like Jacob Rees-Mogg’s 12-year-old son.
It’s a mystery. But an even bigger one is why blackface is quite rightly unacceptable while drag gets bigger by the day. You’d have to be living in an Amish community not to have heard of RuPaul’s Drag Race, while Channel 5’s Drag Kids follows a process which we squares call “grooming”. Yet no one turns a hair. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if the Black and White Minstrels are insulting and reactionary, why aren’t drag queens? If someone can explain to me why race-based parody is bad and sex-based parody “a bit of fun”, I’d love to know. Woke me up and tell me why!
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October 30, 2019
In case it wasn’t already obvious – “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate”
One of the self-described founders of Extinction Rebellion takes to Medium to explain what the organization’s real goals are:
I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start. I was one of the 15 people in April 2018 who came together and made the collective decision to try to create the conditions that would initiate a rebellion. I was a coordinator of one of the original five working groups, and I’ve been organising with XR day-and-night since then (frugally living off my savings so I don’t have to work, having quit an industry that paid me £1000/week). And I’ve been in RisingUp (the organisation from which XR has emerged) since the first RisingUp action in November 2016. I’m a RisingUp Holding Group member, and a member of the XR Guardianship Team.
And for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me “pulling rank” — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say …
And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European “civilisation” was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.
[…]
So Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about “climate justice”, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.
This article is calling to all of those who are involved in XR who sometimes slip into saying it’s a climate movement. It’s a call to the American rebels who made a banner saying “CLIMATE extinction rebellion”. It’s a call to the XR Media & Messaging teams to never get sloppy with the messaging and “reduce” it to climate issues. It’s a call to the XR community to never say we’re a climate movement. Because we’re not. We’re a Rebellion. And we’re rebelling to highlight and heal from the insanity that is leading to our extinction. Now tell the truth and act like it.
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October 28, 2019
The demonstrated need for “Clean Teen” fiction in the YA section
You don’t need to be a Bible-thumping traditionalist to be alarmed at what publishers are pushing into the Young Adult fiction market for teenagers and older pre-teens. There are themes and content choices that many parents would be unwilling to allow younger readers to encounter, but the criticisms are falling on deaf ears, as Megan Fox shows:
“New Spin on YA” by Salem (MA) Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
It’s tough to find a book for pre-teens and teens without graphic sex and violence. The “Young Adult” section, which is marketed to kids from nine to seventeen, is full of stuff most parents would not want their children reading about. Because of it, sites like Common Sense Media, where you can see what kind of content is in the books before you let your kid read them, are very popular with parents. Parents and kids rate the books according to how much violence, sex, drug use, mature themes, and the like are in them. Librarians and the American Library Association are staunchly opposed to anyone categorizing books by content and liken it to censorship. They’re out of their minds. On one hand, they tell parents, “It’s up to you to direct your child’s reading,” but they offer no help in actually doing that by their refusal to mark books that contain adult content. And now that some websites are answering parents’ calls for innocent plotlines by offering “Clean Teen” selections, SJW authors, who think every child should have the sexual knowledge of Caligula, have their panties in a twist about it.
“If they’re named ‘Clean Teen’ novels what are the rest called? ‘Unwashed Teen’ ‘Trash Teen’ ‘Didn’t shower after soccer practice Teen’ ‘Say three Hail Mary’s in confessional Teen?'” said Zorri Cordova, a supposed author.
The far-left weirdos are never satisfied to corrupt their own children, they want your kids too. The American Library Association loves to take potshots at Common Sense Media. “These days, Common Sense Media’s initiatives contain a less than subtle paternalism based on the conviction that its values should control children’s learning experiences,” wrote Joyce Johnston on the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Blog. They have no problem, however, controlling children’s learning experiences with their far-left values. For a laughable example, check out ALA’s LGBT initiatives.
Publisher’s Weekly wrote about this topic.
Kendra Levin at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers observes that “the meaning of ‘clean teen’ can depend on the context, but within publishing houses, I think it’s most often used to describe a buffer zone between middle grade and mature YA — books specifically geared toward the younger end of the teen spectrum. You could also call this young teen and 12-and-up YA, as opposed to 14 and up.
This suggests that 14-year-olds are ready for the Roman orgies and coke parties that are depicted in the majority of YA fiction these days (and yes, I’ve read them). I don’t know what planet these people are living on, but it’s starting to get to me. What is wrong with Little House on the Prairie? Oh yeah, Laura Ingalls Wilder has been branded a racist.
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October 25, 2019
Civil servants tend to be of the left … this should be no surprise to anyone
Arthur Chrenkoff on the political tendencies of people who work for the government:
The western front of the United States Capitol.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
You could believe the whole “protect[ing] the interests… of the American people” shtick if after all this time and the incalculable amount of energy and effort expended on bringing down the President, all those patriotic public servants have been able to show something – anything – for it. So instead of disinterested paragons of civic virtue, it increasingly looks like the federal bureaucracy is full of hard core progressives and liberals who can’t stomach a non-Democrat usurper who doesn’t share their values, ideas and objectives.
It’s not a shocking revelation that public service is overwhelmingly staffed by left-of-centre people. Government work attracts the left the same way that private sector and military attract the right. The left believes in the power of government to affect change and implement its vision. Even the spooks are no different. A couple of years ago I wrote briefly about the myth that the intelligence community is a hive of shady right-wing types. In reality, the CIA – just like the Department of Education – has always been a liberal institution. That so many people believe that the intelligence community is some sort of a vast-right wing conspiracy instead of another part of the liberal establishment, is a testament to the narrative power of the far-left, for whom indeed anyone to the right of selves is right wing, including everyone from John F Kennedy to Hillary Clinton.
Most public servants can be professional enough to work under any government, even if they would clearly prefer that government to be of the left – forever. But others can’t stomach working for people whom they believe not merely wrong but positively evil. The honourable thing to do in such circumstances, of course, is to resign; if you can’t in good conscience work to implement policies you strenuously object to, you should make room for someone who can. But why quit your often lucrative job and watch from the sidelines as the country is in your opinion going to hell in a hand basket, when you can stay on and try to sabotage the government and save the world? Thus you can convince yourself you are protecting the people, even if in reality it’s the people who voted in your new, unsavoury masters. It’s easy if you try; like so many others in the recent past you can argue that the people did not in fact elect the government, which is therefore illegitimate, or you can default to the standard left-wing position that the people don’t know what’s good for them, so their democratic choice as expressed at the ballot box has no decisive meaning. We know what’s best for everyone, hence taking a different position is equated to “the war on… expertise”.
It’s an interesting, if of course also self-serving theory, that public servants don’t work for the government of the day, but for “the people”. As Cottle’s logic demonstrates, it gives you a licence to essentially do whatever you want instead of what your political bosses tell you. The problem, as I mentioned above, is that “the people” don’t vote for bureaucrats, they vote for their elected representatives, based on which policy program they like best – or hate least. Seeing that we – still – live in a democracy, the people are given the opportunity to judge their politicians every few years. If they consider that their interests have been negatively affected by the executive’s excesses, they will vote somebody else in. The problem is that the progressives only like the people if the people agree with them. By and large, however, the people can’t be trusted; like children or mentally handicapped they need someone – like the government, or if the government is in hostile hands, the public service – to look after them. It’s the unspoken technocratic mantra and it justifies the existence of an in loco parentis state, deep or otherwise.
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October 21, 2019
“On Monday Canadians will have a choice between five left-of-centre social-democratic parties”
Except for Maxime Bernier’s invisible-to-the-mainstream-media PPC, the other parties contesting today’s election are all remarkably similar except for the colour of their signs and the mediocrity of their leaders:
As Mrs Thatcher used to say, first you win the argument, then you win the vote. So not engaging in any serious argument has certain consequences. John Robson puts it this way:
As Canada’s worst election ever staggers toward the finish line, a theme has finally emerged. Despite the best efforts of the party leaders to say nothing coherent or true at any point, we know what it’s about. Everyone is running against the Tories. Including the Tories. Makes you wonder what they’re so afraid of.
On Monday Canadians will have a choice between five left-of-centre social-democratic parties: the crony left (Liberals), the hard left (NDP), the eco-left (Greens), the secessionist left (Bloc) and the squish left (Conservatives). The only alternative to the crony-hard-eco-secessionist-squish social-justice statism on offer is a disaffected Tory, Maxime Bernier. John Robson again:
Bernier may be an imperfect human being and a flawed politician. It happens. But whatever his blemishes, his party exists because the Tories abandoned their beliefs and their base long before 2017 on every important conservative issue from free markets to traditional social values to strong national defence.
A billboard in Toronto, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434cM Bernier would like to rethink immigration policy, but that makes him a racist so he shouldn’t be allowed in the debates because, per John Tory, while he’s free to rent the Scotiabank Arena, public buildings such as the CBC studios have a “higher responsibility”.
It’s a good thing for the other guys that Bernier was snuck in to a couple of debates because otherwise they’d be running against an entirely mythical beast — a red-meat conservative behemoth stomping the land for which there’s less corroborating evidence than of Justin in blackface but which is nevertheless mysteriously threatening to steamroller your social-justice utopia into the asphalt. Ah, if only that were true: I hope voters in the Beauce will return Max, and I hope our small band of readers in Longueuil-Saint Hubert will persuade their neighbours to turn out for our pal Ellen Comeau; but this is not shaping up as a breakthrough night for the People’s Party.
Nevertheless, sans Max, what’s left? Virtue-Dancing With The Stars: Elizabeth May says Trudeau wants to eliminate CO2 completely, but not until 2030! Justin Trudeau says that Scheer didn’t believe in gay marriage before 2005! Jagmeet Singh says that May’s selling out to the billionaires by promising to balance the budget by 2047, whereas he won’t balance the budget ever! Yves-François Blanchet says Singh’s ten-point plan to eliminate bovine flatulence by last Tuesday is too little too late compared to the Bloc’s plan to reduce Canada’s carbon footprint by declaring Quebec independent … oh, wait, sorry, that was almost an intrusion of something real: I meant “by declaring Quebec fully sovereign when it comes to jurisdiction over selecting its own pronouns for the door of the transgender bathroom: je, moi, mon …”
And at that point in the debate Lisa LaFlamme moves on to the next urgent concern of Canadian voters: Are politicians’ aboriginal land acknowledgments too perfunctory? Should they take up more time at the beginning of each debate? Say, the first hour or two?
John Robson argues that all five candidates are running against proposals that no one’s proposing because deep down inside they know that lurking somewhere out there is not a mythical right-wing Bigfoot but mere prosaic Reality, which sooner or later will assert itself. I’m not so sure. I think it’s more an enforcing of the ground rules, a true land acknowledgment that public debate can only take place within the bounds of this ever shriveling bit of barren sod. Those who want to fight on broader turf – such as M Bernier – cannot be permitted to do so.
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October 18, 2019
QotD: England has become the Mother Hive
In 1908, Rudyard Kipling published a short story called “The Mother Hive”. In this, the bees in a hive decide to drop all outmoded ideas of hierarchy and to make everyone equal. This includes the right of workers to eat royal jelly and to mate with the drones. In the spreading chaos that results, traditionalist dissidents are first shunned and then murdered. Eventually, the bee keeper looks into the hive, and sees the empty honeycombs and the horribly deformed offspring of the workers. His response is to poison all the bees.
Now, something like this has happened in England. In the past few generations, the whole of national life has been taken over by the cultural Marxists. They run government and the administration, and the law, and education and the media, and business too. They have imposed on us a nasty hegemonic discourse. Cultural Marxism is ultimately to be traced to European thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School. But this has come to England in American clothing. It has prestige because it was taken up by the American universities.
In America, however, the progress of cultural Marxism has been resisted, or slowed, by a strong religious right and by a written constitution that it is taking a long time to subvert. Here, we have no religious right, nor an entrenched constitutional law. In the past, freedom and common sense were safeguarded by an hereditary land-owing aristocracy and gentry. These ran the country, and did much to determine its moral tone. During the twentieth century, they were marginalised and then eliminated from government. They remain as a class — still very rich — but the tacit deal since at least the 1940s has been that they will be left alone, so long as they keep out of politics. Government has been left to middle class lefties. The effect followed the cause only after several generations. But here it is.
It may be interesting for you, as foreigners, to learn an answer to the implied question in the title of this speech. But it is essential for the English to think about the question and its answers. You see, like both the Germans and the Russians, we have had a revolution. Unlike them, we have had no obviously revolutionary event. The Russians had the storming of the Winter Palace and the murder of their Royal Family. The Germans were utterly defeated in 1945. Their cities were bombed flat. Their country was occupied and divided. Every German knows either that German history came to an end in 1945, or at least that a new chapter in German history had begun.
We do not have that awareness, and it would be useful for us to understand, even so, that we are living in a state of revolution. England has become the Mother Hive.
Sean Gabb, “A Nation of Sheep: Understanding England and the English”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2017-09-23.
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October 17, 2019
QotD: IKEA humans
Samuel Biagetti, “The IKEA Humans: The Social Base of Contemporary Liberalism”, Jacobite, 2017-09-13.
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October 12, 2019
QotD: Giving the vote to children
Apparently, this constitutes “planning for the future.”
David Thompson, commenting on “”, David Thompson, 2018-12-08.
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October 8, 2019
Extinction Rebellion – “an upper-middle-class death cult”
Brendan O’Neill watched a death cult hold one of their ceremonies in public on the streets of London the other day:
This was, of course, Extinction Rebellion. Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people. This is an upper-middle-class death cult.
This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence.
Yesterday’s gathering, like so many other Extinction Rebellion gatherings, was middle-aged and middle-class. The commuters heading in and out of King’s Cross looked upon them with bemusement. “Oh, it’s those Extinction freaks”, I heard one young man say. It had the feel of Hampstead and the Home Counties descending on a busy London spot to proselytise the cult of eco-alarmism to the brainwashed, commuting plebs.
It was a gathering to mark Extinction Rebellion’s week of disruption. The group is asking people in London and other cities around the world to “take two weeks off work” and join the revolt against the “climate and ecological crisis”. You can tell who they’re trying to appeal to. Working-class people and the poor of New Delhi, Mumbai and Cape Town – some of the cities in which Extinction Rebellion will be causing disruption – of course cannot afford to take two weeks off work. But then, these protests aren’t for those people. In fact, they’re against those people.
Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of “progressive” politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world.
Extinction Rebellion says mankind is doomed if we do not cut carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025. That’s six years’ time. Think about it: they want us to halt a vast array of human activity that produces carbon. All that Australian digging for coal; all those Chinese factories employing millions of people and producing billions of things used by people around the world; all those jobs in the UK in the fossil-fuel industries; all those coal-fired power stations; all that flying; all that driving … cut it all back, rein it in, stop it. And the people who rely on these things for their work and their food and their warmth? Screw them. They’re only humans. Horrible, destructive, stupid humans.
The Toronto chapter of the death cult shut down one of the major bridges across the Don Valley on Monday morning:
Just in time for rush hour on Monday morning, hundreds of climate change activists have barricaded themselves across a major four-lane bridge in the heart of Canada’s largest city.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) Toronto, the local arm of an environmental protest group with demonstrations taking place across the world today, shut down traffic on the Prince Edward Viaduct between Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue around 8 a.m. on Monday morning.
Members of the group formed blockages on both sides of the truss bridge with their bodies and props, including a larger-than-life set of letters reading “ACT NOW.”
Eco protest shuts down Bloor Viaduct this morning #ClimateChange #environment #Toronto #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/zliNjj49kT
— Rupen Seoni (@RupenSeoni) October 7, 2019
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October 6, 2019
QotD: Modern middle-class “cosmopolitans”
Still, there is a good chance that Jennifer and Jason actually like their IKEA dressers, and prefer them to the old oak chest that their grandparents tried to foist on them. Indeed, the extraordinary popularity of IKEA testifies not only to its convenience but to its ability to appeal to the middle-class self-image. Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city. Whereas the Veneerings’ high fashion covered over an essential vulgarity, Jennifer’s and Jason’s urbane style masks a hollowness.
It may be tempting to call Jennifer and Jason, and the the group of people whom they represent, “cosmopolitans.” (And indeed, IKEA, with its vaguely exotic Swedish names, provides a dash of cosmopolitanism on the cheap.) However, Jennifer and Jason are something newer and more bizarre than cosmopolitans: as Ross Douthat aptly pointed out in the wake of the Trump election, the increasingly insulated college-educated classes of the coastal cities do not grapple with real, substantive differences in beliefs and values, associating instead with cliques of like-minded classmates. In addition, classic cosmopolitans seek out what is best in others’ traditions while showing a fierce pride in their own — a Jordanian extolling the majesty of Petra, a Mexican diplomat breaking into lines of Octavio Paz, etc. Westerners like Jennifer and Jason show no such pride or attachment, instead leaping at opportunities to mock the foibles of their native lands.
Conversely, we must also avoid cheap epithets. The word “cosmopolitan” is a double-edged sword – long a shibboleth for worldly sophistication, it has lately turned upon its makers, serving as a political weapon against urban liberals; it is not surprising that a Trump spokesman recently attacked the “cosmopolitan bias” of a journalist who questioned the White House’s immigration policies. There is nothing particularly new or insightful about attacking urbanites tainted by association with the foreign, like the Judean exiles railing against the silken whores of Babylon. Still, as shallow and hackneyed as this rhetorical strategy might be, it packs a populist punch because the very concept of “cosmopolitan” is purely relative: since no one, legally speaking, is a citizen of the world, one can be “cosmopolitan” only in contrast to someone else – a “provincial” in the Victorian terminology, or a “xenophobe” in contemporary talk. In other words, the idea of cosmopolitanism carries an unavoidable subtext of class superiority.
Samuel Biagetti, “The IKEA Humans: The Social Base of Contemporary Liberalism”, Jacobite, 2017-09-13.
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September 25, 2019
The Children’s Crusade against Carbon
Arthur Chrenkoff explains why political movements treasure and actively seek out the youth:
Illustration of the Children’s Crusade from Tales from far and near : history stories of other lands (1915).
York University Libraries via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s really a no-brainer. Revolutionary movements like communism and Nazism, which sought to overthrow the status quo and create a new society, have always placed huge importance on cultivating young following. I consider the green movement, particularly those sections of it that can be described as the Green religion, as a revolutionary movement too, because its main aim is to implement socialism under the pretense of saving the world from an environmental catastrophe.
There are several reasons why children and teenagers are so valued by utopian authoritarians:
1. As the cliché goes, children are the future. Invest in indoctrinating them now and your investment will last a lifetime, certainly outliving the less enthusiastic elders.
2. Children’s minds are more malleable and they are more impressionable, making them more receptive and accepting of your propaganda.
3. Peer group pressure helps to reinforce what the adults instill.
4. Children are (sorry children) ignorant and naive, having neither the sufficient education nor life experience that make adults more difficult to scare, persuade or bullshit into submission and belief.
5. Children have the energy and enthusiasm, which older people often lack.
6. Teenagers go through the proverbial rebellious stage, where they question their parents and other conventional sources of authority. This makes them very useful for the said revolutionary movements, whether fascist or socialist, which need to destroy the old, more conservative way of life so as to create a new social order according to their design.
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September 24, 2019
More on the demands from the “climate strike” protests
Arthur Chrenkoff on the far beyond pie-in-the-sky demands coming discordantly from the amorphous climate protest groups coalescing around poor Greta Thunberg and her “climate strike”:
Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Fighting “climate change” is a very broad umbrella. What does the Global Climate Strike actually stand for? Greta Thunberg’s (I jokingly referred to her as St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, but the marchers in Paris did carry a poster of Thunberg as a saint) initiative does not offer any extensive manifestos or programs on its website, perhaps not unexpectedly for a child-centric project, but it does provide a brief answer to the question “What are you [as a participant asking for?”:
The climate crisis is an emergency – we want everyone to start acting like it. We demand climate justice for everyone. Our hotter planet is already hurting millions of people. If we don’t act now to transition fairly and swiftly away from fossil fuels to 100% renewable energy for all, the injustice of the climate crisis will only get worse. We need to act right now to stop burning fossil fuels and ensure a rapid energy revolution with equity, reparations and climate justice at its heart [emphasis in the original].
It’s not much, but already more than a great majority of those taking part are probably aware of they were striking for.
It doesn’t help that some of the more outrageous claims are clearly not true:
What of the other aspects of the Global Climate Strike’s five-sentence program? What exactly is “climate justice”? And what the hell are the “reparations” in this context?
The Strike site doesn’t provide answers, but “climate justice” in the last sentence hyperlinks to the website for The People’s Demands for Climate Justice, which explains itself as “Collectively shaped by people’s movements around the world, these demands are an international statement rooted in southern movements, and with input from numerous climate justice organizations and people’s movements around the world. The People’s Demands lays out a vision for a truly just international climate policy. We must ensure the demands of people, not the fossil fuel industry and other Big Polluters, is what is centered in the lead up to and during COP24 in Poland this December, 2018.” (a case here for updating your website.) While the Global Climate Strike is neither a “convening” nor an “endorsing” organisation among the 403 groups who are, by linking it clearly subscribes to the People’s Demands’ vision. Some of which includes:
Support global efforts for a just and equitable transition that enables energy democracy, creates new job opportunities, encourages distributed renewable energy, and protects workers and communities most affected by extractive economies …
Adopt a technology framework that recognizes the importance of endogenous and indigenous technologies and innovations in addressing climate change, and enables developing countries and communities to develop, access, and transfer environmentally sound, socially acceptable, gender responsive and equitable climate technologies.
Respect and enable non-corporate, community-led climate solutions that recognize the traditional knowledge, practices, wisdom, and resilience of indigenous peoples and local communities, and protect rights over their lands and territories …
Developed countries must make new concrete pledges of public climate finance accompanied by a definite timeline for delivery.
Commit to climate reparations to those most affected but least responsible for climate change.
In addition to fossil fuels, the People’s Demands are also against any market mechanisms to reduce emissions (like emission trading schemes), carbon offsets, carbon sequestration technologies, geoengineering and other “techno-fixes”, nuclear power, biofuels and use of biomass to generate energy, and large scale hydro projects – i.e. most of the potential solutions accepted by the serious mainstream climate change political-scientific consensus. This pretty much leaves only solar and wind, geothermal in a few lucky places (like Iceland, which is sitting on top of volcanoes) and small scale hydro to power the entire world post 2030. In other words, a complete fantasy world of green Luddites.
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September 23, 2019
The “Global Climate Strike”
The big “let’s all play hooky from school” event’s Toronto organizers have been getting positive coverage from some of the local media, because of course they have. Here’s Tanya Mok for BlogTO, listing the totally reasonable and not in any way unrealistic “demands” of the movement:
FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.
The coalition has made a list of seven demands, which “reflect the rallying cries of the intersectional movements” they belong to. Some of those demands include:
- Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
- The protection of forests, land, and water sources.
- A shift to publicly-owned renewable energy, and reducing national carbon emission by 65% by 203, reaching zero emissions by 2040.
- A $15 minimum wage for all, and higher taxation on the rich.
- Universal public services like health care and dental care, free university and college, housing as a human right, and free public transit.
- Justice for migrants and refugees, allowing status for all. That includes putting an end to deportations and allowing for the full access to public services.
There will be a concert at Queen’s Park after the rally, as well as a follow-up benefit concert at the Tranzac Club in the evening. A giant street mural project run by Greenpeace will also be taking place prior to the rally, around 10 a.m., at the southern point of Queen’s Park.
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September 18, 2019
QotD: Debunking the notion of “peaceful” Vikings
[…]
Which brings us to the next part. All through the exhibit, people told us over and over again that the Vikings were — contrary to legend — peaceful, peaceful I tell you. Most of the Vikings were, after all, farmers and householders.
I wasn’t buying it. Yeah, sure, most Vikings, if you count women, children, and people to old to go aViking, just stayed put. But no civilization where dying in bed gets you sent to Hel (which was cold rather than hot but much like our Hell) is a peaceful one. In the same way I didn’t buy the continuous reassurances there were as many women as men aboard those ships. Cooeeeeee! Really? The men saddled themselves with a liability likely to get pregnant, give birth, etc AND be weaker in battle? That’s … amazing. Oh, I forget. The idiots writing these cards think women are naturally as strong and physically as fast as men and that the “patriarchy” is a six-thousand-year-old conspiracy to hide this. Sure, there probably was the occasional female in a male role. Contrary to much bleating on the left, the patriarchy didn’t enforce strict gender roles, life generally did, and there are always outliers, and Helga the Ugly who could lift a pig under each arm, probably was allowed to join the guys in their expeditions. For one, who was going to tell her no? For another, no guy ever got drunk enough for her to be at risk.
Other than that, sure, there were as many women as men aboard Viking ships. Coming back from a raid. They called those women “slaves.”
[…]
But no, like the beliefs in powerful women Vikings, (who apparently can ONLY be powerful by pillaging and plundering. Being mistress of a farm is not enough), and in peaceful Vikings too they’re simply an upending of long-held beliefs about something. I.e. if Western culture has long believed something, progressives will believe the opposite, because that’s about as hard as any of them can reason, and congruent with their initial mission to topple civilization so perfect communism will emerge.
Sarah Hoyt, “I Aten’t Dead”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-27.
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