Quotulatiousness

January 22, 2020

You – yes, you – and your “White Supremacy” issues

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Antonia Senior is shocked, shocked to discover that she’s struggling with a whole bunch of internalized issues, according to a new book by Layla F. Saad:

I am a white supremacist. Who knew? I didn’t. I have, however, just read Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad, published next month by Quercus, which has made clear to me that I am white, therefore I am a racist. In fact, Ms Saad told me in the introduction to prepare to “become overwhelmed when you begin to discover the depths of your internalised white supremacy”.

On a similar note, a friend recently told me that my failure to recognise a vast malevolent patriarchy was as a result of “internalising your own oppression”. There seems to be a lot of internalised weirdness going on: gender victim battling it out with racist in my gut. I thought it was wind.

The publisher is pretty sure that the ranks of underpaid, bookish folk who work for them are also all white supremacists. It is distributing the tome to all the British employees of its parent company Hachette, and telling them to spend 28 days “reflecting on manifestations of white supremacy, including white privilege”.

The self-flagellation of all the white supremacists at Hachette is yet another example of how much the Woke borrow from the Church. Identity politics has become a secular religion, and “white privilege” is one of its shibboleths. Indeed Ms Saad makes the point clearly in her book, stating that “I strongly believe that anti-racism practice and social justice work are also spiritual work.”

To be woke demands faith in certain creeds, with the twins Equality and Diversity as unassailable deities. It demands a knowledge of the right language. You must believe in certain disprovable evils — like the existence of a malevolent patriarchy — and like many strict sects, it punishes its apostates most severely. The Twitter storms are fierce for those who express a non-woke view but should have known better than for those outside of the faith altogether.

Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.

December 27, 2019

A Christmas 2.0? – Kwanzaa – December 26th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – DAY 3

Filed under: Africa, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 26 Dec 2019

It is in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, that a young doctor of African studies decides to create his own holiday in California. Half a century later and this holiday has now become the nation-wide Kwanzaa.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Rune Væver Hartvig and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorization by:
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Sources:
valphotography https://flic.kr/p/6yoUEF
Emilio Labrador https://flic.kr/p/65sBT1
Robert Couse-Baker https://flic.kr/p/b2oyrr
Boston City Archives
From the Noun Project:
umoja by Travis Avery
kinara by Travis Avery
Human by Angelina

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Zauana – “Encountering the Unknown”
Sahara Skylight – “Streams of Africa”
Sahara Skylight – “Arriving in Ghana”
Sight of Wonders – “Wildlife Sunrise”

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
17 minutes ago
Today, December 26, our TimeGhost of Christmas Past looks back in the not-too-distant history – in fact into a time in history when some of us here were alive. See, in 1966, Dr. Maulana Karenga decides to create his own holiday in the midst of the holiday season, and, as you’ll see, the rest is history. Now, before some of you become all judgemental and begin shouting in the comment section, remember what Indy says in the video. Think twice before you write something, and please adhere to our community guidelines. And even if you have something controversial to say or not, we’d still like you to share some holiday cheer with us by supporting us on Patreon. It is because of our Patreons that we can fly back into the past and their contributions are vital. See you tomorrow!

December 10, 2019

Warren Kinsella, the PPC, and “Operation Cactus”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kate at SDA linked to this interesting article by James Di Fiore on the Conservative Party’s contract with Warren Kinsella to smear Maxime Bernier and the PPC in the run-up to the Fall election:

If you were new to this country, or part of our sect of apathetic voters, there was a good chance you walked away from the election believing Bernier and his party were nothing but a bunch of racists who thought they finally found a home. From there, being branded the racist party in Canada, all the media had to do was either ignore the PPC, or only run negative stories, not wanting to be seen as an outlet giving positive coverage to what was deemed as obvious bigotry.

Enter Warren Kinsella.

I sometimes wonder how well-known Kinsella really is. Everyone in the Ottawa and Toronto bubble knows him. The media and party members know him. But he’s not exactly a household name, until now maybe. Kinsella, a throwback operative going back to the Chretien years, still manages to convince people to hire him, despite having a reputation of being hopelessly unsavoury, where the ends always justifies the means as long as you remind everyone along the way how great of a person you are.

Kinsella was hired by the Conservative Party of Canada to execute a campaign painting The People’s Party of Canada as a haven for bigotry and white nationalism. Secretly recorded by an employee, Kinsella was heard giving his team a pep talk on how to effectively destroy Bernier. He even tried to reinforce his motivational speech by bragging about falsely smearing three prominent politicians as racists when he knew they were not. He tries to catch himself by saying how easy it is to smear Bernier as a racist because, as Kinsella put it, “this guy actually is a racist.”

When a strong federal party hires a notoriously unethical operative to smear a new party as a gang of racists and bigots, it can be difficult to define your own brand. I asked Bernier if he thought there was a reason some racists did seem drawn to his party’s platform.

“It happened when Preston Manning started the Reform Party more than 25 years ago. People were saying that party was a racist party. The Conservative Party and Kinsella tried to do the same thing with us. That’s why I am looking at all my options to look at the legal procedures that we can do.”

Bernier might have a very strong case, especially now that Kinsella’s mask has been taken off by his own hand.

“The Conservative Party of Canada is morally and intellectually corrupt, and they proved that with their contract with Kinsella.”

It is still unknown how much the CPC and Kinsella impacted Bernier’s party, but it is reasonable to believe Kinsella was ultimately successful. On September 29th, at an event in Hamilton, several protestors accosted event attendees as they tried to get into the building at Mohawk College. The aggressiveness of the demonstrators was palpable as they screamed at seniors, calling them Nazis and preventing them from entering the building. Instances like this make Kinsella’s contract all the more mysterious. After all, his job, according to his own admission, was to activate Canadians against Bernier by stoking the flames of racial intolerance.

There are questions as to whether Kinsella’s fingerprints are on several other party missteps and controversies, including a rash of resignations earlier this year when former loyalists mysteriously began trashing the party publicly.

Operatives normally do not get caught bragging about having a track history of how their lies about other people’s bigotry have been successfully used to disrupt campaigns. In Bernier’s case, Kinsella, a self-proclaimed, lifelong fighter for racial justice, actually spent a career monetizing racial divisions he helped to stoke. When his shtick was exposed through his own accidental confessions, the hindsight view of Maxime Bernier became less blurry.

November 27, 2019

The “Gentrification” debate

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Coleman Hughes explains the furor over gentrification in many big American cities:

The word “gentrification” was coined in 1964 to describe the influx of wealthy newcomers into low-income inner-city neighborhoods, resulting in rising property values, changes in neighborhood culture, and displacement of original residents. Though gentrification predates the modern era, it has only become the target of criticism in recent decades, as cities like Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Boston have witnessed rapid transformations. Opponents of gentrification have ranged from residents directly affected by it to wealthy college students directly responsible for it, as well as prominent Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Critics of gentrification give two main reasons for their opposition: (1) wealthy newcomers drive up monthly rents, thereby displacing original residents; and (2) rapid change to neighborhood culture represents an injustice to original residents. Both critiques are magnified by the presumed skin color of the gentrifiers and the gentrified, who tend to be white and black or Hispanic, respectively.

Though such critiques may seem reasonable at first glance, neither of them survive scrutiny. Not only is gentrification harmless, it’s actually beneficial. Indeed, for reasons I will lay out, it’s exactly the kind of thing that progressives should support.

Let’s begin with the charge that gentrification displaces original residents. Two economists used data from the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2010-2014 American Community Survey to track individual outcomes for all residents of “gentrifiable” — or low-income inner-city — neighborhoods in America’s one hundred largest metropolitan areas. The largest study of its kind, it divided residents of gentrifiable neighborhoods into two categories based on educational attainment. Their findings refute the displacement narrative conclusively.

[…]

On the whole, progressives ought to love gentrification. It makes black inner-city homeowners wealthier. Among less-educated homeowners — who are majority non-white and comprise over a quarter of the total population in gentrifiable neighborhoods — those who remained in gentrified neighborhoods saw a $15,000 increase in the value of their homes due to gentrification. Among more-educated homeowners — who are also majority non-white — those who remained saw a $20,000 increase in property value.

What’s more, gentrification breaks up concentrated poverty and reduces residential segregation. Progressives have frequently observed that poor blacks are more likely to live in concentrated poverty than poor whites. As a result, they lose out on the advantages that come with living in a mixed-income neighborhood. Gentrification helps solve this problem. Moreover, progressives often observe that residential segregation remains pervasive half a century after the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Gentrification helps solve that problem too.

November 1, 2019

The “Wokescreen” protecting the Prime Racist

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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!

October 30, 2019

In case it wasn’t already obvious – “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate”

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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.

October 28, 2019

Inducing cognitive dissonance at Harvard

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin explains some of the unintended consequences of Harvard’s consciously racist admission policies:

Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.

1) Harvard invites students to attend a university – one of the halls of academia. By presenting itself as elite, it invites its students to think that academic ability, academic ways of thinking, are hallmarks (the hallmarks!) of an elite.

2) Having implied the importance of academic talent in overt and subtle ways, Harvard creates an artificial racial reality: it selects its asian-american students to average 140 Scholastic Aptitude Test points more that its white-american students. It selects its white-american students to average 130 SAT points more than its hispanic-american students. And it selects its african-american students to average 180 SAT points less than its hispanics, 310 SAT points less than its whites and 450 SAT points less than its asians.*

Thus Harvard gives members of each of these easily-distinguishable racial groups the routine experience of encountering a consistent, marked discrepancy between their group and other groups in precisely the area that the whole essence of being at Harvard implies is important, not just for gaining some academic degree but for being worthy to decide on politics, social mores, life in general. Day by day, the experience of being at Harvard teaches its students that, in the quality that matters, asians are typically superior, whites are typically normal, hispanics are typically inferior and blacks even more so. Harvard is a university – a pillar of academia, a place that implies academic is everything – and they chose the racial mix of their students to incarnate academic racial inequality.

3) Harvard also teaches that it is the most appalling sin, unspeakably evil and harshly-punished even when the evidence is slight or non-existent, for any student ever to refer in the slightest, most micro, most indirect way to this routinely-experienced reality that Harvard admissions has created. Students must not in any way betray that they have noticed any aspect or even distant side-effect of the artificial reality Harvard has created for them – and this of course compounds the artificiality of the Harvard reality.

So my question is: what does this experience in fact teach Harvard students?

October 10, 2019

Justin Trudeau scrambles to escape from the consequences of his mistakes

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It must be awful to be a Justin Trudeau fan these days, where he seems to spend more time looking awkward as his personal mis-steps keep coming back to haunt him. I’d never vote for the guy — but I wouldn’t vote for his main opponent, the Milk Dud either — but I thought he was a better politician than he’s turning out to be in this election campaign without the dependable strawman of Stephen Harper to struggle against. While I think he’s unfit to be Prime Minister, Barrett Wilson argues he wasn’t even fit to be a teacher:

It should be well established by now that this man is unfit to serve as our Prime Minister.

But if corporate corruption, obstruction of justice, internet censorship, persecution of journalists, buying off the media, and frickin’ blackface weren’t enough to convince you that Trudeau is unfit. Perhaps this latest insanity will.

Trudeau and his campaign team somehow felt it was a good idea for the disgraced Liberal leader to appear on a pre-taped and rehearsed children’s television show today called “New Mom, Who Dis?” The appearance was cringeworthy at best, as host Jesse Cruickshank shamelessly flirted with the PM, but it was also cynical, manipulative, and exploitative, as Trudeau fielded two questions from two young black twin girls.

The first twin asked Trudeau, “Why did you paint your face brown?”

Trudeau answered: “Ooh. Um, it was something I shouldn’t have done because it hurt people. It’s not something that you should do and that is something that I learned. I didn’t know it back then and I know it now, and I’m sorry that I hurt people.”

The second twin followed up: “But did you paint your nose and your hands brown?”

Trudeau: “Mmmhmm. Yeah. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

The clip deserves to be watched more than once just to understand and appreciate how clearly scripted, deeply cynical, and frankly sick, the whole thing is.

Okay. So, this will take a second to unpack. Somehow, Justin Trudeau felt it would be a good idea to use a children’s television show and two young children of colour as a stage for a preplanned apology for his blackface exploits from when he was 29-years-old. Don’t worry everyone. He’s learned from his days of trying to manipulate strong, principled women of colour such as Jody Wilson-Raybould. It’s much easier to exploit young children!

And, by the way — who doesn’t know that blackface is wrong when they are 29-years-old? The culture in 2001 rejected such racist tropes. If Trudeau were actually that stupid at 29, when his brain was fully developed, then how in the hell should he ever lead a G7 country at 47? He can’t even be trusted to properly instruct young school children.

What other stupid things has this guy done that Canada’s enemies could use as blackmail (no pun intended).

October 9, 2019

Theodore Dalrymple on Justin Trudeau and David Cameron

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He doesn’t hate either of them, he just thinks they are either fools or knaves. As the Instapundit often says, it might be time to “embrace the healing power of ‘and'”:

No doubt it is the mark of bad character to rejoice, as I do, in the spectacle of a man being hoist with his own petard, and as the Canadian Prime Minster, Justin Trudeau, has recently been hoist. And while I am at it, I confess also that, though I know that there is no art to find a mind’s construction in the face, I cannot help also but judge people, at least to an extent, by their physiognomy. And the fact is that Mr Trudeau has a face as characterless as that of the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. They are of the same ilk. You look at them and think “What nullities!” The main character discernible in their faces is lack of character.

David Cameron’s official portrait from the 10 Downing Street website, 3 August 2010.
Open Government Licensed image via Wikimedia Commons.

It is not their fault, perhaps; besides which I, or you, might be mistaken in our assessment of them and actually they have backbones (or what my teachers use to call moral fibre) of enormous strength. In any case, there are worse things to be, especially in the field of politics, than a nullity: an evil monster, for example, would be far worse, and no one could seriously claim that either of Messrs Trudeau and Cameron are, or were, evil monsters, however little they inspire admiration.

No one, then, could accuse me of partiality for Mr Trudeau, and the abjectness of his apology for his behaviour when he was a very young man did nothing to increase my liking for him. But it seems to me that sins as a young man were venial at worst, a callow disregard of the sensibilities of others which I common in youth. I very much doubt that he was a deep-dyed racist in any dangerous way, more a silly boy having a bit of fun.

There is a serious side to this imbroglio, of course. If the political leader of an important country can be overthrown or not re-elected on so relatively trivial a ground, while at the same town no one cares in the least about his shallow but dangerous moral posturing and obviously weak-minded pandering to the ayatollahs of an absurd and ill-founded political morality, then a new nadir of decadence and cowardice has been reached. It is a difficult question of moral philosophy as to whether it would be worse if Mr Trudeau actually believed his own political correctness or merely made use of it as a means to power. If the former, he is a fool; if the latter a knave. I leave it to others to decide which is better in a politician, or indeed in any other human being, foolishness or a knavery.

Political correctness is dangerous because when fools or knaves get into power, they may try to implement its dictates. And since many people are much more concerned to appear good than to do good, and since they are unlikely to suffer the consequences of their own actions (except when hoist on their own petard), the implementation may continue for a long time after the negative effects of its dictates have become clear. When implemented, those dictates create a clientele dependent upon their continuation, which turns any attempt to undo the harm into a nasty social conflict.

October 3, 2019

QotD: Media coverage of Liberal and Conservative scandals, respectively

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the Canadian election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has unveiled the centrepiece of its platform:

    A re-elected Liberal government [will] expand the Learn To Camp program.

Under the Learn To Camp program, every Canadian will be provided with a tub of boot polish, a novelty turban, a jewel to stick in your belly button, and genie slippers with curly toes, and trained how to swish across a Vancouver ballroom while asking other guests to tally your banana.

Oh, wait, sorry, that was last week’s Justin story. In America a ten-minute phone call to some fellow in Kiev is all the pretext you need for two years of multi-million-dollar investigation. But in Canada the news that the Prime Minister has spent half his adult life as the world’s wokest mammy singer is just a blip in the day’s news cycle, soon to be supplanted by a genuinely eye-catching scandal such as whether or not the Tory leader had a valid license from the Insurance Councils of Saskatchewan or the Canadian Association of Insurance Brokers back in 1997, or 1978, or whenever. You can understand why the Canadian media would rather stampede after the Andrew Scheer scandal: what journalist with a nose for a great red-meat story wouldn’t prefer chasing down the officially approved accreditation from the Department of Paperwork’s archives than, say, the fruiterer who supplies the Prime Minstrel with his trouser bananas. Was Justin accredited by the Minstrelsy Council of Quebec or the Canadian Association of Burnt Cork Fetishists? Would that make the story more interesting for the CBC et al?

The Toronto Star, like all good government-subsidized Canadian media, has been doing its best to neutralize the mammy songs. The most potentially damaging of the three (so far) blackface incidents is the middle one – a grainy video from the 1990s showing Boy Justin capering about like an ape. So the Star set its crack investigators on the story and tracked down a much better version of the video, and conclusively proved that Tories were misleading the public when they claimed that the Prime Ministrel in blackface, blackarms, blacklegs and blackwhatever-other-appendage was wearing a T-shirt with a banana on it. After all, the banana would imply Justin is a racist who likens black people to monkeys. Whereas prancing around in full-body blackface waving your arms and sticking your tongue out implies no such monkey-like slur.

So the Star‘s new HD minstrel video is of sufficient quality to show that the banana on the T-shirt is, in fact, the beak of a toucan. Unfortunately, the new video is also of sufficient quality to show that the banana is instead stuffed down Justin’s trousers. That risks suggesting the Prime Minstrel is exploiting old white neuroses about the black man’s sexual prowess. But don’t worry – The Toronto Star is only a day or two away from a full-page exclusive asserting that the Negro, impressive though his endowments be, pales in comparison to the average Quebec high-school drama teacher: When Rastus makes the mistake of appearing on stage next to Justin, he’s the one who needs the banana. Not for nothing is Quebec’s provincial dialect called joual, derived from cheval, as in horse.

Mark Steyn, “Blackface Narcissus”, Steyn Online, 2019-09-30.

September 26, 2019

“Canadian politicians answer questions with talking points so ludicrous, counterfactual or shameless that you wonder how they can look their loved ones in the eye”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The extra-long headline is from Chris Selley’s article discussing how the Prime Racist is handling questions about his documented instances of wearing blackface:

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

If anything rational can explain Trudeau’s odd performance at a Monday-morning press conference in Hamilton, Ont., perhaps it’s relief at those findings. Lucas Meyer, a radio reporter for Newstalk 1010 in Toronto, asked the PM a neat question about the video showing him capering around in blackface, apparently with something substantial shoved down the front of his trousers — namely, “what exactly was that costume?”

“I am continuing to be open with Canadians about the mistake I made,” Trudeau responded. “This is something that I take responsibility for. This is something that I should have known better, but didn’t. I will continue to work every day to fight racism, to fight discrimination, to fight intolerance in this country.”

Meyer tried again: “With all due respect, Prime Minister, that wasn’t even close to answering the question. What was that costume?”

“I have been open with Canadians, and I will continue to be open with Canadians,” Trudeau replied, eliciting various noises indicating astonishment from the assembled journalists. “I will continue to fight racism and intolerance every day.”

To be fair, it is by no means unusual to see Canadian politicians answer questions with talking points so ludicrous, counterfactual or shameless that you wonder how they can look their loved ones in the eye. […]

If an honest answer would have been problematic, “I don’t remember” or “it wasn’t a costume, I was just being a goof,” would have worked better. Just about anything would have been better than claiming to be consistently frank and open with Canadians while failing to answer what could be the simplest question he’ll get asked on the whole campaign.

On Tuesday in Burnaby, B.C., Trudeau was asked how he can say he’s being frank and open with Canadians when all he’ll say about the topic at hand is that he’s being frank and open with Canadians.

September 22, 2019

Justin “Harvey Weinstein” Trudeau to give the NRA his full attention

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on Prime Minister Blackface’s latest attempt to switch the voters’ attention away from his racist activities onto a more traditional target for Liberal vituperation … the NRA and scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun murder machines of death:

On Friday, amidst a force-nine crapstorm that (for now) makes SNC-Lavalin look like a spring shower, Justin Trudeau stood behind a podium in Toronto and announced his government would “ban all military-style assault rifles, including the AR-15.”

“You don’t need a military-grade assault weapon — one designed to take down the most amount of people in the shortest time — to take down a deer,” Trudeau intoned.

It was an utterly shameless, utterly formulaic attempt to change the narrative. Trudeau’s government spent much of its first term studying the need for new gun control measures and the result, Bill C-71, received royal assent exactly three short months ago. There was no ban on assault rifles or the AR-15. In fact, the government emphasized the importance of letting the RCMP’s gun boffins classify individual firearms. “It should not be politicized,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told CBC last year.

Now, well, there’s an election on and the boss isn’t sure how many more photos might be out there of him in blackface. So to hell with all that. A lot of people in Toronto and other big cities will eat it up, after all.

This sort of approach long predated Trudeau, of course, and he has used it many times before. In so many ways, over the past four years, he has shown himself to be a conventional Liberal politician. But recent days have taken us miles past conventional.

If blacking up wasn’t spectacularly uncommon in the days of Trudeau’s youth, it must surely nevertheless be the case that the vast majority of Gen-Xers haven’t ever done it — if not because they thought it was racist or knew it could get them in trouble, then because who on earth has that much time to kill? Those costumes clearly took a ton of effort, and he made a habit of it!

Small Dead Animals has a video of Stefan Molyneux discussing PM Dressup’s latest set of embarrassing incidents.

September 21, 2019

Justin Trudeau will magnanimously forgive Canadians for their systemic racism

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s mighty generous of him, after all, it was our racist country’s culture that forced him to wear “skin-darkening make-up” in a totally innocent moment of amusement (or was it three totally innocent moments of amusement?). Andrew Coyne says Justin is no racist … but he is a sanctimonious fraud:

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

If you thought this affair meant an end to the Trudeau brand of conspicuous moral preening — if you thought the rank hypocrisy of lecturing his opponents for their sins against tolerance, even as he was concealing much worse in his past, would deter or even shame him — think again. He seems merely to have exchanged one hypocrisy for another, asking meekly for the forgiveness he has been so unwilling to extend to others.

Which is really what all this is about. It isn’t the insensitivity, or the self-absorption, or the hypocrisy, that will leave the most lasting impression: it’s the calculation, the fakery, the synthetic emotion, the sly manipulation. The prime minister has proved adept at deploying the jargon and cliches of the identitarian left (“microaggressions,” “intersectionalities,” and “ally” all featured highly in the Winnipeg press conference) in moments of maximum political danger: recall his earlier non-denial of having groped a young female reporter, this time as a 28-year-old: “men and women often experience situations differently.”

Is he a racist? No. He is a fraud. The racial masks he wore to conceal his identity 20 years ago are but one in a series: from blackface to feministface to sunnywaysface. If it were just a matter of comparing his youthful errors to his record on racial issues, his partisans might have a point. Certainly the Conservatives, with their record of having exploited fears of Muslims, or asylum-seekers, or God help us, the Global Migration Compact, are in no position to point fingers.

But the character and credibility of a leader is a much broader matter than one issue. It informs every part of his record, the whole of his platform. The leader we saw dissembling so skillfully this week in Winnipeg is the same one who lied to the public, repeatedly, about the SNC-Lavalin affair; who made solemn and explicit promises on electoral reform and balanced budgets he had no intention of keeping; who ran roughshod over Parliament in exactly the same ways he had most decried in his predecessor.

Oh, and: he is the same leader who boasted after the fact of having personally selected a “scrappy tough-guy senator from an Indigenous community” as his opponent for the charity boxing match that would launch his career because he would make “a good foil.” Even on race, that the current occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office is a sanctimonious fraud it is surely at least as significant as that his government sponsors anti-racism seminars.

September 20, 2019

Prime Minister Dressup and the make-up case

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s love of dramatic costume has been noted here before, but over the last couple of days it’s become evident that he’s also felt the attraction of stage make-up, even when most people would realize it’s no longer appropriate to wear blackface:

As Oscar Wilde almost said: “To be caught once wearing blackface may be regarded as a misfortune; to be caught doing so on three separate occasions in the run up to an election proves that there is a God, that he loathes liberal hypocrisy, and that he despises Justin Trudeau, especially.”

Here’s the first offending item:

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 The View, via Time

[…]

Will Justin Trudeau — President Bieber, as I prefer to call him — finally get his comeuppance as a result?

I doubt it. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals tells us: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

This is what we on the non-woke political side of the argument are doing right now. But it’s not going to make much difference, is it?

The other two “make up” incidents are covered in Time:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday night, following Time‘s publication of the photo, Trudeau apologized: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have known better and I didn’t. I’m really sorry.” When asked if he thought the photograph was racist, he said, “Yes it was. I didn’t consider it racist at the time, but now we know better.”

Trudeau said he wore blackface “makeup” in high school to sing “Day-O,” a Jamaican folk song famously performed by African-American singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. Time has confirmed that a photo shows Trudeau at a school talent show wearing blackface and an afro wig.

[…]

A third instance emerged Thursday — this one a grainy video showing Trudeau in blackface, raising his hands in the air. On Thursday, Astravas confirmed that the video showed Trudeau from the early 1990s. It comes despite Trudeau being asked at his press conference whether there were any other incidents he wanted to own up to.

This is a critical moment for Trudeau, who began his re-election campaign on Sept. 11 under the cloud of a scandal over whether he pressured his then-attorney general to drop corruption charges against a large Canadian engineering firm [that’d be the SNC-Lavalin scandal, if you’re keeping track]. The Liberal Party leader has championed minority groups during his nearly four years as prime minister and made his embrace of Canada’s many cultures a major part of his leadership. At least seven of the 35 members of Trudeau’s cabinet are from ethnic minorities.

I doubt any of the remaining minority cabinet ministers will dare say much, as the Liberal Party has a long, long history of enforcing Omertà … or else. If they want to be back in cabinet on the lengthening odds that PM Dressup wins the October election, they’ll say little or nothing to the media.

The good news is that after careful consideration, the PM has found the guilty party … it’s the rest of Canada and its entrenched “systemic racism”:

Don’t you feel awful, fellow Canadians? That shame … that’s all yours, thanks to your shitty racist attitudes. Poor Justin is merely the victim.

September 1, 2019

Gene Roddenberry was his own worst enemy

Filed under: History, Media, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed Driscoll reviews the first of three volumes by Marc Cushman, relating the story behind the legendary original Star Trek TV series. Much of the first volume is apparently about the problems of getting NBC to let Gene Roddenberry back into their good graces after he humiliated the network over an earlier TV show:

Nichelle Nichols was born in Robbins, Illinois on December 29, 1936. She played Lieutenant Uhura the Communications Officer on the U.S.S. Enterprise in the original series, Star Trek. Nichols stayed with the show and has appeared in six Star Trek movies. Her portrayal of Uhura on Star Trek marked one of the first non-stereotypical roles assigned to an African-American actress. Before joining the crew on Star Trek, she sang and danced with Duke Ellington’s band.
NASA photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) was a religious agnostic and left-leaning Texan who became a WWII Army Air Force B-17 pilot, then an LA policeman who wrote numerous scripts for the burgeoning television industry in the 1950s. Eventually, he graduated to producing his own TV show in 1963, The Lieutenant, purchased by NBC and built around Gary Lockwood, the future guest star of Star Trek‘s second pilot, and the co-star of another landmark 1960s science fiction achievement, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Lieutenant was for the most part a formulaic “military procedural” about life at Camp Pendleton, and featured numerous future Star Trek guest stars and cast members. However, Roddenberry, as was his wont, eventually decided to push the envelope, and put into production an episode on racism in the Marines called “To Set It Right,” with guest stars Dennis Hopper, future Star Trek regular Nichelle Nichols and future Trek guest star Don Marshall. The episode lost the support of the Marines, and the good will of NBC. As Roddenberry later recounted, “My problem was not the Marine Corps; it was NBC, who turned down the show flat … There was only one thing I could do, I went to the NAACP and they lowered the boom on NBC.”

As Cushman writes, this did not endear himself with NBC’s executive suit. “Roddenberry had won the battle … but lost the war. Despite satisfactory ratings, The Lieutenant was cancelled.” And NBC’s executives would not forget being hung out to dry by one of their product suppliers.

Even before The Lieutenant‘s only season of production was complete, Roddenberry began crafting a television show he called Star Trek. He had somehow stumbled into the perfect format for an hour-long network television series. While he admired shows such as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and its recombinant network rival The Outer Limits for their ability to comment on American society through the metaphors of science fiction and horror, these were anthology shows, introducing a new cast each week. He knew the most successful network series were those with a recurring cast, such the many westerns that aired during the 1950s and ’60s, such as the long-running Bonanza and Gunsmoke. Viewers treated these archetypal characters almost as their own family members, which in turn encouraged them to tune in each week.

Given the networks’ love of westerns in the 1960s, it’s no coincidence that Roddenberry’s first pitch to the networks used the phrase “Wagon Train to the stars” as a metaphor to describe the show. (As Cushman writes, veteran western and science fiction writer Samuel Peeples actually coined that phrase, the first of many bits of Star Trek lore that Roddenberry would eventually co-opt and take credit for.)

It’s also no coincidence that the show’s second in command was written by Roddenberry as “a mysterious female, slim and dark, expressionless, cool, one of those women who will always look the same between years 20 and 50.” As Cushman deadpans, “To be more specific: actress Majel Barrett, Roddenberry’s lover.” (Roddenberry was also having a tryst with Nichelle Nichols; she would find her way into Star Trek‘s regular cast as well.) While the pointed-eared alien Mr. Spock was also present, he was much more in the background in Roddenberry’s first draft of Star Trek.

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