This is from Mark Steyn: Looking for an Argument in which the point he makes is that in the American system politicians are never forced to debate.
So now we’re told that we all have to rush to Georgia for two months to focus on the run-off election because those two GOP Senate candidates are the only things that stand in the way of Biden-Harris ramming the Green New Deal down your gullet, and giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, thus greatly diminishing Susan Collins’ importance in Senate arithmetic now and forever.
Maybe. But it really would be nice if these guys would make an argument for something once in a while, instead of just saying we’re the fellows to block the other fellows. I mean, we’ve been here before even within the shriveled perspective of political memory: A decade ago we were told we had to back Republicans because they’re opposed to Obamacare. They raised a zillion dollars, saved their seats, won total control in 2016 …and had no plan.
He’s right. We make our politicians debate all the time. Not that it makes all that much difference but it does make some. It also helps that there is always a Leader of the Opposition whose job it is to point out the flaws in what the government is doing. In the US, they just leave that to Twitter and Facebook.
Mark Steyn writes about Mike Adams. I had never heard his name before but this is the saddest story I have come across in the academic world. Go to the link and read the story yourself and then listen to the audio with Rush Limbaugh. There is insanity everywhere, but academic insanity in the United States must surely have reached its peak, although perhaps not.
The Mueller investigation was a conscious sham: an investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 US election created to cover up high-level domestic interference in the 2016 US election. Which is far more serious. Mueller’s report dutifully did its part, asserting belatedly that it was the so-called tip from a friendly ally (ie, Alexander Downer’s g&t with George Papadopoulos in the Kensington Wine Rooms) that led to the unprecedented “counter-intelligence” operation against a major-party candidate in the presidential election.
The ever expanding FBI/DoJ paper trail suggests otherwise. The FISA applications relied on Christopher Steele, and the FBI knew the Steele dossier was a crock even as they laid its garbage before the FISA judge. It’s not just a lack of candor before the tribunal, but outright perjury. Ten days before the Feds obtained their first warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, the Deputy Secretary of State, Kathleen Kavalec, had Steele’s number, and put it in writing:
Kavalec’s handwritten notes clearly flagged in multiple places that Steele might be talking to the media.
“June — reporting started,” she wrote. “NYT and WP have,” she added, in an apparent reference to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Later she quoted Steele as suggesting he was “managing” four priorities — “Client needs, FBI, WashPo/NYT, source protection,” her handwritten notes show.
Indeed. He was a hopelessly conflicted MI6 guy. But a foreign spook obsessed with Trump was vital to the FBI – because they had nothing else. Perhaps the most pitiful yet damning part of Ms Kavalec’s memo is this:
She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”
From which the title of this post comes. Mark starts with a story from Melbourne about Barry McKenzie or something. Meanwhile, from today’s Cut and Paste in The Australian.
Oh dear. Annette Grossbongardt in Der Spiegel on February 7:
The East German state had a habit of taking children from politically undesirable parents and giving them up for adoption. It is a horrific aspect of the communist regime that has never received the attention it deserves.
Grossbongardt continues:
Parents were required to raise their children to become “active contributors to socialism”. If they didn’t do so sufficiently in the eyes of the state, then, in a worst-case scenario, their parenting rights could be withdrawn. This law, says a legal commentator, “opened the door” to punishing aberrant behaviour displayed by parents … Fleeing the country, or even attempting to, was considered a “seriously negligent breach of duty”, the lawyer says. Parents could also lose their children for “subversive agitation”. Indeed, “essentially anything that was adversarial to the state” was considered a violation, “including saying anything that was critical of the regime or reading the foreign press”. The law also foresaw another political justification for interfering in a parent’s rights: a “non-socialist lifestyle”. That applied to people who were active in the church, to those who did not fulfil the “obligation to work”, or to women who frequently changed partners and had many children.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, has ruled that a 14-year-old girl can, without parental permission, get hormone treatments to change her sex, and it has also ruled that the father is guilty of “family violence” because he called her a girl.
Back in February of this year, the girl’s father was ordered to stop calling her a girl and calling her by her birth name, which he refused to do. To stop that crime, the Supreme Court issued a “protection order” mandating that her father be arrested immediately without a warrant, if calls her a girl privately or publicly or speaks about the case at all.
So the courts in Canada will now force parents to indulge the delusions of minor children who think they’re members of the opposite sex.
Virtually proving that the opposition to the move is correct in its belief that this is craziness, the court also expunged court records of the names of two doctors who were in favor of a gender transition for the girl, one doctor of whom, Dr. Wallace Wong, is catching flak for “diagnosing as much as 20 percent of the children in his local orphanage system with some form of gender dysphoria,” reported The Federalist.
The court also emphasized that Clark must not allow relevant documents (petitions, affidavits, letters, court orders, etc.) to come into the hands of third parties not “authorized by order of this court,” or with “written consent” from his daughter.
While forbidding Clark to speak to the public about his daughter’s case, [bc supreme Court Justice] Marzari stated that she was not overriding Clark’s “freedom of thought and speech.” “There is no requirement that [Clark] change his views about what is best for [Maxine],” she explained. “It is only how he expresses those views privately to [Maxine] and publicly to third parties that is affected.”
The fact that Clark is now not allowed to express his views publicly to anyone at all was, apparently, understood to be a fairly imposed consequence for his previous court-objected behavior. Had he strictly abstained from referring to his daughter “as a girl or with female pronouns,” he might not have been guilty of family violence and so subject to this order.
While the judge’s view of matters enjoys support on the political left, some feel the ruling is biased and politically motivated. Kari Simpson, president of Canadian pro-family organization Culture Guard, argued that Marzari’s decision severely limits Clark’s freedom of speech. Citing Marzari’s significant and recent history of LGBT and pro-abortion activism before her 2017 appointment to the BC Supreme Court, Simpson argued that she was operating as an “activist judge” more interested in delivering a ruling convenient to her cause than enforcing laws designed to protect families and children.
Unfortunately, the gag order on Clark makes it difficult to report his reaction to this new development in his case. In the meantime, his appeal of the court’s original ruling regarding testosterone injections is set to be heard on May 14.
Freedom of speech in Canada includes the provision that a judge can stop someone from saying what they think in public. A totally moronic age, perhaps, but actually an age of deep evil, which is getting worse! The thing is that everyone knows how insane all this is, but no one is allowed to say it.
I finally got to listen to PDT’s whole speech and it was spellbinding. Mark Steyn and Tucker Carlson both watched it and both have had the same reaction. Who else today can give a speech that lasts an hour and a half and leave you sorry it has come to an end?
I will also draw your attention to the last quarter hour, from around one hour and ten minutes in, where the President kind of summarises the themes of the 2020 campaign to come.
It could all have been so different from how it is. Like the market economy, which effortlessly produces the goods, almost making it seem as if there is nothing to it, in the same way you think that things just go right, when they go right, because they always will. For myself, I am too too aware how we are in a moment of reprieve from a deluge, that if it happens, will wipe our civilisation away until there is nothing left.
On the off chance you think the generations coming through to replace us are in some sense onside with the notion of free speech and an open society, then watch this video. As they discuss, argument from the left is reduced to ad hominem forms of personal attack. Since everything is socially constructed everything must be socially deconstructed. White males believe what they believe because it is in their personal interests to believe it. Therefore, nothing white males have to say has the slightest value so far as understanding the world is concerned. Non-white, non-males have the answers and are the only ones anyone should pay attention to, all the more so since truth is relative and never absolute.
In the video, Mark Steyn talks to Lindsay Shepherd, the Teaching Assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada who became internet famous at the end of 2017, when three members of the WLU faculty attempted to destroy her life for having shown a short Jordan Peterson public television clip to her students. She had, however, recorded her interview and then released the recording to the media which stopped them in their tracks, and has, in fact, made her famous. Articulate beyond her years, a product of the modern left though she is, she is a bridge between us and the millennial generation. She describes herself as “the most left-wing member of her family”.
Here as well is the original recording of Lindsay’s inquisition by the faculty at Wilfred Laurier, worth every minute of the 43 minutes it takes to listen to it through.
And if you want to see where this is heading, you should look at this and this. More people in “the shut up business”, as Steyn describes it. However, as one commenter on the MS/LS video said:
Peterson’s command of facts, deep understanding of human nature and group behaviour, and wealth of experience with people in need is a reality the SJWs and post modernists cannot deal with. And it rings true to those who listen to him. And gives them something real to anchor too.
From June 2017. About Free Speech. You might even wonder whether this conversation could happen today, never mind a decade from now.
Some quotes from JBP but you need to watch it all for yourself. And there is also Mark Steyn!
“I’ve studied the development of totalitarianism for a very long time and one of the things I know is the issue of ceding control over language, and the Government has carelessly made a precedent and the precedent is compelled speech essentially.”
“I think I am a classical liberal in the old school sense. I am an individualist.”
In reference on the form of sex and gender education that is happening in schools, “people have no idea it is happening. . . . The average person has no idea that it is happening.”
“We take free speech for granted, we actually take our whole civilisation for granted and we don’t understand that it rests on certain foundation blocks and if you remove those blocks all hell will break loose. And I think our civilisation is a whole lot more fragile that people understand and it is also in a lot more peril than people understand.”
“We’re also in a situation right now where your right to say anything about religious beliefs, unless they’re Christian, is seriously in danger, and that’s so dangerous that it’s almost beyond comprehension. It puts us back in Mediaeval times.”
“The patriarchy is just Western Civilisation. Patriarchy is just a code word for that. Governed by their Marxist dogma and post-Marxist dogma, they think it needs to be re-tooled from the bottom up. It makes them natural allies of any other system that opposes our system.”
“Jacques Derrida may be is the most dangerous person of the last forty years.” His writings are the basis for “an all out assault on Western categories of thought. . . . Categorisation is the basis of cognition. And so he has basically made the claim that thought itself is an agent of oppression.”
“As the politically correct movement inches forward. . . . [The Social Justice Warrior types] find a hypothetically vulnerable group – it doesn’t matter what it is – and then they use them as a protective shield while they move incrementally forward and so if you object you are targeted as if you are picking on the poor vulnerable people.”
Why I had stood out was not that I was speaking in generalities but that “I had said there was something I would not do and so had drawn a line so it was the combination of generalities with specificity that made the issue real for people.”
“Many of the kids on the left equate argument for free speech with racism.”
“Why I took these issues on now is because I believe it will be worse later.”
Satire is no longer possible against the humourless and the stupid. When all is said and done, you are no longer entitled to your own opinion.
“Why were you thinking this might be sufficiently dangerous that you would need taped evidence?”
At the end, my impression is that Lindsay Shepherd fundamentally disagrees with Peterson. She is learning but is more millennial than not. But she is getting there and can only hope she brings many others along.
Before I go further, if you are interested in doing your own bit to save as much of our past and history, as well as maintaining as much of our way of life as possible, you must join The Mark Steyn Club. This blog is a tiny tiny part of the global conversation trying to save us. Mark Steyn is a larger part and is read worldwide. You can help him by joining The Mark Steyn Club by going here. I would have thought it’s too late but Donald Trump did get elected so who can know? This is from his latest post, which really did astonish me. He actually went to Rotherham and spoke to the girls who had been sexually abused and worse by Muslim men, and discovered this:
The sexual exploitation of children is still going on in Rotherham. In broad daylight.
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