The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, November 27, 2020

Your Bat Flu Breaking Point

Rod Dreher is a writer who blogs at the website of The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell in 2002 to oppose the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and more specifically the drive for war in Iraq from the right.   Dreher is also the author of such books as Crunchy Cons (2006), How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015), The Benedict Option (2017), and most recently, Live Not By Lies which was released earlier this year.   The last title mentioned warns small-o orthodox Christians – Dreher, who was raised Protestant, became a Roman Catholic and is now Eastern Orthodox with a large-O – about the coming “soft totalitarianism” to which wokeness, the more militant successor to political correctness, is leading the Western world.  Note that there are many who would generally agree with Dreher’s assessment of wokeness but suggest that a past tense would be more appropriate than a future one.

 

Earlier this year, Dreher posted a piece entitled “Your Woke Breaking Point” at his blog.   He began with an excerpt from an article by Megan McArdle at the Washington Post about how Donald Trump’s predictions of four years ago as to how the attacks on Confederate monuments would lead to attacks on monuments to the American republic’s founders, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were coming true.   McArdle, in her editorial, referenced Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility” which has been stated several different ways, the best known being “It will never happen, and when it does you bigots will deserve it”.    The law satirizes, without exaggerating in the least, the paradox of the typical progressive response to conservative warnings about the direction in which left-wing causes seem to be heading, before and after the predictions are fulfilled.   It is likely to end up being Dreher’s single most significant and lasting contribution to political discourse.    McArdle’s article referencing it was an uncharacteristic moment of liberal self-criticism, in which she discussed the progressive side’s seeming inability to restrain its radicals and apply the brakes when they are going too far and too fast.

 

Dreher used the excerpt from McArdle’s article to introduce a challenge that he borrowed from mathematician James A. Lindsay.   Lindsay had tweeted on the 24th of June:

 

Talking with a brilliant friend last night keyed me into an important idea: everybody has a Woke breaking point, a point where they can’t deny any longer the fact that it’s a totalitarian nightmare. Encourage your sympathetic friends to start naming what theirs would be.

 

Dreher re-posted Lindsay’s tweet and several follow-up tweets, the first of which went:


Whose statue has to come down? Seriously, whose is the last straw? Who has to get cancelled? Fired? Doxxed? Destroyed? Beaten up? Killed? Does it take a lynching?  Does it take destroying the thing YOU love? Your family? Your kids? Your job? Your hobby? What is it? What’s too far?

 

It is an excellent question and one that we would do well to pose to any liberals of our acquaintance.  What do the Social Justice Warriors – the BLM, Antifa and MeToo# types -- have to do before you will admit that they have gone too far?  

 

There is a very similar question that I would suggest we start posing to people.   Or perhaps it is the same question asked in a different context.

 

This question I would pose to all those people who think that all the public health orders, all the restrictions imposed to control the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, are necessary and especially to those who think that even more restrictions are called for.   I will note, obiter dictum, that Rod Dreher himself was certainly one of these back in the spring.   Whether he still is or not I am unaware because he has written far less on that subject in recent months than in March, April and May.  

 

The question is simply this – what is your Bat Flu Breaking Point? 

 

Let us clarify the matter with some follow up questions.

 

What do our public health officials have to do for you to agree that they have gone too far?   What line do they have to cross?   What freedom do they have to take away?   How much imposed loneliness, isolation, and misery is too much?   How many small businesses have to be destroyed?   How many people have to lose their jobs?   How many people have to be driven to suicide, drunkenness and substance abuse?   At what point is keeping us safe no longer worth the price we are being forced to pay for it?

 

Would curtailing to the point of eliminating our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion be going too far?

 

Would telling people that they have to close the small businesses that has been in their families and served their local communities for generations and which they have been struggling to keep afloat for years right in the busiest shopping time of the year, the period that they rely upon to make enough to balance their books, be crossing the line?

 

Would fining people thousands of dollars for acts that are not only not mala in se but are rather clearly bona in se although forbidden by some petty health order be one step too many in the direction of totalitarianism?

 

Would opening a snitch line and encouraging people to rat out their family, friends and neighbours be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

 

Would establishing a special police force – a Gestapo, Cheka/NKVD, or Stasi so to speak – for enforcing public health orders be the limit of what is tolerable?

 

Everything I have mentioned so far has already been done here in Manitoba and, indeed, in most if not all of the other provinces of the Dominion of Canada.   For the many who support all of these measures and say they are “necessary” it is difficult to imagine what further step could possibly be taken that would finally have these people saying that it is too much.  

 

Would it take forcing everybody to have foreign substances, including modified RNA, injected into their bodies upon penalty of not being allowed to work, buy groceries, or go anywhere if they refuse?

 

Would even telling everyone that they must pledge their allegiance to Satan by having 666 tattooed on their right hand or forehead in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 finally be enough to do it?

 

Ask everyone you know who is in favour of the sanitary dictatorship what their Bat Flu Breaking Point is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 comments:

  1. @Gerry - Very good post.

    Of course, those who have tried this sort of thing will know that this kind of decisive, irrefutable, knock-down-drag-out argument makes zero difference in real life; and will instead bring down wrath upon anyone who uses it (if, which is very unlikely, they are allowed to complete the argument without being interrupted, silenced, or left alone speaking to a void).

    I spent 20+ years of my life doing that kind of thing, so the experience of wasting my time/ having a counterproductive effect is familiar and somewhat bitter!

    Anyway; the main thing is that you make the point so clearly that from it we can move on to a further and deeper understanding; resulting from the recognition that this Breaking Point has been reached and passed multiple times for almost everyone in The West (and maybe, since the birdemic coup is global, almost everyone throughout the world).

    So, we live in a world where there is No 'breaking point' (or where the breaking point is open-endedly shift-able in a leftward direction); where there is nothing that the masses will-Not-accept in the name of... well, a wide and expanding range of excuses includng the birdemic, antiracism, climate change and the latest evolution of the sexual revolution...

    This is precisely what wise Men said (more than a century ago) would happen if God was regarded as dead, and was forgotten.

    My conclusion is exactly at WmJas Tychonievich said yesterday*:

    This Is The End.

    And spiritually to prepare accordingly - as best I can.

    * https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2020/11/et-in-arcadia.html

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    1. Thank you, Bruce.

      In posing the challenge here I am not so deluded as to think that it will open enough eyes as to change the course of events. The good of those few individuals who have not completely sealed themselves off in this "Great Delusion" is all I am aiming at.

      Your conclusion is certainly difficult to argue against. It raises the question of whether this is The End which every civilization eventually arrives at or The End in the ultimate and final sense. Either way, it confirms the last line in T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" about the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang - and a pretty pathetic whimper at that.

      Have you noticed the ironic paradox that if this is indeed The End, then the climate doom alarmists and those who have been treating this virus as if we were living out Stephen King's "The Stand" are, in a sense completely the opposite of what they mean by it, right about this being the Apocalypse?

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  2. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

    Christendom was the acknowledgement that Christ's authority extended over a territory. Beginning with the French Revolution and accelerating during the First World War, that territory, hard fought for over fifteen hundred or more years, began to recede. In the wake of the retreat, demons once swept clean returned seven fold and entropy took hold.

    Life has been grossly devalued (death cult practices of abortion and euthanasia are celebrated, sterile and narcissistic sexuality promoted), truth has been relativised (spin, ie. centrifugal forces acting on the perception of reality tears apart understanding and knowledge) and everyone has lost the way (self indulgence is the only valid expression and so morality is tossed aside in favour of ubiquitous and elastic "tolerance" - to be intolerant or bigoted is the only sin).

    If there is no path, no truth, and no life, the breaking point is never reached since there is no longer anything of substance to break. All is descending into the void and chaos out of which it was created ex nihilo.

    Agree with Mr. Charleton, a very good post. The discussion will not change anyone's mind but will help those of us willing to engage in it to find deeper appreciation and understanding of what's happening around us. As mentioned a few times here, this is a spiritual battle. The only way to fight it is to be fortified by the way, the truth, and the life.

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    1. Thank you Mr. Henderson. I like your application of Matthew 12:43-45 to the recession of Christendom.

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