Make Gender Sex Again

Come the next Dominion election, which must come by October, is likely to be called shortly after Parliament sits again which is currently scheduled to occur on the eve of Lady Day, and cannot come soon enough in my opinion, the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre will almost certainly form the next government with what is looking to be the largest majority win in Canadian history.  Now I am a Tory, not a conservative, big or little c.  My temporal political allegiance is to King Charles III and his heirs, not to a party in Parliament and, indeed, I consider parties to be a necessary evil that we must put up with in order to enjoy the benefits of the Westminster parliamentary system.  This allegiance comes second to my higher spiritual allegiance to the King of kings, Jesus Christ, and to the earthly manifestation of His Kingdom in His Body the Church, and unlike those small-c conservatives worshipping at the altar of business, the market, and trade I remember that He warned that allegiance to Him excludes service to Mammon.  That is said preliminary to saying that while Poilievre falls short in many ways of what I would like to see in His Majesty’s next Prime Minister, I do look forward to his filling that office as a vast improvement over Captain Airhead and whichever of the abominable choices seeking to fill his place the Liberal Party ultimately chooses.

 

Poilievre was interviewed by CP24 news on Wednesday.  He was asked for his take on the subject of an executive order that Donald the Orange signed on Monday.  This was one of many executive orders that Donald the Orange signed that day, which was the day of his second inauguration as American president.  Now most of these, including the one in question which I will return to shortly, are, as far as their content is concerned, measures that I would consider to be good and would like to see similarly implemented in the other countries of the civilization formerly known as Christendom.  This includes the one abolishing automatic citizenship for the children of non-citizens born in American territory that a US Federal Court blocked as “blatantly unconstitutional” yesterday.  What will come of that will be interesting to watch because the basis of the ruling is an amendment to the American Constitution the legitimacy of the ratification of which has been begging to be challenged for a century and a half and which, incidentally, is the reason American progressives have been able to use the American courts as the means of cultural revolution in their country for so long.  I hate to applaud these orders, because the man signing them is the world’s biggest horse’s patoot, a fact I am no longer willing to overlook since he started threatening my country, but, as Sawyer Brown sang, “I got to give credit where credit is due” even if that means including the devil among the recipients.

 

The executive order in question is entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”  I might quibble that women are not the only ones who need defending from gender ideology extremism the rhetoric of which attacks masculinity as “toxic” but that is a small point.  The first section of the order concludes with Donald the Orange declaring that his administration “will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”  The remainder of the order spells out what this will look like in practice.  This is one of the things that got the dander of the woman pretending to be a bishop whose remarks to Donald the Orange in her homily at the National Cathedral on the Tuesday after his inauguration have so offended him and his followers. I say “woman pretending to be a bishop” because the Apostolic Succession cannot legitimately descend to a woman, let alone a woman who has clearly substituted left-wing politics for the Creed, and so women are ontologically incapable of being true bishops.  Naturally, someone like that objects to things that Donald the Orange is doing that are in themselves right more than to his actual bad behaviour.

 

The exchange between Poilievre and the interviewer about this executive order occurs about two thirds of the way into the interview and takes up only a small fraction of it but is being treated in some circles as if it were the whole of the interview.  Asked if he agreed with what Donald the Orange was saying and if he would be “lockstep” with him in this Poilievre answered “well I’m not aware of any other genders then men and women, if you have any other you want me to consider you’re welcome to tell me right now.”  The interviewer pushed a bit more, but Poilievre returned to this answer and to the position that government should mind its own business and let people make their own decisions on such matters and that he had other priorities.

 

I don’t disagree that the other things he mentioned – homelessness, poverty, rising costs, crime – should be higher priorities.  With regards to his classic liberal or libertarian position that government should mind its own business on this I would say that this position would only be defensible if the government were already minding its own business.  The government has not been minding its own business, however.  Captain Airhead has spent much of the last ten years doing the exact opposite of minding his own business on this matter and rather than letting people make their own decisions he has done everything he could think of to do to write left-wing extremist gender ideology into law and policy and shove it down everyone’s throats.  It will take government action to fix this and return the government to minding its own business.

 

Oddly enough, where I found myself shaking my head at his answer was on the “I’m not aware of any other genders than men and women” statement.  It shows that Poilievre has not been educated in the classical languages although he is bilingual which rather detracts from that as an excuse for not knowing better.  The problem with the statement is the word “genders.” Poilievre and his interviewer consistently used this word in this portion of the interview but it is the wrong word.  “Men” and “women” are not genders, they are sexes.  There are only two sexes.  There are three genders.  The third gender is called neuter.  While anybody who has studied Greek or Latin or, for that matter, any other highly inflected language, would know this, there are three genders in English as well.  Think of the third person singular pronoun.  He.  She.  It.  It is the neuter gender form.

 

My point is that sex and gender are not the same thing.  People and beasts come in sexes – male and female.  Words, specifically nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, come in genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Masculine corresponds to male and feminine to female, there is no corresponding sex to the neuter gender because this gender is only used for words that denote things that have no sex.  The correspondence is not absolute because some things that have no biological sex are identified by nouns that have genders other than neuter.  In English, for example, we use female pronouns rather than neuter when talking about cars or boats.  Countries are treated as feminine in most languages.  This is true even when the root of the word for country is derived from the word for father as with the Latin patria.  It is traditionally considered very rude under most circumstances to use the neuter gender when speaking of a person, which in English would be done by calling that person an “it”.

 

Am I being pedantic in insisting on this?

 

This may seem to be the case but the distinct usage of the two words, gender for the grammatical category, sex for the biological, was fairly consistent until the late 1960s to early 1970s.  Then progressive academics started using the grammatical term to refer to the idea of a socially constructed identity imposed upon people in accordance to their biological sex.  Second-wave feminists who argued that these socially constructed identities served the purposes of a conspiracy on the part of all males to oppress all females that they cooked up in their fevered brains played a large part in this but this was a period in which academic progressives in general were exploring ways in which to weaponize the building blocks of language for use in their cultural revolution.

Jacques Derrida’s doctoral thesis Of Grammatology had been published in 1967.  Rather than attempt to summarize it I will quote one sentence from it that illustrates the point “This coherent reversal, submitting semiology to a “translinguistics,” leads to its full explication a linguistics historically dominated by logocentric metaphysics, for which in fact there is not and there should not be ‘any meaning except as named’ (ibid.).” This can be found on pages 51-52 in the 1997 John Hopkins corrected English edition.  The “grammatology” in the title of the book is his proposed substitute for “semiology” (Saussure’s word for the branch of linguistics ordinarily called semiotics), an expression of his desire to emancipate the written language from subservience to the spoken.  Derrida, who believed that the hierarchical structure of language upheld what he regarded as an oppressive hierarchical structure in society, saw language about language about language as his weapon for attacking the latter through undermining the former.  Radical feminist Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, published four years later showed that she had been drinking from the same tainted spring as Derrida, although it was third-wave feminist literary critic Judith Butler who most directly drew from Derrida as a source.  Her best known book was Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).  Note the switch from sex to gender in the titles from Millett to Butler.

 Another factor in the switch from talking about sex with regards to people to “gender” in its new sense was the publication in 1972 John Money and Anke Ehrhardt’s Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity.  Money’s quack research, which played pretty much the same role in providing a cloak of scientific respectability to the idea of a gender identity that can be separated from biological sex – Money was the “scientist” involved in the infamous David Reimer case in which reassignment surgery was performed after a botched circumcision with seemingly initial success that later went south badly – as Alfred Kinsey’s quack research was in providing scientific respectability to the sexual revolution, has long since been shown to be quackery (see John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl, 2000) but the mischief it helped unleash continued unabated to the present day.

 

The point, of course, is that it was essential to the development of gender identity ideology that the term gender was borrowed from grammar where it belongs, attached to a pseudo-scientific concept rooted in liberal and left-wing crackpottery, then inappropriately substituted for the word sex when speaking of the difference between males and females.

 

A better response on the part of Poilievre would have been to say “You are using the wrong word.  Only words have genders, of which there are three, masculine, feminine and neuter.  People have sexes, male and female.”  Interestingly, whoever wrote the executive order for Donald the Orange, seems to have understood this.  In Section 2 of the order it says “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”  Poilievre should not allow the impression to be created that the loud-mouthed jackass and ignoramus who thinks that a plumber who buys more groceries from the grocery store each year than what he gets for selling the same store his plumbing services is somehow “subsidizing” the store, knows more than him about anything.  Although I did say “whoever wrote the executive order.”

 

So in conclusion, we really need to go back to teaching people Latin and Greek, at least if they want to be anything other than hewers of wood and drawers of water, before stuffing their heads with anything else.  It is very hard to mistake gender and sex, or to mistake the number of the latter (2) for the number of the former (3), when you are made to learn a long list of adjectives and pronouns with the alternate endings of –us –a –um (or –os –e –on)  in their lexical forms.  Although knowing what the difference between he, she, and it is in English really ought to suffice.

Captain Airhead Looks in the Mirror and Sees an Idiot and Thinks He is Looking out the Window at all Canadians

 

In the last few weeks as Captain Airhead and his Grit minions have been on the defensive concerning their carbon tax and its upcoming scheduled increase they have given us cause more than once to ask the question of just how stupid they think Canadians are.   Take, for one example, the terminology with which they choose to frame the matter.  If you have tortured your ears by listening to them on the matter for more than a few seconds you will have undoubtedly heard the expression “price on pollution” umpteen million times. 

 

That sounds good, doesn’t it?  

 

They are making people pay for pollution.  That sounds like they are fining people for dumping garbage, sewage, and chemicals into the lakes and rivers or for producing the kind of toxic air quality that can be found primarily in large cities of the Third World.  The “price on pollution”, however, refers to a tax on the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.   The emission of carbon dioxide is not pollution because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but an essential component of the atmosphere.   Anybody with the most basic of scientific knowledge will be aware that human beings and other animal life take in oxygen when they breathe and breathe out carbon dioxide, which in turn is taken in by plant life that converts it to its use and gives off oxygen.

 

The Liberals must think Canadians are as ignorant of math as they seem to assume them to be of science.   They have been claiming that most Canadians receive more in carbon tax rebates than they pay in the carbon tax itself.   This is, of course, not true, and only a moron would think it to be true.  While governments are prone to spend more than they receive in revenue – the present Liberal government more than any other – the idea of a specific tax that comes with a rebate that exceeds what the tax takes in is ridiculous.   Perhaps you have seen the recent exchange between the evil ditz who is Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister and Minister of Finance and the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in which, having characterized the Conservative demand that the increase in the carbon tax be scrapped as a “cut” to the support Canadians receive from the government in the form of the carbon tax rebates, she said “that’s $1,800 Alberta families won’t get, that’s $1,120 Ontario families won’t get.”   The Conservative leader responded with the observation that according to the parliamentary budget officer “the carbon tax will cost Alberta families $2,943.”  Poilievre then aptly compared this to the actions of a bank robber who “thinks he’s virtuous because he tips the teller on the way out the door.”

 

The carbon tax costs households a lot more than just what they pay out directly on the purchase of energy.  Whenever they go to the grocery store to buy food the price they pay will include the carbon tax paid on the fuel needed to get that food from the farm to the distributor and from the distributor to the store and however many addition transportation steps there may be along the way.  The same, of course, is true of anything else the family buys at the store.   It is difficult to imagine any other single item a tax on which would produce a higher compound cost.   The carbon tax is not the only factor contributing to the inflation that has created an affordability crisis in Canada, but it is also not the only factor for which Captain Airhead and his cronies are responsible.  Indeed, everything they do looks like it was done because they weighed all their options and chose the one that would make life least affordable for the average Canadian.   The housing crisis is largely due to their insane policy of trying to bring as many immigrants and refugees into the country as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of economic, employment, and housing considerations.   It is starting to look like their even more insane policy of making it as quick and easy as possible for Canadians to get a doctor to murder them, euphemistically dubbed MAID – Medical Assistance in Dying – was designed to provide Canadians with a way to opt out of living with the hellish consequences of their misgoverning.   

 

These progressive nincompoops – and being a nincompoop, pronounced with extra stress on the last syllable, is a prerequisite for being a progressive – justify all of this with the words “climate change.”   This is their single biggest display of contempt for the knowledge and intelligence of the ordinary Canadian.  The idea that government should be fighting climate change rests upon the assumption that climate change is a bad thing.  Try telling that to people who lived through the end of an ice age.   You won’t be able to, of course, because the last ice age ended about halfway through the Victorian era but if someone from then were still alive to answer you they would testify that global warming was the best thing that ever happened to them.  The earth’s climate is not now nor has it ever been an unchanging constant.   It is the height of human hubris to think a) that it is all due to our activity and/or b) that we have the power to prevent or control it.   The sane and humble approach to climate change is to observe how the climate is changing to, note among the changes those which will make life easier and be thankful for them, and to note those that will make life more difficult and figure out how best to adjust ourselves so as to live with them.   That is far more sensible than acting like a cartoonish supervillain and trying to bend the world’s climate to our will no matter how many others the happiness and perhaps lives of whom we have to sacrifice in order so to do.

 

Mercifully, Canadians do not appear to be remotely as stupid as the progressives think them to be.  The approval rating of Captain Airhead and the Grits has gone the way of the Titanic and the defectors are not jumping on board the NDP ship which has sprung a leak from which the socialists are attempting to salvage the boat by bailing out the water with a sieve.  Judging from the defeat of the Conservatives motion for a no confidence vote yesterday we are likely going to have to wait for this session of Parliament to come to full term before we see the next Dominion Election.   The longer we have to wait, however, the sicker of both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal we will all become, and the greater their inevitable fall.

Thermidor is on its way.   May the Lord hasten its coming.

Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

 Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election.  He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968.   With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time.   His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history.   The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader.   King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out.   In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master.   Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald.   Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us.   Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow.   Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States.   By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him.   The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.

 

The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time.   Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate.   When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing.   It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm.   The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.   Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.

 

Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father.   Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election.   Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are.   It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone.  What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.”   Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.

 

The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror.   On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.”   A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it.   Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers.   They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad.   In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation.  As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.  

 

Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children.   Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children  from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades.   Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.  

 

Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate.    The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate.   Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019.  It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021.  In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history.   Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism.  Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)

 

Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate.   If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime.   If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words.   While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.

 

Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke.   Consider how he handles real world harms.   His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government.   This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.”   Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it.   Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible.   Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?

 

Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill.   In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything.   He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course.   People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership.   What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his.    This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.

 

Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago.   It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia.   It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.

 

It is about time that he took a walk in the snow.   Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election.   Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet.   Any of these ways works.  

 

The time is come.  The time is now.  Just go. Go. GO!   I don’t care how.  Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)

 

(1)   Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof.   Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim.   Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim.   That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion.   In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant.   Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations.   They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers.   To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us.   The ancients had a term for this failure.   It is the vice of impiety.

(2)   The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986).    Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.

(3)   Apologies to Dr. Seuss.

One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

 

We are almost a quarter of a century into the third millennium Anno Domini.  In that period the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY - gang has grown accustomed to getting whatever it demands, no matter how ludicrous, absurd, or even downright insane, the demand happens to be.   This is true in general across the civilization formerly known as Christendom but nowhere more so than here in the Dominion of Canada.   It has been especially true here for the last nine years since Captain Airhead became the creepiest little low-life sleazebag ever to disgrace the office of the first minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.   Captain Airhead has aggressively promoted the craziest, most fringe, and least defensible elements of the alphabet soup agenda as if they were commonsensical, had the weight of universally recognized moral truth behind them, and could be opposed only by knuckle-dragging moral reprobates.  If knuckle-dragging moral reprobation is what is required to oppose such things then Captain Airhead ought to be leading the opposition.   He was never able to add two and two together and come up with four, however.   Just look at his budgets.  

 

One consequence of Captain Airhead’s alphabet soup policies has been a sharp decline in average intelligence in the country.   We might call this the Trudeau Effect.   It is the opposite of the Flynn Effect, the psychometric phenomenon named after James Flynn by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) that was the reason standardized IQ tests needed to be revised, updated, and recalibrated periodically to prevent the average from running significantly over 100.   The Trudeau Effect is when, due to constant government-backed gas-lighting and bullying, intelligence so declines that people no longer understand the difference between what is true in reality and what someone mistakenly thinks or imagines to be true.   Before Captain Airhead we could say in response to those pushing the trans part of the alphabet soup agenda that we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is a chicken actually is a chicken, we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte actually is who he thinks he is, and neither should we accept that the boy who thinks he is a girl is a girl or that the girl who thinks she is a boy is a boy.   Today, not only do fewer and fewer people understand this, the aggressive promotion of the trans agenda has brought us to the point where there is now a demand that we regard people who think they are something other than people as being what they think or say they are.

 

This is why it has been rather encouraging over the last year or so to see a growing push back against this insanity.    Most recently, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, announced a new set of policies and upcoming legislation for her province that would restrict the genital and breast mutilation sickeningly called by such deranged euphemisms as gender-reassignment surgery or gender-affirming care to those who have reached the age of majority, ban puberty-blockers for those under the age of 16, require that parents be notified and give their consent when pervert teachers try to brainwash their kids into thinking they are the opposite sex/gender, require parental consent for sex education and that all sex ed curricula be approved by the minister of education, and prevent the sort of situation that Ray Stevens has hilariously lampooned in his new song “Since Bubba Changed His Name to Charlene”.   In other words, policies and legislation that anyone who isn’t a total idiot, insane, under the influence of an evil spirit or a substance that turns one’s mind to goo or both, evil on a megalomaniacal scale, or some combination of these, could and would support.   Needless to say, both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the supervillain who somehow broke out of the cartoon universe and into our own and having been denied entry to India due to his connections to the extremists who want to break that country up opted to become the leader of the socialist party here, have been having conniptions over this.

 

Most news media commentators have joined the whacko politicians like Airhead and Dhaliwal in howling in outrage over what could be best described as the very, bare bones, minimum of a sensible provincial policy towards alphabet soup gender politics.   This will not come as a shock to many, I suspect.    Canadian newspapers have acted as if their role was to propagate the ideas of and bolster support for the Liberal Party since at least the time when John Wesley Defoe edited the Winnipeg Free Press.   Arguably it goes back even further to when George Brown edited the Toronto Globe, the predecessor of today’s Globe and Mail.   That the new technological means of mass communication seemed designed to project a distorted view of reality that served the interests of some ideological vision of progress rather than of truth was a critique made by such varied observers as the American Richard M. Weaver, the French Jacques Ellul, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan.  It was radio, television, and the motion picture industry that these men had in mind.   The second revolution in mass communications technology that gave us the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming services has since eclipsed the first.    It has not rectified the problem those astute social critics and technosceptics saw in the earlier mass communications media any more than Captain Airhead’s bailout of the struggling Canadian newspapers solved the problem of their heavy bias towards the Liberal Party but rather, in both instances, the problem was exponentially magnified.

 

John Ibbitson wrote a piece that argued that Smith’s policies were endangering all teenagers in Alberta.   Naturally, the Globe and Mail had the poor taste to publish it.   The obvious reality is that no teenagers – or anybody else for that matter – are endangered by Smith’s policies.    Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, attempted to argue that Smith, who has long been identified with the libertarian wing of Canadian conservatism, has betrayed her ideology.   As Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservative Party, pointed out, however, when he – finally – took a stand in favour what Smith was doing, prohibiting people from making irreversible, life-altering, decisions while they are children means protecting their right to make adult choices as adults.  That is hardly something that could be described as irreconcilably out of sync with libertarian ideals  As an indicator of just how cuckoo most of the media reporting on this has been, Ibbitson’s and Fawcett’s are among the saner of the anti-Smith pieces that have appeared.

 

Poilievre also predicted that Captain Airhead will eventually have to back down on this issue.   I certainly hope that he is right about that and that soon we will have the pleasure of watching Captain Airhead eat his own words.   In the meantime, it is good to see that a rational, sane, pushback against the alphabet soup madness has finally begun.   Let us hope and pray that it continues and spreads.

Monarchy and the Transcendence of Politics

 

His Majesty King Charles III acceded to the throne of the United Kingdom and his other Commonwealth Realms including the Dominion of Canada the moment his mother, our late Queen Elizabeth II, passed from this life on Thursday, 8 September.   The formal proclamations of the accession began to take place on Saturday, 10 September.   Although there were also proclamations in Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland the formal proclamation on behalf of the entire United Kingdom took place at St. James’ Palace in London.   Similarly, while there were provincial proclamations as well, the formal proclamation on behalf of the Dominion of Canada took place at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Saturday, 10 September.  

 

Although these proclamations were, of course, ceremonies of state, they were not political in the common sense of the word.   While the term “politics” is derived from the Greek word for city and state and thus can mean something along the lines of “statecraft” in everyday English we employ it in reference to the process of competing for the power of elected office by flattering the electorate, making empty promises and vain boasts, defaming your competitor(s) and demonizing factions other than your own.   Mercifully, the institution of the monarchy is not political in this sense.   The office of Sovereign is filled by hereditary right and the moment the previous Sovereign dies the next heir in the line of succession accedes to the throne.   Thus the king or queen can be a symbol of unity in a way that no elected head of state could ever be.   It is very appropriate, therefore, that on this occasion, while office-holding politicians were present and had to sign the proclamations, it was generally non-political figures, usually historians or similar such scholars associated with the realm’s college of arms, who had the duty of reading out the proclamation.   In the United Kingdom this was the Garter Principle King of Arms, David White.   In the Dominion of Canada it was the Chief Herald of Canada, Samy Khalid.

 

It so happens that on the day of the proclamation another event took place in the Dominion of Canada which by contrast was very political indeed.   This was the convention in which the Conservative Party of Canada chose their new leader.     Father Raymond J. De Souza, in a column for the National Post a couple of weeks ago criticized both the Conservatives for not post-postponing the convention or at the very least announcing the result “without fanfare” and the Prime Minister for the partisan rant he gave the following Monday in the guise of congratulating the new leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   I wholeheartedly agreed with Father De Souza that partisan politics of this sort ought to have been put on hold until at least after the interment of Her Late Majesty and in that spirit have refrained from commenting on the new Conservative leadership until now.

 

In our constitution, the principal body of government under the reigning Sovereign is Parliament, a bicameral legislature, the lower chamber of which, the House of Commons, is filled with Members chosen to represent local constituencies by popular election.   By custom, the person with the largest amount of support in the House of Commons is invited to become His Majesty’s Prime Minister and to select from his associates those who with him will join His Majesty’s Privy Council as the Cabinet, the committee within the Privy Council charged with the day-to-day administrative work of government and thus conventionally referred to as “the government”.  If you are going to have this kind of government, then you have to accept alongside it the necessary evil of politics in the sense described a few paragraphs ago and the inevitable companion of this kind of politics which is partisanship, the division of the legislative assembly and the electorate it represents into competing factions.    While politics and partisanship are undoubtedly evils, they are far lesser evils than that which occurs when a single faction eliminates its competitors and establishes a one-party, totalitarian, state.   This was a major lesson of the first half of the last century.   Therefore we put up with the nonsense that is this kind of partisan politics and thank God that in the time-tested ancient institution that is our traditional hereditary monarchy we have a symbol of order, unity, and continuity that transcends the political.   Only a complete dolt, a total doofus,  a hopeless sniveling moron would wish that it were otherwise.

 

While political parties claim to disagree about all sorts of different ideas and issues, on one matter they are all remarkably alike in their thinking.   Each believes that the country would be better off if they, the party in question, were the ones governing it.  This is what each party is ultimately trying to convince the Canadian electorate to agree with them about in every Dominion election.    Ultimately, for each political party, their ideas, positions, and policies with regards to specific issues are subservient to the idea that they ought to be the ones in power.   This is the reason why parties often jettison ideas and positions that they once treated as sacred principles.   They, that is the parties, feel that they, that is the ideas and positions, have become a hindrance to their attaining the power they covet.   Since the willingness to sacrifice principle for ambition is ordinarily regarded as being an indicator of bad character rather than good character this can be viewed from one angle as speaking very poorly about the corrupting effect partisan politics has on its participants.   The other angle that needs to be considered, however, is that if this were not the case, and every party was made up of inflexible ideologues rather than pragmatic compromisers, this would hardly be preferable to things as they currently stand.   It would make things more interesting, certainly, but in a way that is much worse rather than much better.

 

The new leader of the Conservative Party, which is currently His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the party with the second most seats in the House of Commons on which the task of holding the governing party accountable to Parliament chiefly falls, was chosen by the membership of the party at the aforementioned, ought-to-have-been-postponed, convention.   In passing, let me say that I very much dislike this method of party’s selling memberships to people who then choose the party leader in convention.   The older method, in which the leader was chosen by the party caucus, that is to say, the Members of Parliament who belong to the party, was much better.  The party leader’s veto over local riding associations as to who runs as the party’s candidate in the constituency, an innovation introduced by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, ought also to be scrapped.  Returning the final say in candidacy to the local riding associations, and the final say in leadership to the caucus, would have the effect of making the leaders accountable to the parties they lead rather than near-dictators within their parties.   Allowing the party leader to act like a dictator within his own party makes him all the more likely to act like a dictator to the whole country should he become Prime Minister.   These reforms, both of which involve returning to an older, better, way of doing things, are the electoral reforms needed, not proportional representation, which would be the way to attain the undesirable goal of a Parliament filled with parties of inflexible ideologues discussed at the end of the previous paragraph, nor lowering the voting age, which if anything ought to be raised.   All that having been said, it was by membership convention that the new Conservative leader was chosen.

 

Pierre Poilievre, the Member of Parliament for Carleton, had been ahead throughout the leadership race, and so it came as little surprise that he won.   He owes his victory to two broad waves of opinion.  One of these is within the members and supporters of the Conservative Party and is the opinion that the party’s leadership in recent years – basically since they left office in 2015 – has shown far too much of that tendency discussed a couple of paragraphs ago, to sacrifice principle for ambition, and without achieving the intended end as they lost two consecutive Dominion elections that ought, by all rights, to have been easy wins.   The other wave is not confined to Conservative supporters but is the growing sentiment among Canadians that the present Prime Minister has been in office far too long, is haughty and arrogant and completely out of touch with the country he governs, has made life unaffordable and miserable for a large segment of the Canadian population and is continuing to do so and by all indications will keep on doing so in the future, has divided Canadians and turned them against each other,  has been hopelessly corrupt and abusive of government power and that he needs to go, preferably yesterday.   Poilievre’s performance as a critic of the government in the Shadow Cabinet for the last seven years, which was better than that of most of his colleagues and any other of the candidates for leader, combined with these waves of thought to make him the natural choice for the next Conservative leader.

 

The qualities of Poilievre that brought him enough support to win the Conservative leadership on the first ballot are such that it is fairly safe to say that he will do an excellent job in his current role of leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   The question that only time will answer is whether these same qualities will translate into the ability to lead his party to victory in the next Dominion election and the ability to govern the country well as Prime Minister should he do so.  

 

I hope that the answer to both parts of that question proves to be yes.   It is not so much that I am anxious to see the Conservative Party in government again.   It is rather than I very much share the sentiment expressed in a recently trending hashtag that the present Prime Minister needs to go.     The last time that the Conservatives were in government they angered me so much by passing a bill giving government agencies enhanced powers to spy on Canadians, a bill which had no support in Parliament outside the Conservatives except from the current governing party, that I vowed never to vote for them again unless they majorly adjusted their attitude and leadership.    While I call myself a Tory I do not use the word in the obvious partisan sense of the present day, or even in the sense of what is usually meant by “small c conservative”, i.e., someone holding views on political, fiscal, economic, social, cultural, moral and religious matters that correspond to those that are ordinarily thought of as right-of-centre although I happen to be that as well, but rather to mean someone who believes in and supports the institutions, spiritual and temporal, that survive as our living connection to the Christian civilization that preceded the Modern and liberal and through that civilization to the ancient world, which meaning accords well with the definition famously provided by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary.   I would recognize a churchman and monarchist whose views on government spending, taxation, economics, etc. are mostly if not all diametrically opposed to my own – F. D. Maurice, the Anglican priest who was one of the founders of the Christian Socialist movement in the Victorian era is an example that comes to mind – as a fellow Tory, far sooner than I would a republican like Lorne Gunter whose views on such matters are much closer to my own.   

 

With that thought we return full circle to where we started this essay and I shall close by reiterating the point that we are blessed to have in our traditional monarchy an institution at the head of our state that transcends the chaos of the perpetual struggle for power that is partisan politics and represents stability, continuity, and order.  

 

God save the King!