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 24^th 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This and That No. 11

To the Second Anonymous Commenter On "This and That No. 10"

For some reason my response to your comment will not go through in the comments section. I will have to check my settings for an explanation. In the meantime it will be easier just to reply to you in this post.

As far as the matter of "imposing ones views on others" goes, every time a law is passed it imposes a particular view of how things should be done on everyone in the country, whether they agree with it or not. To some this is an argument for democracy - if views are to be imposed by law, they should reflect the will of the majority. What if, however, the majority is wrong?

The way things currently stand in Canada, social liberals are imposing their views on me. Now, the social liberal's initial flippant response to that is to say "if you don't like abortions, don't have one". It is not so simple. Canada has a single-payer health care system and the single-payer gets its resources from taxes to which I contribute. Abortions are provided by the health care system. I am therefore forced to pay for something I consider to be murder.

I would never say that couples who are seeking a child through in vitro fertilization are worse than Karla Homolka. It might seem like my reasoning points in that direction, but I don't believe it does. When comparing the relative degree of moral guilt between two actions the number of victims is only one of many factors to be taken into consideration. What I would say is that we as a society need to re-think our approach to ethics and science. Hardin's Law states that "you cannot do just one thing". We need to consider our actions in the light of their entire meaning, ramifications, and consequences.

An argument that would defeat my case that abortion is murder would have to take one of the two following forms. Either it would have to refute my case for the embryo being a human life from the moment of fertilization or it would have to make a legitimate case for abortion falling within the categories of justifiable homicide.

Stephen Harper and Freedom of Speech

In my commentary on the recent election in the last "This and That" I pointed out that Stephen Harper has proven himself to be no friend to the cause of free speech and that there was no reason to think that this would change because he has won a majority. It is less than one week since his majority victory and he has already taken steps that would further threaten freedom of speech.

Harper wishes to pass Bill C-51, an act entitled "Investigative Powers for the 21st Century". He pledged to see it pass as part of his election campaign.

Mark Fournier of FreeDominion has demonstrated the dangers to freedom of speech on the internet posed by this draconian piece of legislation. Clause 5 would make it possible for you to be charged with a hate crime if you post a hyperlink to a website containing material deemed to be hate propaganda.

You can read the full details here: http://www.freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1614466#1614466

Here are Mark Fournier's comments on Clause 11 of the same act: http://www.freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=143529

Bill C-51 is part of the Crime Omnibus Bill that Harper plans to have passed within the first 100 days of his latest premiership.

Blogs Versus Sites

You may have noticed that my links on the right-hand side of the blog are divided into two sections, one for "blogs" and one for "sites". If you are curious as to how I decided which links should go in which section, the answer is that it is largely but not completely arbitrary. The websites of publications like Chronicles Magazine or Touchstone Magazine go into the Sites section. So do websites of organizations like the Monarchist League of Canada. Blogger and Wordpress sites go into the Blogs section. Otherwise it is arbitrary and based upon whether it subjectively "feels like" a site belongs in one section or another. Thus Lawrence Auster's A View from the Right and Laura Woods' The Thinking Housewife are both in the Sites section. Although they are technically blogs for some reason it felt more right to put them in the Sites section.

Articles of Interest

Taki Theodoracopulos on monarchy: http://takimag.com/article/monarchy_the_fairest_of_them_all

Kevin Michael Grace on the Canadian election: http://www.vdare.com/grace/110504_harper.htm