Category: Canada

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People who live in glass houses: Bill C10 continued

I was talking to my old colleague Blair Atholl the other day. He had an acute observation about the backers of C10, the federal bill which seeks to make the Internet conform to Canadian broadcasting rules and ideas.

It is apparent that the only backers of this bill, apart from the Canadian ministry of Heritage, are the official lobby groups of those who are set to draw more income from the eneactment of this legisaltion, or so they believe.

Blair Atholl said of the kind of people who back this legislation that “they are used to speaking in a cancel-culture political environment. Their speech is constrained in many ways. They don’t realize that most people exchange opinions in a much freer way than they can. Normal people exchange views that would put their hair in fire. So they don’t understand what all the fuss is about. If my speech is self-censored, why shouldn’t your speech be censored too?”.

And while we are on the subject, Dr. Jordan Peterson reminded us that he has a million more subscribers to his YouTube channel than does the CBC. This makes him a bigger “broadcaster” than the CBC, it would seem.

 

The bimetrical society

This brochure from Husqvarna was in the mailbox today. Nothing unusual, you say?

Check this out:

In chainsaws,

engine displacements: cubic centimeters, in metric

power: horsepower, an English measure

weight: pounds, an English measure

In lawn mowers (not shown here), radius of the cut was shown in inches, engine displacement was in cubic centimeters, and power output in horsepower.

It was the same mish-mash all the way through. Forty years after official metrication, no one uses metric for certain essential measures.  Metrication happened one or two generations ago. It is not as if people had not gone to school in metric. Speculation is welcomed.

Dear Professor Attaran

Trudeau calls for end to ‘Quebec bashing’ after Ottawa professor says province run by ‘white supremacist government’

 

Dear Professor Attaran:

I take exception to your characterization of the Quebec government as “white supremacist”. I think that is wide of the mark, and quite unfair to the Government of Quebec.  Quebec’s government is not white supremacist. It is French supremacist. The French speakers just happen to be white. Let us imagine for instance that the original founders of French Canada were not French but Tunisians. As the only Muslim majority and North African-origined ethnos in North America, the government of Quebec would believe it was its duty to protect the historic Tunisian and Muslim nature of the country. In this conjecture,  street signs and public advertizing would have to be in Tunisian Arabic with Latin letters distinctly smaller. There is an endless fret about whether the Tunisian nature of Quebec is being lost because the immigrants are assimilating to the English speaking majoriy of Canada. And so forth.

To call the government of Quebec “racist” is misleading. The only race they are concerned about is their own. Need I point out that English-speakers are not part of their “race”? Nor are any other peoples of any skin colour. Their axis of discrimination is entirely ethno-cultural.

And here is the irony. No place in North America is now safer for white people from the anti-white propaganda of the woke. If you attack Quebec for racism they will put on the armour of righteous indignation and the Prime Minister will come to their defence, as he ought to. The Quebecois are immune to “woke” because their politics are frankly about French supremacy. They just happen to be white.

Years ago some self-righteous Liberal apparatchik who normally lives in Westboro, a posh part of Ottawa, was in North Hatley, Quebec. He said how typical it was to find me in the whitest part of North America, or was it just the whitest part of Quebec that he referred to? I can’t quite recall, but he did not mean it in a complimentary or friendly way. Apart from his towering condescension and hypocrisy, of which he was completely unconscious, I find myself in agreement with him. [And what, pray tell, was he doing there?] It is nice living in a place where locking your doors is optional. It is nice living in a place where there is high social trust. Being a part of an English-speaking minority in a French language majority is sometimes aggravating because not all the Quebecois are worldly or accepting of outsiders of any description. But they do not suffer from doubt that the main point of politics is to keep themselves in existence and able to speak French. I like the protective umbrella this offers to fend off the anti-white cultural and racial attacks of the likes of yourself, and the self-loathing of my Liberal apparatchik.

And if we could have just five percent of that attitude in English North America, we would spare ourselves a great deal of grief.

Yours sincerely,

 

Dalwhinnie

 

 

 

 

 

Ignatieffs past and present

N.P.Ignatiev by Kustodiev.jpg

Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev 1832-1908 

From Wikipedia:

“… a Russian statesman and diplomat, became best known for his aggressive expansionism in support of Russian imperialism. In dealing with China, he secured a large slice of Chinese territory by the multi-lateral Treaty of Peking in 1860.[1] As the Russian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1864 to 1877, he worked to stir up pan-Slavic feeling and nationalism against the Ottomans, and had some responsibility for the Bulgarian rebellion of April 1876. He encouraged his government to declare war on Turkey in 1877, and after the decisive Russian victory he negotiated the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878. It heralded greatly strengthened Russian influence in the Balkans. However Britain and Austria intervened and forced the retraction of the treaty. As Minister of the Interior (in office: 1881-1882), Count Ignatyev promoted ultraconservative and Slavic-nationalist policies.[2]

 

……..

“Ignatyev’s son, Count Pavel Ignatyev, served as the last Minister of Education under Tsar Nicholas II and later moved to Canada. His grandson, George Ignatieff, was born in Russia and became a Canadian diplomat, and his great-grandson, Michael Ignatieff, was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2008 to 2011.”

_____________________________________

When I speak of the divine right of Canadian federal Liberals, because they are morally superior, and they are morally superior, because they are Liberals, I am not exaggerating. Michael Ignatieff failed as Liberal leader because he went up against a much tougher fighter in Steven Harper. I hope we can find another such soon.

I wish Canadians had had the advantage of seeing this portrait of his great-grandfather when Michael was running the Liberal Party. It might have told them something important.

 

They can’t help themselves: the divine right of being Liberal

I used to be the token conservative at a weekend gathering of Liberals in the lakes south west of Ottawa. It gathered a good bunch of people for talk, silly clever  word games, and more talk. They belonged to the Martinite faction of the Liberal party of Canada. This means that they had lost to the Chretien-ite majority. Some leading members of the group left for Reform, and stayed there. They were regarded by the remainers as lost sheep, but they were accepted. But on the whole the group had been young activists in the Trudeau the Greater period, ministerial assistants, activists, and they had all the virtues of the Canadian Liberal; bright, optimistic, active, and connected.

Several years of close acquaintance on these pleasant autumn weekends have led me to certain conclusions, and I have never had any reason to recant or modify them. And please recall these were the better sort of Liberal. I have met much worse and they share this characteristic I am about to describe.

They feel themselves to be morally superior. They are Liberal because they are morally superior. And they are morally superior because they are Liberal. This is the core belief. This explains many things about them. In policy terms they can switch from nationalist to free traders, from low tax libertarians to high tax collectivists, without any qualms. Because policy as such has no importance to them. What matters is being Liberal. To be Liberal is to be a better sort of person.

So of course they are not to be assessed by the outcomes of their actions. That would be unfair. They are to be measured by their good intentions. This is why I say about them that they cannot help themselves.

The unelected Liberal Kielburger brothers and the Liberal politicians Trudeau and Morneau are not to be judged by the obvious corruption of the financial arrangements between the WE charity and Trudeau’s family. They are to be judged by the obvious good intentions of the charity that the Kielburgers run. Of course Justin Trudeau is not corrupt, nor is his mother Margaret, nor his brother Sascha, the fanboy of Fidel Castro.

If you feel that you enjoy the divine right of Kings, you behave like Charles I. If you find yourself on trial for treason to the state, as King Charles did, your answer would be: “I am the state”.

If you feel you enjoy the divine right of being Liberal,  you do not need explanations, excuses, or reasons. What you do is for the best, by definition. So what I suggest, for the betterment of our country, is a state trial of Trudeau and Morneau for corruption. Where is our Cromwell?

“The self-flattery of the vision of the left gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left and regardless of its disastrous consequences.” – Thomas Sowell

The Vision of the Anointed: Self -Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, 1996

 

The joys of not paying attention

The recent media kerfuffle about some boys from Covington high school and their supposedly awful attacks on some poor old Indian have turned around into a media catastrophe. The leftist press got everything wrong – no surprise – but was apprehended in the act, and had to back off. The entire incident will be forgotten in a week. I present this as an important reason why I try not to participate in the blogging of outrage.

In the time the entire event arose, spread, was refuted, and collapsed, I had to go to hospital for a cardiac procedure. (I am well thank you). The slight risk of actual death has a wonderfully concentrating effect on the mind. I turned to youtube videos about saw mills and cabin building. They are my way of engaging in escapist literature.

More than this, they concentrate me into practical efforts that bring exercise, accomplishment, and deep satisfaction in their wake.

The net tendency of Internet participation is to be constantly aggravated. If you are like me, it will be offended by the leftist assault on reason, history, religion, males, the white race, Christianity and morality. If you are anti-Trump, then everything happening these days will be offensive to you sensibilities. The best way to regain your poise and equanimity is to stop paying attention to the shadow play of politics.

Hokum and voodoo

I realize this is not what a political blog ought to say. Yet I am more concerned with my own health and sanity than I am with Trump, Trudeau or any of the dozens of points of concern, such as Brexit, Venezuala, or building pipelines in Canada. We have to remember that the reasons why we are conservatives is that most of life lies beyond and outside of politics, and it is to those wells that we go to draw our spiritual water.