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This is Nathan Rambukkana: Obey him!

 

Meet your new overlord. This is Nathan Rambukkana.  As an Assistant Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, he came to public attention this weekend by confirming in the most clear manner that Jordan Peterson is right. In an article that Christie Blatchford can do so well, it appears that he was part of a board of three that grilled a teaching assistant under his supervision for daring to show a youtube clip of Jordan Peterson, who was debating Nicholas Matte on whether  Bill C-16 would compel speech, that is, cause people to use the pronouns that a transgendered person requires his/her/zir’s interlocutor to use.

 

“She was told that after she showed the five-minute video clip, “one student/many students” — the group refused to say how many students were unhappy because that information is deemed confidential — complained that she had created “a toxic climate.”

Spunkily, she asked if she was supposed to shelter students from controversial ideas. “Am I supposed to comfort them?” she asked at one point, bewildered, and said it was antithetical to the spirit of a university.

Rambukkana then informed her that since Bill C-16 was passed, even making such “arguments run(s) counter” to the law.

I will leave that provocation aside for a moment in order to let Prof.Rambukkana identify his work:

Specifically, my research addresses topics such as digital intimacies, the relationship of intimacy and privilege, hybridity and mixed-race identities, the social and cultural aspects new media forms, and non/monogamy in the public sphere. It is situated disciplinarily at the nexus of communication and cultural studies; methodologically within discourse analysis; and draws theoretical energy from a wide range of sources such as feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories; semiotics, affect theory, event theory and psychoanalysis.

I invite the curious to pursue Prof. Rambukkana’s utterances further on his professional website. His personal musings are found at Complexsingularities.net

The issue I dwell upon is not the outrageous nature of the affront to free speech and liberal values that is constituted by the behaviour by Rambukkana and his two colleagues.

The question is: is he right? Have entire lines of thought been criminalized in Canada by C-16?  The answer is no, not yet, but the practical effect of Bill C-16, which deals with gender identity and gender expression is already seen in the assertions of Professor Rambukkana.

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Does the effect of Bill C-16 criminalize the use of a pronoun a person does not favour? According to Brenda Cossman, of  the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, it does not. What this argument appears to rest on is an ambiguity in the use of “criminal”. Something may not attract criminal procedures and penalties (think about the Alberta Human Rights  Commission, Ezra Levant and the Islamic speech issue)  and yet involve years of punishing process and compulsion though not be, in strict terms, a “criminal” prosecution.

Says Brenda Cossman:

“Non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression may very well be interpreted by the courts in the future to include the right to be identified by a person’s self identified pronoun. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, for example, in their Policy on Preventing Discrimination Because of Gender Identity and Expression states that gender harassment should include “ Refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun”. In other words, pronoun misuse may become actionable, though the Human Rights Tribunals and courts. And the remedies? Monetary damages, non-financial remedies (for example, ceasing the discriminatory practice or reinstatement to job) and public interest remedies (for example, changing hiring practices or developing non-discriminatory policies and procedures). Jail time is not one of them.

The second thing that the Bill does is add the words “gender identity or expression” to two sections of the Criminal Code….

It will add the words “gender identity and expression” to section 318(4) of the Code, which defines an identifiable group for the purposes of “advocating genocide” and “the public incitement hatred” It joins colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation or mental or physical disability.

Finally, Bill C-16 also adds “gender identity and expression” to section 718.2(a)(i) of the Criminal Code dealing with sentencing for hate crimes. The provision provides that evidence that an offence is motivated by bias, prejudice or hate can be taken into account by courts in sentencing. The list already includes race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or any other similar factor.”

At this point I need to point out that, although Cossman carefully describes the effect of C-16 on freedom of expression, the Act is already taken to mean, by the like of Prof. Rambukkana,  that a point shall not be argued – not just the use of a pronoun, but an entire train of thought on how students need to be exposed to debate about whether transgendered rights might result in compelled speech.

Those who argue in recondite legal articles about the limits of free speech need to carefully consider what happens to laws when they are interpreted in daily life by faculty committees and other sources of authority, especially those who have an interest in suppressing discussion.

Jared Brown, in another interpretation of C-16, from a point of view more favourable to the principle of free speech, takes a different view.  The text of the federal act on this matter was copied from earlier Ontario legislation to the same effect. Hence what Ontario’s Human Rights Commission says about the wording is relevant.

Thereafter, the [Ontario Human Rights Commission] OHRC clarified its policy by creating a Question and Answer on gender identity and gender expression which seeks to define these terms, and to set out that the refusal of a person to use the chosen/personal/preferred pronoun, or deliberately misgendering, will likely be discrimination.

What this means is that if you encounter a person in a sphere of human activity covered by the Code, and you address that person by a pronoun that is not the chosen/personal/or preferred pronoun of that person, that your action can constitute discrimination.

Further, in the event that your personal or religious beliefs do not recognize genders beyond simply male and female (ie. does not recognize non-binary, gender neutral, or other identities), you must still utilize the non-binary, gender neutral, or other pronouns required by non-binary or gender neutral persons, lest you be found to be discriminatory.

It is the OHRC policy requirement that persons must use the pronouns required by the portion of transgendered individuals making that demand that constitutes compelled speech.

Brown also points out that failure to comply with a finding of the Ontario Human Rights Commission could entail

– requirements to communicate or publish an apology or a publication of the facts of the case and the resulting order;

-non-defamation or gag orders (to refrain from making further offending statements);

-non-defamation publication bans (to refrain from printing further offending statements);

– orders to undertake sensitivity or anti-bias training.

As Brown points out, you can go to jail for contempt of one of these orders, indefinitely.

Rule 60.11(5) of the Rules of Civil Procedure (Ontario) confirms that where the court finds a person in contempt, they can order imprisonment for an indefinite period, in addition to fines and other remedies.  Further a judge can issue a warrant for the arrest of any person against whom a contempt order is sought.

 

Thus while C-16 does not deal with criminal law as its central point, its provisions affect the interpretation of hate crimes, which are criminal in nature. Moreover, if the offence is tried under provincial Human Rights laws, going to jail for refusal to use some person’s desired pronouns for their particular sexual status, and facing years of litigation, a fines, constitutes compulsion.

The Bill also creates the atmosphere of ideas wherein the not too clever can assert that entire avenues of discourse are now illegal. As has Professor Rambukkana.

________________________________________________________

The incipient totalitarian nature of the views being propagated at our universities ought to concern those who endorse a liberal education. You may seek to convey your views to Professor Rambukkana. Be polite.

nrambukkana@wlu.ca

T: 519.884.0710 x4346

The iron mask is coming down. This debate is not, as the left asserts, about respect, dignity and equality. This is about causing masses of people not to speak what is on their minds, and that is the iron mask. It is the hallmark of the totalitarian regime, and it is here now.

The very model of a Governor General

 

I was sitting on the plane this morning when I heard a voice behind me talking to his colleague. It had something of Don Cherry tone to it: assured, a little truculent, a tinge of redneck even, assertive, a little loud. I turned around and saw David Johnston, our former Governor General. Not believing my eyes, I turned around once more and he interrupted his talking to a colleague to say hello to me.

You have to understand my shock. I have known David Johnson peripherally for many years. He is the smoothest man of policy I have ever met. Not merely clever, but wise. Ambitious. The kind of man who, in my belief, learned very early always to say the right thing without once being deceived by his own talk or anyone else’s.  Social smarts coming out the ears. Scholar, law professor, chancellor of the best universities.

When the plane stopped we had a brief chat. He was in fine form. He spoke about his wife getting him out of the house as many a retired man must. He said he had never had a “real job” in his life, and I know what he means, because I have never had one either. The kind that can be measured with a stop watch or a calculator.

The amazing transformation before me was of a man who seemed to have thrown off his smooth persona to  have achieved a kind of thinking man’s Don Cherry-hood. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I am free at last. That is what he seemed to be saying, through all the practised jokes and badinage.

Good luck to you, brother, live long and prosper.

And when you really succeed, maybe you can take over Don Cherry’s job as the second culmination of your career. After being Her Majesty’s Canadian representative, what higher honour can your country give you? Apotheosis?

McGill Students, Marxism, Jews and BDS

 

What a perfect trifecta of provocations this morning! I must apologize in advance for this blog because my thoughts are ungenerous. Extremely un-PC. They have been prompted by a report of the expulsion of a Jewish student from a student governing board. The Post article explains:

Students at the bi-annual General Assembly of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) voted to remove a Jewish student, Noah Lew, from the society’s board of directors. Lew later wrote on Facebook that he had been targeted for his Jewish identity. Before the vote, Lew and two other directors were publicly accused of corruption by a student political group for their affiliation with Jewish political organizations such as the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC).

The actions of the students are discriminatory in the worst sense of the word, anti-Jewish, and wrongly motivated, to say the least. Entirely typical of left-wing thought and behaviour. How did we get to this? I offer some observations as an eye witness to events long ago .

When I went to McGill some 45 years ago, almost the entirety of the student Left was Jewish, and for various reasons not clear to me the Faculty of Arts was about 80% Jewish. I attended classes where the three, four or five goyim would sit together among the 25-35 Jews. That was just the way it was then. It did me no harm, and in a large measure being in an ethnic and religious minority constituted an important education in itself.

What blew my mind – if a I may use a term from that time – was that the political coloration of about a quarter of those Jews (maybe as much as a half)  was some flavour of Marxism. Marxist, Marxizing, Marxian, Marxoid thought was esteemed as historically correct. Franz Fanon was then all the rage. RD Laing. Herbert Marcuse. Norman O. Brown. The intellectual atmosphere was soaked in Leftist assumptions, methods, and political fashions. That toxic stew has since evolved into the anti-Israeli movement called Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) which roils the student politics of McGill, York and many other Canadian centres of higher education.

I am making claims that may need to be teased out.

1) Forty years ago, student Leftism was very largely a Jewish phenomenon. That is provocative but accurate description of the SDS and its allied organizations. Jews so preponderated in left-wing politics that when non-Jews wanted their own party (quite contrary to scientific materialist doctrines) they formed a “Maoist” group. The Maoists were composed principally of rich kids from Third-World countries: India, Argentina, and the like, plus a few police infiltrators from Saskatchewan. Thus, the Marxist orthodox and the Maoists splitters could shout slogans at each other, decry the others’ heresies, apparently oblivious to the fact that a group composed entirely of Jews and another group entirely non-Jewish (atheists from Sikh, Roman Catholic and other backgrounds), had formed different political clubs. Their political religion had split on lines of religion and ethnicity, forces whose reality and legitimacy were inadmissable to them.

2) Forty years ago, the Marxists were siding with the working class of Quebec, so that its targets were the WASP administration and the English minority in Quebec, and its supposed allies were the French-Canadian working class. The BDS movement of its time dealt with South Africa, not Israel.

3) Today, Jews are victims of that same leftism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, leftism did not die, on the contrary it went from strength to strength. Once Leftism dissociated itself from any sort of intellectual discipline – and Marxism was an intellectual discipline even though its doctrines were murderous in consequence and fatuous in content – Leftism was free to become  what it now is: anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian, anti-civilization, anti-economic progress, antinomian. And especially anti-Jewish. When in doubt, blame the Jews. When not in doubt, blame the Jews.

I have had very cautious conversations with people who were at McGill back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The politically correct denied absolutely that the Left at McGill was, at the time, a largely Jewish phenomenon, the Maoists excepted. With those honest enough to recall what was then evident to their eyes, the conversations have been more productive, in the sense that much of what made McGill such a drag in those days was the joyless tone favoured by the spoiled-kid Marxist rabble from middle class Jewish homes, where clearly the apples had not fallen far from parental trees. Dinner tables where a civil conversation had never occurred, where ideas were not for play or exploration, but for bludgeoning, where absolutism was the prevailing mental style: these  Marxists had come from parents who had taught them how to feel and think; they had not sprung like Athena from the brow of Zeus.

Did they get their Marxism from their grandparents in eastern Europe? Were we getting the blow-back from Tsarist repression three or four generations later? Because, for a certainty, the Jewish Marxists I encountered seemed still to be living in a shtetl of their own mind, expecting any day the Cossacks to come and suppress them with whips, and they seemed oblivious to the liberal political culture of Anglo-Montreal and North America in which they then lived. When you cannot tell a liberal state from a fascist one, you are ideologically blind. And they could not discern the difference between freedom and repression. Too much Marcuse, with his ideas of “repressive tolerance”.

There is an ignoble part of me that says to the Marxist Jews of that time: you brought this on yourselves. You spent years and years creating and fostering a culture of leftist opposition to the true, the beautiful and the good, to British constitutional thought and civilized political discourse, to a reasonable, sane and balanced appreciation of politics, to a non-hysterical approach to political division, to an adaptive accommodation to social change, to a spirit of inquiry and compromise, to the possibility of reasoned political discourse that admits the legitimacy of other points of view.  The Marxist Jews of my time were the instigators of Marxist phenomena like political correctness – the notion that politic thought is capable of being right or wrong like an arithmetical sum. They instigated thought crime trials, repressions, schisms,  self-repressions, and mounting hysteria about political divisions. Now that the Left has abandoned Marxism, but retained its oppositional spirit, the Jews find themselves the targets of forces that their Leftist co-religionists abetted and exemplified back in the Soviet era.

You have sowed the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind. I am bold enough to think that some of the Marxists still alive might grudgingly admit the truth of this.

How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction from home, like a rolling stone?

As I said, my thoughts this morning are neither noble nor forgiving. I hold those Jewish Marxists in that time responsible for much evil that has come, is here now, and is yet to come. That the evil is happening now to Jews, however undeserving, provides the unseemly frisson of schadenfreude.

Quebec’s Niqab Ban

I am in favour of it. It is appropriately targeted discrimination. It targets Muslim women who feel compelled to cover their faces in public. People do not cover their faces in public unless they have reasons to fear being looked at or identified. In the case of Muslim women, it is the fear of being subject to the lustful gaze of males who are not their husbands.

Quebec insists, rightly or wrongly, in the assertion of collective values over the choices of individuals. In Quebec and the rest of the western world, women are in general forced to cover themselves from above the breasts to above the knees. We do not think twice about it except when a woman wants to go topless somewhere else than the beach. Even toplessness at the beach is considered provocative in most places. Yet these rules exist and police enforce them. Men as well as women are frequently told by store signs: “No shirt, no shoes, no service”. This is plainly discriminatory, and society generally agrees with the discrimination.

The National Post today is filled with shrill defences of the right of Islamic women to be shamed into covering their faces. Who do you think enforces the shaming? Islamic men, of a particular and strictly Islamic disposition. Body shaming of this sort is the worst form of misogyny, and reinforces power of the Islamic shame culture. Quebec society has had the guts to say no, as in just say no to Islamic body shaming. Is this discriminatory? You betcha.Is it a just and reasonable discrimination? Yes, absolutely.

[The logic of this reasoning about the female face and the male gaze suggests that soon some women in universities will be covering their faces too, so as to escape the “male gaze”, one of the favoured tropes of feminist furies. Face coverings will be labelled progressive.]

In the Islamic idea of male-female relations, it is always the female who is responsible for inciting male lust. Males are not expected to show any control whatever; they are the passive victims of female provocations. The female is covered up to prevent public indecency, because women by their nature are indecent.

Quebec has shown much greater sense than the English-Canadian commentariat about the real reasons women wear the niqab, and much better sense that the collective has a right to insist of public standards of decorum, including not only what must be covered, but what must be uncovered.

 

 

My answer to aboriginal political exploitation of liberal guilt about their dire fate

 

From Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, volume 1,  Chapter XXIII, 1645-1648,  A Doomed Nation

It was a strange and miserable spectacle to behold the savages of this continent at the time when the knell of their common ruin had already sounded. Civilization had gained a foothold on their borders. The long and gloomy reign of barbarism was drawing near its close, and their united efforts could scarcely have availed to sustain it. Yet, in this crisis of their destiny, these doomed tribes were tearing each other’s throats in a wolfish fury, joined to an intelligence that served little purpose but mutual destruction.

Read Parkman on the early relations between whites and “Indians”, and among Indians themselves. It is a tale of ghastly tortures, raids, massacres, enslavements, kidnappings and discriminate slaughters of men, women and children by Indians, our native brethren, of other Indians and whites. Do not believe a word of this stereotype of Indians as the peaceful ecological guardians; they were engaged in a wars of brutish domination. The Iroquois tribal alliance triumphed over Huron and other tribal alliances from Hudson’s Bay to Tennessee. The Iroquois alliance exterminated the Hurons and the Neutrals; even the Nazis did not get all the Jews, nor the Turks the entire Armenian nation. And do not think I mean any insult to the Haudenosay Alliance; they were just the victors in the situation, as were the Aztecs in Mexico.

As to the Aztecs, no understanding of Amerindian culture can take place without reading the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz.   The Aztec culture was based on ritual slaughter of victims whose hearts were torn out of their chests as they lay across stone altars at the top of cués, those sacrifice pyramids visited by tourists (which I view as an Auschwitz raised into a publicly proclaimed religion). Human sacrifice was their Mass. It was depicted in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. It is recorded that on the accession of Moctezuma to the Speakership of the Aztecs, 30,000 captives were slaughtered and eaten in a gigantic cannibal feast. In 1521, on the final assault of Cortez’ band across the causeways that protected the city of Mexico, some of the Spanish were captured. This is what happened:

“the dismal drum of Huichilobos [the Aztec sun god] sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns, and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue from which it came we wsaw our comrades who had been captured in Cortes’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and then they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huichilobos. Then after they had danced the papas laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting  below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces , which they afterward prepared like glove leather, with their beards on, and kept for their drunken festivals. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes. They sacrificed all our men this way, eating their legs and arms, offering their hearts and blood to their idols as I have said, and throwing their trunks and entrails to the lions and tigers and serpents and snakes that they kept in the wild beast houses I have described in an earlier chapter.

The Conquest of New Spain is a book of such astonishing marvels and ghastly deeds that it reads more like a science-fictional account of an alien planet than it does a sober history, but it has the rare distinction of being an account of what an intelligent young soldier actually saw with his own eyes. Its veracity is overwhelming.

Do not weep with false pity for our North American Indians; they fought us every step of the way and the last resisters did not lay down arms until the early 20th century.

At the core of Amerindian religious conceptions was human sacrifice.  Even Quakers would have taken up arms against it.

Torture and human sacrifice of captives is not the whole story, nor is it a balanced story. But it happened, was endemic, and made wars with and among Indians particularly horrible.

The next time you hear some twat announce that he is giving a speech on traditional territories of the Ottawa, Huron, etc, do something rude.

 

PS: For more of the same, see the article in the Federalist on the same topic. Everyone has a cannibal and a slaver up the bloodline.

Iroquois Indian scalping white man in Canada from Encyclopedia of Voyages 1796 by Grasset de Saint Saveur and Labrousse

Law Society goes totalitarian

 

As the shit of post-modernism continues to ooze out of the universities, more and more institutions fall beneath the advancing sludge. My long-lasting distaste for the Ontario bar association (the Law Society of Upper Canada) is now more fully justified. Lawyers in Ontario are now being required to confess their sins of racism and repent.

LATEST UPDATE – September, 2017

Lawyers and Paralegals – Here’s what you need to KNOW AND DO for 2017:
1. Adopt a Statement of Principles  (mandatory)
2. Create, Implement, Review a Human Rights/Diversity Policy  (mandatory for legal workplaces of 10 or more licensees)
3. Participate in the Inclusion Survey (non-mandatory)

Lawyers are not merely being asked to implement programs they may not believe in, they are being asked to sign acts of confession that the policies they are being asked to implement are true, just, and appropriate. Jordan Peterson’s concern for being made to say imaginary pronouns invented by transsexuals was but the harbinger of a totalitarian impulse that will soon affect us all.

The Law Society writes:

Overview

All lawyers and paralegals play a vital role in Accelerating Culture Shift, one of 5 strategies adopted by the Law Society  to address the barriers faced by racialized licensees.

As part of this strategy you are required to create and abide by an individual Statement of Principles that acknowledges your obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in your behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public. (Recommendation 3(1) in the Challenges Faced by Racialized Licensees Working Group’s Final Report)

The Law Society will ask licensees to report on this in their 2017 Annual Report.

This requirement applies to all Law Society licensees. A licensee is anyone who is licensed to practice law or provide legal services and includes retired licensees, licensees working outside of Ontario and licensees not currently practicing law or providing legal services.

Creating a Statement of Principles

The Law Society has developed resources to help in creating your personal Statement of Principles.

We have provided templates of two sample statements. To satisfy the requirement you may adopt and abide by either statement. Please feel free to modify the statements or create your own that meets the requirement. Statements of Principle must be in writing.

Principles:
To help achieve the objectives of valuing equality and enhancing diversity and inclusion, I have adopted this Statement of Principles.

No Discrimination or Harassment

I am aware that under the Human Rights Code every person has the right to be free from discrimination and harassment in employment.

I acknowledge my obligation not to discriminate against, nor harass, any person on the basis of the grounds under the Human Rights Code with respect to my employment of others, or in professional dealings with other licensees.

I acknowledge my obligation not to tolerate, condone, or ignore any form of Human Rights Code-based harassment or discrimination in my legal workplace, or in professional dealings with other licensees or any other person.

I acknowledge that the right to be free from discrimination and harassment applies to everyone at my legal workplace: clients, partners, associates, students, paralegals, legal assistants, or other employees.
Abide by Workplace Policies

I agree to review, understand and abide by all policies in my legal workplace that prohibit harassment and discrimination, and that encourage diversity and inclusion on the basis of the grounds set out in Human Rights Code or other grounds.

I will report any observations or allegations of harassment or discrimination.

If asked, I will cooperate in any investigation and complaints procedure at my legal workplace.

I will not reprise against, or threaten to reprise against anyone for making a formal complaint of harassment or discrimination, or for cooperating in any investigation.
Promote Diversity and Inclusion

To promote diversity and inclusion I agree to:

review, understand and abide by any and all of my legal workplace’s policies that encourage diversity and inclusion on Human Rights Code or other grounds;
encourage a culture of inclusion and diversity at my legal workplace, in order to help attract and retain the best talent and better serve my clients’ needs;
support strategies in my legal workplace (and beyond it, where appropriate) that prioritize diversity and inclusion on Human Rights Code and other grounds in hiring, promotion and retention decisions;
cooperate and engage in any efforts of the Law Society, my legal workplace and others to advance equality, diversity and inclusion in the legal profession and in the broader community;

Serve Clients/ the Public

I am aware that under the Human Rights Code, every person has the right to be free from discrimination and harassment with respect to the provision of services, including legal services.

I will provide legal services in a manner that is courteous and equitable, without discrimination or harassment.

I will ensure that no client or prospective client is denied services or receives inferior service on the basis of the grounds set out in the Human Rights Code.

I will respect both the letter and spirit of human rights legislation in professional dealings with other licensees or any other person.

 

Recall that this constitutes words being put into people’s mouths: you the Ontario lawyer are being required to sign your adherence to nebulous concepts such as diversity, inclusion, harassment and equality.

 

Let’s look at “equality” as the Law Society defines it.

Equality

The Supreme Court of Canada has held that equality is an “elusive concept” that “lacks precise definition.” * Equality does not mean treating all people the same for all purposes. In Canada, court decisions at all levels make it clear that both the Charter of Rights and Freedoms** and human rights legislation aim to achieve “substantive” rather than a “formal” equality.

Whereas “formal equality” involves “equal treatment for those in similar situations and different treatment for those in dissimilar situations” (‘treating likes alike’),” *** “substantive equality” does not always require treating all people the same.

Substantive equality, rather, is aimed at “recognizing and responding to difference and remedying discrimination and stereotyping.” **** It requires “acknowledgment of and response to differences that members of a particular group might experience” in order to be treated equally.*****
To be clear, it is substantive equality that human rights/diversity policies in legal workplace should be aiming for.

The Official Religion of our times is not Christianity. It is the religion of perpetual striving after equality, which is really equality of result, not of opportunity. It is an ideology that will provide endless opportunity for official interference in private affairs, the perpetuation of grievance, the cultivation of envy, and the violation of individual conscience. This is not accidental; it is its post-modernist purpose.

All your children are belong to us

In the category, you can’t make this up!

In the Canadian province of Ontario (which contains nearly 40% of Canada’s population), “child protection” bureaucrats may now remove that child from the parents’ care, in order to permit the child to express its chosen identity at variance from the dictates of biology.  Presumably, this could extend to allowing genital mutilation of the child as a so-called “sex change” operation despite the parents’ strong objections.

See this article by ARPA for details on Bill 89.

Quote of the day

 

Jonathan Kay resigned a few days ago as editor in chief of Canada’s Walrus magazine. He writes:

….One of the lingering problems at The Walrus — and this is something I was never fully able to extirpate — is a failure to accept the fact that great educational journalism will inevitably step on toes and anger some people. Because the magazine was conceived as High Canadian Holy Writ delivered to subscribers’ doorsteps on the wings of angels, Walrus old-schoolers still lose their owl feathers if a Walrus writer challenges any of the many suffocating ideological taboos cherished by the cultural Eloi.

I cannot resist comparing the earnest do-goodedness of the Walrus to the  assured tone of the old Idler Magazine (1985-1993), which was David Warren’s highest secular achievement. The Idler lacks even a Wikipedia page by which to remember it, alas. For certain the old Toronto Idler challenged every one of the suffocating ideological taboos of the cultural Eloi, even as it was the product of dissident Eloi.

Speaking of suffocating cultural taboos, I recently heard an American professor speak of the need for glasnost and perestroika in North America, openness and restructuring. I do not think he meant de-communization in any formal sense. What he meant was the same as Jonathan Kay meant: our lives are being crushed or confined by suffocating taboos. Those of us who are old have escaped the full weight of them, but I think younger people are experiencing totalitarian cultural conformity on university campuses. It is a totalitarianism enforced by social media, which is to say, by the worst-acting in any population. Or the Eloi being conditioned by Morlocks, to follow the metaphor.