Category: Political Correctness

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Kant versus Cant

This is the text of an opinion piece recently published by Sir Roger Scruton in the Spectator on June 13, 2018.

‘Kant vs cant: How liberals lost their way’ – Spectator Life, June 18

I recently attended an academic seminar, along with some of the most thoughtful and distinguished members of what is sometimes called the ‘liberal establishment’. The topic was ‘the crisis of liberalism’. Many of those present believed that there is such a crisis, and that it is caused by the inability of liberal ideas to prevail over the growing threat of ‘populism’. The thing called populism is amorphous and eludes every attempt to define it. However it is out there and ready to pounce, as it did with the election of Donald Trump, with the vote for Brexit, and with the recent emergence of the Italian Five Star Movement, the German AfD and the National Rally in France, formerly the Front National.

Whether or not there is such a thing as populism, there is certainly such a thing as liberalism. It is associated with the great names of Enlightenment thinking, including Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant and Smith, according to whom the business of government is not to gratify autocratic power, but to maintain individual liberty. Liberalism is the philosophy of limited government. It seeks to reconcile the liberty of citizens with the equal liberty of their neighbours. It has an ideal of civic patriotism, which unites us in a shared commitment to defending the government that protects us all. It leads of its own accord to democratic institutions, since it aims to make government accountable to the people.

Hence liberalism frees the law from all more visceral ties. It regards citizens as equal participants in the political process, regardless of ethnicity, religion or class. We belong together, liberalism tells us, because we ourselves create the law that governs us, with the aim of freeing and protecting us all.

That vision is shared by conservatives too. Even the movements dismissed as ‘populist’ subscribe to the liberal idea of constitutional government. In a real sense we are all liberal constitutionalists now, and the presence among us of religious fanatics prepared to murder in the service of their God has only served to confirm our commitment to the liberal inheritance.

But is that the view of liberals? Liberals, I have discovered, are suspicious of traditional loyalties. They defend alternative lifestyles and nonconformist behaviour. They are not attached to any religious institution and feel the call of patriotic duty only weakly. In the recent referendum they would have voted with the Remainers, and when confronting a Leaver they are likely to sniff out the traces of ‘racism and xenophobia’, which are the odours emitted by populists when cornered by their sophisticated critics.

As a result, when it comes to any form of traditional attachment, liberals are against it. When it comes to the big questions they are resolutely opposed to established interests. They identify with oppositional causes, even if — especially if — it is our tradition of liberal government that is the target. Two recent issues have convinced me of this.

The first is the law that makes hunting with hounds a crime. This aimed to extinguish an activity central to rural society for centuries. Of course hunting has no place on the list of liberal amusements. But either you believe in limited government or you don’t. And if you do, you must recognise, with John Stuart Mill, that the business of government is not to mend our morals but to protect our freedoms. What was most striking was that no self-described liberal spoke out against this outrageous expansion of legislative power. The aim was to extinguish a way of life that was of no interest to liberals. So why should a liberal bother?

The other example is the sexual abuse of young girls by immigrant communities. About these cases (in Rotherham, Oxford, Shrewsbury and elsewhere) nobody in authority would tell the truth until forced to do so, for fear of the ‘racist’ label. ‘Racist’ is an accusation that liberals will go through any amount of contortion to avoid, and if, in order to avoid it, you have to grant immunity to gangs of immigrant criminals, so be it.

These cases remind me that the tradition of liberal government exists because we wish to extend the protection of the law to everyone, regardless of faith, ethnicity or family connections. The fate of the Rotherham girls should have awoken the indignation of the entire liberal elite. But it was the liberals who decided that it was best to keep quiet about it, for it was they who had invented and thrived upon the ‘racism’ meme. I conclude that there is indeed a crisis of liberalism, and that the crisis is liberals.

Published in Spectator Life 13th June 2018

The women were not speaking to each other

 

Overpromoted and female.

From the blogsite “The other McCain”

An anonymous email came in over the transom this morning:

Hi, Stacy.
During the early weeks after the USS Fitzgerald was speared by a lumbering Philippine container ship, it was noteworthy that the captain and a couple of admirals were publically named, but not the actual officer in charge, the officer of the deck. (OOD) The other person who should have kept the Fitz out of trouble is the person in charge of the combat information center, the Tactical Action Officer. That individual is supposed to be monitoring the combat radar, which can detect a swimmer at a distance of two miles.
Not until a year later, when the final reports are made public and the guilty parties have been court-martialed, does the truth come out. The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!! The Tactical Action Officer would normally be in near constant communication with the OOD, but there is no record of any communication between them that entire shift!
Another fun fact: In the Navy that won WWII, the damage control officers were usually some of the biggest and strongest men aboard, able to close hatches, shore up damaged areas with timbers, etc. The Fitz’s damage control officer was also a woman, and she never left the bridge. She handled the aftermath of the accident remotely, without lifting a finger herself!
Look it up: The OOD was Sarah Coppock, Tactical Action Officer was Natalie Combs. . . .
When I noticed last year that they were doing all they could to keep the OOD’s name out of the headlines, I speculated to my son that it was a she. Turns out all the key people (except one officer in the CIC) were female!

Indeed, I did some searching, and Lt. Coppock pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty. Lt. Combs faced a hearing last month:

In an 11-hour hearing, prosecutors painted a picture of Lt. Irian Woodley, the ship’s surface warfare coordinator, and Lt. Natalie Combs, the tactical action officer, as failing at their jobs, not using the tools at their disposal properly and not communicating adequately. They became complacent with faulty equipment and did not seek to get it fixed, and they failed to communicate with the bridge, the prosecution argued. Had they done those things, the government contended, they would have been able to avert the collision.

That two of the officers — Coppock and Combs — involved in this fatal incident were female suggests that discipline and training standards have been lowered for the sake of “gender integration,” which was a major policy push at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. It could be that senior officers, knowing their promotions may hinge on enthusiastic support for “gender integration,” are reluctant to enforce standards for the women under their command.

This was the story of Kara Hultgreen, the Navy pilot who died in a 1994 F-14 crash. Investigation showed that Hultgreen had been allowed to proceed in her training after errors that would have meant a washout for any male pilot. But the Clinton administration was pushing for female fighter pilots, which resulted in a competition between the Navy and Air Force to put women into these combat roles. It is not necessary to believe that (a) women shouldn’t be fighter pilots, in order to believe (b) lowering standards for the sake of quotas is a bad idea. Of course, you may believe both (a) and (b), but it is (b) that gets people killed.

It seems obvious that the Pentagon (and the liberal media) sought to suppress full knowledge of what happened to the Fitzgerald in the immediate aftermath of the June 2017 incident that killed seven sailors, in the same way the details of Kara Hultgreen’s death were suppressed. It took investigative reporters like Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times a lot of hard work to find out what actually happened to Hultgreen. Let’s hope other reporters will dig into what’s happening in our military with the “gender intergration” agenda at the Pentagon now.

we are living in a liberal Oceania

Fred Reed writes:

“Affirmative action” means hiring people because they can’t do the job well. Near-synonyms are “diversity,” meaning groups that cannot do the job well, and “inclusiveness,” which means seeking people who you know cannot do the job well. These underpin American society, and have ruined education.

More here.

“Mac Donald goes on to tell of school after school accepting diversity with credentials well below those of real students, of schools dropping the GRE requirement because it makes obvious that in STEM fields women and minorities are not performing as desired. (“Minorities” always means “poorly performing minorities.” Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and so on don’t count.)”

Heather MacDonald on “How Identity Politics is Harming the Sciences”

The situation is dire because the lies are so deeply believed, the conformity required is so effectively enforced, and the penalty for thinking differently is exclusion and oblivion.

Hence we are living in a liberal Oceania

  • inclusion is exclusion

  • diversity is uniformity

  • tolerance is intolerance

A great contrast

I was struck by the most obvious aspect of the debate posted on youtube. The first is a radio show of Jordan Peterson with two orthodox British feminists. The second is a discussion among Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro and JP.

In the radio show, Peterson had just finished discussing how, in Scandinavia, men and women pursue different interests because of equality of opportunity (same as is made in the Norwegian TV series Hjernevask -Brainwash). Clearly this line of discussion could not be allowed to continue, because it would draw attention to the glaring hole in feminism, which is that men and women naturally prefer to follow different interests. The hostess switched the topic to Trump as fast as she could, to  prevent the topic from wandering into the forbidden zone of biological differences.

In the discussion among men – and I mention their sex advisedly – the topics concern psychedelic drugs, Judaeo-Christian morality, myth, truth, mind, and large issues.

One is an example of what really smart men get into, and the other is an example of why there needs to be a revolution against the tyranny of stupid women who think they are smart.

 

 

 

5 for 5

 

My subject is the astonishing level of incomprehension of and contempt for Trump by the American elites.

A perfect illustration is available from Real Clear Politics’ Monday edition of the state of incomprehension of Trump by the American elite. It is called “the End of Intelligence”, and appeared first in the Sunday New York Times. It is written by Michael Hayden, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005.

His concern is with ‘post truth’ America, and what follows is Hayden’s line of argument.

He illustrates his case with some whoppers (outright lies), exaggerations and nonsense that Trump told during the election. [No discussion is made of anything from Hillary].

Hayden writes:

We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.

The case in point is the ill-conceived Presidential directive that has come to be called ‘the Muslim-ban’. Hayden detects a pattern: something starts with a Presidential tweet, then the legions of  experts are called in to dampen, palliate, or moderate the instincts of the President.

“Sometimes, almost magically, he gets it right”, as when Trump agreed with the establishment to keep troops in Afghanistan.

But most of the time, Trump does not agree with the establishment, as on sanctions against Russia. In fact Trump disagrees with large sections of official opinion.

In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science — all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based. Intelligence shares a broader duty with these other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.

On how many issues is the American establishment wrong? They consist of journalists, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science.  And on how many issues are the the general consensus of the establishments in North America and Europe absolutely, completely wrong?

  1. Global warming/climate change: a concatenation of errors in false analysis, false conclusions, and wrong-headed solutions that will impoverish us, all driven by an anti-development ideology masquerading as “science”
  2. Iran deceiving us about their nuclear plans, and we being willing to be deceived
  3. Russia, seen as if it were still the Soviet Union, a confusing the thuggish Putin with the mass-muderer Stalin
  4. Islamic terrorism – you cannot be allowed to see or speak to the link between Islam the religion and Islam the political idea
  5. Korea – seen as insoluble

I would say it is five for five, on the most important issues confronting the West today. And I am not talking about the ideological mess of our universities.

Of course Hayden and his ilk believe that Trump is irrational in opposing Establishment views, because it is impossible that they could be wrong. We have all read their 60-page memoranda; we have all taken our lessons from the professors; we have all bowed our heads to the liberals in robes on the courts; and the police are busy policing thoughts and attitudes, as they ought. How can we all be wrong?

How can the establishments in law, policing, science, foreign intelligence and academia be wrong? The answer is quite simple, really. They have been animated by wrong ideas for fifty or a hundred years, and the results are now being seen.

I was once subjected to spiteful derision from a man who thought my views on global warming were utterly wrong. Without his ever having researched the subject, he found most offensive the fact that I dared to have an opinion that was not the consensus of scientists, as he saw it. How could I be so bold? [As a Protestant I am culturally accustomed to taking on Establishments and declaring them without authority, is the answer.]

The heresy or sin is in having a view that is not an establishment view. And Trump is five for five. And that, my friends, is why the Establishment thinks that Trump is irrational. Because they cannot be wrong.

University of Alberta defends bad decision on Suzuki

The University of Alberta, and more  particularly its President, David Turpin, is under attack from some of  its professors for choosing to honour that senile gasbag, David Suzuki, who attacks the economics profession and the future prosperity of Canada on the ground of eco-catastrophism. Turpin defended his decision with the usual virtue-signalling twaddle:

“Turpin argued that the promise of an honorary degree to Suzuki cannot be reversed without major negative consequences for the institution’s reputation, which is obviously true. He defended the choice of the award to Suzuki on the grounds that a university cannot avoid controversy. “Instead, we must be its champion. Stifle controversy and you also stifle the pursuit of knowledge, the generation of ideas, and the discovery of new truths.” –Colby Cosh, National Post  

So let us see what stirling defence of freedom and controversy is mounted when Ross McKittrick is honoured with a doctorate for his work in debunking global warming hysteria. There are no honorary doctorates for the likes of McKittrick.

The President of the University of Alberta earned a whopping $824,000 last year. By contrast, the head of the broadcasting and telecommunications regulatory agency for all of Canada might earn about half of that. Salaries that large indicate that university administrators now get economic rents, rather than earn economic value.

The people of Alberta should demand his resignation.

Science is superior to native traditional knowledge. And no, I am not sorry.

 

 

Science is a procedure of verifiability, or if you prefer, falsifiability. It is not a racial or cultural trait. If you cannot establish a proposition that is capable of being shown to be untrue it is not science, it is belief, it is conjecture, it is myth, it is “traditional knowledge”

On the other hand, science – by the post modern (racialist) definition – is “white” by accident of being derived from Europe. I am not asserting racial superiority here, but I am asserting that neither Hindu, Islamic or Chinese civilizations managed to develop this form of knowing the world, the one that has produced the greatest improvement of the state of most people in the world in the last 400 years.

In the current environment of insanity, it is dangerous to suggest that there might be conflicts between assertions of traditional knowledge and science. It is a ‘racism of intelligence’.

A Quebec civil servant raised a ruckus when he pointed out that a conflict could arise between science and “traditional aboriginal knowledge”. Bad man! Outrage proceeded from the professionally outraged.

Quoting the National Post article in question:

Bill C-69, which received first reading in the House of Commons on Feb. 8, would require that before a project subject to a federal assessment is approved, “traditional knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of Canada provided with respect to the project” be taken into account — though it provides no definition of “traditional knowledge.” The bill further states that when traditional knowledge is provided in confidence, it “is confidential and must not knowingly be, or be permitted to be, disclosed without written consent.”

A federal law of general application to the assessment of projects would establish, or fail to establish:

  • no definition is given of “traditional knowledge”, and
  • if presented in confidential format, no disclosure of it is required in open court.

The civil servant quite reasonably observed that

“to systematically place Indigenous knowledge on equal footing with scientific data “could prove problematic in cases where Indigenous knowledge and science are found to be in contradiction.” He said criteria should be established to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional knowledge.”

If I were an aboriginal, by these provisions I would be  enabled – for example – to submit to the Court confidentially that the Great Spirit has vouchsafed us a knowledge that He would be wrathful if a pipeline went across our “traditional” territories. It would be “traditional knowledge” if we said it was, and hence its contents would be unverifiable; indeed their contents would be unknown to the parties in the proceeding, they would be undiscussable, and the reasons of the court could not be made available if they relied on it, without written permission of the aboriginal group. So we could have a system of legal review that could not review the reasons for a government decision. A court could not rely on the accuracy or completeness of a record of a proceeding.

Anyone familiar with the trial of Galileo knows that he asserted that the earth went around the sun, that some of the moveable stars, as they were then known, like Jupiter, had their own moons, and that the surface of the moon was pockmarked with craters. The Church held that Aristotle was right, and that these three points were contradicted by the Great Philosopher. Yet in the case of Aristotle, the Church asserted a known, public doctrine.

So the position of the future Galileos in Canadian society is even worse in a way than it was for Galileo. Because you will be brought to trial for offending a traditional doctrine without knowing what that doctrine was, unless the Aboriginal band decided to make it public. To the uncertainty of what will arouse the wrath of Social Justice Warriors will be added secret doctrines, known to the initiates of tribal customs, and unknown to all others.

If you doubt for a moment it will soon be a hate crime to contest traditional knowledge, observe the accusation by the Ottawa law professors against the Quebec civil servant, Mr. Beauchesne, of “racism” for favouring science in a ‘hierarchy of knowledges’.

When I heard Jordan Peterson say that the social constructionist attack on knowledge will soon attack biology for contradicting what the Left says about race, sex, and other biological facts, I thought he might have been extrapolating reasonably. It has become my clear conviction that the days when “white science” will be attacked as racist, sexist, homophobic etc. is already underway.

First they call you a ‘settler’. Then they call you a ‘scientist’.

 

 

 

 

Women and black students less likely to defend free speech

If you think the headline is provocative, that is because the facts are provoking.

Inclusivity is more important than speech, a majority of students say.

When forced to choose, a small majority of college students say inclusivity is more important than free speech, though they widely believe in the importance of both to democracy.

Diverse and inclusive society                       Protecting free speech

All                                                          53                         46
Men                                                       39                         61
Women                                                 64                         35
Whites                                                   47                         52
Blacks                                                    68                         31
At historically black institutions      53                         46
Democrats                                            66                         34
Independents                                       49                         50
Republicans                                          30                         60

The full report is given here.

Michael Barone comments:

So the difference between male and female students may reflect different power positions, with those most at risk of proscription more favorably disposed toward free speech. It may also reflect differences between male and female temperaments on average. Psychological studies over many years conclude that women tend to prize agreeableness and consensus, while men tend to seek out conflict and competition. One can easily imagine evolutionary explanations for this group difference, which of course would not be apparent in every individual.

Female students’ willingness to subordinate free speech to political values is disturbing, in a time when habits of mind and behavior developed on campus tend to leach out to the larger society.

Technical details:
Results for the college student sample are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 3,072 U.S. college students, aged 18 to 24, who are currently enrolled as full-time students at four-year colleges. Gallup selected a random sample of 240 U.S. four-year colleges, drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), that were stratified by college enrollment size, public or private affiliation, and region of the country.

 

Transgenderism as a metaphysical belief

From Commentary, and article by Sohrab Ahmari

The trans movement is asking Americans to accept and indeed to make their lives and their perceptions of reality conform to a set of extraordinary ideas based on very little debate. These claims are often put forth in the language of psychiatry and psychology, and they implicate the lives of real people, many of whom suffer genuine, sometimes unbearable anguish. Which good American can say no to the cries of a suffering minority, especially when they are amplified by scientific authority?

The science isn’t there yet, in point of fact. The case for accepting and advancing the cause of transgenderism is, at root, a radical philosophical argument—one that goes to the heart of what it means to be human. Accepting the trans movement’s argument requires us to lend credence to an extreme form of mind-matter dualism, and involves severing the links between bodily sex, gender identity, and erotic desire.

But first: What do the activists claim? If there is one unshakeable tenet, it is that gender identity and expression—a person’s self-concept as a gendered being and how that person outwardly manifests it—are different from the sex organs that have distinguished male from female since the emergence of the species. They argue that while a physician might “assign” a sex to a newborn, that label may well be at odds with the baby’s true gender. As the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) puts it in a guide for journalists, a transgender person is one “whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know they are on the inside.”…

At the same time, the activists hold—and this is their second major tenet—that gender itself is largely a social construct, since it is society that labels various traits or characteristics “masculine” or “feminine.”…

The third tenet is that gender identity and sexual desire have nothing to do with each other. According to a model school-district transgender policy drawn up by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, sexual orientation is “a person’s romantic and/or physical attraction to people of the same or opposite gender or other genders. Transgender and gender nonconforming people may have any sexual orientation.” PFLAG likewise bifurcates gender identity and sexual preference: “It is important to note that gender identity neither relates to, nor determines, sexual orientation…. People who are transgender can also identify as gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, or queer….

Now we have the necessary elements to put together the vision of the human person offered by the trans movement. Each person has a strong innate sense of gender that, according to the activists, may or may not align with his or her physical sex. When the two don’t align, we are dealing, in essence, with brains or minds that are trapped in bodies with the wrong sex organs.2 It is incumbent on the rest of us, then, to recognize the “true” self that is so trapped and help it break free from the prison of the body.

This is a profoundly metaphysical, even spiritual, vision.

See the rest of the article. As usual, a few minutes of clear thought is enough to skewer the pretensions of folly.