Category: Political Correctness

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A Christian Arab and an Levantine Jew were talking about Islam

Their insights into how a minority comes to dominate a majority are worth heeding. (The relevant portion starts about 20 minutes into the conversation).

Gad Saad and Nicholas Nassim Taleb in conversation.

In Arabic, “din” means ‘law’. In Hebrew “din” means ‘religion’.

Slow Islamization of the West is accomplished through two simple rules: 1. Once you get in you cannot get out. 2. If any of the parents are Muslim, all the children are Muslim.

A very slow conversion rate results in a society that, after a 1000 years, goes from 95% Christian to 95% Muslim.

Only the Wahhabist faction of Islam is truly dangerous, says Taleb. Wahhabism drives the tolerant majority of Muslims to intolerance. Shia and other forms of Islam are not a problem.

The same dynamic of intolerant minorities works on campuses. The social justice warriors drive universities because they are an intolerant minority.

Having heard this, I understand better why, in the Scottish Reformation, a Scottish earl chained a bunch of  extreme Calvinists to a rock and drowned them at high tide. He understood the power of intolerant minorities.

Taleb: “Anything that does not involve costly signalling is not a religion. Gods demand sacrifices. No sacrifices: no religion.”

One of the costly methods of signalling your Christianity – or freedom from Islam – is not eat the sacrificial meat of Islam, halal. Costly signalling is the basis of real religion, says Taleb.

We are governed by children’s television stars

Bill Nye shows off a Canadian $5 bill, which features an astronaut and the Canadarm as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks on during an armchair discussion highlighting Budget 2018’s investments in Canadian innovation at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 6, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang ORG XMIT: JDT103

Mr. Dress-up is seen with his Chief Science Advisor, Bill Nye, Science Guy, in conversation.

Nye seized the opportunity to challenge Trudeau on his support for the controversial Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion project in Alberta and British Columbia. He said research suggests that Canada could be powered entirely by renewable energy right now, “if you just decided to do it.”

Oh sure, Bill. We could get this kind of policy by people who do not know that solar panels do not work at night, that wind rotors do not turn in the calm of minus 40 temperatures, and who object moreover to the smoke from woodstoves. But sure, yes, we can be powered entirely by renewable energy if we just decided to live at the level of poverty enforced upon North Koreans.

I notice with some satisfaction that Mr. Dress-up’s poll ratings are sinking under the influence of Canadians finally realizing the embarrassment of being governed by children’s drama teacher. In the meantime Mr. Dress-up congratulated his science Minister, Kirsty Duncan, as a Nobel Prize winner because she contributed to the IPCC, the climate change fabulists, which in my view is grounds for being dismissed from any serious position in relation to science.

Science consists of the effort to prove a hypothesis wrong, so as to eliminate error, not the effort to maintain an ideology against all challenges. See articles on climate ‘science’ as groupthink.

 

Aboriginal Representation on Juries

 

The Liberals just cannot help themselves.

There is saying attributed to Jesus that you had better get the beam out of your own eye before you try to extract the mote in someone else’s.

As the federal Liberals threaten to tamper with jury selection, and overthrow centuries of common law to make theft by Indians of property more easily achieved by the disabling the rights of landowners to self-protection, here is something you need to consider. The federal government has stopped making jury lists of Canadian aboriginals, so that finding aboriginals to sit on juries has been made much more difficult. The reasons are given below.

The Department of Indian Affairs stopped compiling jury lists because of privacy concerns. So says the website Lawnow.

Until 2000, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) compiled lists of First Nations persons for jury rolls. These lists were used in the situation where band electoral lists were not available. In 2001, INAC stopped providing band lists because of privacy concerns.  The key issue in the Kokopenace case was the Ontario government’s efforts to address problems that had arisen since the INAC band lists were not available, as this had an impact on the right to a representative jury.

The Ontario courts relied on a report prepared by Justice F. Iacobucci, First Nations Representation on Ontario Juries (2013) for data on why Aboriginal on-reserve residents were reluctant to participate in the jury selection process. Reasons included:

  • their views about conflict resolution;
  • systemic discrimination experienced by First Nations people within the justice system;
  • a lack of knowledge about the justice system and the jury system;
  • the desire by First Nations leaders to assume greater control of justice matters in their communities; and
  • concerns for the protection of privacy rights.

Additional concerns included some aspects of the content of the questionnaire itself (e.g. penalty for non-response) and the requirement to declare citizenship. The Iocabucci Report concluded that the ad hoc system for identifying jurors was ineffective, and thus, results in a jury roll that is unrepresentative of all First Nations peoples on reserve. While the report focused on the situation in Ontario, Justice Iocabucci noted that the problem with underrepresentation of First Nations peoples on juries exists in a number of Canadian provinces, as well as in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

“Privacy concerns”?!

Here we see in action the confusion of legal objectives: “privacy concerns”, which are of distinctly secondary importance, are used to trump the availability of jury lists that could be used to increase the number of Indians on juries, which is, to Liberals, of greater importance.

The decisions cited in the Lawnow article make it clear that a jury is not required to be a random selection of all people, and that failure to achieve statistical representation of the entire community is not a bar to effective justice.

 

The Ontario Court of Appeal emphasized that the right to a representative jury roll is qualified. For example, “it does not require a jury roll in which each group is represented in numbers equivalent to its proportion of the population of the jury as a whole” This would be practically impossible and any attempt to achieve this type of representation would not work with random selection process that is used to choose people to receive jury service notices.

The Ontario Court of Appeal focused on the steps taken by the state to prepare a jury roll that provides a group of people, from which to select a competent and impartial jury. The test arrived at was:

In my view, [wrote the court] to meet its representativeness obligation, the state must make reasonable efforts at each step of creating the jury roll. That includes the state’s actions in compiling the lists, but also in sending the notices, facilitating their delivery and receipt and encouraging the responses to them.  The objective of the state’s actions must be to seek to provide the platform necessary to select an impartial petit jury and to maintain public confidence in the criminal justice system by providing groups that bring distinctive perspectives to the jury process with their fair opportunity to be included in the jury roll.

The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal 5-2.

The Liberals just cannot help themselves. 

Pipelines versus peoplekind

The Liberal government is busy making pipelines more difficult to build through revisions to the process by which they will be approved. I have no doubt that between the eco-green tendencies of the Liberal ministers involved, and the need to get oil shipped to refineries, which will suffer. Canada stands to lose many billions of resource revenue through carbon taxation, regulatory lag, and hostility from the greens, many of whom sit in the cabinet (Catherine McKenna) and the PMO (Gerald Butts is the former  head of the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Federation).

None of that will make an impression on the public, though it will impoverish them relative to places more open to business. But what will convince people we are dealing with an idiot is Justin Airhead’s use of “peoplekind”.

 

 

The scolding, the compelled use of language, the disrespect of a religious viewpoint: every aspect of the bossy know-it-all PC vapidity is on display here, including the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction to Airhead’s correction. Would he have dared interrupt some more politically correct intervenor? Of course not.

In every regime, there comes a moment of self-definition.  Jean Chretien as the strangler of some wanker leftist (good for him), Paul Martin endlessly waffling, Trudeau the elder saying “Just watch me”, Brian Mulroney telling John Turner in false anger “You had an option, Sir” not to confirm Trudeau senior’s patronage appointments.

 

This was when the regime revealed itself. Canadians will recall this moment. There will be more of them. We are being held to the derision of the world, and deservedly so.

Your daily dose of Jordan Peterson

You need to hear him. The BBC interviewer interrupts constantly and it is obvious that nothing Peterson says fits her preconceived notions. Yet he calmly prevails. I wish I had as much precision of speech when under pressure.

Worth watching just to see how a careful answer can influence even a BBC interrogator. She interrupts, she fails to listen, she is disagreeable, she acts is unfair.  She projects madly from stuff she misinterprets. In fact, she argues like your wife, your girl friend.

He points out she has the right to be disagreeable, and that she is being disagreeable, and she agrees with him. So how come Jordan Peterson does not have the right to be disagreeable to radical leftist ideologues?

 

 

Trump and the reversal of PC

Myron Magnet nails it: Trump is the dawn of the last days of political correctness: the view that it is not just improper, but immoral, and ought soon to be illegal, to advert to any instance of human inequality as if the less fortunate might have some role in their misfortune, their poorer circumstances, their condition. It is not “blaming the victim”; it is not “hate”. It consists of the reference to facts, to which the Left is strongly averse. The Left hates facts because the facts of life are conservative.

Two op-eds in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal and one on this website brilliantly call attention to aspects of the vast political and cultural change, still in its early stages, that is gathering force in this country as inexorably as the spring thaw breaks up a frozen river, first as a trickle and then a torrent. Donald Trump figures in all three stories. He is at once a cause and an effect of the change—the Tea Party movement embodied and in power, and as much a rejection of the existing order of things as the mob that swarmed onto British ships in Boston Harbor 245 years ago and flung overboard their cargo of tea whose tax they refused to pay in a gesture of defiance that declared “No more!” And they meant it.

Freedom of speech is not for ideas of which you approve. It is meant for “hate” and “hatefacts”.

Shit hole countries

https://barrelstrength.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/tonton-1.jpg

 

I know a former UN official, who holds all the right progressive attitudes, or else she did until recently. A fellow UN official whom she knows lived in Haiti for several years, trying to see that Haitian prisons performed up to some standard, such as feeding the prisoners, and not jamming 250 people into a cell that can hold 20. His task was utterly futile, as you can imagine.

This is what he saw on the streets of Port au Prince one day. One car chased another. The lead car crashed or came to a stop. The following car stopped and a man got out with a machete. He went up to the lead car and dragged out the man he was chasing. The man with a machete chopped his head off and threw it away on the street. Then, without so much as a glance around in fear or apprehension, the man with the machete sauntered away. No fear. No police. Nothing, just sauntered away through the crowds, with no concern whatever. She did not say whether the murderer kept holding the machete as he walked away.

Shit hole countries?

Once again Trump is calling things by their real names, and once again the media believe they have him cornered. The rest of us breathe easier knowing that the man in charge of the administration of US immigration policy is not deceived.

“One of the sources who was briefed on the conversation said that Trump said, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries … We should have more people from Norway.”

“The second source familiar with the conversation, said Trump, who has vowed to clamp down on illegal immigration, also questioned the need for Haitians in the United States.”

I sympathize with Haitians seeking to leave Haiti. I read somewhere, maybe from Steve Sailer, that the highest earning doctors in the US  by ethnic group are Haitians. Let us take in the talented, as we are doing in Canada. Witness a recent Canadian Governor General.

As Conrad Black remarked recently in National Review:

Trump has mannerisms and foibles that are legitimately unattractive to many, and that is certainly adequate reason to disapprove of him, if there is a better alternative. There isn’t.

But then, as is his habit, the president sortied out of what David Brooks calls the “Potemkin White House” and dealt his enemies a shattering rebuff. He had the cameras present in the cabinet room for almost an hour as he led, rather magisterially, as all admitted, a discussion of immigration issues with 22 Democratic and Republican leaders of both congressional houses, and sat himself next to leading Democrats Senator Richard Durbin and Representative Steny Hoyer. The country saw that Donald Trump is reasonable, persuasive, and knowledgeable. To prove to skeptics that miracles occur, CNN’s ne plus ultra of fake-news authorship, Wolf Blitzer, uttered words of respectful admiration for the president.

The “shit hole countries” was almost certainly said by Trump. It is another breach of confidence and another media hit to distract attention from the progress the US is making in enforcing its existing immigration laws, and to devise new ones that will allow the US to control its flow of immigrants. Few Canadian realize that the flow of immigrants into the US is not within the control of the US government. Canadians would not put up with uncontrolled borders, neither should Americans be expected to.

Google and the end of the current regime

An excellent piece by the Z-Man and others on the state of Google. I am not the only one to be smelling a rotting fish. The article reads in part:

The other thing that the printer scams, and now the phone scams, are signalling is the end of the technological revolution. Companies like Google and Apple stopped being technology companies a long time ago. Instead, they are oligopolists. In the case of Apple, they were never a technology company. They were a design and marketing firm that repackaged existing technology into cool consumer products appealing to cosmopolitan hipsters. They sell expensive display items for the trend setters and the fashionable.

As a reader at Sailer’s site observed, Google now resembles an adult daycare center where mentally disturbed women terrorize the few people doing real work. Google has not don’t much of anything, in terms of tech, once it gained a near monopoly of on-line advertising. The reason Susan Wojcicki can wage endless jihad at a money losing division like YouTube is it is owned by an oligopolist given a special right to skim from every internet user on earth. Google is now a tax farmer, not a tech company.

The end of the Industrial Revolution featured civil unrest and industrial scale violence across Europe. In the US, it resulted in great social reform movements that ranged from public morality to economics. By the middle of the 19th century, it was clear that the old feudal governing system was no longer able to maintain order in Europe and the colonial model was not working in America. A century of war and revolution resulted in social democracy, a Western governing system compatible with industrial societies.

What my printer is telling me is not just that the pink has expired, but the social arrangements that allow this scam have also expired. The Technological Revolution has made the old arrangements untenable. It’s why our ruling class struggles to do even the minimum. It may turn out that the managerial state is the perfection of industrial age governance, but entirely unsuited for the technological age. Whether or not we are on the verge of a century of social tumult is hard to know, but that’s the lesson of history.

Letter to a liberal friend

 

Greetings friend:

 

Despite my profound respect for the good  you are doing in the world for the Internet, I cannot agree to this wave of anti-white male-ism you appear to be engaged in (reference your recent email).

At your leisure, read this:

https://www.scribd.com/document/368688363/James-Damore-vs-Google-Class-Action-Lawsuit#download&from_embed

By taking cognizance, I mean giving it more than a dismissive glance. By any rational standards Google is engaged in an obvious, clear, forthright, proud, explicit pattern of anti-white male discrimination, which can be defended only by saying ”they deserve it”, or “it is not discrimination when it is done to white males”, or “the greater good demands it”. Any way you argue it you end up in an ugly moral and intellectual position.

It is evident where all this anti-white male animus leads, and it is not to any place pretty, desirable, just or liberal. Nor a place where people such as yourself will prosper being, as you are, a white male and exceptionally gifted. None of us are immune to the tides of history, not even you. By which I mean that the forces you are seeking to unleash will not stop, will not abate until the momentum behind it is exhausted, leaving not merely Harvey Weinsteins in its wake, but Garrison Keillors. Indeed, the history of the twentieth century gives me no confidence that this movement will not end in bloodshed.   It is one thing to have an anti-Semite raging against the Jews, for example, but to have a white male sneering against white males strikes many as being ………….one searches for the word…. absurd?

 

It is stuff like this that makes me believe that Trump will be re-elected, and quite handily. There are a lot of white males out there, and their wives, daughters, sons and dependents, who believe their life chances are being blighted by this kind of prejudice and racial and sexual discrimination.

A liberal and democratic society demands liberals and democrats. I am concerned that we are descending into the grossest forms of tribalism, authoritarianism, and legally-sanctioned racial and sex-linked privileges. The Left affects to believe that Trump and conservatives are the cause. To the contrary, the forces that are impelling this outcome are coming from what the Left would call “progressives”.

You have known me for long enough to know I believe every word I have said, and I am not speaking for personal advantage – to the contrary, I would reckon –  but to appeal to your reason and better nature.

Think carefully about where all this stuff you preach is going.

 

Best regards,

Dalwhinnie

Google: What goes around, comes around

 

James Damore has filed suit against Google for discrimination against conservative white men.

 

Damore isn’t holding back any punches here. According to his filing, Google employs “illegal hiring quotas to fill its desired percentages of women and favored minority candidates, and openly shames managers of business units who fail to meet their quotas—in the process, openly denigrating male and Caucasian employees as less favored than others.”

The suit also claims that “numerical presence of women celebrated at Google” was based “solely due to their gender” while the “presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with ‘boos’ during companywide weekly meetings.”

Somewhat redundantly, it adds that Damore, Gudeman and “other class members” were “ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males.”

The lawsuit is seeking monetary, non-monetary and punitive remedies.

From my real but limited experience in the Google matrix, what Damore alleges reflects the Silicon Valley Democratic consensus, and the company’s actual behaviours. Google preaches PC every day, in every way.

Further evidence for this proposition comes this morning from Breitbart:

 

The lawsuit further accuses Google of what amounts to racism stating, “Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males. This is the essence of discrimination — Google formed opinions about and then treated Plaintiffs not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in groups with assumed characteristics.” The lawsuit also alleges that Google operates in an “ideological echo chamber, a protected, distorted bubble of groupthink.”

The lawsuit claims that at one of Google’s weekly company-wide meetings the presence of white males at the company was openly booed by employees. “Not only was the numerical presence of women celebrated at Google solely due to their gender, but the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with “boos” during company-wide weekly meetings. This unacceptable behavior occurred at the hands of high-level managers at Google who were responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of hiring and firing decisions during the Class Periods.”

The full pleading is found here.

I have said before and will say again, Google is in the firm grip of a totalitarian cult. What interests me as a lawyer, is that a cursory look at the pleading evinces a clear, self-declared, unembarrassed, explicit anti-white male bias  on the part of Google and its management and many of its employees.