Canadian Cincinnatus

Threat to Freedom: Page Six

A weird and dangerous thing is going on today.  A Superior Court in Ontario is going to consider an application to seize a man's retail bike shop, its contents and a couple of trucks under Ontario's proceeds of crime law.  Here's the catch: the man, Igor Kenk, has not been convicted of any crime, and his criminal trial for bike theft and drug possession doesn't even begin until March 2010.

Now I believe this guy is a crook: police surveillance caught Kenk receiving stolen bikes; they found in his shop over five-hundred bikes that they were able to return to their original owners, and they found cocaine and marijuana.  I think the guy is total scum.

But here's the problem: in our society it doesn't matter what I think or what the police think.  All that matters (or used to matter) is what the jury thinks--after it has heard all the evidence, and after it has had time to deliberate.

 Unfortunately, this isn't just a scheduling issue even though Kenk is pretty certain to be convicted (although nothing is guaranteed in criminal justice system).  As this Toronto Sun article describes, a guy named Chatterjee had $29,000 seized by police because they said they smelled marijuana in his car.  Was there any other evidence?  We don't know because this case never went to trial.  Unbelievably, Chatterjee was never even charged.  The sense of smell is useful, but a smell doesn't hang around to be catalogued into evidence.  (Note: a Toronto homicide detective once told me, "Don't believe that stuff in CSI.  They just make it up.)  So the police just seized Chatterjee's money because they figured he was a bad dude, possibly a drug dealer?

 Or was there a different motivation?  The money police seized goes to victims of crime and back to law enforcement in the form of grants.  In other words, if we go down this road, police departments will be financially motivated to go hunting down the proceeds of crime more than the actual criminals.  Getting a criminal off the street and into jail won't be as important as getting the criminal's money into police department budgets.

 Now this won't stop good cops from going after murderers and rapists with all the effort they can muster, but what will it do to allocation of resources by upper echelon bean counters in a police department's comfortable offices?  Will the drug squad get a fatter share of resources than homicide because they bring in more money?  And if no conviction, or even charges are required, will our streets be any safer?

 If Chatterjee is such criminal that police can seize his proceeds of crime, why isn't he in jail?

 These are important questions, but here's what really disturbs me.  I did a thorough check of the websites of the Toronto Star, the National Post, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Sun on Friday, and only the Toronto Sun had an article about this threat to freedom from unreasonable search, deep in the website, the equivalent of page six.

The Toronto Star did have an article this morning about it, which seemed to suggest that it would help gentrify the neighborhood if the Kenk's shop was seized because he's a noisy and dirty.  They did note that it might prejudice his criminal trial, and his defense attorney should be making that note too.

 Wouldn't it be unfortunate if seizing Kenk's property resulted in having a conviction turned over on appeal because the civil seizure prejudiced his criminal trial?  That's the problem: the cops get the money, but the bad guy gets away.  Who is happy?

 Not me.  I occasionally ride my bike downtown , so I'd like Kenk and his network of bike thieves locked up, so that I'm less likely to have my bike stolen.  That should be the first priority.

 The Civil Remedies Act needs to be rewritten so that proceeds of crime can only be seized after a criminal conviction.

 I do, however, applaud the cops who busted the Kenk.  Hopefully next March, after a fair trial, the guy goes to jail for a long time.  Those cops did their jobs well.  It's the motivations of their bosses in suits that must be governed.

 Freedom requires vigilance.  It's too bad this is a page six issue for the mainstream media.  It should page front page outrage.

 Mike Downtown

Thank you to Blogger Canadian Cynic

For agreeing with me that the Bill Clinton event at the Canadian National Exhibition sold less than half the tickets they originally intended to sell: 12,000 instead of 25,000.  Indeed, the National Post paints a picture of a disorganized event.

I'm sorry that Mr/Ms Cynic got so upset that I called it a "change of venue," but when a crew moves an entire stage sideways and down field so that less than half the seats can now see the speaker, I call that a change of venue even if the location (BMO field) hasn't changed.  Even CNE spokesman Chris McDowell referred to it as a "more intimate venue."

 Mr/Ms Cynic makes much of the fact that people had to pay $15 to get into the CNE before they could pay $5 to see Clinton, but the CNE offers a lot of entertainment for the $15 and is a destination itself, with or without Bill Clinton, so I still feel right about not including that in my calculations.  But then Cynic carefully ignored the cost of union labor for the Clinton show (probably working overtime on Friday to turn that stage) so our estimations still put us in the same ballpark (or soccer field) and the official numbers will eventually prove that show made little or no money.  Oddly the CNE doesn't want to say how much it paid Mr. Clinton, so we'll have to wait until Hillary Clinton does her taxes to find out.

I'd also like to thank Cynic for pointing out that the $3 million went to the whole CNE, not just Clinton's speech.  I misread an article in the Toronto Sun that stated that the money for the Clinton event  "comes from a $3 million grant from Ottawa."  A quick check shows that this National Post article was more specific.  My kids were begging to go to the park, and the weekend is their time, so I was reading and writing in a hurry.

However, Cynic does indicate an interesting line of inquiry: should not the entire CNE be put through a careful audit to see if it has fulfilled the conditions of this grant?  Should we not ensure that all this stimulus money washing around is being appropriately and properly spent?  Did Bill Clinton need further stimulus? (ba-dumb-bump, goes here.  Just couldn't help myself.)

What other debacles has the CNE spent this money on, and is their attendance any better this year because of it?  How much other stimulus money went to American speakers and companies?  Are there no Canadians qualified to speak on "Embracing Our Common Humanity? "

Cynic seems to be very knowledgeable about the specifics of this grant, and he/she surprised me with the long vitriolic response, longer indeed, than his/her slanderous statements about Cincinnatus over the "Obama as the Joker" poster.  Did I touch a nerve when I criticized the CNE or the City of Toronto?

Perhaps Mr/Ms Cynic works for one of these organizations?  I know the website states that he/she lives in the vicinity of Waterloo, but I also know that the head of the CUPE outside-workers for Toronto lives in Aurora, and the Toronto ambulance attendant who stole an ambulance during the strike lives in Barrie.  In fact, it seems a lot of City of Toronto employees prefer to live in more conservative suburbs and then drive the long commute to work, so living far away only makes it more likely that he/she works for the city of Toronto.

 In any case, perhaps Cynic could tell us more about this grant?  What else was the money spent on by the CNE? What other conditions had to be fulfilled?  Taxpayers would like to know.  Perhaps Cynic could save us all the cost of a freedom of information request?

Two quick personal notes for Mr/Ms Cynic:

1)    President Obama has struggled to create an atmosphere of debate without rancor in Washington.  It has failed miserably because of politicals who prefer personal attack to debating issues.  It's a shame, isn't it?

2)    If you had read down to the bottom of the article, you would have discovered that you were criticizing Mike Downtown, not Cincinnatus, but I guess you never got to the bottom of it.

Mike Downtown

Canadian Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Toronto Lefty-Love-in

At first I just thought it was just amusing.  Bill Clinton, ex-left-leaning President of the United States comes to one of the most left-wing cities in Canada to lecture us about "Embracing Our Common Humanity" and they can't sell even half the tickets.

 They intended to sell 25,000 tickets, but when that looked hopeless they changed to a smaller 10,000 seat venue so that it wouldn't look so empty, and still they were 3000 short of a sell out.  The choice tickets cost $50, but yesterday they started practically giving them away at the door for $5 a pop.

 Now you can enter all the jokes here: people were uncomfortable with Clinton lecturing about "Embracing."   Perhaps they could have pulled in a larger audience if they'd renamed the talk to "Embracing our Common Interns."  Ba-dump bump drum slap goes here.

 But what made all this very unfunny is that we're paying for it.  Yup, our federal stimulus money put up a cool $3 million to this little left-wing love-in.  Canadians from Vancouver to St John's are paying for Toronto lefties to go and hang out with Bill Clinton.  I bet Toronto Mayor David Miller and all his councillors even bought tickets with their city expense accounts.

 What should the feds do?  Well a condition of the grant is that the Canadian National Exhibition, the creator of this little event, should make back at least $1 million. 

 So let's do the math: the first 7000 tickets were sold at prices ranging from $20 to $50, but we'll just say they all sold for $50.  That's $350,000 dollars.  The remaining tickets finally all sold for $5 each, so there's another $15,000.  Let's assume all that union labor at the CNE donates their time.  Yeah, right!  Grand total from ticket sales: $365,000.  This is the absolute upper bound.

 But Teflon Bill isn't donating his time.  He's being paid somewhere between $175,000 and $300,000.  So we'll assume he did Toronto a favor and only charged $175,000.  That means the lefty-love-in will only make $190,000 AT MOST.  And that is impossible after accounting for real expenses.  In reality the event probably lost money.

 I suggest that the CNE, which is really just a toy of Toronto's left-wing city council, should be forced to pay back the entire $3 million to the federal government since they did not fulfill the condition of earning $1 million on the event.

 It's time to send a chill through the grant-receiving community that this kind of misuse of taxpayer dollars will not be tolerated.   If we don't put a stop to this waste of money now, imagine how much it will cost us when Obama is an ex-president and they want him to come to another Toronto lefty-love-in?

Oh, and Clinton's speech?  The usual.

 Mike Downtown

The big mistake being made in Afghanistan

The upcoming elections in Afghanistan remind me of the wrong turn that George W Bush made after the US took Afghanistan. The mistake was - and is - to try and turn a hodgepodge collection of semi-independent tribes into a democratic nation state.

The problem is not so much the democracy part; it is the nation state part. Historically, Afghanistan has been decentralized. While there has always been a central government in Kabul, this government has had little practical influence outside the walls of that city. In the countryside the local tribal leaders and warlords rule. The result of this is that the average Afghani doesn’t really understand and – more importantly – has no real allegiance to anything bigger than his own extended family.

This means Afghanistan is easy to conquer but impossible to govern.

For examples of the first part of this aphorism, consider how fast both the US special forces and the Taliban swept through the country. In each of these invasions, the tribal leaders saw who the strong horse was and switched their allegiance to them (after receiving some threats and/or suitcases full of cash). Recalcitrant leaders were few and comparatively easy to roll over militarily.

After the brilliant campaign that liberated Afghanistan from the medieval brutality of the Taliban, somebody should have opened the dictionary and showed President Bush the word ‘suzerainty’, for the definition of that word was (and is) the key to pacifying that region.

The concept of suzerainty is best understood in contrast to the concept of sovereignty. A sovereign is the ruler of a country – the leader who makes its laws and is responsible for its foreign affairs. A suzerain only does the latter. Historically, a suzerain is usually the sovereign of a nearby country who seeks to influence surrounding weak satellites, whose allegiance he demands and whose foreign policy he controls. While the suzerains’ armies can move through his satellite states at will, he is otherwise not interested in their internal matters so long as they pay their tribute and pledge their allegiance to him. This was precisely the arrangement that Alexander the Great set up in Greece and Illyria prior to crossing the Hellespont to conquer the world.

Instead of setting up Hamid Karzai as the sovereign of Afghanistan, we should have set him up as the sovereign of Kabul and the suzerain of Afghanistan - backed up by a relatively small but mobile US force based in Kabul and possibly Kandahar. Leave the local tribes alone - as long as they do not cooperate with the Taliban or al Qaeda, and turn over any terrorists they find in their midst. As a carrot, give them some military and reconstruction aid (which is peanuts as far as the Pentagon budget is concerned) so that they will be strong enough to stand up to the Taliban but dependent on the US. Every now and then a warlord will have to be slapped upside the head when he gets uppity, but the occasional short sharp military manoeuvres that this strategy entails will be much cheaper than the long, slow grind we currently face.

With regard to the opium fields, turn a blind eye to them. It is the only cash cow in a desperately poor region. Going against this industry has only pushed the populace into the arms of the Taliban. In Afghanistan, you can fight a war on terror or a war on drugs. You cannot win both at the same time.

If this has been our approach in 2002, Afghanistan would be a (relatively) peaceful backwater today. However it is not too late to change our approach. While a modern democratic nation state is much preferable to a Hobbesian world of jostling warlords, in war and nation building we must remember Voltaire’s dictum, “the best is the enemy of the good enough.”

 

 

Financial Times – “The risk of a Double Dip Recession is Rising”

Nouriel Roubini of the Financial Times is not optimistic about the US economy:

“the debate is between those – most of the economic consensus – who expect a V-shaped recovery with a rapid return to growth and those – like myself – who believe it will be U-shaped, anemic and below trend for at least a couple of years, after a couple of quarters of rapid growth driven by the restocking of inventories and a recovery of production from near Depression levels.”

Some of his reasons are interesting and worth highlighting:

“...this is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets. This limits the ability of banks to lend, households to spend and companies to invest.”

“...in countries running current account deficits, consumers need to cut spending and save much more, yet debt-burdened consumers face a wealth shock from falling home prices and stock markets and shrinking incomes and employment.”

“...the releveraging of the public sector through its build-up of large fiscal deficits risks crowding out a recovery in private sector spending. The effects of the policy stimulus, moreover, will fizzle out by early next year, requiring greater private demand to support continued growth.”

“...the reduction of global imbalances implies that the current account deficits of profligate economies, such as the US, will narrow the surpluses of countries that over-save (China and other emerging markets, Germany and Japan).”

As I have frequently said, the bottom line is that economic wealth is built only on work, savings and – these days – technological improvements. Obama’s profligate spending on things totally unrelated to productivity – the ultimate source of everybody’s prosperity – undercuts all of these things.

However, prior to Obama, there were many things wrong with the economy that do not have anything to do with him. Looking back on it 10 years from now, I think it will be recognized that the lesson this recession is teaching us is that an economy that does not make things cannot be prosperous. Today, we are told that the current service-based economy is a logical step forward from yesterday’s manufacturing-based economy, the way it was an improvement on the agriculture-based economy that it replaced. A bad but illuminating trend in the past 10 years was people with advanced engineering and science degrees working in finance (where they were in demand because of their math skills). They worked for hedge fund managers because they found it more profitable than R & D. What a colossal waste of talent! While the argument that marketplace speculation is a social good because arbitrage makes the markets more efficient is valid, what all too often resulted in practice was leveraged speculation - a bubble that sooner or later had to burst. All that hedge-funding was just transient economic noise that created little long term wealth.

In the end, I think we are in the process of relearning the fundamental truth that the GDP of a country is nothing more than the sum total of all the goods its people make and the services they render. While it is inevitable that the portion of workers in factory jobs will shrink thanks to automation, just as the proportion of farmers in our society has declined, the total amount of manufactured goods must increase to justify our GDP, just as we produce more food than ever with fewer farmers.

While predicting a U-shaped recession, Roubini also speculated on the prospects of a W-shaped recession:

“There are also now two reasons why there is a rising risk of a double-dip W-shaped recession. For a start, there are risks associated with exit strategies from the massive monetary and fiscal easing: policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they take large fiscal deficits seriously and raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity soon, they would undermine recovery and tip the economy back into stag-deflation (recession and deflation).

But if they maintain large budget deficits, bond market vigilantes will punish policymakers. Then, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields would rise and borrowing rates will go up sharply, leading to stagflation [recession and inflation, ed.].”

I am reminded of what the great economist Friedrich Hayek once said about central banks. The problem with them is that the entire economy rests in the judgment of one man whose decisions on monetary policy affect us all. If he guesses wrong once, we have a recession. What’s worse, it is very difficult to guess right because the effect of every decision is 6 to 12 months down the road, leading central banks to overreact when their initial moderate actions fail to have immediately positive effects.

 

Toronto's Financial Day of Reckoning Coming Soon

When Mayor David Miller took office, Toronto still had a healthy rainy day reserve fund.  If welfare roles dramatically increased or tax revenues fell, it was there to prop up the budget.

But Miller and his executive council instead used the reserve fund to sustain an operating budget year after year that was far in excess of what the city could afford.  They spent the last $43 million of that reserve fund on an expanded 2009 budget that included hiring over 1000 new staff.

Now it's raining.  The economy, especially in Toronto, has slumped and the welfare roles have risen substantially.

Toronto's budget nightmare will become painfully obvious in the spring of 2010. Many voters don't know that the capital budget is in the hole (as of 2008) by $2.6 billion dollars.  That makes debt repayment a staggering $443 million per year, or the second biggest expense on the operating side of the budget.  Only the police department gets a bigger line item.

Last year Dalton McGuinty saved Toronto's budget by kicking in over $400 million from the Province of Ontario, but will he do that again given he'll be trying hard to sell that massive tax increase called the HST?  It'll look as if all the voters of Ontario are paying expanded sales taxes to save spend-happy Toronto.  Not to mention that McGuinty, after years of deficit spending in the good times, has his own financial black hole to survive.

So how should Toronto balance the operating budget in an election year with less money and more expenses?

Intelligent people would suggest that we spend less on environmental initiatives, that we cancel expensive streetcar right-of-way construction, contract out garbage collection and lawn mowing, get rid of arts grants altogether and cut the expense budgets of city councillors. That's not going to happen with a union-friendly left wing city government.

Instead I foresee big tax increases, some barely disguised as garbage user fee increases, and some simply in-your-face property tax hikes.  Maybe that's why Miller wanted to look tough with the unions during the strike.  But city council won't be able to hide behind that distraction next spring. 

Interestingly enough, you won't read about Toronto's woes in the Toronto Star today.  A quick glance at the Star's website shows they preferred to print an article fretting about whether red-heads will be genetically extinct in 100 years, or what will happen to a 68 year old letter found in an old post office north of Belleville. The fact that Toronto is in the midst of it's biggest economic downturn since Bob Rae was Premier of Ontario didn't make the front page.  Go figure.

Whether it gets reported by The Toronto Star or not, next spring Toronto City council will hit the budget wall.  It is a day of reckoning that can't be avoided or ignored.

Who knows, Maybe the mayor will take a page from former NDP Premier Bob Rae and demand city employees take Miller days?  It's going to be very interesting.

Mike Downtown

Toronto: City of Spiders and Flies

Toronto's garbage strike was very different depending on where you lived.  In Etobicoke, voters still had garbage collection thanks to private contractors.  In low-density bucolic suburbs like Scarborough and North York, where people have garages and wide lawns, the stench was minimal. 

But in high-density downtown, where I live, the strike was up-close and personal.  Sometimes the smell from the temporary dump sites could make one gag and roll up the car windows; several evenings the scent of burning garbage wafted through the neighborhoods, as some more independent citizens took incineration into their own backyards.

But worst were (and still are) the spiders and flies.  It's a record year for both downtown, especially fruit flies, thanks to plentiful rot to eat.

Now, as I slash through the spider webs around my back porch and wave the fruit flies away from my green bin, I'm left to wonder what this strike was all about.

At the beginning I went way out on a limb and predicted on this blog that it would be short, damn short.  By the third day I felt that limb snap under me, and I spent a few moments hanging in mid-air like the wily coyote before I metaphorically fell down an impossibly deep canyon.

What went wrong?  Why did Mayor David Miller stab his union buddies in the back for five weeks before completely caving into them?  What possible political capital could this earn?

What ever his reasoning, it was the biggest miscalculation in a career that has had very few errors.  His popularity plummeted when he promised to punish people who dumped garbage outside transfer station fences when the union wouldn't let them easily cross the picket lines.

Perhaps my error was assuming that Miller was very smart, and I admit I've always pictured him as a spider spinning web after web with city hall at the centre.

The flies were the right wing councillors like Rob Ford, who can't help but say what's on his mind and damn the political correctness.  He gets caught and held up to ridicule time and again, even getting censured for not spending his $50,000 office expense budget.

But now I wonder if Miller has been more lucky than smart.

He made ridiculous promises during the strike that he couldn't keep, and he grossly exaggerated when he stated that the sick bank had been "eliminated."  Hey, if a city employee who has been working there for one year can continue to bank 18 sick days per year for the next thirty years then it has not been eliminated for our generation.

Now perhaps he hopes that by saying the sick bank has been "eliminated" often enough that voters will only hear that sound bite and not look too closely at the actual deal, but if so he's mistaken this time.  Every paper, including the Miller-friendly Toronto Star, brought up the fact over and over again that the sick bank isn't really "eliminated."

Miller is still a political juggernaut in Toronto, and the unions will back him in the next election because he's still their mayor, although their ardor may have waned.

He can be sure they won't vote for a right wing candidate, but where Miller may have miscalculated again is that disgruntled union members can chose to unofficially boycott an election.  Maybe some garbage collectors will spend the voting time given to them on election day having a beer at the local pub instead.  Meanwhile, voters who remember the humiliation of the strike could vote for change.

I make no predictions this time, but now I think of Miller more as a hapless fly than a spider, and if the right person spins a web at the right time, Miller could find himself snared and devoured.  I now have hope that change could come to Toronto. 

Mike Downtown

Why I am more optimistic about the future of conservatism than ever before

While this is a thought I have had for a while, paradoxically, my recent brush with defamatory libel has made me more optimistic than ever that our side is winning the political war. I don’t arrive at this conclusion from public opinion polls or election results but through a comparison of the respective attitudes.

For starters, these days, conservative (and libertarian) arguments tend to be direct and logical, while left-wing arguments tend to be evasive, emotional or derogatory. Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny is a typical example of positive conservative argument. In contrast, I am constantly amazed at how often left-wing arguments tend, at the root, to be little more than ad hominem attacks, e.g. “You’re racist! Boo. Hiss.”

It wasn’t always this way. Prior to the Great Depression, it was felt that the chaos of capitalism was hopelessly antiquated and needed to be replaced by rational, centralized planning that could not but be more efficient and better directed to benefiting the Greater Good. I am not talking about what shadowy, violent groups like the Bolsheviks thought but what was circulating in mainstream western society. Look at the correspondence between President Teddy Roosevelt (a Republican) and the progressive sci-fi writer H. G. Wells. Roosevelt cheerily agreed with Wells’ centralizing proscriptions. And so it must have seemed to many other respectable figures in the community. In contrast, the counterbalancing forces of the right generally could do little better than appeal to the ancient cords of custom and tradition.

Of course, from the turn of the century to now a lot has happened to discredit rationalized centralized planning. From our various country-sized experiments that people have conducted, we have learned empirically that centralized planning on a large scale doesn’t work. From recent advances in chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, we have the theoretical foundations to explain why complex adaptive systems like nation states and economies cannot be managed bureaucratically.

In addition, the social revolutions of the 1960’s and the triumph of the new morality have only demonstrated how much heavy lifting customs and traditions (some of which we are scarcely aware of) do (or, more precisely, did) in our society. Try to replace these things with laws and regulations, and the government ends up oscillating between permissive anarchy and zero tolerance authoritarianism.

One of the pet causes of the left back in the good ‘ol days - eugenics (see the disquieting history of Margaret Sanger and her group Planned Parenthood and Tommy Douglas’ MA thesis at McMaster entitled The Problems of the Subnormal Family) - was thoroughly depopularized by the National Socialist German Worker’s Party in the early to mid 1940’s. Many of Planned Parenthood’s solutions that had been adopted in Canada, like enforced sterilization, were quietly dropped once World War II ended. In the 1930’s, the only organized opponents of this policy were Alberta’s evangelical Christians; the sort of people H. L. Mencken called the booboisie. It seems the mystic chords of custom and tradition is good for something after all!

The intervening decades of failure have had the effect of scarring the psyche of today’s leftist. One way this manifests itself is how leftists use anger vs. the way conservatives (and for that matter, everyone else) uses it. We all get angry from time to time, and this is normal - as long as our anger is directed at some negative but concrete circumstance in our lives. For example, American conservatives are very angry about the Democrat’s plans for health care reform (though polling data indicates that many of the opponents are not ideologues of any stripe but rather senior citizens scared that the government is going to start rationing their health care to save money), but it is an anger that is purposeful and directed at a specific source. Very often, the anger of the left isn’t directed at any particular thing but is rather a constant state of mind. On more than a few occasions, leftists proudly even proclaim that they are ‘angry’, without elaborating at what they are angry about. I think this ever-present emotion is a surface manifestation of a deep seated realization that the salad days of their movement are over.

To give a concrete example, Rush Limbaugh pointed out around the time of Obama’s inauguration that even though the left had won everything – the House, the Senate and the Presidency after completely shellacking the GOP – they were still angry, in fact, angrier than conservatives who had just received their biggest electoral drubbing in a generation. I think this is a perceptive comment and while the left likes to characterize Rush as ‘angry’ and ‘spewing hate’ (mostly from quotes taken out of context – hmm, sounds familiar), they cannot explain why he begins his radio show with the proclamation, “I’m having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.” It is an instructive contrast that while he always refers to his optimism about the US and the American people, the left wears their anger like a badge of honour.

 

Relativism and speaking ‘truth’ to power

The whole kafuffle between myself and Canadian Cynic over his fraudulent quotation of me has gotten me asking the following question: why is socialism such a nasty movement? Oh, I know, there are plenty of trolls and thugs in the right, but it seems that the number of goons per capita is much higher on the left side of the spectrum. And what’s more, those that are on the left tend to be respected their more moderate peers while right-wing goons are almost universally shunned by the mainstream right.

I think part of the reason of the disparity is that today’s mainstream, small-c conservatism is a movement designed by and for middle class westerners. These people – with families, jobs, businesses and mortgages – are not the type to dedicate their spare time to ‘activism’ – i.e. name calling and politically motivated violence. As Eric Hoffer has pointed out, the sort of person who is consumed by a political movement tends to be a frustrated ‘artsy’, who looks for intellectual gratification in a political ‘ism’ because he lacks the talent to make good art. These people also lack the worldly responsibilities that can have a moderating effect on behaviour. I think this explains part of the ‘nastiness’ disparity but not all of it.

One of the key intellectual foundations of the left is the idea of relativism. In the first part of the twentieth century, it was moral relativism that predominated. This was the idea that there is no such thing as absolute morality but only relative morality, relative to your class or relative to your status as a superman. Marx and Nietzsche taught this type of relativism and it was one of the root causes of the murder sprees of Communism and National Socialism. The left want to blame all the sins of the Soviet Union on one man - Stalin, but even a cursory examination of some of the bloody-minded quotes from Lenin and Trotsky in the early phases of the Russian Revolution are enough to dispel that excuse. In addition, Stalin can hardly be blamed for China’s Great Leap Forward and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

But from the mid-twentieth century onwards, a different kind of relativism became dominant in left-wing thought, the relativism of truth. Existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre proclaimed there is no objective reality, only human feelings. Deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida taught that there was no such thing as objective scientific truth – in other words, even the laws of physics are relative depending on who you are socially. This has led to intellectual absurdities like feminist physics. Michel Foucault has taught that truth could only be understood in relation to power.

It is easy to see where this kind of thinking can take you if you really believe this stuff: If even the laws of arithmetic are sexist, then what truth can there be in politics? If there is no truth then all political discussion is by definition propaganda. Therefore lying is moral as long as your motivations are good (i.e. you are a leftist). Getting back to my own case, this is the reason why I believe that when Canadian Cynic is alone by himself at night, in his parent’s basement, he well and truly believes that he didn’t do anything wrong by falsely attributing an incendiary quote to me. This would seem imply that he has a clean conscience, but as William F. Buckley once said, “True corruption is not knowing the difference between right and wrong.”

But that is not what the leftist thinks. He believes that because speaking ‘truth’ to power is such an exalted activity, there is nothing wrong when the truth you speak is a lie.

UPDATE: Judging by the comment section, this post seems to have touched upon a raw nerve. Ouch.

 

 

Am I being slandered by a lefty blogger?

The left-wing blogger Canadian Cynic posted this item on his blog, his response to this item of mine about the Obama – joker poster. The racist quote he attributes to be is entirely made up by him. My readers know I said no such thing and I certainly had no contact with him. I think this “quote” could even be characterized as an outright lie. His post is entitled "Racism, What Racism?" Evidently, the answer to his questions is that the only racism is that which is coming out of his imagination. My question to you is this: do you think his misrepresentation of me constitute slander as understood by the law.

According to the Oxford English dictionary, slander is “false report maliciously uttered to person’s injury” and “defame falsely”. Consider the evidence:

His post consists of a racist quote falsely attributed to me. Now he might claim it to be political satire, which would be fine except that nowhere in his post does he make it clear to his readers that he made it all up. I know that the quote is false but I think a case can be made that a reasonable person perusing his post might conclude that this false quote was taken from my post, or that it came from private communication between us. And unless his reader reads my post in its entirely they might erroneously conclude that my post was in some way about race.

This false impression is aided not only by the fact that his screen capture of my original post is done in such a way that my stated reasons for liking the Obama – joker poster are invisible. Given that my post did not mention Obama’s race, anybody else’s race or references race as a topic in any way, even tangentially, one might even conclude that Mr. Cynic is deliberately misleading his reader about my writings for the purpose of defaming me.

What do you think?