Canadian Cincinnatus

Obama’s ‘New Civility’ Update: Michael Moore’s anti-Romney ad says “burn this MFer down!”

From National Review (emphasis added and redaction subtracted): 

This ad, produced by Michael Moore in cooperation with MoveOn.Org, purports to carry a message from the Greatest Generation. That message is to Republicans and Mitt Romney: “If your voter suppression throughout this beautiful country enables Romney to oust Barack Obama, we will burn this mother fucker down.” There’s more: “I’m going to track down Mitt Romney and give him the world’s biggest cock punch.”

The video clip can be viewed here. I think all good conservatives should watch that Obama campaign spot and savour it like fine wine.

Why?

Because it is the sound of victory. Only losers talk this way.

The Food Nazis now want warning labels on junk food

A week ago, the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) launched a campaign against junk food. According to the CBC, this is what the OMA has in mind:

“Unhealthy foods should be taxed the same way tobacco is as part of an effort to battle childhood obesity, Ontario doctors say.

The recommendation is part of an Ontario Medical Association (OMA) campaign launched Tuesday.”

“The group suggests that the province introduce policies including:

Increasing taxes on junk food and decreasing taxes on healthy foods.

Restricting marketing of fatty and sugary foods to children.

Placing graphic warning labels on pop and other high-calorie foods with little to no nutritional value.

Adding retail displays for high-sugar, high-fat foods that prominently advise consumers of the health risks.

Restricting the availability of sugary, low-nutritional value foods in sports and other recreational facilities frequented by young people.

Just as graphic images are required on cigarette packages, the doctors said, junk food such as french fries should come in packaging illustrating the toll obesity takes on the body. Potential images include a foot with an open wound meant to reflect on a problem that people with diabetes may suffer, or a liver riddled with fatty liver disease.”

Around 10 years ago, the far sighted among us warned the rest of us that as the anti-smoking campaign wound down (because of victory), the anti-smoking Nazi’s next target would be fast food. Most people tittered: surely, they wouldn’t attack Big Macs like cancer sticks?

We were wrong.

Speaking of the war on smoking, I have to say that even though I have never smoked a cigarette in my life, I increasingly find the whole exercise contemptible. It becomes more and more clear that it is not about public health at all, but is just a handy excuse for busy bodies to satisfy their inner petty tyrant.

If you think I am unfair by calling anti-smoking activists Nazis, let me remind you that the first anti-smoking Nazi was none other than Adolph Hitler himself; who made his generals stand outside the door of his East Prussian Wolf’s Lair bunker when they wanted to have a cigarette: a scene very familiar around the entrances and exits of 21^st century office buildings.

While the motivations of the individual participants are low, at an institutional level, the OMA’s motives can be summed up by one phrase: ‘mission creep’. If we had serious disease epidemics, the OMA wouldn’t have time for this nonsense, but we no longer have epidemics like we used to. People are no longer dropping by the thousands from TB and the Spanish flu; and hunger, a constant companion not that long ago, is history. As a result, human life expectancy statistics are breaking records every year (by seniors who all used to smoked), and public health officials have increasingly less to do.

As our lot in life improves, these people - anti-smoking Nazis, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, HR Department harpies, PC commissars at our Human Right’s Commissions, and now Ronald MacDonald haters - work ever more feverishly on ever more marginal threats to our well-being. The casualty? Liberty: one of the most precious gifts a political system can bestow on its citizens.

 

P.S. “A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.” Steyn, Mark.

A victory for the right of self-defence in Canada

As I wrote in August, 2011, a homeowner was charged with aggravated assault for stabbing a burglar.

Well, I am happy to report that sanity has prevailed and our court system has affirmed our right to self-defence (emphasis added):

“A homeowner committed to trial on charges of aggravated assault for stabbing an intruder is now a free man.

A relieved Moses Mahilal Mail, 29, had charges withdrawn against him in court Thursday morning after the Crown said they no longer have a “reasonable prospect of conviction.”

His lawyer said he’d feared they were heading to trial.

“This decision reaffirms that people have the right to defend themselves in their own homes especially against unwanted intruders,” said Daniel Brown.”

“On July 31, 2011, he and girlfriend Sarah Walsh arrived home at 3 a.m. to find an unknown pair of men’s shoes at the bottom of the stairs. They called police and then, armed with a kitchen knife, the slight and lanky Mahilal crept upstairs and discovered a man in the bedroom of Walsh’s sleeping mother.

In the ensuing confrontation with Kino Johnson, a strapping 6-foot-4, 200 pound known thief, Mahilal had to stab him three times before he finally fled the upscale house near Keele St. and Eglinton Ave. W. 

Johnson, 33, pleaded guilty in June to break and enter and is serving 20 months in jail.”

Yesterday was good day for Canadian justice!

Caution: Free Speech and Pearl Jam concerts don’t mix

Recently a friend attended a Pearl Jam concert. At one point, the lead singer of the band, Eddie Vedder, went on a political rant in praise of the Democratic Party and generally trash-talking the Republicans as if they were the Lords of Mordor.

A concert-goer a few rows down from my friend shouted, “shut the fuck up and play some music.” The man closest to the shouter shoved him hard from behind, nearly knocking him off his feet. (The whole audience stood for most of the concert.) A minor pushing match ensued that wound down, but that wasn’t enough for other concert goers. One woman felt the need to shout at the man who wanted to hear music at a rock concert. When security showed up and asked who started it, all the Pearl Jam fans in the immediate vicinity pointed to the guy who had been physically assaulted. The troublemaker who wanted to hear music was then escorted out of the arena. The man who committed the assault was allowed to remain, I assume because he committed the assault for the right (or actually “left”) reason. The message here was that violence is okay to the left if it is perpetrated against people on the right.

It goes without saying that profanity-filled whoops and yells (which included words like “motherfucker” shouted during a song by a band member) were commonplace at the concert and, except for this one occasion, generated no controversy. 

I’ve posed this question before but it’s time to pose it again: remember when liberals liked quoting Voltaire’s line, “I may disagree with what you say, but I defend with my life your right to say it”?

It seems like a world away when the left really was the anti-establishment, but were confident that the future belonged to them.

Andrew Klavan is wrong: we should laugh at the poor and downtrodden

Over the past few weeks, this video of an Obama supporter – evidently a poor woman from the Cleveland slums – rejoicing over Obama because he (i.e. the Federal Government) gave her a phone.

PJ Media columnist Andrew Klavan, admonishes conservatives for making fun of this woman:

“I hate to be sententious — I’m not even sure how to spell sententious — and God knows I like to ridicule my fellow man as mercilessly as the next fellow man, but this video that’s been making the conservative rounds that shows an anti-Romney protester declaring she likes Obama because he gave her a free phone? Not really funny. I know, I know — but really, the woman is clearly poor and not very well-educated. And mockery is a pin for the inflated, no? Though the federal programs liberals propose to help such people as the phone lady only make their lives worse, the principle that we ought to be concerned for them remains (sorry) the right one. Just because liberals call us mean until we want to hurl defiance in their teeth by saying anything we damn well please, doesn’t mean we should actually BE mean! As ever, I hold conservatives to a higher standard, because we’re the good guys.”

“And if you really want to make fun of Obama supporters (and who, at this point, does not) why not go after the well-to-do and educated?” 

Usually, I not only agree with Andrew Klavan, but strongly agree with him. But this time I feel he is dead wrong.

Over and above the partisan struggle to defeat Barack Obama (as important as that is), there is a larger issue: the freedom to criticize. Why shouldn’t the Cleveland woman be subject to mockery? She is clearly stupid and corrupt, and therefore deserves what she gets.

Klavan makes the point that common decency teaches us that mockery and ridicule should be reserved for the “well-to-do and educated” not for those on the bottom of society. If common decency teaches us that, then common decency is wrong. The poor should not be off limits to criticism.

In a land as rich with wealth and opportunity as America, most poor people are poor because of the bad decisions they make and the destructive habits they cultivate. In the past, when the rich and powerful weren’t paralyzed by guilt and seduced by decadence, they took it as their solemn duty to cultivate the poor. One way they did that was to punish poor people when they behaved badly. Bad behaviour wasn’t excused because the offender was down on his luck. He was admonished regardless.

When poor people in Appalachia were God fearing and moral and went to church on Sunday in their Sunday best because they strived to act like they belonged to a higher class than they did, they were better off for it. But these days, when rich people act prim and proper but lack the confidence to preach what they practice, poor people feel free to ape the manners of Snoop Dogg and Eminem, and they are the worse for it. Criticizing and ridiculing and mocking poor people when they behave like that idiot in Cleveland is a good thing – for poor people!

Before Political Correctness came along, the left used to get this about the Power of Ridicule. Take Archie Bunker, the dimwitted racist who worked on a loading dock in the 1970’s TV series, All In The Family. Was Archie Bunker an accurate portrait of the typical white, working class labourer back then? No. Was it ‘fair’ for a rich Hollywood elitist like Norman Lear to make fun of the people who toiled by the sweat of their brow while he sipped drinks with umbrellas in them beside his Beverly Hills’ pool? No.

But you know what? White, working class people - as a group - are better off for Archie Bunker; because there was some truth to Norman Lear’s unflattering portrait. Regular people all across America saw a little bit of themselves in Archie when they laughed at him every week. This discomfort motivated them to quietly modify their behaviour. The result can be seen when the quintessentially middle-American Tea Party movement expressed spontaneous enthusiasm for the candidacy of Herman Cain. In the same way, all the stereotypical hick southern sheriffs and the racist American soldiers in Vietnam depicted in 1970’s Hollywood movies forced the conduct of US law enforcement and the US military to improve.

It wasn’t PC bullies screaming, “Racist! Sexist! Nazi!” and the HR department harpies hissing, “Fire him!” that made institutional racism unacceptable in America. These petty tyrants came along long after the war they are currently fighting was won. 

The old war was against racism and working-class provincialism. The new war is against the degenerate poor and ideologically provincial elites. And the way you win that war is not by co-opting the arsenal of Political Correctness, but by employing what has worked in the past: criticism, both fair and unfair, serious and funny. Nobody should be above ridicule - including the weak and the ‘helpless’.

So when you see that woman in Cleveland talking on her Obama phone, go ahead and point and laugh.

What should Tim Hudak do now that Premier McGuinty has resigned?

A couple of weeks ago, before Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty resigned, I opined on these pages that the wise policy for Progressive Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak would be to let Dalton McGuinty stew in his own juices now that he has run out of other people’s money. After Monday evening’s surprise resignation, do I still think that’s good advice?

Yes. More than ever. 

As I noted back then, the most important thing for the provincial conservatives is to change the political dynamic that has been dominant in the province in the past two decades: the Liberals (or NDP) spends money with wild abandon until the money runs out and their public sector union allies turn on them; the PC’s get elected and proceed to do all the heavy lifting to get the provinces finances are in order; but as soon as the budget has been balanced and the fiscal pressure is off, the public re-elects the left because they are tired of hearing the word ‘no’. As a result, the Conservatives have become in the public’s mind the dour, negative party and the Liberals (or NDP) the up-beat, good-time party. To have stable conservative majorities, this perception must change. 

The best way to do that is to show the public that Liberal spending has serious consequences, that budget balancing is not just something sadistic conservatives dream up; but that it is, like a hangover after a good drunk, an unpleasant signpost on the road to sobriety. The way to demonstrate that to the voters is to let the Liberals struggle with their own mess for a while. The political damage they will be forced to do to themselves because the difficult decisions can no longer be put off will pay off in spades. Fate has presented Hudak with the opportunity to do to the Provincial Liberals what Stephen Harper did to the Federal Liberals. 

Right now, there is a headless chicken in the pot. All Hudak has to do is to watch it boil.

Children’s Crusade alert! Friday evening march against sexual assault in the Christie Pits area.

On Friday evening, residents of the Christie Pits area of Toronto marched against the sexual assaults that have been plaguing women in that area for the past several months. According to the Toronto Star:

“Residents in the area of Christie Pits park marched for a second time in as many months against the string of sexual assaults that have brought a culture of fear to the downtown neighbourhood.”

“Three assaults over the Thanksgiving weekend sparked the second rally.”

“About 300 women and men, old and young alike, marched through the neighbourhood streets with a number of prominent figures, chanting slogans, carrying signs and sending the message that assaults like the 13 that have occurred in the area will not be tolerated.

Trinity-Spadina MP Olivia Chow and city councillor Mike Layton were on hand, leading chants on a megaphone and putting up posters in support of the White Ribbon campaign to stop violence against women.

“This isn’t indicative of the neighbourhood,” Layton said of the sexual assaults, adding residents’ voices are strong against the violence. “Women are saying ‘no you can’t take this safety from us.’" 

I hate to tell the women who live in the Christie Pits area, but if all you are going to do about the problem is to hold stupid rallies, then yes, your safety can and will be taken from you.

Marches are fine for solving political problems. It brings pressure to bear on politicians. The problem - as anybody with a scintilla of common sense can divine - is that this is a criminal problem. How is a rally going to affect the predator? If anything, the fact that he inspired them will stoke his ego.

It would be different if the police were not taking the matter seriously. That would be a political problem, and a political rally would then be appropriate. But this does not seen to be the case here.

Back when people where in the habit of doing things for themselves, they would get this. They would not try to convert a criminal problem into a political problem. They would get on and work on the real problem.

How would they do that? First, they would look honestly at its nature and come up with an appropriate remedy. In this case, it might involve escorting women whose schedule requires them to travel on foot after dark. It might manifest itself in a neighbourhood watch program. It might even involve conducting citizen patrols.

Of course, we can’t have that. That would be vigilantism!

I think the reason many modern people recoil from self-defence is that their increasing reliance on others has enfeebled their souls. They don’t get what their DIY forbearers instinctively understood, but it is not because they are dumber. They are simply afraid to look reality squarely in the eye because it has been so long since they actually did something for themselves. If asked, they will say that they are against people “taking the law into their own hands” (as if the law did not belong to them in the first place); that it would lead to anarchy and tit-for-tat reprisals. But these are just excuses; it is moral preening designed to cover up moral atrophy.

Country people would never behave like this: they are too used to taking care of themselves. This is also why downtown condo dwellers are more prone to this folly than suburbanites are. 

People resort to holding impotent rallies because they have a dilemma: they desperately want to do something but, at the same time, they are afraid of the real solution. Such events temporarily empower them. But after the crowds dissipate, the uneasiness that comes from the realization that they are no longer masters of their own fate inevitably returns.

An idea for a Joe Biden commercial for the Romney campaign

Picture this:

a series of 5 to 8 clips of famous Bidenisms; third from the last, Biden’s famous “Obama has a big stick” remark; second from the last, Biden cackling on while Paul Ryan talks about the Iranian nuclear program; and last, a clip of Jack Nicholson as the joker. The commercial ends with the usual attribution required by law. No background music and no commentary.

Alinsky’s fourth rule: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon."

Iceland shows the way out: don’t bail out banks

In 2008 Iceland suffered a catastrophic banking meltdown related to the collapse of an overheated real estate market.

“Iceland, like the rest of Europe, was faced with an almost unprecedented economic situation in 2008. Iceland’s central bank tried to rescue some of the country’s largest banks, bankrupting itself in the process. Iceland’s largest banks held almost 10 percent of Iceland's GDP in assets (much of it foreign) in 2008. The central bank was forced to attempt the rescue after agreeing to guarantee future bailouts in 2001. With the central bank out of commission and a crippled financial sector, Iceland’s GDP took a nosedive.”

“Iceland’s GDP per capita (in current U.S. dollars) was a little over $65,500 in 2007; in 2009 it was almost $38,000.”

But Iceland had one thing going for it that the United States and EU countries like Greece did not: It was too small and unimportant to be bailed out. As a result,

“Icelanders will do better than Greeks precisely because financial institutions collapsed in Iceland, ironically in part because of mechanisms in place requiring bailouts from the Icelandic Central Bank. Economic collapse allowed for proper refinancing. Greece has suffered from too much attention, and because of all of that attention, the actual size of the Greek economy has been forgotten.”

“This international neglect turned out to be Iceland’s saving grace. The crisis ended almost as quickly as it had begun. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development expects Iceland’s economy to grow by 2 percent this year and next. That’s not enough to replace the post-2007 loss, but it’s more than enough to return to the pre-boom trend line, and it’s much stronger than the performance of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain, affectionately known as the PIIGS economies. Iceland’s long-term interest rate, a not-inconsiderable 8 percent, compares well with a rate of over 13 percent for Greece, which is astounding when you consider that Iceland endured a default that Greece, in name at least, has so far avoided. The difference in unemployment—5.8 percent for Iceland against 16 percent for Greece—is even more striking. Iceland expects to have a balanced budget in 2013.” 

“So what’s causing the recovery? The plain-sight answer is the one nobody will consider. Iceland is coming back specifically because its banks went out of business. That happened in spite of strenuous public efforts, but the removal of the tiny nation’s colossally bloated financial sector turns out not to have eliminated all that much value. 

It bears repeating that banks are not creators of wealth. They are places where you store the surplus value generated by productive enterprise. In very narrow circumstances that surplus value can be loaned out at a profit, but a financial sector is the icing, not the cake. This should be common sense, but apparently it is wisdom so rare it can only be learned in countries small and remote enough to avoid the deadly medicine of the global financial markets. “ 

Though it sounds counterintuitive, bankruptcy is a necessary part of a free market’s healing process. Only when the bad debt has been purged, can the economic healing begin. When this isn’t allowed to happen because of artificial means such as bailouts and stimulus spending, the market can’t reach the bottom and zombie companies and banks remain alive to drag down the economy. The result are things like the protracted and painful ‘Obama recovery’ in the US, the endless cycle of bank bailouts in the Eurozone, and Japan’s lost decade(s). Thanks to bailouts and Keynesian stimulus, Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of 200% (the highest in the world, except for Zimbabwe) and has not yet recovered from the stock market crash of 1990!

Of Free Speech and True Tolerance

One of the recurring themes on this site is the endangerment of freedom of speech caused by Political Correctness. Unfortunately, in championing the cause of free speech, I often end up butting up against an uncomfortable dilemma.

On the one hand, I believe in negative rights over positive rights. To see what I mean, consider the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which, in its entirety, states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Notice, it’s all about what the government can’t do. It doesn’t say anything about what one citizen has to provide to another. For instance, lefty commenters have complained over the years that my blog isn’t free speech friendly because I insist on approving every comment before I post them. My reply has always been that this is a my speech zone not a free speech zone (even though I have only ever refrained from posting one comment: a physical threat made by one commenter against another).

An example of a positive right is the so-called fairness doctrine that used to exist in the US. It forced public broadcasters to provide equal time for opposing points of view. The practical result was that broadcasters avoided presenting any point of view at all for fear of ending up in a ratings soaking, tit-for-tat between opposing ideologists. Instead of promoting political debate, the positive right to ‘fairness’ squelching it. It was only after the Reagan administration got rid of it that Rush Limbaugh and talk radio began to flourish.

Therefore, in the interest of free discourse, I am against a positive right to free speech.

The problem with this stance is that Political Correctness flourishes in a climate of no positive free speech rights, just as long as the PC bullyboys don’t cash a government paycheque. Take campus free speech. In the US, many important post-secondary schools, like Harvard and Stanford, are private. The negative rights enshrined by the First Amendment offer no protection for their students against free-speech-hating administrators. Fortunately, because most of these schools are large-scale recipients of federal grants, governments can enforce an atmosphere of free discourse - if they choose to do. A group that I very much support - FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) - has been doing a lot of good, insisting that governments do just that. 

But what about the many cases of free-speech suppression where government grants can’t be used as leverage. What do you do there? The most recent incident concerns the Toronto Blue Jays’ shortstop who was subject to an obligatory two-minute hate for having an anti-homosexual (oops, I almost said homophobic) slogan on his eye-black during a recent baseball game.

Here is my dilemma: I support the negative right to free speech while opposing the positive right, but this is precisely the legal environment that grants the non-governmental PC thugs free reign.

What I yearn for is the climate of free speech that existed briefly in the 1970’s. If you are old enough, you may recall that in that era liberals were fond of quoting Voltaire’s line, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” While a lot of them omitted the “to the death” part, fat chance of hearing a liberal say something like this today. More likely, she will spit out, “Racist! Sexist! Homophobe! Fire ’im now!” The 1970’s were a charmed time for free speech because conservative prudery had withered but left-wing prudery had not yet metastasized (though there were some ominous signs, if you looked).

You don’t believe me? Consider the article entitled Foreigners Around the World that appeared in the National Lampoon in May, 1976 by then lefty anarchist P J O’Rourke. While National Lampoon was criticized for its X-rated, scatological humour, this article inspired no particular outrage above the norm. These days it would be a career-ender, assuming you could find a publisher suicidal enough to publish it. Even National Lampoon has scrubbed it from its website. It would be denounced in Parliament and by the President. Hell, even I am shocked rereading it.

And yet, there is no doubt that P J O’Rourke is not a racist. And the article is funny. And in the 1970’s most people got that. Why can’t we in the 21^st century just tell the PC goons where to stick it?

I think I am beginning to answer my own question here when I say that there are two parts to the free speech issue: the negative right to be free from government censorship, and tolerance by the public at large. And when I mean tolerance, I don’t mean the perverted form of that word in common usage today: a moral obligation on the part of people to not dislike people belonging to protected groups, on penalty of thought-crime. I mean tolerance in the Voltairean sense of being able to associate with people in a civilized manner even though you disagree with them.

Of course, if everybody had to be a Voltairean then we wouldn’t have freedom of thought either. What I am pining for are the days when most people were Voltaireans most of the time, so that society as a whole could disagree with but tolerate the Illinois Nazis among us (the Blues Brothers film being another great cultural artifact from the 1970’s - yes, yes I know it came out in 1980).

How do we get there from here? I think the first step is a realization that rights and civilization are not printed on paper but in the hearts of men. The second step is for all friends of free speech and freedom of thought and true tolerance to go out and proselytize for it and insist on it.

That has always been the way real political and cultural change has been affected.