Canadian Cincinnatus

Three cheers for today’s youth

A couple of years ago, my friend’s son was in his final year of high school. At Christmas, he participated in their Christmas concert. Only problem, it couldn’t be called a Christmas Concert. The Toronto District School Board decreed that it has to be a ‘Holiday Concert’.

However, when my friend and his wife attended the production, they were pleasantly surprised.

One item was a skit called, ‘Putting on a Holiday Concert’. In it, the characters discussed and planned the upcoming holiday concert. The big stumbling block? What to call it. As the characters mulled over the holiday concert, they kept returning to one question over and over, “What do we call the Christmas concert?” Or they referred to their production as a Christmas concert and then corrected themselves with “Oh yeah, I forgot. We can’t call it a Christmas Concert.” These points were made over and over and over again for the length of the skit. The word ‘Christmas’ was mentioned as many times as possible.

Oh yeah, and the music? Nothing but religious Christmas carols. No “Frosty the Snowman” or “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”. Just “Silent Night, Holy Night”, etc.

When we complain about how our youth don’t measure up, we should take the time out to remember incidents like this. We also should remember that from the perspective of our young people, there is nothing edgy or cool about Political Correctness. It is a form of oppression they have known all their lives, like the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Now if only a politician would realise this. Anti-Political Correctness is the transformational issue of the age, just waiting to be championed.

 

P.S. We should acknowledge the enabling role that the teachers played in this production. None of this could have happened without at least their tacit approval. Teachers usually get a bum rap from conservatives, often for justified reasons, but incidents like serve to remind us that they can sometimes be allies as well.

How Tim Hudak could have won – even after he promised to fire 100,000 civil servants

The conventional wisdom is that Progressive Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak lost the last Ontario provincial election because he promised to fire 100,000 civil servants. I believe, in this case at least, the conventional wisdom is correct.

However, in looking for lessons to be learned from the last election, I nevertheless think the conclusions that the Conservatives should never broach the subject of public sector layoffs again is wrong.

To see why, we must go back to the 2011 provincial election to understand why Tim Hudak said what he said in 2014. In 2011, Hudak made the fiscal incompetence of Dalton McGuinty the centerpiece of his campaign. With annual deficits running over $10 billion, and more billion-dollar boondoggles than you can count on your toes, it seemed like a good strategy.

The problem was that the Liberals had an effective counter. They asked Tim what government programs he was going to cut. And Hudak couldn’t tell them. He mumbled something about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Unfortunately, this was not a particularly convincing because if it were possible to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse without implementing painful and controversial budget cuts to do so, even the NDP would support them. No matter how much McGuinty pressed, Hudak didn’t have a serious answer. End result: Hudak looked weak.

To avoid this trap in 2014, Tim Hudak admitted that 100,000 positions needed to be eliminated. While this promise ultimately backfired, many conservatives – myself included – lauded Hudak for his candor. Tell the people the truth, level with them, and you can win… not with ease, but it can be done.

But it wasn’t to be. So does this mean that it isn’t possible to get elected in Ontario by telling the voters the truth? That to govern this province, you must first lie like a Liberal, and then stab your supporters in the back, like Kathleen Wynne will likely have to do in the coming four years? At this point in time, it certainly seems so, but I think there is a way where you can level with the voters and win a workable majority at the same time.

I believe that the weakness with Hudak’s campaign strategy wasn’t its content but its execution. The promise to eliminate 100,000 provincial jobs was just blurted out without any warning, or preparation, or context, or justification. As a result, it was a blank slate that his Liberal Party and public sector union opponents could write the most beautiful propaganda on.

A better campaign would have begun the same way as in 2011: attack the Liberals for their reckless fiscal irresponsibility, highlighting their many fiascoes. In making similar opening moves, the Liberals would have been steered towards the same reaction - calling Hudak out on the specifics of his planned cuts. At this point, the trap could have been sprung.

But first, the campaign would have stretched the moment out, by refusing to answer, in order to emphasize the point, allowing the charge-counter-charge cycle to build up to a dramatic crescendo. Then Hudak could have dropped the hammer, and answered them directly – by introducing a serious plan for balancing the budget, one that wouldn’t have skimped on the hard details.

Why would this have worked, when Hudak’s actual promise to fire 100,000 civil servants went over like a lead balloon?

Because the promise to eliminate 100,000 positions wouldn’t have been made in isolation, but only as part of a much larger plan, one whose aims had been made clear, properly justified, and with accompanying mitigating details (such as the fact that many of these positions would be eliminated by attrition). Many people actually turned off in 2014 would have been convinced because they will have been prepared to accept the right answer.

As well, allowing this point to dangle in the air for so long would have ensured that everybody would have been paying attention, with a significant share of the voters agreeing with it. That such voters exist, I have no doubt. It wasn’t that long ago when Ontario voters endorsed Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution – twice.

At this point, an argument I had made at the time to defend his cuts – but one that Hudak didn’t employ –could have also been used. I said that the only difference between Hudak and Wynne is that he is honest and she isn’t. The issue of the cuts themselves is irrelevant. This is because no matter whom you vote for, the government will have to cut regardless of what promises are made. The iron laws of economics will see to that.

Notice that nothing in my plan waters down any specifics. The problem with Tim Hudak isn’t that he is ‘too extreme’ or that he needs to ‘moderate’, but that doesn’t know how to persuade people about the things he believes in. Mike Harris could do that, and so can, for that matter, Rob Ford. But Hudak can’t. And that is what disqualified him for party leadership.

 

Miley Cyrus’s real problem: she doesn’t know how to be sexy

After Miley Cyrus’s infamous ‘dance’ at the Video Music Awards earlier this year, I was somewhat mystified by the intensity of the controversy that swirled around the performance. A young woman, dressed in an outfit that was no more revealing than a 1950’s swimsuit, dancing lasciviously on TV with her male partner. So what? Haven’t we seen this a thousand times before?

One reason for my lukewarm reaction is that I insist on consistency in my moral standards. For instance, in the late 1990’s, I once happened to catch an MTV music awards show that was crawling with gangsta rappers - unrepentant felons, some possibly even murderers - reveling openly on stage about their criminal lifestyle. As I recall, this elicited no outrage at all by anyone. But in comparison, Miley’s dog-and-pony show is pretty weak tea indeed.

Nevertheless, I was still repelled by Miley’s act. My revulsion was not so much a moral, but because of an act poorly performed. The real problem with Miley was that she was trying to act sexy but didn’t have the first clue as to how to pull it off. There we had a physically fit, 21 year old woman, dressed in a skimpy outfit, and gyrating from one sexually suggestive pose to another, and utterly failing to be sexy. How pathetic is that! 

Miley’s vamp shtick is perfectly encapsulated by her signature pose - her face contorted with her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth as far as it can. It reminds me of something said by an art gallery employee named Serge, played by Bronson Pinchot, in the Eddie Murphy film, Beverly Hills Cop. When Serge came upon a heterosexual man clumsily attempting to look attractive by leaving his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his chest hair, Serge remarked, “Ees not sexy, ees animal.” Because Miley doesn’t know how to seduce, she does the only thing she knows how to do in its stead; she turns the dial up to 11. Ees not sexy, ees animal.

A perfect counterexample to Miley’s public persona is Tricia Helfer’s character, Number Six, on the sci-fi TV series, Battlestar Galactica. Helfer is almost twice Miley’s age but was nevertheless able to play the femme fatale to a T. She did it by perfectly mastering all the little nuances of her character’s archetype:

‘Tricia Helfer was cast after a strong audition, despite some initial concerns over her lack of acting experience. Director Michael Rymer explains: "It wasn't just the way she looked; she just has this vibe about her.”’

What are these nuances that make up “this vibe”? As a heterosexual man, don’t ask me. I just know it when I see it. I am almost as clued out as Miley is about the particulars. I say almost, because I do understand at least one thing Miley doesn’t. If a woman aspires to seduce, she must build her charms on a firm foundation of physical beauty. Exhibit A that Miley doesn’t get this is her ill-suited buzz cut, which only served to draw attention to her oddly shaped head. Miley, baby, why do you think the nice people at Disney gave you a shag hair style when you were Hanna Montana? 

Of course, now that she is over 18 and firmly established, she doesn’t have to listen to any fuddy-duddy grownups anymore. 

The end result is the crass, ostentatious ugliness that Miley Cyrus has become.

A modern woman-of-the-world discovers that she is no longer a spring chicken

From Robin Korth, an “international speaker and writer” (h/t Chateau Heartiste):

“And so, we planned a weekend together. That's when things got confusing, unspoken and just-not-quite there. We went to bed in a couple's way -- unclothed and touching -- all parts near. Kisses were shared and sleep came in hugs. I attempted more intimacy throughout the weekend and was deterred each time.

On Monday evening over the phone, I asked this man who had shared my bed for three nights running why we had not made love. "Your body is too wrinkly," he said without a pause. "I have spoiled myself over the years with young woman. I just can't get excited with you. I love your energy and your laughter. I like your head and your heart. But, I just can't deal with your body."

I was stunned. The hurt would come later. I asked him slowly and carefully if he found my body hard to look at. He said yes. "So, this means seeing me naked was troublesome to you?" I asked. He told me he had just looked away. And when the lights were out, he pretended my body was younger -- that I was younger. My breath came deep and full as I processed this information. My face blazed as I felt embarrassed and shamed by memories of my easy nakedness with him in days just passed. 

We talked for some time more, my head reeling at the content of the conversation. He spoke of special stockings and clothing that would "hide" my years. He blithely told me he loved "little black dresses" and strappy shoes. He said my hair was not long and flowing as he preferred, but that was okay because it was "cool looking." I felt like a Barbie Doll on acid as I listened to this man. He was totally oblivious to the viciousness of his words.”

You know what? I gotta think that Korth’s boyfriend’s reaction wouldn’t have been news to a more traditional woman.

Before the sexual revolution of the 1960’s upended millennia of wisdom about human relations, wisdom encoded in our customs and tradition, people were less clued out about how human nature worked. Specifically, it was widely understood that men are sexually attracted primarily to women of child-bearing age. The more fertile they are, the sexier they will seem – for reasons that were too obvious to mention in an age when people understood that the primary purpose of sex is reproduction.

Among the embedded knowledge, was the understanding that a woman’s best strategy is to snag the best man she can while her looks are in their prime, marry him and raise his children. That way, when her looks fade, it doesn’t matter; she is the established matriarch of her family by then.

But the utopians of the 1960’s had a problem with this. The life-arc from girl to hot-young-thing to mother to matron was too stifling. Something more liberating was required. So the illusion that people aren’t limited by their biology was invented. You want to be fancy-free and sexy. Sure. No problem. Shake your booty until you’re dead. 

The only problem? Biology is more real than ivory tower assumptions. If you ignore biology, you wind up with suboptimal results. A perfect example of this is found in the following comment to Korth’s article:

“I've wasted decades as my worst enemy & searching for men's approval. Something happened in my late 40's, I decided I'd rather be ‘alone’ and content than with someone searching for perfection.”

In other words, she wasted her best years partying and now that she is in her late 40’s, she discovers – too late – that she is no longer a sex kitten and doesn’t have the options she once did. Unfortunately for her, Mr. Right ain’t interested anymore. This commenter - and Robin Korth - are the victims of modern feminism. 

These are needless, self-inflicted tragedies, and they happen when people follow the false promise of utopian dreams. There is only one reality. And all we can do is make the best of our worldly existence… and not try to lead others astray.

When Susan Patton, a Princeton grad, made the same point in an open letter to the Daily Princetonian, there were howls of outrage from the usual suspects. But she nevertheless became famous as a result and has published a dating manual called “Marry Smart”. According to the New York Post: 

“The book argues that coeds have a limited shelf life ‘as young, beautiful [women who are] as attractive to men or as fertile’ and advises them to spend three-quarters of their time in school on the hunt for Mr. Right.”

I guess some people out there are beginning to get past the wishful thinking.

Stupid rock lyrics of the day: Avril Lavigne’s ‘Skater Boy’

Avril Lavigne’s 2002 hit song Sk8er Boi (pronounced ‘skater boy’) is an excellent example of the kind of dualistic duplicity practiced by many artists with a Message. It is a song aimed clearly for teenage girls, but its real message, the one that parents might find objectionable, is covered up by an ‘official message’, one that the parents can’t argue with.

The song is ostensibly about a teenage boy who wants a girl who is too stuck-up to appreciate the ‘real’ person inside him: 

“He was a punk, she did ballet
What more can I say?

He wanted her, she'd never tell
secretly she wanted him as well.

But all of her friends stuck up there nose
they had a problem with his baggy clothes.

He was a skater boy, she said see ya later boy
he wasn't good enough for her”

Later on in life, he strikes it rich and she strikes out:

“five years from now, she sits at home
feeding the baby
she's all alone

she turns on tv
guess who she sees
skater boy rockin' up MTV”

This sets up the song’s official message: judge people by the content of their character not by their external appearances: 

“too bad that you couldn't see
see that man that boy could be

there is more that meets the eye
I see the soul that is inside”

Who can argue with that? We shall overcome!

I mean, if she had not been so shallow, she wouldn’t have ended up as a (presumably) single mom in a dead-end life. If she had seen the potential inside skater boy, she could have been Nancy Spungen to his Sid Vicious. Oh wait. That didn’t turn out so well. 

In any event, the official message is just a wank for the parents.

Which brings us to the unofficial message, the one that actually excited the young female fans of the song: go ahead, chase after the lowlife jerk you really like. You don’t have to settle for the goody two-shoes wimp your mother is trying to set you up with.

So how do we know skater boy is the kind of bad boy that makes girls’ hearts’ run pitter-patter? Lavigne leaves plenty of clues:

“He was a skater boy” – i.e. a cool guy,

“He was a punk, she did ballet” – i.e. he was a rebel,

“his baggy clothes” – i.e. he was stylish,

“now he's a super star
slamin' on his guitar” – i.e. he’s an alpha-male rock star.

The song is sung from the perspective of Skater Boy’s Nancy Spungen: 

“sorry girl but you missed out
well tuff luck that boys mine now

we are more than just good friends
this is how the story ends” 

I’ve got some bad news for you honey, I doubt it. Part of what you love most about him - his state indifference (i.e. his coolness) – means that you will be just one in a long line. But that’s another truth about human nature that Avril glosses over.

Traditional morality implicitly understands that young women are instinctively attracted to alpha male thugs (notice the lyric, “secretly she wanted him as well”), and that this is bad for society because female preferences play a big role in shaping male behaviour. When women tend to prefer beta-male provides, men tend to act like beta-male providers. When women choose alpha goons, then men will act likewise. Because traditional morality knows that beta-male providers form the backbone of modern society and alpha males can be antisocially disruptive, it places a lot of emphasis on influencing female choice: “find a nice young man,” “don’t be the kind of girl who goes out with him”, etc.

All of which is a real downer for young women who are simultaneously feeling the urgings of their instincts to snag the most alpha-est macho man, regardless of his destructive proclivities. Hence the real appeal of the song. It gives cover to the most primitive instincts of young women under the veneer of Civil Rights terminology.

Notice also the juxtaposition of the words ‘punk’ and ‘ballet’. The kid with bourgeois, middle class values ends up a loser while the anti-social rebel becomes a “super star”. Does this happen in real life?

Occasionally. But it’s not the way to bet. Thanks to the popularity of this song, I’ll wager there were a significant number of young people who took the long shot and ended up snake-eyes in the lottery of life.

Which is why the song's lyrics are stupid. Or, to be more precise, evil.

Why Andrea Horwath, the most popular leader in Ontario, is in trouble

Going in to the last provincial election in Ontario, the most popular partly leader – by a wide margin – was Andrea Horwath, the leader of the New Democrat Party. She consistently outperformed her party in public opinion polls. So if that’s the case, why did her party do so poorly in the election – essentially flatlining at 21 seats?

Answer: because she neglected her party’s base. 

See the Toronto Sun:

“The left wing of the party is angry with Horwath for taking them away from their social justice roots. 

Since the election, a number of former candidates and campaign managers have signed a petition calling on Horwath to step aside.

Two Toronto MPPs, Peter Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth) and Cheri DiNovo (Parkdale-High Park), have been openly critical of a campaign platform that focused more on populist, pocketbook issues than on NDP core values.”

While it can definitely be argued that “populist, pocketbook issues” have a wider appeal with the voters-at-large than the ideological obsessions of the NDP’s extreme left, it is also true that the vast majority of the people who concern themselves with things like a party’s ‘campaign platform’ are its’ core supporters, donors, and volunteers. If these people are not onside, no campaign can succeed. 

As I pointed out before election day, the reason Kathleen Wynne’s poll numbers didn’t tank, in spite of the fact that she is much less personally popular than Horwath, and representing a government with an indefensible record in office, is that she took care of her base - dishonestly perhaps (we’ll see how many Ontario civil servants she will have to lay off) - but she did think enough about them to feed them sweet lies.

As I have repeatedly said: the first rule of politics is to protect your base.

Isolationists: the toadies’ of tyrants

On July 20, I wrote a piece about the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over the Ukraine. Some of the pro-Putin comments I received reminded me of an important intellectual error on the right: isolationism. Specifically, I was reminded about how isolationists start out as nationalists, nativists, and patriots but end up as stooges for nasty foreign powers.

To understand why, one must first examine what isolationism is. Isolationism is the idea that a country should avoid foreign entanglements and commitments, that the only criteria for foreign policy decisions should be a direct cost/benefit valuation for the home country. Another country is in trouble? Fuggettabout it. Given that Canada has always played second fiddle to somebody else – first Great Britain, and then the United States, Americans are more susceptible to isolationism than Canadians are. 

In truth, much of the appeal of isolationism is inspired from the loony internationist excesses of the cosmopolitan left. The UN is an obvious popularize of isolationism. In Europe, it is the EU: the biggest failed economic experiment since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The costly failures of the EU and the silliness of the UN make the idea of cutting off foreign entanglements appealing.

Unfortunately, isolationism requires a ruthlessness when thinking about foreign policy that few actual isolationists possess. It is common for isolationists to imagine themselves to be ‘realists’, but in truth, they are not as realistic or tough-minded as they think they are. Among other things, it requires watching strong but bad regimes bully weak but good nations with complete disinterest, nations that have much in common with Canada and the US in terms of the rule of law, property rights, respect for the individual, and democracy. Very few people have the stomach to say, over the Russian attack on Georgia for example, or Russia’s recent attempts at parceling the Ukraine, that this is too bad, that while these are good countries, or alternately are countries aspiring towards Western standards, but it is simply none of our business if a KGB goon like Putin destroys them.

The trouble is, most isolationists cannot bring themselves to make such an honest argument. In short, most isolationists are too good for isolationism. 

So, what do they say instead?

Like most people when faced with a moral dilemma, they rationalize. Humans are the greatest rationalizers, never more so when they want to convince themselves that they aren’t so bad. And in their rationalizations, they become toadies. 

A good modern example of a modern-day patsy is Pat Buchanan. Isolationism led Buchanan to oppose wars that are fought with at least a partial moral goal. He calls them moral crusades. World War II was a moral crusade; at least it was on the English-speaking side. So, for this reason, Buchanan argues that Britain and the United States shouldn’t have fought the Third Reich. Of course, the Holocaust is a major sticking point in this argument, so he is forced to argue that it wouldn’t have happened if Britain hadn’t ‘provoked’ Germany. This is of course magical thinking, for too many reasons to catalogue. If Buchanan had been an honest isolationist, he would have said, OK, the Holocaust was a really bad thing, but it was none of our business. As cold-blooded as this sounds, the correct course of action would have been for the US to have stepped aside and watched from afar. But Buchanan isn’t cold-blooded enough to take his argument though to its logical conclusion, so he concocts an elaborate alternate history of unicorns dancing around rainbows, with the principal hero of World War II (Churchill) cast as a villain. Such is the folly that you lead yourself into believing when you are not intellectually honest with yourself. 

An example from the past was Neville Chamberlain. In his case, it was fear and cowardice, which drove him towards isolationism. He didn’t have the guts to confront Hitler directly, so he sold the Czechs out at Munich, rationalizing that Czechoslovakia was “an obscure country, far away.” In reality, Czechoslovakia had 35 well-equipped divisions posted in terrain ideal for defence. If Hitler had been forced to wage a two-front war in 1938. France would likely not have fallen and World War II would have been a much smaller affair. But the Allies refused to stand up to Hitler until September 1939, and the result was the apocalyptic agony of World War II. Such are the fruits of isolationism.

Even worse, if France had stood up to Hitler in 1936, when he took back the Rhineland, World War II would have been reduced to a month-long policing action.

Back to today’s isolationists. Because they are afraid to confront Putin, they end up pretending that he is a good guy, proclaiming him to be a ‘champion of Western values’. What Western values? Like the KGB, or the Russian mafia, or looting one’s own country. The pattern of behaviour is there for all to see. The apartment house bombings, the War in Chechnya (the conduct of which is known for both its brutality and its ineffectiveness), the Invasion of Georgia, the Invasion of Crimea, and now the chaos in eastern Ukraine. But because they are afraid to see the truth, afraid to be honest enough to admit that their foreign policy preferences enable all of this, they refuse to see it. The byproduct of this self-delusion is a Niagara of rationalized excuses for Putin: Georgia attacked Russia, Crimea is traditionally Russian, and who knows who shot down MH17? Even though Occam’s Razor points straight at Putin, they prefer the deferents and epicycles of isolationsim, er, I mean realism.