Canadian Cincinnatus

Islamic extremists forge a new, united European nation-state

What makes a group of people a nation? Any number of things: religion, language, race (i.e. kinship and DNA), shared history. All the peoples of Europe are defined by one or more of these ties.

Currently, the European Union is attempting to take those disparate peoples and create an entirely new nation state, called the European Union (which Winston Churchill optimistically called the Unites States of Europe). The EUcrats are trying to do that by increasing the economic ties between European nations, and with red tape.

So how well are they doing? Looking at the problems being created by the shared currency - the Euro - it seems, not too well. The Euro looks to be exacerbating rather than smoothing over ethnic tensions. Twenty years ago, there was no real hostility between say, Greece and Germany. These days, the two countries are at each other’s throats, with the Germans at wits end with Greek profligacy, and the Greeks comparing the Germans to Nazis almost every day. The provisional answer seems to be that economic ties can sometimes bind two groups together but can also place them into conflict. With regard to the second cause - the red tape continuously being spewed out from Brussels - I am unaware of any European who gets a warm and fuzzy from the overregulation emanating from unelected bureaucrats living an a foreign country –except the Davos crowd and dippy one-world-government utopians, who ooze contempt for the nation states from which they came.

Looking back at history, have mere economic and bureaucratic ties ever bound a group of people together? There have been a number of multicultural empires throughout history, the Persian, the Roman, and the British, but in every case, military success and sensible laws were unifying factors – made palatable by a laissez faire attitude to local customs and traditions.

In the end, though a people, a tribe, and a nation are just a group of individuals willing to fight and die for other individuals in the group, who they may not even know. Any less of a bond, and the group isn’t cohesive in any meaningful way. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants battled to the death for their respective tribes. In a pair of world wars, Germans and French fought pitched battles against each other, separated from each other by language and history, but internally united by kinship. Englishmen were inspired by Henry V to beat, against great odds, the French in the Battle of Agincourt. Who will follow this man into the breach?

The only conclusion that can be drawn from recent European history is that the European Union project is doomed, being both overly ambitious and poorly executed.

But it has occurred to me that perhaps this forecast is too hasty. Perhaps there is a forge in which a real, meaningful European Union can hammered into existence. What I am thinking of is another mechanism known to forge a nation: a common enemy. There is nothing like a looming foe to bring people together, even people with a history of hating each other. When I mentioned shared history a couple of paragraphs up, this is really what shared history is, because what is history but the history of war? And what greater collective effort is there than  defense against a common enemy? Past differences are put aside to overcome today’s emergency. At the end, new kinship ties are formed.

For Western Europe in the 21st century, that common enemy is Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic states have been the enemy of Christendom for more than the past millennium. Today, the Muslims live in Europe itself, making the common enemy that much more personal to Germans, Frenchman, Italians, and Spaniards.

In Eastern Europe, it is different. Muslim ghettos are nonexistent and nobody cares about Islam. On the other hand, they have Vladimir Putin…

Fifty Shades of Grey and feminism’s contradictions

The current box office champ is Fifty Shades of Grey, produced, directed, and written by women, and based on a bestselling book written by a woman. The topic: a submissive woman falls in love with and loses her virginity to a powerful man who insists on ‘dominance and submission’ role-playing, and with a taste for rough sex. (If this took place in Canada, he’d have his own show on a government-funded radio network, but I digress.)  By all accounts, the overwhelming majority of the fans who made the book and movie so popular are women.

By feminist theory, this does not compute. According to the Gospel According to Germaine Greer, the film should have instead been popular with heterosexual men, as the film affirms the Patriarchy (as feminists imagine it to be in their nightmares). Rather, the husbands and boyfriends try to ditch their wives and girlfriends at the Cineplex to see American Sniper instead. What is happening here is the type of cultural event I look forward to, and that I savour like a fine wine when it happens: a contradiction in left-wing ideology played out in the media.

The contradiction in question is the fact that a woman is programmed by nature to be attracted to a powerful, successful, dominant man, much the same way that a man’s mind has been hard-wired to find young, fertile, and healthy young women to be the epitome of sexiness. This fact directly contradicts a basic tenet of Feminism, namely the equality of the sexes, which many of the movie’s fans would no doubt agree with, if you were to survey them. This is the contradiction.

This is also the reason why I believe so many feminists are miserable. Their core beliefs directly contradict their inner desires. The root cause is that the feminists have gone too far in trying to regulate society. A lot of the sensible things that Feminism championed – the vote for women, political equality, equality in the workplace – have been enacted, enough so that there are few legitimate jobs left for feminists to do, aside from mopping up operations here and there. But, feminists don’t want to lose their jobs, so they champion crusades that take Feminism too far.

In taking the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, they thought they could remold humanity through legislative fiat, Political Correctness, and tendentious Hollywood movies-of-the-week. Men and women could be made – through force of will - to have the same personality type – not dominant, nor submissive, but neutral and reasonable. It was at this point where Feminism became a force of oppression. One popular way we deal with repression when it contradicts our desires is to mouth the Political Correct platitudes when required while living out our true nature while nobody is looking.

Except that every now and then a cultural event comes along to expose the hypocrisy.

Cultural conservatives are mostly clued out about this sort of thing, except that the institutions we champion (e.g. traditional marriage) have real knowledge about human nature baked into the cake, thanks to millennia of trial and error. A typical off-the-mark take on the Fifty Shades phenomenon is provided by Rich Lowry, who titled his article, “Creep Meets Girl, Fifty Shades of Grey: The proper response to Christian’s obsession would be a good kick in the groin.” The operative word here is ‘proper’. The improper – but instinctive – response of a woman facing a dominant alpha male is to fall in love with him and try to have his child. Much as a man’s improper response to a floozy with a set of implants and blonde dye-job is to have quick sex with her.

OK, I hear all my conservative female readers out there screaming, what do you know? I am a woman, and I don’t want to have anything to do with this BDSM garbage.

I hear you, and for what it’s worth, I have no use for it either. But here’s the thing: BDSM is a caricature of male-female relations, and that is the reason it is popular in certain quarters. Dominant-submissive role-playing is a normal man-woman relationship taken to an extreme. In other words, it is a reaction to the joyless, sexless Swedish ideal of equality where the man does macramé and the woman pumps iron. And like any reaction, it goes too far. (Go see the great Norwegian comedy series Lilyhammer on Netflix for a hilarious send-up of Nordic culture.)

What traditional morality does is to employ the woman’s natural abhorrence of female promiscuity to channel her sexuality towards a father-knows-best, pillar-of-the-community type of respectable alpha male. A woman who falls for the Christian Grey-type is shamed. Therefore, women end up shunning him (even if they secretly love him). Instead of being a winner, Christian Grey is turned into a sexual loser, and therefore becomes the butt of other men’s jokes, instead of an object for their admiration. At that point, the women no longer secretly love him. This is the way sexual regulation used to work.

More than anything else, traditional marriage is a compromise between the interests of men and women. As a result, nobody gets everything he or she wants but everybody gets something. And most importantly, everybody gets someone. The latter is the real reason for the prohibition on polygamy and extramarital sex. The only winners with those pursuits are alpha males and (to a lesser extent) alpha females. The rest end up as sexless chumps, which is what you see on the college campus today. The beta-males (aka the nerds) are ignored, while the alpha males (the jocks and players) live like Hugh Heffner. Unfortunately, it is the beta-male provider types who form the backbone of modern society.

The thing about compromises, even good compromises like traditional marriage, is that they often don’t look that great at first glance. All the customs and traditions making up the institution of marriage look like a patchwork of contradictions and antiquated habits. The hard-won empirical knowledge behind the rituals only becomes obvious after they are removed.

Many of our sexual customs were overthrown in the sixties. The reason for their existence is only becoming apparent now.

Europe is threatened by elites who ignore legitimate problems

Both the Euro crisis, brought to the fore again by the recent Greek elections, and the anti-Islamic marches, originating in Germany but now moving around Europe, highlight two key problems facing Europe today: immigration and currency woes.

Let’s take the Greek crisis first. There are two competing narratives about who is to blame. One is that Northern Europe is far more productive than Southern Europe. Northern European countries, most conspicuously Germany, are hard-working, productive, and thrifty. They keep their government spending in check and the people work hard enough to afford their social spending. In contrast, the Southern European countries, most conspicuously Greece, are lazy, unproductive, and profligate. They produce very little but enjoy extravagant social programs courtesy of the German taxpayers. In order to fix their own predicament, the Greeks need to work harder and start living within their means.

The other narrative is that the Eurozone is a currency scheme set up for the benefit of the Germans. Germany is an export machine that needs to keep its currency down in order to maximize exports. By shackling its money to that of its weaker neighbours, it ensures that its own currency is weaker than it would be if it still had the Deutsche Mark, enabling it to export more. As well, because the currency of weaker economies is higher than it would otherwise be, they are enabled to buy more German cars than they could if all they had were Liras and Drachmas. So now the Greeks are told to cut government spending by the Germans because they bought too many Audis.

My take on this is that these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Both contain an element of truth, but the underlying problem is not to be found in Greece or Germany, but rather in Frankfurt. The unified currency is one of the biggest economic mistakes made the Berlin Wall fell. By now this should be obvious to all. I am sure that it is to most EU citizens, particularly the Greeks. But here’s the problem, it isn’t to the elites in Berlin and Brussels and Paris. They seem hell-bent on continuing the project regardless of the damage it inflicts. And if the public votes against it, then it is the election and the public that are wrong, not the unelected non-representatives in another country.  The danger inherent in this arrangement is that if the legitimate parties ignore a serious problem, then illegitimate parties will take up the challenge. Take Greece. As a result of the Jan 25 election, two of the top three parties in Greece are The Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) and Golden Dawn – a violent, overtly fascist party. But hey, what did you expect when the forces of legitimacy champion an austerity program imposed undemocratically on the national government by unelected foreigners?

The second issue, immigration, came to the fore after the latest terrorist attack in Paris. First in Germany, and then spreading throughout many Western European cities, spontaneous but well attended, grass-roots anti-Islamic matches occurred. Again, the elites acted with moral outrage, Angela Merkel in particular, denouncing her own citizens. You know, Angela, given all the problems that Germany has with Muslim immigrants, what with unemployment, crime, lack of assimilation, and the festering of a violent ideology, don’t you think your voters have a legitimate point in there somewhere? Sure, denounce the intemperate remarks and extremist participants if you must, but wouldn’t it be wise to also revamp Germany’s immigration policy, particularly with regard to Muslims? In what way has their presence in large numbers made Germany a better place?

But, as with the currency woes, if legitimate elites ignore the problem, illegitimate forces will fill in the resultant void. While some of these forces are fairly civilized, like UKIP in Britain (which doesn’t stop the elites from denouncing them vociferously), there are many genuinely fascistic parties growing in popularity elsewhere in Europe, a lot of which are funded by Vladimir Putin in order to destabilize his geopolitical foes. For this reason, many on the New Right are openly supportive of Putin and his evil schemes.

What the Eurocrats have ignored or forgotten is that European countries are not multicultural entities. They are nation states, composed (in large part) of people from the same ethnic group and language. Because they ignore this basic fact, they don’t see the damage they cause by scrambling dissimilar people together. For an example on what can happen, take a look at Africa. A lot of Africa’s problems today originate from the fact that its national borders were drawn by colonialists with little regard to tribal boundaries. Such a mismatch is very conducive to war. Well, Europe is kind of like Africa in this regard, except that the tribes are called the French and the Germans and the English and the Spanish and the Italians.

One place in Europe where national boundaries didn’t line up with tribal boundaries was Yugoslavia, an experiment to unite all the Slavic tribes of the Balkans under one leader. This worked fine under a crafty but iron-fisted ruler like Tito, but look what happened after he died. Peace only returned after the Balkans ‘self-segregated’ – at the end of a nasty civil war. No amount of centralized planning can turn the European continent into something that it is not. But a lot of damage can be done along the way.

With massive immigration from a traditional enemy of Christendom, the only end result for Europe I can see are vast unassimilable ghettos developing within Western Europe, ghettos that will still be festering cauldrons of resentment and violence centuries from now. Think Northern Ireland writ large. Who needs that?

A fan of multicultural might object to this reasoning as fascistic, but it is quite the opposite. I am warning against the genuine fascism that is currently on the rise, and what Europe needs to do to head it off at the pass. Through his schmaltzy sentimentality and strategic blindness, the multi-culti EU elitist is the best enabler that the jackbooted thug has. 

Why the arguments against arming the Ukraine are wrong and stupid

Right now, the fledgling democracy of the Ukraine is fighting for its life against Russian incursion in the East. Currently the war is in a phase that John Schindler, over at the excellent 20committee.com blog, has termed a “Special War”. To counter this aggression, one of the strategic options on the table is providing military aid to the Ukraine. Schindler argues for:

“Ukraine’s pressing military needs exist in a few areas. Conventional weapons — armor and artillery, and ammunition for them — Kyiv possesses in abundance; they have no need for heavy weapons from the West at this point.

However, there are a few areas where modest Western gifts of essentially defensive weapons — particularly light anti-armor and air defense systems, plus counterbattery radars and tactical electronic warfare gear — would prove a serious problem for the Russians.”

This sounds reasonable to me.

One counterargument is that arming the Ukrainians will ‘escalate’ the war. The premise of this argument is that the situation in the Ukraine is ‘spiraling out of control’, much like the summer of 1914 spiraled from a political assassination in the Balkans to a horrific 4-year bloodbath. For this premise to be true, the situation on the ground must consist of multiple actors, each making belligerent moves that inspire their opponents to make other belligerent moves, and so on, with each iteration ratcheting up the intensity towards an end that nobody desires. This is obviously not the case here. What we have is a peace-loving country that only wants to maintain its freedom and independence. We also have another country, much more powerful than the first, who is trying to destabilize and destroy the first. Third, we have a bunch of powerful onlookers paralyzed by fear. In reality, the trajectory of this war is being driven by one man, Vladimir Putin, who is adjusting the intensity of the Ukrainian War on a dial in the Kremlin.

A much more accurate historical analogy would be late 1930’s Europe. One of the lessons of those dark times is that appeasement against an aggressive dictator is counterproductive. Each time an opportunity presented itself to stand up to Hitler, the West chickened out. Each time, the West lost an ally and gave Germany more precious time to continue rearming, raising the stakes until World War II became inevitable.

In the case of 21^st century Russia, Putin invaded Georgia and the West did nothing. Encouraged, Putin took Crimea, and the West did nothing. Feeling no resistance, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. In 2008, the Russian military was a ramshackled outfit. Russians then began an ambitious modernization program. The Russian army of today is much more capable than it was 6 years ago. This is why the question posed by the isolationist - is the Ukraine worth it? – is so stupid. The premise is invalid. It is not just about Ukraine, just as it was not just about Georgia in 2008. It is about Putin’s next target, and the next, and then the next. Until NATO’s Article 5 is invoked. And now you have a nuclear standoff. And if you blink then, there goes the entire security structure of Europe itself. All the peace that Europe enjoyed under Pax Americana since World War II will have been swept aside.

What we are dealing with is Bonapartism. Though Vladimir Putin’s talents are in no way comparable to Napoleon’s, he has enjoyed enough success for megalomania to have kicked in. History offers few examples of conquerors who stopped. The only example I can think of is Otto von Bismarck. The usual trajectory is for such men to continue until they are killed. So in a real sense Putin is doomed. The only question is how much damage will he do before his demise.

It is for this reason that a proxy war in the Ukraine is the best course of action. The issue here is not even whether Russia gets to keep the Crimean peninsula (ethnically cleansed as it was by Stalin of its native Tartars) or Eastern Ukraine (containing a significant Russian minority). It is that the price Putin pays for his Ukrainian adventures must be maximized. The more he pays now, the less willpower and resources he can muster in the future. Eventually, the Russian people will turn on him.

Which leads to another popular counterargument: that we must leave Putin alone because he is popular with Russians. This is an absurd standard. Should the West have acquiesced to Hitler because he was popular with Germans? In either case, they were (or are) popular because they were (or are) winning. Everybody loves a winner, not so much a loser. Right now, Russians have been shielded from the bad effects of the war by the state subsidies and propaganda. It has been said that Russians are good at suffering, but this is only because they have had a lot of practice. It is not because they like it. After a defeat, or after the oil money runs out, their opinions will be different.

One objection to arming the Ukrainians is that this would be a dangerous move. You know what? This is correct. But you know what is even more dangerous than a proxy war in the Ukraine? A direct conflict between NATO and Russia. It is precisely for this reason that it is in everybody’s interest to keep the conflict with Russia as far east as possible, and, if possible, confined to non-NATO allies. That is why we should do everything in our power to help the Ukrainians win.

The exact parallel here is the Russian Afghan War. This was a proxy war, and against a much more formidable adversary. It worked then, and it can work again. The Ukrainians have a rich history of partisan warfare to draw upon. Dictatorships are brittle in a way that democracies are not. The Soviet Union could not withstand the defeat in Afghanistan in the same way that the Tsar could not stand the defeat against Japan.

Another argument made for abandoning the Ukraine is that the Ukraine, Kiev specifically, is historically the birthplace of Russia; that for Putin, the Ukraine is a holy cause, and that for the US to interfere there would be like for Russia to interfere in Mexico. How would the US like that? The proper answer to this is, do the Ukrainian people have a say in this? If Kiev is the ancient heart of Russia, why do the current inhabitants of Kiev hate Russia so much? The answer does not lie in the 10^th century but in the 20^th. Does not the Holodomor trump what happened a millennia ago? The Ukrainians hate the Russians because Stalin starved to death 2.5 to 7.5 million Ukrainians. That is why, after World War II, the Ukrainians fought an epic partisan war against the Soviet Union for a decade – another recent epic historical event to trump medieval trivia.

The same can also be said about Russia’s need for buffer states. Do not the inhabitants of these states get a say? There is a reason that the pepole in those countries hate the Russians and prefer the West. The have experienced freedom and know what Russian tyranny really is like. This motivation also speaks to Putin’s strategic stupidity. As I have argued before, for all of his tactical cleverness, Putin is a strategic dunce. He is allying with and helping Russia’s long-term strategic enemies (like Iran and China), while taking the only peaceful border he has, his Western border, which is composed of countries who want nothing but peace with Russia, and turning it into a war zone.

The West needs to understand what it faces squarely and begin to take straightforward action against a menace that has been allowed by wishful thinking and neglect to fester. A long overdue step in this regard would be to help the peace-loving Ukrainian people defend themselves from an unprincipled, power-hungry dictator, who bombed his own citizens to get into power.

How Greece can escape the Euro and prosper

A showdown appears inevitable between Greece and the EU now that an explicitly anti-EU left-wing party, Syriza, won the recent Greek elections. The new Greek Prime Minister, Alex Tsipras, has promised to end austerity, even if it means pulling Greece out of the Eurozone and reinstating the Drachma. Could this work out for Greece?

If I were a betting man I would say no. The chips are stacked against Greece, but there is a way it can be done, and with Greece coming out ahead.

The current problem with Greece is that the Euro is too powerful a currency for Greece’s weak and unproductive economy. The strength of the Euro is set by Germany’s dynamic, productive, export-oriented economy. Because Greece isn’t as dynamic or productive as Germany, its goods can’t compete on the international market so long as they are priced in Euros. The Euro also provides an artificial boost to the spending power of Greeks, enabling them to purchase foreign goods that would be priced out of reach (like German cars) if they had a normal currency.  The result is an atrophying, import-oriented economy.

There is a way out – but just barely. If Greece abandons the Euro for the Drachma, the Greek export sector will instantly get a boost. Unfortunately, this also means that the rest of the Greek economy will get hit in the face by a gale force wind because the price of every import good will skyrocket. The government budget will also come under immediate strain. Budget deficits will be forced to end overnight as the government is cut off from foreign capital.

The key to overcoming these difficulties is to power through them as quickly as possible. This means enabling the export sector in every way possible. This includes massive deregulation as well as aggressive tax cuts on producers. (I know, I know, a lot of Greece’s red tape emanates from Brussels. But with all eyes on the currently battle, nobody will care if EU decrees on toilet seats and light bulbs go ignored.)

As well, because the government has an apparent operating surplus today (i.e. not counting the interest payments), balancing the budget quickly isn’t as far-fetched as it seems - as long as you are willing to forgo paying interest on your debt. These can be renegotiated, as all the leverage will then lie with the Greek government. You want your money back Mr. German banker, then let’s talk.

Unfortunately, to pull this off, austerity will have to be maintained – and for the short-term, even tightened. Once the export sector kicks in, tax revenues will surge and the immediate crisis will have passed. But until then, the people will be hit hard, and for this program to succeed, they must grin and bear it. On the positive side, once the crisis ends, Greece’s economy will have been completely transformed from the sick man of Europe into a Mediterranean tiger.

Can Greece do this? Well, my homeland of Estonia did just that in 1991 when it separated itself from the Soviet Union. Radical free-market reforms were instituted and all subsidies to unproductive Soviet-era industries were dropped - instantly. As a result, by 1994 its GDP had collapsed by 45%. 45%! But by 1999, the GDP had recovered and was growing fast. The upside was that the economy of 1999 was completely different from the economy of 1991. Estonia had become the most dynamic economy of Europe.

One thing that enabled it to happen was national willpower. Everybody was willing to take the pain, because the alternative was unthinkable – national failure and shame. Pensioners, who had their savings wiped out when rubles became worthless, and who could barely make ends meet (especially if they didn’t have kids), had the memories of the Republic they grew up under in the 1930’s to see them through. We had to prove we were better than our hated Soviet overlords, but a lot of those old people had lived through Stalin’s reign so they were tough. Also, thanks to the Soviet Union, socialism was thoroughly discredited. Any Estonian who advocated for socialism was considered a traitor.

Does Greece have this willpower? I doubt it. In today’s Greece, socialism has not been discredited by history. In fact, socialism is looked to for salvation, as an antidote to the hated German-imposed austerity. And Alex Tsipras is not Mart Laar, Estonia’s most important Prime Minister of the 90’s, who won the Milton Freidman Prize in 2006, and who instituted the world’s first flat tax.

Here’s an anecdote of how radically free-market Estonia was before it joined the EU: when Estonia was invited to join the World Trade Organization, the government was told that it had to reduce tariffs and duties as a condition of acceptance. The Estonian delegation looked puzzled. But we don’t have any tariffs or duties on anything, so how can we cut them? In contrast, Tsipras wants to rehire civil servants and bring prosperity back by raising public pensions! Well, he can certainly try that if he wants to, but he had better have high-speed printing presses on hand to keep up with the resulting inflation.

Like in a lot of financial crises, a solution is at hand and it is possible, but only for those willing to take the bitter medicine that it requires.

Supreme Court ruling on doctor assisted suicide is judicial overreach

According to the National Post:

“In a unanimous decision, The Supreme Court Friday struck down as unconstitutional the nation’s contentious century-old law against assisted suicide.”

“Today’s ruling stems from the appeal of a 2012 lower court ruling launched on behalf of two British Columbia women with debilitating and terminal illnesses, Gloria Taylor and Kay Carter, both now dead.

During oral arguments in October, their lawyers argued that section 241(b) of the Criminal Code, prohibiting aiding or abetting someone to commit suicide, violates the Charter’s section 7 rights to life, liberty and security of the person and condemned them to a life of severe and intolerable suffering.”

Just so you know where I am coming from, I actually agree with the plaintiffs as far as the issue of assisted suicide is concerned. While I agree that the suicide of a teenager, distraught over some insignificant teen angst is a horrible tragedy, I am nevertheless sympathetic with a terminally ill cancer patient who only wishes to end his pointless suffering. I think that such people understand their own predicament far better than a disinterested onlooker can. I believe they should be free to decide their own fate without outside interference from busybodies - busybodies who may be motivated by values they don’t themselves hold. The law is there to protect us from predatory criminals, but beyond that, it should leave us alone.

But here is the thing: I also believe in a limited constitutional democracy, where the laws we live under are enacted by our duly elected representatives. I understand that my opinions on suicide are not shared by every other Canadian, but fortunately we have a place where conflicting moral claims can be debated and settled. That place is Parliament.

In contrast, the purpose of the Supreme Court is to interpret the law in specific, problematic or difficult cases. Perhaps there are novel factors at work that were never pondered by our parliamentarians. In such instances, it is the Court’s job to interpret the law using accepted legal practices – but to take care and not exceed the limitations inherent in those practices. This case is not like that. The law in question here expressly contemplated the topic of suicide, and declared it illegal. Every Parliamentarian who voted for that law knew what suicide is and if he had wanted an exemption for mercy killing, he would have put it in.

The other function of the Supreme Court is to ensure that Parliament does not exceed our constitution. Is that the case here? According to the press, one of the relevant Charter Rights passages is section seven:

“7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

No fair reading of this passage could lead one to the conclusion that it requires the legalization of suicide or mercy killing. The plain purpose of this text is to ensure that Canadians are not subject to arbitrary arrest or punishment. In other words, whenever a Canadian is arrested or sentenced it must be in accordance with principals and procedures enshrined in British common law, such the presumption of innocence. To be sure, adjudicating the application of such principles in particular cases usually requires a legal degree in order to properly understand the technical issues involved. But this is not the case here. Whether suicide or mercy killing should or should not be tolerated is a matter for morality. It is not about a legal technicality. The place for deciding such questions is Parliament, if the answer is not explicitly stated in the constitution (as is the case here).

Whenever the Supreme Court exceeds it proper role, the less we live in a free society and the more we live under an unelected oligarchy. We find ourselves in a place not too dissimilar from ancient Egypt, where a caste of priests made up laws via the examination of chicken entrails under the guidance of obscure and inscrutable principles.

Unfortunately reigning in the Supreme Court is easier said than done, because that body does have a legitimate role in checking the constitutional abuses of Parliament. How do our Parliamentarians constrain the Court without effectively removing the legitimate power that the Court should be able to exert over Parliament itself? A question worthy of King Solomon.

Worse still, few of our Parliamentarians are inclined to take up this challenge. The extremist radicals prefer the current arrangement because they like getting laws enacted that they cannot pass by conventional means. Judge-made laws are a favourite tactic of the left. The rest of our politicians are glad that the Supreme Court is willing to tackle messy moral issues for them, no matter that deciding such issues is what they are getting paid the big bucks to do.

All of this may sound like a quibble, especially by somebody who agrees with the particulars of the ruling itself, but it is though such procedural decay that the legal foundations that make Canada strong and free are gradually being undermined. 

Why Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is booming

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is currently enjoying a boomlet among Republicans. He has gone from the bottom of the polls to the top. While this seems to have happened overnight, I think his current popularity was a much longer time in the making than it seems at first glance.

For example, in early November, I took the National Review Post Election Cruise, with about 500 other National Review readers (i.e. die-hard conservative political junkies). At one point on the cruise, we were asked who our favourite presidential candidate was. Walker received an overwhelming show of hands. It wasn’t even close. He must have had the support of 70 to 80% of those in attendance. The rest of the votes were split among the other candidates. This took everybody by surprise, organizers and guests alike.

Going into the cruise, I personally had thought who would make the best GOP candidate. I came up with Walker because he has demonstrated himself to be both principled and pragmatic. His epic showdown with the teachers union showed his fidelity to conservative principles, but also his skill (and willingness) at executing difficult solutions.  All too often, a movement’s hard-core supporters focus on each candidate’s policy positions, checking them off a checklist, but forgetting about each person’s character. Unfortunately, without an accompanying degree of courage, integrity, and a sense of judgment to know what is possible and what isn’t, what you say you believe in doesn’t mean a whole lot. If you can’t turn thought into action, who care’s what you believe in. Or so I thought.

But here is the critical thing; everybody came to the same conclusion independently – and for pretty much the same reason. This cruise was no pre-planned Scott Walker love-in. Walker wasn’t being pushed by any of the speakers in attendance. In fact, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz spoke at a pre-cruise event held in Ft. Lauderdale just prior to departure. Both were well received by the crowd. Walker’s popularity was a genuine surprise to everybody on board the ship.

This result is a sharp contrast to the 2011 National Review cruise, held a year before the 2012 presidential election. Like 2014, a show of hands was requested to indicate everybody’s favourite presidential candidate. (Mitt Romney had not been selected yet.) There was no consensus. At all. The attendees were all over the map. Newt Gingrich got be biggest level of support, but even with him, the victory was marginal and the support was lukewarm. The prevailing attitude was more of a shrug of the shoulder, well who else is there?

Even worse, when the announcer called out Mitt Romney’s name – the eventual Republican candidate, only one person put up their hand. And that was Gov. Sununu, the Mitt Romney operative sent by the Romney camp to the cruise to gin up support for Romney. He didn’t net a single voter among all those core conservatives present. A bad omen.

Perhaps the result of the 2014 cruise is a better omen.

 

Mitt Romney, global warning and purity tests

Former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently came out and stated his belief in anthropogenic global warming (AGW):

‘“I’m one of those Republicans who thinks we are getting warmer and that we contribute to that,” said Romney at an investment management conference.’

Though I personally am skeptical that the impact human activity on the Earth’s climate is as apocalyptic as it is often asserted, what bothers me most about Romney’s statement has nothing to do with the truth-value of the underlying theory.

What disturbs me is that I believe Romney is not being sincere. In other words, I don’t believe that Mitt Romney took a detailed look at the global warming ‘issue binder’ and came to a dispassionate conclusion, which he then announced. That would be one thing. Rather, I think he (or his advisors) felt that coming out in favour of AGW was a good political move. Or to be more precise, I believe that they have been bullied into making that statement by the prevailing media culture.

Which leads me to the real reason why conservatives and Tea Partiers don’t like establishment Republicans like Romney, McConnell or Boehner. It’s not so much their policies that we object to, it’s that we don’t trust them. We think that they will cave under pressure. Take Mitt Romney. Based on the policies he laid out in 2012, he looks like he would have made a good President – especially in the field of foreign affairs where events have proven him prescient. The problem is, presenting ideas isn’t enough. You also need a backbone to carry them through. Would Romney have the fighting spirit to confront Putin? I am sure he would do better than the current inhabitant of the White House, but I am not certain he would be another Reagan. Ok, I am sure he isn’t another Ronald Reagan. But I would more than settle for another Truman or even a George H W Bush.

This is where all this talk about ‘purity tests’ is a lot of malarkey on the part of the media. It is a smoke screen designed to obfuscate the real reasons that conservatives have misgivings about their leaders – and to paint honest American patriots as fanatics who can’t tolerate anybody who deviates from their personal world-view by one hair’s breadth. That this isn’t how conservatives really feel is illustrated by the fact that the phrase ‘purity test’ and the concept underlying it are only ever cited by the enemies of the Tea Party in the Main Stream Media (and the Democrat Party). Ever heard Ted Cruz use that term or apply an ideological test to somebody? Me neither.

I think most conservatives would be perfectly happy with an 80% conservative and they would settle for a 50% conservative. It is just that, having sweated and donated on behalf of the 50% candidate, they insist on getting the 50% that has been promised them.

The best indicator that a candidate will deliver on what he promises cannot be found in his policy platform but rather his character. Which is why I think Scott Walker is currently blooming. In Wisconsin, he has been tested and found to be made of iron.