Canadian Cincinnatus

The Ghomeshi trial shows that the Canadian judicial system still works

What prompted this post is this article in Toronto’s 24-hr news radio station 680 News, entitled “Jian Ghomeshi’s trial highlights need for deep legal reform: lawyer”. Now I am not suggesting that you should listen to 680 News for deep thoughts, but it is a great place to go to see what the Mainstream Media’s current zeitgeist is, because 680 is both too stupid and too sane to deviate much from the received wisdom.

So why does the lawyer quoted by 680 News think our criminal justice system is broken?

“A Toronto lawyer who’s called for substantial reforms to how the legal system handles sexual assault cases says the Jian Ghomeshi trial shows that the adversarial model presently in place is ‘structurally ill-suited’ to deal with such allegations.

The current system is ‘basically trial by war.’”

The reason why our justice system involves ‘trials by war’ is that trials necessarily represent two irreconcilable interests: the interests of the guy who doesn’t what to go to prison, as well as the people who want to send him there. Non-adversarial criminal trials may sound superficially nicer but in practice will mean that one side will not be fairly represented. You either have kangaroo courts – where the rights of the accused are waived – or you have a paradise for criminals. I am old fashioned enough to not favour either option.

“That is probably the worst thing to do to complainants who are coming forward to talk about very intimate and distressing violations of their sexual integrity,” he said.

What about the distress that an innocent man will have to endure for the next ten years in a federal prison?

“The high-profile Ghomeshi case has seen witnesses alter their statements under relentless cross-examination that often focused on details of memories dating back more than a decade”

This is an interesting point, and illustrates the need for a statute of limitations on sexual assault. These cases, especially after an intervening decade, devolve into a question of he said – she said, with no physical evidence or corroborating testimony available for either side. If memories are as unreliable as has been demonstrated in the Ghomeshi trial, how can anybody be found guilty of sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt after a decade has passed?

“— a tactic deemed common among defence lawyers.”

This tactic is also common among prosecutors. This, because it is useful for separating truthful witnesses from perjurers and false accusers.

“Moving away from an adversarial model, I think, is going to be necessary because look at the Ghomeshi trial — who would voluntarily put themselves through that?”

Somebody with a desire for vengeance against a person who has done them grievous harm? Of course, that assumes, grievous harm has actually been inflicted.

“Canada’s legal system has made strides in the last few decades in trying to recognize the unique nature of sexual assault cases, including the implementation of rape shield laws that bar using a woman’s sexual history to discredit her.”

If the Ghomeshi trial illustrates anything at all, it is the absolute necessity of vigorous cross-examination. The testimony of every complainant was full of contradictions and fanciful stories that made no sense at all. If they hadn’t been exposed by cross-examination, what chance would Ghomeshi have to prove his innocence?

“Sexual violence is nonetheless often kept secret: a Statistics Canada survey found that only five per cent of sexual assaults were reported to police in 2014, a proportion consistent with previous studies.”

Really? So how do you go about counting something that is, by definition, unreported? I smell a statistical fish here - as well as another story about the corruption in our sciences.

What’s their solution?

“Creating a specialized court to deal with sexual assault cases, like those earmarked for young offenders or those accused with mental health issues, could help, although those tend to focus on the circumstances of the offender, Witelson said.”

A specialized court that focuses on the circumstances of the complainant? Sounds like a kangaroo court to me.

“In order to convict, the criminal justice system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, a standard that is ‘almost impossible’ to meet, particularly in cases when the complainant and accused have an existing relationship, Butt said.

The civil system, meanwhile, needs only for one side to be more believable that the other, which increases the likelihood that someone will be held responsible, he said.”

See, what did I tell you. This validates what I said in my previous article:

“I also think this case points out how dangerous The Left really is. They demonstrate through their actions that they do not want justice at all - in any recognizable form of the word. What they want to do is to mete out group justice, like the way the Bolsheviks meted out group justice to the kulaks, or how Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge exterminated a third of Cambodia. If this assessment seem harsh, then let me ask you this: in what way is the feminist idea of justice in sexual assault cases different from communist persecution?”

You know, the social justice warriors are not going to stop. They are going to keep going until they achieve Pol Pot’s Year Zero. And green-eyeshades conservatives who just want to focus on ‘balancing the books’ while leave the messy, culture-war stuff to the Left, are inadvertently aiding and abetting them.

For this nonsense to stop, good men (and women) have to step up to the plate and stop them.

The Confederate Flag battle in the culture wars

In the aftermath of the Charleston atrocity, it has become clear that the Left has set its sights on the Confederate flag. In response, many conservatives have agreed that taking it down is the right thing to do. After all, it does represent the pro-slavery side of the Civil War as well as secessionism. Arguing against this, it can be said that the Confederate flag also represents a challenge to Washington DC centralism - a serious problem in our day.

While I think reasonable arguments can be made for and against the Confederate flag, what I want to do here is to step back and look at the bigger picture in order to put this fight into its proper perspective. Doing this, it is clear that the Left views the battle over the Confederate flag merely as a skirmish in a much larger war, a war to completely transform the United States. From their perspective, abolishing the flag is just a speed bump on the way to Utopia. In contrast, those on the Right who want the flag taken down, view the issue in isolation, based solely on the merits of the case. I believe they have been duped by their own reasonableness. The Left is not reasonable, and they are not stopping.

For a perfect example of this kind of wrongheadedness, see Chris Queen’s article over at PJMedia entitled, It’s Time for Southerners to Choose Their Battles: Moving Past the Confederate Flag is the right thing for the South to do. Earth to Chris: The South did not choose this battle. They were attacked. If you are attacked and you don’t fight back, you lose. Period. Also, it is not even about the flag, nor is it about the South. I am not from the South, I am not even an American, but I am concerned – because I don’t want the Left to win the Culture War. In picking a side for this fight I am looking towards the future, not at the past. The original issues that the flag represents are irrelevant to me.

One writer who gets it is Scott McKay, over at the America Spectator. His article is entitled, Cultural Tyrants: It Won’t Stop with the Confederate flag, it isn’t even slowing down. As he correctly points out, they are now going after statues and monuments. There is even talk of abolishing the film, Gone With the Wind. As he observed:

“The flag is anything but a hill to die on, of course; an argument could be made that for people of legitimate good will it represents culture and heritage apart from racism and slavery and those whose ancestors fought and lost in the Civil War use it as a symbol of their family’s suffering.”

“The preservation of Southern history, heritage, and culture might not seem like much of a cause to many of our readers, and that’s fine. But the same crowd howling about the racist rednecks in South Carolina and Mississippi is also demanding that students at UCLA not be taught that America is the land of opportunity, for that is also racist and thus offensive. At Cal-Berkeley, traditional American mantras about meritocracy or our country as a melting pot are now unacceptable. At Cal-Irvine the American flag itself is offensive. So are crosses on display in public places, or dogs or the smell of pork in Dearborn and Minneapolis. Or churches wishing to specialize in intersex weddings. Or “manspreading” males on New York subway trains.

This isn’t stopping at the Confederate flag. It accelerates with each victory the cultural Left achieves. And never, ever is there a price paid for its aggression.”

What to do?

“A price must be exacted. The Left cannot be allowed its double standards and guilty pleasures on the way to unquestioned cultural dominance. If traditional America must perish under Alinsky’s Rule #4 (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”), then so must the Left.

It’s either that, or this cultural war will ultimately give way to something more unpleasant.”

He is right. The Left will not stop until someone stops them. This is why I favour keeping the Confederate flag.

Or if you prefer to fight the Left while also opposing the Confederate flag, then you should take your lead from radio host and author Mark Levin. Last week on his radio show, he dedicated an hour of his show on the history of the Democratic Party, reviewing historical fact after historical fact, all demonstrating that the Democrat Party’s history is inextricably intertwined with secessionism, slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. His overall point is that it is sheer lunacy for Republicans to be apologizing for this stuff when the Democrats created it – all of it. And this isn’t just ancient history. Take Senator Robert Byrd, who died in office in 2010. Not only was he a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he actually created his own chapter. Mona Charen made much the same point.

So if you really want to throw away the Confederate flag, make sure you wrap the body of the Democrat Party in it first.

 

The Battle over Gay Marriage is lost: now let’s concentrate on winning the War On the Family

One of the greatest sins in strategy is failing to see reality as it really is. This is because conflict is an unforgiving accountant. If you make your plans in la-la land you will pay the price. It is in this spirit I declare that the Battle Over Gay Marriage is lost.

It certainly brings me no pleasure to do so. I am no supporter of gay marriage. Rather I think the traditional nuclear family is one of the greatest organizing principles that the human race has ever developed and it would be a catastrophe to lose it. The decline in the female Total Fertility Rate in every country where the New Morality has taken root is a harbinger of bad things to come. In declaring the Battle over Gay Marriage lost, I do so as the bearer of bad news, fully aware of what happens to the heads of such messengers.

Nevertheless, the War Over the Family can still be won but only of we jettison the failed tactics that caused this defeat. We need to adopt newer, better tactics. I have been unsuccessfully preaching this for years but, thanks to the resulting paper trail, I can hold my head high and proudly say it wasn’t me who lost this battle. The social conservatives who failed to take my advice did.

When the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, I wrote an article on this topic. Rereading my words two years later, I see no need to change what then wrote. In part, this is what I said:

 “To avoid repeating past mistakes, they [the social conservatives] must understand why they lost. To do that they must remember something Napoleon once said, that battles are often decided before they are even fought. By this he meant that a key factor in victory is the terrain. If all things are equal, the general with the keenest eye for the battlefield landscape will prevail. At Gettysburg, Meade chose good ground and Lee chose bad ground. When the proponents of gay marriage came up with their political strategy in the late 1980’s, they chose good ground. In other words, the traditionalists lost the Battle for Gay Marriage because they were forced to fight uphill.

To turn things around they need to quit launching Pickett’s charges against entrenched positions and, instead, find good ground. In specific terms this means: forget the gay marriage debate and face the fact that gay marriage is here… at least for the time being. Learn the lessons of the gay marriage battle and reframe the terms of the marriage debate in ways that favour traditional marriage.

My first clue to what this reframe might look like came about around 5 years ago after a gay marriage proposition in Oregon (I believe it was Oregon) was defeated in a referendum. Venting their anger after their loss, some gay rights activists proclaimed that perhaps all heterosexual marriages should be annulled after five years if the couple fails to produce children. While this was clearly an attack on traditional marriage, I thought: hmmm. It is an interesting proposition, clearly meant to turn the pro-traditional marriage argument - that heterosexual marriage is important because it produces children - against itself: if a heterosexual couple doesn’t reproduce, why should the state provide legally support their marriage?

While perhaps too radical, I think they are inadvertently on to something. From now on, traditional marriage supporters should advocate that all government marriage benefits should flow towards married couples with children, and that this cornucopia should be paid for by subtracting such benefits from childless couples.

This approach has a number of advantages:

First, it is an easy position to intellectually justify in secular terms. The production and raising of children is, in the language of economics, an external good, but one that is privately undertaken and funded. It has been estimated that it costs $250K to raise one child from birth to age 18. As the future of our society will one day be in the hands of this cohort, everybody benefits when these responsible adults enter the workforce. Even the childless gay activist benefits from fecund heterosexual families, such as when he is in the retirement home being tended by the grown-up children of these families.

In parallel fashion, everybody suffers when a sociopath or a parasite has been sired. So it is in everybody’s interest that good childrearing be supported as much as possible.

This reframe has many policy implications which I will explore in future articles.

Second, it turns the anti-traditional morality argument, that “the government has no business in the bedroom” on its head. If the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation then why should it mandate that pension funds and corporations provide benefits to spouses of employees or retirees? This made sense in an era when most women didn’t work outside the home – and when most women were busy raising children. In an era where most women work, shouldn’t it be reasonable to expect each spouse to arrange his own benefits? Unless, of course, one spouse stayed at home to raise the kids. In which case, the government does have a compelling reason to make sure that the spouse - who forgoes money and career prospects to perform one of the most important social functions (raising children) - is provided for.

And what business does the government have in regulating how assets can and cannot be dispersed in a divorce? Laws that favour one party (generally the wife) and courts that sometimes override contractual arrangements, like prenuptial agreements, only end up favouring gold-diggers. For this reason, matrimonial law should be converted into contract law as much as possible, with the exception, again, of those statutes that protect the interests of stay-at-home, child-rearing parents. 

And in the latter case, shouldn’t the party in a divorce proceeding who happens to be guilty of gross irresponsibility (i.e. infidelity) be punished financially to encourage others to stay married “for the children”? 

Third, by diminishing the advantages of marriage for non-childbearing couples, it removes the significance of gay marriage as a political issue and an ideological prize. Instead of defeating gay marriage, the issue simply shrivels up as the legal significance of childless marriage as a whole disappears.

With the overall decline in the total fertility rate in the developed world, perhaps a renewed focus on the production of respectable children is long overdue.”

Rereading my words, the only thing I want to add is a stress on the importance of a mother (a female role model) and a father (a male role model) in child rearing. There is plenty of scientific literature on this subject. You wouldn’t want to be against science, riight?

The Charleston church massacre and the wages of racial demagoguery

The sole responsibility for the horrible massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church lies with the deranged killer. Nobody else can be held to blame for the evil he committed. He should bear the responsibility for it alone.

On the other hand, responsibility for today’s social climate - which encourages deranged nuts to come out of the woodwork to avenge their grievances, real and imagined - is another matter. For this, the net of blame must be cast wider.

Specifically I am speaking about President Obama. Leading up to the 2012 Presidential election, the President deliberately adopted a strategy of stoking racial animosity with every local crime story that could be misinterpreted by demagogues. First came the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman circus, then Ferguson, MO, and next Baltimore. The goal of The Narrative appears to have been to anger black Americans in order to maximize black voter turnout.

The first group of nuts agitated by these reprehensible tactics were black rioters; in Ferguson, then Baltimore, then elsewhere, looters in the inner city black communities were provoked and encouraged. It was only a matter of time before some white maniac responded in kind. In Charleston, SC, the inevitable happened.

Instead of pushing a false narrative (Zimmerman attacked Trayvon, the Ferguson police officer assassinated an unarmed ‘gentle giant’, etc.), and instead of spreading the lie that the American justice system in general - and the local police force in particular - are out to get African Americans, a responsible authority figure would have responded firmly but fairly every time a crime story threatened to disrupt racial harmony. President Obama should have had a calming influence. He should not have been the one to amplify historical grievances and animosities. He should have been the voice of reason but he wasn’t.

Why is he doing this?

In politics, it is said that he who frames the debate, wins the debate. The left is framing the debate in terms of its agenda items: discrediting Southern culture (i.e. banning the Confederate flag) and imposing gun control. Any conservative who goes along with their arguments is a fool. Instead, conservatives should point out that racial discord occurs whenever people are treated as groups rather than individuals. He who whips up racial grievances for fun and profit only ends up fermenting unintended – and nasty - consequences. But just because those consequences are unintended, it doesn’t absolve the demagogues of their responsibility. The US Constitution is based on the treatment of American citizens as individuals. In a diverse society consisting of more than one race, the only way that everybody can coexist peacefully is if everybody is treated firmly but equally, and judged only by their own individual actions, not the actions of their distant relatives. If an American politician were willing to stand on this principle, he would win the Presidency - easily.

How do I know this? Because that’s how Barack Obama got to the White House. It was his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 - when he said, “There is no white America or a black America. There is only the United States of America” - that catapulted him to national prominence and jump-started his Presidential bid. It resonated with American voters who sincerely want to put America’s racial problems behind her. As the first black President in US history, he was uniquely qualified to do this.

Too bad he didn’t mean it.

Of soccer games, HR departments and PC lynch mobs

When I was small, my parents told me stories about what it was like in the Soviet Union. One feature was that every workplace, every classroom had snitches. You could sometimes tell who they were and sometimes you couldn’t. As a standard practice, there were at least two snitches in each setting, each of whom didn’t know who the other was. That way, the authorities would know if somebody was withholding incriminating information on their classmates or co-workers. The purpose of this massive surveillance apparatus was, of course, to control speech.

Growing up in the seventies, the attitude with regard to speech couldn’t have been more opposite. Traditional prudery was dying while liberals were still running around quoting Voltaire’s famous dictum, “I may disagree with what you say but I defend with my life your right to say it.” At the time, I thought that speech codes this side of the Iron Curtain were forever impossible. Anybody who tried would be labelled a prude and run out of town on a rail.

That was then. In the ensuing decades I have watched with increasing horror as former Voltaire-quoting liberals transmogrified into the Thought Police. A revealing skirmish in the Culture War occurred just this Sunday in Toronto at a Toronto FC soccer game.

While a TV reporter was interviewing fans, she was heckled by other fans (likely drunk) who harassed her with crude, sexual comments. Instead of ignoring these taunts, the reporter confronted the goons directly with her camera and mike. Instead of backing down and apologizing, they doubled down and said even worse things. The video went viral and soon the instigators were forced to cancel their Facebook and Twitter accounts. So far, so good.

Now the troubling part: one of the foul-mouthed punks was found to work for Hydro One (a local power utility) and was fired from his (lucrative) job. Driving home from work, I heard a labour lawyer gleefully announce on the radio that just because you are not on the job, your employer has a right to hold you accountable for actions you take and words you utter in your spare time, even if it has nothing to do with your work. Huh? When did this happen? When did it become permissible for your employer to discipline you for things you said or did on your own time? It certainly wasn’t that way in the 70’s. Any Junior Gestapo type in the HR department who tried to censor your off-work speech would have been tarred and feathered. Hydro One has subsequently stated that the employee in question was fired because he had violated their ‘code of conduct’. So now employers have the right to enact ‘codes of conduct’ that cover what you do or say on your own time? Swell.

Keep in mind that the man in question was not a public representative of Hydro One (like a PR flack) nor was he doing anything related to his job or career, nor did he identify whom he worked for. While he knowingly made crude comments on TV, he never identified himself. This incident had no bearing whatsoever on his job, except for the fact that his employer made his personal business their business. All of this is corroborated by the fact that the Social Justice Warriors had to actively hunt down who he was and where he worked.

In the Toronto Sun twitter feed, there were many people who said things like “fire him, yeaaah!”, and “serves ‘im right”. I am sure that there were conservatives were among them. I have this to say to conservatives (and anybody else) who think this guy should be fired for violating old-fashioned notions of chivalry: you are a dupe. The social justice warriors have you bamboozled. This is because the reasons given by the witch hunters for firing this guy have nothing to do with gentlemanly codes of conduct towards the fairer sex. They justify their actions with concepts like ‘harassment in the workplace’ and ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘war on women’ and ‘safe spaces’. In short, they are employing the same ideas that they use to suppress free speech on university campuses.

Now clearly, the guy’s actions were wrong. So what should have been done? The cops say they are looking into the incident. I can see that he might violate some petty larceny-type misdemeanor offence like disturbing the peace or public drunkenness or indecent behaviour. Great. Then charge him and convict him and give him his $500 fine or 2 weeks in the local jail. And of course, his employer shouldn’t be any required to accommodate any incarceration time he may be awarded. But terminating somebody after his fair trial is over is different from destroying his career just because the mob is screaming mad over something he said.

The justification given to the empowerment of the HR thought police is that we want to create a ‘harassment free workplace’. This goal sounds good in theory, but in practice it means employees living in constant fear for their jobs lest they make some off-colour joke or say something that somebody subjectively determines to be harassing for obscure personal reasons. This destination looks a lot more like the Soviet Union and a lot less like the Voltairean 70’s. Who wants to work in a place like that?

Any liberty loving person should find these social and legal trends repulsive and should refuse to go along with the burn-the-witch mentality that is all too prevalent these days.

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.

In praise of our commercial Christmas

Around this time of year, serious Christians all across the political spectrum to bemoan the increasing commercialization of Christmas, that the marketing of presents overrides and corrupts the true meaning of Christmas. Let me provide a counter-argument, what could even be called Christmas cheer, to those so concerned.

To see what I am getting at, look at Christmas commercialism from the opposite perspective, say from a devout Muslim living in North America. From his perspective, listening to his kids constantly mewling for Christmas presents, today’s commercialized Christmas looks more like an insidious plot concocted by devious Christians to spread Christianity to non-Christians through the backdoor of ‘secular’ commercialism.  And you know what? He is right, even if most Christians are oblivious to the proselytizing forces latent in the moneymaking zeal of our business world. In his own home, he is trying to hold the line, but he is being relentlessly worn down by his own kids, who want an X-Box or iPad for Christmas. If you want to attract converts, sometimes sugar works better than vinegar.

Now a Christian reading this might counter with the argument that long-term Christian success requires a return to fundamentals and an insistence on piety and reverence, particularly with regard to its faith and traditions. In other words, the constant ads for Christmas presents, complete with Christmas music, are a problem because they offend the true meaning of Christmas. Taking this line of reasoning further, one could also say that a religion that lacks at least some of the masculine militancy of, say, Oliver Cromwell or the Jesuits circa the counter-Reformation, will degenerate into either the corrupt Vatican of the Borgias or the effeminate weakness exhibited by many mainline Protestant denominations today, which are principally populated by little old ladies and led by pedophiles. Whatever else can be said about such an arrangement, it is not the way to future success. What is needed is less turn-the-other-cheek, multi-culti understanding and more Onward Christian Soldier.

If this is your argument, I hear you. In fact, I agree with you to a large degree. But tell me, how does what you say negate what I just said? It does not. Both can be true at the same time. The suspicions held by devout non-Christian believers that, behind the commercialization of Christmas, as well as secular Christmas songs like White Christmas and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer (written mostly by patriotic American Jews), lurks the true meaning of Christmas, is well founded. From a Christian perspective, the glass is half-full, not half-empty.

So all you devout Christians out there, cheer up. All is not lost.

And Merry Christmas!

 

 

Rape hysteria, real rape, and the New Morality

What with Lena Dunham’s autobiography, Bill Cosby, the purported gang-rape at the UVA frat, and the Jian Ghomeshi scandal here in Canada, there sure are a lot of sex assault scandals in the air these days. Granted a few of them have turned out to be bogus, more due to the feverish imagination of an overeager MSM propagandist than to any actual evidence, but still where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Whenever I think of the crime of rape, I remember what a late friend of mine told me. He was a retired Toronto police sergeant who worked mostly in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. He said that a significant percentage of sexual assault complaints were determined after closer examination to be bogus, and an overwhelming majority of these had a common theme.

What he had in mind was this: in a typical courtship, there is a push-pull dynamic going on. While both parties want to consummate the relationship, the woman has to push the man away at least a few times to make sure that he knows that she isn’t ‘easy’. The man must play hot and cold as well, lest his date think that he is a clingy beta-male weakling. While this is how most courtships progress, there are exceptions.

One exception can occur when the man is an alpha male with much greater sexual marketplace value than the woman. In cases like this, the woman is so smitten that she drops all her typical defense mechanisms. As a result, instead of the usual convoluted zigzag path between first glance and consummation, it is a straight line to the bedroom… or backseat… or dark alley… or… you get the idea. An excellent illustration of this from literature is the sex scene found in Tom Wolfe’s great novel, “I am Charlotte Simmons.”

Unfortunately, in these cases, the interests of the man and woman diverge after climax. The alpha male player thinks, how fast can I ditch this chick? While the woman thinks, oh, my God, I surrendered ‘my everything’ to him and he just tossed me aside like a used Kleenex: I feel used; I feel abused; I feel like I was raped; maybe I was raped; maybe I’ll charge him with rape. That will teach him. The brute! The Kobe Bryant incident is the classic example.

As my late friend pointed out, police skepticism is needed to sort these cases out from actual sex crimes. Usually, after questioning, female accusers tend to back off from their accusations. They weren’t really malicious. They just wanted to teach a cad a lesson. When feminists, who don’t want ‘the victim to be put on trial’, discourage detectives and defense attorneys from asking pointed questions, men can be sent to prison for engaging in consensual sex acts.

This also illustrates why feminists are so insistent that women be allowed to determine whether an act of intercourse was rape after the fact. While most men think that such a demand is an outrageous perversion of justice, here is the reason why it is made: a woman can determine whether she has been used by a man only after the sex act is over.

For a man to avoid this pitfall, I am reminded of a story told by a professor at Claremont McKenna College at the recent National Review Caribbean cruise. In a panel discussion on higher education, he told the audience of a male student who confided to him that he felt that, at with regard to the campus sexual assault policy, “the system was out to get him”. The professor gave his student this advice (I paraphrase), “Your instincts are correct. The deck is stacked against you, but there is an easy way you can avoid harm to yourself. Always act like a gentleman around women.”

I thought this was good advice, but also illuminated the larger problem: what is really happening here is a demonstration that the New Morality that the left has been pushing since the sixties isn’t working. Men and women are fundamentally different, with different interests and desires. Therefore, ‘free love’ can’t work. Sexual relations between men and women are best regulated by Traditional Morality, which has evolved by trial and error over countless millennia. It is an unwritten code of behavior that reached a state of near perfection in western societies in the early twentieth century.

If social conservatives were smart, they would seize on these rape panics as teachable moments. If they were smart. They are not. Rather, they try to refight the gay marriage debate, a battle long lost because the Left carefully chose the ground upon which that battle was fought. Thanks to the favourable terrain they chose, the proponents of gay marriage come across as heirs to the civil rights tradition of the sixties, and social conservatives, who champion religious freedom, come across as religious fanatics who assert their need to discriminate against their fellow man because of their barbaric beliefs.

On such battleground, you lose. It would be much better for social conservatives to explain to Low Information Voters what the Left’s real intentions really are, and attack the New Morality boosters for their obvious and epic screw-ups. Fighting battles like this is like picking low-hanging fruit. It’s easy. You just got to do it.

In Ferguson, Missouri, be careful what you wish for Rev. Al

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the National Review post-election cruise in the balmy Caribbean. In one of the lectures, black conservative Deroy Murdock discussed the history of racism in America. His point was that America’s healing process from Jim Crow is disrupted every time race-baiting demagogues like Al Sharpton and Eric Holder gin up a phony controversy, like Trayvon Martin (just before the 2012 presidential election) or Ferguson MO (just prior to the 2014 mid-terms). He described their irresponsible actions as akin to tearing the scab off a healing wound.

He is of course right, but I wonder if he is more right than he knows. What I mean is this: institutionalized anti-black racism by whites was a very real fact in parts of the United States not that long ago. While this situation has changed 180 degrees in the past generation, the memory of it is still alive. And while white Americans are genuinely trying hard to overcome this past, every prevarication by the black race-industry makes it just that much harder to do.

While there is no doubt that Al Sharpton, and, to a less extent, Eric Holder (who came from a mixed and privileged family) remembers real anti-black racism, I don’t think they really imagine that it can ever return. Why do I say that? Because their demagoguery is predicated on the continued existence of white guilt. As long as white guilt exists, Al Sharpton’s methodology works. In other words, he has power only to the extent that white people let him. But what were to happen if this were to change?

This possibility is not as far-fetched as it sounds. History teaches us that when the pendulum swings, it usually swings past the mark. This is what we are experiencing right now: the pendulum swinging from Jim Crow straight right past the colour-blind world that Martin Luther King so eloquently laid out in his Lincoln Memorial speech, to the world of affirmative action and racial hysteria and demagogues and witch-hunts that we have today. But who says that this pendulum is going to stay pinned to this extreme forever? It is possible, hell, it is practically a given, that it will start swinging the other way to compensate for today’s racial excesses. Right now, there are white university students who are so brainwashed in the white privilege malarkey that they actually feel that they deserve to be mugged after they have actually been mugged. This level of perverse ethnomasochism is unsustainable.

Unfortunately, when the pendulum does begin to swing back, it will – once again - swing past Martin Luther King’s ideal world back to a world where it will be once again OK for white Americans to feel racist towards blacks again. (We are seeing something similar happen right now in Western Europe, where a genuinely fascist right is metastasizing to counter the uber-PC sensibilities of the undemocratic and unaccountable EU.) Where the pendulum eventually stops won’t be anything like Jim Crow, as the pendulum will be moving more slowly this time, just like Jim Crow wasn’t anything like the slaveholding South, but it will be a world where the received white opinion will be actively hostile to the likes of Sharpton and Farrakhan and Holder. Unfortunately, it will also be a world where it will once again be OK to be unfair to blacks.

This is bad, but if this future comes to pass, it will not the fault of conservatives like me who oppose affirmative action and racial hysteria. We are doing our level best to dampen the pendulum’s motion so that it may drift back to its ideal resting position. It will be the fault of the racial demagogues, who are right now doing their best to push the pendulum in their favoured direction as far as possible, oblivious to the peril that they are creating for themselves – and for the people they are purporting to help - down the road.

 

Is Interstellar the most anti-global warming film ever made?

According to Wikipedia, part of the plot of Christopher Nolan’s lattest blockbuster, Interstellar, goes as follows (emphasis added):

“Low on fuel, Endurance can only visit one more planet before returning to Earth. Amelia believes Edmunds' planet has the more promising data, but Cooper and Romilly favor Mann's planet, as Mann (Matt Damon) is still transmitting. … The team votes for Mann's planet, but they find it to be icy and inhospitable. Mann reveals that he knew Plan B was the mission's goal all along, and faked data about his planet's viability.”

Apparently, Steve Sailer has alerted Mark Steyn to the fact that a character in Nolan’s latest flick is named Dr. Mann. Mark saw the film. Here is an excerpt from his subsequent film review:

“The movie ‘Mann’ is one of several astronauts out there in search of new worlds. The other guys are just referred to by one-word surnames, but ‘Dr Mann’ is never referred to as anything but ‘Dr Mann’. In other words, the Nolan brothers appear to have consciously chosen to give their villain the character of a ‘climate scientist’. … Given the film's themes, it's difficult to believe the Nolans' choice of name for their bad guy is pure coincidence.

Once he's on his new world, he sends back data telling NASA what a perfect climate it is. When Coop & Co get there, they discover it's an ice planet - a vast frozen wasteland in which even the clouds ice up. Consigning the man who eliminated the Medieval Warm Period to a giant planetary icebox again seems too good a jest to be coincidental.”

Film-maker Christopher Nolan has developed a reputation for being one of Hollywood’s secret crypto-conservatives, especially after the last film in his Batman trilogy, 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, debuted, where the villains are more or less explicitly modeled after Occupy Wall Street. Given examples like this, I think it is incumbent on conservatives to refrain from dismissing all pop culture as trash, and to make an effort to differentiate between films that makes our points and stuff made by the enemy.

Good conservatives should be seeking out fellow conservatives like Nolan and give them sustenance and support. Go rent Nolan’s older films, go see his current movie, and keep an eye out for what he does next. If you don’t, you won’t have anybody to blame but yourself if everything out ends up really being trash.