Privilege

Privilege. That horrible, horrible word.

Nothing grinds the gears of those who subscribe to the Guillotine Doctrine- the perpetual soaking and draining of the rich to feed the ambitions and desires of the poor- than the idea of privilege. If you're the sort of conservative who just adores making leftists mad, you can't do much better than talking about how privilege is awesome. Try it on Twitter sometime.

Privilege is what privileged people have and what oppressed people don't have. (It is very black and white that way, of course.)

Benefits mysteriously accrue to the privileged because our entire culture is skewed in favour of the privileged. The privileged enjoy privileged existences, free of care and worry and effort because they are privileged, and at the same time they spend every waking moment and spare scrap of energy ensuring that oppressed people don't get access to privilege. (Yeah.....)

Now, us privileged people don't know we're privileged. We think our lives spent managing huge corporations bent on destroying people's lives and the environment are so hard. We even think we should be compensated appropriately- possibly even with more money than someone else- for the hard work we do.

This notion- that people have unequal abilities, or unequal drives to be better, and those who are exceptional should be treated exceptionally- drives the left absolutely kookoo-bananas. We'll return to it in a moment.

Because privilege is terrible, it is therefore acceptable, correct, proper and right that the oppressed and not-privileged should be working to destroy anything that grants more privilege to the already-privileged. When Arun Smith destroyed a free speech wall last week, he did so because he was a member of an oppressed group of people and therefore he could destroy things that he felt contributed to privilege.

As Arun's FB post on the subject clearly states, "I consider this action both a moral imperative, and one entirely in line with the mandates of the positions that students on this campus have chosen for me to hold." Being mad about free speech walls and talking to university officials about them doesn't produce the desired result of getting rid of them, so you take matters into your own hands.

Us privileged people, however, should not for one solitary instant assume that if we see something we don't like, we are allowed to destroy it.

Oppressed people, because they have been oppressed, have the moral imperative to ruin the day of people they feel are privileged. Privileged people might just be minding their own business, not bothering anybody, but because they are privileged, they don't know they are privileged, and they are, without knowing it, contributing to oppression.

Oppressed people are allowed to do lots of other things, too. There's a lovely thing called the "tone argument."

Let's say you're derping along one day when suddenly a group of Idle No More protesters decide they are going to shut down your local railway line. Being a privileged person who doesn't know you're privileged, you're not in touch with the oppression of First Nation peoples and you also aren't aware of the specific role you play in that oppression that means you specifically have to be targeted. Now you have Idle No More protesters mad at you.

Now because you didn't prepare for this when you woke up this morning (you awful privileged person, you) you ask them to please calm down so you can process what's going on. And by doing so, you have just made the situation even worse. You see, "people who have the privilege of being listened to and taken seriously level accusations of "incivility" as a silencing tactic, and label as "incivil" any speech or behavior that questions their privilege." So you, privileged person, aren't actually calling for quiet because you're trying to figure out what's going on- you're trying to use a silencing tactic. Why are oppressed people allowed to make assumptions like that? Because they're oppressed, that's why! And you're not.

So, people from oppressed groups are allowed to be angry. What if a conservative person gets angry about something? Well, that's because they're an angry white male.

Sometimes, oppressed people decide they are going to flout the system altogether! When this happens, we have the Red Square movement or the Occupy No More movement. And you can't question the Red Square movement, unless you want to end up like Jean Charest.

All of this stuff falls under the heading of "direct action." You engage in direct action when you want to "obstruct another political agent or political organization from performing some practice to which the activists object; or to solve perceived problems which traditional societal institutions (governments, powerful churches or establishment trade unions) are not addressing to the satisfaction of the direct action participants."

What about us? Could we conservatives engage in "direct action"? No, I guess not, because we're privileged. Why would we ever want to engage in direct action unless it was to protect our own privilege?

You know what? It sounds like oppressed people can do a lot of things that we privileged people can't. If something bothers them, they can engage in direct action and they don't have to make their arguments in a calm, rational way. And we can't say it's not fair, because we privileged people created the unfair situation in the first place. Exceptional people- people from oppressed groups- have to be treated exceptionally. Wait a minute....didn't we start by saying that people with exceptional abilities shouldn't be treated exceptionally according to those on the left?

Like, for example....the Liberals just elected Kathleen Wynne as Premier of Ontario. She makes frequent mention of her own sexual orientation. But she also says that the province has moved beyond consideration of sexual orientation. Her sexual orientation is special and not special at the very same time. What am I supposed to make of that? Nothing, because I'm privileged. I can't have an opinion on the subject.

However, oppressed people enjoy the privilege of having a discussion about whether Wynne's sexuality matters, and....oops. I just said that oppressed people have privilege. But....they're oppressed people. Yet they enjoy an unequal advantage over privileged people when it comes to talking about Wynne's sexuality, and privilege is "advantages that one group accrues from society as on the disadvantages that another group experiences."

If oppressed people can have privilege, that means that privileged people.....can be oppressed?!?!?! By....oppressed people???

Uh oh! I think I just figured out what the whole point of this privilege thing is, and that is to turn oppressed people into privileged people and privileged people into oppressed people!!!

Wynne's Win Is A Lose-Lose Scenario

So yesterday, the OLP Toronto contigent, seeing that Pupatello was on her way to running away with it, quickly put a stop to that with a series of deals. Can't be letting the voters decide anything now, can we?

Hey Liberals, how does it feel to have a handful of people yank away everything you've worked at for months in an instant? Are you just going to take this lying down? Of course you will. It's what you Liberals do.

Any progress towards reducing the size of the deficit is now moot. Any progress towards fighting the unions has been stopped cold.

And the centre is wiiiiiiide open for the PCPO.

Tim Hudak: Your task in the next election can now be compared to making a two-inch putt into a hole which happens to be the size of the Grand Canyon.

Sign That Sun News CRTC License Petition, Or Else

Ezra goes toe to toe with anti-free speech person Arun Smith. Required viewing for every goddamned one. Go. Click THIS LINK. NOW. DO IT.

The preceding smackdown has been brought to you today by Sun News, a.k.a the only network that can be counted on to do stuff like this. But if they don't get their CRTC licence, people like Arun Smith will go unanswered. You know it's true.

So: Get off your asses, all you Principled Conservatives out there and sign the PETITION WHICH IS AT THE OTHER END OF THIS LINK THAT HAS BEEN PUT IN LARGE CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EASY CLICKING. NOW. DO IT.

Thank you for your attention.

For What It's Worth

 

I have news for people frothing at the mouth about the Arun Smith situation at Carleton this morning.

This guy is the cat's paw. For OPIRG, or some other group of greyheads. Laughing at how this guy is a 7th year university student obscures the larger issue.

There was one in the Ford case. There's always one.

What Mr. Smith wrote is what all the rest of those who subscribe to the Guillotine Doctrine believe, but won't say. They want free speech gone, and they're all too willing to use university students to get it done.

Yeah, public opinion is going to come down hard on him. But that won't stop the next one. And the next one. And the next one. Until they succeed in destroying free speech in this country utterly.

And when that happens, we're all going to look about ourselves in wonderment, going, "Duhhhh, wa happen?!?"

When we are prepared to match these people blow for blow, then I will take the online raging seriously.

Good day to you all.

Vanishing Point

The implementation of the principles of the Guillotine Doctrine- that is, the perpetual soaking, punishment, and subjugation of the wealthy as a substitute for economic reform- in government, as is propounded by wise Liberal strategists, cannot take place without the merger of the Liberals, NDP, and other parties to form what will begin as a coalition of "like-minded progressives."

However, given what we have discovered about those who have been advocating a class war long before the Liberal intelligentsia began toying with it as the latest path back to power, this so called coalition will eventually devolve into one of two forms. Either the radicals will engage in a War of Purification against the Blue Liberals that have anchored the Liberal Party to the rock of fiscal sanity, or the Liberal social dominators will co-opt the Guillotine Doctrine and make half-hearted attempts to be wealth redistributing populists while continuing business as usual.

This choice is especially evident in the current Ontario Liberal leadership race. In one corner, you have the darling of the teachers' movement, Kathleen Wynne, who advocates a happy reconciliation between bloodthirsty teachers unions and their willing enablers on the OLP's left wing. In the other corner is Sandra Pupatello, who promises to continue Dalton's phony war on the deficit.

From our perch above this fray, we who hope for a return to balanced budgets someday in the far future can only hope that this is just another Liberal scheme to wangle their way back into the mainstream, just like they did when they took up the cause of free trade 100 years ago, and throwing down the cause of free trade 30 years ago.

We recall with fondness Stephane Dion's Green Shift. Poor deluded Stephane Dion, thinking that he was really on to something with that environmentalism. He thought that was the way to get "bock to pawurr as soon as poss-eebl." And he thought people believed in it as much as he did. He didn't realize that all Liberals know how to do is pay lip service to stuff and take credit for whatever good comes out of it.

But OMG! Prof. Dion wasn't content to just devise policy that required that Canadians actually do something to curb greenhouse gas emissions. He actually went so far as to grant an outsider- Elizabeth May- the opportunity to run unopposed in a Conservative-held riding! The Central Nova Liberals were less than thrilled with the notion, and the idea was chalked up to too much exuberance on an obviously clueless leader's part, until everyone decided some months later that collaborating with other parties on the left on a grand scale was a brilliant idea. So now they pay lip service to a merger.....

Now, I don't know if the Liberals really grasp this or not, but if the shoe were on the other foot- if it were the NDP dealing from strength here- then they would not treat the Liberals with such polite condescension and humour them with the idea of actually sharing power.

You see, I have discovered that people on the left have this concept of "allies". You have your marginalized and oppressed group, living in what are obviously third world conditions here in the midst of plenty, and then you have the people who come from privileged groups who want to help. And it turns out that while we on the right are content to point and laugh at these hipsters claiming solidarity and dismiss them as posers, the people involved in these movement find the support of rich white people overcome by guilt to be problematic.

It's problematic because these people want to use their power and connections to give the fledgling movement legitimacy- but for your average leftist, the very idea of working within the system to effect change is a non-starter. It's messy and sometimes there are setbacks and you end up having to compromise and ain't nobody got time for that.

Do all the hipsters sharing this realize that they're laughing at the suffering of an oppressed woman of colour?

 

OK, OK. So what if I check my privilege and head on down to my local Idle No More protest looking for answers? Surely I'll find some nice Native person who will guide me? Well, not really. See, it isn't the job of these oppressed people to educate you. I don't quite understand yet why it's not their job- I was under the impression that you'd probably do a worse job of trying to bridge a massive cultural gap on your own than if you had someone helping you, but that's probably the privilege talking- but it's kind of like in Avatar when Sigourney Weaver's character isn't really accepted as one of the Smurf people until she decides she doesn't want to be a human being anymore, and the movie holds that up as like the greatest thing ever because humans are bad, and that's probably why that piece of garbage movie got forgotten about instead of awakening humanity to their own selfishness like it was obviously intended to?

 

By the way- we conservatives are all PRIVILEGED. Even those of us on fixed incomes, those of us who don't drive fancy cars, those of use who work two jobs, those of us who aren't white, or straight, or thin.....and especially those of us who EARNED  what we have or CREATED opportunities for ourselves, or MADE GOOD USE of opportunities we were given. Super privileged, the lot of us, which is why we don't understand the plight of those who are oppressed. And here we were, thinking the government was oppressing us......but that's probably what the corporations want you to think, maaaaaaan.





What I'm presenting here is an approximation filtered through all my privileged paternalistic assumptions. To really appreciate it, you have to read it in the original leftist bafflegab, sort of like how, to truly experience Shakespeare, you have to read it in the original Russian (or Klingon).

One cannot help but cringe when members of dominant society tender their prudent instructions to the oppressed. I could not help but cringe when Goldenberg expresses anxiety that Idle No More may devolve into an unpalatable “dog’s breakfast of protest and pageantry” so distasteful that it “alienates the very Canadians who should be its audience.” The message to Indigenous peoples here is that their expressions of cultural resurgence and resistance may be a big turn-off for nervous Canadians, in much the same way I suppose as the genres of jazz, blues, and hip-hop in black cultures of urban resistance were so threatening to white society.

While it's all well and good for the Idle No More movement to dismiss the Harper government for being a bunch of racists while at the same time demanding that the government accede to their demands immediately......there's a big problem for Liberals too. The superficial well-meaningness of the Liberals is not going to convince too many of these people, because to them, the Liberals are just as privileged, and therefore just as bad. Now not only is there no difference between a Blue and a Red Tory, but there's also no difference between a Tory and a Liberal. Send 'em all to the guillotine.

So how long do the Liberal proposers of this union expect to survive with the NDP as the senior partner? Not bloody long, unless the NDP want to find their heads on spikes as well.

What will I discover next as I explore the domain of the far left? Only time will tell!

The Guillotine Doctrine

On this blog, 2012 was a year dedicated to the analysis of Liberals in all their various forms. The goal was to determine the reasons why Liberals are the way they are, and what sorts of things drive them to be that way. And, because being analyzed freaks them right the hell out.

This analysis led to the creation of a list of Laws for Liberals that was an attempt to capture the sort of thinking that lies behind the false pretensions to reasonableness and the delusions of slow, steady progress towards a better world that characterize the Liberal mindset.

 

 

We must never forget, however, that a sizable wing of the Liberal Party and pretty much the rest of the Canadian political spectrum have no such pretensions to reasonableness. When the OLP leadership tried to put a lid on the teachers after letting them run wild for 9 years, those of us on the right rightfully dismissed it as painfully too little, painfully too late. But even though it was a half-assed effort that would have failed miserably if not for the fact that Canadians unquestioningly accept whatever a Liberal government does, it was something of a positive change for the Liberal government. And right now, the Toronto Liberal leadership candidates are playing endorsement poker with one another with the aim of stopping Sandra Pupatello and blowing out the tiny flame of hope that the government will stand up to the union beast it has created.

(If they were smart, they'd all have gotten behind Wynne already. But their egos will not allow it.)

And who are these teachers unions, anyway? Who are these Occupiers, Red Squares, and Idle No More protesters who keep grabbing headlines? Is it possible to continue to ignore them, to write them off as fringe activists and losers who should get a job? It is not. It was never a good idea to have done so in the first place. They are a serious political concern, even going so far as to form a goodly percentage of the voting base for the federal Official Opposition. And, like the Liberals we have struggled against since time immemorial, they must be studied as well.

Now, until recently, this was uncharted territory for me. The baffling behaviour of those on the far left- teachers unions who don't read their own collective agreements, for example, or native chiefs who assume going on the warpath will obscure allegations of misspending and being driven by grudges- make it hard to figure out what's driving these people.


So I decided to read the sorts of things they read and experience it for myself. And because I don't believe in going in for half measures, I dove right into Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine," on the assumption that the people involved in these mass actions believe some version of what's being talked about in there.

The book is nominally about "disaster capitalism", which is the idea that economic crises are manufactured intentionally for profit, and if Klein had confined herself to pointing out specific instances where capitalism went overboard, I might have gotten more out of the read. But when you are writing a book about economics and the first thing you focus on is the history of actual shock therapy- that is, the crude beginning and negative effects of electroshock therapy for supposedly psychiatric purposes- and then make whatever kinds of connections you can between that and vulture capitalists profiting off suffering, then it quickly becomes clear that your aim is not to bemoan capitalism's excesses, but instead to blame every single bad thing in existence on capitalism.

And boy, does Klein ever wear out the shock therapy metaphor. "The IMF was preparing to administer another shock, which was shocking in its shockfulness. This was another example of shock therapy. By the way, the title of the book you are reading is 'The Shock Doctrine."

I wouldn't be surprised if Ms. Klein actually does think that rich plutocrats snigger evilly and engage in Mr. Burns-style fingertip steepling while lighting cigars with $1000 bills as they trade tips on how to ruin the lives of the virtuous poor. In reality, the all powerful corporate oligarchy is a timid group of bumbling overpaid suck-ups who would die screaming if Mama Government ever decided to cut the apron strings. This is what, in generations past, you would refer to as corporate welfare. But we don't hear that time-honoured phrase so often anymore because the aim now is to get as many bailouts as possible for GM and such to protect "middle class jobs".


Klein could easily have said, "These Chicago School people screwed up a bunch of economies and are bad at what they do and we shouldn't listen to them." But it's not good enough for her and her readers for these people just to be incompetent. Nobody can hate goofy incompetent villains- that's like hating the Three Stooges. They must be pure evil. They have all this godlike power over the economy with people all over the globe extolling their wisdom despite the fact that in her version of the story everything they touched turned to garbage. Of course, due to what is obviously 100% corporate media complicity in these crimes, nobody but her with her.....uh....zillion-copy selling book that should have been banned by the 1%?.....has been capable of documenting all of this horror. Ummm.....oh, wait, I get it! The 1% allowed her book to be published and read and bought by zillions of people because they want to co-opt her fearlessness for their own nefarious profit-driven purposes! There's big money to be had in smashing the rotten timbers of capitalism!

And Klein is definitely quick to condemn the shocking shockmaster shock therapists not just for meddling in the economies of every country on earth by exporting Chicago School economics, but also for not meddling in the economies of every country on earth by opposing bailouts. Wait, what? Yep- the Corporate Elite sat by and did nothing during the Asian Tiger Crisis of 1997, intentionally so, so that these economies, which constituted a threat to US/IMF/Illuminati/NWO global dominion, would come begging to them for support. Diabolical! They did exactly the opposite of what Klein spends the first half of the book excoriating them for, but that doesn't mean it wasn't all part of the plan!

And that's not even the most shocking (heh) thing I read in the book. That has to be her treatment of apartheid South Africa.

Now, to you and I, the ending of apartheid in South Africa is pretty huge. The notion is that where once white and black people weren't equal by any measure, there is now progress towards the idea of people not being treated differently because of their skin colour- as is the case, hopefully, in all democracies. No, it is by no means perfect, but it is better. Nope! Not according to Klein. The dismantling of apartheid amounted to little more than cosmetic surgery because the ethic of capitalism was not removed.

You may have asked yourself why the teachers unions are so mad about Dalton giving them the finger. They had some really good times together stomping all over the PC Party of Ontario. Three elections won is nothing to sneeze at. And yeah, when the government finally said to the unions, "OK, party's over," it was done in a dishonest and craven manner. The unions are justified in being annoyed with the government. But for those who opposed the government instead of opting to deal with them, we got full-on Hulkamania rage, as if no goodwill had been built up.

Why? Because, just like it is with Klein and apartheid in South Africa- to the far left, eight years of labour peace does not represent progress.

 

To them, nothing- nothing- Dalton McGuinty has done in eight years has even begun to scratch the surface. There must be total perfect equality now, or the house must be burnt down.

 

Do the people running the Idle No More movement feel the same way? Do they think all of Canadian history is one big unbroken horror story? I'll let you look at this flyer a friend of mine found on the subway and you can decide for yourself.

The back says, "That's Not All Folks! This Is Not Disney Land, It's Native Land!" If I pointed out that "That's All Folks!" comes from Warner Brothers, not Disney, does that make me a colonizer?

 

If all power is concentrated in the hands of the 1%, then it must follow that the 99% are without blame for their own situation. They don't have to take responsibility or feel guilt or even really do anything to change their circumstances. Self-agency and individual rights do not exist. They can't because the all-powerful corporations- who, in the language of those who believe these things, are not people- prevent them from existing. Corporations aren't made of people exercising their own self interest. They are inhuman and must be dehumanized.

 

And from this point of view, there is qualitatively no difference between Stephen Harper and someone like John Tory, who takes every opportunity to demonstrate generosity, thoughtfulness, moderation. They are both rich white males affiliated with conservative parties, and thus must suffer accordingly. And for Harper to try and demonstrate a cuddly side- sweater vest and all- evokes rage, not trust, in these people. He CAN'T be a nice person if he's a conservative! He's got too much MONEY to be nice!

 

Let us therefore term the ideology that binds all these so-called populist movements together the GUILLOTINE DOCTRINE (it even rhymes!). The thinking behind them, as was the case with the French Revolution, can objectively be reduced to "Make The Rich Pay."

 

In my next post I will explore how a merger of the left- which will no doubt make use of some form of the Guillotine Doctrine- will play itself out.

The Mess That They Made

You know, I'm getting real tired of people being shocked and angry when the McGuinty government demonizes them for not playing by rules that they just made up.

Not only should these people have recognized that the Liberal government has played this game with the public so many times that it's impossible to keep a count going, but if it's so important to them that the government treat them with respect, then all they have to do is shut up and vote Liberal like Jimmy Hazel and his tradespeople council did and all would have been well.

This is what happens when you create a society where everyone is dependent on the government. When the government doesn't like you anymore, it's like being pushed out of the womb.

And while (insert group here) is flailing uselessly after being targeted by the government, everyone else is quietly going about their business, thankful that it wasn't them. That's the Ontario McGuinty has created. That's his legacy.

Does that sound like "Forward, Together" to you?

You ever notice how the left likes to get mad about corporations, and how they conveniently never get mad about the government? Well, now that (some) unions are being targeted by a so-called progressive government, I wonder if they have realized that no corporation could ever have the kind of free reign that McGuinty and crew have right now.

That's a minority, absentee, lame-duck, no-cabinet-having Premier that just ripped you to shreds, ladies and gentlemen.

How did he do it? Well, for all his handicaps, he still runs this thing that people automatically give legitimacy to, and that thing is the government. And you put that government in place, and got it re-elected repeatedly.

So sit the hell down and shut the hell up.

And as for the rest of Ontario? Pray to whatever or whoever you pray to that it isn't you next time.

Playtime Is Over

He does not like Laurel Broten's slam! He does not like it, Sam-I-Ham!

“You cannot expect that it will be business as usual in schools going into the new year,” said Sam Hammond, the head of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario.

“You cannot legislate goodwill and you cannot impose goodwill upon my members,” he said.

“You will not erase the stain of Bill 115 by simply repealing it after it’s been used.”

OK, so apparently we need to clarify a few things here. This is a Liberal government. They will always have the benefit of the doubt. They decide when and where loosening of restrictions on alcohol will take place. They decide when it's time to coddle the unions and when it's time to stomp them into the ground.

But the teachers unions will continue to throw their tantrum, we all know. They will kick and scream and whine about how unfair it all is and inconvenience everyone in the process. Yawn. If only CUPE hadn't caved and agreed to the government's demands, then maybe everyone else would have had a leg to stand on. 

Only a Liberal government can do this, I am quickly realizing. They can raise taxes on the rich, or they can break unions with a single stroke. Maybe Stephen Harper should have sent Dalton McGuinty or whoever is supposed to be in charge of Aboriginal Affairs in the Ontario Liberal government to resolve the Idle No More protests, because Lord knows that nobody is ever going to blame a Liberal for the plight of aboriginal Canadians.

I just checked, and poor old washed up Chris Bentley, is actually Aboriginal Affairs Minister in Dalton's cabinet. Remember when he was a contender for Dalton's job? How times change. How the not-really high and mighty are brought low.

Which reminds me: the big bad teachers unions got powerbombed by Dalton at a time when he and half his cabinet is either running for leadership or not running again, and when no business is being conducted in the Legislature. If the government never came back to do business, would anyone care? Where exactly is this government being run from, anyway? 

The Liberal leadership candidates who pledged a better relationship with Ontario teachers sure don't have a lot to say about this latest development. I guess we all know what their status is in the OLP pecking order, don't we?

You know, I think back to this time last year when people were grumbling about how anyone could have beaten Dalton McGuinty.

Who still thinks that today? Anyone?