RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/06/hurricane-canada-n1556770

Hurricane Canada, a category 5 political storm, has made landfall on the country’s capital city in the form of a massive truckers’ strike protesting illegal COVID mandates and vaccine passports, a phenomenon that has galvanized the attention of the world and inspired similar demonstrations internationally. This has become common knowledge, and commentary pro and con has been proliferating with abandon.

What is most surprising in a tepid and unadventurous country like Canada that habitually votes left is the degree of popular support the truckers’ Freedom Convoy has garnered from ordinary citizens across the land. Convoys have assembled in several Canadian cities, the Alberta-Montana border has been blockaded, and reinforcements continue to arrive—even on horseback, taking a page from the RCMP.

Naturally, official aggression is also formidable, as a bought-and-paid-for print media, enjoying Prime Minister Trudeau’s $600 million bribe, and the country’s national broadcaster the CBC, rolling in annual billion-dollar government funding, weigh in against the truckers. Government officials at every level, municipal, provincial, and federal, with only a few exceptions, have joined the vigilante movement against the salt-of-the-earth protesters. Threats of reprisal are mounting, highways have been closed, and the turbulence shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Canada is now a divided country, pitting an elite class of political authorities, journalists, and haranguing pundits against a rising tide of blue-collar resentment.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/06/our-elite-is-no-elite-at-all/

An elite is always variously defined.  

The ideal elites, as ancient philosophers argued, were a “natural elite” due to their exemplary character, aptitude, and work ethic. Understandably, a towering few ascended from all walks of life to positions of power, influence, and occasional wealth.  

But such a natural meritocracy, for obvious reasons, rarely leads to an equality of result.  

Who Are Our Elite? 

Our current idea of ostensible elites could be defined by noting their money and influence. But money alone—even in the huge sums now found on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley—is not the only elite criterion.  

Donald Trump is a billionaire with much influence and lives accordingly. Yet few of our “elite” would consider him a kindred soul. Ditto Elon Musk. He is the richest man in the world. But the elite mostly despise and ostracize him.  

Birth itself has given way somewhat to insider influence and professional parentage. You may be a fifth-generation scion with a name such as Mellon, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller, but if your dad was not an ambassador, your mom not a VP at CBS, your sibling not a Harvard professor or Google executive, you have fallen out of the elite. 

Zip codes still count. Although there are certainly “elites” who hail from Kansas City, Boise, or Sacramento, most of those who exercise national clout are found inordinately on the two coasts, from Boston to Washington, D.C., and from Seattle to San Diego—with respective windows on the wealth of Europe or Asia.  

The Obamas were going to be anointed as multimillionaires wherever they lived. But they would not necessarily remain as elite as they have become living back in Chicago rather than in a tony D.C. neighborhood and out on Martha’s Vineyard. So, it was an easy call for them to follow the trajectory of the Clintons rather than the Georgia-bound Carters.  

In the 21st century, other elite criteria seem to count as much as the old markers of lineage, money, and location. “Certification,” defined as degrees from the “right” undergraduate and graduate schools, is essential for an elite resumé. 

Such brands have little to do with education per se or aggregate knowledge acquired. (It is not clear that an Ivy League student would do better on the same SAT, taken upon graduation as earlier, upon admittance). Are our best generals those with Yale degrees, and our best CEOs those with Stanford MBAs? And are Harvard Law Review editors—think Barack Obama, the boss of Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, James Comey, and John Brennan—our top legal and ethical minds? 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/02/part-two-covid-politics-and-psychology/

Individual and social psychology offers valuable insights into hysterical personal and small group behaviour under COVID, but how can psychology explain the society-wide mass hysteria?  Enter the theory of ‘mass formation psychosis’.  Psychosis is a severe mental disorder which causes, in an individual, abnormal thought processes at odds with reality.  Psychosis at a mass population level, however, occurs when everyone, simultaneously, goes psychotic together. Think of it as the way a hive frenzy develops when each individual bee gets extremely angry because every other bee is getting angry.

Dr. Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, has been Johnny-on-the-spot during COVID by rebranding mass hysteria as ‘mass formation psychosis’ (MFP).  Desmet’s theory has its antecedents in crowd psychology, especially the collective madness of crowds.  In his formulation, MFP arises from the dynamic of individuals acting as a crowd in projecting their own free-floating, generalised personal anxieties, frustration and aggression onto the social construct of a COVID ‘pandemic’ and providing a sense of renewed ‘social belonging’ to mitigate the anxiety.

In MFP, sacrifice (lockdown, for example) and heroism (such as self-quarantine) are called upon whilst opportunities for virtuous behaviour proliferate (‘I’m masking up, getting jabbed, self-isolating for your benefit’).  All participants in the COVID-driven MFP reinforce the mass psychosis by passing on their latest traumatic fears to each other in a closed-system, positive-feedback loop (‘Oh my God, now it’s Omicron!  It’s highly contagious!  Run for the hills!’) whilst thrashing around for scapegoats to make them feel subjectively safer because all their pet interventions have delivered nothing of any benefit.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/who-gets-to-join-the-black-caucus-in-virginia/

If you’re not a liberal, you need not apply.A. C. Cordoza, a black Republican in the Virginia House of Delegates, is excluded from the legislature’s Black Caucus.

V irginia Democrats are certainly taking their defeat last November hard. Last week, they spitefully refused the application of the lone black Republican in the House of Delegates to join the Black Caucus — which in theory is open to non-Democrats.

A. C. Cordoza, who won a surprise election last November in a significantly minority district in Hampton, took to the House floor to say he had been excluded because he dared to have “diverse” ideas. “The questions for entry had little to do with being black and had more to do with being leftist,” said Cordoza. He said the questionnaire asked about his three top environmental-justice priorities, whether he favored charter schools, whether he would limit recalls of election officials to “end harassment,” and whether he would repeal laws limiting suits against police officers. He was also asked if he backed pro-union legislation, abortion rights, mask mandates, and gun control.

“These questions . . . spit in the face of our ancestors who fought to have all of our rights guaranteed,” Cordoza said. “I asked myself what any of those things mentioned have to do with being black. The answer is it has nothing to do with being black. . . . The caucus is not about being black, it’s about being leftist.”