RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/canada-trucker-protests-and-the-new-class-divide

The world is watching what’s happening in Canada with a mixture of fascination and horror. The weeks-long saga of the “Freedom Convoy” protest against pandemic restrictions, spearheaded by Canadian truckers, has taken an authoritarian turn. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to crush the peaceful protest, suspending civil liberties protections, arresting hundreds, and taking the unprecedented step of ordering dissident citizens entirely frozen out of the financial system. What brought Canada’s normally placid politics to this point?

Many have slotted this drama into a familiar framework of right-wing populists versus left-wing elites. But a different way of looking at it may be more helpful in explaining not only what has happened in Canada but also why the political divide now looks so strikingly similar across the developed world, from Ottawa to Wellington.

While much has been made of the “working class” and its alienation from “the elite,” this phrasing comes with associations about material wealth and economic class that aren’t necessarily helpful. Many of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to be relatively solidly middle class, while many a starving artist supports the establishment Left. The character of one’s work and lifestyle seems to shape the common values of each side of the class divide more than income does.

Consider instead two main classes of people in society, who tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways. The first are those people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands and buy or sell or move things around in the real world, like a transport logistics company. This class necessarily works in a physical location or owns or operates physical assets central to its trade.

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2022/02/23/the-woke-ama-n2603652

The American Medical Association now tells doctors: Use woke language! It’s issued a 54-page guide telling doctors things like, don’t say “equality”; say “equity.” Don’t say “minority”; say “historically marginalized.”

Much of the AMA’s advisory sounds like Marxism: “Expose … property rights … Individualism is problematic … Corporations … limit prospects for good health … people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies.”

This is too much even for some on the left, like writer Matthew Yglesias, whose article about the AMA caught my attention.

“Can you imagine anyone actually doing this?” asks Yglesias in my new video. “What would happen if you were in a clinical setting, and somebody starts giving you this lecture about landowners? … Nobody practices medicine like that, and it wouldn’t be helpful to anybody!”

He points out that while the AMA now tells doctors to call poor neighborhoods “systematically divested,” not “poor,” it has long lobbied for things that (SET ITAL)hurt(END ITAL) poor people, like restricting the number of doctors.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/david-solway-2/2022/02/22/canada-has-become-a-standing-joke-n1561240

There are a number of Canadian jokes making the rounds these days. Here are four.

What’s the difference between Canada and North Korea?

One country is a police state under the boot of a young tyrant scion of his father’s dynasty who brutally crushes opponents, free speech, and liberty, and the other is a country in Asia.

Here’s another from The Babylon Bee: “Under orders from the Supreme Chancellor of the People’s Republic of Canada Justin Trudeau, all ATMs will screen people for unacceptable views before they can withdraw funds. According to sources, anti-mandate freedom protestors have already formed their own parallel economy trading in beaver pelts, maple syrup, and Bitcoin.”

And another (of a kind): Romanian Member of the European Parliament Cristian Terhes denounces Justin Trudeau for his declaration of martial law to crush the trucker convoy in Ottawa: “The prime minister of Canada, the way he’s behaving right now, he’s exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania.” Can this really be? Ceaușescu? In Canada? It must be a joke, no?

Last, this one: How many Canadians does it take to change a light bulb?

What’s a Canadian? What’s a light bulb?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

This essay was begun before Russia’s threat on Ukraine’s border became front page news. Putin’s actions validate the thesis that the political stakes are high, that the risks are existential, and that the United States and its Western European allies must change tactics from promoting “social justice” to affirming and defending a belief in classical liberal democracy.

The Cold War lasted for 42 years, from 1947 until 1989. It pitted the United States against the Soviet Union, along with respective allies. It ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain, and when a wave of (mostly) peaceful revolutions overthrew Communist governments in the Eastern Bloc. Three years later Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, which argued the universal acceptance of Western liberal democracies represented the final form of human government. The intervening years have shown how wrong he was. He appears to have misunderstood geo-politics, and he underestimated human desire for power and control.

Today, liberal Western democracies face a new challenge: an autocracy epitomized by China, where power is concentrated in the 205 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a Party that comprises less than seven percent of the population of the world’s most populous country. Joining the Communist Party can take several years and is generally open only to those with Han ethnicity. Xi Jinping is the current, paramount leader. He serves as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and President of the People’s Republic of China. China’s Communist Party is not diversified, equitable or inclusive. According to Statista, 88% of its members are ethnic Han. There are only nine women who sit on the Central Committee, a committee composed of 205 members. Its parliament, the world’s largest, stands at 2,924 members and which, according to CNBC, includes 100 billionaires. The 209 wealthiest members have an average wealth of $300 million. This is a country where the mean adult net worth is less than $68,000, and where GDP per capita is one sixth of that in the U.S.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/23/another-biden-nominee-who-deserves-to-be-dumped/

Of the more controversial nominees to come out of the Biden administration, Gigi Sohn, the President’s pick to be a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), might be facing the broadest opposition of all.

A second confirmation hearing further revealed deep-seated concerns about her policy positions, past statements and actions on critical issues, and unprecedented and eyebrow-raising ethical issues.  The White House even managed to hurt its relationship with allied organizations due to an opaque and seemingly disingenuous nomination process.

The FCC is an independent federal agency that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable.  Among its fundamental mission, the agency is supposed to promote competition and innovation, and work toward a media regulatory framework to ensure “that new technologies flourish alongside diversity and localism.”

In a highly regulated sector like telecom, ownership, and market participation are especially vital for underserved communities.  FCC overreach can easily make it more difficult to own a radio or TV station or reduce the investment needed to bring broadband connectivity to underserved areas, including the 991 majority Latino rural counties in the U.S., for example.

As advisor to previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during President Obama’s second term, Sohn spearheaded a push for regulation that would have enabled big tech companies to effectively use content from smaller programmers, including many Hispanic and other minority-owned ventures, without paying them for their intellectual property.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/23/america-has-two-major-political-parties-the-republicans-and-the-authoritarians/

Yearning to breathe free has become an offense in Canada punishable by arrest. The extreme measures taken by boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in breaking up the truckers’ protest should appall every person in this country. But one group of Americans overwhelmingly approves of Trudeau’s jackbooted crackdown. In another time they’d be called the agents of tyranny, but for now they’re still known as Democrats.

Rather than sitting down with the truckers demonstrating in Ottawa to civilly discuss their grievances and seek a peaceful end to their takeover of the capital’s downtown, Trudeau instead launched “an unprecedented violation of civil rights.” A “giant security force” was “amassed to quell the demonstration,” writes Canadian Laura Koot, managing editor of The National, which covers the Middle East. She went “from feeling great pride for my home country to being filled with shame and horror” in the course of a week.

While we support the truckers’ objective – to break Trudeau’s infringement of human liberty – a legitimate government has the authority to remove those who block public spaces, whether they are Black Lives Matter belligerents, Antifa thugs, or truck drivers who simply want to be left alone to do their jobs.

But Trudeau went well beyond that. His government became illegitimate the moment he used the country’s Emergencies Act to destroy, as radio talk show host Dennis Prager wrote, “the lives of Canadian dissidents.”