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OPINION

The Danger to Canada (and How It Differs from the Danger to the U.S.) By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/05/22/the-danger-to-canada-and-how-it-differs-from-the-danger-to-the-u-s-n1697272

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity — Martin Luther King Jr.

The danger to Canada, writes industrial technologist and army veteran Tex Leugner in The Cochrane Eagle, transcends the state-and-media entente that works to prepare the public for the assumption of elite authority predicated on an ideological agenda. The danger, rather, is delved in the almost insuperable task of “restor[ing] the necessary common sense and good judgment to a lazy, unthinking electorate” prone to electing corrupt, unpatriotic leaders, “a citizenry capable of entrusting an incompetent man with the job of Prime Minister” and refusing to rectify or even acknowledge the blunder: “The danger to Canada is the people in it.”

Election results confirm, Leugner continues, “that more and more Canadians are moving in the direction of socialism with every generation, most of whom no longer have any morality, sense of self reliance, personal responsibility, independent thinking and a willingness to continue the culture of hard-working self-respect that built this magnificent country in the first place.” His conclusion hits hard. “Canada is no longer the country I was once so proud to serve as a soldier. In fact, it is no longer my country.” Many former servicemen, some of whom have become personal friends, agree wholeheartedly. They regret their service, risking life and limb for a country that has neither use nor respect for them, particularly under a Liberal administration.

Evil Triumphs When Conservatives Are Silenced: Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/04/evil-triumphs-when-conservatives-are-silenced/

Tucker Carlson being sacked by News Corp is a blow. I’d trimmed my regular intake of conservative television news and commentary to Tucker and to Andrew Bolt. Tucker was brave, effective, charismatic and popular. That’s presumably why he had to go. There’s speculation about the trigger for his demise. Exposing the January 6 ‘insurrection’ hoax? That or anything else would be a pretext. The dark side hit back. Cancelling is its forte. Getting rid of the presenter who attracted the largest audience is a message to lesser lights.

Bolt is often very trying. On promoting the COVID jabs, for example. On his one-eyed support for Zelensky, on cancelling Mark Latham, on a predilection for being wishy-washy on other things I can’t remember, but remember switching him off. Still, he is absolutely excellent on the racist Voice, on the climate scam, and on the Stolen Generations myth. All striking at the very heart of national life. On the latter, he seems to me to be alone in having the enormous courage to state the truth, so far as it can be discovered, and quite often too. I might have missed it, but I haven’t heard any of his conservative colleagues on Sky take the same stand. Evil triumphs when conservatives stay silent. Mind you, speaking up can get you thrown to the wolves — a cause for anxiety if you have a large mortgages.

Tucker was anything but silent. The demonic Dems hated him. He threw light on their nefarious doings. And, like cockroaches, they don’t like the light. Am I being too harsh? I don’t believe so. How else do you describe those who support flooding and crippling the country with uncontrolled masses of economic asylum seekers, untrammelled abortion to the point of delivery, gender reassignment surgery for teenagers, the sexualisation of children in classrooms, transgender activism, critical race theory, debilitating and discriminatory affirmative action, nobbling free speech, setting the law on political opponents, turning a blind eye to rioting and looting, turning violent criminals back onto the streets, and whatever other evil takes their fancy?

Our Singular Century How to connect the dots when they’re spinning out of control by Walter Russell Mead

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/our-singular-century-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia

The American historian Henry Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain during the Civil War who was charged with keeping Britain from intervening on the side of the South. Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of President John Adams. Born in 1838 when the railroad was still a novelty, he died in 1918. His histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations are still read with respect.

It was the acceleration of historical change more than the fact of it that increasingly fascinated Adams as he watched the Industrial Revolution and its associated dislocations unfold around him. Late in his life he set himself the task of quantifying, so far as this was possible, the rate of change as measured by the total amount of physical force that human beings could control. His results have fascinated me for years.

What he found is what we can call the Adams curve. Wind power and human and animal muscle power were the resources at humanity’s disposal for much of our history, and the amount of force humanity could generate grew slowly with population and a slow increase in the mastery of natural forces.

After 1600 his estimates showed the beginning of a faster increase in humanity’s power. The increase visibly accelerates between 1700 and 1800, and between 1800 and 1900 the flat line of earlier centuries takes the shape of a hyperbola as the rate of increase in human power reached for the sky. As Adams put it, “The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900, but, measured by any standard known to science—by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape—the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800.”

Looking ahead, Adams saw only more of the same, with the curve of human progress becoming more hyperbolic as it became more nearly a vertical line moving straight up the graph. The historian, whose early recollections included walking hand in hand with his grandfather John Quincy Adams to the town school, looked forward to an unrecognizable future in which the gap between pure thought and the material world would close sometime around 2025.

The Anti-Normative Society The campaign against sexual “normativity” is a revolt against reality—and must be resisted. Christopher Rufp

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-anti-normative-society?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1248321&post_id=116087757&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

The most potent line of attack from radical Queer Theory is the discipline’s assault on so-called sexual “normativity.” This is the basic pattern throughout the academic literature and the various subfields that have been inspired by the general thrust of this ideology.

First, you have Queer Theory itself, which provides a ruthless criticism of what it calls the “cis-normative” society, the “heteronormative” society, and the male-female gender binary that underpins it. Then you have a number of derivative subfields, such as fat studies, which provide a ruthless criticism of healthy human proportions, and disability studies, which provides a criticism of well-adjusted, psychologically integrated people. The general idea is that these are norms, promoted by society and reinforced by the economic system of capitalism, that appear to be oriented toward health, reproduction, and psychological integration, but, in fact, are used as a mechanism of oppression against non-normative groups—for example, people who don’t fit into the gender binary or the heterosexual social ideal.

If we break it down further, we see that Queer Theory makes an implicit two-part argument. On the surface, you have a relativistic argument, which says that normative ideals are arbitrary social constructs, and, contrary to the traditional view, society can prioritize either the normative or non-normative at will. In other words, there is no inevitable human hierarchy. On the contrary, these structures are all reproduced through oppressive systems and should be ruthlessly interrogated and deconstructed because, ultimately, none of them have a monopoly on human value.

Kay S. Hymowitz The Transgender Children’s Crusade With its vision of autonomous young people in touch with their innermost desires, gender identity negates all we know about growing up.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-transgender-childrens-crusade

If you’re unfamiliar with Jazz Jennings, you’re missing one of the paradigmatic characters of early-twenty-first-century America. Jazz—this isn’t her birth name, for reasons that will become clear—was a boy born to a southern Florida couple in 2000. Nothing was unusual about his infancy; but by the time he was two, he was showing a marked preference for clothing and toys ordinarily chosen by girls: mermaids, princesses, all things pink—the whole shebang. Soon, he began insisting that he was a girl. His mother remembers him asking when the good fairy would come and turn his penis into a vagina. His “gender dysphoria,” as the medical world calls an emotional alienation from one’s sexed body, continued to trouble him until his parents decided to let him adopt a new name and pronoun, wear girl’s clothes, and present himself as a girl, a process known as social transition. At his fifth birthday, he debuted his new identity: “I got to wear the sparkly bathing suit for my party. I was a girl,” Jazz recalled later.

Transphobia in the United States is said to be ubiquitous and deadly, but for Jazz and family, transition presented extraordinary opportunities. In 2007, Jazz and her mother were interviewed by Barbara Walters. After that, a documentary, I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition, aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network. A best-selling book, I Am Jazz, was next; it has a place on the shelves of school libraries around the country and an award from the American Library Association, and it has been the occasion for public readings in schools, churches, and other community centers. In 2015, Jazz’s career reached its pinnacle. The TLC network launched a reality-show series starring Jazz and her family; it’s now in its eighth season. That year, Johnson & Johnson also named Jazz a spokesmodel for its Clean & Clear skin-care line. In 2018, she designed a bra in partnership with Knixteen, a teen underwear company. She is a much-in-demand LGBTQ influencer, with millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. She was signed by Creative Artists Agency, representatives of Anne Hathaway, Sandra Bullock, and other A-listers. The coup de grace in her rise came when she received an acceptance letter to Harvard. We don’t know how much she has earned from some of these seemingly lucrative enterprises, but it’s safe to say that her Harvard tuition shouldn’t be a problem.

Has the NATO Turning Point Stopped Turning? “No nation can be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests.” by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/has-the-nato-turning-point-stopped-turning/

Remember last year when the NATO nations had a road-to-Damascus moment? It seemed that Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine had awakened the West from its “new world order” dogmatic slumbers, with scenes of death and devastation from a past we thought we had exorcised with the end of the Cold War.

In response to Russia’s attack, last year the air was filled with pledges of military support for Ukraine and blustering denunciations of Putin. Skimpy defense budgets and “postmodern” foreign policy idealism were over. Columnist Michael Barone announced “a vast and historic transformation in Europe . . . that will continue reverberating, no matter what happens in Ukraine.” And according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “February 24 marks a turning point in the history of our continent.”

Lately the “turning point” seems to have stopped turning, as the conflict in Ukraine heads for a long, bloody slog, with no resolution in sight. What many thought would be a triumphal confirmation of the “rules-based international order” has instead seen the return of the repressed foreign policy realism dominated by national self-interest.

French president Emmanuel Macron, for example, besieged by riots and protests over a proposal to raise the retirement age, recently visited China’s autocrat Xi Jinping, in a failed attempt to distance Xi from Putin, though he successfully secured a contract worth billions of Euros. He also called for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. regarding China’s threats to Taiwan, and to avoid the “great risk” that Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours” and ends up “taking our cue from the U.S. agenda.”

The diplomatic confusion and bluster about Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy” raised questions about NATO “unity.” It seems calm with China is more important than upholding the “rules-based international order.” In that case, as Senator Marco Rubio said, if Europe doesn’t “‘pick sides’ between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, then maybe we shouldn’t be picking sides either [on Ukraine].”

A more significant blow to the renewed martial vigor of NATO was the Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by a recently arrested intelligence operative serving with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. If the intelligence is accurate, our public confidence that Ukraine can stop Russia and recover some of its occupied territory is shaky. That “explains the urgency with which Kyiv has been lobbying the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to speed up deliveries of Western-made air-defense systems and to provide Ukraine with Western-made jet fighters, such as F-16s,” the Wall Street Journal reports.