If you are not a fan of Jordan B. Peterson already, this video should do it….
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Tag: social justice warriors
Informalities and Frivolties
My dad used Old Spice. He also grew up in WW2 Germany and emigrated to Canada alone when he was sixteen. He started up his own business after dropping out of high school, got married, and had kids.
He grew up in a time when the formal and the informal had their proper places. The informal stems from the formal, and the formal is foundational. We don’t always want to live in formal mode — life would be too serious then. We want to be able to lighten things up a bit in our day to day lives. I don’t want to call my dad “father” all the time; I want to call him dad or papa most of the time. However, my ability to call my dad “dad” rests on the fact that first I call him “father”.
These days in the west, informality, and thus frivolity, have taken over. The foundation of the formal is crumbling and no one takes life seriously enough. (No one, that is, except the revolutionaries we see yelling and screaming at the universities. But they too have no formal foundation to build upon.) Even a product like Old Spice has to embrace the shallow video game culture in order to sell….
I suppose the West will have to create a new formal foundation before it can mature to its next stage of development.
Further reading: Fatherlessness and the Rise of the Shaving Industry
Free Speech is for Jerks
Recently an Edmontonian man was charged with hate speech for a blog he wrote called The Baconfat Papers (www.sunrayzulu.blogspot.com). The blog has been removed, but I found some of his articles via Wayback Machine.
Now, while I hate racism and think it’s evil (and this guy’s blog was especially despicable — basically at the Westboro Baptist Church level), if a guy wants to write a racist blog, he has the right to do so. That’s free speech, and free speech is for jerks too. If you are offended, don’t read it.
If a guy writes a blog which physically threatens someone or calls for others to physically hurt someone, that’s different. That’s no longer free speech of course, since someone’s life may be in danger.
I don’t know if the author of Baconfat, Barry Winters, actually physically threatened anyone; maybe he did. If he did, yes he needs to be charged — but not with hate speech.
“Hate Speech” is one of those ambiguous terms that confuse the issue and leave too much room for abuse. If Barry Winters physically threatened someone, then let him be charged specifically for that. Or, if he called for others to physically hurt someone, let him be specifically charged for that. But if he just wrote a bunch of blogs about how he hates Natives and gays, so be it — that’s just his opinion. It’s evil and wrong, and you can either write to him and tell him why he’s wrong, or, more wisely, just ignore him. There are plenty of guys like Barry Winters out there. They pose no threat unless we give them a platform. And the way to remove their platform is to ignore them — not remove free speech for everybody. Because in the end, who will it be that defines “Hate Speech?”
~Further reading…
He may be Canada’s ‘ultimate troll,’ but should Edmonton blogger be charged for spreading hate?
This is What it’s Like to be a Race Baiter in Alberta
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Explaining Postmodernism (Book Review)
Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Steven R.C. Hicks (which is available for free here) is a well written and fairly easy to understand critique against the train wreck that is postmodernism.
I am not completely finished this book as I want to read through the philosophical sections slowly so that I can pick up everything. For me, this is not a book that can be read quickly as there is lots of new information that I don’t want to overlook.
Hicks blames Immanuel Kant for getting the whole thing started with his theory of perception. Kant opposed objectivism and reason because we people can never know reality apart from the mediator of our senses. The chair is red because the light reflects off of the chair and some colours are absorbed while others reflect into your eye which converts the info into electrical impulses and sends them to your brain and hopefully nothing goes wrong along the way. But is the chair really red? Really? Who knows? You certainly don’t, because according to Kant, you only live in your head. “The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls” (Hicks, pg. 41)
“Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe all together.” (Hicks, pg. 41) There can not be absolute truth if reality exists apart from one’s perception of reality. I cannot declare that there are only two genders if that claim is solely based on my subjective perception of reality. If that claim is true it has to be objectively true regardless of my observation, or even my existence.
I agree that Kant went to far in limiting us to “our skulls,” but I would argue that we are indeed limited to the physical universe — our senses may show us what’s real objectively, but only within the universe we have access to. Kant criticized objectivity in defence of God. We can see what we see because God gave us the senses to see it, but that does not mean we are seeing things as they really are, but rather, only as how our God given senses allow for. We can take that too far and limit ourselves only to our heads, but we can also take objectivity too far when we deny that things exist beyond our ability to sense them. We can’t prove that God exists with the scientific method, but that doesn’t mean God does not exist. Postmodernists hold to the “limited to the skull” theory, not to defend God, but to attack any and all truth claims. But, as Hicks argues in the book, it is impossible to live in a world where nothing is objectively true.
After the first chapter, Hicks goes deeper into the philosophical background which produced postmodern thought. If you are not interested in all that, then I recommend reading at least the first chapter of this book. In it, Hicks gives a good overview of what postmodernism is as compared to modernism and pre-modernism (briefly illustrated in this chart, from pg. 15)….
So far, it’s a good book. And as I say, if you’re not interested in all the philosophy, at least read the first chapter. Perhaps when I’m finished reading the whole book I’ll update this review.
Progressive Conservatism
I think the best definition of Conservatism is this: The conservation of the progress which has already been made. And when I write “the progress which has already been made” I’m not just referring to the last thirty years; I’m referring to the last five hundred years. When talking about individual people, thinking in terms of decades is fine, but when we are talking about civilizations, we must talk of centuries. Think of what the western world was like before the Great Reformation, and compare that to today. Would we ever want to go back?
Yet, it would seem some people in the western world today really do want to go back. Read this article entitled Want Equality? Curtail Free Speech. Yes, some useful idiot actually wrote that. Now, these morons would call themselves Progressive, but when one writes, “Our Government should look to criminalise not only Islamophobia, but racist rhetoric and the criticism of feminism and LGBTQAA+ rights,” that’s anything but progressive — it’s regressive.
In Canada, a motion (M-103) was passed recently which directs the government to investigate and act against Islamophobia. Now, when I type that word, Islamophobia, on my computer, my spell-checker red flags it. Why? Because it’s not a real word. And that is the problem with M-103 — it uses a term which is not properly defined. What exactly is Islamophobia? If we break the word down and define the parts, it means: an irrational fear of the ideas of the Islamic religion.
When I encounter those who defend M-103, every time I find that they are unable to distinguish the idea which is Islam from the followers of Islam (Muslims). That’s an important distinction — one is an idea, and the other is a group of people. If we want to live in a free society we must be able to criticize ideas. Martin Luther created a freer society when he openly criticized the state of Christianity in his day. It was not easy for him to do that, and because he did, we now live in a society where we are free to criticize. But, for how long?
Listen to Canada’s Heritage Minister defend M-103 in this video. She only gets confused…
Another good example is the exchange between Ben Affleck and Sam Harris on the Bill Maher show…
Once upon a time there was a political party in Canada called the Progressive Conservatives. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s actually a very good term. Progressive conservatism is the idea that, while we do want to progress socially, we do not want to do so at the expense of the progress which has already been made. What has made the western world the best society to live in so far in human history? Where does our wealth come from? What economic system has allowed us to become so wealthy? (Hint: free market capitalism.) Where do our freedoms come from? What system of government has allowed us our freedoms? (Hint: a system in which the rights of the individual are elevated over the group.) We need to conserve those things and protect them from those who would dismantle them while trying to create their utopia in which no one will ever be offended.
