Oh, Canada. The baby, the bathwater, the bathtub, the plumbing, the tiling, actually, screw it, the whole bathroom.
I grew up with great fondness for Canada, with extended family all over the country; from a town that housed a Canadian military ordnance base, leading to a cemetery of WWII graves where the Canadians who sacrificed their lives for the mother country are laid to rest. It’s a country with the same enviable international PR as Sweden, home of Nordic Aryan eugenics. Its place as a forward-thinking, progressive bastion of liberal compassion pervades everywhere you go.
This was the land of the hilarious Rhino Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_Party), the once-irreverent Vice magazine (now an abominable rag), Prime Ministers who deploy the military (https://torontosun.com/2017/02/04/pierre-trudeau-just-watch-me/wcm/b1ab338a-8114-4766-bb12-75d5bdd4e4b3), and badasses — like Leo Major(http://www.badassoftheweek.com/leomajor.html) and Kevin Vickers (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/27/kevin-vickers-hero-canadian-ambassador-who-shot-jihadi-gunman-in/) — so badass they lined up to travel to another continent for a scrap.
Never mind the Toronto Blessing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Blessing), David Icke’s sold-out tours (http://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/anti-semitic-conspiracy-theorist-david-icke-gives-talk-vancouver), or the 9/11 conspiracy axioms: nobody gets it all right.
This week, Canada’s left wing ideologues got schooled. A few months after suffering Doug Ford’s victory in Ontario, they learnt very painfully what happens when you try to virtue signal to countries like Saudi Arabia — moreover, why everyone else is careful in the way they approach a hornet’s nest.
“In her first public response to Saudi Arabia’s actions, the foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said: “Let me be very clear … Canada will always stand up for human rights in Canada and around the world, and women’s rights are human rights.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/11/canada-saudi-arabia-support-us
It seems laudable, at first. As all social media-grade memes do. Of course women are equal. Of course women’s rights are human rights.
The reasons we don’t mess with Saudi Arabia are threefold, and they have nothing to do with oil:
- They are our biggest customer for arms;
- They host the symbol of Mecca, and are the source of control over militant Wahabism;
- They allow us to fly over their airspace when mounting defence of Israel, who they reluctantly ally with against the Shia (e.g. Iran).
To be clear, the treatment of women — and their self-treatment — in Saudi Arabia, is abhorrent. Their medieval “judicial” system is abhorrent. Almost everything about them is questionable.
Until you consider who comes next, if you get rid of the current monarchy. Do we really want to see the outcome of popular elections there?
Dealing with the parent of Mecca takes wisdom. And it’s something Canada has lost in its politicians’ shallow pursuit of visual virtue. Not everyone is your friend. Some people will cut your throat if they’re upset, or for nothing at all. And on the way, they might just attack the hypocrisy of your own culture.
Poe’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law) wasn’t just a relevant critical meme; in 2018, Canada is a living testament that you can parody now-mainstream pseudo-orthodoxy in the most extreme way imaginable, and it will end up being indistinguishable from the reality. In the war for bad ideas, it’s determined never to be outdone.
Contrary to conventional belief, Canadians are not meek, polite, or particularly friendly; their aggression simply manifests itself passively, and their righteous appearance is the vehicle behind which they disguise their ignoble protestations.
In the final year i lived there (2017), I personally saw masked Antifa thugs throw bricks through windows at couples having dinner, USSR flags waved proudly at protests, language police attempting to shut down small businesses (as well as block access to websites), colleagues reported to HR for harmless gifts, university professors hounded from their jobs, police violently charging at students participating in protests they didn’t receive “permission” for from the state, ordinary pub-goers accused of “unconscious” bigotry for disagreeing with feminist “patriarchy” theory and someone’s “right” to “identify” their “gender” as a fairytale creature, and a colleague’s bewildered conversation with her 14-year old daughter that “almost half my year at school are transgender”.
I’ve heard people argue the morality of murder is relative, that gravity is just a “theory”, seen a panelist nearly thrown out of a debating society for daring to suggest Palestinians may not all be victims, and even watched a professor claim there is no link between biological sex and gender — on television. One Jewish twenty-something i had a conversation with tried to explain that the holocaust happened because Hitler “disagreed with Jewish beliefs” and that was why it’s important to make “Islamophobia” illegal.
Most startlingly for the people i know, it’s the realisation that with the political landscape here so abjectly far-far-left-leaning that their own traditionally centrist (classic liberal) perspective would more accurately be categorised as… right-wing.
You read that right. The vocal left here isn’t what we have known as “left”. It’s so far off the political compass, it’s unrecognisable as liberalism. An Angus Reid Institute study found an aggregate 70% -plus of Canadians themselves say it has gone too far (https://globalnews.ca/news/2908808/most-canadians-say-political-correctness-has-gone-too-far-poll/), while newspapers increasingly describe the aggressive battle between ideologues to compete in the public eye for their perceived virtuousness as “scary”.
In one month alone, a BC parent won a case petitioning the provincial government in court for the “right” of their infant child to be “genderless” on all official documentation; a convicted murderer was given $10.5m in hard cash by the government against the wishes of nearly 80% of people questioned; as the property and oil markets plummeted, $20M went out of the public purse on its way to the US (!) for gender equality programs; a Muslim cemetery was blocked; a senator stood to “honour” the Mohawk people in provincial congress by learning their language, attempts to replace the word “sons” from the National Anthem stalled, and Billy Joel songs became a form of “hate speech” that needed to be apologised for. Today, Planet of the Apes is apparently racist.
If you think this is progress, you’re presumably the type of person who would applaud a cannibal for using a fork with a rainbow flag printed on it.
After a while you can’t escape the conclusion that these are not isolated incidents, fringe beliefs, or ignorant individuals. There is a much deeper rot that has set in. The opposite to this isn’t skepticism, it’s sanity. Almost everyone i know has had the experience of just sitting there one day with the palm of your hand in your face, wondering if you’re going mad, or this is all inescapably batshit.
Rural Canadians aren’t like this. They despise it. It’s the land of Faith Goldy, David Crowder, and Lauren Southern.
They despise the weakness of their leadership, the extravagances of Quebec, and the appalling infantilism of their educational campuses. More interestingly, many of them covet the freewheeling, cavalier free market controversy of their southern neighbours, while publicly scorning them.
The fact that the common myth of Justin Trudeau (or “Prime Minister Selfie” as the Edmonton Sun calls him) saying “if you kill your enemies, they win” is almost entirely believed, simply because all the evidence suggests its entirely believable he probably would say something that asinine, particularly with his admiration for Castro, inability to remember all 10 provinces, and arguably his greatest insight “hard things are hard”. As one of my Canadian cousins puts it so well, “it wouldn’t surprise me if he was deciding foreign policy through astrology”.
What does this all have in common, but is also specific to Canada?
The answer is Canada’s two unofficial national sports: pretentious posturing (posing), and sanctimonious virtue signalling.
Social media has given Canadians the outlet they pined for since mass-adopting Friendster in the early days: somewhere to show the world how perfect and righteous they are.
That is, of course, until their pretentiously-named fame-seekers who buy into idiotic tomes like “The Secret” meet reality:
“Accept the fact that everything that makes up your world is there because you attracted it with your own thoughts. Realize that you can control your thoughts and emotions.”
(Sermonising “High on Life” group mission statement extract)
Apart from, it seems, large heights and waterfalls.
https://news.sky.com/story/three-adventurer-youtubers-die-in-canada-waterfall-plunge-11428276
When it comes to the US. Canada’s virtue nemesis, you know what you’re getting: they’re flat-out nuts. and they don’t care. There’s an honest, forgivable, defiant eccentricity to Americans — like Scientology, or the guy who took a flamethrower to the snow in his front yard because he was “sick and tired of four billion tonnes of white bullshit” (https://therooster.com/blog/fargo-man-arrested-clearing-snow-flamethrower-being-generally-awesome).
Where Canada differs though, is the conceit that blankets what can only be described as industrial-scale underlying vanity.
Canadians are every bit as racist, sanctimonious, nationalist, and batshit as their neighbours. Quebec is a really “special” animal in and of itself with its “pure wool” notions and the insufferably vile Bill 101 (the language police). The line of demarcation, arguably, is the suffocating pretentiousness and self-deceit that they are collectively the front line battalion of moral arbitration and noble virtue.
The British might smugly think they’re the smartest, Koreans the purest, French the most sophisticated, but when it comes to Canadians, they’re the most socially advanced; mainly due to how visible they believe their self-flagellation is for the horrors of what they (actually) did to the landform’s indigenous people (despite the bursary program producing an epidemic of addiction).
It’s at its worst around the big cities. Alberta, the prairies, and the areas traditionally sneered at by the “liberalistas” happily exempt themselves. I’m not even slightly right-wing in the traditional sense, but as a classical Locke-esque liberal i find myself convicted inevitable conclusion that “progressive” ideology is laughable at best, contemptuous at worst.
“Posing Coach” is a legitimate career non-job in the world’s most affluent middle class. As are “social media consultant” and “mixologist”. People charge hourly to help you learn how to duckface-pout reliably in your terrible Instagram photos about your food, and customers who think mixing drinks is a scientific endeavour.
It’s common to see entire tables at birthday parties staring into their phones, and on every table is someone doing the digital equivalent of the cringeworthy act of flashing your family photo album, i.e. lives so bankrupt they sit looking at things they already did, as Carlin would put it. An economic downturn for the white middle-class champagne socialists is having to sell their third car.
At this point, to reach the peak of the Canadian social oppression pyramid (i.e. the fashionable zeitgeist), your target needs to be a “transition” to the “safe space” of “identifying” as a postmodern, intersectional, non-binary, overweight body positive, multicultural, atheist, lesbian, pro-Palestine, feminist, transgender/gender-fluid, disabled vegan woman “of colour” anti-hate speech anti-capitalist climate activist whose moral mission in life (i.e. Twitter, Tumblr) is — on behalf of groups you have never met and have never asked you to come to their defence — standing in your “own truth” with your preferred pronouns to oppose the patriarchal. hetero-normative, cis-white Western supremacist toxic masculine rape culture oppressing gender-neutral indigenous people in grade schools that supposedly culturally appropriates motifs from the holy victimised minorities it hates, just to confirm its unconscious fascist misogynistic bias and unjustly resist the unimpeachable intellectual brilliance of unjustified “equality” quotas for everyone and everything as the solution to the world’s micro-aggression epidemic. Thank you for your service.
How can you possibly claim you are the most morally advanced society in the Western world (and demonstrably have the most affluent middle class), yet your population are convinced they are oppressed?
If that sounds insane, just spend 15 minutes in a Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal bar. It’s not that people believe the granular idiocy of these incoherent theories, it’s that it’s taboo to be outspoken by “offending” others by disagreeing with what the perceived current “correct” groupthink is.
It’s all diversity, inclusivity, and equity.
Not that anyone can seem to explain or decipher what these words mean, let alone detail the criticism of them.
Even if it’s abjectly stupid, nonsensical, malicious, unproductive, degenerative, or actually materially harmful. If the accepted virtuous orthodoxy in Canada is that the social construct of the earth is flat, because incest-phobia and scientific consensus from academic papers nobody has ever seen or read, then the “offensiveness” of not going along with the “tolerance” of said accepted axiom should be met with passive aggression, polite social exile, and your spurning from the hive mind with the stigmatization as an “ist” or a “phobic” of some kind — that label being the inverse of the implicitly virtuous offendee.
Rejection of someone’s “bad” is a means of declaring your own “good”; if your target is a allegedly a proponent of “hate” — what does that make you by opposing them or being offended? The very embodiment of “love”. It’s pathologically childish, and with the exception of “auto-marriage”, is the most staggering, record-breaking narcissism any generation has arguably indulged in, egged on by the (capitalist) sewer that is social media. It even beats co-opting the term “trigger” from trauma specialists who treat soldiers that have seen their friends blown to pieces in war zones.
Adopting the infinitely divisible “philosophy of the schizophrenic”, as postmodernism has been described, is all well and good if all you end up doing is alienating ordinary people at BBQs with your institutionalized jargon doublespeak; a diversity of stupidity is just as instructive as a diversity of intellect, albeit devoid of the same pragmatic utility. In those situations, the listeners appear to function solely as a mirror for the crusader’s narcissism.
The utopia of wage equity already exists in Cuba, North Korea, and other delightful pockets of the world where people are entirely equal — in their search to avoid starvation. Yet few Canadians seem to be keen to move away from the oppressive capitalist patriarchy to take the place in the Utopia.
All you have to do to escape your oppression is to drop out of the professor boycott for 10 minutes, enter your credit card number to book a plane ticket in Starbucks on your $2000 laptop or $800 iPhone through the free high-speed Internet, using the fiat petro-currency that your capitalist employer or family unfairly earned from their lifetime of exploiting the minorities you want to be a superhero to.
When it comes to the government passing laws that embed this kind of ideology into executable legislation, we have a very, very serious problem. Canada has raced to the front of the queue in passing some of the most repugnant, reprehensible, intellectually incoherent, and entirely indefensible legislation i have seen in the Western world. It roasts both British mass surveillance and American presidential orders, and wouldn’t be out of place in Mao’s republic or Castro’s special period.
A particularly egregious example of the protocols emanating from these “laws” was the treatment of teach assistant Lindsay Shepherd, who recorded her interrogation in front of an Orwellian “diversity and equity” panel for showing students a video of Jordan “Literally Hitler” Peterson:
https://www.macleans.ca/lindsay-shepherd-wilfrid-laurier/
And in response, she was slandered by feminist ideologues with accusations of “white girl tears”. You can’t make it up. It’s a wonder she wasn’t sent for “unconscious bias” re-programming.
This is what happens when you flirt with radical left-wing ideology of the Soviet and Asian republics (which of course is never the realidealisation). You get dragged into the drowning whirlpool.
First, we had “hate” speech, because words spoken by individuals aren’t our alternative to violence, they are a cause of it to group defined by their shared characteristic. Then the infantile linguistic downgrade to being on the “sides” of “love” or “hate”, along with “virtuous” censorship. The lemming-run to finish the job of total incoherence is now onto the sacred task of dismantling “prejudice” towards obesity, haemophrodism, and pronouns.
Proof is no longer required, because intent and unconscious motivation need to be criminalised and dealt with by re-programming panels. Logicis scorned because it is of masculine origin.
One question that never seems to be asked of these wannabe ideologues pandering to the activists — and one they never seem to ask themselves, for that matter — is what if you’re wrong?
They never seem to consider the possibility that they could be wrong, let alone the consequences if they are. It never seems to occur to our righteous campaigners that they are anything other than unquestionably correct, without any basis for that rather staggering belief. Moreover, those who disagree with them are of bad character.
Opinions are like assholes: everyone has one, and a right to one. Well, to quote Carlin again, my opinion is you have no right to your opinion. If you subjectively “identify” as a doctor, you’re not going to treat anyone i know who has had a heart attack. If you’re a postmodernist pilot who rejects absolutes, i’m not getting into your plane.
Canada is a soft target, because its politicians and leaders are weak. And the softest target of a soft target are its universities.
It’s become my experience those who use innumerable pseudo-justifications in their continual attempts to constrain free speech (illustrated by the Overton Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) aren’t real noble warriors in search of a more civil society, but merely people afraid of what you might say.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, idealism will get your throat cut by people who don’t care about your beliefs concerning the superiority of your values. Just like if you are pretentious enough to try to lecture others over social media on the structure of a “perfect life” which you haven’t earned, and isn’t consistent with reality.
If you’re weak, no amount of whining or social media outrage is going to save you from the executioner’s knife in a Middle Eastern stadium. They know how to call your bluff. Perhaps the safety of passive aggression is better at home, in The Bubble.