The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad

 

I highly recommend Gad Saad's The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC, 2020). It’s an excellent book that deals with revealing truth and common sense in a world corrupted by a progressive woke ideology. Towards the end of the book Professor Saad, who teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, writes,

Everybody has a voice. Activate your sense of personal responsibility. You have agency. Participate. Do not be a bystander as truth, reason, and logic call out for your help. Do not subcontract your voice to others. Do not self-censor. You and your children have a stake in the outcome of this battle, so don't be afraid to speak up. Do not succumb to the Tragedy of the Commons (as popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968), in this case a tragedy of collective inaction. (p. 172)

Obliterating Posters

Here is what remains of hostage posters after being scraped off a telephone pole near here. It’s as though these hostages don’t exist and what caused their captivity never happened, they are being erased, cancelled. This is probably part of the intention of whoever obliterated these posters.

Posters of hostages

                                “The evil that men do lives after them;
                             The good is oft interred with their bones.”

                                                ― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

All of the posters shown in a previous post, "Remember the hostages", have been torn down; I saw an older man meticulously peeling and scraping one of the posters from where it had been glued, he was using an exacto knife to do this. Indeed, in reaction to the tearing down of these posters, a neighbouring community has said that anyone removing similar posters will be fined up to $1K.  

     A few days ago, while walking by Concordia University on Sherbrooke Street West, I found posters with fairly offensive and ignorant comments scrawled across them. Whoever this person with a felt pen is he doesn't care about freedom of speech or that there are still over two hundred innocent people being held by terrorists; the person who wrote on the posters doesn't care about the hostages, or about freedom, or about truth, or about decency, he is full of righteous indignation, hate, and ignorance. Freedom of speech seems minor when placed in the context of war and people held as hostages; but freedom of speech is always significant and many people have lost their lives defending this freedom, defending it against censorship and cancellation. If we deny freedom of speech, in this case including destroying posters and writing on posters, we have descended to the level of this person who has written over hostage posters. In many respects we have moved into a very dark age and, I suspect, this darkness will last a very long time. This dark age hasn’t just begun but it has certainly gotten much worse.

I think not . . .
The evidence is to the opposite view . . .

Revised: 08-11-2023

"No More Lockdown" by Van Morrison

 

In NYC

No more lockdown
No more government overreach
No more fascist police
Disturbing our peace
No more taking of our freedom
And our God-given rights
Pretending it's for our safety
When it's really to enslave
Who's running our country?
Who's running our world?
Examine it closely
And watch it unfurl

No more lockdown
No more threats
No more imperial college
Scientists making up crooked facts
No more lockdown
No more pulling the wool over our eyes
No more celebrities telling us
Telling us what we're supposed to feel
No more status quo
Put your shoulder to the wind

No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown

No more lockdown
No more government overreach
No more fascist police
Disturbing our peace
No more taking our freedom
And our God-given rights
Pretending it's for our safety
When it's really to enslave
Who's running our country?
Who's running our world?
Examine it closely
And watch it unfurl

No more lockdown
No more threats
No more imperial college scientists
Making up crooked facts
No more lockdown
No more pulling the wool over our eyes
No more celebrities telling us
How we're supposed to feel
No more status quo
Gotta put your shoulder to the wind

No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown

No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown
No more lockdown

Memory, and how it got that way

 

Years passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by. A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of the pigs.

                                                                —George Orwell, Animal Farm 

Forget remembering the old days, most people`s memories don't go back much before nine days ago. In fact, a neighbour tells me that her mother's advice is that if you do something embarrassing, not to worry; after about nine days people will have forgotten what you did. And our collective amnesia and revision of the past is what Justin Trudeau has relied on. Have a former Nazi celebrated in parliament, go on a vacation to Tofino on National Reconciliation Day, get caught wearing black face? Quick! You're an actor specializing in sincerity and people are suckers for apologies, the more sincere the better. Apologize or not, in a few days it will be as though you never did anything embarrassing. 

    The old days of free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religious expression, and freedom to own property, the public will get used to these being cancelled, they will even thank Justin for deleting them. Forget how things used to be, those old freedoms were dangerous to the collective, they made some people feel unsafe, and they were necessarily cancelled. We never want free speech again because it hurts people's feelings, people who say what they think or they believe in something we don't believe in are often deniers of alleged scientific fact or of the latest compulsory belief.

    Remember when we used to own property? When we wrote letters instead of emails? When we read newspapers printed on paper, it was a record of what had happened, not something digital and therefore deletable, revisable, or denilable. Remember? Remember? Remember? Remember? Is it a false memory? Are you confused? Think back to the way things used to be and what we lost and what we still remember. Remember when we had only two sexes, men and women, that’s gone. Remember values and morality? Sorry I mentioned it. Remember seeing someone walking down the street reading a book, absorbed in reading a book? How many people do you see reading a book anymore? But you will see many people walking down the street looking at their IPhones. "Remember to remember" said Henry Miller. 

    Justin Trudeau relies on people having short memories; remember the way it used to be before 2015 and we had our own thoughts, it wasn't Justin's agenda imposed on the country. Remember 2015, there was Justin walking to Rideau Hall with his cabinet behind him, his wife beside him, they were all smiling and laughing and optimistic and glorying in their good luck, their new power and authority; my God, the hubris was palpable! They were going to change the world, instead they destroyed a country. It wasn't a new beginning, it was the end of what we loved. There was Justin and his wife who was wearing a white coat and directly behind her there was Melanie Joly wearing the same white coat and both women were laughing, what was that all about? And there were others there, men and women, some have since felt the Wrath of Justin and been dumped from cabinet, others have hung in there, and all know the true measure of Justin Trudeau. We, too, know the true measure of the worst prime minister in Canadian history. Now we laugh when we see him, now we don't believe anything he says, now we know he was never anything but a high school drama teacher, no great intelligence or profundity there, just ruthlessness and cunning. All the good people, all the intelligent people, have been deleted or jumped ship from his cabinet to escape the shipwreck Justin would make of the country; and the ones who remain? They are the deluded, the hopeful, and the relentlessly ambitious. 

We don't yet live in Animal Farm but we are headed there, and if we end up at Animal Farm our collective amnesia will make us wonder what the past was really like or if it ever existed, all it takes is nine days and the past is forgotten, deleted from memory. As George Orwell wrote,

As for the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been. . . Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives; they had nothing to go on except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on such things now. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse -- hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

Hold the Line by Tamara Lich, a review

                                                         

Hold the Line, My story from the heart of the Freedom Convoy

Tamara Lich

Rebel News Network, Ltd., 2023

ISBN: 9781990583025

 

If you don't write down your story, no one will write it down for you, or if they do they might leave you out or change what really happened. Tamara Lich's Hold the Line is both her story and the story of the Freedom Covoy, it's about her participation in organizing the Freedom Convoy, travelling across Canada in winter, the arrival in Ottawa and several weeks of demonstrations against Covid-19 mandates, then being arrested and incarcerated. This is Tamara Lich's version of what happened; it isn't the mainstream media's version of this historical event, or the government's version, or Justin Trudeau's versio, they all vilified the Freedom Convoy from the beginning.   

    What was the Freedom Convoy protesting? It began by opposing vaccine mandates and vaccine passports but, I suspect, it soon grew to opposing Justin Trudeau and how he was transforming the country into something unrecognizable to average Canadians. Among other things, Covid-19 mandates restricted our freedom of movement, promoted mandatory vaccinations, required a vaccination passport if you wanted to travel by air or rail, and required a period of quarantine when returning to Canada from outside of the country. In Quebec Covid-19 mandates included a nightly curfew, the streets were deserted between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. the following day; what did Quebec's curfew achieve? Nothing at all. 

    The day after the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa the mainstream media began demonizing the Convoy. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation began its daily misinformation about the Convoy; this included the alleged "desecration" of the Terry Fox statue that Tamara Lich mentions in her book. On the second day of the protest the CBC interviewed various people on what they thought the Convoy was all about. One elderly man was on the verge of supporting the Convoy until the announcer said that members of the Convoy had "desecrated" the Terry Fox statue and that they had Nazi flags, none of it true; of course, he then opposed the Freedom Convoy. This is only one example of how the mainstream media let us all down with their biased reporting. Tamara Lich writes:

We exposed the Liberal friendly mainstream media for its agenda and its lies. People across Canada, and around the world, could see how the CBC, the Toronto Star, CTV, The Globe and Mail and many others were working to vilify peaceful protesters in servicc to a corrupt prime minister who writes their bailout cheques. For every honest journalist -- and there were some -- there were a dozen or more who were out to call us Nazis or violent criminals, or claiming we were foreign agents or trying to overthrow the government. (218)                           

    Every evening during the Freedom Convoy I watched live streaming of the demonstration on YouTube; I wanted to know as much about it as possible. Every evening I watched as someone walked the downtown streets of Ottawa interviewing people, and what I saw didn't correspond with what the legacy media was reporting; but it did give an idea of what the truckers and the Convoy were all about. The first night there were perhaps a few hundred viewers of these live streams, by the end there was a nightly audience of fifty thousand, that shows the scale and importance of the Freedom Convoy; it was an event of worldwide interest. I was very impressed by what I saw; I didn't see any violence, I didn't hear much or any horn honking by truckers, I saw what I came to think of as a Freedom Festival. And where was Justin? He was hiding in his country home north of Ottawa.

    I wonder what would have happened had Justin walked among the protesters? This is not a rhetorical question or an attempt at humour. I doubt Justin would have been physically accosted, he would have been yelled at, but after the Emergency Act was enforced protesters were physically accosted and knocked to the ground by police officers on horseback. The police were following orders. Maybe, in the early days of the Convoy, Justin could have shown some courage and people would have been truly impressed -- go out and meet citizens with a grievance against the government -- but he doesn't have it in his makeup, and no one is impressed by Justin's relentless publicity seeking, his dancing onstage in India, his black face, his costumes, his bungee jumping, his relentless selfies, his singing a Queen song the evening before the Queen's funeral, his apologies, his taking the knee, his inviting illegal immigrants to enter Canada at Roxham Road, and lots more. It's disingenuous, it's all fake with this man, and it's obvious to the average person how false it is. 

   I always thought one of the hidden reasons for enacting the Emergency Act were the Fuck Trudeau flags; I even saw them in Montreal. Justin is narcissistic and the Emergency Act was his revenge for these many flags. It's not as though there was rioting in the streets as we saw recently in Paris after a young man was killed by the police; the demonstration in Ottawa was inconvenient for many local residents of Ottawa, but there was no violence. And then things got worse, despite their peaceful assembly, the police attacked the demonstrators; they broke car windshields with impunity, they arrested people, including Tamara Lich and others. The government froze people's bank accounts, and this is one of the most egregious acts committed by this bogus use of the Emergency Act; how are mortgages and rents to be paid, groceries purchased, life to be lived with no money? We also saw the banks colluding with and supporting the government. The Emergency Act was as bogus and unnecessary as the Covid mandates were, all a scam testing the public's tolerance for government intervention and control of average people's lives. All of it a scam.

    Hold the Line is an important book and I recommend it, buy a copy and read it! Tamara Lich is not self-promoting, she is giving us, the reader, her true story, and I believe her. On one of the night's of the live stream the man behind the camera entered a tent where a meeting of Freedom Convoy members was just ending. And at the end of the meeting the people assembled stood and said a prayer. I can tell you it was unexpected and deeply moving; these demonstrators that the media and politicians demonized are our fellow Canadians. I doubt there were any meetings of Justin, Freeland, Lametti, Joly, and Mendocino, all government ministers, who have lied to us, betrayed us (especially the English-speaking population of Quebec) that ended with a communal prayer and a statement affirming what they were doing and looking for guidance other than the shallow leadership of Justin Trudeau. 

 

Notes and After Thoughts: 

1. The other event that is similar to the Freedom Convoy is the 1935 protest against Depression conditions and the Trek across the country from Vancouver where unemployed men boarded freight trains; they were stopped in Regina and negotiations with Ottawa began but when the RCMP tried to arrest the leaders they were met with protesters and the Regina Riot began. The site of the Regina Riot is now a historic site. One day the Freedom Convoy will be similarly looked upon and Tamara Lich and the other Freedom Convoy organizers and participants will be recognized as national historical figures; there will be a plaque or statue located on the site of the demonstrations.

2. Tamara Lich is an intelligent and articulate woman; listen to Jordan Peterson's podcast interview with her; she is brilliant! She could run for a seat in the House of Commons for the Conservative Party of Canada, but it may be a big mistake.

3.    Who opposed the Convoy? It included the Liberal and NDP supporters, it was the mainstream media, and it was the managerial class of Canadians who are quick to protect their elite position in society. As an example of this, Tamara Lich's Hold the Line is not for sale at Indigo Books, whether online or in their stores: this is more evidence for why we need to write down or record our own story and publish it online or in print, if you can't read about the Freedom Convoy then it's as though it never happened. Indigo, their book stores and online, a failing business, were quick to cancel Hold the Line by not selling it; but it is not up to a company selling books to decide what we can or cannot read, and the Canadian book industry should be ashamed by their silence on this issue of censoring a Canadian book. However, Tamara Lich's book is for sale on Amazon, a highly successful American company these same liberals love to condemn, in fact it is a bestselling, number one, book; to be a best seller on Amazon requires selling 3.5 thousand to five thousand copies of a book in a twenty-four hour period, and Holding the Line did this despite fake negative reviews on the Amazon website, they were fake because these negative reviews were written before the book was even published. Hold the Line has mostly five star reviews, this is based on over one thousand reviews and book sales. It is still the number one best seller in Canadian biographies on Amazon. I would estimate, conservatively, that Amazon has sold over 25,000 copies of the book.  It is a best seller in Canadian publishing despite the haters, those in the liberal media who pretend the book doesn't exist.

4. In a blog post (31 January 2023) on defunding the CBC, I wrote: 

CBC's biased reporting can slip over into being reporting of even greater dubious value; that is, news has become interpretation, bias, and even falsehood. An example: the second day of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, in January 2022, CBC announcers would mention that two monuments in Ottawa had been "desecrated" by the demonstrators and they've kept repeating this story; among other things, it effectively cowed people they were interviewing into opposing the Freedom Convoy. It was ammo they could use against the Freedom Convoy. But the CBC has a double standard, it has never referred to beheading, toppling, or throwing paint on statues of our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, or Queen Victoria, or Egerton Ryerson as "desecrating" these statues because the CBC sympathizes and agrees with the demonstrators who defaced, destroyed, and desecrated statues of these historical figures. The use of the word "desecrate" is also interesting, it is loaded with innuendo and exaggerates the demonstrators' action which was to drape a Canadian flag on the shoulders of the statue of Terry Fox. The CBC assumes an agreement in values between itself and its audience but I suggest that most Canadians are good and fair-minded people who don't identify as much with the values CBC promotes as the CBC thinks. The CBC wasn't always this way; the CBC used to help unify the country and be known for excellence in broadcasting. Now it's come to the point that the sooner they are defunded the better for the country.

5.  Back in 1968, some people at the St. Jean Baptiste Parade in Montreal threw bottles at Justin's father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau; what did Pierre do? The other politicians ran but Pierre stayed on the podium; he had some courage while his son, years later, had no courage; during the Convoy Justin was like Waldo, he couldn't be found, he was in-hiding in his country home.

6.    Those who supported the Freedom Convoy have been demonized by Justin Trudeau and the mainstream media as ignorant, extremist, racist and biased, but to read Tamara Lich's book is to find a voice speaking the truth about the Freedom Convoy. We now live in a country where to say you are favour of freedom is to be labelled an extremist; in fact, Justin Trudeau is the extremist.

7. Cancelling someone used to be called character assassination; you can see the CBC and other media doing this regarding Premier Higgs of New Brunswick. 

8. My family was always Liberal; in the 1920s two relatives were Members of Parliament from New Brunswick; as a family we always voted Liberal, never Conservative. It was only when Justin Trudeau became prime minister that I began thinking outside of the Liberal box. The years of his administration have been a disaster for Canada and I am not sure we will recover as a nation from what he has done.

                                                     10 July 2023

The impoverishment of language

 

1.

Everywhere life is being reduced, flattened out, and the variety and multiplicity of life is lessened. Small communities are absorbed into cities and cities into a megalopolis; the nation state is being absorbed into larger economic and military alliances, it's only a matter of time before the nation state disappears. And what is the motivation for reducing life, flattening it out, lessening the variety of everyday life? Someone's getting rich, someone else is getting more powerful; and the rest of us are losing out. 

2.

Not too many years ago, North American workers saw their jobs moved to other countries where wages are one tenth or less of what was paid to workers here. American workers were told they would have to "recycle" themselves, but this didn't happen, it was an optimistic and false plan from the beginning. It was a flattening out of society, making more people poor, and a reduction of the number of jobs and the variety of jobs, it was a diminishment of the diversity of jobs here. There was also nothing for these people to recycle themselves to, there were no better jobs for them to move up to even if they did reeducate themselves; it was a fairly cynical move on the part of business and government leaders, they were laughing behind their hands. It was enforced poverty on a segment of society that had worked hard and in the past would have moved to middle class status. Some of these former workers ended up unemployed or homeless or on drugs. Some moved on to work for fast food restaurants and some now drive for Uber or Door Dash delivering food for these same restaurants.

3.

Political and economic changes begin with language, with words, and it can be seen all around us. Words are censored, given new meanings, or deleted from the way we speak when they challenge a political agenda that would control the population. People are now afraid to say what they think and feel and justifiably so; now everyone's concerned they aren't politically correct. Certain words aren't allowed to be said. Certain thoughts and ideas aren't allowed to be expressed; you will suffer condemnation, loss of position in society, perhaps your employment, you will be excommunicated, you will be cancelled. Better to shut up and hope for a better future or else you might disappear from your profession, your friends, your old life. The people who forbid freedom of speech used to be the people who championed free speech, now they are the most vociferous opponents of free speech. 

4.

Consider that our vocabulary has fewer words, fewer long words, than the vocabulary of people just fifty years ago; with this loss of vocabulary we lose the nuance of expressing sophisticated ideas, we lose how to describe things, whether material or emotional, we become language deprived. The vocabulary of the Victorians was more sophisticated than our present day speech; children today have difficulty reading children's books from the Victorian or Edwardian Age, everywhere people have been dummed down. We've become fat and stupid. An obvious example is the revising of Roald Dahl's books, censoring them according to Woke preconceptions which, basically, dumb people down to the same already low level. The King James Version of the Bible is thought to be too difficult for people to read, in fact the vocabulary of the 1611 translation of the Bible is fairly easy to read and is beautifully written; but read the King James Version? Read Chaucer? Read Milton? Read Shakespeare? Read Walt Whitman and William Blake? They're all by dead white men and their books are heading to the municipal dump.

5. 

While our vocabulary today has fewer words what we're allowed to say and what we aren't allowed to say has also been reduced, made subject to what is politically correct. It is made difficult because the politically correct are in the ascendant and they have become mainstream, their ideas have been normalized. I noticed a news broadcaster on CBC, only yesterday, when he mentioned President Trump, he referred to him as "Trump" and he sneered and assumed the audience agreed that Trump deserved this visual and audible condemnation; this television announcer could hardly be criticized, after all, his middle class audience most likely agree with him or why would they be watching the biased CBC news? Whether or not Trump deserves to be sneered at is not my point, it is the underlying assumption of a government employee on a national television network that is subsidized with taxpayers' money expressing a biased opinion on what purports to be a factual reporting of the news. Politically correct assumptions supercede common sense and truth. We may think that government is benevolent because Justin Trudeau keeps telling us that Canadians want to be "safe", but government's motive is power and social control. Forget about being "safe", we all know that "safe" in life doesn't exist.

Note: Revised and edited on 23 February 2023.