Fire MacKay…..and Stronach too

Let’s face it: During and immediately after the convention, we all had a stake in minimizing the importance of MacKay’s temper tantrum over Scott Reid’s proposed constitutional amendment. I don’t feel the need to be restrained as a result of that any longer; the good media coverage of the convention has come and gone and we are now left with the facts that a) MacKay screwed Harper over, casting a wet blanket over positive coverage of Harper’s outstanding speech at the assembly; b) his premonitions of the party’s death if the amendment was adopted were a thinly veiled threat; and, c) he possessed a blatant ulterior motive all along.

And it is not controversial to say that someone so willing to hurt the party in this manner should not be the deputy leader of the party. The deputy leader should be willing to go to the wire for the party; John Reynolds, not MacKay, should have the job right now. Equality of ridings was a deal-breaker? What was the deal-breaker you had with David Orchard, Peter? If MacKay still retains illusions of glory from his PC days, he would be wise to relinquish them, and quickly; the PC Party is dead and gone and we are now attempting to build a new party. Right now, MacKay is a liability to the party and, as such, has no business being the deputy leader.

As for the ulterior motive: As Sean McCormick astutely pointed out, it is Belinda which stands to benefit from the current equality of ridings arrangement. With Frank’s moolah, Belinda can literally buy up assembly and leadership convention votes in ridings with nascent constituency organizations. She did it before, she’ll do it again. Funny how no reporter seemed to grasp this fact in their coverage of MacKay’s tantrum.

Harper needs to protect his leadership from Belinda’s money. (I am not the only one who remains embarrassed with her speaking abilities.) As such, he should demote MacKay and, for good measure, strip Stronach of her critic post as well. The further they get from the limelight, the better.

Cross-posted to Rempelia Prime

Mr. Dithers Knows Best

After Dithering for more than a year regarding Senate appointments, Paul Martin claims that his newly announced choices ” reflect the choice of outstanding Canadians with a record of accomplishments.” But it is hard to think of one thing that Grant Mitchell ever achieved in public life. Conversely, last fall, Albertans elected four outstanding Canadians to represent them in the Senate. Yet, Mr. Dithers refused to name any of them. Many Albertans are rightfully upset. Even the Globe (subscription required) was unimpressed:

Yesterday’s first instalment, filling nine seats, was quintessentially Martinesque: not egregious, not brilliant, just middling.

Paul Martin, the man who would wipe out the “democratic deficit;” who claims to be in favour of Senate reform; and who claims to be sympathetic to western concerns now says that he does not want to achieve reform “piecemeal.”

That can only mean that the PM has a better plan, and that he knows better than Albertans. If Martin is so wise, will he then present to Canadians his plan to reform the Senate? Considering that he will not accept the proposal that Albertans have placed before him, when will he reveal his?

Perhaps his Senate reform plan will be published at the same time as the still-awaited Kyoto policy. In the meantime, he can continue to make room in the Red Chamber for his liberal friends and pals. Some of them will badly need to continue to contract out their girlfriends.

Cross posted to Civitatensis

Ignorant Albertans?

Commenting on Ralph Klein’s position regarding homosexual marriage, The Toronto Star (registration required, no subscription) hints at a conspiracy (Imagine that!). It is predicated on the manipulation of the Albertan public, for as long as it remains, the Star says, “ignorant.”

“It’s bad to be on the wrong side of the law on an issue of human rights. It’s almost as bad to cynically grandstand, to mislead Albertans about your authority, to curry favour from voters you have deceived, hoping they will remain ignorant and supportive.”

It does not occur to the Star that the premier may be trying to do something that Albertans want. If one were to be bet money on who knows the wishes of Albertans better, the Star would not come out ahead of Klein on any list.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

Terry Schiavo, the Enlightenment, and Good Friday

Terri Schiavo seems to be doomed to have to starve to death. She seems to have been given the opportunity to practice her “right to die.” Peak Talk does a good job summarizing the various positions on this case. Peggy Noonan ponders the Western love affair with death. Steve Sailer ponders the economic benefits baby-boomers find in euthanizing the elderly and infirm.

The best analysis I can provide is to quote some lines from “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Ivan tells his story to Alyosha about the day Jesus was brought as a prisoner to the office of the Grand Inquisitor in Seville.

The Grand Inquisitor berates Jesus for all the suffering that he has caused and how people like the GI must protect people from themselves, because Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion does nothing to end suffering. The GI’s suffering for his flock is even greater, as he says to Jesus:

Know that I am not afraid of you. Know that I, too, was in the wilderness, and I, too, ate locusts and roots; that I, too, blessed freedom, with which you have blessed mankind, and I, too, was preparing to enter the number of your chosen ones, the number of the strong and mighty, with a thirst ‘that the number be complete’. But I awoke and did not want to serve madness. I returned and joined the host of those who have corrected your deed. I left the proud and returned to the humble, for happiness of the humble. What I am telling you will come true, and our kingdom will be established. Tomorrow, I repeat, you will see this obedient flock, which at my first gesture will rush to heap hot coals around your stake, at which I shall burn you for having come to interfere with us. For if anyone has ever deserved our stake, it is you. Tomorrow I shall burn you. Dixi.

…

When the Inquisitor fell silent, he waited some time for his prisoner to reply. His silence weighed on him. He had seen how the captive listened to him all the while intently and calmly, looking him straight in the eye, and apparently not wishing to contradict anything. The old man would have liked him to say something, even something bitter, terrible. But suddenly he approaches the old man in silence and gently kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year old lips.

In defense of Ezra

If conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, then it is all too often the conservative’s sense of humor that reality makes off with. Evidence? Look no further then the reactions of different conservative bloggers to this, a wee little pin that Ezra’s Western Standard distributed at the recent Conservative convention:

I can think of three reasons why we should stop thinking about this little pin and perhaps be grateful for the wider truth it reminds us of.

First: The pin was a play on the Young Liberals’ pro-gay marriage slogan of a few weeks earlier: “It’s the Charter, Stupid!� To which one might reply that homosexuality is not mentioned anywhere in the Charter, the framers explicitly left it out, and the Supreme Court pointedly refused to indicate that a right to gay marriage existed in the Charter in its reference a few months ago. But no matter; Young Liberals should not be taken seriously on any sort of substantive basis, and Paul Martin seems to agree with me (heh). After all, when you’re as cool (can you really get much cooler then this?) as these tokin’, same-sex-smoochin’, hooker-solicitin’ Young Liberals, you need as much help as possible in establishing your hip credentials.

In short: Young Liberals are morons and their slogan was calling out for mockery. Greg Staples already called their lesbian banner up for such treatment. Ezra did so for the slogan – good for him.

Second: People seem to think that anyone is going to care a whit about these pins in the next election. Such people are mistaken. I don’t see any further need to discuss the absurdity of the claim that Martin will campaign against Harper on the basis of what an independent magazine writes any more than I see the need to discuss the benefits of a potential Conservative attack strategy on the Liberal Party and the Toronto Star.

Third: Should Conservatives say mean things about the Charter in public? No; the Canadian public is as stubborn as an ass and just as thoughtful when it comes to such matters. But in private, real conservatives should never diverge from the view that the Charter is an intolerable scrap of parchment which has and will do irreparable harm to our national community. It’s inducements to identification with different groups contained within section 15 has fractured our society in unnatural ways while its homogenizing effects have simultaneously suppressed the regional identities which are the essence of Canadian identity. The Charter’s masters and “interpreters�, the courts, are neither cautious nor informed by tradition and experience, but are rather infused with ideology and modernism.

Let’s be competitive in our electioneering, fine. But that shouldn’t convince us that we were wrong all along about the Charter. Ezra’s pin reminds us of the truth that many Conservatives seem to have either forgotten or turned their backs on.

Crossposted to Rempelia Prime

It’s the Demography, Stupid

I’ve posted on how our individualism undermines our sense of marriage and relating to the next generation (also here and here). Today, Mark Steyn hits another home run, in this case on the politics behind starving Terry Shiavo and aborting fetuses with cleft palates in England:

But once you start weighing the relative values of individual lives, there’s no end to it. Much of that derives from the way abortion has redefined life - as a “choice”, an option.

In practice, a culture that thinks Terri Schiavo’s life in Florida or the cleft-lipped baby’s in Herefordshire has no value winds up ascribing no value to life in general. Hence, the shrivelled fertility rates in Europe and in blue-state America: John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birth rates; George W Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.

The 19th-century Shaker communities were forbidden from breeding and could increase their number only by conversion. The Euro-Canadian-Democratic Party welfare secularists seem to have chosen the same predicament voluntarily, and are likely to meet the same fate. The martyrdom culture of radical Islam is a literal dead end. But so is the slyer death culture of post-Christian radical narcissism. This is the political issue that will determine all the others: it’s the demography, stupid.

Castro named as one of the worlds richest men

Forbes has named Fidel Castro one of the richest rulers in the world. Coming in at a net worth of $550m, right after Elizabeth II, Forbes attributes Castros great wealth to “a web of state-owned businesses” such as state-owned Havana Club rum, which he sold to a French company in 1993, and notes that he travels everywhere in a motorcade of black Mercedes limousines.

La Revolucion: stealing from the rich and, er, keeping it. What a hero for the common man.

The Religion Gene

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have published a study with evidence that religion is in our genetic make-up:

Now, researchers led by Laura Koenig, a psychology graduate student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, US, have tried to tease apart how the effects of nature and nurture vary with time. Their study suggests that as adolescents grow into adults, genetic factors become more important in determining how religious a person is, while environmental factors wane.

This study is part of the long standing discussion over nature v. nurture. Previously, psychologists had attributed religion to socialization, while this study and others suggest nature plays a role. A more contentious political issue of course is the question of genetics and sexual orientation (and here). A lot of people take it as given that there is a gay gene and that socialization has nothing to do with it. If both religion and sexual orientation are hard-wired into us, and both are fundamental rights, then it will become necessary to consider these issues, especially when they conflict, on a basis other than genetics.

Gee, maybe we can try moral reasoning?
(Hat tip: No Left Turns)

eBay is the glorious future of humankind

“The power of all of us”, proclaims eBay’s TV ad campaign, and they have found a concept that has long been missed. We can indeed achieve far more if we work together, and the free market makes our co-operation far easier and more efficient than any collectivist or socialist scheme. eBay approaches pure capitalism, and is a living example of what free markets stand for and how they work.

Outside of the Austrian school of economics, no-one will speak well of pure capitalism. Quite aside from the vitriol of Communists, self-proclaimed social-democrats such as Benjamin Barber and even democratic-capitalists like theologian Michael Novak declare that capitalism’s worst excesses must be tempered by the state. But what really happens with pure capitalism? What’s so bad about it?

Capitalism is essentially pacifistic. While socialism rests upon violence to take from some and give to others, capitalism relies upon free exchange. Not only is violence unnecessary, it is to be avoided, since violence wastes and destroys valuable resources that could be used for trading. Capitalism, contrary to the beliefs of many, rests upon the ideas of honour and reputation. To trade, one must have both, and if one is lacking in these fields, it will be difficult to find anybody to trade with. This is how credit ratings work. They are essentially a measure of honour, as measured by the will to fulfill obligations, and reputation, as measured by the experience others have had dealing with you.

eBay is close to pure capitalism. In the case of fraud, eBay users are free to resort to the state courts on their own, but eBay itself uses the noncoercive feedback system. All this does is to make traders wear their reputation and honour on their sleeves, and the penalty for dissatisfying another party is a black mark. Enough black marks and other traders will start to shun. Accumulate more and eBay will cast you out completely. Never is violence against property or the person threatened or used, just the refusal to deal with the offender. Libertarians and anarchists have proposed that this shunning could be applied to an entire society to replace the violent methods of law enforcement we currently use. While the practicality of this is debateable, the example of eBay certainly proves that in the market context of contracts and fraud, shunning alone can work extremely well, even if this might not work so well in purely criminal cases.

eBay is also a proof that pure capitalism does not degrade into a dog-eat-dog system. In some cases, state courts have ruled against eBay rules, but in others, eBay’s contracts have been upheld, even where they supersede state law. For instance, although US law states that an auction bidder may retract even after the auction’s conclusion, US courts have ruled that eBay’s terms (which do not permit retraction) are a contract and thus take precedence. But capitalism does not destroy laws, it requires them. Free trade absolutely requires a legal framework, without which trade cannot take place. Where trade has begun to develop without sufficient law, it has quickly created it. eBay has been a pioneer in developing e-commerce law where none previously existed, and in the Middle Ages, the Lex Mercatoria or Law Merchant was developed by traders to resolve disputes and issue rulings on matters of trade when state law proved inadequate for the task. These courts were private and outside of state courts, and like eBay’s feedback system, did not use violence but shunning and ostracism to enforce their verdicts.

This is why I say that eBay is a glimpse of a glorious future for mankind. It shows us that we can have free trade, pure capitalism, law and order, unlimited prosperity and non-violence. Compared to the poverty, misery, arbitrariness, brutality and despotism offered by collectivism there is really no contest. As Edwin A. Locke said, “Workers of the world unite for global capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your poverty.”

Hey Hans and Athanasios, Go on a Diet

A new report demonstrates some European countries, both “old” and “new,” have bigger obesity problems than the vulgar, materialistic, SUV, super-size me, religous wingnut, Bush imperialist US of A:

The International Obesity Task Force estimated that Finland, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Malta have all now exceeded the United States’ 67 per cent in overweight or obese males.

“The time when obesity was thought to be a problem on the other side of the Atlantic has gone by,” said Mars Di Bartolomeo, Luxembourg’s minister of health.

In Greece, 38 per cent of women are obese, compared with 34 per cent in the United States.

The report was released at the launch of the 25-country European Union’s plan for action on the problem in its member states.

The International Obesity Task Force, a global coalition of obesity scientists and research centres advising the EU, had previously estimated in 2003 that about 200 million of the 350 million adults living in what is now the European Union may be overweight or obese.

However, a closer evaluation of the figures in the latest analysis indicates that may be an underestimate of the scale of the problem, according to the group.

Of course, we won’t find too many people drawing connections between eating pretzels and svoulaki and the EU’s bloated, over-regulatory, wasteful, gluttonous socialist bureaucracy. Nope, no connection there.

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