"Goodbye Sweden, Hello Swedistan" - Sweden's cultural suicide

The Liberal "Islamophobia" motion M103 controversy brought to mind Pat Condell's video of a few years ago on "the cultural suicide of Sweden".  Comparatively speaking we're no where near Swedish levels of progressive insanity, yet, but this seems to be the direction the Trudeau Liberals are pointing the country:

Jacques Frémont - another of Islamism's useful idiots

Barbara Kay:

[We can defend ourselves against Islamists] so long as we exercise our freedom of speech to denounce Islamism and shame those who support it. Which is why Islamists invented the myth of Islamophobia in Western countries to justify their call for a tightening of the noose on this precious freedom. They certainly can’t do it alone, but they have “useful idiots,” ...

One of these useful idiots, Jacques Frémont, president of the Quebec Human Rights Commission (QHRC) and president-elect of the University of Ottawa, is the father of Quebec’s Bill 59, which will give offended individuals the power to have writers they perceive to have criticized Islam censored and punished by onerous fines. This dreadful initiative marks a Canadian watershed in Islamist appeasement, but attention paid to it in English Canada has been shamefully sparse.

Why does Steven Fletcher champion assisted suicide?

I've always been a little puzzled by Steven Fletcher's championing of doctor-assisted suicide.  He would actually make an excellent poster-boy for the other side of the argument.  Despite what must have been huge challenges after becoming quadriplegic early in life, he forged an exceptionally successful political career and a productive life.  However, had assisted suicide been available at the time of his accident it is highly likely that, in the depths of suffering and depression, he'd have requested it.  And he'd have missed the experience of overcoming his challenges and achieving the success that followed.

So, why does he favour doctor-assisted suicide?  Does he regret having lived his life?  It's hard to imagine, but maybe we'll see a year from now whether or not he exercises his new right.  Another, more likely possibility is that he's contemplating that eventually, perhaps many years from now, he'll want to exercise his right.  But, has he considered whether it's worth it given that from now on it is far less likely that there will be any more Steven Fletchers?  Not to mention all the other down-side risks:

Barbara Kay: Euthanasia so accepted, doctors must now justify prolonging a life
Barbara Kay: Suffering people just want an end to their pain
Father Raymond de Souza: Our euthanasia point of no return
Andrew Coyne: Crossing the Rubicon, Supreme Court seems eerily complacent

Ezra Levant:

Doctor assisted suicide.

Barbara Kay's column gets it mostly right - Suicide is none of Medicare’s business.  Doctor assisted suicide in the land of state monopoly medicine would present a huge ethical, moral and physical hazard.

I believe it would be an enormous conflict of interest for doctors and the medical system as a whole. I do not want our medical system looking to killing patients as an easier alternative to seeking a cure or easing their suffering. The American Medical Association gets it right. It’s position is (in part):

“... It is understandable, though tragic, that some patients in extreme duress--such as those suffering from a terminal, painful, debilitating illness--may come to decide that death is preferable to life. However, allowing physicians to participate in assisted suicide would cause more harm than good. Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks. ...”

The Canadian Medical Association, recently came up with the following weasel words (more or less): “it’s fine with us as long as doctors follow the law”. The CMA would seem to be playing down the ethical and moral hazards of doctor-assisted suicide as well as the deficiencies in our medical system.

Looking to death as a solution to medical problems is fraught with significant danger to the public, especially those already vulnerable (eg. the elderly). For example:

Treatable depression is already under-diagnosed and under-treated, especially in the elderly. With suicide as an option this situation will not improve. On the contrary, it will be exacerbated.

Palliative care experts report that the vast majority of terminally ill patients facing or fearing great pain withdraw their requests for assisted suicide once treated for depression and/or provided with proper palliative care. The problem here is that our health care system is already deficient in both depression diagnosis/treatment and palliative care. The availability of assisted suicide would lead to even lower availability of both. Clearly this would be hazardous to people who are ill and vulnerable (especially those already in, say, poverty and/or advanced age).

Many patients requesting doctor assisted-suicide are coerced by family members. There have been documented accounts of people committing suicide under pressure or duress from family members, friends or others present during their suicides. In 2010 it was reported that more than one quarter of assisted suicides in Oregon and Washington did so because they didn’t want to be a “burden” to their family. Does anyone suppose that none of those "burdens" were nudged towards suicide?

Elder abuse is widely recognized as a serious problem. Legalizing doctor-assisted suicide would make available the ultimate manifestation of that abuse.

Then there are the disabled.

Then there’s the slippery slope towards euthanasia, an even greater hazard. Many advocates for assisted suicide are really aiming for legalization of euthanasia.

Trudeau reveals his inner sophomore

Barbara Kay:

How can the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, presumably aware of his father’s role in quashing Canada’s only contemporary terrorist movement, be mouthing these shallow, superannuated bromides of the left?

Trudeau père did not waste a second anguishing over whether these terrorists felt ‘excluded’ or ‘marginalized’.

Jonathan Kay:

... Never did the Tory caricature of Trudeau as a dilettante seem more accurate. Indeed, the Liberal leader’s own words are far more damaging than the Tories’ silly and intellectually dishonest attack ads (whose lameness, until now, had been dominating national political gossip this week). ... [It seems Jon has his mind made up about the Tory ads and can't alter it even when Justin once again proves them accurate.  Intellectually, Jon is to Barbara as Justin is to Pierre.]

A supremely muddled Supreme Court

Barbara Kay on the Supremes' ruling on witnesses wearing the niqab in court:

... Unfortunately, the ruling ... leaves the door open for exceptions to the rule in other cases. For this reason, I would have preferred that the dissenting opinions of Justices Louis Lebel and Marshall Rotstein — that the veil is never to be worn during testimony — had been the majority view.   

... This is an excellent moment for the government to step up to the plate and, with this ruling as impetus, create a law that prohibits face cover for all those giving testimony in court, with no religious exemptions at all.

Right on, Barbara! In fact I'm now closer to the view that wearing the niqab in public, anywhere, be banned entirely.  Allowing niqabs leads to Supreme Court "decisions" like this one.

You didn't choose that!!

The Universe made you choose it!  That's what Sam Harris argues in his new book 'Free Will', excerpted in yesterday's National Post.  Harris believes that we don't make choices freely, but that we are compelled by our genetic makeup and our environment to make the choices we do - that free will is an illusion.

It must be a progressive thing.  It sounds an awful lot like Barack Obama's recent declaration to Americans: "You didn't build that!!"

Anyway, I don't buy it.  I like Raymond Smullyan's approach to the problem in "Is God a Taoist?", a dialogue between God and a mortal which opens with:

Mortal:
And therefore, O God, I pray thee, if thou hast one ounce of mercy for this thy suffering creature, absolve me of having to have free will!

God:
You reject the greatest gift I have given thee?

..
..

And concludes with:

Mortal:
You said a short while ago that our whole discussion was based on a monstrous fallacy. You still have not told me what this fallacy is.

God:
Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without free will! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction and a sentient being exerting free will!) Can you honestly even imagine a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like? I think that one thing in your life that has so misled you is your having been told that I gave man the gift of free will. As if I first created man, and then as an afterthought endowed him with the extra property of free will. Maybe you think I have some sort of "paint brush" with which I daub some creatures with free will and not others. No, free will is not an "extra"; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.
..
..

  See also, Barbara and Jonathan Kay's reponses to Harris.

The problem with Quebec is ...?

... the French. Barbara Kay:

... There are 43 francophone CEGEPs in Quebec, of which 28 are on strike. None of the five anglo CEGEPs are. None of those students will miss their year. There are four universities in Montreal: two francophone, two anglophone. At the Université de Montréal, almost a third of the students are officially on strike – 12,000 out of 40,000. Many of them will lose their term. At UQAM, more than half — 27,000 of 40,000 -– went on strike and the campus pretty well shut down.

... at Concordia, a much more politicized and left-leaning population than the generally more bourgeois constituency at McGill, almost a quarter –12,000 of 45,000 -– were out, but only a small number of actual classes were disrupted, unlike at the franco colleges.

... McGill estimated only 40 – yes, forty – students out of 38,000 were on strike and no classes had been disrupted.

... When political tensions arise, it’s all about culture. Guillotines were a French invention. There’s more than a little nostalgie de la boue in the Montreal air these days.

We mighta' known.

Barbara Kay with Jerry Agar on "fourth-trimester abortion"

[Ack]

Front page flakes

A bizarro tale about two flaky parents who want to raise their child gender neutrally was the lead story on the front page of today's Post:

... A Toronto couple says it is trying to raise a genderless child, refusing to reveal baby Storm’s sex to encourage a more neutral approach to the infant.

Hiding the four-month-old’s sex from the outside world is a “tribute to freedom and choice” that they hope will let Storm grow up unfettered by the values of others, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker have been quoted as saying. [Typical, unrealistic progressive nuttery - unwilling to accept the laws of nature and convinced that social engineering will bring their utopia.]

From Barbara Kay:

Close observers ... are especially troubled that Storm’s two brothers have been co-opted into collusion with the scheme and, well-rehearsed, assiduously self-monitor their own discourse about “Z,” the neutral replacement for “he” or “she.” [Neither "he" nor "she" but "Zed"?]

... Free will has its limitations. One such limitation is human biology. The denial of biological reality by highly educated, but humanly naive “progressives” — and their choice to privilege the “world” over the needs and rights of their own children — speaks more to their narcissism than to their idealism. [I'd say 'over-educated' - ie. educated beyond their capacity to understand.]

... This misguided couple needs intervention before their adult folie à deux becomes a children’s tragedy à trois.

Interesting, but front page?

Intellect, intelligence and wisdom

"The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding." (Thomas Sowell, "Intellectuals and Society")

A must read for the New Year. "Intellectuals and Society", by Thomas Sowell.

From Barbara Kay's recommendation:

... Illumination on what makes intellectuals commit to ideas too stupid for ordinary people to believe, and the effect of these ideas on our culture, can be found in the pellucid prose and crisply coherent analysis of conservative sage Thomas Sowell in his book...

Muslim advisory panels at DND

I missed the item last week in which the Kays (mother and son) debate the wisdom of having paid full-time Muslim advisory panels at DND.

Barbara Kay:

The cancellation of [Imam Delic's] speech by Defence Minister MacKay raises the question of why any government ministry would fund any religious consulting group. Why is there a paid “Muslim Working Group” permanently embedded at Foreign Affairs, whose job it is to advise the government on their foreign policy wherever it touches on areas of Muslim density? Why not a “Christian Working Group” or a “Sikh Working Group”? Can you imagine if there were a “Jewish Working Group” to advise on the Middle East? Don’t make me laugh. To me this is a scandal, and I don’t understand why it has not been addressed. Some of the people in this group hold very insalubrious views or are attached to groups with discomfiting agendas.

Amen! But Barbara's squishy liberal sonny boy, Jonathan Kay, thinks mom is all wet and that Muslim outreach is just what's needed at DND. He argues it was done with Germans and Italians in WWII to help win the war.

Barbara responds:

It’s more likely that Defence or Foreign Affairs invited the Muslims in as an appeasing gesture rather than a step towards victory, and that the motives for the Working Group are not to defeat radical Islam, but to spin it and promote the idea that radical Islam is not our enemy at all. You don’t need an embedded working group to help the military reach out to Muslims. The Israeli government doesn’t hire Arabic leaders to advise the Mossad.

... We’ve had a Communist party for generations, but the military never formed a panel to think about how best to reach out to them.

Jonathan might have a point if the so-called "advisory" panel weren't self-appointed representatives of the most radical and outspoken Muslim group (the CIC) in the country.  I seriously doubt that the CIC will be helping DND figure out how to more effectively kill our Islamist enemies.  Barbara is correct - this effort is more politically correct "community" outreach than anything. In other words, totally irrelevant to defence.

Meanwhile, Blazing Cat Fur asks: "What the hell is going on at DFAIT?"

David Frum, a "Joe Clark" conservative

David Frum spends a lot of time dissing American conservatives.  At every opportunity he snottily derides, insults and dismisses Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and its boosters. At the same time, he's silent about the rabid idiocies of the lib/left.  Liberal media outlets like CNN love to consult him because he can be depended on to slam conservatives.  Then Frum wonders, and so does Barbara Kay, why they treat him like the plague.

Frum always harps that the GOP needs to compromise with the Obama Dems, reach "a consensus among [progressive] elites". Mmm, hmm. Perhaps Frum would be less detested by conservatives if he were to attempt to compromise with his (alleged) own side instead of insulting them.  But he's really not one of them.  His Canadian equivalent is the "Joe Clark" conservative.  He'd rather hob-nob and compromise with  left/libs than be associated with those nasty conservatives. 

Barbara closes with: "David, they don’t deserve you down there. Come on home where you’re understood, appreciated and respected. And where you can be a conservative and also a mensch.

Speak for yourself, Barbara.  We don't need any more Joe Clark conservatives here. They're toxic.