#n.s. lyons

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

N.S. Lyons: Woke is Individualist

Charles, I find your classification of racial idenitarianism and radical environmentalism as the two competing “pillars” of “Woke” to be particularly interesting, and want to hone in on that. This is because I think this classification misidentifies the true competing forces among the Woke, and in doing so accidentally elides its true origin and character, and therefore the broader nature of the challenge to our societies. Obviously this diagnosis is important to get right because the answer will structure how we should respond.

To me, the existing internal divide among the Woke doesn’t appear to be between identitarian racialism and environmentalism (the latter of which notably long predates Wokeism and seems to have simply agglomerated itself to Woke via common association among the people involved in Progressive political movements). Instead the obvious divide seems to clearly be between the two big camps of Race and Trans. You have not touched on transgenderism above at all, but it has become by far the most visible and aggressive aspect of Woke radicalism today other than “anti-racism” (and indeed today seems to have even have surpassed it). But whereas racialism is, I agree, collectivist in nature (though perhaps is more specifically described as a tribalist), the trans craze is not. Rather, it is a manifestation of an out-of-control hyper-individualism.

Trans ideology asserts that an inner psychological “self” is not only a but the only legitimate and authoritative judge of truth and reality. The authority of the self is then asserted as superior over all external claims, whether social or biological. Even the material reality of the body itself is seen only as a form of unjust oppression, an artificial limit imposed on the full sovereignty and “freedom” of the self and its desires that must be overcome through “liberation.” Moreover, the “true identity” of the self (whether conceived of as fixed or fluid) is taken to be so unimpeachable that it can justifiably be imposed externally, in the form of demands for total acceptance and affirmation from others, whose own sovereignty is necessarily seen as subservient to the true self (me). Indeed trans ideology’s central demand is that, for the sake of justice, the world must conform to the will, rather than the will to the world. In this, transgenderism is the ultimate expression of a centering of the individual will to power – and, arguably, of “identitarianism” in a larger sense: of making one’s inner “identity” the cornerstone of reality. But, again, this identitarianism is radically individualist, not collectivist.

Obviously this is all in direct contradiction with the narrative of the racialist camp: their position is that fundamental identity is determined by the biological (skin color and ethnicity), and that identity is immutable and unchangeable precisely for this reason. Those who have tried to import the trans paradigm to the racial sphere – e.g. all those white people who pretend to be black or indigenous while claiming that this is who they “truly are on the inside” – have so far been met only with acute hostility. These two tribes of the Woke are united only through the doctrine of intersectionality (co-identification of the “white cis-heteronormative” as shared oppressor and enemy to be overthrown). 

If I had to pick one of these two positions as the more likely to “win” and come to dominate the direction of Wokeism moving forward (though this is unnecessary), I might actually pick trans over race. Racialism is ultimately a cynical grift, an attempt to redistribute resources, power, and status; trans is a religion. Minority racialism is at least somewhat limited in potential scale by the presence, size, and resentment of minority populations (though these have been sufficient to nonetheless make it terribly destructive); in comparison, the offer the trans cult holds out is universal: “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

The core feature of Wokeism is really the narcissism of “the self without limit,” made possible by complete faith in Progress, the malleability of both Nature and Man, and ultimately man’s ability to fully control, organize, and manage reality as if he were a god (thus producing equity and social justice, i.e. heaven on earth). In other words it encapsulates all the most defining characteristics of our modern age. I believe this should raise some uncomfortable questions for what might be called the “liberal theory of Woke.” For what is the true origin of Woke? Was it some outside anti-liberal force? Or was it really Enlightenment liberalism itself that gave birth to its own successor ideology? I am inclined to see it as the latter. The progressive liberation of the individual self from limits is after all that which puts the lib in liberalism.

So while I wouldn’t disagree that Woke often functions practically as a collectivist ideology, I would point out that this is a reactive instinct. Woke is a product of the world liberalism made: a world of atomized hyper-individuals, liberated from every authority but the inner self and its will to power; for whom every higher authority outside the self has been torn down, and every social norm, duty, responsibility, or unchosen bond to a community beyond the individual destroyed. But in such a wasteland, individuals (still being human) crave nothing more than community and connection, and meaning, and so they seek it – with no authority or inherited guidance or structure (for such things are considered illiberal) – and increasingly find it in toxic, moralistic, pseudo-religious collectives like the Woke movement.

Note well that the cries for “justice” and “sustainability” that you rightly identify as the magic invocations wielded by the Woke both reflect a deep (even existential) sense of alienation; this is no coincidence, for today increasingly we are all alienated from anything beyond ourselves. Meanwhile there is only one entity, one Potemkin community still standing and ready (and very happy) to gather together and embrace all these atomized and alienated individuals, and to flatter, affirm, protect, and provide for all their anxieties and desires: the managerial state. Its growth and that of the atomized modern self proceed hand-in-hand, for there is no other form of authoritative community remaining. And who created this wasteland of deracinated alienation, narcissistic self-worship, and wrecked authority that has led to the Woke total state? Perhaps here Hayek and the libertarians deserve to be put in the hot seat to sweat a while.

What is the way out of Woke? Would a radical reassertion of the individual over the collective do the trick? No, I think clearly not. This can only drive us deeper into the abyss. For the libertarian approach simply cannot provide the kind of robust community, meaning, and direction that people are increasingly lacking and desperate for, and for which they are drawn to totalitarian ideological movements like the Woke. Nor can libertarianism provide strong communities capable of serving as an intermediary force between people and state, counter-balancing the managerial state’s authority and limiting centralization and eventually totalization. Instead libertarianism can only accelerate social breakdown and atomization. This has always been its most fatal, self-destructive flaw.

It is easy to assume that the solution to mass group-think is to champion the individual, but unfortunately it’s not that straightforward. Only an individual buffered and fortified by robust communities, social frameworks, and authorities like inherited tradition and religious faith will be strong enough to truly function as what we think of as a self-governing individual. Otherwise, exposed in the open and under bombardment, he will rush for the safety of the collective herd, and the state.

So, if we want to defeat it, we’d be much better off if we accept the truth: Woke is individualist.

N.S. Lyons: Radical Individualism Produced a Radical Reaction

I would certainly agree that an assumed universal Christian moral foundation seems to have been what allowed classical liberalism to function as a workable system for the centuries that it lasted. I’d therefore suggest that the logical conclusion about what is happening now is that this foundation has been so completely eroded that, in its absence, liberalism is now collapsing in on itself. But I would point out that it was liberalism itself that eroded away – “liberated” us from – that pre-liberal foundation in the first place.

I’d also note that I am quite sceptical of the argument that, by virtue of its moderation, classical liberalism is somehow the “true liberalism,” while “libertarianism” is deformed by its comparative extremism into something different from liberalism. As far as I’m concerned, if something becomes more purely and completely itself (that is, more “extreme”), it cannot be said to have changed its nature into something different. Rather the original compound – in this case what we call “classical liberalism” – was in itself a product of its character as a mixed or diluted thing. Originally it contained and was moderated by non-liberal elements. It then became more and more liberal precisely as it became less and less classical. 

But I suppose this is getting a bit off topic. I think your identification of trans, sexual, and other minority identities as groups that people “join” in order to gain membership in a quasi-tribal collective to be insightful and quite clearly correct. Though I would say that this only occurs because of the state of atomization such people find themselves in as individuals. Those people most adrift, alone, and exposed, are the ones most primed to run to these toxic identity groups for shelter, protection, and some kind of organizing structure for the psyche. And this state of atomization is, again, created by radical individualism – this is a reaction by liberal individuals to the reality of liberal individualism.

I would suggest, however, that we have managed to arrive at a productive conclusion here from slightly different directions: perhaps we can agree that if such identitarian collectives are dangerous – which obviously I think we can – and that we want people to avoid joining these collectives en masse, then we’re probably going to have to try, one way or another, to reconstruct at least some of the moral and psychological foundations that once successfully undergirded classical liberalism for so long.

[menyhei]

I do believe this is the longest thing I’ve ever written, but also the most important. Read with a stiff drink. – N.S. Lyons

[nicklloydnow]

“If the “mummy war” is a class war writ small, Covid policy followed the same dynamic. It was, in fact, a class war writ so large it encompassed minute micromanagement of nearly every facet of everyday life, for years on end, and doled out material consequences for dissenters. And it was all justified with reference to the supposedly neutral domain of science.

This tracks a slow convergence of supposedly neutral governance with partisan class differences that was well under way before the virus, a phenomenon exhaustively documented following the two plebeian revolutions of Brexit and Trump. These events gestated concurrently with my daughter; I won’t rehash the debates here, save to note that they represented the first shot across the bows of the End of History belief that technocracy could be genuinely neutral, and based in objective evidence.

In questioning this doctrine, the mutineers dragged an incipient class war into the open, between what N.S. Lyons characterises as the “Virtuals” of the laptop class, and the “Physicals” whose work is more rooted in the material world. Amid this conflict, Oster’s plea for amnesty is unlikely to be heard, since under those appeals to neutral science much of Covid policy served in practice as a Virtual counter-volley to the 2016 uprisings.

In its most rarefied, de-materialised, Virtual form, the contours of that counter-volley are captured by a short series of declarations of faith. This text, a kind of Nicene Creed for Virtuals, first appeared in response to Trump’s election, and has multiplied across posters, t-shirts, tote bags, and (in America, where they do such things) signs stuck into the front lawns of the faithful.

The Virtuals’ Creed reads as follows:

In this house, we believe:

Black lives matter

Women’s rights are human rights

No human is illegal

Science is real

Love is love

Kindness is everything

Each of these dicta sounds unimpeachable in theory, but is far more contentious in practice. “No human is illegal”, for instance, sounds true; but how do we manage the welfare state, without a means of distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens?

When this lawn sign first appeared, I could have given you a critical run-down of the political pitfalls and ideological sleights-of-hand buried in all those dicta, bar the claim that Science Is Real. Since then, though, I’ve seen this line in the Virtuals’ Creed weaponised without compunction, as a bludgeon to enforce a moral consensus that wasn’t scientific, and wasn’t rational.

(…)

It may be optimistic of Oster, and others of the Virtual class, to try to restore public faith that Science Is Real. But it’s also understandable. First, for reasons of self-interest: those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority. Doubtless the laptop class would prefer that we judge Covid policy by intention, not results, lest too close an evaluation result in their fingers being prised from the baton of public righteousness.

But the rot goes deeper still, for the very foundation of that moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus. And Covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of grey area between “science” and “moral groupthink”. Where “science” shades into the latter, British care workers and American soldiers and police officers dismissed for refusing a vaccination that doesn’t stop transmission can attest that science is sometimes “real” more in the sense of “institutionally powerful and self-righteous” than in the sense of “true”.

This touches on another source of rage that many would doubtless like to forget: the asymmetry in whose shoulders bore the heaviest load. It wasn’t the lawn-sign people who bore the brunt of lockdowns — they could mostly work from home. Rather, lockdown shuttered countless small businesses permanently, or burned them to the ground in lawn-sign-endorsed riots that were justified on public-health grounds even as others were fined for attending Holy Communion in a car park.

Our journey to this point was, at every stage, narrated as the inescapable conclusion of Science, which is Real. But nearly three years out from the start of the pandemic, it looks a great deal more like the massed consensus of “public health” officials and their journalistic cheerleaders has delivered a public that is sicker, unhappier and poorer across a host of measures.

(…)

And these are all downstream of a pandemic-era public discourse that felt like the Brexit/Trump wars on steroids: a battle for class dominance, in which one side used its stranglehold on public institutions to frame censorship as “fact-checking”, and all dissenters as stupid, unscientific, or actively hateful. It’s not that “we” collectively tried to get it right, and “mistakes were made”. It’s that a self-righteous cabal arrogated to themselves a priestly right to determine the proper social order, and to excommunicate those who didn’t conform. Their record in securing the common good speaks for itself.

(…)

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.”

[atlanticcanada]

Proposed shark tourism project has to walk fine line to balance benefits and safety

A proposed tourism project off the coast of Nova Scotia to let people watch great white sharks through the bars of a submerged cage requires a balancing act between sightseeing and the needs of the animals, says one expert.

Shark watching is a growing global tourism industry, but it has the potential to do harm, Fred Whoriskey, executive director of the Ocean Tracking Network at Dalhousie University, said in a recent interview.

"The balancing act is on the one hand, getting your benefits to come out of that ecotourism activity, versus on the other hand, the potential to either do harm to the animals physically or change their behaviour in ways that could begin to have effects not just on those animals, but on entire ecosystems."

Atlantic Shark Expeditions said it plans to launch its shark-watching tours this fall, offering tourists the opportunity to pay to view the animals from the comfort of a boat -- or from inside a cage submerged in the water.

Owner Neil Hammerschlag, who has a PhD in marine biology and fisheries from the University of Miami, said he's conducted research on sharks and the potential effects of ecotourism.

"Unlike some other shark dive tourism that might involve feeding the animals, we don't intend, or we try not to feed the animals," he said.

"We also don't stay in the same spot. We're going to be moving around."

Hammerschlag said the primary goal of his venture is science. The ecotourism project, he said, is to fund his scientific work, which includes photographing the animals and tagging them to monitor their movements.

"Science is the driver and ecotourism is coming along for the ride," Hammerschlag said.

 Aaron MacNeil, professor in Dalhousie University's biology department, said he questions Hammerschlag's motivations.

"If this was a scientific enterprise, you wouldn't be charging people money and creating a business around it. Right? So the motivation, the primary objective here, seems to be having people come and have an experience with these animals. And that's not what you would do if your primary goal is a scientific study."

MacNeil said he is particularly concerned about Hammerschlag's plan to offer sightseeing tours about five kilometres off the shore of Liverpool, N.S., where surfers commonly ride waves.

"For somebody to come in and plunk down there, you know, this shark caging operation, a diving operation … that's probably not in the public interest, it's going to have a raised threat for recreational users."

Hammerschlag, meanwhile, said the five-kilometre distance off southwest Nova Scotia is "really far away" from the shore and that the tourist boats won't interfere with surfers.

But MacNeil said that distance "seems to be pulled out of thin air," adding that he would like the government to come up with a science-based justification for that number.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada confirmed it has issued a Species at Risk Act permit to Atlantic Shark Expeditions, which allows the company to conduct scientific research regarding the animals' population trends, health and habitat. The permit will be valid for the period of May 1 to Nov. 30, for the years 2023 and 2024, said department spokeswoman Christine Lyons.

"These permits are issued under specific circumstances defined in the Species at Risk Act and only when certain preconditions are met," she said in a statement. Lyons declined an interview request to explain what those preconditions were, how the department would monitor the company's operations or what justified the five-kilometre distance from shore. She said she would send a response next week.

The great white shark is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and listed as endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

Whoriskey said the most important measure to take when dealing with an endangered species is to protect them from harm. He said that if animals see people feeding them from boats, "you're changing the behaviour of the animals, you're conditioning them to believe that people mean food."

"And when a boat comes up, they'll come up and they'll start looking for food from people and potentially down the road even becoming aggressive if they don't get food."

A 2020 study in the journal Environmental Law backed Whoriskey's statements, saying that while tourism may provide economic incentives to protect shark populations in some cases, feeding the animals has both ecological and safety implications. The effects of such actions, the study said, are hotly contested among scientists.

"Most report some behavioural changes in participating sharks, but the significance and severity of these changes is the subject of intense and ongoing debate," said the study, called "Blood in the water: shark feeding, tourism, and the law."

Hammerschlag disagreed, saying a shark is not going to associate a boat with a human.

 "The idea is to attract the shark to the boat to get their interest, but the interest might not last very long," he said. "And often when the activity stops, the animals go back to doing their normal thing and don't seem to hang out in those areas."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2023.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/dAbKtF5

[emoxnews]

National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles

National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles

NOTE: The following statement was drafted by Will Chamberlain, Christopher DeMuth, Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony, Daniel McCarthy, Joshua Mitchell, N.S. Lyons, John O’Sullivan, and R.R. Reno on behalf of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The statement reflects a distinctly Western point of view. However, we look forward to future discourse and collaboration with movements akin to our own in India, Japan,…

[arcticdementor]

Today the State Department launches a two-day Summit For Democracy, featuring the participation of 110 invited countries from around the world (but not Hungary, because even though Hungary is a democratic country, and a member of NATO, Hungary is Very, Very Bad™). The idea is to united world democracies to stand firm against “authoritarianism.” Golly. Here’s a fantastic essay by N.S. Lyons, from his can’t-miss newsletter The Upheaval, on how this is a phony exercise, given what the West has become in the pursuit of soft totalitarianism.

…

I assure you this is not the worst on the list. Many Americans have no idea how punitive other liberal democracies have become in policing “hate speech” against Sacred Victims. Read Lyons’s survey; it will shock you. As I write in Live Not By Lies, this soft totalitarianism is coming about for therapeutic reasons: to guarantee safety, comfort, and well being. This is not something that is going to happen someday; as Lyons details, this is something that is well underway right now. If we did not have the First Amendment in this country, people like Joe Biden would be eager to lead America towards the example set by the UK (especially Scotland), Germany, and other countries in the (checks notes) Free World. They would be very happy for America to replicate from sea to shining sea the left-wing illiberalism of many college campuses.

Here’s how Lyons ends his essay:

That old era of liberty, the Age of Liberalism, is over. The real reason Biden’s summit for liberal democracies will fail, why it will not accomplish anything in turning back the likes of authoritarian China, is because there no longer is any liberal West. Everywhere upon the face of the earth, Actually Existing Liberalism is now just oligarch technocratic progressivism wearing liberal principles as a skin suit and flirting with authoritarianism.

And if you can prove me wrong, if you can find me even one country still truly committed to liberal principles, please let me know – because I would like a visa.

[kontextmaschine]

Still optimistic about the fever breaking and the Woke fucking of into irrelevance? There’s a bad take “ How Much Longer Until The Woke Take Over?” from Briggs and a good one “ No, the Revolution Isn’t Over” from N.S. Lyons. Gotta be honest I don’t see a long run victory without something nuclear, like going all Dissolution of the Monasteries on the entire university system.

Ah, another loss in 2022 or 2024 and the Dems start purging them.

There's that post going around so exasperated that people are mixing the Democratic Party of America up with this vague miasmatic cultural scene interchangeably

And okay but maybe that's influence of the common understanding where amid 3 straight Republican terms in the '80s (and no Democrat re-elected since Truman) the DLC-led Dems did in fact scorn the hippies, marginalize them in nominating and other party struggles, and thereby at least leave them exposed to attrition in the broader culture. Which it did by centralizing the granting of boons and access, and denying the juicy ones to those who lent their checkbooks, voices, or talents to off-the-reservation stuff, while opening the floodgates to those ready to play ball. So the understanding is that the Democratic Party is in fact the vehicle for resolving this, and if they haven't yet that's something to hold against their leadership

[dostoyevsky-official]

the guy who wrote the palladium article, n.s. lyons, comes across as convincing and well-read. but in the undercurrent i sensed something off, which becomes prominent in what he focuses other than china on his substack, which is a ceaseless argument against or at the very least an annoyingly incessant preoccupation with Wokeness as Religion discourse. that post in particular runs the gamut of discredited thinkers from peter turchin to andrew sullivan to james lindsay, and positively relies on the “woke dictionary” to supply a section of that essay. googling wang huning America against America also leads to angela nagle’s substack review, where she credits logo daedalus and aime tereese for introducing her to the work. which, as i’ve bolded, relies on alan bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in its barely-two page bibliography (for 350 pages of text). n.s. lyons shows up there, praising nagle in a comment, and she, in turn, priases him.

if you—happily—don’t know these names, don’t bother wasting your time. it’s a list of the worst offenders for the most moronic arguments produced in the new iteration of the Culture Wars, more often producing a poorly-shaped fig leaf for openly reactionary or fascist politics and rhetoric. allan bloom’s book along with harod bloom’s essayistics launched that original late 1980s/early 1990s culture war, which bears a striking resemblance to the one unfolding now; if you take an article from then at random, it would read much as any conservative article today.

i’m not against criticism of whatever is shaping the social/cultural moment (—i am not going to call it wokeness because i’m not a man/womanchild). the trouble is that there is hardly any engagement with it that doesn’t rise above superficial whining. mark lilla, who i would place as a mid-century conservative, wrote a terrific essay about not so much “wokeness as religion,” but on the pervasiveness of a secularized protestant ethic that crosses political lines and makes life unbearable for everyone on the sidelines, or outside america. matthew karp, from the left, wrote an incisive critique of the 1619 project that doesn’t argue about a new “original sin,” but rather discusses the implications of those chosen historical periodizations and frameworks on policies, and their efficacy, put forward as a result. these are two i remember from the last 13 months. what else?

[newstfionline]

Monday, February 21, 2022

Canada’s protests settle down, but could echo in politics (AP) Most of the streets around the Canadian Parliament are quiet now. The Ottawa protesters who vowed never to give up are largely gone, chased away by policemen in riot gear. The relentless blare of truckers’ horns has gone silent. But the trucker protest, which grew until it closed a handful of Canada-U.S. border posts and shut down key parts of the capital city for weeks, could echo for years in Canadian politics and perhaps south of the border. The protest was first aimed at a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers but also encompassed fury over the range of COVID-19 restrictions and hatred of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “I think we’ve started something here,” said Mark Suitor, a 33-year-old protester from Hamilton, Ontario, speaking as police retook control of the streets around Parliament.

A New Class War Comes to Canada (NYT-opinion) A great and mostly unknown prophet of our time is Michael Young, whose book “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” published way back in 1958, both coined the term in its title and predicted, in its fictional vision of the 21st century, meritocracy’s unhappy destination: not the serene rule of the deserving and talented, but a society where a ruling class selected for intelligence but defined by arrogance and insularity faces a roiling populism whose grievances shift but whose anger at the new class order is a constant.      This year it’s Canada’s turn to live inside Young’s somewhat dystopian scenario, set in the 2030s but here ahead of schedule. On one side of the trucker protests you have Justin Trudeau, a condensed symbol of meritocracy-blurring-into-aristocracy—with degrees from two of Canada’s three best universities, but also the pedigree of being Pierre Trudeau’s son—and behind him a Canadian establishment that has followed public-health advice on Covid more closely than the United States, imposing more stringent restrictions throughout the pandemic. Then on the other side you have the truckers and their allies: A complex mix of forces in the style of France’s gilets jaunes, organized in part by right-wingers but inclusive of all kinds of characters and ideas, defined by an exhaustion with pandemic restrictions and a strong connection to the physical portion of the economy, the part that relies on brawn and savvy, not just the manipulation of words and symbols on a screen. To quote the writer N.S. Lyons, the trucker protests have sharpened a division between “Virtuals” and “Practicals”—meaning the people whose professional lives are lived increasingly in the realm of the “digital and the abstract,” and the people who work in the “mundane physical reality” upon which the virtual society still depends.      As Lyons points out, in the Canadian clash each side has used the weapons appropriate to its position. The truckers have leveraged the imposing presence of their trucks and the sympathy of other Practicals—from tow-truck drivers to cops—to attack the physical underpinnings of the capital’s economy. Meanwhile the counterstrike, while it’s finally evolved to actual physical removal, has been strikingly virtual: first a PR blitz to encourage friendly media to brand all the truckers as racists and anti-Semites and Trump supporters, then the convenient hacking and “doxxing” of donors to the convoy, and then an invocation of the Emergencies Act which lets the government attack the protesters via the digital realm, freezing bank accounts and even cryptocurrency funds connected to the protests.

Cuban tourism industry flounders (Reuters) Cuba is struggling to reawaken its tourism industry after months of pandemic-induced slumber as travelers stay away, threatening to derail the government’s plan to haul the economy out of a deepening crisis. The communist-run island, long a popular Caribbean destination, has been betting on tourism to power 4% economic growth this year after the coronavirus pandemic slashed output, resulting in food and medicine shortages and power outages, and contributing to the largest anti-government protests since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. Empty beaches and hotels could prove yet another blow to Cuba’s ailing and inefficient state-run economy, which depends on foreign exchange from tourism, which accounts for 10% of GDP, to purchase basics such as food and medicine on the global market.

China’s willingness to work locally is beating the U.S. in South America (Japan Times) In the hinterland of Argentina, Mario Pizarro’s office looks like a shrine to China. There’s the framed photo of a Chinese peasant with Pizarro’s face superimposed beneath the conical farmer hat. There’s the blue-robed smiling Buddha statue. And there’s the model wind turbine from a Chinese company with an inscription in English and Mandarin: “Create Our Future Together.” Pizarro, 62, is the energy secretary of Jujuy, a province high in the Andes that borders Bolivia and Chile. Overlooking a river, his office building is ordinary—shabby, even—but the projects he and his colleagues oversee are anything but. And the one country that’s made them all possible is China. Chinese technology and money have helped build one of Latin America’s largest solar energy plants in Jujuy, where hundreds of thousands of panels coat the desert like giant dominoes. And beneath the remote, craggy hills and vast salt lakes lie veins of copper, lithium and zinc, the raw materials of 21st century technology—including Chinese-made electric-car batteries.      It’s no secret that China has been pouring resources into South America this century, chipping away at the U.S.’s historic dominance and making itself the continent’s No. 1 trading partner. But while international focus has turned in recent years to China’s ventures in Africa and Asia, an important shift has gone largely unnoticed in the country’s approach to South America: going local to expand and strengthen its financial grip. Instead of focusing on national leaders, China and its companies have built relationships from the ground up. In 2019 alone, at least eight Brazilian governors and four deputy governors traveled to China. In a September 2019 speech, Zou Xiaoli, China’s ambassador to Argentina, said his country’s infrastructure push was helping weave Latin America into the global marketplace. “China will lend strong support to Argentina’s economic and social development,” he said.

People with COVID in England won’t need to self-isolate (AP) People with COVID-19 won’t be legally required to self-isolate in England starting in the coming week, the U.K. government has announced, as part of a plan for “living with COVID” that is also likely to see testing for the coronavirus scaled back. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said ending all of the legal restrictions brought in to curb the spread of the virus will let people in the U.K. “protect ourselves without restricting our freedoms.” Johnson’s Conservative government lifted most virus restrictions in January, scrapping vaccine passports for venues and ending mask mandates in most settings apart from hospitals in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which set their own public health rules, also have opened up, although more slowly.

Passenger found alive on Greece-Italy ferry after blaze, 11 still missing (Reuters) Fire fighters battling a blaze on a ferry sailing from Greece to Italy discovered a survivor on the stern of the still burning vessel on Sunday, the Greek coast guard said, reviving hopes that other missing passengers could still be found alive. Rescuers managed to take at least 281 out of 292 passengers and crew to safety after the blaze broke out on the Italian-flagged Euroferry Olympia early on Friday, but 11 people are still missing, according to the coast guard and ferry operator. Firefighters have been trying for days to contain the fire and cool scorching temperatures on the 183-metre (600 ft) ship to allow emergency crews to board and rescue any survivors.

In Ukraine Crisis, the Looming Threat of a New Cold War (NYT) Vladimir Pozner was an English-language Soviet propaganda editor in Moscow in 1962, a job that gave him rare access to American newspapers and magazines. That allowed him to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis outside the Soviet media filter, and sense a world at the brink of war. Mr. Pozner, a longtime Russian television journalist, says he now feels something similar. “The smell of war is very strong,” he said in an interview on Friday, a day when shelling intensified along the front line in eastern Ukraine. “If we talk about the relationship between Russia and the West—and in particular, the United States—I feel that it is as bad as it was at any time in the Cold War, and perhaps, in a certain sense, even worse.” Unlike 1962, it is not the threat of nuclear war but of a major land war that now looms over Europe. But the feeling that Russia and the United States are entering a new version of the Cold War has become inescapable. For now, no one knows just how the world will emerge from the crisis—whether Mr. Putin is staging an elaborate, expensive bluff or is truly on the verge of launching the biggest military offensive in Europe since 1945. The crisis has brought Mr. Putin some tactical wins as well as perilous risks. Since first mounting a threatening troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders last spring, he has managed to seize Washington’s attention—a goal for a Kremlin that, as in the Cold War, sees confrontation with the United States as its defining conflict. But his actions have also spurred anti-Russian attitudes and further united Europe and the United States against Russia—something that should worry the Kremlin given the West’s still-far-greater global economic and political might.

Biden-Putin meeting discussed as Ukraine war fears loom (AP) The U.S. and Russian presidents have tentatively agreed to meet in a last-ditch diplomatic effort to stave off Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine as heavy shelling continued Monday in a conflict in eastern Ukraine that is feared will spark the Russian offensive. French President Emmanuel Macron sought to broker a possible meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a series of phone calls that dragged into the night. Macron’s office said both leaders had “accepted the principle of such a summit,” to be followed by a broader summit meeting also involving other “relevant stakeholders to discuss security and strategic stability in Europe.” It added that the meetings “can only be held on the condition that Russia does not invade Ukraine.”

Hong Kong reports more than 6,000 new cases in virus surge (AP) Hong Kong reported 15 coronavirus deaths and more than 6,000 confirmed cases for a second day in a surge the Chinese territory’s leader says its overwhelming hospitals. Also Saturday, the government announced plans to have construction crews from mainland China build isolation units with 10,000 beds after crowding at hospitals forced patients to wait outdoors in winter cold. There were 6,063 confirmed cases in the previous 24 hours, raising the territory’s total to 46,763. Hong Kong has tightened travel and business controls as it tries to contain the surge.

Ethiopia turns on the turbines at giant Nile hydropower plant (Reuters) Ethiopia began producing electricity on Sunday from its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a multi-billion-dollar hydropower plant on the River Nile that neighbours Sudan and Egypt have worried will cause water shortages downstream. After flicking a digital switch to turn on the turbines in the first phase of the project, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sought to assure those nations that his country did not wish to harm their interests. His government says the project is key to its economic development, but Egypt and Sudan depend on the waters of the Nile and have worried it will affect them. Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent, has the second biggest electricity deficit in Africa according to the World Bank, with about two thirds of the population of around 110 million lacking a connection to the grid.

[azindy]

Wokeism Contains the Seeds of Its Own Destruction - American Thinker

[guillohdv]

Meditación de un Capítulo Diario de la Divina Voluntad Jesús quiso sufrir en su Humanidad para rehacer la naturaleza humana Volumen 7 - Capítulo 76 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OWQ7SUe7fKNunpTQ7TzExDwBE-tU41zzHPUS4hBr3Q0/edit EL REINO DEL "FIAT" EN MEDIO DE LAS CRIATURAS - LIBRO DE CIELO - LA LLAMADA A LA CRIATURA AL ORDEN, A SU PUESTO Y A LA FINALIDAD PARA LA CUAL FUE CREADA POR DIOS VOLUMEN 7 Enero 13, 1907 Jesús quiso sufrir en su Humanidad para rehacer la naturaleza humana Continuando mi habitual estado, por un instante he visto a mi bendito Jesús y me ha dicho: “Hija mía, cuánto amo a las almas, mira, la naturaleza humana estaba corrompida, humillada, sin esperanza de gloria y de resurgimiento, y Yo quise sufrir todas las humillaciones en mi Humanidad, especialmente quise ser desnudado, flagelado y que a pedazos cayeran mis carnes bajo los azotes, casi deshaciendo mi Humanidad para rehacer la humanidad de las criaturas, y hacerla resurgir llena de vida, de honor y de gloria a la vida eterna. ¿Qué otra cosa podía hacer y que no haya hecho?” Para reflexionar……. N.S. Jesucristo: …. “es tanto el amor con que amo a las almas, que no apenas el alma se decide a darse a Mí, Yo la circundo de abundante Gracia, la acaricio, la conmuevo, la hago recogida, la doto de gracias sensibles, de fervores, de inspiraciones, de necesidades del corazón, y entonces el alma viéndose tan agraciada comienza a amarme, hace como un fondo de oraciones en su corazón, de prácticas piadosas y se decide a ejercitarse en las virtudes, todo esto forma un prado florido en el alma, pero mi Amor no queda contento con las solas flores, sino que quiere frutos y por eso comienza a hacer caer las flores, es decir, la despoja del amor sensible, del fervor y de todo lo demás para hacer nacer los frutos.”........ Vol. 11, capt. 122, Mayo 25, 1916 Por qué el Verbo se hizo carne 456 Con el Credo Niceno-Constantinopolitano respondemos confesando: "Por nosotros los hombres y por nuestra salvación bajó del cielo, y por obra del Espíritu Santo se encarnó de María la Virgen y se hizo hombre" (DS 150). 457 El Verbo se encarnó para salvarnos reconciliándonos con Dios: "Dios nos amó y nos envió a su Hijo como propiciación por nuestros pecados" (1 Jn 4, 10). "El Padre envió a su Hijo para ser salvador del mundo" (1 Jn 4, 14). "Él se manifestó para quitar los pecados" (1 Jn 3, 5): «Nuestra naturaleza enferma exigía ser sanada; desgarrada, ser restablecida; muerta, ser resucitada. Habíamos perdido la posesión del bien, era necesario que se nos devolviera. Encerrados en las tinieblas, hacía falta que nos llegara la luz; estando cautivos, esperábamos un salvador; prisioneros, un socorro; esclavos, un libertador. ¿No tenían importancia estos razonamientos? ¿No merecían conmover a Dios hasta el punto de hacerle bajar hasta nuestra naturaleza humana para visitarla, ya que la humanidad se encontraba en un estado tan miserable y tan desgraciado?» (San Gregorio de Nisa, Oratio catechetica, 15: PG 45, 48B). 458 El Verbo se encarnó para que nosotros conociésemos así el amor de Dios: "En esto se manifestó el amor que Dios nos tiene: en que Dios envió al mundo a su Hijo único para que vivamos por medio de él" (1 Jn 4, 9). "Porque tanto amó Dios al mundo que dio a su Hijo único, para que todo el que crea en él no perezca, sino que tenga vida eterna" (Jn 3, 16). 459 El Verbo se encarnó para ser nuestro modelo de santidad: "Tomad sobre vosotros mi yugo, y aprended de mí ... "(Mt 11, 29). "Yo soy el Camino, la Verdad y la Vida. Nadie va al Padre sino por mí" (Jn 14, 6). Y el Padre, en el monte de la Transfiguración, ordena: "Escuchadle" (Mc 9, 7;cf. Dt 6, 4-5). Él es, en efecto, el modelo de las bienaventuranzas y la norma de la Ley nueva: "Amaos los unos a los otros como yo os he amado" (Jn 15, 12). Este amor tiene como consecuencia la ofrenda efectiva de sí mismo (cf. Mc 8, 34). 460 El Verbo se encarnó para hacernos "partícipes de la naturaleza divina" (2 P 1, 4): "Porque tal es la razón por la que el Verbo se hizo hombre, y el Hijo de Dios, Hijo del hombre: para que el hombre al entrar en comunión con el Verbo y al recibir así la filiación divina, se convirtiera en hijo de Dios" (San Ireneo de Lyon, Adversus haereses, 3, 19, 1). "Porque el Hijo de Dios se hizo hombre para hacernos Dios" (San Atanasio de Alejandría, De Incarnatione, 54, 3: PG 25, 192B). TOMADO DE: CATECISMO DE LA IGLESIA CATOLICA - PRIMERA PARTE: LA PROFESIÓN DE LA FE - SEGUNDA SECCIÓN: LA PROFESIÓN DE LA FE CRISTIANA - CAPÍTULO SEGUNDO - CREO EN JESUCRISTO, HIJO ÚNICO DE DIOS - ARTÍCULO 3 - "JESUCRISTO FUE CONCEBIDO POR OBRA Y GRACIA DEL ESPÍRITU SANTO Y NACIÓ DE SANTA MARÍA VIRGEN" - Párrafo 1 - EL HIJO DE DIOS SE HIZO HOMBRE - I. Por qué el Verbo se hizo carne http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism_sp/p1s2a3p1_sp.html Por qué Dios quiso la Cruz Por: José María Iraburu El Señor quiso salvar al mundo por la cruz de Cristo (137). ¿Pero por qué quiso Dios elegir en su providencia ese plan de salvación, al parecer tan cruel y absurdo, prefiriéndolo a otros modos posibles? Es un gran mysterium fidei, pero la misma Revelación da a la Iglesia en las sagradas Escrituras respuestas luminosas a esta cuestión máxima. 1.–Para revelar el Amor divino. La Trinidad divina quiso la Cruz porque en ella expresa a la humanidad la declaración más plena de su amor. 2.–Para expiar por el pecado del mundo. Jesucristo es «el Cordero de Dios que quita el pecado del mundo» mediante el sacrificio pascual de la Nueva Alianza, sellada en su sangre. 3.–Para revelar todas las virtudes. La Pasión del Señor es la revelación máxima de la caridad divina, y también al mismo tiempo de todas las virtudes cristianas. 4.–Para revelar la verdad a los hombres. En efecto, bien sabe Dios que el hombre, cautivo del Padre de la Mentira, cae por el engaño en el pecado, y que solamente podrá ser liberado de la mentira y del pecado si recibe la luz de la verdad. Y por eso nos envía a Cristo, el Salvador, «para dar testimonio de la verdad» (Jn 18,37), para «santificarnos en la verdad» (17,17), para darse a nosotros como «camino, verdad y vida»(14,6). 5.–Para revelar el horror del pecado y del infierno. ¿Cómo es posible que Dios providente decida salvar al mundo por la muerte sacrificial de Cristo en la cruz? Quiso Dios que el horror indecible del pecado se pusiera de manifiesto en la muerte terrible de su Hijo, el Santo de Dios, el Inocente. «El pecado del mundo» exige la muerte del Justo y la consigue, y en esta muerte espantosa manifiesta a los hombres todo el horror de sus culpas. 6.–Para revelar a los hombres que solo por la cruz pueden salvarse. Sabiendo el Hijo de Dios que «su Pasión redentora es la razón de ser de su Encarnación» (Catecismo 607), y que precisamente en la Cruz es donde va a consumar su obra salvadora.. «Suplicamos fervorosamente que aquel mismo amor que impulsó a Cristo a dejarse crucificar por nosotros sea infundido por el Espíritu Santo en nuestros propios corazones, con objeto de que consideremos al mundo como crucificado para nosotros, y nosotros sepamos vivir crucificados para el mundo [cf. Gál 5,14]» San Fulgencio de Ruspe CONTINUA: https://goo.gl/oab2kf

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Why is the territory of Ukraine strategically so important?

I don’t think the actual territory of Ukraine is especially important strategically. Yes, Russia has some strategic interests in Ukrainian territory, including access to its naval base in Crimea, and control of various natural gas, other resources, and infrastructure. But I think viewing this conflict as being about a need for land or resources would be a big analytical mistake. Russia has plenty of gas already, and the last thing Russia needs is more land. Then there is the idea of Russia wanting Ukraine to remain a neutral buffer zone between NATO and itself, which is a genuine strategic interest for Russia. But I also do not believe this was the main reason for Russia’s invasion, which was such a dangerous gamble to take—Putin had much bigger goals than these, in my view. [...]

We should consider the political and geopolitical context in the months before the war. The United States had just withdrawn in defeat from Afghanistan, and the Afghan National Army, which the US had trained and equipped for two decades, collapsed within a week. New US President Biden was already politically on the back foot, with inflation and economic troubles already looming and his approval ratings exceptionally low. The United States was wracked with intense political and ideological divisions. Internationally, divisions between Europe and the United States appeared to be large and growing, as were divisions within the European Union. In contrast, the Russia-China relationship appeared to have reached new heights of strength. Meanwhile, Biden appeared determined to nonetheless imminently accelerate a new Cold War, framing a global battle between ‘democracies and autocracies’, and preparing new sanctions and technology controls on US adversaries.

In this context, I think Putin reasonably believed he faced a unique opportunity to overturn the whole world order. If his ‘special military operation’ had gone as he seems to have hoped it would—given Russia’s tactical planning—, the US-trained Ukrainian army would have collapsed just as quickly the Afghan army did, Ukraine’s leadership would have fled the country just like the Afghan leadership, and Russia would have taken political control of Ukraine within weeks. We know from their intelligence predictions, and the fact that they offered to fly Ukraine’s president out of the country, that Washington also expected this outcome. They would then respond with sanctions, but given the reality of the new facts on the ground, Europe would fracture over what to do, and there would be no unified response. The credibility of NATO and the whole concept of a coherent US-led ‘rules-based liberal international order’ would shatter. The stranglehold this order had imposed on Russia and China (and others) would finally be broken in a single ‘defensive’ stroke, paving the way for a ‘Eurasian Century’ to begin.

This was, I believe, the primary political objective of the war. Unfortunately for Putin, everything immediately began to go wrong for Russia from the start, and the strategic outcome has so far mostly been the opposite of what he intended.

Even though the United States is not a belligerent party, it has made itself a central player in the conflict. Another difference between this war and previous international conflicts is that the appeal of the United States to rally to forge a ‘world community’ in defence of the American-built world system and against Russia is weakening. How do you see this phenomenon and what are their potential consequences? Is it the appeal of the narrative or the material resources behind it that has weakened?

It is true that Washington has not been able to rally a ‘world community’ behind its position on the war. That is to say, it has not been able to convince a majority of the countries of the world to join in isolating Russia, including India, the Middle Eastern states, Africa, or Latin America. And of course China. But the reality is that the developed bloc the United States has managed to induce to follow (including Europe and key Asian states like Japan and South Korea) nonetheless represents a majority of global economic power, nearly 60 per cent of global GDP. In comparison, China and Russia combined only represent some 20 per cent. This fact is frankly much more important than the majority of the world’s smaller states having dissented from Washington. At least in the short term, America’s geopolitical position has been greatly strengthened by the war.

However, America’s stance should not be overestimated either. What’s clear now is that many, even most, nations would leap at the chance to escape the dictates of American ‘leadership’ if there was an acceptable alternative available. This is due to both the material reasons that American policy may undermine their development, and the narrative or values reasons that they may chafe under America’s growing political and cultural demands. They are now only waiting for that opportunity to arrive—or even actively positioning themselves to prepare for it, such as in the case of Saudi Arabia, which has moved to begin selling oil in currencies other than the US dollar. So in the medium-to-long term, America’s position is much less certain. But whether a post-American world order ever arrives will probably ultimately have more to do with whether China can continue to achieve rapid economic growth than anything to do with American diplomatic strategy.

The European Union apparently wants to do everything, including sanctions on the energy sector, in order to have Russia pay a very high price for its aggression against Ukraine. But what is the price that the West will have to pay if it indefinitely alienates Russia?

It looks like Europe will pay a high price indeed. It may effectively end the Russian military threat to Europe for some time, but losing Russian energy supplies will induce a heavy cost. To date, European countries—or rather parts of Europe, such as Germany—have managed to maintain themselves as global manufacturing centres. However, a key factor in being a competitive manufacturing power is cheap energy to run factories. If energy—along with labour—is cheaper elsewhere in the world, then manufacturers will move elsewhere. Thus, even if Europe is able to replace Russian energy (such as with American gas exports), that energy will be much more expensive. Therefore, European independent manufacturing capacity is in serious trouble. This loss will further undercut Europe’s strategic autonomy, while US economic and strategic influence grows, including through both its military power and increased sales of US energy, armaments, and other manufactured goods.

The strategic and economic interests of every major power—including, of course, Russia, the United States and China—around the world can be recognised regarding this war. They are writing their own stories. The European countries, however, are exceptions. They seem to be unable to write their own stories and negotiate a ceasefire in their own continent. What are the lessons learned from this perspective of the strategic autonomy of the European continent? Did Europe lose its ability to determine its own path?

Yes, it essentially has. The dream of strategic autonomy, in the sense of how France’s Emmanuel Macron conceived of it—as Europe charting its own course, not beholden to the United States, China, or anyone else— is now effectively dead for the time being. Europe has fully thrown itself in behind America, yielding its strategic decision-making to Washington in essence. The next stage will be immense American pressure on Europe to begin decoupling itself economically from China. This is exactly what the United States needs to do to isolate and outcompete China, and would indeed help defuse potential security threats to Europe. But complying will make Europe even more dependent on the US market, while likely further undermining European manufacturing. The end result will be a weaker Europe, a weaker China, and a stronger United States — a fine outcome as far as Washington is concerned.

As to why European countries seem chronically unable to write their own stories and chart their own courses of action, I think that fundamentally comes down to the post-modern mindset of post-WWII Europe, which consciously sought to abandon the idea of the nation, and therefore any framework for determining or advancing the national interest. They sought to replace this with what is now commonly known as ‘globalism’, but globalism provides no guidance on how to make decisions in the effectively zero-sum world of geopolitical power. [...]

How do you see the approach the Hungarian Prime Minister represents during the European political debates, urging ceasefire and peace negotiations?

His approach seems eminently sensible for Hungary, which has been placed in a very difficult position by the war. Besides the serious impact on Hungary in terms of energy prices and other more direct effects of the war, the longer-term impact on European manufacturing described earlier also spells trouble for Hungary, given that a significant portion of its economy effectively serves as a key part of the German manufacturing supply chain. Growing pressure from the United States moving forward to decouple from China will also be an economic negative for Hungary. So. there is no real upside to Hungary from prolonging the war, or from entirely throwing itself behind American goals in general, only risk. Broadly speaking, the same case could be made for much of Europe (with some exceptions). Moreover, the possibility of the war could significantly escalating, even to the use of nuclear weapons, remains very real, especially the longer it progresses. Unfortunately, many have come to see the outcome of the war as existential. So I do not see Hungary’s position as in any way radical or ‘pro-Russia’, even if there are strong arguments by others for why the West should continue to support Ukrainian military advances. This should be a topic open for honest debate.

[atlanticcanada]

Pictou County man faces dozens of charges after series of break-ins, thefts; police seize equipment stolen from fire department

A man is facing more than three dozen charges after a string of break-ins and thefts -- including the theft of life-saving equipment from a volunteer fire department -- in Pictou and Colchester counties and East Hants.

Pictou County District RCMP, Colchester County District RCMP, and East Hants District RCMP responded to the break-ins and thefts between Oct. 25 and Nov. 17.

On Nov. 16, Colchester County RCMP found and seized an abandoned enclosed trailer that had previously been stolen from a property in Valley, N.S.

Police identified a person of interest and arrested a 26-year-old man from Lyons Brook on Nov. 17.

The RCMP executed a search warrant at a property in Lyons Brook on Nov. 18. Police say they seized several items, including a loaded rifle, a shotgun with ammunition, and many high-value tools, including “Jaws of Life” rescue equipment that had been stolen from the Barneys River Volunteer Fire Department.

Police say they also seized a truck that was reported stolen in Ontario in October.

Aaron Eildert Rice, 26, of Lyons Brooks, has been charged with:

break and enter (seven counts)

theft (eight counts)

possession of stolen property (three counts)

fraud

using a stolen credit card (five counts)

identity theft (two counts)

careless use of a firearm (two counts)

possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose (two counts)

unauthorized possession of a firearm (two counts)

possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized (two counts)

possession of a firearm while prohibited (three counts)

possession of a firearm in a motor vehicle (two counts)

Rice remains in custody and is set to appear in Truro provincial court on Wednesday.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/5W3TJr6

[atlanticcanada]

Cape Breton cleanup: Military touchdown, animals evacuated, and Trudeau visit Tuesday

Some of the Sydney area's busiest roadways have been blocked by trees, but military members hit the ground Tuesday to help clean up.

Captain Matthew Casey is living in Sydney. He says to be able to assist some neighbours in desperate need means a lot, but comes at a personal cost.

"My wife and three kids are at home right now, so I'm kind of trying to juggle all that stuff, but they understand that daddy needs to be out here working," said Casey.

For many Cape Bretoners, they have entered their fourth day in the dark. More than 400 Nova Scotia Power workers deployed with the military Tuesday morning.

One Whitney Pier, N.S., resident says these are signs of light at the end of the tunnel.

"That gives me great hope, great hope, knowing that there's help on the way. It's just a matter of waiting," said Kathy Stockley.

Fiona didn't only impact people, but about 32 animals have been evacuated from the Cape Breton SPCA as the storm caused damage and power outages.

"Some are in need of medical care, but really as Cape Breton rebuilds, their best bet at adoption would be at some of our other shelters," said Sarah Lyon with the Nova Scotia SPCA.

As for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seeing the damage first hand in Cape Breton, the province's liberal leader says his message to Trudeau will be clear.

"Money does need to get out the door very quickly because people are experiencing a financial crunch right now," said Liberal Leader Zach Churchill.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/TucDIyS

[arcticdementor]

On July 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a cable to American embassies across the globe with new instructions. In the face of what he described as the growing threat from authoritarian and populist forces emanating from countries around the world, he urged U.S. diplomats to actively “seek ways to exert effective pressure on those countries to uphold democratic norms and respect human rights,” and vowed that “standing up for democracy and human rights everywhere is not in tension with America’s national interests nor with our national security.” This, he specified, must apply even to America’s allies and partners, declaring that “there is no relationship or situation where we will stop raising human rights concerns.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has explicitly characterized his foreign policy as waging “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” and described the world as at an “inflection point” that will determine for the future “who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake.” And while he has named China and Russia as the top threats to democracy, he has stated that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.”

This kind of rhetoric has led many to describe Biden as gearing up to lead a new round of global ideological competition akin to the Cold War, and Blinken’s cable appears to be a step toward operationalizing this conception into everyday U.S. policy.

…

Blinken’s invitation had in fact been a response to a June 26 declaration made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, which itself followed the completion of a “comprehensive report on systemic racism,” which had unsurprisingly discovered its titular subject ingrained around the world – especially in the “excessive policing of Black bodies and communities” in the United States. In her statement, Bachelet castigated the West for a “piecemeal approach to dismantling systems entrenched in centuries of discrimination and violence,” declared that “the status quo is untenable,” and called instead for an immediate “whole-of-society” “systemic response,” with a “transformative agenda” to uproot systemic racism everywhere and implement the “restorative justice” urgently demanded by “the worldwide mobilization of people calling for racial justice.”

The Biden administration could hardly have responded with anything less than full-throated support for such an idea, given that battling the omnipresent specter of America’s “systemic racism” has become a core feature of the administration’s political identity.

And few administration officials have embraced this battle with as much personal zeal as Blinken, who moved immediately after his confirmation to not only install a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the State Department (in a powerful new position reporting only to himself), but ordered every bureau in the department to also appoint a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Diversity and Inclusion as well – with his stated goal being “to incorporate diversity and inclusion into the [State] Department’s work at every level.”

…

Speaking of that kind of thing, most of those upset about Blinken’s invitation of the UNHRC’s racism inquisitors strangely seem to have missed another development in a related front of the global culture war.

This despite the fact that the State Department is eager for you to know that, “On June 23, the United States led, and 20 countries co-sponsored, its first-ever side event on the human rights of transgender women, highlighting the violence and structural, legal, and intersectional barriers faced by transgender women of color.”

So there’s that. But side event to what? That would be the last session of the UNHRC, where the U.S. worked to address assorted “dire human rights situations” by helping to pioneer the launch of the “Group of Friends of the Mandate of the United Nations Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” (GoF IE SOGI).

Besides the United States, the inaugural SOGI Group includes: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Who is this Independent Expert with so many friends? That would be Víctor Madrigal-Borloz, Senior Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program.

After its formation, the Group’s first act was to consider a report produced for the UNHRC by Mr. Madrigal-Borloz titled “The Law of Inclusion.”

“The Law of Inclusion” states that all evidence necessarily “leads to the conclusion that all human beings live in gendered societies traversed by power hierarchies,” and declares that, as we all seek to “build back better” (here inexplicably adopting Joe Biden’s campaign slogan) the “adoption of gender-based and intersectional analysis” is “a fundamental component of a diligent discharge of [all countries’ human rights] responsibility.”

Crucially, an intersectional approach leads to a “recognition of how race is gendered and gender is raced, as well as the many other factors which affect how one is allocated rights.” Plus, as a bonus, “gender theory is also relevant as a tool to address, analyse and transform systems of violent masculinity.”

…

Ultimately, based on his intersectional analysis, the Independent Expert declares a new “fundamental duty of the State” based on his careful investigation:

To recognize every human being’s freedom to determine the confines of their existence, including their gender identity and expression.

(I don’t think you will find a more flawless one-sentence summation of the End-Stage Liberalism I’ve previously outlined, characterized by its endless quest to liberate us from any and all limits, than this, by the way.)

…

The United States and the rest of the SOGI Group immediately issued a statement fully endorsing the report, noting that they “would like to reaffirm” that: “As clearly demonstrated by the thorough analysis provided by the report, gender is a social construct”; that intersectional analysis has “proven to be fundamental to the design and implementation of inclusive public policies”; that they support “the importance of advancing legal gender recognition based on self-identification”; and that they “oppose any attempt to erase gender from international human rights law instruments and processes.”

I hope you will retain at least one takeaway from my subjection of you to this word salad of intersectional jargon on race and gender: that the distinctive language and doctrinal ideological concepts of the New Faith have extended far past the Harvard Quad, crossed the oceans, and have now, as the report puts it, thoroughly “permeated” themselves through elite-managed global institutions like the UN Human Rights Council.

Conservatives, in particular, are typically dismissive of the UN in general and the UNHRC in particular (President Trump officially pulled the U.S. out of the council in 2018, after which Biden rejoined as an observer), as they see it as a pointless talk-shop that spends a majority of its time criticizing the United States and its allies, though with little practical effect. This is a mistake.

What is happening here is the steady creation and entrenchment of new norms that aim to redefine what is considered the normal and acceptable window of cultural, political, and legal practice by countries the world over. The UNHRC may have no direct political power, but it is precisely the ignorance or flippant disregard for the transformative long-term power of norms that has so far lost conservatives every culture war battle they have fought. Somehow conservatives – and now Liberals – have been consistently blindsided by norms falling out from under them (gradually, and then suddenly) even as they have held positions of political power.

Meanwhile, under the Biden administration, Washington has now embraced this kind of norm-setting mechanism for remaking the world in its new and ideologically improved image.

…

Not every country is completely woke to the need for unlimited gender self-identification or a “whole-of-society transformation” to address its hierarchies of oppression, however.

International Expert Mr. Madrigal-Borloz has also noticed this problem, which is why he and the SOGI Group are producing a follow-up companion report to “The Law of Inclusion,” this time to be titled “Practices of Exclusion.”

…

Probably in most other contexts, when an external power or powers attempt to “deconstruct” and replace the “traditional values” and “cultural and religious” norms of a distinct people against their will, this would be called that what it is: imperialism (or, occasionally, worse).

Nonetheless, “Practices of Exclusion” is set to be published at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in New York this September and will undoubtedly be endorsed by the U.S., U.K., and the other progressive members of the SOGI Group at that time – even as many of these same countries are actually still experiencing their own fierce bouts of “resistance” to its core ideas.

What does this all mean? In short, that the ideological battles of Cold War 2.0 are not going to be limited to categories similar to those which at least broadly seemed to characterize Cold War 1.0, or necessarily even uphold the classic conceptions of “liberal-democracy” and “authoritarianism” or “autocracy” with which we are familiar.

Instead, it should be understood that the Biden administration and its like-minded partners are now operating under a rather different ideological calculus about what “democracy” and “human rights” mean, even as, similar to the original Cold War, that calculus directly links domestic and international ideological foes.

In this worldview, in order for a democratic state to be a legitimate “Democracy,” it is not enough for it to have a popularly elected government chosen through free and fair elections – it also has to hold the correct progressive values. That is, it has to be Woke. Otherwise it is not a real Democracy, but something else. Here the term “populism” has become a useful one: even if a state is not yet authoritarian or “autocratic” in a traditional sense, it may be in the grip of “Populism,” an ill-defined concept vague enough to encompass the wide range of reactionary sentiments and tendencies that can characterize “resistance” to progress, as based on “traditional values,” etc. And ultimately, we are told, “Populism” is liable to lead to Autocracy – because if you aren’t progressing forward in sync with Democracy, you are sliding backwards along the binary spectrum toward Autocracy.

Moreover, as in the case of the struggle between Capitalist-Liberalism and Communist-Authoritarianism during the original Cold War, the insidious “forces” of Populism-Autocracy are present not only out in the undecided “Third World,” but even lurking inside Democracies in good standing – constantly threatening to tip them, like dominoes, into the opposite camp. Hence why Biden issues warnings like the one claiming that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.” The fight against the perceived forces of Populism-Autocracy within the United States, or within the European Union, is not in this conception at all separate from the fight against the likes of China and Russia on the world stage; they are the same fight.

…

Exacerbating this sense of fear and division is the fact that a Democracy can’t just hold some of the correct values – it has to hold all of them, in toto. This is after all the prime conclusion of intersectional analysis: all injustice is interlinked, forming interlocking systems of oppression; therefore injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Intersectionality thus demands liberation in totality; there can be no pluralism – no one can simply be left alone or granted the slightest leniency, because no injustice in any place or of any degree can be suffered to exist, lest it pollute and threaten the entire system.

The conclusion is inevitable: the New Faith must be a missionary, evangelical faith. By its own internal logic, for its own survival, it must march abroad to convert the heathens even as it hunts heretics at home.

…

There are still plenty of countries out there – in fact, a vast majority of them – who think intersectional gender theory and other fruits of the New Faith are in essence stark raving mad, and are also rather attached to keeping their own cultures and traditions.

So even if you are a strong supporter of LGBT rights, feminism, or other liberal-progressive ideals (and yes, many countries around the world of course do treat LGBT people, women, and racial minorities terribly), it is still worth considering the practical consequences of Intersectional Imperialism. If the West makes ideological conformity an integral requirement for joining, receiving aid from, or even working with its Democracy bloc (as Blinken has implied), then many of these countries are liable to flee into the arms of China and other genuinely authoritarian but ideologically non-missionary states, despite the security concerns they may have.

…

At this time it was the Soviet bloc, including communist controlled Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, who argued that freedom from discrimination should take precedence over the rights of freedom of expression and assembly.

And it was the Western liberal democracies, together with the Latin American states, that rose to (unsuccessfully) oppose this idea.

The “fundamental right of free speech” was, argued U.K. representative Lady Gaitskell, “the foundation-stone on which many of the other human rights were built,” and it was the U.K.’s position that, despite abhorring racism, “in an advanced democracy the expression of such views was a risk that had to be taken.” Hungary shot back that free speech and tolerance was pointless if “fascists” were tolerated anywhere.

When the U.S. delegation attempted to restrict the scope of speech defined in the law to that “resulting in or likely to cause acts of violence,” the move was blocked by the Soviet group, with Czechoslovakia countering that there could be no democracy if “movements directed towards hatred and discrimination were allowed to exist.”

…

Times have changed. As the European Union prepares to consider writing “hate speech” into the official list of EU crimes, tweeting “gender-critical” thoughts is already an arrestable offense in the United Kingdom, and the United States looks to enlighten the world about the dangers of oppressive microaggressions, one wonders if there is any country remaining, the world over, still willing to genuinely represent liberal values in these terms today.

Instead only the crusaders of the New Faith remain to march into battle against the Autocrats and their Populist allies, and you are either with them or against them. Welcome to the Woke Cold War.

[arcticdementor]

But in any case news and commentary detailing the protests can now be found everywhere, so I’m just going to assume you already have a familiarity with what’s happening, as I want to try to distill a few more unique thoughts on why I find these protests so striking.

Specifically, why all this seems like such a perfect reflection of the Reality War.

In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”

In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”

…

To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today.

…

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.

In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.

The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.

When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking brakes (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world.

…

The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable.

Their first reaction was to dismiss the 50,000-strong convoy as representing, in Trudeau’s words, a “small fringe minority with unacceptable views.” Being, after all, divorced from reality, he did not seem to have any understanding of the implications of what was barreling toward him. No one in his government seems to have prepared at all in the days leading up to the truckers’ arrival as the Freedom Convoy drove all the way across the country to Ottawa.

But once they grasped the situation, the Virtuals’ response was to turn immediately to their default means of dealing with any problem: narrative and informational control.

Trudeau checked his diary list of most used phrases and – after fleeing the city for “security reasons” – unleashed all of them at once in one great shotgun blast of smears, saying the truckers were guilty of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia,” not to mention “misogyny” and being “anti-science.” He accused them of flying “racist flags” and “waving swastikas” (only one seems to have ever been spotted, before being swiftly ejected by the crowd), and announced that he would refuse to meet with them because of he could not go “anywhere near protests that have expressed hateful rhetoric and violence.” He declared Canadians to be “shocked and frankly, disgusted” with the protestors.

…

Academic “extremism experts” were trundled onto television to confirm that this was in fact a pack of literal terrorists, and that if even the protests were technically entirely peaceful (crime in downtown Ottawa having actually fallen), this was only a maliciously cunning cover to enable mass violence. “By what common understanding of the term does what we are seeing on the ground, on TV, in our social media feeds qualify as ‘peaceful protest?’” asked one, presumably talking about the hug-ins, or maybe the on-site meals for the homeless. “Is it merely the absence of physical violence and injury? That’s not unimportant but is insufficient as a definitional threshold.” TV talking heads nod sagely.

…

If all this seemed awfully synchronized, that’s the whole point. Systematic information control, or what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as “public opinion management,” is now the entire strategic response of the Virtual class to every political problem.

But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).

…

No matter how desperately Trudeau has scrambled to change the narrative, he hasn’t yet succeeded. Even a gambit to threaten the truckers with having their children removed by child protection services – presumably to make it easier to instigate a narratively convenient violent confrontation – has only led to backlash so far. Relentless discipline by the truckers has provided him with almost nothing to work with.

Which is why the Virtual elite have steadily escalated up the ladder of more and more coercive informational control, leveraging their hold on state power to try to compel compliance by the revolting Physicals. This began with the government requesting crowdfunding site GoFundMe shut down the $10 million in funds raised there for the truckers. The company complied immediately, saying the Freedom Convoy had engaged in “an abuse of power” (what power was unclear) and was supporting “hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, and intolerance.” Then came as many legal fines for obscure violations as authorities could find to throw at the truckers, while a replacement fundraiser on GiveSendGo was also frozen by a Canadian court.

But now, with the protests in their third week, Trudeau has gone nuclear, invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act for the first time in its history. A renamed version of what was once called the War Measures Act, this allows him to override civil liberty protections in order “to remove the blockades, including by force.” Trudeau specified this includes the ability to compel the tow companies to move the trucks.

…

That Trudeau’s government would choose to jettison any remaining illusion of Canada still being a liberal democracy just to harm their political class enemies isn’t too surprising. It’s their method of doing so that is particularly striking: control over digital financial assets is pretty much the ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals. We should expect more use of this tool around the world anywhere the Physicals continue to revolt against their masters.

And here the Virtuals have a significant advantage because they are free to use the maximum level of coercive force available in their natural domain, while the Physicals cannot – because, in the physical world, that would mean violence, which is something the protestors have rightly forsworn.

So, the current trucker protests in Canada may soon be brought to a close by the state. But this is unlikely to mark the end of the story.

…

So of course they hate and fear the truckers. It’s no wonder that Trudeau is panicking and behaving a bit like a dictator facing an existential challenge to his rule. In a sense he is.

There is an obvious irony here in the fact that ostensibly left-wing parties, like Trudeau’s Liberals, have everywhere turned viciously on the working class – an observation that is now widespread, as far as I can tell thanks mainly to the satirists at the Babylon Bee – but this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occured across the West as the “left” became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress.

…

For the Virtual elite, the most unforgiveable thing about the Physicals, and the physical world in general, is that they stubbornly refuse to yield to full, frictionless control. There is a reason the dominant informational class is today most comfortable in a purely virtual environment – it’s one where they can have direct, instantaneous control over (virtual) matter. Real matter is stubbornly resistant, a reminder that the self doesn’t control the universe. It’s dirty, polluting, a reminder of one’s vulnerability, even mortality. And the need to rely on other humans to deal with it is super awkward.

So expect the Virtuals of the ruling class to double down on trying to exert control, moving with all haste to develop new and innovative methods of information management and coercion to try to eliminate every human vulnerability from the machine. Self-driving truck startups are about to have an excellent next funding round.