Demonization of white people and open discrimination in hiring against them will not make medicine or society better, only more distracted and divided and demoralized.
The time for fancy words is over outright revolution is and will be proven the only real answer to end this nonsense. While I do not encourage an armed revolution I would remind people of the impact of the truckers convoy and rest assured that this little example of a peoples revolt scared the living crap out of Balckface and his crew of misfits. Multiply those people with about 100 times as many people and surround the parliament until those weak cowards give up and leave and then simply lock them up and let the trials begin.
"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, given views to passion without proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities."
Any new movement can start up or grow out of something already established. Liberalism leading to DEI and that leading to (wokeism?) or something that cancels, suppresses, punishes arguments against these ideas. Even though Free and Open Discussion was the basis for the beginning of new ideas and isms. The solution is to ensure that Free Speech is always encouraged and protected.
New thinking (isms) and ideas can grow even with criticism. In fact will become stronger as Debate points out the weaknesses. Now there is backlash against the isms coming out of the DEI ideals. And all beginning with the suppression of individuals who challenged the new ideas. Ergo it is not to anyone's advantage to use suppression or cancelling of free and open discussion.
The absolute best examples of banning, censuring, cancelling are the ones that have taken place (OF ALL PLACES) in our Education systems. Like Trustees Stone, Crawford, and others at Ontario Boards and of course our Universities.
When governments see these happening they should immediately advise the Boards (and any Government run agencies) "you cannot do that to anyone including elected persons. It is really a simple solution and benefits all positions. Paul Crawford
Medicine has been a huge disappointment, both in its covid flip-flops (masks, travel bans, ...) and its embrace of wokeness. Lost a lot of credibility.
Anonymed: As for the Hazony quote which you begin the article, there is nothing which I agree with about this: "A political regime founded on Enlightenment liberalism cannot sustain itself for even three generations. Enlightenment liberalism initiates a perpetual revolution that destroys its own foundations in the name of reason."
First of all, it's factually incorrect. There have been at least 12 generations in America since it was founded (depending on how this is counted out). Secondly, as I have pointed out elsewhere, (https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/subversion-of-meaning) English versions of conservatism have been liberal philosophically since 1689 (the year after the English revolution). What is Hazony on about - we should make like early German conservative and French conservatives and advocate for a return to monarchy? The serf system? How is that going to improve the quality of life for us?
As chairman of the Edmund Burke society in Jerusalem (according to his wiki), Hazony ought to know that there are ways that liberalism can be realized that are not radical and revolutionary - in fact, the liberal philosophy of Edmund Burke (the father of American conservative liberal philosophy) is exactly such an example. As Preece 1977 summarizes: "Locke espoused the principle of individual rights ; Burke confirmed their importance but demanded that real rather than imaginary, concrete rather than
formal and abstract grievances be remedied to ensure those rights."
As for radical individualism, it we were to trace its roots it wouldn't be found in the thinking of real liberal philosophers such as Locke and Burke, rather it would be found in the radicalism of Rousseau and Nietzsche, both of whom hated liberalism incidentally, both of whom made trendy and virulent forms of counter-enlightenment culture. In order to repudiate what he saw as societies biggest problem (enlightened Western civilization itself), Rousseau espoused a way of living "authentically" basically going through life acknowledging only ones own inner code of ethics which need not (or perhaps should not) connect with society itself (which of course is evil Western society itself) - in turn, this led to such counter-culture movements as Romanticism and existentialism; these ways of thinking speak to undeveloped and selfish minds so it may be possible to link with youth movements such as goth, punk, and emo here. I haven't worked out the topic entirely. These movements and so many more have become trendy for the left over the course of hundreds of years, anti-liberal in origin yet championed by people who call themselves "liberals" and "liberal party." There is such a thing a moral liberal position but we distort our notion of that when we observe the "liberal" party.
The point is that much of what is ugly in society right now can be ascribed to the ideology of thinkers who passionately hate the free West. It is really quite objectionable to conflate the fruits of their machinations with what liberal society ought to be like - free of subversive distortions from anti-liberals - if we remembered what it ought to be like maybe that would be the first step.
I would add an additional comment about how indeed the right answer is that our institutions are being subverted (rather than they are innately debased), however, that is really the focus of the entire Great Illiberal Subversion series here at WWC. More posts coming on that.
I was told I was getting torched on here so figured I'd check it out. Thanks for the comment. I'd have to go back and read what I wrote, but maybe I summarized the Hazony position poorly. Or I'm conflating terms. Or I'm just out to lunch. Who knows. What Hazony refers to as the post-war liberal order is for me just postmodernism-lite. And my contention isn't so much that liberalism inevitably led to postmodernism which then gave us wokeness etc etc. More that they share a common ancestor (Enlightenment rationalism) and that the former is ultimately incapable of resisting the latter (especially when other forces like church and family are out of the game). All philosophy is ultimately values-based (no?), even that which gave us rationalism and empiricism. (What reasoned argument are you going to use to convince someone who doesn't believe in reason, etc?) If you divorce those principles from the underlying cultural foundation (what Hazony and other religious people would call Judeo-Christian civilization or some equivalent) then you are left with a series of philosophical tools unmoored from their moral bottom line. If there is no values-based limiting principle, then I worry the tools of reason, empiricism, liberalism (in the sense of English liberty) etc are vulnerable to the relativism that comes with postmodernism and its offshoots.
I agree with you about Burke and Rousseau. But when I read Harzony's argument for national conservatism (in the Anglo-American sense), I don't think he's contrasting that with Burke. I think he's contrasting it with a post-war tendency to forget Burke and open the door to Rousseau (and then Foucault etc). I'm not really qualified to talk about the nuances here, but Burke is known as the father of conservatism for a reason, is he not? While he (and Locke etc) were liberals in the tradition of English liberty, they are not the internationalist, secularist liberals Harzony takes issue with.
I'll read your articles at some point since I'm sure you've rebutted this stuff elsewhere. I get the "long march through the institutions" stuff and of course there has been infiltration and subversion. But I asked in this piece if this explains the extent to which we are losing? Philosophy aside, when I look around at our institutions - be they schools, hospitals etc - I see the supposedly empiricist and rationalist types folding to relativism, or reasoning themselves into knots to the point where they have convinced themselves that patent absurdities are the most logical conclusions out there (Neil Degrasse Tyson thinks gender is a spectrum because light is a spectrum etc). And when I look at the resistance, I see "national conservatives" (which to me is mostly a bunch of Burkes), I see christians, and I see a growing cadre of newly un-limp former liberals who still can't quite figure out how they ended up this way. I'm not a religious person like Hazony, and would resist any proposal to, say, get more bibles into education etc. I don't want to live in a theocracy any more than you, I promise. But let's be honest, that's what we have now and the liberals among us have (until very recently) failed to even notice.
Well, I wrote some words anyway. Ok, go on. I can take my licks in public.
AM: all of your second comment here is fair enough. Yes, who are these "internationalist, secularist liberals" whom Harzony takes issue with? Such a description indicates to me the socialist leftie - I couldn't sympathize more if you'd like to throw shade at the socialist lefties or the liberal lefties who can't help themselves but bend over for the former on every issue.
One can never conflate one's disdain for the liberal party's lowered state with one's assessment of the importance of liberty for a free country. I would happily chastise the droves and droves of Westerners who are weak and spineless, not to mention stupid, who cave to the radical and now dominant culture which has set about remaking society into something much more ugly and unfree than the West has yet known. We can shout down such people all day in total agreement. However, we can never question the principles of enlightenment liberalism or is values because, in doing so, we are already carrying water for our ideological opponents. The moment we carry their water (we being those citizens still willing to fight for liberty against institutionalized social justice) is the moment that the culture war is truly lost.
So in the case of Neil Degrasse Tyson, the man has failed. The principles of reason are unassailable. And so forth. Without principles and a commitment to principles there is no way forward, there is no way out of the nonsense-intellectual finger-traps which the socialist leftie has concocted and the liberal-leftie finds to be a delightful pass time.
Often these are women who never had kids and are hitting menopause with the realization they probably never will. Their own bodies are exploding with rage against them, but they project that rage out onto society as if it failed them. And in a sense it did, but they became willing partners and participants with it's lies. In a sense they are in rebellion against nature itself. Not to mention the creator. They may feel unconsciously guilty for having an abortion as well and be desperately grasping at straws to try to feel good, pure and clean. But only God can forgive that. Wearing a flag does not earn that forgiveness.
Demonization of white people and open discrimination in hiring against them will not make medicine or society better, only more distracted and divided and demoralized.
"The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself." - Böckenförde
Great article! Thanks for this! It’s why I’m calling myself a post-liberal, whatever that is.
The time for fancy words is over outright revolution is and will be proven the only real answer to end this nonsense. While I do not encourage an armed revolution I would remind people of the impact of the truckers convoy and rest assured that this little example of a peoples revolt scared the living crap out of Balckface and his crew of misfits. Multiply those people with about 100 times as many people and surround the parliament until those weak cowards give up and leave and then simply lock them up and let the trials begin.
"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, given views to passion without proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities."
- David Hume.
Any new movement can start up or grow out of something already established. Liberalism leading to DEI and that leading to (wokeism?) or something that cancels, suppresses, punishes arguments against these ideas. Even though Free and Open Discussion was the basis for the beginning of new ideas and isms. The solution is to ensure that Free Speech is always encouraged and protected.
New thinking (isms) and ideas can grow even with criticism. In fact will become stronger as Debate points out the weaknesses. Now there is backlash against the isms coming out of the DEI ideals. And all beginning with the suppression of individuals who challenged the new ideas. Ergo it is not to anyone's advantage to use suppression or cancelling of free and open discussion.
The absolute best examples of banning, censuring, cancelling are the ones that have taken place (OF ALL PLACES) in our Education systems. Like Trustees Stone, Crawford, and others at Ontario Boards and of course our Universities.
When governments see these happening they should immediately advise the Boards (and any Government run agencies) "you cannot do that to anyone including elected persons. It is really a simple solution and benefits all positions. Paul Crawford
Medicine has been a huge disappointment, both in its covid flip-flops (masks, travel bans, ...) and its embrace of wokeness. Lost a lot of credibility.
Anonymed: As for the Hazony quote which you begin the article, there is nothing which I agree with about this: "A political regime founded on Enlightenment liberalism cannot sustain itself for even three generations. Enlightenment liberalism initiates a perpetual revolution that destroys its own foundations in the name of reason."
First of all, it's factually incorrect. There have been at least 12 generations in America since it was founded (depending on how this is counted out). Secondly, as I have pointed out elsewhere, (https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/subversion-of-meaning) English versions of conservatism have been liberal philosophically since 1689 (the year after the English revolution). What is Hazony on about - we should make like early German conservative and French conservatives and advocate for a return to monarchy? The serf system? How is that going to improve the quality of life for us?
As chairman of the Edmund Burke society in Jerusalem (according to his wiki), Hazony ought to know that there are ways that liberalism can be realized that are not radical and revolutionary - in fact, the liberal philosophy of Edmund Burke (the father of American conservative liberal philosophy) is exactly such an example. As Preece 1977 summarizes: "Locke espoused the principle of individual rights ; Burke confirmed their importance but demanded that real rather than imaginary, concrete rather than
formal and abstract grievances be remedied to ensure those rights."
As for radical individualism, it we were to trace its roots it wouldn't be found in the thinking of real liberal philosophers such as Locke and Burke, rather it would be found in the radicalism of Rousseau and Nietzsche, both of whom hated liberalism incidentally, both of whom made trendy and virulent forms of counter-enlightenment culture. In order to repudiate what he saw as societies biggest problem (enlightened Western civilization itself), Rousseau espoused a way of living "authentically" basically going through life acknowledging only ones own inner code of ethics which need not (or perhaps should not) connect with society itself (which of course is evil Western society itself) - in turn, this led to such counter-culture movements as Romanticism and existentialism; these ways of thinking speak to undeveloped and selfish minds so it may be possible to link with youth movements such as goth, punk, and emo here. I haven't worked out the topic entirely. These movements and so many more have become trendy for the left over the course of hundreds of years, anti-liberal in origin yet championed by people who call themselves "liberals" and "liberal party." There is such a thing a moral liberal position but we distort our notion of that when we observe the "liberal" party.
The point is that much of what is ugly in society right now can be ascribed to the ideology of thinkers who passionately hate the free West. It is really quite objectionable to conflate the fruits of their machinations with what liberal society ought to be like - free of subversive distortions from anti-liberals - if we remembered what it ought to be like maybe that would be the first step.
I would add an additional comment about how indeed the right answer is that our institutions are being subverted (rather than they are innately debased), however, that is really the focus of the entire Great Illiberal Subversion series here at WWC. More posts coming on that.
I was told I was getting torched on here so figured I'd check it out. Thanks for the comment. I'd have to go back and read what I wrote, but maybe I summarized the Hazony position poorly. Or I'm conflating terms. Or I'm just out to lunch. Who knows. What Hazony refers to as the post-war liberal order is for me just postmodernism-lite. And my contention isn't so much that liberalism inevitably led to postmodernism which then gave us wokeness etc etc. More that they share a common ancestor (Enlightenment rationalism) and that the former is ultimately incapable of resisting the latter (especially when other forces like church and family are out of the game). All philosophy is ultimately values-based (no?), even that which gave us rationalism and empiricism. (What reasoned argument are you going to use to convince someone who doesn't believe in reason, etc?) If you divorce those principles from the underlying cultural foundation (what Hazony and other religious people would call Judeo-Christian civilization or some equivalent) then you are left with a series of philosophical tools unmoored from their moral bottom line. If there is no values-based limiting principle, then I worry the tools of reason, empiricism, liberalism (in the sense of English liberty) etc are vulnerable to the relativism that comes with postmodernism and its offshoots.
I agree with you about Burke and Rousseau. But when I read Harzony's argument for national conservatism (in the Anglo-American sense), I don't think he's contrasting that with Burke. I think he's contrasting it with a post-war tendency to forget Burke and open the door to Rousseau (and then Foucault etc). I'm not really qualified to talk about the nuances here, but Burke is known as the father of conservatism for a reason, is he not? While he (and Locke etc) were liberals in the tradition of English liberty, they are not the internationalist, secularist liberals Harzony takes issue with.
I'll read your articles at some point since I'm sure you've rebutted this stuff elsewhere. I get the "long march through the institutions" stuff and of course there has been infiltration and subversion. But I asked in this piece if this explains the extent to which we are losing? Philosophy aside, when I look around at our institutions - be they schools, hospitals etc - I see the supposedly empiricist and rationalist types folding to relativism, or reasoning themselves into knots to the point where they have convinced themselves that patent absurdities are the most logical conclusions out there (Neil Degrasse Tyson thinks gender is a spectrum because light is a spectrum etc). And when I look at the resistance, I see "national conservatives" (which to me is mostly a bunch of Burkes), I see christians, and I see a growing cadre of newly un-limp former liberals who still can't quite figure out how they ended up this way. I'm not a religious person like Hazony, and would resist any proposal to, say, get more bibles into education etc. I don't want to live in a theocracy any more than you, I promise. But let's be honest, that's what we have now and the liberals among us have (until very recently) failed to even notice.
Well, I wrote some words anyway. Ok, go on. I can take my licks in public.
AM: all of your second comment here is fair enough. Yes, who are these "internationalist, secularist liberals" whom Harzony takes issue with? Such a description indicates to me the socialist leftie - I couldn't sympathize more if you'd like to throw shade at the socialist lefties or the liberal lefties who can't help themselves but bend over for the former on every issue.
One can never conflate one's disdain for the liberal party's lowered state with one's assessment of the importance of liberty for a free country. I would happily chastise the droves and droves of Westerners who are weak and spineless, not to mention stupid, who cave to the radical and now dominant culture which has set about remaking society into something much more ugly and unfree than the West has yet known. We can shout down such people all day in total agreement. However, we can never question the principles of enlightenment liberalism or is values because, in doing so, we are already carrying water for our ideological opponents. The moment we carry their water (we being those citizens still willing to fight for liberty against institutionalized social justice) is the moment that the culture war is truly lost.
So in the case of Neil Degrasse Tyson, the man has failed. The principles of reason are unassailable. And so forth. Without principles and a commitment to principles there is no way forward, there is no way out of the nonsense-intellectual finger-traps which the socialist leftie has concocted and the liberal-leftie finds to be a delightful pass time.
See the book titled "Political Ponerology".
Often these are women who never had kids and are hitting menopause with the realization they probably never will. Their own bodies are exploding with rage against them, but they project that rage out onto society as if it failed them. And in a sense it did, but they became willing partners and participants with it's lies. In a sense they are in rebellion against nature itself. Not to mention the creator. They may feel unconsciously guilty for having an abortion as well and be desperately grasping at straws to try to feel good, pure and clean. But only God can forgive that. Wearing a flag does not earn that forgiveness.