Category: Forward!

Dispatches from the Maple Gulag Truck Stop

Canada’s Bolsheviks Forward! Gradually Then Suddenly Great Moments In Socialism It's Probably Nothing 11 Comments

Bankruptcies abound, yet the Mark Carney’s job numbers show a huge increase in transportation and warehousing?  I am starting to think the job numbers are prepared by the same people who said Mark Carney would win by a landslide in Alberta.  Trucking News reports on bankruptcies in Canada and Freightwaves reports on US bankruptcies, so any news of growth in the industry is highly suspicious.  Several months ago Gord Magill reported on the financial chinanery in the trucking industry

Sonar truck freight index shows an 11% decrease this year after several years of decreases.  Yet somehow we are supposed to believe the economy is adding jobs when trucking is failing, construction jobs are down and housing sales are flat?  Something stinks in the state of Denmark.

Just Another Ten Chances

Forward! You Might Be A Liberal 4 Comments

Readers will note the sly conceit that what matters, all that matters, is the sum being stolen this time, not the whole at knifepoint or gunpoint business – as if this lively means of cash extraction were some trivial detail, beneath acknowledgment. A thing with no informational content, no clues as to the character of the perpetrator, their fitness for a civilised world.

Those pointing to the smallness of the sum as if it were a significant mitigating factor don’t seem troubled by the implication that someone who will violate others, and threaten them with death, for a mere $20 is someone who will use very small incentives to behave in monstrous ways. Likewise, the implication that robbing people with only $20 to surrender is a matter of no import.

On three-strikes laws and the contortions of progressive critics.

Merriment Detected, Fretting Ensues

Forward! The Tolerant Left 5 Comments

White people strum banjos, have fun. Fretting ensues at University of Sheffield:

Obviously, activities that are chiefly indulged in by white people – in this case, folk singing – must be deemed suspect and found problematic with great urgency, and then probed for hidden wrongness. At taxpayer expense. And all this scholarly rigour ain’t cheap, you know…

Behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though, as so often, details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming.

Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.

“Our aim,” say our tearful academics, “is to break down the barriers for people to get involved in folk music. Opening up the genre to different audiences.”

Different audiences. Not the audience that folk music actually has, mind, the one it attracts and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. And again, no actual barriers to participation are specified. But the audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.

One of these.

Fishing Without Bait

Forward! If Women Ran The World 15 Comments

Or, The Difficulties of Satisfying Progressive Women:

It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid.” As “emotional labour.” As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.

The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether.” Though possibly not in ways the author intended.

As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.

The White Guilt Industrial Complex

Forward! 29 Comments

National Post- The push to have Canadians hear a ‘slavery’ acknowledgement at public events

After a standard land acknowledgement mentioning the various First Nations whose traditional territories overlap with the City of Toronto, attendees were also asked to acknowledge “those who were brought here involuntarily; particularly those brought to these lands as a result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery.”

Related…

“Export Markets”

Canada’s Bolsheviks Forward! 23 Comments

Dr. Byram W. Bridle- The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Bloodlust for Ostriches: Part 2

The most hypocritical aspect of this is that the people responsible for the deaths of hundreds of valuable, healthy ostriches that were almost certainly virus-free (prove me wrong with data), likely let their own kids play on beaches and parks that are routinely populated by ducks, geese, and seagulls, and stipple-painted with the feces of these birds that serve as natural reservoirs for the virus.

Subordination, Baby

Forward! I, Napoleon 3 Comments

On allyship, so-called, and assuming the position:

The word ally is typically used, by the people who rush to use it, to mean something like advocate, or mouthpiece, or supplicant, or puppet. There’s no discernible interest in, or expectation of, reciprocation; no obvious shared goal or mutual benefit. Indeed, the role, once assumed, appears to entail saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming unreliable and absurd.

Say, by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow, magically, women. Or that a reluctance to mouth fabulist pronouns, to affirm a person’s imaginary themness, is some life-threatening moral oversight.

And then there are the not infrequent detours into outright struggle sessions – as seen, for instance, here, where a disobedient woman finds herself being scolded by a man in an unconvincing wig for not doing the “work” expected of an ally – essentially cowed deference and dishonesty on demand. This, then, is a world in which allyship – “listening to the community” – requires prostration, a suspension of cognitive faculties, and a surrendering of basic probity.

There’s more.

Little Things, Like Sanitation

Forward! 3 Comments
On cross-dressing shoe-robbers; “lesbian-dog relationalities”; and a nightmare eco-holiday:

Dish magazine hailed the project as “Seasonal, sustainable, organic, artisanal, waste-free, foraged.” While readers of EasyJet Traveller were told that the resort is “A new way of living that’s as sustainable as it is delicious.” For Ms Helbæk and Mr Hansen, the name of the resort, which is Danish for “sense of place,” reflects “which direction we need to go as a society.”

Readers will doubtless be intrigued by the “foraged” food – i.e., carrots and leaves, served repeatedly – plus the unheated rooms, the lack of running water, and the whole shitting-in-a-barrel thing. For a mere £900 a night, one can’t expect luxuries like plumbing, protein, or the prospect of heat.

The Progressive Anxiety

Forward! You Might Be A Liberal 3 Comments

On crime, conflictedness, and weird excuses:

Regarding the consequent conflictedness and anxiety, all that progressive wrongness, these three posts include suitably vivid illustrations of the phenomenon.

Among which, a claim that more theatre for schoolchildren would somehow deter the kinds of creatures who repeatedly sucker-punch elderly ladies for being the wrong race, and a chap who insists that women should allow themselves to be mugged lest their mugger, out on probation, come to harm.

Oh, and the belief, expressed by a Guardian columnist, that when you find your home being burgled in the middle of the night, the real victims, the people deserving of sympathy and indulgence, are the ones breaking into your home while brandishing carving knives and then driving off with your valuables in your car.

Our betters, you know. They say so themselves.

Are You Feeling The Vibrations?

Forward! Quackery 6 Comments

When your on-campus Indigenous Healer is armed, indigenously, with a totally indigenous tuning fork:

Those touched by Ms Schenandoah’s uncanny powers will learn that the forest is “a relative, not a resource,” and that birds “sing in the morning because they’re happy.” Quality stuff.

Armed with such arcane skills, Ms Schenandoah – whose job description is curiously vague – will provide “a safe space where Indigenous students can cope with stress and trauma.”

Yes, the trauma of attending one of the more expensive and statusful colleges in America, with its annual fees of $70,000, its 920 acres of rolling lawns, its 20 tennis courts, and a capacious ice-skating pavilion.

One of these.

How Dare You Get Your Life Together

Forward! 6 Comments

On perversity as a marker of progressive status:

The meaning of the term “marriage fundamentalism” – a term used repeatedly – isn’t made entirely clear, and its allegedly racist and life-crushing particulars are, inevitably, “hidden,” “invisible,” and conveniently vague – despite the loudly announced use of “an intersectional lens.” But it seems to mean something like the tendency of many adults to see marriage as of mutual benefit and an optimal way to raise children.

Stripped of contrivance, I’m assuming the above is a roundabout admission that, on average, people who find marriage an alien concept and much too demanding, and who opt instead for transient partners, fatherless children, and unstable relationship trash fires, tend to do less well in life, along with their offspring. Though I’m not sure why the response should be to blame those who get their shit together, marry, and raise children more successfully.

If little Don’t-Know-Who-My-Dad-Is is starting fires at school and looks destined for a life of delinquency and crime, this is not obviously the fault of the happily married Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their two non-fire-starting children. And no amount of chest-puffing about “heteropatriarchy,” “unequal power relations” and “white supremacy” seems likely to alter that fact.

One of these.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation