An appeaser, wrote Winston Churchill, is someone who chooses to feed a crocodile in hopes that it eats him last.
In the case of the arts industry in Canada—which has been slavish in its devotion to even the most unhinged fringe groups— the appeasers have provided a very tasty dish for the culture crocodiles the past few weeks. Here’s a brief summary on the appropriation fiasco now devouring several dedicated editors.
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This week on my podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin, my guest is the eminent British mental-health expert and social critic Theodore Dalrymple. (https://goo.gl/WlB4Cm) To say he has a few inflammatory opinions in this age of moral relativism would be an understatement. Among the issues we discussed was Prince Harry’s public admission that he’d sought help in coping with the death of his mother.
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History has seen the Bronze Age. And the Pleistocene Age. And the Stone Age.
Now welcome to The Nice Age. Humanity— alright, humanity in the western world— has entered into a time when the tender sensibilities of humans have become the organizing principle of society. Be Nice, clean your ice. And what’s wrong with people being nicer to each others? A little civility, giving the other person alittle space, a smiley face. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with reminding others that they’re not the only ones on the planet.
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There was never a bigger fan of Bruce Springsteen. It was a revelation when The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle first dropped on my turntable in 1974. Springsteen’s tales of Asbury Park’s street people, reprobates and the desperate ones breathed originality into a rock-and-roll form gone stale and self serious.
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The news that Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Despond, are set to visit Canada this summer was greeted with something less than rapture from his subjects here. Indifference probably best describes the reaction to the sort of Royal news that, in the past, might have set off excitement from coast to coast to coast.
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The verdict on the U.S. president seems conclusive. The Republican dashes from “one thing to another with amazing dispatch… each act of his, and each opinion expressed likely to abolish or contravene some previous act or expressed opinion.” Consistency is a word he abhors, reversing himself on foreign war, the Mexican issue and the role of Congress in his agenda.
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The thing you must understand about the modern Democratic party— in particular its impatient, intolerant progressive wing— is that the game is up without control of the Supreme Court.
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To paraphrase Robert Duvall (Col. Kilgore) in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of whining in the morning. It smells like… government funding”.
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Back in the day, the simple word debt could make someone a pariah. It could strip him or her of their self respect. Debt could leave you dependent on charity soup kitchens and consignment shops. I can remember my parents, children of the Depression, grow dark and silent when they learned one of my uncles was being buried by debt.
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Unless you’ve been out of the universe since Y2K you’ve no doubt heard that a plague is sweeping the nation. Bullying has become a dread curse for the progressive left. There are online campaigns, in-school codes of conduct and television commercials decrying this bane on society.
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The moment was pure Justin Trudeau. Virtuous. Blithe. Impulsive. And more than a little messianic.
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Ah, the Oscars. Tinseltown never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Lost in Beatty’s Bungle-Rama (live TV!) was a more telling misstep. Host Jimmy Kimmel orchestrated a stunt where a bus-full of tourists was ushered into the auditorium to gawk at the perfect people.
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The poor old Swedes. There they were, minding their own progressive business. Then Donald Trump caught them in his cross-hairs, and the Tre Kronor reacted something like this (https://goo.gl/WqSCag)
They discovered what America discovered last year when Trump had the temerity to break the gentleman’s agreement to not talk about immigration. While average Americans were very concerned about the issues of illegal immigrants, the political class was bent on not listening to them about the issue.
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Here’s a satire Alec Baldwin won’t be doing this Saturday night on SNL. Keith “Overheated” Olbermann (https://goo.gl/3d2YVp) contends that the duly elected U.S. president, Donald Trump, is an autocrat and a tyrant of the stripe of Hitler who wants to accumulate absolute power over Americans. He’s demanding the gibbet for Trump over consorting with there godless ex-Commies in Russia.
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Consider the George W. Bush paradox. According to the attack strategy employed by Michael Moore and his resisting pals, POTUS 43 was either capable of the most intricate conspiracies the world has ever known or he was a blithering idiot. How could Bush be both evil genius and town fool? Depending on the day, marshmallow Marxists could cleverly employ one of the Bush piñatas to explain why they were losing the Congress, state legislatures and, finally, the presidency.
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Donald Trump must have some karma saved from another life. Alternatively, he has sold his soul to the man at the crossroads. In his run to the White House he was repeatedly rescued by deus ex machina. Engaged in a costly alley fight of his own making on immigration, the new president was handed a reprieve for his beleaguered executive-order rollout.
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There’s a liberal truism that goes, people can believe anything they want— so long as it’s the same thing. As the Women’s March On Washington amply demonstrated, the left’s free market in ideas and opinions is honored more in the breach than in the observance.
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When Donald Trump is inaugurated this week as the 45th president of the United States, a vocal portion of his electorate has decided it will not be so. “Not my president” say the sociology sophomores at Brandeis. Over 65 Democrats in Congress are sitting out the ceremony. If you were among those optimists who thought that the clever folk gorged on the eight years of Barack Obama’s leadership might relent after a little whining and moaning, there is bad news for you.
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It seems fitting that, as Barack Obama tried to put lipstick on his eight years as America’s first black president, Donald Trump was the one the U.S, media really wanted to talk about. If anyone had made the rude real-estate mogul into a president-elect, it was Obama himself.
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Anno domini 2017 has begun in much the same way 2016 expired: In a debate about news and “fake” news. The current cause célèbre is the CIA claim of alleged Russian hacking in the U.S. electoral system last year. The spooks say they have evidence, Julian Assange says it’s all codswallop. Donald Trump says whatever has come into his head that morning on the issue.
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