~ YES, I CAN BE longwinded in these things, so today, a short one.
A sad realization I’ve had over the past few weeks– Oleg Atbashian (The People’s Cube) was a former Soviet propagandist, he’s also an author, essayist, satirist, and graphic artist. He came to America for freedom.
Like many former Soviet dissidents come to the West, his reception was mixed– now, he’s a positive threat to the new Sovietization of the West. The same happened to Jamie Glazov’s parents, at Marxist-deluded Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS, Canada. Don’t reveal the ugly truth of the Worker’s Utopia!
Neo-Amerika, 2018
Now, under the politically correct, the corrupt establishment, politicized academia & media, we are going Soviet. Soft Soviet, with a smug smile and an iron fist. This devolution has been underway for almost a century, under many guises, and stages. Coercion of thought and behaviour is the ultimate goal.
Symptoms, just on Campus? Tribunals, trial by media & mob, the politics of personal destruction, radicalization of politics, thought-police, a quiet terror keeping people quiet & scared. Wrong-thinkers versus the Party Truth. Spying & tattling & surveillance. All must be sacrificed for the utopia.
We have become a Soviet-style prison, just waiting for the final bars & locks to be fitted. Ironic, no? Tragic, too.
Theodore Dalrymple:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
A Gift To Us All
And patiently, year by year, Oleg & his amazingly insightful website has been warning us of the risks ahead, from his life under the Soviet nightmare. We should all be grateful, and aware of his work.
Go read his blog. Read his book “Shakedown Socialism“. Buy his merch. I’m not saying he’s always right in everything said & done and thought– but that his angle is unique, deeply insightful, and hard-won by bitter experience.
Heed his warnings. Tragically, he’s turned out to be right, so far.
~ SO THE OTHER DAY, The She-Binks was out with a friend over tea, and while they were chatting, happened to mention a certain small resort in rural Nova Scotia. She had her smrtphone with her, on the table. She hadn’t googled that place, or anything like: just spoken words.
Two days later, advertising banners for that small resort showed up on her smrtphone. She was underwhelmed. and came to mention the strange occurrence. Somebody had been dropping some eaves.
Lesson? They Are All Listening. Presume so. To EVERYTHING within earshot. To your confessions, married special-time, private business chats, secrets, dinner conversation, family fights. Anywhere these computerized phones are present, BigEar may be listening in.
Smartphones are Smart! S-M-R-T!
Our Electronic Mini-Masters?
I don’t have one– my last was a fancy flip-phone. But I presume my iPad is listening, and her smrtphone, and the two boy’s smrtphones.
Solution? Turning it off and putting it in a metal box might do the trick. Or, one of these cool RFID/ signal blocker cases… or, just not having one. The addictive little things can wreck your brain anyway, as study after study confirms. At very least, break your smartphone addiction now, so you can have your life & brain back. And those of your loved ones.
Rats In A Maze
When you think about the brain-effects, spying, and biological effects of smartphone & cellphone technology– and the rising number of cancers which might be linked to their use– it strikes me that this is a giant socio-biological experiment with no permission or parameters, introducing many good and bad factors into daily human life, often from toddler on up. Experiment. Like on rats.
For those of us geezers raised in the pre-smartphone/ social media era, all of this is an add-on technology, which can multiply our existing curiousity, wonder, imagination, habits of being & learning & socializing. It’s a power-tool of sorts.
Quick: Example Us, Binks!
SO, for example– I’m currently reading Nigel Tranter’s Margaret The Queen. When I’m reading a book (dead tree or Kindle), I will constantly be looking up places, definitions, pictures of the places, historical summaries, art, related literature, and other interesting detail to flesh out the book. It becomes three-dimensional learning, based on my older trained & ingrained pre-digital habits.
What of the screen-addicted younger people raised in a time who have never known the old ways of curiousity, imagination, extrapolation, a love of learning and the intellect at play? I’m worried that endless music-playlists, SnapChat, InstaGram, flickering bytes and images which go by like dead leaves in a windstorm make it harder to develop those older qualities, which are not simply a “Different” form of intellectual and mental life, but the kind that is thousands of years old, and which built & sustained Western Civilization for thousands of years. Are our kids and grandkids being mentally flickered to death?
Who Did This? Not the Kids
Even if older generations find smartphones are manageable tools, it is a false logic to assume that people raised on them will turn out likewise. It’s that same thing with TV addiction in my youth: the idiot box ate your time, gave you a lazy brain, and– it turns out– wound up aggression even as kids were passively drooling before the one-eyed God.
Smartphones & digital technology are super-TV on meth & cocaine, doing untold damage all around us, even as we look on, semi-uncomprehendingly. “Kids today”, we moan, forgetting that every society creates exactly the kids it deserves. Think about it. ~
A few hours every day, Binks strives to darken the world with ugliness and sorrow over on FaceBook, and soon, on the 100% less Zuck alternative, MeWe. These are a few recent tidbits.
Years after I stopped my news-link aggregation service (100-150 of the best & topical and timely links, 2-3 times a week), FaceBook fiddling almost makes it needful again.
“Enjoy”,
Evil Binks The Hatful
Vive La Revolution
The 1976 visit to Cuba strained relations with Washington when Pierre Trudeau declared ‘Viva Castro.’ Fidel Castro is at centre; Margaret Trudeau holds baby Michel (Photo by Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Canadians has the dumb, because we’re only used to fighting evil tyrants ELSEWHERE, and not at home. It’s why the recent crop, from Trudeau, Chretien, Martin & Co. all the way to Junior, have gotten away with so much.
We assume that government is benign & mostly harmless. That the horrors of Mahometism or Marxianism somehow don’t have any effect on us, and that they wouldn’t want to use, abuse, or hurt us. That we can actually half-knowingly do Sex-Revolution evil like convenience abortion, euthanasia, fornication, and all the rest, and still be “basically good people”.
Just Say No. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
.. until they get the point, or get butthurt and go away, or actually get a clue.
#BoycottTheRevolution
Sheikh Imam Mustafa Khattab laughs during a speech at the Celebration of Abrahamic Faiths at Edmonton City Hall in Edmonton, Alta., on Sunday, December 16, 2012. The event, which focused on holiday celebrations by Jewish, Muslim and Christian groups, is run by the Phoenix Multi-faith Society for Harmony and the Edmonton Interfaith Centre for Education and Action. Ian Kucerak/Edmonton Sun/QMI Agency
Want to hurt & kill Jews? Flog women? Behead infidels and sharia law-breakers? Stone homosexual people to death? Conquer everywhere and everything? Subvert, riot, rape, bomb and bald-facedly lie?
The Canadian Government Summer Jobs Grants Has Your Back!!
Boycott Han Soylo, The Movie!
Saith Teh Binks:
Powerful Social Justice Warriors– like some movie-makers today COFF StarWars COFF– are like the kids who show up, hurt other kids and break things, and then crow about it.
Star Wars is/ was a cultural thing to enjoy for our times. SJWs are spoilers, mean-spirited hyper-Puritans who get joy out of preventing other people having joys. It’s a spiritual disease, a false religion, a smug holier than thou hypocrisy with delusions of grandeur.
Join The Boycott Army. Just say no to SJW story-molesting, and man-hating.
Sad to say it, but some “Foster Care” in the West is rife with sexual abuse, child slavery, underage prostitution, pedophilia, occult connections, and worse.
We are modern slavery states. Sad that “Black Lives Matters (A Soros Production) literally doesn’t give a flying flip about this, or real slavery in Africa & elsewhere, isn’t it?
Paul Joseph Watson– Why is cultural appropriation only OK when this idiot does it?
Saith Teh Binks:
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Alfie Evans: Another Child Sacrifice on Britain’s NHS Altar
Stalin: One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. The tragedy of this sick boy has focussed the billion killed by the current culture of death for many people in a way it’s been hard to do before.
World War III? We are already waging war on ourselves: against the unborn, sick born, chronically ill, disabled, mentally handicapped, elderly sick.. the statistics mount up every day, only our gulags & Auschwitzes are hospitals and clinics and medical wards, so it’s hidden and we can pretend to ignore it.
I still think about the fact that the medical waste incinerator for the main Halifax hospital (where the abortions were done) cast those baby-ashes over the nearby neighbourhoods, my school, and the children’s hospital just up the block.
I remember the smell, and the little smutches of ash and soot that would sometimes get on your skin & clothes during recess and lunch hour.
“SJWs don’t need proof. They just need to declare something makes them feel unsafe, and thus is super bad, and has to go or else. They’ve got emotion and outrage. So they pitched a big bitch fest. It was all the usual accusatory stuff, misogynistic, homophobic, racist etc. (and their examples? Nothing from real life, just a couple of his FICTIONAL characters bad behavior from among the thousands of fictional characters he’s written).”
Pope Trek
“Vatican. Your holiness. Have you gone mad? What are you trying to prove? Break off the ambiguity! Holiness, we have bishops giving communion to the divorced and remarried here. If you can hear us, stop the confusion! Holiness, why don’t you answer our Dubia? Holiness! Answer! Come in, Holiness!”
This entire episode has been a nightmare of cold and twisted official hubris in action, but none of it more disturbing than that exhibited by the Catholic Bishops of England. They will be held to account.
I am struck by the early remarks of Paglia which stress the pain of the parents in such a way as to make it seem a little bit selfish. Naturally they are thinking of the personal loss if they lose their child. But i’ve also had the sense that both parents are enraged by the larger issue of what it means to have the government take ownership of anyone’s child.
I don’t think for one minute that they cherished any great hope of a cure and a normal long life for Alfie — that they ever considered putting him through the degrading process of artificially prolonging his physical functions indefinitely, which would indeed have been a selfish act. They knew it was a judgement call, based on his responsiveness and general health. Anyone who looked at that child could see that he did not fit the definition of “failure to thrive” — he had healthy looking skin, full and glossy hair, was bright-eyed, plump and well-nourished. What he was NOT was (in words the authorities were careful not to use) “cost effective”.
Watching and waiting, lavishing him with care and love until he was insensible to it, was never going to add up to progress or improvement. But it would have been filled with grace and peace. Doctors used to care about the healing power of a graceful death. Government used to understand it as a right. Bishops used to recognize it as a sacramental necessity. All those with power and authority failed abysmally.
~ YOU KNOW those deliriously happy people in commercials and photos?– we’re supposed to be like that. Just– super-DUPER happy. Happy with the new tech-toys, happy with travelling and gathering random experiences, happy with the semi-anonymous exchange of bodily fluids, happy watching the same movie and listening to the same song, each only slightly varied from the other ones. Such very fun!
Except.. life. The world. Politics. Our longing hearts, seeking a kingdom of true peace, and inner peace. And in our world, restless Progressivism must “progress”, which means interfering with everything & everyone in sight.
“People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”
Most of all, the meddlers don’t like a taste of their own medicine. The Euro & American establishments both got a huge dose of meddlesome & uppity peasants with the U.S. Fall election of one Donald John Trump in 2016, and the Brexit vote earlier that same Summer.
Big Meddle got a royally bloody nose. And then their planet-sized snit ensued.
Elites: “This is going to hurt you peasants a lot more than you hurt us.”
The Snit Ensues: Details
Looking back at 2016, Team Meddle knows one thing: internets helped bad thing happen: must part-muzzle peasants! In 2015-2016, YouTube, Twitter, Google Search, Drudge, FaceBook were all used by the peasants as levers of public awareness, circumventing the lapdog media, and the political establishments feeding the elite narrative.
Must fix! So now it’s Big Backlash by Big Meddle, with shadow-banning, leftwards algorithms, demonetized videos and YouTube Channels, Twitter deletions and bans, FaceBook Jail & nanny-messaging. This is all to one end: to stop the anti-Meddle meddling by the revolting peasants. Social Media weaponized against non-compliant political-cultural-religious users.
Our digital self is a big thing for many Western people: imagine being all but banned, being digitally unpersonned, silenced, unable to get alternative news quickly, and not being able to discuss it with others? A genuine debility, in some respects.
It gets worse for the meddlers in 2018– the peasants not only spoke up several years ago, they keep speaking up, and even when some get banned, shadow-banned, de-monetized, and slapped down, they and their peasant allies still keep fighting back and speaking out! What’s a Big Meddle authoritarian to do?
The Other SoHappier 2018…
You see, just now President Hillary the globalist mafiosa is entering her second year, with her Canada-style gun rules coming into force and her FBI poodles covering her tracks, and the bodies quietly piling up; and a nearly de-blooded Islamicized United Kingdom is laying prone before the unelected autocrats in Brussels, surrendering every freedom, distinctive, and historical authority over itself to Big Meddle, and imported trouble. Same as it ever was, before 2016. Nigel Farage is merely a bad memory.
Just as planned pre-2013, the one-world progressive Pope is working closely with globalist schemer George Soros, President Hillary and the EUcrats towards a one-world government, more social control, more disruptive weaponized “immigration”, and a gentler Chinese-style control of the internet and all social media. And a suitable one-world religion to match.
In the 2018 that should have been, the internet is still an issue, but as long as a few grumblers don’t actually write letters, protest, speak to their elected representatives and get organized, they are pesky, but harmless: one mosquito at a time. SLAP! People vanish from Twitter and YouTube and FaceBook, and nobody wonders why.
New uppity-peasant YouTube channels with ‘unacceptable’ politically incorrect content all have a terrible time trying to get started, and make no advertising money. Troublesome news-sources are all but invisible online, or very hard to find on Google, banned on Twitter, sidelined on FaceBook, or in links on other pages. With advertising revenues dropping, many outlets are forced to cut back reporting, or shut down entirely.
What Next?
The fight must continue. Alternative social media platforms are only part of an answer, since we must stay in the public square, not surrender it to the bullies. And the bullies are not totally above the law, or invulnerable, either.
Actually protesting, writing letters, speaking out, exposing the Big Agenda and educating others about it, getting involved at the local level, reading books, praying for God’s Kingdom to come, and aligning ourselves with His almighty will makes any protest or expressed concern more than just our team versus theirs, screech versus scream.
It will cost us something– perhaps everything– but the West is not founded on trusting in the strength of men, but on a trust in the Risen power of Jesus Christ– the only-begotten Son of God– to truly make all things new, in the great re-creation.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King.
This is our fight, in our day. God knows the outcome, but I know that if we sit back and self-indulgently despair, we have already lost our contribution to the battle for freedom, faith, and our own civilization in our time.
— Do you or someone you know & care for suffer from ‘The Black Dog’?
— Does that addict or drunk or sad co-worker suffer from depression? Do you?
— Do you “helpfully” offer endless free advice and ‘fixes’ because you find dealing with depression really awkward?
~ FOR MANY PEOPLE, depression is a day, a week, a season. It is left behind as an sour note in an otherwise happy life.
In our happy “we can fix everything” universe, TV and movie stories resolve every problem via heroism and happenstance and all is well again. E xcept.. people can break, and sometimes only partly tape and glue and tie themselves half-together again, enough to limp along a while longer.
What Kind Of Beast IS This?
This Black Dog is patient, vicious, and quiet: it has hunted & haunted my parents, and grandparents, and down the genetic pathways for generations. For others, life & crises and trouble starts it up fresh for them.
Yet for others– yes, of all ages– it is interwoven into the very stuff of life, perhaps as far back as memory reaches, a misty shadowed valley that never seems to come to an end, with light only breaking through now and again. The Valley of the Shadow; this vale of tears; the bleak lands where affliction dwells.
Yet even there, Christ the Lord walks and talks with his own sheep. Sometimes, he will shift us up onto his shoulders awhile. Faith can make an infinite difference in the experience & severity of depression. I’m there: so’s He.
Pilgrim Walking
All better? Nope.
There are no magic happy-cures, nor skipping through the sparkly flowers on a unicorn– but a costly cross-bearing love which both lightens your burden, and enlightens the path and things around you. Suicide– the permanent solution to temporary problems– may lurk like a vulture on the crag, but need not live on your shoulders.
The proper meds & counselling and living life the best you can any given day will help, too. The grinding miserable trudge can thus become a pilgrimage: but to where?
The shadowed vale of tears is not infinite. God is.
Just A Little Farther
There is a fair City and golden castle farther on ahead, with towers and steeples and fair pennons flying.. you know not exactly how far.. but in it is light, and peace, and no more pain or black dogs, suffering or tears, and all the former things are passed away. There are battles to fight and people to help along this path– and many needing help– on our way.
And perhaps in that City, the black dog– which can teach us so much about perseverance, tribulation, compassion and understanding– will be revealed as having golden fur, for the troubles that lead us closer to God are blessed troubles. St. Paul besought the Lord to remove his sufferings, and instead, God said “My strength is made perfect in weakness.”
Without such hope and faith and love– and the mercy of God & others– I would be long-dead. Will you walk beside me and the others like me, or pass us by on the other side? ~
>> BARELY SATIRE: “Look at the calendar. Do you know what year it is? It’s 2018! Say it with me: two thousand eighteen. That means it’s long past time for us to get a few important things straight, once and for all.”
~ JUST THE OTHER DAY, some ‘marchers for peace’ from Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, Canada, protested a speech by lighting-rod author, professor and gadfly, Jordan Peterson. Inevitably, they wanted him silenced for, you know.. Reasons™. Some windows at the university were broken; virtue was signalled, the young Marxist social justice warriors felt superior, and succeeded in not learning or unlearning a single thing.
There was even a little incitement to murder & arson. ‘Lock em in and burn it down!’ yelled some of these “tolerant peace-loving” students. Yeah, that’s how I deal with discussions. Incitement & threats. Fire & kill.
The title of the terrible, horrible, very bad speech? “The Rising Tide of Compelled Speech in Canada.” Lifesite reports:
“Peterson posted several clips of the protest on Twitter, telling a follower that the speaking engagement was “absolutely surreal.”
“The mob neglected to bring torches and pitchforks, but the sentiment was there: ‘Lock them in and burn it down,’” he wrote.”
The End Is Past Nigh
Coming over for tea.. and staying for dinner.
In Mel Gibson’s excellent movie Apocalypto (2006), neither the protagonists– captured slaves– or the bad guys– the forest-wrecking temple-building heart-ripper-outers know that it’s the end of their world. They go about their business.. then, in the penultimate scene, we see the European sailing ships coming closer to the shore.
Whatever was before is not gonna be that way very much longer. The future isn’t what it used to be. “Burn all down! Fresh start!” is the new cry for revolution, devolution, and The Big Satanic Lie that we can make a new world by sincerity, effort, and all built of our own fallen selves. “Ye shall be as gods”.
Read, Learn, Weep
Miss H. White.
That’s the wisdom I draw from Hilary White’s latest essay cri de cœur “BECOMING AS GODS: The Murder of Desdemona by Othello, Abortion and Communion in the Hand“.
Just go read the whole thing, and as yourself the question from Mel’s movie: If our world was ending, would we know it?
The thing I like about Hilary’s essay is the big picture– taking little signs and symptoms and showing how the whole structure of the West is in danger, from within and without. Nihilism is nopt a passive force: it’s rather like a poison gas leaking into everything, dissolving the core, and leaving only fragile appearances of what was, ready to fall.
Sadly, the same radicalism has captured most Western Churches: disruption, discontinuity, ugly new utopian content. Hilary nails this perfectly.
What If It’s Here?
Acadia U. Nice view. shame about the silencing.
What if your own kids & grandkids– poisoned by socially & politically radical teachers, cultural influences, and college– were the new barbarians inside the gates? How could you tell?
Right now at Acadia University, in elm-shaded picturesque Wolfville Nova Scotia, is the fresh front in the war on civilization by “outraged” students and their enabling professoriate. Professor Rick Mehta is under fire for– teaching things. Things contrary to the progressive/ Marxist meta-narrative of victimhoods, oppressors, and the politics of personal destruction for any who don’t toe the party line.
Honestly, I’d rather just binge on NetFlix and hide while the walls come tumbling down on this city that I love: but dear people and good and true and beautiful things are at risk, and even the current enemies of those things might be saved from their madness and hate and self-righteousness.
A Sign of Hope?
Despair and doom-binging can be self-indulgent and blind to the possibilities even within apparent overwhelming darkness. After all, St. Paul & Christ’s Apostles faced and entire Empire founded on naked power, Emperor-worship, and pagan confusions. “Redeeming the time, for the days are evil“, says the Apostle to the Gentiles [Eph. 5:16].
One tiny point of brightness: I recently read on a YouTube video a comment by a college-aged kid who said that countless numbers of his friends & fellow students were binge-watching Jordan Peterson and other such content, because they were tired of the one-note lock-step radicalism of their professors. Truth finds a way.
That is, behind the deceptive ivy-facade, and behind the radicalism within, social media was in fact enabling young people to learn to see all sides of various questions, to hear actually diverse points of view, and to — horror of horrors- learn to think, reason, argue & debate. That they have to have a hidden remedial education within a $5-$10K institutional mis-education– while parroting their professors– is a picture of the horror-circus we have let develop in our society.
We will need such young people and all such folks to rebuild things on the ruins of what was. The end IS past nigh.
Do Your Duty
Look BEHIND the facades….
Investigate your local schools and colleges. Do due diligence before sending your kid off to school, imagining it still is like it was 30 or 50 years ago. Withhold donations and gifts and let them know what you think. And of your kindness, say a prayer and send a word to Acadia on behalf of Professor Rick Mehta. And don’t forget the petition.
Queens grad? Let them know what you think about the recent semi-riot. Because some students used their free speech to oppose free speech.
Navigating the Acadia website was like wandering through a picturesque maze, with not a single human being to be seen. In five minutes, I didn’t see the actual name of anyone, let alone Heather Hemming’s. I phoned the switchboard, hoping to speak to someone who could give me Ms Hemming’s email address: the hours are 8:30-4:30, Monday to Friday, so no luck. So, here I am at the general email address.
I also thought of contacting Acadia’s Office of Safety and Security as I believe that Professor Mehta’s safety and security are under siege—the topic of this message.
I have been an educator for 45 years. In that time, I have noticed a serious deterioration in both the maturity and behaviour of a critical mass of students. At the same time, I have noticed a standing down of the administrators, whose first line of defense now seems to be to appease the miscreant. This solves the problem of having to deal with an even more angry, entitled student and, often, that student’s belligerent parent(s). It’s nice for the three parties just mentioned—and hell for teachers, not to mention society at large.
I have twice been physically assaulted as well as suspended, minus due process, on the say-so of well known, student bullies. In all cases, the students were coddled and catered to: there were no negative consequences for them, but plenty for me. Who do you think felt really unsafe? As a colleague says, “Our schools are safe, all right—for the bullies.”
I attended excellent public schools in Toronto in the 50s and 60s: the adults were in charge. There were clear boundaries and not only were we safe, we felt safe! Academics were rigorous—a far cry from the curricula today—and we were held to account. We were not taught to be offended : the very idea of micro-aggressions and triggers didn’t enter our minds.
We were treated respectfully, which meant that we were held to high academic and behavioural standards. We could actually fail a grade. We could actually be suspended. Teaching our children that they have a right not to be offended is, in my opinion, a form of child abuse. This fiction renders young people very vulnerable to their own capricious and often tempestuous emotions. How is allowing vindictive and often misguided emotion to be the standard by which a university makes crucial decisions helpful to anyone?
Professor Mehta sounds like a man after my own heart. If the fairy tales being propagated at places like Acadia weren’t so outlandish, Professor Mehta’s ideas would seem to be just what they are: fairly mainstream. Why are his rights the only ones being disregarded? Why is his integrity considered expendable? Why is it OK to offend him?
Ms Hemmings, in attempting to censor, shame and bully Professor Mehta, Acadia seems willing to put itself in the same position as Wilfrid Laurier, which, deservedly, became a laughing stock. It seems that you’re unable to discern the gigantic double standard under which you appear to be operating. Acadia seems to have everything backwards: in order to enforce tolerance, you are intolerant. In order to appease the immature appetites of a group of coddled adult toddler students, it seems that Acadia is willing to sacrifice not only the integrity of a hard working, accountable academic, but his very livelihood. Shame on you.
How about if Acadia were to come to its senses and follow the example of the University of Chicago, re its expectations of its students? How about if Acadia were to actually treat its students not like spoiled brats, but like adults?
“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” the letter said.
How about if universities stopped being Potemkin Villages of Tolerance and became, in fact, safe spaces for all of their faculty and students? Now, wouldn’t that be a novelty?
Well done, Dr. Benson (FB Profile here), and thank you!
So saith,
Teh Binks
Iain T. Benson writes:
Office of the Vice-President, Academic
Acadia University,
Wolfville,
Nova Scotia,
Canada
Dear Heather Hemming:
Re: The Role of a University and University Leaders in a Time of increasing Polarization and Fear: Why the Clear Protection of Free Speech and Diversity of Opinions is Essential on a University Campus.
As a Canadian living and employed as a full Professor of Law in two countries outside of Canada and a former visiting Professor and Research Fellow at two Canadian Universities and a Fellow of Institutes relating to Law in a number of other countries, I would like to raise something with you.
At Conferences and lectures recently in the UK, Australia and in South Africa questions have been raised about why the Canadian academic environment has become so apparently closed to free speech and diversity of moral viewpoints and why university leaders seem to lack courage and leadership to say anything public about it.
In short the question seems to be this: where is Canadian academic leadership and why is it so seemingly cowed by contemporary political movements that attack freedom on campuses?
Do you have a response that can comfort those of us who have studied liberty and law and see both in trouble in Canadian universities and wider Canadian society?
Whether the widespread threatening of the status or activities of certain student groups, the threats to academic teachers or to accreditation itself, Canada is a worrying scene.
The pending decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Trinity Western University case (argued December 2017) while dealing with the wider issue of accreditation, raises the entailed question as to why the Canadian academic establishment is so weak in clearly, firmly and publicly defending genuine diversity and civil liberties against current attackers?
Canadian Law Deans, amongst other elite groups, exhibited, unanimously and embarrassingly, a shockingly pusillanimous esprit des corps in relation to Trinity Western University. One hopes the highest court will follow the British Columbia and Nova Scotia courts in supporting diversity of opinion there but the fact that so many at the highest levels of the legal and academic establishments failed to see the dangers to genuine diversity is a most worrying sign of the times.
Many will watch Acadia closely to see if it, and you, will do the correct thing here in relation to Professor Mehta and others like him as the juggernaut of identity politics increases speed.
The howling of mobs and the politics of fear and decontextualised arguments about “equality” have no place on a University campus worthy of the title of “higher learning”. Make no mistake: free speech is in trouble in Canada and many around the world know this and are watching to see if responsible leadership emerges from other than the judiciary to stop the well entrenched ideologues.
Please act decisively and courageously at Acadia University to lay out the principles of academic freedom, diversity of viewpoint and the importance of open discussion, disagreement and adult debate to a university and the wider society in which it has or should have a most important leadership role.
You may find the July 2012 statement of principle from the University of Chicago a good starting point for principled articulation at Acadia:
Letter Writing Campaign In Support of Professor Rick Mehta:
Please be CIVIL.
****KEY POINTS TO ADDRESS****
> Why, specifically, were Professor Mehta’s teaching allocations altered and reduced? (Rationale not clarified)
> Are the following teaching complaints and suggested remedies justified?
{Complaint} “the students have not expressed in writing the precise details of the racist and transphobic comments, but it is clear from their interactions with me that they are extremely disturbed by your comments, some to the point of not going to class.” (para. 4, p.2 in letter from Rob Raeside)
{Suggested Remedy} “stick to the content provided in the course text(s), and avoid pulling in data that might be seen by students as advancing a fringe point of view.” (para. 5, p.2 in letter from Rob Raeside)
{Suggested Remedy} “be very diligent about avoiding any comments that might be perceived as racist or transphobic.” (para. 5, p.2 in letter from Rob Raeside)
{Suggested Remedy} “…some of these perspectives may be challenging to students. However, in a first-year class it is imperative that the approach be well-balanced and must be in line with the published resources, i.e., the text book.” (para. 6, p.2 in letter from Rob Raeside)
> What is the evidence for Professor Mehta’s violation of Acadia University’s Policy Against Harassment & Discrimination?
– How, specifically, has Professor Mehta sexually harassed
students with his commentary?
(see letter from Heather Hemming; see policy document)
– How many complaints?
(see letter from Heather Hemming; see policy document)
I have just sent the following letter in support of Dr. Mehta:
Dear Dr. Hemming,
My family and I have been some-time residents of Nova Scotia since 2003, and have always been moved by the friendliness of your people and, in general, their practical common sense and peaceful ways. Therefore I am stunned to read about what is being done to Professor Rick Mehta, at your university.
I have skin in this game, as they say. I have been a professor of literature for more than thirty years, introducing students to a range of works spanning four thousand years and more than a dozen cultures, written in a broad variety of languages, ten of which I read. So I can see where Dr. Mehta is coming from.
He and his family have been, in their lives and in profoundly personal ways, the victims of ugly prejudices, some of them arising from a clash of cultures, the British and the Indian, and then the Canadian and the Indian. And yet he has the grace, and it seems the courage, not merely to condemn the British, and then your own people the Canadian, for pure evil. He has tried to understand both peoples and to evaluate them with equity, and because of that — because, apparently, he does NOT HATE his erstwhile overlords with sufficient passion — you are now doing to him exactly what you accuse the overlords of having done.
In other words, YOU are playing the part of a colonial master, coming down hard against a mild-mannered and gentle man, for daring not to be your intellectual puppet.
That is disgraceful in its own right. At a university, supposedly a place where young people are to be taught to pursue the truth, it is inexcusable.
Yours sincerely,
Anthony Michael Esolen Fellow, Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts
Panel Discussion on Free Speech at Universities (Acadia University; May 3, 2017)
~ AS MY FATHER used to say, ancient civilizations were invaded from outside by barbarians: modern societies are more efficient– we make our own barbarians, inside the gates.
This is an actionable moment for any concerned Canadian, Nova Scotia, Acadia Grad, academic, or just concerned person. It’s also a time to press the media to tell an accurate story, unlike the Canadian Press hack-job reprinted in the recent Chronically Horrid, which mostly quotes an associate professor from New Brunswick as the “expert”.
“The Upside Down is an alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world. It contains the same locations and infrastructure as the human world, but it is much darker, colder and obscured by an omnipresent fog…. [a] dimension that is a dark reflection, or echo, of our world. It is a place of decay and death, a plane out of phase, a place of monsters. It is right next to you and you do not even see it.” … “Nope. No parallels under here.” (Hilary White)
>> Hilary White: Two religions; one Church? – the infiltration of the Modernist Anti-Christ (Nov. 2017)
~ BINKS IS just about to finish ‘Stranger Things‘ on Netflix, Season 1. Must say, I love it.. and it’s hard not to binge-watch it.
No major spoilers ensue below. Promise.
Like ‘The Matrix‘, the hit-show Stranger Things employs that familiar & human sense of displacement, weirdness, that there is an Unseen all around us which sometimes breaks in upon us in our ‘ordinary’ lives. That there is more going on than meets the eye.
In the popular Netflix series, which overflows with references to 80’s pop-culture, there is literally an evil copy parallel dimension called ‘The Upside Down‘, where people can be trapped, and eaten by a monster. The dimensional doorways can appear anywhere and everywhere: the wall of a house, a tree trunk, the basement of a top-secret government lab.
What both ‘The Matrix‘ and ‘Stranger Things‘ lack to make them universal is a spiritual universe above and inter-penetrating the visible ‘ordinary’ universe.. and a clear sense of God & His guiding providence. Sadly, religion plays almost no part in the show, or the lives of the characters.
What ‘Meant’ Means
By comparison, the writer J.R.R. Tolkien repeatedly mentions providence without explicating that it is of the Valar (archangels) and Eru (God). The wizard Gandalf’s own long mission in Middle Earth was a sending from the Blessed Land to fight evil, help the free peoples via suffering and pity, and– ultimately– to defeat Sauron, the dark successor to Morgoth (a fallen Valar, the Satan-figure).
In that Lord Of The Rings scene– which Peter Jackson moves from Frodo’s kitchen to the Mines Of Moria– we read:
Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”
Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”
That ‘meant’ bears a world of significance. Consider.
‘Meant’ is God’s providence, in the world, in events, ‘coincidences’, and via people. The Bible proclaims: “All things work together for good to them that love God.” [Rom. 8:28] Note: NOT ‘all things will be pleasant, easy, and straightforward’.
Remember: Christians serve a Crucified and Risen King, who still bears His (now glorious) scars. No easy path there: take up your cross. Follow, die.
Living Our Double Sight
And there’s another sense of “the unseen dimension”, our own actual “Upside Down”, which tempers our anger and enlightens our struggles. As Saint Paul teaches the Christians of Ephesus, and us:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” [Eph. 6:12]
Any battle with sin, darkness, heresy– in the church and the world, and in our own hearts, is a combination of many forces, many invisible, or acting through us or other people in a greater & darker pattern than the simply human (as bad as we can be).
Exorcists are still busy in 2018. Possessed people still exist– some in politics, and in the Church itself. Even some clergy may be thus.
The Disorientation Is Real
In the current pontificate of Francis, there is unprecedented darkness, division, dishonesty, confusion and discouragement afoot. Papal hyper-loyalists rally ’round the revolutionary throne, throwing accusations at critics and radical (deep-rooted) Catholics who demand the whole witness of the Church to be heard, respected, lived, taught.
Sometimes, it feels as if an UnChurch from some evil parallel dimension like ‘The Upside Down‘ has invaded our reality, and is seeking to proclaim itself as the real, true, and only thing to serve. There is a spiritual war afoot: each of us can play a double part, on earth as in heaven, for good or bad. The darkness is not simply the opposition themselves, nor we only the bright good ones– for humility and reality’s sake, we admit there are brighter and darker forces in conflict within what we see, and in each soul.
Holy loyalty and faithfulness and restraint are good: but we do not honour the Church or her current leadership via our blind obedience, nor forgetting Whom She really belongs to, and Whose Voice she is supposed to obey. His will is not simply to be identified with the novel dictates of people who seem bound to another message, an unKingdom, a utopia of exalted man making himself into a God, his desires and feelings the measure of all truth and goodness. OUR kingdom come, OUR will be done: and yet, even in this, a greater darkness can be felt, seeping through, pushing, ruining, distorting the Church, but also the fever dreams of utopia, too.
Some Christian Basics
That evil unholy being is not some exact counterpart to God, but a created and fallen Enemy, and likewise all the fallen angels and powers under his control. Alone, we cannot defeat such darkness, for we are but mortal and finite and compromised with darkness ourselves. From such, Christ came to deliver us.
Ancient Paganism sought to placate the dark powers; to deflect the ill will of spirits, gods, sprites, and malicious beings of every sort. Animal and human sacrifice was the trading of precious life for benefits, or being left alone.
The Incarnation changed all that. Jesus is become the Lord of the living and the dead. The suffering King Jesus lays bare the plans and pride and shining schemes of Lucifer; He bore in himself our sin, and has already won the victory over sin, and death, and Hell.. yet the long wrapping up of the battle will seem almost like defeat, as the faithful must abide darkness in the world, the Church, the human heart, and in malicious spiritual forces.
But, but– What To DO?
Read the headlines; pray; comfort one another; love the sacraments; repent. Read the Bible & the Church Fathers, and the saints. Read solid blogs and books. Same as it ever was, and there’s no greener grass elsewhere. Cheer up! It will very likely get much worse.
Stay faithful, for God is faithful, and will not abandon us, or leave us weak and comfortless and enslaved to the machinations of the Enemy and his minions, nor to our own sins, negligences, and ignorances. These bizarre times WILL be sorted by God, and by his judgment & mercy, and by better Church leaders and theologians in decades and centuries to come. +
So saith:
Teh Binks
“Lo, I am with you always,
even unto the end of the world. Amen.”
[St. Matthew 28:20]
Just as planned pre-2013, the one-world progressive Pope is working closely with 
And perhaps in that City, the black dog– which can teach us so much about perseverance, tribulation, compassion and understanding– will be revealed as having golden fur, for the troubles that lead us closer to God are blessed troubles. St. Paul besought the Lord to remove his sufferings, and instead, God said “My strength is made perfect in weakness.”
A Swift Sunrise 