The Mark Steyn show trial in Vancouver

Here's Canadian journalist David Warren at his best on the "human rights" show trial of Canadian commentator Mark Steyn for "hate crimes" in Vancouver:

This is a disaster also for Canada’s Muslims, for the views of fanatical Islamists are being presented as representative of them all. No single person has done so much to advance contempt for Islam in this country as Mohamed Elmasry, president of the “Canadian Islamic Congress,” the complainant in this case -- whose public assertions have included e.g. the view that every Israeli citizen is a valid target for Palestinian hitmen.

The bland acceptance of this jackass, by mainstream Canadian media, as the definitive spokesman for Muslim interests in Canada, cannot be blamed on the Muslim community. Innumerable Muslims have disavowed him, and yet are entirely ignored. Indeed: Mark Steyn has been among the few journalists distinguishing between camps. He would be: for he has plenty of Muslim supporters.

Yes, I have seen all that happen myself. And the point I most want to get across to fellow Canadians (said better and more pungently by David) is that Canadian Muslims, by and large, are not doing this. Leftwing activists are doing it, using the few Muslims who actively cooperate with their system as a crowbar to pry Canada loose from the historic civil rights that have always been our pride and their bane. Non-Canadians can best help us by monitoring the situation, spreading the word, and making sure it does not happen where you are.

Anyway, Warren begins,

Show trial

The writings of Canada’s most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada’s obscene “human rights” commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act.

I wrote “obscene” advisedly. Before Canada’s “human rights” tribunals, a respondent has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists.

I wrote “show trial” advisedly, for there has been a 100 percent conviction rate in cases brought to “human rights” tribunals under Section 13.

For the rest go here.

By the way, three other things:

1. I am adding Free Mark Steyn - Free the press in Canada! as the top link in my blogroll to the right.

2. This "human rights" situation is the reason I disabled the comboxes at my blogs recently. The galloping rate at which "human rights" commissions will hear cases of people claiming to have been offended by something they read leaves me with little choice. As a writer, I must subject myself to that risk, but cannot ethically subject others - not until or unless these commissions are relieved of most of their current responsibilities - including all responsibility for policing Internet content.

3. Rely on the blogosphere, especially the links through Free Mark Steyn for information. Legacy media have been surprisingly slow to catch on, given how much they are at risk. My friend Parliamentary journalist Deborah Gyapong wrote on Monday,

For those who are not ignorant of what's going on, I wonder whether there is a weird Stockholm syndrome at work. Rather than see they are being held hostage by their fear of radical Islam, (and tiptoeing so as not to offend or blaspheme so foreign correspondents won't get kidnapped or worse) they have displaced their fear and loathing onto the people who write about it. They are like the bank robbery hostages or hijacked plane passengers who get pissed off at police for shooting their captors. They have identified with their captors, even formed a bond with them, for their own psychological survival. If the captors see that I like them, they will like me and I will come out of this okay they tell themselves.

Most of it, though, is massive ignorance I'm afraid. I don't think most journalists can even conceive that we have such a shadowy, parallel "justice system" that can hand out severe penalties without any of the normal protections in a criminal or even civil law court.

I replied,

Deborah, two things:

1. It IS the Stockholm syndrome (SS). Not a weird form but the real thing. SS always looks weird up close. Think of the police officer who dodges bullets to rescue a hostage, only to have her denounce him as a fascist and promptly shack up with the sociopath hostage taker on his trailer weekends, hanging on to every bit of bullshirt that comes out of his mouth like it was the gospel reading (which, for her, it is). Think of that when we hear legacy media types making oblique excuses for FGM, honour killings, forced marriage, and the like.

Not everyone gets SS, and it is significant that the syndrome was first identified in Sweden.

The people who are especially susceptible to SS start out with fixed and very convenient ideas about who the villains are and who the victims are.

They “know” things, where the rest of us would withhold judgement before doing some research. As the threat advances, they erect ever more barriers to discovering a reality they are entirely powerless to face. Capitulation feels so good because it preserves their worldview (at the expense of their sanity and well-being).

2. Not every journalist needs or wants freedom of the press. That is the single most dangerous misconception out there. Many of our colleagues would be very happy indeed with a situation that prevented them from feeling badly about not taking REAL risks with their coverage because the government doesn’t allow it - “to protect minorities” and all that. No one will be more unctuous in advancing such explanations than the person for whom they are a cover for sloth and cowardice.

Those interested in David Warren's entertaining views on religious matters (he is a devout Catholic but a serial offender against the Received Dogma of modernism, and his skepticism is matched only by his good sense and good humour), go here. (Note: This is a search string on The Mindful Hack, so the first story you see will necessarily be this one. Scroll down to the next one for the "David Warren vs. received witlessdom" stories.)

Canadian journalist David Warren on Oscar the deathcat!

Oscar is the cat who was written up in the New England Journal if Medicine for predicting when people in an old age home would die. (I say he did it by scent.)

Anyway, David Warren, acknowledging Oscar, commented amusingly on catly skills in general:

... I had adopted, or rather been adopted by (unlike dogs, cats choose their masters), one of these cats. I named him Ferdinand, after Magellan, the Portuguese explorer in the Spanish service, for his cathemeral activities took him on a circuit of considerable extent.

He was the sort of cat I would myself choose for a voyage of circumnavigation. It would have to be a cat, as I am persuaded by nautical memoirists from Joshua Slocum to Lorenzo Ricciardi, that goats make poor sailors. The virtues of cats, at sea, are attested by many of the feline voyagers themselves, from Trim, the famous cat of the famous Captain Flinders; to Mrs Chippy, aboard Shackleton’s Endurance; to Pwe, the “ineffective hunter of albatrosses” who crewed with Miles and Beryl Smeeton.

Don't like cats? I will try to find you something about dogs then.

Actually, I have often thought that it would be better to find a dog who could do what Oscar does. A dog can be much more easily trained to alert people to a situation than a cat. And I BET goats make poor sailors!

Home personnel knew only by the change in Oscar's behaviour that a patient's death was imminent , not because the cat thought it his business to alert them.

See also: Can people simply decide when to die?

Blindness: Spiritual blindness worse than physical?

Canadian journalist David Warren comments on blindness and spirituality

The most fascinating thing about actual blindness, is that it confers certain advantages in seeing what is invisible to the eyes. There is, to put this plainly, a spiritual world "behind" this visible one, just as there is a visible world behind the tactile. The blind do not have the visible world to distract them.

The spiritual world is not disputable. To deny it would be like a man born blind, denying colour because he has never personally experienced it, and refuses to take it on someone else's faith. Nor could one prove to that blind man that colour exists. Even if you showed him a rainbow. And yet, there are people born blind who can tell the difference between red and blue, when they touch these colours in the sunlight.

and - as a man who is no friend to violent thugs- Warren is compassionate to the genuine seekers in Islam,

I am not saying there aren't many hard, violent passages in the Koran, and Hadiths; nor am I saying these are no better or worse than similar passages in the New Testament, or Dharmapada. For to say this is to ignore fact. But before we stare, at what may seem alien and frightening, and before we let anger make us blind, we must realize that the sincere Muslim, in his humility, is doing what we are, when we are seeking God. He is in prayer.

Warren has as little use as I do for evolutionary psychology and "Darwinoids", and some of his comments can be found here.

Physician and essayist Theodore Dalrymple doubts God but dismisses "new atheists"

Theodore Dalrymple takes on the "New Atheists" in City Journal, and it is all the more interesting because he himself has doubted the existence of God since a school assembly at age nine.

He thinks but little of this spate of anti-God works, saying, for example:

This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.

and also

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

But I will spoil it no more for you.

Toronto journalist David Warren writes to say,

Hitchens & Dawkins are, or were, both capable of charm & wit -- including, even, self-deprecatory wit. It disappears in their atheist tracts. What appears in its place is just the worst sort of narrow, sneering, vindictive,
religious-style bigotry, that any religious person is supposed to be on his
guard against. Which is to say, they do not know what they are talking about; it is "beneath them" even to do the most elementary research into the actual histories & actual beliefs of the people they are attacking; & they will throw any missile that comes to hand, without considering its provenance. It is the flavour of Ulster at its very worst; or worse still, for there is not even a thin pretence of charity.

Dalrymple is by contrast modern, "post-Christian" European at its best. He is not a believer, but he does, actually, know something about Christianity, & he is aware of the need to retain specific virtues -- including charity, including humility -- that were inculcated in the Christian tradition. He is deeply concerned about the preservation of civilization (see his writings on every other subject; for he is a brilliant observer of post-modern life, from the angle of having been a doctor in places like prisons).

I got the same impression as Warren in both cases (the neo-atheists and Dalrymple), but didn't manage to put it half so well.

P.S.: David Limbaugh comments on Christopher Hitchens here.

Thought for the day: Can everyone be wise?

David Warren comments on perennial philosophy:

While reading recently the third edition of After Virtue by the great living philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, I was struck once again by the notion of the "philosophia perennis." This is the notion that there is one, and only one, recurring and inevitable set of mutually dependent universal truths on the nature of man, and of the world in which he appears -- one and only one convincing view of what we can mean by the good, the true, and the beautiful. This view is accessible to all men who can summon the intellectual and moral resources to be wise, which include the patience to deeply consider the alternatives and reject all those that ultimately contradict themselves.

MacIntyre is not a philosopher with whom I feel entirely at home. ...

Mario Beauregard, my lead author on The Spiritual Brain, is a perennialist, and Warren's take is interesting.

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

David Gelernter drives yet another stake through the idea of "artificial intelligence":

believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly could be built out of software--and might be useful. Unfortunately, AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind are nowhere near knowing how to build one. They are missing the most important fact about thought: the "cognitive continuum" that connects the seemingly unconnected puzzle pieces of thinking (for example analytical thought, common sense, analogical thought, free association, creativity, hallucination). The cognitive continuum explains how all these reflect different values of one quantity or parameter that I will call "mental focus" or "concentration"-which changes over the course of a day and a lifetime.

Hat tip to David Warren. We make a similar point in The Spiritual Brain.

Monk-led protest against Myanmar generals' regime now under heavy assault

Last week, Buddhist monks led a protest against the dictatorial regime of Myanmar's generals.

But, according to Canada's Globe and Mail:

RANGOON -- Protesters who have crowded the streets of Myanmar's major city of Rangoon for days began to flinch in the face of a harsh military crackdown yesterday, turning out in smaller numbers - unaccompanied by the country's Buddhist monks, who have been barricaded in their monasteries or taken into custody.

Also

The organization said that all cyber-cafés in Rangoon (also known as Yangon) were closed and that the military was persecuting journalists who continued to work despite the difficult conditions.

The regime has also ordered Christians to be wiped out, apparently.

Further to the "Goons in Rangoon" news, David Warren offers context in the Ottawa Citizen,

Looking, through the dusk screen of the media, at the events in Burma, one
feels a cold and pointless rage. The vicious regime that has long enslaved that country is again winning a struggle in which they have all the weapons.

With the "subtle, malign cunning" (I am quoting Kenneth Denby, writing bravely for the Times of London, from Rangoon) that is possible only to a cat with a cornered mouse, the regime has watched the nation's Buddhist monks lead the people onto the streets. It allowed them nine days to vent their grievances, and is now cutting them down.

But the cutting down has been done with much greater efficiency than after the last demonstrations on this scale, that began August 8, 1988. Perhaps 3,000 were massacred in the course of snuffing out the flame of liberty on that occasion. In this latest reprisal of government against people, it seems only a few dozen have been killed -- including the Japanese press photographer, Kenji Nagai, shot down in cold blood to send a message to the other foreign reporters.

In recent history, however, the "monks" tend to win.

BUT this shows us that victory is a long way off.

Civil rights protests force extinction of Olympic torch

Speaking of the Dalai Lama and his monks (see story below) , notice how they and their sympathizers co-opted the Olympic Torch, which went out a number of times thanks to civil rights protests organized against China's chronic human rights violations. Matchless control of symbols, that!

Friend David Warren wrote recently,

We have the pleasure this morning of catching up with the mounting Tibet protests that are following the Olympic torch around the world (the "aubergines" in Paris today have twice had to pull the torch to safety on a bus, which necessitates extinguishing the flame), as it gradually dawns upon the Beijing Politburo that they have laid out so many billion yuan to achieve one of the great publicity own-goals of the century.

Let us hope so.

Here's another story about monk-led protest for civil rights in Eastern Asia.

It's interesting to reflect on the number of situations in the last century when religious figures played a key role in organizing civil rights actions, whether in South Africa, Poland, Romania, the Philippines, the southern United States, or Eastern Asia. I suspect that a lot depends on whether the government has co-opted the religion of the people or, alternatively, despises and persecutes it. In the latter case, it can quicky become a focus of resistance to tyranny.

Does behaviorism work?

Behaviorism was one of the now-discredited psychological theories of the last century, championed by B.F. Skinner, according to which mental states do not matter because behavior can be programmed directly. Mario Beauregard and I talk a bit about this in The Spiritual Brain.

Actually, the mere mention of the placebo effect should be enough to sink behaviorism as a theory. Basically, for many illnesses, mental states play a huge role in how well treatments work (placebo effect) - or DON'T work (nocebo effect).

Of course, W. H. Auden took a down-to-earth approach to how the theory was used in practice. He said,

Of course, Behaviourism "works". So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, & simple electrical appliances, & in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

Behaviorist treatments for obsessive compulsive disorder have, for example, included forcing compulsive handwashers to touch toilets in public washrooms, after which they were forbidden the wash their hands. As a result, many refused to seek treatment. And if that's a new standard in enlightenment, we might as well move back to the Dark Ages.

Hat tip Toronto journalist David Warren for the Auden quote. Here are some other fun quotes about psychological and educational bad ideas.

Pope blames world's worst woes on atheism

It should not surprise anyone particularly that Pope Benedict XVI, in his second encyclical, blames atheism for the world's worst woes, just as the recent spate of popular anti-God books blames religion:

Pope Benedict XVI strongly criticized modern-day atheism in a major document released today, saying it had led to some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" ever known to mankind.

But in his second encyclical, Benedict XVI also critically questioned modern Christianity, saying its focus on individual salvation had ignored Jesus' message that true Christian hope involves salvation for all.

I am SO glad, as a Catholic Christian, that someone (and imagine, it is the Pope, of all people) is speaking up against the irrelevant Jesus-hollering that has defaced so much recent evangelism in his 76-page document. (I haven't read it yet, but I am hardly surprised that he would say things like these, and I certainly look forward to reading it.)

Look, I am personally a Christian and I believe that Jesus is the answer, but if you can't be bothered to define the question, how do you know if I am right or wrong?

Hat tip fellow Catholic journalist David Warren, who didn't himself notice this till some friends forwarded it to him. I didn't know till he forwarded it to me. Just shows you what sinners we Catholics are. We were drinking heavily in assorted low-class pubs when the news was announced, okay? Glad that's cleared up.

A fellow journalist's thoughts on neuroscientists and God

A journalist friend, David Warren writes,

I have met few neuroscientists in my time, but I have met a couple, & it just struck me that each was seriously religious. Ditto, brain surgeons. Whenas, almost every common-garden biology prof or grad student I've encountered was stark raving atheist. ... Well, I am famous for my small statistical samples.

The same thing seems to distinguish microbiologists & geneticists: this propensity, which I suspect is founded in what they study, to be religious. Whereas, people who study textbooks, as opposed to nature, tend not to be.

The more obvious, & demonstrable divide continues to be between scientists of any speciality "teaching" in universities, & research scientists, mostly employed in corporate-sponsored institutions, where results count. The former give the impression of being wall-to-wall "post-modern," the latter wall-to-wall "born-again." And the distinction is once again between those who study nature, & those who study personal gratification.

It would be fun to see a "large" statistical sample. One does run into neuroscience grad students who are atheists, after all. On the other hand, there is Mike Egnor.