Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[Brad Sallows]

There is a second aspect, which I didn't see in the article.  Recently Macleans magazine ran an article about "social justice" topics and the space (time) they occupy in education.  Predictably, supporters of those policies responded strongly (as per the tone of most of the letters chosen for publication in a subsequent issue).

But indoctrinating/educating/persuading children to be compassionate and empathetic is just the "L" ("lecture") part of "LDE".  Without the presence of charitable organizations actively working in places where people can become involved or at least rub shoulders, there is no "demonstration" or "explanation" of how they function and serve, thus driving home the lesson of social responsibility.  Government charitable services are as much unseen by most Canadians as our military.

 

[ModlrMike]

There was a time where charities provided the bulk of social services. These services were by and large provided by religious organizations, most of which did not restrict the services to their own congregations. As we moved through the 60s, 70s and 80s government gradually usurped the role of charity in the name of diminishing "church" power, and centralizing government power. The irony is now that as government looks to offload some degree of service, "churches" are no longer equipped to step into the gap. In our rush to become a secular state have we cut off our nose to spite our face?

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

There was a time where charities provided the bulk of social services. These services were by and large provided by religious organizations, most of which did not restrict the services to their own congregations. As we moved through the 60s, 70s and 80s government gradually usurped the role of charity in the name of diminishing "church" power, and centralizing govisernment power. The irony is now that as government looks to offload some degree of service, "churches" are no longer equipped to step into the gap. In our rush to become a secular state have we cut off our nose to spite our face?

The family also used to player a much larger role in providing services.  it wasn`t that unusual to see 3 generations of a family live together.  Now, the seniors are cast aside, largely, with government expected to pay the bills for living and medical expenses, while young people move back in with their parents, not to assist their parents in any reasonable way, but rather to maintain their standard of living (IPODS, I Phones, drinking, etc) on their parents dime until they can purchase a $300,000 `starter` home.

The diminishment of the family and it`s deference to the government, IMHO, is more troubling than the lesser role of the church.  No matter your religious views, your parents are always your parents and kids your kids.  When this bond was replaced by the government (I can`t even decide when to take my kid out of a car seat anymore!) we, as a society, sold our souls.

 

[ModlrMike]

The family also used to player a much larger role in providing services.  it wasn`t that unusual to see 3 generations of a family live together.  Now, the seniors are cast aside, largely, with government expected to pay the bills for living and medical expenses, while young people move back in with their parents, not to assist their parents in any reasonable way, but rather to maintain their standard of living (IPODS, I Phones, drinking, etc) on their parents dime until they can purchase a $300,000 `starter` home.

The diminishment of the family and it`s deference to the government, IMHO, is more troubling than the lesser role of the church.  No matter your religious views, your parents are always your parents and kids your kids.  When this bond was replaced by the government (I can`t even decide when to take my kid out of a car seat anymore!) we, as a society, sold our souls.

Yes, I agree and should probably have extended my essay in that direction. But I would also argue that "church" was one of the glues that held the family unit together and promoted family values. I guess the thrust of the message is that charity has been taken out of the hands of those best situated to provide it - the people. Unpaid volunteers that engender a community spirit in those with whom they interact and support will always be more efficient at providing charity than distant, insulated bureaucrats who lack local situational awareness. The state is too monolithic and not sufficiently agile to respond to conditions on the ground like communities are. One only needs to look at how well local "emergencies" are managed by society versus government intervention that often arrives too late to be of real benefit. We regularly marvel at how small towns can respond to crisis, but wonder why larger centers can't do the same. Our power and our will to look after each other has been diminished to such a level that we now can barely look after ourselves.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This part of the ongoing left <> right debate in China: where does the Confucian family's responsibility end and charity or <gasp> even the state kick in. Fifty years ago the answer was easy, now, after the greatest migration in human history ~ tens of millions of Chinese have moved to the East coast "rich strip" in just one generation ~ the Confucian family's "reach" is no longer long enough: young people have gone to the East, leaving their elderly parents in the Central and Western provinces with, often no one to care for them. The one child policy (since circa 1980) exacerbates the problem.

Hu Jintao introduced several embryonic social programmes with which we, Canadians, would feel comfortable but which still shock many, many Chinese for whom te idea that one would or could leave his parents to the mercies of charity or, even less conceivable, the state is horrifying.

 

[a_majoor]

Rather brilliant encapsualization of Progressive tropes in this one article:

http://sultanknish.blogspot.ca/2012/12/gun-control-thought-control-and-people.html

Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?


To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli.

You wouldn't blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Individual behavior is a symptom of a social problem. Identify the social problem and you fix the behavior. The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual.

That is how the left approached this election. Instead of appealing to individual interests, they went after identity groups. They targeted low information voters and used behavioral science to find ways to manipulate people. The right treated voters like human beings. The left treated them like lab monkeys. And the lab monkey approach is triumphantly toted by progressives as proof that the left is more intelligent than the right. And what better proof of intelligence can there be than treating half the country like buttons of unthinking responses that you can push to get them to do what you want.

Would you let a lab monkey own a gun? Hell no. Would you let it choose what to eat? Only as an experiment. Would you let it vote for laws in a referendum? Not unless it's trained to push the right button. Would you let it drive a car? Nope. Maybe a bicycle. And if it has to travel a long way, you'll encourage it to use mass transit. Does a monkey have freedom of speech? Only until it annoys you.

You'll take away most of the monkey's bananas, which you're too lazy to go and find for yourself because you have more important things to do than fetch bananas. You train monkeys to fetch bananas for you. That is how the enlightened elites of the left see the workers whose taxes they harvest; as monkeys that they taught in their schools and created jobs for with their stimulus plans for. And the least that the monkeys could do is pay their taxes, because the monkeys didn’t build that. You did.

You do plan to take care of monkey's medical expenses, at least until they get too high, and spay and neuter it with free birth control. You will train it to be the smartest and most well-behaved monkey it can be. And when it gets too sick, you plan to have it mercifully put down so it doesn't hang around spreading diseases and depressing you with its misery.

And what's wrong with any of that? Human beings are just evolved monkeys. It's not as if you're being cruel to the monkey. You're engaged in what you might charitably think of as a symbiotic relationship with the monkey. If the monkey were smart, it might think of you as a parasite. But you have a whole lot of rounds of ammunition stockpiled in case of a Planet of the Apes scenario.


If you assume that there is as much of a substantive difference between the elite and the common man as there is between a man and a monkey, there is nothing particularly inappropriate about such behavior. We herd animals. Liberals herd people. The human being is the livestock of the liberal animal farm.

The Nazis believed that they were the master race because they were genetically superior. Liberals believe that they are the master race on account of their superior empathy and intelligence. There's an obvious paradox in believing that you have the right to enslave and kill people because you care more, but that didn't stop millions of people from joining in with revolutions that led to a century of bloodshed in the name of movements that cared more. 

The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. Conservatives have attempted to counter that by defining freedom as compassionate, as George W. Bush did. Liberals counter by attempting to define compassion as liberating, the way that FDR did by classing freedoms with entitlements in his Four Freedoms.

On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Liberal compassion is not the compassion of equals. It is a revolutionary pity that uses empathy only as fuel for outrage. It is the sort of compassion practiced by people who like to be angry and who like to pretend that their anger makes them better people. It is the sort of compassion that eats like poison into the bones of a man or a society, even while swelling their egos with their own wonderfulness.

Compassion of this sort is outrage fuel. It is hatred toward people masquerading as love. And that hatred is a desire for power masquerading as outrage which in turn is dressed up as a deep love for others and empathy for all living creatures. Peel away the mask of compassion and all that is underneath is a terrible lust for power. And the only way to truly justify the kind of total power summoned by such lusts is by reducing the people you would rule over to the status of non-persons.

The clash that will define the future of America is this collision between the individual and the state, between disorganized freedom and organized compassion, between a self-directed experiment in self-government and an experiment conducted by trained experts on a lab monkey population. And the defining idea of this conflict is accountability.

To understand the left's position on nearly any issue, imagine a 20th Century American and then take away accountability. Assume that the individual is helpless and stupid, has little to no control over his own behavior and is only responding to stimuli and functions in a purely reactive capacity. Then use that data to come up with a response to anything from kids getting fat to a football player shooting his wife to terrorists firing rockets at Israel. The only possible answer to reactive behavior is to find the thing being reacted to and condemn it.

If you want to fake being a member of the left on any topic and in any setting, master this simple phrase. "But we have to look at the root causes to see who is really responsible." Congratulations, you can now get by anywhere from Caracas to Brussels to Berkeley.

The root cause is a perpetual search for an accountability vested in systems rather than people. That search always ends up with systems and ideologies, rather than mere people, because it justifies the destruction of those systems and ideologies. And destroying systems and ideologies allows them to be replaced by their progressive replacements.

The final failure of accountability for the left is a failure of moral organization, while for the right it is a failure of personal character. The right asks, "Why did you kill?" The left asks, "Who let him have a gun?", "Who didn't provide him with a job" and "Who neglected his self-esteem?"

Freedom goes hand in hand with personal moral organization of the individual by the individual. Organized compassion however requires the moral organization of the society as a whole. A shooting is not a failure of the character of one man alone, or even his family and social circle, it is the total failure of our entire society and perhaps even the world, for not leveraging a sufficient level of moral organization that would have made such a crime impossible. No man is an island. Every man is a traffic jam.


Social accountability on this scale requires the nullification of the personhood and accountability of the individual, just as the moral organization that it mandates requires removing the freedom of choice of the individual, to assure a truly moral society. When compassion and morality are collective, then everyone and no one is moral and compassionate at the same time. And that is the society of the welfare state where compassion is administered by a salaried bureaucracy.

Choice is what makes us moral creatures and collective compassion leaves us less than human. The collective society of mass movements and mass decisions leaves us little better than lab monkeys trying to compose Shakespeare without understanding language, meaning or ideas, or anything more than the rote feel of our fingers hitting the keyboard.

This is the society that the left is creating, a place filled with as many social problems as there are people, where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments, and where no one has any rights because freedom is the enemy of a system whose moral code derives from creating a perfect society by replacing the individual with the mass. It is a society where there is no accountability, only constant compulsion. It is a society where you are a social problem and there are highly paid experts working day and night to figure out how to solve you.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Yup, pencils are the cause of bad spelling and poor math and forks make you fat.

 

[Dissident]

Did he REALLY need to compare the "left" with Nazi's to help make his point?

 

[Edward Campbell]

Did he REALLY need to compare the "left" with Nazi's to help make his point?

No, of course he didn't, but conservatism is broken.

Real conservative values like fiscal prudence, social moderation and a cautious foreign policy, backed up by a sufficient military have been displaced by absolutes like Norquist's "no tax increase" pledge, extreme social positions that would make a Wahhabi iman smile and support for every weapons system ever devised, no matter the bank breaking costs.

The conservative intellectual spring that preceded and informed Ronald Reagan's government (except on fiscal policy where he racked up growing debts) has turned to a bleak winter. All US conservatives can manage is to hate President Obama - they have consigned themselves to the political wilderness for a while. They need an Eisenhower - not Ike the war hero/general but Ike the fiscal and social moderate who could lead America.

 

[a_majoor]

Walter Russell Mead looks at the disintigration of the "Blue" model in terms of demographics. While we see the more obvious Democrat/Republican stuff from here, there are lots of internal splits within the various parties as well (think back to the Canadian Alliance, or the Chretien/Martin split in the LPC). Here the split is basically over who can seize the tax dollars. Given the growing numbers of "entitled" groups and the larger portion of people collecting vs contributing via taxes, I think the concern is well founded.

Canada's split is also demographic, but also geographic as well, people, especially the productive tax contributing ones, are flowing west and leaving the traditional "core" of Upper and Lower Canada (the Toronto-Montreal axis) behind and scrambling to seize the crumbs left.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/01/18/the-gray-lady-confirms-blue-civil-war/

The Gray Lady Confirms Blue Civil War

You know the blue model is in serious trouble when even New York Times writers turn against it. Yesterday dyed-in-the-wool Democrat Thomas Edsall responded to Via Meadia‘s take on blue model collapse. In his response he struggles mightily with the bluer angels of his nature, calling our take “apocalyptic,” but in the end admits that 20th-century liberalism is in serious trouble:

    Dozens of city and state public employee pension plans are on the verge of bankruptcy—or are actually bankrupt—from Rhode Island to California; in 2010, a survey of 126 state and local plans showed assets of $2.7 trillion and liabilities of $3.5 trillion, an $800 billion shortfall. The national debt exceeds $16 trillion.

The result is that the different power blocks that make up the Democratic base are trampling each other in a rush to grab the last rents of the dying blue system:

    In cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Houston, African-Americans are competing with Hispanics and others for government jobs, good schools, good neighborhoods, political power and basic resources.

Twentieth-century liberalism is a victim of its own success: it gave us longer and more prosperous lives, in turn putting tremendous pressure on social services and pensions. The result is the fragmenting coalition Edsall points to. Though he places part of the blame for the blue civil war on Republican-backed austerity measures, Edsall admits that demographic shifts and outmoded ways of delivering social services also played a role.

The reality of blue model decline is so obvious that nobody can ignore it any longer.

 

[a_majoor]

Nothing like letting Brownshirts run around telling us what is acceptable on Canadian Universities:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/22/not-every-opinion-is-valid-activist-censors-peers-by-tearing-down-universitys-free-speech-wall/

‘Not every opinion is valid:’ Carleton University free speech wall torn down within hours

Tristin Hopper | Jan 22, 2013 7:04 PM ET | Last Updated: Jan 23, 2013 11:04 AM ET
More from Tristin Hopper | @TristinHopper

HandoutOnly hours after students installed a “Free Speech Wall” at Carleton University to prove that campus free speech was alive and well, it was torn down by an activist who claimed the wall was an “act of violence,” against the gay community. .

Only hours after students installed a “Free Speech Wall” at Carleton University to prove that campus free speech was alive and well, it was torn down by an activist who claimed the wall was an “act of violence,” against the gay community.

“What we wanted to promote was competition of ideas, rather than ‘if I disagree with you I’ve got to censor you,’” said Ian CoKehyeng, founder of Carleton Students for Liberty, the creators of the wall.

Installed on Monday in the Unicentre Galleria, one of campus’ most high-traffic areas, the wall was really more of a 1.2 x 1.8 meter wooden plank wrapped in paper and equipped with felt markers.


In truth, the wall’s only overt references to sexual orientation were pro-gay, such as “QUEERS ARE AWESOME,” “Gay is OK” and “I [Heart] Queers.”
.
By Tuesday morning the wall was gone, destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance,” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.

“In organizing the ‘free speech wall,’ the Students for Liberty have forgotten that liberty requires liberation, and this liberation is prevented by providing space … for the expression of hate,” he wrote in a 600-word Facebook post in which he identified himself as an anti-homophobia campaigner.


Related
Jonathan Kay: You want a “free speech wall” that stands up? Take a lesson from the three little pigs
.
Calling the area around the wall a “war zone,” he intimated that it was “but another in a series of acts of violence” against gay rights.

In a Tuesday afternoon Twitter exchange with a CBC reporter, Mr. Smith dubbed free speech an “illusory concept” and declared that “not every opinion is valid, nor deserving of expression.”


You don't get to make that call. @arun_smith: @Simply put, it's not a bad decision. Not every opinion is valid, nor deserving of expression—
kady o'malley (@kady) January 22, 2013
.

@kady Just watch me.—
Arün Smith (@arun_smith) January 22, 2013
.
Mr. CoKehyeng hinted at the irony of the wall being taken down by an LGBT activist.

“Free speech is a friend of minorities, it shouldn’t be people who feel marginalized in society who are trampling on free speech,” he said.

“Free speech is something you can’t monopolize for yourself, you have to give it to everyone else.”


The only comment that verged into anti-gay territory was a scrawl reading “traditional marriage is awesome.”
.
“Only someone who had gone to university could write something so utterly stupid,” said Fred Litwin, the Ottawa-based creator of the blog Gay and Right, in reference to Mr. Smith’s Tuesday morning Facebook post.

“Free speech is free speech … and I just wish these people would get a life.”

In truth, the wall’s only overt references to sexual orientation were pro-gay, such as “QUEERS ARE AWESOME,” “Gay is OK” and “I [Heart] Queers.”

The only comment that verged into anti-gay territory was a scrawl reading “traditional marriage is awesome.”

According to Mr. CoKehyeng, the four-word phrase prompted a visit from Ryan Flannagan, the university’s director of student affairs.

“He saw that it wasn’t inciting hate speech at all, so he let that one slide,” said Mr. CoKehyeng.

“Many students used the wall to express diverse views about many topics,” wrote Mr. Flannagan in a Tuesday email to the Post.

Expression on the wall was not entirely free, of course.
If the Free Speech Wall had suddenly been wallpapered with swastikas and racial slurs, university officials could have ordered it removed as a contravention of the University’s policies against discrimination.

“I didn’t want to prepare for it because I was hoping it wouldn’t happen,” said Mr. CoKehyeng. “Personally, I wouldn’t have censored anything unless I was told to.”

Fortunately, the board remained surprisingly civil, featuring a number of personal greetings such as “I love my clitoris!!” as well as a few campus political standards like “Obama Murders with Drones” and “Harper is a douche.”

A phrase reading “Abortion is murder” spawned complaints, said Mr. CoKehyeng, but also a string of scrawled counter-arguments.

Tuesday morning, a handful of students took to Arun Smith’s Facebook page to cheer the wall’s destruction.

“DIRECT ACTION GETS THE GOODS!,” declared Shane Davis-Young, a computer programming student at Ottawa’s Algonquin College.

A McGill University student whose Facebook avatar bore the phrase “say yes to the press!” similarly applauded the action against the “heinous” Students for Liberty.

In a 2012 ranking of “campus freedom” compiled by the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms — a sponsor of the Free Speech Wall — Carleton University received one of the group’s lowest rating for free speech — largely because of university efforts to deny funding and space to anti-abortion groups.

As of Tuesday, Mr. CoKehyeng, was in the process of building a new wall but says he “can’t guarantee” it will not meet the same fate.


#FreeSpeech Wall 2.0 seems to be going well at #Carleton. Let's hope this one lasts http://t.co/hvlgEy7u—
Grant Dingwall (@GrantADDingwall) January 23, 2013
.
National Post

 

[a_majoor]

The damage done by Progressiveism can be thought to be due to the inability or unwillingness of Progressives to understand human nature. (the counterargument is these are the intended results, because Progressives understand human nature only too well):

http://philoofalexandria.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/reynolds-law/

Reynolds’ Law

September 25, 2010 by philo

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.
This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental.

Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, Democrats—but not only Democrats—have fretted that the middle class is shrinking due to the power of large corporations, and that only government action to “level the playing field” can save the middle class. The “middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity.” Obama? Hillary? No, that’s Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (The New Freedom). It’s striking to realize that progressives have been playing the same tune for a century, no matter what’s actually taking place in the economy—indeed, in the midst of the greatest expansion of affluence in the history of the world—with the same set of proffered solutions: greater government power, regulations, higher taxes, and subsidies for the markers of affluence.

Reynolds’ Law thus strikes at the heart of progressivism as a political ideology. Progressivism can’t deliver on its central promise. In fact, it’s guaranteed to make things worse in exactly that respect. It’s not that it sacrifices some degree of one good (liberty or prosperity, say) to achieve a greater degree of another (equality). That suggests that the choice between conservatism and progressivism is a matter of tradeoffs, balances, and maybe even taste. Reynolds’ Law implies that progressivism sacrifices some (actually considerable) degrees of liberty and prosperity to move us away from equality by undermining the characters and thus behavior patterns of those they promise to help.

Not coincidentally, progressives accumulate power for themselves, not only by seizing it as a necessary means to their goals but by aggravating the very social problems they promise to address, thus creating an ever more powerful argument that something has to be done.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Thanks for looking around! And thank you, Glenn!

 

[a_majoor]

When government organs become ideological, then we are all in trouble. Does anyone else now have a feeling that other data released by StatsCan may have been "cooked" or spun somehow?

I am starting to think that StatsCan should not be allowed to do anything other than release the tables of raw data, if the end user spins it then at least we know the how and why, but a supposedly non partisan government agency?

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/01/28/terence-corcoran-statscan-class-warfarists-latest-volley-adds-little-insight-into-income-debate/#more-26579

[quote
Terence Corcoran: StatsCan class warfarists’ latest volley adds little insight to income debate

Terence Corcoran | Jan 28, 2013 8:55 PM ET | Last Updated: Jan 28, 2013 9:03 PM ET
More from Terence Corcoran | @terencecorcoran

Instead of tracking useful and important data, StatsCan’s occupy activists have been busy tracking Canada’s rich

So, it looks like Statistics Canada has finally worked out the fine points of the complicated business of measuring income inequality in Canada. In a set of statistics published Monday in The Daily, the agency’s routine distribution vehicle, the government of Canada’s official statistics creator and disseminator has distilled Canadians down into two income groups: the “Top 1%” and the “Bottom 99%.”

That, at least, is how Occupied StatsCan divided Canadians in its Monday news release, titled “High-income trends among Canadian tax filers, 1982 to 2010.”

Here’s what StatsCan said: “The top 1% of Canada’s 25.5 million tax filers accounted for 10.6% of the nation’s total income in 2010, down from a peak of 12.1% in 2006. In the early 1980s, the top 1% of tax filers held 7.0% of the total income reported by all tax filers. This proportion edged up to 8.0% in the early 1990s and reached 11.0% by the early 2000s.”

As for the rest of Canadians, referred to as the “Bottom 99%” by StatsCan, the agency apparently has no meaningful data except to say that “the rest” of Canadians had median incomes of $28,000.

What is the point in carving Canadians into two such groups, including a group called “the rest” or the “Bottom 99%”, unless you’re seriously preoccupied with class and income and a little social unrest.

Related
Richest 1% of Canadians earn tenth of nation’s income: StatsCan
Canada’s top earners still a modest lot compared to U.S.
RRSPs all about tax brackets
.
Ultimately, the news release added nothing to the ongoing ideological debate over inequality or any meaningful new analysis. All it did was reinforce StatsCan’s recent role as one of the country’s leading class warfarists. For a decade of more, StatsCan has been fixated on, even obsessed with, Canada’s rich, tracking their incomes, sex, age, geographical location, taxes paid and marital status.

The latest stalking document contained nothing much new, but grabbed online headlines — Huffington Post: “Income inequality in Canada: Rich Taking Ever Larger Share of the Pie, But Is the Trend Fizzling?” Over at the Toronto Star, there’s no news like old StatsCan news: “Richest one per cent of Canadians earn one-tenth of all income.”

If there’s any shock in such numbers it is how little it takes to become a member of the top 1%: $201,000. Are Canadians really ready to mount a social revolution over such a small number?

StatsCan tried to turn it into an ideological stalking point by noting that the $201,000 is 37% higher than it was in 1982, when the figure was $147,000. StatsCan doesn’t have data that goes back further. The fact that 1982 was the pit of one of the worst recessions in Canadian history, when GDP fell 6.7%, suggests StatsCan is essentially cooking the statistical books.

Another measure is median income, which StatsCan also warps into a meaningless comparison. The median income — the mid-number in which half the 1% earn more and the other half earn less — is a remarkably low $283,400. But StatsCan spins it into a warfare stat by comparing it with the median of “the rest,” $28,400.

The income statistics are based on total income from all sources, including investment income. Such income would have jumped among the 1% before the 2008 crisis. The numbers also suggest that since 2008 the 1% had less investment income.

The agency could also have tracked after-tax income. But it didn’t. Other agendas seem to prevail, ones that have been alive at StatsCan for some time.

Back in 2008, the agency cranked out a paper titled “Income Trajectories of High Income Canadians, 1982-2005.” It contained many of the same preoccupations that appeared in Monday’s release, and at least one of the same authors and number crunchers.

The listed contact for Monday’s release is Brian Murphy, located at the StatsCan complex in Ottawa’s Tunney’s Pasture. Mr. Murphy was co-author of the 2008 paper with Michael Wolfson, former assistant chief statistican at Statistics Canada and now University of Ottawa professor.

Mr. Wolfson appears to be displaying an activist bent since he left StatsCan. In a recent op-ed for The Globe and Mail, he attacked a Fraser Institute paper that appeared to show that Canadians are mobile up the income chain. He called the Fraser results “misleading” and concluded that the bottom was marked by a “reality of precarious jobs among the poor” that belie the Fraser Institute’s Horatio Alger ‘rags to riches’ myth.”

Unfortunately, neither Mr. Wolfson nor StatsCan has ever presented any detailed analysis of income shifts over time across all income groups. Are Canada’s poor and middle class worse off or better off than they were 30 or 50 years ago?

Instead of tracking such useful and important data, StatsCan’s occupy activists have been busy tracking Canada’s rich. And you know what? The big discovery is that the 1% are rich (sort of) and pay a lot more taxes than the rest of us: 21.2% in 2010, up from 13% in 1982.
[/quote]

 

[Good2Golf]

...or (statistically speaking)...

"Canada's Rich Pay Almost 12 Times More Tax Per Person Than Other Canadians."

(10.6%tax/1%ofCanadians)/(89.4%tax/99%ofCanadians)=11.7

"Lies, damned lies and statistics." :nod:

Regards
G2G

 

[Brad Sallows]

>destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance,”
>declared that “not every opinion is valid, nor deserving of expression.”

One of these days sanctimonious humourless pricks like him are going to wake up and find that people like me have had quite enough sh!t from people like him and our collective response will be, "OK, fu<kers: game on."

 

[a_majoor]

Steady Brad, people like him will be consumed in the Zombie Apocalypse (if there is no physical eating of flesh, there will be a metaphorical one as these people are ejected into the real world and discover just what their skills, experience and opinions are really worth... >)

The coming collapse of the Progressive model as money runs out will see subsidization of "eight year" undergraduate degrees end as one first order effect, and I think we all know what will happen after that.

 

[a_majoor]

Universities as Brownshirt incubators. Officer candidates need to demonstrate a University education, while the first hand examples that I have taught do not seem to demonstrate the intolerence of the examples mentioned here, I would suggest that the reason they come off as being uneducated (think of the recent story where University students could not locate the Atlantic Ocean on a map) is they spent their time in school having this sort of indoctrination poured into their heads, rather than learning how to think, process data and so on. A cadre of uneducated people has negative long term consequences for society and institutions as well. Since the CF is a "consumer" of University educated people, I think we have a large stake in this debate. We say we want "educated" people, instead we get "indoctrinated" people:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/01/30/barbara-kay-the-campus-condition/

Barbara Kay: The Campus Condition

Barbara Kay | Jan 30, 2013 12:01 AM ET | Last Updated: Jan 29, 2013 5:49 PM ET
More from Barbara Kay | @BarbaraRKay

In his Saturday National Post column, Rex Murphy considers the case of long-time student Arun Smith, who last week enjoyed his 15 minutes of media fame for vandalizing a message board at Ottawa’s Carleton University, because he found some of the postings on abortion and marriage offensive.

Rex poses the question: “How can a person spend seven years in any university studying anything, let alone human rights [with a minor in sexuality], and arrive at so preposterous a position?”

By “preposterous,” he means Arun Smith’s complacent self-anointing as supreme judge and executioner of inadmissible discourse within an allegedly “free speech zone.”

It’s a rhetorical question, for he well knows the answer to it. As Rex concludes, the episode is a “reminder that some universities are in the business more of promoting attitudes than liberating young minds, and more concerned with fleeting ‘correctness’ than lasting truth.”

My only quibble with that statement is the word “some.” I would say that the arts and humanities departments of nearly all Western universities are incubators for the production of ideologically rigid, intolerant clones, for which the smirkily self-righteous Arun Smith serves as the prototype.

Academia has been the intellectual equivalent of a closed union shop for decades, from which only the most critically independent minds emerge unscathed. The rest, the uncritically receptive — the Arun Smiths — are steeped in opiates provided by such radical left-wing gurus as Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse. All were Marxists; all believed westerners are the fountainhead of wickedness. And all believed that the omelet of “social justice” justified the breaking of many classically liberal eggs.

For a glimpse into the epicentre of Arun Smith’s mindset, consider the words of the “father of the New Left,” political theorist Herbert Marcuse. In a 1965 essay entitled Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse inspired generations of academics to embrace a principle of epistemic subversion. “The restoration of freedom of thought,” he argued, “may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions.”

By “restrictions,” Marcuse was thinking selectively. He meant that in order to inculcate students with (correct) socialist doctrine, it was permissible to impose a moratorium on conservative speech.

Marcuse’s words were taken to heart. Academia is pervaded by a dual message of social mission and cultural blame. Academics believe they have a mission to change society according to their utopian lights. The obstacles en route to social perfection — pesky conservatives, Christians, Zionists, the usual suspects — may not only be blamed for their cretinous views, they may justifiably be denounced or gagged.

Thus, clearing the way for “truth” is made to seem not only a normal perspective, but an admirable one. That’s why Arun Smith is not the least bit conflicted about his act of vandalism. As he put it on his Facebook page, “If everyone speaks freely, we end up simply reinforcing the hierarchies that are created in our society.” As an activist, Arun Smith may be more bullish than his peers, but he is no outlier in the thinking process that guided his actions. For the condemnation of incorrect speech is a commonplace on Canadian campuses.

In October 2012, the conservative-leaning Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms released its 2012 Campus Freedom Index, based on a larger report, The state of campus free speech in 2012. Among the reported incidents: McGill University ordered a Jewish club to refrain from calling a social event “Israel: A Party” for its play on the word “apartheid”; the University of Calgary condoned the obstruction of pro-life displays on campus; and Carleton University — that’s Arun Smith’s home — had members of its pro-life club arrested, handcuffed and charged with “trespassing” for attempting to express their views in a provocative fashion.

Oh, and a few years ago, Simon Fraser University advertised for a professor with these qualifications: “extensive experience in academia, or as an activist” (my emphasis).

It’s the Arun Smiths of Canada whom many universities are looking to hire. The academy is now a natural professional home to left-wing activism. Those students who feel alienated by the prevailing doctrine feel marginalized and uncomfortable. They must achieve a balanced learning portfolio defensively, often in isolation.

For too long, university administrators have been silent or complicit in the promotion of illiberalism. Some soul-searching at the upper echelons of academia is in order. A gesture of good faith would be for Carleton to investigate whether Arun Smith should be charged with vandalism, and thereby subject him to the consequences he would experience in real life, something it is high time he learned about.

National Post
bkay@videotron.ca
[/quote]

Sub note: even our "own" institutions like RMC are not free of this sort of thing; think of the flap created by an RMC instructor (forget the actual job title) over havng Don Cherry receive an hounourary degree. I'm sure people who work with or associated with RMC may have other examples.

 

[wannabe SF member]

I would disagree about RMC, at least as far as politics and history, are concerned. We are blessed with extremely balanced and objective staff and I've never felt like speech was being stifled in any way. mind you, the nature of the institution does mean tht a lot of cadets will tend to be right-leaning.

The Don Cherry incident, while regrettable, was due to the actions of only one SLT teacher. Most of the college stuents were highly supportive of him.

 

[a_majoor]

Too true, but a large fraction of officers (or even in the NCO/NCM ranks) are educated in civilian Universities (and this is also where my representative sample comes from).

As "consumers" of this product, we do have a stake in this debate. Some possible solution have been highlighted in the "Education Bubble" thread, and I am sure many people have other ideas on this subject as well.

 

[a_majoor]

While this example and the backpedaling are American, one only has to look at things like unleashing "lawfare" against Mayor Rob Ford (while city council apparently has the time to critique the Edmonton Zoo for how they deqal with animals or declare Toronto a "sanctuary" for illegal immigrants without comment), or the never ending stream of faux scandals directed at the CPC (but total silence on similar incidents if committed by Liberal Senators, for example) to understand that these tactics are already in place here in Canada as well. Looking at the list of "nonpartisan" partners also brings to mind Vivian Krause's exposure of the nature and sources of funding for many Canadian "environmental" groups opposed to government policy as well.

As Gelnn Reynolds points out on the Instapundit blog, the best response is to fight fire with fire, and learn,understand and use these tactics against Progressives everywhere:

http://theothermccain.com/2013/02/23/progressive-tax-exempt-groups-secret-plan-to-eviscerate-cripple-gop/

Progressive Tax-Exempt Group’s Secret Plan to ‘Eviscerate,’ ‘Cripple’ GOP

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 16 Comments and 0 Reactions

Blueprint NC is “a nonprofit that coordinates the activities of liberal-leaning nonprofits” in North Carolina and when this 501(c) group’s communications director Stephanie Bass forwarded a strategy memo to member organizations, she included a disclaimer:

“CONFIDENTIAL to Blueprint, so please be careful – share with your boards and appropriate staff, but not the whole world.”

Oops. The memo got leaked to reporter Mark Binker at WRAL in Raleigh. The contents are quite disturbing and clearly partisan:

“The most effective way to mitigate the worst legislation is to weaken our opponents’ ability to govern by crippling their leaders (McCrory, Tillis, Berger, etc…)” the memo reads, referring to the governor, House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.
The memo goes on to describe a “potential two-year vision” during which the groups would “eviscerate the leadership and weaken their ability to govern.”

Matt Vespa at PJ Tatler has many more details on the shocking partisanship carried out by this tax-exempt 501 (c)(3) group.

Let me bring this a little closer to home for regular readers: Why do you think I’ve devoted so much coverage to Bill Schmalfeldt’s relentless harassment of Lee Stranahan?

Perhaps a better question: Do you suppose Stranahan was randomly selected for this harassment? Can’t you see that Lee’s association with Breitbart.com is the motive for the attacks on him, and isn’t it obvious that this is part of a much larger strategy by the Left to discredit, suppress or silence conservative journalists?

Thanks to journalists like Mark Binker and Matt Vespa, we know how Blueprint NC orchestrated an effort to “cripple” and “eviscerate” Republicans in North Carolina, but how many strategy memos like this — how many conference calls and private e-mails — never leak out of their “confidential” channels? And if the Left can shut down Lee Stranahan, what’s to stop them from shutting down Matt Binker or Matt Vespa or anyone else they decide to target?

People need to wake up to what’s really going on. The Left isn’t just trying to win elections and pass legislation. The Left has totalitarian ambitions to destroy all opposition and silence all dissent.

and the reaction once they were outed:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/02/24/blueprint-nc-disavows-memo-calling-for-the-evisceration-of-state-republicans/

Blueprint NC Disavows Memo Calling For The Evisceration of State Republicans

by
Matt Vespa

February 24, 2013 - 3:04 pm

Last Thursday, a memo from Blueprint NC was leaked to the press, which stated they intended to ‘eviscerate, mitigate, litigate, cogitate, and agitate’ the North Carolina Republican leadership.  Blueprint is an ACORN-afiliated group, and its list of partners represents the core of the American far left.  Since their dirty little secret was revealed, the organization has disavowed the memo.

Mark Binker of WRAL.com wrote yesterday that:

    “The email from Stephanie [Bass, Blueprint NC Communications Director,] is referring to the slide deck, the POLLING MEMO and the data,” Blueprint NC Executive Director Sean Kosofsky wrote in an email on Saturday. “This document from early December is not our document at all. We never drafted that. All these news outlets have been had.

    “This is a James O’Keefe-style splicing of two radially different things,” he continued, referring to a Republican filmmaker and provocateur whose work has frequently been called into question.

    When interviewed on Thursday , Kosofsky defended his group’s involvement with the documents, saying that it was appropriate for 501(c)3 groups to discuss ways to push their agenda. The Charlotte Observer reported Saturday that a major Blueprint NC funder was unhappy with the memo and reviewing its funding for the group.

    “If you want to push against a policy, one strategy is to take advantage of your opponents weaknesses,” Kosofsky said Thursday. He said Saturday that he did not realize the three-page strategy memo with the aggressive language was what WRAL News and other reporters were asking about. “Research is perfectly safe for your partners.”

    Kosofsky describes Blueprint NC as a “back office” for nonprofit groups, helping to coordinate activities and take advantage of economies of scale that small nonprofits would not have on their own. He insists the organization is nonpartisan.

As the Civitas Institute noted, Blueprint NC was “organized and funded by the progressive Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.”  Kosofsky’s remark is disingenuous in the extreme.  Furthermore, he seems to not have read his organization’s mission statement.

    Ultimately, Blueprint aims to influence state policy in NC so that residents of the state benefit from more progressive policies such as better access to health care, higher wages, more affordable housing, a safer, cleaner environment, and access to reproductive health services.

Also, here’s a list of Blueprint’s “nonpartisan” partners:

        Phillip Randolph Institute
        Action for Children
        American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina (ACLU)
        Carolina Justice Policy Center
        Center for Community Self-Help/Center for Responsible Lending
        Center for Death Penalty Litigation
        Common Cause
        Community Reinvestment Association of NC- CRANC
        Conservation Council of NC Foundation
        Conservation Trust of NC
        Covenant with North Carolina’s Children, Inc.
        Democracy NC
        Disability Rights NC
        El Pueblo
        Environment NC
        Equality NC
        Fair Trial Initiative
        Institute for Southern Studies
        Ipas
        League of Women Voters – Charlotte
        Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation
        NARAL Pro-Choice NC
        NC ACORN
        NC Against Gun Violence
        NC Alliance of Black Elected Officials
        NC Association of CDCs
        NC Center for Voter Education
        NC Coalition Against Domestic Violence
        NC Coalition Against Sexual Assault
        NC Coalition to End Homelessness
        NC Community Development Initiative
        NC Conservation Network
        NC Environmental Defense
        NC Fair Share
        NC Housing Coalition, Inc.
        NC Institute of Minority Economic Development
        NC John Muir Foundation (Sierra Club)
        NC Justice Center
        NC Latino Coalition, Inc.
        NC Minority Support Center
        NC NAACP
        NC Policy Watch
        People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
        Planned Parenthood Health Systems
        Planned Parenthood of Central NC
        Southern Alliance for Clean Energy
        Southern Coalition of Social Justice
        Traction
        Working Families Win

    A.J. Fletcher Foundation
    The A.J. Fletcher Foundation, whose mission is to support progressive nonprofits, gave $205,000 to the NC Justice Center and over $66,000 to the NC Housing Coalition in 2007.

    Tides Foundation
    Tides Foundation received a $25,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, part of which was used to create gettraction.org. The Tides Foundation has given grants to the Center for Community Change as well as over $1 million to Project Vote.

    [...]

    AFL-CIO
    The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations is a federation of 57 international labor unions. In North Carolina, AFL-CIO shares a building withACORN NC and is on the North Carolina chapter of Health Care for America Now.

    [...]

    Service Employees International Union
    SEIU has donated over $3.6 million to ACORN over the last six years. SEIU Local 100 was co-founded by ACORN founder Wade Rathke. In 2008, SEIU gave $1.1 million to the NC Democratic Party.

Binker added that when:

    Asked [if] it was appropriate for his organization to participate in meetings where such memos are distributed and whether he endorsed all the ideas in the memo, Kosofsky replied via email:

    Darn right. C3 nonprofits should absolutely try to stop bad policies that hurt the poor and hurt the environment, women and the middle class. If they need to exploit weaknesses of lawmakers, they should. I stand by that.

    The meeting in December was of over 50 organizations. People bring their own idea. I am not going to claim or distance myself from things without greater context. The only thing that matters to Blueprint is what Blueprint does. I cannot speak for others. We cannot be held to what others do at meetings we are at. that is completely unfair.

    I am not going to cherry pick ideas from that draft plan and say which ones we approve of or disapprove of. I will say this…The stakes are high for the people of NC. This governor and legislature are approving raises for their cabinet while gutting benefits for folks already injured by unemployment. Blueprint and our partners are passionate advocates for policy passed in the public interest, not passed for special interests. Our partners can educate the public, educate lawmakers and absolutely hold them accountable when they vote against the interests of the people of NC. the public should know that charitable groups can and do advocate strongly. they should. Blueprint doesn’t lobby or do any public advocacy. This isn’t about us at all.

Binker concludes his piece by saying, “it is worth noting that many of ideas contained both in the polling memo and the three-page strategy document have shown up elsewhere.” However, the Goodmon family, who owns WRAL, has four members on the board of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, which has ties to Blueprint NC.  The NC Justice Center originally housed Blueprint during its formation.

As I posted yesterday:

    WRAL is also actually doing one of the items in the strategy memo. The memo on page 3 calls for tracking McCrory “Campaign Promises” and “slam him when he contradicts his promise.” WRAL appears to have taken that for action by launching their “Promise Tracker“, complete with cute little ”Skull & Crossbones” symbols.

WatchdogWire- North Carolina questioned WRAL over this coincidence, and responded that they “didn’t have the resources” to do this four years ago under Democratic Governor Bev Perdue.