Time Immortal

It never ceases to amaze me how a minor little blog such as mine (seriously: check out the Technorati rating on the sidebar…mid-to-high 30s? Pathetic!) attracts the notice, on occasion, of folks in the news. Not that David Kahane is exactly a household name. Then too, he hasn’t exactly managed to avoid the spotlight either, and he writes in to remark on something I wrote about a class he teaches.

“St. Joseph’s College strives to engage everyone in the experience of those human values that encourage a respect for all persons, promote social justice, service, and friendship, and foster a desire for truth that includes the sacred.”

Hear hear. And yet I’m not feeling this ethos in your condemnation of me. Sorry.

I wish that you weren’t so quick to categorize me as your enemy, and to dismiss my work based on very limited information.

For the record, O Reader, I am but a former student of St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta — I am not currently a student of that institution, nor am I a member of the staff or faculty there. I am a member of the College chapel parish, as it is a Catholic church in addition to being an institution of learning, but that is about as far as it goes.

To be fair, I generally align myself with the ideals expressed in the statement of purpose that Mr. Kahane has excerpted above, especially in regard to “a desire for truth that includes the sacred.” To be equally fair, my intent in my earlier article was not specifically to offer condemnation, nor was it to define myself explicitly as the enemy of another person.

Rather, it was meant as a commentary on a certain…shall we call it liberal smugness? Fundamentally, what was at issue was that a philosophy class — in which students were encouraged to, among other things, think positive self-referential thoughts in a meditative style and to spend time sitting in public directing these “positive energies” as passers-by — was being touted as an experiment in social justice, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. Had it been billed as an experiment in liberal self-absorption, I’d have not bothered to take issue with it, because that latter classification would have been closer to the truth. But as it was billed as an experiment in social justice, I chose not to remark upon the untruth.

Sitting around thinking happy thoughts and hoping that the people walking past are getting your vibes is not social justice; it’s hippie-dippy claptrap. Social justice is spending five hours in a meager kitchen serving the best damn meal possible to a few hundred homeless people. Social justice is volunteering to take persons with out for various recreational activities. Social justice is joining [insert profession here] Without Borders and going to Africa for a year or two to do your very damndest to improve the lot of as many people as you can through the use of what technical skills you have amassed.

I’m not interested in being the enemy of anyone but Satan. I’m not trying to make enemies with what I write (as hard as that might be for some to believe). But equally, I have no tolerance for bullshit. If that sets me at odds with the “ethos” of the mission statement of St. Joe’s College (the educational institution, not the church), that’s something I’m willing to risk.

Christians have been complaining about homosexual reading materials aimed at young children becoming part of either library stock or curriculum-required reading material in schools for a few years now. One Dad, Two Dads, Red Dads, Blue Dads, for example, was widely decried as concerned parents objected to what they saw as an attempt to subversively “recruit” their children into the homosexual lifestyle.

And for the most part, nobody paid any attention to said parents.

They should have claimed the books offended Islam — that seems to get results.

Double standard, anyone? Or just more progressive Racism?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

So it would appear that the founder of the Facebook group opposed to Bill C-10, University of Alberta professor David Kahane, is also the teacher of a course where students meditate, repeat to themselves “May I have the ease of well-being,” and have as homework the task of sitting in public places directing thoughts of love and kindness at passers-by.

And this is apparently a “social justice“-themed class.

Look, I know a lot of Catholics out there have some strong reservations about the “social justice” movements that have been gaining ground in the Church of late (some see it as nothing more than a backdoor attempt to sneak socialism back in to the Church). Be that as it may…for all the reservations that people might have about such groups, at least they do works of social justice from time to time, usually.

Not Professor Kahane’s students, it seems. They’re too busy telling themselves that they are okay, too busy having “the ease of well-being” (whatever that might be). And when it actually comes time to do something apparently related to social justice, what do they do? Sit on a park bench and think happy thoughts at the people going by.

It’s nice work if you can get it, but do you suppose that any of Professor Kahane’s students — let alone David Kahane himself — has ever, I don’t know, seen the inside of a soup kitchen? That is social justice. Sitting on a park bench wishing yourself “the ease of well-being” and intently hoping that your positive vibes are reaching the people walking past is not social justice.

It’s just lazy, self-centered liberalism at its finest.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

In the minds of the York Federation of Students, debating whether abortion should be legal is like debating whether wife-beating should be legal.

Margaret Fung, President of Students for Bioethical Awareness (SBA), one of the hosting clubs, describes what happened: “I was told in a meeting by members of the York Federation of Students that debating abortion is comparable to debating whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife. They said that there is freedom of speech to a limit, and that abortion is not an issue to debate. They demanded that the event not take place and shut us down.” Present at this meeting in addition to Fung were Jeremy Salter, Executive Director of the York Federation of Students (YFS), Fuad Abdi, VP Operations of the YFS and also the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Student Centre, and Amir Mohareb, President of the York Debating Society.

SBA, an official York University Student Club, worked with the York Debating Society to organize the debate. The debaters were Michael Payton from Freethinkers for the pro-choice side and Jose Ruba from the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Awareness for the pro-life side. It was to be an organized debate moderated by the York Debating Society. Both sides were ready and willing to debate, but after it was demanded the event be shut down, dozens of students planning on attending the event were turned away at the door.

I find it intersting how it was the atheist student organization that had stepped up to debate for the pro-abortion side.

But that’s a minor little detail. On one hand, it’s not so surprising that the York Federation of Students banned the event — like most campus student governments, YFS tends to espouse a fairly liberal worldview, and if there’s one thing that has become abundantly clear about liberal college and university students, it is that they are cowards who are so uncomfortable with the idea of having their views seriously and rationally challenged that they would rather just impose Censorship upon opinions with which they disagree.

And that’s really what this is — censorship, as surely as any HRC ruling would be.

And that’s a shame, and a major loss for the students of York University. The Reader is free to take whatever view s/he cares to take on the abortion debate (my own views are reasonably well-known), but I encourage the reader to look past this situation as being merely another instance of pro-lifers attempting to protest the killing of the unborn. This was supposed to be a debate which both sides were looking forward to — it was intended to be an intellectual discussion of the issue, with facts arrayed against facts and argument arrayed against argument. With both sides presented, the participants in the debate and the audience of the debate would be free, at the end, to make their own decisions about the abortion issue…and would be able to do so with a goodly deal of evidence and reasoning to draw upon. That’s the beauty of honest debate — it really brings things out into the open.

Of course, Jose Ruba is a persuasive speaker and devastating in debates, and probably would have carried the day. Which, I think, was something the YFS was afraid of — the risk that some students might swing their views around to the pro-life side was an unacceptable one, and so the event had to be cancelled. And that’s what’s shameful. Universities and colleges are supposed to be about critical thought, about looking at things rationally and making informed decisions after consideration of different arguments and evidence. They are supposed to be places of learning, not places where groupthink is the rule of the day. And yet increasingly, thanks to groups like the YFS, and thanks to university and college faculties and administrations which are likewise cowardly, the tradition of critical thinking in higher education is fading, being replaced by encouragement to follow the approved consensus view.

YFS couldn’t take the risk that even one more student might barbarically begin to believe that the unborn are every bit as human, and every bit as deserving of a right to live, as any of the students filling York’s lecture halls. So the debate about abortion was cancelled. That’s a loss for all the students at York, and one more nail in the coffin of freedom of expression and critical thinking.

Update: Mark Shea has the best one-line take on this whole issue:

I sometimes get the sense that Canada is about one half hour into America’s future.

Ouch, Mr. Shea…ouch.

Update, Part Deux: Welcome, Steynians!

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results — very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further — though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her — 42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped — a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The chance that the victims would not consider this event “serious enough to report,” or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences — supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.

By now, it ought to come as no surprise whatsoever that hardcore leftists and professional feminists are willing to lie their faces off in pursuit of an ideological goal. It’s a pity that the rest of us have to fork over our dollars because of their lies, but I suppose that in the final summation all of that dishonesty and extortion will be sorted out.

I’d always thought that the claim that one in four women at my university had experienced a sexual assault was a dubious claim, especially since I became friends with quite a few women (more than just four) during that time, and only one ever reported having been raped — and in that singular instance, the assault was in no way connected with the university or another student thereof, and had happened several years before her enrollment at said institution. Even allowing for the fact that on campus, men and women perhaps do live and work in closer proximity to each other than in the “real” world (an assumption which itself is fairly dubious to begin with), the idea that the rate of sexual assaults on campus would be twenty to twenty five times higher than in normal society seems absurd.

At any rate, the article goes on to explore the strange world of casual sex and promiscuity that is modern college/university student life, and if anything I think reading the whole thing has convinced me of two important things: 1) my daughters will learn how to beat the living snot out of an attacker, and 2) my daughters and sons will not be allowed to join sororities or fraternities (respectively), or (at least) will be actively discouraged from doing so).

Victor writes in a few words of encouragement.

I found your site through freemarksteyn. According to the
last post I read (the cab drivers and inconvenience* store owners) you seem to be losing readership over your outspoken views on Islam. You’ve also gained one, if that’s any consolation, please keep up the good work.

I attend Ryerson in Toronto, where our student union president made moonbat notoriety by joining forces with the [Osgoode Hall] 4, and giving them a public platform from which to whine about their victim-status to my fellow Ryersonians (Mike Brock covered it well at noncogent.blogspot.com). Seeing that shit for 4-8 hours a day, seeing ‘celebrate diversity’ posters with every flag of the middle east (except Israel) beside defaced posters for the school Christian club, well…I sometimes feel the world is upside down. I appreciate doeses of sanity from sites like yours.

Thanks.

Well, Victor, you are more than welcome. The issue of losing readers doesn’t much bother me, although the concern is appreciated. There have been times in the past where I’ve racked up a couple thousand visits in a week, and there are times when I’m lucky to have a few hundred. It is, as Victor notes, a case of ebb and flow…but equally, it is also a non-issue. At the end of the day, I write this blog for myself; if other people derive value from something I say, that’s a bonus, but hardly a requirement. That said, it is always nice to get feedback and to hear that something I’ve written reaches people.

I’m sorry to hear of how set upon Victor sometimes feels at Ryerson, especially because that is something that our progressive “betters” would have us believe they desire all people to be free from feeling. I suppose that the bigotry is still acceptable when it is directed at Christianity, or when it is directed at Jews in a subtle way.

This brings me back to something. Yesterday was, yet again, an interesting time of reflection, and reading the above rather adds to it.

On the face of it, we who live in Canada are really lucky. Really, really lucky. Oh, sure, our government operates censorship commissions (HRCs); and sure, we don’t have the right to private property enshrined in our Charter; and sure, our health care system is bloated and failing; and sure, pretty much every politician we’ve elected in the last 30 years has been hot for gun control. Let’s take all that as granted. We’re still pretty lucky.

We live in one of the biggest, most resource-rich countries in the world, but our population is only slightly higher than that of the capital city of Mexico (and our population density is, for the most part, negligible by comparison to almost everywhere else in the world). We’re more or less free from the burdens of war, famine, poverty, terrorism, and disease that ravage so many other places in the world, and we’re even pretty safe from most natural disasters that befall other places in the world. Yeah, the weather sometimes throws us into the deep freeze, but that’s okay; the variety is good, and it makes us a hardy lot for the most part.

My interesting reflection added one thing to the above: it was that here in Alberta, we seem to be even luckier. It’s with no small amount of relief that I observe that out here, I’ve rarely if ever witness people defacing the posters for the ’s Christian groups, and even the pro-life group’s posters have remained mostly intact (including the huge one that they recently hung in a major student traffic area). The student council has remained mostly non-radical, and in my last year the student president was a practicing Catholic and all-around reasonable guy. One of the busiest lectures held on campus every year is given by a Christian, presenting on the issue of the science-Religion dialogue. And around Christmas time, traditional carols are sometimes sung by choirs inside the provincial Legislature, and a Nativity Scene can be found in the annex thereof.

It seems that such freedoms are becoming a rare thing in other parts of the country. And that is, I think, a lamentable wrong, and hardly befitting a free, Western nation with as proud a heritage as Canada’s. Still, it is wonderful to hear of people continuing to persevere, as Victor does, in the face of the “soft” bigotry of progressives. Canada needs as many people like that as it can get.

So in turn, Victor, thank you. It can be too easy, sometimes, to lose heart, and I hope that you never do.

Update: Actually, since this whole Mark Steyn/Ezra Levant/HRC fracas started, my traffic has tripled. That’s not saying all that much, given that back in December of last year I was averaging about 20 visits a day. But according to Google, I’m up to 61.56 visits/day over the last month, and that’s pretty cool. Admittedly, that’s only about half the traffic that another site that I run gets, but hey…even a single visitor is cool, I think. I’ll take 60 when it happens though, given that it’s about 60 more than I’m ever expecting to get on any given day of the week.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!