This reviewer thinks that Harry Potter is a step backward for literacy and fiction. Leaving aside whether it makes children read more (it probably does) or whether it's any better or worse than the vast majority of fiction of any genre currently published, her assertion that Harry Potter is both appealing and dangerous because of its clear definition of good and evil is worth a deeper look.
Good and evil do certainly exist in the world of Harry Potter. Most of us (although very few literary reviewers and mass market journalists) also recognize that they exist in our world. While Harry is decidedly identified with good and assorted villains with evil, the nuances of the plot and characters are far too intricate for a French foreign minister to grasp. In fact good and evil are interesting in the books precisely because of how entangled the lives of mortals become as they grapple with them. Harry fights evil not so much because of a specific choice he has made as because of his heritage; orphaned by the forces of evil, he is drawn into the struggle by the memory of his parents and only later on his own behalf. Other characters join Harry to protect themselves from the persecution of evil forces, or out of solidarity with their friends. Some of the heroes have done dreadful things in the course of their struggles, and yet are clearly identified with the side of Harry Potter now, despite earlier lapses. The children on several occasions unwittingly advance the dark forces of the books by acting in ignorance or impatience. In short the heroes of these novels are a lot like the heroes of real life struggles against evil: few of them wake up one day with a sudden and fierce desire to do good against all odds, but rather find themselves drawn into a larger struggle for the sake of themselves, their friends, and the causes and people that they love, and despite their own flaws and weaknesses.
On the other side of the equation, while there is a Dark Lord and a few villains who follow him knowingly and willingly, many, many more end up supporting Voldemort for more complex reasons. The Giants, who have French names and live on the continent fairly near England, for instance, are not inherently bad but due to internal division, pride and disorganization end up on the side of evil. Some children refuse to join Harry and his supporters because their parents have forbidden it. One teacher at the school, who is clearly one of the great heroes of the forces of good, fails to act in time because he is unable to recognize the nature of the problem this time around. Another teacher, who is not on the side of the Dark Lord, is nonetheless petty and vicious and advances evil because it seems much neater from an administrative perspective. In other words, as in our present situation, the most evil and purposeful are assisted by those who pursue less evil ends in their company, as well as by those who, out of ignorance, misdirected goodwill or expedience, fail to stop them.
The final clue that the reviewer mentioned above is not to be taken too seriously comes in a brief paragraph midway through her essay. If Harry Potter really did interest children in the conflict of good against evil, she wonders, why has there not been a boom in children's participation in the Church of England or the Boy Scouts? At this point she reveals her decisive ignorance either of children's mental acuity, the current state of these two great institutions, or perhaps both. It is hard to think of a more morally obtuse religious institution than the Church of England, with its gay clergy, druid-supporting Archbishop and foreign policy contortions. And unlike the American version, which shows an admirable tenacity in the face of pressures to endorse alternative lifestyles and families and the relentless obsession with unjustified self-esteem, the British Boy Scouts have been tripping over themselves in their haste to atone for their imperialist, heterosexist, Anglo-Saxon orientation toward self-reliance, faith, humility and service to others. It is the mark of a very sensible and morally oriented British child to keep well away from the present day Church of England and the Scouting movement.
Talk of a cease-fire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has focussed attention on the founding document of the leading obstacle to peace, Hamas, aka the Islmaic Resistance Movement. A peek at its Covenant reveals that not only is an accomodation with Israel an impossibility but also that much of Europe is under a future threat.
Hamas clearly aims at the destruction of Israel and vows never to share an inch of the Middle East with a Jewish state. Israel is the product of an international Zionist conspiracy fostered by the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, capitalism, communism, Fremasons and Jews. These cunning adversaries control the United Nations, the banking system and the media. They have been responsible for the French Revolution and all war since then -- as revealed in Hitler's bed-side reader "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".
This may seem laughable but as the Covenant reminds us: "All this is utterly serious and no jest, for those who are fighters do not jest."
If you think Hamas and the larger Muslim terror network of which they admit they are a part are just Ariel Sharon's problem, think again. Isael and all lands ever conquered by Muslims at any point in history are considered a "waqf" or legacy, to be held in perpetuity.
To refresh your memory, the following areas were once Islamic territory and may, thus, be reclaimed by Muslims and subject to sharia law: Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Hungary. Purists might also insist on the inclusion of Central Europe up to Vienna and France up to Poitiers.
Hamas also states that as long as the Palestinian Authority conceives of Palestine as a secular nation-state there can be no cooperation with them or the PLO. It is in everyone's interest that Hamas be eliminated.
Here is an interesting take on the American school voucher situation. The author's point is that the primary objection to school vouchers (in the USA, at least) is the feeling that taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize instruction in religious values. There is no value-free education, though; as Susan Wise Bauer points out in her book on homeschooling, in our society, to believe that there is a God with moral standards for us is considered bias, whereas to insist that there is no God, or at least no fixed morality, is considered neutrality. In reality, of course, either viewpoint will inevitably be reflected in the teachings of its adherents. So when liberals insist that it's unfair to use public funds to promote a certain agenda, they only mean it if the agenda in question is religious or conservative; certainly almost any public school in the USA unquestioningly advances the dogmas of diversity, reproductive choice, feminism, and multiculturalism.
I fear that the author misses the point, though, in her assumption that pointing out that any school has its bias and its agenda will change the debate. Teacher's unions, teacher's colleges and socialist governments are all well aware of the agenda advanced by public schools. Financial constraints and equality of opportunity are the arguments they use to promote public education above all other options, but at least as significant is the fact that television-obsessed children of parents with busy lives may well spend more of their waking hours with their teachers than with their family. This is why these interest groups not only refuse to subsidize home schooling and private schools but frequently do all they can to hamper them: public schools represent the chance to indoctrinate children in the Correct Way of Thinking (complete with Heather Has Two Mommies, Columbus was a genocidal tool of imperialists, etc) for 25 hours a week, 32 weeks a year, until they're at least 16. As the Jesuits could tell you, by the time the poor kids are 7, the damage has already been done.
The National Post online has an editorial today praising the decision to charge Ahenakew, the Jew-hating aboriginal, with hate crimes or some such thing. There are some good points in the essay, chiefly when demonstrating that there is no good interpretation of Ahenakew's remarks and when commenting on the lamentable slowness of both Big A and the wider native community to respond. Nonetheless, bringing charges against Ahenakew is a mistake.
First, while his public career had been effectively ended, this renewed publicity may just revive it. He will undoubtedly be presented as a martyr by segments of the native community, and many will lap it up. Aboriginal Jew-hatred surely exists, for the same reason that black Jew-hatred does so well in the USA: when your political raison d'etre is to scream over and over again that your people are wallowing in the gutter due to persecution and lack of government handouts, nothing is more embarrassing than a minority that has been far more persecuted and had far fewer government handouts and yet thrives and prospers. Airing Ahenakew's remarks repeatedly in the national press is more likely to stir this illogical resentment than would letting him spend the rest of his days in shame-faced obscurity.
More importantly, the notion of criminal charges against Ahenakew is based on faulty legal and philosophical underpinnings. As the standard of what constitutes hate speech is lowered and lowered, to the point where to hurt someone's feelings is to commit a crime, the government will be increasingly empowered to end debate it finds inconvenient or embarrassing. On what grounds can a Bible be legally sold in Canada if it condemns buggery, bestiality or adultery as abominations? This is surely hate speech against those whose lifestyle choices include these options. In Europe criminal charges have been brought against those who question why adherents of the Religion of Peace (aka Islam) are so much more prone to self-detonation in public places than less peaceable non-Moslems. In Britain teachers are instructed not to refer to group discussions and planning as "brainstorming" so as not to offend epileptic students and staff members. Why not charge an errant teacher with hate crimes?
There is no question that Ahenakew's remarks were damaging, both to Jews and decent people in general who see no place in our society for Jew-hatred and to aboriginals who might admire Ahenakew and follow his shoddy example. The remedy for this damage, though, cannot be pursued by the government unless we are also to allow the government to act similarly in any situation in which values are discussed or any behaviour condemned. And this is precisely what some people would like to see. Those who call for prosecution of Ahenakew are taking a dangerous position on the basis of an understandable disgust with his behaviour.
I am not strongly committed to either radical position on gun control. While it would be perfect, perhaps, to create a society in which nobody owns guns, this is clearly impossible, and efforts to engineer this result, as in Britain, in a society in which only those already predisposed to breaking the law own guns. On the other hand there is no legitimate reason to own an assault rifle for personal use if you're lucky enough to live in North America. Regardless of one's personal view on the issue, though, meaningless statistics are often tossed about to bolster in particular the anti-gun argument. This is an excellent essay about the dangers of knowing nothing about statistics specifically as they relate to gun control arguments.
Health in particular is prone to this fallacy, in which people (even doctors) confuse correlation with causation. Gerd Gigerenzer, a German statistician, has written an excellent book called Reckoning With Risk that illuminates how staggeringly ignorant most doctors are about basic math. He also points out how important it is for doctors to truly understand what is meant by, for instance, saying a drug will cause a given side effect X percent of the time, or that a test for a certain disease is falsely positive and negative certain percents of the time; one of the saddest case studies he presents is of five men in the USA who committed suicide after being told they were HIV positive. They weren't, but neither they nor their doctors realized that especially in low risk populations, positive results can be false more often than they are correct.
Health care, because of the tremendously complex nature of human health and nature, lends itself easily to these errors in thinking. Breastfeeding has been linked to higher IQ, for example, and many books confidently state that you will raise your child's IQ by breastfeeding. They neglect to discuss the possibility that, since in the past 30 years breastfeeding in the West has been by far most common among middle class, concerned mothers, the IQ of this subset might be higher anyway. Similarly, at least once a month it is mentioned on the health page that consuming wine correlates more strongly with better health than do abstinence, beer or spirit consumption. Unless the study controls for the fact that wine drinking is more prevalent in the higher sections of the socioeconomic ladder, as well as the fact that significant numbers of abstainers do so due to medical conditions, this doesn't indicate that wine actually makes you healthier.
Other studies that explore the mechanisms of both breastfeeding and wine consumption, rather than brute and simplistic number crunching, have done much to show that they are, in fact, beneficial. As to the first in particular there seems to be no doubt, since livestock are healthier when nursed by their mothers than when given formula, and this doesn't seem limited to the better educated and more privileged livestock. But merely pointing out a correlation should not impress anyone unduly. Nobody can be thought intelligent, educated or accomplished in our society if he is illiterate (unless he's an athlete -- that's another discussion). Innumeracy should be considered equally harmful to sound decision-making and clear thinking.
This Globe and Mail article takes the highly doubtful position that American domestic policy will be influenced by the lamentable decision in Ontario to allow, without time for reflection or government appeal, what we shall refer to for the sake of convenience as "gay marriage". Despite the Defense of Marriage Act, and the utter lack of popular support for such an institution south of the border (recent studies indicate that upward of 40% of Americans believe that consensual homosexual activity between adults ought to be criminalized) the American Bar Association's alternative families specialist thinks that international treaties obliging American and Canadian governments to recognize marriages performed by the other nation will cause a change in American law.
This is of course utter nonsense. The current government in Washington has shown for better or for worse a distinct lack of interest in prior agreements made with other countries. With a more traditionally oriented population than Canada's, and with slightly less muscular activist judges, is it really credible to argue that the US will put the wishes of a tiny minority of its own citizens and those of a larger minority of a country that borders on hostile above the Judeo-Christian tradition and common sense?
One of the greatest gifts that a father can give a son is self-confidence and the belief that the kid will go on to become a good man. Sometimes, though, a parent can go a little overboard in that department. Which father said this of his son?
"He will .... bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in by virtue of his existence and his presence. I acknowledge only a small part in that, in that I know I was personally selected by God Himself to nurture this young man and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity.... "[He] will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.... He is the bridge between East and West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."
Apparently, new immigrants are to be restricted to one spouse regardless of how many they had in The Olde Country. It seems that some men immigrating from the Middle East and Africa (and what religion? Or would that be an impolitic question?) try to bring with them their many wives and offspring, in defiance of Canada's downright old fashioned commitment to marriage being between an adult, unrelated man and woman. But in what other situation is that the case? This seems to be the one situation left in which the government is willing to stick to its guns on what a marriage is and is not. Perhaps immigrants would have better luck if they claimed to be two-spirited and asked to import both a wife and a male life companion. While nobody on this blog wants to define marriage in new terms, it seems quixotic to insist that a small group of people honour conventional definitions of marriage while insisting that those lucky enough to be born here can create as many permutations of the institution as their imaginations can allow, and then enjoy every conceivable social, financial and legal benefit of marriage. Most immigrants will probably just seek to stay under the radar and settle in here, fast, rather than challenge this ruling; this is unfortunate, as reductio ad absurdem seems the only path left to illustrate for most Canadians how truly loopy some recent rulings have been.
It was a thrill to see our old Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on television over the past few weeks, having been lured from well-deserved obscurity to speak at, and about, the Tory leadership convention. That same wonderful voice was in evidence as well as that boundless self-love that endeared him to so many of us from 1984-92. Listening to him one might almost forget that he had driven Western Canadians to abandon the Conservatives and invent the Reform Party, thus ensuring a perpetual Liberal ascendancy. As those deep amber tones washed over the audience, the perpetual crises in Confederation which he provoked -- the cronyism, the deals that brought Quebec separatists such as Lucien Bouchard into the federal cabinet, Meech Lake, the Charlottetown Accord, the CF-18 scandal, the "revenue-neutral" GST -- all faded away for a moment. A brief moment. But in that moment I knew why we embraced him so enthusiastically in 1984 and why he was able to reduce John Turner to an embarrassing footnote in our national political history. For a moment we all fell in love with his blatant insincerity.
In 1984 we knew that Brian Mulroney was a hypocrite but after years of Pierre Trudeau with his contempt of us and Parliament -- the extended finger offered so freely -- we wanted a litle soothing treatment from our Prime Minister. We wanted to be courted and loved and dosed with blarney. We knew that though he had killed Turner's ambitions with an attack on Liberal patronage Mulroney would be no different in office. We knew that he would be as ruthless as Trudeau and no more understanding of the West but we loved that voice and the fact that he was prepared to lie to us. In a perverse way that proved that we mattered and could not be taken for granted as we had been by Trudeau. Matthew Arnold said that hypocrisy was the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In 1984 we knew we were being paid tribute and it felt good.
So thanks for the memories Brian. Now go away and don't come back.
A group of people with too much time on their hands has voted Jean Chretien Stupidest Man in Canada. This is a gross calumny. Even Chretien's worst enemies (that would be Paul Martin and me) know that the Prime Minister is lacking in a number of essentials but basic intelligence is not one of them. He has not remained in office for so long -- despite being an inarticulate, unprincipled, vain, nasty liar and bully -- by acting stupidly. He understands power as well as anyone who has led this country (and that includes Mackenzie King) and will retire to a life of prosperity and happy memories of crushing most of those who have opposed him. Those foes whom he has not destroyed or outlived will find that he has done his best to undermine their future.
There is a wonderful painting from the early 19th century by Eugène Delacroix, "The Death of Sardanapalus". It shows an oriental despot in his final moments, lying on a heap of his treasures as his favourite slave girls, page boys and Arab horses are murdered in front of him. Rather than have his possessions go to his successor he will see them destroyed. In like fashion Chretien's revenge on the ingrates of the Liberal party who hastened his exit is Bill C-24 which will make it harder to raise megabucks from the corporate sector for election campaigns. Similar legislation in Manitoba gutted the Conservative party which has yet to figure out how to raise money from real people. It may be that Chretien's scramble for a "legacy" and a poison pill for Paul Martin will accidentally leave Canadians better off. Who would have thought it?
Why some Iraqis at least think the Americans are doing a fine job.
Fifty-nine years ago today, troops from the anti-Nazi coalition invaded German-occupied France. Here is a list of the Canadian units which participated in the D-Day landings and airborne assault:
• Regina Rifles • Canadian Scottish Regiment
• Royal Winnipeg Rifles • Le Régiment de la Chaudière
• Highland Light Infantry • North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment
• Queen's Own Rifles of Canada • Stormont Dundas Glengarry Highlanders
• North Nova Scotia Highlanders • Cameron Highlanders
• Fort Garry Horse • First Canadian Parachute Battalion
• Les Fusilliers de Sherbrooke • Sixth Armoured Division
What wonderful names. What a debt we owe them. By the end of that day hundreds of them were dead, wounded or prisoners.
Here is a fascinating look at the battle for Normandy from the perspective of the Canadians' enemies, particularly the 12th SS Panzer Division manned by the fanatical teenagers of the Hitler Youth. It illustrates the horror of the fighting and the suicidal bravery of men on both sides.
The online edition of the Weekly Standard has an interesting rumination on intelligence in leaders and morality by Joel Engel. Essentially it boils down to a restatement of the notion that there is nothing so stupid that an academic (or brilliant intellect) will not believe it. Much social policy seems to confirm the inverse of this, as well: anything simple and effective will be dismissed out of hand by the right-thinking. This is why we are told that abstinence doesn't work, and teachers have graphic discussions with pre-teens about every sexual act imaginable before handing them condoms and maps to free clinics -- and then are astonished at sky-rocketing rates of teen pregnancy and VD. This is why so many truly well intentioned politicians are blind to the corelation between welfare rates and the number of people on welfare. High intelligence is like any other gift of the gene pool; just as we don't expect musical virtuosi or people who are 6' 8" automatically to be blessed with clarity, wisdom or morality, neither should we assume that bright people are necessarily possessed of any of these other, in many ways more important virtues. The Clintons are not people who have ever been accused of lack of intelligence, no matter what else their foes may say about them, and yet his intelligence didn't help him to realize that he should keep his, er, hands off an employee his daughter's age, and she wasn't smart enough to see the moral problems in her wilful blindness and collusion in years of lies.
Charles Murray, in his study of IQ and its corelates, finds a superficial link between high IQ and lower incidence of what is generally considered immoral behaviour: bearing or fathering children out of wedlock, frequent divorce, criminal convictions and so on. From this he doesn't conclude, though, that IQ automatically enhances morality. Rather, he speculates that those with higher reasoning abilities can, in a society which penalizes immorality or criminality, make better decisions. A bright man might badly want a new TV, but realizes that the consequences and problems of stealing it are on balance far worse than working for the money for it or doing without; someone less intelligent doesn't make the same analysis. An intelligent teenager is more likely to balance the risks and consequences of promiscuity against the needs or desires of the moment, and is therefore more likely to avoid unwed parenthood; less bright children don't. The great lesson from this is that by getting rid of consequences, we create a world in which neither virtue nor reason are rewarded. When high schools have their own day-cares and the government will rent you an apartment, it takes an especially bright and calm teenager to decide rationally not to risk pregnancy. When immoral and adulterous behaviour is tolerated and considered amusing at the highest levels of society, the stigma that used to regulate behaviour will influence fewer and fewer people. And when, as in England, a homeowner defending himself from violent criminals is more harshly penalized than the criminals themselves, and indeed is sued by them for the wounds they received while attempting to rob him, even the most intelligent may have trouble understanding why they bother to be law-abiding. The great majority of religious precepts that place boundaries on human behaviour have counterparts in logic and reason, at least in a society that rewards good and penalizes wrong-doing. As we destroy these social and legal boundaries, though, we face a world in which people are bound only by their conscience, a terrifying prospect.
Diane Francis, in today's NP (not available online until tomorrow) offers a slightly different take from Dexter on the MacKay/Orchard compromise. Her tone is pro-conservative but opposed to both men, but her prognosis is slightly more optimistic, at least for those who see the Tories as well intentioned but obsolete. She argues that the combination of MacKay's Maritime heritage (which makes him less likely to win over Western cons from the CA) and Orchard's pugnacious anti-business attitudes (she actually uses the phrase "illiterate farmer") will finally push Western conservatives all the way into the Alliance camp, while giving the Alliance enough of a push in the Ontario business community to enable them to break the barrier that has for so long made them the party of the West.
The Alliance, for its part, must continue to signal its intention to be the party of all Canadians who consider themselves conservative, whether fiscal or social, and who are tired of defining our national culture in anti-American, philo-Eurosocialist terms. While learning French is of some advantage, few Francophone Quebecers will ever likely vote Alliance, and the Tories there will never die. It is more important that the Alliance find and field local candidates in Ontario and the Maritimes who can combine intellectual and credible conservatism with an understanding of regional problems and issues. More extensive campaigning and more frequent appearance by the party leaders in these areas would add further credibility to the Alliance's claim no longer to be a regional party. The Alliance are in many ways, and especially in Central and Eastern Canada, unknowns. Fortunately for them, many Canadians are rapidly reaching the conclusion that any unknown will be better than yet more Liberal reign.
Zhao Ziyang died in late April and I didn't even notice. For the past 14 years he and his wife had been under house arrest in Beijing, guarded and kept away from the attention of his nation and foreigners. The General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, his crime had been to oppose the Politburo's use of armoured columns to crush the pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3, 1989.
He went into the square to beg the students to disperse before the tanks arrived but to no avail. The demonstration was dispersed at the cost of thousands of lives and Zhao's career was ruined. He was stripped of all party posts, just as he had been during the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. This time he was not rehabilitated and he remained in isolation until his death.
Political commentators across Canada are questioning the "Faustian bargain" that the new Progressive Conservative leader Peter McKay struck with David Orchard in order to win Saturday's convention vote. You may remember Dr Faustus as the medieval alchemist who sold his soul to the devil, not for power, but for knowledge. To accuse the Tories of Faustian behaviour would be to suppose that they had a soul to sell. Since the days of the first Joe Clark regime these guys have peddled that commodity so many times that little of it remains.
They have switched from opposing free trade to implementing free trade to questioning free trade. They have moved from Diefenbaker's vision of One Canada and "unhyphenated Canadians" to Clark's "Canada as a nation of nations" to Mulroney's embrace of separatists to absolute irrelevance in Quebec under a leader whose French-language skills are rudimentary at best. They have moved from social conservatism to a gay-friendly, ecologically sensitive group for whom David Suzuki could easily serve as poster boy. They have moved from Diefenbaker's reflexive anti-Americanism to Mulroney's love-in with Reagan at the Blarney Summit back to flirting with Yankee-bashing.
In short, they have consistently adopted Liberal policies, always an election too late. Neither fish nor fowl, neither hot nor cold, they have not convinced Canadians of their reason for being. If they had not cynically sold themselves as the party of continued welfare dependency for the Maritimes they would have ceased to exist as a Parliamentary entity.
But in uncrating the shambling Peter McKay/David Orchard mutant, the mad scientists at the Tory convention may finally have found a successful formula -- to outflank the Liberals on the left. Paul Martin's Liberals will be occupying not only the centre in the next election but spilling over to both sides of the centre as well. Since the Alliance has the true conservative vote locked up, where else can the Tories go? Jack Layton's federal NDP will continue to strike most Canadians as too radical and if the PCs can recast themselves as Diefenbaker nationalists they may recapture enough seats in the West to maintain the illusion of a national party. All they need to do is to is cling to life long enough to benefit from the inevitable disenchantment with the Liberals that temporarily grips Canadians once every generation. Within six years Peter McKay (or a more fluently bilingual successor) will be the Prime Minister of Canada. You read it here first.