Dead Right

If you want to live in a liberal society, you have to be willing to be offended. And these people are not willing to be offended. They don’t understand the nature of life in a modern society. They are in the West, as I always have said about them, but they are not of the West.
fourad ajami, the toronto star

Go read the whole thing.

Written by jay on February 13th, 2006 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Terror and culture.

Crazy and Heroic

I walk the free speech walk but not to the edge of a cliff. Not so two insane - but heroic guys in Paris yesterday.

One, in red and white, is (silently) wearing a sign with the Danish flag saying “Support Denmark, Support free speech”. Besides (silently) wearing a sign reading “Free Cartoonist” on it, the other, the founder of the BAF protest warrior-type organisation, is holding a (fake) severed hand, a pen among its fingers.

Voices start to ring out. “It’s provocation!” “You tread on 1.5 million Muslims!” “Connards!” “Rat faces!”

“Ignore them, they are idiots!” reply others as a crowd starts to press around. A rhetorical question rings out: “Would they be carrying out the same provocations in other types of demonstrations?!” (Actually, Monsieur, yes we would and yes we have.)
no pasaran.

And there is video.

If more people were willing to stand, silently, in the face of the Islamic protests against free speech I would feel less concern about the erosion of my culture. As it is, I am struck by the madness of two civilized people standing before the mob.

Interestingly, the French police did nothing to protect their right to bear witness:

What has happened is that a short blonde Frenchwoman has tugged on their sleeves and gently but firmly started pulling them away.

“I will show you my ID 10 meters from here” says the plainclothes cop. “They are going to lynch you!” she adds, as she leads us into another street.
no pasaran

While I realize that the French police chose discretion over valor, what we are going to have to be prepared to do is force the state to protect people who propose to exercise their rights. On both sides. A counter demonstration should not be hustled down a sidestreet. It should be protected from any illegal action on the part of the members of the main protest.

Again, if free speech means anything, it means being able to take your stand in the face of a potential mob and be able to count on the state to help you uphold your position.

Written by jay on February 13th, 2006 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Terror and culture and media.

Beer and Popcorn…Er, no

One of the world’s most popular parenting gurus is to warn that placing children younger than three in nurseries risks damaging their development.

Steve Biddulph, whose books have sold more than 4m copies worldwide, says that instead of subsidising nurseries, which do a “second-rate” job, the government should put in place policies to enable mothers to stay at home with their babies.

The advice signals a reversal of views for Biddulph, an Australian with more than 20 years’ experience as a therapist, whose previous bestsellers
include Raising Boys and Raising Girls.

In his new book Biddulph will admit he has changed his mind because of growing evidence of increased aggression, antisocial behaviour and other problems among children who have spent a large part of their infancy being cared for away from home.

He argues that such children may have problems developing close relationships later.
times of london

The principle difference between the Liberal’s childcare plan and the Conservatives is that the Conservatives allows for the possibility that mum might be the best childcare provider for very young children. The poor Liberals, needed to think of something else for the state to do, could not admit this might be the case.

Here’s why: the “hidden agenda” of the Liberal Party (and the NDP) has been to “empower” women to work outside the home. While this has been done in the name of feminism it has also had the consequence of allowing a rapid expansion of the workforce. It has also had the largely unntended consequence of reducing the number of hours children spend with their parents, particularily their mothers.

This was an experiment in child rearing without precedent and undertaken simultanously through most of the West. The hope was that children raised by stangers would have much the same outcomes as those raised by their mothers.

To no one’s great surprise the research - such as that cited by Biddulph - is rapidly accumulating suggesting that subcontracting childrearing does not work.

From a child development perspective this cannot come as much of a shock. In fact, development specialists have been split for a long time as to anyone other than mum caring for young children; but working mums were consoled with what turns out to have been rather bogus research suggeesting that the outcomes for daycare babies and kids raided by mum were, more or less, the same. It turns out they weren’t.

Poor, dumb, Paul Martin in full pander to the professional day care lobby, drank this kool aid and got onboard the whole jobs for the boys (well, girls, actually) national daycare bandwagon.

The altenative is simply beyond the capacity of the politically correct, 80’s feminist mindset which drive the Liberals and the NDP. Yup, it looks like it is better for children for mum to take a few years out of the workforce.

This has huge political, economic and social implications. The most significant of them being that if we want healthy, well developed kids, we are going to have to accept a shift of resources from taxpayers without children to taxpayers with children. Or, and this would be my preferred solution, the reduction of taxes across the board with a coresponding reduction in governmental activity.

In many ways creating a child friendly, family friendly society is the challenge Western governments face in the next few decades. Somehow, as societies, we have to get out birthrates back up to replacement rate or our culture will simply die out. The daycare driven, one and two child families which are stand issue for many in the West are not getting that job done. Thinking seriously about how to raise the birthrate, starting with giving stay at home mums support through three or four children, would be a start.

Written by jay on February 13th, 2006 with 16 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Education.