This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 20: Does the topic of abortion make you uncomfortable? It should. Abortion is wrong.
I don’t write or talk about it much, though I hope I’ve done a sufficient job of bearing witness from my privileged public platform. It’s not that I lack passion or the courage of my convictions. But I speak and write to persuade and when I cannot see a way to reason with people I try not to shout at them.
That does not mean I accept the description of abortion as the World War I of policy debates, where participants despairing of a breakthrough resort to attrition. I believe with J. Budziszewski that people are logical, though slowly, and on abortion, as on slavery, they will sooner or later be forced to abandon untenable positions.
Thus I saw hope in the now-famous editorial by the interim editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal saying, because in some cultural communities it is common to abort girls, doctors should not reveal the sex of a foetus until so late in the pregnancy that abortion is almost impossible.
While a handful of thoughtful commentators said his solution was not practical because there are too many other ways to determine the sex of a foetus, the reaction of defenders of our modern “peculiar institution” (which, like slavery, dare not speak its name) was revealing in its unreason. This choice, they said, might be wrong, being anti-woman, but was still right.
Precisely the same point was made during the only other significant dispute thus far, in an otherwise free society, over whether something that seemed human really was and how to handle the question legally and politically. That’s why, in the run-up to the American Civil War, public attention unexpectedly fixed on series of debates between rising Whig star Abraham Lincoln and Democratic heavyweight Stephen Douglas in 1858.
Ostensibly they were contesting Douglas’s Illinois Senate seat, and neither man wanted to make slavery his main issue or take an extreme position on it. Lincoln was too canny a politician to tie his future to an issue that divided people and relegated purists to the fringes. And Douglas was no “fire-eater” pledged to defend slavery to the death; indeed after losing the 1860 presidential election to Lincoln on the northern Democrats’ ticket he denounced secession vehemently before his premature death in June 1861. But questions thrown out the front door have a way of climbing back in the window.
Thus while the 1858 debates have their share of tedious partisan bickering over long-forgotten trivia there are also moments of tremendous moral and rhetorical clarity, especially for Lincoln. In the unexpected moral crisis of those debates, on dusty stages in small Illinois towns, he choose to move toward the intellectual and moral light instead of away from it, and begin his ascent to the Gettysburg Address, his 2nd Inaugural and the statesman’s monument on the Washington Mall.
Douglas, who retained his Senate seat but visibly dwindled as he sought to fudge his way to the middle ground, repeatedly insisted that states and communities should simply choose for themselves whether to have slavery.
Not so, Lincoln thundered in their final encounter: “No man can say that he does not care if a wrong is voted up or down… [Douglas] says that whatever community desires slavery has a right to it. He can say so logically if it is not a wrong, but if he admits that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”
Ditto sex-selective abortion. The Ottawa Citizen, relegating the matter to a 2nd editorial, said “If there is a problem in some Canadian ethnic communities, the better approach is for doctors to counsel parents against aborting a fetus based on gender. In Canada, women have a right to choose abortion. In some cases, the reason for doing so might be regarded as deplorable, but that is still a woman’s choice.” Behind all the ifs and mights, piling a passive voice on a conditional, their fundamental position is that it’s wrong but you have a right to do it. But you don’t. You can’t.
Our “fire-eaters” are at least consistent: If you can abort the handicapped, sacrifice a child to your career, or give no reason at all, it cannot be wrong to abort a girl. Indeed, by their logic it is not even possible to "abort a girl" because there’s no person in there, just a clump of cells, and no causal or moral link between sex-selective abortion and a later shortage of female children. But most people can’t swallow that. They know the point of sex-selective abortions is to kill women before they are even born. Which is horrible.
That’s why this question won’t go away. Because abortion is wrong, and in their hearts everyone knows it.
This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 19: Well, isn’t this nice? The government really really wants to know what we think should be in the federal budget. In fact, they can’t stop talking about all the consultations they’re holding in which we totally agree with them.
Last Tuesday they told me “Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty will be available to the media prior to holding pre-budget consultations on Wednesday... at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce… A photo opportunity will follow.”
By the way, is it just me or didn’t politicians use to try to arrange photo ops while pretending they were something else? Now they brazenly offer four or five a day without even a flimsy face-saving pretence that they’re saying something important, we’re covering it, and it just happens to result in a flattering published photo of the politician. And don’t get me started on the ones where the “photo op” is all you get: You may gaze upon the king but do not presume to intrude upon his contemplations.
No, my topic here is the barrage of fake budget consultation press releases. Another the same day said: “Jobs and Growth the Priorities as Minister Flaherty Hosts Pre Budget Consultations at Roundtable in Vancouver” and in that one, while claiming to solicit your opinion Flaherty not only admits his mind is already made up, he blurts out that in his version you will end up having said he was right. “Budget 2012 will maintain our focus on jobs and economic growth while reducing the deficit and returning to balance in the medium term,” said Minister Flaherty. “Today and in coming weeks, I want to hear from Canadians on how we can advance the next phase of our Economic Action Plan to continue to deliver results on these priorities.”
On Wednesday the 11th it was “Minister of Finance to Host Pre-Budget Town Hall in Whitby, Ontario” on Thursday and “Jobs and Growth the Priorities as Minister Flaherty Hosts Pre-Budget Consultations at Roundtable in Calgary”. On Friday, “Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency and Minister of Heath will taking part in pre-budget roundtable discussions in Nunavut. Media are invited for a brief question and answer session and photo opportunity.”
On Monday she emerged to recite “Our Government remains focused on jobs and economic growth while reducing the deficit and returning to balance in the medium term,” which you’ll note parrots Flaherty word-for-word, almost exactly as though some junior staffer had cut and pasted the release. Still, by all means show up; you’ll make a useful prop. And if Iqaluit sounds too cold “the Harper Government has also launched online pre-Budget consultations.” Either way, you support their jobs and growth agenda. I assure you.
It doesn’t matter whether you actually say their overspending is killing the economy, or they’re heartlessly gutting vital public services. Modern budgets are so vast, complicated and tangled up that this year’s is already well under way within the bowels of the Finance Department and no great wind from our mouths can blow it off course.
I don’t like the fact that government is now so huge and unwieldy that public servants largely run the country and Parliament can’t do any more about it than ministers. But I really hate ministers fanning out to pretend it’s not so, cupping their hands to their ears exactly as though they were listening to us, then announcing that, gosh, we said exactly what they were already thinking.
This Monday “The Honourable Alice Wong, Minister of State (Seniors), will host a round table with stakeholders to discuss the economic and social priorities in advance of Budget 2012 and beyond, as well as local or regional challenges” on Tuesday and “Minister Wong will be available for a photo op…” It’s so bad the blasted “photo op” is the only honest thing in the whole release.
Two days later, déjà vu. “Jobs and Growth the Priorities as Minister Flaherty Hosts Multi-Site Pre-Budget Consultations via Video Conference” with “business, academic and sectoral leaders in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.” And guess what? “Budget 2012 will maintain our focus on jobs and economic growth while reducing the deficit and returning to balance in the medium term,” said Minister Flaherty. Which you’ll note is lifted verbatim from his own release eight days earlier. As was the next sentence.
I suppose it’s not a very well kept secret that people don’t actually say the things press releases say they say. But are we really meant to believe, even in this age of relentless messaging, that the finance minister spews talking points verbatim? Or does cutting and pasting this crudely mean you’re not even trying to hide your contempt for us?
Heck, why even bother with the photo ops? Just hand out the same picture over and over to accompany the press release boilerplate, monotonously fake consultations and doctored audio of us all going “jobs and growth the priorities… continue to deliver results… returning to balance in the medium term”.
Oh yeah, and thanks for listening. Thanks a lot.
This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 18: So what’s your opinion of the new head of Canada’s Communications Security Establishment? (a) who’s that? (b) what’s that? (c) I hope he’s good at his job or (d) all of the above. I’m pretty much a (d) man but with an emphasis on “I hope he’s good at his job” for two reasons.
First, in a world dependent on high-tech communications for everything from banking to warfare it really matters that the agency in charge of protecting that stuff (which is the answer to “(b) what’s that?”) do a good job. Second, I’m very worried about the way we choose senior public servants.
I know bureaucracy is a boring topic and it’s more interesting to worry about celebrity divorces or Tim Tebow getting “Bradied” in the NFL playoffs. But the fact is that our lives are dominated by government and government is dominated by bureaucrats who now increasingly write the rules, implement them and act as judge in their own case if you fight back.
In short, when they mess up you pay so you can’t afford to ignore them. This particular appointment even made the newspapers because the CSE spies on foreigners by listening in on their electronic chatter and tries to keep them from doing it to us, and in its spare time help out law enforcement and security agencies. And now we have a spy scandal to remind us that this stuff matters.
Of course Canada continues to have a high-quality public service by world standards and I’m not suggesting they pick names out of a hat or choose their cronies. Quite the reverse: We seem to pick top bureaucrats according to the highest standards of contemporary management theory. But that’s the problem.
What happened in this case (yes, I’ve been hitting the government press releases again) is the Associate Deputy Minister of Infrastructure got put in charge of the CSE. So here’s the question: What does an Infrastructure guy know about signals intelligence?
I mean, you might get lucky and it’s his hobby. Or you might not and he knows as much about it as I do. (Or less: I have, as a hobby, read Simon Singh’s The Code Book, R.V. Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945, Anthony Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies and Jack Nissen and A.W. Cockerill’s Winning the Radar War.)
After all, the government probably didn’t pick him for his subject matter expertise. I say that not because I’m jaded, although I may be, but because I get these “PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER ANNOUNCES CHANGES IN THE SENIOR RANKS OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE” press releases fairly regularly and they frequently show senior public servants moving between essentially unrelated departments (like the July 2010 shuffle of the DM of Environment to HRSD, a guy from Industry to Environment and so on).
It reflects the modern technocratic dogma is that “management” is a skill separate from the grubby details of what’s being managed. (If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be such things as MBA programs.) This dogma, derived from the Enlightenment idea that mathematics is the language in which truth is written, dates back at least to the 19th century, when Walter Bagehot said because “at the summit all mountains are very much the same” ministers should be chosen for political and administrative skill rather than expertise in any given department. Hence, for instance, John Baird is suddenly foreign minister, having excelled at Transport, Environment and Treasury Board at least in the political sense.
Unfortunately as soon as I read Bagehot’s claim I was reminded of a warning line from an outdoor survival manual (unless I am much mistaken, the classic Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills) to the effect that mountains are always topologically more complex than they seem from a distance. So even though basic mountain climbing skills work on pretty much all mountains, no experienced climber would dream of setting foot on one before making a detailed study of its peculiarities while hikers and other amateurs should never go up them at all. Likewise, departments are complex and so are the substantive policies, like defence or infrastructure, they deal with. Indeed, people who actually take security seriously were long bothered by the fact that at one point Canada had had 22 ministers of defence in less than 30 years.
One might be partly reassured by the thought that ministers don’t really run departments anyway. They are so big and complicated that things like the federal budget or infrastructure have such intricate momentum that the minister’s job is to smile and bob and make it look as though whatever happened was (a) good (b) intentional (c) his or her doing. But if senior bureaucrats are also not really running their departments, only “managing” whatever is generic like compensation and disability plans, who’s minding the store?
In short, the science of management has reduced us to hoping the people in charge of government know how to do their jobs… without giving us any reason to believe they even know what they are.
This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 17: For all modernity’s horrors, from the Blitzkrieg and death camps to genocidal famine, moral relativism, drug-resistant diseases, atomic weapons and terrorism, at least we haven’t yet seen effective biological warfare. So what sort of reckless idiot would consider publishing the recipe for a devastating man-made flu? My answer is, a wise and responsible one.
This story begins, as a news story, last September, when word began trickling out in scientific publications that researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands had created a strain of H5N1 that passes easily among ferrets. Why should you care unless you’re one of those odd people who keeps a ferret? Because H5N1 is an avian flu that rarely infects people but, when it does, kills nearly 60% of those who catch it, and because for reasons best known to scientists ferrets are similar to humans when it comes to flu.
How did the scientists do it? We don’t yet know (those who could understand it, I mean) and if the U.S. government has its way we won’t. They’ve asked scientific journals not to publish key details for fear that it will fall into the wrong hands. And unlikely as it sounds, this is a mistake.
My reason for taking that view has nothing to do with flu, or any sort of science. It’s because of a very basic security principle I first encountered in my teens reading magician John Scarne’s classic Scarne on Cards, which explains how to play every popular card game except Bridge. But first it explains how to cheat at cards, for the same reason that during World War II the U.S. military let Scarne explain it to GIs and sailors. Namely the bad guys already know.
To be sure, some would-be card cheats don’t know all the tricks, at least not yet, so explaining them may add a little bit to the arsenal of the villains. But it does way more for the good guys, because most of them know nothing about cheating. And once even a handful of honest soldiers in boot camp recognize the “mechanic’s grip” or the “second deal” it makes life much more difficult for the cheaters.
The same principle applies to biological warfare research. If it’s easy to make H5N1 that spreads readily among humans, bad guys will figure it out soon enough anyway. After all, that’s what they do. Virtuous medical researchers, or ones who are simply selfish and greedy, pursue all kinds of things from pure knowledge to pure profit. Bad guys relentlessly explore how to kill. And if some honest peaceful researchers have worked it out, it probably means the general state of science on the subject has brought it within range of other scientists including the evil kind.
So if good guys have stumbled on it first, be glad. And hope other good guys get the key information so they can learn to detect tell-tale signs that someone else is working on the problem, find ways to block the virus’s replication process or develop an effective vaccine.
If you’ve seen the movie Snakes on a Plane, by the way, you’ll understand why it’s important to get working on the issue right away: It’s little use asking the expert for advice once the vipers are loose because he’s sitting gruesomely dead in row 15.
In the face of any such deadly pandemic, we want the good guys working on it before it spreads, not only because of how many of us it will otherwise kill before they hit on a solution but because of how many of them it will kill so they never do hit on one. And when it comes to diseases, remember, natural as well as laboratory mutations can unleash pandemics and it would be a tragic mistake to keep knowledge of the problem from people who might devise a cure to foil mad scientists only to have Mother Nature go rogue on us on a Spanish flu or even Black Death scale.
It is of course true that loose lips sink ships. But they also sink U-boats. Free discussion is a potent weapon and, moreover, one available only to open societies. Having lots of smart, dedicated people tackling a problem from lots of angles is a really good way of solving it fast. And while it’s tempting to keep the public in the dark and let only experts share the secrets, an additional major benefit of free discussion is to keep expert orthodoxy from stifling innovation, and keep governments from hiding a problem from citizens until it’s too late.
In this case the academic motto “Publish or perish” is likely to be literally true. So tell us how the Frankenflu was made.
This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 16:
The Federal Liberals just wrapped up their Biennial Convention in Ottawa with visions of renewal dancing in their heads. Renewal being a word here meaning “winning elections, you know, the way we used to”. Their web site declares “The Liberal Party is Canada’s Bold New Party!” But without underestimating the importance of organization (or wanting to see the Liberals triumph) I must remind them that ideas matter more and so does honesty. And they won’t be serious contenders again until they apply some of the latter to the former.
Outgoing party president Alfred Apps just wrote “The Liberal Party sees itself as the party of progress and reform, the voice of the people…. it’s now estranged from its base.” But, he added, “Canadians have sent Liberals to the political woodshed on three previous occasions – 1930, 1958 and 1984…. Liberals bounced back from defeat by … reaching out to new people with new ideas, and modernizing their organization.”
Fine. So where are these new ideas?
Liberals returned from the woodshed in the 1960s by promising to protect people from the alleged ravages of the market and the supposedly pervasive intolerance of their fellows and in the 1990s by promising to balance the budget without fundamentally reforming the welfare state. I do not say either was a good idea. But each was an idea and a big one. And they won’t get anywhere this time by cranking out these decades-old hits like some aging rock band on a reunion tour.
Today, unless you’re committed to protecting the unborn or find international affairs acutely terrifying, the top public agenda item must be reining in spending in the face of demographic crisis, especially given the drumbeat of bad financial news out of Europe. And you need a real idea: Not just a wish that the problem go away or a slogan (like Stephane Dion’s “Green Shift”) but an explanation of why it’s happening and a comprehensive plan to set things right. Chretien-Martin trimming and squeezing won’t work this time.
That doesn’t mean a boutique policy like legalizing marijuana is necessarily bad. The problem is, it doesn’t seem to be connected to any coherent political philosophy.
I say “doesn’t seem to be” because modern Liberals stand for permissive social policy generally and perhaps want to legalize pot for the same reason they favour gay marriage, abortion on demand and so on. But what is that reason?
It’s certainly not libertarianism. Where someone like Ron Paul would legalize drugs because he opposes government meddling in your life for your own good even with majority support, the Liberals seem to stand for your right to do anything you want while the swollen state stands by to protect you from any consequences financial, medical or even social. They proudly support human rights tribunals and hate speech laws that punish us severely not only for exercising our freedom of association but simply for criticizing someone or something.
Even if this nagging nanny state were a good idea, which it’s not, it isn’t a new one. Bold and exciting in 1968, it’s stale and mouldy now. Worse, while a state that made sure your life worked out regardless of your choices was a dream for 1960s radicals, it’s a nightmare for 2012 finance ministers. And if the Liberals haven’t got some idea how to make it affordable, or rein it in, they are not going to win power except briefly and accidentally, the way Tories did when they didn’t seem to know who they were or why they hated Liberals so much.
Whatever the Harper Tories have done well, or badly, they have not been fiscally responsible. From fy 2006 through 2010, they hiked program spending 40%. It’s not a partisan problem; the McGuinty liberals have been no better. But it’s a partisan vulnerability, to anyone willing to talk frankly about it and their own position.
Here federal Liberal weakness for smug self-satisfaction is a major danger. Sure, there are blatherskites everywhere. But in Britain, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Rachel Reeves, just admitted her own Labour party is not ready to govern. “If there was a general election tomorrow, of course we haven’t got enough flesh on the bones,” she told the Daily Telegraph, and their leader “does need more time”. Furthermore, “I don’t think that every pound of money spent under the last government was spent as wisely as it could have been. Look at what happened to the pay of those people at the top of the civil service, in local government, or in quangos. Look at the contract for GPs.”
Until federal Liberals can admit what they did wrong during their long political dominance, where they spent too much, which ideas they would now repudiate, they better hope the political woodshed is cozy. Because the only way out of it is to think your way out.
Without having any sympathy for the Taliban, who not only want to destroy Western civilization but would torture Western soldiers without hesitation or shame, I am firmly in favour of investigating the notorious video of U.S. marines now making the rounds and, if it is genuine, punishing the perpetrators. I know some people say those who are not combat soldiers should not make judgements about what happens in the heat of battle. And I am not a soldier. But Eugene Sledge was. He was a marine in the Pacific in World War II and his superb memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa was an important source for the recent series Pacific. So I submit his account of the time he almost desecrated a corpse as the most fundamental reason why, although I know these things happen, I am certain they should not (I quoted this on Newswire on Jan. 13).
I noticed gold teeth glistening brightly between the lips of several of the dead Japanese lying around us. Harvesting gold teeth was one facet of stripping enemy dead that I hadn’t practiced so far. But stopping beside a corpse with a particularly tempting number of shining crowns, I took out my kabar and bent over to make the extractions.
A hand grasped me by the shoulder, and I straightened up to see who it was. "What are you gonna do, sledgehammer?" asked Doc Caswell. His expression was a mix of sadness and reproach as he looked intently at me. "Just thought I’d collect some gold teeth," I replied. "Don’t do it." "Why not, Doc?" "You don’t want to do that sort of thing. What would your folks think if they knew?" "Well, my dad’s a doctor, and I bet he’d think it was kinda interesting," I replied, bending down to resume my task.
"No! The germs, Sledgehammer! You might get germs from them." I stopped and looked inquiringly at Doc and said, "Germs? Gosh, I never thought of that." "Yeah, you got to be careful about germs around all these dead Nips, you know," he said vehemently. "Well, then, I guess I’d better just cut off the insignia on his collar and leave his nasty teeth alone. You think that’s safe, Doc?" "I guess so," he replied with an approving nod.
Reflecting on the episode after the war, I realized that Doc Caswell didn’t really have germs in mind. He was a good friend and a fine, genuine person whose sensitivity hadn’t been crushed out by the war. He was merely trying to help me retain some of mine and not become completely callous and harsh.