Thoughts and Queries

"I'm Uncomfortable"

2006-08-30T12:01:00.000-04:00

A few nights ago, my lovely little wife rolled over to me in bed and said "I'm uncomfortable". Naturally I asked if she wanted another pillow, blankets, if she was hot/cold, etc. - all the things a guy should say in this situation according to page 57 of the man's guide to women handbook. Then she repeated, "I'm uncomfortable ..." with a pause, "... I'm uncomfortable with life."

What she was meaning is that she had grown uneasy with this world, with the way things were going, with what was happening around us and to us and the fact that we generally felt helpless in our attempts to stop it and to correct the various evil deeds.

It has been a crazy summer and really a crazy year since we have been married. Every morning we wake up and mentally gird ourselves against the things that might bring us and our spirits down that day, and it seems lately that every day or at least every other something happens.

Every morning I remind myself that the sun is still shining, that I have a beautiful wife and two annoying little kittens, that I have an education, that I have my health, that I have my family - and I use this as a quick meditation to start the day. Unfortunately, even though the sun shines, bad things still happen to good people and some people never understand how much their actions have consequences and how they can affect other people. It is on those days that I try desperately to reach out for God.

I have realized my state of affairs, and maybe it is because of that that I reach for God. I have abandoned my faith in men and women and I am hoping that it will find something at a higher level to sustain me.

Today is a different day. Today I believe that my overshooting faith has finally found something. Today I realized that my little meditation that i say in my head every morning actually is a statement of blessing. I am blessed. I do have a wonderful wife and two annoying kittens. I do have an education. I do have my health. I do have family that supports me. I do have friends that I am loyal to, and friends that are loyal to me (quality not quantity!), most of all ... I do have faith - I must learn to never lose sight of that.

I woke up today and the sun was shining.

"I have reason to believe
that I have victories to taste
I can feel them on my teeth
Upon my lips and in my chest
I can roll them on my tongue
They are more supple than defeat
i feel the tension in my lungs
and every move is fueled by my resolve to...
BREATHE!"
- Chris Carrabba

Thanks to Jon, here's a post for Comic Fans around the world.

2006-08-30T11:57:00.000-04:00

1) Transformers the movie is coming out. Don't believe me? Check out the trailer.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0418279/trailers

2) The sequel to Batman Begins is called "The Dark Knight" starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger as The Joker.

3) Marvel: Civil War comics, if you don't know what is going on - ask Jon Sinclair because he led me to this little nugget of gold.

Okay, now I am going to take off my geek hat and write a real post.

movie recommendation

2006-06-14T16:01:00.000-04:00

if you are feeling like a good heart-warming movie, rent "Dear Frankie" - it is a dandy and you will not be disappointed. Excellent cast featuring Emily Mortimer (i believe she is also in Matchpoint) and Gerard Butler (who graced the screen as the Phantom in last year's Phantom of the Opera). It is a movie full of thick Scottish accents so it might take a while to catch on what they are actually saying, but once you do you will be delighted.

the next step

2006-05-23T12:28:00.000-04:00

So it is a gloomy may day (whatever happened to April showers ending at the end of April?) and the sidewalks are fairly empty around my work, which is surprising but believable - hence the weather.

Anyways, I have decided to take a few minutes to tackle the topic of conversation that seems to beat around my head constantly the past few days - the next step.

Four years of university have passed and Kingston has been good to me. Great friends, memories, weather, a lovely wife and a little family (2 kittens: Yoda who is now 8 months old and Maximus who is a measly 31/2 months old and about half the size of Yoda, but a terror no less.)

Lauren and I will both be staying in Kingston for one more year (Lauren is doing her B.Ed, I am taking some courses, working, writing music, etc.) We have officially started making plans for a trip to Europe next summer. If everything goes well, we will travel/backpack for a month over there. I can't wait. The thought of being places that are hundreds and thousands of years old blows my mind. I can't wait to scale the Scottish countryside, or have lunch by Hadrian's Wall or wish for good luck at the feet of Marcus Aurelius or enjoy the nightlife in Paris and Barcelona. These are places that I have studied about for 4 years and now have a chance to dive into it. We will probably only stick to the north/western side of Europe with hopefully a venture down to Rome, Venice and The Vatican, although if the money holds out a trip to Athens and Sparta would also be on the timetable.

Besides that trip which is consuming my mind currently, I have plans to apply to grad schools and law schools both here in Canada as well as the UK and Ireland.

Musically I find myself at a crossroads. For 2 1/2 years I have had the privilege to be a part of Seven Year Sunrise (listen to some tunes if you want at garageband.com/artist/sevenyearsunrise or myspace.com/7ys), a good ol' rock band here at Queen's. the 4 remaining members of the band have all moved on to different things, accepting jobs here and there and embarking on the 'next steps' of their own lives and I wish all the best to each of them. But for myself, the question arises whether my destiny is fulfilled jamming out in my family room or do the songs that come warrant a larger audience. Only time will tell.

To all my friends abroad and afar (Bolivia, Guyana, UK, British Columbia, Ukraine, the Maritimes and other parts of this great nation) I wish you all the best and hope to see you soon.

Curtis

PS. I will post a little pic of Maximus Jeffs, whom we affectionately call 'the monster max'.

... more bonfire pictures

2006-05-22T18:08:00.000-04:00

The End of the Dude Ranch ... please don't call the fire department on us Tea Lady!

2006-05-22T17:40:00.000-04:00

Ok all, so it has been quite some time since I have 'blogged', but life has been busy. This, my first in a series of new blogs, is meant to tell a tale about one final night at 58 Centre Street. The situation was this. We were leaving the dirty hole that was the Dude Ranch (although some of us had left a year earlier, but returned for one last night), and noticed that we still had an excessive amount of wood in our garage and one empty fire pit in the backyard. Our fire pit, maybe 4 square feet at max was used to burn this wood, desks, coffee tabls, beds, posters, lecture notes and if we weren't too careful - blades of grass. I must say that it was a surreal night full of many fond stories of years past, goodbyes and hopes for the future to come. If I had my way, I would assemble the same group every summer for the rest of our lives - if I had my way (which means that I need to get rich so that I can buy the best summer spot ever and pay for everyone to fly back in).

Anyways, if I can figure out how, I will put up a bunch of pictures from that night, pictures of the many faces and smiles that have made 4 years seem like a lifetime and a moment all at once, and the most wonderful lifetime/moment at that.

Thank you all.
curtis

a few Bohemian words to leave lying around

2006-04-25T16:58:00.000-04:00

There's only us
There's only this
Forget regret or Life is yours to miss
No other road
no other way
No day but today

There's only now
There's only here
Give in to love
Or live in fear
No other path
No other way

No day but today

-- rent (finale b)

--- to all of my friends, companions and colleagues who are wrapping up their undergraduate degrees this week, I wish you all the best in your next steps and adventures and hopefully life will cross our lives again soon. Congrats and God Bless...

My day as the GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs

2006-03-29T20:26:00.000-05:00

So as the 2005-06 season comes to a close for the Maple Leafs (mathematically speaking they still have a chance at the post-season), I have decided to take a few minutes and give you my ideas for the 2006-07 edition.

Players returning and salaries (my guesses at least):

Mats Sundin - 6m
Darcy Tucker - 1.5m
Jeff O'Neill - 1.25m
Alex Steen - 450,000 (rookie contract)
Matt Stajan - 450,000 (rc)
Kyle Wellwood - 450,000 (rc)
Alexei Ponikarovsky - 500,000 (?)
Tie Domi - 1.25m
Tomas Kaberle - 4.25m
Mikael Tellqvist - 450,000

Totalling: 16.55 million
> This gives us just under 30 million to add 5 D, 4 forwards and a #1 goaltender

Goaltending Scenario
1. Sign a guy like Curtis Joseph for a one-year, financially simple contract around the 1-2million range and hope that a combination of he and a tellqvist/aubin can handle the 82 games.
2. Package one of your goaltending propects (Pogge or Rask), draft pick(s), roster player(s) and ship them off to Florida for Roberto Luongo - sign him long-term for around 6million a year and make him your franchise goalie for the next 10 years.

Financial Commitment: 2-6 million, depending on scenario; bringing total to either 18.55m or 22.55

Defencemen Scenario
1. The Leafs said that they had set aside 9 million for both Kaberle and McCabe (Kaberle signed for 4.25, leaving 4.75 for McCabe). Offer that to McCabe for a few years, if he takes it you have your 1-2 dmen, if he walks you quickly go after either Zdeno Chara or Wade Redden from Ottawa, offering 5m-ish to either.

FC: with McCabe (23.3m or 27.3m); with Chara or Redden (23.55 or 27.55)

2. It is now time for the Leafs to go out and get a LEGIT 3-4 defencemen. The man we should grab is Jay McKee who will be looking to make around 2million next year.
FC: with McCabe (25.3 or 29.3); with C or R (25.55 or 29.55)

3. What about the remaining 3 D spots. Well I highly doubt that we will see Khananov or Berg (possible retirement) back in a Leafs uniform and the same could be said for Wade Belak. Luke Richardson is a question mark only because I don't know what time he has left on his contract, if he is around for another year, it would be for no more than 2 million - leaving 2-3 D spots for the rookies to battle out for (Kronwall, White, Bell, Harrison, Wozniewski, and Coliacovo)

FC: add 2 million for Richardson and 1.35m for 3 rookie contracts, for a total of 3.35 million.

FC: with McCabe (28.65 or 32.65); with Chara/Redden (28.9 or 32.9)

Forward Scenario:
Well there appears to be 4 spots open on the roster for next year (5 if Jeff O'Neill retires). Possibilities from this year's team: Jason Allison, Nik Antropov, Eric Lindros, Clark Wilm, and Chad Kilger. Out of these I believe it is time to say farwell to Allison and Antropov. Allison was only on a one-year deal and did his job, but this is a quicker NHL that seems to flow around him. As for Antropov (restricted free-agent), I believe the experiment with the big Kaszak is over and it is time to either deal him or do not qualify him, making him an unrestricted free agent.

Lindros, Wilm and Kilger deserve contracts back with the Buds; Lindros and Kilger will get contracts between 1 and 1.5 m. Wilm will see a contract around 800,000, fitting him in as the 12th/13th forward.
Total for the 3: 3.3million

FC: with McCabe (31.95 or 35.95); Chara/Redden (32.2 or 36.2)

You might ask , we need one more forward and yes we do. Finally we need a winger for Sundin, someone who can convert all of the Swede's magnificent passes, my answer is Patrick Elias of the New Jersey Devels. Elias will probably demand around 4.5-5m. Lets give him 5m for numbers sake.

FC: with McCabe (36.95 or 40.95); Chara/Redden (37.2 or 41.2)

> Other forward inclusions could be anybody from Ben Ondrus to John Pohl. These Marlies have proven that they can play.

One last financial detail is to add Ed Belfour's buyout at 1.5 million.

FINAL FC Totals:
with McCabe (38.45 or 42.45); Chara/Redden (38.7 or 42.7)

This will leave anywhere from 3.3 - 7.55 million available for any deadline deals.

POSSIBLE LINEUP:

Elias-Sundin-Ponikarovsky
Tucker-Lindros-Kilger
Steen-Wellwood-O'Neill
Domi-Stajan-Wilm/Ondrus/Pohl

Kaberle - McCabe/Chara/Redden
McKee - Rookie
Richardson - Rookie

Luongo - Aubin

Angels and Airwaves

2006-03-25T21:04:00.000-05:00

To all you Blink-182 fans out there, there is a new band around the corner. Tom Delonge, guitar player for Blink has a new band called Angels and Airwaves and I think there is one song on their website that you can check out. Very good tune, it will keep your head bobbing.

c.

www.angelsandairwaves.com

Declaration of Human Rights

2006-03-23T16:34:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone,

So I was walking and talking in my head the other day, going over issues of political, religious, social, ethical significance and I thought to myself: I believe I am a man who supports worldwide equality and ethics, and would therefore adhere to the grand-daddy of them all, the Declaration of Human Rights. The more I pondered this the quicker I realized that I had actually not read the Declaration of Human Rights set forth by the United Nations in 1948. wow, i thought. Some global citizen I am. Well to those of you who are like me, globally minded but one document short of the mark, click on the link below.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Curtis

PS. If you haven't seen the movie 'Crash', you should. I watched it months ago, and re-rented it this week following the big Oscar win. It contains some language and violence but definitely makes you think about racism, mankind and the way we treat each other.

Coldplay

2006-03-20T18:56:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone, sorry that it has been a few since I last updated you on my life. Anyways, what's new? well I had the fortune of spending St. Patty's Day in Ottawa with Lauren and a friend of ours named Dennis. Lauren had a lovely day shopping at the Rideau Centre and we all discovered that Jesus is the new fad for the Spring fashion line. I think every store from Guess to Aritzia had either a cross or Bible verse on all of their new spring line, it was funny. Christianity was a dialogue unmentionable last year, now it will be on everyone's t-shirt and jeans... odd indeed. We had a lovely dinner out at this very over-crowded and very joyful Irish pub down in the market then it was off to the Scotiabank Place for an evening with Coldplay. It was amazing. The opening band was a fine man by the name of Richard Ashcroft (and for you music trivia people, yes he is the former lead singer of the Verve) and he was great - especially when he ended his set with Bittersweet Symphony. Then Coldplay came on and took over and the show was amazing, from the countdown clock during 'Square One' to the falling giant yellow balloons during 'Yellow'. 'Fix You' was also very special, nearly as good as 'Streets' live by U2. Anyways below is the set list, as much as I remember, so now you can all burn your own Coldplay Live CD's. Have fun kids.

Curtis
Richard Ashcroft SetList (I don't actually remember the order of the songs but these are the ones he did):

Music is Power
Science of Silence
Words just get in the way
Keys to the world
Break the Night with colour
Bittersweet Symphony

COLDPLAY Setlist:

Square One
Politik
Yellow
Speed of Sound
God Put a Smile Upon your face
X & Y
What If
White Shadows

Don't Panic
A Message
The Hardest Part

Trouble
Till Kingdom Come
Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash cover)

Shiver
(... another song here that I can't remember ...)
The Scientist
Clocks
Talk

Encore:
Swallowed in the Sea
In My Place
Fix You

Also: They did the song 'Low' off of the new album, but I can't remember where it went.

"The Rules" by C.S. Lewis

2006-02-28T14:00:00.000-05:00

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money - the one you have have almost fogotten - came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old so-and-so adn have never done - well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it - and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me that I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much - we fell the Rule of Law pressing on us so - that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

- an excerpt from Mere Christianity

4 years ... over so fast and all I can take from it is that I need more patience

2006-02-23T21:40:00.000-05:00

This post will be one of the more personal nature, an escape from my usual political/spiritual inputs. It just so happens that tonight I sit alone in my apartment, on my last reading week of university, my wife is 3 hours away and my crazy cat is having the time of her life with a pen - yes a pen, but not just any pen, a red pen ... it doesn't take much to entertain my little Yoda.

It is funny because you reach this point in your life and you feel like the last 4 years have been such a whirlwind that you can't remember one thing that you actually did during those years.

Then you remember that have done enough work to get a degree, got married (and subsequently welcomed a little kitten into the world), did the band thing, made a lot of great new life friends, and was generally so busy that you didn't have a minute to think most days. But all of that seems somewhat small (except the marriage) when facing the giant sized steps of the future. It seems day in and day out I convince myself that I have nothing to worry about - that the future should not be feared but rather embraced with excitement. Thankfully Lauren keeps me rationally grounded during my rants so that i can get some sort of perspective on what I am really supposed to do.

It is funny. So many great things happened in 2005, but I was one of the first to place that year behind me because of reasons that are too many and too private to place on a website. I hope 2006 will be a little bit more comforting. My quest for this year is to gain patience and stability in the only things that remain a constant for me - God, Lauren, the Jeffs and of course the previously mentioned terror known to her mother as Princess Yoda.

In a time with so many changes both good (new niece, friends moving) or bad - it is key that we learn to be patient in this crazy world and through everything that it throws at us. Do i know where i will be in a year, 2, 3 ,5 , 20 ... no. is that scary? yes. can i endure? ... certainly.

I pray that one day soon i will wake up and not have to convince myself that everything will be okay, that that day i will wake up and know not just in my heart but in my mind that it will be fine and that (lauren and) I will be fine. maybe that day will be tomorrow, maybe not. i just need to keeping working this thing called life through ...

Another Melanie Article - Thanks Dave!

2006-02-13T10:47:00.000-05:00

Posted by melanie at 09:50 AM
The authentic human rights
Jewish Chronicle, 23 December 2005

When, back in the mists of time, I first started writing controversially about family breakdown (the world fell in on me because I thought children were best served by being brought up by their father and mother) there was one particular insult that was hurled my way which stood out from all the others.

‘You’re just an Old Testament fundamentalist’ my assailants hissed. Hmmn, I thought, no sooner do they disagree with me than they’re reaching into the box marked ‘creepy Jew’. I thought it was just a low blow by nasty people, and left it at that.

But now I think differently. It was not a random bit of bigotry at all. It was a highly specific bit of bigotry. For what I was defending was not just traditional family life but a code of behaviour which followed rules and precepts laid down in what has been called the Judeo-Christian heritage. And at the heart of that was the Mosaic code.

The onslaught on traditional family life, by those who promoted lifestyle choice and said that anyone who disapproved of serial promiscuity and children with no fathers was a fascist, was being mounted by people who wanted to overturn that heritage and replace it by secular ‘human rights’.
This doctrine said that everyone had an absolute right to personal autonomy — in other words, make up their own moral rules. This was supposed to usher in a new dawn of happiness and self-fulfilment. Human rights were the way to end all the horrible things in the world like prejudice and hatred. Freedom of choice was the holy of holies that would create the new Jerusalem.

Anything that prevented this freedom, like religion, was considered an affront to decency. Religion was oppressive because it put constraints on human appetites. And the people who first invented those constraints were the Jews.

The only problem with this analysis was that the Mosaic code is actually at the root of our human rights. That’s because it gave the world the concept of morality, the sense of obligation to others which is what makes a civilised society rather than a bunch of savages all trying to knock each others’ eyes out.

Real human rights derive from the belief that we are all made in the image of God. That’s what gives us our belief in human equality. Take away the Torah and equality — the dignity of every individual — goes out of the window.

This line of argument doesn’t go down with secularists at all well. We don’t need religion to tell us how to behave well, they cry. To listen to them, anyone would think that they spend their entire lives in a bubble completely insulated from the culture that makes all of us what we are. The fact is that secularists also derive their values from the surrounding society, and like or not (they do not) the principles that our society most values come in the main from Judaism and Christianity.

Nonsense, they riposte: our liberal values, human rights and so forth, derive from the Enlightenment which was a revolt against Christianity. Not so fast. Yes, it was a revolt against the abuse of clerical power which separated church from state, allowing the development of tolerance, privacy and all those good things. But the architects of liberalism also knew that freedom depended on laws and that it was Biblical morality that kept the whole show on the road.

What’s happened now is that it’s come off the road. The secular onslaught against religion replaced freedom by licence. The notion of individual equality before God, the core of personal liberty, was replaced by the identical value of groups.

Since all lifestyles were of equal value, moral judgments between different lifestyles became discrimination, and duty was replaced by entitlement.

So behaviour such as sexual promiscuity or the abandonment of children became regarded as normal. Anyone criticising it was a bigot because the overriding requirement was that no-one should feel badly about themselves. Alternative lifestyles thus became mainstream. The counter-culture became the norm.

But this created victims among the most vulnerable — particularly children — and produced misery and harm. Far from being progressive, human rights doctrine is actually deeply reactionary because it prevents what is absolutely central to progressive values: encouraging the good in people and discouraging the bad.

Religion gets a bad press, particularly at present. And without doubt it has been, and still is, responsible for terrible things in the world. But secular societies tend to be very nasty places and secularists are among the most intolerant and illiberal people I have ever met.
A society without religion is a society without a soul. This weekend, we celebrate the victory of religion over a tyranny that tried to deny it. Religion gave us human rights. Don’t let the tyranny of the ‘human rights’ movement destroy it.

CD of the Year

2006-02-12T15:29:00.000-05:00

So I picked up a new CD this week, and I have to say that it is my choice for CD of the Year (so far). It is an album called 'Sometimes' by Colour & City . Dallas Green is the lead singer of Alexisonfire and this is his first solo CD. It is a very mellow/emotional acoustic album that will just blow your mind. If you have a few extra cents, or can bum some money off of your parents whilest you are home for reading week - go and pick up this album, you will not be disappointed.

Melanie Phillips - why I am Progressive

2006-02-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

January 01, 2000: Melanie Phillipps
Why I am a progressive
New Statesman, January 2000

Once upon a time, in one of the most enlightened countries on the globe and in the most enlightened era known to mankind, there lived and worked a journalist. Let us just call her M. This journalist subscribed to certain unshakeable principles. She believed that members of a civilized society had a set of duties towards each other, that selfishness was wrong, that the strong had a particular responsibility to help the weak, that harm to others could and should be avoided and that the lies by which all power was abused should be exposed. She believed that by adopting these principles it was possible to build a better society. She was thus indistinguishable from the left-wing circles in which she moved, which congratulated themselves repeatedly on being the most progressive social grouping in the country, if not the world.
One day, M stumbled across some disturbing facts about education. Children were not being taught to read; nor were they being taught history or maths or languages or anything very much. A view had prevailed that children were as well equipped as adults to make sense of experience. So teachers, who decided that teaching children facts or the rules of language or maths might stifle their innate creativity, were taking a back seat. This view was said to be progressive. Yet the result was school-leavers who could barely write an application letter and even university undergraduates who were having to take remedial courses in the basics.
M was baffled. She wrote that teachers should transmit knowledge to give children the mental maps by which they could find their way in the world. Desperate parents and teachers intimidated by the doctrinaire education orthodoxy wrote in support. Her left-wing friends, however, told her she had become reactionary, a Gradgrind and appallingly right-wing. Yet how could it be progressive to support a philosophy which inflicted its most devastating damage upon children at the bottom of the social heap?
After a while, M stumbled upon another perplexing finding. Rising numbers of people were abandoning their spouses and children, or breaking up other people’s families, or bringing children into the world without a father around at all. M’s enlightened friends claimed that these activities made the women and children involved happy, and were a refreshing change from the bad old days when simply everyone was miserable because marriage chained women to men who as everyone with the correct view knew were basically feckless wife-beaters and child abusers and irrationally prejudiced against the opposite sex.
Yet M knew there was a huge amount of evidence that family disintegration and re-formation did incalculable damage to children, and that there was far greater risk of abuse of children or violence between adults in cohabiting or serial relationships. So since by and large marriage was a protection for both children and adults, M thought the state should promote it as a social good. To her surprise, she was told she was reactionary, authoritarian and of course, right-wing. Yet how, she wondered to herself, could it be progressive to encourage deceit, betrayal of trust, breaking of promises and harm to children?
What was really weird was that the more loudly such ‘liberals’ proclaimed their progressive credentials, the greater the harm they seemed to promote. They were now advocating legalisation of cannabis and even ‘hard’ drugs on the basis that it was possible to regulate safe drug-taking and reduce harm. Dismissal of this view was to ‘suppress grown-up debate’. Yet M was reading clinical studies which were documenting alarming effects of this ‘soft’ drug marijuana. These studies showed, among other things, permanent damage to brain function among people using cannabis between 10-19 days per month; far greater carcinogenity than tobacco; damage to the immune system; damage to unborn children; the onset of psychosis, memory loss and, among some people, aggression; implication in road traffic accidents and at least one aircraft crash; and unlike alcohol, long-term retention of the effects in the body.
In other words, legalisation of cannabis, let alone other drugs, would not minimise harm —it would nationalise it. Yet when she wrote all this, self-styled liberals accused her of being ‘criminally insane’ and ‘evil’. ‘You’re a nazi’, one reader wrote. Another, who claimed to work with drug users, accused her of ‘spreading bile and lies’ and that she was ‘worse than any drug dealer could ever be – and are probably responsible for killing more people, too’. Far from being thought irrational or wicked for such a vicious response to evidence, such writers would be considered to be in the very vanguard of progress. Is not legalisation, after all, said to be the liberal position on drugs? Another reader wrote to M to confess his own thought crime. ‘I am reasonably liberal but really fear this dreadful culture shift’. The ‘but’ revealed how far liberal values had travelled, to become their own antithesis.
Reader, I can hide the truth from you no longer. I am M. Over the last fifteen years or more, I have come to the conclusion that great harm is being done to some of the most vulnerable people in our society through the collapse of normative rules of behaviour, harm which I think is inimical to a liberal and civilised society. This position is said to be reactionary. The harm itself is redefined as entitlement and those who advocate it are said to be progressive or liberal. How can this be?
What has happened is that language itself has been twisted out of recognition in order to conceal the deeper lies that are being told. In a country notable for its suspicion of theory and where political history has been all but abolished in schools, it’s only too easy to sow confusion. What, after all, do these slippery terms —liberal, progressive, conservative—actually mean? I don’t accept the Prime Minister’s Manichean division between progressives and the forces of conservatism. Many who claim to be progressive in fact subscribe to what David Selbourne has called the ‘corrupted liberal orders’. They are social wreckers in progressive clothing.
Our liberal values were first given to us by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Right from the start these values contained elements which were later to threaten the whole project. In particular, they suggested the perfectibility of mankind, that through open-ended advance society would be improved and human goodness would flourish. As Christopher Lasch has written, the outcome was that the economic machine came to be driven by ‘insatiable desires’. Pursuit of happiness became the highest goal of society. As the individual took ever greater priority, moral questions turned from how we ought to behave towards each other to promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Moral obligations were in effect junked, opening the way for a libertarian revolution in which freedom became an end in itself and liberalism was directly threatened.
For liberalism was essentially a moral project based on recognising the difference between right and wrong. As John Stuart Mill himself warned, a free society would be threatened if its ‘restraining discipline’ was relaxed. This is because the paradox of liberalism is that although it is a philosophy of freedom, it depends on moral restraint as the basis of liberty. Licence, by contrast, is a threat to freedom since it observes no obligation to others. As Jonathan Sacks has put it: ‘For liberalism, freedom is collective self-government and morality consists at least in part in those virtues which support it. For libertarianism, by contrast, freedom is the protection of individual choice’.
So in our libertarian society, where individual choice is all, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ have come to mean something very different. Liberals took for granted that freedom depended upon self-discipline. Libertarians decided that all such restraint was repressive. The individual had to be free from all attachments to family, culture, nation, institutions and traditions that might fetter freedom of choice. Since every individual was equally entitled to such free choices, the distinctions that were the basis of morality became eroded. To be progressive was thus inevitably redefined as being free to do harm, with harm itself being reinvented as virtue. So to walk out on your children was, in the remarkable words of Michael Ignatieff, an act of the ‘liberal imagination’ as it upheld an individual’s needs against ‘the devouring claims of family life’.
People who criticise this attitude as not only selfish but socially destructive are told, however, that they are illiberal, prejudiced and reactionary. They are also intimidated into silence. In his devastating pamphlet Moral Evasion , David Selbourne bears witness to the vast vocabulary of Orwellian distortions used by the ‘liberal’ media (which unsurprisingly failed to register his shaming rebuke) in their attempt to impose conformity. Terms of abuse routinely hurled at ideological opponents include ‘moral crusaders’, ‘moral muggers’, ‘moral panic’, ‘moralisers’, ‘authoritarian moralists’, ‘mullahs of the religious right’, ‘new puritans’, ‘priggish’, ‘hectoring,’ ‘baying’, ‘guilty of knee jerk intolerance’ and even ‘ushering in a New Reich’. Such intellectual thuggery is routinely deployed in the interests of the right to behave badly. How can these assailants possibly be liberals?
In our culture of rights, what we desire is elevated to an entitlement regardless of the consequences upon others. Anything goes, all ethical bets are off, and anyone who objects is a reactionary. Yet as John Gray has written, far from creating tolerance, group rights are likely to lead to more intolerance since issues become non-negotiable and permit only victory or surrender, leading to a kind of reverse apartheid. A prime example of this is the tactics of the gay rights lobby, which brands opponents of the reduction in the age of consent or the abolition of Clause 28 as homophobes and subjects them to hate campaigns of rare viciousness.
It is of course perfectly possible to be tolerant and compassionate towards gay people while opposing elements of a militant campaign which may do harm to children. Not to think so subscribes to the view that minorities which claim victim status can do no wrong and so anyone who opposes anything they say is to be branded a bigot. Indeed, it is not just perfectly decent, liberal heterosexuals who are so branded but even some gays themselves, whose own principled opposition to such measures may expose them to ‘outing’ campaigns whose vileness beggars belief but on which phoney liberals, forever trumpeting their concern for gay sensibilities, are strangely silent.
The trump card played by all group rightists is ‘equality’, the claim that all they ask is to be treated the same as everyone else. This, though, is another debasement of the language. Equality once meant the equal worth of persons expressed through fellowship, shared experience and mutual respect. Now it has come to mean instead identical material ends and outcomes. Yet people are not identical. Their behaviour and circumstances are very different from each other. To treat them as identical may therefore be unfair or harmful.
That’s why, for example, the woman who doesn’t want a man around but gets pregnant via a sperm-bank on the basis that she has the right to be a mother ‘like any other woman’ is reckless of the disadvantage to the child conceived through such a brutal utilitarian procedure. That’s why, in education, the ‘all must have prizes’ doctrine that says there is no difference between academic and vocational qualifications is leaving young people both uneducated and unskilled. That’s why divorce court judges who award children and assets with no regard to behaviour routinely cause the manifest injustice of rewarding wrongdoing and punishing blamelessness. How can any of this possibly be considered progressive?
This radical individualism worships autonomy and deems obligation to be oppressive. Yet without obligation there can be no such thing as society. Isn’t this what liberals were supposed to find so objectionable about Thatcherism? Instead, progress has been reduced to a hedonistic selfishness which unites the so-called progressives of the left with the so-called conservatives of the right. Consumerism rules in personal relations as much as in economics. Our most advanced thinkers regularly genuflect before the altar of globalisation, loudly reasserting their powerlessness to make a fairer society in the face of market forces.
In such a world, it has become a positive merit to stand for nothing since this means that nothing can stand in the way of change and the march of global capital. The term progress has become vacuous, meaning merely change for change’s sake. All tradition thus becomes a suitable case for disposal. Ironically, this is as backward-looking as it is ahistorical. If the nation state is to be junked as an anachronism, we may enter what the French thinker Alain Minc has called a new Middle Ages characterised by tribal conflicts and hostilities. As for the claim that the traditional family should now be consigned to a museum, no less a liberal than the divorce expert Lawrence Stone warned that the present anarchy in personal relationships would take us right back to the pre-modern period.
To reject the barbarisms which are flowing so strongly from this reductive view of progress is not to be illiberal or reactionary. On the contrary, to resist them is to be progressive because a forward-thinking world view is one that genuinely cares for individual human beings. It recognises that for their situation to improve we must connect with reality rather than construct a fantasy of utopia. Human nature is not perfectible. It is neither intrinsically good nor bad. Instead, human beings are capable of both good and bad deeds and have a fundamental need for attachments. If we don’t want a savage war of all against all, we have to encourage good behaviour and socially useful attachments and discourage the bad and socially harmful. In other words moral distinctions are crucial. Progressives therefore have a duty to resist the ‘happiness above all’ philosophy which collapses those distinctions and takes heavy casualties.
The idea that all pre-existing traditions or values are by definition just so much unprogressive baggage is as philistine as it is risible. Values dismissed as conservative are actually universal: attachment, commitment to individuals and institutions, ties of duty, trust and fidelity, the distinction between constructive and destructive behaviour. Without these things freedom cannot flourish and society cannot exist. The paradox is that only by conserving such values can progress occur. Small, incremental steps are the most secure way of bringing about beneficial change. Radicalism or revolution are likely to implode and leave us worse off than before.
In other words, we have to rescue progress from the so-called progressives. We need a liberal, not a libertarian, social order with deeper values than contract and other criteria for progress than material advances. Moral restraint is the glue that provides social cohesion. Liberty is not achieved but threatened by the relativistic pursuit of autonomy and rights. The task for progressives is to defend liberal democracy. That means, paradoxically, using conservative weapons. The old enemy which brought liberalism into being remains. There is still the danger of fanaticism, authoritarianism, abuse of power, exploitation or abuse of the old and the young, corruption, rigged elections and harm to minorities. In our confused discourse, some people who embody these very threats have disguised themselves as liberals. Their deep intolerance and intimidatory techniques in pursuit of licence and power must be resisted in the interests of preserving a decent, fair and free society.
That is why I am a progressive.

Personal Morality vs. Moral People

2006-02-09T13:54:00.000-05:00

Over the past few years, I have come to notice that our world in the last 20-30 years has switched from a society of moral people to one of personal morality. You may ask, well what is the difference? The difference in my opinion is this. Personal morality dictates that the concept of morality is a personal thing, different from individual to individual based on opinion, aspiration, upbringing, acquaintance, etc. Right and Wrong is no longer dictated by a social norm but rather by every individual person. What is right to me could be wrong to you and vice versa. Well what is wrong with this? (besides the obvious anarchy-laden undertones) The problem (as I see it) is simple, and is reflected in the politics and media of today. Where there once was a social conscience there now is nothing except a society fighting against each other and within itself for moral supremacy. At one point one could say this statement easily: adultery is wrong. Now it would look something like this: adultery is wrong ... ?
It frightens me to think that we function on a moral whim. It is constantly changing. What we perceive as being right/wrong today is reversed by tomorrow. This happens because we have lost our social conscience, which provided us with a moral framework to work within and progress in. We have ignored the constants that built this great country/society and have existed for millenia called them 'right-wing', 'old-school', 'outdated' and what we find ourselves in is a society where the up and coming generations do not have a common respect for each other, family, work/jobs, education and (most disturbingly) for life in general.

(as witnessed by the increasing gun and gang related deaths that we have in our cities - for example the Boxing Day shooting in Toronto where only hours before my very own sister-in-law was shopping).

There is a really interesting article that I will post up here next by a journalist named Melanie Phillips on Progression/Conservatism/Liberalism and some other dandy treats. It is quite long but if you have the time, give it a read.

Welcome!

2006-02-08T10:45:00.000-05:00

Thank you for visiting me here at my small space on the www. Please feel free to leave your questions, comments, hate mail, etc. for I would love to respond to all. Have a great day and Welcome/Bienvenue!

Curtis