This excerpt from Suzzan Blac. This is where we end up if we forgo child safeguarding. No one deserves this. We as a society need to stand together and protect our children from predators.
“I am a survivor of child sexual abuse, sexual assaults, numerous rapes and sex trafficking.
This had been my life. My normal. So normal, that I didn’t even realise that I had been abused and been a victim for the majority of my childhood. I only began to acknowledge and understand this in my mid-twenties. I finally sought counselling when I was thirty-three years old.
Recovery was extremely traumatic and it took me more than twenty years to overcome the worst of it. One of the reasons it took so long to recover, was the victim blaming that many people inflicted upon me. In my experience, victim blaming is as painful and distressing as the abuse itself.
Between 2000 and 2004, in order to try and help myself, I decided to paint my story of abuse to help me process my pain, anger and trauma. I began by drawing subconscious doodles whilst watching TV, as I knew that these drawings had to come from deep inside of me and not my thoughts. I then turned the drawings into realistic paintings that depicted ‘me the victim’ and ‘the perpetrators’.
I was sometimes shocked by what I had painted, but I knew that they were my true feelings. I painted forty images over four years and I hid them away for over a decade, because they were for me alone, and not meant for anyone to see, especially knowing that I would be condemned if I showed them.”
“Climate activists in Vancouver said they threw maple syrup on a painting by one of Canada’s most iconic artists at the Vancouver Art Gallery Saturday to bring attention to the global climate emergency”
“The group is demanding an end to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline project, currently under construction from Dawson Creek to Kitimat on B.C.’s north coast.
The group told media that they, along with other protesters around the world, are targeting works of art because too little is being done to stop the progress of human-caused climate change.”
Stunts like these are setting a precedent for more irresponsible ‘activism’ in the future. Eventually they will target a work of art that isn’t behind class or similarly protected and then their bullshit antics will destroy a work of art permanently.
“Police said no arrests have been made, but officers are investigating the incident.”
The authorities are gladhanding this incident, as usual it seems, with little or minor consequences for the perpetrators of criminal actions.
Canada needs to brace for more insipid activism as we have a class of children coming up who are not prepared to deal with reality or how to live peacefully in the current society.
We grapple with the question of tolerance and how to apply the notion in society. Theodore Dalrymple’s thoughts provide insight into the question of how the mechanics of tolerance works.
“If you don’t judge people,” I would ask, “how can you be tolerant?”
They did not grasp at once what I meant, so I would explain:
“If you disapprove of nothing, there is nothing to tolerate. You do not tolerate what you like or agree with; you tolerate what you dislike or disagree with. If you make no judgments, tolerance is redundant, there is nothing to tolerate.”
The misunderstanding of what tolerance is the explanation, perhaps, of a paradox: the more we extol tolerance as a virtue, the less tolerant we become. We become like the humourless man who says that he has a wonderful sense of humor.
Back in the 1960s, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse popularised the notion of “repressive tolerance.” According to this notion, the freedom to express any opinion without fear of retribution actually resulted in, or at any rate served, repression because it duped people into supposing that they were free. Yes, they could say anything they liked, but in practice they lived in a society in which they decided nothing for themselves and in which they were straitjacketed by laws, conventions, moral codes and so forth, all to the material benefit of a small elite, of course (Marcuse was some kind of Marxist). This notion, which was expressed in the dullest of prose, was appealing to utopian adolescents who a) wanted to deny that they were the most fortunate generation who had ever lived, and b) dreamed of a life completely without restraints on their own pleasure.
Half a century later, “repressive tolerance” is taking on a different meaning, one that actually has some practical application. It is repression carried out in the name of tolerance.”
Kissinger laments the failings of today’s faltering meritocracy:
‘The civic patriotism that once lent prestige to public service appears to have been outflanked by an identity-based factionalism and a competing cosmopolitanism. In America, a growing number of college graduates aspire to become globe-trotting corporate executives or professional activists; significantly fewer envision a role as regional- or national-level leaders in politics or the civil service. Something is amiss when the relationship between the leadership class and much of the public is defined by mutual hostility and suspicion.’
Kissinger here recognizes that interest cannot bind a people together. Ideology might bind peoples in common derangement, he suggests. But the “civic patriotism” he references is rooted in a people’s common moral life, shared culture, and even their religious faith. This is not to say that at age ninety-nine, Kissinger has become a public moralist. But this account recognizes that America—and much of the West—has lost something as they have encouraged their best and brightest to adopt the more cosmopolitan mores exemplified by the academy and elite business class. This is not the only cause of our crisis of leadership, however.
Our obvious lack of great leadership flows from the decline of deep literacy and thoughtfulness. Here, Kissinger argues that the rise of visual and digital culture is responsible. Television and social media produce less thoughtful and attentive minds, and television in particular, Kissinger thinks, undermined older norms of self-command and restraint in favor of public emotionalism and impatience. That this shift has happened amidst a world experiencing dramatic technological change is a disaster, he argues.
But despite a kind of gloomy realism about the challenges confronting our world, Kissinger’s overarching argument nonetheless demands an attitude of hope. Just as previous great leaders were to some degree sui generis, the next great statesmen could emerge from the most unlikely of places.
I’ve has the honour and pleasure to meet some brilliant people over the years. Some even happen to reside in my home province and share some of the same political tribulations that I do. This letter is a call to halt the erasure of females and female history in our society in the name of being diverse and inclusive.
I encourage everyone to get a hold of ATB if you deal with them and ask why are they participating in activities that remove women from the public sphere and edit them out of history.
“Dear Ms.————,
I hope this finds you and yours well. I have received your email response, made on behalf of the Alberta Treasury Branches’ Customer Service department, in response to my earlier email which was in regards to the ATB art show “In Full Bloom” which is scheduled to be held in Calgary in 2023 on International Woman’s Day. As you know the call was for “artists who identify as women.” The description of the exhibit is as follows: “In Full Bloom: A celebration of artwork by and about women will focus on artwork that celebrates the creative practices of women with an emphasis on female- and nature-inspired imagery and narratives.” In a nutshell my initial complaint was that opening this show to men was both highly insulting and sexist. The response I received on behalf of the bank was that the ATB believes in “inclusivity.” But what exactly is “inclusivity”? After having researched Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology I have concluded that so called inclusivity, as the ATB is practicing it, is a postmodern concept which is playing a role in deconstructing and redefining the material reality of the human sex class of men and women/boys and girls.
As a student of art history and a woman with a degree in painting from the Alberta University of the Arts, I can assure you that the disappearance of women’s and girls’ artistic endeavours in order to centre men is nothing new. For millennia the artistic works of women were disappeared, negated, or not even brought to life. Not because women lacked talent or artistic merit, but solely based on the material reality of our sexed lives. Artistic women had a brief window, beginning in the late 1960’s with the rise of second wave feminism, where we successfully challenged the system which had resulted in an art history full of nude portrayals of the female form created by men and a tiny percentage of art works created by women. It was those successful challenges to the artistic norm that lead institutions like the ATB to offer sex-based opportunities for female artists. Now the ATB simultaneously asks us to reflect and create art work on the theme of womanhood and nature while literally redefining woman from adult human female to nothing more than a claimed identity.
This brings me to the portion of my letter where I will illustrate how the ideology of inclusion negatively impacts the lives of girls and women in societies where DEI have risen to the forefront of society. It is via the mechanism of inclusion that the following events are taking place: In June of 2017, with no public accountability and without being made clear to the voters of the 2016 election, Bill C-16 was passed into law. The bill amended the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. Running along side Bill C-16 was a change as to how Canadians were identified on their legal documents. Sex was overturned in favour of “gender.” This alteration allowed any man to “identify as a woman” with four simple words: “I am a woman. In the same year the federal government began housing convicted male criminals in women’s prisons where they were put into the general population. It is difficult to get clear numbers on the number of violent and sexual offenses these men committed because all crimes are recorded via “gender” so all crimes appear to be women on women. However, testimony gathered from women within the prison system anecdotally suggest that they are being harassed, terrorized, robbed, assaulted, sexually assaulted, and even raped by criminal men.
I assume the ATB would like to consider itself as partners in Reconciliation, yet First Nation’s women are disproportionately housed in prisons. Now they must attempt to rehabilitate themselves while taking shifts at night in order to attempt to keep violent males at bay. As I draft this response Canada’s top ranked woman competitive cyclist is currently a man. This means that at least one outstanding woman cyclist has been pushed from the podium. We will never know how many women no longer compete because of the policies which allow men to steal the podium. The sporting events women fought for so that our daughters could make their mark are now used to affirm men’s identities. This bizarre colonization by men and boys increases the number of serious, even life threatening, injuries to female athletes, including concussion and spinal injuries. This policy of inclusion also subjects girls and women to naked males in their formerly female only change rooms. As well, mediocre males can now easily change their “identity” at any time so that they may claim the prize monies, awards, and educational scholarships which were formerly for girls and women.
The notion of inclusion also affects matters of justice. For instance, in 2019 during a trial where a woman was giving testimony against her rapist in British Columbia, the victim was forced to perjure herself and mis-sex her attacker because his “preferred pronouns” were she and her. As a survivor of male sexual violence, I can well imagine the mental torture and humiliation of being forced affirm a rapist’s wrong sex identity rather than speak to the material reality of the sex of her assaulter. More recently in August of 2022, a woman in Ontario entered a rape shelter for counselling and housing after she was raped. While at the shelter seeking care and safety, she was raped again by a serial rapist who gained access to the shelter by “identifying as a woman.” Does the ATB really want to practice “inclusion” when it has this kind of real-world impact? I am sure the ATB thinks of itself as a supporter of gay and lesbian rights. Yet there is an inherent conflict between a heterosexual man who “identifies as a woman” and lesbian women who are exclusively same sex attracted. Thanks to the same inclusivity the ATB proudly claims, lesbians are now told they must “get over their genital preferences.” A well documented example of this took place in Toronto when a heterosexual man who “identifies as a woman” and therefore as a lesbian, set up a workshop on how to “overcome the cotton ceiling.” The event was aimed at teaching men how to get lesbians to accept “women with a female penis” in their dating pool. That is an attack on the rights of homosexual women to practice their sexuality free from harassment from male persons. Finally, the inclusivity the ATB declares as policy puts women and girls like myself in real danger as well as financial and mental crisis. We are harassed, silenced, fired, cancelled, and even physically assaulted when we attempt to discuss this rewriting of the rules of society in both private and public spaces.
So, what is it I would like from the ATB?
Going forward I would like the ATB to alter its language on the calls for submissions for opportunities set aside for women and girls so that those programs are for girls/woman only. Should the ATB want to offer separate artistic opportunities for people who identify as the opposite sex, or asexual or non binary or cat or cake gender I have no issue with that at all. Cat and cake gender are real examples by the way. For example, I can be “A woman who used to have $$$$$$$ in savings at the ATB” gender. After all, gender is undefinable, subject to change at any time and, as I am constantly reminded, all genders are valid. In closing, I certainly appreciate the situation the ATB finds itself in. While other countries like the UK have had several successful legal challenges to Gender ideology, Canada lags a few years behind.
However, as the issues become clearer over time and more courageous Canadians and First Nation members begin to re assert the need to provide sex-based rights for girls and women, things will change. I am providing the ATB with a chance to assess their policy and tweak it in order to provide everyone a chance to excel in their field while serving the sex-based rights of more than half of the population of Alberta. As I mentioned in my last email to you, I was planning on closing my ATB account over this issue even though my husband and I have been dedicated ATB clients since 199-. Currently the combined balance in our saving accounts is in excess of $$$$$$$, a sum we see as having some significant value. We also have an ATB Line of Credit and ATB Mastercards. I would of course prefer to stay with my local branch because the women who work there are pleasant and familiar with our needs but given the scope of the issues brought about by “being inclusive,” should no policy change be forthcoming, we will be forced to close our accounts and take our business elsewhere. I have researched other institutions and I believe I have found one who still respects women and our sex-based rights. I look forward to your response in this matter.”
Well said and unfortunately a very necessary action that needs to be taken in our society.
“Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
Harden Democratic Institutions
Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.
For instance, the legislative branch was designed to require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next election cycle.
Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.
A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.
Reform Social Media
A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: The Arch Heretics, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.
But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.
Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.
In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
Prepare the Next Generation
The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.
Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”
Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8- or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place, schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids used to do.”
You might be wondering why this is relevant here at a rally about ending child mutilation. Well, it’s actually extremely relevant, because the justifications given for performing these horrific surgeries on children are rooted in absurd, reality-denying pseudoscience about basic biology.
It’s a pseudoscience that denies the existence of males and females.
It’s a pseudoscience that says biological sex is just an arbitrary social construct.
It’s a pseudoscience that says a person’s identity determines their biology.
And it’s a pseudoscience that says that a person can be born in the wrong body, which is demonstrated by having preferences or behaviors that are typically associated with the opposite sex.
Most people don’t realize how much our major scientific and medical institutions have been captured by this pseudoscience literally claiming that girls who are tomboys, and boys who are effeminate, are transgender.
But the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychiatric Association, and even the CDC, to name only a few, all literally define “transgender” as “persons whose expression or behavior does not conform to that which is typically associated with their sex.”
That’s their definition. Go look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me.
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. If your daughter is not a feminine girl, she’s actually a boy. And if your son is not a masculine boy, according to them, he’s actually a girl. Or even something else entirely different altogether.
This is absurd in the extreme.
We know that if left alone, many of these extremely “nonconforming” children will grow up to be normal, healthy, gay adults.
But now, because of gender ideology, these children are being told they have a mismatch between their gender identity and their biological sex, which can then be “fixed” with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.
In addition to these beliefs defying all we know to be scientifically true about basic biology, they are also grotesque and evil.
What is occurring at Vanderbilt Medical, and hospitals and clinics all over the country in the name of gender pseudoscience, is a medical scandal of horrifying proportions.
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