We Have Lost Our Moorings

The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of an illegitimate, passionate intensity

I wrote some time ago about how a guy in Scotland trained his pug to do a Hitler salute and ended up with a criminal record—the guy, not the pug.

The guy was no Nazi, it was a joke. And guess what, it was funny. Any small dog lifting a front paw is like a Hitler salute. My Toby salutes me many times a day, and he has no affiliation with the Nazis, Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas. But I am suspended for saying the Muslim Brotherhood does. Feelings > history and truth.

Here’s a Nazi Westie; that is one of my less successful business ventures, but still working on it. The government sent me a bill for $1576 in GST even though I sold zero bags of dog food last year; someone was not a math major.

But I think our society has lost some essential moorings - moorings hold you down and stop your ship or whatever from blowing away and being lost and destroyed - because, as a society, we show no evidence of moorings.

Shouting Intifada Revolution and Death to Jews is fine in Toronto; the cops will bring you coffee, and if you want sweetener, not sugar, they will be there for you. Our society chases squeaky wheels incessantly, and we only care about making them happy and dimming their racket.

I am in my 10th month of suspension at my university because I hurt my feelings by stating historical facts. We must keep Chat GPT at three-year-old levels - any hint of violence, and they will not make an image for you - but rocks through synagogue windows are fine. Almost only Jews showed up to protest them.

Christians have historically sat on the fence when they have seen Jews persecuted (if they were not persecuting them actively), and history is not repeating but rhyming; my colleagues hear “F*** Zionists” in the hallway; they know that two anti-Semites are leading the charge against me. They will not write the Provost to support me; they don’t want to get involved.

But they watch Schindler’s List and tell themselves they would have helped the Jews back then. No, they wouldn’t; if they don’t dare to write an email now, they would be as meek as the ‘Christians’ in the 1930s—shame on those who call themselves Christian and are silent.

I am told I am way off base on my Muslim Brotherhood/ Hamas/Hitler connections, and maybe you are right — look at them here discussing tea; I’m sure Hitler was sharing his favourite incest fantasies and why he should have gotten into art school. But the ideology, no, no, just like my union that hates Israel and supports Hamas, an ISIS-level terrorist group, the Mufti was not discussing politics and never supported Hitler.

We have lost our moorings.

We have lost the ability to differentiate between what is important and what is trivial. We think we are being sensitive when we worship identity groups. We are so afraid of offending someone with brown skin that we let them threaten our cops with “putting them six feet under.” When a radical Palestinian colleague who has never met me is allowed to rant and rave and say I should not be allowed to be around students or children, that I am violent and other defamations, they are silent and cowardly. I called Hamas Nazis -even though the current Grand Mufti of Egypt recently said that Hitler trained the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the parent of Hamas - but truth, if it is offensive amongst cowards, is not allowed.

I love my students, and my accuser came very close to calling me a paedophile. If he said it to my face, I don’t think my Krav Maga would help, but he wouldn’t do well. It’s disgusting.

But my friend Jim McMurtry, who the BC school board has attacked, knows (he recently had a meeting; the bastards made him wait five hours. If they did that to me, I’d be kicking in the door), the truth < feelings.

Jim, a high school teacher with a PhD, was fired because he hurt feelings, even though he spoke the truth. There don’t seem to be any graves at the Kamloops Residential school, and they weren’t tossing kids into ovens either and no, they weren’t taking kids up in helicopters and transporting them to child abuse horror shows. Sorry, I’m getting my conspiracy theories confused.

But a lawyer investigating me at my university just accused me of faking someone else’s posts (it took me one hour to figure out how to put two documents into a PDF—like I could fake anything). Her allegations would have involved time travel as I didn’t know the person then. Oh well. But she’s on the right side of the identity politics game, so reason has left the building.

We have lost our moorings.

The phrase “I identify as” is magic, a verbal Aladdin’s lamp, and it determines your gender. It does not yet determine the much more flexible claims of ethnicity, except at the top of the NAACP or if you have a lot of Coppertone. Or if you are in academia and looking for grants. It is strange how many academics raised in rich suburbs by Italian parents have an indigenous heritage.

Yes, in Canada, white academics are claiming aboriginal roots if they have a vague memory of drunk Uncle Hamish telling the grandkids that because he had a dream in 1958, he was at a Pow Wow.

But this country is so off-centre, saying, “I’m Canadian” is weird, like, “Where’s the hyphen, man? What is wrong with you.”

We have the same people grilling a man with a PhD about aboriginal history who, after they are done trying to convince themselves that feelings about history are equal to history, after all, say I saw it on Disney, the one on Sunday nights on real TV with the German castle.

They showed natives as always getting along, with no fighting, no slavery, no cannibalism, and no disease, so it’s true. These same people interview a class of kindergarten students and proclaim that three of the kids have gender dysmorphia and should be on puberty blockers.

Even though most of the world has gone away from the idea that tomboys are men in women’s bodies, Canada hangs on to its idiocy.

We have lost our moorings.

We hire racists to be anti-racists, and we see our productivity go down 30% at the CRA, so we hire 30% more employees.

We have students who look like they just stepped out of a Yeats poem, who have never read a book in their life doing a presentation on the labour movement and who are standing in front of my class reading ideas that would make the Shining Path wince and go, that’s a bit much there fella.

Unfortunately, my student is drowning in information. He has never read a book, understands nothing, googled four words, clicked on the first slide, and threw it in a PowerPoint presentation. He’s like a man trying to save a drowning child who doesn’t know whether to throw rocks or life preservers; he gets especially confused if the rocks are orange.

We have lost our moorings.

We wonder why we have an angry white working class in Britain and Canada; we have told them they are racist scumbags, deemed masculinity toxic and not worthy of concern because they never got their victim identity grading card, so nobody should pay attention.

We have lost our moorings.

They say that Canada should go it alone on global warming/climate change, and they say that tree ring data from 10,000 years ago is as accurate a temperature indicator or whatever talks to my iPhone on the Weather Network. We emit 1.5% of the world’s CO, and the big countries are telling us to get bent; we shouldn’t sacrifice our economy. But the parliamentarians have no skin in the game. They work six years and get a $54K pension for life.

They say it’s like, wouldn’t we send our soldiers to fight the Nazis on D-Day? Even if we only did a little? If we were the only ones landing, we’d be staying home and, sorry, Europe, but you would have to be starting to learn what an umlaut is.

We have lost our moorings.

I just called the HRTO (Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario). They forgot to put any appeal procedure in there for the respondents, the accused. If you get accused of being Nazi, racist, paw saluting, Niqab not loving, not wanting people who think God has told them if they do a little holy writ contortions to show then rape is a not an issue - they must be coddled, you are out of luck, Dougie Ford forgot about the respondents. Oops.

You can always pay tens of thousands and try a judicial review, wait two to three years and get someone like the one who asks me time travel questions as your judge. Or I can talk to the MP in charge of Universities and Colleges - who has no experience in human rights offices and should be trying to turn institutions into learning bastions and move them away from their current academic credential factory aspirations. But I have my doubts about whether he is up to it. He was last found managing a Dairy Queen and loading that soft-serve goop that probably has no relationship to any cow ever born.

We have lost our moorings. We are adrift.

If repeated, how much new teaching would have your grandfather look at you and worry about his genetic line being extended?

If “I identify as” is going to move and take on more areas, age would be a good one; it might keep some guys my age from having to use sugar daddy sites.

I’m 60 now, and I’m sure if I get fired, Universities will be lining up to get to the verge of retirement guy - but perhaps I can brag about my crystallised knowledge.

I’m an Irish citizen; I have tons of Guinness merch, but HRTO actions seem based on skin colour, ensuring equal treatment unless you are white or Jewish. But we believed in fairies. Can I use that?

Irish fairies were believed to be mischievous, unpredictable, and even vengeful if disrespected. They could bring good luck or misfortune depending on how they were treated. I will immediately start accusing students of sitting on a fairy if they sit at a particular desk.

If they argue, it’s off to the HRTO for them, and I’ll put them on the docket. I’m sorry, as a respondent, you need to suck it up, you’re a piece of garbage automatically, and you will never disrespect my fairy stories, you racist.

And what about Changelings? Fairies swap human children with their offspring. Can a student claim to have failed Econ 102 because a fairy child took them over?

It’s their ethnicity; it’s HRTO land. What if the fairy that takes over your body is a math phobe? How is that your fault? It was often used to explain strange behaviour. Maybe the back row is full of changelings.

Stop mocking my creed, and remember it is lowercase, not that pretentious band from 20 years ago. My ancestors liked to offer food, drink and tokens to appease the fairies, so when I leave that burrito on my desk, maybe that cleaning guy needs to be hauled off to HRTO land because he threw it away when it was an offering to appease the fairies.

Those bigots wouldn’t know a fairy if it shat on them.

We have lost our moorings.

Disability, let’s be clear: for the hard of hearing, blind, and those who are immobile, we must go to the ends of the earth for them. But they say 20% of our population is disabled.

I don’t quite get that; the whole ADHD racket seems like a bunch of white, rich kids whose parents have gone to the testing centre and paid $3000, so little Angelika could get double the time for all of her university voyage because she now has a learning disability. I suspected those testing centres had never found anyone who tested negative for ADHD.

And I am sure they will give her double the time on the first day of her post-graduation job.

If anyone offends her or gives her a grade below 80% and she’s not white or uses the phrase “I identify as” correctly, she can always use a Human Rights complaint to punish any professors who aren’t on board with her princess categorisation. The University Human Rights Office offers lots of options.

It seems like gender fluidity and the “I’m not sure category” are still big. Place of origin is not the biggest complaint, though it’s being held against me; my accuser is from Bethlehem, which Jesus seemed to have thought highly of but has gone from 80% Christian to about 10%.

Even a record of an offence is a special category, so I’m not sure how far this goes; if your new hire is in charge of money transfers and has recently been released from prison and was in there for theft, are you allowed to know?

But no starting conversations with, “Hey Jailbird, don’t complain about the food; it’s a lot better than they served at Milhaven.” Don’t say that.

But if you get accused of any of these, you are floating down a raging creed the French called Merde, and good luck because the HRTC forgot about respondents.

They have weaponised the human rights process, but if you are accused, you are halfway down shit creek, and you are going with the current. Your paddle is a box that you use to haul your groceries out of Costco. Good luck. You’re screwed.

Yes, we have become unmoored.

Nobody understands Yeats's Second Coming poem, but he does not discuss Jesus coming back. He was talking about madness and a monster, but that was 1917, and we’re still here. He said, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” Society is collapsing, and the central values or institutions that hold it together are disintegrating. It sounds very similar, though he did not refer directly to criminalising dogs with short front legs.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”:

Yeats laments that the morally good or wise are passive while dangerous and destructive forces are rising to power. Well, Mr. Yeats, you hit the nail on the head here.

We have lost our mooring.

We are tossed and thrown about, and the good, especially in Canada, are meek and quiet and think it virtuous - though it is cowardice with good PR.

We have dangerous and destructive ideas on the rise, and I’m not talking about leaders. I’m talking about ideas and crazy ones. We laugh at Christianity and redemption and then move on to tell 6-year-olds that God put them in the wrong body and that they might want to start checking out dresses, drugs and mutilation.

Then we have the arrogance to clothe ourselves in ripped and dirty clothing that we call compassion, but it makes us look like madmen. If Diogenes brought his lamp back, he would still be looking for his honest man, and he’d have a tough time, especially if he stayed on campus.