Humanity against People

Gilets jaunes: Investment-predation globalism for the mobile urban elites versus rural nationalism for the sedentary and threatened middle-class

In the West, there is a global class conflict, decades in the making, which is a direct consequence of the globalization of investment predation. For the good of humankind, and for the good of the planet, and for social peace and stability, we should side with the deplorables.

by Denis Rancourt, PhD

First published at Dissident Voice:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/12/humanity-against-people/

Nature of the maturing geographical and global Western class conflict of Trump and Macron

Thanks to the Gilets jaunes in France, a few astute social theorists are finally being heard on YouTube, despite mainstream resistance and diversion. They are finding words more lucidly than could be achieved in the absence of such revolutionary upheaval.

I’m referring to the renowned French economic analyst and essayist Charles Gave who, in his near-twilight years, has broken rank with his class in order to impart a penetrating and devastating analysis of the current French melt-down, based on the original work of French social geographer and author Christophe Guilluy.¹

Guilluy has been describing an emerging Gilets jaunes backlash for some fifteen years, through his analysis of the class structure, and its geographical, demographic and ideological basis, in France; which is virtually identical in most Western nations, certainly the UK, Canada, the USA and many more.²

Basically, what was a relatively stable, balanced and integrated post-second-world-war working-class / middle-class / professional-class / managerial-class societal structure, has, over the course of several decades, and accelerated by the fall of the Soviet Union, devolved into three classes separated by large geographical, wage, ideological and mobility gaps.

The dominant class is comprised of the “bobos” (“bourgeois-bohème”). This is the highly-paid professional class of financial managers, media pundits, politicians, corporate lawyers, institutional professionals, governance civil servants, and so-on. They are urban, and espouse humanistic global “values” such as “free trade”, “human rights”, climate concerns, immigration justice, and so on.

The recently manufactured underclass is comprised of the imported immigrants that serve the bobos. They are restaurant workers, parking attendants, child-care workers, cleaners, cab drivers, food producers, and so on. They are malleable and obedient, as they benefit from First World amenities. They generally live in the urban-satellite suburbs and are provided with efficient mass-transportation to work, and so on. They are kept in-line and policed as needed.

The third class are the “deplorables”.³ They live outside of the large urban centres, in rural France, USA, UK… They are Trump, Le Pen, Brexit, the Gilets jaunes… They were the white factory workers, farmers, loggers, miners, industrial plant workers… who have largely been made redundant by the globalization that is managed by the bobos, always to the great and increasing benefit of the bobos, of course.

As such, the societal structure has evolved towards two camps: Those who are mobile and could live the same life anywhere, and those who want to live their lives where they are; those who share grandiose global values and those who struggle to stay at the same level.

The bobos run the show and see little utility in the rural remnants of the former society; a “remnant” that comprises half of the national population and is fiercely proud and nationalistic, while being imposed “values” that are out of sync with their daily concerns.

The transformation, especially since the early 1990s, has been spectacular. Executive salaries have skyrocketed. Professional salaries have increased disproportionately. Taxing of the ultra-rich has been eliminated. “Democracy” has been mechanized, with virtual impossibility of grassroots representation. Globalization logic is the new mantra, and protectionism is made to sound Neanderthal.

National sovereignty has been eliminated wherever possible. Sanitized globalist doctrine is infused everywhere: climate alarmism, generic anti-racism, generic gender equity, generic human rights, political correctness of language and attitudes… Meanwhile, actual genocidal military campaigns of economic blockades (“sanctions”), regime change, conquest, and nation destruction are the main drivers of the whole system. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Palestine… to name just the most recent and ongoing trillion-dollar mass-murder and plunder projects.

Language is one of the strongest indicators of the new social-structure’s pathology. George Orwell could not write his novel today because it would be perceived as a second-rate current affairs report. Forced speech has reached epidemic proportions. Its importance cannot be over-stated. With virtuous regulated language comes the instant ability to recognize those who stand out and must be eliminated.

The conflict clearly opposes two distinct ideologies: Globalism and continued economic elitism versus nationalism and reconstruction of rural communities.  The elitist “Left” has been globalist and reckless. The rural Right wants to preserve place and home.  The battle is not capitalism versus socialism.  The battle is between re-establishing class balance within national boundaries versus continued and accelerating global class exploitation, carbon taxes and all.⁴

Both sides have much to lose, and the bobos can manipulate the two underclasses to oppose each other rather than cooperate to force restructuring. Will Western societies completely become managed serfdoms and parallel favelas?  Or will a more egalitarian and stable structure be imposed by the deplorables?

Theoretical physics studies of the stability of dominance hierarchies are relevant and provide a guide for the macroscopic approach that would newly stabilize society. From his PhD research, Joseph Hickey writes:⁵

The model thus suggests that the violence of societal interactions (δ) and the degree of authoritarianism (α) in the society must be kept in check in order for the society to retain its structure over long periods of time and not degrade into a totalitarian state. As either of these features of inter-individual interactions is increased the inequality of the society increases. When the level of inequality becomes large enough that the society nears the transition into runaway deterioration of its class structure, the society may be required to reduce one or both of the parameters in order to retain a viable structure. Analysts have suggested that several recent major political events, including Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are best understood as backlashes against increasing societal inequality. According to the model, for such backlashes to have a stabilizing effect on the social hierarchy, they must result in decreases in the violence of societal interactions, the degree of authoritarianism in the society, or both.

The enabling institutional mechanisms that accompany the said “degradation into a totalitarian state” of gap-divided classes were described by me here.⁶

1. “Gilets Jaunes : Vers une Guerre Civile ?”, interview, YouTube channel Planetes360, uploaded December 12, 2018. []
2. “France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom”, by Christophe Guilluy, The Guardian, December 2, 2018. []
3. “Clinton: Half of Trump supporters ‘basket of deplorables‘”, BBC News, September 10, 2016. []
4. “Most Oil Sector Emissions Will Be Exempt From Federal Carbon Pricing: Report”, by Canadian Press, Huffpost Business, updated December 11, 2018. []
5. “How Societies Form and Change”, by Joseph Hickey, Dissident Voice, December 26, 2017. []
6. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017.

Social Animals have Two Modes of Being

By Denis Rancourt, PhD


This article was first published on Dissident Voice:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/07/social-animals-have-two-modes-of-being/


I want to describe what I think is a fundamental truth about the individual bio-psychology of social animals, including humans.

Setting for the model

The setting for my model is arguably the greatest current scientific revolution: The formal realization and empirical demonstration that virtually all of social behaviour and individual psychology is encased in the evolutionary, biological and metabolic reality of dominance hierarchy.

For example, see Sapolsky’s influential 2005 review of primate studies [1], and my critical review of medicine [2]. The metabolism of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin and the associated evolutionary biology is now an established area of science [3][4][5][6]. In my opinion, the said area of science, although far from complete, constitutes a foundational building block of the new tectonic-plate theory of social science, whether social scientists are aware of it yet or not. And it has started to infuse the popular culture [7].

This knowledge implies that the metabolic biochemistry of dominance locks us in. No socialism theory that presumes altruistic cooperation as its organizing principle can ever work. Non-hierarchical anarchism and its libertarian cousin are useful conceptual end-points that can never be sustainably achieved. The best we can do is to have a responsive and optimally (evolutionarily) beneficial dominance hierarchy that is actively prevented from exercising pathological excess [8].

The model

In this setting, I propose that the animal has two modes of being, which are binary end-points on an attitudinal, self-image and behavioural psychological-state-scape.

I’m not saying that each individual is permanently in one or the other mode of being. Rather, I propose that the individual shifts and slides into one or the other mode depending on his immediate social circumstances and on his history (biological and metabolic memory) of being predominantly in one mode or the other.

The modes of being that I propose map onto the social dominance hierarchy, and are consistent with the roles of different individuals within the hierarchy.

Specifically, one mode is the mode (and strategy) adopted by the dominated individual. This mode is one were the individual seeks “fairness” and minimal aggressions in their environment. The individual seeks a “safe space” and has no actual design to displace dominants. The culture of individuals that coalesce into such a stratum of the hierarchy is one where “kindness” and “being a good person” are the highest social values that are encouraged and rewarded. Altruism and “goodiness” are elevated to a status meriting religious indulgences. Viciousness actuated by enforcers within the social stratum is turned towards violators of this code.

The other mode is the mode (and strategy) adopted by the individual who intends to be and to remain dominant. It is an outlook of waging and winning battles for dominance. This is the climber with a “killer’s instinct”, prepared to joust for relative advantage and eager to dominate.

These modes are distinct mental and physiological states of being. They occur inside the individual and cannot always be ascertained reliably from outside indicators. For example, climbers in a corporate or government office hierarchy may achieve success by “kissing ass” rather than by confronting superiors. Advancement in these institutions may arise from actuation of the goodiness mode rather than the competitive mode, or competition within an office level may be the selector used by superiors. Anything is possible in a given corporate enterprise, in terms of utilization of intrinsic human behaviours.

The two distinct modes are real regarding the individual’s experience and bodily biochemistry, in the circumstances, rather than ascertainable from superficial outside features such as house or car or ring size.

The psychological-state-scape is binary in the two modes because the metabolic physiologies of the two modes are incompatible. The holistic state of being cannot be both simultaneously. Different blood biochemistries and tissue and organ responses are in play. It’s one or the other: Vying for dominance or accepting subservience. Fight or flight. Challenge or hide. More than a billion years of evolution ain’t goin anywhere.

“Bosses” will find each other to fight. Subservient individuals, subservient in the circumstances, will lower their eyes, group to the edges of the room and exchange vital information about who is “a nice person”.

Application to politics

The establishment bosses that run the Left, more than the Right, exploit the population of individuals that are most easily corralled into the goodiness mode and seduced by goodiness promises.

The boss propaganda (mainstream media, institutional messaging) is clearly designed in this direction: human rights, minority rights, environmentalism, democracy, participation… whereas the state continues its vicious wars of dominance world-wide and its violent apartheid of aboriginal and low economic classes and of non-violent Criminal Code offenders.

It is a textbook illustration. Extreme social justice warriorism and safe-space obsessionism are, in my opinion, pathological and predictable outcomes of unchecked exploitation by those who ride the Left.

As a backlash against the overly successful establishment Left propaganda and institutional capture, individuals who are inhabited by the competition mode react in revolt by violating the goodiness rules of expression and behaviour, causing generalized and amplified outrage. They break the taboos, express racism, use the N-word, graffiti swastikas, speak their minds, and trigger and troll the masses.

The establishment bosses that run the Right have not been keen to use this relatively unmanageable population and have been only tentative in exploring how to use it. Trump changed that. There is no denying that Trump unsettled traditional Republican forces.

This does not mean that all Right-thinking voters are competition-mode individuals, not by any stretch. Most Right-thinking voters are conservatives who seek the “safe space” of traditional family and religious values. They are horrified at the prospect of an eroded institutional framework that could threaten this safe space and they seek the good-person representatives that would protect them.

The establishment bosses that exploit both the Left and the Right understand that goodiness is a winning electoral formula, since most individuals in a dominance hierarchy are goodiness-mode followers rather that competition-mode individuals who vie for higher echelons. This is the nature of a stable dominance hierarchy: Most people just want to be oppressed fairly, to know their place and to be safe. In a so-called “democracy”, since show elections are required, the only question is the flavour of the goodiness.

A problem arises when the flavours of goodiness are so different that the other side is threatened when institutions are captured. Then many will feel they are in danger and the conditions are ripe for competition-mode redress.

In these circumstances, the Right voters shift to seeking and supporting competition-mode leaders that will fight back on their behalf, and more of the Right adopts a competition-style stance. It could have gone the other way, like it did for decades. The Right could have accepted defeat, accepted the humiliation of being “bad persons”, and sought refuge in their own spaces. The Right could have stayed in a social state with most of its individuals in the goodiness mode being pampered by goodiness-mode representatives promising elusive “justice”.

In Canada, I think Preston Manning was a goodiness organizer (reform by rational argument) whereas Harper organized a coup and dismantled as much Left capture of institutions as possible. The Left stuck with goodiness and turned it on, screaming about the Right’s demolition of “human rights”, “environmental protection” and “democracy”. We got Trudeau. Now the Right is rightly pointing to some of the pathologies of going too far with Left goodiness, and its managers are exaggerating the institutional threats against family and against human nature itself, no less.

So goes the seesaw of political manipulation, perfectly in resonance with the intrinsic modes of being of the individual. The individuals naturally self-organize and are corralled into protective communities, both within and between strata of the hierarchy.

Application to religion

Institutionally organized religion is a perfected system of goodiness rules, which stabilizes and strengthens a dominance hierarchy. Even environmentalism can be understood as such a state religion [9].

Religious belief and practice, for most people, is deeply ingrained in the goodiness mode of being of the individual, as should be obvious from my above description. The rituals of recycling, healthy lifestyle practice, donations to The United Way and so on, while they have no positive effect on population health, systemic negative class bias or “the planet”, nurture and solidify a prolonged and robust adoption by the individual of the goodiness mode of being.

As long as a majority of citizens reside in the goodiness mode of being, the dominance hierarchy cannot be challenge and major displacements will not occur. Public peace will prevail.

Of course religious seminal texts, nowadays including much of the so-called scientific literature, are more complex than state propaganda and can be used, as needed or desired, to incite individuals into the competitive mode of being, into the confrontational state, to be manipulated by political organizations.

This is actively seen today in Zionist Israel with Torah and holocaust scholarship, where the texts are used to incite and rationalize genocidal displacement, confinement and suppression of the native population. Interestingly, hard science (genetics) has established that white European Jews that have always run the modern state of Israel do not have a relevant ancestry that originated in Palestine.[10] If science mattered.

Conclusion and verification

It is in our animal and human nature — inherited on our evolutionary path — to occupy either the goodiness or competitive modes of being, which represent biochemical and physiological states of either accepting or challenging the dominance of others.

The reality of my model of individual modes of being can be tested (experienced) by experimentation with LSD, which alters serotonin metabolism.[11] A common description of mild LSD experiences is that the subject is able to escape their persona and become conscious of their identity programing and conscious of the identity or motivational programming of others.[12] Dominance hierarchy is dissolved by blocking serotonin receptors on neurons. No wonder that’s illegal.

Endnotes

[1] “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health”, by R.M. Sapolsky. Science, 29 April 2005, vol. 308, pages 648-652. DOI: 10.1126/science.1106477. http://pinniped.net/sapolsky2005.pdf

[2] “Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis”, by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, December 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285574571_Cancer_arises_from_stress-induced_breakdown_of_tissue_homeostasis

[3] “Serotonin, social status and aggression”, by Donald Edwards and Edward Kravitzt, 1997, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 7, pages 812-819. http://animalnecessity.com/doc/research/Serenin/Serotonin-Social-Status.pdf

[4] “Serotonin modulates behavioral reactions to unfairness”, by Molly J. Crockett et al., Science, 2008 June 27; 320(5884): 1739. doi:10.1126/science.1155577. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2504725/

[5] “Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior through effects on harm aversion”, by Molly J. Crockett et al., PNAS, October 5, 2010, vol. 107, no. 40, 17433-17438. http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/40/17433.full.pdf

[6] “Serotonin and Dominance”, by Anna Ziomkiewicz, January 2016, In: Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1440-1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310586509_Serotonin_and_Dominance

[7] “Jordan Peterson and the Threat of Working-class Intellectual and Attitudinal Liberation”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, June 3, 2018. https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/06/jordan-peterson-and-the-threat-of-working-class-intellectual-and-attitudinal-liberation/

[8] “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

[9] “The Climate Religion”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 15, 2016. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/09/the-climate-religion/

[10] “A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages”, by Marta D. Costa et al., Nature Communications, vol. 4, Article number: 2543 (2013). https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

[11] “Serotonin and Hallucinogens”, by GK Aghajanian and GJ Marek, Neuropsychopharmacology, vol. 21, pages 16S–23S (1999). https://www.nature.com/articles/1395318

[12] “Larry Hagman 'All Politicians Should Use LSD'”, interview of Larry Hagman, YouTube, November 24, 2012 upload by xBehindthetruthx. https://youtu.be/UBanX4kpswo

Urban landowner rights versus zoning bylaw practice in Old Ottawa East by Denis Rancourt

This article was first published in the July 1, 2018 issue of the Ontario Landowners Association:

http://www.ontariolandowners.ca/news/urban-landowner-rights-versus-zoning-bylaw-practice-in-old-ottawa-east-by-denis-rancourt/

Basically, a small neighbourhood in Ottawa is being devastated by large three-storey multi-unit buildings being built next to family homes, sometimes encasing and isolating a given home or small cluster of homes. The general bylaw prohibits three-story buildings on the small lot sizes. The City’s Committee of Adjustment is allowing this abuse by improperly using a loop-hole in the law. The Committee has virtually always decided that erecting a different species of building onto too small a lot size constitutes a “minor variance” from the bylaw. On the contrary, the bylaw is intended to protect residents from exactly this type of de facto expropriation. ...

Here is the article:


I’m a volunteer researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca) and I have seen many non-stop government violations of individual rights in several arenas but recently I got a front-row seat at the violations of my own landowner rights.

I fought them and won. This is how I did it.

Landowner rights are two-sided: You have a right to use your property. And you have a right not to be subjected to undue nuisance from other landowner’s uses of their property. The latter is the so-called nuisance tort of common law.

In an urban or community environment, the municipality or city in addition is given statutory rights intended to optimize service provision and to minimize conflicting ambitions. The resulting creatures are called zoning bylaws, which are enforced by police powers.

Virtually all the problems arise at the boundaries between lots and between differently zoned areas, where owners on either side of the boundaries have different designs.

Badly zoned residential areas allow multiple and changing problem boundaries between lots, where constant impositions are forced on established residents by changing uses of lots. This can in-effect amount to forced expropriation out of one’s residential neighbourhood that historically had a definite character and lifestyle culture.

My own neighbourhood of Old Ottawa East (formerly Archville, which was incorporated as the village of Ottawa East in 1888 and in 1907 was amalgamated with the growing community of Ottawa) is particularly bad in this regard. The bylaw zoning allows both single-family dwellings to co-exist with rental multi-unit four-floor-level buildings. And it allows single-family dwellings to be demolished and replaced with such multi-unit buildings.

This is what that looks like for my neighbour at 39 Chestnut Avenue (the small white house):

My neighbour is in a wheelchair and her house was adapted for her at great expense. She is now suddenly surrounded by noisy air-conditioning units, shade-casting buildings, privacy-vitiating high windows, and many near-proximity noisy neighbours. She opposed the out-of-character developments but the Committee of Adjustment (“Committee”) and the Ontario Municipal Board (“Board”), in their infinite wisdom, decided that the developments were “minor variances” and were “desirable for the appropriate development”.

In my own recent case, my wonderful immediate neighbour died of cancer and her husband moved to a managed home. They owned two lots because the second was a large vegetable garden and a utility building. They supplied their extended family and many neighbours with tons of vegetables.

The developer who bought the two lots made applications to sever the lots into three and so-called “minor variance” applications to build a large two-unit three-story building and a large single-unit home. Full-lot-footprint affairs.

This would have had deleterious effects on my family’s enjoyment of our property.

It was the beginning of my crash course in the corrupt practice of “minor variances” in Ontario. I was to learn that the minor variance provision (s. 45(1)) of the Planning Act is unconstitutional, and that both the Committee and the Board most-often do not have jurisdiction to approve variances.

I also learned that Ontario is the only province in Canada whose bylaw-variance provision in its planning act sets a jurisdictional threshold as “minor variance”, without defining “minor” and without providing the established criteria of undue harm from compliance with the bylaw and absence of injury to neighbouring properties.

I talked to many people and decided, with my wife’s permission and support, to make full legal arguments against the applications. I’m not a lawyer but I have made constitutional arguments before in the courts.

The staff of the Committee and of the Board were professional, competent and helpful, a nice change compared to Ontario courts!

I was shocked by the Committee at its hearing of my challenge because it did things that no administrative tribunal in Canada is supposed to do:

    It expressly stated that it would not hear or receive any constitutional arguments whatsoever.
    It expressly stated that it would not hear or receive any challenge to its jurisdiction to decide the minor variance applications.

These statements by the Chair of the Committee, Helena Prockiw, are equivalent to deciding that the constitution and the Charter do not apply in a committee of adjustment hearing and that, unlike with the mere Supreme Court of Canada, the jurisdiction of the Committee cannot be challenged.

I expressed my dismay to no avail.

Only one out of five Committee members opposed the variance applications, even though a strict interim control bylaw was in force that was grossly violated, in addition to the general bylaw.

I then filed a notice of appeal to the Board. The developer hired two lawyers from a large law firm and lined up an expert witness. The partner at the firm in an email to me said: “We are of the preliminary view that your constitutional argument is not properly brought to the OMB, but should be the subject matter of a court Application. You may wish to research this before filing your notices.”

That is plain wrong and is echoed by City lawyers. So you have to be careful.

Then I filed my Notice of Constitutional Question, in view of the scheduled Board hearing, to the Attorney Generals (Ontario and Canada). When the Attorney General of Ontario’s counsel responded to me, there was no mention that “your constitutional argument is not properly brought to the OMB”, to the contrary.

My Notice of Constitutional Question prompted the City to request standing to intervene at the Board on the constitutional question. The Board in-effect granted this and I advised that I did not object.

Next I served and filed my full legal argument, with much of my evidence and a description of what my main expert witness would say. I also sent it to the Attorney Generals and to the City’s lawyer. The 53-page document is posted on the OCLA web site here:

http://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/PUB-OMB-PL180027-Appellant-Rancourt-submissions-of-2018-05-08.pdf

It tells the full story in evidence and lays out the legal arguments.

Here are all my legal arguments, in notice of appeal format:

>>>>Unconstitutionality and Violation of Charter rights

    Section 45(1) of the Planning Act (henceforth, the Act) is unconstitutional because in-effect it infringes or denies the complainant’s s. 15(1) Charter right of equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination:

(a) The applicant’s common law property rights are kept intact, whereas the common law property rights (nuisance tort) of the complainant are prejudicially negated, disregarded and violated.

(b) The residents living near the applicant’s land are denied the full protection and benefit of the zoning bylaw whereas other residents are not.

    In the alternative, the complainant is discriminated against as an ordinary resident of a dwelling, acting in personal interest to protect his living environment, compared to a non-resident developer acting with a business interest.

    The said discrimination is established in the body of the decisions made by the Committee to grant the requested relief from the bylaws. It is quantitative and palpable, and is thus not saved by a s. 1 Oakes analysis. It is not prescribed by law nor demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

    The Committee refused to hear or consider the appellant’s constitutional argument. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has been clear that constitutional challenges should be heard by the administrative tribunal (hence the Committee, and now the Board): Cooper v. Canada, 1996 CanLII 152 (SCC), [1996] 3 S.C.R. 854.

>>>>Constitutional vagueness of the Planning Act

    Section 45(1) of the Act is unconstitutionally vague, in that it does not establish transparent boundaries for the domain of jurisdiction of the Committee to authorize variances from the provisions of the by-laws in effect (in this case the Interim Control Bylaw 2017-245 and the Zoning Bylaw 2008-250).

    The doctrine against vagueness in the laws is founded on two rationales: a law must provide fair notice to citizens and it must limit enforcement discretion, e.g.: R. v. Nova Scotia Pharmaceutical Society, [1992] 2 SCR 606, 1992 CanLII 72 (SCC).

    The doctrine against vagueness applies to all law, from the criminal code to regulatory enactments. Any provision of law, which does not satisfy both rationales of the doctrine against vagueness, is invalid and without force or effect.

>>>> Jurisdictional argument

    Section 45(1) of the Act provides conditional jurisdiction to the Committee and to the Board to authorize variance from provisions of bylaws enacted pursuant to the Act. The jurisdiction to authorize variance from bylaw provisions is limited to “minor” variances, which is a true jurisdictional question.

    The historical jurisprudence of allowing minor variances is to admit the difficulty of imposing codified bylaw conditions on the complexities of real land-use circumstances.

    Any jurisdictional question must be answered both objectively and correctly; it is not a matter of discretion; however the Act does not provide a definition of or a test for the jurisdictional threshold expressed as “minor”. Therefore s. 45(1) of the Act is unconstitutionally vague. In the alternative, if the impugned provision is not constitutionally vague (which is denied), then the meaning of “minor” must be taken from the common-law jurisprudence, not solely from Ontario case law that has developed in a statutory context in which a test for “minor” is not specified.

    On this basis, the Committee did not have the jurisdiction to substantially override the prohibitions of the Interim Control Bylaw 2017-245 passed by the elected Council, nor did it have the jurisdiction to override the general bylaw. The Board also does not have the jurisdiction to do so.

>>>> The variances are not desirable for appropriate development

    In the alternative, if s. 45(1) of the Planning Act is constitutional (which is denied) and if the Tribunal has jurisdiction (which is denied), then the applications should be denied because the applied-for variances are not desirable for the appropriate development of the lots:

    There are unacceptable and easily avoidable deleterious effects for the neighbours in this established community.
    There are unanswered and proven concerns of soil toxicity and public health, without a city plan to prevent health risk.

The following are some particulars in this regard. [And so on…]

Within hours, the applicant (developer) had abandoned all his applications and suggested that the hearing was not necessary.

He implemented a plan B and is now building two single-unit homes on the two original lots. He has been respectful, responsible and responsive to the community in the on-going building process.

I responded that I was willing to proceed with the constitutional questions, which I argued were not moot.

Within days, the Board released its formal order that the applications are denied for the reason that the applicant advised he would not make submissions. The matter of the appeal is closed.

However, the minor variance provision of the Planning Act remains unconstitutional and continues to be misused. It is unlawfully a planning instrument that gives the tribunals virtually unlimited discretion. Also, the general bylaw must be changed.

I’m helping neighbours and the community association to continue the battle, and some have adopted my legal arguments.

Recently, zoning law procedures have been overhauled in Ontario. The Board has been replaced by a “Local Planning Appeal Tribunal”. But, unfortunately, the “minor variance” statute provision and the legal culture in Ontario have not changed. Appeals of minor variance decisions are run essentially the same way as before. I will witness the procedural differences soon. I hope that things have not been made worst for ordinary landowners and residents.

The USA supreme court did NOT just uphold "Trump's Arab and Muslim ban"

By Denis Rancourt

Statements to the effect that the USA supreme court just upheld "Trump's Arab and Muslim ban" are FAKE NEWS for fabricated outrage and to obfuscate reality.

Read the court's decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf

The executive order that was before the court was not an "Arab and Muslim ban". It is a detailed policy instrument meant to ban, limit, punish, propagandize against and coerce USA geopolitical enemies (Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen...) while not affecting the USA ability to co-opt those nationals or to collaborate with the opponents of the governments of those countries.

Read it. It could not be more clear. It is a USA policy, not a Trump policy. It is not primarily racist. It is primarily colonial and anti-international-sovereignty.

Sarcastically, one could say that the USA has "the right to defend itself against the reactions of its victims".

The global money printing press

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

ON GLOBAL PATHOLOGY

The world's greatest structural pathology is that the USA prints the US-dollar and therefore has an endless supply of currency to militarize, bribe, intimidate, ravage, exploit, destabilize, propagandize, co-opt and plunder.

 The world will continue to recover from the global parasite/enforcer as states align with competing blocks and continue to abandon the USA dollar; one country and one vital resource at a time.

As such, USA economic sanctions (criminal blockades) have reached a tipping point where they now mostly accelerate the needed overhaul rather than bring independent nations into line.

Witness the end of the era of USA global organized crime, in live time, as we experience the transition.

Unfortunately, the USA elite-class and intelligentsia refuse to partake in a smooth transition. Fortunately, there are more responsible influential nation blocks.


Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association and a social theorist. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism.

"Call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals" -- Auschwitz survivor

Auschwitz survivor, Dutch theoretical physicist and human rights activist HAJO MEYER (died at 90 in 2014, both his parents were killed at Auschwitz):

<< “If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals,” Meyer said. The hate of the Jews by the Germans “was less deeply rooted than the hate of the Palestinians by the Israeli Jews,” he observed. “The brainwashing of the Jewish Israeli populations is going on for over sixty years. They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being.”

While discussing Europe’s response to Israel’s policies, Hajo said that Europe should respond with “a much more large scale boycott of Israel” than a ban on settlement products. If we Europeans pretend to hold high the flag of humanity with what is happening in Gaza, Israel should be outcasted by us.”

I asked him if he had a message for the Palestinians, Israelis or human rights activists.

“My message for the Palestinians is that they should not give up their fight,” he replied. “If they give up, they might lose their self-esteem with the ongoing humiliations by the Israeli Nazis. Fight with human means. It is justified to show to the Israeli Zionists that you are a force to reckon with. Fight with stones, with weapons. Yes, also with weapons. If you don’t fight, you lose your self-esteem and will not be respected by the Israelis.”

“If we Western democratic societies don’t support the Palestinians in their fight, we must feel ashamed if the Palestinians are annihilated. The US and the European Union must show their teeth,” he added. >> --LINK

And this from the heavily-Israel-lobby-patrolled Wikipedia:

<< Meyer became politically active, including as director of A Different Jewish Voice. He wrote Het einde van het Jodendom (The End of Judaism) in 2003, which accuses Israel of abusing the Holocaust to justify crimes against the Palestinians. He was a member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. He participated in the 2011 "Never Again – For Anyone" tour. He claimed Zionism predates fascism, that Zionists and fascists had a history of cooperation (Nazi/Zionist cooperation was the subject of 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, which was collected and edited by Lenni Brenner), charging, among other things, that Israel wants to foment anti-Semitism in the world to encourage more Jews to migrate to Israel.[4]

Meyer spoke in favor of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.[5] Meyer was a member of the Dutch GreenLeft. >>

And directly from interview:

<< Now the world is silent while the Jews, or- the Israelis- harass, humiliate and steal away land from the Palestinians. And the world is silent, and I want to awake the world, because any criticism on the policies of Israel, is hampered and made impossible by a terrible trick and crime of Israeli propaganda, that any criticism on the politics of Israel comes out and is induced by anti-Semitic feelings. >> --LINK

That is freedom of speech

Comment by Denis Rancourt

Vehemently arguing that someone should not utter certain words or express certain views does not violate freedom of speech. It presumes freedom of speech.

Campaigning and arguing in favour of censorship does not violate freedom of speech. It presumes freedom of speech.

Demonstrating to an institution or corporation that a speaker should be deplatformed does not violate freedom of speech. It presumes freedom of speech.

Cancelling one's own event because there is demonstration against the event, in circumstances where the event could have continued one way or another, is to deny one's own freedom of speech.

An institution or corporation that deplatforms (cancels) a scheduled speaker violates freedom of speech.

An institution or corporation that refuses or frustrates access to its venues because of partizan or social pressures violates freedom of speech.

Governments that have active laws (civil "defamation" tort, "hate speech" criminal code provisions, Human rights codes against expression, codes of language conduct...) against free speech violate freedom of speech.

Rules and laws that prescribe speech violate freedom of speech.

Rules and laws against "disturbing" expression violate freedom of speech.

Governments that have secrecy laws (e.g., so-called access to information statutes) and practices violate freedom of speech.

Governments, institutions and corporations that silence employees and observers by rule or intimidation or prosecution violate freedom of expression.

Judges that do not protect, extend and enforce the open court principle violate freedom of speech.

Media providers that sensor content violate freedom of expression.

Get it?


RELATED LINKS:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/towards-a-rational-legal-philosophy-of-individual-rights/

https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/respecting-rules-of-war-in-societal-battles-science-sex-and-hate-speech/

http://ocla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/DGR-Canadian-Defamation-Law-Violates-ICCPR-for-posting.pdf

Amnesty International Report - June 2018: Undeniable USA mass war crime in Raqqa - Syria

The Amnesty International report of June 5, 2018,

Syria: “War of annihilation”: Devastating toll on civilians, Raqqa – Syria

5 June 2018, Index number: MDE 24/8367/2018 

https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE2483672018ENGLISH.PDF

presents undeniable evidence of USA criminal disregard for civilian life, on a mass scale, in a populated city, and calls for official investigations leading to war crimes prosecutions.

The Report is an administrative description of USA evil deeds, performed under a cover of media silence and war propaganda at home.

The disregard for human life and urban installations on such a scale, under questionable pretext, while illegally attacking a sovereign nation, is as criminal as war crimes get.

The USA has no legitimacy in its proxy war for regime change in Syria.


Here are excerpts from the June 2018 70-page Amnesty International Report:

Amnesty International researchers travelled to Raqqa in February 2018 and spent two weeks visiting 42 locations of strikes and interviewing 112 witnesses and survivors. The organisation analysed satellite imagery and reviewed other publicly available material. This report documents the experiences of four families whose cases are emblematic of wider patterns.

The cases provide prima facie evidence that several Coalition attacks which killed and injured civilians violated international humanitarian law. ... Coalition forces did not take adequate account of civilians present in the city and failed to take the precautions necessary to minimise harm to civilians and civilian objects. ...

To date, the Coalition has not explained why it continued to launch strikes which killed so many civilians while a deal granting IS fighters impunity and safe passage out of the city was being considered and negotiated. Many survivors of Coalition strikes interviewed by Amnesty International asked why Coalition forces needed to destroy an entire city and kill so many civilians with bombardments supposedly targeting IS fighters – only to then allow IS fighters to leave the city unharmed. ...

In all the cases detailed in this report, Coalition forces launched air strikes on buildings full of civilians using wide-area effect munitions, which could be expected to destroy the buildings. In all four cases, the civilians killed and injured in the attacks, including many women and children, had been staying in the buildings for long periods prior to the strikes. Had Coalition forces conducted rigorous surveillance prior to the strikes, they would have been aware of their presence. Amnesty International found no information indicating that IS fighters were present in the buildings when they were hit and survivors and witnesses to these strikes were not aware of IS fighters in the vicinity of the houses at the time of the strikes. Even had IS fighters been present, it would not have justified the targeting of these civilian dwellings with munitions expected to cause such extensive destruction.

The Coalition has so far refused to even acknowledge the scale of harm caused to civilians by the military campaign. At the height of the Raqqa battle, in September 2017, outgoing Coalition commander, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, wrote that “…there has never been a more precise air campaign in the history of armed conflict”. However, this precise air campaign killed hundreds of civilians. At the same time, US Marines’ activities described by Army Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell (senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), suggests that the Coalition operation was far from precise: “In five months they fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets… They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine artillery battalion, or any Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam War.”

Given that standard artillery shells fired from an M777 howitzer have an average margin of error of over 100m, launching so many of these shells into a city where civilians were trapped in every neighbourhood posed an unacceptable risk to civilians. Yet despite incontrovertible evidence of civilian casualties and wholesale destruction in Raqqa, and the high level of civilian casualties, the Coalition narrative remains unchanged.

The international Coalition [allegedly] to defeat IS in Iraq and Syria was formed in 2014. Named “Operation Inherent Resolve”, it sought to present itself as an international Coalition with broad-based support from nations and institutions around the world. But the military action it took in Raqqa against IS was an overwhelmingly US military affair. Under the command of a US General, US forces fired 100% of the artillery into Raqqa and carried out over 90% of the air strikes. British and French forces were the only other Coalition members to strike Raqqa from the air. ...

Eight months after military operation ended, most of the city’s residents remain displaced and those who have returned are living in dire conditions among the mountains of rubble and the stench of dead bodies trapped beneath, facing the threat of mines/improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and unexploded ordnance. Virtually every resident of Raqqa who spoke to Amnesty International asked why those who could spend so much for a costly military campaign to destroy the city cannot provide the relief so desperately needed in its aftermath, including the heavy-lifting equipment needed to clear the rubble and recover the bodies and clear the IEDs.

My comment in square brackets.

NOTE: This Amnesty International Report follows massive 2017 criticism of the organization's nasty propaganda work regarding Syria, when it was widely dubbed "Shamnesty International": LINK TO LINKS. Maybe it understands now that true human rights defenders are well informed?

RACISM AND ISRAEL AND YEMEN

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

RACISM. The Western middle-class ethos has been infected by a disproportionate taboo-like hyper-aversion to attitudinal and opinion racism.

This is a socially engineered and recent pathology that is not checked by humour and satire. People are now routinely prosecuted and jailed for victimless "hate speech" that is inferred to signal blasphemous beliefs and attitudes.

One consequence of the said pathology is that, as a result of the obsession with thought racism, it is difficult to discerned physical racism operationally enabled by states.

The more thought racism is an obscene crime, the less difference there is with racism actuated as state-run predation, genocide or war, which are the Western state’s main expenditures.

You can't get Canadians upset about the on-going mass genocidal war in Yemen. On the contrary, average liberal Canadians in-effect agree to sell the Saudis weapons to help advance the massacre and cheer on the sanctions and blockade. But if a baker refuses to make a cake for a gay wedding all hell breaks loose.

The public is content to accept state-run physical racism if it is masked by vigorous demonstrations of concern for attitudinal and opinion racism.

For example, Canadian aboriginals can continue to be poisoned on toxic holding reserves and continue to have their land rights violates if "we" give them "respect" and "value" their traditional knowledge and languages, and suitably freak out at social media examples of overt personal expression racism or related interpersonal incidents.

Similarly, as a result of the said pathology, a charge of anti-Semitism is a powerful censoring bludgeon to silence objections to Israel's violent and genocidal 70-year containment and eradication campaign.

The defenders of the “Words that Wound” industry of manufactured outrage and criminalization against attitudinal and opinion racism make a steep slippery slope argument [a]. They argue that individual expression is the tail that wags the state-sponsored racism dog. I argue the opposite, that free expression checks state violence and abuse, and produces meaningful and robust cultural development. Instead, we have silenced the comics, militarized the media, and jailed the “hate speakers” that are the most triggering catalysts for intellectual and moral development.

Instead of discerning thought and expression racism of individuals in our own society from physical-violence racism of our state, the pathology is so advanced that we are reduced to pointing out inconsistencies or bias in outrage.

For example, Ivan Kalmar, anthropology professor, University of Toronto, argues that both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are appalling and that “both are fed by the Israel/Palestine conflict” [1]. In this way, the powerful state of Israel’s violent and genocidal containment and eradication of the native population is not an egregious long-term mass violation of the Geneva Conventions regulating military occupation but rather is simply part of a “conflict” that produces “appalling” individual racist attitudes and demonstrations in both a priori legitimate sides; because after all, it is those racist demonstrations at home that concern us.

Steven Salaita, on the other hand, has brilliantly exposed the narrative (“hasbara” or spin) pushed by Israel to be fundamental state-sponsored racism, underpinned by true conviction of race superiority [2]. But he has not done it in a way that expressly challenges the “Words that Wound” pathology, as he did in the “legitimizing anti-Semitism” tweet that made him famous.


Endnotes

[a] “Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chapter 5 in: The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menard, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226520049; which is a critique of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, by legal scholars Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw, Westview Press, 1993.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editors/2018/05/31/your-letters-muslim-anti-semitism-and-jewish-islamophobia-are-based-in-geopolitics.html

[2] http://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/defending-israel-actually/


Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is a social theorist and the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism.

Message from The Man

Dissidents: If you are too threatening, actually threatening and not protected, then you will be murdered. If you are too popular, then you will be character assassinated. If you confine yourself to properly "academic" expression and the pretext to fire you is too costly or risky, then you will not be censored. Only your web venues will be very very very s..l..o..o..o..w.

Jordan Peterson and the Threat of Working-class Intellectual and Attitudinal Liberation

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

[This article was first published at Dissident Voice: LINK.]


SUMMARY: Why the industry of glib and vehement mainstream character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson? My examination of Peterson’s “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back” suggests that it is a seminal work anchored in a prestigious body of scientific research that should form the theoretical basis of social science in the coming years. Peterson is simply presenting this nascent scientific paradigm of the primacy of dominance hierarchy directly to the people, without an institutional filter, and using it in a cognitive therapy approach to solve the self-image catastrophe that white males in particular are experiencing. There is no valid basis for the attacks against Peterson, which are motivated by establishment machinations.


I’m a world-class scientist. I’m a physicist with an h-index of 36 (i10-index 81). I was a university professor at 29 and a full and tenured professor at 40. I’ve made discoveries in physics and some of my most cited papers are in soil and environmental science. I’m not clever in navigating society’s dominance hierarchy but I am intellectually honest and I am damn smart when it comes to understanding concepts and recognizing new phenomena.

Only those of my enemies who are professional liars (lawyers) have ever dared to call me stupid: “Mr. Rancourt is an intelligent man Your Honour”, but not repeatedly.

That is why I have been surprised to observe the deluge of strident voices, opinion leaders of our time, who use the establishment’s highest media venues to launch character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson based on… nothing.

Peterson is a fascinating media and social phenomenon worth investigating. I looked at his outstanding research record on Google Scholar and read several of his most cited and recent scientific papers. I watched several of his debates against said opinion leaders and several of his pedagogical presentations.

The scientific papers are exemplary, with correct applications of sophisticated statistical, significance and factor analysis tools. I often find sloppy and incorrect applications to be the norm in the medical field,¹ for example, but not here.

In the presentations, I find clear and intelligent statements on the questions related to his many areas of expertise, and ya, some exaggerations and incorrect statements in areas where his gaze has not been objective, it appears.

For example, I don’t understand how an authentic intellectual could read the landmark works of Karl Marx and the critiques of the said work by the great anarchist theorist Kropotkin and not be thoroughly impressed by the genius of Marx, and the elements of his theory that are seminal and fundamental even if incorrectly extrapolated by Marx. I conclude that Jordan has not actually read this stuff or he is being irrational in his evaluation, for whatever reasons related to his personal history.

In my evaluation, however, Peterson’s occasional stupid summaries are entirely a result of his boldness to put ideas out there, on the fly, in his broad and continuous interactions with the world; and they remove nothing from the depth and rigour of his other written and spoken words. Even Einstein wrote naïve and silly things without the prerequisite background study: “Why Socialism?”, 1949.

Next, I decided to get myself a copy of his record-breaking best seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I’m a slow reader, and I read all the notes and most of the articles themselves that are cited. I have now finished up to the end of: “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back”.
I thought: “Holy crap. This guy is doing something unprecedented. He is taking a nascent scientific paradigm and bringing it directly to the people, with no institutional intermediaries. Brilliant.”
I’ll explain what Peterson is doing and its significance but before I do…

I next went back to the products of the character-assassination professionals to see what the service intellectuals had said about “Rule 1”, and I looked for “Rule 1” summaries and explanations on line.
I was shocked to find the degree to which the said service intellectuals had done their job. What a distasteful spectacle. Such vile dishonesty. Only an assigned mission and attempts at opinion mobbing could produce such trash, which actually hurts the brain unless your purpose is mindless subservience to establishment spin.

What is the “nascent scientific paradigm”, which threatens key tenets of the current social engineering complex if it is not sufficiently buried? Let me be blunt. In the last decade or more, biochemists, biologists, animal behaviourists and psychologists have established proof of what some astute observers have been saying for centuries: Dominance hierarchy rules, across the animal kingdom and over evolutionary time. It is rooted in a primordial physiology and metabolic biochemistry.

The metabolism of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin, and the associated evolutionary biology, is the first synthesis of the new tectonic plates theory of social science, whether social scientists are aware of it yet or not. Period.

The metabolic biochemistry of dominance locks us in. No socialism theory that presumes altruistic cooperation as its organizing principle can ever work. Non-hierarchical anarchism and its libertarian cousin are useful conceptual end-points that can never be sustainably achieved. The best we can do is to have a responsive and optimally (evolutionarily) beneficial dominance hierarchy that is actively prevented from exercising pathological excess.²

Jordan is spelling this out (p. 14-15):

This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected-and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence. We (the sovereign we, the we that has been around since the beginning of life) have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. [Footnote 17: “Serotonin and dominance”, by Ziomkiewicz-Wichary, 2016] It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious and weak. If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of fight that life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies. And it is not only the behavioural and experiential similarities that are striking. Much of the basic neurochemistry is the same.

Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in the lobster. Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency—as anything whatsoever may happen, at any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely something good). Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan—among humans, just as among crustaceans. Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps are held constant. The importance of this can hardly be overstated.

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society …

What the ignorant hit men against Peterson have failed to recognize is that Peterson has summarized the greatest scientific advances of the last few decades, which have immediate relevance to human anthropological consciousness—not to mention representing a direct threat to the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry.²

Peterson is doing this as part of a state-of-the-art cognitive therapy guide or companion.
How can his glib critics be oblivious to this? Simple: Their place and the place of their bosses within the dominance hierarchy are threatened.

Jordan goes on (p. 23-24) to explain the fundamental roles of anger and of fighting back, both as necessary elements of personal liberation and as the fundamental agent to prevent societal spiralling into totalitarianism. His summary on this point is brilliant, and is as seminal as Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology in the geopolitical field.

The same point is also the main thrust of my 2013 book³ and was made in my 2011 blog extract from the book:

There is no denying the first reality about humans. We are social beings, first and foremost regarding the forces that determine our lives. Our societies are hierarchical and, when not constrained by geography or balancing natural forces, spontaneously grow in size towards more hierarchy and fascism.

A recent antidote against the runaway excesses of Western monarchical and religious hierarchies has been the development of an ethos of individual freedom, spawned in the Enlightenment and anchored in mid-layer economic independence from the top hierarchical predators. …⁴

Peterson is not waiting for the social and medical sciences to catch up to the paradigm elucidation that has recently occurred among dominance-hierarchy pioneers. He is taking those discoveries as his world view and as the foundation for his advice to the youth.

The dominance-hierarchy view of nature is powerful and compelling, now supported by a few decades of hard science. It is a predictive model with unlimited capacity to organize our perception of the world. It is a dangerous truth, as is any truth about ourselves, which is not dominance-hierarchy-given but which instead is anchored in objective reality.

In the words of Harold Pinter:

[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
– Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

Peterson is having an impact because his important words are true and because oppressive false words have gone too far.

Goodiness is helpful in stabilizing the domestic dominance hierarchy, but goodiness has been co-opted and used to excess by one side of the establishment forces, the so-called “Left”. In a classic positive feedback loop—not unlike Jordan’s explanation of alcoholism—goodiness (political correctness) has achieved pathological levels and its totalitarianism is spraying dead bodies all over the landscape.

Regular white males are very publicly being told to “check their privilege” (that is, to shut the fuck up), to cower and to apologize and make amends for a historical accumulation of “toxic masculinity”. Privileged (professional class) non-white and non-male service intellectuals are recruited into a deceitful industry of supposedly fixing society by engineering language and by mounting witch hunts against perceived attitudinal blasphemy.

Dominance hierarchy theory tells us that this is a recipe for backlash. Self-image catastrophe is the dominant determinant of ill-health and is accompanied by violent outbursts or self-destruction.⁵
Jordan Peterson is furiously working to prevent and alleviate a violent race and gender civil war, waged by competing hierarchical exploiters, and guided by a disgusting array of careerist social managers.

Jordan Peterson is also fighting for reason and objectivity and against ideological madness.
I mean, come on:

[T]he idea that there is no binary male/female sex divide in humans is simply a vast overstatement of the fact that many other things also occur in the genital and metabolic physiology of a minority of individuals. …

That environmental factors—including culture and the violence or authoritativeness of the local social dominance hierarchy—affect both natural reproduction and the said set of sex-differentiating physiological attributes does [not] invalidate the sex binary in human society.⁶

Jodan’s Rule-1 explanation about gender roles (pp. 15-16) is anchored in science. His Footnote 18 is “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom”, which has:

Combining Bateman’s principles with Darwin’s conception of eager males and discriminating females, the Darwin-Bateman paradigm is now the most commonly invoked concept to explain conventional sex roles (…). Specifically, it provides the conceptual framework to understand two central manifestations of conventional sex roles—female-biased parental care and male-biased sexual dimorphism.⁷

What is next? Are we going to pretend that sexual dimorphism is not real? Or postulate that virtually all animal behavioural studies are cultural fantasies imagined by the field observers? Are we going to throw out evolutionary biology and all of Darwin’s ideas as “male science”? Why not discount Einstein’s theories as “Jew science” while we are at it?

Look, white males are assholes, fine. But the “Words that Wound” industry service intellectuals are going too far.⁸ Establishment “science” can be lethal, as is literally the case with medicine,¹ but that does not negate what we actually know about cell biology and metabolic reactions. Likewise, fundamental empirical discoveries about dominance and sex are not negated because Freud was off and psychiatry is a horror. You cannot simply extrapolate cherry picked scientific reports of anomalies into broad self-serving ideological conclusions.

These are the things that Jordan Peterson is responsibly questioning. Thank god.

1. “Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis”, by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, December 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129. [↩] [↩]
2. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017. [↩] [↩]
3. Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism, by Denis Rancourt, Stairway Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9859942-8-0. [↩]
4. “Individual freedom versus collective oppression as the determinative conflict in a hierarchical society”, by Denis Rancourt, Activist Teacher, August 16, 2011. [↩]
5. “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014. [↩]
6. “Respecting ‘Rules of War’ in Societal Battles: Science, Sex and Hate Speech”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, November 8, 2016. [↩]
7. “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom”, by Janicke et al., Science Advances, 12 Feb 2016: Vol. 2, no. 2, e1500983 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500983 [↩]
8. “Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chapter 5 in: The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menard, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226520049; which is a critique of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, by legal scholars Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw, Westview Press, 1993. [↩]

Kim and Moon KOREA

Why renewed peace now, after decades?

Here is my tentative answer:

1. USA global hegemony is visibly eroding. Nations have less and less incentive to be oppressed servants of USA domination. The new multi-polar world (with an emerging Eurasia, etc.) has many more advantages than servitude to USA human and natural resource extraction, including stability, security and peace.
2. Kim has the needed background of safety, thanks to his now hydrogen bomb and intercontinental missile capabilities.
3. Distributed media technology (social media, etc.) makes it impossible for the USA to create a flawless web of war propaganda. Populations are more and more informed about reality, rather than simply manipulated. (That is why there is a top-down "fake news" frenzy.)
4. Trump, with all his flaws and qualities, is the man of the hour in the USA: the common-sense player that wants to maneuver and manage hegemonic-come-down (America First) rather than try to impose hegemony with ever more violent wars.
5. Russia and China have developed massive advanced military defence capabilities, and technologies that can be exported to their allies. They could survive a USA first-strike attempt and therefore cannot be intimidated. They can choose their battles, such as in Syria. Russia has decided to frustrate the USA model of nation destruction (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...) Next even Gaza and Yemen and Africa... will be healed.

I think the USA propaganda that is unfolding corroborates my analysis:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/26/world/korea-summit-kang-kyung-wha-amanpour-intl/

The USA needs an out without losing face and Moon is happy to help in that regard. The USA makes the world go round. Right?

Denis Rancourt, PhD

Check out this related commentary:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

Canadian Societal Depravity is Anchored in Medical Care

Where good will provides cover for predatory population enslavement

by Denis Rancourt, PhD

This article was first published on Dissident Voice (LINK).


A society of socially engineered individuals who cannot identify their own anthropological dissonance is a depraved society.

Its depravity is further established by its managers who do not experience profound discomfort in the face of the state’s domestic and foreign perpetual mass crimes.

Here, I explore the role of so-called health care in maintaining Canadian societal depravity. Canada is a satellite state of the USA, which defines itself as a jurisdiction with public medical services.

The truth is Canadian “health care” has become a system in-effect designed to keep Canadians stupid and sick. This design serves the global-elite bosses, the political class, the medical profession and the Big Pharma predators, in what is a symbiotic mesh of enslavement. So Canada defines itself by one of its main systems of social control.

I’m driven to write this by a few recent events that point to a downward spiral.

First, in 2017 the Ontario government announced its new publicly funded “pharmacare” program for people 24 years old or younger, which includes virtually every patented “behavioural enhancement” drug. This was done in a total absence of scientific impact studies and in a total absence of independent studies of hierarchical needs and drug efficacy.

Then, last month, in a further cynical move to buy votes in time for the June 2018 election, the Ontario government expanded its “pharmacare” program to seniors, the most over-mediated segment of our drugged society.¹

On top of it all, I had the displeasure of reading the leading Left health-care guru’s 2017 book Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin.²

Martin’s book is superbly researched, authoritative and beautifully written. It is an essential current resource for medical care activists and managers. But it plays right into the hands of the said mesh of enslavement by recruiting Left organizers and people of good will to believe that fixing is possible — if guided by research, brave implementations and a moral desire for a fair society.

Such fixing by gradual change from within is not possible with the hydra that we are contemplating. Yet, Martin states:

In the anatomy of a system for change, clinicians are the feet that do the walking. They can also be the feet that drag. […] Making change is always about the art of the possible. Sometimes it would be great to pass a piece of legislation requiring hospitals or doctors to do something, but it just isn’t feasible. At other times it would be better to engage physicians and inspire them to drive change locally, but sometimes they’re frankly unwilling or unable to do so.

You get the drift. It’s on and on like that.

Martin’s “six big ideas” are too many: (1) return of the patient-physician relationship, (2) too much prescribing of drugs too expensive, (3) get physicians to voluntarilly “do less”, to stop harming patients and to reduce costs, (4) do more with less, (5) eliminate poverty to improve health and reduce overall government expenditures, and (6) be smart about actuating change.

A realistic campaign would have just one idea: The medical-establishment-led so-called health care system does far more harm than good and is a system of exploitation and enslavement that must be dismantled. With one application note: The reform will have to be grassroots and culturally anchored or it will easily be hijacked.

Contrary to Martin’s thesis, death by medicine is not some manageable feature that can be remedied by better procedures and more responsible practice. Rather, it is systemic and would require accountability and publicly documented enforced penalties, which exist on paper but are in reality foreign to the profession.³

In my 2015 critical review of the scientific literature, I summarized the problem of fatal medical “errors” this way:

In the words of Dr. Barbara Starfield, and many others, it is therefore incontrovertible that establishment medicine is the third leading cause of death in industrialized countries, after deaths from heart disease and cancer, which in turn are causes that medicine can do very little about. The next and fourth leading cause of death is cerebrovascular disease and its rate is far below that from medical-induced (iatrogenic) deaths, such that “medical manslaughter” is not about to give up its rank of third leading cause.

In concrete terms, I calculated that this means that between 6% and 8% of advanced Western state citizens die from medicine rather than any other cause, including both medical-error deaths and non-error medical deaths.⁴

In the West, medicine causes more deaths that all wars, violent crimes, car accidents… you name it. It is routinely referred to as an epidemic in the scientific literature, yet it is not on the radar of media-driven public policy concerns. The media is too busy telling us about the supposed dangers of self-administered cannabis.

You are at more risk walking into your doctor’s office or into a community clinic than from virtually every other thing you will ever do.

You have been hoodwinked. To achieve this, it is necessary to continuously engineer and maintain a cultural veil that makes one fundamental biological truth impenetrable: almost always the body heals itself, and does a remarkably good job of it if dominance power does not interfere. The human body has been doing this for more than a million years; and this self-healing capacity has sustained the most successful species of large mammals on the planet, despite the opportunism of witch doctors and fortune tellers.

The only exceptions are the inevitability of old age and accidents that are fatal in the absence of crisis intervention. Medical crisis intervention means: Stop the bleeding and repair vital organs that will not repair themselves in time to prevent death or permanent disability, without causing death by the intervention itself. Modern heart attack interventions and repairs following massive lacerations are examples.

Virtually everything else involves simply securing an environment that optimizes healing by ensuring security, alleviating stress and removing causal factors. Admittedly, these are difficult healing goals in a dominance hierarchy of lobotomized and exploited individuals being milked for service charges and drug dependence by a “health care” system.

The said biological truth has been replaced with a constellation of lies: That industry-recommended “medication” and interventions are required and beneficial; That pain plays no useful role and should be artificially suppressed; That drugs accelerate healing without diminishing the body’s ability to heal itself; That disconnected doctors know best; That technological tests and physical measurements are substitutes for self-knowledge; That it’s better to consult rather than try to be one’s own doctor; and so on.

In 1974, Ivan Illich put it this way and things have only gotten much worst since:

Within the last decade medical professional practice has become a major threat to health. Depression, infection, disability, dysfunction, and other specific iatrogenic diseases now cause more suffering than all accidents from traffic or industry. Beyond this, medical practice sponsors sickness by the reinforcement of a morbid society which not only industrially preserves its defectives but breeds the therapist’s client in a cybernetic way. Finally, the so-called health-professions have an indirect sickening power – a structurally health-denying effect. I want to focus on this last syndrome, which I designate as medical Nemesis. By transforming pain, illness, and death from a personal challenge into a technical problem, medical practice expropriates the potential of people to deal with their human condition in an autonomous way and becomes the source of a new kind of un-health.⁵

“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health” was true is 1976 and that threat has only dug itself in and widened.⁶ However, more is scientifically known now about the mechanistic cause of ill-health of the individual animal then was known in the 1970s.⁴,⁷,⁸  Therefore, then and now, in addition to hiding the truth about healing, the fundamental truth about the cause of ill-health must also be hidden from the individual and buried as deeply as possible.

Even at her most progressive, Martin in-effect plays this role admirably well. She points to the large area of health research known as “social determinants of health”. The researchers in this field avoid treating the harmful nature of establishment medicine itself and, instead, focus on the societal factors that statistically correlate with ill-health.

They find that the dominant factor that correlates to ill-health and mortality is poverty, and that this correlation is significantly modulated by a co-factor that is the magnitude of the income gap between rich and poor in the society. Martin concludes, therefore, that governments should eliminate poverty to improve public health and to reduce overall government expenditures.

Martin’s economic structural solution amounts to what doctors do best: Divert resources and attention towards suppressing the symptoms rather that addressing the cause, even though she firmly believes that she is addressing a cause. Eliminating poverty by systemic change is an honourable and just cause in itself and it should not be anchored in any ancillary goal, especially not one that relies on the medical profession for its accomplishment.

Of course, extreme poverty causing fatal nutritional and environmental deficiencies causes death. That is not controversial. However, all such extreme poverty has been structurally eliminated in Canada and the killer now is the subjective stress and self-image devaluation caused by the inherent violence of society’s dominance hierarchy, including the violence from the medical enterprise itself.⁴,⁷,⁸  This is true to different degrees in all social classes, from professional workers to aboriginal reserve residents to urban homeless people.

Martin in no way is contributing to a solution. Rather, she is vying for partisan influence for good-will managers and enlightened professionals. However, the problem is deeper than anything addressed by establishment forces, including the progressive ones.

Both private (USA) and public (Canada) medical systems are networks of oppression and enslavement run by collaborating corporate, government and professional bodies whose members derive disproportionate and immoral benefits. Arguing which is best is akin to arguing about whether to vote Democrat or Republican, prior to the somewhat democratizing anomaly of Trump that was enabled by the technological opportunity of a temporarily free social media.

At its heart, individuals have been infantilized and reduced to following directives under paternalistic umbrellas. On the contrary, knowledge and individual responsibility must be distributed and accompanied by individual influence and power. The structures that have neutralized us in every sphere and the forces that keep us depressed are the factors that make us sick and keep us dependent.
The way forward is to fight for fundamental rights that ensure a measure of influence and power, starting with the most fundamental rights of free expression and free association.

Furthermore, those with institutional power must be accountable, rather than shielded. The professional associations, colleges and councils that shield lawyers, doctors and judges must be defeated and made to answer to their victims.

“Whistleblower protection” cannot mean tenuous protection for the few individuals who expose egregious abuses. It must mean broad effective protections for all employees who wish to disclose and complain about government and corporate employers and procedures. It must mean actual transparency by distributed impetus.

“Freedom of the press” cannot mean shielding government and corporate media from accountability and protecting journalist shills who serve interested publishers. It must mean distributed power to individuals to publish in social media without imposed constraints, with effective protection against establishment hijacking of technological venues.

Actual education is a collective and self-organized societal process, not a method to train and indoctrinate. Optimal freedom gives enlightened and healthy individuals. Excessive domination gives the opposite. This principle is increasingly painfully obvious.⁹

Everything else is a surreal argument about whether the organized oppression is fair or unfair.

1. News Release: Making Prescription Drugs Free for People 65 and Over – Expanding OHIP+ Will Make Prescription Drugs Free for Nearly One in Two Ontarians, March 20, 2018, Office of the Premier.
2. Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin, Penguin Random House, 2017, pp. 298.
3. “Psychiatrist Louis Morissette Should Be Barred From Practice” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, April 5, 2018.
4. “Cancer Arises from Stress-induced Breakdown of Tissue Homeostasis – Part 1: Context of Cancer Research” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, December 4, 2015.
5. “Medical Nemesis” by Ivan Illich, The Lancet, vol. 303, no. 7863, May 11, 1974, pp. 918-921, at p. 918.
6. Limits to medicine: medical nemesis—the expropriation of health by Ivan Illich, London: Marion Boyars, 1976, pp. 294.
7. “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health” by Robert M. Sapolsky, Science, vol. 308, no. 5722, April 29, 2005, pp. 648-652, DOI:10.1126/science.1106477.
8. “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014.
9. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017.