A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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As many of you have probably seen, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, Dr. Yusuke Narita, has suggested that one solution to Japan’s aging society and the burdens placed on a shrinking number of young people by a growing number of elderly is the mass suicide of the old. Narita has also stated that in the future, mandatory euthanasia will become a matter of discussion—I couldn’t help but think of the proposed legislation in the Netherlands allowing anybody to opt for assisted suicide after the age of 65 (it is ominously called “completed life” legislation). While false prophets have yowled about overpopulation, the real demographic crisis—plunging birthrates—has been mostly ignored. I think Narita is right—mandatory euthanasia will become a discussion. Narita’s suggestion is a trial balloon.
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In The Spectator, Douglas Murray takes a look at the UK government’s Prevent program, which aims to combat extremism. So what, you might ask, does the government consider key signs of a developing extremist? Behold:
In one RICU document a number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation. These include a book on the Rotherham rape gangs, books by Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and – once again – me. Without wanting to beat my own drum, the book of mine that is singled out for this sinister treatment is my 2017 work The Strange Death of Europe. This book spent almost 20 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller lists, has been translated into dozens of languages and was for some time the bestselling non-fiction book in the UK. So that is an awful lot of potential radicals just there.
That isn’t even the worst of it. Consider that this list of warning signs was put together after nearly thirteen years of the Tories in power:
When I first saw these documents I felt a sort of white-hot anger. But then I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop ‘extremism’ in these islands.
There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.
If you love your country—or the things that made it great—you may be a radical. As you were, I suppose.
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ARPA’s response to the final report of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying is very much worth reading. The report is awful; the recommendations are worse.
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Canada’s euthanasia regime continues to produce gut-wrenching stories. Even suicide facilitators—know more formally as MAiD providers—are expressing their doubts. In Maclean’s, Dr. Madeline Li confesses that she has regrets about killing a patient with a treatable condition. Her honesty is rare.
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It’s people like this old man in Kelowna—who is struggling to find healthcare—that are dying in this regime. They are being killed in their thousands.
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From C-Fam—Western nations are again attempting to ramrod gender ideology and radical redefinitions into international documents. Increasingly, international politics is a matter of brinkmanship over cultural and ideological differences.
