Bruce Beavis

Avid bagpiper, reader of history, fly fisherman, slightly better than average woodworker. Ex-pat Canadian

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

SIBLEY: Canada didn't just lose Dominion Day — it lost part of its identity https://t.co/uDpPNY6H5V

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

Drive through almost any corner of the English countryside and sooner or later you pass a ruin: a roofless abbey, a row of broken arches open to the weather, a few worked stones in a field where something vast once stood. We are so used to these skeletons that we file them under scenery. In truth each one is a crime scene, and the oldest warning we have about what the English state does when it decides its own people are there to be harvested.

The fashionable comparison this season is the Civil War: the 1640s, the king against his parliament, the long slide to the sword. The state-as-enemy-of-the-nation. I think it's the wrong century. To see our situation as it actually is, go back a hundred years earlier, to the 1530s, and to the largest seizure of wealth in English history before the modern age - the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The monasteries were far more than churches. They were the welfare state of their day, among the many other pillars-of-society which they constituted. They ran the hospitals and fed the poor at the gate. They schooled the clever sons of nobodies, took in travellers, lent money, employed half the county, and held perhaps a fifth of the land in England in a kind of standing trust for the people around them. They were the accumulated institutional capital of the nation, built up across four centuries.

In barely four years, the state took the lot.

The way it was done is the whole point. First the audit: Thomas Cromwell sent his men to value every religious house in the land down to the candlesticks - the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a Domesday Book drawn up for plunder. Then the justification: the same men came back with lurid dossiers of monkish vice and idleness, much of it invented and all of it deeply useful, because a thing you mean to destroy must first be declared rotten. Then the disposal. The proceeds went nowhere near the poor who had depended on the place. The land was sold, fast and cheap, to the Crown's creditors and courtiers and the rising, grasping gentry - a new class of men bound to the regime by the very loot they were handed, a good many of whose descendants sit on the same acres now.

When the north rose against it, in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rising was put down and its leaders hanged on the strength of a royal pardon that was never meant to be honoured.

The result, for ordinary people, was a disaster that took generations to undo. The hospitals shut. The poor relief evaporated. England filled with vagrants and beggars - "sturdy beggars", in fact, which the same government then set about whipping through the streets - because the institutions that had carried the poor had been cashed in for the king's wars and the courtiers' estates. It took the better part of a century, and the Elizabethan Poor Law, to rebuild a fraction of what those four years had wrecked.

This is the English disease in its purest form, and a man ought to know his own country's worst habit when he sees it come round again. The English state has never had much need of tanks or secret police. Its signature is subtler. It finds the institutions ordinary people rely on, declares them corrupt or inefficient or unaffordable, audits them, hollows them, and transfers their substance - the money, the land, the power, the security - to the class that runs the machine.

You have watched it done. The hospitals, the courts, the high streets, the post offices, the savings, the very safety of the streets - audited, downgraded, closed, sold, or left to rot, while the apparatus sitting on top of it all has swollen to £400 billion a year and answers to nobody you can name. The monks are long gone and the method is immortal.

The ruins in the field are a gravestone, but they are also evidence, and evidence is always useful. Once a people learns to recognise the method - the audit, the manufactured rot, the fire-sale to insiders, the whole business wrapped in the word "reform" - it stops working on them.

The English have rebuilt everything that was stripped from them before: the parish relief, the friendly societies, the great Victorian foundations, the hospitals and schools of the last century, every one of them raised by people who refused to accept that the floor under ordinary life was gone for good. We will do it again. The first step is to stop calling the men selling the country reformers, and to call them what Cromwell's men were: looters with a jolly good filing system.

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@Justin0_5 Should go over the laces and the top of the boots to keep debris out

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@CanadaLoyalist I thought his name was Thrifty McScot

[National Post @nationalpost]

NP View: It's time for a new kind of Governor General
https://t.co/VHFqsXPbi9

[Without Diminishment @WDiminishment]

Geoff Russ: Are the images of Old Canada radicalising you?

"Culture is also the code of a people and community. It includes beliefs, manners, history, tastes, and the higher standards that emerge from them."

https://t.co/QdsXx6asG4

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@pdug175 @JimElliott95607 I think so.

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@davidpugliese @OttawaCitizen 10 years! 5 in planning, 5 in procurement. The Second World War was done and dusted in 6. They are not designing the tanks; how much smarter will the army be on the topic after 5 years vs 1?

[JayGen 𝕏 er🇨🇦 @JayGenXer]

One of my FAVOURITE SPEECHES that SUMS up Canada

[Jeff Fynn-Paul @JeffFynnPaul]

European countries are becoming deathly afraid of portraying their own histories on their money, or in any cultural artifact which represents those histories in a positive light. This is a direct result of my humanities colleagues adopting an almost universal anti-Western bias in everything they write and teach. Nearly every historical figure from Europe, it seems, is now officially "offensive," "divisive," or linked to something bad. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue if Europe is to have a bright future. A country which is not proud of its greatest past achievements--even such obviously universal achievements as discovering the germ theory of disease, or bettering the lives of millions through mandatory secular education--is a country which will soon lose its will to exist.

My humanities colleagues might think that this is exactly what they want--for European countries to cease existing as European countries with European traditions. But in this, my learned colleagues show themselves much more naive, and less capable of governing, than the average person in the street. This is why democracy works so well as a rule--because the collective judgment is usually better than the judgment of any group swayed by groupthink, as the liberal arts academy now is to a shocking degree. As Shaftesbury said, "the most ingenious way to become foolish is through a system." And my colleagues, by giving in to the social media-driven Leftist hooliganism and pre-Enlightenment irrationality epitomized by CRT and its ideological cousins, are certainly proving his point.

[UnHerd @unherd]

“I call myself a Christian because I think that my values are Christian”

Historian @holland_tom joined UnHerd’s @freddiesayers and rock icon @nickcave to discuss what makes him a Christian, and why being ‘culturally Christian’ is indistinguishable from just being Christian.

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@Lucvend @tleehumphrey Thats good news.

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@tleehumphrey Are new LAV’s still in production? Any idea of timing of replacement?

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

@Tristyn_Jones1 Never understood the two arguing faces in the design. Was that meant to symbolize “two solitudes “?

[Albertagirl62 @Albertagirl62]

👍

[Brian Lilley @brianlilley]

Stephen Harper on stage with Jean Chretien.
Tells Mark Carney that the American Revolution and War of 1812 were better examples of Canadian unity than the Plains of Abraham.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The best Burns Night joke of them all:

An English doctor is being shown around a Scottish hospital. At the end of his visit, he's shown into a ward with a number of patients who show no obvious signs of injury. He goes to examine the first man he sees, and the man proclaims:-

"Fair fa' yer honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o'the puddin' race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place, painch tripe or thairm:
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace as lang's my arm...."

The doctor, being somewhat taken aback, goes to the next patient, who immediately launches into:-

"Some hae meat, and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit."

This continues with the next patient:-
"Wee sleekit cow'rin tim'rous beastie,
O what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty, wi bickering brattle
I wad be laith to run and chase thee, wi murdering prattle!"

"Well," said the Englishman to his Scottish colleague, "I see you saved the psychiatric ward for last."

"No, no, no," the Scottish doctor corrected him, "this is the Serious Burns Unit."

[Michael Nicoletos @mnicoletos]

Best things I have read on social media - a must read! Just brilliant👇👇👇

[Bruce Beavis @cmrbud]

Great day for justice in Canada

[Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms @JCCFCanada]

John Carpay breaks down today’s major ruling. The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal and confirmed (again) that invoking the Emergencies Act was unconstitutional.

Thank you to the thousands of Canadians whose donations make our work possible: https://t.co/Utp4jMl53j

[The National Roast @NationalRoast]

The National Roast is proud to present the next edition in our Hinterland Who's Who reboot: The Canadian Karen