HANNAFORD: Nietzsche's toxic empathy — Canada’s ruling class loses its grip on reality

It’s great to be fair.But it is possible to be so fair-minded that you become an idiot. Unfortunately, in our woke dominion, that kind of idiocy defines our ruling elites.Take the judge who gave an immigrant a reduced sentence, so that he wouldn't be deported. That was too much even for another judge. As Calgary Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel Garner tells the story in the Western Standard, “The B.C. Court of Appeal ruled last week that a lower court judge gave too light a punishment because the attacker risked deportation.”.Rempel Garner slams judges for soft sentences on violent non-citizens .What had he done, then?“The offender had stabbed his victim in the arm and stomach, leaving him with 18 stitches and 50 staples. Instead of jail, the man received a conditional sentence of two years less a day to help him avoid removal from Canada.”Huh! What was it about this guy, that we wanted so badly to keep him in Canada?Or this chap from India, who tried to buy sex from someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl? It turned out to be a sting, and he was arrested. However at trial, although he was found guilty, he received a lesser sentence so that his immigration process wouldn't be compromised.My word, what a great place is Canada!.To be fair to lower court judges, first we obviously don’t know what was in their secret thoughts. But, more to the point, they may have felt they had precedent and could do no other: For a very long time, Canada’s judges have been putting their thumb on the scales to keep offenders from being deported.Obviously, the BC Court of Appeal didn’t agree in the first example, which is why they upset the lower court decision.However, while the Pham case from 2013 wasn’t the first example of judges exercising their discretion to keep immigrant criminals from being deported, it is definitive. There, the Supreme Court of Canada ‘unanimously agreed that a sentencing judge may reduce a sentence in order to prevent deportation.’ The Court also held that if immigration-related concerns were not raised before a sentencing judge, they may be raised before an appellate court..So here, we’re not actually talking about one wacky judge on acid. Instead, we have to ask what is it about Canada’s ruling elites — and judges are absolutely the ruling elite, but they have their fellow travellers in the political class — that they cannot accept the obvious that everybody else sees?This mentality is not just about the law, after all. It's pervasive.Our political leaders can’t seem to recognize that men don’t belong on women’s sports teams or in women’s changing rooms. We recently had a prime minister who said that if a man said he was a woman, he was a woman. Excruciatingly inclusive public officials, concerned perhaps that one day a man will have a baby, place themselves beyond the foul taint of prejudice by referring to mothers as gender-neutral ‘birthing persons.’ (I thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t. Even the unions are in on it.)To those folks we say, if the future of the human race rested on your hope that men will one day exercise their right to give birth, we'd be living in the last generation..Meanwhile, if somebody breaks into your home and you defend yourself, you risk a criminal charge. And let’s not even start on the cowardice that permits unlimited immigration (mustn’t be racist, must we?) but then fails not only to protect from vicious acts Canadian Jews whose families have been here for generations but also to publicly condemn and prosecute those responsible.It seems to our governing classes that everything that’s obvious to you and me, is actually misguided or lacking in what they consider noble sentiments.What’s the matter with these people?I confess, I don’t know. But here's a theory. Sixty years ago, I do recall a first-year university philosophy course drawing attention to Nietzsche’s concept of what we sometimes today call 'toxic empathy.' (Nietzsche didn't use the exact term.).That’s when you seem to be doing a good thing but it’s actually more about you, than the object of your concern. Magnanimity is after all, a comfortable feeling and judges enjoy it at no cost to themselves when at society's expense, they bestow an undeserved benefit upon a creep, or sympathize with the villain who broke into your home and was left wishing he had not.Nietzsche is not a light read. This blogger had the idea, though. "Toxic empathy is when you do not just replicate and reflect another person’s emotions or feelings, you also experience and consume them… Regular over-empathizing can lead to a reduced capacity of making one’s own decisions as per their best interest."Quite. That's Canada's governing class, in a nutshell. They're so on the side of the supposed underdog, that they make actual underdogs out of honest folk who are just struggling to do the right thing and get by. And call it justice.As the hippies used to say in the '60s, in a phrase they adjusted from the on-screen tv warning of erratic broadcasting performance in those days, "Do not adjust your thinking. (Set.) Reality is at fault."

HANNAFORD: Nietzsche's toxic empathy — Canada’s ruling class loses its grip on reality

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