Zeitgeist

Yeah. Should Dialamah be canceled? The irony…

“You people”. Your pea brain can only lump everyone together and paint them with the same brush.

It may be Canada’s undoing if more people realize and start exclaiming that their rights aren’t protected in Canada. The US Bill of Rights is better. Canada may have to go through painful constitutional reform if our governments keep exploiting loopholes in our constitution. Countries have had civil wars over this and Canada could break up over it. Instead there’s a lot of overlooking and pretending we’re fine going on right now. People can’t handle more upheaval. Denial is easier. The best course is sensible strengthening of our constitution through reform. Instead the government keeps chipping away further at our rights, especially on the ideas front. Bill C-11 and the attempt to add more “Canadian” gatekeepers to internet searches is bad news. The days of having to prop up Can Con at great expense can’t fly in the current context of so many Canadian success stories. The “keeping us safe” from disinformation scheme is especially alarming, as though we’re babies. We barely have a free press as it is. I’d like to keep a semblance of free speech thanks.

Well none of us knows how this started. We do know that very risky virology experiments were taking place at the Wuhan lab and that dangerous viruses and associated research was shared between China, Canada, and the US. What responsible government allows this, let alone funds it then tries to redact all of the information surrounding it? Why were the Chinese research couple fired from the Manitoba lab? I understand the philosophy that there are only so many things we can control and worry about, but these kinds of practices raise serious concerns worthy of scrutiny from citizens. We also have good reasons to question mandates that compromise freedoms and have serious consequences to people’s livelihoods when it’s clear that such mandates were of dubious value, especially by February 2022. This isn’t about wildly outlandish conspiracy theories. Many people rightly feel that decisions are being made and passed down by unaccountable think tanks and bodies at the international level that have far reaching consequences for individual rights, businesses, and our very way of life. These aren’t nothing because we’ve seen it play out in WHO directives and climate policies. Now it’s central bank digital currencies. I never watched Alex Jones and I don’t sit around thinking about the WEF’s next plans, but we’ve never seen this scale of social control in western democracy. Canada does seem to be creeping towards a more Chinese form of capitalism. I’d like to keep our constitutional freedoms.

Hardner, Exflyer, Eyeball…You guys are sell out apologists for this mess we’re in. Party-line Brezhnev stagnating oppressive ways. That’s what your sunny ways became. Carry on, nothing to see here. Don’t worry, nothing has changed and we’re all carrying on in an era of less freedom and higher costs. Make the best of it and don’t make waves, comrade.

These days a person who questions authority is termed a conspiracy theorist. Far right is another favourite dismissive label. Manipulation by unaccountable people happens, whether or not it’s done behind the scenes or in plain sight. It’s necessary to discern when it has society-changing impacts.

I already explained the meaning of the American Dream in the West as a motivator and cornerstone of liberal-democracy and free markets. I don’t know what kind of Canada you think we should have, but I don’t want to live in one that doesn’t value liberty and opportunity.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the milquetoasts like Hardner who defend mediocre and sometimes malignant government practices are actually pretty dangerous when the going gets tough because they’ll go along and give tacit approval. Psychologists have puzzled over how dictators could win hearts and minds, but we know that fear has tremendous power. We also know that people can be very unquestioning and almost zombie-like through social conditioning. The rise of Hitler has been described as mass hypnosis. Hear and see enough messages, fear enough, and feel exhausted or resigned enough and people will accept all sorts of injustice.

True, and people will keep demanding liberty, but governments are developing pretty air-tight means of controlling populations through tech. Surveillance, digital transactions, and data collection systems are making it harder for protesters to push back without social and economic consequences. The overreach must be curtailed or expect more “protective measures.”

Exactly. The pandemic became an excuse to strip away individual rights and downplay their significance in the name of “keeping people safe”. Keep yourselves safe. Once masks, vaccines, and better treatments became widely available, that excuse vanished. People had what they needed to protect themselves. In fact the elderly usually had the option to stay home. Instead of backing off mandates and restrictions or at least respecting the protesters and meeting with them to discuss a plan, the feds doubled down against them. They held all the cards: use of force, removal of licenses, a public forum and media to disparage the opposition, and a new frightening tool, the freezing of bank accounts. I don’t care if some call it paranoia or conspiracy: We have good reasons given our recent history of government overreach to be concerned about our rights. We wait in fearful anticipation of the next crisis and government measures to solve it. The talk of financial turmoil, climate crisis, digital identification, and digital government currencies, all in the context of our government’s use of the EA against the mandate protests, has given people good reason to worry. Sunak is now pushing the digital ID and currencies for G7 countries. It seems the British Conservatives are buying into more government control. I thought Britain has been freer than we are but maybe I spoke too soon. It’s deeply concerning how much government has come to control how we live. Our rights and freedoms can be shut down very fast and there’s little we can do about it. It happened for over two years. I’m not sure people will ever be the same. I see the fallout among kids and elderly. Keeping us safe? No thanks. Protecting our healthcare system? Change the damn healthcare system. Our liberal-democracy is tenuous. Our cultural values are increasingly confused. People are getting poorer. We can’t afford to compromise our way of life further. Or rather, has our way of life permanently changed? Is the American Dream dead?

Yes and the irony is that it’s the truckers and farmers who feed and service these professional politicians. If the society collapses, it’s the truckers and farmers who will be hands on with the trades rebuilding. The elites are totally reliant on them. The police and military know it too, which is why the leaks were happening and government was on shaky ground. The tow companies wouldn’t get on board with the government until they were pressed into service.

The climate crisis is mostly an idea. We have no idea how much our human behaviour is accelerating it and how much of it is part of natural interglacial cycles and sunspot activity. We certainly don’t know if our carbon measures will make any substantive difference to climate change. We do know the impact of carbon taxes on cost of living. It’s significant. We wouldn’t have had such a divided country under Harper. We certainly wouldn’t have had as much protest or an EA. Harper was also much better on China. The Liberals were totally in bed with the Chinese. The US then moved against Huawei and the two Michaels detainments were the collateral damage. Trudeau’s foolish admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship” and his naivety about their manipulation has helped make Western democracy less secure. Don’t get me started on the ridiculous work on bio weapons with Chinese researchers in Manitoba and Wuhan. Insanely reckless to our national security and public safety.

I totally disagree. Harper was consistently professional. He was a much wiser statement internationally and he managed to show respect towards Quebec and Indigenous without turning Canada into a house of shame. His programs supported families without being redistribution schemes for select groups. The scandals you mention barely register compared to Trudeau’s. He saved Canada from a costly and insane central planning climate agreement. Trudeau buys into all the international programs and sells Canadians short to look good on the world stage, though he looks like an attention-seeking fop. Trudeau also won’t let his MP’s vote with their conscience on matters like abortion. He’s a King Godfrey mama’s boy with good hair. Early on I thought maybe there were real smarts and wisdom behind the image, but that impression quickly faded. How can you think for a second that the country is just as good now as it was under Harper? Our dollar is worth much less. Our debt is much higher. Our economic growth is flat. Our cost of living is much higher. Our national pride is much lower. Our freedoms have been reduced and challenged. Our population is far more divided. Our moral compass is haywire, whether the issue is assisted suicide, trans teachers with gargantuan prosthetic breasts, the rise in drug addiction, or the general malaise and confusion of young people. I wasn’t a fan of Harper initially because I was taught to fear conservatives, even as a centrist, but Trudeau has really compromised Canada.

You clearly didn’t see the thousands of regular citizens lining highways and showing up in Ottawa to oppose mandates. You’re using the same degrading language to paint everyone with the extremist brush. “Tiny minority” sounds just like “fringe minority” (Trudeau).

Not true at all that there was a reaching out of government to protesters and their organizers. There was no violence among protesters, the honking and blockade had mostly ended, and agreements were being settled to shrink and move the protest footprint before the EA was invoked.

Yup, and we see these moves in all sorts of areas. You can’t order a passport in less than four months now unless you can provide evidence that you will be visiting another country to the passport office. At what point did we have to start sharing this information with passport officials to get the basic service of ordering a passport? It reminds me of Soviet Russia.

Again, it’s not really about left v right or con v lib anymore because that traditional binary assumed that certain fundamentals were unshakable, namely free market capitalism, constitutional rights, and representative democracy. What happens when the people in power aren’t what they pretend to be and the reality of elitist self-preservation is exposed? I’m talking about a system where the government has become so detached from what most people have to deal with each day that they no longer can really claim to represent the public interest. Don’t get me wrong, this has always been possible, but the pandemic exposed just how inane and out of touch these institutions have become. I don’t even blame the Liberals particularly for this creep, but it’s the result of years of consorting with other privileged and out of touch theorists at various conferences and high level forums. It’s the result of an ensconced self-referential political class. We saw many instances of MP’s simply ignoring constituents during the pandemic. Instead of discussing concerns with people, some MP’s, including our PM, vilified people with opposing views. It wouldn’t be so bad if the discussions didn’t impact people’s constitutional rights: freedom of movement, the right to earn a livelihood, medical discretion, etc. Government failed to recognize the importance and necessity of such rights to a free society. What’s more, the old world political binary struggles to account for the totalitarian impacts of data-driven government that uses algorithms and metrics to determine how much freedom or social engineering is necessary to “protect our healthcare system.” Basically our democratic rights are sacrificed to uphold a failed healthcare system. We learned that our reliance on an unsatisfactory government healthcare system has far wider implications for our social conditions and democracy than we thought. With regard to your whole Trump-Fox-American freedom thing, which you set up as an unCanadian evil, that’s also a very problematic aspect of your argument I had issues with Trump and I never watched Fox very much or at all, but Trump tapped into a very real frustration with politics as usual, particularly the kind of detached professional political class that it’s very arguable runs our federal government. If you value economic and political freedom, it’s very hard to argue in favour of our current Liberal government. I don’t think you appreciate just how tentative our democracy has become and just how important it is to affirm our rights within it. Canada and much of the Weat has veered too close to China and too dependent on the state to tell us what we deserve and how we should live. When a sizeable chunk of the country starts to see this unfolding in our government, that’s a real problem that isn’t just about “conspiracy clowns”. Certainly ignoring such concerns just proves how far we’ve drifted as a society from important values that used to be considered fundamental. The safety argument used to justify all sorts of controls starts to look pretty shabby. So I understand your views as a kind of cognitive dissonance, a difficulty with absorbing how much the forces at play have changed. Poilievre is popular because he does seem to understand the forces and talks about people wanting control of their lives back. His rejection of government that’s beholden to unelected international think tanks is also important, because both the left and right parties got too cozy with this out of touch jet set. As for your unquestioned “reality” of “climate change”, I certainly don’t think most people understand the data on this or just how theoretical and hard it is to discern causes and the human impacts of climate change. I certainly think it’s stupid to throw billions of tax dollars at “fighting” it I also think it’s incredibly irresponsible to our energy needs and security to regulate and tax our energy producers into the ground. It makes life more expensive and less secure for Canadians. My politics were always slightly left of centre, but the left used to be about workers. I’ve tried turning to the Conservatives because I think that they now care more about rights and cost of living. Yet I think the Conservatives can easily lapse into the same out of touch, virtue signalling, self-serving phoney woke-green nut jobs as the Liberals have clearly become. Time will tell, but if you don’t think that the government funding of print and other legacy media has helped insert government narratives in our press, I can’t help you.

No that’s not the issue. China had far fewer deaths but most Canadians don’t want to emigrate to China. The issue is that because our healthcare system is weak and our governments decided that individual medical discretion and constitutional rights are less important than protecting a failed system and pretending it isn’t failed, government essentially lapsed into totalitarianism. Individual rights such as freedom of movement and medical discretion were overridden. I’d say that for much of the pandemic the public understood that sacrifices were necessary, but by the time vaccines became available to anyone who wanted them and the dominant Covid strains weakened, the mandates came to look unnecessarily harsh and arbitrary. People had vaccines, masks, and treatments to protect themselves irrespective of what other people did. For government not even to talk to the opposition and instead to vilify them, was pretty awful. The EA, bank account freezes, etc. added insult to injury. You don’t get to impose drastic rules on people without damn good reasons or to treat them harshly without damn good reasons. There simply weren’t good reasons for any of this. It looked like a fearful and cowardly government killed a fly with a sledgehammer.

The Globe is mostly left wing pablum now. I’d like to know more about what you consider “conspiracy clown” because your views seem mostly left wing, so I think anything right would fall into the clown category in your eyes. I’ll venture to assume that you’re referring to people who question having decisions made for them by unelected think tanks overseas in places like Davos. There’s no conspiracy there. The attempt of such bodies to make life altering decisions for millions of people is blatant and open. The pushback against this is real and well understood by many Canadians, especially young people. I think you may just be stuck in an old paradigm of roughly B Clinton versus G Bush type liberal versus conservative. Legacy media has somewhat lost the plot understanding the new forces at play, which are more about the elites versus the workers and fading middle class. It’s important to understand this dynamic, because people who are already struggling to pay their bills are being squeezed further by somewhat nebulous abstract causes like “fighting climate change” and “equity” identity politics that are adding costs (e.g. carbon taxes) and creating new forms of discrimination. These causes are elite causes. They come from liberal arts colleges, corporate training, and political leadership forums. They’re removed from the everyday challenges most people face. I’m interested in news that hasn’t been editorialized by self-interested ideologues or editors who are so petrified of losing government funding or being canceled that they won’t make waves when necessary. If I’m reading opinions, I want them to be deeply critical and honest about the ways in which authorities self-aggrandize and distract from real injustice. It’s not even about how conservative a journalist is for me. My favourite journalist Beri Weiss is left wing, but she’s merciless to the left and right when it comes to giving an honest and fair account. If you think that the general MSM consensus Liberal perspective is where journalism should continue to be in Canada, I’m not interested in more government cheerleading fluff.

The Star has become radical left in the last decade. It used to be a great paper. The Globe is now firmly Liberal. It used to be Conservative. The National Post is pretty centrist. There are no mainstream conservative papers. The CBC and CTV are Liberal. I get my news online now, mostly through Substack.

It’s not that there’s no truth in the news. It’s that it’s watered down in order to never make waves with the employer, which in Canada is now largely the government, because of the heavy government funding. It will get even worse once the CRTC gets their paws on Google, YouTube, etc. and starts telling us what content is “Canadian” enough. The bills are going to the Senate…

Wrong. The Conservatives don’t constantly express how shameful Canada is. The Liberals of the Chrétien era were fiscally prudent. That party is gone. The current Liberals stole the 2015 election platform of the NDP and continue to overspend, over-tax, and wonder why inflation climbs and living standards drop.

True. Most MSM in Canada sounds like government press releases.

Exactly. It shows that the emperor wears no clothes. His failure is written all over the events. He insulted thousands (millions really) of Canadians who had legitimate concerns about vaccine mandates and restrictions after two years of deprivations and serious damage to mental health and businesses. Rather than reaching out and working with people he insulted them, hid, and imposed the harshest measures available, the “nuclear option”. This wasn’t an FLQ terrorist action resulting in kidnapping and murder. Fair minded people who see how our constitutional rights were disregarded and the failure in government leadership are made to feel like their concerns are illegitimate. It’s called gaslighting.

You’re such a sycophant of the Trudeau regime. You think it’s fine to declare martial law (that’s what it is under a euphemistic name) to put down a non-violent legal protest that was in the midst of having its sharpest edges dulled (removal of blockades, ending of honking, shrinkage of protest footprint), and that Trudeau’s disparaging of a large segment of Canadian society that opposed mandates was fine. You know about the freezing of bank accounts, seizure of assets, etc. For you to think this wasn’t a big deal and that it won’t be remembered in our history books is pure denial of the obvious. The Freedom Convoy and the “democratic slippage” of our Canadian government’s overreach won’t be forgotten. In fact it was an international symbol of a modern liberal democracy under threat of lapsing into totalitarianism. People couldn’t believe what was unfolding in Canada. It was highly significant.