Zeitgeist

Lots of chatter about a manufactured food shortage hitting Europe or cyber attack, EMT, etc. The crisis isn’t always the real crisis in such situations. The response is. Everyone has to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist today unfortunately, because it lets the authorities know we’re watching back.

That’s nice. Put your head back in the sand.

Any fool can borrow money to overspend. There’s also a fundamental problem with the idea that government should take care of so many aspects of your life, at your expense of course. It’s weak and counter to the idea that you can use your talents to build what you value and what you think others will value. It’s the state as parent. Nanny state.

The issue is that you can’t have a heavily socialized economy and a low-cost, entrepreneurial, open economy at the same time. Canada is at the extreme end of socialism and creeping towards communism. Too many expensive and ineffectual government programs and policies. When mainstream media have become cheerleaders of government and free speech is being cut back, you can see the results: big, overbearing bureaucracy, less business opportunity, lower incomes that are more heavily taxed, more treatment of ideology as fact, and so on. It’s the slow moving, ham-fisted yet very intrusive and overbearing government problem we see in the most left-leaning European countries. It’s the central planning cookie cutter Soviet system in waiting. Self-determination and wealth are frowned upon and the successful are mocked and shaken down for taxes to maintain the bloated nanny state. Free speech is for “alt right” capitalists, colonialists, and imperialists. The rhetoric is very Marxist. Do you honestly think that such a system is better for working people? It’s not, certainly not in the long run. Money and talent will flee the country and people will get poorer. Our incomes have declined relative to the US over the past decade.

So I would counter that perspective by saying that Peterson is taken very seriously by people who make important decisions impacting people’s lives far more than many intellectuals because of his prowess and ability to explain complex ideas in layman’s terms, but also because he’s able to discern what’s pertinent and applicable, whereas many intellectuals can’t translate ideas to other disciplines or see what’s relevant about what they know to the lives of most people. It’s the ivory tower problem. Testifying before Congress and interviewing highly influential public figures doesn’t make him a hack. I would be careful with this “We know better” mentality and the idea that very few people are qualified to raise questions about government policy, because it’s the elitist perspective that ordinary citizens don’t know what’s good for them. It’s an anti-democratic perspective, actually. Expertise and credentialism are important when speaking about specific issues within a specialized field, but when the issues are across fields and extend beyond academia, they are fair game for the public to weigh in. You can’t avoid it, actually, because they will have input politically in a democracy, thankfully.

It’s been a thousand bones.

You don’t seem to see the inflationary impact on housing and how services are stretched due to policies that have essentially ignored the cost of living challenges to people of higher taxation, regulation, and unprecedented mass immigration. Life has become much more expensive, and trying to spend money we don’t have to fix it has accelerated the crisis. Look at wage growth and the amount of people’s salaries in Canada dedicated to housing, transportation, and heating alone. Much of this crisis relates to policy choices over time. It has gotten much harder for people in the last several years, and only so much can be blamed on the pandemic, which also could’ve been handled differently.

The “expert” tact simply doesn’t hold as much water as it used to because people have the ability to access much of the same information as the experts. Yes it’s important to respect someone’s credentials and the rules of apprenticeship within the field. There’s also the very basic and longstanding convention of academic freedom and freedom of expression. Peterson is speaking about these general concepts because they have been attacked at the legislative and policy levels by governments, professional associations, and universities. He’s qualified to address such abrogations and can comment on the psychological damage and political consequences with knowledge and authority. Others from other fields can weigh in and I hope they do. Atwood and Rowling have spoken out too thankfully. Peterson just happens to have command within influential online media. I don’t hold him up as a saviour because his flaws are obvious and he’s just one person speaking about his experiences. It’s nevertheless very important because few people have the resources and platforms that he does. Most people just go along to get along, and a part of them dies each day.

It’s simply a tax on existence, because we need the products and services that have carbon taxes, such as heating, transportation, and the products impacted by the multiplier effects of these taxes through the supply chain. The carbon tax is about making life more expensive so that we live less: go fewer places, buy less, eat less, stay warm less, have less, and die more. Carbon taxes hurt people because the war on carbon footprints is a war on humanity.

Since when should government provide all of the services that individuals used to choose to pay for themselves? When did Canada become Cuba? 2015? You do realize that all of this is being paid for by debt at this point, hurting future generations? If we can’t even get government healthcare right, should we really be overspending on more lousy government services? Trudeau has tripled government spending.

All of this is concerning, but half the posters on here spend their time defending or denying that any of this is happening or worth worrying about. Some simply have a visceral hatred or jealousy of Peterson, so they disagree with anything he says because he says it. Most people are simply too busy, too scared of repercussions, too confused, too brainwashed, or too complaisant to do anything about the creeping controls over speech and behaviour. The pandemic, planned or unplanned (and we’ll probably never know the truth), provided authorities with an opportunity to test the limits of surveillance, removal of rights, and enforcement through fines, job loss, freezing of bank accounts, and general deplatforming. Imagine adding more technology for control and surveillance in similar or even bigger crises. Unfortunately we’ve seen that policy can be set and handed down from non-state unelected bodies radically and efficiently. Some politicians are complete dupes or even embrace this governance. It explains why now there are only two goals: inclusivity and fighting climate change. These ideas and the policies supporting them are overriding all other considerations, much as “keeping us safe” during the pandemic obliterated basic constitutional rights. What’s strange is that even though most people you talk to have other priorities, the right think of these imposed values is always the narrative in the background of our lives: in government, media, training at work, even at most churches. We know that something is amiss, but we can’t quite remember or understand what.

I always opposed going to Iraq and I marched with Jack Layton against it. Was I a commie dingbat? Probably, but I stand by opposing that invasion. I agree that Trump is a strange standard of preference, but he was right that Obama’s backing of a Shi-ite unelected government in Iraq only added to the creation of ISIS, though W certainly got the US in deep over there. My issue with Biden is that his whole Ukraine strategy is yet another warmongering move directed from the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and God knows what other unelected scriptwriters. Canada is along for the ride. I don’t think Putin would’ve seen a need to get more invested in Ukraine if Trump was at the helm. We had no wars under Trump. That whole saga can be traced back to NATO’s move eastward after Secretary of State James Baker promised the opposite.

Yet again we hear funding announcements from a government that is driving up debt at record levels. It’s so irresponsible and amounts to nothing more than bribing voters with taxpayer money. $6 billion for housing, $1 billion for school breakfasts, countless billions for childcare and pharmaceuticals, including free birth control in a country with a collapsing birth rate. How can anyone support this? According to its latest fiscal projections, the federal government will spend $449.8 billion on programs and services in 2023/24—up 75.5 per cent (nominally) from 2014/15 when program spending was $256.2 billion. Adjusting for population growth and inflation, the Trudeau government has recorded the five-highest years (2018-2022) of per-person spending in Canadian history, and is on track to record a sixth. But have we seen a corresponding increase in economic growth? “Canada has experienced an economic growth crisis for the last decade. One of the best ways to measure economic growth is to use inflation-adjusted per-person gross domestic product (GDP), which provides the broadest measure of living standards for Canadians. According to a recent study by Philip Cross, former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, between 2013 and 2022 Canada’s per-person GDP (inflation-adjusted) grew at its slowest pace since the 1930s. Moreover, economic growth in Canada has fallen well behind growth in the United States, showing that Canada’s stagnation was not inevitable.” https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/prime-minister-rejects-austerity-despite-massive-debt-and-dismal-economic-growth

I would be content as a starting point to wind the clock back to around 2010 or 2012. Things really came apart a couple of years into Trudeau’s government and got intensively worse during the pandemic. Probably the late 90’s was the golden age for liberal democracy and the nation state. From 2001 on, including the War on Terror, 2008 market meltdown, and worst of all the C-19 shutdown, we have seen major challenges to freedom, democracy, and basic morality.

Unfortunately all of this absurdity is Canada today. There’s very little political opposition to it, and people who attempt to call out what’s happening are shunned because we’ve become a country of spineless unquestioning sheep.

I assume that you’re referring to Iran-Contra? No doubt that was bad and the Americans propped up some dictators to fight the Soviets and communists. How much those events 40 years ago had to do with the drug lord who hurt your niece’s family is pretty hard to quantify. My guess is very little. There were multiple operations underway fighting drug lords but many governments were in bed with drug lords throughout central and South America, so these are complicated situations. Now if you wanted to talk about the matter of Chavez’s influence and the various American involvements for better and worse, yes those are far more recent and relevant events that have impacted current migration. There’s a lot of poverty and corruption in those regions that you can’t blame on America. You’ll try though. Anyway, I’ve weighed in on countless wars and interventions funded or led by America that I thought were dubious Unfortunately you have to make decisions in life that involve supporting politicians. No one’s hands are clean but some are much better than others.

Poor baby. What does Reagan have to do with your niece? Nada. Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Turn that frown upside down. Lol I don’t even think Reagan is especially great. I do think he’s better than many of the clowns running today.

Are you a witch? There’s a giant cauldron of boiling water and an angry mob waiting for you.

Stooping to insults, huh? Okay I’ll call you out as basically an amoral whiner You’re sitting on the fence trying to live the pleasurable life as the elitist you truly are while paying lip service to caring about workers and poor people. Hardner is another mamby-pamby enabler. Herbie is a Marxist because he likes getting free stuff and being a layabout. You’re all pretty transparent. The CIA, Pentagon, and a slew of agencies run the US. Reagan couldn’t penetrate that and either could Kennedy or Trump. The reason I cite Reagan is because he won the Cold War and in many ways represented the American spirit. For a brief time the world seemed quite united. Life was pretty good under Clinton too. The American Dream of getting a decent job, owning a home, and having kids if you want them, was alive and well. People understood the value of democracy and generally knew the difference between right and wrong. We’ve gone backwards since at least 2019.

I’m fine with Ronald Reagan.

Judeo-Christian institutions are the roots of the tree.

You’re incredibly selective in your accounts. I could talk as much about the Act of Supremacy under Henry the 8th or the mass murder of clerics during the French Revolution as I can about the Spanish Inquisition. The medieval society centred around the church made sense spiritually, intellectually, and financially to the villagers because it gave their lives a higher purpose, provided a bullwark against the material self-interest of the local lords and monarchs, and it provided an education to the illiterate masses prior to the printing press. I’m not going to have a pissing contest over travel, even if I’m sure I’d win it. One doesn’t need to travel to learn. What’s important to understand is that the most advanced and liberated societies had their origins in Christianity. That wasn’t by chance, because our higher institutions of learning began as religious institutions, and they reflected the apprenticeship process of learning towards mastery in the first guilds and manufacturing. Much more can be said on these topics, but your perspective is one that makes it seem that our civilization would’ve happened without the important foundations of Christendom and Judaism, which were spread around the West primarily through the Greek and Roman civilizations and had antecedents in many prior cultures. Learn and respect history, because it explains a lot about what works and what doesn’t in societies.

The only problem with the Conservatives is that they aren’t conservative enough. I want them to be more socially conservative too, but as Canadians have been fed a steady diet of cultural Marxist BS through state-funded media and education, which have been hijacked by the radical left, Canada seems locked into left wing governments.

You fail to understand the alternatives. You don’t see that it was through the Christianization of the Roman Empire that slavery lessened, arbitrary rule and oppression were curtailed, and checks on the authority of Caesar or the King were put in place. These advances were the logical conclusions of a better moral framework. The first universities were ecclesiastical. The renaissance was a rebirth of the spirit of the elevation of opportunity. The first modern democratic jurisdictions were the Italian merchant city-states that came out of this fertile ground. The missionaries and “colonizers” of North America exchanged and advanced technology. Even the Reformation that brought us the Protestant Work Ethic that brought us the US, Canada, and much of what we value about the modern nation state, grew out of an attempt to find the true unmediated message of Christ, who was following in a long line of histories in the Old Testament and prior. Erase or remove those histories or belittle their importance and see what results. The Bible is the most important book in Western culture, both from a religious and literary perspective. Even taken as fiction, its stories reveal powerful and important truths about human nature and the world.

Well I remember your perspectives late in the pandemic. You’re basically a closet fascist, as far as I can tell. God and religion are bulwarks against the kind of extreme statism you support. You take for granted the conditions that allow you to thrive and you fail to see the causes that gave rise to them. Basically you think anything goes morally as long as the state supports it, even if that meant that your liberty was removed. You don’t see any higher authority than the state. Who or what do you think should guide young people? Or do you think that young people don’t need guides? Or are you of the secular fascist ideology, thinking that anything non-religious is by definition good, so our young should be guided by LGBTQ2S+ and radical feminists who hate “the patriarchy” or race obsessed activists who hate the “settler colonialists”? Take away people’s appeal to a higher authority than the state and all you will get is a government pretending to know how everyone should live, reducing parental rights while giving more power to the state, and pushing the population into servitude in order to meet puritanical net zero and quasi-Marxist goals for equality of outcome. Individual freedom will be sacrificed to meet state goals for the hive-society, much as happens in China. I won’t even get into the implications for fertility and civilizational suicide. What do soul-less individuals matter in this cultural Marxist world view? Only the collective matters and “saving the planet”, whatever that means. I can promise it’s dystopian.