Zeitgeist

I’m not disputing that climate change exists nor that there’s a human impact. I question the degree to which humans are impacting it and whether the high costs of attempting to mitigate our impact is worth paying given the coming population drop due to demographic patterns and the inevitable technological advances that will eventually have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions. The Earth has been hotter and colder than it is today, with humans on it. We know that our climate oscillates between hotter and warmer periods due to astronomical patterns. We have had flooded coastlines and ice ages that people survived. We’re better able to adapt than ever before. Set up affordable building codes and carbon capture, expand nuclear, hydro, etc. Incentivize green power in reasonable ways. We shouldn’t be destroying our finances to fight a somewhat theoretical problem with costly theoretical solutions.

Norway has a ton of oil that funds government programs, pensions, etc. You can’t really compare Norway’s conditions to most countries of a similar size. It happens to sit on oil like Saudi Arabia. The politicians were at least smart enough to keep the wealth for the public. However, only Norwegians can afford the high cost of living there.

Who is hanging out with Nazis? What nonsense have you swallowed? Climate change is the best scam going for government to take and redistribute more of workers’ money. No one knows how much our human activity impacts climate change or whether any of the current government solutions will fix it. Nevertheless, we are expected to take this medicine of carbon taxes as the cost of living goes through the roof.

You’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There’s nothing radical about Poilievre. He’s attempting to correct the country’s course, which Trudeau has brought closer to radical left internationalist dictatorship. Your constitutional rights are weak, especially under Trudeau. You’re allowed to have limited perspectives in Canada. It’s creepy. I would have a foot outside Canada to protect yourself when the next “crisis” hits, because this government wants to control your life more.

No one knows who the f@k Eyeball is. Besides, you’re a communist, so you get full party protection.

Canadians are only allowed to have one political perspective. If they criticize the government they lose their jobs or are disciplined and forced to make apologies. Free speech is dead in Canada. The recent court orders compelling speech are straight out of Stalin’s USSR.

It’s expensive at a time of expensive energy and goods.

I’m not even right-wing. Unverifiable expensive solutions to unverifiable problems.

Typical communist central-planning thinking. You’re so lost to the radical left. Stop pretending to be conservative. You do realize that by definition your existence is at the expense of the environment and impacts climate change. Carbon tax is existence tax. We need heat and food to exist and shouldn’t have to pay a surcharge for meeting our basic needs to survive. Carbon taxes are for extremely stupid suckers.

Stupid is as stupid does. Not even the US Democrats would inflict these costs on the American people. The cost of living is high enough. A slave, hive mentality is now prevalent in Canada.

Carbon taxes are for stupid suckers.

You illustrate the typical shoot yourself in the foot, I can’t think for myself and need the state to punish me attitude in Canada. Carbon taxes are perfect for stupid naive people. In fact, take away their cars and central heating. Don’t allow them to have kids. Stop them from eating meat. Ban heterosexuality. Anything to reduce the carbon footprint of humans. Canadians are probably willing to swallow all this oppression. Paying these extra taxes that make no measurable difference to climate change makes you a good person though. Why? The gubernment tells me so. Lol.

I find your complete faith in multiple vaccines just as radical as the anti-vaxxer who attributes the deaths of all vaccinated people to vaccines. Science has a way of evolving. If you can’t acknowledge that some people have adverse side effects from the vaccine and that the vaccine is relatively new and therefore unsubstantiated by long-term trials, that can also be called unscientific and superstitious. I’m very sorry to hear about your wife.

When Harper started funding legacy media it was to rescue it rather than influence it. Yes Diefenbaker started military reductions but it got a lot worse in the 70’s. Harper only reversed course on spending after the 2008 crisis. He maintained a contingency fund and a plan to return to being in the black. Our dollar was strongest it’s been in decades and we avoided the painful US recession. Justin moved straight into deficit spending with his reckless debt-to GDP scheme. He added taxes, including the carbon taxes, and got rid of the tax write-off for child sports and arts activities. He also put Canada firmly in bed with China and God knows what dangerous virology information was shared with the Chinese researchers who were fired. He also mandated a pro abortion stance for Liberal party members and federal workers. He caused major national shame and hemorrhaging of funds over his various Indigenous suck-up schemes. He imposed martial law on thousands of lawful protesters, publicly smeared political opponents, and went after their money. Trudeau has done more damage to Canada than any PM in all of Canadian history.

More self-righteous comments from the universally Democrat-loving Canadians. ?

You seem to have missed the important memo about the coming population drop as the Boomer generation dies off. Canada almost has a negative birth rate, which is why immigration continues to be pushed. If Canadians had more kids, less immigration would be necessary to maintain the workforce. Really we should be able to live with a lower population over time as automation makes many jobs redundant, but we need to ensure that the profits generated through automation get to the public WITHOUT lapsing into totalitarian controls, which is essentially the managed economy or fake capitalism (top-down Chinese style totalitarian capitalism). I believe that such totalitarian controls are the single greatest threat to humanity. We can adapt to climate change by migrating, building dikes, constructing differently, etc. Technology will reduce emissions over time. However, when “enlightened” leaders start limiting how much we can travel, what we can buy, to the degree of imprisoning people in their homes, under the threat of asset seizure, public ridicule, criminalization, etc., we’re in real trouble. Canada is a sucker for top-down central planning. Canadians generally believe and do what governments and state-funded media say. There’s no real opposition in Canada. Liberal media instilled fear of cultural values and thinking for oneself, which are portrayed as extremist, colonial, patriarchal, etc. Constitutional rights in Canada are increasingly compromised in the interest of the state’s current agenda. You have no constitutional property rights in Canada. Pierre Trudeau’s flirtation with Castro and snubbing of the US seemed like the “cool” counter-cultural thing to do in the era of Vietnam and draft-dodging, but it has resulted in Justin’s Post-National State wherein Canada’s culture is erased and deplored as certain preferred groups are encouraged to dominate: Quebec, BC NDP, China, UN, certain well-connected Indigenous organizations, etc. The US had to force Canada into a corner over Huawei 5G. The Trudeaus and many like-minded Liberal-NDP types are like the spoiled rich kid who rebels against the providers (US export market and NATO defence), causing all sorts of shit for the West. We went from having a more values-based society with a strong Canadian dollar and shrinking taxes under Harper to this overbearing interventionist Liberal-NDP regime that constantly tells us how we should live and think while putting our economy at risk by overspending, hurting national pride, and reducing free speech. Canada is increasingly a de facto one party state of government-dependent and controlled sucks. We don’t have an independent foreign policy because our military is weakened and our PM constantly puts unaccountable international agendas ahead of the interests of Canadians. From carbon taxes to over-regulation to suppression of constitutional rights, Canada is in a rut.

No, you miss the whole point of Jesus’ sacrifice. We move away from the fire and brimstone “eye for an eye” into salvation. “Judge not lest ye be judged.” Jesus consorted with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. His last words on the cross were, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” His life is then sacrificed so that sinners (humanity) can be redeemed. He says, “It is done” before he dies because the sacrifice is complete. However, belief in any of this is a matter of faith. I can’t make you believe. It’s a leap one takes or doesn’t take. I’ve done the atheist nihilist existentialist thing before. I’m not going to try to sell it to you. I’m merely explaining what the majority of people who call themselves Christians believe.

Funny, you don’t know much about Christianity, huh?

That’s not true at all. Perfection isn’t required of humanity. Faith is what matters most and trying to follow the Commandments, which in Christianity are summed up as love God and love thy neighbour. When we fall short we ask for forgiveness and guidance.

The critics bcscapper and Aristides are way out of their depth n theology and religion. I also think their ethics are weak for atheists. Nihilistic.

Most of the worst crimes and mass murders in history were committed by atheist regimes: Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao…. Hitler used religion to manipulate people but he didn’t believe in it. You throw out platitudes and generalizations. Be specific. Christianity ended servitude in the Roman Empire and was used to justify eliminating slavery in the US. The Old Testament is the ongoing story of the enslavement of the Israelites by tyrants and liberation through following the Covenant.

Don’t bring your notion of God into this. People have choices or we wouldn’t be free. Rather than repeat myself here, read my last post on the indoctrinating children on euthanasia thread. I’m not so naive as to not understand that we often seek the lesser of evils, that killing is done on ethical grounds in war to prevent greater amounts of killing, etc., but that kind of greater good long term self-defence isn’t what we’re talking about here. You can leave religion out of the discussion and talk solely about the ethics of active euthanasia. My position is clear in the post I referenced. I don’t judge people who have suicided or the people who’ve assisted them. I do think Canada is getting into bad practices.

These remarks reveal a shallow understanding of theology, logic, and ethics. There’s a difference between causing suffering personally and not relieving someone’s suffering. To relieve someone else’s suffering one has to be in a position to do so. One has also to perceive that suffering is taking place. One person’s solution to suffering may differ from someone else’s. For example, if a child is “starving in front of me”, while I’d give that child food and drink, I’d have many other questions: Where is this child’s caregiver? Since there’s likely to be one, why isn’t this parent feeding his or her child? If the parent has the money and it’s a choice the parent made not to feed the child, I’d call CAS due to parental neglect. In fact even if the parent couldn’t afford food I’d call CAS because they can align the parent with social services such as family shelters. If I could speak to the parent I’d ask why a food bank wasn’t accessed and direct him or her accordingly. Food and shelter are provided free in Canada for people in desperate circumstances. If the parent wasn’t in a position to take care of the child, there are temporary foster homes available. If you’re talking about people overseas that’s a different situation because it’s very hard to address the specific circumstances of a person overseas without relying on a charity that has administrative costs. It can certainly help but you may not know who it helped or how much of your donation actually gets to the intended target. Countries have their own rules, can be corrupt, etc. Charity is good but some charities are much better than others. If you want to help a child overseas you’re likely reliant on an intermediary organization. So don’t compare actively killing a child to not donating to a charity overseas that may help a child who may be starving. We need to meet our own basic needs to be of much help to anyone. Also we are thinking, feeling people. “Man does not live on bread alone.” I suggest that there are many ways of helping people to manage their mental and emotional needs that don’t involve helping them kill themselves. The government-assisted suicide epidemic in Canada is growing and speaks to insufficient healthcare. In terms of your understanding of who “God” is and whether God thinks your analogue is valid, I’m sure we have different understandings of what God means and I acknowledge that mine is limited. I think yours is too. Humans have choices, though our circumstances differ. It’s hard to understand why the circumstances into which we’re born can differ so radically or why some people get very sick or suffer sudden hardship. There are books on the topic such as, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? These are hard questions and you’re free to be an atheist. I’m not going to sell faith. I do think that faith factors into well-being. Research has shown that religious people tend to overcome mental health challenges with better outcomes. I don’t judge an adult of sound mind who chooses suicide. I don’t judge anyone who “suicides”. However, I think the state is in a precarious ethical position when assisting with this process. Were all treatments attempted (drugs, counselling, surgeries, etc.?). Are there other causes, such as socioeconomic ones (e.g. inability to access housing and supports)? Is the person of sound mind and how do you know? As if these questions weren’t hard enough to answer, now we have some practitioners suggesting that people who aren’t of sound mind should be helped to kill themselves. We hear that children and people who aren’t in a position to make informed decisions to protect their health and must rely on adults to protect them may soon be killed by the state. What guiding principles remain here? Who can be trusted to decide who deserves to live or die when the basic principle, “Thou shalt not kill?” is abandoned and our healthcare system gets into the business of killing people? All of this was predicted and laid out by medical ethicists decades ago. The supporters of MAID said that the ethical problems unfolding with it today would never happen. I think we need to address our system’s ability to cure people before we start adding ways to kill people.

Who here in Canada can watch a child starve? We don’t let kids starve in Canada. Even in most of the developing world today it’s hard to find children starving to death. Yes such kids exist. Do you have their addresses?

That’s a ridiculous analogue. There’s a big difference between actively doing something extremely harmful or lethal versus doing what you think is necessary to live as suffering persists in other places. You want to discredit virtue. I guess that it’s because you don’t want to recognize that virtue is possible as it reminds you of your weaknesses. It’s normal to have weaknesses, but the cynicism line wears thin pretty fast. I say that as someone struggling with my own cynicism.