GrittyLeftist

In 1987 I was a nerdy 6 year old who really liked astronomy. I read every book I could find in my local library about our solar system, and because I was way out in the sticks, most of those books were written in the 50s-70s. I learned that Venus is farther away from the Sun than Mercury is, but Mercury is much less hot - surface temperature of Venus is ~900F while on Mercury is ~800F, even though Venus is about 31 million miles farther from the Sun than Mercury. The reason, I learned, is because Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and methane, which are "greenhouse gasses" that trap heat. FWIW, the only scientists who dispute that greenhouse gasses can alter the climate of planets are the ideological heirs of the doctors who were paid by tobacco companies to testify absurdities like, "passive smoking is not harmful." If anyone is interested and considers the Scientific American to be a reliable source I could offer them this link: Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public - Scientific American ____________ OK, let's pretend I've proven to everyone that climate change is real and we should do something about it - I haven't, but whatchagonnado? Let's talk about Trudeau's new plan. Several things can be true at the same time - it doesn't go far enough, it lacks sufficient international buy-in, it is not the most efficient way to rein in the harmful effects of pollution, it allows political expediency to trump real science in some particulars, it is better than Trudeau's old plan. Good arguments can be made to support these ideas, among others. However, politics is not a choice between perfection and the prime minister. It is a choice between multiple competing imperfect people, parties and ideas. Rather than, "is this the perfect way forward," we perhaps ought to ask, "is this an improvement over the plans put forward by other electable politicians?" Viewed through this lens, we might be able to arrive at more reasonable and helpful conclusions. Just a thought; thanks for reading!

Respectfully, I think we are too far apart to agree on very much, so instead of disputing your conclusions I will try to address your premises and share some neat things I've learned in the past few years. ____ Marxists are supporters of the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. BLM is a decentralized movement that opposes the extralegal murder of black people by police officers and all other forms of racially motivated violence against black people. In order to make Marxists happy you would need to get rid of capitalism. In order to make BLM happy you would need to make it illegal to use violence against black people for being black (and actually enforce those laws). Different grievances. They are related only in that both advocate for different types of equality - Marxists want economic and social equality, BLM wants racial equality. There are some Marxists in the BLM crowd, much as there are some white people in the BLM crowd. Calling BLM, as a whole, "Marxist," is about as accurate as calling it "white." ____ The Liberal party of Canada is not "far left", although they are "farther left than they were 20 years ago." Classical Liberals (the ideology that claims government requires the consent of the governed, sees society as composed of individuals, believes strongly in individual rights, etc) are not either. They are, at most, left-of-centre. If you look farther left of them you will see Social Democrats, who believe that we should work within the bounds of capitalism using democracy to advocate for more socialistic policies such as universal health care. If you look even further left you will find your Socialists, Communists and Anarchists of varying stripes. The farther left you look, the more people fragment, and extreme leftists do far too much bickering amongst themselves to be able to promote their ideologies, which is part of why most people don't really know anything about them. Someone who actually WAS far left would be advocating to violently overthrow capitalism so that the working class could assume control of the means of production, or they would be claiming that governments are illegitimate because they use violence in ways that cannot be justified, or they would be saying things like, "eat your landlord," and "the only thing billionaires should be running for is their lives." ___ There are two ways to use the phrases "left" and "right". One of them is to use them to locate ideologies on the political spectrum, for example, "Fascism is a far right ideology". The other way is to describe ideologies relative to your position. For example, if I worked for Fox News I would regularly describe CNN as being "far-left", because compared to me, they are far-left. However, CNN is, in reality, right-of-centre. They are a privately owned, for-profit multinational corporation - they are clearly not trying to create a classless and/or stateless society. It has been argued that the real reason Fox News uses the phrase "far-left" to describe CNN is as a sneaky trick. If the ideas on CNN are radical, dangerous, and subversive, then anyone who has ideas that are even farther left than the ones on CNN must just be a raving nutcase whose opinions can be dismissed out of hand. It has be argued that this serves to artificially limit the scope of acceptable political debate. ____ Anyways, hope this is helpful. My goal is to share knowledge, not to be a troll. Thanks for reading!

This crisis has amply demonstrated that the wrong people are in charge of society. After SARS, a plan was put in place in case of a novel coronavirus but it was not followed. Canada has cared more about the bottom line of the wealthy than the right of citizens to not die of the plague right from day one. For me, the right play would have been to invoke the Emergency Measures Act a year ago at the latest. Then we could have temporarily suspended Charter rights such as the right to travel, the right to free assembly, and the right of newspapers to print covid denialism. Could have saved a lot of lives... but it would have cost the megarich some money. Can't have that. Besides, what's the point in being an oligarch if you can't flit around the world on your private jet, spreading plague everywhere you go?

It "freely" allows the super-rich to plunder our economies so that they can "freely" move that wealth to overseas secret bank accounts and "freely" choose not to pay taxes on it. Yay freedom!

I think there is probably a real word to describe this, but I don't know what it is, so I call it "moral infrastructure." "Moral infrastructure" = "the values, beliefs and behaviors that allow a society to operate in a certain way safely and peacefully". For instance, if you live in a town where people can safely leave their doors unlocked, you have the moral infrastructure to support the lifestyle choice of not locking your door. I worry that bad actors are making a ton of money by undermining the moral infrastructure that supports free speech.

Anyone following Trump is an extreme right winger - where else on the spectrum could they possible be located? Having read that article, it does not claim that anyone on the left or the center helped storm the capitol building. That said, on the more interesting question of what this portends for Canadian democracy - bear with me, this takes some explanation. Free speech is the idea that we ought to be free to speak our beliefs without fear of government censorship and retaliation. Speech acts are when, by saying something, we are also performing an action. Marriage vows, declarations of war, and promises are classic examples. Note that we hold people responsible for their speech acts in a way that we do not for their free speech. The Principle of Harm states that we ought to be free to do whatever we want, as long as it does not harm someone else. I believe that, for decades, we have been allowing a few wealthy, privileged people to use their free speech to perform speech acts that violate the principle of harm, and that it has been horrible for our democracy. A few examples follow: In the 70s governments were not yet sure if smoking was bad. Trying to create good public health policy, they paid many doctors to testify under oath to Parliament/Congress/etc. Some of those doctors, who were on the payroll of tobacco companies, testified under oath things like, "passive smoking is not harmful." Many people were harmed by the delay this caused in implementing public health measures we would nowadays believe to be common sense. Those doctors were allowed to keep their profits and their credentials, and many of them were paid for expert testimony on other occasions as well. None of them were brought to justice, in spite of having committed perjury. In the 00s, Fox News platformed a bunch of "experts" who claimed, without evidence, that Iraq was behind 9-11 and had WMD. Those claims were obviously false in real time, but they convinced enough Americans that their Republican government was able to invade Iraq. Now millions of people are dead and neither the "experts" nor the "news" organizations that profited by platforming them, have ever been brought to justice for the consequences of their lies. You can probably think of other instances where people were allowed to use their free speech to perform speech acts that violated the harm principle. We don't have to let them get away with it. When we figure out a good mechanism for holding people to account for these types of misdeeds, we will see the health of our democracy improve. We could make it illegal for an organization that calls itself "news" to make false claims, or to call someone an "expert" and then give them a platform to make false claims. We could make it illegal for billionaires to assemble gigantic propaganda empires such as Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc. You can probably think of some other things we could do.

Mr. O'Toole is, in my eyes, a big step up from Mr. Scheer. I think the best thing he could do is the same as the best thing any politician can do - advocate for clearly understood policies that will benefit Canadians. We have a real dearth of policy discussion right across the political spectrum. I think this is partly because of our education system (it functions for the benefit of the employer, not the student, parent or society) leaves those without university education at a large cognitive disadvantage, and partly because the non-wealthy have to spend so much time working to make ends meet that many of them do not have enough time, energy, and goodwill towards society to meaningfully participate in politics.

This is an interesting thread. It prompted me to go back and revisit the story. After much googling, I was not able to find the controversial comments in context. This is very strange to me. I mean, if I were in Mrs. Ford's shoes and believed my comments were being taken out of context, I suppose I would publish the entire "secret" conversation in full, provide that context, and then answer any questions Canadians had for me. If I were a reporter, rather than insinuating that someone is a white supremacist, I would give the raw, unedited transcript, highlighting the problematic areas, and then let the public decide. Was anyone else able to find her comments in their entirety? I can only find snippets and excerpts. I fully agree that there is too much character assassination in Canadian politics. Voting based on policy > voting based on party > voting based on personality. Character assassination is useless for refuting policy.

Not being raised in gun culture myself, I initially found the idea of "banning assault rifles" to be kind of a no-brainer. I mean, why do we allow private ownership of weapons designed to kill large numbers of people? Turns out it is more complicated than that. If anyone is interested, hop on youtube and search for 'beau of the fifth column gun control.' He doesn't have all the answers, but does explain the complications involved in a pretty easy to follow way. As a result of having watched his videos, I understand why this legislation is a foolish waste of money.

Try telling that to the Hell's Angels.

To the question in the OP - very few Canadians vote Liberal as their first choice. However, FPTP makes it so that the Liberals can tell Canada, "If you don't vote for us the Conservatives will get in."

Rex Murphy is many things, but he is not "left".