For those who have not yet been Greatly Awokened; Trudeau inspired the terror of conspiracy theorists around the world when he made reference to the "Great Reset" initiative
You can count me in as a conspiracy theorist since about June 2020. Maybe all the way back to March when I read Chrystia Freeland’s book Plutocrats. My gut started to turn when I read her book....she’s one of them...she’s wined and dined with them and moderated their conferences and forums. It felt kind of icky. Then the pandemic numbers just didn’t add up. I’m no scientist but I have lived in an alternate universe of health information for the past 15 years since my child was diagnosed with autoimmune disease by a naturopath. Yes a naturopath. Trained as an MD at McGill university, mind you. That naturopath was able
To figure out her issues were gut and diet related and our family moved into a more serious relationship with food and health from that moment. We have spent those 15 years taking back control of our health and building our immune systems and we are all in great shape thank you very much. I say all this to explain how I got to the idea that something strange was happening to the world. A virus that wasn’t really affecting Africa at all but Africa was shutting down—-many Africans countries feed themselves by going to market daily...shut down and the government doling our rations from trucks...for what? There was really no noticeable virus present there! Reports from Australia in June that they had their first case in a month! As if that’s a consideration?!! Melbourne locked down completely with the most draconian restrictions on liberty ever seen...for four months! The problem here, Jen, is that most humans aren’t really in touch with their health and don’t really know or care that they can heal themselves from chronic illness or symptoms of disease. As shown by the US where heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and chronic illness reign. Many developing countries haven’t had the opportunity to stuff themselves with fast food, trans fats, sugar laden treats all day everyday. They didn’t really experience this virus the way the US did. Even Canada wasn’t that affected. The PCR test is absolutely and unequivocally unreliable at best and possibly used fraudulently at worse. There is ample evidence of that from the New York Times and highly regarded epidemiologists and scientists around the world. There is definitely a plan that lines up with the World Economic Forum goals and it has been rolling out while we’ve slept over many years. The plan has been to get control of the population through fear—did you know that mainstream media was mandated to change the language of climate change to climate ‘crisis’ in 2018 or 2019 - I recall a Guardian article discussing the same. That was part of the plan. So by now we have a global population paralyzed by fear of a climate crisis...ripe for another crisis that, according to Fauci and Bill Gates has been coming and would happen during Trump’s reign. Et voila. People who haven’t thought that much or been affected that much by chronic illness and the desire to heal themselves or the necessity just don’t know what’s going on. We really need to wake up to what’s happening around us. I’ve found it shocking to witness the lack of awareness of the body’s ability to heal itself with a little knowledge and some attention to diet and exercise. How can a wealthy and educated population not be aware of the fact that humans exist because of viruses! Viruses are everywhere, challenging our systems every minute and making us stronger. We are arrogant to think we can control viruses, control the climate. Both need to be studied and understood. But not necessarily controlled. The way we are now being controlled.
Henry Kissinger's book, World Order. Its where the term came from and the work of the UN, WHO, WEF are all part of the parcel. Christia Freeland Plutocrat's. She is a member of the Board of Trustees on the WEF along with Fink from Blackrock Investments (where all our infrastructure money and investments are) and Marc Carney as well. Read, investigate, the facts are there.
As a Liberal supporter, I appreciate your efforts to debunk Pierre Poilievre's "Great Reset" conspiracy theory. It reminds me of when George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev both talked about a new world order emerging after the Cold War, and it turned into a conspiracy theory about a New World Order. But:
"Nobody's in control. Nobody's ever been in control."
As a counter-argument, I would observe that we have a whole range of institutions which aim to keep things stable and predictable in our pluralistic, multicultural, and regionally divided society, and which work pretty well. Some are obvious, like the rule of law, or democratic elections to replace governments; others are less obvious. This stability is a huge advantage of living in Canada (compared to China, say). The downside is a Canadian tendency towards inertia, complacency, and caution.
Some examples:
Recessions. The Bank of Canada uses monetary policy (interest rates) to push the economy back towards full employment while keeping inflation stable. On the fiscal side, there's automatic stabilizers (rising EI spending, falling tax revenue) which automatically loosen fiscal policy (larger deficits) in a recession, and which tighten it as the economy recovers. When there's an unusually large economic shock and these don't suffice, the federal government can loosen fiscal policy further, as we're seeing now on a massive scale.
The permanent civil service, led by non-partisan deputy ministers ("Permanent Secretaries" in the UK), is a strong force for stability and continuity. This contrasts with the "spoils system" in the US where each incoming administration appoints the top layers of the civil service. Joseph Heath comments in his recent book "The Machinery of Government" that the Canadian civil service is one of the best in the world.
Our economy is noticeably oligopolistic, with many sectors - banking, rail, airlines, telecommunications, groceries - dominated by a small number of large companies. This makes for higher prices and a lack of innovation, but also greater stability. (In an economic crisis like the current one, small businesses are much more vulnerable.)
At the international level, the outstanding example of the dynamic pushing towards stability is the balance of power. Modern European history is the story of one power after another attempting to overthrow the international status quo and dominate the entire continent - Spain under the Hapsburgs, France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, Germany under Wilhelm II and Hitler, the Soviet Union - and an opposing alliance forming against it (often put together by England). This is exactly what the Biden administration is planning to do to balance the power of an increasingly emboldened China and its "might-makes-right" diplomacy: the US may only account for a quarter of the world's economy, but a US-led alliance accounts for half the world's economy.
You'll note that we argue that "nobody's in control." That's very different from arguing that "nobody's in charge."
Obviously, there are national and supranational organizations that are "in charge." And these organizations implement policy that can have a good or negative impact on the public body.
There are many failings of specific political temperaments, but the major failing of the Liberal one is this: Lack of epistemic humility. There is an assumption among Liberals that "being in charge" is the same thing as "being in control." There is a fundamental failure to grasp that human systems are infinitely complex, perhaps beyond controlling, and that humans -- as individuals and as groups -- often fail to react the way that they "should" to the most well intentioned policies of their "betters."
This failing hurts Liberals in two major ways; the first is hubris. Liberals act as if: "We are well intentioned and intelligent people who have the correct understanding of the world around us. And if only the idiot masses could recognize our superiority and fall in line with our policy proscriptions, we could *fix* all of the failings of humanity according to our moral lights -- which are, of course, the only correct ones."
This is why Liberals almost always wind up creating policies and pronouncements that are fiendishly divorced from the needs, desires, and moral perspectives of the people they condescend to help. Which fuels the conspiracism that now runs rampant in groups that feel disconnected from an insulated national and global elite.
The second result of this Liberal failing is a tendency toward profound individual ethical lapse. (Because the noble and well-intentioned can bear no evil in their hearts -- and we all know that good people like them can do no wrong.) We've seen this with Justin Trudeau on several occasions now.
Of course, there are self-destructive tendencies among Conservatives, as well. But that's a post-script for another column.
Interesting - as a Liberal supporter, I would have said that the Liberal approach to politics is nearly the opposite. My favorite joke (told to me by a Conservative friend):
A man is lying in a ditch by the side of the road. A Conservative politician happens by, and asks him, "What happened?!" He manages to say that he's been mugged. The Conservative runs off down the road, saying, "I need to find the mugger so that we can punish him!"
Next an NDP politician comes by, asks the same question, gets the same answer. He too runs off, saying, "I need to find the mugger, so that we can rehabilitate him!"
Then a Liberal politician arrives. He leans down and asks, in a low voice: "What did the other two guys say?"
Of course it's a joke, but it's true that the Liberals are ideologically flexible. When the federal debt was a big problem, back in the 1990s, Chretien and Martin cut spending and ran surpluses. After Harper cut revenue and spending further, to its lowest level since Diefenbaker, Trudeau outflanked Mulcair in the 2015 election by promising _not_ to balance the budget.
What are the counterproductive Liberal policies you're thinking of? For me, the big items that come to mind are the Canada Child Benefit, which cut child poverty by a third; raising taxes on earned income over $200,000 and on CCPCs; legalizing marijuana; the national carbon price floor and other climate policies; buying TMX and getting it through the courts; CETA and TPP; holding off Trump and renegotiating NAFTA. But none of them seem to fit your description.
"The second result of this Liberal failing is a tendency toward profound individual ethical lapse."
Charles Burton Marshall's Vietnam-era observation comes to mind: "Moral superiority is a wasting asset." I think a tendency to overestimate one's moral standing is a universal human failing. To counterbalance it, I like this quote from Lucius Shepard's "Life During Wartime":
"It occurred to Mingolla that his father had been right about war, that it had indeed made a man out of him. He could see intricacies that he had never before suspected, he understood the nature of his responsibilities and felt able to handle them. But the problem was that _he had not become a very nice man. Not even average_. His capacity for violence and indifference bore that out."
None of the things you're describing strike me as a party that is "ideologically flexible." Just because a party does things that you or I might like doesn't mean it's not ideological.
Which brings me to the other thing I always run into when I talk to Liberals: They honestly believe that they -- and they alone -- are not ideological. It's always everybody else who is blinded by ideology, never them. They're uniquely open minded and flexible, which is why they know what's best for everybody. Admittedly, this is a subsection of the failing noted above: lack of epistemic humility.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear: I was only citing one example of ideological flexibility, the switch from tight fiscal policy under Chretien/Martin to looser fiscal policy under Trudeau. I'm not claiming that this is not ideological, of course, only that the ideology has clearly changed!
(I think this ideological opportunism is usually regarded as a failing, not a virtue, hence the joke from my Conservative friend. NDP supporters often complain that Liberals often steal NDP policy ideas, like pharmacare; or that Liberals campaign to the left and govern to the right.)
But my question was about this point that you made: "Liberals almost always wind up creating policies and pronouncements that are fiendishly divorced from the needs, desires, and moral perspectives of the people they condescend to help." Could you give a couple examples of the policies you're thinking of?Would this description apply to the Canada Child Benefit or to marijuana legalization, for example? (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.)
I take your point that Trudeau and his advisors may be subject to groupthink. Just as Harper had Bruce Carson to give him the Liberal viewpoint (according to Paul Wells), maybe Trudeau needs someone in the PMO to give him the Conservative viewpoint.
You can count me in as a conspiracy theorist since about June 2020. Maybe all the way back to March when I read Chrystia Freeland’s book Plutocrats. My gut started to turn when I read her book....she’s one of them...she’s wined and dined with them and moderated their conferences and forums. It felt kind of icky. Then the pandemic numbers just didn’t add up. I’m no scientist but I have lived in an alternate universe of health information for the past 15 years since my child was diagnosed with autoimmune disease by a naturopath. Yes a naturopath. Trained as an MD at McGill university, mind you. That naturopath was able
To figure out her issues were gut and diet related and our family moved into a more serious relationship with food and health from that moment. We have spent those 15 years taking back control of our health and building our immune systems and we are all in great shape thank you very much. I say all this to explain how I got to the idea that something strange was happening to the world. A virus that wasn’t really affecting Africa at all but Africa was shutting down—-many Africans countries feed themselves by going to market daily...shut down and the government doling our rations from trucks...for what? There was really no noticeable virus present there! Reports from Australia in June that they had their first case in a month! As if that’s a consideration?!! Melbourne locked down completely with the most draconian restrictions on liberty ever seen...for four months! The problem here, Jen, is that most humans aren’t really in touch with their health and don’t really know or care that they can heal themselves from chronic illness or symptoms of disease. As shown by the US where heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and chronic illness reign. Many developing countries haven’t had the opportunity to stuff themselves with fast food, trans fats, sugar laden treats all day everyday. They didn’t really experience this virus the way the US did. Even Canada wasn’t that affected. The PCR test is absolutely and unequivocally unreliable at best and possibly used fraudulently at worse. There is ample evidence of that from the New York Times and highly regarded epidemiologists and scientists around the world. There is definitely a plan that lines up with the World Economic Forum goals and it has been rolling out while we’ve slept over many years. The plan has been to get control of the population through fear—did you know that mainstream media was mandated to change the language of climate change to climate ‘crisis’ in 2018 or 2019 - I recall a Guardian article discussing the same. That was part of the plan. So by now we have a global population paralyzed by fear of a climate crisis...ripe for another crisis that, according to Fauci and Bill Gates has been coming and would happen during Trump’s reign. Et voila. People who haven’t thought that much or been affected that much by chronic illness and the desire to heal themselves or the necessity just don’t know what’s going on. We really need to wake up to what’s happening around us. I’ve found it shocking to witness the lack of awareness of the body’s ability to heal itself with a little knowledge and some attention to diet and exercise. How can a wealthy and educated population not be aware of the fact that humans exist because of viruses! Viruses are everywhere, challenging our systems every minute and making us stronger. We are arrogant to think we can control viruses, control the climate. Both need to be studied and understood. But not necessarily controlled. The way we are now being controlled.
This is satire, right?
I wish. Personal health issues are not satire.
Henry Kissinger's book, World Order. Its where the term came from and the work of the UN, WHO, WEF are all part of the parcel. Christia Freeland Plutocrat's. She is a member of the Board of Trustees on the WEF along with Fink from Blackrock Investments (where all our infrastructure money and investments are) and Marc Carney as well. Read, investigate, the facts are there.
As a Liberal supporter, I appreciate your efforts to debunk Pierre Poilievre's "Great Reset" conspiracy theory. It reminds me of when George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev both talked about a new world order emerging after the Cold War, and it turned into a conspiracy theory about a New World Order. But:
"Nobody's in control. Nobody's ever been in control."
As a counter-argument, I would observe that we have a whole range of institutions which aim to keep things stable and predictable in our pluralistic, multicultural, and regionally divided society, and which work pretty well. Some are obvious, like the rule of law, or democratic elections to replace governments; others are less obvious. This stability is a huge advantage of living in Canada (compared to China, say). The downside is a Canadian tendency towards inertia, complacency, and caution.
Some examples:
Recessions. The Bank of Canada uses monetary policy (interest rates) to push the economy back towards full employment while keeping inflation stable. On the fiscal side, there's automatic stabilizers (rising EI spending, falling tax revenue) which automatically loosen fiscal policy (larger deficits) in a recession, and which tighten it as the economy recovers. When there's an unusually large economic shock and these don't suffice, the federal government can loosen fiscal policy further, as we're seeing now on a massive scale.
The permanent civil service, led by non-partisan deputy ministers ("Permanent Secretaries" in the UK), is a strong force for stability and continuity. This contrasts with the "spoils system" in the US where each incoming administration appoints the top layers of the civil service. Joseph Heath comments in his recent book "The Machinery of Government" that the Canadian civil service is one of the best in the world.
Our economy is noticeably oligopolistic, with many sectors - banking, rail, airlines, telecommunications, groceries - dominated by a small number of large companies. This makes for higher prices and a lack of innovation, but also greater stability. (In an economic crisis like the current one, small businesses are much more vulnerable.)
At the international level, the outstanding example of the dynamic pushing towards stability is the balance of power. Modern European history is the story of one power after another attempting to overthrow the international status quo and dominate the entire continent - Spain under the Hapsburgs, France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, Germany under Wilhelm II and Hitler, the Soviet Union - and an opposing alliance forming against it (often put together by England). This is exactly what the Biden administration is planning to do to balance the power of an increasingly emboldened China and its "might-makes-right" diplomacy: the US may only account for a quarter of the world's economy, but a US-led alliance accounts for half the world's economy.
You'll note that we argue that "nobody's in control." That's very different from arguing that "nobody's in charge."
Obviously, there are national and supranational organizations that are "in charge." And these organizations implement policy that can have a good or negative impact on the public body.
There are many failings of specific political temperaments, but the major failing of the Liberal one is this: Lack of epistemic humility. There is an assumption among Liberals that "being in charge" is the same thing as "being in control." There is a fundamental failure to grasp that human systems are infinitely complex, perhaps beyond controlling, and that humans -- as individuals and as groups -- often fail to react the way that they "should" to the most well intentioned policies of their "betters."
This failing hurts Liberals in two major ways; the first is hubris. Liberals act as if: "We are well intentioned and intelligent people who have the correct understanding of the world around us. And if only the idiot masses could recognize our superiority and fall in line with our policy proscriptions, we could *fix* all of the failings of humanity according to our moral lights -- which are, of course, the only correct ones."
This is why Liberals almost always wind up creating policies and pronouncements that are fiendishly divorced from the needs, desires, and moral perspectives of the people they condescend to help. Which fuels the conspiracism that now runs rampant in groups that feel disconnected from an insulated national and global elite.
The second result of this Liberal failing is a tendency toward profound individual ethical lapse. (Because the noble and well-intentioned can bear no evil in their hearts -- and we all know that good people like them can do no wrong.) We've seen this with Justin Trudeau on several occasions now.
Of course, there are self-destructive tendencies among Conservatives, as well. But that's a post-script for another column.
"The first is hubris."
Interesting - as a Liberal supporter, I would have said that the Liberal approach to politics is nearly the opposite. My favorite joke (told to me by a Conservative friend):
A man is lying in a ditch by the side of the road. A Conservative politician happens by, and asks him, "What happened?!" He manages to say that he's been mugged. The Conservative runs off down the road, saying, "I need to find the mugger so that we can punish him!"
Next an NDP politician comes by, asks the same question, gets the same answer. He too runs off, saying, "I need to find the mugger, so that we can rehabilitate him!"
Then a Liberal politician arrives. He leans down and asks, in a low voice: "What did the other two guys say?"
Of course it's a joke, but it's true that the Liberals are ideologically flexible. When the federal debt was a big problem, back in the 1990s, Chretien and Martin cut spending and ran surpluses. After Harper cut revenue and spending further, to its lowest level since Diefenbaker, Trudeau outflanked Mulcair in the 2015 election by promising _not_ to balance the budget.
What are the counterproductive Liberal policies you're thinking of? For me, the big items that come to mind are the Canada Child Benefit, which cut child poverty by a third; raising taxes on earned income over $200,000 and on CCPCs; legalizing marijuana; the national carbon price floor and other climate policies; buying TMX and getting it through the courts; CETA and TPP; holding off Trump and renegotiating NAFTA. But none of them seem to fit your description.
"The second result of this Liberal failing is a tendency toward profound individual ethical lapse."
Charles Burton Marshall's Vietnam-era observation comes to mind: "Moral superiority is a wasting asset." I think a tendency to overestimate one's moral standing is a universal human failing. To counterbalance it, I like this quote from Lucius Shepard's "Life During Wartime":
"It occurred to Mingolla that his father had been right about war, that it had indeed made a man out of him. He could see intricacies that he had never before suspected, he understood the nature of his responsibilities and felt able to handle them. But the problem was that _he had not become a very nice man. Not even average_. His capacity for violence and indifference bore that out."
None of the things you're describing strike me as a party that is "ideologically flexible." Just because a party does things that you or I might like doesn't mean it's not ideological.
Which brings me to the other thing I always run into when I talk to Liberals: They honestly believe that they -- and they alone -- are not ideological. It's always everybody else who is blinded by ideology, never them. They're uniquely open minded and flexible, which is why they know what's best for everybody. Admittedly, this is a subsection of the failing noted above: lack of epistemic humility.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear: I was only citing one example of ideological flexibility, the switch from tight fiscal policy under Chretien/Martin to looser fiscal policy under Trudeau. I'm not claiming that this is not ideological, of course, only that the ideology has clearly changed!
(I think this ideological opportunism is usually regarded as a failing, not a virtue, hence the joke from my Conservative friend. NDP supporters often complain that Liberals often steal NDP policy ideas, like pharmacare; or that Liberals campaign to the left and govern to the right.)
But my question was about this point that you made: "Liberals almost always wind up creating policies and pronouncements that are fiendishly divorced from the needs, desires, and moral perspectives of the people they condescend to help." Could you give a couple examples of the policies you're thinking of?Would this description apply to the Canada Child Benefit or to marijuana legalization, for example? (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.)
I take your point that Trudeau and his advisors may be subject to groupthink. Just as Harper had Bruce Carson to give him the Liberal viewpoint (according to Paul Wells), maybe Trudeau needs someone in the PMO to give him the Conservative viewpoint.