Morality and the Political Spectrum

 

One thing that has fascinated me is what at first blush appears to be the dichotomy of why the Prairie’s, still dominated by the perfect example of the free enterpriser, the farmer, yet is the birthplace of Canadian Socialism, the New Democratic Party (NDP). An important aspect of farming is that it is dependant on the vagaries of the weather. Poor weather results in poor crops and therefore little to no income.

As a result of the latter, two things took place: there was a predominance of evangelical religion and the formation of co-operatives, whether it be for marketing their grain or buying supplies.

Recently I have read the book “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathon Haidt, a moral psychologist. What he has found with his research is that you are pretty much born with a set of moral rules that in turn affect your political beliefs and work ethic. He has identified 6 pairs of moral foundations:

• Care/Harm - sensitivity to signs of suffering and need.
• Fairness/Cheating - sensitivity to indications that another person is likely to be a good or bad partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism.
• Liberty/Oppression - sensitivity to, and resentment of, attempted domination.
• Loyalty/Betrayal - sensitivity to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player.
• Authority/Subversion - sensitivity to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly given their position.
• Sanctity/Degradation (sensitivity to pathogens, parasites, and other threats that spread by physical tough or proximity.

He has developed a series of questions that test a persons’ weighting of each of these moral foundations and he and his associates have done extensive testing around the world and common trends have been exposed. These trends can be summarised by the observation that those who are at the far left of the political spectrum put the greatest emphasis on the first two foundations (care/harm and fairness/cheating) and much less emphasis on the rest. Whereas those farthest to the right tend to give all moral foundation roughly equal weighting; they are much more morally balanced.

And this brings us back to the Prairie’s, an area, when times are good is very politically right. That balance of moral foundations has paid off with the creation of co-operative efforts that give the first two foundations precedence but do not forget the other four. But the NDP, though their origins lie with these strong moral foundation’s now put far more emphasis on the first two and thus now represent the left side of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, the same shift can be used to describe the Liberal party and to a certain extent the Conservative party. None are as morally balanced as they used to be. Having said that we must keep in mind that there are always exceptions to every rule. We all know a politician of any of these parties that showed more, or less moral balance than one would expect for where their party was interpreted to lie on the spectrum. Never mind the fact that each and every party has shifted with the times, typically based on the efforts of the back room gang currently pulling the strings and whose moral foundation’s may not be the same as the publicly displayed foundations of the party.

I recently watched an interview between Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, the former an interviewer and the latter a political commentator. They were discussing how currently it is the far left that is the most vocal right now, yet their arguments typically are weak. For example, “Black Lives Matter”. Not only is this a directly racist statement but it brings forth the question “don’t all lives matter”? In fact, most of the issues being promoted by the far left are attempts at nullifying what we have come to accept as our basic rights and freedoms. Two examples are: no one should be discriminated based on race, skin colour or sex, and everyone should have the right to speak their minds as it is only through frank and open discussion compromises can be made. The question that has puzzled me is “what is their end game”? Why are they so determined to pervert the rights and freedoms our ancestors had fought and died to attain?

Shapiro made a comment that I found very valid that answers the question: the lust for power. Every country where a far left government has taken charge, whether it be Communist, Marxist or Fascist, the driving force has been the lust for power and nothing more. Keep in mind too that each leader did not get there without the help of others. All showed signs of saying they were doing it because of the first two moral foundations but their actions have always proven that they were lying, and they had little, if any, morals. That is why history has looked back at each and every one with disgust. Yet we still allow ourselves to be seduced by these people who use simple phrases that at first blush seem to hold a truth but with any closer examination are easily exposed as being attempts to do the opposite. “No Hate Speech” is designed to at least cripple free speech. ANTIFA is just an attempt to apply Fascist controls over people. “Black Lives Matter”, as already stated, is to promote racism. On and on. They say the opposite of what they want to do, all in the lust for power.

Thus, what is needed by us, the electorate, before it is too late and even that “right” is removed by the power mongers, is to judge every candidate on their moral character. It will not be easy as the first two moral foundations are universal across the political spectrum. But that is the secret of how to pick and choose. Find people who make a point of addressing the other moral foundations. It is those people who will more likely have your best interests at heart and are not striving for power and the corruption that is inevitable to follow.

Propaganda

 

The following essay was submitted to the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal on July 30, 2020, which they published it in the September 1 edition.

 

“Propaganda” is defined as communication designed to influence an audience and to propagate an agenda. We are bombarded by all forms of propaganda, primarily in the form of advertising to get people to buy, or not buy, consumer goods or to sell, or discourage, political beliefs. In a country that supported “Free Speech” the onus has always been on the person being subjected to that propaganda to evaluate its merits and then make their own decision. That is what a “Free” society is all about.

Some societies, especially totalitarian ones, use censorship to ensure you only see or hear the propaganda that favours the ruling regime. Take for example the current Communist China government. They have been working extra hard to subvert the Hong Kong people and get them to give up their freedom and only hear and see what the communist government wants then to see or hear. Our own Prime Minister has been doing the same using his loyal propaganda machine, the CBC, and reinforced by the rest of the mainstream media.

I remember well when the USSR was still in existence that Canadian media all mocked the Soviet newspaper, Pravda; in English that name translates to “Truth”, yet we all knew that was not what they “reported”. I find it ironic that our own media is now nothing more than the equivalent to Pravda.

It has slowly been building up but we are quickly approaching a nexus in which, if we collectively do not act, we will soon be subjected to our own version of communist rule and freedom of expression and thought will be a thing of the past. History has shown unequivalently that every totalitarian state results in the deaths of millions and is far more dangerous than any disease known to man. Do we wish this upon ourselves just by being gullible rubes willing to believe anything we are allowed to see and hear?

They say that if you throw a frog into a pot of hot water it will promptly try to get out. But if you place the frog in cold water then slowly raise the temperature it will allow itself to cook to death. And so, it is with us. We have let totalitarians in the guise of “socialists” pervert our society through their lack of a good moral foundation.

Let me illustrate this progression. Back in the early 1960’s, Rachel Carson published her book “Silent Spring” which denounced the use of DDT. Soon after, that chemical was banned. Since then the science has shown that many of her opinions were not based on fact, yet it was allowed, and rightly so, to be disseminated amongst the public for us to debate and decide.

In 2006 the documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth” was released and broadly shared. Many jumped on the band wagon. Since then none of the predictions have come to pass. Yet many found the message resonated with them even if the evidence did not support the premise. Several years ago, another documentary movie maker, Marc Morano, tried to distribute his film “Climate Hustle”. He and his film were subjected to a campaign of smearing and banned from the same theatres that had shown the Gore film as it went contrary to what some think is “truth”.

Very recently it has gotten even worse. A documentary film called “Plandemic” was announced as being under production. Its creators are accused of being “conspiracy theorists” just by raising attention to issues just like Carson and Gore did. Yet they were not given that moniker.  This blatant smearing of an alternative idea and application of “cancel culture” to only those themes one political extreme do not want you to consider has become so intense it likely will not see the light of day. “Free Speech” is not supposed to work this way.

This does illustrate why totalitarianism enforced propaganda and the suppression of free speech needs to be avoided; all arguments they present to coax you into buying into their lies are easily disproved. But the quest for power is all consuming and as they say, power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. George Orwell tried to warn us with his book “1984”. Well, we have ignored the warnings and the dystopian world he warned us is almost here, albeit about 50 years later than predicted, all because we are compliant sheep easily accepting of propaganda with little, if any, push back.

We Are in A World War

 

We are amidst a world war, the first since the last one ended in 1945. First the good news. Rather than having soldiers wage mortal combat against one another, instead we are having politicians and the major media making battle using propaganda enforced by our supposed “legal” system. Laws are being invoked based on nothing but what has turned out to be an outright fraud. Supposed “journalists” are supporting this fraud by engaging in what has been described as “panic porn”. Thankfully, this is a war of words rather than wholesale death. That last may appear ironic in that it got started with grossly pessimistic modelling estimates of the impact of a newly identified virus with those models predicting millions of dying from this virus.

It is sad to report that no one validated those models by inputting historical data and seeing if it would predict the actual trends. Admittingly at the time in January the models were based on widely speculative suppositions that have proven to be totally false. These include that the new virus was very deadly and that it easily spread such that a significant portion of the population of the world would be infected and an abnormally large number would die.

Then reality started to show itself but has been ignored by politicians and media who instead were encouraging this war on humanity. It was not helpful when China, the source of the virus, clamped down on the sharing of information which encouraged the panic that was then just arising. Then hard evidence began to appear. One of the first was the instance of the Diamond Princess cruise ship upon which this new virus appeared as an infected person had boarded. The ship was quarantined to contain the contagion. In the end, and this has been documented by the CDC among others, in a report published March 9 of the 3,711 people on the ship about 17% were found to have been infected and about 0.4% died. Of the latter all were over 70 in age.

Next to expose the actual face of this virus was that of the US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. Out of a crew of about 4,800 about 600 were found to have tested positive for this new virus, or 12.5% of all onboard. In the end 1 person died.

With this information beginning to pop up amongst the efforts to “flatten the curve” by imposing a lock down and the infringement of what we had, up till then, thought were “fundamental” rights and freedoms few took this contradictory information seriously. Instead this war on our freedoms was increased in intensity, all under the guise of “protecting our health”.

Here we are four and a half months after the lock down was imposed pretty much worldwide with few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Sweden. There the chief epidemiologist took an interesting path. Rather than forcing people to isolate themselves he recommended that, other than maintaining good hygiene and separation of at least a metre (as that is the approximate distance that saliva droplets can be expelled when speaking), nothing needed to be done and allowed  the human immune system do its job, just as we do for the common flu.

I have taken the time to compile the numbers from available sources (Statistics Canada, Heath Canada, BC Center for Disease Control, Ontario and Quebec Ministries of Health and the Public Health Agency of Sweden). The numbers focused on were deaths and cases. Admittingly the latter doesn’t mean much in that it reflects only those who were tested, or it was assumed they were infected. For comparative purposes I also located and downloaded data for the flu with the most recent numbers being for 2017 and 2018. These flu numbers provide a base line on how deadly Covid-19 is and how contagious one is compared to the other.

The results are conclusive; the lock downs and the fears being propagated by politicians and media alike, are totally unfounded! Here is a chart showing the results:

After normalising all data sets by relevant population resulting in numbers per million of population these data sets were combined into one chart. The first observation is that the flu, for both 2017 and 2018 has been more deadly across all age groups than Covid-19. Sweden, thanks to its absence of lock down, allowed the full population to become exposed to this new virus and the results show that, like the flu, the elderly are the most susceptible to dying as a result of being infected. Yet Covid-19 is not as deadly, even for the aged, as the flu. Here in Canada we managed to shield a significant number of people from becoming exposed to the virus such that the death rate is about a third due to the flu.

What conclusions can we draw? First keep in mind what we have always done to “fight” the flu. Other than recommending that the most vulnerable take a flu vaccine, no extraordinary measures were taken. The flu is an accepted risk. Covid-19 is not as deadly as the flu nor is it more virulent. Both are facts supported by real data, not an opinion. Yet we have had politicians thrust upon us unreasonable and, as has been shown, unwarranted restrictions to our freedom and this was encouraged by the media who did nothing to investigate if any of that was warranted! And what have we done ourselves? With rare exception we have acted like compliant sheep to the point that I for one am ashamed of my fellow human beings who show so little regard for what our forebearers fought and died for; our freedom.