The Political Spectrum Revisited.

For some time I have been reviewing and mulling over the “Political Spectrum”. An early reference was Wikipedia but I found it wanting in that most of the diagrams summarising the various ideas are two dimensional except for the Vosem Chart. The latter I have to agree with in that we are dealing, from a society perspective, three primary measures: society, economic and government. These can be summarised as describing degrees of Freedom.

It has taken me some time to try and get this in an easy to understand form, but I think I have something that works. What I have done is modified the Vosem Chart idea by setting my 3 axes as being a measure of Personal Freedom, Economic Freedom and Democratic Freedom (the reciprocal being increasing Government control). Then I gathered what appear to be the dominant Political Groupings, created a table and then gave each a subjective score:

	Freedom
Category	Economic	Personal	Democratic
Anarchist	10	10	10
Libertarian	9	9	8
Conservative	6	7	6
Liberal	5	5	5
Social Liberal	3	3	5
Socialist	2	2	4
Fascist	2	1	1
Communist	0	0	1

An Anarchist believes in total personal and economic freedom with no government control. As “Democracy” is all about freedom of personal choice then the situation where there is no government, I give a Democratic score of 10 with Personal and Economic freedom scores also being 10. Libertarians typically are those who understand the need for common services and thus limited government yet still value maximum personal and economic freedom. Classic “Liberal” is typically middle of the road so that is how I scored it. Because “Conservatives” usually want a bit more economic and personal freedom as well as smaller government than classic liberals I scored them accordingly.

One class that has bothered me, and something I have previously written about, is where does Fascism lie? For the last few decades it has been a catchall term for the “alt-right” and the “extreme right” but the “right” is a term firmly connected to those who value maximum personal and economic freedom with limited government. That does not fit with the Fascism of the early 20^th century where personal freedom was greatly limited under severe government control yet with some economic freedom in that individuals outside of government still ran businesses (some economic freedom). Now I understand that why I was so troubled by this problem is that the extreme left (Communists and Marxists especially), in an effort to redirect attention from their cruelty have used successfully “Projection” to apply their flaws on the innocent.

Here is the result in graphical form:

I must point out that I did not intentionally have the “left” side of the graph being populated by those ideologies that favour reduced personal and economic freedom along with maximum government control! But that is how it works out.

Now I admit this isn’t perfect, but it does a better job, I think, that other schemes I have seen. A wild card is that there is a force that corrupts the right leaning ideologies and that is extreme environmentalism. The sad thing is that these people do not look at the Human Race as being a part of the global ecosystem but instead as a blight that needs to be eradicated. Think of Jim Jones and the mass suicide he encouraged his followers to commit at Jonestown in 1978. 

In conclusion I need to make some admissions. The first is that the “Liberal Party of Canada” (LPC) is not “liberal”. It was at one time but has been degrading itself over the years into a group of socialist’s thanks primarily to the infiltration of the Greenies (Environmental Activists). When you get right down to it they have also infiltrated the NDP to the point there is little difference ideologically from the LPC. Ironically the “Conservative Party of Canada” (CPC) now fits the more classic liberal description. That leaves the “Peoples Party of Canada” (PPC) as the only right of centre party in Canada and one that so far has not been corrupted by the Greenies. As I see it the PPC is the best choice for Canada but since when does logic decide the outcomes of “democratic” elections.

The Liberal Party has become a monster that needs to die.

The following I submitted recently to the local news paper. When I did so I knew that it likely would not be published as is so common these days typically only a view that is favourable to the Liberal Party is published, even when they say in writing "they respect opposing views"; they do not. So, here it is unchanged:

I have been a long-time resident of Northwestern Ontario with a 19-year hiatus in northern Manitoba. While my body is less tolerant of the deepest cold of winter I have, and still do, enjoy the extended seasons with Spring and Fall being especially enjoyable. I grew up in a blue-collar family and though university educated still prefer to get my hands dirty doing “real” work. As such for as long as I can remember my personal mantra has been, and continues to be, “Fiscally Responsible yet with a Social Conscience”. The one political party that for many years aligned with that philosophy was the Liberal Party, both the Federal and the Provincial varieties. But then things changed, not with me but with the Liberals. For example, I supported the repatriation of our Constitution. Back in the 1980’s I was totally disgusted with the outright thievery by the federal Progressive Conservatives (PC’s). I was a big fan of the needed financial controls and restraints implemented by Paul Martin, Finance Minister under Chretien. 

Then, beginning with Chretien, things began to change with the Liberal Party. Justice Minister Allan Rock brought forth the gun registration legislation that turned out to be the boondoggle I knew it would become right from the get-go. I had been an avid gun owner and hunter since an early age and even though I despised the PC’s I agreed with the concepts of safe gun storage that they legislated, because they made sense. The long gun registration system, implemented in 1995, did not, especially when you take into consideration that handguns had been registered since the 1950’s with no impact on their use by criminals. Where was the “social justice” in this? I couldn’t, and still can’t find it. This is the point that, while my personal beliefs have not changed, my allegiance to the Liberals started to wane.

Then in 1997 along came a group within the United Nations called the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”, or IPCC who proposed the Kyoto Protocol which the Chretien Liberals gleefully signed on to. I love nature and the outdoors and respect the environment. That was the primary reason I became a Geologist. But nothing presented in support of that protocol made sense when measured using the tools I had acquired through my science training. At the most basic level how could we Canadians, now at about 35 million (or to put it a little differently, 0.035 billion), make a difference compared to the rest of the world, current population of 7.6 billion? Yet we will somehow show the rest of the world how it should be done by us making the required, so we are told, sacrifices?

It was then I started to realise that the Liberal party had changed, and not in a good way. It no longer aligned with my basic principals. Rather than stealing money from we the taxpayers and lining their own pockets like the PC’s did they instead are throwing it away to line other people’s pockets just so they can be re-elected. In doing so they have become addicted to OPM (Other Peoples Money) and like all drug addicts have become severed from reality. No longer do they care about what is good for society. “Green” policies have nothing to do with the betterment of society. Another area where “social justice” has been abandoned by the Liberals, and ironically the New Democrats as well!

In 1993 the PC party, thanks to their blatant dishonesty, got almost wiped out. Out of their ashes has arisen the current Conservative Party of Canada. What was left of the PC’s merged with the Reform Party with the goal to represent the best interests of Canadians being at the fore front rather than the best interests of party donors. Unless the Liberal Party does a similar rebirth of representing the best interests of all Canadians it too should be cast into the dust bin of history. 

It is time for a lot of people in Northwestern Ontario to come to the same realisation I did years ago; the Liberals have no desire to represent our best interests and a vote for them will continue the economic downward spiral that began back in 1995. To illustrate, 20 years ago there were 10 pulp and paper mills between Marathon and the Manitoba border. Now there are 3. The same can be said for sawmills; their numbers have been decimated. Mining shares a similar story. But resource industries like these are passé you say. Okay, and where are the new age industries and associated jobs? No where to be found. And where have the Liberals been, both Provincially and Federally? Again, no where to be found although working hard to kill what industry we still have and taxing us heavily so they can help their donor friends like SNC Lavalin and Loblaws. Nope, they are not our friends and anyone who supports them is living in a dream world. It’s time we come to our senses and stop supporting these scoundrels!

A follow-up to "Political Name Calling"

One thing I came to realize a long tome ago is that while my thoughts on topics may seem unique at the time it is only because similar analysis by others has not yet made it to my attention, primarily due to the terrible Main Stream Media bias we have been subjected to these last few decades. But every so often I come across a video or written commentary that shows similar development of thought to mine and so it is for my short treatise on Nazi's as I described in the post "Political Name Calling - too often the Pot calling the Kettle Black".

Today I came across this article in the National Post that, while the conclusions are not exactly the same as mine they are still very similar and for the same reasons:

The far-left side of fascism

• National Post (Latest Edition)
• 31 May 2019
• Philip Cross Philip Cross is the former chief economist at Statistics Canada.

Vincenzo D’alto / Postmedia News Files

Police watch as anti-fascist protesters gather outside the home of neo-nazi Zeiger in Montreal last May.

It is fashionable among the radical left to demonize the growing number of elected conservative governments in the Western world as the rise of the extreme or alt-right. This is most pronounced in the anti- fascist ( antifa) movement, particularly on university campuses. However, the anti- fascist movement has a sophomoric misunderstanding of fascism and its location on the political spectrum. More disturbing, this lack of understanding extends to its own social media and even physical tactics that mimic the mob psychology, street rage and bullying that are hallmarks of the fascism they denounce.

Fascism is best thought of as a nationalistic version of socialism, embodied in Hitler’s National Socialist party, which was shortened to the Nazis. Fascist governments like those of Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini ( and, to some degree, Spain’s Francisco Franco) in mid- 20th century Europe believed in totalitarian control of the economy and oppressive state curtailment of individual liberty. Those are the antithesis of conservative principles. Fascism subsumes all ideology to the goals of the state and the need for state surveillance. The extreme version of conservatism isn’t fascism, as the left wants us to think. It’s libertarianism.

Instead of left and right or liberal versus conservative, a better schema is to locate movements on a spectrum that runs from tyranny to liberty. Fascism embodies many elements of the socialist’s state control of society. For libertarian icon Friedrich Hayek, Hitler’s National Socialism “was indeed socialist in concept and execution,” while H. Pierre Secher, biographer of one of Austria’s leading socialists, Bruno Kreisky, wrote of the striking similarities between the leftists and the fascists in that country: “Ideologically, the distinction between the ‘ Sozis’ (Socialists) and Commies on the one hand and Nazis on the other, was probably only the internationalism of the Marxists and the nationalism of the Nazis. In every other respect they agreed on the evils of capitalism.” The connection of Jews with capitalism helped fuel the anti-semitism of the Nazis.

Mussolini’s claim that in a fascist regime there was to be “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” is of course the totalitarian opposite of the libertarian ideal. Mussolini was long involved with the socialist movement in Italy, breaking with it because of personal ambition and because his socialist brethren would not support Italy’s entry into the First World War. Once in power, he inaugurated a major extension of welfare spending and public works projects. Mussolini’s insistence that his fascist deputies take seats on the far right of the Italian Constituent Assembly may have led some observers to wrongly conclude that fascism was right wing.

Students have been drawn to the appeal of totalitarian certitude long before political correctness and the antifa movements arrived on campus. When the conservative sociologist Peter Berger, whose family fled Austria from the Nazis, found himself in the midst of a violent, left- wing antiwar demonstration in the 1960s, he said it reminded him “of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood” with student protesters adopting from fascists “their anti- intellectualism, their anger, their street theatre, their glorification of youth, or their mysticism.” There was also their “mob psychology” and “the militant antireason impervious to argument.” These characteristics are all amply evident in today’s campus protests against a fascism they hotly denounce but whose tactics they generously employ.

Off campus, the triumph of religious appeal over reasoned argument today is found in the radical environmental movement, whose early roots were in German fascism. The historian Anna Bramwell, while making the common mistake of conflating conservatism and fascism, nevertheless wrote that “Greenness was seen as an incipiently sinister conservative or even Fascist idea in German thought” going back to Hitler’s support of renewable energy to help reduce Germany’s dependence on oil, in short supply through much of the war. The anti- fossil- fuel movement uses the fascist’s appeal to emotion over reason, demonizing all who dare question it as “climate change deniers.”

Today the rise of extremism is more pronounced and frightening on the left than the right. The demonization of the right as fascism, that therefore forfeits its place to be heard in the public square, employs the strategy developed by the Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse. One of the progenitors of the socalled New Left in the 1950s, Marcuse maintained that certain views on the right had to be silenced because this freedom of expression was “serving the cause of oppression.” In this line of thought, censorship serves the cause of freedom because intolerance against the right, while indulging extremism from the left, somehow levels the playing field for democratic debate. That absurd notion is at last managing to take hold in many academic and media circles today.

Plastics Follow-up

In a recent post I made, I responded to a friend who asked for my thoughts on the City of Victoria banning plastic bags. To summarise, my response was that such bans do nothing but virtue signal and that the real problem are "environmentalists" who typically promote nonsensical solutions while at the same time denigrate real solutions at the expense of the environment they supposedly want to "save".

Here we are a week after I posted that commentary and I came across a reference to a very interesting paper titled "Save The Oceans, Stop Recycling Plastic" written by Mikko Paunio, a professor of  epidemiology at the University of Helsinki, and researcher in Finland. Here in it's entirely is the Executive Summary from the report (where bolded the emphasis is mine):

A marine plastic litter crisis has been declared and the mass media around the world has given their front pages over to the story for a while now. The European Union – among other actors – has declared a war against marine litter. Annually over 10 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic litter end up in oceans, harming wildlife. The International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) – the most competent specialist organization in the field – has summarized the origins of the marine litter crisis:

75% of land based marine litter in low to upper-middle income economies comes from litter and uncollected waste, while the remaining 25% of the land-based sources is plastic which leaks from within the waste management system.

In other words, the ISWA report shows that 25% of the leakage is attributable to the waste management option preferred by green ideologues; meanwhile, waste incineration can prevent any leakage of plastic if municipal solid waste (MSW) is incinerated along with sewage sludge. Despite this, incineration is vehemently opposed by green ideologues and also by the EU, which chooses to believe in the mirage of a circular economy.

The vast majority of the marine litter problem is attributable to poor waste collection and other sanitary practices in Asian, and to a lesser extent African, towns and cities in coastal areas and along rivers. The problem is particularly acute in China. The neglect of urban sanitary policy – the backbone of development agendas until that time – started when the ‘mother of sustainability’, Norway’s Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, personally refused to have it be part of her World Commission’s work program and ultimately its 1987 report, which famously led to the adoption of ‘sustainable development’ goals by the UN General Assembly.

This report describes the absurdities, inefficiencies, double or even triple waste management structures and horrible consequences of the EU’s erratic green waste policy (such as the terrible waste catastrophe in Naples in 2008), its fact-free claim that its waste policy helps to implement the Paris climate agreement, and its dumping of 3 Mt of plastic in China each year, with horrific consequences for the marine environment and health.

The EU has now started to sideline – in the name of circular economy – the highly successful waste incineration policy implemented in seven EU member states – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden – which all have major waste incineration capacity and now landfill less than 3% of their MSW.

So, as you can see while I may not have specific expertise in a field I do have a well rounded scientific background that I frequently can "see the Forest for the trees" very early on when an "issue" is in its early years. And while it does look like I am boasting, once I have gathered enough evidence to be sure, once I have taken a position I have yet to be proven wrong. As evidence of this claim you need go no further than review my earliest posts on this site and then compare with more recent ones.

So if you have thought my rumblings in my "Plastics!" post are those of a lunatic I encourage you to read the paper cited above and then I suggest you re-read my previous "Plastics!" post. Let me know if you see a hole in either my logic or that of Professor Paunio's.

If there is a lesson to be learned it is that when an environmental issue is identified we have to stop listening to the "solutions" being proposed by cultural leeches such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club as just two examples. While they may have identified something of significant concern they couldn't care less about finding a real solution as then they would no longer be able to raise money through their incessant fear-mongering.