ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

[Carl Bilodeau]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

I'm not worried about the US attacking Canada, last time they tried it, we kicked their butts!:D

Of course their military was a lot smaller back in 1812, not so many aircraft carriers!

Now Carl, you do realize the US is the only country that has attempted to invade Canada. But yes, I am sure they would help with our defense if necessary. Well, at least the tar sands.

The tar sands? USA is a simple customer that pays for a product we sell. We spend more money in buying their cars than they do buying our petrol. Why don't you say that Canada would help USA if they invaded just to protect our Car supplier. I really think you watch to much Canadian TV deformation.

What would you say about China if Canada had a border with them and with Tibet? I understand it is a left-wing regime so you would support them and respect them. We have the best neighbor in the world. They are rich so they can buy our product. They invest here. They have a free trade agreement with us. Don't you think this is better than Morocco and Algeria who have closed borders? Or Turkey and Armeny? Do you really know what you are talking about when you describe our neighbor like you do?

Carl

[Bob Gillanders]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

The tar sands? USA is a simple customer that pays for a product we sell. We spend more money in buying their cars than they do buying our petrol. Why don't you say that Canada would help USA if they invaded just to protect our Car supplier. I really think you watch to much Canadian TV deformation.

What would you say about China if Canada had a border with them and with Tibet? I understand it is a left-wing regime so you would support them and respect them. We have the best neighbor in the world. They are rich so they can buy our product. They invest here. They have a free trade agreement with us. Don't you think this is better than Morocco and Algeria who have closed borders? Or Turkey and Armeny? Do you really know what you are talking about when you describe our neighbor like you do?

Carl

Carl,

I haven't said anything that I would consider derogatory about the American people themselves. But they do have some very major problems with their democratic and financial systems as recent history has demonstrated. I wish them well and hope that they will solve their problems.

I don't look at the USA through the same rose coloured glasses you are wearing. I don't measure the greatness of a nation by its military might alone. As a neighbour, the USA is okay, we could do a lot worse. As for the free trade agreement, they seem quite willing to disregard it when the rulings are not in their favour. As for investment, they invest here to make money, not as a favour to us. So what is your point?

The old left vs right wing political concepts are outdated. They do a poor job of describing the complex world we live in. Because I may have left leaning tendencies in some political debates, that does not translate to agreeing with everything China does. I am highly critical of China with respect to its human rights abuses and its domination of Tibet.

Bob

[Carl Bilodeau]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Carl,

...

But they do have some very major problems with their democratic and financial systems as recent history has demonstrated.

...
Bob

1 - Recent history has demonstrated... that a democrat should not be at the head of the FED.

Financial system in a free market is like climate. It goes up and down and if you want to control it, you realize afterward that when you want to help, it may be worse.

In my opinion in 50 years people will conclude that the democrat Allan Greenspan (left-wing = a lot of intervention in the market) at the head of the FED (independent from the government) was 80% the cause of the actual financial crisis. Let me explain: If my baby loose weight and I decide to simply give him tons of candy, I will not solve the problem on a long term.

Greenspan kept his finger on the easiest button to keep the economy stable: This button is "Interest rates of nearly 0%". And he kept his finger on the button for 10 years (and I listened to every announcement he did in this period since I had millions in business loans). The baby went very fat and exploded. Every parent tell their kids to not use too much credit, but when credit is nearly 0% what do you do? You buy and this is what Greenspan wanted you to do.

Greenspan then showed his baby to everybody saying: "Look at the good result". Then the baby started to vomit, vomit....

For the next 100 years, the authorities will now know that you can not keep the finger too long on any financial solutions. Sometimes you have to let the market to reach some problems without interfering too much. A republican should always be at the head of the FED.

It will be the same for the actual crazy goverment spendings. If they press the button for 12 months then it is not so bad, but if they do it for 5 years then there will be a bankrupy of many countrys when everybody would expect a recovery. So one mandate for Obama is not so bad (he is telling indirectly every month to democrats on many issues: Finally I take the same decisions the republicans would take ... so next time you may vote republican.), but two mandates could be dangerous for the world economy.

I am glad that you decided to talk about bad behavior of other countrys like China. When you were talking of USA only, it remembered me the last TV news I watched on Canadian TV CBC. You can continue and talk situations where we would have Russia as our biggest neigbor!

2 - Left or right no more true?
Left or right is normally a way of thinking base on your principles. Yes an individual can pick to the left or right, but basically we have .... well, let Jonathan Krohn, the author of "Define Conservatism" explain in a video and here.


Jonathan Krohn, 12 years old

3 - Finally, you say you don't evaluate a country to its military. I agree, but when you talk about the decline of an empire, the army size and power is important data!!! Their army budget is more than 500 billions per year. One of the most popular Quebec made movie has been "The decline of the american empire." which was made 20 years ago. Since then the USA productivity has increased, the army increased, the population increased, the scolarity increased, the number of powerful enemy went down.... do you really want to continue to make false left-wing predictions on:
American empire;
Warming;
The economy;
etc.

Carl

[Alan Baljeu]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Before Rome collapsed it was spending most of its money on the army. Political infighting kept the government unstable. Problems kept rising, and provinces grew angry at the exorbitant tax burden with little infrastructure spending.

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, it was spending huge dollars on its military. But it couldn't keep its hungry oppressed populace happy and various factions arose in dissatisfied states.

If the USA goes down anytime in the next 50 years (not likely I think), it will be due to relative bankruptcy, not because the army lost its power.

[Carl Bilodeau]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Before Rome collapsed it was spending most of its money on the army. Political infighting kept the government unstable. Problems kept rising, and provinces grew angry at the exorbitant tax burden with little infrastructure spending.

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, it was spending huge dollars on its military. But it couldn't keep its hungry oppressed populace happy and various factions arose in dissatisfied states.

If the USA goes down anytime in the next 50 years (not likely I think), it will be due to relative bankruptcy, not because the army lost its power.

I agree with you 100%.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: Re : Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

LOL. This author says that it incroporated elements form both left and right-wing so that he doesn't have to write that is was "National Socialism". Read more Paul, continue to search.

Socialism = left wing. Hitler was democratically elected and had a hard time to seduced the army which was on the right.

P.S.: You use the word "us" in your last messages when you insult me. What does this "us" mean? Are you many people in your house in front of the computer or have you been democratically elected by some organisation?

Carl

Carl: look up Socialism on Wikipedia, and tell me where you find that it mentions the Nazi movement? It DOESN'T!

The Franklin Declaration of 1951 states: "In some countries, powerful capitalist groups helped the barbarism of the past to raise its head again in the form of Fascism and Nazism."

Are you trying to tell us you know something about the Nazi movement that no one else knows? Well, I suggest this: try and submit your beliefs on Nazism as you've expressed them here to Wikipedia. See how far you get.

Not that I would say Wikipedia is free from error and/or opinion, but if they made such a huge mistake to describe Nazism as mainly a right wing movement when it was really a left wing movement, that news would be all over the Internet and Wikipedia would be very discredited.

The mistake is on YOU, CARL BILODEAU. You have shown yourself to be totally ignorant and deluded in matters of history, among others. With your expressed opinion on Nazism, you show yourself to be a buffoon.

There may be the odd person on this board who agrees with your views, but the vast majority regard you as a laughingstock, an amusement. That's who I mean by "us". You are so out of touch that you don't have a clue how out of touch you are.

I'm sure your kids, once they escape your influence and think for themselves, will inform you what a peabrain you are, unless... (shudder).... you are home schooling them.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

For a government to make rule and laws is normal.

If you are talking about laws governing how businesses can conduct their business, then the more laws the government makes, the more anti-capitalist the system becomes. DUH!!!!

If they don't take the cars back, then they can not get a sale permit next year.

Government intervention. Left-wing socialism. Try telling the car dealer that that is capitalism. He'll beat the snot out of you. Car dealers don't give a flying f**k about recycling! DUH!!!!

ECONOMICS 101! POLITICAL SCIENCE 101! Go back to school!

[Carl Bilodeau]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

If you are talking about laws governing how businesses can conduct their business, then the more laws the government makes, the more anti-capitalist the system becomes. DUH!!!!



Government intervention. Left-wing socialism. Try telling the car dealer that that is capitalism. He'll beat the snot out of you. Car dealers don't give a flying f**k about recycling! DUH!!!!

ECONOMICS 101! POLITICAL SCIENCE 101! Go back to school!

Some on the left-wing dislike that NAZI was a socialist movement. Nazi means "National Socialism" and came at a time when there was a lot of unemployed in the country. With their Socialism politics they gave 100% jobs to the people like any socialism party should do. When someone from the left says that it was both, it is too easy. In 50 years, some people from the left will probably associate Communism of the twennieth century to left and right.

Listen to me: genocides and wars of the NAZI can not be associated to a left-wing movement only. People from the left or the right can do stupid killings. It is simply human extremism. But in the case of the NAZI or the Soviet regime, when the people expect a left-wing Socialism goverment to take from them their responsabilities then this is where it can go. In Quebec the Parti Quebecois and the Bloc Quebecois are National Socialism party like the NAZI were and it will not lead to any genocide. But like in Germany and Soviet Union, it lead to very very BIG governments with a lot of money and a lot of influence in all aspect of the life of the people. When a extremist comes to lead such a goverment then he has a very BIG power and a lot of Money and millions of Government Employees just like the NAZI had.

So if you look at the NAZI from its origin, it is a Socialism regime just like we have in Quebec. But if you look at the end of the regime then you see dictature when at the beginning there was democracy. You see genocide when at the beginning there was simply jobs.

Take for example yourself. We can see from your readings how much your are left-wing convince and this is very good because you care for the world and the environment. But read the whole current thread and you will see what I explain. It is you a left-wing that took the most radical positions and the worst personnal and radical insults. If we give you tomorrow the title of "Emperor of Americas" then you could say like you said previouly:
"No matter how much it cost, no matter the consequence, lets build a forest over the ocean to save the air. Money is not important since it is the life of people. No matter the cost." So it means that your goverment would raise very big taxes and become very very BIG to save the people just like the Communists movements wanted to do in its origin or the NAZI. But see how people in the end were prisonners of these big goverments in Germany, China, in Soviet union, in Cuba. Your decisions to build such a forest, no matter the cost, over the ocean means that even if I don't agree, you will take fiscal money and taxes to achieve your goverment priority projects instead of mine. If the forest require that 25% of the population work on the project then "at any cost" means that you would have to mobilize young people by law. The day we would discover there was no problem with CO2 your goverment with its stupid forest project could start to control the media to hide the truth (a big goverment spend a lot of money in media, they will say what you want them to say). And I can imagine how many other projects you would have with people taxes. Imagine when an industrial sector go bad in Canada at the head of the Canada you would Nationalize it to save it from the bad americans that you dislike just like the Castros are doing or like we do in Quebec with wine, electriicty, daycare, pension management, etc.

This is how a left-wing National Socialism regime lead to what we have seen in europe in the last century. Big goverments remove the power and the "will for success" from the people hands so that more and more solutions has to come from the goverment and the easiest way for a businessman to do money is now via corruption of goverment employees.

I think that in europe for the first time in the last 100 years, there is no "National Socialism" goverments. France, Spain, Germany, Italy all have elected other kind of goverments. In the occidental world there is only Quebec and some south-americans countrys to still have National Socialism goverments I think.

Carl

[Benoit St-Pierre]

Röhm-Putsch

Some on the left-wing dislike that NAZI was a socialist movement.

The nazi party is a strange beast:

The Nazi Party is generally described as being at the extreme or far right of the left-right political axis. While the party incorporated elements from both left and right-wing politics, the Nazis formed most of their alliances on the right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

But fascism is right-wing extremism:

Fascism is a political ideology that seeks to combine radical and authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system, and which is usually considered to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

The SA, the nazi paramilitary "socialist" faction, soon became problematic:

The SA under Röhm's leadership soon became a major problem for the party. Many of the 700,000 members of this well-armed working-class militia took the "socialist" element of "national socialism" seriously, and soon began to demand that the Nazi regime broaden its attack from SPD and KPD activists and Jews to include the capitalist system. In addition, Röhm and his associates saw the SA as the army of the new revolutionary Nazi state, replacing the old aristocratic officer corps. The army was still outside party control, and Hitler feared that it might stage a putsch if its leaders felt threatened with an SA take-over. The business community was also alarmed by the SA’s socialist rhetoric, with which, as noted earlier, Hitler had no sympathy beyond transferring power from Churches to the State.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

For every solution there is problem:

Hitler moved against the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm, because he saw the independence of the SA and the penchant of its members for street violence as a direct threat to his power. He also wanted to conciliate leaders of the Reichswehr, the official German military who both feared and despised the SA—in particular Röhm's ambition to absorb the Reichswehr into the SA under his own leadership. Finally, Hitler used the purge to attack or eliminate critics of his regime, especially those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, and to settle scores with old enemies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

[Carl Bilodeau]

Re: Röhm-Putsch

The nazi party is a strange beast:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

But fascism is right-wing extremism:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

The SA, the nazi paramilitary "socialist" faction, soon became problematic:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

For every solution there is problem:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

Thank you Benoit. We can see that National Socialism by creating big governments and big organisations can lead to something very ugly. We can say the same for the Communism under the soviet regime that led to something that at the end was not in the "social" interest of the people. Hundreds of Canadian went in Russia to help the creation of communism and most of them finished to be killed a few years later by the socialism regime they wanted to create.

To me the eco-extremists of CO2 could become the new version of such organization. They start with a good idea to save the world. At the end, they change the data, they lie on studies, they take control of newspapers, they destroy the reputation of honest scientists, they mobilize millions of people and billions of dollars for.... nothing. And during this time, enemys regime work secretly on the atomic bomb while our eyes are all pointing in the sky to the clouds.

Carl

[Benoit St-Pierre]

Communism

We can see that National Socialism by creating big governments and big organisations can lead to something very ugly. We can say the same for the Communism under the soviet regime that led to something that at the end was not in the "social" interest of the people.

In the same paragraph, we see theory:

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.

and then practice:

In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism and the policies of the various communist states which had government ownership of all the means of production and centrally planned economies. Communist regimes have historically been authoritarian, repressive, and coercive governments concerned primarily with preserving their own power.

What you are hinting at, Carl, is anti-liberalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-liberalism

Liberalism is opposed to totalitarism, authoritarism, conservatism and traditionalism. Liberalism is a very, very broad concept:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Maybe we can circumvent that problem (defining liberalism is tough) by mentioning the central thesis of the picture you provide:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-statism

This opposes well to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etatism

Strangely enough, no links are provided between the etatism page and the anti-liberalism redirection page.

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: Communism

Carl should remember the story of Abraham Lincoln who when asked "If you call a tail a leg how many legs does a sheep have?" allegedly replied "Four - calling a tail a leg doesn't make it into one".

Calling yourself a "Socialist" doesn't make you into a Socialist. And calling the Nazis "left wing" doesn't make them left wing no matter how often you repeat it.

[Gary Ruben]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

ECONOMICS 101! POLITICAL SCIENCE 101! Go back to school!

Global warming has now been solved. The cost is 100 billion a year.

Isn't it wonderful !!!

[Alan Baljeu]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Left and Right are not as well defined as you would like. Delve into the details, and see how much Nazi policy differed from Stalinist policy. I can think of only one: Nazi's funded private business instead of only public institutions.

What they had in common was an overriding belief that all people should work to serve the glory of the state, which is the embodiment of the collective will and power of the people.

Government funding private business may be a right-wing ideology, but there are far more important issues than that.

[Benoit St-Pierre]

Stalinism

Delve into the details, and see how much Nazi policy differed from Stalinist policy.

No need to delve into details :

Trotskyists argue that the "Stalinist USSR" was not socialist (and certainly not communist), but a bureaucratised degenerated workers' state — that is, a non-capitalist state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste which, although not owning the means of production and not constituting a social class in its own right, accrued benefits and privileges at the expense of the working class. Left communists like C. L. R. James and the Italian autonomists, as well as unorthodox Trotskyists like Tony Cliff, described Stalinism as "state capitalism" – i.e., a form of capitalism where the state takes over the role of capital. Milovan Đilas argues that a New Class arose under Stalinism, a theory also put forward by various liberal theorists. Some in the Third Camp use bureaucratic collectivism as a theory to critique Stalinist forms of government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism

What we learned so far:

1. nazism is not the same before and after 1934;
2. historical communism is not philosophical communism;
3. stalinism is not communism, but state capitalism (I'd say fascism);
4. communism is not always socialism.

A very pleasing way to learn about isms word, **The Ism book** :

http://www.ismbook.com/

(Please not that the objectivists leniencies make St. André exclude third-world fascism from his definition, but still are corporate dictatures.)

It's almost never economical to rely on an ism word. It's almost better to state the main thesis that we condemn. Liberalism and socialism can almost mean anything.