I hate duking it out with left-wing warriors pushing a cause, but sometimes you just have to take on some of these crusaders.
Somehow I got drawn into a website that featured a story about the decline and fall of Canada because the author believed this country no longer carries high principles of freedom and has lost its sense of humanity. The piece was written by a former New York Times reporter who attached no sense of neutrality to his leftist observations about Canada.
He decried the suspended freedoms and “stiff” prison terms resultant from the G-20 arrests and Canadian withdrawal from Kyoto (to facilitate the subsequent “orgy of environmental degradation” facilitated by “tar sands” development, in his words) as examples of a new harsher direction for this country.
He was highly supportive of Occupy movements and condemned the evil overlords of corporate greed.
He is an American roughly my age who somehow found himself caught by the “familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state” while visiting Montreal. It was a well-written piece of fiction — complete with descriptive over-the-top language to flesh out thin facts based strictly upon emotion and an overwhelming sense of moral superiority.
In short it was the perfect example of leftist doctrine and, halfway through the article, they asked for a donation to the cause — a just and pure cause free from the clutches of corporate influenced media sources.
My first thought was: Stay away Jimmy — this is not your world. The trained seals clapping for more nonsense from this guy sincerely believe the man and his message, even though he is full of something unprintable in a newspaper.
Instead, I decided to jump into the game and passed along my assessment of the guy from my point of view. It was a brief message that launched me into a debate from one of his apostles, a guy from Ontario via Dalhousie University who took major exception to my opinions.
The second guy is an activist who actually lists the Occupy movement as his favorite team, so we were definitely not on the same ideological page. This gulf was even more evident after he launched into a long diatribe about the need to bring “corporations and their political sycophants to heel” and “the ecological and economic catastrophe caused by free market capitalism.”
So I told him that I didn’t know him from Karl Marx, but his general contempt for free enterprise was vaguely nostalgic in a 1960-ish student radical kind of way, and that all of the good karma in the world would not heat even one Canadian household.
The predictable result from my comments was a lengthy manifesto stuffed into one paragraph from this guy. He initially attacked me as a denier because I am a guy who does question the science behind man-made global warming, or anthropomorphic global warming as he called it. He was nice enough to explain the term because, as a denier, I would naturally not understand big words. Incidentally, the use of the term “denier” automatically categorizes me as a flat-earther or likely Holocaust denier for extra effect.
Then he launched into some erroneous information about Ontario’s consumption of Alberta oil (he did have Quebec’s current non-use of Alberta oil correct) and an assessment of the oilsands development as a Ponzi scheme supported by private banks. He advocated a national rail service, which I assume he meant to replace our current system of highways, presumably to return us back to the 19th century for transportation in Western Canada. He advocated alternative energy replacements, even though Germany has invested heavily and unwisely in these concepts and regrets mothballing their nuclear plants.
It was ideological nonsense in comparison to the real world where real people live and work in this country.
Worse than that, he delivered it in a highly condescending style that was laden with excessively large words so that I could find my proper place as his intellectual inferior. He took his game to another level of sarcasm because he explained every big word to me.
That is the greatest failing of the neo-leftists: they are completely inflexible and totally unwilling to entertain a bigger picture of the world around them. Those who disagree with them are simply morons and rednecks who want to ruin the planet.
There is no middle ground for these people, they are morally correct in view of their superior intellect and we are morally wrong in view of our cavemen intellect.
Jim Sutherland is a local freelance columnist. He can be reached at jim@mystarcollectorcar.com.