A Conversation About My Viewpoint

The following is a Facebook conversation that I've been having regarding my apparent leftist bias.  For the record, I'm a centralist who believes in holding the government, whatever their stripe, to account, making government more representative and reasoned, and preventing extremism from taking control of society. I believe that no religion, philosophy, science, or political approach has a monopoly on truth. They are all blind persons trying to describe the elephant of reality.

Good ideas are good ideas, but evil is evil. You can judge the moral character by actions and results - the fruit. Do the words match the actions? Does the action benefit as much as society as possible, or just a privileged few. Is it driven by selfishness or compassion? There are standards, but no one possesses the ultimate truth, and real truth is not so fragile that insults or satire can destroy it.

Richard HeathenWell every post I see from you is attacking conservatives, and quoting socialists like Muclair from the NDP. NDP would be just as bad if not worse than Harper.

Michael S Fricker That's because Harper is evil. Anyone who speaks out against him is an ally. And I'm more of a centralist, but the conservatives have become bankrupt of ideas because of their slavish worship of neoliberalism and their adoption of the fascist-like tactics of neoconservatism.

 

Richard Heathen Muclair, Ignatieff, Layton, are/were just as evil as Harper.

 

Michael S Fricker I wouldn't necessarily argue with that. The one that's actually in charge is the one that you have to at least keep in check. Layton wasn't evil, he had the right intentions and actually tried to fight for the common people, but politics demands a ruthlessness that leads to evil. If Harper actually had instituted the accountability and systemic reform he promised instead of hypocritically doing the opposite, I wouldn't call him evil either. Power corrupts. When I first got political, it was just about proportional representation, something I thought that would at least make the system and government more representative. Harper's actions since getting his majority is what got me really active again. Canada has always been ruled by parties who came at the middle from the right or left, but tried to govern in the middle in order to represent the majority of people. Harper has encouraged a division and rules from the extreme right, leaving the majority of Canadians without effective representation in the actual governing of the country, because our system renders half of the house of commons irrelevant and enables the PM to be a dictator. Harper is just the worst example of exploiting it that our country has produced. He worships the same ideas that George Bush did and we know where that led. As for Ignatieff, he was just useless. He never did anything that was positive or negative, or even apparent.