Canadian Politics

[GCn20]

Just now, Wideleft said:

You have no idea what the content is, then.  I offered you an opportunity to learn.

I am fully aware and it does not change my opinion. I do not want my child exposed to these discussions in grade 2. It is too young imo.

[JCon]

Now we're onto the latest alt-right propaganda, save-the-children? 

FFS.  There is no bottom for them. 

[GCn20]

The wind blows hard in the vortex. I'm out.

[Wideleft]

[17to85]

Conservatives are so funny. They claim to want open discussion but hate that discussion involves actually explaining why their views are wrong so they cry foul and run away back to their safe spaces. Biggest snowflakes going are Conservatives. 

59 minutes ago, GCn20 said:

Great...so if someone who pushes pro-abortion on someone who is not comfortable with it is an ******* too right? If not, that's quite the double standard.

There is no pro-abortion... only pro choice. Which means you are free to be morally against abortions if you want, no one cares. It's the other side that wants to restrict choices and impose their views on everyone else.

[HardCoreBlue]

1 hour ago, Wideleft said:

It's not about believing in or being against abortion, that's moot, hold whatever beliefs/opinions you want, it's about ensuring access to this specific healthcare service to women if they so choose.

My support for women to choose is not shoving pro-abortion down one's throats. That's a weird thing to say. 

If one's hardened beliefs on this specific issue dictates/forces/controls what a woman can do with their uterus, that's an issue.

Supporting women to have control over their own bodies, supporting the provision of evidence-informed resources for women to access if they so choose to assist them in what they need to figure out and support the provision of different options of what appropriate avenues they can take based on their own particular situations/dynamics, this is not an issue. This is being a responsible human being for other human beings.

Oh and pointing this out is not bullying ffs.

Edited August 10, 2023 by HardCoreBlue

[GCn20]

16 minutes ago, HardCoreBlue said:

It's not about believing in or being against abortion, that's moot, hold whatever beliefs/opinions you want, it's about ensuring access to this specific healthcare service to women if they so choose.

My support for women to choose is not shoving pro-abortion down one's throats. That's a weird thing to say. 

If one's hardened beliefs on this specific issue dictates/forces/controls what a woman can do with their uterus, that's an issue.

Supporting women to have control over their own bodies, supporting the provision of evidence-informed resources for women to access if they so choose to assist them in what they need to figure out and support the provision of different options of what appropriate avenues they can take based on their own particular situations/dynamics, this is not an issue. This is being a responsible human being for other human beings.

Oh and pointing this out is not bullying ffs.

Never said it was bullying. The bullying is when people are called stupid, or lesser than for their beliefs. I have no issue either with people openly being in favor or against abortion in a respectful manner that doesn't interfere with anyone elses morality on the issue. I do not believe anti-abortion should be demonstrating, looking to over turn abortion rights etc. 

30 minutes ago, 17to85 said:

Conservatives are so funny. They claim to want open discussion but hate that discussion involves actually explaining why their views are wrong so they cry foul and run away back to their safe spaces. Biggest snowflakes going are Conservatives. 

There is no pro-abortion... only pro choice. Which means you are free to be morally against abortions if you want, no one cares. It's the other side that wants to restrict choices and impose their views on everyone else.

I will concede that there are those who are anti pro-choice that deserve the scorn and criticism they receive.

[Tracker]

8 hours ago, GCn20 said:

Take it seriously. However, and I agree that misrepresentation deserves response, the manner of response is important to any discussion. Divisiveness builds when someone feels their opinion gives them the right to belittle another. If someone doesn't believe in abortion, or schools teaching gender diversity...that does not make them a bad person. 

The difference is that our beliefs are supposed to givern our conduct and interactions with others. When we use our beliefs to compel others to follow our rules, that is where the line is drawn. If you choose to practice in your life that abortion is wrong, that is fine. If you use that excuse (almost exclusively rooted in dogma) to force others to carry unviable foetuses to term, or by doing so, cause physical or psychological harm to the pregnant woman, you have crossed that line and are creating harm. If you teach that gender identity is defined by your beliefs and anyone who disagrees is deviant should be ostracised or otherwise punished, you re casuing harm. And the list goes on.

Edited August 10, 2023 by Tracker

[JCon]

It's always about feelings and not evidence. Can't teach this or that to this age group because of something but that "something" is never rooted with evidence. It's always fearmongering, and then martyrdom. Poor me. 

[HardCoreBlue]

17 minutes ago, JCon said:

It's always about feelings and not evidence. Can't teach this or that to this age group because of something but that "something" is never rooted with evidence. It's always fearmongering, and then martyrdom. Poor me. 

Yup. It's mind blowing to me that some believe they can hold any opinion they want, any opinion along the continuum of craziness and outright falsehoods, and no matter what, no matter where this opinion sits along this continuum, it must always be met with civility and respect and if its not, the responder who calls these opinions out because they are wrong and dangerous, they are the problem in their mind, they are echo chamber WOKE libtards, not the actually opinion that runs counter to all the evidence on that particular issue. These same people will then appropriately come in very very hot on opinions offered by others that run counter to things they won't tolerate and/or care deeply about based on factual evidence.

Perplexing, fascinating, exhausting etc. 

[Sard]

The part I don't get is why gender identity keeps being associated with sex and sexuality.  They are completely different things.  Just because the word sex is used in place of gender in a lot of places, people think that teaching kids about gender identity is in some way exposing them to sex.  Kids are aware that there are genders (male and female) from a very young age... they may not know all of the physical differences there, but that's not what gender identity is about anyway, so why would it be wrong to teach to a kid in grade 2?

People need to stop confusing teaching gender identity with teaching sexual education because they are barely even in the same realm.

[Pepper_Brooks]

I was being facetious when I labeled a particular commenter above as a "Fake News Declaring Election Denier" in a different thread. Interestingly, it appears there might have been some truth to it, which also explains their later emotional outbursts.

[HardCoreBlue]

4 hours ago, 17to85 said:

Conservatives are so funny. They claim to want open discussion but hate that discussion involves actually explaining why their views are wrong so they cry foul and run away back to their safe spaces. Biggest snowflakes going are Conservatives. 

There is no pro-abortion... only pro choice. Which means you are free to be morally against abortions if you want, no one cares. It's the other side that wants to restrict choices and impose their views on everyone else.

Some here  and elsewhere wrap it nebulously as 'we' (don't know who this 'we' are) are being very divisive by telling them they can't have opinions that run counter to 'ours (I've never really seen this happen here)', they are being bullied and forced in having to groupthink like 'us' and their opinions are wrong and feel victimized by how they are treated when all they are trying to do is keep others honest.

This is an absolutely weird and confusing thing to say. We all have valid and invalid opinions every last one of us but if one is being a messenger of fact, of sound and reliable evidence, of knowledge and wisdom no matter what they personally think to discount half truths, unsubstantiated claims, lies, made up ****, falsehoods, embellishments etc etc,, that's the best one can do. 

[Tracker]

2 hours ago, HardCoreBlue said:

Some here  and elsewhere wrap it nebulously as 'we' (don't know who this 'we' are) are being very divisive by telling them they can't have opinions that run counter to 'ours (I've never really seen this happen here)', they are being bullied and forced in having to groupthink like 'us' and their opinions are wrong and feel victimized by how they are treated when all they are trying to do is keep others honest.

This is an absolutely weird and confusing thing to say. We all have valid and invalid opinions every last one of us but if one is being a messenger of fact, of sound and reliable evidence, of knowledge and wisdom no matter what they personally think to discount half truths, unsubstantiated claims, lies, made up ****, falsehoods, embellishments etc etc,, that's the best one can do. 

(Insert Hermann Goerring quote here)

[Wideleft]

A very good read:

OPINION

Pierre Poilievre, the class tourist who didn’t read the guidebook

 

SHANNON PROUDFOOT

OTTAWA

PUBLISHED AUGUST 11, 2023UPDATED AUGUST 13, 2023

 

Near the end of July, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre paced a rally stage in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., showing off his summer makeover: no glasses, grey pants, a white henley shirt with the sleeves pushed up, but still with the expensive-looking shoes.

He was in full what-a-nice-young-man mode, cracking cheesy jokes that the crowd ate up, mocking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and flexing about how everything would be better if he took the top job.

Mr. Poilievre had drawn a good crowd of about 400 and opened with a classic campaign-style anecdote. A local waitress ran over to give him a big hug that morning, he said, and she ordered him to “Get him out, get in there and fix this” – meaning the various ways in which Mr. Trudeau was laying waste to the country.

Later in his remarks, Mr. Poilievre returned to this waitress to make a point about the burden of taxes and benefits clawbacks.

”I don’t know her personal story, but let’s say that she has three kids,” he said. “And let’s say that she earns $60,000, 25 bucks an hour.” At this point, several people even in that extremely friendly audience made little strangled noises of surprise and confusion, the human equivalent of a record-scratch sound effect.

A waitress in a blue-collar Northern Ontario city pulling down a cool $60,000 a year? The median income of everyone in Sault Ste. Marie – including the lawyers, the doctors, the teachers and all the people who work in the service industry or manufacturing jobs like Algoma Steel – was $40,800 in 2020. The average annual income of people working in the food service industry across Canada was $21,175 last year.

Outtakes from a ‘kinder, gentler’ Pierre Poilievre’s efforts to flip the script

It would be as churlish to make a big thing out of a minor gaffe like that as it would be to point out that Mr. Poilievre began making $141,200 as a 25-year-old MP in 2004 and now makes $287,400, so perhaps his voter narratives are graded on a curve.

Or rather, it would be cheap to point out such discrepancies – if Mr. Poilievre didn’t keep saying out-of-touch or insulting things as he wages his chosen game of class warfare.

A week earlier, in trying to make a point about housing, he asked why it cost $550,000 in Niagara Falls to buy a “tiny little shack,” and even gave the address of this supposedly decrepit abode. As it turned out, a real person lived there and she found his remarks “a little embarrassing” for reasons we can all understand.

What’s more, her house was a perfectly lovely 1.5-storey postwar home that would not look at all odd or shack-like to many, many Canadians – especially the working-class people Mr. Poilievre keeps fetishizing. Sault Ste. Marie, which is where I grew up, is home to entire blocks lined with identical houses, and many in that crowd of political admirers would have left a house exactly like that to attend his rally.

Back in May at an airport, Mr. Poilievre recorded a selfie video that can only be described as deeply weird. “I just had a great weekend, meeting with the common people, listening to their common sense. I just want to remind everyone politics is supposed to be a blue-collar job. Check out these boots,” he said into the lens, before panning toward his blurry and apparently muddy feet.

“That’s what it’s like to be out with the people, in the rain, attending their festivals, listening to their stories, hearing their dreams.”

If I know anything about the working class, it’s that they constantly refer to themselves, in the manner of a particularly cringey museum exhibit, as “common people” who delight in primitive “festivals.” And they absolutely view dirty boots as something to preen about, like an especially successful Halloween costume.

But the bigger problem with Mr. Poilievre’s class tourism is this: He has grasped a real thing that is simmering just below a boil. Too many people feel like they can’t afford any sort of reasonable life or even pin the hopes of such a thing to their children. And many people – some included in the group above, some not – feel ignored, maligned and scolded by the current federal government.

But in seizing on those feelings without an evident shred of real empathy, perspective or authenticity, Mr. Poilievre seems to see them as smouldering embers of resentment to be fanned for his own purposes, rather than a set of real problems in need of solving.

My dad – Northern Ontario working-class smarts through and through – once told me: “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink or swear.” That advice isn’t really about alcohol and cursing. What it means is that you should be careful around someone who refuses to let down their guard, who keeps their true self bottled up in the packaging they want you to see.

What it also means is that so-called common people are not idiots. They know very well when they’re being patronized – or when someone is pretending.

And they deserve something better than being patted on the head and treated like cardboard cut-outs by someone who claims to understand the very real stresses in their life.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-pierre-poilievre-the-class-tourist-who-didnt-read-the-guidebook/

[Wideleft]

 

From today's Washington Post:

Charges: Violation of the Georgia RICO Act; conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer; two counts of conspiracy to commit first-degree forgery; two counts of conspiracy to commit false statements and writings; conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

Roman helped coordinate the alternate-elector plan with other Trump lawyers and top aides. Roman sent emails about the elector plan that were later published by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. He circulated a detailed spreadsheet that kept track of each of the seven states that Biden had won but where he and others on the campaign were urging Trump’s electors to gather and vote on Dec. 14, 2020.

An attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Edited August 15, 2023 by Wideleft

[WildPath]

4 hours ago, Wideleft said:

But in seizing on those feelings without an evident shred of real empathy, perspective or authenticity, Mr. Poilievre seems to see them as smouldering embers of resentment to be fanned for his own purposes, rather than a set of real problems in need of solving.

PP in a nutshell.

4 hours ago, Wideleft said:

What it also means is that so-called common people are not idiots. They know very well when they’re being patronized – or when someone is pretending.

Disagree. I am continually amazed to see the support PP gets despite how poorly acted and thinly veiled his contempt for "common people" is.

[Noeller]

apparently the CPC are running campaign ads already, for some reason (no election in sight...) Saw one the other night voiced by his wife talking about what an amazing REGULAR person he is (no mention of the fact that he's held no job outside of politics his entire life and has been making at least $125k as a sitting MP since he was 25 years old...) 

[Goalie]

There's a difference between abortion and teaching gender diversity tho. 

One should definitely involve women since it's their body not mine. 

As for the gender diversity stuff? Umm, sometimes it's not ok to play along. People are identifying as cats now,  if I said I identify as a mouse and you are bullying me, that's nucking Futs right. But that's what's gonna happen until ppl wake up and realize mental illness isn't a nucking game. I grew up with a few friends who are no longer around because one year Michael would be Michelle and then a few years later he'd be Michael and then Michelle and then Michael hung himself.  It's not ok to play along 

[Sard]

6 hours ago, Goalie said:

There's a difference between abortion and teaching gender diversity tho. 

One should definitely involve women since it's their body not mine. 

As for the gender diversity stuff? Umm, sometimes it's not ok to play along. People are identifying as cats now,  if I said I identify as a mouse and you are bullying me, that's nucking Futs right. But that's what's gonna happen until ppl wake up and realize mental illness isn't a nucking game. I grew up with a few friends who are no longer around because one year Michael would be Michelle and then a few years later he'd be Michael and then Michelle and then Michael hung himself.  It's not ok to play along 

First off, identifying as a cat has nothing to do with gender, so playing along with that is dumb.  Second, I don't know that I believe that's actually a thing... it wouldn't surprise me if that was something that someone came up with as the "big scary extreme" to scare people into not accepting true gender diversity at all because they just don't want to.

[MOBomberFan]

I have a family member that went full transition female to male. They are way happier now as a straight male than a gay woman. It took me a long time to look at them and not see who they used to be, but I get it now, this is actually who they were all along and are way better off now than they were before. It may have even saved their life. They were born in the late 70s, this isn't some kid raised by the internet, its someone that had the same 80s/90s analog upbringing as many of us here. They didn't have to be taught to think or feel this way, it's just how it was and I believe them

 

That being said, nobody actually identifies as a cat, outside of Maureen Ponderosa or a few pronoun-bedazzled Tik-Tokers that crave to be unique and different from all the other unique and different Tik-Tokers. Transitioning isn't going away but Xim/Xer's and the pronoun laden cat people are a fad that will be pretty cringey in retrospect. It's like people who used to say they 1000 year old were vampires on my space. Where are they now? 2 kids and a white collar job. They grew up and got on with their lives.

[Wideleft]

14 hours ago, Goalie said:

There's a difference between abortion and teaching gender diversity tho. 

One should definitely involve women since it's their body not mine. 

As for the gender diversity stuff? Umm, sometimes it's not ok to play along. People are identifying as cats now,  if I said I identify as a mouse and you are bullying me, that's nucking Futs right. But that's what's gonna happen until ppl wake up and realize mental illness isn't a nucking game. I grew up with a few friends who are no longer around because one year Michael would be Michelle and then a few years later he'd be Michael and then Michelle and then Michael hung himself.  It's not ok to play along 

 

[Brandon]

3 hours ago, MOBomberFan said:

 

 

That being said, nobody actually identifies as a cat, outside of Maureen Ponderosa or a few pronoun-bedazzled Tik-Tokers that crave to be unique and different from all the other unique and different Tik-Tokers. 

https://www.insider.com/japanese-man-spends-15000-on-lifelike-dog-costume-2022-5?amp

Also look up furries and cloppers on Google.

I don't think people with serious mental health issues will be going away any time soon like a fad. 

[rebusrankin]

20 hours ago, Noeller said:

apparently the CPC are running campaign ads already, for some reason (no election in sight...) Saw one the other night voiced by his wife talking about what an amazing REGULAR person he is (no mention of the fact that he's held no job outside of politics his entire life and has been making at least $125k as a sitting MP since he was 25 years old...) 

They are trying to make him look softer in order to appeal to female voters. Yeah, a guy who had a salary of $141,000 when he had just turned 25 and was elected as an MP and who now makes over $250,000 is a regular guy. Conservatives said JT had a weak resume, PP is weaker. Party staffer and then MP.

[MOBomberFan]

53 minutes ago, Brandon said:

https://www.insider.com/japanese-man-spends-15000-on-lifelike-dog-costume-2022-5?amp

Also look up furries and cloppers on Google.

I don't think people with serious mental health issues will be going away any time soon like a fad. 

My favorite recent mentally ill person with too much money was the white guy that had his face carved up and pigmented so that he could 'be Korean'

I think there is a ton of middle ground between meowing and wearing cat ears on the internet and sex changes, and there is even more middle ground between sex changes and species (cat/dog) or race (White to Korean) changes. Many of these people are confused and processing (like teens have always done, only weirder than it used to be), some of these people genuinely need hormones or surgeries to be who they are supposed to be... and then a few of them are straight up bananas and may even want to transition into being a banana.

But they aren't all the same people and I hope you aren't suggesting that sex changes are on the same shelf or even in the same ballpark as dogman and whitey-san the Korean man. I know I only have an anecdote to share but my trans family member is by all accounts a perfectly normal and well adjusted dude, married with a kid a house and 2 dogs, plays hockey and drinks beer, likes to go camping. Just like so many other normal guys. That he used to have a ****** doesn't really matter 99.9% of the time.

 

Also I don't have to look up furries I've been in love with Lola Bunny for 20+ years now 😍