Thorn

Right now, the U.S, is probably the best example in the world of a state which is corporatist in its mentality to the point where ordinary people get screwed over time and time again without recourse.

See above post. If I wanted to be insulting towards Americans in general I could come up with a lot better than an accurate (in my opinion) description of their knowledge about the world around them.

I was directly responding to your claim about how Americans feel. And, given what I've seen of Americans, my description was accurate, and not meant to be insulting to Americans in general. In fact, I freely admit that if you were a Canadian and had made the same remark "Ie, most Canadians don't think their society..." I could have simply replaced the word 'American' in the above with 'Canadian'. Most Canadians know very little about how other societies work either. In any event, none of it was an insult directed at you. Nor, in all honesty, was it meant to be mocking or insulting towards Americans in general, since I feel Canadians are pretty much just as ignorant about life elsewhere.

Just for argument's sake, and after all, isn't that why we're all here? Because we like to argue about things? What would be the drawbacks of making punishments, and the violation of the rules which caused them, publicly known? I can think of immediate benefits. That's extremely difficult given the daily provocation by people who do not, and who seem to get away with it. It's like telling a hockey player who keeps getting tripped, slashed and elbowed to not retaliate, even though everyone else is doing it and the referee has his whistle in his pocket. So far the only solution I've found is to put the worst of those who habitually sneer, mock and insult into my ignore file, but given the regular behavior here I have a feeling that eventually there'll be almost no point in bothering to read this forum as EVERYONE will be in my ignore file.

His response was nothing but sneering and mockery. My response to you was not so I'm confused about what you mean. Perhaps you could point them out to me? Are you speaking of some other post on some other topic? I admit to not being a saint. There seems endless provocation on this web site, but I do try not to insult people who have not first insulted me. By the way, I don't accuse people of being 'clueless'. I have more imagination than that.

No one says you MUST take three or four or five weeks off. What I'm suggesting is that without governmental intervention we will not be accorded the opportunity (except in some unionized cases) of taking that much paid vacation. You are perfectly free to turn down your vacation if you don't want it. I use all mine. Are you assuming everyone in Europe works at a high paid job? I bet there are cleaning staff and security guards and store clerks throughout Europe, and they still manage to get by okay with their four or five or six weeks of vacation. In fact, I bet those poor people are better off than the poor people working for no vacation in the US. This is just more of the 'stuff is better than life' argument. If put to a straight up vote, how many Canadians would vote 'no' to having five weeks of vacation instead of two? Would there be economic consequences to that? Perhaps. But the people of Stockholm aren't lining up in bread lines or freezing in their cold, unheated, rat infested hovels, now are they?

I make no such assumption. I was referring to a specific not to a general. In this case, the specific is that people who don't bother to vote don't get much attention. So I pointed out another specific which says people who don't work hard, who are lazy, don't make as much money. In other words, if you don't bother to put out the effort why should you expect to get the same reward as people who do? That was not a general commentary on all poor people.

There are two aspects of the moderation here I'd like to address. Both of which, I believe, stand in the way of this forum attaining real success, by which I mean broader exposure and more membership. The first is derived from the English expression from the last century which says that "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." No one would think of telling people they have no right to know if someone was convicted of a crime, or what their punishment was. The community needs to see what is being done so it can judge whether the punishment fits the crime, whether justice is done, in other words. In MapleLeaf what passes for justice is done secretly. The community does not know who has been punished or why, or what the punishment is. Thus the community has no means of determining whether justice is being done, or whether it's one-sided and unfair to one or another group or person. The second aspect of the moderation here which I find problematic is the wide divergence between the rules, as written, and the behaviour, as evidenced through daily reading of the postings here. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you probably can't find any political topic on this forum that doesn't have a dozen violations of the written rules. To use a hockey analogy, everyone knows what the rules are of hockey. They're written in plain black and white. But those aren't the 'real' rules. The real rules are whatever the referee chooses to call in a given game. Sometimes the rules are strictly enforced. Sometimes, the ref puts away his whistle and ignores virtually everything. That's okay, though. The players can adapt to either. What the players really, REALLY hate, though, is a ref who lets everything go, and then inexplicably decides to call something late in the game that he's ignored a dozen times already. And not just call it, but throw the player out of the game. Not only can this be seen as injustice but the rest of the community learns nothing from it. The rest of the community has no means of learning from that example, or of gleaning what the 'real' rules are, and so amend their own behaviour.

There were massive changes underway in the USSR which I don't think we can compare to Harper becoming PM. Canada isn't going to undergo the huge societal and political changes that Russia did, at least, not any time soon. I understand Harper's hope of 'creeping conservatism' as it were, of incremental changes to society, and I'm not saying he won't be able to change us a little, but I just don't think it's going to be the kind of earthquake the Russians experienced. Nor anything like it. Russia was in tatters after the USSR fell apart, reduced to begging for money from its neighbours. The number one aspiration among young girls was to become a prostitute. Canada is on considerably more solid ground, economically, politically and culturally.

I am not a Lefty. I'm a practical person who looks at the way life is lived in other parts of the world and says to himself that we ought to adopt the things that work. And many of the things they do over there work better than the way we do them. And your argument seems to boil down to we won't be able to buy as much 'stuff' if we don't work work, work. I'm not saying you don't need to work, but I think our society carries it past its logical limits and that we'd be better off with less 'stuff' like some of the Europeans, and more 'life'.

What a coincidence. The moment I saw your name I said to myself "Well, this will be nothing but sneering, snotty insults, mockery and jeering" and it was! And then I said to myself, after the first insults, that it wasn't worth reading further, and that life is too short to bother with the anti-social misfits on the internet whose lives are so empty and meaningless that their only hope of gaining a sense of self-importance is by putting down others. Welcome to my ignore file.

I don't think lowest earners are lazy across the board. I didn't suggest that low income earners are low income earners because of laziness, but because of choices made in their lives. Why should they be? I mean, are they all as smart as high income earners? Are they as capable? Do they have the same drive to succeed? Do they push themselves as much, on average? For the record, I am among those who believe that the income disparity in this country is too great, and that's it even worse in the US. I am all for ways of evening things out as long as they are, uhm, 'fair' and that means I am interested in providing equality of opportunity, not equality of results. I don't think it is. On the other hand, how many people with university degrees live life in poverty unless there's a sickness involved?

Most Americans know nothing about what life is like in other countries, other than the countries they see on their faux news views of the world. And that mainly consists of riots, wars, and starvation. Those few Americans who travel abroad usually spend a week or two in a tourist area looking at the pretty sights and then go home. I wonder how many Americans could actually name any city in France, England or Germany other than London, Paris and Berlin? They know little or nothing about how the French and Germans live. They certainly don't know anything about how the Norwegians live. How many Americans, even to save their lives, could name a single city in Norway of Finland or Sweden? So your collective assessment of how well their societies work compared to yours is largely irrelevant. Third world people, these days, few of whom know anything beyond what they see in Hollywood, and the myth of endless riches here. Then they arrive and become a gardener working for under minimum wages with no benefits. They'd be way better off in Norway or Belgium. That's pretty obvious. I don't know why you felt you needed to point it out. Governments have no money. They only redistribute money. Me too. I'd love to pay them less money in taxes. But I live in a society whose health largely depends on taxes. I don't want people starving in the streets or dying of diseases in the 'poor quarter' while I sip wine by the pool and slaves wave palm fronds over me. I'm not a believer in Communism. I certainly believe hard work ought to be rewarded, and slackers punished. I don't like a system whereby the lazy can live nicely. Far from it. I'd draft the lazy into some sort of gardening corps or road gangs or something. Work or don't eat. That being said, I also believe in providing everyone with the means for self-improvement, for bettering their skills and education so as to be better able to support themselves. And I believe in helping those who are physically, mentally or emotionally disabled for some reason. I don't think your society does much of a job on any of that. Even mine doesn't do as well as it could. The Europeans do a much better job. And btw, there is necessary correlation between hard work and high pay. Taxi drivers here work long, long hours for very little pay. Meanwhile a lawyer can make a ten minute phone call and rack up as much money for it as the taxi driver does for a week of work. Oh, but the lawyer went to law school and worked hard, you'll say! Well, perhaps, but the taxi driver probably never had that opportunity. Few lawyers I've known or heard of were poverty stricken as youths. Most people in good, well-paying jobs had parents who were in good, well-paying jobs. Didn't have parents like that? Tough for you, right? At least in America. Violent crime in the US is, in large measure, a result of a massive underclass of minorities, principally Black and Hispanic, with multiple generations living on welfare living in urban blight without hope. Instead of doing something about that you build prisons, hire more cops, more security guards, put bars on your windows and hunker down with your guns. And some would prefer to be able to work for less than minimum wages too. But it's been shown to be in society's interest for people to not be able to underbid each other down into the ground. It's also in society's interest for people to be able to live a little, to have vacations now and then. The many benefit despite the few being annoyed. I doubt many Americans would be upset at getting another week or two of paid vacation.

But you point out that the Conservatives use it too. So, in all likelihood, do the Liberals and BQ, the Communist Party and, if there is one, the Nazi party. They all think they know what fair is. They want fairness. So what's the point of using the word at all in the context of an ideological statement? It's essentially meaningless. Hitler thought the world was being unfair to Germans. He thought society was being unfair to Aryans. All he wanted was fairness!

Riiiight. Because that never happens with Left leaning people. Why, you could search this site for hours and hours and not find any examples of a 'left leaning' poster doing that...

I am also in the highest income bracket and I'm voting Conservative. What am I, cruel and evil? Do I hate fairness? And what is a 'fair' level of sharing? If I work seventy hours a week in order to be successful and earn that money, is it fair to take a huge chunk of my earnings to give it to people who do no work at all by choice? Is it fair to give force me to give money to people in other countries because you want to be generous? These are the sorts of questions the Left rarely likes to address, but instead prefers to dismiss. It's true that poverty can come to anyone, but it's also true that, barring sickness, most people's poverty, in this country, is the result of personal choices they've made, and continue to in their lives. Am I to wholly compensate them for that? I am all for extending a helping hand insofar as helping people learn a skill, helping them get educated, helping them get into the work force, but I have little tolerance for people who screwed up their lives, feel sorry for themselves, do little or nothing to improve them, and then whine about their lot in life.

I think the problem lies in the fact that 'fair' is a concept which, in any given situation, is a judgement call. What you think is 'fair' is probably not what I think is 'fair'. What those on the Left think is 'fair' is unlikely to be what those on the Right think is 'fair'. You can't build an ideological stance on shifting sand.

Sounds to me as if they're treated quite fairly. This is like saying lazy people who don't want to work are treated unfairly because they don't have as much money as energetic people who work hard...

You make it sound like that was a regular occurrence. As far as I can remember they did that once, with regard to "we've had enough of prime ministers from Quebec" And I don't blame them. Quebecers had been PM for something like thirty of the previous thirty five years, all while the West was largely shut out of power.

You sound awfully mature for sixteen. Then again, given some of the personalities here, I suppose almost anyone sounds good by comparison.

Good thing you didn't try it in Toronto. You'd probably still be kettled.

Yeah, well, it's against the law to cross the street except at the lights... technically. Doesn't stop everyone from doing it anyway.

They're not.

He was not my favorite guy, and I never would have voted for the policies he advocated. But he had balls, and he was no dummy. No one will ever accuse him of having been an empty suit like so many of those people in Ottawa.

Isn't it against the rules to insult people here? Because there are some people here I'd really like to insult, who really deserve to be insulted, who lack any semblance of class or manners or intelligence. Can I? Huh? Can I?