Jump to content

Zeitgeist

Senior Member
  • Posts

    9,829
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    70

Everything posted by Zeitgeist

  1. Nonsense. First off, I’m a moderate who used to be a member of the Liberal Party. I’m not extreme in any way. People follow freedom and opportunity, always. The alternatives to Western expansion were worse and the facts don’t lie. People keep coming to colonial Canada in spite of our own government’s anti-Canadian rhetoric. Your hands are not demonstrably cleaner than anyone else’s on this forum, if you think your identity makes you extra. In fact your notions of the “noble savage” are straight out of the European Enlightenment. The Indigenous made contributions to our democracy and way of life. Read about Kondiaronk the Wendat orator. Read about various medications and technologies. What I particularly take issue with is your attempt to paint some cultures/groups as especially predatory in Canada and to grant special victim status to others, somehow aligning yourself with them as having a better understanding of colonialism than someone like me, presumably through your “lived experience” when it’s clear that you’re immensely steeped in “the system” (with all its colonialism and “whiteness”: your categories, not mine). Trying to make a connection between your supposed moral clarity and the colonized of early Canada is ridiculous. Their “victimhood”, assuming we agree that they were innocent victims (and I don’t), has nothing to do with your life, nor does anyone alive today have any connection to those “colonizers”. We all have benefited from their legacy more than we would’ve had there been no Canada, or why did you or your ancestors come here? Also, where is your evidence of the intentional killing of Indigenous people in Canada by the French and/or English? There is none. Grow up, stop applying US narratives to Canada, and drop the identity politics. It’s unjust and gross.
  2. Well this is a real problem for Canada. It’s not really a pluralistic society because we’ve been taught by a biased media to be biased. There’s barely any conservative voice in Canada, as the Liberals have essentially identified Canada with themselves and associated all opposition with the Americans and MAGA. It means that anyone who criticizes the Liberal agenda is depicted as scary and dangerous to Canada. It was always there in my lifetime but it kicked into high gear under Trudeau Jr. The CBC echoes and amplifies that rhetoric, making their journalism suspect.
  3. Why should I watch Canadian content regulated and paid for by a government that considers the country bad? Yes there’s a point I’m making. Throw your country under the bus and expect to go down with it, including the programs you fund.
  4. You don’t seem to understand that the very language you use and the conditions for your opinions are contextual for our times and steeped in a cultural history that’s much broader than your po-co 2nd year university revolutionary take. It’s like you’re demanding that the parents who fed and raised you be sentenced to death for giving you much of what’s good in your life. It doesn’t matter. You’ll either persist in your immature opinions until you have real responsibility like kids or a serious job or you’ll persist in your rant wondering why sensible people don’t agree with you. In order to fairly ascertain the actions of people you need to look at what all the other players were doing and why, understand that our standards didn’t exist because life was harsher for everyone, and see that the best methods for living won the day. People didn’t come to America to kill or erase culture out of some kind of sadistic joy, at least not the vast majority. They came because they saw opportunity and took it. They keep coming. The way of life established in the West afforded the best living standards, attracting more people, and making everything else a problem to be solved by the same people who had success in so many other areas. In the end success breeds success. While slaves were taken and people slaughtered in places and times, as had always been the case, the real juggernaut that continues to “colonize” and advance at the expense of everyone and everything else is the lure of cutting edge civilization, because that’s what people choose and gravitate towards. It’s not something that one person, a king or president, made happen. It’s not based on skin colour or gender. It happened because highly developed civilizations grow and devour everything in their path because they’re compelling and powerful in their own right, including all the leftist programs and anti-colonial projects such civilizations afford. They’re all colonial af and you yourself will be judged as a colonial retrograde by future generations. In fact, your missionary zeal and lack of self awareness make you as ripe for cancellation as all the colonialist founders of America, Canada, etc. At least here you won’t be killed by the revolutionary mob when it turns against you.
  5. Lacks contextual perspective and makes value judgments without evidence to support.
  6. No, you don’t understand context. The people of 400 years ago thought that they were doing good and just things, bringing the light of civilization to the world and creating opportunities. Today’s governments and settlers think that they are doing the same thing and will be judged just as unfairly by the Black Dog of 2224 as you’re judging the early colonial settlers. Oh, and my guess is that you would’ve been there among the French missionaries trying to save the “savages” just before the Iroquois barrelled through your door and slaughtered you rather savagely. Self-righteous fakeness and hypocrisy doesn’t sit well. Have some honesty and humility.
  7. The arguments for the CBC are that the content is made by Canadians for Canadians with Canadian content, and to provide it to all Canadians no matter how far flung and small their communities are, but given that the Liberals have declared Canada genocidal, racist and patriarchal, wouldn’t it be better to keep Canada out of people’s living rooms, especially in the boonies? It’s certainly cheaper. Also what does all this protection of monopolies do for consumers? Let in all the cell phone and cable providers from around the world, boost competition and lower prices. Slash the CRTC. Public broadcasters are for countries where the government and its people believe that the country has value and a good story to tell. Otherwise, we might as well watch other stories.
  8. No, immigration and colonization are identical, just as they were 400 years ago. If you were one of the femmes de roi coming to New France to help populate 400 years ago, you would see yourself as an immigrant seeking opportunity in a mostly empty land. You would only worry about Indians from a safety perspective, namely yours. The Pakistanis and Nigerians coming here today want better lives just as they did, and the government thinks it’s helping people just as they thought they were then. The colonialism narrative is a political perspective that can be debated, but it’s largely written after the fact of early settlement and discussed by people with the luxury to do so. If you don’t think that blacks were attacking each other or keeping slaves in Africa or that Indigenous weren’t doing similar things before and when Europeans arrived, I’ve got some land in Tuktoyuktuk that might interest you.
  9. Slavery is awful and we’re lucky not to have had much of it in Canadian colonial history. A good book to read on the subject is The Book of Negroes. The worst of it for Canada was in Nova Scotia, but even there it was relatively small in numbers and ended well before slavery ended in the US. The rest of colonial Canada didn’t allow it, and that’s pre-Confederation. There would’ve been remnants of indentured servants and slaves but it’s close to zero for slaves, apart from Indigenous on the West Coast who kept slaves for thousands of years. We know of the slave trade in Africa and the Caribbean and that colonial powers practiced it along with many parts of Africa. There’s a legacy but barely any in settler Canada. It’s just not an issue for blacks living in Canada today. The Indigenous stuff is messier in Canada, but the sad truth is that it’s messier because Canadians tried to solve it through literacy and the Indian Act, which of course didn’t work well, but the Americans handled it far more brutally, through bounties and wars and slaughter, yet interestingly, you don’t see nearly as much handwringing in the US as in Canada over Indigenous affairs, where the settlers “won”, perhaps because we tried harder to preserve cultures and make peace? And that’s the irony of living in one of the most peaceful and successful countries: The more you solve problems, the more problems people seem to find and the more detailed and frivolous the demands become. It’s reached a point where we’re becoming dysfunctional and self-destructive because of guilt and shame. It’s unhealthy. Meanwhile I think slavery still exists in parts of Africa, or it did until recently. It reminds me of the argument against reporting on the abuse of Indigenous children to CAS. If people can argue that they’ve been victimized, somehow that makes some people feel entitled to victimize others. “Intergenerational trauma” becomes the excuse for child abuse, alcoholism, etc. Well some people may buy that excuse but I don’t, not really. The victim mindset is unhealthy and removes personal responsibility. How many people alive in Canada today really deserve to continue blaming their current circumstances on colonial settler injustices?
  10. BS. Stop pretending you’re a special victim and purveyor of justice. You’re just as responsible for your productivity and happiness as anyone else here. Also what’s with your nickname? Should I call myself White-assed Honky?
  11. It’s incredible how powerful the British navy was in North America, especially after Napoleon was shut down. They blockaded the US ports and sent around 20 ships near Baltimore after sacking Washington, but the Yanks put up enough resistance to make a treaty worth signing that left the borders where they were at the start of the war. The Brits could’ve taken more, but they left their forts on the US side and let the trade flow that helped both countries dominate the next two centuries. God Bless America and God Save the King.
  12. True, though the smart phone was created in Waterloo, Canada by Blackberry. The Yanks can’t take away that distinction. Apple just made a cooler phone. Blackberry Messenger is still the superior texter. The War of 1812 was a stalemate, but by the end of it the Americans built a real navy and the Federalist and Democrat-Republican parties united in the cause of completing the American Revolution. However, the English and French in Canada united against the US, so that War consolidated two distinct North Americas, one under the Crown and one a republic.
  13. Well you know how it ended: The Yanks burned down Newark and York in Canada then the Brits burned down Lewiston to Buffalo and Washington DC. They were stopped at Baltimore. They also failed to take New Orleans, where we see the career of Andrew Jackson kick into high gear. The Yanks defeated or betrayed the Indians in the south, but the Indians were brutal too. The wave of Manifest Destiny had a certain inevitability as people kept coming and setting farther west. They still are. Colonization continues in overdrive, and the Indians are profiting Big Time, either on the socialist end shaking down government through shame or the capitalist end selling and developing property and resources, running contraband tobacco and guns, or joining the settlers and beating them at their own game.
  14. Well that’s one of the main reasons that I can no longer tolerate the Liberals and the NDP, because I don’t believe in programs that we all pay into only being available to select groups. Even the phrase “means tested” makes a sickening socialist noise. Why should all these gold plated programs only be available to the segment of the population that pays less for these programs than anyone else? Obviously the rich don’t need some of these programs, so they probably shouldn’t qualify for some of them, but they’re paying more for these programs than anyone. The federal daycare program isn’t really working.
  15. They really didn’t know what to do. Integration, if it was even possible, meant giving up ways of life. Preservation of the old ways , which wasn’t fully possible, would mean having a relatively prosperous society alongside a much harsher one. The reserve system was a compromise. The topic is too big for a few paragraphs and requires ample reading about the Indian Act, treaty histories, the failed attempt by the Brits and Indigenous allies to create an Indigenous state (which fell apart in the compromise that ended the War of 1812). The people who whine today about colonization are the same people who push current immigration policy, which is colonization on steroids. Basically a society of hypocrites who don’t know their history (and by society I mean every cultural and racial group) aren’t really able to get their heads in contexts that no longer exist.
  16. The Conservatives will blow it eventually, which is why we need term limits, at least for the PMO.
  17. It makes Canada a weaker democracy. Hopefully people begin to see it and overturn the policies.
  18. At least one US state gets it: https://prismreports.org/2024/03/13/florida-universities-eliminate-dei-positions/
  19. I think it’s hard for Mike to believe that our country has declined to this point. Don the rose coloured glasses.
  20. Hockey Night in Canada generated good revenue. They should bring back Don Cherry before he dies. Once they fired him I stopped watching the CBC, including all HNIC except Leafs playoff games. I do NOT watch intermission commentary.
  21. The CBC will survive less government funding by having to produce more product that people want. Oh wait, that sounds like every business I know.
  22. While it may not be nice to misgender and most people probably wouldn’t do it to someone’s face, making it illegal to misgender is wrong because there are reasonable grounds for not calling someone their adopted gender: believing that one is always one’s biological gender (not unreasonable), accidentally misgendering (easy to do if someone looks like another gender, especially the biological one), and religious grounds (my faith believes that you are your natural God-given gender (not unreasonable for religious people). I call someone their chosen pronouns and names, but it should remain a choice, as I may have legitimate reasons for doing otherwise. Also, I would no doubt face ridicule and alienation from the community for “misgendering” someone, as Canadian society is ground zero for woke mind virus. Already I know I would be fired for misgendering due to organization policies. It also appears that I would have to go before the Human Rights Inquisition — I mean Tribunal, to justify having a brain in a supposedly free country.
  23. Yes government funding of all media is problematic, but especially so if the media being funded seems uncritical of the government doing the funding. Look, CBC has had some great programming over the years, but we’ve lost some of the great interviewing, reporting, sports coverage, and home grown comedy in exchange for more preachy identify politics that’s based on imported US narratives. What do you like on the CBC today? What has gotten better instead of worse?
  24. Exactly. The Nazis claimed they were purifying humanity through eugenics. We see similar language used to by those who seek to purify the planet through climate policies or those who are willing to maim kids to assert the will to immediate and unlimited self-identity. We actually see straight up Nazi antisemitism in the wish to eliminate the “settler colonialists” in Israel. Indigenous activism gets this way in the efforts to give preferential treatment to “First Nations”, as though such people are better than others and never invaded or occupied places where people lived. I understand the idea behind the Prime Directive in Star Trek not to interfere with other cultures and nations, because forms of social justice often result in recriminations, no matter how apparently helpful people are. The progressives thought they were giving literacy, opportunities, and salvation to the Indigenous through residential schools. Now they are hated for it by today’s progressives. Sir John A. MacDonald is also hated by progressives today for talking about not giving food and shelter to Indigenous because it would make them dependent and interfere with their way of life. Context and details are everything. It’s so easy to judge the past through today’s lenses. Often the people who do so fail to understand how much worse conditions could’ve been had other courses of action been taken. I learned a long time ago when I was doing development work in a developing country that our organization was dangling a carrot of Western lifestyles and consumption in front of the locals, that I was creating envy where people had been relatively content. How helpful were we really? Not all is as it seems, which is all the more reason to keep speech free, so that issues can be openly discussed, warts and all. Be wary of attempts to penalize people for offending people.
×
×
  • Create New...