Zeitgeist

France, like Canada and Ireland, have forgotten the values that made them successful to begin with. They are doing everything possible to lower their already low birth rates and disempower Christianity and cultural roots: Promote ani-family values; disparage Christian faiths by declaring them colonial, patriarchal and racist; declare men toxic; promote unlimited abortion, birth control, euthanasia, homosexuality, alternative sexualities, and trans identities; accelerate immigration; alienate farmers; feminize the military and men in general; impose laws against free speech to disempower political opposition; turn over more authority to the EU/UN/non-local, international unelected authorities; regulate and tax people into subsistence living to further disempower and reduce the middle class; entrench DEI.

How do you run a society without functioning institutions of governance, banking, etc.? The people in these institutions need stable incomes to operate. No one makes people borrow money from banks, but certainly if you want to invest and get ahead, you will likely have to borrow money in the form of a mortgage and business loan. Why should anyone loan you money interest free? It’s a nice thing to do but unsustainable. People default all the time. It’s why we have insurance. In fact our economy is partly built on the small difference in interest rates between what the Bank of Canada charges banks to borrow money and the higher interest rates the banks charge the public. Without that difference, there are no banks, no loans, no business investment, and probably next to no home ownership. You can’t blame Trudeau or Biden for this. Put another way, would you rather not have to pay taxes and bank interest and live in a poverty stricken hell-hole or a country where roads and buildings are clean and safe and in good repair? Would you rather pay a bit more in taxes to have well paid police who don’t take bribes or live in a corrupt and de facto lawless society run by gangs and thugs? Canada wins on safety and stability. Even in terms of financial opportunity, Canada does very well. You may not be able to get as rich as quickly in Canada as some places, but you probably don’t have to worry about being killed or having your possessions robbed as most of those more opportunistic places.

Why do you make the assumption that someone is going to disadvantage someone without some kind of artificial advantage? I’ve always been a champion of the underdog. Everyone likes a Cinderella story. If someone comes from a challenging background and does a good job, I want to see them succeed. Sometimes those underdogs are black. Sometimes they’re not. Every individual is unique. Making sweeping judgments about a person’s background based on race is biased. There are these academic coaches specifically for black students in high schools in Ontario now. I find it the most presumptuous racist kind of assistance: “Black kids need extra help because they don’t do well.” Why not just offer extra help to students who need it?

I don’t think Haiti is the place for a Canadian protectorate. Its history of dysfunction is too deep. There was an opportunity with Turks and Caicos, but Canada doesn’t make such moves. It’s a shame. I’d love a Canadian Virgin Islands type setup where you could live and work in a great climate all year on a Canadian passport. Climate is the only downside of Canada, except perhaps Vancouver Island and BC’s lower mainland.

Well exactly. No one gets a pass to be less competent or to be racist. I also find that once someone resorts to the victim narrative in areas where its impact is debatable or negligible, everyone who isn’t in the designated victim group stops weighing in, because no one wants to hurt or offend or say something bigoted, so there’s no real scrutiny of purported mistreatment. It’s easier just to go along to get along, to listen and smile and nod. That’s not to downplay clear injustice and mistreatment, which must always be addressed, and most people understand that. It seems like some people like to wear victimhood like a badge. Life is hard; some have faced serious adversity, and I’m sure more struggles exist among minorities, but so much depends on each individual and our laws are fair. Everyone is unique. It’s not what you have that counts. It’s what you do with what you have. Once rights and fair laws are in place, the work of improving attitudes remains, but what will do that? Conscientiousness, hard work, kindness, collaboration, all the virtues that everyone must pursue to be a successful human. We’re in a good place on the whole, but some things are about human nature and individual responsibility, not “the system”. Rigging the system to favour groups, even ones that were mistreated in the past, only creates more injustice. I don’t think Black History Month has to be about any of that. It can and should be about black excellence, so that black children see themselves reflected in our cultural pantheon, and so that we’re all reminded that greatness comes in all races, colours, etc. It takes nothing away from anyone. I do think it can seem a bit tokenized, having designated months or days. It can be infantilizing because really great people should be recognized without regard to race, etc. I guess we’re in transition. Then again, we should have an MLK day, remember people like Rosa Parks, and keep those days locked in. I realize some of that is specifically American.

Do you have evidence of this?

If you think that racism plays such a large role in assessment, it’s easy to create blind marking using numbers or codes instead of names for tests, exams, etc.

Yet she got the symposium gig out of her story. I think there are opportunities to make hay out of stories of discrimination. I shared an apartment with a black med student. He was smart and hard working and no one I knew would dare say an insulting word towards him, racist or otherwise. If he ran into people with racist attitudes along the way, he never mentioned it nor did it hold him back, because his leadership qualities and strength were simply far too powerful to be objected. Anyone with the power to hold him back and who attempted to do so would be a pariah. I think you need to think more critically and look at what’s to be gained by oppression narratives.

Even the native oppression narratives treat natives as if they have no agency and had clean hands throughout history. We know that deals were struck selfishly to gain weapons and horses, that tribes brutalized each other, and kept more slaves in Canada than any “colonial” settlers. I won’t even get into the supposed graves that haven’t been unearthed. Yes people treated people badly and some groups were more on the losing end than others for periods in Canada, but what can be done fairly to address the past today without punishing people who had no role in oppression? Also, how do you quantify how much someone alive today has been economically impacted by oppression going back generations? There are native billionaires. Do they get reparations? From whom? Can I get a payout for property left in the US when my Loyalist ancestors fled to Canada for their safety? It was only around 250 years ago. Where’s the sense of self-reliance and the belief that hard work pays off? Much of success comes down to the basic premise, “You get out of it what you put into it”, as long as the rules of the game are the same for everyone.

Yup. Canada hasn’t yet required that race or other superficial characteristics that have nothing to do with knowledge and skills not be considered in hiring and admissions if the purpose of such discrimination is to elevate the representation of select groups. Of course discrimination is discrimination. It’s an uncomfortable reality that some minority groups actually punch above their weight as a percentage of the population in high status positions. Many Asian groups fit this bill. That’s just one reason why trying to make outcomes the same for all racial groups and genders is absurd and Marxist: There’s no accounting for the prevailing skills and interests within each group. Instead, we get the Marxist critique of economic master and slave, the idea that the only reason for inequality is some form of oppression. Of course there are no racist laws or hiring policies and as people of different backgrounds get to know and trust each other, racist attitudes have declined to insignificance, except for this one new area where whites are defined as privileged solely on the basis of their colour and men are patriarchal oppressors solely on the basis of gender. There are actual policies in hiring and admissions that engender this new discrimination, which certainly is systemic.

The jobs required certain skills but they were exclusively for “racialized”. I have no reason to make it up. I wish it wasn’t the case. I referenced a specific job posting on another thread many months ago that has probably been filled. If you doubt it, that actually tells me you don’t know or are pretending not to know that such postings exist. I’m glad you revealed that your idea of systemic racism has nothing to do with laws or policies but relies entirely on “attitudes and practices that are engrained”. Really? By whom? Have you interviewed people to discern their attitudes? Have you observed their practices? Or is it really just a numbers game where you’re looking at the percentage of representation and making assumptions about why disproportionalities exist? Believe me, I’ve read many studies and theories on these topics and I can speak woke. I also know when someone has an agenda without a solid basis but is hoping that people will just buy into the assumptions. If you shout loud enough and throw out stats that in themselves don’t tell you why, maybe people will buy in. That’s DEI to a tee.

I can’t share more for reasons that should be obvious. If you don’t know that many such postings exist at this late point, you have your head buried in the sand or you’re playing games. This was mentioned many months ago. Do your own research if it’s important to you. I’m solid in my position.

I posted an example ages ago. Do your own homework. I have no reason to fabricate. I wish such postings didn’t exist.

You’re dumbing down the spiritual and talking about bearded sky gods. Simply, there are answers we don’t have because of our imperfection. You may not believe there’s a creator, but it’s no less a matter of faith to say there is no creator as there is one, because it’s unverifiable. That’s where religion comes in, where science ends and faith begins.

What do you mean by “coded”, “systemic racism”, and the”patriarchy”? Define your terms and give real world current examples. It’s clear that you see the world in a way that departs from reality. If you said bias instead of systemic racism, you would be more compelling. By “coded” I’m guessing you think there are secret passwords or handshakes or some kind of nefarious anti-black trickery? Explain. Who and where are these patriarchs? Are they the unemployed young men who couldn’t get into university and are sitting around in their parents’ houses playing video games? Are they the soldiers who fought in WW2 and liberated the West from fascism? Who is preventing hard-working effective people from climbing the corporate ladder? Who on the courts or among police is tacitly approving the beating or oppression of women? I’m not suggesting there aren’t bad apples, but that’s not systemic in any way. You’re tilting at windmills and anyone with any real analytical sense can see through your radical left views.

Because it does. I read job postings exclusively for racialized people and people from specific groups. Hamilton school board is one example. Equity jobs, of which there are now a lot, are not given to white people generally, apart from a slim minority of white women. Anyway, Hardner, I’m not doing your work for you. You’ve clearly been out of the workforce or you would see the discrimination and know how hard the push is.

But the religious impulse is also hard-wired, not just in the obvious ways of people going to church and thumping the Bible, but in the sense that we conduct ourselves teleologically, with higher goals and purposes in mind. We do this because our consciousness conceives of possibilities that we first imagine then create. We can conceive of ideal lifestyles, ideal action, etc. Why should anyone do anything of purpose if there is no purpose? Why live at all? “To be or not to be?” We persist because, though we may not have all the answers, we can seek them and aspire to better ways of living and doing and thinking. God is the idea of the perfect, the Word. When you take away the idea of the perfect or the pure or the sacred, we are nothing more than machines, not unlike computers. We are cogs in wheels, and Marxism or Materialism has always taken the form of treating people like expendable tools whose value lies only in membership in the collective, since there’s nothing underpinning the value of individuals, no soul.

You’re disingenuous. No one here is suggesting that people shouldn’t do any career that interests them, as long as they can do it.

Can you tell us more about “the patriarchy in action”? Where was it invented and who’s responsible? Or is it a problem with men in general? Are men toxic? What must be done?

You don’t think that STEM and traditionally male dominated fields have been made amenable to women? You need to visit job fairs. You don’t think that there are differences between men and women, or that there are cultural differences between ethnicities? It doesn’t mean people can’t enter fields less associated with their gender or culture, but you’re not going to make Asians become poorer students or have men dominate the nursing profession. Not everything is a result of social conditioning. Men can’t give birth or breastfeed. It’s one of the reasons more men than women are on corporate boards: Many women leave the workforce for extended periods. Or do you chalk it all up to “the patriarchy”, which you think can and should be dismantled? Do you think the state should take over reproduction so that all men and women can equally participate in some worker’s paradise?

You seem to like the idea of government coercion or social engineering, yet you can’t explain why doing so is good or necessary. Making sure that people who choose to enter a field and who demonstrate that they can do the work have those opportunities open to them is what counts. Encouraging people to use their talents and take risks is also helpful. Telling people they should enter a particular profession in order to meet an artificial equity metric with arbitrary targets is problematic for many reasons. I’m sure there are many women who could be good auto mechanics who would rather do other things. Simply stating that we need to get the female percentage of auto mechanics to reflect the percentage of female adults in society, throwing money at it as an incentive, and using discriminatory policies that make it easier for women to become auto mechanics and harder for men isn’t necessarily helping men or women. It’s probably a waste of resources, destructive of meritocracy, discriminatory, and arguably coercive.

So well written. It’s all about empowerment. Have to build people up, and different individuals require different things. I think Black History Month has value because everyone gets to learn about accomplished black people. It’s inspiring and it helps for people of any minority to see people who look like them in positions of great responsibility and status. We all need to see more heroes, guides and mentors of all colours and backgrounds, because otherwise people literally don’t learn how to act and conduct themselves in healthy ways. Many (most?) of the problems for young people stem from a lack of good guides and mentors.

That’s your mistake. The laws and policies aren’t discriminatory, no matter how much you want people to think they are, unless you’re talking about DEI race-based hiring and admissions.

I guess the alternative to scrapping DEI and the discriminatory hiring and admissions that go along with it are for every special interest group to go all out to disfavour and discriminate against all other groups except one’s own. I can see that happening very soon if DEI discrimination persists.

What’s your basis for making exactly the same percentage of males and females enter all fields? Do you not recognize that there may be different career preferences among genders? Something similar can be said about trying to make all representation in fields reflect the racial, ethnic or other group breakdowns in society. It doesn’t take cultural differences/preferences into account. It doesn’t look at how long each group on average has been in the country, language proficiency, and a host of other factors that have nothing to do with racism. Not everyone in a group has the same background and it’s irresponsible and discriminatory to presume that they do. As a general rule I think you provide the information, let people know that many different careers are possible, but some require certain aptitudes and proof of competency. Sprinkle in grants for people who may not have the financial means, but I wouldn’t play the impossible and presumptuous game of deciding what percentage of each gender or group must be in each field and throwing tax dollars or creating discriminatory policies to advantage or push certain groups. It just alienates people and opens organizations up to accusations of systemic discrimination, which is what it is. We should only look at people’s individual merit and let people choose their careers/programs freely without unfair rules of entry.