Zeitgeist

Well I think there’s a frightening enforcement of acceptance of values that run counter to the values that have existed within most cultures for almost all of history. It’s crowding out free speech, religious/spiritual beliefs, pluralism of political views, etc. While Blackbird’s Christianity might be narrower or more particular than mine, I think that his reaction is quite reasonable to the radical dismantling of tradition and faith. I would rather live in a world where Treebeard is the outlier than Blackbird, because I like traditional family values and think that they’re foundational to any great civilization, but the reality is that the Marxist-Nihilists have taken charge. You see it in our government and workplace training. A kind of radical materialism has taken hold. Even many people who call themselves Christian or spiritual or conservative are practically speaking following the same trajectory. Hardner, for example, sounds to me like a Marxist cultural revolutionary, yet he calls himself conservative. That’s very common now. Everyone is a radical leftist now because it’s enforced policy now, and I do think it’s destroying our civilization.

I’m speaking in particular about that which is psychologically healthy and fairly standard socialization and transference. It would be quite universal across cultures, though certainly there will be outliers, just like cannibalism might be somewhat acceptable in a very small segment of the population for certain periods. There are big implications for calling that which falls outside the normative range normal and for casting aspersions towards the normative. An example is gender dysphoria, which was and is considered a psychological disorder. We should be careful what we normalize, because the impacts can be devastating. There’s a great deal of gender experimentation and confusion being “affirmed” by governments.

Treebeard makes a virtue of homosexuality. He’s part of the movement against “heteronormativity”, the most ridiculous cause to date, basically saying that anything that falls in the normative range, how the vast majority of humans act, is bad.

Retract your lie.

No you’ll be in the ocean after the next major earthquake.

It doesn’t say that. Don’t mislead.

What like the French?

True. Now it’s some kind of Chinese North American Post-National hybrid run by the UN and the radical Democrat farm team called the Liberal Party of Canada.

Everyone came from somewhere, including Indigenous. Lots of invasions, wars, and displacements going back millennia. Guess what, the settlers keep coming, 500,000 a year. Do we require that they give stuff to the people who were born here? Are Indigenous designated as the “get free stuff” group ad infinitum? If you want to fund welfare prison camp two-tier citizenship, you can advocate for that while I advocate for equal treatment under the law and self determination without special treatment. The culture of “We’ll take care of you because we know what you deserve” has created dependency and dysfunction. That’s cultural genocide because it weakens peoples and puts them in human zoos. Nothing is free, and until Indigenous can both make their own decisions and pay their own bills, real progress won’t happen. Many Indigenous have already moved on from colonial arrangements and handouts.

As stated in the past, actions speak louder than words. If it’s so important to you, you should cut a fat personal cheque to Indigenous.

Because everyone knows that tax money appears out of thin air and doesn’t come from workers. Lol

Good, you revealed your belief in confiscating property and money from Canadians alive today in order to give it to people with Indigenous status. I have nothing to add.

Ha, you don’t know what I do or what I have handled, but that’s fine. None of the discussion about Indigenous injustice is about me or what I want. My only concern is getting it right. When I hear inaccuracies and the inevitable painting of some people as angels and others as demons, when I know there was plenty of bad behaviour to go around, I have to call it out. You don’t get to wear the victim shirt unless your individual story warrants it. More often than not it isn’t as simple as good guys versus bad, and it often turns out that the wolf versus grandma show is a distraction from what’s really going on.

I think you need to hand over some fish. Y’know, reparations…

I’m not interested in attempts to paint whole groups as sharing in equal victimhood based on race or ethnicity. That’s a lazy copout. Each person’s situation is different. I’ll go along with the take that most students in Indigenous residential schools had a harder time than most students in non-Indigenous schools, but after that assumption you have to look at individuals. I don’t think most Indigenous students were abused, unless you consider disciplinary methods like “the strap” abuse by yesterday’s standards. If you do, then millions of children across ethnicities were abused. Again, I’m not disputing that more Indigenous had it worse. I’m curious to know what more you think must be done besides the payouts and dismantling of the rez school system. You know that Indigenous continue to choose to maintain the Indian Act with reservations and Indian status with concomitant benefits. They must deem that there are aspects worth keeping. I imagine it burned your bottom to stop fishing once you hit your quota while Indigenous exceeded it. Too bad for you.

You need to read histories on this because it’s complicated. The main reason for having residential schools was that it was economically impossible to build day schools for every far-flung remote community. It still is, which is why residential schools still exist but now under Indigenous instruction (depression, drug abuse, and suicide persist at these cites). Indian Act agents collected students who didn’t attend because education was deemed mandatory and many Indigenous parents did support this to some extent. Kids could get out of attending school if there was work to be done in the reserve or community. Abuse took place in most schools, committed by some individuals. There were also good people working in all schools, including residential schools. Discipline was much harsher than today in all schools. I’m sure more abuse took place in residential schools due to racism and opportunity. Underfunding and overcrowding created added health problems. There was clearly a mandate to educate Indigenous from the public and conditions in Indigenous communities generally were substantially worse than in settler communities. Was it generally better to provide education and literacy than not? How should it have been done differently and was the settler population that provided education equipped to know and do better? Clearly, abusers are bad.

I have only sympathy and compassion for anyone who suffers rape and other injustices. Such people are victims deserving of justice. You on the other hand I have zero sympathy for. You made some pretty fascistic comments on the health policy front. You’re a leftist in political rhetoric but pretty totalitarian in your attitudes. I certainly wouldn’t want to work under you.

Yes Dr. Bryce knew how crowding would spread infection, but he was one among many competing voices. It’s like the voices today advocating for expanded assisted suicide versus those who see how it might lead to the suicides of people who are facing economic or mental capacity challenges but seek suicide because no better solutions are offered. The zeal for free education and economic opportunity competed with the zeal for public health. The zeal for protecting the cultures of minority groups is relatively recent. Still today in most parts of the world you conform to the dominant groups or risk your safety and well-being. Think of western Christian women or atheists travelling through the Middle East. Yup, this generation will be judged for producing new injustices for sure.

Context is everything. I knew we were dealing with radical ignorance when the revolutionaries tore down Ryerson’s statue. The guy died before the first residential school, yet this founder of public education might as well be Hitler. He learned Ojibwe, lived among Indigenous and taught them farming techniques, and advocated for Indigenous treaty rights. Some educational leaders today refer to him as a “notorious racist”, as always judging the people of yesterday with the values of today. Lincoln is also terrible by today’s standards. No sense of what was considered progress at the time. Of course today’s revolutionaries will be judged with similar derision a century from now. Their hypocrisy and oppression is already notorious.

I’m all for justice, but the reason people feel cynical about the current obsession with race, colonialism, and narratives of oppression is because we all know in our heart of hearts that people generally did the best they could with the knowledge they had and that none of the identity groups flagged as victims worthy of special treatment were on aggregate any better than the whites or colonialists in their treatment of each other and other identity groups. Indigenous kept more slaves in Canada than the European settlers. They warred and invaded each other’s “territories” and property meant something quite different for most Indigenous groups living hundreds of years ago than it does today. Much of the dispute about land claims and compensation relate to settler notions of property and money, and most settlers were simply seeking better lives without considering impacts on Indigenous that happened incrementally in Canada, as there were very few battles or attacks by settlers on Indigenous in Canada. There might have been more Indigenous attacks on settlers. No one was innocent. Much of the residential school push early on was by progressives who believed they were helping by providing literacy and opportunities. Was it misguided? Well, everyone has biases and people saw things very differently a century and a half ago. There was no systematic attempt to kill Indigenous That narrative is a lie. With regard to Black slaves in Canada, there were probably under a 1000 in total over the 200 years leading up to when slavery was banned in the British Empire in 1834 Canada wasn’t founded until 1867. We don’t have to get into the fact that blacks traded blacks in the slave trade. So, how much do you want to make stories of oppression and systemic racism the centrepiece of the Canadian story? How helpful is it? When is justice served? Who today deserves extra stuff based on race or ethnicity and who should give it? It’s unhealthy and infantilizing to treat groups as victims who need special treatment, but it’s the main narrative today pushed by government and media. Does anyone honestly think that a government leader is going to eventually say, “Okay, enough on this subject, groups that got a raw deal have gotten enough”? Do you think everyone will accept such a judgment? No, the victim narrative will continue. Our federal government uses it for political gain by claiming to be the servers of justice and giving handouts, maintaining the unhealthy dependence. It’s much healthier to instil independence and confidence in people so that they chart their own course. The Liberal/Democrat oppression narrative and the culture of dependency/victimhood are two sides of the same coin. Can’t have one without the other. Individual acts of injustice must always be addressed and any racist codes/laws/systemic racism must be eliminated. If you want to improve attitudes and health for all, emphasize that we are all human and everyone is individually accountable and judged on their own merit. It’s what you do with what you have that counts.

You’re saying that previous contracts were honoured. This was quite temporary after the American Revolution, however, and most of the slaves in Canada were kept by Indigenous. Consider that Upper Canada was established in 1793 and ”A compromise was reached and on July 9, 1793 an Act was passed that prevented the further introduction of slaves into Upper Canada and allowed for the gradual abolition of slavery although no slaves already residing in the province were freed outright.” AND ”The historian Marcel Trudel catalogued the existence of about 4,200 slaves in Canada between 1671 and 1834, the year slavery was abolished in the British Empire. About two-thirds of these were Native and one-third were Blacks. The use of slaves varied a great deal throughout the course of this period.” Canada was founded in 1867

The only groups that supported slavery in Canada were the Northwest Pacific Coast Indigenous, who kept slaves and maintained rigid dominance hierarchies.

There are conservative posters on this forum?

Did other cultures have ancient stories/myths that guided morality? Are some of them variations of Biblical stories? For me it’s not about whether you believe the stories are literally true, because they have tremendous metaphorical truths about human nature and they warn of what happens when we stray from the natural order. In the Far East it’s called the Dao (way). These stories have stood the test of time for a reason. They have been foundational to our democracy and our public morality. There are many stories about what happens when people ignore the lessons of the past, including factual history, and the Bible does have history within it, even if there’s debate about what isn’t to be taken literally. You shun past wisdom and think that whatever one wants is good? Or is it whatever is legal? Or is it whatever you can get away with? There are good reasons to learn about and understand your culture and its origins. If you want to take an atheist perspective, at least understand what it is that you depose. I don’t respect people who aren’t at least willing to be informed. At least read some Joseph Campbell comparative mythology. You don’t seem to understand the universality of most Biblical stories and themes.

You’re talking about the importance of personal responsibility, which is based on the very Biblical idea that we are individuals with free will who have as much value as anyone else. We are spiritual beings with souls. It’s an extremely empowering message that’s lost on those who fear making their own decisions and using their talents. Having a mortgage and job do give one a sense of personal responsibility and fulfillment, but “man does not live on bread alone.” It’s in our interactions with others that we learn and grow because our responsibility extends beyond self-gratification towards improving life for others. Only a life of greater purpose beyond ourselves will provide a sense of a meaningful life worth living. That’s the antidote to anxiety and depression. It’s not necessarily about the obvious charitable works all the time. It’s more about using your unique gifts to improve conditions as much as you can. My message to young people would be to listen, seek to understand, take care of your material needs, with some extras that make life enjoyable in your downtime, but also to aspire to greater purpose that gives back in some way It doesn’t mean relying on the state to take care of you or mindlessly following an ideology Religion is empty if it isn’t come by personally through contemplation and questioning. Some people are agnostic or atheist, but recognize that much of what we value about our country and society derived from great stories of the upward movement towards liberation and enlightenment The metaphor of light is very telling.