Zeitgeist

It’s becoming very clear that mere opinion-based school board policy such as “gender affirmation” of students by educators without informing parents is being mandated without parent input. Even school trustees representing a large number of parent opinions are being banned from meetings merely for questioning such policy. This is not an open or fair process. What’s more, these board policies, which are highly experimental, may be causing lasting damage to children, constituting child abuse. It’s time for parents across Canada to band together, push back, and take legal action if necessary. The silencing of parent voices that represent a significant percentage of the population sets a very dangerous anti-free speech precedent. Parents are feeling powerless and school boards seem to face no obligation to table different opinions and defend their policies. One end of the political spectrum is dictating policies. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ontario-school-trustee-trans-policy/wcm/46c5cc0e-6e49-49d2-9cc4-43760f19e642/amp/

Unfortunately Tory is already pretty left of centre. He’s another politician who won’t say no unless it’s uncontroversial.

It’s funny, I think that people are good…but then some people say and do things that upend that notion. You’re the guy who takes the job at the political prisoner camp and can’t understand why people are upset with you when the regime that gave you the job is turfed. I can see you wearing the fancy commissar coat and snitching on neighbors in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

You don’t see a problem with the state assisting people with killing themselves, which in actual fact makes the state complicit in the killing of citizens. You also don’t see the tremendous opportunity for abuse in the context of a state-funded healthcare system that will never have sufficient funding. I now understand why our public healthcare system is worse than a private healthcare system (with a second rate universal safety net for those who can’t afford or get private insurance). Making doctors who are there to cure the arbiters and aides of suicide is a conflict of interest, clearly. As for the same-sex marriage question, I’m not sure we understand the impacts long term on children with only one gender role-model, though we know the stats on hardship for single parents. I know that there are highly successful children of single parents and of same sex couples, but I don’t think they’re ideal situations for kids, which in the context of marriage, a religious institution, is important. Religion is about striving towards God and perfection. Couplings without the possibility of having natural births makes sexual union about pleasure primarily. I realize that these are more traditional views by current Canadian social standards, but I think Canadian social conditions are in decline. The fabric of society has weakened. I also understand that this view relates to political, ethical, and religious perspective, which is fine. We’re supposed to have freedom of religion and thought. For tax purposes, the state has civil unions that it calls marriage, but these have nothing to do with marriage in the traditional sense.

It’s true. The NDP wanted property rights left out, so yeah, much easier for Canada to slide into communism than the US. I think if the government overreach paternalism and handouts get too extreme, Canada could break up along those lines. Resource development and individual rights are under pretty heavy assault in Canada.

You can’t get out of an Ontario hospital in less than 4 hours. Generally you will sit in triage overnight. After several hours, hopefully, a doctor will see you for 5 minutes. If you need an MRI because of possible terminal disease, just hope that the disease doesn’t advance too far before your scheduled appointment months later. I’m sure if you’re having a heart attack you’ll be seen to fairly quickly, so the next time you’re very sick and your family doctor’s office is closed, have a heart attack and you’ll be seen to at the hospital right away.

You’re the perfect communist citizen.

You’ve been raised to depend on handouts and believe that you’re useless and need to be taken care of. That’s obvious. The really sad part though is that the parties that you think stand up for the little guy are doing the opposite now. They’re using phoney progressive rhetoric and the distraction of insane, unethical, and unscientific identity politics to cement themselves into power. You’ll always vote for them because they seem to offer you more freebies. The price you pay is the inability to think and do for yourself. In the end it’s your problem though, and your histrionics tell me that the leopard isn’t changing its spots in this lifetime.

Yup, had to join the Communist party to get the best jobs. Canada is into compelled speech now, which isn’t much different from using torture to exact a confession. Basically if you want a degree and job opportunities, you must read and sign the script. Western universities are no longer institutions of open discourse, learning, and debate. They are purveyors of credentials based on strict compliance to radical left political ideology.

Nope. Your totalitarian wannabe crowd go down in history as the coward sycophants of government overreach. The Convoy was an important international movement of resistance against very real threats to our democratic freedoms. Trudeau only relented because he had no choice. There was too much concern among the sizeable portion of the country that supported the protest against mandates. The Senate saw this and were opposing the emergency measures, so Trudeau removed them. The next day, “Look over here, invasion of Ukraine!”

Basically the radical left running the rest of Canada and the US is pummelling Alberta into submission. Yes that’s obvious.

Unfortunately the radical left are running our institutions now. I’ve spent hours already this week at work being lectured about white privilege. There’s no sense of context or perspective. Rather than saying that our society has grown more diverse and our values are changing, there’s an attempt to interpret events in the distant past as though we’ve always lived in 2023. The main reason that 50 years ago most of our books and films had white themes and characters in Canada wasn’t a white supremacist plot. It was because the vast majority of society was white and the people created the culture in their image. We became more aware of how our natural tendency to be around people who look and sound like us hurt minorities as the racialized population grew and we heard more stories. It’s also true that the main reason Indigenous were educated in residential schools was because providing free public education was seen as a social good and only the settlers were providing it. It’s only through today’s lens that we better understand the impact on the cultures and families. The largest groups tend to dominate the narratives, which is the main reason we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to protect the rights of minorities and individuals. Unfortunately progressivism, while generally good, tends to devour itself because when it takes on revolutionary fervour, one can never be progressive enough and everyone must go to the guillotine. That was the lesson of the French Revolution. Most countries aren’t in a perpetual state of apology, shame, and purging of the laggards, as we find ourselves in today. Canada is weakened by the failure of the current public and its representatives to understand and appreciate the efforts to build this country. By failing to value that hard work, we risk losing what we’ve built. The signs of decline are clear: fading meritocracy, emphasis on identification by race and/or ethnicity and/or sexual identity and/or sexual orientation as the determining qualitative identifications of a person. Work ethic, moral values, talent, skill, and personality are deemed less important by today’s revolutionaries. We’re afraid to refer to each other by our biological genders and to raise children as males and females complete with the transference of responsibilities associated with gender role models This is leading us to new and greater divisions and a sense of hopelessness for our families, communities, and country. I’ve never seen so many confused young people. I won’t even get into our healthcare system and the creeping growth of assisted suicide in Canada, which now has the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world. What a mess. It took less than a decade to get us here. I don’t know how bad it will get, but I do know that this is happening on Trudeau’s watch.

Is Justin back in the classroom? Sneaky guy.

Yup, the liberals promote servitude. Their political class’s existence depends on it. Party of slave owners. Of course the revolution they’ve unleashed will come for them.

Well that’s why parents are upset about CRT, because it appears to tie race to economics in a race-based version of Marxism. Basically take property from its owners and give it to the designated racial group. There’s policies of equal outcome irrespective of what someone does to merit getting something. It’s Bolshevik property redistribution based on race instead of economic status.

It’s just another way of letting a committee decide who’s in and who’s out. We pay a lot of money to have the CRTC beat us with a stick, limiting competition and duplicating regulatory policies south of the border, mostly so we can slap a maple leaf on it. Any artists whose work is worthy of attention generally get it. There are Canada Arts Council and other grants for artists. If I feel like some kind of content is being pushed on me, I won’t read or watch it.

Feels like a way of making a case for expanding the military industrial complex.

You don’t read posts. The answers are in my prior posts and I’m not repeating myself. If you don’t think my posts sufficiently answer your questions, that’s fine. I generally don’t agree with your views, which is fine.

Okay good, you’re paying attention. As someone who was mostly left of centre most of my life, even I can see how dangerously overreaching our government has become, but when I try to find a political movement that opposes the stakeholder capitalist tecnocracy, there’s a dearth of opposition. This has been my point over the past year. You don’t want to live in a country where diversity of thought, including political views, are unacceptable and state dogma is reinforced technologically and through media that are highly dependent on state funding. Such a country quickly becomes a de facto one party system. Digital ID makes it easier to gather comprehensive information about citizens and to restrict access to freedoms at the speed of light. China loves social credit systems and surveillance because the government can socially engineer the public to follow state dogma with rapid efficiency. Punishment can be instant. No trial necessary.

Do you read and think about what you read? I agree that two wrongs don’t make a right, so let’s agree to stop doing bad stuff, including acts of vengeance against people living today who have done nothing wrong. I also find it tremendously ironic that many of the figures leading the vengeful mob are among the most privileged people alive today. The Bolsheviks are closet aristocrats. They always have the best champagne and dachas.

When it’s digital it’s much more accessible. Basically all of your personal data is stored digitally and accessible by decree. We already learned from Snowden that the public is under surveillance, but we at least have the pretence of “no search and seizure without a warrant” in a court of law. When that information is available at the speed of light from the comfort of someone’s laptop, you’re asking for abuse. We already know that “emergency powers” and “national security threat” give a pass to such surveillance. We also know that if security services want to skirt due process, for example using surveillance without a warrant, they can find the evidence and use it retroactively. We saw retroactive crime law implemented during the pandemic. People who legally donated to a protest were suddenly deemed to be engaged in criminal activities (and therefore had their money seized) for doing something that wasn’t a crime at the time they did it (making a donation). The sheer willful ignorance and lack of indignation among people in positions of authority and supposedly intelligent people, including on this forum, was incredible to watch. The take away from history is that we must protect individual rights, including the right to privacy. That’s why we have laws and a constitution. That’s the theory anyway. I don’t think our rights are protected enough. Why would we give another inch of access to personal information to the powers that be? You know it only takes a crisis for government to justify further infringements to privacy and individual rights.

What rule?

The reason digital ID is so dangerous is because of how it can become the single point of identification for every transaction: medical, travel, payment, age of majority, voting, everything. Who has access to that information and how can it be used to direct behaviour? There’s a reason we have different passwords for different organizations and functions. The border guard and Canada Revenue Agency have no business knowing my medical history. My political views aren’t my bank’s business and so on. It’s very easy to start limiting access or imposing punitive measures on many levels through digital ID. We saw how government went after the bank accounts of people who made donations to a protest that the government didn’t like. We saw how a government leader literally said that protests that try to change policies are concerning. If a corrupt or tyrannical government decides to target or misuse power, it will have immediate all-encompassing consequences for individuals whose lives are on a digital ID. Why in God’s name would anyone trust government to manage this well after everything we’ve learned about the identification systems used during the Holocaust? I mean, are we trying to create an impossible situation where no one can buy or sell anything without the mark? Yeah that’s going to go over well with the “conspiracy theorists.” I don’t know how any sane person, left or right, could want to give government more access to our information and control over our lives. Government should only exist for the practical use of the citizens and its power must be very limited. Many people don’t agree with the values of many of our representatives and our constitution is there to protect our individual rights. Sunak in Britain is pushing digital ID for the G7. We should be worried. I like cash over digital currency too. It’s a relief to know that if the shit hits the fan people can sell their possessions without a storefront. I don’t want to lose the lemonade stand economy. If I want to do digital payment there are already lots of options from etransfer to Apple Pay to PayPal. I certainly don’t want government having access to people’s money. They will abuse power at some point. They always do.

This is one of the main reasons I can no longer be a liberal. When naive and ignorant leaders continue to say how unfair, racist, and colonial our country has been (even though evidence illustrates how exceptionally progressive Canada has been relative to almost every other country and tribe), after a while people believe it. We start pretending that Indigenous, blacks, and most racialized and ethnic groups never invaded, killed, kept slaves, or traded them. In Canada there were Indigenous groups that behaved far worse than the Canadian government. The reward for suppressing some facts and exaggerating others is new forms of injustice. That’s why Trudeau has been irresponsible and helped foment the division and new forms of racism we see today. He was naive to think that his rhetoric wouldn’t be used for nefarious purposes. He’s not alone among western leaders. The problem too is that pointing out Trump’s antics made it easier for Liberals and Democrats to justify their rhetoric. The focus on race is making us come apart in a country that didn’t have a lot of racial division just five years ago. Much of what’s happening is the spillover effect from George Floyd’s death in the US, a country with a much more brutal history with race that is today one of the most accepting countries from a policy perspective. So if in Canada we don’t have racist policies in government or organizations, what we’re really talking about is improving people’s attitudes towards groups outside their in-groups. What’s going to do that? Certainly not trying to make the people who are alive today who happen to be a certain colour feel guilty or like bad people. Taking or destroying their property won’t do it either. Right now the only racist policies I know of are the Indian Act (which the government wants changed but most Indigenous want to keep) and these new “racialized-only” job postings and unfair treatment of people who are accused of racism without any evidence and who are mistreated by their employers on the basis of such false accusations, even after investigations dismiss the accusations, as in the TDSB. Actually some of the content of mandatory equity training that is sweeping across organizations is also an example of systematic racism because it makes value judgments about racial groups such as, “White people are fragile” and “White people are privileged” or “Black people are oppressed.” Clearly some white people are not privileged and some black people are. Generalizing about all people who happen to be a certain colour is racism.

Well this is the Canadian political crisis: There’s no real opposition. Canada is leftist in all government institutions, the bureaucracy, most media, public education, and large businesses. The game is using the slight of hand of progressive rhetoric while accumulating as much power and money as possible for oneself. When the workers pipe up, they’re called racist or told to check their privilege. Whoever charms the public with the most politically correct rhetoric wins. I just find it grotesque listening to the phoney performative progressivism. Everyone is made to bend the knee, attend the Pride Parade, publicly decry their privilege, and so on. That’s most workplaces today.