I am Groot

Here's more anecdotes from the net My soon to be 12 year old daughter has been having problems with a very specific demographic of boys at her public school. The girls have joined in and have made comments about her not being proper because she's mixed race and doesn't conform to what their parents have been teaching them about how a woman should act and what they should wear. She dresses like any other 12 year old kid I've ever met. It's getting progressively worse with zero intervention by the school. The kid who assaulted mine on the bus multiple times? "We'll talk to the parents". Then "they're banned from taking the bus". But are still allowed on the bus. Nobody has an answer as to why they can ride the bus , the bus driver says her hands are tied and can't tell me more. The "conflict resolution" strategies suggested by the school are a joke. It puts the onus on the kid being bullied to find their own solutions in the face of harassment and violence. She'll be in Jr high next year and the school she is streamed into in our slice of the burbs is worse. Far worse plus weapons and gang violence. The principal and several staff are on leave. I've registered her for an entirely different board simply to avoid her having to go to the school in question. Goodbye ocdsb ****** Principal at Hillcrest was disappeared for trying to get things under control last year. She was accused of racism. She is an acquaintance and from what I’ve seen/heard not racist at all. Once she was removed a chill was put over all other P’s and VP’s to tow the line or suffer the same fate. Does racism exist?…absolutely. Is having rules and behavioural expectations inherently racist?…not at all. But you gotta play the game to climb the ladder. I can confirm, as a former colleague of said Principal, who as a teacher made a name for herself working with at-risk students, that what happened to her was wrong. @few-seaweed-1465 you are absolutely right that this sent a chill through administrations across the Board. Teachers too are becoming less willing to get involved with student conflict or even enforce basic class rules as they fear reprisal from the Board. An incredible number of teachers have been put on leave for “racist” behaviour and with the majority of them this has been unwarranted. It’s a terrible time to be in Education but working in this Board makes it that much worse. This is what happens when you have Director with an agenda and a bunch of sycophants as Superintendents. Hopefully the new Director rights this ship and brings calm and pride back to this once inspiring organization.

I think most of us are aware of what happens to teachers who speak publicly on such issues. And the two followups were, in fact, cited. I'm hearing these same 'anecdotes' all over the place.

If you had read the entire cite you would have realized that in fact it DID articulate this very argument along with supportive evidence.

This was from the other side of the country last year. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/defiant-students-fearful-teachers-and-an-elementary-school-in-disarray-what-really-happened-at-pinecrest-public-school Similar report from this year. https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/adam-time-is-running-out-for-a-solution-to-school-violence

I've read a few of these over the past year, and it seems to be the same across the country. The schools are filled with refugees and immigrants who can barely speak a word of English, have brought their cultural issues with them, and are aggressive if not violent. It's worse in the downtown and poorer areas of cities, but I've read some news accounts of other areas with similar things going on. In every case the educational establishment just nods and smiles and does nothing about the violence and lack of discipline in schools. And I can't help wondering just what kind of education the next generation is receiving. And when they get to college/unviersity is it any better given how these institutions are stuffed full of foreign students? Reprinting a particular post I found elsewhere because what they say seems to be echoed by so many teachers, and confirms some of the things I've read in the local media. *** My teaching situation is an absolute nightmare. For context, I teach junior high. I teach at an inner city school. I am trained in teaching history and English language arts at the secondary level. I teach in what is supposed to be a general Ed classroom. I am not qualified to be an ESL teacher, a phonics teacher, a crisis worker, a special Ed teacher, a social worker, or a behaviour interventionist. Unfortunately, I have to fulfill all of these roles at my school. I am completely overwhelmed. My classroom is a warning to the world of the dangers of inclusive education. There is no learning happening in there. I am not safe. The kids are not safe. My “normal kids” are neglected because I have so many behavioural problems in my room. Inclusion comes at a cost. This model is not sustainable and we are f*cking failing our children the longer we keep this model going. The kids with behaviour problems do not get anything out of being there. The regular students do not get anything out of being there. I don’t care if that is not politically correct. Some kids do not belong in our classrooms! School is not the best environment for all kids! My classroom composition is as follows: I have multiple kids who cannot speak, read, or write English. Many of them are illiterate in their native languages. Somehow being placed in a mainstream class is the best thing for them????? They get a single twenty minute reading intervention pullout a week. I have to teach these kids their goddamn alphabets in grade seven English while the rest of my class is writing essays. I have refugee and immigrant kids who are EXTREMELY violent and aggressive. They have never been in a classroom before. There are daily fights. Many of them come from cultures that do not respect women, and as a result, I am treated like absolute shit compared to my male colleagues. The homophobia, antisemitism, and misogyny I witness from these kids on a daily basis is astounding. Several students with IEPs and special needs - I have a blind student, a student with low functioning autism, a student with ODD, multiple children with severe ADHD, and a student with an extreme communication disability. I have been hurt at work. I have been sexually assaulted at work. I am sweared at everyday. I have never experienced as much disrespect anywhere before as I do at my job now. I worked in the service industry for ten years and never experienced anything to this degree. Many of my native-born, English-speaking students are way below grade level. A large chunk of them are reading and writing at a grade three level. I teach grade 7/8/9. They too are actually illiterate because they cannot read or write or sound out words. I have a student who has been placed back in a normal school environment after being in a juvenile detention centre for the last three years. He has a history of violence and has assaulted multiple students and teachers over the years. He has put a kid in the hospital. He is in no position to be placed in a regular classroom. I am scared of him. Every day, there is an incident with him. Admin says we need to give him a chance and really try to connect with him!!! I have kids who are at grade level and even some who are working well above it. Their reward for working hard? They get ignored. They do not learn anything. They are subjected to trauma by being around these kids. I have no EA support. I have over thirty kids in each of my classes. Suspensions are far and few between because nobody would be at school if they happened. Admin takes a soft approach to these kids because “trauma informed classrooms.” What about MY trauma? What about the trauma of my other students? I am told there is no funding. I am told that classrooms are diverse and that’s a good thing! I am told this is just how things are now! I am told that the kids are still recovering from covid and that they deserve grace! There is no help. There are no resources. There is no time. I am planning three to four different lessons for a single subject. How the f*ck is that okay? The government and the board are hurting teachers. All they care about is cutting costs. These people do not have teachers’ or students’ best interests in mind.

I have no idea what he's even talking about. Equity was not mentioned in this story, nor income inequality. Maybe he's thinking of the GDP per person as a measure of our actual wealth? Because that is shrinking. Or it could be the fact that half of economic immigrants - our most successful type - have incomes below the national average after ten years in Canada. That isn't a matter of equity, it's a matter of a points system that obviously is not functioning as it should. It means even the economic class is not leading to increasing our wealth. And when you add in the huge numbers of family class and refugees it goes a long way to explain our decreasing wealth as a nation.

I have seen a lot of criticisms of our immigration system over the years, especially lately, but this piece in the Globe and Mail is the most complete takedown on the sh1tshow it has turned into under Trudeau and the damage it's doing not only to those who come in but to the country itself. It also blows away any and all excuses the Liberals are making for these continuous increases in mass immigration. Whether it's helping the economy, enriching Canada, providing needed workers or making up for an aging population this destroys all of those arguments with facts. Yet, soaring immigration levels under the Liberals have not made Canada richer, or its social programs more sustainable. If anything, the opposite is true. While the country’s overall economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP), has grown in recent years, Canada’s GDP per capita (also known as per capita income) has failed to keep pace with that of other developed countries and even declined in recent quarters. GDP per capita is a far more meaningful indicator of a country’s standard of living than the brute size of its economy. And Canada’s is falling. -- What’s more, the vaunted “points system” Canadian immigration bureaucrats have relied on since 1967 to select applicants (based on education, skills, work experience and proficiency in at least one official language) is increasingly being bypassed in favour of short-term labour-market demands, mostly in low-wage sectors. “For economists who study this, we just shake our heads,” says the University of Waterloo’s Mikal Skuterud, one of a growing number of labour-market experts critical of the Trudeau government’s immigration policies. “I think we have completely gone in the wrong direction.” -- Prof. Skuterud and his colleagues looked at the earnings levels of immigrants who arrived in Canada as permanent residents in 2006. They found that half of those accepted as economic immigrants had incomes below the Canadian average in 2016, a decade after their arrival. They conclude that the selection criteria used by IRCC “were not effective in boosting the average human capital level of the Canadian labour force.” -- The Century Initiative plan sees population in the Toronto region almost quadrupling to 33.5 million in 2100. That would make Canada’s largest urban agglomeration about the same size as New Delhi today, and only slightly smaller than Tokyo. Under the Century Initiative vision, the Montreal and Vancouver regions would each be home to about 12 million people in 2100, three or four times their current numbers. Those who insist that Canada’s cities could accommodate this massive growth if they loosened zoning restrictions to encourage densification do not live in the real world. For most people, the “Canadian dream” does not consist of living their whole lives in cramped apartment and condo towers, and no politician wants to burst their bubble. The political class continues to peddle the increasingly elusive goal of single-family home ownership, with greenspace for the kids and dog. https://archive.ph/p9GxW

I think influence with America depends on what you can do for them. And in Israel's case Jewish votes. I think both Israel and the Saudis have more influence with them than we do at the moment.

The Taliban got a meeting in the White House with the president. Every American president grovels at the feet of the Saudis and Gulf states. The Turkish butcher Erdogan has their total respect. What are these 'privileges' of which you speak?

The children of Israel don't need our help. And the only thing we could do for the children of Gaza is take them away from their shitty parents who keep raising each generation to hate.

Jews are still hated. Where have you been? That's why a million of them were forced out of surrounding Muslim countries back when they lost their first war to Israel. Israel, of course, took those people in and made them citizens. But the Palestinians? What about them? The surrounding Arab countries said Fack them. THAT is the source of the long decades of festering rage. Only these people should be directing their anger at the surrounding Arab countries, not Israel.

What's new is, as Douglas Murray has said, the Israelis are the only people not allowed to win wars. If they had crushed the Palestinians years ago, or even pushed them off the land they wouldn't have faced this kind of attack. They listened to whiny westerners and sanctimonious bullshit Arabs (who didn't give a shit about the slaughter of Arab Muslims by Iranians, by Syrians, by ISIS, etc.) Now we have the same people telling them to be 'proportionate' and to not attack because of the danger to civilians. And I hope this time they tell them all to Fack off and just roll through Gaza with tanks and artillery and kill everyone who raises a gun or throws a rock.

I've noticed that when people seem to be having difficulties offering up a convincing argument they tend to congratulate themselves on some kind of 'victory' over their interlocutor. Frankly, it's kind of silly and childish. The way Hamas attacked Jewish villages and groups during their breakout was absolutely the same as any group of savage barbarians attacking an enemy village, town or city going back to the Rape of Constantinople. They behaved no differently. Yes, the weapons were different. But they were the same bloodthirsty men utterly lacking in empathy and with the same mindsets in a different time. And if the weapons had been bows, swords and axes they'd have behaved in exactly the same fashion with the same gleeful abandon at being set free from all restraints of law and the encumbrances of society on how they would be allowed to behave. And the way Israel will attack Gaza will be much the same as the way Americans hit villages in Vietnam, complete with the men who will go down into the tunnels to hunt down the enemy. They might even use many of the same weapons like trench guns and grenades. Though if they have enough sleepy gas on hand they might pump that into the tunnels first.

Maybe we should tell that to all the students in all the military academies around the world, from West Point to Sandhurst. Apparently, they're wasting their time studying past wars and battles.

What's stupid is pretending there's something new in what is going on between Israel and Hamas, instead of something as old as recorded history.

The Jews were peaceful enough when people weren't trying to kill them. Are you bothered that they tend to get violent when people do? Most observers I've read (actually all of them) say that if they'd held an election Hamas would have won handily anyway. What recent polls have been taken say the same. Hamas regards elections as a western concept. They want to establish an Islamic state, not a western democracy.

History has no bearing on today? Now THAT'S stupid! Those who forget history are condemned to relive it. I think the Israelis are uninterested in reliving the slaughter of their people when the Hamas savages broke free of their cage.

Certainly not ALL. But they've been brought up from the cradle with hatred of Israel and Jews fed to them through every means possible. Look up some of the Western reports on Palestinian schoolbooks sometime. Or on what is contained in Palestinian media or publications. Or what they're told in the mosques. Hatred of Jews and Israel is nearly unanimous throughout the Palestinian territories. It's damned near unanimous throughout the whole region for the same reason. When Hamas attacked Israel and killed so many there were joyous scenes of delight and exhilaration throughout the Palestinian territories. Throughout the Arab world, too. Outside polling agencies like PEW will attest to that. There was an interesting story in the Post today about Gaza seventy years ago after the Arabs lost the first of their wars against Israel. Gaza was a much better place then. But Seventy years of war and brutal terrorism and reprisals have not exactly been good for it. But even then even the few who admitted the war had been a mistake had no empathy for Jews. https://archive.ph/PyAmB

How many German civilians were killed when conquering Germany in WW2? Should we have backed off to avoid that?

You evaluate world problems based on your western values and the complacency of someone who has never known want, fear or danger. But Arabs don't share your values. They don't want what you want. Colonialism is wrong? Why? Gaza was controlled by Egypt before they lost it to Israel. Before that it was the British. Before that the Ottoman Empire. It's a strip of land with no ethnic, religious, cultural or racial distinction from the areas around it. Take all the dirty Jews away and you think there'll be paradise there? It'll be another Iran, where teenage girls are beaten to death for not properly wearing their hijab, or worse yet, another Afghanistan. There's no interest in democracy and freedom there. They want an Islamic state. This is what you and the other Western lefties are siding with, not the hope of freedom, but the hope of a brutal authoritarian Islamic state. The response to Hamas' brutal, heartless attacks on civilians was joy and celebration throughout the Arab world. If they continued, killing and raping tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, the cheering would have been even louder. That's what you and the other unimaginative, unknowing and ignorant lefties don't seem able to wrap your heads around. It was a Hamas video taken in the Gaza strip while they paraded her in front of cheering Palestinians. The location of such things is easily pinpointed nowadays through matching images online.

I would have thought the video of Hamas gleefully riding in a pickup truck with a virtually naked Israel woman they took prisoner would have been sufficient evidence. Not to mention basic human behaviour patterns. If you have men so lost to any sense of empathy or morality they can gun down unarmed young dancers and spend hours hunting them through the fields do you really think they're not going to rape women they come across? Why wouldn't they? Because they're too high-minded and moral? Because Arab men are known to be so respectful of women? Especially Jewish women?

There's tons of evidence and even Hamas doesn't deny it. WTF is your problem anyway?

You are as dumb as a bag of rocks.

Win what? You're 2% of the population. If you can't take an oath to the monarch who represents the nation state of Canada then you aren't much of a Canadian and should probably go live in India.

I think you misunderstand me. I'm on your side! I want Quebec to separate too! I think Canada, without Quebec, would be much saner, much less given to wasteful spending, much more Capitalist and conservative, and we could probably finally get control of our borders. I don't 'loath' Quebecers. I just see them as whiny, spoiled people who think the world owes them a living and view themselves as endlessly oppressed. Quebec has little to differentiate itself from anyone else other than its language and a few foods. It's not 'distinct'. It's not a nation. And it's the home of much of the corruption in Canada. It's also the home of bad government, and virtually every dumb decision Canada has taken over the past fifty years has originated with Quebec politicians. It may be too late, but if we got rid of Quebec perhaps Canada could regain its sanity.