I am Groot

You disagree? This is what children are being taught today in a world where ideologues have taken such a grip on education you have important and influential people claiming even math is racist, where expressing any pride in your country draws accusations of white supremacy or white nationalism or some such bullshit. First of all, you are once again being a poor reporter since no one suggests the columnist lied but you. They simply shirked their responsibility to fact-check. Second, you dismiss the importance of the national anthem being changed because, I suspect, you believe you're too sophisticated to care about such things and don't really understand why anyone would. You do this with almost all the complaints conservatives make about attacks on Canada's culture, values and heritage. I suspect you really don't care much about such things and are perfectly content living in a United Nations environment with 'no core identity' as Trudeau describes it. But having our country's national anthem sung in an international forum before a mass audience of foreigners by an ideologue who doesn't believe in the legitimacy of this country and who changes the anthem to reflect that is very much an insult to those who do. The illiberal progressive suggestion that only natives are the legitimate 'owners' or citizens of the country made by the child of refugee we have allowed in would strike most conservatives as an affront both to basic values of gratitude and another indication of how far this country's education system - and cultural elites have fallen.

Disunity is a function of people not feeling connected. This is not merely an ideological view of left vs right. The person very nicely represented to aspects of this disunity: the lack of proper integration of immigrants and their children and the sense among many due to continuing harangues from illiberal/progressives that Canada is basically a shithole and always has been and everyone in it except white men are victims of oppression. But your complaints were not entirely in accord with the facts, and what seemed to really both you is the disparagement of refugee claimants by claiming they were cooking goats. I'm concerned about the intellectual elements attacking and disparaging Canada, its history, values and heritage, rather than mocking refugee claimants.

Clearly, it hasn't been updated in many years. Why is it still there? Why not get rid of it and simply make the forums the 'home' page?

What have I expressed outrage with? I do bring up specific instances or actions which transgress what I believe represent good government, as well as those that indicate sicknesses/failings of a society going in the wrong direction, as the piece I cited above mentioned. I do tend to look into the future as to where such things are headed and you don't seem to feel the same need and so fairly readily dismiss many of my concerns on these matters as not a big deal TODAY. Anyway, rather than discuss the actual topic of the cite you've focused on the newspaper which reported it, despite the facts being fairly easily verified and despite this story having nothing to do with the one that has provoked you and being written by a different columnist. That seems obsessive to me.

I don't think anyone here is arguing there should be no social services. But there are, or ought to be limits based on our ability to pay for them. Men seem more aware of this than women. Running up huge debts is a relatively recent thing, too. Previously they only happened during wars, and after the war we tried to pay them down again. We're running up huge debts during peacetime, during good times and bad. And the higher the debt rises the more concerning it is. Yes, and the article helps to explain why. So why are you arguing with the points of the article? But you just pointed out conservatism has always skewed male and conservatism is well known as an ideology which prefers smaller government (and thus lower taxes) and more balanced books.

This seems to have gotten you somewhat obsessed. It's a single column by a single columnist five years ago who acknowledged they were wrong. And you use this to condemn the entire organization? By the way, the press council rejected the complaint that it was racist, and the Sun did indeed accept the ruling, so it seems you too are guilty of inaccuracies in your reporting. Of course, you are not a reporter, but if you're going to go on a rant about a reporter not fact checking you ought to fact check your report. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/12/13/news/press-council-comes-down-toronto-sun-serious-breach-after-false-report-about-goats

Seen Stockwell Day around since he dared to disagree that every institution in Canada was systemically racist?

Yes, that is a natural human feeling, though normally it doesn't align simply with skin colour but with tribal feeling. Of course, most of the Black people in Canada are foreign-born and would have little sense of kinship with Canadians. The problem I have with this is that if anyone tried to make a 'white only ' space the heads of the mainstream media reporters would explode and every politician at every level would be screaming in anguish, horror and fury. Not to mention the university leadership would be rushing through their expulsion orders as fast as they could get them printed up.

Segregation is a good thing now! It's the progressive thing to do! Spaces designated for students from marginalized backgrounds are spreading across Canadian universities, as officials say they are a necessary and overdue response to decades of racism on campus. Toronto Metropolitan University officially opened a space late last month for students who self-identify as Black. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/a-beautiful-community-universities-open-lounges-for-black-students-1.6342294

I'm not sure where this fits but it is another story of how hardcore the illiberal elements of the Left who infest education have become with their endless insertion of their ideological views into the curriculum. Saying 2+2=4 is an example of covert white supremacy, according to a group of influential math teachers in Ontario. Questioning them on their assertion simply means you are an anti-trans, anti-immigrant person who doesn’t like anyone who isn’t white. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-radical-teachers-claim-that-saying-224-is-white-supremacy

Okay, then anything French alienates me. So when is the federal government going to do everything they can to destroy their culture and heritage?

I think you misapprehend the point of the article. It was more an explanation of why women vote liberal with far less regard to what all those 'helpful' government services cost or even how much debt we wind up with providing them.

You mean it's a Donald Trump kind of exaggeration. None of these people are fascists. I don't particularly like Trump or Netanyahu and I think they should both be locked up, but you're just using the term as a loose pejorative for people you don't like on the right. He was elected and re-elected. He is a right-wing populist with authoritarian tendencies and is certainly dangerous to the future of Hungary's democracy, but at the moment he can't be properly labeled a fascist. He (and Meloni) are mainly products of the continuing hand-wringing incompetence of the EU in dealing with mass migration. And you can expect more like them if something isn't done about it.

Please name the people here who have said any of those things.

Fat is a pejorative term. Are you suggesting calling a Black man a Black man is similarly pejorative?

Progressives DO gatekeep the mainstream media, as well as what I guess you could call the mainstream internet. To begin with, neither of these is Canada. Second, they're not considered mainstream. 4chan especially. And their influence is limited to their target audience. 4chan has 22 million unique visitors. Reddit, by itself, over 400 million. FOX is an infotainment channel which really only attracts angry, politicized right wing people. Meanwhile, you have the entire streaming world, from Disney to Prime to Netflix, plus all the networks pumping out woke TV shows blaring THE MESSAGE and movies all day, every day for years. Disney seems willing to sacrifice profit and audience to pump out THE MESSAGE and if half the country has turned away from their product in disgust that doesn't seem to bother them much. Giving that half the finger with every show they put out pleases them more than money. Here is what you insist on ignoring. In a true public square, there MIGHT be consequences if your opinion is wildly out of tune with the bulk of the citizenry. But if your message is Communism is the best possible kind of government, which certainly IS out of step with most people no one is going to be petitioning your boss or school to fire you. No one is going to be trying to track you down both online and in person to harass and insult you. But if your message is we've taken the concept of 'gender fluidity' to extremes and should pull back until there are unbiased studies the situation will be wildly different. What did JK Rowling say that was insulting or hateful to trans people? Don't pretend you have to go that far. The baying mob will come for you if you say males who declared themselves females yesterday shouldn't be getting naked in women's change rooms. What percentage of people called 'transphobic' do you think deny transgender people exist? I'm figuring maybe 1%-2% in Canada. Most people just express doubts about all the demands for complete equality with real biological women. "The public"? My perception and what polls I've been able to find suggests 'the public's opinion more closely mirrors that of JK Rowling than it does Justin Trudeau. This is what the illiberal left who call themselves progressives do - for now. The Trudeau government keeps bringing in more restrictive laws regarding what people can say on the internet, and there are rumblings about doing something more about in-person too. After all, when your words are endangering the safety of trans people simply by disagreeing with them surely it must be made illegal to disagree with them. Define 'insulting' language, if you can. Because we're moving back into the territory of compelled speech again. Because failing to use the speech dictated by transgender activists is, to their mind, insulting and offensive. As is disagreeing with any aspect of their demands. Including saying those under eighteen shouldn't be allowed to change genders, which you did earlier. So you're already guilty. Give me your employer's name so I can call them and tell them you're a transphobe is using hateful language and trying to deny my existence. Yes, mine. I've decided I'm a woman. Just today. Maybe tomorrow I'll be a man again, or perhaps a tiger or some other animal.

A column by Barbara Kay quoted some interesting statistics on male/female preferences about politics and the reasons for them. Women overwhelmingly vote Left while a plurality of men vote Conservative. Women are less supportive of freedom of speech that causes offense than men are, and much more prone to support BIG government that takes care of people, that, in effect, 'mothers' them, with scant regard to costs and budgets. That includes a strong degree of climate alarmism as well as support for minorities and disadvantaged people. Again, without regard to costs. The percentage of women attending university has been rising steadily while male attendance continues to fall, and those women report themselves to be liberal or far left in ever greater numbers compared to men. On average, “women are more willing to suppress science for moral reasons, and men are more willing to allow offensive or even potentially harmful ideas to be shared. (In time), support for including moral and harm concerns into the scientific and publishing process is likely to increase, and support for academic freedom is likely to decline.” Women account for 80 per cent of gender studies graduates in the U.S., which are essentially activism boot camps in radical gender ideology. These are the women disproportionately likely to end up as diversity, equity and inclusion administrators in universities, and to be in a position to enforce the illiberal tendencies they sharpened in university. Taken together, studies show that women in higher education are more likely than men to: believe hate speech is a form of violence; endorse shutting down a speaker; defer to Indigenous “ways of knowing” as equal in value to science; approve censure of scientific findings if they conflict with woke doctrine; and claim it should be illegal to say offensive things about certain minorities. When female activists meet with verbal opposition — as anyone who watches student protests on YouTube can observe — they are far more likely than men to react emotionally, sobbing or screaming, which effectively shuts down any dialogue, let alone the kind of open, sometimes abrasive debate that typifies male-dominated forums (like the male-dominant university I attended in the early ’60s, where I learned to think critically and fight my polemical corner with evidence, never — ugh! — tears). A 2011 study found that women cry emotional tears an average of 30-64 times per year, compared to five to 17 times for men. And it’s not the male students who are asking for “a designated place on campus to cry,” as one female student demanded during a cancellation crisis at Georgetown University’s law school. In his Substack, Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, tackled the quandary in an insightful recent post titled, “Women’s tears win in the marketplace of ideas.” He notes that it’s considered bad form to make women cry, while neither women nor men have sympathy for men who cry.

And your example is also wrong. A more appropriate one would be calling a Black man a Black man when they demand to be acknowledged as an Asian woman because all physical evidence to the contrary that's how they 'feel'.

I don't agree that our interpretation of mainstream is the same. Yours is based on the public sphere which is denied to those who have doubts about the spread of transgenderism.

I see you have seized on this effort to equate racism with doubts about transgender policy. It's not an intellectually honest argument on your part. DIsliking someone for their skin colour has no relationship to a demand that people ignore reality and humor someone in their mistaken belief about their sex. And their right is to not feel unsafe by anyone denying their fantasy about what sex they are. In Canada? Rarely. Where?

But the 'sources of information' control access to the public square. They control how a given topic is treated in the public sphere, ridiculing and putting down anyone who disagrees on a variety of topics. This is most especially evident on social policy issues where voices of detractors are only very rarely heard or portrayed incorrectly. They propagandize their views and outlaw contrary views. Ordinary people can discuss things among themselves in private away from media condemnation but their views are largely ignored by politicians. This is silly. First, you're utterly ignoring the way progressives will seek to have you turned into an outcast, pressuring and threatening you, your friends and family as well as employers or schools. You're also ignoring the implications of the inclusion of trans into human rights and criminal codes on harassment/discrimination, as well as corporate policies. You are, in effect, demanding we ignore reality because the government won't yet imprison you for calling a man a man, even though other elements of the progressive left will try to destroy you without regard to what the voiceless 'mainstream' might think of what you said. You are also equating refusing to deny reality with issuing a racist slur. Using a racist slur has no motive and no point but to cause offense. Denying someone's fantasy because it conflicts with reality is quite a different thing.

I agree with those three statements. Society, unfortunately, does not.

And you were wrong when you said it and wrong now.

Yes, but should we trade off the rights of women who comprise 50% of the population for the rights of a tiny minority who are mostly following a fad or psychologically ill? That's an interesting point to make given so much of the discussion on this subject is that no one is permitted to oppose any aspect of trans rights because even questioning the rules makes them feel 'unsafe'. That high school kid banned from school, for example, was because he made trans kids feel unsafe by questioning and doubting their preferred gender. This is a copout that always ignores that gender is wedded tightly to sex. Any laws which affect the separation of or acknowledgment of gender do the same to sex.

You are obsessed with this stupid refrain about fascists everywhere. Do you check under your bed every day in case a fascist is hiding there?