I am Groot

Intimidation in pursuit of political aims does not constitute terorrism or else just about every protest that blocks a road or a rail crossing can be so described.

There was violence from the trucktards?

Wasn't there news just a few days ago saying the calls for Trudeau to step down actually came from Russian proxy sites?

Biden has been tougher on US foes than Trump. He's challenged China repeatedly, reaffirmed the US commitment to Taiwan, sent weapons to Taiwan, and billions in armaments to Ukraine to fight off Russia. He's also challenged North Korea, and reinstated US/South Korean military exercises Trump ordered stopped.

Uh, no it has not. It didn't start until 2015, and in 2016 there were about 300 such crossings. Then big mouth Trudeau decided to virtue signal to the world and the few hundred became tens of thousands. Word got out, and it rose to 60,000 crossings last year. And it likely will continue to grow as it's becoming more widely known as an easy path into Canada. Sanctuary cities are a problem, but the real problem is our refugee laws, how long it takes to get through the process, and how easy it is to get a claim accepted without any evidence. Not to mention that we don't have any real enforcement mechanism to kick people out when they overstay. Basically, once you're here you're here permanently unless you're repeatedly caught breaking the law in a major way or rape a schoolbus full of babies or something.

I already stated what the solution is. Saying it's not possible is simply to admit that political cowardice prevents governments from doing what should be done.

We have shitty laws which no one seems to be bothered enough to change. Convicting someone of a white-collar crime, be it fraud or something like selling smuggled or counterfeit goods takes massive amounts of evidence for almost no sentence but a slap on the wrist. In fact, it's so bad police forces rarely even bother to investigate fraud anymore. Even a conviction just gets a small fine or suspended sentence except in the most extreme cases. Even when their open fraud is exposed by consumer groups or those hidden camera shows mechanics and contractors aren't charged by police. You really have to put a lot of effort into it to get any kind of sentence. As for Chinese interference in our elections, it honestly doesn't feel as if the Trudeau government cares, as long as it's to his benefit. Much like Trump didn't care about Russian interference for the same reason. Other countries, like Australia and the US have put in place laws against election interference. Canada has been 'studying' it for years now. Chinese influencers are everywhere, which CSIS has been telling us for years. They own almost all Chinese language media and tow the PRC line. And they donate money to the party they're told to and get reimbursed by China. This is, in turn, an example of how slack we've been with our immigration. We bring in tens of thousands of people from China every year but we don't interview them. We don't subject them to intensive background checks to ascertain what connections they might have with the Communist Party or military. We don't even try to find out why they want to immigrate here. Is it because they want to breathe free air? Because if so why do so many return 'home' again many times, often for very long periods of time? What is their commitment to Canada? Why does the Chinese consulate say it's so 'easy' to influence them to the PRC's preferred narrative?

Our immigration system is an unholy bureaucratic mess, so it should surprise no one that our refugee system is even worse. It's overloaded with work and understaffed. It's doing what it was never intended to do, with numbers it was never intended to cope with. These two things are linked. Immigration and refugees. Because most of those coming in as refugees are simply immigrants who couldn't be bothered to go through the time-consuming exercise of applying. And why would they when this is so much faster and has a higher acceptance rate to boot? We used to accept 35% of applicants. Now it's 70%. Once upon a time, we went by the UN convention on refugees which specifically excludes those fleeing war and poverty. Now we accept anyone with a sad story about how bad things are at home. The numbers at Roxham road keep climbing every year because the word is out that this is a virtually guaranteed path to life in Canada. Even those who are eventually rejected after years of hearings simply stay on. We don't have the means to find them let alone remove them. And it's fairly easy to live as an illegal immigrant in our 'sanctuary' cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Now things are so bad we're busing migrants from Quebec to Ontario. The Liberals have clearly made the determination that they can lose most of the complaints from Quebec over this while Ontario organizations and media, bound so tightly in political correctness, won't dare complain. They're probably right. I haven't heard a peep of complaint from Doug Ford even though Toronto's shelter system and public housing is already full of migrants. Poilievre seems to feel he can complain about Roxham Road as long as he doesn't give any solutions. That's because the solutions, while perfectly acceptable in Quebec, would be anathema to Canada's English language media. Andrew Coyne's head would probably explode, just to start. And the STar would put out eighteen-pound bold screaming headlines about how the Conservatives hate immigrants and are white supremacist xenophobes. The solution, of course, is to detain them at the border until their hearings. We can't do that because our crappy system requires five or more years to slowly, and torturously process the claims through various levels of appeals. So we need to take the refugee determination system out of the court system by using the Notwithstanding clause. Give them a quick hearing, then a quick appeal, abide by the UN convention, and then boot them out. Do that for a short period of time and word would quickly get back to countries of origin and most of the fakes would stop trying. Good luck finding a Canadian politician with the balls to do it, though. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tasha-kheiriddin-trudeau-cant-be-trusted-to-take-roxham-road-seriously

The Globe obviously has a mole in CSIS, or a whistle-blower, take your pick. Anyway, these reports show yet again what a dishonest government this is and also make it patently obvious how much effort China is putting into keeping them in power and keeping the Conservatives out. Some of the activities are clearly illegal, but with the continued denials by the Trudeau government, we've seen no sign of any effort at law enforcement. Key excerpts. The full extent of the Chinese interference operation is laid bare in both secret and top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents viewed by The Globe and Mail that cover the period before and after the September, 2021, election that returned the Liberals to office. The CSIS reports were shared among senior government officials and Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence allies of the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Some of this intelligence was also shared with French and German spy services. *** Drawn from a series of CSIS intelligence-gathering operations, the documents illustrate how an orchestrated machine was operating in Canada with two primary aims: to ensure that a minority Liberal government was returned in 2021, and that certain Conservative candidates identified by China were defeated. The documents say the Chinese Communist Party leadership in Beijing was “pressuring its consulates to create strategies to leverage politically [active] Chinese community members and associations within Canadian society.” Beijing uses Canadian organizations to advocate on their behalf “while obfuscating links to the People’s Republic of China.” The classified reports viewed by The Globe reveal that China’s former consul-general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, boasted in 2021 about how she helped defeat two Conservative MPs. *** In early July, 2021 – eight weeks before election day – one consular official at an unnamed Chinese diplomatic mission in Canada said Beijing “likes it when the parties in Parliament are fighting with each other, whereas if there is a majority, the party in power can easily implement policies that do not favour the PRC. Most important, the intelligence reports show that Beijing was determined that the Conservatives did not win. China employed disinformation campaigns and proxies connected to Chinese-Canadian organizations in Vancouver and the GTA, which have large mainland Chinese immigrant communities, to voice opposition to the Conservatives and favour the Trudeau Liberals. The CSIS documents reveal that Chinese diplomats and their proxies, including some members of the Chinese-language media, were instructed to press home that the Conservative Party was too critical of China and that, if elected, it would follow the lead of former U.S. president Donald Trump and ban Chinese students from certain universities or education programs. “This will threaten the future of the voters’ children, as it will limit their education opportunities,” the CSIS report quoted the Chinese consulate official as saying. The official added: “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC can support.” CSIS also explained how Chinese diplomats conduct foreign interference operations in support of political candidates and elected officials. Tactics include undeclared cash donations to political campaigns or having business owners hire international Chinese students and “assign them to volunteer in electoral campaigns on a full-time basis.” Sympathetic donors are also encouraged to provide campaign contributions to candidates favoured by China – donations for which they receive a tax credit from the federal government. Then, the CSIS report from Dec. 20, 2021 says, political campaigns quietly, and illegally, return part of the contribution – “the difference between the original donation and the government’s refund” – back to the donors. In early November, 2021, CSIS reported, Ms. Tong discussed the defeat of a Vancouver-area Conservative, whom she described as a “vocal distractor” of the Chinese government. A national-security source said the MP was Kenny Chiu. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source, who risks prosecution under the Security of Information Act. The source said Mr. Chiu was targeted in retaliation for his criticism of China’s crackdown in Hong Kong and his 2021 private member’s bill aiming to establish a registry of foreign agents, an effort inspired by similar Australian legislation to combat foreign interference. The United States has a long-standing registry; Canada is still studying the matter. According to CSIS, Ms. Tong talked about China’s efforts to influence mainland Chinese-Canadian voters against the Conservative Party. She said Mr. Chiu’s loss proved “their strategy and tactics were good, and contributed to achieving their goals while still adhering to the local political customs in a clever way.” In mid-November, CSIS reported that an unnamed Chinese consular official said the loss of Mr. Chiu and fellow Conservative MP Alice Wong substantiated the growing electoral influence of mainland Chinese-Canadians. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-china-influence-2021-federal-election-csis-documents/

People come here largely for entertainment. No one is going to invest the better part of an hour in watching some video unless it's by Bill Burr or Jim Jeffries. And I highly doubt your video on the evil Left is going to be as entertaining as either of those two. If I want to watch videos to teach me about things I'll select my own from people I know will be intelligent and honest.

But very little of it has been on the actual topc - ie, whether the left is destroying western civilization - as opposed to the poor nature of the OP.

If only it was just teenagers and not academics and administrators.

You know what is destroying western society? When 'science' is reduced to this kind of utterly brainless political posturing. Western universities are graduating legions of sociologists, gender and racial studies "experts" while China churns out mathematicians and engineers. The words “male” and “female” should be phased out in science because they reinforce ideas that sex is binary, scientists have suggested. Researchers studying ecology and evolutionary biology should be encouraged to use terms such as “sperm-producing”, “egg-producing” or “XY/XX individual” to avoid “emphasising hetero-normative views”, experts say. https://nationalpost.com/news/females-no-they-are-called-egg-producers-scientists

No. Posting a video of any kind as a topic starter is problematic. Posting a 45-minute video is pointless under almost any circumstance.

Do we really want to be using a half-million-dollar missile to shoot down a balloon anyway? I get that the first Chinese one was enormous and up way above the fighters' operational ceiling. But the last three were down low enough to just fly at it and shoot. And they weren't so big that filling them full of holes would have let them float on forever.

When they're dismissing the legacy of western culture and writing as coming from 'dead white men' and substituting writings from unknown Africans and Arabs. When they're calling out western concepts like 'punctuality', the 'protestant work ethic', 'planning for the future', and believing 'hard work is the key to success' as 'whiteness' and 'white supremacy, and saying hiring and promotion on merit is 'an inherently racist construct' ' I think they're amply demonstrating their feelings.

Trudeau never took covid seriously. Sorry. He just had good press. He was late to the game on every front. While other nations were preparing he was calling out conservatives as racist for wanting to close the borders to Chinese visitors. We were late to issue guidance to wear masks. Unlike other nations, when we did close the borders to visitors we kept it wide open for Canadians and businessmen and didn't do any health screening at all. Instead of contracting with western pharmaceutical companies for a vaccine we relied on China. How'd that work out? Then he had to scramble to butt into line by paying huge amounts of money (he won't tell us how much) to get the vaccines in a more timely manner. All of which goes on top of him giving away our PPE and letting warehouses close down and tossing out what PPE we had because it had expired over the years while not buying more. The only thing the Trudeau government did during covid which worked was paying a fortune to finally buy vaccines. Everything else was a complete screwup. Including when they were finally goaded into doing some sort of screening and quarantining. What a mess that was! A multi-million dollar FUBAR from start to finish! And btw, his stern attitude about vaccines only came at election time. Before that he had the same policy as the Conservatives because he said mandates would be too divisive. Well, when it came to getting elected he tossed any concern for divisiveness out the window! Edit. Oh, wait, I forgot that at the height of the 'stay home, don't go anywhere, don't meet with anyone!" orders he decided to go to the byward market in Ottawa to join a BLM demo and 'take a knee with his fist in the air' UGH! And while the border between Quebec and Ontario was frozen to prevent the spread, he and his entourage went up to Meech Lake in Quebec to enjoy themselves. Screw the rules. The rules are for the peasants, not the kings.

I rather doubt the US would be shooting at anything they couldn't identity, particularly if they had even the most remote suspicion it might be ET. Not unless ET had proved violently hostile already without anyone telling us, anyway.

Are you assuming this was specifically about you? Because it doesn't sound like it.

Is that what he was doing?

Just gonna park this here. If you want to work at a university you have to sign a pledge to support diversity, equity, and anti-racism policies. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-canadian-universities-using-dei-statements-to-force-conformity-of-thought

I have? Please show where I've suggested one damned thing about what you hate or don't hate. I wasn't trying to get it to count for anything. It was a direct response to your claim that I'm "barking the same cry, just under a different banner." Implied? Subconscious? There is no way to impact subconscious biases I'm aware of. The 'training', ie, indoctrination so many have to suffer from has not been shown to have any positive impact. In fact, there is some suggestion it causes sufficient irritation that it has a negative impact. More to the point, there's no evidence these 'subconscious/implied/inherent biases' cause any harm. The case for affirmative action rests on the statistical inequalities between groups. But groups are different because of cultural values more than skin colour. And those cultural values causes different groups to prioritize different goals, including education and marriage. To be more specific, giving priority for hiring and promotion, as well as educational opportunities to Group A because it performs worse than Group B when the cause of that lesser performance is entirely of its own making seems blatantly unfair to Group B. The allegation is it's always do to skin colour or some sort of prejudice but there's precious little to support that vs group preferences and behaviour. That part of my response was clearly directed at what to do about the present situation, not an accusation towards you personally. Already explained. You can indeed call it petty. You can say it's petty to complain about a black hairdresser going on the ten dollar bill instead of Sir John A MacDonald, or that it's petty to notice how many black actors I'm seeing on TV commercials and how many black newsreaders and reporters are suddenly popping up in a nation where blacks make up 3.5% of the population. You can call it petty that certain universities have created separate study areas and dorms for blacks "to feel safe" or caring about mandatory diversity education at government institutions or a requirement for people to sign an attestation regarding their belief in diversity and equity before being considered for employment at university. You can call it petty to complain about Trudeau's seemingly neverending apologies on behalf of Canada to this or that identity group and the neverending stream of programs and funding to said groups and the new censorship bill designed to 'protect' them from offensive and harmful words and the endless stream of other bits and pieces of the government's ongoing efforts at dividing Canadians. But taken as a whole, resenting it all is not petty.

What culture? The Trudeau government says we have no culture. Trudeau himself rather proudly said we had no common identity. The CRTC has been around for decades. How's that protection going so far? I don't see many signs of it. Unless you think watching American network news carried by CTV, CBC and Global with occasional local voiceovers is can-con. Does CTV even have any Canadian shows other than news and sports? Who here watches a lot of Canadian TV shows? What are they? Putting in place a complicated bureaucratic formula that requires small web producers and developers to fill out and file forms in order to qualify as Canadian is just so incredibly bureaucratically Canadian it would likely make other countries with successful home-grown media laugh uproariously. Justin Bieber? Nope, he doesn't qualify! Margaret Atwood? Nope! Not her either!

I'm confused. The topic you're referring to seems to be about a digital ID for healthcare and government services. This one is about internet censorship.