kimmy

Cherry-picking at its finest. Institutionalization of people, voluntary or involuntary, is a minuscule piece of the overall mental health picture. In all of those countries, including the US, the number of people undergoing treatment for mental health issues of some sort or another is is in the thousands or tens of thousands per 100,000 people. There's zero evidence to suggest that any of these mass shooting killers would have been candidates for forced institutionalization, so the probative value of that particular statistic in analyzing this issue is dubious at best. -k

I suspect that this promise would be quickly forgotten after securing reelection. -k

I've gotten pretty tired of all the candidates just dropping out. I do feel like, as you explain it, peoples' choices are being taken away for rather trivial reasons. Someone posted a bad joke on their facebook page 6 years ago? BETTER RESIGN! Somebody thought that 9/11 was an inside job? BETTER RESIGN! I have no love for the 9/11 Truthies and think they're a bunch of utter morons. I probably wouldn't vote for one myself, even if I really wanted their party to win the election. But the fact is, some backbencher's views on 9/11 are about as irrelevant as it could get as far as election issues go. I think it has some probative value as a litmus test: is this person too dumb to hold public office? But depending on the situation, maybe you still want their party to win even if the candidate is a dumb-ass. I suspect that supporters of all parties have had to hold their noses and vote for candidates they didn't like from time to time, placing the party's national success higher on their list of priorities than the competence of their local backbench MP. But the flurry of resignations this year has robbed people of the opportunity to make that decision for themselves. Personally, if it was just a question of the merits of the candidates I'd vote for the penis joke lady before I'd vote for gay conversion therapy guy. -k

What would happen if a student cited religious beliefs as a reason for not doing required course work? Well, if it were a Christian, what would happen is that conservatives would declare her a champion of religious freedoms and pass a law preventing the school from holding her back for not doing her course work. But if it was a Muslim, then yeah, people would probably think it was ridiculous. -k

I completely agree about microwaving fish in the office microwave. One rule that's vital to a happy, productive team environment: no fish in the office microwave. Every workplace I've been at where people didn't that follow that advice was inevitably filled with stress, strife, and backstabbing. I once worked in an office in Edmonton's Mill Woods district where many of my co-workers were Muslim. One day our employer had an "employee appreciation day". The food they brought in: Ham And Pineapple pizza! Sausage pizza! And hot-dogs! Plus 37 jugs of Diet Pepsi. No regular Pepsi. No Sprite or 7-Up. Diet Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi alone. And looking over at the Muslim guys with their little paper cups and no food, and sitting there with my crappy pizza and no drink, I reflected on what dumb-asses our employers were. And I went over to the Muslim guys and said "you could probably have a hot-dog, because I doubt there's any pork in them." I don't know whether they appreciated my lame attempt at humor, but it has to have been one of the worst-planned "employee appreciation days" in history. But as for people not bringing their own food because of other peoples' religious beliefs, screw that. "Coexist House" can go do a backflip into an empty pool. In the famous words of Ted Nugent, "if Coexist House gets in my way, you know I'll burn it down." -k

The call girl is barely related to the issue at hand. One can conclude that mentioning her at all was nothing more than a shameless excuse to include racy pictures taken from her web profile in the article. A shameless attempt to exploit the young woman in an attempt to generate page views. We've talked about Bruce Carson in the past; his business operation attempted to sell water filtration systems to native reservations who were having water quality problems. As Carson had previously worked for the government (including Indian Affairs) within the preceding 5 years, he may (or may not) have been in violation of lobbying rules (the "cooling off period") that were brought in by the Harper government. That he had a 22 year old girlfriend was completely unrelated to the substance of the matter. That she had worked as an escort was completely unrelated to the substance of the matter. That she was to receive some portion of the business's revenues was completely unrelated to the substance of the matter. None of that stuff is against the law. The substance of the matter is that Bruce Carson may have performed restricted lobbying prior to the end of the 5-year cooling off period. Trying to pretend that "the call girl" is part of the story was sleazy journalism, and it's sleazy of OP to make reference to it here. The other issue referenced by the Tyee article is that Carson may have committed more lobbying prior to the expiry of his five year "cooling off period". After his water filtration business, he went on to participate it what may (or may not) have been a lobbying operation on behalf of oil industry interests. He may well be in violation of those rules, but he and his lawyers dispute that his activities fall under the legal definition of lobbying. We will have to wait for the courts to decide. Bruce Carson might not be a very ethical dude. He might not be a very smart one either. Perhaps he should get together with Rahim Jaffer and Helena Guergis and start a rock band. I don't know. I do know that the substance of this issue is possibly 0, 1, or 2 counts of lobbying before the 5 year "cooling off period" has expired. Nothing more. Trying to bring the young woman into it to try to get page hits and attract attention is just tactless. I believe The Tyee is one of those publications that writes frequently about the unfair exploitation of sex workers; how hypocritical of them to pimp out the 22-year old girl to try to generate some page clicks. -k

That's science fiction being peddled by scammers trying to part you from your money. I have seen so many ads like this on the web. "Free Energy! Power Companies Hate This! Buy it before it's banned!" And there's a picture of some ridiculous contraption that looks like a blower motor, or a Dalek, or a toaster with a satellite dish mounted on it, or Ahmed's clock. There's no "free energy". -k

Davis and her lawyer also claimed 100,000 Peruvians had a prayer rally for Kim Davis, but that didn't happen either. Serious doubts about their mental stability. -k

I feel the same about Trudeau; for me it has been a choice between Harper or Mulcair from day one. Luckily I don't have to worry about strategic voting. Unless my local CPC candidate is caught on video setting fire to a bus full of orphans, nothing could prevent my riding from sending a Conservative to Ottawa. -k

And you're saying that's Karl Marx's fault? -k

Ever see the movie Spinal Tap? When St Hubbins is explaining the concept behind their new song "Sex Farm"? Take that scene, replace the word "sex" with "Marxism" and "farm" with "cultural", and that's basically about how smart "cultural Marxism" sounds. As I wrote earlier, transplanting the concept of Marxism into this context leaves so many unanswered questions: -k

So brave. -k

I failed to convey the idea was trying to express. Offering a pork-chop to your Jewish friend is a social miscue resulting from ignorance. Talking to the blonde lady in small words because you assume she doesn't know anything is a social miscue resulting from ignorance too. The difference between the two situations is an element of personal disrespect. There's not much reason for your Jewish friend to take it as a personal insult that you aren't familiar with his dietary customs. On the other hand, when somebody inadvertently lets you know they think you're an idiot, it's kind of hard not to be a little annoyed. Well, sure, and that was a complaint I raised early on in the thread. I think the idea itself is quite reasonable, but the official definition limits the scope of the discussion to race and gender issues; I don't think my own experience actually counts as a real microaggression in the official sense, since the blondes aren't a disadvantaged minority group. I think the general idea makes sense as a way of describing something we've probably experienced in some way or another. Interactions that while not overtly insulting are none the less annoying and upsetting. If it happened once it would be easier to shrug it off, but when it happens with some frequency, it's hard to overlook. Hypothetically maybe a particular salesman might be that inept, but as a group they've kind of lost the benefit of the doubt. As the old saying goes, "you never get a second chance to make a first impression". Whether by malice or by ineptitude, he's made my day a little shittier and it's going to be harder for him to sell me something. It just is. That's just it. These aren't *rules*. This is information that's being presented. Your momma probably told you to never ask a woman her weight or her age, but she probably didn't tell you to not just assume that the black lady is a janitor, because that's outside her realm of experience. The University of California brochure is intended to help you by providing advice that you wish your momma had told you but she couldn't because she didn't know it herself. And suppose BestBuy looks through their customer feedback and says "gee, we're losing sales because our sales guys are unintentionally insulting blonde women by treating them like idiots." And they produce an employee information brochure with handy tips like that. And if that happened, e^pi*i would frame it as "BestBuy snuffs free speech by issuing Orwellian directive telling sales staff what they can say to customers!!" And yet aren't people always clamoring for advice on how to interact with the opposite sex? I can't imagine a situation where providing people more information is a bad thing. I think in many contexts it would be a perfectly reasonable topic to have a perfectly reasonable discussion about. Conversely, I could also imagine a situation where somebody interprets it as a comment directed towards them. For example, it's not something I'd blurt out at a party where we're welcoming our new black co-worker to the team. I mean, somebody here at the forum still describes Barack Obama as "the affirmative action president". -k

"Marxism" certainly exists, but what cyber and I were getting that is that "cultural Marxism" is an inane construct. -k

Around here the guys I see with their long hair twirled up in a bun tend to be rugged, athletic men who probably spend their spare time doing wilderness trekking, extreme sports, hunting, off-roading, cage-fighting, or adding to their collection of body piercings and tattoos. I don't know where you guys live that you don't see rugged, athletic men everywhere. -k

Kim City is full of real men with real testicles! I assume you're not reaching into peoples' trousers to check or staring intently at their crotches, so I'm curious to how you are able to determine whether a man has testicles or not. -k

That's a rather simplistic view of things. Most of microaggression provided here-- in the U of California brochure, for example-- aren't just social miscues, they're miscues that inadvertently reveal ignorance. To again reference my experience with salesmen... if the guy starts off explaining what a "gigahertz" or a "gigabyte" is, what's the real message? In his mind, perhaps he is thinking "I am providing helpful information! yay me!" but the message he's given me is that he has assumed, based on my appearance, that I'm an idiot. It's not an "unintentional offense" in the sense that I've gotten a mistaken impression of his attitude. My read on his assumptions is correct. The "unintentional offense" is that he didn't mean for me to realize he thinks I'm an idiot. That's the only part of this interaction that was unintentional. And I'm not going to flip out, or call the Human Rights Commission, or anything like that. But it'll affect how we interact. You can say that's foolish, but if somebody tells you they assume you're an idiot, isn't that likely to affect your interaction with them? Do you think the salesman is more likely or less likely to get a sale after treating me like an idiot? If I do decide to buy something, and the cashier gives me a receipt that says I can go online and fill out a survey for a chance to win a prize, do you think I'm likely to provide positive feedback or negative feedback? Do you think I'm more likely or less likely to go back to that store in the future? If people were robots, then stuff like this wouldn't matter, but people aren't robots and so it would be helpful for people to understand how to interact with each other more effectively. Especially if your livelihood depends on successful social interaction. -k

haha, sure it is. And yet you keep referencing this Milos guy who insists it's a war against "Cultural Marxism", whatever that is. The gamergaters want to have their cake, and eat it too, while insisting there's no cake the whole time. -k

Perhaps you're just hanging out in the wrong places, Freddy. -k

What does that even mean? I've heard "cultural Marxism" before (from the Gamergater-supporting Breitbart writer Milos Yiannopolos) but I don't know what "Marxism" actually has to do with what's going on. Who are the "cultural capitalists"? What is "cultural capital"? Who has "cultural capital"? Is "cultural capital" being taken away from its rightful owners and redistributed to "cultural laborers"? Who owns "cultural means of production"? What *are* the "cultural means of production"? Is the "cultural economy" a zero-sum game? If social media has allowed the "cultural proletariat" to participate in the "cultural economy" to a greater degree than ever before, does that mean that the "cultural capitalists" have had their "cultural capital" taken away? Are the "cultural capitalists" no longer able to use "cultural capital" to extract "cultural interest" to obtain "cultural income"? Are their "cultural landholders" as well? Are they able to obtain "cultural rent"? What is "cultural land?" Is "cultural land" also being redistributed to the "cultural proletariat"? This idea of "cultural Marxism" sounds very interesting, but it leaves me with so many questions. -k

He's not bashing Jews in general, just the obnoxiously fundamentalist Haredim sect. And despite the sensationalized headline, he didn't "link them to the taliban". He compared their religious fundamentalism to the Taliban. Nothing he said is actually wrong: It's too bad you can get kicked out of the election for saying something as reasonable as that. I would have more respect for the NDP if they'd stood behind him. -k

So given the lack of any demonstrable effect, I think it's fair to say that the much-ballyhooed changes were just window dressing, and Flaherty's huffing and puffing about tax avoidance in 2013 (and the Snitch Line! don't forget the Snitch Line!) were just for show. I feel it's rather hilarious to describe sending billions of dollars to places like Bermuda to finance a "business" with 1 employee that operates out of a broom closet as "investing". For your "investment" you've bought a Bermuda mailbox and hired a local mook who opens the mailbox, puts the envelopes into other envelopes addressed to Ireland or Holland, licks the stamp, puts the envelopes back in the mailbox, and goes home and drinks rum out of a coconut for the rest of the day. "Investment" my ass. -k

The SJWs didn't invent this, and they're certainly not the only or the first ones to do this sort of thing. It's standard behavior for many religious groups to try and use their numbers to intimidate businesses who make decisions they don't like. It wasn't SJWs who pretty much ended the Dixie Chicks or Sinead O'Connor as headline performers. In the past week we had a couple of politicians resign from their campaigns; a Liberal for joking that an electric fence post at Auschwitz looked like a penis, and an NDPer for making the (entirely fair) comparison of the Haredi Jews' attitudes toward women with those of the Taliban. Were those candidates yanked to appease the SJWs? Perhaps your real complaint isn't that this sort of influence exists, per se, but rather with who has access to it? Perhaps things were just easier back in the days when it was just church leaders who could raise an army to boycott stuff they didn't approve of, or an influential sponsor or donor who could kill a documentary with a single phone call. This power was generally in the hands of people who could be trusted to support good ol' conservative values. But now with the rise of social media everybody gets a say. -k

Wasn't illegal when he did it, still isn't illegal today. Despite Flaherty promising to get tough on schemes like this, despite stamping his feet about it and setting up his little Snitch Line and making some cosmetic changes, more money than ever is going to overseas tax havens, and the one thing that would really help-- hiring more investigators-- is apparently not in the cards. -k