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4 minutes ago, GrittyLeftist said:

Yeah, America casts a vast cultural shadow and we are right next door.  It is a problem.  Most Canadians are unaware of things like, for instance, the difference between 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of expression.' I think that one reason our government has chosen to "import" America's racial narrative is because it keeps the conversation AWAY from "who owns the land." 

 

No doubt...Canadian federal and provincial governments do not want to open that Pandora's box any further.   Most of British Columbia was never ceded at all as "Crown land".    Keeping the focus on the American narrative buys more time and insulates Canada from the much more dynamic factors at play in the U.S.    Canada never had equivalent civil rights conflicts, but it has had labour unrest (riots).

The impact of American culture is obvious...I recall watching one arrested Canadian demanding his nonexistent "Miranda rights", something he learned from watching so much American television and films.

 

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39 minutes ago, GrittyLeftist said:

but I can think of many reasonable adults who would say some pretty uncomplimentary things about Trump, Republicans, Brett Kavanaugh and the Georgia election laws.

For sure, but I can guarantee you that 95% of them are misinformed.

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I had hoped to give you the chance to consider the context that Marxism evolved out of, and perhaps also the needless cruelties inherent in Capitalism, rather than to convince you of a particular fact.  Regardless, thanks for your time, it says something that you took the time to read it.

I completely understand that Marxism arose from a desire to create a more idyllic society, and I agree that it's a really nice idea, but like I said earlier, making all of the money in a society flow through the government's sticky fingers is guaranteed to end in disaster.

It's more "Move, Bitch, Get Out The Way" than "Kumbaya".

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3 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

Their platform is on the web, so it changes with the tide.

Sorry, noticed this post after the other one ?

I totally believe you when you say you've seen a changing platform on the web that claims to represent BLM.  I have not yet been able to find any evidence that they are one group, I am totally not an expert (which you probably already knew :P).  I think that there are multiple competing movements using the same 'BLM' brand, which makes dealing with them more difficult for sure.  Like with Occupy, when 'The Man' finally got around to asking what their demands were, and all the Occupiers started shouting contradictory things at the same time.  What a wasted opportunity :(

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That was interesting, thanks for sharing.  I have no trouble believing that there are violent radicals involved with the BLM movement in various capacities.  As far as the link between 'blm' and 'communists' goes, I would think it's kind of like how some people who support X political party, but not all, also support Y cause.  Like two different oceans, and some fish swim freely between them?  Dunno if that metaphor works or not.

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Every video that's pimped by BLM always starts after there's a problem. "Oh look at what the cops are doing to this winner!" When the whole story finally comes out it's nothing like they said. 

They use stories like Brionna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Michael Brown, George Floyd etc which are all textbook examples of what not to do when the cops come. They also lie and say that race was a determining factor in those cases. Fact is that the police kill almost 2 times as many white people, they kill almost 2x as many unarmed white people. 

I do have some sympathy for cops - nobody really cares what happens until there is a problem, and that's gotta be frustrating.  Thing is, the Police officer is the one with the badge, the gun, and the training, so for me, the onus is on them to be responsible for the violence they choose to use in fulfilling their duties.  I very much agree that there have been people murdered by Police using "textbook examples of what not to do."  For me, those officers need to be criminally prosecuted, and the people who signed off on them being "trained" ought to face some kind of consequences as well.  I've heard people on the internet claim that police kill more white people than any other but I've never encountered a reputable source that claimed that.  No idea whether you consider the Washington Post to be reputable (I haven't vetted them FWIW), but they claim to have been keeping a database of people killed by police.  Police shootings database 2015-2021 - Washington Post

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Sure, blacks are overrepresented in those stats, but white people do not teach their kids to hate/fear/fight police. The BLM narrative grooms the next generation of black 'victims'.

Police officers have been complicit in the public, extralegal murder of various black people for a very long time.  Wikipedia has an article on lynching (which, interestingly enough, happened mostly to white people until emancipation) if you're interested.  At this point in time, I can't blame black americans for being afraid of cops.  Frankly, I'm afraid of cops too (I'm a white guy who started smoking pot when he was a teenager and learned to see Cops as the people who want to put me in jail for doing something that isn't harming anyone.  Am unlearning that, but it's a process).  Anything that can be done to anyone can be done to anyone, and anyone includes me.  If Police officers can get away with murdering other people, what's to stop them from getting away with murdering me?  I'm not saying "all cops are bastards" or anything that extreme, just saying "the mechanisms we use to hold delinquent Police officers to account are not functioning properly."

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China, Cuba. That's two.

Which groups of people experienced genocide in those countries?  I am aware of the Uighers in modern, "Communist" China, but I am not aware of Mao using genocide as a means to seize power (I'm totally not an expert on Mao though :P).  I know about the "cultural revolution", which as I understand it was when ~4 million Chinese people were murdered by their government for having university degrees.  Is that what you mean?

FWIW, Marx explicitly warned against groups of intellectuals seizing power to "benefit" the proletariat, as happened in Soviet Russia.  He seems to have wanted workers to band together and do it en masse, although, to my knowledge, he didn't leave any writings on how that should be done or what the next step should be. 

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The leaders are marixsts, so the followers are....?

OK, I see where you are coming from.  We still haven't established whether BLM has a centralized leadership or whether there are many different competing would-be leaders or whether the whole thing is a god-awful mess like Occupy was.  Even if we had, there are many people who follow, say, Trudeau, or Harper, or whoever you like, who do not support everything he does blindly, but are "holding their nose" because they feel strongly about particular issues.  So I guess I'm saying "maybe it's more complicated than that."

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Don't you find that odd? The whole world knows about G Floyd, and they both died the exact same way. 

This is a really good point.  In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky talks about how media only has so much air time, so they have to decide which victims are "worthy" of media coverage, and which are not.  The people who decide which stories make the news are the owners and editors of profit-driven multinational corporations.  Why don't they want us to know that Police violence also affects white people?  

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It's verboten to say 'all lives matter', 'blue lives matter' or to talk about white victims of police brutality. 

I agree there is a social cost to using those phrases. 

A 'strawman argument' works as follows: Person 1 makes a claim.  Person 2 rephrases that claim in a distorted or inferior form.  Person 2 then goes on to rebut their own, inferior version of person 1's claim as though it were their claim.

Person 1: Black lives matter. Person 2:You're saying black lives are the only ones that matter! Person 2:All lives matter.

Most people lack the formal education necessary to explain the flaw in this argument, but do know that their argument is not being addressed in good faith, so they get quite angry.  A large part of their anger is IMO caused by their inability to say what I just said, your mileage may vary.

When people who are upset because they believe Police officers are allowed to murder black people are told, "blue lives matter," many of them hear it as "cops should be allowed to murder black people."  Not saying they are right to do so, IMO more political literacy on all sides would solve this problem.

FWIW I think talking about white victims of police brutality is very important - as long as white people think of police violence as a "minority problem" they may be less inclined to do something about it.

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BLM isn't 'working on the issue of bringing police to justice' at all, they're fear-mongering racists.

If there were people who sincerely believed that Police were being allowed to murder black people and get away with it, what should they do?

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I'm asking you for evidence of racism "in the killings of those black people by police". 

I'm not sure what I could offer as anything more concrete than anecdotal evidence.  Maybe I could invite you to consider the difference between how the mostly black BML protesters were treated, compared to the nearly all-white insurrectionists who literally stormed the capitol building in an attempted coup and actually killed a police officer?  

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What I said means: "What happened to those black people is in no way proof of racism, because police have done the exact same things to white people". I didn't say that killing white people gave them a license to kill blacks. 

Thanks for clarifying, sorry I didn't read your argument more charitably.  It seems to me that if we are concerned about police violence against anyone, be they white, black or purple with polka dots, we ought to see blm as a good thing because it will force police to be more accountable for the violence they choose to use.

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Because Trudeau forced the AG to use the DPA for SNC, a company that's got a court-documented history of bribing Canadian politicians, then he blocked the investigation, and the media doesn't mention SNC's history of bribes or the blocked investigation. 

Right.  Ok, I understand this and it has substance.  That said, Trudeau *attempted* to force the AG to do his bidding, but it didn't exactly work out very well for him.  Granted that we should be concerned, but I don't see this as proof that Trudeau has overruled the judicial branch, I see this as proof that privately owned corporations have their tendrils through all levels of our government and are routinely telling our politicians "you better get rid of this tax or regulation or let us break this law or else we'll just have to get rid of these jobs."  You are right that SNC's criminal past was greatly under-reported.  Keep in mind that most big media players are privately owned, for-profit companies.  Maybe they were pressured/coerced by SNC not to cover that?  

I actually can't name someone who SNC bribed, nor do I know who Dr. Ford is in this context.  *sigh* there are too many things to know.  That said, you don't need to convince me that a privately owned corporation did something wrong, you would need to convince me of the opposite :)

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Their bias is in favour of the Dems, so it's 'evil'. 

I consider the Dems to be a far right political party.  If I had to slot Camerican political parties, I would say they go Greens->NDP->Liberals->Conservatives->Democrats->People's Choice->Republicans.  For sure there are reasonable adults who would disagree with me.

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My bad, sorry if I was a bit testy. I consider BLM to be a huge problem, not a solution - at all. 

Not at all, what kind of useless lumps would we be if we didn't occasionally have passionate reactions to emotionally charged events?  Nobody tries to teach us how to have civil, respectful political conversations with people who disagree with us.  Maybe, those in power don't want us to respectfully converse.  Maybe they are afraid that we will discover that we share a lot of the same problems.  Maybe they are afraid that we will discover that our problems have a lot of the same political solutions.  Maybe they want us to sit down and shut up so that our betters can run the country.  

Haha or maybe I'm some random crank on the internet saying, "Th guvmint done stole m'teefs!"

Cheers to you as well WCM!  I have a policy of not following the news on the weekends (helps avoid depression) but I'll be back here on Monday to pick this conversation up.  I'm learning a lot more than I normally do - too often political conversation is either everybody agreeing with everybody else, or everybody screaming insults at everyone else.

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2 minutes ago, GrittyLeftist said:

Sorry, noticed this post after the other one ?

I totally believe you when you say you've seen a changing platform on the web that claims to represent BLM.  I have not yet been able to find any evidence that they are one group, I am totally not an expert (which you probably already knew :P).  I think that there are multiple competing movements using the same 'BLM' brand, which makes dealing with them more difficult for sure.  Like with Occupy, when 'The Man' finally got around to asking what their demands were, and all the Occupiers started shouting contradictory things at the same time.  What a wasted opportunity :(

That was interesting, thanks for sharing.  I have no trouble believing that there are violent radicals involved with the BLM movement in various capacities.  As far as the link between 'blm' and 'communists' goes, I would think it's kind of like how some people who support X political party, but not all, also support Y cause.  Like two different oceans, and some fish swim freely between them?  Dunno if that metaphor works or not.

I do have some sympathy for cops - nobody really cares what happens until there is a problem, and that's gotta be frustrating.  Thing is, the Police officer is the one with the badge, the gun, and the training, so for me, the onus is on them to be responsible for the violence they choose to use in fulfilling their duties.  I very much agree that there have been people murdered by Police using "textbook examples of what not to do."  For me, those officers need to be criminally prosecuted, and the people who signed off on them being "trained" ought to face some kind of consequences as well.  I've heard people on the internet claim that police kill more white people than any other but I've never encountered a reputable source that claimed that.  No idea whether you consider the Washington Post to be reputable (I haven't vetted them FWIW), but they claim to have been keeping a database of people killed by police.  Police shootings database 2015-2021 - Washington Post

Police officers have been complicit in the public, extralegal murder of various black people for a very long time.  Wikipedia has an article on lynching (which, interestingly enough, happened mostly to white people until emancipation) if you're interested.  At this point in time, I can't blame black americans for being afraid of cops.  Frankly, I'm afraid of cops too (I'm a white guy who started smoking pot when he was a teenager and learned to see Cops as the people who want to put me in jail for doing something that isn't harming anyone.  Am unlearning that, but it's a process).  Anything that can be done to anyone can be done to anyone, and anyone includes me.  If Police officers can get away with murdering other people, what's to stop them from getting away with murdering me?  I'm not saying "all cops are bastards" or anything that extreme, just saying "the mechanisms we use to hold delinquent Police officers to account are not functioning properly."

Which groups of people experienced genocide in those countries?  I am aware of the Uighers in modern, "Communist" China, but I am not aware of Mao using genocide as a means to seize power (I'm totally not an expert on Mao though :P).  I know about the "cultural revolution", which as I understand it was when ~4 million Chinese people were murdered by their government for having university degrees.  Is that what you mean?

FWIW, Marx explicitly warned against groups of intellectuals seizing power to "benefit" the proletariat, as happened in Soviet Russia.  He seems to have wanted workers to band together and do it en masse, although, to my knowledge, he didn't leave any writings on how that should be done or what the next step should be. 

OK, I see where you are coming from.  We still haven't established whether BLM has a centralized leadership or whether there are many different competing would-be leaders or whether the whole thing is a god-awful mess like Occupy was.  Even if we had, there are many people who follow, say, Trudeau, or Harper, or whoever you like, who do not support everything he does blindly, but are "holding their nose" because they feel strongly about particular issues.  So I guess I'm saying "maybe it's more complicated than that."

This is a really good point.  In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky talks about how media only has so much air time, so they have to decide which victims are "worthy" of media coverage, and which are not.  The people who decide which stories make the news are the owners and editors of profit-driven multinational corporations.  Why don't they want us to know that Police violence also affects white people?  

I agree there is a social cost to using those phrases. 

A 'strawman argument' works as follows: Person 1 makes a claim.  Person 2 rephrases that claim in a distorted or inferior form.  Person 2 then goes on to rebut their own, inferior version of person 1's claim as though it were their claim.

Person 1: Black lives matter. Person 2:You're saying black lives are the only ones that matter! Person 2:All lives matter.

Most people lack the formal education necessary to explain the flaw in this argument, but do know that their argument is not being addressed in good faith, so they get quite angry.  A large part of their anger is IMO caused by their inability to say what I just said, your mileage may vary.

When people who are upset because they believe Police officers are allowed to murder black people are told, "blue lives matter," many of them hear it as "cops should be allowed to murder black people."  Not saying they are right to do so, IMO more political literacy on all sides would solve this problem.

FWIW I think talking about white victims of police brutality is very important - as long as white people think of police violence as a "minority problem" they may be less inclined to do something about it.

If there were people who sincerely believed that Police were being allowed to murder black people and get away with it, what should they do?

I'm not sure what I could offer as anything more concrete than anecdotal evidence.  Maybe I could invite you to consider the difference between how the mostly black BML protesters were treated, compared to the nearly all-white insurrectionists who literally stormed the capitol building in an attempted coup and actually killed a police officer?  

Thanks for clarifying, sorry I didn't read your argument more charitably.  It seems to me that if we are concerned about police violence against anyone, be they white, black or purple with polka dots, we ought to see blm as a good thing because it will force police to be more accountable for the violence they choose to use.

Right.  Ok, I understand this and it has substance.  That said, Trudeau *attempted* to force the AG to do his bidding, but it didn't exactly work out very well for him.  Granted that we should be concerned, but I don't see this as proof that Trudeau has overruled the judicial branch, I see this as proof that privately owned corporations have their tendrils through all levels of our government and are routinely telling our politicians "you better get rid of this tax or regulation or let us break this law or else we'll just have to get rid of these jobs."  You are right that SNC's criminal past was greatly under-reported.  Keep in mind that most big media players are privately owned, for-profit companies.  Maybe they were pressured/coerced by SNC not to cover that?  

I actually can't name someone who SNC bribed, nor do I know who Dr. Ford is in this context.  *sigh* there are too many things to know.  That said, you don't need to convince me that a privately owned corporation did something wrong, you would need to convince me of the opposite :)

I consider the Dems to be a far right political party.  If I had to slot Camerican political parties, I would say they go Greens->NDP->Liberals->Conservatives->Democrats->People's Choice->Republicans.  For sure there are reasonable adults who would disagree with me.

Not at all, what kind of useless lumps would we be if we didn't occasionally have passionate reactions to emotionally charged events?  Nobody tries to teach us how to have civil, respectful political conversations with people who disagree with us.  Maybe, those in power don't want us to respectfully converse.  Maybe they are afraid that we will discover that we share a lot of the same problems.  Maybe they are afraid that we will discover that our problems have a lot of the same political solutions.  Maybe they want us to sit down and shut up so that our betters can run the country.  

Haha or maybe I'm some random crank on the internet saying, "Th guvmint done stole m'teefs!"

Cheers to you as well WCM!  I have a policy of not following the news on the weekends (helps avoid depression) but I'll be back here on Monday to pick this conversation up.  I'm learning a lot more than I normally do - too often political conversation is either everybody agreeing with everybody else, or everybody screaming insults at everyone else.

BLM's regional chapters are all independent and don't answer to a central authority. But, the founders of the Movement For Black Lives: Patrice Cullours, Alecia Garza and..........I'm forgetting the third now, have had generous corporate and foundation grants dumped over them, and no doubt the donors intended for them to reign in radicals all across America and just run a more limited operation, doing protests and marches and maybe making up a DSA committee or something.

But, with everything going on, nobody can control what's going to happen on the streets, and that makes a lot of businessmen who want wave BLM banners and claim a show of support nervous, because they want a nice, respectable BLM movement that won't break windows, throw stuff at CNN reporters and cameras etc..

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1 hour ago, Right To Left said:

But, with everything going on, nobody can control what's going to happen on the streets...

I think that recent 4 year jail sentence coupled with the $12 million fine is a good indication that somebody's giving it a shot.

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16 hours ago, GrittyLeftist said:

Sorry, noticed this post after the other one ?

I totally believe you when you say you've seen a changing platform on the web that claims to represent BLM.  I have not yet been able to find any evidence that they are one group, I am totally not an expert (which you probably already knew :P).  I think that there are multiple competing movements using the same 'BLM' brand, which makes dealing with them more difficult for sure.  Like with Occupy, when 'The Man' finally got around to asking what their demands were, and all the Occupiers started shouting contradictory things at the same time.  What a wasted opportunity :(

 

Your takeaway from the occupation of CHAZ was that it was 'a wasted opportunity'?

My takeaway was that they occupied 7 sq blocks for three weeks and in that short span of time they killed a 16 yr old black kid and critically wounded another, then they cleared that scene of evidence.

If regular police were killing black kids that fast it actually would be a huge genocide. There are about 30,000x as many cops as there were CHAZis (there are about 1M cops in the US, I'm guessing 30 CHOP gestapo?), that would work out to 30,000 kids every 3 weeks, or 10,000 per week. That would make for 520,000 dead kids per year in crime scenes where the evidence was hidden.

That's a lot, right?

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That was interesting, thanks for sharing.  I have no trouble believing that there are violent radicals involved with the BLM movement in various capacities.  As far as the link between 'blm' and 'communists' goes, I would think it's kind of like how some people who support X political party, but not all, also support Y cause.  Like two different oceans, and some fish swim freely between them?  Dunno if that metaphor works or not.

So you don't even know about this? https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/inside-blm-co-founder-patrisse-khan-cullors-real-estate-buying-binge/ The 4-house-commie BLM leader?

 

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I do have some sympathy for cops - nobody really cares what happens until there is a problem, and that's gotta be frustrating.  Thing is, the Police officer is the one with the badge, the gun, and the training, so for me, the onus is on them to be responsible for the violence they choose to use in fulfilling their duties.  I very much agree that there have been people murdered by Police using "textbook examples of what not to do."  For me, those officers need to be criminally prosecuted, and the people who signed off on them being "trained" ought to face some kind of consequences as well.  I've heard people on the internet claim that police kill more white people than any other but I've never encountered a reputable source that claimed that.  No idea whether you consider the Washington Post to be reputable (I haven't vetted them FWIW), but they claim to have been keeping a database of people killed by police.  Police shootings database 2015-2021 - Washington Post

 

Another BLM tactic is to throw around stats in the most misleading manner possible. Just the other day some dude was on tv saying that "every day police kill 3 people". He didn't say that over half of the people killed by police every day were white. He then went on to say that blacks were killed at a disproportionately higher rate, leading people to assume that most of the people killed were black.

That's some sick bullshit, right?

FYI white people never teach their kids to act out against police officers. Black kids get that message every day. That's a pretty good indicator that one group is at a higher risk.

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Police officers have been complicit in the public, extralegal murder of various black people for a very long time.  Wikipedia has an article on lynching (which, interestingly enough, happened mostly to white people until emancipation) if you're interested.  At this point in time, I can't blame black americans for being afraid of cops.  Frankly, I'm afraid of cops too (I'm a white guy who started smoking pot when he was a teenager and learned to see Cops as the people who want to put me in jail for doing something that isn't harming anyone.  Am unlearning that, but it's a process).  Anything that can be done to anyone can be done to anyone, and anyone includes me.  If Police officers can get away with murdering other people, what's to stop them from getting away with murdering me?  I'm not saying "all cops are bastards" or anything that extreme, just saying "the mechanisms we use to hold delinquent Police officers to account are not functioning properly."

Police officers aren't getting away with killing anyone.

The bar for a cop to use lethal force is pretty high.

Brionna Taylor: Cops had a legal warrant. They knocked and announced their presence, did it again again, then when they had to kick in the door one of them got shot. That's the exact scenario where the cops shoot at center of body mass. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

Rayshard Brooks: Police were arresting him for the best reason on earth - he passed out behind the wheel of a car and blew way over. The police were excessively polite, and so was Rayshard, at first. Then he punched a cop, stole his taser, and shot it at his face. In Georgia law a taser is treated like a gun. (In fact, just two weeks earlier a cop in Atlanta was charged with aggravated assault for merely pointing a taser at someone. Willie Sauls, the girl's last name was Pioneer iirc) The taser that Rayshard has has two charges - he was, legally, in 'a gunfight'. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

Michael Brown - "the gentle giant". Violent robbery, cops called, he tries to wrestle control of a cop's gun from him, gets shot. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

G Floyd: Resists arrest, claims to be unable to breathe while all alone in a cop car (it's in the bodycam video), get knelt on and says he can't brethe, cop doesn't believe him, kneels him to death. The cop had reason to do a lot of things, but he crossed a line and Floyd died. The cop was found guilty of murder.

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Which groups of people experienced genocide in those countries?  I am aware of the Uighers in modern, "Communist" China, but I am not aware of Mao using genocide as a means to seize power (I'm totally not an expert on Mao though :P).  I know about the "cultural revolution", which as I understand it was when ~4 million Chinese people were murdered by their government for having university degrees.  Is that what you mean?

Yes, that's what I mean. "Kill at least one person from every village", etc. 4M is a lot of G Floyds. It's a genocide. The final death toll was closer to 50+M, but a lot of those people were starved to death.

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FWIW, Marx explicitly warned against groups of intellectuals seizing power to "benefit" the proletariat, as happened in Soviet Russia.  He seems to have wanted workers to band together and do it en masse, although, to my knowledge, he didn't leave any writings on how that should be done or what the next step should be. 

Regardless of how power is seized, one person always ends up at the top, and usually it's someone with a penchant for violence and a need to consolidate power. 

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This is a really good point.  In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky talks about how media only has so much air time, so they have to decide which victims are "worthy" of media coverage, and which are not.  The people who decide which stories make the news are the owners and editors of profit-driven multinational corporations.  Why don't they want us to know that Police violence also affects white people?  

That's a big part of it. CNN made a disgusting amount of money from the 24/7 M Brown coverage, ditto for Floyd, Brooks, etc. 

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I agree there is a social cost to using those phrases. 

A 'strawman argument' works as follows: Person 1 makes a claim.  Person 2 rephrases that claim in a distorted or inferior form.  Person 2 then goes on to rebut their own, inferior version of person 1's claim as though it were their claim.

Person 1: Black lives matter. Person 2:You're saying black lives are the only ones that matter! Person 2:All lives matter.

Most people lack the formal education necessary to explain the flaw in this argument, but do know that their argument is not being addressed in good faith, so they get quite angry.  A large part of their anger is IMO caused by their inability to say what I just said, your mileage may vary.

The argument against the name 'black lives matter' is that it's predicated on the assumption that as a society we feel like black lives don't matter. That's nothing more than an attempt at fear mongering and division. 

If I opened a discussion with you, using the phrase "Torturing babies isn't funny, Grit" that wouldn't be an honest attempt at rational conversation. Neither is the name BLM.

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When people who are upset because they believe Police officers are allowed to murder black people are told, "blue lives matter," many of them hear it as "cops should be allowed to murder black people."  Not saying they are right to do so, IMO more political literacy on all sides would solve this problem.

People who came to the conclusion that police are allowed to kill black people without cause, just from watching CNN's hateful screed, need to wise up. Shooting cops gets you killed. Trying to kill a cop with his own gun gets you killed. Shooting a taser (which is quite lethal when used improperly) at a cop's face from close range can get you killed.

People who say Blue Lives Matter do it because people like Barack Obama won't. When Obama stood in front of 5 dead cops at a eulogy in Dallas, instead of saying: "Whoever did this was a worthless piece of shit!", he made their murders about "centuries or racism, slavery and Jim Crowe laws (nasty Dem things)".

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FWIW I think talking about white victims of police brutality is very important - as long as white people think of police violence as a "minority problem" they may be less inclined to do something about it.

You can only speak for yourself in that regard, I personally don't feel that way.

Police misuse of force against people of any race is an extremely serious crime.

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If there were people who sincerely believed that Police were being allowed to murder black people and get away with it, what should they do?

1) They should avoid derailing the issue by lying about cases where misuse of force wasn't actually present

2) They should advocate for, NOT AGAINST (like BLM does), bodycams - it's really hard for the police to get away with murder when it's on video. 

BLM doesn't like bodycams because it's really hard for them to selectively edit video to make pollce look bad when the police have their own video. 

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I'm not sure what I could offer as anything more concrete than anecdotal evidence.  Maybe I could invite you to consider the difference between how the mostly black BML protesters were treated, compared to the nearly all-white insurrectionists who literally stormed the capitol building in an attempted coup and actually killed a police officer?  

It's like you just walked right into a minefield GL. 

Here's the difference:

- in 1 riot that lasted less than 2 hours, involving less than 200 people, the police killed a white woman who was visibly unarmed without so much as shouting a warning. 

- in thousands of riots where over 2,000 police officers were injured, several people were murdered, and the police had frozen cans of pop thrown at them, molotov cocktails thrown at them, fireworks shot at them, and which included the armed takeover of a police building, the police never fired a single shot at any BLM protestors, aside from 1 firefight where a cop was killed. 

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Right.  Ok, I understand this and it has substance.  That said, Trudeau *attempted* to force the AG to do his bidding, but it didn't exactly work out very well for him.  Granted that we should be concerned, but I don't see this as proof that Trudeau has overruled the judicial branch, I see this as proof that privately owned corporations have their tendrils through all levels of our government and are routinely telling our politicians "you better get rid of this tax or regulation or let us break this law or else we'll just have to get rid of these jobs."  You are right that SNC's criminal past was greatly under-reported.  Keep in mind that most big media players are privately owned, for-profit companies.  Maybe they were pressured/coerced by SNC not to cover that?  

I actually can't name someone who SNC bribed, nor do I know who Dr. Ford is in this context.  *sigh* there are too many things to know.  That said, you don't need to convince me that a privately owned corporation did something wrong, you would need to convince me of the opposite :)

Nah, you don't get off that easy bud.

Of course you know who Dr Ford is because our media made a very big deal about her. She was the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of "almost raping her, in about 1985 or 86, in one of the summer months, at a location that she doesn't quite remember, and she also never mentioned it to any friends or family over the past 35 or so years". Yeah, that's enough to make a woman internationally famous, right? That's the kind of thing that our media should glom onto?

On the other hand, we have a PM who created a law specifically for a known criminal entity, so that they could get federal contracts, and then he tried to coerce the AG to use it when she was certain that their crimes were too severe to warrant that protection, and our media covered up the fact that around the time Trudeau was working so hard for SNC, a Mtl politician named Michel Fournier was pleading guilty to accepting $2.3M in bribes from SNC Lavalin for help securing a $127M contract to fix the Jacques Cartier Bridge. CBC knew about the story, because if you google it, they're the ones who wrote about it, a year or two before Trudeau's scandal became known to the public.

Why does the CBC tell us so much about a lying bimbo from the States and nothing about the fact that the company that Trudeau works for is known to give big bribes to Canadian politicians? 

Try to tell me that's not a big deal Grit. 

I didn't even get into the We scandal, which just went away when Trudeau said "I should have recused myself from the obvious decision to choose We". And why did such a huge scandal just magically go away when he said that? It's especially confusing because we all know that's not what happened. 

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I consider the Dems to be a far right political party.  If I had to slot Camerican political parties, I would say they go Greens->NDP->Liberals->Conservatives->Democrats->People's Choice->Republicans.  For sure there are reasonable adults who would disagree with me.

The Dems were evil back when the KKK was their militia, and they're still evil now when they use BLM and Antifa as their militias.

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Not at all, what kind of useless lumps would we be if we didn't occasionally have passionate reactions to emotionally charged events?  Nobody tries to teach us how to have civil, respectful political conversations with people who disagree with us.  Maybe, those in power don't want us to respectfully converse.  Maybe they are afraid that we will discover that we share a lot of the same problems.  Maybe they are afraid that we will discover that our problems have a lot of the same political solutions.  Maybe they want us to sit down and shut up so that our betters can run the country.  

Haha or maybe I'm some random crank on the internet saying, "Th guvmint done stole m'teefs!"

Cheers to you as well WCM!  I have a policy of not following the news on the weekends (helps avoid depression) but I'll be back here on Monday to pick this conversation up.  I'm learning a lot more than I normally do - too often political conversation is either everybody agreeing with everybody else, or everybody screaming insults at everyone else.

I probably watch too much news, which is surprising considering that I never watch CTV, CBC or Global at all.

 

Cheers Grit.

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On 4/29/2021 at 7:00 PM, GrittyLeftist said:

There are two ways to use the phrases "left" and "right".  One of them is to use them to locate ideologies on the political spectrum, for example, "Fascism is a far right ideology".  The other way is to describe ideologies relative to your position.  For example, if I worked for Fox News I would regularly describe CNN as being "far-left", because compared to me, they are far-left.  However, CNN is, in reality, right-of-centre.  They are a privately owned, for-profit multinational corporation - they are clearly not trying to create a classless and/or stateless society.  

Just because an institution is privately owned does not mean it can't have an agenda which is strongly tilted to the Left on a wide variety of social issues and causes, even if that tilt does not include the abolishment of Capitalism. Everything is privately owned in this society, after all.

As to CNN, while I used to laugh off FOX watchers claiming CNN was ridiculously biased and far left the last year has changed my mind. On social justice issues, particularly those involving the causes of anti-racism, homophobia, trans-rights and feminism they most definitely DO have an agenda which is quite far over on the Left of the spectrum. That's not to say FOX isn't far over on the Right, of course.

And the real problem with both is not their ideological tilt but the profoundly dishonest ways in which they misinform people with slanted news in order to convince them they're right.

 

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@GrittyLeftist https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/fournier-charged-snc-lavalin-1.4260367

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On Thursday, Fournier pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering in relation to an SNC-Lavalin contract with the Jacques Cartier Bridge Corporation in the year 2000, and acknowledged having received $2.3 million in kickbacks. He claims to have only $775,000 left after squandering the rest in high-risk investments.

Here's how Global News described the whole affair: https://globalnews.ca/news/4953015/snc-lavalin-explained/

The only time they ever mention Trudeau specifically is when a defence is mounted, never when an allegation is made. Otherwise it's "the PMO".

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In a bombshell report, the Globe and Mail alleged SNC-Lavalin lobbied the PMO’s office to secure the remediation agreement.

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Trudeau called the allegations in the Globe report “false” and said no one in his office “directed” Wilson-Raybould to make any decision, but refused to comment when asked whether there had been any broader “influence” efforts

They mention that the DPA law was created, but they don't mention that it was just tucked in on page 540 of an omnibus bill. 

They also don't mention that SNC has a court-documented history of bribing Canadian politicians.

If Trump was in this situation they wouldn't be saying "the PMO" instead of Trump every time they mentioned something bad, and they wouldn't be leaving critical details out of the story like "SNC bribes Canadian politicians". That would be right up in the title. 

All the networks only briefly covered the story, and none of them mentioned Michel Fournier and the bribes that he received. The only way to find out about those is from The Rebel, Spencer Fernando, etc. 

As a Canadian, if you don't get your news from the internet, you don't your news. 

 

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On 4/29/2021 at 7:00 PM, GrittyLeftist said:

Respectfully, I think we are too far apart to agree on very much, so instead of disputing your conclusions I will try to address your premises and share some neat things I've learned in the past few years.

____

Marxists are supporters of the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

BLM is a decentralized movement that opposes the extralegal murder of black people by police officers and all other forms of racially motivated violence against black people.  

In order to make Marxists happy you would need to get rid of capitalism.  In order to make BLM happy you would need to make it illegal to use violence against black people for being black (and actually enforce those laws).  Different grievances.  They are related only in that both advocate for different types of equality - Marxists want economic and social equality, BLM wants racial equality.

There are some Marxists in the BLM crowd, much as there are some white people in the BLM crowd.  Calling BLM, as a whole, "Marxist," is about as accurate as calling it "white."

____

The Liberal party of Canada is not "far left", although they are "farther left than they were 20 years ago."  Classical Liberals (the ideology that claims government requires the consent of the governed, sees society as composed of individuals, believes strongly in individual rights, etc) are not either.  They are, at most, left-of-centre.  If you look farther left of them you will see Social Democrats, who believe that we should work within the bounds of capitalism using democracy to advocate for more socialistic policies such as universal health care.  If you look even further left you will find your Socialists, Communists and Anarchists of varying stripes.  The farther left you look, the more people fragment, and extreme leftists do far too much bickering amongst themselves to be able to promote their ideologies, which is part of why most people don't really know anything about them.

Someone who actually WAS far left would be advocating to violently overthrow capitalism so that the working class could assume control of the means of production, or they would be claiming that governments are illegitimate because they use violence in ways that cannot be justified, or they would be saying things like, "eat your landlord," and "the only thing billionaires should be running for is their lives."

___

There are two ways to use the phrases "left" and "right".  One of them is to use them to locate ideologies on the political spectrum, for example, "Fascism is a far right ideology".  The other way is to describe ideologies relative to your position.  For example, if I worked for Fox News I would regularly describe CNN as being "far-left", because compared to me, they are far-left.  However, CNN is, in reality, right-of-centre.  They are a privately owned, for-profit multinational corporation - they are clearly not trying to create a classless and/or stateless society.  

It has been argued that the real reason Fox News uses the phrase "far-left" to describe CNN is as a sneaky trick.  If the ideas on CNN are radical, dangerous, and subversive, then anyone who has ideas that are even farther left than the ones on CNN must just be a raving nutcase whose opinions can be dismissed out of hand.  It has be argued that this serves to artificially limit the scope of acceptable political debate.

____

Anyways, hope this is helpful.  My goal is to share knowledge, not to be a troll.  Thanks for reading!

No offence, but my knowledge of the political spectrum runs much deeper than current MSM or Marx and Engels. I was a member of the Liberal Party of Canada in the Chrétien days when they were far more fiscally responsible and unafraid to stand up for independent Canadian public policy.  The current Liberals have taken much of the NDP platform to get more votes and they are scared of China and the US.  They’re an irresponsible overspending party that is beholden to special interests.  I guess they’re claiming to be feminist, but that’s mostly an inauthentic rhetorical device. Also I’m not an ideologue and don’t buy into “isms”, whether on the left or right.

Also I fully support equality, as do the vast majority of Canadians.  I don’t support schemes to take money from those who earn it and give it to those who don’t who are deemed more deserving by a committee.  That’s where we’re headed under current leadership.  

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On 5/1/2021 at 11:20 AM, Argus said:

Just because an institution is privately owned does not mean it can't have an agenda which is strongly tilted to the Left on a wide variety of social issues and causes, even if that tilt does not include the abolishment of Capitalism.

Yes, but that shows that the left you are referring to here, is not even close to a real left that is developing in the shadows of a failing system that is about to collapse, with or without help from real leftists who will have to try to build socialist communities from the ashes of this decrepit system, or face some kind of common extinction!

The institutions you refer to as 'left' above, are organizations like the World Economic Forum, where the real rulers of this world gather together in Switzerland (except during pandemic interruptions) and plot out how to maintain control of everything and receive maximum profits for it. 

These are hardly leftists, but merely dishonest operatives who skillfully use language to cause people to believe things that are untrue.  A nice quick example appeared on my Twitter timeline early this morning from a favorite account - Aisha Ahmad - a Pakistani lawyer working on her Phd while attending Oxford University, regarding this bizarre CIA recruitment commercial:

 

If it doesn't show, the text of the CIA commercial are:

"I am a woman of color"

"I am a cisgender millennial"

"I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder"

"I am intersectional"

Aisha Ahmad has another Twitter thread asking followers whether the following quote is from AOC or the CIA. Each one is tough to guess! And that should tell you a thing or two about how easily ruling classes coopt language and use it to coopt the AOC's and other either fake or unprincipled posers pretending to be 'left.'  

For one thing, anyone really on the left is by default Anti-War! And that's why the CIA and other three letter Pentagon agencies are so bent on coopting their language....just as they coopt the language of the right.....which they have completely in their hip pocket anyway!

 

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10 minutes ago, Right To Left said:

 

For one thing, anyone really on the left is by default Anti-War! And that's why the CIA and other three letter Pentagon agencies are so bent on coopting their language....just as they coopt the language of the right.....which they have completely in their hip pocket anyway!

 

It's posturing, simply put.  For Nike, Pepsi, the CIA or someone to stamp "we care" on their packages has a marginal cost of zero.  The net energy that is diverted to these discussions takes away from real change...

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On 4/30/2021 at 9:04 PM, WestCanMan said:

Your takeaway from the occupation of CHAZ was that it was 'a wasted opportunity'?

My takeaway was that they occupied 7 sq blocks for three weeks and in that short span of time they killed a 16 yr old black kid and critically wounded another, then they cleared that scene of evidence.

If regular police were killing black kids that fast it actually would be a huge genocide. There are about 30,000x as many cops as there were CHAZis (there are about 1M cops in the US, I'm guessing 30 CHOP gestapo?), that would work out to 30,000 kids every 3 weeks, or 10,000 per week. That would make for 520,000 dead kids per year in crime scenes where the evidence was hidden.

That's a lot, right?

I went back to this format because it takes up less space and is easier for me to keep track of.

I evaluate the morality of a person based in large part on how they treat people who are of no use to them - being nice to your friends or people who might advantage you is just enlightened self-interest IMO.  Similarly, I evaluate the morality of a society based in large part on how it treats those who are of no use to it.  In this context, that means the folks Jesus cared about - the poor, the homeless, the criminal.  Viewed through that lens, you may be able to understand why I see more value in, and have more empathy for, a poor, homeless and/or criminal person (well, some types of criminals anyway) than I do a wall street tycoon.  I'm not asking you to share this moral sentiment, just to understand it, because then the rest of my arguments will make a lot more sense.  This does not mean I think poor folks should be able to get away with murder, it means that, all other things being equal, I have more sympathy for them, and see more value in them, than I do with rich people who have wasted their lives improving their own place in the world instead of improving the world.

I see Occupy as a wasted opportunity because a bunch of people who believed themselves to be voiceless and powerless stumbled across power and a voice and were not able to make any meaningful changes with it.  Like if a peasant in the dark ages was awarded 3 wishes and managed to not improve their life, or the lives of the people they cared about.  I completely understand that lots of people see this differently.

As far as killings go, the Police are a trained, heirarchical organization.  If a rank and file beat cop does something, it is reasonable to hold his chief accountable for it.  The Occupy movement was a bunch of misfits, cranks, anarchists and weirdos with no structure or training.  This does not make it okay for them to kill people, but the Police are an organization in a way that Occupy never was.  For me, responsibility for any killings that happened during Occupy are squarely on the individual who committed the murder, and those individuals should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

So you don't even know about this? https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/inside-blm-co-founder-patrisse-khan-cullors-real-estate-buying-binge/ The 4-house-commie BLM leader?

"There is no cause so noble it will not attract it's share of fuggheads"  - Larry Niven.  Finding individuals who have done bad things involved in an organization or movement does not, for me, necessarily discredit the movement as a whole.  Also, a person buying million dollar real estate cannot reasonably be described as a "commie".  If they described themselves that way, the word I would use to describe them is "hypocrite," or maybe "person who doesn't know what commie means."

Another BLM tactic is to throw around stats in the most misleading manner possible. Just the other day some dude was on tv saying that "every day police kill 3 people". He didn't say that over half of the people killed by police every day were white. He then went on to say that blacks were killed at a disproportionately higher rate, leading people to assume that most of the people killed were black.

That's some sick bullshit, right?

FYI white people never teach their kids to act out against police officers. Black kids get that message every day. That's a pretty good indicator that one group is at a higher risk.

Police officers aren't getting away with killing anyone.

The bar for a cop to use lethal force is pretty high.

People on all sides abuse stats.  In my more cynical moments, I believe statistics exist to be abused.

If you acknowledge that black people are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate, would you acknowledge that as evidence that something is wrong with the way police are operating?

I've met white people, mostly young men, who have a chip on their shoulder regarding the Police.  I would request some clarification - I don't think you are claiming that all black children are told every day to act out against the police, but I don't know how else to read that sentence.

Brionna Taylor: Cops had a legal warrant. They knocked and announced their presence, did it again again, then when they had to kick in the door one of them got shot. That's the exact scenario where the cops shoot at center of body mass. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

"According to officials, it (the single warning shot fired by Kenneth Walker) hit Mattingly (one of the officers) in the leg and the officers fired 32 shots in return.  Walker was unhurt but Taylor was hit by six bullets and died." From the wikipedia article about this shooting.

For me, this shows that those officers did not train and were neither competent nor responsible.  They discharged 32 rounds inside of a city, where every missed round might ricochet and kill somebody, and they did not hit the person they were aiming for once.  They did, however, kill a bystander, who was also a woman, if that matters.  For me, this reeks of carelessness, corruption, entitlement and incompetence.  I definitely understand that being shot at is scary, I would point out that Police officers are given specialized training and equipment and are supposed to be brave.  Pretty sure the soldiers in Afghanistan exercised greater trigger discipline than that.

These are not offered to change your mind, but as something I found interesting and thought provoking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5DBrOBIgNM - this video tries to help rural American white folks understand the fear minorities feel for cops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmjB7TUroyE - this video is a story about the time an American police officer allegedly asked this youtuber for training.

I don't always agree with the guy in the videos and there are things he has done that I disagree with, but I do find him reasonable and thought provoking.  

I didn't research the particulars of the other cases you mentioned because I only have so much time for research and it's easy to get bogged down in arguing over minutia.  I'm more interested in the broader, decades-long pattern of "white police officer kills unarmed civilian, white judge gives him back his badge and his gun and lets him back out on the street, rinse and repeat" than I am in arguing about whether individual cases were justified.

Yes, that's what I mean. "Kill at least one person from every village", etc. 4M is a lot of G Floyds. It's a genocide. The final death toll was closer to 50+M, but a lot of those people were starved to death.

From Oxford Languages: Genocide, noun: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

I agree that Mao murdering 4 million people for having an education was an atrocity, but I don't see it as a genocide.  You are also correct about the famine and mass starvation, but again, unless they are trying to eradicate a nation or ethnic group, it is not a genocide.  Hopefully it's obvious I'm not defending Mao's actions, just pointing out that they do not meet the standard of "genocide."

Regardless of how power is seized, one person always ends up at the top, and usually it's someone with a penchant for violence and a need to consolidate power. 

That's a big part of it. CNN made a disgusting amount of money from the 24/7 M Brown coverage, ditto for Floyd, Brooks, etc. 

True, but they are a for-profit "news" organization.  I don't see anything sinister in them getting paid to report the news.  I do think that all 24 hour "news" organizations should be dismantled and we should go back to the day when one individual was only allowed to own (if I remember right) 1 TV station and 2 newspapers.

The argument against the name 'black lives matter' is that it's predicated on the assumption that as a society we feel like black lives don't matter. That's nothing more than an attempt at fear mongering and division. 

If I opened a discussion with you, using the phrase "Torturing babies isn't funny, Grit" that wouldn't be an honest attempt at rational conversation. Neither is the name BLM.

If I was a member of a nation that had been torturing babies for laughs for more than a hundred years, or if I was defending people who tortured babies for laughs, someone might have to open a discussion with me that way.  I do understand your point about inflammatory language, but for me, pretending that America is not a racist nation is just that - a pretense.  If it matters, I think Canada is also a racist nation.  All nations with Colonial pasts, to the best of my knowledge, must confront the racism inherent in their past, and it is never a quick, simple, easy or cheap process.

People who came to the conclusion that police are allowed to kill black people without cause, just from watching CNN's hateful screed, need to wise up. Shooting cops gets you killed. Trying to kill a cop with his own gun gets you killed. Shooting a taser (which is quite lethal when used improperly) at a cop's face from close range can get you killed.

People who say Blue Lives Matter do it because people like Barack Obama won't. When Obama stood in front of 5 dead cops at a eulogy in Dallas, instead of saying: "Whoever did this was a worthless piece of shit!", he made their murders about "centuries or racism, slavery and Jim Crowe laws (nasty Dem things)".

I don't think anyone is saying that police should not be allowed to defend themselves or others.  Those centuries of racism, slavery and Jim Crowe laws are still relevant today.  That said, more precise language about racism would probably make it a lot easier to have this conversation.  Whipping someone until they answer to a dog's name (that scene in Roots) is maybe morally different than avoiding hiring someone because of the colour of their skin.  Not saying the second thing should be okay, just saying that using the same word to describe both those acts is going to cause some frustration and sincere miscommunication.

You can only speak for yourself in that regard, I personally don't feel that way.

Haha I'm a stranger in a strange land in my hometown.  I am pleasantly surprised when someone is civil to me and never expect agreement.

Police misuse of force against people of any race is an extremely serious crime.

Agreed.

1) They should avoid derailing the issue by lying about cases where misuse of force wasn't actually present

2) They should advocate for, NOT AGAINST (like BLM does), bodycams - it's really hard for the police to get away with murder when it's on video. 

BLM doesn't like bodycams because it's really hard for them to selectively edit video to make pollce look bad when the police have their own video. 

You are using "they" as though you believe that BLM is one entity.  BLM as a whole has no leverage over individual people who claim to be part of BLM - by contrast, any individual who is a Police officer has been trained and equipped by a single organization and can be disciplined or removed by that organization.  BLM does not have a leader and cannot regulate the behaviour of every yahoo willing to stand on television and claim to be part of the movement.

I do not believe that BLM is "good" or "morally pure", but I do believe that when reasonable adults disagree, they are usually both partly right.  I have seen very little indication that American police forces contain very much in the way of reasonable adults but I definitely understand that many people very much disagree with me.

It's like you just walked right into a minefield GL. 

Here's the difference:

- in 1 riot that lasted less than 2 hours, involving less than 200 people, the police killed a white woman who was visibly unarmed without so much as shouting a warning. 

- in thousands of riots where over 2,000 police officers were injured, several people were murdered, and the police had frozen cans of pop thrown at them, molotov cocktails thrown at them, fireworks shot at them, and which included the armed takeover of a police building, the police never fired a single shot at any BLM protestors, aside from 1 firefight where a cop was killed. 

Just googled "was there warning of the capitol hill riot".  Here are the top 3 links.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-riot-fbi-intelligence/2021/01/12/30d12748-546b-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/12/fbi-warned-war-threat-day-before-capitol-riots-report-says/6641706002/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/capitol-police-ignored-intelligence-warnings-ahead-jan-6-riots-watchdog-n1264054

I'm sorry, I've seen pictures of the crowds at the Capitol, to say there were less than 200 people there is just not credible.

The woman who was killed was an Air Force veteran who was knowingly participating in a literal coup.  The day before she chose to participate in the coup, she posted to twitter "Nothing will stop us... they can try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours... dark to light!"  For my money this is an adult who knew what she was getting herself into and made her own choices.  If you are a veteran who is participating in a revolution, you should understand that sometimes revolutionaries die.  For me, this is analogous to someone getting shot for trying to burn down a Police station - yes it would be nice if lethal force hadn't been necessary, but what were they expecting?

I've noticed that which information a person receives depends largely on their news sources.  Some news programs avoid telling you things that make police look bad but do show you things that make BLM bad, and vice versa.  I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.  In my opinion, we need regulations penalizing organizations that call themselves "news" that promote demonstrably false information, for instance, when Fox News was helping convince Americans to invade Iraq by claiming that Saddam was behind 9-11 and had WMD.
 

Nah, you don't get off that easy bud.

Of course you know who Dr Ford is because our media made a very big deal about her. She was the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of "almost raping her, in about 1985 or 86, in one of the summer months, at a location that she doesn't quite remember, and she also never mentioned it to any friends or family over the past 35 or so years". Yeah, that's enough to make a woman internationally famous, right? That's the kind of thing that our media should glom onto?

On the other hand, we have a PM who created a law specifically for a known criminal entity, so that they could get federal contracts, and then he tried to coerce the AG to use it when she was certain that their crimes were too severe to warrant that protection, and our media covered up the fact that around the time Trudeau was working so hard for SNC, a Mtl politician named Michel Fournier was pleading guilty to accepting $2.3M in bribes from SNC Lavalin for help securing a $127M contract to fix the Jacques Cartier Bridge. CBC knew about the story, because if you google it, they're the ones who wrote about it, a year or two before Trudeau's scandal became known to the public.

Why does the CBC tell us so much about a lying bimbo from the States and nothing about the fact that the company that Trudeau works for is known to give big bribes to Canadian politicians? 

Try to tell me that's not a big deal Grit. 

I didn't even get into the We scandal, which just went away when Trudeau said "I should have recused myself from the obvious decision to choose We". And why did such a huge scandal just magically go away when he said that? It's especially confusing because we all know that's not what happened. 

Oh, THAT Dr. Ford.  Yeah I know who she is, I just didn't think she was related to the SNC case.  Honestly, I still don't see any relevance.  I do think that calling her a "lying bimbo" may sound misogynistic to some ears.  For my money having Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court greatly diminishes its credibility and gravitas.  I agree he has not been convicted of anything, but a Supreme Court appointment ought to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and I do not think that happened in this case.

CBC is a news organization - of course they reported the news that a Supreme Court nominee was being credibly accused of rape.  I can see why you think that Trudeau, or someone in the Canadian government, influenced CBC to over-report some cases and under-report others.  FWIW I think that is a problem no matter who is in power and is an ongoing concern with any government controlled media organization such as CBC, BBC, etc.  CBC is only one media organization in our infosphere, and is the only one the government has that kind of direct leverage over.  Do you believe that, say, Global News, or CTV, or the Calgary Herald, were victims of government censorship?

That said, if the media as a whole, or even just CBC, is actively helping Justin Trudeau cover up criminal activity, I fully agree that is a very serious matter and ought to be investigated thoroughly, and any wrongdoers should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, even (especially) if those wrongdoers happen to be the Prime Minister.

FWIW the WE scandal is still very much a thing - I liken Trudeau's various ethics scandals to Harper's in that for a long time the public's reaction was to shrug and say, "yeah, but who else is gonna run the country?"  Then one day they decided they had an alternative so they took it.  Your mileage may vary, but I think much of the damage to Trudeau has been below the waterline, and I think we'll have a Conservative government in power the next time they field a candidate that most Canadians can see as a responsible adult.  JMO.
 

The Dems were evil back when the KKK was their militia, and they're still evil now when they use BLM and Antifa as their militias.

Worth remembering that the Democrats used to be the party of racism.  You see the Democrats as evil - do you see the Republicans as good?  Not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to better understand your position.

I probably watch too much news, which is surprising considering that I never watch CTV, CBC or Global at all.

I feel you there.  I have noticed that many news outlets deliberately appeal to people's sense of outrage.  I have noticed that when I am angry I do not think as clearly or consider as many alternatives.  I believe that when an article or pundit says something designed to make me angry, it is so that I will be less inclined to critically evaluate whatever they're trying to tell me.  I believe this tactic is being used by some pundits on both sides of the political spectrum.

Cheers Grit.

Right back atcha!

 

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On 4/30/2021 at 2:14 PM, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

No doubt...Canadian federal and provincial governments do not want to open that Pandora's box any further.   Most of British Columbia was never ceded at all as "Crown land".    Keeping the focus on the American narrative buys more time and insulates Canada from the much more dynamic factors at play in the U.S.    Canada never had equivalent civil rights conflicts, but it has had labour unrest (riots).

The impact of American culture is obvious...I recall watching one arrested Canadian demanding his nonexistent "Miranda rights", something he learned from watching so much American television and films.

 

Haha I've been that guy.  Well, not literally, I just mean "sincerely believing that things I saw on TV about American law applied in Canada."

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On 5/1/2021 at 8:20 AM, Argus said:

Just because an institution is privately owned does not mean it can't have an agenda which is strongly tilted to the Left on a wide variety of social issues and causes, even if that tilt does not include the abolishment of Capitalism. Everything is privately owned in this society, after all.

As to CNN, while I used to laugh off FOX watchers claiming CNN was ridiculously biased and far left the last year has changed my mind. On social justice issues, particularly those involving the causes of anti-racism, homophobia, trans-rights and feminism they most definitely DO have an agenda which is quite far over on the Left of the spectrum. That's not to say FOX isn't far over on the Right, of course.

And the real problem with both is not their ideological tilt but the profoundly dishonest ways in which they misinform people with slanted news in order to convince them they're right.

 

You do have a point - I was overgeneralizing too much.  That said, it's hard for me to see any privately owned, for-profit business as being any farther left than Social Democrat (those are the folks who think we should work within the bounds of capitalism using democracy to advocate for more socialism).  Also, many things are not privately owned in Canada, from roads to schools to bridges to airports to hospitals to prisons to parliament.  I think I might have misunderstood you on that one though, maybe you meant something else?

Interesting point about CNN.  I do what I can to avoid 24 hour news sources because I see them as misinformation, so I am not in a good position to agree or disagree with you... except about misinformation, which I totally agree with you about.  If I had my druthers there would be financial and legal penalties for organizations claiming to be "news" who were spreading demonstrably false information.  I would also like to see some version of the Fairness Doctrine brought back.

FCC fairness doctrine - Wikipedia

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On 5/1/2021 at 8:55 AM, WestCanMan said:

@GrittyLeftist https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/fournier-charged-snc-lavalin-1.4260367

Here's how Global News described the whole affair: https://globalnews.ca/news/4953015/snc-lavalin-explained/

The only time they ever mention Trudeau specifically is when a defence is mounted, never when an allegation is made. Otherwise it's "the PMO".

They mention that the DPA law was created, but they don't mention that it was just tucked in on page 540 of an omnibus bill. 

They also don't mention that SNC has a court-documented history of bribing Canadian politicians.

If Trump was in this situation they wouldn't be saying "the PMO" instead of Trump every time they mentioned something bad, and they wouldn't be leaving critical details out of the story like "SNC bribes Canadian politicians". That would be right up in the title. 

All the networks only briefly covered the story, and none of them mentioned Michel Fournier and the bribes that he received. The only way to find out about those is from The Rebel, Spencer Fernando, etc. 

As a Canadian, if you don't get your news from the internet, you don't your news. 

 

Stick-tap for the good sleuthing!  Geez, it's getting to the point where you need a university education and thirty hours per week of research to really know what's going on in the news.  I am so grateful for the internet, warts and all, because it reduces the ability of gigantic corporations to decide which information we need to know and which we don't.

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On 5/2/2021 at 8:16 AM, Zeitgeist said:

No offence, but my knowledge of the political spectrum runs much deeper than current MSM or Marx and Engels. I was a member of the Liberal Party of Canada in the Chrétien days when they were far more fiscally responsible and unafraid to stand up for independent Canadian public policy.  The current Liberals have taken much of the NDP platform to get more votes and they are scared of China and the US.  They’re an irresponsible overspending party that is beholden to special interests.  I guess they’re claiming to be feminist, but that’s mostly an inauthentic rhetorical device. Also I’m not an ideologue and don’t buy into “isms”, whether on the left or right.

Also I fully support equality, as do the vast majority of Canadians.  I don’t support schemes to take money from those who earn it and give it to those who don’t who are deemed more deserving by a committee.  That’s where we’re headed under current leadership.  

No offense taken :) I didn't mean any either.  A lot of what I call "political literacy" is stuff I've only learned in the past few years, and nobody tried to teach it to me in school.  Agreed the Liberals used to be much more fiscally responsible, and that they just got elected by running on an NDP platform then welching on the parts they were "just kidding" about.  FWIW, I'm scared of China and the US too, I don't blame anyone in government for those emotions, but I do think they ought to have a plan of some kind, and if the Liberals have deviated from their "economic engagement will improve China's human rights because REASONS!" platform, I have seen no evidence.

Solid points with your last paragraph, and the way you phrased it I don't disagree.  I would, however, point out that one of the meanings of the word "earn" is *deserve* and I believe that many rich people nowadays do not deserve their money.  If I inherit six figures and invest it in industries which harm society and become a millionaire, have I "earned" that money?  If I were able to buy up every vacant house in Canada and then leverage my monopoly to charge exorbitant rents, have I "earned" money?  If I spend millions of dollars lobbying congress for them to change copyright laws, like Disney did, then turn around and use those new laws to make billions, have I "earned" those billions?  If I convince taxpayers to fund the research and development of a life-saving vaccine, then sell it for profit, have I "earned" that money?  If you answer 'yes' to some or all of these, that's cool, I ain't here to tell you right from wrong.

I have noticed that as soon as someone acquires money they defend their right to keep it by claiming that they "worked hard" for it.  I have literally seen an actual street-level drug dealer make that claim, no lie.  He sincerely believed it, too.

Sometimes when a wealthy person claims they "worked hard" for the money they "earned," the truth is a little more complicated.

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16 hours ago, GrittyLeftist said:

No offense taken :) I didn't mean any either.  A lot of what I call "political literacy" is stuff I've only learned in the past few years, and nobody tried to teach it to me in school.  Agreed the Liberals used to be much more fiscally responsible, and that they just got elected by running on an NDP platform then welching on the parts they were "just kidding" about.  FWIW, I'm scared of China and the US too, I don't blame anyone in government for those emotions, but I do think they ought to have a plan of some kind, and if the Liberals have deviated from their "economic engagement will improve China's human rights because REASONS!" platform, I have seen no evidence.

Solid points with your last paragraph, and the way you phrased it I don't disagree.  I would, however, point out that one of the meanings of the word "earn" is *deserve* and I believe that many rich people nowadays do not deserve their money.  If I inherit six figures and invest it in industries which harm society and become a millionaire, have I "earned" that money?  If I were able to buy up every vacant house in Canada and then leverage my monopoly to charge exorbitant rents, have I "earned" money?  If I spend millions of dollars lobbying congress for them to change copyright laws, like Disney did, then turn around and use those new laws to make billions, have I "earned" those billions?  If I convince taxpayers to fund the research and development of a life-saving vaccine, then sell it for profit, have I "earned" that money?  If you answer 'yes' to some or all of these, that's cool, I ain't here to tell you right from wrong.

I have noticed that as soon as someone acquires money they defend their right to keep it by claiming that they "worked hard" for it.  I have literally seen an actual street-level drug dealer make that claim, no lie.  He sincerely believed it, too.

Sometimes when a wealthy person claims they "worked hard" for the money they "earned," the truth is a little more complicated.

Some wealthy and some poor are unethical in how they use their money and conduct themselves.  Nevertheless, no state should have the right to arbitrarily take someone’s money or property, whether that money was inherited, a gift, earned easily or with great difficulty.  It’s a real problem in Canada that property isn’t protected.  If you don’t believe that hard work will pay off and that you can reap what you sow, why sow?  That’s one of the fundamental reasons why communist states fail.  Little incentive for hard work. I’m not especially materialistic, but I fear a society that doesn’t allow people to acquire personal wealth far more than one that allows freedom of self-determination and free markets.  Let people produce what they can to meet market demand.  If they’re successful, good for them. That isn’t to say that a reasonable level of taxation on income isn’t necessary to protect the vulnerable and those who run into crisis.

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13 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

Some wealthy and some poor are unethical in how they use their money and conduct themselves.  Nevertheless, no state should have the right to arbitrarily take someone’s money or property, whether that money was inherited, a gift, earned easily or with great difficulty.  It’s a real problem in Canada that property isn’t protected.  If you don’t believe that hard work will pay off and that you can reap what you sow, why sow?  That’s one of the fundamental reasons why communist states fail.  Little incentive for hard work. I’m not especially materialistic, but I fear a society that doesn’t allow people to acquire personal wealth far more than one that allows freedom of self-determination and free markets.  Let people produce what they can to meet market demand.  If they’re successful, good for them. That isn’t to say that a reasonable level of taxation on income isn’t necessary to protect the vulnerable and those who run into crisis.

I think most people would argue that states have the right to taxation - not sure if you consider that arbitrary or not.  Agreed that being poor does not confer virtue.  I would argue that "property law" is enforced in Canada - if you want to evict your tenant the state will help you (after making you jump through a bunch of hoops), if someone destroys your property the police will come and they will get a fine and/or some time (if they're caught), if your employees go on strike the state will legislate them back to work and if they defy that legislation the state will authorize police violence against them, if you are trying to develop a resource project on unceded land the state will literally deploy militarized RCMP officers with assault rifles, media blackout zones, drones, and snipers with orders to use lethal force if necessary.  In some circumstances it is legal for citizens to use violence to defend their own property.  I'm not sure which property protections Canada is lacking, but I would be interested in hearing about them.

I tried, but failed, to find out how many people incarcerated in Canada are there for property crimes, would be very interested if anyone else can find those numbers.

If money is inherited, a gift, or easily earned, you didn't need to "work hard" to get it, therefore, saying "taxation decreases the incentive to work hard" does not work in these cases.  In fact, you could make a good case that taxing these things *increases* the incentive to work hard - if you can't coast through life on inheritances, gifts and easy money, it seems to me that you have a greater incentive to work hard.  Finally, this rhetoric about "I worked hard for this money" ignores the fact that there is very little correlation between "working hard" and "having money".  Does Jeff Bezos work as hard as all of his employees put together?  If not, why does he have more money than all of them?  You may reply, "because he's smart."  Is he smarter than all of his employees put together?  Maybe he has that money because he has ruthlessly exploited an unfair system without caring about the people who suffer so that he can have a grossly inflated standard of living. 

For most people, if they work hard their boss makes more money but nothing changes for them.  The ruling class likes to blame those people for their circumstances - "if you hadn't made bad choices you wouldn't be working for Wal-Mart/Amazon/7-11/Whoever!"  Problem is that we have chosen to structure society in such a way that, if the people working "McJobs" had made better choices, someone else would be working there in their stead.  If our current crop of homeless people began making "better choices" and stopped being homeless, a new batch would replace them, because we have created artificial scarcity of shelter, deliberately.  It's not a bug, it's a feature. 

Anyways, just a thought.  Thanks for reading!

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People should be able to give their money to whomever they want, whether in a will or some gift.  No the state shouldn’t have a right to steal against the owner’s will.

When our constitution was drawn up the NDP specifically pushed not to have protection of property in it, unlike in the US.  For that reason alone we may want to join the US.

With regard to various hypothetical human-created climate crises, I don’t support using fear and ideology to tax existence and make people poorer.  That some specially qualified green/social justice politbureau gets to decide how that collectivized money should be spent - who wins and who loses - is not a comfort.  

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49 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

People should be able to give their money to whomever they want, whether in a will or some gift.  No the state shouldn’t have a right to steal against the owner’s will.

When our constitution was drawn up the NDP specifically pushed not to have protection of property in it, unlike in the US.  For that reason alone we may want to join the US.

With regard to various hypothetical human-created climate crises, I don’t support using fear and ideology to tax existence and make people poorer.  That some specially qualified green/social justice politbureau gets to decide how that collectivized money should be spent - who wins and who loses - is not a comfort.  

Respectfully, taxation isn't theft.  We vote on our politicians and our politicians set our taxes.  Taxation is legal, theft is not.  I am not aware of a nation anywhere that has no taxes.  Canadians are free to give their money to whoever they want, and (I believe) the person who receives it declares it as "earnings" and is taxed on it as though it were any other form of income.  This is in accordance with the law, and the laws are created by the politicians we vote for.  Frustrating at times?  You betcha.  Theft?  Sorry, "theft" is a word that already has a legal meaning.

I had not heard that property rights were not part of the constitution but looks like you are correct.  Thanks for pointing that out, I did not know that.  Which forms of protection of property do you believe are missing?  Canadian property law - Wikipedia

Sorry friend, climate change isn't hypothetical, and there aren't various crises, there is one crisis - we are on a path that will someday render our biosphere uninhabitable to humans.  We can have a reasonable discussion about when that date is and which actions are the best to take to prevent that outcome, but the rest is settled, except among industry - funded lobbyists and some political partisans.  That said, I would respectfully invite you to consider the stakes of this debate.  If it turns out that the environmentalists are wrong, we'll waste a bunch of money and several thousand people will lose good paying jobs.  I'm not trying to gaslight you, this would be a blow to the country as a whole and those individuals in particular, and I fully acknowledge that that would be bad and unfair.  However, if it turns out the industry-funded lobbyists are wrong, we're looking at the extinction of our species.  Personally, I have always found it incredible that we have chosen to weigh the wealth of a privileged few on the same scales as the survival of our species.

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18 hours ago, GrittyLeftist said:

My takeaway was that they occupied 7 sq blocks for three weeks and in that short span of time they killed a 16 yr old black kid and critically wounded another, then they cleared that scene of evidence.

If regular police were killing black kids that fast it actually would be a huge genocide. There are about 30,000x as many cops as there were CHAZis (there are about 1M cops in the US, I'm guessing 30 CHOP gestapo?), that would work out to 30,000 kids every 3 weeks, or 10,000 per week. That would make for 520,000 dead kids per year in crime scenes where the evidence was hidden.

That's a lot, right?

I went back to this format because it takes up less space and is easier for me to keep track of. 

I evaluate the morality of a person based in large part on how they treat people who are of no use to them - being nice to your friends or people who might advantage you is just enlightened self-interest IMO.  Similarly, I evaluate the morality of a society based in large part on how it treats those who are of no use to it.  In this context, that means the folks Jesus cared about - the poor, the homeless, the criminal.  Viewed through that lens, you may be able to understand why I see more value in, and have more empathy for, a poor, homeless and/or criminal person (well, some types of criminals anyway) than I do a wall street tycoon.  I'm not asking you to share this moral sentiment, just to understand it, because then the rest of my arguments will make a lot more sense.  This does not mean I think poor folks should be able to get away with murder, it means that, all other things being equal, I have more sympathy for them, and see more value in them, than I do with rich people who have wasted their lives improving their own place in the world instead of improving the world.

I see Occupy as a wasted opportunity because a bunch of people who believed themselves to be voiceless and powerless stumbled across power and a voice and were not able to make any meaningful changes with it.  Like if a peasant in the dark ages was awarded 3 wishes and managed to not improve their life, or the lives of the people they cared about.  I completely understand that lots of people see this differently.

As far as killings go, the Police are a trained, heirarchical organization.  If a rank and file beat cop does something, it is reasonable to hold his chief accountable for it.  The Occupy movement was a bunch of misfits, cranks, anarchists and weirdos with no structure or training.  This does not make it okay for them to kill people, but the Police are an organization in a way that Occupy never was.  For me, responsibility for any killings that happened during Occupy are squarely on the individual who committed the murder, and those individuals should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I didn't say, "Hey Grit, can you virtue signal?", I asked you if you think that the CHAZis had an alarmingly high murder rate, so your blather doesn't qualify as an answer. 

Do you feel like BLM should look at that incident and say "Damn, it can sometimes be hard to avoid killing people when you take on the job of protecting people"?

The irony is visible from Pluto - the group that says "Police kill too many people and they need to be held accountable" kill too many black kids and then hide the evidence of what happened. 

You need some reason and humanity, Grit, and not just when it suits the people who you feel are of use. (More irony, whoa)

 

 

FWIW "Occupy" was just exactly what it was - an example of just how shortsighted the BLMers are and how dystopian their society would actually be if they got the chance to have it. 

They think that America doesn't need a military but then they saw what it's like to try to hold territory and police it, and they saw the value of weapons. They act like the police look 'militarized' but they brandished weapons every chance they got.  

 

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So you don't even know about this? https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/inside-blm-co-founder-patrisse-khan-cullors-real-estate-buying-binge/ The 4-house-commie BLM leader?

"There is no cause so noble it will not attract it's share of fuggheads"  - Larry Niven.  Finding individuals who have done bad things involved in an organization or movement does not, for me, necessarily discredit the movement as a whole.  Also, a person buying million dollar real estate cannot reasonably be described as a "commie".  If they described themselves that way, the word I would use to describe them is "hypocrite," or maybe "person who doesn't know what commie means."

"There is none s blind as he who will not see." - Boom.

When you see an organization that's as racist, corrupt and violent as BLM but then try to 'splain away the massive gap between the leader's avowed principles and their actions it makes you look somewhere between 1) disingenuous and 10) atrocious. This is a solid 9.5. 

 

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Another BLM tactic is to throw around stats in the most misleading manner possible. Just the other day some dude was on tv saying that "every day police kill 3 people". He didn't say that over half of the people killed by police every day were white. He then went on to say that blacks were killed at a disproportionately higher rate, leading people to assume that most of the people killed were black.

That's some sick bullshit, right?

FYI white people never teach their kids to act out against police officers. Black kids get that message every day. That's a pretty good indicator that one group is at a higher risk.

Police officers aren't getting away with killing anyone.

The bar for a cop to use lethal force is pretty high.

People on all sides abuse stats.  In my more cynical moments, I believe statistics exist to be abused.

OMG dude, now you're making excuses for people who are sowing racial division ffs. 

Are you evil, Grit?

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If you acknowledge that black people are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate, would you acknowledge that as evidence that something is wrong with the way police are operating?

Why would I acknowledge something that is simply untrue? 

I already told you the main reason why black people get killed at a disproportionate rate - they are raised since birth to fear, hate and resist police. Even Michelle Obama tries to get them to do it. How can you instil those dangerous things in them and then expect them not to do the very things that get them killed?  

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I've met white people, mostly young men, who have a chip on their shoulder regarding the Police.  I would request some clarification - I don't think you are claiming that all black children are told every day to act out against the police, but I don't know how else to read that sentence.

Kids teach other kids to fear police: "Hey, let's sell some joints, just watch out for the fuckin' pigs, bro." And you'd be correct in assuming that a lot of them get killed.

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Brionna Taylor: Cops had a legal warrant. They knocked and announced their presence, did it again again, then when they had to kick in the door one of them got shot. That's the exact scenario where the cops shoot at center of body mass. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

"According to officials, it (the single warning shot fired by Kenneth Walker) hit Mattingly (one of the officers) in the leg and the officers fired 32 shots in return.  Walker was unhurt but Taylor was hit by six bullets and died." From the wikipedia article about this shooting.

For me, this shows that those officers did not train and were neither competent nor responsible.  They discharged 32 rounds inside of a city, where every missed round might ricochet and kill somebody, and they did not hit the person they were aiming for once.  They did, however, kill a bystander, who was also a woman, if that matters.  For me, this reeks of carelessness, corruption, entitlement and incompetence.  I definitely understand that being shot at is scary, I would point out that Police officers are given specialized training and equipment and are supposed to be brave.  Pretty sure the soldiers in Afghanistan exercised greater trigger discipline than that.

These are not offered to change your mind, but as something I found interesting and thought provoking:

So you weren't there, you read 1 wiki article, and you're making those assumptions... am I correct?

It's a really, really, really, really big deal when you shoot at a cop who's performing his lawful and necsessary duties. They will fire back. You need to understand and appreciate that, but you clearly do not. Being brave means going to places like this frequently, it doesn't mean "letting people shoot at you". 

Brionna was not "a bystander", she was a person in a dar room where her boyfriend was shooting at cops. She's a person who was found to have a murdered person in the back of her rental car in recent years. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5DBrOBIgNM - this video tries to help rural American white folks understand the fear minorities feel for cops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmjB7TUroyE - this video is a story about the time an American police officer allegedly asked this youtuber for training.

I don't always agree with the guy in the videos and there are things he has done that I disagree with, but I do find him reasonable and thought provoking.  

No time for videos right now, maybe later.

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I didn't research the particulars of the other cases you mentioned because I only have so much time for research and it's easy to get bogged down in arguing over minutia.  I'm more interested in the broader, decades-long pattern of "white police officer kills unarmed civilian, white judge gives him back his badge and his gun and lets him back out on the street, rinse and repeat" than I am in arguing about whether individual cases were justified.

That's not a pattern. The pattern is: "BLM mischaracterizes a police shooting or puts out selectively edited video, gets people riled up, incites rioting & racial discrimination, the truth comes out, they move on to the next false event. Rinse and repeat.

That's why you ignored all of the other cases which you don't even need to research, you already know about them. They were on the mainstream news for months, if not years. Brionna's was actually the least well-known of all those cases. 

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Yes, that's what I mean. "Kill at least one person from every village", etc. 4M is a lot of G Floyds. It's a genocide. The final death toll was closer to 50+M, but a lot of those people were starved to death.

From Oxford Languages: Genocide, noun: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

I agree that Mao murdering 4 million people for having an education was an atrocity, but I don't see it as a genocide.  You are also correct about the famine and mass starvation, but again, unless they are trying to eradicate a nation or ethnic group, it is not a genocide.  Hopefully it's obvious I'm not defending Mao's actions, just pointing out that they do not meet the standard of "genocide."

OMFG dude, they killed everyone that they could find who seemed to exist with a certain belief set, literally millions of them, and terrorized the rest of the population into following their exact belief system on pain of death. If that's not fucking genocide then nothing is.

Don't you find it a little bit evil around the edges to 'splain away an actual genocide, and to try to make it fruity and light? Of course it's fucking genocide. 

You act like the killing of a million people is less significant than the killing of one.

"Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill a million and you're a hero..." Is that your philosophy, Grit?

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Regardless of how power is seized, one person always ends up at the top, and usually it's someone with a penchant for violence and a need to consolidate power. 

That's a big part of it. CNN made a disgusting amount of money from the 24/7 M Brown coverage, ditto for Floyd, Brooks, etc. 

True, but they are a for-profit "news" organization.  I don't see anything sinister in them getting paid to report the news.  I do think that all 24 hour "news" organizations should be dismantled and we should go back to the day when one individual was only allowed to own (if I remember right) 1 TV station and 2 newspapers.

There's your willful ignorance again. 

There's EVERYTHING sinister about mischaracterizing events in the news in a way that maligns a police officer and causes people across the whole planet to hate/fear American police in general. 

It's an abomination. 

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The argument against the name 'black lives matter' is that it's predicated on the assumption that as a society we feel like black lives don't matter. That's nothing more than an attempt at fear mongering and division. 

If I opened a discussion with you, using the phrase "Torturing babies isn't funny, Grit" that wouldn't be an honest attempt at rational conversation. Neither is the name BLM.

If I was a member of a nation that had been torturing babies for laughs for more than a hundred years, or if I was defending people who tortured babies for laughs, someone might have to open a discussion with me that way.  I do understand your point about inflammatory language, but for me, pretending that America is not a racist nation is just that - a pretense.  If it matters, I think Canada is also a racist nation.  All nations with Colonial pasts, to the best of my knowledge, must confront the racism inherent in their past, and it is never a quick, simple, easy or cheap process.

No one is a member of a nation where the police kill black people indiscriminately, so there's no traction to the name BLM.

I can accuse you of being ok with genocide, on account of the fact that you downplay Mao's blatant genocide. 

Should I start saying GNTSSG? Grit needs to stop supporting genocide? 

Grit - stop supporting genocide dude. It's really wrong, ok?

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People who came to the conclusion that police are allowed to kill black people without cause, just from watching CNN's hateful screed, need to wise up. Shooting cops gets you killed. Trying to kill a cop with his own gun gets you killed. Shooting a taser (which is quite lethal when used improperly) at a cop's face from close range can get you killed.

People who say Blue Lives Matter do it because people like Barack Obama won't. When Obama stood in front of 5 dead cops at a eulogy in Dallas, instead of saying: "Whoever did this was a worthless piece of shit!", he made their murders about "centuries or racism, slavery and Jim Crowe laws (nasty Dem things)".

I don't think anyone is saying that police should not be allowed to defend themselves or others.  Those centuries of racism, slavery and Jim Crowe laws are still relevant today.  That said, more precise language about racism would probably make it a lot easier to have this conversation.  Whipping someone until they answer to a dog's name (that scene in Roots) is maybe morally different than avoiding hiring someone because of the colour of their skin.  Not saying the second thing should be okay, just saying that using the same word to describe both those acts is going to cause some frustration and sincere miscommunication.

If the Dems want to come to terms with their KKK, their Jim Crowe laws, their history of fighting to uphold slavery and to disenfranchise blacks, good for them. They should also stop trying to get the next generation of black kids killed by the police. I'm not apologizing for things that I've never supported. My family came from coal miners and soldiers. We didn't own slaves, unlike Kamala Harris's family. 

The point that you're missing in all of this is that Obama shouldn't have been lionizing the guy who killed 5 cops, he should have been characterizing that person as worthless scum. 

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You can only speak for yourself in that regard, I personally don't feel that way.

Haha I'm a stranger in a strange land in my hometown.  I am pleasantly surprised when someone is civil to me and never expect agreement.

Police misuse of force against people of any race is an extremely serious crime.

Agreed.

1) They should avoid derailing the issue by lying about cases where misuse of force wasn't actually present

2) They should advocate for, NOT AGAINST (like BLM does), bodycams - it's really hard for the police to get away with murder when it's on video. 

BLM doesn't like bodycams because it's really hard for them to selectively edit video to make pollce look bad when the police have their own video. 

You are using "they" as though you believe that BLM is one entity.  BLM as a whole has no leverage over individual people who claim to be part of BLM - by contrast, any individual who is a Police officer has been trained and equipped by a single organization and can be disciplined or removed by that organization.  BLM does not have a leader and cannot regulate the behaviour of every yahoo willing to stand on television and claim to be part of the movement.

I do not believe that BLM is "good" or "morally pure", but I do believe that when reasonable adults disagree, they are usually both partly right.  I have seen very little indication that American police forces contain very much in the way of reasonable adults but I definitely understand that many people very much disagree with me.

If you follow Christ, then you're setting yourself up to be accused of supporting the things that Christ supported in his speeches and actions. 

If you follow BLM, join in their riots, and carry their platitudes over your head then you're a part of that "entity". When you're doing the things that THEY'RE TELLING YOU TO DO then of course BLM is regulating your behaviour

They were regulating your behaviour right at the very moment you typed that tripe in support of them.

Did you think that your words meant "BLM musta said some good things in addition to all the evil that they spewed, and ONLY the good things that people do at BLM's bidding actually reflect back on BLM. BLM cannot be held responsible for any of the crimes that people commit at their behest"?

 

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It's like you just walked right into a minefield GL. 

Here's the difference:

- in 1 riot that lasted less than 2 hours, involving less than 200 people, the police killed a white woman who was visibly unarmed without so much as shouting a warning. 

- in thousands of riots where over 2,000 police officers were injured, several people were murdered, and the police had frozen cans of pop thrown at them, molotov cocktails thrown at them, fireworks shot at them, and which included the armed takeover of a police building, the police never fired a single shot at any BLM protestors, aside from 1 firefight where a cop was killed. 

Just googled "was there warning of the capitol hill riot".  Here are the top 3 links.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-riot-fbi-intelligence/2021/01/12/30d12748-546b-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/12/fbi-warned-war-threat-day-before-capitol-riots-report-says/6641706002/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/capitol-police-ignored-intelligence-warnings-ahead-jan-6-riots-watchdog-n1264054

I'm sorry, I've seen pictures of the crowds at the Capitol, to say there were less than 200 people there is just not credible.

The woman who was killed was an Air Force veteran who was knowingly participating in a literal coup.  The day before she chose to participate in the coup, she posted to twitter "Nothing will stop us... they can try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours... dark to light!"  For my money this is an adult who knew what she was getting herself into and made her own choices.  If you are a veteran who is participating in a revolution, you should understand that sometimes revolutionaries die.  For me, this is analogous to someone getting shot for trying to burn down a Police station - yes it would be nice if lethal force hadn't been necessary, but what were they expecting?

I've noticed that which information a person receives depends largely on their news sources.  Some news programs avoid telling you things that make police look bad but do show you things that make BLM bad, and vice versa.  I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.  In my opinion, we need regulations penalizing organizations that call themselves "news" that promote demonstrably false information, for instance, when Fox News was helping convince Americans to invade Iraq by claiming that Saddam was behind 9-11 and had WMD.
 

There were only 200 people who went into the buildings. There was nothing wrong with what the rest of the crowds did.

Therefor, when you talk about the riots at Capitol Hill that needed to be constrained by police, the number is 200.  The police had to deal with less than 200 people for just a couple of hours, they resorted to shooting and killing unarmed people. 

In thousands of protests which included serious attacks on police officers and quite a few murders, police never fired on BLM except for one instance when they were shot at first. 

You need to come to grips with that instead of trying to support the killing of an unarmed person. Don't you think that the people who committing murders at the riots were guilty of far more than Ashley Babbit?

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Nah, you don't get off that easy bud.

Of course you know who Dr Ford is because our media made a very big deal about her. She was the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of "almost raping her, in about 1985 or 86, in one of the summer months, at a location that she doesn't quite remember, and she also never mentioned it to any friends or family over the past 35 or so years". Yeah, that's enough to make a woman internationally famous, right? That's the kind of thing that our media should glom onto?

On the other hand, we have a PM who created a law specifically for a known criminal entity, so that they could get federal contracts, and then he tried to coerce the AG to use it when she was certain that their crimes were too severe to warrant that protection, and our media covered up the fact that around the time Trudeau was working so hard for SNC, a Mtl politician named Michel Fournier was pleading guilty to accepting $2.3M in bribes from SNC Lavalin for help securing a $127M contract to fix the Jacques Cartier Bridge. CBC knew about the story, because if you google it, they're the ones who wrote about it, a year or two before Trudeau's scandal became known to the public.

Why does the CBC tell us so much about a lying bimbo from the States and nothing about the fact that the company that Trudeau works for is known to give big bribes to Canadian politicians? 

Try to tell me that's not a big deal Grit. 

I didn't even get into the We scandal, which just went away when Trudeau said "I should have recused myself from the obvious decision to choose We". And why did such a huge scandal just magically go away when he said that? It's especially confusing because we all know that's not what happened. 

Oh, THAT Dr. Ford.  Yeah I know who she is, I just didn't think she was related to the SNC case.  Honestly, I still don't see any relevance.  I do think that calling her a "lying bimbo" may sound misogynistic to some ears.  For my money having Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court greatly diminishes its credibility and gravitas.  I agree he has not been convicted of anything, but a Supreme Court appointment ought to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and I do not think that happened in this case.

CBC is a news organization - of course they reported the news that a Supreme Court nominee was being credibly accused of rape.  I can see why you think that Trudeau, or someone in the Canadian government, influenced CBC to over-report some cases and under-report others.  FWIW I think that is a problem no matter who is in power and is an ongoing concern with any government controlled media organization such as CBC, BBC, etc.  CBC is only one media organization in our infosphere, and is the only one the government has that kind of direct leverage over.  Do you believe that, say, Global News, or CTV, or the Calgary Herald, were victims of government censorship?

That said, if the media as a whole, or even just CBC, is actively helping Justin Trudeau cover up criminal activity, I fully agree that is a very serious matter and ought to be investigated thoroughly, and any wrongdoers should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, even (especially) if those wrongdoers happen to be the Prime Minister.

FWIW the WE scandal is still very much a thing - I liken Trudeau's various ethics scandals to Harper's in that for a long time the public's reaction was to shrug and say, "yeah, but who else is gonna run the country?"  Then one day they decided they had an alternative so they took it.  Your mileage may vary, but I think much of the damage to Trudeau has been below the waterline, and I think we'll have a Conservative government in power the next time they field a candidate that most Canadians can see as a responsible adult.  JMO.

Did you hear a whoosh sound? 

The whole point was that you didn't even know who Michel Fournier was but OUR Canadian news told you every little sordd detail of Dr Ford and her bullshit accusation. 

And FYI, Kavanaugh was never 'credibly accused' of 'rape'. She couldn't name the year, the location, she named 4 witnesses and none of them ever heard of her story, she never told her friends, family or the police, she claimed to have phobias but it was proven that she doesn't even have those, she claimed to be unaware that the GOP offered to fly a lie detector to her but even I knew days in advance from the opposite side of the continent in a different country. She was A LYING BIMBO. That's not misogyny. It's just a simple fact.

Michel Fournier's story was very germane to one of the biggest scandals in Canadian political history. CBC knew. They hid it.

Did you not know that Trudeau gave CBC $695B when he first got elected? 

Get up to speed, Grit. Your willful ignorance and convenient dearth of pertinent facts regarding every single story that you talk about is highly suspect. 

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The Dems were evil back when the KKK was their militia, and they're still evil now when they use BLM and Antifa as their militias.

Worth remembering that the Democrats used to be the party of racism.  You see the Democrats as evil - do you see the Republicans as good?  Not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to better understand your position.

In this instance there's evil and there's not evil. Not evil doesn't necessarily mean 'saintly'.

 

I'm guessing that's full of typos, its a lot to go over on the fly and I didn't have time to read it through.

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23 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:

It's posturing, simply put.  For Nike, Pepsi, the CIA or someone to stamp "we care" on their packages has a marginal cost of zero.  The net energy that is diverted to these discussions takes away from real change...

Sure it's posturing. Does that make it okay then? The gradual adoption of liberal, woke rhetoric and buzzwords by the new breed of managers in the CIA and the growing realization that young, woke liberals have no reason to fear getting drafted and sent off to a foreign war anymore, means that war, imperialist policies and foreign policy in general, is off the table for centrist posers calling themselves 'the left' today.

But, make no mistake about it! For any American liberals whose hopes are just slight advances in wages and a public healthcare system; these goodies cannot be paid for by an increasingly indebted nation that has depended on stealing the wealth of resentful poorer nations of the global south. 

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13 minutes ago, Right To Left said:

1. Sure it's posturing. Does that make it okay then? ... is off the table for centrist posers calling themselves 'the left' today.

2.  these goodies cannot be paid for by an increasingly indebted nation that has depended on stealing the wealth of resentful poorer nations of the global south. 

1. Posture is a pejorative word... Like poseur.

2. GDP per capita increases with time but inequity increases more

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15 minutes ago, Right To Left said:

But, make no mistake about it! For any American liberals whose hopes are just slight advances in wages and a public healthcare system; these goodies cannot be paid for by an increasingly indebted nation that has depended on stealing the wealth of resentful poorer nations of the global south. 

 

Do American liberals and narrative control Canada in this way too ?    Is there any federal policy independent of the American narrative ?   Is that why such things are so often discussed here and in Canadian media using the American framework ?

Is Canada the poorer nation to the north ?

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8 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

Do American liberals and narrative control Canada in this way too ?    Is there any federal policy independent of the American narrative ?   Is that why such things are so often discussed here and in Canadian media using the American framework ?

Is Canada the poorer nation to the north ?

1. Probably more so. Because most of our media and narrative control today is coming at us from either Google or Facebook or both.

2. No. Not since NAFTA was fully locked down and the key thrown away by the year 2000!

3. Probably. There is no separate Canadian framework. You didn't know this already? You been on here a long time now.

4. Who know. We're both ruinously in debt and real inflation cannot be denied anymore, now that food prices, along with most commodities are joining land and real estate prices higher and higher, as any investors look for real value to move dollars out of.

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