I mean, pick First Nation group at random, and chances are you’ll find a buckload of more legitimate grievances than these protesters have. So I’m not at all sure we’d have to have the same opinion of an equivalent FN protest in order to be consistent.
I don’t see what that has to do with it. Your position on what the protesters are protesting about isn’t the same as whether
- It’s a “Fringe” position, or
- The legality and appropriateness of the tactics of the protest.
A protest is either legal or illegal, ethical or unethical. Whether I agree or not is irrelevant. I would be sick and tired of the trucker blockades if I agreed with them 100% up and down the line; they should have shown up, protested for a day, make some noise and been a little inconvenient, and gotten the hell out of town. The government should have done something about it long ago. I have exactly the same opinion despite not agreeing with them about, really, anything. How far a protest can go is a matter of the law, not of whether I support their position.
I cannot say that I sincerely believe in civil rights if the extent to which I am willing to extend to others is proportional to how much I sympathize with them.
Are you suggesting that I can’t hold the view that whether a specific form of protest is ethical depends on what the protest is about? That seems horribly wrong. Legality, sure. Blocking a street or whatever either is or is not legal, and what I’m protesting won’t impact that. But the judgement on whether a protest is ethical is a whole other matter.
If, for example, our government were holding political prisoners, disappearing dissenters in the middle of the night, murdering journalists and opposition politicians, etc, then a whole fuck of a lot of illegality at protests might be ethically justified, up to and including assaulting police officers. On the other hand, if I’m protesting because the government refuses to pay me compensation for letting me be abducted by aliens, then my protest doesn’t ethically justify so much as jaywalking. If I see other people protesting in the same way on those two grounds, I don’t have to form the same judgement about the legitimacy of their tactics in each case in order to have a coherent, consistent moral stance.
Well, one, not “an organizer”. All of the main organizers are fascists. Two, we’re not talking about a couple of people with odious beliefs. There is, for example, an entire contingent of “Sons of Odin” there. Come on, let’s not play around on this. The convoy was created as a con to grift people into giving money to alt-right white nationalist and for them to garner some support. To not see that is to intentionally have blinders on. That they succeeded so well is a humiliation to Canada. In any case, the people who have stayed are by-and-large apparently ok with the alt-right and quite possibly somewhat ok with the white nationalist too.
If you want to talk about some hypothetical protest where one or two people are bad eggs and the rest are legitimate protestors then I might agree with you, but that’s not the case here. This was a “protest” started by fascists for fascist purposes. They found a nice wedge issue that they could use to get the “I hate Trudeau and so should should you” types on their side to bolster their numbers and to take their money.
Nazi sympathizers and overt racists turn up at these rallies because they know they’ll be tolerated. And they are.
This bunch is worse than Trumpers, they’re just Canadian wanna be Trumpers, could anything be lamer?
If the Natives’ demands included removing the entire government, just six months after the last election, in which the Natives grievances were a major election issue, with two national parties supporting that position, and two other national parties opposing that position, and the latter two parties won the election, then yes, I’d say they were “Not accepting democracy”.
If they don’t speak up and distance themselves, then yes.
You try explaining to your Jewish teenage girls that the nice people marching along with the white supremacists with the Nazi, Gadsden, and Confederate flags mean them no harm and most of the people just don’t want to have to get vaccinated. This is organized by hateful people to spread hate. If others are so susceptible to the BS that they are happy to march alongside, they are carrying the same message.
This isn’t about being “woke”, but you come from a place of privilege here. They don’t want to “send you back from where you came from”.
And 2/3 or respondents want to send the army in at this point. Enough is enough.
Well, I find that absurd. I’ve known lots of people who marched in BLM protests and they weren’t rioters or communists, even though many BLM protests involved riots. If you let a few maniacs force every protest to shut down because of guilt by association you’d hardly ever have a protest. Hell, you couldn’t have a decent sized parade. And even then they still have exactly the same rights as anyone else, and their protest should be subject to exactly the same legal limitations.
If those hadn’t been hustled out within a day, I’d see your point. Size matters. If a sizable portion of the protest are nazis or tiki-torch wielding weirdos, that’s another matter. That just isn’t the case here.
Again, I don’t LIKE these people. They’re mostly nitwits. They should have been forced to break this shit up long ago. But this is NOT a fringe thing - t he fundamental purpose of the protest is protesting pandemic measures, not white supremacy, and it’s not subject to just a few percentage points of support. It has a lot of support, even now after vastly wearing out their welcome.
No, the fundamental point of the protest is to own the libs.
The intent of a BLM protest is not to riot. In some demonstrations, bad actors took advantage of the situation to cause problems.
The intent of this “protest” is to shut down the city and the nation. Causing problems is the goal of every single person there.
Does the intent of the protestors not mean anything to you at all?
As far as your continued accusations of communism, it’s not equivalent to fascism. One can make the argument that communism could work, if done right, and is not hijacked by authoritarians. Fascism, the entire point is the authoritarianism. Communism in its simplest form is the ideal of from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Naive and probably unworkable on any large scale, but that’s the ideal. The ideal of Fascism is a totalitarian state that violently suppresses any opposition and regiments society according to class.
For instance, you have communes, where everyone gives and shares as equally as they can, and those work out on small scales just fine, for the most part. You can’t have authoritarian enclaves in the same way.
So, your attempt at equivocating BLM for having some leaders who subscribe to some Marxist teachings to this convoy that was organized entirely by authoritarians is entirely misplaced.
Right, tell me how many international borders were shut down by BLM demonstrations.
I’d still like to see a cite on that.
The organizers and leaders fall squarely in the hatred camp. It’s not like some racist guys are just tagging along.
I’ve made my views crystal clear: if you support this in anyway, you are either directly advocating or tacitly condoning violence against me and my family. Don’t “Yes, but…” unless you are willing to stand up and distance yourself from the hate.
Yes, the claim that nobody said (except you) is indeed bullshit.
As would I.
I think that most of the folks who were fooled initially have now seen enough to know that this “protest” was co-opted early on by a bunch of idiots who wanted to simply cause chaos and have a “do-over” on the last election.
What support they had initially is now back down to Western separatists, members of Bernier’s party and assorted Q-anon and conspiracy theory nutbags.
Like these guys today standing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier throwing Nazi salutes?
I’m surprised that’s possible.
Seems someone tries that at Arlington, they are going to have a bad day. Is the Canadian equivalent not guarded?
Nope, and it’s pretty much right there, next to a major sidewalk that sees lots of foot traffic pretty much every day. You can see a photo of Confederation Square here. The Tomb is that rectangular bit in front of the statue of the soldiers hauling an artillery piece.
Here’s a map that puts it in perspective of where it’s located in Ottawa. Parliament Hill is about a five minute walk west, so it’s right in the middle of everything.
Canada largely relies on the honor system to keep people off it. Up to now, that’s been mostly successful.
There is normally an honour guard there. One of the soldiers on guard duty, Nathan Cirillo, was shot dead back in 2014.
Yeah, I decided to check that, it’s only guarded part time, it seems:
Here’s Pat King, one of the organizers and a “Proud member of the White Race”. A fine young man /s
In fact, I thought of Bernard when I made my original post. Of course, a pollster can generally get whatever answer they want by phrasing their question carefully.
For my example…
I would guess that the respective replies from random Canadians would be: 80+% yes, 70+% yes, 50-60% yes, 20-30% yes and 5-10% yes. Which paper or party is funding the poll? And does the poll actually ask random Canadians?
(If you just asked people who live in downtown Ottawa, or rural Saskatchewan, the answers probably would differ somewhat.)
Statistics is not that difficult, but most do not understand them well, nor how easy they are to manipulate.