March? June… the 19th to be specific.
Classy.
Sounds extremely plausible.
Incorrect. It means that after the better part of a century of living here, much of which was spent actively immersed in our social and political culture – and as I said elsewhere, I spent many years traveling this country far more than almost any ordinary citizen would ever have the chance to do – I think I have a pretty good understanding of the Canadian cultural landscape.
And Elmo ain’t it. Because his father was a South African plutocrat, his mother was raised in South Africa and learned Apartheid values, and Elmo himself was raised there in those same circumstances. Are you just feeling particularly argumentative, or particularly obtuse?
What’s that cultural landscape had to say about First Nations peoples for the better part of the last century?
Are you just feeling particularly argumentative, or particularly obtuse gaslighty?
Mostly the former. You said something characteristically stupid, and I thought it deserved to be highlighted.
Now that I think about it, “boy wonders” is too flattering to these barely-adult white supremacists Elmo has deputized to run the country for him.
Moving forward I’m going with “Muskjugend”.
For the record, the “characteristically stupid” thing I said about Elon Musk was this:
And, also FTR, as I mentioned in several threads in the past, I considered myself fortunate to have a job that for a period of about six years required me to fly all over Canada, as often as several times a week. In the process, my perspective on the country came not only from my own friends and acquaintances, but from literally thousands of people that I met from coast to coast over the years. I felt I really came to know our nation well. So fuck you and your pointless hostility…
Yes, that’s the one. Although I didn’t decide to get hostile about it until your dickheaded, “I don’t know every Canadian” response. You wanted to play at being an asshole, I’m more than happy to go along.
Uh-huh. Doug Ford still holds elected office up there, doesn’t he? Or does he not count because you didn’t personally meet him?
I worked on a project in Edmonton for a while, and I met plenty of colossally racist assholes. Most Canadians I know are decent, but certainly not all.
If you’ve never met a single one, you’re in even more of a bubble than me, and I live in one of the bluest cities in the U.S.
Lived in Canada all my life, wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else (no matter how cold the winters get), and I must say that there’s plenty of racism and bigotry up here in the great white north.
It runs the full gamut from frothing at the mouth anti-immigrant/first-nations speech to the insidious polite differentiation between Canadians and “Old Stock Canadians”/“Les canadiens de souche”. It even is hot enough to affect our politics when discussing affordable housing or post-secondary schooling or what compromises “reasonable accommodation”.
Canadians also DO have a history of legal slavery, land theft, genocide, segregation, and more in our history. These issues have effects that reach segments of our minority populations to this day. This is borne out in our policing, wealth inequality, population distribution, and daily life.
Musk, the Nazi-larping corporate fascist, is just the easy one to spot.
Musk chose his Balilla Boys well.
I’m sure there weren’t any Canadians in that convoy in Ottawa a few years ago.
No True Canadians!
This is starting to get way off topic, but I have to respond to this. You’d have to be an idiot to take my statement to mean that no Canadian has ever been a bigot, or even that I’ve never met one. Saying that Elmo is “the exact opposite” of every Canadian I’ve ever known is overstating it a bit, but it’s meant to convey that Elmo – and his co-president Trump and all his cronies – represent a level of evil Nazi-level racial hate that is rare in Canada, though it certainly exists in some quarters. But in the US, it’s running the whole damn federal government right now, and gone completely amok! How likely is that to ever happen here?
In some other thread – possibly even more than one – I talked about my lifelong best friend – the guy who was best man at my wedding and I at his. I marveled at how incredibly well we got along despite some stark political differences, in particular his strong alignment with fairly far-right conservatism and, frankly, racial bigotry. But we always got along because he was a good person at heart who could laugh off our differences and, unlike Musk or the Trump mob, I never knew him to be unkind to any person or animal. Part of his belief system came from his experience as an auto insurance adjuster specializing in big-ticket bodily injury claims. He swore that so many of the claims that turned out to be fraud came from a certain ethnic immigrant minority that he was much more inclined to initiate surveillance investigations in those cases than in any others. I had no facts with which to argue, so we dropped the subject and had another drink.
I do dearly appreciate the job I held that let me experience so much of this country and its people for more than half a decade of constant travel. Your retort here is just silly. Maybe you were thinking of his crackhead brother Rob? Lots of people dislike Doug Ford for various reasons, but he’s been a competent leader who handled the COVID crisis well, enacting measures that would have been anathema to typical reactionary conservatives. He stood up to Trump’s tariff threats, proposed some of the toughest retaliatory measures heard from anyone, and told Fox News to go to hell. He eliminated the government cash grab of mandatory emissions testing (pretty pointless nowadays), and eliminated annual license renewal fees for non-commercial vehicles.
If you wanted to vilify someone you should have named someone like former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a genuine born-again nutcase and climate denier. Some of his backbenchers from Alberta were even loonier than he was. But even Harper could understand the Canadian zeitgeist and his Canadian constituency. Despite urgings from said lunatic backbenchers and others, even Harper vowed to never again bring the abortion issue before Parliament, and Canada remains one of the few nations in the world with no anti-abortion laws at all. It was also one of the first countries in the world to recognize same-sex unions.
The humourous one.
If he was, it was allowed by his parents. Plenty of White South Africans grew up when he did and resisted apartheid. It wasn’t some kind of infection you inevitably caught. You were taught it.
And that’s all my (joking) comment was about.
Really? Canadians didn’t murder indigenous children for racist reasons, I take it?
My bolding
Is your friend outside Canada? Or does it really make a difference to you that he’s not “raging”?
Does it matter what nationality he or anyone else considers him to be? He could be from Shangri-La by way of Cockaigne and he’d still be a racist shithead.
I appear to have started a shit-storm based on my defensive misinterpretation of a joke. Sorry. I guess I’m feeling very defensive of Canada right now.
We have stains on our history, as do many nations. Yes, we also imprisoned Japanese during WW II for no other reason than that they were Japanese, just as Americans did.
But here’s the thing. We got better. We’re getting even better. While America descends into Trumpian neo-Nazism.
I’m trying to have an honest conversation, which may be a mistake with certain parties mainly interested in scoring brownie points.
Let me put it this way. There’s a difference between Case #1: “I’m trying to make a deal with this person, but he’s of X heritage, and I don’t trust Xs” and Case #2: “Deport all the Xs (regardless of status)” and its immediate corollary, “Kill all the Xs”.
Then maybe tone down the Canadian exceptionalism a bit. There’s not as much daylight between you and the American nationalists, “my country is the greatest ever,” folks here as you might like.
Canada has lots of nice people and it’s not as fucked as the US is yet, but it’s not the shining beacon of freedom and progressive values that you imagine.
Only a very small one, and not one you should be ignoring. 2 is closer to 1 than its corollary.
You think your friend wouldn’t support deporting all Xs if he had his druthers?