johnfabian
4d ago
Short attempt to explain an upcoming Canadian constitutional snafu
I'll try for brevity here. If you see any Canadian news showing up in your feed you might be aware there's been some wrangling over the "Notwithstanding Clause." This is the clause in the Canadian constitution that essentially allows the invoker (either a provincial government or the feds) to override court challenges to legislation except for stuff related to the basic functioning of democracy (like how elections are conducted). Outside of Québec the NWC has rarely been used at the provincial level and never at the federal level. It was included as a compromise in the 1982 constitution, and has historically been treated as an Option-of-Last-Resort when it came to disagreements between the provinces and the feds. It expires after five years of invoking which theoretically means it can only be used with popular support.
The structure of Canada's institutions were meant to mimic the United Kingdom's: parliament is supposed to reign supreme. Courts and the judiciary were meant to be deferential to the will of legislatures, and likewise legislatures were meant to honour the spirit of the broad constitutional principles embodied by the Charter. As many of you might suspect however, over time there has been some element of judicial creep, with the judiciary finding more and more things to be unconstitutional. Federal laws against abortion and gay marriage were struck down by Charter challenges (in each case I think correctly), but somewhat more speciously you have things like restrictions on public drug use or simple math tests for prospective teachers being declared unconstitutional. I know people around here might cynically think this is being done exclusively for progressive causes and while I think there is an undeniable slant among the judiciary you also have things like the courts deeming the measures taken against the trucker COVID protests unconstitutional.
More coherently the principle underlying the general trend is this: the judiciary wants more discretionary powers for itself. It does not want governments to dictate to judges the limits of their powers or decision-making. And where this is really drawing things into conflict is with respect to criminal justice. To give a non-culture war example, the previous Conservative government amended the Criminal Code to require consecutive life sentences be given for mass murderers; i.e. if you committed multiple first-degree homicides your eligibility for parole would not be after 25 years as normal but rather 50+ years (depending on the extent of your crimes). This was struck down on appeal on the grounds that this was "cruel and unusual punishment", on behalf of a man who had murdered six Muslims at a mosque in a mass shooting (not exactly a progressive hero, but now eligible for parole in 2039). Similarly the ability to hold potentially at-risk criminals without bail or severe bail conditions has been very limited, and a wide raft of possible contingencies for sentencing have been essentially mandated by court challenges. You might be familiar with "Gladue" reports (essentially lighter sentencing for indigenous offenders), but this has also resulted in bizarre sentencing decisions for immigrants who would risk deportation otherwise.
Almost-certain future PM Pierre Poilievre has made some waves by suggesting he would use it federally to override challenges to stronger criminal justice laws. This forthcoming showdown seems to be inevitable given the increased intransigence of both the judiciary and politicians: anger and confusion with these court appeals is not limited to conservatives and support for harsher sentencing is very strong. The original purpose of the Notwithstanding Clause was not as a means to reinforce parliamentary supremacy, but the expanded scope of court appeals has given it a new role in this context. The judiciary has badly overplayed their hand if they thought the political cost of using it would enable them to expand their reach without opposition.
johnfabian
16hr ago
He's really fat. Easily obese.
johnfabian
2d ago
In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European.
Has there been some recent fascination with the book? I looked it up in the Toronto library system and all 8 copies are signed out, with multiple holds past that. Unusual popularity for a book from the 1940s.
johnfabian
11d ago
This is just the substack equivalent of the more deranged branches of critical theory. They posit that because they are against the people who claim all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society and YOU need to pick a side, that in fact all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society (but different). I'm fond of reading tea leaves but I think one loses the point (and fun) of it when you start smashing your head into your cup.
I was reflecting upon this earlier today when I saw on Reddit that the children's show Bluey had uploaded to youtube an episode that had been "banned" in the US. It wasn't actually banned, but Disney decided not to include it in the show's episodes for American subscribers. You can watch it here and take a guess as to why that might be. If you haven't heard of Bluey, it was the second-most watched television show (in total minutes) in America last year in spite of its short format. It's a charming show and is much more tolerable to adults than much of contemporary children's programming, most of which seems like the virtual equivalent of crack cocaine. It's been in the news recently because it may or may not have ended (?) despite being massively successful and profitable. I took a gander at some of the culture warring over it and it's invariably idiotic. The lunatic left see its messages of friendship and inclusion as proof it is secretly Marxist; the retarded right see a wholesome nuclear family with nary a Pride flag in sight and think it's hiding its power level. This kind of reading-into-things seems to me little different than the kind in the linked article.
Any time I see stuff like this my eyes protectively glaze over and my curiosity is ended. All of this kind of culture war obsession just strikes me as so incredibly infantile.
johnfabian
6d ago
Somewhat related, Scottie Scheffler has been on the biggest tear golf has seen since prime Tiger; in late March/April he won four out of five tournaments in a row and narrowly missed winning the fifth - some $20ish million in winnings. All this while his wife was 8+ months pregnant; I can't find speculation as to what the precise due date was but comments from him seemed to suggest late April so now she's overdue. He is skipping the big money event this week but more to the point he was very vocal that if his wife went into labour he would step off the course mid-round. He said this also applied if he was leading in the last round of the Masters (which he won comfortably). Now it's not a team sport (besides I suppose the caddy) but the question is essentially would he potentially compromise his individual legacy as a golfer to be with his wife during labour.
johnfabian
16d ago
Absolutely not. Don't even bother thinking about it again. They were out to scam you and you just got them first.
johnfabian
15d ago
Lots of places sell or "misplace" their mailing lists to other parties.
johnfabian
13d ago
One might argue that it would predict that Churchill would get a pass from the anti-fascist collective, given that the thing he's most famous for is helping to defeat the most prominent example of fascism in human history.
Not if the argument is that Churchill was in charge of an only-slightly-less-fascist state, whose conflict with the greater was merely about Who Should Dominate.
Among quasi-Marxist (this is misleading because contemporary leftists almost uniformly haven't read Marx) people in the present they have already decided that the Soviet Union, near-alone, defeated Nazi Germany.
johnfabian
1mo ago
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
Even this analogy is somewhat inapt; it would require for OJ Simpson to have been unrepentantly open about killing them, with the defence team meanwhile trying and failing to construct alternative scenarios regardless.
Like I've said many times everytime SS starts beating this drum, Holocaust deniers never seem to come up with a convincing way to get around the fact that the Nazis were quite happy to admit they had killed millions of Jews. At best they would feign that they had somehow been coerced, or threatened, or were just following orders.
johnfabian
1mo ago
A short post about Metrolinx, Ontario's incompetent transit authority
I enjoy talking about public transit. Not just because I advocate for it to be better, but also because I think it sits at the nexus of a number of problems in the Anglosphere: crushing regulatory barriers, unwieldy bureaucracy, land use and housing, GHG emissions, and the declining state capacity to envision and build projects that better the lives of its citizens. As has been discussed much before, the Anglosphere has a problem separate from other western countries with respect to its construction costs, and this is particularly egregious for transit. Similar projects to those accomplished in Spain or Norway or Italy are - when attempted in Canada, the UK, or the US - considerably more expensive (often 10x more, per km), take longer to build, and when finished have inferior performance. If you live in the Anglosphere and are barely aware of local issues you can probably think of a few local examples off the top of your head.
The Eglinton Crosstown is a classic example. Originally intended to open in time for Toronto's hosting of the 2015 Pan Am games, this light rail line was subsequently cancelled, revived, and redesigned before construction eventually began, with a greatly inflated budget. The project's completion date had previously been announced as 2020, then '21, then '22... in September 2023 a news conference was called by Metrolinx to announce they had no update for when it might be operational. Ostensibly it will be this year, but no one would bet on it. There is presumably some fault with the construction (informed speculation points to leakage and erosion in some of the stations near the intersection with the Yonge-University subway line) that is not being publicly announced due to legal wranglings with the P3 contractor. All in all it's a gross failure, and a pathetic one.
Which made it all the more unbelievable that Metrolinx decided to launch a PR campaign mocking those who complained about delays. Sometimes you get a glimpse of someone's personality by some action they take that seems to reveal in a moment all you need to know about them, and I get the feeling based on the public reaction this substantially hardened people's opinions. Now I know some people who have worked in or with Metrolinx, and I was aware of their general incompetence, their paralyzing bureaucratic approach, their malaise of indecision. I was not aware they were so contemptuous of the public. This 30 second advertisement and its accompanying campaign cost $2.25 million and was immediately pulled due to the response (all told, one of their more on-target projects).
But the real reason I wrote this is so I can share the amazing parody of the Metrolinx ad campaign that perfectly captures the passive-aggressive sanctimony.
johnfabian
28d ago
This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.
Experimentally proving the greenhouse effect is a common science class task for sixth graders. The author of this could probably do it with materials that exist in his house. This is a rather extreme self-imposed ignorance.
johnfabian
21d ago
There's another element: discovering wealth does not necessarily make you wealthier. Within 100 years of discovering the Cerro Rico at Potosi which essentially doubled the world's silver supply, the Spanish crown was serially bankrupt.
johnfabian
1mo ago
Anglo countries allow for individuals or groups to mount legal challenges to the state much more aggressively than other nations, and judges are much more likely to grant injunctions, freeze construction etc while those cases progress.
Amusing example recently from Toronto: the process is underway of electrifying the rail network in order to transform it into a German style S-bahn with frequent, fast, bi-directional service all day. This is legitimately maybe the most important public transport project in Canadian history, give or take the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions it might be the biggest individual project because it will displace tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of car trips yearly.
So it is totally rational for the project to have been delayed because a group of concerned citizens (who incidentally, live near the rail corridor) were worried that the electrification might affect a type of salamander in a nearby ravine. That is not to say the salamander actually lives in the ravine in question: but it might, and the electrification of the railway and the increased train traffic might affect it somehow. No, the salamander isn't endangered. But who knows: perhaps it one day will be?
johnfabian
26d ago
It might depend on what level of salami slicing is attempted. Estonia is a very soft target; there doesn't need to be some massive build-up of force to seize most or all of it. So let's say you have a normal force distribution at standard readiness in the Leningrad Military District. All of a sudden the wire comes in - ethnic Russians have been killed by the government of Estonia, and the rest need immediate protection to prevent the same! It's only a 200 km drive to Tallinn from the border. There are negligible forces in your way. How much preparation is actually needed at this point?
johnfabian
26d ago
I think a significant part of it is simply staff size. A 10-man team can create a work of art. A 1000-man team is answering to shareholders first.
johnfabian
28d ago
They sort of flip Jessica and Paul's eagerness with respect to the missionara protectiva prophecy; in the book Paul is all for it and Jessica reluctant. But in the movie it is Jessica who is the insistent one and Paul troubled with it. This makes Jessica seem much more manipulative and also lumps her in with the rest of the Bene Gesserit when she was supposed to be the black sheep
johnfabian
4mo ago
A brief retrospective on the Battlestar Galactica reboot:
So I saw the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. This interested me for a few reasons: firstly, I'm getting old. This was the first TV show I was actively a "fan" of, and as a young teenaged boy it was everything I could have wanted. Timing-wise, it aired in the last heyday of the network TV drama: before the writer's strike of 2007-08 that would see the bifurcation of television into cheap reality shows and "prestige" (but relatively little-watched) cable dramas. As such the show ever tries to balance itself between the seriousness of its concept and demands for mass appeal with 20+ episode seasons. But it also served as a sort of test case for the rebooted franchise, a phenomenon you may have observed has become more common in recent years. It is also not dissimilar to the slew of comic book movies in that it took a somewhat childish and cheesy media property aimed at children and "updated" it for adults. So in many respects it's interesting to see it again as a portent of the shape of things to come.
So I sat down and watched the miniseries, and then a bunch of episodes from season 1. It's still great, and although it collapsed into nonsense later in its four season run it's still very much worth a watch. Don't worry about spoilers here, I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you're interested then don't google anything. The characters are rich, the plotlines imaginative, the music might be the best ever composed for the small screen, and the special effects look great (especially for a constrained budget). And when the show fails, it does so trying to swing for the fences... or in an attempt to please network execs.
It's an interesting look back in time from a culture war standpoint, because it is a show very much of its time. It mines pretty heavily the feelings of post-9/11 America (though like almost all low-budget sci-fi, is staffed almost entirely by Canadians). There's an alternating sense of paranoia and simultaneous togetherness that runs through everything. The show muses repeatedly about the nature of overlapping civilian and military governance, and the appropriateness of how either might extend their power given the situation. The Iraq War of course provided inspiration no science fiction show could pass up, but the show generally opted for much more interesting parallels, and ones that you might not expect.
You might not also expect how little the ripped-from-the-headlines controversies resemble the culture wars of today. Take for instance the sex-swap of fan favourite, hotshot pilot "Starbuck", who was now a woman in the rebooted series. This is the sort of thing that has become a rote controversy in current media adaptations; inevitable long youtube rants about "wokeness" and trillion-dollar companies playing the victim ensues. There was a minor, albeit passionate outcry at the time, but was pretty solidly squashed by how well the show pulled it off, in part because the show makes no attempt to treat it as significant or lecture the audience. In fact there's almost no gender-war elements at play in the series, and the only one of note I can remember again does not play out how you might expect. (A bunch of characters were also "race-swapped"; some light googling suggests no one even cared at the time, nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly).
But there also exist parallels that didn't exist at the time: it's pretty impossible to watch it today and not think about it as an exploration of the dangers of AI. Of course, rebelling robots was a hackneyed concept even by the time the original series aired in the 1970s, but the reboot does a good job of imagining the ways superhuman intelligence might rapidly evolve out of our ability to contain or comprehend it.
So do you like sci-fi? Do you like drama? Do you like shows that respect your intelligence and don't treat you like a child, morally or intellectually? Do you like depictions of a military that is not totally incompetent and treats discipline as actually essential? Then hey, give it a shot. Though I understand it can be tricky finding it to stream legally; Amazon or torrents or 123moviestv dot net would be better options, especially because you want to start with the miniseries before season 1, episode 1.
Churchill in this message was actually reusing some of the same words he had used in a message to Anthony Eden two days previously (in the context of learning about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
"There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners' camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death." link
Ironically enough he torpedoes two denialist claims in this short message. No wonder they pretend it doesn't exist.
Anatomy of a slow-moving scandal: Canada's 2018 WJ hockey team
The "World Juniors", the under-20 international hockey championship, is probably the third-biggest sporting event for Canadians after the NHL playoffs and the Olympics. Played immediately after Christmas each year, it gets massive TV ratings as people are home for the holidays. It helps that Canada wins more often than not, though its hold on being the undisputed champion of ice hockey becomes more precarious year-by-year. The brightest stars of junior hockey in Canada are often already household names before they go onto their professional careers, and people look back at certain years with specific fondness for their wealth of talent, in particular the 2005 team.
Well no one is going to look back at the 2018 team with much fondness: five of its members have been ordered to surrender to police to face charges for the gang rape of a woman after a celebratory gala in June 2018 to commemorate their victory. The move towards criminal prosecution has been somewhat glacial; an investigation was briefly opened in February 2019, but was closed and the story never reached the press. In 2022 the victim sued Hockey Canada; they settled with her out of court, and it was this settlement that sparked media attention as news of the incident had never reached the public. The settlement ignited a real public scrutiny on Hockey Canada, which was revealed to have a special unmarked fund for compensating victims of sexual assault by its players, and using government funds to do so. The criminal case into the affair was re-opened, and the problem of sexual assault within Hockey Canada and hockey culture in general became a national debate.
Hockey culture is kind of weird. I grew up somewhat alongside it; I was good enough to play rep hockey, but my parents were too busy for it so apart from a summer when I was 12 I never got too deep into it. But I knew the guys who played AAA or junior hockey and a few future NHLers, and I got enough taste of the locker-room culture to put me off it. It's really not too dissimilar, from my understanding, to the culture of similar macho, competitive sports like American football; a mix of jokes and pranks and lighthearted misogyny and homophobia (with an undercurrent of repressed homoeroticism). For the really competitive teams hazing was common and could get quite severe, bordering on sexual assault of new players. If you're a really good player (not necessarily a future NHLer, but maybe a pro in Europe or somewhere) you leave your family at 14 or 15 to go play junior hockey in the CHL. Education is very much a lesser priority, you probably don't go to university, and there's generally few people telling you you're anything but hot shit. If you make it to the Canadian WJ team you're practically a national celebrity if only for a brief period of time. I think all of these things add together in not necessarily the most wholesome of ways.
So that this kind of scandal would happen, or that it would be swept under the rug only to eventually reappear later, is not entirely shocking. "Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal a real shock to anyone who has never met a junior hockey player" says The Beaverton, the Canadian equivalent of The Onion, and yeah that pretty much sums it up.
Since the coming to light of the incident in 2022 there's been a flurry of speculation about who might have done it: my understanding was only two of the players (including superstar Cale Makar) had airtight alibis as far as internet sleuths could tell. Every time news came out about one of the 2018 WJC players there was speculation it was somehow linked: a player being traded, or not being re-signed by their team, or rumours about locker room problems, etc. My team (the Ottawa Senators) didn't re-sign a player, Alex Formenton, from the 2018 WJC who had had a good season the year before, and so speculation swirled that everyone behind the scenes knew what was up. There have apparently been a few hunches confirmed: in the past day and a bit five players have been announced by their teams to be taking "indefinite leaves of absence." All five were semi-regular NHLers (except for the aforementioned Formenton who was now playing in Italy). I wonder whether there will be pushback against the teams that employed them, presumably knowing this was coming for a while.
There's no statute of limitations in Canada (except for treason, bizarrely: 3 years!). Presumably the London Police feel they have a strong enough case here: besides the woman there were apparently three others who saw and did not take part. As of yet I've seen no sort of arguments that the alleged victim was lying or something, but there are some conflicting details and perhaps more that will emerge as prosecution moves further along. This is after all what the criminal justice system is for. So as of yet this case has sort-of ignited a culture war debate, without yet succumbing to culture war neuroses quite yet. The last big sexual assault case that got national attention in Canada was gigantic clusterfuck (Jian Ghomeshi, if you're interested) and pretty badly damaged the credibility of the media. We'll see where this goes.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I finally caved and watched it. I had seen Malarchuk, I had seen Zednik (much less worse), wasn't particularly interested in seeing this one until I became aware there was a debate over whether it was intentional or not.
Do I think Petgrave deliberately kicked him in the throat? No. Do I think he deliberately raised his leg? That's harder to say. I play hockey and I flatter myself into thinking I have a generally decent understanding of this sort of thing. It's really, really difficult to try and parse intent by slowing down a video frame-by-frame. Hockey is a very fast sport and these sorts of collisions occur in fractions of a second. It is extremely tempting to read into these sort of things more than is actually there.
A little bit of background: about 15 years ago pro hockey started cracking down on hits to the head. There were a rash of bad concussions to high-profile players like Sidney Crosby and the general rumblings about the concerns of CTE, so the NHL, fans, and the general public were supportive of further restricting what was legal. (Before you could more or less hit people in the head without getting penalized, provided you did not commit another penalty in the process - this resulted in hits like this being entirely legal and generally celebrated). Before players were generally held to be responsible for themselves - don't want to get hit in the head? Don't skate through the neutral zone with your head down. Now the onus was reversed; it was the responsibility of the player hitting not to target their opponent's head.
This created two general trends: first, since the ban players have been generally less "heads up" in their play. It used to be keeping your head up was important for not getting concussed by the meathead on the other team; now you can more safely watch the puck while you're stickhandling. Part of the reason Johnson gets caught in the neck here is that he's looking down as he comes across the blueline (previously a very risky move), and so he's both unaware of the player coming at him and more crouched over.
Secondly, it has created a professional and hobbyist enthusiasm for watching slo-mo videos. In order to determine whether a hit merits a suspension, the league would look over video repeatedly from different angles and with different speeds trying to parse intent, and when they would announce the results of an inquiry they'd produce a handy film, JFK style (example). Similarly every time there's a big hit in the NHL you will see on social media fans poring over every frame trying to prove or disprove intent to injure. Very frequently you will see very absurd manipulations by fans to try and conjure up something that isn't there. A favourite tactic is to slow down the video before impact, and then speed it up at impact; this gives the impression of more deliberation by the hitter and a more violent impact.
So for Petgrave's hit: no I can't say for sure either way. It looks somewhat suspicious; he may well have been trying to stick a leg out to sort of block or hamstring Johnson. He might have lost his balance. He might have been trying to stick a leg out and then lost his balance. I think it would be fair to rule out any deliberate intent to hit Johnson so high, but whether the play itself was dirty I feel like I could be convinced either way.
What this incident reminds me of is a play about a decade ago where Matt Cooke, notorious head-hunter, severed the Achilles' of superstar Erik Karlsson. This was another incident where a notoriously dirty player injured a star, and there was an intense debate over the time whether it was deliberate or accidental. The discussion on it was inevitably coloured by the reputations of the two players.
Canada's most famous indigenous woman: not indigenous, not even Canadian
Buffy Ste-Marie is a musician. She has a deep discography of folk music that incorporates her indigenous identity and activism. She has lived a long and productive life as arguably the most famous Canadian indigenous woman. For Americans she's probably better known as the first woman to breastfeed on television, an interesting milestone in its own right. It's also good that this proves she's a woman, as it's the only element of her public identity that is still standing. In news that should shock exactly zero people who are tangentially aware of the notion of "Pretendians" in Canadian high society, the CBC has rather convincing evidence that Buffy Ste-Marie's version of her life's history is fraudulent.
The details have changed over the years - a sign in itself, if anyone would have risked official censure to point it out - but in general Ste-Marie has claimed herself to have been born to a Piapot Cree woman, and then subsequently removed from her birth mother (either because of her death, or forcibly as part of the "Sixties Scoop", which should have itself been a red flag considering she was born in 1941). She claimed to have been adopted by an American family, and later reconnected with and adopted by her birth people in Canada. Well, the documentary evidence seems fairly irrefutable: her "adoptive" parents were her birth parents. Her siblings are her full-siblings. She was born Beverly Santamaria in Massachusetts, and has no ancestral connection to Canada at all. Her father was Italian, her mother English.
She appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry in her early 20s, first claiming to be Mi'kmaq, a perhaps more believable white lie having grown up in New England. Alternatively, she said she was Algonqiun. A few years later she claimed she was Cree, which prompted her paternal uncle to correct a local newspaper on that fact in 1964. In the next few decades as her career began to take off, coinciding with a general surge of interest in Native American arts and culture, she increasingly resorted to legal threats to silence her family members from contradicting her self-constructed origin story, including threatening her brother that she would tell the world that he had sexually abused her.
I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published. It seems clear to me that Ste-Marie's story was not borne of confusion or innocent mistake, but was rather a deliberately and cynically constructed narrative that was upheld through threats and intimidation. The investigation was much more thorough and dug into a lot more nasty stuff than I expected. Ste-Marie was a Canadian legend, and had been endlessly fêted by the CBC (and other Canadian media) prior to this. I would point out that although the CBC has generally gone mushy progressive, its investigative journalism programs, namely Marketplace and The Fifth Estate (who undertook this project) have remained excellent and provide very good value for taxpayer money.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.
Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is the only possible outcome. Getting rid of DEI is an impossibility. Nobody with their hands on the levers of power actually wants to do it. All that will actually happen is Jews will get re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy, or a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy will be set up. And they will continue to collaborate throwing white people under the bus for literally everything.
Somebody writing for the Wall Street Journal did a bit of polling, and the results were amusingly predictable.
Only 47% of respondents could identify which river and which sea "from the river to the sea" meant. When shown the region on a map and realizing what the slogan would mean, 75% of respondents who had previously supported the slogan moderated their opinion.
johnfabian
5mo ago
I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.
Something I can speak of when I talk to friends and family about their shifting opinions on immigration is that there's a widespread sentiment that people feel their tolerance and generosity has been abused. Not necessarily by immigrants alone (or more accurately, not by immigrants who aren't international students), but also by federal and provincial governments. Most people I know are small-l liberals and up until a year or two ago were broadly supportive of immigration. Now people are much more skeptical, and think they might have been naïve about the intentions of government/business as well as the attitude of prospective immigrants. The change in opinions has been very rapid and has not necessarily come from people I would have expected. I think the Liberals might have killed the golden goose here by going too hard, too fast.
With respect to francophone immigrants from North Africa, in Canada there's been somewhat of a friction historically between them and middle Eastern Muslims. Maghrebien Canadians tend to be much more hostile to the hijab and other things they view as signs of Arabic cultural dominance within the Muslim world. Maghrebien immigrants broadly supported the Québec's government banning of public employees wearing "religious symbols" (which was effectively targeted specifically at the hijab).
Trump is an obese 77/78 year old. It makes sense to have a backup you'd be happy with regardless.
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