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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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NAME ONE LONG SENTENCE. ONE.

You are projecting Jan 6 and the failure and symbolic flagellations of it onto the trucker convoy.

Two entire different protest in two vastly different countries with VASTLY different outcomes.

Canada removed restrictions FASTER than the US after the Trucker convoy. In the Angloshpere and Europe it was by no means that the restriction would be removed at all. After the Convoy and sister protests in Europe and Australia exploded these contries opened faster and removed travel restrictions faster than the US.

The American restrictions on entry were only removed in May of this year, last month.

Stop projecting your American Doomer bullshit onto other Countries. Canada had a political revolution over the past year, the Netherlands had a complete political upset with the Dutch Farmer aligned BBB winning major political offices.

The fact YOU are under the thumb of your elite with no effective means of resistance or organization becuase Trump sucked all the energy out of the room and then tried to bargain it away to the elite, does not mean that resistance has failed in other countries.

the Netherlands had a complete political upset

It isn't often that we get a mention in this place, but as in all things, foreign takes on smaller nations' politics are nigh-universally mistaken. This is no exception.

First-off: people saw BBB's victory coming a mile away. Something isn't an 'upset' when it's been well-predicted in advance, so I'll take issue with the phrasing you're using here.

Even aside from that, this kind of thing isn't unprecedented, or really uncommon in Dutch politics. Charismatic protest movements do really well in elections all the time. In this millennium alone we've had the LPF, TON, PVV, FVD, and now BBB doing the whole run-around; when you get a new bunch of these guys every election cycle or so it's not so much EXCITINGLY NEW as it is business as usual.

Except, you know, that doesn't sell clicks, and foreigners love to map stuff abroad onto their own politics and vice versa, so now and then we get to roll our eyes. So it goes.

You are projecting Jan 6 and the failure and symbolic flagellations of it onto the trucker convoy.

I'm not "projecting", I am specifically considering them both as parts of the same phenomenon, because behind the local details, it's the same system at work in both places. As the comment on your claim "Becuase the flyover rubes are better than you.". They may be better than me, for sure, but I am not seeing them achieving anything near TOTAL VICTORY. I'd love for them to do this, but that's not what I am seeing happening. Nor in Canada, nor in the US. In fact, in Canada even worse than in the US, since Canada does not have US's constitutional freedom protections and it is way further on the road to fascism than the US, in general. One bad gun bill failing doesn't reverse all of that.

If, as you say, the flyover rubes were some kind of super-predator capable of overwhelming revolutionary victories, the same victories would be happening, many times over, in the US. They are not. Which puts this claim superiority into question. Unless Canadian rubes have some specific qualities that US rubes do not - which ones then?

The American restrictions on entry were only removed in May of this year, last month.

Very small number of people cares about entry restrictions in the US (and, I suspect, except for the US-Canada border, same goes for Canada). The flyover country person certainly doesn't. All the rest of the restrictions - important ones, ones that affect an average small business owner in a small flyover city - has been removed way earlier. The international ones lasted that long because nobody cared for that enough to push it. If you show that the internal restriction removal was affected by the protests, we'd have some basis for discussing it. But "we protested and in mere 8 months we got restrictions nobody cared about removed" is not something that can be seriously considered.

Canada removed restrictions FASTER than the US after the Trucker convoy

If we consider the internal ones, the ones that affect the average person, I find this claim very suspicious. "The US" is very different - Florida, California, Idaho, Alabama and New York had very different restrictions and timelines. So claiming Canada removed all the restrictions faster, and this was due to the protests (and not the number of cases and deaths dropping, for example) - I think needs some better support than just capital letters.

Canada had a political revolution over the past year,

I'll believe it when I see Trudeau prosecuted for abuses of power or at least a legislation enacted preventing further abuses, and there would be some way to ensure that this legislation would not be just ignored when inconvenient. Until then - enjoy your TOTAL VICTORY until the next time the government needs to squash you like a bug.

Canada had a political revolution over the past year, the Netherlands had a complete political upset with the Dutch Farmer aligned BBB winning major political offices.

Canada has had no revolution, you are imagining these things. The Netherlands had an election upset, but are the policies the farmers were objecting to -- the plans to shut down much of Dutch agriculture -- going away? No, because they're being pushed by Brussels, and without Nexit, there's nothing to be done.