The not so Great Racism in Canada Thread

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by esquire

You're right. As kool m. put it recently, any reasonable person will agree with the proposition that Black Lives Matter. And in the Canadian context, you could also add Indigenous Lives Matter. I'd imagine that people would support efforts to make the justice system fairer, to promote equal opportunities for those in historically disadvantaged communities, etc.

The problem is that the initial successes stirred up a frenzy of fringe ideas like the whole "Defund the Police" thing. I mean, I'm sure people would support carving off some police funding to provide increased mental health resources, help for those with addictions, etc. But the activists calling for abolition of police are living in an undergraduate's dream world. No actual grown up would take that seriously. And as the ideas coming from the echo chamber get more extreme, dumber and more alienating to broad swaths of the population, the more the movement consigns itself to irrelevance.

Every movement is a mélange of opinion. “Defund the police” means carving off money for other tactics, which you deem acceptable. “Abolish the police” can mean get rid of them entirely or get rid of them and replace them with something else. “Defund” is the far more prevalent idea I have heard. Focusing so heavily on the extreme position and then saying that that “consigns” the movement to irrelevance is a choice you and others here are making. It is not being foisted upon you. You are capable of listening and weeding through this time of change in many ways. We each hear what we want to hear because it suits our own purposes in some way.

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by rousseau

I think the superficial similarities between Canada and/or Manitoba and Minnesota are overshadowed by the differences. I ranted about this several years ago: https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6854136#post6854136

Jesse "The Body" Ventura was once governor of Minnesota. That alone pretty much makes it impossible for Minnesota to be anything like Canada.

Words like “impossible” or “anything” indicate a kind of black and white thinking. Minnesota is both similar to Canada and vastly different. Conglomerations of millions of individuals readily allow for such paradoxes.

The Fords also come to mind as an obvious counterpoint.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

Every movement is a mélange of opinion. “Defund the police” means carving off money for other tactics, which you deem acceptable. “Abolish the police” can mean get rid of them entirely or get rid of them and replace them with something else. “Defund” is the far more prevalent idea I have heard. Focusing so heavily on the extreme position and then saying that that “consigns” the movement to irrelevance is a choice you and others here are making. It is not being foisted upon you. You are capable of listening and weeding through this time of change in many ways. We each hear what we want to hear because it suits our own purposes in some way.

But that’s not how words normally work. “Defund” means stop funding.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund

If you wanted to change funding in health care (say with more emphasis on preventative care instead of acute care) you would not stand in front of a hospital with a “Defund Health Care” sign.

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by acottawa

But that’s not how words normally work. “Defund” means stop funding.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund

If you wanted to change funding in health care (say with more emphasis on preventative care instead of acute care) you would not stand in front of a hospital with a “Defund Health Care” sign.

They mean reduce funding. It takes a few minutes of research and curiosity to figure that out.

I was also confused by the wording at first.

So many changes in modern life only require some time and effort to understand, if you actually want to understand them.

We have so many resources at our finger tips and we are each responsible for our own education.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

They mean reduce funding. It takes a few minutes of research and curiosity to figure that out.

I was also confused by the wording at first.

So many changes in modern life only require some time and effort to understand, if you actually want to understand them.

We have so many resources at our finger tips and we are each responsible for our own education.

Defund means defund, which means cancelling the funding of, and some of the radical anarchists hiding behind the BLM movement want precisely this.

If BLM wants to be taken seriously, then they should have a well defined organization and a spokesperson, as well as a manifesto of achievable goals that they can bring to a negotiating table. In addition, they require internal discipline, so that the government representatives they negotiate with will know that if an agreement can be reached, that the demonstrations and civil disobedience will cease.

Instead, the government has only an angry mob staring them in the face, goaded on by professional agitators and committed anarchists. The anarchists have no desire to reach an agreement.

Who speaks for BLM anyway????

[wg_flamip]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I have long suspected that the strong anti-nationalism wasn't simply a virtuous desire for greater fraternity among the world's peoples across borders.

Global corporate interests don't want a world of *citizens* (loyal to countries or nations), they want a world where our only identities are as *consumers*.

We ought to make a distinction between those who believe in creating and nurturing globalized identities and those who merely seek to facilitate the global movement of goods and capital. Though the latter group may appropriate the language of the former to make their actions palatable and/or defensible, the two groups are fundamentally at odds.

Global capital has a vested interest in preventing the formation of a global class consciousness among workers. In the current globalized economy, national identity and, by extension, nationalism are used to alienate parts of the global supply chain from each other. Labour in the Uzbek cotton field, the Bangladeshi garment factory and the Canadian clothing shop are kept from forming a united front against the capitalist class that extracts wealth from their combined labour, for example.

[wg_flamip]

Originally Posted by LakeLocker

I'm a firm believer a sexually liberal society occurs when the rich dominate society.

When has anyone but the rich dominated society? And what does "sexually liberal" mean anyway?

The morality of sex has always been in flux, is rarely if ever universal across or universally enforced against all groups within a society, and is not some linear scale with permissiveness on one end and repression the other. While in many respects our society has become more permissive over recent decades, it has simultaneously become less so on other fronts. Take the prohibition of cousin marriages and the rising age of consent, for example. Or consider our society's increasing discomfort with nudity in gender-segregated environments like locker rooms.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

The hippies...role in articulating and implementing social change is really overstated here.

They were a potent and identifiable amalgam of the countercultural ideas swirling around in the 1960s that resulted in fundamental changes in mainstream life in the West, first filtering down to the high school kids in the 1970s and then eventually to the rest of society by the 1980s. Everybody knew who they were and what they represented.

For example, in terms of sex, Playboy magazine started up in the 1950s, but always idealized a Mad Men/James Bond style of risque lifestyle mostly unavailable to those outside the executive class. The plumbers and mechanics hanging the centrefolds up in their shops were fully aware that the paeans to libidinous freedom in the articles were not for them. That all changed in the 1970s, when plumbers and mechanics began leaving their wives for spirited women "finding themselves" (another hippie trope).

Penthouse and Hustler started up in 1969 and 1974, respectively, and pushed the boundaries by offering more explicit material. There was no way that the latter two would even have been conceived of in the 1950s.

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

Social mores around sex had started loosening up long before the 1960s. Taboos surrounding premarital sex were already loosening up in the 1920s, enabled by the increasing availability of contraception.

Sexual mores did not loosen up in the 1920s. The carnality of the flapper era and the Weimar Republic documented in illustrated magazines was strictly the province of very specific neighbourhoods and social classes in a handful of major cities.

The 1960s were when previously hidden or avoided social mores and practices were thrust into the foreground of public life. Not sure how this can possibly be contentious.

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Defund means defund, which means cancelling the funding of, and some of the radical anarchists hiding behind the BLM movement want precisely this.

If BLM wants to be taken seriously, then they should have a well defined organization and a spokesperson, as well as a manifesto of achievable goals that they can bring to a negotiating table. In addition, they require internal discipline, so that the government representatives they negotiate with will know that if an agreement can be reached, that the demonstrations and civil disobedience will cease.

Instead, the government has only an angry mob staring them in the face, goaded on by professional agitators and committed anarchists. The anarchists have no desire to reach an agreement.

Who speaks for BLM anyway????

This interpretation is your choice. Ranting louder and harder does not make it universally true. Those that want to abolish the police have no chance of achieving that goal so what is the point in being alarmed.

BLM is a movement. It is not an organization. People are taking it seriously. Change is happening. Your alarm is panicky and hard for me to fathom.

How has this really had a negative impact on any of our lives?

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

They mean reduce funding. It takes a few minutes of research and curiosity to figure that out.

I was also confused by the wording at first.

So many changes in modern life only require some time and effort to understand, if you actually want to understand them.

We have so many resources at our finger tips and we are each responsible for our own education.

That’s not an effective way to get anything accomplished. Your personal definition of “defund” might not mean defund, that does not mean others have the same definition. It reminds me of the Trump press secretary trying to explain how whatever nonsense Trump says was not what he actually meant.

[LakeLocker]

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

When has anyone but the rich dominated society? And what does "sexually liberal" mean anyway?

Living in a society where it is socially acceptable to have multiple partners.

In a society where this is allowed rich men cycle through young woman.

with old women being ignored and poor men being celibate.

In a society where this is frowned about monetary inequality doesn't so intensely translate to social inequality.

This becomes hyper relevant when you live in a society like our own, where material wealth is far far detached from social inequality.

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

The morality of sex has always been in flux, is rarely if ever universal across or universally enforced against all groups within a society, and is not some linear scale with permissiveness on one end and repression the other. While in many respects our society has become more permissive over recent decades, it has simultaneously become less so on other fronts.

Not sure what your point is, other than to say history is fluid.

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

Take the prohibition of cousin marriages and the rising age of consent, for example.

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

Or consider our society's increasing discomfort with nudity in gender-segregated environments like locker rooms.

Eh wha?

[wg_flamip]

Originally Posted by rousseau

They were a potent and identifiable amalgam of the countercultural ideas swirling around in the 1960s that resulted in fundamental changes in mainstream life in the West, first filtering down to the high school kids in the 1970s and then eventually to the rest of society by the 1980s. Everybody knew who they were and what they represented.

You're talking about how the hippies were interpreted after the fact, as a symbol of the countercultural ideas swirling around. They were not, however, the originators of those ideas, nor did they ever present those ideas as part of a cohesive platform for social change against which we can evaluate their accomplishments.

Originally Posted by rousseau

Sexual mores did not loosen up in the 1920s. The carnality of the flapper era and the Weimar Republic documented in illustrated magazines was strictly the province of very specific neighbourhoods and social classes in a handful of major cities.

Sexual mores absolutely did loosen up in the 1920s. Although you're right in that this was not experienced uniformly across location and class, you're severely underestimating the scope and significance. We're not just talking about back alley Berlin and the antics of the Bloomsbury Set here. The 1920s
saw increasing momentum behind the contraception movement (see: Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Bagshaw in the UK, US and Canada, respectively). They also marked the first availability of the industrially produced condom. This didn't totally upend sexual morality at the time, but it laid the groundwork for how that morality evolved into and through the following decades, including the 1960s.

Originally Posted by rousseau

The 1960s were when previously hidden or avoided social mores and practices were thrust into the foreground of public life. Not sure how this can possibly be contentious.

What's contentious is not that radical changes occurred in the 1960s, but how and why they occurred. It is my argument that those changes were the result of the continued evolution of social forces and material circumstances that long predated the hippies. My contention is that hippies were, in a sense, instruments of change rather than agents of change.

[wg_flamip]

Originally Posted by LakeLocker

Living in a society where it is socially acceptable to have multiple partners.

In a society where this is allowed rich men cycle through young woman.

with old women being ignored and poor men being celibate.

In a society where this is frowned about monetary inequality doesn't so intensely translate to social inequality.

This becomes hyper relevant when you live in a society like our own, where material wealth is far far detached from social inequality.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. It appears you're using examples of how you'd use a term without ever defining what it means to you, even when asked.

Originally Posted by LakeLocker

I'm not saying I support cousin marriage or a lower age of consent, just noting that increased permissiveness with regard to some sexual acts/ideas can occur simultaneous to decreased permissiveness toward other acts/ideas (see: Foucault's The History of Sexuality).

Originally Posted by LakeLocker

Eh wha?

Well, take this, for example.

[saffronleaf]

Originally Posted by dreambrother808

You choose this interpretation because it allows you to use a very broad brush to discredit an entire movement.

Everyone is racist. We are all the problem. White people have more power to change that because they have been invested with more power over generations in a white supremacist society that was designed to benefit them at the expense of others.

White people who refuse to recognize that are a bigger problem, naturally.

This is so infantilizing, patronizing, and condescending that I really do wonder if you're deep down a White supremacist who has found a new, morally acceptable way to intellectually masturbate over how special White people are.

[saffronleaf]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

And what's palatable to the majority will expand, due to the current activism. That's how it works. In fact, it has probably worked, or begun to work, already, it's just a matter of seeing how far the energy takes it.

Sometimes they have bad ideas and try to effectuate bad change.

Look at the huge support among liberal elites in Europe for pedophilia during / after the sex revolution.

See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws

[saffronleaf]

Originally Posted by acottawa

But that’s not how words normally work. “Defund” means stop funding.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund

If you wanted to change funding in health care (say with more emphasis on preventative care instead of acute care) you would not stand in front of a hospital with a “Defund Health Care” sign.

I wonder how Team Blue interpreted statements by Republicans about defunding Obamacare. Surely just an intelligent reallocation of funding?

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by saffronleaf

This is so infantilizing, patronizing, and condescending that I really do wonder if you're deep down a White supremacist who has found a new, morally acceptable way to intellectually masturbate over how special White people are.

I think you've nailed it. The self-abasement really does seem like a classic case of psychological projection.

[LakeLocker]

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. It appears you're using examples of how you'd use a term without ever defining what it means to you, even when asked.

Hypergamy (colloquially referred to as "marrying up", occasionally referred to as "higher-gamy"[1]) is a term used in social science for the act or practice of a person marrying a spouse of higher caste or social status than themselves.

It becomes incredibly common when people aren't bound by marriage.


I.e. all the young women want to be with wealthy men.


So you get a whole lot of poor men who can't maintain stable relationships.


Those young women get old and are discarded some time between 25 and 30.

This has been happening time and time again since as far as we can go back.

Hypergamy brings about inequality between men which in term brings in more violence.


It is a cycle that we've been going through for 400,000 years.

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

I'm not saying I support cousin marriage or a lower age of consent, just noting that increased permissiveness with regard to some sexual acts/ideas can occur simultaneous to decreased permissiveness toward other acts/ideas (see: Foucault's The History of Sexuality).

Sure, I'm still not sure what you're trying to say.

Originally Posted by wg_flamip

Well, take this, for example.

My point is how in the hell is that relevant? Are we charting how people react to dogs fucking now?

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by saffronleaf

This is so infantilizing, patronizing, and condescending that I really do wonder if you're deep down a White supremacist who has found a new, morally acceptable way to intellectually masturbate over how special White people are.

You sound hysterical.

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by rousseau

I think you've nailed it. The self-abasement really does seem like a classic case of psychological projection.

Some of us have enough self-esteem to admit obvious racial realities without viewing it as self-abasement.

But you have shown adept argumentative skill. Being able to make clearly racist statements and then find a way to turn that around to accuse the person who pointed that out. How creative, clever, and amoral.