Yes, let’s make Washington state a Canadian providence.
Totally cool making WA a Province but leave providence out of it. Canadian politics are aggressively secular and we would prefer any divinities keep their noses out of our maple-y business.
I think the point being made is that often women are called upon to do emotional labour by men who are often only acquaintances who look at them as resources that should be on the cultural hook to dispense emotional intimacy. A lot of women are fed up with the gendered nature of that expectation because you have a lot of men taking of that resource but not seeing it as being something they should actively be doing too and that their lack of reciprocation and participation in that space is a problem.
The fact that cultural norms prevent men from seeking solace from other men is a problem not just because it’s root lies in a lot of homophobia but because it creates both a category of gendered work for women and isolates men from their peers. Women are often pressured into that role which means if they don’t want to perform that function for any reason they can meet resistance as that emotional intimacy can be treated or assumed as being mandatory.
Nor is it a good idea to lay all your problems at the feet of an intimate partner regardless of gender. They have a lot of investment in you generally and it is easier to talk with them but they are generally ill equipped to shoulder all of your problems because they lack emotional distance to set you right if you are going astray. They often have other investments in you as well which means they cannot always tell it to you straight because if you disagree or react poorly they might lose you or jeopardize life goals and plans.
Being approachable and available to provide support should be a genderless issue with neither automatic expectation of providing or expected coldness laid at the feet of anyone.
Admittedly the Liberals are not my party of choice but there still is validity for voting for the lesser of two bad options. Until we can address the first past the post system we are beholden to voting more against than for a given regime by reaching a sort of mutual concensus with our neighbours before we hit the polls. That representive voting system needs to happen elsewise we’re stuck playing this dumb game.
But it’s hard to compare even this party I am not terribly enthusiastic to to the Democrats when there’s at least mediocre commitments to a number of decent causes toward reconciliation, reasonable commitment to the Kyoto climate accord targets, stated support of LGBTQIA+ causes and at least a lukewarm support of Palistine mostly expressed through refugee programs and a spineless condemnation of the atrocities and a recognition of two state authorities in the region. There’s also a much more robust court culture and a wider swath of people in the party who at least demonstrate a desire for a properly pluralistic, secular society.
It’s more useful to veiw the parties based on how they talk within their own parties because it’s not a presidential situation. There’s less unilateral moves to be made as a PM without party support is a lame horse. While I wish we would see wider endorsement of the NDP it’s not traditionally a popular party in the field and there’s way more swing between Libs and Conservatives.
The Liberals are trying their best to find a tasty middle ground for the “fiscal Conservative voter” to bite because strategy reasons. They put forward a candidate who is Albertan, Catholic, an outsider to politics with a lot of financial sector ties who pulls quotes from the era of the Quiet revolution and balancing government budgets for the discerning blue voter while the more leftist ones can chew on his ringing of alarm bells of wealth inequality, climate change and the lack of application of morals in the markets. He’s been largely silent on 2SLGBTQIA+ issues which while always a little unsettling the previous admin left on a very openly queer friendly stance so while again, not ideal, all that currently is needed at present is just not undoing what’s been done and supporting the stuff already in progress.
Is he everything we’ve dreamed? Not really. But it shows they are trying to build out a solid concensus candidate that a broad range of people can stomach.
Why are you trying to conflate Canadian Liberals and the Democrats? They aren’t remotely the same party, the systems of government don’t look anything alike and they aren’t in cahoots.
And the Canadian Conservatives are fronting a guy who has stated his support of American style “Right to Work” legislation and other Americanizing government initiatives who went into politics immediately from going to school for international affairs against a guy who has spent years as Governor of two National Central Banks and created a number of international contacts across the Commonwealth in the international financial sector that can be leveraged and yet Conservatives are trying to paint themselves as “better for the economy”. Pollievre has been utilizing anti gay anti queer dogwhistles in his rhetoric for the past ever as well. Fuck Right to Work bullshit and fuck anybody who wants to roll back civil protections. There’s not a lot of places in the world as safe as Canada for queer people to exist so it’s not like there’s much better places to escape once the fortress falls.
I think they want to expunge groups because a monoculture is easier to control. If everyone fits into a couple of narrow boxes that all speak the same language, fulfill the same roles, have the same hard limits on expression and are all able-bodied, mentally tuned to function as desirable cogs in a machine you get an easily exploitable force. It’s why they want all costs of maintenance and risk borne by the individual and more specifically the family unit which has the power to ostricize and disenfranchise on a micro scale. Pluralistic societies mean that the individual is supported by a culture of acceptance and those groups all run off of different rules which make demands of society. They want a society that makes very few demands but feels catered to thus earning higher levels of compliance.
While I don’t doubt your stance comes from a history of trauma, policing any kind of identity in this way causes real trauma to others. It causes a pervasive sense of isolation that is antithetical to feeling supported and secure and puts a check on a person’s ability to participate in their culture. Your lack of comfort does not mend leveling the playing field of stripping away the comfort of others if it is being expressed peacefully.
Bans also very become a very fuzzy line. Most holidays are based off of religious festivals that are widely participated in by the secular and non-secular alike. Once someone starts making exceptions because a wide number of people like a specific one you start creating an artificial canon where minority cultures are oppressed while a narrative of “dominant culture” is allowed giving certain religious traditions cultural supremacy. For example people inside the Church have been trying to get rid of the multitude of pagan festivals that were rebranded as Christmas for eons. They ended up just rubber stamping it because taking away something beloved doesn’t go well. In a modern context you could try and rebrand Christmas to a non-religious holiday… But good luck. It’s layers of Christian over Pagan imagery and traditions fused into a gastalt religious melange. Any governing body that has tried to get rid of it before has spectacularly failed and leaving it be would quickly become a symbol to people who come from places with different dominant partially seclarized religious traditions that they remain cultural outsiders who don’t have the nessisary concensus to participate in public. It would translate directly into supremacy narratives.
It’s healthier for a society by far not to police the range of peaceful human expression and connection. People deserve to see themselves represented and connect with each other without needing to act like undercover spies in hostile territory.
Nobody. Canadians are worried about a good old fascist… I mean fashioned war war.
I am less shocked and more resigned. Been tracking the progress of the Republican party over a decade now and watching them throw out euphemism after euphemism as they just aren’t needed anymore. What the reaction of shock got us back then was “alarmist” since the Conservative playbook was so layered up in dogwhistles the average person thought it was tinfoil hat fodder.
The base was being groomed to accept this as an outcome and so they were slow boiled. It was that way for the Nazis too. Each terrible move wasn’t quick it was the next horrible logical conclusion of their worldview of removing the “useless” aspects of humanity. They started first in government services and then with eugenics in mental health care while dismantling queer infrastructure in cities under the same eugenics line citing them as non-reproductive genetic dead ends. Then it turned to homelessness. Then as their policies created more “useless” classes of people in the form of minorities who could not legally work because of the laws they passed they turned to liquidation of those groups. Each step was followed by a pause to make the rhetoric more callus to build off the basic premise that as an able-bodied, regularly employed, sane, cishet, white, Christian / atheist that your resources were personally being stolen from you to feed the “undeserving”.
How far back can you remember Republicans on their soap box about people being undeserving of assistance or support? About people being a waste of resources or campaigning to make those people easier to stigmatize? It shouldn’t be surprising after over a decade that they’ve been dropping the mask.
Are you talking about the NATO shortfall? Because the Canadian government has a number of places where it is scrambling to find budget for a lot of things. Consider
An expanded commitment to rehoming and financially supporting refugees from Ukraine. Processing and approving 962,612 submissions starting from 2022
Reconciliation efforts with notoriously under served indigenous nations to improve dismal conditions of services support, locate and providing funding to document the Residential school genocide and providing better support to survivors.
Reinvestment in one of the most challenging Public health care landscapes in the world due to the sheer landmass the government is constitutionally on the hook to cover.
A history making sized population of people now reaching retirement age and requiring more drastic critical health interventions and social supports than ever before.
Static commitments like NATO spending are a bit like rent. If you are financially struggling through other financially challenging problems the landlord cannot often be convinced to give you a temporary forgiveness for extenuating circumstances. All of the above things are challenges that are either in service to international peace against the encroachment of Russia, the thing NATO was created to do, or they represent inflexible commitments the government has to serve the needs of it’s people as written into it’s own laws… But a NATO landlord has a contract with a number and the number doesn’t change no matter what.
These jabs are only vaguely in your direction. I have been aiming past you to people who are not shut down. You have decided to stay sidelined which I have said at multiple points, is fine. You do you. But what you keep doing is to try, quite transparently, to discredit the seriousness with which I am taking the situation by signaling to the people around me that inaction is noble. That what I am doing is shameful… That is my only problem with how you comport yourself because otherwise even those who are useless are fairly neutral.
But you aren’t useless, you are taking this personally. You are throwing up your hands and crowing victim which is another silencing tactic well worn in circles that aim to keep the conversation going so the solve never comes. That isn’t useless behavior , it is undermining tactics. This isn’t about you. Get over yourself.
At this point this convo is so buried that the point has essentially passed so I will not continue. Goodbye.
Get used to there being a front line because as this gets worse these mediums of communication are going to get more action driven. You think it’s overkill now but the more you get used to hearing other people calling for ACTUAL action the more you will see what it actually looks like and will know what you could be participating in. This is likely lost on you because at this point you are simply reacting to being checked.
Yesterday the US failed diplomatically at a fundemental level with allies who are key to policing the international waters and air between the USA and Russia. Don’t be fooled. It is not just a trade war, it is a softening of US defenses as well. Priorities will be changing and depending they could change faster than you expect. If this follows the patterns of other historical conflicts we will all only learn how critical our time was at this stage in hindsight.
No APATHY is calling a call for further action moreso than the feather touch of resistance “being an edgelord” it’s an attempt to shame someone into less vocal rhetoric so that people take what is happening less seriously. It’s an attempt to shame people out of mobilizing.
You want to stay out of the frontline? Fine. Move to the rear and stay out of the way of the people who are showing up People who are taking classes in collective action or medic training, showing up to protests and getting arrested or helping their neighbours with minor acts of institutional sabotage. You don’t get to shame on people taking this more seriously than you are.
We are so far beyond caring about toothless boycotts.
Well quite frankly nobody asked for this but we have it and we’re not the first fucking generation to have to put aome skin on the line to make the place we live habitable after everything goes to shit. If you think all you can do is wait to cash your ballot or wave a sign then I am speaking to you. It’s time to organize better and move because it is only going to get worse from here.
You are free to ignore this. You are free to go quietly. However keep your destructive apathy to yourself. More of us have to look apathy and personal disenfranchisement from the system in the eye and see it as the weight that stops any of this from ever getting better.
Your government design and allocation of power made it so one person could do this. Trump is simply the first to flaunt the social contract this brazenly. There was no lock on the door, only a verbal agreement not to go through it.
Once this is done, once Trump is deposed the fight will not be over. Measures must be enacted to make the systems safe so that another Trump can’t do this ever again. The system is just as liable for this happening as the man himself. We need to stop thinking in terms of singular bad actors and recognize faults in system design because otherwise it is just a waiting game for the next bad actor to do just as bad or worse.
It is your government. This is your head of state and the head of the US government weilding power that once belonged to Congress but ceeded to the executive branch about a hundred years ago. This man represents you.
I understand it is uncomfortable. That you wish it wasn’t so I get it… But Do not diminish this fact because these are the stakes. He is your, I repeat Your, Government. Do not wash your hands of him acting as he does because in your silence and denial he still acts on your behalf and you need so much more than silence and denial.
The anti-trans community does have a branch devoted to hating on trans men. It just looks different and has different targets. Trans hate in this direction is often quite patriarchal. It looks at trans men as a loss of a valued resource in the form of a reproductive object. It paints them as lost and confused little girls who were led astray by peers and the confusion of existing under patriarchal oppression into taking the easy way and becoming traitors to their category. Trans hate towards Trans men has largely the same hallmarks of homophobia and the social oppression that women will regret any non-natural change to their bodies or that they will regret not having babies. Trans men are framed as “a mistake”.
The second half of transmisandry is erasure focused on refusing to acknowledge some of the biological realities of Trans men. For example that for some trans men it is still possible to become pregnant or have periods. This second half props up the first half as it erases the fact that the social category of men do get pregnant and when they do resources are often riddled with stigma, services do not support them as frequently and they are treated as less valid a parent.
So. We don’t have a fentanyl “czar” we have Erin O’Gorman President of the Canada Border Services Agency who has been in the position since 2022 and was not appointed at the behest of Trump. The whole situation with requested assistance to halt the bleed of illegal guns from the USA has been something we’ve advocated for for a long time but the US tends to not take Canadian affairs very seriously because we are effectively a very small country with only marginally more population than the state of California. Honestly, we’ve never been prioritized as Americans cannot be made to care that they are shit neighbours.
Additional boarder Enforcement was approved 6 months ago when Trump was elected due to the possibility of another influx of immigrants fleeing the US which happened the first time Trump was in office due to proposed travel bans. It is here to stay as instability in the US is rising. We also dropped the requirements for recruitment to branches of the military because we are taking these threats seriously. If Trump never asked for anything we would be doing the same thing.
Trump essentially just threw a tantrum, we told him we would cover it because he was asking for things already in progress but what he wanted was to crow his strong man tactics to the media which is what he got.
Do not be fooled by media exaggerating the “wins” of Trump. He’s just using flash and glitter and misdirection.
It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.
Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.
Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.
If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.
If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.
What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.
Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.
Considering the US has the more millitary bases on foreign soil than the rest of the world combined…
Actually let me recontextualize this so you realize how much America has a gun to the rest of the world’s collective heads. The number of foreign bases, exempting potential secret off the record ones, held by the totality of nations Other than the US is less than 100. The US has over 750 bases on foreign soil in over 80 countries.
How did you think America had gotten away with it’s warcrimes scott free until now? Until America itself calls the shot the rest of us are basically on tiptoe.
I get what you are saying but at the same time as a Canadian that comes across as more American-centric myopia.
We are a small country in terms of people with only nominally more people than the state of California spread out over a landmass 1.6% larger than the US. Our energy infrastructure doesn’t fully connect through our own country and due to American strong arming a lot of our manufacturing industry is not super robust. It’s the Goose next to the Eagle. We’re tough enough to defend ourselves and make it hurt to attack us but we aren’t getting anything out of this fight. For us it’s a fight for our lives not a fight we can profit off of. Whatever wounds we take in this fight will soften us up for the regular problems we fight. The forest fires that have become exponentially worse through climate change that have erased entire cities off our map. The healthcare crisis of a mass of retiring boomers needing more care in a system that has constantly under fire from Americanizing rhetoric that has caused disinvestment from an ethically better system. The protectionist rhetoric that comes with conflict which will erode the systems of government and create legal precedent for more autocratic means of operation that will need to be later undone. The pausing of reconciliation efforts with indigenous nations. This conflict, even as it is now, will cause real trackable losses of life and livelihood some of which will not come back.
Our existence and future as a sovereign nation is threatened but nope “The US will be the real victims of this”? Bloody fucking tonedeaf mate.