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Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
Look Fabricator, I don't know either woman enough to be able to judge if they are telling the truth or not. If you know them better than I do I will defer to your opinion. If you don't know them any better than I do then shut up about it. Are we good, Mr Superior?Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
Stop being an idiot. You know damn well that when republicans were accused of sexual harassments that democrats said the women should be believed. I'm on record as saying the women should NOT be believed whether it be a republican or dem that is accused. This isn't some gotcha moment. I simply want to know where you stand but getting a straight answer from you is like pulling teeth.Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
This is the last time I will comment on this topic. You may think this is a black and white, yes or no, believe or not believe issue. Maybe when you mature a little more you will understand that not much in this world is black and white. There is a lot of gray.
So, when I say I don't know these women well enough to judge whether they are telling the truth or not, that is exactly what I mean.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
That is yet to be seen.
So it appears that you are admitting that when Billy said that women should not automatically be believed he was correct.You may think this is a black and white, yes or no, believe or not believe issue. Maybe when you mature a little more you will understand that not much in this world is black and white. There is a lot of gray.
So, when I say I don't know these women well enough to judge whether they are telling the truth or not, that is exactly what I mean.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
The thing that has always frustrated me about copier addict is his refusal to debate an issue openly and honestly. Take the current topic. I ask him if women should be believed. He comes back and says that "I don't know these women well enough to say one way or another."
Duh! The issue isn't whether or not he knows these women. The issue is whether or not women in general should automatically be believed like the dems say they should. When pressed, copier addict refuses to give a straight answer.Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
This explains why Canada has never elected a black Prime Minister
How Canada tries to hide its racism by pointing a finger at the U.S.
In 1969, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau famously said that living beside the United States was like “sleeping with an elephant.” Indeed, a beast of such size is impossible to ignore in even a king-sized bed, and his every grunt and movement becomes the problem of his bedfellow.
Canadians love to conceive of our relationship with the United States like this: we are helpless and can do little against the giant beside us. Roll over. Put a pillow on your head. Hope to God he doesn’t roll over on you.
But the relationship is much more than a tale of a helpless small animal keeping an even keel in the midst of an elephant. Our identity is formed not simply by lying beside the beast, but also by using the United States to whitewash and obscure our own reality.
The United States is more like a thick fog that we use to hide reality and create the fantasy that we are better: our racism is kinder, our inequality is milder, our problems aren’t as bad and therefore, life here is great.
This mythmaking forms the basis of mainstream thought that can be applied to pretty much any issue. The Globe and Mail editorial board used this as a justification for why Canadians should not support defunding the police: “Canada’s problems, though related, are different in nature and scale. As noted earlier this week, the number of people who die at the hands of police in Canada each year is around 26; in the U.S., it is more than 1,300.”
Policing, gun violence and racism get this treatment the most. White Canadian pundits and politicians are fast to reach to American statistics to argue that things here aren’t so bad.
argued that this is a common trope: “The premiers’ comments reflect a misconception that runs through the veins of Canadian society. Canadians have a history of presenting themselves as 'less racist' than the U.S., but systemic racism is as old as Canada itself.” She then details how Canada’s immigration system has discrimination built into it, through the points system that allows some people to immigrate to Canada more easily.
Deflecting criticism by referencing the United States has a long history in Canada, and it helps maintain white supremacy by calming people into believing that things in Canada aren’t so bad, if you look at the United States.
When politicians and journalists dodge criticism by pointing to the United States, they weasel out of needing to take how a problem has evolved specific to Canada seriously. It becomes an easy way to ignore important issues.
Canada might rank behind the United States in police killings, but the rate of people killed by police is far higher than most other countries, including France, Australia, the Netherlands and Portugal. The Globe and Mail missed this detail.
The defund the police and Black Lives Matter movements have roots in Canada that are as deep as they are in the United States.
"The habit of using American fog to hide Canada’s own systemic racism has perpetuated white supremacy, and allowed decision-makers to avoid dealing with the problems that racism causes."
Canada’s legacy of slavery is different than the United States’ but because of that difference, the echoes that exist today look different. Different is not a synonym of better.
More than 4,000 people were enslaved in Canada, and the richest Canadian families and religious orders owned slaves. Slaves were a mix of Indigenous and Black people, and a Black slave was evidence that someone had greater economic power.
Mainstream Canadian history took stories from the Underground Railroad to sanitize this history: rather than being a nation built on slavery, Canada welcomed freed slaves.
Where the economic power from slave-grown crops in the United States formed the basis for modern capitalism there, Canada derives its economic power from natural resources. Clearing vast territories to make way for resource extraction or farming: that’s the foundation of Canada’s modern economy. To do this required a concerted genocide against Indigenous Peoples, organized by the state and religious organizations and carried out by soldiers, police and religious activists.
The most efficient tool to achieve this was through the Canadian Pacific Railway, built to flood Western Canada with white settlers and to ship goods to market. The CPR was built by thousands of Chinese labourers. They weren’t slaves, but they were paid less than half of what white workers were paid, and given the most dangerous jobs along the most brutal parts of the railway to do the work.
Canada’s labour market, where racialized people are paid less and expected to put themselves in danger, is the true legacy of this history.
There is a straight line between the origins of Canada’s racist economy and the fact that the overwhelming majority of workers who have died from COVID-19 have been racialized: among health-care workers, the majority have been Black.
There are so many other examples too, the largest being the temporary foreign worker program, which is premised on the idea that foreign workers can be paid less to do difficult or dangerous work at wages that Canadian workers refuse.
The habit of using American fog to hide Canada’s own systemic racism has perpetuated white supremacy, and allowed decision-makers to avoid dealing with the problems that racism causes.
Until we ditch this trope, white supremacy will remain firmly entrenched in Canada.
Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
One of the worst things is they don't teach this in school. The first Canadian Prime Minister, John A MacDonald, was the architect of the residential school system along with the Catholic church. A system that stole indigenous children from their parents and tried to take away their heritage. It was a terrible thing.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
... to elect a black Prime Minster of Canada, such a person would have to first run for the office.
One of Canada's opposition party leaders is Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic Party. He has a long shot chance of becoming Canada'a next Prime Minister.
Upon his election, Singh became the first person of a visible minority group to lead a major Canadian federal political party on a permanent basis.
Singh is also the first turban-wearing Sikh to sit as a provincial legislator in Ontario.He has been widely recognized in Canadian media for his fashion and style sense.Ideologically, Singh identifies as both a progressive and a social democrat. He advocates raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, decriminalizing personal possession of all drugs, and supports eliminating several tax deductions available to the highest-income earners.Comment
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Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
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Re: The Shining City Upon a Hill
... please continue to quote six month old opinion pieces to try and make whatever point you are trying to make. If you read the articles you post, other than just the headline, you will learn so much about America's largest trading partner and greatest ally.
"An opinion piece is an article, usually published in a newspaper or magazine, that mainly reflects the author's opinion about a subject".
An opinion piece is one authors's opinion on a topic. Opinion's do not have to be factual, data driven nor scientific. Opinion pieces helps newspapers and others retain readership and drive advertising revenues.
Kind of like the late Rush Limbaugh. His entire career was about defending and promoting far right US political topics and he made a lot of money for himself and his broadcasters doing so.Comment
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Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
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