Canada General Discussion (2019-)

[Vosem]

Yeah, if there's a political party this Canadian election trying to brush off scandals with "grow up, nobody really cares about that", it's the Liberals.

[Vosem]

Impeach Trudeau !!

There is no impeachment in Canada, which means that you are supporting an unconstitutional coup against the elected Canadian government.

Yeah, the point when the government is suspending civil liberties, using measures designed for wartime or response to large-scale terrorist actions, is the point when this sort of thing starts to become thinkable. The silver lining, I suppose, is that in 1970 Quebec was only 6 years away from 1976, so perhaps Canada is only 6 years away from reappraisal too.

My understanding is that this measure is going to enable the seizure of bank accounts and crowdfunding proceeds, which is entirely unacceptable even if we were dealing with literal Stalinists or Nazis. Money is speech.

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Has it actually dawned upon  Is any critic of the Canadian government's action here that  Freezing the bank accounts of The protesters Until they cease illegally trespassing and shutting down the roads as they have been for weeks  Is is an infinitely more humane and Is non violent response than the typical American version of sending in cops with truncheons and tear gas?

No, actually extrajudicially seizing people's property is a much less civilized response than arresting them and letting the judiciary decide whether they've done anything wrong. There would be far less outrage if Trudeau had done the Canadian equivalent of sending in the National Guard.

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Do you think Stalin was better than Hitler?

Yes, actually. In the real world it is very often necessary to choose a lesser evil.

[Vosem]

Do you think Stalin was better than Hitler?

Yes, actually. In the real world it is very often necessary to choose a lesser evil.

Do you think that people in Ukraine or then eastern Poland or the Balkans or Belarussia or Finland during World War II would have regarded Stalin as better than Hitler?

I'm aware that Hitler was also brutal to especially people in Ukraine and Poland, but I don't think for people in Ukraine that all that many people would have believed that Hitler was worse than Stalin.

Yes, very many of them did. Some didn't initially, to be sure, but most histories of WW2 will underscore that Nazi occupation generally grew more brutal/genocidal over time, and by 1943, when Mr. Hunka joined the SS, there was very little popular support left for them on the ground. On March 20, 1943, the OUN -- who agreed with the Nazis on killing Jews and enslaving Poles and various race theories, and were led by the notorious Stepan Bandera -- nevertheless declared war on Germany. This was before it was even obvious that the Germans would lose; Nazi occupation was just that bad. Although non-Jews were not targeted for extermination by the Nazis, this should by no means be taken to mean that they were not also treated incredibly brutally; at the lower end, something like 3 million non-Jewish Ukrainian civilians were killed by the Nazi regime, and most estimates are higher than this.

To be fair, I'm not completely impartial here; even besides my ethnicity, which I've discussed on this forum before, my mother's mother's father (who lived to 2010, so this is someone I had long conversations with as a child) was, in 1941, pursuing a career in Stalin's Border Patrol in western Ukraine, and spent most of the next several years in a pro-Soviet partisan group. Most of the other members, in his recollection, were ethnic Ukrainians, not Jews. "Hitler is worse than Stalin" was not just a common sentiment in this period, it was the overwhelming sentiment. Hunka here is an incredible outlier, one that even the actual Banderites would not necessarily defend.

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https://twitter.com/DavidColetto/status/1707346630305865746?t=6tLyc-KO2hItyDC8Ag...
So this poll came out. I find it fairly informative,  cause it's going to be perhaps the only federal poll of the province for a long time, perhaps until the GE if even. So there is data here with a respectable MOE rather than the usual absurdly small sample size of the N&L subsample in Altantic Canada polls.

I would put the numbers here as only a bit worse that 2011 for the liberals, just with the Conservatives pulling the voters rather than the NDP.  However,  the Tories having a more efficient vote distribution means the liberals probably only hold St. John's South and Avalon,  compared to the 4 seats held in 2011.

I do not know much about Canadian politics, but why are Liberal voters flocking to the Tories, rather than the NDP?

Party/ideological loyalties are not as fixed in Canada as they are in the US, so it's not uncommon for Liberal-Conservative swing voters to make up a large part of the vote in any given province (though it is somewhat rare in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the poll was taken).

Also, Poilievre's promise to expand the seal hunt is likely a large part of is since the seal hunt is a large part of NFLD's economy.

How large a fraction of Newfoundland’s economy are oil revenues? I know historically the province was extremely dependent on federal transfers, and correspondingly developed a political culture which was very statist/Republican-definition-of-socialist, which was still around as recently as the 2008/2011 cycles, but every time I hear any sort of allusion to Newfoundland’s economy or culture outside of federal transfers — where it seems like the energy industry and hunting are both very important — it feels like a WV-esque place that’s bound to move rightwards at some point. (And yes, I know in an absolute sense that the Atlantic provinces are poorer than any US state, which explains the dissonance to some degree.)

[Vosem]

Yeah, the Poilievre video was received so well in my (online) circles that people were questioning if the whole thing was staged.

https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1714381556020588577

Of course not everyone is, uh, even on the anti-journalism-culture right at all.

[Vosem]

Contempt for journalists as individuals rather than journalism being bad as a consequence of the demands of the media owning class is pretty explicitly a matter of contempt for the notion of a free press with the ability to expose the truth. "I should be able to lie whenever I want and not be challenged on my lies"

Not sure of this -- I think it is possible to say that the current ways that people go into "mainstream" journalism select for particular sorts of groupthink and ignorance without thinking that a free press is bad. (The classic version of this critique is a Chomskyan one made from the left, though I think a rightist critique that it has been overcome by an institutionally "woke" culture is much more common today). There is also a question of power -- in a world connected by social media, an article written about a person or corporation or set of ideas in a widely-read publication might set the narrative about that person/corporation/set of ideas for many years in a way which is hard to reply to, and when the person writing it seems clearly ignorant of the topic and motivated by ideological considerations which seem arcane to many the whole thing starts to look very arbitrary and absurd.

Michael Crichton famously quoted Murray Gell-Mann as noticing that whenever the press discussed physics -- Gell-Mann's field of expertise -- they would make horrific mistakes, but that Gell-Mann trusted them on all other topics anyway. Crichton expands this to ask why you should ever trust someone who is not a subject-matter expert to explain a particular subject to you; I think contempt for journalism culture in this sense is quite old, and not necessarily particularly driven by tech-libertarianism.

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Does anyone believe that Trudeau has more competency than Pedro Sanchez or even Chris Hipkins?

Less than Sanchez who despite losing popular vote is still PM.  Hipkins hard to say.  If Trudeau does win less because of him and more Poilievre does something.  And considering his willingness to pander to more extreme types and number of crazies in party not out of the realm of possibility. 

In fairness to Trudeau, he lost the popular vote in 2019 and 2021 and still remained Prime Minister, although that was a pretty unexceptional outcome in the Canadian system.