America's history is equally as bad as Nazi Germany

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That was pretty much my original point, every country has some skeletons in their closets, it's just weird that Americans are so neurotic about ours, it's a different kind of national arrogance.

I am shocked when I see this lack of objectivity from many Amerians.
I think it has something to do with "Confirmation bias" and nationalistic tendencies.

Canadians aren't much better in this regard. The residential schools issue exists in both countries, it's been public knowledge in Canada for decades but not many people gave a s**t until they started finding bodies.

And suddenly the same people who criticized calling those actions cultural genocide a decade ago are ordering their orange shirts so they can engage in some performative activism to post on Facebook meanwhile in a few months they'll be back to calling us Siberian freeloaders and complaining about treaties.

I'm not sure if that's quite the same, though from my own encounters with Canadian lefties they do seem to share a taste for empty virtue signalling with their American brethren. Do Canadian liberals also take a perverse pride in a sort of anti-patriotism, where they almost seem to compete with each other about who hates their country more? That's kind of what I was referring to regarding the American left, they make a big deal of rejecting American exceptionalism except when it comes to the various sins of the country, then they're worse than the right as far as acting like we're the only country worth paying attention to. The longstanding joke is that an American liberal would go to China and say "look at all the minorities! Isn't it great how well they're doing!" without realizing how insulting that is.

It sounds like your orange shirts are similar to our blacked out profiles of last year; did that stuff make it north of the border? Lots of people want to get in on the signalling or the occasional shaming pile on, but no one actually makes any real changes or inconveniences themselves personally.

I just find the whole thing a bit comical, the straw man right winger is the "America, F*ck Yeah!" guy that thinks we're the best country that's ever existed by every metric, where as the lefty position is the opposite but just as wrong in positioning the US as history's greatest villain. I'm harder on the left here for a few reasons, namely they annoy me more, I live in an area that's completely lousy with them so I have to deal with their foibles on a daily basis (where as conservatives and their flaws are much more distant), and they do tend to be the more educated, intellectual types who really ought to know better.

Canadian nationalism is weird because of how much of it is motivated by just not wanting to be like the US; a lot of centre-left types don't know enough about Canada's history so they just assume Canada's history isn't tainted like America's is.

I've been pretty aware of Canada's history and have noticed that if I condemn Canada like I condemn America there's always some so-called lefties who are deeply offended, but I'd argue the typical patriotic Canadian who supports Trudeau isn't a leftie by any definition except the Fox News definition.

Yes, blacked out profiles made it up here, large protests in support of BLM even happened in relatively small cities. Canada also has similar issues with policing, the only real difference being that Canadian cops aren't as trigger happy because they're not worried everyone might be armed. Carding and excessive force are still issues though.

These threads are regularly hijacked by posters who are more interested in attacking other WP members than addressing the topic, In the last few days there are more than usual.

I was pointing out the hypocrisy of their "whataboutism" but realise the circular arguments will continue till this thread gets locked.

I put forward reasons why American minority groups may feel their historic treatment resonated with Nazi Germany (which was the topic thread). At least three members chose to shift the discussion to other countries rather than look at America. That is the literal definition of obfuscation.

That actually sounds very familiar to me; I had a Canadian girlfriend from Montreal for about 2 years, and it was amazing how much of her political identity could be summed up as "not an American". I've got to say, if she was at all representative, Quebecois are not like the other Canadians at all, she was much more aggressive than I've ever been, and actually used to chastise me for avoiding getting into fights. I hadn't realized that there was so much honor culture up there, the way she described it reminded me more of the old South than anything.



Yeah, there's always a bit of a translation error when you try to directly compare the politics in various countries, left wing in America doesn't necessarily translate to left wing in Canada, or England, or Australia, or wherever else. Our system is also weird with the two parties kinda cramming people together who don't necessarily have a lot in common, though they're getting more ideologically homogeneous as the great sort purifies districts and concentrates urban liberals.

That's actually kinda funny to me though, Canadian lefties getting mad if you apply the same standards to Canada as you do America, where as American lefties beat their chests by trying to top each other in denouncing America. Honestly, if I think about it a minute, I wouldn't be surprised if you got a similar reaction from American lefties if you started going off on Canada in front of them, I'd almost bet money that they'd start objecting that America is worse.



You know what's interesting about that though, is that even though Americans are the most famous for it, Canada is still a top 10 country for civilian gun ownership, and yet your violent crime is still pretty low. I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent, but I've long believed that the problem with America as far as violence goes isn't that we have a lot of guns, it's that Americans are a violent people for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with our culture. But I digress.

What's been frustrating to me about the whole BLM/defund thing is that it not only feels like performative activism that doesn't actually accomplish much (we got Aunt Jemima off the syrup bottle...), but that it poisons the well with the conservative voters who are the ones who actually need to be convinced that criminal justice reform is necessary and good. I've been working at that for years, and I've gotten very good at pitching those audiences in such a way that they'll listen, but now it's all been so racialized and associated with goons in Portland trying to burn down the police station every night that I can't get anyone to listen anymore. Then there's the backlash that's coming, but again, I don't want to completely derail here.

I mock Canadian nationalism as basically hockey, Tim Horton's and not being American.

I think the question of aggressiveness depends on context, there's plenty of rough, rednecky towns where what you're describing as honour culture exists and there's some very rough neighbourhoods in most cities. There's places where I could basically assume I was going to get assaulted over how I dressed in my teens and 20s and it wasn't much of a deterant.




My ex Tsion was (i assume is) fairly left-leaning and when I met her she had a very rose-coloured glasses view of Canada. A lot of Canadian liberals buy into essentially the same vision and it fuels their patriotism. It's almost as though both cohorts just view it as Canadian patriotism = progressive, good; American patriotism = regressive, bad. I'd say folks further to the left in either country are more likely to be skeptical of patriotism in general but progressives don't hold that same skeptism towards the concept of patriotism.







Canada has high gun ownership, but is also really strict when it comes to what you can own. Canada is stricter than the US when the Assault Weapons ban was in place when it comes to regulating types of firearms.

I'd say your criticism of BLM is actually one you share with people who work within it. People who fixate on trivial issues that just end up as culture war fodder waste it's energy and trigger needless hosility. Criminals who take advantage of protests basically end up doing the same thing that agent provocateurs do, even if they're acting on selfish interests instead of political ones.

Man, I've been trying to stay on topic, but I feel like we've kind of beaten the US vs Nazi Germany thing to death, so I'm going to digress for a moment.

I know Trudeau tightened things up recently, but a little known piece of information here is that there are actually certain guns that you can get in Canada, or at least you could up till the last few years, but that I couldn't get in the US, notably some of the shorter barreled Israeli Tavor carbines and a bunch of Chinese Norinco guns.

Despite our reputation, US gun law is actually quite schizoid, the laws vary quite a bit state to state, and the import rules can shift dramatically from administration to administration, because so many of our laws are vaguely written and open to interpretation. We've got this "sporting purposes" requirement written into our import law that basically means whatever the current regime wants it to, and we have these depression era laws governing how short your rifle or shotgun barrel can be (an area where Canadian gun law is actually more permissive than US), what kind of hand grips you can put on, etc.

I know this isn't your area, but it might surprise you to learn that our regulations on silencers, for example, (you can own them, but it's a pain and expensive) didn't come about because of criminal use, it was the 1930s and people were starving, and the fear was the people would use them to quietly poach game in violation of the game laws, so it was essentially a class thing.

Guns and the laws governing them really are this weird area of progressive cognitive dissonance here in the US (I don't know if this is similar in Canada), as the progressives who want stricter laws know that the police that will be called upon to enforce those laws are not going to enforce them in a fair manner, that if they put in some kind of strict zero tolerance policy that it's going to disproportionately effect urban minorities, but they kind of force themselves to forget they know that, and convince themselves that the cops are going to go after Bubba out in the sticks with his AR15s, when everything they know about law enforcement says otherwise. There's also the fact that gun laws are historically and indisputably racist in this country, e.g. the Sullivan Act in New York going after Irish and Italian immigrants, or the Mullford Act in California targeting the Black Panthers for open carrying for protection from the police, or the entire Jim Crow regime in the South, but that's a whole other can of worms.

Smart progressives like Matt Yglesias know this, and know that a Democratic party that dropped this particular albatross would be unstoppable nationally, but the donor class, notably Bloomberg and the other billionaires are really hot on this stuff, so the party keeps pushing these laws and losing elections over them.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/national-d ... re-embrace

I'll respond to your other stuff too, but the words really get flowing when I get to talk gun politics, it's literally where I learned about being politically aware in the first place and has informed many of my views over the years because it was my first real exposure to politicians and the media lying to me about something I had personal experience with.

This doesn't happen just in America and Canada.
This is an "interesting" peccadillo of the political left.
More annoying and amusing than anything/k else.

I guess their positioning might be different if an outlier criticises their country. [shrug]

It's been long enough since I was a regular here, and I don't recall interacting with you much, so allow me to recount a little bit of my origin story as it were, and apologies if you've already heard it.

I attended an alternative school in Seattle in the late 90s called the Nova Project that was this funny little anomaly in the public school system, a school run by old hippies with no mandatory attendance, where everything, including the teacher pay, was put to a committee vote of staff and students, where the students could design their own curriculum and teach classes for credit if the students could pass the standardized tests afterwards (I taught a world history class), and was about as far left as you could get in both staff and student makeup.

As you might imagine, left wing activism was a constant presence on campus, and all of my friends were involved in multiple large protests, most notably the 1999 WTO protests where black bloc anarchists from Eugene showed up and smashed up parts of downtown Seattle (they even made a movie about it called "Battle in Seattle).

I was incredibly skeptical back then of how effective said protests were, and that's one of the few beliefs of mine that hasn't changed much since high school, I saw how much the fragmented messaging coupled with the property damage enraged the "normies" (we didn't have that word yet, but that's what they were), and how my friends all blamed their lack of success in changing policy on "outside agitators" police provocation, a hostile media, basically everything but their own approach. I didn't even fully disagree with what they were advocating, I just thought their methods were counterproductive and unlikely to persuade the people who needed persuading, i.e. people who weren't already far left in their politics.

Flash forward to last year, and it was like high school all over again for me, huge protests coupled with property damage, a very complacent media ("Fiery but mostly peaceful protests"), social media pressure campaigns that alienated people but didn't persuade, but in this case for a cause that I not only broadly agreed with, but had been practicing my own activism on behalf of (minus the racial angle, my pitch was that bad cops hurt everyone), and all the old excuses for the lack of concrete success. Don't even get me started on "defund the police" as a slogan when it then required ten minutes of explaining what that actually meant, or other activists then doubling down on "yes, we mean defund" when others were pushing a more nuanced version, just confusing everyone, etc.

I'm not one of those people who says that the whole thing was a grift (though some grifting definitely went on), but it all seems like such a waste now, all that energy and potential just flushed because people couldn't figure out how to sell their message to the people who actually needed to buy into it.

Are you getting the sense that a lot of my animosity towards the left stems from disappointment yet?

Heh, that sounds incredibly accurate in my experience, especially the not being American part. It's part of the distortion field that our cultural dominance creates, people define themselves against us, or what they think is us. I've got a few Canadian friends, mostly BC area on my social media, and the stuff that tends to surprise them isn't the flag waving or the big trucks or any of the usual stereotypes, it's more the questioning of authority, at least in my experience.

We had a member here for a while that I was pretty friendly with whose username I've sadly forgotten, and when he and I would occasionally debate, he was always just shocked at how little I trusted my government and my general suspicion of anyone labeled an expert; come to think of it, I think that's a common reaction from citizens of most of the commonwealth countries to Americans. The funny thing about the current moment is that the authority questioning is now so concentrated on the right, traditionally it was more on the left, but they've come to control so many of our cultural institutions that the polarity has flipped.



Oh man, this girl was something else, I'm talking about flat out calling me a p**** for not getting into fist fights with other men, even though she knew I had a gun on me and had to be the responsible party; she even threw that in my face a few time, that I was only carrying so that I didn't have to fight. I don't know if that's typical for Quebecois, but it sure made an impression on me.

We're only allowed to rag on America here at WP.

At least that covers 2 entire continents!