And not enough is said how truly dispiriting this is. It's like a religion and/or Fox News viewers who simply don't care about anything except the solidarity of their group. To call them "low information" is generous; at this point after all the serious blowback, they're obviously as bad as the perpetrators, except maybe dumber. The banality of evil. I don't think any of us really knew how many stupid people there are out there, I mean stupid enough to not even know to come in out of the rain stupid. Sure as hell doesn't make our education system look good.
So 40 odd years of voting for the SAME party is bad enough; that made Albertans look totally tribal but at least that was the PROGRESSIVE Conservatives. Voting for this new rube UCP version drops us even lower to utterly deranged. It's just mortifying to live here.
And the situation with the Oilers is probably firing them up even more because THAT'S their team too.....I mean, there's no difference....
A large part of the problem, and why so many RWNJ leaders seem to be untouchable, is that the press is institutionally paralyzed. The need to be seen as “non-partisan” has them frozen.
Just look at the top two stories right now. The wildfires and the newest round of Smith’s insane comments. The press goes right from covering the crazy comments to treating her seriously on the fire. Sometimes in the same press conference.
And if they really accept that Smith is a compulsively lying nut job, all that becomes impossible. If you really accept she’s nuts you’re no longer able to ask “neutral” questions about her firefighting response. Or about the thousand other routine campaign announcements.
If the press really took her derangement seriously it obliterates all the routine nature of their job. And they have no idea what to do with that.
What I find amazing is that even with knowledge of comments like these, and multiple others, that the TBA group put their resources and people behind Danielle Smith to make her UCP Leader. I can only conclude that TBA group had insight into her past comments and opinions and supported those comments and opinions. Not voting Danielle Smith is a given for me. So is not voting UCP until they exit from the grip of the TBA group. You are known by the people you associate with.
I for one am glad that The current premier is learning a little about Nazism, but I wish it wasn’t from Netflix, and I wish she had some more discernment and better judgement. I wish frankly that she took her job more seriously than if she were a high school student council president.
A family member is permanently vaccine injured because she gave in to the pressure, trusted the pharma industry and took that shot. Afterwards she was vilified and called an anti-vaxxer because of what happened.
With all trust in "public health" gone, we'll never again support a party who doesn't support bodily autonomy, even if the rethoric gets over the line sometimes, sorry.
I have two friends that were badly injured by the vaccine. It's needed in some situations, like masks, but not in the way it was purported. As if it was zero risk.
And to paraphrase another more recent Trump comment from a different context.... "Unfortunately. (Shrug). Or fortunately." Which adverb you apply to the Teflon-ality of Ms Smith I suppose is a matter of perspective.
I can see the correlation with people allowing the government to take on more sweeping and wide ranging powers, removing the normal governmental safeguards, bullying tactics to keep businesses inline, silencing of all questioning... Just because it didn't end up in people being gassed, doesn't mean it wasn't a similar pattern when the Nazis were coming into power.
Bullying people because they are minorities, Jews, gypsies, etc, is considerably different than trying to keep the vulnerable population over 60 alive until a vaccine was available. That is just sound public health policy, like wearing seatbelts, stopping at red lights, and so. Inconveniencing the few to protect everyone, even anti maskers and antivaxxers.
It might be worth it, I respectfully suggest, to read a book on the run up to WWII. Try In the Garden of Beasts
(Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin) it is a story based on historical diaries detailing the time quite meticulously, written by Erik
Larson. Then pass your friend, Danielle, your copy when you are done.
Nazi bullying was not just aimed at minorities, but also Germans that didn't get behind them wholeheartedly. I'll look the book up, thanks. I have read Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, which details that time also. As well as some Jewish memoirs. Red Famine Anne Applebaum, describes the Soviet situation during that time which also has many parallels.
Be careful assuming only inconvenience was caused. Or that the plan shoved down the Canada's throat was the only possible solution. It is always better if thoughtfulness prevails.
So please tell us WHY on earth, and all of a sudden, because so unprecedented, do you and your cohort dismiss people who are FAR more educated than you, also keeping in mind the considerable body of knowledge carefully and conscientiously accumulated and applied over decades of medical experience with communicable disease and pandemics, why all of a sudden do all you people think we're NOT talking about SCIENCE here, acting instead like it's all a matter of opinion like religion, where you either "believe" or don't? The science is absolutely top-drawer as are all the medical people from the World Health Organization down, or they wouldn't be there! What's changed when you think science is also like religion in its absolute "certainty?!" And how many of you DO believe there's some god and a heaven (!) and even a devil probably??!! The rigorous scientific method, ever open-ended and open-minded is as good as it gets; it's as good as WE get! But religion? The opposite. It's us as cowering, fearful and judgmental little people looking for a leg up with their alternate reality that of course also has an alternate AUTHORITY. Nothing trumps "God," except Trump of course if you're one of those people steeped in American exceptionalism, i.e. Republicans. Their narrative is trumpeted by the new iteration of non-progressive conservatives here who we now call "cons" because they couldn't care less about what's TRUE either. And the truth is just not THAT subjective.
Taking any vaccine or is a risk but SO IS GETTING THE DISEASE. The WHO estimates roughly 7 MILLION people died around the world from covid, which is still happening because it's still here. A public health emergency is to protect the maximum number of people but this constant undermining of medical expertise, science, government, intellectualism and authority in GENERAL is pure libertarian BS using social media to instil doubt at a time when we were struggling with something unprecedented in our lifetimes and fear was rampant. That's utterly indefensible but so is "libertarianism;" it can be compared to a teenage boy with oppositional defiance disorder. So stupid in other words.
So we had another unprecedented experience of living through science in real time and a government stepping up to their job by taking advice from that formerly esteemed quarter. So it evolved a bit and changed. Most of us respected that but too many lost their minds and went down the rabbit hole, just like the entire political right wing has done. Same thing is happening with climate change so we're in a genuine culture war here and to say that conservatives could kill us all is no longer just a meme.
There's a bit of Hitler in all of us. Anger, greed, envy, malice, etc... Money, knowledge and power often doesn't help. In the same way the Oil industry can be corrupt is the same way the War machine can be corrupt is the same way the Pharmaceutical industry can be corrupt is the same way the Church can be corrupt. People. If you allow this to be a possibility and re-look at the situations in governments around the world, you might see that there are at least some valid reasons for people to be suspicious of the circumstances around so much of what happened. I don't believe it's a conspiracy, I think it's just people. Hitler, the Nazis, and the Germans who allowed them are not as unusual as they are made out to be. The science the WHO purports is not the only science out there, it's just the loudest. That does not mean the rightest ;-)
And there it is, there's the difference, there's what's changed; you gave it away. Social media rears its ugly head again, that automatic, exponential multiplier of "alternative narratives" stoked by the illusion that everyone's opinion is valid and that all opinions are of a piece, which is absolute BS. I have a nephew who never read, wasn't good in school so was never a critical thinker shall we say, but he discovered a community on the internet that resonated and offered a platform for airing his essence for the first time, heady stuff when you never even kept a diary. So it not only gave him an inside track on what was REALLY happening, i.e. "the truth," it also placed him above all the "sheeple," so comfortably "beyond the fray" so to speak. Powerful stuff. With him it was "Info Wars" and Alex Jones which is possibly a niche or online cul-de-sac that you, Thomas, feel superior to, but your big picture assessment that this is just what people are like, we all have some Hitler in us? Although a different rabbit hole, it's a rabbit hole nonetheless.
Pan out even further and you will recognize that there are always alternative narratives, always have been (none more reflective of people's inherent weakness for wishful thinking than religion and therefore the most successful) but after all this time we have fine-tuned much as a society and evolved in our organization to the point where the World Health Organization (along with the United Nations itself which this chippy, bad-boy, social media-stoked alt-right has ALSO marginalized, imperfect though it is but also, irrationally and weirdly BECAUSE it's demonstrably imperfect) is absolutely a worthy apex of our scientific collaboration on public health, as is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on climate science.
So this is as good as it gets as a final authority; science is actually extremely conservative and careful when you get down to it; again I point to the scientific method itself that's the actual hero here but we humans DID come up with that, and the best among us I'd say. (Sure as hell NOT the conservative "thinkers" hovering in our midst.) Our other bona fide man-made salvation has been the ever more messy rule of law, but Roe v. Wade shows the influence of the Catholic judges following their god whose "divine" law of course trumps that too; it's a big part of why they've subscribed as I mentioned, that proverbial leg up.
So another example of religion actually being the first, worst big lie and a shining example of how and why the truth really is ALL we fractious humans have. Not coincidentally, the moniker of "post-truth" accompanies this time of truly existential dread, unique in our history because entirely self-inflicted.
And again, NOT coincidentally, this trendy, irrational undermining of any and all authority that reached critical mass during the pandemic, including the convoy, was also rife with religious references. Poilievre isn't overtly religious, but he's a high priest of malicious, irresponsible "rage farming" to obtain power for the sake of it, but also to "own the libs" or progressives because he/they know we'll always be the actual majority. But who wants to enter THAT fray of division and anger? It would REALLY help if the media would at least point out which side is responsible for this marked "deterioration of public discourse," especially because it looks like a bunch of guys with their elbows out trying to WIN, i.e. "bothsidesism."
It's the myth of leadership being the rightful domain of a "strong man." Even though that's finally starting to weaken, the cons prefer the past so are going for broke, literally. Poilievre apparently went into politics because he wasn't good enough for hockey. And again there's those parallels with all these bad boys on the right who suddenly feel addressed and have excitedly turned toward politics as a way of "adulting." Great. And something "new" that's THEIRS.....
I'm sorry about those in your life who have begun "irrationally undermining all authority." I can offer you some connection points that can open up a conversation to bring him further over to your perspective, but you'll need to be willing to recognize that authorities have erred in lack of transparency. You might not think that they sought control over science/truth/evidence. Or that a few prominent scientists have dictated a response with very little scientific evidence supporting it. Or that they tried to squash people with questions even though questioning is the foundation of all science and necessary for good science. But at least you'll be able to sit down and argue with him good naturedly because while you think the other is wrong, you care about the other person as well. Not needing to control other's thought, but develop your own.
And not enough is said how truly dispiriting this is. It's like a religion and/or Fox News viewers who simply don't care about anything except the solidarity of their group. To call them "low information" is generous; at this point after all the serious blowback, they're obviously as bad as the perpetrators, except maybe dumber. The banality of evil. I don't think any of us really knew how many stupid people there are out there, I mean stupid enough to not even know to come in out of the rain stupid. Sure as hell doesn't make our education system look good.
So 40 odd years of voting for the SAME party is bad enough; that made Albertans look totally tribal but at least that was the PROGRESSIVE Conservatives. Voting for this new rube UCP version drops us even lower to utterly deranged. It's just mortifying to live here.
And the situation with the Oilers is probably firing them up even more because THAT'S their team too.....I mean, there's no difference....
A large part of the problem, and why so many RWNJ leaders seem to be untouchable, is that the press is institutionally paralyzed. The need to be seen as “non-partisan” has them frozen.
Just look at the top two stories right now. The wildfires and the newest round of Smith’s insane comments. The press goes right from covering the crazy comments to treating her seriously on the fire. Sometimes in the same press conference.
And if they really accept that Smith is a compulsively lying nut job, all that becomes impossible. If you really accept she’s nuts you’re no longer able to ask “neutral” questions about her firefighting response. Or about the thousand other routine campaign announcements.
If the press really took her derangement seriously it obliterates all the routine nature of their job. And they have no idea what to do with that.
What I find amazing is that even with knowledge of comments like these, and multiple others, that the TBA group put their resources and people behind Danielle Smith to make her UCP Leader. I can only conclude that TBA group had insight into her past comments and opinions and supported those comments and opinions. Not voting Danielle Smith is a given for me. So is not voting UCP until they exit from the grip of the TBA group. You are known by the people you associate with.
Brett, it's simple. Smith is less intelligent, less educated, less experienced than Jason Kenney--therefore much more easily led.
In the Garden of Beasts
Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by
Erik Larson, is better than Netflix for explaining Nazism. Please tell Danielle Smith.
I for one am glad that The current premier is learning a little about Nazism, but I wish it wasn’t from Netflix, and I wish she had some more discernment and better judgement. I wish frankly that she took her job more seriously than if she were a high school student council president.
A family member is permanently vaccine injured because she gave in to the pressure, trusted the pharma industry and took that shot. Afterwards she was vilified and called an anti-vaxxer because of what happened.
With all trust in "public health" gone, we'll never again support a party who doesn't support bodily autonomy, even if the rethoric gets over the line sometimes, sorry.
I have two friends that were badly injured by the vaccine. It's needed in some situations, like masks, but not in the way it was purported. As if it was zero risk.
And to paraphrase another more recent Trump comment from a different context.... "Unfortunately. (Shrug). Or fortunately." Which adverb you apply to the Teflon-ality of Ms Smith I suppose is a matter of perspective.
And she looks pretty good confronting the forest fires, ////trump never looked good,
I can see the correlation with people allowing the government to take on more sweeping and wide ranging powers, removing the normal governmental safeguards, bullying tactics to keep businesses inline, silencing of all questioning... Just because it didn't end up in people being gassed, doesn't mean it wasn't a similar pattern when the Nazis were coming into power.
Bullying people because they are minorities, Jews, gypsies, etc, is considerably different than trying to keep the vulnerable population over 60 alive until a vaccine was available. That is just sound public health policy, like wearing seatbelts, stopping at red lights, and so. Inconveniencing the few to protect everyone, even anti maskers and antivaxxers.
It might be worth it, I respectfully suggest, to read a book on the run up to WWII. Try In the Garden of Beasts
(Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin) it is a story based on historical diaries detailing the time quite meticulously, written by Erik
Larson. Then pass your friend, Danielle, your copy when you are done.
I looked up the book. It's described as "creative nonfiction". I prefer to find straight nonfiction, thanks though.
Nazi bullying was not just aimed at minorities, but also Germans that didn't get behind them wholeheartedly. I'll look the book up, thanks. I have read Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, which details that time also. As well as some Jewish memoirs. Red Famine Anne Applebaum, describes the Soviet situation during that time which also has many parallels.
Be careful assuming only inconvenience was caused. Or that the plan shoved down the Canada's throat was the only possible solution. It is always better if thoughtfulness prevails.
So please tell us WHY on earth, and all of a sudden, because so unprecedented, do you and your cohort dismiss people who are FAR more educated than you, also keeping in mind the considerable body of knowledge carefully and conscientiously accumulated and applied over decades of medical experience with communicable disease and pandemics, why all of a sudden do all you people think we're NOT talking about SCIENCE here, acting instead like it's all a matter of opinion like religion, where you either "believe" or don't? The science is absolutely top-drawer as are all the medical people from the World Health Organization down, or they wouldn't be there! What's changed when you think science is also like religion in its absolute "certainty?!" And how many of you DO believe there's some god and a heaven (!) and even a devil probably??!! The rigorous scientific method, ever open-ended and open-minded is as good as it gets; it's as good as WE get! But religion? The opposite. It's us as cowering, fearful and judgmental little people looking for a leg up with their alternate reality that of course also has an alternate AUTHORITY. Nothing trumps "God," except Trump of course if you're one of those people steeped in American exceptionalism, i.e. Republicans. Their narrative is trumpeted by the new iteration of non-progressive conservatives here who we now call "cons" because they couldn't care less about what's TRUE either. And the truth is just not THAT subjective.
Taking any vaccine or is a risk but SO IS GETTING THE DISEASE. The WHO estimates roughly 7 MILLION people died around the world from covid, which is still happening because it's still here. A public health emergency is to protect the maximum number of people but this constant undermining of medical expertise, science, government, intellectualism and authority in GENERAL is pure libertarian BS using social media to instil doubt at a time when we were struggling with something unprecedented in our lifetimes and fear was rampant. That's utterly indefensible but so is "libertarianism;" it can be compared to a teenage boy with oppositional defiance disorder. So stupid in other words.
So we had another unprecedented experience of living through science in real time and a government stepping up to their job by taking advice from that formerly esteemed quarter. So it evolved a bit and changed. Most of us respected that but too many lost their minds and went down the rabbit hole, just like the entire political right wing has done. Same thing is happening with climate change so we're in a genuine culture war here and to say that conservatives could kill us all is no longer just a meme.
There's a bit of Hitler in all of us. Anger, greed, envy, malice, etc... Money, knowledge and power often doesn't help. In the same way the Oil industry can be corrupt is the same way the War machine can be corrupt is the same way the Pharmaceutical industry can be corrupt is the same way the Church can be corrupt. People. If you allow this to be a possibility and re-look at the situations in governments around the world, you might see that there are at least some valid reasons for people to be suspicious of the circumstances around so much of what happened. I don't believe it's a conspiracy, I think it's just people. Hitler, the Nazis, and the Germans who allowed them are not as unusual as they are made out to be. The science the WHO purports is not the only science out there, it's just the loudest. That does not mean the rightest ;-)
Oh yes it does. There is history here.
And there it is, there's the difference, there's what's changed; you gave it away. Social media rears its ugly head again, that automatic, exponential multiplier of "alternative narratives" stoked by the illusion that everyone's opinion is valid and that all opinions are of a piece, which is absolute BS. I have a nephew who never read, wasn't good in school so was never a critical thinker shall we say, but he discovered a community on the internet that resonated and offered a platform for airing his essence for the first time, heady stuff when you never even kept a diary. So it not only gave him an inside track on what was REALLY happening, i.e. "the truth," it also placed him above all the "sheeple," so comfortably "beyond the fray" so to speak. Powerful stuff. With him it was "Info Wars" and Alex Jones which is possibly a niche or online cul-de-sac that you, Thomas, feel superior to, but your big picture assessment that this is just what people are like, we all have some Hitler in us? Although a different rabbit hole, it's a rabbit hole nonetheless.
Pan out even further and you will recognize that there are always alternative narratives, always have been (none more reflective of people's inherent weakness for wishful thinking than religion and therefore the most successful) but after all this time we have fine-tuned much as a society and evolved in our organization to the point where the World Health Organization (along with the United Nations itself which this chippy, bad-boy, social media-stoked alt-right has ALSO marginalized, imperfect though it is but also, irrationally and weirdly BECAUSE it's demonstrably imperfect) is absolutely a worthy apex of our scientific collaboration on public health, as is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on climate science.
So this is as good as it gets as a final authority; science is actually extremely conservative and careful when you get down to it; again I point to the scientific method itself that's the actual hero here but we humans DID come up with that, and the best among us I'd say. (Sure as hell NOT the conservative "thinkers" hovering in our midst.) Our other bona fide man-made salvation has been the ever more messy rule of law, but Roe v. Wade shows the influence of the Catholic judges following their god whose "divine" law of course trumps that too; it's a big part of why they've subscribed as I mentioned, that proverbial leg up.
So another example of religion actually being the first, worst big lie and a shining example of how and why the truth really is ALL we fractious humans have. Not coincidentally, the moniker of "post-truth" accompanies this time of truly existential dread, unique in our history because entirely self-inflicted.
And again, NOT coincidentally, this trendy, irrational undermining of any and all authority that reached critical mass during the pandemic, including the convoy, was also rife with religious references. Poilievre isn't overtly religious, but he's a high priest of malicious, irresponsible "rage farming" to obtain power for the sake of it, but also to "own the libs" or progressives because he/they know we'll always be the actual majority. But who wants to enter THAT fray of division and anger? It would REALLY help if the media would at least point out which side is responsible for this marked "deterioration of public discourse," especially because it looks like a bunch of guys with their elbows out trying to WIN, i.e. "bothsidesism."
It's the myth of leadership being the rightful domain of a "strong man." Even though that's finally starting to weaken, the cons prefer the past so are going for broke, literally. Poilievre apparently went into politics because he wasn't good enough for hockey. And again there's those parallels with all these bad boys on the right who suddenly feel addressed and have excitedly turned toward politics as a way of "adulting." Great. And something "new" that's THEIRS.....
I'm sorry about those in your life who have begun "irrationally undermining all authority." I can offer you some connection points that can open up a conversation to bring him further over to your perspective, but you'll need to be willing to recognize that authorities have erred in lack of transparency. You might not think that they sought control over science/truth/evidence. Or that a few prominent scientists have dictated a response with very little scientific evidence supporting it. Or that they tried to squash people with questions even though questioning is the foundation of all science and necessary for good science. But at least you'll be able to sit down and argue with him good naturedly because while you think the other is wrong, you care about the other person as well. Not needing to control other's thought, but develop your own.
Develop my own eh? Wow. Miss the point much?
You remind me yet again that the real question before us all at this point is whether or not we will survive the male of our species....
Lol, maybe so.