Fellas! Don’t let the temptresses get their hands on your cup of everlasting spooge power, Reddit NoFapper warns

@Anonymous:
It was one of the other guys. Specifically, it was Larry Correia that got passed over for the Campbell award. (Not strictly the Hugo award, and selected differently, but handed out at the same time, so a lot of people get confused.) From the descriptions I’ve heard, Correia’s Monster Hunter series involves a group of gun-happy Southern U.S. monster hunters that pretty much started as escaped slave hunters pre-U.S. Civil War, and still revered their founder. That should tell you most of what you need to know about his politics.

@Surplus to requirements:

Not a very high hurdle, mind you.

I thought that part rather went without saying.

@Rabid Rabbit:
*bwahaha* I recall the whole political mess when Sikhs fought for the ability to wear their turban despite the official RCMP dress uniform. Yeah, that would be a fun slap, especially since the bill presumably only applies to civil servants of the Province of Quebec.

@Alan Robertshaw:
That’s a careful balance people have to worry about. It’s the sort of reason why the Toronto District School Board went with their own Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on immigration status; undocumented immigrants keeping their children out of school for fear of getting caught doesn’t help anybody.

@solecism:
It’s like when people scream about ‘nazi commies’ or something like that… it’s not a thing, it’s not actually possibly a thing, but to the people saying things like this words don’t so much have meanings as they have emotional content, and both of those are words for bad people, so of course their opponents are both.

@Rabid Rabbit:
Yes. Odd how ‘reasonable accommodations’ often actually are as reasonable as they first sound, despite the whining of some ‘slippery slope!’ folks.

(There are actual slippery slopes, but making simple accommodations to a fitted uniform to match simple religious requirements generally isn’t one of them. And the benefit of having a police force that is actually as diverse as the people they’re policing is one of those things that really should be better acknowledged. And attempted.)

@Rabid Rabbit:

Appeasement? Since when has that ever prevented extremism, as opposed to encouraging and emboldening it?

As I’ve said before this supposed religious neutrality law ignores that if you’re white large numbers of people will assume you’re Christian, unless told otherwise.

Some Quebec government rep said this morning that the law is no different than someone being told they can’t wear a bikini to work. If someone knows of a religion that requires women to wear bikinis, please let me know.

@Jenora Feuer:

Honestly, the big problem with the clause in Canada here is much like the big problems currently going on in the U.S. and the U.K.: the political system was set up with the fundamental assumption that while the parties might disagree on policy and how to implement the system, they all agreed that the basic system of society and democracy were good things.

That assumption, unfortunately, is no longer valid. Systems that could prevent a single individual from dragging the country off the deep end don’t work when the entire party is helping pull, and has convinced a sufficient portion of the public to prevent anybody else from stopping them.

In fairness, it’s probably impossible to create a democracy without that fundamental assumption. And every time there’s a sufficiently major crisis a party will arise that breaks that assumption. In the Weimar Republic both the Communist party and the NSDAP were anti-democratic. Needless to say that didn’t end well. There’s shades of it now with Brexit, and the US Republican Party has been anti-democratic for a while now — arguably since Nixon and the “Southern Strategy” and certainly no later than 2000 and the Shrub’s questionable election to office.

Such parties will always be able to find ways to throw sand in the gears, cause the system to be discredited in the eyes of more and more of the public (thus potentially drumming up more recruits), and directly sabotage representativeness (see also: voter ID laws and gerrymandering).

The historic track record here is not good: once such parties become a large enough percentage of the political system, the only way to fix things seems to involve the use of force. A landslide victory by pro-democracy forces, followed by prompt reforms to the voting system and to the underlying causes of grievance, might be able to save things if it’s soon enough. In the US this would pretty much require a strongly progressive result in 2020 (e.g. Sanders/Warren with hundreds of AOCs elected to the House and Senate) and for the resulting administration to kill voter-ID laws and gerrymandering dead dead dead as well as doing some major and concrete things about job quality and affordable housing: giant FDR-style public works projects to build out green power, housing, and fiber-to-the-home might do it, both creating oodles of quality jobs and lowering housing and connectivity costs while also making concrete steps to address climate change. We’re talking AOC’s Green New Deal times a hundred here.

It won’t happen, of course, which means Civil War II is probably about 10 to 20 years down the road, if even that.

@Surplus to Requirements:
And we’re getting far too much of that in Canada with the modern Conservative parties. At the federal level the current Conservative party was formed after the Reform party split from the previous Progressive Conservative party because they actively wanted a more regressive setup, and then after a couple of elections of split votes the Reform/Alliance Party executed a hostile takeover of the original party.

The same sort of thing happened in Alberta with the Wild Rose party splitting off and then engaging in a takeover.

In Ontario there wasn’t that sort of split and takeover, the Conservative party just went pretty much straight to semi-fascist after the NDP (labour/union) managed to win a term in government. Because they didn’t have the break and regroup, they still call themselves ‘Progressive Conservatives’, even though there hasn’t been anything Progressive about them since before Mike ‘the knife’ Harris got into power.

(Quebec politics are different because of the Federalist/Sovereignist split being one of the more defining lines, though the Sovereignist tend to align with the regressive types.)

Most of the other provinces didn’t have splits either; the provincial conservative parties have just followed the lead of the federal party over the last few decades, while at the same time taking lessons from the smash-it-all types in the U.S. on how to exploit male fragility for votes.

One thing I’ve noted before is that part of the problem isn’t just that the anti-democratic types cause people to lose faith in the system: they also create their own echo chamber, and as a result over time the folks who are anti-democratic for the grift slowly get replaced by the next generation of folks who actually believe and who actually do want to break the system because they’re annoyed at the previous generation failing to do what they promised just as a way to get votes.

@Dalillama:
That’s less of a specific issue in Canada than it was in the U.S.. (If you’d said landowning gentlemen I’d be more in agreement, and that requirement does usually block out non-white people.) Canada wasn’t formed until after slavery was banned across the British Commonwealth, and the U.K. legal system predates a lot of that being an issue at all; U.K. democracy sort of built off of the previous feudalistic setup where the landowners were the ones represented, and most of the slaves/serfs/peasants were white as well.

Not that we’re all that much better, but a lot of the current political racism is either implicitly imported because we get inundated with U.S. entertainment and news, or explicitly imported because politicians want to scare people.

@Dalillama:

the point I was getting at is that none of these systems were ever built on principles of universal suffrage or anything close to it

Fair enough. The path towards democracy in the U.K. was mostly started by barons who didn’t want the king telling them what to do, and they would have been more than happy to stop it there if they could.

(Heck, during the American Revolution, it seems pretty clear that most of the southern plantation owners were more interested in being barons than in any of the relatively liberal attitudes of the people who wrote the Constitution. And given that their economic support was required to finance the Revolution, well, we got things like the 3/5 compromise.)

I wonder how much of the path towards democracy in the U.K. was changed because most of the ‘troublemakers’ left to go to what would become the U.S.