Obviously monarchy is an outdated concept, but this is a strange hill to die on. The King, or The Crown, is the merely the symbol of Canada’s sovereignty. That’s it. It’s no different than Americans pledging allegiance to the flag. They are not literally pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth anymore than we are literally pledging allegiance to Charles the man. It is just symbology. Neither Charles nor the GG has any real power in Canada and if they ever tried to use their symbolic powers independently of our elected government, it would create an instant Constitutional crisis.

Haha, yes, I was being cheeky. :)

DCS. Easy peasy.

I enjoy listening to Katty Kay and the Mooch. However, I think we hit peak Mooch just before election day.

I am still favour of using the Mooch system for measuring the length of appointments, just for the sake of nostalgia. We need to standardize it, though. Is it 11 days or 10?

This is an interesting case and is sensible. I mean, people have to sleep somewhere.

This is a multi-faceted problem, though. Encampments grow massively in the summer and shrink in the winter. Conversely, the shelters empty out in the summer and fill up in the winter. Why is that? It’s because many homeless people actually do have an indoor place to stay and/or access to a shelter space, but prefer to camp out when the weather is nice. I don’t blame them for that. People are handing out free tents, sleeping bags, and meals where I live. Would you rather sleep on a cot in a big room full of farting, snoring people, or in a nice private tent? However, the ruling doesn’t really apply to people’s preferences. The court ruling is about the struggle for shelter to protect oneself from the elements, not to create a right to camp wherever and whenever they want to because they feel like it.

I’m a big believer in affordable public housing. I think we also need institutions to house people who are not capable or willing to live independently without destroying the home they are given. I’m also in favour of wet shelters for those who are hopelessly addicted to alcohol or drugs. I’m also a believer in shelters to temporarily house people who are transient or waiting to get an affordable home. I’m not a believer in allowing shanty towns to grow unchecked, nor in allowing people to camp wherever and whenever they want to. If there is a shelter bed available, they must use it and too bad about their preferences. No shanty towns. That is just plain unacceptable in a modern developed nation. And, I suspect that 95% of the Canadian population feels the same way.

Thank you. :)

So many assumptions there. I don’t look down on the Palestinian people. I admire their willingness to fight. But, at a certain point, the war is over. You can have an eternal insurgency, or you can make peace. As I said, the issues that would allow Israel and Palestine to live side-by-side have largely been negotiated already. Look, we all get it. The creation of Israel was done poorly. But ongoing events like October 7 are not healthy or sustainable for either side. Israel isn’t going away. It can’t go away. Israel is a fact on the ground. So what is the point of ongoing terrorism like October 7? Obviously, all that terrorism has accomplished is retaliation and death. There is a better way.

The same choices will probably present themselves to the leadership of Ukraine, sadly. If the US and Europe don’t drastically ramp up support for Ukraine and give them long-range weapons, Russia will grind them down. What should the Ukrainians do if they can’t win? Fight to the last man? Achieve a ceasefire and then spend the next 80 years supporting a holy war insurgency against Russia? No, that’s dumb. That’s a good way to lose the world’s support and also get bombed into oblivion by Russia, and make your people miserable and poor. Ukraine isn’t dumb. They’ll negotiate a ceasefire and acknowledge the de facto borders at the time of the ceasefire. Then Ukraine will build up its economy again and wait for Putin to die and for events to turn their way. Then, hopefully, they will join the EU and possibly NATO.

Palestine could do something similar. Go for the two-state deal. Forget about right of return, forget about Jerusalem, drop the religious fundamentalist bullshit. Trade away Gaza to Israel in exchange for removing all of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Or something similar. Unify the Palestinian people in a common geography and a positive vision for the future. Land deals work. Remember that time Israel handed back the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt? Egypt and Israel are still at peace.

What about compensation? Well, the world will help the Palestinians rebuild if they think Palestine will be stable and not an Iranian puppet supporting a terrorist insurgency. The Saudis alone would probably supply tens of billions of dollars to Palestine if Hamas wasn’t there to hoover it up and convert it into weapons and terror tunnels.

I think we all need to cut out the zero-sum thinking because it leads to people becoming so desperate that they are willing to do literally anything to win.

This is extremely reductive identity politics. The point of the 2024 election results is that Trump made gains with all racial groups. You can’t just boil it all down to identity. Beyond that practical lesson, identity politics is bad for any country because it is a zero-sum game. If we don’t look past identity politics to a common set of ideals, we will end up with people at each other’s throats.

Northern Canadian here. Your worst enemy in the cold is wetness. As others have said, layers are key. Silk and wool are top of the list, but synthetics are okay, too. Silk and wool are expensive, synthetics are cheaper. Do NOT wear cotton. Cotton gets wet and stays wet. It truly sucks in cold weather.

Sweating makes you wet. You have to match your layering to your activity. If you are going to be active, don’t overdress. You should feel chilly when you first start your activity. A common trick is to layer up, then take off your parka to do physical activity, then put it back on when you are done with the activity. Some jackets have pit zips that you can open to shed excess heat. If you are going to sweat, plan it so that you end up indoors somewhere you can dry out. Don’t sweat and then plan to stand around or sleep outside.

If you are going to be mostly standing around, you need big, bad-ass Baffin-style boots, which are heavy. If you’ll be moving around, you can use insulated hiking boots and wool socks. Bring extra underwear and socks because they get wet.

Mitts and a touque are mandatory. Bring two sets because they get wet. Gloves are much less warm than mittens. You can layer that, too. A very thin synthetic glove inside of a mitten works when you need to take off your mitts to work on stuff. It is also worthwhile to get a thin, synthetic balaclava to help prevent wind burn and frost bite. Fingers, toes, and cheeks are the most susceptible to frost bite.

Grow out your beard if you are a dude.

In terms of less intuitive tips, as someone else said, if you start getting cold, expelling urine and faeces really does help. Also, stay hydrated. You get cold when you get dehydrated. You may not even feel thirsty, but cold air is dry air and you will get dehydrated quicker than you think in the cold. Especially if you are shoveling snow.

Shoveling snow sucks, so people tend to rush. The key is to go slow, especially if you are older. You will build up heat rapidly if you are shoveling. Avoid sweating too much, unless you have somewhere warm to dry off. Even if you aren’t shoveling, manhandling a snowblower will make you sweat heavily, too.

You see, that’s just twisting what I said. I didn’t say that genocide is okay. I said that people who do crimes are responsible for them, not their descendents. And, that eventually the migration of populations, with the possible displacement of the previous population, becomes permanent.

Look, practically all of history is a series of migrations, wars, resistance, conquest, counter-conquest, etc. Action and reaction. The Arab countries tried to eject Israel and Israel beat them back five times. Israel is spear-won territory. The Palestinians continue to fight, as is their right, but they’ve lost. Israel is not going to pack up its bag and give up their country, so the only way to get rid of Israel is to literally genocide them. If the Palestinians continue to fight the way they did on October 7, they should also expect to die, including civilians as collateral damage. That’s war. If they want to stop dying, they should make a compromise with Israel. The two-state solution has been close before, but certain death cults keep scuttling it. You know why? Reasonable people think it is all about land division and compensation. But that was all negotiated previously. At the end of the day, the final sticking point was Jerusalem. The crazy Jews want to rebuild the Temple, and the crazy Muslims want to stop the Jews from tearing down al-Aqsa mosque to do it. It is the nutters, not the average person, who is standing in the way of peace. Unfortunately, you can’t fix stupid, especially not religious stupid, which is why Israel wants to crush Hamas utterly. All of this hand-wringing about genocide is silly and counter-productive. It is based on some woke narrative, not on facts. If the Israelis wanted all of the Palestinians dead, there would be millions killed, not 43,000. They want Hamas dead and for the Palestinians to stop supporting that death cult. If you leave the narrative aside for a moment, 43,000 dead over the course of a year of pretty one-sided war sure does sound a lot more like collateral damage than genocide, doesn’t it?

Oh, you mean the ancestors of the current Dutch population. Gotcha. Okay, well if we are talking about ancestors, then I guess every ethnic group has had ancestors that colonized somewhere or other, since humans don’t live exclusively in the place we evolved. And I’m sure we also agree that people don’t have to answer for the crimes of their ancestors, only the crimes we do ourselves.

What are you talking about? Did the Dutch colonize Palestine?

No, but it’s been used as a protest song at Palestinian rallies. That’s the context, not just the lyrics. This bullshit has no place at our Rememberance Day ceremonies.

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Sorry, who can’t read, lol? The very first paragraph of the linked article says:

“A coalition of Canadian legal rights groups has launched a landmark lawsuit against the federal government, charging it with failing to prevent genocide in Gaza and violating its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.”

Dude, you must be so embarrassed. You should try reading articles before you post them, and certainly before you criticize someone who actually did read the artcile. At least read the first paragraph, FFS. Unless you are just trying to rack up virtue-signalling points, I guess. Then only the headline matters.

For fuck sake, suing the Canadian government for failing to prevent a genocide in Gaza? This is the kind of bullshit that got Trump elected in the US. Downvote me all you want. I’m telling you, this shit doesn’t fly with the average person.

Yes, thank you. Every generation “discovers” the Palestinian issue and then some act like its a new problem. And then some dumb-asses in America choose that as their hill to die on. To the point where they helped Trump get elected this time.

The Palestinians have been locked in a death embrace with Israel for 80 years and no amount of whining by privileged American protesters is going to change that. Do they really think that more river-to-the-sea terrorism is going to make the Israelis just give up and die? No, a two-state solution where all the Palestinians move to the West Bank and all the Israeli settlers move back to Israel is the only viable solution. Every generation eventually figures that out, too. Also, Gaza is finished this time. It was always a dumb idea to have two separate Palestinian enclaves.

It is down to the practical matter of separating the two sides and imposing a peace since apparently they can’t do it for themselves. If that sounds harsh, it is almost certainly better for the Palestinians than letting the Israelis settle it the Roman way. And that is on the table now, since I’m sure we can all agree that Trump doesn’t give a single shit on his golden toilet about the Palestinians.

Very true

OK, so what does this mutual aid look like? Are you talking about organizing armed resistance for when the Gestapo come for you? Or more like food-sharing for when the revolution comes and destroys the economy you don’t care about? I don’t have a sense of what you are getting at.

Couple of things:

1. Revolution sounds good until it actually happens, and then it sucks. It unleashes all the crazies and the outcome is uncertain. And it tanks the economy.
2. If you look at exit polls, people told you why they voted for Trump. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t believe he is a fascist, or at least that the US system won’t allow him to indulge his fascist tendencies. Again, I don’t know if they are correct, but that’s what most people believe.
3. The majority believe that the wokism and identity politics of the left is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

So, the answer to your question is that you won’t find much support IRL because most people don’t actually think they are supporting fascism. Time will tell if Trump is an actual fascist or just a blowhard. I wish we didn’t have to wonder, but there you have it.