Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/28/blame-canada.html
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It’s not necessarily that they support any specific conservative policies or political ideals.
Those things no longer exist. Sometimes Buckley could make an argument that was hard to refute, but today the debate consists of “Ha ha loser!”
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Lately Canada’s been looking like the best hope for North America.
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It seems that the old fashioned conservatives (people who I would describe as having circumscribed intellectual horizons but are otherwise well meaning) don’t like the way the world is going because they resent the pressure to come into contact with new ideas. They have tolerated the far right troublemakers because they thought that the result would be to roll things back a bit. They haven’t really listened to what these people were actually saying, because mild conservatives don’t actually engage much. And now the rough beast has actually been born in Bethlehem Washington and all of a sudden they are hearing it for the first time.
I know one of these people - and he was saying “I think we should give Trump the benefit of the doubt” right up till the wife of one of his friends, on holiday in the UK, was barred from returning to the US, her husband and children because her mother is Iranian. It took direct contact with what is happening to make him pay attention and suddenly wake up.
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Canadians doing the USA’s heavy lifting, again.
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The Canada Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed. But, in the Year of the Trump War, it became something greater: our last, best hope… for victory.
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“they’re dismayed by reactionaries taking over the conservative movement”
Taking over? Who does she think has been running the show all this time?
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Firstly, “Julia” is the hero we both need and deserve. Bully on you kid!
Having said that, bullies just might be in her future. We all know what Milo’s troll army fanbase is going to want to do, and in this brave new world of ours where these kinds of deplorable shitbags feel empowered to operate in the plain light of day, the fact that Julia is a 16 year old girl won’t matter a single bit. Unless of course you’re still somehow under the impression that these people have a sense of decency. I hope that the pseudonym is enough.
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Here’s a whole town like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/us/immigration-trump-illinois-juan-pacheco.html?_r=0
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“Mr. Grigsby said he would still vote for Mr. Trump”.
It seems like more of a severe case of cognitive dissonance to me, rather than suddenly making the connection.
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You go, girl.
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Probably people like her pastor or school head.
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“As a grandson of immigrants, I am all for immigration reform, but this time you have arrested a GOOD MAN that should be used as a role model for other immigrants.”
I’m sure absolutely no one saw that coming. No one said that Trump’s rhetoric on immigration would result in the good undocumented immigrants getting thrown out as well as the real “bad hombres.” That possibility was never, ever brought up by anyone who opposed Trump’s plan.
SARCASM SELF-TEST COMPLETE.
Oh, good. That’s back online.
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What is funny is Milo repeated went after the left for over looking actions of its members that they would have burned alive if the right had done it. Then he actively engaged in activity forcing the right to do the same thing.
So I think we can walk away from this with two lessons:
Milo is a master troll.
We are more alike than we want to admit.
I’ve heard worrying things about candidates for the leadership of the Canadian Conservative party experimenting with the xenophobic and bigoted rhetoric being employed by right-wing populists elsewhere in the West. If this is how a young conservative-leaning Canadian responds to it, you’re probably right.
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Or neither! I think it’s more likely that he’s simply a spineless troll that has zero conviction behind his words.
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It sounds like that might be the trend.
“They do believe in a big tent and inclusivity — in as much as they trust themselves first, they want everyone to have an equal shot,” she said.
“I think the message where we’re declaring war on transgendered people and undocumented immigrants and religious minorities like Islamists is anathema to that group.”
Of course, not all young conservative-leaning Canadians are going to respond negatively to such rhetoric, but when moving away from that in order to attract millennial voters is the recommendation being mooted at the same conference hosting a Conservative Party leadership debate… It gives me some hope.
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This is very much the issue.
An anthropologist (perhaps somebody can chime in with who exactly as I forget) found that all successful societies were divided roughly equally into two types of people, the adventurers who would go out and discover new places, new foods, new ways of doing things, and the hearth-tenders, who stayed home, resisted change, and generally acted as a brake on the excesses of the adventurous. (One example was of an adventurer going forth and finding a new type of berry which seemed completely safe but had a cumulative poison, the hearth-tenders survived because they refused to eat it.)
Anyway, the TL;DR: (if you got this far) is that the rate of change in the world is only increasing, thanks to technology, and the hearth-tenders are terrified.
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these cynical, empathy-free manipulators might be fun to listen to, but their adorable sociopathy also means they’ll have plenty of ugly baggage that will get out someday
That’s only a problem if it tweaks their existing prejudices and becomes too uncomfortable for them. They never cared about Trump bragging about sexual assault, after all. If Milo was rationalizing “straight” statutory rape instead of pederasty, it would have heightened his appeal as a trolley.
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Who is Zathras in this analogy?
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