All: if you're going to post in a thread like this, where the topic is inflammatory, please make sure you're up on the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html — and do one of the following:
(1) post thoughtfully and substantively, with respect for the people you disagree with,
Also keep in mind that in the backdrop of all this is the fact that our Prime Minister has called the protesters racists and misogynists. Probably inspiring someone who ran over some protesters in Winnipeg.
Canadian news and politicians are desperately trying to denounce the protesters while ignoring the fact that Canada has some of the harshest Covid restrictions in the world at the moment, while the US has hardly any and European nations are mostly moving to remove all restrictions.
Uhh, I think calling for the overthrowing of the federal government[0] is a little more than just protesting a covid mandate lol. To be clear, I'm not saying overthrowing the federal gov't is racist or misogynist. I'm just saying that clearly there is a lot more going on than that
Overthrow the government in this case means publicly and commit to repealing mandates, and set up a citizen group to review policy.
Similar requests of governments happen every year in western countries. There are citizen oversight groups set up for failing school districts, police departments, and the environment.
> One of the main groups behind the protest is Canada Unity, which has opposed what it says are “unconstitutional” Covid rules. The group recently posted a “memorandum of understanding” to its website, saying that members plan to present it to politicians on Parliament Hill. The group claims that the leader of the senate and the governor general will sign the document to create a governing committee, which they claim would work to revoke the vaccine mandate.
I started a reply but realize I was just repeating what I said before.
This isn't radical.
Organized protests for hundreds of years have demanded public written concession. This is the norm and what organized protest looks like
> SCGGC will effective as of midnight on this ___, day of ___________, 2021,instruct all levels of the Federal, Provincial, Territorial, and Municipal governments to re-instate all employees in all branches of governments and, not limited to promote the same to the private industry and institutional sectors employees with full lawful employment rights prior to the wrongful and unlawful dismissals that stem from the SARS-CoV-2 (and not limited to SARS-CoV-2 subsequent variations) vaccine passport mandates
Not only do they want full control of all levels of government, but they also want to be able to tell all private companies that they need to rehire people fired
I have, that's why I wrote my original post that overthrow is a
ridiculous claim. I dont think you understand it.
The SCGGC is the currently existing and only government of Canada. CU (the protesters) are asking it to use its powers to do something.
In your quote, they are asking the SCGGC to use its power to stop and reverse all SARS-CoV-2 firings.
They are also asking to SCGGC to agree to set up a committee (CCC) with no powers that will be used to share schedules for the covid policy reversal and issue joint statements about the mandates lifting
I mean, in terms of legalese, they actually made a reasonable pass at scoping it down. Literally the only verbatim goal there is to reverse what was seen as overreach.
Just because it's a wide reach doesn't mean grasping for full unilateral ongoing control.
Well, the media can’t spend two years telling people that riot and protest are legitimate forms of expression when feeling disenfranchised and then act shocked when all political demographics follow suit (J6, truckers). Want things to calm down? There’s a way to deescalate, but I don’t think the media is a friend in this story - they have a profit incentive to stir up chaos and disorder. People are increasingly losing confidence in elections - the right response isn’t to tell people to shut up, loosen controls and gerrymander, it’s to double up transparency and audits. People are losing confidence in institutional authority - the right response isn’t a public/private alliance on overt censorship, it’s less censorship and encouraging open debate. People feel mandates cause more harm than benefit now and are pissed about the prospect of eternal emergency powers. What’s the right response, Justin, calling in the military?? People increasingly feel the institutional “leaders” are incompetent, full of shit, and focused on the wrong priorities. Very dangerous to have loss of faith in elections concurrently with unsatisfactory office holders.
I'm concerned about 1st amendment and the soft power politicians have on freedom of speech (yes I know this is in Canada). When the head politician of a country essentially calls your group terrorist, wouldn't that put some pressure on social media or other organizations to restrict access, money or censor speech?
Not all violations of free speech are literally police sending someone to jail for saying something. If the politicians pressure private organizations to censor speech, resulting in the speech being censored, then its absolutely a violation of free speech
Antifa is a terrorist organization. They have political goals that is fighting against political stance and they are trying to achieve this by violence.
“Terror” about describes it if it’s your neighborhood and not just a scene on TV. The people breaking windows of businesses that don’t sport the right stickers or threatening violence against those not wearing the right clothes or making the right salutes are appropriately called “terrorists” if not worse. I don’t take the label terrorist to heart when it’s some bullshit overseas conflict, but I know what structure fires look like, I know what mob frenzy looks like. I know what actual political violence looks like. I know how dangerous self-righteous violence can be. Calling antifa terrorists is spot on because that’s what they were/are as demonstrated/experienced by their actions and goals (of which, ant-fascism seems about opposite).
Yeah, we do not have what you think of in terms of freedom of speech in Canada. A private corporation using their insured property to audibly harass a city and blockade streets is not considered freedom of speech in Canada.
Take away their toys and let them hold a protest with their boots and parkas.
Freedom of expression features prominently in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is included in Section 2, which details fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly. It strains credulity to argue that this protest somehow exceeds protest norms when bullhorns, drums, honking, and other noisemaking has been a key part of protests for decades.
Civil disobedience was always a crime. Blocking streets without a permit is a crime. Excessive noise making at all hours of the day and night is a crime. These actions don't become legal if you label them "protest".
All of those "crimes" result in a ticket, not the person in question being hauled off to jail, and they typically aren't enforced on protestors. The government could direct the police to crack down, but that would just throw any pretense of evenhanded enforcement of the law out the window, and harden the protestors' resolve.
The notwithstanding clause kind of renders all those rights and freedoms a joke. The legislature can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, just like in every other country, albeit with less pretense about it.
This is the second time someone has implied this protest isn’t valid because they’re doing it efficiently. It sounds like boomer “in my day” type rhetoric but is irrelevant to the legitimacy of any protest.
Why does the insurance status of property matter? Why does it matter if it belongs to a corporation (also don’t many truckers have their own trucks)? Do you also think megaphones shouldn’t be used to protest? What about amplifying platforms like Twitter? I feel like the line drawn in Canada is unprincipled, if it is as you describe, since truckers are using their property and platform of choice to enhance their protest, which fundamentally isn’t very different to me.
It's a bit worse than that given that CBC(among others) have received 1.4B in funding from the government. CBC is just as good or bad(depending on your viewpoint) as CNN/FOX, if not better/worse.
It feels really bad to have comments removed for keywords like PoC when it's coming from your own tax dollars.
Even more stupid: Canadian media and Twitter users saying they are “fringe” because by a poll (totally no incentive to lie on those), 85% of truckers are vaccinated.
To which I say:
A. I bet more than 15% are unvaccinated because why answer honestly with Canada’s level of restrictions and penalties?
B. If it is actually 15%, that’s not fringe, and also that’s low enough that dropping the mandate should be reasonable (see all the countries who dropped restrictions at 75%-80% vaccination).
"He that would make his own liberty secure
must guard even his enemy from oppression;
for if he violates this duty
he establishes a precedent
that will reach to himself."
— Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1791)
You don't have a right to cross a border and spread a deadly disease. As far as I'm aware, these truckers are allowed to work unvaccinated within their own country.
Various disease, actually. Not the flu, but most borders will ask that you're vaccinated for a whole host of diseases if you come for professional reasons.
As far as I understand, Canadians were exempted from these vaccinations for non-covid diseases. That is probably because vaccinations are mandatory as a child in Canada.
At this point a majority of Canadas anti-mandate movement, which recently became a majority is “vaccinated but anti-mandate” just because the numbers literally don’t allow for any other reality.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, and we rate-limit or ban accounts that do it. We have to, because it's not only not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I had to sign a letter with my employer stating that I accepted I could be terminated should I not be fully vaccinated by Dec 31, 2021. I feel a line has been crossed, and I fully support the idea that the mandate is bad. Vaccines are great, I voluntarily got it anyway, but I don't feel it's ok to say you deserve to be fired or worse (and I've heard much worse) if you decide the vaccine is not for you. I support the protest. It is not an anti-vax protest. I do not beleive it is about racisim or white supremacy despite what our prime minister says or thinks.
in the USA, a psychiatric patient, even if seriously ill, has the right to refuse medication. This non-negotiable law is in place exactly because of past generations battle over forced medications.
I don't think that's comparable at all. If you don't want to get vaccinated but your employer has a mandate, you can quit.
Similarly, your employer can fire you if there is no reasonable accommodation for your medical condition that you are willing to accept. If, for example, you have a treatable form of schizophrenia but refuse all medication, you can get fired if that condition renders you unable to perform your job duties.
You can get committed to an institution, or your employer can be forced to reinstate you, but absent such an order from the legal system, you are free to refuse treatment, and your employer is free to let you go.
>I don't think that's comparable at all. If you don't want to get vaccinated but your employer has a mandate, you can quit.
You can't quit the game. I assure you. Might as well make the stand here and now, because in the end, it will find it's way back to you. People problems always do.
Most states define laws of their own around this, and usually a longer involuntary stay requires a court hearing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if even those are operating in a legal gray area that would get shot down upon a SCOTUS hearing. More realistically, the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear these cases due to higher priorities, but I think the “right to liberty” has only very few exceptions.
Same, I'm vaccinated but I recently resigned from my company because they had a vaccine mandate (no testing option) because they're a federal contractor. Now I'm working for a company that has a testing option but I choose to upload vaccine card instead. My personal choice. The company I resigned from dropped the mandate after it was stopped by the courts but the damage had already been done.
In fact, shouldn't it be the opposite way? Imagine getting vaxxed just so you are forced to stay home or wear a mask everywhere just like everybody else.
Public health “experts” have done very little to quell fearful vaccinated people. In my opinion some of the worst anti-vaxx propaganda comes right from these health departments.
If you are vaccinated, you are done with the pandemic. Morally, ethically, and practically. You should be allowed to return to actual, pre-pandemic normal. End of story.
Even if you are vaccinated you can still get sick. The chances are reduced, but you can still end up in hospital, you could still die.
If enough people still get sick at once there could still be a collapse in a local health system due to overloading.
Given the uncertainty with new variations of COVID isn't it better to err on the side of caution and try to protect both the health systems and as many people at once?
No. The time for an abundance of caution was 2020. You can get vaxxed if you want and N95's are effective if you want to protect yourself. Society can't keep dragging this giant "safety" rock behind it forever.
It all depends on what are the numbers. In any case before deciding on vaccine mandates, certain conditions have to be satisfied:
1. Will the mandate increase vaccine uptake?
2. Will the mandate prevent overloading hospitals and clinics?
3. Are the health benefits for others proportionate to the risks for vaccinated?
4. Are less restrictive policies available that can achieve similar outcomes?
The UK decided to go with without vaccine mandates. They even revoked them for healthcare workers because with omicron variant they no longer made sense.
I am not saying what Canada should do, but at this moment vaccine mandates don't really seem worth to truckers, if not for all people.
> If you are vaccinated, you are done with the pandemic. Morally, ethically, and practically. You should be allowed to return to actual, pre-pandemic normal. End of story.
What if you have children who are not yet eligible for the vaccine?
"Covid-19 has killed 280 children under 18 from January through September 2021, the time span in which the alpha and delta variants were active. Flu and pneumonia, heart disease, drowning, guns, and motor vehicles were all deadlier to children during the same time periods annually from 2015 to 2019 (the latest years with available data)[0]."
While I agree that it seems children are very low risk you have to remember they are partly lower because of the precautions taken(lockdowns, mandates, vaccines, masks, fear, etc). We don't know the "normal" death rate for Covid just yet.
The Bayesian probability leans heavily toward the vaccine being safe and the virus dangerous.
From what we are seeing the vaccine side effects are similar but considerably milder and short term, the virus sometimes has long term negative effects (lung capacity, fatigue, weakness, inability to concentrate…)
If you made a list off the lunatic safetyism that kids have to put up with these days, I don’t think wearing masks would even make the short list. There’s a lot.
> They aren't against the vaccine, they are against the mandate!
It makes no sense, but the amount of people who conflate the two is shockingly high. I guess strawmans are easier to argue against than someone who holds nuanced views.
FYI Merriam Webster is among the worst dictionaries. They are highly activist and have redefined words repeatedly to suit the progressive/far-left political platform.
>why answer honestly with Canada’s level of restrictions and penalties?
Surely you jest. Polls are anonymous. And even if the security is bad, nobody is scrutinizing IP logs of poll respondents. Maybe in Kazakhstan or something, but freedom in the West has not fallen that far.
People do lie on polls, of course, but it's usually about self-expression, not self-protection. I'd imagine that vaccinated truckers are more likely to report antagonism to vaccine mandates by lying about being unvaccinated vs. the reverse.
You also have to consider that unvaccinated answering the poll honestly would be admitting to something that puts their livelihood on the line. I imagine that a disproportionate number would refuse to respond at all.
I also took his comments to say they're not Canadian.
The GFM action is also quite dehumanizing. It's a statement from a large donation platform (with all the associated feelings of righteousness) about the value of the protest.
I'm not really sure GFM is the problem though. I think the fear of the media might be forcing their hand. The consequences for keeping this fundraiser open would have hurt them somehow. Same with the consequences for shutting down a BLM fundraiser. Same consequence from the same source.
Last I heard, the convoy organizers put a bounty on the Nazi flag guy for any information leading to his identification. There is also video of protesters calling out the confederate flag guy and telling him to leave. Two assholes showing up to a protest don't represent the agenda of the entire group. The BLM riots had a much higher asshole ratio last time I checked.
How silly is it to have a confederate flag at a Canadian protest, anyway, if not simply for shaping optics in the citizenry of the United States to tell them how to frame current events??
Screams of an orchestrated heuristic.
If you’re aware of such a fringe factoid as flags appearing in the crowd but simultaneously unaware of the footage demonstrating these to be literally false flags you may want to diversify your information sources.
The use of the plural "people" here is interesting. As far as I can tell there was one Nazi flag and one Confederate flag. But they sure got a lot of media play...
No, he didn't. A unanimous declaration by members of parliament (incredibly rare) denounced events happening in the shroud of the protests. And they are really happening!
If someone denounces looting at a BLM protest -- also something that happened -- does that mean every BLM protester is a looter? That is absurd.
> If someone denounces looting at a BLM protest -- also something that happened -- does that mean every BLM protester is a looter? That is absurd.
Of course not. Just like the presence of extremists at a rally doesn't mean everyone's an extremist. If you've followed Trudeau at all through these events, he's constantly painted all protesters as extremists...
The things the PM says "in person" are widely reported on. You alluded to them multiple times in hopes of portraying your claim correct, but the single bit of proof you've provided shows absolutely nothing of the sort.
They're protesting against mandates. Which most of the world is lifting...
And I'm not on the truckers' side per se... But the response from the government has been shocking and I'm sure as hell not on the government's side.
For the record, I'm vaccinated. Not an anti-vaxxer. Literally just went to Europe and came back. Getting out of and back into Canada was the most onerous part of the trip.
Just to be clear, the government of Canada doesn't mandate vaccination of truckers, what it mandates is for non-vaccinated individuals (which includes truckers) that are entering Canada through the border that they must get tested and quarantine on entry.
So if you can't prove vaccination on entry, you need to have a proof of negative test and quarantine a few days.
I just want to point that out, because it seems the media has taken to make it sound like the Canadian government wants to force vaccinations on truckers, it doesn't, but it's enforcing safety measures around border entry, and depending on your vaccination status, those measures are possibly more inconvenient.
The other thing I want to bring up is that in Canada, the government, and I'm turn the tax payers, they subsidize and pay for medical treatment of people who have COVID and need treatment.
So it makes more sense that you'd want to make sure people take necessary preventative measures, otherwise you're having tax payers pay the bill.
Some people in Canada are even suggesting that instead of such preventative measures, if people want to be allowed to take their own risk, then the treatment for COVID for individuals that didn't take preventative precautions shouldn't be offered to them for free and shouldn't be prioritized over other medical interventions. But this is pretty extreme as well, and while reasonable, Canadians don't really want to just let someone in need of medical treatment to not be able to get it. So the general sentiment is that you'd rather make sure everyone is taking necessary precautions and cover people who need treatment no matter what. But as people push back on precautions, the idea to be stricter on who gets access to subsidized treatment will probably become more and more popular, especially with regards to vaccination status.
That requirement is equivalent to barring them from their profession. It's also an absurd requirement for someone who spends the majority of their working time alone. If it's such a sensible requirement then why aren't we mandating that all grocery store workers be vaccinated or be required to self-isolate for 2 weeks after each shift? Why not mandate it for all professions that involve face to face contact?
They're not barred from the profession. There are trucking jobs within the US they can do. As far as going to the US from Canada, you'd have to blame the US on that one.
People whose job requires international travel have always been expected to keep up to date regulations. Truckers were just an exception.
>These people are protesting against vaccines. You are not on the right side of this argument.
You aren't even getting the argument right. They are protesting mandates. I can be pro-sterilization but anti forced-sterilization. There is a big difference. Enough to drive a few trucks through.
Are you sure you are on the right side of the argument yourself?
Suppose next year, the government mandate that you lose weight, or stop smoking or run everyday, all that of course for the "greater good". And then the year after that, it requires that you give pills to your children because that makes them "less indisciplined" and so on and so forth.
Stop being so certain and think a little bit. By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
This is a classic slippery slope argument. Losing weight is not the same thing as a pandemic like this. The two-fold reason that these measures are taken is A) over-filling of hospitals and shut-down of all non-emergency services and B) extremely high death rate. Smoking or whatever scary slippery slope you think we're on is not the same thing as the ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't.
The idea that we should be against common-sense measures to promote herd immunity during a very real pandemic because "the government will make you stop smoking" is frankly an outrageously claim.
It's long been held, since at least America began, that herd immunity is vital to the success and security of a nation. Our militaries require these vaccinations because a fighting force must be healthy. Our schools require these vaccines because sick kids and sick cities don't learn.
The idea that a vaccine mandate is anything more than a century-old, bog-standard, completely required part of the human war against disease is a radical and anti-civilized position. Herd immunity is non-negotiable for our level of modern society to exist.
I swear, we are killing ourselves. Dense civilization requires trade offs, and in the war against pandemic disease, that does include vaccination.
> ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't
This claim is mostly overblown at this point. It was a legitimate concern early on, but it hasn't been true for some time.
The vaccine claims are also misleading. Herd immunity by vaccination is not the only way to protect society, and the distinct lack of discussion or recognition of immunity from infection is conspicuous. COVID's infection fatality rate for certain cohorts is low enough that vaccination isn't strictly needed, and arguably taking a different tack on this could potentially have saved far more lives.
For instance, consider if we had only isolated and vaccinated those at greatest risk of death and complications from COVID (40 and older, immunocompromised, comorbidities), and then shipped the remaining vaccine supply to the third world to suppress the emergence of variants. We might not have had Delta or Omicron at all. It's not at all clear that this would not have saved more people in the long run.
Beating this vaccine mandate drum is blinding people to other rational solutions. It's not going to end well. This convoy is probably only the beginning.
It's not overblown all across America where the omicron wave did once again force ICU to capacity and cause the cancellation of non-emergency care across the country.
Herd immunity by vaccination is the only way to protect society without requiring infection, which fills hospitals and leads to deaths. Vaccination means you're about 40x less likely to be hospitalized or die, which saves our health system. Do you honestly believe there should be more discussion of infection immunity as a solution, when it results in 40X more hospitalization and death? I've seen anti-vaxxers call public health officials "genociders" for decisions far less death-causing than that.
If you think the vaccine mandate is why this convoy happened, instead of conservative fake news creating vast conspiracy theories from the "NWO" to "Q-ANON", funded by conservatives billionaires and the governments of multiple countries, to help destabilize and bring down the west, then to each their own. But how many Americans are among them? How many fans do they have abroad? It's not about Canadian mandates, it's about the global right wing conspiracy movement.
But I do not believe that the vaccine anti-mandate stuff is anything more than todays convenient whip for the very powerful forces of conservative media control to use to continue their war after Trump lost. Just another issue politicized for convenience, as until conservative media flipped the switch, vaccine hesitancy was almost entirely left-wing. Even in America anti-vaccination attitudes on the right did not start until post-election and post-vaccine rollout, and there's a large group of vaccinated conservatives who regret it because now it's seen as a mistake in that ideology.
Furthermore, unvaccinated people are occupying fewer beds than vaccinated people in terms of numbers. Even if they all got vaccinated, we'd be basically in exactly the same place, so how do you expect vaccine mandates to help here?
The reason Ontario (and Canada in general) is doing well is because they have a much higher vaccination rate and a healthier population in general. In the US, the high numbers of hospitalization and death are overwhelmingly unvaccinated and/or extremely unhealthy individuals. Also, comparing absolute numbers is disingenuous when the vaccination rate is so high.
Yes, Canada does have a higher vaccination rate, but Canada and Ontario in particular has a very low number of ICU beds per capita compared to other nations in the developed world, so the picture presented by those numbers is actually pessimistic. That's also why we've had far more lockdowns here than the US, because our underinvestment in healthcare has come back to bite us.
In any case, I think it's clear that the claim I responded to that "hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't" is overblown regardless of these numbers. The people dying are mostly the elderly and the sickly, which are exactly the people who we would in fact expect to die suddenly, and healthy people would not be dropping dead in those numbers even if the ICUs were overflowing.
No, that's absurd. You need to think a bit first. Those things are more easily taxed to "solve". And you being fat doesn't impact me in the least, unless I am unfortunately stuck next to you on a plane. I can't catch it from you. So that isn't comparable to COVID.
Notice how smoking has long been regulated and limited, but not banned? That slippery slope argument doesn't work either.
And the bit about giving kids pills is paranoid nonsense. And ironically, kids have had required vaccines for a very long time. With no sliding down any slopes.
>By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
No we're not. Accepting mandates doesn't somehow force everyone to automatically accept anything any politician claims or does in the future. That's not how anything works.
1918 had some cities implement lockdowns as a response to the rapidly spreading Spanish Flu. And then there were anti-lockdown protests which caused some cities to lift their lockdowns early and the virus surged. Business owners also railed against the lockdowns, and were sometimes successful in getting them lifted.
There was a similar situation with mandatory masks, and then loud anti-mask protests which resulted in the lifting of some mask mandates.
What happened over the past two years has happened before, and will probably happen again. You can find examples of lockdowns in other pandemic eras. Venice partially locked down in 1575 due to the plague.
You may disagree with lockdowns, but there's plenty of precedent. Your "fact" is incorrect.
My dude, "nothing in history" is a very strong statement. You should read up about what state actors did to limit the spread of the plague. I'm sure someone could find something older, but lockdowns are attested to as a public health measure since at least ~500 BCE (whenever Leviticus was written).
I don't feel like you're engaging in good faith, so I'm going to go ahead and quit responding.
In order to show that literally it turned out fine. It didn't turn into us being mandated to lose weight or whatever that commentator is scared of happening
It's justification for the sake of allaying that commentator's fears. Most people that support the mandate support it because it makes sense and they've thought about it. In fact, I'd wager that those who are against the mandate are more often susceptible to being brainwashed than those who are enthusiastically for it
That's a pretty cool slippery slope you just constructed. You've almost convinced me, but you forgot to tell me that they'll take my guns and make me gay.
I'm completely unsympathetic (or rather hostile) to the protests, but I find it shocking that there's any legal framework under which Gofundme could shut down the page, seize all of the donations, and force people to basically file paperwork to get them back. There's something deeply asymmetrical in the way we treat white-collar crime as opposed to street crime.
It's bizarre that they even though they could get away with that in such a high-profile situation; I suppose they thought that they could rely on the hostility of people like me to passively take the side of the woke corporation against normal people.
> I find it shocking that there's any legal framework under which Gofundme could shut down the page, seize all of the donations, and force people to basically file paperwork to get them back. There's something deeply asymmetrical in the way we treat white-collar crime as opposed to street crime.
I agree that it's fucked up, but the "legal framework" is just the fact that people agreed to the terms and conditions. It's not really shocking, though that doesn't make it right
Also, to be clear, the donations that weren't refunded were to go to charities of the choosing of the organizers. It's not just being pocketed
Refusing to provide a service and giving people a refund is broadly legal in most of the western world for most reasons except for isolated cases like protected classes, etc.
GoFundMe's original plan was to force each donor to file a claim for a refund, with the remainder going to unspecified charities instead of the original cause. They amended this to automatic refunds after a massive backlash.
Why shouldn't they be able to? Gofundme shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers. If someone wants to collect money for a cause, then Gofundme should be a neutral platform for that.
It's up to individuals whether they want to donate to any particular cause.
if ISIS isn't under US financial sanctions, then yes. GFM is not, and should not, be in the business of gatekeeping people's desire to fund causes they believe in, as long as those causes are legal.
If ISIS is just a political ideology then you have a point. But it's a terrorist organization. I am not sure what's going on in your head. Are you going to argue about terrorism is just a subjective label?
It’s a private company, it absolutely does not need to be neutral. They can choose any side they want. If you don’t like it, don’t use their platform. Gosh, when did the notion of private firms got so mixed up with so-called political neutrality? Are people this naïve?
When you have several groups of people who distrust and dislike each other, and you start using your business as a means to support the fight of one group against the other, you only increase the enmity between the groups and harm all businesses by starting a process that forces everyone to choose which group to support.
It does not matter whether the reason for initial distrust is religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or political beliefs. You should not start such "economic war" unless your goal is complete elimination of the other group, which, i think, is a rather stupid goal to have.
You’re going to be really upset then to think about the business organizations that receive tax breaks in order to influence politics. Many non-profits exist only for this purpose.
The only reason abortion is a political issue, for example, is because of the outsized influence that tax exempt organizations have.
Are you implying that existence of these tax-exempt organizations and politicization of issues is a good thing?
I don't see anything positive in tax breaks and tax code complexity in general as it is a method to obfuscate spendings and evade taxes, which creates all kinds of unintended consequences.
No, I am not implying that. Just noting its systemic and may as well be an intended feature of the system. At the very least, it's an intended consequence.
I can see positives in having the flexibility to tax things to discourage them, or to encourage behaviors. That's one of the best tools the government has to influence the public's behavior! (EG cigarette taxes). No assessment of the net-net benefit, merely pointing out the complexity of taxes does enable some good things as well.
This is not to say that businesses should not do this, only that they have to position themselves to profit from this change in the market.
Selling to both sides can be a profitable venture, which encourages neutrality, but so is locking in customers by something other than the quality or price of your product
I am saying that if we condemn such behavior in all cases (even when neutrality is violated in our favour) we'll reduce the situations when that second strategy becomes profitable, and that will benefit everyone. We don't even need a very large percentage of people for this, even a relatively small group that always supports neutrality will be enough to keep the market neutral.
It's because Canadian politicians suggested they should... Thankfully there's enough people in the US who are rightly disgusted by it and GoFundMe is a US company.
Well, I commented it. Ofc it is my opinion, who else would it be?
It also happens to be how reality works. Private organizations have literally always chosen sides. It’s how the world works, and I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your likes. Nothing you can do about it mate.
>Well, I commented it. Ofc it is my opinion, who else would it be?
Your "point" doesn't stand for much if it's just your opinion and you refuse to justify the reason for it.
>It also happens to be how reality works. Private organizations have literally always chosen sides. It’s how the world works, and I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your likes. Nothing you can do about it mate.
The state can always send Men With Guns to quell dissenting speech. Should we also proclaim that the government "absolutely does not need" to guarantee freedom of speech? Corporations can ultimately coerce you into accepting terms that overwhelmingly favor them, by offering services under "take it or leave it" terms. Should we say that consumers "absolutely does not need" to be afforded consumer protection rights?
One can’t, for example, solicit donations for cancer research and then instead take those donations and fund swimming pools for dolphins or whatever… even if you’re a private company.
>Gosh, when did the notion of private firms got so mixed up with so-called political neutrality? Are people this naïve?
When all speech, commerce, and art became transmitted by the permission of a small number of private firms whose combined powers exceed that of any nation-state.
In a free society, businesses shouldn’t be able to suppress or punish customers for their political views. We already require businesses to not just do whatever they want in many ways. That’s what anti discrimination laws do, for example. We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
Apart from that, we also regulate a lot of private companies to be neutral. Your power utility may be private but can’t deplatform you. Telecom carriers are similar. Social media companies are just common carriers and public utilities that have avoided regulation so far with careful political donations. Payment companies (Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, PayPal, and yes, GoFundMe) are all just basic payment utilities and should also be treated as public utilities in many ways even if they remain private otherwise.
>In a free society, businesses shouldn’t be able to suppress or punish customers for their political views.
>We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
I have not gasped at the outlandishness of an HN post in some time.
GoFundMe is not a grocer, or a transit provider. It isn't a power company. It is a luxury service in a free market with low capital requirements.
Under no circumstance should arbitrary businesses be required to cater to people of all political persuasions.
Protected classes exist based on attributes of ourselves which are immutable. You can't change being a woman, being old, or being a particular ethnic group. You certainly "choose" your political opinions.
> >We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
> I have not gasped at the outlandishness of an HN post in some time.
How else can a democratic republic preserve the diversity of viewpoints required for such a society to function? This really shouldn't be a controversial idea.
Differences of opinion are not only okay, they are essential!
Should a conservative landlord be able to evict anyone who voted for a progressive? Or deny renting in the first place?
> Protected classes exist based on attributes of ourselves which are immutable. You can't change being a woman,
I can't phrase this any less provocatively... Are you saying that all rights against discrimination end if one has a gender transition because it's no longer immutable? I really don't think immutability is the right line to use to decide who gets rights.
Religious belief is protected, and also mutable. Ask me how I know. Political affiliation needs the same protection.
Should a conservative landlord be able to evict anyone who voted for a progressive? Or deny renting in the first place?
No, but housing is already protected. How can you possibly think GoFundMe and housing/food are the same thing?
I simply struggle to understand why a decent person should have to serve someone who wants to kill minorities, or who wants to end democratic government in this country.
Furthermore, you act like if you don't enact this protection you're defending, no one will serve people of different political opinions. The truth is you're making a mountain out of an anthill. Most places serve people of differing political views. I go to a bar with a "Fuck Greg Abbott" sign at the front of the bar, and they'll happily serve a Conservative as long as they aren't being hateful. I happen to go to a bar owned by a Trumpian, anti-worker, anti-vax conservative (I happen to respect some of the bartenders, and the food is good). I am allowed to eat there despite the lack of your proposed legislation.
P.S.
>How else can a democratic republic preserve the diversity of viewpoints required for such a society to function?
It's functioned for close to 250 years, and the more I read American history, the more I realize that the current tumult and animosity is actually the norm, and the "peace" of the postwar period was the outlier.
That's a misunderstanding of what the transition is - the transition is on how the gender is presented, not the underlying gender.
That's not to say immutability is a great method to determine rights. Mind you, I don't think political affiliation needs such protections. Freedom of expression and association already handle interactions with political affiliation. The government guarantees your ability to have a political opinion, but not for other people respect it or to help you promote it. What people do with their business is still part of their view points - the real solution is to decentralize power more, so that even if you get thrown out for your political opinion, you can always work somewhere else that likes your politics
Yeah, I despise general deplatforming, but "mandating that businesses accept everyone no matter the politics" is just as bad. Not everything needs a law.
Anyone complaining about some big "left" collusion is essentially bashing a straw man. The actual truth is that there are more than two groups of political interests. Corporate interests are biased towards corporate interests, period. They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique. Shoehorning everything that you disagree with into a single category and then thinking the whole world is ganging up on you is a completely broken model, but it is unfortunately lucrative.
The article is, in fact, doing the opposite of "complaining about some big 'left' collusion." It's an explanation of how a vocal minority can produce similar results without any sort of conspiracy.
> They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique.
The notion that this stuff has the "broadest appeal as a marketing technique" doesn't hold water. Why are Hispanics suddenly "Latinx" now, when virtually no Hispanics identify with that term? https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in.... Last year, they had "Black Trans" posters at our local mall. My county is half Republicans, and a lot of the Democrats are middle class Black people who definitely do not have socially progressive views on gender identity.
The article explores some mechanics while still focused on this idea that corporations are inescapably left.
I'd say the larger difference is left activism is pro-social, or hyper-social in the extreme. "Black Trans" is promoting one specific identity, but not at the expense of others (apart from dilution). Whereas what is perceived as right activism has to rise to the level of being anti-social - a simple picture a happy heteronormative traditional family does not suffice (since it is taken for granted as the norm). Rather it defines itself by explicitly opposing left activism, and such overt conflict is a commercial non-starter.
> I'd say the larger difference is left activism is pro-social, or hyper-social in the extreme. "Black Trans" is promoting one specific identity, but not at the expense of others (apart from dilution).
Left activism is anti-social: it elevates the sovereign individual to primacy. It rejects the legitimacy of the majority to impose norms and demand conformity—even when it comes to socialization of children. It replaces that with the right of small minorities to impose norms on everyone else. For example, whereas in Asian countries you have norms that demand you address elders by formal titles, in left activism you have norms that require everyone to exchange pronouns for the sake of a small minority. The insistence on social affirmation, moreover, makes modern left activism different than the old liberal pluralism.
In the form of intersectionality, left activism is also appropriative. It uses the political capital of Black people, for example, to advance a number of other ideological positions which most Black people and Muslims don’t support and don’t agree with.
While you've made valid points for consideration about the blue tribe's blindspots, you're riffing off a different definition of anti-social than I used. You're talking about larger appreciation of social conformity, where I'm talking about creating immediate conflict.
Furthermore, US society is deeply rooted in individualism and so professing individualism is not leftist. In fact I'd say your framing does well to illustrate the disconnect - by attempting the claim that individualism is a leftist thing, despite it being overwhelmingly ingrained in mainstream US society, you're not really arguing for conservatism but rather something well to the right of conservatism. From that perspective, of course most everything appears to be leftist including conservatism itself.
> While you've made valid points for consideration about the blue tribe's blindspots, you're riffing off a different definition of anti-social than I used.
I know—my point is that you’re using a quite liberal sense of what’s “anti-social.”
> You're talking about larger appreciation of social conformity, where I'm talking about creating immediate conflict.
During her confirmation hearing, Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown claimed that she “wasn’t aware” that the Christian school where she was a board member espoused traditional views on gender and abortion. Why did a Black woman feel the need to not only clarify her own views, but actively disassociate herself from an organization that is completely normal for a Black woman to be associated with? Why did she need to imply that she might have acted differently had she known that a Christian school affiliated with a Black baptist church taught traditional Christian doctrine (as if that was a surprise?) You don’t think it was because of the threat of conflict from the activist left?
> Furthermore, US society is deeply rooted in individualism and so professing individualism is not leftist.
The US is more individualist than say China, sure. But most of the US, from the Puritan-descended WASP northeast, to the Midwest, to the South, never struck me as especially individualist. The west coast, sure, and maybe Colorado or Arizona. Recall, the US is the most religious developed country in the world—in terms of how many people pray daily, it ranks up there with Iran. The rhetoric of rugged pioneer individualism yields to communalism pretty readily in most of the country. In the small Iowa town where my wife went to high school, sports practices were all scheduled to allow kids to also attend church youth groups.
> Why did [Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown] need to imply that she might have acted differently [during her confirmation hearing]
Because she was looking for approval from the Democratic Party? Are you asking why the Democratic Party cares about the opinions of the "activist left" ?
> But most of the US, from the Puritan-descended WASP northeast, to the Midwest, to the South, never struck me as especially individualist
Religion in the Northeast seems more like a token thing rather than a way of life (eg "Christmas and Easter Catholic"), and despite communal structures the entire US is still steeped in individualism. One of the current major political issues of the political right, anti-mask / anti-vaccine, rests mainly on appeals to individual freedom! It's front and center in the founding documents - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
The article is, in fact, doing the opposite of "complaining about some big 'left' collusion." It's an explanation of how a vocal minority can produce similar results without any sort of conspiracy.
> They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique.
The notion that this stuff has the "broadest appeal as a marketing technique" doesn't hold water. Why are Hispanics suddenly "Latinx" now, when virtually no Hispanics identify with that term? https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Last year, they had "Black Trans" posters at our local mall. My county is half Republicans, and a lot of the Democrats are middle class Black people who definitely do not have socially progressive views on gender identity.
Okay, so you are the first person to discover that corporations are not politically motivated but only financially motivated, and they manufacture the appearance of political concern to pursue their financial interests. Nice, cool.
Now explain to me what is wrong with political factions publicly criticizing corporations under the guise of wanting political and moral change at the corporation, when in reality, they are attacking the corporation's financial interests, and their goal is to render their own brand of politics the one that commercial interests bend the knee to.
You have made the empiricist's error: conflating what he discovers to be, with what ought to be.
It's worse than that. It's that right-wing conspiracists already vote for everything that they support, so there's absolutely no need to pander to them. In fact, you can fund them while pushing woke PR. It's the potentially class-conscious who should be pushed to see the world as a bunch of benevolent corporations pushing fairness against the "white working class" forces of darkness.
My point is this: If you have a vaccine its inherently non-political, its just a medical intervention. But when it becomes mandated now you introduce a process by which some people can decide for some other people what must be done. That is politics.
Autism is one of many strawmen that the antivax movement throws out. You may have only become aware of this under Trump, but the antivaxers in my family are a flavor of anti-establishment Christian fundamentalists (quiverfull-aligned) that are absolutely political, and have been (I attest as a first-hand witness) for decades, long predating Trump's rise to power.
Their grandma just died of covid, and while part of me would hope that it would be a wakeup call, the kids are all home-schooled, so they've probably swallowed the narrative that nothing different could have been done; it was just her time to meet Jesus.
I hope they don't get chickenpox, personally. I hope they get some life experience that opens their eyes to how ignorant they are.
I'm not implying they nor their family are ignorant. Chicken pox is easily survivable for children. Less so for older adults. My parents took me to a pox party of other kids specifically to be exposed.
Covid is also easily survivable for children, and adults in reasonably good health. I survived corona a year ago and now see no medical reason to get those jabs.
You don't have to say it, they're my family and I'll tell it like it is: they are ignorant, and deliberately so. Home schooling is all part of the plan. (This is not a generic statement about home schooling, just these particular home-schoolers)
Immunity to COVID wanes over time, in part because it can take hold on the surfaces of your respiratory tract to a certain point without triggering the ire of your immune system (which is why vaccinated people can spread COVID). To keep yourself from developing a serious case of it, vaccinations need to be periodic, like the flu. You could keep getting it every year or so if you want, but getting it this year isn't going to prevent you from getting it next year
just because some people disagree with a policy does make it "political". I know someone that opposes seatbelt laws but that doesn't make them "political".
That said I don't think it's productive to debate what "political" means.
All policy is political by definition. Also the shared etymology is a bit of a hint too. Observe thar policy-makers is used as a synonym for politicians.
This article does not support your claim. It talks about things being liberal, which is a right-wing, pro-market ideology and fundamentally incompatible with leftism.
That might be true if you're in a political science course or something, but in the US "liberal", "leftism", "left-wing" is usually synonymous with each other. Some of the "liberal causes" that the article talks about include "women’s march, BLM, and Occupy Wall Street ".
Sounds like American political parlance needs to be elevated by people learning the distinction between all of those terms. Which is exactly the point of the comment. Just because a lot of people misuse terms and conflate unrelated concepts, doesn't mean they're right.
>Just because a lot of people misuse terms and conflate unrelated concepts, doesn't mean they're right.
On the one hand, I want to agree with you because every time I see someone on here use "woke" without any sense of what the word is actually meant to describe (hint - Spotify removing Joe Rogan episodes isn't "wokism") it puts my teeth on edge.
On the other hand, that's how language works whether one likes it or not.
Do you have some kind of source that gave you this misinformed idea you keep repeating? Neither Britannica, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com or any other obvious source remotely supports what you are claiming.
I mean, I've seen Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama referred to as Marxists and Communists numerous times. "Liberal" has been a pejorative for Democrats and progressives for decades. Nuance is not a property that American political discourse possesses.
Hacker News used to be about things that mattered to programmers and startups, etc. Now we are turning into yet another Reddit scream box. This type of article does not belong here. The comments keep turning into pointless vitriol.
While I agree most of the comments are garbage, this is just one thread and you can leave with the back button. There are hundreds of other non political posts a day
Edit: you've been posting a ton of unsubstantive and flamebait comments lately. Would you please stop that? We ban accounts that keep doing it, for what ought to be obvious reasons. Not liking HN, if that's how you're feeling, is not an ok reason to break the rules here.
I hate both the protest group and desantis but honestly he’s right.
The only reason gofundme (or any org with similar practices) do this is because they know that some people will miss the deadline, and the it becomes pure profit.
GoFundMe almost immediately changed their policy and instead directly refunded everyone
If this was a matter of politics, I think their politics would actually push them to make this decision more because the alternative was to make the organization that organized it choose another charity to give it to. That charity would likely be something that does not align with the politics of the average GFM employee
Really? My reading was that the donations will be refunded in their entirety.
I will say that I find GoFundMe's tactics around fees to be distasteful. It's been a while, but I recall having selected a donation amount and then being asked to pay an extra fee "so the charity doesn't have to bear this burden" or some such thing. Basically they just wanted to increase the donation amount (which increases their fee), and they were using guilt as a tactic.
DeSantis initiated this after they changed their stance. This is purely a political move. Just go check out patriots.win (the successor to /r/thedonald). They're still completely convinced that GFM took all the money and is giving it to BLM. I'm not even being hyperbolic, check it out
DeSantis probably just picked up on the rightwing twitter chatter and is trying to ride the wave
No... I was following along with thedonald.win for a long time. They were preparing for a transition to patriots.win for months before they ditched the old domain. It came from some letter of Trump's who vaguely hinted towards starting a new party called the "Patriots Party". Obviously that never came to pass, but the name stuck
It's literally the exact same platform, style, users, posts, etc. Nothing got "shut down"
My gut feeling is that GFM wanted to keep their tips, and this was a "good" way of doing so.
However it's also a little complicated since some of the money has been dispersed to the organizers (most of which went to Tamara Lich, according to the GFM page.) I guess they'll prorate the refunds or absorb the loss?
If anyone wants to know a little more about what their demands are:
> SCGGC will effective as of midnight on this ___, day of ___________, 2021, instruct all levels of the Federal, Provincial, Territorial, and Municipal governments to re-instate all employees in all branches of governments and, not limited to promote the same to the private industry and institutional sectors employees with full lawful employment rights prior to the wrongful and unlawful dismissals that stem from the SARS-CoV-2 (and not limited to SARS-CoV-2 subsequent variations) vaccine passport mandates
I must be the only person here who doesn't already know about these trucking protests; I'm having trouble establishing the basic facts of what is in dispute. Who exactly is required to be vaccinated?
It seems like the fraction of truckers who engaged in cross-border trucking with the US were subject to a Canadian federal vaccination mandate, which applied to some workers in the transportation sector as well as many federal workers, but this requirement was dropped a couple of weeks ago for cross border trucking.[1]
Are the truckers still protesting even though the requirement for cross border truckers to be vaccinated was dropped? Do they have some further demand?
Is anyone here able to kindly cite a (non-editorial) journalistic source which summarizes these events?
So according to these sources, Canadian truckers don't have to be vaccinated. They just have to quarantine if they have symptomatic COVID.
The first link says "On Wednesday evening, a Canadian Border Services Agency spokesperson said truckers would remain exempt from vaccination, testing and quarantine rules — a reversal from what the government had said publicly just hours before."
My top hit on the search is a primary government source stating that: "A Canadian truck driver who is not fully vaccinated can't be denied entry into Canada—Canadian citizens, persons registered as Indians under the Indian Act and permanent residents may enter Canada by right. [...] Any individual who is symptomatic upon arrival to Canada will be directed to a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) official and will be directed to isolate for 10 days from the time they enter Canada. As of January 15, 2022, unvaccinated or partially vaccinated foreign national truck drivers, coming to Canada from the US by land, will be directed back to the United States."
See, the entire reason these protests are stupid, is because what they're actually protesting is US policy that requires them to be vaccinated or test negative to enter the US. You are correct, they will not be turned away at the border coming back to Canada.
They are protesting US policy in Ottawa because this is really auxillary to the political goals of the organizers.
> Starting on Saturday, truckers coming back into Canada from the U.S. will have to show proof of vaccination or face quarantine and testing requirements. If they’re symptomatic the quarantine could last up to 10 days.
Regardless the trucker topics, the dispute around media bias is very solid to me. We have a good deal less variety than the US, CBC is very “metric” driven, click bait. It is kind of like if NPR was the main source of news for everyone. Regional news is drying up fast, to boot. There isn’t really “other news”.
“Kitchen sink” finance, inflationary issues are also a big part of the protests imo
It’s also quite frankly a massive dance party, which people have been missing out on
ie protest is (right now) seemingly a bit of a conservative mishmash, not just trucking dispute
> The organizers have demanded that the government be disbanded by the mechanism (senators and governor general dismissing the PM? wtf?) they made up out of nowhere.
In principle, couldn't the Senate force the government into a loss of supply situation triggering mandatory relinquishment of government or advice to the GG to dissolve Parliament? I mean, it wouldn't be immediate, as the timing would be based on the budget cycle, but unless I’m missing something it seems like it would be possible.
I think GFM did a massive blunder by not declaring that they will immediately refund the donations. I can understand their practical considerations - it probably costs them something to refund, but they should have just eaten the costs. Instead, they made it look like they are seizing the money - which looks very much like breach of trust. If I give you something with the promise that you will bring it to my friend, and you decide you don't like it so you donate it to the charity, I'd be pissed. Yes, I know GFM probably has a 200-page user agreement that makes you confirm your soul and your firstborn belongs to them and you have absolutely no rights whatsoever, but nobody reads that and everybody has expectations how this works, and "we'll seize all the money and send them to a charity" is wildly outside those expectations.
Gofundme is in the trust business. You have to have a lot of trust in them or you won't use them. They seem to be pivoting to a strategy that encourages distrust.
This is pretty much how a lot of people view gofundme now:
I don't know if that's true. I think the participation of many white nationalists in the trucker movement was a disaster waiting to happen for GFM. Ultimately the police were the ones who told them to take it down and they agreed the threat of violence violated their TOS
They followed their standard protocol to offer refunds and then donate any unrefunded money to charities of the choosing of the main organizers. And they've even changed their policy to issue direct refunds instead. I think they're clearly still in the business of trying to maintain their trust
I reported a funeral fundraiser for a criminal gang where i live a few weeks ago to Gofundme. These funerals involve reckless, high speed driving by hundreds of bikies wearing Swastika vests who hurl violence/verbal abuse at people if they happen to get in the way. I provided all this info and they didn't do anything.
A reasonable person would think a Gofundme for a group who derive their income from the methamphetamine trade would be higher risk than a bunch of truckies, but then again it didn't raise near $10m usd.
Anyone have commentary on how cryptocurrencies will step in to this space? Platforms like GoFundMe provide such a thin veneer of value. It's easy for them to overstep their bounds to the point where it's not worth it. If I were a journalist raising funds for a documentary I would be wary of such platforms.
(Didn't see this mentioned elsewhere in the thread)
Any cryptocurrency, upon becoming established enough to notice, will be regulated at the point of fiat conversion, or as soon as it gains legal tender status. Cryptocurrency enthusiasm is completely oblivious to the fact that currencies are legitimate because they are recognized as such by what people acknowledge as the authorities.
The difference was likely the threat of GFM getting involved in expensive legal situations since the protests were growing increasingly violent. The Canadian Trucking Alliance itself pointed out that most of the protestors had no connection with trucking. Other investigations found a lot of the participants had ties to white nationalist movements.[0] GFM is in a tricky spot. They prolly realized being hated by ant vaxxers was less of a headache than being accused of helping white nationalists. Their own public announcement simply stated that the cops pressured them to take it down due to reports of violence (which violates their TOS)
Rubin is Jewish/gay, Dichter is Jewish. But according to Trudeau they are homophobes, racists and white supremacists. The recording is from shortly before the deplatforming, so it not up to date.
I spent a decent part of my adult life in Canada and I can’t believe what in God’s name is happening to that place.
Canada is experiencing a severe housing bubble at the backdrop of Chinese snow washing, wage stagnation is real and middle class is slowly getting wiped out. The only thing keeping the GDP at the level it is is high level of immigration which favours the wealthy in the name of a “point based immigration system”.
The ruling liberal party is genuinely out of touch and the PM knows nothing but virtue signaling. The conservatives are also facing a leadership crisis since they lack largely a coordination and single thread holding the party. NDP is a joke and virtually does nothing and the electoral system is almost broken thanks to this three party system (oh and then there is Bloc which I don’t even want to get started on). Trudeau was elected prime minister with less than 33% votes.
The whole COVID crisis was used by Trudeau to call a snap election and then they don’t seem to have a plan to embrace the endemic outlook. This whole vax mandates for truckers was such a distraction at the backdrop of inflation and struggling service sector. I keep thinking what are these people thinking? Any decent policy advisors would say now is not the time to do things out of spite against the people who are critical to supply chain.
As a Canadian, it's been utterly shocking to watch our country crumble in the last few years. This summer I'll be moving away for good.
In the last decade I've seen most of my family leave for the US due to the higher incomes. I always kept hope that maybe Canada would get better. It hasn't, it's gotten very bad. The insane level of immigration has eroded away any leverage the working class has. Now you see all that frustration coming out, on both sides of the political spectrum, with each side blaming the other.
Housing and necessities are un-affordable for everyone, the divisive rhetoric has turned society against each other. Simply being in Canada is depressing now. I just got back from 2 months in Europe, the difference is shocking.
I've been looking to move to Canada (vs moving to US due to more sane social services like healthcare and pension system), is what you are describing present all over Canada or just in some parts of it?
My experience has been essentially the opposite of the person you're replying to.
Health care where I am is great, I can see my primary care doctor mostly same day or next day and the odd tests I've needed have never been any kind of wait longer than 3 weeks (for non-urgent tests). Immediate care for actual emergencies, I've been seen right away. It's a triage system, so if you go to the emergency department at the hospital with the sniffles you could wait a bunch of hours.
Yes, there's a huge housing crisis and yes it's an area of concern. There's some issues here in that the real difference-makers are controlled by cities. There's a LOT of NIMBYism.
I haven't really seen evidence of Canada "crumbling"; just a lot of people pushing that narrative whenever they're despairing over their own fortunes. Could it be better? Absolutely.
> Health care where I am is great, I can see my primary care doctor mostly same day or next day and the odd tests I've needed have never been any kind of wait longer than 3 weeks (for non-urgent tests).
Try living outside Canada. I used to think healthcare was great as a young male... (men typically don't interact with the healthcare system as often as women for biological reasons)
My girlfriend is pregnant. She's from the Czech Republic. We were just in the Czech Republic for 2 months. 3 weeks for non-urgent tests? Try a day. As in phone the clinic, get a test for the NEXT day. During the Omicron wave. She had bloodwork done, an ultrasound, x-ray for a foot injury, treatment for said injury, dental work done, etc... No wait times for anything. No wait times at the clinic. No need for a primary care doctor (something which many Canadians don't have because of a shortage of doctors).
Canadians take the sad state of affairs as normal and actually believe our government's propaganda that the rest of the world works the same way. It doesn't.
> I haven't really seen evidence of Canada "crumbling"
Go to another developed country. Live for awhile. The only people who think Canada's doing OK are the ones who never left.
And on an individual level; any country is great if you have enough money. Doesn't mean society is OK.
> My girlfriend is pregnant. She's from the Czech Republic. We were just in the Czech Republic for 2 months. 3 weeks for non-urgent tests? Try a day. As in phone the clinic, get a test for the NEXT day. During the Omicron wave. She had bloodwork done, an ultrasound, x-ray for a foot injury, treatment for said injury, dental work done, etc... No wait times for anything. No wait times at the clinic. No need for a primary care doctor (something which many Canadians don't have because of a shortage of doctors).
My partner had a similar experience when she went through her pregnancy during the first wave of covid (when everything was less certain). A pregnant woman is going to always have things like soft tissue ultrasounds before a guy with a light sports injury (my example of having to wait 3 weeks).
Your pregnant partner and I with a light sports injury are, in no good healthcare system, going to be given equal priority.
For an actual important scan like an X-Ray of a broken bone, it's always been immediate.
> Go to another developed country. Live for awhile. The only people who think Canada's doing OK are the ones who never left.
This is an awful assumption to make of anyone, especially anyone in a tech forum online IME. We're one of the most mobile workforces. I've absolutely lived and worked for lengthy stretches in other countries and experienced life there. I've obviously not lived everywhere but I suspect almost every country has its own pain points.
It's clear from your various posts though that you're stumping for the Czech Republic, and that's great, I'm glad you found a spot to make you happy.
I am sure Czech healthcare system has been subjectively better in your experience. But I hesitate to call it objectively better than Canada's, given that life expectancy at birth is 3 years shorter in Czechia compared to Canada. Something must be causing the disparity, and usually that tends to be the healthcare.
I can tell you why the disparity: many Czechs who are still alive were born and raised under communism and carry all the generational trauma caused by growing up under poverty and dictatorships. As a country it wasn't really 'developed' until quite recently. And, well, old people are the most likely to die, for obvious reasons. Funny enough, Czech life expectancy at 60 is exactly 3 years less than Canada's. Meanwhile there's no way to truly measure the life expectancy of someone born today.
But if you go check metrics like doctors per capita, beds per capita, how many clinics there are, insurance coverage, etc..., it's shocking. Twice as many doctors per capita as Canada, for example.
Edit - for example, under 5 year old mortality rate for Czech Republic is 3.2 per 1000 while for Canada it's 4.9...
Everywhere, albeit to varying levels. Canada's healthcare is a joke; it's 'free', but it's a joke. And the highest possible pension payout wouldn't pay half my rent today.
If you have the opportunity to move the US and have your employer pay for your healthcare, your quality of life and income will be much, much higher than you could ever expect in Canada. The main thing is that incomes in the US, especially for tech, are much, much higher while cost of living is lower.
I would answer that it's centered in a few major cities. The big problem with Canada is that political power is so concentrated in Montreal, Toronto, and to a lesser extent Ottawa and Vancouver that the views of the rest of the country are ignored, so there is not really an escape. It would be like if all US government policy was set by the Bay Area and NYC
While I can understand the healthcare part, what about US public pensions (Social Security) is not sane? The US public pension is quite generous compared to the rest of the developed world, including Canada.
The US can be accused of many things, but having a poor public pension isn't one of them.
I agree with everything you're saying. I'm hoping the current protests are going to be a catalyst for Canadians who for the most part are apathetic and apolitical to wake up and notice what has happened to our country and finally push back. We're so far gone though I don't know how we can actually reestablish ourselves though: in particular, our political parties are so hollowed out of anyone remotely competent and interested in the future of the country that regardless of the will of the people, I don't see how it can be represented.
We've also literally created millions of crazy people with all the covid fear propaganda, and I don't know how we reintegrate them into society.
Prague, Czech Republic. SO is Czech so we're moving mainly for the lifestyle, culture, plus now with a kid on the way we're concerned about access to education, healthcare, etc... Where we live in Canada it's literally $1 million to purchase any kind of housing whatsoever... We could make it work but I have no family here anyway and for the same money we can live much better there, plus be close to her family...
Canada's birth-rate is bellow what is necessary to sustain or grow the population. Without immigration Canada's population would be shrinking.
If you think it is bad now, imagine how bad would it be if the majority of the population was in retirement. Sustaining a pension scheme (or a healthy economy for pension funds) becomes very hard, plus all of the services required to keep the society running would be greatly reduced.
Canada's immigration system seems one of the better I've looked into, skills, language, education and job offer all have to be accounted to get in.
>The only thing keeping the GDP at the level it is is high level of immigration which favours the wealthy in the name of a “point based immigration system”.
Is that supposed to be bad? The main factors that contribute to your points are language skills, education, work experience, age, and job offer. It's true that those requirements favor the wealthy, but would canada be better served by immigrants that don't speak english, are inexperienced, old, and don't have a job lined up?
I think what they are trying to say is that a country can always increase its GDP by increasing population. Of course, if 2x the amount of people that are eating a pie that is 1.1x bigger, the quality of life has dramatically decreased. For the people immigrating, Canada is obviously appealing just simply from a security point of view. All things equal, they don't really care if their quality of life is the same as long as they won't randomly be killed.
Of course, this all needs to be substantiated with facts to actually show the cause of the issue. I honestly don't know if Canada's immigration levels are too high and causing problems for the middle class or if the OP is just angry that an Indian family now operates their local Husky.
I think it promotes skilled Canadians emigrating, along with keeping poor places poor. Instead of having competitive compensation, Canadian companies hire cheaper skilled labour from abroad.
If we got more cheap unskilled labour, we could expand our whole economy to be rich enough to pay for the expensive skilled Canadians. Making a ton of poor people richer ads a lot more total value than adding a couple of rich people
One thing most Americans don't understand about Canadian politics how much effort is put into limiting the influence of money. Corporations cannot make political donations in several provinces. Even unions can't contribute in some provinces. Individual donations to political parties are capped. On top of that, political parties have to adhere to campaign spending limits during election periods (although some do circumvent caps using third party PAC's).
In Alberta, where the organizer[1] of this GoFundMe is based, campaign spending limits for a provincial election are capped at $2,121,368 for a political party[2].
This GoFundMe just raised five times what an entire political party is allowed to spend during an election in Alberta.
Ostensibly, this cash was to be used to pay for gas and motel stays for those involved in the protest, but those truckers were never going to see a tenth of what Lich was given. Lich is a founding member of several Western separatist parties. Those parties, although they do have legitimate grievances that find some sympathy with moderates, take an approach that is wildly unpopular. Namely, separatism. They don't raise much money as a result. It's likely that Lich would have funnelled the remainder of this GoFundMe into support for one or more of the political parties she's affiliated with.
What could have happened is that, during the next few elections in Western provinces, we'd have seen a bevy of implausibly well funded PAC's shilling for Wildrose, Maverick, etc.. Their ads would have been similar in quality and quantity to those of the major parties. That could have significantly shifted the polls.
What about Lich's goals for the protest itself? As someone who wants to see Canada break up into several smaller nations, it's in her interest to demonstrate how weak and ineffectual the federal government is. What better way to do that than by blockading the capital and several key trade routes at the U.S. border while the federal government dithers and provincial governments do nothing?
Keeping money out of politics is a sisyphean task, but it's one most Canadians embrace. When GoFundMe's can raise this much cash in the blink of an eye, we have to recognize that the game has been fundamentally transformed yet again. In this instance, all that stopped a politically transformative amount of cash from flowing into a fringe party's hands was the hesitation of a foreign corporation. I fully expect regulations for political fund-raising through services like GoFundMe are going to be in the works shortly.
Keeping money our of Canadian politics has in no way democratized it, and I would argue the opposite. Our political leaders are dominated by a small group of elites (men from specific parts of Montreal). These incumbents would be threatened by any new money flowing into the system and would rather trade on their legacy networks. We could greatly benefit from politics being shaken up here with some outside donations.
This sort of discussion never goes well, but using GoFundMe to finance occupations, especially across national borders, is an incredibly dangerous game.
If a GoFundMe to harrass and harangue Ron DeSantis -- to effectively sponsor people to park outside his home and blast horns, among other things -- would he be okay with that? How about if Canadians paid millions for people to park on US interstates? Is that okay?
This is entirely outside of the mission of GoFundMe. And it's interesting how exactly the same group of people lamenting the paying of bail for BLM protesters are falling in line with rights for this trucker group to harass and occupy Canadian cities.
Any and every corporation with more than a hundred employees is a money-generating sociopath. GoFundMe doesn't give a damn about anything at all, they just recognize it's profitable to back some causes and unprofitable to back others.
Did you watch the linked video? It spends half the time talking about the CHOP and how the fundraiser is supporting it. The founder says they want to maintain a police free location to further the goals of BLM
You are seriously misinformed on CHOP/CHAZ. Likely 1-5% of the area was devoted to a garden. The rest was filled with protesters waging nightly war on the police and surrounding businesses. More than that, CHAZ/CHOP protestors were directly responsible for multiple killings of black people.
It was not mostly centered around urban farms. That was only a tiny, tiny slice of Cal Anderson park. It wasn’t an actual farm either, but desperate PR - they threw down a few bags of soil a few inches deep, and obviously nothing came of it (in terms of food production). I am not sure the size of CHAZ even matters - it was a chokehold on the most frequented parts of Capitol Hill, the businesses in and near it, and the roads used by tens of thousands daily that run through it.
As for how safe it was - it was a lawless zone that gave safe harbor to crimes (including murder) and weapon stashes used by BLM/antifa affiliated rioters to attack the nearby police precinct. Here are some sources:
A missing piece of this is Canada's Bill C51 [1], which characterizes interference with critical infrastructure as terrorism. A significant difference between CHAZ/CHOP and these protests is the legal context. Looters bad, rah rah, but GoFundMe doesn't want to touch (legally-defined-as) terrorists with a 10 foot pole. But C51 was passed with an eye towards stopping anti-pipeline protests, and conservative Canadians loved that*. But now, they want the right to interfere with critical infrastructure as a legitimate form of protest. Should have thought of that in 2015, I guess.
Given that parents getting into a shouting match with a particularly dense school board functionary is defined as "terrorism" now I think this can only lead to the terrorism accusation losing its sting. If every petty political squabble is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism.
A shouting matches at a school board in the US at least is not terrorism. Bringing your guns and saying you might use them in the future and making vaguely threatening comments about that sounds like something that should be illegal to me. Saying I hate this decision that you're making and I'm going to vote against you, not terrorism.
The law is vague enough so that if FBI wants, it can declare a real lot of things to be domestic terrorism. The official definition is "dangerous criminal acts intended to
intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence or affect government policy or conduct within the jurisdiction of the United States".
Now, what is "dangerous"? There's no objective standard to it. Some people say publicly disagreeing with the government is "dangerous" for our democracy. A lot of people thinking Twitter and Facebook not banning everybody to the right of Nanci Pelosi is "dangerous". Other people say using wrong pronouns is "dangerous". Yet other say disagreeing with CRT is "dangerous". It all depends on how the law enforcement would define it.
Next is "influence or affect government policy". If you protest the government, you obviously want to influence its policy, right? Otherwise, what's the point of it? So, as long as FBI is willing to consider you "dangerous" - and again, there's no objective definition of it, and they will suffer absolutely zero consequences if they're wrong or overzealous in it - they have lawful authority to treat you as a terrorist.
Of course, there's a serious step to overcome - "criminal act". Only the court can decide if an act is "criminal". But for the FBI is would be impossible to enforce the law if they had to wait for a court conviction to do anything - so obviously, they are given a lot of leeway in persecuting acts that they think are "criminal" - and as long as they can prove there's not a law that explicitly says what you were doing is not criminal and FBI is explicitly forbidden from prosecuting you - even if you ultimately prove your innocence they suffer zero consequences. It's called "qualified immunity", look it up. And when we're talking about "terrorism", they could do a real lot of damage to you without ever taking matters to court. The process is often the punishment, and they can ruin your life very thoroughly way before you ever see the inside of a courtroom. And we know for a fact they are willing to lie in court documents - including outright fakery - to achieve their goals. You personally probably wouldn't be big enough fish for them to need to do that - but if they need to, they will.
No, that's not what I said. What I said is, if FBI wants it, it can be treated by them as terrorism, and to prove them wrong would take a lot of effort. And there's no way neither to prevent them from it, nor to punish them for getting it wrong.
And if you think matters are different in Canada with respect to how law enforcement works, or how "anti-terrorist law" works - you'll soon learn Canadian law enforcement can make one's life hell the same way FBI can.
I wonder how partisan this anti-mandate resistance is. My gut tells me it enjoys a lot of support from conservatives but also a healthy amount of support from a lot of moderates and a huge swath of the working class regardless of party affiliation.
Anti mandate movements in general have something closer to what you said, but everyone I know that isn't right wing is embarrassed or angry at the convoy, even those who don't like mandates.
How accurate of a gauge do you think your liberal friends are? I am not as liberal as all of my coworkers seem to be, but implying otherwise would make me feel less certain about keeping my job. Any chance your friends are just conforming to what they assume you think in order to maintain social status or your friendship?
In another post you claimed "seems to be siding with the government because the intent of the protest has been declared wrong-think by the PM"
Do you really think this? Do you really just caricaturize people who think differently from you in some easy "but they don't really think that" bin? In another you declared it "boomers".
Most of Canada is strongly over mandates. I'm over mandates, and many public agencies have made clear that things are going back to normal. Omicron changed everything. But we don't identify with an *ignorant* group primarily funded by and cheered on by Americans. It is, at its essence, almost traitorous.
And again let me say that I lean conservative. BLM protests that get out of hand? SEND IN THE POLICE. Rail blockades that go on for days? SEND IN THE POLICE. If I were in Seattle, the whole CHAZ/CHOP thing would be completely unacceptable. Amazingly I am also fully and completely against some of the most profoundly ignorant people this country hosts, financed by foreigners, terrorizing a city 24/7 (and yes, while you have "seen on Twitter" that the honking stops at 10 -- 105db incessant honking -- it actually happens throughout the day, along with fireworks and loud music), and the only victims are the citizens of Ottawa and Canada.
Maybe everyone who thinks differently from you is just a boomer conforming and eagerly consuming what the PM declares "wrong-think". Or maybe your perspective of the world is completely broken.
My friends aren't only liberal, and most of them aren't from work. I worked for a fair bit in logistics and still have contact with that field, which leans much more to the right, and I haven't heard any support so far.
That’s interesting. I feel like most of my normie acquaintances don’t really know what’s going on much less have strong feelings. In general I get a sense of disillusionment among my normie/nonpartisan friends with respect to the CDC guidance, vaccine mandates, etc.
What other option is there when the government is tone deaf? They do it in France for other things and it's quite legal when there's a union behind it.
And what will the government do if the truckers finally throw in the towel like they did in the UK (or maybe it was Polish and other Eastern European truckers who chose to operate on the mainland after Brexit)?
That's not what happened in the UK. There was demand for a lot of truck drivers, in the past there were a lot of immigrants who would work for low wages, but they brilliantly cut off those workers, suddenly they were not enough truck drivers. There hasn't really been this big "I am anti-vax mandate and I'm not working thing" that some people are fantasizing about.
I never said anything about mandates in the UK, probably because there weren't any. But they did cut off the truck drivers in a different way and it's not the only labour shortage they'll experience due to brexit. This is how governments create artificial labour shortages.
Every truck union and federation has denounced the protests. Despite the protests, everything is operating logistically completely normally.
It isn't "truckers". Some participants brought trucks because they a) have sleeping facilities, b) have big loud horns, c) take a lot of space and are hard to remove. That doesn't make it a trucker protest anymore than someone riding a bicycle there would make it a bicycle protest.
How many people that aren't truckers just happen to have that kind of truck laying around for the occasional protest? Are you aware of the cost of a truck like that?
I didn't say these people don't have trucks or employment driving trucks. Clearly they do. But that the misrepresentation that they represent truckers, instead of just being some small subsection that have trucks, is misleading.
Again, all logistics are happening like normal through this whole event. Cross border traffic (despite vaccine mandates on both sides) at normal levels. National traffic at normal levels.
You can take virtually any field and find some subsection with these sorts of "beliefs". Coders against mandates. If someone smeared all coders because some subsection of HN stood honking horns at parliament, wouldn't that embarrass you?
OK, I see what you're saying now. On first read it sounded like you were saying they aren't truckers, but you're actually saying they don't represent all truckers.
In reality they represent at least as many truckers as are present (and who knows how many that aren't: what a union's PR department says and what its members think aren't necessarily the same thing), and presumably a large chunk of the people out there cheering them on.
If someone smeared all of a group of people for something that some individuals in that group did, I'd probably assume that their takes on things aren't very useful. I'd be frustrated to the extent that their pontificating affected my life negatively. I wouldn't be embarrassed.
I worked in logistics and I can tell you that the vast majority of truckers are vaccinated. I don't think they will throw in the towel. I don't see what happened to the UK happen in Canada.
This is a good point and if this law were enforced fairly and equally across all political causes, I would support it. Infrastructure is not, in my view, appropriate for political persuasion. It feels coercive in the same way ironically, that vaccine mandates are. However, I worry that often times these laws are enforced by whoever is in power in a one-sided manner. This was definitely the case in Seattle - we had a socialist city council member who helped BLM protesters break into city hall (a sort of manufactured protest event) but any hint of moderate or conservative protest and you can expect to be held to the letter of the law.
No, you don't seem to get it. This is happening in Canada. The laws here are different from Seattle. The question of how this law is enforced has zero application to the BLM protests stateside. GoFundMe has made the choice to operate in Canada, and they're going to make inconsistent-looking decisions because the laws simply aren't the same on both sides of the border.
No. Arson, attacking police and forcefully occupying a public space are all illegal in Seattle too. Pretty sure arson is a felony. Someone was murdered in CHAZ.
In practice it's quite different. For example if you send money to a suspected terror group your bank will block the transaction and freeze the funds (that is, they don't even get you your money back), even in the absence of any crime.
They won't do this for regular criminals. Even if they know that a transaction is probably related to criminal activity, the bank will just file a report and complete the transaction. Except for terrorism financing and sanctions evasion, it is entirely the job of Law Enforcement to act on reports.
I desperately wish that were true, but alas, that has not been been the case for several decades. It's cool to indefinitely detain and torture suspected terrorists, haven't you heard? Folks didn't care when it was just Muslims, but we all lost our rights to the war on terror.
Bill C-51 was written to enable the government to silence dissent. That's a right we all need. But it was passed at the height of the Idle No More protests, which many of the truckers out there would be vehemently opposed to. Politicians gain power when they can use fear and hate to fuel divisions and justify the erosion of our rights.
Unless you're specifically paying someone to engage in arson and murder, which isn't the case, it's not illegal. Funding terrorists is illegal in a way that funding someone who happens to be a felon isn't.
Hmm - I might be missing something, but I think we are in agreement? I was just making a point that laws need equal enforcement to be just, regardless of jurisdiction. The Seattle mention was just to provide an example of a law being unequally enforced. I also agree that GFM may make different decisions for different locations to comply with the local laws, and also agree that protests should not displace the use of infrastructure like roads.
It's obviously a peaceful protest*. The word "occupation" here is already spin from the side that wants to shut it down and is trying to build a case for doing so.
Peaceful protest involves physically assembling and making noise. That is no doubt unpleasant both for those who disagree with the protestors and those who live in the neighborhood, but the right to do this in public is fundamental and vital in democratic society. I thought we were all raised to understand that? For the life of me I can't understand people who are so ready to trash those rights just because they don't happen to agree with a cause. Either these are democratic rights or they aren't, and if they are then they apply to everybody.
* Edit: I shouldn't have said obviously. I should have said: from what I've seen. Some people are posting that there have been violent things going on, but those claims have come without evidence. In the few cases where I have seen objective information, such claims have turned out to be exaggerated. If I see objective information showing that the protestors have turned violent, I will change my mind. (As long as it is clear that it really was the protestors and not someone trying to make them look bad, since that kind of thing also happens at protests.)
It is literally, by every definition, an occupation.
People came in and brought homes with them (sleeper cabs, RVs, etc). Now they have set up permanent structures such as kitchens and other facilities (today they brought in a sauna), and have been stating repeatedly that they are in for the long haul.
There is a reason that's called an occupation. A protest is normally a discomfort for the protester. Enduring the elements. Going without. But waving a flag and chanting slogans that convey a message. Here we have a bunch of people in transport trucks blasting their horn 24/7.
Maybe, but if the popular discourse doesn’t use the word “occupation” for the likes of CHAZ, then I think it’s fair to avoid it here as well. We should strive toward fairness and away from partisan favoritism IMHO.
Everyone referred to the Seattle occupation as an occupation. They literally called it the "Capital Hill Occupied Protest". A simple Google search finds endless pages of media reports calling it an occupation.
Are you being truthful about the 24/7 horn blasting? I’ve seen reports on Twitter that the convoy stops horns at 10 PM because they’re not protesting the Canadian people/Ottawa citizens. Is there any video of the horns honking 24/7?
Just to be clear:
Are you asserting that the fact people are building/taking into account logistics to protest for the long haul with regards to something they vehemently disagree with detracts from the legitimacy of the act of protesting?
If so, wow. That's low-key\backhand authoritarian to a T; defining legitimate protest as something that isn't in the grand scheme of things effective at disrupting something enough people disagree with, and anything that does make a dent either terrorism or something else.
Protests throughout time have been at hardship and discomfort of the participants. When your "protest" are sleeper cabs (in vehicles regulated through monopoly by the government, which seems like an easy lever) and hotel rooms, now with saunas and food prep rooms, funded by the American right, and your "protest" is laying on horns 24/7, there is zero legitimacy there.
Canada had railway blockades in early 2020 that were groups of people literally sitting in the cold for days on end on railway tracks. And the interesting paradox is that the Canadian "right" were demanding that the police go full stormtrooper on them. Now this same group is cheering on parking a transport truck in the middle of the road and blasting horns around the clock. Bizarre times.
Since when was the efficiency of how a group protested used to determine the validity of a protest? Slacktivism, or using social media to protest, generally costs participants nothing in the way of comfort. Neither does walking in a street on a beautiful day in the summer chanting one’s beliefs. Is there any video evidence of honking horns all night? I’ve read on Twitter that they stop honking at 10PM because they are not protesting the Ottawa citizens. This is a legitimate protest by workers and the side that is usually pro-worker seems to be siding with the government because the intent of the protest has been declared wrong-think by the PM.
So we agree, GFM should have nothing to do with any occupation, right? You agree with this, correct?
You think that I'm some sort of partisan in this -- perhaps a projection -- and you caught me in hypocrisy. But you didn't. Financing protests is an incredibly dangerous game.
I was against BLM justified violence and looting, as well as the various "free" zones.
I was against the railway blockades in Canada (due to complex aboriginal issues)
I am against the trucker occupations and criminal harassment of the citizens of Ottawa and other jurisdictions (and I think they should be layered with so many fines their trucks become the property of the state).
I'm remarkably consistent on this. Law and order is good. Democracy is good.
I think the point that has the previous poster concerned is that you seem to be asserting that anything that requires capital allocation to perpetuate it's effectiveness as a disruptive protest isn't a protest. This thereby de-facto caps the effectiveness of any protest to something that can be quaintly noted and largely dismissed by the establishment.
This ultimately degenerates around the extremes, and I believe that is what the poster is concerned about; that your definition basically bakes in the assumption that any protest must necessarily be so minor in nature as to not overly disrupt, when in reality, the point of a truly effective protest is to disrupt.
Assume that somehow a fit of madness took hold of the Highest authorities in the land and sufficient agency to implement and enforce dicta in a resistable, but still a threatening degree to the nation as a whole. Assume quite literally the entire country except the perpetrators disagreed.
Now apply your rule. We've got a situation where literally everyone but the people wrecking things is ready to organize resistance. Your rule places the Authorities on a privileged position of presumptive legitimacy where none exists. Only token protests capable of being safely ignored due to transient nature and poor coordination will be tolerated. Anything (even peaceful in the extreme, literally being somewhere, taking up space, breathing air, and just existing), but requiring extensive/non-trivial logistics becomes an act against which force of law is "justifiable" to disperse.
Personally? I don't accept your view. If there are enough people that feel like their capital is best allocated making themselves a pain-in-the-ass to <authority of the week>, that's their perogative.
...Now, given, the cross-border jurisdictional complications in this case, I will give you this seems different because people in another nation are funding disruptive activity in yours. If it were only coming from domestic funders, that'd be one thing. The external funding elevates this to something else. However, this is a complication that has been long in coming to the forefront, and poses diplomatic questions currently above my paygrade.
However, I'm still more sympathetic to the protestors here in the same manner that I disagree with the Taft-Hartley Acts ban on organized secondary striking. Ultimately, I believe the People (for any unit Nation's definition thereof which is a completely different thing to kavetch about) are the ultimate authorities on what is legitimate, and what isn't. If they decide to fund something that the government, or even the rest of the populace doesn't like, ultimately, the vote of no confidence inherent in the action elevates their behavior to civil disobedience.
Which I am totally okay with.
Note: the implicit okay evaporates once people start getting violent, actually committing crimes (where said crimes are not transparently "stop being inconvenient" crimes, a la assault/battery/arson/murder/larceny/grand theft/kidnapping/property destruction).
Is this what your rhetoric is reduced to? Demanding that people answer for invented, imaginary hypocrisy? I didn't "dodge" a completely stupid, manufactured question because I have literally no onus to answer it.
GFM shouldn't be used to sponsor *ANY* protest. I've said that REPEATEDLY, and consistently. A protest that needs sponsorship is not a legitimate protest.
You realize the Civil Rights movements in the US had substantial fundraising? The March to Selma? How do you think people were fed? Where did they sleep?
So by your logic the Civil Rights movement was not legitimate?
Do you think if the relatively tiny sponsorship didn't happen, the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened? I specifically talked to protests needing sponsorship, and in the case of the current occupation the bloated GFM -- funded by the far-right in the US who have achieved such a bucolic utopia of governance they now want to export it -- spurred on the participation. It legitimized it. This was nothing before everyone was chomping at the bit to get their slice of a big pie.
"How do you think people were fed? Where did they sleep?"
They literally slept in fields and went days with negligible food. In Ottawa protesters are sleeping in hotels and in $600,000 sleeper cabs running 24/7 and are eating like kings. They have built various facilities including a sauna. They are treating it like a fun vacation. What a shocking contrast.
All of this makes the other reply to you simply incredible.
I think his point is that only well-off people, who can fund themselves, should be allowed to protest. Poor people, who can't support themselves protesting, should have no right to do that.
"And as the other response mentioned, demonstrations were in fact funded in the past"
You think this is a retort. Amazing.
"Getting all defensive and outraged is one way to avoid an answer"
Demanding an answer out of someone, especially when they've spoken directly to the topic repeatedly, and then announcing an imagined, projected hypocrisy, is an unbelievably ignorant, boorish tactic. I might just say a troll tactic. Did you learn this from Tucker Carlson? It has absolutely no place on HN.
A friend was shoved into a snowbank by a protester because she wore a mask. I was verbally assaulted for the same while skating on the canal. They're not peaceful.
BLM protestors were going around pouring drinks on diner's heads, and eating their food off their plates, then assaulting them. GoFundMe had no issues with that.
>I think the real struggle is understanding the degree to which they are peaceful or not. Obviously nothing is black or white.
I would also add, the next struggle is what it impact it should have on our reaction, if any.
Obviously violence has nothing to do if someone if right or wrong, but it does have to do with if they should be tolerated. At what point do we no longer tolerate protests based on some violent indivduals?
What if their leaders endorse violence? If 1% of protesters are violent? If 0.001% are violent?
These are the real questions, and not particularly new ones.... There was a lot of violence from US civil rights protesters, people even got violent at MLK protests.
But still, there is a limit somewhere. I think protests should be shut down if the leaders endorse violence. Beyond that, it is really hard to say. Maybe percent is a bad way to think about it, and we should look at damage, IDK.
Ah I see what you were meaning now. I agree, while we could say zero violence in a perfect world, we know that is it rife with conflicting interpretations in the real world.
I agree with the leaders endorsing violence being a clear market for an unacceptable protest.
Beyond that, I would probably leave it to some authority like a judge. They could make the call based on number/severity of incidents, etc.
I live in Ottawa. This is not simply unpleasant noise that the residents downtown are being forced to live through. This is a large number of transport trucks and various general trucks blowing their horns throughout the day and night. There are multiple trucks driving around with train horns which are extremely loud. A lawsuit has been filed against this tactic being used by the protesters (https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/class-action-suit-...)
Nor is it limited to auditory harassment. Some examples:
- Convoy protesters harass local shelter for free food. It's not that big a stretch to characterize this as stealing from the homeless since that's specifically who the food is meant for.
https://twitter.com/sghottawa/status/1487854425368633344
I personally know people who have been verbally intimidated for wearing a mask, one who was screamed at and pushed to the ground for wearing a mask, and another who was threatened with rape as she walked into her place of work.
A number of businesses have closed for the weekend due to safety concerns and have subsequently been brigaded with negative comment and reviews on their google listings.
Of course, you can make the claim that the participants are not actually protesters but could be false flag, paid actors, antifa or whatever. I personally think that's reaching. I've lived here for many years, seeing many large protests come and go, and I've never seen such an influx of hateful incidents.
I fully agree with their right to protest and sympathize with some of their complaints but these tactics are in no way acceptable or peaceful. People need rest and these protesters are denying this to a huge amount of people. People should feel safe walking through the streets of their city and people absolutely do not feel safe walking close to the protests because of the many examples of harassment.
Apologies for the length of the reply but, as you can imagine, it's very disappointing to see these events minimized.
It does seem pretty clear that just like Trump in the US attracted all the haters, racists and Nazis and their adjacent friends (which wasn't the same thing as his massive support among the angry working class white cohort), this protest is doing the same in Canada. And now you have this weird thing that American far right-wingers like DeSantis are jumping on the bandwagon and trying to pull their fake "working people 10-4 good buddy" street cred instead of the racist Nazi street cred.
I thought the real issue was that GoFundMe didn't initially return the money to the donors, instead they gave the money away to a charity, or so they claim.
They didn't do that, but they released a statement that they were going to do that, until there was a massive outcry and several state attorney generals got involved and promised to open investigations.
> And it's interesting how exactly the same group of people lamenting the paying of bail for BLM protesters are falling in line with rights for this trucker group to harass and occupy Canadian cities.
The inverse is also true, and at least in the more recent case people can point to the earlier BLM precedent. I.e., “if the platform can be used to fund BLM protests, then it can be used to fund trucker protests”. If GoFundMe didn’t want their platform to be used for this kind of thing, they should be mindful of the precedents they set.
I'm glad the governor is looking into this. Undoubtedly there are FL residents who contributed to this worthy cause via GFM, and then to have GFM suddenly say they're going to redirect the funds? Seems like some sort of fraud to offer a service for one thing and then change it after money has changed hands. GFM obviously realized this was a problem, so changed their minds and is providing automatic refunds. But this sort of fraud can only have a negative impact on the cause people were wanting to fund.
But GFM at the very least comes across as partisan, if not hypocritical. If they're going to be a partisan funder, then I'm sure there are other laws they need to comply with which they currently don't.
The plan presented to GFM by the organizers called for excess funds to be given to charities. How is it fraud for GFM to follow the organizer’s plan? The only thing they refused to do was fund the illegal occupation of downtown Ottawa.
To equate giving all of the funds to other charities and not allowing any of it to be used for its given purpose with giving the rest of the money after its intended purpose has been met is... well, not right.
Like, consider a non-profit that you want to support its vision. Most of the money goes to its mission, the rest pays its execs. They decide to use 100% of it for the execs. According to your argument, that's just fine.
I neither believe it is truthful to call it "occupying the nations capitol" nor am I surprised that GFM won't fund it.
Regardless, your response was a non-sequitur. You really need to deal with what I actually said.
To help you along, I also wouldn't be surprised for a charity to redirect 100% of its income to its executives. But that wouldn't mean I would say it was fine for them to do that, even though the reason I gave the money was for clean wells in Africa. That's what you're defending.
> I neither believe it is truthful to call it "occupying the nations capito
People who live in Ottawa disagree.
> To help you along, I also wouldn't be surprised for a charity to redirect 100% of its income to its executives. But that wouldn't mean I would say it was fine for them to do that, even though the reason I gave the money was for clean wells in Africa. That's what you're defending.
This is a textbook strawman. We're talking about a specific situation here, so stop trying to invoke entirely different situations to defend it.
The fact is that this has turned into an occupation. It's not reasonable to expect GFM to fund that.
Look, I've already explained that I'm not surprised. You are claiming I'm lying? Or what? Also my example is not a straw man. It's a simple analogy. This will be my last comment.
The thing I'm trying to address is your claim that it's just fine and dandy for them to redirect all the money to charities because that's equivalent to what the original organizers were going to do anyway. It's not. It's so obviously not appropriate that GFM immediately realized they could never get away with that and changed their minds and decided to refund all of the money instead. So I don't know why you're even bothering to defend their original plan. You're probably literally the only person in the world who thinks it's fine.
> The thing I'm trying to address is your claim that it's just fine and dandy for them to redirect all the money to charities because that's equivalent to what the original organizers were going to do anyway. It's not.
Not just any charities, charities that were going to be chosen by the organizers, which is in line with the agreement the organizers accepted. I honestly don't understand how you can believe something nefarious was going on when they were following the agreement that was made with the organizers.
> It's so obviously not appropriate that GFM immediately realized they could never get away with that and changed their minds and decided to refund all of the money instead. So I don't know why you're even bothering to defend their original plan.
That's one interpretation. A much simpler interpretation is that they realized it's 100x easier to just refund the money instead of having to vet every charity chosen by the organizers to make sure the money wasn't being embezzled or used for actual nefarious purposes. Go head and look into the organizers of this protest. They're overt white supremacists.
its a bit of dark pattern but i'm not sure if it is illegal. i suspect gofundme wanted the donations redirected so they would still receive the revenue the donations created. from their POV if they refund all the donations then they are paying fees for processing and refunding and not receiving any revenue. if gofundme wanted to still try and process the donations the more ethical option would be to set the default to be refund and allowed people to opt-in to have their donations redirected. also, my understanding is gofundme always planned to redirect funds to charities approved by the original organizers. i've seen some people claim that it was going to be charities approved of by gofundme alone but i have not seen evidence of this. i think in that case that would be deeply unethical.
I would think that every GFM campaign is approved by default once the money starts flowing in. To change it after the fact should be seen as a criminal act.
>And it's interesting how exactly the same group of people lamenting the paying of bail for BLM protesters are falling in line with rights for this trucker group to harass and occupy Canadian cities.
That's true, and its also interesting how exactly the same people who support the paying of bail for BLM looters and rioters (lawful protesters aren't arrested and don't need bail) are cheering the decision of GoFundMe to block the funds to the Canadian protesters. The issue as I see it is the failure of GoFundMe to have a consistent standard that is neutrally applied without regard to the underlying politics of those raising funds. If they say that its prohibited to raise funds for those involved in breaking the law, then that standard should be applied to both BLM and the truckers.
Another important issue in this case was the initial decision of GoFundMe to keep all donated funds absent a proactive request for a refund by those who had donated. Its bad enough if GoFundMe decided to act in a nakedly partisan manner when deciding who is allowed to raise funds on their platform, but its entirely another matter for them to make people jump through hoops to get their money back. I'm glad to see GoFundMe reversed this decision and decided to offer automatic refunds, but it shouldn't have taken a huge outcry for them to reach this decision.
"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." - Pierre Trudeau, 1969
When trying to grasp the Canadian point of view on GoFundMe, understanding the primal fear this quote invokes in us is vital.
The thing is BLM protesters broke laws. They started fires, destroyed businesses, trapped drivers in tunnels, attacked police, set fires in people’s homes, and declared an autonomous zone that claimed to secede from the country - and this is just from my city. GoFundMe happily allowed them to be funded while Facebook and Twitter happily allowed them to organize. Driving trucks and using the roads as they are meant to be used does not seem anywhere nearly as egregious (I know some did more than this). It also seems appropriate given that bodily autonomy is the most fundamental civil liberty. If you don’t have control over your body, what do you have in terms of liberty and why does rule of law matter?
But they didn't tho. The people that did that were criminals taking advantage of the situation and lack of police. BLM protestors where nonviolent except when police tried to push them back and silence them. Sure they took over areas, but that's what happens during social movements. The damage was greatly exaggerated unrealistically by right wing news media.
When I watched the live streams on twitch, I remember one video where the police were just standing there doing nothing, the protesters were yelling abuse. The police just stood there. It wasn’t until the protesters started throwing bottles and setting a car on fire that the police got involved.
There were videos live streamed by people in the groups who were smashing the windows of the power company, going inside and destroying everything.
I don’t believe anything was greatly exaggerated or unrealistic when this was live streamed by people doing it.
Most of the protests were peaceful. But there was a lot of damage and a lot of violence not started by the police.
(I’m not American and don’t live in America, but I watched too many hours of the live streams while it happened)
Edit: twitch had streams of people streaming multiple streams. So 1 twitch stream was showing about 15 live streams happening at the time.
So the same as this protest? The violence is by criminals taking advantage of the situation. They are nonviolent except when the police try and push them back.
I’m going to guess you don’t think that because you don’t like the goals behind this protest?
The vaccine isn’t being forced on anyone. Body autonomy is no more being violated here than any other time in history where vaccines have been required to do certain things, of which there are many examples.
Not to mention, all the things you listed at the start of your comment have been done by the Ottawa occupiers. I don’t like to call them truckers because most are not, and most truckers are against this occupation.
> The requirements changing for a job they may have had for decades is also a legitimate reason to be upset.
People are fired all the time because their job requirements changed, or they were made redundant. Where have the mass protests been for that?
> Let's not pretend there aren't legitimate concerns here.
Some concerns are legitimate, other's are not. But occupying the nation's capitol, and assaulting people who wear masks are not a legitimate avenue to express those concerns.
I said trending in that direction, I didn't say we were in or close to that territory. The idea behind protests is not just to move out of some conceptual territory, but also to stop movement into such territory if we're headed in that direction.
> People are fired all the time because their job requirements changed, or they were made redundant. Where have the mass protests been for that?
When has there ever been talk of a society-wide policy which would forcibly unemploy 15% of the population that are otherwise fully qualified to continue to work in their current jobs? When have citizens ever had to carry papers around to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship?
Let's not pretend that the scenario we find ourselves in falls well within the boundaries of precedent.
> The idea behind protests is not just to move out of some conceptual territory, but also to stop movement into such territory if we're headed in that direction.
No, the reason for these protests is a bunch of grown adults are scared of a safe and effective vaccine in a global pandemic, and are now terrorizing downtown Ottawa.
> When have citizens ever had to carry papers around to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship? Let's not pretend that the scenario we find ourselves in falls well within the boundaries of precedent.
Agreed. The scale of impact of this pandemic is without precedent. Thus the response is obviously without precedent as well. I don't know why you're surprised at that.
I must say, that line about "there is no force, only consequences", it does sound a bit ludicrous, not matter when it used. When other human being A willfully inflict a consequence on other person B because of past actions of person B, I thought such consequence is commonly referred to as a "punishment", especially if A has some sort of authority or official capacity.
Like, I live in Finland. Here is an illustrative episode from what I remember from school. In Finnish case, the first world war manifested as a brutal civil war where about 1 % population died. The interwar period was characterized by political instability and sectarian violence, where it was near always people aligned with the "White" anticommunist side (victors of the civil war) doing the violence. People who publicly professed communist or socialist ideas often got roughhoused and in some incidents were killed; many times, their printing presses were burned by right-wing activists. The government turned a blind eye to these actions, but it wasn't something government orchestrated -- the actual activities were genuine "grassroots" effort from a part of populace that found any idea of communist action as totally opposed their mental image of Finnish nation, and certain democratic norms were not running very deep. (During some specific moments, the politicians were often afraid of facing a popular right-wing coup.) And granted, some of the communist action during that time was supported by the Soviet Russia and was publicly agitating for an international revolution.
However, what I am trying to say is this: Sure, a galactic alien with all the tact and deep understanding of human behavior that Lt. Commander Data possess could describe the events as "phenomena where communists faced consequences for their freely exercised speech actions because they found out their speech was wildly unpopular with some other people, without government doing censorship", but any sensible human being would recognize that there was political violence with express purpose of limiting the political speech of the left side. If you think these people had right to express their political message, it was repressed, with violence.
Now, I write about this episode of Northeast European history exactly because it is a distant analogue about any current situation anywhere in the world. But one can not pretend that if you inflict any kind of cost to other people either because they did something or because you want to change their behavior, the costs you inflict are some impersonal "consequences" which somehow makes it so that any other context of situation does not apply -- for example, your purpose for inflicting the consequences.
Are you also against the other laws that we have governing our behaviour as a collective society? For instance, you are "coerced" into driving your vehicle within a certain measure of sobriety.
This is a false equivalency. Getting vaccinated does not stop me from getting or spreading SARS-CoV2. At best these vaccines reduce severe symptoms in an individual.
Great point. It's actually more equivalent than I thought.
The vaccine reduces the amount of hospitalizations necessary to treat COVID infections which means we don't overrun our hospitals.
Much in the same way that the hospitals would be overrun if everyone was driving drunk and sending a high number of people to the hospital via car accidents.
What do you think would happen when truckers get fired and nobody's going to deliver your food to the supermarket or will do it for eight times the amount because they got a jab?
This is not health sector or senior home work. It's trucking. It requires minimal interaction with other people.
> Cool, imagine if I passed a law saying donate 20% of your life savings to Trump or go to jail. Don’t worry, you aren’t forced to, by that logic.
But the threat of jail is actually being forced. No on is going to jail for being unvaccinated. Are you equating finding another job to being incarcerated?
> Or in a more realistic world from the past, you’d better not employ that German Jew or your business will get forcibly shut down. Don’t worry, you’re not forced to not hire him.
Race is a protected class. Vaccination status without documented medical reason is not. Also, no one is forcing these businesses to shut down. They simply can't employ unvaccinated people.
Good, then you aconowledge that discrimination on this characteristic was an act of force requiring explicit protections to be implemented to cease the practice?
The poster is making the assertion that the same underlying pattern of behavior is unfolding, and your interpretation of it not being an act of force requires that your definition of "force" be so out of touch with the reality/form of life that they are invoking under the pre-supposition you both can come to an agreement on a dictionary referenced definition of the word, as to be uselessly undermined by arbitrary political distortions so as to be useless to continue trying to communicate.
This is not a good sign; for anyone involved; I might add.
You do know that the vast majority of jobs in Canada do not require being vaccinated, right?
Did you know that vaccine requirements for certain jobs have existed for decades, and no one has lost their minds like this?
Do you think it’s possible that right wing politicians are purposely trying to cause outrage over something that has been a normal and accepted practise in order to further their political goals?
It's called a career because you do it your whole life and you keep getting paid more money to do it. What are other job options for truckers? Fast food? Warehouse? It's not like you can just go get a SWE job.
Yes, but you agree to that mandate before getting the job. When you join the Army you know you're selling your body to the state.
Of course politicians are politicizing. But they're just riding the wave of something that people are already mad about--like higher taxes and abortion. Your comment makes it sound like people are mindless automatons whose opinions have no substance. They are opinions that differ from your own but that's OK. We need both sides of the discussion for a healthy democracy.
> It's called a career because you do it your whole life and you keep getting paid more money to do it.
People get fired all the time for a multitude of reasons. In fact, thanks to at will employment in the US, people get fired for no reason at all. I haven't seen mass protests about at will employment.
> What are other job options for truckers?
I would assume the same jobs available to anyone when they get fired.
> We need both sides of the discussion for a healthy democracy.
Agreed, but there is a problem when one side is not arguing in good faith. I would call occupying the nation's capital and assaulting people wearing masks not arguing in good faith.
We started with almost no jobs needing proof of vaccination to a lot needing it.
Each week more and more require it, you talk like this is a minor thing that will not escalate, when it clearly has been.
The options you seem to think unvaccinated Canadians have are slim and moving towards non, That is why people are protesting.
>"You do know that the vast majority of jobs in Canada do not require being vaccinated, right?"
Well suddenly vast majority now does require COVID vaccination. It is forced even on people that never show up in the office. So if I were you I'd come up with some better arguments to advance the agenda.
They have attacked police. They have had dance parties on war memorials. They threw human shit at a home with a pride flag in the window. They assaulted people for wearing masks. Healthcare workers are now told to remove any indications that they work at a hospital for their own safety.
> Healthcare workers are now told to remove any indications that they work at a hospital for their own safety.
This seems like a really weird narrative. Why would people who are protesting vaccine mandates be against healthcare workers? They aren't the ones keeping the mandate in place. There's a tenuous connection with them being the ones to administer a vaccine if someone decides to get vaccinated but it's not like attacking a healthcare worker is going to accomplish anything. A lot of the people engaging in this protest have already been vaccinated, what's their beef with healthcare? Honestly, this just seems like spin that's aimed at creating two opposing groups.
From what I've seen it's just spin. They (the CBC et al) have taken the worst examples, real, imagined, or completely out of context, and acted like this is what the protest is all about.
The war memorial is a good example. This is something that's at the site of the protest because it's in downtown ottawa. Pretending it's being "disrespected" is some nonsense you could level at any group protesting downtown. In this case its particularly silly because the demographic that is protesting is overall very supportive or Canada's military, and is literally there protesting for freedom.
Yeah, I think post Trump 2016, CBC took a very activist-oriented approach which hemorrhaged their cultural trust. They got pushback and then dug in further. There’s no self reflection at all.
Do you live in Ottawa? I'm asking because you appear to be speaking as though you have some special insight into this. If so, perhaps sharing some video of such incidents would be helpful.
You're right. It's worse. BLM was because black people were being unjustly murdered. This occupation is because grown men are scared of a safe and effective vaccine during a worldwide pandemic.
Would you please stop taking the thread further into flamewar? I understand that you're justifiably upset about it, but you've posted 29 (edit: now 35) comments in this thread alone, many of them repetitive, and at this point you're falling into swipes. That doesn't help persuade anyone and it certainly isn't the curious conversation we're hoping for here.
Edit: Since this request didn't work, I've rate limited your account. Lest that seem to be out of bias, I've also rate limited the other commenters who have been feeding the repetitive flamewar side of this thread. I also banned at least one of the worst offenders. If you don't want to be rate limited, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the site guidelines in the future.
Sorry I thought your comment was in response to my earlier GP comment. I edited it to clarify. And yes I haven’t seen any of the same things with the Canada protests.
It is being forced. If you can experience significant losses or risks unless you comply, that’s being forced. You’re being disingenuous. It’s easy to see where this breaks down - per your logic a mobster running a protection racket isn’t forcing anyone to pay extortion money either.
Accepting your premise that it's being forced on us, how is this different from the many other laws we are "forced" to obey as a part of Canadian society?
By definition, this is forced. Force means to make someone do something against their will.
In this case the choice is be fired or take the vaccine. They obviously don't want to be fired, so they are being forced to take the vaccine. Yes, it isn't physical force, but it is forced none the less.
> By definition, this is forced. Force means to make someone do something against their will.
Yes, but they aren't required to get the vaccine against their will. They have the choice to quit. That's what makes it a choice. If they had no choice to quit, then you would be correct.
> In this case the choice is be fired or take the vaccine.
Exactly.
> They obviously don't want to be fired, so they are being forced to take the vaccine.
Some choices are hard. That's life. As you wrote in the previous sentence, it is a choice.
> Yes, it isn't physical force, but it is forced none the less
No more forced than any other condition of employment.
That is the point. 'Have a vaccine or be fired' is the same.
Sure, it isn't 'forced' as in, we will tie you up and someone will give you the vaccine, (same as have sex with me or be fired, technically I won't force myself on you) but basically amounts to the same. And taking in account that a) there are vaccine side effects (I had them and know a few others that also did) b) they don't really help with the spread, just reducing the symptoms, it shouldn't be the business deciding on it.
And this is forced through other means that aren’t physical - but it is still forced. I am also not sure why the choice to get other jobs changes or justifies anything here. For example consider this: “There are other jobs so quit complaining when we racially discriminate against you.”
I'm afraid that's not what happened in reality in Seattle. You repeated the allegations multiple times but repeating them doesn't make it true. There were criminals who came to that area, but the BLM themselves did not seem interested in that stuff.
And I was upset at the leaving of the area by the police, but the multiple admitted fake pics on fox news didn't show reality.
And now we know from the emails and discussions of the police and the mayor that they kind of left the police precinct with an expectation of the chaz that the precinct was going to be burned down after thet left by the crowd and they were almost disappointed . In Seattle we're currently in this weird situation where the police are basically in an almost complete work stoppage, and there's endless court battles about the cops who went to Jan 6, cops don't enforce Laws around property crimes. I don't see any future for the existing police force in Seattle. They just need to be fired and replaced en mass. But it will take years to eject them.
This is probably too much about Seattle but when trying to understand what's happening in Canada one has to be careful of the American press that lies about what's happening. My own dad believes that Seattle is burning basically.
Remember when GoFundMe was actually encouraging people to donate on Twitter to CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle? During a pandemic when most states still had mask mandates?
I do, and GoFundMe is a bunch of partisan hypocrites. Let me quote Elon: Professional Thieves.
It wasn’t just during a pandemic. It was literally the week after the stay at home lockdown order for WA state expired. It was the start of the various “phases” of restrictions following the hard lockdown order, including in King County where CHAZ took place. And of course the phases got paused because of a sharp increase in cases that June - the primary month in which CHAZ, other riots, and peaceful protests took place (while virtually everything else was shut down).
Apparently Elon Musk also got involved and called GoFundMe “professional thieves”, because they were going to redirect donations intended for Canadian protesters to other (likely left leaning) causes:
https://nypost.com/2022/02/05/elon-musk-gofundme-professiona...
He also called out their double standard for claiming to not support protests that aren’t peaceful after they funded so many violent riots and illegal actions like CHAZ back in 2020.
Redirecting donations intended for one cause to causes of their choosing is fraudulent.
If they have an issue with a cause, which should be stipulated in their ToCs up front and not subject to inflight changes, then refund all donors to the best of their ability.
Before GFM decided to directly refund everyone, their plan was to redirect any non-refunded funds to charities of the choosing of the organizers of the GFM. The only way they would go to left-leaning charities would have been if the organizers of the GFM were left-leaning and chose that
The charities were going to be selected by the convoy but "approved" by GFM. Obviously there's no public list of charities GFM has "approved" in the past but it goes without saying that only left-leaning charities make the list.
"...on Friday, saying it violated its terms of service. At the time it said donors would have two weeks to request a refund, with any remaining funds distributed to “credible and established charities.”"
"I'm not shoplifting, I put the things back after you caught me."
I would bet a lot of money that the logistics aspect of it is what he's concerned with. Parts from suppliers don't magically show up at Tesla assembly lines.
> they were going to redirect donations intended for Canadian protesters to other (likely left leaning) causes
Per the article you linked, donors have two weeks to request a refund, and any remaining funds will be redirected to causes chosen by the Freedom Convoy organizers:
> Donors have until Feb. 19 to ask for a refund, and the rest of the money the group raised would be allocated to “credible and established charities” chosen by Freedom Convoy organizers, the site said.
Spotify hosts Joe Rogan, so I'm having a hard time seeing how they're leftist. If they were activists, they would have left that money on the table and never signed a contract with Rogan in the first place. It seems to me that they follow the money like most companies.
If a trusted source (news) tells you Rogan is right wing and you don't hear anything to the contrary, it's easy to take that at face value and accept it. In fact based on human nature, a brain will actively resist anything to the contrary after hearing it enough times.
There was a contingent of what might be called libertarians who supported Bernie but then went hard for Trump and shifted rightward. It doesn't make much sense to me except that they're both nominally anti-establishment (in different ways of course).
You'll also note that I didn't actually call Rogan right wing, but it does seem that many/most of his listeners tilt right.
The point I was making is that it's highly unlikely that any leftist activist organization/company would support Rogan by platforming him, regardless of his actual beliefs (to me, it seems that he's just playing to an audience).
"to me, it seems that he's just playing to an audience"? what audience? if you actually listen to his podcast its plain random... because of him i learned about Bernie Sanders and introduced me to Kyle Kulinski and other left leaning people, so i never understood why he is considered right wing by the media and people on twitter, he brings up wanting universal health care and basic income all the time, that's very far from right wing
What you're framing as an extremely un-nuanced left/right dichotomy is really a power dichotomy. All the companies you're calling "leftist" seem quite conservative to me, regardless of their supposedly liberal veneer. They act within the existing political/economic system, have every incentive to maintain the status quo, and have nothing to gain by dismantling "the system (man)." They bow to pressures of the market at times, but that is no way a leftist stance.
As an outsider this left vs right stuff in the US is really fascinating and a little bit scary.
(Most) people won't stop selling sandwiches to each other, money is more important. But there is a segment that will. I find it really weird the amount of visceral hate that seems to come out of the woodwork on HN when topics like this come up. Otherwise rational people end up calling for starving people that they disagree with.
Conservatives could not deny service for a personalized cake to a gay couple without unbelievable fights that they barely won at SCOTUS, but left-wing companies can deplatform as much as they want from their generic service if they don’t like your politics.
I don’t have to be conservative to say it’s extremely hypocritical.
I'm vaccinated and I support everyone getting vaccinated. I do not think mandates are appropriate, though. Nor are they necessary at this point. The truckers are protesting forced vaccinations. I think if someone doesn't want to do their job because their job is forcing them to undergo a medical procedure that they do not want, that seems very legitimate to me.
And it also seems like a basic principle of liberal democracies that I thought we had all agreed on quite a while ago. Apparently not anymore.
To be honest, if the left treats their wishes with no respect and calls them racist and misogynist without any foundation, they should be prepared for whatever shit comes their way.
No it's not and this harmful absolutist rhetoric casting it as a tribe vs tribe till extinction matter will only further exactrebate the problems we are seeing.
Most people are not angry idealougues hell bent on revolution most people are not white supermacists that hate all other races as inferior. Most people are decent people trying to make their way in the world for themselves and their families, the constant bombardment of fear and outrage from every side for the past several years is what got us to this place, digging further into this tribal hole of left vs right isn't going to get us out of it.
I'll be an absolutist against deplatforming and government overreach to the death. Wherever that lands me on the political spectrum over time, I don't care.
The CEO of every major US company is basically the same person. They came from the same background and went to the same schools. They have a stranglehold on the working class of America. They can deplatform you and de-bank you.
The working class will have a hard time withdrawing from a society that is designed to keep them in check. Parallel economy likely to pop up.
Seriously. Some people need to lay off the Fox and the right wing talk radio. They act like they’re being so oppressed because they have opinions people don’t agree with and they get called out for it. Like, how privileged has one’s life been and how much of a small bubble do they live in that they have never said something stupid and faced consequences for it. These are the same people that bitched about desegregation.
Flamewar comments like this will get you banned here. You may not owe media networks better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it.
I'm so glad you agree with me. So you are okay then with truckers refusal to deliver food to lefty run cities.
Awesome we agree!
So just be prepared to be treated how you are treating the right. Lefty company bans ppl on the right, then we have the moral obligation to ban ppl on the left from our businesess.
Are you banning stirfish and bavent as well, who recently engaged with this account? It seems to me like most of their comments are low quality and trying to pick a fight with the person you just banned.
This parent comment (that you just replied to and banned the account for) felt somewhat useful. It is drawing a parallel to a prior SCOTUS nomination (Kavanaugh) and the unproven allegations that came out at a politically opportune moment to generate outrage. His point was that unethical political warfare invites a tit for tat back and forth that spirals into something worse.
That's an extreme spin on "his point". The account history is egregiously beyond the pale. If we don't ban that sort of account we might as well not ban anybody.
Going from a Democracy to a Communist State is not a matter off flipping a digital bit from 0 to 1…what you see happening is what happens in the transitory stage!
Most people that use the BLM name and phrase pretty much have never heard of the incorporated BLM organization that lives rent free in conservative's minds.
Just something that I've noticed is a bit of a disconnect.
People typically are wanting to bring attention into lack of oversight in policing practices, which would benefit all. There is an organization of the same name that has some truly strange and unrelated desires and governance structure. The latter is typically conflated with all the people using the phrase BLM in right wing publications and circles.
In response to the earlier variant of your comment
> Is there any point at which those people with reasonable views who aren’t associated with the BLM organization might .. not chant their slogan repeatedly to establish and reenforce that association?
Doubt it. Onlookers, skeptics, critics and right wing publications have the choice of being just as nuanced and choose not to, in favor of honing in on the mostly ignorable BLM organization. The people with the BLM bumper stickers and BLM posters in their windows are ignoring followers of right wing publications at this point and also aren't paying attention to the BLM organization of the same name.
If you want to know whats happening you have to understand the different way any of this is perceived at all. Its not even opposite, its completely different.
I don't see anything unsubstantive and/or flamebait in that comment, that future will come at some point. And the desire to secure/improve supply chain through automation is something everyone wants!
So this is the problem with censorship it's just that you don't like my comment not that there's problems with it.
Sorry, but by the moderation standard here, that was clearly an unsubstantive comment. This was not a borderline call and doesn't have to do with liking or disliking.
And the next time the government will want to force you to do something you disagree with, who is gonna fight it, the spineless white collars that we pretty much all have become?
You raise an interesting point. Who will end up controlling the self-driving truck fleets, and what will the laws end up saying about how those fleets can be used?
Please do not add hellish nationalistic flamewar—which is what this comment points straight into—in addition to the ideological flamewar we've already got with this topic. These things are not what HN is for. We want curious conversation here.
Your attempted explanation is wrong. Trump won the rust belt in 2016 because neoliberals sold out the working class and their unions. This behavior by the administration is a half hearted attempt to roll some of that back.
I don’t buy that the neo-liberals sold-out the rust belt: This was a slow death march over decades and across party lines.
After all, slave labor is cheap and lets the wealthy pool wealth, while feeling good about pouring money and industry into third-world countries. Best of all, it left the purchasing power of the middle class intact.
For a time.
I do agree though, that the liberals turned a blind eye when things were becoming unsustainable in the rust belt (fly-over country).
It might be more accurate to say that the democrats started taking the rust belt for granted. And it's hard to ignore the left's shift (in primary focus) from blue collar workers issues towards race and gender issues.
>I cringed when my co-workers talked about “fly-over” country, but I was equally shocked when Hillary Clinton lost.
That's not taking for granted like you are saying. That's coastal elites and intelligentsia looking at "fly over" working class with contempt. It's a mutual cultural divide equivalent to xenophobia.
>Just to be clear, I’m a liberal at the end of the day but anyone who thinks “their side” doesn’t have problems, I can’t really agree with.
Not a Trump supporter. I'm a "politically homeless" liberal as well.
Famously, the two main parties switched their roles in the South in the 1960s and 1970s.
It may happen with the unions too. Especially with the blue collar private sector unions. I do not expect this change for public sector unions to happen.
But he wasn't appealing to those voters on the basis of increasing the power of unions against rich business owners.
The question is whether those voters wanted other things more than that (and whether Trump managed to deliver those other things to their satisfaction).
> is a half hearted attempt to roll some of that back
That's just assumed and is normal politics so I didn't see it worth mentioning. You didn't refute my other point that President Biden does not see Musk as a political ally
> Using a political office to effect political change is against the law.
From your linked article:
>using this language to specify those who are exempt:[10]
> (i) an employee paid from an appropriation for the Executive Office of the President; or
> (ii) an employee appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, whose position is located within the United States, who determines policies to be pursued by the United States in the nationwide administration of Federal laws.
I'm sure that "the administration" that evv555 was talking about involves either of those people, instead of some random civil servant.
Neither i nor ii above apply to political (elected) officials. They are absolutely covered by the Hatch Act. If an elected official were to direct one of the exempted classes to perform a political act, the act of directing them would be a crime.
>Neither i nor ii above apply to political (elected) officials. They are absolutely covered by the Hatch Act.
From the linked article again:
>Its main provision prohibits civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government,
Do "political (elected) officials" count as "civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government"? My memory from civics class is a bit hazy, but I recall that elected officials are in the legislative branch, not the executive branch?
If I accept money on behalf of someone else, with the expectation that the cash will be given to that person and I just use the money as I please, this is called fraud.
If I set up a monetary relationship between 2 entities and then I interfere with that relationship, this is called tortuous interference with contracts.
GoFundMe tells a lot of people who they can or cannot send money to via their platform. First, there are laws around sending money to designated terrorist organizations, then there are restrictions around violence, pornography and sex work, and many more. The giant list can be found here: https://www.gofundme.com/c/terms
If you want to mail a check to these truckers, have at it, but GoFundMe is not obligated to collect money on their behalf. Here's another example, but not one Ron Desantis would ever care about - https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200131-gofundme-shuts-us...
They weren't obligated to continue to collect money on their behalf, but once they started collecting that money, they are obligated to handle it responsibly. They do not get to decide to withhold money unilaterally and give it to other charities (as GoFundMe has stated they intend to do).
A telephone company can't decide to give me a phone number then tell me who I can or cannot call. My ISP cannot tell me which websites I can or cannot access (without a court order). If GoFundMe allowed the convoy to open a charity drive, they cannot unilaterally close it and confiscate the money.
Please do not take HN threads further into hellish ideological flamewar. We want curious conversation here.
Also, please keep personal attacks off this site. Not ok here.
Edit: you've been posting so many personal attacks and breaking the site guidelines so repeatedly that I've banned the account. That is seriously not cool here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Is this essentially going to be an investigation in which they find that which has made people butthurt is something they signed away in the terms & conditions they never read? Seems like it. Good on GoFundMe.
If you put in big letters "Contribute to <this>" and then, somewhere totally else, in tiny letters amid 15,000 other tiny letters, put "but we may take your money and contribute it to anything we like"... then you are NOT the good guy. You are swindling the user and a lot of people are of the opinion that this is exactly the kind of situation the government should step in on.
Alternatively, make the 15,000 tiny letters illegal, and require products to specify in clear, easily understandable language what the user is agreeing to; with the ability to return whatever it is if they do not agree with it.
Who reads t&c? Gofundme exists because people fund campaigns they want to. They can point to their T&C and say hard luck. But they won't exist for long with that response. Existence of any business is not a law of nature. If they mess with their user base, they will cease to exist.
Terms and conditions aren't bulletproof. Contrary to popular belief (among socialists in particular for some reason), corporations cannot do whatever they want. If something is illegal, no amount of fine print can make it not illegal.
GoFundMe has already backed away from this new policy and will refund directly, so it's honestly probably moot at this point.
But this idea of donating to other charities unless a refund is requested appears to be something novel. As far as I can tell, it's something they came up with, then backed away from, just for this incident specifically.
As I understand it, the convoy was sparked by a decree that truckers crossing the US/Canada border would have to either be vaccinated or go into 14 days of quarantine. The latter would effectively take away the livelihood of anyone whose job involved doing that frequently. I don't think it's very useful to argue that taking away someone's livelihood isn't "force", or to argue that people are just "choosing" to lose their livelihood. Sure it's not physical force but it's a pretty extreme level of coercion, and it's perfectly easy to understand both why people in that position would turn to their democratic right to protest, and also why a whole lot of vaccinated and pro-vaccine people would support them.
Your only taking away someone’s livelihood if being an unvaccinated trucker is their only option. The vast majority of jobs in Canada do not require a vaccine. Choices have consequences.
Mandatory school vaccinations, mandatory military vaccinations, mandatory drug testing in many jobs, etc. Why did no one lose their minds over those things?
I think you've effectively conceded the point here. Losing one's job is generally understood to be a catastrophic outcome for people in our society, especially when someone has been doing that job for a long time (and perhaps also doesn't have the educational level to get another job at anything close to the same compensation). It follows that "do X or you're fired" is a form of force or coercion. In fact that's so obvious in general that to narrow the definition of "force" to exclude it seems to be a case of special pleading. Threatening someone with a severe material consequence and then saying "it's not force because it's your choice" isn't an argument most people are going to accept, and I find it interesting that you're resorting to it, because it's surely not the strongest argument for your position.
> Losing one's job is generally understood to be a catastrophic outcome for people in our society, especially when someone has been doing that job for a long time (and perhaps also doesn't have the educational level to get another job at anything close to the same compensation)
I haven't seen any mass protests about at-will employment. Why not?
> It follows that "do X or you're fired" is a form of force or coercion.
But we've had these things around for decades. Vaccines have been required in other jobs, tests have been required for jobs, and yet no mass protests. Why not?
> Threatening someone with a severe material consequence and then saying "it's not force because it's your choice" isn't an argument most people are going to accept, and I find it interesting that you're resorting to it, because it's surely not the strongest argument for your position.
It actually is the strongest argument, because it's true. No one is being forced.
> I haven't seen any mass protests about at-will employment. Why not?
The cases are not comparable because if an at-will employee loses a job with one employer, the employee can often find a job with another employer.
> Vaccines have been required in other jobs, tests have been required for jobs, and yet no mass protests. Why not?
The cases are not comparable because, as far as I know, there is no testing option in the Canadian regulation. Also, as far as I know, there is no exception made to the 14-day quarantine period for those who cannot be vaccinated because of either a negative reaction to a prior vaccine or deeply held religious convictions.
> The cases are not comparable because if an at-will employee loses a job with one employer, the employee can often find a job with another employer.
And so can anyone fired for not begin vaccinated, since there are many more jobs that don't require a vaccine than those that do.
> The cases are not comparable because, as far as I know, there is no testing option in the Canadian regulation.
It depends which jobs we're talking about. Make so mistake, this "trucker" protest has been coopted by basically anyone mad about vaccines. So for instance Alberta healthcare workers do not have to get vaccinated, but are subject to periodic testing instead.
> And so can anyone fired for not begin vaccinated, since there are many more jobs that don't require a vaccine than those that do.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. The jobs I was referring to are Canadian cross-border trucking jobs, all of which are affected. Affected truckers may be able to transition to other trade routes, but they may face hardships (e.g., increased time away from family, lower pay, expenses for required additional training, or opportunity losses relating to non-use of expertise gained in cross-border work).
"Do X or you're fired" -- this is coercion by any reasonable definition. If you think it's easy to just "get another job", you are speaking from a position of immense economic privilege. It's tantamount to "let them eat cake".
Urbanites will regret their fickle treatment of the key workers who provide them with food and Amazon deliveries.
> "Do X or you're fired" -- this is coercion by any reasonable definition.
Do X or you're fired is literally the basis for all employment.
> If you think it's easy to just "get another job", you are speaking from a position of immense economic privilege. It's tantamount to "let them eat cake".
Demand for labour is immense right now. I'm sure you've noticed. People are fired all the time for a number of reasons.
> Urbanites will regret their fickle treatment of the key workers who provide them with food and Amazon deliveries.
They won't, because the vast majority of truckers are vaccinated, working, and against this occupation.
Big Canadian company that does much software development has sent mail to their (never mind employees) but subcontracting companies - get vaccinated or you are out.
The irony of it all is that all this noise is just for American consumption.
Trudeau and the Liberals are loving the damage "The Honkening" causes to the Conservative brand. Erin O'Toole spent the last election trying to convince Canadians that the Conservative Party of Canada is civilized and not a tribe from Trumpistan.
That has all gone down the drain, the CPC kicked O'Toole out and the party is about to swallow the Trump bait, hook and line. Even populist conservatives like Doug Ford (Ontario's premier) can see this.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Party of Canada is just giggling and partying as quietly as they can contain themselves.
Per GFM's standard procedures, which the organizers agreed to when setting up the gofundme, when a gfm gets cancelled, donators have a certain amount of time to ask for refunds. The leftover money that wasn't refunded goes to charities of the choosing of the organizers of the gfm
>"If you think vaccines are being forced on anyone, you have no clue what’s going on in Canada."
Yes vaccines are being forced - how else a threat to loose your job can be called. And yes I live in Canada.
>"you don’t live in Ottawa and have no clue what’s going on"
Do we have a clue about what's really going on in the rest of the world? We do not but it never stops people including HN crowd from judging. I bet you are guilty of that too.
> Yes vaccines are being forced - how else a threat to loose your job can be called. And yes I live in Canada.
I call that a choice. Parent's have a choice to vaccinate or homeschool. Military members have a choice to non-covid vaccine or not be a service member. No one was losing their minds over that.
There are many jobs available that don't require a vaccine.
> Do we have a clue about what's really going on in the rest of the world?
We can just listen to people who live in Ottawa. Among others, the mayor has been pretty clear what's going on.
I'm not familiar with the US tax laws, but in Canada if you don't file a tax return and don't owe money, there are no consequences. If you owe money, and do not pay, eventually you will end up in jail. That's actually being forced, and makes this a terrible analogy.
If someone is fired from the military for not getting a non-covid vaccine, are they being forced to get the vaccine?
They are not being forced. Stop playing word games.
In the US, everyone must file a tax return if they have anything over $12,000+ in income. If you don’t, you could get arrested. That is rightfully called forced, because the threat is that you will lose your livelihood if you don’t file. Nobody would call living in jail a real choice.
Similarly, if you don’t take the vaccine, you are also losing your livelihood in the military, possibly having no way to provide for your family outside the military, and this can be rightfully called forced.
Your comment already spoke volumes. Remember when conservatives used to talk about choices having consequences? Funny how they they don’t seem to like that concept when it’s inconvenient for them.
Choices do have consequences, but that does not mean those consequences are just, or that someone can just say those are the consequences take-it-or-suffer.
Like I said, we've had vaccine and testing requirements for many jobs for decades. No one lost their mind. You are being manipulated by right wing politicians.
(1) post thoughtfully and substantively, with respect for the people you disagree with,
or
(2) don't post.
We want curious conversation here.