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  #141  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2017, 8:20 PM
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He's not wrong, Anglo Canada doesn't really have a cultural identity, we mirror the Americans in almost everything.

The main difference? Canadians aren't very friendly and outgoing, Americans are. Canadians are reserved like the Brits but have the accent and culture of the Americans.

Only 2 regions in Canada have a legitimate Identity, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
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  #142  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2017, 8:52 PM
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So, I visited friends in 'A World Class Canadian City' during the holidays and I met up with an old friend. She's great - don't get me wrong - but she's one of those ethnicity/nationality, name-dropping multicultarists: "Ooh, we have to go to the Portuguese bakery next to the Jamaican place and we really should go to the Bangladeshi place because my Croatian neighbour and the Azerbaijani guy at work goes there too. Ooh, and tomorrow we can to this little Maltese place where I know the Spanish waiter..

You know.

Then you go to the dinner party, with all the lily-white friends (there may be a Canadian Asian - sole tribute to multiculturalism) where everybody talks about real estate and daycare and 'good schools' .. and of course, they all rave about the latest Bolivian/Icelandic fusion place around the corner from the Nepalese Yakball joint..

Thing is, few of them can count any of these nationalities as their friends. Few of them can find any of these countries on a map - let alone know aything about said countries. Speak another language? lol!

Multiculturalism in Canada is farce. We import people to take our shit jobs and then pretend that we're generous, accepting, open to all..!

Bullshit. Germany took in over a million refugees yet we're still patting ourselves on the back for taking in 50,000? "Oh we're so wonderful! So Canadian! We're so nice! So many new taxi drivers!"

Canadians love multiculturalism because it hides the fact that we have no culture to speak of - other than Costco, Walmart, MacDonalds, Starbucks, Netflix, etc.. Immigrants are still treated like shit here - look at the numbers - but being the smug-ass pricks that we love to be, we think we're so superior. We're so nice!

We're assholes, but we're such polite assholes that, why wouldn't you prefer to trade your PHD in to be a floor washer here? After all, we're so multicultural!

And of course, whatever happens, we're sorry!

Sorry

And it's so great to be known as a nation of sorry sayers. "Oh, you punched me in the face? Sorry! Sorry that my face got in the way of your fist. Sorry!

That's just awesome but.. we're multicultural!

Sorry!
It's PJ O'Rourke's vituperation schtick modified for Canada. Actually, O'Rourke could have written this if he'd ever paid any attention to Canada.

The thing about O'Rourke, though, is that he gets as much wrong as he does right. He writes amusingly caustic sentences that stick in the brain, but they don't usually stand up to much scrutiny.

I mean, I enjoyed this. Our multicultural pieties can be cringe-inducing, but still: a lily white group of friends in Toronto? Is that a vignette from 1965? When was the last time that ever actually happened? Even downtown, away from the ethno-burbs, it's virtually impossible to be more than one or two arms' lengths away from a non-white person in any setting.

And reducing immigration to doctors driving taxis is, erm, reductive. Not least because the kids turn into Canadians.

Still, though, yeah. The whole reverence for ethnic diversity in Toronto is a meme that deserves skewering, so good on you for that.
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  #143  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2017, 9:34 PM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post
It's PJ O'Rourke's vituperation schtick modified for Canada. Actually, O'Rourke could have written this if he'd ever paid any attention to Canada.

The thing about O'Rourke, though, is that he gets as much wrong as he does right. He writes amusingly caustic sentences that stick in the brain, but they don't usually stand up to much scrutiny.

I mean, I enjoyed this. Our multicultural pieties can be cringe-inducing, but still: a lily white group of friends in Toronto? Is that a vignette from 1965? When was the last time that ever actually happened? Even downtown, away from the ethno-burbs, it's virtually impossible to be more than one or two arms' lengths away from a non-white person in any setting.

And reducing immigration to doctors driving taxis is, erm, reductive. Not least because the kids turn into Canadians.

Still, though, yeah. The whole reverence for ethnic diversity in Toronto is a meme that deserves skewering, so good on you for that.
What's most astonishing to me is the near-absence of dissenting voices. Or at least, that dissenting voices keep extremely quiet.
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  #144  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2017, 10:11 PM
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Originally Posted by Bcasey25raptor View Post
He's not wrong, Anglo Canada doesn't really have a cultural identity, we mirror the Americans in almost everything.

The main difference? Canadians aren't very friendly and outgoing, Americans are. Canadians are reserved like the Brits but have the accent and culture of the Americans.

Only 2 regions in Canada have a legitimate Identity, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
Your angst is showing.
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  #145  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2017, 10:14 PM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
What's most astonishing to me is the near-absence of dissenting voices. Or at least, that dissenting voices keep extremely quiet.
Those dissenting voices most often divulge headfirst into blatant racism/xenophobia, so it's not surprising that they usually stay quiet outside of Internet forums.
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  #146  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2017, 10:23 PM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
What's most astonishing to me is the near-absence of dissenting voices. Or at least, that dissenting voices keep extremely quiet.
My take on this is that while the jokers invariably take the piss out of whatever is prominent or held in high and earnest regard in a society, the problem with Toronto is that its most prominent characteristic is its spectacular ethnic diversity, and, well...

Very few in London or New York shoot at that target either for fear of being taken in by the retrograde right wing fringe. Because the satire tends to get lost in the fog of stupidity. Trump using the term "fake news" is a living, textbook example of the dunderheaded appropriation of a pointed critique that nevertheless blunts the original intention beyond all recognition.

Paris is different, I think. From what little I know about it, Charlie Hebdo is fearless in a way that the anglosphere never is.
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  #147  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 3:26 AM
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Those dissenting voices most often divulge headfirst into blatant racism/xenophobia, so it's not surprising that they usually stay quiet outside of Internet forums.
There is quite a large zone between that and "open borders to anyone who wants to come here, no questions asked" although that is not always acknowledged. It's as if people were forced to choose between the two. I refuse to.
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  #148  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 3:28 AM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post

Paris is different, I think. From what little I know about it, Charlie Hebdo is fearless in a way that the anglosphere never is.
Yeah, well, the francophone world is much less PC than the anglophone world.
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  #149  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 3:34 AM
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Originally Posted by rousseau View Post
My take on this is that while the jokers invariably take the piss out of whatever is prominent or held in high and earnest regard in a society, the problem with Toronto is that its most prominent characteristic is its spectacular ethnic diversity, and, well...

Very few in London or New York shoot at that target either for fear of being taken in by the retrograde right wing fringe. Because the satire tends to get lost in the fog of stupidity. Trump using the term "fake news" is a living, textbook example of the dunderheaded appropriation of a pointed critique that nevertheless blunts the original intention beyond all recognition.

.
Admittedly it's not as rock-solid as "If I can make it there I'll make it anywhere" (and the "no time for losers" subtext to all of that), but it's extremely strong on the virtuous side.
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  #150  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 6:34 AM
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Glad to see the usual cast of characters and their rants against multiculturalism are at least confined to one thread now!
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  #151  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 7:03 AM
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Complaining that a place is not diverse enough and judging it for being "too white" is currently a socially-acceptable urban hipster thing to say.
The opposite of diverse is homogeneous, not white.

I don't know who you hang around, but there are multitudes of white people who complain about a place not being white enough, and many of them vote with their feet and move to predominantly white areas. How many people have complained about Brampton being too brown or Richmond being too Asian? Many. Whether this is "acceptable" to say or not just depends on who you hang around with. There's plenty of people you can associate with who would complain that a place is not white enough, if you prefer that.

I don't really care -- if a brown person wants to move to Brampton and a white person wants to move to Oakville, that's their prerogative. Having such options is nice, if anything.
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  #152  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 9:19 AM
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Yeah, well, the francophone world is much less PC than the anglophone world.
You know PC is a fiction, right? I know its been all the talk for a number of years now, but it is mostly a ploy for some voices to shout over some other voices. It has been beaten to death by now . . . time to move on. PC, not PC, how about we start to focus on simple proper argument (discursive discourse) like in the old days, when it was a fiction.
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  #153  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 9:19 AM
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There is quite a large zone between that and "open borders to anyone who wants to come here, no questions asked" although that is not always acknowledged. It's as if people were forced to choose between the two. I refuse to.
I don't really know of anybody in Canada advocating for that. So you're presenting the majority viewpoint as being some sort of extremist Utopianism and I find that really weird and wonder what purpose you see in doing so.

The fact is, yeah, most who have a problem with diversity in Canada end up being xenophobes. I don't think it's inaccurate to state that.
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  #154  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 9:27 AM
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Originally Posted by BretttheRiderFan View Post
I don't really know of anybody in Canada advocating for that. So you're presenting the majority viewpoint as being some sort of extremist Utopianism and I find that really weird and wonder what purpose you see in doing so.

The fact is, yeah, most who have a problem with diversity in Canada end up being xenophobes. I don't think it's inaccurate to state that.
I am often sympathetic with this, but it's not quite true. But, even if we are to be a bit more understanding of the motives of those people, I can only back off the "xenophobia" descriptor by replacing it with "inexperienced," "ignorant," and "stupid." All these terms are insulting, but they also have straightforward meanings.
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  #155  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 9:30 AM
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Many of us like to tip toe around it and it may seem like a premature label to apply, but ultimately that's the root of most of that rhetoric. Of course I'm generalizing here, before somebody accusing me of labelling them personally as a xenophobe. Ignorance is a huge aspect of it too. People can become less xenophobic with less ignorance. In fact this is normally what happens.
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  #156  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 11:50 AM
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You know PC is a fiction, right? I know its been all the talk for a number of years now, but it is mostly a ploy for some voices to shout over some other voices. It has been beaten to death by now . . . time to move on. PC, not PC, how about we start to focus on simple proper argument (discursive discourse) like in the old days, when it was a fiction.
No, it's not a fiction at all. And there have been lots of good things about it, like how we've stopped referring to persons with disabilities as "cripples", and Chinese people as "chinks", and so many other examples.

OTOH it gets fucked up when we call a place and ask for "Dave" and the person answers there is more than one Dave, and the Dave you're asking for is black, but you dance around the issue on the phone because you really don't want to use that identifier for Dave, given that you're caught up in an extreme PC obsession.

Even though saying that Dave is black should be the same thing as saying Dave has red hair.
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  #157  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 12:12 PM
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I don't really know of anybody in Canada advocating for that. So you're presenting the majority viewpoint as being some sort of extremist Utopianism and I find that really weird and wonder what purpose you see in doing so.

The fact is, yeah, most who have a problem with diversity in Canada end up being xenophobes. I don't think it's inaccurate to state that.
We might not be there yet but we're definitely moving in that direction.

Look at how Kellie Leitch is getting vilified for her (admittedly misguided) values test. This is someone who is in favour of maintaining current immigration levels which admit several hundred thousand new people into the country every year.

It's like there is a witch hunt not for those who actually say negative things about diversity and immigration, but even against those who are *suspected* to not be open enough to the concepts.

I get accused of being xenophobic and racist on here all the time for telling both sides of the story, including the fact that not increasing immigration too much, capping immigration, lowering immigration and cutting off immigration are all morally acceptable policy options for a country to have.

It's extremely annoying to always have to remind people of my personal view (current immigration levels are good, and could even be raised a bit) in order to not be labelled a raving xenophobe on here. And even so, a lot of people disregard that and label me a xenophobe anyway. I'm still "suspicious".
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  #158  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 12:23 PM
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Just look at how non-diverse cities and regions of Canada are so harshly judged on here. Often they are non-diverse through no fault of their own, but due to economic and geographic challenges. And would and do welcome newcomers just as well as other more diverse parts of the country, when immigrants do choose to settle there.

It's funny meeting Vietnamese-Canadians in Montreal and Ottawa-Gatineau who speak French with an Acadian accents. I met a few over the years and at one point asked one of them where he got his accent.

He laughed and said his family were boat people who were sponsored by Acadian Catholic parishes in New Brunswick. They had nothing and these communities opened their hearts and wallets to them. Within days of their arrival they had a house to live in for free, they were fully clothed and had the fridge and cupboard filled for the months it took for them to get back on their feet. This guy and many others grew up there but just like many younger locals the lack of economic opportunity forced them to move to larger cities. Their parents followed their kids and grandkids in the exodus. So there are hardly any Vietnamese people left in small town French Canada (Québécois and Franco-Ontarian parishes also were part of this) that opened its heart to the boat people.

I am almost positive the same story repeated itself all across rural Anglo-Canada.
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  #159  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 12:24 PM
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Meet the new religion. Same as the old religion.

Have fun with that.
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  #160  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2017, 12:43 PM
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The opposite of diverse is homogeneous, not white.

I don't know who you hang around, but there are multitudes of white people who complain about a place not being white enough, and many of them vote with their feet and move to predominantly white areas. How many people have complained about Brampton being too brown or Richmond being too Asian? Many. Whether this is "acceptable" to say or not just depends on who you hang around with. There's plenty of people you can associate with who would complain that a place is not white enough, if you prefer that.

I don't really care -- if a brown person wants to move to Brampton and a white person wants to move to Oakville, that's their prerogative. Having such options is nice, if anything.
Maybe I just associate with a better class of people? (Taking a classic page from the SSP Canada book.)
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