This is extremely reductive identity politics. The point of the 2024 election results is that Trump made gains with all racial groups. You can’t just boil it all down to identity. Beyond that practical lesson, identity politics is bad for any country because it is a zero-sum game. If we don’t look past identity politics to a common set of ideals, we will end up with people at each other’s throats.
Northern Canadian here. Your worst enemy in the cold is wetness. As others have said, layers are key. Silk and wool are top of the list, but synthetics are okay, too. Silk and wool are expensive, synthetics are cheaper. Do NOT wear cotton. Cotton gets wet and stays wet. It truly sucks in cold weather.
Sweating makes you wet. You have to match your layering to your activity. If you are going to be active, don’t overdress. You should feel chilly when you first start your activity. A common trick is to layer up, then take off your parka to do physical activity, then put it back on when you are done with the activity. Some jackets have pit zips that you can open to shed excess heat. If you are going to sweat, plan it so that you end up indoors somewhere you can dry out. Don’t sweat and then plan to stand around or sleep outside.
If you are going to be mostly standing around, you need big, bad-ass Baffin-style boots, which are heavy. If you’ll be moving around, you can use insulated hiking boots and wool socks. Bring extra underwear and socks because they get wet.
Mitts and a touque are mandatory. Bring two sets because they get wet. Gloves are much less warm than mittens. You can layer that, too. A very thin synthetic glove inside of a mitten works when you need to take off your mitts to work on stuff. It is also worthwhile to get a thin, synthetic balaclava to help prevent wind burn and frost bite. Fingers, toes, and cheeks are the most susceptible to frost bite.
Grow out your beard if you are a dude.
In terms of less intuitive tips, as someone else said, if you start getting cold, expelling urine and faeces really does help. Also, stay hydrated. You get cold when you get dehydrated. You may not even feel thirsty, but cold air is dry air and you will get dehydrated quicker than you think in the cold. Especially if you are shoveling snow.
Shoveling snow sucks, so people tend to rush. The key is to go slow, especially if you are older. You will build up heat rapidly if you are shoveling. Avoid sweating too much, unless you have somewhere warm to dry off. Even if you aren’t shoveling, manhandling a snowblower will make you sweat heavily, too.
You see, that’s just twisting what I said. I didn’t say that genocide is okay. I said that people who do crimes are responsible for them, not their descendents. And, that eventually the migration of populations, with the possible displacement of the previous population, becomes permanent.
Look, practically all of history is a series of migrations, wars, resistance, conquest, counter-conquest, etc. Action and reaction. The Arab countries tried to eject Israel and Israel beat them back five times. Israel is spear-won territory. The Palestinians continue to fight, as is their right, but they’ve lost. Israel is not going to pack up its bag and give up their country, so the only way to get rid of Israel is to literally genocide them. If the Palestinians continue to fight the way they did on October 7, they should also expect to die, including civilians as collateral damage. That’s war. If they want to stop dying, they should make a compromise with Israel. The two-state solution has been close before, but certain death cults keep scuttling it. You know why? Reasonable people think it is all about land division and compensation. But that was all negotiated previously. At the end of the day, the final sticking point was Jerusalem. The crazy Jews want to rebuild the Temple, and the crazy Muslims want to stop the Jews from tearing down al-Aqsa mosque to do it. It is the nutters, not the average person, who is standing in the way of peace. Unfortunately, you can’t fix stupid, especially not religious stupid, which is why Israel wants to crush Hamas utterly. All of this hand-wringing about genocide is silly and counter-productive. It is based on some woke narrative, not on facts. If the Israelis wanted all of the Palestinians dead, there would be millions killed, not 43,000. They want Hamas dead and for the Palestinians to stop supporting that death cult. If you leave the narrative aside for a moment, 43,000 dead over the course of a year of pretty one-sided war sure does sound a lot more like collateral damage than genocide, doesn’t it?
Oh, you mean the ancestors of the current Dutch population. Gotcha. Okay, well if we are talking about ancestors, then I guess every ethnic group has had ancestors that colonized somewhere or other, since humans don’t live exclusively in the place we evolved. And I’m sure we also agree that people don’t have to answer for the crimes of their ancestors, only the crimes we do ourselves.
What are you talking about? Did the Dutch colonize Palestine?
No, but it’s been used as a protest song at Palestinian rallies. That’s the context, not just the lyrics. This bullshit has no place at our Rememberance Day ceremonies.
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Sorry, who can’t read, lol? The very first paragraph of the linked article says:
“A coalition of Canadian legal rights groups has launched a landmark lawsuit against the federal government, charging it with failing to prevent genocide in Gaza and violating its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.”
Dude, you must be so embarrassed. You should try reading articles before you post them, and certainly before you criticize someone who actually did read the artcile. At least read the first paragraph, FFS. Unless you are just trying to rack up virtue-signalling points, I guess. Then only the headline matters.
For fuck sake, suing the Canadian government for failing to prevent a genocide in Gaza? This is the kind of bullshit that got Trump elected in the US. Downvote me all you want. I’m telling you, this shit doesn’t fly with the average person.
Yes, thank you. Every generation “discovers” the Palestinian issue and then some act like its a new problem. And then some dumb-asses in America choose that as their hill to die on. To the point where they helped Trump get elected this time.
The Palestinians have been locked in a death embrace with Israel for 80 years and no amount of whining by privileged American protesters is going to change that. Do they really think that more river-to-the-sea terrorism is going to make the Israelis just give up and die? No, a two-state solution where all the Palestinians move to the West Bank and all the Israeli settlers move back to Israel is the only viable solution. Every generation eventually figures that out, too. Also, Gaza is finished this time. It was always a dumb idea to have two separate Palestinian enclaves.
It is down to the practical matter of separating the two sides and imposing a peace since apparently they can’t do it for themselves. If that sounds harsh, it is almost certainly better for the Palestinians than letting the Israelis settle it the Roman way. And that is on the table now, since I’m sure we can all agree that Trump doesn’t give a single shit on his golden toilet about the Palestinians.
OK, so what does this mutual aid look like? Are you talking about organizing armed resistance for when the Gestapo come for you? Or more like food-sharing for when the revolution comes and destroys the economy you don’t care about? I don’t have a sense of what you are getting at.
Couple of things:
So, the answer to your question is that you won’t find much support IRL because most people don’t actually think they are supporting fascism. Time will tell if Trump is an actual fascist or just a blowhard. I wish we didn’t have to wonder, but there you have it.
It’s because of the drive-thru. If I could get a locally-made channa masala on rice or a good salad at the drive-thru with a decent cup of coffee, that would be my daily lunch. And, yes, I know that’s lazy, but the drive-thrus are packed so I know I’m not the only one. Unfortunately, only the fast food chains have drive-thrus where I live. There is a business opportunity.
We live in a capitalist society in the West and it has delivered spectacular benefits to most of us, more so than any other economic model that’s been tried.The fundamental problem at the moment isn’t “colonialism”, it is that the balance of power in our capitalist society has shifted over time to benefit the rich more than the middle and bottom of the economic spectrum. From WW2 until about 1975, we had a pretty good balance, but real wage growth stalled after that. How do we fix that? By whinging about colonialism (in 2024!?!) and engaging in worthless and destructive zero-sum oppressor/oppressed victimhood identity politics? Fuck no. We need to shift the political balance in economics to something more reasonable. We need Bernie Sanders-type practical working class socialism, not academic champagne socialism that is obsessed with language policing and fantasy-based kumbaya communism.
Yes, the Germanic tribes most certainly did eventually impose their culture and law on the Romans. Do you remember who sacked Rome in 410? It was Alaric of the Visigoths, which was a Germanic tribe. The Visigoths definitely imposed their laws, the Visigothic Code, when they could on the territories they colonized. And that was after a couple of hundred years of various Germanic tribes setting up relatively peaceful colonies in the Roman Empire. After they sacked Rome, they wanted to adopt the authority and prestige of the Roman Empire, so they became foederati, left Italy, and colonized southern Gaul. Then they colonized Spain by booting out another Germanic tribe, the Vandals, and imposing the Visigothic Code on the locals there. However, this weakened their position in Gaul, so the Franks came along and booted them out, imposing yet another culture and set of laws and creating the basis for modern France. Then the Arabs came along and defeated the Visigoths in Spain and imposed yet another culture and set of laws. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ad infinitum for all of human history. So, remind me again who the bad guys and the good guys are?
Edit: And with regard to North America, I wouldn’t say that Europe colonized North America in any kind of organized way at all in the beginning. European countries competed with one another for land and trade, and many colonists were independents fleeing religious persecution in Europe. My first ancestor in North America was a poor French farmer who left Europe in 1650 because the nobility owned all the land in Europe and he didnt want to be a serf. He didn’t have some evil plan to trick the Indians and eventually take the whole continent. His small group of farmers didn’t even bring many women. My ancestor married a local native girl. He and his little group largely integrated with the native people. They got the benefits of French farming techniques and crops, and he got the benefits of a new family and culture and the know-how of the locals. Of course, the Church also came along an their motivation was to convert the natives, but from their perspective that was about saving souls (misguided as that was), not conquest and genocide. A while later, after many more Frenchmen had migrated to North America, the French nobility became more interested and the king decided that he would make a more serious claim, but even then he was mostly trying to keep the British out. The French largely remained allied with the natives. Eventually, it got to the point where North America was no longer just a source of furs and an outlet for unpopular religious minorities in Europe and colonization kicked into high gear. The natives were literally at the Stone Age level of technology – no metal-smelting, no written language, not even the wheel – so they simply had no ability to maintain their sovereignty and culture once the European machine really got going, so they got steam-rolled. Thats not even considering the terrible effects of being exposed to Old World diseases that they had zero immunity to. Modern estimates are that 90% of the indigenous population of North America died of various Old World diseases long before serious permanent colonial expansion began.
My point is, once again, that many people have been indoctrinated to a narrow, black-and-white view of colonization. It isn’t a separate thing from migration, it is one part of the continuum of migration. If you think of it on a continuum, it becomes hard to sustain the binary good vs. evil narrative that you seem to be stuck on.
Sure. How do you imagine colonization actually happens? It is rarely a bunch of conquistadors invading and defeating the local population and then genociding them. It is almost always a long process of migration, perhaps punctuated by conflict and perhaps not. The Greeks founded colonies all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, some of which exist to this day. Not every colony becomes an overwhelming nation state. When various Germanic tribes invaded Rome at various times, they came and settled on Roman territory in their own little colonies, sometimes with authorization and sometimes not. When the first Europeans came to North America, they set up tiny little agricultural colonies and mostly had a peaceful (if awkward) coexistence with the local native tribes.
Over time, though, the power balance may change and then the colonists may start to demand more control. If the original and the invading cultures aren’t compatible, or if resources are scarce, they may end up at war with each other. What you think of as “colonization” is the most extreme form where one side is so technologically superior and aggressive that the original inhabitants simply have no chance. The weaker culture is subsumed and perhaps even destroyed by the stronger one. But it rarely starts out that way. Colonization is a spectrum from small colonies within a larger dominant culture to extreme cases where the colonizing culture completely displaces the existing inhabitants, and everything in between.
So, is it really as simple as good guys and bad guys? If you think so, think about it some more with a more objective and less doctrinaire lens.
And thank you
I don’t think NATO is in any danger. Trump has a very aggressive and bombastic style of negotiation. You saw this with NAFTA. Trump called it the worst agreement in the history of the world. But the USMCA is just NAFTA with a new acronym and now it’s apparently the BEST trade agreement in the history if the world. Its the same with Trump and NATO. The Europeans are the worst freeloaders in the history of the universe…until they up their defense spending by half a percentage point to appease the Donald, and then NATO will be the best alliance ever. Typical bombastic bullshit.
So many assumptions there. I don’t look down on the Palestinian people. I admire their willingness to fight. But, at a certain point, the war is over. You can have an eternal insurgency, or you can make peace. As I said, the issues that would allow Israel and Palestine to live side-by-side have largely been negotiated already. Look, we all get it. The creation of Israel was done poorly. But ongoing events like October 7 are not healthy or sustainable for either side. Israel isn’t going away. It can’t go away. Israel is a fact on the ground. So what is the point of ongoing terrorism like October 7? Obviously, all that terrorism has accomplished is retaliation and death. There is a better way.
The same choices will probably present themselves to the leadership of Ukraine, sadly. If the US and Europe don’t drastically ramp up support for Ukraine and give them long-range weapons, Russia will grind them down. What should the Ukrainians do if they can’t win? Fight to the last man? Achieve a ceasefire and then spend the next 80 years supporting a holy war insurgency against Russia? No, that’s dumb. That’s a good way to lose the world’s support and also get bombed into oblivion by Russia, and make your people miserable and poor. Ukraine isn’t dumb. They’ll negotiate a ceasefire and acknowledge the de facto borders at the time of the ceasefire. Then Ukraine will build up its economy again and wait for Putin to die and for events to turn their way. Then, hopefully, they will join the EU and possibly NATO.
Palestine could do something similar. Go for the two-state deal. Forget about right of return, forget about Jerusalem, drop the religious fundamentalist bullshit. Trade away Gaza to Israel in exchange for removing all of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Or something similar. Unify the Palestinian people in a common geography and a positive vision for the future. Land deals work. Remember that time Israel handed back the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt? Egypt and Israel are still at peace.
What about compensation? Well, the world will help the Palestinians rebuild if they think Palestine will be stable and not an Iranian puppet supporting a terrorist insurgency. The Saudis alone would probably supply tens of billions of dollars to Palestine if Hamas wasn’t there to hoover it up and convert it into weapons and terror tunnels.
I think we all need to cut out the zero-sum thinking because it leads to people becoming so desperate that they are willing to do literally anything to win.