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Did you ever need to see what ignorance and a banal level of patriotism looks like? Here ya be. The Rally for Freedom in my hometown. It is so very disheartening to see this level of absolute farce on display.
These individuals are demonstrating their absolute lack of social responsibility and disregard for others. Sadly, others will pay for their ignorance while they enter the healthcare system en masse pushing scheduled and necessary life saving surgeries down the queue because getting vaccinated and following public health measures is just too much of an infringement on their rights.
This is a near perfect clip of the level of malicious ignorance being celebrated. It illustrates not giving a fuck about others (even your own child) while basking in a glorious herd stupidity moment of social irresponsibility. Seems like the perfect video for the anti-vax/anti-responsibility freedum crowd.
Covid has brought the out the very worst of the selfish libertarian impulse in people. It confirms that selfishness wrapped in hyper-patriotic tat wins against the serious responsible fact based response medical science has painstakingly laid out for us.
If the situation were not so fucking dire, the irony on display here would be laughably delicious. This willful malicious ignorance will come to no good end.
I’m revolted to the core.
US commentators still seem to be mulling the prospects of how close, or how far they came to living in an authoritarian fascist state under Donald Trump. It is interesting how little air time the States dances with fascism get in the media today.
The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put things well on the morning of January 7, 2021, in a column titled “Appeasement Got Us Where We Are”:
‘So, is it finally OK to use the F-word? One shouldn’t use the term “fascist” lightly…Donald Trump, however, is indeed a fascist — an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals. So are many of his supporters. If you had any doubts about that, Wednesday’s attack on Congress should have ended them.’
Observing the events one day before, when Donald Trump instigated an attempted putsch meant to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and constitutional rule of law, the esteemed veteran historian Robert Paxton, author of the classic volume The Anatomy of Fascism, finally relented. He had to admit that he’d been wrong on Trump and that the 45th US president was in fact what Krugman said – and what many of us on the margins had been saying from the start.
Paxton was one of a bevy of “fascism experts” who had been proclaiming that Trump didn’t qualify for “the F-word.” This august list of Trump fascism-deniers included an impressive roster of 20th Century European historians who were hopelessly out of their depth when it came to analyzing 21st century US society and politics: Paxton, Stanley Payne (emeritus at the University of Wisconsin), Roger Griffin (Oxford), Richard Evans (Cambridge), and Samuel Moyn (Yale) (also meriting mention here is Japanese historian Gary Leupp [Tuft’]s). But field specialization and professional immersion in the previous century was no excuse for other deniers: NYU law professor Bruce Neuborne and the political scientists and government professors Sheri Berman, Cory Robin, Eric de Bruin, and Jason Brownlee. The heights of denialist comedy were scaled by Neuborne, who couldn’t put “the F-word” in his text or index in a book that discovered no less than twenty common themes, tactics, and policies that Trump as president was “copying from the early Hitler government” while “following Hitler’s playbook” and “letting Hitler’s genies out of the bottle”: holding power without winning majority support; finding and using direct lines of communication with their base; blaming others and dividing along racial lines; relentlessly demonizing opponents; constantly attacking objective truth; relentlessly attacking mainstream media; assaulting science; cultivating a fawning alternative media to spread lies; regular orchestrated mass hate-rallies; extreme nationalism; closing borders; embracing mass detention and deportation; using borders to protect selected industries; embedding authoritarian rule by rewarding capitalist elites; rejecting international norms; attacking domestic democratic processes; attacking courts and the rule of law; glorifying the military and demanding loyalty oaths; proclaiming unchecked power; relegating women to subordinate roles[1].
When asked about parallels with Trump and the Trump presidency, the “fascism experts” engaged in straw-dog reasoning by ticking off numerous and obvious ways in which the 45th United States president and the United States during the Trump years fell short of the committed doctrinal fascism of Mussolini and Hitler and the fully consolidated fascist regimes of interwar and WWII Europe. Nothing less than Classic Coke passed muster for these sweet-rooted connoisseurs of pure historical fascism, who chattered about the absence of “real fascism” in Trump and Trumpism as they missed and/or unduly downplayed remarkable political, rhetorical, ideological, and movement continuities between fascism old and new while failing to grasp contemporary US and global fascism as a movement and politics – a movement and politics with a very real (if clumsy and more “instinctive” than doctrinal) fascist cult leader in the most powerful job of the most powerful nation in world history from January 20, 2017 through January 20, 2021.
The next presidential election in the US should be very telling as the populace will once again have to choose between the ribald Republican strongman and some hapless Democrat empty suit.
No topic in a liberal democratic society should be off the table for reasonable debate. Yet here we are in 2022 with a seasoned educator being silenced and suspended for raising safeguarding concerns over ideological transgender literature being made available to children. Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.
The studies regarding medical transition are not conclusive, yet here in select transgender children’s literature everything is a-fucking-okay. This is an issue worth discussing in public and in great detail at the *very* least.
Canada’s National Post has run a story called No Dissent is Allowed:
“An Ontario school board is facing charges of censorship this week after shutting down a teacher’s presentation to the group, saying her comments about books on transgender issues violated the province’s human rights code
Carolyn Burjoski was discussing publications she said are available in the libraries of Kindergarten to grade six schools. She had begun to argue the books made it seem too simple and “cool” to medically transition to another gender when her presentation was cut short by the Waterloo Region District School Board’s chair.”
Ms. Burjoski’s presentation was about safeguarding children from potentially dangerous medical treatments. Seems reasonable right? (Wrong)
“Scott Piatkowski ruled she could not continue and the board eventually voted 5-4 to back up his decision. The fallout has continued since.
Though controversial and opposed by most transgender advocates, concerns have been voiced before — including by leading figures in the movement itself — that gender-dysphoric young people are sometimes pushed too aggressively into medical transition.
Piatkowski latertold a local CTV station , however, that Burjoski’s comments were actually transphobic and “questioned the right to exist” of trans people. Meanwhile, the organization took down its recording of the meeting — a regular, public session of elected officials — and had YouTube remove another copy of the video for alleged copyright infringement.”
Piatkowski and the Board have taken down the meeting off of youtube, fortunately the meeting recording has appeared elsewhere.
Go here and judge for yourself if *ANYTHING* Ms. Burjoksi says or presents is in the least bit ‘transphobic’ or in violation of the Canadian Human Rights Code (nothing is).
Time Stamp Highlghts:
2:01 – Book called ‘Rick’ – That is about why Rick doesn’t think about naked girls. He goes to a ‘rainbow club’ and identifies as ‘asexual’. Counterpoint – Maybe Rick doesn’t have sexual feelings yet because Rick is a child. Also a book that sexualizes and objectifies girls might not be appropriate reading for young girls (ed. or really *any* educational setting)
2:59 – The first warning from Piatkowski directed at Ms. Burjoski on the unfounded basis of her presentation somehow being against the Ontario Human Rights Code.
3:55 – Book called ‘Shane’ – The main character dismisses the very real consequences of being sterilized. The book also makes medical transition seem like an easy cure to emotional and social distress. (ed. it most certainly is not).
4:16 – Ms. Burjoski shut down by Chair Piatkowski for alleged breach of Ontario Human Rights Code.
Watch the whole thing, but like any zoom meeting its disjointed and frustrating to watch especially when those who value critical analysis and freedom of speech are shut down.
A bit of a side bar for you, gentle reader to make the judgement for yourself of what the Ontario Human Right Code actually says and how it happens to be interpreted by Chair Piatkowski. Here is a portion of the informal legal analysis by a Canadian lawyer justdad7 :
“The Board refers to the Ontario Human Rights Code its own policies on human rights and equity and inclusion. There is also a policy on harassment.
There is nothing wrong with the board’s policies. They accurately reflect the requirements of the Human Rights Code and the case law interpreting it. The problem is the Board’s interpretation.
The Human Rights Code prohibits discrimination in the employment, housing and the provision of services on prohibited grounds of discrimination which include “race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status or disability.”
It also prohibits harassment in employment or housing. Harassment “means engaging in a course of vexatious comment or conduct that is known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome.” The board’s human rights policy elaborates on this definition and explains that harassment consists of conduct directed at an individual such as insults, epithets, persistent teasing and offensive jokes based on a protected characteristic. Nothing in Ms. Burjoski’s presentation could possibly fit this definition.
The Ontario Code does not attempt to regulate speech in general. Section 13 prohibits publication of a “notice, sign, symbol or emblem” that indicates an expression to discriminate but it is subject to a proviso that it shall not interfere with freedom of expression.”
Yeah… So it would seem that these ‘human rights violations’ are really just important and valid concerns with gender ideology that desperately need to be discussed in context of their application in Public Schools.
Also Ms. Burjoski was then summarily excommunicated from her staff and students for her heretical statements.
“And then the teacher was given what she calls a “stay-at-home order” and told not to communicate with colleagues or students, though she’s still being paid and is slated to retire soon. On Thursday, she says her union rep informed her the board had appointed an outside investigator to examine her actions.”
Yep. Did you think that freedom of speech is a valued tenet of our society? Try speaking out against the gender-religion and see how far you get. Suspended in Burjoski’s case for wanting to discuss the appropriateness of sexualizing children and child safeguarding against still largely experimental medical gender therapies.
“In her first interview on the affair, Burjoski said she was “flabbergasted” by what happened at the meeting and Piatkowski’s remarks afterward
“I am not a transphobic person. It’s crazy that just because you ask a question, the first thing people do is call you that,” she said. “We do need to have a conversation about the intersection of biology and gender. We’re not having those conversations in our culture because, look what happened to me.”
She said the order to stay away from school was likely meant to make an example of her: “The message is clear: no dissent is allowed.”
No ideology is above reproach and measured critique by members of a free and open society, yet here we are watching a teacher be excommunicated for questioning the transgender doctrine in the context of prioritizing the safety of children.
If you are not asking questions about what transgender ideology is and how it affects children (and society) it is time to start. How many more people are we going to let be silenced in the name of transgender orthodoxy? Thankfully Ms. Burjoski is not going quietly. Support her legal fund as she fights not to be silenced for making valid criticisms of a potentially pernicious ideology.
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