This is an interesting case and is sensible. I mean, people have to sleep somewhere.

This is a multi-faceted problem, though. Encampments grow massively in the summer and shrink in the winter. Conversely, the shelters empty out in the summer and fill up in the winter. Why is that? It’s because many homeless people actually do have an indoor place to stay and/or access to a shelter space, but prefer to camp out when the weather is nice. I don’t blame them for that. People are handing out free tents, sleeping bags, and meals where I live. Would you rather sleep on a cot in a big room full of farting, snoring people, or in a nice private tent? However, the ruling doesn’t really apply to people’s preferences. The court ruling is about the struggle for shelter to protect oneself from the elements, not to create a right to camp wherever and whenever they want to because they feel like it.

I’m a big believer in affordable public housing. I think we also need institutions to house people who are not capable or willing to live independently without destroying the home they are given. I’m also in favour of wet shelters for those who are hopelessly addicted to alcohol or drugs. I’m also a believer in shelters to temporarily house people who are transient or waiting to get an affordable home. I’m not a believer in allowing shanty towns to grow unchecked, nor in allowing people to camp wherever and whenever they want to. If there is a shelter bed available, they must use it and too bad about their preferences. No shanty towns. That is just plain unacceptable in a modern developed nation. And, I suspect that 95% of the Canadian population feels the same way.

Thank you. :)

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.

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:

1. Revolution sounds good until it actually happens, and then it sucks. It unleashes all the crazies and the outcome is uncertain. And it tanks the economy.
2. If you look at exit polls, people told you why they voted for Trump. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t believe he is a fascist, or at least that the US system won’t allow him to indulge his fascist tendencies. Again, I don’t know if they are correct, but that’s what most people believe.
3. The majority believe that the wokism and identity politics of the left is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

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

Look at the result of the US election and tell me why you think it is beneficial to promulgate this simplistic colonizer/colonized, oppressor/oppressed narrative. It is no longer useful. Identity politics has become the new McCarthyism of the left. I am on the left, and I want us to extract our heads from our collective asses and start talking about things that matter to non-indoctrinated people.

When Germanic tribes invaded the Roman Empire because they were pushed West by the Mongols, were they the bad guys? When the Romans killed Germanic peoples to prevent them crossing the border, were the Romans the good guys? When illegal immigrants cross the US border in their literal millions to escape the poverty and oppression of central America, are they the bad guys? When the Anishnawbec tribes invaded the territory of the Sioux and expelled them because they were pushed West by the Algonquin, were they the bad guys? The Inuit killed the Dene who were encroaching on their territory because of starvation, were they the bad guys or were the Dene the bad guys? When Hannibal invaded Rome and killed thousands of Italians over several years and attempted to genocide Rome, was he the bad guy, or was Rome the bad guy when they subsequently invaded Carthage and ended the war once and for all? Who were more evil, the Arabs who bought Afrcian slaves, or the African tribes who kidnapped their own people and sold them to the Arabs? History is a series of actions and reactions, not a set of good guys and bad guys.

I’m listening to the CBC right now and the prevailing opinion I’m hearing is that the Democrats lost because Biden waited too long to step aside. Talk about learning all the wrong lessons.

Watch how the Liberal narrative will emphasize that. They want Trudeau to step aside, and if (when) they lose to the Cons they’ll say it’s because Trudeau wouldn’t step aside. Or if he does step aside, he didn’t step aside early enough.

Even if they are 100% First Nations, their ancestors were also colonizers. First Nations tribes warred and displaced one another regularly.