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Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by MichaelZuo on Monday February 21, 2022 @04:56PM (#30421158)
Discussing the politics of a country that the vast majority of HN readers do not understand in-deth in response to a rant by someone else who also only has cursory understanding is adding useless noise to HN.

Canada has never been about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, bar a small minority. In many areas it is closer to the EU than the U.S.

In fact these rants are self-defeating as they convince ever more voting Canadians that the whole fiasco was boosted to an unnatural degree by self-interested U.S. based groups, and thus further legitimizing the crackdown.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by mardifoufs on Monday February 21, 2022 @06:36PM (#30422199)
Yet Europeans and canadians are allowed to discuss American politics and even completely trash American values repeatedly. It's funny to see canadians be so defensive when someone else does it to us when we are usually extremely smug about doing exactly the same to our southern neighbors.

And by the way no, sorry but that's absurd. There's a huge line between being a freedom gun loving American and being against enacting emergency measures that do away with due process because of a protest. To think canadians support this just to... own the Americans online? Is so ridiculous that it might border on satire.

Remember, trudeau is still in a minority government and lost popular vote twice in a row to the conservative party. The conservative party has voted against enacting emergency measures. So you might be living in a bubble where everyone actually supports this, but it's not representative of the electorate.

Trudeau is completely, completely losing it and that's coming from someone who has met him a few times when he was my MP. I also volunteered for his campaign back in 2015 and 2019. Yet to me he seems completely unhinged at this point.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by defaultname on Monday February 21, 2022 @08:01PM (#30422880)
"but it's not representative of the electorate"

The two parties supporting this measure got 8,862,977 votes. Every other party together got 8,287,006. And the best part still is that the Conservatives and BQ get to vote against this measure specifically because they know it will pass. It's a free vote where they get to claim overreach while also not suffering by defeating the measure and the ensuing problems end up being placed in their laps. That's how adversarial parliaments function.

So your claim about the electorate was simply wrong, even if we ignore that it is fundamentally ignorant in the way Canadian government even functions.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by mardifoufs on Monday February 21, 2022 @08:21PM (#30422994)
The NDP's support was very weak but even then, my point was not about the Canadian parliament works. I'm very familiar with how our elections work, you just missed my point.

The comment I was replying to was assuming some sort of mass Canadian consensus/unity w.r.t to the situation which is obviously not the case, because as the figures you cited yourself show, trudeau doesn't have a very strong democratic mandate. I'm not saying the majority thinks this or that way, I'm saying the GP cannot assume a consensus.

Also if you are actually saying that the conservative party is just voting against because they know that it will pass, you probably missed the parliament debates of the past 2 weeks. Because they have been very very vocally opposed to what trudeau is doing. Much more so than at any other point during the pandemic.

If anyone is playing politics it's the NDP since they basically condemned trudeau while still voting in support, since they can't afford an election right now.

I don't know why you'd think that there's no opposition to such a radical measure (you are basically saying that even the CPC is not actually opposing this?!). I guess it's in line with the trend I've been seeing online of canadians ramping up the rhetoric against the protests

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by defaultname on Monday February 21, 2022 @08:32PM (#30423047)
"you just missed my point"

No, I didn't. You pointed out the number of votes between two parties to demonstrate mandate. Only the actual numbers betray a completely different situation. You don't get to casually claim that one whole set don't matter because it makes your story work better.

"NDP since they basically condemned trudeau"

Again you're speaking like you don't know how politics work in Canada. How else do you think they will frame it? They know that if it is not passed, armies of trucks (parked just outside the city in a set of farmer fields) will return back to Ottawa, and yes they would be blamed for that, and there would be consequences. So they support it while (perhaps rightly) pointing out that it is only necessary because of bungling by Trudeau. That's what they do.

Do you think 100% of Liberals and NDP support this? I have no doubt you'll say no, that you actually think most of them are against it. Now here's a better question - do you think 100% of Conservatives and BQ are against this? The notion is simply absurd, and both parties have leaned heavily on extraordinary powers historically. There are countless examples of Conservatives in particular demanding extreme responses to, for instance, aboriginal blockades. Historically the Conservatives have been a very law and order party.

And the emergency action should never have been necessary. My province, Ontario, has a literal army of officers, heavy equipment, and penalties and measures to squash this occupation at the outset. There was a bit of negligence, territorial behaviour, and perhaps intentional blindness, that led to it becoming such a problem.

Although it is a bit rich that the #1 reason given for opposition to the motion is that the motion was successfully used to clear Ottawa. Basically that now that the problem is superficially resolved, now it isn't necessary. Not that it was never necessary.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by mardifoufs on Monday February 21, 2022 @09:27PM (#30423403)
I'm sorry but when did I ever say that every liberal is for what's happening or that every conservative is against?! I literally said that I'm not assuming any level of support, as opposed to what the comment I was replying to did. My point was that it's ridiculous to pretend there is a consensus. Of course I know that a lot of conservatives support the measures and if anything I'm sure the majority of Bloc supporters do. You are just ignoring what I said and assuming I just dont know how the system work.

Okay yes the CPC has been historically a law and order party so what? Trudeau has been very pro consensus/liberalism etc in the past too so what's your point? Just look at how he dealt with protests that he agreed with. And when has the CPC ever enacted the emergency measures act?

Not that it has anything to do with my original point anyways, which was that the original commenter was weirdly defensive about "attacking Canadian values" and that whole canadians don't necessarily agree with the American vision of freedom there is a huge line between that and agreeing wholesale with suspending the charter because of a protest.

You are also coming up with tons of ad-hoc explanations for everyone: the conservatives secretly support because of they are the party of law and order this but voted against, the ndp secretly supported this but attacked trudeau, the bloc secretly supported this but didn't. I guess that's your opinion (and not a fact) and yeah there is a lot of theater in parliamentary politics but even if we assume it's all just bs pandering they are still representing an electorate. The conservatives have had no problem voting for pandemic measures earlier when their voters supported it.

The CPC and PPC had a total of 40% of the votes, which is still a huge chunk of the population (yes not all of them are opposed to the measures but the only reliable figure we have is still the votes), which makes the GP's argument moot. That's it, it has nothing to do with what happens in parliement.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by defaultname on Monday February 21, 2022 @10:05PM (#30423595)
"I literally said that I'm not assuming any level of support"

Your entire post was predicated on an assumption about the level of support.

"weirdly defensive"

It is neither defensive or weird. A lot of Americans in particular are grossly misinformed about {broadly gestures at almost everything related to this}, but they have very deep opinions. It's actually telling that you tried to portray the inverse (e.g. Canadians talking about America), when that simply isn't true: We are overwhelmed with American news and political happenings for time eternal, in media, news, social media, etc, where most Americans have a very superficial understanding of Canada for obvious, practical reasons. DHH's post panders to an alt-right crypto crowd, but to every Canadian it looks like ignorant clowning.

"You are also coming up with tons of ad-hoc explanations for everyone"

You're injecting a ridiculous number of strawmen. I argued against your statement that political positions on a vote = actual reasoned opinion. That has never, ever been the case in Canadian politics. No rational person expects it to be the case.

"agreeing wholesale with suspending the charter"

And with this statement, everything you've said on this entire topic has been completely discounted. The emergency act does not upset a single charter right. Not one. As with DHH ridiculous claims about martial law, it betrays that the speaker's hysterical take can be ignored as baseless rhetoric.

Further, the root post nowhere claimed "all Canadians support this". They noted that our base values are different and that many Americans aren't fully informed, and that is 100% true. As you've done with my posts, you're bizarrely spinning that out into something completely unsaid.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by john_petrucci on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @02:22AM (#30424940)
Bitcoin is needed because it is decentralized, transparent, traceable and a lot of other good properties

OR

Hey we need bitcoin because a convoy of large trucks led by a bunch of white supremacist anarchists ( https://mrsbrittanybested.com/2022/02/03/rotten-to-the-core/) whose MOU was to literally overthrow the democratically elected government, who chose to block the core of the capital and disturb other citizens' peace by honking constantly, harass masked first line workers and cause businesses to shut down for 3 weeks, block major land borders causing billions in economic damages, who were asked repeatedly by order of court to leave, when the very public data leak showed an overwhelming amount of so-called donations to a government-toppling movement came from outside of Canada, and when all levels of law enforcement from municipal to provincial were inadequate in dealing with this that forced the federal government to step in (an action supported by 66% of Canadians) in order to actually restore peace in the city of Ottawa, a motion that has to be supported by a majority in the parliament every 30 days to be renewed....

Sure, that sounds like a compelling argument for Bitcoin. Lets funnel bitmonies to every "peaceful movements" around the world to destabilize nations, overthrow governments and cause anarchy.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by jpambrun on Monday February 21, 2022 @06:39PM (#30422230)
As a Canadian, this type of rant makes me wish crypto was banned. They are already used for fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and now to interfere in other nations internal affairs. I imagine they could/will be used to bypass political spending laws.. Enough is enough..
Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by defaultname on Monday February 21, 2022 @06:19PM (#30422047)
It is sobering whenever this topic appears on HN (though thankfully this time it seemed to be flagged directly off the first three pages immediately, and perhaps DHH's low quality pablum has been properly binned) because it really resets my perception of the quality of comments here. Like reading a newspaper or magazine article on a field you happen to know in detail, making you realize that what you thought were considered, informed opinions are actually just people giving uninformed, careless takes. Strongly held, highly emotional opinions that are built on a tower of, in essence, shit.

It's someone telling you, with great passion and confidence, that the Linux kernel needs to be rewritten in Visual Basic because the current PHP code isn't maintainable. Throughout these comments, and in hot takes like DHH's, there are just profoundly ignorant errors that betray that the speaker doesn't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. It instantly reveals their rhetoric to be noisy garbage.

Re:I was wrong, we need crypto by seanp2k2 on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @01:51PM (#30431877)
Media these days is just about exposure to sell ad space. The only credential required to be an influencer is the ability to influence via any means.