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There’s a lot of baggage with the term “woke” as it’s levelled here. In North America presently it is the brush that is used to tar anyone who is not white, “conventionally attractive”, skinny, cis, heterosexual or a narrow range of subtypes pandering to those audiences as a means to blanket criticize and apply pressure to remove them unilaterally from public. It’s such a politicized term used for years by an outright supremacist movement and levied as a dogwhistle in outright genocidal political spheres that it has no nuance. If you want to convey nuance it doesn’t work as a term.

Your views do not appear to strictly align with the movements who use “Woke Propaganda Cringe” as a tool of linguistically signaling this cluster of held beliefs in a space. It’s a bit like if you walked into a space where gangs are active and started throwing up specific gang signs. Where you come from those signs might have nuance and usage that is lighthearted and non serious or specific but in spaces where those gangs are active and enacting violence those signs are strict affiliation markers with implied buy in to violence and little allowance for misinterpretation.

If your intention is to not be deliberately incendiary towards the targets of the American far right when dealing with the people in North America it’s probably best to drop the usage of “woke”.

It’s less about giving money to the woman herself and more about how HP and JK Rowling are used as memetic weapons. Every release of a new property has seen a rush of transphobic actors invading trans spaces for years. Invoking the name of the author and showing solidarity in a lot of contexts is a not subtle way of showing support to the veiws expressed by the Terf ideology during a time when being trans is becoming criminalized in more places. The news isn’t generally covering it well but Texas is passing laws where it is a criminal offense to misrepresent your birth sex at work or in public government spaces.

“Oh but it’s just money” isn’t so much the problem. It’s the cover this entire conversation about ethical consumption or the lack thereof in daily life is providing to people throwing up open flags of anti-trans bigotry in public and using that as a tool to band together to attack the community and send open messages that trans people are not welcome in ways that the average cis person will dismiss as just “they like kid wizards”.

It isn’t for “no real effect”. Harry Potter is a merchandise empire and it’s important to see how that empire is being utilized. Open fan support of Harry Potter is often used as a direct open signal of anti-trans support and Terf ideology. Here in Vancouver where we have a larger than average population of trans and non-binary folk and more open accommodation to the community a billboard was put up saying “I❤️ JK Rowling” downtown because it’s a more nebulous dogwhistle that wouldn’t immediately ping Canada’s hate speech laws so that the whole “Freedom of Speech” ploy could be envoked.

Whenever a new HP franchise item comes out there’s a wave of people who flood online and sometimes in person trans spaces who use the barest veneer of support of the franchise as a means to say some truely awful things about trans people. Some don’t even bother mentioning the franchise they just participate in the storming because they have the opportunity. Those spaces are often filled with vulnerable people seeking support and solidarity and these rushes can leave isolated trans people without community for weeks.

Here in Van someone wearing HP merch in any queer space is throwing up a flag that says “I am potentially an unsafe person.”

Article of the billboard.

http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5722244

You don’t have to give up your books. All we ask is that people do not white knight the author or the publication and merchandising empire which keeps making her influence into an active memetic weapon.

It’s not Canada or Denmark which will suffer the most from-it, but US themselves

I get what you are saying but at the same time as a Canadian that comes across as more American-centric myopia.

We are a small country in terms of people with only nominally more people than the state of California spread out over a landmass 1.6% larger than the US. Our energy infrastructure doesn’t fully connect through our own country and due to American strong arming a lot of our manufacturing industry is not super robust. It’s the Goose next to the Eagle. We’re tough enough to defend ourselves and make it hurt to attack us but we aren’t getting anything out of this fight. For us it’s a fight for our lives not a fight we can profit off of. Whatever wounds we take in this fight will soften us up for the regular problems we fight. The forest fires that have become exponentially worse through climate change that have erased entire cities off our map. The healthcare crisis of a mass of retiring boomers needing more care in a system that has constantly under fire from Americanizing rhetoric that has caused disinvestment from an ethically better system. The protectionist rhetoric that comes with conflict which will erode the systems of government and create legal precedent for more autocratic means of operation that will need to be later undone. The pausing of reconciliation efforts with indigenous nations. This conflict, even as it is now, will cause real trackable losses of life and livelihood some of which will not come back.

Our existence and future as a sovereign nation is threatened but nope “The US will be the real victims of this”? Bloody fucking tonedeaf mate.

They did a study and money can buy happiness but it caps out after the point it allows you chances to travel and take stress free time off. Being poor literally shortens people’s lives through misery.

So what we have is a man whom money will make as happy as he will ever get and remains miserable plunging people into a deficit of security through his actions. He’s infectiously miserable and someone needs to quarantine him.

Are you talking about the NATO shortfall? Because the Canadian government has a number of places where it is scrambling to find budget for a lot of things. Consider

• An expanded commitment to rehoming and financially supporting refugees from Ukraine. Processing and approving 962,612 submissions starting from 2022

• Reconciliation efforts with notoriously under served indigenous nations to improve dismal conditions of services support, locate and providing funding to document the Residential school genocide and providing better support to survivors.

• Reinvestment in one of the most challenging Public health care landscapes in the world due to the sheer landmass the government is constitutionally on the hook to cover.

• A history making sized population of people now reaching retirement age and requiring more drastic critical health interventions and social supports than ever before.

Static commitments like NATO spending are a bit like rent. If you are financially struggling through other financially challenging problems the landlord cannot often be convinced to give you a temporary forgiveness for extenuating circumstances. All of the above things are challenges that are either in service to international peace against the encroachment of Russia, the thing NATO was created to do, or they represent inflexible commitments the government has to serve the needs of it’s people as written into it’s own laws… But a NATO landlord has a contract with a number and the number doesn’t change no matter what.

This is actually in part an issue of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of one of the situation law enforcement and people forced into dangerous circumstances face. Ever played that game where you have your hands out and a person puts their hands under yours and you have to withdraw your hands before you get slapped? It’s the same principle. Reaction is slower than action. When someone states they have a weapon and they reach for it you could be dead in about a second, maybe two if they pull it and instead fire at you. This means your “safe” reaction space is about a second to a half second long.

If you duck out of the way you get a person with a weapon who can choose to turn it on bystanders or retaliate by getting you into another situation where you have even less reaction space. While it is realized that cops, particularly US ones tend to escalate situations more quickly in part that is because in the US there’s a higher chance someone is packing heat and in part because of a culture of standing one’s ground. When we are talking about ACAB events a lot of the time those deaths occur in circumstances where the cops either should not have been there at all, escalated far too quickly or the death happened when the person was restrained and no longer an active threat. In Canada for instance improper use of force applies to everyone. If you had to be violent as a citizen, including as a cop then you are vulnerable to legal reprocussions unless your use of force was judged appropriate to mitigate damage to life. Not property, only life. If you exhaust every other de-escalating option only then you are cleared to use violence but the initiation of this reaction window is the point of no return. People who experience this window basically operate strictly on instinct and often are traumatized to some degree after the fact.

In this instance the officer’s life was at risk the moment the gun was indicated to be in the vehicle and the person in question stated they would use it. Could the entire traffic stop have been a series of inappropriate escalations on behalf of the officer, yes. Is there zero justification for an officer shooting this guy? No. We don’t know the first part, you would have to pick apart the senario starting from when he stopped the car. But if you end up in a situation where you have a gun trained on you and you escalate the situation further by saying you are reaching for a gun then basically this is effectively how you suicide.

Nope, this tracks. Travelling while trans even before the Trump presidency means hastle. Gender markers on passports often mean very little aside from potentially outing passing trans people to asshole agents when they don’t match what you look like.

Normally it looks like variations of this : You go through the body scanner and a guard makes a determination based on basically vibes and pushes one of two buttons, a pink or a blue. If you have boobs and the blue button is pressed or a dick and the pink button is pressed you get flagged as having something “unexpected” on you and then are subjected to a body search during which they might just stick you in a holding place for as long as they feel like while they figure out who to send to perform a rather humiliating discussion about your medical history while your privates are checked over by strangers.

Or, someone just looks at you, looks at your passport flags the sex marker or your photo as a “suspicious error” and pulls you out of line. It’s remarkable how poorly the whole bureaucracy suddenly operates when you don’t immediately fit someone’s exact expectations of what a trans person looks like. Most of the time this just wastes a lot of time as you wait around for someone to have a long ass conversation and they run the papers to check them.

These delays can mean missing a flight but the person who missed the flight could be in a place to sue if they don’t offer a solution hence… Standby flights. So this is more or less just going back to being the old sucky forms of travel discrimination versus an even worse form. The bar is in hell and folk are gunna feel about it based on what the bar was before it was lowered. Whether that’s “oh thank god” or “fucking hell life is shit” is a glass half full/empty reaction. Both are valid.

Yup, already had the “flee or stand and die” convo with my partner a few weeks ago. I am firmly willing to risk death to defend the progress we’ve made as a Province and Nation. We aren’t perfect and are early in the process but we’re trying to recon with our history of colonial genocide and embrace a truer multiculturalism which the US refuses to even acknowledge. We have made commitments to the health and well-being of all citizens, not just the productive bodies which fuel the markets. It’s incomplete but aspirational and walking it back would be a disgrace.

The American democracy is an outdated shambles that has fallen into ruin and I will not be bound by it by choice. There is no freedom or opportunity the USA can offer us. Only more oppression on rights we already have enshrined.

We can’t. We’re way too small. There are only marginally more Canadians than there are Californians spread out over a country 1.6% larger than the entire US.

We’re gunna try to land some lawsuits against the administration and accept refugees from the States like we did last time but it’s unfortunately asking a mouse to take on a cat.

It may seem like a pedantic difference but you are missing a key part of what’s going on here. Nobody is challenging that gender dysphoria is a bad thing to experience… This policy is saying it’s kosher to proclaim “transness is a mental illness” which means in effect that encompasses gender euphoria and all expressions of gender incongruity as symptoms of a mental illness. It’s a subtle linguistic difference but one makes it possible to publicly derride trans people as being delusional or harmful to people around them or dangers to themselves and push for “curing” all transness by approaching being trans as a failure state.

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The whole thing with trans health is that being trans is not considered a mental illness but gender dysphoria still has a diagnostic rubric and has health problems associated. So saying trans people who have transitioned aren’t sick anymore isn’t quite accurate because they were never considered sick in the first place. One of the ideas behind this way of thinking is a trans person’s issues aren’t caused because they are trans, it’s caused largely due to the lack of acceptance and support in the society around trans people. Framing transness as a mental illness also ignores the flipside of dysphoria - gender euphoria which is a very specific joy experienced by trans people expressing themselves healthily, it’s not simply from lessening pain around dysphoria, it’s basically something mostly unique to the trans experience that is overwhelmingly positive.

Also there’s not a one size fits all response to dysphoria. Some chose to physically transition and others choose to use other management techniques to help. There isn’t a “cure” to gender dysphoria. There are limits to what can be achieved through physical transition even if one goes all the way. One can have dysphoria around stuff like not having periods and child bearing capabilities even if they are fully transitioned or there are things that are irreversible if the transition happens too late. Being trans can be a kind of complicated state of being where one needs to learn and implement how best to be supported. Framing it not as an illness removes the stigma of looking at the experience entirely clinically as something to be solved. The fix isn’t to be “less trans” as it is when one approaches something as a disorder to be removed and minimized.

I recognize that speech is never free when the place it is conducted is owned by shareholders.

It may sound odd but this could actually be a sea change moment for a lot of people. Having been stuck around far right coworkers enough a lot of them have hung their hats on the whole “free speech” lynchpin. That’s the thing they condemn leftist spaces for doing, that’s the hill thwy will die on. Their sycophantic love of Musk is bound up in the idea that he’s some kind of champion of free speech. This likely is the rude shock some of them might need to realize that was never true.

Is it going to get them to revisit their whole worldview? Probably not. But it’s a crack in the facade.

In the articles I have read the terms “raised alarms” does a lot of work. Yes a lot of Christian groups “raise alarms” but that’s a little toothless when there is a history of a lot of sects believing that suicide, regardless of it’s circumstances, is a gateway to hell. The median age of people taking up the offer on assisted suicide is at age 78.

We as a country have a massive die off occurring as the youngest of the Baby Boomers, one of the biggest ever generations in our country’s history… Is now reaching retirement age. There is a steep change in how the body ages and metabolizes things around age 60 and there’s a bit of an expected die off that accompanies that change. Considering the Canadian government and population is particularly sensitive to watchdoging any potential genocide or eugenics programs the system is designed with a lot of checks and balances. You need two doctors who are unrelated to each other’s practice to sign off on even starting the process which takes about a year to complete if you are not terminally ill. Any particular spikes in pairs of potentially colluding doctors who sign off together on the paperwork too often trigger an investigation.

Part of the cultural development of the last two decades has been fallout from the government admiting that they and the Catholic Church were jointly responsible for a genocide of the indigenous peoples. While keeping a weather eye on the program is merited a lot of the controversy is more towards the end of people wanting a scary bogeyman to point to in order to erode faith in the Government when really the system is one that was heavily advocated for and was very carefully designed. While concern is natural… It’s also good to do the reading to explore the depths of the system’s design and implementation and know that it was from the get go in conversation with ethical watchdogs and is under review since it’s inception to monitor the effect it is having. “Somebody warns scary numbers are scary” is basically the imperative of the media who only gets paid when you pay attention to them and scary, half explained things is one of the noisemakers that is effective.

As a Canadian who has watched a loved one die very slowly and spent a fair amount of time in hospice I changed my mind about wanting to fight to the bitter end.

My mother in law was a lovely lady, but unable to really face her death. Seeing what others were going through she begged us to not let that be her but the rules are she and she alone needed to sign off on the paperwork while she was lucid. We couldn’t set that up for her, she needed to do it herself… And she couldn’t face it and she missed her window.

The last week of her life was hell. She was so weak from not eating due to her cancer that she fell and hurt her hip. Thing people don’t really tell you about wasting away is your brain essentially becomes too energy expensive to run. She lost the ability to understand what was going on around her and had to be restrained in the bed so she wouldn’t try to get up and she, unable to interpret what was happening, started making escape attempts throughout the day and night frequently crying in pain. She begged like a small child for us to help her and looked at us like monsters because we couldn’t. She had been one of the most staunchly independent people I had known and she spent her last week in agony and all of us were powerless watching knowing it was the last thing she wanted.

I was so thankful for the Hospice care. I realized it could have been so much worse if her care was expensive or wasn’t handled with such an incredible standard of compassion… But the experience left all of us close to my MIL more than a little traumatized.

It’s important to realize that these decisions are intensely personal. I would not wish what happened to my MIL on my worst enemy. Depictions of death in media do not adequately prepare you for the potential realities of every situation. That perceived duty to live as long as you can isn’t always a kindness.

You are partially correct. Judges are allowed to perform marriages in their off hours as they are ordained to do so.

Big HOWEVER here…

Courthouse weddings are an offered service of the state. These judges are officially on the clock to perform these services which are booked through government infrastructure meaning that when they are performing this service they do so as government employees operating on Government funding. This is provided by the Government as a means to make marriage accessible to all protected legally marriagable couples. When a judge is engaged this way this is specifically what they are being paid by the government to employ their time. They cannot spend their time on other matters.