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.

Admittedly the Liberals are not my party of choice but there still is validity for voting for the lesser of two bad options. Until we can address the first past the post system we are beholden to voting more against than for a given regime by reaching a sort of mutual concensus with our neighbours before we hit the polls. That representive voting system needs to happen elsewise we’re stuck playing this dumb game.

But it’s hard to compare even this party I am not terribly enthusiastic to to the Democrats when there’s at least mediocre commitments to a number of decent causes toward reconciliation, reasonable commitment to the Kyoto climate accord targets, stated support of LGBTQIA+ causes and at least a lukewarm support of Palistine mostly expressed through refugee programs and a spineless condemnation of the atrocities and a recognition of two state authorities in the region. There’s also a much more robust court culture and a wider swath of people in the party who at least demonstrate a desire for a properly pluralistic, secular society.

It’s more useful to veiw the parties based on how they talk within their own parties because it’s not a presidential situation. There’s less unilateral moves to be made as a PM without party support is a lame horse. While I wish we would see wider endorsement of the NDP it’s not traditionally a popular party in the field and there’s way more swing between Libs and Conservatives.

The Liberals are trying their best to find a tasty middle ground for the “fiscal Conservative voter” to bite because strategy reasons. They put forward a candidate who is Albertan, Catholic, an outsider to politics with a lot of financial sector ties who pulls quotes from the era of the Quiet revolution and balancing government budgets for the discerning blue voter while the more leftist ones can chew on his ringing of alarm bells of wealth inequality, climate change and the lack of application of morals in the markets. He’s been largely silent on 2SLGBTQIA+ issues which while always a little unsettling the previous admin left on a very openly queer friendly stance so while again, not ideal, all that currently is needed at present is just not undoing what’s been done and supporting the stuff already in progress.

Is he everything we’ve dreamed? Not really. But it shows they are trying to build out a solid concensus candidate that a broad range of people can stomach.

Why are you trying to conflate Canadian Liberals and the Democrats? They aren’t remotely the same party, the systems of government don’t look anything alike and they aren’t in cahoots.

And the Canadian Conservatives are fronting a guy who has stated his support of American style “Right to Work” legislation and other Americanizing government initiatives who went into politics immediately from going to school for international affairs against a guy who has spent years as Governor of two National Central Banks and created a number of international contacts across the Commonwealth in the international financial sector that can be leveraged and yet Conservatives are trying to paint themselves as “better for the economy”. Pollievre has been utilizing anti gay anti queer dogwhistles in his rhetoric for the past ever as well. Fuck Right to Work bullshit and fuck anybody who wants to roll back civil protections. There’s not a lot of places in the world as safe as Canada for queer people to exist so it’s not like there’s much better places to escape once the fortress falls.

While I don’t doubt your stance comes from a history of trauma, policing any kind of identity in this way causes real trauma to others. It causes a pervasive sense of isolation that is antithetical to feeling supported and secure and puts a check on a person’s ability to participate in their culture. Your lack of comfort does not mend leveling the playing field of stripping away the comfort of others if it is being expressed peacefully.

Bans also very become a very fuzzy line. Most holidays are based off of religious festivals that are widely participated in by the secular and non-secular alike. Once someone starts making exceptions because a wide number of people like a specific one you start creating an artificial canon where minority cultures are oppressed while a narrative of “dominant culture” is allowed giving certain religious traditions cultural supremacy. For example people inside the Church have been trying to get rid of the multitude of pagan festivals that were rebranded as Christmas for eons. They ended up just rubber stamping it because taking away something beloved doesn’t go well. In a modern context you could try and rebrand Christmas to a non-religious holiday… But good luck. It’s layers of Christian over Pagan imagery and traditions fused into a gastalt religious melange. Any governing body that has tried to get rid of it before has spectacularly failed and leaving it be would quickly become a symbol to people who come from places with different dominant partially seclarized religious traditions that they remain cultural outsiders who don’t have the nessisary concensus to participate in public. It would translate directly into supremacy narratives.

It’s healthier for a society by far not to police the range of peaceful human expression and connection. People deserve to see themselves represented and connect with each other without needing to act like undercover spies in hostile territory.

Nobody. Canadians are worried about a good old fascist… I mean fashioned war war.

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.

So. We don’t have a fentanyl “czar” we have Erin O’Gorman President of the Canada Border Services Agency who has been in the position since 2022 and was not appointed at the behest of Trump. The whole situation with requested assistance to halt the bleed of illegal guns from the USA has been something we’ve advocated for for a long time but the US tends to not take Canadian affairs very seriously because we are effectively a very small country with only marginally more population than the state of California. Honestly, we’ve never been prioritized as Americans cannot be made to care that they are shit neighbours.

Additional boarder Enforcement was approved 6 months ago when Trump was elected due to the possibility of another influx of immigrants fleeing the US which happened the first time Trump was in office due to proposed travel bans. It is here to stay as instability in the US is rising. We also dropped the requirements for recruitment to branches of the military because we are taking these threats seriously. If Trump never asked for anything we would be doing the same thing.

Trump essentially just threw a tantrum, we told him we would cover it because he was asking for things already in progress but what he wanted was to crow his strong man tactics to the media which is what he got.

Do not be fooled by media exaggerating the “wins” of Trump. He’s just using flash and glitter and misdirection.

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.

Not bad. I get most of my veg from local Chinese grocery where everything is a little closer to spoil but cheaper by half and all the sourcing info is in a language I don’t read so I basically wrote that off as a whole in the name of scraping by.

But was decently happy to learn that my spending habits were mostly Canadian centric by default anyway exempting snacks. Mind you I live in a chunk of Van where most of my fav stuff is imported from Asia through local companies and ports so my easy solve was just segwaying hard into Korean and Japanese imports.

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.

She should be given the biggest of side eyes. A lot of the laws Alberta has been passing are fairly direct challenges to Charter rights.

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.